Davis (2010) – epocal [epochal]

The epochal transformations of the history of being show that in each attempt to name being, to say what it is as the ground of beings, being itself undergoes an erasure or falls into oblivion. In other words, being as such remains unthought within the epochs, in so far as what defines an epoch is its singular way of taking being for granted as presence, as something already given, as the being of beings. The different names for being – precisely in their difference – all have in common, then, this distinctive trait, namely, that they enact a covering over of the retreat in the becoming manifest of being as ground. As a history, then, it can be said that being shows itself as ground only by hiding itself as a groundless sending from nowhere.

Heidegger thus says that the epochs overlap – which is to say, that they have an affinity and are connected – but also, again attending to the literal expression, that they cover over or obscure each other in a difference that determines all of them precisely as a sending withdrawal. There is an untranslatability that prevails between the epochal groundings, a moment that eludes each of them in their totalizing claim and yet reveals that they belong together in such an excessive strangeness. Thus, the destiny in question here is not first of all a lineage, in the sense that it can be determined according to a logic. It is not a sequence of events determinable in the opposition between necessity and chance. The epochs do not “belong together” except in the step back into the destined withdrawal, in which what becomes evident is the belonging together of the strange as strange.

Yet we see that when Heidegger speaks of the destiny of being, it is also the case that he finds, in the withdrawal that prevails throughout the epochal sendings, a kind of trajectory towards a greater oblivion: “what is appropriate shows itself in the belonging together of the epochs. The epochs overlap each other in their sequence so that the original sending of being as presence is more and more covered over in different ways” (TB   9=ZSD   9, trans. mod.). And precisely because our age is determined by the ultimate oblivion of being, as the age of technology, in which all beings are at the disposal of the wilful subject and determined according to the mere “framing” or positing by this subjective will (see Chapters 12 and 13), our age is uniquely positioned to experience the sending as withdrawal, as a groundless grounding. This is why Heidegger says that the encounter with being as Ereignis is now necessary, not according to a logic of history, but according to the destined withdrawal of being in which every possible necessity and logic of history collapses. The history of metaphysics, in other words, since its beginnings with the Greeks, has led to a culmination or an exhaustion of the possibilities for naming being. The ending of metaphysics and philosophy – from its beginning with the Greeks, and as it first culminates in Hegel  ’s systematic logic, but also as it attains a more thorough exhaustion in Nietzsche  ’s inversion of Platonism – appears precisely in the ultimate epoch of metaphysics. The groundless withdrawal of being announces itself most explicitly in the most totalizing project.

[DAVIS, Bret. Martin Heidegger Key Concepts. Durham: Acumen, 2010]