MARTIN HEIDEGGER EXPLAINED: LATER WRITINGS

In this lecture, I will attempt to explain Martin Heidegger's later thought, which is defined as everything written after Being and Time. It will be COMPLETELY incomprehensible if you have not first read my first lecture on Being and Time. Please do so if you have not. You may even want to review it briefly if you have already read it but it has been some time. This lecture covers over 30 years of books, lectures, essays, letters, and so on. I have thus attempted to make it an overview that is broad in some areas and detailed in others.

If you want to have a good overview of later Heidegger, everything I cover in this lecture is contained in the following books:

Basic Writings: Ten Key Essays, Plus the Introduction to Being and Time (1927-1964)
Introduction to Metaphysics (1935)
Poetry, Language, Thought (1935-1951)
Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (1936-1938)
The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (1940-1954)

2. The Nature of "The Turning"

After Martin Heidegger published Being and Time in 1927, something in his thought substantially changed. That much is clear. But what exactly is it that changes? What is the nature of what Heidegger came to refer to as "die Kehre" or "the turning?"

The most apparent change that will strike anyone is the bizarre and difficult style of Heidegger's later texts. Being and Time already has a very belabored, turgid style with a very unorthodox vocabulary, which makes its particular "arguments" somehwat hard to fish out. However, it still has a fairly rigorous structure. Heidegger's later texts present a clear break with this method. They are deeply obscure and often feel closer to a kind of prose poetry than to a rigorous proof of concepts. They drop the reader in a deep abyss of being from the very beginning. Any meaning to be found in them has to be struggled and fought for.

But is there an actual change in Heidegger's "position?" That is harder to say. And that is mostly because as his career progresses it seems less and less appropriate to speak of Heidegger's philosophy in terms of "positions" at all.

What does it mean to "be?" This is the first and most fundamental question of all philosophy. It remains THE question of Heidegger's career, both in the early and later periods. For centuries, philosophers ave gone awry in trying to answer this question by merely focusing on WHAT things there are or what PROPERTIES they have rather than what it means to BE in the first place. Of course, we would have to answer this question in a completely new way. Whatever "being" means cannot be an answer that just turns it into one thing among others, even if we somehow make it transcendent or elevate it among all others as the most basic or general.

So in what way do we ask this question if not in the traditional metaphysical way? In Being and Time, Heidegger attempted to answer this question via phenomenology, the careful description of the structure of our own conscious experience. In order to get at the question of being as such, he chose to analyze the being of one particular kind of entity, namely Dasein, the kind of being that we as humans are. Dasein is distinctively interested in and to some degree aware of its own being. Its manner of being-in-the-world occurs via a complex structure called the care-structure, consisting of disposedness/thrownness, understanding/projection, and fallenness.

Dasein generally exists in an inauthentic state of "fallenness" and absorption in the everyday things around it. But it comes into an authentic existence as itself and as a whole when it has an awareness of its own possibility of death, and thus its inherent finitude and groundlessness in anything in the world. This state is called anticipatory resoluteness. However, its structure is still the same care-structure, as in its inauthentic state. We can say that Dasein can only exist on the basis of this care-structure.

And the care-structure can only exist on the basis of time. But this temporality is ecstatic. The idea of ecstatic time is very removed from the standard understanding of clock-time. We come to experience this temporality not as a series of constantly progressing "nows," but as the determining modes of future, psat, and present in which we project our possibilities, have a basis to act upon, and have a surrounding context in which to ake action. Out of this, the unity of Dasein as an entity emerges through its history and through its meaningful relation to the past. Out of this primordial conception of temporality, time in the standard conception of successive nows (clock-time) emerges as a latter phenomenon. It is far removed from the original ecstatical experience of time. This concludes a short review of Being and Time.

Being and Time thus already puts forward a radical idea: Dasein always arrives at a certain "disclosure" of meaning on the basis of being thrown into a particular circumstance and tradition that it inevitably finds itself in. It does so via a projection of its own possibilties, which are necessarily limited by its own eventual not-being. The upshot of this is that there is never one "eternal truth" that stands true above and independent of all other occurrences and states of affairs. "Meaning" itself is something that is inherently TEMPORAL and HISTORICAL.

However, this is why Being and Time in a sense destroys itself from within its own structure. One might say that the whole method of Being and Time still reeks of Kant. While Heidegger's system makes meaning something inherently temporal and finite, it still appears as an attempt to construct an overarching and transcendental ground to explain how everything else comes into being. In this sense, it is too traditionally "metaphysical." It is still too dependent on an "If A, then B" way of thinking that seeks to find the necessary and essential gronuds of something, and thereby to get "outside of it."

But what else can philosophy do if not this? If the meaning of being is always something that changes and evolves, how can we ever get "outside of it" and answer the question of being as such? Are we not lost in a relativist, postmodernist void? The truth is, however, that Heidegger's later thought is as much an enemy of the kind of postmodernism that reduces all truth to lived experience and social constructs as it is to the kind of blind worship of science that reduces it all to mere calculation and measurement. That is because these remain based on a conception of what philosophy is for and what it can do that many of us have, and that perhaps Heidegger had when he wrote Being and Time, but that he by no means has in his later career.

Heidegger's philosophy continues to revolve around the first and foremost question of all philosophy, the "Seinsfrage" or "question of being." That much has not changed. But the question of being is no longer a "problem" to be solved, but a "pathway" to be opened up. The way to approach the question of being is not by finding an eternal, transcendent answer that exists "out there." It is by picking it up and appropriating it as a particular historical people. The Greeks had their own conception of it, as did the medieval scholastics, as did the Dasein of every other epoch in history.

In this sense, Heidegger breaks with most of the western philosophical tradition in that he explicitly sees his work as something belonging to a particular epoch and historical set of circumstances and NOT as something eternal or universal. In Hubert L. Dreyfus's words, he is the first "philosopher of finitude." The question of being is no longer "What does it mean to 'be?'" but is rather "How does "being" unfold historically?" Because that is the only real way to approach that question. As such, our task is now not to provide the grounds for any concpetion of being, but to learn how to once more adequately respond to the unfolding of being that is distinctive of modernity in an appropriate way. And what that ultimately means is to learn how to live a good and meaningful life.

As we shall see, however, this lack of "eternal truth" by no means makes philosophy something trifling or superficial. It is the opposite. Heidegger's later writings, precisely because they are so concerned with the particular historical circumstances of modernity, are written with a sense of URGENCY paralleled by few other philosophers. This is because, as we shall see, our current era is one of a profound ontological crisis, the implications of which we can still barely grasp.

3. An Overview of Martin Heidegger's Later Thought

There is no explicit "structure" to guide us through most of Heidegger's later career. On top of that, there is a "strangeness" to many of this texts. Richard Polt has said that there can never really be an "interpretation" of many of these texts but only a "confrontation with them." Lee Braver has described them as a "hermeneutically repulsive magnetic field" that seems to resist all interpretation. They require a sensitive reading that is equally scholarly and creative. Moreso than the last lecture, then, I will be quoting Heidegger's own words at considerable length in this one. To whatever degree these texts awaken and respond to the question of being, they do it not through theory but through poeticism, and looking at the language itself is important.

I divided this lecture into six sections, which I believe build on each other successively and comprehensively treat the most important themes in Heidegger's later career. Let us begin.

3.a. Metaphysics and Truth

Central texts for this section:
"Was ist Metaphysik" aka "What Is Metaphysics" (1929)
"Das Wesen der Wahrheit" aka "On the Essence of Truth" (1930)
Einführung in die Metaphysik aka Introduction to Metaphysics (1935)

3.a.i. The Metaphysical Crisis of the West

Being and Time was published in 1927, but was never finished according to its original design. In its current state, it gets to the point of positing "temporality" as the being of Dasein. It would have concluded by extrapolating time in general to be the "horizon" under which the question of being as such could be answered, not just as the being of Dasein. But Heidegger became skeptical of the idea that temporality really was the best way to answer the question of being. The second part of Being and Time which was never written would have been a so-called "destruction" of the history of western metaphysics. This history would have gone in reverse chronological order. It would have assessed the conception of being in Kant, Descartes, and Aristotle, respectively.

In the early 1930s, Heidegger begins to move away from his phenomenological roots. He no longer attempts to answer the question of being by appealing to the structure of Dasein. Instead, the historical study of western philosophy itself becomes his method to reawaken the question of being on firmer grounds. The central text of this period is called Introduction to Metaphysics. The title is somewhat misleading, as it presumes quite a bit of familiarity with the ancient Greek philosophical tradition and is by no means meant for novices.

But what is "metaphysics?" If we remember the opening to Being and Time, Heidegger began with a critique of figures before him who would try to answer the question of what it means to "be" by gorunding being in some other THING like substance, idea, God, monad, consciousness, noumenon, will-to-power, or whatever else. All those theories really do is change what things there ARE in the world. They just shuffle around the conceptual "furniture" of our view of the world witohut getting to what "being" itself MEANS in any determinate way. This entire process and method of philosophy is traditionally called "metaphysics."

For Heidegger then, "metaphysics" is a term of disparagement. "Metaphysics" is the kind of thing that defines western philosophy roughly from Plato onward. And it is something that he thinks is constrainin us and keeping us from understanding "being" in a more original and primordial fashion. Heidegger's philosophy is thus post-metaphysical, or at least it aspires to be.

Part of the reason he ends up rejecting the phenomenological method of Being and Time is that they are still too tied to the language and norms of metaphysics. His attempt to find a fundamental horizon for being, such as time, is now dismissed as too "metaphysical." The entire goal to philosophy is no longer to find eternal answers, but to RESPOND in the correct way to the unfolding of being as historical Dasein. And he thinks that to do this correctly we have to move beyond metaphysics and ask the question of being anew.

In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger formulates this question as "How does it stand with being?" In German, this phrasing has a sort of humorously casual and colloquial air. An English equivalent might be something like "How are things with being?" or "How is it going with being?" But this colloquial air is there for a reason. It's important to get at the question of being without setting up some kind of misleading metaphysical framework where we examine being as a substance or a process or whatever else. And the verbiage of "How does it stand with being?" is the best way to ask this question in a way that is once more fresh and free of over 2000 years of metaphysical baggage.

At first it might seem that "being" is a near-meaningless phrase. But the truth is that our use of the word "being" has a history of its own. Whenever we unthinkingly say that something "is" or "is not," we are passing on a long western lineage of interpretation of being and are largely unaware of how exactly it constrains us. In order to accept or to reject this lineage on a firmer basis, the first thing we have to do is make it explicit. And that is what most of his early 1930s period seeks to do. He seeks to open up a new horizon for our being itself to be situated.

However, we can only correctly follow and appreciate this later philosophy if we rid ourselves of two misconceptions of what philosophy is and what it can achieve. Those misconceptions are:

1. That philosophy can become a foundation for the forces of culture and history. This might take the from of a criticism like "Philosophy did not contribute to preparing the revolution, therefore it is useless." We can imagine that this criticism was equally common from both communist and fascist radicals alike at the time.

2. That philosophy can help us get a clear picture of the world and help us solve particular, discrete problems and questions. This might take the form of a criticism like "You can't do anything with philosophy" or "Nothing comes of philosophy." This probably would have been the kind of criticism that the more analytic-minded thinkers in Germany at the time would have levied. An example would have been Rudolf Carnap, who famously said that Heidegger's work was "the prime example of nonsense."

This readily gives the impression that philosophy can and must provide a foundation for the current and future historical Dasein of a people in every age, a foundation for building culture. But such expectations and requirements demand too much of the capability and essence of philosophy. Usually, this excessive demand takes the form of finding fault with philosophy. One says, for example, that because metaphysics did not contribute to the revolution, it must be rejected. That is just as clever as saying that because one cannot fly with a carpenter's bench, it should be thrown away. Philosophy can never directly supply the forces and create the mechanisms and opportunities that bring about a historical state of affairs, if only because philosophy is always the direct concern of the few. Which few? The ones who transform creatively, who unsettle things. It spreads only indirectly, on back roads that can never be charted in advance, and then finally--sometimes, when it has long since been forgotten as originary philosophy--it sinks away in the form of one of Dasein's truisms.
Against this first misinterpretation, what philosophy can and muts be according to its essence, is this: a thoughtful opening of the avenues and vistas of a knowing that establishes measure and rank, a knowing in which and from which a people conceives its Dasein in the historical-spiritual world and brings it to fulfillment--that knowing which ignites and threatens and compels all questioning and appraising.
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Chapter 1.8 [1]

According to this distortion, philosophy orders the whole of beings into overviews and systems, and readies a world picture for our use--a map of the world, as it were--a picture of the various possible things and domains of things, thereby granting us a universal and uniform orientation. Or, more specifically, philosophy relieves the sciences of their labor by meditating on the presuppositions of the sciences, their basic concepts and propositions. One expects philosophy to promote, and even to accelerate, the practical and technical business of culture by alleviating it, making it easier.
But--according to its essence, philosophy never makes things easier, but only more difficult. And it does so not just incidentally, not just because its manner of communication seems strange or even deranged to everyday understanding. The burdening of historical Dasein, and thereby at bottom of being itself, is rather the genuine sense of what philosophy can achieve. Burdening gives back to things, to beings, their weight (being). And why? Because burdening is one of the essential and fundamental conditions for the arising of everything great, among which we include above all else the fate of a historical people and its works. But fate is there only where a true knowing about things rules over Dasein. And the avenues and views of such a knowing are opened up by philosophy.
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Chapter 1.8-9 [2]

And he warns us not to be misled by continuing to engage with these frameworks in mind:

In what will become a familiar method of later Heidegger, he decides to get at what "metaphysics" really entails by tracing it to its earliest etymological roots. The word "metaphysics" comes from the ancient Greek word "phusis." "Phusis" is traditionally translated into Latin as "natura," the root of "nature." "Natura" literally means what is "born," but comes to mean what "exists," what there "is," and "nature" most generally. This word "phusis" then gets joined with the prefix "meta," meaning "over" or "beyond." "Meta-physics" then becomes a sort of higher-order study of what there "is" or "nature." But Heidegger argues that in the long history of equivalences in translation here, we lose access to the most original understanding of being that the ancient Greeks referred to by the name "phusis." It has become restricted and narrowed down to the spiritually destitute state of modern western philosophy.

The majority of Introduction to Metaphysics takes up "phusis" as a theme. But before we do, Heidegger takes a moment to make it clear that the stakes are high. Moving beyond metaphysics by reawakening this ancient Greek experience of phusis is by no means a trivial matter. He makes it clear that the entire fate of the west hangs in the balance:

This Europe, in its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and the rootless organization of the average man. When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously "experience" an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for?--where to?--and what then?
The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline [which is meant in relation to the fate of "being"] and to appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with cultural pessimism--nor with any optimism either, of course; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free has already reached such proportions throughout the whole earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable.
We lie in the pincers. Our people, as standing in the center, suffers the most intense pressure--our people, the people richest in neighbors and hence the most endangered people, and for all that, the metaphysical people. We are sure of this vocation; but this people will gain a fate from its vocation only when it creates in itself a resonance, a possibility of resonance for this vocation, and grasps its tradition creatively. All this implies that this people, as a historical people, must transpose itself--and with it the history of the West--from the center of their future happening into the originary realm of the powers of being. Precisely if the great decision regarding Europe is not to go down the path of annihilation--precisely then can this decision come about only through the development of new, historically spiritual forces from the center.
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Chapter 1.29 [4]

The situation in Europe is all the more dire because the disempowering of the spirit comes from Europe itself and--though prepared by earlier factors--is determined at last by its own spiritual situation in the first half of the nineteenth century. Among us at that time something happened that is all too readily and swiftly characterized as the "collapse of German idealism." This formula is like a shield behind which the already dawning spiritlessness, the dissolution of spiritual powers, the deflection of all originary questioning about grounds and the bonding to such grounds, are hidden and obscured. For it was not German idealism that collapsed, but it was the age that was no longer strong enough to stand up to the greatness, breadth, and originality of that spiritual world--that is, truly to realize it, which always means something other than merely applying propositions and insights.
Dasein began to slide into a world that lacked that depth from which the essential always comes and returns to human beings, thereby forcing them to superiority and allowing them to act on the basis of rank. All things sank to the same level, to a surface resembling a blind mirror that no longer mirrors, that casts nothing back. The prevailing dimension became that of extension and number. To be able--this no longer means to spend and lavish, thanks to lofty overabundance and the mastery of energies; instead, it means only practicing a routine in which anyone can be trained, always combined with a certain amount of sweat and display. In America and Russia, then, this all intensified until it turned into the measureless so-on-and-so-forth of the ever-identical and the indifferent, until finally this quantitative temper became a quality of its own. By now in those countries the predominance of a cross-section of the indifferent is no longer something inconsequential and merely barren but is the onslaught of that which aggressively destroys all rank and all that is world-spiritual, and portrays these as a lie.
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Chapter 1.35 [5]

3.a.ii. The Emergent Sway of Phusis

What exactly is "phusis?" What does this word apparently refer to in the Greek understanding of being? Heidegger defines phusis as an "emerging-abiding sway." The original German word here translated as "sway" is "Walten." Charles E. Scott points out that this word is etymologically related to the English "wield" in the sense of wielding power or wielding a weapon. It suggests a sort of power or rule over something. Scott uses the example of a festive mood holding "sway" over a town or someone's dream holding "sway" over her actions as a clue to how we should understand the "sway" of phusis. [6]

But to avoid lapsing back into metaphysics, we have to avoid thinking of phusis as some particular "thing." Phusis can never be some transcendental entity that lies beyond anything we experience. Phusis is the word for the way that things come to arise or appear for the ancient Greeks. And it is not conceived of in terms of "substance" and "essence," but in terms of "happening," of "emerging," and of "unfolding." A cognate of "phusis" is "phuein," which means "to grow" or "to make grow." In these terms it seems like phusis is a sort of process by which things come into being. But in truth phusis is even more basic than that. Phusis is what allows things to emerge into being AS processes in the first place. [7] [8]

This conception of phusis is before any word or name in language. So it has to be sketched out in more indirect terms. We can do this best by showing how later philosophers in the western traditionn have narrowed and delimited the meaning of phusis (and thus of being) over the course of western philosopher. Four things have been drawn out of being-as-phusis and contrasted with it, namely:

1. being and becoming
2. being and seeming
3. being and thinking
4. being and the ought

In an original experience of phusis, these things all occur together and are not yet drawn out as opposed to and incompatible with each other.

3.a.iii. Parmenides and Heraclitus

In order to illustrate how this is so, most of Introduction to Metaphysics is a sustained analysis of a number of ancient Greek texts. However, for Heidegger, "metaphysics" as we know it emerged with Plato and Aristotle. Thus, if we want to recover the pre-metaphysical past of philosophy where we can experience phusis in the purest way, we need to go back even earlier. What sources does he instead favor? There are a number of Greek authors referenced in this text, both those who we traditionally conceive of as "philosophers" and those who we do not. But the two thinkers who are most thoroughly explicated and sourced are the two godfathers of all western ontology: Parmenides and Heraclitus.

Heidegger's lecture presumes a high degree of familiarity with these two. In the interest of making this lecture as accessible as possible for such difficult texts, I will try to shortly summarize the standard understanding of these two figures. This is necessary, as Heidegger's interpretation of these two is quite unconventional and controversial. As such, we must remember that we are always really learning more about how Heidegger interprets these thinkers than the thinkers themselves. But first for the standard interpretation:

Like all Presocratic philosophers, the words of Parmenides and Heraclitus are preserved only as fragments. Both of them lived sometime from the late 6th to the early 5th century BC. We are not sure which one predated the other, but it has become conventional to take the two as a pair who proposed opposin ontologies: Parmenides defined "being" as constancy and subsistence while Heraclitus defined "being" as flux and change. For Parmenides, all change and variance is an illusion while for Heraclitus all stability and identity is an illusion. We shall soon see that Heidegger actually thinks both of them can be united if we view both of them as describing being in the context of phusis. But we should sketch out the conventional understanding of the two a bit more thoroughly first.

Parmenides wrote his philosophy as an epic poem written in the same meter as Homer and Hesiod. We have several fragments of it and many are of considerable length, which is helpful in establishing greater context as poetry. These fragments are often quite stilted and awkward and do not strike us as the work of a natural poet. But their value as philosophy cannot be overstated. The poem begins with Parmenides speaking as an authority who has received a divine revelation on the nature of reality. A fanciful allegorical prologue describes him arriving at a sort of supernatural dwelling, where he describes encountering the gates of the "roads of night and day." Where exactly this is and what mythology it is meant to evoke is uncertain. The gates are kept watch by a gatekeeper who is identified as "dike," the personification of justice. She lets Parmenides through, as his cause is a just and true one. Inside, he meets a goddess who has not been definitively identified. She explains to him that:

From the beginning, then, Parmenides sets up a division between "aletheia" ("truth") and "doxa" ("opinion"). The way of "truth" is the one that is certain and steadfast, while the way of "opinion" is merely conventional knowledge that cannot be certified as infallibly true. Interestingly, despite the fact that Parmenides dismisses the way of "doxa" as merely "opinion" that cannot be truly relied on, he devoted the vast majority of the poem to explaining "doxa" or "opinion" rather than "truth." These parts of the poem are more scattered and fragmentary, but they seem to have described an elaborate cosmology where all things are composed of a mixture of light and darkness. He moved from the general to the specific and described the way the sun, the moon, and the ether were formed and how they operated in the heavens, the creation of man and woman, the way human beings are able to move and think, and so on.

