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Introduction: Approaching Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy and Its Companion Charles E. Scott An unusual way of thinking comes to expression in Heidegger’s Contributions To Philosophy (From Enowning).1 He “made” this “book” by combining re¶ections on an extraordinary number of topics that include thoughts on thinking and the grounds for thinking, observations about Platonism, nature and earth, critical studies of history and language, reconsiderations of key ideas and descriptions in Being and Time, and, above all, explorations in a performative thinking of the truth of “being .” I have marked the words “made,” “book,” and “be-ing” because I believe that Heidegger did not experience himself as making a book when he wrote the words and sentences and fragments of sentences that are intended to bring to thought and to language an interrupted and highly elusive word for the enactment—the “enownment”—of the living occurrences of beings. Contributions does indeed have in its dynamic form a well-planned approach on the order of a fugue (which many of the essays in this volume address). All of the aphorisms, short discussions, paragraphs, repetitions, re-considerations, departures and returns to major themes, and considerations of Western histories and futures are gathered together by a title, section headings, and numbered sub-section headings—it looks like a book. And I suppose it should be called one. But it pushes the limits of “a book” in the way that a group of meditations in a diary that are held together by a long trip pushes the meaning of “book.” Heidegger is in the midst of an Erfahrung—an experience of traveling along, a “progress” in older usage—as he writes; but instead of being centered in his own private world of feeling and observation as many travelers are, he ¤nds that he is drawn out by a troubling, persistent, indeterminate thought that is not his to own. ‘It’ has no clear way leading to it. This thinking is thus more like exploring than like a trip de¤ned by a destination, and it does not present itself as naming any speci¤c thing. It is like a new thought a-borning, one bred in years of strict, philosophical learning and discipline , one that does not come ready made or clearly produced, and one that challenges not only other thoughts of being but challenges as well the way thinking (and books) usually takes place. The new thought that is ¤nding its birth is the thought of be-ing. It is thought that does not ¤nd its destination in a group of beliefs, a system of reasons, or a summarizable body of contents. This new thought composes a way of thinking with our philosophical heritage—our re¶ective commonwealth —a way that is less a position than it is a manner of disciplined alertness with the occurrence of being. Such occurrence appears to be 2 Charles E. Scott the same for everything that is alive and present, and ‘its’ sameness appears not to be any thing. ‘It’ appears as beings come to pass, and Heidegger wishes to think alertly in the eventuation of this happening. I believe that a person would be mistaken to expect in Contributions either a clearly marked philosophical path or a helter-skelter of notes. Heidegger is certainly exploring and experimenting in the book’s language and thought. You could use his logging-path metaphor and say that he goes up (or down) one path after another and ¤nds them all going in the same region and in what appears to be a similar direction but also ¤nds each way leading to clearings that dwindle into overgrown , dense, and dark forest. Or you might think of Nietzsche’s play on Versuch (which can mean attempt or temptation) and say that Heidegger’s attempts in thinking compose a temptation that is not completely within his control, that his very exploration shows in its life a strange and perhaps dangerous draw, promising neither vortex nor golden city, to something missing, uncertain but important, even crucial , but not a speci¤c being. Do we join in? Heidegger’s thought obviously clears out a region of words and considerations —I have at times the impression that he is whacking away at underbrush—but it is not so much a well de¤ned path that he clears as an area for thought—I also ¤nd him coming back toward me while I am trying to determine where he is going. In my image he...

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