Heidegger's Poietic Writings

From Contributions to Philosophy to The Event

Daniela Vallega-Neu

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253033918
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Fenomenología en filosofía

Engaging the development of Heidegger's non-public writings on the event between 1936 and 1941, Daniela Vallega-Neu reveals what Heidegger's private writings kept hidden. Vallega-Neu takes readers on a journey through these volumes, which are not philosophical works in the traditional sense as they read more like fragments, collections of notes, reflections, and expositions. In them, Vallega-Neu sees Heidegger searching for a language that does not simply speak about being, but rather allows a sense of being to emerge in his thinking and saying. She focuses on striking shifts in the tone and movement of Heidegger's thinking during these important years. Skillfully navigating the unorthodox and intimate character of these writings, Vallega-Neu provides critical insights into questions of attunement, language, the body, and historicity in Heidegger's thinking.

1	Introduction to Heidegger’s Poietic Writings The Regress to the Source

VOLUMES 65 TO 72 of Heidegger’s collected works contain his attempt at rethinking the question of being more radically than in Being and Time.¹ They were not conceived for public understanding and were written only in view of finding a language to think and speak of being in a more originary (ursprünglich) way.² Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) is the first of the series and many consider it to be Heidegger’s second major work. According to the testimony of the editor of Heidegger’s collected works, Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann, Heidegger said that Besinnung (1938/1939), Über den Anfang (1941), Das Ereignis (1941/1942), and Die Stege des Anfangs (1944) are all “especially closely connected with Contributions to Philosophy [1936–1938] insofar as these treatises rethink in its entirety and with a new approach the conjuncture [Gefüge] of Contributions to Philosophy” (GA 66, “Afterword of the Editor,” 433–434). Furthermore, Die Überwindung der Metaphysik (1938/1939) and Die Geschichte des Seyns (1939/1940) are also closely related to Contributions. All these volumes (as well as further notes gathered in GA 73.1/73.2, and perhaps—at least to some extent—Heidegger’s concurrently written Black Notebooks³) contain Heidegger’s attempts at thinking being as and in its historical happening, which he now calls Ereignis (“the event”). Such thinking is seynsgeschichtlich, “beyng-historical,” which means that its aim is not to objectify or represent being but rather to respond to being in its historical eventuation in such a way that in this response, historical being is opened up and articulated in an originary way.⁴ If and when such thinking succeeds, it allows itself to be addressed by historical being in such a way that what is articulated in this thinking becomes a site of disclosure of being in its historicality. In other words, if a saying of the event succeeds, then it is historical being itself that comes to word and not simply a representation of “it” based on some form of subjective act or projection (Heidegger would call the objectifying representation of history Historie [“historiography”] in contrast to history as event, which he calls Geschichte). In order to mark this more originary sense of historical being, Heidegger writes “beyng” (Seyn) with a “y.”

Because historical being is not something ready-made and only subsequently thought but rather occurs only in thinking, I speak of Heidegger’s beyng-historical (seynsgeschichtlich) writings as “poietic.”⁵ Although such thinking is not poetry, in its approach it is very close to poetry.

Already in the early 1930s, when Heidegger begins to search for a new language to think and say being in its historicality, he reflects on the proximity of poetry and thought (Dichten und Denken).⁶ As is well known, the poetry of Hölderlin becomes central to Heidegger and his quest for a new articulation of being. It is in dialogue with Hölderlin that Heidegger will begin to articulate beyng in its historicality and that he will frame the history of being in terms of a first and other beginning of this history. All this begins in the early 1930s, when Germany is being seized by a new resurrection after World War I, by a new promise for a great history, a fever that—as is well known—infected Heidegger’s thinking and acting as well.

