The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger's "Contributions to Philosophy"

The Emergency

of Being

On Heidegger’s

Contributions to Philosophy

RICHARD POLT

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Die Not, jenes Umtreibende, Wesende—wie, wenn es die Wahrheit des Seyns selbst wäre, wie, wenn mit der ursprünglicheren Gründung der Wahrheit zugleich das Seyn wesender würde—als das Ereignis?

Emergency—that urgency that assails us in its essential happening—what if it were the truth of be-ing itself? What if, with the more originary grounding of truth, be-ing would also come to happen more essentially—as the appropriating event?

—Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), §17

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction: Thinking the Esoteric

The Esoteric Turbulence of the Contributions

Reading the Contributions

1. Toward Appropriation

The Giving of the Given

Givenness and Belonging in Early Heidegger

The Contributions on Being and Time

Be-ing as Appropriation

2. The Event of Thinking the Event

Be-holding, Representing, and the Identity of Knower and Known

Other than the Present Indicative

Bethinking as Be-ing-historical Thinking

Inceptive Thinking

Telling Silence

The Juncture and the Quarry

3. Straits of Appropriation

Be-ing: The Withdrawal, the Abyss, and the Fissure

Being-there: The Happening of Ownness

Time-space: Evoking the Momentous Site

Be-ing and Beings: Simultaneity and Sheltering

The Gods: The Ultimate Apocalypse

4. Afterthoughts

A Philosophy of Possibility?

Liberalism and Modernity

Reason and Logos

From Beings to Be-ing and Back

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Work on this project was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend in 1998 and by sabbatical leaves from Xavier University in fall 1999 and spring 2004.

Earlier versions of portions of this book first appeared as "Metaphysical Liberalism in Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie," Political Theory 25, no. 5 (October 1997): 655–79, © 1997 by Sage Publications, reprinted by permission of Sage Publications; and The Event of Enthinking the Event, in Companion to Heidegger’s "Contributions to Philosophy," edited by Charles E. Scott, Susan M. Schoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Alejandro Vallega (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.

Earlier versions of other portions were presented as What Is Inceptive Thinking? at the 1998 meeting of the North American Heidegger Conference, and "Evoking the Momentous Site: Time-Space in the Contributions to Philosophy" at the 2003 meeting. I thank Martin Weatherston and Allen Scult for commenting on these papers, and the organizers and attendees for their support and reactions.

I am grateful to Charles Scott and John Sallis for inviting me to participate in the 2000 Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Citta di Castello, Italy, which was devoted to the Contributions. I learned much from the other participants, including Miguel de Beistegui, Robert Bernasconi, Walter Brogan, Daniel Dahlstrom, Dominique Janicaud, Kenneth Maly, Michael Naas, Hans Ruin, Dennis Schmidt, Susan Schoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and David Wood.

For their help in the writing process I thank Timothy Bagley, Duane H. Davis, Daniel J. Dwyer, Chad Engelland, Daniel Fidel Ferrer, Barbara Fiand, Gregory Fried, Charles Guignon, Bob Korth, William McNeill, Sidnie Reed, and Frank Schalow. Special thanks go to Theodore Kisiel for our cooperative archival research.

Abbreviations

All references within parentheses in the main text are to GA 65, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, second, revised edition (1994), unless otherwise indicated. The pagination of GA 65 is also provided in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). However, translations from GA 65 are my own, as are all other translations unless otherwise indicated. For consistency with my own translations, I have substituted being for Being and being-there for Dasein in all quotations from other translations; these substitutions have not been individually noted. Unless otherwise noted, all italics in quotations are from the original.

Introduction: Thinking the Esoteric

The enigmatic manuscript titled Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) was composed by Martin Heidegger in private during 1936–38. It sets the stage for all his later thought by shifting from Being and Time’s hermeneutic phenomenology of Dasein (the entity who understands being) to a meditation on the event of appropriation (das Ereignis) as the happening of be-ing (Seyn) itself.

