The official title: Contributions to Philosophy
and
the essential rubric: Of the Event


The official title must by necessity now sound dull, ordinary, and empty and will make it seem that at issue here are "scholarly" "contributions" to the "advancement" of philosophy.

Philosophy can be officially announced no other way, since all essential titles have become impossible on account of the exhaustion of every basic word and the destruction of the genuine relation to words.

The official title, however, is also in accord with the "matter at issue" to the extent that, in the age of transition from metaphysics to the thinking of beyng2 in its historicality, no more can be ventured than an attempt at a thinking which would arise out of a more originary basic position within the question of the truth of beyng. Yet even the successful attempt must—in conformity with the basic event of that which is to be thought inventively—keep its distance from every false claim to be a "work" in the previous style. Future thinking is a course of thought, on which the hitherto altogether concealed realm of the essential occurrence of beyng is traversed and so is first cleared and attained in its most proper character as an event.

The issue is no longer to be "about" something, to present something objective, but to be appropriated over to the appropriating event. That is equivalent to an essential transformation of the human being: from "rational animal" (animal rationale) to Da-sein. The fitting rubric is therefore Of [von] the Event. That is not to be understood in the sense of a report on it [davon], about it. Instead, it means that a belonging to beyng and to the word "of" beyng, a belonging in thinking and saying, is something appropriated by [von] the event.



2. Archaic form of "being" to render das Seyn, archaic form of das Sein—Trans.


Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) (GA 65) by Martin Heidegger