Books about Heidegger

The Apocalypse of Being The Esoteric Gnosis of Martin Heidegger. Mario Enrique Sacchi, translated by Gabriel Xavier Martinez, South Bend, Indiana, St. Augustine's Press, 2002.

Heidegger says that being cannot be thought in religion, and it can be thought in metaphysics. So where can being be thought?

In history itself, because Heidegger did not conceive Sein as the very act of things that are, so that its manifestation is not reached through the knowledge of being, that which Sein entifies, but through its happening (Ereignis), which is always a temporary event, since events only happen in time, the measure of motion exercised by material things of the universe. This confirms that, if the act of being were an Ereignis, and if every event is measured by time, the act of being itself would have to be exhausted temporarily or to succumb to the finiteness of this world -- in-der-Welt-sein. That is why it is necessary to admit that Heideggerian thought about Sein is permeated with a colossal immanentism.

P. 79

Arendt and Heidegger The Fate of the Political. Dana R. Villa, Princeton, Princeton Univeristy Press, 1996.

Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger An Ontological Encounter. Allen Scult, New York, Fordham University Press, 2004.

Western culture came about from Greek and Jewish origins. The Greek beginning, philosphers' invention of reason, is broadly emphasized in Heidegger's works and in the secondary literature. This book, which examines his works' affinities with the Talmud and its Rabbinic reading, handsomely redresses the balance.

Best for readers already familiar with Heidegger, this book gathers together many aspects of Heidegger thinking on hermeneutics and rhetoric for an engaging ontological inquiry. One of the problems it addresses is personified by Hermes, the messenger of the gods: how to preserve the sanctity of the gods' message while transmitting it. Or, how to authentically interpret the message, without interference from the world and language, the rhetoric, in which it is communicated.

The book is partly guided by Heidegger's 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric, the last of a series of courses on Aristotle that began in SS 1922.

Rhetoric, as conceptualized by Aristotle in his definition, provides and makes accessible to philosophy, the systematic "how" of out everyday being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-seins), which at the same time is a being-with-one-another (Miteinandersein) through speech.

P. 114

At the time Heidegger's thinking was emerging from his beginnings in Christian theology, which provided the factical ground for his thinking. He reflected on sacred texts and sacred expriences.

Like the revelation at Sinai, life-as-it-is befalls us, is given to us, as a "properizing event Ereignis." It "appropriates" us as we allow ourselves to be appropriated by it.

P. 54

The short quote is from the Kriegsnotsemester lecture course, via Kisiel's Genesis.

When the author explores how revelation in the Pentateuch (with mediation from Beckett's Trilogy) overcomes the limits of narrative, Ereignis appears again as Heidegger's description of the revelatory possibilities of naming, as:

[T]he possibility of being appropriated by something more powerful than one's own capacity to invent.

P. 83

Heidegger hopes that through careful speaking and careful listening, the message can be successfully appropriated by the listener. The author indicates that this is similar to a rabbi's problem. A rabbi must authentically transmit the words of the Torah itself. A rabbi reads the words and waits for the words to speak through him. Using Heidegger's exegesis of Parmenides 6, from What Is Called Thinking?, the author argues that through Heidegger's way of speaking the call of being may be heard.

The question is not whether [Heidegger] is a true or false prophet, but whether his speaking successfully forges a link between our own thinking and the most closely watched words of those who thought in grander times.

P. 106

Beyond Subjectivism Heidegger on Language and the Human Being. Abraham Mansbach, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 2002.

This book is a good study of Heidegger for someone who already understands the outline of his works. It's theme is Heidegger's critique of subjectivism in Western philosphy. It begins with Heidegger's response to subjectivism with dasein in Being and Time, and then follows the theme through Heidegger's later works on art, language, and technology.

Heidegger's use of Ereignis to overcome the language of traditional metaphysics is discussed:

Heidegger sees the term Ereignis explaining presence in its entirety without the need for a privileged ontological point. Everything that we witness is possible because of the appropriating event. We are not only talking about beings, the world and language here, but also about Being itself. Before introducing this concept, Heidegger speaks about the giveness of Being: "there is" (Es gibt) Being, he tells us. Ereignis is regarded as the source of this givenness: The appropriating event grants this givenness. It is, in turn, the source of language. Ereignis is that which allows language to be granted and for the human being to receive the grant, the listening and saying as disclosure.

With this new expression, Heidegger is trying to expose a dimension of Being that had been concealed until now. Being's occurrence, as well as the possibility of exposing it, cannot be explained in any other terms, not even those of the cause and effect.

P. 116

Reviews: Robert Bernasconi

Daimon Life, Heidegger and Life-Philosophy. David Farrell Krell, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1992.
Reviews: Michael Eldred

Delimitations Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics. John Sallis, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995.

Demythologizing Heidegger. John D. Caputo, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993.

Dialogue with Heidegger Greek Philosophy. Jean Beaufret, Translated by Mark Sinclair, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2006.

This book is the first of Beaufret's four volume collection of essays on philosophy Dialogue. It contains eight essays on Greek philosophy from Heidegger's perspective. The second volume is on modern philsophy, and the final two engage Heidegger's thought directly. This volume also includes a letter to Heidegger in 1969.

The essays cover the origins of philosophy with the pre-Platonic philosophers, Heraclitus and the Eleatics, and Aristotle on Plato, energeia, tragedy in Poetics, and the "subject" in book Z of Metaphysics. In this latter essay, Beaufret indicates how Aristotle's questioning of the many senses of being continued, after two thousand years, to guide Heidegger's thinking. So much so that it even lead to him changing direction after Being and Time.

Echoes: After Heidegger. John Sallis, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990.

While examining the shift in emphasis in Heidegger thinking between Being and Time and the On Time and Being lecture, John Sallis has this to say about Ereignis:

Yet if what I am calling time out towards the clearing is said in many ways in the lecture, that which the lecture ventures finally to say can, it seems, not be said otherwise. Or, rather, as soon as it is named Ereignis, one has already named it otherwise, already represented it as something present (SD 20). Even if one were somehow to elude this trap, going on then to formulate the decisive question, the question that philosophy will always formulate, the question "What is Ereignis?"-- one will only have stumbled on into another trap. For in asking about the "what," about the essential Being of Ereignis, one asks about that which is now only to be determined from Ereignis, almost as if one wanted to derive the source from the stream (Zur Sache des Denkens 20-21, 24).

P. 72

Eclipse of the Self : The Development of Heidegger's Concept of Authenticity. Michael E. Zimmerman, Athen, Ohio University Press, 2nd edition, 1986.

