discursive living • gary e. davis • berkeley: discussion of beyng Heidegger

September 1, 2025

My discussion of Heidegger’s passage #133 on “the essence of beyng,” from Contributions to Philosophy brought some exchanges with a Heidegger scholar (“MM” below), over five days, which I would like to share because that evinced some themes for later discussion elsewhere, as well as providing some detail about what I was doing, in case someone is interested. Basically, though, it’s a good example of online philosophical dialogue.

MM: I appreciate your effort to bring Heidegger’s dense formulations into a register of self-actualization and community life. But I worry that in doing so you risk bending Beitrage back into a humanist or therapeutic idiom that Heidegger himself was working to leave behind. A few points of divergence strike me:

===Dependence vs. “need” of beyng
You equate Heidegger’s claim that “beyng needs humans” with the primal dependence of infants and our social reliance on one another. But in GA65, “need” (Notwendigkeit) belongs to the seynsgeschichtliche structure of the event itself. It is not primarily anthropological dependence but the abyssal belonging-together of Da-sein and beyng. To translate this into developmental or social dependence risks reducing Ereignis to psychology or sociology.

===The leap (Sprung)
Heidegger’s “leap” is not the gradual work of therapeutic self-realization but the radical dispositional shift that appropriates Da-sein into the clearing of beyng. To frame it as a “long path to fulfillment” makes it too continuous with Bildung and not radical enough as a rupture of the first beginning.

===The “last god”
You interpret the stillness of awaiting the “last god” as dwelling and building sacredness “within ourselves, among each other.” Heidegger’s language here is not a metaphor for community values but a seynsgeschichtliche indication of a possible god of the other beginning, a figure of withdrawal and advent, not simply human sacredness.

===Oscillation of need and belonging
You render this oscillation as the tension between domination and freedom in social life. But for Heidegger, the oscillation is the way beyng itself withholds and grants, appropriates and expropriates. Translating this into political struggle alone risks missing the abyssal play of concealment and unconcealment.

So my concern is that by humanizing and psychologizing the terms, you flatten Heidegger’s attempt to think beyond subjectivity and anthropocentric categories.

My question back to you is: if we interpret beyng’s “need” and the leap primarily in terms of human fulfillment, how do we still preserve Heidegger’s insistence that Ereignis is not reducible to human striving, but is the historical destiny of beyng itself?

GD: Thanks for your thought-provoking comments! You show exemplary care for what’s said.

MM: You equate Heidegger’s claim that “beyng needs humans” with the primal dependence of infants and our social reliance on one another.

GD: Relating isn’t equating. Appreciating a developmental background isn’t reductionist. Need is indeed primal, then develops with healthy individuation into a mix with desired preferences of oneself. But there is always need, too.

MM: But in GA65, “need” (Notwendigkeit) belongs to the seynsgeschichtliche structure of the event itself.

GD: Indeed. but the historicity of a life echoes the historicality of its enculturation. Though inquiry into the conceptuality of that has no direct connection to the historicity of a given individuation, need also belongs to the historicality of life which is encultured by values (which become cultural needs); and is socialized (which becomes systemic imperatives and requirements which impress themselves on lives as needs). You might want to claim that Heidegger, in #133, doesn’t have persons in mind, but historicality only shows through living persons. I do believe that beyng pertains to existence, to personss.

MM: It is not primarily anthropological dependence but the abyssal belonging-together of Da-sein and beyng.

GD: As a matteer of historical distortion—and deconstructing the conceptuality of that—you’re right. But #133 isn’t about that.

MM: To translate this into developmental or social dependence risks reducing Ereignis to psychology or sociology.

GD: True. But to consider dependence developmentally is relevant. I wouldn’t reduce conceptual inquiry into developmental background.

MM: Heidegger’s “leap” is not the gradual work of therapeutic self-realization…

GD: I agree. It’s inceptive. But orientation by appeals of new beginning presumes the capability for that, which has been severely inhibited by socialization.

MM: … the radical dispositional shift that appropriates Da-sein into the clearing of beyng.

GD: OK. So, how does that show in practice?

MM: To frame it as a “long path to fulfillment” makes it too continuous with Bildung and not radical enough as a rupture of the first beginning.

GD: Bildung doesn’t have an end point which is constrained by traditional conceptions of that, e.g., the Romanticism of its 19th century appeal and Hegelism. Being-historical thinking (i.e., participating in and seeking to contribute to the historicality of thinking as ongoing) is not a break with the historicality of its background; rather, an advancement beyond the conceptuality of that appreciation. A paradigm shift in conceptuality belongs to being-historical thinking in a prospective sense which may become lastingly influential.

MM: You interpret the stillness of awaiting the “last god” as dwelling and building sacredness “within ourselves, among each other.”