The project seems crucial, but so far there is less consensus about this book than about nearly any other twentieth-century philosophical text. Is it Heidegger’s major work or metaphysical dadaism?¹ An earthshaking achievement or laughable gibberish? Specialists do not even agree on how to translate Ereignis—much less on the value of the text. Even Heidegger himself was uncertain. By showing the manuscript to just a few friends during his lifetime, he gave it a special mystique—but his secretiveness was partly due to his misgivings. The text describes itself only as a premonition of a work that would be called Das Ereignis (77).² It itself is unsuited for publication as a work, Heidegger notes shortly after its completion (GA 66, 427); it is a framework but not a structure (GA 69, 5). In fact, even at its inception he surely never expected it to take the form of a treatise to be presented to the public during his lifetime.³ In 1948, he recalls that when he was working on the text in his cabin in the summer of 1936, he knew that it was an essential step, perhaps the genuine (eigentlich) step; yet he always understood the text as completely precursory, as its title implies.⁴

Whatever their worth as a work may be, the Contributions to Philosophy are forbiddingly strange. They are an arrangement of 281 opaque notes and fragmentary sketches. The language is hypnotically repetitive and dense, consisting of formula after formula in which Heidegger tries to say everything unsayable all at once. The style borrows from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Hölderlin’s hymns, without attaining the grace of either writer. The book’s pronouncements on the present age offer the grotesque spectacle of a Hegelianized Kierkegaard, where world history is conceived in terms of decision and the moment of crisis, yet no individuals—or hardly any—are capable of making decisions. As an account of the essential happening of be-ing, the text resembles a treatise; as an investigation of the roots of concepts, it resembles history of philosophy; as an analysis of a crisis, it resembles cultural critique; as an invocation of a moment of decision, it resembles prophecy; as a self-conscious deployment of language, it resembles poetry.

The book’s tone is tense, almost desperate.⁵ Even though its fundamental mood is said to be restraint (§13), it is full of sweeping judgments and impassioned denunciations, driven by an effort to set in motion a revolution comparable only to the beginnings of Greek philosophy—to sow the seeds of a question that might determine the style of thinking for centuries (19). The Contributions are arrogant and obsessive, stubborn and self-important, because they are the result of their author’s decision to let himself give vent to intimations that were long held back in hesitation (xvii).

What are we to make of this? Many readings of the Contributions are either dismissive or imitative. The few analytic philosophers who have not ignored the book have mocked it; this was predictable enough, but the mockery is all the more gleeful thanks to the sheer silliness of the available English translation.⁶ The interpretations on the other end of the spectrum tend to be faithful, all too faithful, so that when it comes to the central thoughts of the Contributions there is little difference between original and interpretation.⁷ The problem here is that interpreting, as Heidegger insists, means working out a projected possibility (SZ 150). The projection opens an interpretive space, a context; to understand something is to put it into context. And it is strictly impossible for a text to state all the context for all its statements. It follows that in order to understand a book, we have to go beyond it. To use a non-Heideggerian metaphor: stereoscopic vision requires different perspectives. To reproduce the surface of a text, no matter how accurately, is not to see the depth, the source of its sayings. Without a perspective of our own on the matter at stake, our interpretation becomes a Potemkin village.⁸ It is equally true, however, that any interpretation that forces a text into its own preconceptions is reductive and shallow. The solution is to engage in a hermeneutic circle: the reader’s own standpoint should illuminate the text, but the text, in turn, should be allowed to transform that standpoint. In a good interpretation, this circle reveals progressively more facets of both the text and the issues at hand. The goal is not to correspond to the words of the text, but to co-respond with the text to the issues.

This approach is exemplified by Reiner Schürmann’s posthumous magnum opus, Broken Hegemonies,⁹ and Miguel de Beistegui’s Truth and Genesis.¹⁰ Both authors present close but tendentious readings of the Contributions as part of their larger projects. Schürmann’s project is a deconstructive account of the self-dissolution of principles; Beistegui’s is a constructive, Deleuzian account of being as difference. Although I disagree with both interpretations, their very tendentiousness makes them the most thought-provoking to date.

