Back to Heidegger: Ereignis and Situating Volume 1 A Path to Being

The Commercial Press, 2012

Contents

Preface

Introduction: Heidegger’s Story of Philosophical Situating

One: “How (Wie)” in Heidegger’s Philosophical Writings

1. The three “Big Others” Heidegger encountered

2. Theory of textological situating: for whom to write?

3. Four kinds of texts in Heidegger’s intellectual biography

4. Commentary side notes, records of thoughts, quasi‑text and neologism in divergent situatings

Two: Heidegger Tells about Heidegger

1. Heidegger’s self‑description: reliable or not?

2. Public and secret self‑positionings: reflections on different intellectual roads

3. Being and Time: the beginning of the “First Road”

4. Refuse (Verlassen) being: the concealed endeavor towards “Another Road”

5. The true situating of thought of “Another Road”

6. A road of necessity and lonely desperation

The last word: Road, but not works.

Three: Possible Light amidst Being Lost on the Path of Exploring Heidegger

1. Adorno’s criticism: outside of the transition from “Ontology” to Ontology

2. Bourdieu: the lost one in the maze of ontology

3. Derrida: the mysterious trace of the cross mark over Sein

4. Arendt: the willing of letting be (seinlassen)

5. Charles Bambach: a pirouette through politically colored lens

6. Heidegger’s complex dual situating of thought

Four: A Historical Line Drawn from Outside

1. Dormancy of young Heidegger’s thought

2. Towards being: to become Heidegger himself

3. Overcome metaphysics and refuse being: the formation of Ereignis’ situating

4. A mazelike unfolding of thought

Volume One: A Path to Being

Chapter One: “Split Soul” of Devout Mountain‑Dwellers’ Son

One: Young Heidegger’s Helplessness Being Thrown into the World

1. Four worlds intertwined: divinity vs. secularity, authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) vs. work (Arbeit)

2. A dual world of “being theologized” and “being graced”

3. College: from theology to philosophy

Two: A Point of Complicated Situating in Heidegger’s Early Thought

1. Flashing light in Heidegger’s early performative text

2. Secret texts deviated from the Big Others

Attached: Dilthey and His Historical Hermeneutics

1. The death of matephisics in historical consciousness

2. Spiritual science (Geisteswissenschaft): inner experience of actual life

3. Re‑situating: the philosophical secret of historical hermeneutics

Chapter Two: Young Heidegger’s Thought in Early Freiburg Period

One: Life Experience As Event (Ereignis)

1. “Having something” and the structure of life experience

2. “Echo“ situating of the Umwelt experience

3. Event (Ereignis) and the objectification process apart from life

Two: Forming (Ausformung) and Ordering (Zuordnung): the Secret of Representation in Phenomenology

1. "Das nicht ursprünglich Historische“ as the principle of philosophy

2. Zuordnung: the fundamental difference between Formalisierung and Generalisierung

3. Apparence (Erscheinung) of form: the secret of constructive Phenomenology

Three: Presence of Dasein: A Deconstruction of Jaspers’ Humanism

1. A deconstructive critique: a detour back to the original

2. The staging of the limited historical Dasein

3. The initiative questioning on Dasein’s being

4. Das Historische and eigene Geschichte of conscience (Gewissen)

Chapter Three: Life Phenomenology: A Study on Aristotle without Aristotle

One: Loose Pages: Situating of A Strong Representation Behind A Week One

1. Basic situation of the text

2. Non‑solution situating in the loose pages

3. Philosophy’s current corruptive situation and its retroflexed questioning

4. Introduction: the in‑between examination of a higher level

Two: Foregoing Phenomenological Questioning after the History of Philosophy and Philosophy

1. Capture the pre‑understanding: “premises” of philosophical understanding

2. Philosophical history and the history in life connections (Zusammenhang)

3. Was→Wie→Sein: the foregoing path of “what philosophy does”

4. Deconstruction: subject of phenomenological ontology

5. Acting towards: understand the philosophy in situation

6. Being as the meaning of being

Three: Practical Life: Dasein in a World of Sorgen

1. Deconstruction of relations: from life to world

2. Sorgen: relational meaning of life

3. The emergent world under the direction of Sorgen

Four: The Sad Hyperbolic: Life Ruinance in the Sense of Relation

1. Inclination as directional force

2. The hyperbolic: the forgotten pre‑existing distance and self‑distancing

3. Self‑blocking in the elliptical

4. Relucence and pre‑construction in action

5. Zusammenhang: relucent essence of the surrounding world

Five: Gloom Survival in This World

1. Existence towards ruinance in phenomenological horizon

2. Chairological characters of time and nothingness

3. Four formal features of ruinance

Chapter Four: A Report to Natorp: Heidegger’s First Important Academic Presentation