GD: Yes.

MM: Heidegger’s language here is not a metaphor for community values…

GD: I agree.

MM:… but a seynsgeschichtliche indication of a possible god of the other beginning,..

GD: No. The last god is not a prelude to a new god.

MM: …a figure of withdrawal and advent,…

GD: How about: a self-withdrawing advent of originary inception?

MM: …not simply human sacredness.

GD: Agreed. Heidegger distinguishes Dasein (the person as such) from the mortality of that. We are always ALSO mortal. But the potential of beyng actualizes itself in its ownmost way, at best with full appreciation of the historicality of its inceptiveness, but likely not yet originary, rather intimating conceptions from the history of thinking already fated.

MM: You render this oscillation as the tension between domination and freedom in social life. But for Heidegger, the oscillation is the way beyng itself withholds and grants, appropriates and expropriates.

GD: What Heidegger writes in #133 is about “oscillation of needing and belonging… [as not] representable at will for everyone at any time” because “the uniqueness of the oscillation” in the leap is not available through representational thinking.

MM: Translating this into political struggle alone risks missing the abyssal play of concealment and unconcealment.

GD: Agreed. Domination by need, due to manifold factors, requires remedies which are personal, cultural, and social, in order for political change to ensure better life because [MH}“our humanity does for the most part pursue being-away,” and that humanity involves all modes of life.

MM: So my concern is that by humanizing and psychologizing the terms, you flatten Heidegger’s attempt to think beyond subjectivity and anthropocentric categories.

GD: But I don’t believe that I did that. I do, though, see the relevance of standard ways of understanding for giving practical relevance to what Heidegger is prospecting. Though Heidegger was indeed, as you say at the outset, “working to leave behind…humanist or therapeutic idiom,” he was not implying that those modes of engagement were mere idioms. The emancipatory interest of thinking is integral to _Being and Time_, “The Essence of Truth,” and all of his lecture courses. Indeed, philosophy began as a therapeutic, critical thinking is a therapeutic, and the Wittgensteinian regard of philosophy as a therapeutic can be related to Heidegger’s lecture series on Nietzsche, as well as his lecture series on _What is Called Thinking?_.

MM: My question back to you is: if we interpret beyng’s “need” and the leap primarily in terms of human fulfillment, how do we still preserve Heidegger’s insistence that Ereignis is not reducible to human striving, but is the historical destiny of beyng itself?

GD: I agree that appropriative enownment is not about human striving. But beyng, at best, destines. It has no destiny in its inceptive opening.

MM: I see more clearly now how you’re using developmental and social registers without intending to collapse Heidegger’s seynsgeschichtliche claims into them. A few points in response:

On “need” and historicity
I take your point that enculturation and individuation are themselves historical, and so there’s an echo between ontological “need” and developmental/social need. But Heidegger’s Notwendigkeit in GA65 is not just echoed in personal history, it grounds the possibility of any history at all. My worry is that if we emphasize the echo too strongly, we risk losing sight of that grounding abyss, which is what Heidegger is pointing toward when he says beyng needs humans.

On the leap and practice
– You ask “OK, how does that show in practice?” That’s exactly the point where Heidegger resists giving content: the leap cannot be turned into a program, nor assimilated to Bildung as steady advancement. It is an incalculable dispositional rupture. That doesn’t mean it has no bearing on practice, but its bearing is always indirect, never programmatic.

On the last god
– I appreciate your refusal to treat the “last god” as simply a prelude to another god. But when you phrase it as “a self-withdrawing advent of originary inception,” I still hear a tilt toward positing an event for us to appropriate. Heidegger’s language tries to hold open the strangeness: the last god as figure of extreme distance, absent yet intimated, refusing capture by our concepts of sacredness.

On the oscillation of needing and belonging
– You rightly point out that §133 says this oscillation is not representable “at will.” My concern is that if we cast the oscillation mainly in terms of domination/remedy, we tether it too tightly to political or social critique. Heidegger is pointing to something more abyssal: the way beyng itself grants and withdraws. Political readings can be illuminating, but they are not yet seynsgeschichtlich.

Therapeutic dimensions
– I don’t deny there’s a therapeutic dimension to philosophy, and Heidegger certainly inherits that strand. My worry is that when we foreground that too much, it risks re-anthropologizing what Heidegger is trying to estrange us from. The emancipation Heidegger seeks is not simply human flourishing but the freeing of beyng itself from representational capture.

So I’d turn the question back to you: if beyng “has no destiny in its inceptive opening,” as you put it, then how do we keep from making its inceptiveness into a function of our projects (therapy, politics, Bildung) rather than letting it remain what Heidegger calls its “highest strangeness”?

