NOTES

Introduction

§1. Deconstructing Action

1. Sp 206/ISp 16. Although I refer in each citation both to the German edition and to the published English translation, I follow the latter only exceptionally. I use double quotes for all quotations, whether identified directly or only indirectly, single quotes for conventions, emphasis, etc.

2. SvG 123 f.

3. VA 25/QCT 18.

4. N II 428/EPh 25.

5. KPM 195/Kpm 206.

6. KPM 237 f./Kpm 253.

7. This concept enters even less here into the classical theories of the best State; cf. Plato, The Republic (558c), and Aristotle, The Politics (1302 b 28 ff.), who both characterized as ἄναϱχος the unjust form of government that democracy was in their eyes.

8. Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” (A 481), in Lewis White Beck, ed., On History (Indianapolis, 1963), p. 3.

9. The two quotes are from VA 133 f./BWr 349.

10. Wm 245/QB 93. On “deconstruction,” Abbau, cf. GA 24 31/BPP 22 f. and VS 133.

11. “Perhaps patient meditation and painstaking investigation . . . are the wanderings of a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the world that is ineluctably to come and which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowing,” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore, 1976), p. 4 (trans. modified, emphasis added).

12. SvG 73.

13. SZ 39/BT 63 (emphasis added).

14. It is with reference to these epochal principles that I should like to read the lines from Novalis quoted by Heidegger: “Would the supreme principle contain, in the task it imposes on us, the supreme paradox? Would it be a position which never allows us any rest, forever attracting and repelling us, no sooner understood than always rendering itself unintelligible again? A position that ceaselessly prods our activity—without ever exhausting it, without ever becoming habitual?” (quoted SvG 30).

15. Wm 183/BWr 231.

16. VA 229/EGT 78. Cf. “Essential thinking is an acting” (Wm 106/EB 359).

§2. Theory of the Texts

17. VS 73. Cf. below, ch. 12, n. 24.

18. The two quotations are from EdD 23/PLT 12, a text written in 1947, the first in which Heidegger speaks of “the topology of being.”

19. Understanding, Verständnis, is to be taken “in the originary sense of Vorstehen: to be standing before, to be on a par with, to be of a stature to sustain that before which one finds oneself” (VS 72, cf., SZ 143/BT 183).

20. VS 73.

21. SdU 15 f./SA 476 f.

22. SdU 18/SA 479. This reading of Heidegger is defended most coherently in the article by Karsten Harries, “Heidegger as a Political Thinker,” Review of Metaphysics XXIX (June, 1976):642–669, repr. in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven and London, 1978), pp. 304–328. That the structure of “resolve” in BT implies a need for authority appears highly debatable to me. Even those who find such a reading convincing would still have to acknowledge what in 1953 Jürgen Habermas called a transformation in the “quality of appeal” between BT and IM. In BT, writes Habermas, “Heidegger still exalted the quasi-religious decision of the private, self-individuated existence as finite autonomy,” while the praise of power and violence was only a momentary “fascist coloration” of the subsequent discovery of “the history of being,” Jürgen Habermas, Philosophisch-politische Profile (Frankfurt, 1971), pp. 67–75, trans. Dale Ponikvar, “Martin Heidegger. On the Publication of Lectures from the Year 1935,” in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, VI, 2 (Fall, 1977): 155–164. What makes for this tendency in reading BT is a voluntarist interpretation of Entschlossenheit. I will return later to the problem of the will (see below, sec. 42). But to convince oneself of the weakness of this starting point it is enough to see Henri Birault, for example, sustain with at least equal cogency that Entschlossenheit prefigures the later notion of Gelassenheit, Heidegger et l’expérience de la pensée (Paris, 1978), p. 519. This latter reading can at least avail itself of an explicit affirmation in Wm 94/BWr 138 as well as in the recently published lectures on Parmenides (1942–43), which Heidegger opposes the conceptual cluster Entschlossenheit/areta/alētheia/aidōs/Entbor-genheit to the cluster Entschlossenheit/will/subject (GA 54 111). Does the same concept in BT yield both the call to service and the call to letting-be?

23. Karl Jaspers, Notizen zu Martin Heidegger (Munich, 1978), p. 183. See also Philosophische Autobiographie (new ed., Munich, 1977), pp. 92–111. These two publications continue a debate formerly opened by Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno and summarized by Beda Allemann, “Martin Heidegger und die Politik,” in Heidegger, Perspektiven zur Deutung seines Werks, ed. Otto Pöggeler (Cologne, 1969), pp. 246–260. It has been taken up more recently in slightly different terms by Jürgen Habermas, who now opposes enlightenment to the “new right,” a distinction which for him covers that between modernism (whose spokesman is Kant) and post-modernism (one of whose spokesmen is Heidegger). This typology becomes cruder still when rationality and communication are described as modern enlightened ideas, whereas today’s “young conservatives” (Nietzschean, Heideggerian, French), “old conservatives” (Aristotelian, Straussian) and “neo-conservatives” (early Wittgenstein, late Gottfried Benn) stand accused of identifying modernism and nihilism, state intervention and totalitarianism, anti-militarism and sympathy for terrorism. . . . In writing he has formulated some of these criticisms in a summary treatment of the late Adorno and Heidegger, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, 1981)—for instance vol. I, pp. 516 ff. My earlier remarks about enlightenment may suffice at this point to suggest how untenable these facile disjunctions and amalgamations are.

24. Harries, op. cit., p. 669.

25. H. Birault, op. cit., p. 74.

26. “Firmness of the will” and “clearness of the heart” are the themes of the funeral eulogy delivered by Heidegger in 1933 for Leo Schlageter, G. Schneeberger, Nachlese zu Heidegger (Bern, 1962), p. 48.

27. Ibid., pp. 63 f. and 136.

28. The first position is more common; see, for example, Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheits-begriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin, 1967), p. 288. The second position, that of Gerold Prauss, Erkennen und Handeln in Heideggers “Sein und Zeit” (Freiburg, 1977), is undoubtedly more difficult to defend. In any case, Prauss presents it only as complementary to the first, ibid., pp. 30 f. The third is most in conformity with Heidegger’s intention; see for example Otto Pöggeler, “Einleitung,” in Pöggeler, ed., Heidegger, op. cit., p. 34.

29. Wm 145/BWr 193.

30. Cf. BT, sec. 69. The statements in this important section squarely contradict those made about “knowledge of the world,” sec. 13. In this latter text, theoretical knowledge is the result of a suspension of Besorgen: “If knowing is to be possible as a way of determining entities given as objects by observing them, then there must first be a deficiency in our concernful dealings with the world” (SZ 61/BT 88). But this same conception of the genesis of 𝛝εωϱει̃ν from a suspension of manipulation is criticized in the other text: “It would be tempting to characterize the changeover from ‘practical’ circumspective manipulating, using and so forth, to ‘theoretical’ exploration in the following way: pure looking at entities is something that emerges when concern holds back from any kind of manipulation. What is decisive in the ‘genesis’ of the theoretical attitude would then lie in the disappearance of praxis. . . . However, the discontinuance of a specific manipulation in our concernful dealings does not simply leave the guiding circumspection behind as a remainder” (SZ 357/BT 409).

31. Wm 146/BWr 194, cf. VA 55 f./QCT 167.

32. SZ 358/BT 409.

33. The inauthentic project of existence is marked by a double reduction: coexistent beings, that is to say, others, become “objects” of concern (Besorgen) rather than of solicitude (Fürsorge, SZ 122/BT 159). Concern finds itself in turn reduced to the “mathematical project” as an existentiell a priori (SZ 362/BT 414). Through this double reduction, the three types of entities mentioned become undifferentiated, indifferent. The world is then the endless accumulation of the same, the addition of products detached from their context (entweltlicht, SZ 177/BT 221). Authentic totalization, on the contrary, “lets others be” and “shatters all one’s tenaciousness in whatever existence one has reached” (SZ 298 and 264/BT 344 and 308). It is clear that inauthentic totalization here prefigures “calculative thinking,” and authentic totalization the releasement (Gelassenheit) necessary to “meditative thinking” (Gel 15 and 25/DTh 46 and 54). Consequently, the later concept of technology does not have its root in the analyses of technique in BT, but in those of the inauthentic project of existentiell totalization. Technique still appears harmless here, whereas the traits that—dissociated from any existentiell project—later apply to worldwide technology, such as quantification, standardization, “one-dimensionality,” etc., in BT characterize inauthenticity.

34. In BT there are two lines of reasoning about the “primordial” or “originary self” that once again contradict each other flagrantly. On one hand, “the originary phenomenon” (SZ 129/BT 167) is the “they,” das Man. Authenticity can then only be the result of an existentiell modification of this primordial “they-self.” But in other texts, the situation is exactly the reverse: “inauthenticity has as its ground possible authenticity” (SZ 259/BT 303). Here it is the authentic self that is originary, primordial. On this issue, one can even quote two literally contradictory statements: “The authentic self . . . can be only an existentiell modification of the ‘they’, which has been defined as an essential existential” (SZ 130/BT 168). Compare this with: “The ‘they’ . . . is an existentiell modification of the authentic self” (SZ 317/BT 365). The first type of argument is the one that predominates in BT (see also SZ 179, 267, 268/BT 224, 312, 313). On these difficulties as a whole, see the article by Joan Stambaugh, “Authenticity and Inauthenticity in ‘Being and Time’,” Research in Phenomenology VII (1977):153–161. For us, what counts is that in the period of BT, the question of the possibility of a technological domination of nature and its roots in Dasein not only remains unsolved but is not even clearly raised: is technological praxis the result of the techniques of scientific research, of the mathematical project as an a priori of inauthentic existentiell totalization, of the “they” as primordial existential structure, or again of a certain historical turn, the “decontextualization” (Entweltlichung) effected by Descartes (cf. BT secs. 6, 19–21, 43)? Whichever of these four answers is chosen, none of them allows one to say, as Heidegger later does, that “the modern natural sciences have their roots in the development of the essence of modern technique, and not the reverse” (MHG 72/IW 37). This is further evidence that the most decisive concepts, still fluid in BT, receive their precise denotation only when read in the light of the later writings.

35. EiM 152/IM 199. In 1966, driven to defend these lines, Heidegger opposes the concept of “technology” they contain to his later concept of Gestell (Sp 204 f./ISp 16). But these belated explanations raise more questions than they answer:

—Why was this passage not delivered orally although it stood in the manuscript of 1935? Because of “the imbeciles, stool pigeons, and spies” in the auditorium, says Heidegger. Does Heidegger want to give this parenthesis, thirty years later, an anti-Nazi ring that would have provoked an informer? Does the line contain a protest against National Socialism?

—In context, the parenthesis hardly sounds like a criticism: in 1935 Heidegger still trusts that if modern man can come to grips with technology it will be through National Socialism. Then how far did his disillusionment really go when he resigned from the university rectorate a year earlier? Does the line contain some form of allegiance to National Socialism?

—In 1935, technique, as I have said, is not yet seen in the context of Western metaphysics, but rather in that of authenticity. The later notion of Gestell, then, depoliticizes technology, since man’s encounter with it is no longer thematized in the context of political forces. So, does the line perhaps hint at a relationship between technology and fascism which Heidegger would never take up again?

Protest, allegiance, and an implicit charge that technology is the hand of fascism cannot be meant at the same time. The basic ambiguity in Heidegger’s comment on his earlier remarks lies in the understanding of technology. His attempt to make these lines express some amalgam of the three positions above is contradictory. One cannot praise National Socialism for allowing control of technology and at the same time equate National Socialism with “Americanism” and “the Communist movement” as being determined by “planetary technology.” In 1935 National Socialism was said to possess an inner truth and greatness because of a potentiality that neither Americanism nor Communism could offer. The same line which in 1935 opposed National Socialism to planetary technology is used in 1966 to claim a fundamental identity between National Socialism and global technology.

36. EiM 34/IM 45. The description of what is happening in America and Russia recalls the very terms of the passage on inauthentic totalization in BT quoted above (note 33): “In America and Russia this development grew into the boundless etcetera of indifference and always-the-sameness—so much so that the quantitative took on a quality of its own” (EiM 35/IM 46).

37. Hw 102 f./QCT 152 f.

38. “Ways, not works.” This epigraph is all that was left for Heidegger to formulate, shortly before his death, in lieu of a projected preface to the complete edition, GA.

39. SZ 263/BT307.

40. “Possibility as an existential is the most originary and ultimate positive way of characterizing Dasein ontologically” (SZ 144/BT 183).

41. SZ 38/BT 63.

42. SΖ 250/BT 294.

43. This opposition was first introduced by William Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague, 1963), p. 22; see the reservations expressed by Heidegger in his prefatory letter, ibid., pp. xxii f.

44. SD 44/OTB 41.

45. Ν II 486/EPh 79. This extreme formulation should be tempered in the following way: what draws to a close in the technological age is the history of epochs, but not, of course, the history of presencing.

46. The first division of Henri Birault’s remarkable work cited above—“Une introduction kantienne à la question de l’être” (pp. 45–353)—testifies, in its own way, to the continuity between Kant and Heidegger that I have been defending in this Introduction. It is regrettable, however, that for the most part Birault’s book was composed prior to the publication of SD (this is suggested by, among other things, his observations about SvG and US, p. 394, and about the lecture “Time and Being,” p. 452). This particular circumstance renders many passages in the second part obsolete from their very date of publication. Indeed, Birault uses expressions such as “ontico-ontological difference,” “Es gibt,” “unconcealment,” “epochē,” “proximity,” “correspondence,” without ever even suggesting that with the lecture “Time and Being,” these phrases cease to be applicable to the constellations of presencing incipient with technology, and that other terms—“world and thing,” “favor,” “event,” “clearing,” “fourfold,” “thinking”—must be substituted for them (see below, sees. 35–40, “The transitional categories”). Quoting SD only incidentally (pp. 476, 502 f., 506, 548—citations used only to illustrate points established from earlier writings), and not reading Heidegger backward, Birault seems to ignore the hypothesis of closure, although it was clearly adumbrated since 1946 in the concept of “eschatology of being” (Hw 301 f./EGT 18). This entails a confusion between the two senses of “concealment” in Heidegger: concealment as lēthē, an integral part of alētheia, is not clearly distinguished from concealment as epochē. Now, with the metaphysical closure, the second mode of concealment comes to an end; in this consequence lies the entire import, and possibly the sole content, of the hypothesis of closure. To speak, for example, of “the epochē as the draw and withdrawal of being” (the title of page 547, see the table of contents), is clearly to attribute to the epochē what belongs to alētheia. If, “for the thinking that enters into the Ereignis, the history of being is at an end” (SD 44/OTB 41), then it cannot be claimed that “the epoch of being is nothing other than the untruth, the mystery, the obscurity in being: a measure of darkness in the heart of the light” (p. 548). Since this confusion between the epochal withdrawal and the essential, aletheiological withdrawal of being is frequent in the literature, I want to stress the point here. Quoting a text from “On the Essence of Truth” about alētheia, Birault comments: “Untruth guarantees truth its essential origin and its essential element.” Granted. But this does not entitle him to go on to say: “Untruth is therefore the epochē or suspension of truth” (p. 499). The first untruth designates the absence that abides essentially in the heart of presencing. The second untruth is entirely different. It is the “forgetting” or the withdrawal of being over the course of the metaphysical age. In regard to the first, it may be said indeed that “without ever lifting it, thinking unveils the veil of being.” But it cannot be said that “because thinking of being is thinking of the forgetting of being, the true name for this thinking is remembering. ‘Denken ist Andenke’” (P. 550). Forgetting and remembering (Werner Marx had already established this in 1961; see below, sec. 20, nn. 2 and 18) are terms that apply retrospectively to the history of metaphysics and are canceled by the hypothesis of closure. Therefore, to say that “the thought of being does not abolish the forgetting of being” (p. 551) is plainly ambiguous. The “thought of being” does not abolish lēthē, the essential untruth in the heart of truth, but it certainly abolishes the epochē, the forgetting or withdrawal of the truth of being since the Socratic turn. Lēthē is and remains the transcendental condition for error and errancy; but the entire effort of Seinsdenken is directed toward ending the concrete errancy that has been our own since the Greeks, and which Heidegger terms “epochal.”

47. SD 44/OTB 40 f.

48. NI 28/N i 20.

49. SD 55/OTB 51.

50. Gel 37/DTh 62 f.

51. “The conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience,” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 158, B 197.

52. SD 2/OTB 2, cf. SD 25/OTB 24.

53. According to GA 24, 29–31/BPP 21 f., the construction—“the central piece of the phenomenological method”—is the “free project” that brings itself into view. This construction or projection makes it possible to establish the structures of being (what later and in another context I will call the categories of presencing). The de-construction is the act complementary to the projection of those structures, the act by which they are dislodged from their casing of facticity. The reduction, finally, is the guiding back of the gaze from the naive natural grasp of entities to the question of their being. Heidegger calls the implementation of this whole program, “durchkonstruieren” (obviously another Kantianism in these early works, cf. the “durchgängige Bestimmung,” complete determination, e.g., Critique of Pure Reason, A 571, B 599). The complete construction “brings into light the pattern of foundations.” Elsewhere, Heidegger speaks of “the ‘dissolution’ which loosens and lays bare the seeds of ontology” (KPM 39 f./Kpm 46).

54. Cf. SD 32/OTB 30. For the double step backward, see also below sees. 18 and 19.

55. VA 180/PLT 181, cf. SD 80/OTB 73 (emphasis added).

56. EiM 35/IM 46 and MHG 73/IW 37.

57. This in no way prejudges the nature of what I will call below the practical a priori, see Part V. As to the attempts to read outlines of theoretical anarchism or utopianism into BТ, they “mutilate”—to say the least—the project of fundamental ontology as well as that of existential analytic, as Karsten Harries rightly remarks, art. cit., p. 651, n. 21, about the works of Graeme Nicholson, “Camus and Heidegger: Anarchists,” University of Toronto Quarterly XLI (1971): 14–23, and “The Commune in Being and Time,” Dialogue X, 4 (1971):708–726.

58. “The distinction, which is metaphysical in origin, between theory and practice, as well as the representation of a transmittance between the two, obstructs access to the understanding of what I call ‘thinking’ ” (Sp 214/ISp 22).

