Marx and the Concept of Historical Time · 第 70 页

Schürmann notes, ‘the principium becomes a law of the mind…a first truth conceived by reason and formulated as a premise.’¹²³ For Schürmann, this is the philosophical and historical context that Heidegger’s conception of beginning [Beginn], inception [Anfang] and the origin dismantles.¹²⁴ Beginning and inception are categories which cut across Heidegger’s critical engagement with the metaphysics of presence. Beginning entails an inchoate movement that signals the precondition of thinking, whereas inception recovers the Presocratic idea of being seized by and responding to an experience, one which brings forth a dynamic constellation of sensation, speech and thought. The Ursprung – the ‘primal leap’¹²⁵ – is phenomenologically simultaneous with and yet ontologically prior to Beginn and Anfang. For Schürmann, this priority of the origin comes through two co-constitutive questions: the question of ‘ontology originarily’, which is the task of Being and Time, and the question of ‘origin ontologically’, from which presencing as event – and with it Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis – emerges.¹²⁶

The problem with Schürmann’s scheme is not the questions themselves but the fact that Being and Time is not held accountable to the question of the origin ontologically. This should not come as a surprise. The origin as such is not thematised in Being and Time. At the start of the second division, the ‘originariness’ [Ursprünglichkeit] of an ontological Interpretation (as opposed to interpretation as the existential working out of an understanding) is loosely defined in relation to the unity of Dasein’s structural whole, but this definition does nothing to mitigate – actually it exacerbates – the fact that, strictly speaking, there is no concept of the act in Being and Time. Dasein is phenomenologically presented as the ontological basis of temporalisation, but nowhere is it ontologised qua action and the act. The lack of an ontological concept of the act in Being and Time, a lack which dictates that the phenomenological ontology of Dasein implicitly stands in for this concept, is synonymous with the lack of an ontological concept of the origin in Being and Time. The consequences of this are diverse. For one thing, it consigns the philosophical status of the ‘equi-originary’ [gleichursprünglich] to a descriptive seriality. Being and Time is a serial text like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: the ‘equi-originaries’ of

¹²³ Ibid. 106.

¹²⁴ ‘…the task is crucial if acting – life – is to be disengaged from teleocratic as well as principial frameworks; if deconstruction is to set free from beneath archē and principium an origin less compromised by command and domination; and if in the final analysis the question of acting comes down to complying with that more elusive origin.’ Ibid. 121.

¹²⁵ ‘To originate something by a leap, to bring something into being from out of the source of its nature in a founding leap – this is what the word origin (German Ursprung, literally, primal leap) means.’ Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ [1935-6], trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 75.

¹²⁶ For Schürmann, ‘many of the misunderstandings concerning Heidegger are explainable by the exclusive attention paid to his effort to raise the ontological question originarily, without noting his simultaneous effort to think the origin ontologically.’ Schürmann, Heidegger on Being and Acting, 128-29. Ereignis is a concept of the later Heidegger, after the so-called ‘turn’ [Kehre].

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