Today we conclude our excerpts from the Young Heidegger on the appearance of Ereignis in his first lectures.

The movement underwent a "deepening" in the Germanidealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Scheiermacher's discovery of "primal Christianity" "influenced decisively Hegel's youthful writings on the history of religion and indirectly the whole of Hegel's specifically philosophical systematic, in which the decisive ideas of the German movement in general condensed as their high point." Heidegger was thinking here of Hegel's "(phenomenology) of spirit and of the historical dialectic of reason." With reference to his lectures from the previous semester, he added that "Hegel's so-called pan-logic has its origin out of historical consciousness and is not merely the consequence of a radical theorizing of the theoretical!" Indeed, in KNS 1919, he had told his students that, once "the idea of the system" is seen to be "illusory," "we stand facing Hegel, i.e., before one of the most difficult confrontations." He was thereby renewing his earlier call in 1915-16 for a "confrontation with [Hegel's] system of historical worldview."

Heidegger explained further that Dilthey then "tackled the problem of a critique of historical reason...in continuity with the German movement (with Scheiermacher above all) and the development of historical consciousness." "Dilthey already (1883) saw clearly the significance of the singular and the unique in historical actuality...In [the natural sciences] this is only a 'means,' a passageway to be transcended in analytical generalizations; in history it is the 'aim' and goal." And, near the end of his life, he "saw the significance of Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen" for a descriptive psychology of historical consciousness. Finally, the problem of history was taken up in a Neo-Kantian "value-philosophy," where we find, for example, Rickert's notion of the "unsurveyable multiplicity" and "heterogeneity" of "actuality in its individuality and uniqueness." Here we also find Heidegger describing Windelband's notion of the historical human sciences as "Ereignis-sciences," which are "oriented to the happening of a unique, temporally demarcated actuality and its exhaustive presentation. Shapes of human life--heroes and peoples, languages, religions, legal systems, lieteratures, art, sciences--are supposed to be presented in their 'unique actuality.'" Whereas the natural sciences are "nomothetic," i.e., oriented to universal laws, the historical sciences are "idiographic," i.e., oriented to to idion, das Eigene, what is own, the peculiar, the idiosyncratic in the Ereignisse of history.

P. 278-279

What's interesting to me about these early lectures is that Heidegger is already grappling with major issues revolving about Ereignis. These issues are the same ones he struggles to articulate in his final seminars: the propriation when something comes into presence, the event at the beginning of Western thought, and all the different aspects of Ereignis in between.

These excerpts started back in August.  ¶ 8:15 PM