After the so-called 'turn' of Heidegger's thought, Da-sein no longer refers to the human and existence alone, but to the concrete, historical place or site opened up and held open by a configuration of truth, the scene of the eternal strife between two tendencies or forces that oppose one another and yet reciprocally implicate one another. This is the 'the site of the moment' (die Augenblicksstätte). Not the occurence of something in a measurable instant and identifiable place, not even the vision of the essence of time and space, but the occurrence or the event of time-space. The essence of time and space, in a way. Except that, here, essence can only be understood as the happening ot the unfolding not of some essence that would itself not be entirely implicated in the happening, but as the unfolding or the taking place of a configuration of time-space, a specific and singular time-space assemblage, jointure or articulation. The unity of time and space as the 'site of the moment' designates this taking place of place or this temporalizing of time as history. History does not so much take place in time as it is the happening of time-space, every time absolutely singular and unique. The event of time-space is the emergence of history as such, which is also always the emergence of a historical configuration, from out of a turning in Ereignis. Every turn of the screw or the pole of Ereignis marks a new epoch, and by that we should understand a decisive reorganization or a new deal between world and earth in their eternal strife, and gods and men in their en-counter:

History is not the privilege of the human but rather the essence of beyng itself. History is at stake in the between of the en-counter between gods and the human as the ground for the strife of world and earth; history is nothing other than the happening [Ereignung] of this between. [P. 337]

What Heidegger is telling us here is that history is of truth and being. There isn't a history of truth, and a history of being, which would be a subset of a broader, more universal history. Rather, history is itself born of the essence of truth, and of its inner conflict. History is the very way in which truth unfolds and comes about. What is so striking about our own history is its remarkable unity. It is a unity marked by the systematic and increasing erasure of one aspect of truth in favour of the other, an erasure and a forgettenness recorded in the metaphysical tradition, and carried out most forcefully in the birth of modern science, and subsequently the domination of planetary technology and techno-science. Our history is dominated by the withdrawal and the forgetting of untruth (or concealment) as the essence of truth, and so by the domination of what is left in the wake of this forgetting, namely, presence, the objective world and the human as its master and possessor. From the start, and until the bitter end, Heidegger's struggle will have been to reawaken Western philosophy, Western culture and the Western consciousness in general to its forgotten and repressed origin. This is what, in Contributions, and in other texts of that period, he calls 'the other beginning'--a new beginning towards which his own thought is only a 'crossing'. Heidegger viewed his own effort as an attempt to prepare thought for this other beginning, and to open it onto this other, hidden history, or, better said perhaps, this other side of truth that is pregnant with a different future. Given the remarkable unity of our Western history, Heidegger contrasts this 'other beginning' with what he calls the 'first beginning', which stretches from the Greek origins of Western culture to the twenty-first century. Despite his talk of various epochs within that first beginning, and his attempt to distinguish between moments 'within' a history that sinks deeper and deeper into the forgetting of its own origin, we must bear in mind that this is a unified and unidirectional history. The other beginning alone would be a genuine alternative, and mark a real turning within history. It alone would herald something like a historical break, and a decisive rupture.

P. 84-86

¶ 8:12 PM