Abstract

Heidegger's main question, the question of Being concerning human facticity, struggles to uncover the original ground to which humans belong, a ground from which modern society tends to uproot itself through the dominance of calculative and representational thinking. What is most dangerous for Heidegger about this process is that the original ground of humans and beings in general might be covered and forgotten to the extent that humans lose completely the sense of what they truly need. The task of philosophy is to help bring back humans and beings in general to the place which they originally belong, i.e., to their most fulfilled way of being which is their proper or own [das Eigene, eigen]. The term "En-own-ment" or "Ap-propri-ation" [Er-eign-is] — the key word in Heidegger's thinking since the 1930's — marks his attempt to think more originally than metaphysics the relation between Being and humans in terms of the being "enowned" of humans through Being and in terms of the belonging of humans to Being. I will rethink the question of this relation in reference to two of Heidegger's writings, and will focus on his struggle for a proper language which would be able to say what essentially remains concealed in metaphysical language: the truth or Being as Ereignis.