The Fourfold
In Martin Heidegger’s work, the fourfold is the gathering or the coming together of earth, sky, mortals and divinities. It is the space in which a ''here'' is generated, through which things come to constitute themselves as essencing/thinging (i.e., manifesting the activity, as being-at-work, inherent to what in themselves they are; more simply, it is simply the doing of the thing that is inherent to its essence as such). It is in and through this gathering that we have a ''thing'' as such. It is in the clearing of this fourfold that we are inserted in a network of meaningfulness, since we are always among-beings, and things themselves essence themselves only and matter as such - which is to say that the fourfold clears the possibility of ''meaningfulness'' as such - through the fourfold. Put alternatively, one could say that the fourfold is gathered into the bringing forth of things, and things themselves then generate a network with other things insofar as their mutual co-essencing generates a ''here'', a locality. In being brought forth (poiesis), they ''announce'' that they are, insofar they are limited (not boundless) and pointing beyond itself to a network of things which simultaneously co-essence. A thing is always among other things, and it is in this among-ness that a interconnected network is formed. The mortal in turn is always co-(ap)propriated towards the interconnected network of mutually essencing things, ''thrown'' towards them, which provides the groundwork for the phenomenological viewpoint. Now, as for the particular points of the fourfold:
First, the earth. For Heidegger, earth is the bearer. In other words it is what grounds and establishes all that which comes to be in the bearing of the earth. It grounds things. However, and this is what Heidegger comments on in his works through the 30s and early 40s, Earth as the ground is something which is not present and is not a thing among other things, but rather their abyssal ground (Abgrund). In this sense, the earth is what grounds but only insofar as it simultaneously withdraws and rejects any attempt of making it present as a thing among other things; it withdraws into absence. In this sense, it is not as if the things themselves lack a ground but that is in the withdrawing of the ground that grounding becomes something possible since presence is always co-essencing with absence. In this sense, ''possibility is higher than actuality''; the bringing-forth is itself inexhaustible, containing in itself an inexhaustible possibility. This is why Heidegger when commenting on technology sees the earth as that which, in its withdrawing, rejects scientific-reductionist thinking that wants to fully mathematize it and mechanize it for its own purposes. The presupposition behind that thinking is to make the earth something fully present, or accessible and by enframing it as a standing-reserve.
The sky. As the earth withdraws and retreats from presence, it is what by withdrawing allows things to ''bloom'' and to presence or shine as such. To come-to-presence and shine is for the things to essence (i.e., do the activity that is inherent to its essence) themselves, freely let to be. As such if the earth is the ''dark'' ground whose grounding is that of grantedness of possibility, the sky is the ''space'' in which all things, that are illuminated, essence as such in their presentness whether that means they become different from itself, or remain the same or do whatever. The sky is the domain where the appearing qua appearing occurs. It is also the same for the mortals, who, under the sky and in their community prepare for death.
The mortals. What makes human Dasein both human and Dasein is death, the utmost possibility. Death is simultaneously something that is inherent to us, and it is us and yet what we cannot ''possess'' or ''be'', insofar as it is a futurity (Zukunft; coming-towards-us) that is absent and in which we are-not. In this sense, what distinguishes our utmost possibility is that Dasein always finds itself in relation to itself, but as itself which is outside of itself since this relation to what is outside, i.e. death which is inherent to Dasein and is Dasein, is a relation to that which cannot be made present. This is being-towards-death of both B&T, as well as the Contributions and the Bremen lectures from the 1949. That being said, death is not a negative ''not'' in relation to a dialectical yes. It stands outside of those relations; it is not a lack, but since Dasein is being-in-the-world (which is opened by the fourfold), it is therefore always in an ekstatic relationship towards that which is outside of it, since it belongs to its essence to be open to what is outside of it by virtue of death.
The divinities. This is perhaps the most complex out of the three, since Heidegger's thinking of divinities is something quite unorthodox. In my view, Heidegger is not talking about a God, or even gods, but rather to those who are messengers who let the message of the self-concealing Beyng manifest. Divinities signal that which is the radically different, extraordinary, and foreign to the mortals; and insofar as they're an ''element'' in the fourfold, they signal through language and through things in their essencing that there is a relation to something extraordinary. The domain of divinities is where the thinking and the manifesting of the Godhead, or the Gottwesen, occurs. The Gottwesen cannot be calculated or made into something calculable; it is that which escapes and hides itself in such attempts. The divinities in that sense always open up the fourfold and disclose an openness that manifests that not all can be made completely present and accessible. It is in and through the message that the non-appearing manifests in the appearing qua appearing and where the Holy also occurs in which the god can appear or withdraw. This is the domain of poets and poeticizing, and a concrete example of this would be in Heidegger's interpretation of Hölderlin.
