The Companion to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy stakes a precise claim within Heidegger studies: it offers a set of disciplined, conceptually discriminating paths for entering the fugally composed terrain of Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), together with a patient reconstruction of the book’s internal motors—its experimental diction, its composerly sequencing, and its demand that thinking should become responsive to the truth of be-ing as enowning. Its distinctive contribution lies in joining strategies of orientation with close engagements of decisive knots—the time of the work, the leap, the abyssal ground, the last god—so that method, vocabulary, and conceptual stakes co-articulate. The volume’s editors and authors make the Companion function as a tutelary field of practice: an apprenticeship in how to undergo the book’s thinking while keeping faith with the textual jointure that makes the undertaking possible.
The Companion frames Contributions as a writing that stretches the sense of bookhood itself. Charles E. Scott’s introduction emphasizes that Heidegger “made” this “book” through aphorisms, returns, departures, and layered reconsiderations that push the boundary of what a book is, like a diary held together by a long journey; the point is to convey a thinking in motion that attempts to find a disciplined traveling with be-ing rather than a destination in doctrine. The introduction thereby names the core task: to let the reader discern the “performative thinking of the truth of ‘be-ing’,” which the Companion takes pains to keep in view as the living center around which the essays revolve. The figure of a fugue—recurrent motifs gathering in contrapuntal returns—becomes a guiding image for the book’s composition and, correspondingly, for the Companion’s method of accompaniment.
Two structural decisions in the Companion secure that task. First, Part I foregrounds orientation: how to acquire the right stance for reading, how to hear Heidegger’s vocabulary in its own register, and how to measure the transition from metaphysics to be-ing-historical thinking without reducing it to the reinstatement of a conceptual system. Second, Part II gathers case-readings of focal sections—the dimensions of time, ground and ab-ground, the leap, Da-sein’s placement, the Vergessenheit Gottes, the last god, the meaning of “be-ing” in the closing part—so that the orientation is constantly tested against the text’s own turning points. Scott explicitly motivates this double movement as a response to the organization of Contributions itself: introductory approaches prepare an entry into the whole, and specialized readings “circle back” to beginnings in a fugal rhythm that respects the work’s transitions. The Companion thus models an interpretive gait that alternates between attunement and analytic focus, returning to first steps whenever a motif reappears altered by the path it has already traversed.
Susan M. Schoenbohm’s “Orientation” advances a decisive methodological clarity: philosophy, in the sense that governs Contributions, must be grasped as questioning into be-ing under temporal, disclosive conditions, without appeal to a supersensible ground. The shift from Being and Time to Contributions therefore intensifies the primacy of temporal disclosiveness and refines the status of Da-sein as that region where the being of beings becomes at issue. As Schoenbohm argues, to read the book is to experience a reconfiguration of care as the disciplined standing-in amidst beings and the standing-out toward be-ing’s withdrawal—an abyssal experience that deposes inherited securities without collapsing into subjectivism. The attunements she details—startled dismay, reticence, the creative “hanging-in” of reserve—name not psychological states, but the tonalities through which thinking acknowledges the refusal of direct givenness and learns to guard the singular occurrence of things as enowned. The “double movement” she tracks—toward the fascination of entities and back into the abyssal question—becomes a dynamic index of the text’s own idea.
That idea governs the Companion’s sustained attention to saying. Daniela Vallega-Neu’s essay on “poietic saying” articulates how the transformation from proposition to saying belongs to the work’s inner necessity. In her reconstruction, poietic words shelter the withdrawal of be-ing by letting the strife of world and earth appear; this does not mean inventing a neologistic language for its own sake, but listening, in reserved attunement, for the enowning call that opens saying at all. The essay insists that this transformation of language remains at risk—always threatened by metaphysical misunderstanding—precisely because it must draw upon inherited words while bending them toward a more originary task. She therefore reads the failure of language in Being and Time as a prelude to the more radical experience in Contributions: be-ing occurs as refusal (Versagung), and the work’s first fugue, Anklang, sounds as an echo of that refusal—an echo without a source, an echo of silence that founds the necessity of a saying that listens. The Companion thereby sharpens a practical criterion: a reading of Contributions must show how its language wrestles with refusal and how words can temporarily shelter, without enclosing, the unsayable.