59. About φϱόvιμoς as the “personification of the norm” in Aristotle, see Pierre Aubenque, La prudence chez Aristote (Paris, 1963), p. 41. The author also shows the “technical” and hence physicist origin of this normative relation: “In the Nichomachean Ethics ethical judgment is compared . . . to the know-how of the carpenter,” p. 42. For the question whether in Aristotle’s ethics actors are indeed related ideally to the standard of the “prudent man,” see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles (Heidelberg, 1978), and below, sec. 11, n. 30.

Part One: Genealogy of Principles

I. Understanding History through Its Reversals

1. TK42/QCT 44.

§3. The Puma-Shaped City

2. SvG 40, 42.

3. Bertrand Flornoy, The World of the Inca, trans.. W. Bradford (New York, 1965), pp. 111–112 (translation modified).

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Genealogy of Morals,” Preface secs. 2 and 7, trans. W. Kaufmann, Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York, 1966), pp. 451 and 457.

§4. The Rise and Decline of Principles

5. SvG 192/PG 208.

6. Heidegger says “Scheu,” see below, sec. 19, n. 194.

7. SvG 15, 96 f., 192.

8. The “reversal (Wandel) in being,” understood as “reversal of its destiny,” TK 38/QCT 39.

9. Quite a few phrases in Heidegger’s texts concerning the history of being are openly reminiscent of Hegel’s vocabulary: “eschatology of being” (Hw 302/EGT 18); the “identity and simplicity of the destiny of being” (SvG 153); “the essence of being hitherto declines into its still veiled truth” (Hw 301/EGT 18), etc. But in spite of these similarities, many of which should be explained by a desire for dialogue, Heideggerian phenomenology does not permit one to speak of a rationality underlying the reversals of history. For Heidegger, the essence of metaphysics is not itself metaphysical. About the dialogue, Aussprache, with Hegel see for instance GA 55 42.

10. Heidegger’s characterization of all Western philosophy since its beginning in classical Greece as “metaphysics” (e.g., Wm 141/PDT 268) has attracted various criticisms. In The Rule of Metaphor, trans. R. Czerny (Toronto, 1977), Paul Ricoeur writes: “I regret the position assumed by Heidegger. This inclosure of the previous history of Western thought within the unity of ‘the’ metaphysical seems to me to express a sort of vengefulness” (p. 311). Jürgen Habermas, Philosophisch-politische Profile (Frankfurt, 1971), considers “this conception, on the whole unilateral” (p. 73), trans. D. Ponikvar, “Martin Heidegger: On the Publication of Lectures from the year 1935,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal VI, 2 (Fall, 1977): 162. For Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie (Frankfurt, 1976), “his speculative efforts toward a philosophy that transcends metaphysics” cannot prevent Heidegger, in spite of himself, from objectifying the un-objectifiable (vol. I, p. 259). Many of these criticisms would collapse if their authors saw that what is at stake in the program of “deconstructing metaphysics” and the claim of an “end of philosophy” is an appreciation of the situation in which we find ourselves today, rather than a summary judgment on the past.

11. See for example N II 141–202/N iv 96–149.

II. Understanding Practice through the “Turning”

1. TK 40–42/QCT 41–43.

§5. Practical Philosophy and the Hypothesis of Closure

2. Hw 50/PLT 61 f. Several of the efforts to “extract” a political philosophy from Heidegger’s writings are based upon this text. Alexander Schwan, Politische Philosophie im Denken Martin Heidegger (Cologne, 1965), has carefully traced the parallel between the essence of truth as it sets itself into work in art and as it unfolds itself in “the deed that founds a political state.” But for Schwan, the apogee of such an unfolding of the essence of truth is the totalitarian state. Schwan’s point of departure is undeniably correct: Heidegger’s phenomenological deconstruction of metaphysics henceforth deprives political philosophy of its traditional foundation. But Schwan does not apply the regressive reading of history which alone would justify that starting point. In the words of Jean-Michel Palmier, Les écrits politiques de Heidegger (Paris, 1968), “for us, the question is to understand how Alexander Schwan, starting from correct principles, arrives at absurd consequences” (p. 152). These few lines from “The Origin of the Work of Art” provide a textual base that is extremely slender for developing a political philosophy out of Heidegger purely by exegesis. Otto Pöggeler, Philosophie und Politik bei Heidegger (Freiburg, 1972), qualifies such an attempt as “inadmissible” (p. 122) if it relies primarily upon that article on the work of art. Still, the reasons advanced by Pöggeler are hardly convincing either. This essay, he writes, “belongs to a ‘romantic’ position of Heidegger which he later abandoned” (p. 122). In the Introduction above I have tried to show on the contrary—and this is the only viable argument against those who believe they can read fascist tendencies into Heidegger’s works—that a ‘regressive’ hermeneutics is the condition for fully understanding Heidegger’s itinerary, retained as a path and in its totality. If Schwan makes too big a case out of those sentences from Holzwege, and Pöggeler too little a case, Bernard Dauenhauer, “Renovating the Problem of Politics,” Review of Metaphysics, XXIX (1976):626–641, is content to indicate merely a plan for working from this Heideggerian text. What is needed, he writes, is to achieve “the delimitation of the realm of politics from other realms of human expression” (p. 639). He sketches five elements that appear “if what Heidegger says about art is translated into the question of what the political is and is then conjoined with his reflections on meditative thought and technology.” These five elements are: the historical, irreducibly manifold, speech-like, autonomous character of political action as well as the task of preserving tradition (pp. 635 f.). By virtue of their larger frame of reference, these remarks successfully correct Schwan and respond somewhat, implicitly at least, to the question posed by Palmier, but they are far from delineating even the contours of the terrain in which, after Heidegger, political thinking could take root. This terrain is the field of the history of Western metaphysics, and its contours are spelled out by the categories (see below, Part IV) of the phenomenological deconstruction of that history. Thus the preliminary for any reconstitution of political thinking after Heidegger is what I am suggesting as the genealogy of epochal principles.

3. There are four senses to be distinguished in Heidegger’s usage of the German Lichtung, opening or clearing. The word is a translation of the French clairière, see SD 71 f./OTB 65. All four senses depend on the understanding of truth as alētheia, as unconcealment. The primary sense of “clearing” is that of the opening constituted by being-in-the-world insofar as the being that we are is the “there” in which entities can show themselves (SZ 133/BT 171 f., cf. Hw 49/PLT 61). A first slippage of meaning occurs when the location of truth is no longer thought of in reference to Dasein but to logos. The logos “yields” the opening in which presencing can occur. Now unconcealedness is understood as the difference between presencing and what is present (VA 247/EGT 93). As an event, the opening is seen as constituted by “nature,” phusis, rather than by man (Höl 55–58). The third sense refers to the history of being. Here Heidegger speaks of “the history of the clearing of being” (IuD 47/IaD 51) or of the “epochal clearings of being” (SvG 143). The fourth sense, finally, is ahistorical: “the clearing is the opening for everything that is present and absent” (SD 72/OTB 65). This opening is thought of as the atemporal condition of history. It “grants being and thinking as well as their presencing to and for each other” (SD 75/OTB 68). In this last sense, Lichtung has lost all affinity with light metaphors and, as the translator observes, is rather “related to [the French] lever (i.e., alleviate, lighten a burden),” OTB 65, note. The sense that has priority in the genealogy of epochal principles is the third one. For the fourth, see below, sec. 37.

4. Herbert Marcuse, “Heidegger’s Politics: An Interview with Herbert Marcuse by Frederick Olafson,” in Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal VI (1977):28–40, considers that due to his nearly exclusive focus on philosophical works Heidegger tends “to get away from the social reality rather than into it.” He accuses Heidegger of a “fake concreteness.” “Heidegger’s concreteness was to a great extent a phony, a false concreteness” (ibid., pp. 29–31). Cf. H. Marcuse, Negations (Boston, 1968), p. 32. This general tendency, expressed a bit crudely by Marcuse, is confirmed perhaps by the two instances when Heidegger does leave the philosophical tradition: the poetry of Hölderlin and modern technology. It is confirmed there because Heidegger understands both instances in relation to his one philosophical issue, the question of being.

5. The manifest order is not presencing, understood as an event, but presence: the modality in which the totality of entities present epochally arranges itself.

6. To say that the political is the domain where an epochal principle is most apparent is not to claim that all other phenomena can only be explained politically, nor that phenomenology, as the deconstruction of metaphysics, ceases to be regional. The political is only that region (Gegend) of phenomena whose essential trait is to join publicly the theoretical and the practical. The analysis of ‘regions’ is given up only with Heidegger’s discovery of Ereignis.

7. N II 421/EPh 19.

8. For Heidegger, the problem of the text usually comes down to that of poetic texts. As he wrote to the literary historian Emil Staiger, all speech is “that unconcealment which reveals something present,” but the poem, in this instance a poem of Mörike, “brings to language that very mode of presencing” which belongs to language in general. Emil Staiger, Die Kunst der Interpretation (Munich, 1971), pp. 35 and 40. On the expression “bringing to language” see Beda Allemann, Hölderlin und Heidegger (Freiburg, 1954), p. 108.

9. Such an activity, described in SZ 66–72/BT 94–102, should not be confused with work as it is described in Wm 218–220/QB 42–68. The figure of the worker represents the reign of worldwide technology. See Palmier, op. cit., pp. 169–293.

10. Some of Heidegger’s critics, particularly early ones, denounced the almost total absence of any reference to such elementary experiences as love and hate in his work. At least regarding the first period of his writing, their observations result from a misapprehension of the very task of existential analysis: to lay bare the ontological structures that compose, order, and determine the unity of the being that we are as well as its ontic possibilities (see SZ 13 f./BT 33 f.). Among these critiques, the most recent is Marcuse’s “Heidegger’s Politics,” op. cit., p. 33. Love and hate are ontic “existentiell” forms of the ontological “existential” structure called “being-with,” Mitsein (SZ 114–125/BT 149–163).

11. G. W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, Preface, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1952), p. 13.

12. Thus the “theater” is the fixed order of incipient modernity (Hw 84/QCT 131 f.) and technology as “Gestell,” framing, that of closing modernity (VA 27 f./BWr 301 f.).

13. This premise of the “history of being,” that there exists no primordial norm-giving order, marks the radical difference between Heidegger and the Frankfurt School. One of the preoccupations that indeed makes a ‘school’ out of this latter group is its attempt to construe forms of ultimate legitimation, see for example Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston, 1975), p. xxv: “the close connection between material questions of a theory of contemporary social formation and foundational problems . . . can be clarified within the framework of a theory of communicative competence.” Cf. idem, Erkenntniss und Interesse, “Nachwort” (Frankfurt, 1973), p. 413.

14. Michel Foucault’s description of “order in its very being,” which he calls epistēmē, appears very much like the working out of a concrete instance of the history of being in Heidegger (the philosopher, he says, whom he has read most). This order, writes Foucault, shows itself in a region “anterior to words, perceptions, and gestures . . . more solid, more archaic, less dubious, always more ‘true’ than theories . . . ,” The Order of Things (New York, 1973), p. xxi. But as an archē of knowledge, epistēmē is one of the regions where being gives itself, and the archeology of human sciences only one case of deconstructing modalities of presence.

15. SvG 123 f.

16. “Greek classic antiquity agreed that the highest form of human life was spent in a polis and that the supreme human capacity was speech. . . . Rome and medieval philosophy defined man as the animal rationale; in the initial stages of the modern age, man was thought of primarily as homo faber, until in the nineteenth century, man was interpreted as an animal laborans,” Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York, 1968), p. 63. Concerning the transition from the order prior to the polis to that of the polis, see idem, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), p. 26; concerning that from the Greek polis to the Roman civitas, ibid., pp. 23 f., and the entire second chapter, “The Public and the Private Realm,” as well as Between Past and Future, pp. 120–135; on that from the Roman Empire to the medieval community, ibid.; on the rise of the nation state and the passage to imperialism, idem, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1958), pp. 123–302; on the transition toward the totalitarian state, ibid., pp. 305–479; finally, on the decline of the republican state, idem, Crises of the Republic (New York, 1969), pp. 3–47 and 201–233, as well as idem, On Violence (New York, 1970), passim.

17. This ‘bottom’, Grund, where the origin shows itself as neither archē nor principle (in an opposition to both which is not ‘contradictory’, but ‘disparate’) is the abyss, Abgrund or Ungrund. These terms borrowed from Meister Eckhart, are meant to negate the origin both as cause and as condition (SvG 71).

18. Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 22–49.

19. It is in the sense of eidos and of idea as immediately graspable by sight that I call the political order of an epoch the “aspect” of whatever is present within it. Presencing itself, on the other hand, will have to be thought of otherwise than through the metaphor of visual perception, viz. through that of hearing.

§6. The Closure as the Withering of the Pros Hen Relation

20. SvG 73.

21. SvG 206/PG 219.

22. US 37/OWL 159; the translation omits the words “Spitze des Speeres,” point of the lance.

23. Wm 312/Phy 224 and SvG 111. Cf. H. G. Gadamer, Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles (Heidelberg, 1978), pp. 91 f.

24. Regarding medieval philosophy, Heidegger seems however to deny that the pre-understanding of causality which determines the representation of the world as created is of Aristotelian origin (Hw 19/PLT 29).

25. Agere sequitur esse. See the various formulations of this axiom in Thomas Aquinas, cited by Joseph de Finance, Etre et agir dans la philosophie de Saint Thomas (Rome, 1965), pp. 70–72.

26. Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, II, 19; 100 a 11 with the two commentaries by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 1975), p. 314, and, more specifically, Kleine Schriften, vol. I (Tübingen, 1967), p. 110. The archē to which the pros hen relation points in the last two books of the Politics is the perfect state; in the Ethics, it is happiness. Throughout the branches of Aristotelian philosophy the paradigmatic thought pattern remains that of ousiology, the doctrine of substance.

27. The special issue of the Revue française de science politique devoted to “Political Theory,” Vol. XI, no. 2 (1961), contains several contributions illustrating this formal identity. See especially the remarks by Eric Weil, “Philosophie politique, théorie politique,” ibid., pp. 267–294.

28. As I said, this concept of formal identity between the theoretical and the practical philosophies depends on the reading of Metaphysics, IV, 2; 1003 a 33 (“Being is spoken of in many ways, but always relative to one term”) which remained predominant in Aristotelianism until Franz Brentano, On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, trans. R. George (Berkeley, 1975). Opposed to this reading based on the analogy of being stands that of Pierre Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote (Paris, 1966), especially pp. 190–198. For Aubenque, the concept of the analogy of being is not authentically Aristotelian and consequently the One to which the pros hen relation refers is not, in the last analysis, substance: “the pros hen has nothing to do with a relation of attribution” (p. 194). Rather, it refers to being, as distinct from ousia and as a “residual” factor of the categories. Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 278–289.

29. Nicomachean Ethics, V, 6; 113 a 26 ff. This passage deals with political justice, that is, with justice as it applies to free men (which presupposes the existence of unfree men in the city, “unequals,” toward whom relations are ruled by a mere semblance of justice, ϰ⍺ϑ’ὁμoιότητ⍺). Justice among citizens is founded upon their “proportional or arithmetic” equality (ϰατ’άναλογίαν ἢ ϰατ´ ἀϱιϑμόν). Then Aristotle adds that this latter equality refers subjects, “not to a man, but to a rational principle.” Thus justice and equality among citizens are understood in terms of the same reference to a first that provides the rational schema in the later theory of substance and accidents, see for example, Metaphysics, IV, 2; 1003 b 6–10.

30. This deconstruction, writes a commentator, has “in effect undercut all of what Heidegger would call the metaphysical theories concerning the relation between what is to be thought and what is to be done or achieved politically,” Dauenhauer, “Renovating the Problem of Politics,” op. cit., p. 629.

31. The metaphor of the body politic illustrates well the analogical relation between authority and subject. It has provided a semblance of legitimacy, based more on imagination than reflection, for enslavement to the state or to the “mystical body of Christ” as well as for the theories of a Hobbes (the state as “artificial man”) or a Hegel (the state as “organism”).

32. “What we call a site . . . is that which gathers in itself whatever is essential about a thing,” SvG 106. Political action has its site just as a poem (US 52/OWL 172), or a thing like a bridge (VA 154/PLT 154), or, again, modern man (Hw 194/QCT 54), or God himself (Hw 235/QCT 100), or finally, each entity, present or absent (VA 222/EGT 72).

33. Here I am following a suggestion by Jean Beaufret: “Should we translate Erörterung as ‘situation’ then? Nothing indeed would be better if only the word ‘situation’ had not been so used and abused,” Dialogue avec Heidegger, vol. 2 Philosophie moderne, (Paris, 1973), p. 148.

34. The distinction in BT between entities “given as present,” vorhanden, and entities “given for handling,” zuhanden, prefigures the topology to the extent that this distinction designates the sites where Dasein encounters entities in the world (SZ 132/BT 171). In subsequent writings, Heidegger understands a site no longer in reference to being-in-the-world, but on its own terms, as a self-clearing, self-manifesting or self-alleviating (Selbstlichtung, Her 189/H 117) of presencing. Thus in US 38/OWL 160 the “situation,” Erörterung (and not “discussion” as the English translation has it), is the preliminary for elucidation, Erläuterung. This latter in turn makes it possible for clarity, das Lautere—unconcealed presencing—to show itself.

35. Sp 206/ISp 17.

36. “Essential space,” Wesensraum (Häl 16) or “room for play,” Spielraum (Hw 194/QCT 55).

37. SD 44/OTB 41. The act of thinking that retrieves the event of appropriation, Henri Birault correctly writes, “opens up a certain history, it makes history,” Heidegger et l’experience de la pensée (Paris, 1978), p. 378. Strictly speaking, however, this cannot also mean that such an act “makes an epoch,” as the author adds. Still to speak of epochs beyond the boundary of the closure amounts to a confusion between the “reversals,” Wenden, within metaphysics and the “turning,” Kehre, out of metaphysics. I therefore cannot agree with Birault when he adds: “The ‘historical’ thinking of being responds and corresponds to the epochal character of the destiny of being,” ibid. It responds and corresponds indeed to the constellations of being, but these constellations are no longer “epochal.” Birault however appropriately describes the several meanings of the word Ereignis, event or event of appropriation, in Heidegger: “Firstly, das Ereignis commonly signifies ‘the happening’. Secondly, das Ereignis derives from the word eigen, which means ‘proper’ or ‘properly’. From this sense come, for instance, die Eigenschaft, ‘the quality’ or ‘property’ in the sense of characteristic feature, and das Eigentum, ‘one’s own good’ or ‘property’ in the sense of possession, as well as the currently somewhat obsolete philosophical notion of die Eigentlichkeit, ‘authenticity’. Thirdly, in a more remote and hidden way, das Ereignis makes reference to the old German verb er-äugen, which is constructed from das Auge, ‘the eye’ or ‘the look’,” ibid., p. 41. I might add that Kant still says eräugnen for ereignen, e.g., Critique of Pure Reason A X and Eräugnis for Ereignis, ibid., A 199, 451, 543 f.

