Heidegger's Possibility: Language, Emergence - Saying Be-ing 9781442688216

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Fore-word 1: Situating the Work
Fore-word 2: The Word
Fore-word 3: Giving Shape to the One Matter
Introduction: Matters for the Opening
PART ONE. Points of Departure
1. The Necessity of Philosophy
2. Own to Language: Word and Saying
3. De-cision
PART TWO. Reaching for the Full Context: Heidegger’s Contributions
4. Directives as We Begin
5. What Translation Calls for, Philosophically
6. The Turning-Relation of and in Be-ing
7. Turnings in the Deep Sway of Be-ing and the Leap
Afterword: Returning, Thinking Possibility
Appendix 1: Two Heidegger Texts
Appendix 2: Concentrating Gently on the Various Critiques of Our Translation of Beiträge
Index

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HE I D E G G E R’S PO S SI BI L ITY

NEW STUDIES IN PHENOMENOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS Kenneth Maly, General Editor

New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics aims to open up new approaches to classical issues in phenomenology and hermeneutics. Thus its intentions are the following: to further the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger – as well as that of Paul Ricoeur, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Emmanuel Levinas; to enhance phenomenological thinking today by means of insightful interpretations of texts in phenomenology as they inform current issues in philosophical study; to inquire into the role of interpretation in phenomenological thinking: to take seriously Husserl’s term phenomenology as ‘a science which is intended to supply the basic instrument for a rigorously scientific philosophy and, in its consequent application, to make possible a methodical reform of all the sciences’; to take up Heidegger’s claim that ‘what is own to phenomenology, as a philosophical “direction,” does not rest in being real. Higher than reality stands possibility. Understanding phenomenology consists solely in grasping it as possibility’; to practice phenomenology as ‘underway,’ as ‘the praxis of the selfshowing of the matter for thinking,’ as ‘entering into the movement of enactment-thinking.’ The commitment of this book series is also to provide English translations of significant works from other languages. In summary, New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics intends to provide a forum for a full and fresh thinking and rethinking of the way of phenomenology and interpretive phenomenology, that is, hermeneutics.

KENNETH MALY

Heidegger’s Possibility Language, Emergence – Saying Be-ing

U N I V E R S I T Y O F TO R O N T O P R E S S Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9829-0

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Maly, Kenneth Heidegger’s possibility : language, emergence – saying be-ing / Kenneth Maly. (New studies in phenomenology and hermeneutics) Includes index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9829-0 1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. 2. Language and languages – Philosophy. 3. Translating and interpreting – Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series: New studies in phenomenology and hermeneutics (Toronto, Ont.) B3279.H49M2725 2008

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C2008-900396-9

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Stammt der Mut des Denkens aus der Zumutung des Seyns, dann gedeiht die Sprache des Geschicks. Sobald wir die Sache vor den Augen und im Herzen das Gehör auf das Wort haben, glückt das Denken. Wenige sind erfahren genug im Unterschied zwischen einem Gegenstand der Wissenschaften und einer Sache des Denkens. Gäbe es im Denken schon Widersacher und nicht bloße Gegner, dann stünde es um die Sache des Denkens günstiger.

When thinking’s courage stems from the summons of be-ing, then the language of affordance flourishes. As soon as we have the matter before our eyes and in our heart an ear for the word, thinking turns out well. Few are experienced enough in the difference between an object of scholarship and a matter of/for thinking. If there were already strugglers returning to the matter and not just opponents, then things would go more favorably with the matter of/for thinking.

Martin Heidegger, ‘Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens,’ in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (GA 13, p. 77)

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Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

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Fore-word 1: Situating the Work

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Fore-word 2: The Word xxii Fore-word 3: Giving Shape to the One Matter

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Introduction: Matters for the Opening 3 Part One: Points of Departure 1 The Necessity of Philosophy 21 2 Own to Language: Word and Saying 3 De-cision

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Part Two: Reaching for the Full Context: Heidegger’s Contributions 4 Directives as We Begin 69 5 What Translation Calls for, Philosophically

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6 The Turning-Relation of and in Be-ing 101 7 Turnings in the Deep Sway of Be-ing and the Leap Afterword: Returning, Thinking Possibility Appendix 1: Two Heidegger Texts Own to Philosophy 147

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138

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Contents

Own to Humans (Mind in Enowning)

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Appendix 2: Concentrating Gently on the Various Critiques of Our Translation of Beiträge 161 Index 187

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for permission to use portions of previously published works by the author: Indiana University Press (Bloomington) for permission to use pages 150–70 of Companion to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, edited by Charles E. Scott, Susan Schoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Alejandro Vallega (2001). Duncker and Humblot (Berlin), the publishers of Heidegger Studies, for permission to use pages 115–38, vol. 16 (2000). Marquette University Press (Milwaukee) for permission to use pages 247–70 of Issues in Interpretation Theory, edited by Pol Vandevelde (2006). Kluwer Academic Publishers (now Spinger, Netherlands) for permission to use pages 148–56 of From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy and Desire, edited by B.E. Babich (1995). I would like to express my gratitude to Richard Ratzlaff of the University of Toronto Press for his guidance and support in the publication process and to James Thomas for his exquisite copy-editing. Above all, I am grateful to Len Husband of the University of Toronto Press for his full support and constant encouragement, both for this book and for the series New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. This book has been written with the help of a sabbatical from the College of Liberal Studies of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

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Abbreviations

Following is the bibliographical information for all the volumes of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe cited in my book. All of these texts are published by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag in Frankfurt. Wherever there appear two numbers in parentheses in the text, divided by a solidus (/) without any other reference, the first number refers to the English translation, unless otherwise indicated that of GA 65, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), while the number after the solidus refers to the German original, that is, unless otherwise indicated, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). In all quotations in this book, what appears in parentheses ( ) appears as such in the text being quoted; what appears in angle brackets < > is meant as an aid to translation; and what appears in square brackets [ ] is meant as an aid in interpretation. In most cases this distinction is clear and easily managed, but there are a number of cases where the distinction is not so clear. I risk this imprecision for the sake of some clarity. GA 1 GA 2 GA 5 GA 7 GA 9 GA 10 GA 12 GA 13 GA 15 GA 16

Frühe Schriften (1912–16), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1978. Sein und Zeit (1927), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1977. Holzwege (1935–46), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1977. Vorträge und Aufsätze (1936–53), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 2000. Wegmarken (1919–61), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1976. Der Satz vom Grund (1955–6), ed. P. Jaeger, 1997. Unterwegs zur Sprache (1950–9), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1985. Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (1910–76), ed. H. Heidegger, 1983. Seminare (1951–73), ed. C. Ochwadt, 1986. Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (1910–76), ed. H. Heidegger, 2000.

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GA 33 Aristoteles, Metaphysik Q 1-3: Von Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft (Summer semester, 1931), ed. H. Hüni, 1981. GA 45 Grundfragen der Philosophie: Ausgewählte ‘Probleme’ der ‘Logik’ (Winter semester, 1937–8), ed. F.-W.von Herrmann, 1984. GA 53 Hölderlins Hymne ‘Der Ister’ (Summer semester, 1942), ed. W. Biemel, 1984. GA 54 Parmenides (Winter semester, 1942–3), ed. M, Frings, 1982. GA 59 Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks (1920), ed. C. Strube, 1993. GA 65 Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936–8), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1989. GA 66 Besinnung (1938–9), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1997. GA 69 Die Geschichte des Seyns, ed. P. Trawny, 1998. Pt 1, Die Geschichte des Seyns (1938–40). Pt 2, Koinon. Aus der Geschichte des Seyns (1939). GA 85 Vom Wesen der Sprache (Summer semester, 1939), ed. I. Schüßler, 1999.

Fore-word 1: Situating the Work

Let me walk you, the reader, through the interwoven web that I have called ‘Heidegger’s possibility.’ Rather than being fenced in by Heidegger’s mistake with national socialism; rather than being misled by the English word authenticity (translating the German Eigentlichkeit in Being and Time) into taking Heidegger to be an existentialist (as if that thinking were dealing with the existing, concrete individual, i.e., always within subjectivity); rather than being mired in a loose-cannon template of ‘deconstructive strategies,’ which ‘finds’ but is actually constructing a metaphysics of presence in Heidegger (attempting thus to undo the radical collapse of the subject-object duality within Western metaphysics that Heidegger’s language has allowed to emerge, attempting thus to undo the rethinking of transcendent being unto being as emergence, unfolding, unconcealment – which taken to its fullest expression or emergence is called ‘be-ing as enowning’) – this book invites you, the reader, to follow these major shifts in Heidegger’s thinking that offer new possibilities putting us in touch with those deep dynamics that embrace humans in the world, but which have gotten covered over with layers of constructed ‘reality.’ This leads to the following question: What does the word Heidegger name in the title Heidegger’s Possibility? Does it name the person Heidegger who lived in Germany and died in 1976? Hardly. Does it name the mass of hard copies of books, essays, and lectures that Heidegger gave or wrote and left for us? Whereas what the word Heidegger says is embedded in these ‘works,’ they do not define the word. With that we turn to a third possibility, one mirrored in Heidegger’s calling his Gesamtausgabe ‘ways, not works’ (Wege, nicht Werke). With this ‘turn,’ we turn away from ‘work’ as opus to ‘work’ as the work ‘of thinking,’ i.e., thinking’s ‘matter,’ its

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task, what calls for thinking – in short, the engagement in which ‘it’ and we dwell. Thus the word Heidegger names the work of thinking mirrored and opened up and made possible within the opus that is Heidegger’s ‘works.’ This book embraces this third possibility, i.e., a sense of the word Heidegger employed to name what emerges from and is sustained by the work of thinking that we call ‘Heidegger.’ As you will soon read in the introduction, Heidegger’s philosophy has been useful in other domains of research and creative thinking, such as architecture, theoretical physics, environmental thinking, qualitative research in nursing, and interpretive studies. Given that we today recognize the need to learn how to think outside reductionist forms of rationalistic inquiry and maintain the necessary rigour while doing qualitative research, Heidegger’s contributions in the realm of interpretation/hermeneutics, along with his original and creative philosophy beyond subjectivity, i.e., beyond dualism, come in handy. In our epoch of thinking, major shifts are happening in how we view the world, the universe, or ‘the way things are’ (the area of concern embedded in what is traditionally called cosmology, ontology, or metaphysics). The shift is from understanding the universe as static, separated from us, and itself composed of separate and independent entities, to an understanding that undermines the inherited tradition and moves toward the experience of a world that is connected, always in movement (change, impermanence), and includes our human participation in its very unfolding. Whereas I do not pretend to have the solution – as if there were such a thing – or to have resolved the dilemma dancing around these issues, whether in thinking, language, or translation, I am convinced that the work accomplished here is in accord with this revision and with the emerging ‘other’ way, an other beginning that lies hidden at the heart of the long-standing paradigm of Aristotelian substance metaphysics and Kantian ego-subjectivity. Other thinkings and word-imagings have dwelled among these emerging other ways. Heidegger is not the only one. But I am convinced that his contribution is unique and deserving of our engagement. Thus my book. Almost a hundred years ago Einstein shook the world with his discovery that matter is or contains immense amounts of energy, and that energy, not particulate matter, is the driving force of the universe. Rather than making this shift with Einstein and changing our patterns of thinking and modi operandi, society and its major institutions (of education, re-

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ligion, politics, and economics) are still today amazingly oblivious to the implications of Einstein’s discovery. But these implications demand more and more of our attention. In trying to unmask and get away from this reduction of the way things are to static and independent substance, we tend to look to archaic paradigms and ancient mythical practices of ‘non-Western’ and ‘non-rational’ comportment, to see how what we experience as solid and quantifiable (our bodies, trees, even the human ‘psyche’ in some forms of psychoanalysis and sometimes in behavioural psychology) is nothing but structured and manifest energy. We tend to look at other cultures and traditions to get a glimpse of a world not straightforwardly substantial, objective, and metaphysically ‘real.’ But this same matter haunts the very historical unfolding that has given us static and independent substance as the dominant paradigm. Einstein’s thought, and the whole of contemporary quantum mechanics and the new physics, is one way that shows how we can gain access to this hidden dimension that is not solid, static, or substantial. We can perhaps gather what it is that Einstein’s discoveries put out there for us to grapple with into three main pathways or markings: 1 That all things in the universe are primarily energy and not mass or matter. This means that the ‘driver’ of things is dynamic and not static, is always underway, and never reaches any objective or absolute position. 2 That all things are held together by a force of attraction – a common bond, itself perhaps formless as it lets emerge and holds all form. Physics calls this ‘gravity,’ whereas Buddhist literature often calls it ‘love.’ 3 That it is human thinking and languaging that mediates between the world of physical-material things and the onefold of the energetic of the withdrawing, formless dynamic ‘from within which’ all things come. Ensconced within this ‘space’ is the deep sway of nondualism (or the one-fold dynamic), as well as a core reciprocity that engages all beings. This calls for a way of thinking/saying that is not denotative or characterized by a one-to-one correspondence. Heidegger’s work provides another access to this domain, this deep sway of things. For he asks, How does language work with – how does thinking engage in – the openings mirrored in quantum physics, which in its own turning challenges Aristotelian substance metaphysics and Kantian ego-subjectivity. In this book I want to tackle this matter for thinking,

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from within Heidegger’s work of thinking – what I call Heidegger’s possibility. ‘Heidegger’s possibility’ is one avenue toward thinking that ‘other beginning’ hidden at the heart of the long-standing paradigm of Aristotelian substance metaphysics and Kantian ego-subjectivity. Still today, we are mostly unaware of the hidden, withdrawing dynamic dimension of ‘the way things are’ that is sheltered within our inherited historical unfolding – let alone allow it to influence our understanding of the universe and our world. ‘Heidegger’s possibility’ names that originary emergence (what needs human participation in order to be what it is, but not human control) that lies deeply within the way things are, available and possible despite the myriad ways of covering it over, defining it, or reducing it to a construction. Experience How shall we experience this dynamic? How shall we go all the way into the heart of this phenomenon? And how shall we say it? The words we need for saying this dynamic are not those of substance metaphysics or of objective ‘realism.’ Many attempts have been made to describe the phenomenon. From our generally accepted priority of rational/logical/ mental definition, most attempts to say this dynamic are seen as deficient, if not off the mark entirely. Is this thinking in isolation, or is it thinking in some form of interactive languaging? Is it about things static and independent, or does it need to say the dynamic interbeing of all things? Is this thinking all brain, or is it non-physical? The very form of these questions is dualistic and pre-shapes our thinking/saying. In our experiencing of the withdrawing formless dynamic, we necessarily leave the moorings of our inherited metaphysics, cognitive logic, and definitional language. We grab for something to hold onto, lest we drown. But what if we allow the non-mooring its full display? Away from ‘what is’ as ‘is’ and toward/within what emerges as ‘emergent’? Away from the various phases of a plant’s growth and toward the very emerging that happens ‘between’ each spurt of its growth? Away from the subatomic particles making up ‘atomic reality’ and toward the dynamic of emergence as such? Energy, rather than mass? Dynamic movement, rather than measurable parts? Heidegger’s thinking/language offers us a path toward this shift in how

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we understand the way things are, the world, the universe. In this book I want to engage with Heidegger’s work for the sake of the opening that it provides to thinking at this juncture, as outlined above, using discoveries in physics after Einstein as starting points. Which paradigm needs to adjust in this shift of thinking/saying? In philosophy I would call this traditional paradigm that is called into question by the experience of the dynamic of emergence the metaphysics of substance and of subjectivity and of presence. In science it might eventually be the very notion of theory itself. In the current debate in speculative physics about string theory, it is clear that, at least so far, string theory does not fit within what science usually means by ‘theory.’ In his book The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, Lee Smolin puts his finger exactly on this dilemma: How can string theory even be a valid field of research if, at its core, it does not fit what theory is in science? He quotes Lisa Randall, a particle theorist at Harvard University: A theory is ‘a definite physical framework embodied in a set of fundamental assumptions about the world – and an economical framework that encompasses a wide variety of phenomena. A theory yields a specific set of equations and predictions – ones that are borne out of successful agreement with experimental results.’1 Whether or not string theorists declare this definition of theory to be true (a discussion that does not have to concern us here) and whether or not string theory will eventually prove itself to fit within scientific theory as described by Randall (or show itself in the end to be a side-tracking of the fundamental question about the way things are and what makes them up), there remains the question, Is it possible that the shifting in how we experience the world and the way things are calls for a revamping of the very the definition of theory? Whereas I cannot answer this question, I want to keep it visible as I work through the issues of this book. Richard Feynman, who was called ‘the best mind since Einstein,’ hints at this very thing where he suggests, in The Feynman Lectures on Physics, that there is an indeterminacy inside electrons that remains a ‘puzzle’ and that we are limited to ‘computing probabilities’ – and then con-

1 Lisa Randall, ‘Designing Words,’ in Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement, ed. John Brockman (New York: Vintage, 2006), as quoted in Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), xvi.

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cludes that this being limited to probabilities is something that ‘we suspect very strongly … is something that will be with us forever – that it is impossible to beat that puzzle – that this is the way nature is.’2 And a little further he writes, ‘It is not true that we cannot pursue science completely by using only those concepts which are directly subject to experiment … It is absolutely necessary to make constructs.’3 What happens to objectivity and substance metaphysics when it takes into account the questionability of the dominant traditional paradigm – of substance metaphysics, ego-subjectivity, and exclusive rationality of reductionist science? There are two central questions raised here: (i) How can philosophical thinking find its way into the originary connection to this tradition? For Heidegger it is impossible to predict or know with certainty how this destiny of thinking will look. (ii ) What is thinking’s image when it moves away from the strictures of this tradition, as it must when it takes into account the phenomena that guide this major shift happening in our epoch – mirrored in what physics and science are investigating and saying, as well as in what philosophy sees as its possibilities? Here is where the work of philosophy comes in and finds its home. There is a difference between science – and the end of philosophy when it emerges as science – and thinking in this more originary sense. Hidden within the shift that happens at this ‘end’ is a withdrawing and formless dynamic that comes to the fore within thinking’s possibility in our epoch. Heidegger would say that, whereas this thinking is rather simple in its givenness, it is not at all easy to accomplish in thinking. This is indeed our challenge. Language All of this demands a renewed care for language, word, and saying. It requires a retrieval of the originary hold of our own language – and knows what is derived and what is not. This book tries to meet this challenge and to take on this thinking. To do this, it must take on that non-ordinary relationship within language. It must speak from what is own to language in its originary saying. Thus the question of language and saying

2 Richard Phillips Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 3 (Reading, MA: AddisonWesley, 1965), 1–11. 3 Ibid., 2–9.

