Chapter Six Ereignis and Technology: Heidegger’s Thinking of Identity and Difference

Last chapter we discussed the first two phases in Heidegger’s relationship with Hegel, the earlier critical rejection of Hegel in Being and Time and dialogical confrontation with Hegel on the problem of finitude, infinitude, and the ontological difference in the PhG. In this chapter, I turn to the third and final phase in Heidegger’s confrontation with Hegel: the “enveloping” appropriation which proceeds through a complicated “step back” behind Hegelian metaphysics to its unthought origin, the “difference as difference”. This experience of the ontological difference, according to Heidegger, is what inaugurates the “first beginning” of metaphysics in Plato and Aristotle, with its subsequent history developing as the increasing forgetting of the question of Being. The forgetting of the latter manifests itself historically in the representational thinking of identity and metaphysics of subjectivity, which culminates in modern technology as the utter oblivion of the ontological difference. Hence Heidegger’s task is to find ways of articulating the non-metaphysical difference as the hidden origin of Western metaphysics, to prepare an onto-poetic thinking of this difference no longer bound to the modern metaphysics of representation or the metaphysical search for “grounds” or ultimate foundations.