This is how things stand with relation to his understanding of language. The language ''as the house of Being'' is precisely always with relation to, or rather as from ''within'' the ''clearing'' or the fourfold. Language with relation to beings and their unconcealment is through the dynamic of the earth-sky, as well as mortals-divinities. Earth withdraws in order to allow for the grounding and the things to constitute themselves, and it is in and through the sky - the manifesting qua manifesting - that things show themsleves in what they are. The earth withdraws from the sky, for it is through the sky that the manifestness and meaningfulness of things show up. And it is through this that human beings create communities, for they are always among-things. We are always already in meaningfulness and among beings. The sky is simply the manifestness qua manifestness of that meaningfulness of things in their essencing. Of course, this is only in and through mortals as well and which constitutes their essential ''entrance'' into language, which shows and manifests things. But humans are always being-towards-death as well, whether as ''inauthentic'' (B&T) or in resoluteness towards it. Finally, the language of the divinities is always to signal through the poetic word what remains beyond presence and thereby extraordinary.
Gerhard Krüger's critique of Heidegger
Born in 1902, Gerhard Krüger was the son of the calculator Joseph May Krüger and his wife Pauline Helene Martha née Jähniger. Krüger attended high school in Friedenau and studied philosophy, Protestant theology and history in Jena, Tübingen and finally Marburg. He received his doctorate under Hartmann in 1925. After his habilitation in 1929 with the thesis Philosophy and Morality in Kantian Critique, he worked as a private lecturer in Marburg. His teachers were Paul Natorp, Rudolf Baltmann, Nicolai Hartmann and Martin Heidegger. Together with Heidegger and his pupil Gadamer, he signed the 1933 Nazi confession of allegiance of the professors and students at German universities. He was appointed professor extraordinaire at University of Marburg in 1938, and then became a full professor of philosophy in Munster in 1940. In 1952 he moved to Frankfurt-Main as Gadamer’s successor, who in turn took over Karl Jaspers’ chair in Heidelberg. In Frankfurt-Main he lectured on metaphysics, history of philosophy and philosophy of history until 1956, when he retired. He died in Baden-Baden, 1972.
According to Krüger, Heidegger misinterprets the ‘’yoke’’ in the Cave Allegory. Heidegger believes that Being and aletheia are under the yoke of the Idea of the Good. What Heidegger misinterprets, due to him ignoring sections pertaining to the analogy of the Divided Line, is that intelligible things (Forms) are only knowable for nous if they are illuminated by truth (aletheia), as the middle between intelligizing and the intelligibles. Truth relates these two, and this relation is called by Socrates the yoke. Therefore, the relationship between aletheia and the Good is not that of yoke. More crucially, this means that the Idea of the Good, as the Cause, does not put anything under a yoke. Furthermore there is no reason to believe that in Plato the Idea of the Good in terms of its ontological status is the highest Idea. Plato’s characterization is very careful; he does not say it is the ,,supreme’’ Idea, but rather that it only stands beyond Being and Forms and so that it is neither of the two.
Heidegger misinterprets the relationship between perception and orthotes in Plato. While orthotes and aletheia are both present in Plato, aletheia is nonetheless still fundamental and orthotes is derivative. Plato does not forget the fundamental character of unconcealedness. In addition, Heidegger misinterprets logos according to Kruger. Rather than using dialogues for cosmetic reasons or simply as a mere way of presenting his own thought, it expresses the very form of Plato’s thought; Plato’s thinking, just like Heidegger’s, is that of ways. Instead of being a philosophical embarrassment, Plato’s Logos is not simply confined to that which is spoken or the boasting of a triumphant reason. Plato’s dialogues present a searching reason (forschende Vernunft) which is always seeking and anti-dogmatic.
