Richard Polt
For Heidegger, Ereignis is an “inception” in which we become an issue for ourselves and enter being-there. The Greek “first inception” established presence as the Western sense of being; the “other inception” would found a new time-space exceeding presence. In the early 1930s, Heidegger saw Nazism as this new inception, but he comes to view it as the end stage of the “machination,” “brutality,” and “criminality” of late modernity. According to the Black Notebooks, however, this critique is not a rejection but an “affirmation”: modernity must be played out to its catastrophic end before the other inception can take place.
What does Ereignis mean?
The Contributions to Philosophy were published 30 years ago, and there is still no consensus on that question. We can’t even agree on how to translate the word: Appropriation? Enowning? Event?
My own reading takes the connection to “inception” as a crucial clue. Heidegger writes in the Contributions: “The greatest Ereignis is always the inception [Anfang]” (GA 65: 57). “The inception—inceptively conceived—is beyng itself … as Ereignis” (GA 65: 58, cf. GA 78: 336).
Today I’ll briefly indicate how the question of inception enters Heidegger’s thought after Being and Time; how I interpret Ereignis as inception; and how, in the Black Notebooks, inception and catastrophe are linked in Heidegger’s evolving attitude toward Nazism. These points are discussed at much greater length in my book on the Contributions, The Emergency of Being, and in my new book, Time and Trauma: Thinking Through Heidegger in the Thirties.
The hypothesis of Being and Time is that temporality makes our understanding of being possible. Presence is just one dimension of being, and it is available to us through the conjunction of futurity and pastness. Dasein or “being-there”—the entity who exists temporally and understands being—cannot itself be understood as merely present.
In the following years, Heidegger makes his way toward a more radical idea: Dasein’s temporality itself originates at certain crucial moments when “time opens itself up in its dimensions” and is “torn open into present, past, and future” (GA 4: 39-40/122). History erupts at these rare “moments of temporalization” (GA 69: 116/98 tm).
If being depends on time, then the origin of time is also the origin of being. The “happening of being” (e.g. GA 94: 6/6, 32/25, 59/45) involves “the inceptive disclosure of beings as a whole,” which takes place “in a ‘time’ which, itself unmeasurable, first opens up the open region for every measure” (GA 9: 190/145 tm).
In 1932, Heidegger thinks of the origins of Greek philosophy as just such a moment:
Beings as a whole, previously concealed from self-manifestation, find for the first time and henceforth … the site and the room in which they can step forth out of their concealedness in order to be at all as the beings they are. … Thus, what is comes to its being. … Through this original questioning and only through it, being becomes what is at issue above all, and for all that is. Inasmuch as being comes into understanding in this way, beings as such are empowered to themselves. Henceforth they can come to light as the beings that they are. … The questioning concerning being is the basic act of existence; with this questioning, there begins the history of humans as existing. [GA 35: 93-95/71-72 tm]
Heidegger takes our predominant understanding of being as presence as a legacy of this “first inception” of philosophy among the Greeks, which can be overcome only in “another inception,” a radical new transformation.
An inception, he writes in 1936, is “a turning point in history itself [when we] properly take over the there, and thus first create it”; this is “an extraordinary moment of history, in the preparation for which we are standing” (GA 82: 74). In this passage, it seems that the “first inception” did not quite succeed in bringing us into the condition of Dasein. That transformation will take place only in the other inception.
Such inceptions are not supratemporal or eternal, but are greater than eternity; they are “the shocks of time” (GA 65: 17). The happening of beyng forces itself upon us intermittently and unpredictably; it is the “shock of beyng itself” (GA 65: 464, cf. 463). Beyng must strike us with the strangeness and obscurity of “what happens only once, only this time” (GA 65: 463). It is the rarest, the most unique, and it happens only at a few moments (GA 65: 255). Beyng is not a constant; “beyng is at times” (GA 70: 15). “Being does not ... subsist ‘perpetually’ .... Being has an inception, and essentially so: it is the appropriating inception” (GA 71: 147/127 tm). How often do these inceptions come? Has one ever fully taken place? The answers are elusive. “When and how long being ‘is’ cannot be asked” (GA 69: 145/124; cf. GA 98: 160).