38. Letter to Peter Gast, August 14, 1881, Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bänden, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich, 1956), vol. III, p. 1172.

39. IuD 24/IaD 33. This text speaks of belonging as a constellation “of man and being.” Belonging is therefore not something that happens in one domain or another, rather it occurs in that domain (Bereich) which in BT is called ontological (SZ 13/BT 34). However, this constellation of man and being, or the ontological essence of the entity that we are, is only the condition for the possibility of belonging to regions of phenomena: objects, tools, works, actions, etc. This transcendentalism is described, although in another language, in VA 158/PLT 157.

40. SvG 188.

41. Aristotle, De Anima, III, 4; 426 a 19.

42. René Char, Le nu perdu (Paris, 1971), p. 48; La Parole en archipel (Paris, 1962), p. 73; Commune présence (Paris, 1964), p. 255.

III. Genealogy of Principles and Anti-Humanism

1. Wm 176/BWr 225.

2. Wm 142/PDT 269.

3. Wm 141/PDT 269.

4. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. B. Brewster (New York, 1970), pp. 229 f. and Positions (Paris, 1976), p. 132.

5. Gottfried W. Leibniz, “New Essays on the Human Understanding,” Preface, #4, in Philosophical Writings, trans. M. Morris (London, 1934), p. 146.

6. Louis Althusser, “Reply to John Lewis,” Marxism Today, XVI (1972), Part 1:316.

7. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972), p. 14.

8. Wm 153/BWr 202.

9. Claude Lévi-Strauss, L’homme nu (Paris, 1971), pp. 614 f.

§7. A Threefold Break with “Humanism”

10. Gel 37/DTh 62.

11. Althusser, For Marx, op. cit., p. 227.

12. Ibid., p. 67.

13. Ibid., p. 229.

14. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. A. Jolin and J. O’Malley (Cambridge, 1970), p. 137, cited in VS 125. Heidegger believes that “Marxism in its entirety rests on this thesis.”

15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” 1, trans. W. Kaufmann, Basic Writings (New York, 1966), p. 751.

16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York, 1968), sec. 617, p. 330.

17. Ibid., secs. 485 and 490, pp. 269 f.

18. Ibid., sec. 715, p. 380.

19. Ibid., sec. 493, p. 272.

20. Ibid., sec. 574, p. 309.

21. Wm 159/BWr 208.

22. VA 180/PLT 181 (emphasis added). I translate “das andenkende Denken” as “the thinking that attends,” namely the constellations of presence. “An-,” Latin ad-, indicates directedness, and “tending” (e.g., a flock), the attitude of the “shepherd of being.” Cf. William Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague, 1963), p. 294, n. 108.

23. Wm 176/BWr 225.

24. Wm 176/BWr 224.

25. Wm 160/BWr 209.

§8. A Threefold Break with Principial Origins

26. VwR XXIII/PrR XXII.

27. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, pp. 141 f.

28. Michel Henry, Marx: A Philosophy of Human Reality, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Bloomington, 1983), p. 69. I am well aware that this interpretation of Marx poses difficulties. Paul Ricoeur, “Le ‘Marx’ de Michel Henry,” in Esprit (October, 1978): 124–139, has brought them into relief with greater subtlety than, for example, François Guéry, “La division du travail entre Ure et Marx (à propos de Michel Henry),” in Revue Philosophique, IV (1977):423–444. Whatever the merits and shortcomings of Henry’s transcendentalist picture of Marx may be, I am more concerned with the issues of metaphysical closure and plurification of the origin than with a literal interpretation of Marx.

29. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow, 1976), pp. 36 f. (emphasis added).

30. “How the True World Finally Became a Fable,” in Twilight of the Idols; trans. W. Kaufmann, The Portahle Nietzsche (New York, 1954), p. 485.

31. The Will to Power, sec. 428, op. cit., p. 233.

32. Ibid., sec. 630, p. 336.

33. Ibid., sec. 462, p. 255.

34. Ibid., sec. 488, p. 270.

35. Ibid., sec. 715, p. 380.

36. Ibid., sec. 647, p. 344.

37. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Unschuld des Werdens, vol. II, sec. 1332 (Stuttgart, 1965), p. 473.

38. Ecce Homo, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” n. 3; Basic Writings, p. 757.

39. Wm 252/QB 107.

40. “Ursprüngliche Verwurzelung” (SZ 377/BT 429).

41. SZ 12/BT 32.

42. SZ 331/BT 380.

43. SZ 329 and 326/BT 377 and 374.

44. I borrow this term from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rhizome (Paris, 1976), pp. 17 f. Among the company of writers, notably in France, who today herald the Nietzschean discovery that the origin as one was a fiction, there are those who espouse the multiple origin with jubilation, and this is apparently the case with Deleuze. There are others who barely conceal their regret over the loss of the One, and this may indeed be the case with Derrida. It suffices to listen to him express his debt to Lévinas: “I relate this concept of trace to what is at the center of the latest work of Emmanuel Lévinas,” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore, 1976), p. 70. The article by Emmanuel Lévinas to which he refers announces in its very title—“La trace de l’autre,” The Other’s Trace—how far Derrida has traveled from his mentor. For Derrida, the discovery that the “trace” does not refer back to an Other whose trace it would be, is like a bad awakening: “arch-violence, loss of the proper, of absolute proximity, of self-presence, in truth the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of,” ibid., p. 112. For Heidegger, neither intoxicated jubilation nor mourning—there is only sober attending to the πολλαχώς λέγεται of the origin, “a thinking more sober than scientific technology” (SD 79/OTB 72).

45. “Thinking the most difficult thought of philosophy, means thinking being as time” (N I 28/N i 20).

46. I borrow this expression from Orlando Pugliese, Vermittlung und Kehre. Grundzüge des Geschichtsdenkens bei Martin Heidegger (Freiburg, 1965), p. 76.

47. According to Max Müller, Existenzphilosophie im geistigen Leben der Gegenwart, 3rd ed. (Heidelberg, 1964), p. 67, the third part (not published before GA 24) of BT should deal with a threefold “difference”: “a) The ontological difference in the narrow sense, as ‘transcendental’: the difference between an entity and its beingness [Seiendheit]; b) the ontological difference in the broad sense, as ‘quasi-transcendental’ [transzendenzhaft]: the difference between, on one hand, an entity and its beingness, and, on the other, being itself; c) the theological difference in the strict sense, as ‘transcendent’: the difference between God, on one hand, and an entity, beingness and being, on the other.” But even this third difference, a curious one to be sure, does not seem to have been intended to make God the subject of history. In any case, it is not to be found in GA 24, which is a “new elaboration of the third section of Part One of BT” (GA 24 1/BPP 1).

48. The rather puzzling remark that “the Marxist vision of history is superior to any other historiography” (Wm 170/BWr 219) clearly cannot in any way be read as the sign of an adoption by Heidegger of dialectical materialism, however understood.

49. Hw 311/EGT 26. Έπέχειν means to abstain from, to stop searching: the Stoic sage resigns himself to not possessing wisdom in the face of the multitude of doctrines about truth—and in this way he obtains wisdom, ἀταϱαξία, or ἀπάϑεια, tranquility of the soul, equanimity. See the excellent article by P. Couissin, “L’origine et l’évolution de l’epochē,” Revue des études grecques, 42 (1929):373–397.

50. “The epoch of being belongs to being itself” (Hw 311/EGT 26 f.) and: “Sheerly, out of its own essence of concealment, being appropriates its epoch in the event” (TK 43/QCT 44). In neither of the two senses “does epoch mean a span of time in occurrence, but rather the fundamental trait of sending,” SD 9/OTB 9. Heidegger speaks of a “sequence of epochs in the destiny of being,” ibid., dismissing both the theories of chance and those of necessity in history. Several texts enumerate epochal “stamps” of being, for example: “phusis, logos, hen, idea, energeia, substantiality, objectivity, subjectivity, will, will to power, will to will” (IuD 64 f./IaD 66 f.). See as early as 1916, FS 350.

51. Hw 54/PLT 66. This text directly recalls Cicero’s advice to “withhold one’s assent,” Academica II, 59, as well as that of Sextus Empiricus, Hypotyposes, I, 232 f.: “to withhold oneself from everything,” ἐπέϰειv πεϱί πάντων.

52. Hw 193/QCT 54. See also below, Sec. 37.

53. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (New York, 1963), p. 115.

54. Wm 251/QB 105. After the “turning,” Heidegger dismisses all root metaphors just as he dismisses the very question of political systems (see above, Introduction, n. 1). Instead of tracing phenomena to their “originary rootedness” (above, n. 40) in Dasein, he now says: “The concept of ‘root’ makes it impossible to say anything about man’s relation to being,” VS 127. Hence my loan from Deleuze and Guattari (above, n. 44).

55. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York, 1977), 2 vols., describes the lack of notable traits in Adolph Eichmann’s personality, with one exception: “it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness,” vol. I, p.4. She places the analyses in this first volume, Thinking, under an epigraph taken from Heidegger concerning das Denken. “Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today’s world” (Gel 13/DTh 45). Arendt pursues the point: “Don’t we all know how relatively easy it has always been to lose at least the habit, if not the faculty, of thinking?” (vol. II, p. 80). Heideggerian “thinking” stands not only at the antipodes of any apology for totalitarianism, the loss of one and the relapse into the other are two sides of the same phenomenon. “If there is anything in thinking that can prevent men from doing evil, it must be some property inherent in the activity itself” (vol. I, p. 180).

56. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 472.

Part Two: The “Very Issue” of Phenomenology

1. HW 67/PLT 80.

2. “Genuine knowledge of the history of being could not yet be reached in BT. This is the reason for the clumsy non-destinality (Ungeschicklichkeit) and, strictly speaking, the naiveté of the ‘ontological destruction’ ” (VS 133).

3. VS 124 f. (emphasis added).

IV. Mutations of Phenomenological Transcendentalism

1. SD 90/OTB 82. The title under which Heidegger has collected his last essays, Zur Sache des Denkens, is obviously a word play on Husserl’s slogan “zu den Sachen selbst” The terminological resemblance must, however, not hide the fact that in Heidegger the phrase designates thought “issues” rather than perceived or ideal objects, “things,” that are directly given to experience. Heideggerian Sache recalls the Greek πϱᾶγμα, as in Aristotle who said of his predecessors that “the very issue (αὐτὸ τὸ πϱᾶγμα) marked out the way for them and forced them to investigate” (Metaphysics I, 3; 984 a 18).

2. SZ 38/BT 63. “Möglichkeit” means a possibility charged with power, Macht, which is seized upon because it is cherished, mögen. Therefore, it is also a “potential.” It is true, however, that even in the period of BT, Heidegger writes: “When phenomenology is correctly understood, it is the concept of a method” (GA 24 27/BPP 20).

3. SZ 50 n./BT 490.

4. The remarks on Husserl that follow are based primarily on his Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague, 1960), pp. 65–88, and Experience and Judgment, trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston, Ill., 1973), pp. 58–68.

5. VS 124.

§9. From Subjectivity to Being-There

6. US 95/OWL 9, cf. Phän 47.

7. VS 111.

8. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York, 1977), vol. I, p. 241, cites a passage from Aristotle’s scientific treatise, On Sense and Sensible Objects, one of the rare texts that accord primacy to the ear rather than the eye: “For the mere necessities of life and in itself, sight is the more important, but for the mind and indirectly hearing is the more important” (437 a 4 f.). She adds: “The point of the matter is that [Aristotle] seems never to have remembered this observation when he wrote philosophy.”

9. Cf. ibid., pp. 110 f. Francis Bacon observed that “visibles require some distance between the object and the eye, to be better seen,” Sylva Sylvarum, III, 272; The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. Spedding et al., vol. 2 (London, 1859), p. 431.

10. SZ 48/BT 74.

11. Cartesian Meditations, p. 67.

12. SZ 115/BT 151.

13. VS 110.

14. See the excellent article by Gérard Granel, “Remarques sur le rapport de ‘Sein und Zeit’ et de la phénoménologie husserlienne,” in Vittorio Klostermann, ed., Durchblicke: Martin Heidegger zum 80. Geburtstag (Frankfurt, 1970), especially pp. 358–368.

15. SZ 38/BT 62 and VS 116.

16. VS 111, cf. SD 86/OTB 78. “Husserl himself who, in the Logical Investigations—especially the sixth—came close to the question of being proper, could not persevere . . .” (SD 47/OTB 44).

17. VS 113. For a more detailed commentary on these pages, VS 110–118, see Jacques Taminiaux, “Le regard et l’excédent,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain 75 (1977), pp. 74–100, and Jean Beaufret, Dialogue avec Heidegger, vol. 111 (Paris, 1974), pp. 126–130.

18. E. Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. H. Findlay (New York, 1970), p. 781.

19. Ibid., p. 780.

20. VS 115.

21. Hw 84/QCT 131. This remark is not aimed at Husserl in particular, but at the entire modern age.

22. Another way of describing this transition would be to contrast Heidegger’s “hermeneutic” phenomenology with Husserl’s “scientific” phenomenology, cf., SZ 397–404/BT 449–455. See also Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 1975), pp. 214–234.

23. Rather than characterizing “the turning” in Heidegger’s thinking as a renunciation of phenomenology, as Carl Friedrich Gethmann does in Verstehen und Auslegung (Bonn, 1974), p. 22, it should be read as “radicalized” phenomenology; cf. Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin, 1967), pp. 262–280.

24. Such is the way Husserl himself seems to have understood BT when, on the title page of his copy, he wrote these words: “Is this not anthropology?” His position has frequently been taken up since then, for instance by Erich Rothacker, Philosophische Anthropologie, 3rd ed. (Bonn, 1970), and more briefly, by the same author, Gedanken über Martin Heidegger (Bonn, 1973), pp. 23–28.

25. This reversal of the foundational relation between cogito and Dasein has been demonstrated most succinctly by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Subjekt und Dasein (Frankfurt, 1974) pp. 9–10.

26. It is only in the works subsequent to BT that Heidegger’s terminology distinguishes clearly between being as the “beingness” (Seiendheit) of entities (e.g., Wm 329–331/Phy 237 f.) and being independently of entities (e.g., SD 2/OTB 2). These two meanings are still united in the determination of being as “the transcendens pure and simple” (SZ 38/BT 62).

27. Heidegger exposes a threefold preeminence of Dasein: ontic, insofar as “in its being, it is being itself that is an issue”; ontological, since “in its being, Dasein stands in relation to being itself”; and as “ontic-ontological condition for the possibility of any ontologies” (SZ 12 f./BT 32 and 34). This threefold preeminence implies that the subject is primordial neither in “existentiell” experiences, nor as an “existential” condition, nor as the starting point of past philosophical systems. Therefore, sentences like “ontology has an ontic fundament” (GA 24 26/BPP 19) must not be read out of context.

28. SD 67–69/OTB 61 f.

29. The phenomenology of BT remains a phenomenology of sight. It consists in “letting entities that are accessible be encountered unconcealedly” (SZ 147/BT 187). But it is not a phenomenology of evidence. Thus further on in that text Heidegger tries to set apart “intuition,” “thought,” and “phenomenological ideation” as three modes of understanding. It is true, however, that sight remains the model even of Verstehen, of which hearing is but one mode.

30. GA 24 23/BPP 17. In this text Heidegger speaks of the “science of being” and calls it “the transcendental science.”

31. GA 24 69/BPP 50. This movement of thought is here called Rückgang.

32. In the Introduction to What Is Metaphysics? entitled “Regress [Rückgang] into the Ground of Metaphysics,” Heidegger develops the image of Descartes’ tree “whose roots are Metaphysics, the trunk Physics, etc.,” and asks: “What is the soil in which the roots of the tree of philosophy have their hold?” That soil is Dasein (Wm 195/WGM 207).

33. SZ 34 f./BT 58 f.

34. GA 24 3/BPP 3. In BT phenomenology is characterized as “scientific” (SZ 37/BT 61), but in the strict sense, the sciences are the project in which entities are thematized as objects in general (SZ 361–363/BT 413–415).

35. SZ 31/BT 54 f. Contrary to what one might believe, the first two senses do not, then, directly characterize the phenomenological projects of other authors like Husserl and Scheler, although this passage may well also contain such a polemic.

36. SZ 35/BT 59.

37. SZ 37/BT 61. A more detailed presentation of the three senses of φαίνεσθοα and of the corresponding types of phenomenology can be found, for example, in Jarava L. Mehta, Martin Heidegger: The Way and the Vision (Honolulu, 1976), pp. 98–104. The same author suggests that perhaps the training in phenomenological seeing recaptures the authentic sense of the Greek θεωρειν, ibid., p. 264. However, he does not corroborate his suggestion with the double etymology possible for that Greek verb: either ϑέα (aspect, appearance) and ὁϱάω (seeing), in which case “theory” is the look that makes a present entity appear, or ϑεά (the feminine of ϑεός, god) and ώϱα (attention, respect, esteem), “and then ϑεωϱία is the reverent paying heed to the unconcealment of what is present,” that is, to alētheia (VA 52 f./QCT 163–165). If phenomenology recaptures theōrein, it is not in the Platonic sense of the vision of the Ideas, but in the sense—perhaps derivable from Parmenides—of “the beholding that watches over truth” (ibid.).

38. SZ 1/BT 19.

39. VS 73.

40. VA 68/QCT 180.

41. N I 28/N i 20, cf., Wm 205/WGM 215: “In Being and Time, ‘being’ is not something other than ‘time’, insofar as time is named as the first name of the truth of being.” Gadamer says more bluntly, “Heidegger’s thesis was that being itself is time,” Truth and Method, p. 228.

§10. From Menschentum to “Thinking”

42. VS 128.

43. Gel 25/DTh 55 (emphasis added).

44. Hw 193/QCT 54.

45. “In resoluteness [Entschlossenheit] we have gained that truth of being-there which is most originary because it is authentically its own” (SZ 297/BT 343).