Ereignis is discussed extensively in a chapter on the "The Mature Concept of Authenticity". There the author explains:

In trying to explain Ereignis, Heidegger attempts the impossible. Since Ereignis "is not," we cannot talk about it propositionally. Heidegger himself says that "Everything--statements, questions, and answers--presupposes the experience of the matter itself." (ZS, 25-26) Yet in discussing Ereignis, he maintains that man is called on to bring it to language. Mortal legein is supposed to gather and shelter the the cosmic Logos. In his 1936 essay, "Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry," he described language as a gift. For Hölderlin, man becomes himself when he affirms that he belongs to the things that are. We belong to everything because we can understand them. We can be universal because language allows us to transcend the immediate environment. Hölderlin suggests that language is rooted in "innerness" (Innigkeit) which--much like the Logos of Heraclitus--means the setting-apart which binds together the beings of the cosmos. We become most human when we affirm that we belong to this innerness. "This attesting to belonging to the whole of being happens as history. But so that history is possible, language is given to man. It is the 'good' of man." (EHD, 275) Western history has been conditioned by the various ways in which Western man has "attested" to belonging to the whole of being. In the modern age, man has concluded that the whole of being belongs to him! We have forgotten that "Language is not a tool at [man's] disposal, rather it is that Ereignis which disposes of the highest possibility of humanity." (EHD, 276) Man becomes attuned to cosmic necessity when he responds to the silent appeal of Logos or "Saying" (Sagen). (US, 52-53) We can speak only because Logos endows us with that power. "Authentically language speaks, not man. Man only speaks insofar as he cor-responds to language." (HH) Since the essence of language lies in unconcealing, and since language is distinctive to man, then genuine human existence means disclosing things through language. "Man is that being [Wesen], who--by speaking--lets what is present lie forth in its presence, and perceives that lying forth." (WGM)

P. 72

Glossary
ZS: Zur Sache des Denkens, On Time and Being
EHD: Erläuterungen zu Hölderlin Dichtung, Rememberance of the Poet
US: Unterwegs zur Sprache, On The Way to Language
HH: Hebel: der Hausfreund
WGM: Wegmarken, Pathmarks
[Page numbers with the references in the text are for the English translations, where known.]

Encounters & Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929-1976. Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1993.

The Glance of the Eye Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory. William McNeill, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1999.

Hannah Arendt Martin Heidegger. Elzbieta Ettinger, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1995.
NYTimes review.
New Criterion review by Berel Lang

Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being. Walter A. Brogan, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2005.

A very well written study of some of the major themes in Heidegger's reading of Aristotle. A single book could not cover all the angles, but this one explains many of the major issues, starting from the 1922 preface for Heidegger's unpublished book on Aristotle, to the essay on Physics B1 in Wegmarken, back to lectures in the 1920s, and lectures on Metaphysics Theta 1-3 in 1931. It is all tied together by the many aspects of the twofoldness of being.

A description of the issue is captured in the discussion of the 1931 course.

Aristotle's task, one he inherited from his predecessors, was to conceive how being could be both a unity and a manifold, both simple and changing, both always there and yet always becoming. Aristotle frames the question of force in Metaphysics ΘΙ primarily in terms of the problem of the one and the many, which rings so familiarly in our ears that we can miss the intensity of philosophical questioning involved here. A constant refrain in Aristotle's work is: to on legetai pollachos, being is said in many ways. But his, Heidegger says, is not just a formula. "Rather in this short sentence Aristotle formulates the wholly fundamental and new position that he worked out in philosophy in relation to all of his predecessors including Plato; not in the sense of a system but in the sense of a task." ...

Aristotle is not so much merely opposing Parmenides who insisted that being is simple and one, and excludes from intself all nonbeing. It is not that Parmenides insists that being is one, and Aristotle responds that it is many. Heidegger says that Aristotle does not deny and disavow the first decisive truth of philosophy as expressed by Parmenides. Rather, he first truly comprehends it by asking: if being is one, how can beings be? Must not multiplicity too belong to being as one? Must not nonbeing, the not-ness itself, belong to the essence of being? And how can this be done without destroying the fundamental Greek meaning of being, and without violating the Parmenidean prohibition against mixing being and nonbeing, thereby collapsing the difference between the two? These questions about Aristotle's place vis à vis the entire Greek philosophical tradition, and thus also the history of Western philosophy, are at the heart of Heidegger's 1931 lecture course. Heidegger says that what occurs in the Aristotelian confrontation with the question of being is a transformation of the sense of being and a shift in the understanding of the question of the oneness of being.

Heidegger, then, views Aristotle's philosophy as in some way a return to the presupposition of Parmenidean philosophy, the necessary horizon for Parmenidean thought that Parmenides himself may not have completely understood, though the aporia, the prohibition and impasse at the heart of his thinking, certainly echoes it, namely, the difference between being and beings. Aristotle is struggling to understand this difference in the proper way, that is, as an ontological difference and not merely as an attempt to account for the differences among beings or the different characteristics of any particular being.

P. 113-114

Heidegger and Christianity. John Macquarrie, New York, Continuum, 1994.

This book comes from a series of lectures given by John Macquarrie, one of a team of two who translated Being & Time (1962) into English. The lectures are an overview of Heidegger's thinking, with the temporal and the historical as a theme.

Describing 'it gives' from the Time and Being (p. 8) lecture, Macquarrie comments on Heidegger's naming Ereignis as the 'event of appropriation' which determines both 'time and Being'.

So this ultimate source is not a substance but an event, as indeed is clear from the name we have already learned, 'It gives'. But it is an event of 'appropriation'. What does that mean? The German verb ereignen usually means simply 'to happen', while the noun Ereignis is simply 'event'. But in using such words, Heidegger is again exploiting their etymology and drawing attention to relationships usually left unobserved, yet which lie deep in language and presumably in thinking. Ereignis includes the root eigen corresponding the the English word 'own'. This word eigen is, of course, also met in the word eigentlich, which we have translated 'authentic', as when we speak of an 'authentic existence'. The Ereignis then is just not any event, but the event of appropriation, when something is made someone's own. This appropriation would seem to be the other side of the act of giving.

The gift of giving being a property of appropriationg (p. 22).

But almost immediately we are warned that sometimes instead of the granting of a presence there may be a withdrawal, and we shall see later what this means. But meantime we are concerned with presence and presencing rather than withdrawal. To what does Being present itself? Obviously to Dasein, the being who is a clearing, the locus where the light gets through, the one who has access to unconcealedness, to being in truth. The idea of an event of appropriation therefore gathers together many items in Heidegger's thinking.

P. 101

Heidegger and Ethics. Joanna Hodge, London, Routledge, 1995.

Heidegger and the Essence of Man. Michel Haar, translated by William McNeill, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1993. Forward by Hubert L. Dreyfus.

After quoting from The Way to Language, Dreyfus's ends his forward with the question concerning Ereignis.

Ereignis is what makes possible human practices everywhere and thereby makes possible the historical, should it come to pass. Whether Heidegger's account Ereignis succeeds in enabling us to understand this most basic essence of man, or whether Ereignis is just a new name for that interlacing that poses insurmountable difficulties to thought, Haar's book whose purpose is to question Heidegger, not to praise or condemn him, fittingly leaves open.