For Krüger, Heidegger underestimates Eros as Stimmung. It is not simply a feeling, but an attunement that enables and conditions the givenness of the world. It opens up the world and the possibilities therein because it is not just a subjective state, and that is why Eros is the fundamental setting of Plato’s Symposium and dialogues in general. Platonic dialogue as inquiry is inseparable from Eros. This is the crux of disagreement between Kruger and Heidegger; whereas Heidegger chiefly thinks here of anxiety and boredom, Kruger’s answer, appealing to Plato, is eros. The path to Being Itself is through eros.
As a result, Heidegger does not grasp that Plato’s first and foremost conveying a pathway to understand the Forms, and not simply a propositional or logical argument. Because of this he also gravely mistook the notion of presence and eternity in Plato; Krüger believes that Plato has fully appreciated the problem of temporality/forgetfulness and that the true problem for Plato instead was the forgetfulness of eternity. This is not to emphasize the pre-eminence of eternity or presence over time, to simply elevate eternity as the ground of duration in time. This is not presence through which past and future are forgotten, but in which whole time as such manifests itself as a flash and is viewed in this flash as such. Krüger points out that the Form of the Beautiful shows itself not as some eternal and static substance but rather all of a sudden - ἐξαίφνης.
This experience is not at all like that one which Heidegger discerns in Greek metaphysics, namely the contemplation of eternal being. To my mind Krüger's reading is more immanent to what Plato wanted to convey and what Plato himself thought was problematic in his own time and Periclean Athens before him in particular. That is the emphasis on finitude and mortality at the cost of forgetting of eternity - but for Plato, the latter is not in fact a static, immobile present that never ceases. A good example of that is precisely ἐξαίφνης; Plato does not destroy its original Homeric meaning, namely as the flash - but in the Homeric and pre-Platonic setting, ἐξαίφνης was tied to meaning sudden shift of emotions, changing from anger to happiness and vice versa, like a flurry in which human beings are utterly subordinate to and has connotations with finitude. Achilles' story is typical: his anger, his grief, and his regret at the end when talking to Priam. This is why ἐξαίφνης both in the Symposium and in the Parmenides is now the flash of the eternal, in Parmenides in particular being the ontological flash in which the entire world comes to be. Plato tried to overcome what he perceived to be the defects of his age through its self, its very concepts and structures themselves. It is this flash of eternity, in the Symposium as attunement and in the Parmenides as the most true that is truly liberating for Plato according to Krüger.
Gadamer and Friedländer’s critiques
Gadamer likewise argued that Plato actually held the fundamental truth of ἀλήθεια, and that Heidegger’s view that Plato’s thought would inevitably lead to the oblivion of being and modern subjectivity is not correct. Gadamer has various strategies to prove his point of view.
Gadamer accepts truth as aletheic but believes Heidegger utterly misunderstood Plato in this respect: for Gadamer Plato is not the initiator of the oblivion of Being and aletheia but rather sees Plato formulating a thinking which is devoted to preserving aletheia as unconcealment. For Gadamer, Heidegger fundamentally missed this due to his inability to understand the Idea of the Good in its apart-ness from other forms. In this sense, he casts doubt on Heidegger's thesis that Plato is the initiator of metaphysics. Instead he believes his view of Plato, as well as his theory of history of forgetting of Beyng, is one-sided in part because of the Nietzschean influence. Similarly to Paul Friedländer, Gadamer sees both correctness and unconcealment in Plato’s understanding of truth, particularly Philebus and the Seventh Letter. He also claims that Heidegger misunderstood the status of the Idea of the Good because he made it too close to thinking of it under eidos, whereas the Good is not eidos.
This is where the fulcrum of Gadamer's critique resides; Heidegger makes the mistake of seeing the idea far too much like eidos, in other words as a ,,that’’ which appears in order to be seen by the intelligible sight. Gadamer painstakingly wants to show in his book that deals with the Good in Plato and Aristotle that Plato never uses eidos for the Idea of the Good, but only idea and that therefore the meaning of eidos has to be sharply distinguished from idea. The ‘‘idea of ideas" is what enables aletheia as the yoke which binds the intelligible and the intellective together by providing the light which grants the possibility of intelligizing in the first place, whilst maintaining the idea is irreducible to it and, per the Seventh Letter, hardly visible. An alternative to this view, albeit close to Gadamer's conclusion, is Friedländer's Plato. He criticized Heidegger for being unable to see that Plato contains both aletheia as unconcealment and correctness; while later he retracted some of his more sharper critiques, recognizing that there was a certain sort of transformation from the pre-Socratics to Plato which otherwise Heidegger claimed was essential in inaugurating the beginning of Western metaphysics, Heidegger recognized in his later works that the view that there was an essential transformation from unconcealment to correctness was mistaken, thanks to Friedländer's influence. Heidegger instead claimed that correctness was already present in pre-Socratics such as Homer, in line with Friedländer's critique.
