Young Heidegger expands on the notion there's a rational development of history through stages.

But this view thereby "dissolved all historical happening into conceptual connections, causes and purposes, and conceptually clear goals, treating the individual (the unit of historical happening) not as individuality, but as a particular case of genus, as a historical atom, if you will." Here Heidegger made a comments that relates to his use of "the sunrise" in Sophocles's Antigone as an example of the notion of Ereignis, as well as to his interest in Hölderlin and the Romantic poets: "Thus the poets are not valued as creative shapers within a genuine world of lived experience, but rather as perfecters of language, which in its refinement and polish brought special and public life to an elevated stage." In his courses of 1919, Heidegger mentioned repeatedly that the distinctive and irreducible types of lifeworld in which one finds the worlding-out of the primal something include the artistic, the religious, the political, and the scientific. The artistic and the religious spheres are not inferior or antiquated such that in the march of progress they need yield to the positivist's theorized world of "things" and "facts."

If, according to Heidegger, France and England were the primary exponents of the Enlightenment, "technology," "naturalism," and "materialism," the "German movement" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought about a "reversal" vis-à-vis the Enlightenment project. Starting with Herder, the focus now becomes historicity, "historical consciousness," "historical Dasein." This received "a decisive clarification" especially through the category Eigenheit, owness or peculiarity, in which we should hear resonances of the terms Ereignis and haecceity:

Under the influence of Hamann, [Herder] saw historical actuality in its manifold and irrational fullness and above all acknowledged the independent ownmost value [Eigenwert] of each nation, each age, and each historical appearance in any sense. Historical actuality was no longer seen exclusively within a schematically rule-oriented and rationalistically linear direction of progress...There awakens an understanding for individual, qualitatively original effective centers and effective contexts; the category of "owness" becomes meaningful and related to all shapes of life, i.e., this category becomes visible for the very first time.

In the works of Herder, Schlegel, and others, the historical lifeworlds of people were explored through their expressions in literature, myths, sagas, folksongs, political and legal history, and so on. "Schleiermacher saw for the first time the ownmost being [Eigensein] and ownmost value [Eigenwert] of the community and of life in the community, as well as the peculiarities [das Eigentümliche] of the Christian community." Heidegger expressed his high regard for the Romantics in the statement to Blochmann in 1918 that "these romantic figures were indeed eminent philosophical figures."

P. 277-278

Continued.  ¶ 7:37 PM