To the author, thinking Ereignis does not do much for man.

Ereignis, as much as being, even as Gestell, retains a "freedom" infinitely superior to that of man. Man can merely await Ereignis that, like the Turning, is already and is not yet, as Gestell is only the prelude. Ereignis is therefore the name given by way of anticipation to a possible "identification" between man and being, beyond metaphysics. In awaiting a new commencement, a new History, Ereignis in Heidegger's last writings disposes over man to the same extent and with the same total sovreignty as does being. In particular, it reveals that man is "used," that he speaks on inasmuch as he listens to language and belongs to it. "Ereignis appropriates man to the usage [Brauch] it makes of him." All schemas of freedom, activity, and power that were those of being are transferred to Ereignis, in the face of which man keeps the same determinations of quasi-passivity and dependency. The thought of Ereignis therefore does not fundamentally change the definition of man's essence as resulting from his relation to being, and from being's relation to him.

P. 67

The quote, from The Way to Language, is this book's own translation.

Heidegger And The Place Of Ethics: Being-with In The Crossing Of Heidegger's Thought. Michael Lewis, London, Continuum, 2005.

This is the first of three volumes calling for a new understanding of Heidegger and politics. Specifically a politics of a Lacanian via Slavoj Zizek flavor. That said, this volume may appeal to a broader audience because it is mainly a study of several aspects of Heidegger thinking, and one that examines recently published works in an original way. Many of the author's translations of Heidegger's German differ from the English books, and in many cases they appear closer to the original when I compare them.

The central theme of the book is "being-with", and what it can tell us about ethics in Heidegger's way of thinking. The early chapters study being-with from its first appearance as being-with-others in Division I of Being and Time and its relation to Sein. Next being-with and Ereignis, based mainly on material from the Contributions. And finally being-with in Gestell and Politics.

In this passage, from a section on Time-Space, Lewis discusses the essence of Ereignis.

If Ereignis is the essence of Seyn then let us begin by asking what in turn is the essence of Ereignis? Heidegger name this essence explicitly and on many occasions throughout Contributions to Philosophy: it is the refusal which hesitates (die zögernde Veragung). This refusal which hesitates is precisely the gesture that will explain how it is that a withdrawal can give. Heidegger goes on ever more simply to specify the relation between withdrawl and giving, replacing these words--withdrawl/giving, refusal/hesitation--with others that bring us gradually closer to an understanding of the way in which this process 'actually' occurs, the process of abyssal grounding.

So far we have seen this process to comprise: being/beings, abyss/ground, withdrawal/giving, refusal/hesitation.

'Hesitant refusal' is the essence of Ereignis as the name for the slash or the process of rifting that seperates and joins the contrasting processes named above and that is ultimately the differenciation of the ontological difference called Seyn. It is necessary to follow this process to the point at which being can be seen fully to 'join up' with beings, in such a way that we may explain, as Being and Time did not, how being's withdrawal from beings as a whole allows them to form an organized totality or world. In other words, it is necessary to follow this process until we reach the thing.

P. 118

Reviews: Leslie MacAvoy

Heidegger and the Poets. Véronique M. Fóti, New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1992.

Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge. Charles B. Guignon, Indianapolis, Hackett, 1983.

Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology. Jacques Taminiaux, translated by Michael Gendre, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1991.

Heidegger and the Question of Time. Françoise Dastur, translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1998.

Considering the importance of time in Heidegger's work, it has been surprisingly under represented in the literature. This book examines time in his work from the lectures leading up to Being and Time to the On Time and Being lecture in 1962. It is valuable work for examining temporality thematically throughout his works, and for the clarity it brings to the subject.

It has this to say about Ereignis:

Heidegger does not consider Ereignis, which names the relation of what is in question in "Being and time" and in "time and Being" (TB, 4), to be a terminological decision peculiar to him but, instead, the highest gift of the German idiom, comparable to the Greek aletheia (HPT, xxii) or, as well, to the Chinese Tao (ID, 36). According to him, language is not left to arbitrary human invention but is itself the most proper mode of Ereignis; it is its melody that deploys itself through our corresponding and thanking saying (OWL, 135). This is why Ereignis, which in modern German means "event", must be understood on the basis of its etymological sense, which pertains first not to eignen and to eigen, to propriety and appropriation, but to Auge, to the eye and to seeing: it means to eye. Ereignen as eräugen thus signifies bringing to ownness by making visible. Ereignis, by making visible the unfolding of the Being of man as Da-sein in the clearing, brings the mortals to their own by making them appropriate (vereignen) to Being, which, for its part, is appropriated (zugeeignet), that is to say, given over to the Being of man (OWL, 128-129).

Heidegger and the Subject. François Raffoul, translated by David Pettigrew and Gregory Recco, New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1998.

'With a new perspective on Heidegger's work, François Raffoul addresses on of the most crucial and difficult issues in contemporary thought: the fate of the subject in the postmodern era. Against traditional interpretations, which claim either that Heidegger has rendered all accounts of subjectivity -- and consequently of ethics -- impossible, or on the contrary, that Heidegger merely renews the modern metaphysics of subjectivity, Raffoul demonstrates how Heidegger's destruction/deconstruction of the subject opens the space for a radically nonsubjectivistic formulation of human being.
'Raffoul reconstitutes and analyzes Heidegger's debate with the great thinkers of subjectivity (Descartes, Kant, Husserl), in order to show that Heidegger's "destructive" reading of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity is in fact a positive reappropriation of the ontological foundations of the subject. Raffoul's recasting of Heidegger's work on human subjectivity should prove indispensable in future debates on the fate of the subject in the postmodern era.'

In part this book is concerned with "mineness" (Jemeinigkeit). In the conclusion the author ties mineness to Ereignis.

Far from characterizing a property of the I (even if this were to occur in a distinctive way), and so confirming the modern metaphysics of the subject, mineness is thought from that dimension in which human beings are appropriated to their own Being. All the clever distinctions, oppositions, reversals and other turns between various periods of Heidegger's thought are insufficient representations of what is at issue here. There are no two "thoughts", one subjectivist, the other "de-humanized," but one single (though polymorphous) thought which seeks to say the co-appropriation (Er-eignis) of Being and man.

P. 257

Heidegger and the Tradition. Werner Marx, translated by Theodore Kisiel and Murray Kisiel, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1971.

Heidegger and the Will On the Way to Gelassenheit. Bret W. Davis, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 2007.

"The will" has been a theme in much German philosophy, but it is not one typically associated with Heidegger. Heidegger does discuss Nietzsche's "will to power" in detail in the Nietzsche courses of the late 1930's, and he posited a possible technological future driven by the "will to will" in his latter essays, but the will's relevance to fundamental ontology is not immediately obvious. In an early Nietzsche lecture (P. 55) Heidegger traces the will back to the Greeks, specifically to ὄρεξις in Aristotle's περι φυσεως; a word Liddell & Scott translate as "appetitive". Occurences of the will everywhere in the Heidegger corpus are explored in this book's early chapters. In particular Entschlossenheit in Being and Time, where it is usually understood as willful resolve.