One: “Upon Which (Woraufhin)”: The Underlying Situating of Historical Hermeneutics

1. Precondition for perception and understanding: Blickstand, Blickrichtung and Blickweite

2. Philosophy: unbearable heaviness of being

3. Situation: replay in its particular whileness of the practical life in historical context

Two: The World of Umgang: The Field of Circumspection (Umsicht) Constructed by Dasein’s Activity of Sogen

1. The three worlds where practical life exists

2. Besorgen, objective existence through Umgang, and Logos

3. Observation and explanation of Aufenthalt in the forming of Umgang

Three: Verfallen of Life in the World of Umgang and the Possibility of Its Countermovement

1. What causes the Verfallen of the world?

2. Das Man with the fate of “Verfallen”

3. Countermovement: historical Sein stands facing Death

Four: The Resolving Transition from “Ontology” to Ontology

1. Objective tendency of Umgang: worldly foundation of “ontology”, phenomenology and hermeneutics

2. “I am just reinforcing phenomenology and hermeneutics.”

3. A thread of modern western intellectual history contained in the deconstructive hermeneutics of facticity

Five: The Resolving Philosophical Situating of Aristotle’s Thought

1. “Überhellung”: the historical presence of object in the pre‑existent cognitive structure

2. A being: the available thing created in the Sorgen of Umgang

3. The observation and research after the transition from “ontology” to ontology

Six: A Phenomenological Interpretation of Aristotle’s Text

1. A resolving inspection into the five ways a soul acquires the truth

2. “Ontology” →Ontology: Umgänglich “Was ist es” of being in the world

3. The generation of pure understanding: Besorgen’s forgetfulness of upon which (Woraufhin)

Chapter Five: “Man” and Dasein: Hermeneutics of Facticity

One: Deconstruction of the Objective Ontology

1. A preceded explanation of the text

2. Objective ontology and the ontology of Dasein

3. The concealed questioning

4. The facticity of Dasein’s existence

Two: The Hermeneutics of Facticity

1. The historical detour of hermeneutics

2. The self‑explanation of practical existence of Dasein

3. Möglichsein of practical existence of Dasein in fore‑conception (Vorgriff)

Three: “Man” and Averaging to Das Man of Practical Dasein

1. Definition of Man and Scheler’s phenomenological “revolution”

2. Today and everyday: the facticity of Dasein’s existence in its particular whileness (Jeweiligkeit)

3. “Wie” in the existence of Dasein: the public averagedness of Das Man

4. Das Man in academics and his performance with mask

Four: Bildung: Publicized and Averaged Das Man’s Consciousness

1. Unconscious revelation of the “mystery” in the critique of “Bildungsbewußtsein”

2. “Historical consciousness” as main hermeneutic direction of “today”

3. Spengler: A case of critique of “historical consciousness”

4. The condition of the averaged Das Man in philosophy

Five: Hermeneutic Direction of Dasein in its Particular Whileness

1. Da‑: presence of Dasein in Sein’s basic characteristics

2. Verweisungsstil: explanation of Dasein in averaged Das Man’s historical consciousness

3. Violent ordering of logic: averaged Das Man’s philosophical explanation of Dasein

Six: The Phenomenological Path of the Hermeneutics of Facticity

1. The meaning‑history of “phenomenology”

2. Phenomenology is a methodological possibility.

Seven: Practical Life: Dasein is a Sein in the World.

1. Two misunderstandings first denied: the subject‑object model and prejudice without a certain standpoint

2. “Being”: Dasein’s encounterance in its particular whileness and meaningfully constructed Umwelt

3. Sorgen: the origin of the encountered meaningful world

Eight: Meaningfulness: Encounter Readiness‑to‑hand and Presence‑at‑hand in the World

