Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) (Studies in Continental Thought) Hardcover – June 11, 2012

I think I like this work more than Being and Time. The passages remind me of Pascal in a sense...but each phrase is thoroughly Heidegger. Do yourself a favor and read "Tao Te Ching" as a companion to this work. Phrases like "Truth is untruth" and other paradoxical sentences are very much intended in earnest. With Heidegger, one always feels suspicious as to whether he is kidding or serious or insane or delusional or the very prince of Western Philosophy itself. He teases us. Tickles us and then bowls us over with the "unthought" in the realm of thought. Perhaps even the "un-thinkable". The commentary mentions this book is compiled from Heidegger's lecture notes, so who knows what some of his abbreviated statements really might have developed into...but the book reads as if it were ready for publication and its perspective well founded, perhaps even more deeply founded than his earlier work.

I give it 4 stars for its not being a complete publication, but 5 stars for its content and importance. How come this book isn't at the center of academic discussion? My guess? It's too challenging and ground breaking...yet I found many of its arguments to be simple and playfully creative. Highly Recommended!

Contributions to Philosophy is, in my opinion, Heidegger's most important work. It is not nearly as accessible as Being and Time (and to speak of Being and Time as in any way accessible will sound ridiculous to many) but compared to Contributions, Being and Time is a model of clarity. The difficulty of the text is not made any easier by this particular translation. In fact, it is made much more difficult. The translators of this work decided to invent English neologisms for many of the most important words that Heidegger uses which are not neologisms in German. In other words, the German reader reading this text will be encountering ordinary German words, albeit used in a different way, but still understandable to some degree in terms of their ordinary connotations. The English words that Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly use to translate those words are entirely made up. This makes the text virtually unintelligible in places. It is not unlike someone who simply decided to invent their own language and then went around and expected people to be able to understand what they were saying. There is a new translation on the way so if you are not in any immediate hurry to read this book it might be worthwhile waiting for the new translation: Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event (Studies in Continental Thought).

If you are in a hurry it is certainly possible to make sense out of this translation. The book is not impossible, it does not quite degenerate into total non-sense, but the task of interpreting is made extremely difficult. It is for that reason that a companion to this text is absolutely essential. In my opinion the best choice is The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy by Richard Polt. Richard Polt does a fantastic job of making the Contributions accessible and philosophically exciting. Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction (Studies in Continental Thought) by Daniela Vallega-Neu is also quite good but not quite as accessible as Polt. And while I have only read a couple of the essays in the collection Companion to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: seems like a decent companion as well. Another very interesting book that deals with the Contributions is Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology (Studies in Continental Thought) by Miguel de Beistegui. Beistegui's interpretation is, in my opinion, not an entirely faithful interpretation, and it is not clear that Beistegui intended it as such, but it is an extremely interesting reading of the Contributions nevertheless (actually only the first half is about the Contributions, the second half is about Deleuze).

Contributions is really an amazing book. It is not really possible to offer a summary of this work. It really has to be read and it has to be read in the light of Heidegger's other writings. It is particularly important to have read Being and Time and Introduction to Metaphysics (Nota Bene) before reading this book. It would also be very helpful to have read Heidegger's essay The Question Concerning Technology. Contributions develops themes from all of those works. It develops the notion of Dasein from Being and Time and offers a fundamentally new interpretation. It develops the notion of the oblivion of being from Introduction to Metaphysics and it develops the notion of machination from the essay on technology. The goal of the work is to get human beings to make the leap into Da-sein, the site where it is possible to make a decision about be-ing, and open up the possibility of a transition between the first and the other beginning. This will sound unintelligible to those who have not read this book and to fully explain what all of this means would require a degree of unpacking that is not really possible in an amazon review but if you have the patience, and you have a good companion (like the Polt book) it is certainly possible to unpack that statement, and when you do you will find a vast field of philosophical riches waiting for you.

All I can really say is that this book is absolutely essential for anyone interested in Heidegger. It is impossible, in my opinion, to get a sense of Heidegger's entire project without reading this book. If you focus on Being and Time you will wind up thinking that Heidegger was an existentialist primarily concerned with reinterpreting the being of human beings. That was basically my interpretation of Heidegger for a number of years but reading Contributions (along with some of Heidegger's other essays) changed that. The book is difficult but it is worth the effort. If you have some understanding of the other Heidegger works I mentioned you should definitely pick up Polt's book and start patiently making your way through this book. Actually it does not have to be read in order and I think the section on Grounding is really the central section so you might consider starting there which is actually what I did. Good luck!

Written a decade after the masterwork Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy was Heidegger's second major attempt to reflect on the meaning, or truth, of Being. While Being and Time approached the question of Being from the perspective of the human being in its everyday engagements with the world, here Heidegger shifts his attention away from the ontology of the human being and towards an analytic of beyng as the event of appropriation.