The thorough examination of the will in Heidegger leads to a discussion of the privative "non-willing" (Nicht-Wollen), a particular kind of renunciation of the will, and from there to Gelassenheit, a word of critical importance to the later Heidegger, and one that has not been well explained in the literature. This book goes a long way toward remedying that deficiency, making this a crucial book to anyone studying that aspect of Heidegger's way of thinking. Gelassenheit is usually translated as releasement or letting-be. A key function of this book, is to steer readers from misinterpreting Gelassenheit as passivism, quietism, or indifference. Those may be considered to be synonyms for "not-willing", the simple negation of "willing". This book is about teasing out the subtleties of "non-willing".

This passage from the book binds the justifications for speaking of "the will" and "non-willing".

Because the comportment of willing lends itself to hypostatization as "a faculty" or indeed as "the ground of beings," it is appropriate to speak in the nominative of "the will." Heidegger is not always clear on (or concerned with) the distinction between "willing" and "the will," and indeed he claims at one point that the word for this relation is lacking. Nevertheless, he does suggest there that while "the word 'will' ['Wille']" indicates that which grounds the essence of the soul according to the metaphysical tradition, the word "willing" (Wollen) would indicate 'the carrying out of this will" (GA 77:78). The deeper matter at stake is thus the will; for "we are always in the scope of the will, even when we are unwilling" (P. 57). Genuine non-willing would involve a radical negation, not just of "willing," but of the hypostatized "will" itself; "Nicht-Wollen [ultimately] bespeaks then," Heidegger writes, "Nicht-Wille" (GA 77:79).

And yet I prefer to use the quasi-verbal term "non-willing," rather than "non-will"; for the comportment of non-willing would neither be a faculty of the subject nor a substantial metaphysical ground, but rather a way of fundamentally comporting oneself, of being (verbal) fundamentally a-tuned, of being-in-the-world in a manner other than willing. Refusing to reify "non-willing" into a noun, we acknowledge the fact that to think the possibility of non-willing we must call into question the very grammer in which we think. Thus, for Heidegger the question of how to think in the manner of a "thinking [which] would be something other than willing" (P. 59) is inseparable from the question of how to think the fundamental attunement of non-willing. Ultimately, to think non-willing would require thinking non-willingly (see GA 77:67).

P. 15

Non-willing is also tied several aspects of Ereignis; for example, in this excerpt. I found the discussion of letting-be (Seinlassen) particularly helpful because of its critical role in allowing what is present into the open. Besides the appropriative Ereignis, Ereignis is also considered as a historical event, and how to wait for it:

Waiting is ultimately identified, as is "thinking," with releasement to the open-region (P. 74); "thinking changes in Gelassenheit from...a representing to waiting upon the open-region" (ibid.). Waiting, properly undertaken, is already Gelassenheit. It is not only the attentive anticipation of the other beginning, but is already, as the responsive attunement to the open-region, the released non-willing comportment proper to man. Thus, in the end, it is not only the case that we can "do nothing but wait for the essence of man" (P. 79). Properly undertaken, such a waiting is nothing other than that "Gelassenheit through which we belong to the open-region" while the latter "still conceals its own essence" (ibid.); and indeed, since a self-concealing would remain an essential aspect of the event of being as a granting-in-withdrawal (as Ereignis/Enteignis), waiting in "openness for the mystery" would always remain an essential aspect of man's proper comportment to being.

P. 222

All in all, the level of scholarship here is excellent, and bound to provoke further thinking of its themes.

A Heidegger Dictionary. Michael Inwood, Oxford, Blackwell, 1999.

Part of the entry that describes Ereignis is here.

Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism. Charles R. Bambach, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995.

Heidegger In Question The Art of Existing. Robert Bernasconi, New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1993.

To the author Ereignis from the silence in language.

Although there is a sense in which the essence of language is always brought to language whenever there is speaking, we are appropriated to it in our ownmost essence only when we hear the stillness speaking in language or correspond to it in our saying--as when we remain silent and renounce the attempt to name the essence of language metaphysically. The renunciation arises as a matter of destiny, specifically that of our time as the time of der Fehl des Gemeinsamen, the lack of something common--a universal--which binds together and to which we may refer language. Through this lack we enter into dwelling in Ereignis. What looked li[k]e a task we set ourselves--to bring language to language as language--becomes the way-making (Be-wegung) which is Ereignis itself. The transformation of the formula about bringing language to language as language is the passage from Being to Ereignis.

P. 202-203

Heidegger On Being and Acting From Principles To Anarchy. Reiner Schürmann, translated by Christine-Marie Gros, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990.

This book is a study of Heidegger's way of thinking and how it applies to the dichotomy between theory and practice. In the section titled Unconcealment/Event Reiner Schürmann quotes first from The Question Concerning Technology and then follows up with On Time and Being to describe Ereignis.

As if to point out the threshold upon which the Ereignis, event of appropriation, starts coming into play, Heidegger adds: "The lightning stroke is the event in which the constellation of the turning [comes about] in the very essence of being, and that in the epoch of enframing (des Gestells)." The categorical transition from 'unconcealment' to 'event of appropriation' is datable: it occurs with contemporary technology.

What is called 'the event' of appropriation here would thus be setting in with technological enframing. Technology is "the liminal appearance of the event of appropriation," the limen of a possible era determined solely by surface fluctuations. "Between the epochal formations of being and its transformation into the event of appropriation stands enframing." The most pertinent description the phenomenology of reversals can give of this turning is that it is "the entry into dwelling in the event of appropriation." These threshold metaphors must not hide the fact that the event of appropriation has been operative 'always already', although it emerges from the rubble of principles only with technology. Also, if principle constructs could foul its recognition, this indicates that the event of appropriation is simultaneously an event of expropriation. The very possibility of 'denial' and 'neglect' must be traced to this ultimate, although radically finite, condition of the self-structuring designated by the categories of world and of favor. Expropriation, Enteignis, accounts for the tendency towards negativity in a given economy--all and any negativity in all and any econony. It accounts for concealment (lethe) in unconcealment, which in turn accounts for withholding (epechein) in the epochs. It is the undertow of all surface fluctuations. "The event of appropriation is in itself an event of expropriation; this word takes up, in a manner commensurate with the event, the early Greek lethe, in the sense of concealment."

P. 217-218

Glossary
liminal: the border of conscious awareness at which something can or cannot be experienced
limen: threshold

Heidegger On Ontotheology Technology and the Politics of Education. Iain Thomson, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

There are two aspects to this book, one shows that ontotheology is an important aspect of Heidegger's way of thinking that has often been glossed over by other scholars to their disadvantage, and then, having formulated the importance of ontotheology in understanding Heidegger, ontotheology is used to help elucidate Heidegger's criticism of technology, his relationship to the Nazi regime, and his views on education.

