As he pushes on to Ereignis, he announces that now he must find a new foundational mood. It is crucial to remember, however, that Ereignis is no radical departure from Aletheia. It is, rather, both unconcealment and concealment, so that truth cannot open onto Ereignis without going hack to truth as aletheia. So it is with wonder. Verhaltenheit, as it turns out, is nothing more—and nothing less—than a more primordially thought Erstaunen, a new incarnation of thaumazein that holds itself between wonder and its opposite—a wonderstruck, horrified, amazed kind of fright that becomes the dispositional possibility of futural thinking itself.

We will recall that the work of this futural philosophy will be to think the beyng that has withdrawn from beings, and through this abandonment, has given beings over to the objectifying forces of Gestell. Brought into being abandoned, beings can only appear as calculable objects, and so, severed from being. Beings are not themselves. And yet, beings are. This, for Heidegger, is absolutely terrifying. The disposition that might unsettle thought out of its comfortable representative manipulations, then, is not a simple wonder at the thatness of beings—for who could possibly be surprised that beings are—but rather, depending on the source, shock (Schrecken) and/or terror (Erschrecken) that, strictly speaking, beings cannot he. What instills this terrifying shock is the sudden realization "that beings can be while the truth of being remains forgotten"—that, like wind—up dolls with lost keys, “beings strut as beings and yet are abandoned by beyng” (Grundfragen, 197/169). Such unfamiliarity with the familiar is reminiscent of the sudden impossibility of the pseudês doxa, which produces in Socrates a kind of harrowed astonishment. And, in fact, Heidegger acknowledges that "just as wonder hears in itself its own sort of terror, so does terror involve its own mode of self-composure, calm steadfastness, and new wonder" (Grundfragen, 197/169).

P. 36

¶ 6:14 AM