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becomes a thread that weaves itself through the entire book. The secret to Heidegger’s whole work of thinking – and thus to ‘Heidegger’s possibility’ – is within and from language; it is from and within what is own to language and languaging that emergence happens and that enowning ‘enowns.’ This thinking/saying that goes beyond the traditional metaphysics of substance and subjectivity, that wants to move within the experience of nonduality of subject-object, that is not grounded in a metaphysics of substance or oriented from a subjectivity – this thinking/saying requires an accommodation to what has not yet arrived for us to think. Only another language, that of the poi-etic, can vibrate in that domain. Translation Then we come to the whole issue of translation and the interpretation necessarily inhering in all translation. What is the work of translation? What are its possibilities and its limits? What is the balance that the language of the original must strike with the language of the translation – and with that, how does the work of thinking move from the thinking/ saying of the ‘author’ and from within the thinking/saying in response to the reading by the ‘reader’? The new language emerging in Heidegger’s thought has been found by many to be quite useful. And my work presented here pursues that pathway, to help shed light on what is going on at the deepest level of language, thinking, and the interpreting of the way things are. The finest example of this – and it runs throughout my entire work – is Heidegger’s use of the word ereignen in German, which I translate as enowning in English. If we learn to hear what ‘own’ means in our language, this whole dimension will open out in front of us. First, rather than taking up the more abstract ‘essence’ of this or that, we learn to look for and say ‘what is own’ to something. What is own to nature, what is own to language, what is own to human beings. (What would Aristotle say is own to human beings? What would Descartes say is own to humans? What would Newton or Heisenberg say is own to the physical universe?) So now we see that what is own to nature and what is own to human thinking are not separate. Thus the thinking is beyond the subject-object dichotomy or dualism. Then, if we think this ‘owning’ process itself – how nature ‘owns up’ to what it is, how we find what is own to nature, how nature ‘owns itself over’ to us or ‘owns’ us (in a non-possessive way) – our thinking is then turned to this dynamic of ‘owning’ itself. This is

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what Heidegger calls Ereignis or ‘enowning.’ In a sense my book is about elucidating these two rather basic dynamics, is about thinking-saying the gathering that thinks them together, non-dualistically. Central to this enowning is the dynamic connection between what is (being, emergence) and thinking’s interpreting of the way things are. I have named this relation emergence and interpretation (more technically, hermeneutics). To do this interpreting of the way things are, thinking has to keep in mind the enactment character of thinking ‘after’ Heidegger – as well as the transformative character of that enactive thinking. What is the key role that language has in any thinking on this level, including the key understanding of translation as interpretation? As soon as anyone starts to read Heidegger, he or she has to take into account the German original way of using language – ‘languaging,’ if you will – and how to deal with that in one’s own language. Circling around the word clusters that emerge from the word enowning – own to, owning over to, owning up, being own to – enactive thinking engages in such a way that the words and language themselves manifest the power that words have to shape meaning. Thus this book enacts a certain way of ‘taking care of’ language. The place where humans and things/beings are and the dynamic by which they are (here, emergence) must be thought/said nondualistically. Normally named being, beings, and Da-sein, this threefold character of the way things are is said and thought in their coming-together, or ‘fusion.’ Rather than reduce the experience or phenomenon to what gets constructed within a cultural paradigm (as a social construction) – as do some contemporary schools of postmodernism and deconstruction – this work tries to think how the experience of what is, in its emergence, is tied to the interpretation of that event without being reduced to a social construction. In this context I would like to think that my manuscript is a good example of interpretive, or hermeneutic, phenomenology. A Story What if, held within the dominant paradigms of Aristotelian substance metaphysics, of Kantian ego-objectifying-subjectivity, and of reductionist technique’s disposability, there is another possibility? What if, within things as substance, as object, and as disposable, it is possible to revision, rethink, and resay things as things, i.e., as standing forth for what they are in the gathering of the world that they manifest and co-unfold? What if this required of us a transformation in how we know, think, and language? What if Heidegger’s possibility added a useful and neces-

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sary option to what calls forth thinking today, when thinking is engaged in the question of the way things are? May this work be useful to some thinkers at the edge. May it share in the work of the emergent shift in thinking and knowing awareness that is all around us today – and perhaps provide some sort of grounding?

Fore-word 2: The Word

As much as the thinker (philosophy) is shaping the word, the word is shaping the thinker (philosophy). Phenomenology Sitting down, mulling over, reading the text, opening to what the text says, what the text opens out to, trying to find the right word to say this (what the text says, what shows itself, textually and phenomenologically at the same time); and the word appears. It befalls one. And all we can do is say, ‘yes, that is the right word.’ This is not the word of analytic or cognitive language, or of ‘linguistics.’ Rather it is the word of poiesis: the poietic word. From the Greek poieien – to bring forth, to let emerge.1 This is essentially different from language as a system of signs ‘for’ something, e.g., for the ‘object’ of thought. Rather than the assertions of propositional language, the poietic word says, i.e., brings forth, is enactive. Thinking-saying that is poietic is a doing that says be-ing. It brings be-ing forth. Thinking ‘says’ be-ing, and ‘saying’ itself says be-ing, for thinking. This is different from poetry as we know it. For poietic saying belongs to the rigour of philosophy, as well as to the creative realm of poetry. Note that the word is poi-etic, from which is derived the English word po-etic. This way of saying (of the ‘word’) is telling for understanding that the work of thinking called Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) is pre-

1 See Martin Heidegger, ‘Die Frage nach der Technik,’ in Vorträge und Aufsätze (GA 7), 12, where he says that poivhsiõ is ‘advancing toward emergence … bringing-forth.’

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paratory for the historical unfolding of be-ing, is a getting-ready for that. Also, given that the de-cision by which thinking-saying says be-ing is not made by us humans alone, or from our ‘side’ – but rather human thinking, in responding, actively participates in and recognizes the shift into historical-enowning thinking – human thinking cannot bring this forth by itself. Opening to this, we give ourselves the opportunity (opening up) to transform. The poietic saying of philosophy’s rich possibility that is involved here is different from the metaphysics of epistemological inquiry. Philosophy in its poietic saying learns when the moment-site is shifting and be-ing as enowning is taking place, when it is called on to say things, poetically. Poi-etic saying is so central to the matter of be-ing that issues of language, saying, and word permeate every aspect of the work presented here. Matters of translation and their philosophical import are also central. Sometimes whole chapters are dedicated to these issues; otherwise, they come up again and again, in virtually every discussion. Thus what may appear as a tautology or redundancy is in truth an organic unfolding of these issues; and the repetitions are germane to the project of thinking be-ing, enowning, be-ing as enowning – to the work of thinking that is Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Just as in bringing forth a pot there is a need for the clay to be centred and for the potter to find this centre or balance, so too poietic saying calls for thinking, in hermeneutic phenomenology, to find the centre. The thinking of the deep sway of be-ing must be poietic saying. Working with the text and the dynamic that it opens out on, philosophy is guided back to the rhythm, the turning, of enowning. This is our task. This is our challenge. This is our joyful opportunity!

Fore-word 3: Giving Shape to the One Matter

One way to say what happens in Heidegger’s work of thinking (and in his opus) is that his thinking continually, with undivided attention, passionately circles around the domain (called the ‘question of being’) that • does not reside in human beings, even as humans participate in its make-up; • is not conceived, created, or controlled by human reason; • is not a thing, and entity, or a being – is rather nothing, no-thing; • cannot be gotten at within or via analytic thought or the language of definition, literalness, or denotation; • is other than the being of metaphysics. Named unconcealment, the temporality of being, ajlhvqeia, lovgoõ, enowning, time-space, regioning of the region, fourfold, emergence – in all these names Heidegger’s thinking stays with this one matter: how to think/say what sustains things/beings without itself being a being, how to think/say the dynamic of emergence, ongoing unfolding, unconcealment itself, as what sustains thinking/saying, and thus sustains beinghuman. It is very difficult for current philosophical thinking to stay within this domain. It is also not easy for thinking that wants to stay in this domain to critically work with the constraints of inherited, metaphysical thinking. In short, it is a challenge for philosophy to handle the rich possibility that emerges and self-shows within this realm – to think it and to say it.

HE I D E G G E R’S PO S SI BI L ITY

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Introduction: Matters for the Opening

So – What are we doing here? In this book? In this writing? In this conversation? The framework of my work here is Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) by Martin Heidegger. I wish to share with the reader my understanding of this text and its import. I offer these thoughts and invite the reader to check them out. Hopefully something from my book will be helpful as each reader wrestles with what is a most difficult and exciting work of Heidegger’s. These thoughts of mine constitute a work of hermeneutic phenomenology, as Heidegger uses the word. This means phenomenology as a gathering-saying of what shows itself from within itself as it shows itself. This phenomenology enacts a thinking that tends to the phenomenon – what shows itself – with keen awareness. It interprets and says this self-showing, always sustained by what self-shows and the self-showing as such, always held to that ‘mark.’ The ‘phenomena’ that need to be observed include the ‘things’ as they show themselves, as well as the self-showing or emergent emerging as such, which always include the saying/showing as such, language as it says-shows. So each time that the word phenomenology or phenomenological thinking appears in the text, it says Heideggerian phenomenology, heard and understood in this way. Heidegger’s phenomenology is in line with Husserl’s phenomenology of reflexive intuition, eidetic evidence, and intentionality and with Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual consciousness. But it is vastly and essentially different from those phenomenologies. For both Husserl and much of Merleau-Ponty are within subjectivity, whereas Heidegger’s phenomenology breaks out of that defining limit. For Heidegger what self-shows, and the self-showing as such (the emergent emerging), includes both

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what humans bring to, and what they ‘receive’ in, the phenomenon. Thus, at the heart of Heidegger’s phenomenology, from Sein und Zeit onward, the subject-object distinction collapses. Here I will attempt to enact the thinking of that collapse and what emerges from within it. I will thus try to think ‘the way things are’ in their interbeing and dynamic relatedness – and not in their distinctness and isolation. To think gathering and permeation as the heart of the matter that shows itself alongside things in their distinctness and separateness. A significant shift has been taking place for some time now, with the world’s (the way things are) being seen as less closed, less absolute, less defined by established boundaries. That is, the world, or the way things are, is increasingly seen and thought as more connected and more dynamic. I want to set the stage for this writing and this thinking by naming and describing six significant imagings of this shift, imagings that Heidegger’s thinking in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) helps to ground. 1 Theoretical Physics and the Universe Relativity and quantum mechanics – and more recently supergravity and super string theory – have netted a worldview where physical matter, particles, and metaphysical substance have lost their central role in ‘defining’ the way things are. This central role now goes to principles of gathering, attracting forces, self-regulating adaptiveness, the dynamic of resonance. One could say that, whereas the old way of seeing saw the atoms ‘gathered’ from the ‘material’ that emerged in the ‘big bang,’ thinking is now opening up to the gathering as such, as a phenomenon – e.g., to taking in the smallest/basic components of matter (subatomic particles), no longer as ‘objects,’ but as mirroring a more expanding dynamic of connectedness. Rather than seeing an electron as a tiny particle, we realize that what emerges is openings, energy, connecting space – and has no dimension. Whether physics or philosophy as discipline has fully, or even actually on any level, recognized the import of this shift in thinking is not yet clear. From mechanical, abstract, objective, and absolute entities (particles, matter, substance) to interdependence, emerging and co-emerging, interbeing – things come into their own in relationship and interactive resonance. What if space is no longer taken as abstract, absolute, mechanical, a container – itself an entity, even surmised to be ‘physical’ – but rather

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seen or taken as a finite with no boundaries (Stephen Hawking), or as itself simply ongoing, unfolding, unfurling? Proceeding from the experience of contemporary physics, where the observer participates in the emergence of what is (the subatomic particles, for example), we then experience the ongoing dynamic relationship between what is ‘in the world’ and the human participation in it. And, taking that another step, we must recognize an intrinsic and inseparable relationship between humans and the originary concealment and disclosure, self-showing (being/Sein in Being and Time, be-ing/Seyn1 in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)). Inherent in this dynamic is ‘that which gives a world’ but is itself not a thing. Also inherent in the dynamic is mind as part of the dynamic of the unfolding/emergence. Mindfulness involves the whole interactive dynamic of humans and what is, and then of Da-sein and be-ing. What can phenomenological thinking bring to this shift? To find the language that says this interbeing and ‘reality’ as ‘process’ – and then the language to say how the dynamic itself has awareness – is a big task, seen from where thinking is now. 2 The Humans-versus-Nature Paradigm The paradigm of humans as separate from nature (soul separate from body, spirit separate from matter), inherited from Judaeo-Christian theology – at least in its dominant and institutional forms – as well as from Aristotelian substance metaphysics, is giving way to the dynamic of reciprocity, self-regulating ‘systems,’ and interrelatedness: human-earth as a ‘one.’ This ‘one’ is not a static unity in metaphysical presence (which postmodernist thinking and deconstructive strategies are wary of, rightfully so) but the permeating by which the dynamic encompasses and holds-gathered-together, and is in some sense the holo-movement of a ‘onefold.’ The essential human-earth connection is one of reciprocal dynamic and interbeing. Heidegger’s thinking of the fourfold mirrors this connection and invites thinking to work critically with it. Earth, sky, mortals, and gods enown one another, as well as the place of their joining. Ereignen: en-owning, bringing into its (one’s) own, the dynamic by which

1 The distinction between these two spellings will be dealt with later – and will become quite crucial for this work.

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the four of the fourfold (i ) emerge; (ii)manifest in belonging to one another; (iii) come into their own in the joining; and so (iv) come each into its own within the fourfold – where a true ‘seeing’ (Eräugnen, from Auge/eye, also connected in its root to Ereignis), each of each and each to each, brings each of the four as well as the fourfold, itself, into its own. Sky is not truly sky in isolation from earth. Each comes into the open expanse of the joining (manifest in and as Da-sein and responded to therein), and each comes into its own within the joining/belonging of the fourfold. This is what ereignen says, this reciprocal joining, this becoming/coming into the own of each and the joining of the fourfold as such, in the seeing of each for what it is. All of this is said with the word en-owning (the German er-eignen). What is own to dwelling (the deep sway of dwelling) is humans’ belonging to the other three of the fourfold. Dwelling is not merely a human process but involves a holding within the four aspects of the fourfold. We humans cannot ‘create’ or ‘invent’ the dwelling, the preserving of the fourfold, but we are open to the others and so are given the belonging and thus the dwelling. The ever-coming, ever-emerging fourfold, in the dynamic of enowning, is that of which we humans are a part (participate) but which we do not control or define. Rather, we respond actively, spontaneously. Dwelling: human participation and enaction within the unfolding of the fourfold, and as a core aspect of the fourfold as such – in the joining node, as it were. How can phenomenological thinking open up what is mirrored at the crux/ node of this interbeing and of the fourfold that joins humans and earth? 3 The Convergence of Emergence and Interpretation We humans always already participate in the unfolding of the way things are. If we are to do this in a way that is not subjectivity-oriented, not driven by human will or choice, not founded within any domain of egosubjectivity – then how shall we enact it? Our opportunity here is akin to the one presented in cutting-edge physics today. In attempting to find a ‘holographic’ view of how it is in physics, we need to think the gathering of quantum theory and general relativity. For, whereas Einstein’s theory of general relativity changes how we see/think space and time (and therefore the Newtonian universe of particles in space), it does not change any assumptions about the

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relationship of the observer and the observed, the assumption of ‘objectivity’ and ‘objects’ as the basis of what is does not change. By contrast, quantum theory does wrestle with the relationship of the observer and the observed and radically alters the assumptions of classical physics (and I might add of classical modern metaphysics); however, the Newtonian view of space and time remains the same. From elementary particles (things, ‘objects’) to emergence, from ‘objective’ reality to the observer. In hermeneutic phenomenology there are several names for the various imagings of the convergence: what is and our understanding of it, pre-theoretical experience and saying/showing that experience, the phenomenon (what self-shows) and hermeneutics (interpreting the phenomenon, to its ‘own’), the non-theoretical and the en-owning of it, emergence and interpretation, what is not defined by us as it comes to us and our necessary participation in ‘how it is.’ Without reducing these many namings of this convergence, Contributions goes deeply into this realm, on its cutting edge, with the language of en-owning. A first step toward this convergence takes place where Heidegger thinks Da-sein in Being and Time as the undoing of the duality of subject-object (underneath objectifying subjectivity). A second step takes place where he thinks the ontological difference – being over against beings, the being of what is over against what is. What is that by virtue of which beings are but that is itself not a being? The third step – crucial for comprehending the issues of Contributions – takes place in the thinking of the ‘essential turning’ of en-owning, where be-ing is no longer thought in terms of beings (that which is) but in its own full, deep sway – being. Humans thus enter into a completely other domain of historical unfolding. Here the name for the convergence of emergence and interpretation (hermeneutic phenomenology) becomes the relationship of be-ing and humans. Two questions coalesce: How do humans participate in the emergence (how does the observer participate and alter the observed)? And then, how does be-ing ‘need’ Da-sein while Da-sein belongs to be-ing? How can thinking think and say what is own to human Da-sein in a world that does not know where it fits, where it is ‘unto its own’? Where is the ground that is own to humans? This ‘ground’ is other than the ground or foundation that metaphysical thinking has provided up to now. This inherited, metaphysical ground is formed under the domination of calculative and representational thinking, a ground taken to be ‘objective’ and valid and absolute, named in the received notions of idea

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(Plato), ejntelevceia (Aristotle), cogito (Descartes), reason (Kant), absolute spirit (Hegel, Schelling), will to power (Nietzsche). The shared ‘quality’ of each is such as to take away from what is own to Da-sein and to be-ing. (Note that, along with this received metaphysical concept, these key words in philosophy may well carry another possibility or option. For example, Aristotle’s ejntelevceia might well be sayable within the openings of the other beginning that is no longer defined and delimited by the metaphysics of substance or presence.) Heidegger’s thinking intends to bring humans and beings (‘back’?) to the place where they originarily belong, to that way of being which is their own (eigen). Thus the keyword for thinking these matters is en-owning (Er-eignis). (Note that the whole question of a language to say and enact this thinking will be taken up in part 1.) Contributions is Heidegger’s attempt to enact the thinking that reconnects humans and be-ing, and this happens in the thinking of be-ing as en-owning, of the truth of being in the deep sway of en-owning. Put in a languaging that images this complex and cutting-edge phenomenon, Heidegger says that be-ing enowns Da-sein, and Da-sein, enowned, throws this enowning open – and this convergence of the enowning throw of be-ing to Da-sein and the throwing open that enowned Da-sein does is the originary turning of en-owning. This opens up two core issues. (i) Whatever ‘be-ing’ is or names, ‘it’ is no-thing: the word be-ing does not name an entity, a being, highest being, or anything substantial. The very words ‘be-ing as enowning’ (Seyn als Ereignis) undo this traditional metaphysical weave – unto perhaps another weaving? It is too early to know how this might unfold, historically. (ii ) An intertwining of levels and a circularity will unfold in the course of this work of thinking. Indeed, the intertwinings merely named here will become the inseparable dynamic that this book means to say or let emerge. Our inherited language and conceptual formation are indebted to metaphysics. In this paradigm our traditional, inherited language has us take humans and being as two separate entities, whose relation is in question. But the thinking of en-owning calls for thinking beyond this duality. This is what Heidegger is saying in section 115 of Contributions, where he says, ‘The leap, the most daring move in proceeding from inceptual thinking, abandons and throws aside everything familiar, expecting nothing from beings immediately . Rather, above all else it releases belongingness to be-ing in its full essential swaying as enowning’ (161/227). This is the path that we must follow up on, hold ourselves to.