Richard Polt’s essay on “the event of enthinking the event” complements this by interrogating the activity/passivity schema that tempts us to misunderstand thinking. By gathering Heidegger’s dispersed names for the practice—“inceptual thinking,” “ingrasping,” “en-thinking”—Polt argues that enthinking is enowning’s own happening insofar as the emergence and flourishing of meaning is what enowning indicates. The consequence is both methodological and criteriological: representational conceptions of truth as correctness must give way to truth as the event of letting meanings arise, and thus the standards appropriate to such an event are internal to what is to be thought; there is no external method to apply. Polt’s further proposal—enowning as the event, in the strong sense of a reinterpretive turning-point that discloses a new measure for interpretation itself—recasts the reader’s work as participation in a decisive juncture, rather than as the passive reception of a deposit. This gives sharp edges to the Companion’s insistence that one cannot approach Contributions from late summaries or from general slogans: one must undergo the book’s own eventive self-clarification.
What, then, distinguishes the Companion’s approach to Contributions as a whole? Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann’s contribution advances two hermeneutic resolves. First, read Contributions from itself rather than through later expositions; the later writings presuppose the pathway that is first cut here. Second, grasp the being-historical perspective as a transformation of fundamental ontology, retaining and transfiguring what must be retained from the earlier question of being. This clarifies why the Companion persistently treats Wesung (essential swaying) as the key to the book’s historicality: to say that “enowning is originary history itself” is to locate history in the way the truth of be-ing occurs, not in a sequence of conceptual determinations imposed from outside. The directive is unambiguous: interpretive responsibility means learning to think within the guiding perspective that the treatise itself enacts, instead of importing alien criteria.
Scott’s introduction repeatedly insists that the work’s measure lies in its success at releasing thinking from the transcendence/immanence alternative and at orienting attention to the enactment of beings without reifying be-ing as a highest entity or a hidden substrate. The Companion’s essays keep that measure in play by returning to three convictions that Scott extracts from the text’s movement: beings draw their essence from their enactment; only single-minded attention to the mortal, temporal fragility of enactment can alter our comportment; and such alteration is a condition for turning away from a machinational world that exhausts beings by subsuming them under objectified uses. The Companion sustains the philosophical stakes of these convictions by showing, in different keys, how the text’s compositional choices—its alternation of short fragments with meditative paragraphs, its insistence on rehearsal and return—perform the very discipline they demand.
This discipline becomes concrete when the Companion turns toward the book’s inner layers. William McNeill’s attention to the time of Contributions (signaled in Part II’s first reading) draws out how the work articulates time/space as the dimensional opening in which determinations occur, rather than as a neutral container. The leap essays (Kenneth Maly on turnings and the leap; Walter A. Brogan on Da-sein and the leap of being) pick up Schoenbohm’s attunements and show the leap as a decision that cannot be grounded in subjectivist willing; it is a displacement through which Da-sein comes into its belonging to be-ing. John Sallis’s treatment of grounders of the abyss traces how Ab-grund functions as the non-ground that both ungrounds and enables grounding, making plain why the Companion is methodologically vigilant about avoiding both foundationalism and romanticized indeterminacy. As the sequence approaches its theological center, Günter Figal’s analysis of the forgetfulness of God and David Crownfield’s reading of the last god articulate a sobriety that matches Vallega-Neu’s point about refusal: the last god is not a supernal supplement but a name for a way the truth of be-ing withdraws and calls, altering measure and world-formation. The closing reading by Parvis Emad returns to the terminus of the book—“On ‘Be-ing’”—and secures the Companion’s insistence on keeping the entire arc in view: the last part is not a mere appendix, but the decisive place where the work’s saying sharpens its own claim. The Companion’s architecture lets these readings displace one another in a measured sequence, a feature that echoes Scott’s observation that the fugal movement of Contributions requires repeated returns to beginnings.
One of the Companion’s most valuable achievements is to make palpable how the book’s vocabulary gains necessity from the work it performs rather than from a thirst for novelty. Vallega-Neu shows how the necessity arises from the event of refusal: inherited words bend against their ordinary usage because the matter at stake—be-ing as enowning—cannot be said as a statement about an object. Hence the deliberate leverage exerted on familiar terms—truth, ground, history, leap—and the care with which the Companion introduces glosses where needed: Wesung as essential swaying; Ereignis as enowning; Ab-grund as abyssal non-ground. Polt’s compact glosses knit these into an accessible map: beings as what shows up; being as the meaning of beings; Da-sein as the condition in which that meaning becomes a living issue; be-ing as the happening that grants such questioning; enowning as the way be-ing essentially happens. Because these glosses are embedded within a critical genealogy of truth and logic, they avoid lexical fetishism: the names are vectors of methodological conversion rather than detachable labels.
