The Heidegger Dictionary [2 ed.] 1350190349, 9781350190344

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The Heidegger Dictionary

Bloomsbury Philosophy Dictionaries The Bloomsbury Philosophy Dictionaries offers clear and accessible guides to the work of some of the more challenging thinkers in the history of philosophy. A–Z entries provide clear definitions of key terminology, synopses of key works, and details of each thinker’s major themes, ideas, and philosophical influences. The Dictionaries are the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying these key philosophers.

Titles Available in the Series: The Derrida Dictionary, Simon Morgan Wortham The Gadamer Dictionary, Chris Lawn and Niall Keane The Hegel Dictionary, Glenn Alexander Magee The Heidegger Dictionary 1st ed., Daniel O. Dahlstrom The Husserl Dictionary, Dermot Moran and Joseph Cohen The Marx Dictionary, Ian Fraser and Lawrence Wilde The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary, Donald A. Landes The Sartre Dictionary, Gary Cox The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary, Eugene B. Young

The Heidegger Dictionary 2nd edition Daniel O. Dahlstrom

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Daniel O. Dahlstrom, 2023 Daniel O. Dahlstrom has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: Pocket watch with chain (© swaite / iStock) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-9034-4 PB: 978-1-3501-9035-1 ePDF: 978-1-3501-9036-8 eBook: 978-1-3501-9037-5 Series: Bloomsbury Philosophy Dictionaries Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Eugenie and Max, again

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Contents

Preface

viii

Method of Citation

x

Acknowledgments

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List of Themes

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Introduction 1 Part One: Themes 17 Part Two: Names 293 Part Three: Texts 323 Appendix: Critical Considerations

367

References

372

Index

375

Preface

D

ictionaries, Heidegger observes, contain mere lexical items or terms (Wörter) not spoken words (Worte) and the very tradition of dictionaries goes back to a specific way of thinking whose limitations he labors to expose (38: 17, 21, 23). “For a dictionary can neither grasp nor contain the word by which terms become words” (12: 181). Yet another judgment is less harsh: “A ‘dictionary’ can give hints for the understanding of words but it is never an unqualified and binding authority from the outset” (53: 75). In the spirit of this judgment, the following dictionary aims to provide hints to understanding Heidegger’s words, not merely his terms. Just as Heidegger was an avid user of dictionaries (51: 88), my hope is that students of his writings find this dictionary a useful introduction and aid to interpreting and criticizing his thinking. Part One reviews the main themes of his thinking. Part Two discusses his interpretations of his main “interlocutors” (predecessors and contemporaries). Part Three glosses the volumes of Heidegger’s published writings, lectures, and posthumous works in the Complete Edition. In keeping with a dictionary format, exposition takes precedence over criticism, with two exceptions: in the Introduction and the entry on “politics,” I criticize views found in the more recently published Black Notebooks; in the Appendix I offer some brief critical considerations of a more directly philosophical nature. Heidegger’s terminology, like his thinking, develops, at times dramatically. Some terms (e.g., “disposedness,” “fallenness,” “metontology”) have a short shelf-life, others (e.g., “Dasein,” “freedom,” “ground”) remain in force but take on different meanings. With no claim to exhaustiveness, the dictionary attempts to identify significant shifts in his terminology. Given the wealth of words used by Heidegger and given constraints of page-length, competence, and differences in interpretation, the present effort is even more an abridgement of the language in question than a standard dictionary would be. Scholars will no doubt miss glosses of some key terms and figures. But researchers have the benefit of other resources: a valuable dictionary by Michael Inwood, another by Alfred Denker and Frank Schalow, a concordance by François

Preface

Jaran and Christoph Perrine (published by Bloomsbury), and most recently, a monumental lexicon by a host of scholars under the able editorship of Mark Wrathall. Consultation of these works can make up for many a term not treated or not treated adequately in this volume. A final word about this second edition: When the first edition of the dictionary appeared, multiple volumes of the Complete Edition, including the Black Notebooks, had yet been published. One of the main reasons for the new edition is to expand the dictionary’s scope to include consideration of the contents of those additional volumes. The result is the inclusion of several new and revised entries in Part One, for example, “appropriation,” “being and beyng,” “hint,” and “politics.” In Part Three readers will now find glosses of every published volume of the Complete Edition.

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Method of Citation A

ll numbers followed by a colon and other numbers in parentheses refer to the respective volume of the Complete Edition (Gesamtausgabe) of Heidegger’s works, followed by the page numbers after the colon. For example, “(5: 177)” refers to Martin Heidegger, Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe Band 5, herausgegeben von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2003), S. 177. Within entries, reference to a volume of the Collected Edition is made by using the standard abbreviation “GA,” followed by the volume number; for example, “GA5” refers to the volume cited previously. When no reference is given immediately following a quoted passage, the next parenthetical reference in the respective paragraph contains the reference. Since most English translations include the respective page numbers of the original German edition, it would be redundant to cite the pagination of those translations. In Part Three English translations of volumes of the Complete Edition are listed along with the respective German volume. “SZ,” followed by numbers, in parentheses refers to the pages of the most widely used edition of Sein und Zeit: for example, “(SZ 75)” refers to Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1972), S. 75. No corresponding English pagination needs to be given for Sein und Zeit since the page numbers of this edition (issued in multiple years) are indicated in the margins of both standard English translations of Being and Time. When my translation of a term from SZ differs from one of these translations, I indicate their translation by citing an abbreviation for the translation, followed by a colon and their translation. “MR” refers to the John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson translation (San Francisco: Harper, 1962); “S” refers to the Joan Stambaugh translation, with a foreword by Dennis Schmidt (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2011). So, too, “W” refers to alternate translations

Method of Citation

of entries found in Mark Wrathall, The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). All italicized words within quoted phrases or lines are italicized in the original.

xi

Acknowledgments

S

pecial thanks go to Lucy Russell, Akshaya Ravi, and the general editors of Bloomsbury press for their encouragement and for proposing this revised and expanded edition of the dictionary. I continue to owe a debt of gratitude to Ian Dunkle, Walter Hopp, Manfred Kuehn, Nolan Little, Andrew Mitchell, Mary Catherine McDonald, Josh McDonald, Claudius Strube, and Robert Scharff for their sagacious advice and help with the first edition. This new edition would also not have been possible without the help of several people: Andrew Butler, Filippo Casati, Joseph Cohen, Peter Hanly, James Kinkaid, Rosalie Looijaard, and—once again—Richard Polt. I am also grateful to Dennis Schmidt for his careful reading of the penultimate draft of the book. The dictionary would also not have been possible without the constant support of my wife, Eugenie, and my son, Max. The third party copyrighted material displayed in the pages of this book are done so on the basis of “fair dealing for the purposes of criticism and review” or “fair use for the purposes of teaching, criticism, scholarship or research” only in accordance with international copyright laws, and is not intended to infringe upon the ownership rights of the original owners.

Themes

absence abyss aletheia ambiguity angst animals appropriation art as-structure assertion attunement authenticity

Abwesen Abgrund ἀλήθεια Zweideutigkeit Angst Tiere Ereignis Kunst Als-Struktur Aussage Stimmung Eigentlichkeit

being, beyng being-here being-in-the-world being-with biology bodiliness boredom building

Sein, Seyn Da-sein In-der-Welt-sein Mitsein Biologie Leiblichkeit Langeweile bauen

care certainty circumspection clearing comportment conscience consciousness constancy

Sorge Gewißheit Umsicht Lichtung Verhalten Gewissen Bewußtsein Ständigkeit

xiv

Themes

correspond curiosity

entsprechen Neugier

danger death decision destruction difference, dif-ference disclosedness discourse disposedness dwelling earth enframing epoch errancy essence ethics everydayness existence, existentials, and ek-sistence experience, lived experience expropriating

Gefahr Tod Entscheidung Destruktion Differenz, Unter-schied Erschlossenheit Rede Befindlichkeit wohnen Erde Gestell Epoche Irre Wesen Ethik Alltäglichkeit Existenz, Ek-sistenz Erfahrung, Erlebnis enteignen

facticity fallenness fate and destiny finitude fissure fit forgottenness of being formal indication fourfold freedom future ones

Faktizität Verfallen Schicksal, Geschick Endlichkeit Zerklüftung Fug Seinsvergessenheit formale Anzeige Geviert Freiheit Zu-künftigen

gigantic, the gods ground grounding

das Riesige Götter Grund Gründung

hermeneutics hint

Hermeneutik Wink

Themes

history of beyng history holy, the homecoming human being

Seynsgeschichte Geschichte das Heilige Heimkunft Mensch

identity idle talk inception innerworldly knowing, cognition language leap logic logos

Identität Gerede Anfang innerweltlich Wissen, Erkennen Sprache Sprung Logik λόγος

machination meaning metaphysics mineness modernity mystery

Machenschaft Bedeutung Metaphysik Jemeinigkeit Neuzeit Geheimnis

nearness negation nihilism nothing

Nähe Negation, Verneinung Nihilismus Nichts

objectivity ontic ontology onto-theo-logy open, the overturning

Gegenständlichkeit, Objektivität ontisch Ontologie Onto-theo-logie das Offene Überwindung

pass people phenomenology philosophical anthropology philosophy physis poetry

Zuspiel Volk Phänomenologie philosophische Anthropologie Philosophie φύσις Dichtung

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Themes

politics possibility presence primordial psychology

Politik Möglichkeit Anwesen ursprünglich Psychologie

questioning

fragen

readiness-to-hand reality reason releasement representing resoluteness resonance restraint

Zuhandenheit Realität Vernunft, Grund Gelassenheit vorstellen Entschlossenheit Anklang Verhaltenheit

science self sense sign spatiality steadfastness step-back subjectivity

Wissenschaft Selbst Sinn Zeichen Räumlichkeit Inständigkeit Schritt zurück Subjektivität

technology theology they thing thinking thrownness time time-space transcendence translation truth turn twofold

Technik Theologie Man Ding Denken Geworfenheit Zeit Zeit-Raum Transzendenz Übersetzung Wahrheit Kehre Zwiefalt

uncanny understanding

unheimlich Verstehen

Themes

wholeheartedness will winding back word world

Innigkeit Wille, wollen Verwindung Wort Welt

In regard to the foregoing List of Themes, it bears noting that Heidegger often nominalizes certain themes by employing the definite article. The employment of the article serves as a means of noting that he intends to focus on the respective theme’s central, dominant features (much as ethical writers differentiate uses of “good” and “the Good”). In this way he elevates, for example, the ordinary German pronoun man to a theme of its own by referring to das Man (“the They”); he treats the preoccupation with the gigantic by similarly nominalizing the German adjective riesig to das Riesige (“the gigantic”). He uses numerous other terms (many that are central to his thinking) both with and without articles, for example, Ereignis and das Ereignis (“appropriation” and “the appropriation”), Kehre and die Kehre (“turn” and “the turn”). In these cases the article often signals a discussion of the theme as such, that is, in more or less summative fashion. Some of these uses of articles (e.g., das Heilige, das Offene) but by no means all of them are flagged in the List of Themes. He also regularly distinguishes use and mention of terms by employing quotation marks for the latter, although he also often uses quotation marks for emphasis, that is, as scare quotes (see Dahlstrom 2022).

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Introduction

H

eidegger is a thinker, and, as far as the person of Heidegger is concerned, one is tempted to say no more than he said of Aristotle: “As for his personality, our only interest is that he was born at a certain time, that he worked, and that he died” (18: 5). Yet this dissociation of thinking and thinker will not do, especially for the thinker who gave currency to the very concept of the existential in Western thought, tying how we exist to our selfunderstanding in a way that allegedly serves as a condition for any theory or practice. Rarely if ever does he reveal any wavering in an arguably overblown belief in the transformative potential of examining how we think of being and, no less importantly, how we forget it. Like so many of his generation, he experienced firsthand the all-but-lost nearness of things and he understood all too well Hölderlin’s “flight of the gods” and Nietzsche’s “death of God”: the absence of any ultimate grounding (anything transcendent or absolute) in our lives. As he fervently tries to retrieve that nearness and that grounding (they point to the same), he implicates the history of Western philosophy in presentday nihilism—the mindless and unimpeded pursuit of power in a world dominated by markets and means of production, a rapacious technology, and the calculating, computerized representation of everything. Of course, there are other good reasons for not divorcing Heidegger’s thought from his life, notably his evolving apostasy, the traumatic effect of the Great War on his generation, his alarming alignment of his philosophy with National Socialist ideology in the early 1930s, his stubborn refusal, after the war, to make any further apologies for that involvement or its consequences, and the distressing additional evidence of his chauvinism and his antisemitism, especially in the more recently published Black Notebooks. Biography and phenomenology are different but they invariably intersect, and the rest of this introduction highlights points of intersection of Heidegger’s life and thinking.

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The Heidegger Dictionary

Born on September 26, 1889, in the small town of Messkirch, in an area long known as “Catholic country,” Martin Heidegger attends public high schools in Constance and Freiburg from 1903 to 1909. At Constance he resides at St. Conrad’s Seminary, a residence for students of modest means who were regularly reminded of their second-class status by the better-off students at the high school. Nonetheless, Heidegger recalls his studies at the two “humanistic” gymnasiums as a time of “fruitful learning from excellent teachers of Greek, Latin, and German.” At the seminary Heidegger becomes close to its rector, Conrad Gröber, a figure active in conservative Catholic politics, and Heidegger’s first publications (1910–12) are popular pieces bemoaning modernity and individualism while championing the Church’s “eternal treasure-trove of truth” (16: 7). In 1907 Gröber gives Heidegger a copy of Franz Brentano’s 1862 dissertation On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle, a work whose “question of what is simple in the manifold of being” provided a constant stimulus, Heidegger later acknowledges, to his 1927 masterpiece, Being and Time. Despite the acknowledgment, it deserves noting that, while Brentano privileges the categorial meaning of “being” (being as a substance and its properties) over the other three meanings (being as accidental, true, and potential-or-actual) Heidegger will eventually assign pride of place to the sense of “being” convertible with “truth.” After ill health impedes his study for the priesthood, Heidegger studies mathematics, physics, and chemistry before turning to philosophy, mainly with Heinrich Rickert, at the University of Freiburg. In his 1914 dissertation on “The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism,” he follows Husserl in arguing that the logical character of judgment lies outside the purview of a psychological study. In a 1916 qualifying monograph (“habilitation”) on Duns Scotus’ doctrine of categories and meaning, Heidegger draws on Husserl’s Logical Investigations to interpret the medieval philosopher. A year after completing the habilitation, Heidegger marries one of his students, the Protestant Elfride Petri, in a Catholic ceremony. It is wartime but poor health interrupts military service until the final months of the war when, after training near Berlin (while poring over the works of Schleiermacher), he serves as an army weatherman. When he is occasionally in Freiburg during this time, he seeks out Husserl who arrives at the university as Rickert’s replacement, and, after some hesitation on the older man’s part, the two phenomenologists become frequent interlocutors for the next decade (including regular, celebrated Saturday discussions during this early Freiburg period). Heidegger opens lectures in 1923 with the acknowledgment that “Husserl gave me my eyes” (63: 5). In the late 1920s, unfazed by reports of their differences, Husserl reportedly tells Heidegger: “You and I are phenomenology” (Cairns 1976, 9).

Introduction

In 1919, Heidegger writes to his friend Engelbert Krebs, the priest officiating at his wedding, that “epistemological insights” regarding the theory of historical knowledge “have made the system of Catholicism problematic and unacceptable to me—but not Christianity and metaphysics, that, however, in a new sense.” With these prescient lines, Heidegger formally signals his break with Catholicism. In addition to the riskiness of such a move at the time (with a newborn at home and uncertain job prospects), the decision is particularly revealing for its commitment to metaphysics “in a new sense.” Traditional metaphysics attempts to answer the question: “What are beings?” But, as Heidegger was fond of emphasizing, this leading question of metaphysics traditionally amounted to a question of meta-physics, that is, if not an afterthought to physics, at least an extension of the determination of the structures and processes of things in nature as opposed to a foundational investigation into what it means to be per se. In later years he would see in this metaphysical tradition a legacy of the original Greek understanding of being as physis, what constantly emerges and prevails as the constant presence of things in nature. The new approach to metaphysics announced in his letter to Father Krebs begins to take shape in the early Freiburg lectures (1919–23) via a radical reformation of Husserlian phenomenology, abetted by investigations of history and religious experience found in the writings of St. Paul, Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey. In a 1921 letter to his student Karl Löwith, Heidegger writes: “I am no philosopher” but instead “a Christian theologian” (Papenfuß and Pöggeler 1990, 28f). During these early years a hermeneutics of the historicity and facticity of the pre-theoretical experience of living the faith takes the place of Husserl’s theory-driven, detached observations of consciousness. Here being is experienced neither as some object set over against a subject nor as something only privy to subjective consciousness. Since Heidegger’s phenomenology is hermeneutical, it makes no pretension of being presuppositionless. In Marburg, where he lectures from 1923 to 1928, Heidegger spells out the nature of not only his appropriation of phenomenology but also his reasons for breaking with Husserl’s version of it (see “Phenomenology”). Heidegger’s early years in both Freiburg and Marburg are also marked by intensive engagement with Aristotle’s texts. Indeed, SZ emerges from an attempt to elaborate categories for a planned Aristotle commentary, a commentary that again, as part of metaphysics in a new sense, departs radically from interpretations based upon Catholic Scholastic thought. In this regard Heidegger takes up the baton, if not from Luther himself, then from a long tradition of Protestant commentary on Aristotle. SZ has its origins principally, however, in Heidegger’s grievance with traditional metaphysics, and that grievance was not simply that traditional

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The Heidegger Dictionary

thinking of being takes its cues from the structure and processes of natural entities: even more egregious in his eyes is, as mentioned earlier, its failure to pursue the question that first has to be answered, namely, “What is being? What is the sense of being? What is the meaning of ‘being’?” Three insights converge in his attempt in SZ to raise this question and put metaphysics on a new footing. First, the notion of “sense” here is fundamentally phenomenological in a manner already emphasized by Husserl, that is, designating the way in which something is experienced. Unlike what is experienced, the way it is experienced is typically hidden, just as, in my visual experience of a tree, I see the tree but neither what I see it as (that is to say, the sense of being a tree that allows me to see it as a tree is hidden from sight) nor how I see it (e.g., as an object of botany, a source of shade, or a thing of beauty). The sense of being that enables the experience of beings/entities is itself hidden, and it is the task of a phenomenology to expose that sense, leading Heidegger to declare: “ontology is only possible as phenomenology” (SZ 35). Second, as the focus shifts to the question of the sense of being, the examination must take its initial bearings, not from just any entity, let alone natural entities, but from the entity that has an understanding of being— the entity identified as being-here (Da-sein). The analysis looks, in other words, to the phenomenological subject itself, albeit not a human being as part of nature but as being-here, where “here” stands for the disclosedness, the clearing in which beings and their being are present to us and absent from us. In this respect, Heidegger notes, he follows a long tradition of recognizing that the study of being implicates an account of the mind of the human being with an understanding of being “which obviously has nothing in common with a pernicious subjectification of the universe of beings” (SZ 14). From the supposition that any ontology must take its bearings from the understanding of being that is proper to being-here, Heidegger concludes: “Thus, the fundamental ontology, from which all others are first able to spring, must be sought in the existential analysis of Dasein” (SZ 13). The third insight underlying SZ emerges most clearly from the conclusion of its existential analysis. That analysis, aimed at determining the meaning of “being” disclosed by being-here (being-here both inauthentically and authentically), concludes that time, appropriately construed, constitutes the sense of Dasein’s being and thereby underlies any understanding of being. But time is not itself an entity if “being an entity” means being present, as it does for much of the Western tradition. The being of Dasein is not itself a being but a lived time, including both what is and what is not present. This conclusion—that time is not an entity in time—conforms to the third insight driving Heidegger’s analysis, that is, his insistence, from the outset of SZ, that “the being [Sein] of beings ‘is’ not itself a being [Seiendes]” (SZ 6).

Introduction

These three insights—that any study of being must be phenomenological (rooted in experience), that it entails existential analysis (a determination of Dasein), and that it must uphold the difference between being and beings— form the foundation of Heidegger’s thinking, not only in SZ but for the rest of his life (but see “ontology” and “phenomenology”). Notably, however, he planned a second part to SZ, aimed at dismantling the history of ontology’s myopic equation of being with presence. Yet he aborted the project because, as he later puts it, the metaphysical language he was employing in SZ distorted what he was endeavoring to say (9: 328f). Indeed, although adamant that his philosophy is in no way existentialism, centered as the latter is in subjectivity, Heidegger acknowledges that the talk of “being-here [Da-sein] in SZ still has the appearance of the ‘anthropological’ and ‘subjectivistic’ and ‘individualistic,’ and so forth; and yet the opposite of all that was in my sights” (65: 295). While he conceived SZ as an attempt to raise a transforming question that metaphysics traditionally failed to pose, his talk of “conditions of the possibility” and time as the “transcendental [constantly present] horizon” of the understanding of being (SZ 41) exemplifies his misleading reliance upon the language of metaphysics. In other words, conceiving temporality and historicality transcendentally, as conditions of the possibility of relating to beings, courts an understanding of them as determinations of a transcendental subject and thereby forfeits an essential component of that very temporality and historicality. Looking back at his path-breaking work, Heidegger concludes that in SZ he emphasizes how Dasein projects those conditions while understating that its existence (projection) is itself thrown. In this pivotal respect, the analysis of Dasein as a transcendental subject, however radical in comparison with a Kantian (or Husserlian) transcendental ego, remains in the ambit of a philosophy that understands itself as metaphysics and is thus not of a piece with a particular time and history. By not thinking being historically, it betrays a forgetfulness of being, or, more precisely, beyng—the appropriation (Ereignis) of being-here and the being of beings to one another. Beyng as that appropriation has a history of its own, the history of Western thinking since its Greek inception. According to the existential analysis of SZ, truth is part of the basic constitution of Dasein (SZ 226); but Heidegger now comes to acknowledge that the decision is still out on whether Dasein executes its essential role in grounding this truth of beyng by thinking beyng historically. Beginning in the early 1930s, based upon these considerations, Heidegger distances his Contributions to Philosophy (GA65) from all metaphysics and from anything ontological or transcendental, including the vestiges of a transcendental subject. The center of gravity gradually shifts from “being and time” to “being and history,” that is, from the temporality of Dasein to the historical relation between Dasein and the being of beings, a relation

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The Heidegger Dictionary

understood as their mutual appropriation and groundless ground (for review of this major shift in his thinking, see “being and beyng”). Heidegger commandeers the term “Ereignis” (ordinarily signifying “event” and often so translated) for this ground. Over the next decade and a half until the end of the war he elaborates this theme through critical studies of the history of philosophy, issuing in highly original and controversial readings of Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Schelling and Nietzsche. Heidegger’s insight into the necessity of thinking beyng historically and leaving transcendental thinking behind takes shape during a period that coincides with his most public and notorious adoption of a political posture. In 1933 he is elected Rector of the University of Freiburg and becomes a member of the National Socialist party. In this capacity he is outspoken and enthusiastic in his support of the regime, support that raises obvious questions about the nature of his partisanship, the degree of alignment of his views with official party rhetoric and policy, and how his philosophy may be implicated in his support of National Socialism. In letters at the time Heidegger himself reveals how swept up he was in the events surrounding the rise of National Socialism. Although in mid-December 1932 he writes to Rudolf Bultmann that, despite seeing much that is positive in the party, he is “not and never will be a member,” his tone changes dramatically by the end of March 1933, not long after the “Enabling Act” that eliminated the legislative role of parliament (Reichstag), giving Hitler complete governing authority. In a particularly telling letter to Elizabeth Blochmann on March 31, he writes: Present events have for me—precisely because much remains obscure and unmastered—an unusual, gathering force. The willing intensifies as does the sureness of acting in the service of a great mission and helping out in the construction of a world, with a grounding in the people [völklich]. For a long time the shallowness and shadowiness of a mere “culture” and the unreality of so-called “values” have sunk to nothingness and left me seeking new soil [Boden] in Dasein. We will only find it and at the same time the calling of Germany in the history of the West if we expose ourselves to being itself in a new manner and appropriation. (16: 71)

These lines betray not only how naively Heidegger looks upon events that proved so ominous but also how effortlessly he embraces them with the terms of his philosophical project. At the same time, although he continues to work and encourage many Jewish students (and remain on good terms with Jews like Blochmann), he is not above playing an antisemitic card with authorities when convenient and, as more recent publications demonstrate, he cloaks

Introduction

his own distinctive antisemitism in the garb of his philosophy (more on his antisemitism later). Like the passage cited from the letter to Blochmann, Heidegger’s lectures and seminars during this period amply document the close and incriminating connection that he draws between his philosophy and his politics at the time (for review of the relevant public pronouncements and addresses, see “politics”). Heidegger may have never surrendered his belief in “the inner truth and greatness” of a socialist movement grounded somehow in the German Volk, even if the meaning of the phrase means one thing in 1933 and something else in 1939. Nonetheless, given the horrors inflicted upon the world by National Socialist policies, there is no excuse for his unqualified retention of the phrase in the 1953 edition of the Introduction to Metaphysics (40: 208) and his refusal after the war to accede to the imploring of students like Herbert Marcuse to apologize more publicly for his “mistakes.” At the same time it remains true that Heidegger had long been disaffected with the regime and its policies, resigning in 1934 after one year as rector. According to posthumous publications and students’ reports, he becomes increasingly critical of the regime and what it stands for, and this criticism continues until the end of the war. For example, while unsparing in his criticism of Americanism and Bolshevism, by 1940 he writes that “the danger is not ‘Bolshevism’ but we ourselves since we supply its metaphysical essence, raised to the highest levels” (69: 120; 66: 122f). Around the same time he observes: “National Socialism is not Bolshevism . . . but both are victories of machination—gigantic forms of the completion of modernity—a calculated process of using peoples up” (96: 127). Yet these misgivings with National Socialism, whatever their merits, by no means constitute a repudiation of German white supremacy (more on his chauvinism later). During the turbulent 1930s, poetry and art come to play central roles in Heidegger’s new efforts to think beyng historically. According to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” his first public lecture after resigning as rector, truth inserts itself into the artwork, thanks to art’s fundamentally poetic and thus disclosive character. In this way art exemplifies the truth of beyng as the hidden unfolding of the presence of things. This truth, already indicated by the Greek a-letheia (un-hiddenness), is the hidden unconcealing (beyng) of beings which brings them—their presence, their being—into the open and makes them present to Dasein. The contest between the hidden and the unhidden is the truth (crystallized as the conflict between earth and world) that is enacted in the artwork. As noted earlier, Heidegger characterizes beyng as this appropriation (Ereignis) of Dasein and the being of beings to one another. The study of art and Hölderlin’s poetry during this period also introduces new themes that concern him in the ensuing decades, for example, the

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meaning of things (in contrast to works, tools, or substances at hand), the struggle of the world with the earth that—like beyng as the appropriation— withdraws from every attempt to grasp it, the significance of art as a techne that, in contrast to modern technology, “allows the earth to be earth” and, not least, opens human beings up to a dimension in which they can be addressed by the divine. Hölderlin’s “flight of the gods” symbolizes the impoverished metaphysics of modernity, equating being with being a possible object of human representation and thereby ruling out the existence of a genuine deity. From 1936 to 1938 Heidegger completes a major work, the posthumously published Contributions to Philosophy, during a period when he is also giving lectures on Hölderlin and on Nietzsche (he would publish both lectures separately after the war). Taking their cues “from the appropriation” (the parenthetical subtitle of the work), the Contributions attempt to prepare the way for a new inception of Western thinking, one that retrieves what is originary in the first inception, namely, the way that the clearing in which beings come to be present is itself concealed. This new inception attempts to come to terms with metaphysics by thinking, not on the basis of some conception of beings in general or some supreme being in particular, but on the basis of the history of beyng, the appropriation operative but unrecognized (corresponding to the forgottenness of being) from the inception of Western thinking. In this connection Heidegger reads Nietzsche’s doctrines of the eternal return and the will to power as the penultimate culmination of Western metaphysics, paving the way to its consummation in modern technology. While Nietzsche’s thinking, with its valorization of life and willing, remains mired in metaphysics, Hölderlin alone recognizes the hiddenness of beyng and the urgency of retrieving it in a way that does not forsake its hiddenness. An Allied tribunal forbids Heidegger to teach in 1945, and, a year later, he suffers a nervous breakdown, requiring hospitalization. In the immediate post-war period (1947) he settles accounts with existentialism and examines the question of humanism in the light of his thinking (9: 313–64). Shortly thereafter (late 1949), he delivers lectures in Bremen: “Insight Into That Which Is” (GA79). These lectures attempt to confront the challenge of the all-enframing character of modern technology by contemplating dwelling and relating to things and the world via “the fourfold” (earth, sky, mortals, divinities). A year later (1950) he publishes Off the Beaten Track (GA5), with earlier essays on art, the world-picture, Hegel, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Anaximander. In 1951, a year after gaining permission to lecture again, he holds the year-long lectures What Is Called “Thinking”? (a favorite of Hannah Arendt, who visits him at the time). In 1954 he publishes Lectures and Essays (GA7), a collection containing discussions of technology, science, overturning metaphysics, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, building and dwelling, and fragments of Heraclitus and Parmenides. In the mid-1950s he revisits

Introduction

the theme of “releasement,” first broached in the 1940s (13: 37–74; 16: 517–29), ties Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason to the representational and calculative character of modern technological thinking, and contrasts the latter with meditative, poetic, “thankful” thinking (GA10). In 1957, he continues his lifelong, unorthodox re-readings of Parmenides with a telling account of the difference more basic than identity, something unthinkable from the perspective of metaphysics (GA11). In 1959 Heidegger publishes On the Way to Language, the culmination of over three decades of studies, where he elaborates, among other things, the meaning of his claims that “language is the house of being” and that “language speaks.” Throughout the following decade he gives significant, retrospective lectures, including “Time and Being” and “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (GA14). Also, in addition to holding a number of seminars on ancient philosophers and his own thinking with Eugen Fink and others (GA15), he conducts seminars in Zollikon, Switzerland, for a group of psychiatrists and medical students (GA89). In 1970 he begins arrangements for the Complete Edition of his works, arrangements often criticized for falling short of a critical edition, prompting suspicions about the contents of posthumously published volumes (see Part Three). The first volume—the 1927 lectures, Basic Problems of Phenomenology—appears a year before Heidegger dies on May 26, 1976 (for a concise and perceptive study of Heidegger’s “life and thought,” see O’Brien 2020). By Heidegger’s own account, he conceives the theme of his thinking initially as that of “the sense [Sinn] of being,” which he works out in terms of time. However, the subjective connotation of “sense,” understood as it was in SZ as a projection, led him to replace the theme of sense with that of “the truth [Wahrheit] of being,” that is, its history as the clearing for the unconcealing of beings. However, in order to preclude a misunderstanding of truth as correctness instead of that clearing, he begins to explain the truth of being in terms of the place (Ort) of being (15: 334f, 344f). There may be other paths to this place (as Heidegger’s reading of Eastern thought increasingly makes clear to him), and his own path to it is hardly a necessary one. Yet it is perhaps easy to see how, in Heidegger’s eyes, this “place,” with its own time and space, as the opening that gathers things together, brings his path of thinking to a close. The opening withdraws, letting things be things and allowing us to be who we are, that is, allowing us to be humans—and not merely rational animals—if we open ourselves to it and let things be themselves. Heidegger’s thinking, from beginning to end, aims at transforming human thinking for humans’ sake by reminding us that we are the fragile yet potent site of the disclosedness of the being—the presence and absence—of beings. The fragility of the site is all too apparent, overshadowed as it is by the scientific and industrial powers of technological production. Yet this site abounds

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with possibilities that nothing—no entity, not even the world-industrial complex—can foreclose. For the task of thinking, Heidegger submits, is to think “the possibility of world-civilization . . . overturning at some point the technologically-scientific-industrial imprint as the sole measure for human beings’ worldly sojourn” (14: 75).