Impasses in the Project of Being and Time

Heidegger was led to conceive the necessity of a thinking (out) of the event—proceeding from an originary disclosure of being itself—due to impasses he encountered in the project of Being and Time. Here already the attempt was to think being out of time, that is, to resituate the metaphysical question “What is …?” in the “is,” such that being is understood temporally. The issue is no longer to think atemporal essences, but instead to question the “is,” the be-ing of things. Philosophy was to be brought back from its entrenchment in neo-Kantian epistemology to the question of the meaning of being. Heidegger continuously points out how in traditional Western thinking, being as such (Sein) is always questioned on the basis of a being (Seiendes), such that when we ask “What is a living being,” the answer to this question is framed as an atemporal essence on the basis of a particular living being we represent. Western thought develops as a representing (Vor-stellen) such that thought places (stellt) what is thought before (vor) itself. At the same time, Heidegger shows that while in ancient and medieval thought the thing—what shows itself to us—was conceived as the basis for a representation, with modern philosophy, the “I think” becomes the ground for all representation. Thus the question of being is conditioned by the “I think,” which is an “I represent”; being is conditioned and objectified by a subjectivity and being as such is simply represented as the most general determination of beings with no meaning on its own, an empty husk hovering before the mind’s eye.

The task then becomes to revitalize the notion of being as one that addresses us in our concrete temporal and historical existence. In Being and Time, Heidegger chose to approach the question of the temporal meaning of being through an inquiry into the being that each of us is, which he calls “Dasein,” translated literally, there-being.⁷ Rather than placing the question of being in human subjectivity, this entails decentering the concept of human subjectivity, since, as he shows, in our concrete everyday “there-being,” we are precisely not first and foremost with ourselves, encapsulated in some self-conscious “I-thing,” but rather “out there,” engaged by things, tasks, and others. Dasein is being-in-the-world and only from there comes back to itself when it becomes reflexively self-aware. This reflexive return to oneself carries with it a distancing of I and thing, I and other, I and world. Pointing to our prereflexive being-in-the-world fulfills the double task of resituating our being in its engaged being with … and of bringing alive the question of being as one that addresses our very existence along with the being of things and events we find ourselves to be prereflexively engaged with. The discovery of our being as being-in-the-world becomes as well the discovering of the being of other beings, or, as Heidegger would articulate it in Being and Time, along with the being of Dasein, the being of beings as a whole is disclosed.

Heidegger shows how the meaning of being is temporal by again first considering Dasein’s being. Dasein has the character of a thrownness into and projection onto possibilities of being; this thrown projection is rooted in temporality as the coming toward oneself (futurity) in retrieving one’s having been (past), which opens up and structures the present.⁸ In our being, future, past, and present appear in their indissoluble unity, with respect to which time, understood as the flowing by of moments of “now,” is derivative.

The explicit discovery of the temporal character of our being requires that we are faced with our existence such that our daily engagement with things is interrupted, that we find ourselves exposed to our mortality and with it to being as such; that we endure this exposure as we face our finitude and thus are more authentically. This is made possible by fundamental attunements (Grundstimmungen), which are not simply feelings but dispositions that overcome us and expose us to what they reveal, moods in which we find ourselves exposed to our finitude. In Being and Time Heidegger shows this with the fundamental attunement of Angst. In later writings he will speak of other fundamental attunements.

The next step in the project of Being and Time is announced in section 8 of the book but was never carried out. The initial task entailed showing how the temporality of Dasein, the being each of us is, is rooted in the temporality of the being of beings as a whole. This latter temporality Heidegger articulated as the horizon into which Dasein always already transcends and from which it comes back to itself. Heidegger called this transcendental horizon the “condition of the possibility” for the disclosure of being, using a conceptuality that echoes Kant. Yet the project of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology completely overturns the Kantian subjective approach. It overturns the Kantian project—almost in a new “Copernican Revolution”—in that the transcendental realm of the condition of the possibility for experience is not transcendental subjectivity but the temporal horizon of being as such out of which Dasein—our being—temporalizes and finds itself always already “there,” in a world, and not “here” in a human consciousness.

However, Heidegger became dissatisfied with the transcendental-horizonal approach to being. He thought that the language of Being and Time failed in its attempt to say being in its truth,⁹ and that it still borrowed too much from metaphysics. Although ultimately the task was also to show how our being is disclosed out of the temporal horizon of being as such, the notion of transcendence still invites one to think of a human subject that transcends into a horizon, thereby seemingly turning the horizon of being into an object of thought (GA 65: 450–451).¹⁰ What was required, then, was to think and articulate being “directly” out of the horizon of its disclosure. Heidegger indicates this in a marginal note referring to the planned third division (“Time and Being”) of the first part of the project of Being and Time: “The overcoming of the horizon as such. The return into the source [Herkunft]. The presencing out of this source” (GA 2: 53; BaT 37).