Ontotheology, a word apparently invented by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, is one of those words that Heidegger has ascribed with his own particular meaning. Ontotheology attempts to answer two questions: "What are beings as such in general?" and "What is the highest being, and what is its nature?" However, the distinction between the structure and the source of beings goes back to the Greeks. It was formally expressed by Aristotle, and we can find traces of it back to the origins of philosophy. The first chapter describes how the two facets have been named by thinkers through history up to Nietzsche. Heidegger's insight into the combination of both is summed up nicely:

When metaphysics conceives of the being of entities ontologically, in terms of an entity in whose being all other entites share, and theologically, in terms of an all-founding entity from which (or whom) all entities issue, what is thereby "taken for granted" is that being (understood as the being of entities) plays the role of a "ground of entities," that is, a foundational role. Indeed, metaphysics reinforces its foundational claim about what and how entities are--its "truth concerning the totality of entities as such"--by coming at the problem from both ends of the conceptual scale simultaneously: Metaphysics effects both a bottom-up "ground-giving or establishing" (in which its understanding of the being of entities, reached by generalizing from its conception of the most basic entity, grounds the intelligible order from inside out) and a top-down, theological "founding or justification" (in which its understanding of the being of entities, derived from its conception of the highest entity, secures the intelligible order from the outside in). All successful, epoch-grounding metaphysical systems combine these two different forms of foundationalism, thereby securing our understanding of the being of entities (and so grounding the intelligible order) from both the inside out and the outside in, microscopically and telescopically, floor to ceiling--or, as Heidegger puts it, ontologically and theologically, that is, ontotheologically.

P. 18-19

Having established Heidegger's understanding of ontotheology, the following chapters examine several important aspects of Heidegger thinking through his understanding of ontotheology. The chapter on techonology concentrates on the claim that Heidegger is a technological essentialist--in what ways might that be the case, and what are the implications. The next chapter revisits his time as Rector of Freiburg University and his involvement in politics. The final chapter examines the future direction of university education envisioned by Heidegger and what aspects of that are relevant today. As part of setting the context for the importance of ontology for education, Heidegger's thinking on the relationship of philosophy to science are clearly brought together from several of his texts. That is something the author does well in this the book, gathering the ideas about several subjects that are found throughout Heidegger's texts into succint accounts.

Reviews: Daniel Dahlstrom

Heidegger's Confusions. Paul Edwards, London, Prometheus Books, 2004.

As can be gathered from the title, this is an anti-Heideger book, but unlike many other books out there with similar intentions, that invent a strawman to punch, this one is quite well informed about Heidegger's works and reasonable in many places. For starters, it quickly disposes with Heidegger the nazi and concentrates on Heidegger the thinker. It proceeds by identifying some of the inconsistencies in Heidegger's works. These inconsistencies are familiar to writers sympathetic to Heiedgger's thinking, and are the subject of different interpretations and much debate. The author is perhaps most critical of those that have sympathetically translated and commented on Heidegger's way of thinking.

In part the book is about comparing what is said about being in different translated passages and it's all jolly good fun. The ancient problem of being as the attribute of every entity that that cannot be isolated is revisited. Similar criticisms could, of course, also be raised about anything else that is important to humans but impossible to measure scientifically, like poetry.

If a philosopher is a lover of wisdom, as per the Greek, then how does Mr. Edwards understand the word love? Might not all his criticisms of being also be leveled at love? Is he merely reiterating that science cannot say anything outside the box it has defined for itself?

Although the book quotes extensively from Heidegger translations, it feels driven more by the history of Being & Time's penetration of the anglophone world, than by Heidegger's way of thinking.

I have given a few samples of Heidegger word-torrents, but for the most part I have extracted the more or less discussable conclusions. No matter what the starting point of a discussion is in the later works, whether it is a passage from Parmenides, a poem from Hölderlin, or a quotation from Nietzsche, the end is always the same: Being west, the Presence presences, Being conceals itself but reveals itself in its very concealment or the other way around, the Appropriation appropriates (I skipped this one out of mercy for my readers),

Well, withstanding criticisms is a key factor, a requirement, for any reasonable thought. If Heidegger's way of thinking has a future in philosophy, it will be in part because it weathers the criticisms in this book. I think it already has, but if you are an anti-Heidegger frame of mind, feel that it's all wrong at a gut level, and want to explain why, this book is a good starting point.

Heidegger's Hidden Sources East Asian influences on his work. Reinhard May, translated by Graham Parker, London, Routledge, 1996.

'In Heidegger's Hidden Sources, Reinhard May demonstrates that Martin Heidegger drew upon German translations of Chinese Daoist and Zen Buddhists classics for some of the major ideas of his philosophy. May also shows how Heidegger's appropriation of East Asian modes of thinking continued through conversations with Chinese and Japanese scholars over many years.

'The author concentrates on a series of close textual comparisons of passages from Heidegger's major writings with exercepts from translations of Daoist classics and a collection of Zen texts - translations with which Heidegger was known to be familiar. The striking similarities in vocabulary and syntax that come to light are, May argues, too numerous to be coincidental. In addition, there is a detailed discussion of Heidegger's "From a Conversation on Language; Between a Japanese and an Inquirer" and published here for the first time, an English translation of the account given by the scholar with whom Heidegger had the dialogue that under lies his "Conversation".

'Graham Parkes's complementary essay sketches a hitherto overlooked aspect of Heidegger's intellectual development by providing further details on Heidegger's contacts with several eminent philosophers from Japan, notably Kuki Shuzo, who subsequently introduced Jean-Paul Sartre to Heidegger's thought. May's groundbreaking study will not only go a long way towards explaining Heidegger's enormous influence in Japan and China; it will also have a profound impact on future interpretations of Heidegger's work.'

The author believes that Heidegger's thoughts on Ereignis, found on pages 127-128 of On the Way to Language, were influenced by the last four line of Laozi 25:

Man follows the earth. Earth follows the universe. The universe follows the Tao. The Tao follows only itself.

Especially when the last line is rendered as "Meaning conforms to itself."

Graham Parkes provides his own translation of the passage from "On the Way to Language."

The productive propriation [Eignen] that arouses Saying as show in its showing may be called 'appropriating' [Ereignen]. This produces [er-gibt] the Open of the clearing, in which what is present persists and from which what is absent withdraws and can maintain its persistence in withdrawal. What appropriating produces through Saying [Way/dao] is never the effect of a cause, not the consequence of a ground. Productive propriation, appropriating, is more granting than any effecting, making, and grounding. The appropriating is Appropriation [das Ereignis] itself -- and nothing besides. Appropriation, seen in the showing of Saying [dao], can be understood neither as an occurrence nor as a happening but only experienced in the showing of Saying as that which grants. There is nothing else to which Appropriation leads back, from which it could be explained. Appropriating is not a product (result) of something else, but the Product [die (sic.) Ergebnis], from whose generous giving something like an 'It gives' can grant, and which even 'Being' needs in order to come into its own as presencing.