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Ereignis usually means ‘event’ in German. It is clear that this translation will not work for the thinking of Contributions. Heidegger makes clear that the eigen part of the word says ‘own,’ and the er- part of the word says something like ‘enabling,’ ‘bringing into the condition of,’ ‘welling up’ – bringing into its own, coming into one’s own, the very action by which this own (to humans, to things, to be-ing) is enacted in thinking. Ereignis names the enabling and enacting character of this enowning. This enacting character (the enaction of thinking) is from enowning in its full, deep sway (the enowning throw of be-ing and the throwing open that Da-sein, enowned, does or the originary turning that is enowning). Thus ‘from enowning’ says, from within the originary experience of being enowned by/to be-ing and of belonging to be-ing. The ‘call’ or throw of be-ing is Zuruf or Zuwurf. In participating in response to this call, thinking says (brings to language) enowning in its full, deep sway (the enowning throw of be-ing and the throwing open that Da-sein, enowned, does or the originary turning that is enowning). I quite deliberately repeat that phrase so soon again, for its crucial saying here. The deep sway of enowning is the historical unfolding of the enowning call/ throw of be-ing to Da-sein and Da-sein’s enowned response as it throwsopen this call/throw. One of the issues before us is to think how this language of the inhering dynamic convergence of the enowning throw of be-ing and Da-sein’s enowned throwing-open of what is thrown is mirrored in the language of emergence and interpretation (hermeneutics) (see chapter 2). Language/saying/word is part and parcel of the emergence of be-ing – being as enowning, be-ing as emergent emerging. 4 The Enactive Stillness of Withdrawal If be-ing is not an entity – and not some ‘thing’ at all – then the originarily historical thinking that ‘enjoins the deep sway of be-ing’ (9/11) calls for heeding the self-sheltering (Sichverbergen) involved in the enowning throw of be-ing and must itself then work ‘in the style of reservedness [Verhaltenheit]’ (9/12). Heidegger asks, ‘What saying accomplishes the utmost reticence [Erschweigung] in thinking?’ (10/15). Thinking’s attunement to these matters is named as • startled dismay (das Erschrecken); • reservedness (die Verhaltenheit); • awe (die Scheu).

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Startled dismay, Heidegger says, is the enaction of thinking whereby one ‘returns from the ease of comportment within what is familiar to the openness of the press of the self-sheltering [that which holds itself back or withdraws, but which pushes or presses forward in its self-sheltering/ concealing]’ (11/15). But this startled dismay is not an evading. ‘Rather, because it is precisely the self-sheltering [that is part and parcel] of be-ing that opens up in this startled dismay … what is own to the “will” of this startled dismay allies itself to startled dismay from within’ (11/15). This is what Heidegger calls reservedness (Verhaltenheit). The thinking relation to the withdrawal of be-ing by staying with the withdrawal by reservedness – not turning away from it, but holding it in its and thinking’s hesitation (Zögerung). Thus the ‘ground’ of be-ing in Da-sein is originarily and essentially an ‘abground’ (Abgrund), the staying away of ground. This is how be-ing happens or comes forth, unfolds historically. ‘In reservedness – and without eliminating that return – the turn into the hesitant self-refusal reigns as the deep swaying of be-ing’ (12/15). Awe goes even further than reservedness. From awe ‘arises the necessity of reticence [Verschweigung]’ (12/15); ‘it is the letting-sway of being as enowning, which through and through attunes every bearing in the midst of beings and every comportment to beings’ (12/16). Da-sein is en-owned – and thus humans are enowned as Da-sein. Enowning takes place in the withdrawal or self-sheltering/concealing of be-ing, the ab-ground, or staying away of ground (which is the truth of be-ing). Gathering the crucial dimensions here, we can say (i ) ‘how it is’ with be-ing is such that humans (here as Da-sein) participate in the ‘make-up’ of be-ing but do not control or create be-ing; (ii ) the enowning throw of be-ing includes at its heart the withdrawal, self-sheltering/concealing; and (iii) the participation of humans as Da-sein includes – as what is own to it – the reservedness, the reticence that mirrors the withdrawal within be-ing as enowning. How can this be-ing-historical thinking from enowning inform and help to unfold the thinking at the cutting edge of ‘the way things are’ as thought today by contemporary philosophy and physics? 5 The Courage to Think Possibility Held within these various matters mentioned here at the beginning is perhaps the most challenging opportunity for thinking at this time in

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the history of thought. It is an opportunity to think and put into language what to many appears as undoable: a radical shift in how we think the way things are, how it is in the world. Thinking this possibility – to some an impossible task – calls for ignoring the sceptics and simply getting on with the work. Right now philosophical scholarship is partially and unduly dominated by the ‘nominalism’ of postmodernist ‘pluralism.’ Everything is equally ‘valid’ because there is no ‘objective’ validity. There are only texts to be interpreted unto traces and layerings of meaning (subtexts) that have no ground. Multiple contexts, pluralistic relativism, and social construction – all hold the attention of the most recent trends in continental philosophy, which has its historical roots in phenomenology, hermeneutics, and hermeneutic phenomenology. But in trying to avoid the pitfalls or traps of metaphysical unity, presence, and objective truth (which surely need to be ‘gotten over’ or moved beyond), perhaps these trends fail to avoid the pitfall of becoming blind to emergence and to experience – forgetting perhaps that paradigms and constructions are not about the phenomenon and emergence. Failing to take experience into account, failing to keep experience on the front burner and let experience – in its myriad ways of unfolding – have its say. If postmodernist pluralism is about expression that is determined not to claim too much, then hermeneutic phenomenology is about saying ‘the same old thing,’ which happens to be the way things are – to the eye that sees – but saying it in a different way, one called for by the necessity of thinking that emerges from within be-ing as enowning. But its thrumming is held within the sheltering of be-ing, of the other beginning. Surely interpretation is part of all that we know. But it is also true that apples do fall, rain does happen, and there are cars, trees, and the heavens. Thus the interpretation of texts is surely essential to any ‘true’ philosophizing; but this interpretation cannot ignore emergence: the way things are, or how it is, in the world. The say of direct experience. The dance is between emergence and interpretation, between the role of humans (the enowned throwing open of the throw of be-ing, which Da-sein does) and the emerging unfolding that throws itself to Dasein. The challenge is to think the matter here as ‘though more than one, not two.’ In this context, let me say that what I offer here is not the only or the ultimate reading of Heidegger. But perhaps it offers something for the reader’s perusal. I invite the reader to check it out with an open mind.

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6 The Unfolding Quality of Thinking and Language In the Heidegger-text published at the beginning of the von Herrmann Festschrift (written in 1964)2 Heidegger addresses the issue of the historical unfolding that belongs to his own thinking. Noting that throughout Being and Time ‘being’ (Sein) is indeed thought as emergence (Anwesenheit) and this emergence ‘is never and in no way some thing that emerges [Anwesendes],’ he acknowledges that this was not so clear at the time of writing Being and Time as it was forty years later. Noting that thinking’s being able to get at this emergence as such at the time of writing Being and Time had to unfold from within and out of ‘idealistic, transcendental phenomenology’ – and had to break loose from it – he notes an historical necessity for thinking to go this way. Noting that, as he turned to the Greek ajlhvqeia to say being as emergence and translated ajlhvqeia as Wahrheit, his thinking ran the risk of being misunderstood – in the direction of correctness and certainty (what Wahrheit/truth usually mean) and thus ‘the later wording of truth of being is misleading’ – he then says, ‘But what does one do, given the lack of adequate saying, which today [1964] is still as great as it was decades ago?’ Gathering his pondering on this earlier, less-clear understanding and a ‘lack of adequate saying,’ Heidegger writes, In saying this now, I do not mean to imply that, as I was working out Being and Time in 1925/26, I ought to have known all of this as clearly as I describe it now. But whoever knows what it means to be underway in a deep, necessary sense knows how the view of the way-to-go that opens out in front of him is constantly changing, just as is the view of the way just gone – especially when this being-underway is not meant personally or biographically, but is experienced in the historicity of Dasein.’3

Our thinking is also bound to this historical unfolding that is not personal-biographical. For Heidegger, as well as for us, gaining greater clar-

2 Martin Heidegger, ‘Zum Einblick in die Notwendigkeit der Kehre,’ in Vom Rätsel des Begriffs: Festschrift für Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Paola-Ludovika Coriando (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1999), 1–3. This Heidegger-text will appear in GA 73, Zum Ereignis-Denken. 3 Ibid., 2–3.

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ity and thus using different words to show a greater understanding of the same matter – now more apt to what the saying requires – arises or emerges, as Heidegger says, ‘from a necessity of thinking’ (GA 4, 7). The same dynamic is at work in translation. Translation itself is a philosophical matter! Thus, just as I have devoted a whole chapter to language and saying (chapter 2), so do I dedicate a whole chapter to the philosophical matter of translation (chapter 5) – as well as an extensive appendix in which I address some specific issues in the translation of Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Given that these issues are dealt with at length in future chapters, here at the end of the introduction let me say just a few words about translation – how one decides to translate certain of Heidegger’s words here, or, perhaps, how the matter itself ‘decides’ one (see chapter 3). First, every translation is an interpretation. Second, translation is tied to what is own to a word and its saying, both in the internal translation within a language and to the translation from one language to another. Thus translation can even bring out aspects and nuances that are in the original but are not as clearly laid bare. Third, the translation is also bound by the historical unfolding of thinking, from within a necessity that inheres in thinking itself. Fourth, and finally, just as ‘staying with the matter’ calls for a renewed thinking/saying, one using other words, so too does translation call for these kinds of newly emerging words. That is to say, one’s own understanding grows and the ‘necessity of thinking’ calls for an evolving dynamic in translating. Throughout this book, when quoting from the published English translation of Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), I will occasionally put into angle brackets an alternative English wording, motivated by an awareness that the ‘necessity of thinking’ calls for this. It is my intention that the wording used to translate Heidegger’s German is always true to the measure that Contributions itself sets. I wish to give several important and specific examples of this dynamic that responds to the measure of thinking/saying as it evolves for the one translating. First, in rendering the German words Wesen and Wesung, in one of their several ways of saying, the published English translation of Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) gives essential sway and essential swaying. Along the way toward that decision, words like in-depth-sway(ing) or just deep sway(ing) were tried. Without going into the reasons here for our final decision, I can say that Parvis Emad and I decided to use ‘essential sway/ing’ to render into English the word das Wesen/die Wesung whenever it named the dynamic of enowning/Ereignis.

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There was some fear that the word deep implies a contrasting ‘surface,’ as well as something like an immutable essence. It is true that the English word deep sometimes says what is down or inward from the surface. But the word itself does not say an essential unity or some kind of hierarchy that metaphysics represents. The word deep, akin to the German tief, also says the following: deep and hollow, in from the edges, strongly felt, dark and rich, intense, profound or profoundly absorbed, immersed, much involved – and then deep as something rich: powerful, full deep mellow, and abundant. ‘Extending far,’ rather than ‘deep down away from the surface.’ ‘Deep’ also says the middle, the intense part or domain.4 Given all of the above, we can hear and say Wesen/Wesung des Seyns as ‘deep sway(ing) of be-ing,’ which says the richness of be-ing’s holding sway, the intense ‘own’ to the swaying of be-ing, immersed in what is at the heart and the own of be-ing. In continuing to read Heidegger and to work with the text of Contributions, I have decided to use ‘deep sway(ing)’ to render into English the German words Wesen and Wesung. Or, perhaps, the matter has decided me. Second, in this same dynamic of what is at play in the words Wesen/ Wesung, we pointed out, in the translators’ foreword to Contributions, how the German word Wesen has several rather distinct ways of saying in Contributions. Das Wesen des Seyns – calling for something like ‘essential sway,’ ‘in-depth-sway,’ or ‘deep sway’ – is perhaps the most crucial sense of the word Wesen, certainly inhering in the matter of Ereignis/enowning and Seyn/be-ing. However, the word Wesen says something else as well: what is ‘own’ to something. For example, das Wesen der Sprache and das Wesen des Menschen: what is own to language, what is own to human beings. With these examples it becomes clear that the usual translation of Wesen as ‘essence’ is not so accurate. Rather das Wesen as ‘what is own to’ is philosophically more correct and is a truer saying of the matter. Thus, saying ‘what is own to language’ for das Wesen der Sprache says more accurately that das Wesen der Sprache is not about what is ‘common’ to all languages or what is the ‘essence’ of language, but rather what is own to language, what belongs to language as ‘its own,’ in a deep sense. Wesen as ‘essence’ opens up the domain of universality, of what is common to something, the unity of a multiplicity, whereas ‘what is own to’ says the domain of dynamic possibility, something to be enacted.

4 See Hermann Paul, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 9th, rev. ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), s.v. ‘tief.’

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It is intriguing to note how the deep connection in Contributions between the words Ereignis and Wesen/Wesung can be named in English with the words enowning and own, words with the same cognate. Indeed, the deep sway of be-ing (das Wesen des Seyns) is the own-enowning of being – or the own of enowning. (This word own in enowning demonstrates one of those fortuitous dynamics in the English language.) Third, the word Entwurf calls for serious consideration. When translating the word in Being and Time, the English says ‘projection’ – and the verb entwerfen is translated as ‘projecting.’ These translations run the risk of taking the action of entwerfen as being entirely within the domain of the thinking subject, of ego-subjectivity. The English words project/projecting/projection have two connotations that are unhelpful in reading Contributions: (i) a psychoanalytic connotation of ascribing to others one’s own ideas and impulses; and (ii ) the implication of planning, designing, programming. Both of these connotations waylay what entwerfen is saying in Contributions. Along the way of translating Contributions, we translated entwerfen and Entwurf with some form of the English word throw. The intention was to avoid the subjectivity-oriented implication of the words projection/projecting. Also the Anglo-Saxon word throw seemed more concrete, more grounded – and certainly less encumbered by encrusted philosophical jargon. Throw – from the Middle English throwen, thrawan: cause to twist or turn – says send forth, bring forth (as in ‘throw-open’), throw out (as in ‘give expression’ or ‘make visible’). Also, the word’s connection to werfen, loswerfen, Entwerfer, Werfer, Wurf, Gegenwurf, Loswurf, and Geworfenheit/geworfen is kept explicit with the use of the word throwing-open to translate ent-werfen. In the English translation – following a certain give-and-take between us the translators and the press and its review process – entwerfen was rendered into English as ‘projecting-open.’ By adding the word open, we hoped to avoid the pitfalls of the word projection, as outlined in the previous paragraph. In the spirit of the ongoing dynamic at play in the interpretation that every translation is, I have decided to use the word throwing-open and throw-open in rendering the German words Entwurf and entwerfen in English. This way of saying Entwurf shows its fittingness when Heidegger writes, ‘Entwurf, d.h. die gründende Eröffnung des ZeitSpiel-Raumes der Wahrheit des Seyns’ – ‘the throw-open, i.e., the grounding enopening of the free play of the timespace of the truth of being’ (4/5). Hardly a ‘projection’ in either of the usual senses! The interpreting that takes place in translating helps to manifest/say what is meant – or said – in the original. In Hölderlins Hymne ‘Der Ister’

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Heidegger uses the image of a mountain peak and its heights when he says, ‘The peak of poi-etic or thinking work of language must not be worn down or leveled off through translation … Translation must set us on the path of climbing to the peak.’5 When our thinking has gained more clarity and when the matters being thought themselves find a more adequate saying, the wording and language are inseparable from that clearer thinking and thus must follow suit – for the sake of staying the course to the peak. Within the context of this dynamic of translating words within the own/original language, for the sake of gaining access to what is being said in this originary saying, as well as from one language to another, for the sake of staying true to what is being said (both in the original and in the translation) – it is crucial to keep the original word in mind and to be sensitive to its nuances in the original language. Thus no other fitting option is open but to bring the keywords in Heidegger’s German along in any work of thinking that holds to this language and its saying. For this reason the German words that appear in parentheses – or otherwise in this text – are an essential part of this ‘English’ work. In traversing the path of being-mindful of these six imagings – as they move ever more to the heart of the matter – we are called to think along with Heidegger unto its next possible unfolding, the emerging possibility for thinking the way things are. We see that Heidegger’s philosophy has been – and will continue to be – useful in other domains of research and creative thinking – architecture, art and aesthetics, theoretical physics, environmental thinking, qualitative research in nursing and interpretive studies, among others. Given that we today recognize the need to learn how to think outside the reductionist forms of rationalistic inquiry and how to maintain the necessary rigour while doing qualitative research, Heidegger’s contributions in the realm of interpretation/ hermeneutics, as well as his original and creative philosophy beyond subjectivity, i.e., beyond dualism, come in handy. The place where humans, things/beings are – and the dynamic by which they are – needs to be thought in a way that gathers them, thought non-dualistically. This could be said as the ‘fusion’ of emergence and interpretation. Throwing open (involving hermeneutics or interpreta-

5 Hölderlins Hymne ‘Der Ister’ (GA 53), 76.

Introduction

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tion) the way things are (in their appearing, emergence) is useful in several ways: • by delineating what philosophy is for Heidegger – enactive, transformative, with a core role played by language as saying/showing; • by acknowledging the power of language to say/show and by keeping this showing power of language at centre stage in enactive thinking; • by taking de-cision out of the realm of a merely human will-act – beyond human agency – in the way of parting and gathering that belongs to the whole dynamic of being, beings, and humans (where we humans are not in charge of what we choose but rather are vigilant participants in the unfolding of what is); and • by envisioning and enacting translation as itself a philosophical activity. How does thinking own up to this task? What is own to humans? How can one think this enowning?