The Black Notebooks (Schwarze Hefte) In keeping with the dictionary format, exposition takes precedence over criticism in the entries. Yet Heidegger’s thinking presents recurrent challenges and a few of the more basic ones deserve flagging (see the Appendix). However, with the publication of the Black Notebooks (SH), Heidegger has come in for criticism, largely of a moral and political character. One reason for this new and revised edition of The Heidegger Dictionary is the publication of many of these notebooks (along with other volumes of the Complete Edition) in the years following the dictionary’s first edition. The Black Notebooks refer to a large number of texts of various lengths from 1930 to the early 1970s, numbered in chronological order with indexes, in notebooks with black covers. The first such notebook has not been found but the remaining thirty-four notebooks have been published in volumes 94 through 102 of the Complete Edition (Volume 94, for example, contains the first five notebooks). For thumbnail descriptions of the contents of each volume, see Part Three. The value and notoriety of these notebooks lies in their exposure of the juncture of the person (Heidegger’s beliefs, outlook, and actions) with his philosophy. Heidegger himself calls attention to this juncture when he opens “Annotations IV” (the eighteenth notebook) with Leibniz’ remark: “Whoever knows me only from my publications, does not know me” (97: 25). The notebooks do in fact provide a further glimpse into who Heidegger is and how he thinks, even if it is a glimpse that he wants to orchestrate. They demonstrate not only his concern for a wide range of issues, wider than any found in his publications or even his lectures, but often, too, his means of digesting them philosophically, that is, in terms of what he understands as his efforts to think beyng historically and non-metaphysically. What follows is a sampling of the myriad issues on display in the notebooks. We find Heidegger remarking that “it is perhaps the most difficult thing to be a philosopher as a ‘professor of philosophy’” (94: 353). He combines repeated complaints about “the sciences and the university giving way to technical schools” (96: 124–7) with the contention that historical narrative (Historie) is nothing but a form of technological thinking (95: 182f,

Introduction

206ff, 235f, 246f, 250f). Another recurrent theme is modern culture or, more exactly, his diatribe against it “becoming the basic form of barbarism” (95: 514f) with Christendom as “its most dangerous manifestation” (96: 4, 70). He attributes to modern culture an egoism (part of a Cartesian legacy but by no means confined to the individual) that, together with nationalism, enshrines ultimately self-centered concepts of life, peoples, and race; indeed, construing the spiritual as “an expression of race” is in his eyes “the most radical nihilism” (96: 250, 396f, 436). Drawing on Lenin, Heidegger discusses the meanings of Bolshevism, socialism, and communism—deeming them all “metaphysically the same” in exemplifying “the basic form of the empowering of machination” that rules out any “spiritual” or “historical” questioning as a merely intellectual, false need (96: 128ff, 134). But something similar applies to the Anglo-Saxon world (whose revolutions are precursors to the Bolshevik revolution). “The bourgeois-Christian form of English ‘bolshevism’ is the most dangerous” (96: 154). With its pragmatism and lack of history, Americanism is “the epitome of nihilism,” the place where “modernity perishes unconditionally in the wasteland” (96: 225, 257, 282). The following sentence sums up this perspective: Americanism is the organization of the unconditional senselessness of “being-here,” combined with the prospect of a rising “standard of living” (electric heating and cooling in living quarters, mounting car-owners, increasing numbers of movie-goers and other “economic-technologicalculture” amenities of “life”). (96: 269; see, too, 96: 114, 235, 253, 258ff, 266f)

Echoes of this revulsion at the looming “overamericanization” of the West can be found in complaints about “film factories,” certain forms of music, the urbanization of the countryside, and the like. The notebooks also contain barbs directed at ideas of Herder, Spengler, Wagner, Jaspers, Sartre, and Habermas. But there are also more benign, if no less critical glosses on Pascal (95: 342–6; 96: 39), Kierkegaard (96: 215–18), and Ernst Jünger. There are also passing references to Clausewitz, Wittgenstein, Arendt, Caspar David Friedrich, T. E. Lawrence, Rilke, and Adalbert Stifter. The Black Notebooks have the style of notes, from entries of only a line or two to entries over several pages, occasionally marked with headings and provided with Heidegger’s own index. Given this style and format, the notebooks reveal, as may be gathered from the foregoing sampling, themes, patterns, and episodes of Heidegger’s thinking that, even though prepared for public consumption, are less staged and subjected to formal philosophical constraints than his published works. In that sense the Black Notebooks are replete with ruminations that not only shed light on his personal convictions

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but also richly complement the lines of thinking on display in many posthumously published lectures and writings, such as the Contributions sequence (GA65–71). The publication of the first three volumes of the SH, covering the period from 1931 to 1941, has drawn considerable attention. In the first notebook in particular, Heidegger directly links various themes of his philosophy at the time (both the existential analysis of SZ and the developing project of thinking beyng historically) with a commitment to what he takes to be the promise of National Socialism and Hitler’s rise to power. Even as his commitment to drawing this link fades, the notebooks from the 1930s contain a fatuous affirmation of German exceptionalism, ugly expressions of antisemitism, and a critique of the European Enlightenment’s endorsement of rational ideals of individual freedom, equality, and participatory democracy. Given the ethical and political disaster of National Socialism, the fact that any sort of thinking lends support to it is reason enough to question the tenability of that thinking. Indeed, for many scholars the evidence in SH that Heidegger grounded his politics in his philosophy calls into question the validity of his thinking in general and, with it, contemporary attempts to further its critique of modernity’s espousal of the virtues of rationality in particular (for a powerful indictment along these lines, see Heinz 2016). The entry on “politics” in Part One critically discusses the implications of Heidegger’s philosophical endorsement (in SH and other texts) of a National Socialist political ideology. However, three disturbing aspects of Heidegger’s thinking prominent in SH (albeit not only there) warrant separate mention. The first of these troubling aspects, a kind of philosophical hubris, may be gathered from Heidegger’s repeated acknowledgment of his mistake in 1933. Just what is he acknowledging to be mistaken? Not the content of the movement (as one should, indeed, expect), but his own naiveté about the force of thinking or his ability to convey what his thinking could mean for the movement in an academic setting. But if that is his mistake in 1933, he appears to continue to make it long afterward, indeed, even as he increasingly takes issue with the government’s policies, particularly in the second half of the 1930s. Here, arguably like Hegel, he seems to have an inordinate confidence in the power of thinking—particularly the thinking that he advocates—to start anew and change everything. This level of confidence in thinking’s capacity to make the salient difference to human history (in contrast, for example, to political economic, technological, or epidemiological factors) is perhaps a shortcoming peculiar to philosophers. Nonetheless, the difference that thinking in general makes (which is indisputable) hardly entails— without much further ado—even the possibility of the radical, traditionoverturning difference that thinking beyng historically is supposed to be able to make.

Introduction

A second troubling aspect of Heidegger’s thinking that is rife in the Black Notebooks is its chauvinism. It is troubling not least because this sense of German exceptionalism appears to long outlast his initial enthusiasm for the National Socialist movement. Thus, Heidegger speaks of the “unconditioned calling” of Germans (95: 372; see, too, 362, 403) and of the “essence of the German, its historical definition” to arise at the moment that “either jolts Western humanity into being-here or delivers it over to the planetary machination” (96: 55). But beyond nods toward “the land of poets and thinkers,” Heidegger once again offers little in the way of justification for his pretensions. He makes controversial claims about the affinities of Greek and German and about the capacity of German thinkers (the Idealists and Nietzsche) to tap into the Greek inception of Western thinking. But, even if these claims were to stand, they do not justify the world-historical importance that he attaches to the German people. Germany occupies, to be sure, a unique place in the historical, geographical, and political landscape of Europe and its contributions to European arts, sciences, and philosophy are as formidable as those of any other European country. But none of these considerations entail the spiritual mission that Heidegger assigns to Germany alone. The idea of German exceptionalism is as farcical and preposterous as American exceptionalism and it remains a major hurdle to discerning whatever philosophical merit there otherwise is to Heidegger’s thinking. What has been said of Heidegger’s chauvinism holds for his antisemitism as well and yet, while his antisemitism is beyond doubt, it is also complicated. Given his rejection of race-based or biological identifications of the German people, his prejudice differs from that of many mainstream National Socialist ideologues. Nor does his prejudice reveal itself in personal and professional relationships (with few exceptions) prior to 1933. In addition to welcoming numerous Jews into his lectures and seminars, he directed the dissertations of several Jews who would go on to prominent careers, for example, Marcuse and Löwith (although he ceases to do so after becoming rector); he would have friendships and (hardly discreet) affairs with Jews. Many of these same individuals were aghast at his decision to join the party and even more greatly disappointed by his public support in the early 1930s and his refusal to apologize publicly (or at least more publicly) after the war for National Socialism’s atrocities. In the face of the Shoah, his reference to National Socialism’s “inner truth and greatness” (40: 208) comes across, quite rightly, as a well-nigh unforgivable moral slur, signaling an unimaginable depth of obtuseness toward his fellow Mensch. Throughout the notebooks there are antisemitic remarks that Heidegger explicitly bases upon his attempt to think beyng historically and counter the nihilism of modern machination (where there are only beings and their manipulation). Thus, he speaks of Jewery’s alleged “groundlessness”

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(Bodenlosigkeit), “worldlessness,” and complete lack of history, rendering it incapable of beyng or anything more than reckoning with beings (94: 96f, 161, 168f; 95: 322–6, 339; 96: 46). The charge of groundlessness goes hand in hand with indictments of the machinations of “international Judaism” and “World-Jewry,” the question of whose role, Heidegger adds, is “not a racial question but the metaphysical question of the sort of humanity that, without any ties, can take over the world-historical task of uprooting all beings from being” (96: 133, 243, 262). Given Heidegger’s philosophical vantage point, it is hard to imagine a more damning indictment—one that he extends to Husserl! (96: 46f). Yet given the groundlessness and sheer prejudicial nature of the charge, it is far more a damning indictment of its author. These references, asserted without argument or explanation, reveal a virulent ethnic antisemitism that is made to fit a story Heidegger wishes to tell, violating his own strictures on thinking historically. One of the more perverse expressions of Heidegger’s antisemitism is his implication of Judaism in the politics of race. The elevation of the concept of race to a principle is, Heidegger contends, a consequence of the power of machination that necessarily subjugates beings in every domain to “planned calculation” and reduces life to a calculated sort of breeding (and ultimately de-racination!). “With their emphatically calculative giftedness,” Heidegger writes, “Jews have lived the longest according to the principle of race, which explains why they resist so vehemently its unrestricted application” (96: 56). In a 1942 notebook, continuing to press his metaphysical conception of Judaism, he notes how Christianity stems from Judaism (Judenschaft), “the principle of destruction” within the age of metaphysics, leading him to comment on the importance of the meaning of the inception of Western history that remained outside Judaism and Christianity (97: 20; see, too, 97: 438). Later in the same notebook from the 1940s, after deeming prophecy a technology of historical narrative and “instrument of the will to power,” he alludes to the mystery that the great prophets were Jewish, while disingenuously dismissing the idea that the allusion has anything to do with antisemitism (97: 159). Regardless of how he conceives the “antisemitism” dismissed here, the idea that worlddestruction and modern dictatorships are somehow traceable to Christianity’s Jewish heritage is simply fatuous. (On Heidegger’s antisemitism and antijudaism, see Cohen and Zagury-Orly 2021). On the preceding pages only three of the more distressing features of the Black Notebooks have been singled out. There are additional difficulties, some sketched in the Appendix, with the basic coherence of his thinking. The value of identifying such features consists precisely in the patent challenges that they present to assessing Heidegger’s thinking. Particularly when we approach that assessment with an appreciation of what we take to be various merits of his thinking (at least in different respects, at different times), the

Introduction

assessment cannot forego the pressing question of how tied his philosophy— and our appreciation of it—is to those otherwise damning expressions of philosophical hubris, German chauvinism, and antisemitism. As I argue in the “politics” entry later, aspects of Heidegger’s existential analysis in SZ already open the door to his endorsement of National Socialism, but neither that analysis nor thinking beyng historically provides a compelling case for walking through it, regardless of his interpretation to the contrary. Something similar holds for the three troubling aspects of his thinking found in the Black Notebooks that have been flagged above. At every stage of Heidegger’s life of thinking one finds a basic criticism of Western philosophy’s forgottenness of being in favor of a preoccupation with mastering and managing beings. Like the difference between being and beings, the criticism is both powerful and elusive (what precisely is that difference and what difference does it make?). The purpose of this revised and expanded edition of The Heidegger Dictionary is to provide readers with an opportunity to understand better and grapple with Heidegger’s challenging and developing language and thinking. It runs the risk of simplifying and making more pedestrian thinking that often trades on esoteric and allusive connections—and necessarily so, Heidegger contends, given its subject matter. By further demonstrating how seamlessly Heidegger blends philosophical considerations with prejudice and attempts at political machination, the Black Notebooks and other more recent publications demonstrate the challenge of interpreting his thinking. As noted earlier, these publications make clear that, if one is to find lines of thinking in Heidegger’s thought valuable, one has to sift critically through expressions of belief that—particularly in their historical context—are as philosophically groundless as they are morally and politically repugnant. But herein, too, lies the abiding importance of grappling with the most fundamental objective of his thinking, namely, the persisting challenge of demonstrating the difference—philosophically, morally, politically, and so on—that inquiry into being makes or not.

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part one Themes Absence (Abwesen) In a riff on Husserl’s view that nothing perceived through the senses is fully present to us, Heidegger frequently conceives the being of beings in terms of their absence as well as their presence (5: 104f; 40: 76; 65: 381; 66: 202f; 96: 86). In this way he counters the traditional interpretation of being that accords a primacy to presence while casting absence aside to such an extent that it restricts what is essential to presences and construes absence as nothing more than the formally negative (40: 122f; 66: 312; 70: 63; 94: 80; 97: 400). Yet “the ab-sence is richer and mightier and of more original essential force than the exaggerated presence. The absence [obtains] as having-been and as future. Both as the original bending apart [Auseinanderbiegung] of the essential and essentially prevailing unity. And finally presence [is] only a forgottenness of this unity” (94: 81; see, too, 5: 271, 347; 54: 123, 211). SZ first attempts to critique the Western metaphysical tradition’s fixation on presence by demonstrating how time, including but not equated with the present, provides the sense of being of our being-here. When Heidegger subsequently shifts away from a transcendental framework, he stresses how the presence of beings and the metaphysical understanding of being as presence are grounded in the hidden clearing (the appropriation of being and being-here to one another). Nonetheless, in the 1930s he is also wary of the sufficiency of the notions of presence and absence, tied as they so often are to the present-at-hand and the ready-to-hand (65: 261, 270, 324, 380). So, while extoling pre-Socratic thinking for its attentiveness to the essentialness of absence (5: 347–55; 55: 307, 320, 338f), he is also critical of otherwise remaining in the ambit (ῥυθμός) of the Greek understanding of presence and

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absence (65: 340; 100: 43, 193). Nonetheless, in 1962 he redeploys notions of absence, noting not only how the absence of both the no more and the not yet “extend” (gereicht) what we understand by “presence” but also how what affords being is “a presence of an absence” (14: 17f, 22ff).

Abyss (Abgrund) Heidegger uses the term “abyss” in its more or less ordinary sense to designate an area of literally “immense” depth, incapable of any grounding (or at least seemingly so). Language is an abyss in this sense and philosophical thinking moves within such an abyss (11: 48; 12:11; 28: 310). So, too, Heidegger cites approvingly Hölderlin’s line that mortals, in contrast to gods, “reach into the abyss” (4: 69; see, too, ibid., 41, 53, 60f, 185; 5: 271). He also characterizes as an abyss: the chasm that lies between “the Sermon on the Mount and thinking” (98: 7); beings and beyng, beingness and beyng (67: 14, 78; 70: 29); humans, beyng, and gods (65: 26); animals and humans (29/30: 384); the same and the like (100: 124). In addition to employing “abyss” in these more or less conventional ways, Heidegger builds upon them to characterize being itself as an abyss. Just as the principle that everything that is has a ground (sufficient reason) does not itself have a ground, so being lacks any ground. Being is an abyss in this sense: the ultimate ground of beings insofar as they are, that is, constituting them in their being (their presence and absence), without itself being similarly grounded and without further determining or grounding what beings are (5: 269f; 65: 460, 485). While the true and ultimate ground of beings, being itself cannot be grounded by or in anything, on pain of the paralogism of identifying it with another being. Hence, in order to think being (and, in a different sense of “grounding,” to ground it), it is necessary to make the leap (Sprung, Satz) from the pursuit of grounds or reasons other than being, since that pursuit amounts to reducing being to an entity or particular being (10: 87, 164–9; 65: 236, 490; 70: 9ff). During the period (late 1920s) when Heidegger still countenances thinking in terms of transcendence, he first broaches the notion of the abyss in terms of the way Dasein’s transcending freedom grounds the essential prevalence of grounds. On this account, every entity has a ground because Dasein transcends entities, projecting them onto some world, or equivalently, understanding them as being. The transcendence that underlies the transcendental, grounding character of being is grounded in Dasein’s freedom. “But as this ground, freedom is the abyss of Dasein” (9: 174f). In lectures on Parmenides (1942/43), Heidegger speaks similarly of the abyss that makes up the essence of the human being (54: 153).

A

In Heidegger’s subsequent attempt to think being historically, that is, nontranscendentally (for which he introduces the term “beyng”), he identifies the abyss as the “first essential clearing concealment, the unfolding of truth.” Far from the denial of any ground, the abyss is the affirmation of grounding “in its hidden expanse and distance.” Thus, the hiddenness of beyng, not supporting itself on any entity and fending off any such ground, is an abyss precisely as “the unity of the primordial timing and spacing” and “the site of the moment of the ‘between’ that Da-sein must be grounded as” (65: 379–88; 66: 99, 131; 70: 53; on this “between,” see “being-here”). The history of beyng is itself an abyss (69: 98) and there are accordingly different senses of “abyss” for each inception of thinking. In the first inception, the abyss is the “ungrounded [character] of the truth of beyng”; in the second, it is “the appropriated [inception] of receding [or going-under, Untergang],” presence’s self-concealing (70: 13; 100: 235, 243). The truth of the appropriating is the “primordial ground” (Ur-grund) that opens itself as self-concealing only in the abyss (Ab-grund) (65: 380). We are free, Heidegger submits, to experience the groundlessness of metaphysics and the truth of beyng precisely by experiencing the latter as an abyss, an experience that coincides with being appropriated by beyng (the appropriating) (65: 170, 278, 346; 67: 16, 21, 65; 100: 235, 243).

Aletheia (ἀλήθεια) Aletheia, the Greek word for truth, typically stands for the correctness of a thought, perception, or assertion and, in fact, as early as Homer, a cognate of correctness, homoiosis, served as a synonym for it. According to Heidegger, this construal of aletheia derives from its more basic meaning as un-hiddenness, where the privative prefix “un-” apes the corresponding privative Greek prefix “a-” in “a-letheia” and “letheia” derives from words for the hidden or forgotten. For example, “the sun shines” is true in the sense of being correct only if the sun’s shining is not hidden. Just as the hidden is hidden from someone, so aletheia as the unhiddenness of “things” entails their actual or potential presence to someone, someone who in the relevant sense is here (da). Since “being” stands for this presence of something (together with the absences the presence entails), aletheia is at bottom the truth of being (genitivus appositivus, like the “city of New York”), irreducible to beings or to human beings, to objects or subjects. Greek thinkers were so taken by aletheia as the sheer unhiddenness of things that they equated it with being, so much so that attention to the unhidden thing displaced consideration of unhiddenness itself, the hiddenness it presupposes, and the movement (“beyng”) from being hidden to being unhidden. The yoking (sugon) of

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aletheia—in Plato’s Cave Allegory—to the manifest way things look in the light marks a key site of its devolution from unhiddenness to correctness (5: 37f; 9: 223–34; 34: 21–112; 45: 180f; 65: 331–5; 66:109f). The foundation of a-letheia (un-hiddenness) in hiddenness is fatally lost when aletheia is translated as veritas (truth) and its opposite is no longer the multiple forms of hiddenness but simply falsehood (54: 23, 63f, 73f). That hiddenness encompasses—among other things—any alternate profiles of entities, the obstruction of some entities by others, observers’ shortsightedness, the fading past and the oncoming future, and ironically the unhiddenness itself. The essence of aletheia (truth in a primordial sense, the truth of beyng) is neither the correctness of assertions nor the unhiddenness of beings, but the interplay of that hiddenness and unhiddenness, absence and presence, or, equivalently, the strife (eris) between earth and world, disclosed in humans being-here. Aletheia in this basic sense is the hidden “openness” in the midst of beings that grounds their unhiddenness (65: 339, 342–51, 357). Letting things present themselves-as-they-are supposes an opening, identified in SZ with being-here (Da-sein) as the clearing or disclosedness, and thus “the most primordial phenomenon of the truth” (SZ 133, 220f). This openness amounts to nothing if things are hidden or concealed from us. In a distant but unmistakable echo of the medieval conception of verum as a transcendental (convertible with ens), aletheia as this unhiddenness is “a determination of entities themselves and not somehow—like correctness—a character of an assertion about them” (45: 121). Truth as correctness accordingly “stands and falls” with truth as the unhiddenness of entities (45: 20, 96–103, 129ff). Far from ignoring bivalence, this account of truth as the struggle of unhiddenness and hiddenness, in advance, as it were, of any human shortcomings, provides a way to explain it (9: 191). Some critics (e.g., Jaspers, Tugendhat) charge that the interpretation of truth as sheer disclosedness forfeits its specific meaning, where correctness (bivalence) is fundamental. The issue remains controversial but it deserves noting that aletheia entails that errancy is inherent in any human disclosedness; we are in the untruth as much as in the truth (SZ 222f; 9: 196ff; see “errancy”). Moreover, to apply the notion of correctness to truth as unhiddenness is a category mistake since correctness presupposes unhiddenness and not vice versa (65: 327). Thus, for example, whereas errancy gives rise to the disjunct Fa v ~Fa because a remains hidden from me, it is the unhiddenness of a (its “being-true” in a primary sense) that determines whether Fa or ~Fa is correct (“true” in a secondary sense). In a late address, in contrast to his practice for three decades, Heidegger proposes holding off from construing “truth” (Wahrheit) as a translation of aletheia. Given the weight of tradition’s equation of truth with correctness, he concedes that “aletheia, unhiddenness thought as clearing of presence is

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not yet truth,” though he continues to insist that the correct correspondence presupposes it, “since there can be no presence and making present outside the realm of the clearing” (14: 86; 15: 396).

Ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit) In SZ the German term (literally “double meaning”) stands for an existential state of not being able to decide between what is and what is not genuinely disclosed. Along with idle talk and curiosity, this ambiguity circumscribes Dasein’s “fallenness,” its inherent tendency to conform to the crowd, “the They” (das Man), where what we encounter in everyday being-withone-another is presumably accessible to everyone and everyone has a say about it. This undecidability extends to the world, being-with-one-another, and even Dasein’s relation to itself. Thanks to this ambiguity, what seems to be genuinely understood is at bottom not, while what does not seem to be genuinely understood is. Of a piece with this ambiguity is a widespread sense of knowing in advance what is supposed to happen, surmising what others are surmising, and—“based on hearsay”—being “on the same track” of things. Being on the same track of what “the They” surmises is a matter of subscribing to an official line of interpretation (öffentliche Ausgelegtheit), and it has the effect of downgrading action and precluding genuine bonding or commitment. “Being-here is always ambiguously ‘here,’ i.e., in the public disclosedness of being-with-one-another where the loudest palaver [or ‘idle talk,’ Gerede] and the most inventive curiosity keep the ‘business’ going, here where everyday everything and at bottom nothing happens” (SZ 173f). To be inauthentic, that is, to remain indistinguishable from the crowd, is to live in ambiguity, an existence defined by ambiguity (SZ 271, 298f). In his 1929/30 lectures Heidegger stresses the threefold ambiguity of philosophy. The first ambiguity arises from the uncertainty whether philosophy is science or a worldview; at this time Heidegger holds that it is neither despite earlier signaling its status as a science and, less frequently, as a worldview (29/30: 15ff). The second ambiguity—traced by him to the Platonic and Aristotelian “schools” (29/30: 53)—has to do with philosophy’s appearing in a university setting as one academic discipline among others, when it is anything but that. The university setting creates the expectation that, as in the case of other disciplines, philosophy is the subject matter of lectures that derive their authority from the discipline’s non-circular, provable content (29/30: 17–20). The ambiguity here is created by the illusion that provability is what is essential to philosophy, that it must eschew circularity at all costs, and that philosophy is not “something that stands on its own in

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a primal sense” (etwas Urtümlich-Eigenständliches) (29/30: 20ff, 30ff, 87, 276). The third ambiguity tracks the view that philosophy is, on the one hand, a matter of common sense, something that everyone knows or can know, and, on the other hand, something that concerns what is ultimate. What drives this “insurmountable” ambiguity, however, is the fact that being-here is “the being-here of a human being.” While philosophy is an attack on the human being, driving it out from its everydayness and back into the ground of things, the attacker is not the human being but the “Da-sein in the human being.” As something that makes up “the basic happening of being-here,” philosophizing must be motivated here by a basic attunement and the primary task is to awaken such an attunement. But here the “essential” ambiguity of philosophy becomes patent, as the awakening cannot occur without the appearance of portraying it as something present-at-hand (like other human properties) that underlies our situation (29/30: 31, 87, 113f, 123, 259, 276f). The ambiguity lies, in other words, in the fact that philosophy seems to describe a human property when it is not doing so but rather beckoning human beings to be what makes them who they are. To invoke a venerable idiom, the form of philosophical language is indicative but the function is both indicative and exhortative, that is, protreptic and “transformatory” (29/30: 259).

Angst (Angst) In everyday life we are immersed in things ready-to-hand and relevant to one another in a system of relevance (meaningfulness) that is ultimately in place for our sake. As we move from project to project, we find nothing that is not part of some context of relevance in the purposeful world of our concerns. As we get in a car to drive somewhere, for example, everything in the car has a purpose, as does the car itself, the road on which we drive, and so on. When we arrive at our destination, for example, our workplace, we find another set of things ready-to-hand, each part of a complex of mutual significance that has some ultimate relevance to human projects and goals. Angst hits us when suddenly it dawns on us that being-in-the-world as such, as the ultimate relevance and purpose of anything ready-to-hand, cannot itself be correspondingly relevant or purposeful (since being-here is not itself something ready-to-hand, made for such a use). Angst discloses— preconceptually—that the world that makes the readiness-to-hand of things possible is itself “nothing” ready-to-hand; that is to say, it is not obvious that there is anything that it is for (SZ 184–91, 341–5). In a complementary way (looking back, as it were, instead of looking ahead, that is, looking to what becomes of things rather than what they are for), angst also reveals

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the nothing in the sense of the slipping away or nihilation of all entities (9: 111–18). Equivalently, angst is the experience of the meaningless of existence, at least in the sense of not experiencing why we exist, what we could possibly be here for. When all our involvement and everything we experience within-theworld, from the crudest implement to the most organized means of assessing and shaping public opinion (the phenomenon of the They), is for the sake of an existence bereft of meaning and purpose, everything within-the-world, too, becomes utterly insignificant (nothing) to us in the grip of angst. If being at home in the world means having a purpose within it, like the relevant implements that we use and produce, the experience of angst is an “uncanny” experience, the experience of literally “not being at home” (unheimlich). Angst is a “fundamental” and “exceptional” disposedness of Dasein because in it Dasein confronts itself. Although angst can be sudden, it is “always already latently” determining being-in-the-world, inasmuch as Dasein’s absorption in the They is a way of fleeing from itself, from its ability to be authentically itself (SZ 189). Because angst confirms that Dasein’s fallenness (its conformity to the crowd) is a flight from its capacity for authenticity, angst is also liberating, bringing Dasein back to the “individual” possibility that it “always already” is, the thrown possibility of being authentic. In this regard it is possible to distinguish a sense of angst that first enables our fallenness, motivating us, as it were, to turn away (Abkehr) from ourselves and embrace our worldly concerns and innerworldly beings (SZ 182, 186; 9: 110–15) and a further sense of angst that precisely awakens us from our inauthentic slumber and calls us to be ourselves: “In it [angst in the latter sense] Dasein is completely taken back to its naked uncanniness and captivated by it. This captivation, however, not only takes Dasein back from its ‘worldly’ possibilities but gives it at the same time the possibility of an authentic capability of being” (SZ 344). Drawing upon a similar distinction made by Kierkegaard, Heidegger compares and contrasts angst with fear. As a disposition, fear also discloses Dasein to itself, its way of “being-in,” and what it fears. We fear something threatening within-the-world, something that approaches us from a certain direction with the potential to harm us in a determinate way. Fear is guided by circumspection and Dasein’s everyday concerns (SZ 141). So we fear precisely what is detrimental to us in and on account of our concerns. We can also fear “for” others. By contrast, what is threatening in angst is nothing within-the-world at all; far from approaching from some direction or other, it is nowhere. In angst things “slip away,” there is “nothing” to hold onto; it is the basic attunement in which we encounter “nothingness” (9: 112f). For obvious reasons, circumspection loses its bearings in angst. Gone is that competence, perhaps even the expertise in seeing how to manage our respective worldly

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concerns. Dasein experiences angst over its individual being-in-the-world as such and precisely on account of it. Just as our concerns with what there is within-the-world presuppose being-in-the-world, so “fear is angst that has fallen prey to the ‘world,’ angst that is inauthentic and hidden from itself” (SZ 189). The analysis of angst serves as the template for the structural analysis of the unity of existentiality, facticity, and fallenness in care (SZ 191f). It also figures prominently in the analysis of authenticity. Dasein’s thrownness into death “reveals itself to it [Dasein] more primordially and penetratingly in the disposition of angst” (SZ 251). Here, too, Dasein is confronted with nothingness, not in the sense of the absence of the relevance of something ready-to-hand but in the sense of the possibility of Dasein’s impossibility (SZ 265f, 308). The call of conscience is the call “determined by angst,” a call to Dasein’s capability of being itself that is “revealed in angst” (SZ 277). Heidegger describes the resoluteness that, hearing conscience’s call, anticipates death as having this angst itself (sich ängstigende Freiheit zum Tode SZ 266) and being “constituted by it” (SZ 296); but he also describes this resoluteness as a “readiness for angst” (SZ 297, 301, 322). This ambiguity aside, Heidegger claims that angst reveals what is required to be authentic for Dasein’s being as a whole, thereby enabling the resoluteness that embraces that angst (SZ 305, 308, 322). The analysis of angst in SZ reverberates in Heidegger’s later thinking as well. Thus, he characterizes it as the “basic attunement” that withstands the unsettling nature (Ent-setzen) of beyng’s appropriation of being-here and its dethroning (ab-setzt) of beings as such (65: 483). So, too, as the basic mood of “only a few,” it elevates into beyng by “elevating the thoughtlessness of metaphysics and anthropology and every worldview into the nothing—where all is decided” (69: 194f; 70: 50). He also links it to the attunement of “pain” that comes with the experience of the appropriation, the truth of nothingness, overturning metaphysics, and getting over beyng (71: 233ff). “The angst of pain is the angst, not in the face of pain, but the angst springing from the pain as the experience of nothingness” (71: 220).

