Abstract:
(1) The “thing itself” of Heidegger’s thinking was Ereignis. (2) But Ereignis is a reinscription of what Being and Time had called thrownness or facticity. (3) But facticity/Ereignis is ex-sistence’s ever-operative appropriation to its proper structure as the ontological “space” or “clearing” that makes possible practical and theoretical discursivity. (4) Such facticity is the ultimate and inevitable presupposition of all activities of ex-sistence and thus of any understanding of being. (5) Therefore, for ex-sistence – and a fortiori for Heidegger as a thinker of Ereignis – there can be no oing beyond facticity.
Machine summary:
Despite disagreements about what constitutes “the one thing only,” this much seems clear: Within the classical Richardson-Pöggeler paradigm, die Sache selbst was not ex-sistence, no matter how much the pre-1960s scholarship, intoxicated as it was by Heidegger’s so-called “existentialism,” may have claimed it was.
e. , of its a priori appropriation (Ereignis) to its proper structure as the ontological “space” that makes possible the practical and theoretical discursivity whereby we understand the being of things.
Heidegger’s basic question using the metaphysical term “being” (Sein) Metaphysics in its ontological moment takes things as its material object: that which is “in-being,” that which has reality; and then asks what makes them be real/in-being.
12 Similarly when Heidegger asks about being – not things – as such (οὐσία ᾗ οὐσία = das Sein als solches), he is asking for the “essence” of being13 – what Aristotle would call its ἀρχή and αἰτία – that which allows being to be present and operative at all, that which makes being possible and necessary.
”17 The heuristic phrase “das Anwesen selbst”—or in Heidegger’s misleading “being” language, das Sein selbst—stands in for that which makes meaningfulness both possible and necessary: it is only a heuristic indication of Ereignis.
”40 In the final analysis, ex-sistence as the intrinsically concealed, appropriated- or thrown-open clearing is the “fact” – die Sache selbst – that Heidegger’s philosophy was always about and that he never got beyond.
One of the Heidegger’s richest terms for our thrown-openness is In-der-Welt- sein, usually translated as “being-in-the-world.