I have tried, then, to provide perspective on the Contributions—neither in order to reduce the text to familiar concepts nor to refute it, but to engage with it in a confrontation about the things themselves. A confrontation is not a polemic, but an encounter with a way of thinking that respects it and learns from it precisely by struggling with it.¹¹ In a confrontation, more must be at stake than competing sets of statements; the parties must remain focused on a shared concern. Accordingly, this book is not simply an introduction to the Contributions.¹² Although I seek various points of entry to the text, my main goal could be called an extraduction. I want to lead myself and my readers through the text and out of it in order to encounter the issues at stake. In fact, the very distinction between inside and outside is ultimately artificial: one cannot dwell within a text unless one interprets the theme that lies outside it.

The central theme in my confrontation with the Contributions is emergency. The Contributions venture the thought that being comes into its own in Not—emergency, urgency, exigency. Genuine encounters with beings (das Seiende)—the earth on which we dwell, the tools we use, the art we create, the communities in which we try to work out our goals—require a rare, urgent moment when we appropriate and are appropriated by the significance of beings as a whole. Heidegger usually calls this significance Sein, being, while calling the event of appropriation, the event in which being emerges, Seyn—which I render as be-ing. (I develop these concepts at length in chapter i.) The heart of history, for Heidegger, is not a sequence of occurrences but the happening of be-ing—the eruption of significance at inceptions, or critical junctures. Such a juncture decides the course of an epoch; it initiates a realm of truth and an order of representation. An inception would appropriate us, or bring us into our own, by making all being, including our being, into an urgent issue. Unlike a conventional emergency, such a moment may not call for immediate action; in fact, it may leave us at a loss and call for long reflection. Yet the word emergency appropriately describes how such an extraordinary event calls us into question. In emergency, being emerges.

Heidegger charges our tradition with oblivion to the emergency of being. In particular, the three political alternatives of the twentieth century—liberal democracy, communism, and fascism—all come under attack. Contemporary politics, along with science, philosophy, and religion, are part of a Western culture that Heidegger sees as estranged from the happening of history—dangerously so, because our oblivion brings with it the hubris of supposing that we can establish an absolute, ahistorical mode of representing and manipulating beings. This hubris is a betrayal of our unique role as Dasein—the guardians and cultivators of emergent being. The Contributions, then, attempt to shock us into an awareness of our current crisis—die Not der Not-losigkeit, the emergency of the lack of urgency—by exposing the oblivion of be-ing.¹³ Heidegger tries to find a way beyond this crisis by reflecting on its ancient roots and developing a new way of thinking that is appropriate to the event of appropriation.

The central questions for my interpretation are: how would being emerge in an emergency? How would this emergency draw us into our own world, our own way of approaching all that is? And how would we properly think and speak of this event? In pursuing these questions, I interpret das Ereignis as a unique happening that is not in effect a priori or always already. It is also a possible event that demands to be thought in a future-subjunctive tonality, as a what if? Such thinking is not a description of what is directly or indirectly given, but an experimental thinking that ventures into the possibility of the self-concealing event of giving. Against most interpreters, I choose this difficilior lectio—a reading that is more difficult, not at all because it contradicts Heidegger’s text but because it upsets our received ways of conceiving. We tend to think of philosophy in a present-indicative tonality, as an account of present or quasi-present structures. In contrast, the Contributions invite us to risk a kind of thought that leaps into a singular possibility, a possibility that exceeds thought but also requires thought. In this sense, the event of thinking of appropriation is the very event that it thinks.

Although my confrontation with the Contributions requires a close interpretation of the text, it is not intended as an all-inclusive commentary. The sheer length and richness of Heidegger’s book rule that out. I provide detailed readings of some particularly important passages, but in general I range freely through the text as I gather relevant references; and while I discuss all the main positive ideas in the Contributions, I say little about their negative ideas. Heidegger’s critiques of traditional philosophy and the modern world cannot be judged properly until we have confronted their source—the thought of Ereignis.¹⁴ In my final chapter, however, I engage with parts of Heidegger’s critique—his attacks on liberalism and reason—in order to begin a reply to his characterization of the West.

