| dc.description.abstract | This thesis is an interpretation and determination of Martin Heidegger s Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), which is his most important work after Being and Time. It was only published in 1989 fifty years after it was written and the English translation did not appear before 1999. Thus it is a work still in the process of being understood and assessed.
Contributions is an attempt at overcoming metaphysics, because for Heidegger metaphysics constitutes a structural delimitation of Being. Metaphysics and more specifically ontology is identified as grasping, and thus constituting, the Being of being in terms of constancy and presence. For Heidegger this means a delimitation of Being itself, which must be grasped as essential sway (wesung). The latter means that Being cannot be comprised by the phenomenon of presence and thus cannot be structurally determined by horizons of presencing, namely time and space. Rather, Being itself withdraws from presence, and it is the tug between Being and ontic beings that constitutes the essential sway of Being itself; between being and not being.
In pre-Socratic Greece this was manifest in the concept of Aletheia, which grasped Being as simultaneously arising and concealing in a co-conditional dynamic. Heidegger envisions a return to this understanding, and his second beginning is articulated in the concept of Enowning (Ereignis). Enowning describes Be-ing s primary appropriation of man, i.e. that man is a recipient, subject to the originary decisions of Being itself. Enowning indicates the radical turn that must come to pass in thinking if it is to overcome metaphysics and re-open to man the truth of Being as essential sway. Thinking must turn from the notion of truth as a relation over which human being presides, to the conception that truth is unmediated intimacy with Being itself, which requires man to leap free of his subject into the essential sway of Being.
My thesis seeks to construe the basic structure and concepts of Contributions, and do so in juxtaposition to Being and Time. This is a means of understanding an immensely difficult work, and also of understanding Being and Time anew. Chiefly the thesis seeks to demonstrate what the radical turning in thinking in fact amounts to, why it is the leitmotif in Heidegger s thinking as such, and how Heidegger conceives of achieving the turning by the enactment that Contributions is meant to be. | nor |