Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: Life and The Last God 9781472546739, 9780826496799

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To Louis and Jaxon

Abbreviations and References

Works by Heidegger BQ - Basic Questions of Philosophy (1994) BT - Being and Time (1998a) BW - Basic Writings (1993a) CP - Contributions to Philosophy (FromEnowning) (1999) EHP - Elucidations of Holderlin's Poetry (2000b) IM - Introduction to Metaphysics (2000a) M - Mindfulness (2006) NI - Nietzsche; Volume I: The Will to Power as Art (1981) NIV - Nietzsche; Volume IV: Nihilism (1991) OBT - Of the Beaten Track (2002)

OG- 'Only a God Can Save Us' (1993b) OWL - On the Way to Language (1982) P - Pathmarks (I998b)

SA - 'The Self-Affirmation of the German University' (1993c) ST - Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom (1985)

Works cited in the text are referred to by author, date of publication and page number. Square brackets enclosing a date refer to the original date of publication or production, rather than to the Works Cited at the end of this book. The pagination of English translations has alone been provided for each of Heidegger's works, excepting Contributions. The decision to provide only the English pagination for the texts was made on the basis that standard translations into English are in the main very good, so I have adhered to a rule of using available translations in this book. However, I have included both English and German page numbers for references to Contributions, doing so in the following way: reference to the text is signified by 'CP', followed by the English page number, then by a semi-colon, and then the German page number. I use the Emad/Maly translation throughout this book, even given its flaws, only so as to aid the English language reader. The much more natural language of Heidegger's German text should, if

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Abbreviations and References

possible, be referred to when making one's mind up about Contributions, since it brings the matter about which Heidegger thought to a more natural expression. Reading Contributions in English will always, perhaps, be a misleading experience; the English translation offers a great deal, but not the essence of the book. I personally felt confident about how to read Contributions only when reading the actual words which Heidegger used. I have been fortunate in having a prior and thorough interpretation of Contributions in Richard Polt's work, The Emergency of Being, and while I think that my interpretation goes more deeply into Contributions, and is therefore different to it in essential ways, I agree with his rule about the activity of paraphrase and interpretation. The intention of my own work is to render Heidegger's thought into an English which is unforced and not merely an indirect translation. 'Translationese' is a constant temptation and a reliable way out of difficult philosophical problems when following Heidegger's 'path of thought'; at least by using Heidegger's coinages and phrases we have an 'authority'. The route followed necessarily enters an area for which the words may always, despite all precautions, be lacking, and so we could merely rely on that easily gained authority; but this book is intended as a plain-speaking rendition of Contributions, and therefore reliance on direct quotation had to be tempered by a certain originality.

Preface

I have seen it appropriate to begin this book with an Introduction giving a none too brief account of what be-ing, enowning and human being each respectively mean when Heidegger uses these words. I have done this because even amongst specialists there is a good deal of controversy and confusion about what these words mean: it seems the further one travels into the area, the more interpretations differ. In the chapters of this book which follow the Introduction I have tried to guide the reader through Contributions at a sedate pace, but I have provided my own understanding of these words, openly and as clearly as possible at the outset. The Introduction also gives us the opportunity to study those elements - 'life', and 'god' - which furnish this book with its subtitle. l Finally, I have provided an account of the origins and overall structure of the book as the third section of the Introduction. There are eight chapters in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning): two expository chapters, and six attempts to 'join in' with the event of be-ing. Heidegger did not feel that any one of his 'joinings' was more important than the others, and I have not read them in my own book as they were laid out by Heidegger in Contributions. I have, however, devoted one of my own chapters to each of Heidegger's six joinings, and a single one dealing with the expository chapters 'Be-ing' and 'Preview' (Chapter 3). For Heidegger's eight, I therefore provide seven; the Contents page of this book indicates the order in which I have done this. Within each of my chapters I have included discussions of what appear to me to be relevant contexts for Heidegger's writing. These discussions, set alongside my interpretations of the respective 'joinings', are: Heidegger's development in the analysis of 'life' and 'lived-experience' (Chapter 1); the progression beyond Being and Time (Chapter 2); the effects of Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche (Chapter 4); the various works which were composed prior to Contributions through the 1930s (Chapter 5); and his reading of Holderlin (Chapter 6). I have put the historical genesis of the book, its composition and overall description in the Introduction, since these chronological factors are crucial to a balanced understanding, even while they are still extrinsic to the matter of the mystic 'now' which is, more or less, at issue. Their inclusion in this

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book is required because my ideal reader will be seeking to learn about Heidegger's major work for the first time, attracted by the lure of an answer to 'the meaning of life', and a philosophical account of God. A brief description of the book's genesis would thereby be essential. Given the difficulty of Contributions, however, I hope to find readers who are already familiar with it, but who are sceptical (as, I confess, I am about my own interpretation) about whether their own interpretation is entirely right. Throughout this book I have assumed that Heidegger was justified and methodologically sound when he consistently demanded that his reader change his/her human being in order to accommodate the problem at hand: 'be-ing' (Seyn) is a matter of actual living and existence as much as it is an apparently special philosophical question. Not that 'the way we live today' and the ways in which we can think about our life, are the actual objects of his study: 'real life' or 'actuality' is a facade in Heidegger's opinion. There may be problems with a philosophical account of our existence which, as a preliminary, asks that we account our current existence as 'inauthentic', and, from the outset assumes that human being is only one way of our existing, and which thereby denies to us the means to question it by reference to how things stand actually, today, or by how we usually think about events, reality, actuality and life. However, this demand is the very essence of his work: it is the 'decision' which, as Heidegger saw things, has to be made. In my Conclusion I have briefly tried to justify my agreement with Heidegger on this fundamental attitude towards reality. I take this opportunity to acknowledge the assistance of Karl Simms, who has been interested in this book almost from its inception, and has given advice and encouragement through several drafts, as well as for his practically teaching me how to write such a book as this. For their responses to inquiries and petitions for help, I would also like to acknowledge Michael McGhee, Timothy Clark, Roger Scruton, Theodore Kisiel and Richard Polt. It is an honour for me to be able to include these names in my book, although only on the understanding that deficiencies herein will not reflect upon those named.

Introduction

Life or Be-ing? When reading Heidegger we have the feeling that something is being discussed of the utmost importance with the greatest conviction; but when we propose to speak of what we have read with others, a strange confusion overtakes us. Perhaps the most distressing fact about the study of Heidegger's philosophy is that one can never be sure of what Heidegger meant by the word 'being'; this does not appear to me to be Heidegger's fault, though some have doubted whether or not he has attempted over a lifetime to mislead us, or whether he has actively sought to mystify his readers. 1 The trouble is that we cannot put the meaning of the word 'being' into simple and intelligible propositions from which we could then proceed to elaborate a system; but statements can be made about being, and I will provide some of them as the initial step towards the more perfect elaboration of the meaning of the word in Heidegger's works. In Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) we have a book which is resolutely exclusive in an irreducible way. Heidegger offers a decision: become truly human by uniting with the as yet unknown basis of our existence, or continue to dis-humanize our selves as we do universally today. One of the most common ways in which we dis-humanize ourselves is by speaking and thinking, and thereby acting, in an objective way towards what has long been conceived of as God's Creation. Even if Christian or other monotheistic types of belief are less convincing today, and a general and progressive destruction of religious worship and belief has taken place, we still act towards ourselves and the environment in which we find ourselves as if God had created it as an objective thing, this is because no alternative fundamental stance has as yet been taken up regarding what we ourselves, and this 'Creation', are. It is one of Heidegger's outstanding achievements to have shown that Christian/Aristotelian/Platonic approaches to whatever exists are still in progress, and still dominate our thinking today, even though 'God is dead'; this post-Christian, or metaphysical attitude is named 'nihilism' by him. Such post-Christian metaphysics,

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Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy

an onto-theology - that is, such a way of thinking, acting and standing towards ourselves and our world as if they had been created by a willing subject (God) for a receptive and cognitive agent (humans) - is, in the later stages of its development, almost entirely freed from any human involvement. Objective or metaphysical thinking about things distances us from those things, and from ourselves, to such a degree that we become rootless, dis-humanized, and locked in a position in which being has simply left us to it. According to Heidegger, human beings are those who can transform themselves into those who recognize that they are 'here' in life, and they can think this through, and live accordingly. We are able to cut down all dispute about what 'being' means for Heidegger, and what being is, if we bear in mind what being should not be: that is, it must not be thought of objectively, or as 'actuality', or the 'life' which we have lived, nor yet as 'the world', or as the perceptions about the world with which we try to make sense of our place; these are part of it, but divert our attention. Being is simple for Heidegger, more so than one would expect from a philosopher whose works are amongst the most formidably difficult in any language. Being is the 'being here' which you and I experience right now; our being-here is what Heidegger means whenever he writes of 'being' or 'be-ing' (Sein/ Seyri). There is the impersonal being-here of Da-sein, and then there is being itself; they are distinct in theory because Da-sein changes over a history, but remains the same in its ground. Since human beings have to transform themselves if they are to begin to think about this, we should also refer to it as 'being-^r^', in another type of existence, but still in a kind of stance, in a place where there is a stillness and steadiness of the self. What characterizes being-here (Da-sein) is simply the fact that we are here, no matter where on earth, at whatever time, in whatever state; it is a peculiar 'that-ness' not of any particular thing, but a general factuality of our existing. I propose that this is the basic meaning of the word 'being' as Heidegger uses it. However, one must consider that being-here, or 'Dasein' as it is often spoken of in English, is a restricted finite event with which each of us is familiar to varying degrees, and over varying episodes of our lives, and therefore, we must presuppose a general basis of this absolute foundation, which is not 'being-t/ here' but simply: be-ing.4 Although be-ing, this Tactic' situation in its strange abyssal 'givenness', is the most basic state of ours, and could mean that we are lost in the totality of every thing, such that being-here is to belong to the Unity, or to the whole 'world', yet, it is not a thing, or a substance in which we live, inhere, or belong to; it is not God in a Spinozistic, mysterious, pantheistic

Introduction

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omnipresence;5 it does not give anything specific; and it hides itself from our gaze, shrouded in a darkness. Perhaps it is pure darkness itself in some ways, the only light of which is our brief life, our rise from within it to our sense of Da-sein, a life which opens from it as be-ing's 'truth'. Be-ing cannot be 'the all' since that implies that 'we' are a part of it, and that it is a collection in unity. Therefore, the theme or matter of Contributions is an unaccountable and almost inexplicable obviousness, the bare and elusive primal event of being-t/here which we instantiate at every moment, and which, Heidegger proposes, harbours untold riches. Such riches include the normal world which we know and live in; the self-hiding of the event of be-ing itself; the emergence of earth and world, man and god, the everyday world into which we flee so as to escape the dark nothing; the creative play of time and space into ordinary history, or into the more basic and divine history in which we might live; it also includes technology, groundless historical activity, normal perception, involvement with things and other people, common or scientific understanding of life and being-here, and so on. This being-here is fundamental enough to be the basic ground of all of these and pure enough to produce any theoretical thought, or to incorporate nothing itself; both nothing and thought are effects of it, so simple and close at hand to us though it is. This 'fact' is not so much something we know about and can point to (on the contrary!) but is that meagre brute given which vanishes the more it is examined. The impulse-driven major question of the later Heidegger's inquiries does not wonder why there are these separate things, and this here existence, but focuses on being-here itself in that happening. The question is not, therefore, the metaphysical one about 'why are there things rather than nothing?', but 'what is happening with be-ing when we find it in our being-here?', or, 'how does it stand with be-ing?' To understand be-ing, to philosophize it, we, humans, have to extract ourselves from everyday life in a definite way. When one reads Contributions for a first time, this is perhaps the most overwhelming impression. In a sense, life can be thought of as Heidegger's theme: we live, we are in a world, we experience it. However, to properly see what we are, we must rather face up to death, our not-being in a world, and face nothingness. Even when there is no world (i.e., nothing), there is still being. Hence, removal from the world, 'death', is actually the state where being is most clearly revealed, and where 'we' are most surely revealed to philosophy. In a state where we lose the world, we see what we truly have been all along: an opening up. Critics of Heidegger are in agreement about this 'dead' character of Dasein - to a degree. The state of lucidity about life is attained in death. A recent book by Miguel de Beistegui, for example, states that:

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Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy What's left, then, when all things have vanished, when my usual grip on the world has failed me, when I can no longer hold on to it and rely on it, is the fact of the world itself, that is, the fact that I am nothing outside this worldliness, or this being-in-the-world. What's left, then, is myself as this pure openness and exposedness, my worldly, vulnerable and abyssal self, and, with it, the awareness of something within me that I cannot master, (de Beistegui, 2005, 21)

Such a moment of insight and lucidity springs only from the experience of nothing, from a deathlike dissociation from all life and world. Even, that is, beyond the world, and beyond 'life', in 'death', there is still be-ing. Heidegger says all of this in part in response to and as a critique of what being is typically, and metaphysically, understood to be. So what is 'being', our life and death, when metaphysics or Christian onto-theology understands it, and against what background did Heidegger shape his new unique account? In general (and Heidegger gives many general surveys of the history of metaphysics in this way), being is an illusive 'quality' of any thing which is very obvious, and therefore is often passed over in silence, or in haste; by the age of Nietzsche it had become a 'vapour', the last hint of the vanishing God. When metaphysicians have encountered a being, say, a human being, they already know that it is\ as Heidegger points out in a late essay on Kant, 'being' is therefore not a predicate of something, but is to be assumed as holding true of anything which we encounter or speak about. The being of something is the fact that it is actually there, perceivable; its being is that it stands there, in fact. 7 Furthermore, if something, a human being for example, is not, then it may still exist according to the modalities: it might exist as a possibility, similarly, if it will always exist, then it has 'being' by necessity] and when it actually does exist, then it is said to have being in actuality. The debate, for Kant at least, therefore revolves around whether existence is an attribute or quality which a being has: if the human being can be encountered, then it exists, and therefore, its 'being' is of no further interest. But, as Heidegger sees this matter, we go astray at the very moment at which we consider individual beings such as human beings as the keys to elucidating being. In his repeated discussions of the metaphysical way of relating our thought to beings and their being, his most consistent way of explaining how the metaphysical 'is-ness' of things is interpreted is as follows: they are present. That is, when Kant and others approach the human being, what they do is decide that it exists on the basis of its presence (whether necessary, actual, or possible). When something 'is', it is present to us:8 this definition of the being of beings, and any definition of the being of beings will always, and has always been, a diversion

Introduction

5

away from the real issue. Kant and the other metaphysicians since the Greeks had decided being like this because being is the most general property of any thing: the most general feature of all things is that they are located in time somewhere. Heidegger writes, in one of many assaults on this metaphysical approach: Its most general form was formulated by Aristotle, as Ti TO oV; What is a being, i.e., for Aristotle, what is ODOTOC as the beingness of a being? Being here means beingness. This says at the same time that, despite rejection of the species-character, being (as beingness) is always and only meant as the Koivov, i.e., what is common and thus common for every being. (CP, 52; 75) The most general and common feature of every being is that it is a substance, and that it is present in a moment of time. In contrast to this, Heidegger continues, the right approach to the 'is-ness' of things or is-ness (being) itself, is not via any single thing, such as a human being; rather, it is a matter of finding in ourselves the fact that existence belongs to us, and that we are mysteriously and symbiotically related to it, such that 'we' are the clearing in which whatever exists occurs. The truth of be-ing is this very stream of life in which we stand, an opening of which we, and other beings, are part. The opening is Da-sein. We will only understand that anything exists when we have taken this problem seriously to heart, and let it come to us as what is, both overwhelmingly obvious and simultaneously most hidden: the fact that existence is happening to and in this existence (of ours), here, uniquely, since all that is happens as part of something deeply within us. In contrast to the metaphysical explanation, Heidegger says: [I]f one inquires into be-ing, the approach here is not from beings, i.e., from this and that being respectively - and also not from beings as such in the whole - but rather the leap is enacted into the truth (clearing and sheltering) of be-ing itself. (CP, 52~3; 75-6) The so-called 'leap' is a thought-act, a path of thought; what we leap into is the unique fact that we are alive, and that there is existence at work; being is not, rather, it is happening, it 'sways' (see CP, 52; 74): we leap away from asking 'why are there beings rather than nothing?' to asking 'what is going on with be-ing?' This leap, of course, leaves us different than we were, and, turning within be-ing in a relationship which Heidegger calls 'enowning', be-ing itself changes, becomes itself and is founded by man. Tn order to hold sway in that seldomness and uniqueness, be-ing 'needs' Da-sein; and

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Da-sein grounds human-being and is its ground, insofar as, in sustaining and inabiding, man founds it' (CP, 185; 262). It is this mutual relationship, a 'hermeneutic' kind of circular conscious relationship in which each part of the pair mutually helps the other to attain to greater clarity and effectiveness, which Heidegger referred to as 'enowning' (Ereignis). We have seen that it is difficult to speak of be-ing, in part because 'we' are so deeply immersed in it, and that when it happens, it happens to and as us at some level; literally, we have no words for it. It is possible to point to its vague obviousness as I have just done, but the topic of philosophy, by whatever means, is to think, say, and perhaps become, this be-ing. The phrase 'immersed in it' was just used, but this is inadequate because only a being can be immersed, and only another being can immerse something else: but what other means of speaking do we have than this language only appropriate to 'things'? A second reason for the difficulty of speaking of this event of being-here is that it hides itself from us, and is essentially self-concealing, concealing itself in order to allow humans and other beings to have their freedom, giving them the appearance or feeling that they are each individually free and not part of a onefold unity. Heidegger's notion of how to begin to get nearer to it in his thought was to 'leap' into be-ing, and to provoke man to recognize his role, and thereafter to speak on be-ing's behalf: to speak 'from enowning' (as the title of the book suggests). The subtitle of my own book, Life and the Last God, is meant to indicate the preoccupations of Heidegger's Contributions. But these simple names: Life and God, are not without new meanings when they are subjected to what Heidegger offers. Life is that immediate fact and event with which thinking must begin, true; and the mood of the life which he favours as characteristic of the enowned life of Da-sein is a mood which is near to God. But this named God is not the monotheist creator God; it is true that theological metaphysics shares its area with Heidegger's philosophy: we are dealing with ultimate questions. But Creation implies that everything about which we can think is standing before us, objective, as if it had been created and 'given'. Be-ing, however, is not a given in this sense, not a creation which God made from nothing; it is something which God and we ourselves are not able to transcend: we are wrapped in it. Again, the most familiar fact of being alive as the opening up of be-ing is also the most primordial and greatest uncircumventable reality; neither God, time, nothingness nor thought can surpass it. Changes which we make in ourselves are reflected in what it is. The more deeply we become ourselves, and thoughtfully recognize our being, the more openly be-ing reveals itself, even if it reveals itself as a mystery. We will have difficulty in ever speaking in a sure and objective way about be-ing in part because we will be speaking simultaneously about that very

Introduction

1

unity from which saying itself comes. It is this deep communion which guides the strangeness of Heidegger's diction, grammar and logic throughout his triumphant and yet initially impenetrable masterpiece. 'Enowning' would be the proper title for the 'work' that here can only be prepared for; and therefore instead of that the title must be: Contributions to Philosophy. The 'work' is the self-unfolding structure in turning back into the towering ground. (CP, 54; 77) Vom Ereignis, 'From Enowning', the 'proper title' (CP, 3; 3) of Contributions, means 'event', or 'appropriative event', the event of our being-here, the event by which the 'being of worlds' rises to itself through human Da-sein and takes hold, appropriates us, and is experienced in words. Naturally, the being-here which is 'us' is not the man of everydayness pure and simple: it is a meditative philosophical and self-sacrificing state, a world-renouncing state. Also, it is not in our control; as part of be-ing we are 'swayed' by the destined self-moving event which be-ing is. The element of thinking and saying it cannot be underestimated: that is what makes this an act of philosophy, rather than, say, an act of political genius, or sainthood. 'From Enowning', written between brackets, is the proper title because it is intended to be a book containing the very voice of enowned being-here itself, the voice of be-ing; 'Contributions' indicates the status of the work, for Heidegger saw it more as a frame than as the voice of be-ing itself. Ereignis, the German term which Heidegger uses, is related in a punning way to Eigenen, or 'to own'. It also has a relation to Augen, and Augenblick, 'the moment'. The English translation provides 'enowning' for the German term Ereignis, and thus substitutes one word for another single word; but if this convention of word-for-word translation were to be set aside, we could explicate the term as: 'an event in which be-ing makes us its own in the moment of insight'. It is worth spelling out Heidegger's project on this basis, since it can seem that philosophy is a rather pointless exercise otherwise, which is not true at all: given the fact of being-here as the most supremely basic fact, we find simultaneously the deepest mystery because this fact has hardly ever been thought about. That to which enowning enowns us is the territory of the holy, a passing moment in which a god nears, and in which what used to be known, ontotheologically, as 'Creation', surges towards us in its truth, and welcomes us humans as its guardians. We think about it clearly in its mystery when god is near, and thus become those 'guardians' (BW, 217). We tend to become continuous with be-ing, in a way similar to that in which, when man accords with nature, a certain pantheism seems the appropriate interpretation.

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A principal question of the book is therefore 'Who are "we" '?: 'As mindfulness of be-ing, philosophy is necessarily self-mindfulness' (CP, 34; 48); a provisional and favoured answer by Heidegger is that we are the 'guardians of being'. As guardians, we are accompanied by a god who appreciates and needs this guardianship. This god who accompanies us in our moment of being mindful of ourselves is a passing moment. That type of human being to which we must ascend if we are to become properly ourselves and part of this God-less creation, as Da-sein, is a state of human being which takes place in a holy place and time: that is where the self becomes and can speak itself, and where be-ing is able to enown. As we see, although Heidegger was battling with onto-theological metaphysics, and the limitations of his language, his type of thinking still places a god at the origin of all things, and although Heidegger recognizes, like Nietzsche, that God is dead, yet he has a notion of god, of a philosophical god (and therefore the greatest one), and the last or ultimate one. Seeker, preserver, guardian, and caretaker: this is what care means as the basic trait of Da-sein. 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 turning 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' [Temporalitdt]} 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. And joined up in the joining of be-ing,10 we stand at the disposal of the gods. (CP, 13; 17-18) So a 'result' of this philosophy is to 'restore beings' and to put us back amongst them. These are the major intentions of Contributions, themes which we have to follow in a reading of the book. Contributions was Heidegger's greatest testament, his magnum opus (Poggeler 1993, 205), and these themes can be read, whether in the late works as Heidegger shyly proposes them, or in the early ones, as he fights to express them through more traditional means. At his simplest, speaking for a television audience in 1957, Heidegger said of his life's work: 'The fundamental thought of my thinking is precisely that being, or the manifestation of being, needs human being and that, vice versa, human beings are human beings only if they are standing in the manifestation of being.' 11 The complexity of the thought which Heidegger undertakes in response to be-ing, or in other words, the complexity of the thought 'of be-ing', cannot be underestimated. Da-sein is a mobile leap, or thrust, which has

Introduction

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roots in nothing particular, and yet it has roots. In a state of release from its mere falling and staggering amongst its world, human being discovers the anxiety of its simply being-here, alive, and, so removed from its world, as if dead, it seems that the human essence is freedom. The thought 'of it is similarly mobile and necessarily free, traversing what we would usually call 'nothing'. For example, humans do have a relation to be-ing; the problem is, it is a blind one, manifesting technological ways of life and thought. In the present day, or in this life which happens to us, willing or not, technology is the way in which be-ing both happens, and is understood. Be-ing sways as technology. It is this which stops us from sensing that we always stand at the heart of be-ing (the event of existence occurring to us), and from sensing the nearness of god (a god whose existence or non-existence Heidegger makes no attempt to discuss in normal theological terms). By 'technology', Heidegger means something more essential than this or that product of progress, such as TVs, computers, industrial labour techniques, and other things which reinforce our expectations of what 'life' must be. Technology is a way of existing, a way in which be-ing happens, a way which confines us to what is taken to be 'reality', 'actuality', 'life' and the things of history; technology is the way in which we humans relate to ourselves and to our place in be-ing, while also ignoring our own basic being-here. Taking place in a crisis of the history of the self, in which technology rather than the pure event of existence rules man, Heidegger sought to provide a way to safety, otherwise: 'The labouring animal is left to the giddy whirl of its products so that it may tear itself to pieces and annihilate itself in empty nothingness' (1993d, 69). Technology, which, alongside presence, is the being of beings today, blockades us from becoming what we are; it grasps human being to itself; its enframing, shaping power throws beings towards man, and dictates how he will respond. I have said that Contributions invites us to re-conceive ourselves, and enter a new type of existence with the words which Heidegger has cast within the book, as a counter or totally new direction to technology. He styled himself as the voice of be-ing in its first whisperings; Contributions' strangeness consists in part in the immovable determination to utter only those first tones, and not to compromise. As Heidegger sees it, we already are the guardians of the self-concealing origin of the fact of existence here and now, that totality which we sense as much in the nothingness of our life as in the eventful enchantingness of our life and its experiences amongst other beings and people. Setting these beings and people aside, we can become those who leap into the true nature of ourselves; then, we might find that we belong to be-ing as it belongs to us in so obvious a way, and that we possess its voice; first steps towards it are in recognizing the 'enowning' relationship

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Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy

between us and be-ing: we find who we are, and what we are, and above all, that we are, for it is the basic feeling of wonder, shock and distress about this last fact which is the founding moment of Heidegger's philosophy. It is also, Heidegger was eager to point out, a feature of poetry; in sentences indicating that the usual world of representation, security and sure perception of facts will be set aside in the leap which must be made to Da-sein, Heidegger asks: 'To what extent [does] this [occur] in Greek tragedy?' (CP, 261; 374), remarking in this way that we should be ready to enter be-ing in a pure way, and leave the all-too-orderly and unreal 'wasteland' (CP, 222; 194) of technological reality behind - even if this leap brings on the innerness and the violence of tragedy. The language of Contributions, like that of tragedy, sets out the deepest divine inwardness in dramatic and external shapes, hoping to combine beings to be-ing in a single performance with symbols and signs, acts and language.12

God or 'the Last God? To explain how Heidegger thinks of God, or 'god', it is not possible to ignore the influence of the poet Friedrich Holderlin. To explain Heidegger's reliance on Holderlin is not everything, of course. But given that Heidegger does not devote any work to a thorough detailed discussion of what he meant by the name 'god', and that he admired Holderlin's ideas in this area, such a comparison is a sure way of finding the correct direction. It turns out, however, that in most of his mentions of Holderlin's work in Contributions, Heidegger does not show exactly where Holderlin is important, but simply points the reader that way, so that we have to turn to Holderlin's poetry and prose for ourselves. In his early Jena essays, Holderlin, whose poetry reflects intense philosophical readings of Kant, Leibniz and Fichte, set out a response to Kant's Critique of Judgement. In a conscious divergence from Kant, Holderlin conceived a system of be-ing in which it was impossible to systematize. The human awareness, he held, was only a chance event, one which sprang from the pure unity of being only because of, or alongside, an original and dark violation and transgression of that unity, accompanied by a feeling of punishment. When consciousness, which is different from be-ing, arose to itself, it violated the unity of be-ing; its violation consisted in its becoming 'free' and obeying the law of freedom or 'intellect'; thereafter, only further punishment, or further transgression, could unite it back to being; this further, later, act is a moral, imaginative and 'sacred' attunement. That attunement would never be a pure belonging to be-ing, but only a

Introduction

11

temporary and inadequate relationship such as a violating and violated consciousness could achieve. Our origin, the origin of human being, this occurrence of human consciousness and difference, may not have happened; its contingent character is due to that initial transgression which brings on the punishment of isolation for us; again, the unity is only possible on condition of another contingency: that we can transgress and suffer once more. It is therefore a moral event when the imagination reaches a point where its order corresponds absolutely, or in an aesthetic 'intellectual intuition', to be-ing. In such an event, we would properly be, and would have clear knowledge of be-ing. Imaginative moral unity happens to unite the subject to objects, and thus to become be-ing itself, but only in suffering and punishment; it is not a complete unity since the subject/?/^ the object is still not absolute unity, but is a historical approximation. The question to be asked, here, is why Holderlin described this attunement as 'sacred', and why it must involve the gods. Work on god is so emphatically oriented toward the monotheist transcendent or omnipresent God in our culture that it seems absurd to make alternative gestures. Historians and theologians have seen the Judaic type of solitary creator God to have been a triumph in human progress towards the truth; even atheists feel that acceptance or rejection of the monotheist God is the sole matter of dispute. But we are clearly just as far from this kind of God as we are distant from an account of existence in terms of an objective set of beings in a collectivity, a positive situation of beings, something which the positive sciences make sense of, that is, the situation of the ordered universe such as is taught in our schools today, and which is promulgated by the advances in technology. What is being dealt with and thought over by Holderlin is the origin of consciousness, and a kind of eternally valid, and possibly non-existent situation of our being-here; this calls for a different kind of conception of god. In an indivisible unity, by definition, there are no parts, no beings, no positive givens; similarly, when consciousness arises, there must be some reason or point at which it arises to know and to be free, and it would arise first of all with the transgression of the unity, and the punishment, an immediate feeling of pain, a mood of dread following it; self-mortification characterizes the first movement into discrete beings and 'normal life' such as the consciousness knows it. But what calls for this transgression to happen? First, this 'event' never actually happened; it is the kind of event which is happening at all times, in a history not of normal history, but of the history of be-ing. Holderlin seems to find it self-evident that the spur to the transgression, and thereby of consciousness itself, is some god which possesses a pure freedom and intellect, which is why the state of punishment and anxiety for our own freedom and knowledge of being is 'sacred'. The god is

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Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy

the reason why consciousness transgresses and steps outside of the pure being, the sphere; and the god is the reason why we feel the pain and despair. Moods of despair and happiness are usually explained by an account of the utilitarian value of happiness: it is useful to feel remorse since it keeps us from doing acts which cause pain. On the other hand, in the larger perspective, Holderlin and Heidegger seem to have asked whether there is an overall use of 'living' and being-alive, or having utile moods in the first place. These moods, in both Heidegger's work, and Holderlin's, are the core and most familiar species of our proximity to be-ing. Heidegger calls them hints of the nearness or distance of god, and also attunements to be-ing: despair is the hint of the distance of god, peace of the nearness. Not all moods are sacred, yet some few, or all of them essentially, hint, if we can read them properly, at the nearness and distance of god, and at our consequent journey to or from our own essence in be-ing. For Holderlin, the moods of despair and anxiety, or joy and peace, fundamental moral moods, are ways in which to return to be-ing; they are sacred because they are involved in an initial move back to be-ing or away from it under the impulsion of gods. Heidegger and Holderlin conceive of a god which needs us to be the bridge to be-ing. Complete and impossible intellection of be-ing is 'sacred', and the mood of suffering is sacred, too; they are opportunities for those who do not 'exist' (the gods) to become near to being and to exist; therefore, when the mood of despair or joy befalls us, the explanation is not to be framed in terms of some mundane chain of causes which we have suffered or achieved, but in terms of the nearness or distance ofgod. Thus, Heidegger says insistently that humans are the guardians of the stillness of the passing of the last god, as if humans give to the god the necessary stillness and the place which it needs in order to pass, to have the firm position at which it can pass, or from which it can flee. In that Holderlinian eruption of man and god from original unity, man remained in existence, but gods lost contact. '[M]an, founder of Da-sein, has to become guardian of the stillness of the passing of the last god' (CP, 17; 23). Similarly, the god needs us as founders and creators, such that, when we are not such founders and creators, the god is in need of us: 'How far removed from us is the god, the one who designates us founders and creators, because what is ownmost to god needs these [founders and creators]? God is so far removed from us that we are incapable of deciding whether it is moving toward us or away from us'. There is a requirement of each for the other, and both for be-ing: '[T]he recognition of the belongingness of man into be-ing through god, the admission by god that it needs be-ing' (CP, 17; 23).

Introduction

13

What most intrigues us, however, is how certain Heidegger is that we should have a need to wonder about the nearness or distance of god in the first place: what manifestation or revelation of god did Heidegger have which he did not reveal in his works? As far as one can gather, Heidegger was in earnest about this 'god' which is so strange because he alone had any immediate sense of it. But then again, what made either Heidegger or Holderlin believe that the transgressive philosophical search for the primordial unity of be-ing as the ground was a worthwhile or even meaningful activity? These two types of thinking (of god and of be-ing) are deeply related, or, indeed, cannot be carried out alone, one without the other. Da-sein (human being in its essence) cannot be thought of properly without either its association with gods on the one hand, or without be-ing on the other. Only thus does be-ing become estranging itself, the stillness of the passing of the last god. But Da-sein is enowned in be-ing as the grounding of the guardianship of this stillness. Flight and arrival of gods now together move into what has been and are withdrawn from what is past. (CP, 285; 406) On our side of this triad - god, being, humans - humans are related to the other two by a special hinting mood. The very definition of'anxiety' cannot, therefore, be framed as a human phenomenon, but as a sacred moment in which we are fulfilling a destiny of removal from be-ing into a semi-divine freedom and intellect, but as people aware of it; likewise, supreme peaceful happiness is not to be accounted to our own ability to make ourselves happy, but to the nearness of be-ing and god. Normal human comportments would only be derivative versions of these grounding 'attunements'. Holderlin developed this 'system' in his cultural era, in response to, and as an initial step of, German Idealism. But, in part due to his notion that be-ing could only be approached by an aesthetic moral imagination, and that the nearness of god is hinted at in beauty, he set out his thinking and experience in poetry. These explanations of moods and punishment are not, therefore, to be taken merely as the thoughts of a poet, but as thinking of be-ing which could only, as he saw it, come to word in a kind of tragic poetry, one attuned to suffering and happiness, and expressions of the continuity between humans and nature. The spring from and back to be-ing which they speak from, happens to us within time, time which prohibits a full unity; similarly, our language and thought is temporalized into manifold signs which cannot

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Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy

all be expressed at once. Tragedy, as Holderlin conceived it, is such an event of being-history; the tragic poem expresses inwardness, the prime character of which is to seek the pure and the sacred mood, and to show objectively this deeply private occurrence. Many motifs of Heidegger's Contributions derive from this 'system' which cannot really be set out as a system, and is, properly, a critique of German Idealism, showing its inadequacy at its inception with Hegel and Schelling. For example, the idea of man's rising into the space of beings, and then his necessary 'going-under' in order to re-find being. 5 The origin in be-ing is intimately related to a divine purity of consciousness to which we aspire, yet which involves the loss of be-ing itself. We leave be-ing in order to reach god, and approach be-ing, or return to it, when feeling the attunement and punishment: all of this takes place for god. God and be-ing need each other; man is the bridge between them. Less relevant to philosophy, perhaps, Holderlin saw hints of god in beauty and the beings which were beautiful. They were signs of the original unity of god and man (in his Hyperion, after making this statement, Holderlin acknowledges that he speaks 'mysteriously', but there is a wealth of thought in this simple statement (Holderlin, 1977, 184)). Holderlin's poetry is also, therefore, committed to a praise of the home, the land and actual places, 'beings' where an experience of beauty can occur. Holderlin places strict emphasis on where, when and amidst what place he lives, or where he journeys. His poetry is for 'Germany' and the events of a life. So beings and 'normal reality' do matter; but only those arising from an attuned mood, a sacred source of consciousness of unity with their essence in be-ing as the whole which contingently releases us and has historically brought us back over a history. He is therefore not the poet of beings, but the poet of the arising and returning to be-ing over its history. This is a search for home, and the history of the flight and arrival of gods from us as we lose the source of our punished state, and the gods' return in the coming time of the history of be-ing.16 To Holderlin, therefore, beings do matter, and are not, as I will sometimes be drawn to say, to be disregarded as mere parts of actuality and normal life, standardized representations imposed on a more pure experience. It seems, however, that for Heidegger's vision to be realized, it is required that we forget them for a while, for they overwhelm poetry and philosophy in the present day in their prefigured and technological, postChristian shapes. Philosophy and life must 'cease and desist' for a while, desist from getting involved in beings. We should know only the changing and epochal state of our immediacy of existing here in be-ing, knowing that the moods of it, and the glimpses of unnatural beauty, when attuned, are specifically aimed at, and hint at, gods. In future epochs of the history of be-ing, when our attuned-ness to be-ing becomes clearer, so the god will be nearer;

Introduction

15

it will take time for the history to unfold, however. The Christian and other Abrahamic religions of'God' only hold back this respect for what man is. The religions of the Book merely continue the old history of the neglect of the unity of be-ing, and our contingent distance and nearness to it; of course, Holderlin's poetry is in large part a response to the inadequacy of these religions to meet the needs of humans in our time.17

Composition of the Book The third chapter of Contributions is entitled 'Leap'. Its subject is as simple as the word of the title: the leap is from the question of beings and metaphysics (What is a being?), into the being-historical question ('How is it with being?'). In a sense, every word or short section of the book is a leap, as Heidegger says of the sections of his Mindfulness (M, 383). Furthermore, Da-sein itself must be understood as a leap, a strife, essentially an action. Contributions cannot be accounted for by psychological genesis (M, 369); bibliographical details are a diversion from what it means. However, once we have paid sufficient attention in a serious manner to reading the actual work, the biography-chronology-doxology scheme becomes a way of reinforcing and holding in mind what has been learnt, since this has proven to be a crucial means of understanding and being familiar with a work of philosophy. Contributions was composed amidst a huge quantity of other pieces: lectures, courses, seminars, essays and papers of very diverse intentions. It has been said that the 1920s were Heidegger's period of most activity and innovation, but an equal amount of activity is to be observed in the 1930s, and at a more important and enduring level. Contributions, nestled amongst such a flood of original work, has the form of both a complex fugue, and the appearance of notes, yet it is a regulated 'work', a creation with a rationale if not a systematic exposition. Its repetitive style is due to its saying one thing alone, but a single thing with a vast extent, which must, in each leap, a leap which joins the thinker to be-ing, say something all at once, and only by reference to the other factors: 'The "repetitions" [are] necessary since each time the whole is to be said. Yet, still mostly a pursuing and a pondering, seldom is granted a saying of the saying. Without a mandate and without a calling' (M, 383). It is written by an author with 'human' words struggling to speak from the nearness of god, for god, indeed, and in tune to the event of be-ing 'happening'. There is no systematic first principle to revert to, or to proceed from, nor any later principles, which could be added in the geometrical, systematic way. Its philosophical inventiveness, the ingenuity of the tropes, 'rhetoric' and metaphors, used to explain and delicately draw out

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Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy

the bare knowledge of being-here, are not only a part of Heidegger's verbal competence, but are the substance of the book itself: developing or hearing new ways of speaking of the most ancient matter is what 'thinking' and philosophy are in this book. Contributions was a secret book of Heidegger's, composed during his lectures on Nietzsche, and three years after the Rectorate (see Chapter 5). He composed the book largely in his hut in Todtnauberg (see Chapter 1), and took care to see it survive in a form with which he was satisfied that it could be read after his death (which was still some forty years in the future), but he would not allow publication. From 1936 through to 1937 the 'Preview' and the six joinings were composed, meditations on life, and how to get a grip on this site of truly belonging and being at home. Beings are hardly part of the book at all, although they are perhaps the ultimate point, since hearing life's message and voice is also to learn to safeguard beings, and to start to think of their history in an other way. The theme, the start and end of this thinking, is be-ing itself, that modest intensity and boredom of just being-alive. There is no approach to it by or though things; it is simply stated and named in thinking beyond human life and death. There is a stunning break-away from Heidegger's early and equally stunning formulation of being-here as being-in-a-world, and being in a situation. It is Seyn, 'be-ing', alone which counts, and this can be heard to give its meaning and its voice only in a realm of innerness, holiness, ascetism and removal. It is not sought as a feature of this here life, this existing here, but for itself and as it joins itself, with thinking as the 'join', to Da-sein. Da-sein unfolds be-ing itself into the space-time-drama which we take part in as humans. But there must be some reason why we do not know this simple fact, and why it is at present structurally impossible to understand it. Heidegger says it is because be-ing, the immediacy of a thinking-relation of Da-sein to the event of life, which should surely be the richest experience of our existence, has abandoned human cognition and subjectivity. Dark and concealed, it was always necessary that we should abandon it; but dark and concealed as it is, there must be a saying which is appropriate to it, after the decline of ratiocination and calculative thinking which we are witnessing along with the self-destruction of man in essence and in fact. Heidegger therefore devised four means of interacting provisionally with be-ing ('Echo', 'Leap', 'Playing-Forth', and 'Grounding'), and two more guides to why these four are necessary and predetermined ('The Last God' and 'The Ones to Come'); these six are prefaced by the 'Preview'. Finally, a summary, which attempts to gather the six ways in which to think be-ing in this way, called simply 'Be-ing', was composed in 1938. The date of composition was therefore 1936-38. Heidegger collected his notes and gave them a

Introduction

17

very careful handwritten rendering of 933 pages thereafter, complete by May 1939. He and his brother, Fritz Heidegger, then typed up this handwritten booklet. It was typed only so that Heidegger could more easily refer to it, rather for ease of publication (M, 380). The manuscript was very carefully numbered in terms of sections, chapters and as a whole, so that there are three types of page numbering. The typing was concluded by June 1939. The two documents were then compared: Fritz read the typescript, while Heidegger followed his words on his own handwritten version. The whole process was meticulously achieved, and shows how much care Heidegger had that this work on god(s) and be-ing's abandonment of human awareness one day be available for the public, as well as being in a handy textual form for his personal reference.18 Heidegger refused to have the work published around the time when he had completed it, and wrote elsewhere: 'But even here that form has not yet been attained, which, precisely at this point, I demand for a publication as a "work". For here the new style of thinking must announce itself— the reservedness in the truth of be-ing' (M, 377). He had planned to have Contributions published even later than 1989 (Vallega-Neu, 2003, 2) - when von Herrmann published it as volume 65 of the Complete Edition - stipulating that the public lectures must be published first. As a work of public revelation of a 'style of thought', it was, for him, a failure of a kind, because though it had to be revealed, 'even here' that form had not been attained. Heidegger's strange sentence indicates that the style of thought had to be revealed, that is, as if the style itself were the interaction with be-ing, as if it were the innovative element of the work. On the other hand, Contributions had not attained it in a good enough way. The intent is not at fault, but the execution. One may suspect this overt attempt almost to 'found a religion' would have been embarrassing to him; perhaps, on the other hand, he thought that the book would only be properly received in a distant future, when a futural public had learned to see that his attempts and contributions do have a deep coherence to the torment of metaphysics. Maybe this 'religious' book was intended for a time when the danger of the oblivion of be-ing was greater, the entrenching of technology as the sole manifestation and law of be-ing deeper, as he assumed it would be. What became a secret writing was held by some, on its publication, and prior to it, to be Heidegger's true 'magnum opus'; Otto Poggeler described it in these terms (Scott et al., 2001, 32; also, Poggeler, 1993, 205). Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann saw it as a way into the later work (Scott et al., 2001, 125), and the second major treatise, the core of later Heidegger. Giinther Figal writes that it is 'the centre of Heidegger's thinking after Being and Time' (Scott et al., 2001, 199). But both Being and Time and

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Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy

Contributions are flawed by the lack of attunement and stylistic expression of the ground, the failure to speak of that which is abandoning our thought and which is self-concealing in its very being-here. Given that Contributions achieves such a 'saying' to a greater degree, it is surely his major work (M, 366-9). Certain fragments of the work were circulating in note-form prior to the edition of 1989, Heidegger having shown the manuscript to friends who made notes; this made the full publication quite a major event in Heidegger scholarship. The edition was anticipated to be a great revelation, yet Heidegger, a master stylist and teacher, himself had been unsatisfied with it, feeling that his Contributions do not let one 'go-ahead' in a clear enough manner for today's public (M, 378). Interpretation would be needed, interpretation which a reading public might not be capable of; indeed, how can a mere edition of the work be a major event, when set beside the infinitely greater event of a sound interpretation, its reception by 'preservers', or the more likely event of a general misunderstanding? So while it has been well received in some places, a substantial number of critics refused it 'major' status; no doubt many readers have not 'received' its meaning at all. The book is the largely unsaid background of his speeches and public writings of the 1930s and later years. 'Utterly strange and daring for their time, they [the 'Contributions'] arise from an encounter with Holderlin, and bring to language an abysmal source - [in a] vastly different approach than Being and Time' (Vallega-Neu, 2003, 2). What is this style, the new and potentially misunderstood sort of writing, this philosophy which writes beyond consciousness, impossible to relate to human subjectivity, logos, voice and self-presence? It would be a writing working towards the traces of the most true extra-subjective other origin of a new philosophical tradition, and an other history of being on earth; conscious of difference, Contributions would be written, if not possessed by, and spoken by a non-ego-centered consciousness. The writing demarcates and 'is' deep time, the place of opening and truth, since it is the thinking of opening and being-here itself, the time of be-ing which is movement/withdrawal itself, in which be-ing provokes events from within man, and man in turn lets his words harbour and shelter be-ing. God leads thinking to this deep-time position in which there is no death because there is no subjectivity or distinct individuality. For gods, time is withdrawn and approached, but not presence. They are like ghosts, these gods, transient and fleet, like moods (for is a mood a thing?). Philosophy is between gods and being-here (Da-sein): attentive and capable of both, desiring both if not careful. Its near total lack of value for modern life, its futural gaze towards a religious type of person, and its so refined and intangible subject-matter have lent it towards critiques

Introduction

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which psychologize Heidegger and tempt some writers to snatch at what they can, making use of Heidegger's work as a theory of'the unexpected', for times of'emergency', or in the name of ecology, or theories of literature, and so on. Such approaches are not those which will ultimately demarcate the area in which Heidegger was working. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly had translated Contributions by 1999 for Indiana University Press. This was followed by two releases: an introduction by Vallega-Neu, and a companion to it, edited by several Heidegger and Derrida scholars. In 2006 the next volume in the series of posthumous works, Gesamtausgabe 66, Besinnung, was translated (M). These two works, and a few others (see, M, 382~3) were the third division of the Complete Edition. The Indiana University Press releases were to accompany the translation and general reading of the work, but in Germany it had, prior to this, been read by many already, and commented on by, amongst others, Heidegger's biographer, Riidiger Safranski (1998), and especially by the eminent German critic Otto Poggeler (1991), and also by some Americans, Philipse amongst them (1998). Recently von Herrmann, the general editor of the Complete Edition, has been researching the last god in particular, and teaching Contributions. Safranski saw it as a mere diary, the darker, less communicative side of Heidegger, in a trip beyond the philosophical and significatory into a religious and erotic fantasy in which existence is transcended and then erotically desired. The great American Heidegger scholar, Theodore Kisiel, sees it as one of Heidegger's many 'thought experiments', so that it takes its place amongst other attempts to speak the immediate fact of being-here. In 2006 Richard Polt released his The Emergency of Being in which a great deal of the overt themes of the book were presented and considered in an objective way; Polt's approach was to clarify in English what Heidegger meant in a plain-speaking way, and to put the clarified ideas to the test of reason; the approach is good in some respects, yet not all of Heidegger's thought will yield such common-sense accounts or submit to clarity. Indeed, the subject matter of Contributions is almost darkness itself, something which, while needing thought to a high degree, as an almost infinite project, does not thereby offer a conclusive and clear 'answer'. Contributions is a book attempting to think the subtlety of a simple yet insoluble problem: what is it that is going on with be-ing? This, of course, raises a multitude of other questions, but we must never be tempted too much by secondary explanations and considerations if we are to follow Heidegger when answering this.