One more task I have had to forego is an account of the Contributions" place in Heidegger’s writings as a whole—not to mention their endless connections to other thinkers.¹⁵ I draw on other Heideggerian texts and discuss the evolution from Being and Time in some detail, but my main focus is what I take to be distinctive about the Contributions themselves. There is a characteristic tone and approach in this text that fits its understanding of appropriation—an understanding that may not jibe with later works, which seem to dilute the urgency, uniqueness, and historicity of Ereignis.¹⁶ Determining the precise relation between the Contributions and Heidegger’s later writings would take much more textual and philosophical work than I have done; furthermore, we are still awaiting the publication of some of the private texts from the years immediately following the Contributions.¹⁷ It is probably true that we could fit the Contributions into a unitarian interpretation of Heidegger’s thought if we simply discarded their apocalyptic language ... the cosmic drama, the mystical metaphors, the Teutonic bombast.¹⁸ Before we do so, however, we should meditate on apocalypse. Apo-calypsis means exactly the same as a-letheia: unconcealment, revelation. Could it be that truth takes place in a moment of crisis?¹⁹ Could it be that the Contributions" focus on emergency offers a distinctive and valuable understanding of truth and being—including our own being?²⁰ Between Being and Time’s decisionistic tendencies and the later texts’ nearly quietistic Gelassenheit, the Contributions may leave room for free action while thinking far beyond traditional concepts of subjectivity and will.

The first and closest interpretation of a foreign-language text is translation. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly’s translation of the Contributions represents years of interpretive labor. However, I have presented my own translations and paraphrases here—first, so as not to spare myself the work of interpreting each word anew, and second, because it must be said that the existing translation is often peculiar, inconsistent, or misleading. Despite a number of felicitous coinages (such as be-ing for Seyn, which I gratefully adopt), and despite the fact that Heidegger himself invents words in the Contributions, the translators have resorted to neologisms too often. Their more bizarre constructions (such as enswaying and charming-moving-unto) have made the fog surrounding Heidegger’s text nearly impenetrable. This is the sort of esotericism that, as I will argue, is extrinsic and hinders readers from confronting the intrinsic mystery. I prefer to use established English words while allowing their connotations to adapt to a new context. Heidegger himself usually adopts normal words (such as Ereignis and Wesen), so that even though these words gain new meanings in his experiments, they retain a connection to the old. Language opens fresh horizons by drawing creatively on its own heritage—not by breaking with it.²¹ In particular, I have not succeeded in employing enowning as a meaningful English counterpart to Ereignis. The translators’ cases against event and appropriation are less than convincing, as I will show—so I translate Ereignis by the more traditional appropriation, appropriating event, and event of appropriation, expressions whose worst fault is their length.²²

I have also decided to translate Da-sein (which is usually hyphenated in the Contributions) as being-there. Since the publication of Macquarrie and Robinson’s version of Being and Time in 1962, most Anglophone Heidegger scholars have left Dasein untranslated (with the notable exception of William J. Richardson, who uses There-being in his 1963 Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought). I am persuaded by Daniel Dahlstrom that it is high time we found ways of speaking about the matter in English.²³ Dasein runs the risk of serving as a bit of jargon that is so familiar that we no longer pause to consider what it means. Dahlstrom recommends being-here. For my purposes, being-there is best, because the Contributions suggest that we are not yet Da-sein, or not fully so. The child’s backseat refrain is a good question: are we there yet? The there is not necessarily here, and being-there is not necessarily being human. In being-there we must hear several meanings. First, being-there is being situated in a there, inhabiting a place or world. Second, it is a way of being the there—existing as a site (SZ 133). Third, it is the there for being—the site where the meaning of beings as such can be manifested, cultivated, and transformed. In short: if we attain being-there, we will dwell in our world in such a way that we become the arena where it is decided what it means to be.²⁴

The Esoteric Turbulence of the Contributions

So far, we have not confronted the Contributions but only announced the confrontation. The confrontation itself needs to begin with the book’s style. How does it resist our desire for a straightforward and consistent doctrine? Why is it so turbulent and esoteric? What does it demand from its interpreters?

