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7 The Time of Contributions to Philosophy
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7. The Time of Contributions to Philosophy William McNeill In memory of Hillary Johnson, 1975–1999 Chronologically reckoned, Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Of Ereignis )1 date from 1936–1938, an extremely rich and productive period of his work that is commonly regarded as marking a fundamental “turning” in his thought. To the most important works of around that period—works that at once attune, and are in turn attuned by, Contributions —there are the lecture course on Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine” (1934/35); the lectures entitled Introduction to Metaphysics (1935); the lecture courses on Nietzsche (1936–1939); and the essays “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935/36), “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetizing” (1936), and “The Age of the World Picture” (1938). Of these, all but the lectures on Hölderlin’s “Germania” and “The Rhine” (which have since appeared as volume 39 of the Gesamtausgabe), and of course Contributions itself, were published by Heidegger himself during his lifetime. Taken together, these works point to a formidable breadth and depth of philosophical activity in the space of just a few years. And Contributions should, of course, be read critically within the context of the other works of this period, as well as within the scope of the thinker’s work as a whole. Nevertheless, the true time of Contributions is not that of a particular historical period as commonly understood by our historiographical representation of events, nor does it belong within a chronological ordering of the thinker’s biography. As with all of Heidegger’s thinking from the early 1920s on, the time of Contributions is that of the Augenblick: the “glance of the eye” or moment of authentic presence that at once sustains and is sustained by the authentic action of the thinker, his thoughtful work. The time of the Augenblick is not that of a “now” or point in time that can be set before us or represented as one “moment” in a linear sequence of events. It no more belongs to such a sequence than does the associated event of Ereignis, or coming into one’s own, that is the proper topic of Contributions. This is not to say, however, that the Augenblick is not also historical; rather, it belongs to the Ereignis or event of the “history of being,” that is, to the way in which being happens and is destined to historical human beings. Human beings, on Heidegger’s account, ¤rst become historical and come to belong to a history through the happening of this event that is the address—the speaking—of historicality itself. The Augenblick or moment of authentic presence is the temporal moment in which we thoughtfully respond to the way in which being addresses us. Whether thoughtful or thought-less, our 130 William McNeill response to the address of being is the essence of all human action. The time of the Augenblick, as the time of thoughtful action itself, is a time of genesis, creation, and passing away, of both natality and mortality: a time in which and out of which an action or a work ¤rst emerges that can then, subsequently, be taken up into a history or ordered within a chronology. Such, as I shall try to show, is the time of Contributions. Before proceeding to look at Contributions, and in particular at part II, entitled Der Anklang, I should ¤rst like to recall some of the key characteristics of the Augenblick that emerge from Heidegger’s early phenomenological analyses.2 The Augenblick as the Site of Human Action: Heidegger’s Reading of Aristotle and the Phenomenology of Dasein Heidegger’s early phenomenological analyses of Aristotle, as presented particularly in the 1922 treatise “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle”3 and in the 1924/25 lecture course on Plato’s Sophist,4 are of pivotal importance for his subsequent understanding of the Augenblick. For it was in these early encounters with Aristotle, as his student Hans-Georg Gadamer reports, and in particular through his discovery of the intellectual virtue of phronesis in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, that Heidegger “took his ¤rst, decisive distance from ‘phenomenology as a strict science.’”5 In Aristotle’s analysis of phronesis, Heidegger found a kind of knowing and understanding that was fundamentally different from—and indeed more primordial than—any form of theoretical or “scienti¤c” knowledge and yet absolutely decisive for the apprehension and conduct of human life. Aristotle’s analyses of the...