Chapter 1

Who Are We? The Ones to Come

Todtnauberg In a letter of the late 1940s to his brother, Heidegger recalled that he began Contributions in his Black Forest hut at Todtnauberg in 1936; no doubt he largely continued it there in the seclusion and simplicity of the house which he had built during the 1920s.1 Heidegger preferred to be removed from the contemporary world although not, at least in his teaching and his ideal of a community, from other people; he was called to Berlin to take the chair of philosophy in the 1930s, but after a debate with himself, and with some country folk of Swabia, he decided against it, preferring his seclusion to the historic events taking place in the city. The contemporary world, in a real sense, offered only perverted thinking, irreligious living, ways of living and progress for which he could see no ground. Besides, he could, it seems, only think his own thoughts in his native region, and in solitude he could observe the movement of be-ing's history, as opposed to the disastrous and inessential history in which people were taking part through the 1930s and the twentieth century. Within the forest, the confusion of beings, 'natural' or man-made, is removed, and replaced by unformed earth and nature, the primeval happening. The forests through which a path leads, heading endlessly on, indistinguishably pass into the darkness and the brief rays of light. The light and the heavenly bodies, the rise and fall of the ground to which man belongs, there, Heidegger was able to remove himself from distinct beings at leisure, and to let be-ing shelter itself within the unsteady play of time-space of which human being is intrinsically both a part and the origin. Be-ing is there sheltered in the random and formless shapes and happening of something traditionally called 'nature' and beauty. Of course, the world which presses itself upon one with overwhelming consistency, permitting a power and capability to interact with actuality in a city such as Berlin, where we are embedded into technology as into our strange home, is not totally unreal. It too belongs to be-ing, but in a form which be-ing has sent in default of itself: it is a sure world built up over centuries of metaphysical

Who Are We? The Ones to Come

21

behaviour, amenable to representation and the workings of power. But in his hut, Heidegger faced only the minimum of technological traces, hardly technology at all, but the basics of human life: food, writing equipment, a stream or water-well, a desk, a hearth, wardrobe and clothing, family life. The door opens onto be-ing, that which grips humans and, finite as it is, condemns them to a history which is bounded by darkness or death. Each thing of life there only permits the essence of human being to happen and permits the union of human being and be-ing itself for a mindful thinking. We cannot doubt, given how he preferred to live, and how he wrote Contributions, that this simple self-communion within the basic happening of be-ing, that this simple solitude, was his vision of how human being should be, and how the few who prefigure 'the ones to come' should abide in their down-going. It is the going under of the man in retreat, the tragic one who leaves, and undermines civil society for the society of gods and ancestors, of how they lived, and of where they went to in death. What he writes he hears in the voice of the forest, or properly, in the voice of be-ing which the forest shelters in its canopy and its lights. Heidegger refused to have his Contributions put up for the game of publication and fame, expressing himself on this theme in the work itself as if it were a preoccupation which he tried to avoid. His words, speaking the voice of be-ing which the human ear hears in the experience of be-ing, let human being be overcome by the strangeness of the elements, the ravaging of sun, rain, lightning and time's efforts. It is also to retreat before the mastery and ambition and power of technology, the retreat into silence, for there is no alternative to power and technology for us today as yet. He seems to have sought retreat before what these create: mass industry, compulsion, complete representation, and the domination of the earth. In this situation, Heidegger described man as himself becoming no more than an asset or 'standing-reserve' for technology, a process which, as the distorted face of withdrawn be-ing, holds and calls man to itself and overpowers him. In defeat, philosophy retreats and goes under in the face of technology; it seems to lose power and to gain nothing but the stillness. No doubt, it is the same as the madness of Nietzsche, Holderlin and Kierkegaard. To be broken by beings, technological behaviour and thinking, and yet to find saviour in defeat, open to the storm of concealed be-ing, to enter into it and be lost to contact by other people is what entering be-ing means. These three philosophers and poets felt, at varying levels, the absolute needfulness, the distress, the 'emergency' of solitude and groundlessness: they grounded the abyss as an emptiness which is studiously ignored with each century and each new step onward in positivism and metaphysics. Alone as he was as he wrote, perhaps Heidegger found this situation to be so much more obvious,

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obvious that man by himself is really and truly alone, and groundless. Each of the three named above was concerned, perhaps above all, to point out man's absolute isolation, his being alone and finite, or that existence is superior to god, and that the consequences are such as to require a new, other beginning to the way in which we exist. Alone in his shelter against the rain and cold of be-ing, Heidegger philosophized the sacrifice of the few who prefigure the ones to come, a class of people who could guarantee that be-ing was heard and set in action. With no safety in technology, or in the gratification of belonging to the pursuit of the domination of the earth which the human race practises in unison today, the philosopher finds only the security of himself being alive, and from that one fact springs the experience of be-ing. Does this springing forth in a concealed manner into us and into our life happen as a leap of thought, and if so, is it appropriate that we too leap along with that concealed origin and ground, concealed in the happening of the earth and man's battle to turn it into a place to live in, a world? To flee into this mad questioning is to leap, Heidegger has it. It means forgetting oneself, and to become impersonal Da-sein, to forgo comfort, to practise disdain, and to cultivate distress about our groundlessness, to feel the need for a ground to stand on, as Antigone in Sophocles' drama seeks to base her need to bury her brother in the need of gods. To leap is to leap with be-ing and to become its event. This is a kind of answer to the problem of groundlessness, for we thereby become the grounding-event itself.

The Ones to Come The writing in Contributions takes the form of two main types: there are expository prose explanations which attempt to speak from be-ing in a meditative way; these expositions are 'Be-ing' and 'Preview', and stand at its opening and its close. Enclosed within them are six chapters: 'Echo', 'Playing-Forth', 'Leap', 'Grounding', 'The Ones to Come' and 'The Last God'. These six chapters were designed by Heidegger to be ways in which a writer can speak from the site of be-ing itself (rather than from the site of normal life or the 'ego'). But only the first four of these are designed specifically to be ways of speaking from that site; 'The Ones to Come' and 'The Last God' represent a third type of writing. When Heidegger writes in these two chapters he veers away from deep meditativeness and makes a forecast of something which he hopes will happen to people: they will become a certain type of persons, and they will inter-subjectively recognize each other as those who experience the nearness of the last and ultimate god.

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'The Ones to Come' can be read as the most obvious way into the practical meaning of Contributions, being one of those forecasts. It is the briefest chapter, and also the one most obviously ad hominem, an appeal to us as we are today in our humanity. Heidegger holds that there are, today, some few people who prefigure in their homeless going-under a type of coming people. At present these coming people are not here; what will be special and impossible about them is that they hold one fact to be self-evident, and they think this through to its ground: life and ground and any being-here is part of the inexplicable mystery and concealed obvious uniqueness of'be-ing'. The five sections which comprise 'The Ones to Come' provide a description both of certain few living people, a type which we can achieve, and then of the yet more philosophical type. We find in these sections a description of the few who are 'attuned' to be-ing: they are in touch with their own self, and view themselves not as a variety of animal, or a biological thing, or as a part of the confused course of life and death in normal human terms, but as a site of stillness. What we have tried in the Introduction to insinuate as the relationship between be-ing-here and be-ing itself is drawn in greater detail in the chapter in question. Heidegger writes of people who are aware of what has been 'allotted to them', they have accepted, in a decision, that something both gives and refuses itself to them in life. He means that human being is a decision about whether to think and behave amongst the quite limitless possibilities of our powers and technologies, or to merely discover that a gift and a denial is made to us in the form of our life and our consciousness. When, for example, such a Heideggerian person awakes from sleep in the morning, while he finds the environment around him, he does not act and think towards this as a set of objects to work with randomly, as if he were its master, but rather, he finds in this environment the signs of'the simple mastery that prevails in every thing and every breath' (CP, 233; 395). Be-ing is giving and denying to the person such that life becomes not a subjective field for doing things, but a field for recognizing something of the essential activity of be-ing itself, sent and received as a destiny. But there are a few who recognize in this situation of theirs a ground of the abyss of be-ing itself. Such a person does not relate to beings as things with which to calculate and be concerned with; instead, this person, one of the few, is The stillest witness to the stillest stillness, in which an imperceptible tug turns the truth back, out of the confusion of all calculated correctness into what is ownmost: keeping sheltered what is most sheltered, the enquivering of the passing of the decision of gods, the essential swaying of be-ing. (CP, 277; 395)

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Be-ing is attuned to by the stillest stillness, and the few select philosophers of today are likewise calm and immovable (for they recognize be-ing and recognize themselves as be-ing-here); recognizing oneself as Da-sein (being-here) is to be transformed into Da-sein and to lose many habitual human characteristics. Something, a 'tug', draws them back from beings, drawing them into stillness: at this moment a god seems to come near, and rather than finding beings, they feel the motion and action of be-ing. Normally, beings are so obvious to us that they overcome us, and thrust at us their shapes, colours and demands as well as the concomitant calculative thinking; it is technological comportment and relations with be-ing which forces this and draws it out of humans; but to found a new way of existing it is necessary to 'withstand the thrust'. We seem to read in Heidegger the demand that we accept ourselves as related entirely and only to be-ing; but simultaneously, be-ing thrusts confusion, normal life and overwhelming beings at us. Where would the thrust which confuses us come from, except from be-ing? And hence, be-ing would be both the stillness, and the thrust which confuses us. This is a crucial point about what we call the difference between be-ing and individual beings: intrinsically, they are the same event, they spring from the same source, or are the same. What decides to make them seem different is the point of being's history at which we stand, and also, our willingness to co-operate with its blinding and self-hiding sway, or, properly, our own decision to become mindful being-here. The decision about what shall be, whether be-ing and the nearness of god shall be, or whether beings and our power over them shall be, is precisely the decision which be-ing's sway is proposing to us in the disaster which our technological moment is. The ones to come will have decided that be-ing and the god are the reality of what faces us: for such persons, beings (trees, words, roads, dreams, houses, machines) are disguises and shelters of be-ing. Be-ing 'thrusts' itself at us; it is our choice whether to become still, as it is, or to be confused, and to be overwhelmed. Heidegger clearly states that to achieve this stillness a leap is necessary; he means a leap beyond normal human life in its variety and confusion; it means doing as be-ing does: when be-ing is in essence the event which is throwing up itself towards us, then we must leap with it, and become it. Heidegger is able to offer, then, a spare description of what it feels like to be near be-ing; what be-ing 'looks' like, as opposed to beings. He does this in a provisional way by describing the relationship between ourselves and our home-ground as 'attunement': it is as if for once and for the first time, we are paired together in a kinetic harmony. We are not attuned to beings, as if they were a guide, but to be-ing, as if it were our inner ground: it is the 'grounding-attunement'.

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Heidegger describes this relationship to beings as 'reservedness', 'the spirit of courage', as well as a stillness, and a leaping, a certain thinking along towards expressing be-ing. The ones to come are 'destined by the last god' when they are gripped and when they submit their human being to this ground; this last saying from section 249 is quite strange and unaccountable, but is perhaps the clearest that Heidegger can become about how far we, as yet, are from being those 'ones'. They have a notion of god, and are near to the god: it seems that the god plays a part in giving a destiny to them; naturally, this destiny is not a destiny of a life-course: it is better understood as being sent as a site or a moment, a destined ability to ignore or follow be-ing, whether in its rising or its decline into a kind of nothingness (ours is the age in which we will find it destining only the decline when be-ing has 'abandoned' humans). In the section which follows, Heidegger turns to an account of who we are today, as opposed to those ones who will exist in future. We exist in preparation for them, and our own possibility is that of decline or failure. 'Our hour is the epoch of going-under.' Going-under means becoming reticent, and preparing for the destiny and the moment. We are going under because, in the face of present actuality, the few to whom Heidegger speaks are filled with a sense of the future: they sacrifice themselves for the 'invisible ground'; they ceaselessly expose themselves to questioning. 'Seeking brings the seeker first to itself, i.e., into the selfhood of Da-sein' (CP, 279; 398). This is a matter of transformation of human being; the few (Heidegger's privileged readers) withstand the utmost fury of 'the abandonment of being' in the form of our normal life: the life of our cities, of information, technological thinking. Instead, being-here comes about for them as retreat and going-under; when they go under it is with distress about the emptiness. At first we find only the emptiness and anxiety about there being no decent self-relation; but 'self-being is the find that already lies in the seeking' (CP, 279; 398), and by trying to find ourselves, we have already found: for we are essentially that search amongst emptiness. What we are is an opening, a mere space in which be-ing and beings happen, and we are the echo of the most unique and greatest, which, unfortunately for 'us', the few, means being the site where we recognize emptiness. This open-space which we are, an openness to be-ing as that which hides itself, that is, which hides its own obvious immediacy, and is protected from any simple conceptualization, points to a central theme of Contributions' analysis of our proper self; according to a running motif, be-ing, and hence the proper self (not the same thing as 'human being'), is the point at which a certain basic combat or strife arises. The strife is the still and intense moment at which a world arises from the inanimate and tumultuous earth. Heidegger

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means that earth and world, in the normal sense of these words, arise from be-ing, but they only do so after they have had a site in Da-sein: but that makes us into their fight to settle down into what they are. Therefore, humans are intrinsically a settled and tumultuous combat, just as they are essentially needed to leap, for be-ing is this process of movement, strife and leap. '[L]et Da-sein be the innermost order, out of which strifing above all obtains its law. The strifing outshines whatever is encountered and above all allows us to experience the simplicity of what is essential' (CP, 281; 400). This order and this moment of strife easily remains unseen because it is standing outside of perceptions, representations, the real world and actuality: it is the movement of the innerness of being-here. It seems invisible to the eye or the ear, but then it is the most obvious thing, the essential, for it is happening right now, if we could become Da-sein. As for beings, things, tools, thoughts, those appearances, they are where be-ing shelters itself: they are not essentially things to make use of or to apply our powers of aggression and rational mastery upon. Heidegger refers to beings and the way in which they deceive us about their true nature as 'the maze' (CP, 280; 399). Another noteworthy feature of this chapter in Contributions is the way in which we should try to, and the ones to come do, belong to the last god. As we have seen in the Introduction, the notion of god is something which Heidegger may have felt in his own way, but he expressed it in terms borrowed from Holderlin. As he says in the 1934—35 lectures on Holderlin (Heidegger, 1980), the god is the god of a people; it will make a people (whether the Germans, or the human race as a whole) find their ownmost, their true self. We suppose that a god is primarily a matter of individual conscience today, but Heidegger gives many indications that he does not respect the opinions of thoughtful people today, nor the standard approaches to god over the course of history as they have been discussed. God is not a matter of individual conscience and not something which calls one to become aware of one's unique human individuality; rather, for the proper advent of be-ing to succeed, an entire people or race must become transformed into an intuiting attunement to god. God, as Heidegger describes the divine, is not for individuals, or for other people; god is, with regard to people, the route by which they become Da-sein. The ones to come are such an entire people, or else, the few who can guide a people: they are not existentially informed and isolated persons. Heidegger knows that only some are able to think be-ing through, and that some are better at acting, building, leading, or working than at thinking; but all will become grounded in be-ing by a common standard, the point at which each person, and therefore a whole people as a single being,

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recognizes and declares simultaneously the nearness of the ultimate god.3 One should expect no less than a feeling of unease when presented with such a prospect, or with such an idea from a philosopher; but Heidegger proposes this in a definite perspective. As he sees it, the human race as a whole, and without exception, is in varying ways bound together, and already declares simultaneously the power and truth of technology. There are isolated places where technology has no place, of course, but then are there, really? In any case, it is on this level of generality that Heidegger intends a universal awakening to an other sort of self-relation for human being. The terms which Heidegger uses for this general transformation are quite explicit and beautiful and we will examine these; however, it is important to note what sort of god we are dealing with. It is a philosophical god, one which brings thoughtful lucidity to a people. Heidegger never tries to prove that the god exists, nor indicates what it looks like, or what it does, or what relationship it bears to other gods of the past. There are a thousand typical questions of theology which are left undiscussed. Heidegger just declares that the god will set up the paths on which a people, an entire collection of people, or the human race, 'wanders beyond itself, in order to find once again what is its ownmost and to exhaust the moment of its history' (CP, 280; 399). It therefore seems that the 'ones to come' means the future human race as a people. Heidegger envisages a massive change in their attitude, but in a basic formula: they will 'remind themselves of the greatest thing that is created: the enfilled onceness and uniqueness of being'; that is, they will be completely clear that creation itself, the uniqueness of being-here, now and not at any other time or in any other way, is the one event to base thinking and acting upon. The reserve and reticence and stillness which we have examined already are the 'innermost feast of the last god', they are the way in which the god comes and is celebrated by people; meanwhile, the ones to come, or the future human race under the tutelage of its philosophers and the voice of be-ing, will live alongside the god by 'works', but in that work they will be respecting what it is that is hidden and sheltered, harboured in the shapes and colours and events of normal life: the happening of be-ing. These people are not, of course, straightforwardly human beings, for they are transformed - transformed into Da-sein. Humans live on earth in a world, and god comes near or departs from them, but Da-sein is the meeting or confrontation of these two (near humanity of god, or semi-divinity of man): when people start to recognize that they are near to god, the ensuing confrontation is Da-sein. Da-sein and be-ing happen at that confluence, at that meeting, whether it is a moment of joy, or anxiety: that confluence is the ground throwing itself up.

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We noticed that a leap has to be made: what sort of leap is this, what is the meaning of this simple command which seems to be something not made by the legs onto a definite place? It seems, given what we have said about beings and the humans who move and live amongst them, to be a leap by humans beyond beings. For the following reason: if be-ing is that which beings and man intrinsically are, and be-ing projects them into being what they are, then that leap or projection which be-ing makes is the same one which we must make, but, perhaps, in reverse. One leaps beyond beings, into the movement of be-ing. '[The leap] is the enactment of projecting-open the truth of be-ing in the sense of shifting into the open, such that the thrower of the projecting-open experiences itself as thrown - i.e., as en-owned by being' (CP, 169; 239). But one doubts if this might not be a kind of stupidity, a blatant refusal to accept the evidence of the senses, and to madly refuse to live in the given world. Perhaps this would be so if we did not sense that there was a ground purer than reality, and that there is something about our technological way of living which is destroying itself. What the senses of sight, hearing, touch and so on give is a set of beings which, for the most part, humans have created, and which we form and understand due to our inherited metaphysics and the order which we place upon beings. In a city, or a village, or any place where we live in these times, there is barely a time or place in which we do not bring our own representations and our own formative powers to bear: these powers are in part what Heidegger calls 'technology'. If there were ever a place and time where man had not hitherto been, even then we would bring our names and schemes to bear, as we do, for example, in mountain ranges and other nature 'reserves'. Heidegger envisages a relationship to the earth where a world has not yet been formed, where that struggle may take place newly and uniquely; he envisages a type of consciousness which would be able to notice that the struggle or strife to form a world takes place in and as us. One would find, one supposes, water journeying through a landscape, the movement of the heavens, and beings arising from a hidden unity; even the names 'water', 'landscape' and 'heavens' still bring a scheme which imposes metaphysical power over inanimate earth. The purity of such a given experience would shelter be-ing; however, if we were open to it, it would seem to demand that we name it and make a place to live in it. It would not be 'nature' or 'unspoilt landscape', it would be that to which we belong: the happening of be-ing in its own time. Given that finding such a place and time is unlikely, we can only leap beyond the present technological way of our existence and 'go-under'. In which circumstances could Heidegger have found such a god selfevidently a presence or absence in our life? Perhaps it can be explained as follows: when a person has a sense of being at one with all things, or of being

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indistinct from be-ing to a high degree, that is, a condition in which one's sense of one's self is the same as the sense of an external reality, then there still remains a residue of otherness, of strange approach and distance from something or somebody; indeed, freedom and intellect seem to encroach onto us at a higher level; beings become beautiful, there is a danger of being overcome by too much sovereign freedom. 5 This is the state which Holderlin, in his letters and in his poems which celebrate the confrontation with beauty and with giving names to the nameless, seems to express. In the situation of near pure unity which I have described, there remains an excess of great distance from that unity, a freedom and intellect in excess, although the human side of oneself has been consumed or seated in be-ing; perhaps this distance is god. We will continue to explain how god can be real, and what part god plays in this philosophy in succeeding chapters. Heidegger attempts to describe the place of be-ing, and the transformation of man into Da-sein as the 'confrontation' of man and god, their meeting. Da-sein is therefore not human or divine, but a place which god and man rush onto in their meeting. Not that god plus man is Da-sein, but that when man faces god, then Da-sein occurs. Da-sein is that very confrontation in which man meets god and interacts, when the chance of a half-god, demigod situation seems to arise, as at festivals, and so on; hence when Da-sein feels the distance or passing of god, that is the point at which human being and god mutually meet each other. In our day, we simply feel, perhaps, the fittingness of Holderlin's poetry about gods, his sheltering of the experience of be-ing in words, and the dim view of a divine presence which meets us, and requires us, we who can feel and give substance to godhood, and then make a place of god in our lives for no very good reason. Naturally, this conception of what human being is is very far from the authoritative scientific account of mankind's history, or that of the various surviving religions today. The hint of god (for Heidegger speaks of god as a hint when he is using metaphysical terms), is in that exact reticent silence which must be taken up in order to be Da-sein. The hint of the god is the sadness and grief, or the joy which we feel which has no explanation, just as life itself has no explanation; or else it is the quality of something shining and hidden in beings, as if beings were a shelter for a deeper communion between ourselves and things. Heidegger seems to mean that, when we face be-ing, we face nothing real or nothing very interesting. Yet still we find a certain joy, or grief: the joy is the arrival of the god; the grief is the flight of god. There is a strange economy of god, man and Da-sein which I will try, in conclusion, to propose. Man and god are separate; they meet in the joy or grief of man; but when man feels this, he is no longer man, but Da-sein. Da-sein is therefore the hint of god. What this means is that the god is

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directly relevant to humans, but that as soon as man approaches god, he ceases to be man, and becomes transformed, and puts his existence at stake. Each of the four parties could equally be placed at the centre of the description: be-ing is most important in one regard; but then the emphasis lies on man, it seems, for the most part; but, for man to be relevant, he must become Da-sein; and yet there can be no Da-sein without the god. (A fifth element would be beings, or earth and world in their time-space; there are still others, too. Later Heidegger spoke of a 'four-fold' to assert this jointure in a more memorable form.) We cannot directly and systematically outline the full picture without invoking, with equal pertinence, alternative ways of doing so; the central problem is that this whole shifting pattern is a single event, involved in be-ing and nothing, hiding and clearing, an ineffable event, however, which philosophy cannot simply give up on, but must adapt itself to. Heidegger attempts throughout his work to say this all-atonce scheme of beings, be-ing, man, god, time and space, and every other element of his work; at first glance this extremely dense type of writing is unfathomable, but there is a discernable (and brilliant) meaning, when the means to decipher it can be had: Be-ing is the enstrifing enownment which originarily gathers its enowned (Da-sein of man) and its refused (god) into the abground of its 'between' [Zwischen], in whose clearing world and earth enstrife the belongingness of what is their ownmost to the free-play of time-space, in which what is true comes to be preserved - what as 'a being' in such preserving finds itself in be-ing (enowning) for the simpleness of its ownmost. (CP, 342; 485)

Life in Time and Space It will not do, however, to insist that Heidegger's Contributions leads us to a place and time where there are no beings and where the enowned state of genius exists in a state of blindness and near dumbness. It is true that for human being to become Da-sein, it has to recognize its personal possible non-existence, and then recognize the fact that beyond that non-existence a residual lucidity about be-ing remains. Da-sein is therefore that residual openness onto both nothingness, and also onto the world. This duality of facing life and death is called, in Heidegger's work, a 'turning in enowning'. Da-sein must face both be-ing (nothing) and beings in the world. Heidegger's Being and Time had been involved in precisely our 'world' of activity and life, and had sought to locate 'the truth of being', the interaction of

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Dasein as the open space with beings, in this world of ours. In Being and Time there is presented an account of human beings in which, prior to becoming philosophical, as we may put it, we exist in a 'world' of concrete situations, moods, where we face challenges, 'beings', and all of this in a definite space and time. Apparently planet Earth spins on its axis towards and away from the sun; the other people exist; we work, communicate and so on. There are clear factors of our life, such as our birth, our death, our having a family, our education. So much is, as a bare-bones account of what we exist as, incontrovertible. Where it is necessary to say that Heidegger leaves the 'everyday' kind of humanity behind, and enters the state more of'sainthood' than of pragmatic 'realism' is in the way we interpret these basic features of our life. As we know, Heidegger locates the ground of reality not in beings and an objective view, but in be-ing and its truth as the fact of being-here: 'Historically, a being first emerges out of the truth of be-ing, and the truth of be-ing is sheltered in the inabiding of T)a,-sein' (CP, 183; 260). The main features of the commonplace philosophico-metaphysical existence which we take part in are its partition into three dimensions of space, and then a linear dimension of time; within this geometric space and time lie specific beings with specific qualities. Such a view of reality has been variously presented by philosophers from Descartes to Kant and beyond, and holds for other philosophers, indeed, the great majority (there has been, of course, a general doubt that our life in space and time is the ultimate reality; Kant, for example, doubted if this scheme of reality was more than something imposed by our own faculties). It is this type of objective and geometric approach to existence and beings with which Heidegger takes issue. Here, in terms of Da-sein, a totally different relation to be-ing is thought and enacted; and that occurs in the time-space that emerges from removal-unto and charming-moving-unto truth itself. Time-space itself is a strifing domain of strife. From this strifing domain - following the immediate assault on beings as such in the first beginning only thepresencing became graspable and seizable as the standard for all interpretation of beings. Along with that, time [was thought] as present and space, i.e., place as here and there, within presence and belonging to it. But in truth space has as little presence as it has absence. Timing spacing - spacing timing (cf. the strifing of the strife) as the nearest region of joining for the truth of be-ing - but not as what falls into the common formal space- and time-concepts (!), rather as taking [time and space] back into the strife, world and earth - enowning. [Translation modified] (CP, 184; 260-1)

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I have said that Heidegger removes thinking and experiencing away from a naive approach to beings and the time and space in which they belong. Rather than thinking of be-ing from beings, he attempted to put aside these 'guides' and to seek the ground itself. With reference to beings, our experience will inevitably be best approached with space and time as separate frames. But, starting with be-ing itself, space and time are found to be unified in a more basic experience; this is because Da-sein, as a unity through which space and time happen, projects a single kinetic play-space in which beings arise. Properly seen, time-space is a play-field within which be-ing eventuates itself into beings; it 'shelters' itself in them, 'playing' itself out in that time-space. Beings are then said to move within that play in a 'charming-moving-unto' Da-sein, and a 'removal' away; with these (translated) expressions, Heidegger is remarking the effect of fascination which beings and truth offer to us when we are attuned to be-ing. That is, we, humans, are charmed by them, or removed away from them in their happening in the open space of Da-sein. So, although Heidegger is abstracted from normal kinds of experience, this is only in a manner of speaking. It is not 'the world' which is changed, but a transformation in human being has effects on the world's way of existing. There is no experience of be-ing and enownment without Da-sein's projection of beings; even the nearness of god, and the experience of be-ing is fundamentally, also, the nearness to beings and space-time. After all, if Da-sein is the act of truth itself and the opening onto beings, then there has to be a field of time and space in which this happens. Only the one who comprehends that man must historically ground what is ownmost to him by grounding Da-sein, only the one who comprehends that inabiding the sustaining of Da-sein is nothing other than residing in the time-space of that event that is enowned as the flight of gods, only the one who in creating takes the dismay and bliss of enowning back into reservedness as grounding-attunement - only this one is capable of having an inkling of the essential sway of being and, in such a mindfulness, is capable of preparing truth for what is coming as true. (CP, 36-7; 52)

Chapter 2

The Echo in Everyday Life

The Meaning of Life Being and Time opens with a quotation from Plato followed by a brief analysis remarking that the meaning of the word 'being' is little discussed, and has been unremittingly avoided since Plato's time (BT, 19). The 'meaning of being' indicates an investigation into a double matter: first, the meaning of existence itself, as in 'why am I here?', 'what is the meaning of life?'; and, on the other hand, 'what does it mean that something exists, that a being can be said to exist?' But Heidegger is largely indifferent to both these two types of question, and the introduction by way of Plato diverts attention from the matter in question. Being and Time is not concerned with the 'meaning of life' which is the matter of certain metaphysics, or religions, or 'world-views' (as in ideologies). Nor does it take its leading question in such a problem as 'how can we be sure that things are real, and understand them in the true light of their actual existence?' An interrogation of the meaning of life, the meaning of being, already presupposes that there is a 'meaning', a sensible and intelligible 'meaning' to the path of life. Heidegger begins, however, with a position which does not have any pre-ready answers, and concentrates on the fact that in truth we are merely, basically, just here. And the truth of beings in the sense that there is a true kind of approach, properly and philosophically valid, which shows how and that they truly exist, presupposes the adequate powers of our mind to grasp beings properly, and once again misses that fact of primal truth which Heidegger considered to be the true matter of philosophy. Being and Time moves, with a study of Da-sein, towards another kind of 'being', irrespective of its meaning: it is the primal event of being-here itself, the pre-theoretical happening, that event of truth itself'happening'. (It is not so straightforward as this, since Heidegger does believe that there is an understanding available to 'everydayness' which repays attention, but not what we would expect.) One could be confused by the various analyses of an apparently 'human' life discussed in Being and Time on the way to this fundamental and omnipresent event, this It, this sovereign superabundance to which humans belong;

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however, as Heidegger's analysis of human being progresses, one discovers that the envisaged human being is stripped down more and more, refined and elevated to a higher level, confined to one true kind of experience: the sovereign, utterly free, utterly comprehending, mute kind of'consciousness' of the Da-sein which faces death. Heidegger looked back on his work in a manner which saw its chief and sole merit as lying in this very refinement of 'human being' down to a specific view of itself as an open space in which be-ing could take hold of it and be recognized: Historical preparedness for the truth of be-ing replaces the systematization and deduction. And this requires above all that this truth itself already might create the basic traits of its abode (Da-sein) out of its barely resonating essential sway, and that the subject in man must transform itself into the founder and guardian of this abode. In the question of being we are dealing solely with the enactment of this preparation for our history. All specific 'contents' and 'opinions' and 'pathways' of the first attempt in Being and Time are incidental and can disappear. (CP, 171; 242) For the most part, criticism of Heidegger's work treats it, favourably or not, as a general anthropology, an analysis of everyday life, the groundlevel study of ordinary human life in its most striking aspect as largely ^-scrutinized while it is being lived by us. There were times, especially in the early years of his philosophical activity, when Heidegger felt that such a study would yield knowledge of the ultimate intensity of be-ing itself, but mostly, from the first, ordinary life, the background understanding which we have of our living, was sacrificed wholesale for the experience of religious life and something like the experience of self-withdrawn genius. In his mature period Heidegger was only interested in special, insightful experiences of'life', those which are 'other-worldly', mystical, yet the selfconscious truth of all mundane and merely 'lived' life. Throughout my own interpretation of Heidegger's 'second major work' - Contributions - I have tended to adhere to the principle that study of 'ordinary life' is not the study for thinking be-ing. In a 1919 lecture which anticipated all of Heidegger's work in toto in its broader shape, and in some striking details, Heidegger remarks that there is both the brute fact that we are faced with existence, and there is also 'a world' in which we live. However brutally that world is lived in, it is still there, here, before us, as the basic 'something' which is the face of be-ing. In this chapter I will try to explain what relationship to 'the world' and 'being-in-the-world'

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Heidegger's 'mystical' flights have: for, certainly, the world is just as given to us as the brute fact of being-here is. Most Heidegger criticism takes place in the United States and Great Britain where an emphasis on 'special' and elite types of person or life may strike philosophers and critics as contrary to the prevailing ethos of their homeland. The mystical, saint-like Da-sein is not productive, and not easily possessed by any/every person; it does not contribute to the economic life of the country, nor does it make itself pleasantly agreeable to a democratic mind. However, if we want to follow where Heidegger himself was heading, rather than merely to try to take or salvage something from his 'works', then we must try to understand where he was going and state this clearly, backed up by facts, naturally.1

Being-in-the-World Heidegger's task, as we see, is to understand be-ing; be-ing, in the 1919 lectures, has a twofold immediate aspect: as a 'preworldly something' (i.e., it is just an It, a fact of being-alive), but also, however, it is most assuredly a 'world-laden something' (i.e., we have a world, and we know how to live it). The most strikingly original contribution to philosophy which Heidegger appeared to make in those early days was his appreciation that we are not, as humans, faced with a subjective isolation, or faced with a set of solid objects, but with a world in which we are already furnished with the means to live. The discussion of both the preworldly something, and the world-laden something is, therefore, a dual road towards understanding the immediacy and unity of being-here. My own stress on a kind of isolated, special, mystical kind of experience of be-ing beyond 'the world' therefore has to be explained, since, in these early works, and Being and Time at least, Heidegger is committed to understanding being-here with reference to the world. If we call the position outlined as the authenticity of Da-sein, and the 'enowned' Da-sein of Contributions, the 'high-point' of experience, then it should be realized, in order to understand what Heidegger was doing in Contributions, that he sought this high-point because it gives cognizance of be-ing: that is, it permits us to articulate be-ing. As opposed to a study of our being-in-the-world, this self-articulating high-point has a special privilege. For, if we study mere everyday being-in-the-world, we ourselves, we, the philosophers, are thereby tied to a kind of vacant being-in-the-world such as we absent-mindedly live from day to day. But such an absent mindedness does not conduce to the heightened consciousness which philosophy needs. Therefore, to philosophize be-ing and the world, one must describe and

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enact the state of the philosopher, not the everyday and absent minded consciousness. Rather than being a study of everyday life, Contributions is a study of how thinking about be-ing takes place: Contributions is thought about thought. Only in a state of thoughtful and abstracted meditation does a link to be-ing by thought take place; and only by studying it, therefore, can we study the link to be-ing which we have. The site of saints, the site of genius, of poets, is the site of philosophy; the philosopher may be 'of the world, yet while he thinks about it, he is removed from it, engulfed in it consciously, but not as a participant. Therefore, while it is true that Da-sein is in the world, this 'in the world' of Da-sein cannot hear or experience or think be-ing itself. It has already an understanding of being, as we know, but to outline that understanding requires that the philosopher and that Da-sein remove themselves from the world: a place nearer to be-ing, and further from the world, has to be attained. That is, one must become the clearing of be-ing if one is to think about it, and must let god approach. Thereby, the high-point of be-ing is the surpassing the world towards god; not as transcendence (which was the tactic of Being and Time], but as a kind of hearing and attunement: one must become the depth oneself. To think of the world you know already, you must leave the world which you know, and enter the depth, become the clearing. The truth of life's immediate happening is revealed to us in the encounter with god, not in the steady adherence to everyday life - even though humans do exist in the world, and are mostly tied to it. And what is seen? We see that being-in-theworld is the strife of earth and world, the moment of decision, the freedom of thinking, the primordial questioning which we are, the innerness of selfreflection and self-relation, the feeling of powerlessness against fate, yet the so heavy weight of freedom in our thinking, the power of words and 'saying'. This is why Heidegger follows a track outside of the world towards a holy site, even if the discussion is always about the simplest fact of being-here and merely being alive. Along with brute existence there is also a world with which we are deeply familiar, and this world is not something which can be removed to disclose a truer world. On the other hand, to understand it, one must be able to remove oneself from it towards a realization of our semi-divine status as immaterial thought, freedom, the clearing of being itself. Therefore, we see that Contributions does not utterly reject actuality, but only its commonplace, rather soporific mode as 'living actuality'. It thinks about thinking, like a philosophy of philosophy. Specifically, it finds thinking to be more a hearing and saying than a logical systematization, more an enowning than an objective glance, more awareness than mute and passing life-experience. In thinking, we surpass the world, not so that we stand above and beyond

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it, but as thinking-being-itself, the voice of be-ing happening: the highpoint. Thereby Heidegger hoped to account for what we already know of be-ing (the brute fact and the world-laden something, the It), and what is forever hidden from us in its concealment.