Heidegger claims that the pursuit of his single philosophical way necessitates a change in standpoints (84). If philosophy is a doctrine—a system of assertions—then this claim is a paradox: a change in the assertions is a change in the philosophy. But Heidegger always insists that truth is not a matter of assertions. Assertions rest on a more primordial unconcealment, an openness for beings and being. A thoughtful text should let its statements spring anew every time from an experience of an issue (21) and try to evoke an analogous experience in the reader. Such a text does not prove anything—if proving means establishing that an assertion is indubitably correct. Philosophy proves itself only by proving successful in displaying the issue to which its assertions are pointing. The effort of displaying has to involve both the writer and the reader. The process is faltering—collapsing and climbing (84)—because revelation is never total. Presence is always situated, display is always limited.

But why would a persistent focus on the same issue lead to a change of standpoints? We must look more closely at the limitations of display. Being and Time tries to show that presence requires the interplay of past and future (SZ 350). Our past, our habits and heritage, is the source from which we draw future possibilities. Thanks to these possibilities, we are able to deal with things—we understand them. Interpreting, then, is an intrinsically finite event: it can never abolish either the uncontrollable thrownness that comes with having a past or the prejudicial anticipations that come with having a future. Interpretation can never vouch for its completeness and permanence by securing an immediate and pure access to its object. But although we cannot eliminate the limits of interpretation, we can work with them and challenge them in an ongoing disclosure. Our past can be critiqued and retrieved; our prejudices can be altered in an attempt to do justice to the thing we are interpreting (SZ 153). This is the meaning of Sachlichkeit—devotion to the Sachen, the things themselves. It is a willingness to wrestle with the issues and with oneself in an interpretation that acknowledges its own temporality.²⁵ Unconcealment is not contained in any particular assertion generated by this interpreting. It occurs in the interpretive motion itself, as long as we continue to confront the issue at hand and the limits of our understanding. Consequently, a statement that participates in the event of truth at one moment may at a later moment be stuck in a stagnant understanding that is no longer actively interpreting.²⁶ Interpretations of the same thing must stay in motion in order to remain loyal to the thing.

Motion is not identical with alteration. Interpreting may remain in motion even if it simply consists of repeated efforts to grasp something with the same words and concepts. In fact, this repetitive style is common in the Contributions and Heidegger’s other private manuscripts. Our task is to avoid mouthing his statements as mantras, and think through them anew on each occasion. In this way our understanding remains in motion, even if it is only moving in a circle. However, alteration can and should be part of the motion of interpreting. The circle can become a truly hermeneutic circle—or a helix that deepens its approach to its theme with each new turn. As we discover our limitations, our words and thoughts can change. Such progress is not upward progress, the construction of a cathedral of thought. It is downward progress, the excavation of our own foundations, the discovery of elusive bedrock that always threatens to be covered up again by the rubble we generate in uncovering it. This is quarry work. The turbulence of the Contributions—their sometimes rushing, sometimes halting search for new approaches to the same topic—is not due to the fact that the text is a set of notes rather than a finished work; turbulence is an essential aspect of interpretation as Heidegger sees it.²⁷

But the book is not just hermeneutic; it is hermetic. Not only is it engaged in a constant struggle, but it also seems to refuse us access to its inner sanctum. At crucial points, it frustrates the desire for clarity. What is the source of this esotericism? An esoteric text keeps its meaning on the inside, where only some are privileged to enter. But what does it mean to be inside or outside a text? And may one write about an esoteric text without being esoteric oneself?

To be admitted into a text is to be admitted into an experience of the issue of the text. An esoteric text maintains watch over who is admitted into the vicinity of its issue. It has a policy of restricted admissions. How do the Contributions enforce this policy? Whom do they admit and exclude? Why are they exclusive in the first place?