Animals (Tiere) Neither irrational beasts nor sophisticated machines, animals have a unique way of being that is instructively different from being-human. Aristotle already appreciated rudiments of this difference in terms of differences between the human logos and animal voices (18: 17, 55, 99, 111, 238f). Thus, being alive is not the same as being on hand or handy (present-at-hand or ready-to-hand),

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but it is also not the same as being-in-the-world, since the world is essentially tied to human freedom (SZ 50; 25: 20; 28: 189; in contrast to an earlier gloss of zoon (living) as “a manner of being and, indeed, being-in-the-world,” see 18: 18, 30). So, too, life is “its own sort of being . . . neither pure beingpresent-at-hand nor Dasein” (SZ 50, 58). At the same time, the only path to determining the ontological status of living things is through a “reductive privation on the basis of the ontology of Dasein” (SZ 50, 194, 246). Heidegger initially characterizes animals as “world-poor” in comparison with humans, though the notion is used only for the purpose of “comparative illustration,” not for affirming a hierarchy. Unlike (world-less) stones, they have access to their environment or, more literally, the “world around them” (Umwelt)—but such an environment or, better, such surroundings (Umgebung) do not constitute a world. Instead of comporting themselves to a world, they behave toward their surroundings and this behavior (Benehmen) is based upon a complex relation of their drives to their surroundings—and only the surroundings—that dis-inhibit (enthemmen) those drives and the facilities based upon them. In the process, animals are continually drawing circles around themselves, not in the sense of encapsulating themselves, but in the sense of opening up or, better, struggling to open up a sphere “within which this or that disinhibiting factor can disinhibit” (29/30: 370). In keeping with our necessarily privative approach to animals, Heidegger characterizes the animal’s relation to its surrounding as “captivation” (Benommenheit), a term he also uses to characterize Dasein fully in the grip of its concerns (29/30: 153, 376f; SZ 61). Thanks to this captivated behavior, animals do not relate to beings as beings. The animal lacks this elementary “as” structure (29/30: 361; see ibid., 345, 367, 372, 416, 496; 54: 237f). For this reason, an animal’s openness to its surroundings is not to be confused with the openness of human beings to a world. The captivated character of animals underlies their world-poor character, rather than vice versa (29/30: 393f, 509). Instead of being able to relate to things as they are, animals are driven from drive to drive, in what amounts to a continual process of eliminating what it is that inhibits them (29/30: 362–8). By contrast, humans form a world, a world that only is what it is in this process of formation (29/30: 413f). In the late 1930s Heidegger combines these considerations with a stern opposition to what he regards as the reductiveness of the traditional conception of a human being as a rational animal (as well as to humanisms and philosophies of life bound to that conception). He emphasizes even more strongly the difference between humans and animals (so, too, the difference between humans insofar as they are capable of being-here (da-sein) and humans who act like so-called “technological animals” and “historically narrating animals,” focused exclusively on beings) (43: 21, 140, 213; 65:

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3, 28, 62, 98, 275, 479, 491; 66: 17, 27f, 86, 137–43, 160f, 225, 250f, 277). So he now affirms that animals have no world: “World is always spiritual world. The animal has no world, not even an environment [Umwelt]” (40: 48, 214). The difference maker is the disclosure of beyng that is inherent to human beings: “Beyng alone delivers the human being over to its essence that excepts him from any comparison with the animal and what is merely alive” (66: 113).

Appropriation (Ereignis) Some types of soil are better suited than others for growing certain vegetables. Sandy loam (loose soil that drains well) is the most proper soil for potatoes but, of course, the potatoes, too, have to be suited to the soil. So there is a matter of appropriateness in both directions: the soil’s appropriateness to the potatoes and vice versa. In the process of germination, the soil lends itself to the potatoes and it becomes the soil of the potatoes, belonging to them, just as the potatoes belong to that soil. In this sense, the soil and the potatoes not only are appropriate to one another but also have or appropriate one another, that is, the soil becomes the possession of the potatoes and vice versa. This mutual appropriation is a relationship that involves the engagement of both soil and potatoes but is not reducible to either, a relationship that is not visible in the soil or the potatoes or their juxtaposition but sustains and, in that sense, grounds them. This sketch of a sustaining relationship, in terms of senses of “appropriateness” and “appropriating,” is an attempt to provide a rough, first glimpse into the significance of “appropriation”—by Heidegger’s own lights “the leading term” of his thinking since 1936. Ereignis, the term translated as “appropriation” here, normally stands for an “event” (like the process of germination earlier) but, warning against this translation, Heidegger exploits the term’s etymological roots in eigen, a term standing for “own” or “proper,” and connotations of “being appropriate” and “appropriating” (again, loosely akin to the uses of these terms in the earlier description of the soil and potatoes) as well as connotations of being authentic (eigentlich). He also uses Ereignis as a metonym for “being,” though he later warns that this characterization itself can be misleading (9: 316n; 12: 248n2; 14: 26f). The characterization can be misleading since “appropriation” stands not for being as such, for example, for the presence of beings, but for the joint ways that being (as that presence or whatever it is historically taken to mean) appropriates Dasein and Dasein appropriates being, without being directly discernible in or reducible to either. In this regard the sustaining relationship

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of the soil and the potatoes is analogous; yet the analogy fails inasmuch as the latter relationship is between two beings, explicable in causal terms or even in terms of non-causal grounding; by contrast, “appropriation” signifies the noncausal, mutual appropriating of being and being-here. A further shortcoming of the potato analogy is that the potato and soil are initially separate and enter into a co-adaptation, something that cannot be said for “appropriation” since there is no Dasein and no dispensation of being, prior to the ungrounded appropriation of them to one another. In keeping with a distinction maintained by Heidegger (during the late 1930s and early 1940s) between being or beingness as conceived by metaphysics and beyng, he also identifies the appropriation with beyng and the inception (65: 470–7; 66: 100, 308; 71: 121; 73.1: 236f, 733; 73.2: 1041; see “being” and “inception”). But he also discusses appropriation in his later writings, holding in abeyance its usual significance as an event in time. In 1959 he observes how saying things that allow beings to show themselves for what they are, in their presence or absence, is a matter of appropriation; in this sense, language (the “house of being”) is based upon the appropriation (12: 247, 250, 253). In a lecture three years later he employs “appropriation” to designate what determines how being and time belong together (14: 24). The example of the relationship of the soil and the potatoes is meant to provide a toehold on this elusive but crucial concept. But the sharp disanalogy between that example and the significance that Heidegger assigns to “appropriation” has already been noted. Since he employs the polyvalence of the metaphor to characterize this core notion of his thinking, it may be helpful to consider a closer structural analogy from the history of philosophy: Plato’s own analogy of light and the good, the sources of visibility and intelligibility, respectively. The reality of seeing requires a visible object and someone with the capacity to see but also the sunlight illuminating both. Plato likens to this function of light the function of the good beyond beings that enables them to be and to be intelligible (24: 399–402). In a structurally analogous fashion (albeit only structurally), Heidegger uses the metaphor of a “glade” or “forest clearing” to characterize the appropriation, a clearing (Lichtung) that, beyond being and beings, both allows things to be present to us and allows us (beinghere) to access them, whether in the dark of night or the light of day (see “clearing”). The appropriation is the opening up of that clearing, at once bringing beings into their own (their being) and grounding Da-sein; indeed, the “da” signifies “the appropriated open—the appropriated clearing” (70: 46; 71: 211). Yet importantly the clearing remains hidden, forsaken as it were for the things that present themselves within it. In Heidegger’s view the most obvious example of such a hidden appropriation is the enframing of modern technology, where everything presents itself as an actual or possible part of the standing reserve,

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made or makeable, while the presence of what is present and its emergence from absence—which is not itself made—remain hidden, presupposed, to be sure, but nonetheless ignored or forgotten. (For Heidegger’s account of how this plays out in the history of Western thinking in epochs that are part of the “destiny of beyng,” see the entries “destiny” and “epochs”). Thinking the appropriation is nonetheless hindered by a tendency to think of it as being or a being/entity (presence or a presence), when in fact it is “essentially other than because richer than any possible metaphysical determination of being” (12: 248; 70: 17). Indeed, “being vanishes in the appropriation” (14: 27). Hence, rather than thinking the appropriation as being, the task is to think beyng (“being itself”) as the appropriation that, while hidden, grounds the clearing (the da) and in this way unfolds/prevails (west). What is grounded—being and Dasein—is not separate from the appropriation; insisting on the appropriation’s simplicity and uniqueness, Heidegger stresses that only within it is there a clearing (Dasein) or any particular being at all (70: 17, 117; see, too, 11: 45; 12: 248; 65: 247, 256, 470; 66: 100; 67: 62; 70: 16; 71: 192). Heidegger contends that Ereignis can no more be translated than the Greek logos or the Chinese tao (11: 45). The contention, while peremptory, can be traced to the term’s four distinct, historical meanings, reviewed below, each of which can lay claim to being primary. (a) In ordinary German Ereignis signifies an event (e.g., a wedding is a glückliches Ereignis: “a happy event”). In Heidegger’s first Freiburg lectures, he himself uses it to designate a situational, lived experience all one’s own (aus dem Eigenen) in contrast to an objective occurrence (Vorgang) (56/57: 75, 205f). However, in the late 1930s, it signifies what is originary, opening up of time-space altogether, in advance of any lived experience or reckoning with time; hence, he repeatedly insists that it is not an event in the sense of an occurrence in time (and should not be translated as such) (11: 45). Taking it as something occurring readily lapses into thinking of it as a particular being, when in fact the relation of any particular being/entity to its being (e.g., an event’s being) only arises from out of the appropriation (70: 17f). Nonetheless, the appropriation is something that happens, remaining hidden as it opens up the clearing and, in doing so, marking the inception of the history of beyng and Western thinking from epoch to epoch. Once again, enframing as the essence of technology, definitive of what it means to be for our epoch, exemplifies such an appropriation. But, under a similar description, Heidegger also equates the appropriation with the inception, entailing the transition from the first inception (metaphysics) to the other inception (overcoming metaphysics by “getting over” beyng). In these ways, despite Heidegger’s warnings, some of the term’s ordinary significance as an event carries over (11: 45; 65: 472).

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(b) Already in his first Freiburg lectures, Heidegger observes that “lived experiencing does not pass me by like an object that I set aside; instead I appropriate [er-eigne] it to myself” [alternatively, “I make it my own”] (55/56: 75). So, too, as noted earlier, he stresses in those early lectures that what makes it such an experience is that it is one’s own or comes from what is one’s own (aus dem Eigenen). From the late 1930s through the early 1940s, he also elaborates the meaning of Ereignis with reference to notions that have cognate roots in the German for what is one’s “own” or what is “proper” (eigen) to something. Thus, in a chapter devoted to the “vocabulary” of the essence of appropriation, he characterizes the inception as what is “ownmost” (Eigenste) of the appropriation, as the appropriation “hands over what is its own” (Übereignung) to being-here (or, in a middle voice that avoids the personification, it simply is this “handing over” or “deliverance”). Similarly, “ceding” to the human being (above every other entity) what is its own (Zu-eignung), the appropriation renders the human being the sole preserver of the truth of beings and, in that sense, its “property” or “the realm of what is its own” (Eigentum); that is to say, it takes possession of the human being and makes it (qua being-here) its own (An-eignung) (71: 149–52). But the human being thereby “comes to itself, comes into its own [Eigenes] because it now must be on the basis of committing/ceding itself [Zu-eignung] to the appropriation. The human being becomes “authentic” [eigentlich] in a rigorously-singular sense of the term” (71: 154). Heidegger also exploits a cognate term, that is, the “ex-propriation” (Ent-eignung) that pulls beings back from the reference to the inception as a means of characterizing how the forgottenness of being in metaphysics comes about (71: 165). He also refashions terms with similar roots like “alienation” (Vereignung), “adaptation” (Eignung), and “suitability” or “aptness” (Geeignetheit) in this connection. These considerations speak strongly in favor of translating Ereignis as “appropriation.” (c) Yet, perhaps aware of the risks of personification (making appropriation into an ens primum or absolute being that owns us), Heidegger also warns against relying too heavily upon the sense of “own” or “proper” (eigen) in interpreting Ereignis. Instead he hearkens back to its etymological root, not in the derivative sense of being one’s own, but in the original sense of coming into view and being “eyed” (eräugen), an eye-opening ostension or clearing. Thus, as the opening up of the clearing, the appropriation first brings beings into view, making their presence present to Dasein. He introduces this sense of Ereignis precisely in terms of the need to learn to experience (erfahren) it (71: 184; 12: 260; 11: 45). (d) In addition to these three senses of Ereignis (happening, owning, showing/experiencing), the root verb “eignen” also signifies being suited or adapted to something else (or, reflexively, adapting itself to something

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else). Just as “appropriation” preserves connotations of “proper” or “own,” so adaptation preserves connotations of “apt” or “fitting.” Heidegger’s appeals to eignen (11: 45, 78n115; 12: 246ff; 14: 26; 52: 1740) and suggests appropriement (a nominalization of a verb signifying “to adapt”) rather than appropriation as a possible French translation (15: 365). Citing these passages and the ways that “adaptation” captures the other three senses, Marc Wrathall makes a strong case that adaptation should be the leading, albeit, to be sure, not the exclusive sense in which Heidegger employs Ereignis (see W 26–30). As a technical term, “adaptation” is taken to be an apt (!) translation for these reasons. But the term “appropriation” (particularly if it is meant to flag what is proper to beings and being-here but no supreme being) arguably provides similar advantages, capturing the sense of eignen (being proper to, being appropriate to), without having the considerable Darwinian baggage of “adaptation.” The latter term also can misleadingly suggest that there is a pre-existing being to which Dasein must conform (recall the shortcoming of the potato analogy) rather than a happening in which Dasein finds itself and its environment intelligible (appropriated to one another) in a single stroke. Suffice it to say, the translation of Ereignis remains controversial given Heidegger’s own invocation of its multiple meanings and connotations. Hiddenness and distinctiveness. While bringing things into view, the appropriation does not appear alongside what comes to appear in it. Instead, remaining hidden and withdrawn is essential to it. The appropriation determines time, including the withdrawal of the having been and the withholding of the future, and it accordingly “expropriates” (enteignet) itself in the sense of holding back what is most its own from boundless unconcealment (14: 27f). Herein lies the mystery of the appropriation: while it opens things up to us and opens us to things, the appropriation or adaptation itself remains hidden (much as, going back to the Plato analogy, we focus on what is lit up by the light rather than the light itself). The appropriation hands the human being over (übereignet) to its essence of “having to preserve, lose, inquire into, and ground the truth of beyng” (71: 190). In this process, the appropriation does not collapse into what is disclosed (Entbergung)—as it appears to do in the wake of the first inception—but is instead preserved in its hiddenness (71: 147–54). The appropriation is unique (einzig, singulare tantum) in the sense that it cannot be numbered, simple (einfach) in the sense that what are appropriated to one another (being and Dasein) are inseparable in it, and closest to us since we exist at all only in belonging to it (11: 45f). It is the realm of what is one’s own (Eigen-tum), the region (Bereich) “through which being and being human reach one another in their essence” by losing those determinations that metaphysics has lent them (11: 46). In other words, Dasein and being are not even to be conceived primordially as parts of a complex structure;

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differentiating them for whatever reason is posterior to the appropriation itself. Heidegger considers his conception of appropriation (Ereignis) innovative. Not even the Greek thinkers of the first inception broached it. “This clearing itself as the appropriation remains unthought in every respect” (12: 127; 14: 12). “Enframing,” the essence of modern technology, is directly related to the appropriation. In the enframing, being and human beings belong to one another, albeit in the form of a reciprocal challenge. Yet while this essence of modern technology directly matters to us, because we are “in” it, it is nothing that we can literally or figuratively place before ourselves or represent. The same holds for the appropriation and Heidegger accordingly observes that the enframing is “as it were a photographic negative” of the appropriation, that we catch sight of “the first, oppressive flash of the appropriation” in the enframing, and that what we experience in the enframing is the “prelude” to what “ap-propriation” means (11: 45f; 14: 28; 15: 366). The enframing is prelude because it brings with it the possibility of “winding the mere sway of the enframing back into a more inceptive appropriating” (11: 46).

Art (Kunst) Philosophical study of art in Germany before Heidegger focused mainly on questions of aesthetics, the subjective dimensions of works of art, where the affective experience itself—on the part of the audience (Kant) or the artist (Nietzsche)—dictates in the last analysis whether the work is beautiful or not, whether it is art or not. The work itself is nothing more than a thing or an instrument, the material in an object formed by the aesthetic experience, the “lived experience” (Erlebnis), for the respective subject. This general acquiescence to modern subjectivism, where an artwork becomes an object defined by the subject’s lived experience (“the domain of the pastry chef”), sets the stage for the catalogued collections and showings of the art-trade (Kunsthandel), its “market” (5: 26; 40: 140; 43: 91). (Even in Hegel’s aesthetics, where art is the sensuous display of the absolute, what makes something an artwork is its non-contingent, sensuous capacity to convey a spiritual content to our minds and spirits.) In addition to its inherent subjectivity, two other aspects of an aesthetic approach to art are noteworthy: first, aesthetics arises, as Hegel recognized, only in the wake of great art or at least when it has passed its prime and artworks are museum pieces, and second, in reducing what makes something an artwork (namely, its beauty) to the aesthete’s experience (in Nietzsche’s case, the artist), aesthetics separates art from truth, denying it the possibility of telling the truth (5: 21–6, 67; 6.1: 74–91, 117ff; 65: 503f).

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In “Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger takes aim at this aesthetic approach by observing that the artist is an artist because of the work just as much as the work is a work because of the artist. So, too, any account of aesthetic experience must piggyback on an account of the artwork. “The origin of the artwork and the artist is art” (5: 2, 44f). Aesthetics’ tendency to understand the work as a thing is misconceived not only because of the opacity of things as such but also because a work is not an implement outfitted with some aesthetic quality. A work of art brings out in its own way the presence (being) of beings, their truth (e.g., van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes brings to light the reliability of their manner of being as equipment). That truth inserts itself into the work (5: 25, 73f). That truth is neither otherworldly nor eternal. As exemplified by the Greek temple, a work of art establishes a world on earth for a particular, historical people. More than anything we can touch or perceive, the world is the open-endedness of the times and spaces of things. At the same time, the artwork places that world squarely on the earth. While sheltering the world as what emerges from it, the earth shatters every attempt to penetrate it and, in that sense, it is inherently at odds with the world (5: 33). The artwork sets forth the earth in just this way. While material disappears into the implements made of it, the impenetrable yet “inexhaustible fullness” of the earth is on display in the artwork. Indeed, the hylomorphic structure so prevalent in aesthetics applies not to artworks but to tools (5: 12). In contrast to the way the produced character of a tool uses up the earth, the artwork “frees [the earth] to itself” (5: 34, 52). The truth that inserts itself into the artwork is the essential strife between world and earth, through which each asserts itself. The essence of truth consists in the primordial struggle between unhiddenness and hiddenness, epitomized by the strife between world and earth. By embodying this strife, the artwork is one of the ways that truth as that primordial struggle—in the glimmering guise (Scheinen) of the beautiful—happens (5: 42f, 48f; 4: 162, 179). Artworks are created. While the artist disappears into the artwork, the artwork’s created character consists in (a) providing the transforming line and shape of the struggle between world and earth and (b) standing out as created. The more purely the artwork exhibits these created characteristics, the more it “transports us from the realm of the ordinary” and “transforms the customary ties to the world and the earth.” In this sense, art is always creative, a beginning. “Art is history in the essential sense that it grounds history.” Artworks need, in addition to creators, those who preserve it, that is, not connoisseurs or curators, art historians or critics with taste, but those who are willing to stand fast in the artworks’ transforming truth. Together, the artworks’ creators and preservers make up “the historical existence of

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a people” (5: 54ff, 63–6). All art is poetic in a broad sense (Dichtung), not to be confused with poesy (Poesie), that is, poetry in a narrow sense. This poetic character of art arises from the fact that language first brings beings as such into the open. Without language, there is no openness of beings or, for that matter, of what is not a being. “Language itself is poetry in the essential sense,” and there is poesy because “language preserves the original essence of poetry.” Each art is “its own respective poetic composing within the clearing of beings that has happened already and unnoticed in language” (5: 62). Like Hegel, Heidegger is interested only in “great art” and accepts that the present technological age, as the culmination of metaphysics, confirms Hegel’s thesis that, as far as its highest vocation is concerned, art is a thing of the past (5: 26; 74: 198). However, he leaves open the question of whether art is at an end, adding that what matters is attaining “a completely different ‘element’ for the ‘becoming’ of art” (5: 67b). Meanwhile, reflection on what art might be depends completely on the question of being. Art is neither an appearance of the spirit nor an accomplishment of culture but instead belongs to the appropriation of Dasein by beyng, on whose basis alone the sense of being can be determined (5: 73). Nietzsche takes art to be a higher value than truth and the antidote to nihilism but only because he mistakenly approaches art aesthetically and equates truth with correspondence (6.1: 73ff, 142f, 150– 5, 570–5; 66: 30–40). Art continues to play a salient role in Heidegger’s later writings, although the concern for poetry remains paramount. At the end of his technology essay, he claims that the decisive confrontation with technology must take place in art as a realm akin to, yet fundamentally different from, technology (7: 36; 10: 31, 51–60). During this time, however, he also sees a strong convergence between his work and the paintings of Cézanne and Klee. In 1966, at the opening of a solo show of works by the sculptor Bernhard Heiliger, Heidegger delivers “Remarks on Art—Sculpture—Space” (80.2: 1289–302). A year later he gives an address in Athens on “The Lineage of Art and the Vocation of Thinking” (80.2: 1309–45) and in 1969 he publishes the essay “Art and Space” (13: 203–10; 74: 185–206; see, too, Mitchell 2010).

As-Structure (Als-Struktur) In using something for hammering, I take it and thus, in a sense, “interpret” it as a hammer (SZ 149). This “as-structure” need not be asserted in the process, and, indeed, a theoretical assertion itself modifies how an entity is taken as thus-and-so. This modification corresponds to a difference in the respective “forestructure,” that is, what we have before us and in advance, what we are

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looking for, and our pre-conception. In our circumspective, prepredicative interpretations, we are dealing with something ready-to-hand (handy). Heidegger leaves the impression that the ready-to-hand implement becomes an object of a theoretical assertion, that is, something simply present-athand (a way of speaking that may controversially imply a single object that can be either ready-to-hand or present-at-hand; regarding this controversy, see “readiness-to-hand”). In any case, insofar as it is present-at-hand, we attend to what it is and what its properties are from the standpoint of simply observing it and no longer in terms of using it circumspectively in some relevant context. “The primordial ‘as’ of an interpretation (hermeneia) which understands circumspectively we call the ‘existential-hermeneutical as’ in contrast to the ‘apophantical as’ of the assertion” (SZ 158). The form of the apophantical “as” (e.g., S is P, Fx, or x as F) is derivative of the more basic, hermeneutical understanding (the “hermeneutical-as,” e.g., taking, handling, seeing, signaling x as F) (21: 143–61; 29/30: 416–507, see esp. 456). Both sorts of as-structure are ontic and ontological at once; for example, while taking some entity ontically as a hammer, I take it ontologically as ready-tohand. Animals lack the “as-structure” altogether, that is, the very structure that is the key to understanding the copula and relating to beings as beings (29/30: 416, 484).

Assertion (Aussage, S: statement) Assertions point to something and, by way of predication, determine it as such-and-such, allowing us to communicate as much to one another. Though Heidegger discusses assertions before discourse in SZ, this threefold structure—ostensiveness, predication, and communication—is essential to discourse. These structural components are inter-connected; that is, assertions have to be about something, but they are not about it irrespective of the specifications that certain predications entail and, indeed, commonly entail, that is, entail for the purpose of communication. Drawing extensively on Aristotle’s account of logos apophantikos, Heidegger attributes this structure to the fact that assertions can be true or false (SZ 218; 29/30: 441–89). By making it possible for things to present themselves for what they are, assertions differ from other forms of speech (questions, exclamations, commands) (17: 19–28; 20: 181; 21: 129). Assertions are thus essentially part of the process of disclosing and in that sense, of truth-making (although they can, of course, conceal and be false): “The assertion is not the primary place of truth, truth is the primary place of the assertion” (SZ 226; 21: 135). (To claim that the assertion is the place

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of truth is, like the claim that assertions are exclusively about beings, a logical prejudice.) Integral to understanding and interpretation, assertions are existentials, basic revelatory ways of being-in-the-world. Hence, it is a category mistake to take them as things simply on hand, like objects found in nature. Nonetheless, the assertion written down in a sentence is capable of being observed and conceived in this way. Logic and linguistics, as they have been traditionally conceived, tend to mis-construe the phenomenon of assertions in this way (38: 1–5, 10). Like any interpretation, assertions are existentially grounded in a “mostly inconspicuous” forestructure. We use something as a certain implement in view of what it is for, how it fits into a full complement of implements and the purposes for which we utilize them. For example, we use and thereby interpret something as a device for hammering. This “as” character, rooted in what something is for, constitutes the hermeneutical as-structure of circumspective interpretation. Assertions build on this as-structure by making aspects of this interpretation explicit. “Making explicit” in this connection can take place in different ways and for different purposes, however. There are accordingly many gradations between assertions made in the course of circumspective interpretation and theoretical assertions (SZ 153–8; 21: 156n8). Whereas the former, in contrast to the latter, are typically integral parts of a practical or pre-theoretical experience, theoretical assertions arise from disengaging with various concerns and referring to innerworldly entities with a view solely to inspecting them. At times Heidegger aligns theoretical assertions (“categorical judgments” in Kant’s logic) with an ontology limited to what is present-at-hand (65: 457–61). Already in SZ he claims that the “reduction of the original ‘as’ of circumspection to the ‘as’ of the determination of the present-at-hand is the prerogative of assertion” (SZ 158). Such considerations appear to call into question Heidegger’s own project in SZ, replete as it is with assertions that are theoretical in some sense. How can any theoretical assertion be made about Dasein without mis-construing it as something present-at-hand (on hand)? How can we make assertions about being without stamping it thereby as a being/entity? At the end of his 1925 lectures, with this problem in mind, Heidegger finds it necessary to distinguish two sorts of assertions: worldly assertions about the present-at-hand and “phenomenologically categorial” or “hermeneutical” assertions. Despite having the same structure as worldly assertions, the primary sense of hermeneutical assertions is not to point to something present-at-hand (on hand) for the sake of observing it, but to make it possible to understand being-here, that is, who we are (21: 410, 410 n. 1). Assertions can be made about being-here without reducing it to something present-at-hand, because those assertions are not made for the purpose of inspecting being-here (as though it were something present-at-hand) but

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for the sake of formally indicating and thereby disclosing what it means to be-here (indeed, authentically). In other words, Heidegger seems to be saying here that there’s nothing inherently restrictive or “dimming” about assertions but only about assertions that descriptively point out something present-athand as part of a theoretical comportment toward the world—in contrast to assertions that interpret entities’ place in the world in view of and, indeed, as part of the subject’s involvement with them. In Heidegger’s writings after 1930 he continues to acknowledge these crucially different uses of assertions. He refers to “perceiving” and “objectifying” assertions (65: 180, 246; 66: 312), assertions that “present” or “represent” (vorstellende) something (65: 433; 11: 62; 12: 19), thereby “pinning it down” (feststellende) (13: 171, 179). These uses of assertions fall under the umbrella of what he deems “customary” as well as “logicalmetaphysical” uses of assertions. That customary, everyday use of assertions is to describe some being/entity (typically a state of affairs) that is or could be presented to us, that is, something that could, in principle, be placed before (vorgestellt) us (66: 210, 268). The logical-metaphysical use canonizes this ordinary usage (11: 66; 13: 164; 14: 24f) by analyzing and formalizing the structure of assertions as something present-at-hand in language, with a view to producing inferential techniques that hold for the assertions and what they are about. Focusing on theoretical assertions that tend to describe some object in terms of its properties makes way for an account that privileges the form “S is P” or “Fx” and the systems of truth-functional logic and quantification that rest upon such a form. Heidegger notes the metaphysical dimension of this logical use, namely, the supposition of the constancy of some underlying subject of properties (hypokeimenon) placed before us, that is, a particular present-at-hand being/entity about which we make an assertion (65: 459, 497; 66: 210). But there is also a technical dimension to this concentration on the logical-metaphysical use of assertions; logical systems are systems of techniques for managing what is taken to be merely present-at-hand, the assertions directly and, via assertions, what is asserted. Abetting this approach is the idea that language is, at bottom, a “human possession and tool” (65: 502). When Heidegger asserts (!) that any sentence in the form of an assertion proves a hindrance to speaking of the appropriation, he clearly has this use of assertions in mind. Assertions in this sense cannot “say” what appropriation is, since it is never something that can be placed before us or represented as though it were (14: 28ff). Yet this use of assertions is not the only use. Indeed, there is an inherent “ambiguity of assertion” since, in addition to the logical-metaphysical use, assertions can be made non-metaphysically, that is, without the supposition/ implication that they are inevitably about some entity present-at-hand lying or potentially lying before us. Elucidating this “ambiguity of assertion,”

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Heidegger observes that in the sentence “beings are” (an example of the logical-metaphysical use) “the character of the assertion is other than it is in saying ‘beyng is’” (472ff; 70: 64; 71: 31). So, too, his writings are replete with assertions about being, beyng, the appropriation, and the inception; for example, “Being and beyng are the same and yet fundamentally different” (65: 171); “Beyng is the ap-propriation” (65: 470); “As the appropriation, beyng is the inception” (65: 58); “Appropriation and inception belong together” (70: 9). He also pairs the difference between the two uses of assertions with the difference between the leading question of metaphysics (“what are beings?”) and the basic question that metaphysics cannot raise (“what is being?”) (76f; 66: 89f). Hence, when Heidegger observes that “‘there is being,’ ‘there is time’ are not to be understood as assertions” (14: 49), he has the customary, logical-metaphysical use of assertions in mind. But the observation leaves the misleading impression that assertions can have no other use, when he in fact, as noted, makes clear that there is a non-metaphysical use that he repeatedly employs (65: 474).

Attunement (Stimmung) Attunements have an intentional structure, affectively disclosing our situation holistically (albeit not completely) and thereby orienting us within it. (Because moods can be understood as purely internal, subjective, and even non-intentional, and because the term “attunement” wears its intentionality, as it were, on its sleeve, the latter seems like the more apt translation.) Attunements determine how the world and entities within the world appear to us, for example, as inviting or irritating, enthralling or threatening. Attunements are pre-reflective, and they are matters of neither our choice nor our making. Instead they come over us as part of our thrownness into the world. If we try to adopt a certain attitude toward others, for example, we may tap into or awaken latent attunements, but the mere decision to adopt such an attitude cannot of itself produce an attunement. Nor are we always clear about the hold attunements have on us. Sometimes a friend or an event makes it clear that we have been acting out of fear or love, even while we have been blind to the fact. While some attunements (e.g., fears) orient us to a specific being or beings, other attunements (e.g., angst, kinds of boredom) orient us to our situation as a whole. Attunements have an existential significance. They tell us at once that we are and how we are, that is, the disposition or state of mind we find ourselves in. Dasein always finds itself already attuned (in a mood) (gestimmtes Sichbefinden). “Attunement represents the manner in which

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in each case I primarily am the thrown entity [that I am]” (SZ 340). Attunements do not come from without or from within (as though they were mental states) but instead emerge as a manner of being-in-the-world. They constitute and reveal Dasein’s openness to the world, its capacity to be affected by the world and things within the world. “The attunement has in each case already disclosed being-in-the-world as a whole and first makes possible directing oneself to something” (SZ 137). At the same time there is no understanding that is not disposed and attuned, pervaded by an attunement. An attunement is a “medium” of thinking and acting (SZ 142, 148, 253, 335; 29/30: 101f). From this vantage point, it is far closer to the truth to say “I feel, therefore I am” than to say “I think, therefore I am,” not only because feelings, as attunements, precede knowing and willing, but also because they tell us, more fundamentally than anything else does, that we are. Yet they reveal neither where Dasein’s existence comes from nor where it is going. Instead they bring us face to face with the burdensomeness of existence as something handed over to us that we have to live through—although they do so principally in flight from that burden. In all these ways attunements disclose to us our existence as something not to be confused with anything simply ready-to-hand or present-at-hand (SZ 134–7, 265, 270, 276, 335, 339f; 71: 218). In SZ Heidegger chiefly elaborates two attunements, fear and angst, with the aim of showing that their basic existential character, consisting in “a bringing back to [where we already are]” is grounded in Dasein’s temporality (SZ 340–5). However, he mentions several other attunements that can be interpreted in this temporal way: hope, joy, enthusiasm, cheerfulness, disgust, sadness, melancholy, and despair (SZ 345). The expression “basic attunements” (Grundstimmungen) only makes a single appearance in SZ, as designations of angst and joy (SZ 310), but attunements of this sort become more important in Heidegger’s writings after 1929. While basic attunements have a kinship with disposedness (Befindlichkeit) as elaborated in SZ, Heidegger is later critical of that elaboration because it can give the impression that a disposedness is a state of mind (Zustand) (71: 218, 221). In keeping with this self-criticism, he contrasts “the attunement,” understood as the prevailing of the appropriation, with attunements as psychological states of mind (65: 21, 33; 71: 171, 217, 220). After 1929 he examines several basic attunements: the “mystery” as our basic attunement to the indeterminate manifestness of beings as a whole (9: 192ff), homesickness and boredom (GA 29/30: 12, 120, 200; see “boredom”), Hölderlin’s holy mourning (39: 140, 182f), and Greek wonder (GA 45). In his 1934 commentary on Hölderlin, he stresses that an attunement is not something subjective, not a mere feeling, mental state, or epiphenomenon nor can it be grasped by way of the traditional doctrine of the soul or mind.

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In fact, the character of basic attunements compels us to give up the standard conception of human beings as rational animals or subjects whose essence consists in presenting or representing and thinking objects. Echoing his comments on the role of attunement in “On the Essence of Truth,” he contends that “[t]he attunement as attunement allows the openness of beings to occur” (39: 82). Basic attunements are not something in us; rather we find ourselves transported into them, and, as such, they first expose us, together with others, to entities (39: 89, 139, 223). Taking Hölderlin’s description of holy mourning as his model, Heidegger identifies four essential features of a basic attunement. Basic attunements (a) move us away from one thing and (b) move us into something else. Holy mourning, for example, moves us away from particular beings, placing us in a relation to the departed gods, and, at the same time, it moves us into relations to the earth, the landscape, and our homeland. In keeping with this dual movement and in a pre-presentational, pre-representational way, an attunement (c) opens up the region or world within which things can first be explicitly presented. In its power to move us in both ways and open up a world, the attunement “places Dasein on its grounds and before its abysses . . . determining for our Dasein the place open to it and the times of its being” (39: 141). The basic attunement thus “hands our Dasein over to beyng in such a way that it must take over, shape, and bear the latter” (39: 222). Again, it is not that we are first presented with things and objects to which attunements are then attached, but rather that any presentation or representation is based upon a foregoing attunement (39: 140). As exemplified by the joy that expresses itself in holy mourning, the intimacy-and-wholeheartedness of a basic attunement is such that it brings forth its opposite and oscillates within the resulting conflict (39: 148). Basic attunements also figure prominently in Heidegger’s account of the history of beyng. In the Contributions he lists the basic attunements of the history of beyng: shock, restraint, awe, foreboding (Ahnung), portending (Erahnen) (65: 14–22, 46). But it is clear that restraint is at the very least the first style-determining basic attunement among equals (65: 33–6, 46, 52, 122, 241, 256, 309, 375). Whereas the first inception of Western thinking sprung from the basic attunement of astonishment in the face of the unhiddenness of things, the transition to another inception of thinking is necessitated by restraint (45: 1f; 65: 14ff). In the early 1930s, Heidegger depicts this attunement in terms of Dasein’s comportment (Sich-verhalten). Countering the tendency to lose ourselves in the entities toward which we comport ourselves, restraint consists in holding onto ourselves and thus comporting ourselves freely toward entities, thanks to the understanding of being that transcends them (35: 87–90). In the second half of the 1930s, Heidegger continues to construe restraint as the basic attunement. The first

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step of another inception for thinking begins with a transformation of human beings. The transformation consists in being moved to “be here” by shock and awe—shock at being’s abandonment of beings, the casualness of the human pretension to be in complete control, and the supposed utility of everything; awe at the nearness and fecundity of being that persist nonetheless. This shock and awe characterize more explicitly what belongs primordially to the basic attunement of restraint, being attuned to and prepared for being’s “refusal” (its hiddenness) as a gift. As Dasein’s “strongest and at the same time gentlest” preparation for the appropriation, restraint grounds care, the decisive anticipation of the truth of beyng (65: 15, 33ff). These three basic attunements (shock, awe, and restraint where the latter is, as noted, the primus inter pares) intimate and forebode, not in the sense of some predictive calculation, but in the sense of taking the measure of “the entire temporality: the time-space of the here [Da]” (65: 8, 12–23, 30–6, 46, 312–17, 374, 382, 395; 52: 171f; 70: 133ff). A few years later Heidegger provides a list of the basic attunements of beyng’s history that differs from that given in the Contributions. In the new list he mentions astonishment (in the first inception), wonder (with the beginning of metaphysics), shock (with the transition), thanks, and awe (adhering to the other inception) (71: 222). So restraint gives way to awe and there is no mention of intimating and foreboding. These writings in the years immediately following the composition of the Contributions also include magnanimity (Großmut) as “the attunement of the transition,” forbearance (Langmut), and the joy and sadness attuned to the voice of the dignity of beyng (70: 134f; 71: 219). Despite these variations certain aspects of Heidegger’s treatment of basic attunements remain paramount, namely, that, while inherent to being-here, basic attunements come from beyng (71: 219) and that they are implicated in giving voice to beyng, by way of thoughtfully hearing and responding to it (65: 21; 70: 56, 78f, 104, 133–6; 71: 48f, 110, 156, 171, 210, 217f). In this last regard, he plays on the connotations and etymological similarity of the terms for voice (Stimme), attunement (Stimmung), and to attune or be attuned (and be right) (stimmen). Thus he writes, for example, that “the attunement attunes the voice—as word, that is, as silence, as being” (70: 133) and that “attunement is steadfastly listening to—answering the voice of the dignity of beyng, a dignity that attunes the voice to the pain that is inherent to the dignity of the question of beyng” (71: 219). This listening is a matter of experiencing these attunements in thinking, albeit non-metaphysically; that it is to say, being attuned consists not in thinking of attunements as objects but of “being attuned in thinking” (denkerisch zu stimmen) or “the thinking attunement” (71: 110, 171f, 218, 284). Attunements, so construed, are “the origin of concepts” (71: 220).

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Authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) Dasein relates to itself as the possibility that belongs to it more than anything else does, and yet as something it is capable of losing or attaining. Authenticity and inauthenticity are modes of being that are grounded in the fact that each Dasein is its own respective possibility (SZ 42f, 53, 232). While Dasein is initially and for the most part inauthentic, having lost itself in the “They” or not yet found itself, authentic existence modifies—without detaching itself from—the They (SZ 128, 130, 175–9, 181). In its absorption in the They, Dasein turns away from itself and flees its authentic capability of being (fleeing, too, the angst that reveals its freedom to choose itself, that is, to be authentic or inauthentic) (SZ 184–8, 191). Dasein’s disclosure of itself with respect to what is most its own is the “authentic disclosure,” showing “the phenomenon of the most primordial truth in the mode of authenticity” (SZ 221). The possibility that Dasein shares with nothing else and that is most its own is its death, the possibility of its impossibility. Authentically relating to this possibility consists in anticipating rather than evading it. Anticipating death as our defining possibility discloses our finitude but also enables us to become free for it and free, too, to understand and choose authentically among finite, factical possibilities. “Resoluteness . . . is nothing other than authentically being-in-the-world” (SZ 298). But that means that it breaks the hold of any obdurate identification with possibilities either previously attained or awaited, while also guarding against being with others inauthentically, by way of either mistaking their possibilities for ours or foisting our possibilities upon them. Of course, the possibilities Dasein projects in tandem with its projection of the possibility and responsibility that is most its own may coincide with possibilities promoted by others, yet with the crucial difference that, in projecting them, Dasein is not “following the crowd.” Instead it is ready for the angst that comes from choosing for itself. Resolutely anticipating death thus arouses us from the social inertia of merely conforming and brings us face to face with the possibility of being ourselves, unsupported in the final analysis by any project we undertake with one another. In Eigentlichkeit, the German term for authenticity, lies the root term for “own” (eigen) and, indeed, to be authentic is precisely to own up to oneself, not least, as a “being towards death” (SZ 259–66). Conscience attests to this authentic capability, calling Dasein to take responsibility for itself in the wake of its existential guilt, that is, the fact that, while not responsible for being here, it is singularly responsible for choosing certain possibilities over others. In contrast to an existence completely absorbed in the They, an authentic existence listens to itself, to the call of

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its conscience. To understand the call of conscience, listening to it without distortion, is to want to have a conscience or, equivalently, to be resolute. Resoluteness is the “authentic disclosedness to which Dasein’s conscience attests in itself” (SZ 297). Before we have even come of age, we have fallen prey to forces of assimilation. We seemingly make choices all the time, but it is not clear that we are doing any more than going through the motions since the choices are made under the sway of some group (the They). In other words, we have not really chosen to choose but instead enacted choices expected of us, accommodating and inhabiting shared perspectives just because they are shared. In order to make choices in an authentic way, it is necessary for us to make choices conscientiously, that is, on the basis of the fact that we are someone with the responsibility of making them—and remaking or retracting them if necessary, precisely in view of the possibility of our impossibility. To choose to choose in this conscientious way (or, equivalently, to want to have a conscience) is to be resolute—and to be resolute is to exist authentically (SZ 336). There is a distinctive transparency and constancy to being authentic, to assuming responsibility for ourselves concretely (“ontically”). “The more authentically Dasein is resolute . . ., the more unambiguously and noncontingently does it selectively find the possibility of its existence. Anticipating death is alone capable of driving out any contingent and ‘provisional’ possibility. Only being-free for death affords Dasein the goal in an unqualified way and plunges existence into its finitude” (SZ 384). With finitude comes the possibility of “taking back” or “giving up” any specific resolution (SZ 264, 308, 391). To be resolute in a manner that anticipates death is to come back repeatedly to oneself and one’s factical situation (“dependent upon a ‘world’ and existing with others”), disclosing the respective possibilities of the situation “on the basis of the legacy” that one takes over in being thrown into the world (SZ 383; 64: 117, 122f). One challenge for Heidegger’s treatment of authenticity is how we account for the basis for the choice, even as we choose to choose. If the basis, for example, some reason or belief, is drawn from tradition and the averageness of everyday Dasein, then the choice’s authenticity seems questionable, given its conformist credentials. If the basis of the choice prescinds from any such norm, it invites the charge of decisionism. While this issue remains fraught, both readings are problematic, at least without further ado. The conformist reading violates the indexicality of Dasein’s authentic choice, that is, the fact that its choice to choose is made in view of its projection of its death, not shared with any other Dasein. The decisionist reading renders authenticity an unmotivated spontaneity, a kind of moral luck, rather than a truthful response to its historical thrownness, overlooking the fact that the disclosiveness of resoluteness is “the primordial and authentic truth” (SZ 297, 316).

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In Heidegger’s later writings he returns briefly to the theme of authenticity, as the center of gravity shifts from existential analysis to thinking beyng historically as the inception of the appropriation of being-here and the being of beings to one another. “Only in the appropriated authenticity in the sense of sheltering and guarding the truth of beyng does the selfhood of the historical human being, in keeping with the inception, arise” (71: 156). Heidegger contrasts the authenticity of corresponding to that truth (what makes a human being a human being) with the pursuit of some self-made task stemming from a metaphysical-anthropological, willful subjectivity in the form of an “I” or “we” (71: 154–61). Authenticity in this sense presumably steers clear, at least in Heidegger’s eyes, of decisionism and conformism.

Being, Beyng (Sein, Seyn) Whatever we are dealing with, whatever we find in our paths, by the very fact that we deal with it we take it as something rather than nothing. We accordingly distinguish whatever else we may say of an entity (e.g., what kind of thing it is, what are its qualities, proportions, relations, and properties) from its being, much as logicians distinguish “Fx” from the quantified sentence “∃x(Fx),” indicating that something is and that it is something (this or that). At the same time, although “being” is accordingly said of entities, it does not itself designate an entity or a kind of entity distinct from other kinds (14: 12). Nevertheless, “being is what determines entities as entities, with regard to which they are already respectively understood” (SZ 6). As a means of differentiating being from beings (entities, Seiendes), Heidegger subsequently uses the term “Sein,” the nominalized form of the German infinitive for “to be.” In SZ the fundamental question is: What is the sense of being? The tendency to understand being as presence, while ancient, seems unfounded, not least because it trades on an unquestioned dimension of time and proves unable to countenance the ways that absences (indeed, including the fading past and the approaching future) are part of the sense of being (at least for some beings). What something is often corresponds to the way it comes—always more or less, for a while, but never completely—into the clear from absence. Herein lie the rudiments of a dominant sense of being: a temporal, hidden interplay of the presence and absence of beings. Heidegger arrives at this provisional interpretation of the sense of being through the existential analysis undertaken in SZ. This interpretation is provisional because the analysis is restricted to one type of being. Since being is always the being of a particular being or beings (entity or entities), it is

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necessary to determine the meaning of “being” in the case of a particular sort of being. Analysis of our manner of being is the starting point, Heidegger reasons, because it matters to us; that is to say, we are the only entities for whom being matters. Moreover, even if we restrict the meaning of “being” to the presence of beings, this meaning entails what they are present to: ourselves as being-here (Da-sein). To be sure, their presence is not produced by our being-here. Yet without the attuned understanding characteristic of being-here, there would be no presence (or absence) of them, that is, no being. What is ontologically distinctive of being-here is the fact that it is the “clearing” where the different manners of being of beings/entities, including its own, are disclosed (SZ 133). The existential analysis differentiates being-here from being ready-tohand or present-at-hand as manners of being that, while not fabricated by being-here, are disclosed only in virtue of distinctive ways of being-here (a hammer, for example, has the manner of being of something ready-to-hand but it manifests itself as such only if we are disposed to it and understand it in the appropriate way). This differentiation, along with his mention, if only in passing, of other ways of being (e.g., art, life, nature) suggests that in SZ Heidegger conceives being analogously, perhaps requiring a conception of restricted quantifiers. Yet this difficult question is not explicitly entertained, as the main objective of SZ is to discern the meaning of “being” in the case of being-here; a few years later he in fact pans the Scholastics’ analogia entis (9: 181n. a; 33: 46). Heidegger moves to demonstrate that time is the sense of being in the case of being-here by first establishing that the being of being-here is care. That is to say, it is in the course of caring that being-here is the clearing, the site of the disclosure of manners of being (SZ 191f). Care consists in being always already ahead of ourselves, projecting possibilities afforded by the world into which we have been thrown, all the while opening us up to entities in our midst. So construed, care, the essence of being-here, has a fundamentally temporal structure (the interconnection of the future of being “ahead of itself and projecting” with the enduring past of “having been thrown,” and the present of being now “in the midst” of entities). Such is how we originally experience time and it is in this distinctive sense of making up the structure and process of care—and not to be confused with an empty sequence of now’s—that time provides the sense of being, at least for beinghere (SZ 192f, 324ff). Having secured the meaning of “being” for being-here, Heidegger originally intended to pivot to the question with respect to other sorts of being. Heidegger came to see at least five basic, closely related problems with the foregoing examination of what it means to be. First, it starts out rather obliviously from the distinction between being and beings. While the

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distinction is warranted on some level, it relies on what is neither being, so distinguished, nor beings and yet somehow grounds their differentiation and union. (As discussed later, Heidegger subsequently introduces the concept of appropriation to account for the differentiation and union.) Moreover, far from explaining this differentiation, a transcendental analysis of Dasein wrongly suggests that Dasein itself (a transcendental subject of sorts, even if pre-egological) is that ground. This suggestion is reinforced by, among other things, Heidegger’s observation that Dasein “itself is the clearing [Lichtung]” even if the italicized “is” is not intended to signify “is identical to” (SZ 133). Third, the foregoing analysis suggests, paradoxically if not inconsistently, that its conclusions are timeless, that the ways we think about being are not themselves part of a history. Fourth, it is not immediately evident how the conclusions of SZ, that is, the distinctive timeliness that is the sense of being for being-here, can be generalized to analyses of other manners of being. Fifth, with its appeals to light (Licht), the metaphor of a “clearing” (Lichtung)—a hidden one at that—is not only ambiguous but deeply misleading. “The unhiddenness of beings, the daylight afforded it, darkens the light of being” (5: 337; see, too, 70: 173). Because of these and other issues, Heidegger does not finish the projected final sections of SZ and eventually gives up on the idea of a fundamental ontology altogether, at least as originally planned, where the timeliness that provides the meaning of “being” for being-here would be the template for understanding the meaning of “being” for other manners of being in general. For a short interval in the late 1920s and early 1930s he continues to pursue investigations of being that he describes as metaphysical and transcendental. But in the early 1930s the center of gravity of his thinking begins to shift. In the 1935 lectures presented as an “introduction to metaphysics,” Heidegger reviews how being, in the traditional understanding of it as presence, is distinguished from becoming, semblance, thinking, and what should be; and yet each of the latter is in some sense, albeit not in the traditional sense (40: 98, 107, 110, 122, 190, 202). From this conundrum he concludes: “Thus, the previous concept of being does not suffice to name all that ‘is.’ Hence, being must be newly experienced from the ground up” (40: 212). With its title (Introduction to Metaphysics), these concluding remarks to the lecture might suggest that Heidegger has his sights on a revamped sense of metaphysics based upon a new experience of being. But finding the words for this new experience entails overcoming metaphysics and, as discussed below, “getting over” being altogether. As Heidegger attempts to convey this new experience of being without re-instituting metaphysics, he continues to rely upon the concepts of Dasein and the clearing, albeit in revised senses. Dasein is not identical to the clearing but belongs to it, and the clearing occurs as the “appropriated clearing” (ereignete Lichtung), that is, the appropriation

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of being-here and the being (presence) of beings to one another. The “appropriated clearing” is the hidden “time-space” of the disclosure of the being of beings and thus, too, their difference (71: 205, 211, 222). The key term here is “appropriation,” dubbed by Heidegger as the leading term of his thinking since 1936 (see “appropriation”). In order to think of the “appropriated clearing” (or “clearing of the appropriation” [70: 213]) as something that itself is but obviously not in the sense of the being of beings (Sein des Seienden), the presence of entities that it affords, Heidegger introduces an archaic term “beyng” (Seyn). The archaic spelling signals the appropriation described earlier; “beyng” and “appropriation” accordingly function as metonyms in Heidegger’s account. “Beyng is neither ‘over’ us nor ‘in’ us nor ‘around’ us; rather we are in it as the appropriation”—where “in” signifies involvement or immersion (“in love,” “in sync,” “in the flow”) not spatial containment (69: 55). The primordial appropriation of beings and Dasein to one another—their presence to Dasein—“happens” (geschieht), and beyng is historical (geschichtlich) precisely as this happening, the happening of the appropriation (9: 134, 201; 69: 21). However, its happening is not a universal (which would reduce it to transcendent(al), metaphysical beingness). It happens as something that uniquely began (indeed, it is the inception and its essence is the originary inception) and is still coming to us, provided we are here (da) for it (more on this later) (70: 16, 23f). With this robust sense of the historical in mind—not to be confused with historical narrative (Historie)—Heidegger identifies the essence of beyng with the essence of history (60: 162; 65: 32f, 451, 494; 69: 136). The “truth of beyng” is, Heidegger notes, the theme of his middle period; history as the appropriation is that truth and its grounding (66: 116; 69: 96, 101f; 71: 180). The differentiation of being (Sein) from beings, unexplained in SZ, is now traced to beyng (Seyn: a profounder, historical meaning of “being”) as the appropriation of being and being-here to one another (70: 74). The differentiation of being from beings hearkens back to one of the subject matters of Aristotle’s metaphysics, that is, being qua being or, alternatively, beings insofar as they exist (Metaphysics 1003a21). With regard to that subject matter, the history of metaphysics is a history of beyng, that is, a history of appropriations of being and being-here to one another, appropriations that, however, remain respectively hidden or withdraw from the first inception of that history. Playing on the original sense of epoche as a withdrawal, Heidegger reads the history of beyng as a series of epochal attunements to being that define a world. For example, medievals find themselves appropriated by and appropriating being as creation; everything in the modern world seems to present itself and to be represented (appropriated) as an object for a subject; in late modernity a conception of being as effectiveness, actuality, power

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similarly sets the “appropriate” terms for the world and its inhabitants; machination and technological enframing dictate what there is and how we engage it (who we are) in the present (24: 158–68; 69: 24, 46). These conceptions are invariably indebted, Heidegger submits, to an ancient Greek understanding of being, “oriented to the ‘world’ or, better, to ‘nature’ in the broadest sense,” that construes being as the emergence and presence of a being/entity (SZ 25; 14: 11). He later makes a similar point by stressing how metaphysics takes its bearings from physics, such that φύσις is the determination of being at the inception and the dominant determination of it ever since (40: 17; 69: 6, 24, 30f). Notably, Heidegger identifies beyng and being as φύσις and ἀλήθεια, in the ways pre-Socratic thinkers understand them, precisely because both yield what is present yet conceal themselves in the process (54: 17, 159, 163, 173–7; 66: 135; 71: 25). In similar ways, interpreting Parmenides and Heraclitus, Heidegger characterizes being as the “clearing” (even though its character transforms into presencing), the “open into which every entity is freed,” and the “self-opening, accommodating expanse” (χώρα) (9: 332, 337; 54: 224; 55: 173, 337). Yet it deserves iterating not only that beyng as the respective appropriation and source of these meanings of “being” remains hidden, but that it remains hidden and unthought as such for these first thinkers, just as it does for the ensuing history of metaphysics. Herein likely lies yet another reason for adopting the archaic spelling, Seyn, namely, to underscore this preeminently hidden and historical character in contrast to metaphysical being (being as beingness, Sein als Seiendheit), whose universality putatively touches everything, bringing it, at least potentially, into the open. We may understand being as the unhiddenness of beings without being cognizant of the appropriation that, while hidden, makes their unhiddenness possible. “The understanding of ‘being’ [Sein] is essentially remote from knowledge of beyng [Seyn]” (70: 9). In a similar vein, after equating philosophy with metaphysics, he remarks: “Being is what philosophy thinks” (69: 6). A further distinctive feature of metaphysics in each epoch that calls for the distinction between being and beyng is its manner of conceiving being on the basis of a conception of a particular being/entity, a practice epitomized by “ontotheology,” for example, the reduction of being to God or nature as the primary being, in some sense the ground of everything else (14: 5, 12; 66: 163). Every such ontotheological account of a transcendent being or simply of being (beingness) is, Heidegger charges, an attempt to transcend and forego the historical abyss—the absence of any ground (Ab-grund) that marks beyng as appropriation (65: 293; 66: 83, 148; 69: 27f, 106, 108, 116, 146; 70: 10f, 19, 66f). For the modern epoch, the term “being as beingness [Seiendheit]” designates the set of all objects of thinking, whatever (thanks to an allegedly

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constant presence) can be placed before the I as subject—a term, Heidegger is quick to stress, that is not to be confused with “being” as it is understood in SZ (65: 75f, 128, 171, 182, 196, 209, 215; 66: 21, 90, 128ff, 163; 67:n16). As a further mark of the difference between being as beingness (metaphysical being) and beyng, Heidegger observes that beyng, far from being something other than beings (Seienden), is nothing else but beings themselves. The appearance of opposition here is only possible where “being is taken as beingness” (Sein als Seiendheit) and something universal set off from the particular (69: 53; see “difference”). Metaphysics is guided by the question of what beings are or, alternatively, what makes an entity an entity. The answer to the question—metaphysical being (Sein)—amounts to some conception of the being of beings (their beingness) and/or the supreme being responsible for all the rest (see “metaphysics”). This guiding question (Leitfrage), like the answer, presumes that “what genuinely is” are beings themselves, what is or can be present to us and thus availed and exploited by us. However, in the course of the 1930s, Heidegger comes to the conclusion that metaphysics does not ask the fundamental question (Grundfrage): What is being? Nor can it ask this question since it takes its bearings from whatever beings there are for it. By contrast, Heidegger insists that only beyng is, the appropriated clearing and hidden ground of any attempt to say what there is (65: 473; 66: 192; 69: 141f; 70: 11, 15). Yet it is neither the common feature of all that there is nor does it leave any trace of itself in beings—despite its dependence upon human beings or, more precisely, being-here (65: 293; 66: 53, 199–203). Beyng might be construed as a significant part of Heidegger’s answer to the fundamental question, what he first dubs the question of the sense, later that of the truth of being itself, but only if it is kept in mind that, far from being a matter of description or explanation, beyng is historical and its history is yet to be decided. What remains to be decided is “whether human beings dare beyng and thereby going under or whether they are contented with beings” (65: 91, 451f, 464; 69: 59f). Earlier we noted how the conception of beyng as appropriation of being and being-here to one another provided what was missing or deficient in SZ, that is, an explanation (of sorts) of the difference between being and beings. In virtue of being-here and the historical appropriation at play, human beings have an understanding of being that allows them to know and deal with beings as such. But the line cited at the end of the last paragraph makes clear that Heidegger understands that this explanation, far from solving the question of beyng, poses a question that can only be answered in the form of a decision. Thinking the other inception—or, equivalently, knowing beyng as the appropriation—begins with coming to terms with beyng’s hiddenness, “getting over” it by winding it back to the beginning (Verwindung des Seyns),

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which also means safeguarding it as hidden (70: 19–22, 92, 100). It is one thing to leave beyng in its hiddenness and another thing to experience it as self-concealing. Experiencing it brings beings back within their limits and takes from them the singular priority they seem to have (65: 254). What is at stake is nothing less than humanity’s complete abandonment to the devastation of the power of machination, as opposed to the decision to “be here,” to carry out and belong to the hidden truth of beyng (65: 254, 489f, 69: 24f, 31). Beyng is poor and unrelated to power or its absence. Instead, it is the utter majesty of not producing or needing to produce anything (66: 287–96; 69: 110f; for eight names of beyng as the appropriation, dispensing with “any assistance from explanations of entities,” see 65: 471). In his 1962 lecture “Time and Being,” Heidegger observes that the sentence “there is being” (es gibt Sein) can simply mean that there are beings or that beings are, that is, that they are present, thereby inviting the sort of metaphysical interpretation of being as the presence of beings. However, the sentence “there is being” can also point to what “affords” (gibt) the presence of beings, what allows for their presence. “Being [Sein] disappears in the appropriation. In the phrase ‘being as the appropriation,’ the ‘as’ now means: being, allowing for presence dispensed in the appropriating” (14: 27). Similarly, in his 1969 seminar, Heidegger distinguishes being as the presence of a being/entity (the metaphysical sense of “being”) from what grants or allows for (lassen) that presencing, a granting that “no longer leaves space for being” or, equivalently, the “pure giving that . . . points back to what is understood as the appropriation.” In this same context, citing his 1962 lecture, he refers to “the gift of ‘the giving that only gives its gift, yet concealing and withdrawing itself in such giving’” (14: 12; 15: 364f). Although “being” often gives way to “beyng” in the 1930s for the reasons mentioned earlier, it does not do so invariably. Moreover, from the 1950s he rarely uses the term. Thus, in the 1955 essay on the question of being, Heidegger does not employ “beyng,” but he attempts to ward off the almost inextirpable habit of presenting or representing being as something standing somewhere for itself and occasionally confronting human beings by crossing out “being” and placing a large “x” or St. Andrew’s cross over the word, where the four points of the cross refer to the four regions of the fourfold (9: 411). In “What Is Called Thinking?” (1954) and “Time and Being” (1962) (glossed earlier), he speaks solely of “being” (never once using Seyn), even as he treats some of the content otherwise meant to be captured by “beyng” (GA8, GA14; see, too, GA5: 155 where a footnote from the first edition of Holzwege containing the only mention of Seyn is deleted). In short, one cannot presume that, from context to context, Heidegger uses Sein in the same way. Still, the two senses of “being” highlighted by the different spellings—being as presence (the hallmark of the metaphysical conception of being) and being

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as the hidden appropriating event that affords (gibt) that presence—helps explain why being is, as Heidegger puts it, the most empty and yet fecund, the most common and yet unique, the most intelligible and yet hidden, the most worn-out and yet the source of every being, the most relied upon and yet an abyss, the most said and yet silent, the most forgotten and yet constantly recalling us, the greatest constraint and yet liberating (51: 68, 49–77; 71: 48).