As early as the spring of 1932, according to Heidegger, he began to focus these lines of thought on das Ereignis (GA 66: 424). Ereignis normally means “event,” but it also echoes eigen (own, proper)—hence the translation “appropriating event,” which I think is not bad.
Now, some interpreters have denied that Ereignis refers to an event of any kind, and prefer to see it as an a priori structure of Dasein. Heidegger himself, in several postwar essays, denies that Ereignis is an “occurrence” or “incident.” But the Contributions use very “eventful” language in connection with Ereignis: “Only the greatest happening, the innermost Ereignis, can still save us” (GA 65: 57). Ereignis involves the “happening of the truth of beyng” (GA 65: 287), the “happening of owndom” (GA 65: 320), and “happenings of owning” (GA 65: 310).
According to the Contributions, the expression “the appropriating event” is short for “the appropriating event of the grounding of the there” (GA 65: 183, 247). In this event, we would come into our own as we were seized by an inception. We could then properly “be there,” and things could gain their proper places and significance.
The appropriating event would found a world and let being become an issue. It would generate time-space as the “site of the moment” (GA 65: 323/255) where and when earth and world can clash (GA 65: 30) and a decision about the divine can take place (GA 65: 230, 264, 411).
There is an essential connection between inception and selfhood. The appropriating event, as inception, gives birth to our own being by calling it into question and urging us to decide who we are. It is an event of owning, an event that seizes us and makes it possible for our being to be our own. As a crisis of selfhood, it is an emergency, and Heidegger suggests that emergency (Not) is the truth of beyng itself (GA 65: 46). But in a time that is indifferent to crisis, beyng may fail to happen (GA 65: 11, 107, 119, 125, 234-37). Without such an emergency, there is no true disclosure and no true selfhood. But if the emergency properly takes place, the founding of the there will bring a unique place and age into a configuration that claims human beings as its own; the place and age will become a home where human beings can be. Only then can we be ourselves (GA 65: 311, 320; GA 69: 123-26) and enter “the domain of what is proper” (GA 65: 320/253).
This selfhood is not just individual, but collective. The inception would found a site where a people’s destiny can unfold—a site where the question “Who are we?” has purchase. From the inceptive event of appropriation springs an order of unconcealment—a world in which the givenness of beings can be cultivated by a community (97).
This is all starting to sound very political—and Ereignis, with its emphasis on owning and belonging, slants to the right. We now know that already by 1930, Heidegger was earnestly recommending Mein Kampf to his brother.
However, for Heidegger belonging was never grounded on a fixed identity, as invoked by nationalist and racist myths. Selfhood involves alienation, nihilation, and expropriation (GA 66: 312). Absence, departure, denial, and longing point more genuinely to our selfhood than any easily ascertainable, present-at-hand characteristics. Sense and self hover over an “abyssal ground” (GA 65: 379/299).
For these reasons, it was never wholly accurate to describe Heidegger as a convinced Nazi, since from the start he hoped for a questioning more radical than any party slogan. And by the mid- to late thirties, he begins to view mainstream Nazi ideology as an instance of the domineering and reductive metaphysics of modernity. From Heidegger’s point of view, Nazism hardened into a collective subjectivism: it took the Volk as a gigantic, self-serving, self-certain will, while failing to ask “Who are we?” and confront the question of being.
By the time of the Contributions, Heidegger is coming to see all the established political and religious options as forms of bankrupt subjectivism, whether on the individual, the national, or the international scale. All the ideologies of his time posit humanity “as already known in essence” (GA 65: 25/22). The self-assured subject willfully plans and manipulates the world, turning itself into the center of all sense, without attaining genuine selfhood. “This ... self-certainty is the innermost essence of ‘liberalism,’ which precisely for that reason can apparently unfold freely” and march on in its unstoppable “progress.” The predominant racial ideology is nothing but “biological liberalism” (GA 65: 53/43).
Let’s turn to the Black Notebooks now, where we can see more clearly how the dynamic of the first and the other inception is played out in Heidegger’s attitudes toward the events of his times, and we can get a more nuanced understanding of his view of Nazism.