To fully grasp this work, it is crucial to note Heidegger's change in locution here from the metaphysical conception of "being" to a more primordial conception of "beyng". These concepts refer to entirely different things with entirely different histories. In illuminating beyng as event, Heidegger rejects the metaphysical understanding of being as the Platonic form of beingness--the most universal and vague concept under which all beings (objects, particles) are subsumed. According to Heidegger, this has been the reigning manner of understanding Being since the time of the ancient Greeks, and it was out of this vulgar understanding that the sciences, with their preoccupation with beings and the advancement of technology, were born. Heidegger does not want to eliminate the metaphysical conception of being outright; rather, he wants to work to overcome it through a "new beginning" that will give priority to the basic question of the truth of beyng. Addressing the basic question will require a re-thinking of the "first beginning" that was initiated by the Greeks in their relegating being to mere beingness.

In contrast to this ordinary and mundane conception of being, beyng can only be understood as the most unique and strange concept, the event Dasein finds itself mysteriously thrown into when it awakens to its being appropriated over to the cleared region of the "there". The awakening to beyng can best be described not by wonder and curiosity, but rather by a sense of utter shock, wherein a sense of estrangement befalls Dasein. When Dasein leaps into questioning beyng, no longer does it ask about the nature of beings in accordance with the guiding question of Western metaphysics began by Plato. Instead, what is inquired into is the event of appropriation, whose immense mystery ceaselessly conceals itself, while at the same time revealing beings as entities to dominate through calculation and manipulation. Throughout the past two millennia, beyng has succeeded in hiding itself while bringing beings to the forefront of Dasein's dealings. Heidegger believes philosophy must no longer inquire into beings as such if it wants to progress, as would those in the sciences. It must meditate on the event of appropriation in its overwhelming occurrence.

To accomplish the task of thinking the truth of beyng, Contributions takes a complete reversal in thought from that of Being and Time; while Dasein maintains a strong presence in this work, it is only insofar as Heidegger intends to speak the truth of the "Da,", or "there," of Da-sein--the appropriating event that calls on Dasein to ground the truth of beyng out of the needfulness of the gods. It is in the cleared region of the event that beyng essentially occurs as the "between" of the encounter between gods and the human, a realm of strife where the refusal of the gods, and the withdrawal of beyng from beings, can first be discerned. In the modern age, Dasein discovers itself in the plight of the abandonment by beyng, where life has lost its greater meaning, and humanity risks succumbing to nihilism. The greatest plight of the modern man is precisely a lack of a sense of plight in its ignorance of beyng as event. With Contributions, Heidegger intends to overcome the prevalent nihilism by provoking a return to the truth of beyng as grounded in Dasein.

Many have described the tone of the numerous aphorisms contained in Contributions as dark and haunting. While this is not strictly inaccurate, it is also optimistic in its summoning for a new beginning to philosophy out of thinking toward the event, which bestows upon Dasein the cleared space where beings only then can reveal themselves as beings. With this book, Heidegger succeeds in bringing back that sense of awe and mystery behind the phenomenon of just "being there," which scientific thinking is quickly removing from view and explaining away through findings in particle physics. After studying Being and Time along with this book, one is likely to discover that such reductionistic thinking comes up short when thinking moves into the question of the being of beings. Heidegger speaks on behalf of a domain of private experience that is very real, but remains unaddressed by the physical sciences in their disregard for the phenomenological significance of the human essence.

I would love to give Contributions five stars, but there are several problems preventing me from doing so. It sorely lacks the organization and fluidity accomplished beautifully in Being and Time, and also leaves obscure many central concepts. For example, Heidegger often discusses beyng as the field of strife between "earth and world", of "gods and humans", but he does little to elucidate what is meant by this. As a result, the book often reads more like private journal entries than a work intended for a public audience.

With that said, I do not think the basic premises of this work are impossible to understand, so long as one is prepared to slowly meditate on the ideas set forth and think simply and intuitively. Even if the details are fuzzy, Heidegger's position has a wonderful coherence that philosophers too often fail to achieve. It is clear Heidegger has a rigid vision that he takes pains to get across here without altering his views midway through, but the struggle is saying something through language that transcends representation by words. I have not read the German for comparison, but this new translation seems to be a clear and precise rendering of the original text.

Whenever I reached a passage in the new translation of the Beitrage I could not comprehend, I consulted the first translation, and between the two translations I could dimly make out what Heidegger intended to say. You need two points of view to make it through to the end of the Beitrage with some degree of understanding because the original German at many points "does not translate". You can say in German what is not expressible in English. I am sorry to have to say it, but this is the truth.