The Companion also clarifies what counts as evidence in this terrain. On Polt’s reconstruction, enthinking does not submit to extrinsic canons; it must be judged by how it lets what is to be thought determine the path of thinking in the very event of its emergence. Vallega-Neu’s account of poietic saying supplies a parallel criterion: where words can be shown to shelter withdrawal—to let the strife of world and earth appear without enclosing the unsayable—the language is doing its work. Schoenbohm’s analysis of attunement adds a third: where a reading can describe the tonalities that accompany the transition and can display how they alter care, Da-sein, and decision, it is answering to the book’s matter. The Companion thereby proposes a triangulated standard: eventive attunement, sheltering-saying, and the inner self-determination of thinking by its topic.
This is why the Companion’s editorial framing is important. The insistence that contributors cite the Emad/Maly translation while making their own renderings explicit when they diverge is not mere apparatus; it expresses the conviction that translation is itself a mode of the path, a practiced carrying-over that continuously risks metaphysical relapse. Scott underscores this when he remarks that all the contributors worked in the German well before the translation appeared, and that readers gain by comparing preferred renderings against the published version. The Companion’s pedagogy thus occurs on two levels: it demonstrates the practice of reading Contributions in its fugal sequence, and it models translation as a philosophical operation inseparable from the book’s matter.
Treating composition, the Companion finds in Heidegger’s arrangement a concrete pedagogy of displacement and return. The sequence from Preview into the six fugues—announced in the Companion through closely keyed motifs—teaches the reader to live with echo, to convalesce within silence, to measure the leap by the way it interrupts and re-grounds. The orientation essays anticipate this by repeatedly stressing the necessity of relinquishing the demand for didactic continuity; the long practice of re-reading beginnings becomes an essential part of the book’s method. Dennis J. Schmidt’s piece, in a register of bracing honesty, recalls the shock of the book’s publication and the difficulty of reading a work “intimate” in its self-address, whose stylized idiom refuses smoothing. The avowal of difficulty becomes, in context, an index of fidelity: to reduce difficulty prematurely would be to obscure the historical task the book sets—preparing a thinking that can receive the other beginning in its own idiom.
The Companion is careful to preserve the asymmetry that belongs to the book’s center: the truth of be-ing is not a beyond that could stabilize entities from above, nor an immanent infrastructure that could be inventoried; it is the event of their enactment. Scott articulates this most compactly when he writes that the thought of enowning leaves behind the transcendence/immanence dualism by thinking the event of be-ing as at once the eventuation of beings. The philosophical wager follows: only an alteration in how the meaning of being is understood—toward enactment and away from subjective presence—can redirect our comportment in a machinational age. The Companion maintains pressure on this wager by reading Contributions as a training in alertness rather than as a treatise of theses.
The result is a volume that both respects and intensifies the book’s character. It refuses the relief of a system, and it refuses the resignation that would make of Contributions a cryptic work. Instead, it advances an narrative of its own: that one learns to read Contributions by acquiring a composite discipline—attunement to refusal, practice in poietic saying, patience with fugal return, and readiness to leap. This discipline is enacted across distinct engagements: hearing time/space as the opening that grants determination; discerning the leap as Da-sein’s decisive displacement; learning to think ground as ab-ground; allowing the last god to mark a new measure rather than to answer a theological lack; and receiving the final part’s “On ‘Be-ing’” as the place where the entire arc gathers itself. The Companion’s contributors keep these moments in play by letting them merge into and displace one another, so that no single theme hardens into a center.
One can say that the Companion offers more than exegesis. It furnishes an apprenticeship in the work’s distinctive rigor and an account of the book’s compositional sequence and outward frame that equips readers to undertake their own passage. It identifies the pressures that shape the path—language under the sign of refusal, thinking under the demand of event, care under the claim of withdrawal—and it gives readers practical means for sustaining those pressures without collapse. In doing so, it honors the stakes that Scott sets at the beginning: that the measure of Contributions is whether it occasions a thinking that can travel with be-ing in its essential swaying. The Companion makes that measure explicit, gives it conceptual articulation, and embeds it in a pedagogy of return. It thereby earns the claim, echoed across its essays, that Contributions is indeed pivotal for the corpus and that the proper response is a transformed practice of reading—one that holds itself open, in reticence and discipline, to the event of enowning as it comes to pass.
Simon Gros 
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