The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger's "Contributions to Philosophy"

by Richard Polt

"The heart of history, for Heidegger, is not a sequence of occurrences but the eruption of significance at critical junctures that bring us into our own by making all being, including our being, into an urgent issue. In emergency, being emerges."―from The Emergency of Being The esoteric Contributions to Philosophy, often considered Martin Heidegger's second main work after Being and Time, is crucial to any interpretation of his thought. Here Heidegger proposes that being takes place as "appropriation." Richard Polt's independent-minded account of the Contributions interprets appropriation as an event of emergency that demands to be thought in a "future-subjunctive" mode. Polt explores the roots of appropriation in Heidegger's earlier philosophy; Heidegger's search for a way of thinking suited to appropriation; and the implications of appropriation for time, space, human existence, and beings as a whole. In his concluding chapter, Polt reflects critically on the difficulties of the radically antirationalist and antimodern thought of the Contributions. Polt's original reading neither reduces this challenging text to familiar concepts nor refutes it, but engages it in a confrontation―an encounter that respects a way of thinking by struggling with it. He describes this most private work of Heidegger's philosophy as "a dissonant symphony that imperfectly weaves together its moments into a vast fugue, under the leitmotif of appropriation. This fugue is seeded with possibilities that are waiting for us, its listeners, to develop them. Some are dead ends―viruses that can lead only to a monolithic, monotonous misunderstanding of history. Others are embryonic insights that promise to deepen our thought, and perhaps our lives, if we find the right way to make them our own."

Genres: Philosophy

296 pages, Hardcover

First published May 25, 2006

About the author

Richard F. H. Polt is a professor of philosophy at Xavier University. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago (1991). His main interests are the metaphysical and ethical problems of Greek and German philosophy. He has taught elective courses on a variety of topics, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, German idealism, existentialism, slavery, time, and Heidegger.

Selected publications:

Heidegger: An Introduction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

A Companion to Heidegger's "Introduction to Metaphysics." Edited by Richard Polt and Gregory Fried. New Haven: Yale Unversity Press, 2001.

Heidegger's "Being and Time": Critical Essays. Edited by Richard Polt. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005.

The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger's "Contributions to Philosophy." Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Reviews

[Joe]

Comment:

Polt's introduction uses the term 'esotericism' a lot. I want to clarify that in this brief note. The 'Esotericism' that interests our author has nothing to do with the esotericism of Leo Strauss. Strauss is concerned with the caution that philosophers write with in order to protect themselves from the City, and the City - from themselves. Polt is interested in the 'unsayable' that Heidegger finds fitfully slumbering at the deepest levels of Ontology. Heidegger's 'esotericism' is therefore rooted in a Concealed Actuality; that of Strauss (here one fights the urge to type 'merely') in Human Nature.
I think that eventually philosophy is going to have to come to a decision about the vast 'problem of the Unknown'. Either it is found to lie outside Man, - or within. Either answer sends philosophy and the cultures it influences careening in wildly different directions. One based on Ontology; the other on (group) psychology.
While I consider it a truism to say that "'to be' is to be surrounded by the unknown,", I suspect the correct answer to the question of the Unknown is both. That is, the problem of the Unknown / Unknowable is both within and beyond Man. But, alas, the fashions, whims, and myths that are at the unassailable roots of all human cultures, world orders, and world eras are always allergic to nuance.
Nuance is so difficult to turn into a slogan. ...As is genuine philosophy. And thus ontological and (perhaps regrettably) politico-philosophical esotericism are both permanent parts of Philosophy.

[Jack Shipley]

The best book on the Contributions. Polt is a gigantic thinker of Heidegger.

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is by far the best and most lucid introduction to the Contributions I've seen. Polt's account of Heidegger's philosophical break with Husserl is also better and clearer than anything else that I have read. This is a good book for those interested in getting an overview of what Contributions to Philosophy is about, or anyone looking for a straightforward explanation of some of this work's main concepts.