But clearly, as philosophers, we are more interested in the way of "truth" than the way of "opinion." Luckily, we have his description of the way of "truth" in what seems to be a nearly complete state. But the description is dense and difficult to grasp. At the beginning of the description of the way of "truth," the goddess sketches out two paths of investigation:

To sum things up: we have the way of "truth" and the way of "opinion." The way of "truth" is furhter divided into the roots of "is" nad "is not." We have the way of "is," of "is not," and of "opinion." In order to do ontology, that is to answer the question of what there really "is' beyond the level of mere opinion and speculation, we have the roots of "is" and 'is not." This means that we can study what there IS or what there IS NOT. But the second root, the one of "is not," is rejected outright.

Why reject "is not" outright? Parmenides's reasoning seems to be that there can be no legitimate conception of what "is not." Any attempt to understand a "not" or a "nothing" will turn it into a "something," an object that we apprehend. Therefore, in order to have an accurate conception of reality, we have to talk only about what "is." In Parmenides's words "thinking and being are the same." This is generally interpreted as saying that what can be thought of can be and what cannot be thought of cannot be. And since we cannot meaningfully think of "is not," it must be rejected.

Parmenides now sketches out what "is" in accordance with these rules in a series of very concise arguments. He argues that what is is "ungenerated and imperishable, whole, unique, steadfast, and complete" (DK28B 3-4). All the proofs for these characteristics have to do with rejecting the concept of what "is not." If what "is not" cannot be meaningfully conceptualized, it cannot play any part in our ontology.

What "is" cannot emerge from what "is not," because what "is not" cannot give birth to or cause anything, since it "is not." A something cannot come from a nothing. What "is" cannot come into existence at any time or other, because that would mean that at some point in time it was "not." So what "is" is both ungenerated and imperishable. It always was and always will be. It has no beginning and no end. And that means that it never changes or moves, because and change and movement need to take place in time, and they imply that something "is" one way at one point in time and "is not" at another point in time.

In a murky section, Parmenides then argues that what "is" is indivisible and consistent. This seems to mean that in what "is," there is really only one "thing" and that there is no way to separate or divide it, nor to distinguish anything in particular out of what "is." All of it is identical. Any distinction of one part from another part would make some part lack something that the other part has and thus make it not like the other part, reintroducing what "is not."

It seems then that, for Parmenides, what "is" is an unchanging, indivisible oneness that is so constant, eternal, and monistic that time and space itself ceases to have any meaning. This is the only interpretation of reality that is logically consistnet. Of course, it is completely unlike any way that we actually experience the world. And this is why he gives another explanation for the nature of reality based on "doxa" or "opinion." This makes for a very strange text, since it gives two explanations that directly contradict each other, but that the author apparently felt were equally deserving of being the subject of philosophy. This is despite one of them being explicitly defined as more "certain" and "reliable" than the other one.

As difficult as Permenides is to get a grasp on, we at least have a surviving sustained argument for what seems like the essential core of his thought. We have no such luck with Heraclitus. We have a great number of fragments from him (far more than Parmenides), but all of them are reduced to short snippets. Some are only a few words and very few are more than a sentence or two long. We have idea what the context of any of them is. Given that Heraclitus gained a reputation even in the ancient world as being a difficult and obscure thinker, it could be that his thought primarily consisted of these kinds of cryptic aphorisms rather than a sustained series of arguments. But we simply have no way of knowing for sure.

There are obvious common themes between these fragments, but it is hard to put them into a cohesive view of the world. Unlike Parmenides, they are broad in scope and besides ontology seem to discuss topics as broad as epistemology, culture, society, and politics, often with a sort of misanthropic or cynical tone. As such, this summary will overlook a number of themes and motifs that can be picked up on throughout the fragments of Heraclitus and focus on the ones that matter most for Heidegger's project.

The key word for Heraclitus's thought is what he calls the "logos." This is a mysterious and elusive concept, and it is hard to get an exact stance on what he means by it. It seems to be a kind of universal principle that things operate according to, but that people can only get a dim awareness of. The word "logos" is most commonly translated as "reason" or "word." It is derived from the verb "legein," which is generally translated as "to say," but is itslef derived from the Proto-Indo-European root "leg-," which can have a whole multiplicity of meanings, including but not limited to saying, speaking, choosing, gathering, arranging, measuring, and reasoning.

This word "logos" is the root of the word "logic" in English. It was already used to more or less mean "logic" in the sense that we use it by Aristotle. The understanding of "logos" is only further complicated by the mysterious opening prologue of the Gospel of John in the New Testament of the Bible where the author writes that "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God" (John 1:1). In English, this is usually translated as "the Word," but the original Greek takes advantage of the full ambiguity and philosophical lineage of the word "logos." The question of what "logos" means here in the context of Christian theology is, of course, a centuries-old debate that would require a lecture of its own.

But let us forget about what "logos" would later mean for Aristotle and for the Christian world and try to look at Heraclitus without being biased by these later thinkers. When we try to understand Heraclitus's conception of the "logos," it seems to be a mysterious sort of rule or principle by which all things ARE and operate. It, in fact, seems very comparable to the concept of the "Dao" in Laozi's Dao De Jing. Observe the following fragments:

Two metaphysical themes that appear most often in the fragments of Heralitus are:

He speaks in terms that make heavy use of seeming contradictions in saying that the finest harmony is composed of things that are odds with each other. All things come to be through "strife." The logos consists in the agreement of opposites, like the dynamic tension of a well-strung bow. For Heraclitus, all things seem to emerge through the inner play of opposites.

This is connected to his idea of all things being in "flux." A famous maxim of his (though actually a cobbling-together of words and ideas from separate fragments and not quite his exact words) is that "We cannot step in the same river twice, for it is no longer the same river and we are no longer the same man." Other fragments similarly call attention to cyclical nature of ever-changing things. The imagery of "fire" is strong in Heraclitus, and there is some debate over whether he literally or only metpahorically believed that all things in nature were a kind of ever-shifting fire in fragments like the following:

It should now be obvious how in the traditional conception, Parmenides and Heraclitus are fundamentally opposed. Parmenides defines "being" as constancy, changelessness, and uniformity. Heraclitus defines it as flux, variance, and the unity of opposites.

If we recall the opening, Heidegger referred to four elements that were originally one in a a more primal understanding of being as "phusis," but only later became disentangled from it. These are being and becoming, being and seeming, being and thinking, and being and the ought. In Parmenides and Heraclitus, we already see the first two starting to become dislodged.

Parmenides sees all "becoming" as alien to being, because anything that "becomes," "emerges," "changes," etc. would introduce what "is not" back into the picture and make things incomprehensible. Heraclitus, on the other hand, sees being as a constant process of "becoming," where things are always emerging as something else and nothing stays eternally.

Both thinkers also make it clear that we misunderstand being when we simply apprehend what "seems" to be the case for us. Parmenides explains this as the way of "doxa" or opinion, which is not reliable. Heraclitus is less overt, but in a number of fragments he mocks the simple, conventional understanding that people have when they do not accurately apprehend the logos.

And yet, Heidegger puts forth a novel and unorthodox claim: Parmenides and Heraclitus are more similar than different. This is because both apprehend "being" first and foremost neither as constancy nor as flux but as PHUSIS. In the Greek understanding of phusis, being is not yet to be contrasted with becoming, with seeming, with thinking, or with the ought. Heidegger skips over "becoming" for now and begins by considering "seeming" for reasons that will soon become apparent.

3.a.iv. Aletheia

At first glance, the difference between what really "is" versus what only "seems" to be is the most obvious difference. It "seems" that the sun orbits the earth, but in truth the earth orbits the sun. It "seems" that a stick in the water is bending, but in truth it is really straight. For Parmenides, it "seems" that there are individiual things that change, grow, and move, but in truth there can really be no change or distinction. For Heraclitus, it "seems" that things are stable and uniform, but in truth they are in a state of constant flux. However, Heidegger wants to argue that all of this rests on an understanding of "truth" that is quite removed from the original conception of turth of the ancient Greeks.

Parmenides originally sketches out the way of "truth" as contrasted with the way of "opinion." The word that is translated as "truth" is "aletheia" in the Greek. This word "aletheia" is traditionally translated as "truth." Heidegger does not want to argue that it is an inaccurate translation, but he argues that the way we understand "truth" in the modern era does not accurately grasp the full meaning of "aletheia."

The modern conception of "truth" is essentially truth-as-correspondence. That is to say, we have some proposition like "The lamp before me is red," and we assess whether this is true or false by comparing it with some state of affairs before us and seeing if it corresponds. If it corresponds, it is true. If it does not correspond, it is false. But on the basis of WHAT can we check if something corresponds to something else? On the basis of there BEING something THERE. I can only determine if the lamp before me is red or not if I have something like a lamp "revealed" to me. I can only apprehend a lamp if something like it comes across to me as INTELLIGIBLE.

Turth is always, first and foremost, a sort of "revealing." Truth is always first an experience o fsomething standing forth and showing up for us. Truth is always first located in "things" before it is located in propositions that are narrowed down to being true or false. It is only on the basis of that original revealing that anyhting like truth-as-correspondence can come to us as a latter phenomenon.

All of this is indicated etymologically by the word "aletheia." In Greek, the word "lethe" literally means something like "covering up," "concealing," or "concealing." It is most famous as the name of the River Lethe in the Greek underworld, where the shades of the dead go to drink and forget their previous lives. "Aletheia" is thus a NEGATIVE version of "lethe." It is an UN-concealment, an UN-forgetting, a DIS-closure. It is a sense of truth in which we let things "be" as they are. We set them free to be as they are in their own revealing.

In a difficult essay, Heidegger describes the "essence" of truth as being "freedom." And he describes this "freedom" as a "letting things be," but not in the sense of indifference or neglect:

Before any sense of "freedom" in the sense of being able to do what we like, there is a more fundamental "freedom" in the sense of being open to, receptive towards, and invested in the disclosure of what opens itself up. But there is an important takeaway from this. At the same time, we have the ability to NOT take up and engage with what reveals itself. This is "untruth." This point is of primary importance for Heidegger. Whenever there is some "revealing," something else is "concealed." Nothing can come into being and intelligibility without something else being covered up and obscured.

As an example, think of how we might conceive of a "tree." We might think of a tree as a fundamentally different thing from the seed that it grows out of. But is it really? Stop and think about it for a moment. Are they really different things? What is the moment that a seed stops being a seed and becomes a tree? Suddenly it's not so clear. We see the whole interrelated process of seed to sapling to tree to decaying tree to mulch to new trees and so on. We don't know where to draw the lines anymore.

But we ultimately ARE able to make sense of a "seed" as a different thing from a tree in our daily lives. And it's precisely because we choose to IGNORE a substantial amount of ways that the seed is related to other phenomena that it can show up as a "seed." If we don't put up any of these "barriers," then the seed won't be revealed as its own phenomenon, because we can't tease it out from the tree, the soil, the nurtients from the sun, and so on. But if we cover up its relation in this full process of growing, sprouting, decaying, becoming mulch, and so on, we can isolate the seed as a "thing." There are always a huge manifold of other potential ways for things to "show up" and be intelligible to us. And we always have to choose some and leave others behind:

It is on a similar basis that Heidegger often talks about what he calls "the nothing." "The nothing" seems to refer to this unspoken realm that everything has to define itself in contrast to. Heidegger describes the fundamental interplay and struggle between these two forces over and over in his career. The terms change, but we sense that the idea underneath does not. He will use terms like "being" and "the nothing," "disclosure"and "covertness," "meaning" and "unintelligibility," and much more poetic, strange terms in his later texts.

In all cases, he seems to say that we need to create a "boundary of nihiliation" around whatever emerges to us. That is, we need to "carve" it out of what is unintelligible. This boundary can always be reinterpreted, but never vanishes. It is necessary for it to be there. There must always first be beings instead of nothing. And that "instead of nothing" is not a simple flourish. It indicates the fact that identity and meaning is always contingent. [18]

In an early bridge from the framework of Being and Time, he explains how Dasein can only define itself on the basis of "the nothing:"

Now that we understand this interplay and struggle between conceealing and revealing, we can have a greater understanding of phusis. Phusis is the way that beings first and foremost come to us as a disclosure in aletheia. The "sway" of phusis is the unconcealed coming to stand in itself, as itself. Heidegger argues that this is evident in both Parmenides and Heraclitus if we read their words carefully and attentively.

Fragment 123 of Heraclitus reads "Phusis kruptesthai philei" (DK 22B123). It is traditionally translated as "Nature loves to hide" or "Nature keeps its secrets." The word translated here as "nature" is, of course, "phusis." Heidegger translates this fragment in a very different (and very unwieldy) fashion as: "Being [emerging appearance] intrinsically inclines toward self-concealment." That is, in order for anything to be "revealed," something else must be concealed. All "being" is a stepping-out into and appearing-from-out-of a concealment. There can be no revealing without a concealing that it emerges against. [20]

Parmenides begins his text by sketching out a contrast between the way of "truth" ("aletheia") and the way of "opinion" ("doxa"). The word "doxa" is derived from the original verb "dokei," and can be more or less translated as "aspect" in the following senses:

1. "aspect" in the sense of respect, glory, magnificence (as in the "glory of God" in the New Testament)
2. "aspect" as the "sheer view" that something offers
3. "aspect" as "merely" looking so, semblance
3. "aspect" as the view someone creates for himself, opinion

Covering all of these meanings under one umbrella as "doxa" is not merely being sloppy as a result of a primitive language. It reveals a deep awareness of the esesntial traits of being in their connection with each other in its most original state. Heidegger argues that for the Greeks, "seeming" as "doxa" was not just a "lesser" "distortion" of what really "is." For the ancients, all "being" had to emerge against "seeming" in a fundamental interplay with it:

Let us think about the sun. It rises and sets for us daily. Only a very few astronomers, physicists, and philosophers directly experience this fact otherwise, as the movement of the Earth around the sun--and even they do so only on the grounds of a particular, although rather widespread, conception. But the seeming in which sun and Earth stand--for example, the early morning of a landscape, the sea in the evening, the night--is an appearing. This seeming is not nothing. Nor is it untrue. Neither is it a mere appearance of relations that in nature are really otherwise. This seeming is historical and it is history, uncovered and grounded in poetry and saga, and thus an essential domain of our world.
Only all the effete latecomers, with their overly clever wit, believe they can be done with the historical power of seeming by explaining it as "subjective," where the essence of this "subjectivity" is something extremely dubious. The Greeks experienced it otherwise. Again and again, they had first to tear being away from seeming and preserve it against seeming. [Being essentially unfolds from un-concealment.]
Only by undergoing the struggle between being and seeming did they wrest being forth from beings, did they bring beings into constancy and unconcealment: the gods and the state, the temples and the tragedies, athletic competition and philosophy--all this in the midst of seeming, besieged by it, but also taking it seriously, knowing its power. Only with the sophists and Plato was seeming explained as, and thus reduceed to, mere seeming. At the same time, being as idea was elevated to a supersensory realm. The chasm, khorismos, was torn open between the merely apparent beings here below and the real being somewhere up there. Christian doctrine then established itself in this chasm, while at the same time reinterpreting the Below as the created, and the Above as the Creator, and with weapons thus reforged, it set itself against antiquity [as paganism] and distorted it. And so Nietzsche is right to say that Christianity is Platonism for the people.
In contrast, the great age of Greek Dasein is a unique, creative self-assertion amid the turmoil of the multiply intertwined counterplay of the powers of being and seeming.
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Chapter 4.80-81 [21]

Why does Parmenides spend so much time discussing the way of "doxa" or "seeming" in his poem? Because it was by no means seen as a "lesser," diminutive form of being for him or for the other ancient Greeks. All "being" takes place against and within the context of seeming. The way of "truth" for Parmenides is the way of aletheia or truth-as-unconcealment. If we remember his poem, he sketches out the paths of both "is" and "is not." He immediately closes off the path of "is not" as something which we cannot investigate with any meaning. But he still must mention it. This is because these pathways are really the paths of "being" and of "the nothing."

All being must emerge against something opaque and unknown. There can be no "being" without the background of nihiliation that it must tear itself away from. In this interplay between being, the nothing, and seeming, we as humans must constantly answer the question of being anew. We must delimit things and, in so doing, allow beings to come into presence. From from depicting the question of "being" as something static and infinite, Parmenides depicts it as a constant struggle between opposing forces. And in that sense he is closer to Heraclitus than he lets on. [22]

3.a.v. Logos as Polemos

When Heraclitus says that all things are in "flux," he refers to this constant interpaly of being and seeming. He evokes the delimitation of things standing forth in their being. The most famous statement of this occurs in Fragment 53:

A common, but simplistic interpretation of this fragment is that it makes a sort of social Darwinist statement by saying that the strong always triumph over the weak and that this is the necessary condition for any civilization to emerge. But this is a complete misunderstanding of the real, higher meaning of this fragment.

The word translated as "war" here is "polemos" in the Greek. Heidegger takes it to mean something far more broad and complex than just "fighting," "quarreling," and "combat." "Polemos" is a "strife." And it is a "strife" that happens whenver there is a striving to set forth things AS things and set them "free" to their presencing. In order for anything to appear AS a thing and come forth in its own thinghood, there must be a "struggle" and a "striving" to set forth its boundaries and limits against the constant threat of nothing and of seeming.

Beings can only be drawn out of concealment with this struggle against it. And this is not the work of either gods or humans, as Heraclitus makes it clear in the fragment that it is only through the "polemos" or strife that gods and humans are disjoined and allowed to stand apart in the first place. And yet it doesn't seem to happen without human beings either. This is because it may be the case that the organisms known as homo sapiens could exist on the planet before the primal struggle of "polemos," but they only have a full sense of themselves as humans, as Dasein, as a result of it. And this largely occurs in language. All of this happens before there is any divide between mind and body, inner and outer, intentions and behavior, and even self and world.

Such was the original being-in-the-world of the Presocratic Greeks. As Richard Polt says, the "polemos" or strife can never be won or resolved, but only neglected. [24] There is always a "polemos" between being and the nothing, where seeming emerges. The truth we experience as unconcealment is a result of whatever the currently-existing state of the polemos is. In this sense, being and seeming are no longer to be opposed. Seeming is not to be thought of as a "lesser" version of being. "Seeming" is what comes forth out of the primal struggle between being and not-being.

With the division between "being" and "seeming" dissolved, this is where Heidegger finally returns to the first of the four divisions: that between being and becoming.

"Becoming" as we understand it, is a process that is transient. It can appear one way in one moment and a different way in the next. In the sense that "becoming" can be inconstant and pass out of presence, becoming is a "seeming" of "being." In that way, the distinction between being and becoming is just an extrapolation of the most fundamental distinction between being and seeming. And that distinction is not a clearcut separation of the two into separate and exclusionary realms, but a constant strife that Dasein must always be caught up in and creatively contribute towards.

One "seeming" was reduced to a lesser state and thought of as only "mere seeming" against what really "is," the original Greek conception of phusis was already lost. And this was the whole basis for the next division: That of being and thinking.

With the division of being and thinking, we no longer understand phusis as an "emerging-abiding sway," but as something that is "represented." Being now becomes an "object" to be "represented" to a "subject." Thinking now does not JOIN in the interplay between being, not-being, and seeming, but stands above them, representing all of them to itself as subject. Thinking now becomes the basis for all the other divisions, and not just a third in addition.

What is "thinking?" Thinking has a science of its own, beginning with Aristotle. It is what we call "logic." As Aristotle conceived it, "logic" is the "rules" for thinking. But just as "metaphysics" has narrowed down phusis via one particular interpretation of what it must be, so has "logic" narrowed down and confined the "logos" from which it derives itself. The whole schema of "logic" as the "rules" for thinking could only emerge after the original essence of truth had been forgotten. Only after aletheia (truth-as-unconcealment) was narrowed down and delimited into the scope of truth-as-correspondence could something like "logic" come to govern it. That is because all logic does is assert WHEN things can be right and wrong. It turns propositions, not beings, into the locus of truth. It was only after thinking was set apart from being that logic could come to govern it. But we cannot discover any "being" in logic itself. Logic presupposes "being." It does not allow us ACCESS to "being." [25]

With that in mind, we must find the original unity of phusis and logos that later became disjoined. The original understanding of the verb "legein," from which the noun "logos" is derived, is that it means "word," "discourse," or "talk." But in its very earliest uses it has no essential relation to language. The original "legein" means to glean, to collect, to gether, to make a selection, and so on. It means to lay one thing out next to another and bring them together as one. See the word "analogy," which literally means a kind of relating, a laying out of one thing next to the other.

For a piece of evidence, see the original meaning of "legein" as "gathering" in this passage from Homer's Odyssey, where "lexaito" (a form of "legein") is translated as "bring together:"

It is Heraclitus who discusses "logos" most thoroughly, and we can understand quite a bit about the connection of the emergent sway of phusis with logos-as-gathering if we look at his words. These are Heidegger's extremely belabored translations of Heraclitus's first two fragments. These "translations" are almost intentionally prolix and exhaustive, as if Heidegger is trying to show the very ambiguity and richness of meaning in the words by making them as extensive as can be:

On the basis of the above, we can say that, for Heraclitus, "logos" means something like a "constant gathering." Logos is what gatehrs everything together in itself and holds it together. It is via this "gathering" that particular beings come into presence and become understood as relating to one another in any kind of intelligible way. This "gathering" is, of course, not a being in and of itself. It is the background that allows us to understand anything. It is what makes things coherent with regards to each other by "gathering" them in an appropriate manner. But few understand the logos itself, even when they understand everything else by means of it.

