history of being

is the context for all thinking about art, literature and cultural debate.

But that ‘world’ in which we find our existence is not static: basic attitudes and assumptions alter. They alter in ways that cannot be calculated or predicted. This makes up Heidegger’s crucial notion, ‘the history of being’ (Seinsgeschichte). It can conveniently be expressed by the phrase ‘deep history’. The ‘history of being’ is the context for all Heidegger’s thinking about art, literature and cultural debate.

is the idea that really only three events are truly ‘historical’ (geschichtlich), changing the fundamental sense of the word (1) the translation of Greek into Latin (2) Christianity (3) Scientific Method

In Heidegger’s history of being, perhaps only three events emerge as truly ‘historical’ (geschichtlich) in the guise of a change in the fundamental sense of the world, in the ‘essence of truth’. First is the translation of the Greek world into Roman Latin. The translation of the Greek language and world into Roman Latin was – is – a decisive event in the unfolding of productionist thinking. The Greeks, Heidegger argues, had lived still a relation to being in which human thinking did not take itself as the sole arbiter to which other things had to justify themselves but retained elements of a non-appropriative, non-conceptual relation to being. These are still legible in the surviving fragments of the archaic, Pre-Socratic philosophers and in the tragedies of Sophocles. This pre-reflective experience of being was not explicitly thought in classical Greek philosophy, yet it is the unthematized experience from which that thinking drew. This is why a more originary relation to things is still legible in the Greek language, as in ‘aletheia’, the word for truth, which is more literally ‘unconcealment’ as we have seen, or the word ‘physis’, commonly translated as ‘nature’ (cf. ‘physics’ ) but more precisely the ‘self-unfolding emergence’ in which individual things come forth from obscurity.

is without a ‘why’ (has nothing we might recognize as a meaning): it so happened because it so happened.

Phrases Heidegger uses such as ‘being withdraws’ or ‘history of being’ make it sound as if ‘being’ were some kind of inscrutable non-human agent, even God, but this is an accident of language. ‘Being withdraws’ is analogous not to a sentence like ‘God hid himself’ but to one like ‘the apple fell’ or ‘the wind veered’. There is no underlying rationale or motive for history. Of course, various contingencies and events can be traced as to how, say, the Roman world supplanted the Greek – as Heidegger writes such things are ‘not accidental’ – but that is not to find some hidden law of history. Ultimately, like human existence itself, it is without a ‘why’ (has nothing we might recognize as a meaning): it happened because it happened.

is a tracing of the transformations of intelligibility.

Each such transformation is a revolution in human patterns of intelligibility, so what is appropriated in the event is Dasein and thus the human capacity for taking-as (see e.g., Contributions 271: 343). Once appropriated in this way, Dasein operates according to a specific set of established sense-making practices and structures. In a Kuhnian register, one might think of this as the normal sense-making that follows a paradigm-shift. But now what is it that does the appropriating? Heidegger's answer to this question is Being.

is a series of appropriating events in which the different dimensions of human sense-making—the religious, political, philosophical (and so on) dimensions that define the culturally conditioned epochs of human history—are transformed.

The history of Being is now conceived as a series of appropriating events in which the different dimensions of human sense-making—the religious, political, philosophical (and so on) dimensions that define the culturally conditioned epochs of human history—are transformed.

is concerned with how a people's relation to Being serves as the destiny that leads the community through history and lays out its possibilities.

Now, why should we care about these various oppositions? What difference do they make? According to Heidegger, they literally make all the difference in the world. In Introduction to Metaphysics, readers will find some of the strongest statements of a conviction that runs throughout Heidegger's later work: human history is guided by the history of Being. A people's relation to Being is the destiny that leads the community through history and lays out its possibilities.

is , with modern science, transformed into no more than the totality of objects to be mastered by the technics of human knowledge, driven by its quest for certainty.

(QCT: 130) 3 5 These notions of the ‘Creator’ and ‘creation’ still betray the deeply anthropocentric bias of productionist thinking. Finally, there is the emergence of the modern metaphysics and science in the seventeenth century, the dominance of questions of method in all pursuit of truth, and the would-be mathematization of nature. To this mode of unconcealing, being appears as no more than the totality of objects to be mastered by the technics of human knowledge, driven by its quest for certainty.

is , with the emergence of the modern science (in the 17th century) dominated by questions of method and the would-be mathematization of nature.

history of being, n.All

history of being