Enowning is Heidegger's name for the rapprochement between human beings and Being by which intelligibility take places. That is, Ereignis designates the process whereby human beings actively participate in the becoming-intelligible of their worldly environments, the disclosure of their worlds.
"En-own-ment" or "Ap-propri-ation" [Er-eign-is] is the key-word in Heidegger's thinking since the 30s, in which he attempts to think more originally than metaphysics the relation between Being and humans in terms of the being enowned of humans through Being and in terms of the belonging of humans to Being. In the following, I will rethink the question of this relation in reference both to Heidegger's well known Letter on Humanism and to the more difficult book Beiträge zur Philosophie (Contributions to Philosophy). I will thereby focus on the difficulty, as well as on Heidegger's struggle for a proper language which would be able to say that which essentially remains concealed for metaphysical language: the truth (or ground) of Being as Ereignis.
I shall examine the concept of poiesis articulated in An Introduction to Metaphysics and attempt to clarify the sense in which, according to Heidegger, it is an original site of truth. To this end, I will first examine why the issue of artistic production moves into the foreground of Heidegger's concerns in the 1930s. Since this concern is animated by Heidegger's retrieval of an original concept of poiesis, I shall endeavor to reconstruct the conceptual basis of this discovery.
Scientific inquiry follows the imperative: "let things themselves alone determine how they are described." But "the nothing" is not just one more subject matter, one more field of objective research, among others. Rather, understanding of "the nothing" is what makes possible, motivates, and governs the attitude that first defines and addresses a range of entities as a field of objective research. But if science can't make "the nothing" itself an object of objective scientific research, how is it that we can speak or know anything about "the nothing"?
In this essay I give a reading of Martin Heidegger's text An Introduction to Metaphysics which begins from an attempt to question the priority of the question with this work. I move from this to issues of beginnings, reading and interpretation before finally attempting to suggest a way of perhaps breaking from the priority of the question. This last move is attempted through the introduction of a concept of desire based on the use of a notion of textual figures borrowed from Roland Barthes work A Lover's Discourse. The issues that then come into focus are those of the nature of philosophy and the role of the sensual as 'against' the intellectual.
Reflections on Early Greek Thinking.
The English translation of Heidegger's The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic first appeared in 1984 and is still available from Indiana University Press. The Translator's Introduction, however, appeared as a separate insert in only a limited number of the clothbound first editions in 1984-85.
Notes on Heidegger's Nietzsche lectures.
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