This "gathering" is not merely the random accumulation of things. The gathering allows them to have some sort of "rank" in the sense of order and meaning:

In this sense, phusis and logos are one. Logos gathers beings so that particular "things" can stand forth in their emergent sway. It is only with Parmenides that the logos begins to be disjoined from phusis, but not in a way that fully osbcures truth-as-unconcealment just yet. Heidegger focuses on the famous statement in Fragment 6 of Parmenides: "Thinking and being are the same." The word here translated as "thinking" is "noein." Thinking in this sense is connected to logos as that which allows things to stand forth via a "gathering."

The traditional interpretation that reads this "thinking" as the action of a "subject" is a mistake. According to this interpretation, everything that is real would be a construction of our own mental structures and seem to present us with a kind of early Kantian idealism. But this interpertation is a result of reading Parmenides with contemporary biases and is inaccurate. Rather than "Thinking and being are the same," Heidegger translates this phrase as "Belonging-together reciprocally are apprehension and being."

In Fragment 6, Parmenides claims that "It is right both to say and to think that it is what-is" (DK 28B1 28-32) [31]. The word translated as "think" is "noein," and the one translated as "say" is "legein," which is the root verb of "logos." Thus, here we already have "thinking" together with "logos." "Thinking" in Parmenides is "noein." It originally means something more broad than a kind of conceptual brain-process. It means apprehension. It means to let something come to us. It means to set ourselves up to receive what shows itself, such as troops taking up a position to receive an enemy. When Parmenides says that thinking (noein) and being (phusis) are "the same," he says that they are "to auto." This does not mean that they are the exact same thing, but rather that they belong together in the sense of being unified as that which contends. Wherever being holds sway, apprehension too holds sway and happens as the reception of what shows itself.

There is nothing here about the human subject. Indeed, the human subject is only determined on the basis of being and how that being comes to appearance. In his words, the determination of the essence of the human being is never an answer but is essentially a question. And this happens first as the belonging-together of being and apprehension. Apprehension is not just a faculty of the human being who already exists. It is only in the happening of apprehension that "humanity" itself appears and enters into history. It never first emerges as an "I" or as a "we," but first as a historical "questioning." Only in this struggle and striving do humans and gods step forth.

3.a.vi. Antigone and Doing Violence

This is all difficult to understand, so we will need to have an illustration of how it occurs. It occurs in thinking that is "poetic" as much as it does in philosophical thinking, because for the Presocratic Greeks, philosophy was inherently poetic rather than scientific. The division between poetry and philosophy as we know it did not exist. The illustration will come via the firsrt choral ode of Sophocles's Antigone.

The treatment of Antigone is one of the most strange and controversial parts of Introduction to Metaphysics. But it is clearly an important one. To set us up, Heidegger provides his own translation of the first choral ode. While this is by no means an inaccurate or distorted translation, it is important to remember that we always see a great deal of Heidegger himself in his Greek translations:

"Manifold is the uncanny, yet nothing
uncannier than man bestirs itself, rising up beyond them.
He fares forth the foaming tide
amid winter's southerly tempest
and cruises through the summits
of the raging, clefted swells.
The noblest of gods as well, the earth,
the indestructibly untiring, he wearies,
overturning her from year to year,
driving the plows this way and that
with his steeds.
Even the lightly gliding flock of birds
he snares, and he hunts
the beast folk of the wilderness
and the brood whose home is the sea,
the man who studies wherever he goes.
With ruses he overwhelms the beast
that spends its nights on mountains and roams,
and clasping with wood
the rough-maned neck of the steed
and the unvanquished bull
he forces them into the yoke.
Into the sounding of the word, as well,
and into wind-swift all-understanding
he found his way, and into the mettle
to rule over cities.
He has considered, too, how he might flee
exposure to the arrows
of unpropitious weather and its frosts.
Everywhere trying out, underway; untried, with no way out
he comes to Nothing.
A single onslaught, death, he was unable
even to resist by any flight,
even in the face of dire illness
deft escape should be granted him.
Clever indeed, for he masters
skill's devices beyond expectation,
now he falls prey to wickedness,
yet again valor succeeds for him.
Between the ordinance of the earth and the
gods' sworn dispensation he fares.
Rising high over the site, losing the site
is he for whom what is not, is, always,
for the sake of daring."
- Sophocles, Antigone (lines 332-375)
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Chapter 4.112-113 [32]

In the opening lines, man is referred to as "to deinotaton" or "the uncanniest." The term "deinon" comes from the adjective "deinos," which will be translated as "uncanny" for the remainder of the text. It is not an inaccurate translation. But it will be misleading if we only understand it as "uncanny" in the sense of "strange" or "uncomfortable." It is not the same sense of "uncanny" as Heidegger took as a theme in the study of anxiety in Being and Time either. "Deinos" means something like the old English sense of the world "terrible," not in the sense of "detestable" but in the sense of "astounding," "overwhelming," "sublime." "Deinos" signifies that which is wondrous and mighty, that which is powerful and inspiring, that which is greater than we can conceive, and so on. And yet in the manifold on uncanniness that is before us in the world, nothing stands as more uncanny than man:

In the beginning of the ode, there were a number of images of man striving to find a place for himself amidst what is overwhelming. He charts out a place in the sea and is able to raise up the riches of the earth. Man has to break into the vast sway of being and cause a rupture to make his own place within it. Heidegger refers to this (somewhat uncomfortably) as "doing violence." To be human is to "do violence to" the overwhelming manifold that comes to us and pulls us into the orientation and direction that it drives all things towards. The uncanny shows itself as a kind of "fittingness," where there is some "order" and "rank." It is never a mere assemblage of things. The human Dasein has to cause a rupture in the midst of this to set up its "world." It has to set something up in the midst of the overwhelming to be the site and ground of its own world-disclosure.

The next section of the ode moves from the mastery of the land and sea to the use of language and foundations of culture and civilization. And yet, we should never see this as a kind of "evolution" or "perfection" of the previous struggle. Dasein is always in danger of being bogged down in the "familiarity" and "ordinariness" of its surroundings. It is only by constantly returning to the inceptive struggle that it can continue to "do violence" and hence to be:

We have already alluded to the fact that this is not a matter of describing and clarifying the domains and behavior of the human, who is one being among many; instead, this is a poetic projection of human being on the basis of its extreme possibilities and limits. In this way, we have also warded off the other opinion, according to which the ode recounts the development of humanity from a wild huntsman and a traveler by dugout canoe, to a builder of cities and person of culture. These are notions from cultural anthropology and the psychology of primitives. They arise from falsely transferring a science of nature that is already untrue in itself to human being. The fundamental error that underlies such ways of thinking is the opinion that the inception of history is primitive and backward, clumsy and weak. The opposite is true. The inception is what is most uncanny and mightiest. What follows is not a development but flattening down as mere widening out; it is the inability to hold on to the inception, it makes the inception innocuous and exaggerates it into a perversion of what is great, into greatness and extension purely in the sense of number and mass. The uncanniest is what it is because it harbors such an inception in which, from overabundance, everything breaks out at once into what is overwhelming and is to be surmounted.
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Chapter 4.119 [34]

Dasein is thus caught in a constant push-and-pull of falling into the familiarity and ordinariness of its surroundings while also being driven to return to the inceptive struggle in the face of the overwhelming. However, there is something which provides it with a sense of finitude that limits this constant tension and gives it a boundary. The answer is the same as it was in Being and Time: It is Dasein's own death. As the ode says, death is the single thing that Dasein comes up to and is unable to overcome or struggle against. Dasein, in its finitude, thus becomes a happening in which the forces of being are wrested into an order via acts of "violence." [35]

We may now return to Parmenides. When Parmenides says that apprehension or "noein" and being or "phusis" belong-together, he is calling attention to this reciprocal relationship. There is an overwhelming "fittingness" around Dasein. And it must enact the "violence" of knowing in order to find its way and ground its world.

Again, we must remember that "war" in Heraclitus is "polemos," not mere fighting and quarreling. It is the primal conflict of being, not-being, and seeming. Anything that comes into being as phusis does so against the background of this polemos. But when he says that "justice is strife," the word being translated as "justice" is "dike" in the Greek. And "justice" here can by no means be fully grasped merely by what goes on in law courts, any more than polemos can be fully grapsed merely by what happens on the battlefield. Dike means "justice," but more broadly means a kind of order, a fittingness, a sense of custom. For Heraclitus, "dike" is what fits together the opposed. It is an enjoining structure. It is what allows things to be set apart in phusis and come to presence.

And if we remember the beginning of Parmenides's poem, the one who watches as gatekeeper over the ways of being, seeming, and the nothing is none other than the personification of "justice" or "dike." This is the hint that it is only against a kind of order and fittingness that things can open up. In Heidegger's words, apprehending is always "a decision FOR being AGAINST nothing and a confrontation WITH seeming." It always moves humanity out of its comfort and into the uncanny. Its belonging-together with being is always something that happens via a struggle

In the logos, which we understand as the essence of language, humanity is able to gather things out of the overwhelming, set them into limits, and bring them to stand. Humans are the gatherers, who stand and act in logos. They tame the overwhelming and preserve it. Just as truth-as-unconcealment always has to leave something obscured and covered-up, the logos must always make a selection and a decision. It always has to center some things above others. It does not simply gather at random, but establishes rank and measure. In so doing, Dasein must govern this unconcealment and constantly guard it against concealment and covering-up.

All of this has been forgotten. This inceptive understanding of the logos was not maintained. "Logos" has been narrowed down from the gathering and bringing to stand of the overwhelming into merely "reason" and "rationality." In so doing, Aristotle's conception of the human being as "zoon logon echon" or an "animal with logos" was diluted and distorted into the "animal rationale" of the Latin.

This first and foremost began with Plato. Plato first began to define "being," that which really "is," as "idea." This word is derived from "eidos" and literally refers to the visual appearance or "look" of something. Of course, anyone who has read Plato knows that his whole theory of "ideas" or "forms" is something beyond the physical senses. But the reduction of the entire drama of phusis to something's "mere" visual appearance continues to set the standard for how he apprehends being. Now it is merely the ability to be conceptualized in a mental process that defines something's being. The emerging sway that Dasein gathers in an act of violence is lost.

Aletheia, the unconcealment that unfolds in the emerging sway of phusis, now becomes "homoiosis" or "similitiude" and "mimesis" or "resemblance." Now it becomes something that correctness can be assigned to with regard to "the real thing." Logos now means merely a property of assertion. It now refers to propositions being correct or incorrect. And now that assertion in each case refers to the "hypokeimenon," the "thing lying under" or "subject." Being now displays itself in every case as "ousia" or "substance." We have been reduced to a merely mathematical understanding, where there are independent "things" that we attach categories like "being large," "being related," and "being in a state" to. And under Christianity this gets further exacerbated by the idea that all things were created by God and therefore were all thought out rationally in advance.

3.a.vii. The Rejection of "Values"

This brings us to the final of the four divisions and the most controversial: the division between being and "the ought." This is one of the few times that Heidegger directly addresses ethics or morals as a philosophical subject. His treatment of it is brief and somewhat troubling.

Becoming, seeming, and thinking have all been shown to have originally occurred along with being and not been opposed to it. In doing so, Heidegger has been able to at least give us a hint of what a non-metaphysical philosophy could look like. But when we think of the concept of ethics, it seems to be completely mired in the language and framework of metaphysics. This makes us wonder: Does post-metaphysical philosophy also have to be post-ethical? And wouldn't a philosophy free of ethics be a very dangerous one indeed? The fact that Heidegger was at this time a member and supporter of the Nazi party of course makes these concerns all the more palpable.

The western sense of ethics is grounded in metaphysics. All of this begins when Plato defines being as an "idea." As we already showed, this is where the understanding of nature as an emerging sway that unfolds in a dynamic fashion shifts to an understanding of nature as a series of discrete, static things that are combined and manipulated in a mathematical fashion. And part of that is Plato proclaiming that the highest idea is the idea of the Good.

This is the introduction of ethics based on "values" or "the ought." That is to say, there emerges a contrast between what "ought to be" or "should be" based on values and what there "is." Nature becomes a realm which is devoid of any inherent value. All values become something that is projected onto nature by a subject. This finds its most sophisticated realization in Kant's categorical imperative. And all of it is seems clearly to be caught up in the framework of subject divided from object, self divided from world, and being divided from the ought.

But how would we be able to evaluate what is right or wrong, good or evil, worth doing or not, and anything else like that without some sense of "values?" Heidegger hsa no answer in Introduction to Metaphysics. Instead, he ends the discussion with this infamous passage:

With the being of values, the maximum in confusion and deracination has been reached. Yet because the expression "value" is starting to look worn out, especially because it also plays a role in economic theory, one now calls values "totalities." With this term, however, just the spelling has changed--although when they are called totalities it is easier to see what they are at bottom--namely, half-measures. But in the domain of the essential, half-measures are always more fatal than the Nothing that is so terribly feared. In 1928 there appeared the first part of a collected bibliography on the concept of value. It cites 661 publications on the concept of value. Probably by now there are a thousand. All this calls itself philosophy. In particular, what is peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism, but which has not the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement [namely, the encounter between global technology and modern humanity], is fishing in these troubled waters of "values" and "totalities."
Yet we can see how stubbornly the thought of values entrenched itself in the nineteenth century when we see that even Nietzsche, and precisely he, thinks completely within the perspective of the representation of values. The subtitle to his projected main work, The Will to Power, is Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values. Its third book is headed: Attempt at a New Positing of Values. Because Nietzsche was entangled in the confusion of the representation of values, because he did not understand its questionable provenance, he never reached the genuine center of philosophy. But even if some future thinker should reach the center again--we today can only labor to pave the way--he will not avoid entanglement either; it will just be a different entanglement. No one can leap over his own shadow.
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Chapter 4.151-152 [37]

This is a somewhat ominous conclusion. However, Frank Schalow has presented an interesting interpretation over what a Heideggerian conception of ethics without values could look like. Heidegger, like Kant before him, believes that freedom is the first and foremost condition for there to be any conception of ethics. If we are not free, we cannot be judged to be ethical or moral. We cannot judge right or wrong without the ability to make a decision. But for Heidegger, "freedom" is not something we HAVE but is something we RECEIVE.

Insofar as Dasein receives the gift of unconcealment, it can reciprocate by participating in the process of disclosure. Before there can be any "freedom" in the sense of being able to do as we wish, there is "freedom" in the sense of being open and responside to the sway of unconcealment itself. Ethics now becomes a kind of "stewardship." Much as we would seek to protect and conserve the gift we receive from the natural world in a reciprocal relationship, we guard our freedom by promoting and guarding over the freedom we have with others. We let others be. We let them have their own free relationship with being. But we do so in a way that is vigilant and not indifferent. This cooperative preservation of disclosure is perhaps what ethics could look like without being bogged doing in something like "values." [38]

3.b. Art and Poetry

Central texts for this section:
"Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" aka "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935-1936)
"Wozu Dichter?" aka "What Are Poets For?" (1946)
"Die Sprache" aka "Language" (1950)

3.b.i. The Artwork as a Happening of Truth

The first thing to make clear about this section is that unlike many other philosophers' writings about art and aesthetics, Heidegger's writings on art are by no means a mere footnote or addendum to his "main" project of ontology. For Heidegger, the study of art plays a role in his entire project of asking the question of being, and quite a substantial one at that. Much of the following will have special value and implications for creators and appreciators of artworks. But that is more of a "bonus" to the main goal of them, just as all the phenomenological insights in Being and Time were not there for their own sake, but for the sake of something greater. And that something greater, then and now, is to explicate the question of being in a new, original fashion.

His most famous text on the subject of art is called "The Origin of the Work of Art." This section will focus on it extensively, but also on his writings about poetry, which was the kind of artwork that interested him the most. Heidegger wrote about poetry from the beginning of his career to its end, so we can chart quite a bit of his development through those writings.

What is it, then, that is so ontologically relevant in "The Origin of the Work of Art?" In the briefest terms, it is that the close study of art can reveal much about the nature of truth and the historical unfolding of being. This text was first published in 1936, just one year after Introduction to Metaphysics. The themes and "positions" are largely the same, but much of the language and imagery has changed. The essay has an amorphous structure and drifts around quite freely, which makes its exact focus easy to lose track of. But let us attempt to summarize it.

As in Being and Time and all of Heidegger's work, we have to first admit that we are inevitably caught in a hermeneutic circle. To say what "art" is, we have to have some conception of "artworks" and "artists," but we can have no conception of artworks and artists without knowing what "art" is. And as in all of his work, the circle is not a vicious one. We only have to enter it in the correct fashion.

What can we say about artworks? First and foremost, we can say that they are "things." No matter how "sophisticated" we are as artists, we cannot get around the "thingly" character of works of art:

Works of art are familiar to everyone. Architectural and sculptural works can be seen installed in public places, in churches, and in dwellings. Artworks of the most diverse periods and peoples are housed in collections and exhibitions. If we consider the works in their untouched actuality and do not deceive ourselves, the result is that the works are as naturally present as are things. The picture hangs on the wall like a rifle or a hat. A painting, e.g., the one by Van Gogh that represents a pair of peasant shoes, travels from one exhibition to another. Works of art are shipped like coal from the Ruhr and logs from the Black Forest. During the First World War Hölderlin's hymns were packed in the soldier's knapsack together with cleaning gear. Beethoven's quartets lie in the storerooms of the publishing house like potatoes in a cellar.
All works of art have this thingly character. What would they be without it? But perhaps this rather crude and external view of the work is objectionable to us. Shippers and charwomen in museums may operate with such conceptions of the work of art. We, however, have to take works as they are encountered by those who experience and enjoy them. But even the much-vaunted aesthetic experience cannot get around the thingly aspect of the artwork. There is something stony in a work of architecture, wooden in a carving, colored in a painting, spoken in a linguistic work, sonorous in a musical composition. The thingly element is so irremovably present in the artwork that we are compelled rather to say conversely that the architectural work is in stone, the carving is in wood, the painting is in color, the linguistic work in speech, the musical composition in sound. "Obviously," it will be replied. No doubt. But what is this self-evidently thingly element in the work of art?
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" [39]

Whenever we use this word "thing" so uncritically, what are we really talking about? What is a "thing?" Again, to answer this question correctly, we have to make the lineage of metaphysical distortions clear. Traditionally, we call anything a "thing" that is not merely "nothing." In a traditional concpetion, the "thing" is that around which many properties have assembled. It is "to hypokeimenon" in the Greek, meaning the "subject" or literally "that which lies beneath," contrasted with "ta symbebekota" or the "characteristics" or "properties" that float above it or attach to it but are not essential to it.

But this old, Aristotelian concpetion of subject and predicate doesn't really reflect the structure of the "thing" as we come to know it. It doesn't account for te difference we have in apprehending different kinds of things, for one. We are certainly more likely to say that a stone in the road is a "mere thing" than a cow in the field, much less a fellow human being, and certainly much more than whatever a work of art is.

In contrast to this, a popular conception from the phenomenological tradition that Heidegger rose out of is that the "thing" is a kind of unity of sensations, a gathering-together of the manifold of sense data that we perceive the world in. Of course, the old criticism from Being and Time can be revived here:

What applies to hearing applies for any sense, of course. We never first experience something like "red." We have to abstract this out of our experience of roses, of blood, of traffic lights, of fire trucks, and so on. Heidegger says that if the former, Aristotelian conception keeps the "thing" too "far way" from us, then this phenomenological one brings it too "close." In both extremes, the thing itself in its thinghood vanishes. The thing must be allowed to show itself in its own self-containment.

This gives us a hint to the third idea, which is to see a "thing" as "formed matter." Anything is somehow a collection of matter that we distinguish by its particular form and shape. However, this is what Being and Time called a present-at-hand understanding of entities. And we can again revive the criticism from that text. When we make use of equipment, we take it as more than just matter and form. Shoes, for example, only show themselves AS the thing they really are when they are worn and used. And in doing so, far from appearing as "mere" formed matter, they retreat from our experience altogether and merely sit in the background of it. The whole idea of a "thing" as a formed piece of matter is ultimately also strengthened by some 2000 years of Christian theological bias that takes everything as intentionally "formed" or "constructed" by God. We are biased to view things as "formed matter" in a worldview where God is the ultimate and final craftsman.

