(JB2015)
Contributions is divided into eight parts: a “Preview” (Vorblick) into the task at hand, six enjoining “junctures” or “coordinates” (Fügung) that correspond to six interconnected stages upon the path of transition, and a final part titled “Beyng” (Seyn).1 The six coordinates are:
(1) The “appeal” or “resonance” (Anklang), i.e., the indirect and mute reverberation of beyng (being3) within the framework of metaphysics which has precisely “refused” to think being3.
(2) The “pass” or “bringing-into-play” (Zuspiel) through which the postmetaphysical question concerning being3 is “played into” the framework of metaphysics and its first, Greek inception.
(3) The “leap” (Sprung) into the previously disregarded context—beyng (being3)—of which the beingness of beings (being1) questioned by metaphysics is only one aspect. This move corresponds precisely to the first aspect of the “turn” that could not be brought about in Being and Time. It cannot be completed with previously available conceptual means and must therefore be a sudden and unexpected transformation into a decisively different context of thinking.
(4) The “groundwork” (Gründung), which seeks to incorporate presence (being1) into a background context of nonpresence (being2), thereby ultimately reestablishing or “grounding” it in terms of its differentiation (being3) from that background. This is the second, constructive part of the “turn,” in which what was left behind in “the leap” is reconsidered from a new framework.
(5) The “forthcoming ones” (die Zukünftigen). This brief section discusses the postmetaphysical Western humanity—specifically, its thinkers and poets—for whom Contributions is paving the way. They are also the “futural” ones in the sense that they will have assumed ecstatic timely situatedness—now characterized as “insistency in Da-sein” (Inständlichkeit im Da-sein)—and are thus oriented primarily to the dimension of forthcoming (Zukunft; GA 65, 82/CPFE, 57/CPOE, 65–66).
(6) The “ultimate god” (der letzte Gott). This coordinate, perhaps the most striking and challenging part of the book, discusses a postmetaphysical (and postreligious) divinity in the sense of an experience of a new, meaning-orienting ultimate dimension that can emerge after the “death” of the metaphysical and ontotheological God of Aristotle and scholastic theology. The ultimate god also suggests a possible break with the epoch of technical nihilism brought about by this modern withdrawal of the divine.
This ordering or conjunction (Fuge) of Contributions is, at the same time, the framework (Gefüge) for the transition of thinking as well as an ordinance or injunction (Verfügung) for a thinking to come. Each coordinate can be understood as a stage in the approach to beyng as Ereignis. “In each of the six coordinates, the attempt is made always to say the selfsame of the selfsame, but in each case from the perspective of another essential realm of that which is designated by the word ‘event’ [Ereignis]” (GA 65, 81–82/CPFE, 57/CPOE, 65; tr. mod.).2
The final part of the work, “Beyng” (Seyn), addresses the entire background context from which all the six coordinates spring and in terms of which Heidegger’s “reversed” thinking speaks. This is the most encompassing perspective of the book, and its appropriate place in the structure of Contributions is therefore ambiguous. In the original manuscript, Heidegger placed it immediately after the “Preview” and before the six coordinates, concluding the manuscript with “The Ultimate God.” However, in a marginal note to the manuscript he pointed out that this was not the appropriate order; accordingly, the editor of Contributions, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, decided to place “Beyng” at the end.3 The six coordinates are thus merely preparing the ground for “Beyng”—or, alternatively, elaborating its implications—by focusing on different aspects of the transitional trajectory of thinking. In order to concentrate on the question of the unity of being in the transitional framework, we will “leap to conclusions” and move on to study this final part.
- For interpretive summaries of the six coordinates, see von Herrmann, Wege ins Ereignis, 32–39; “Contributions to Philosophy and Enowning-Historical Thinking,” 112–21; Kovacs, “The Leap (der Sprung) for Being,” 44–46; Polt, “ ‘Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis),’ ” 188; The Emergency of Being, 137–38; Pöggeler, “Heidegger und die hermeneutische Theologie,” 482–91; William J. Richardson, “Dasein and the Ground of Negativity: A Note on the Fourth Movement in the Beiträge-Symphony,” Heidegger Studies 9 (1993): 37–38; Roesner, Metaphysica ludens, 188–97; Vallega-Neu, Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, 31–45.[
] - Cf. Kovacs, “An Invitation to Think through and with Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie,” 21–22.[]
- von Herrmann, editor’s epilogue, GA 65, 514–15/CPFE, 365/CPOE, 405; cf. Otto Pöggeler, “Zum Tode Martin Heideggers,” in Radical Phenomenology, 38; Neue Wege mit Heidegger (Freiburg: Alber, 1992), 262/translated by John Bailiff as The Paths of Heidegger’s Life and Thought (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1998), 177; Kovacs, “An Invitation to Think through and with Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie,” 30.[]