Homecoming, The Holy, Ereignis, The Adab Called Verhaltenheit, The Turn

Heidegger glosses the poet's calling as "homecoming" in the Holderlin poem by this name. Coming home requires traveling to the origin. Homecoming is the "mystery" of the joy of coming home to the nearness to the origin. "To write poetically means to be in the joy that safeguards in word the mystery of the nearness to the most joyful"...The poet has the delicate task of saying yet safeguarding the "mystery," bringing it near us, by keeping it far away. Accordingly, the poet does not name but wordlessly sings or, better, strums the holy...

Because [the holy] is only as something that is coming, the poet never represents or grasps it as an object. Still, even the poetic gesture of mediating the holy would threaten it, were it not the case that everything is only by being gathered into the wholeheartedness of the holy...The holy is sheer unselfishness, the appropriating event [Ereignis] is the holy, fitting gods and humans to itself and to one another...

Yet the appropriating event itself keeps to itself, it withdraws, and this withdrawal is part of what is peculiar to it...The appropriating event determines time, including the withdrawal of the having been and the withholding of the future, and, by the same token, "disappropriation [Enteignis]" is inherent in it...

Ereignis can no more be translated, Heidegger contends, than the Greek logos or the Chinese tao [or, we should add, the Arabic hu]. In ordinary German, Ereignis signifies an event. However, since it opens up time-space altogether, in advance of any reckoning with time, it is not an occurrence in time.

The adab called Verhaltenheit ("reserve") attunes us to the appropriating event and, in the process, demands that we begin to think anew. It demands, that is, that we think "from out of this appropriating event," as it were, steadfastly and decisively yet humbly about the truth of the historical being of beings--as the appropriating event that grounds their unhiddenness to us and our openness to them. Although we are no longer preservers of the astonishing unhiddenness of beings (as the Greeks putatively were), reserve transforms us into vigilant guardians of the clearing for the self-concealing of historical being. Reserve is anything but a retreat or recoil from beings. To the contrary, by not trying to turn them into objects or master them, it lets them be. Reserve is the ground of care, sheltering the truth and its unfolding into concerns and transactions with beings...

The adab called Verhaltenheit "unwinds" that characteristic of modernity in which "human beings assert themselves over everything through objectification." This "unwinding" Heidegger called "the turn" (Kehre) or "...the appropriating event counter-swinging in itself."

[Selections from Dahlstrom, The Heidegger Dictionary, 2013].

Ritual (i.e., symbolic) performances of the Unwinding: