"[Heidegger's] greatest work... essential for all collections." —Choice "... students of Heidegger will surely find this book indispensable." —Library Journal Contributions to Philosophy, written in 1936-38 and first published in 1989 as Beiträge zur Philosophie, is Heidegger’s most ground-breaking work after the publication of Being and Time in 1927. If Being and Time is perceived as undermining modern metaphysics, Contributions undertakes to reshape the very project of thinking.

I propose in this paper to explore Heidegger's thought of selfhood in Contributions to Philosophy through a close reading of key paragraphs. It is often assumed that after the "turning" in his thinking, when Heidegger engages in a thought of Ereignis no longer centered on human Dasein as the locus of the meaning of being, the reference to selfhood would fade away. However, a close reading of the Contributions reveals that a renewed thinking of selfhood, of what Heidegger calls "self-being" (...) , is enacted precisely at the same time that the subjectivistic understanding of the self is more radically abandoned. I attempt to delineate how Heidegger undertakes to rethink selfhood no longer from the paradigm of the ego, but from the event of Ereignis , or enowning. (shrink)

I have spent 20 years preparing for the translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In these 20 years, I spent 10 years in Germany writing the master and doctoral thesis on Heidegger in order to understand Heidegger’s thoughts properly. Later on I spent other 10 years teaching Heidegger’s philosophy at university while translating Being and Time into Korean. At that time, there were already 4 different translations of Being and Time in Korean. But because these translations were based on Japanese (...) translations, many concepts and terms were ungraspable by ordinary Korean people. Impressed with Heidegger’s use of the ordinary words as important philosophical concepts, I also did my best to translate Being and Time using ordinary Korean words. (shrink)

In this article, I attempt to analyze some of the contexts of the language of being after Heidegger’s “turn” (Kehre), a clearly discernible change in his philosophy in the second half of the 1930s. Heidegger proposed a new concept to revealing being itself, namely its “event‑enowning” (Ereignis). The key to this understanding of being is that now language becomes “the house” of being. Heidegger combined this with the “joint” (fugue) function. Language as a fugue joins with being itself, and (...) therefore constantly follows and touches upon the boundary of silence. Silence is the ultimate complement of language and constantly limits it, because what is said only reveals a part of being, while the rest remains hidden and “expresses” silence, as it is in the case of a fugue, where the main motif of the theme “escapes” into silence. In the text, I first consider the fugue of being, then the language of being as its expression, in order to consider the problem of saying further, and finally analyze the limit of language, i.e. the way to silence. (shrink)

From where does the frequently explored connection between identity, difference and power stem? One thinker influencing contemporary discussions on this theme is Judith Butler. To her, the primary difference constituting identity is the difference between the subject and the historical power constructing it. Although they belong together, power can still be said to subjugate the subject. However, within this system, the origin of power cannot be accounted for. I will therefore attempt to examine this origin on the basis of Martin (...) Heidegger's The History of Being, written 1938-1940). According to him, power is something intrinsically dependent on subject metaphysics. The latter stems from what he calls the oblivion of being, which can also be expressed as the forgetting of the difference between beings and being. The abiding in this difference opens the way into that which Heidegger calls enowning, in which the human being can reach identity in a qualified respect, as a nearness to his own being. Only on this way can the regime of power, permeating identity construction, be overcome. (shrink)