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PART ONE Points of Departure

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1 The Necessity of Philosophy

Anyone who has read Heidegger at all will know that he sometimes uses the word philosophy to name what thinking needs to ‘leap’ beyond – as in the essay ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,’ where philosophy is named as metaphysics.1 Philosophy as metaphysics needs to be ‘gotten over’ (verwunden). And at other times the word philosophy names the richest and most question-worthy matter – as in Contributions, where the word is used to name what thinking needs to do when it says or gathers the deep sway of be-ing. In this sense the word philosophy says the richness of possibility. How the word is demarcated, and what it stands for, in the originary thinking of enowning, is the theme of sections 14, 16–19, and 258–9 of Contributions. By delving into these texts, I want to try to let this matter become manifest. Philosophy in this rich sense of possibility is to be distinguished from (i ) philosophy as worldview (Weltanschauung); (ii ) ‘scientific’ philosophy of epistemology and the idea of knowledge as certainty; (iii ) philosophy as metaphysics; and (iv) philosophy as thinking the ontological difference. Philosophy that thinks the deep sway of be-ing as enowning, this rich possibility, is quite different from these four. Here ‘philosophy’ names what is called for in the thinking of Contributions – even as it holds back from dismissing these other notions of philosophy. For they all belong to the historical unfolding of metaphysics in the ‘first’ beginning. We will have to look into these ways of ‘philosophy’ that are not the same

1 Martin Heidegger, ‘Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens,’ in Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1969), 61.

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as the philosophy that thinks be-ing/enowning but at the same time belong to the historical unfolding that is be-ing as enowning. First, this rich way of philosophy is distinct from ‘philosophy’ as worldview (Weltanschauung). Worldview orients experience in a certain direction, as ‘cultural commodity.’ Worldview, thus, can never call itself into question; for it is enclosed within this ‘view’; and its enclosure is unknown to it. Therefore, worldview limits genuine experience. This staying put and not questioning itself refuses new possibilities, holding onto the established norms that make up worldview. ‘Absolutely’ or in the course of cultural development, worldview is the articulation of human beings and of human culture with regard to the system of valid norms in the formation of such values as what is true, good, and beautiful. Worldview takes on a life of its own. Worldview operates as machination, which controls and conquers what comes unto it – otherwise named/seen as new possibility. Worldview cannot let this new possibility in. Rather it slides into the ‘lived experience’ of the human subject and as such is taken as individual lifeexperience, even though it does not involve individual ‘will,’ but rather succumbs to the ‘opinions’ that make up the finality and validity of worldview. (An example of this is current opinion polling. Opinion polls appear to measure the opinions of individuals, but in fact mirror the values and ‘ideals’ of a specific worldview. They have the semblance of individual freedom and critical assessment but are in fact the expression of the fluctuation of public opinion as worldview.) Seen from this perspective, worldview takes the form of a totalizing that goes hand in hand with machination. Thus the insurmountable difficulty of worldview: ‘The total worldview must close itself off from the opening of its ground and from engrounding the domain of its “creating”; that is, its creating can never arrive at what is its own way of being and become creating-beyond-itself, because thereby the total worldview would have to put itself into question’ (29/40, italics in the original). This leads to ‘endless operations’ (Betrieb) but never to creative opening, unfolding of the new, of emergence, of the hidden domain that worldview does not and cannot touch, or of any richness of possibility. However, philosophy as the grounding of the deep sway of be-ing (being as enowning, as unconcealment, as opening unto possibility) has its origin or source – the domain of its grounding opening – in itself: ‘it must take itself back into what grounds it and build itself up only from that’ (27/39). Second, this rich sense of philosophy as opening is not the ‘scientific

The Necessity of Philosophy 23

philosophy’ of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity. Science, from the Latin scientia, does not necessarily mean only what we today call ‘science’ (physics, chemistry, etc.) over against the humanities. Rather ‘scientific philosophy’ would be a philosophy of ‘knowing as certainty (self-knowledge)’ (27/37), which intends to ground the knowable in a mathematical system. Whereas the modern metaphysics of subjectivity still wants to rescue those matters that are own to philosophy in its richest possibility (thinking be-ing) – that is, to deal with the matter of tiv to; oj[n, of how things are, the ontological question – it actually stops opening up to it beyond mere epistemology. In transforming the matter of tiv to; oj[n (how things are) into the question of certainty and knowing (ens certum of Descartes), ‘scientific philosophy’ no longer sees the openings that this matter calls for. It cannot see its own necessity, emerging from the deep sway of be-ing, from enowning – the rich possibility to be thought from within but going beyond the matter of the way things are (be-ing, unconcealment, emergence: Anwesen) – ‘because philosophy already lacks necessity and owes its “cultivation” to its character as “cultural commodity”’ (27/38). Philosophy becomes ‘erudition’ of scholarship, thus becoming itself an aspect of worldview. With the totalizing of worldview and the certainty-principle of ‘scientific philosophy’ or the philosophy of knowledge (epistemology), which itself became a value/view of worldview, worldview and the thinking of modern metaphysics renounce ‘essential decisions’ (29/41). In drawing these first two senses of ‘philosophy’ together and showing how they do not name the matter for thinking in Contributions, Heidegger asks, ‘But does philosophy not … above all … lay claim to “the total” [i.e., system, certain/secure epistemological foundation], especially when we define philosophy as a knowing awareness of beings as such and in the whole? The answer is yes, as long as we think in the form of philosophy up to now (metaphysics), and as long as we take philosophy in its distinctively Christian cast (in the systematization of German Idealism). But it is precisely here that modern philosophy is already on the way to “worldview”’ (29/41). When, by contrast, ‘philosophy finds its way back into its inceptual way of being [back into what is its own in the beginning, covered over and not thought “then” and now covered over such that it does not show itself without the stress of philosophy’s opening to rich possibility within the beginning, i.e.] (in the other beginning)’ and when what be-ing says becomes the question of the ‘grounding midpoint’ (29/41), philosophy

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as abground (staying away from ground, open to possibility, without ‘foundation’) is manifest. This philosophy ‘must return to the beginning,’ to what is inceptual, where matters ‘start.’ Philosophy becomes mindful, in its ‘free-space,’ of what goes beyond itself, does not have the rigidity of finality, is open to being put into question, is ‘estranging and ongoingly unfamiliar.’ Philosophy is mindful of (from within) the deep sway of be-ing as enowning. The question for philosophy as thinking be-ing is ‘the leap into its deep sway and thus into be-ing itself’ (31/43). The question then is one of how to say be-ing’s enowning of Da-sein and how that enowning ‘needs us’ (humans as Da-sein) ‘insofar as we sustain and inabide – are persevering in – Da-sein – and ground Da-sein as the truth of be-ing’ (31/ 45). Philosophy as mindfulness ‘leaps into the utmost possible decision’ (31/44). This is philosophy’s necessity: the mindfulness by which it thinks what needs to go beyond – from within – the first and utmost distress (Not), i.e., the modern metaphysics of objectifying subjectivity. Philosophy that thinks be-ing and possibility does not transcend the limitations of worldview or of modern metaphysics, nor does it ignore or try to overcome the distress, of which mindfulness is aware, in this notgoing-beyond-itself of worldview and the metaphysics of objectifying subjectivity. Rather, the necessity is to stay in the no-way-out of the lack and of the distress. Thus Heidegger says, ‘The necessity of philosophy consists in the fact that as mindfulness it does not have to eliminate that distress but rather must persevere in it and ground it, i.e., make it the ground of man’s history’ (32/45). Or, again, philosophy cannot simply throw off its inherited ‘habit of metaphysics.’ Rather it ‘must still often go in the track of metaphysical thinking … [but must] always know the other’ (303/430). Third, this rich sense of philosophy as thinking be-ing (as enowning) is distinct from philosophy as metaphysics. The word metaphysics names the whole history of Western philosophy up to now. How so? The word metaphysics ‘is meant to say that thinking of being takes beings in the sense of what is present and extant as its starting point and goal for ascending to being, an ascending which immediately and at once turns again into descending into beings’ (298/423). This means that being is thought as a being and always in conjunction with beings and never thought as ‘being as such.’ Heidegger says that the ‘whole history of … inquiry into being (into beingness, in the shape of the question of what a being is) … is the history of metaphysics, history of the thinking that thinks being as the being of a being from out of and unto a being’ (300/

The Necessity of Philosophy 25

426). This determination is exemplified in Kant, whose transcendental inquiry takes beingness to be the ‘condition for the possibility’ of the object of experience. This philosophy includes modern metaphysics, where ‘philosophy … has long since made itself at home only in the objectness [Gegenständlichkeit] of … objects (epistemologically, ontologically, i.e., in terms of representation)’ (349/496). Philosophy that thinks be-ing frees itself from this priority and limitation. It is open to possibility, not defined or held captive within this paradigm of metaphysics. Thus to move beyond these limits, i.e., as defined by metaphysics, is to release this priority, with its ‘ideal,’ ‘causal,’ ‘transcendental,’ and ‘dialectical’ explanations of beings (of the way things are). Philosophy no longer grounds beings in the beingness of beings (which takes its measure from beings) or in the transcendental realm of objectifying subjectivity (where beingness rests in ego subjectivity). Within the historical unfolding of metaphysics (and thus philosophy as metaphysics) this ground of beings as that from which beings are, in their coming-to-be (emerging) and in their dis-appearing, has always remained within the realm of beings. This is the case, whether the ground is taken as the ontic causation of what is real (Aristotelian substance metaphysics), the transcendental possibility for the objectivity of the object (Kant), dialectical mediation of the movement of absolute spirit (Hegel), or the positing of values at the core of the will to power (Nietzsche).2 Fourth, philosophy as the thinking of be-ing is distinct from the thinking of the ‘ontological difference.’ When Heidegger, already in Being and Time, introduces the notion of ontological difference, he means to think being over against beings. But, as he says in Contributions, this thinking is still bound or de-fined by beings. Thinking the ontological difference is thinking beings and being in their difference. Proceeding from what is present/extant (beings), thinking moves toward being in its difference from beings. One might say that the ‘necessity of thinking’ called for thinking to say the question of being as ontological difference – but then, drawn on by that very necessity, to think be-ing itself, where be-ing does

2 This is a paraphrase of a list that Heidegger offers in ‘Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens,’ 62; found in English in Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 56.

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not get its determination from being-as-other-than-beings, but from being as such. Heidegger calls what is present das Anwesende (beings in their presence) and the being of those beings die Anwesenheit (being as what ‘grants’ beings or what is present). It is possible to translate Anwesenheit as ‘presence.’ That translation would imply a certain static presence, maybe even a unity – a metaphysical unity. Thus one might be tempted to say that, whereas Heidegger says that his thinking moves out from within a metaphysics of presence or unity, this word here indicates that his thinking remains (imprisoned?) within that metaphysics of presence. But things are not so simple. In a little text from a larger work entitled ‘Die Seinsfrage: Der Holzweg’3 Heidegger says that all talk of ‘being’ in Being and Time is thought as Anwesenheit. ‘Even the being in “Da-sein” is ecstatic, a manifold emerging to … what emerges [Anwesen zu … Anwesendem].’ Then he says, ‘Anwesenheit is never and in no way something present [ein Anwesendes]; in this regard it is the nothing.’4 Hardly a metaphysics of presence! Thus, granting a certain unclarity on the level of ‘grammar’ or literal meanings, the saying/showing in the word Anwesenheit cannot be said adequately in English as ‘presence.’ So, Anwesenheit as ‘presence’ becomes Anwesenheit as ‘emergence.’ The ontological difference was opened up in Aristotle, as beings (ta; o;[nta) and being qua being (o;[n h|æ o;[n). (‘Opened up’ here means that Aristotle’s thinking took place in the light of the ontological difference. Whether Aristotle thought the difference as difference, i.e., explicitly, is another question entirely and an open question.) What we call a being (Seiendes) Greek philosophy called das Anwesende (o;n[ , ejovn): what presences, emerges, comes forth. Greek philosophy called a being das Anwesende because, as Heidegger wrote in 1965, being spoke to the Greeks as Anwesenheit – named in Aristotle as oujsiva – which got reduced in the history of metaphysics to ‘being,’ ‘beingness,’ and even substance. This reduction is clearly demonstrated in F.E. Peters’s Greek Philosophical

3 Martin Heidegger, ‘Zum Einblick in die Notwendigkeit der Kehre,’ in Vom Rätsel des Begriffs: Festschrift für Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. PaolaLudovika Coriando (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1999), 1–3. The published text is part of a larger sheaf of papers to which Heidegger gave the title ‘Die Seinsfrage: Der Holzweg.’ The whole text will appear in GA 73, Zum Ereignis-Denken. 4 Ibid., 2.

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Terms, where he writes, ‘Aristotle is further convinced that the problem posed by metaphysics, and indeed by all of philosophy, i.e., “what is being [o;[n]?” really comes down to “what is ousia?” since being is, first and foremost substance.’5 The difficulty here is that, when philosophy thinks being, over against beings and what is, it takes its cue from beings. Thus, whereas the difference is indeed thought, it is determined as what it is over against beings. The danger in this way of thinking is that it ‘thinks being as the being of a being from out of and unto a being’ (300/426). To release the thinking of being from the shape given to it in terms of beings – over against beings (as beingness, as presence) – thinking as enaction needs to ‘return’ the ‘ontological difference’ to its ‘own’ place within the question ‘that historically decides metaphysics and decides about metaphysics and its inquiry’ (328/466). Therefore, the thinking of ontological difference is an unavoidable transitional moment, from within which the inquiry into be-ing takes place. Thinking must pass through the ontological difference, so that the necessity of asking the grounding question of be-ing can be manifest. Thus Heidegger writes, ‘But this task cannot be avoided as long as any way at all must be secured that leads out of the still very inadequate tradition of metaphysically inquiring thinking – into the necessarily [up to now] unasked question of the truth of be-ing’ (328/467). Working from within and out of ‘ontological difference’ simply bears witness to the fact ‘that the attempt at a more originary question of being must be a more essential appropriation of the history of metaphysics’ (329/468). For the historical unfolding as such, thought as be-ing as enowning, is the source for the ontological difference. ‘And this, man’s being-thoroughly-tuned by be-ing itself, must be experienced by naming the “ontological difference” – namely, at that point when the question of being itself is to be awakened as question’ (330/469). One of the most revealing ways in which Heidegger says this dilemma or enigma is in section 132, entitled ‘Be-ing and Beings’ (‘Seyn und Seiendes’). This far-reaching title demonstrates the wider expansion, ‘beyond’ the ontological difference of ‘being and beings’ (Sein und Seiendes). For, whereas section 151 is entitled ‘Being and Beings’ (‘Sein und Seiendes’) – thus naming the tension/difference of the ontological

