The following is an attempt on speech and its origin in relation to therapy. What is a therapy? A therapy is a treatment that aims at healing or relieving from disease. Disease itself is, literally, a disturbance or the absence of ease. The fact that a therapy heals from disease means that it takes away the burden which is constituted by the absence of ease. Therapy disburdens from disease by restoring the ease in its capacity for easing. What kind of ease are we talking about? Who is, in the first place, the diseased? The diseased is modern man, that is to say: each one of us. Modern man is diseased in the sense that he is deprived of the ease to which his being originally belongs and whence this being finds its native temper. We are not at ease in that we are excluded from the easing, liberating element—the element which, in the first place, eases into human selfhood. This element, which relieves from disease, thus easing man into human selfhood, we call Da-sein.

Before we try to clarify the relation between Da-sein, as the originally easing element, and the origin of speech, we need to address an objection that could be raised against the approach we are taking. The diseased, we said, namely, the one whose ease is to be restored, is modern man. Assuming that this is true, the following question arises: what is the relevance of indicating this ease- restoring element for psychotherapy, which, one should assume, attempts to heal not modern man as such from a general disease, but specific diseases affecting the mind of individual human beings? The question is legitimate: as a matter of fact, the thinking of Da-sein does not entail any useful consequence for psychotherapeutical practice—to be true, it does not entail any useful consequence at all.

ONSET AND UNTERSCHIED

In 1955, in the context of a seminar in Cerisy-la-Salle, for which he had delivered, by way of introduction, the lecture Was ist das—die Philosophie?, Heidegger said the following:

WHO IS “WE”?

This chapter grows out of a first reading of the treatise Das Ereignis. Rather than providing a review of this treatise, it attempts to indicate a few motives that can be found in the treatise. The attempt is such also in the sense that, in interpreting the Denkweg, this chapter—perhaps even more daringly than the ones that precede it—attempts an English word for the saying of being. While most translations from Das Ereignis appearing in the present text are elucidated, or become clear, within their context, the last three sections of this chapter are devoted specifically to the question of how Wesen, Da-seyn, and Aufmerksamkeit may be brought into English. The translations of several keywords of Heidegger's thinking elaborated in previous chapters are not discussed here again at length. However, a brief reminder of the more significant among these translations might be helpful for the understanding of what follows.

1. (1) Seyn is translated as “beȝng.” “ȝ” is the M.E. “yogh,” whose sound is “y” as in “yes” The same sign is also used to transcribe “gyfu,” the name of the Anglo-Saxon g-rune meaning “gift, generosity,” whose shape is that of an “x.” Thus, “beȝng” indicates the gift of άλήθεια en-owned as the ground for the crossing of the strife of world and earth and the countering of the god and man.

2. […]

1. Seyn

being as the absolute transcendental horizon of presence

or

the bidance of the off-ground fairing the crossing of the countering of the god and man and the strife of world and earth—named beȝng?

2. Geschichte

the sequence of occurrences involving the essencing of being and truth

or

beȝng itself weirding a manhood unto the openly absconced ground of its selfhood in the flagrant worthing of the bidance of the truth—named wyrd?

3. Unterschied

the difference between what is a cause and ground of beings and what is merely a being

or

the wyrd itself breaking as the pure coming of the in-itself off-breaking atoning cut—named schism?

4. Da-sein

being-there as the situational and existential determination of man's conscious and unconscious life

or

the schism itself openly biding in the grounding of beȝng's clearing and truth—named there-being?

5. Ereignis

the event of appropriation

or

there-being itself worthing as the in-itself turning sway of beȝng's on-owning call and man's in-owned belongingness—named enowning?

6. Wort

the human faculty of uttering articulated sounds

or

enowning itself speaking as the soundless tune that tunes man's being to the temper of silence, thus gathering a manhood into the saying instress of its mother-language—named word?

7. Welt

the totality of naughtless beings in the nearnessless of the will to will

or

the word given in the onset to be kept in the enowning of the clearing whose day is the mirror-play of sky and earth, divine and mortals-named world?

To Parvis Emad

What follows is not and cannot be a “neutral” attempt to compare systematically the positions of two thinkers with regard to a certain concept or phenomenon named “Dasein.” In fact, such a comparison inevitably takes the form of a computation, and thus of an evaluation, of the compared terms. In order to compute and evaluate these terms we need to have previously seized them in a computable form, that is, as values. This is done by means of historical formats. The formated and thus computable terms are pure data, namely, given concepts depurated of their philosophical stress. In order to perform this formating seizure, our thinking self must have acceded to the will that wills the computability, and therefore formatability, of all sense, so that this sense may function as a willable value within the self-implementation of the pure will to will.