1. The pseudo “see” in everyday fife

2. The situating “see” in meaningful encounterance

3. Readiness‑to‑hand and presence‑at‑hand: meaningfulness as characteristic of encounterance in the world

4. Another analysis of meaningfulness

Nine: Besorgen through Umgang: the Feature of the World’s Ultimate Encounterance

1. Time and space of meaningful Besorgen

2. Sorgen: the real way Dasein to be in the world

Bibliography

Afterword

Abstract

In the whole process of the development of Heidegger’s thought exist simultaneously two completely different ways of thinking, a dual philosophical situating‑the philosophical situating of polemic to “overcome metaphysics” and the poetic situating of Ereignis to “refuse being”. On one hand, to overcome metaphysics is to turn to the first beginning Plato and Aristotle initiated. It is to make beings transcendentally return to the ground (Zurückgrund), grounded (bodenständig) and rooted (verwurzelt) in their real being. The difference between beings and being leads us to the whole new realm of where to be in both the life world and the spiritual world. On the other hand, the footstone of the new road towards refusing being is Sein with the cross mark, the historical consideration of Seyn. Along this dim alley there is no more dazzling light of logos. The presence and the readiness‑to‑hand which reveal all the beings will be replaced with the refusal of being; the being‑truth way of cognition to unconcealing, together with the abstract gathering‑together (Versammlung) generated by the predominant questioning of logos will be replaced with the truth‑Wesen and the resort in Seyn’s basic questioning. The world in terms of being will come to its end, and the heaven, the earth, being toward death, and the ultimate God will form a new divine and poetic time‑space‑play realm of Seyn. Therefore, in Heidegger’s development of thought, there is no breaking point, and there is only one Heidegger! This Heidegger, in his doppelter Zurückgrund to the Greek origin, exists both in the “first beginning” of his struggle to deconstruct metaphysics, and in his “another beginning” of Ereignis, where beyng essentially happens as enowning (Seyn west als Ereignis). His effort in both of these two philosophical situating levels is spreading over the whole process of the development of his thought.

Introduction: Heidegger's Story of Philosophical Situating

According to the different ways Heidegger deals with the three encountered “Big Others”, the theological, the academic and the political, his texts can be divided into four kinds: the performative, the expressive, the presentative and the secret. Heidegger’s intended construction of these different levels of his texts, together with his side reading notes, records of going‑on thoughts, the quasi‑texts written in a divergent situating, and his neologism generate a completely new textual structure.

Heidegger’s autobiographical writings and self‑summaries on his theoretical development are important texts for studies on the history of Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger tells about himself in these texts on two very different situating levels: at the first are reports to a certain institution to meet a specific requirement, and texts in this category are usually Heidegger’s official documents of experiences and intellectual development that people can see; and at the second level are Heidegger’s summaries for his own path of thought, including public texts and secret texts, and texts in this category form a self‑identification in a dual level. Around 1937, Heidegger wrote a secret summary, Ein Rückblick auf den Weg, which has not been published until recently. In the second part of this essay, Beilage zu Wunsch und Wille (Über die Bewahrung des Versuchten), he made comments on his earlier lectures and key texts. It is a very important reference to the development of Heidegger’s theory, especially to his complex and difficult approach after Vom Ereignis in 1932. It is a sign to a desperate and tough intellectual road.

The development of Heidegger’s thought is different from the usual evolvement of a theory in the tradition of western philosophy. He only stayed for a short and necessary time in the field of traditional metaphysics, where he left brilliant arguments. The development of Heidegger’s thought, unlike that of most other scholars’, did not experience an evolutionary process from a lower to a higher level in a chronological manner. Meanwhile, Heidegger’s thought is also continuous without any breaking turn: there is only one Heidegger. This Heidegger, in his doppelter Zurückgrund to the Greek origin, exists both in the “first beginning” of his struggle to deconstruct metaphysics, and in his “another beginning” of Ereignis, where beyng essentially happens as enowning, Seyn west als EreignisI. His effort in both of these two situating levels of thought is throughout the whole process of his intellectual endeavor.

Volume One: Young Heidegger's Beginning in Academics

Chapter One: The “Split Soul” of the Son of Religiously Devout Mountain‑Dwellers

There is no breaking change in Heidegger’s theoretical development. It is the same Heidegger both in his criticism of metaphysics at “the first beginning” and in the Ereignis‑Denken at “another beginning”. It is to say that Heidegger’s approaches are consistent in these two situating levels. Generally, Heidegger’s intellectual development can be divided into 4 stages: first is the latent time of young Heidegger; second is where Heidegger found “Dasein”; third is the time of his Überwindung der Metaphysik and Ereignis‑Denken; and the fourth is the late Heidegger.

In his early private writings, Young Heidegger revealed some true ideas of his own in a non‑performative way. Especially in Approaching God in You, a letter to his newly married wife, young Heidegger conveyed a new philosophy: outside of the illusion of both sinking religious world and academic field, there is an original world, which is the existential world full of vitality.