46. Wm 202/WGM 213.

47. Wm 204/WGM 215 and SZ 316–323/BT 364–370.

48. The “pre-eminence of man” is abandoned, Heidegger writes, once thinking understands itself as responding to what is historically “sent” to it, das Zugeschickte (VS 125). This however remains unthinkable in BT.

49. See above, the epigraph to this Part II.

50. As such, Menschentum (inexplicably translated by J. Barlow as “a race of man”) is opposed by Heidegger to “mankind,” “the individual,” “a community,” “the people” and “a group of nations” (Wm 142/PDT 269). Its sense as “epochal type” results from its link to the fundamental positions in the history of being (N II 421/EPh 19. Cf. Gel 35 / DTh 61, Hw 62 / PLT 75, N II 257).

51. See above, sec. 8, n. 44.

52. The phrase is Paul Ricoeur’s, The Conflict of Interpretations, trans. K. McLaughlin (Evanston, 1974), p. 53.

53. SZ 386 and 384/BT 438 and 436.

54. SvG 108 f.

55. Heidegger describes the epochs of the history of being as the “folds” that Western destiny “unfolds” (for example, Wm 241 f./QB 87). In the context of the ontological difference, phenomenological thinking unfolds the “double fold” of the present and of presencing (for example, KR 10/AaS 6).

56. The metaphysical sense of the transcendental does not refer here to the medieval doctrine of the “transcendentals,” universal and general qualities proper to created things, but to the Aristotelian πϱότεϱον: being as substance is prior to all particular entities. It is their a priori, not πϱὸς ἡμᾶς, but τη̄ φύσει (cf., N II 213–217/N iv 159–161).

57. Needless to say, this “correspondence” or respondency has nothing to do with the traditional ὁμοίωσις or adequatio, the conformity between a proposition and a state of affairs, cf. below, sec. 39.

58. VA 166/PLT 168. The ambiguity of the concept of φύσις in Aristotle—“being” as simple presencing and “being” as the sum of things not made by man—reveals this poietic attitude in its incipiency (Wm 358 and 369 f./Phy 259 f. and 268). Jean Wahl, Sur l’interprétation de l’histoire de la métaphysique d’après Heidegger (Paris, 1951), p. 30, writes correctly that with Plato and Aristotle, instead of “general presence, we have as the starting point the idea of fabrication of objects or artworks.”

59. Aristotle, Metaphysics II, 2; 994 a 19 f., op. cit., p. 713. The άϱχαί, although more remote from our way of knowing (πϱὸς ήμᾶς), are more knowable in themselves (φύσει), Aristotle, Physics I, 5; 189 a 5 f. To know becoming in its archai or to know a reasoned argument in its principles is to give rise to science. “We say that we know a thing only when we think we recognize its first cause,” Metaphysics I, 3; 983 a 25. The Scholastics say “scire per causas”: the intelligible principles, i.e., genera and species, allow us to define quiddities according to their degrees of universality. To know the absolutely first cause and principle would be to know everything indistinctly and absolutely—a doctrine that, in the Neoplatonists, Meister Eckhart, and the German Idealists, illustrates the progenitorship of the Aristotelian Physics. In a Heideggerian reading of these Aristotelian texts, and more so of his commentators, it is important to show the forgottenness of the earliest sense of the origin (contained in the word phusis) once the archai enter the context of fabrication, and then of science. This earliest sense even disappears from language when the Medievals translate προς ήμάς as quoad nos and τη̄ φύσει as quoad se. Heidegger, on the other hand, makes a point of preserving the allusion to φύσις in Aristotle’s parlance and translates τη̄ φύσει by the paraphrase “according to the order in which being essentializes and an entity ‘is’ ” (N II 217/N iv 161).

60. The word Gelassenheit, “releasement,” does not appear in BT (although resoluteness is there called “the condition for letting the others ‘be’,” “ ‘sein’ lassen,” SZ 298/BT 344). The later zulassen, “letting” in the sense of “permitting,” is a translation of the Greek parechein, Wm 136/PDT 265. “Releasing,” entlassen, properly designates the event by which presencing lets what is present appear. The correct understanding of Heidegger’s notion of releasement requires that this event of presencing be seen as one with human loslassen, “letting go.” For this oneness, see for instance IuD 24/IaD 32 (a text that is actually a commentary on Parmenides’ fragment 3 on identity). Only when we disengage ourselves from the present is thinking eingelassen, “let in” or “left to,” fitted into, that presencing, ibid.

61. WhD 86/WCT 126.

62. “Casualness,” Lässigkeit, or “neglect,” Vernachlässigung (WhD 114/WCT 187) or again “cessation,” Ablassen (WhD 158/WCT 145).

63. The event of presencing is “what is purely and simply singular, what in its unity is unique and, as unique, is the unifying One before all number,” Hw 318 / EGT 33. The Neoplatonic overtone is not fortuitous: Plotinus was the first to think of what is ultimate otherwise than as substance, idea, or any entity. See also below, sec. 26.

64. “Thinking is thanking” (WhD 91 f./WCT 139f.). Much poetic, pious, or psychologistic ado about this assonance in the more lyrical Heidegger literature could have been avoided if danken had been clearly understood as receiving and heeding modalities of presencing. Thinking is thanking inasmuch as it cannot but respond and correspond to the way phenomena appear in a given order of unconcealment. But what it does immer schon, “always already,” it has yet to learn to do expressly and for its own sake. “Thanking” then designates respondency to transient constellations of presencing, as transient.

V. Deconstruction of the Political

1. TK 40/QCT 40 f.

2. “Whence and how is it determined what must be experienced as ‘the things themselves’ in accordance with the principle of phenomenology? Is it consciousness and its objectivity or is it the being of entities in its unconcealedness and concealment?” (SD 87/OTB 79).

3. These three “fundamental elements belonging to a priori knowledge constitute what we call phenomenology” (GA 24 27/BPP 20).

4. Husserl cannot recognize that “what is historical is what is essential in being” (Wm 170/BWr 219 f.).

5. Edmund Husserl, “Pariser Vorträge,” in Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (The Hague, 1950), p. 8.

6. “The investigative gaze is led back from naively grasped entities to being” (GA 24 29/BPP 21).

7. Decades: e.g., those of the different epochs of modern physics (VA 61/QCT 172), or those of the atomic age (SvG 57–60); centuries: e.g., those of modernity, (SvG 99 f.); two millennia: the epoch of the “withdrawal of being qua being” (SvG 97).

8. This concept of construction must not be confused with the one originating in Kant and which has currency in logic and mathematics. In Kant, this term designates the synthetic process by which the forms of judgment are realized purely in the intuition of space and time. Only quantities, especially mathematical ones, are so “constructed,” Critique of Pure Reason, B 742, whereas empirical judgments arise from reconstruction. A concept or a judgment that receives a content of sensible intuition through “reconstruction” in this way is said to be “realized,” B 185. It is this Kantian and Neokantian notion of construction that Heidegger rejects along with the distinctions between subject-object, interior-exterior, etc. (GA 24 90/BPP 64, cf. KPM 226/Kpm 241).

9. GA 24 30 / BPP 22.

10. SZ 148/BT 188 f.

11. In this, phenomenological construction differs from any metaphysical construction in the sense of a speculation on systems, cf. Hw 93/QCT 141.

12. GA 24 31/BPP 22 f. In the twenties, Heidegger does not yet distinguish between Destruktion and Abbau, cf. above, p. 10.

13. In BT the project of destruction “is still faulty” (Wm 187/BWr 235) because it “has not yet been thought according to the history of being [seinsgeschichtlich]” (N II 415/EPh 15).

14. SZ 23/BT 44. Cf. GA 24 31/BPP 23. The positive appropriation of the tradition is indicated in the phrase “Verwindung of metaphysics” (e.g., WM 242/QB 87 and VA 71/EPh 84): not “overcoming” (Überwindung) (and certainly not “restoration”!) but disengagement, or perhaps “enucleation,” extraction of the nucleus. We disengage ourselves from something only in grappling with it, as a neurosis is grappled with by Freudian “durcharbeiten,” working-through. “One cannot shake off metaphysics as one shakes off an opinion. One can by no means set it behind oneself as a doctrine no longer believed and defended” (VA 72/EPh 85). To “verwinden” means first of all “getting over” suffering: “This getting-over is similar to what happens when, in the human realm, one gets over grief or pain” (TK 38/QCT 39).

15. Not only does deconstruction avoid ridding itself of the concepts of the tradition, but it needs them as the very material for reduction and construction. As a result, Werner Marx rightly observed, in Heidegger “the basic words ‘being’ and ‘essence’ obtain a meaning so altered and opposed to the traditional,” that their Aristotelian articulation becomes pointless; Heidegger and the Tradition, trans. T. Kisiel and M. Greene (Evanston, Ill., 1971), p. 6.

16. The principles men have retained throughout the centuries as, each time, the most real entity, from the Platonic Good to today’s consumer goods, objectivate and reify entities as such (cf. Hw 76 and 79/QCT 123 and 126).

17. In his last writings, Heidegger attempts to “think being without regard to its groundedness in entities” (SD 2/OTB 2).

§11. Deconstructing the Substantialist Patterns

18. Gel 35/DTh 61.

19. In the “Letter on Humanism” the two formulations occur: “Thinking acts as it thinks,” “Das Denken handelt indem es denkt” (Wm 145/BWr 193), and: “Thus thinking is a doing,” “So ist das Denken ein Tun” (Wm 191/BWr 239; both emphases added). Thinking is called supreme “Handeln” (Wm 145/BWr 193), but also supreme “Tun” (Gel 35/DTh 61).

20. WhD 2 and 55/WCT 4 and 25; WhD 159/WCT 146.

21. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, 1; 1094 a 1 f., trans. W. D. Ross, in R. McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York, 1941), p. 935. (Although the translation is always cited in this section [as Basic Works], I do not always adhere to the translations adopted by McKeon.)

22. WhD 55/WCT 25.

23. “Since discourse (Rede) is constitutive of the being of the ‘there’ . . . and since being-there means being-in-the-world, being-there . . . has always already expressed itself (ausgesprochen). Being-there has language (Das Dasein hat Sprache)” (SZ 165/BT 208). Language is public because it belongs to being-in-the-world. About the publicity of “world,” see SZ 71/BT 100.

24. In “the saying that projects . . . the concepts of a historical people’s essential way of being, that is, of its belonging to world history, are coined in advance (vorgeprägt)” (Hw 61/PLT 74). Prägung, “seal” or “stamp,” designates the order of an era that manifests the epochal principle (cf. SD 44 and 67/OTB 40 f. and 60).

25. SD 55/OTB 51.

26. Wm 145/BWr 193 f. (italics added).

27. For phusis, see Wm 369 f./Phy 268. For alētheia, see Wm 138/PDT 266 (cf. below sees. 23 and 24).

28. SZ 2/BT 21.

29. N II 409/EPh 9 (cf. N II 228 / N iv 171).

30. Recent commentators on Aristotle seem divided about the status of his political and more generally, practical, writings. There is agreement that ethics is a part of politics and that both are concerned with prudence, φϱόνησις. But for some, φϱόνησις covers a domain of analysis essentially irreducible to metaphysics or even to knowledge. On this reading, Aristotle’s practical philosophy proposes no “theory” ready for application, but rather an “interpretation” of concrete man and of what is good for him. This is notably Hans-Georg Gadamer’s position in Truth and Method (New York, 1975), pp. 278–289 and 482–491, in Kleine Schriften, vol. I (Tübingen, 1967), pp. 186–191, and in Die Idee des Guten zwischen Plato und Aristoteles (Heidelberg, 1978), pp. 77–103. In this last work, Gadamer traces two concepts of “good” in Aristotle, one ontological, the other practical. The first “is inseverably linked to the problem of being” (p. 79) mainly because, as in Plato, it is established through mathematical metaphors: the supreme Good precedes all entities as the number One precedes all numbers (p. 81). As regards the practical good, no such “subsumption of the particular under the universal” is possible. Rather, like an archer, the φϱόνιμος “fixes his gaze on an always particular goal” (p. 96) for the attainment of which “the idea of ‘the Good’ is ‘practically’ useless” (p. 89); Aristotle “accords some truth to that idea, but rejects it as irrelevant for politics” (p. 88). The non-ontological notion of “good” in Aristotle is actually genuinely Platonic, Gadamer adds. It is for reasons of polemic that Aristotle had to neglect all non-metaphysical traits of the ἀγαϑόν and “insist particularly on the Good as χωϱιστόν” (pp. 79 f.; cf. p. 86). The practical good is irreducible to the theoretical Good because subsumption is of no avail in the know-how called prudence. What is at stake in politics is not “rendering universal knowledge concrete,” but “rendering the concrete more general” (p. 97). Gadamer himself extends this understanding of the practical good, unyielding to subsumption, into Kant’s moral philosophy (p. 99). A more developed treatment of that parallel, however, is to be found in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago, 1982). The φϱόνιμος, she writes, has no ultimate measure to turn to in action, but only examples: “In the Critique of Judgment, i.e. in the treatment of reflective judgments, where one does not subsume a particular under a concept, the example helps one in the same way in which the schema helped one to recognize the table as table” (p. 84). For Arendt, who finds Kant’s unwritten political philosophy (pp. 7, 19, 21, 31) in his third Critique, political phenomena are located neither within the reach of knowledge, compelling it to true statements, nor within that of the will, impelling it to appropriation; rather, their phenomenal site is akin to that of aesthetic objects in that praxis requires us to “think the particular” (p. 76). This can only be done through examples, as when we say that someone is “as brave as Achilles” (pp. 77 and 84). Φϱόνησις is that kind of judgment that “enables man to orient himself in the public realm” (p. 104). At the other extreme of the spectrum, interpreters of Aristotle consider his theory of society to be based largely on his metaphysics. This was Wilhelm Dilthey’s position, taken up and developed today by Manfred Riedel, Metaphysik und Metapolitik (Frankfurt, 1975). Riedel sees a systematic correspondence in Aristotle between political philosophy and metaphysics. “In its essential points,” writes Riedel, “this correspondence rests on premises of a doctrine of principles, which reach beyond the domain of an originally political formation of concepts and principles” (p. 65). Pierre Aubenque’s position, La prudence chez Aristote (Paris, 1963), is more nuanced. Like Gadamer, he is careful to separate the Aristotelian starting point—“a certain type of men we are all able to recognize”—from any essentialist starting point. “Here, recourse to portrait description is not a makeshift but a requirement of the issue itself.” Indeed, “the existence of the prudent man is already implied” in any definition of the essence of φϱόνησις. Therefore, such “logical” procedures as specification of a generic concept of virtue, that is, of subsumption, will never teach us what a prudent man is (pp. 35 and 39). Like Riedel, on the other hand, Aubenque considers “that Aristotle’s ethical theory of prudence cannot be dissociated from his metaphysical doctrines” (p. 2). He maintains the phenomenal autonomy of prudence in Aristotle, but not the theoretical autonomy of his practical writing. This agrees with Heidegger’s view of Aristotle as both “Greek” and “non-Greek.”

31. Wm 315/Phy 226.

32. In the Second Book of the Physics, Aristotle introduces his exposition of the four causes by declaring that they are common to “coming to be and passing away and every other kind of physical change” (πάσης τής μεταβολής, Physics II, 3; 194 b 20 f./Basic Works, p. 240). This is a declaration of principle that seems to concern things that are “by nature”—“animals and their parts, plants and simple bodies, like earth, fire, water, air” (Physics II, 1; 192 b 8 f./Basic Works, p. 236)—to the exclusion of those made by man. The definition of phusis at the beginning of that Second Book consists mainly in opposing ta phusika to things that originate from “other causes, viz., practical and poietic human activity.” In texts like these, phusis, then, does not designate ousia as, for instance, in Metaphysics V, 4; 1014 b 35/Basic Works, p. 756.

As one reads the examples Aristotle provides for each of the causes one begins to doubt, however, that they are common to all phenomena of movement: “Bronze is the cause of a statue and silver of a cup.” These are examples of material causes. “The man who gave advice is a cause, the father is cause of the child . . . health is the cause of walking” (Physics II, 3; 194 b 21–33, cf. II, 3; 195 a 15–26/Basic Works, pp. 240 f.). These are examples of efficient and of final causes, again taken from human fabrication or action. In this list only the example of formal cause, “the relation of 2:1 for the octave, and generally number and the parts of a definition,” departs from praxis as well as from poiēsis, but here again without at all corresponding to the definition of phusis provided at the beginning of the Second Book.

Here is, now, how the four causes are applied to the city in the Seventh Book of the Politics: “Just as a weaver or a shipbuilder or any other artisan must have the material proper for his work . . . so the statesman or legislator must have the materials suited to him. First among the materials required by the statesman is population: he will consider what should be the number and character of the citizens, and then what should be the size and character of the country” (Politics VII, 4; 1325 b 41–1326 a 8/Basic Works, p. 1283, italics added). Such is the matter of the city-state. What is noteworthy are the examples that illustrate causality here, taken again from the technical domain. The form of the city is its constitution and its end, happiness: “The city is a community of equals, aiming at the best life possible. Since happiness is the highest good . . . the various qualities of men are clearly the reason why there are various kinds of states and many forms of government; for different peoples seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government” (Politics, VII, 8; 1328 a 36–1328 b 2/Basic Works, pp. 1287 f.). Moreover, the identification of the formal cause with the constitution and with institutions entails this quasi-dogmatic result, which is indeed revealing of the technical model that presides over the description of the ideal state: changing the constitution amounts to changing the city-state. This surprising consequence is only understandable given the physicist premisses: to change the form of a statue is to make a different statue. The efficient cause of the city-state, lastly, is the natural impulse of human beings to live in common; this indicates by itself how close pragmata and phusika are in Aristotle’s conception, it indicates his naturalist conception of the origins of community. But the legislator, too, is called an efficient cause: “To be sure, the tendency we all have to form a community of this kind is a natural fact, and yet he who first founded the state was the greatest of benefactors” (ibid., I, 2; 1253 a 29 f./Basic Works, p. 1130). For the transference of the causal schemata to the political domain in Aristotle generally, cf. Riedel, Metaphysik und Metapolitik, pp. 65–73. Riedel concludes that “politics, as a theory, works with concepts and principles that are not themselves ‘political’ ” (pp. 58 f.).

33. Wm 314/Phy 225.

34. Cf. FD 53 f. and 63 f./WTh 70 and 81 f.

35. ἐστὶ δ’σύσία τὸ ύποϰείμενον, Metaphysics VIII, 1; 1042 a 13/Basic Works, p. 812.

