In-der-Blog-sein

Joseph S. O'Leary homepage hosts his essay "Theological Resonances of 'Der Satz vom Grund'."

The word that came most easily to Heidegger’s lips was: Wesen (essence). The method and content of his work can be summed up under the rubric: a thinking of essence. Whenever he brings the essence of something into view, in a phenomenological Wesensschau, in the course of one of those stubborn, patient analyses where he has us think – ‘into the wind of the matter’ (GA 13:78), the result is so illuminating that we are likely to overlook the rarefied character of his constructions. History, to the X-ray vision that cuts through mere contingencies and distracting loose ends, knows no other movement than a parade of shining essences, e. g.:

The metaphysical beginning of the modern period is a transformation in the essence of truth, of which the ground remains hidden… In the beginning of the modern period the beingness of beings undergoes a transformation. The essence of this historical beginning resides in this transformation. (Nietzsche, Pfullingen, 1961, II, pp. 295-6)

Beginning, essence, transformation, ground… if these constructions have any validity at all they can only benefit from being reinserted in the pluralistic texture of empirical history.

...

[A]ssociation of the finitude of being with history applies in the case of the limited mittences of being that happen in the course of the history of being, but as far as I can see the field of being that is brought into view in the thought of the Ereignis is not finite in any historical sense, but only in so far as its dimensions are those of a world, a dwelling for mortals, on whose mindfulness it depends for its radiant deployment. As a prophet of the Ereignis Heidegger shows no modest sense of the limits of Western tradition. The word is put forward as a name for the very essence of reality itself, and Heidegger boldly suggests that its status and scope are comparable to the Chinese Tao. In alluding to the world-formula sought by Heisenberg (Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 1) he betrays the immoderate ambition to think time, space and being from their unifying origin. I feel that he overreached himself at this point. In erecting the Ereignis as the caput mortuum of his thought he consigned his critical reprise of Western metaphysics to a closed system of essence instead of opening it out into a pluralistic dialogue. Still the variety of trails that lead to this dogmatic summit exhibit the pluralistic texture of Heidegger’s own thinking, and his efforts to force them to converge remain blessedly inconclusive.

  ¶ 8:28 AM