CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHILOSOPHY
The question of being is the question of the truth of be-ing. When accomplished and grasped as it historically unfolds, it becomes the grounding-question – over against the hitherto ‘guiding-question’ of philosophy, which has been the question about beings.
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[…] what is happening everywhere here is really history [Geschichte], which remains out of the reach of what is merely historical [das Historische], because this history is not a matter of allowing the past to come up but rather is in all respects the momentum over to what is to come. [7]
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[nb. re-reading CP following a reading of Nancy Being Singular Plural, where the question of Schmitt’s ‘radical title’ from Nomos insistently returned. Nancy thinks the constitution of the group/community in a radical way, making being-with into first philosophy (ontologically primary). For Schmitt, the appropriation of land is the gesture that founds law, although this presupposes a constituted community and the question arises as to how that community can be constituted as such prior to the gesture that grounds them. In Nancy, the radical being-with is the ‘spacing’ of the world, but it is not clear that he is able to think its concrete grounding in the world. In both Nancy and Schmitt, the community is severed from the world. The challenge is to think the two together and synthesise this moment. Is Heidegger’s analysis of enownment and the ‘grounding’ of truth as the truth of be-ing helpful for this purpose?]
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The questioning which is concerned with the truth of be-ing cannot be reckoned from out of what has gone on up to now. And if this questioning is to prepare the beginning of another history, than the enactment of this questioning must be originary.
[…] the historical moment of the crossing must be enacted out of knowing that all metaphysics (grounded upon the quiding question: What is a being?) remains incapable of shifting man into the basic relations of beings.
[…] But be-ing is not something ‘earlier’ – subsisting for an in itself. Rather, enowning is the temporal-spatial simultaneity for be-ing and beings. [10]
[…] Seeker, preserver, guardian, and caretaker: this is what care means as the basic trait of Dasein. Man’s determination is gathered in these names, insofar as he is grasped according to his ground, i.e., according to Da-sein, which in turn is enowned by enowning as by be-ing’s essential sway. And it is only on the strength of this origin as the grounding of time-space (‘temporality’) that Da-sein can become an inabiding for transforming the distress of the abandonment of being into the necessity of creating as the restoring of beings.
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Whatever in the future and in truth dares to be called philosophymust as its first and foremost accomplish this: first to find the site for thinking questioning of the renewed inceptual question, i.e., to ground Da-sein.
end of transcendence
When we speak of god and of gods, we think – according to a long-standing habit of representation – in that form which still indicates primarily and above all the multi-faceted name of ‘transcendence.’ By this term one means that which transcends extant beings, including especially human beings. Even where particular ways of transcending and of transcendence are denied, still this way of thinking itself cannot be denied. With this way of thinking one can easily gain an overview of today’s ‘worldviews’:
- The transcendent one (also imprecisely called ‘transcendence’) is the God of Christianity.
- This ‘transcendence’ is denied and replaced by the ‘people’ itself – however undetermined the latter is in its way of being – as goal and direction for all history. This counter-Christian ‘worldview’ is only apparently unchristian; for it is essentially in agreement with that way of thinking that is called ‘liberalism’.
- The transcendent that is meant here is an ‘idea’ or a ‘value’ or a ‘meaning’, something for which one does not put one’s life on the line, but which is to be realised through ‘culture’.
- Any two of these meanings of the transcendent – people’s ideas and Christianity or people’s ideas and ta culture-oriented politics or Christianity and culture – or all three of these couplings are mixed up in various degrees of definitiveness. And this mixed product is what is today the average and dominant ‘worldview’, which intends everything but can no longer make a decision about anything.
[…] these ‘worldviews’, unbeknownst and without thinking, all agree that what is ownmost to man is already known – man as that being unto and from which every ‘transcendence’ is determined and indeed as that which in the end primarily determines man. But this has become fundamentally impossible, because in his determinability man has already been established, instead of determining him as that which needs to be dis-placed from out of his hitherto accepted determination, in order first to be attuned to a determinability.