36. The pros hen schema is applied by Aristotle wherever something appears to be relative to something else. Terms relative to another are intermediary between synonyms or univocals and homonyms or equivocais. The former designate things identical in nature and pertaining to the same genus; the latter, things that have nothing in common but their name—for example, the bear in the forest and the Great Bear in the sky. Midway between synonyms and homonyms, the terms called aph’henos and pros hen are of things whose common name derives from one single “nature” they share. What they are, they are by virtue of this single nature. It functions as their principle of common determination. The case par excellence of such a relation to a single term is being: “There are many senses in which a thing may be said to ‘be’, but all that is is related to one focal point, to one common nature, and is not said to ‘be’ by homonymy” (Metaphysics IV, 2; 1003 a 33 f./Basic Works, p. 732). What is this one focal point? “Everything is predicated of substance as subject” (Physics I, 2; 185 a 31 /Basic Works, p. 220). Substance is that to which all other terms refer, that to which they are either relative or inherent. Inherence is the mode of being of things essentially related to the substantial One, and subsistence the mode of being of that One itself. The pros hen relation can be called an analogy, as long as this is not understood as a proportion. (In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle calls ἀναλογία the proportion a:b::c:d—” . . . a unity by analogy: as sight is to the body, intellect is to the soul,” I, 4; 1096 b 32 f./Basic Works, p. 940.)

In the Seventh Book of the Politics, Aristotle describes the ideal city. The description goes into the particulars, “for the perfect state cannot exist without a due supply of the means of life” (Politics, VII, 4; 1325 b 37/Basic Works, p. 1282). This due supply is spelled out in detail by applying the four causes: In the ideal city, what must the sum total of the population be and what the size of its territory? Who will be called upon to legislate? For which institutions? And, the decisive point, the final cause: If it is happiness that the inhabitants strive to have in common, in what way do they share it? Who will be happy “substantially” and who “accidentally,” or only by analogy? The latter are the laborers, workers, and merchants. They play the role of means for the end which is the happiness of the whole. They are the instruments in the hands of free men. Between the class of laborers and the free city, “there is nothing that is common, except that the one receives what the other produces.” Again a technical example follows: just as “the art of the builder is for the sake of the house,” so the ideal city is the end for the sake of which some are like builders and others, the slaves, like tools. The happy city is the single focal point to which men are ordered analogically, pros hen: “Some attain it, while others have little or none of it” (Politics VII, 8; 1328 a 30, 32 f., and 39/Basic Works, p. 1287).

The transference leaps into view. From the Physics to the Categories, to the Metaphysics, to the Ethics and the Politics, the pros hen schema organizes phenomena so diverse that one cannot but ask: where does this schema stem from? I will take up this question again below, in connection with the concept of archē. The political triumph of the attributive schema is indeed reached with the relation ἄϱχειν ϰαι ἄϱχεσϑαι, to govern and to be governed. Within the context of the Seventh Book, the transposition of the pros hen schema to politics, its exile in that field, is obvious. It is at home in the domain of fabrication. From there, Aristotle expatriates the predicative model to the domain of the polis.

37. Physics VIII, 7; 261 a 13 f./Basic Works, p. 378. Cf. in the Politics: “The city is by nature prior to the family and to the individual,” I, 2; 1253 a 19/Basic Works, p. 1129.

38. Physics I, 2; 185 a 31/Basic Works, p. 220. Cf. in the Politics: “the state is independent and self-sufficing,” IV, 4; 1291 a 9/Basic Works, p. 1210.

39. Cf. above, sec. 6, n. 23.

§12. Deconstructing the Ontic Origins

40. GA 55 367. These lines are an interpretation of Heraclitus’s frgm. 112.

41. Hw 204/QCT 65. Heidegger adds that the destiny of metaphysics consists in all these shapes “suffering the loss of their constructive force and becoming void.” See a similar list in Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1974), sec. 347, p. 289.

42. The critique Habermas directs at Arendt, viz., that taken by itself praxis yields a unilateral concept of politics, is certainly phenomenologically founded, whatever its sociological significance may be. Praxis is the conjunction of words and deeds, poiēsis, of things and deeds. To add “things,” that is, work, to speaking and acting (or doing) is to enlarge the concept of polis, cf. Jürgen Habermas, Kultur und Kritik (Frankfurt, 1973), p. 366, and “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” Social Research 44 (1977), especially p. 15.

43. Husserl never went beyond the position described in Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague, 1960), pp. 106–36.

44. These difficulties have been pointed out for example by Klaus Held, “Das Problem der Intersubjektivität und die Idee einer phänomenologischer Transzendentalphilosophie,” in Ulrieh Klaesges and Klaus Held, eds., Perspektiven transzendental-phänomenologischer Forschung (The Hague, 1972), especially pp. 3–60, and Michael Theunissen, Der Andere: Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1965), pp. 35 ff., 51 f. and 102–155.

45. On this point I follow Jürgen Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie (Frankfurt, 1968), p. 152: “At best, phenomenology grasps the transcendental norms according to which consciousness necessarily operates. It describes (in Kantian terms) the laws of pure reason, but not the laws of a universal legislation derived from practical reason and obeyed by free will.” This is however only true of the phenomenology of the subject. What I wish to show of Heideggerian phenomenology is that the economies of presence indeed produce injunctions or directives (Weisungen, e.g., VA 184/PLT 185): not universal ones, derived from reason, but epochal ones, derived from dispositions in “being.” Furthermore, the practical injunctions that result from deconstructing metaphysics are not those of an “ideological whip” (ideologischer Einpeitscher), J. Habermas, “Martin Heidegger: On the Publication of Lectures from the Year 1935,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, VI, 2 (1977):169, but the consequences, which grow more and more precise through the course of Heidegger’s writings, of the concept of authenticity in BT (cf. above, Introduction, sec. 2, nn. 33 and 34). Helmut Fahrenbach, Existenzphilosophie und Ethik (Frankfurt, 1970), regrets that the sketches of concrete analyses in BT have not been pursued in Heidegger’s later writings to show “how reflection, motivated by practical questions, leads back to praxis and guides it” (p. 210). To this Reinhart Maurer, Revolution und ‘Kehre’. Studien zum Problem gesellschaftlicher Naturbeherrschung (Frankfurt, 1975), p. 56, objects correctly that such a search for a new link between reflection and practice misses the very meaning of the Kehre, but in my opinion, the reasons Maurer provides are not the appropriate ones. His aim is to rehabilitate “the subjectivity of the totality of entities,” which requires “man to take back, to some extent, his own subjectivity” (p. 218, emphasis added). This is not a way of overcoming subjectivism as the late form of metaphysical humanism but only of moving in circles within it.

46. “It could be that the ‘who’ of everyday being-there just is not the ‘I myself’ ” (SZ 115/BT 150).

47. The title “fundamental ontology” means two things: the discourse on the being of that entity that we are, and the discourse on the foundation of regional ontologies. In neither respect does it fulfill the task of working out the question of being as such; it only prepares it. The being-question receives appropriate treatment only through the topology.

48. The loss of foundations or grounds can be repaired only by reverting to some form of subjectivist transcendentalism. Witness transcendental philosophy of language: “critical theory” can base its rationalist utopia of undistorted linguistic communication only on a philosophy of the subject. In Karl-Otto Apel, Toward a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby (London, 1981), the problems of practical and political legitimation are solved by a “community of communication” that implies a new version of transcendental subjectivity, see especially the chapter “The A Priori of the Communication Community and the Foundations of Ethics,” pp. 225–300. This subjectivity is called “transsubjectivity” only to defend “the argumentative representation of interests” against “the egoistic assertion of one’s interests” (p. 277). The “poverty of critical theory” stems, then, from having to postulate surreptitiously an ontology of the subject. Günther Rohrmoser, Das Elend der kritischen Theorie (Freiburg, 1970, especially p. 80) sees this shortcoming in the proclaimed opposition, in Habermas, between ontology and criticism, while in their critical theory of rational consensus Habermas and his school have to appeal systematically and at every step, to an ontology of the subject. The other language approach, structuralism, suffers from the complementary defect. In dissolving political phenomena in “a vast semantic field,” linguistic structuralism in fact presupposes an ontology of the object (see the text by C. Lévi-Strauss quoted above, ch. 3, n. 9). Indeed, one wonders whether in the end structure does not turn into a kind of ens realissimum: “In demonstrating the rigorous arrangement of myths and in thereby conferring on them the existence of objects, my analysis highlights the mythical character of the objects—universe, nature, man—which for thousands, millions, billions of years have done nothing but unfold their combinatory resources in the manner of a vast mythological system before folding up and annihilating themselves under the evidence of their obsolescence” (italics added), op. cit., pp. 620 f. Needless to add that the objective order thus “conferred” no longer has anything to tell us about the political or about action in general.

49. In BT, the ontological difference is meant to set apart “the ontic depiction of innerworldly entities and the ontological interpretation of the being of these entities” (SZ 64/BT 92). This is not yet the temporal difference.

50. The coercive force of the state and institutions in general derives from the force of an epochal principle. But force is not power. Power is a potential (the German word Macht, power, just like machen, to make, derives from mögen, vermögen, to be capable of). In Heidegger, the understanding of this concept, too, changes radically in the transition from existential to aletheiological phenomenology. First, potential (Möglichkeit) as an “existential, is the most originary and ultimate positive ontological determinateness of being-there” (SZ 143 f./BT 183). Hannah Arendt, in her opposition between force and power, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), pp. 199–207, draws on these suggestions in BT. However, Arendt emphasizes the “humanistic” character of power: “Power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence . . . so long, at least, as the interplay is alive,” ibid. p. 200 f. For the Heidegger after BT, on the contrary, “it is being itself which empowers that potential. . . . Its essence is nothing human” (N II 377/N iv 232 f.). Cf. N I 392 f., where being’s potential is described in the Nietzschean terms of eternal return (there remains however something “humanist” in Nietzsche when he founds “like all thinkers before him”—and one might add, like Hannah Arendt after him—the relation to others, to things and to oneself on the model of “mutual understanding,” N I 577 f.). As the text of Hw 204/QCT 65 (quoted above, n. 41) indicates, an epochal principle exerts a coercive “force.”

51. SZ 11/BT 31.

52. VA 175/PLT 176.

53. GA 24 15/BPP 12.

54. Hw 203/QCT 64.

55. “The poetic project comes out of nothing” (Hw 63/PLT 76).

56. Hw 50/PLT 62.

57. Heidegger develops the metaphor of soil in explicit reference to alētheia when he says that “truth happens in the struggle between world and earth” (Hw 38/PLT 50). “World” here signifies disclosure and “earth,” “self seclusion.” See also the notion of Bodenständigkeit (Gel 11–28/DTh 43–57).

58. See above, n. 17.

59. Concealment, lēthē, “earth,” connotes the absence of an entity that is no longer present (Hw 323/EGT 37), but it denotes “the withholding of the twofold,” i.e., of the difference (VA 256/EGT 100). Its connotation refers to entities, its denotation, to presencing. The retreat of an epochal principle is to be understood as a connotation of “absencing,” kruptesthai. The point is that a connotation may cease, leaving the denotation intact (as happens when epochal principles wither away).

60. “Verwesen,” Hw 204/QCT 65. In another enumeration of these principles, similar to the list in Hw 204/QCT 65 (n. 41 above), Heidegger mentions the Platonic Good, the Christian God, the moral Law, the authority of Reason, Progress, the Happiness of the greatest number (N II 273).

61. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, 1965), pp. 164–166. For the end of the Middle Ages one may add the movements of the Free-spirit: “It is this communal idea, pursued since the twelfth century . . . that triumphs on the 18 of March, 1871,” writes a chronicler of the Commune, cited on p. 324.

62. N I 437.

63. See this text cited above in the epigraph to sec. 6.

64. The paradigmatic role of the polis is the key for understanding Hannah Arendt’s political concepts, cf. The Human Condition, pp. 22–38, and On Revolution, pp. 21–25. However, I have said that from the perspective of the Heidegger after BT, the anthropocentrism in the classical Greek concept of power falls into historical impossibility. This concept, together with the paradigm of the polis, has been criticized in another light by Jürgen Habermas as “unimaginable for any modern society,” “Hannah Arendt’s Communications Concept of Power,” Social Research 44 (1977), p. 15. But the other light that Habermas tries to shed on the phenomenon of power hardly makes it easier to circumscribe the rule of ultimate referents in history since there can be no legitimating of political action by a “universal and pragmatic reconstruction of discourse in general” (Erkenntnis und Interesse, 2nd ed., Frankfurt, 1973, p. 416, “Postscript” not translated in Knowledge and Human Interest, trans. J. J. Shapiro, Boston, 1971) without systematic recourse to a metaphysics of subject, be it the subject of communicative rationality. Transcendental-subjectivist reconstruction and phenomenological deconstruction are most sharply opposed in regards to norms for action. For deconstruction, the very project of “describing universal rules of a communicative ethics in terms of fundamental norms of rational discourse” (Erkenntnis und Interesse, p. 413), is but another variation on fundamentalist themes. Heidegger’s unique position on practical imperatives will appear more clearly below, sees. 40 and 41.

65. Hw 302/EGT 18. In this text from 1946, under the concept of “eschatology of being,” the first formulation is to be found of what Heidegger will later call the end of epochal history: “What once occurred in the [Greek] dawn of our destiny would then come, as what once occurred, to its extreme end (ἔσχατον); that is, the destiny of being, hidden until now, would take leave. . . . The history of being is gathered in this departure” (Hw 301/EGT 18). The eschatology of being sets action free from the rule of principles. Henri Birault’s book, Heidegger et l’expérience de la pensée (Paris, 1978), contains a long commentary concerning freedom as the essence of truth, to which nothing need be added (pp. 443–527). I will, however, address three questions to Birault from the passage of Hw just quoted: (1) If in “the turning” the history of being since the Greeks is gathered so as to take its departure (Abschied), this extrication from our metaphysical destiny cannot remain without consequence for our understanding of life in common, the political life. If it is foundational thinking that takes its leave—the thinking that grounds, first of all, action—can the “thinking of being” remain “in itself always indifferent to the ontic and practical forms of a historical or political commitment” (p. 378)? (2) Does the “departure” of the “destiny of being” not oblige us to distinguish between reversals and the turning, and correlatively between the epochal concealment (which is taking leave) and the aletheiological concealment (which is to be preserved and given emphasis) of being? If so, can it be said that “forgetting is always the forgetting of a forgetting” (p. 505), that “the thinking of being does not abolish the forgetting of being” (p. 551)? The epochē is the forgetting of lēthē, but does Seinsdenken not put an end to “the forgetting of this epoche’? Then, “any rise of a world” is precisely not held “suspended in the epochal essence of being” (pp. 553 f., emphasis added). It matters little whether this distinction between epochē and lēthē is expressed in terms of “principial economy” and “anarchic economy” or in another vocabulary. But does confounding the two not amount to missing the Kehre, purely and simply? (3) Is lēthē really “the initial non-essence of truth,” substituting for “Sinn” in BT (pp. 504 f.)? In VS 133, Heidegger corrects himself about lēthē: it is not as he had said in S D 78/OTB 71, “the very heart of alētheia.” Therefore it is not lēthē that takes the place of Sinn, but eon and its loci, the topoi of the temporal difference.

66. Wm 251/QB 105 (emphasis added).

67. Wm 83/BWr 127.

68. WhD 153/WCT 132 f.

69. VA 32/QCT 25 (emphasis added).

70. VA 33/QCT 26.

71. Wm 81–84/BWr 125–127, cf. N II 397.

72. KPM 257/Cas 197.

73. Wm 147 f./BWr 196.

74. N II 485/EPh 79.

75. SD 55/OTB 52.

76. WhD 22/WCT 52. These lines deal with the “destruction” of one transmitted philosophy, that of Nietzsche.

Part Three: The Origin Is Said in Many Ways

1. MHG 77/IW 40, cf. VA 148/PLT 148. The remark about the invention of new terms seems to allude to SZ 39/BT 63.

2. In Plato’s dialogue, Meno, Socrates, before questioning a young slave about geometry, inquires about the boy’s native tongue: “Is he Greek? Does he speak our language?” (81 b). It seems that the storehouse of forms on which recollection draws is first of all a natural language.

VI. Archē: The Kinetic Paradigm of Origin

1. Wm 317/Phy 227 f.

2. E.g., The Iliad, XXII, 116; The Odyssey, XXI, 4.

3. The German poet Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826), the unequaled translator of Homer, correctly rendered the verse of the Iliad at II, 494: “Führer war der Boioten Penelos”—‘leader’ and not ‘commander’, Homers Ilias, trans. J. H. Voss (Wiesbaden, s.a.), p. 32.

4. Politics, III, 13; 1284 b 2. Aristotle speaks of “nations whose spirit has been stirred by the recollection of their former power.”

5. The list of the many senses of this word in Metaphysics V, 1; 1012 b 34–1013 a 17, is hardly more than a lexicographical enumeration. It mixes the two meanings. Aristotle defines ἀϱχή as that out of which something is or becomes or is known. The term therefore designates a source of being, becoming and knowledge beyond which it is useless to try to investigate: the source is ultimate in that it both begins and commands. Ἀϱχή as inception, Pierre Aubenque remarks, “is not a simple beginning that is left behind by what follows, but on the contrary, it never ceases to begin, that is, to govern that whose ever bursting forth inception it is,” Le problème de l’être chez Aristote (Paris, 1966), p. 193. The concept of ἀϱχή is broader than that of αἰτία: “all αἰτίαι are άϱχαί,” Metaphysics V, 1; 1013 a 18, but all άϱχαί are not causes (literally: all ἀϱχαί are not ‘guilty’ of something, αιτία designating “what is culpable for an entity’s being what it is,” Wm 315/Phy 227).

6. In Plotinus the hypostases are the constitutive elements, ἀϱχαί, of the universe, just as created being and freedom are the constitutive elements of man, Ennead III, 3, 4, 1–7.

7. Θεωρει̃ν “brings before [our] perception and exposition the ἀϱχαί and the αἰτίαι of what is present” (VA 53/QCT 164).

§13. The Causal Concept of Archē

8. Wm 317/Phy 228.

9. H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (DK), 8th ed. (Berlin, 1956), Fragm. 12 A 9: “ἀϱχὴν τε ϰ⍺ὶ στοιχει̃ον εἴϱηϰε τω̃ν ὄντων τò ἄπειϱον.” Cf. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1971), p. 105.

