What is Paris Doing to Us?

Abstract

Heidegger makes a descriptive claim that both weds his work to the history of western philosophy and incites a turn within this history. This is a combination that defines one edge of his originality. The claim is that western thought carries and perpetuates a questionableness that takes place in its own occurrence, a questionableness that takes place in the happening of everything that appears in thought. This questionableness, as it emerges early in our lineage, does not involve something present and permanent that strikes wonder in people and gives rise to reflective activity. His historical claim about the question of thought in the absence of ultimate or eternal presence sets him apart from another claim that is dominant in our tradition about the origin of thinking. That claim states that thought at its best belongs to the enactment of a primordial being or to a non-temporal order. His different claim is that our heritage of thought has its inception in the utter strangeness of things whose appearing arises in an occurrence of simultaneous coming to presence and losing presence. Our ability to think is formed by a nascent experience of being’s happening as mortal temporality in a double movement of presentation and withdrawal from presentation. There is, however, agreement on this classical idea: thought names a kind of mentation that is different from calculation, computation, and practical intelligence. Thought, which is the occurrence that defines a philosopher, arises as some people are stirred by excess to our meanings and clarity, an excess to which human being seems essentially to belong. Such people are stirred to thought by a mood which seems to be connected to this excess. This mood might be articulated by such questions as, what are things really made of? Who are we in common beyond the differences that divide us? What is the meaning of mortality? How do beings begin? Is everything that happens characterized by sameness? These are questions whose emergence requires mentation that is distinct to solving problems. They require the cultivation of perceptiveness that is strangely related both to something that is not comprehended and to the occurrence of human being.