Heidegger's critique of Parmenides
I’d like to quote some essential paragraphs from the commentary of the Moira fragment, Four Seminars and Zur Sache des Denkens. In my view Heidegger’s issue does not reside in the fact that Parmenides was aware of the nominal and verbal duplicity in ἐὀν – he readily admits this – the problem resides in the fact that Parmenides did not think the unfolding of the duality itself, or more precisely, he did not think the It that grants the duplicity itself. In order to substantiate this, here are the relevant passages. First from What is Called Thinking?
The duality of individual beings and Being must first lie before us openly, be taken to heart and there kept safely, before it can be conceived and dealt with in the sense of the participation of the one, a particular being, in the other, Being…In terms of grammar later on, and thus seen from the outside, Parmenides' saying says: take to heart ἐὀν as participle, and with it take heed of ἔμμεναι in ἐὀν, the Being of beings. However, no further inquiry and thought is given to the duality itself, of beings and Being, neither to the nature of the duality nor to that nature's origin. The duality emerges only up to the point where the ἔμμεναι of ἐὀν, the Being of beings, can be taken to heart. Thus it is that the one thing which remains to be asked-what are particular beings in their Being?-comes to the fore within the sphere of this duality. (p.221, translation by J.G. Gray)
While the passage above is a critique of Western metaphysics which did not heed Parmenides’ proem correctly, Heidegger is more explicit about Parmenides’ own shortfalls in relation to this theme in his commentary on Moira:
To what extent can and must noein, thinking, come to light in the duality? To the extent that the unfolding in the duality of presencing and present beings invokes legein, letting-lie-before, and with the released letting-lie of what lies before us, grants noein, something it can take heed of and thus preserve. But Parmenides does not yet think the duality as such; he does not at all think through the unfolding of the twofold… (Moira, p. 91)
Heidegger ends the paragraph with the note that Parmenides does see that noein is inseparable from the duality, but the crucial question that Parmenides did not ask is why not. Finally, I think these passages can be connected with Heidegger’s statements on Parmenides from the Four Seminars and Zur Sache des Denkens. This is where Heidegger’s claim of Es gibt comes into play, as the It which grants Being, or the duplicity inherent to ἐὀν-ἔμμεναι itself. I invoke the Four Seminars and the Zur Sache des Denkens because they’re relatively from the similar period and are a good representative in my opinion as to what Heidegger thought about Parmenides at this stage. First, from the Seminars:
ἔστι γὰρ εἶναι ‘’Being namely is.” I have long considered this saying; for a long time, I have even been ensnared in it. For does it not reduce being to the level of beings? Only in regard to a being can one say that it is. And here Parmenides now says: being is. This unprecedented saying marks exactly the distance between ordinary thinking and the unusual path of Parmenides. The question now is to know if we are capable of hearing with a Greek ear this Greek saying which speaks of ἔστι and είναι. (Klostermann 1977, p. 135; Mitchell/Raffoul 1986, 2003, p. 158-9)
While Heidegger rates positively Parmenides’ statement that Being is and differentiates it from the modern (per example, Hegelian) understanding in that it does not reduce it to the ontic, this is still connected to Parmenides’ awareness of duplicity. Parmenides, however is not aware of the unfolding of the twofold itself from a more primordial source, which is what the following paragraphs from Zur Sache des Denkens touch upon:
Being is not; It only gives Being [Sein gibt Es], as the disclosure of presence… The historicity of the history of Being determines itself apparently only out of the way in which Being occurs […] out of the way in which It gives Being. At the beginning of the disclosure of Being, it is true that Being, εἶναι, ἐόν is being thought, but not the “It” that “gives.” Parmenides says instead ἔστι γὰρ εἶναι, “For Being is.” (Tubingen: Niemeyer 1969, p. 6-8)
As such, while Parmenides is capable of thinking unconcealment in the genuine Greek way, he is incapable of thinking concealment. Of course it remains to be said that Heidegger’s standpoint with relation to Parmenides and Heraclitus is not that he wants to repeat them or simply remain negatively critical but to turn in the direction they were taking and advance beyond them by addressing what they didn’t. Of course, it remains to be ascertained whether Heidegger’s interpretation of Parmenides is ultimately an external intervention into Parmenides. Parmenides does think ontological difference but it is evidently not the ontological difference late Heidegger thinks, and to my mind there is some kind of projection of presuppositions that is unwarranted.
