1 THE UNITY IN THE TRANSFORMATION OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER’S THINKING Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann forthcoming in Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual, 2020, 43-75 (translated, with Appendices, by Thomas Sheehan) tsheehan@stanford.edu 1. The article surveys the arc of Heidegger’s work and argues for its unity by discussing three texts: GA 56, Sein und Zeit (with GA 24), and Beiträge. He rightly calls Heidegger’s transition from his earlier approach (focused on Existenz as Transzendenz) to his later approach (focused on Existenz as Ereignis) by the title die Wende and not die Kehre. 2. As phenomenology, Heidegger’s work is exclusively a hermeneutics of meaning, both (1) the meaning of things (das Anwesen des Anwesenden) and, more importantly, (2) what is responsible for the meaning of things (viz., das Anwesenlassen, GA 14: 45.28-30). Heidegger gives this Anwesenlassen various names: die Lichtung, das Offene, das Da, das Ereignis, etc., all of which he identifies with Existenz, the Da of Da-sein. 3. Existenz-as-the-clearing is not something separate from us but rather is our Wesen, our way-of-being. It is our facticity: what each of us cannot not be. Heidegger has a host of names for describing the structure of this existential “cannot-not-be,” for example: • Geworfenheit: we are thrown into Existenz-as-die-Lichtung • Ausstehen: we cannot not sustain Existenz-as-die-Lichtung • Anspruch: we are claimed by Existenz-as-die-Lichtung • Ereignis: we are appropriated into Existenz-as-die-Lichtung 4. None of these terms, including Ereignis, names a chronological event. All of them name our existential- ontological structure – which we can personally-existentielly make our own within chronological time by what Heidegger called the act of resolve or, later, the Einkehr in das Ereignis. 5. The unity running through Heidegger’s oeuvre, both early and late, is that Existenz-as-the-clearing is responsible for the meaningfulness of things (i.e., das Sein des Seienden). The Wende of the 1930s underscores the facticity that Heidegger had already established in Sein und Zeit, namely that no one “throws open” the clearing sua sponte et ex nihilo. Rather, we experience ourselves as thrown open (Geworfenheit) and thus as appropriated into our essence as the clearing (Ereignis).