While it seems easy at first glance, in fact merely taking a thing in its own "thing-being' is a very difficult thing to do. We cannot rely on the undstanding of a thing as a substance bearing properties, as a unity of sensations, or as formed matter. But now Heidegger gives an example of what it might look like to sit with the thing itself and take it in its own being. He does so via a very difficult analysis of a painting of a pair of peasant shoes by Vincent van Gogh:

When shoes like these are adequately used as equipment, they would become transparent to the user. When engaged in her work, the peasant woman in the field would not notice her shoes as a "thing" in and of themselves, unless something had gone wrong (like a hole appearing in one of them). One would think that in a painting like this, which merely isolates the shoes as a sort of still life, their equipmental being would be denied and obscured. But the opposite is true. Heidegger sketches out the experience that this painting gives us in poetic terms:

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, and trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.
But perhaps it is only in the picture that we notice all this about the shoes. The peasant woman, on the other hand, simply wears them. If only this simple wearing were so simple. When she takes off her shoes late in the evening, in deep but healthy fatigue, and reaches out for them again in the still dim dawn, or passes by them on the day of rest, she knows all this without noticing or reflecting. The equipmental being of the equipment consists indeed in its usefulness. But this usefulness itself rests in the abundance of an essential being of the equipment. We call it reliability. By virtue of this reliability the peasant woman is made privy to the silent call of the earth; by virtue of the reliability of the equipment she is sure of her world. World and earth exist for her, and for those who are with her in her mode of being, only thus--in the equipment. We say "only" and therewith fall into error; for the reliability of the equipment first gives to the simple world its security and assures to the earth the freedom of its steady thrust.
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" [41]

We have not been able to apprehend the "thingly" character of the thing by viewing it through any of our traditional philosophical schematics. But in the experience of this work of art, something about the thing has been revealed to us. In this painting, we have a better knowledge of what the true "being" of these shoes are, and not in a crude way (like an illustration in a textbook). We do not come to understand what the thing is because it is "reproduced" in the artwork. The artwork rather captures its "essence." We have come to understand the shoes because artworks are a "happening" of truth.

As a second example, Heidegger points to a short poem by C.F. Meyer called "Roman Fountain." In htis poem, as in Van Gogh's painting, we experience truth "happening" and the "being" of this fountain becomes clearer through it:

3.b.ii. World and Earth

How can an artwork be a "happening" of truth? Because truth, as Heidegger consistently argues, is "aletheia." It is not merely a truth-as-correspondence. It is first always a "diclosure." As we saw in Introduction to Metaphysics, the emergent sway of phusis is something that comes out of a primal struggle ("polemos"). And this struggle is always historical. If truth happens in the artwork, it must be something that is received and struggled for in a particular epoch of history.

In "The Origin of the Work of Art," Heidegger calls this a "world." In Being and Time, he defined the "world" of Dasein's being-in-the-world as the nexus of intelligibility into which we as Dasein always find ourselves thrown into. In a sense, the "world" he refers to here is similar. Any historical people must take up the primal struggle and create a "world" out of it. And for Heidegger, works of art do this. They are a disclosure of truth. However, this also means that their "world" is inherently "historical." The "world" (the nexus of intelligibility and way things come to appear and be) of the ancient Greeks was fundamentally different than the world of medieval Europe, as much as the world of medieval Europe was different from our world today.

By that measure, the "world" of Greek marble statues is torn away from them when they are placed in museums some 2000 years later. The world of an altarpiece from a Gothic cathedral is torn away from it when it is placed in a museum. The world of an ancient temple is torn away from it when it is no longer used. The world of the plays of Sophocles are torn away from them when they are not performed in their contemporary age. The world of a totem pole is torn away from it when it is moved into a museum. All of these works opened up a "world," but that world is now something we can only get a sense of when we see them in museums or study them as objects of scholarship. World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be undone. We can "remember" worlds, but we can never "recreate" them.

On the one hand, artworks always open up a world. But if we remember, there is no opening up and revealing without a concelaing and a covering up that it occurs against. This mysterious realm of the unknown, upon which everything rests and gets torn out of is called "earth" in contrast to the "world" in the language of this text. To get a handle on what this looks like, Heidegger moves on to his last example of a world-defining work, a Greek temple:

A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico. By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as a holy precinct. The temple and its precinct, however, do not fade away into the indefinite. It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people. Only from and in this expanse does the nation first return to iteslf for the fulfillment of its vocation.
Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the obscurity of that rock's bulky yet spontaneuous support. Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, first brings to radiance the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple's firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and pull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and thus come to appear as what they are. The Greeks early called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things phusis. It illuminates also that on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth. What this word says is not to be associated with the idea of a mass of matter desposited somewhere, or with the merely astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises as such. In the things that arise, earth occurs essentially as the sheltering agent.
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" [43]

In this description, we have an idea of how artworks can "reveal" the thinghood of things, even without "depicting" anything. Artworks are things that a historical people orients itself around. An artwork is not just a representation of some beliefs or conceptions that already exist, but is a happening of truth itself. A "world" is always set out and enacted through a struggle in great works of art:

Julian Young makes the point that in thinking of a "work" like a Greek temple or Gothic cathedral, we should not necessarily think of these as one particular artwork, but as a "type" of art that is instantiated over and over again by a certain historical people. [45] A temple for the Greeks or a cathedral for the medieval Europeans does not just "represent" or "express" something that is already "there." They set up the entire "world" of the peoples who gather around them. The Greek temple reminds the people of the sacredness of the gods in the natural world. The cathedral reminds the people of the relation of God to man and the practice of faith. A world is "founded" or "erected" by these artworks in constantly reorienting a people around what matters most.

And yet, that is not all. Any great work of art does not just proffer us a world, but sets up this world against the ever-concealing background of "earth" that no disclosure can exist without. In Heidegger's words, earth "rises up through" or "juts through" the world:

The world is the self-opening openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing. World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world. Yet the relation between world and earth does not wither away into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another. The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as shelting and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.
The opposition of world and earth is strife. But we would surely all too easily falsify its essence if we were to confound strife with discord and dispute, and thus see it only as disorder and destructoin. In essential strife, rather, the opponents raise each other into the self-assertion of their essential natures. Self-assertion of essence, however, is never a rigid insistence upon some contingent state, but surrender to the concealed originality of the provenance of one's own being. In strife, each opponent carries the other beyond itself. Thus the strife becomes ever more intense as striving, and more properly what it is. The more strife, for its part, outdoes itself, the more inflexibly do the opponents let themselves go into the intimacy of simple belonging to one another. The earth cannot dispense with the open region of the world if it itself is to appear as earth in the liberated surge of its self-seclusion. The world in trun cannot soar out of the earth's sight if, as the governing breadth and path of all essential destiny, it is to ground itself on a resolute foundation.
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" [46]

3.b.iii. Art as Techne

In this strife of world and earth, everything first comes to intelligibility. Unconcealment itself emerges from the counterplay of world and earth. A work of art is one way that this uncocealment is set forth. We must now ask: How can there be something like art that allows truth to "happen?"

Certainly one thing that distinguishes artworks for us is that they are, in Heidegger's words, "worked and effected." That is to say, they are MADE. Any artwork is a "bringing-forth." It is something that is created. Of course, the creation of any piece of equipment is just as much a "bringing-forth." Chairs and tables, forks and knives, toilets and sinks, and all the rest are all "made" just as much as paintings and sculptures are.

It seems that both "art" and "craft" are defined by "making." But the truth is that the ancient Greeks had no word for "fine arts." They had the same word for "art" and what we would call "craft." That word is "techne." The artist and the craftsman were both called a "technites." "Techne" is "art" in some sense, but it has a much broader meaning. We have echoes of this in our modern language when we talk about things like the "art" of war, the "art" of conversation, martial "arts" and so on.

"Techne" is "art" in a sense of "know-how." Aristotle would later divide "techne" as a "practical" know-how from "episteme" as a "theoretical" knowledge. But in the pre-metaphysical past, the two words "techne" and "episteme" are used almost interchangeably. On the basis of this, we can tell that the original meaning of "art" then signifies not creating nor even making. It signifies a mode of KNOWING.

"Techne" refers to the activity of an artist and craftsman because by either creating artworks or equipment, they cause beings to come into presence. To create is not mere "craft." It is to let something emrege and come into its own being. This happens in the creation of artworks, but it does just as much in the founding of political states, in athletic festivals, in the performance of tragedies, and all the other ways in which a historical people comes into contact with what is most important: its own historical destiny.

However, we know from Introduction to Metaphysics that the primal struggle is never something that gets resolved without humans. And this is why, for Heidegger, a great work of art must not only have a "creator," but also must have its "preservers." An artwork opens up a world, but that world cannot come to fruition unless it finds its people to "enact" it. But this is never simply a subject apprehending some object. As we know from Being and Time, Dasein never simply exists as a free-floating subject encountering objects. And of course this is true for artworks too. For Heidegger, it is the state of "Entschlossenheit" or "resoluteness," as defined in Being and Time, that a people must stand in to preserve the work. The work is only preserved if we stand in the sublimity for the truth that happens in it. This goes beyond all "scholarship" and all "subjective" or "private" experiences of the work of art.

All this allows us a better understanding of how to conceptualize the "thing" if not as a substance bearing properties, as a unity of sensations, or as formed matter. The "thing" belongs to "earth." It only reveals itself in the opposition and strife of earth and world. And the work helps us make that more clear and salient. Art is a setting-forth of truth. All creation is a drawing up of something primal and original, like water from a spring. The word "Origin" in the title of "The Origin of the Work of Art" is "Ursprung," which literally means "primal leap." Art is always a drawing up of something primal and original, and is always the beginning of history anew. Artworks open up a world. And that world is sustained as long as it has its preservers. Heidegger summarizes it in the following way:

The setting-into-work of truth thrusts up the unfamiliar and extraordinary and at the same time thrusts down the ordinary and what we believe to be such. The truth that discloses itself in the work can never be proved or derived from what went before. What went before is refuted in its exclusive reality by the work. What art founds can therefore never be compensated or made up for by what is already present and available. Founding is an overflow, an endowing, a bestowal.
The poetic projection of truth that sets itself into work as figure is also never carried out in the direction of an indeterminate void. Rather, in the work, truth is thrown toward the coming preservers, that is, toward an historical group of men. What is thus cast forth is, however, never an arbitrary demand. Genuinely poetic projection is the opening up or disclosure of that into which human being as historical is already cast. This is the earth and, for an historical people, its earth, the self-closing ground on which it rests together with everything that already is, though still hidden from itself. It is, however, its world, which prevails in virtue of the relation of human being to the unconcealedness of being. For this reason, everything with which man is endowed must, in the projection, be drawn up from the closed ground and expressly set upon this ground. In this way the ground is first grounded as the bearing ground.
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" [47]

3.b.iv. The "Aesthetic" Conception of Art

Like all of Heidegger's later thought, this reflection on art has a profound sense of urgency. In the modern era, we do not approach art in this way at all. The modern understanding of art is completely dominated by "aesthetics." For Heidegger, "aesthetics" is as much a term of disparagement when talking about art as "metaphysics" is when talking about ontology. The "aesthetic" understanding of art is limited. In it, we distinguish "fine arts" as things to be contemplated in a kind of disinterested enjoyment from "crafts" as things to be used without thought or care. This is completely different from the ancient conception, which views all bringing- forth and making of things as "techne."

In the modern aesthetic understanding, of art, the value of art is all concerned with "beauty." This is even more evident in the original German, where the term used for "fine arts" as distinct from "crafts" is "die schöne Kunste," literally "the beautiful arts." The aesthetic coneption values "beauty" among all else. Heidegger almost never mentions "beauty" as a reason for art being valuable. "Beauty" as we know it is an aftereffect of the original mystery and sublimity of this revelation of the struggle between world and earth.

Under the aesthetic conception, we may have a fear that equalizing the creation of "fine arts" with "crafts" will drag fine art down to a level where it no longer has in special value. In Heidegger's words, it would give us the understanding of art of "shippers and charwomen." But for Heidegger, it seems to be the opposite. Returning art to one "techne" among others would not drag art down to the level of the mundane but rather raise every other "techne" to the high level of art. It is rather the "aesthetic" understanding of art that devalues and limits it. It merely makes us passive consumers of works in museums, moving from one piece to the next in a gallery until each one blends together in the way one potato chip blends into the next when we eat a bag of them. In Heidegger's words, it turns artists into "pasty chefs." Heidegger argues that the supremacy of an "aesthetic" conception of art is what has begun to lead to a general decline of worth in modern western art.

Such is the argument of "The Origin of the Work of Art" as I understand it. There are, however, some questions we might want to ask about it. I directly paraphrase these from Julian Young. One question that remains somewhat unclear is just HOW earth "rises up through" the artwork. When using equipment like shoes or utensils or whatever else, we tend to forget and ignore their material "thingly" quality such as their color, their lustre, and so on. On the other hand, in artworks this "thingly" quality appears before us. As he says at the beginning, there is something to the color and texture of a painting, the weight and shape of a stone, and so on. Of course, the understanding of the material we have in appreciating these works as artworks can never be captured in merely a weighing and measuring of the qualities of their materials in a scientific manner. But there is always something thingly in the work that we apprehend, and we would think that the value of this is more than the sheer "beauty" of those materials, as that would bring us back into an "aesthetic" conception of artists as "pastry chefs" where we only passively appreciate materiality for its beauty and nothing more.

In some passages, Heidegger seems to imply that experiencing the materiality and thingly character of artworks is a way that earth "rises up through" them. When we consider the "thingly" nature of paint on canvas, we are aware that there is a whole infinite range of other ways that this paint could have been used to become intelligible to us. The same goes for the stone used in a statue. The stone could have been formed and carved in a number of other ways, and we are aware that in its carving it is being delimited and constrained in a sense. This unites the metaphorical use of the word "earth" with a more literal use of "earth." In both cases, we have to create a world of intelligibility out of "earth" in the sense of both the obverse side of meaning and in the sense of the literal materials we draw out of the physical planet.

Julian Young says that certainly many great works of art only become complete via the "thingliness" of their material. He argues that perhaps for an ancient Greek temple, the heaviness of the stony material adds a lot to the impression of eternal solitidy that it has in a way that, for example, wooden material would not. But Young gives the example of a Gothic cathedral for what seems like a counter-example. Most would say that to have the proper respect and awe of a Gothic cathedral we have to feel the pull of the ascension of its impossibly vertical upward projection. But to do that, we have to precisely IGNORE the fact that it is made of heavy stone and feel like it is made of a kind of immaterial, ethereal stuff instead. It seems, then, that the question of HOW earth rises up shouldn't be seen as settled, if there is even one answer that could sum up all the ways that artworks do so. [48]

Something else we might feel concerned about is that Heidegger seems to view great art as inherently "communal." It has to find a people that enacts the world it opens in order to be completed and seen as a great work. But we know that there have been tons of great works of art that were not appreciated in their own time at all. How do these fit into this picture? Is there no room for works that are minor or unappreciated? What about Francisco Goya's "black paintings," which not only were not appreciated in his time, but were apparently not even intended for others to see, as they were painted as murals on his walls after he became a recluse.

Julian Young sees this as a problem. However, some interpreters like Iain Thomson have argued that this is a misreading that focuses too closely on the example of the Greek temple. We don't need to ask the question of what Heidegger would think about a piece of art that was not appreciated in its own time. We have one in the text itself: the Van Gogh painting that he begins the text by anlayzing. Everyone knows that Van Gogh was totally unappreciated until after his death. In fact, he is probably the most famous example of the eternal story of the struggling artist. And yet this painting is the one Heidegger uses to show the power of the strife of world and earth in a modern art piece. [49]

By no means then should we interpret Heidegger as a staunch classicist who is opposed to everything modern. This is unfortunatley a caricature of him which is all too easy to fall into given that "The Origin of the Work of Art," like Introduction to Metaphysics, was written while he was an active member of the Nazi Party. It is all too easy to map his worship of the ancient world onto Nazi rhetoric of worship of the past, of tradition, and of the strong promotion of Greek-inspired neoclassical sculpture in opposition to "degenerate" modern art.

But a study of Heidegger's biography proves this idea untenable. His views on art are one of the many things that makes him a difficult and frustrating person to get a hold of. The "Nazi" Heidegger's taste in art could not be any more full of things that Nazi leadership would have considered prime examples of the "degeneracy" of modern art. To quote Julian Young at length:

Heidegger expressed, inter alia, great esteem for, in music, Igor Stravinsky and Carl Orff, in poetry, Georg Trakl, Paul Celan, René Char, Stefan George, and Rainer Maria Rilke, in architecture, for Le Corbusier, in sculpture, Bernhard Heiliger and Eduardo Chillida, and, in painting, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Braque, Paul Klee, and Paul Cézanne. And in the officially despised "art business" of modernity he had, in fact, a considerable number of friends and acquaintances: inter alios, George Schmit, the Basel gallery director and friend of Paul Klee, the art collector Ernst Beyeler, and the art historians Hans Jantzen and Heinrich Petzet. (The latter he encouraged to publish Rilke's Letters on Cézanne and to pursue book projects concerned with both Cézanne and Klee.) In the mid-1950s he made a special excursion to Holland to see the Van Goghs in the newly-opened Kröller-Müller museum outside Arnhem and was in frequent contact with the Erker Gallery in the Swiss town of St Gallen for which he wrote (or rather engraved on lithographer's stone) the essay on sculpture, "Art and Space." Not least significant is the fact that Heidegger continued, as he had done all his life, to write poetry--sometimes of considerable quality. The later Heidegger was, then, in a word, up to his elbows in the "art business" of his times. His life, his relationships, and his judgments on individual artists are completely at odds with his generalized pronouncements on the character of modern art as such.
Julian Young, Heidegger's Philosophy of Art [50]

Thinking about how modern art can function without becoming the domain of "pastry chefs" is something that it would do us well to keep in mind as we continue to discuss these writings. Iain Thomson argues that Heidegger's description of the Greek temple is thus by no means a call for us to exactly recreate the way that the Greeks engaged with their great works of art. He is quite clear that the "world" of the ancient Greeks is long gone. His evocation is meant to show what a non-aesthetic appreciation of and engagement with great works of a certain time has looked like in the past. And his study of the Van Gogh painting is an attempt to show how we could respond to and preserve the "world" opened up by the great artworks of our present. And that is precisely why Heidegger wrote this text. "The Origin of the Work of Art" aims to help us break out of the aesthetic view of artworks and create a ground for artists and preservers, operating in this new and yet ancient paradigm.

3.b.v. Hölderlin and the Flight of the Gods

With this is mind, we may turn to some other texts related to the medium that Heidegger prized above all others: poetry. Reading Heidegger's later texts, it is clear that he had deeply poetic sensibilities. It should be no surprise that poetry was so important in his view. It was indeed fundamental enough for him to say in "The Origin of the Work of Art" that "all art is essentially poetry." What does this mean? Why does poetry come before any other art? The reason has to do with the extreme priority that Heidegger attaches to language.

Traditionally, the entire divide in western philosophy between the so-called "analytic" and "continental" sides is thought to have a great deal to do with language. The story goes that it began in the early 20th century with a movement away from solving problems on a metaphysical basis and towards solving them on a linguistic basis. This began with the work of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell in the adoption of propositional logic as the fundamental work of philosophy, found a sophisticated and controversial treatment in early Ludwig Wittgenstein, and has continued to be a fundamental motivating force for the analytic thinkers of greatest substance, including Rudolf Carnap, J.L. Austin, Willard Van Orman Quine, and Saul Kripke, among others.

Certainly, Heidegger can in no way be thought of as belonging to this analytic tradition. But for a "continental" thinker, he attached an enormous importance to language. In one text, he famously claimed that "language is the house of being." This phrase reads as something of an echo of Wittgenstein's famous quote that "The limits of my language means the limits of my world." But what exactly does it mean to say that language is the house of being? Can we assume that Heidegger believes that reality is in some sense language or that language is an irreducible aspect of reality, in the way that the early Wittgenstein seems to argue? I would argue that in some sense we can, but not if we understand language as merely an accumulation of words and something that can be understood via rules of grammar and logic. This is all a latter present-at-hand understanding of language. Language is always, first and foremost, the ground where the primal struggle of world and earth is enacted. For Heidegger, the most original form of language is never logical but is always poetic:

In the emergent sway of phusis, in the strife of world and earth, "things" are able to come to presence. And one of the primary ways that Dasein allows this to come to fruition is through the enacting of language. We respond to the "clearing" of aletheia by delimiting and putting boundaries around things as CONCEPTS, as WORDS, as PROCLAMATIONS, and so forth. This was prefigured in the section on "discourse" in Being and Time to a degree. Before there is language, there is intelligibility. In the response to the call of unconcealment, we shape it and enact our historical resolve against it by responding in logos (in language). We "gather" the sway of phusis and allow "things" the freedom to stand in their own self-subsistence. The first and purest place that this happens is in poetry.

Heidegger references and engages with many poets, but there is one who is ranked above all others as the one who is most central for his thought. That is the German romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin. For Heidegger, Hölderlin outranks any philosopher including Husserl and Aristotle in terms of importance for the development of his thinking. What exactly is it that is so important about Hölderlin in particular compared to, say, Homer or Hesiod or Sophocles, all of whom are far more intimately connected to the ancient roots of western thought that Heidegger is so concerned with?

We can come to understand the particular relevance of Hölderlin and with him the importance of poetry itself for Heidegger's philosophical project as a whole by first consulting some of Hölderlin's poems. I will follow Julian Young's analysis quite closely at times. We should start with an excerpt from Hölderlin's poem "Andenken" or "Remembrance:"

"Poets establish that which endures." Here, we see the ancient conception of a work as something that "opens up" a world and calls for its preservers. Hölderlin's poetry is so special precisely because it is a "remembrance." His works, which are permeated with Greek imagery and are highly enigmatic and obscure, are an experience of phusis. His work opens up language as that which responds to the unfolding of being and stands in the presence of the emergent sway. And this is all the more important to do as our current age is one of darkness and desolation. For Heidegger, we live in a time where the "gods" have abandoned us. We can only come face to face with this crisis by first recognizing it and responding in an appropriate fashion. The sense of "holy mourning" that permeates Hölderlin's poetry is the attitude we must adopt in response to it.