Appropriation gathers the design of Saying [dao] and develops it into the structure [Gefüge] of manifold showing. Appropriation is the most inconspicuous of the inconspicuous, the simplest of the simple, the nearest of the near, and the farthest of the far, in which we mortals spend out whole lives.

What holds sway in Saying [dao], Appropriation, can be named only by saying: It -- Appropriation [Ereignis] -- propriates [eignet].

Reinhard May remarks about this passage:

Drawing from the doctrine of dao, especially as exemplified in the relevant chapters of the Laozi, Appropriation is naturally for Heidegger 'not a law in the sense of a norm that hovers somewhere above us'. The passage just quoted speaks clearly enough in its detailed papaphrasing the language of the Dao de jing, and especially of the last line of Chapter 25.

There turns out to be a series of unmistakable resonances with doctrines of dao in the course of the two essays on language, the documentation and interpretation of which will be reserved for a later, more detailed exegesis.

P. 40-41

Heidegger's Hut. Adam Sharr, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2006.

Heidegger's Language and Thinking. Robert Mugerauer, London, Humanities Press International, 1988.

Heidegger's Later Philosophy. Julian Young, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Reviews: Daniel Dahlstrohm

Heidegger's Phenomenology of Religion. Benjamin D. Crowe, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008.

Heidegger's Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation. Herman Philipse, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998.

Philipse begins by explaining which problems an interpretation of Heidegger's question of being should solve, and he specifies which type of interpretation is the best basis for an evaluation of Heidegger's thought. He then identifies various strands or leitmotifs in Heidegger's idea of being, and shows how these strands hang together in the philosopher's work. In doing so, Philipse offers new insights into Heidegger's views on such subjects as human existence, authenticity, logic, and language, and into his readings of such philosophers as Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Philipse then integrates into his interpretation of Heidegger's overall theory the latest scholarship about the philosopher's engagement with Nazism. Finally, Philipse examines the fundamental structures of Heidegger's philosophy and assesses whether Heidegger's views are true, probable, or possess some other epistemic or existential value.
Review: Stephan Käufer

Heidegger's Philosophy of Science. Trish Glazebrook, New York, Fordham University Press, 2000.

Review: Stephan Käufer

Heidegger's Possibility: Language, Emergence--Saying Be-ing . Kenneth Maly, University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Heidegger's Topology Being, Place, World. Jeff Malpas, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2006.

Jeff Malpas's book joins other recent analyses of Heidegger's way of thinking that are both well articulated, and gather significant themes into valuable considerations. It should put an end to the common criticism that the secondary literature consists mainly of racapitulations of Heideggerean jargon. The ideas in it are thought provoking and expressed eloquently.

The theme of this book is that of place and its role in Heidegger's thinking. Place is a term that Heidegger himself used for the ultimate destination of his way of thinking. And it is one that has not received proper consideration before this study. The book begins by looking at the question of situatedness in early Heidegger, and then moves on to a detailed analysis of place in Being and Time, with many references to Dreyfus's study. The role of our bodies in our understanding of space and orientation is examined, as is dasein's embeddedness in the world. Questions about place and its meaning, its role in different works, are revisited through out the book, so that our understanding of its importance in Heidegger's philosophy grows steadily. In addition to Being and Time, the pertinent parts of the "Letter on Humanism", "The Origin of the Work of Art", and "The Thing", are covered in detail, as are several courses. And because the theme is place, "Building Dwelling Thinking" also gets close attention. However, every aspect of topology is not exhausted. I was surprised to find that Heidegger's use of horizon only gets a cursory mention.

Place, in the sense used in this book, is not merely space or geometric volume. Heidegger discusses the development of the technical understanding of space in Being and Time, and in more detail in his lectures on science, where reads he closely reads Galileo and Newton's texts to illuminate the paradigm changes within. I found that Malpas's notion of the meaning of place, and its integral part in Heideggers central thread, is best summarized and articulated in the second paragraph excerpted from this book here.
Reviews: David Kolb, Edward Relph

Heidegger's Ways. Hans-Georg Gadamer, translated by John W. Stanley, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1994.

Heidegger's Transcendental Aesthetic An Interpretaton of the Ereignis. Tristan Moyle, Aldershot, Ashgate Press, 2005.

In the early chapters the book examines Heidegger's thinking as an extension of Kant's transcendental aesthetic, drawing heavily from Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and the lectures from that period, and focusing on the relation of being with time and spatiality. Then the concealing that complements revealing, and the revealing in the work of Art and language is considered, leading on what that means for thinking and works of genius. The final chapters examine truth, comparing Heidegger's conception to the positions of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, and the historical changes that lead Heidegger to prepare for the new ontology, or hidden god.

This book was first announced with the tentative title The Idea of Human Sensibility in Early and Later Heidegger and that may be a more descriptive title because one doesn't get the sense that it is about interpreting Ereignis, while it does tell us much around the subject of a priori sensibility. Ereignis is examined with regards to spatial distance, and specifically Jean-Luc Marion's criticism in God without Being. Heidegger's comments on Ereignis and language start the discussion in the chapter on the 'Speaking' of Language, which lead to an examination of the rhythm of language--a subject overlooked in other studies. Finally Ereignis is considered the event of transformation in thinking, which leads to it giving us a gift of thanks.

Heidegger: Thought and Historicity. Christopher Fynsk, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1993.

Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought 4th Edition. William J. Richardson, New York, Fordham University Press, 2003.

Historical Dictionary of Heidegger's Philosophy. Alfred Denker, Lanham, Maryland, Scarecrow Press, 2000.

The entry for Appropriation from the dictionary is here.

The Incarnality of Being The Earth, Animals, and the Body in Heidegger's Thought. Frank Schalow, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2007.

This book is on Heidegger's discussion of embodiment, and the questions he avoided. Considered first is the body, its value in the economic world, and how its requirements guide people, especially in case of physical addiction. The second chapter is on body's sexual differences and their source erotic desire, and what they tell us about ontology. The intersection of Heidegger's thinking and the erotic is an underexplored area. So much so that in the moview Derrida, when the interviewer asks his subject what he would ask if he could ask Heidegger one question, he responds that he'd ask Heidegger about sex. Although this won't remain the defintive discussion of the subject, it does present various paths for further questions and exploration.

Also explored is the body's influence on ethical questions regarding human's relations with the earth and animals, and with other humans. The latter leads to revisting the influence of Heidegger's thinking on his politics. Through out the issues are examined in light of writings from Heidegger's entire career. A discussin of Heidegger's entanglement of freedom and the ontological difference is excerpted here.

Intimations of Mortality: Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger's Thinking of Being. David Farrell Krell, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986.

In a chapter on Die Kehre and the twists and turns in Heidegger's thought, the author says the following about Ereignis:

By the mid-1930s Heidegger is employing the word Ereignis to name the granting of various epochs in Being's history and destiny. The "topic" of that history is the essential unfolding or occurence (wesen) of the clearing of Being. Although "truth" remains the focus, Heidegger now understands his task to be the overcoing of metaphysics, including the metaphysics of truth.

