OK I said I wasn't going to do this, but the "sway," the "overwhelming," refers to beings as a whole, which, if you've read B&T, you know is revealed in the experience of Angst (basically meaninglessness). (Elsewhere Heidegger says that "beings as a whole" are also revealed in profound boredom, overwhelming joy, and love, but Angst is how they show up in B&T.) Meaning is "wrested" from this meaninglessness through human activity making unconcealed what has been hidden by the "overwhelming." "Violence" is understood as the act of doing so. I suspect he owes a lot here to Jaspers and Hugo Ott's idea of the Holy.
Like I said, this H's Promethean "storm the heavens" phase, which I personally don't happen to like much and which goes from about 1933 to the time of the second Nietsche lecture. Probably not coincidentally coinciding with the period of identification with National Socialism and then disillusionment with it.
The Heidegger material I personally enjoyed most were:
Being and Time (of course) The Phenomenology of Religious Experience (I LOVE that reading of the Gospels!) The lecture course on Parmenides Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta 1-3 (an AMAZINGLY close reading of Aristotle's text) The lecture course where he discusses boredom and the lecture course that is basically Part III of Being and Time -- I always forget their names. They were given in the late 20s. The lecture on Leibniz where he discusses the principle of sufficient reason (Der Satz von Grund is the German title, I don't remember the English translation) Anything where he talks about Meister Eckhardt.
--- Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
>
> How do you make this interpretation of "violence"
> fit what is said in
> the passage?
>
> "Beings as a whole, as the sway, are the
> overwhelming, *deinon* in
> the first sense."
>
> "The *deinon* [in this sense] is the terrible in the
> sense of the
> overwhelming sway, which induces panicked fear, true
> anxiety, as well
> as collected, inwardly reverberating, reticent awe.
> The violent, the
> overwhelming is the essential character of the sway
> itself."
>
> This makes "the violent" the "essential character"
> of "beings as a
> whole" as "the sway".
>
> This is a "disclosure" about "beings as a whole",
> isn't it, i.e. it's
> the outcome of "wresting disclosure" not the act of
> "wresting
> disclosure".
>
> "Humanity" is claimed to be "deinon" in two senses:
>
> First, it "belongs to Being" and is therefore
> "deinon" in the first
> sense, i.e. it is "the violent".
>
> Secondly, it's "deinon" in the second sense of
> "violence-doing". In
> this "It gathers what holds sway and lets it enter
> into openness".
> "What holds sway" is "the violent, the overwhelming"
> since this
> constitutes "the essential character of the sway
> itself." So
> "violence-doing" gathers what holds sway" - "the
> violent" - and "lets
> it enter into openness".
>
> Ted
>
>
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