Julian Young argues that there is an evolution in Heidegger's thought that can be traced over the course of his many writings on Hölderlin. At first, he seems to believe that the ancient Greek heritage evoked in Hölderlin's poetry and the renaissance of thought to happen among the German people were to be one and the same. He believed that the same "gods" would return. Again, we can think that some of this may have been due to the influence of Nazi rhetoric. However, it is a difficult idea to preserve. More than anything, it is difficult because Hölderlin's Greek gods are very different from the ones we see in authentic Greek sources. They are a romantic era conception of the Greek gods and show clear influence from Judeo-Christian thought and values.

It makes sense, then, that Heidegger would become far more pessimistic about the idea of a world from the past coming back to life. It seems that there must be new gods, new thinking, and new works that will unite people and bring them in touch with the most important and holy aspects of their being once more. There is nothing "holy" and uniting in the modern age. And Hölderlin's value is to show us a path toward what something like the holy might look like. [53]

It should be obvious that Heidegger means nothing like a traditional Christian religious conception when he talks about something like "the holy." The fact that he almost always refers to "gods" in the plural, rather than God in the singular should be proof enough of how far removed he is from his Catholic roots in his thinking. But his conception doesn't seem to map onto a traditional "pagan" concpetion when he uses phrases like "gods" and "the holy" either. We will touch on this more in later texts, but it is clear that Heidegger sees "gods" as a sort of personification and manifestation of "the holy," meaning the mystery and sublimity of being, something which is very broad and could be defined in many ways.

Heidegger has a difficult essay called "What Are Poets For?" where he asks the question "What are poets for in a destitute time?" The essay was written in 1946, which was certainly as "destitute" a time as the German nation had ever experienced in its history. But for Heidegger, the ruins of war and fascism were only the outward effects of something far larger. This question iteslf is taken from the seventh strophe of Hölderlin's elegy "Bread and Wine:"

We ask again: What are poets for in a destitute time? We should look at Hölderlin's analogy once more. He compares poets in times of need to priests of the wine god Dionysos. That is, rather than priests at a large public festival that gathers an enitre people in splendor, they are private cultist followers. They move quietly and subtly in the night. They confront danger and risk failure, fully aware of the abyss that surrounds them. They act in secret, on the traces of something greater, but still must wait for it to make itself manifest. They proceed in a kind of holy mounring and with attentive eyes and ears. In Heidegger's words, poets exist in this age to chase out "the traces of the fugitive gods." Poets cannot force the appearance of new gods. The most they can do is consecrate a ground for the gods who they await and look for signs of their coming.

3.c. Technology and Enframing

Central texts for this section:
"Die Frage nach dem Ding" aka "What Is a Thing?" (1935-1936)
"Die Zeit des Weltbildes" aka "The Age of the World Picture" (1940)
"Die Frage nach der Technik" aka "The Question Concerning Technology" (1949)
"Wissenschaft und Besinnung" aka "Science and Reflection" (1954)

3.c.i. The Crisis of Modern Technology

I have continued to talk about the "crisis" of our age and how "destitute" it is. This theme runs throughout all of later Heidegger. His later writings are poetic and beautiful. They are reflective and mysterious. But they are also written with an unmistakable sense of URGENCY. They again and again refer to how much of a "crisis" is unfolding in our modern age. Now it's finally time to really explain what this "crisis" and "danger" is.

And the answer is actually pretty simple. The "crisis" is technology. More accurately, it is the essence of "machination" or "technicity" that underlies modern technology, which is something we almost never have as much of a sense of. This technicity has had, is having, and will continue to have profound implications that few of us really understand and that we remain inadequate to prepare ourselves for without a deep re-evaluation of philosophy as we understand it.

Heidegger was a rustic. It shouldn't surprise us that he felt some degree of fear and apprehension at the rapidly industrializing world. But it is important to avoid simplifying what his concern really was, which is something very complicated and nuanced. It would be a mistake to read Heidegger as a Unabomber-style primitivist. He did not reject everything modern in technology as a matter of principle. He drove a car, seemed to have used a typewriter on occasion, and apparently in his later years even became fond of watching soccer matches on his neighbor's television set. So his problem was not necessarily with new technology as a whole.

Heidegger understood that humans couldn't merely reject everything and roll back the industrial revolution. They could not do this even if all modern technology were destroyed in a freak solar flare accident. That is because the technicity has already fundamentally affected us in our essence. In that sense, the "danger" of technicity is before any ecological concerns about the overuse of earth's resources and degradation of wild nature, although these are problems that Heidegger was concerned with and that have made and will make his work relevant for generations of ecologists.

The most famous and important text on this theme is a 1949 essay called "The Question Concerning Technology." However, the problem of technicity is one that permeates all of Heidegger's later philosophy. By the end of his career, it is in fact precisely the crisis of modern technology that in his view should orient the whole of contemporary philosophy. With that in mind, we can try to sketch out the general argument of "The Question Concerning Technology" and some other technology-related texts that touch on the same points.

3.c.ii. Poiesis and Techne

Heidegger begins by asking what "technology" is. In our traditional conception, we think of "technology" as a means to an end. "Technology" refers to the way that we create and use tools to accomplish certain goals. In that sense, it is a human activity as well. It is something humans involve themselves with in order to accomplish certain goals. The thought goes that a radar station may be a much more complex mechanism than a weathervane, but that both are, at the end of the day, instruments designed and used to help us accomplish certain goals (in this case, tracking the weather).

But with this conception, we pass over the real "essence" of technology. We will miss what is essentially unfolding in modern technology if we only view technology as a means to an end or an instrument that is orchestrated via human activity.

If technology is a means to an end, then it must stand in relation to that end. It must bring about that end. In short, it must be a cause that brings about an effect. Modern technology stands somehow within the scope of causality. But from where does this view of causality originally come from?

The most sophisticated understanding of causality that we begin with in western philosophy comes from Aristotle, who proposes four "causes," that is, four explanations for how something comes to be. We will explain what these are in brief using the example of a silver chalice as our "effect:"

1. Material cause: The material of a thing that causes it to come into existence. In this case, it would be the silver that the chalice is made out of.

2. Formal cause; The appearance, form, shape, etc. into which the material enters. In this case, it would be the way that the silver is turned into the form of a "chalice" as opposed to that of a brooch, a ring, etc.

3. Final cause: Now thought of as the "purpose" for which something comes into existence, but this is a simplification. It is what gathers and confines the thing in advance, what bounds the thing and keeps it bound. In the case of the chalice, it is the sacrificial rite in which it will be used.

4. Efficient cause: That which beings about the effect in the end. In the case of the chalice, it is the silversmith who "makes" it.

Centuries of scholastic theology and modern rationalist thinking has obscured the original Greek sense of the word "cause." In the modern age we have a very narrow understanding of what a "cause" is. We think of it as the direct event or object that predates the other event or object chronologically and directly has it metaphysically follow after it, like a link in a chain. Under this conception, only the final of these four, the efficient cause of the silversmith, would really count as a "cause." It is the only one that can be a "cause" in the sense of flipping the lightswitch on "causing" the lights to come on.

So why are the material, formal, and final causes counted as "causes" in the first place? What does "cause" even mean here? What is it that unites all four of these modes as things that can be called "causes?" The word "cause" is derived from the Latin "causa" or "casus," which itself is dervied from the verb "cadere" meaning "to fall." "Cause," therefore comes to mean "that which inevitably comes about," "that which comes out as a result in such and such a way." This is already a distortion of the original Greek word "aition."

"Aition" means "that to which something is responsible," "that to which something is indebted." All of these four "causes" are ways in which something becomes "responsible" for something else. Of course, "responsible for" doesn't mean anything like bearing responsibility in a moral sense. Rather, it means that they ALLOW the thing to come to presence. They are forms of "bringing forth" the thing. The word that the ancient Greeks used for this was "poiesis."

"Poiesis" occurs whenever something goes forth into presencing. "Poiesis" happens with the opening of buds from new flowers, the ray of sun bursting from behind a cloud, the wind sweeping through the tall stalks of grass in the field, and so on. But it also happens with human making in art and craft. Human beings make things and bring them to presence. The craftsman creates a boat from the carving and accumulation of wooden boards just as much as the poet brings forth an understanding of things in his words. Indeed, the word "poetry" is etymologically dervied from poiesis. That is because poetry is always a "bringing forth," an allowing of something to stand in its presence. It is a fulfillment of the emergent sway of phusis.

In "The Origin of the Work of Art," it became clear that all forms of creation and making in this sense are "techne." A craftsman or statesman is a technites as much as a painter or poet is. And that is because "techne" at its root is connected to "episteme," meaning "knowledge." Techne refers to a kind of knowin. Techne is a way in which truth (aletheia) first happens as disclosure. Techne is a sense of knowing in the sense of receiving the revelation of truth. And "techne" is, of course, the word that is the root of our modern concept of "technology."

3.c.iii. Standing-Reserve

Now we see the true essence of technology more clearly. While we thought that technology was merely a kind of human activity of using tools to accomplish goals, it is something deeper. Technology is a form of revealing. It is a mode of bringing things forth to stand in their presence. And this is where the particular nature of modern technology as a distinct thing from antique technology becomes clear and becomes disturbing.

A radar station and a weathervane may be indistinct in their essence if we view them both as "tools" used to accomplish certain goals But if we compare them in terms of how they "reveal" things and allow them to stand in their presence, they are completely different. John Steinbeck had a sense of this in The Grapes of Wrath in this evocative passage on the introduction of mechanical equipment to a traditional farm:

Heidegger speaks of the same thing in language that is more philosophical but by no means less poetic. For him, something like a simple weathervane reveals nature and brings things to presence in the sense of poiesis. Any modern piece of technology like a radar station, on the other hand, reveals nature and brings things to presence as a "Herausfordern" or a "challenging-forth." It "challenges" things to stand before it in an unreasonable demand. A lengthy excerpt will make it clear exactly what he means by this:

In contrast, a tract of land is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In sowing grain it places seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy, which can be unleashed either for destructive or for peaceful purposes.
This setting-upon that challenges the energies of nature is an expediting, and in two ways. It expedites in that it unlocks and exposes. Yet that expediting is always itself directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense. The coal that has been hauled out in some mining district has not been produced in order that it may simply be at hand somewhere or other. It is being stored; that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the sun's warmth that is stored in it. The sun's warmth is challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory running.
The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning. This turning sets those machines in motion whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the long-distance power station and its network of cables are set up to dispatch electricity. In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears to be something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives form the essence of the power station. In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousnes that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that is spoken by the two titles: "The Rhine," as dammed up into the power works, and "The Rhine," as uttered by the art-work, in Hölderlin's hymn by that name. But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an obejct on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.
The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. Such challenigng happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is in turn distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end. Neither does it run off into the indeterminate. The revealing reveals to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course. This regulating itself is, for its part, everywhere secured. Regulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the revealing that challenges.
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" [57]

Such is the "unconcealment" of mdoern technology. In it, everything is ordered to be available to stand by and to be able to be further used at will. His word for this is "Bestand" or "standing-reserve." Under modern technology, everything in nature comes to present itself not as its own self, but as "standing-reserve."

It is worth noting, however, that the whole crisis of modern technology here is something deeper and more profound than merely a statement of concern about the reckless overuse of the earth's natural resoruces. Of course, it is very prescient as an ecological text when we consider the year that this essay was completed: 1949. Heidegger thus wrote this essay right as mankind first attained the ability to drive itself to complete extinction, on the one hand by the creation of nuclear weapons with unheard-of powers of destruction, and on the other hand by the transition from the holocene to the anthropocene epoch, right as mankind began to hold sway over earth's climate and begin heating the earth via excess release of greenhouse gases.

If we want to get mystical about it, we could say that Heidegger may have been privy in a kind of intuitive, non-scientific way to the great environmental precipice on which mankind stood in 1949. However, what Heidegger sees as the "crisis" of technology comes before the creation of any particular technological machines and before the degradation of any particular part of the natural world. The first crisis comes in how things open up to reveal themselves to man. They now only reveal themselves as standing-reserve. This revealing is not something that happens independently of humans. But it is also not something that we as human can ourselves control. It is something that we can only respond to:

The forester who measures the felled timber in the woods and who to all appearances walks the forest path in the same way his grandfather did is today ordered by the industry that produces commercial woods, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines. The latter, in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand. Yet precisely because man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of ordering, he never is transformed into mere standing-reserve. Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing. But the unconcealment itself, within which ordering unfolds, is never a human handiwork, any more than is the realm man traverses every time he as a subject relates to an object.
Where and how does this revealing happen if it is no mere handiwork of man? We need not look far. We need only apprehend in an unbiased way that which has already claimed man so decisively that he can only be man at any given time as the one so claimed. Whenever man opens his eyes and ears, unlocks his heart, and gives himself over to meditating and striving, shaping and working, entreating and thanking, he finds himself everywhere already brought into the unconcealed. The unconcealment of the unconcealed has already propriated whenever it calls man froth into the modes of revealing allotted to him. When man, in his way, from within unconcealment reveals that which presences, he merely responds to the call of unconcealment, even when he contradicts it. Thus when man, investigating, observing, pursues nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" [58]

3.c.iv. Enframing

One might object to this by pointing out that surely there were times in the past when people saw things as "standing-reserve." This is completely true. A medieval peasant would have, at least sometimes, looked out over his field and the first thing on his mind would have been how his yield has been. Humans have been "using' the natural resources of the earth as long as human civilization has existed. The problem is not tha we can sometimes see things as "standing-reserve." We have always had the capacity to do so. The problem is that under the sway of modern technology all other ways of revealing gets suppressed. Everything in the modern world comes to be seen as standing-reserve. Heidegger wryly points out the way we talk of having a "supply" of patients for a clinic, or how what used to be called "personnel departments" are now called "human resources."

It is therefore necessary to create a term that refers to the manner in which modern technology turns everything into standing-reserve and suppresses all other modes of revealing. Heidegger's word for it is "Gestell." This word originally means a "frame" in the sense of something like a book rack. "Stellen" means a "setting" of something or other, but this kind of "setting" is a forceful one that constrains us. The word "Gestell" thus is translated as "Enframing." Whenever we try to open ourselves up to the emergent sway of phusis, we find ourselves inevitably in the realm of "Enframing" and are forced to view things as standing-reserve.

Even when we come across truly "wild" and "open" nature in somewhere like a national park, its value is still locked into the model of Enframing. Its value is now precisely that it is not yet standing-reserve. Or perhaps more accurately it is that it is standing-reserve that is still left alone and untouched. Even when we try to contradict the nature of Enframing, we still find ourselves in its framework. This problem, then, seems to be one that not merely the creation of more national parks will help us fix.

When did this era of Enframing begin? It did not occur all at once. The domination of Enframing was more serious in 1949 than it was in 1927 at the beginning of Heidegger's career. It was undoubtedly more serious in 1927 than it was at the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 1700s. And we can be almost certain that its dominion today is more extreme than Heidegger could have ever imagined. But where does it come from? If the ancients could use and make their own machines and devices and use the natural resources of the earth without being trapped in the realm of Enframing, why can't we?

Heidegger's answer seems to be that Enframing begins around the late 17th to early 18th century, as exemplified by the dominance of Newtonian physics. It is under modern science that nature first emeres entirely has what he calls a "calculable coherence of forces." It is under modern physics that we first get a revealing that turns everything into extension, numer, mass, and calculation. It is under this modern physics that three of the four causes are disposed of and only the efficient cause remains. This is because only the efficient cause can be understood in terms of pure ordering and calculation. Everything now begins to show and reveal itself in terms of the coherence of cause and effect. The whole view of modern physics, of modern mathematics, and so on is a calling-forth that orders the "stuff" of nature to stand forth as standing-reserve to be made use of. In the past there were more safeguards against this Enframing. Now there are very few.

In a related essay called "The Age of the World Picture," Heidegger makes it clear that Enframing is not a problem that can be solved by subsituting one "view" or "picture" of the world for another one which is more "correct" or "useful." The entire process of creating a "picture" or "view" of the world is precisely the result of Enframing in the first place. We can only make ourselves a "picture" or view of the world to take up or reject if we first turn the world into something to be ordered, manipulated, and arranged for our purposes. It doesn't matter if we have a rationalistic understanding where one objective world picture is the correct one or a postmodernist understanding where there are a great variety of culturally relative and constantly evolving world pictures. The fact that the world CAN become a "picture" for us to "take up" at all is because of Enframing.

Since man must always first respond to what is revealed and unconcealed, there doesn't seem a way for modern man to escape Enframing at first glance. Heidegger thus calls it a "Geschick" or "destining." He seems to say that it will be what determines and sets the direction of our path in history, whether we want it to or not. But there is a supreme danger in this. In Heidegger's words, "In the midst of all that is correct, the true will withdraw." All will begin to show itself under the guise of orderability and calculation. Even God himself becomes a mere "causa prima" or "first cause" when he is revealed in "theology," the modern science of religion, rather than under faith. And the final and most extreme peril will raise its head when man will no longer encounter even himself on the earth:

As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve. Meanwhile, man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself and postures as lord of the earth. In this way the illusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself. Heisenberg has with complete correctness pointed out that the actual must present itself to contemporary man in this way. In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himeslf, i.e., his essence. Man stands so decisively in subservience to the challenging-forth of enframing that he does not grasp enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, in terms of his essence, in a realm where he is addressed, so that he can never encounter only himself.
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" [59]

3.c.v. The Danger and the Growth of the Saving Power

We might now very reasonably ask: Is there anything we can do? Is "The Question Concerning Technology" a fatalistic essay? Is our fate sketched out as inevitable and hopeless? Not quite. Heidegger makes it clear that the destining of Enframing can simply not be avoided in the modern age. We cannot run away from Enframing. But we do have a choice in how we choose to respond to the revealing under it. For our great freedom always comes in how we are able to respond to the call of what reveals itself:

It seems then, that we will inevitably be pushed towards an extreme danger. But it may indeed be that this extreme danger is what is needed to make us aware of the dominion of Enframing and begin to envision a way to safeguard against it. As Michael Wheeler says, we can make a rough analogy with the Marxist idea that it is in the excessive crises of capitalism that a socialist transformation of society would emerge. Heidegger hopes that the domination of Enframing may be what makes us realize the importance of non-technical modes of revealing and of poiesis. But just like Marx's conception of a socialist society, it seems to be a conclusion that is by no means inevitable. All we can to is to continue to question and think in the right manner in order to prepare for this turning, if it can indeed happen. We can only have the right hope once we are fully in contact with despair. And technology brings the potential to awaken us to both at once: [63]

3.d. Dwelling and the Fourfold

Central texts for this section:
"Die Kehre" aka "The Turning" (1949)
"Bauen Wohnen Denken" aka "Building Dwelling Thinking" (1951)
"Das Ding" aka "The Thing" (1951)

3.d.i. "...Poetically Man Dwells..."

We now have a general sense of the crisis that motivates Heidegger's later thought. To move into a post-metaphysical philosophy will be essential in response to the crisis of Enframing. Between the years 1949-1951, Heidegger wrote a few very mysterious texts that attempted to give a sketch of what an alternative could look like. Perhaps the best way to enter into these texts is that they sketch out something more "positive" in contrast to the "negativity" of "The Question Concerning Technology."

We know that nowadays we are comepelled to constantly view all things of nature as standing-reserve. But what would an alternative look like? How is man to live on the earth? And does this reveal something important about who we are at our core and our being? We can turn to Hölderlin once more for a good way to begin understanding it:

"Poetically, man dwells on this earth." The word "dwelling" becomes paramount to Heidegger's later thought. We already see this word a fair amount in Being and Time. When sketching out Dasein's being-in-the-world, he makes it clear that Dasein is never just plopped down in the midst of physical space. Dasein is in the world insofar as it DWELLS in the world. It belongs to and is at home in the world it finds itself in. It is now "dwelling" that Heidegger more or less focuses on as the determining horizon of the being of Dasein rather than time.

How do we get at this understanding of "dwelling?" Well, at the time that Heidegger wrote these texts (1949-1951), "dwelling" was quite an issue. In the midst of the development of World War II, housing shortages were endemic to Germany and many other parts of Europe. And one of the primary forces contributing to the destruction of wild nature was and is the expansion of urban development. This would soon ramp up on an immense scale in Germany in the post-war period. "Dwelling" is certainly anything but an abstract concern. We all must inevitably find a place to live and keep secure.

But where does man "dwell" on the earth today? Must we be at "home" to dwell? Do we not "dwell" in places like schools and railway stations even if we do not consider them our "homes?" Is a working woman not at "home" in a spinning mill even if she does not "dwell" there? As usual, the best way to come into closer contact with the real nature of things is through a careful study of language:

The German word for "building" in the sense of mere construction is "Bauen." It can be traced back to the Old English and High German word "buan," which means "to dwell." And we have a trace of it in the word "neighbor," both in English and German. In Old English, the word for "neighbor" is "neahgebur," made up of the word "neah" ("near") and "gebur" ("dweller"). The same trace can be found in the German word for "neighbor," "Nachbar," and its High German origin "Nachgebauer." We can then say that the neighbor is a "near-dweller," one who dwells nearby.