History and Decision in Heidegger’s Private Writings: The animal historicum and the Da-sein In this paper, we aim to reconstruct Heidegger’s critique of the modern conception of subjectivity, history and freedom, as it appears in his posthumous writings and in the Black Notebooks of the 1930’s and 1940’s. In order to do so, we will examine the meaning of decision ( Entscheidung ) and its links with the history of Be-ing ( Geschichte des Seyns ). Our first section will be (...) devoted to a critical reconstruction of Machenschaft as a symbol of our modern times. According to Heidegger, the Machenschaft represents a place in history where no new historical decisions can be made in any conceivable way, and humanity becomes an animal historicum. In spite of that, the way of a new beginning and a new decision concerning ourselves remains difficult but possible, a phenomenon that we analyze in our second section: how the essence of humanity can be transformed in Da-sein, but only if we think anew our relationship with being. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thinking with Heidegger:Rethinking Environmental Theory and PracticeKevin Michael DeLuca (bio)Environmentalism is tired. It is a movement both institutionalized and insipid. The vast majority of Americans claim to be environmentalists while buying ever more SUVs, leaf-blowers, and uncountable plastic consumer goods. Indeed, environmentalism itself has become just another practice of consumerism, a matter of buying Audubon memberships, Ansel Adams calendars, and 'biodegradable' plastic bags with one's Sierra Club credit card. (...) As a practice of everyday life, environmentalism has devolved into another lifestyle choice.On the political front, carbon-copy blow-dried presidential candidates proclaim their allegiance to the environment, an allegiance that is more a sign of fealty to opinion polls than a concern with environmental issues. In the world of real-politic, environmental regulations are gutted as corporations write legislation for the politicians they have bought. Outspent and outmaneuvered, mainstream environmental groups preach at the altar of broken promises about the potential of lobbying and insider access while awaiting the blandishments of the next candidate. As [End Page 67] a political practice, mainstream environmentalism has degenerated into a marginal special-interest group.On the intellectual front, a confusing array of reform environmentalists, deep ecologists, social ecologists, ecofeminists, wilderness advocates, social justice activists, social constructionists, and Christian ecologists offer a cacophony of competing paradigms and programs while exchanging charges and countercharges of wrong-headedness and infidelity. If on the level of practice an exhausted environmentalism has achieved both institutionalism and irrelevance, intellectually environmentalism has reached several stasis points. This is crucial, for at a level that is unusual for social movements, environmentalism has always highlighted the importance of how we think about the environment, that ideas of nature are powerful because practices follow from ideas. In other words, how we think about nature guides how we act toward nature. In the midst of this melee I want to suggest we reconsider the work of Martin Heidegger.I want to think Heidegger in distress: in the distress of machination; in the distress of the technological enframing of the earth; in the distress of the environmental crisis. In rejecting a Heideggerian hermeneutics, a piety to textual exegesis, I hope to stress Heidegger in order to stress environmental theory. With few exceptions,1 two insufficient responses typify the reception of Heidegger in environmental thinking. One is to champion Heidegger as some proto-environmentalist. Certainly, quotes from such works as Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, "The Question Concerning Technology," "Building Dwelling Thinking," and "The Age of the World Picture" inspire such a reading. Such readings, however, present a simplified Heidegger. For example, a poor reading of an essay such as "The Question Concerning Technology" produces the conclusion that Heidegger was anti-technology.2 These misreadings are not merely accidental but a result of the goal of the citation. The challenge of Heidegger is not engaged to develop environmental theory; rather, Heidegger is cited to lend some borrowed legitimacy to the fledgling enterprise. The most prominent example of this move occurs in Devall and Sessions' Deep Ecology, wherein Heidegger joins a potpourri of thinkers, including Dogen, Job, St. Francis of Assisi, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Thoreau, Chief Seattle, Herman Melville, John Muir, Aldous Huxley, Gandhi, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aldo Leopold, Robinson Jeffers, Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Stanley Diamond, and [End Page 68] David Brower from a host of traditions, including Taoism, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, Christianity, Native American thought, Romanticism, and ecological science (1985, 79–108). The result is confusion, at best.On the other hand, in a second response Heidegger serves as a kind of bogeyman, a Nazi used to tar the more radical environmental groups. The syllogism is simple and simplistic: Deep Ecologists are bio/ecocentric; Deep Ecologists quote Heidegger; Heidegger was a Nazi; Therefore, Deep Ecologists are Nazis/fascists. (To push this thinking to its logical extreme, then, all nonanthropocentric thinking is fascist.) Both responses may be useful for polemics but serve to prevent a possibly productive exploration of Heidegger for the engagement of the difficult problems that have stumped environmentalism on multiple levels.Violating HeideggerAs a prefatory word, even a cursory glance at Heidegger's work reveals him to be a thinker who... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thinking with Heidegger:Rethinking Environmental Theory and PracticeKevin Michael DeLuca (bio)Environmentalism is tired. It is a movement both institutionalized and insipid. The vast majority of Americans claim to be environmentalists while buying ever more SUVs, leaf-blowers, and uncountable plastic consumer goods. Indeed, environmentalism itself has become just another practice of consumerism, a matter of buying Audubon memberships, Ansel Adams calendars, and 'biodegradable' plastic bags with one's Sierra Club credit card. (...) As a practice of everyday life, environmentalism has devolved into another lifestyle choice.On the political front, carbon-copy blow-dried presidential candidates proclaim their allegiance to the environment, an allegiance that is more a sign of fealty to opinion polls than a concern with environmental issues. In the world of real-politic, environmental regulations are gutted as corporations write legislation for the politicians they have bought. Outspent and outmaneuvered, mainstream environmental groups preach at the altar of broken promises about the potential of lobbying and insider access while awaiting the blandishments of the next candidate. As [End Page 67] a political practice, mainstream environmentalism has degenerated into a marginal special-interest group.On the intellectual front, a confusing array of reform environmentalists, deep ecologists, social ecologists, ecofeminists, wilderness advocates, social justice activists, social constructionists, and Christian ecologists offer a cacophony of competing paradigms and programs while exchanging charges and countercharges of wrong-headedness and infidelity. If on the level of practice an exhausted environmentalism has achieved both institutionalism and irrelevance, intellectually environmentalism has reached several stasis points. This is crucial, for at a level that is unusual for social movements, environmentalism has always highlighted the importance of how we think about the environment, that ideas of nature are powerful because practices follow from ideas. In other words, how we think about nature guides how we act toward nature. In the midst of this melee I want to suggest we reconsider the work of Martin Heidegger.I want to think Heidegger in distress: in the distress of machination; in the distress of the technological enframing of the earth; in the distress of the environmental crisis. In rejecting a Heideggerian hermeneutics, a piety to textual exegesis, I hope to stress Heidegger in order to stress environmental theory. With few exceptions,1 two insufficient responses typify the reception of Heidegger in environmental thinking. One is to champion Heidegger as some proto-environmentalist. Certainly, quotes from such works as Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, "The Question Concerning Technology," "Building Dwelling Thinking," and "The Age of the World Picture" inspire such a reading. Such readings, however, present a simplified Heidegger. For example, a poor reading of an essay such as "The Question Concerning Technology" produces the conclusion that Heidegger was anti-technology.2 These misreadings are not merely accidental but a result of the goal of the citation. The challenge of Heidegger is not engaged to develop environmental theory; rather, Heidegger is cited to lend some borrowed legitimacy to the fledgling enterprise. The most prominent example of this move occurs in Devall and Sessions' Deep Ecology, wherein Heidegger joins a potpourri of thinkers, including Dogen, Job, St. Francis of Assisi, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Thoreau, Chief Seattle, Herman Melville, John Muir, Aldous Huxley, Gandhi, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aldo Leopold, Robinson Jeffers, Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Stanley Diamond, and [End Page 68] David Brower from a host of traditions, including Taoism, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, Christianity, Native American thought, Romanticism, and ecological science (1985, 79–108). The result is confusion, at best.On the other hand, in a second response Heidegger serves as a kind of bogeyman, a Nazi used to tar the more radical environmental groups. The syllogism is simple and simplistic: Deep Ecologists are bio/ecocentric; Deep Ecologists quote Heidegger; Heidegger was a Nazi; Therefore, Deep Ecologists are Nazis/fascists. (To push this thinking to its logical extreme, then, all nonanthropocentric thinking is fascist.) Both responses may be useful for polemics but serve to prevent a possibly productive exploration of Heidegger for the engagement of the difficult problems that have stumped environmentalism on multiple levels.Violating HeideggerAs a prefatory word, even a cursory glance at Heidegger's work reveals him to be a thinker who... (shrink)