Being-Here (Da-sein) Dasein is “the good German translation” of existentia, the traditional Latin term for whatever is on hand or present (65: 296; 66: 326f; 71: 208). Departing from this traditional usage, Heidegger characterizes Dasein as that entity whose being is at stake, at issue for it. Though this use of Dasein is supposedly untranslatable, Heidegger trades on the way it combines the verb “to be” (sein) with an adverb for place and time (da) and the way its significance is inherently related to that of “existence” (a term that he also conceives non-traditionally). The adverb da typically means “here” or “there” (as in “the uncle’s here” (66: 327) or in “da und dort” or “hier und da,” both of which can be rendered as “here and there”); but da can also be used to mark a time, as in Luther’s translation of da kam ein neuer König auf in Ägypt: “at that time a new King arose in Egypt” (Exodus 1, 8). In any case, we find ourselves to be here in a way, Heidegger stresses, that is not reducible to merely occupying a space. To be-here is to experience a world opening up, in which entities and even objects have a place (and a time). Accordingly, he urges his readers to understand da not as a spatial adverb but as signaling the disclosedness or, equivalently, the clearing (Lichtung), in which entities are present or absent (SZ: 133; 15: 204; 65: 296, 298; 71: 211). Heidegger thus adopts “clearing” as a metaphor for Dasein. A clearing in the ordinary sense is a place situated within a forest, a place where things (like a deer) and events (like a bird’s flight) can be seen that the forest might otherwise conceal. As the clearing, Da-sein makes spatial orientations possible (being here or there in their usual senses) and renders things accessible or hidden, as the case may be, in the light as well as in the dark. “Dasein is its disclosedness” (SZ 133). Unlike the beams of a flashlight or rays of the sun, Dasein does not disclose by virtue of anything other than itself. Disclosing in this fundamental, self-referential sense distinguishes being-here (Dasein) from being ready-to-hand (Zuhandensein), being simply present-at-hand (Vorhandensein), or being alive. (Since Heidegger sometimes singles out the “da” of da-sein, I use “here” as its translation, with the understanding that, as in the German, it signifies Dasein’s disclosedness, albeit a situated, thrown

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disclosedness, further supporting the translation of da. “Being-here” seems more apt than “being-there” for at least three reasons. First, the former more closely echoes ordinary usage in Heidegger’s region of Germany. Second, it conveys the nearness and transparency of existence in ways that “beingthere” does not. Finally, there is the temporal connotation, noted earlier in the Luther translation, that we find in the English expression “Here we go” made, for example, at a turning point in an event where “here” designates a time-space.) “Dasein determines itself as an entity in each case on the basis of a possibility that it is and somehow understands in its being. This is the formal sense of the constitution of the existence of Dasein” (SZ 43). The phrase “in each case” here indicates that Dasein relates to its existence always as its own and that it exists in the first person as a “who,” not a “what,” though it may do so authentically or inauthentically. Depending upon the context, Dasein may designate this self-referential, self-projective manner of being or the entity with this manner of being (the former is its existential [ontological] sense, the latter its existentiell [ontic] sense). Accordingly, being-here is not identical to being-human, and the analysis of Dasein is distinct from traditional studies of human nature (e.g., anthropology, biology, psychology), especially since they pre-emptively construe the human as something present-at-hand or alive in nature, ontologically on a par with other natural formations or realities. While being-here and the human being, though conceptually distinct, overlap in SZ, Heidegger develops their contrast in later works, contending that we, as humans, are not yet here (da), that is, not yet the disclosedness of Da-sein. Dasein is “the ground of a specific, future [way of] being human” (65: 300). “The human being is futurally, in that it takes over being the clearing [Da], provided that it conceives itself as the guardian of the truth of beyng, a guardianship that is indicated as ‘care’” (65: 297, 302–26, 487ff). In SZ the “Da” in “Dasein” signifies the clearing or the open, but as such it falls victim to its transitional role between metaphysical and post-metaphysical thinking (SZ 305). Thus, for example, when regarded as the condition of the possibility of the presence and absence of entities, it serves a function similar to that of transcendental subjectivity, a point of convergence with Kant that Heidegger exploits but later recognizes as metaphysical and thus fatal to thinking being (14: 39f; 66: 146; 71: 141, 213). “Yet Dasein overturned all subjectivity, and beyng is never an object; only entities are capable of becoming objects and even here not all of them” (65: 252; 71: 303, 488f). Whereas it was already clear in SZ that Dasein can never be encountered as an entity simply present-at-hand, the Contributions signals its futural status as the entity that does not allow everything to become an object. “The Da means the appropriated open—the appropriated clearing of being” (65: 296ff, 318; 71: 211). Beyng as the appropriating appropriates Dasein, opening it up

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to its truth as the clearing that allows beings to be present to Dasein, but it remains hidden itself. Attempting to free consideration of Dasein from any transcendental connotation, Heidegger writes that Dasein’s “essence belongs entirely to beyng” (70: 129). “In being-here, beings become themselves and are thus shaped into beyng” (71: 210). As Heidegger’s thinking shifts in the 1930s to thinking beyng historically, that is, in terms of the hidden inception-and-appropriation of being and being-here to one another, he devotes entire chapters or parts of chapters of the Contributions sequence to the significance of Dasein or Daseyn in this connection; see especially GA65: 291–392; GA66: 274f, 307f, 319–30; GA70: 124–44; GA71: 203–24; and GA73.1: 249–57, 273–488 (note, however, that illuminating glosses on being-here can be found throughout every volume of the Contributions sequence). Echoing SZ, Heidegger notes that any attempt to grasp being-here from an “anthropological, i.e., metaphysical” standpoint is insufficient. But he now adds that it must be conceived in terms of its understanding of being, an understanding that “unfolds as the guardianship of the truth of beyng” and overturns the (de-)humanizing (Vermenschung) of the human into “its mere self-affirmation (subjectivity)” (66: 328). In this respect, although skipped over by the thinkers of the first inception, beinghere is “more primordial” than being human, “grounding being human in its essential ‘relation’ to the prevailing of being” (73.1: 274, 283, 286, 290). Unsurprisingly, the accounts of being-here in the Contributions sequence stress its appropriation by and of being. “We experience beings because they are. But they are because being prevails [west]. Being prevails because we continue [bestehen] to be-here. We continue to be-here insofar as the prevailing appropriates us (appropriation)” (73.1: 275; see, too, 66: 7). Beinghere is “the historical ground of the clearing of beyng, a ground appropriated out of the appropriation . . . Being-here is to be grounded steadfastly only in the ap-propriating of the appropriation, i.e., on the basis of beyng” (66: 328; see, too, 66: 108). Being-here’s coming into its own appropriated essence coincides with the transition from the first to the other inception, one of several senses (see below) in which being-here is being “in-between.” This transition is of a piece with the impending decision of the “transformation”— also “movements,” “essential change” (Wesenswandel), and “transporting”— of the human being into “being-here” or into “the steadfastness” of or in being-here (66: 42f, 48f, 108, 274f, 307, 310, 321f, 328). In this respect being-here is the site of the decision, the battle of appropriation. This battle is “the battle of battles,” where either machination wins out (total engagement with beings and obliviousness to being) or it is refused in favor of steadfastly being-here and thus appropriated. This appropriation of being-here that checkmates machination also grounds the truth of beyng as the urgency of the intersection of the encounter of God with the human

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being and the strife between earth and world (thus, notably, a fourfold before the familiar Geviert) (73.1: 285, 289, 297; 65: 30–4, 90f). “Steadfastness in being-here is the constancy of . . . saying ‘yes’ [Ja-sagens] to the essence of truth as clearing of the hiddenness of a refusal belonging to the region of decision about the encounter of humanity and divinity” (66: 119). There can be no such encounter if there are only beings, particularly beings construed as objects or parts of a standing reserve, neither of which applies to gods or human beings. “Steadfastness” and being “between” or “in-between” become watchwords of Heidegger’s account of being-here in the Contributions sequence (see “steadfastness”). Steadfastly thinking in terms of being-here means both (a) taking leave of the rational animal and its manner of thinking by way of presenting or representing something to ourselves and (b) taking the leap into the clearing (66: 85). “The grounding of the truth of beyng belongs not to the present-at-hand and ‘living’ human being but to being-here for the steadfastness in which the human being must at times transform itself” (66: 83; see, too, 144f; 65: 82; 71: 211ff). Here attunement takes center stage; human beings are transported into being-here (and thinking steadfastly) by attunements and being-here is itself appropriated via attunements—angst, pain, thanks, restraint, magnanimity—to beyng (65: 17, 21f, 33ff; 70: 50, 104; 71: 219–24, 276, 286, 301). “‘The attunements’ of being-here ‘come’ from beyng; they are unavoidable but essentially never states of mind [Zustände] that overcome [it]”; instead being-here “steadfastly,” actively experiences them (71: 219). “Steadfastness in the attunement first becomes necessary and essential in carrying out the transition to the other inception,” and the attunement of the transition is the “magnanimity of patience with the poverty” of beyng, based upon the riches of the appropriation of being-here (70: 134). This steadfastness of being-here goes hand in hand with it being “between” or “in-between” in different but overlapping senses. In addition to being between the first and the other inception (as already mentioned), to be here is to be “in-between” beings (66: 108, 144f; 73.1: 275, 291, 295, 321; 5: 113) and “in-between” being and beings (65: 114; 70: 76; 73.1: 216). But being-here is also “not only ‘between’ subject and object as present-at-hand” but (as also flagged earlier) between God and human being (73.1: 299, 353; 65: 28f), finite and infinite (73.1: 327). Although Heidegger devotes less attention to the topic of being-here in his late writings, he revisits the topic in “The Letter on Humanism” and the Zollikon Seminars. In the former Heidegger takes on interpretations of Da-sein as an “accomplishment of subjectivity,” whether it be a “secularized” version of a Christian conception of human beings or Sartre’s existential construal of the human in terms of existentia (9: 336). Heidegger labors to dispel these

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misreadings by stressing that being-here is the clearing for being precisely by “ecstatically projecting” and “standing out from itself” (ek-sistierend— not to be confused with existentia); and he importantly adds that being-here and its projection (Entwurf) are themselves thrown (geworfen) and, indeed, thrown by being itself (9: 326ff, 337). Accordingly, the human being is “not the master of beings” but “the shepherd of being” (9: 342; see “humanism”). In other words, although Dasein is a “thrown projection” and in that very sense is its disclosedness, being its disclosedness (being the “clearing”) does not mean that it necessarily has control, cognitive or otherwise, over what possibilities it projects (and thereby discloses); but being its disclosedness presents it with the possibility of authentically being-here, that is, responding attentively to what shows itself in the clearing that, as a “thrown projection,” it is and has to be. In the Zollikon Seminars Heidegger emphasizes that Dasein must always be seen as being-in-the-world, concerned with things and caring for others, standing in the clearing for the sake of what concerns it and what it encounters (see GA89: 145, 151, 161, 182, 188f).

Being-in-the-World (In-der-Welt-sein) “Being-in-the-world” is a metonym for “being-here” (Dasein), frequently interchangeable with it. While it is, to be sure, “an a priori and necessary constitution of being-here,” being-in-the-world is “by no means sufficient to determine fully its being” (SZ 53, 351). Nonetheless, as constitutive of beinghere, being-in-the-world cannot be understood adequately as anything readyto-hand (the manner of being of implements) or present-at-hand (the manner of being of objects “uncovered” by ontic sciences such as physics or biology). As the hyphens are meant to underscore, “being-in-the-world” signifies the holistic and unified, worldly and transcending character of being-here, its inseparability from a world, a world that includes others and more or less complex systems of implements. It is not as if humans exist in some sense and then, over and above this, happen to have or occasionally (gelegentlich) strike up a relation to the world (SZ 57). In this sense, “being-in-the-world” is meant to signal the very antithesis of a Cartesian or transcendental subject and its potentially skeptical pitfalls. Heidegger explicates three dimensions of being-in-the-world: (a) the relevant sense of the “world,” (SZ §§14–24), (b) “who” Dasein is in that world, particularly in its average everydayness (SZ §§25–7), and (c) its ways of “being in” the world, what Heidegger dubs “the basic existentials” (SZ §§28–38). Heidegger begins his investigation of the relevant sense of “world” (the first dimension) by analyzing the world of Dasein’s concerns

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or what it takes care of in its facticity and thrownness. This world is replete with implements (what is ready-to-hand) that are functionally relevant to one another (the key is for the truck, the truck is for transporting goods, etc.), but the whole, that is, the totality of these purposeful relevancies, obtains solely for Dasein’s sake. That “wherein” Dasein understands itself coincides with what the implements are for, allowing them to be encountered in their relevance. “This ‘wherein’ is the phenomenon of the world” and “the structure of that to which Dasein refers itself [therein] makes up the worldhood of the world” (SZ 86). Heidegger’s use of prepositional formulations (worin, wozu, woraufhin, etc.) here makes for difficult reading. But he summarizes this first dimension of being-in-the-world by stressing that the worldhood of the “world” is what makes possible the discovery of innerworldly beings (readyto-hand and present-at-hand) and, as such, it is “an existential determination of being-in-the-world” (SZ 87f; see, too, SZ 56ff, 65, 76, 105, 108, 113, 135, 172, 191f, 252, 331). The second dimension of being-in-the-world consists in ways of beingwith-others, that is, of being more or less solicitous of them. Thus, whereas the first dimension is the world of its concerns (Besorgen) in making ends meet, this second dimension is the world of solicitude (Fürsorge), a function of the fact that being-in-the-world is constituted by “being-with” others no less than by its worldly undertakings. The average, everyday way of beingin-the-world falls prey to the crowd (the They) on multiple levels—seduced, sedated, and alienated by a public world that thrives on ambiguity (SZ 176ff). As for the third dimension, Heidegger identifies four basic existentials, that is, four equally basic structures of being-here’s worldly existence. These four basic ways of “being in” a world consist of (a) being affectively disposed in (b) understanding and projecting its possibilities, and doing so all the while (c) discursively in a world into which (d) it has been thrown and has fallen. Being-in-the-world implements each of these basic existentials in inauthentic and authentic ways. It is in terms of being-in-the-world, finally, that Dasein is also fated, worldly, and historical (SZ 380, 383f, 388, 393).

Being-With (Mitsein) We are with others from the outset, indeed, in such a way that, in many cases, we hardly distinguish ourselves from them. But we also find ourselves just as often in the position of being for and against particular others, empathizing and collaborating or falling out and competing with them. We can also be quite alone in the midst of others—alone in a crowd, as it were—but this experience, too, is possible only by virtue of originally being with one another in some

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sense. Underlying these sorts of quotidian (existentiell) social phenomena is Dasein’s ontological, that is, existential character of being with others. Just as a bare subject without a world (a Cartesian or transcendental ego) is never given, so being-here has no world without others. Being a self and being with others are joined at the hip. In Heidegger’s own terminology, Dasein’s world is an inherently shared world (Mitwelt) and, just as each Dasein is, from its own vantage point, being-with-others (Mitsein), so, too, others are “here with it” (Mitdasein). Like Dasein, they do not have “the ontological character of something present-at-hand along with it within a world” (SZ 118; 20: 328). Being-with is an existential constituent of being-in-the-world and both the irreducible fact of being-with-others and the irreducible fact that they arehere-with me are “equally primordial” structures of being-in-the-world (SZ 114, 125). Just as Dasein typically understands itself on the basis of its world, so the way that others are-here-with it is typically encountered “at work,” that is, from the standpoint of what is ready-to-hand within-the-world. This observation seems woefully narrow, ignoring familial, amicable, and other sorts of relations that can hardly be regarded as a matter of work. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s formal, broad-based point in this regard stands, namely, that “this being-here-with of others is only disclosed in an inner-worldly way for a Dasein . . . because Dasein is in itself being-with” (SZ 120). This beingwith determines Dasein existentially even in the factical absence of others (the “alone in a crowd” phenomenon mentioned earlier). The facticity of being-with-one-another (including experiences of empathy and antipathy) is grounded in Dasein’s existential (ontological) status of being-with and not simply in the co-occurrence of several subjects on hand. Others can encounter Dasein as being-here-with them only insofar as Dasein of its own has the essential structure of being-with. In contrast to concern (Besorgen) for what is ready-to-hand, that is, to taking care of one’s concerns or business, taking care of others and concerning oneself with them (in negative as well as positive senses) is solicitude (Fürsorge). The latter term can also mean “welfare,” a social institution that is grounded in being-with and motivated by the typically deficient yet everyday modes of solicitude such as neglect or indifference (reinforcing the misconstrual of others’ being as the “sheer present-at-handness of several subjects”). Just as working with what is handy in the context of concern is guided by circumspection (Umsicht), so solicitude is guided by degrees of considerateness (Rücksicht) and acceptance (Nachsicht) of others. The possibilities of solicitude lie within a spectrum between two extremes. At one extreme, solicitude “can as it were take away the other’s ‘care’ and put itself in its [the other’s] place in the context of some concern, leaping into its place for it” (SZ 122). The displaced other becomes dependent and

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dominated, a cog in the machinery of some work-world concern, retreating in order to take over the result of the concern as something finished and available, but not of its doing (the Marxist overtones—the charge that by denying the workers control of the production process, capitalism alienates them—are unmistakable). At the other extreme, solicitude “leaps ahead, not in order to take away the other’s ‘care’ from it, but to first give it back authentically as such” (SZ 122). This latter sort of solicitude is a form of authentically caring, that is, caring for the other insofar as she exists and not insofar as she takes care of something within some concern. “This solicitude . . . helps the other become transparent to herself in her care and free for it” (SZ 122). Dasein exists essentially for the sake of itself, but, since it is essentially being-with others, “Dasein is essentially for the sake of others” (SZ 123). This phrase is open, to be sure, to different interpretations, from radical altruism to, at a minimum, merely others-involving practices. Yet while being authentic is necessarily individualizing in the sense that each Dasein must take it upon themselves, the most straightforward reading seems to be that there is or, more precisely, there can be no authenticity on an individual level without authentic socialization, without authentically being-with-one-another (see Dahlstrom 2014).

Biology (Biologie) In Heidegger’s earliest articles, as part of defenses of Catholicism, he criticizes versions of the theory of descent (partly on scientific grounds), taking on Darwin-inspired biologists such as Ernst Haeckel and arguing for the autonomy of organisms as well as the need to understand the complexity of their interaction with the environment. In SZ he takes pains to differentiate existential analysis from a biological investigation and warns against the inference to “biologism” from the insistence upon having an “environment” (SZ 45, 49f, 58). He contends that the path to an ontological determination of the living—“neither purely being-on-hand nor also Dasein”—is a “reductive privation on the basis of the ontology of Dasein” (SZ 10, 50, 194). He pursues this determination in his 1929/30 lectures, while targeting Darwinist and mechanist approaches to organisms as well as neo-vitalist approaches based upon Kantian purposiveness or Aristotelian entelechy. He not only draws on Driesch’s concept of “holism” (Ganzheit) but also criticizes Buytendijk’s view that an animal is in its surroundings almost as though they were its body. Instead he turns to the work of Baer and, above all, Uexküll’s exploration of animals’ distinctive “environment.” All the while he emphasizes the privative character of the analysis, where we take our being-here as baseline and interpret the animal as a privation of this or that feature of being-here. This

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privative approach is presumably mandated by the fact that our access to animals is neither a case of being-with-one-another (reserved for Mitdasein) nor a case of simply being-alongside something handy or on hand, readyto-hand or present-at-hand. Instead we have to transport ourselves into the animal’s life (29/30: 309, 335, 380f; 76: 66f). Heidegger criticizes the Darwinian emphasis on self-preservation, an emphasis made with a view to “an economic consideration of the human being.” To construe self-preservation and adaptation as the relation between things present-at-hand (where one of the things is the environment) fails to do justice to animal or to human reality. In contrast to Darwinism’s economic approach, Heidegger proposes an “ecological” approach (glossing the concept of the biologist Franz Doflein): “The word ‘ecology’ comes from oikos, house. It means research into where and how animals are at home, their manner of living in relation to their surroundings,” not to be confused with a world or with how humans comport themselves to a world. Crucial to Heidegger’s criticism is an emphasis on the complex roles played by the organism’s drives and facilities in interaction with its surrounding, as conditions for any causal account of the relation of animals to their environment (29/30: 377, 382). In keeping with Heidegger’s rejection of purposiveness, he contrasts the finished and prepared character (Fertigkeit) of human productions with the facility (Fähigkeit) of organisms. What machines and organisms have in common is a kind of serviceability. Echoing Aristotle, Heidegger distinguishes between an artifact prepared to serve a purpose beyond itself, available apart from the process that produced it, and a living organism’s selfserving facilities that never exist apart from the organism interacting with its surroundings. Drawing on Uexküll’s research on amoebas, Heidegger asserts that the facilities enable and even render necessary the possession of organs rather than vice versa. In other words, it is not that an animal can see because it has eyes but rather that it has eyes because it can see. An organism has organs because it has certain facilities, rooted in drives and urges, through which the organism—as long as it is uncurbed, uninhibited—advances and regulates itself of its own accord, opening up its surroundings in the process (29/30: 319–35, 342; 26: 102f, 113). This process is one in which the animal is “captivated,” as surroundings unleash its circle of drives and the animal proceeds to eliminate what unleashes it. Heidegger refers to this basic conception of captivation as “the first conception, on the basis of which every concrete biological question can first be established” (29/30: 377). Six years later he voices skepticism about the viability of biology as an understanding of life as long as biology derives its legitimacy from science in the grips of modern processes of “machination” (65: 276). As for versions of biologism, they are all forms of metaphysics, the metaphysics of power and machination, particularly when it

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comes to eugenics (46: 215f; 65: 173; 94: 472). Thus, he refers to a “murky biologism” with which a vulgar national socialism aligns itself, a “barren and crude biologism,” and, in connection with racial considerations, “the basic deception” of “biologism” (94: 142ff, 233, 338; see, too, 95: 217f, 224; see Kessel 2011).

Bodiliness (Leiblichkeit) Sartre and Löwith head a list of critics who charge Heidegger with neglecting the body in SZ. Heidegger himself confesses that he found the theme “the most difficult,” and at the time of writing SZ he did not know what more to say beyond the few lines devoted to it (SZ 56, 108; 89: 292). Nonetheless, even in his early lectures, he affirms how life-experiences are given necessarily in connection with bodiliness (W: “lived body”) (56/57: 78, 210f). From Husserl and Scheler he inherits the distinction between bodiliness and corporeality— roughly: body as lived (Leib) and body as observed (Körper) or body as experienced and body as scientific object—and stresses that “body” (σῶμα) in Aristotle’s sense should not be confused with corporeality (60: 214; 18: 28, 199, 347). While the body receives short shrift in SZ, Heidegger’s analyses of the spatiality of being-in-the-world yield dimensions of the lived body (its own proximities and orientation) that find their way into Merleau-Ponty’s later paradigmatic treatment of le corps dans le monde (body-in-the-world) (see “spatiality”). In lectures shortly after the publication of SZ, Heidegger asserts that Dasein is factically split off (dispersed) into a body, coinciding with a specific sexuality, by virtue of its inherent “thrownness” and “being-with” others (26: 172–5). Not fundamental ontology but metontology, the “metaphysics of Dasein,” would be the place for thematizing the body (26: 174, 202). Yet this thematizing never materializes, falling (like the projected metaphysics of Dasein) to the wayside. Still, in the Zollikon Seminars (see GA89) Heidegger justifies neglecting to treat the body in more depth by observing (a) that an adequate elaboration of Dasein’s basic structures is a necessary condition for a phenomenology of the body and (b) that no satisfactory description of the phenomenon of the body exists, that is, a description that takes its bearings from being-in-the-world (89: 202). In these seminars he addresses bodiliness in several respects: its dependency upon Dasein’s spatiality, its irreducibility to corporeality, its absence and remoteness, its way of being both here and there at once, its dynamic character of “bodying-forth” and relation in that respect to the self (89: 105, 109, 111, 126f, 244, 294; see, too, 65: 275f). Yet Heidegger continues to differentiate being-in-the-world from our way of

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being bodies: “Bodying-forth is inherent in being-in-the-world as such. But being-in-the-world is not exhausted in bodying-forth” (89: 244; see, too, 15: 235ff).

Boredom (Langeweile) Boredom is, literally, “a long while” (Langeweile). Time is oppressively prolonged in three distinct ways, yielding three forms of boredom: being bored by something, being bored (or, more literally, boring ourselves) with something, and deep boredom (tiefe Langeweile, also translated “profound boredom”). In each case, time is neither filled-up nor fulfilling; boredom leaves us empty and holds us in limbo. Thus, we may be bored by a train station, vainly trying to pass the time by counting its windows, as we wait for the next train. We may also be bored with a dinner party, where (in contrast to the first form of boredom) the entire event is a way for us to kill time (our time). In this second form of boredom, the emptiness of the time springs not from some object or setting (e.g., the train station where we tarry) but from our decision to immerse ourselves in the predictable, dull rituals of the dinner party, while leaving our authentic selves behind and abandoning ourselves to the meaninglessness of time without a past or future. Deep boredom is a “basic attunement” (Grundstimmung, also translated “basic mood”), and in it we are bored by everything, including ourselves, and nothing in the world matters. The time of beings as a whole is startlingly empty. “Beings as a whole do not vanish but instead show themselves precisely as such in their indifferentness” (GA29/30, 208). Heidegger accordingly notes two complementary components of deep boredom. We are both “left empty” (leergelassen) by it, as everything seems to withdraw, and “suspended” or “kept in limbo” (hingehalten) by it, since every possibility lies fallow. In contrast to boredom’s other forms, we do not try to fight deep boredom by distracting ourselves, since there is no point in doing so. Whereas the time that stands still when we are bored by something or by others (in the first two forms) is some relative time period, in profound boredom it is time as a whole that is boring. Yet, like any refusal, this sweeping refusal of significance also supposedly reveals other, unexploited possibilities and brings Dasein face to face with its self (not its ego) and its temporal freedom. Dasein’s prospects of liberating itself lie in its capacity for resolute self-disclosure in the moment (Augenblick). Whereas the moment cannot be heard in the pasttimes marking the first two forms of boredom, the third form compels us to hear it. What it says (albeit ironically by refusing) is the authentic possibility of Dasein’s existence, the moment of resolutely disclosing, seeing and acting

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in a world of significance (29/30: 115–249; also 9: 110). Without specifying any particular form of boredom, Heidegger refers to it as the companion of machination (96: 196; see Elpidorou and Freeman 2019).

Building (Bauen) “Building” here is the nominalization of the verb “to build,” although the German word-family importantly includes cultivating, for example, “winegrowing” (Weinbau), as well as constructing. In the Anglo-Saxon equivalent to the latter sense, we speak of building a house to live in or building in order to have a place to dwell. But building in the “authentic sense” (comprising senses of both “cultivating” and “constructing” in the German term) is not so much a means to dwelling as it is already a way of dwelling, a way of being on earth (as respective etymologies of the corresponding German terms suggest). Hence, it is impossible to ask, let alone decide, what it means to build “as long as we do not consider that every [act of] building [Bauen] is in itself a way of dwelling” (7: 150). As a way of being on earth, dwelling is being at peace with the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its way of essentially unfolding, precisely as a gathering of earth and sky, divinities and mortals (7: 151, 155). To build a bridge, for example, is to erect a distinctive place where earth and sky, divinities and mortals come together as one, and where that fourfold unity directs the process of building, its erection of places and arrangement of spaces. In keeping with the ancient sense of techne, such building “brings the fourfold” into the thing built and “brings the thing as a place forth in what is already present [i.e., the fourfold], for which this place now makes space”; or, as Heidegger puts it less clumsily in the same context: “Building erects places that allocate a site [einräumen, make a space] for the fourfold” (7: 161). The things built in this way (die Bauten) safeguard the fourfold, and “this fourfold safeguarding is the simple essence of dwelling” (ibid.). By the same token, “we are able to build only if we are capable of dwelling” (7: 161f).

Care (Sorge) Dasein is always ahead of itself in the sense that, as long as it exists, it projects possibilities for itself. Projecting those possibilities matters to it and it cares about them—or, more simply, it cares—accordingly. Those possibilities may be realized, altered, or impeded but in any case, the beat goes on and

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Dasein continues to exist only by caring and projecting as yet unrealized and further possibilities. Moreover, the possibilities projected by Dasein are not just any possibilities but instead precisely possibilities that are part of the fabric of the particular world into which it has been thrown, that is, in which it already is. (When I leave my office and get in my car at the end of the day, I am projecting—caring about—the possibility of getting home; I rely upon the road home as a possibility already in place. If my normal route is obstructed by an accident, I take a different route. But these factical possibilities are unavailable to someone who works at home.) By virtue of both being ahead of itself and already in a world in the senses described, Dasein also invariably finds itself alongside or amidst entities within-theworld (in the previous example, I come across pedestrians, other cars, and so on thanks to the drive home). Being ahead of itself, being already in a world, and being alongside/amidst implements within-the-world—Dasein’s existentiality, facticity, and fallenness respectively—make up its ontological structure. “The being of Dasein means being-ahead-already-in (the-world) while being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world). This being fulfills [realizes] the meaning of the term care, that is used [here] in a purely ontological-existential sense. This meaning excludes any ontically meant tendency of being, such as worry or carefreeness” (SZ 192, 284). Because Dasein is essentially care (Sorge), it has concerns (Besorgen), that is, it concerns itself with what is ready-to-hand (taking care of business), and it has solicitude (Fürsorge), that is, it “cares for” others (taking care of them). Dasein’s concerns are concerns about one’s work (think of business concerns), including both equipment relevant to its particular objectives and the work-world within which this equipment has this relevance, that is, the sorts of entities preoccupying Dasein in its concern and the world that enables that engagement. Being concerned about getting a job done and having the proper tools to do it exemplify an existence defined by care. At the same time, this existence is always exemplified by a care for others. In the everyday work-world others confront us as objects of solicitude and never as merely ready-to-hand tools. Based upon these considerations, Heidegger concludes that “care is always, even if only privatively, concern and solicitude” (SZ 194, 266, 298, 300). It is a complex but fundamental existential-ontological phenomenon, more basic than any theory or practice, any willing or wishing, any drive or urge. In other words, it is “a priori,” what is presupposed “in the most primordial sense” (SZ 193–6, 206, 228). Being toward death is grounded in care, and the call of conscience is the call of care, a call out of the uncanniness of being-in-theworld (SZ 252, 259, 277f, 286). And yet care can be inauthentic or authentic (and so, too, by implication can its concerns and solicitude). Being resolute is “nothing but the authenticity of care itself, cared for in care and possible only

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as care” (SZ 301). Moreover, selfhood can only be existentially read off “the authenticity of Dasein’s being as care” (SZ 322). From the fact that being ahead is grounded in the future, being already in “having been,” and being alongside in making present, Heidegger infers that “the primordial unity of the structure of care lies in temporality.” Thus, Dasein is, at bottom, care and the sense of care lies in temporality (SZ 234, 326f). The notion of care surfaces less frequently in Heidegger’s later thinking, although when it does, he continues to understand it as a basic feature of Dasein, albeit within the context of the history of beyng as the appropriating. As such, care shows us to be “seekers, preservers, guardians” of the truth of beyng. Grounded in restraint, it is “the anticipatory decisiveness” for that truth (65: 17f, 35, 294; 52: 181). In a similar vein he speaks of “the care of the abyss” as safeguarding the clearing from which alone our fate (a decision about the holy and the un-holy) comes (71: 255).

Certainty (Gewißheit) Care about a specific sort of certainty can dominate and even override concerns with freeing up the possibility of encountering basic facts. Care about this certainty is, he submits, a common, detrimental feature of Descartes’ and Husserl’s philosophical inquiries (17: 44, 72, 212, 258, 268). Descartes’ “specific care for certainty,” taking its lead formally from mathematics, shows that “the care for knowing does not dwell on an entity as an entity and on objects with respect to their factual content but instead approaches them in terms of how they can be grasped and, indeed, with a view to assent” (17: 221). By shifting from the content of things to the method of grasping them, this sort of care about knowing mistakes its ownmost possibilities as it restricts science to possibilities of knowing things clearly and distinctly as “the only path of rigorous knowledge” (17: 224). Notwithstanding its appearance as a radical reflection on the foundation of knowledge, this sort of epistemic care in fact sedates/tranquilizes (beruhigt) knowing and it does so, Heidegger submits, because it is at bottom a care about certainty and the security it allegedly provides. Evidence for Descartes’ conflation of truth with certainty begins with the guarantee of having been created by God and continues with the validation he finds in universally binding propositions (17: 225, 228, 245). “The being of knowing has tranquilized itself from the outset via the co-assumption of the human being as creatum” (17: 226). After noting both the “fundamental differences” between Descartes and Husserl and their common ground, Heidegger outlines distortions to phenomenology produced by Husserl’s own care for certainty (17: 258, 268,

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270–89). The care for certainty signals a specific flight from being-here, as it “waylays every question of being into a question of being an object for science” (17: 283). The foregoing gloss stems from Heidegger’s 1923 lectures but he repeatedly iterates the extraordinary historical importance of Descartes’ identification of truth with certainty and beings generally with what can be securely, that is, methodically placed before (vor-gestellt) the cogito (and thus represented as an object by and to the cogito; see “presenting”). In this way, Descartes’ influential construal of the true as the certain (verum as certum) is the key to modern subjectivism (“subjectiveness”) and nihilism (SZ 24; 5: 107–11, 133–6, 147, 154; 7: 84; 48: 188, 202–6, 231–4, 241; 67: 188). Yet Heidegger has no intention of relinquishing the concept of certainty to the legacy of Cartesian method and science. In SZ, in addition to contending generally that “certainty is grounded in truth or belongs equiprimordially to it,” Heidegger speaks of a “being certain” (Gewißsein) with respect to death “that in the end exhibits a pre-eminent certainty of being-here”—not to be confused with death’s empirical certainty or even with the supreme, “apodictic” certainty of the sort found in certain regions of theoretical knowing (SZ 256ff, 264f). There is, indeed, an authentic certainty that resoluteness, hearing the call of conscience (Gewissen), attains in anticipating death (SZ 300ff, 307f).

Circumspection (Umsicht) “Circumspection” is a technical term for seeing how, in the context of some concern (Besorgen), tools are meaningfully related to one another in teleological chains and how to use them accordingly for the purposes of that concern. It consists in seeing—in medias res, as it were—what an ensemble of implements is for and the manifold references these tools have to one another “in order to” (um) accomplish the task at hand. Anyone who plies a trade like carpentry or mechanics typically does so circumspectively, seeing what “goes” where and when, what tools (e.g., claw hammer and roofing nails, torque wrench and engine bolts) are best suited for a particular job and in what connection. In a similar way circumspection figures more generally in the concerns of being-in-the-world (from building a computer or operating the software on it to preparing a meal or driving to work). The “seeing” (-sicht) in circumspection is pre-reflective, a matter of know-how, the way we see our shoes when putting them on or survey the traffic on the road. Circumspection is thus a crucial feature of our mode of dealing (Umgang) with ready-to-hand implements and, as such, it is to be distinguished from theoretical scrutiny of something present-at-hand—“theoretical comportment is merely-looking upon [something] non-circumspectively.” Thus, merely

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looking at a hammer will never tell me what it is for; its use and availability as something ready-to-hand are only seen circumspectively (SZ 69). Still, it would probably be overstating the role of circumspection to include within its purview, albeit in a privative sense, merely “taking in” things of no known relevance to what we circumspectively are doing (such as noting the things that idly catch our eye as we pass them by while driving). So, too, it would seem necessary to invoke another sort of circumspection or something other than circumspection to characterize the seeing involved in aimless play and forms of sheer enjoyment.