And yet, what does this "dwelling" mean? Certainly it does not mean merely sitting there or lying inert. It means having a profession, doing business, moving this way and that, and so on. All that we do and that we are is invoked in this verb "to dwell." The wide scope of this dwelling sneaks by us unnoticed but is evident whenever we speak of ourselves in the German. To say "I am..." or "You are...," one says "Ich bin..." or "Du bist..." In that case, we use the word "bin" or "bist," which is itself derived from "bauen." Thus, when we say "I am..." or "You are..." in the German, we are already saying "I dwell" and "You dwell." We ARE insofar as we dwell.

But ON WHAT do we dwell in this era? What sense of place is there in which to dwell in the modern era of technicity, under the constant assault of Enframing? It is hard to say. This is mostly because of something that Heidegger already noticed back in Being and Time. If we remember the discussion of Dasein's being-in-the-world, there is always some sort of "spatiality" in the disclosure of our "there." This phenomenological distance does not necessarily map onto the physical, metrical space we understand in science. A painting in an art gallery is far "closer" to us in terms of standing out more in our experience than the glasses on our face. The friend we talk to on the phone is far "closer" than the inert phone in our hand. But of course the omnipresence of modern technology has completely changed any traditional notion of distance. We can read the following passage written in 1951 and only imagine how much more it applies today:

In spite of all this, Heidegger claims that this ruthless conquest of all distances brings no real nearness. Everything gets placed at the same equal distance and thus robbed of any special meaning it might have to us and any being we could have towards it. How do we dwell on the earth when nothing stands out in the right way and is both equally far and equally near? The answer is that we must let things "free" to BE things in their own fashion. His distinctive terminology for this is a thing "thinging." When a thing is allowed "to thing," it will come near us in a way that is more genuine than merely some spatial or temporal relation.

3.d.ii. The Primal Oneness of the Four

If we remember the discussion of "logos" in Introduction to Metaphysics that defines it as a "gathering." Any "thinging" does so by a gathering in the same fashion. Any thing comes into presence via a gathering. But in these later texts, Heidegger no longer conceives of this in terms of a primal struggle between world and earth. He instead describes a thing "thinging" as a thing gathering what he calls "the Fourfold" or "earth, sky, divinities, and mortals."

What do these strange, somewhat religious-sounding terms indicate? The passages that seek to explain the nature of "the Fourfold" and the manner in which a thing "thinging" unites them have to be directly read to be understood in their power:

Earth is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal. When we say earth, we are already thinking of the other three along with it, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four.
The sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year's seasons and their changes, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether. When we say sky, we are already thinking of the other three along with it, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four.
The divinities are the beckoning messengers of the godhead. Out of the holy sway of the godhead, the god appears in his presence or withdrawals into his concealment. When we speak of the divinities, we are already thinking of the other three along with them, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four.
The mortals are the human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies, and indeed continually, as long as he remains on earth, under the sky, before the divinities. When we speak of mortals, we are already thinking of the other three along with them, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four.
Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking" [67]

While it would be a mistake to think of these in purely analytic terms, we can attempt to offer some very brief definitions for these four parts of the "Fourfold:"

"Earth" clearly seems to refer to the natural world in some sense, but it seems to be something inhabited poetically rather than understood scientifically. It may be in some sense a reworking of the concept of "earth" from "The Origin of the Work of Art" in the sense of a mysterious, sheltering ground.

"Sky" also seems to refer to the natural world, but it seems that perhaps "earth" refers more to the stable, enduring ground and "sky" to its shifting, cyclical manifestations.

Heidegger's understanding of "gods" or "divinities" in later writings is difficult to understand in any straightforward fashion. Michael Wheeler sketches out an idea based on the section on "historizing" near the end of Being and Time. In that text, Heidegger dwells on the way that Dasein always inherits a tradition and heritage of its own as a part of history that sketches out its particular nexus of intelligibility. A part of that is the relation to particular individuals that play a decisive role in my projection of who I am. It seems to be that these important historical "models" and "archetypes" are now defined as "divinities." But in this new understanding, "divinities" may encompass not only the traditional mythological figures we would traditionally think of, but also human individuals in our past or present history and even particularly important objects, places, events, and so on. [68]

"Mortals" is, essentially, the new word for "Dasein." Just like in Being and Time, what ultimately makes mortals authentic and gives them their truest existence is death. In Being and Time, death was conceived of as our ownmost, something that is always ours and ours alone. However, in these later texts, death seems to be something more universal, more uniting, and more communal. Death is still that which delimits and directs our existence as a true and authentic existence. In the case of our own finitude, but it is not something that happens alone, but in the context of the Fourfold.

Heidegger makes it clear that there is a "primal oneness of the four." Anytime we think of one of these four, we conceive of the other three along with it. In the Fourfold, there is no binary or division between nature, culture, and mankind. Each one reflects and strengthens the other. Any "thing" for Heidegger is, first and foremost, a gathering of the Fourfold into a "lightening," a "mirroring," and a "worlding:"

For a clearer example of a thing "thinging," he uses the example of a jug. A jug could be understood merely as formed matter, as a substance bearing properties, as a unity of sensations, or any other metaphysical or scientific concept. But when the jug "jugs" as a thing, it shows up as something quite different:

The spring stays on in the water of the gift. In the spring the rock dwells, and in the rock dwells the dark slumber of the earth, which receives the rain and dew of the sky. In the water of the spring dwells the marriage of sky and earth. It stays in the wine given by the fruit of the vine, the fruit in which the earth's nourishment and the sky's sun are betrothed to one another. In the gift of water, in the gift of wine, sky and earth dwell. But the gift of the outpouring is what makes the jug a jug. In the jugness of the jug, sky and earth dwell.
The gift of the pouring out is drink for mortals. It quenches their thirst. It refreshes their leisure. It enlivens their conviviality. But the jug's gift is at times also given for consecration. If the pouring is for consecration, then it does not still a thirst. It stills and elevates the celebration of the feast. The gift of the pouring now is neither given in an inn nor is the poured gift a drink for mortals. The outpouring is the libation poured out for the immortal gods. The gift of the outpouring as libation is the authentic gift. In giving the consecrated libation, the pouring jug occurs as the giving gift. The consecrated libation is what our word for a strong outpouring flow, "gush," really designates: gift and sacrifice. "Gush," Middle English guschen, gosshen--cf. German Guss, giessen--is the Greek cheein, the Indoeuropean ghu. It means to offer in sacrifice. To pour a gush, when it is achieved in its essence, thought through with sufficient generosity, and genuinely uttered, is to donate, to offer in sacrifice, and hence to give. It is only for this reason that the pouring of the gush, once its nature withers, can become a mere pouring in and pouring out, until it finally decays into the dispensing of liquor at the bar. Pouring the outpour is not a mere filling and decanting.
Martin Heidegger, "The Thing" [70]

In our dwelling, we have to allow things to "thing." We have to allow the world to "world." And we have to have the adequate relationship to the Fourfold:

Mortals dwell in that they save the earth--taking the word in the old sense still known to Lessing. Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save properly means to set something free into its own essence. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from boundless spoilation.
Mortals dwell in that they receive the sky as sky. They leave to the sun and the moon their journey, to the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessing and their inclemency; they do not turn night into day nor day into a harassed unrest.
Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities. In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for. They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence. They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn.
Mortals dwell in that they initiate their own essential being--their being capable of death as death--into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death. To initiate mortals into the essence of death in no way means to make death, as the empty nothing, the goal. Nor does it mean to darken dwelling by blindly staring toward the end.
Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking" [71]

3.d.iii. The Turning

What does this look like concretely? This is hard to say. It will require a complete "turning" in being. This "turning" can only happen once we realize that poetic dwelling is under attack from Enframing and realize that we are the ones to safeguard it. We must allow the bringing-forth and presencing of poiesis. Maybe this means protecting the wilderness, creating artworks, engaging in traditional crafts, or something else still. There can be no one specific suggestion that applies in all cases.

To return to the beginning, dwelling has practical business to attend to as well. And one of these is and has been building. Heidegger ends the essay "Building Dwelling Thinking" by focusing on a farmhouse in the Black Forest as an example of a constructed building that is able to unite the Fourfold. Thinking about the difference between this building and that of modern unchecked development will reveal quite a lot:

This example is not brought up to say that we should go back to making these exact kinds of buildings. But it gives us an idea of how we have been able to build by dwelling. The most we can do now is be thoughtful like this in our activities and try to become the safeguards of being. We cannot enact the turning itself, but only prepare the ground for it to appear. We cannot know when and where the turning will occur. And we do not need to know. Heidegger claims that it may indeed even be detrimental to our essence to know, as man's essence is to wait and to attend. We simply must prepare the ground and keep watch. And in his words, the first step of all will be to to abandon the kind of thinking that merely represents in favor of the kind of thinking that "responds and recalls."

3.e. Event and Appropriation

Central texts for this section:
Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) aka Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) (1936-1938)
"Nietzsches Wort 'Gott ist tot'" aka "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God Is Dead'" (1943)
"Über den Humanismus" aka "Letter on Humanism" (1947)

3.e.i. Enowning

We are finally ready to tackle the text that is the greatest candidate for a second Being and Time in Heidegger's career: Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). This text is perhaps the most comprehensive statement of his later thought in one place. However, we can only approach this text after having a decent grasp of phusis, of aletheia, of poiesis, of techne, of Enframing, and of the Fourfold. This is probably the most difficult text in the Heideggerian corpus.

Contributions to Philosophy was written between 1936-1938, but was not published until after all of his other lectures had been. If we consider Heidegger to be a mystic of sorts, this text is perhaps his highest-level tantra, only comprehensible and of use to the most deeply dedicated initiates. Therefore, it had to be left to the end after all the groundwork had been laid. This account might seem a bit too romanticized, but what is certain is that this is a highly "esoteric" text. This does not mean "esoteric" in the sense of "magical" but in the sense of expressing a kind of knowledge directed at a very small subset of the population.

It is hard to exaggerate just how difficult of a text this is, even by the standards of later Heidegger. If you don't have a background in Heidegger, or even if your background only extends to Being and Time, reading Contributions to Philosophy must feel like reading a philosophical version of Finnegans Wake. For Daniela Vallega-Neu, what distinguishes this text, along with a few related ones, is that it is fully "poietic." If we remmeber, "poiesis" is the kind of revealing that happens outside of Enframing. It is the revealing of the falling leaves in autumn, of the gathering storm clouds on the horizon, and of the intricate workings of the spider at its web. But humans are not excluded from participation in poiesis. Poiesis is, in fact, the root of the word "poetry," in the sense that poetry is a kind of "bringing-forth." In the Greek past, all arts, crafts, and sciences occurred within poiesis.

As such, Contributions to Philosophy is a highly "poietic" text. Like a poem, it does not merely convey its meaning by the use of sentences that represent things in the world in a mechanical, scientific way. It rather evokes and brings forth something in the very language itself. This text is the furthest Heidegger came to not only "talking about" the turning in being that woudl need to occur to escape the modern domination of Enframing, but to actually ENACTING this turning itself via the very text. In that sense, it is in some ways a text that is meant to be reacted to and appropriated on a personal level more than it is "interpreted." This text comes highly close to collapsing philosophy and thought into a pure response to the historical unfolding of being itself. This whole idea is summed up in the notoriously difficult term "Ereignis," often translated as "enowning" or "event of appropriation." But we are getting ahead of ourselves. All of this will become clearer after we set out the context of this text a bit more. [73]

A good way to enter into and start to understand Contributions to Philosophy is via the "parable of the madman" from Friedrich Nietzsche's 1882 text The Gay Science. It is the location of the famous pronouncment that "God is dead," which is usually repeated without a full awareness of its context. This passage would be of profound importance for Heidegger:

The madman.--Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"--As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?--Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doin when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all direction? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us--for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto."
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and started at him in astonishment. At last he threw is lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. "I have come too early," he said then; "my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars--and yet they have done it themselves."
It has been related furhter that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is siad always to have replied nothing but: "What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?"
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book 3.125 [74]

In Heidegger's interpretation, this parable expresses far more than the standard understanding that belief in the Christian "God" has become untenable and that all the morality, metaphysics, and so on that are wrapped up with that belief must also now become unsubstantiated and be rebuilt. According to Heidegger, this passage points not only to the Christian God but to EVERYTHING "suprasensory" as losing its power to explain and provide meaning. This passage thus represents the final "completion" and decisive end of western metaphysics. For Heidegger, Nietzsche was the last and final metaphysician.

In a copious series of lectures that are outside the scope of my lecture, Heidegger puts forward the claim that Nietzsche's will-to-power and eternal recurrence represents the final state of western metaphysics. Anyone in the field after him will simply be spinning their wheels. Since there can be no more advances to metaphysics, we have entered a state of extreme nihilism. If the Presocratic Greeks represent the "first beginning" of western thought, then Nietzsche represents the end of this "first beginning."

Now we can sketch out exactly what the "turning" we have spoken so much consists of. Since Nietzsche has "completed" metaphysics, we are in an uncomfortable interim state. All that is left is technicity, Enframing, or in the words of Contributions to Philosophy, "machination." This is not becuase of an error. It was the inevitable fate of metaphysics to lead us to the complete domination of machination and the reduction of all meaning to calculation and measurability. The beginning of the long path towards this was first established by the "first beginning" of western thought with the Presocratic Greeks.

But now, we have a profound choice before us. The "turning" must emerge after the death of metaphysics. Either machination will achieve complete dominance and the history of being will once and for all end, or there will be a "turning" to enacting the "other beginning." And this text, Contributions to Philosophy, is an attempt to not only speculate about that "turning," but to enact it within language.

The Contribution is not without structure, but it can appear completely impenetrable at first glance. As Daniela Vallega-Neu says, the text itself is more the "site of a struggle" than a systematic treatment. This does not mean that it is sloppy or lacking in rigor. But it does mean that it is difficult to find a way in or out of. Being and Time used Dasein as a jumping-off point to get to the question of "being" itself. This text, in contrast, speaks not "towards" being, but "from" it.

Heidegger adamantly states that all notions of "transcendence" must disappear. Here this even includes the so-called "ontological difference." In Being and Time, the whole question of "being" is sketched out by setting up a fundamental difference between "beings" (entities) and "being" as such. He says that "being" itself, if we are to understand its meaning, can never be A being among others. But now even this distinction must be reconsidered. Heidegger now considers "being" and "beings" (entities) to exist in an "original unity." All beings require being to make their appearance. But being cannot occur without finding beings to "shelter" it. In "The Origin of the Work of Art," we first got a sense of how a particular being (a work of art) can "shelter" being as such. Heidegger's hope is now that a work of philosophy can do the same thing. [75]

We have to abandon everything in reading this text then. It is an incredible ask. We must take the "leap" beyond any supporting structure, belief, or value. In fact, we can't even really say that "we" are the ones taking the leap. Even this sets up a division of ourselves as subjects in contrast to "being." The "turning" itself must occur as a historical event. But we cannot say who or what turns. And that will coincide with the shift from the so-called "fundamental ontology" of Being and Time to the "seynsgeschichtliches Denken" or "beyng-historical thinking" of Contributions to Philosophy. And no, "beyng" is not misspelled! I will explain this shortly.

First we should consult one of Heidegger's opening statements. It is a good example of how the work is written in an extremely uncompromising style that Michael Wheeler calls pure "Heideggerese:"

First things first, what's up with the spelling of "beyng?" In one of many idiosyncrasies of language in this text, Heidegger begins to spell the German word for "being," "Sein" as "Seyn." "Seyn" is an archaic and old-fashioned spelling of the word, although the pronunciation is the same. He seems to spell it this way in order to interrupt our tendency to think of "being" as some ultimate, transcendental entity that is "out there" and that "sits behind" things in the world. That is the exact OPPOSITE of how we need to understand "being." And the archaic spelling calls attention to the fact that we have to think in a way that is at once novel and ancient, a way that is not merely "representational" but is "reverential."

Translators have taken various approaches to rendering "Seyn" in English. The most common way is to use a hyphen and write it as "be-ing." Translators Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly adopt this method in my preferred translation. However, Heidegger adds unconventional hypehns to many other words in this text for strategic purposes, and "Seyn" is not one of them. To avoid that confusion, I still prefer to translate "Seyn" as "beyng." This is the only modification I make to their translations. "Beyng" is a genuine archaic spelling in English and is therefore closer to Heidegger's use. Of course, it's not a perfect equivalent. "Seyn" would look decidedly old-fashioned and archaic to a German, but not strike them as immediatley unfamiliar and bizarre in the way that "beyng" does in English. But it will have to do.

If we remember Heidegger's treatment of "Angst" or "anxiety" in Being and Time, he describes a particular "mood" where Dasein no longer feels at home in the world. In anxiety, we are unsettled from our day-to-day involvements and the meanings that things come to have in their everydayness. We have a glimpse of the nothing that conditions all menaing via our own potential not-being, i.e. our removal from the world of our involvements. In a sense, Contributions to Philosophy attempts to keep us in this state in order to do our deepest thinking. But now it is no longer DASEIN'S potential not-being that evokes this unsettledness, but the withdrawal and absence of BEYNG itself, as experienced in the modern era of machination after the completion of metaphysics. It is not Dasein, but beyng itself that is unsettled.

Heidegger uses the same word as in Being and Time, "Stimmung" to describe an affect like "anxiety." But rather than "mood," we should translate it more literally as "attunement." In the Contributions, anything that lapses back into the subjectivity of a mental state or anything like that has to be avoided. And having the right attunement is very important. Let us recall the discussion of "Stimmung" in Being and Time. "Moods" or "attunements" are far from just a kind of "tint" over an objective world that is "out there." Depending on what attunement we are in, the entire world will open up to us in a completely different way.

Thus, the correct attunement is something that has to come before anything else, even before the division of ourselves into a "self" against the "world." And the "Grundstimmung" or "grounding-attunement" that we must constantly remain in is "Verhaltenheit" or "reservedness." We must stay in a state where we are aware of the distress that is inevitable in the abandonment of being, are still and attentive, and are imbued with a quiet awe. We cannot engage in beyng-historical thinking otherwise. Nor can we adequately engage in what comes to be the central concept of this work and. indeed, all of Heidegger's later thought: "Ereignis" or "Enowning." [77]

The title of this work is originally Contributions to Philosophy (From Ereignis), which is translated as "Enowning." Certainly, this word must be important to grasping the meaning of this text. But what does it mean? If you look up "Ereignis" in a dictionary, it will usually be translated as "event." It is derived from the verb "ereignen," which is usually translated as "to happen" or "to occur." For that reason, we can most basically understand "Ereignis" as a kind of "happening," "occurring," and "coming to pass." But it is clear that this doesn't mean anything like merely a carved-out section of time. In a sense, Ereignis is not an "event" but is the background that is necessary for things to make themselves manifest as "events" in the first place.

However, the root verb "ereignen" is also a false cognate of the unrelated word "eigen," meaning "one's own." It seems then, that Heidegger chooses this word Ereignis precisely because it has an air of "ownership," of "appropriating," and of "making one's own." Richard Capobianco has pointed out that Ereignis as a concept is often understood more clearly by Chinese and Japanese commentators due to their intellectual traditions. In his words: "'Ereignis' conveys the simple and quiet but also profound and astonishing 'coming to pass' of all things, such as the tree coming into bloom--suddenly, or so it seems." [78]. "Ereignis" thus seems to speak of a making-manifest that occurs as we take up the beyng that we are thrown into as something meaningful in a particular poignant event that nonetheless cannot be fully expressed in words.

There is a good argument to be made for leaving the word "Ereignis" untranslated in English, just as we would not be able to translate the "logos" of Heraclitus, the "Dao" of Laozi, or indeed the "Dasein" of Being and Time. But it would be very hard to translate Contributions to Philosophy without rendering this word into English. This is because, like pretty much every other essential term in this text, "Ereignis" does not appear as a static noun but gets used as a verb, a steam, a segment o various compound words, and so on. Contributions to Philosophy uses language in a remarkably creative, dynamic fashion. We would have to invent ugly terms like "Ereignis-ing" or "Ereignis-like" to grasp its full use. Thus, the translation that I use renders "Ereignis" as "enowning" and I will follow suit. But whenever this word "enowning" appears, remember that it is a translation of "Ereignis" and that no one word can capture the full range of what "Ereignis" means.

Now that we have a grasp of enowning, the final and most important element, perhaps we can unpack what seems like the closest thing to a "mission statement" in the text:

And yet: Whenever a being is, beyng must sway. But how does beyng sway? But is a being? From where else does thinking decide here if not according to the truth of beyng? Thus beyng can no longer be thought of in the perspective of beings; it must be enthought from within beyng itself.
At times those grounders of the abground must be consumed by the fire of what is deeply sheltered, so that Da-sein becomes possible for humans and thus steadfastness in the midst of beings is rescued--so that in the open of the strife between earth and world beings themselves undergo a restoration.
Accordingly, beings move into their steadfastness when the founders of the truth of beyng go under. Beyng itself requires this. It needs those who go under; and, whenever beings appear, it has already en-owned these founders who go under and allotted them to beyng. That is the essential swaying of beyng itself. We call it enowning. The riches of the turning relation of beyng to Da-sein, which is en-owned by beyng, are immeasurable. The fullness of the enowning is incalculable. And here this inceptual thinking can only say little "from enowning." What is said is inquired after and thought in the "playing-forth" unto each other of the first and the other beginning, according to the "echo" of beyng, in order to "ground" its truth, as a preparation for "the ones to come" and for "the last god."
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), I.1 [79]

As obscure and strange as much of this text is, at multiple points Heidegger claims that "being holds sway as enowning." In a sense, this is the closest he ever came to putting forward ONE consistent answer to the question of being in his later career. One might want to call this text Being and Enowning in contrast to Being and Time, as he suggests that being "holds sway" as enowning in a similar way to how he previously posited "time" as the horizon of answering the question of being. Indeed, if one thing could sum up all the ways that Heidegger came closest to defining "being," it would probably be as "enowning." Think of unifying the temporal ekstases in Being and Time, gathering phusis as logos in Introduction to Metaphysics, sheltering the struggle of world and earth in artworks in "The Origin of the Work of Art," and dwelling by uniting the Fourfold in his Bremen lectures. All of these seem to be summed up in the concept of "enowning:" taking up and appropriating what we are thrown into and actively allowing it to come to pass.