One of the great virtues of the book is its impeccable clarity and readability." —Peter Warnek In her concise introduction to Martin Heidegger’s second most important work, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Daniela Vallega ...

Lang, B. Philosophy and the manners of art.--Hofstadter, A. Freedom, enownment, and philosophy.--Mehta, J. L. A stranger from Asia.--Fox, D. A. A passage past India.--Rucker, D. Philosophy and the constitution of Emerson's world.--Schneider, H. W. The pragmatic movement in historical perspective.--Barnes, H. E. Reflections on myth and magic.--Cauvel, J. The imperious presence of theater.--Seay, A. Musical conservatism in the fourteenth century.--Hochman, W. R. The enduring fascination of war.--Davenport, M. M. J. Glenn Gray and the promise of wisdom.

This paper begins with a discussion of the thesis that politics is a kind of téchne, as Aristotle states. He defines téchne as being the opposite of túche. Hence, politics is neither an exact science nor an accidental opinion; it is, rather, a teachable art or skill. Based on this theme, the paper investigates how Hannah Arendt interprets political freedom in the public sphere as the will of the plural citizens, facing an uncertain future, attempting to still the disquiet of (...) the collective ego. A comparison between Arendt and Heidegger could be made if we further investigate Heidegger’s understanding of political freedom in the public sphere based on his comprehension of the will of Da-sein and the enowning of Being. (shrink)

Heidegger maintains that the root of modern technology, like that of all other technologies, lies in technē. However, because the art dimension of technē is suppressed in modern technology, the essence of this technology becomes a Gestell that enforces product-making, and thus drives technology beyond the control of human beings. The more fundamental reason underlying this “frame-becoming” nature is “the mathematical” that emerges in ancient Greece, which, through the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy, turns the world into the images represented by the (...) subject, and things into definite objects. To escape the dictatorship of the Gestell, it is necessary to re-realize the art-dimension of technē in modern technology, i. e. to let the gentle granting nature of the enowning re-master technology. In this respect, both Heidegger and Heisenberg were inspired by or at least resonated with Lao Zi or Zhuang Zi’s Dao. Confucians will greatly appreciate the critique of modern technology by Heidegger, and especially his view of returning “home” to overcome the possible dangers brought about by technology. However, from the perspective of Confucianism, Heidegger’s critique contains some shortcomings: for example, his ignorance of the individualistic impact in the Gestell and his unidirectional “ontological difference,” which leads him to a view of “home” that lacks “family” and therefore renders his solution loose and rootless. Only an organic community originated in the family, be it Confucian or Amish, can effectively reduce the control of modern technology over the human being. (shrink)

O objetivo do presente texto é investigar as articulações essenciais de três noções decisivas para a constituição do pensamento heideggeriano posterior à assim chamada virada : acontecimento apropriativo , seer e linguagem. Para tanto, deter-nos-emos fundamentalmente na análise de algumas passagens importantes do escrito Beiträge zur Philosophie . Através desta análise, procuraremos, ao mesmo tempo, revelar em que medida o conceito de acontecimento apropriativo possui uma relação direta com o acontecimento de uma apropriação de si mesmo por parte do homem (...) enquanto ser-aí.The central goal of this paper is investigating the essential liaison between three decisive concepts for Martin Heidegger's thought after the so-called "turn" : Event , Being and Language. In order to do this we will mainly analyse certain important passages of the book Contributions to Philosophy . Through this analysis we will try to show at the same time in which measure the enowning is in a fundamental relationship with the occurrence of a self-appropriation of the man as Dasein. (shrink)

There are numerous books which seek to interpret Martin Heidegger’s seminal text, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), and others which address the question of how to translate his writings. By joining these two tasks, Translation and Interpretation: Learning from Beiträge, stands out from other such books in the field of Heidegger studies. The volume begins with Parvis Emad’s translation of an original essay by Martin Heidegger, “Contributions of Philosophy. The Da-sein and the Be-ing (Enowning).” -/- Through six carefully crafted (...) essays, Emad then takes the reader through a journey which examines the relationship between Heidegger’s being-historical thinking and such key figures—including Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Friedrich Hölderlin—who either occupy the forefront at the end of metaphysics or mark the “crossing” to the “other beginning.” -/- This book will be of special interest to scholars and graduate students alike, whether in philosophy or such diverse fields as poetry and linguistics. (shrink)

This study responds to Theodore Kisiel’s “review and overview” of Contributions, the English translation of Heidegger’s Beiträge, included in his essay published in Studia Phænomenologica, vol. 5 (2005), 277-285. This study shows the uniqueness and the significance of Beiträge, as well as the nature of the venture to render it into English (I); it explores the language and way of thinking, the be-ing-historical, enowning perspective, endemic to Heidegger’s second main work, and identifies the “ideal” and the difficulties of its (...) translation as a hermeneutic labor, as well as the inadequacy of “an archival perspective” for guiding the translation and the grasping of his text (II). Based on these insights, this study, then, leads to a critical assessment of Theodore Kisiel’s hyperbolic, acerbic, despairing reactions to Contributions as a work of translation, thus exhibiting the collapse of his gratuitous assertions and assumptions under their own weight, as well as the failure of his “archival” approach to the translation (and ultimately to the assessment of Heidegger’s thinking) (III); it concludes with showing the nature and the disclosive power of Contributions, as well as its significance for the future of Heidegger studies (IV). (shrink)