5 F.E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 150.

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difference – in section 132 the title breaks out beyond that difference. It is as if the being-question in the ontological difference is being woven into the be-ing-question of the historical unfolding that is enowning, being as enowning. That is, the title of section 132 does not hold thinking/ saying back ‘with’ or ‘in’ the ontological difference. Thus the very title ‘be-ing and beings’ announces the necessity in thinking to break out of the limiting distinction and to leap directly into the matter of be-ing, being as enowning. What motivates this breaking out and leaping? Heeding the way that language says/shows from within the matter of saying and of be-ing, it ‘says itself’ from within the dynamic of what ‘matters’ in the dynamic of the turning of be-ing as enowning. The necessity of this manner of saying/thinking is shown on the first page of Contributions, where Heidegger writes, ‘It is no longer a matter of talking “about” something … but rather of being owned over into en-owning. This amounts to an essential transformation of the human from “rational animal” (animal rationale) to Da-sein. Thus the proper title says: From Enowning. And that does not say that a report is being given on or about enowning. Rather, the proper title indicates a thinking-saying which is en-owned by enowning and belongs to be-ing and to be-ing’s word’ (3/3). There are two dimensions said here: (i) The human being is transformed into Dasein – which here says, into Da-sein as the open expanse for the claim or throw of be-ing to Da-sein and for Da-sein’s response or throwing-open what enowns it. (ii ) This whole matter is enowned by be-ing in the very saying of it. That is why on the next page Heidegger says, ‘This saying does not stand over against what is said. Rather, the saying itself is the “to be said,” as the deep sway of be-ing. This saying gathers be-ing ’ (4/4). Now we can go back to what is said in section 132, where the very title of the section announces the breaking-out. There Heidegger says that the distinction itself pushes thinking in the direction whence it comes, namely the being named in the ontological difference. Thus, thinking is called to ‘get around’ the distinction by mastering it, by grasping ‘its very origin and that means its genuine onefold’ (176/250). But this necessity to master the distinction, to grasp it in its origin, has another side to it that makes it ‘tormenting and discording’: For as necessary as this distinction is (to think in traditional terms), in order to provide any preliminary perspective for the question of be-ing, just as disastrous does this distinction continue to be. For, whereas this distinction does arise from a questioning of beings as such (of beingness) [what the

The Necessity of Philosophy 29 ontological difference names], in this way one never arrives directly at the question of be-ing. In other words, this distinction itself becomes the real barrier which misplaces the inquiry into the question of be-ing, insofar as, by presupposing this distinction, one attempts to go further than this distinction and to inquire into its onefold. This onefold can never be anything but the mirroring of the distinction and can never lead to the origin, in view of which this distinction can no longer be seen as originary. (176–7/250)

Thus the dilemma. We cannot just ‘abandon’ the ontological difference, because it is part and parcel of the historical unfolding of be-ing in its shape as metaphysics. But to be let into the dynamic of be-ing as enowning, we must ‘leap-over’ the distinction. But this paradox also belongs to the necessity of thinking, which Heidegger’s saying-thinking wants to open up. Gathering up the several moments of the thinking of ontological difference and where it points, we can say the following: • The ontological difference dare not be objectified (into a concept), but philosophy as thinking be-ing will let the difference play, let it be in play. • The ontological difference – as well as philosophy as metaphysics – and the deep sway of be-ing are not independent of each other. Rather they belong essentially within the historical unfolding of be-ing. • Metaphysics has represented the difference but has not thought it. It has named being as what is common, as highest being, as sufficient ground – and has called it beingness. Metaphysics has thought being in terms of beings. • The ontological difference, its blindness to its source in be-ing, and the incorporation of both of those aspects in the philosophy of thinking be-ing – none of this is created by philosophy. Rather, it belongs to the historical unfolding of be-ing, even as thinking be-ing is always already moving within the distinctions, as something taking place within the historical unfolding of be-ing. • We are called to step into the ‘happening’ of this distinguishing, remembering that human thinking does not do the distinguishing or the deciding about the ontological difference and its place within the historical unfolding. Rather it is be-ing as enowning ‘itself’ which carries these dynamics. (Enowning ‘itself,’ of course, is be-ing’s enowning throw and enowned Da-sein’s throwing-open this dynamic.)

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• Enowning involves (i ) the way of presencing and differentiation in metaphysics; (ii ) the bearing of that over to us (Austrag); and (iii) the very dynamic-in-action of that process. • The originary thinking of be-ing – as the gathering of Heraclitean lovgo", as the disclosing/uncovering of Parmenidian ajlhvqeia, and now be-ing’s claiming Da-sein (enowning throw of be-ing) and Da-sein’s responding (enowned Da-sein’s throwing-open the enowning-claim, an en-active thinking) in the originary turning of Heideggerian Ereignis – is hidden and un-enacted in the first beginning of metaphysics and not accessible via the thinking of ontological difference, defined as it still is by ‘beings.’ Now we can turn to the rich sense of philosophy as thinking be-ing as enowning. We have seen that these four senses of ‘philosophy’ just outlined (i) are not own to this rich sense of philosophy; but (ii ) are not separate from it. So what distinguishes this richer sense of philosophy? First, it thinks be-ing as enowning. It does not take its orientation from beings or even from being as determined by beings (either as itself a being, the highest being, or as the beingness by which beings are what they are). Second, this philosophy thinks the relation to be-ing that Da-sein has as Da-sein’s inabiding in be-ing, as Da-sein’s ‘standing within the truth of be-ing (as enowning)’ (329/467). In sections 258 and 259 Heidegger addresses directly how to understand this rich, originary sense of philosophy. He begins by stressing that this grasp or understanding of philosophy is geschichtlich: historical. But in what sense? ‘“Historical” here means belonging to the deep swaying of be-ing itself, enjoined unto the distress of the truth of be-ing and thus bound into the necessity of that decision which on the whole has at its disposal what is own to history [Geschichte] and its deep sway’ (297/ 421). There is no English word that says or reveals what is at stake in this word, Geschichte. The word history is too bland, i.e., does not say well what is being said here in the German. What Heidegger wants to say with this word is that be-ing is a carrying forth, a bearing on – an ‘encountering’ if you will – that is the same as the enowning that be-ing enacts. I use the phrase ‘historical unfolding’ as the best that I can find. I will take up this issue of Geschichte, Seynsgeschichte, and seynsgeschichtlich again later and in more detail (see chapter 7). For now let me just indicate a couple things about what Heidegger wants to say with Geschichte and Geschichte des Seyns (GA 69). The German word comes from the verb geschehen, to happen. Geschehen says, to happen, in the sense of ‘to befall

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one,’ thus involves something ‘given.’6 Geschehen also says, to take place, to go on; to yield, to afford; to be accomplished. It involves an unfolding and a setting forth, a developing. Something comes to pass, encounters us, bears itself over to us. All of this is included in what Heidegger wants to say with Geschichte. (Some of this nuance of the word history gets revealed in English when we talk about ‘family history’ or ‘medical history.’) One might say that, in English as well as in German, the normal usage of the word history/Geschichte means an account of what has happened. We are called to move from this ‘account’ aspect to the unfolding itself, to the dynamic that is at play in how ‘history’ happens. Whereas there is no ideal English word to do all of this, I have chosen to use the phrase ‘historical unfolding.’ The reader needs to keep in mind the richness of the German word as Heidegger uses it. (Note that these nuances are a bit easier in the original German – but not all that much!) (I might suggest that the English noun history would be less adequate to say this matter than the English adjective historical, as in ‘historical unfolding.’ ‘Historical’ holds within its saying something of the dynamic of the sending-forth, the carrying-forth, the bearing-out, the affordance that is Geschichte for Heidegger here.) Philosophy as ‘inquiring into being’ (299/424) can be heard in two ways. The first way, which is somehow inherent to the four senses of ‘philosophy’ just outlined, is the inquiry into ‘the being of beings.’ The second way of ‘inquiring into being’ carries this first way within it and ‘leaps over’ the being of metaphysics and the ontological difference, to reach what is its ‘own’ – what is own to philosophy as thinking the deep sway of be-ing. Within the gathering of the first and the other way is ‘the directive for crossing from the one to the other’ (299/424). In the moment-site (Augenblicksstätte) or time-space of this crossing, ‘the question of being [of the first beginning, thought throughout the historical unfolding of Western metaphysics] becomes the question of the truth of be-ing … [is] now inquired out of the deep swaying of be-ing and is grasped as the clearing of the self-concealing/sheltering and thus as belonging to the deep sway of be-ing itself’ (302/428). This second way of saying ‘philosophy as inquiry into being,’ namely philosophy as thinking/saying the deep swaying of be-ing as the open-

6 Hermann Paul, Deutsches Wörterbuch, 9th, rev. ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), s.v. ‘geschehen.’

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ing/clearing of the self-concealing/sheltering, becomes the way in which the word philosophy says its rich possibility. In section 259 Heidegger works through this saying of philosophy in a series of openings, each of which lets become manifest the intricacies of this most noble venture. This pathway of several openings is to be heard in a circular interweaving of the matter – at the heart of the thinking of be-ing as enowning. Gathering up some of the momentous moves that this richness of philosophy’s possibility says, let me address six issues: 1 Philosophy thinks the deep sway of be-ing. And be-ing is named ‘clearing-opening of self-sheltering/concealing.’ One can say this in English as emergence. Emergent emerging (anwesend, anwesen, ejjo;n e[mmenai). Disclosing or uncovering un-concealing (Unverbergen, ajjlhvqeia). The gathering (lovgo" in Heraclitus). Oujjsiva as ejjnevrgeia in Aristotle – ongoing at-work that is own to be-ing.7 Be-ing is not ‘a being.’ Nor is it a thing or entity. Be-ing is no-thing, but the enactive (en-ergeia) dynamic of ongoing unfolding or emergence. To say be-ing as enowning is to say that enowning as be-ing is be-ing as gathering, emergence as such. Thus when be-ing ‘enowns’ Da-sein, it is the clearing-opening of self-sheltering that ‘does’ the enowning. The saying-unto (Zuspruch) that be-ing makes is none other than and simply the clearing-concealing, the emergent-withdrawal, emergence. The uncovering (ajjlhvqeia) names the emergence from within the withdrawal. This is Heraclitus’s lovgo", which inheres in all things and sustains all things – ‘all things come to be according to lovgo", in accord with and owing to this lovgo"’ (B-1). Note that lovgo" is gathering and word at the same time.8 Thus the gathering and the saying are the

7 See Martin Heidegger, ‘Was ist das – die Philosophie?’ in What Is Philosophy?, trans W. Kluback and J. Wilde (New Haven: College and University Press, 1956), 54. This aspect of Aristotle’s oujjsiva is mostly hidden within the traditional reading of oujjsiva as substance. 8 St John’s Gospel begins, ‘In the beginning was the word (lovgo") and the word (lovgo") was with God and the word (lovgo") was God.’ Resonating with this saying, we might here say, ‘In the other beginning – be-ing as enowning, the deep sway of be-ing as emergence – is the word/saying and the word/saying is with be-ing and the word/saying is be-ing.’

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same. The ‘saying [word] itself is deep swaying of be-ing … This saying gathers be-ing’s deep sway’ (4/4) – as gathering, as emergence. Saying (the word) gathers be-ing, which is as gathering. It is the same gathering, in dynamic. Saying/gathering brings forth be-ing as gathering emergence disclosing. Then we can say as follows: Be-ing as ongoing emergence enowns Da-sein. Da-sein, enowned by this enowning from/by be-ing as the dynamic of self-showing itself, throws open this dynamic of being enowned by emergence and of emergence’s enowning work. And this dynamic is the originary turning of enowning. 2 This way of philosophy no longer thinks ‘in terms of beings’ (vom Seienden her) but ‘rather as en-thinking of be-ing’ (302/428). This enthinking of be-ing opens up the ‘between’ of be-ing’s enowning throw to Da-sein and enowned Da-sein’s throwing-open this dynamic, in response. Er-denken says historical unfolding, the carrying through, the accomplishing, the doing, the bearing-forth (Austrag). In the enthinking of be-ing the deep sway of the truth of be-ing becomes historical (in this enactive sense of doing and bearing forth). Becoming historical: ‘to rise out of the deep sway of be-ing and therefore to continue to belong to it’ (321/456). The historical unfolding is this emerging from within (out of) the deep sway of be-ing as emergent emerging, as disclosing. This means that philosophy must ‘allow be-ing [its] attuning-determining [stimmend-bestimmend] power for designating what is own to thinking (enthinking)’ (323/459). This power, this deep sway of being, is never definitively sayable (bringable to word). But this is not a lack. Rather it is be-ing’s very power: ‘The non-definitive knowing precisely holds fast the abground [i.e., the staying away of ground, the withdrawal, the self-sheltering/concealing] of, and thus the deep sway of, be-ing’ (324/460). Thus en-thinking is fairly far removed from logic! Whereas we have inherited the prejudice that ‘logical thinking’ is the most rigorous, from within the deep sway of be-ing ‘it is perhaps “logic” that is the least rigorous and least serious procedure in determining the own [i.e., of be-ing and of Da-sein]’ (324/461). In gathering this whole dynamic, Heidegger writes, ‘However, because thinking (in the sense of en-thinking) receives its own from be-ing, because Da-sein too – whose one inabiding must be en-thinking – is en-owned first and only

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by being [read here, be-ing],9 the thinking, i.e., philosophy, has its ownmost and highest origin out of itself, out of what is to be thought in philosophy’ (325/462).10 3 This philosophy is called for through be-ing (emergence and emergence’s enowning of Da-sein and Da-sein’s throwing this dynamic open). This is the necessity of thinking. That is why philosophy is called unto possibility – the possibility ‘to think be-ing itself in its deep swaying without proceeding from beings’ (302/429). Philosophy as this rich possibility ‘leaps into’ thinking be-ing directly. 4 As this ‘between,’ be-ing is ‘that holding [deep] sway in whose truth beings can first enter into the preserving of beings’ (302/428) – the deep sway in which beings come forth and take their place as beings. Beings are what they are from within this deep sway of be-ing (be-ing as disclosing, emergence, revealing-concealing, the clearing-opening of withdrawal and self-sheltering). Beings are tuned and determined from within and out of be-ing, emergence, revealing-concealing, ajjlhvqeia. Be-ing as emergence grants to beings to come into and stand in what is their own – as things. Gathering the way just gone, we can say this rich way of philosophy as thinking be-ing as emergence, as ‘what’ determines and necessitates, and as what lets beings be in what is own to them, from within and out of the en-owning of be-ing. 5 Be-ing – what needs to be en-thought (enacted and brought forth in thinking) – cannot be reached from the standpoint of metaphysics. However, in its deep sway it includes the historical unfolding that is metaphysics (the first beginning) and thus ‘stays in the track of metaphysics’ even as it is always already knowingly aware of the other beginning (see 303/430). Thinking leaves the standpoint of metaphysics, not by abandoning it outright, so to speak, but by becoming enjoined to the distress that

9 Note that, whereas Heidegger in Contributions distinguishes between Seyn (be-ing) and Sein (being), he is not always consistent in his spelling. It is clear from the context here that Heidegger means to say Seyn/be-ing. 10 This is one of the clearest examples of how Heidegger uses the word philosophy in Contributions to designate the rich possibility in thinking the deep sway of be-ing, over against those other texts where the word philosophy is identified with metaphysics and is something to be ‘gotten over’ – precisely not what is being said here.

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emerges when one realizes that beings in what they are – what is own to them, namely, their own as they are within the deep sway of be-ing – are abandoned. The way of the being of metaphysics is such that (i ) it covers over the way things are as they are within the deep sway of being; and (ii ) it itself experiences a lack of distress, as if it is oblivious to what does not emerge in metaphysical being, in the ontological difference. In its emergence and in the enactive dynamic of knowing awareness that beings are not taken in their hold within the deep sway of being, distress is the truth of be-ing. Philosophy has to ‘be subordinate to this distressing.’ Heidegger uses the word unterstehen: subordinate (302/429). Subordinate in the sense of standing or working under the sway of the distressing, under the power of this distressing, under its ‘command.’ The distressing is the motivating force for abandoning the metaphysical standpoint – and it sends out its distress ‘call’ from within metaphysics. All of this belongs to the historical unfolding of be-ing, or to the historical unfolding that is be-ing as enowning. The abandonment of metaphysics is enjoined by this distressing. The decision whereby this distress takes hold and provokes thinking, whereby it stays in the no-way-out dynamic that is central to distressing – this decision is not merely of human thinking-making. Rather it waits for a certain historical unfolding within (or as) be-ing as enowning. Philosophy as rich possibility in the deep sway of be-ing can indicate and be ready, but it cannot ‘produce’ this decision. (See chapter 3 for more on de-cision.) In this context Heidegger writes, ‘On the other hand, being-historical thinking of the other questioning does not now somehow just enter the light of day. Being-historical thinking remains sheltered in its own depth, but now no longer by concealing its enclosedness in the unerupted origin, as it has been since the first beginning of Western thinking and throughout the history of metaphysics, but rather in the clarity of a severe darkness of a depth that knows itself and has arisen into mindfulness’ (304/431). There is a detour (Umweg) that metaphysics takes, through (über) beings, such that it precisely does not reach being – let alone be-ing. When this detour reaches its end, it becomes strong enough that the distressing from within it helps to open up the possibility in thinking the other beginning. Thus the metaphysical detour through beings (held fast by and defined in terms of metaphysics), when held in its staying and saying power, opens out onto the possibility in the other beginning. Thus the ‘other beginning is the more originary taking over of what is own and con-

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cealed to philosophy, its own which arises from the deep sway of being and, in accordance with the respective purity of the origin, remains closer to the decision that is own to the thinking “of ” be-ing’ (307/436). With knowing awareness of an other beginning and from within the track of metaphysics, philosophy’s possibility to think this other beginning (the deep sway of be-ing) emerges. What is own to philosophy begins to emerge, to come out of concealment. This brings philosophy closer to the ‘decision’ that is carried and enacted in the thinking ‘of’ be-ing (see chapter 3). In what might be read as a gathering of the several interweavings at play here, Heidegger ends the first part of section 259 with the following paragraph: Be-ing-historical inquiring into be-ing is not reversing metaphysics but rather de-cision as the throwing open of the ground of that differentiation in which the reversing must also maintain itself. With such a throwing-open, this inquiry moves completely out of that differentiation of beings and being [i.e., out of the ontological difference]; and it therefore now also writes being [Sein] as ‘be-ing’ [Seyn]. This should indicate that being here is no longer thought metaphysically. (307/436)

Metaphysics takes a detour through beings and does not reach being – and therefore comes to its end. Experience of the distress of this ‘end’ gives the strength to turn thinking to the other beginning. This breakthrough is hidden in the first beginning, though not thought as such. It was ‘only the hint of a gift (oujsiva, ajlhvqeia), which did not let itself be grasped and preserved’ (306/434). 6 Revisiting the historical unfolding, be-ing as historical unfolding, enowning-historical thinking gathers the deep sway of be-ing as enowning and the historical unfolding that lies at the heart of be-ing as enowning. Historical unfolding takes place when ‘be-ing itself enowns thinking to itself.’ If historical unfolding wants to remain historical, ‘be-ing itself must enown thinking to itself ’ (304/431).11 Be-ing enowns thinking that belongs to be-ing.