Heidegger introduces six phrases in quotation marks near the end of the last excerpt. These are "echo," "playing-forth," "leap," "grounding," "the ones to come," and "the last god." He gives some brief, cryptic explications of these in detail:

These are the names for the six "joinings" or chapters of Contributions to Philosophy, with one final epilogue of sorts simply called "beyng." It's tempting to read them as some kind of progression or evolution, culminating in "the last god." But it would be a mistake to read them like this. All the "joinings" say the same thing but in different ways and from different perspectives. All six of these terms appear in each joining. Of course, what that connection is and what all thees terms mean is difficult to convery and can only be fully experienced by reading the text and standing fully open and ready for the turning to the other beginning. But I will do my best to summarize them. Much of the following summaring is indebted to Daniela Vallega-Neu. [81]

3.e.ii. Echo

After Nietzsche has "completed" metaphysics, we are in a state of extreme nihilism. But this is all too quickly brushed off a just a personal "crisis of faith" during the rise of secularism in Europe and the associated alienation from the world of morals and values created by the belief system that was Christianity. This is a very crude interpretation of Nietzsche. The "nihilism" that Heidegger interprets as discussed in the parable of the madman is something far more severe. It is the abandonment of "being" itself:

Directed toward the other beginning, nihilism must be grasped more fundamentally as the essential consequence of the abandonment of being. But how can this become known and be decided upon when what Nietzsche first experienced and thought through as nihilism has remained uncomprehended up to now and above all did not come into mindfulness? Partially misled by the form of Nietzsche's manner of communication, one took cognizance of his "doctrine" of "nihilism" as an interesting cultural psychology. But already before doing so, one makes the sign of the cross in front of its truth, i.e., openly or surreptitiously keeping it at a distance as devilish. For, according to enlightening consideration, where would we come to if that were and would be true? And one has no inkling that this very consideration, as well as the attitude and comportment toward beings that sustains this consideration, is the actual nihilism: One refuses to admit the goal-lessness. For this reason one suddenly "has goals" again--even if it only means that what in any case can be a means for setting up and pursuing goals is itself raised to a goal: the people, for example. And therefore the greatest nihilism is precisely where one believes to have goals again, to be "happy," to attend to making equally available the "cultural values" (movies and seaside resort vacations) to all the "people"--in this drunken stupor of "lived-experience,"--precisely there is the greatest nihilism: methodically disregarding human goallessness, being always ready to avoid every goal-setting decision, anxiety in the face of every domain of decision and its opening. Anxiety in the face of beyng has never been greater than today.
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), II.72 [82]

As has already been sketched out so many times, the primary symptom of the "abandonment of beyng" today is Enframing, the reduction of all meaning to what can be calculated and measured. In this text, Heidegger uses the term "Machenschaft" or "machination" instead, but he seems to essentially be describing the same thing. But what is distinctive of Contributions to Philosophy is that in it he usually speaks of "machination" as paired with another component: "lived experience."

The typical instinct we have when we realize the omnipresence of and become sick of machination and the overly "technical" nature of everything around us is to run away into our own private "lived experiences." But Heidegger sees "lived experience" as just the other side of the same coin. This is because "lived experience," as we consider it, posits "ourselves" first and foremost as the "subject" of an experience. It makes us a "master of our own meaning" to some degree. And this is an equally dangerous proposition. It doesn't fix the problem of machination simply shifts its center from the "outer" world of scientific measurement to the "inner" world of "ourself" as what posits everything that comes into being or not. It enforces the division between inner and outer and between objective and subjective rather than getting beyond it. In some ways, "lived experience" is even more dangerous than machination, because it gives a more convincing illusion of returning "to the things themselves," when it is actually anything but.

And yet, in the midst of this "withdrawal" of beyng, some will begin to experience its essential sway. Beyng is in a withdrawal. As Daniela Vallega-Neu claims, it is not as if there is some THING here which is in withdrawal. It is rather beyng ITSELF that occurs AS this withdrawal. [83] But in that withdrawal, the essential decision emerges: the decision of whether the other beginning will come to pass or whether beyng will withdraw completely.

This withdrawal is first experienced as an "echo" or "Anklang" in the German. This word "Anklang" does not mean "echo" in the sense of a sound being duplicated. It is closer to the way we might describe "echoes" of a past historical era in some present historical event, or "echoes" of an earlier influence in a later artist's work. It means something like a moment in which a sound is arising but is not yet fully unfolded. It implies a silence, an anticipation, a waiting, and a listening carefully. It is something that is found through hints, through small mutterings, and subtle signs that have to be carefully attended to. The abandonment of beyng first reveals itself as this "echo." Heidegger gives a list of 16 of these "signs" and "hints" that announce the withdrawal of beyng, some of which seem like very pointed critiques of the Nazi establishment:

That wherein the abandonment of being announces itself:
1. the total insensitivity to what is ambiguous in that which is held to be essential; ambiguity brings about asthenia and disinclination for an actual decision. For example, all of what the "people" means; the communal, the racial, the lower, the higher, the national, the lasting; for example, all of what is called "divine."
2. no longer knowing which is the condition, the conditioned, and the unconditionable. Fully idolizing as unconditioned the conditions of historical beyng, for example, of all the ambiguity having to do with a people.
3. getting stuck in thinking of and beginning with "values" and "ideas"--in which the interconnective form of historical Dasein is seen, without any serious question, as in something unchangeable--to which thinking in terms of "worldviews" corresponds.
4. consequently everything is built into a "cultural operation"; and the highest decisions, Christianity, are not laid out according to their roots, but rather evaded.
5. art is subjugated to cultural usage and essentially misconstrued; blindness to what is ownmost to art, the manner of grounding truth.
6. generally noteworthy is the misestimation of oneself in relation to what is repulsive and negating; it is simply shoved away as "evil"--misinterpreted and thereby belittled and thus in its danger all the more enlarged.
7. therein is manifest--completely from afar--the not-knowing that the not and the nihilating belong to beyng itself and the lack of an inkling of the finitude and uniqueness of beyng.
8. not-knowing what is ownmost to truth goes along with that; [not knowing] that truth and its grounding must be decided prior to whatever holds true; [not knowing] the blind mania for what holds true in what appears to be serious willing.
9. hence rejection of genuine knowing and anxiety in the face of questioning; evading mindfulness; the flight into the events and machinations.
10. every stillness and reservedness appears as inactivity and letting go and renunciation--and is perhaps the broadest swing-over back into letting being be as enowning.
11. the self-certainy of no-longer-letting-oneself-be-called; hardening against all hints; the asthenia for awaiting; only calculating.
12. all of these are only emanations of an intricate and rigidified dissembling of what is ownmost to beyng, especially its cleavage: that uniqueness, seldomness, momentariness, chance and onset, reservedness and freedom, preserving and necessity belong to beyng: that beyng is not the emptiest and most common, but rather the richest and highest and holds sway only in en-ownment, by virtue of which Da-sein grounds the truth of being in the sheltering by beings.
13. the specific elucidation of the abandonment of being as derangement of the West; the flight of gods; the death of the moral, Christian God; its reinterpretation (cf. Nietzsche's remarks). The masking of this uprooting by the groundless but supposedly newly beginning self-finding of man (modernity); this masking eclipsed and enhanced by progress: discoveries, inventions, industry, the machine; at the same time the loss of individuality, neglect, pauperization, everything as the disengagement from the ground and from arrangements, uprooting--which is the deepest masking of distress--asthenia for mindfulness, powerlessness of truth; pro- gress into non-beings as the growing abandonment by beyng.
14. abandonment of being is the innermost ground of the distress of lack of distress. How can distress be effected as distress? Must one not let the truth of beyng light up--but what for? Who among the distressless ones is capable of seeing? Is there ever a way out of such a distress-a distress which constantly denies itself as distress? The will to get out is lacking. Can remembering those possibilities of Da-sein which have been lead to mindfulness here? Or must here something unusual and not-conceivable thrust [us] into this distress?
15. the abandonment of being [is] brought nearer by being mindful of the darkening of the world and the destruction of the earth in the sense of acceleration, calculation, the claim of massiveness.
16. the simultaneous "domination" of the powerlessness of empty sentiment and of the violence of the establishment.
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), II.56 [84]

This text is thus unapologetically "elitist" in a sense. But that is simply a must ofr philosophy. The ones who can hear and respond to the "echo" of the abandonment of beyng are necessarily "the few and the rare." As such, the kind of philosophy reserved for them must necessarily be difficult to comprehend. Indeed, it must border on incomprehensibility. And it can especially never dilute itself by becoming muddled with things like science, anthropology, politics, and psychology, none of which have anything to do with philosophy:

In this new era of beyng-historical thinking, the task is no longer to find a proposition that we can serve up to the masses on a platter. The questioning ITSELF is now the goal:

3.e.iii. Playing-Forth

If the turning to the other beginning is to occur, it cannot happen by merely ignoring the first beginning, tossing it aside, or even as "refuting" it. The first beginning and the other beginning must come together in a confrontation of sorts. It is only by doing so that the two can be set forth into their essence. Above all, we should not think of the "turning" as merely something linear, where the other beginning occurs at a particular point in time after the end of the first beginning. Of course, it is very hard to conceptualize it in a way that is not temporal. But this entire linear, temporal framework is a result of "metaphysics" and thus of the first beginning. We have to get outside of it. But that is not done by ignoring the past 2000 years of philosophy. We can only enact the other beginning by taking them more seriously than ever before.

As Vallega-Neu notes, there is a reason that we speak of the first and OTHER beginning rather than the first and SECOND beginning. That is because there is some essential connection between the first and the other beginning. This section of the Contributions repeats quite a lot from Introduction to Metaphysics. It shows how the original conception of phusis has been narrowed and limited over the past 2000 years. [88]

The most notable thing for the Contributions is the way that the Presocratics experienced truth as aletheia or unconcealment. That is to say, truth occurred both in appearance and in concealment. It occurred both in presence and in withdrawal. They are two sides of the same coin. We thus have much to learn from them about how to find beyng in withdrawal, since our era is one of profound withdrawal. We live under the dominance of machination and lived experience, so one of the things we must appropriate in the turning is the first beginning and its ability to teach us about finding truth in withdrawal:

3.e.iv. Leap

When Heidegger uses the word "decision," he often hyphenates it as "de-cision." This calls attention to the fact that the "-cision" in "decision" is derived from the Latin "caedere," and literally means a "cutting." We have seen in Introduction to Metaphysics how there must always be a "carving out" in the primal struggle of phusis. In this "carving out," things like humans and gods are separated and distinguished from each other. In the playing-forth, the first and other beginning become decided in the essential sway of beyng. Everything essential becomes "decided" and "enowned." And this does not happen as a logical argument or as a mental imagining. It has to happen as a leap into the abyss. It has to happen as a leap outside of everything familiar. And that leap plays out as enowning.

Beyng holds sway as enowning. However, humans are not the ones who "take" this leap of enowning. Humans, rather, only come into being in this leap. We should never think of "humans" on one side and "beyng" on the other. Beyng itself holds sway AS enowning, which is something that needs humans to "complete" it. Beyng emerges as a "call" that we as humans respond to and indeed only makes itself manifest AS that very response. And then humans, in turn, become who they essentially are AS beyng occurs in a particular niche of time-space to be enowned within. This niche of time-space is what is called Dasein. However, now Heidegger hyphenates the word as Da-sein to call attention to its original meaning even more explicitly: being-there. A certain "there" is cleared and "lit up" as the space in which the enowning occurs:

Compared to Being and Time, Heidegger's conception of Dasein is even further removed from anything like a Cartesian "subject," if that was even possible. The treatment of Dasein in Being and Time is now considered to be still too anthropological and "subjective." This is namely because Heidegger no longer even wants to limit Dasein to merely what is "human." For him, the "clearing" of Dasein is now a "Zerklüftung," which means a "cleft," a "rift," a "cleavage," or a "fissure."

The "cleft" is what de-cides humans and gods from the nothing that permeates them. It is not merely humans that become manifest in enowning. The "gods" now also make themselves apparent. We will return to the conception Heidegger has of "gods" more thoroughly later in this text. But it is clear for him that they are not transcendent, immortal things that live "above" us and that would exist without us. They need to become manifest via our enowning. Otherwise they remain in flight and do not show themselves.

In taking the leap, we stand in the absolute withdrawal of beyng. And yet, this profound "nothing" of the withdrawal is at once also the truest revelation of its capability. It occurs as a ripeness, a bending-back, a fresh ground.

If we remember in Being and Time, our most authentic and truest possibilities as the Dasein that we are in each case is revealed in being-towards-death. It is revealed against the possibility of Dasein's own not-being. The same basic principle seems to apply here. But the "nihilation" that we ground ourselves against is no longer that of an individual Dasein, but that of BEYNG itself. The time-space to ground the truth of beyng is first opened by beyng revealing itself AS a withdrawal: [91]

3.e.v. Grounding

This section is perhaps the most difficult segment of the most difficult text in the entire Heideggerian corpus. What it seems to speak of more than anything is the turning itself from the first to the other beginning and how this must be "grounded." This will happen via Dasein, the opening up of a certain clearing of time and space in which the unknown of the abandonment of beyng takes place. I will try to elucidate this a bit more clearly.

The truth of beyng is grounded in Dasein. But "Dasein" in Contributions to Philosophy is a "being-there," not just a human subject. It is the clearing in which humans and gods are de-cided and make themselves manifest via enowning. The whole concept of Dasein now has a much stronger historical dimension. It occurs as a spot to "ground" the whole unfolding of beyng itself via enowning. And this is something that is itself historical and contingent:

In Being and Time, Dasein becomes "itself" in authenticity, where it takes up its own possible not-being in being-towards-death. In Contributions to Philosophy, humans gain selfhood in enowning. We become "ourselves" most genuinely when we become the ground for belonging to beyng. We are "ourselves" when we are "owned over" to the truth of beyng. This "belonging" is never that of a subject encountering an object, but is an openness that is grounded in the historical unfolding of beyng:

In their "groundedness," human beings are called by three names: "seekers," "preservers," and "guardians."

As "seekers," we constantly look for intimations of the withdrawal of beyng and keep that very refusal and concealment exposed.

As "preservers," we keep the truth of beyng from disappearing altogether by sheltering it in beings like works of art, speeches, actions, and so on.

As "guardians," we unite these two divisions for decisive moments to prepare the grounding of the other beginning.

In a sense, these three dimensions bear a resemblance to the ecstatic dimensions of future, past, and present from Being and Time:

Of course, this is all something that occurs before any purely "temporal" nderstanding of beyng.

In the crossing from the first beginning to the other beginning, the truth of beyng that we stand open towards will occur as a refusal and a withdrawal. That is exactly because there must be an open ground to enact the other beginning within. There must be an interval to allow the enowning to occur within. Heidegger calls this an "abyss," Emad and Maly translate the original German word "Abgrund" more literally as "ab-ground." (They do so wisely in my opinion.) It means something like the "away-ground," the "separate-ground," the "downward-ground." This word is important because it encompasses both the idea of emptiness and void but also of infinite depth and possibility. Beyng appears as something that self-conceals and hesitates. It appears as something that is still wanting and waiting:

Ab-ground is the originary essential swaying of ground. Ground is what is ownmost to truth. If time-space is thus grasped as ab-ground and if, in and through turning, ab-ground is grasped more definitely from within time-space, then the relation-in-turning, and the belongingness of time-space to what is ownmost to truth is thereby enopened.
Abground is the originary onefold of space and time, that unifying onefold that above all lets them go apart into their separatedness.
But ab-ground is also beforehand the originary essential sway of gorund, of its grounding, of what is ownmost to truth.
What is ab-ground? What is its manner of grounding? Ab-ground is the staying-away of ground.
And what is ground? It is the self-concealing-receiving, because it is a sustaining--and this as towering-through of what is to be grounded. Ground is the self-sheltering-concealing in sustaining that towers-through.
Ab-ground, staying-away, as ground in self-sheltering-concealing, it is a self-sheltering-concealing in the manner of not-granting the ground. However, not-granting is not nothing but rather an outstanding originary manner of letting be unfulfilled, of letting be empty--thus an outstanding manner of enopening.
However, as essential swaying of ground, ab-ground is not a mere self-refusing as simply pulling back and going away. Ab-ground is ab-ground. By refusing itself, ground brings into the open in an outstanding manner, namely into that initial openness of that emptiness, which is thus already a definite one. Insofar as ground nonetheless also and simply grounds in ab-ground and yet does not actually ground, it is hesitating.
Ab-ground is the hesitating refusal of ground. In refusal, originary emptiness opens, originary clearing occurs; but the clearing is at the same time such that the hesitating manifests in it.
Ab-ground is the primarily essential sheltering that lights up, is the essential swaying of truth.
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), V.242 [95]

Humans and gods become enowned as time-space within this ab-ground. This original unity of time and space clears out and delimits the "t/here" of Da-sein in which the truth of beyng can show itself as the ab-ground. In some of the most obscure and difficult passages, he describes the determination and clearing as a gathering of the original onefold of time-space:

As far as the termporal dimension goes, Heidegger describes a gathering of three "Entrückungen" or "removals:"
the removal into coming to be
the removal into having been
the removal into the present abandonment of beyng
In the present abandonment of beyng, these are "gathered" in a decisive moment where beyng sways as enowning and/or as refusal. His term for this moment is the familiar term "Augenblick" or "moment-of-vision," as seen in Being and Time. It literally means a "blink of an eye." In this case, he calls this moment a "remembering-awaiting," which stands as the moment and gathers and unites this first beginning and the other beginning.

As far as the spatial dimension goes, the self-removal of beyng appears as a "Berückung." This difficult term is translated, rather clumsily, by Emad and Maly as "charming-moving-unto." Vallega-Neu translates it more simply as "enrapturing." The word in German has a connotation of being set outside the everyday, standing out from what is normal. It has a sense of enchantment, as if being held in a magical circle. All of this symbolizes there being an opening and also a limit to what is opened, both of which are completely unfamiliar to the everyday and normal. It is how enowning becomes spatialized in the decisive moment. He calls this spatialization an "Umhalt" or "encircling hold."

Space is rendering ab-ground that charms-moves-unto the encircling hold.
Time is rendering ab-ground that removes unto the gathering.
Charming-moving-unto is the encircling hold of gathering that holds to abground.
Removal-unto is gathering unto the encircling hold that holds to abground.
When removal-unto proves to be gathering and charming-moving-unto proves to be encircling hold, then there is each time therein a counter-turning. For, removal-unto appears to be dispersal, and charming-moving-unto appears to be estranging. This counter-turning is indeed what is essential and indicates the originary referral of both to each other, on the basis of their separatedness.
Time spatializes, never charms-moves-unto.
Space temporalizes, never removes-unto.
But time and space also have nothing in common as a unity; rather what they have is what brings them to a one, that which lets them spring forth into that inseparable referral, time-space, the ground's holding to ab-ground; the essential swaying of truth. However, this springing forth is not a tearing-away but the opposite: Time-space is only the prevailing unfolding of the essential swaying of truth.
Thus rendering ab-ground of ground is not exhausted in what is its ownmost but only made clear as the grounding of the t/here.
Time-space is the charming-moving-removing-unto gathering encircling hold, is the ab-ground that is so enjoined and correspondingly attuned, whose essential swaying becomes historical in the grounding of the "t/here" through Da-sein (its essential trajectories of sheltering truth.)
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), V.242 [96]

The temporal and spatial gatherings occur together and neither can occur without the other. They occur as the original onefold of time and space, not as two separate things occurring at the same time. And yet, none of this can occur without the truth of beyng being sheltered in some being. The most fmiliar example of how truth can set itself to work in a being is in works of art, as seen in "The Origin of the Work of Art." But truth can set itself to work via enowning in any number of ways. Beings, be they works of art, speeches, deeds, rituals, or whatever else.

Heidegger attempts to shelter this truth in a philosophical text, the Contributions to Philosophy itself. But this should never be understood merely as reducing the meaning of beyng to a kind of magical incantation that inevitably reproduces it via a set of definite words. The sheltering must require a listener as well as a speaker. And all must stand in the correct attunement. This breaks down the entire ontoloical difference that started off Being and Time. There remains a difference between beings and being as such, but it is no longer as static categories. The difference now emerges as a constant strife between world and earth that is enacted by and through and in beings. [97]

3.e.vi. The Ones to Come

Who has actually become authentic? Who has become seeker, preserver, and guardian? Who has actually become themselves by enowning the truth of beyng as the abyss it manifests as? The only one who Heidegger explicitly names as such is Hölderlin. Whoever these individuals are, what is clear is that they are necessary for the turning to the other beginning to be accomplished. These individuals are referred to as "the ones to come." Despite the futural tense, Heidegger does say that there are already a few of them here today. We might see the futural aspect not as implying that they do not exist yet, but that they orient their being towards the future turning.

