The Event the Event

by Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger's The Event offers his most substantial self-critique of his Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event and articulates what he means by the event itself. Richard Rojcewicz's elegant translation offers the English-speaking reader intimate contact with one of the most basic Heideggerian concepts. This book lays out how the event is to be understood and ties it closely to looking, showing, self-manifestation, and the self-unveiling of the gods. The Event (Complete Works, volume 71) is part of a series of Heidegger's private writings in response to Contributions.

Genres: Philosophy, Germany

336 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2012

About the author

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with phenomenology and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary European philosophy. They have also had an impact far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory (see e.g., Sharr 2007), literary criticism (see e.g., Ziarek 1989), theology (see e.g., Caputo 1993), psychotherapy (see e.g., Binswanger 1943/1964, Guignon 1993) and cognitive science (see e.g., Dreyfus 1992, 2008; Wheeler 2005; Kiverstein and Wheeler forthcoming).

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

As “Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event)” was a clarification of Heidegger's previous thoughts, especially as expressed in “Being and Time”; this book is a further clarification on “Of the Event”. A few other books in between the two (GA66, 67, 69, 70, and 72) and published recently seem to serve the same purpose. Heidegger wrote all these books for himself and none were intended for publication during his lifetime. It seems to me that their purpose was to help Heidegger develop, understand, clarify, and fix the fundamental occurrence of “the Event” to himself. In all his other books, including “Being and Time”, I noticed hints at this fundamental occurrence/structures and he fully developed their consequences in different areas; however he never presented us with the structures of the fundamental occurrence themselves.
The Event, or the "event of appropriation", is the beginning of everything – including Being, thinking, language, Dasein, beings, the Being-beings difference, time-space, gods, and so on. As such, there is no way to approach or describe it directly - but only through an imaginative thinking and an original language (i.e. both thinking and language follow and are appropriated by the Event). Reason, logic, “objective presence”, ideas, representations, subject/object distinctions, sciences and technologies, philosophy, theology, and so on are just expressions of metaphysics; and metaphysics in turn is just the inevitable downfall of the Event. Trying to approach the Event through metaphysics is going nowhere; in fact the Event with its Being-beings difference is unknown to metaphysics and consequently to us moderns or post-moderns. The early Greeks were outside metaphysics and able to glimpse the Event. Heidegger goes back to their pre-metaphysical thinking and language in his approach to the “first beginning”; and to the post-metaphysical thinking and language that is still to come in the “other beginning”. However, the first and other beginning/Event are the Same to Heidegger.
These books on the Event - in their contents, style, language, circular arguments, and so on - seem like pure nonsense to a modern thinker. However, out of them Heidegger produced one of the deepest and original reading of the entire philosophical history, a fundamental understanding of technology and science, a devastating critique of modernity, a new understanding of what it means to be human and rational, new insights into thinking, arts, languages, and so on. It is strange to realize that Heidegger wrote these books during the most extreme period in recent history; that is during the rise and fall of the third Reich.

[TL]

This may be Heidegger's best book.

'Beyng is groundless and therefore does not know any "why". Beyng is, in that it is pure appropriating event.
As the abyssal ground, however, beyng is the beginning of all consignment of beings to their essence.
For here prevails the deep mystery that everything, resting in itself, harbors incontestable strangeness and becomes the call which inceptually calls forth the rarity of self-belonging.'

'Exclude for once mere description, which always takes refuge only in "beings", forbid mere reports, which are given over only to the past, desist from plans and calculations, which are attached only to the immediate future—and then still try to think and speak. Then to you it is as if there were nothing. Yet then to you would be what is: beyng.'

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Correspondence, coherence, or consistency are the three methodologies that we traditionally use to get at the truth. Heidegger strives to come up with another method with the Event.

The book lays out in a scattershot way his new methodology as the appropriation of the unveiling of the gathering through the clearing at the inception of the thinking about the thinking which generates a thanking (awe) reconciling the difference between the truth as beying and beying as truth for the start of philosophy where ‘beying’ is the ontological difference between what’s in us and what is outside of us, and this appropriation is the Event.

In this book, Heidegger only dwells with the beginning of Western Philosophy and deconstructs all history of philosophy in order to build a new structure if only temporary. He never puts the question as the beginning of dasein within the individual but as the understanding of the essence of dasein as the Greeks began to realize their own spirit as such with words and before poetizing.

There is a surprisingly amount of Fascist thought that lurks within these writings, there’s a footnote that states something to the effect that ‘even though I wrote that in 1941, today in 1948 I still stand behind it’. The statement was on how only the Germans understand the real spirit within the beginnings of philosophy. In addition, in this book Heidegger never wastes an opportunity to legitimize the Fascist Spengler and his craziness which aligns with today’s fire breathing MAGA hat hating Trump morons.

I would say overall that Heidegger’s thoughts don’t always cohere within this book and he’s trying to conclude more than what his premises would allow and he is struggling with what he wants to say overall and knows that these notes are not really publishable as a book hence not allowing this to become a book in his lifetime.

[Edward Moran · Rating 3 out of 5]

He Talks about the difficulty of "thinking" versus "thinking about thinking" which we do most of the time. Most people have little contact with "reality" and instead are involved in man-made things, like literature and politics. He speaks of the forgetfulness of being and how we are lost in machination or "will to willing." Overall, very difficult work to understand, but that's the whole point. As long as we are predicting, controlling, explaining, understanding,describing, etc... We are not thinking and forgetting being.