The Black Notebooks from the 1930s show the same fascination with the mystery of the inception that we’ve seen in other texts of the period. “The inceptions withdraw from every will to seize hold of them; in withdrawing, they merely leave behind the beginning as their mask” (GA 94: 283/208 tm). “We never grasp the inceptive; in order not to become a bygone given and thereby forfeit itself, the inceptive must constantly withdraw. This is why the inception can never be presented [darstellen]; it can only be carried out” (GA 94: 334/243 tm).
The first, Greek inception asked the question: What are beings as such? The answer was physis, the burgeoning and enduring presence of things. But this experience degenerated into the categorizing of various sorts of presence, and ultimately into the scientific and technological description and manipulation of what is taken as present. The first inception seems to have lost its force: being was “once the lightning that suddenly bursts and draws all things into its light,” but is “now a weary semblance … an exhausted possession, an object of prattle, a bore, a name—the end” (GA 94: 89/67).
The other inception would no longer take physis as its point of departure (GA 94: 241/176). The first inception was “an immediate Yes that took a stand for continuance and constancy” (GA 94: 49/37 tm)—it affirmed presence as the central sense of being. In contrast, the other inception is open to “the full essence of being—in which presence (the ‘is’) is positively incorporated … Not the ‘it is,’ but the ‘so be it’ (thrown projection)” is the primary clue (GA 94: 51/39 tm). No longer can we stand before the given as what is present; that stance has long degenerated from awe and wonder to mere objectification. Instead, we have to become alive to history, to the way in which any givenness of entities draws on a heritage for the sake of a destiny.
Within this general orientation, the Notebooks paint a bleak picture of the times: “The world is now out of joint; the earth is a field of destruction” (GA 94: 218/160). The world “is no longer a world, or, said more truly—it never was a world. We are standing only in its preparation” (GA 94: 210/154).
What is going on in this sham or warped world? Heidegger answers: uprooting, criminality, machination, and brutality.
First, “The oblivion of being has uprooted beings” (GA 94: 76). We talk about beings, measure them, produce them, manipulate them—but fail to ask what it means to be. World Jewry, says Heidegger in a now notorious passage, is “the kind of humanity which in an utterly unrestrained way can undertake as a world-historical ‘task’ the uprooting of all beings from being” (GA 96: 243/191).
We also live in a time of “criminality.” “Criminality [Verbrechen] … is the devastation of everything into what is broken. The broken is broken off from the inception and dispersed into the domain of the breakable. Here, there remains only one possibility of being—in the mode of order. Ordering is only the counterpart of criminality, understood in terms of the history of beyng (not juridically-morally)” (GA 96: 266/211 tm). In a world without meaningful connections among beings, the only solution seems to be a forced consolidation or arrangement. Modern man thus becomes “the organizer of nihilism” (GA 94: 452/328).
The word “machination” (Machenschaft) normally refers to scheming, but Heidegger draws on the root machen or “making” to take machination as a productive and manipulative understanding of beings, so that they appear as objects to be calculated, controlled, and transformed. Under the sway of machination, to be means to be a computable construction. “The power of machination … has reached its final stage” (GA 96: 53/41-42).
Finally, “brutality” is portrayed by Heidegger as the necessary counterpart of rationality (GA 95: 402; GA 96: 18). To view ourselves as rational animals—brutes with logic—is, at the same time, to assert our animality. “The mark of the reality of everything real at the end of metaphysics is the capacity for brutality. This is what the ‘mastering’ of technology consists in” (GA 96: 253-54/201 tm). “The predatory animal, covetous of victory and power” is now the “‘ideal’ of humanity” (GA 95: 422–23/329).