10. We owe this Aristotelian reading of Anaximander to the Neoplatonist Simplicius summarizing the Peripatetic Theophrastus. Heidegger mentions this filiation in Hw 299 / EGT 15f.

11. “Πϱω̃τος αὐτòς ἀϱχὴν ονομάσας то ύποϰείμενον,” quoted in Kirk and Raven, op. cit., p. 107. Their translation: “being the first to call the substratum of the opposites archē.”

12. This is John Burnet’s translation, cited in Kirk and Raven. Burnet takes άϱχή in the most limited Aristotelian sense of ‘material cause’. In any case, the point seems established that Theophrastus wanted to attract attention to the idea of άπειϱον in Anaximander, and that he speaks of άϱχή as an Aristotelian. Burnet writes: “The current statement that the term archē was introduced by [Anaximander] appears to be due to a misunderstanding,” Early Greek Philosophy (London, 1930), p. 54. All this concurs with Heidegger, Wm 317/Phy 228, and conflicts with Bruno Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes (4th ed., Göttingen, 1975), p. 222 (chapter XIII, “Das Symbol des Weges,” in which Snell treats the concept of archē, is not contained in the English translation by T. G. Rosenmeyer, The Discovery of the Mind, Cambridge, Mass., 1953).

13. Metaphysics I, 2; 982 a 6 f. Philosophy is an ἐπιστήμη, a science, because it poses the question of the ἀϱχαί 𝜘αί αἰτίαι, ibid. VI, 1; 1025 b 6.

14. “First philosophy” would then be the knowledge of the πϱώτη άϱχή, Metaphysics, VI, 1; 1026 a 21–30, that is, of “being as ground” (IuD 57/IaD 59 f.).

15. “The tacit standard for the interpretation and appreciation of the early thinkers is the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. . . . But simply to disregard subsequent representations comes to nothing if we do not first of all examine how it stands with the matter [itself]” (Hw 297/EGT 14).

16. Metaphysics IV, 2; 1003 b 6 ff. See the commentary on this passage by Aubenque, op. cit., p. 192.

17. Metaphysics I, 3; 983 a 24-b 2; Physics II, 3; 194 b 16–195 a 3.

18. This impossibility of a “science that would possess universal sovereignty,” Posterior Analytics I, 9; 76 a 16, has been pointed out by Aubenque, op. cit., pp. 206–219. The priority of first philosophy would make it the archē of all knowledge, but an archē that is inaccessible to knowledge.

19. GA 55 78.

20. See above, n. 11.

21. Hw 297/EGT 14.

22. See the quote from Aubenque above, n. 5.

23. SvG 182 f.; N II 431/EPh 28.

24. GA 9 124.

25. Heidegger sides with Nietzsche not only in denouncing the passion for causal explanations in the Western tradition as a symptom for an interest in manipulation (cf. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, sec. 551, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York, 1967, pp. 295–297), but also in viewing the quest for causes as a thin disguise of what Nietzsche calls an anthropomorphic projection (“we derive the entire concept [of cause] from the subjective conviction that we are causes,” ibid., p. 295). See in Kant, Akademie-Ausgabe (Berlin, 1902–1955) vol. XVIII, nb. 3921, and Vorlesungen über die Metaphysik, ed. K.H.L. Pölitz (Erfurt, 1821), p. 79.

26. See the analysis of Physics, 192 b 16–32, in Wm 320–328/Phy 230–236 In the Middle Ages the opposition ‘moved by itself—moved by another functions as the middle term in the proofs, other than the ontological and that from participation, of the existence of God.

27. Heidegger’s remarks on the participle φύον (VA 267–273/EGT 111–115) should be read strictly parallel to those on the participle έόν (VA 242 f./EGT 88 f.). In both cases, the usage of the Presocratic key words is equivocal: they can be understood in reference to substance, and then the participle is nominal, or in reference to action, and then the participle is verbal. As nominal participles, φὑον and έόν result in Aristotelian ‘physics’ and ‘ontology’; but as verbal participles they produce expressions as anti-metaphysical as οὐσία φύσις τις, “the being of entities is something like an emerging” (cf. Wm 369/Phy 268) and τò τί ἠν είναι, “that which something was to be” (Metaphysics VII, 4; 1029 b 13–14, cf. KPM 233/Kpm 249, EiM 147/IM 193 and GA 55 56 f. and 73). At the close of his interpretation of Physics, B, 1, Heidegger opposes these two ways of understanding φύσις, the nominal and the verbal, as ἀϱχή ϰινήσεως and ϰίνησις (in the primary sense of’coming about’, of γένεσις) (Wm 368/Phy 267).

28. “Γένεσις and φϑοϱά are to be thought from φύσις, and within it, as a rising that alleviates and a decline” (Hw 315/EGT 30).

29. GA 9 124 (emphasis added).

§14. The Teleocratic Concept of archē

30. GA 55 201.

31. Wm 321/Phy 231 and G A 55 369.

32. Wm 321/Phy 231. “Telos is not goal or purpose, but end in the sense of the completion by which the essence of something is determined,” ibid.

33. Metaphysics, IX, 8; 1050 a 21.

34. Ibid., 1050 a 22 f. According to R. Hirzel, “Über Endelechie und Endelechie,” Rheinisches Museum, Neue Folge 39 (1884): 169–208, there are two possible etymologies of the word ἐντελέχεια: either it is composed of ἐντελές (or ἐντελως) and ἐχειν, ‘to be fulfilled’, or it is composed of έν, τέλος and ἐχειν, ‘having the end in itself. In both cases, however, if the entelechy is thought from the standpoint of the είδος, it means that becoming is accomplished in the fully constituted substance possessing its end and in that sense ‘finished’.

35. Metaphysics IX, 8; 1050 a 7 f.; cf. Nicomachean Ethics VI, 2; 1139 a 32 f. and the commentary on this text (VA 53/QCT 164).

36. Ή τε ϰίνησις ἐνέϱγεια μέν τις είναι δοϰεῖ, ἀτελής δε, Physics III, 2; 201 b 31 f. translation by Heidegger (Wm 355 f./Phy 257).

37. “The standing-in-the-work is the work,” ibid., 1050 a 22; τέλος δ’ ή ἐνέϱγεια, “the end is the standing-in-the work,” ibid., 1050 a 9; as identical to ἐντελέχεια, ἐνέϱγεια (the scholastics translate it ‘actuality’) is opposed to δύναμις (‘potentiality’), e.g., ibid., IX, 7; 1048 b 35 f. Dynamis is the ‘not yet’ of full presence; it is presence as about to become constant and visible.

38. Nicomachean Ethics VI, 4; 1140 a 2.

39. Ibid., I, 1; 1094 a 3–6.

40. Only action, and notably political action, renders one “self-sufficient,” Nicomachean Ethics, I, 7; 1097 b 8–12.

41. These two types of ends remain intermeshed, for example, in the catalogue of the species of archē already cited, Metaphysics V, 1; 1012 b 34–1013 a 23, and ibid., IX, 8; 1050 a 7–15.

42. The Aristotelian theory of the immanence of the end in action has been summarized most succinctly by Hannah Arendt: “Acting is fun,” Crises of the Republic (New York, 1969), p. 203. Action, she writes, has traditionally been described as pursuit of happiness; yet acting is already happiness. See also her “Action and the ‘Pursuit of Happiness’.” Politische Ordnung und menschliche Existenz, Festgabe E. Voegelin (Munich, 1962), pp. 1–16.

43. “Μάλιστα,” Metaphysics V, 1; 1013 a 14.

44. VA 17/QCT 8 (emphasis added).

45. See above, n. 27, and Hw 298/EGT 14.

46. The different variants of humanism “all agree in this, that the humanitas of homo humanus is determined with regard to an interpretation of nature established in advance . . . what is peculiar to all metaphysics is that it is ‘humanistic’ ” (Wm 153/BWr 201 f., cf. Wm 141/PDT 269).

47. In John the Evangelist it is onto-theological, since in his gospel archê designates God.

VII. Princeps and Principium: Time Forgotten

1. SvG 42.

2. “Causam appello rationem efficiendi,” Oratoriae Partitiones, n. 110, quoted in SvG 116. This should obviously be translated: “I call a ‘cause’ the reason [or ground] for achieving something.” Heidegger, however, apparently to stress the prefix ex-, translates efficere as “to produce,” hervorbringen, and ratio as “account,” Rechnung. “I call a ‘cause’ what accounts for a production.” His motive for that translation will appear below (sec. 16).

3. The principium grande reads: “Nihil est sine ratione seu nullus effectus sine causa” (quoted in SvG 43).

4. For example, “we accept without further examination that the proposition ‘cogito sum’, emphasized by Descartes himself as ‘the first and most certain’, is a supreme proposition and a ‘principle’ in the traditional sense: the ultimate premise, so to speak, for all conclusions. However . . . what is henceforth the ‘ground’ and ‘principle’ is [rather] the subiectum in the sense of representation representing itself” (N II 167/N iv 118).

5. L. Couturat, Opuscules et fragments inédits de Leibniz (Paris, 1903), p. 515.

6. Again it is Cicero who introduces the word evidentia into Latin philosophical language, translating ἐνάϱγεια, “clear, vivid presentation,” a technical term of Greek rhetoric, Academtea, ch. 2, n. 17. He is the one who opens the epoch of philosophizing in Latin.

7. The Latin versions of the New Testament quite naturally translate ἀϱχή by principium, e.g., Jn 1, 1 and 8, 25. This last text especially (“Then they said: ‘Who are you?’ Jesus answered them: ‘What I have told you from the beginning.’ ” But the Vulgate reads: “Principium, qui et loquor vobis,” “I am the Beginning, the Principle, that is speaking to you”) gave way to patristic speculations identifying the principium with God. See for example, Saint Augustine, De Trinitate, Book V, ch. XIII, 14, where the three divine Persons are called a single principle: “Unum ergo principium ad creaturam dicitur Deus, non duo vel tria principia,” with the commentary in M. Mellet and T. Camelot, eds., Oeuvres de Saint Augustin, “Bibliothèque Augustinienne,” vol. 15 (Paris, 1955), p. 586, n. 37.

8. SvG 118.

§15. From the Principle of Essences to the Principle of Propositions

9. SvG 54.

10. In Die Katagorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotos (“Duns Scotus’ Doctrine of Categories and Theory of Meaning”) Heidegger was already striving to trace the “differentiations of sense” of the concept of principle: just like “cause,” he then wrote, “principle” “designates something from which something else issues and thereby receives consistancy” (FS 198, emphasis added). “Applied to logical relations, the word ‘principle’ means ‘ground’, but in the domain of natural reality, ‘cause’,” (FS 276).

11. Metaphysics VII, 1; 1027 a 31-34 where ουσία is called the ἀϱχή of accidents. In Aristotle himself, as well as in his reading of the Eleatics, ἀϱχή may also designate one of the four causes (cf. Wm 336 f./Phy 243) or causality in general (Wm 316/Phy 227: “das Urtümliche”).

12. Patristic and scholastic titles abound in which the supreme Being is called ‘origin’: for example Origen, Πεϱί ἀϱχων; Bonaventure says that the creature, “because of its imperfection, constantly needs its principle, and the first principle, because of its clemency, ceaselessly pours itself out into the creature,” Breviloquium, V, II, 3.

13. See for example, the Analytic of Grundsätze, first propositions, in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

14. After Descartes, writing treatises on the ‘principles’ of a science became a veritable tradition: principles of philosophy (Descartes), of nature and grace (Leibniz), of mathematics (Russell), of political economy (Ricardo), of psychology (W. James), etc.

15. “To act according to principles,” Kant; Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung (Frankfurt, 1979).

16. For example, Herbert Marcuse’s “performance principle,” Eros and Civilization (New York, 1962), pp. 81 ff.; E. Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 2 vol. (Frankfurt, 1959).

17. SD 70/OTB 63.

18. This is how Nietzsche seems to have translated the Stoic ἐπέχειν, The Will to Power, sec. 715, trans. W. Kaufmann, New York, 1967, p. 381 (in one of his rare mistranslations, Kaufmann renders “Willens-Punktationen” as “treaty drafts of will”). Cf. sec. 639, where an “epoch” is called “a point in the evolution of the will to power,” p. 340.

19. principium has of course also always designated rules of thought formulated in propositions. But the propositional understanding of the principles did not predominate until the rise of modern subjectivity, to which it is intimately linked. The text cited in the epigraph above describes the relation between ground and consequent as the matter for representation: “everything must be represented as a consequence.” The subject is the principle inasmuch as it renders everything present anew. In Heidegger, this connection to re-presenting subjectivity had found its first expression with the aid of Heinrich Rickert’s philosophy of value, in his dissertation for habilitation on Scotus: a judgment, Heidegger then wrote (FS 212), just like a principle (FS 254), “obtains,” “is valid,” gilt. Later he writes that God himself “is pervaded by the principium rationis: the domain of validity of the principle of reason comprehends all entities, up to and including their existent first cause” (SvG 53). As Heidegger himself indicates in a letter, printed as the preface to Henri Mongis, Heidegger et la critique de la notion de valeur (The Hague, 1976), p. viii, throughout the three stages of its historical articulation—in Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche—the notion of value has been intimately linked to the question of being; it can therefore serve as guiding thread for the deconstructive trajectory, running through Western metaphysics since its beginnings. The root of the propositional understanding of principles—subjectivity—however, remains veiled until modernity. Before the reversal of history that institutes subjectivity as the tribunal over propositions, principles are not, and cannot be, ‘evaluated’, gauged explicitly according to their validity for the judge that we are. Subjectivity and value arrive on the philosophic scene together: “Value seems to express that, in the position we adopt in regard to it, we ourselves contribute what is most valuable” (Hw 94/QCT 142, cf. Mongis, op. cit., pp. 90–99). What has value first and foremost for subjectivity, once it is explicitly constituted as the tribunal for verification, is a principle formulated as a proposition.

20. Cf. SvG 35.

21. John Duns Scotus, A Treatise on God as First Principle, I, 1; ed. and trans. A. B. Wolters (Chicago, 1966), p. 2.

22. According to Etienne Gilson, Jean Duns Scot, Introduction à ses positions fondamentales (Paris, 1952), pp. 33 f., 158, 256, 327, the vocabulary of “primum” and “principium” in Duns Scotus goes back to Avicenna.

23. “I wish to start from the essential order as from the more fecund medium,” I, 3; trans. p. 2 (translation modified). Since Heidegger in “Duns Scotus’ Doctrine of Categories and Theory of Meaning” (FS 131 ff.) treats logical issues raised by the notion of order, he does not deal with the essential order.

24. Cf. FS 197–200.

25. Duns Scotus, op.cit., I, 6; trans. p. 5.

26. Ibid., I, 8; trans. p. 5. Scotus places this text under a reference to Aristotle, Metaphysics V, 11; 1019 a 1—4: “Some things are called prior according to nature and essence, namely all those that can exist independently of other things, whereas the others cannot exist without them—a distinction already employed by Plato.” Pierre Aubenque remarks about this reference of Aristotle to Plato: “We do not know of Platonic texts that would expressly contain that definition of the prior,” Le problème de l’être chez Aristote (Paris, 1966), p. 46. Scotus repeats, following Aristotle, that the priority of the principle is established “testimonio Platonis.” But if the reference is obscure in Aristotle, it is doubtful in Scotus: priority “according to nature and essence,” as it is operative within the representation of an essential order, presupposes a creationist perspective.

27. “Relatio realis est simpliciter relatio, et relatio rationis secundum quid relatio.” “Real relation is a relation purely and simply, whereas a relation by reason is only a relation in a manner of speaking,” Opus Oxoniense, I, dist. 29, n. 1; “Editio Vaticana” vol. VI, 1963, p. 166. This distinction is complicated, however, by the fact that Scotus also calls a relation by reason a thing, “res.” See the following note.

28. Jan Peter Beckmann, Die Relationen der Identität und Gleichheit nach J. Duns Scotus (Bonn, 1967), pp. 69–74, has pointed out four meanings of the word “res” in Duns Scotus: it can designate the non-contradictory, the extra-mental, autonomous beings, or substance. Any relation is real in the first of these four senses, but the essential order is made of relations in the last sense only.

29. See the texts cited in Beckmann, pp. 44–47.

30. “Essential dependence terminates in nature,” Duns Scotus, op. cit., IV, 91; trans. p. 150.

31. Topics I, 8; 103 b 20–25; Categories, ch. II; 1 b 25–2 a 3.

32. “It is clear not only what cause and caused are, but also that what is caused depends essentially upon the cause,” Duns Scotus, op. cit., I, 10; trans. p. 6 (translation slightly modified).

33. See the argument to prove the unicity of the first nature, Duns Scotus, op. cit., III, 46–54; trans. pp. 62–66.

34. FS 223.

35. According to Scotus, the notion of essence cannot be comprehended by the opposition between universal nature and individual substance. Essence is indifferent to universality and singularity. As is well known in the history of ideas, it is with such an essentialist realism that the disciples of Duns Scotus challenged those of Thomas Aquinas. For Etienne Gilson’s thesis on Scotist “essentialism” versus Thomist “existentialism,” see, for example, his L’Etre et l’essence (Paris, 1948), pp. 121–140 and 297; Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto, 1949), p. 208.

36. In his thesis on Duns Scotus Heidegger expresses the concept of hierarchy again in terms of values: the principle is “what is of highest value,” das Höchstwertige (FS 202). “Each object of natural reality possesses a determinate value (Wertigkeit), a degree of its being actual” (FS 203).

37. The thesis, Augustinian in origin, of the priority of will over intellect may well be, in Duns Scotus, the expression of a deeper necessity in which an ontology of order must represent the principle as ‘power’, as ‘imposing’ ordinance on entities, and in that sense as thetical.

38. Wm 353/Phy 255.

39. Ex. 3, 14: “I am He who is” (in the Septuagint translation).

40. On the unknowability of God as substance in Duns Scotus, see the texts quoted by E. Gilson, Jean Duns Scot, op. cit., pp. 218–234.

41. N II 410/EPh 10. This remark by Heidegger concerns the translation of ἐνέϱγεια as actualitas. It applies to medieval metaphysics as a whole, insofar as it is based on the causal analysis of movement.

42. Duns Scotus, Treatise on God as First Principle, III, 43, trans. p. 62 (translation modified). The expression actu existens, signifying the primum effectivum, the most efficient cause, illustrates the transmutation of ἐνέϱγεια as “standing-in-the-work” to actualitas as the “omnipresence” of the supreme cause (cf. N II 416/EPh 16).

