our ability to seize on and define our own lives. Such falling into public preoccupations Heidegger sees as a sign that we are fleeing from the fact that we are finite beings who stand before death (understood as the culmination of our possibilities). When, through anxiety and hearing the call of conscience, we face up to our being-toward-death, our lives can be transformed. To be authentic is to clear-sightedly face up to one’s responsibility for what one’s life is adding up to as a whole. And because our lives are inseparable from our community’s existence, authenticity involves seizing on the possibilities circulating in our shared ‘heritage’ in order to realize a communal ‘destiny.’ Heidegger’s ideal of resolute ‘taking action’ in the current historical situation no doubt contributed to his leap into politics in the 1930s. According to his writings of that period, the ancient Greeks inaugurated a ‘first beginning’ for Western civilization, but centuries of forgetfulness (beginning with the Latinization of Greek words) have torn us away from the primal experience of being rooted in that initial setting. Heidegger hoped that, guided by the insights embodied in great works of art (especially Hölderlin’s poetry), National Socialism would help bring about a world-rejuvenating ‘new beginning’ comparable to the first beginning in ancient Greece. Heidegger’s later writings attempt to fully escape the subjectivism he sees dominating Western thought from its inception up to Nietzsche. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935), for example, shows how a great work of art such as a Greek temple, by shaping the world in which a people live, constitutes the kinds of people that can live in that world. An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) tries to recover the Greek experience of humans as beings whose activities of gathering and naming (logos) are above all a response to what is more than human. The later writings emphasize that which resists all human mastery and comprehension. Such terms as ‘nothingness’, ‘earth’, and ‘mystery’ suggest that what shows itself to us always depends on a background of what does not show itself, what remains concealed. Language comes to be understood as the medium through which anything, including the human, first becomes accessible and intelligible. Because language is the source of all intelligibility, Heidegger says that humans do not speak, but rather language speaks us – an idea that became central to poststructuralist theories. In his writings after the war, Heidegger replaces the notions of resoluteness and political activism with a new ideal of letting-be or releasement (Gelassenheit), a stance characterized by meditative thinking, thankfulness for the ‘gift’ of being, and openness to the silent ‘call’ of language. The technological ‘enframing’ (Gestell) of our age – encountering everything as a standing reserve on hand for our use – is treated not as something humans do, but instead as a manifestation of being itself. The ‘anti-humanism’ of these later works is seen in the description of technology (the mobilization of everything for the sole purpose of greater efficiency) as an epochal event in the ‘history of being,’ a way things have come-into-their-own (Ereignis) rather than as a human accomplishment. The history or ‘sending’ (Geschick) of being consists of epochs that have all gone increasingly astray from the original beginning inaugurated by the pre-Socratics. Since human willpower alone cannot bring about a new epoch, technology cannot be ended by our efforts. But a non-technological way of encountering things is hinted at in a description of a jug as a fourfold of earth, sky, mortals, and gods, and Heidegger reflects on forms of poetry that point to a new, non-metaphysical way of experiencing being. Through a transformed relation to language and art, and by abandoning ‘onto-theology’ (the attempt to ground all entities in one supreme entity), we might prepare ourselves for a transformed way of understanding being.
See also CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY , EXIS- TENTIALISM , HERMENEUTICS , HUSSERL , LE – BENSPHILOSOPHIE , POSTMODER. C.B.G.