Chapter Two: Young Heidegger’s Thought in Early Freiburg Period

In his early Freiburg lecture in 1919, The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of World‑View, Heidegger through analyzing the concept of experience proposed a boundary beyond phenomenology of consciousness, and emphasized the “enworlded” in the pre‑theoretical first‑hand world, Umwelt, which is the lived experience as "happening" (Ereignis).

Heidegger’s Formalization and Formal Indication is usually considered as a representative evidence to show that he is under the influence of Husserl’s phenomenological methodology. But as a matter of fact, in this text, Heidegger has already put Husserl’s phenomenology into question: he revealed an ordering principal hidden in phenomenological “formal indication” and a metaphysical mechanism existing in the process from the construction of order to the construction of form, and then to objectification.

Dasein is one of the core concepts of Heidegger’s early philosophical thoughts, which was derived from Luther and Kierkegaard, but was also obtained through his deconstruction of Jaspers’ humanism. In his commentary on Jaspers’ book Psychology of World Views, young Heidegger claimed Jaspers’ humanistic subject as the limited historical Dasein, and accused Jaspers of explaining the generation of history with ideas instead of objective studies. Therefrom, “what is human” was transferred into a deeper questioning of the historical practical life of Dasein in time.

Chapter Three: Life Phenomenology: A Study on Aristotle without Aristotle

In Heidegger’s lecture text Phenomenology of Interpretations of Aristotle emerges a heterogenetic situating of thought with a differentiating representative content. In the “loose pages“, which are separated from the main text and published as a part of the book’s appendix, Heidegger presents strongly, out of the phenomenological context, his at the time emerging thought of the caring (Sorgen) of practical life. It means that in the “loose pages” emerges a deeper situating level of thought, which does not exist in Heidegger’s formal lecture text. It consists of a group of new concepts bursting into a field of thought: clear differentiation between being and beings, Besorgen corresponds to Besorgnis in the way of Zurückgrund, a brand new approach to the characteristic of being and how to be. This is already something totally different from Husserl’s phenomenological discourse.

Starting from a standpoint of phenomenological deconstruction, Heidegger re‑interprets the traditional concepts of the history of philosophy and philosophy. In Heidegger’s understanding, the research of the history of philosophy is not to pursue an absolute and illusive objectivity of philosophers’ thoughts and texts, but rather to argue in a complicated hermeneutic way. Philosophy should not be an instruction of any given knowledge in the passing down of theories, but instead, it originates from the pre‑establishment of questioning the established thoughts, and this is the preliminary condition to generate any philosophical thinking. Philosophy is not knowledge being passed down, but thinking in questioning.

Phenomenological deconstruction precisely presents the approach of “how” in the process of cognition itself, which is not consciously awared by the general scientific knowledge. It is the form in presentation. The presence of the pre‑understanding in the form of deconstruction is a more original reference to the constructed object. The sense of relation is the inclination towards reality. This is already a phenomenology beyond Husserl. The sense of relation here is the objectified substance in the traditional philosophy, and achieved after being is deconstructed. The significance of being, which makes a being to be, is even a more fundamental basis of our world.

When Heidegger puts Husserl’s concept of inclination back to its ground (Zurückgrund) as practical life, he directly identifies the nature of life to be caring (Sorgen). It is the result of substituting the inter‑subjective relation in the traditional philosophy research with the inclinational activities of the subject. Caring is doing with an inclination in practice, and it is the directional inclination in caring that generates our surrounding world.

According to Heidegger, the practical life is not the same as being experienced by the common sense, or happening objectively. It starts from directional inclination, and through the invisible hyperbolic, loses itself finally in the self‑closed blocking‑up of the elliptical. As seen in the dynamic process, it is only realized through the constant relucence (Reluzenz) and pre‑construction of the complicated caring (Sorgen). However, the surrounding world we have built in the relucence of caring activities is not something of its own (eigen), but the ruins towards ruinance (Ruinanz).

Young Heidegger has the idea that in the unstable life we are actually losing ourselves while chasing wealth and novelties, because the material something we long for in life is in its essence nothingness. The ruinance (Ruinanz) of life itself is no longer the abstract caring (Sorgen), but within the nothingness in the time of care (Besorgnis)‑and the space with chairological (kairologisch) characters of time and care. The emphasized caring is caught into the care of material desire. The temptative, alienation and uproots of being itself compose the reality of the practical life.