43. The element of “construction” that best indicates this continuity between Aristotelian onto-physics and Scotist and medieval onto-theology, the one that Heidegger seems to have understood from the beginning as giving unity to metaphysics, is the principial role played by the four causes (FS 267).

44. GA 55 364; cf. Hw 324/EGT 38.

45. This reduction of the archē to rule—the result of “forgetting” time and absence (which were still implied in Physics IV, 11; 220 a 24)—indicates to Heidegger that one single region of phenomena continues to offer itself to thought, the region of subsistent (vorhanden) entities. Their constant availability is expressly affirmed by the notion of actuality. As the philosophical vocabulary changes from Greek to Latin, the understanding of origin slips from the activity of the artisan to the actuality of the Creator (cf. Hw 342/EGT 56 f., N II 410–420/EPh 10–19).

§16. From the Principle of Propositions to the Epochal Principles

46. SvG 14.

47. Commenting on the passage from the Physics II, 1; 192 b 16 f., Heidegger opposes the pre-terminological sense of the categories in Aristotle himself to their propositional sense. According to the latter, they “must” (in Kant) be deduced from judgments (Wm 320–323/Phy 230–232).

48. Therefore we will not have to pursue the two key lines along which Heidegger interprets Leibniz, namely, the understanding of being as will (N I 45 and 68 f./N i 35 and 56; N II 342/N iv 205; VA 114/WNZ 421; Hw 226 and 256 f./QCT 90 and PLT 100) and the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (Wm 210/WGM 220; N II 347/N iv 208; N II 446/EPh 42).

49. “The final reason for things must be in a necessary substance, in which the detail of the changes can be contained only eminently, as in their source. It is this substance that we call God,” Monadology, # 38; G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, trans. and ed. L. E. Leomker (2nd ed., Dordrecht, 1970), p. 646. Cf. SvG 53 and 55.

50. In speaking of axioms, Leibniz intends to remain faithful to Aristotle. In the Topics VIII, 1; 155 b 29 f. and 159 a 3 f., ἁξἰωμα designates an opinion from which an argument is initiated, a starting supposition that may eventually prove false. In the Posterior Analytics I, 2; 71 b 20 f., on the contrary, it more generally seems to designate a true, immediate, evident content of thought which founds the propositions of a proof. Axioms are ϰοιναί δόξαι, convictions common to all men or to all sciences (Metaphysics III, 2; 996 b 28) or ϰοιναί ἕννοιαι (cf. SvG 33). But for Leibniz, an axiom is a proposition, an “aphorism” or a “maxim,” and not a general content of thought. That Leibniz appeals to Aristotle therefore “is not justified,” Heidegger concludes (Wm 26/ER 17, cf. N II 159/N iv 112).

51. Cf. SvG 44.

52. SvG 15, 96 f., 192.

53. In this rendition different aspects of the ground become operative. The reddere is understandable only in light of the Grundfrage, the question of being; it indicates the Grundstellung, fundamental position, of modern man; it appears on the Hintergrund, the background, of the ontological difference and in the context of the Grundlehre, the fundamental teaching, of the epochal understanding of being. In this way Heidegger’s Gründlichkeit, thoroughness, leads beyond the Satz vom Grund, principle of sufficient reason, as understood by Leibniz. On these different terms see Alexius Bucher, Martin Heidegger, Metaphysik als Begriffsproblematik (Bonn, 1972), pp. 190 f.

54. Ν II 141/N iv 96.

55. The phrase “field of origin” occurs already in KPM 20/Kpm 27, where, however, it designates finitude in a still non-historical sense.

56. Sees. 31 and 32 respectively of the Monadology treat the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason (Leibniz, op. cit., p. 646).

57. Ibid.

58. See above, n. 50.

59. Leibniz’s logic is not “like” Aristotle’s, Heidegger says; it belongs to the “same” mode of thinking according to logos, the “onto-theo-logical” mode inaugurated by Plato (WhD 103/WCT 165, IuD 68/IaD 70). The difference within this identity stems from the new concatenation of on with theos and logos.

60. EiM 92/IM 121, cf. Wm 25/ER 13.

61. SvG 75.

62. FD 82/WTh 106, cf. N II 24 f. and 298.

63. FD 84/WTh 108 f. Only through this ego-principle can the logos become, for Leibniz, “the activity of the subject” (US 249/OWL 119). The ego-principle indicates “a determinate idea of being in general,” namely, as “the essence of the ‘subjectivity’ of the subiectum, understood monadologically” (Wm 32/ER 31).

64. In the texts dealing with the forgottenness of being, Heidegger tends to oppose “authentic thinking” (das eigentliche Denken) to “ordinary thinking” (das gewöhnliche Denken) as he opposes pre-metaphysical thinking to metaphysical thinking. Reification, then, is an epochal “stamping” or “seal.” In a few texts on the Presocratics, however, reification is said to precede the turn toward metaphysics. Then the two modes of thinking are opposed as the ordinary opinions of the polloi to “the thinker’s thinking,” in particular Heraclitus’s (e.g., GA 55 146).

65. N II 238/N iv 180 and N II 474/EPh 69.

66. SvG 210/PG 222.

67. See above, sec. 8, n. 30.

68. Leibniz, Monadology, sec. 14, op. cit., p. 644. Modern “perception,” Heidegger observes, must not be taken as simple receptivity, but rather as “driving together,” co-agitatio, and as “assault,” Angriff (Hw 100/QCT 149 f.). See below, sec. 46.

69. Leibniz, Monadology, sec. 30, p. 646.

70. N II 167/N iv 118.

71. N II 439/EPh 35. Heidegger quotes two texts by Leibniz: “I say that substance is actuated by one entelechy without which it would contain no principle of true unity”; and: the unity of non-substantial being “stems from cogitation.”

72. SvG 47.

73. SvG 65.

74. VA 234/EGT 82.

75. N II 452/EPh 48.

76. SvG 45.

77. During the age of metaphysics, “being takes its essential stamping each time from one being that gives the measure” (N II 421/EPh 20).

78. Leibniz calls principles necessary truths, as distinguished from contingent truths. Strictly speaking, however, principles are not truths but rules for truths. The principle of sufficient reason splits into a principle applicable to necessary truths, which stem from innate ideas, and another principle, applicable to truths that stem from sensibility. Heidegger’s strategy, in Der Satz vom Grund, is to blur, it seems, this distinction between principles and truths so as to establish the principle of sufficient reason as the ultimate truth or referent for our era.

79. See the lines quoted above in the epigraph to this chapter.

80. Truth as representation constitutes the last narrowing of truth conceived as conformity between a judgment and a fact. The first such narrowing occurred in the transition from Platonic homoiōsis, moral assimilation to the Good, to Latin adaequatio, propositional adequateness to a fact.

81. According to the first “key,” Heidegger emphasizes: “nihil est sine ratione,” according to the second: “nihil est sine ratione” (SvG 75).

82. SvG 154, cf. above, sec. 10, n. 55.

83. Heidegger translates: “Versammlung,” gathering (VA 210/EGT 62).

84. Cogitare in the sense of co-agitare, driving together (Hw 100/QCT 150).

85. Heidegger translates: “Aufgehen,” rising (VA 271/EGT 113).

86. Heidegger translates: “Entbergung,” disclosure, VA 258/EGT 103.

87. Hw 100/QCT 149.

88. Hw 98/QCT 147.

89. SvG 153.

90. SD 9/OTB 9.

91. SvG 58. That we name our era after a source of energy indicates once again how exclusively thought has come to be determined by available stock and “oppressing presence” (Andrang).

92. The notion of principle does not designate here some in-itself realized progressively through the centuries—a construct that Marx has so sarcastically criticized in the Idealists; see his parody of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon quoted above, sec. 8, n. 53. A similar accusation is leveled against Max Stirner in the German Ideology (Moscow, 1976), p. 264. Marx there claims to “invert” idealism: “It is better the other way round: life has created the principle.” However, this “reversal of metaphysics, already accomplished by Karl Marx” (SD 63/OTB 57) leaves the metaphysical quest for causes intact. To turn against idealism Marx reverses the causal relation between principles and life: the needs, the productive forces, in short, life, causes—“creates,” he says—the principles rather than the latter creating the epochal forms of life. It is clear that this entire problematic of ultimate determination either by some in-itself, “ideas, categories, principles,” or by material conditions, collapses the moment one is content to trace phenomenologically the internal ordering of epochs instead of searching for their ontic causes. The phenomenological notion of epochal principle does not designate a cause, but the most present, the most unveiled entity in a given aletheiological field.

VIII. Anfang and Ursprung: The Temporal Difference

§17. The Vocabulary

1. GA 55 370.

2. N II 421/EPh 20 (emphasis added).

3. E.g., GA 55 78. In the remarks about Beginn, Anfang, and Ursprung in this section, I follow especially Heidegger’s 1943 course, “The Incipience of Western Thinking,” whose subject is to a large extent the clarification of those terms. “Instead of the deliberately formulated title of this course, ‘The Incipience of Western Thinking’ (‘Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens’),” Heidegger says in the introduction, “one could also say ‘The Beginning (der Beginn)—or the Origin (der Ursprung)—of Philosophy in the West’. The reason we are retaining the other title will become clear as the course proceeds” (GA 55 3 f.).

4. GA 55 332.

5. GA 55 387. Thanks to the turning, “what the beginning of thinking has once (formerly) begun will once (at a time to come) come back toward man” (GA 55 288). On the insurpassable lead that the beginning in pre-classical Greece maintains over all Western history, See GA 55 383.

6. GA 55 211 f. (emphasis added). Elsewhere the Beginn designates the first step in questioning, which is the essence of thinking (GA 55 241).

7. GA 55 377 (emphasis added).

8. GA 55 78–80 (emphasis added).

9. See above, pp. 107.

10. GA 55 15.

11. TK 40/QCT 41. Here is how, in the course of a seminar, Heidegger connected the sense of ‘correspondence’ to the etymological sense of ‘Anfang’: by “incipience” one has “to understand quite literally what . . . takes us and ceaselessly retakes us, what, therefore, holds us in a web. . . . This word does not so much mean ‘announcing in advance something yet to come’, but rather ‘calling, provoking to respond and to correspond’,” quoted in M. Heidegger, Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part, trans. W. Brokmeier (Paris, 1962), p. 60 n.

12. Theaetetus 155 d (quoted WP 24/WPh 79).

13. SZ 1/BT 19.

14. GA 55 27.

15. US 262/OWL 131.

16. GA 55 146.

17. GA 55 43. Cf. in the same sense: “We will never find the incipience of Western thinking by calculating backward through historical comparisons. We will find the incipience only by thinking forward through historical experience” (GA 55 80). “The transition toward the other incipience . . . [is possible only in] returning to the ground of the first incipience” (N II 29).

18. GA 55 175.

19. GA 55 25.

20. GA 55 125.

21. GA 55 93. In Heidegger, quite as in ordinary German, it is the substantivated verb, das Anfangen (or das Unterfangen, a word I have not found in his works) which designates the action of initiating something. In the narrower sense of human undertakings one would say “das Beginnen” (cf. GA 55 350).

22. GA 55 139.

23. GA 55 131. Concerning the experience of thinking, it may do to construe an equivalence between anfangen and “being-in-the-world,” as C. F. Gethmann does in Verstehen und Auslegung (Bonn, 1974), p. 268. But that is insufficient for “the incipience ‘of’ being,” i.e., the incipience which is being itself.

24. GA 55 150. “That which holds sway initially pertains to relatedness, it is neither a thing nor a state” (GA 55 133).

25. GA 55 143. This text, with its undeniable transcendental overtones, seems to make pure appearing a universal and necessary condition for all knowledge of what appears. The impression of transcendentalism is confirmed by the curious parallel that Heidegger establishes here with time and space: like them, phusis is always seen first, gesichtet, but also like them, it is never thematized, erblickt.

26. GA 55 159.

27. So understood, “truth is the initial essence of being, it is inception itself” (GA 55 175).

28. GA 55 128.

29. GA 55 345 (emphasis added).

30. GA 55 123.

31. N II 481/EPh 75.

32. GA 55 222.

33. GA 55 220. The editor of this volume, who formulated the section titles, put it more straightforwardly: “The Equation of Thinking and Logic as The Origin of Western Destiny” (GA 55 221, emphasis added).

34. GA 55 150.

35. GA 55 174.

36. GA 55 245.

37. GA 55 196.

38. GA 55 197.

39. EdD 17/PLT 9, cf. W. Marx, op. cit., p. 251.

40. GA 55 227.

41. GA 55 240.

42. GA 55 328.

43. GA 55 293. For homologein, see below, sec. 25.

44. GA 55 345.

45. GA 55 185.

46. GA 55 361 f. On the expression “being as time,” see above, p. 18, 4.

47. GA 55 343 f.

48. GA 55 333.

49. GA 55 278 (emphasis added).

50. Hw 64/PLT 77 f.

51. GA 24 30; KPM 40/Kpm 46.

52. The “unrelenting pursuit of originariness” (dieses unausgesetzte Drängen auf Ursprünglichkeit, KPM 121/Kpm 133) in Heidegger is part of a long lineage: the Aristotelian quest for the πϱòτεϱον (πϱòς ημάς or φύσει) opposed to the ΰστεϱον, the Cartesian quest for cur ita sit opposed to quod ita sit, the Kantian search for the universal and necessary conditions of experience as opposed to its empirical conditions. . . . In every case the a priori is a “source” of concepts (see GA 24 31/BPP 23).

53. In BT the retrieval, Wiederholung, was already described as the repetition of a possibility: not only of the question of being as a possibility (SZ 2–4/BT 21–24), but also of authentic resolution (SZ 308 and 339/BT 355 and 388) and of existence as such (SZ 391/BT 443). Moreover, both before and after the “turning,” the reference to Nietzsche is obvious in the context of the retrieval. “The authentic retrieval of a past possibility of existence—that beingthere choose its hero—is grounded existentially in anticipatory resoluteness” (SZ 385/BT 437). This formulation is comparable to the description of “monumental” history in Nietzsche, that attitude for which “what is highest in one moment of the distant past be for me still alive, bright and great,” F. Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. P. Preuss (Indianapolis, 1980), p. 15. Heidegger links his concept of retrieval or repetition explicitly to that of monumental history (SZ 396/BT 448). Later, the temporal mode of authentic retrieval, the instant (SZ 386/BT 438), is expressed in the vocabulary of the eternal recurrence. The Nietzschean phrase “collision of the future and past [in which] the instant returns to itself’ (N I 312) then replaces the Wiederholung of SZ and KPM.

54. The inherited ontologies “take their rise” (entspringen) from fundamental ontology (SZ 13/BT 34). In more Kantian language, laying the foundations of metaphysics is to trace its origination (Ursprung) to the essence of knowledge in general (KPM 20/Kpm 26 f.) as finite intuition and dependence on the intuited.

55. KPM 216–219/Kpm 230–233.

56. SZ 377/BT 429. The allusion to Kantian transcendentalism and to the common root of the “two stems of our knowledge” (KPM 132 and 190/Kpm 144 and 201) is too evident for me to take at face value Heidegger’s claim that BT enabled him to interpret that root as the “originary self,” as opposed to Kant enabling him, in BT, to speak of “originary rootedness” (GA 25 394).

57. According to BT, the “clearing” is opened by human existence: “ecstatic temporality clears the ‘there’ originarily” (SZ 351/BT 402, cf. SZ 133 and 408/BT 171 and 460). After 1930, however, the clearing is understood out of being itself, as the opening of a field of presence. The word Lichtung then no longer signifies the natural light (SZ 133/BT 171)—disclosedness as man’s ontological structure—but a “lightening”: “to make something light, free and open” (SD 72/OTB 65, with the English translator’s note). On this transformation of the notion of clearing, see the concordant remarks of Werner Marx, “Das Denken und seine Sache” in H.-G. Gadamer, W. Marx, G. F. von Weizsäcker, Heidegger. Freiburger Universitätsvorträge zu seinem Gedenken (Freiburg, 1977), p. 25; of Ernst Tugenthat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin, 1967), pp. 275–277; and of F. W. von Herrmann, Die Selbstinterpretation Martin Heideggers (Meisenheim am Glan, 1964), pp. 61–63.

58. Wm 163/BWr 211.

59. SD 61/OTB 55.

60. SD 80/OTB 73.

61. SD 5/OTB 5.

62. SD 48/OTB 45.

63. Cf. the remark on Aufhebung below, n. 169.

64. As I have suggested above (sec. 7 and 8), in this refusal of all concepts of a necessary truth Heidegger’s debt to Nietzsche is too evident to be masked by the violence of his interpretations in N I and N II.

65. See above, sec. 12, n. 41.

66. The exemplary sense of φύειν, oriri, Aufgehen is the rising of the sun (EiM 11/IM 14). On the double repetition see VA 267–276/EGT 111–118.

67. After Greek (archein) and Latin (principium), German, the third philosophical tongue (“Sprache des Denkens”) according to Heidegger, seems more suitable for preventing and combatting the reduction of speech to conceptual language (Begriffspräche) because it is a more primary tongue than any other modern language. According to E. Schöfer, Die Sprache Heideggers (Pfullingen, 1962), the word Ursprung, along with its derivatives, is an exemplary case of “the vocabulary of German inwardness. . . . This vocabulary belongs to what is most German—sit venia verbo—in the German linguistic treasury and has always been keenly felt as the most genuine expression of the German soul” (p. 243; cf. the entire section entitled “Das Vokabular der ‘deutschen Innerlichkeit’,” pp. 243–247). Because it is less fixed, the German language would be particularly fit for “winning back the originary experiences of being in metaphysics through the deconstruction of representations that have become current and empty” (Wm 245/QB 93). Toward the end of the Latin age, Meister Eckhart was the first to designate the origin no longer by the noun principium but by the verb urspringen. This is not to say, however, as Schöfer does, that “since the German mystics the words of this derivation no longer appear in the philosophical texts” (p. 243). To mention only Kant, H. Ratke, Systematisches Handlexikon zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg, 1929), pp. 267 f., indicates eight different meanings of the word Ursprung in the Critique of Pure Reason. It is undeniable, in any case, that in Heidegger’s view the German language, by its malleability, allows for a certain recovery of the initial experience of pre-metaphysical Greek thought: “I am thinking of the special inner kinship between the German language and the language and thinking of the Greeks. The French keep confirming this to me again and again. When they begin to think, they speak German” (Sp 217/ISp 24). In a letter to Jean Beaufret, Heidegger underscores Beaufret’s remark, “the German language has resources, but the French has limits.” Heidegger adds: “Here lies hidden an essential indication of the possibility of learning from each other,” M. Heidegger, Questions III, ed. A. Préau, R. Munier, and J. Hervier (Paris, 1966), pp. 156 f.