Heidegger's Lifelong Task As may already be clear, this book presents Heidegger as a kind of otherworldly thinker; insofar as he thinks in terms which, as far as possible, are removed from common reference, this is clearly the case. But why is this? To begin with, there are a few basic points which I could make to show the way through what I see as Heidegger's area and method in Contributions. This involves a brief critique of Richard Polt's interpretation of Contributions, and then a survey of Heidegger's enterprise in a schematic, simple way. Polt understands Heidegger's term 'Seyn' (be-ing) as something which 'gives' being, and thus beings as a whole. It gives this mere fact of there being anything at all, and also the meaning of these beings. Polt's stress lies on the giving of this act, this event. 'Heidegger's Seyn, I will argue, is best interpreted as the giving of being, that is, as the event in which beings as such and as a whole are enabled to make a difference to us' (Polt, 2006, 28-9). To my mind, Polt's understanding of being is a bit too 'anthropocentric' and metaphysical, since that to which being gives meaning is that sort of person who is interested in the meaning of beings, namely the everyday human being. Be-ing, in his view, therefore, is something which interacts directly with human life today. It is thus that Polt has scruples throughout his book about Heidegger's 'elitism' and exclusivity (particularly in Chapter 4 of his book, which is largely a defence of liberalism and traditional logic; his defence of liberalism is a means of explaining how liberals and Heideggerians can share the same space). Polt's moral feeling, however, does not merely counteract Heidegger's own brand of conservative revolutionary mind-set: it counteracts his whole philosophy; this is because the avoidance of any trace of normal life, of any normal and already perfect 'us', is the very essence of Contributions. The 'us' to whom be-ing gives meaning, according to Polt's account, seems to me to be mere 'subjectivity', a conscious philosophical and metaphysical mastery afraid to give in to be-ing itself, and ignorant of'the last god'; (it is another feature of Polt's book that this god is not really seen in the larger picture). After the rectorate, and seeking a way to 'build ahead' towards the future for his thinking, Heidegger imagined the kind of individuals who would be the ideal 'us' or 'we' (I quote the passage, written in 1937, at length in Chapter 5). While

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composing Contributions, Heidegger sought to 'show exemplary figures [of tradition], in order to occasionally implant a new claim in those essentially rare individuals - somewhere, sometime, and for someone' (Petzet, 1993, xxix). It is a complete error to imagine that such rare individuals have any place in any kind of political situation or any kind of discourse in which T can appeal safely to 'you' in the secure knowledge that you will understand me; yet this is the very basis of the kind of liberalism (or Nazism/ Communism) within which Polt is trying to fit Heidegger's work. As I see Contributions, and the effects of be-ing on 'us', it is intrinsic to Heidegger's message and to the revelation of be-ing, that it does away with the kind of readership to whom Polt addresses himself. The other-worldly appearance and venture of Heidegger's text is due to his attempt to think about being-here; but to do this is to add 'thought' to be-ing; in the confluence of being-here with thought, both of them need to mutually change each other, since it is being-here itself which is doing the thinking, and thought has to go beyond its normal areas of reference in order to get closer to being. Since thought is primarily ours, and is tied to being-here in Heidegger's philosophy, it has qualities in common with us: it 'leaps', it 'struggles', it 'renounces', it 'decides', it clears a 'between' standing outside both earth and world, god or man. Fundamentally, it is subject to the law of freedom. To be able to understand being-here, we need to take up a philosophical and free standpoint; but the standpoint of philosophy is the thinking, intellectual and sovereign one, not the one of being-in-the-world to which 'we' usually belong as students or practical people; therefore, philosophical Da-sein is somehow outside of the world, yet still intensely in be-ing. The most 'Heideggerian' philosophical presentation, Being and Time, traverses the area of being near to god which we have described in the Introduction and Chapter 1. While I have tried to show that Contributions is Heidegger's major work, I do not thereby denigrate Being and Time, which has traditionally been seen as his 'major work', and a work which for the most part follows our everyday proximity and thoughtful/thoughtless relationship to existence in the world. It is most certainly true, however, that while the theme of Being and Time may be the same as that in Contributions and later works, the method and manner of Being and Time was rejected by Heidegger only a few years after its completion, and for the most crude reasons; he saw phenomenology as 'a mere academic affair', such that, while the matter about which it thought - 'life' as we live it in various ways, and particularly the most intense ways - was still his concern, the manner of Being and Time seemed to him to obscure the very simplicity of the theme. From 1919, when he was a relatively young twenty-nine years old, (he would be forty-six by the time he began Contributions}, Heidegger set out his

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major topic in a famous 'War Emergency Seminar'. Theodore Kisiel describes that topic with a series of words; a series is more appropriate than a solid definition since Heidegger changed his names for it, and because its near ineffability produced a kind of inaccuracy for all names. Kisiel writes of it as: 'the primal something, life in and for itself, factic life, the historical I, the situated I, factic life experience, facticity, Da-sein, being' (Kisiel, 1995, 16-17). One can hardly praise Kisiel's work on Being and Time enough, I feel, and in the following brief remarks I make only the most cursory attempt to paraphrase some of his findings about Being and Time's genesis and its meaning. The point about Being and Time in regard to the lifelong topic and task of Heidegger's thinking is that while be-ing, the topic, life, 'the pure' (as H61derlin referred to it) is merely and simply the experience of being alive, and while the task is to describe this in such a way as to show both it and how it can be understood purely and appropriately, the theoretical 'formal' complexity of Being and Time is, on the contrary, astonishing. Heidegger rejected its approach so thoroughly that the author of Being and Time is barely perceptible within the text of Contributions - even while the subject matter is the same. One could witness this transformation, carried out in the 1930s, by starting at the place where Kisiel starts: the account of be-ing in the 1919 lecture series. There, the 'original motive for philosophizing' is 'the "unrest" that resides at the heart of life' (Kisiel, 1995, 17); philosophy 'springs from the ever superabundant and ebullient "happening of Da-sein" itself (ibid.). Heidegger's ultimate scheme, his way of speaking formally of this place, this happening, is as the 'preworldly something (basic moment of life as such)' the 'primal something' (Kisiel, 1995, 21). Heidegger's then famed way of speaking of this event was to call it an Tt' which, towards us, even 'through' us, simply happens: Tt worlds', or, Tt is' (es gibt}. Heidegger's problem from then on is to use the resources of language to explain how this strife and happening which we belong to, this Tt', can be understood; thereby we would be able to explain and know philosophically, phenomenologically, what happens in life. Heidegger developed a means of approach from this reflexive and impersonal (neither subjective nor objective) phrase, Tt worlds'; the It is a factical happening, irrespective of its meaning and order, what it is, or who experiences it; It gives and worlds a world in which we live. There is, also, an explanation for how we live in a normal everyday way, despite the fact that the mystery of existence is so crude and brutally just given to us: along with that brute It, there is the simultaneous happening of a certain intuition for making our way in it, a 'categorial intuition', or, in phenomenological phraseology, 'intentionality' which places us in 'a world'.

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But, in the end, these are mere attempts to give a sense to the fact of It, of our being-here and the immediacy of our life amongst the multifarious beings amongst which we live which are simultaneously the one fact of being-here. From this point in his lifelong efforts, Heidegger was to develop theoretical accounts of the experience of factic life, only to find that his accounts were missing the point, or becoming over-academic, or were locked in metaphysics, or were becoming too abstract. For, the closer to accounting for beings and things as emanating from be-ing and Da-sein Heidegger came, the further he moved away from be-ing itself: 'Life befalls me, anonymously, impersonally. I am of It, I find myself in It willy-nilly, already underway in existence'; to remain close to it in his theory of it, Heidegger often found himself'backtracking' with mystical tones, because 'It is ontologically different from beings' (Kisiel, 1995, 24-5). Being and Time's approach is to find the secret means of understanding being-here which everyday man has, thereby to discover It. This means that 'being' would be disclosed when human being's own subconscious understanding of being could be disclosed. Contributions disavows this and merely posits being-here as related to be-ing for the intense moment of mindfulness, and while we may have an intuitive awareness of how to live in the world, that does not necessarily reveal anything about the It. What we do have is a meditative attunement, a relation to be-ing. Being and Time represents a highly cogent and useful account of the relation between mind or theory, intellect or freedom, and the beings amongst which we live; it also relates these, in turn, to the primal experience, the It. On the other hand, the ineffability of this matter, the variety of experiences to which it gives birth, the varieties of consciousness, and the intensity of some few 'religious' types of nearness to It, seem to have frustrated Heidegger: knowledge of the world is not that of pure be-ing. Beings and life are accounted for in the text, but the immediacy of be-ing, towards which Heidegger was moving - a variety of experience which has been lost in history, perhaps never before thought of by humans in a clear philosophical way - was his supreme task, not this account of beings and normal life which is superficially and often taken to be the point of Being and Time. It seems that Heidegger became frustrated, such that he lost patience with phenomenology, and perhaps even with academic philosophy itself around 1930, because it was obfuscating that self-awareness: Da-sein's self-awareness is immediate, if unusual and rare, but that does not mean that Da-sein has a pre-given acquaintance with or intuition of it. The ineffable be-ing was an experience which had never happened properly, since it had never been thought properly; its never having been thought was a matter of the human race, its past and present: humans living today, in

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the state, Germany, the community, were intrinsically involved in and guilty of forgetting be-ing. It was thus that, slightly disappointed by the efforts of mere philosophy and phenomenology, Heidegger welcomed an intervention in politics in the 1930s, a natural intervention in order to highlight a longstanding absence. It is also just as familiar, though obscurely, to poets and statesmen, as Heidegger showed in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics lectures. It also meant that philosophy alone may not be the place to ground a recognition of the fact of be-ing: his turn to Holderlin and the Greek poets in the 1930s is explained by this. The experience he sought was still that primal experience, the It, which must stand within, yet be hidden and refuse itself to the types of consciousness carried out in normal life; and it must happen in such a way that it gives rise to 'the world', just as Heidegger had it in that 1919 lecture. But was a phenomenological, neo-Kantian explanation of the experience of entering into it by us appropriate? Even in the 1916 book for his Habilitation, Heidegger wants to discuss a kind of life and experience, a way of knowing which stands close to the primal happening, which belonged to the genius or the saint, rather than to the everyday human being; for, while we do not have a pre-given intuition of it, there are states of 'mind', or moods, in which it becomes clearer, and we become something like a truly authentic Da-sein: At the end of this series stand the deeds of the Divine intervention in history in an 'irrational' revelation, like the Word made flesh in the person of Jesus. Such acts of God's grace constitute a 'breakthrough' of absolute values and a unique 'influx into history of the ever fresh and new', in what has since been called a Heilsgeschichte. These more surcharged manifestations of 'irrationality' or 'brute facticity' (Fichte's word for them) thus mark the entry into human history of the unexplainably new, unprecedented, and creative. (Kisiel, 1995, 28) But only the saint, perhaps, could fathom this. Be-ing is something happening continuously; but everyday humans have no access to it, and their philosophy, and the states of mind which it encourages, do not recognize it. When they notice it, humans become transformed into an event which tends to tear up human experience of beings and a life; while it lies hidden it happens as the struggle of human being to form a life: but while it is discovered and acknowledged it tends to explode this complacency and to found human lives anew; while there may have been such moments in religious life in the past, they have never been explicitly articulated or recorded in philosophical literature. This is the kind of nearness and newness in history which Heidegger wants to experience and to explain, for it would explain how be-ing

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happens in and to us even while it explains how such a world is torn up by the act of genius. While this theme is to be found in a convoluted way in Being and Time, this experience is the express and single motive of Contributions. The long progression towards showing it in the earlier work, arriving at the discussion of the moods and attunements 'resoluteness' and 'anxiety' and so on in Being and Time, point to a place where It happens immediately in a confrontation with death. Since this same 'holy' kind of experience was what Heidegger had put forward in an 'academic' way in Being and Time, and is shared by Contributions, where it is simply leapt into, rather than explained gradually, Heidegger depends upon his readers having already seen the hints of this, and followed the route laid out in the earlier work: the later work does not replace the earlier, it makes a more direct route there, in a totally different style and authorial way of existing and speaking. The ultimate aim is to know be-ing; not as a person, but as something like an impersonal force of nature, a genius, saint, or philosopher. Everyday human beings' tacit awareness of'world' is not the same thing. Furthermore, if the philosopher is the one who can gain access to be-ing, surely the philosopher's work must be self-referential. In consequence, the passage through the experiences of a lifetime, the nearness to beings, the account of how humans understand the factical events of history, is a diversion laid out only to be discarded once the 'holy' moment and state has been shown. The normal life of people is discarded, while an intense form of life is revealed as the proper destination. The holy type of life is the appropriate one because it is self-reflective and articulate; it is also simple in the content of its experience: it is based on renunciation. The character of everyday Dasein in Being and Time is 'care' (Section 41, ff.), something similar to the moods and the 'guardianship' of enowned Da-sein; however, we see that it was necessary to go much deeper when we read Contributions. It is thus that, as we will see, 'lived-experience' is not only discarded as a mere diversion in Contributions, but is condemned and despised. Any type of words and sayings, concepts, schemes and systems, which obscure the philosophico-mystical experience are condemned by the intense immediacy of the holy nearness to be-ing by the mind and the hearing-power of humans for the divine. The experience is tremendously rare because humans need a means of thinking what they experience: yet we have had no means, unless helped by the divine. Heidegger, in the works of the 1930s and beyond, leaves his early masters - Lask, Husserl, Rickert, Dilthey - behind, turning instead to the wider horizon of the whole history of thought since Parmenides and Sophocles. That wider perspective recognizes that never before in human history has be-ing been encountered properly, or thought of congruently; to have been experienced it would have

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needed philosophy, but philosophy only emerged with the Greeks, and the Greeks did not think it adequately. Therefore, Heidegger felt himself on the verge of a dramatic climax in the history of human being. Meanwhile, the experiences of everyday life, the experiences which are studied by the human and physical sciences, the experiences reduplicated in arworks and technological media, were to be seen as mere 'errors' drifting over the core experience. Before going on to look at the disparaging experience of normal life which for Heidegger was, as it were, complacent, ancient, and dominated by the insidious and blinding light of technology, we might have a break from this confusing duality (of the difference between the experience of beings in lived-experience and the experience of be-ing itself as the philosopher experiences it) by examining the new sense of urgency with which Heidegger turned to the poetry of Holderlin, and demanded 'Who are we?' The issue is clearly one which involves asking the reader to become one definite type of variety of experience, with a rare account of who we ourselves are. It asks us to become philosophers.

'Who Are We?' This question of 'who we are' is often asked in Contributions and other works of the period. The question is given a long discussion from many angles in section 19 of the book, ending with an insistence that this question is almost the essence of ideological or 'world-view' thinking itself, and is a 'dangerous' question. The Second World War was fought (or would be fought) over the stakes of this question, between those who thought of themselves as Marxists, Nazis, Christians, Europeans, and so on. Heidegger suggests that it cannot be answered without listening to the poet, and following him by recognizing or hearing the proper name and language for ourselves. Naturally, this language is one, for Heidegger, which rests in being: 'Above all the question "who are we?" must remain purely and fully enjoined with the inquiry into the grounding question: How does be-ing hold sway?' (CP, 38; 54). Throughout his work Heidegger was concerned with answering the question, even when not doing so in an obvious way. For example, Being and Time seems to be an anthropological description of what humans are; on the other hand, by the time of the rectoral address (SA), it became clear that Heidegger, while using the same scheme of reference as in Being and Time, was most interested in a science which could account for us in our existence. The issue at stake in the rectoral address

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and the early master-work is that if we are to experience the primal something of the brute fact of being-here, then we, as humans, will have to refashion our account of ourselves. Who 'we' are is a matter of dispute; it is a matter of choice or, at best, an account which cannot be backed up by facts of a simple kind. The most plausible way of telling who each person is is by letting them tell of their life, of their name, and their origins; Heidegger, on the other hand, does not find this to be essential enough. We are grounded in be-ing, the unity. Therefore, we find Heidegger describing who we are, humans, as those who exist in such a unity, that is, in a human community; the city or polls is our be-ing and our ground. We find Heidegger in the 1933 rectoral work, and in lectures of the year 1934, as well as in the Holderlin lectures of 1934—35, insisting that human beings are essentially real because of their social living in large communities: be-ing is the city. This notion means that, for humans, for us, the whole totality of the hidden and the revealed is that set of beings in the whole amongst which we live and exist as political and communal beings; this whole set is the polls. As humans we are always amongst beings: namely, the facts of a life, the issues, created things, inherited institutions. It is with such a notion of who we are that Heidegger contrasts the normal subjective and objective view of who and what each of us is. The site in which we exist, the immediate place in which we find ourselves and in which we reach out to ourselves to discover ourselves is thepolis. This is how it is for humans. But 'who we are' is not necessarily a matter of being human. We, for example, have always a greater or lesser proximity to god, and have, sometimes in a non-human life, a closeness to nature; similarly, there are animal, unconscious or irrational elements to our existence. In essential terms, there is a yet deeper understanding of who a person is: principally, the deeper implication of man's existence-as-the-city is that authentic man is the founder of the city. To have founded or changed and given a history to the city is something which must have its basis outside the city itself. This is what certain types or momentary abilities of a human self can achieve. The poet is specifically able to tell us who we are in this respect because, for Heidegger, the poet is such a founder: to name or found a city and its being would require somebody to reach its deeper ground. But we now understand poetry as a founding - through the naming of gods and of the essence of things. 'To dwell poetically' means to stand in the presence of the gods and to be struck by the essential nearness of things. Existence is 'poetic' in its ground - which means, at the same time, as founded (grounded), it is not something earned, but is rather a gift. (EHP, 60)

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It is in this way that, for humans, whose being is thepolis, be-ing seems to be that ability to found the city and to discover its beings by naming them; founding therefore seems to be the gift of be-ing, a mysterious donating power, which would imply that 'we' are partially founded in be-ing as bearers of a gift. There is, however, yet one level deeper to which we can descend to find the ground, and to approach a language able to express who we are. Heidegger's Contributions is not addressed at humans merely; it is a theory and an address aimed at persons such as Holderlin: he conceived a kind of life in which a person could be near to the ground, and above thepolis. Contributions speaks to the founders, and seems to ask each of us to become such founders. The founder is the one who approaches the unity of be-ing, is endangered, tragic perhaps, and then returns, with the power to intervene beneficently in human living. Heidegger witnesses such enownments, such instantaneous moments of being gripped by be-ing itself in certain statesmen, thinkers, or poets. With such a role, the poet is neither human, nor god: he is between them. It is in this respect that the answer to the question 'who are we?' can be answered as follows: we are not the rational or political animal, but we, the few and rare ones, are different from the normal human being, and are grounders of be-ing, utterly appropriated by it. Heidegger's question of the Holderlin course, addressed to his lecture audiences at Freiburg, seems, therefore, to have a double sense: first who are we, we humans; and second, who are we, the elect, the few who are permitted, perhaps to hear the voice of be-ing. In both Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) and the other works from this period leading to Contributions, Heidegger gradually removes his hopes from the University, the State, the Nazis, and settles his gaze on a few unknown individuals whose existence and belonging to tradition would gradually achieve what politicians and historical activities could not. His book is not, therefore, an appeal to every man or woman, but to the few who can be the founders. But does not this imply that, essentially, there is a secret and deeper life in each human being, but one which is fated and destined only to be heard and announced by a few? Heidegger reaches out to a point in human life at which it becomes semi-divine, the life of the demi-god. It is clear that, until the 1942 Ister lectures on Holderlin (Heidegger, 1996), this exclusivity and the sense of being chosen, like a saint, above other humans, was what Heidegger felt was special about Holderlin. One wonders, however, as Heidegger does not seem to, whether this is not a delusion, or a presumption; after all, this is apparently an elitist position, or a defeatist one, implying perhaps that only those with the time and energy, or the money, could belong to the few. Heidegger himself had benefited from such

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an organized division of labour and wealth afforded to him personally by the Catholic Church. In his work, the 'we' to whom he addresses himself are those philosophers who have similarly benefited from being thrown from everyday life; Heidegger could afford to reject everyday life wholesale for an existence which went closer and closer to the life of gods. What prohibited his march onward through the forests of be-ing towards god and to becoming a demi-god, it seems to me, was only the fear of the madness which fell on others who went that way, and, more likely, the great difficulty of achieving the path. The grounder of be-ing, the one who can found human life, faces the tragic existence of being close to gods and the very ground of day and night, the primal unity of all beings in which all beings are one, and gods and humans were originally one. Heidegger therefore rejects the normal life, and the question of the meaning of beings as a whole, in order to enter be-ing itself in its immediate event of catching hold of a person, dissolving him, such that the person simply becomes the primal moment in which existence happens, and more precisely, the moment in which it can be heard to speak and think through/about us. Being is the primordial unity and god takes us to it again, in beauty and signs, thus stripping our human life away. Heidegger cites Holderlin with approval: 'The world lies before me, brighter and more serious than before! I am pleased with what happens, I am pleased as when in the summer "the old holy father with calm hand shakes the holy lightning flashes out of the red clouds". For among all that I can see of God, this sign has become my chosen one. I used to be able to rejoice over a new truth, a better view of what is above us and around us, but now I fear that I shall end like old Tantalus, who received more from the gods than he could digest.' (EHP, 61) The poet and the philosopher have therefore gone beyond beings (or, at least, only see certain beings as signs), to the nearness of god, the primal unity of man and god, and, in other words, what is between them; they do this so as to be able to think and 'sing' the event of being-here. This sacrifice of everyday life is not gratuitous, but moves towards the place in which that precise being-in-the-world can be thought. The philosopher stands where the poet stands: just as Holderlin poetizes the act of the poet, so Heidegger thinks the act of the philosopher. 'The poet himself stands between the former - the gods - and the latter - the people. He is the one who has been cast out - out into that between, between the gods and men. But first and only in this between is it decided who man is and where his existence is

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settled' (EHP, 64). The poet stands in the between and acts on behalf of the people and gods to give the name to be-ing; the philosopher, on the other hand, stands in this between in order to think it through, to remain there, neither working for god or man, he 'thinks through to the ground and centre of being' (EHP, 64). Put simply, that is, metaphysically, the philosopher and the poet hold 'firm to the Nothingness of this night', rather than to the beings in which humans live. Now we see whom the 'we' belongs to, that is, to those who are invited to follow Heidegger, and become the grounders of the future type of human being by thinking of it. But it is important to recall that what they think of or poetize is simply and always our mere being-here, our being-alive, this so concrete and familiar, so undivine be-ing.

Echo of Invisible Un-thought Be-ing The chapter of Contributions which most starkly demonstrates this kind of venture beyond beings only to find their basis, going beyond the world so as to think of its very being-here, is 'Echo'. This chapter shows that we must rise above the world towards god if we are to achieve a thought proper to being-here, and it displays the way in which this is to be thought of from out of that nearness to god; such a position is one which finds the moment of being-here transparent to itself. It is a moment and place where thought not only thinks about be-ing, but is almost the voice of be-ing itself. One could consider the notion that be-ing has a voice strange and arbitrary, but in fact it points to the fact that the human voice is not what we thought it was: the human voice is not the model for be-ing's call; rather, be-ing's call is the heart of that voice. This strategy directly replaces the Da-seinanalytic of Being and Time. Being-here is capable of being-thought from there in a better way than the study of Da-sein in a factic location by means of formal indication. The guiding-attunement of echo is the shock of disclosing be-ing's abandonment and at the same time the deep awe before the resonating enowning. Shock and deep awe together first let the echo be enacted in thinking.

(CP, 277; 396) As this quite beautiful translation shows, Heidegger finds in a certain attunement, a certain type of being-beyond the world, a speechlessness, an echoing emptiness where the echo reverberates: the echo sounds out where being-here should be. The attunement is therefore a mood of perpetual shock and awe; we could say that the sense of awe and shock which we

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have, unaccountably, about the point of our being-alive is due not to any explicit cause, but due to 'be-ing's abandonment' and our speechlessness about it: that is 'shock'. One can still be attuned to be-ing even in its abandonment, Heidegger says, since enownment, the way be-ing appropriates our being-here, can occur as abandonment and hiddenness. Now, if attunement carries on between being-here and be-ing, and we humans can ascend to the kind of consciousness which is purely of being-here, then our thoughtful-consciousness will recognize that it is in fact itself be-ing's consciousness. Speaking from be-ing is also to 'be' it, and to take up a place where enownment is recognized as what we are - even if that means taking the place up in obedience to technology and the present-day brand of revelation of beings. It should therefore be possible to take up the place within be-ing, as self-concealing revealing and abyss, such that this place is spoken and thought by philosophy. It would be the truth of the ground, and of the event of being-here in conscious articulation. The 'Echo'joining offers one side of that unified but suspended event of our self-recognition. It begins: Echo of the essential swaying of be-ing out of the abandonment of being through the distressing distress of the forgottenness of be-ing. The joining begins like this, with a set of phrases explaining the meaning of the 'Echo' (or 'Intuiting') which is heard in the mood which is demanded of the reader of the book. The notion on which it is written is that our life as humanity is ignorant of its own basis, having followed a history in which human consciousness, will to power (Nietzsche) and representation (Descartes) explain and ground reality, and ignore being-here. This is the nihilism in which nothing is happening with be-ing itself.3 In the meantime, in hiding, be-ing sways through this life of ours; it is be-ing to which this life Da-sein - must relate itself. But in the age of the history of be-ing in which we stand, the age of nihilism, be-ing is only an echo, an 'after-shock' or thud as it leaves and distresses man who is awe-struck and distressingly searches for it. The problem of'life' happening to us, constantly, but in varying manners, degrees, states of lucidity, and as a history traversing nothingness, just never has been raised properly, either in the shape of the immediacy of human being, or in Da-sein's relationship to be-ing, hence 'be-ing' spelt in this way (Seyn) is the whole collective issue of the problem of philosophy which, Heidegger thought, had been awaiting its prophet. We have 'abandoned' the event of life by turning away from it and merely getting on with

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our infatuation and necessary involvement with things. It, in return, has abandoned us, since due to the internal sort of relationship which we have to life, actions on our side are mirrored by that which is both part of us, and greater than us: be-ing itself. 'Bringing this forgottenness forth through a remembering as forgottenness in its hidden power - wherein the echo of be-ing resounds. Recognizing the distress' (CP, 75; 107). The attunement of distress is to be set alongside the others so far mentioned: awe and shock. Be-ing has been 'abandoned', but also forgotten. This does not mean that life as a mere philosophical puzzle has lost any sense, and certainly not that it has been left aside, like a pack of cigarettes. It means that the happening of life in the self, in us, is neglected, thereby the happening of the world, and our thinking and interaction with it, is set loose into ruin too. Not taking notice of its workings is the fault beyond all faults: life is out of joint with itself, and recognition of this fact involves a natural and essential distress. This condition is known as nihilism by Heidegger, summed up in and as Nietzsche's positive, classical, self-conscious nihilism (see, NIV, 4ff.). More than a mental fault, this abandonment will require a full and whole turn of the self around, not just a correction of our ideas. We noticed that the turn would be more than philosophical in the presentday sense of that discipline; it would be philosophy in a robust sense, philosophy as the guardian of life, as a properizing of be-ing. 'Can such a distressing befall us (whom?) again? Would it not have to aim at a total transformation of man? Would it dare to be less than what is inevitably most estranging?' (CP, 79; 113). 'How is this to be experienced? What is this abandonment? It is itself arisen from what is precisely not ownmost to be-ing, out of machination. From where does this come? Not from the notcharacter of be-ing! On the contrary!' (CP, 75; 107). The problems of expressing the relation between our awareness and our being-here always arise from the fact that we are already disclosed, and life is already, intimately, within us. We are already potentially, from of old, Da-sein. In a sense, this philosophy is dealing with the intimate and deep history of subjects, the T and the 'you' and 'us'. The fact is, philosophy and living show that we do in fact ignore it. We can not make a subjective choice with desire or will, however, for life is not ours to make of what we will: rather, our constitution as subjects prohibits any turn inwards. The name for this prohibition has been called 'machination': it involves science, culture and mathematics as the model for the true and objective perspectives on life. Machination is a kind of life: it is not an activity amongst others, and is not 'from the not-character of be-ing'. The very surfeit and abundance of beings and the overwhelming power of be-ing has, sort of, blinded us to what is actually going on with be-ing. The absence is not because be-ing is not, but

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because be-ing shows itself to us as manipulable beings as a surfeit and excess of things, and we take our ability to interact with beings in this way as the standard approach to thinking about existence in general. This means, paradoxically, that to once again intuit be-ing, we have to remove ourselves from its effects. It, as lived-experience, is too near to us even as it gives so much. Indeed, recognizing the way in which be-ing is apparently in absence, and retreats from us, a status which propels its history, and which it projects, is a step towards recognizing be-ing. What does machination mean? Machination and constant presence: poiesis - techne. Where does machination lead? To lived-experience. How does this happen? By disenchanting beings, as it makes room for the power of an enchantment that is enacted by the disenchanting itself. Enchantment and lived-experience. [Translation modified] (CP, 75; 107) Be-ing sways as abandoning and as giving 'lived-experience' and machination; there is too much of it - and thus it functions as an apparent absence. Machination is based on the kind of life which is 'constantly present': therefore, life as an event based ultimately on Da-sein's relation to be-ing becomes a matter of'matter', 'substance' and 'movement', 'objects', the T and sense-certainty; more fundamentally, this position disenchants the mystery of life's occurrence, thus putting an end to questioning, and any respect for our ground while making beings enchanting. We seek the enchantment of unusual situations, stimuli, new experiences, representations of a staid reality in fantastic shapes in films, machines, information, sensual gratification, resort holidays, and so on. Life is constituted as these constantly present features called 'reality', our contemporary life experience and world, which is made magical to us by the 'new': these are the media of machination. It leads to 'lived-experience', that is, not a meditation on the fact that there is life/being, but that there is a continually present lived-experience out there and in here for us. These are the very objects of interest for modern (analytic) philosophy. A strange fixation with beings and events takes place: beings, which are revealed by us from out of be-ing, are turned into mere 'things', experienced objects, and resources, ideas; they are then disenchanted, and the link to be-ing is lost in them. Science, for example, seeks 'new findings', always, meanwhile, obliterating and atomizing beings down to intelligible and schematic non-objects. Experiencing our time in life becomes very enchanting: at the expense of life/be-ing itself. The definitive consolidation of the abandonment of being in the forgottenness of being.

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The epoch of the total lack of questioning and of aversion to any setting of goals. Averageness as rank. Echo of refusal - in which resonance? (CP, 75; 107) So concludes the dense first section of the 'Echo'joining, with phrases which not only recall Nietzsche, but show that this book is written in the philosophical era of Nietzsche, finding in his terms the account of what be-ing is doing. In the last Nietzsche lectures of 1940, Heidegger read in Nietzsche of the 'aversion to any setting of goals'; the meaning of this is summed up by Nietzsche as 'God is dead', which means that we have become aware of what was already the case centuries before (NIV, 4), or, in Nietzsche's terms, that the devaluation of values is nihilism, and that values, as the primal constituents of life/be-ing, were always inadequate to their task; Heidegger further interpreted this stress on ideal values to be due to the 'refusal' of be-ing to communicate with human life. By the term 'values', Nietzsche meant 'direction' in life, the search for a higher truth. Such direction has been lost. But, as Heidegger sees it, to reaffirm values will not lead to the truth, nor bring about the distress which it deserves. Always, while we are set loose, rootless amongst beings, free to examine and understand ourselves as will to power, be-ing is absent from us in every obvious way. So, for those few ones such as Heidegger who seek it and intuit it, it arises only as an after-shock, a resounding groundlessness in ourselves, and an amazement that there is no ground to speak of even while it operates and 'reverberates' in us. The fact that there is life might be an empty and pointless question, as Hegel says of Sein at the beginning of his Science of Logic, or it may be a 'vapour' (IM, 38; NIV, 182), as Nietzsche says, in a remark often quoted by Heidegger; it is the most basic thing. Nevertheless, Heidegger sees in it a great future, and the point at which, when recognized, human history will become be-ing's history, whose origin as a history is coming. In metaphysics he sees only a total lack of questioning about life, and the effects of this ignorance everywhere. The effects were not so bad in times past, because the old history was still in action, still developing; but, since Nietzsche's statements and analysis a rot has set in which might last for centuries, even millennia; it will see the symptoms we see in Nazism and capitalist society, as well as the worst excesses of the scientific deployment of societies and races as mere tools in the game of power: averageness, massiveness, no goal-setting, total lack of interest in life itself, consumerism, the seeking of pleasures and experiences in life, a 'return to nature' where it is realized that man is a mere animal, only differentiated by his use of reason: in all, an experience of Nietzsche's visions which are taken as being quite natural, and where

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Nietzsche's thought is the guide for all thinking. In nihilism, life is based entirely around human capabilities and human perspectives in a representational, 'perceptual' and scientific positivistic format, where these positive given states of life which we lead are meaningful only with the goal of attaining power. Everywhere people talk of worthwhile aims, values, rights and comparable goals or duties, but being will never find itself amongst this list of values. Heidegger lists factors of modern living which are signs of this disease: a general culture of that which is 'valuable' and 'ideal'; an immovable attachment to 'the world' and the role of philosophy to give that world an ideological total-explanation; an aversion to stillness; and many other related symptoms (see CP, 82~3; 116-19). The more general qualities of the current interpretation of life are listed again: calculation, acceleration and 'the outbreak of massiveness'; then, the 'divesting, publicizing, and vulgarizing of all attunement'; related to this, a universal 'insipid "sentimentality" ' (CP, 84-6; 120-4); science is but one more symptom of this, a symptom analysed over several pages (CP, 98-115; 141-66): its in-vogue status is a symptom of a far greater nihilism and machination, which, in turn, are symptoms of the split within 'man' between his being alive and his consciousness of this fact in his thinking. This split between what we are and what we think we are is, finally, due to our distance from god and our simultaneous and correlative distance from be-ing. One sees how distant this listening to the echo is from the experience of life as 'lived-experience', or the life of'everydayness', by seeing it as the echo of god, as well as the echo of be-ing. When we feel the distress of our lack of attunement and ground, we start to approach a mood of holiness or godhood and shocking distress: 'the utmost distress, the lack of distress in this distress, breaks open and lets the remotest nearness to the flight of the gods echo' (CP, 79; 113).

Distress Machination and lived-experience, in the hollowness of their nihilism, sound out with what is unsayable/unthinkable as an echo. This should be felt as a distressing inability to get close to ourselves in any way; but so far removed from that, instead, there is a distressing lack of distress, a needful lack of need, which hardens our life amongst beings and 'the real world'. Our 'life' has become a curtain drawn over what we are; if there were an analysis of contemporary Da-sein, it would reveal that human being is distressingly lacking in distress; what would be required is a careful retreat

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to examine our very being-here, or a leap beyond this situation in line with the leap which be-ing is and sways as. Be-ing abandons because of machination. Machination arises from be-ing, it takes from beings their enchantment and turns Da-sein into lived-experience. One can see the interpretation of life, on the basis of its essence as subjectivity and metaphysics, as a great chamber, a scheme, which echoes with something else. In the horror of technology and machination Heidegger hears it; it also echoes in our experience, the way we see things (which is precisely not interested in the lack of interest in be-ing which characterizes modern philosophy). Our epoch of the total lack of questioning is that in which everything is at hand and our answers are given to us without distressing search, everything can be made, all real true things can be re-presented; the distressing lack which we feel when reading the Greeks, or wondering about how or why life happens to us, is not even felt as a distress, and the most questionworthy is rendered 'harmless' (CP, 76; 109). Even when there is the intimation of the shocking absence, it is machination's way to make this shock public, and to mediate for it, turning the echo into our technological advances, our interest in natural things, our media-productions, world wars, and advances in science. The absence of any point, any firm location, our being 'uprooted', in fact, impels our 'progress' and decline into worse situations, while the earth dies, and man becomes pointless, and godless. An epoch of simple solitude can alone withstand this riot of machination. The future is 'the simplicity of solitude' (CP, 77; 110). Medieval Christianity had its part to play in this.4 From beings as created, ens creatum, the logical form of their essence developed naturally into a metaphysical system, with 'logical form' as beingness or categoriality (CP, 77; 111). Form shelters itself in beings, and is hidden in appearing, and is imagined to be found therein so that we can find it as beingness. In previous moments of the history of being, man still dwelt among beings, real things, which, harboring their strange appearance out of nowhere and groundlessness, were welcomed as reflections of our need and distress. Beings shelter and contain be-ing, so, in contact with them, we are in contact with our home, the great unique simple happening of being-here. Perhaps Heidegger felt that while the Christian religion had a hold on people, and put machination at arms length, there was still a redemptive holiness and inwardness in people, even if it was theologically and not philosophically spelt out. But the distress is no longer felt. Humanity is in distress at the lack of history/life/truth - and yet feels nothing at all; it feels neither sin, scepticism about life's origins, an impersonal reason to pursue grace and happiness, nor a restraint to its ambitions and horizons, nor yet a

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respect for beings as the signs of something greater. Will beings be regrounded in be-ing when their origin in Da-sein is rediscovered and after the leap into fathomless Da-sein?

Experience In section 56 of Contributions, Heidegger embarks on a lengthy history of beings and the disappearance of be-ing; it has sixteen stages, beginning with a survey of the ambiguity of machinational thinking, which cannot cope with or see the unique; then the loss of the thing-ness of things; art becomes a mere cultural commodity and necessity of life; the required intuition of absence and nothing is impossible; anguish before nothing becomes the rule, which causes a flight further into the superficial and the real; again, peacefulness, which is necessary in order to recover the ground, peace in the self, is a merely 'useless' capacity in this age; there is no patience, and a hardening against sensitivity, and the hardened faith in reality; finally, the Christian God, who could have lent us towards innerness, is dead, and the gods have flown, even while findings about 'man' increase indefinitely. Will memory call us back, as it could call the Platonist back to life and the idea? Or is this world-desertification and lack of sight for the problem due to continue indefinitely, especially since the old, and recent philosophies cannot help? 67. Machination and Lived-Experience

Machination is the domination of making and what is made. But in this regard one is not to think of human dealings and operating but rather the other way around; such [human activity] is only possible, in its unconditionally and exclusivity, on the basis of machination. This names a certain truth of beings (their beingness). Initially and for the most part this beingness is comprehensible for us as objectness (beings as objects of representing). But machination grasps this beingness in a deeper way, more inceptually, because machination relates to TS%VT|. At the same time machination contains the Christian-biblical interpretation of beings as ens creatum - regardless of whether this is taken in a religious or a secular way. (CP, 92; 131-2) But because we unconsciously suffer the abandonment of be-ing, an abandonment like that of a pair of lovers who are apart yet still affected by each other, there is hope that we will see clearly, more clearly than hitherto, that the ground within ourselves and in being-here is lacking and thus will realize the abandonment. We suffer from the abandonment in the sense that all of

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human history is now heading toward godlessness, machination, exploitation of the earth and universe, and the transformation of man into something sub-human; maybe we will start to recognize our distress in an essential way, as the distress 'of be-ing. It is a time of danger, the age of massiveness; but the moment of the greatest danger offers the shortest way, and demands the greatest risk and exigency, putting forth some thinkers and people into a keen sense of what be-ing is about and doing: for example, it will make us wonder where technology originates, or it will arouse us to the necessity of a god's arrival: 'The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become' (Heidegger, 1977, 35). In this age, where in its deepest, most philosophical element, life is equivalent to value for conscious subjectivity, and the valuable is the real, be-ing, lacking value, may be never decided upon. It is an age of events, somehow dominated by a lack of questioning: 'truth is long since no longer a question' (CP, 87; 125). Rather than question and be at peace in that which it is, the modern self becomes sentimental about Nature, interested in experience, and amazed by the diversity and wonderfulness of beings: but it does not question where and how these came about as beings, a question still ripening, and almost ineffable in its foreignness to our language and style of thinking. The very greatness of the problem indicates the history which awaits it, and the intense simplicity and originality of the theme indicate that it has the power to overturn all previous thinking.

