The Self that Belongs to an Abyssal Ground: Reading Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)

Abstract

This article addresses the co-belonging of self and ground. I argue that, between 1927 and 1930, ‘self’ for Heidegger comes to mean something like that which gathers into a cohesive whole. By the Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) of 1936–1938, it seems the word has lost much of its reference to humans beings and has come to mean an originary space or site which gathers I, you, we, a people, as and into a historical context. However, this paper will demonstrate that Heidegger still talks of something ‘more-than-human’ that contributes to what we understand when we understand what it means to be a self. I argue, however, that it is precisely in being claimed by this something ‘more-than-human,’ the task of being claimed by and responding to an abyssal ground, that Heidegger reinterprets philosophy’s need to attend to the essence of ground not as fundamentum absolutum but rather as a fundamentum ab-sconditus to which the self belongs.