The Movement of Showing by Johan de Jong;

Author:Johan de Jong;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

INTRODUCTION TO THE “TRANSITIONAL THINKING” OF THE CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHILOSOPHY (OF THE EVENT)

In the opening of the Contributions, Heidegger announces that the text will not speak “about” anything: “The issue is […] neither to describe nor to explain, neither to promulgate nor to teach” [hier wird nicht beschrieben und nicht erklärt, nicht verkündet und nicht gelehrt]. Rather, the Contributions are to enact a movement of saying: “Here the speaking is not something over and against what is to be said but is this latter itself as the essential occurrence of beyng” [hier ist das Sagen nicht im Gegenüber zu dem Sagenden, sondern ist dieses selbst als die Wesung des Seyns] (CP 4/6).

The entirety of the Contributions can be seen as an attempt to respond to the question of how to conceive the limits of what one is so essentially involved in, that it already permeates the very attempt to articulate those limits. In that way, the structure of “being-in” that controls Being and Time and the “remarkable ‘relatedness backward or forward’ ” of the question of being, still guides the path of the Contributions. By way of an introduction, I preliminarily indicate how this thematic of “being-in” relates to the concealment that was so important in the discussion of Being and Time. Shortly thereafter, I situate my discussion of the Contributions within the broader framework of the present investigation, by showing Heidegger’s critical relation to metaphysics to be irreducible to both a “reversal” and to “transcendence.” I do this to clarify the “cessation of overcoming” that marks the Contributions’ “transitional thinking.”

In the Contributions, Heidegger frames the question of the limits of what one is inextricably in as the question of the possibility of an “other beginning.” This would be a beginning other than the “first beginning” of Western history or of metaphysics. In the Contributions, Heidegger calls the situation of Western metaphysical mankind “machination” [Machenschaft]. Machination stands for the ubiquitous and pervasive power of a technological understanding of being that prestructures “our” world; a “thorough and calculable explainability” [dürchgängigen berechenbaren Erklärbarkeit] (CP 132/104) that Heidegger will later call Technik. According to Heidegger, machination is the ground and the original essential determination of what Nietzsche understood under the concept of “nihilism” (CP 119/95). Like Derrida’s logocentrism, machination must be understood to denote both a historical circumstance as well as a structural figure.

This means that the question of an other beginning is a question born out of a distress [Not] or a plight, and that plight necessarily has a peculiar structure. Heidegger speaks of “the concealed plight of a lack of a sense of plight” [der verborgenen Not der Notlosigkeit] (CP 11/11). Machination is so pervasive that the inability to conceive its limits is not even experienced as a plight, and this itself is the distress out of which Heidegger’s questions are born.

One can think here of similar motifs in Kierkegaard’s work, such as the “universality” of the “sickness unto death” and its dialectical character (that the “most cherished and desirable place to live” of despair is precisely concealed in the “heart of happiness”).

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