...[Then from 1950 to 1964...]

The very question of Being, and the word Sein itself, become increasingly problematic: the danger Heidegger sees is that Ereignis will inevitably be understood in metaphysical fashion as a transcendent ground for Being. He therefore tries to think unconcealment on its own terms in the apparently metaphorical language of the clearing, dwelling, sojourn, and so on, even though he is well aware that all meta-phor is meta-physical. Once again, however, it is important to recall that the clearing of Being is a theme that precedes Ereignis.

P. 104

The Irony of Heidegger. Andrew Haas, London, Continuum, 2007.

This book proposes two approaches to the irony of Heidegger's works, either Heidegger took the seriousness in his works seriously, and one should treat such seriousness with irony, or Heidegger was himself ironic about their seriousness, and thus so should the reader be. Each of the six chapter examines a different work of Heidegger's in search of irony, with the seriousness their subjects call for, but also with a restrained sense of humor that is rare in these sorts of studies.

The first chapter tackles the introduction to Being and Time, beginning with the epigraph from Plato's Sophist, and its manifold interpretations. What is the relationship between sophistry and philosophy, what does that mean for the question of being, and what is Heidegger position? The second chapter asks after Heidegger's intentions in the Rektoratsrede, what changes was Heidegger calling for in the university, and how did they stand with or against the politics of that time. The third questions truth, art, and 'The Origin of the Work of Art'. The next chapter addresses the 'Letter on Humanism', with an excursus into Plato's allegory of the cave. Then the 'The Question Concerning Technology' and its dangers, with some parallels from modern physics alongside. The final chapter is on the posthumous Der Spiegel interview, wherein Heidegger responds that the proper response to the modern era is silence.

Reviews: Richard Polt

Language and &"The Feminine" in Nietzsche and Heidegger. Jean Graybeal, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990.

The Later Heidegger. George Pattison, London, Routledge, 2000.

Martin Heidegger and the Pre-Socratics. George Joseph Seidel, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1964.

Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking. Otto Pöggeler, translated by Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber, New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1989.

Metaphysics and Oppression, Heidegger's Challenge to Western Philosophy. John McCumber, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999.

John McCumber unfolds a history of Western metaphysics that is also a history of the legitimation of oppression. That is, until Heidegger's thought opened doors to challenge domination encoded in structures and institutions—such as slavery, colonialism, and marriage—that in the past have given order to the Western world. But Heidegger himself did not recognize the destabilizing implications of his philosophy. McCumber brings this challenge to light by contrasting Heidegger’s thought with the inscription of domination present in the very nature of Being as it is conceived by Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke. The result is a unique and creative explication of Western philosophy that confronts the difficult and important task of decoding Heidegger's political alignment and indicates possibilities for breaking Western traditions of domination, exploitation, and oppression.

The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought. John D. Caputo, New York, Fordham University Press, 1990.

The New Heidegger. Miguel De Beistegui, London, Continuum, 2005.

This book collects six essays on different and familiar ways of Heidegger's. What is new about these essays is that the familiar ways are examined in light of the many new works of Heidegger's that have published recently as part of the Gesamtausgabe project. The subjects covered by the essays are life (as in the possibility of a philosophical life), truth (a survey of truth beyond correspondence from The Sophist lectures to Contributions to Philosophy, space and time (ontology from the meaning of being to the truth of being), technology (the techological and productivist basis of metaphysics, and the proper response, Gelassenheit), art and poetry (free of technology), and the politics of the Rektorat.

The essay on space-time has an explanation of Ereignis and the changes in thinking both from Being and Time to the Contributions. Towards the end, the essay summarizes the interconnectedness of the both pairs--space and time, and space-time and Ereignis--like this:

The unity, or intimacy (Einigkeit, Innigkeit) of time and space lies in this counter-turning, in the becoming other of each: "This counter-turning is indeed what is essential and indicates the originary referral of both to each other, on the basis of separatedness [Geschiednis]."[P. 269] And so, it is on the basis of their being two counter-tendencies, one oriented toward dispersal, the other one towards estrangement, that each one comes into its own. It is in their veryseparatefness, their very counter-orientation, that each is brought into its own essence and proper unfolding. But at no stage is this opposition dialectical, for both unfold, as counter-tendencies, from the structure of Ereignis itself, torn between--and this being-torn-apart, this quartering is not the result of some indecision, some temporary state of hesitation, but designates Ereignis in its essence--belongingness and call. This primal and irreducible 'event' is the forever-renewed origin of time-space, the very source of the spatializing and the temporalizing that is world configuring.

But in the end, what matters most is that this temporalizing and this spacing be that of Ereignis, understood as the unity of belongingness and call, as this singular and unique event on which fate of the human hinges. Ereignis, as the evnt of time-space, is thus the unity and co-originarity of this movement of ecstacy and captivation, dissemination and alienation, in and through which time is from the start brought back into the hold of space, and space itself from the start carried away in the breaking out of time. History is nothing other than the state of equilibrium reached at any given time by this spatio-temporal economy. History is of time-space. It is the mark or the inscription of a particular configuration of the tension opposing time and space.

P. 93

There's more on time, space, and Ereignis here.

Reviews: Iain Thomson

On the Truth of Being, Reflections on Heidegger's Later Philosophy. Joseph J. Kockelmans, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1984.

The author tells us that Ereignis is how the man comes to understand Being.

Each self-manifestation of Being and beings has the character of an Ereignis, an appropriating event binds together Being and beings; it weaves Being, man, things, and world together into an articulated and textured whole. It is the appropriating event which in each case lets man come into what he most properely is; it is what first launches man into his essence. At the same time, it constitutes his destiny. Out of this destiny history grows, in the sense that history is shaped from the way Being presents itself and all beings to man in each case. The appropriating event, thus, in each case "determines" the way and form in which Being and beings arise for man or are closed off to him. Finally, the appropriating event also "determines" the free spaces, the possibilities of human life, and the historical forms of human Dasein on earth.

P. 62

The Other Heidegger. Fred Dallmayr, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993.

The Paths of Heidegger's Life and Thought. Otto Pöggeler, translated by John Baliff, New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1998.

The translator's comments on Ereignis and Pöggeler on the stages of Heidegger's thinking are here.

Preparatory Thinking In Heidegger's Teaching. Miles Groth, New York, Philosophical Library, 1987.

There are two parts to this book. The first is on Heidegger's ideas on a preparational thinking that is not metaphysical. In it, the author also proposes some original translations for some of Heidegger's key terms. Read it and learn why dasein might be translated as "mortal"; Sorge as "sorrow"; In-der-Welt-sein as "Being-in-a-World", and about the different paths of thinking: Hozlwege and Feldweg. The second part is on the Cura fable of Hyginus, which Heidegger interprets in History of the Concept of Time and Being and Time. The book ranges widely through Heidegger's works and will appeal to those that have already read some Heidegger and are looking for new insights into his way of thinking.