Science As has already been mentioned a few times, Heidegger considers the 'actual' world to be orderly and amenable to various sciences not because be-ing submits itself to scientific scrutiny with its real face, but because fundamentally our approach to be-ing is to master and to be amazed by the beings which it projects-out. Technology is contemporaneous with the natural sciences; the essence of machination is the power to order beings, to put them at our disposal, to enframe them with an ideal and rootless account of what they are, to place humans in such a proximity to them that technology can reign or sway. 'Science' is an activity and thinking derived from the machinational essence of beings, but not integral to the truth of be-ing itself. As knowledge of challenged-forth ordered beings, it does not receive any great treatment by Heidegger. Suffice it to say that in the 1933 'Address' Heidegger made an affirmation of the University's potential to go beyond the various discrete sciences and technology: it had to affirm itself against

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the labour and military services, which were putting humanity at the service of technology. Total-mobilization has no goal: it just treats beings as objects to mobilize into some sort of labour or war. It becomes clearer how little essential truth science holds about being-here when it is pointed out that the same set of objects is the basis for history, geography and anthropology as it is for physics, chemistry and the other 'exact' sciences. No matter how exact a science is, the beings it deals with, and the subjectivity which deals with them, are givens, whose essential basic features cannot be found: 'beings as a region lie in advancefor science, they constitute apositum, and every science is in itself a"positive"science (includingmathematics)' (CP, 101; 145). Ifbe-ingsways and has a history, then science and its truths would be only temporarily true. It is this 'happening' which underlies all discrete physical and human sciences, and so they will have to change and go under when and if the world of reality goes under. The hearing of the echo and the mood of distress are attunements which are intended to be aware of be-ing's default and disappearance. They are philosophical states of intuiting and knowing about be-ing which go beyond reality and the technology and science which are mutually supportive. With distress and the hearing of the echo, Heidegger steps beyond beings. We see that Heidegger's accounts of'attunements' in certain states of renunciation replace his earlier phenomenological account of Da-sein's categoriality and the Da-sein-analytic. Being attuned, Da-sein is ready to understand its own being, just as in Being and Time the hermeneutics and the formal indication was indicative of Da-sein's categorial existential selfunderstanding. An attunement is a state of self-recognition by the philosopher, and it is thus that these semi-mystical states are fitting in a work of philosophy. The attunements are not merely stillness: they are states of thinking.

Chapter 3

Sayings and Contributions to Be-ing

Thinking Nothing Western metaphysics has dealt only with beings. So when we search for terms to describe that thing to which we are attuned (in a shocked, distressed way) when meditating on the fact of existence, the word 'nothingness' is an appropriate word for it; this same nothing is what Heidegger calls 'refusal': be-ing as refusal, and 'nothing', are the same. This nothing is what is usually called boredom, or normal life, and the lack which is so evident within it. Be-ing is nothing, and if it is recognized it will be found to be 'absence' or 'refusal'. Man is not refused by be-ing as if it were something which should be his if he had more powerful means; rather, he is permitted to exist because he is denied access to be-ing, and because he resides on an abyssal, hollow life of superficiality, and so this absence is part of his existence. This clearing will never be filled up by the plenitude of full-existence because the clearing only exists due to negativity: human being-here is an opening in and as which the fact of life happens. Its purpose is to be an empty space in which be-ing gives things and withholds itself. Nothingness is integral to be-ing. In an account of his 1929 lecture, 'What is Metaphysics?', Heidegger says: 'By contrast, this lecture thinks the nihilating 'nothing' as what arises from the swaying of be-ing as refusal (from enownment unto sheltering-concealing). Negation arises only from out of refusal' (M, 334). Giving beings and our being-here, be-ing itself is hidden; how could the thought of being-here stand outside of that being-there and intellectually grasp its own basis? This is where gods and humans come into their own, however, for humans, as we know, do stand outside of human beings when they conflict with gods. In the meeting of god and man a thought and a mood come about which can think through both being-here and this 'nothing' as something which, while not being 'physical' or 'substantial', still has 'sway'. What this means is that in the experience of nothing which one may have when one renounces attachment to the world, the experience in which attachment to beings passes for us, is a condition of being 'almost dead', one becomes the clearing itself and knows

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that one is the clearing of being. One would expect be-ing to arise and appear: but it does not. What is this life? It is a pure given, obvious to all, so empty that it is hardly worth thinking about. Da-sein is the opening onto life, it is the projection of a world, but it is not used to turning back onto itself and seeing itself seeing. Heidegger explains it by a relation to itself, or, the relation of life itself (Seyn) to this-life (Da-sein), through human language in which the language is a 'shelter' of be-ing. The relation is appropriation (Ereignis) and is attended by a god when it is thought of. 'Enowning is the between with regard to the passing of god and the history of man' (CP, 20; 27); that is, when man feels and meets god over his history, he is also attuned to be-ing and becomes Da-sein in a conscious way. As the there/here, and 'between', be-ing, qua the event of the ground happening in us, is the confluence of man and god in a transformed thoughtful human self-relation. Be-ing itself, in its link to Da-sein, changes in that relationship: it becomes a history of hiding itself in darkness and revealing in the clearness of light. Various types of thinking are revealed in this history of be-ing, various sequential philosophical stances and types of philosophy in something like a teleological series. But from the first instance of such a nearing of god, a new history, a hitherto hidden and still obscure history of be-ing begins. There are moments of the history of life and be-ing; life reveals beings such as sky and sea and man in a close relationship with philosophies: in its Greek origins, philosophy and the thought of being originates with the pre-Socratics, reaches a height of powerful light upon beings in the Medieval philosophy of scholasticism and Christianity (basically, this height is the philosophy of Aristotle), and declines into scepticism about those beings with Descartes and Nietzsche. Finally, ours is the age in which beings and be-ing are equally uninteresting. Even as we forget be-ing, it holds sway and gives an essential shape to our life because it is our life, whether as technology or as the holy leap into an invisible ground. Because we interpret life as based merely and solely on subjectivity, as Kant does, and as Hegel does - as something conditioned by human knowledge, just so, it in turn is an event solely throwing back at us this human-centred emptiness. As a 'cure' for this, Heidegger asks that we begin to think of be-ing as a process of history which will unfold itself in moments of the clearing happening of be-ing: Be-ing-historical thinking - out of its necessity for interpreting ahead can be made question-worthy in four ways: 1. 2.

Within the perspective of gods. Within the perspective of man.

Sayings and Contributions to Be-ing

3. 4.

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In looking back at the history of metaphysics. As thinking 'of be-ing [Seyn]. (CP, 308; 437)

Where thinking of and from the history of be-ing is in question, it can be objectively studied in these four ways. The place of this thinking, its 'mind', as it were, is in enownment. This 'language act' is the act not of humans, but of Da-sein. This is the transformation to be achieved; it is a sovereign state of the 'between'; it is the openness of life, the opening, neither god nor man, nor the world or nature (earth); it is not a thing, but a happening: between god and man. 'Da-sein means en-ownment in enowning as in the essential sway of be-ing. But be-ing comes to truth only on the ground of Da-sein' (CP, 207; 293). Be-ing only happens in Da-sein; this statement is a matter of philosophy and thinking, and given this task, something greater than human power is needed: The territory that comes to be through and as the way of enthinking of be-ing is the between that en-owns Da-sein to god; and in this enownment man and god first become 'recognizable' to each other, belonging to the guardianship and needfulness of be-ing. (CP, 60; 86-7) So what is seen and thought about be-ing from that philosophical vantage, that attunement which has been encouraged, trained, 'prayed' for? Exactly 'nothing' beyond the beings and the hints of god. Maybe, in this region, that of be-ing as opposed to being-here, the immediacy of life and its clarity for philosophy is a mere matter of thoughts. But then, what is thinking? Thinking of this intense kind is 'enowning', and the very issue of his 'contributions': Heidegger puts the highest emphasis on thinking and the role of philosophy; it decides everything essential, it puts us in touch with a voice older than God's, and a ground for a true life. God is the 'enquivering' vibration of the turning motion between be-ing itself and the opening of this be-ing (Da-sein). As counter-turning enowning 'is' thus the highest mastery over the coming-toward and the flight of the gods who have been. The utmost god needs be-ing. The call is befalling and staying-away in the mystery of enownment. The hints of the last gods are at play in the turning as onset and stayingaway of the arrival and flight of gods and their places of mastery. The law of the last god is hinted at in these hints, the law of the great individuation in Da-sein, of the aloneness of the sacrifice, of the uniqueness of choosing the shortest and steepest pathway. (CP, 287; 408)

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There is not a great deal to be-ing as Contributions encounters it; the language and the path far outweigh the content and the destination of the journey. But then this work is a work of transition to a future where things may be different. However, it seems, on a reading of Contributions, that what holds the parts of be-ing together, and what holds the book together as its point, is thought itself. And this enowned special and essential thinking is realized in the nearness of god, acted out by man, who is then transformed into Da-sein, relates Da-sein to be-ing, and with its clarity, permits one to discern and name beings. But this is perhaps only to be expected in a work of philosophy. One does not have the 'key to Heidegger' if we recognize the importance of thinking as the joining factor. The issue of his philosophy is that the earth, beings, be-ing, Da-sein, human being, nothingness, god, and so on, are by and large resistant to thought to begin with. With such a 'key' we face a yet deeper matter: one cannot think in a Heideggerian way until one has become Da-sein, yet one cannot become Da-sein until one can learn to think in an enowned way. This circle is that same hermeneutic circle which is the chief resource of Being and Time, as well as of Contributions.

Two Beginnings The chief question of philosophy has always been 'what is a being?'; it thus pursues beings as the guide for a thinking about being in general. This traditional 'chief question' of Western philosophy we call the guiding question. But it is only the penultimate question. The ultimate, i.e., first question is: what is being itself? This question, the one which above all is to be unfolded and grounded, we call the grounding question of philosophy . . . The grounding question remains as foreign to Nietzsche as it does to the history of thought prior to him. (NI, 67) To understand the radical inventiveness and 'strangeness' of these terms and themes of the two types of questioning and thinking, we must see how the notion of studying life with the aid of a god and a firm attentiveness to life happening is part of a new history which must begin in philosophy. What is history? It is a process which has a narrative or conscious accompaniment by those involved in the process. The process of the 'history of being' is the involvement of man in be-ing; the process leads from a beginning through stages; the stages are man's gradual recognition of who he is, and philosophy is the conscious, questioning-thinking accompaniment. The events of this being-history are events such as the nearing of god, hearing the echo of

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be-ing, performing the leap, the birth of the ones to come: all of these themes, however, are only the first steps and intuitions of a new history. The basic point of Heidegger's predication of a history of be-ing is that there will come an other history, a simultaneous and hitherto hidden history which is totally absent, say, the more conventional philosophical histories of philosophy of Bertrand Russell, or Hegel. Within the long history of Western thinking from the Ancient Greeks to the modern era, Heidegger sees humans and philosophers as turning with be-ing; gradually, thinking and living become more familiar with the strong core of what history was from the start, but confirmed, hardened, pared down, and almost turning back on itself: a history founded on beings now finds itself destroying them, devastating the planet, manipulating beings, configuring them as power. A history, in short, which ends with the hidden concealed being of beings asserting itself as order and power, and 'enframing' beings. The basic malaise of 'enframing' and the technology which it gives rise to is that it is always ignorant of the fact that beings are seated in, and are always transcending above and away from, be-ing. Heidegger intuits the possibility of another sort of thinking, another life. The theme of the other beginning of the history of life is not only outlined in Contributions, but also in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), the Basic Questions lecture (1937-38) and also the Nietzsche lectures (1936-40), so it is not an isolated and experimental element of Heidegger's thought. The current history of philosophy is a history of variations on a theme, the theme of an experience of be-ing which was ignored; thinking and philosophy sought to master and collect the beings which appear within life by making them ideal, and then gather them into a complete self-consciousness, an 'Absolute Knowing, or by describing beings as actuality. But, always, the ground of this very history was turned from. The mystery of happening, the mystery of being-here, was seen and expressed in pre-Socratic philosophy, but not so clearly that Plato could learn from and follow its words. Instead, a vision of a true existence was formed on the basis of beings as guide and truth as something like 'value'. It awaits a new inceptive vision to inaugurate its other, the 'other beginning' which is being hinted at by the god's nearness and distance, and in a call to silence, a stillness. Unlike the history of our involvement with beings, it will deal only with the ground, the ultimate and fleeting, hidden immediacy of our being-here. It is not, actually, 'new' at all, as in a 'new philosophy', but is just the hidden, other, opposite history: while the pre-Socratics felt and thought of the fire of happening, the darkness which hides itself yet reveals itself into beings, they let it fall into oblivion. Heidegger now re-inaugurates that vision of the streaming happening of life qua Da-sein. It just so happens

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that Heidegger lived at the time when this should happen, or, if you look at it with cynicism: Heidegger felt it his personal destiny to be the thinker who is 'the bridge between millennia'. What alone counts is how quickly we can begin the crossing from the 'guide question', to a history of the 'ground question', and how much a part of the new destiny we are: we are part of it when we recognize that be-ing can be thought of with a thinking which hears, listens, is attuned, and therefore enowned. Hence the decisive matter is our lucidity about who and what we humans are, and whether god destines us in its nearness. The first sign of the start of this new history is the arrival of the last god. Those who seek this god, Heidegger says, speed up its arrival and thus the beginning of that history. One does not say that the god is not real. Rather, since a god is never real, we say that it, the divinity, is in the mood one has about the nearness of be-ing to itself, or, the god is the ability of humans to hear being and become Da-sein: there is no Da-sein without the confrontation between humans and gods. 'But understanding be-ing-historical thinking from within the perspective of gods is "the same" as attempting to indicate what is ownmost to this thinking from within the perspective of man' (CP, 309; 439). In our reticent distressed silence we can sense the departure (atheism, nihilism) or the arrival (holiness of life) of god: simultaneously we are on the trace of understanding be-ing, or not, respectively. We technologists feel that we cannot trust or believe in a god because of the other things which we know — namely experimental science, 'actuality', reality, our thinking in terms of causes and effects, perception, our knowledge of beings, our technological and real power over them, our very 'life'.3 From these things the god flees. Even were we to seek the gods in their lives above us, they would still be far away, and would be felt as such. They have fled from mortals, even as with the concepts of'life', 'actuality', 'reality', we feel no distress about our groundlessness and homelessness. We start to feel god as soon as we feel the unhappiness and deep dread of our lack of an ultimate point to our existence, and our lack of relation to our deep self in the immediate moment of happening. The poets attest to this, those who are most sensitive to the gods: we have grown too weak for the heavenly absence, the great release from life as the weight of facts and subjectivity, the joy of the freedom, the joy of going-under. The activity of Da-sein in this other history would be enowning. The world of things such as earth, sky and sea, is given its vitality from out of the turning. This occurs as Da-sein's projecting opening of be-ing; for, essentially, Da-sein is the conduit for a world, the cleavage in be-ing. By 'the turning', 4 Heidegger seems to mean Da-sein's relationship to both beings as their clearing, and to be-ing, as its truth (something like the

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turning between 'life' and 'death'); while these are simultaneous in themselves, Da-sein cannot relate to both at once. Da-sein also only becomes aware of itself when it turns away from the world, and becomes what could be called 'ascetic': ' [O]r do we have to be content with above all protecting the night so that the false days of everydayness are restrained, whose most false ones are those that believe also to know and possess the night when they light up the night and eliminate it with their borrowed light?' (CP, 343; 487).5 The point is, the world we inhabit and know is actually rooted in us, is part of us: it is not something provided to us from outside, say, as if we were a subject facing an object, or a soul which inhabits a body. We, as Da-sein, live on earth, and are earthly; we are being-here, as the 'here' of be-ing. Whatever the world is, or beings are, depends on us; therefore, the purity of existence and the mystery of it, the simplicity of being-here in its darkness in be-ing, must be protected. Essentially, what is innermost to human Da-sein is this way of grounding a world on the basis of that darkness; the darkness is the refusal or abandonment of be-ing. When Da-sein 'circles' it turns either to this darkness, or to beings and the world. Turning from be-ing, then, Da-sein strives with the earth to demarcate a world to live in; the projection occurs within and because of the projection of a time-space by Da-sein. 'But wherever plant, animal, rock and sea and sky become beings, without falling into objectness, there withdrawal (refusal/not-granting) of be-ing reigns be-ing as withdrawal. But withdrawal belongs to Da-sein' (CP, 207; 293) . If we should recognize ourselves as part of, and not opposed to whatever exists, if we see ourselves as Da-sein in holiness, this does not mean that all suddenly becomes clear: far from it. What we see is that our ground, in fact, withdraws itself. This is owing to the fact that be-ing is inherently not limitless, but is dark as well as light-bestowing: yet without Da-sein there would be mere darkness, mere untruth. But how should it be (if it can be explained at all, and if it is worthwhile asking this), that be-ing is partly hidden? But be-ing [5^w] en-owns [er-eignet] Da-sein for itself, for grounding its truth, i.e., its clearing; because without this lit up, separating-deciding [lichtende Entscheidung] of it itself into the needfulness of god and into the guardianship of Da-sein, be-ing would have to be consumed by the fire of its own unredeemed glow.6 How can we know how often this has not already happened? If we knew that, then there would be no necessity of thinking be-ing in the uniqueness of its essential sway. (CP, 343; 488) Of course, the 'lit up, separating-decision' spoken of is the decision to turn to be-ing rather than to beings, the decision of renunciation, the near death

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which is dark closure of 'be-ing', but not total extinction of the clearing: thoughtful hearing remains. Heidegger seems to mean that, if be-ing did not let go of Da-sein, then it would consume him and not ever become a glow to light things up. But there is a hint of the fact that, while we do not respect the decision and the gulf between be-ing and us, we are already being burnt up - by technology and nihilism: this would imply that there will be a steady loss of life, and a superfluity of light the more we ignore our ground, such that we will eventually lose all sense of being alive unless we respect the decision. The more we are unable to respect the difference between be-ing and beings, the more it will happen that be-ing will simply be too close, and dis-humanize us, swallowing us up, depriving us of freedom and a proper relation. Therefore, the turning (away) is essential, since it permits sufficient distance. One must attend to Da-sein, not to beings and to that constant closeness and presence of beings. One feels that this is what Heidegger means when he is so shocked by be-ing's power and the disappearance of beings in the atomic age and the age of total mobilization: blinded to be-ing, we live so close to it that there is no longer the distance required to let beings exist properly. We will continue to let the fire and intensity of be-ing simply burn us and the world up in an inconscient darkness and lack of thinking. Only the one who comprehends that man must historically ground what is ownmost to him by grounding Da-sein, only the one who comprehends that inabiding the sustaining of Da-sein is nothing other than residing in the time-space of that event that is enowned as the flight of gods, only the one who in creating takes the dismay and bliss of enowning back into reservedness as grounding-attunement - only this one is capable of having an inkling of the essential sway of being and, in such a mindfulness [Besinnung], is capable of preparing truth for what is coming as true. (CP, 36-7; 52) This Heideggerian 'self-mindfulness' has left 'subjectivity' behind, as well as the cult of'personality', the art of the 'genius', as well as the notion of man as 'soul-body-spirit', as well as the T of self-legislation and ethics. The question of who we are is an incredibly 'dangerous' and decisive question for man (CP, 38; 54) since it decides so much; for Heidegger, 'Man's ownmost "being" is thus grounded in belonging to the truth of being as such' (CP, 36; 51) - that is, in the happening of be-ing itself, a happening which is the truest truth. Such is the experience and word which it gives, which Heidegger sees as inaugurating the other beginning of the history of life. Each of our attempts and leaps, down-goings, enownings, and feelings

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of dread, will be imitative of and part of the first greatest communication between us and be-ing. History is a sequence of repetitions; the first act, after which all follow, and to which they return, 'the beginning', is not the Hebraic act when God created the world, or the Christian one when Christ becomes man, but the recognition by man that he and be-ing are one in an event of happening, and man decided to view his moment of life as such.

Language Heidegger begins the book as a whole with a brief remonstration on words, and thus sets about, from the first, inventing new words, for all words which indicate deeper things (Gmndworte] have been made petty, and the true function of words as expressions of the inside has become impossible. Heidegger was primarily concerned, in his writing, with forcing words to make unusual effects, or, better, to unearth the resources of words already in use, as well as to make new combinations of them, according to his need. (One could put it that he 'forced' them, that he 'created', but Heidegger himself insisted that he 'heard' be-ing; it is probably not correct to make him seem like a sort of talented 'writer'.) The very use of the word 'being' (Seiri) itself is a new usage of that term, one which is 'unnatural' and violent.7 J: Why did you not surrender the word 'being' immediately and resolutely to the exclusive use of the language of metaphysics? Why did you not at once give its own name to what you were searching for, by way of the nature of Time, as the 'sense of being'? I: How is one to give a name to what he is still searching for? To assign the naming word is, after all, what constitutes finding. (OWL, 20) In the interview with a Japanese inquirer, the Japanese participant asks why Heidegger used the word 'being' at all, for it is an old, metaphysical word, but Heidegger's view is that old words can be made new if we are ready to let them be. This writing,/rom enowning, is 'a thinking-saying which is en-owned by being and to be-ing's word' (CP, 3; 3). This event in the history of be-ing is the one major object which the 'work' has, or to which it is preparatory. 'This saying gathers be-ing's essential sway unto a first sounding, while it itself [this saying] sounds out only of this essential sway' which essences and reigns via man (CP, 4; 4). Next, Heidegger is concerned to point out that his book, work, or 'saying' (das Sagen) is not fully complete, but is a

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contribution: the time for systems is gone, yet 'the time of re-building the essential shaping of beings according to the truth of be-ing has not yet arrived' (CP, 4; 5). Such a perfected work would ground beings such as the event of the play of day and night in time in their springing out of the self, grounded there and opened up from space-time-play (the happening in which things occur) of the truth of be-ing, but upon the ab-ground, the abyss, not some sort of constantly present mind. What this means is that the self opens be-ing up, revealing truth as a space of clearing therein, and projecting or revealing beings within there, in a space-time unity. This space-time-play in which a world is grounded is hard to understand in a rational way as yet, but a decision must be made to make it understood, so that objects are not transcendental, and their origin is not in the 'eternity' (Ewigkeit] of human ideas, but in the unique, in something which takes place historically, in the interaction of the self with be-ing, so that beings and their happening can be grasped each time as the unique. Despite the original lexicon and syntax, the message is not mystical; beings are be-ing in a different form, namely, with man as the intermediary. 'Whenever a being is, be-ing must sway' (i.e., be at work, being must be-there) (CP, 5; 7). As for humans, they must renounce the self, in order to be 'those founders of the abground [who] must be consumed by the fire of what is deeply sheltered' (CP, 6; 7). Man transformed into Da-sein will stand there, where a world emerges, in a fight between mere existence and inconscience on the one hand, and a world on the other: a struggle in which be-ing puts itself forth, in which we recognize ourselves in our essence. We are that struggle and leap. This struggle takes place in the 'soul', in the deep self. To do this, to create a world, and permit things to exist as beings, we must go under along a way: going under is to be a self, and thus to take part in the events of be-ing's history as that which hides and reveals itself: 'That is the essential swaying of be-ing itself. We call it enowning' (CP, 6; 7). Going under is what is happening to this age anyway, but the founders go under in full awareness. Ereignis is the thinking-act of entering non-self-hood and pure life, entering the unity of things, which is within, which the 'personality' that writes the poetry of Holderlin seems to do in each poem; Holderlin and this changed personality is marked by the experience of a consciousness which can intuit the unity of be-ing by uniting with 'nature', such that this way of living which the poet speaks from must be that mood and consciousness which is also close to life itself as an event. It is this sublimated and holy voice which so attracted Heidegger about the poet Holderlin, for whom the miracle of existence and inwardness is the theme, and for whom self-consciousness of nature is the theme of the poems (the river poetry,

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and those poems which Heidegger studied in particular), although grief about the death of God makes the vision of be-ing blurred and marked by homelessness. The historical destiny of philosophy culminates in the recognition of the necessity of making Holderlin's word be heard. Being able to hear corresponds to being able to say, which speaks out of the question-worthiness of be-ing. [.. .] (Of course, 'interpretation' here does not mean 'making understandable' but rather grounding the projecting-opening of the truth of his poetizing unto mindfulness and attunement, in which future Da-sein resonates.) This historically essential characterization of philosophy grasps philosophy as the thinking of be-ing. (CP, 297-8; 422) Heidegger adds that the danger is greatest for those people who are able to 'go under', and 'Holderlin is their poet' (CP, 281; 401), for such people are impotent to do anything in the world (unkrdftig geworden):' Our hour is the epoch of going-under' (CP, 278; 397), and so the danger is that the massiveness of the subjective world will overcome them under the appearance of 'greatness'. Poet and philosopher are useless, and easily overcome, only capable of retreat even before themselves. They may refuse to go under; but this going under to the abyss is the character of the age. The founder of the future does so by 'the shortest and speediest pathway' (CP, 287; 408). Under the species of style which Heidegger maintains throughout the work, of subtle alterations in the order and combinations of his words, Heidegger speaks this same complex throughout the remainder of 'Preview', with a sense which is each time different, and each time necessary, in order to follow the mobility of our hour of the history of be-ing. But it is not necessary to follow Heidegger in each of these permutations. Rather, let us concentrate on sifting this work for an account of 'authentic Da-sein' in all of its character as a transformed version of the selfhood of an existent person. Such a portrayal does not aim to reveal the self for itself, but as it relates and turns around be-ing: it is therefore the most basic yet richest, most hidden happening. Neither does such a portrayal simply 'present' this self- not, at any rate, without distorting Heidegger's works, and destroying his efforts at a new essential philosophical vocabulary. The self is not presented, but located out of its unified developing and leaping with be-ing. Contributions is a book which can be read and re-read; it is not, therefore, the actual happening of be-ing here and now, since it remains the same while time passes. However, its words describe the mobile leap and struggle not of a steady and abiding thing, but the mobility of thought itself. Contributions

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is thought about thought, or thought about a thinking which has never before been enacted, and which had to be described and exemplified. Though speech is metaphysically seen as a mere fact amongst others a capacity of man which is proper only to man, 'given along with' him (CP, 351; 499), that is, as part of nature and culture - in Heidegger's scheme, on the contrary, speech is part of the joined complex of be-ing. Speech is also interchangeable with man: man is that to which be-ing speaks with words and language, which has accompanying 'anthropological' and 'psychological' determinations (CP, 354; 503); man can belong to be-ing because he understands be-ing, and holds to be-ing through language. In all, speech is not a given, a thing external to man, rather, it is a activity coeval with the history of be-ing, and springs from it — for the origin of speech will be the origin of everything else; but above all, we must try to avoid the interpretation of language as a 'symbolic' system (CP, 353; 502). Speech is ours, and through speech we belong to be-ing, facing inwards. Now, obviously, with a recognition of speech as a 'capacity' or a given, which is how technological thinking (logic, and linguistics) has it, as an object, or ordinary comportment amongst beings, speech cannot assume this destiny; likewise, man as a rational animal is not a part of be-ing, for the rational animal 'uses' speech to attain power over beings, and to do the works of technology. The normal everyday comprehension of speech has it that words are just symbols, empty in themselves, awaiting fulfilment by referring to other things, like tombs; the emptiness of this schema of selfunderstanding by man is destined to turn him into a being as empty as it itself is; but we must resist this, even if this destiny will work itself out for a long time to come for those humans who are only attuned to life as gradual unfolding of planetary technology. It is not a matter simply of waiting until something occurs to man within the next 300 years, but of thinking ahead (without prophetic proclamations) into the time which is to come, of thinking through the fundamental traits of the present age, which have scarcely been thought. . . . I do not see the situation of man in the world of global technology as a fate which cannot be escaped or unraveled. On the contrary, I see the task of thought to consist in helping man in general, within the limits allotted to thought, to achieve an adequate relationship to the essence of technology. . . . For me Holderlin is the poet who points to the future, who expects god and who therefore may not remain merely an object of Holderlin research and of the kind of presentations offered by literary historians. (OG, 110-2)

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The Decision Which Cannot Be Made As we have hinted, the event of life happening is the new or other side of the history of philosophy, a history yet to be begun, but with a future before it. We see that this happening is something for which there are no words or names, so that we strive with the old words: being, Sein, 'consciousness', subjectivity, man, Da-sein - either rejecting them or putting them to new use by finding out their hidden depths and the extent of the power which they already have over our thought of life. What we can do, meanwhile, is attune ourselves to this event, this Ereignis of our life to be-ing itself, by attaining to special and relevant moods. The first origin, namely Aristotle's thinking, begins with a mood of wonder (thaumazeiri) (see, BQ, 140-2); the other begins, then, with horror (das Erschrecken). Horror and fear about the lack of be-ing, which retreats from modern subjectivity, is the appropriate mood of being-attuned to this absent, abyssal ground made up of a darkness which thought cannot hope ever to illuminate; and while the mood does not reveal be-ing, it reveals how be-ing has forsaken discrete beings such as man and subjectivity. Then there is the 'mood' or state of soul characterized as resoluteness or reserve; that of awe; and then others, each attuned to different aspects of the work of be-ing as a history: anticipation; and care which calls the self to not-be-ing, and to the stillness of god. None of these are anthropological moods, nor are they brought about by an effort of choice or will-power: they do not depend upon a view of the world (Weltanschauung], but struggle through earth and world (the givenness of life) to provide a firm ground for be-ing to happen, and situate us as a moody, attuned opening between be-ing out there and be-ing as it is for us. But unless these inner, depth self-attunements are achieved, each 'experience' is pointless ultimately: unless the distress of the abandonment of be-ing is felt and thought, everything is mere politics and history, unguided and inessentially determined, abandoned 'things'. So, beginning to recognize these moods is also a way towards the momentary origin of the other history. The stillness of Da-sein is the ground for a true view of things. In the stillness, the trembling of be-ing can be felt; the onefold of human life and be-ing is the simultaneous self-creation of all things: then, the call of the ground (Grundstimmung], a voice we can understand, grips onto the self, drawing it into itself. This is enowned philosophical thinking about being-here. What else are these moods, states and attunements, than those of tragic ones, in the like of which Holderlin and the early Nietzsche were so interested, the state of joy ofEcce Homo, a thankfulness towards life? The open unlimited 'yes' to life which the god Dionysus represents for Nietzsche? What else again, than

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the states of mind which are associated with a god's nearness, which Heidegger himself points out? When gods call the earth and a world resonates in the call and thus the call echoes as Da-sein of man, then language is as historical, as historygrounding word. Language and enowning. Fleeting shimmer of earth, resonance of world. Strife, the originary sheltering of the cleavage, because the innermost rift. The op en place. Language, whether spoken or held in silence, [is] the primary and broadest humanization of beings. So it seems. But it [is] precisely the most originary non-humanization of man as an extant living-being and 'subject' and the heretofore - and thereby the grounding of Da-sein and of the possibility of non-humanization of beings. Language is grounded in silence. (CP, 358-9; 510) The situation described so beautifully here is in no proper sense either in the time, place or word of humans, or of normal life while at the same time it welcomes us to realize that while we give human names to things, that naming dis-humanizes us and makes us into agents of be-ing. The importance of the various moods depends on the situation vis-a-vis be-ing; at a time when be-ing is felt as abyss, steadiness and renunciation in that abyss are necessary. The endless turning of the self towards be-ing at one time and to loss of the awareness of life at another requires this steadiness which is 'neither a romantic flight nor a bourgeois repose' (CP, 25; 36). The great characteristic divide between those who see and feel this, and those who don't, is 'distress' (Not] on the one hand, and 'distresslessness' (Notlosigkeit], or the lack of being destined, on the other (the lack of feeling that there is any point to yourself). Heidegger has it that be-ing rules in the truth: as lighting/clearing through the self in order to reveal beings (which incidentally then hide their origin in be-ing); this situation brings about distress in those who feel the refusal of be-ing, and a contented lack of distress in those who do not, who are drawing on be-ing's influence without knowing it, 13 while it leads them into a technological and ego-based future. All in all, be-ing is not, but is an activity, a history requiring the self; without the self s knowledge it carries on. But then, without this understanding, surely the self is in some sort of pain and torment? The years in which this takes place are not those of the calendar; the time at which the distress falls is the time when the decision can be faced. But this distress must still be experienced. And what if man has become hardened against this distress and, as it seems, is as stubborn as ever?

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Then those must come who awaken, who in the end maintain that they have discovered distress because they know that they suffer distress. (CP, 19; 25-6) We have already seen at the start of this chapter that there are two histories of philosophy. In 'Be-ing', which concludes Contributions, this dual history is again brought to light, in its basis in 'the decision'. The decision to be made is not, for Heidegger, merely a matter of choice, a use of the will; the decision is a whole 'throw' of the self into a certain direction: basically the direction of be-ing. As in the rest of this writing, Heidegger's method now is to show the stakes of this self-throwing, this deep-existential leap (Sprung] to a place where thinking can take place. When speaking of the innerness of the self, its meditative stillness, Heidegger turns to gods as signs (Winke) of achieved selfhood. These gods are not polytheistic imaginary embodiments of this or that, elements either of fantasy or of existence: they are features of the decision, for the decision is between two ways of being alive. In the one case a mood of exploitation and self-mastery; in the other, a condition of a holy mood and openness to the possession by be-ing. The self, when it has leaped, decides on its god too: about whether it is one or many; it is 'meant as the allusion to the undecidablity of the being of gods, whether one single god or of many gods' (CP, 308; 437). Deciding is not to set a god forth as an object: nor is it an event which can be represented. In a metaphysical determination of godhead, a god will be a being, or, rather, the most-being - like a creator versus his creation; but for the true self as the truth of be-ing, the god will, rather, be the corollary experience of true interaction with be-ing, since through us the god approaches what it needs. The god will be self-evidently part of the process of being-happening. This god is not over or beneath life, but that which brings be-ing to our meditation: there is no be-ing experience without the god who brings it to the self. 'Gods' need be-ing in order through be-ing - which does not belong to gods - nevertheless to belong to themselves. . . . And as impenetrable as the needfulness of be-ing must remain for thinking, it still offers a first hold for thinking 'gods' as those who need be-ing. We thereby accomplish the first steps in the history of be-ing, and thus be-ing-historical thinking commences. (CP, 309; 438) Be-ing is the distress of gods, the need of gods, their necessity, just as it is, secretly, ours. While be-ing is the distress of god, and be-ing itself only comes to its truth through the thinking which the self carries out when it nears the god, so this thinking, which is philosophy in the other beginning, is required

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by the gods: philosophy is necessary to this god (not because they 'do' philosophy, but because 'philosophy must be z/^'gods" are again to come into decision and if history is to obtain its ownmost ground' [CP, 309; 438]). Such is the complex nature of the issue to be pursued in the other beginning: god is a defining factor of philosophy, and so, god is definitive of be-ing; at the same time, thinking is the key to be-ing and to god. It is a familiar technique in this book: there is a single rock face (Steinbruchs], a great unity of life, which is approached and broken down into pieces which leave the imprint of their origins alongside other rocks and stones hued from the same source. In the long prose disquisitions (CP, 310-59), Heidegger presents other factors, such as 'thought', 'speech' and 'man' on the one hand, and features of the decision which are prevalent in the first origin, such as 'the gigantic', 'beings' and the subject. Though 'Be-ing' as a chapter has to do with be-ing, Heidegger's constant final concern is with the corruption of the self into the Cartesian ego-subject by philosophy, to which he opposes its saving event when it 'leaps' into Da-sein and a relationship with be-ing in the other beginning. For the subject there are beings, which today come under the interpretative ontological event of finding beingness and essences in their size and quantity: in this age beings rule under the disguise of'the gigantic'. Inside, on the other hand, there is no reckoning of large and small: just the measure of be-ing by the steadiness of the self, taking the measure of how far the decision has been achieved or not. This is the measure - not that of quantity. Heidegger's analysis recognizes that, in the metaphysical way of thinking, beings are dependent on a sort of grasping of them by the mind of the subject. Privileged in this metaphysics are single things, the One, the presented thing, the discrete entity, the ego. Thinking, as practised in metaphysics, and as conceived as a guide through the manifoldness of existence, deals with single things and gatherings, unities and self-identical things. This lends itself to a logical style of thinking, or a thinking which is essentially logical in regard to present unified things, that is, as 'logic'. And despite the glamour of scholastic and modern philosophy, logicizing thinking is no more than 'calculation'. Calculation - comes to power primarily by the machination of technicity, is grounded in terms of knowing in the mathematical; here the unclear foregrasping into guiding principles and rules and thus the certainty of steering and planning, the experiment; the lack of questioning in somehow managing \_Durchkommen\\ nothing is impossible, one is certain of'beings'; there is no longer need for the question concerning what is ownmost to truth. (CP, 84; 120)

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Heidegger demands a thinking which is fully turned away from logical statement and practice; logical thinking based on the presence of beings is weak, a mere first entry to thinking, and deals only with representations for a subject, or with appearances. The essence of logic as an outgrowth of subjective self-awareness and its grasp of itself as self-identical is seen best in Hegel. By contrast, the passing to the other beginning must take its basis in the deep self; it will face the danger of being lost in the depth, and the silence, in the immeasurable. In the passing-over thinking, all which is historical and strange and once-only, unique, is the object and measure (rather than 'logic'). In a recurrent 'metaphor' which is part of the whole 'figurative' though not representational language of this book, Heidegger refers to, or supplements the word 'be-ing' with the word 'hearth-fire' (Herdfeuer}. But the 'hearth-fire' is not a metaphor, rather one of the ways of naming be-ing as what it acts as 'in reality'. It is the core or home where we live as humans when becoming Da-sein. Be-ing is the hearth-fire in the midst of the abode of gods - an abode which is simultaneously the estranging of man (the 'between' [das ^wischen\ in which he remains a (the) stranger, precisely when he is at home with beings).16 How to find be-ing? Do we have to light a fire in order to find fire, or do we not have rather to be content with above all protecting the night so that the false days of everydayness are restrained . . . (CP, 343; 486-7) This fire in the midst of the house of gods, strange to man because he is used to dealing with beings, is a fire which lights up the self and lets it be, while refusing to be seen for itself. Renunciation, as in much else, is the key to be-ing: to find be-ing it is necessary to flee ourselves, or to 'renounce' (CP, 343; 487), and go into the night, getting away from the false and easy 'everydayness', for the uniqueness of the relationship between the self (which is an opening for be-ing's fire) and be-ing itself, fights against renunciation, but still one must persevere. This is of course the mark of Da-sein, to stand unsupported and unprotected downward into the ab-ground and therein to surpass the gods. The ^rpassing of gods is the going-under into the groundership of the truth of be-ing. (CP, 343; 487) As we see, by renouncing human being, and entering Da-sein, we also become greater than god is, in a sense, since be-ing is greater than god.

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Renunciation brings the abyss and the night, and so brings truth's clearing of be-ing to view as the essential happening of something immediate and potentially full of riches, namely, Da-sein, or ourselves, in a completely unselfish and 'truthful' character: the key is to fight against the storm (Sturm] which burns within be-ing which forces the self to face the other way, to become technological, everyday, and basically empty of thinkingmindfulness. The renunciation and the pathway towards god is in the name of discovering the means to speak the truth of being-here. That is the decisive act in this history, and the refashioning of man. The subject is what must be renounced: renouncing subjectivity, that constantly present aware consciousness which we take to be static and grounding as 'mind' and intellect or representation; renouncing 'reality' and daily life as it is forced on us, one gains a thinking of be-ing. Man, the self, is one of the two partners which stand either side of be-ing: the other partner is god. But renunciation is man's essence, although whether or not one can deny the world, only being can decide. This world and history gets smaller and only exists due to Da-sein; is it worth clinging to, and renouncing in mortification of the sense? It is diminished by the destitution of experience due to reckoning, calculation, progress and the unreality of beings. 'The lostness into beings is lived as capability of transforming "life" into the calculable whirlwind of empty circling around itself and of making this capability believable as something "true to life" ' (CP, 349; 495). The renunciation therefore acts in the name of a recuperation of our everyday life and especially of beings. One of the related things which this philosophy tries to save is our 'external' experience of the earth and world especially since the destitution of the world, beings and experience is also essentially a destitution of us] it does not reduce our contentment or quality of life, or any other determinate feature, but 'we' ourselves. If we renounce 'factual life' in favour of be-ing, we will be able to return and regain beings, and somehow be able to live properly.