In Being and Time, Heidegger undertakes fundamental ontology. Heidegger conceives of Being as temporality. Being (Sein) is unconcealment which is replaced by be-ing (Seyn), that is, the disjunction between unconcealment and concealment. In the topological phase as in Contributions to Philosophy (CP), The Thing and Building Dwelling Thinking be-ing yields to enowning. “B-ing holds sway as enowning” (CP section 10). But be-ing holding sway entails that a being (Seiende) “is”. Which means that a thing things. Enowning is (...) Dasein’s thinkingresponding to the call of Be-ing. Hence be-inghistorical thinking (Seynsgeschichtes Denken) which is enowned thinking. When a thing things, world worlds (Die Welt weltet). Be-ing-historical thinking is thinkingthinging, that is, thinking space-time or thinking gathering (Versammlung) of elements that “belong together”. Thinging is the mirror interplay of the fourfold. In Four Seminars, Heidegger says: “There is no longer room for the very name of being.... Being is enowned through enowning. Sein ist durch Ereignis ereignet.” But enowning means thinking thinging. (shrink)

There must be a forward trajectory to history, and not merely a connection to the chronology to past events, if history is to provide the stage for the disclosure of being. Conversely, if history does not merely reflect shifts in the course of human events, then the freedom to decide must originate from the reciprocity between being and Da-sein. In this essay, I outline the narrow passageway by which Heidegger shows how decision can unlock the transformative power of history, and, (...) reciprocally, how history grounds decision as a compliance or measured response to the claim ( Anspruch ) of being. I will center my inquiry on sections 45 – 48 of Contributions to Philosophy (Enowning), not only to provide a sharper focus, but also to bring into play the enactment of being-historical thinking as the key to coalescing the key motifs of history, decision, and freedom. (shrink)

Heidegger’s philosophy of being and enowning contains many religious topics, such as the last god, the divinities within his concept of the fourfold or his so called hölderlintheology. In this paper, these aspects shall be illuminated by relating the overall concern of Heidegger’s later philosophy to the tension between philosophy and theology: It will be argued that on the one hand his rejection of ontotheology is justified, since god is not a causally operating entity, and that on the other (...) hand his concept of man being a part of an incomprehensible ongoing is not only an accurate criticism of reason in terms of a reflection on its limits, but also has a religious character, which can be seen as the starting point of an adequate and up to date philosophical theology. Against Heidegger’s exorbitant claim of uniqueness, his later philosophy can thus be placed in the context of traditional critique of religion and reason respectively. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of the article is to characterize Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of art, as accurately as possible, through what he wants to take distance from; and then we seek to outline a problem that seems structural. With the notion of enowning [Ereignis] Heidegger intends to distinguish his perspective on art especially from two other ones, namely that of Neokantian tradition and Hegel’s. This allows us to have a dimension of Heidegger’s conceptual radicalism, insofar as the enowning aims (...) to point to a poetic moment which is prior to language. This moment is conceived as a world disclosure. However, it escapes the reference relations foreseen in the notion of world, and becomes basically unspeakable. In addition, the work of art that opens up a world can also be identifed as something innerworldly, thus entangling Heidegger’s own perspective in a series of seemingly unsurmountable difficulties. (shrink)

In The Weirdness of Being, Ivo De Gennaro stakes out a pilgrimage of sorts through the stark, shadowy terrain mapped out by what he calls the “pentalogy” (2) of recent Heideggerian publications. These are the five works – the Beiträge (GA 65) as well as Besinnung (GA 66), Die Geschichte des Seyns (GA 69), Über den Anfang (GA 70) and Das Ereignis (GA 71) – whose gradual release over the past few decades brought with them so many questions and complications (...) that Heideggerian scholarship birthed a subfield dedicated to their study. De Gennaro’s book touches upon many of the familiar landmarks of that discourse. At its heart, however, The Weirdness of Being is a treatise on translation. According to De Gennaro, something “has happened” (2) in the Beiträge and its companion texts that redefines both the role that we should ascribe to translation within Heidegger’s thought, and the approach that the translator of this thought ought to take. (shrink)