11 ‘... das Seyn selbst sich das Denken ereignen muß.’ Grammatically, this is strong and unusual wording. The sich in this sentence has to be dative – thus literally ‘be-ing enowns thinking to itself (to be-ing).’ This is unusual, because ‘normally’ the sich

The Necessity of Philosophy 37 This reinforces how historical unfolding belongs to be-ing as enowning, how it is be-ing as enowning, and how be-ing as enowning cannot be said without saying historical unfolding. Again, ‘Historical [geschichtlich] here means: belonging to the deep swaying of be-ing itself, enjoined unto the distress of the truth of be-ing’ (297/421). So we come full circle, where philosophy as enthinking the deep sway of be-ing emerges as rich possibility for thinking – as it rises out of the distress at the end of metaphysics and as it finds ‘strengths of questioning and of saying … other than what the historical unfolding of metaphysics could ever bring forth’ (304/432) ‘in the clarity of a severe darkness of a depth that knows itself and has arisen in mindfulness’ (304/431). Revealing-concealing – emergence. Be-ing as emergence, in its historical unfolding, enowns Da-sein. Philosophy as enthinking be-ing is the necessity that Contributions stands us up against. Enthinking the deep sway of be-ing – and saying be-ing, saying as the deep sway of be-ing (4/4) – is the challenge that we call philosophy. And this philosophy is necessary.

In 1955 Heidegger gave a lecture in Cerisy-la-Salle, Normandy, France, entitled ‘Was ist das – die Philosophie?’12 In this lecture he addressed the matter of ‘philosophy’ in terms of the same dynamic as that of Contributions, as to what philosophy is and does. In Die zarte, aber helle Differenz: Heidegger und Stefan George, F.-W. von Herrmann shows how the two texts show the same about what ‘philosophy’ in its rich possibility ‘has’ to do.13 It is useful here, at the end of this chapter, to follow along with von Herrmann as he brings out this connection. The pathway to opening up this question – What is philosophy? – ‘lies directly in front of us [vor uns]’14 because, in turning our minds to the word philosophy, we encounter the word in its origin and ‘hear the word

would be part of the reflexive verb, sich ereignen. But this is clearly not the case here, as das Denken is the accusative or direct object of the verb ereignen. So it is perhaps more accurate to say, ‘be-ing enowns thinking that belongs to it (be-ing).’ If the dative can say this ‘belonging,’ then the belonging that is named may perhaps say openly enough to allow for the widest possible connotation. 12 Martin Heidegger, Was ist das – die Philosophie? (Pfullingen: Neske Verlag, 1956). Published in a bi-lingual edition as Martin Heidegger, What Is Philosophy? References to these works will be abbreviated as N (for Neske) and WP (for What Is Philosophy?), with German followed by the English pagination. All translations from this text are mine. 13 Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Die zarte, aber helle Differenz: Heidegger und Stefan George (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann Verlag, 1999), 31–49. 14 N, 11 / WP, 26.

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philosophy from within its origin.’15 To do this, we leave behind the literal, dictionary meaning and let the word be heard in its Greek saying, understanding it in its Greek bearing. Thus the task is not a literal translation, but a ‘translation’ that is hermeneutical.16 That is, we need to get behind the usual, self-evident ‘concepts’ of philosophy that we have inherited, ‘which cover up the primary Greek experience of thinking.’17 The hermeneutical-phenomenological thinking frees Greek thinking from these inherited, traditional layers of interpretation that cover over what is said in the Greek word filosofiva. Hermeneutics, then, ‘has the task of freeing up its subject-matter, which needs interpretation, from the interpretations [i.e., constructions] that cover over this matter, so that this matter can show itself as it is with and from it itself. To match such provisions – that what is to be interpreted can show itself as it is with and from it itself – fulfils the sense of phenomenology as the procedure [i.e., a “method”]. Hermeneutics gets to its task only if it proceeds phenomenologically. Proceeding hermeneutically-phenomenologically is deeply critical insofar as it clarifies and distinguishes between the various historical origins of ways of thinking.’18 As a Greek word, philosophy is a pathway. It does not say something finished, or simply in the past. Rather, in the various ways of its historical unfolding and in terms of what it puts before us to think, it opens up a possibility. Heidegger says that this way is both ‘behind us’ (in that it has determined and continues to determine how Western thinking got onto the historical path that it has gone up to now) and ‘in front of us, in that the word has long been spoken out there in front of us (vorausgesprochen).’19 Von Herrmann says that vorausgesprochen means ‘the word philosophy and the matter that is indicated therein is spoken into the historical future … is the matter for future thinking.’20 We are called to take over the matter of philosophy from out of Greek thinking, not to keep it within the limits of Greek thinking but ‘to experience and to unfold the future possibility that lies within it.’ We turn back to the Greeks to retrieve what they thought, not unto the inherited tradition, but from

15 16 17 18 19 20

N, 12 / WP, 28. Von Herrmann, Die zarte, aber helle Differenz, 31. Ibid., 32. Ibid. N, 12 / WP, 28. Von Herrmann, Die zarte, aber helle Differenz, 33.

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within and out of the matter that is thought by the Greeks, ‘to experience the own matter for [our] thinking as current and future task of thinking.’21 Or, as Heidegger says, ‘tradition does not hand us over to a constraint by what is past and irrevocable. Being handed over [in tra-dition], delivrer, is a freeing up, into the freedom of a dialogue with what has been [held in its “own”].’22 Von Herrmann adds, ‘In thinking’s entering into what has been [held in its own] there emerges the possibility harboured within it.’23 Two very significant matters are harboured within what philosophy in this rich sense attends to: (i ) that the ‘answer’ to the question is ant-worten (a word in return, in response, where inquiry into what philosophy is calls for this ‘in response,’ or returning the word philosophy to itself);24 and (ii) whether and when thinking manages to do philosophy in this enactive way of thinking-saying in response is ‘by no means in our [human thinking’s] power.’25 So, if it happens, it will be by a saying that is a dialogue with the word, with what claims thinking or gathers it (levgein). Heraclitus says, oujk ejmoue , ajlla; toue lovvgou ajkouvs v anta" oJmologeien sofovvn ejstin e}n pavvnta. (B50) If you have heard, not me, but the logos, then it is wise to respond to the logos: all is one.

In Was ist das – die Philosophie? Heidegger refers to the dynamic of this fragment. He says that oJmologeein is ‘to speak as the logos speaks, i.e., to respond to logos.’26 Heidegger says this dynamic of how logos gathers us, how we say-after, as a saying in accordance with logos as the address (Zus-

21 Ibid., 34. 22 N, 15–16 / WP, 32–4. The German here is das Gewesene, to be distinguished from the simple past (das Vergangene). It says something like, what has been and is held within the own of that ‘has been,’ as possibility for future thinking. Thus das Gewesene comes unto us from the future, i.e., is in front of us as possibility. 23 Von Herrmann, Die zarte, aber helle Differenz, 35. 24 N, 30 / WP, 64. According to Paul, the prefix ant- means in return or in response. Thus ant-worten is a word in response, responding to the claim put on it. See Paul, Deutsches Wörterbuch, s.v. ‘antworten.’ 25 N, 31 / WP, 66. 26 N, 21 / WP, 46.

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pruch) by/from being and thinking’s responding – or how we say in accord with the addressing. Thinking says-back (ent-spricht) to the saying-unto (Zuspruch) that being does. The responding inquiry into being responds to the address of being to us. Heidegger says, ‘Philosophy is the actually undertaken and self-unfolding responding [Entsprechen] that responds to the address [Zuspruch] of the being of beings.’27 Philosophy is as responding. Though a bit awkward, perhaps it is useful to say this as follows: Being says-itself to thinking, and human thinking, thus addressed, actively says ‘back’ to that saying of being. These two belong in a single dynamic. In Contributions this same dynamic is named as ‘enowning throw of being to Da-sein and enowned Da-sein’s throwing it open.’ The claim or enowning says that philosophy – as enthinking the deep sway of be-ing – has to have been addressed/enowned. This is the hermeneutical pregiven, already showing itself. And thinking Da-sein enactively throws that dynamic open, says it in return. And that is philosophy! Own to this responding is that it takes place in a tuning. It is tuned and attuned (enowned), and it actively responds or ‘answers’ – as in ‘gives word in return’ – from within that attunement. This is nothing new in philosophy, but only forgotten for a long time now. Both Plato and Aristotle tell how philosophy begins within and belongs in qaumavzein – erstaunen – pavqo". ‘Wonder, as pavqo", is the ajrchv [i.e., beginning] of philosophy.’28 Beginning here does not mean ‘cause’ of philosophy. Rather it is ‘beginning’ in that it gets philosophy on its way and pervades its every step. Heidegger writes, ‘We usually translate pavqo" with passion, emotion, emotional thrill. But pavqo" is connected to pavscein: to suffer, to endure, to bear out, to be carried along with, to let oneself be attuned by.’29 Thus Heidegger says pavqo" as tuning/Stimmung. Being attuned by the being of beings. ‘Wonder is the attuning within which the Greek philosophers were granted the responding to the being of beings.’30 Throughout our work so far, and again here at the end of this chapter, we see that any question of the rich possibility that is philosophy – the enthinking of the deep sway of be-ing, be-ing as enowning – involves the

27 28 29 30

N, 43 / WP, 90. N, 38 / WP, 80. N, 39 / WP, 82. N, 40 / WP, 84.

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question of language. What is own to philosophy is entwined with the matter of language, with what is own to language: language, saying, the word. Heidegger’s possibility? Philosophy’s possibility?

2 Own to Language: Word and Saying

Heidegger says that be-ing as enowning (Ereignis) must be ‘correspondingly thought and that means said.’1 All thinking involves saying – involves language in an essential sense, in the sense that is own to language. In his lecture What Is Philosophy? Heidegger says that in Greek thinking what is own to language manifested as lovgo" and that we need to have a dialogue with this Greek experience of language. ‘Why? Because without an adequate mindfulness on language we will never truly know what philosophy is as re-sponding as outlined above, what philosophy is as an eminent way of saying.’2 Language becomes central to the work of philosophy presented here: the rich possibility for thinking the deep sway of be-ing. But what kind of language? What does ‘language’ say here? Linguistics? Grammar and syntax? Dictionary language? What is own to language, such that something of what language does is at the heart of the rich possibility of philosophy, when it thinks and says the deep sway of be-ing? Without thinking much about it, we carry with us an inherited, traditional notion of language: Words have meanings. We speak a language, with sounds. The sound (fwnhv)v is what is given and received by the senses. These words carry meaning. This meaning is ‘produced’ in the intellect and then communicated through words. Our usual conception of language fits this pattern. Language is a

1 Martin Heidegger, ‘Rückweg und Kehre,’ Jahresgabe der Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft (2000), 17. 2 N, 45 / WP, 94.

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means of expression and communication. It consists of the sound in sensation and the meaning in the mind/intellect. But what happens when we attentively observe what is taking place? It seems at first that, in our everyday speaking and use of language, we seem to be as close as possible to language and what is own to it. And without much mindful reflection we assume that how we are with language is evident and well-defined. The history of philosophy shows this confidence about human understanding of language. When Aristotle says that the human being is the living being who has ‘language’3 (zwelon lovvgon e[con), Western philosophy has tended to imagine that this saying of Aristotle’s defines and clarifies fully the human being’s relationship with language. However, when we allow our awareness to open out to this dimension, we become aware that we do not really know definitively or with total clarity what is going on in language. Heidegger says that our awareness brings us to the insight that our relationship with language is still ‘undefined, dark, and almost absent of language .’4 Philosophies of language and linguistics usually do not open us up to this awareness. The usual theories about language focus on language as a human activity, something that human beings do in their ‘spiritual’ being (animals do not have language). Language consists in the abovementioned sounds and the non-physical, spiritual meaning. The meaning is about inner experiences that are counter to the external world, to things ‘out there.’ But what if this ‘definition,’ or paradigm, is itself an interpretation, one that covers over other and perhaps more essential possibilities for language, possibilities that are perhaps closer to what is ‘own’ to language, to what language has as its own? In discussing these issues of language – and in reiterating Heidegger’s distinction between knowing ‘about’ language and having an experience ‘with’ language5 – von Herrmann asks, ‘The question that is up for decision is whether, in these fundamental representations of language and of the human relation to it, what is own to language has been fixed once and for all – or whether in these fundamental representations an essential interpretation of language and

3 I put the word in quotation marks here in order not to reduce lovgo" to what is merely ‘linguistic’ – and in order to honour the opening that lovgo" has to its other nuances: gathering, saying as gathering, or even ‘thinking.’ 4 Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (GA 12), 150. 5 Ibid., 150.

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humans gets manifest that is not the only one.’ And if there is another way – aside from these inherited ways, which rely on a specific interpretation with its own preconceptions – then our knowing awareness might begin to see and to think an ‘other, perhaps more originary way of language and of the essential relationship of humans to language.’6 If our thinking moves beyond what we know ‘about’ language and words – to having an experience with or ‘from’ language – then we open up to the possibility that ‘language’ is more than these parts (sounds and meanings, given in dictionaries). ‘The word might even belong to the truth of be-ing.’7 Then what the word ‘says’ is said from within the originary thinking of be-ing. Usually words mean things, beings. Every ‘something’ that is spoken about is a being. But the ‘is’ just spoken is not a being. This word names be-ing. Herein lies the self-showing that belongs to be-ing as emergence, as unconcealment. Saying be-ing, in the ‘is,’ points to something that is other than beings. Be-ing is what grants to beings their ‘meaning.’ Be-ing enowns beings, and this is what is done when thinking says ‘be-ing.’ ‘Only because language [Sprache] arises from the saying [Sage] of be-ing can language become language. But the saying of be-ing can never be thought and experienced from out of language or from out of the metaphysical explanation of language.’8 With these words – being, is – humans already have the protection of knowing that be-ing is said and sayable, before beings take their place in presence. To think this saying is to think the beginning of language, what is own to language. And this ‘own’ to language is not what is spoken in sounds. ‘Humans have language [Sprache] because language emerges in the word [das Wort]; but as the saying [Sage] of be-ing, the word has humans, i.e., determines them in their determination . The attuning [das Be-stimmende] is the voice [Stimme] of be-ing, which does not sound but is silent in the stillness of the winding of be-ing into its truth.’9 In the earliest shaping of word/saying and being, the one word lovgo"

6 Von Herrmann, Die zarte, aber helle Differenz, 55. 7 Martin Heidegger, ‘Das Wort: Die Bedeutung der Wörter,’ in Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, vol. 3: Im Spiegel der Welt: Sprache, Übersetzung, Auseinandersetzung, ed. Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler (Frankfurt: Klostermann Verlag, 1992), 14. 8 Ibid. 16. 9 Ibid.

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is the name for both word/saying and being (Heraclitus). Lovgo": gathering, being as gathering, emergence, word, and saying. What is own to language (das Wesen der Sprache) is saying (die Sage). ‘As way-making [das Be-wëgende], saying gathers everything into the nearness of the overagainst-one-another [i.e., the encounter] – and does this soundlessly … [which is named] the ringing of stillness’ (GA 12, 215). This calls for a different understanding of ‘word,’ one that is neither linguistic nor literal but poi-etic: word that says and in saying brings forth. Poetry and thinking are both sheltered and hidden in be-ing and its granting/enowning. The poi-etic word is the originary saying that gives to both poetry and thinking what they have as their own. These are the matters that we need to take up as we think and say what is own to language, i.e., what is gifted to language: the saying power of the word. One of the texts in which Heidegger opens up this matter for thinking is the dialogue with the Japanese philosopher, published under the title ‘Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache,’ in Unterwegs zur Sprache.10 This text is most useful, in that the very way of language and saying that happens within this dialogue enacts precisely the matter that is questioned and presented. As we handle this text mindfully, we find that our enacting the very question presented – thus letting emerge in action (deed, enaction) precisely what the ‘matter’ is – is a far cry from a ‘theory’ or a ‘definition’ ‘about’ language. If phenomenology is engaged in attentive awareness of what shows itself (of the ‘phenomenon’), in interpreting that phenomenon (unto the matter becoming manifest), and in putting into words what has shown itself and has been interpreted – then two things are of paramount importance. (i ) Along with everything that is disclosed or unconcealed, the very dynamic of disclosing or emergence is manifest – along with. (ii) The interpreting and the saying (putting into words) are of one piece.

10 Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache (GA 12). The dialogue was translated into English as ‘A Dialogue on Language’ and published in Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. P. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1971). Unless there is a clear reference to Contributions, numbers in parentheses in this chapter refer to these published texts. The first number refers to the original Neske edition of Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959), which appears in the margin of the Gesamtausgabe edition (GA 12). The second number refers to the English translation, for orientation purposes. Here all translations of this text are mine.