Chapter 4

Philosophy Playing-Forth Without God

Playing-Forth 'What is ownmost to playing-forth is historical. Playing-forth is a first foray into the crossing, a bridge that swings out to a shore that must first be decided' (in which Da-sein for the first time becomes abode) (CP, 119; 169). It is this vision of an other history hidden in the first which is the theme of'Playing-Forth' as a chapter or 'joining'; the joining therefore runs over what Heidegger sees as the history of philosophy. It is, like 'Echo' and the other chapters, an attempt to get to a position in which be-ing is recognized and begins to relate to itself in a hermeneutic way, revealing what it already knows or already practises; what we already practise, namely the study of the history of philosophical idealism, is a means of entry into the thought on be-ing. Heidegger comments on the Hegelian/Russellian kind of'history of philosophy' which studies, as he sees it, a progress made since the Greeks, heading to our own (nihilistic) days: Historically mindful deliberations can be used - and even quite advantageously - merely as historical [historisch] observations that are immediately correctable and perhaps as discoveries, without there ever breaking forth from them the hint of that history that is of be-ing itself and that bears in itself the decisions of all decisions. (CP, 119; 170) The decision spoken of is the decision to become Da-sein and to attempt to take away from be-ing its being 'forgotten' and of its having abandoned humans, even as it happens to and as us. In one of the many seemingly metaphorical images of Contributions, Heidegger speaks of 'The Great Philosophies'; these philosophies are those inclusive of Leibniz, Aristotle, Plato, Descartes and German Idealism. The beginning of section 93 reads: [The great philosophies] are towering mountains, unclimbed and unclimable. But they endow the land with what is highest and show its primeval bedrock. They stand as the aiming point and forever form the sphere of sight; they bear transparency and concealment. When are

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such mountains really what they are? Certainly not when we have supposedly climbed and conquered them. Rather, only when they truly persevere for us and for the land. But how few are capable of this, of letting the most lively soaring emerge in the stillness of the mountain range and of remaining in the sphere of this soaring-over? This alone is what thinking's genuine setting-into-perspective must strive for. (CP, 131; 187) Here we hit upon the question of'Playing-Forth' itself: these philosophies are valuable to the saying of be-ing's reign precisely as they are concealing be-ing, and while they let beings and ideas, transcendent beings, be transparent. One can climb these mountains, but if one does so, one rises too far above be-ing: what they do is 'persevere' for us and for life: they emerge, up above, in stillness. That stillness is what thinking must strive for: a setting in perspective of the new experience of be-ing-here. The 'great philosophies' set in perspective how far away from be-ing humans have hitherto been thinking and soaring. A Kant or a Hegel, when we soar up with them, reveals where thinking will have not been, how far above be-ing thinking is, and how much different it must become. A 'moderately great philosophy' could not, presumably, do this for those in search of Da-sein and be-ing for it would neither soar far from be-ing, nor explicate beings from a suitable vantage. What they find 'up there' is a philosophy of ideas and objective idealities - that is the key motif of'great philosophy', both in the Platonic and the Hegelian versions; the same holds for Kant and for Nietzsche. Heidegger devotes the most part of 'Playing-Forth' therefore, to idealism and ideas as the essence of beings amongst which we hitherto lived and moved (CP, 141-57; 202-24). We shall look at this joining of'PlayingForth', the forward and upward path of philosophy, again at the conclusion of the present chapter, after having examined one of these 'great philosophies' - Nietzsche's.

Nietzsche During the composition of Contributions in 1936-38, Heidegger was delivering lectures on Nietzsche at the University of Freiburg. These lectures, whose meaning was integral to the development of his philosophy of be-ing, were published in his own lifetime, signifying what importance he gave to them himself. He also saw it as his duty to vindicate Nietzsche and save him from the Nazis; Nietzsche's philosophy was directly relevant to Heidegger's own day, to the twentieth century, and could not be appropriated by any one group. Heidegger saw in Nietzsche's work a philosophy

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whose words would weigh on human life for centuries to come because Nietzsche saw to the very end of the destiny of Western being-alive, and expressed it in the most complete and extreme metaphysical way, showing how life can only be interpreted if we remain within the allotment which has been designated for us by be-ing. If modern thinking and behaviour examines itself honestly, it finds itself fighting against or alongside, but always within, Nietzsche's account of metaphysics, that is, in Nietzsche's account of reality. Nietzsche's thought is not a set of slogans about the way life can be lived by those who chose to live it in an immoral way as, for example, Russell saw it (1991, 728-39), but the actual and inescapable destiny of how man must live in this era of the dreadful ignorance of be-ing. These complex aspects are discussed in this chapter; but more important to my study is the point that Nietzsche's philosophy is, as Contributions shows, ^philosophy of life, and its account of truth is firmly based within a vision of humans as rational animals who need 'truth' in order to gain power. It was therefore crucial to the genesis of Heidegger's Contributions, a book whose meaning is the rejection of such a position. The attempt to first accept Nietzsche's importance and then to surpass the epoch which he speaks for was part of the crucial move away from the death of God, and away from man as self-sufficient 'rational animal', towards man as being-here in be-ing, and to god as the distant harbinger of be-ing's possible turning to us. Heidegger held that each philosopher thinks about the same thing, but does so in a different way; each philosopher thinks about the same, yet misunderstands the other philosophies of the same. The radical difference between them can be seen in the fact that Nietzsche saw not the least significance in our being-here, but always looked for reasons, goals, incentives, the presence of the self in a stable, powerful way, and his method was to discuss the value of these features. While he refined the history of philosophy into a stark and simple set of propositions, each of these propositions or 'rubrics' have almost no bearing on Heidegger's one theme. The Nietzsche lectures are and were, by Heidegger's own admission, essential keys to how to understand his path of thought in those years. Nietzsche is given an incomparable reading; by one both horrified and intrigued. Heidegger noticed all of the good things which metaphysics was grasping at but failing to find, and all of the inessentiality of the way in which we have to think about life: especially the way in which we cannot approach the fact of being-here. Nietzsche is the philosopher of life as a means to an end par excellence, rather than the philosopher of life pure and simple. Life is construed as power, as present actuality, as eternally recurrent present reality and as value for the value-positing will. While Heidegger finds in this philosophy the modern classic statement of nihilism and

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a more or less reversed-Platonism, he seems even to model the layout and phrasing of Contributions on Nietzsche's ^arathustra and Will to Power, in an effort to go beyond and deeply into this obvious denouement of the history of philosophy as the human enslavement to power, will and technology. Nietzsche may have deeply desired to access being-here, and to dissociate himself from its opposite (conscious mastering subjectivity), but he did not have the means so to do, trapped in a mere reversal of it as he was. Essentially, Heidegger and Nietzsche are of one mind, but their thinking differs. The guiding ideal of the representational will which our age's thinking follows, as Nietzsche exemplifies it, is only given to metaphysics as the domination of the earth: thinking about beings considers them under the guiding understanding of being for which the meaning of being, the beingness of beings, is power. In metaphysical interpretations the being of beings calls for the domination of the earth; thinking is the thinking of how to collect all beings and make them available, ordered, challenged forth and ready for use. This is what metaphysical thinking does when it seeks the cause, principle, reason or 'ground' of beings. It makes them available, for they are essentially available things. The race to exploit the earth is happening, but not in overt metaphysical terms as Nietzsche predicted (in his statement about the 'wars' of philosophy [1979, 127]); it happens covertly and innocently for the most part, and only articulately in the 'mountain-peak' which Nietzsche's work is. This misunderstanding of what importance Nietzsche has, his articulation of our deep guiding tendency, is the danger, since no reflection on this urge-to-power happens. Heidegger saw that our destiny can be read in Nietzsche; and since this has not been seen correctly, he had to spell this out by reading Nietzsche to his students at Freiburg, and then publishing the transcripts.

Nietzsche's Philosophy The principal character of thinking today is that thinking about the way in which we exist finds itself thinking nihilistically. As we saw, to think of be-ing, we need to be near to god, and to think about being-here should be the aim of philosophy; however, nihilistic thinking finds that God is dead, and that being-here is something uninteresting and almost nothing. Nietzsche saw nihilism in more positive terms, however, not as a lack of essential thinking, but as our being set free from the Christian past. Nietzsche defines nihilism in one way, therefore, according to his own posttheological view, while Heidegger interprets nihilism in another: the one

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experiences it as the devaluation of Christian values; the other as the total oblivion of be-ing, respectively. Heidegger splits up Nietzsche's doctrine into five 'rubrics' which each say the same thing, but do not form a system: they speak from a place. These rubrics are: a) eternal return, b) will to power, c) revaluation of all values, d) superman, and e) nihilism. The joinings of Contributions, like these rubrics, all say the same; they say the truth of be-ing in a definite 'abode' or place in the history of be-ing. They speak historically and, hence, not definitely of a set of facts: they speak from the abode of a certain kind of place in be-ing. In Nietzsche, one thing which is most constantly present is the human subject - and this is the abode from which Nietzsche's thoughts speak, the abode of a mind observing and willing, representing a world of actuality. A human life and its Da-sein is just a means and a value for the subjective will. If power could do without inwardness and Da-sein, then it would let them go. 'The subject' means that which underlies every being most constantly. When Nietzsche says 'will' he means the 'perceptual' faculty: there is no world nor any beings without a perceptual grasp of them, a place for them in the will. This was an explanation of the being of beings held by Schelling and Hegel as well as by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Leibniz first overtly expressed this 'representational' element of the will (NI, 35). It has been characteristic of Western philosophy to think will as the being of beings, and, at least, to hold that the truth of any thing can only be made clear when there is a language and a mind which can speak and think that truth of beings. This means that the ego cogito, the subject, the self-possessed mind or spirit of mankind is the core of existence. Nietzsche's culmination of this tradition should be read, Heidegger showed in his lectures, in his view that, after the death of God, our view must be honed and paired down to a heavy emphasis on pure human capabilities, such that, since will to power and representation are the essence of any thing, then the aim of will to power must only reside in itself, and must chose better values than service of God or, simply, God: the aim of our life is to gain more life and more power. 'Willing itself is mastery over . . ., which reaches out beyond itself; will is intrinsically power' (NI, 41). But what has power to do with will and representation? By 'power' Nietzsche means the steadiness of the ego amidst all the flux of becoming and change; power is a move to attain to longevity and lastingness. Power is not some goal or appendage: it is 'the essence of will' (NI, 42). Now, will is 'passion just as often as affect' (NI, 47); a passion must last, must be part of will, and endurance. It must bring longevity, within becoming. The new goal, the only one which can be justified rationally in the absence of God, is 'absolute dominance over the earth' (NIV, 82). Nietzsche

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was concerned to point this out since this new goal is a 'value', one which replaces the old values, the chief of which was God and the 'true world' of mind and ideas. To attain to this new value requires a perfect selfishness; man will be determined as the absolute centre and 'sole measure of beings' (NIV, 83). Heidegger does not see this metaphysical account of human life and life itself as 'Nietzsche's' personal thought-theory: it is the dominant path of thinking for any one who thinks deeply in the manner which has been allotted to us today. The work in reading Nietzsche therefore clarifies how we live today, and how the highest possible attainment, the highest and most lucid awareness of 'who we are' will turn out, of necessity, today. Therefore, those who read Nietzsche as a racist, or immoralist, or a philosopher of positivism, or of power-politics, misread him, and misunderstand their destiny and how we must think of our being today. To recognize who we are and what our destiny is, however, permits Heidegger a vision of how to overcome this nihilistic destiny. Nietzsche, as the end, is a 'transition' (BQ^, 116). He is the end of'former modes of thought'. Nietzsche's work must be'survived' (BQ, 118).

God

Heidegger's first reference to Nietzsche after Being and Time, where Nietzsche was mentioned for his Untimely Meditations, was in 1933 in the rectoral address (SA); Nietzsche is called 'the last German philosopher who passionately searches for God', and who announced that 'God is dead' (SA, 33; Poggeler, 1993, 33). Nietzsche also poses the hardest question for Heidegger, a challenge: will man become the struggle for domination over the earth? That challenge is presented to man in the form of the superman. Therefore, there are two major strains in the reading of Nietzsche, and several minor ones: 1) Nietzsche is the philosopher who attempted to engage with God and the divine, and who dismissed the metaphysical in his formula that 'God as dead'; 2) Nietzsche gave a culmination to Western metaphysics, announcing that its final aim is to dominate the earth, and that man must take up the place assigned to him as the one who will seek to dominate the earth, and whose will must be based on willing itself. These two strains, however, offer a conflict and a potential way ahead for Heidegger's way of thought towards himself and the place in which Da-sein can be recognized as the truth of being, revealing itself as the holy immediacy of human selfrecognition upon the darkness of concealment.

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In the 1933 public address, Nietzsche's philosophy is apparently embraced, and Heidegger implies that, with a certain amount of will, what matters can come 'to power' (Poggeler, 1993, 86). But by 1936 Nietzsche's work is seen as an account of the nature of beings in their common element, but also as a preparation for the gods, the 'yes' to being, a cry of suffering about the demise of gods. The 1936 critique of Nietzsche implies that power and self-affirmation will not permit be-ing to manifest itself. For Heidegger, Nietzsche's work embodies a challenging either/or situation: either total domination of the earth must become man's ideal aim (a thought and a purpose which horrified Heidegger, but which Nietzsche emphasizes); or, by contrast, humans must undertake a search for the divine and the sense of be-ing. To avoid the future of man which Nietzsche presents with his 'superman', God would have to be rediscovered. Now, whatever else will be said of Heidegger, it would be wrong to think of him as God-less: he is only God-less to the extent that philosophy always must remain within the sphere of what exists, rather than what is divine and transcendent (imagining a God of life-after-death, for example, is, in Heidegger's view, unprofitable). In a letter of 1921 to his former student Karl Lowith, Heidegger wrote that it was a 'fact that I am a "Christian theologian" '. The stress on the underlined '-logian' indicates that Heidegger found himself close to God, a believer in God even; however, philosophical means were inappropriate and inadequate ever to do more than speak the name of God, and Heidegger's task was not theology, which would, presumably be capable of explaining what significance this name has in itself. Therefore, while Heidegger remained close to God, he avoided any direct turn towards God, turning, rather, to what exists, to existence itself. In his letter he does not insist that he is a wholesale Catholic believer, nevertheless, he is a thinker whose thoughts do not depart from God, and the experiences which he favours are those which are those of a believer; These states of mind are the resources which he draws on, the ways of being of the Da-sein which he describes as philosophical are those which are near to God, states which his Tactic origin, milieu, life contexts' gave to him. The nearness of God was 'a vital experience in which I live' (Kisiel, 1995, 78), and which, despite a discourse on God Himself, would serve as the place of philosophy. But neither was Nietzsche a pure atheist, nor does the superman replace God. Christianity, which Nietzsche consistently opposed, does not mean the religion of the New Testament: it means the political and cultural churches. God actually is not dead, only the Church and its values. The sense of the godly and divine still happens - but not as values and the transcendental. 'But then in this case the Yes to being, which the superman says, could be

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preparation for readiness for the gods' (NI, 220). Thus, superman is not in God's place, but makes way for a new god. Nietzsche's atheism can be construed as, actually, 'a knowing silence about God' (Poggeler, 191, 102). 2 The death of God is, according to Nietzsche, and to Heidegger, indirectly, ' "The greatest modern event" ' (OBT, 162); God means the supersensory world, the world of the truth and ideas in general. The purpose of Heidegger's essay is to understand this announcement of Nietzsche's. ' "God is dead" means: the supersensory world has no effective power. It does not bestow life' (ibid.}. God no longer gives a meaning and stable centre to life; all the same, now the task of finding a new meaning begins. This task, and the death of God, is nihilism; it is also something which had been waiting in all previous metaphysics: existence and human life had always been empty of meaning like this, but had not yet come to clarity. Now that God is dead, 'there is nothing left which man can rely on and by which he can orient himself (OBT, 163); but 'Nihilism, thought in its essence, is ... the fundamental movement of the history of the West' (ibid.}. Beings have never had a core and a ground; the Platonic ideas and the mental archetypes which Aristotle and modern philosophers discovered to ground them were always hinting at be-ing itself but failing to find it, since it is shrouded by these very beings. If God were, as Nietzsche seems to imply, something deeper and more holy, then this God would still require thinking and discovery, and God would still be 'alive'. Nietzsche says, as Heidegger notes, 'Well-nigh two thousand years and not a single new god!' (NI, 1), as if God's life and holiness were felt by him, and as if he longed for God, and, not finding sufficient means to speak of God, he provoked us further towards Him by posing the horrific and nihilistic alternative. Heidegger recognizes in Nietzsche a philosopher who has seen that the history of Western philosophy and its idealism is exhausted, and that it was always nihilistic, empty of substantial content: empty of the theme of being. 'Nietzsche is thefirstto recognize - in his orientation to Platonism - as nihilism is in truth', that both Christian and Platonic nihilism, their decay in our age, and their always potential decay, are 'only the foreground of the far deeper happening of the forgottenness of being' (CP, 80; 115). Nietzsche's power-metaphysics is used as the prime example of the abandonment of be-ing, our ignorance about our own being-here. His standing up into a meaningless life is a fundamental experience; Nietzsche certainly had the experience of standing in the unknown, 'a fundamental experience' for him, but he always interpreted the truth of the life which he lived, and made sense of it with a positivistic notion of truth. His answers are illusory, since he interprets truth in light of the will to truth, based on the will to power, and his truth is already settled - as the obvious, the actual, the givenness of life,

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the positive reality which stands outside the mind and representational faculty vis-a-vis beings, rather than as the 'nothing' or the interactivity of the self with the historical happening of be-ing within oneself. For Nietzsche, only the truth's value matters, and its power to preserve life. Nietzsche could not en-think be-ing because he had not the resources in philosophy's history (CP, 253-6; 361-5), yet he made metaphysics so distressing and strong enough for another beginning. He reveals to us the distress, and although Nietzsche did not attempt a new turn to be-ing, he expressed a distress about its loss. 'Nietzsche's revolt' against German Idealism was a revolt against the final inclusion of the metaphysical subject within the absolute. The subject is the Absolute in German Idealism, and what it faces, represents and thinks, is its 'life'. The subject is being. Heidegger asks 'Which life? And if life requires such decisions, then the question is how conditions themselves and decisions about them - belong to "life" and what "life" then means' (CP, 255; 365). The point is, Heidegger can conceive of a deeper and simpler form of life, as that which rises in the truth itself and unfolds itself from be-ing as opening, as the truth.

Heidegger's Alternative to Nietzsche Now for Heidegger, nihilism is a proper consequence of how be-ing behaved towards metaphysical man in the first beginning. It reveals itself into beings and then departs; while beings arise, their ground goes under: be-ing is the event of truth, revealing beings, and hiding itself. How are we to understand the fact that being stays away, unless its default is a structural necessity? The staying away is being: 'the default of being as such is being itself (NIV, 214). Being occurs essentially as withdrawal, leaving beings in its wake. The abode of withdrawal is man; 'that locale, however, is the essence of man' (NIV, 217). He stands in the unconcealment of beings as the concealed locale within which being essentially occurs in its truth. He stands in this locale, which means that he is ecstative in it, because he is as he is always and everywhere on the basis of the relationship of being itself to his essence; that is, to the 'locale' of being itself. 'As the one approached by being, man is the one who thinks' (NIV, 218). 'Would it not be possible for thought to advance upon its own failure, namely, the failure to think being itself in its unconcealment?' (NIV, 224). We must encounter and think 'being in its default' (abandonment) as such, and man'as the abode of its (Being's) advent" (NIV, 225).

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In his last Nietzsche lectures Heidegger calls being by several names: the promise (NIV, 228); the mystery (226); the enigma (228); the secret (233); the compelling (244); the advent (244); the need (247); 'That withdrawal, as the self-withdrawal of being, still remains a mode of being - an advent. By thinking to encounter being itself, thinking no longer omits being, but admits it: admits it into the originary, revealing unconcealment of being, which is being itself (NIV, 227). His way of saying what Nietzsche could barely see, let alone name, is to accept the hiddenness of be-ing as one of its primal characteristics. This thing which is so hidden is merely, however, the opening space in which we live, life itself as an event, a clearing, the factical sense of being alive: 'the truth'. Apparently, what calls Da-sein to thinking is nihilism itself. Being is calling through nihilism itself, so that saviour comes with danger. When thinking dispatches itself into thought, it stands already in the admission of the enigma of the history of being. At the moment thinking thinks, being has already been intended for it. The mode of this primordial summoning is the default of the unconcealment of being in the unconcealed being as such. (NIV, 233) Thinking in terms of the history of being lets being arrive in the essential space of man. .. . being lightens as the advent of the keeping-to-itself of the refusal of its unconcealment. What is identified with 'lighting' 'arriving' 'keeping to itself 'refusal' 'revealing' and 'concealing' is one and the same essential occurrence, namely, being. (NIV, 243) However, as we say, the moment of saviour and the tragic recognition of what we have lost, comes in the darkest moment. Man is gradually recognizing his extreme homelessness, his avoidance of truth, his loss of the earth and his flight in the face of his own essence: The unfamiliarity of beings as such brings to light the homelessness of historical man within beings as a whole. The 'where' of a dwelling in the midst of beings as such seems obliterated, because being itself, as the essential occurring of every abode, fails to appear. The partly conceded, partly denied homelessness of man with regard to his essence is replaced by the organized global conquest of the earth, and the thrust into outer space. Homeless man - thanks to the success of his management and ordering of ever greater numbers of his kind - lets himself be driven into flight in the face of his own essence, only to represent this flight to himself as a homecoming to the true humanity of homo humanus, and to make humanity part of his own enterprise. (NIV, 248)

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Nietzsche and Playing-Forth After hearing the echo of being in the machinality of experience, Heidegger presents another way to let metaphysics come forward and show itself as what it is: exhausted, the clear occasion for something new. By reading Nietzsche's metaphysics in this way Heidegger 'plays it forth', speeding up the process of exhaustion, and revealing the necessity for the other beginning. This first sight of the necessity is a prelude to a new beginning, the backward, preparatory step for a forward leap: 'What is ownmost to playing-forth is historical. Playing-forth is a first foray into the crossing, a bridge that swings out to a shore that must first be decided' (CP, 119; 169). Metaphysics is a relationship to beings, not to be-ing, about which it knows nothing. Metaphysics is very far from the truth of be-ing: but how escape this situation, how renounce metaphysics, without fleeing into mere Nothing (Nichts] (CP, 120; 170)? '[A being] in its emergence unto itself (Classical Greece); [a being] caused by a supreme [being] of the same essence (Middle Ages); [a being as] the extant as object (modernity)' (CP, 120; 171). All of this concludes with Nietzsche and nihilism: its end will arrive only when the other origin is won. This end will come when Da-sein is grasped as the ground of beings, the opening of the truth, that from which be-ing sends itself (see, also 'On the Essence of Ground', 'On the Essence of Truth', in P). The salvation of Western history will not, however, be due to a confrontation with metaphysics (which is what Nietzsche carried out), but due to a working out of a place outside, a discovery of the ground, the ground about which one can decide, for which a return to this intuition of the Greeks is needed. For metaphysics is not something which was wrong from the start, or something which has gone wrong, and which can be fixed: the other beginning must occur not from moral principles, or choice, or correcting metaphysics, but by necessity within that first origin. We have read in Nietzsche's philosophy an example of the historical playing-forth of a philosophy from the initial vision of beings into its final stages. The playing-forth is the mythical/poetic description of philosophy's history in a temporal sequence heading from its start to its end through a variety of predetermined and sent, enowned, stages: it ends in nihilism, the point at which beings are overcome by the process which being set in motion. This famous Heideggerian-Nietzschean history of philosophy is sometimes seen as a myth, a fictional/figurative construction upon the history of philosophy (it can be seen as such not least because most of what other thinkers consider the history of philosophy does not enter into this history) .3 Heidegger shows how we can and must renounce beings as the way into be-ing. When the first beginning, which loves to exceed, to surpass itself

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in development, comes-into-its-own fully, a 'foothold' is gained into the other beginning (CP, 120; 171). 'The crossing to the other beginning introduces a caesura that long since no longer runs along with direction of philosophy (idealism-realism, etc.,) or even along with attitudes of worldview' (CP, 124; 177). Note that the caesura is a Holderlinian term associated with 'Remarks on "Oedipus" ' (Holderlin, 1988, 102), and his critique of tragedy - with the tragic fall into divine emptiness. The caesura is the moment at which, having entered the divine frenzy, the tragic man is cut down by circumstances and leaves the action with a new realization - both in himself and in the spectator and chorus: it is a breathtaking leap into the abyss of the ground which is not there, but which nevertheless 'sends' being and truth. After being utterly involved and lucid about be-ing, the tragic one falls back to normal human life, now lost and alone, bereft of the divine, and what the divine allotted to him as his own. Heidegger plays forth the drama of philosophy's history in the same external way, such that, at the point of catastrophe, the actor (metaphysics) falls into the divine for a moment, but a moment deep enough to permit insight into be-ing. Thus Heidegger implicates the philosopher and the reader in the activity of a play of tragedy in which, by entering be-ing by means of his mythic play-forth, he will re-emerge, broken, but with a new realization, one in which it can be communicated that life promotes a new sway over beings, in which be-ing is separate from any occurring and perceiving of beings. He envisages an existence of perhaps direct contact with the concealed essence of beings, and as Da-sein, in which there are not beings and no static ordered technological-universe, but the happening of being into a world for man who exists as the between of the darkness of the earth, the light of the heavens, and the nearness of god. Playing-forth makes this tragedy comprehensible by taking the steepest, shortest path] the path of exhausting metaphysics, so as to see what remains beneath it. Speeding up the history of metaphysics is achieved by a lucidity about being which had always been missed with the loss of the ontological difference. That is, it unfolds the guiding-question in the most effective and incisive way by giving an account of beings in a philosophy - speeding-up history. The history of philosophy is also put up for destruction, in that, by saying 'no' to it, the origin is put back into possession of itself while the individual moments of history are neglected. 'No' is 'yes' to the origin within history, and the uphill trajectory takes us to the absent god (CP, 125; 178). Metaphysics had a history which unfolded over millennia with a single motif: beings guide thought. Those who escaped this ancient destiny handed to us from at least the Medieval origin of the West, and beyond to the Greek beginning, were 'Holderlin-Kierkegaard-Nietzsche' (CP, 142—3; 204).

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They suffered the uprooting to which Western history is being driven and at the same time intimated their gods most intimately: they suffered the uprooting, and they intimated their gods. Heidegger sees these as the moment of divine entry and caesura. Hence the distress and the gods' intimation are our route to the futural, never-before-thought-of origin. Perhaps we are back with Christ, St Paul, St Augustine, but with emphasis on life, nothing and be-ing, not beingness, beings and Creation.4

Chapter 5

The Ground We Stand On

In this chapter we will examine Heidegger's path to Contributions through the 1930s as it can be witnessed in his lectures and public works. Such a chronological narrative is essential to a proper understanding of the book. We notice an initial enthusiasm for Nietzsche and Nazism (in a very personal manner as regards the latter), then, gradual disillusionment both with humans as a philosophical object and as agents of change in the recognition of the history of be-ing, especially because the Nazis did not become what he had hoped. The details of Heidegger's involvement in Nazism are not as shocking as this mention may appear to make it. 1 That Heidegger was involved in Nazism and was a great philosopher is, even, to his advantage for readers who are careful, since his work offers thought about that catastrophe of European history by one directly involved in it. At this time Heidegger's vision of the scheme of being tends to remove itself away from the almost psychological complexity of the analysis of Dasein and what Dasein knows, to a perspective in which discrete beings such as man or human being become simple elements to be opposed to the might and obscure hiddenness of the 'inward' and the 'spirit'. The realm of beings is grounded by technology, power and will, everydayness and 'reality', all of which can be summed up in the word 'being'. On the other hand, there is the inward and true act of spiritual Dasein, and, in the term which arrives after 1936, 'be-ing'. The interaction of these two regions is the theme of his work in the 1930s. I have had some trouble finalizing the shape of the present chapter. The problem is the same one which Heidegger himself faced. A great deal of his work in the 1930s is concerned with an apparently irrelevant problem for a philosopher of the future: the past history of philosophy. There are at least two major essays and lecture courses which bear the name 'metaphysics' in their title. While 'What is Metaphysics?' and Introduction to Metaphysics were being delivered, Heidegger himself was not very clear about what relation he himself bore to metaphysics. Often he seems to be writing

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a counter-weight to it, even while trying to observe its rules and to read its history properly. Thus he reads Aristotle (on several occasions in the 1930s) in order to explain what Aristotle thought, and also to find something new in his works. This kind of reading was called 'deconstruction' (Ab-bauj Destruktion) by Heidegger; it was a faithful reading which nevertheless discovered something new and more vital. This difficult work of retrieval and supercession of the old was, however, rendered almost defunct when Heidegger, around the year 1936, began to read the history of philosophy, the history of metaphysics since the Greek inception, not with the aim of transforming it, but with the aim of putting paid to it: he conceived of 'the other beginning to philosophy'. In a sense, unless we are willing to conceive of such an earth-shattering event, a new inception, then Heidegger's work will remain closed to us. The difference between 'being' and 'be-ing', which I will remark on more than once in this chapter, is symptomatic of this split between the old origin of philosophy (in which the Greeks felt wonder about beings) and the other origin of philosophy, which is based on shock and awe about how little of be-ing we can or do know. What Heidegger had once supposed to be his one theme - being, and the being of the human being (Dasein) - had, by the 1930s, begun to seem an involvement in power and reality, when he was really seeking that spiritual, free inwardness which we have, in previous chapters, tried to elucidate. My own hardship in trying to communicate the combat between inwardness and Reality is of a piece with Heidegger's own bitter struggle to get through an intellectual problem himself. How can Dasein, which is a part of being, its opening, pit itself against being? How can spirit be completely determined to resist being, when spirit is part of being? Or how can Dasein close itself to its own role in the activity of metaphysical existence? The only solution posed itself to Heidegger in terms of two histories: the old one, and the other one. To simplify the conflict, barely clear to Heidegger himself, between the metaphysical, old-historical sense of being, and the new, other one of be-ing, I will, at times in this chapter, speak of'Reality' as if it were a term interchangeable with 'being'; I will do this only because the too frequent use of a word which has two senses is apt to confuse the reader, and because there is a huge difference which the similarity of sound and spelling (being/be-ing) does not reveal. As I say, 'being' will sometimes be interchangeable with the term 'Reality'; the term be-ing (Seyri) on the other hand, will remain unchanged. Both being and be-ing have a relationship to beings (things), and this is where the stark division is most clear; this matter is discussed at the conclusion of this chapter. We will examine the way in which be-ing relates itself to beings there, by reading a joining of

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Contributions: 'Grounding'. We will thereby find ourselves back on familiar territory, as we have found it in Chapters 1-3.

'What is Metaphysics?' (1929) The important lecture of 1929 delivered on the occasion of Heidegger's assuming the professorship at Freiburg, 'What is Metaphysics?', deals with nothing because nothing is a way of not speaking of beings but rather of their origin. We already find ourselves heading outside of the first history of philosophy, towards an other history. 'If it does not concern itself with beings and inquire about their first cause among all beings, then the question must begin from that which is not a being. And this is precisely what the question names, and it capitalizes the word: the Nothing. This is the sole topic of the lecture' (P, 290). The Nothing is that which guides the history of Reality; it is not a temporal history, but one of unconcealing be-ing into that Reality; as we see, the two histories, that of be-ing, and that of being (Reality), are intermingling in a confusing way, one which does not settle a question, but invites us, and prompted Heidegger, to continue much further on his path over the next decade. As we will see in the public address of four years later, 'The Self-Affirmation of the German University', the reign of beings over us in their being (their Reality as power and will) is to be contrasted with the opening of be-ing itself through Da-sein as the Nothing and as 'spirit'. Such is the lecture which inaugurates the period of philosophy after Being and Time, in 1929.3 The stress on 'Nothing' marks it as a metaphysical lecture, however. Only for metaphysics does 'Nothing' belong to the name of be-ing; for metaphysics be-ing 'is' Nothing: for the much more intense and inward language of enowning, this Nothing would be called 'refusal' and 'abandonment'. But in 1929, naming it thus, Heidegger was doing a metaphysical study of metaphysics, a meta-metaphysics. A similar simplicity and resort to metaphysical ways of thinking would mark many other famous public speeches and courses of this decade. Four years later comes a complicated involvement of this Nothing with the State, which would last until about 1936 when Heidegger became pessimistic about the prospects for modern governments. Metaphysics backs up the 'world' of'beings' in which we currently stand in 'actuality'. It does not, therefore, offer the ability to assert be-ing in its changing and free character, and thereby let true human being overcome the overwhelming power of beings over us. This is the relationship between the 1929 lecture and the rectoral speech of 1933. This new science of the freedom of the clearing and

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truth of be-ing, as opposed to the fateful destiny of beings and their Reality, would be Heidegger's work-horse during the rectorate.

1933 and the Rectorate: Humanity Asserting Itself Against Reality Debate over Heidegger's guilt or innocence in the early 1930s, it seems to me, rests entirely on how seriously one takes his philosophy and his pretensions, that is, how truly great is the thinking of be-ing. The revelation of being can be seen, as Heidegger saw it, to surpass praise and blame, and to enter a new realm, one different to that of subjective personal responsibility, in an act on behalf of what is always blameless and always truth; acts of evil, stupid technological and ambition-driven power struggles, will be set aside when a single Dasein becomes the essence of humanity. The problems in the debate arise when we disagree about a) what be-ing means, and b) whether it is as original and urgent as Heidegger supposed it to be. Heidegger never admitted guilt about his alliance with the Nazi Party, and so never admitted the moral contamination, although he offered that he had been misled. What is most annoying about 'Heidegger's silence', his resolutely continuing to teach and think after and during the evil of Nazism — particularly to Arendt, Jaspers and commentators of recent years - is precisely that the Nazi policies hardly affected his philosophy at all: the thoughts which he had thought seemingly on behalf of the 1933 political uprising were much the same as those which he thought when the War was over. The important notion of the 'other beginning' to Western history's relation to be-ing did arise, but this is already presupposed in a confused way in his earliest work in an un-thematic way. Heidegger did not recognize the guilt of Germany as a special factor in the War; individuals were merely doing the work of fate in the way in which beings must act and appear today; he saw the gas chambers as the same as other types of industries, part of the devastation of life and Da-sein, even if traditional (metaphysical) ethics saw things in the typical metaphysical way. In a lecture of 1949 to a small audience in Bremen which thereafter became infamous (Safranski, 1998, 414) he lamented the German War-dead with no sense of what their deaths had made possible (Poggeler, 1993, 233); he pointed to atrocities committed by the Allies, such as the fire-bombing of Dresden, the use of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima, the camps in Siberia, and the expulsion and murder of the East Germans, which were equivalent in terms of be-ing-history (if not for conventional ethics) to the Holocaust, and all of which were quite typical kinds of activity when technological types of life are stirred into action. Heidegger did not seem to

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feel any guilt where it should have been expected for his alliance with the Nazi movement, for however brief a time, or in however tangential a way. He also retained his loyalty to the German people. Later, he denied Celan, a survivor of the camps, any explanation or apology for his activity in the 1930s, insisting that technology itself was to blame, but that every participant in technology is, therefore, to blame (Petzet, 1993, 199).4

'The Self-Assertion of the German University' (1933) 'The Self-Assertion of the German University', Heidegger's speech as rector in 1933, suggests that the university (Heidegger means Freiburg, but also the 'University' in general) make a demand on the basis of what it really is, and that it take upon itself the task of thinking through to the ground of present political events. In it, Heidegger presents Reality/being (Seiri) as if it were the power of destiny, the pressure of then current political and social powers: the Nazi government, technology, total-mobilization. Since Reality (the being of beings, all things together and their meaning) for humans is the State, then these are the fate of humans today. Given this, a certain self-assertion against Reality was necessary. The speech demands thought on what Heidegger here calls the fate of an action, the overwhelming power which holds it, and which it must release itself from; if an action is rooted in Dasein, then, like genius, it can defy fate. Like everything else, the university, whose existence is based on philosophical thinking about Reality, has either to promote its own Dasein, or not; asserting itself, it assures or gambles on its existence. One should point out that Heidegger's Dasein, almost like an act of originative genius which can defy fate, belongs to another kind of register than any which can be discussed objectively in the previous history of philosophy. His Dasein is not that of humanity or metaphysics. Its ability to choose the grounds for its choice are not subjective, or based on 'actual fact'. The university needs to assert itself in the face of the new 'labour service' and 'military service' then being instituted, as well as the possible extinction of Germany, a fear which Heidegger shared with the Nazis; he believed that thinking could, as it did in Ancient Greece, set up a relationship to actual happening, actual Dasein. Nowhere in Greek thinking does such a conception reveal itself (except vaguely, in Plato and Parmenides), but Heidegger is making a 'deconstruction' of Greek thought in order to retrieve what they themselves had not said overtly. Heidegger proposes a 'knowledge service':

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But there is, to be sure, one thing that we do know which follows from the essence of science as indicated above, and that is that the German university can only then attain form and power when the three forms of service - labour service, military service, and knowledge service - come together primordially into one formative force. (SA, 37) What asserts itself? Dasein, self, Nothing, that which is also called, in this open public address, 'spirit'. And what is it against? Beings-in-the-whole, Reality, being, fate, the overwhelming power of the given. There are therefore two types of being in this lecture, a duality which becomes more pronounced in Heidegger's mind with the years: on the one hand 'being' (Reality) as the whole set of things which weigh down on human beings and restrict freedom; and, then, Dasein or 'spirit', the freedom of action, based in a deeper existence than that of mere facts and beings. The address is not very clear about what 'spirit' is, assuming, as part of the deployment of the term, that his audience will know what he means by reference to the traditional term. This 'spirit' is a strangely traditional name for what Heidegger will soon call 'be-ing' and enowned Da-sein; Heidegger associates it with soil and Volk: For 'spirit' is neither the empty acumen nor the noncommittal play of wit nor the busy practice of never-ending rational analysis nor even world reason; rather, spirit is the determined resolve to the essence of Being, a resolve that is attuned to origins and knowing. And the spiritual world of a Volk is not its cultural superstructure, just as little as it is its arsenal of useful knowledge and values; rather, it is the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk, the power to arouse most inwardly and to shake most extensively the Volk's existence. A spiritual world alone will guarantee our Volk greatness. [Translation modified] (SA, 33-4) Fate is the overwhelming power of everything which exists as it bears down on an existing thing; it is the collectivity of beings-as-a-whole: 'Science is the questioning standing firm in the midst of the totality of being as it continually conceals itself. This active perseverance knows of its impotence in the face of Fate' (SA, 32). The university must face up to Reality and the forces which control it; facing up to it means thinking about it and taking steady measures to save humanity from global technology and metaphysical nihilism. Thereby, the Volk and the nation learn to exist, and become Dasein. Heidegger was concerned above all with the existence or not of the people, the race, although a 'race' is defined by him as those who hear a

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common voice of Reality: 'thinking about philosophy comes from "the people" only if it grasps that philosophy has to spring forth from its very ownmost origin and that this "leap" can succeed only if philosophy as such still belongs to its first, essential beginning' (CP, 30; 43). Heidegger was appealing to humans in their human potential to realize that humanity, against the powers of fate which are invisible to the metaphysical eye, and at a crisis point vis-a-vis technology, must assert itself. The enemy is non-being, practical rootlessness, being ignorantly carried along by Reality - nihilism: 'But where is the real work of nihilism at work? Where one clings to current beings and believes it is enough to take beings, as before, just as the beings that they are' (IM, 217). Hence the willful 'self-assertion'. This assertion, a strangely Nietzschean conception of how to work within be-ing, is a powerful movement in contrast to the later 'renunciation' and stillness of Contributions. Heidegger already presumes a Nietzschean Reality, the will to power, forming beings; his own 'assertion' is partially related to this Nietzschean will. But, 'Let not propositions and "ideas" be the rules of your being [Sein\. The Fiihrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law' (SA, 47). The 'reality' of the Fiihrer is the leader's spirit and attuned Dasein. At this time, Heidegger had yet to conceive of an alternative destiny or 'way of living' to that which Nietzsche described; as we saw, he was thinking of Reality as will to power. He saw it as the actual and only basic way of understanding beings today, and so as our destiny. The only way to transform this situation was to seek inwardness and authentic Dasein and to mix them with the will and power; when one seeks for something substantial on which to base this transformation, one finds merely Nothing, and so power has to be the means of expressing the transformation. (Even in Contributions, what one finds is be-ing in its retreat and self-concealing.) On the other hand, if Dasein were to find itself in a people, or, more likely today, in a single individual leader, then this would institute a point for leadership and conquest over fate, since this Nothingness would become corporeal, and more than Nothing: it would be spirit. Perhaps it is the problem of how Da-sein can be one alone, and yet be so obviously related to multiple individuals, which confused Heidegger, forcing him to observe, in the strong leader (Hitler), the chance of an authentic Da-sein which could lead humans (Germans) back to self-awareness. In any case, there is a strong element of leader-following in Heidegger's politics and in his view of how Da-sein should make effects in the orientation of humans towards beings and Reality. This is due to the singular uniqueness of Dasein, yet the multiplicity of humans. Heidegger was never to find much merit in democratic forms of government; they could never be the means for Da-sein to become universally recognized or followed.

