Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts by Bret W. Davis

Author:Bret W. Davis [Davis, Bret W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General
ISBN: 9781317492252
Google: PKLCBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-12-04T23:00:00+00:00

Ereignis, Ent-eignis and the historicality of being

Part of the difficulty of this thought of Ereignis is that we cannot wilfully subject ourselves to the experience of being as appropriating event, and, without at least some sense of this experience what Heidegger attempts to think and say can simply sound hollow and absurd. However, Heidegger believes that there is a fundamental attunement latent in our epoch that makes it possible for at least a few of us to find themselves exposed to that abyssal openness of beyng out of which we may experience beyng occurring as Ereignis. In Being and Time it was the fundamental attunement of anxiety that was shown to displace us from our familiar dealings with things such that our being emerged authentically in its finitude, that is, in its being towards death. In Contributions, the basic disposition that transposes us into the disclosing event of the truth of beyng is both manifold and also historical (in the sense of geschichtlich); it is the disposition of an epoch rather than that of an individual human being.

Heidegger names the basic dispositions that in their unity displace us into the abyssal openness of beyng: “shock” (Erschrecken), “restraint” (Verhaltenheit) and “diffidence” (Scheu). Shock entails the experience of the abandonment of beings by being in the domination of machination (Machenschaft) and adventure (Erlebnis; often translated as “lived experience”) such that beings are reduced to mere variables for calculation and to means for adventures. As a consequence, even the need for questioning being does not arise. In order to find the question of being again, the abandonment by being and forgottenness of being first need to be experienced as a plight. What thinking then realizes, attuned by shock, is that in our epoch being does not occur as an appropriating event but rather as a refusal (Verweigerung or Versagung).11 Thus beyng, at first, is experienced as withdrawal, that is, not as appropriation but as ex-propriation, as Ent-eignis. Heidegger writes: “In this epoch ‘beings’ are … expropriated by beyng [des Seynsenteignet]” (GA 65: 120). Thus the truth of beyng, disclosed in shock, reveals itself as lacking ground such that t ruth has the character of an abyssal opening. Heidegger believes that this abyssal truth needs to be sustained if beyng is to find a site (Da-sein) and if the possibility of the appropriating event (Ereignis) is to be preserved. The sustaining of the abyssal opening of beyng as withdrawal is made possible by the dispositions of restraint and diffidence that dispose Dasein together with shock.

Ent-eignis, expropriation in the sense indicated above, thus has a “negative” connotation: it indicates that in our epoch Er-eignis does not (yet) occur and the truth of beyng remains concealed. This implies what Heidegger calls, in Being and Time, the fallenness of Dasein. It also refers to what, in his essay “The Essence of Truth”, he calls untruth in the sense of errancy (Irre; BW 132–3). But Heidegger speaks of Ent-eignis also in a “positive” sense, namely in terms of the originary concealment that belongs to the truth of beyng even when it holds sway as Er-eignis.

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