Abstract
This paper identifies the hyphenation of the word “Da-sein” as marking not just a grammatical shift, but a distinctive “moment” in the enactment of being-historical thinking that uncovers the reciprocity between be-ing (Seyn) and man. The interlingual translation of Da-sein, then, points to the “cut” in the origination of history, as the place for the manifestation of be-ing itself. But just as the term “Da-sein” has a distinctive ancestry in the German language, so the origin of its meaning in English must also be addressed through the “crossing over” of an “interlingual translation.”
Parvis Emad’s enduring reflection on translation has some of its most significant passages in his essay “Thinking More Deeply into the Question of Translation: Essential Translation and the Unfolding of Language,” in John Sallis (ed.), Reading Heidegger: Commemorations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 323–340, in the “Forewords” to his translations of Heidegger’s Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, GA 25 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977a). Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997; Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (with Kenneth Maly) and Besinnung (with Thomas Kalary), as well as his essays on the interpretation and translation of the thinking from Ereignis, collected in On the Way to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press) 1977.
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Notes
- 1.
This word, spelt with one “t,” is to be distinguished from the technical term “formatted” used in information technology and other fields.
- 2.
See GA 65, p. 295; tr. 208–209.
- 3.
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 161986), p. 42. Sein und Zeit, GA 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977b), p. 56.
- 4.
Wesen is written in quotation marks in order to indicate the suspension of the metaphysical sense of this word (i.e. Wesen as “essence”) in favor of the manner in which the same word speaks in the Denkweg (i.e., Wesen in its so-called “verbal” understanding). In a fully expanded version, the citation should therefore read: “Dasein’s biding – which the (now broken) forgottenness of the sake of thinking only allows to grasp as “essence” – resides in its existence.”
- 5.
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche I (Pfullingen: Neske, 5 1989b), p. 278. If we translate Geschichte with “history,” the quoted passage appears as a purely historical proposition, technically speaking, as a mere information. Alternatively, we can translate Geschichte, as a diction of the Denkweg, with the old English word “wyrd” (from the I.E. [Indo-European] root *uer-, as in German werden; cf. weird). In this word resounds the abruptness of the self-absconcing “giving to wit” (and thus assigning) in which Geschichte consists. By saying: “That which we indicate with the word Dasein cannot be found in the hitherto wyrd of philosophy,” the sentence loses its merely propositional and informational character and reads as a saying of thinking. (On the translation of Geschichte and schicken, respectively, with “wyrd” and “to weird” see below, footnote 24, and my article “Owning to the Belongingness to Be-ing or Thinking as Surrender: Parvis Emad’s Book on Beiträge and the English Denkweg,” in Heidegger Studies, 25, 2009: 115–141.) – The “quasi-adjectival” use of “hitherto” is attested in the Oxford English Dictionary (“The hitherto experience of men” – Green, Ethics).
- 6.
See my articles, “Owning to the Belongingness to Being,” and “Why Being Itself and Not Just Being?,” in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy VII, ed. Burt Hopkins et. al (Seattle: Noesis Press, 2007): 157–195.
- 7.
Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 5 1993), p. 53 [IRP].
- 8.
We ought in fact to speak of an “allowing,” in that the Urphänomen of evidence consists in the ur-movement of appearing as giving-itself by itself, which, though being ur-posited in the transcendental stance, is nevertheless not made but admitted.
- 9.
The meaning of ideell is: darinsein als immanenter gegenständlicher Sinn, that is, being there-within as an immanent objective sense.
- 10.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen (Hamburg: Meiner, 3 1995), p. 21 [CM].
- 11.
CM, pp. 58–59.
- 12.
However, as far as I can see, even in this formal sense, there remains in Plato an element that in Husserl we do not find, namely, the undecided relation between φύσιV (physis) and εÉδος (eídos).
- 13.
On the rigorous meaning of “contingency” see below, p. 232.
- 14.
