enowning
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
 
Nancy J. Holland on our favorite singulare tantum, from her book The Madwoman's Reason: The Concept of the Appropriate in Ethical Thought:
In "Time and Being," at the other end of Heidegger’s career, the meaning of this term has been completely and explicitly reversed—and tied once more to the appropriate and its cognates: "Ereignis will be translated as Appropriation or event of Appropriation. One should bear in mind, however, that 'event' is not simply an occurrence, but that which makes any occurrence possible." Here Ereignis is related to Being itself, as the process by which both things and events in the usual sense come into the "clearing" of human existence. Moreover, the title of this piece, as well as its references to specific passages from Being and Time, strongly suggest that the transformation of this concept in the development of Heidegger’s thought is due to a purposeful major rethinking of its possibilities and resonances, rather than merely a specialization of its use.

It is in "The Turning," however, that two small clues appear that suggest lhat the change in Heidegger's understanding or the appropriate and the appropriated is less complete and more subtle than it may at first appear. There, Being is described as "that which genuinely [eigentlich] is." Lovitt presumably translates this in a way that masks its relationship to authenticity in Being and Time, because the Being referred to here is very different from the being of Dasein (although the German sentence is given in a footnote). In the later Heidegger the focus has shifted precisely from Dasein, human existence, to Being itself, so the appearance here of a term so central to the hermeneutics of Dasein in Being and Time may be meant to underscore the difference between the two uses of the word, and hence the two texts in which they appear, rather than be an invitation to confuse them. The eigenst that is at issue in this text is no longer the ownmost of Dasein, but rather the mutual appropriation of the fourfold. Ereignis is that event of appropriation, and so it is Being itself that is eigentlich
("authentic").

The role or mortals, that is, Dasein, in this authenticity is, moreover, the result of a denial of human agency, the result of our appropriate appropriation by the fourfold: “Only when man, in the disclosing coming-to-pass (Ereignis) or the insight by which he himself is beheld, renounces human self-will and projects himself toward that insight, away from himself, does he correspond in his essence to the claim or that insight. In thus corresponding man is gathered into his own (ge-eignet) that he, within the safeguarded element or the world, may, as the mortal, look out toward the divine." when we are gathered into what is our ownmost, that is, appropriate (geeignet), we become part or the mutual appropriation of the fourfold, part of that which authentically is, and hence become again ourselves authentic. As this circle of concepts closes, the distance from Being and Time to "Time and Being" begins to seem very small indeed. Perhaps that is part of the point. This configuration suggests that authenticity, the ownmost (eigenst) possibility of Dasein, the truth disclosed in the clearing of Being, and the Ereignis or the fourfold as mutual appropriation can function as quasi-moral concepts, or at least as recommended ways of being, closely related to a concept or appropriate action.

Pp. 6-8
 
Comments:
There's authenticity used as a Macguffin again.
 
It is a pity, that now I can not express - it is compelled to leave. But I will return - I will necessarily write that I think.
 
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