For decades, the Contributions were private in an obvious sense: they were unpublished, and their very existence was a matter for connoisseurs. Heidegger showed the text only to a few confidants who communicated brief selections to other scholars.²⁸ In Heidegger’s last years, he specified that the Contributions and other private texts could be published only after all his lecture courses (513).²⁹ This makes a good deal of sense. The Contributions are written in such a condensed and allusive style that they are guaranteed to send a novice away in despair, while the lecture courses usually begin with the tradition and common sense, and are primarily devoted to challenging our presuppositions.

Do the lectures, then, provide the key that unlocks the Contributions and admits us to an experience of the issue at stake? The Contributions often assume familiarity with the lectures and Being and Time—so there is no reason to argue with Heidegger’s recommendation that we read other texts first. However, this will not erase the esotericism of the Contributions themselves. The lecture courses always remain superficial; within the fundamental mood, they begin at an apparently arbitrary stretch of the path, and from this point they offer views of the whole (GA 66, 421). In order to grasp why the starting points of the lectures are not really arbitrary, one must already share the fundamental mood: one must already be initiated into the experience of the topic of Heidegger’s thinking. Maybe at some later time, some will succeed in experiencing what is kept silent [in the lectures] ... and will then be able to set what is explicitly said within its [proper] limits (GA 66, 421). The lectures, then, always come from outside (GA 69, 173). As exoteric texts, they cannot be fully understood unless one already understands the position from which Heidegger is speaking—so one must grapple with the esoteric Contributions.

When we turn to the Contributions themselves, no matter how well we may know the lectures, we find that the style of the book enforces its esoteri-cism—so much that although the text has now been published, its meaning can hardly be said to be public. Consider the second paragraph of § i. It warns us from the start that the text is "not yet able to join [fügen] the free juncture [Fuge] of the truth of be-ing from be-ing itself; its center of gravity does not yet lie in the heart of its topic (4). So in order to understand the text, we must already have built our own way to an issue that is not successfully addressed in the text itself. When Heidegger does try to say something about the heart of the matter, in the conclusion of the paragraph we are considering, he resorts to an emphatic but highly obscure sentence, couched in idiosyncratic terms: the essence of be-ing in its trembling .. . then strengthens into the power of the released mildness of an intimacy of that godding of the god of gods, from which the assignment of being-there to be-ing, as the grounding of truth for be-ing, comes into its own" (4). The words are like emissaries from the inner sanctum, tokens sent out from the hidden center. Like an oracle’s words, they seem to speak a private language. This paragraph uses plays on words, repeated sounds, and neologisms: fügen, Fuge, Gefüge; Götterung des Gottes der Götter. Er-eignis is echoed in sich ereignet (comes into its own or, in its usual sense, takes place). The odd expression trembling (Erzit-terung) is applied to be-ing, with no explanation. In fact, none of the key words is explained or defined. Some of them are stressed, but because we are not privy to their meaning the stress only heightens the mystery. This passage from the opening of the book shows us that the book has no opening; the beginning presupposes a vocabulary that will never be defined in familiar terms. There is no royal road to the meaning of the text. Instead, Heidegger experiments with families of words, sketching and unsketching connections, straining to say what he knows he is failing to say. The effect of this style is that no single passage is intelligible on its own; instead, we must thrash about and learn to swim.

Who will sink and who will stay afloat? Heidegger’s style excludes those who are unfamiliar with his previous writings; those who are unfamiliar with the history of philosophy or too entrenched in some phase of it; and above all, those who are unwilling to experience a transformation. Those who are admitted are those who have followed much of Heidegger’s path up to now and who are willing to go further—not because it is his path but because it is also part of their own path. We must experience his attempt as both coming from far away and belonging intimately to us (8).³⁰

Maybe this can be said of any text: only those with the necessary background and tenacity will be admitted to an experience of the issue that the text is about. But a nonesoteric text presents no deliberate barriers to the unqualified, and may even try to overcome the barriers that these readers carry with themselves. An esoteric text, in contrast, actively fends off the unqualified. It either prevents them from seeing anything at all or points them toward a public (exoteric) message that conceals and protects the true message. The Contributions are the former type: to the unqualified, they present not a misleading message, but no message at all—they are unintelligible.