Clearing (Lichtung) Dasein is disclosedness in the sense that it is illumined (erleuchtet, gelichtet), not by something else, but such that “it is itself the clearing.” Descartes’ talk of lumen naturale (the natural light of human understanding) is based upon Dasein’s being the clearing—in the sense of an opening—for light and dark alike (SZ 133; more on this operative metaphor below). Nonetheless, particularly in SZ, Heidegger often glosses the clearing in terms of light (drawing upon the fact that Lichtung, the German word for a clearing, builds on Licht, the word for light). Thus, in advance of any temporal interpretation, care is said to be what essentially illumines (lichtet) being-here (Da-sein), “making it ‘open’ as well as ‘bright’ for itself” and “first enabling . . . any encountering [Vernehmen], ‘seeing’ and having of something” (SZ 350). So, too, in the course of identifying the ground of the existential possibility of care as temporality and thus what illumines it originally, what accounts for the clearing that being-here is, Heidegger writes that “ecstatic temporality illumines the here primordially” (SZ 351). In Heidegger’s later works, the emphasis shifts from Dasein as identified with the clearing to the clearing of being, to which Dasein is not identical but belongs, and in this context he often differentiates the clearing from any sense of light or lighting. “As long as one thinks in a physicalist way, the fundamental character of the clearing, that lies in advance of the light, is not seen” (15: 231; 262; 54: 217f). The clearing is the “free region” where things are present, coming across or standing opposite one another. It is the “open” or “openness” that affords any possible appearing and showing. Heidegger draws on the metaphorical sense of “clearing” that stands literally for a glade. Again, despite the closeness of the German words for clearing (Lichtung) and light (Licht), a glade can obviously be quite dark. So while “light can fall upon the clearing . . . and in it the brightness can play with the dark,” the light presupposes the clearing and not vice versa. “The clearing is the open for

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everything that comes to be present and absent” (14: 80f; 89: 16). At times, however, Heidegger continues to associate “clearing” with “light” (5: 40ff, 61; 7: 259; 9: 331, 365). The clearing underlies metaphysics, it makes metaphysics possible, without being thought itself, though Parmenides, a pre-metaphysical thinker, experiences it as, and names it, aletheia. “The peaceful heart of the clearing is the place of the stillness out of which there is the likes of the possibility of the co-belonging of being and thinking, i.e., presence and perceiving” (14: 84). Since any possible claims on what is binding are grounded in this co-belonging, the importance of thinking aletheia as the clearing is patent. “Only because the essence of being is aletheia, can the light of the light come into prominence” (54: 218). Just as aletheia is the struggle in which what is hidden from us becomes unhidden, so the clearing—to hearken back to the SZ comment about ecstatic temporality—is a timing as well as a spacing (14: 81; 16: 630f). The fact that philosophy as metaphysics thinks what the clearing affords but not the clearing itself is due to the fact that the clearing is not only a clearing of what is present but also a clearing of the self-concealing presence of what is present (14: 88). The clearing is the end of Heidegger’s analysis of truth, as the un-grounded ground—or, in other words, the grounding abyss (Ab-grund)—of the other levels of truth. “The essence of truth is the clearing for the self-concealing” (65: 348). The self-concealing rages through the clearing, and, only if the ensuing struggle between hiddenness and unhiddenness (concealment and unconcealment) happens and dominates the “here” (Da) wholeheartedly (innig) is it possible to succeed in rising from the level of sheer manipulation and toward the steadfastnesss of being-here (Da-sein). To the extent that we find ourselves on the former level, being human requires rising to something completely other than ourselves, that is, “the clearing of being” (15: 386f). To rise to this level is to countenance the stubborn and unyielding hiddenness of beyng—and thus the lack of control on our part—that the clearing entails. “Thus, truth is never only clearing, but unfolds as hidden just as primordially and intimately with the clearing. Both, clearing and hiddenness, are not two but the essential unfolding of the one, the truth itself.” This unfolding or becoming of truth is nothing less than the appropriation itself (65: 349; see, too, 65: 348–53; 273, 329f, 348–357; 66: 84f, 108–14, 314).

Comportment (Verhalten) Comportment is a way of behaving toward—or carrying oneself with respect to—something or other. Notably, Verhältnis is a cognate word for relation

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and Verhalten is a nominalization of the reflexive verbal construction sich verhalten auf or zu that may be literally rendered “to relate oneself to” as well as “to comport oneself to” (a family of terms that Heidegger frequently exploits; see, e.g., 71: 173, 193). Although Heidegger later speaks occasionally of the gods’ comportment (71: 161), he mostly conceives it as a feature distinctive of being-here. As such, comportments are manners of being-in-the-world. The German term “Verhalten” is often used for behavior, in the sense studied by animal and human psychology, which, in the case of behaviorists, excludes consideration of any internal, conscious phenomena (the behaviorist B. F. Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior is translated Wissenschaft und menschliches Verhalten). Heidegger, too, uses comportment in a way that does not necessarily imply explicit awareness of the activity (behavior) or its aim. But, unlike behaviorists, he construes it as a way of relating to something or other meaningfully and that means with a certain attunement (comprising as it were a central part of the phenomenal character of the respective intentionality) and with a tacit awareness or concern for what it is about or for. Since every comportment is a comportment toward something, that is, each has the structure of being directed at something, Heidegger understands “intentionality,” the central theme of Husserl’s phenomenology, in terms of a comportment (24: 80f, 85f). Because it incorporates the triadic structure (act, meaning, object) that Husserl assigns to intentionality, characterizing comportment along these lines may be aptly deemed “phenomenological,” albeit with the crucial difference that, far from being identical to intentionality (the mark of most forms of consciousness in Husserl’s phenomenology), comportment is the way of being-in-the-world that, by transcending, that is, passing beyond beings to their being, grounds intentionality (20: 46; 24: 80–94; 224–30; 444ff). In the broadest sense Dasein comports itself toward “innerworldly entities” it encounters as well as toward its world and itself as existing (SZ 12, 41f, 86, 108, 113, 437). Attempting to make up for philosophy’s traditional neglect of the phenomenon, Heidegger stresses the distinctive way in which we comport ourselves toward our world in using tools and devices (including signs) in our everyday lives (SZ 15f, 69f, 79; 25: 21f). So, too, we comport ourselves toward time by reckoning with it or using a clock (SZ 405, 420). But just as he cautions that “care” does not signify a priority of practical over theoretical comportment, so by no means are comportments limited to practical engagement with things (SZ 193). We also comport ourselves to death and guilt (SZ 261f, 282) and there are “logical,” “scientific and theoretical,” and “metaphysical” comportments as well as a historian’s distinctively “factical” comportment (SZ 300, 319, 361, 393, 401).

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Yet comportment is not the end of existential analysis. Heidegger contrasts comporting oneself to another being with being in relation to one’s potential to be (SZ 192); similarly, he maintains that resoluteness as a mode of disclosedness is not a specific comportment but essentially constitutive of being-in-the-world as such, the condition of the possibility of any comportment (SZ 297). In keeping with these restrictions on the scope of comportment, Heidegger writes: “Every comportment/behavior on Dasein’s part is to be interpreted in terms of its being, namely, temporality” (SZ 404f). Over a decade later, Heidegger continues to echo these qualifications regarding the status of comportment: “The relation to being is the appropriation of the grounding of ‘being-in-the-world,’ that first and already allows the comportment [Verhalten] to beings to prevail” (70: 125).

Conscience (Gewissen) Conscience is the silent call of Dasein from its “They-self,” that is, its absorption in the They, to the capability-of-being that is its alone as being-inthe-world. To the extent that Dasein is constantly listening to the din of the They, the call of conscience interrupts the latter. Conscience in this sense is an existential, a primordial phenomenon of being-here, a way Dasein discloses itself to itself. “In conscience Dasein calls itself . . . The call comes from me and yet over me” (SZ 275). Neither God nor some anthropological, biological, or psychological factor, this one who is calling Dasein is Dasein itself. The call comes from the uncanniness of being thrown as an individual self into the world, something not determinable by anything worldly. Hence, insofar as Dasein is ordinarily wrapped up in the They, the call sounds strange, even alien to it. The call’s uncanniness is the basic attunement of the angst that brings Dasein face to face with the nothingness of the world and with its own individual capability-of-being. The call of conscience in the existential sense summons Dasein to the fact that it is guilty in a primordial sense, not by virtue of something (some being) it owes others, but by virtue of existing at all or, in other words, by virtue of something it owes itself for existing. Each of us has been thrown into the world as the sort of being who, without having chosen to be at all, individually projects some possibilities rather than others. We are not the ground of our being, and we are the ground of not projecting certain possibilities. As a thrown projection, situated between these two nullities (not the ground in one respect, being the ground for the fact that some possibilities do not hold in another respect), our existence is accordingly shot through with a distinctive, individuating indebtedness and responsibility. Being

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thus indebted and responsible simply by virtue of existing is being guilty (Schuldigsein) “existentially.” One cannot choose not to have a conscience, but one can choose to want to have one. To understand conscience’s call is to choose to want to have a conscience or, equivalently, to let oneself silently act on oneself on the basis of being-guilty in the existential sense. Letting oneself so act on oneself enables Dasein to be responsible and testifies to its authentic capability-of-being. In understanding conscience’s call, the attunement (mood) is one of uncanniness at being completely by oneself; such are the “pangs,” the angst of conscience (Gewissensangst). Conscience attests to the authentic disclosedness in Dasein, as Dasein silently projects itself onto its “ownmost” guilt, all the while prepared for angst. This authentic disclosedness is resoluteness (SZ 295ff).

Consciousness (Bewusstsein) Modern philosophy tends to represent consciousness primarily as a matter of having something placed before or represented to us (uns vorgestellt), at least long enough for us to recall it, where, of course, we can be ourselves the ones who place it there or represent it (5: 144ff; 65: 326; see “presenting”). Thus, for those who share this modern tendency, to be is ultimately to be a possible object for a consciousness, for a conscious subject, and—as the word’s etymology suggests—relative to a kind of knowing (7: 178, 240; 10: 113f). Beginning with Descartes and continuing prominently in the works of Leibniz and Kant, Hegel and even Nietzsche, modern philosophers conceive consciousness in these terms and so also self-consciousness, as fundamental and, in some sense, a priori (5: 124f; 7: 84, 87, 97; 15: 202; 65: 208, 232, 313; 71: 80, 198, 296; 94: 27). This conception is mistaken since consciousness, like intentionality, rests upon a more basic phenomenon: the comportment of Dasein as a being-in-the-world, which in turn supposes the clearing, the open in which Dasein sojourns; indeed, Heidegger repeatedly stresses the need to differentiate being-here (Da-sein) from being conscious (Bewußt-sein) which “is only possible on the basis of the ‘here’ [Da] as a mode derived from it” (15: 202ff; 24: 249, 444; 65: 68). Heidegger identifies idealism in broad strokes with the consciousnesscentered conception of being, described earlier. He does not limit it to idealism in a narrower and perhaps more canonical sense, for example, Berkeleyan idealism, Kant’s transcendental idealism, or Hegel’s absolute idealism. The idealism of modern philosophy is more far-reaching, resting upon a widespread commitment to the primacy of consciousness and thereby

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exemplifying a kind of ego-centric subjectivity (SZ 49, 62, 203, 207, 212, 363n; 89: 226). In Heidegger’s first Marburg lectures he examines how consciousness came to be the theme of then present-day phenomenology, particularly given the absence of such a notion among the Greeks. He finds the answer in a suspect care for certainty that has a history traceable to Descartes’ philosophy and its medieval roots (17: 47, 106f). He also reviews Descartes’ revision of psychology into a “science of consciousness that . . . attains its object in the so-called inner experience” and its influence upon the nineteenth century and beyond where “scientific” philosophy in all its orientations—not least Husserl’s phenomenology—has consciousness as its theme (20: 16–23; see “phenomenology”). Heidegger critically examines the role of “pure consciousness” in Husserl’s elaboration of the field proper to phenomenology in which concrete instances of “the various manners of consciousness of something” first become accessible (20: 130f). His contention is that Husserl arrives at his determinations of pure consciousness not by attending phenomenologically to consciousness itself as an entity but in the interest of securing it as a region for an absolute science (20: 147).

Constancy (Ständigkeit) Dasein is authentic to the extent that it constantly and resolutely projects itself onto the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-here. Both the constancy of the self and the possible lack of the same (Unselbstständigkeit) require an existential-ontological inquiry since such an inquiry is the only adequate means of access to the problems they present (SZ 117). Inauthenticity and a lack of self-constancy are characteristic of a self-identification with one’s everyday, more or less anonymous social world, the They. At the same time, there is a “‘constancy’ that is nearest at hand” and that, as part of our everyday ways of being among one another, is an inauthentic way of being-with (SZ 126). This inauthentic constancy is betrayed by a troubling obsession with maintaining a distinctive sort of distance (Abständigkeit) from others, entailing catching up with some and keeping others down. The preoccupation with this distance runs hand-in-hand with everyday Dasein’s comforting, inconspicuous immersion in the They. Through involvement in common, interchangeable practices (like using public media) and by relying exclusively upon the accessibility and acceptability of public criteria and interpretations, Dasein in its everydayness is no different from anyone else. Accordingly, the “‘constancy’ nearest at hand” is marked by a certain averageness, a leveling

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down of possibilities, and its publicity or public character accommodates Dasein’s lassitude, relieving it of the burden of being. Although this inauthentic constancy, which Dasein exhibits when absorbed into the They, is not the constancy of the self, it remains an existential (something Dasein does by disclosing and discloses by doing). Nonetheless, Dasein’s ontological distinctiveness lies in its capacity for being constant in its selfhood. Dasein is ontologically different from the real and the present-at-hand, inasmuch as its standing or constitution (Bestand) consists, not in the substantiality of a substance, but in the “self-standing character” (Selbständigkeit) of the caring self (SZ 303; 322). In Heidegger’s later writings he emphasizes the related concept of steadfastness (Inständigkeit) in the sense of “taking and maintaining a stand in being-here” as the clearing, the truth of beyng (67: 9, 31, 62, 75; 71: 189, 191, 193, 206; see “steadfastness”).

Correspond (entsprechen) “Correspondence” can be used to translate Übereinstimmung or the Latin adequatio (in adequatio rei et intellectus) to designate the truth-defining relation of “agreement” or “adquateness” between things and understanding (judgment, proposition, representation, etc.). Truth as correspondence in this sense is derivative of truth as unhiddenness. However, “to correspond” is a translation of another German word, ent-sprechen, which signifies listening to what language says. “The human being speaks only because he corresponds to language,” where language is not the expression of thinking but the house of being, the place for thinking. “Language is the originary dimension within which humanity in general is first able to correspond to being and its claim, and, in corresponding, to belong to being. This originary corresponding, explicitly carried out, is thinking” (12: 29f; 8: 59, 173; 11: 25f; 70: 25; 71: 252, 287; 79: 21, 71).

Curiosity (Neugier) In SZ Heidegger characterizes curiosity as the everyday sort of seeing that, along with ambiguity and idle talk, is characteristic of the way the They (das Man) discloses in general. This characterization draws upon Augustine’s account of the temptation of curiosity as a concupiscentia oculorum, a craving on the part of the eyes, that is, the desire to look in the sense of merely taking something in (Nur-Vernehmen). This tendency arises, Heidegger contends, when, in periods of repose, Dasein is no longer bound to the work-world and

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concerns itself only with the possibilities of seeing the world simply as it appears (the world solely as a spectacle and an ongoing one at that). Curiosity is thus Dasein’s everyday tendency to let itself be carried along solely by the ways the world appears. Like the ambiguity and idle talk that also characterize Dasein’s fallenness (its tendency to fall prey to the crowd), curiosity becomes a way of fleeing our original and authentic future. Exploiting the German etymology of the term, a combination of the new (neu) and avarice (Gier), Heidegger notes the specific restlessness that characterizes curiosity. It is a restless search for the new, jumping hastily from one thing to the other in a constant state of distraction rather than tarrying among things and wondrously contemplating them. The curious become dispersed accordingly among ever new possibilities, while never dwelling anywhere (Aufenthaltslosigkeit). Augustine is again the source of the related notion of dispersal into a plurality as falling away from one’s proper calling and oneness (with God). Although curiosity and scientific theory alike are ways of forgetting ourselves in the interest of seeing what is present-at-hand or, better, how it appears, the restlessness of curiosity—its “inauthentic seeing”—distinguishes it importantly from the “excellent” way of attending to what presents itself that is the hallmark of the “pure uncovering” of innerworldly things achieved by science’s “objective thematization” of them (SZ 363; 17: 289). Complicating matters in this last regard are Heidegger’s developing views on science and its assimilation with technology in an age of machination (see “science”).

Danger (Gefahr) By putting everything on order in a standing reserve, those who are caught up in the enframing (Ge-stell)—the essence of modern technology, the destiny of being in the present epoch—completely neglect things and are oblivious to the world and to what they are doing. The enframing “stalks” the truth of being or, as the German word may also suggest, puts it behind or after everything else (nachstellen). This stalking (or “entrapment” as it is also translated) is the innermost essence of the enframing. All the enframing’s ways of positioning and positing (stellen) beings (at the cost of their being) go into this stalking, and together they are the danger (79: 53). Since the enframing is nothing less than the hidden unfolding of beyng itself (the way beings are present to us and the way we relate to them in the present), the enframing is obliviously, vainly stalking itself. “In this respect, what is most dangerous about the danger consists in the fact that the danger conceals itself as the danger that it is” (79: 54). Since the corresponding urgency is also not experienced, the lack of urgency is what is most urgent.

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Nonetheless, there are characteristic marks of the danger. The fact that millions perish in concentration camps, suffer and die of hunger, or languish in poverty are telltale signs that the danger remains concealed, because it continues to be distorted and obscured by the essence of technology, that is, the enframing. (Regrettably, Heidegger cites these deplorable facts not only without explaining more specifically their connection to the enframing but also without mention of any possible moral or political responsibility for them.) A complementary sign is the tendency to grapple with technology by technological means alone, thereby reinforcing the hiddenness of its essence and origins while underestimating its power. Yet another telltale sign of the danger is humanity’s lack of a free relationship to technology, its inability to say “yes and no” to technology, as it becomes increasingly difficult to think non-instrumentally or even conceive of thinking as something other than an instrument. Technology is in its essence neither a means to some purpose nor is it itself a purpose. . . . The essence of technology is beyng itself in the essential shape of the enframing. But the essence of the enframing is the danger . . . not as technology but as beyng. The presence of the danger is beyng itself insofar as it entraps the truth of its essence with the forgottenness of this essence. (79: 62)

In other words, the danger is the hiddenness of beyng that accounts for its forgottenness and humanity’s complete immersion in technology. Yet, in a riff on Hölderlin’s line “where the danger grows, the saving power also grows,” Heidegger notes that beyng itself, while beyond the reach of technology, is capable of bestowing that saving power and, with it, a new world where “remembrance” of beyng is restored (7: 28; see, too, 5: 280f, 292–6; 7: 26–9, 33; 16: 526ff; 79: 57).

Death (Tod) Every moment that we are alive, death is a constant and definitive possibility, even where its how and when remain indeterminate. We cannot somehow overtake or outrun our death; we cannot even experience it as a particular entity (als Seiendes), and no one else can die our death for us. Death is definitive as the possibility of the end of any other possibility we might have. Yet it ultimately escapes the realm of what we can take care of (Besorgen) as well as the field of our solicitous relations with others (Fürsorge). Like a great love, it is most intimately ours—and yet not of our choosing and not in our control (SZ 234–40, 250f, 257ff, 263). At the same time, it is a possibility that

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we are likely to ignore, elude, and conceal—underscoring our cognizance of its status as our pre-eminent possibility (SZ 252–5). “Death as Dasein’s end is the possibility of Dasein that is most its own, not shared, certain and, as such, undetermined, and not capable of being overtaken” (SZ 258f, 263ff). Because the “existential concept of death” pertains precisely to what belongs to us each individually (in the first person, as it were), it is not to be confused with the deceased (Verstorbene), the perishing (Verenden) of something alive (including ourselves), the demise (Ableben) of others (or ourselves), or even the absence of what is simply “not yet.” In regard to the deceased, our loss is not theirs nor can it be, since death in the existential sense is not shared. At the same time, we are in stricto senso never presentat-hand (like the clouds above us or the trees lining the street) but always “here,” whereas the corpses that we come to be in perishing are precisely not “here” (SZ 241). In other words, dying is not perishing because what perishes is something present-at-hand ante mortem and post mortem (SZ 248; this restricted view of the living is corrected somewhat in Heidegger’s discussion of animals in the 1930s but it is in keeping with his general subordination of the concept of life to that of being, beginning in the early 1920s; see “animals” and “life”). Biological-physiological, medical, psychological, biographicalhistorical, ethnological, and theological studies of death investigate Dasein’s demise, an “intermediate phenomenon,” co-determined by conceptions of perishing and the existential conception of dying. Death is also not anything like the absence of what is not yet the case—an unpaid bill, a full moon, a ripened fruit—since these are endings of something present-at-hand or readyto-hand. “In death Dasein neither is completed nor has it simply disappeared, nor has it become finished at all or fully accessible as something ready-tohand” (SZ 245). Death is the possibility of being-here that is “most its own” (eigenste), precisely as “the possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-here” (SZ 250). Dasein projects this possibility nolens volens, even if by way of repressing it. Hence, to be-here authentically, Dasein has to project this possibility explicitly for itself. It has to “anticipate,” literally “run ahead into death” (Vorlaufen in den Tod)—again, not as something that can be actual for it or that it can make actual, but precisely as the possibility of the absence of its possibilities (SZ 262ff, 305). Anticipating this defining possibility discloses the finality and finitude of existence, enabling us to become free for it. With this freedom for death comes a freedom to understand and choose among finite, factical possibilities authentically. Anticipating death is also liberating in the sense that it breaks the hold of any obdurate identification with some previously attained or expected possibilities. Being free for this ultimate possibility also serves as a check against being with others inauthentically, that is, mistaking their possibilities for ours or foisting our possibilities on them (SZ 264).

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Dasein’s anticipation of death as its uniquely defining possibility exposes any forlornness on its part and confronts it with the possibility of being itself, without the support of any concerns or solicitude, “cut loose from the illusions of the They” (SZ 266). In Heidegger’s later works, he continues to draw on the liberating character of the anticipation of death but now with a view to the history of beyng, the hidden appropriation, and the other inception. In the unusualness and uniqueness of death, what is most unusual in all beings, beyng itself, opens itself up. But in order to be able to intimate something of this most primordial connection, . . . the relation to death itself . . . the anticipating had to be made apparent . . . not so that the mere “nothing” is attained but the reverse, so that the openness for beyng might open itself completely and on the basis of what is most extreme. (65: 283ff)

Whereas anticipating death was previously synonymous with Dasein’s authenticity, in the Contributions “carrying out this being-towards-death is only necessary in the context of the task of laying the ground for the question of beyng’s truth,” that is, “it is a duty only for the thinkers of another inception” (65: 285). As the departure (Abschied) from beings, death brings Dasein nearest to the nearness of the clearing of beyng and the “going-under” (Untergang) that is equivalent to beyng’s “supreme inception” and “most extreme concealment” (70: 138f, 142; 71: 152, 189–94). As in SZ, Heidegger at times continues to insist that only human beings (not animals) die. But in an outrageous passage from a 1949 lecture he claims that even human beings are not yet able to die. In this offensive passage he makes the vile claim that masses of people—including those annihilated in concentration camps and those dying of hunger in China—do not die but merely perish (a term that he uses in the 1949 lecture as in SZ to signal an animal’s end). A few lines later he adds that human beings generally are not yet mortal and that the essence of death has been distorted—which raises the question of why he first singles out those political victims (even if rhetorically for the sake of cheap shock value, it remains demeaning to a fault, betraying a repugnant insensitivity). Humans are not yet mortal, not yet able to die, on Heidegger’s account, because they lack the capacity to bear or carry out (austragen) what death essentially is. Death is essentially “neither an empty nothing nor the transition from one entity into another” (“the end of an earthy life”) but instead “the shrine of nothingness.” As such, it conceals and shelters (birgt) in itself the hiddenness of the appropriation that is the essence of beyng. Death is inherent, not to the human being as such, but to the beinghere of the human being insofar as the appropriation both makes being-here its own and lets it come into its own. A human being is accordingly capable

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of death, so construed, “only and first when beyng itself . . . appropriates the essence of the human being into the essence of beyng” (79: 17f, 56). In order to be able to die I have to come to terms with the hiddenness of beyng, the appropriation that encompasses nothingness (the not yet and the no more) and is, as such, the abyss that grounds but remains radically different from any being/entity.

Decision (Entscheidung) Whereas resorting to a lottery is a way of evading a decision (in effect, a decision not to decide), to umpire is to embrace decision-making. In genuinely, that is, non-arbitrarily deciding, an umpire “becomes who he is supposed to be, he becomes he himself,” since he is not this self prior to the decision. The decision is pre-reflective in the sense that, ignoring any relation to egoistic considerations, proclivities, and prejudices, he decides “completely on the basis of what he is supposed to decide” (38: 70ff). While being authentic is analogous to being an umpire in this sense, there is a crucial difference between an umpire’s decision and the decision of who we are. With the umpire’s decision, the matter is ended; but the decision of who we are is ongoing. In lectures in the summer of 1934, following his resignation as rector, Heidegger speaks of genuine decisiveness in the context of higher education as a decision against traditional university practices and policies (including the division of faculties) and a decision for “the authentic task of higher education,” a task that he regards as coinciding with the National Socialist revolution of the preceding year. He lambasts mere appearances of decisiveness, for example, the rector appearing in a Nazi para-military uniform instead of traditional academic apparel, yet leaving the same old university practices in place. Continuing those practices is not a genuine decision but amounts to “closing oneself off” from what is genuinely happening. Genuine decisiveness is the same as “opening oneself” to it, that is, resoluteness (38: 75–7). Two years later Heidegger addresses the theme of decision, playing again on its etymology, only this time in the context of inquiring into the essence of beyng, that is, the appropriation as the inception which he now glosses as the original de-cision or division (Ent-scheidung) of gods and humans. “De-cision” in this sense applies widely to “appropriating,” “beyng,” and “inception”; thus, “the essence of beyng prevails in the appropriating of the de-cision” (65: 95) and “the inception sustains . . . and thus brings everything decidable into the simplicity of the one decision (either beyng or beings)” (70: 12; see, too,

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88, 470, 474, 488; 70: 67, 73, 157). Thanks to this de-cision neither humans nor gods are supreme beings in the metaphysical sense and both are beholden to beyng as an “abyss” that is not of their making or in their control (66: 46). While unorthodox to a fault, this use of the term (flagged by the hyphen) is meant to underscore the fact that, while the primordial de-cision is not made by human beings, human decisions are only authentic by corresponding to it (and this corresponding amounts to their being-here) and in this important sense the history of beyng is still in play (un-decided). Indeed, in the present epoch, the age of enframing and machination, there are only beings and there is no place for gods. Heidegger leaves distressingly underdetermined how this would change through being-here and corresponding to that de-cision. To be sure, Heidegger concedes that it is scarcely possible to approach decision without reference to human choice. Indeed, this reference, he avers, proved to be a stumbling block to conceiving the SZ account of resoluteness as truth in the sense of openness. However, the de-cision is not fundamentally “moral-anthropological” or “existentiell”; it has “nothing in common with . . . making a choice” (65: 87f, 100; 70: 67). Instead it is that division of gods and humans that lets the hidden appropriating (beyng) of the open come into play, the open as the clearing for what is yet un-decided, thanks to that hiddenness. This de-cision thus makes room for a further decision, namely, the decision of owning up, or not, to this primordial de-cision. In this sense the decision is “about history or lack of history, i.e., about belongendess to beyng or abandonment in non-beings” (65: 100). As a means of preparing for this impending decision, Heidegger lists several either/or decisions that spring from it “as historical necessities” (e.g., “whether the human being wills to remain a subject or grounds being-here,” “whether art is an exhibition of lived-experience or the setting-into-work of truth,” “whether the human being in general even dares the decision or whether he leaves himself over to the lack of decisiveness or indecision that the age takes as the ‘pinnacle’ of ‘activity’”). What is common to this imposing list is the one decision, namely, whether beyng definitively withdraws, “whether this withdrawal . . . becomes the first truth and another inception of history” (65: 87–91, 93, 103; 40: 84). Once again, Heidegger has regrettably little more to say about either the make-up of those subordinate decisions or how exactly they spring from the primordial de-cision. But he does offer an explanation of sorts for the necessity of the decision: “because it is still only from the deepest ground of beyng itself that beings are saved” (65: 100). Presumably, deciding in a way that corresponds to the de-cision made by beyng itself is the key to rescuing beings in the age of machination. While continuing to speak in generalities, he does add that the one decision requires human beings, both “the future ones” and those who prepare for them. The future ones include the few individuals who are the founders in poetry,

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thinking, deed, and sacrifice; the groups who in alliance with the founders make out “the laws for recasting beings”; and the many with a common historical ancestry. The agreement between the individual, the groups, and the many—loosely analogous to the three divisions of Plato’s state or Schmitt’s three orders—is dominated by the respective ways in which being is present to Dasein and in the latter a “primordial gathering” is prepared. In and as this gathering, a “people” becomes historical (65: 96ff). The decision is not one of self-preservation, not least because to make the people’s preservation the goal is to confuse a condition for setting a goal with the goal itself. Not a culture or worldview but only the truth of beyng—the de-cision of the inception that gives way to gods and humans—is decisive (65: 97ff, 102f).

Destruction (Destruktion) Heidegger’s earliest sketches of phenomenology include the notion of dismantling the preconceptions that stand in the way of authentically appropriating factical existence (58: 139; 59: 29). Only by tracing the ways in which we take up phenomena and bring them back to their historical roots is it possible for us to see how phenomena genuinely present themselves (64: 75f). Because our experiences are always wrapped up in a foregoing interpretive context, formed by our language and traditions, phenomenology is necessarily destructive. It investigates what “foreconceptions” dominate an account of a given phenomenon, but it does so with an eye to determining the extent to which they are explicitly lifted from a pre-theoretical, basic experience as opposed to being made to correspond to theories already at hand (59: 93). As Heidegger makes clear in his discussion of the forestructure of interpretation, there is accordingly no regress, no endless deferral of interpretations; destruction is not deconstruction in the sense made popular by Derrida (SZ 153). As he puts it in the Summer 1920 lectures that he explicitly construes as a phenomenological destruction: “Destruction is accordingly no critical shattering and smashing-to-pieces but a directed dismantling and a dismantling not in some isolated region of meanings; instead it pertains . . . to factical experience of life and the lifeworld in its historical concreteness” (59: 180f). A destruction (S: “destructuring”) of the tradition is necessary, thanks to Dasein’s complementary tendencies, inherited from the Greeks, to equate its manner of being with that of things within-the-world and to embrace interpretations bequeathed to it. Working against these two tendencies provides the structure, respectively, of the two parts of SZ, though Heidegger never publishes the second part, the aim of which was to be the explicit

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destruction of the tradition. The planned destruction was to begin with the Greeks who conceived being in terms of nature (the world as physis) as the overriding, that is, present presence of things, a conception that is fatal to understanding the temporal and historical character of Dasein’s being. It is essential to the project of fundamental ontology that we achieve transparency about ontology’s history. This task, guided by the question of being, is “the destruction of the transmitted content of ancient ontology . . . to arrive at the original experiences from which the initial and subsequently leading determinations of being were acquired” (SZ 22). Heidegger himself later criticizes the naiveté of this “ontological destruction” for its failure to recognize how being itself, far from presenting itself transparently, in fact conceals itself (15: 337, 395). Nonetheless, precisely by dismantling the ways the ontological tradition obscures “the originary dispensation of being as presence,” the destruction affords a preliminary insight into the history, that is, the destiny of being (14: 13).