Chapter Four: A Report to Natorp: Heidegger’s First Important Academic Presentation

Although in the name of phenomenological reading of Aristotle, young Heidegger's Natorp Report presented a completely heterogeneous hermeneutic situating, which is an emergent explanative situating constructed by three factors ‑‑ visual position, visual direction and horizon. This particular situating was in fact constructed by two factors: the heaviness of being‑in‑the‑world of Dasein and the complexity of the world. And the philosophical study refers to, through historical consciousness, the re‑presentation of the actual life in the situating of fundamental concerns on the heaviness of its own being.

In "Natorp‑Report", the young Heidegger for the first time realized his turning away from traditional ontology towards the ontology of life. Philosophy should be the questioning of the being of man’s real life. We are only faced with the “things for us”, which are changed by our activities directed by caring and constructed by our abstract structure of ideal‑oriented dealing. The pre‑existing pure reason, the transcendental nature of idea and the like, are precisely the solidified objective structure of the actual dealing and caring activities, kept in "fidelity" in the falling of human life.

A completely new world‑view of functional dealing emerged in young Heidegger's Natorp‑Report. Herein ontology was constructed as the ontology of life activities. For each individual life, being means “I care, therefore I am”, and it also means, “we deal, therefore the world is as it is”. However, the dealing with Umwelt is the same as falling. As the individual as Dasein has put himself to the being‑in‑the‑world of dealing and caring, so he is bound to lose the independence of being authentic, and he is falling as das Man, the averaged man in the world.

This new world‑view of functional dealing in young Heidegger's Natorp‑Report was undertaken in the name of interpretating Aristotle. However, Heidegger did not follow the historical context of Aristotle's texts but dismantled them in a phenomenological style. In reading Nicomachean Ethics, Metaphysics and Physics, Heidegger found the valued orientation of function in the kingdom of the circumspection of dealing, which was metaphysically kept in fidelity. Herein ontology was constructed as the ontology of life activities, beings became available things created by the concerns of dealing, and all possible philosophical studies should be oriented in the Worauf (toward‑which) of the dealing of caring. But how and in which way the activities are produced always remain silent in the usually invisible hidden structure of the situating of Heidegger’s ontology.

Chapter Five: “Human” and Dasein: Hermeneutics of Facticity

The main content of Ontology: the Hermeneutics of Facticity is to deconstruct the traditional ontology ‑‑ use the practical Existenz of Dasein to substitute the exploration for the world origin of objectivity. For Heidegger, the real basis the ontology of objectivity misses is the existence of being. What is needed is to regenerate a non‑theoretical thought questioning the existence through the hermeneutics of facticity of Existenz.

However, Dasein, the practical Existenz which is to replace the abstract humanity is after all a sorrow perjury whose essence is being abandoned in the world. The practical Existenz of Dasein is just this “today” which is constructed by the interpreted averaged public. In the averaged every day, das Man, the averaged man exists, but Dasein does not. This is also the secret hidden in the university academia, which is full of das Man.

For Heidegger, the civilized consciousness of a time is the publicized and averaged consciousness of the averaged man, and it usually refers to university and “the dominated interpretative direction” in academia. When a profound academic thought is transformed into a situation being interpreted by the public, it becomes the “today” in terms of ideology. Graphing and visualizing cognition in the historical consciousness, and ordered hierarchical structure in the philosophical consciousness are activities that represent the “today” of academia.

There are two misunderstandings in epistemology of traditional philosophy: the first is the subject‑object dualistic model; the second is the absolute objectivity without a subjective standpoint. These are the two traps Heidegger warns us to keep away in advance. The world is not the sum of the material objects in reality in the subject‑object dualistic model. The world where Dasein exists is what Dasein encounters. Encountering is the current construction of fields and situations. Therefore, the world around us is not the sum of objective objects, but is the directive construction of Dasein’s existence itself. Its direction is the basis of the surroundings.

People can feel the material existence of the external world every day, but their objective contact with and cognition of it is merely a false “seeing” in their everyday life, and what people cannot see is the significance of being itself. Significance is not a category of epistemology but an encountering existence. Only by asking why and how we encounter a thing, but not through the simple objective cognition or the description in a false subject‑object dualistic model, can we situate an encounters. The presence of the significance is not only the order of seeing in epistemology, but rather it directly expresses two features of being: one is the ready‑to‑hand or the present‑at‑hand status of significance, and the other is significance’s manifestation in the with‑world (Mitwelt). Present‑at‑hand is the familiar condition of Dasein’s previous existence as ready‑to‑hand. The presence of the with‑world (Mitwelt) is the continuance of the meeting of non‑singular Daseins.