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That dynamic is an undivided action of thinking. That is why thinking is always saying. This notion is a bit foreign to our traditional ears. With this interweaving of emergence and interpretation – and the further core interweaving of interpretation and saying (‘language’), which is even more enigmatic to our philosophical ear – we need to think through the connection of interpretation, hermeneutics, and Auslegung to language, saying, and the word. This is precisely how the dialogue unfolds. Whereas we could try to distinguish the matters of hermeneutics and of language as they unfold in the dialogue, the enactive thinking therein shows that the matters of language, hermeneutics, and saying are all essentially and irretrievably intertwined throughout the entire dialogue. The German title of this dialogue is Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache. Quite literally, this says, ‘From within a Dialogue from Language.’ This is the same from (von) that is in the title of Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) – Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). In chapter 4 this word von/from becomes thematic for saying the enactive thinking of Contributions. There it is a matter ‘from’ enowning. Here it is a matter of ‘from’ language, in the sense that language itself has something to do with how the dialogue unfolds. Language ‘plays’ with us, we could maybe say. Rather than being a dialogue ‘about’ language and hermeneutics, what is happening is that language itself is having its say with us, with our thinking. We think from that place/dynamic. Phenomenologically speaking, it is the saying/showing that language and the word itself do that we are heeding and actively engaged in. So it is not ‘about’ language at all. Rather it is ‘from’ language: we in our thinking are called on to undergo an experience with language, from language. But what does ‘language’ say here? The full title of this dialogue in German reads, ‘Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache: Zwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden,’ which I translate as ‘From within a Dialogue from Language: Between a Japanese and an Inquirer.’ Language is the theme, and hermeneutics is an inherent part of the matter at hand. This will show itself in our mindfully reading the dialogue. Referring to a lecture course from 192111 and to his attempt to think

11 In the dialogue the Japanese remembers this course to have had the title ‘Ausdruck und Erscheinung’ (‘Expression and Appearance’). A marginal note added by Heidegger in his personal copy of Unterwegs zur Sprache reads, ‘correct: Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression.’ See GA 12, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 86. This lecture course is published as GA 59, Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks.

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the relationship of language and being, Heidegger tells how in that lecture course ‘there was quickening in it the attempt to walk a path of which I did not know where it would lead’ (91/6). An attempt was emerging, arose, came to the fore. Grappling with the issue, thinking could not say precisely what the outcome would be. This is the ‘nature’ of this kind of thinking. ‘Only its immediate openings were known to me, as they never let up in drawing me in – even as the range often shifted and clouded over.’ Can we today allow (dare we not allow) such a thinking, a beckoning-call, including the hidden and withdrawing aspect? Heidegger dealt with the same question in his Habilitationsschrift entitled ‘Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus.’12 ‘Theory of Categories’ is the usual name for explaining the being of beings; ‘Theory of Meanings’ means the grammatica speculativa, the metaphysical reflection on language in its relation to being. Here, too, ‘all of these relationships were still unclear to me at that time’ (92/6). Then Heidegger refers to his lecture course in the summer semester of 1934, where – he reminds his Japanese visitor – the theme was lovgo", ‘wherein I sought what is own to language.’ Still, he says, ‘it took almost another ten years before I was able to say what I was thinking – the suitable word is still missing today [1953–4]. The horizon for the thinking that struggles to respond to what is own to language is still veiled, in all its vastness’ (93/8). The dialogue then turns to Being and Time and its discussion of hermeneutics. Phenomenological description is Auslegung : laying-out, interpreting. It is eJrmeneuvein, by which the own sense of being and its basic structures are announced (get laid out, not defined or proven) to the understanding of being that belongs to Da-sein. Heidegger writes in Being and Time, ‘Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, proceeding from the hermeneutic of Da-sein, which … makes fast the end of the path of all philosophical questioning there, from which it arises and to which it returns.’13 Hermeneutics was initially (historically, with Schleiermacher, for example) about the interpretation of literary works. But for Heidegger it is not that. ‘In Being and Time hermeneutics means neither the theory nor the art of interpretation … but rather the attempt to determine first and foremost what is own to interpreting from

12 In Martin Heidegger, Frühe Schriften (GA 1). 13 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (GA 2), 51.

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within the hermeneutical [i.e., from within what hermeneutics does]’ (97/11). Still, what the word hermeneutics says is enigmatic. Is it in any way suitable? Or was it once and no more? Heidegger points out that in his later writings he no longer uses the word. The question then becomes this: Why is it that Heidegger in his later writings no longer uses this word? This use of and then use no longer of the word hermeneutics has something to do with how the ‘way’ belongs to thinking. Ways of thinking have this mysterious dimension whereby they take us into what is nearest at hand, which in its turn would bring us ‘back’ to the beginning, to what gets thinking going. What gets thinking going reveals and holds back simultaneously. Gathering both (i ) how Heidegger’s thinking did not say this matter in a full-blown way (because it did not show itself clearly at first, and even as it did reveal itself more and more, it remained veiled – and still does today); and (ii ) how within the matter itself there is a withdrawal, a hiddenness, a vibrant stillness – gathering all of this up in a pregnant exchange, the Japanese offers the comment, ‘We Japanese do not think it strange when a dialogue leaves what it really means undetermined [in the realm of the undetermined] or even shelters it back into the indeterminable.’ And Heidegger responds, ‘This [trait] belongs to every dialogue among thinkers that turns out well . This [thinking dialogue] can, as if of its own accord, take care, not only that what is indeterminable does not slip away, but that its gathering force unfolds ever more brilliantly in the course of the dialogue’ (100/13). Notice how language and the word play their own role in the unfolding of the dialogue, how the dialogue ‘works’ from within the saying of language and the word. So what is this indeterminable, this gathering? It shows itself, says the Japanese visitor, in ‘a beholding that is itself invisible, a beholding that in its gatheredness bears itself over against the empty.’ And Heidegger adds, ‘The empty then is the same as the no-thing, that deep swaying [jenes Wesende] which we try to think as the other to all that is present and absent.’ And the response was, ‘To us, the ‘empty’ is the best name for what you want to say with the word being ’ (108/19). Then Heidegger explains how, in the first steps of thinking, the word being led to much confusion, stemming from the word itself, because the word being belongs to the language of metaphysics, as its ‘property.’ By contrast, Heidegger was using the word in an effort to bring forth what is own (das

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Wesen) to metaphysics and thereby to gather metaphysics into the constraints of its limits. Asked if that is what he meant by the ‘overcoming of metaphysics,’ Heidegger says, ‘Precisely and only that; neither a destruction nor only a denial of metaphysics.’14 Given the myriad ways of its historical unfolding, the limits to what the word says in metaphysics, and the rich possibility that inheres in the words being and is, the word being itself draws thinking unto reticence and reservedness. Holding back the word (for being or for the indeterminable or for the gathering or for the owning-to) is called for, ‘not in order for the thinker to keep it to him/herself, but rather in order to carry the word out over against what is worthy of thinking (what calls for thinking’s response)’ (117/26).15 In section 276 of Contributions Heidegger asks, • ‘how does what is own to language arise in the deep sway of be-ing?’ (352/500) • ‘how does language hold sway in the deep swaying of be-ing?’ (352/ 501)

14 It might be useful here to remind ourselves of the ambiguity that Heidegger found in the word Sein/being. Drawn along by the matter itself, within language, his thinking moved from using the word, to not using the word, to writing the word and then crossing it out – all attempts to think/say what the matter at hand is. I am confident that in the end Heidegger kept the word Sein/being to name the matter. Of course, in Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) he introduced yet another word-image, Seyn/be-ing. More on this later. 15 There is an implication here of the dynamic tension of distinguishing and gathering, of moving apart while moving toward, of cutting apart to gather together, parting that yields the originary nondual enowning. This thematic will be taken up directly in chapter 3, ‘De-cision.’ If we get a good sense of this ‘to and away and unto’ of the beckoning here, we also get a better sense of what happens in Contributions, in the section on ‘Time-Space as Ab-ground’ (section 242, pp. 264ff.), where Heidegger uses the word Ent-rückung (shifting or removal unto) and Be-rückung (enchantment or charmingmoving-unto). Remembering that ‘ab-ground’ is the staying-away of ground and that thinking needs to think unto the staying-away, the very ‘unto’ is that whence the onefold of time-space first gets thought. This interlocking web of unto-away and of removing-unto opens up the space for thinking enowning, thinking be-ing as enowning, thinking the deep swaying of be-ing, in its be-ing-historical sway. Another way to think this dynamic or phenomenon is to think how the unfolding, opening, deep swaying is outside the realm of any ‘dualistic’ thinking (body-soul, night-day, metaphysics-nonmetaphysics, being-beings). Can one dare to think that?

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• ‘how so … does language become experiencable in its relation to being?’ (353/501) In ‘Der Weg zur Sprache’ in Unterwegs zur Sprache Heidegger provides clues toward what these questions say. ‘The saying [Sage], which resides in enowning, is – as showing [Zeigen] – the most own way of enowning [said here in its even more enactive form, as a verb, ereignen] … Saying is the way in which enowning speaks … For the enowning saying brings forth what emerges [things, beings, das Anwesende] from its ownhood – from that to where it belongs as an emergent [being, things that are] – and lauds it, i.e., allows it into its own way of being … Saying [is] the way/manner of enowning’ (266–7/ 135).16 If the above ruminations and their resonatings open out to what is ‘own to language/Sprache’ in its ownmost way of being as ‘saying/Sage,’ then the dialogue ‘From within a Dialogue from Language’ is the pathway that enacts that thinking/saying whereby saying says what is own to language – not language, linguistics, or the usual ‘philosophies of language,’ but saying/showing. So we mindfully listen – and co-enact in thinking – the opening of this pathway ‘from within a dialogue from language.’ Heidegger says that the word hermeneutic modifies ‘phenomenology,’ but not as a ‘methodology of interpretation.’ This leads the dialogue to move in and out of the matter of words; this is, for example, why Heidegger no longer uses the word hermeneutics and why the word still says something useful in the discussion that opens up ‘saying’, saying what is own to language and from where the dialogue ‘from’ language emerges. Language as saying. These words point to the ‘site’ of language, where the dichotomy between the spoken/written word and its meaning (signifier and signified) yields to the matter for thinking that the distinction ‘word-to-meaning’ covers over. Rather the discussion is ‘from’ what is own to language. What is own/owning to language (das Wesen der Sprache), whether spoken

16 In a marginal note to this last sentence (‘Saying … the way/manner of enowning’) Heidegger writes, ‘belongs into enowning’ – ‘in das Ereignis gehört.’ One could say, then, that being the manner of enowning and belonging/fitting into enowning say the same from out of the same.

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or written, is something else besides what we are accustomed to think. The matter of thinking is the saying of be-ing. Thus language in its owning reveals the ‘discussion that opens’ this site.17 So Heidegger thinks the word hermeneutics (121/29) as follows: Inquirer: Exactly. The expression ‘hermeneutical’ comes from the Greek verb eJrmeneuvein. The verb refers to the noun eJrmeneuv", which we can connect to the name of the god ‘Ermenhe ", in a play of thinking that is more binding than the rigour of science. Hermes is the messenger of the gods. He brings the message of the sending/shaping [Geschick]; eJrmeneuvein is that laying open that brings tidings, insofar as it is capable of hearing a message. Such laying open becomes the laying-out of what was said earlier by the poets, who themselves (according to Socrates’s word in Plato’s dialogue Ion (534e) … [are] ‘messengers of the gods.’

Hermeneutics here is other than interpreting texts. It must be heard phenomenologically (116/30): Inquirer: Because it was this originary sense that moved and helped me to characterize the phenomenological thinking that opened the way for me to Being and Time. What mattered then – and still matters – is to bring forth the being of beings; of course, no longer in the manner of metaphysics, but rather such that being itself comes to the fore. Being itself – this says: emerging of what emerges , i.e., the twofold of the both from within their onefold. This is what speaks to humans and calls them to what is their own.

What matters is to bring forth in language – as saying – emergence and what emerges. This twofold of emergence and what emerges speaks to humans, and humans respond to its enowning. What holds in this dynamic humans-twofold (in something like a threefold: humans-emergence–the emergent thing) is language/saying. This is what is own to the hermeneutical. Let us pause for a moment. Interpreting the dialogue, perhaps we are enacting the thinking from what is own to language in its owning. Language and hermeneutics are of one piece. They are in action as humans think/say the twofold of emerging and of what emerges (be-ing as emergence and beings as the emergent). The dialoguing partners continue (127/34): Japanese ( J): Thus your mindfulness of language … Inquirer (I): of language in its relationship to the deep sway of being, i.e., to the holding sway of the twofold. J: But if language is the basic trait in the hermeneutically determined needfulness, then from the beginning you experience what is own to language very differently from what happens in the metaphysical way of thinking. This is actually what I wanted to refer to earlier. I: But what for? J: Not for the sake of contrasting something new over against what has been up to now, but rather to remind us that – precisely in the attempted mindfulness of what is own to language – the dialogue speaks as an historical dialogue. I: From within the thinking recognition of what has been.

Returning to the question of language and hermeneutics, the partners in dialogue say the following (137/42): J: … But I believe that I now see more clearly the full import of the belonging-together of the hermeneutical and of language. I: Full import in what direction? J: Toward a transformation of thinking – a transformation, however, that cannot be brought about as readily as a ship can change course – and even

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less as the consequence of an accumulation of the results of philosophical research. I: The transformation takes place as a wandering … J: … in which one site is left behind in favor of another … I: … which requires a discussion that opens up. J: The one place is metaphysics. I: And the other? We leave it without a name.

Now the dialoguing partners return to their earlier question, How does Japanese say ‘language/Sprache’? With some hesitation the Japanese dialoguing partner finally gives the Japanese word for language, Koto ba. The word Koto says a graceful attraction, the coming to radiance in fullness, what gives delight, something like the bringing of a message, the ‘enowning of the clearing-opening message of the graceful attracting, the swaying enowning.’ The word ba says ‘leaves,’ including and especially the leaves of the blossom, the petals. Koto ba is the Japanese word for language : Language, then, could be said to be the unfolding/opening/ letting emerge (which is what enowning is, the be-ing historical sway that is the deep sway of be-ing) that attracts gracefully, like the opening of the leaves and the petals of a flower. This notion of language allows for much reticence, for the saying power of language that says/shows without pouncing on the phenomenon (on what emerges in emergence). This way of language does not define, delimit, reduce – but rather opens up and says and points to (144/47): I: That [Koto ba, the petals that emerge from Koto, i.e., ‘language’ in Japanese] is a wondrous word and thus not able to be thought through all the way. It names something different from what the metaphysically understood words like Sprache [language], glwessa, lingua, langue and language represent to us. For a long time now I am hesitant to use the word language/ Sprache when thinking the swaying of what is its own [Wesen]. J: But can you find a more appropriate word? I: I think that I might have found it – but I want to protect it from being used as a common [i.e., faddish, current, too familiar] label and from being corrupted to signify a concept. J: What word do you use? I: The word saying/Sage. It means: saying and its said and the to-be-said. [Read as the saying itself, the ‘what’ of the said, and what calls for saying – what calls unto us, what turns its gaze to us, what calls for gathering in the saying.]

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This is a very important interlocking web for understanding what it is that language does to us and what it is that grounds as well as opens up ‘hermeneutical phenomenology.’ J: What does ‘saying’ [sagen] mean? I: Apparently the same as showing/zeigen in the sense of letting appear, letting shine [forth] – but all of this in the manner of hinting. J: In accord with that, saying is not the name for a human speaking … I: … but for that deep swaying that your Japanese word Koto ba hints at: shaped and sent in saying, deeply connected to saying, coming from saying itself [not coming from human saying]: das Sagenhafte … J: … in whose hinting I am, only now through our dialogue, at home – so that I also now see more clearly how well-guided Count Kuki was when, under your guidance, he tried to think and be mindful of the hermeneutical. I: But you also see how meager and inadequate my guidance was bound to be; for, with the look into what is own to saying, thinking only begins that pathway which takes us back, from a merely metaphysical representing, into heeding the hints of that message, whose message-bearers we would really want to become. J: The pathway thereunto is long.

The dialogue is moving around within the question of language, saying, and hermeneutics. It has become clear that it is not the usual sense of language that is at stake, that Heidegger prefers to use the word saying/sagen rather than language/Sprache or speaking/sprechen to name this matter for thinking. So that thinking needs to wander ‘into the site/ place where the own/owning of saying is [Wanderung in die Ortschaft des Wesens der Sage].’ Whereas this somehow distinguishes between language/speaking and saying – and all that that entails – not enough is won with that distinction. What is called for is this: Within a certain and essential reservedness, thinking must be attentive to the ‘mystery’ of saying, to the withdrawal that is said in the saying. So that mystery becomes mystery and shines forth as mystery, only when the matter (showing, self-showing, emergence) of mystery’s holding sway within saying itself does not come transparently to the fore! So the danger is (i ) to talk too loudly about mystery and then (ii) to miss and misread its sway. We need to shelter the mystery’s wellspring – and that is perhaps the most difficult thing to do. It seems as if we must

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speak ‘about’ language, but when we pay this close attention to language/speaking, the question emerges, Is there such a thing as speaking/languaging ‘about’ language? Now the dialogue moves to this crucial matter: thinking ‘from’ language rather than ‘about’ language, clarifying all the interweaving dimensions of the saying and enactive thinking from (149/50): I: A speaking about language almost inevitably turns language into an object. J: Then what is its own [i.e., what belongs to it in its deep sway] disappears.18 I: We have positioned ourselves above [über] language, instead of hearing from it. J: Then there would only be a speaking/languaging from language … I: … in such a manner that languaging would be called out from what is its own and be guided to it. J: How can we do that? I: A speaking from language could only be a dialogue. J: Without a doubt, we are moving in a dialogue. I: But is it a dialogue out from the owning of language? J: It seems to me that we are now moving in a circle. A dialogue from language must be called from its own. How is the dialogue capable of such without first letting itself into a hearing that, as it were, reaches into language’s own/owning? I: I used to call this estranging relationship the hermeneutic circle. J: It prevails everywhere in the hermeneutical, that is to say – according to your explanation today – where the relation/connection between message and message-bearer holds sway. I: The message-bearer must already come from the message. But she/he must also have already gone to it. J: Didn’t you say earlier that this circle is inevitable – and that, instead of trying to avoid it as a seemingly logical contradiction, we must walk it ? I: Yes. But this necessary recognition of the hermeneutic circle does not yet signify that, in the representing of the recognized circling, the hermeneutic circle has been experienced. J: You would thus abandon your earlier position.