After he steps down as rector of the University of Freiburg (1934), Heidegger increasingly sees Nazism—or at least, mainstream, actual Nazism—as embodying these characteristics of late modernity. To quote just a little of his critique: “Where a people posits itself as its own goal, egoism has expanded into the gigantic. … All this is radically un-German” (GA 94: 233/171). Nazism, as “the machinational organization of the people,” can never freely command technology itself (GA 94: 472/342). “Those who want to breed the people ‘biologically’” (GA 94: 364/266) are carrying out an “animalization and mechanization of the people” (GA 94: 223/163). This program is “a consequence of the machinational power which must subjugate beings, in all their domains, to planning and calculation” (GA 96: 56/44). By the late thirties he writes that “all glorification of ‘blood’ [is just] a facade and a pretext” to distract the masses from “what properly and only is, the unconditional sovereignty of the machination [Mach-schaft] of destruction” (GA 95: 381-82/298 tm).
However, Heidegger’s growing metaphysical critique of Nazism is not accompanied by an ethical or political critique. Morality, he insists, is a superficial criterion, based on a bankrupt metaphysics (GA 95: 13). The Christianity that sustained it for so long is now a pathetic remnant, “the loudest possible screaming about the long-dead God” (GA 95: 396/309).
He portrays not just Nazism, but all contemporary forces, including communism, democracy, and so-called “world Jewry,” as instances of “machination” and “uprooting.” His critique of modernity thus gets associated in his discourse with the traditional prejudices against Jews as supposed nomadic cosmopolitans and manipulators.
Now, if the first inception is to be superseded by the other inception, then the first must, somehow, come to an Untergang. Literally this term means “going under”; I will translate it as “downfall” and the verb untergehen as “collapse.” “What is great collapses, what is small remains forever” (GA 95: 427). Downfall, then, is “the supreme victory of beyng,” “the highest testimony to, and history of, the uniqueness of beyng” (GA 95: 403/315). “Beyng itself is ‘tragic’—that is, it has its inception in downfall as an abyssal ground” (GA 95: 417/325 tm). “Beyng itself brings itself into the ‘catastrophic’ course of its history, it becomes manifest in and through it” (GA 95: 50/38 tm).
It follows that “the greatest danger is not barbarity and decay, for these conditions can drive us into an extreme and thus bring forth an emergency. The greatest danger is averageness and the uniform management of everything” (GA 94: 330/240 tm), which will never lead to a downfall, but will continue indefinitely forestalling a new inception.
Heidegger’s idea, then, is that modernity must drive on to an extreme that will precipitate the downfall. “Before the downfall, man must rise up to become the overman” (GA 97: 367) who presents himself as the ultimate technological manipulator.
Heidegger draws the conclusion that critiques of dictatorship are misguided. Totalitarian systems are “effective forms of machination,” and dictators are “the executors of the consummation of modernity” who bring modernity “to its highest essence”—“that essence of being from which modern humanity cannot withdraw, because in order to become itself it must affirm that essence, even in all its essential consequences” [GA 95: 431/336 tm].
Consequently, despite Heidegger’s numerous critiques of Nazi ideology, it is untenable to say that he rejects Nazism. He sees it as a kind of machination, and writes that “Machination fosters the counter-essence [Unwesen] of being. But the counteressence itself, since it is essential to the essence, is never to be depreciated” (GA 65: 126).
A crucial passage from 1939 tells us:
... during the years 1930–1934 I saw in National Socialism the possibility of a transition into another inception and gave it this interpretation. Thereby I mistook and underestimated this “movement” in its authentic forces and inner necessities as also in the extent and kind of its greatness. Instead, what begins here is the consummation of modernity as regards the humanization of the human being in self-certain rationality—in a much more profound, that is, more encompassing and gripping way than in fascism…. The consummation required ... the Complete “Mobilization” of all capacities of a humanity that has based itself upon itself. … On the basis of the full insight into the earlier deception about the essence and historical essential force of National Socialism, there results the necessity of its affirmation, and indeed on thoughtful grounds. [GA 95: 408-9/318-319 tm]
As I see it, Heidegger’s “affirmation” of Nazism is a sort of amor fati, a love of fate: “The new politics is an inner essential consequence of ‘technology’… ‘technology’ can never be mastered by the ethno-political [völkisch-politische] world view. What is already essentially a servant can never be a master. Nevertheless, this birth of the new politics from the essence of technology … is necessary, and thus is not the possible object of a shortsighted ‘opposition’” (GA 94: 472/342-343).
