Dall’Ereignis all’Happening. Rorty e Heidegger sulla natura del linguaggio

The article focuses on Rorty’s interpretation of Heidegger’s Ereignis in light of his philosophy of language. Rorty considers Heidegger, along with Dewey and Wittgenstein, the most influential philosopher of the 20th century because he proposed a ‘poetic’ or ‘pragmatistic’ alternative to the traditional ‘scientific’ view of language, jumping out of the clash between ‘Gods’ and ‘Giants’. However, according to Rorty, after the Kehre Heidegger would undermine this discovery by making the Ereignis an entity superordinate to the discursive practices of human beings, falling back into a form of metaphysics that conceives of Sprache as the ultimate substitute for God. This error would be due to a general underestimation of the Darwinian conception of an ever-evolving language in which no metaphors are more worthy than others. Rather than as the Event of Being, the Ereignis should be conceived as a linguistic space open to plurality and confrontation between different vocabularies, as a Happening in which speakers converse to find the most meaningful words for the development and well-being of humanity. Exploring the main junctures of this reading, the paper aims to reconstruct Rorty’s historical interpretation of Heideggerian thought, identifying some internal inconsistencies and suggesting that it may derive from a selective or even deforming reading of Dewey’s evolutionary pragmatism.