[…] the awakening of this distress is the first displacing of man into that between [Zwischen] [zone?] where chaos drives forth at the same time as god remains in flight. This ‘between’ is, however, not a ‘transcendence’ with reference to man. Rather, it is the opposite: that open to which man belongs as the founder and preserver wherein as Da-sein he is en-owned by be-ing itself – be-ing that holds sway as nothing other than enowning. [19]
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The flight of the gods [end of transcendence?] must be experienced and endured. This steadfast enduring grounds the most remote nearness to enowning. This enowning is the truth of be-ing.
The distress of the abandonment by being first opens up in this truth.
The grounding of the truth of be-ing, the grounding of Da-sein, becomes necessary from within this distress.
If the other beginning is still being prepared, then this preparation is concealed as a great transformation; and the more hidden it is, the greater is the occurrence.
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[…] insofar and as soon as philosophy finds its way back into its inceptual way of being (in the other beginning) and the question of the truth of be-ing becomes the grounding midpoint, the abground [anarchic?] character of philosophy reveals itself. As such, philosophy must return to the beginning […]
of a people
Who would deny that philosophy is philosophy ‘of a people’?
As evidence that quashes any opposing view, can we not appeal to the greatness of the beginning of Western philosophy?
Is it not philosophy of ‘the’ Greek people?
And the enormous end of Western philosophy – ‘German Idealism’ and ‘Nietzsche’ – is it not philosophy of ‘the’ German people?
But what do we say when we make such self-evident statements? We do not say anything about what is ownmost to philosophy itself.
Such an obvious way of philosophy’s belongingness to the ‘people’ gives the false impression that, by indicating such belongingness, we say something essential about philosophy – or even about creating a future philosophy.
In what way does a people become a people?
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A nation first becomes a people when those who are its most unique ones arrive and begin to intimate. Thus a people first becomes free for its law, which it must struggle for, as the ultimate necessity of its most noble moment.
[From Heidegger, Hegel, and the Political in On Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit:
If spirit is always the ‘spirit of a people.’ we not only have to ask about the relation between state and people, but also about what a people is in the first place. For Heidegger, the state is insofar the ‘Beying of the people’ exists, as the ‘people’ is the ‘source’ of the state.
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In any case, the constitution – though not in the juridical sense – of a people is marked by a certain event. Here, Heidegger leaves the context of Hegel’s philosophy and enters the space of Holderlin’s poetry. The genesis of a people is the event of a ‘theophany’. A people appears in the ‘separating nearness of the God to come’. In the Holderlin lecture course, it is maintained that ‘the true appearing or non-appearing of the God in the being of the people out of the distress of Beying and for it’ is at stake. Especially in the Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger has given sustained attention to the idea of a negative-theophanic genesis of a people, the people of the event.
grounding
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Da-sein is the crisis between the first and the other beginning.
The meaning and matter of the word Da-sein in the thinking of the other beginning is completely different, so different that there is no mediating transition from that first usage to this other one.
Da-sein is the very own self-grounding ground of alethea and phusis, is the essential swaying of that openness which first enopens the self-sheltering-concealing (the essential sway of be-ing) and which is thus the truth of be-ing itself.
In the sense of the other beginning, Da-sein is still completely strange to us; it is what we never find lying before us, what we leap into solely in leaping into the grounding of the openness of self-sheltering-concealing, that clearing of be-ing in which future man must place himself in order to hold it open.
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To enground the ground of the truth of be-ing and thus to enground be-ing itself means to let this ground (enowning) be the ground through Da-sein’s steadfastness. Accordingly engrounding becomes grounding of Da-sein as engrounding the ground, i.e., the truth of be-ing.
Truth and with that the essential sway of ground become dis-jointed temporally-spatially. Thereby, however, time and space are grasped originarily from truth and are essentially related to the grounding.
The context in which time and space arrive at their essential concept is here in the sphere of grounding and its mastery by thinking.
Immeasurable in its breadth and depth, the essential moment has begun […]
One can speak of Da-sein only as grounding, only in enacting in thinking ‘Echo’, ‘Playing-forth’, and ‘Leap’.
But grounding always means grounding historically in and for our future history, enjoining its innermost distress (abandonment of being).
This joining, as the self-joining preparing the site for the moment of utmost decision, is the law of proceeding in thinking in the other beginning, as distinguished from the system in the historical end of the first beginning.