Why write esoterically? One motive can be personal protection from political or religious persecution.³¹ This motive might seem to apply to Heidegger. The Contributions often attack Nazi ideology, and they certainly could not have been published in the late thirties without exposing Heidegger to serious danger. In fact, the text is at odds not only with Nazism but with all current forms of political organization. And Heidegger was concerned about his political position (witness his stipulation that his 1966 interview with Der Spiegel could be published only after his death). But an author’s caution does not, per se, make a text esoteric. A manuscript that is treated secretively, that is not published during the author’s lifetime, is not necessarily an esoteric manuscript. In fact, the Contributions are rather direct in their political criticisms, even if they rarely get into specifics.³² The political dimension of this book is not the root of its esotericism.

In a writer like Plato we find deeper motives for esoteric writing. Not only is Plato politically cautious (as a follower of Socrates might well be), but he also represents human beings as belonging to different ranks. The true rhetorician must be an expert psychologist who tailors his speech to the soul of his audience (Phaedrus 271d, 277b-c). Books—ordinary ones, that is—speak to everyone in the same voice, so they are clumsy and often harmful (Phaedrus 2 75e). Plato seems to have designed his dialogues in such a way that different audiences will be affected differently by them, but each effect will be beneficial for the particular audience affected. For instance, the Phaedo presents a number of arguments for the immortality of the soul, all of which are flawed, as well as a series of myths. Those who accept the myths or the arguments will come away with a salutary belief. Those who challenge the arguments and recognize the myths as myths will come away with something better: they will become participants in the examined life.

In the Contributions, Heidegger does not write in this Platonic way. His is the type of esoteric text that is simply opaque to outsiders, instead of offering them a salutary alternative to the esoteric message. However, he shares Plato’s insistence on ranking human beings (§5, §45, §§248–52), and like Plato, he uses the capacity for philosophy as his main criterion. For Heidegger (and arguably for Plato), philosophy means a self-transforming engagement in questioning, not the argumentative construction of theories (13–14). His sentences are elusive, evocative, interrelated yet unsystematic, so that anyone who wants to extract a theory from the text will be frustrated. He thus excludes the philosophical establishment. Those who proceed beyond the bland, empty public title Contributions to Philosophy and who succeed in thinking Of Appropriation will be the few and the rare who are capable of solitary questioning (11). Heidegger claims not to care about the misunderstandings that may beset his project among the many: if a decision on behalf of be-ing ever expresses itself, it is inevitably misinterpreted, and this very misinterpretation protects it from vulgar groping (92).

Elitism runs deep in the Contributions. Heidegger often expresses contempt for the average understanding, which he associates with rationality. He claims reason destroys truth by ignoring differences in rank and treating unconcealment as if it were equally accessible to all (343, cf. 65). We may ask whether he has done justice to reason—but this critical assessment will have to wait. For now, we must see that his distaste for accessibility and rational clarity is linked to his understanding of truth and be-ing. The happening of be-ing is not something that can be represented at any time, however one likes, to whomever one chooses (251).

We are approaching the deepest sense in which this text is esoteric. The types of esotericism we have considered so far are based on prudence: it would be incautious to state certain views directly, because this could be damaging to the author (if the views are controversial), to the audience (if they are not prepared to grasp the views properly), or to the meaning of the text (if it falls into the hands of interpreters who would judge it by an alien standard). All these types of esotericism are extrinsic: the mystery of the philosophical thoughts is not crucial to the thoughts themselves, but is imposed by the cautious style of the author. However, there may also be an intrinsic esotericism, as Schelling suggests: Philosophy is necessarily esoteric, by its very nature. There is no need to try to keep it secret, for, instead, it is essentially mysterious.³³