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Man faces planetary technology, the destiny of human being in the present day, and must come out the victor, in control of it; he must overcome fate by returning fate to its ground in Dasein. The rather horrified and combative idea of modern technology and the Nazis' role in its transformation can be associated with profit with that of Ernst Jiinger and the 'Conservative Revolution'; it remained crucial to Heidegger's thought through Introduction to Metaphysics in 1935, and into 1936-38 when he wrote Contributions. As Nietzsche's superman harnesses the will of others to great efforts, and as the worker-officer of Jiinger does so - then Heidegger's spiritual philosopher does battle with the forces of fate and the being of beings, technological and metaphysical, to realize a genuine national community. It is noteworthy that, while Heidegger read Jiinger and similar writers with admiration, he was intent on a way out of technology, as opposed to a strengthening of it and an acceptance of it in the manner of the Jiinger worker-soldier. The invocation of Prometheus is entirely fitting in this regard (SA, 31), as, indeed, such Greek demi-gods are appropriate to be set alongside poetic and city-founding Dasein. The Greek model of original and unprecedented combat with the forces of fate and mere brute human being's situation in this world, in order to create a world by the power of art and philosophical science, was an ideal model which gave Heidegger comfort, but led him astray. One cannot become an original genius by imitating original genius. With disillusion came a revulsion with merely human efforts and the ideal of the leader as well as what this had been. While the rectoral work indicates the desire to revive Greece in Germany, later work introduces the notion of an other, completely original beginning, which would not be due to any imitation or the efforts of a leader.6

Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger presents the conflict between man and god, and the birth of Dasein in a historical polls, thus continuing the project of the rectoral address. This is not, therefore, a pure presentation of Da-sein facing be-ing, but is still involved in the human community and human interactions. The stress lies not outside human activity altogether; true, Heidegger does not have any faith in a revived Greek polls any longer; yet his way through the rectorate and its failure was to imagine that there were others like himself, who could approach the theme of his thinking with their own brilliance. But they are 'freaks of nature', moments of genius, events and people which a politics cannot regulate, having nothing to do with politics and policies of mobilization of the intellectual energies of a

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Volk, let alone with the now deeply regretted hope of an assertion of philosophy through the university, nor with a self-understanding of humans as agents with power to assert their human will from 'nothing' upon the fateful destiny of their place in Reality. In 1937, thinking of how he got beyond the failure, he wrote: Giving up and renouncing everything? No. Blindly affirming everything? No. Adjusting to everything? No. The only thing to do is to build ahead [This means] to stay and try to exhaust the possibility of coming into contact with individuals. To stay, but not in order to prepare the university - this is absurd now. Rather, to stay in order to preserve the tradition; in order to show exemplary figures, in order to occasionally implant a new claim in those essentially rare individuals — somewhere, sometimes, and for someone. This is neither a resignation nor a way out, but a necessity that originates from within the essentially philosophical task . . . To bring on a knowledge but to do so only when the exigency of truth is experienced. And this requires above all knowing about the forgetting of being and the destruction of truth. [Translation modified] (Petzet, 1993, xxix) 7 We find that while Introduction to Metaphysics is a quite public meditation for other people, in that they can learn to follow a Fiihrer, or a poet, Contributions itself is indifferent to followers, and speaks directly and purely to the poet, or philosopher, or statesman, rather than to an audience or a public. In the Introduction to Metaphysics lectures - asserting that Reality is incomprehensible to logic and science, since these activities are what make use of metaphysical insight but do not seek its ground, because they are vulgar and effective only because so generally common - Heidegger examines the thought of Sophocles and of tragedy where he finds a clear description of what he is looking for, an image of the individual man or Da-sein entering the simple fact of being-here, alive, unique, like an abyss, in terror or distress, and discovering its nature by rising out of the midst of beings, out of the 'homely' (IM, 161) into 'perdition' (IM, 173). The lecture still belongs to that rectoral period in which Heidegger looked to individuals with a sense of Dasein to become the leaders for others and to let be-ing intervene in the fate which beings are. We see the quite central place which 'The SelfAffirmation . . .' has in Heidegger scholarship, since it tends to join Being and Time with work of the 1930s. However, Contributions represents quite a break with it, since it expresses reluctance and refusal to become involved in politics any longer, and is removed from the discourse of'spirit', intent rather on releasing the self from involvement. Renunciation, not will and

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self-assertion, is the theme of the later work. The tragic individual (an essentially individual one) founds history and metaphysics, he rises above beings while part of them. Sophocles seems to both belong to metaphysics and yet to doubt whether Heraclitus and Parmenides exhaust the questioning of beings. Sophocles is the poet of disclosing the Greek metaphysician's sense that 'a man is a wonder', the notion that man, a being, can achieve infinite things. Though the poet has this kind of dual position in beings on the one hand and in be-ing on the other, the poet is not human; he must become inhuman to disclose this. Heidegger is moved by Antigone's murder (in Sophocles' Antigone] because she refuses the law of man and beings, of the way things are, in favour of gods and be-ing: following god, she upsets the human order; but in this way, she shows the human essence, that it both belongs to beings, and is also capable of destroying them, and taking part in the violence of be-ing. Humans are the most strange and uncanny because they have two homes: the one amongst beings, and the one which the tragic poet glimpses. This deeper home has no name except violence, or pure strife. One who is in this way (namely as the uncanniest) should be excluded from hearth and counsel. Nevertheless, the chorus's concluding words do not contradict what it previously says about being-human. Insofar as the chorus turns against the uncanniest, it says that this manner of being is not the everyday one. (IM, 175) We have found that the realm in which we find god and the place of be-ing is this very life here, here and now. But does this insight, intuition and nearness to god have the fate of being condemned by humans as the chorus condemns Antigone? And does it really found all of our normal human life; is it so dreadful and uncanny? Is the expulsion and murder of Antigone a perpetual fate of the grounders of the abyss? Heidegger considered the mood of speculation in the first beginning, which Aristotle fully completed, to be wonder about beings. Hence the framing of the question which metaphysical Dasein asks is, 'why are there beings rather than nothing?' Sophocles, one of those who sees that there is no ground, and is yet amazed in wonder at what there is, and simultaneously distressed - he rather exemplifies a position beyond metaphysics. His tragic figures are without recourse, they find no steady ground, and absence itself informs their actions. The tragic one both wonders, and is distressed, and from the ground of nothing, marvels at what there is, produced, as it seems, from nothing: but produced, and sent out, by a chance and a gamble - so that Da-sein, too, is a gamble, a violence which has to, as Da-sein, say 'Yes'

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to this overwhelming: 'As the breach for the opening up of being in beings a being that has been set to work - the Da-sein of historical humanity is an in-cident, the incident in which the violent powers of the released excessive violence of being suddenly emerge and go to work as history' (IM, 174). The tragic poem puts absence onto the stage in the shape of the 'uncanny human being'.

The Role of Da-sein: Self-Assertion Greek Approaches to Reality. So we find in Introduction to Metaphysics a move towards showing humans becoming Da-sein and the necessary violence which must accompany the opening up of be-ing in the State, in order to counteract the force and power of beings in their destinal givenness. Heidegger does not express it in these terms, of course; they would only become clearly relevant for him in a few years time. Instead, he remains in the metaphysical area of the discourse of 'being' (which I have been calling 'Reality'), and the beings which being determines as regards their effects on humans. This course, on 'metaphysics', traces the first steps toward an elucidation of Reality as constituted by beings, things, which are dimly seen to be disclosed by the open space, the truth which is Dasein. Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics is essentially a theory of tragedy and the tragic course of life in which the leaders who would counteract the enslavement to beings and technological Reality, those leaders who are not recognized, often dramatized in tragic terms, such as Antigone, Oedipus, Prometheus, suffer and go under. Heidegger expresses his vision of be-ing in metaphysical terms in the lectures; he is not, therefore, doing metaphysics or studying its past for the sake of studying the Grecian past; he is showing how Dasein was there, at the Greek inception, more or less apparently in Sophocles, Parmenides and Heraclitus, but that it came to a high point in the study of beings in Aristotle. In Heidegger's view, what is the role of Da-sein? Who is this leader? This poet or genius is able to resist normal Dasein, and to inaugurate a link to being itself, to that nothing which is simple being-here. Being-here can be delivered from the entanglement of everydayness, from the compulsion of its preoccupation with beings; for the mass of people, one supposes, this tragic course is not to be desired though it is possible; for the few, however, it is not only possible, it is a demand. According to the rectoral address, and the speeches surrounding it, such isolated and unique Dasein must become the only reality and law. But this is not so easy, because 'Being violates Dasein (in the literal sense), makes Dasein into the site of its appearing, envelops and pervades Dasein in its sway, and thereby holds it within

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being' (IM, 190). Dasein, for the most part, is overpowered by beings; it is unclear to itself. Dasein has never, even to the Greeks, been clear as the opening of truth, because it is so flooded by experience and beings; there are hints of it in Heraclitus and Plato (see 'Plato's Doctrine of Truth' [in P]). Reality is a kind of brute, given world, filled with beings, and no lucidity about beinghere itself is available. However, there is a way of counteracting this overwhelming dedication to fate. There is a strange moment in Introduction to Metaphysics when Heidegger suggests that to overcome technological will to power, Reality's grasp on Dasein, the only option Da-sein has is to refuse its role as Da-sein (spirit), resist its role as the clearing for such beings, otherwise it is destined and decided. Being/Reality needs Dasein in order to clear beings; Dasein is subject to violence as that opening up; when it is recognized, it appears to itself as violent strife. If Da-sein does act for Reality, and opens up the world, it must be violent, and it will eventually be overwhelmed by Reality, and simply die. In fact, beings require this violence, to the extent that they will shatter Da-sein against itself and cause it to cease to be. Death is Da-sein's ultimate act: Here, the uncanniest possibility of Dasein shows itself: to break the excessive violence of being through Dasein's ultimate act of violence against itself. Dasein does have this possibility as an empty way out, but it is this possibility insofar as it is; for as Dasein, it must indeed shatter against being in every act of violence. (IM, 189) Becoming Dasein Properly. This seems to mean that to be itself properly, Dasein must be violent against itself, try to stop doing its job. Heidegger's view of human being as Da-sein is that it interprets life and death purely in terms of the basic fact of being-here. Human life is essentially and entirely failure: it lacks any self-contained point, its only point being that it opens beings up and must thus be a kind of fissure. The more open it is as a fissure for beings, the more violent it is. Therefore,perhaps, to resist beings, to be able to have the power to assert itself against 'the overwhelming7, Dasein must cease to be the open-clearing and turn away from beings. It thereby refuses to be the violence and become the stillness. A philosopher is not open, but is conscious of his role as the open-space. Hesitantly, I suggest that human beings have to die away from beings and life in order to gain the clarity for philosophy. They must turn away from beings, resist the sway of technological beingness or Reality which they are revealed in, close up and find the ground itself: Da-sein in be-ing. This closure, renunciation, contradicts Dasein's nature, it would seem, since now Da-sein has no relation to beings; however, the turn away from beings in a kind of death is not perpetual, but, perhaps,

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part of that circling-turning which is more moderate than the tragic and violent acts of humans. The tragic one returns from the divine mood of renunciation, founding the Greek or German life. The readiness for the abyss, for recognizing himself as already-dead, concentrating simply on what he is, an opening, and becoming entwined with god, this is the tragic mood, and is characterized only as the terrible: it establishes the greatness of man. Man is able both to be closed to beings and resist destiny, and also to be one of those beings, acting and shaping them. Antigone is such a one; homeless, she is the poetry of be-ing, be-ing become mood, establishing the terrible as a human form, be-ing as an event happening within the midst of beings, a being in communion with gods. The Greek metaphysical relationship to be-ing must be tragic, and daring, risk-taking. To have existence and know it means to step into the overwhelming, which beings embody and which man feels as something overpowering and controlling, and then to recognize simple being-here when man ceases to be that clearing, ceasing to be the slave of Reality. Richardson, when reading Introduction to Metaphysics in his great study (1963), centred on 'the shattering': broken in pieces in its 'failure', Da-sein is the contention with Reality; Da-sein, the clearing of Reality, contends with its fate, for it has freedom. Its highest moment is its transparency to itself; that is, to see itself as finite and dying, and to see that this is so because Da-sein is only the inroad of Reality into its various real things. That is, to cease to be Dasein, and yet to see itself, to be able to think itself. The supreme triumph over being is to cease to be there (IM, 189). Tt is for There-being, in complete transparency to itself, to consent to be what it is: the There of being which is consummately finite. But is not this exactly what SZ [Being and Time] called the achievement of authenticity as brought to pass by re-solve? Decision and resolve are one' (Richardson, 1963, 287). One can almost feel Heidegger's heading to the ground, to a deeper be-ing than Reality, a process of lighting upon the ground taking place in his mind, and establishing a settled lucidity for it. For while he cuts himself off from beings and their Reality (power), he nevertheless turns towards be-ing, the nothing, spirit. But the lecture course on metaphysics was not the place for this announcement, for Heidegger was supposed to be speaking about how philosophy and human life have been approaching existence for millennia; to speak of be-ing required a different space than the lectures on metaphysics. Nevertheless, what we find in Heidegger's imitation and retrieval of the Greeks is not Greek philosophy. As he sees it, man is not a mere theoretician of beings, but that one which can intermediate with that which they shelter: the event of being-here. One will find no discussion of this in

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Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy. In Heidegger's view, a Greek city, a state, a nation, is only founded by daring against the overwhelming such as only a dramatist, not a philosopher, has ever described. But after the plenitude and the divine, the tragic one must fall back to the sway of thought and isolation, abstracted from god and be-ing, back amongst the sway of the other people and beings. Such a Da-sein uncovers be-ing into beings, and is the process of be-ing's truth. He belongs for the time of his absence at least, to the history of be-ing itself, to the truth, and can carry the humanpolis forward, allowing it to go forward according to that history, because instead of letting life just get on with itself, in a rut, century after century, the poet or thinker is lodged in the living source from which change in the way beings arise happens. Beings will, therefore, one day, no longer be determined as power, presence and the technological, but, due to those who have gone under, and those who will do so, they will find the means of carrying on into the other origin. At the time of writing Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger still believed that the future and the origin were not 'other\ but based in the past, in Greece: the greatness of that origin stood as a promise and a dangerous challenge to Germany. Reality is destined to be as it is, and holds beings to itself nowadays as technology; but that which, through Dasein and spirit, permits this sway to occur, and gives it momentum, because it is its origin, is be-ing. Only the history of be-ing is true history, and only it can ultimately decide what shall come to pass and what is not part of truth. Human Dasein, in the form of those tragic ones who go under and suffer for all that when they return, is the way in which that history works itself into beings. Thus Da-sein and its spirit is a grounder of thepolis and can show authentic life to others. Heidegger considered the Nazi movement to have originally been such a daring leap into the sway of spiritual be-ing and true history, against technological necessity and Western destiny, on the part of himself at least, or perhaps, Hitler, and those who voted him in. This, he says, is the Nazi movement's 'inner truth and greatness' (IM, 213); that is, it would require a great shift from human being to Da-sein if this greatness of the Nazi moment were to become relevant. He complains that various biological-racial cultural and economic theorists hijacked and ignored the event, and ruined its bravery. The Nazi revolution constituted a chance for humanity, in Germany at least, to demarcate a new existence, against the overwhelming uncontrolled global technology; the Reality of humans is the State, and with such a decision to find a leader, Da-sein can give such a State, delivering it over to true history. Summary. Beings have overpowered man; humans do not recognize who they are, and therefore do not take the decision; Heidegger thinks of this

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blindness as the state of being 'overwhelmed'. When it is not seen for what it is, Reality just holds humans in a state of abandonment while they are still subject to its power. The only way to get around the disastrous and violent fate is to refuse to be. He must turn against Reality in a way the Greeks did not, who rather followed its bidding in violence; they had their original insight into the abyss, and interpreted its gifts in terms of the beings in which they lived as constantly present beings, ideally encountered entities; they have bequeathed to us their notion of the formal reality of beings; now that history has reached a sour conclusion, winding down, it manifests itself in our present blindness and our straying course. For the Greeks, the matter of existence resolved itself into the question 'What is a being?'; for us it must now be 'How does it stand with be-ing?': The question of how it stands with being also proves to be the question of how it stands with our Dasein in history, of whether we stand in history or merely stagger. Everywhere we are underway amid beings, and yet we no longer know how it stands with being. We do not even know that we no longer know it. We are staggering even when we mutually reassure ourselves that we are not staggering, even when, as in recent times, people go so far as to show that this asking about being brings only confusion, that it has a destructive effect, that it is nihilism. (IM, 217) As we see, Heidegger can only permit, in order to remedy this 'staggering', a lucidity, an account of the truth in words from a place in be-ing. When he understands Reality, he sees it as the nihilistic technological moment of total-mobilization of all beings, including man himself. According to Contributions, such a lucidity is only possible when we stand in the proximity of gods, removed from existence as far as possible, ceasing to be the clearing of Reality's truth for a while, and simply staring into the absent nothing in the turn away from Reality and being human. Enownment to the moment of be-ing can take place then, and a true philosophy.

The Schelling Lectures The series of lectures on Schelling, given in the summer semester of 1936, indicate what was on Heidegger's mind in the mid-1930s. We do not find here the corrective to Schelling in a straightforward way, nor a condemnation of his inadequacies. Rather, Heidegger reads in Schelling what prefigures his own quest for the happening of be-ing, for it is only at this time that Heidegger conceives of Seyn (be-ing) as that deep ground to which

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Dasein relates, something which beings only shelter, and which is not 'the being of beings', as, for example, 'power' is for Nietzsche. Be-ing (Seyn) is recognized as the absolutely pure, something like the unity of beings with their ground, something to which Dasein belongs. Schelling is acclaimed as the high-point of post-Kantian German Idealism in its lineage stemming from Leibniz and Descartes. Schelling's deficiency is not so much the area about which and in which he was thinking: it lies in the perhaps extrinsically important concepts and systematic method which he adopted. But these concepts and the systematic method are said to have been necessary: while he could not escape them, Schelling could not progress either. Heidegger suggests that in the question of be-ing, the only step forward could be achieved if his own, Heideggerian methods, were taken up. It seems to me that, on the whole, Heidegger only got his notion of be-ing from this reading of Schelling, however, and the near simultaneous reading of Holderlin. It represents a significant step beyond Being and Time, 'The Self-Affirmation . . .' and Introduction to Metaphysics. This preoccupation, which Heidegger shared with Schelling, is the very heart of his philosophy, the step into be-ing, beyond beings and every support, in order to base all phenomena and all existence on the surest basis. Given the systematic idealist tradition in which this step takes place, the ground which will be found will be the human being in its deepest form, and the matter in which we are dealing will be the very happening of all events as a whole, or the event of be-ing itself. Heidegger quotes Schelling: 'Only he has come to the ground of himself and has known the whole depth of life who has once abandoned everything and has himself been abandoned by everything. He for whom everything disappeared and who saw himself alone with the infinite: a great step which Plato compared to death.' (ST, 7) As we said of Da-sein when reading Introduction to Metaphysics with Richardson, 'death' or sensual extinction is a kind of new life of lucidity. The issue which causes most trouble, and which motivates this step beyond beings and into abandonment, is, of course, the enterprise of philosophy itself. There is be-ing, and there is also the need to understand it from the ground up. The demand to find absolute truth requires that in some area of the human self, there is the ability to think beyond the normal. Given that this might not yet be possible, and might not ever be possible, Schelling's Treatise is an 'Inquiry', not a definite standpoint, just as Heidegger's work is a set of 'Contributions', not a system. In any case, we see Heidegger moving into a final state of readiness for the full announcement of Da-sein, irrespective of beings and mundane history. With the example of Schelling, it seems to

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me, Heidegger could conceive of a philosophy which is utterly convinced that beings are mere 'shelters' of be-ing. Schelling's characterization of the deepest most attuned element of human being is, in a metaphysical conceptualization, 'freedom'. This freedom contrasts with Schelling's other characteristic and basic view of reality: anything which exists, including human being, is part of God; hence, Schelling was, following Spinoza, a pantheist. In Schelling's view, be-ing is God. This lecture series, therefore, is the study of philosophical pantheism and its difficult relationship to human freedom; the problem is that pantheism is fatalism, while human freedom implies the obverse of fatalism. To resolve what is, indeed, the question of be-ing and the human relationship to it, Schelling brings forward the matter of 'evil' or nothingness. This evil and nothingness are thus placed squarely within God (or be-ing) as 'lack': As a lack, it is true that a lack is not-being-present. Nevertheless, this absence is not nothing. The blind man who has lost his sight will argue vigorously against the statement that blindness is nothing existent and nothing depressing and nothing burdensome. Thus, nothingness is not nugatory; but, rather, something tremendous, the most tremendous element in the nature of being. (ST, 101) Schelling's treatise then posits be-ing as something historical, such that it becomes and must become aware of itself, transform itself, from ground into things with freedom, so as to overcome its nothingness or its evil, that lack. This transformation of God into a reflection upon Himself is where man arises, since, with the lack within God, it is possible for freedom and individuals to arise. We are not, as Heidegger is not, providing this reading of Schelling so as to show a 'proper' philosophy. It would be quite trivial to show that and how Schelling was wrong or right. As Heidegger says, Schelling was seeking something which he could not properly conceptualize: he became 'stranded' in his efforts (ST, 97), and kept on pushing forward fruitlessly, with concepts of God, evil, reflection, history and human freedom. Characteristic of all of modern philosophy, too, God or the ground is characterized as desire, and also spirit: desire for what is missing, and struggle which human beings easily assume. We see, in Heidegger's closing words, that in 1936 he was fascinated by this picture of what be-ing and humans are, a vision in which 'God is not debased to the level of man, but on the contrary, man is experienced in what drives him beyond himself (ST, 164). The fact of human freedom has for him its own factuality. Man is not an object of observation placed before us which we then drape with little

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everyday feelings. Rather, man is experienced in the insight into the abysses and heights of being, in regard to the terrible element of the godhead, the lifedread of all creatures, the sadness of all created creators, the malice of evil and the will of love. (ST, 164) It is not that the problem of be-ing and God must be measured or understood against our knowledge of man, but the other way around: man must be measured against God, be-ing and evil. Man, in a sense, has to be dissolved by the thought of be-ing. With such a vision of man, Heidegger left behind the confusion of politics, the polls, the Nazi involvement, and any attempt to find be-ing by making overtures to the will of his contemporaries. Finally, he ceased to ponder the being of beings, and centred on be-ing itself, (Schelling's 'God'). He merely faced god and let human being become its hidden essence by doing philosophy.

Grounding At the start of this chapter, I tried to give a simplified view of Heidegger's division of be-ing into two parts: being and beings in the first history (Reality) ; and then Dasein (or spirit) in the other history, and its interaction with be-ing. Throughout this chapter, we have seen a conflict between Dasein and beings; Heidegger sought to assert Dasein against such beings and the fate of which they are part. In a way, his ideas were unclear during the 1930s since he was pitting Dasein against its own world; that is, against the metaphysically determined view of what the world is. Gradually, he sensed and was able to speak of a deeper ground: be-ing (Seyri). This deeper ground is not, however, deeper than beings and being; rather, when it came to Heidegger's mind, it came with the notion of the other beginning of the history of philosophy: these two types of thinking about being-here in life are not comparable, for they are completely different to each other. In a popular concept of recent continental philosophy, they are 'other' to each other; they are like two sides of a door. For be-ing to have a place in his thought, it would belong to a new history. In 1933 he still saw a return to the Greek origin as enough, as the way forward; now, in 1936, it is a matter of inaugurating a totally other beginning, one concealed in that Greek one. Now, if beings used to be a matter of fate and were essentially power in their being, how does Seyn relate to these same beings? If all thinking-mindfulness does not focus on the one thing, namely that beings are lighted up and inhere in the openness, or within a 't/here',

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and that man himself errantly wanders through this openness without either being familiar with, or belonging to, the sway of the clearing, then all pursuit of philosophy that is underway continues to be lost in endless imitations of metaphysics whose 'un-sway' (inseparable from the sway) disseminates in such a manner that it lets the question concerning the truth of be-ing remain ungraspable. (M, 184) 'Grounding' could be seen as the most important chapter of Contributions by reference to conventional philosophical expectations, since while Contributions 'joins' elements together, this chapter tends to analyse them. It tries to explain how be-ing is distinct from Da-sein, earth from world, man from god, space from time, beings from be-ing, and how each is entirely a part of a one-fold; it does so, meanwhile, as a 'speaking' from the site of the one-fold entirety, since this is the means of speaking the almost ineffable which this unity is. The issue is the relation between beings, humans, being-here in being, and then language. 'Humanity is the Here that is open in itself. Beings stand within this Here and are set to work in it' (IM, 219). The notion that both the subjective cogito and objective beings are pre-given in their difference is not something which Heidegger accepts. The traditional subject-object distinction, set out by Kant in his critical philosophy, is overcome by this same Heideggerian concept of be-ing as mediated by being-here. It was Holderlin's idea to use the name 'be-ing' for this unity: Being - expresses the connection between subject and object. Where subject and object are united altogether and not only in part, that is, united in such a manner that no separation can be performed without violating the essence of what is to be separated, there and nowhere else can be spoken of Being proper, as is the case with intellectual intuition. (Holderlin, 1988,37) But be-ing is itself an unspeakable emptiness, except when we begin to speak of the space-time into which it projects itself. For, in space-time, beings are the same thing as be-ing: they are shelters of it.

Time-Space and Grounding Heidegger's account of time-space and its play is intended to link be-ing to being-here, and then to suggest how beings such as humans thence emerge. Consistent with his refusal to think overtly about beings except

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as those things which conceal within themselves the happening of be-ing, Heidegger treats time-space, that realm within which we live and act, as something projected from Da-sein, and therefore as something derivative. Time and space, the element in which humans live, are a juncture of transport and captivation, the Tree-play of time-space of chaos and of hints. What belongs to be-ing' (CP, 230; 329). In the opening of the 'there' of Da-sein, time and space operate. The opening is a 'play-space', it is opened up from the clearing of Da-sein. One could imagine be-ing as a great happening without limit, containing an opening which Da-sein is, yet this opening would permit nothing to happen, and be-ing would be history-less, unless there was a certain withholding of be-ing itself, and unless it also accepted a limit to itself in the form of the nothing, permitting that 'play'. At this level, a level of approaching the area in which man, earth and world exist, we are removed from be-ing itself, and enter the area in which be-ing hides itself in an uninteresting nothingness of time's play with space. There, beings arise, conceal their origin, and are permitted a space and time in which to give vent to a certain freedom, or play (leeway, or 'give' in the sense that a machine has an amount of'play' which permits its sound functioning) in which they captivate us and transport themselves. This time-space is the primordial and essential nature of 'normal' space and time. For metaphysical thinking, time and space have a mathematical and strictly measurable dimension; however, in the other beginning of the history of be-ing, in Da-sein, time and space, the pre-conditions for the appearance of beings, arise from the event of be-ing itself: they are be-ing seen and happening from the perspective of those who are sited in be-ing as beings. Essentially, the beings which arise within time-space are 'simultaneous' with be-ing itself, and hide it. It is important to note that be-ing happens only with the clearing of being-here, and being-here happens in turn in the midst of beings, and therefore, in the play of time-space, and there will always be beings. 'The truth of be-ing and the essential swaying of be-ing is neither what is earlier nor what is later. Da-sein is the simultaneity of time-space with what is true as a being' (CP, 155-6; 223). As for the actual shape and meaning of the beings within the world, one gets the impression that Heidegger would not be content to leave as it is the apparent usefulness and presence, the availability of beings as science conceives them. The scientific account of beings, an account which is actually multiple (since no 'universal field' exists for which a universal field theory could provide), treats beings as 'things-inthemselves' in a very unphilosophical way, not as what they truly are, namely, as shelters of be-ing.8 It is hard to see how, if Heidegger's view of

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beings were to become commonplace in an other history of philosophy, any of our sciences (whether of the physical kind, or of the human kind psychology, sociology, economics, and so on) would maintain their use. This, of course, would only be disadvantageous if we were in fear of foreign civilizations with a superior technology (should there ever be any in the future), or if we value what these sciences have given us: cloning of beings in many senses, inter-planetary travel, population explosion, extended lifespans without any sense of living, the burgeoning of useful information, the industrialization of food production, extinctions of various animal species, globalized and standardized human being whose reality is constantly observed and regulated by tele-technological means, global travel and the indifference to time or space, environmental disasters, nuclear energy, poisoning of the earth's life, state-wide mobilizations of armies and war-economies, to name only some of the most spectacular results. Truth The origin and arrival of a new history, announced and hinted at with the arrival of a god, and a new mood of crudest despair or distress, comes with both a new notion of the real truth of beings, and of truth itself. Even, however, with the new beginning and orientation to be-ing, be-ing does not thereby become clear and apparent: rather, it is withdrawn and concealed. Truth itself is the fact of being-here, but what it springs from, be-ing, is concealed. 168. Da-sein and Be-ing Da-sein means en-ownment in enowning as in the essential sway of be-ing. But be-ing comes to truth only on the ground of Da-sein. But wherever plant, animal, rock and sea and sky become beings, without falling into objectness, there withdrawal (refusal/not-granting) of being reigns - be-ing as withdrawal. But withdrawal belongs to Da-sein. The abandonment of being is the first dawning of be-ing as selfsheltering-concealing from out of the night of metaphysics, in and through which beings pushed ahead into appearing and thus into objectness and be-ing became an addendum in the form of the apriori. But how much in the light that belongs to abground must the clearing for self-sheltering-concealing be lit up, so that the withdrawal does not appear superficially as a mere nothing but rather reigns as gifting. (CP, 207; 293)

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Be-ing is sheltered in beings; when we inspect those beings for the be-ing which gifts them to us, we find nothing. Be-ing withdraws as it gives; wherever there is sea, rock, sky, etc., there is also the sheltering of something which hides itself. Let us remind ourselves again what this 'it' is: it is 'being-here', and nothing else except the philosophy which thinks about that. It is that by which there is be-ing, and in itself a happening which seems also to be 'owned' by something, always so 'happening'. The happening is the truth itself: 234. The Question Concerning Truth (Nietzsche) The last and most passionate one to inquire into truth is Nietzsche. For on the one hand he proceeds from 'our not having the truth' (XI, 159) and on the other hand he still asks what truth is - nay, even what it is worth (VII, 471). And yet, Nietzsche does not inquire originarily into truth. For, with this word he almost always means 'what is true'; and whenever he asks about the essence of what is true, this is entangled in the tradition and does not come from an originary mindfulness such that this mindfulness is immediately grasped as the essential decision also about 'what is true'. Of course, when we inquire more originarily, then this never guarantees a more certain answer - on the contrary, only a higher question-worthiness of what is ownmost to truth. And we need this question-worthiness, for otherwise what is true will continue to make no difference. (CP, 253; 362) When Nietzsche speaks of truth, he has not made the hazardous daring leap beyond beings: he still thinks of actual fact, the contingent events of our mundane life, and beings as understood in a true or false way: he belongs to the first history. Heidegger on the other hand, sees the primary opening up and disclosure of beings as the act of truth, so that what is true is quite simply the gifting and opening up, the unconcealing of be-ing in the first place, which only subsequently shows us beings and reality while hiding itself. Heidegger's extreme reservation about 'life' as Nietzsche uses the term is that it means something like 'appearance and what is common' to all people, something like 'what is common' and 'actuality' (CP, 257; 367-8). However, in the other beginning, 'life' is a matter of living amongst beings as shelters of the abyssal. What the abyssal shows is only life as truth itself. Da-sein becomes the abode of the truth of being. The abode of being is the place where man stands as Da-sein. Da-sein is abode, place within the history of be-ing.9

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The In-Between and Settlement 'Be-ing - nothing godly, nothing human, nothing worldly, nothing earthly, and yet the "in-between" to all these in one - inexplicable, without effect: be-ing sways outside power and powerlessness' (M, 69). The idea is that in all of our concepts and ways of approaching the primal 'something', we cannot speak of it with the use of words such as 'our world', 'earth', 'god', or human-life-experience. It must be somewhere where they all meet, or in between them. This 'between' is a calm settlement of the event. Introduction to Metaphysics introduced us to the subtle hint of an other history of philosophy within Greek metaphysics and its primal and original genii, Parmenides, Sophocles, Heraclitus, Aristotle. What could not be said there, for it is not a metaphysical statement to be read in their works, is that between all of its concepts of'world', 'finitude', 'beings', 'reality', 'power', and so on, there is a hint of something else, so faint, and yet harbouring our whole future existence. Heidegger names it 'the settlement', and a certain 'stillness'. The settlement is the point of harmony and stillness in which humans can live and gods find a place amidst the primal and possible chaos of be-ing. If there were no such settlement, there would be only the monolith of be-ing as it happens immediately. Related to this settlement is the coming and going of time-space. At the place where settlement takes place, in the between, god and man meet or counter each other. Their meeting is a steady place, the moment of time-space; it makes an enduring moment in the chaos of be-ing. In itself be-ing is nowhere, but Da-sein gives it a place: 'Only the historical "arrival-in-between" of man unto the truth of be-ing necessitates and makes possible a relation by virtue of which man comports himself to beings, which as such are preserved in the constancy and presencing, because beings seem to bring about the nearest and the unique counter-holding ground against the ab-ground' (M, 77). 'En-ownment is settlement' (M, 273).

Chapter 6

The Last God and Poetry

Ask be-ing! And in its stillness as in the beginning of the word god responds. You may roam through all beings; nowhere does the trace of god manifest itself. (M, 314) We have already had occasion to speak of Holderlin's impact on Heidegger's work during the early and mid 1930s, especially as it is seen in the lectures on 'The Rhine' and 'Germania' (Heidegger, 1980), and then in the 1936 talk, 'Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry', where Heidegger's own ideas mirror those of Holderlin. Holderlin helped Heidegger to get beyond the rectoral period in which he had made mistakes, and had put his hope in a self-estimation which was far from practical. He had hoped, for example, that the churches would give their full co-operation to a leader, whether Hitler or himself, and, in doing so, begin to think of be-ing and the god who is its sign, leaving moribund Christianity behind. Holderlin, the poet of the ground of beings, rather than of beings themselves, gave to Heidegger a vision of a writing written from that ground, rather than from the humanity which 'staggers' on that ground. With his poetry which spoke of the death of God in a way which outlasted all temporary measures to recruit Christian believers and cultural bodies, he held out the vision of the necessity of the eventual recognition by all that, while the churches were finished, a new god would near or depart. In fine, Heidegger saw that there are other kinds of'founders' of be-ing than the merely political or religious ones, and that a transformation of humanity into its proper Da-sein can take place without actual efforts being made; rather, efforts of the 'soul' and the mind, in events of saying, language and poetry would suffice today as preparation. Holderlin had gone to the opposite kind of revolution to the Heidegger of the rectorate. He had entered be-ing itself, rather than trying to change the way that human beings comport themselves to it in the State. He lamented the passing of the old gods from thepolis of modern humanity, and prophesied the coming of the new gods; in the process of entering that ground he was blinded by the night. 'Poetry awakens the illusion of the unreal and of the dream as opposed to the tangible and clamorous actuality in which we

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believe ourselves to be at home' (EHP, 62). While leaving the 'actual' time of thepolis, the founders of be-ing make way for a different age in the time of a people, not the time of the everyday. In be-ing-history a time starts, rises to a height, and declines as that people rests itself in its clear or obscure ground. Such a rhythm of growth and decline is the proper history which he observed, and foresaw. Such a coming origin is deeply complicit with the hint and announcement of a coming, transient, god. We saw in Chapters 1 and 2 that there is a difference between Da-sein and normal, everyday humans. For humans, be-ing is thepolis and the realm of beings, but for Da-sein it is the event of happening itself, the event of beinghere at all, a spring or leap-up in which we can take part, or can hide from. Heidegger viewed Holderlin's poetry as the speaking from that event for humans, but nevertheless as a speaking which is not the human voice in the everyday sense. In reaction to German Idealism, Holderlin framed his view of the unity of all things — be-ing — as a primal unity from which 'we' have fallen and where poetry speaks between Da-sein and man, like the voice of the demi-god. In parts of his theory and poetry, it is clear that Holderlin viewed the lost unity as a time, never experienced, in which man and god were one. Both humans and god have been ejected from that unity, and god, seeing infinitely more clearly than humans, wants above all, to return to it. Heidegger echoes this, writing: This historical moment is no 'ideal-state,' because an ideal-state always runs counter to what is ownmost to history. Rather, this moment is the enownment of that turning in which the truth of be-ing comes to the be-ing of truth, since god needs be-ing and man as Da-sein must have grounded the belongingness to be-ing. Then, for this moment, be-ing as the innermost 'between' is like the nothing; god overpowers man and man surpasses god - in immediacy, as it were, and yet both only in enowning, which is what the truth of be-ing itself is. (CP, 292; 415) So Da-sein is the route back to be-ing not only for humans, but also for gods. Therefore, if humans change themselves into Da-sein, they become the link to existence for gods. Clearly, this is a view of humanity and our immediate possession of ourselves which is not commonplace or positivistic. The essential, basic, and perhaps the only necessary determination of human consciousness and life for the German Idealists is the intellect (spirit) and freedom which we obviously possess. This freedom and intellect belong to us only as a consequence of our loss of unity; similarly, these belong to gods in a higher degree: but they do not belong to existence at all. On the one hand, there are gods with intellect and freedom; on the other, be-ing, which

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has neither of these: in the middle stand humans, who negotiate between them. For Holderlin, what counts, therefore, about human life, is the hint of god, for the hint of god's nearness is the hint of our coming close to our original home in a unity of mind and be-ing. To feel the hint it is necessary to become our essential self. Such hints are the emotional attunements of sadness or joy, and, crucially to his poetry, the awareness of beauty. The signs of beauty in 'nature' and in life are the hints of god. This view of god is not that of an answer to prayers in a practical way, nor the ideal of a god who created us, and so on. But then again, the god is incomparably important in this scheme; the basis of our existence is deeply and intrinsically related to god, or our becoming 'demi-gods'. That experience is, naturally, most dangerously related to madness and the suffering spoken of in the poem of Holderlin's madness which Heidegger esteemed very highly, the poem beginning 'In lovely blueness blooms . . .' (Holderlin, 1986, 245-8). It is the picture and voice of a simple, tragic and finite life. 105. Holderlin - Kierkegaard - Nietzsche Let no one today be so presumptuous as to take it as mere coincidence that these three, who, each in his own way, in the end suffered profoundly the uprooting to which Western history is being driven and who at the same time intimated their gods most intimately - that these three had to depart from the brightness of their days prematurely. What is being prepared for? What does it mean that the first of these three, Holderlin, became at the same time the one who poeticized thefurthest ahead, in an epoch when thinking once again aspired to know all history up to that point absolutely? (CP, 142-3; 204) Holderlin was dually important because of his relation to nature, or, in his later poetry, his relation to the variations in the story of be-ing. Holderlin 'dived' into, leaped into Da-sein, as the non-human opening in which the essential history of things takes place; Holderlin was conscious of this time as that in which the holy is no longer recognized as the event which we take place in. His notion of be-ing as the binding of subjectivity and objectivity is perhaps found nowhere else in quite so Heideggerian a way. Be-ing joins, as 'Judgment and Truth' (Holderlin, 1988, 37-8) says, the substantial, historical and independent existence of the total historical object to the living actuality of the subjective consciousness.2 Man only becomes this subjective-object when he intuits a mood in himself; this mood is the nearness of god; conversely, the god is a requirement of that mood. Man is therefore that strangest of beings which, in its standing amongst other

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beings, does not belong to them, but must seek its home by journeying outside itself: this was explained by Holderlin in reading Sophocles and other Greek poets, and imputes to man an inescapably tragic fate. Through a wealth of indications and overt attributions, Heidegger showed that he relied on Holderlin's work and poetry as something from which he both learnt and where he found confirmation of his own ideas. Notice also the matter of language: the matter of Holderlin's poetry is the matter of hearing a sort of primordial Saying.3 Holderlin himself was a student of the Greeks, and was intent on discovering god; he was distressed by the death of the Christian faith, and sure that another nearness to god was immanent. There was something in the Greek experience of life which indicated a fascination with be-ing itself in those Greeks, and a certain intensity which indicated that they had such a contact with both gods and be-ing. It was a naive nearness to be-ing which expressed itself in forms, and the love of beauty, but not in clear philosophy; the typical Greek philosophy tends to contradict the Greek way of life and the Greek tragedy and art; it was left to a later epoch, the German one, perhaps, to think be-ing through clearly. Holderlin's own intuition of be-ing was therefore in part recollected from the past, a sense of life which was once-upon-atime intense and which could be read in between the lines of Greek works and seen in their culture, their art, science and their whole 'history'. This sounds romantic and nostalgic: but it is the essential way in which life happens: life's immediacy is deferred to the past so that it has to be recollected, as having happened intensely and more closely at a distant past or future time which never actually happened. Greek 'history' shows signs of having been closely lived as an essential history, and to have been sustained by a fiery closeness to be-ing. But this Greek history is not, therefore, the overt one, told in Greek and modern history books; it is a hidden one, unconscious even and especially in the Greeks who so lived. 'Only history which is grounded in Da-sein has the guarantee of belonging to the truth of being' (CP, 21; 29). Holderlin's type of history is therefore distinct from normal historical accounts. For example, the events of ordinary humanistic history would tell of the rise of Prussia and the decline of Viennese Austria contemporaneously with the poet; on the other hand, Heidegger conceives of a history which 'exposes to that history whose "events" are nothing other than thrusts of en-ownment itself (CP, 326; 463): the events of essential history are those at which Da-sein becomes itself, and connects with its ground; it speaks of its past and future specifically with regard to how it interprets its own beinghere, not as regards the rise of powers, various turns of events, or the progress of the rational animal. As Heidegger views the past, it arose with a first

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beginning in the Greeks, went through a meditation on the Creator God in the medieval era, and declined in modernism. Thoughtful reflection on this first beginning, retrieving it, is one of the means of retrieving and thinking the other beginning. Thinking the past is thereby raising the question of the future. Holderlin's work must be 'held fast' (BQ, 118), it reflects on the first beginning and shows the thoughts which did not occur in it.

