enowning
Friday, November 04, 2011
 
Concluding Thomas Sheehan on the event of sense.
A marginal note in the Humanismusbrief gets right to the topic. At
330=161.21 Heidegger glosses the phrase “die eigentliche Würde
des Menschen” with: “Die ihm eigene, d.h. zu-geeignete, er-eignete
Würde. Eignung und Ereignis
.” In the early period the “value proper to man,” his openness whereby sense-as-such is generated, was concretely taken over when man appropriated bis being-ahead-of-himself-unto-death (die Übernahme der Geworfenheit, SZ 325). The later position in the gloss states that this same value of aheadness and openness, while remaining proper to man, is not appropriated by him so much as apportioned to him as his possibility. Most important of all, this apportionment happens in the pattern called Eignung und Ereignis. To state it baldly these two name the same thing: the energeia ateles that is movement; indeed at one point in his 1928 seminar on the Physics Heidegger combines both words into Ereignung. In that seminar he defines movement as "Sich-ereignen" in the sense of die Anwesenheit des Geeigneten in seiner Eignung, the presentness which Something appropriated has precisely in its state of being appropriated—a perfect translation of Aristotle’s entelecheia tou dynatou hei dynaton. But that definition states only what movement is in Aristotle. The unique atelic presence which is Ereignis in Heidegger’s thought is the happening of the event of sense, not the mere "thereness" (Vorhandenheit) of Aristotelian movement; it is the on-going retrieval of power for the meaningful givenness of beings amidst unsense, non-sense, and no-longer-sense; it is the continual actualization of the finite realm of sense-as-such from out of its own potentiality for appearance. This fundamental movement is Sinn as Wegrichtung (377=206.27) which happens only in man’s essential proper existence. Projected ahead of himself (geworfen in SZ) or drawn beyond himself (angezogen in WS), man experiences the "wonder of all wonders," the partially open, partially closed emergence of the topos within which beings have meaningful presence. Heidegger’s topic is the event of sense, the movement of aletheia where the lethe-dimension functions as the withdrawn but present power for the meaningful appearance of things.

Pp. 312-3
 
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