Presencing from out of the Source and the Withdrawal of the Source

To think being out of its disclosive, temporal horizon, means to understand being as a presencing rather than as some entity that is already present. Coming to presence occurs as a disclosure, which is how Heidegger rethinks the notion of truth. Reinterpreting the Greek notion of truth, ἀλήθεια, in terms of unconcealing, Heidegger understands the truth of being as the unconcealment of presencing. This presencing is not a thing; it is not a being but the presencing through which beings are revealed in their being. Let us say that on a sunny afternoon, sitting on a balcony, you find yourself suddenly caught by the slow movements of a caterpillar; you are struck by the being of this caterpillar; that it is. In Heidegger’s thinking you would not have first a sensible representation of this entity that subsequently you identify as a caterpillar. All this—the representation, the identification, and “you”—comes “later”; it is already the result of the coming to presence of what then reveals itself to be a caterpillar and you looking at it.

For Heidegger, presencing needs to be thought in the middle voice, a verb form that is neither active nor passive, and that we find in Ancient Greek but not in contemporary Western languages (I emphasize “Western” because at least some African languages do have a middle voice). There is nothing that presences, presencing is not the activity of a subject or entity, but happens as rain happens, when “it” rains. Ultimately, presencing is groundless; we may say, the source of the presencing is “abyssal” (abgründig). We find this expressed in the lines of Angelus Silesius I quoted already in the preface: “The Rose is without ‘why’; she blooms, because she blooms.”

We will see how in the sequence of Heidegger’s poietic writings, his thinking will move more and more into this abyssal dimension of being, into the concealment that goes along with unconcealing, into the unsaid that withdraws in what is said (the silence of the rose, as it were). Concurrently, he will think being not primarily as presencing but as self-withdrawal such that in this withdrawal things and events appear as what is present. In being present, however, beings (what appears) conceal the unitary occurrence of concealment and unconcealment through which their presencing happens. Things appear, so to speak, “flat”; they do not let their being resound “without why.” They become objects, things opposing our gaze, things we can describe, count, classify, and reckon with. These certainly are all very useful attributes for the development of science and for our daily dealings, except that once we operate in the mode of objectivity, the question of being has no more place.

Truth of Being as Ereignis: The Event and the Turning in the Event

To think the truth of being from itself as that from which we, too, first come to ourselves would require that we do not objectify it in any way but rather attempt to articulate how being occurs in the very moment it occurs. Such thinking is utterly groundless, as it has nothing already there to hold on to. It requires a Loswurf, a casting oneself loose, as Heidegger says in an early Black Notebook (GA 94; Ü II, 108–110). In such casting loose Heidegger begins to experience and think the truth of being as appropriating event, as Er-eignis, in which the being of beings and we as well, first are appropriated (ereignet), come into our own being.¹¹ This new approach to the truth of beyng would not start with an analysis of Dasein and would involve an even further displacement of human being from subjectivity. Heidegger had planned a new work that would take this approach “from” the truth of being as event as early as 1932 (GA 66: 424),¹² as we can now see from the Black Notebooks, but it finds its first attempt at a configuration only with Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event, written 1936–1938. Heidegger had to find a radically new approach and with it, a new conceptuality, a different language. The following elucidations of what he means by the event therefore are drawn from Contributions.

Thinking out of the event (when it succeeds) does not mean that we return to think from a somewhat “objective” horizon toward “us.” Activity and passivity are insufficient for understanding the event, which occurs rather in the “middle voice” as I have already indicated above. Heidegger often articulates the middle voice character of the event in terms of a “turning” (Kehre). In this turning, being and thinking do not stand in an opposition such that one could relate to the other as somehow distinct. They emerge at once: thinking occurs as the thinking of being and being emerges as such only in thinking. Still, Heidegger suggests a certain priority of being when he emphasizes how thinking is always already a response, how it finds itself responding to a call (of being) that in turn discloses itself as call only in the response. We may approximate this with experiences in which an idea “comes to us” out of an attuned being toward some indefinite, not yet articulated “region.” The idea is articulated as it comes to us and it is as if the idea itself beckoned the fitting word that we may eventually find (or not) such that only in this finding of the word the idea properly emerges. Moments of wonder bear the same middle voice ...