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8. Turnings in Essential Swaying and the Leap Kenneth Maly Within the context of the joining called “Leap” (der Sprung) in Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), one of the ¤rst things that we can say is that, however the “turning” (die Kehre) in Heidegger’s thinking has been read/interpreted to this point, it now calls for a rethinking. What the turning means must be thought to a new level. To begin with, all talk of a shift from “Heidegger I” to “Heidegger II”—along with the rather simplistic idea that Heidegger’s thinking moved from “Daseinoriented ” to “being-oriented” (at times even more misunderstood by calling that shift a “reversal”)—is, once and for all, obsolete. A ¤rst and strong hint, which might have grounded thinking of the turning even then, can be found in Heidegger’s letter to William Richardson . Writing in 1962, Heidegger in that letter offers several “warnings ”: (1) Thinking being cannot be a “from . . . to” but is always rather a “through . . . to”—thus not leaving anything behind. (2) Be-ing (Seyn) will always need a properly responsive thinking—thus thinking is never abandoned. (3) The turning involves a dynamic and a bearing that took his thinking years to clarify. (4) Whereas thinking the turning is a shift in his thinking, it is not a new standpoint, nor does it abandon the grounding of the questioning of Being and Time; rather, it happens because his thinking stays with the matter for thinking in Being and Time. (5) The turning, then, is in play in the dynamic itself (the very bearings of the issue)—neither invented by Heidegger nor applicable only to his thinking. (6) Since from the beginning the movement of thinking in Being and Time takes place outside the domain of subjectivity, since the being that is thought therein is neither posited by human subjectivity nor in any way substantial, and since that being comes into play for Dasein and gets thought from within being’s character as time, as temporal , in coming-to-presence (An-wesen)—thus from the beginning of the being-question in Being and Time a kind of thinking is called for and enacted that matches the movement of the turning that is in play in the dynamic itself (in the very bearing of the issue). (7) Far from abandoning the question begun in Being and Time, thinking the turning enhances it. (8) This enhancement of the question of Being and Time with the thinking of the turning actually gives for the ¤rst time a suf¤cient and adequate determination of Da-sein as what is ownmost to the human being thought in terms of the truth of being (truth as concealing unconcealing).1 The whole discussion of the turning in his letter to Richardson culminates as Heidegger quotes his own text, a text belonging to the ¤rst draft of his lecture course Grundfragen der Philosophie (GA 45), written at the same time as Contributions: Turnings in Essential Swaying and the Leap 151 Over and over again one must be enjoined: In the question of truth that is asked here, what is at stake is not merely an altering of the traditional/ inherited concept of truth. . . . What is at stake is a transformation of being-human. New psychological or biological insights do not require this transformation. The human being here is not object of some kind of anthropology . [Rather] the human being is in question here in the most profound and far-reaching—in what is really the grounding—perspective: Humans in their relation to being—i.e., in the turning. Be-ing and its truth in relation to humans.2 Given all these warnings regarding the turning, given that with the publication of Contributions in 1989 the old ways of thinking the turning are obsolete, and given that a rethinking of the turning is called for, to a new level, what are the ways that Contributions shows us? One pathway , the one that I take here, is to move through several radical openings that are thought in Contributions, thought within the joining called “Leap”: a. the turning as it sways in the “whereunto” of the leap—leap into the encleaving midpoint of the turning in enowning (der Sprung in die erklüftende Mitte der Kehre des Ereignisses); b. the turning-in-relation of and in be-ing (der kehrige Bezug des Seyns or im Seyn) told also in be-ing’s need (Brauch) of humans and humans’ belonging-to and...

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