The ones to come are those who prepare the gronud for the other beginning. They are the ones who bear witness to the stillness required. This decision occurs not as a grandiose event, but quietly and simply. It would go unnoticed to those who were unaware of it. The decision for whether beyng will ultimately be lost or whether the other beginning will begin is made by the ones to come. Heidegger is not very specific about how this will occur. However, he calls attention to a few signs that are not necessarily to be taken as discrete, linear progressions of stages:

There will be a few who, in advance, shelter truth in artworks, in poetry, in decisive actions, in rituals and deeds, and so on. There will then be a few of "those who go under." These are the individuals, like Hölderlin perhaps, who take the first leap into the other beginning. Lastly, there will be "those many allied ones," who grasp what the few who go under have accomplished and wait for further signs to follow. [98]

How this can happen is not certain. Only the ones to come can tell us. And what they will accomplish is to consecrate the ground for and bear witness to "the passing of the last god:"

Today there are already a few of those who are to come. Their intimating and seeking is hardly recognizable to them themselves and to their genuine disquiet; but this disquiet is the quiet steadfastness of the cleavage. It bears a certainty that is touched by the shiest and remotest hint of the last god and is held toward the breaking-in of enowning. How this hint is preserved as hint in the reserved reticence in silence, and how such preserving always resides in taking-leave and arriving, particularly in grief and joy, in that grounding-attunement of the reserved ones, to whom alone the cleavage of beyng opens and closes: fruit and falling-toward, onset and hint.
Those few to come count among themselves the essentially unpretentious ones, to whom no publicness belongs but who in their inner beauty gather the shining-ahead of the last god and then gift it to the few and the rare by radiating it back to them. They all ground Da-sein, through which the accord of the nearness of god resonates, a nearness which neither rises above nor fades away but has taken the steadiness of the deepest awe for the most singular space of resonance. Da-sein--shifting through all relations of remoteness and nearness (onset) of the last god.
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), VI.252 [99]

3.e.vii. The Last God

This text mentions something called "the last god" over and over again. Let's finally attempt to understand what exactly this means. Of course, this is no easy task. In a sense, only the ones to come seem to know for sure. If there's one thing we can be certain of it's that "the last god" hsa absolutely nothing to do with some monotheistic conception of a supernatural being or personage that stands above everything as its creator, least of all with the god of Christianity. Certainly, it is nothing that stands before us as superior, least of all because Heidegger makes it quite clear that the last god needs US to bring it forth through enowning.

Whenever Heidegger seems to speak of "gods," he seems to refer more generally to whatever a people holds as sacred or higher than themselves. And all societies do this with something, be it a mythological figure, a person, a place, a ritual or rite, an event or tradition, a value or ethical choice, and so on. It would, however, be a massive mistake to say that this is a "secularization" of a religious idea. For Heidegger, it is the exact opposite. The mere understanding of "gods" as supernatural, religious, or, god forbid, "theological" is rather a cheapened, lessened understanding of what originally counts as "sacred" and "poetic." All the bounding of "gods" to the form of religious dogma is just another form of metaphysics. Of course, in our era of Enframing, we lose this original connection to the gods more and more. This is the whole point of Nietzsche's parable of the madman. In Heidegger's view:

Inevitably, during the crossing to the other beginning, there will be an utmost sense of despair and a lack of all gods. This is the passing of the last god. All the gods who either arrive or flree will be gathered in this passing. We should be very wary of speaking of the last god in terms that could lapse back into "metaphysics," but if we can do so in any sense, it seems that the last god is closer to an event than a being. It seems that the last god is manifest insofar as it becomes enowned in a number of events, actions, beings, words, and so on. And in particular it is that which gathers the other gods to the turning of the other beginning.

Above all, the last god is not a transcendent "ultimate being." It is fundamentally historical. When will its passing occur? We cannot say. Perhaps we are already in it, whatever this passing consists of. It is only known to the ones to come, and probably not to them in full. Whenever it happens, it will largely remain hidden. Only the few and the rare will ground it: [101]

The last god is not the end but the other beginning of immeasurable possibilities for our history. For its sake history up to now should not terminate but rather must be brought to its end. We must bring about the transfiguration of its essential and basic positions in crossing and in preparedness.
Preparation for the appearing of the last god is the utmost venture of the truth of beyng, by virtue of which alone man succeeds in restoring beings.
The greatest nearness of the last god is enowned when enowning as hesitating self-refusal increases in not-granting. This is something essentially other than mere absence. Not-granting as belonging to enowning can be experienced only out of the more originary essential sway of beyng, as it lights up in the thinking of the other beginning.
Not-granting as nearness of the un-avertable makes Da-sein the one who is overcome; that is to say: not-granting does not crush Da-sein but lifts it up into grounding its freedom.
But whether man can master both, sustaining the echo of enowning as not-granting and enacting the crossing to grounding the freedom of a being as such--to renewing the world out of rescuing the earth--who is inclined to decide and to know? And so, those who are consumed by such a history and its grounding always remain separated from one another--summits of the most separate mountains.
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), VII.256 [103]

3.f. Thinking and the End of Philosophy

Central texts for this period:
"Was heißt Denken?" aka "What Is Called Thinking?" (1951-1952)
"Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens" aka "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking" (1964)
Der Spiegel Interview (1966)

3.f.i. From Philosophy to Thinking

I have sketched out the most important themes in later Heidegger and have shown how they seem to be most thoroughly treated in Contributions to Philosophy. As a final section, I would like to focus on some of Heidegger's last writings and try to answer the question of what exactly he would want us to take with us from his writings after his death. And I want to once more take up the question of Heidegger's Nazi Party membership and offer some thoughts on my interpretation of it now that we have a clearer grasp of his writings.

What should Heidegger's legacy be? What should we DO on the basis of all this now? Heidegger's answer in his last years is quite shocking and provocative: we should stop doing "philosophy" as we know it altogether and begin "thinking" instead! What does this mean?

In the 1960s, Heidegger was astonished more and more every day at the rate at which everything had become technical, measurable, scientific, mathematical, and so on. For him, this is to be expected. It is the logical end of "metaphysics" as we know it. That is to say, with thinking that is concerned with representation of data and with discovering the ultimate grounds of being. For him, "metaphysics" has to be at an end in the modern era.

Stephen Hawking once infamously said that "Philosophy is dead. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovering in our quest for knowledge." Heidegger would unequivocally agree. Philosophy, as construed, has now become science. And there is no going back. But note the important words: AS CONSTRUED. As built on the assumption that knowledge is a concern with finding grounds, calculating, and science-minded speculation, i.e., as metaphysics. In this sense, "metaphysics" has reached its end. But that does not mean that it has reached a state of perfection. It rather has brought us to a profound desolation, where the need for the turning to the other beginning begins to echo and resonate.

Heidegger then says that we should learn to "think" once more. This is because science does not teach us how to "think." It teaches us how to reason, to calculate, to measure, to problem-solve, and to hypothesize, but not how to think. Nor does the "lived experience" we set up in opposition to it. For picturing, imagining, wishing, and daydreaming are not thinking either. First and foremost, we have to learn how to respond to what calls us. In this sense there can be no magical guru who imparts it all to us. Certainly Heidegger is not that teacher.

He says that learning to think is something distant and yet so near to us that we look right over it. It is similar to becoming a cabinet maker in the old fashion as opposed to the new fashion of technological assembly-line production:

At the end, then, it all seems to come back to truth-as-unconcealment. It all comes back to aletheia. To think again is to learn to respond to the call of what discloses itself. It is to experience the clearing of what opens up. And above all, it is not to reduce it to something that is merely calculable and computable. Only in so doing can we accurately put an end to philosophy as metaphysics and enter into beyng-historical thinking instead.

3.f.ii. Heidegger and the Nazi Party

In 1966, Heidegger decided to give an interview to the German magazine Der Spiegel on the condition that it would only be published posthumously. This wish was granted, and it was made public ten years later in 1976 shortly after his death. This interview was where he gave most of the deatils about his involvement with the Nazi Party. We can run down Heidegger's account of it, where he defended himself against the claim that he was a Nazi ideologue:

Upon Hitler's seizure of power, the rector of the University of Freiburg was a social democrat and a friend of Heidegger named Wilhelm von Möllendorff. He was removed by the Minister of Culture of the state of Baden when he refused to display a "Jewish poster." In the interm, Möllendorff and another colleague encouraged Heidegger to become rector in their place so that the position of rector would not fall to a mere Nazi Party propagandist. Heidegger lacked the experience and for that reason was doubtful, but ultimately was pressured into taking up the post and found himself having to accept it when it was too late to back down. In that sense, he was by no means power-hungry and eager to Nazify the university. He claimed, in fact, that his colleagues in the faculty had come to the conclusion that their only possibility was to try to withstand the political development in the most constructive way that they could. If they did not, the University of Freiburg itself would be as good as gone.

Heidegger was clear that he believed in Hitler as being a positive force for Germany in the early 1930s, but that he changed his mind as early as 1934, the year that he stepped down as rector. He was opposed to their overly "biological" thinking and was against the dogmas that characterized their ideology from the beginning. Of course, he mouthed approvals when required. He had to make compromises to survive. He quit his position as rector after one year and went back to his lectures. He claimed that these lectures were obviously critical of Nazi leadership for anyone who could see through the indirect and oracular nature of his speaking. For this reason, he never "apologized" for his time as a Nazi, as he saw himself a subversive element who attempted to critique and reform the Nazi regime "from the inside," to the degree that he could be expected to without putting his own life and well-being in danger. Perhaps he was not a martyr for the sake of his highest believes, but how many of us can claim to be?

Some historical details come to light that continue to complicate this picture. We know, for example, that he had bought his brother a copy of Mein Kampf as a gift before he ever became rector. We know that he mixed many anti-semitic tropes and stereotypes into some of his private writings from the era in what are known as his Black Notebooks. We know that we can't pass this all on him just being a rural country person, because his region of Germany actually had comparatively low support for the Nazi party (as most Catholic strongholds did). Some have said that his later remarks were an attempt to revise his own history once he saw where the wind was blowing, and in that sense followed the path of many other men of low moral character after the war.

I don't know what went on in Heidegger's head, but I can only make an opinion based on the evidence I see. I believe that Heidegger naively believed that the rise of Hitler would inaugurate the turning to the other beginning that he so desperately sought. The Nazis were masters at rhetoric that appealed to fans of traditional, bucolic, pastoral Germanic culture. And Heidegger was certainly as attached to this lifestyle as anyone could be. But he ultimately found the Nazis to be deluded by a warped, technical understanding of the world. Indeed, their worldview resulted in the most perverse monstrosity of all modern technicity: genocide as a technological, streamlined machine. Millions of human beings as standing-reserve, not to be "killed" or "murdered" or "slain," but merely "liquidated."

Perhaps I am naive, but personally I do believe Heidegger about his intentions and efforts after 1934. As for his decision to never explicitly ocme out and apologize for being a part of the regime or to explicitly call attention to his role as a subverter, I think we have to once again remember that Heidegger, for all his brilliance, was a human being with his own contradictions, moral misgivings, and imperfections. One of them was a sense of pride. Another was a desire to not get roped back into the world of politics after his venture into Nazism gave him a bad taste. Can you blame him for this in some way? Sure. But I do believe that his philosophy is untouched by it and in fact is critical of the Nazi party line in many ways. You can see it in the Contributions especially when you read it closely.

3.f.iii. "Only a God Can Save Us"

In the same interview with Der Spiegel, Heidegger gave some remarks on his thinking. It was not the last thing published by Heidegger in chronological terms, either during his lifetime or after it. But it does read as a sort of final coda for his thoughts. Perhaps he intended it to be so, knowing that it would be published after his death. In any case, it is a very appropriate piece to end this lecture with as a message for the future that would come after him. It is a bit ominous. But it also shows us the possibility of hope as the "saving power" that grows along with the danger. The most noteworthy part emerges when Heidegger is asked about the movements of democracy, communism, and fascism, and transitions to speaking of Enframing instead. He claims that this is far more decisive for the modern age than any of these merely political developments:

Der Spiegel: Which of the trends just sketched out, according to your view, would be most suitable to our time?

Martin Heidegger: I don't see [any answer to] that. But I do see here a decisive question. First of all, it would be necessary to clarify what you mean by "suitable to our time." What is meant here by "time?" Furthermore, the question should be raised as to whether such suitability is the [appropriate] standard for the "inner truth" of human activity, and whether the standard measure of [human] activity is not thinking and poetizing, however heretical such a shift [of emphasis] may seem to be.

Der Spiegel: It is obvious that man is never [complete] master of his tools--witness the case of the Sorcerer's Apprentice. But is it not a little too pessimistic to say: we are not gaining mastery over this surely much greater tool [that is] modern technicity?

Martin Heidegger: Pessimism, no. In the area of the reflection that I am attempting now, pessimism and optimism are positions that don't go far enough. But above all, modern technicity is no "tool" and has nothing at all to do with tools.

Der Spiegel: Why should we be so powerfully overwhelmed by technicity that...?

Martin Heidegger: I don't say [we are] "overwhelmed" [by it]. I say that up to the present we have not yet found a way to respond to the essence of technicity.

Der Spiegel: But someone might object very naively: what must be mastered in this case? Everything is functioning. More and more electric power companies are being built. Production is up. In highly technologized parts of the earth, people are well cared for. We are living in a state of prosperity. What really is lacking to us?

Martin Heidegger: Everything is functioning. That is precisely what is awesome, that everything functions, that the functioning propels everything more and more toward further functioning, and that technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth. I don't know if you were shocked, but [certainly] I was shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us]--the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today. Recently I had a long dialogue in Provence with René Char--a poet and resistance fighter, as you know. In Provence now, launch pads are being built and the countryside laid waste in unimaginable fashion. This poet, who certainly is open to no suspicion of sentimentality or of glorifying the idyllic, said to me that the uprooting of man that is now taking place is the end [of everything human], unless thinking and poetizing once again regain [their] nonviolent power.

Der Spiegel: Well, we have to say that indeed we prefer to be here, and in our age we surely will not have to leave for elsewhere. But who knows if man is determined to be upon this earth? It is thinkable that man has absolutely no determination at all. After all, one might see it to be one of man's possibilities that he reach out from this earth toward other planets. We have by no means come that far, of course--but where is it written that he has his place here?

Martin Heidegger: As far as my own orientation goes, in any case, I know that, according to our human experience and history, everything essential and of great magnitude has arisen only out of the fact that man had a home and was rooted in a tradition. Contemporary literature, for example, is largely destructive.

[...]

Der Spiegel: Obviously, you see a world movement--this is the way you, too, have expressed it--that either is bringing about an absolutely technical state of has done so already.

Martin Heidegger: That's right.

Der Spiegel: Fine. Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action?

Martin Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.

Der Spiegel: Is there a correlation between your thinking and the emergence of this god? Is there here in your view a causal connection? Do you feel that we can bring a god forth by our thinking?

Martin Heidegger: We can not bring him forth by our thinking. At best we can awaken a readiness to wait [for him].

Der Spiegel: But can we help?

Martin Heidegger: The first help might be the readying of this readiness. It is not through man that the world can be what it is and how it is--but also not without man. In my view, this goes together with the fact that what I call "being" (that long traditional, highly ambiguous, now worn-out word) has need of man in order that its revelation, its appearance as truth, and its [various] forms may come to pass. The essence of technicity I see in what I call "Enframing," an often ridiculed and perhaps awkward expression. To say that Enframing holds sway means that man is posed, enjoined and challenged by a power that becomes manifest in the essence of technicity--a power that man himself does not control. Thought asks no more than this: that it help us achieve this insight. Philosophy is at an end. [105]

FOOTNOTES

1. Martin Heidegger [trans. Gregory Fried & Richard Polt], Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, 2000

6. Charles E. Scott [ed. Richard Polt & Gregory Fried], A Companion to Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, 2013, "The Appearance of Metaphysics"

7. Charles Guignon, Ibid., "Being as Appearing: Retrieving the Greek Experience of phusis"

8. Susan Schoenbohm, Ibid., "Heidegger's Interpretation of phusis in Introduction to Metaphysics"

9. Parmenides [trans. Richard D. McKirahan], Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction With Texts and Commentary, Hackett Pub Co. Inc., 1994

16. Martin Heidegger [trans. John Sallis] [ed. David Farrell Krell], Basic Writings: Ten Key Essays, Plus the Introduction to Being and Time, HarperPerennial, 2008, p. 125

18. Richard Polt [ed. Richard Polt & Gregory Fried], A Companion to Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, 2013, "The Question of Nothing"

19. Martin Heidegger [trans. & ed. David Farrell Krell], Basic Writings: Ten Key Essays, Plus the Introduction to Being and Time, HarperPerennial, 2008, p. 103

20. Martin Heidegger [trans. Gregory Fried & Richard Polt], Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, 2000

22. Richard Polt [ed. Richard Polt & Gregory Fried], A Companion to Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, 2013, "The Question of Nothing"

23. Heraclitus [trans. Richard D. McKirahan], Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction With Texts and Commentary, Hackett Pub Co. Inc., 1994

24. Richard Polt [ed. Richard Polt & Gregory Fried], A Companion to Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, 2013, "The Question of Nothing"

25. Daniel Dahlstrom [ed. Richard Polt & Gregory Fried], A Companion to Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, 2013, "The Scattered Logos: Metaphysics and the Logical Prejudice"

26. Martin Heidegger [trans. Gregory Fried & Richard Polt], Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, 2000

35. Clare Pearson Geiman [ed. Richard Polt & Gregory Fried], A Companion to Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, 2013, "Heidegger's Antigones"

36. Heraclitus [trans. Richard D. McKirahan], Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction With Texts and Commentary, Hackett Pub Co. Inc., 1994

37. Martin Heidegger [trans. Gregory Fried & Richard Polt], Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, 2000

38. Frank Schalow [ed. Richard Polt & Gregory Fried], A Companion to Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, 2013, "At the Crossroads of Freedom: Ethics Without Values"

39. Martin Heidegger [trans. Albert Hofstadter], Poetry, Language, Thought, HarperPerennial, 2013, p. 18-19

45. Julian Young, Heidegger's Philosophy of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2004

46. Martin Heidegger [trans. Albert Hofstadter], Poetry, Language, Thought, HarperPerennial, 2013, p. 47-48

48. Julian Young, Heidegger's Philosophy of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2004

50. Julian Young, Heidegger's Philosophy of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2004

51. Martin Heidegger [trans. Albert Hofstadter], Poetry, Language, Thought, HarperPerennial, 2013, p. 129-130

52. Friedrich Hölderlin [trans. James Mitchell], Remembrance, Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, 2022

53. Julian Young, Heidegger's Philosophy of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2004

54. Friedrich Hölderlin [trans. James Mitchell], Bread and Wine, Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, 2022

55. Martin Heidegger [trans. Albert Hofstadter], Poetry, Language, Thought, HarperPerennial, 2013, p. 89

57. Martin Heidegger [trans. William Lovitt] [ed. David Farrell Krell], Basic Writings: Ten Key Essays, Plus the Introduction to Being and Time, HarperPerennial, 2008, p. 320-322

63. Michael Wheeler, Martin Heidegger, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011

64. Martin Heidegger [trans. William Lovitt] [ed. David Farrell Krell], Basic Writings: Ten Key Essays, Plus the Introduction to Being and Time, HarperPerennial, 2008, p. 358

65. Martin Heidegger [trans. Albert Hofstadter], Poetry, Language, Thought, HarperPerennial, 2013, p. 217

68. Michael Wheeler, Martin Heidegger, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011

69. Martin Heidegger [trans. Albert Hofstadter], Poetry, Language, Thought, HarperPerennial, 2013, p. 178

73. Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction, Indiana University Press, 2003

74. Friedrich Nietzsche [trans. Walter Kaufmann], The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, Random House, 1974

75. Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction, Indiana University Press, 2003

76. Martin Heidegger [trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly], Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Indiana University Press, 1999, Intro.1

77. Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction, Indiana University Press, 2003

79. Martin Heidegger [trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly], Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Indiana University Press, 1999, I.1

81. Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction, Indiana University Press, 2003

82. Martin Heidegger [trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly], Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Indiana University Press, 1999, II.72

83. Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction, Indiana University Press, 2003

84. Martin Heidegger [trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly], Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Indiana University Press, 1999, II.56

88. Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction, Indiana University Press, 2003

89. Martin Heidegger [trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly], Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Indiana University Press, 1999, III.89

91. Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction, Indiana University Press, 2003

92. Martin Heidegger [trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly], Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Indiana University Press, 1999, V.143

97. Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction, Indiana University Press, 2003

99. Martin Heidegger [trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly], Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Indiana University Press, 1999, VI.252

101. Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction, Indiana University Press, 2003

102. Martin Heidegger [trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly], Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Indiana University Press, 1999, VII.255

104. Martin Heidegger [trans. Fred D. Wieck & J. Glenn Gray] [ed. David Farrell Krell], Basic Writings: Ten Key Essays, Plus the Introduction to Being and Time, HarperPerennial, 2008, p. 379