Finally concerning the third region between ἀλήθεια and δόξα, this is actually a very old and an open question in the scholarship to this day. Contemporary translations of the last part of the proem (1.28-1.32) are very careful when it comes to the ending:
It is necessary that you learn everything: both the unshaken heart of persuasive truth as well as the mortals’ opinions, in which there is no true conviction. But nevertheless these you shall learn as well, how appearing things should be accepted: all of them altogether as beings.
Namely what is contentious are the last two verses. There have been many arguments they should be taken to be signify a third independent standpoint between Truth and Opinion. Ever since Karl Reinhardt’s original research scholarship was always interested if there is something in-between that relates Aletheia and Doxa. Of course this is far from settled.
Some thoughts on will-to-Ereignis in Heidegger
The following post consists of my reflections that were spurred on by a conversation I had with a friend who is a Heideggerian and deeply invested in his work regarding the letting-go of willing in later Heidegger’s work, as well as related concepts such as Gelassenheit, Ereignis and Es gibt. One of the main concerns he shared with me regarding the letting-go of willing is that he does not believe Heidegger intended it as a mere inversion, namely that non-willing is simply antithetical to willing as such. Furthermore, he cast doubt on how exactly the movement or transition from the will to non-willing is to manifest, without reducing this movement to the positing of the will itself. As my friend nicely stated:
Since Ereignis is already always given before anything else (as the initial nodding, as H. says), it itself is already completely (i.e. finishedly) at play when the contents of Sein emerge, which include us and our willing. Ereignis is, so to say, the grounding "ousical" mechanism which gathers & constellates a "here" into itself and its operation, which then allows for an entity to properly essence [*from* it].
It would seem to me that, if we'd have something like "will to Ereignis", then it'd amount to something like "letting it happen" (which retroactively would reveal it already always has happened), and only afterwards, if we followed its trail, whether through thinking or poetizing, we'd come to discover any of its content. The letting-be-ness or Gelassenheit would be the corresponding gesture towards Ereignis, since Ereignis already-always has let things happen too.
In this sense, there would be no room for willing in the humanist sense. We would instead allow for "what always-already was to be" to pass [from...*] into the world through us (and our bodies), and we'd discover what those contents are post facto, once they have already been generated. In other words, it's through us that any poietization/production may be called into the world. We have only to let ourselves be called into our role, so to say, as the "letting pass through" of any productive content.
But yeah, if we still want to characterize this attitude as "willing (to let be)", I guess from within the perspective of willing it will appear as a willing. From elsewhere, though, it seems like that kind of willing no longer has a place within that framework. If it's still a "willing" at all to "let things happen" is definitely a good question to explore; it very well might be.
My response was as follows:
I think it's certainly true that if it is a mere inversion, it cannot genuinely be a "non-willing" qua Gelassenheit, but I think Davis himself warns against this view [of mere subjective inversion] by quoting Heidegger regarding how this a) remains beyond any kind of willing b) and is overturning of the will in such a way that one finds the originary essencing of the will underneath the modern subjectum (for instance, just like Heidegger theorizes regarding how the "subject" was something foreign and other to the Greeks, who understood the "I" as precisely in a non-modern way / or how the originary meaning of "image" is not representation, but coming-to-presence). If this willing is going beyond oneself that coincides with the determination to "go back" and essentially determine from within the past its possibilities in the move of facticity, then the transformation of the willing into a non-willing, as Dasein [clearing of presence] is by being propriated within the absolutely singular "eventing" of Ereignis. While Ereignis is already given, the way there can be propriating as such is only insofar as Dasein in affirming its willing goes beyond itself [factically - this is the movement of the "affirmation" of willing], which simultaneously coincides with the overturning of the will by being propriated into the Source/Nothing/Aletheia as the ever-prevailing power (to echo Heidegger's comment that Dasein is that which stands under the overwhelming power of Beyng in lectures on Hölderlin) that in its self-refusal completes the movement of Dasein's self-transcendence. That said, this is definitely far away from "ordinary attitude" - we have simultaneously here the mechanism of self-transcendence both futurally and historically (the latter is emphasized in Davis, as the going back and recourse to the beginning as transformation of past possibilities); this is willing qua willing that only belongs to authentic Dasein.