The primary sense is the grounding-trait that says itself in a word. This trait is the origin of a variety of meanings and tones, and therefore does not coincide with any of the meanings a dictionary may record.
- 15.
We need to keep the notion of likelihood clear both from the common and from the technical (statistical) meaning of this word.
- 16.
Anticipating the findings of Section IV of this essay, we can say that the character “vorhanden” implies that the givenness of the given is cast into contingency (i.e., that it is, in a manner of speaking, “contingentated”) in such a way that the original giving (the Es gibt) is not heard, as such, in and through the da.
- 17.
As long as we understand the “refusing to afford itself” merely “in general,” we are understanding the nearness itself as an object. The rigor of thinking in the dimension of the being-wyrd (Seinsgeschichte) consists in showing how metaphysical thinking attains the nearness via contingency, namely, as the beingness of beings. See my “Owning to the Belongingness to Be-ing,” p. 116, footnotes 3 and 4.
- 18.
“Contingency is broken, but the breaking (the schism) is not grounded as such:” This formula describes the Greek onset of thinking as the onset of the tradition of philosophy. What the Denkweg is there to indicate is that the grounding of the schism’s own truth becomes both likely and a stressing need only in the thinking of Da-sein prompted by the Seinsfrage, whose flashing has already forethought, and thus opened, the depth of Da-sein that thinking, by itself, can never attain.
- 19.
See Ivo De Gennaro and Gino Zaccaria, Dasein : Da-sein. Tradurre la parola del pensiero (Milano: Christian Marinotti Edizioni, 2007), p. 11. Many of the analyses of this essay are supported, precisely in what might be their genuine contribution to the English Denkweg, by the attempt accomplished in this book.
- 20.
“Self-contained” implies: abiding merely by impact and as an impact, without an openly sustained schismatic decision.
- 21.
This is not the subjective awareness of an already constituted, given thinking, but, on the contrary, an awareness that onsettingly determines what thinking and who man may be. Awareness, here, is not a character of consciousness, but a synonym for Da (Lichtung).
- 22.
In Ideas, Husserl speaks of pure consciousness as a “phenomenological [i.e. non-real] residual.” (IRP, p. 59; cf. also p. 108).
- 23.
“Unschismatic” means: the schism itself (the only element of thinking) is not the first sake for thinking, but weirds itself unto a wyrd of growing oblivion constituted by the “onto-schismatic” forms of philosophical thinking that we encounter (but are still far from knowing in their schismatic implications) as the hitherto determinations of the beingness of beings. See my “Owning to the Belongingness to Being,” p. 135. – We know the word “weird” only as an adjective meaning “strange, unusual.” The I.E. root that speaks in this word is *uer- “to turn, plait,” which also gives rise to the Latin vertere and to the German werden. The adjective “weird” is originally a noun (O.E. “wyrd”) meaning “the principle, power, or agency by which events are predetermined; fate, destiny,” then also: that which is destined or fated to happen (one’s lot or destiny), finally any event or occurrence (as in the common saying “after word comes weird”). The adjectival use stems from the “weird sisters” in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
- 24.
da (small “d”): a character of contingent beings; das Da (capital “d”): the contingency-free element.
- 25.
IRP, p. 105.
- 26.
IRP, p. 87.
- 27.
Formale und transzendentale Logik, 1929, p. 240, quoted in: Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 3 1988), p. 70 [ZSD].
- 28.
“[K]ein reales Sein … ist für das Sein des Bewußtseins selbst … notwendig.” (IRP, p. 92).
- 29.
As to the positivity of its being, the contingent world, that is, nature as a correlate of absolute consciousness, is in itself nothing. This being has the merely relative sense of a being for consciousness (form/soul/spirit/history as transcendental genesis), that is, of an intentional being. All transcendence is contained in and constituted by absolute Dasein (cf. IRP, § 85).
- 30.
In all this, contingency remains ineliminable.
- 31.
In his essay “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964), in ZSD.
