During this time...

During this time, Heidegger accordingly began to take up with greater and greater explicitness the question of the relationship of ordinary language, and the metaphysical assumptions that underlie it, to the life of the kind of beings that we ourselves are, what he had characterized in Being and Time as “Dasein.”[^327] This language, he argued, has for a long time determined the life of the human being as the “subjectivity” of a subject of experience.

In the complicated and enigmatic Beiträge zur Philosophie , written between 1936 and 1938, Heidegger connects this metaphysical conception of subjectivity as “lived-experience” to the complex of technological practices and calculational ways of thinking that he calls “Machenschaft” or machination.

These are practices and ways of thinking that he sees as increasingly characteristic of, and dominant over, modern life and its forms and institutions of power; they include, but are not limited to, what he would later characterize as “technology” and “calculational ways of thinking.” With the development of the “history of being” that he undertakes at this time, Heidegger aims both to unmask the complicity of a metaphysical conception of subjectivity with these forms of practice and thought, and also to demonstrate the root of this complicity in the historical forms of language that, as he holds, continue to prevent the truth of being itself from coming to expression.

I. As he became more and more concerned with the nature of language, Heidegger came to see the very possibility of the expression of being, as limited by the forms of ordinary language, determined as they are by deep-seated metaphysical assumptions and interpretations that tend rule out this expression.

Beginning in the 1930s, accordingly, his history of being aimed to prepare for the futural occurrence of an “event” [ Ereignis ] of being that is, within the metaphysical language that is the only language that exists, literally inexpressible. The term aims to express the possibility of an “en-owning” or self-expression of “being itself,” an expression that, according to Heidegger, has normally and ever more pervasively been blocked by the forms of metaphysical thinking and language.