According to Heidegger in “A Dialogue on Language,” the god of gods (i.e., the derivative messenger, Hermes, the intermediary) “was named…by a playful thinking “ (29), like the brainchild of the Burning Bush (“fire in the crucible,” mystics say), “more compelling than
the rigor of science,” like intimate mirroring in a therapeutic alliance? (Does the starry night speak to us?)

It’s Said (according to Walter Burkert) that Hermes is “the divine trickster.” Is that because
the path of the “psychopomp” (guide of souls) is uncanny?

No wonder, then, that resistance (normal in psychotherapy) is a central theme (“refusal”)
of Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy: from enowning (circa 1938).

“A Dialogue” notes that interpretation is between historical message and tidings (between what’s divined and what’s alive): “Hermeneutics means not just the interpretation but, even before it, the bearing of message and tidings“ (29).

There are two bearings: (b) the interpretive message (and tidings) given relative to the presence of someone causing good reason to interpret, after (a) the granting of the message to the receptive message bearer. Prior tidings are oriented by the other’s presence—not merely directed toward another there; not primarily prepping another (who is mere audience) for the message. Though that’s not stated by Heidegger, he would agree (I have no doubt) that the message bearing is about events of appropriation, which are always relative to occasions calling for interpretation of something.

Interpretation is not primarily about bringing another nearer to the translated message; rather, interpretation is oriented by and for living presence.

The paradigmatic site is teaching. Here, futures of students (“ones to come”) prevail: thinking for the sake of future thinking. An historical background is appropriated relative to living presence, which is always futurally oriented for lives going well. In other words, thinking about related history is better appreciated relative to future-oriented interests, rather than for its scholastic sake (which, by the way, is always motivated by some practical interest: enhance-
ment of one’s sophistication, academic advancement, market appeal,...). In teaching, we want to foster others’ ownmost futures, facilitating their events of enowning, not primarily the interpreter’s expression of intimacy with historical messaging.

Such is the calling of priestly service (or rabbinical calling), which remained for Heidegger as teacher (after he left seminary): care about, for, and with another. Genuine teaching is oriented by enhancing the potential of another—enabling “authentic potential for being” (Being and Time) beyond drawing another nearer to an origin. (Reviving early Greek thinking was not Heidegger’s general aim, which he says over and over, re: “the other beginning” for “ones to come.”)

That other-enhancive aim of interpretation was, I think, the “original sense,” says Heidegger of interpretation, that helped “open…the way to Being and Time for me” (“A Dialogue...,” 30). Of course, I’m reading into a brief comment by Heidegger a broader dyadity than he states, but congruent with the fact that (a) hermeneutical (b) interpretation is always motivated or interested in there being new understanding between “us.”

Next in that passage of “A Dialogue,” he highlights “the Being of beings” which is distinguished by him from “essential being.” The meaning of “Being” (capped, reflecting one’s proximal worldview—transcendentalist? onto-structuralist?) is on the way to “essential being”: immanently actualizing ownmost potential relative to deep holism of Time. Essential being is a living immanence of comprehensive flourishing, I venture (and would argue that Heidegger intends).

Allegorically, mirroring gods (which were personified tropes mirroring sacred values, virtues, conceptual “stars” that we constellate, etc.) herald one’s way to actualizing potential, “though no longer in the manner of metaphysics” (ibid.), i.e., no longer regarding “the presence of present beings” as paradigmatic—though that’s a waystation (which kept Being and Time “necessary,” Heidegger says in On Time and Being, pp. 2, 24, 32, 37). In other words, the presencing of authentically-lived time is primordially different from presencing of things other than ourselves, i.e., being with each other and being oneself.

By the way, the etymology of ‘being’ and ‘Sein’ have no kinship with Greek ‘ont-‘.

Essential being is beyond inflating a conception of beings to cosmic scale (ontologized “Being”). Essential being is beyond formalisms, historically playing forth (one way or another) “comprehensive” conceptualities axiomatically. Flourishing gives way beyond “Being” (onto-) God’s (-theo-) Order (-logy). We live best in light of being ourselves, which originates from itself.

Such a simple distinction (being ourselves versus things being) has profound implications, because the “onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics” saw its avoidable outcome in the scientization of authoritarian power which led to World War II. And the nature of that kind of complex (essentialized theocentric pretense) continues in contemporary authoritarian theaters.

During his lifetime, Heidegger’s so-called “Silence” was hardly heard by Europeans and Americans, “still not thinking,” as the “atomic age” dawned; still not thinking more than a decade after his death, until Germany began to face Itself (the “Historikerstreit”).

The Silence can be deafening. A Pope didn’t put a note into the Western Wall until the turn of the millennium, saying in part: “…we are deeply saddened…and commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood…”

But Heidegger, already in 1946 (“What are poet’s for?”), speaks “despite all suffering, despite nameless sorrow…,” hoping to instill holiness.

In his “Letter to a young student,” 1950 (Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 182 ), Heidegger says—about (I surmise) actualizing potential:

The default of God and the divinities is absence. But absence is not nothing; rather it is precisely the presence, which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness and wealth of what has been and what, thus gathered, is presencing, of the divine in the world of the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus. This no-longer is in itself a not-yet of the veiled arrival of its inexhaustible nature.

After appropriating given presence, hidden potential may show its open nature.

The message is “you,” though that may seem dismissibly precious.

The exiled scribes’ character Moses realizes “I am who I am” (as no one knows ultimately
why any of us are), which in Hebrew also validly translates (I’m told: ftn. c of Exodus 3:14)
as “I will be what I will be” (not “who“?).

That echoes better in the enscribed message of the character Jesus: A kingdom of heaven is within/among “you,” since we’re all created equal in God’s “Image” (imago Dei), those days
when The Word so was.

Two millennia later, religious folklore has evolved into cultures idealizing well-being, the public policy industry, striving for educational excellence and fairness, and sanctifying the values of higher quality of life through the UN, humanitarian initiatives, and so on.

Humanity is Ours to advance, Ours. The Point of being is—why not?—enhancing the future of humanity, partly—yet greatly, in principle—by teaching excellently: by inspiring high scales of aspiration, thereby launching new generations durably—in each teacher’s small way, but in Our aggregate greatly—into contributing to making life better for everyone, near-and-dear; and even, compassionately, for “us” far away with whom we belong as persons together chosen by being.