the fallen/absorbed self overlooks is not being (otherwise one could make no sense of anything) but rather its own mortal thrown-openness as the source of all meaningful presence. (2) The same holds for Heidegger’s history of metaphysics: Seinsvergessenheit is the overlooking not of being but of the clearing that accounts for all forms of being. The homology holds as well for the overcoming of the forgetting of the clearing. In the first case, in Being and Time that overcoming takes place when one responds to the “call of conscience” (or equally, wakes up to the no-thing in dread) by resolving to accept one’s finite thrown-openness and to live mortally. In Heidegger’s later work, it is still resolve—now in the form of taking “the turn into appropriation”47—that is our way of effectively acknowledging the ever-hidden clearing. In the first case (the early Heidegger), one turns from one’s domination by the crowd-self to taking over one’s mortal ex-sistence and becoming the author of one’s own life-narrative. The world opens up afresh, making possible καινότης ζωῆς, a new way of living, in what Heidegger calls “the situation,” the domain of meaningfulness insofar as it is informed by one’s resoluteness.48 In the second case (the later Heidegger), one turns from the oblivion of the clearing that characterizes the whole of metaphysics and especially the epoché of technik, and takes up one’s home in appropriation,49 such that the world of meaning opens up afresh (das Welten von Welt).50 Thrown-openness as one’s existential structure in the early Heidegger is the same as the appropriated clearing in the later Heidegger. And likewise the way of taking over one’s essence51 and thus “becoming what one already is”52 is the same in both the early “diachronic” analysis and the later “synchronic” narrative.
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However, when it comes to a possible “rescue” from the epoché of technik, the later Heidegger seems to go cosmic. In his 1949 lecture “Die Kehre”53 Heidegger discusses what the end of the world of exploitation might look
47. GA 14: 51.33–34 = 42.30–31: “[die] Einkehr in das Ereignis”; see ibid., 50.23 = 41.24 and GA 15: 390.12 = 75.6.
49. GA 79: 70.19 = 66.18–19: “darin Wohnen nimmt.” One then lives in the existentiel condition of “releasement” (Gelassenheit: GA 77: 117.25 = 76.27), which is the later parallel of the earlier “authenticity.”
50. GA 79: 74.21–22 = 70.17–18.
51. SZ 325.37 = 373.14–15 (with ibid. 325.38–326.4 = 373.16–21) and GA 65: 322.7–8 = 254.36–37.