- 32.
Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, p. 119 (see also p. 7); BPh, p. 169 (p. 9).
- 33.
Martin Heidegger – Eugen Fink, Heraklit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970), p. 202 [H].
- 34.
In “clear-cut,” “clear” does not indicate a quality of cutting or being cut (as it does in the common meaning of the adjective “clear-cut,” which means “sharply defined”), but the clearing of the cut itself, and therefore the clearing yielded by this cut. This clearing is then also the ground for all Entscheidungen, for all “decisions,” which will, in turn, each time have the character of being a clear-cut, that is, a cut that clears in the sense of the either-or (cf. BPh, partitions 44 and 47). Here, “cut” speaks as a synonym of “schism,” both of these words being translations of the Denkweg-diction Unterschied. – Concerning the translation of Seyn with beзng, note the following: Middle English knows the letter з (“yogh”) for the sound “y” (as in “yes”). Moreover, this sign is used to transcribe “gyfu” (Proto-Germanic *gebô), which is the name of the Anglo-Saxon g-rune, a rune meaning “gift, generosity” (as that which sustains [soothes] the being of man when all beings fail), and whose shape is that of an “x.” For a more detailed justification of this translation of Seyn, see my “Owning to the Belonginginess to Be-ing,” p. 125.
- 35.
The Da is itself the in-between: not the in-between of man (thinking) and beings, but the in-between of being itself and who man may be, and thus, eventually, the in-between toward the selving of beings.
- 36.
BPh, p. 490.
- 37.
This point is crucial for the distinction between the self-experience of transcendental subjectivity and the psychological investigation of psychical acts.
- 38.
This culminating point is the computed-computing animality of man as historisches Tier.
- 39.
Vermenschung (which, just as its opposite, i.e., Entmenschung, is a key word in Heidegger’s writings of the late thirties) is not to be confused with Vermenschlichung (humanization).
- 40.
This want and claim hints at that which provisionally may be called “the eros of the other onset.”
- 41.
H, p. 202.
- 42.
The thus obtained man-kind is itself neutral in the precise sense that, being grounded in Da-sein, it wants gender, that is, it always already wants man as an en-gendered being. Here is the origin, in the sense of the Seinsgeschichte, of what we know as “human gender” (“male,” “female”). One of the places in which Heidegger treats the gender-wanting neutrality of Da-sein is his 1928 lecture course Einleitung in die Philosophie, GA 27 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996).
- 43.
This pole is the yoke that subjugates the cut and its flashing.
- 44.
…or in any way acting upon…
- 45.
This is not to authoritatively invoke some mysterious “voice of being” issuing directives to the ear of those who, being in quest for being, are “elected” to receive them. In fact, what the preceding sentences articulate reflects the most elementary notion of what language and speaking are. To this notion belongs the fact that a language does not say what it says by virtue of some natural or artificial, “magical” or “pragmatic” imprinting, but thanks to an inner (and just as well outer) source that is not this language itself. Thinking, and, in a different manner, poetry, speak their language at the limit, namely, at the limit whence this language draws its capacity for saying from the speechless tune of beзng. In fact, what poetry and thinking have to say is precisely this tune, which silently tunes a language as such.
- 46.
By virtue of this un-emphatic indication, we can say that, in turn, beзng is the sheer emphasis of the “there is,” where “emphasis” means “the implicit, absconcedly tuning say.”
- 47.
On the crossing, see, for example, partition 8 of Heidegger’s treatise Besinnung.
- 48.
Emily Dickinson (Johnson, # 258).
- 49.
The “always already” is, in the other onset of thinking, what the a priori is in transcendental philosophy. This implies that the “always already” and the a priori are incomparable.
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De Gennaro, I. (2011). Husserl and Heidegger on Da-sein: With a Suggestion for Its Interlingual Translation. In: Schalow, F. (eds) Heidegger, Translation, and the Task of Thinking. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 65. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1649-0_12
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