in whom the being of beings, thus beings in the whole, are revealed. The human being is that being in whose ownmost being and essential ground there occurs the understanding of being” (GA 31, 135/94). With such an event, as Heidegger put it in Introduction to Metaphysics, the emphasis shifts “ from the understanding of being to the happening of being [vom Seinsverständnis zu Seinsgeschehnis]” (GA 40, 219/IM, 233).43 The self must then be understood as arising from the event of being, not from the position of a subjectivity. “Da-sein,” as “the overcoming [Überwindung] of all subjectivity, arises out of the essential occurrence of being [Wesung des Seyns]” (GA 65, 303/240).
This belonging to the event, or the eventful character of the self, is described in several key sections of the Contributions, starting with the way in which Heidegger rethinks the motif of self-consciousness in terms of self-mindfulness (Selbstbesinnung). Heidegger claims that “as mindfulness of be-ing [Besinnung auf das Seyn], philosophy is necessarily self-mindfulness [Selbstbesinnung]” (GA 65, 48/34 {39}). That statement is repeated like a leitmotif in various forms and in several places in the text (paragraphs 16, 19, and 30). How is one to understand this proposition? The paradigm of theoretical self-consciousness is replaced by the notion of self-mindfulness, which is to be taken in an eventful—and no longer cognitive—sense. Heidegger notes that in the history of metaphysics, the motifs of the soul, reason, spirit, thinking, representing, and so on have come to the fore for essential reasons.44 What this situation reveals, although in an unclarified way, is that human Dasein is required, implicated in, and needed in the question of be-ing and that, as Heidegger puts it, “somehow the human being and then again not the human being—and indeed always through an extending and a displacing—is in play in grounding the truth of be-ing. And it is this question-worthy matter that I call Da-sein” (GA 65, 313/220 {248}). Mindfulness is necessarily self-mindfulness because, first and above all, Dasein is necessarily “in play” in the event of be-ing. What is “mindfulness”? It is, Heidegger states in paragraph 16, the “inquiring into the meaning (cf. Being and Time), i.e., into the truth of be-ing” (GA 65, 43/36). {36}). It is thus an inquiring into the event of being. As such, it is inceptual thinking and, in fact, Heidegger claims, the essence of philosophy itself (GA 65, 49/34), if philosophy is indeed to be understood as an inquiring into the truth of being. This indicates straightaway that Besinnung cannot be rendered by “reflection” any more than Selbstbesinnung can be rendered by “self-reflection.” This is indeed no longer within the context of the tradition of reflection as it has structured modern philosophy from Descartes through Husserl, no longer following a subjectivist understanding of the human being: the human being is no longer taken as a subject or substrate but in terms of the event and truth of being. To think be-ing and its truth is not about the thinking ego reflecting upon itself. And yet, Heidegger immediately insists, mindfulness is necessarily self-mindfulness.