18 Note the Hertz translation says, ‘its reality vanishes’ – translating das Wesen as ‘reality.’ This is clearly not what is being said here; philosophically ‘reality’ is not at issue – leaving aside the fact that Heidegger does not use the language of ‘reality.’

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Points of Departure I: Of course – and especially insofar as the talk of a circle always remains in the foreground. J: How would you now portray the hermeneutical relation? I: I would like to avoid such a portrayal as decisively as I would avoid a speaking about language. J: So everything would depend on achieving a co-responding saying from language. I: Any such saying co-responding could only be a dialogue. J: But obviously a dialogue of a very special kind. I: Such a one that would remain originarily joined and enowned to what is own to saying. J: But then we dare not any longer call every talking-together a dialogue … I: … in case from now on we hear this name as naming the gathering unto what is own to language [as it gathers in its owning].

In this sense ‘dialogue’ works when what is own to language – i.e., saying – owns humans, unto their ownhood within, and in responding to, language’s own/owning. This cannot happen in speaking about language, but only in saying from language, from the deep sway of what is its own. This dynamic obviates the matter of ‘written’ or ‘spoken.’ Rather it involves whether or not the dialogue is poi-etic, i.e., a saying that brings forth – and this can happen in either written or spoken dialogue. Indeed, this poi-etic dynamic in the own of saying undermines any distinction between – or priority given to either – the written or the spoken. The dialoguing partners, embraced as they are by the dynamic owning that language as saying is and does, are very much aware of how difficult – and well-nigh impossible – this venture in thinking/saying is. Indeed the Japanese dialogue partner says as much (152/53): J: Are we not attempting the impossible? I: Indeed, so long as that message-bearing has not been sheerly guaranteed for humans – the message-bearing that the message which speaks-to humans the disclosing of the twofold needs. J: To call forth this message-bearing – and still more to go on it – seems to me incomparably more difficult than to discuss openly what is own to Iki. I: Surely. For something would have to take place by which that vast distance, in which what is own to saying comes to the fore, is opened and illuminated to message-bearing.

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J: Something like a stilling would have to take place, a stilling that would quiet the stirring of the vastness, into the conjoining of the calling saying. I: The hidden relationship of message and message-bearing plays everywhere. J: In our ancient Japanese poetry an unknown poet sings the intermingling scent of cherry blossom and plum blossom, on the same branch. I: That is how I think the owning sway unto each other of the vastness and the stillness in the same enowning of the message of the disclosing of the twofold. J: But who today could hear therein an echo of what is own to language that our word Koto ba names, flower petals that flourish from within the clearing message of the graceful attracting that brings forth? I: Who can find in all of this a useful clarifying of what is own to language [in its owning]? J: We will never find that, so long as we demand information in the form of theses and catchwords. I: But any number of us could be drawn into the preliminary play of a measure-bearing, as soon as we get ourselves ready for a dialogue from language. J: It seems to me as if we ourselves, right now – instead of speaking about language – might have attempted some steps on the way entrusted to what is the owning of saying. I: The way that says itself to this saying in its own. Let us rejoice if it not only seems so but is so.

What is own to language (Sprache) is saying (Sage). ‘Saying [Sagen], sagan means to show: to let appear, in clearing-concealing to set free as to reach out and offer what we call world. The clearing-concealing, veiling offering of world is what sways in saying’ (200/93). And so, finally, ‘The quickening in showing of saying is owning [Das Regende im Zeigen der Sage ist das Eignen]’ (258/126). Die im Ereignis beruhend Sage ist als das Zeigen die eigenste Weise des Ereignens … Die Sage ist die Weise, in der das Ereignis spricht … Saying, which resides in enowning, is, as showing, the most own way of enowning … Saying is the way in which enowning speaks. (266/135)

3 De-cision

At the end of chapter 1 we came to that place where Da-sein is addressed and is called to respond. Using Heidegger’s words, be-ing speaks to Dasein and Da-sein responds. He also names this dynamic as be-ing’s throwto Da-sein and Da-sein’s throwing-open. Be-ing enowns Da-sein; and Dasein, enowned, throws-open the dynamic. This is the decisive momentsite opened up and said in Contributions. It is the place of de-cision. This is the phenomenological dynamic of the originary enowning, be-ing as enowning. At the end of chapter 2 we came to that place where saying – as the own/owning of language – is ‘from’ be-ing, be-ing as enowning in its dynamic, sustaining, empowering stillness. To begin with, ‘We can never say be-ing itself in any immediate way, especially since it arrives in a leap. For every saying comes from be-ing [en-owning] and speaks from within its truth. Every world and thus all logic stands under the power of be-ing’ (79/55). Thus Heidegger says that the title ‘From Enowning’ is not ‘a report on or about enowning. Rather, enowned by enowning, [this title] wants to say: a thinking-saying belonging to be-ing and to being’s word ’ (3/3). From that, the saying from/of be-ing says enowning, says this dynamic in tension: ‘[Originary] turning holds sway between the call (to the one belonging) [i.e., by and from be-ing as enowning] and the belonging (of the one who is called). Turning is counter-turning’ (287/407–8). Then Heidegger calls this ‘the grand stillness of the most sheltered and concealed self-knowing.’ This is where all language of Da-sein originates – and is essentially ‘stillness’ or ‘silence.’ This is where de-cision comes in. Heidegger says that we must grasp be-ing as the ‘origin that first de-cides and en-owns [ent-scheidet und er-

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eignet] gods and humans’ (60/87). Von Herrmann calls this the ‘originary domain [Ur-Bereich] of the clearing of being that takes place in the throw-to [that be-ing does] and the throwing-open [that Da-sein does].’1 Given the dynamic that is at play here, the word Ent-scheidung/de-cision becomes a key word-image to name this ‘origin.’ In common and ordinary usage both the English word decide and the German word entscheiden tend to signify an action by a human agent. Humans decide. It is hard to avoid being limited by this common usage: decision is human choice, resolve, preference. And it is hard to think ‘decision’ without falling into a ‘moral-anthropological’ trap. However, if we keep in mind the grounding-question of the ‘meaning of being’ – as what drives, sustains, and motivates Heidegger’s thinking, always and from the beginning – then decision needs to be thought away from human decision-making and toward and into the deciding in be-ing as enowning. ‘It’ decides us. ‘Thereupon what is called here de-cision shifts into the innermost swaying midpoint of be-ing itself and then has nothing in common with what we call making a choice and the like. Rather, it says: the very going apart, which divides and in parting lets the en-ownment of precisely this open in parting come into play as the clearing for the still un-decided self-sheltering-concealing, man’s belongingness to be-ing as founder of be-ing’s truth’ (61/88). At first this use of decision and deciding (Entscheidung and entscheiden) is estranging. But if we pay attention to the words, their etymology, and their history, the words will be less strange. And then, if we are open to the thinking/saying of be-ing as enowning in its originary turning (being enowns Da-sein and Da-sein, enowned, throws-open be-ing’s enowning – and then that dynamic in a onefold as the originary turning in enowning), we can hear and then say the decision of/from be-ing. Heidegger’s words here say/show an amazing complexity. The saying is subtly rich. First, de-cision in Contributions has nothing in common with making a choice, preferring, willing. Second, de-cision does not reside in humans, even as they participate. Rather, and third, de-cision resides (holds sway) in be-ing itself, in its middle – as what is own to be-ing. De-cision says the going-apart, which in the parting lets the dynamic open, lets it come into play. De-cision names (i ) a coming apart, which (ii) in parting opens up a ‘space’ (the moment-site), in which is manifest

1 Von Herrmann, Wege ins Ereignis (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994), 359.

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the clearing for self-concealing (the open space of revealing-concealing), as well as the dynamic space of be-ing’s truth and Da-sein’s belonging to be-ing. The coming-apart is at the same time a gathering of that open, midpoint, time-space for be-ing-human. The very coming apart allows the gathering (coming together) as a two- in one-fold. Etymologically, both the German prefix ent- in ent-scheiden and the English prefix de- in de-cide have both of these meanings: apart, against and fully, entirely, or ‘in’ (figure 3.1). In the root sense of ent- and de- in ent-scheiden and de-cide, both of these meanings converge: in cutting apart, it opens up because that space (time-space) emerges. (Note the prefix ent- is etymologically connected with the Latin int- into, the Latin ante- before or unto [something], and the Greek ajntiv- against.) Somehow in this deep sense the prefixes ent- and de- manifest and sustain this ambi-valence (i.e., leaning/weighing in both directions at once), and this ent-scheiden and de-cide do the same: (i ) come against, go apart, cut apart; and (ii ) be in the happening of a coming-together. For example, a decision is both a cutting one thing off and ‘deciding’ for the other and a firmness of resolving the dividing, because in coming apart things come together and resolve the duality of the tension and conflict – not to a static unity (metaphysics) but to an ongoing dynamic one-fold. Emergence (being) and the emergent (things that are, beings). Gods and humans. The revealing and concealing. Be-ing and humans: be-ing’s throw-to that enowns Da-sein and enowned/thrown Da-sein’s throwingopen the very dynamic that is in play. The enactive thinking of Da-sein is a core dimension of the originary turning of enowning. We hear this apart and together in English, this twofold sense that is said here when we say, ‘cut out for,’ as in, ‘She is cut out for that job.’ We hear the non-personal and non-biographical non-will or choice-making in the word decisive : a decisive battle, where the battle ‘decides’; a decisive game, where the outcome of the game ‘decides.’ When we say, ‘It decided to rain,’ our language mirrors a deciding not done by humans. The case decided me. New evidence decided her. The weather was the deciding factor. German reveals this dimension of non-human deciding with the reflexive: Es entscheidet sich. Recognizing that the decisive shifting/opening/gathering takes place in the non-subjective realm – named here ‘belonging-to-be-ing and being’s truth’ – we note how they are combined in a single dynamic, unto the own of be-ing as enowning.

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Figure 3.1. The German prefix ent- and the English de- and disEnt-

Entgegen von etwas weg gegen auseinander ent-bergen

Hinein auf etwas hin rückgängig

against away, off apart

gathering returning as gathering

entschlafen entzünden

movement, vibrating one unto the other hervortreten in Erscheinung emerges into appearance ent-hüllen ent-härten

De-

Dis-

entspringen entstehen

separation

full resolvedness/gatheredness

apart off away detach away

thoroughly, completely

away, off

through (connected to the Greek diav)

dissect

defunct

dispense dissimulate (totally simulate)

Two meanings together con-tension povlemo~ going-away and re-connecting dynamic tension

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We think of decision solely as something that happens within the context of either-or. And this context works. Heidegger suggests that some either-or decisions can give direction and prepare for the originary and unfolding historical interpretation (Auslegung) (62/90) of de-cision. Thus in section 44 of Contributions, entitled ‘Decisions’ (quotation marks in Heidegger’s text), he names twelve either-or decisions. Four of those either-or’s are: 1 ‘either man wants to remain “subject,” or he grounds Da-sein’; 2 ‘either truth as correctness degenerates into the certainty of representation and the security of calculating and lived-experience, or the inceptually ungrounded “own” of ajlhvqeia as the clearing of selfsheltering/concealing comes to be grounded’; 3 ‘either history is degraded into the arsenal of verifications and precursors, or surges as the chain of estranging and unclimbable mountains’; 4 ‘either humans are satisfied with beings, or humans venture be-ing’ (62–3/90–1). After enumerating such either-ors, Heidegger says, ‘All these decisions, which seem to be many and varied, are gathered to the one and only de-cision: whether be-ing withdraws for good or whether this withdrawal as refusal becomes the first truth and the other beginning of historical unfolding’ (63/91). De-cision is connected to the ‘space’ of be-ing (61/88). ‘De-cision’ means being for beings and is ‘an originary determination of beings as such from within the essential sway of be-ing ’ (62/89, italics added). The ‘essential sway of be-ing is itself de-cision’ (64/92). From all of this, we can say that the dynamic of cutting or going apart only to come together and to gather – or phenomenological comingapart-gathering that lets be manifest the space of the gathering – is indeed saying the same as revealing-concealing, as ajlhvqeia. And the middle that opens up when decision is the determining by which the going-apart brings together (von etwas weg auf etwas zu – away from-unto) is the open expanse of be-ing in which the Da- of Da-sein is. It is be-ing’s enowning throw which Da-sein, enowned by be-ing’s throw, throws open, the middle, midpoint, cleavage, the rift. ‘The essential sway of be-ing sways in the en-ownment of de-cision’ (65–6/95). The ‘last step,’ which brings us nowhere unless back to the middle, is the most difficult and the most magnificent aspect of de-cision for be-ing: it stays invisible and closed-off, and ‘should it ever exhibit itself, it is

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unhesitatingly misinterpreted and thus actually protected from every vulgar touch’ (63/91–2) – its ‘own/owning’ stillness. It is own to de-cision – itself own to be-ing – to be essential reservedness and refusal, withdrawal and self-hiding. It is saying itself – which brings forth but does not logically connect, brings forth but does not control – that in its very saying enacts this reservedness, this ‘stillness.’ ‘De-cision is made in stillness [fällt im Stillen]’ (67/97). Gathering these many moves in the dynamic of de-cision, Heidegger says, ‘But in the light and path of decision the mandate [Auftrag] is: sheltering the truth of enowning out of the reservedness of Dasein into the great stillness of be-ing’ (66/96). He calls this the ‘utmost decision from within and about the truth of be-ing’ (68/99). He says that decision ‘comes about in the stillest stillness and has the longest historical unfolding’ (69/100), that decision is ‘related to the truth of being, not only related but determined only from within it’ (69/100), and, finally, that ‘the timespace character of decision [is] the bursting-open cleavage of be-ing itself’ (71/ 103). This dynamic of going-apart that provides the middle for the gathering coming-together permeates section 267, where Heidegger says and thinks a series of names for be-ing as enowning: • Er-eignung – en-ownment • In the needfulness by which gods need be-ing, be-ing needs/enforces Da-sein for the grounding of be-ing’s truth and therein lets the between (Zwischen) hold sway, in and as enowning (see 331/ 470). • This between is the opening (coming apart) that opens (gathers, reveals) the dynamic of be-ing as enowning, in which enowning (i ) gods are owned to themselves; (ii ) humans are enowned and in throwing-open the dynamic come into their own within the originary turning of enowning; and (iii ) things (beings, that which is, the things that are) come into their own as ‘things’ from within be-ing. • Ent-scheidung – de-cision • De-cision is gathering unto enowning, or is enowning, the ‘ground that holds to abground’ (331/470) – the gathering that holds to the ‘gap’ of ground’s staying away – the freedom by which a distress/ needfulness emerges. • This distress yields or lets come forth a partedness, going-apart. • This is an overflow of the ground that is abground, i.e., (i) the apart-

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ness by which ground is not basis or secure foundation; and (ii ) the gathering by which ‘ground’ stays away, in this dynamic of ongoing unfolding. • What emerges (in emergence) is the distress (active emergence) in which things (gods and humans and beings) come into that between of partedness. • Ent-gegnung – countering • Meeting over against, countering offers the holding-to-one-another of de-cision as also an ‘against’ – the utmost ‘counter.’ • As the ‘unto’ and the ‘against’ one another, countering ‘bridges over’ or gathers the abground or staying away of ground. • This countering is a dynamic work of holding the open open, of naming the dynamic emergent character of de-cision, which in turn names and holds open the apartness in the between of enowning. • Ent-setzung – setting-free • In countering the strife (povlemo") or con-tension (Streit), this setting free names enowning/Ereignis in its relation to beings. • Da-sein, as enowned, is set free to inabide in the non-ordinary being over against all beings. • Beings are set free from being lost only in beingness and not emerging from within be-ing. • Da-sein is set free (i ) from its being named and limited to ego-subjectivity; and (ii ) unto the be-ing, unto emergence as such, which sustains and enowns Da-sein, even as Da-sein is needed and participates in be-ing in order for be-ing as enowning to be its most originary own. • Ent-zug – withdrawal • From within the clearing of the t/here (Da), the setting-free is at the same time the withdrawal of enowning (be-ing as enowning). • Enowning withdraws from any representing or calculating, holds sway as refusal. The de-cision (Ent-scheidung) that enowning is frees up – as an overflow of ground as abground – an emerging distress or needfulness, from which and out of which partedness comes forth. De-cision lets emerge the countering, the coming-together and going-against, for the ones parted – as what gathers the ground-abground dynamic of be-ing. This countering, the back-and-forth movement of moving-unto and going-awayfrom (i ) sets beings free from being lost in mere beingness, not named or seen in their emergence out of be-ing; and (ii ) sets Da-sein – essentially

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other than ego-subjectivity, will, or the lived-experience of an ‘individual’ – free unto its being enowned by be-ing and throwing-open the dynamic in active responding. Along with this setting-free (Ent-setzung) is be-ing’s withdrawal (Ent-zug); enowning withdraws, from the calculation and representation of modern metaphysics of subjectivity. Heidegger then adds that (i ) in its simpleness (Einfachheit) be-ing as enowning is not the ‘result’ of anything but the ongoing dynamic relating-in-action; (ii ) it brings the countering-parted ones into relation and thus into their own; (iii ) as the dynamic-in-relating emergence, be-ing is more abground than it is ground, more the dynamic staying-away of ‘unity’ or ‘ground’ than any resulting static ‘one.’ ‘In unmediated fashion the between holds sway as the ground of the countering ones. Within it [the between] this is its [be-ing as enowning’s] simpleness, which is not emptiness but rather the ground of the fullness that springs forth from the countering as strife