Difference, Dif-ference (Differenz, Unter-schied) In Heidegger’s ontological-transcendental period, the difference between being and beings is the most essential difference. Whatever particular, innerworldly beings we are concerned with, theoretically or practically, we in some sense transcend them by understanding what it means for them to be. In addition to relating to entities as the particular entities they are (trees as trees, desks as desks, etc.), we take them as entities, that is, take them to be. The “ground of the ontological difference” lies in “the transcendence of Dasein,” the way it is always moving beyond beings, not to another entity, but to the world, here a metonym for “being” (this movement is the very sense of Dasein as being-in-the-world). Dasein’s timely projection of its world (the unity of its temporal horizons) provides the sense of being that enables its interactions with innerworldly beings (9: 123, 134f; 24: 322; 27: 223). In the Contributions, Heidegger considers transcendental conceptions of the ontological difference inadequate, since they cannot escape conceiving the difference between being and beings in terms of differences between particular beings (e.g., the difference between the transcendental subject as the particular being housing conditions of possibility of experience and the particular beings subject to those conditions). This way of conceiving the difference shows its metaphysical pedigree, since metaphysics thinks of being exclusively from the standpoint of beings. (The history of metaphysics

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is a history of disempowering being in favor of the limitless primacy of beings; 65: 427f, 449.) The ontological difference, that is, the metaphysical differentiation of being from beings, precludes any account of their unity and continues to treat being itself as a particular being (14: 41; 65: 250, 424; 73.2: 973–7, 989), a feature evidenced by resorting to God as the primary being (onto-theology) (73.2: 1039, 1042, 1048f). “Transcendence is in itself already the installment of the forgottenness of the difference” (99: 59; 73.2: 988, 1055). At the same time, the ontological difference remains an “unavoidable” means of passage to the truth of beyng. The task of thinking is to grasp the ontological difference’s origin and unity in beyng as the appropriation (65: 272f, 423–6, 455, 464, 467). “In beyng the difference between being and beings (in the sense of beingness) takes place [sich ereignet]” (73.2: 991). Yet this turn to beyng introduces, Heidegger concedes, an obvious difficulty since beyng (the separating of being and beings that underlies their difference) is itself different from the ontological difference between being and beings (73.2: 1031; indeed, he has to stress the uniqueness of the former difference between beyng and ontological difference, in part to forestall a regress). In an attempt to avoid confusing these differences, Heidegger often employs two distinct words in this connection. He uses the Latinate word “Differenz” to characterize the ontological difference (the difference between the being of beings and beings) and the German “Unterschied” (often hyphenated Unter-schied) to characterize the dif-ference or, as it might also be translated, the “underlying separation,” out of which the ontological difference is to be thought. Nonetheless, the point made at the outset of the last paragraph deserves iterating. The ontological difference remains for Heidegger, in an important sense, provisional and transitional. Thinking must begin with this difference on the way to an initial clarification and then “leap over” this differentiation into its origin and unity (65: 207, 251, 451, 469). “To consider the ontological difference [Differenz] is not to cancel it and set it aside—but instead first to enter explicitly into it—to unfold its essence: the dif-ference [Unter-schied]” (73.2: 987; see, too, 73.2: 999, 1046) or, equivalently, to think beyng itself as the difference (Unterschied) (73.2: 1065). In 1941 Heidegger accordingly makes a note to himself that “being as beyng ‘is’ itself difference [Unterschied] and never . . . one of the two differentiated” (70: 76). Moreover, the key to thinking the difference in non-metaphysical terms is to recognize that it is not the result but the ground of thinking (70: 70–4). In 1957, when Heidegger ceases to use “beyng” but continues to affirm the fundamental sense of “being” as the appropriation, he notes that what matters is thinking “the difference as difference” (11: 56, 59). We only think being fundamentally when we think it in its difference from beings and vice

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versa (11: 68). This difference cannot be placed before us or represented (vorgestellt) and attempts to do so abet the misconstrual of it as a relation that we produce or a “distinction” that we make. The difference is instead something that we find in advance of any presentation or representation of beings. What we find is that being “comes over” beings, disclosing them, and by this means the unhiddenness of beings “arrives.” This “coming over” and this “arrival” coincide; it is not as if there is being without beings or vice versa. Moreover, being in this context is not a universal; “there is being” only in this and that historical character. “Being in the sense of coming-over and disclosing, and beings as such in the sense of the self-concealing arrival prevail (as so distinguished) from the same, the dif-ference [Unter-schied].” Here, too, Heidegger thinks of the difference (Differenz) of being and beings in terms of the dif-ference (Unter-schied), the dif-ference between “coming over” beings and their “arrival,” as described earlier. This dif-ference grants the “between”—Da-sein—that both holds the coming-over and arrival apart and keeps them related to one another (11: 68–73). The foregoing demonstrates how, in addition to distinguishing the ontological difference from the dif-ference, Heidegger stresses the need for “winding” the former back to the latter, that is, making the transition from the former (metaphysical thinking) to the latter (thinking in terms of the history of beyng). In keeping with these moves, Heidegger also questions, not only whether the ontological difference must be given up (since it inevitably entangles us in metaphysics) but what that would mean: “Can thinking ever escape what is thought as ontological difference [Differenz], what is to be sure misconstrued yet constantly ‘present’ [anwesend] and thus can never be removed?” (73.2: 1466; see, too, 14: 111; 73.2: 1431, 1465–72, 1477).

Disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) “Phenomenological truth is the disclosedness of being” (SZ 38). The disclosedness of being contrasts with the discovery (Entdecktheit) of beings (SZ 200f, 203, 210, 220–8, 297, 420). Dasein is able to discover entities and features of them (ontic truths) only because it is disclosedness itself or, equivalently, the clearing that enables the encounter with particular beings (SZ 133, 182). Disclosedness is not knowledge or willing since dispositions and attunements can disclose to being-here “that it is and has to be” while leaving its whence and wherefore completely in the dark (SZ 134–7). Furthermore, understanding discloses to Dasein its being (including its meaningfulness, what it is for-the-sake-of, and its capability-of-being) and this understanding of its being must be in place for it to know and will (SZ 143–7). Together,

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“[a]s existentials, disposedness and understanding characterize the primordial disclosedness of being-in-the-world” (SZ 148; 160, 182). In the final chapters of SZ Heidegger analyzes the timely character of disclosedness in general, that is, the timely character of the disclosedness of the world, the workworld, and the environment in particular (SZ 335–52, 356, 364–8), as well as the timely character of the disclosedness of one’s historical situation and destiny (SZ 384ff, 397). Dasein can only take time for itself and even lose time because a time has been allotted to it as “an ecstatically extended timeliness” whose disclosedness is grounded in that timeliness (SZ 410).

Discourse (Rede) Discourse (“talk” would be an apt, alternative translation) is an existential, that is, a constitutive feature of the way Dasein’s exists and discloses itself. As such, it is no less fundamentally existential than the other basic existentials in SZ: disposedness and understanding. Indeed, our disposedness and understanding reside within an intelligibility that has been articulated in discourse even before it is interpreted. “Discourse thus already underlies interpretation and assertion” (SZ 161). We exist as discursive beings and, in and through that discursiveness, what it means to be (including to be this or that, even ourselves) is disclosed to us. Based upon such considerations Heidegger dubs discourse “existential language” (SZ 161), that is, the process of speaking and listening to one another (and to ourselves) in which our existence is disclosed to us. What can be articulated in interpretation but is originally already in discourse is a “sense” (Sinn) and what is sorted out (das Gegliederte) in an actual articulation is a “totality of meaning” capable of being broken up into meanings (Bedeutungen) that always reflect the sense of the discourse. Discourse just is “the meaningful sorting out of the disposed understandability [Verständlichkeit] of being-inthe-world” (SZ 162). Language (Sprache) is discourse’s specifically worldly being insofar as, once spoken or put into words, it can become something ready-to-hand within-the-world. However, language can also be treated as something present-at-hand in nature and culture, open for inspection like any other natural phenomenon or cultural artifact. In other words, language resides on three levels: existentially (as disclosive discourse), practically (as an instrument of communication), and theoretically (as a scientific object), but discourse remains foundational. Discourse always sorts out meaningfully the intelligibility of beingin-the-world, particularly in our shared concerns, and, in that sense, it is invariably about something (wishing this, commanding that, recommending

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one thing or another, each its own sort of linguistic intentionality). Not only determinate assertions, but wishes, commands, and recommendations are about something. In this last regard, much like Wittgenstein, Heidegger is critical of linguistic studies’ traditional overemphasis on assertions, and he stresses the effectiveness of different forms of locution today labeled “performatives” (SZ 161f, 165f). While (a) being about something (Worüber) is the first element of the structure of discourse for Heidegger, he identifies three other elements as well: (b) what is said as such (Geredete), (c) communication (Mitteilung), and (d) making oneself known or expressing oneself, that is, not some inner state but one’s being-in-the-world, how it feels to be in the world (Bekundung des befindlichen In-Seins, Sichaussprechen), often conveyed by intonation, modulation, and tempo. These four existential characters of discourse make language—“the voiced character of discourse [Hinausgesprochenheit der Rede]”—possible (SZ 162f). The roles that hearing (hören) and keeping silent play in discourse illustrate its connection with understanding and intelligibility. This connection is exemplified in English by the fact that, when we fail to hear someone correctly or faithfully, we often say that we did not understand her. When we do hear, it is in virtue of the fact that we already have an understanding. Thus, “we never hear noises and complexes of sounds” but instead “the motorcycle . . . the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire” (SZ 165). So, too, when we hear someone speaking, we hear, not so much the vocalization, but what they are saying and about what. But while it is rooted in understanding, hearing also makes plain the shared character of understanding—even within a single Dasein. Thus, Heidegger notes that hearing (or listening to: hören auf) is Dasein’s openness for others. But he adds that it is also Dasein’s authentic openness to its ownmost potential, in the sense of “hearing the voice of the friend that each Dasein carries within herself” (SZ 163). At the same time, being-with establishes itself in listening to one another, where hearing can lead to obeying and hearkening as well as to tuning others or oneself out. In this regard the fourth feature of discourse (announcing, letting others know that we are communicating) is central, even if it frequently “goes without saying.” In SZ Heidegger singles out two modes of discourse, inauthentic and authentic, that is, respectively, the everyday sort of discourse, namely, idle talk or palaver (Gerede), characteristic of the fallenness of the They, and conscience, the exceptional mode of discourse that calls Dasein from “the public idle talk of the They” to its authentic self. Idle talk is dominated by hearsay and quick reads, keeping informed about what is said as such, and passing it along—all taking precedence over concern for what the discourse is about. “Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without a foregoing appropriation of the matter” (SZ 169). Whereas in idle talk Dasein

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overhears itself, listening only to the They-self, conscience calls Dasein silently to itself, to the capability of being that is most its own (SZ 269ff, 277, 296). One central ambiguity in Heidegger’s SZ account is the character of the equiprimordiality assigned to discourse (seemingly putting it on a par with disposedness and understanding), given his claim that “words accrue to meanings” (SZ 161). While hardly straightforward, the claim suggests to some scholars that meaningfulness is in principle pre-linguistic or, better, prediscursive, generated by ways of being-in-the-world. But this suggestion runs afoul of claims to equiprimordiality and, in fact, to the primacy that Heidegger assigns to language after SZ. Notably, commenting later on the troublesome passage (“words accrue to meanings”), Heidegger makes clear his mature view on the matter, writing: “Untrue. Language is not superimposed [aufgestockt], but is the primordial essence of truth as here [Da]” (2: 117 note c).

Disposedness (Befindlichkeit) Dasein always already finds itself disposed to being one way or another. When we ask someone how she is, we are asking how she feels, and how she feels—her mood—corresponds to her disposition. The German word translated “disposedness” is constructed from the verbal construction, sich befinden. The query Wie befinden Sie sich? means simply “how are you?” or, more literally, “how do you find yourself [to be]?” Disposedness (MR: “state of mind,” S: “attunement”) is a basic existential, a way of beinghere that discloses its way of being to it. Disposedness discloses Dasein’s thrownness, its being-in-the-world as a whole, and its openness to the world (SZ 137, 340). The first basic existential treated in SZ, disposedness is the primary indicator of existence. In contrast to “I think, therefore I am,” it would be more correct to assert “I feel, therefore I exist.” How Dasein is disposed brings it “more or less explicitly and authentically face to face with its ‘that it is and that, as the entity that it is, it has to be in its potential-to-be’” (SZ 276). As a basic existential, disposedness is constitutive of existence generally. Understanding, for example, is always disposed; even indifference is a way of being disposed. We are typically (ontically) familiar with modes of disposedness in the form of moods or affects, which are accordingly originary and disclosive in a holistic way. For example, while fearing makes up who we are, and discloses something essential about us, it does not do so apart from the fearfulness of the situation and the threats within it. A mood or affect is in this respect constitutive of our being-in-the-world as a whole. As early as 1929 Heidegger dispenses with the term “Befindlichkeit” in favor

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of mood (Stimmung) while retaining key features of the original analysis sketched earlier. (In 1941, Heidegger acknowledges that his SZ conception of Befindlichkeit coincides with his later account of Stimmung; see 70: 131.)

Dwelling (Wohnen) Dwelling is “the basic feature of being, in keeping with which the mortals exist” (7: 163). Already in SZ Heidegger points out that the sense of “in” in Dasein’s “being-in” stems from words for dwelling (“wohnen, habitare”) (SZ 54). But it is in his later work that he stresses how dwelling is mortals’ manner of “being on earth” and so, too, under the sky and before the divinities, since each of these four (earth, sky, divinities, mortals) entails the others. More precisely, “by dwelling, mortals are in the fourfold,” safeguarding each in its distinctive unfolding as one (7: 152; 79: 77). This dwelling takes place precisely where mortals are, namely, among things. Inasmuch as dwelling safeguards the fourfold by bringing it to bear on things, dwelling is a kind of “building” (bauen) in the broad sense of cultivating things that grow and erecting things that do not (see “building”). Nonetheless, “we can build only if we can dwell” (7: 162). Thus, things built, for example, bridges, are places that make space for the fourfold, while also arranging and safeguarding it, that is, “saving the earth, receiving the sky, awaiting the gods, and leading the mortals. This fourfold safeguarding is the simple essence of dwelling” (7: 161; 97: 55). Thinking, like building, belongs unavoidably to dwelling (7: 163; 97: 122, 398, 512). “Thinking, we first learn to dwell in the realm in which the winding back of the dispensation/destiny of being, the winding back of the enframing takes place [sich ereignet]” (79: 71; 97: 65, 69, 79). Yet neither thinking nor building is sufficient for dwelling as long as they are pursued apart “instead of listening to one another” (7: 163). “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (from which much of the foregoing gloss was culled) is an address given at the invitation of the city of Darmstadt, still reeling from the bombings of the war and in the midst of a severe shortage of dwellings. In typically contrarian fashion and quite insensitively given the hardship at the time, Heidegger contends that the “genuine urgency of dwelling” consists not in that shortage but in the fact that “mortals must first learn to dwell” and that human beings do not consider this urgency to be what is urgent. Toward the end of the address, he makes an observation, both callous and suspect, about the motivational virtue of homelessness: “Yet as soon as the human being thoughtfully considers [bedenkt] the homelessness, it is already no longer misery. Rightly considered and properly maintained, it is the sole claim that calls mortals into dwelling” (7: 163f).

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Earth Heidegger discusses the earth in relation to the divine, the world, and the fourfold. (a) The earth and the divine. In the 1934/35 Hölderlin lectures, Heidegger speaks of “the power of the earth” where it is “not a mere space marked out by outer boundaries, a region of nature” but a homeland in which “human beings first experience themselves as belonging to the earth” (39: 88). As this homeland, the earth is opened up to the power of the gods, losing its way (weglos) once the gods have fled (39: 93, 104f, 224). This character of being subject to divine power is buried, coinciding with the homeland’s downfall, as it becomes “the mere site of utilization and exploitation”; by contrast “where it reveals itself in the unselfishness of authentic Dasein, it is holy—holy earth” (39: 105f). The holy mourning over the gods’ flight moves us at once toward them and into the earth, Hölderlin’s “mother earth,” that is, “the hiddenness itself” and, as such, “the grounding abyss” (39: 140, 242). As original powers, earth and gods struggle with one another, even as—like dark and lightning—they define one another (39: 240–4, 251. 266). It is, moreover, the poet, the demi-god, who thinks this dual movement in antithetical yet thereby complementary directions: “poetry . . . grounds the being-here of the human beings on earth in the sight of the gods” (39: 216) and “earth first becomes earth in the poem” (39: 226). (b) The earth and the world. In his lectures on the origin of the work of art, Heidegger sees the earth in conflict not with gods but with the human world. From the cliff on which it sits and the storms it withstands, from the gleam of its stonework to the fauna and flora surrounding it, the Greek temple puts the earth in focus. Linking the notion of earth to the Greek conception of being as physis, he characterizes the earth as the place that shelters what emerges (physis) (5: 28). The Hölderlin gloss continues to echo in the description of the earth as a “homeland” (5: 28) and in the claim that the work of art “lets the earth be an earth” (5: 32). The artwork places itself and brings us, as it were, back down to earth by allowing earthly, phenomenal qualities to come forth, and thereby revealing the earth as the “sheltering that comes forth” (5: 32). In yet another echo of Hölderlin, Heidegger explains that this sheltering is equivalent to the earth’s hiddenness precisely because, even as it allows those phenomenal qualities to come forth, it thwarts any penetration of them. Try as we might, we cannot break down or analyze the massiveness, weight, or color of the stone. “The earth only appears . . . where it is as the essentially undisclosable . . . and that means constantly maintains itself as closed off” (5: 33). To set forth the earth is to “bring it into the open as what closes itself off” (5: 33f).

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Pairing this talk of “setting forth the earth” with that of “setting up a world,” Heidegger characterizes the artwork as the site of the struggle between earth and world, the hidden and the clearing as essentially different yet inseparable. The world reveals that the earth closes itself off and if the world did not serve as counterpoint to the earth in that struggle, the earth would remain hidden (5: 35f; 66: 84). In this sense, the struggle coincides with truth as something that “happens as the primal struggle of clearing and concealing” (5: 42, 45, 50f). (For the earth’s relation to history and a people, see 65: 399.). In the Contributions sequence Heidegger refers to the struggle of world and earth as the “initial appearance of the abyss and thereby the truth of the appropriation” (65: 389f). Safeguarding and sheltering that truth consists in “moving the self-concealing into the open, as it is itself dominated by the clearing of the self-concealing” and by “growing back into the way the earth is closed off” (65: 390f; see, too, 483ff, 510, and passim; 5: 28, 57; 66: 56, 98; 68: 43ff). (c) The earth and the fourfold. Heidegger incorporates many of the features of the earth discussed in earlier contexts into his account of its place in the fourfold, the gathering of the earth with heavens, gods, and humans that makes up things (see “fourfold”). He again describes the earth as the “bearer” (Tragende) but adds that it “cultivates” or “builds” (bauend) and “serves,” nourishing and yielding fruit, “spread out in stone and waters, rising up into plants and animals” (7: 151; 79: 17). While further determining the sense in which the earth is a bearer, this talk of “cultivating” or “building” also blurs, at least at the edges, the difference between world and earth stressed in the artwork essay. The passive-aggressive posture of the earth in its struggle with the world (central to the gloss in the earlier context) gives way to a more active role, shared with the world as well as with the gods and the heavens. Descriptions of the earth as the bearer can be misleading, suggesting that the earth is the material substrate of things, a conception that would fit it into some intelligible structure. Instead, in a way more akin to those phenomenal appearances of things touted in the artwork essay, it is inscrutable and irreducible. So, too, its bearing is itself an activity, indeed, a bevy of activity, from tides and seasons to cycles of growth and decay. Again, as in previous contexts, the earth remains an abyss, not only ungrounded by anything but also not obtaining in advance of what it grounds.

Enframing (Gestell) In the modern technological age, everything is envisioned as something that can in principle be placed before us or represented to us (vor-gestellt) and accordingly produced (her-gestellt) in a calculated way; thanks to technology, it

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seems possible to put everything on order (be-stellbar), forcing every entity into the position (Stellung) of being a uniform, replicable piece of a standing reserve (Bestand). Together these ways of positioning and enframing how entities are present in modern technology constitute the enframing (W: “inventory”; also “positionality”), the essence of modern technology (79: 32, 40). A Gestell in ordinary German is a shelf or frame. The essence of modern technology shelves or frames whatever is into the standing reserve (79: 32; 11: 115–20). The essence of the enframing is in turn “the danger”—dangerous because the standing reserve is a self-enclosed circuit of ordering, with a “violence that overtakes everything” (11: 118, see “danger”). Nothing has any standing outside it, and human beings are no exception. What is particularly dangerous about the enframing is the illusion that it is solely a matter of exploitation and machination of and by human beings (79: 29ff). The forces of nature also do not elude the enframing, for the forces of nature placed in the service of technology are represented by physics in the same way that the enframing positions whatever is present. Hence, “nature is for physics the standingreserve of energy and matter.” Both a utilitarian reduction of everything to a resource (a “use value”) and a metaphysical reduction of beings as a whole to a theoretical preconception of their potential significance play out in the modern technological connection of science and nature. “Modern technology is not applied natural science but rather modern natural science is the application of the essence of modern technology,” where nature is already secured as the “basic standing-reserve,” composed of nothing but beings, capable of being calculated in advance (79: 41ff). The ways things once affected us, thanks to their proximity or remoteness, wane as they become objects of calculations and representations (computerized models). This objectification opens the way to the enframing where everything is equally near and far, where things no longer really matter to us, and where everything is subject to the same, indifferent accounting. Indeed, in the standing reserve there are no longer even objects (79: 23ff, 42, 44). The dangerousness of the enframing remains “covered over and distorted/ obstructed” and “this distortion/blockage is what is most dangerous in the danger.” What distorts it is, once again, the appearance of technology as a tool in human hands (79: 68). The enframing, the essence of technology, can never be mastered or undone by anything humans do. For it is the destiny of how beings present themselves to human beings (the destiny of being) that this essence remains concealed. Alluding to this last point, Heidegger observes that “enframing is as it were the photographic negative of the appropriating” (15: 366). Like a photographic negative, it is not yet developed but in this undeveloped state being and human beings belong to one another—appropriate one another—but in the form of a reciprocal challenge. We are “in” this enframing and it matters to us; yet, unlike everything enframed/appropriated

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by it, it is itself—like any appropriation—nothing that we can literally or figuratively place before ourselves or represent and thereby manage. Yet without humanity, there is no unconcealing. While technology is not overturned (überwunden) by humans, they can play a necessary, corresponding role in winding it back (verwunden) into its still hidden truth (the appropriation). For this to happen, human beings must come to an essential, “free” relationship to technology, not simply technological instruments but also technology as beyng (the hidden appropriation of being and being-here to one another in this final stage of metaphysics). “Modern humanity must first find its way back into the breadth of its essential space.” This space’s dimensions come solely from the co-hold (Ver-hältnis) of being and human beings on one another, that is, the way the safeguarding of being (the presence of beings) is ceded (vereignet) to the essence of the human being. If human beings do not cultivate this essential space and learn to dwell in it, they are incapable of anything within the destiny now holding sway (7: 9; 79: 20, 69f). The Greek roots of “enframing” are discernible in its connection with physis as what allows things to come about and be present. Although cognizant of the difference between the natural and the artificial (the technical), the Greek understanding of physis sets the stage for conflating them, for conceiving nature’s way of bringing things forth as itself a way of positioning (stellen) and producing (her-stellen) them out of itself and, indeed, for human representing (vor-stellen). “The genealogy of enframing’s essence as the essence of technology points and reaches into the essential derivation of the Western-European and currently planetary destiny of being from physis in which the unhiddenness of presence lays its claim as the hidden originary essence of being” (79: 65). Enframing is the end of metaphysics in this sense, yet, as noted, it need not be the end of the story. As that “photographic negative” of the appropriation, the enframing provides us with “the first, oppressive flash” of it and thus the “prelude” to or “hint” of what “ap-propriation” means, “a look into what is” that brings with it the possibility of “winding the mere sway of the enframing back into a more inceptive appropriating” (11: 45f, 122; 14: 28; 15: 366). Herein lies the meaning of the line from Hölderlin’s Patmos, cited by Heidegger in his glosses on the danger of the enframing: “where the danger grows, the saving power also grows” (7: 35; 11: 119f).

Epoch (Epoche) In a twist on the Stoics’ and Husserl’s use of this term (to designate a suspension of judgment), “epoch” signifies how being “keeps to itself” or

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“holds back,” but in such a way that a world “suddenly and unexpectedly” opens up and lasts for a time, while the ecstatic character of being-here is the correspondence “to the epochal character of being,” a correspondence that we are initially able to experience (5: 192, 337f, 265, 371; 71: 17). Because being or, better, beyng (the appropriation of the presence of beings) withdraws, beings are left as the exclusive standard for being (6.2: 347, 383, 385, 440). As a result, each epoch necessarily misnames and misconstrues being by thinking it in terms of beings or, what is the same, failing to come to terms with its withdrawal. While there is a tradition from epoch to epoch and their succession is not contingent, they are not derivable from one another (see “fate and destiny”). Instead each springs from the same hidden source (10: 135f; 14: 12f). The process by which being presents itself as the objectivity of objects but in essence withdraws from us specifies a new epoch of the withdrawal, that is, modernity (10: 83, 90, 101; 67: 247). Each epoch is a way in which presence transmits itself to Western humanity, for example, from modernity’s objectivity (Gegenständlichkeit) to, as modern technology advances, constant availability (Beständigkeit) or orderability (Bestellbarkeit) (15: 367, 388). This epoch is also the epoch in which being unfolds as the enframing, an appropriating that consummates the forgottenness of the essence of being. So, too, “it is the epoch of the complete neglect of the thing via the enframing” (79: 51). “The danger is the epoch of beyng,” that is, its withdrawal, “unfolding/pre-vailing as the enframing” (79: 72).

Errancy (Irre) Dasein errs in the sense that, turning “insistently” to what is accessible, it passes by the mystery of being, the hiddenness that is essential to truth as un-hiddenness. Yet this erring is not a matter of occasionally going astray. To the contrary, “the errancy is inherent to the Da of Dasein,” the “space” in which it “deftly forgets itself anew” (9: 196f). (Here a kinship with the existential “fallenness” in SZ is patent, although errancy is mainly a post-SZ theme for Heidegger.) One consequence of errancy is the fact that any entity that stands forth in the open also stands at the same time in the “un-truth” in the dual sense of hiddenness and illusion (66: 259; SZ 222). Yet errancy is also not fundamentally an error or mistake on our part in thinking or representing within some already secured region of objects, though it is the ground of such inevitable errors. Indeed, it is at bottom nothing “human” at all (66: 113). The ground of errancy is instead “the primordial, originary hiddenness, into whose regions knowing does not reach because it is excluded from the clearing” (69: 150). In other words, the ground of

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errancy is being itself. “Being withdraws in bringing itself to light in beings. In this configuration, illuminating beings, being misleads [beirrt] them with the errancy [Irre]. Beings are appropriated into the errancy in which they meander errantly [umirren] and thus establish the domain of errancy [Irrtum]” (5: 337). So, too, “every epoch of world-history is an epoch of errancy” (5: 338). Errancy goes hand-in-hand with the hiddenness of being from Dasein, and this hiddenness is essential to their appropriation to one another that opens up a world. In other words, “the errancy itself is the clearing (openness— truth) of beyng,” and, far from being opposed to truth, it is “the appearing of the truth itself in its own essence” (66: 259; 69: 150). So, too, “the clearing of being is at the same time the beyng of errancy” (66: 11f). In other words, Heidegger attributes errancy to the truth of being insofar as it is the appropriation that withdraws, remaining hidden, in allowing beings to be. As such, errancy comes with the territory as it were; that is, it is the essential counterpart (Gegenwesen) to the essence of truth, opening itself up “as the open space [Offene] for each counter-play [Widerspiel] to the essential truth,” that is, beyng’s hidden grounding, appropriating (9: 197; 71: 82). Errancy is the space “that opens itself up in the entanglement of being, unhiddenness, and semblance [Schein]” (40: 116f; 70: 61f). To be sure, this errancy, grounded in being’s hiddenness, gives rise to a raft of errors from the most ordinary oversights to the most decisive blunders in human history. He refers, too, to a “metaphysical errancy” (67: 52f) and “the errancy of machination” (71: 93f). At the same time in the errancy, being’s hiddenness becomes apparent. Thus, errancy also creates the possibility for human beings to lift themselves up, “by experiencing the errancy itself and not mistaking the mystery of being-here” (9: 197). In this respect the poet moves errantly “between the holy and the unholy,” the thinker “between inception (what is alone worthy of inquiry) and beings (as the ‘actual’—‘objective’)” (71: 329). As I look around me, I find numerous entities (desk, chairs, pictures on the wall, carpets, tables) but no being. To be sure, I typically equate seeing them with their being or as a sufficient condition for taking them to be. But their being—in the sense of their presence—is literally hidden, as is the fit (beyng as appropriatedness) between my being-here and their being. This hiddenness is not my doing but it explains my tendency to immerse myself in those entities and to forget being and ignore beyng. This inescapable immersion, due to the hiddenness of being/beyng, signals the basic form of errancy. “How does it come about that human beings misconstrue beyng so much? Because they must be exposed to beings in order to experience the truth of beyng. In this exposure, beings are the truth, the open and they are this because beyng, as it unfolds/pre-vails, conceals itself ” (65: 255; 71: 19f, 93f).

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Essence (Wesen) Phenomenologists are concerned with the discernment of essences. Heidegger is no exception. From beginning to end, his writings are replete with references to essences and what is essential. But unlike other phenomenologists, he argues that discernment of them is grounded, not in some eidetic intuition, but in existential understanding (SZ 147). Moreover, when he first uses the term in SZ, he introduces it in scare quotes (“Dasein’s ‘essence’ lies in its existence”), suggesting an uncomfortable association with its traditional significance as essentia (SZ 42, 133, 214; 9: 327). At different junctures Heidegger glosses that traditional understanding of essence, depicting it as the necessary whatness of some thing or set of things, a property universally necessary for them to be what they are yet distinct from their existence, or the quiddity that is a mere possibility in contrast to the actuality signified by existentia (9: 150, 225, 316f, 327). In contrast to this traditional conception of essence, he proposes understanding it “verbally,” in terms of the clearing as the happening of truth (aletheia)—the unfolding of unhiddenness from hiddenness or, better, the prevailing of that unfolding—that is the basic feature of beyng (9: 201, 325; 12: 166; 65: 288; more on this verbal sense later). This alethic characterization of essence explains why, in “On the Essence of Truth,” Heidegger argues that this question is bound up with the question of the truth of essence (just as later the essence of language becomes a question of the language of essence). In the late 1930s Heidegger revisits the question of essence, rehearsing his theme that the essence of truth is a question of the truth of essence (44: 46f, 56f). His treatment of essence in this connection is at once instructive and dubious since he traces it back to Greek conceptions of being that come closer to its verbal sense even as they set the stage for latter-day conceptions of essence (45: 47, 60), and even if—and here’s the dubious part—essentia and Wesen translate Greek terms/concepts into subsequent and different philosophical outlooks and linguistic families (as indicated by Heidegger use of Wesen to translate οὐσία; 45: 67). For the Greeks, universality (koinon, holding for many) is a consequence, not the genuine mark, of the “whatness” or “beingness” of a being (later deemed its “essence”). Instead what something is or its being is what constantly shows itself, affording a look (eidos) of itself and enabling a representation or perception of it. “Only on the basis of this Greek interpretation of constant presence is it the case for the Greeks that the beingness of being is determined in the first place by what they are” (45: 69). In this way the early Greeks discriminate what something truly is (its essence) from what it is not. Thanks to this interpretation, Plato and Aristotle were able to identify the essence (beingness) of being respectively with idea and ousia (45: 67ff, 74f).