The Last God The last god as it is presented and thought, as it exists through Da-sein and in the text of Contributions, is by no means something which Heidegger learnt from Holderlin; Heidegger had, at least before he began to take Holderlin seriously as a guide to thinking, thought of a god which was superior to any known, theological or metaphysically understood God. His sense of the divine was of something coterminous with the opening of truth. 'Ask be-ing! And in its stillness as in the beginning of the word god responds' (M, 314). We cannot therefore offer the reading of Holderlin alongside 'the last god' as a new theme of his writing of the mid-1930s unreservedly. However, excepting Nietzsche, who shared with the poet the feeling that there was something which had remained hidden about the divine for too long, Holderlin was the source from which that mood of holy disclosure had a first airing and thinking-through as Heidegger saw it. The last god offers a name which is potentially offensive and 'bad theology'; how can there be many gods? And how can one more supervene on others, and replace them, as 'the last'? Heidegger considered gods to be elements of a human relation to the human self in an authentic relation; the fulfilled self is 'Da-sein': this fulfilled self is one which recognizes itself as a conscious opening up of the concealed: a god is a moment of spiritual transformation in humans when they recognize that they are no more than the opening of be-ing; he therefore does not consider the name of'the last' to be a name applied to an existent thing which could die, or be born as the last, or first: gods are reflections of be-ing, and a new sort of be-ing means a new sort of god. As for the sense that this god arrives in the default of other 'past' gods, Heidegger's view of be-ing is that its history is not that of linear time: be-ing is beyond mundane calculations. The name 'last' or 'ultimate' is the essential name of god, since it highlights the 'onceness' and unique transience of the god. Besides, 'last' means that this god, too, would be finite; yet Heidegger does not mean that there will be a time, to which he looks forward, when gods will be no more; so 'last' means something other than 'finite':

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But the last god, is that not debasing god, nay the greatest blasphemy? But what if the last god has to be so named because in the end the decision about gods brings under and among gods and thus makes what is ownmost to the uniqueness of the divine being [Gottwesen] most prominent? If we think calculatively here and take this 'last' merely as ceasing and the end, instead of as the utmost and briefest decision about what is highest, then of course all knowing awareness of the last god is impossible. But in thinking the divine being, how should one intend to reckon, instead of being all-around mindful of the danger of what is estranging and incalculable? (CP, 286; 406-7) Clearly, 'last' is not meant in terms of the 'final' god, but as 'beyond number' (it is a word which disrupts non-essential usages of numbering on principle), that is, it means the essential god, the most philosophical god. 'Last' and 'ultimate' means beyond any numbering, but until we realize this, there will only be gods (plural). The last god is last because it is the most powerful vis-a-vis be-ing. We have stressed that the god is the means of joining beinghere together with itself in an attuned, moody thinking; this thinking relates mind to being-here, to the deep self, to be-ing, which means the sense of being happening. Heidegger so often speaks of god because our nearness to god must come first, and originate the new thinking; in itself that philosophical thinking is still too weak to inaugurate itself. The thoughtful 'hearing' relation which being-here has to be-ing is called by Heidegger 'the turning': Turning holds sway between the call (to the one belonging) and the belonging (of the one who is called). Turning is counter-turning \Widerkehr}. The call unto leaping-into enownment is the grand stillness of the most sheltered and concealed self-knowing. All language of Da-sein has its origin here and is therefore essentially stillness (cf. reservedness, enowning, truth, and language). As counter-turning enowning 'is' thus the highest mastery over the coming-toward and the flight of the gods who have been. The utmost god needs be-ing. The call is befalling and staying-away in the mystery of enownment. The hints of the last gods are at play in the turning as onset and stayingaway of the arrival and flight of gods and their places of mastery. The law of the last god is hinted at in these hints, the law of the great individuation in Da-sein, of the aloneness of the sacrifice, of the uniqueness of choosing the shortest and steepest pathway. (CP, 287; 408)

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As we see, the relation of being-here to be-ing is the turning between the call: it is the stillness and 'self-knowing' of this experience in a being (namely, man) in which man knows himself in stillness and shelters, protects and allows to get ready the sense of be-ing. If the god brings a law, then that law is nothing 'moral' in the common sense, but the lawful injunction that we become Da-sein. Everything which Da-sein accounts normal derives from this relation, in particular his language, which thus has a pregiven fittingness to speak intimately with be-ing. Again, as we see, Heidegger puts this relation as the place to which the god is at home near to be-ing since be-ing is not belonging to gods, but they 'need' it. The god seems to impose a demand and a law of how the turn to be-ing must be achieved: as a holy mood, a stillness, an innerness, and a solitary sacrifice away from the multitude of beings to which Da-sein is inherently related. The point about the god is that it intimates how finite and 'once-only' being and being-here is: life is a history (which we see happening all around us, and must learn to see essentially), in which the decision has to happen as to whether be-ing replaces beings in their presence with something else: when we think philosophically of existence we must think of being-here, not of beings. Gods hint to us and to Da-sein, in beings and in history, about a turn inwards, the counter-turning of being-called and belonging to the happening of be-ing. Be-ing as this relation is not always there, not lying in wait, like a subjacent layer: it happens only in the turn to it, and in the history thus created from the act and hint, uniquely. In such essential swaying of the hint, be-ing itself comes to its fullness. Fullness is preparedness for becoming a fruit and a gifting. Herein holds sway what is the last, the essential end, required out of the beginning but not carried out in it. Here the innermost finitude of be-ing reveals itself: in the hint of the last god. (CP, 288; 410) Perhaps above all, if we have any experience of an experience of God ourselves, as Christians, or members of other religions, whether it was when we were children, adolescents, or at times of great happiness or mourning, then these experiences, no doubt only inadequately accounted for by theology, are those experiences of a divine nearness which Heidegger means to draw on as hints of a possible nearness to be-ing, and indications of where we should start when we think about the finite position in which we exist. On consideration, it seems natural that Heidegger's own obvious belonging to the Catholic Church as a youth, and his continual link to religion throughout his life, should bestow on him a sense of God which is distinctly powerful, monotheistic, and devoted.

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'But how should thinking succeed in achieving what earlier remained withheld from the poet (Holderlin)? Or do we have to wrest his path in the direction of the truth of be-ing?' (CP, 9-10; 12). Heidegger does not believe that Holderlin had direct cognizance of the field in which he dwelt. In the creative one - the thrower of the truth of be-ing - a stillness from which be-ing (as enowning) can be heard, is opened up; yet this does not imply that Holderlin had a clear mind as to what was occurring to him. Heidegger thought of the poet, whose interest as anything more than the poet of poets, is, for most critics, lacking, as special for more than this one reason. For one, he was the poet of the god; he was then the poet of be-ing; and he was the poet with a mind which would become more prevalent in future. 'Holderlin's purity above all futural - and thereby historical, for this crossing' (CP, 90; 129). His 'futurality' is like that of the 'ones to come': it is due to the fact that the nearness of the god is in the future, in the coming of the last god, and must be made ready for, and therefore demands a living 'in' the future. Holderlin felt the distress, not the plenitude; his nearness to god was therefore a deferred nearness which never actually happened to him, but was intuited as a future event for other people in distant times. Holderlin's fate was that of one whose days were spent 'prematurely' (CP, 143; 204). Heidegger's word should be understood as the language of future man, or of someone looking to the future; Holderlin was part of the 'hidden history of the nineteenth century' (CP, 143; 204). So Heidegger's opinion about how philosophy should proceed was based on the need to make Holderlin's word known, and this is what Contributions is; it expresses a greatness 'which we hardly surmise' but which lies in Holderlin's work (CP, 304; 432). He is the enowned poet, the one who relates his own being and his own voice to the voice and happening of the unfolding of be-ing itself, a conjunction brought about by the nearness of the god. Holderlin developed a mythology based on the community of human individuals. Life in his scheme is constant exchange between mortals, immortals, nature and time; the poet is the demi-god who intermediates for each of these with language and signs. The river Danube, 'the Ister' and the river Rhine are also 'demi-gods' for Holderlin, since they also intermediate for man and be-ing, providing a place to live, a home, within be-ing for humans; similarly, the rivers give life and existence to be-ing by way of human lives which live and are conscious of beauty and of the need for a home in time. Heidegger in Contributions very largely appropriated this mythic scheme for himself. The result is not religious poetry; it is poetic religion, or myth-based religion on the Greek model.

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Tragedy Holderlin's religious ideas were learnt from Sophocles and Pindar, poetic ideas expressive of a state in which man mixes freely and to his cost with the god. The tragic man is under a divine influence, and the definite allocation of be-ing which he has as a being is exchanged with a divine life. His transport is empty and immediate] the tragic actor is empty because he has lost his human characteristics and existence.5 He is a divine existence, that is to say, one without substantial existence in life, but, nevertheless, a pure consciousness and recognizance of what existence is; he is 'dead' already; this divine existence which he takes from god becomes apparent to him at the moment of the drama's climax, and comprehensively destroys him; it had been a moment of divine detached existence which human life cannot properly bear. This is the theme of the unfinished sketch of the drama 'Empedocles' which Holderlin attempted to complete so many times around an experience of being so close to be-ing, and then of losing this nearness; the human becomes divine, hubristically, and is then thrown back into the cruelty and sway of be-ing as the hidden ground; the tragic one is totally isolated then, both from humans, gods, and the awareness of be-ing. It was the exact innerness and community which the distinction of the actual dramatic poem seeks to demonstrate. It is an inward state, yet one which does actually result in 'real' activities eventually. But the initial hubris which impels the leap along with be-ing is a fury which motivates him to ruin himself. Da-sein will always be tragic since the experience of be-ing is violence itself, and hubris is Da-sein's only chance of being real: this divine violence, a point where god and man are one with existence in a unity, is history's origin and its constant end and ground. Once Da-sein has felt this nearness to be-ing and god and expressed it to others, the hubristic Da-sein becomes tragic human being again, but now shattered and useless, out of place amidst beings. Familiar with be-ing before, now he is a stranger both to it and to normal things. But the nearness to god or the distance is the heart of tragedy itself. Here no redemption takes place - which is basically a subduing of man but rather a letting-into [Einsetzung] of what is more originarily ownmost (grounding of Da-sein) in be-ing itself: the recognition of the belongingness of man into be-ing through god, the admission of god that it needs be-ing, an admission that does not relinquish god or its greatness. (CP, 290-1; 413) And thus 'the strife between god and man, between the passing of the last god and the history of man' (ibid.) is enacted in these few individuals, and more so in works of'obscure' philosophy and poetry.

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'The Last God' is the chapter of the giving up, renunciation of everything, of holy renunciation, and meditation on the strife of earth with world in the self; renunciation, however, is not to cease taking part in history. Tragic drama is clearly a 'historical' type of life story which animates the intervention of the 'extra-historical', such that both are in conflict on the stage. Experience, subjective interpretations according to metaphysics, man, future hopes and types of man - all of these make no sense to the self confronting the last god. Still, the historical effect of the god decisively affects history. As in tragedy, an event can be seen in the human or the divine perspective. Death for example, has a human and an essential meaning: 'Given that as yet we barely grasp "death" in its utmost, how are we then ever going to be primed for the rare hint of the last god?' (CP, 285; 405). The hardest thing to do, perhaps, is to reconcile the essential meaning of death and life to the normal human way of thinking of these things. A drama would be possible in which the demi-god would not be recognized as tragic by the signs of breaking human laws or possessing exceptional powers which are punished. It would be an era where Holderlin—Nietzsche—Kierkegaard would no longer be premature.

'Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry' (1936) 'Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry' (EHP, 51-66) was a talk of 1936 which put in condensed form much of what Heidegger said in the lectures of 1934-35 on Holderlin. Heidegger plays with the oft-cited verse: 'Full of merit, yet poetically, man/ Dwells on this earth' (EHP, 51), from the late poem of Holderlin's madness, Tn lovely blueness blooms . . .'. A meditation on poetry leads to the meditation on man, and then on to the deeper essence of man and language as a unitary power of dwelling on earth. As ever, Heidegger seeks the deeper, more genuine form of the self and language: language is conversation, and founding of beings. Language is a form of poetry; so, humanness is a form of poetic experience: human experience and language are the opening up of beings, bringing them from out of the nothing of be-ing. With its harmless exterior, poetry is a dangerous nearness to god, dangerous because it is 'cast out' from commonplace humanity (EHP, 62). The poet is cast out into the between of gods and men, where he is neither god nor man but to the 'between' (EHP, 64). This is where the true self is; Heidegger quotes from 'Empedocles' (III, 78): . . . To be himself, that is Life and we others are only the dreams of it.

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Art is the creative conservation of truth through Da-sein in a work. The work of art is a response by a 'human' to the advance of be-ing towards him which is happening through Da-sein (himself). The artwork is just like speaking of what oneself, the clearing, is. It speaks of what is disclosed (a being), and is the act of disclosure itself, and, perhaps, as Da-sein reflecting on itself, it is the 'closed-up' Da-sein which is 'dead'. That means that we instinctively or obviously see that truth is in process in a poem being read, or a painting, or a building, or an act, which always arises from the 'plan' of an artist. It sometimes seems to Heidegger, however, that Holderlin could observe and speak the process in a 'poetry of poetry'. These ideas were formed and expressed under the impulsion of Heidegger's desire to make a counter-statement to what he was then reading and lecturing on with regard to Nietzsche and Nietzsche's notion of the 'artist' as the maker of a work of art, and as the conscious though rapturous point of will and power. For Nietzsche, art is superior to truth since it creates a point of view rather than inheriting and accepting a positivist set of truths (which he calls errors). Heidegger says of Holderlin's work: 'In the work, the happening of truth is at work; at work, indeed, in the manner of a work. . . . This happens in creation, understood as the bringing forth of the unconcealment of beings. At the same time, however, setting-to-work also means: bringing the work-character of the work into motion and happening' (OBT, 44). There is a relationship between the truth of be-ing as Da-sein, and the truth in a work of art. The work of art is already in being, waiting to be spoken in terms of 'the happening'. That is, language, like being, brings things for the first time in to the open by giving a name and lending light: being and language both do this, and this is the basis of poetizing. 'The essence of all art is poetry' (OBT, 45). Heidegger is not describing truth itself. He is describing how Da-sein creates a piece of work on that basis. Tn other words, being advances unto the There which has been thrown-forth by being itself and is met by the project of There-being which forces it into disclosure as the given work of art.' (Richardson, 1963, 409). But the work of art does not work in the dimension of being and Da-sein, but rather of earth and world. Just as a work of art, a painting, or a temple, comes from the earth, and forms a world, so, essentially, it is poetry because poetry names and secures beings from the passing and the darkness of becoming: But when gods are originally named and the essence of things come to expression so that the things first shine forth, when this occurs, man's existence is brought into firm relation and placed on a ground. The poet's

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saying is not only foundation in the sense of a free bestowal, but also in the sense of the firm grounding of human existence on its ground. (EHP, 59) We see the value of art in its juxtaposition of beings to deep-happening in a study which Heidegger made of one of Holderlin's poems. The most constant issue of the poetry is 'nature' or be-ing. In an essay of 1939 (which studies 'As when on a holiday . . . ' ) , Holderlin's 'nature' is recognized as a variation on the Aristotelian, Greek 'physis' (EHP, 79). Elucidating this will elucidate the processes and the reigning of nature within human technological mastery. Aristotelian nature produces 'things' as a power which rarely shows itself; it is a producer of strife too, amongst its creations, reconciling them in 'beauty'. When nature does appear, it does so as a hint of god; as beauty it then appears and is a change of life; but this is temporary, since nature is older and more fundamental than god or beauty. Heidegger's arousing of the decision, then, involves the following logic: to show the ground of things as nature, and as be-ing, in words of poetry which hold this ephemeral presence and appearance in words which last; this thereby puts the essence of technology up for display too. The permanence of an inceptive, deep, lasting vision helps others to remark what it is difficult to recall in everyday life, and serves as a decisive moment of enowning, of founding and securing the place of home. The issue is resolved in that the self is the mediator between the immediateness of being and the law, because the law is mediate (EHP, 84-6). Nature in 'herself, is 'all-living', all-smiling, giving to gods the power of gaiety; holding everything, even the gods, in 'life' (EHP, 87). In his hurry to make nature's gifts and its gaiety useful, man 'took what was granted by nature, divinely beautiful, only for their own use and service, and reduced the all-present to the form of a servant' (EHP, 87). But this holiness lies in the heart of the poet so that he recalls it to himself and us. We see then that the gifts of beings are derived from the immediate fact of being-here and are not to be exploited.

'The Origin of the Work of Art' (1935-36) 'The Origin of the Work of Art' was a lecture which went through several drafts in 1935-36, delivered on three occasions in different forms. For a single essay, it is an important work of Heidegger's with an elucidative role as regards Contributions', it also refers indirectly to the work on Nietzsche, for it proposes a different, more essential interpretation of art than the one he was outlining in the first of his Nietzsche lectures of that year (1935-36);

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finally, it relates to the first of the Holderlin lectures (1934-35), since H61derlin is precisely the poet and artwork from which Heidegger has learnt the confidence to speak of art. The conflict of truth and concealment for Da-sein is, in terms of human being, that of earth and world. There are therefore two distinct kinds of approach to art here: that of Da-sein in its essential place, and of humans in their more familiar place. This dual layer of man on the one hand, and Da-sein on the other, is something which Heidegger held as a principle throughout Contributions] he remarked in the 'Addendum' to the lecture that 'the relation of being and human being' is 'unclear even in this version - a distressing difficulty' (BW, 211). However, unclear as the distinction may be, Heidegger intends to say that man is faced always by a world which he himself shapes; it is shaped from the earth, something unknown and dark, with which he conflicts in order to lend meaning to his life, depending upon it as the ground upon which he lives. This 'shaping' of the world is made sense of on the understanding that Da-sein 'clears' or shapes be-ing. Da-sein brings truth about, the human being clears a world from earth. Human strife with earth does more than resemble the act by which Da-sein is the truth of be-ing as that opening up of an abode amid concealment. This act of man is not a power which he possesses among others, say, for example, being able to walk or speak: this forming of a world is the essence of what man is. It is essentially language, the bestowal of meaning and therefore the ability to dwell and live. This essence is precisely what nihilism cannot see; for it takes the world as it is in its givenness and objectivity: as that which is lived in 'lived experience' (BW, 206) and representation: nihilistic attunements grasp man's place as something predestined and unalterable. Nihilism is a result of technology and mastery of the earth; in a sense, the technological human being does not want to recognize the creative power of the artist because it proves that technological mastery is only one kind of mastery of the earth, and that actuality is only a result of history, not its essence. A normal person has a world which is lived technologically, but it is the artist who understands it in the light of creating a world; that is, in that art locates the point at which this event happens. The artist recognizes himself as Da-sein, and cuts ties with normal human being, and is, in principle, 'dead' to it. One of the properties of art is that it takes us away from the ordinary realm of living. What is revealed by art is the thrust outside normal human life into our essential power: it 'transports] us into this openness and thus at the same time transports] us out of the realm of the ordinary' (BW, 191). The making of the world out of the earth by man is the start of his history, the history of the world; the meaning of history is that a people recognizes itself, and becomes itself: but the start of that

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process will be prefigured in an initial vision which sets up that world. Moreover, it is by means of an artist with a specific kind of world-founding experience: it is with the nearness of god alone (it seems) that this event can happen to the artist. A world can emerge from earth for man to live in only in the conflict of that world with the earth; as the world of humans, this emergence somehow absolutely requires the sense of a god's nearness and the god's intervention, although modern works, such as that of Van Gogh, do not actually depict a god. Not that the god 'actually' comes; what we mean here is that that moment of division and conflict between concealment and truth, earth and world, is staked out into a world with the image of a god or of beauty which the artist senses; that creation of the beautiful by the artist is the 'actual' presence of the god. Art is the god's presence in the god's approach toward being; the god's nearness and flight comes with the strife of world and earth. It is experienced as a 'vision' from the perspective of god and a great clearing of earth into an appropriate world. The artwork forever stands as the inception of this new world sprung from be-ing. The created or spoken place at which the god is felt is the point where the clearing happens; that still point of conflict is the work of art: 'Createdness of the work means truth's being fixed in place in the figure' (BW, 189). Art just will be godly, and no art will be without god, no world revealed in its immediate richness as the miracle of being here, alive, without god, as Heidegger sees it. The proper truth is godly. It is for this reason that most Greek and pre-modern art is simultaneously 'religious', since the ground of human living is in a divine intervention. As for Holderlin, the process leads towards inwardness and a certain unity; the unity of man with be-ing or nature, or earth. At the transition from mere earth into a world of beauty in his vision, the poet is possessed by art; it is his task to secure this passage, and to thereby relate the world to the earth with signs of such beauty, or, in Heidegger's terms, with signs of the shining clearing of truth itself in action. It is done in investigating earth, the material of his craft: words, or colour, or stone, or architectural creation. Individual instances are not enough, however, to make a beginning; a communal setting into the earth is required. In this communal setting in, the people sets up a firm figure in that transition, the figure of a god. The god is the being of passage, the moment of decision, for without a people, there is no art. Perhaps one of the most powerful and also most personal and essential indicators of where Heidegger came from, and what he was continually, indistinctly concerned with, is contained in this essay in the following sentences and their surrounding discourse:

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A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico. By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as a holy precinct. The temple and its precinct, however, do not fade away into the indefinite. It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people. Only from and in this expanse does the nation first return to itself for the fulfilment of its own vocation. (BW, 167) The rage against god and the new god in our times is the sign of the impossibility of a new enowning event of truth, and the impossibility of our coming to the knowledge that the earth is being ruined, just as our own human essence is being devastated. It is the impossibility of art, and of our appreciation of it. Ours is an unbeautiful age. It may be that Holderlin and Heidegger, and some few 'ones to come' do see this essence of man and necessity of god, but a 'world' is the possession of a people and a community, not merely of a few isolated individuals. Hence, there is no hope of the change in the destiny of the West, or of the planet, while reality is taken to be what it is: The poetic projection of truth that sets itself into work as figure is also never carried out in the direction of an indeterminate void. Rather, in the work, truth is thrown toward the coming preservers, that is, toward a historical group of human beings This is the earth and, for a historical people, its earth, the self-secluding ground on which it rests together with everything that it already is, though still hidden from itself. (BW, 200) One of the other elements of this lecture, and a way in which it directly contradicts Nietzsche's theory of art, is that Heidegger calls for people to become involved; he reasons that without 'preservers', those able to follow the artist, interpret and act according to the world which has been opened by him, there can be no beginning and no future. It is the figure of beauty which Heidegger means when he says that a 'figure' is laid or drawn upon the dividing line between truth and concealment, earth and world, by the artist in a state of being Da-sein, of being

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aware of the awesome fact that he is here. Beauty heralds the divine; it demarcates the place where truth happened in the nearness of god. Heidegger speaks of the self-realization of man that he is Da-sein as a mood of holiness: man faces the world and the earth which conflicts with it in him, as a divine act. One could perhaps imagine a temple set up on the hill as a mere set of bricks, or a roof with walls; or, one could let it become irrelevant as a site of infinity. But humans need a place to live, a world, and so the temple is between bricks and infinity. It is the home of a god, the place where the entrance of be-ing and god into human life is set out and made steady; the work of art is dedicated to that event of human being alive, here and now, upon the earth, in a world. But to what does the human being give this work, if not to something different from itself? To dedicate means to consecrate, in the sense that in setting up the work the holy is opened up as holy and the god is invoked into the openness of his presence. Praise belongs to dedication as doing honour to the dignity and splendour of the god. . . . it is in the dignity and the splendour that the god comes to presence. (BW, 169) It is as if the god is part of human being in the world, unavoidably, such that what is taken for dignity and dedication and thanks, are, essentially, the presence of god. And only through this dignity and splendour does a world grow and become fit to live in. Perhaps the central point of this, as in the other thoughts of Heidegger, is that Da-sein is that state of man in which he becomes aware that he exists, and is then consumed; no longer an individual, man becomes a site for be-ing to unfold itself and to be steady. In such a stance towards himself, and to the world, the name of'things' becomes silent; everything appears anew, without reason. Earth stands naked before us, a glimmer and a vast unknown in the past, future, in the distance of space or time, subject to error; there too, forming from it, is world, the sure set of meanings and values, the knowledge we have, the well-defined sensations, perceptions, and so on. The basic fact is that there is being, and that it opens up here and now, in Da-sein: this Da-sein is its happening truth. The first, initial naming of a world from that chaos is the act of poetry and art, possible just where earth becomes world, and slides back again, from be-ing. On that rift, the figure of the beautiful object, a clearing in itself, is set, as the point of setting up. At the end of the essay, Heidegger is at pains to give sense to the way in which he began, for 'The Origin' does not start off by speaking of earth and world, or of gods and man; rather, it discusses 'the thing' and the thingness of the things amongst which we live. An artwork does not set up a world as

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something pure apart from the earth, but it is the earth which it sets up, and allows to shine: this is precisely the way in which it is a strife of earth and world, truth and concealment. '[T]he temple-work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the open region of the work's world. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; metals come to glitter and shimmer . . .' (BW, 171). It is in this sense of making a world worth living in, in contrast to a devastated and empty, pointless world of technological labour, that the art-labour is to be put against technology. As usual, art, and the philosophical thinking which preserves its foundational act, is setting out to get to grips with, and first allow us to live in, be-ing itself. It is this, so close to us, earth, be-ing, being-here, which is most hidden, but: 'A beginning, on the contrary, always contains the undisclosed abundance of the awesome, which means that it also contains strife with the familiar and ordinary' (BW, 201). With this in mind, it is possible to see what Heidegger saw as so futural in Holderlin. We must also stress the utmost predominance of art in Heidegger's thinking, not often, if ever, directly expressed. The poetry of Holderlin is the particular artwork in which Heidegger saw art most intensely present. Whenever we see 'Holderlin-preaching' (see de Man, 1983), we see Heidegger giving way to poetry, as opposed to historical works of philosophy and his inherited set of concepts (as when he lectured on Schelling or Hegel). Holderlin 'points to the future' (OG, 112) because the naming of a god, and questioning of Christ and the decline of Christianity in Germany, is the incipient opening of a world which has not yet happened, but which his poems open on to. Germany, or the West, has still to recognize the world which emerges from this poetry of a coming god; the beginning which occurred in Greece had its gods, and Christ too was a god, but the last god is still to come, one which will be timeless yet brief, intense and unquantifiable, an ultimate and divine moment of be-ing. Holderlin prefigures this, speaking from a time when his word was and is isolated, to a time when it would become the word of a new kind of life for humans by turning them to Da-sein. It would be an existence of nearness to the divine, as the human life must be which becomes neither human nor divine but an enownment.

Conclusion: A Book Which Demands a Leap

In My View . . . I have not exactly reserved my own judgment on Heidegger's Contributions throughout this book, and have not maintained the distance from the work which is customary when presenting a work of philosophy. An objective approach is useful in most circumstances, especially when both philosopher and critic share a common 'reality' about which the facts are not open to doubt. Most philosophers would speak of a being, a human being for example, as either existing or not existing; if a certain philosopher contends with arguments that a particular human being does exist, then a critic can dispute the arguments in an objective way. Such a critic is objective, he brings something new to the matter, opens up insights, and helps the reader along the path. Being objective and deploying argumentative strategies to make sense of a philosopher's work is the critic's task. Such an approach is not, however, very fruitful when dealing with Heidegger, and I have not been either willing or able to follow such a path. Heidegger shares next to nothing with philosophical critics who are 'objective' and who share a common view of reality. I do not, however, consider this to be a disadvantage, and Contributions will only be dismissed if the reader refuses to 'leap' with Heidegger into the matter to be thought about. Only those who are willing to make the decision, who have already made it, will understand the need for this. We could point out that so-called 'objective' approaches bring presuppositions and so on, political, cultural, unphilosophical, or whatever; similarly, we could think about how every truly great philosophy must strike its readers as venturing upon ideas and into areas over which there has previously been no consensus in even the most rudimentary way. But a justification of Heidegger by a reasoned argument against 'analytic philosophy' and its 'reality' would be to extend the present book beyond its scope. One does wonder, though, by what standard this thinking proceeds if it does not appeal to facts and self-evident truths, that is, to reality as we know it; we should recall that 'truths' of factual statement about beings do not guide this thinking: the truth is a 'ground', an open-space of happening. That is

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Heidegger's notion of truth, and thinking must match up to it, as open and empty as it may be. Heidegger's work is so overwhelmingly unusual that giving an account of its importance, its value next to other attempts, or giving a forecast of its future, seems particularly difficult. I am not the first writer to notice that, in order to understand and esteem highly Heidegger's work, one has to become a follower (see Philipse, 1998). Most critics who observe this think of it as something indicative of'charlatanism' or the sign of a kind of substitute religion, such that admirers of Heidegger would need to be 'converts', and that they are not doing philosophy, but following a dogma. It is true that, without becoming a converted type of person, one cannot understand his work properly, or cannot, at least, convey its meaning; but this is no secret, given the overt theme of'the leap', a concept derived most clearly from the literary theologian Kierkegaard. So if one has to be 'converted' and yet one remains in the realm of philosophy, how are we to understand Heidegger's view of philosophy? That should be the question; not whether or not he realizes our expectations about what philosophy should be. Heidegger's predictions for the West, his belief in a deep history, indeed, a completely other beginning for Western Dasein's history, his overall massive judgment on technology, mankind, and on the distance of god, are huge issues which Heidegger meant seriously and are not mere verbiage or the ramifications of the German language. But they find only a faint echo in 'contemporary problems'; for example, Heidegger's view of the Christian God as being 'dead' could be of use in setting intelligent minds to rest when they imagine that they must take part in wars over religion or ideology in the Middle East or Europe; again, Heidegger's critique of technology and power could throw a light on the contemporary stresses about how global destruction in its manifold ways can be tempered. But these are side-effects of his work, not the main thrust; Heidegger rejected the very language in which such debates could ever be carried out and thought about. The main point is that Heidegger really meant the things which he wrote about, and meant them to be taken on their own account, not as marginal spiritual insights shedding light on more immediate problems; it is clear that he, if no one else, did think these 'strange' things about the state of our existence, and his mind deserves to be perused for its own sake. On the matter of whether Heidegger was right to condemn us and our situation today, one should remember that Heidegger was not, for most of his life, an outsider, but sought to influence others and sought to belong to a community; he expected some kind of eventual consensus. The consensus would, presumably, involve as much effort being put into the actual unfolding of being-here and self-affirming spirit as is currently being put into the

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devastation of the planet and the enslavement of human beings to technology in every way. When one imagines Heidegger's work in the future, or in the present, one can imagine a world not so distant from ours, in which he is taken not only more seriously, but even in the same way as he took himself: as the person who could hear the voice of be-ing, and who showed others that it was possible to hear it. He saw himself as destined and sent by be-ing. It is possible to imagine, for example, a world in which the planet on which we live has been exploited and nearly destroyed by those very philosophies, and the scientific, industrial world citizens for whom these philosophies, the products of sponsored research institutes, apologize; the practitioners of such philosophies would, I am confident, find not much more than nonsense in Heidegger's words today. What place is there for Heidegger's thinking when world democracy is carried on in the language of aims, goals, monetary economics, power structures and struggles, information, exploitation and scientific research? Who in their right mind doubts what the truth of a matter is essentially, or what the essence of humans is, or worries in the least that the sense of beauty and the holy has no place at all in political or cultural activities today, or that if it does, it is almost completely without any thoughtful basis? 'Heideggerian' issues and thoughts make not the least effect in actual practice. It is possible, however, that Heidegger's time is still to come, and comes more quickly the more the disaster, which in Heidegger's terms, technology is, goes on. The almost certain disaster of technology will not necessarily result in complete catastrophe, but if there are humans left in the centuries to come, Heidegger's works will seem to shed a light upon human and divine life, a light and sense which will probably seem more and more like the appropriate one. The catastrophe which is certain to come, either in a bang or a whimper will only be, however, a sign of Heidegger's appropriate account of existence; the philosophy itself might seem, in times to come, something deserving of more attention. Really, for 'the few and the rare', for those who already suffer the going-under, understand the distress or despair of Dasein, it is already an appropriate account, and no catastrophic sign of the West's forgetting of be-ing is necessary. I suggest that this view of Heidegger's works could be one estimate of his value, for, in the current climate of analytic and pragmatic philosophy, it is quite true, there is little enough place for the kind of thinking and work which Heidegger carried out so uncompromisingly. It seems possible, however, that the future will recognize his voice for what it pretended to be.

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As for my own critique of Heidegger, and the purpose of this book, I have sought to make Heidegger better understood, and hope to have succeeded in making lines such as the following intelligible: Be-ing holds sway as enowning. The essential swaying has its centre and breadth in the turning [where] strife and countering [are carried out]. The essential swaying is warranted and sheltered in truth. Truth occurs as the clearing sheltering. The grounding-jointure of this occurrence is the time-space that originates from within it. Time-space is what towers up for fathoming the cleavage of be-ing. As en-joining truth, time-space is originarily the site for the moment of enowning. The site for the moment holds sway from out of enowning, as the strife of earth and world. Strifing of this strife is Da-sein. Z)$-sein occurs within the ways of sheltering truth from within the warranting of the lit-up and sheltered enowning. The sheltering of truth lets the true as beings come into the open and into dissemblage. Thus a being first of all stays in be-ing. A being is. Be-ing holds sway. (CP, 22; 30)

Leap! We began this book by stressing the 'committed' nature of Heidegger's thought. We should end the formal analysis of the work in a similar vein by looking at the last as-yet-unread chapter. 'Leap', which calls from Da-sein to Da-sein, or from be-ing to the thinking self, demands the decision over being and the new style of thinking. Heidegger describes the necessity of the leap, and then that into which one leaps. In metaphysical terms, the leap is into nothing. It leaps with be-ing; like be-ing, the human self is essentially a kinetic position, a locus of struggle and opening. A process of uncovering and thinking, the human self leaps because it belongs with the unknown and incorrigibly finite and failing; at its heart is this factical givenness in which we live, and which in itself only shows us trite things, the so-familiar range of beings, in a word, nothing.

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[The leap] is the enactment of projecting-open the truth of be-ing in the sense of shifting into the open, such that the thrower of the projectingopen experiences itself as thrown - i.e., as en-owned by be-ing. The enopening in and through projecting-open is such only when it occurs as the experience of thrownness and thus of belongingness to be-ing. (CP, 169; 239) What one leaps into is being-here, and yet this is hardly more than the boring tired 'reality' which offers nothing new. Being-here is nothing because be-ing refuses itself, and because life is pure happening; but it is not any sort of event to be described according to an intuition of space and time, or according to categories, or by some theory. Be-ing enquivers, thinks and attunes through us; be-ing's enquivering is refusal: it is god's godding; free-play of time-space; it is the law-giving clearing. One jumps into be-ing, amidst gods and the almost-impossible-to-say. Da-sein is the clearing and truth (of be-ing); it is the finite event which be-ing must shatter eventually, and which, therefore, is already 'dead' if we are to think it and from it with lucidity. It is essential to realize that the world is not changed by the leap. Beings do not metamorphose, they do not disappear. The world remains the same old world, only one's attitude and mood, one's silence, changes, and the 'world' becomes the place of be-ing. Still, due to human freedom, a change of mind is a change in the way life is lived, so that beings do, in fact, change beyond all recognition. The absolutely technological and dominated face of the earth would, eventually, be changed by the enowned human in the course of time. Such a leap is the entry into Da-sein's abyss, into the self itself and into 'the single individual' in its uniqueness; it returns to the human, and ends tragically. Heidegger did not write a tragedy, but thought and experienced this tragedy of be-ing as the very moment of metaphysics in its playing-forth. The leap is nothing else than a leap from beings and our history, into being-history, in which 'we' speak of ourselves according to the mindfulness which we have of be-ing, in the nearness of gods. Rather than the continuing progress of political and cultural or religious history, this history is the one of our going under, into the nearness of the enowning law for beings in nothing; one notices the new sway, not the sway of the will to will, but of our mere existence which is, actually, something more than the trite knowledge about what surrounds us in our daily situation. But this leap is just what we had seen Heidegger advise the university to do in the rectoral year. It was also the leap of the German people into its dreams. The leap is supposed to leave behind itself the epoch of machination. The nature of this leap is

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hinted at here at any rate its danger. If it were not dangerous, would it matter or be genuine? In the other beginning beings come with the openclearing of their origin - their clearly belonging to/appropriation by be-ing. While for the subject and its sort of knowing all life is normal, and is interpreted, as experience, as a ground for technological advantages, all experience for the self is 'strange to everything that is "true to life" ' (CP, 162; 227); this is because a sacrifice has to be made of normal experience, the sacrifice of the world en masse, and of beings - so that the self is no longer a mere life (man). Ceasing to be a life, man therefore, more or less, enters death in this leap. Nearing the 'hearth-fire' of be-ing (CP, 162; 228) is the renunciation of'life' and self (ibid.}] it is renunciation of these things for a 'once-only', a uniqueness, the same one moment of history: it shocks man, and it is the way 'by which alone a beginning and specifically the other beginning' can begin (CP, 162; 228-9). Death does not come as the end of the story for the self: it is the highest sign of be-ing; death is just its sign and the 'human' based interpretation of it: 'the uniqueness of death corresponds to the nonordinariness of be-ing' (CP, 163; 230). As in Being and Time, we first become ourselves when standing in this region. 'What counts in the other beginning is leap into the encleaving mid-point of the turning of enowning in order thus to prepare — in knowing, inquiring, and setting the style - the t/here [Da] regarding its grounding' (CP, 161— 2; 231): at the other beginning of history the jump into the ripped open middle of the turning of that event is necessary. Be-ing and the self circle. That is, the self faces be-ing for a moment, and faces beings at another moment; not that facing be-ing is possible literally. The 'turn' is a process of the self when it throws the world up, and also communicates with its ground: be-ing, which is hidden and withdrawn into itself. The distinction, then, between subject and self, is that between the truth revealed in beings which are objectively separate from the subject and the way in which the self, on the other hand, is the ground of beings, and the opening up of be-ing: in this way, the self somehow throws out light upon beings; it does this as the ground of time-space. What is the appearance and experience of the ground for the one who grounds? That is, what does be-ing seem like? This be-ing which is everywhere described by Heidegger as 'hiding' itself, or refusing itself? When the self throws up a world of things in space and time, it does so by simultaneously hiding be-ing; indeed, be-ing is always hidden. In this way, Da-sein is turning continually between itself as space-time and, on the other hand, as facing nothing, or as a renunciation of be-ing. The idea is not strange to readers familiar with Being and Time, itself the self-preparatory start of the reign of be-ing, grounding the 'truth' as time-space-play; and though be-ing is hidden, 'we' are the innerness

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of be-ing. Be-ing is the refusal (CP, 172; 244); and while we struggle with be-ing, we do not find it, but rather an absence, finding instead the god, and yet still a mood within ourselves, but no immediate self-presence, rather, a quite pointless nothing. Nothing is the vibration of be-ing, yet not be-ing itself; because it is the sign of be-ing, nothing is more life: 'But how do we understand the Nothing here? As the overflow of pure refusal. The richer the "nothing", the simpler the be-ing' (CP, 173; 266). From nothing (be-ing) comes all things, and in this refusal to suffuse everything, be-ing lets a world be. So, examining our life-here, we find only the simplest and most banal things of a life story, nearly nothing at all but parts of a world: there is nothing. Yet this is where all life begins, in the here and now, and it has the greatest depth and resource. Of course, the major change is just in man and the subject: these are now the deeper, real self. The truth of this self is that it occurs first, as Being and Time had it, as being-toward-death. Death hides the necessity of a cleaving open of life - hiding it under a mixture of modalities, such as possibility (in the utmost possibility, not to be outstripped, in Being and Time]. Death cannot be understood in any other sensible way, except, perhaps, as the opening up of something strange: 'What is most nonordinary in all of beings is opened up within death's non-ordinariness and uniqueness, namely be-ing itself, which holds sway as estranging' (CP, 199; 283). The opening is deathly, and these two things belong together. The banality of that being-here which 'we' essentially are quickly finds something of a greater meaning and depth to the seeker when death happens to cross our path. Suddenly we are nearer to god, we sense the fleeting passing of gods, a certain infinite value attaches itself to being-here and our time-space: The few humans, who do not know of one another, will prepare themselves unto the free-play of time-space of Da-sein and will be gathered into a nearness to be-ing that must remain strange to everything that is 'true to life.' In long periods of time, which to be-ing history are merely moments, be-ing history recognizes exceptional enownings. Enownings such as: allotment of truth to be-ing, the collapse of truth, consolidation of what is not its ownmost (correctness), abandonment of beings by being, the return of be-ing into its truth, the enkindling of the hearth-fire (of the truth of be-ing) as the solitary site for the passing of the last god, the flashing of the once and only uniqueness of be-ing. While destruction of the hitherto existing world, as self-destruction, screams out its triumphs into the void, the essential sway of be-ing gathers into its highest calling: as enownment, to own the domain of decision of the godhood of gods to the

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ground and the free-play of time-space, i.e., Da-sein, in the onetimeness of its history. (CP, 161; 227-8) Let us remind ourselves that 'enowning' means the relation of thinking to be-ing and to being-here, a thinking which must be close to god if it is to be appropriate to its subject-matter. The relation of Da-sein to be-ing is 'enowning'; such reflections of being-here on itself qua enowning(s) are 'nearness to be-ing', but they are not 'true to life' because they are actually getting to grips with life as the opening of time-space, which has a deeply familiar and yet absent nothingness at its heart, a nothingness which is made more wealthy when true nothingness (death) threatens it. Such moments which have already happened are those of the first Greek beginning: they have not been an authentic relation to be-ing; instead, they represent an enowning in which be-ing has been turned away. Heidegger characterizes these abandonments of beings by Da-sein as an opening; the collapse of the opening of truth which Da-sein is into an empty livedexperience; the consolidation of all thinking as mere correctness of statements. On the other hand, there are moments of life's history in which a proper relation is set up: in which be-ing returns and becomes clear as the truth of life; the enkindling of the hearth-fire 'as the solitary site for the passing of the last god' (which is the condition for such a relation), and a sight of the immediacy of life which can be phrased as the 'uniqueness' of be-ing. Therefore, there are moments of be-ing's history in which Da-sein is in touch with itself as the opening up of be-ing itself, and others in which it 'collapses' and is covered over, so that truth remains unnoticed as that event of opening and lightening, and in which the decision over whether a god is near or not becomes 'stupid' and 'spooky' but not serious. Da-sein is a once-only event, continually renewed according to be-ing's history; it is the opening of be-ing, as time-space, in which the hint of the god comes to pass, and in which 'man' will find a place to exist. But when we follow these figures which attempt to capture the fragility of a new experience which is beyond human, which is deeper than life-experience as commonly encountered, the words of Heidegger conjure, in their beauty, something which Heidegger is a master of. For that is perhaps what he is most of all: one who can invent and create a discourse which is compellingly attentive and beautiful about this event of Da-sein, the event of human being as a mortal event. Being-here is a fact which has perhaps never been written of before, even though it is the most basic; and Heidegger struggles to find the words for it, knowing that the efforts of the human race as a whole are necessary, in its mission as the architect and builder of 'the house of being' ('Letter on Humanism', BW, 217), and as the Da-sein in

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which the silent and inconscient earth struggles to become a world and to become sheltered in a being (in a discourse, a language and a speech) and a future history. Finally, we should now be able to understand the following characterization of philosophy as Heidegger saw it, and, perhaps, have a clearer idea of what this be-ing of ours is: Philosophy is the immediate, useless, but at the same time masterful knowing from within mindfulness. Mindfulness is inquiring into the meaning , i.e., into the truth of be-ing. Inquiring into the truth is leaping into its essential sway and thus into being itself. The question reads: whether and when and how we belong to being (as enowning). This question has to be asked/or the sake of the essential sway of being, which needs us - needs us, not as beings who happen to be extant, but insofar as we sustain and inabide - by persevering in - Da-^zVz, and ground T)a,-sein as the truth of being. Hence mindfulness - leap into the truth of be-ing is necessarily self-mindfulness. That does not mean as observation turned back upon us as "given." Rather, it is grounding the truth of self-being according to Da-sein's ownhood. [Translation modified] (CP, 31; 43—4) As the last word of this book, one must reveal the proper secret which impels much of Heidegger's charm and originality. He found a way of defying 'reality' and 'actuality'. In plain terms, Heidegger's regret about 'subjectivity' and 'representation' in cinema, science and technology is that it bases itself fully on an unhistorical view of what 'reality' or 'actuality' is. Technology grasps actuality and what is in it - ordered, 'challenged forth', prefigured, demanded beings; intrinsically, beings belong to a history of ways of existing which belongs to man in his role as the guardian of be-ing, and they could be ordered and be represented otherwise. They should be like a mirror-image of our 'soul', a place in which we live. The proper and changing historical actuality of man and beings is be-ing, and is what Heidegger continually relied on, the 'essential'. With the essential, therefore, Heidegger defied reality: not in favour of another 'world', but one aware that technology has it in its grasp, and that there is an essential actuality awaiting it in a new awareness of the history of be-ing, in the sense of the simple uniqueness of our being-here.