GD: Your comments are immensely useful. I feel good reason to not resort to quick, short reply. And good questions deserve to stand as guides for thinking, rather than occasions for short reply.

I'll say, though—sure that you'll agree—that contextualizing one passage in _Contributions..._ relative to the large scale of his project implies large-scale stances to which short reply can't be fair.

You share concerns at the level of his overall project which are thought provoking. Thanks.

I should further add that I had recently finished a long discussion of [Richard] Capobianco’s mystical sense of Heidegger [link below] which is very concerned with the human/person difference, after having discussed Capobianco’s misreading of a couple of passages from Heidegger’s notebooks; see the second half of “Let’s clear thinking,” beginning at “...But Richard Capobianco (RC hereafter), for example, splits off Dasein…” My discussion there was initially motivated by the theme (claim) that clearing is about a process of enlighten-
ment, not a conceptual place to reach.

Then came that long discussion of Capobianco’s mystical sense of Heidegger: “Richard Capobianco’s mystical sense of Heidegger”

MM: thanks for pointing me to your essays. I see more clearly now how your work is shaped by resisting Capobianco’s “mystical” Heidegger. You’re right: Capobianco often casts Heidegger as a kind of seer of radiant presence, where the clearing looks like a luminous realm beyond history. Your insistence that the clearing is not a place but an ongoing happening of revealing-with-concealing, rooted in finite historical existence, is a crucial corrective.

What I still wonder, though, is whether in pushing back against mystification you risk swinging to the other side. When Ereignis is interpreted mainly in terms of developmental dependence, therapy, or social emancipation, isn’t there a danger of anthropologizing what Heidegger calls das Höchstfremde—the highest strangeness? Heidegger was trying to move beyond both mystical presence and humanist domestication.

GD: Thanks for your supportive comments (first paragraph).

Second paragraph: You’re raising important kinds of concern which will be good for later. I don’t want to seem to be interpreting Ereignis mainly in the terms you indicate—terms which are important for understanding practical implicatures. For me, it’s way beyond humanist domestication.

Like the difference between a theory and its praactical entailments, one shouldn’t understand a theory (or here, conceptualization) relative to its prospected entailments (nor likewise not understanding premises relative to conclusions), rather the converse: understand a practice in terms of its theoretical background—but before that, seek to understand what may be importantly relevant for teaching, higher education, public policy, and progressive organizational life, which theory may best serve. This is why I'm so Habermasian. (Excuse the small font size.) And: "doing theory and practice":  

 Shape theory in the first place (here only to continue an analogy) from emergent needs and better values of given life calling for better ways, while working to preserve the best ways which are at risk of suppression. That pertains to conceptual venturing, too.

Now, I want to add some more, which wasn’t part of my last reply above:

When Heidegger responded to the Holocaust in terms of “Letter on Humanism” (in direct light of “What Are Poets For?,” written a few weeks earlier: recovering orientation by holiness of our belonging together as persons), he was not advocating humanist domestication.

Referring to high strangeness is already an entailment (an interpretation) of that enowning which results in actual contributions to philosophy.

Ereignis itself (however one understands that—Albert Hoftstadter consulted with Heidegger, I believe [1970], when he chose “event of appropriation”) must lead, somehow, to timely and topical articulations which aren’t meant to be describing the long process from “Echo” to anticipating aptness for “ones to come,” which is itself (as articulation) an appropriative articulation of long-term wayfaring.

As Heidegger told W. J. Richardson, 1962, so-called “Heidegger II” (post-“Turn”) was already in mind for so-called “Heidegger I,” i.e., when _Being and Time_ was written), leading to more-focal dwelling with phenomenology, inadequacies of anthropological views, explorations on truth, reviving Hölderlin, deconstructing metaphysicalism in the face of nazi Catholic suspicions, and explicating art as the ground of history (being-historical thinking.

A reader should never forget that they’re looking at a text which Heidegger regarded as appropriative teaching, not representation of his experience.

I make no claim to capturing Heidegger’s experience. But I work with his “entailments” (his languaging, his articulating—and in English translation)—like anyone else. That’s not meant as a defensive point, but as feeling shared engagement in ventures of conceptual life which should be ultimately open to unexpected conceptions.

We all are living in difficult times where too many persons in authority ignore the type of rhetorical question: “Where’s your humanity?” A fundamental aim of philosophy is to implicitly address the truth, goodness, and beauty of Our shared humanity, especially inasmuch as we unwittingly conceal it all in self-concealing pretenses (e.g., onto-theo-logical constitutions of academic-"Christian"-scientism backing autocratic German license) which invite disaster, these days in unprecedented ways (e.g., trends toward unsustainability of life)

End of sermon.