Quoting a passage from The Word of Nietzsche: 'God Is Dead', the author notes that, in his copy of the text, Heidegger glossed that Being itself is Ereignis.

The author writes that preparatory thinking, by welcoming thought, participates in Ereignis.

Welcoming thought, taken both in the sense of greeting actively and in the sense of receiving with assurance that which is greeted, corresponds for the Dasein to the appropriating/withdrawing event of Being [das Ereignis] "in relation to" the Dasein, to Being's emergence for the Dasein's "receiving with assurance," and in its withdrawal, for which the Dasein is itself always on a course of drawing closer to what has emerged but withdraws as well (Being).

P. 44

The Question of Being A Reversal of Heidegger. Stanley Rosen, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993.

The Question of God in Heidegger's Phenomenology. George Kovacs, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1990.

Rosenzweig and Heidegger Between Judaism and German Philosophy. Peter Eli Gordon, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003.

Reviews: Nitzan Lebovic

Seditions Heidegger and the Limit of Modernity. Heribert Boeder, Translated and Edited by Marcus Brainard, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997.

A Short History of Existentialism. Jean Wahl, translated by Forrest Williams and Stanley Mason. New York, The Philosophical Library, 1949.

First published in Paris, this small book is notable for having the first coherent explanation of Heidegger in English. The final chapter is a roundtable discussion of existentialism with several philosopers wherein Emmanuel Levinas offers this explanation:

I think that the new philosphical "twist" originated by Heidegger consists in distinguishing between Being and being (thing or person), and in giving to Being the relation, the movement, the efficacy which until then resided in the existent. Existentialism is to experience and think existence-- the verb "to be"--as event, an event which neither produces that which exists, nor the action of what exists upon another object. It is the pure fact of existing which is event. The fact of existing, until then pure and reticent and tranquil; the fact which, in the Aristotelian notion of the act, remained quite serene and equal to itself among all the adventures that befall a being; the fact which was transcendent to all being, but which was not itself the event of transcending; this fact appears in existentialism as the adventure itself, containing History in itself

When Heidegger says "being-in-the-world" and "being-for-death" and "being-with-others," what he adds that is new to our millenary knowledge of our mortality, our social nature, and our presence in the world, is that these prepositions--"in," "for," and "with" are in the root of the verb "to be" (as "ex" is in the root of the verb "to exist"); that these phrases are not created by us as existents placed in detreminate conditions; that they are not even mathematically contained, as in Husserl, in our nature or our essence as existents; that they are neither contingent not necessary attributes of our substance; and finally, that they are articulations of the event of being, heretofore considered to be tranquil, simple, equal to itself. One may say that existentialism consists in feeling and thinking that the verb "to be" is transitive.

This, in existential philosophy there are no longer any copulas. The copulas express the very event of being.

I think that a certain use of the verb "to be"--which does not mean that I give to Being a purely verbal signification--corresponding to this notion of transitiveness, is more characteristic of this philosophy than the evocation of ecstasies, anxiety, or death, which are in themselves as nietzschean or christian as they are existentialist.

Glossary
copula: a linking verb. One that links the subject with the complement of a sentence; e.g. She is a philosopher.

That Is to Say: Heidegger's Poetics. Marc Froment-Meurice, translated by Jan Plug, Stanford University Press, 1998.

Here's a bit from the book on the eye of Ereignis.

Thinking in the Light of Time Heidegger's Encounter with Hegel. Karin de Boer, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2000.

Thinking with Heidegger: Displacements. Miguel de Beistegui, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2003.

Six essays on anthropology, history, politics, science and aesthetics.

The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger. Jacques Taminiaux, translated by Michael Gendre, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1997.

Time and Death Heidegger's Analysis of Finitude. Carol J. White, Aldershot, Ashgate Press, 2005.

How death fits into Heidegger's thinking has had many explanations. Many center around the descriptions of death and the finitude of Dasein in Being and Time. The author explains differing interpretations of what Heidegger's analysis means for how we might think about death, especially in light of Heidegger's comments on death in many of his later works. The author interprets the analysis as describing the finitude of a world collapsing and the anomolous behaviors that point to the next world's culture. The issues are well described and amply footnoted.

In the fifth chapter the author explains the term Ereignis and its roots at length, chosing to translate it with an always capitalized Appropriation.

Insight is in fact the 'happening' in which Dasein lets itself be taken up in the Appropriation of being. It is not so much that the Appropriation and the moment of insight are two different phenomena as that they are the same phenomenon viewed from the two different perspectives of an investigation of being and an investigation of Desein. Dasein comes into its own in the moment of insight, and being comes into its own in the Appropriation; but the two phenomena are at least mutually dependent, and we could not have one without the other.

P. 159

Appropriation is included in the author's interpretation of Heidegger's thinking as analysis of the history of being.

[W]e can summarize the essential points conveyed by Heidegger's notion of the Appropriation of Time and being in three propositions: (1) the contexts of Western culture all share a Temporal orientation toward the present and items of use; (2) they change historically; and (3) they do so in a process of ordered, Temporal development.

P. 163

Reviews: Iain Thomson

Transformations Thinking after Heidegger. Gail Stenstad, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.

Translating Heidegger. Miles Groth, New York, Humanity Books, 2004.

The first part of the book is a history of the first translations, beginning with early reviewers of his German texts and their struggles with Heidegger's key words. The earliest translation of Heidegger's terms was in a review of Being and Time by Gilbert Ryle, the English analytical philosopher. This is a story of errors by translators who didn't understand Heidegger's philosophy, and their attempts to translate Sien, Dasein, Seiende, and Existenz for an English audience. This section ends with a chapter on the translations of Heidegger's essays in Existence and Being, the first book of Heidegger's texts published in English. Sadly, none of the translators understood Heidegger's philosophy well enough to explain it to an English speaking audience clearly. Although the story of English translations in this book ends in 1949, the problem of providing adequate translations for those that do not read German persists to the present day. Nevertheless, things have improved tremendously from the earliest translations.

The second part of the book is on Heidegger's view of translation, and a close study of Heidegger's translation of Parmenides Fragment VI. Before Heidegger, translators' ideal was to come up with a set of rules and a word dictionary for translations between languages. Heidegger instead argued that the key task in translation is to translate what the original writer had thought. The translator had to think the same thought as the writer and then write what would invoke the same thought in the new language. To achieve true translation, merely converting the words between languages was inadequate.

The book includes many footnotes and also includes over one hundred pages of bibliographic material-- probably the best bibliography of Heidegger's translation into English to date.

Tree Leaf Talk. James F. Weiner, Oxford, Berg, 2001.

Truth and Genesis. Miguel De Beistegui, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2004.

What Is A Human Being? A Heideggerian View. Frederick A. Olafson, Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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