Notes Preface 1. Throughout I follow Emad/Maly in translating ''Gotf and its variants with a lowercase when Heidegger is speaking of the divine in an obviously un-Christian way. When the Christian God is mentioned, or the God who 'is dead', in Nietzsche's terms, I use the standard upper-case. Similar linguistic conventions have been followed in the use of the terms 'Dasein' and 'being'. Heidegger hyphenates Da-sein in Contributions as a means of distinguishing it from his use of the term in Being and Time] he also spells Sein as 'Seyn* for a similar reason. In the name of simplicity I have almost always hyphenated Da-sein and be-ing except when we are dealing with Being and Time or with the metaphysical tradition. 2. I have chosen to use the masculine form of the third-person pronoun throughout, although the he or she about whom the book is concerned is, as Da-sein, quite sexless, and, of course, the feminine would do just as well. See Derrida (1995, 'Choreographies') on the a-sexual nature of Da-sein. On the other hand, a certain Bataillean sovereignty sometimes appears both greatly to resemble Heidegger's state of Dasein, and also to depend upon sexual difference. See Bataille 1987, for example.

Introduction 1.

Cf Philipse (1998). By Philipse's own procedure of 'deductive hypothesis', we should presume that there is no simple way of speaking of being since we could deduce that if there were, then Heidegger would have followed it. Therefore, being cannot be as simple as some commentators have assumed; rather, it seems as if Heidegger spent his entire career after Being and Time attempting to put 'being' into words which step beyond mere nomination. 2. Dis-humanization is a term used in Mindfulness (M), a work which was the immediate successor to Contributions. Dis-humanization is bad since it strips away our relation to the beings amongst which we live. It is to be contrasted with 'dehumanization' by which Heidegger means the process of deepening our sense of who we are until we, or some few of us, become something more than human. 3. 'The essential mark of "nihilism" ', Heidegger says, is not in destroying Christianity, but in tolerating and defending it (CP, 97; 139). A thread running right through Contributions is that Platonism, which became Christianity in a form

138

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

Notes acceptable for 'the people', must be overcome; he therefore holds that Platonism/ Christianity are still dominant, and are the same essentially, and must jointly have to be deconstructed to make way for an other origin beyond them, or hidden within them. 'Therefore, in order to bring about a preparedness for leaping into Da-sein, an unavoidable risk is to initiate the overcoming of Platonism by means of a more originary knowing awareness of what is its ownmost' (CP, 153; 219—20). The term 'Christianity' is a complex one, and Heidegger's vituperations are not wholesale; 'Christianity' means, for him, as it did for Nietzsche, the various Christian churches and the general transcendental idealism which underpins its teaching. Heidegger's semi-archaic spelling, Seyn, is rendered as 'be-ing' in the Emad/Maly translation; the coinage is acceptable because it puts stress on the insistent factuality of existing right here and now, so that to be here and now is to be; this hyphenation also retains the familiar form of the more usual 'being'. Richardson has translated it as 'Beon', while others have tried 'Beyng'. Though it is something similar to this. Heidegger considered Schelling's Treatise on Human Freedom to have been the high point of German Idealism precisely because it foreshadowed his own work so much. He is at pains, in his Introduction to those lectures, to show that Schelling was on the right track, but became 'stranded' by systematic philosophy (ST, 97). We find in Schelling's work, as Heidegger reads it, an account of God as absolute being standing as a kind of monolith. It is Schelling's task to build a system which accounts for human being and its essential nature (freedom) within that isolated monolithic totality. 'Kant's Thesis about Being' [1961] (P, 337-64). This Aristotelian original stance towards beings, by comparison with Heidegger's own view of being, was recognized by Werner Marx in his early study of Heidegger (Marx 1971); Marx, however, does not seem to have recognized what being meant for Heidegger. The clue to Being and Time's purpose in the light of his later works, he wrote retrospectively, is that it revealed the inappropriateness of the generally held metaphysical view that the being of beings is that beings are present at hand. Heidegger's notion of god seems to be very much influenced by Holderlin (see Chapter 6, below). In 'Celebration of Peace' they are called 'fleet transients' (schnell VerganglichallesHimmlische, Holderlin, 1998, 210). Note that, contrary to some commentators, I consider the name 'joining' (Fug), which Heidegger uses to describe the activity of his chapters, to indicate not merely that each joining joins itself to the others like a textual cloth (although it means this too), but as if they were joined, each in a distinct and irreducible way, to be-ing itself. (Polt, 2006, 157). See Holderlin on his own 'Empedocles' in the essay 'The Ground for "Empedocles" ' (1988, 50-61), on the inwardness which tragedy sets out externally. See Thomas Pfau's introduction to Holderlin's critical writings (Holderlin, 1988); I have followed his Introduction in my exposition. However, Pfau leaves the notion of the sacred to one side, unexplained; I attempt here to clarify it.

Notes

139

14. It is a fundamental tenet of Arnold Toynbee's History (1957), for example, that humanity made a great step forward in the Jews' recognition of the One God, and that we must not recidivate. 15. See also the study of Antigone in Introduction to Metaphysics (IM) in which man is the uncanniest being, a kind of being both amongst beings, and also at their ground. (See Chapter 5, below.) 16. SeeScruton (2005,49). 17. Heidegger's relationship to the Christian religion remained, in view of his philosophy, frustrated and even aggressive in his theorizations during the 1930s. It is as if he wanted the Christian churches to realize that 'God is dead' and yet to continue to seek god within Creation, turning to be-ing, that which is more powerful than God. In the years after the War, Heidegger said that what he regretted about the activity of the Germans in the years 1933-34, and the derailment of 'the movement' (as he referred to the Nazi Party), was that those who could have acted to salvage the moment of revolution (in many senses) did not act. In explanation of what he hoped for, and what had not happened, he pointed especially to the churches which, though religious in feeling, and always, at least in theory, in search of God, did not see the need for a new relationship to be-ing and god; for him, the revolution in politics, the unity of the German people into one mind for a short time, was the opportunity to put aside the old inauthentic religion, and begin seeking under a spiritual leadership. He seems to have thought that, if the Christian churches had become involved in switching from a mere observance of rites, and had become involved in really thinking about god and be-ing in a religious life, then the political and social revolution in Germany would have worked; according to Karl Lowith, Heidegger's former student, Heidegger was surprised and rather annoyed by the 'vitality' of the Christian churches (Wolin 1993, 142). We should therefore give far more attention to Heidegger's attitude to god in the Contributions and in his later work as a whole, especially when thinking of politics and society as well as when thinking of be-ing as Heidegger does. In a sense, it can be seen as anti-Christian; indeed, it sometimes seems as if the 'god', 'the last god', is, in its love of be-ing rather than of heaven, something more akin to the Christian 'Devil': if only in the characteristically German manner of Mephistopheles, lder Geistder stets vermin?, the fervent 'lifeworshipping' Dionysianism of Nietzsche, the fated and accursed 'death in life' of Adrian Leverkuhn. 18. There is a unique view of the cultural milieu in which he moved in his 'The Wish and the Will' (M, 370—8). Heidegger seems to conceive of his contemporaries as a great public with a few proper individuals here or there.

1

Who Are We? The Ones to Come

1. See Polt (2006, 2, n4). Safranski (1998, 129) says that Heidegger bought the land and then let his wife Elfride oversee the construction. See also Sharr (2006).

140

Notes

2. Thus section 249 indicates the four chapters as distinct from the other two of the six (CP, 277; 395). 3. In later chapters, we will have reason to consider to whom this philosophy is aimed. In his career as a Catholic scholar, destined for the clergy, and later as a university professor, speaking to what he saw as a nation's elite, Heidegger was always enmeshed in a philosophical or religious strata of society, a 'caste' who would have the means and time to make fundamental decisions and think deeply. As we witness in the rectoral period, Heidegger saw the University as an institution whose members represented a core force in national life, a strata of society, the 'scientists' perhaps, a type which needed to assert itself against the majority who could follow. While this self-estimate may have affected his style and his hopes, it does not necessarily affect the constituents of his future and present readership who do not need to belong to such an instituted elite. 4. Derrida, who was cautious about Heidegger's attempts to gather and present a vision of homogeneous human being, was no less sure that today technology or 'globalatinization' does hold unilaterally across the globe, such that non-Western countries are Western insofar as they take part in the triumph of technology, and that everyone is within globalatinization's grasp, willing or not. This does not, of course, mean that Derrida would approve of Heidegger's converse and 'other' vision of a better future. See, Derrida Acts of Religion (2001), 'Faith and Knowledge'. 5. Georges Bataille's work was developed in near independence from Heidegger's; however, the proximity in essential matters, despite the difference in style and historical circumstances of production, can be of great benefit in clarifying what each was respectively searching for. See Inner Experience (1988) on the 'contestation' which thinking must carry out to reach the free sovereignty of Da-sein. Bataille was, during his later years, greatly consoled by the thought that Heidegger had approved of his work. (Heidegger's imprimatur is quoted on the jacket of the Athlone edition of Bataille's On Nietzsche [1992]. The comment by Heidegger, however, is not perfectly verifiable, and Bataille, almost in pursuit of absolute failure, doubted whether he could rely on this sign of success for his life's work.)

2

The Echo in Everyday Life

1. As Kisiel says, they are 'ways' not 'works' (the epigraph to his projected Complete Edition was 'Ways not Works'); we therefore must follow the way, not pick at the works. This will mean being prepared to assume unpopular positions which leave everyday potential behind, and give up trying to contribute to mundane and immediate issues in contemporary life. 2. See Kisiel's summary (2002b) of the winter semester 1933-34, 'On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History and the State'. 3. 'Nihilism' is a frame of mind which believes that there is nothing to beings as such; it names the being of the being as nothing. Being veils itself, not into a name, or an event, but into nothing. '[TJhere is nothing to the being as such' (NIV, 220);

Notes

4.

beings become 'disenchanted' and uninteresting for those who question about existence. This is what nihilism means in metaphysics — since Plato's time, even though Plato did not frame his attitude to beings or being as such. 'In Nietzsche's thought the question of Being itself cannot be raised' (199). According to the Spenglerian view, Medieval Gothic philosophy dictates everything about our modern philosophy.

3 1.

2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

141

Sayings and Contributions to Be-ing

Gilbert Ryle offered a famous picture of those people who do not have personal interior lives or the experience of being-here; Richard Rorty gives another account (Rorty, 1980, 70-127). These considerations, while being not improper in this age, and not insignificant as signs of how thinking goes on today, are on the whole a betrayal of philosophy. The role of the philosopher is to get to the heart of life, not to rip it up by means of mere ratiocination, or to invent a language in which we may never need to speak as if we had an inner life, or in which we can disregard the fact that we are finite and alive. See, 'Hegel and the Concept of Experience' (OBT). The writings of Richard Dawkins, for example, express this machinational thinking about god (s) very well (seeDawkins, 1989). Such'scientific'writing is the automatic product of machination in our era, not of deep thinking; it does not reach the minimum threshold of an awareness of Da-sein. See for example, CP, 22; 30. 'Be-ing holds sway as enowning. The essential swaying has its centre and breadth in the turning.' These most false ones seems to be the theological writers who believe they know of the mystery, and illuminate it with Platonism, a borrowed light. This, surely the nexus from which Contributions and Heidegger's thinking springs, is a peculiarly direct rendering of the ideas of Schelling. ' [M] an learns that his peaceful dwelling place is built on the heart of a primeval fire, he notices that even in the primal being itself something had to be posited as past before the present time became possible, that this past remains hidden in the ground and that the same principle carries and holds us in its effectiveness which would consume and destroy us in its effectiveness' (Schelling, 1946, 13) (translated by Andrew Bowie [Schelling, 1994,21]). See R. May (2005, 11-20) on the issue of how Heidegger routinely 'edited' material and recalled conversations and experiences so as to attune them (perhaps) more clearly to be-ing. A familiar notion from Introduction to Metaphysics and Being and Time., man is nothing in essence. He opens onto nothing, realizes his world as nothing in his transcendence from it. A theme of the Introduction to Metaphysics, Basic Questions as well as of the Ister Hymn lectures. The immediate fact of being-here is apparently ineffable; to speak of it mediates it.

142

Notes

However, Heidegger sought always the way to speak while not stilling the stream of life, always saw a link between be-ing and the word. 11. See also, On the Way to Language (OWL, 111-36). 12. 'Be-ing holds sway in truth and is clearing for self-sheltering' (CP 21; 29). 13. The similarity of this to Kierkegaard's despair is clear insofar as the lack of self-relation is something which one may or may not know about, and whose only cure is in the intervention of God (see Kierkegaard, 1989). 14. 'A being is. Be-ing holds sway' (CP, 22; 30). 15. The works of Schelling have been recognized to play a major role in lending grace and daring to Heidegger's later style. The hearth-fire for example is a motif of Schelling's, likewise the characterization of the onefold unity of all things, including the cogito, with the name 'Seyn'. Romantic German philosophy and poetry around that trio of Schelling—Holderlin—Hegel is, perhaps, the most fruitful nexus for future thinking even today. In a simple adolescent but direct way, that 'Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism' (see Holderlin 1988, 154-6) gives the guiding intent of all German philosophy, including Heidegger's. 16. See IM, and Chapter 6.

4

Philosophy Playing-Forth Without God

1. 2.

See Kisiel (1995, 78) on this matter. Bataille (1992, 174, etpassim) quotes Nietzsche: '"And how many new gods are still possible!" ' 3. The myth was perhaps first developed by Nietzsche, who also considered it a history of lies or self-deceit vis-a-vis life, beginning with Plato and continuing in Christianity. See Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche, 1990, 50-1; 'History of an Error'). It is also prevalent in Derrida's early work (Derrida, 1997). 4. Incidentally, speculation that Heidegger somehow rejected Hebraism and any sense of God in his post-1933 work, as some suggest, is superfluous when we read Contributions. There is a widespread opinion that Heidegger had a relationship to National Socialism because his philosophy routinely disrupted and undermined any personal sense of responsibility. Heidegger insisted that his philosophy went far beyond the Greek philosophy; similarly, his 'theology' went far beyond the Hebrew theology. As a.philosopher, Heidegger gave more attention to Greek philosophy than to Hebrew and Christian theology. I cannot see that an analysis of being-here has any bearing either on personal responsibility or its lack. Responsibility is simply extraneous to his work, a feature of everyday life which yielded no knowledge of being-here.

5 1.

The Ground We Stand On

I have not space to go into it here, but direct the reader to Hugo Ott's work (1988) (a historical account by a non-philosopher), the work of Poggeler on this subject (1993), and that of Theodore Kisiel (2002a, 1-35). Suffice it to say that Heidegger

Notes

143

has come through the scandal of the discovery of his involvement without detriment to his work. 2. Even if Being and Time was not anthropological or psychologistic, it certainly appeared to be so, and does not leap radically enough into its theme in a fitting manner. Being and Time, of course, is very much preparatory to and integral to the later Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy. 3. The 'What is Metaphysics?' lecture, delivered to the assembled university faculties, was famous in its own day, and had been read by both Wittgenstein (who admired it), and the Vienna Circle, amongst others. It went through several editions, with Heidegger adding an 'Introduction' and 'Postscript' (both in Pathmarks) in the following decades. 4. Celan probably did not desire an apology. It would be a very simple-minded critic who viewed Celan as waiting for 'a coming word' (see Celan's 'Todtnauberg' [1996, 301]) of apology from the philosopher who was himself, like Celan, waiting for the future poet who would bring a completely other kind of'word'. They were both, after all, sure that a word from the heart could herald and create a new type of human being. 5. Strangely, Heidegger considered, it seems, that there will one day be a single mind, one Dasein, and all will recognize it and become it; for the time being, while there is no such single mind (though National Socialism seemed to offer it), we will have to make do with 'leaders' and those who go-under, who embody that Dasein. While there is no one Dasein/or all, we must learn to follow the one Dasein which Heidegger offers as a prefiguration of it. 6. I draw the attention of the reader to another closely related work by Derrida, Spectres of Marx (1994), where Derrida explains that a revolution, a movement, cannot escape the ghosts of its prior models; the French revolution imitated the Roman Republic; it is open to debate whether the German 'civil war' was to have been a strife over an embrace of the Greek independent city-state. 7. Quoted by Parvis Emad in his translation and introduction to Petzet's Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger (1993). 8. In modern thought, they are not even regarded with scepticism as the phenomena which hide the noumenal according to Kantian epistemology, notwithstanding the fact that Kant is relatively well respected by modern thinkers. 9. A full explicit account of'truth' as the opening up of life itself - rather than the contingent facts which are 'true' or 'false' — can be found in various essays from the early 1930s: 'The Essence of Truth' and 'Plato's Doctrine of Truth', for example (both in Pathmarks). This notion of truth is also to be found in Being and Time. The value of Contributions is in the elaboration of this notion of truth into the other elements of the whole complex of be-ing.

6 1.

The Last God and Poetry

See Heidegger (1980). The idea that a thing of beauty is a hint of being itself, that is, of the arrival of god and therefore of human closeness to be-ing as the unity, is seen in

144

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

Notes

various places in Heidegger's work. When Heidegger speaks of the 'shining' of a being he means its beauty. 'There the truth of being originally opened itself up as the shining revelation of what comes to presence. There truth was beauty itself (EHP, 186). There are other details to mention. For example, how Holderlin views eros and will as only temporal detours, eccentric courses through time, but not the original unity itself. Outlined particularly in Heidegger's later works such as 'Language in the Poem', a talkonTrakl (OWL, 159-98). On the other hand, could there ever cease to be disastrous consequences for being a poet? What if all were poets? Still there would be violence, and never peace, since for history to happen, man has to step out of be-ing, and the majority of people always are without it: 'To become historical means to rise out of the essential sway of be-ing and therefore to continue to belong to it' (CP, 321; 456). He is obviously what Bataille called 'sovereign'; see Bataille (1988). See'The Ground for "Empedocles"' (Holderlin, 1988,50-61). The transport of the tragic actor is immediate and empty, it is the removal of a man into 'the excentric sphere of the dead' (Holderlin, 1988, 102). See LacoueLabarthe's work on Heidegger and Holderlin and Greek art in his Heidegger, Art and Politics (1990). See Heidegger's discussion of Rilke's poetry in the Duino Elegies in Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought, for a dismissal of that poetry, even if it does call on 'angels' and a certain god (Heidegger, 1975, 91-142; 'What Are Poets For?'). Rilke, like Nietzsche, is still subjective, and hence 'technological'.

Conclusion 1.

See Safranski, (1998, 3); Heidegger links both Holderlin's composition of'The Ister' and his own birth to a 'sending' by be-ing which was fated to mark points on the way toward the new history of be-ing. 2. I use the adjectives 'basic', 'simple', 'straightforward', or 'obvious' throughout this book; I do so in the same spirit as Heidegger when he entitled his works 'Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics', 'Basic Questions of Philosophy', and so on. Heidegger was convinced that his theme was the most simple and obvious, and also that it was therefore very far removed from the complications of human approaches to it: what is most near is most distant from us when we try to express it. The same 'simplicity' shows itself in Heidegger's notion of'home', which, again, is, as 'be-ing' itself, both most near and yet utterly distant. Therefore, though the theme is very simple and basic, grounding and fundamental, it is always necessary for Heidegger to fall into a very subtle and hardly discernable pathway beyond our normal sort of understanding. His work thus becomes far from simple and basic.

Works cited

The list of works below only contains those few to which reference was overtly made in the course of this book; further reading on Heidegger's philosophy, if any is needed by the beginner, should start with, and perhaps not move very far away from, the works of Richardson, Poggeler and Kisiel. Books devoted to Contributions are as yet still few in number; I would suggest Richard Polt's book for a view of Contributions which discusses it in a less committed, more discursive style than I am, I confess, able to achieve. This list also contains most of Heidegger's stronger works and collections. Bataille, Georges (1987), Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood. London: Marion Boyars. (1988), [1943], Inner Experience, trans. Leslie-Anne Boldt. New York: SUNY Books. (1992), On Nietzsche, trans. B. Bone London, Athlone. Celan, Paul (1996), Selected Poems, trans. Michael Hamburger. London: Penguin Books. Dawkins, Richard (1989), The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. deBeistegui, Miguel (2005), The New Heidegger. London: Continuum. de Man, Paul (1983), Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. London: Methuen. Derrida, Jacques (1989), Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby. Chicago: Chicago University Press. (1994), Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. P. Kamuf. London: Routledge. (1995), Points: Interviews 1974-1994, ed. E. Weber, trans. P. Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (1997), OfGrammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. (2001), Acts of Religion, trans. Samuel Weber, Joseph F. Graham, et al.; ed. Gil Anidjar. London: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin (1975), Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row. (1977), The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row. (1980), Hb'lderlinsHymnen'Germanien'una"DerRhein', ed. Susanne Ziegler. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.

146

Works Cited

(1981), Nietzsche; Volume I: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell. London and Hanley: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (1982), On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz. New York: HarperCollins. (1985), Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Athens: Ohio University Press. (1991), Nietzsche; Volumes III and IV, ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Collins. (1993a), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrel Krell. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (1993b), '"Only a God Can Save Us": Der Spiegel's Interview with Martin Heidegger (1966)', trans. Maria D. Alter and John D. Caputo, in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (1993c), 'The Self-Assertion of the German University', trans. William S. Lewis, in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (1993d), 'Overcoming Metaphysics', trans. Joan Stambaugh, in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (1994), Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected Problems of Logic, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (1996), Holderlin's Hymn 'The Ister\ trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (1998a), Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. (1998b), Pathmarks, ed. W. McNeill. New York: Cambridge University Press. (1999), Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. (2000a), Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven and London: Yale Nota Bene. (2000b), Elucidations of Holderlin's Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller. New York: Humanity. (2002), Of the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2003), Beitrdge zur Philosophic (Vom Ereignis). Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. (2006), Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. London: Continuum. Holderlin, Friedrich (1957), Gedichte; Hyperim, ed. Herbert Lorenz, Miinchen: Wilhelm Goldman Verlag. (1986), Holderlin: Selected Verse, trans. Michael Hamburger. London: Anvil Press Poetry. (1988), Friedrich Holderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Thomas Pfau. New York: SUNY. (1998), Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger. London: Penguin Books. Kierkegaard, S0ren (1989), [1849], The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Alastair Hannay. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Works Cited

147

Kisiel, Theodore (1995), The Genesis of Heidegger's Being and Time. London: University of California Press. (2002a), Heidegger's Way of Thought, ed. A. Denker, and M. Heinz. London: Continuum. (2002b), Tn the Middle of Heidegger's Three Concepts of the Political', in Heidegger and Practical Philosophy, ed. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew. New York: SUNY. Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe (1990), Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner. Oxford: Blackwell. Marx, Werner (1971), Heidegger and the Tradition, trans. Theodore Kisiel. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. May, Reinhard (2005), Heidegger's Hidden Sources, trans. Graham Parkes. London and New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, F. W. (1968), The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. (1979), Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books. (1990), [1889], The Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books. (1996), Also Sprach ^arathustra; ein Buchfur Alle und Keinen, ed. Peter Piitz. Berlin: Goldmann. Ott, Hugo (1988), Mar tin Heidegger, a Political Life, trans. A. Blunden. London: Fontana Press. Petzet, H.W. (1993), Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Philipse, Herman (1998), Heidegger's Philosophy of Being. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Poggeler, Otto (1991), Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber. New York: Humanity Books. (1993), 'Heidegger's Political Self-Understanding', trans. Steven Gait Crowell, in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Polt, Richard (2006), The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Richardson, William J. (1963), Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Rorty, Richard (1980), Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Russell, Bertrand (1991), History of Western Philosophy. London: Routledge. Safranski, Riidiger (1998), Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. E. Osers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schelling, F.W.J. (1946), Die Weltalter, ed. M. Schroter. Munich. (1994), OntheHistory of Modern Philosophy, trans. A. Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, C.E.,Schoenbaum, S.M., Vallega-Neu,D. andA. Vallega (2001), Companion to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Scruton, Roger (2005), Modern Culture. London: Continuum.

148

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Sharr, Adam (2006), Heidegger's Hut, Cambridge MA: the MIT Press. Toynbee, AJ. (1957), A Study of History (Abridgement of volumes VII-X by B.C. Somerville). London: Oxford University Press. Vallega-Neu, Daniella (2003), Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Wolin, Richard (1993), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Index

Absolute, the x, 4 anxiety 100, 109 appropriation 11 Arendt, Hannah 42 Aristotle 58,75,89,91,97 and Da-sein 110 as the first beginning 100 and ideas 69 and nature 82 and wonder 122 art 43,64,98, 123, 125 and Da-sein 124 the impossibility of 114 and philosophy 121 'As when on a holiday' (Holderlin) attunement 10, 24, 40, 67, 122 to be-ing 64 the event of 56, 69 grounding 24,49 Augustine, St 113 authenticity 87 awe 69

121

Bataille, Georges 140n. 5 beauty 13, 14,20,46, 118, 125 in art 122 and the divine 113, 126 beginning 79 the first 85, 109, 136 the other 27, 60, 61, 65, 75, 85, 89, 91, 118,129 and god 72 and horror 69 the caesura of 86 be-ing 61

abandonment of 1, 5, 41, 48, 62, 79, 112,115, 136 absence of 50, 90 attunement to 65,107 clearing of 63, 98 for Da-sein 9,64,84, 117 distress of 98 drama and 55 finitude of 56 and the fourfold 89 giving of 73 god and 52,63, 101, 104 God and 37 hearth-fire 58, 65, 73 history of 43,51,82 house of 53,133 how it stands with 32, 73, 89, 112, 135 language of 40, 46 locale of 65 machination and 49, 68 names of 8,33,110 nothing 30, 59 origin of 84 refusal of 79 reign via man 51,64 sheltered 25,57, 101 shock of 103 thought of 7,81 today 63,83 and truth 106-8 violence of 62,83,134 voice of 9,36,45,47,59,80,134 and will 38, 53 as withholding itself 108,119 the 'Yes' to 20

150

Index

be-ing-historical-question 100 being-in-the-world 15,35,36,37 Being and Time (Heidegger) 2, 30, 31, 36, 39 as magnum opus 33, 34, 35 being-toward-death 18, 134 everydayness 133 transcendence 38 beings andbe-ing 14,30,55 and'being' 16,54,89, 117 and disenchantment 23,66,136 opened up by Da-sein 23,31, 101 the essence of 8, 107 and fate 50,93,98 and form 86, 98 going beyond 40 as guide 22,32,57 history of 28 and metaphysics 53, 72, 132 and objects 102 overpowering 46,99 and philosophy 60, 85 and power 58, 60 presence of 21, 64 restoration of 53, 73 as shelters 26,53,83, 102 and technology 78, 88, 100 between 38,46,120 of god and man 84 calculation 16, 72, 86 call 115 care 8,115 Celan, Paul 42 challenging-forth 78,92 Christ, Jesus 55,65 Christianity 1, 4, 58, 87, 127, 139n. 17 decline of 114 and Holderlin 1,6,11,14,53,81, 139n.17 and philosophy 111 circling 111 city, the 100,133 Clark, Timothy 101 consciousness 57 conservative revolution 11,14

Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)

(Heidegger) genesis of 7 the MS 16,118 Heidegger's view of 68 as the language of be-ing 60, 65, 73, 76 danger, the 55,78,84, 128 Da-sein 22,29,41,59,67,99 and art 67 between man and god 109 as fire 29 inwardness 25, 39, 76,100, 126 opening of truth 10, 58, 61, 69, 88, 99, 121 the origin of philosophy 99 Dawkins, Richard 102 de Beistegui, Miguel 141n. 3 dead, the 3 death 42,120 as Da-sein 99, 103, 119 and god 133 decision 3, 4, 71, 100 deconstruction 64,89 demi-god 45,92, 113 Derrida, Jacques 95 Descartes, Rene 19, 31, 72, 75, 103, 140n. 4, 142. n3 desire 58 destiny 23,70,92, 104 destruction, of the earth 100 devastation, of earth and man 129 dis-humanization 1,2, 125 distress 52, 53, 64, 83 down-going 25, 46, 66, 70, 73 'Empedocles' (Holderlin) 56 earth, domination of 21, 78, 84, 120 and metaphysics 28 and world 26, 28, 30, 38, 79, 107, 121 EcceHomo (Nietzsche) 123 echo, hearing of 69 enowning, definition of 66, 119, (see 'be-ing') as hearing 30 as truth of be-ing 6 turning in 112

Index error 62 event of being-here 7, 11, 22, 43, 112 everyday life 3,33,73,97, 114 evil 98 existence 104 experience 9, 44, 55 facts 39,41,42,99 falling 10 fate 9,94-6,105 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 99 film 10,50 form, logical 85 founders 53, 66 fourfold, the 111 freedom 6,9, 10,30,36, 100 in German Idealism 104 future, the 67, 112, 118 genius 34, 68 Germany 91,95, 101, 127 God 82,114 death of 1,8,67, 112, 115-18 and nihilism 51,78,82 andbe-ing 12,71, 113, 126 in Heidegger's early lectures 12, innerness 115 philosophy 104, 110 silence about 71 god, the last 79 abode of 82 and ancestors 73 andbe-ing 21,22,60-2 and beings 117 and Da-sein 111 and desire for be-ing 59, 118 earth and world and 59 feast of 112 hintof 27,71,81,105,115-16,129 and human self-relation 124 'last' 29,69,81,87 law of 41 meeting with man 54, 44, 62 nearness of 7, 10,8,32, 111 prayer 81 stillness 71,104 and the new history 24

151

thought of 26, 36 decision about 100 Greece, Ancient 102 andbe-ing 98,114 and philosophy 85,114 ground 8,61,85, 105 between god and man 111, (see 'between') happiness 86 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 12, 13 and Absolute Knowledge 14, 51, 76 and the history of philosophy 61 and subjectivity 58, 73 Heidegger, Fritz 93 Heidegger, Martin Catholicism of 89, 46, 102 and Christianity 79 and dogmatism 94 and Germany 128 and god 139n. 17 and God 13 and Greece 81,128 guilt of 98 and Hitler 88,91-2,94, 117 on Holderlin in 1930s 10, 12, 18, 21, 101, 111, 138n. 9, 138n. 12 and home 41 and Husserl, Edmund 16, 62 metaphysics 42 Nazism of 139n. 17 Nietzsche lectures of 91-5 personal destiny of 101 political involvement of 56,120-2, 129 and the public 76, 78 reading of Nietzsche 78 service to the State 88 and the university 16, 18, 37, 43, 80, 81 andtheVolk 132 Heraclitus 80,98, 110 hermeneutic circle 6, 60, 99 history 107 of be-ing 9, 14, 58, 66, 74, 101, 123 and Da-sein 79 god and 114

152 and leap 114 meaning of 113 of philosophy 42, 69, 78, 112 twentieth century 90 unique moments of 108,133 violence and 132 Western 20 Hitler, Adolf 87, 101 Holderlin, Friedrich Wilhelm 86 and the aesthetic 67 caesura 111 and the city 11,13 down-going of 14 and essence 118 and the future 45, 68 and Germany 86 and home 67 intimating gods 14 his language 113 on mood 43 on nature 66 on philosophy 13, 66 as poet of poets 118, 127 thinker of the other beginning 121 and tragedy 111 'Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry' (Heidegger) 69, 111 holy, the 36,52,91, 126 home 53,73,84,96-7, 112, 113, 122 human, the agent of be-ing 98 and artworks 118 and be-ing 125 in Being and Time 60 city as being of 44,97, 119 confrontation with god 29, 44, 57, 123 Da-sein 32, 33, 43, 51, 52, 79, 102 essence of 12,20,58,83 as everyday 120 as guardian 5, 14, 23, 59, 106 and homelessness 25, 41, 86 as intermediary 66,136 lacking distress 100 language and 103 and nature 68 as open-space 52 and race 112

Index as rational animal 26, 34, 70 and reality 88 real self of 7,8, 16,68, 122 as staggering 104,134 and stillness 111 and tragedy 64,114 and the truth of be-ing 95 Tn lovely blueness blooms...' (Holderlin) 82 Idealism, German 13, 14, 75, 76, 83, 96, 112 ideas 94, 103 information 120 Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger) 45,50,88,95-102 inwardness 14, 72, 89, 110, 119, 138n. 12 'The Ister' (Holderlin) 45 It, (the pre-worldly something) 33, 37, 39,40, 124 Jaspers, Karl 36 Jiinger, Ernst 91 Kant, Immanuel 31, 58, 76, 95, 106 Kierkegaard, S0ren 4, 10, 21, 86, 129 Kisiel, Theodore x, 19, 39, 140n. 1, 140n. 13 language 15, 18, 68 and art 7, 13 ofbe-ing 65 as grounding of history 120 Heidegger's use of 111 non-human 70 origin of 114 assaying 115-16, 124 as shelter 58, 72 symbolic 136 leader, the 98,117 leap 5,6, 15,22, 111 with be-ing 66, 132 definition of 26 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 67, 75, 79, 102 liberalism 10,

Index life 22,34, 101, 109, 123 and art 37, 38 lived-experience 42, 43, 50, 134 logic 123 Lowith, Karl 72, 139n. 17 machination 50, 54, 81 May, Reinhart 132 metaphysics 3,15,33,51,83 and beings 40 Christian 86 exhausted 82,88,132 Greek 53 language of 57, 110 mastery in 68 meta-metaphysics 37 nihilistic 85, 108 positivist 90 subjective 21 and tragedy 72 mind 80 mindfulness 64,66,136 Mindfulness (Heidegger) 40 moment 7, 15 moods 12,42,62, 113 mythology 69 nation 95,118 nature 20,125,122 exploitation of 55 Nazism 28, 38, 45, 51, 76, 92, 101, 105 neo-Kantianism 101 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 8,16,21, 41,51,60,77,79 and art 79,121 and Christianity 78,81 and intimating gods 69,113 and reality 58, 69, 77 and the superman 95 and tragedy 69 truth for 82,109 and will to power 48-51, 79 as last metaphysician 78, 80, 86, 85 nihilism 1,48,62,85, 123 as machination 52 as staggering 102

153

nothing 9,90-7 asbe-ing 47,57, 131 more than'lack' 104, 108 objects 66, 106, 126 Oedipus 98 ones to come, the 25-7 onto-theology 2 origin 9,11,101 of philosophy 86 'Origin of the Work of Art' (Heidegger) 122-7 Otto, Hugo 142n. 1 pantheism 2,7,104 Parmenides 98,110 path, of philosophy 86 pathway, speediest 59, 67 Paul, St 87 peace 54 perception 10,26, 126 personality 64 phenomenology 38, 39, 41 Philipse, Herman 137n. 1 philosopher, the 42, 46 philosophy 7, 14, 33, 38, 43, 53, 59, 67, 75,94,99, 128, 141n. 1 analytic 50, 130 and be-ing 67, 78 and god 81 Heidegger's view of 136 history of 61,67,75,82,85,89 systematic 14, 15,66, 103 Pindar 119 Plato 1,61,75,99, 100, 131n. 3 play, of time-space 107 playing-forth 76 poet, as demi-god 41, 45, 62, 96, 118 poetry 10, 13,44,46-7, 111 and poets 36 the essence of language 120 mythical 118 Poggeler, Otto 8, 17, 142n. 1 Polt, Richard 19,37, 138n. 11 power 52, 77, 89 Nietzsche 79, 102 presence 31,50, 101, 102, 110

154

Index

present day, the 4, 52, 55, 68 Prometheus 95,98 question, the ground the guide 42, 60 questioning 55 lack of 51,7

27, 60

real, the 54 reality x, 9, 50, 82-3, 89-91, 94, 99, 102, 136 opposed to be-ing 62,90,105,125 enslaving 100 refusal 57,90 renunciation 42, 56, 63, 73, 94, 96-7, 120,133 representation 10, 14, 21, 136 of objects 54 ofreality 28 reservedness 25, 27 resolution 69 retrieval 115 Richardson, William, J. 100 Rorty, Richard 141n. 1 Russell, Bertrand 61, 77 Ryle, Gilbert 141n. 1 sacred, the 10, 11, 14 sacrifice 59 Safranski, Riidiger 19, saying, of be-ing 36, 65 Schelling, Friedrich 14, 79, 102-5 science 11,43,55,56, 136 account of man 29 representation 52 destruction of beings 50 effects of 107-8 Scruton, Roger x Second World War, the 91 self 66 assertion 94 knowing 115 mindfulness 8, 136 recognition 48,80 relation 58 renunciation 66 seeking 25 'The Self-Affirmation of the German University' (Heidegger) 90-2

Seyn 138n. 5, see 'be-ing' sheltering 109

shock 47,48,51,89 Sophocles 22, 42, 96, 97, 110, 139n. 15 and god 97 forHolderlin 114, 119 and metaphysics 97 speech 68, (see 'language') Spinoza, Baruch 2,104 spirit 88,93 96,112 State, the 45,98, 101 statesman, the 96 stillness 61, 110, 135 strife, of earth and world 31, 36 subject, the 113, 133 subjectivity 37, 63, 72, 79, 92, 106, 136 and the absence of be-ing 69 renunciation of 64, 74

technology 9, 17, 20, 61, 122, 136 and art 123 forming reality 28, 99 and beings 94, 101 and language 68 as nihilism 64 global 27,53,130 theology 53 thing, the 126 thinking 59,131 lack of 64,78 the new 115 thought 36, 57, 83 Thus Spoke ^arathustra (Nietzsche) 78 time 13 time-space 32, 106-10 Todtnauberg 16,20,21, total-mobilization 56,92 Toynbee, ArnoldJ. 139n. 14 tragedy, Greek 10,14, 86, 96 and be-ing 98,119 truth 5,55,64,72, 101 and art 121 and be-ing 73-4,98, 108 as event 33,109 and the godly 124 locale of 83

Index for Nietzsche 77, 109 as openness of 18, 30, 83-4, 134 revealing and concealing 108,123, 136 and time-space 66 and value 83 turning, the 62, 70, 115 withbe-ing 61, 63,99 unique 73, 135 unity 13,46,106 university, the 45, 55, 92, 96 and Heidegger's rectorate 93, 132 value voice

52, 55, 77 112,130

155

War Emergency Semester (Heidegger) 41 West, the 129 'What is Metaphysics?' (Heidegger) 57, 88, 90-1 Will to Power (Nietzsche) 78 will 69,71,77,79,82 wonder 89 world 28, 36, 52, 55, 80 and art 126 beyond the 7, 39, 47, 74 opening of 30 philosophy and 67 saving of 74 of technology 127