In this respect, I think he is purposefully playing off of an Eckhartian paradoxical understanding of the will; the higher the will is posited, the nearer is its willed self-dissolution in the desert of the Godhead; only here, this is interpreted in a "historicist" way [Die Geschichte des Seyns]. In other words, while the philosophical willing [both futural and historical] is already not subjective willing, it is not yet will-to-Ereignis unless there is propriation as such, which, for the "condition of its possibility" also demands the attunement of the knowing will to the Dasein of the Volk it "inhabits" and most importantly, the overturning of the highest willing by its own going-beyond-itself that makes the will not-willing [in Fichte's words, the Sicherblicken - the I that sees itself beyond itself only truly "is" I, inasmuch it seeing beyond itself, and seeing itself in a glance beyond itself means that it is not as I] through the reciprocal exchange with Beyng [which gets us into Gegend qua openness]. The going-beyond-itself and abiding in the dwelling of the Open coincides with its being "overwhelmed" by Beyng. I think that is how "will-to-Ereignis" might work, but please take the above explanation with a sack of salt.
In my limited view, I think that the point that this is the overcoming of the modern willing/subjectum is very much adequate. As for ''beyond willing'', I assume that the move for him consists in the kind of willing that coincides with its letting-go-of-itself; it is a willing that affirms itself by overcoming itself into a letting-be, which paradoxically, precisely in virtue of its being-at-work it brings about its own ''sublation'' into non-willing. But this can only be done in the openness (Gegend), so I further assume that Dasein, as the lower clearing in contrast to the higher clearing, overcomes ''willing'' in and through the immanence of willing through a readiness for what is in-apparent.
In this respect, if we also consider that according to him, the overcoming of the will must be understood in and through his thought that the being of beings appears to modern metaphysics as will, and that consequently the human being must appear as emphatically willing, the overcoming of willing consists in recognizing this as the most extreme epoch of history of Beyng that coincides with the extreme point of forgetting of Beyng/Nothing/Source/Es gibt/Ereignis, etc. This movement of ''immanence'' can also be recognized thematically in motifs like ''where the danger grows, also does the saving power'' or subjects regarding the Ge-stell, etc. I think that the circularity is present in this particular case, which my friend aptly pointed out above with regard to my interpretation. To put it in Heidegger's words:
Thus we constantly find ourselves moving in a circle. And this is an indication that we are moving within the realm of philosophy. Everywhere a kind of circling. (GA 29/30:266/180)
And with regard to the interpretation of the will above, I suggest the following excerpts. As my friend also pointed out, the ''will'' is not something simply present in modern metaphysics for Heidegger, but goes all the way back to the Greeks.
By the word “will” I mean, in fact, not a faculty of the soul, but rather—in accordance with the unanimous, though hardly yet thought-through doctrine of Western thinkers—that wherein the essence of the soul, spirit, reason, love, and life are grounded. (GA 77:78)
Further, in order to substantiate his reading of ''will as being of beings'', he points out that: “Thinking is willing, and willing is thinking” (G 30/59)“. This is especially relevant in German Idealism, where it is posited first in Kant and then Fichte that there is no difference between thinking and willing. The one who is most credited for this is actually Fichte (1794 WL) and it was later radicalized by Schelling and Hegel. In this sense, the will is a Grundstimmung.
Going back to the above, it is relevant insofar it implies the overcoming of the attunement that is willing, and which is inherent to Dasein insofar as Dasein is fundamentally inseparable from attunement, and the latter is a fundamental ''constituent'' of Dasein insofar it is what makes Dasein as Dasein. In this respect, I think that the overcoming of willing in the aspect of going beyond willing as such (and not only the modern subjectum) should be re-interpreted in light of this.
