Heidegger

Everyone,

I’ve been trying to decipher a particular passage in “On the Essence of
Truth” (using the _Basic Writings_ version) and was wondering if I could
mine some of your minds. The passage is this:

“In letting beings as a whole be, which discloses and at the same time
conceals, it happens that concealing appears as what is first of all
concealed. Insofar as it ek-sists, Da-sein conserves the first and broadest
undisclosedness, untruth proper. The proper nonessence of truth is the
mystery. Here nonessence does not yet have the sense of inferiority to
essence in the sense of what is general (_koinon_, _genos_), its
_possibilitas_ and the ground of its possibility. Nonessence is here what in
such a sense would be a pre-essential essence. But ‘nonessence’ means at
first and for the most part the deformation of that already inferior
essence. Indeed, in each of these significations the nonessence remains
always in its own way essential to the essence and never becomes unessential
in the sense of irrelevant” (_Basic Writings_, 130-131).

Here are my questions: first, is the “pre-essential essence” Heidegger’s
view or is he attributing it to those who see the nonessence as “inferior”?
I believe it is the former, but I can’t quite make it out (the English is
too ambiguous: does the “is here” refer to the traditional view or his
reformulation of it?). Second, how is this notion of nonessence a
“deformation of that already inferior essence”? Is his view of the
nonessence a “deformation” of the traditional view or does he mean something
else that does not come out in the translation?

Your thoughts would be appreciated.

Kevin Winters

P.S. This is partially for my summary and commentary on “On the Essence of
Truth” at my blog  http://heideggerian.blogspot.com), for those who are
interested, as I wouldn’t mind your thoughts there too.

Furthermore, to say that Christianity is empty of content because it is not
a doctrine is only chicanery. When a believer exists in faith, his existence
has enormous content, but not in the sense of a yield in paragraphs.
Johannes Climacus/Soren Kierkegaard

Posted on Thursday, June 1st, 2006 at 12:50 pm
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