In my reading, Heidegger thinks Nazism must be “affirmed” because it will accelerate the necessary apocalypse, the salutary downfall of the first inception. In contrast, democracy is “a barricade that can delay but is incapable of stopping the essential consummation of modernity”; it is modern, “but without the courage for the unfolded essence and for the extreme essential consequences” (GA 95: 406/316-317). These consequences must be brought out in order for modernity to collapse, and totalitarian dictatorship is a necessary part of this process. Nazism is the ultimate modern destiny, an extremity of willfulness that must be played out to its catastrophic conclusion before a new inception can become possible (GA 95: 50, 417).
Heidegger rarely picked up his journal during the most intense phase of the Second World War; there are only a few pages dating from 1942 to 1945. But these pages include three comments in a row on Jews. The most striking one reads: “When what is ‘Jewish’ in the metaphysical sense combats what is Jewish, the high point of self-annihilation in history has been attained—supposing that the ‘Jewish’ has everywhere completely seized mastery, so that even the fight against ‘the Jewish,’ and it above all, becomes subject to it” (GA 97: 20). The passage can certainly be read as blaming the victim. It seems to say that European Jews have brought their own annihilation upon themselves, that they themselves are responsible for the Holocaust. But Heidegger is also saying that the Nazis are unwittingly lashing out against their own ideological source: they are fighting without understanding that they themselves exemplify a “Jewish” mentality.
It is helpful to compare the passage on “self-annihilation” to remarks on other forms of self-destruction, which proves to be a recurring theme in Heidegger’s reflections. He writes, “The highest stage of technology is reached when, as consumption, it has nothing more to consume—than itself” (GA 97: 18). Elsewhere he writes that the Soviet onslaught against the West is really a form of the West’s self-destruction, since communism is Western (GA 96: 276; GA 97: 37, 53). Or, he writes after the war, since the Americans are destroying Europe and they are essentially Europeans, Europe is destroying itself (GA 97: 230).
On the one hand, Heidegger hardly seems to be celebrating these events. His expressions “high point” and “highest stage” should not be taken naively as some sort of praise. “Neither annihilation nor ordering nor new ordering can essentially satisfy a historical destiny” (GA 96: 260/207). Although he is no pacifist or moralist, then, he could hardly have agreed that the Holocaust was a solution, final or otherwise, to any real problem. If both war and peace are superficial, as he claims (GA 95: 189, 192, 235), the same would be true of genocide.
On the other hand, the dynamic of self-destruction may be precisely how Heidegger imagines that machination, taken to an extreme, may lead to its own downfall, making way for a new inception. This malignancy turned against itself would then have to be “affirmed.”
Where does all this leave us? First, I think the Black Notebooks help us to see the political dimensions of the often very abstruse, abstract meditations in the Contributions to Philosophy. We need to keep in mind that the Contributions are tentatively envisioning a transformation, or new inception, that in the early thirties Heidegger had hoped National Socialism would bring about. We also need to understand that he believes a catastrophe is required before a new inception can take place—and this implies a disturbing “affirmation” of Nazism, even after Heidegger has developed a metaphysical critique of dominant Nazi ideology. But this is not to say that all the language of the Contributions is simply disguised political language. It’s more the other way around: for Heidegger, politics is, at most, an occasion for a deeper transformation.
My view is that Heidegger can rightly be blamed for abandoning ethical responsibility and failing to appreciate the properly political realm. He also thinks of the appropriating event and inception on a vast scale that reduces most individuals and concrete happenings to insignificant surface phenomena. But I think there is a lot of promise in his critique of presence and fixed identity, and in his focus on transformative, inceptive moments that generate or refresh our temporality and selfhood. What we need to see is that such moments are not rare foundings of a people, but take place at many times in each of our lives. The political realm should be understood as one space in which such inceptions can happen. In Chapter 3 of Time and Trauma, I make the case for Arendt’s view of the political in these terms. In short, I propose that we should pluralize Heidegger’s “appropriating event” and “inception,” and put them to use in a better interpretation of action and politics than he himself developed.
Richard Polt - Inception and Catastrophe in the Beiträge and the Black Notebooks
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