An attunement is a way [eine Weise] . . . in the sense of a melody that does not merely hover over the so-called proper being at hand of humans, but that sets the tone for such a being, i.e., attunes and determines the manner and way [Art und Wie] of their being. . . . [Attunement] is . . . the fundamental manner in which Dasein is as Dasein [die Grundweise, wie das Dasein als Dasein ist]. . . . [It] is not—is never—simply a consequence or side-effect of our thinking, doing, and letting. It is—to put it crudely—the presupposition for such things, the “medium” within which they first happen. (GA 29/30:101; see also GA 9:110/87)
More to the point:
The will in this willing does not mean here a faculty [Vermögen] of the human soul . . . ; the word “willing” here designates the being of beings as a whole. Every single being and all beings as a whole have their essential powers [das Vermögen seines Wesens] in and through the will. (WhD 35/91)
Now, regarding the willing's overcoming of itself, I'd posit it consists in re-interpreting these two excerpts thoughtfully:
Willing always brings the self to itself; it thereby finds itself out beyond itself (N1 63/52).
In willing we [seek to] know ourselves as out beyond ourselves; we have the sense of having somehow achieved a state of being master [Herrsein] over [something] (64/52)... [willing] is being-master-out-beyond-oneself [Über-sich-hinaus-Herrsein]” (76/63)
In this respect, the will is, to put it in Davis' words, an ecstatic incorporation; it is that which, by virtue of itself, goes beyond itself and thereby is itself by mastering what is beyond it. Because of this, as the fundamental attunement the ''expression'' of will as such, which can also be seen in Ge-stell, is ordering, commanding, organizing, etc. Of course the paradox of the will is this: it is nothing but going-beyond-itself but it is precisely because of this that it is itself. In this sense, the will wills that which is always already willed. It does so by overcoming itself, which is its willing, but in overcoming itself it is already with itself, because the will wills itself. And the will is nothing but the willing of itself.
To will is to will-to-be-master [Wollen ist Herr-sein-wollen]. . . . The will is not a desiring, and not a mere striving after something, but rather, willing is in itself a commanding. . . . What the will wills it does not merely strive after as something it does not yet have. What the will wills it has already. For the will wills its will. Its will is what it has willed. The will wills itself. It mounts beyond [übersteigt ] itself. Accordingly, the will as will wills out beyond itself and must at the same time in that way bring itself behind and beneath itself. Therefore Nietzsche can say: “To will at all is the same thing as to will to become stronger, to will to grow. . . .” (The Will to Power, section 675, 1887–88). (GA 5:234/77–78)
The overcoming of the will as the fundamental attunement, therefore, as I interpret Heidegger consists in willingly renouncing willing that coincides with the readiness to be the clearing (Da) of what strictly speaking remains beyond willing (Sein). On the one hand, we have the fundamental awakening of a new attunement: ''Where there is attunement, there is the possibility of a change in attunement, and thus also of awakening attunement. (GA 29/30:268/181)'', as well as the carrying out of the will to fulfill its paradoxical movement: if the will is nothing but the willing of itself as going-beyond-itself in order to be master of itself, then the movement consists in simultaneously radicalizing its movement of going beyond itself, but in virtue of abandoning itself and its own movement as willing itself - and by becoming the clearing of presence - it coincides, as immanently with relation to its self-overcoming, with the coming-to-presence of that which absences and is the inapparent. In other words, the will by willing never truly overcomes itself; it simply overcomes in order to be itself. The ''culmination'' consists in paradoxically allowing the full motion: if the will is nothing but the overcoming of itself, then the genuine resolution of willing is to abandon itself. This is supposed to be the thinking beyond philosophy, or a thinking that is not simultaneously a willing but is the originary ground thereof that has remained concealed in its movement of self-concealment: ''thinking [which] would be something other than willing'' (G 30/59).
To be further clear: the will does not renounce itself in order to become nil. If this were mere a renounciation, then as a not-willing it would merely be the will positing/willing its own nothingness; in other words, a mere inversion that still presupposes the will's movement of willing (which is nothing but the will). This is why he says for instance that this is not a denial of will (GA 77:77) or an abandonment into a divine Godhead (GA 34/62), but rather an uncovering of a more primordial thinking that is not not-willing, but non-willing, etc. The movement is not by renouncing itself, but rather in paradoxically fully affirming the implications of the will's movement itself: the will overcomes itself, but precisely by not willing -itself-; or, it overcomes the movement of overcoming by finally letting go of overcoming, which paradoxically fulfills the will's essence as overcoming. If the will is nothing but overcoming then it transcends itself into non-willing (and not simply overcoming in order to be itself - this is, in light of this view, not a true overcoming) in uncovering its originary essence which reciprocally comes-to-presence in letting-be. In other words, by letting-go the will arrives to its truth. That would be my ''circular'' or ''twohalves'' interpretation, as my friend aptly named it in our conversation.