Even if we have qualified as genuine thinkers in Heidegger’s sense and have grown familiar with his language, the Contributions cannot give us direct access to their topic, because this topic is itself intrinsically inaccessible to direct thought. The event of be-ing withholds itself in the very moment of granting being (the significance of beings). Being is born in the blinding flash of an inception that must remain inexplicable—for every explanation falls short of the inception and degrades it (188). The event of emergence is not itself something that has emerged; the source of openness is not itself open; the origin of givenness is not itself given. What is clear and distinct, then, can only be what is derivative. Heidegger puts this in the most histrionic terms when he declares that if philosophy makes itself understandable, it commits suicide (435). (In Das Ereignis he draws the conclusion that true philosophers never seek to understand other philosophers, but only to intensify the questioning.)

Many would object: isn’t it the philosopher’s mission precisely to clarify the unclear, to shed light on the mysterious? In response, Heidegger would insist that it is not just his text that is esoteric, but his topic itself that is dark. We have to wean ourselves from the notion that the dark is what is not yet illuminated, what would show itself fully if only we found the right access to it. When it comes to be-ing, the right access is partial and indirect. An obscure presentation of an obscure topic is, in a sense, clearer than a clear presentation of that topic. The obscure presentation does justice to the obscurity of the thing. When the topic of one’s thought is self-concealing, then there is no difference between seeking and finding (80): the obscure question, the frustrated search, is itself the most appropriate response to the thing.

Heidegger’s goal in the Contributions was to say the truth of being sim-ply.³⁴ Yet being proves to be enigmatic, not because it is too complex but precisely because it is so simple—so basic to everything we do and say. The simple saying of the simple topic of being becomes a saying that does not say, a telling silence (78–80). Telling silence makes the Contributions an intrinsically esoteric text. As a style of writing, it springs from restraint as a style of being-there (15, 33–34). Restrained existence and discourse is attuned to be-ing as what leaves us speechless—what cannot be explained proposition-ally but only named poetically (36). Restraint lets us respond to the strange without reducing it to the familiar.

Heideggerian restraint parallels Socratic irony. Irony is neither a personal quirk of Socrates that has nothing to do with his philosophical thought, nor a thesis that can be supported by a Socratic argument. It is a style of existing that pervades what Socrates does, says, and does not say—a style that is not arbitrary but is based on Socrates’ own experience of what is at stake in life. We do violence to Socratic irony, we differ from Socrates, as soon as we try to explain irony instead of participating in it. But we may say that Socrates’ irony points to his experience of his own limits, an experience that makes him less limited than those who have not yet experienced their limits.

Heidegger, too, speaks from an experience of finitude—finitude as ap-propriation.³⁵ As we will see, on the basis of this experience he rejects the Socratic-Platonic postulate of the forms, the ideai that serve to orient a life lived in Socratic irony. We will have to ask whether this rejection is justified and whether Heidegger himself avoids postulating an idea.

Reading the Contributions

We will revisit the style of the Contributions in greater depth when we are ready to connect it more thoroughly to their content. But our preliminary look at the book’s esoteric turbulence can already give us some guidelines for reading it.

First, if the point of a philosophical text is to reveal an issue, this revelation must depend on the reader at least as much as on the writer. The text demands that we think along with it: to understand [a philosopher] always means ... to run up against the same problems on one’s own (GA 28, 185). But how can we be sure that we and the writer are thinking about the same thing? We cannot. All we can do is let the writer’s words resonate with our own thoughts and discover whether the insights we gain in this way lead us back productively to the text, showing us new facets of it. As long as this process continues, the reader and writer stand a good chance of being engaged in a dialogue about the same topic.

This is not to suggest that the reader should agree with the writer or use the same words. A shared focus brings with it the possibility and even the necessity of differing thoughts. Since our situation differs from Heidegger’s, our presuppositions and expectations differ. In order to challenge these limits of our understanding, we need means that differ from his. Thinking the same as Heidegger does not mean being Heideggerians who recite his words and imitate his mannerisms. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a Heideggerian. Such a creature would have to accept all of Heidegger’s assertions—including the assertion that thinking is not a matter of