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The idea is the essence of a being because it is the presumed, dominating look that an entity presents and that we have in view, albeit not thematically (gesichtet, aber nicht eigens betrachtet), whenever we relate to that entity (45: 62). Similarly, the ousia is the essence because it is to ti en einai (the what it already was [for something] to be), what is presupposed by anything else that may be said of that thing and what in a certain sense the respective thing already “was” before it became a complete individual existing in time and space (45: 58f; 65: 288). This Greek conception of the beingness of beings runs counter to some contemporary sensibilities, where reality is typically identified, by contrast, with the individual present-at-hand here and now. Nevertheless, even today when essences are investigated, the investigation focuses on the whatness of beings while “bracketing” the present-at-handness (conceived as the actuality of the respective individual beings) (45: 71). Heidegger agrees with the Greeks that essence in the sense of what something is, its beingness, is more basic (essential) than any universality (45: 30, 37f). He also agrees that “essence” stands for what endures. At the same time, his rejection of the Greek identification of being with unhiddenness and the Platonic identification of it with the constant presence (ἀεὶ ὄν) or continuance of an idea demands a re-interpretation of the concept of essence (7: 31f). He is aided in this re-interpretation by hearkening back to (a) the historical uses of Wesen (the term translated as “essence”) and its cognates, (b) the Greek term for truth, and (c) the appropriation overlooked by the Greeks. (a) Tapping into the etymology. Heidegger’s unorthodox uses of the term—both as a verb, for example, “Das Seyn west” (65: 7, 30, 230, 256, 260, 329, 331) and as a gerund, for example, “Dasein wesend als das ‘Zwischen’” (65: 268, 354)—are throwbacks to earlier usage. According to Grimm’s Dictionary, the verb and the gerund formerly signified “existing, i.e., being-here” in the sense of “living and moving” (leben und weben, from Luther’s translation of Acts 17:28: “in Him we live and move”). The noun Wesen emerges as the corresponding “substantive,” the nominalization of those verbal senses. In this latter sense Wesen stands for a particular entity and this usage is commonplace, as can be gathered from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason where he refers to the human soul, thinking beings other than ourselves, phenomena and noumena, and God (“the essence of all essences”) as essences (7: 31). This underlying verbal sense of the term, implicit in the substantive, provides Heidegger with a needed alternative to ordinary uses of “is” with respect to beings. Having such an alternative provides a useful way of countenancing but also differentiating being from beings/entities. Thus, in the Contributions he cautions that saying that “beyng is” can misleadingly suggest that “is” is used in the same way as in the assertion that “a particular

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being/entity is” and thus that “beyng” stands for a particular being itself. To avoid the suggestion and underscore the difference between being and beings, he sometimes employs “wesen” for the former, which I translate as “unfold” or “pre-vail,” as in “Beings are. Beyng pre-vails” (Das Seiende ist. Das Seyn west) (65: 30, 74, 473). It deserves noting, however, that he subsequently reverses course somewhat, insisting already in the Contributions and repeatedly in the immediately following unpublished writings “only beyng is” and that “beyng is, beings are not” (65: 472f, 488; 66: 89, 112; 69: 53, 108, 125, 140; 71: 31). But this shift in expression does not change his central point regarding the concept of essence, namely, that it applies primarily to beyng and its cognates, especially truth. (b) The convertibility of essence and aletheia. In addition to drawing on resources in German, Heidegger’s reinterpretation of essence also exploits the Greek conception of truth (hence, his refrain that the question of truth’s essence entails the question of essence’s truth). For Heidegger truth is aletheia in the sense of the emergence of unhiddenness from hiddenness. That is to say that truth is not unhiddenness itself. “The ‘essence’ of truth is a happening that is more actual and more effective than all occurrences and facts, because it is their ground” (45: 44; 65: 288). It is not merely a true judgment since its truth presupposes the unhiddenness of what the judgment is about (e.g., one of those “occurrences and facts”). But neither is it that unhiddenness itself since the latter presupposes its hiddenness and coming into the clear, that is, making itself present in the clearing that is co-extensive with being-here (Da-sein) (see “truth” and “aletheia”). Such is what Heidegger means by saying that the essence of truth is a “happening” and, set against the traditional conception of essence, it explains why it entails a particular conception of essence. Defending his use of “essence” in SZ and its difference from essentia, Heidegger observes: “For essence—verbally understood—is indeed only the way something is, how it is” (49: 69; 7: 31). A few years later but in a similar key he also glosses it as “the ground of the inner possibility of what is initially and in general taken as familiar” (9: 186). The familiar, bivalent conception of truth as a property of a judgment presupposes how things are, the way they pre-vail, emerging for a while into an unhiddenness and thus adjudicating between true and false judgments of those pre-vailing things. “The truth pre-vails [west], it is . . . the determining power for everything true and untrue. . . . The ‘essence’ of truth is a happening” (45: 44). “The truth never is, but instead unfolds/pre-vails” (Die Wahrheit “ist” nie, sondern west) (65: 344). (c) The essence (pre-vailing) of appropriation. How one conceives essence depends not only upon how one understands truth (as just reviewed) but also upon how one understands being. If being is projected as a constant presence or as timeless, essence is determined accordingly. However, if

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being is projected as temporal, then essence itself endures in some timely fashion (49: 60f, 68f; 65: 288f). Heidegger’s reinterpretation of “essence” along these lines is of a piece with his mature understanding of beyng as the appropriation of being and being-here to one another, an appropriation that also grounds time-space. Whereas traditional notions of essence serve the pretense of being independent of being in some sense, the verbal understanding arises from thinking the essence on the basis of beyng as the appropriating. “Beyng unfolds/pre-vails as appropriation” (Seyn west als Ereignis) (65: 342). He also speaks of “the essential unfolding/pre-vailing [Wesung] of the ‘here’ [Da] (the clearing for the self-concealing)” (65: 330). By no means universal, Wesung determines what is essential in the sense of what is “primordially-unique” (65: 66). Beyng essentially unfolds/pre-vails (west) only in the moment where Dasein leaps ahead into the appropriating (65: 75; 7: 44; 12: 190). The significance of this verbal sense of essence in relation to the appropriation and being-here is particularly evident in Heidegger’s gloss on the “ambiguous” essence of technology: the enframing (“a photographic negative of the appropriation”) (7: 34; 15: 366). After iterating that “everything essential endures” (Alles Wesende währt), he adds that only what is “granted” or “afforded” (das Gewährte) endures. Given the danger that enframing’s challenging character presents, it seems counterintuitive to claim that, in enduring, it also affords us something. Nonetheless, while the enframing, in the rush of putting everything in order and on order, distorts any look into the appropriation underlying the revealing, thereby fundamentally endangering the relation to the essence of truth, it also uses human beings in the process and in doing so affords/grants them the possibility of experiencing and safeguarding “the essence of truth” (7: 34). Accordingly “essence” stands not for what merely endures but also for what affords what endures and, in the face of the threat of annihilation that modern technology presents, the essence of truth/truth of essence is thus the “saving power” (7: 34; see Dahlstrom 2018a).

Ethics (Ethik) If ethics is study of the good life or of the principles of right and wrong, the existential analysis of SZ is not an ethics. Yet its identification of existential phenomena (e.g., conscience, resoluteness) and the authentic selfhood informed by them outline an existentially grounded normativity. Nor does this normativity entail nothing more than duties to oneself. To the contrary, the existential analysis presents reasons to be wary of theories of value not

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founded upon the way human beings are with-one-another (SZ 99, 286). Moreover, by differentiating authentic and inauthentic ways of being-withone another, namely, liberating and domineering relationships respectively, the existential analysis provides the rudiments of an ethics. For example, being-with-others, not to be confused with being-alongside anything else, is a condition for sympathy rather than vice versa. Similarly, the ontological analysis of Dasein yields existential conceptions of phenomena presupposed by ethics (e.g., conscience, freedom, responsibility, authenticity, and selfhood). Hence, the existential analysis in SZ, while presumably neutral on questions of the good and the right, has implications for ethics, demonstrating that (and, to an extent, also how) the ontology of Dasein, not that of beings on-hand, is the condition of the possibility of morality (SZ 286, 293). A year after the publication of SZ, Heidegger introduces metontology as the inquiry that turns from fundamental ontology to beings as a whole, in light of the fact that the understanding presupposes the factical existence of human beings, which in turn presupposes the factual on-handness of nature. “Here, too, in the domain of metontological-existentiell inquiry, is the domain of the metaphysics of existence (here the question of an ethics may be raised for the first time)” (26: 199, 136). Yet this passing mention bears no fruit, as Heidegger aborts the project of metontology. Ethical concerns permeate his thinking in the fateful early 1930s. He extols pure willing as the basis of Kant’s categorical imperative (31: 284f) and portrays knowledge of “the spiritual-political mission of the German people” as the “demanding knowledge of what must be before anything else and for everything else, if the nation should grow into its greatness” (36/37: 4). Later in the decade, he criticizes the traditional equation of being with presence for its inability to countenance what ought-to-be (das Gesollte) and value (40: 205–11). He also identifies the nihilistic effects of equating being with power and the will to power in the form of machination, the gigantic, and their political expressions (Americanism, Bolshevism, and National Socialism). Since that equation is rooted, not in human failing, but in beyng’s self-concealment, thinking the latter is diagnostic. Yet it is also the key to human liberation, that is, to human beings becoming who they authentically are, namely, being-here, standing with gratitude, steadfast reserve, and humble awe in that appropriating. Eschewing “metaphysical explanations” of human beings as sinners or beyond good and evil, Heidegger identifies “the nobility of the poverty of the historical essence of the human being,” namely, not clinging to beings but instead guarding beyng as the appropriating (the self-concealing clearing) (65: 491; 66: 148; 69: 110f; 70: 113, 132; 71: 212f). Heidegger’s post-war discussion of dwelling poetically and thinking outside the enframing as the essence of technology continues this call to

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being-in-the-world in a way that is at odds with the notion that everything is useful (i.e., a potentially useful part of a standing reserve). The supreme human action is thinking authentically, and authentic thinking consists in corresponding to a claim that being makes on us (12: 30, 166, 169f). Acknowledging the pressing question of ethics, Heidegger notes its traditional connection with ontology. Looking to the Greek meaning of ethos before such disciplines arose, he notes that ethos is the familiar human abode that is also the open region for the unfamiliar divine presence. If, in keeping with this basic sense of ethos, “ethics” means considering this human abode, “then the very thinking that thinks the truth of being as the originary element of the human as ek-sisting, is in itself the primordial ethics” (9: 313, 356; but see “beyng in bad faith” the Appendix).

Everydayness (Alltäglichkeit). Heidegger orients the existential analysis of Dasein to everydayness as the way of being-here that is nearest to us, yet repeatedly skipped over. Everydayness is Dasein’s inconspicuous, average way of existing, the way it is “initially and for the most part” (SZ 16f, 66, 370). “All existing as it is” comes from and goes back to Dasein’s everyday, indifferent way of being, dubbed its “averageness.” Not a mere aspect of Dasein, everydayness embodies “the structure of existentiality a priori” (SZ 43f, 50). Dasein’s concern, its circumspection, the inconspicuous context of its implements, and its ways of orienting itself spatially with respect to what is near and what is far are all part of its average everydayness (SZ 73, 81, 105ff). In Dasein’s everydayness it is predominantly “captivated” (benommen) by its world, and the amorphous, public They is “who” it is (SZ 113f, 127f). Idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity characterize how being-here is its here (“Da”) everyday, namely, as fallen. “Fallenness is a basic type of being of everydayness,” that is, a lost, inauthentic everydayness, so basic that authentic existence can only be a modification of fallen everydayness (SZ 175, 178–81, 313, 376). “Everydayness takes Dasein as something ready-tohand that is procured [besorgt], i.e., administered and reckoned away” (SZ 289). Everydayness has an obvious temporal sense. It constitutes how we comport ourselves day after day and “as a rule.” An entire section of SZ (§71) is devoted to “The Temporal Sense of the Everydayness of Dasein” (SZ 370ff). In writings after SZ, as the center of gravity shifts from being-here (Da-sein) to the appropriation (Ereignis), everydayness plays a lesser role. Yet Heidegger continues to point to it as concealing the truth of being-here

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and beyng, even while, seen from the standpoint of beings, there is something right about its claims (65: 71, 487; 66: 314f; 71: 282f; 94: 160).

Existence, Existentials, and Ek-sistence (Existenz, existenzial, Ek-sistenz) In SZ Heidegger uses “existence” as a technical term equivalent to “beinghere” and, in this connection, differentiates “existential” from “existentiell” and from “categorial.” Shortly after the publication of SZ he gradually substitutes “ek-sistence” for “existence” as he begins to cede the technical use of the latter. (a) Existence and being-here. “Existence” (Existenz)—like “beinghere” (Da-sein)—is a standard translation of the Latin existentia, signifying the reality (actuality, presence-at-hand) of an entity, paradigmatically (but not exclusively) something found in nature. Heidegger breaks from this traditional use of the term by reserving “existence” (Existenz) exclusively for Dasein, the entity whose being is at issue for it (SZ 42; 24: 36f; 26: 159, 171). More precisely, existence is the being (its own) that Dasein always comports itself to, one way or another. “The ‘essence’ of Dasein lies in its existence” (SZ 42). Dasein invariably understands itself on the basis of its existence as the possibility of being itself or not. Existence can be authentic or inauthentic accordingly. (b) Existential, existentiell, and categorial. The possibility of relating to itself authentically or not is decided “ontically” (i.e., in the realm of beings) by each individual Dasein, guided by an “existentiell” understanding, without a need for the theoretical transparency provided by “existential” analysis and understanding of the structures of existence (which together make up the “existentiality of existence”). “Existentiell” designates ways of being peculiar to being-here pre-ontologically (e.g., caring, talking, being curious, experiencing angst, occupying certain social positions and roles); “existential” designates the ontological interpretation/determination of these ways of being-here. Whereas fundamental ontology is grounded in the existential analysis, the roots of this analysis are ultimately “existentiell, i.e., ontic.” Dasein’s ontic (existentiell) existence as one entity among others is the subject of ontological (existential) analysis; that is to say, the analysis presupposes Dasein as the one entity capable of authentically or inauthentically disclosing the respective manner of being of entities, that of its own and others. As Dasein, on an existentiell level, uses a hammer, it pre-reflectively discloses the hammer’s manner of being as being ready-to-hand. Dasein exists by disclosing the manner of being of the entities to which it relates and in that

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sense “transcending” them. This transcending is “the fundamental happening of existence” (27: 214). “The assertion of the transcendence of existence is an existential (ontological) assertion, no existentiell (ontic) assertion” (26: 217; 27: 205). Existentials make up Dasein’s being (its existentiality) as the basic structures according to which it comports itself, authentically or inauthentically, toward the possibility of being itself. Dasein is its disclosedness and thus existentials at once constitute by disclosing and disclose in constituting existence as Dasein’s being (SZ 12f, 42f, 53, 183ff, 201, 212, 232f, 260, 298, 302f, 304). “The primordial ontological ground of Dasein’s existentiality is temporality” (SZ 234). Existence is in motion, but its motion is not the movement of something present-at-hand. Instead it is the happening that determines existence as historical (SZ 374f, 382, 386). Categories designate basic possible ways of being for beings other than those who exist (being-here). The problem of categories—not least their plurality and difference from other ways of speaking about being (particularly in the context of Aristotle’s metaphysics)—profoundly affected the young Heidegger. However, since categories historically derive from the ways of addressing and passing judgment on what is encountered within-theworld, that is, beings other than Dasein, he sharply distinguishes existentials (designating Dasein’s ways of being) from categories. Whereas categories answer to the question of what or how (in the broadest sense) something is, when we come across a stranger we are more likely to ask who, not what, she is (SZ 44f, 56, 88, 143). Being-in, being-alongside, concern, solicitude, world-hood, the They, possibility, and sense are examples of existentials. Death, conscience, and guilt are existential phenomena (SZ 240, 270, 317). At times Heidegger identifies disposedness and understanding as the two fundamental existentials (SZ 134, 143, 148, 150, 160, 336). Yet truth is a fundamental existential as well (SZ 297). Discourse is a primordial existential (SZ 161, 165), and fallenness is an existential mode of being-in-the-world (SZ 176). All four (disposedness, understanding, discourse, fallenness) are Dasein’s “most general structures” (SZ 270). Existence itself is an existential determination, as are facticity and fallenness, and all three together, as a unity, make up the fundamentalontological character of care (SZ 191ff, 249f, 284, 316, 328, 350). (c) Existence and ek-sistence. “The substance of the human being is not spirit as the synthesis of soul and body but existence” (SZ 117; 9: 329). To many of Heidegger’s contemporaries, this observation suggested parallels with Kierkegaard’s and Jaspers’ conceptions of existence. However, the “existentiell” concept of existence in their thought concerns the human self as an entity, “insofar as it is interested in itself as this entity” or even “a human being’s moral concern for itself” (49: 39; 9: 189). By contrast, the

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“existential” concept of existence in SZ concerns the human self, “insofar as it is related, not to a self as an entity, but to being and the relation to being,” to standing “ecstatically” in that relation, not to standing out from nothing but into it (as Heidegger describes the fundamental attunements of angst and boredom) (49: 39, 54, 60). After the publication of SZ, Heidegger dubs that relation “ek-sistent” (9: 189f, 325ff, 333f; 49: 53f). “Thought ecstatically, ‘ek-sistence’ . . . means content-wise standing-out-into the truth of being” (9: 326). (For an extended discussion of how Heidegger’s use of “existence” differs from that of Jaspers and Kierkegaard, see 49: 18–75; 70: 194). As a metonym for “existence” (as understood in SZ in contrast to existentia or actuality), “ek-sistence” signifies the “essential ground of the human being,” namely, the “freedom” of letting beings be (“the essence of truth”), exposing itself to them and their unhiddenness, and transferring all comportment into the open (9: 189f, 343). By projecting being on to time and standing out in the openness of time, Dasein is exposed to the unhiddenness of beings as such (49: 45, 53f). “The essence of the human being rests on ek-sistence” (9: 345; see, too, 324–31, 342, 350). With the freedom of this ek-sistence, however, comes the possibility of covering up and distorting. Yet un-truth, in the broader sense of “hiddenness,” does not spring ultimately from human carelessness, but is of a piece with the “essence of truth,” that first enables the bivalence of true and false propositions (9: 189– 92, 200). The ek-sistent exposedness to beings as a whole is an attunedness to them that remains mostly indeterminate as Dasein comports itself in each case to particular beings, revealing them while concealing others. The hiddenness of beings as a whole is not an afterthought, a consequence of piecemeal knowledge, but is “older than every openness of this or that being . . . older than the letting-be itself” (9: 193f). What safeguards the letting-be in its relation to the hiddenness is “the hiddenness of the hidden as a whole, i.e., the mystery”—not an isolated mystery, but the one that pervades and dominates (durchwaltet) “the being-here of the human being” (9: 194; see “mystery”). Insofar as being-here “ek-sists” (literally, “stands out from” the unhiddenness) it safeguards this mystery, “the first and widest absence of un-hiddenness [Un-entborgenheit]” (9: 194; 5: 338). Insofar as humans are immersed in things, dominated by their comportment to what is accessible and controllable, they forget the mystery and thus errantly “insist” upon themselves qua subjects as the measure of beings (see “errancy”). Accordingly, “ek-sistent, Dasein is insistent” as the mystery becomes the “forgotten and thus ‘inessential’ essence of truth” (9: 196, 337). While “the essence of the human being consists in its existence,” existence is not a given but something that human beings can come to. In order to make the transition to existence (i.e., to ek-sistence in contrast to insistence) human beings must

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be transformed by it, and this transformation is a matter of letting be, that is, freedom (9: 189f; 35: 78, 85ff, 90–3). Thus, although this errancy and insistence on themselves beleaguers human beings, it helps at the same time to create the possibility of human beings not being misled by it insofar as “they experience the errancy and do not look past the mystery of being-here” (9: 197). On a similar positive note, Heidegger observes that, as “ek-sisting,” human beings are “the shepherd[s] of being” (9: 331) and that they “ek-sist” in language, “the house of being, by belonging to the truth of being, protecting it” (9: 333). Heidegger’s use of “ek-sistence” in contrast to “existence” appears to have been partly motivated by a need to underscore how his use of the term differs from Jaspers’ use. However, in the wake of Jaspers’ publication of “Philosophy of Existence” (1931), Heidegger substitutes “steadfastness” (Inständigkeit) for “existence” in the “dictionary of thinking” (49: 54; see, however, 6.2: 432–5, 437f).

Experience, Lived Experience (Erfahrung, Erlebnis) German has two words that are typically translated “experience,” each based upon a different root that Heidegger, as one would expect, does not fail to exploit. One is based upon the word for life or living (leben) and is accordingly translated “lived experience” (Erlebnis). The other word, here translated simply “experience” (Erfahrung), builds on the verb for traveling or moving (fahren) away from where one is. Whereas lived experience is part of the stream of consciousness of a living subject, “experience” stands for reaching something by going down a certain path (12: 159f, 167). Heidegger’s thinking on the topic of lived experience (Erlebnis) moves through three phases, from (a) embrace of lived experience as the focus of phenomenology to (b) criticism of the role that Husserl assigns it, and finally to (c) an identification of it as the counterpart to machination. Although Heidegger also uses “experience” (Erfahrung) through all three phases, it is particularly in the final phase that he speaks of the urgency of specific experiences in contrast to the manufacture of lived experiences. (a) Phenomenology as the science of the original lived experience. In Heidegger’s first lectures after the war, phenomenology is the most basic science (Urwissenschaft) by virtue of being concerned with the underlying sense of lived experience, that is, with purely describing but not “reifying” it or otherwise inserting it into some causal nexus—as though it were an object or subject matter (Sache) like any other. Although complaining that

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the term “lived experience” is “hackneyed” (abgegriffen), he concedes that it is both apt and unavoidable (56/57: 66; see, too, 9: 19; 20: 375). In addition to analyzing the lived experiences of questioning and of the surrounding world and their differences, he distinguishes a lived experience—as an event (Ereignis)—from an occurrence (Vorgang) and counters Natorp’s challenge that the phenomenologist’s lived experience of reflecting on lived experiences “stills the stream” of such experiences and thereby distorts them. To this end he defends the “hermeneutical intuition” of a pre-theoretical, nonobjectifying “lived experience of lived experiencing” (56/57: 66, 70, 75ff, 99–117). Similar appropriations of a phenomenology concerned with lived experiences and life recur throughout the early Freiburg lectures (e.g., 56/57: 126; 58: 25–128; 59: 23f, 169ff). (b) The non-original character of lived experience in Husserl’s phenomenology. After the move to Marburg in 1923, Heidegger takes closer aim at Husserl’s understanding of lived experiences as the equivalent of consciousness or self-awareness, in a manner traceable to Descartes’ cogitationes, precisely insofar as they are accessible to an inner perception that is, as such, allegedly certain (17: 54f, 133f, 274). Critically glossing Husserl’s account of the phenomenological reduction, Heidegger notes that “while all lived experiences are given immanently, every other being is such that it announces itself in consciousness,” regardless of whether something really corresponds to it or not (20: 143f). Heidegger’s problem is not with the possibility that something does not correspond but rather with the reduction of being (the being of beings) to what announces itself in consciousness. So, too, Heidegger critically observes, the alleged determinations of being of lived experiences are not original, not based upon the matters themselves, but on securing an idea of philosophy as an absolute science, inspired again by Descartes (20: 147; 24: 29). Lived experiences are immanent to the subject, supposedly belonging “indubitably” to it and engendering the wrongheaded question of how those “subjective lived experiences can refer to something objectively present-at-hand” (24: 86–9). In a portent of things to come, after noting how the old definition of a human being as a rational animal forms the background of questions about lived experience (Erlebnis), Heidegger questions whether “this definition is drawn from experiences [Erfahrungen] that aim at the primary experience [Erfahrung] of the being of the human being” (20: 174; 9: 188). (c) The manufacture of lived experience (Erlebnis) and the urgency of experience (Erfahrung). At the beginning of the 1930s, as the extent of Heidegger’s break with Husserl becomes widely known, he continues to pan lived experience, increasingly regarding it in terms of an “inner” or “mental” (seelisch) lived experience, convertible with consciousness, linked to the certainty of the I, and thus belonging to the “metaphysical region of

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subjectivity” (Subjectität) ((29/30: 93, 100f, 123f, 137; 65: 131; 12: 123; 70: 109). He equates consciousness qua lived experience in this connection with “(re-) presentation,” the process of literally or figuratively (representatively) placing an entity before us and thereby inserting it into our lives as something lived (er-lebte) so that it “can count as an entity [kann als ‘seiend’ gelten]” (65: 129; 12: 122). Heidegger also pairs lived experience, so conceived, with machination, “the dominance of making and the made”; machination’s “second law” is that the more it conceals itself, the more it presses for the predominance of lived experience, something that seems to be completely opposed to it but in fact is essentially of a piece with it (65: 127, 131). Concerned solely with beings and oblivious to being, machination and lived experience are names for “the history of beingness and the first inception”; devoid of any boundaries or shame, “everything is open and nothing impossible for them” in their sheer objectification of beings (65: 131f). Leading to an anthropological manner of thinking (a Cartesian legacy), the dominance of lived experiences “unconditionally confirms machination” (65: 134n; 66: 147). At the same time lived experiences also become a product of machination, in the form of the cultural business of manufacturing lived experiences. Thus, for example, he notes how “kitsch” applies not to films as such but to what, “as a consequence of the machination of lived experiences,” they put on public display as “lived experiences of the ‘authentic’ ‘lived experiences,’” including matters of social behavior, fashion, and public gesturing (66: 31; 94: 384, 397, 401f; 95: 3–6, 65, 73). He speaks, too, of “a schooling of lived experiences,” training to assess everything solely in terms of the essence of beings in machination (the production process), where there is “nothing more to be sought behind or above beings/entities,” as lived experience itself becomes an “accessory of calculation” (66: 33, 250). For all the reasons noted, Heidegger is explicit about the need to move beyond the talk of lived experiences. “It is not out of stubbornness and philosophical idiosyncrasy that we no longer speak today of lived experiences, lived experiences of consciousness, and consciousness; instead we are compelled to another language on the basis of a transformation of existence” (29/30: 298; 70: 109). That transformation is by no means complete but it requires experience (Erfahrung) in another sense, experience of being (not beings), the truth of beyng, and other cognates such as “beinghere” and “appropriation” (9: 194, 202, 306f; 29/30: 397; 65: 27, 61, 76, 80; 67: 129). In addition to repeatedly calling attention to the Greeks’ basic experiences of being, he notes the urgency of a new experience of being, given the deficiencies of the Greek legacy (5: 7, 103; 40: 65, 89, 101, 191f, 213). The need for a new inception rests upon experiencing the overturning of metaphysics which in turn requires experiencing the abandonment and

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forgottenness of being and the truth of beyng as the abyss (65: 96, 99, 107, 112, 129; 67: 5–8, 16, 34, 130). In glosses on Hölderlin’s poetry Heidegger plays on the connection, mirrored in the words themselves, between experiencing (Erfahren) and the exiting/traveling away (Ausfahrt) that is part and parcel of the experience. Experience, so construed, cannot be described in terms purely immanent to consciousness, as is frequently the case with lived experiences (Erlebnisse). In stark contrast to the latter, experience (Erfahrung) requires that we depart from where we are and encounter others. Thus, we experience the first reflection/afterglow (Widerschein) of ourselves in the foreign (4: 137; see, too, 94, 115–18, 128, 132f, 140ff). This “law of becoming at home” must be experienced (53: 165ff, 172f). Heidegger probes the challenges to experiencing (erfahren) the essence of the near, a thing (like a jug) (79: 5, 10, 13, 45), technology and the technological ordering (Bestellen) that puts everything into a standing reserve (79: 27, 31, 45), and the urgency of the danger that the enframing presents to experiencing the essence of beyng (as well as experiencing enframing itself as the prelude to the appropriation) (79: 54f, 70, 123, 125). A lecture on the “principles of thinking” is an attempt to experience the essence of our thinking as the thinking that determines our historical Dasein and world-history (79: 94f, 98, 103, 133f, 142). In three lectures on the essence of language, Heidegger ventures to “make the experience with language,” which entails that it “resists [widerfährt] us, affects us, comes over us, bowls us over, and transforms us,” as we accommodate ourselves to its claim on us (uns ihm fügen) (12: 149).

Expropriation (Enteignung) “Expropriation” signifies a dispossession that comes with “appropriation” (Ereignis) (66: 147, 311, 319; 67: 55). Heidegger deploys it in two ways, differentiable by their contexts: the expropriation that deprives beings and human beings of beyng (65: 120, 138, 231; 66: 59, 364; 69: 119) and the expropriation that is part of the experience of beyng and restores them to beyng. In the latter sense he speaks of “the expropriation of every vain and contingent addiction to the ego” (66: 330) and how the dif-ference “expropriates the thing [but leading it thereby] into the calm of the fourfold,” that is, depriving them of what holds them back from residing in the fourfold (12: 25f, 30). This sort of expropriation of beings and their primacy, far from taking anything from them, is “the essential consequence of appropriating beyng into its truth” (69: 110).

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Facticity (Faktizität) In Heidegger’s earliest lectures he attempts a phenomenological analysis of life in terms of the largely tacit and indeterminate experience of a world (Selbstwelt) of immediately experienced meanings and relations. This experience is centered on the self while subtending both the world surrounding it and the world it shares with others. In this context “facticity” designates a world of meanings and relations, something in no way detachable from that life itself (58: 101–10). In Being and Time it has a similar connotation, signifying the myriad, everyday ways of pursuing our worldly concerns (Besorgen) and being-with-one-another (SZ 56, 120). Facticity is of a piece with the hybrid character of being-here, “in the world but not of it” (John 17: 14f). While facticity is inherent to being-in-the-world and thus irreducible to merely innerworldly (innerweltlich) things like tools and natural phenomena, it nonetheless inheres in being-in-the-world. It inheres in the latter precisely insofar as being-in-the-world is also innerworldly, albeit in such a way that is capable of “understanding itself as bound up in its ‘destiny’ with the entities that it encounters within its own world” (SZ 56). In contrast to the matter-offact-ness (Tatsächlichkeit) of the factum brutum of something on hand (e.g., the fact that the hammer is heavy or the soil loamy), our facticity consists in having been thrown into being in the sense of “being handed over” to ourselves to be (SZ 135). Not something that is given in an intuition, Dasein’s facticity disperses it into specific ways of “being-in,” and both what it is capable of being (Seinkönnen) and its way of “being swept up into the whirlpool of the They’s inauthenticity” are marks of its facticity. “Dasein exists factically” and, together with existence and fallenness, facticity is a “fundamental ontological character” of Dasein as care. Also inherent in facticity are various ways of being “closed off” and “covered up,” accounting for the fact that Dasein is equiprimordially in the truth and untruth. The primary sense of facticity lies in Dasein’s “already” being, a sense that coincides with its thrownness (SZ 55f, 135, 145, 179, 181, 191ff, 222, 229, 276, 284, 298, 316, 328).

Fallenness (Verfallen) Heidegger characterizes fallenness (MR: “falling,” S: “falling prey”) as a basic existential and kind of directed movement, namely, Dasein’s everyday proneness to become absorbed by the world into which it has been thrown, namely, the world of its concerns (die besorgte >>WeltGround>are