Contributions to Philosophy, passage #133
(p. 197-8, of the 2012 translation)
gary e. davis
August 26, 2025
September 10
The passage is footnoted to associate with “The Leap.”
I regard that Leap as a path of thinking and learning actualized over time, relative to a person’s interest, life stage of capability, and engagement (degree and fidelity to enpathing, so to speak). Enowning or appropriating a path of thinking is more than being a person living a life, which is so beyond objectivation of oneself (which is typical of being regarded as a resource for production or
as a subject for examination). Actualizing one’s potential for being involves unconcealments (discovery through normal learning events, sometimes difficult realization) and involves fair freedom of expression.
Heidegger’s association of truth with the preliminary value of unconcealment leads into paths
of learning, possibly inceptions, which are vital for a good life, good community, good politics.
A person can possibly enact a leap (over a span of time) into that which the leap newly articulates, which is what “beyng” is basically about: actualizing potential for inception in the futural mode of temporality.
Heidegger is not explicating a position in the passage. He’s prospecting furtherance of terms of analysis, as if rehearsing what he might say (or did say?) in class.
MH: Beyng needs humans…”
GD: An inceptive life needs others who are living...
MH: …in order to occur essentially, and humans belong to beyng so that they might fulfill their ultimate destiny…
GD: There’s no mystical element to Heidegger’s point: One’s long path to fulfilling their potential is beyond basically appreciating there being one’s life beyond being some thing.
I want to extrapolate from that. Fulfilling one’s ultimate destiny—so-called (no longer given, rather self-actualized)—is essential to being human, in principle (commonly concealed), though fulfilling is not as such what being human is about (merely being a life). But being human essentially includes potential for seeking fulfillment because a life is a person’s life in some singular way: potentially seeking fulfilled self-actualization: being essentially: beyng.
Reading thoughtfully can be fairly extrapolative: keeping fidelity to the text while letting the text be evincive for thinking is fair, but not losing sight of the difference. I would defend my extrapolations as congruent with Heidegger’s point, while respecting the point that is his own.
MH: Does beyng not become dependent on an other, if this needing constitutes its very essence and is not a mere concomitant of that essence?
GD: The question seems rhetorical, in the manner of what MH might ask in a presentation to others, like normal teaching, seeking to evince thoughtful discussion.
Yes, actualizing one’s “ownmost potential for being” (Being and Time) becomes dependent on an other, in fact long before a person engages in higher seeking of fulfillment. The dependence is primal and primary (for baseline living). We all need to depend on each other.
Yet, a person is capable of free engagement, beyond dependency.
But how might we best understand that?:
MH: Yet how can we speak of de-pendency here, in view of the fact that this needing radically recreates what is needed and forces it to its self?
GD: —inasmuch as need reproduces itself “radically,” forcefully. How can in-dependence break away from reproduction of inhibitive dependence? Severe reproduction is going on daily in Germany. It is a daily reality in German life under nazism.
MH: Conversely, how can human beings bring beyng under their domination…,
GD: That is, how can people break free of domination when need is forced upon people? How can life make a fullness of freedom prevail for everyone’s lives, inasmuch as…
MH: …they must precisely give up their lostness in beings,…”
GD: …to which persons are subjected (e.g., survivalism, yielding to power, consumerism…); and with which persons identify (e.g., as subjects of admired power or as consumers).
MH: …so as to become ap-propriated to beyng, belonging to beyng? This oscillation of needing and belonging constitutes beyng as event,…”
GD: That is: Possible orientation by actualization of persons’ potential (belonging in beyng) is unfortunately strapped with, if not identifying with, radical forces as well as validly needing others.
How is that to be dealt with? Appropriation of one’s actualized potential for enlightenment, for openness, and for fair freedom of expression—“to become ap-propriated to beyng”—is not passive.
To be “appropriated” by processes external to oneself (e.g., expropriation by patriarchal socialization) is passive: subjecting oneself to authority.
But being appropriative in self-actualization is no subjectivism. Releasement (preliminary to inception), letting be wholly, is very enactive.
But getting to free self-actualization must overcome submission, and....
MH: Thereby, however, we must renounce the habit of striving to assure that this essential occurrence of beyng is representable at will for everyone at any time.
GD: Articulating what is and what can be is not enough. Such is likely misleading, as if representation itself brings about self-efficacy. Extrapolating: Education, even therapeutic processes within edu-
cation, are needed, congruent with conceiving thinking as emancipatory (enabling openness), as well as enlightening (engaging openly).
But openness of fair freedom can be dangerous to patriarchal dispostions, as Socrates learned, and as so many voices in the history of the West learned through Exccommunication. “Death to astute critique!”
MH: …we reach the uniqueness of the oscillation in its pure self-concealment in each case only through the leap.
GD: That can be a difficult process of self-examination (as every psychotherapist knows), as well as being a long path of open-minded learning and thinking.
MH: Thereby we know that what we come by here is…the essential occurrence of stillness,…
GD: —which is not merely the stillness itself; rather, that which stillness may disclose, the essential occurrence belonging in/with stillness.
MH: …that which is the most finite and most unique as the site of the moment of the great decision regarding the remaining absent and the advent of the gods.
GD: That is, the essential occurrence of the moment—time and importance—which is the decision for (or against) the challenge of the emerging path into facing what truly matters (and unconcealing what truly matters), orienting oneself by what truly matters.
MH: Only therein do we attain the stillness of the watch for the passing by of the last god.
GD: And thus, building and dwelling with sacredness without gods, rather (I extrapolate) building, dwelling, and thinking together—and within one’s ownmost way— openly, freely, and in the full truth of beyng, which is more than epistemic (unconcealed, resolved mystery), more than appealing (evincing inspiration), and more than good (orienting values). The truth of beyng embodies, enowns it all: aesthetic, epistemic, and ethical in fair freedom of openness for inception.
MH: The uniqueness of beyng (as event), its unrepresentability (not an object), its highest strange-
ness, and its essential self-concealment [GD: as learning process, always incomplete, as well as commonly self-evasive]—these are indications we must follow up in order at first to prepare ourselves to surmise that which, versus the obviousness of beyng, is the most rare and in whose openness we stand, even if our humanity does for the most part pursue being-away.
GD: Indications to follow up: Entry #133 is a precursory note to self: Given openness to beyng,
we are challenged to face rare standing, despite aversive conditions.
MH: These indications address us only if we at once withstand the plight of the abandonment by being.
GD: abandonment by others, as well as facing aversive conditions, who and which would conceal the potential of being to express orientation of life by authentic self-actualization, beyng.
MH: … and confront the decision regarding the remaining absent and the advent of the gods.
To what extent these indications bring about the basic disposition of restraint,…
GD: That is, bring about prudence in the face of dangers and self-evasion—which we know these days, too.
MH: …and to what extent restraint disposes us toward compliance with them.
GD: That is: surviving to let beyng prevail—to whatever degree feasible—over self-concealing abandonment and subjection to who and what protects its license dangerously.
An interesting August exchange about my dialogue with Heidegger’s passage is transcribed here.