We hardly ever have a clear awareness of what it means to think in the enclosure of subjectivity. Subjectivity, in its specifically modern sense, begins with Descartes' methodical cogitations and finds its philosophical completion in Nietzsche's metaphysics of the “will to power.” This completion is the extreme where the thinking of subjectivity must attempt to finally assure itself its own ancestry up to what stirred the Greek onset of thinking, in order to assure itself over against this ancestry. This completion must seek the exclusiveness and absoluteness that is attained only when the very unmindfulness of this ancestry constitutes itself as the self-assured universal subject. What comes after Nietzsche in terms of a late “critique” of the subject only attests to and exploits this assurance, thus catering to the meanwhile operatively implemented regime of subjectivity, that is, the “will to will.”

To think in the enclosure of subjectivity means: to leave out what is ownmost to man; to leave out what is ownmost to the world. It means to think in a seclusion from that which wants to be thought as that which, in the first place, has withdrawn from thinking. The enclosure as such rests entirely in the ongoing holding off of that which wants to be thought. This holding off is the enclosure. That which wants to be thought is: das Sein selbst, that is: being, kept to its selfhood, swaying in itself.

In one of the many places in which his book on Contributions to Philosophy addresses the problem of language and translation in the context of Heidegger's Denkweg, Parvis Emad writes:

This remark, whose sense is enacted throughout the essays that form the book, is of critical importance for the stance we are to take in the attempt at rethinking the only thought the Denkweg itself has set out—and taken on—to rethink. Such rethinking can unfold only when our ordinary relation to language is unsettled and our thinking is shifted unto an as yet ungrounded element that we may call “the say” (die Sage). The say, which is not any one of our languages, stresses thinking to soothe and bear it so that it may be grounded in its truth and thus sway in the tempered tone of world-calling names and world-bearing things.

“Saying again”or “approximating”and other questions concerning the interlingual translation of Heidegger's keywords

Parvis Emad and Ivo De Gennaro

In the spring of 2009 a conversation on the question of Heidegger and translation took place between Parvis Emad and Ivo De Gennaro. The background out of which that conversation grew is shaped in part by De Gennaro's most recent works on Heidegger. As he shows in these works, De Gennaro conceives the task of the interlingual translation of the keywords and phrases of Heidegger's thought as consisting in “saying again” or “saying anew” that which they indicate. As shown largely but not exclusively in his On the Way to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, Parvis Emad conceives the task of the interlingual translation of the keywords and phrases of Heidegger's thought as consisting in “approximating” those keywords and phrases as these emerge from out of Heidegger's own intralingual translations. Having realized that there are significant differences in their views regarding the task of an interlingual translation of Heidegger's keywords and phrases, they embarked on a conversation on this topic as follows. However, before presenting the text of that conversation, it may be helpful to give a preliminary idea of the presuppositions that each conversant brings to this conversation. In one of his recent works, De Gennaro alludes to the presupposition upon which his part of the conversation rests when he articulates the following possibility: “Should ever man regain a mortal stance; should ever a ground for the flashing of the godliness of gods be restored; should ever beings return as world-bearing things, the preparation for this ‘with-fall’ (Zu-fall) requires a thinking that owns to man's belonging to the ‘onlyness’ and ‘apartness’ of be-ing” (Heidegger Studies Vol. 25, 2009, p. 118).

SEINSFRAGE AND DENKWEG

No doubt the dominant philosophical fact of the past thirty-five years has been and is the appearing—with a frequency of two volumes per year—of Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe. It has been rightly observed that, thanks to this edition, in the place of what has long appeared as an archipelago of scattered endeavors (roughly divided into, on the one hand, Being and Time and what belongs to it, and, on the other, the so-called late philosophy), a whole continent has begun to emerge. Of this continent, however, we are as yet hardly able to make out the shape—not to speak of the top to which it towers and the depth to which goes. Once all 102 volumes of the planned edition (which, we are told, make only half of the existing handwritten material) have been published, the whole of Heidegger's attempt may finally, for a long moment, flash in its irreducible weirdness.

Meanwhile, the dominant role of the appearing of the Gesamtausgabe shows mainly in the marked reservation that is maintained vis-à-vis the Seinsfrage and the numerous critical questions it implies. Is Da-sein the element in which the stance of homo humanus may finally be grounded—or is it not? Is Ge-stell a sufficient determination of that which is and thus of the universal trait of sense of our epoch—or is it not?