§18. ‘Original’ Origins, or How the New Comes About in History

68. VA 73/EPh 86. I have translated Anfang as “original” and ereignen as “the event in which occurs. . . .” Cf. in the same sense GA 55 377.

69. The text continues: “The decline has already taken place. The consequences of that event are what has happened in the world history of this century” (ibid.). Elsewhere, however, Heidegger remarks on the contrary that “not even two world wars have been capable of tearing historical man away from mere business among entities and placing him before being itself” (GA 55 84).

70. Hw 63/PLT 76. It is from the standpoint of the end that any beginning even becomes thinkable as such: “The initial dawn (die anfängliche Frühe) shows itself to man only at the end” (VA 30/QCT 22).

71. VA 227/EGT 76.

72. SD 44/OTB 41.

73. Alluding to the poem of Parmenides on the way of truth (the first of the “only ways of inquiry that can be thought of” is the way of “it is and cannot not be,” H. Diehls and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 8th ed. [Berlin, 1956], frag. 2; G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers [Cambridge, 1971], p. 269), Heidegger describes this closure as “the event in which the farewell (Abschied) to all ‘it is’ comes to pass” (US 154/OWL 54). Cf. below, sec. 34.

74. US 134/OWL 39.

75. “Das anfänglich Gedachte noch anfänglicher durchzudenken” (VA 30/QCT 22). “What has been thought initially” is described by an implicit reference to a text from Aristotle: “Between what is prior by nature and what is prior for us there is no identity,” Posteríor Analytics, I, 2; 72 a 1 (trans. W. D. Ross, in R. McKeon, ed., Basic Works of Aristotle, New York, 1941, trans. modified). Cf. N II 215–217/N iv 160–162. By contrast, the other half of Heidegger’s sentence, “to think through still more originally,” refers to the dawn (die Frühe) before Plato and Aristotle. “Philosophy as metaphysics begins with Plato’s interpretation of being as an Idea” (N II 226/N iv 170). Metaphysics begins with the discovery of the non-identity between what is prior and what is posterior in knowledge: “In this way the a priori enters into the distinction between what is prior and what is posterior in knowing” (N II 227/N iv 170). The pre-metaphysical beginning is nearly always called “Anfang”: “At the inception (im Anfang) with Parmenides and Heraclitus . . .”(ibid). Cf. for example, Wm 370/Phy 268.

76. “For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression ‘being’. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed” (Plato, The Sophist, 244 a). These remarks are tendered by the Eleatic Stranger in order to confound a group of people who claim to know what a being is “by telling stories about it.” The ignorance to which the Stranger confesses seems to signify the impossibility of gaining knowledge by story-telling. In the remarks on BT that follow I am indebted to the article by John Sallis, “Where Does Being and Time Begin?” in F. Elliston, ed., Heidegger’s Existential Analytic (The Hague, 1978), pp. 21–43.

77. The distinction between the Presocratic inception of philosophy and the beginning of classical ontology remains implicit in BT (cf. the remark on Parmenides, SZ 100/BT 133). I agree with Werner Marx (Heidegger and the Tradition, trans. T. Kisiel and M. Greene [Evanston, Ill., 1971], p. 116) that the beginning to be retrieved in BT is that of Plato and Aristotle, and that in the subsequent writings Andenken differs from Wiederholung by its reach beyond the classical Greeks, i.e., by the “return to the [Presocratic] foundations of metaphysics.” Similarly for the “end of philosophy”: “the whole of the history of metaphysics” “lies between Plato and Nietzsche” (N II 226/N iv 170), whereas the problematic of the “there is,” opened by Parmenides, would come to completion only with the closure, whose hypothesis alone can be formulated at present.

78. SZ 1/BT 19 (emphasis added).

79. SZ 5/BT 25. Post-metaphysical thinking would transform the Platonic discovery of the a priori, which inaugurates metaphysics. It is pre-understanding that comes to precede knowledge because it differs in kind from all conceiving: “We understand the ‘is’ . . . but we do not grasp (begreifen) it” (GA 24 18/BPP 14).

80. KPM 232/Kpm 248 (emphasis added).

81. ‘. . . aus der epochalen Lichtung von Sein” (SvG 143).

82. Hw 63/PLT 76 f.

83. René Char, Fureur et Mystère (Paris, 1962), p. 83.

84. Hw 63/PLT 76.

85. Cf. the text, which is paramount for my entire discussion of the question of acting, quoted above as the epigraph to sec. 12 (GA 55 367).

86. VA 162/PLT 161.

87. “The Greeks dwelt in this essence [the legein] of language. But they never thought this essence of language” (VA 228/EGT 77).

88. Höl 61 f.

89. Höl 63.

90. Hw 63/PLT 77.

91. Ibid. No phrase in Heidegger shows more clearly how far he stands from Sartre’s “humanism.” For Sartre, epochal constellations are brought about by the agency of millions.

92. Hw 63/PLT 76.

93. Höl 63.

94. Cf. the texts quoted above, sec. 1, notes 1–7.

95. See the use Heidegger makes of the Parmenides fragment 3 (“For thinking and being are the same”), Hw 83 f./QCT 130 f. and VA 231 ff./EGT 79 ff.

96. HW 50/PLT 62.

97. “The [aletheiological] struggle first projects and develops what had hitherto remained unheard of, unsaid and unthought. Thereafter this struggle is carried on by the creators, poets, thinkers, statesmen” (EiM 47/IM 62).

98. Hw 83/QCT 130.

99. Hw 59/PLT 72.

100. Char, Fureur et Mystère, p. 205.

101. SvG 110.

102. VA 229/EGT 78.

103. Friedrich Hölderlin, Letter No. 236 to Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorf, December 4, 1801, 11. 73–77 (ed. Adolf Beck, Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe, vol. VI, 1 [Stuttgart, 1954–58], p. 427).

104. In order to think “more originally” [anfänglicher], it is necessary to go “counter to humanism” (Wm 176/BWr 225, cf. above, sec. 7, nn. 23 and 24).

105. FD 38/WTh 50. The anti-humanistic sense of ‘economy’ appears from the broader meaning of νόμος: “The νόμος is not only the law, but more originally the injunction contained in the dispensation of being. Only this injunction is capable of inserting man into being. Only such insertion is capable of supporting and carrying” (Wm 191/BWr 238 f.). Laws in a narrower sense, including Kantian laws of reason, are human responses to the eco-nomy of “being.”

106. A theory, for example, one that maintained the determination in the last instance of things spiritual by the means of production, would thereby designate an empirical antecedent.

107. From frag. 3 of Parmenides to “the supreme principle of all synthetic judgments” in Kant (see KPM 114 f./Kpm 123 f.) to being-in-the world, then to the phenomenology of the reversals, it is the process of identity that remains the same. It is best described by the όμολογεῑν of Heraclitus (see below, sec. 25).

108. SZ 38/BT 62.

109. It is rather curious that Heidegger, while making this distinction his own (see following note), nowhere recognizes its source in the Critique of pure Reason, B XXVI, B 145, B 166 n., B 194–195, B 358–359, B 411 n., А 397, B 497, B591–592, B 799. Still more curiously, when commenting directly on the Critique (Kpm and WTh), Heidegger presents Kantian “thinking” as signifying indiscriminately both the activity of the understanding and that of reason.

110. VA 180/PLT 181. Under different designations, this distinction often recurs, e.g., Gel 15/DTh 46 f., Sp 212/ISp 20.

111. This confirms the regional character of the archaeology of knowledge as practiced by Michel Foucault. It is regional by the double restriction of the origin to arche and of thought to epistēmē. His archaeology cannot but describe the phenomenon of epochal beginnings—for example, the appearance of houses of confinement in the seventeenth century—in terms of knowledge, of “perception”: “There must have formed, silently, and doubtless over the course of many years, a social sensibility, common to European culture, that suddenly reached a threshold and manifested itself in the second half of the seventeenth century. . . . It is this mode of perception which we must investigate.” M. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. R. Howard (New York, 1973), p. 45 (translation modified).

112. GA 24 68/BPP 50.

113. See below, sec. 47.

114. EiM 12/IM 15.

115. In his first book on Kant, this transcendentalism was not yet fully dissociated from subjectivity, but the interpretation of transcendental imagination as the common root of intuition and understanding aimed already at exhibiting the originary as an event, which explains the numerous comments on the literal sense of Ursprung in that book (KPM 20, 44 f., 190, 219/Kpm 26 f., 50 f., 201 f., 233). His second Kant book, with its emphasis on historical “fundamental positions” and the corresponding “reversals in being-there” (FD 74 f., 82, 143/WTh 95f., 106, 183), shows the original as an occurrence (Geschehen) which founds history (Geschichte).

116. VA220/EGT70.

117. VA 222/EGT 72.

118. FD 38/WTh 50.

119. See the conclusion to sec. 9, above, for this usage of ‘sense’.

120. US 175/OWL 72.

121. Hw 301 f./EGT 18. When Heidegger calls questioning “the piety of thinking” (VA 44/QCT 35), the word πϱόμος (Latin primus, German fromm) is to be understood out of the πίστις ἁληϋής, “trusting [first] what is unconcealed,” in Parmenides (SD 74/OTB 67, VA 42/QCT 34).

122. US 127/OWL 33.

123. What reserves itself while it grants itself is “the holy” (US 44 and 64 f./OWL 165 and 183). Das Anfängliche is holy in this double sense: through the ages, it opens up phenomena while obfuscating itself as the original phenomenality (cf. Höl 61). Its coming is adumbrated by the poet (Höl 62). Indeed, the holy “formerly smiled,” whereas now it is “misknown” (Höl 63). As both hiding and showing, the holy is then the “trace” leading toward an imminent “reversal,” toward the “return of the gods who have fled” (Hw 250/PLT 94). Hölderin called what is given and at the same time withheld “the fatherland” (Höl 14). Das Anfängliche is as antinomical as the semainein of Heraclitus (“The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks nor conceals but gives a sign,” frag. 93) (cf. EiM 130/IM 170 and Wm 349/Phy 252).

124. To be “pious” toward the constellations of truth—“yielding” to them—is to anticipate a “brighter dawn” (hellere Frühe, US 70 f./OWL 188). For the “juncture” brought about by the changing context of lēthē and alētheia, cf. VA 272/EGT 118.

§19. The ‘Originary’ Origin, or How Presencing Comes About

125. FD 64/WTh 83.

126. SD 44/OTB 41. What Emmanuel Lévinas criticizes in Heidegger, it seems to me, is the originary Parmenidism, not original Parmenidism, the identity of being and thinking at the rise of an age. Lévinas attempts to save ontic thought as the “window on the Eternal” from ontological thought, “which fixes itself in the heart of the Same” at the expense of the Other, En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (Paris, 1967), p. 89. The original is the identity of the non-identical: of legein and epochē. So understood, original Parmenidism does not prohibit saying that “Being is exteriority,” Emmanual Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, 1969), p. 290.

127. GA 55 365.

128. Presencing, as temporal coming-about, remains “the very issue,” die Sache selbst, of Heidegger’s thinking throughout his writings (see SZ 35 f./BT 59 f. and SD 72–75/OTB 65 f.). This issue, being as time, is what the twofold transcendental step backwards is to attain which leads from ontic to ontological knowledge and from there to fundamental ontology; or in the words of KPM, from empirical to transcendental knowledge and from there to the foundation of metaphysics; or according to the last writings: from entities (das Seiende) to beingness (Seiendheit) and from there to being (Sein); or, in terms of time, from the present (das Anwesende) to its mode of presence (Anwesenheit) and to presencing (Anwesen, SD 75/OTB 68, or Anwesung, Wm 359/Phy 260); or finally from letting-be as an attitude to letting-be and to letting-be (VS 103 and SD 40 f./OTB 37 f.).

129. EiM 5/IM 6.

130. FD 43/WTh 57. In the absence of philosophy, “an originary relationship to things comes to be lacking” (FD 31/WTh 41).

131. SD 2/OTB 2. The “saltatory” essence of originary thought must be distinguished from the leap through which originary thinking is entered. The wordplay on Satz (both ‘proposition’ and ‘leap’) concerns the second meaning, the step back toward fundamental ontology or to the laying of the ground of metaphysics, i.e., to being or to coming-to-presence, to letting-be (see above, n. 128).

132. “Ungeschichtlich, besser geschicklos,” “ahistorical, or better, without destiny” (SD 44/OTB 41).

133. For instance, the notion of phusis as coming-to-presence or presencing is worked out from the original usage of that notion in Aristotle (Wm 368–370/Phy 267–269).

134. SD 14/OTB 13, or Anwesung, Wm 369/Phy 268.

135. Or Abwesung, Wm 369/Phy 268.

136. Hw 315/EGT 30.

137. “What is purely other than all entities is non-being. But this nothing unfolds itself as being” (Wm 101 f./EB 353). In a subsequent edition of this text, Heidegger added two marginal notes: the ‘absolute other’ “is still thought [here] in a metaphysical fashion in terms of entities,” and: ‘non-being’ here means “no-thing” (GA 9 306).

138. SZ 38/BT 63.

139. That is the first sentence of Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, p. 3.

140. SD 25/OTB 24.

141. GA 9 306. During his middle period, in which the issue of phenomenology is the history of being through an overcoming of metaphysics, Heidegger thinks the ontological difference from the viewpoint of Anaximander’s chreōn, as “the handing over to its while, in each case, of whatever happens to be present” (Hw 340/EGT 55). To the hiding-showing so understood refer such phrases as “distance and nearness” (Höl 138 and VA 108/WNZ 417), “danger and saving” (VA 36, 40/QCT 28, 32). During that period, the “difference” is the name for presencing insofar as it permits entities to appear as absent or present. When Heidegger later tries to think the difference without recourse to entities (whether present or absent) the double trait of appropriation and expropriation comes to belong to presencing as such (SD 44/OTB 41). This agonistic pull then no longer describes “the withdrawal of the essence of unconcealment, viz. of concealment, for the sake of the unconcealed, which appears as entities” (Wm 199/WGM 210 f.). Rather, concealment and unconcealment are traits of preseneing itself, regardless of its difference from entities. After the discovery of the ahistorical event of Anwesen, then, the concept of alētheia is not the same as before.

142. “Denial and withholding obtain even within the event of appropriation inasmuch as they concern the manner in which there is time” (SD 58/OTB 54).

143. This “rise,” Ursprung, is manifold, in accordance with the multiplicity of regions disclosed by existential projects. In order to understand what the ‘originary’ phenomenon in the Existential Analytic is, one has to see not only that the many regions coexist for the entity that we are, but also that an entity, e.g., the jug in the essay “The Thing,” can pass from one originary region into another: it is present, it “arises” differently when used at the table, when photographed in a wine magazine, or again when analyzed according to its crystal composition. The entity that we ourselves are also ‘arises’ in more regions than one: Dasein for fundamental ontology, vorhanden as an object for medical science, zuhanden as cannon fodder.

144. According to BT, “Kant grasps the phenomenal content of the ‘I’ correctly in the expression ‘I think.’ . . . ‘I think’ means ‘I bind together’.” On the positive side, the “I” is therefore not a substance for Kant. On the negative side, however, it appears as res cogitans and as a logical “subject” that is vorhanden, and Kantian logic amounts to a “logic of things” (SZ 319 and 11/BT 367 and 31). In pursuing the direction indicated by Kant, Heidegger comprehends the “ich verbinde” as projecting a world. Care then takes the place of apperception as “originary unity of this structural whole” (SZ 232/BT 275). Werner Marx puts the continuity from Kant to Heidegger more squarely: “ ‘ursprünglich’ (transcendental),” op. cit., p. 90.

145. This impossibility is to be maintained against some ambiguous formulations in Heidegger himself, according to which the forgottenness of being could be “fundamentally and expressly overcome” (SZ 225/BT 268). See also Henri Declève, Heidegger et Kant (The Hague, 1970), p. 173, who suggests a double explanation for Kant’s “recoiling” from temporality, by structural obfuscation (lēthē) according to BT, but for “historical reasons” (epochē) according to KPM. While Seinsdenken would eventually clear away epochal concealment, it would stress the concealment at the heart of alētheia. Later Heidegger maintains the impossibility of total disclosure against the pretense of universal explanation by modern science (e.g., VA 168/PLT 170).

146. SZ 64/BT 92.

147. Wm 142/PDT 269.

148. KPM 136/Kpm 148. The adjective ursprünglich corresponds to “originarius” in such Kantian expressions as intuitus originarius and exhibitio originaria. Needless to add that Heidegger leaves aside all speculation about intellectual intuition attached to these phrases and retains only what remains “bound to the phenomenon” (KPM 129/Kpm 141).

149. EiM 145 f./IM 190 f.

150. EiM 146/IM 191.

151. Hw 30 and 34/PLT 41 and 45.

152. HW 35/PLT 46.

153. HW 43/PLT 55.

154. See Hw 53/PLT 65.

155. “How does truth happen? We answer: it happens in few essential ways” (Hw 44/PLT 55). Some of the modalities of “originary setting-in of truth” are enumerated in Hw 50/PLT 61 f.

156. VA 150 f. and 171 f./PLT 150 and 173 f. See also “Hölderlins Erde und Himmel,” in Hölderlin-Jahrbuch XI (1958–60): 17–39. According to a remark in SD 45/OTB 42, all of OWL would treat the “fourfold.”

157. VA 149/PLT 149. This originary unity is the synchrony of the fourfold: the four dimensions are situated, are “implicated,” in the same “simple fold” (Einfalt, ibid.). Any diachronie perspective on the “folds” through which the destiny of metaphysics “unfolds” (entfaltet, Wm 241 f./QB 84) is in this way excluded from the “fourfold.” On the diachronie Entfalten, see for instance SvG 182 f.

158. The “fourfold” is thus what presencing appropriates, das Ereignete (SD 45/OTB 42). It is not correct, then, to describe Heidegger’s radicalization of finitude in typological terms, as Walter Schulz does: “Man knows himself to be conditioned by things [bedingt, as opposed to unbedingt, unconditioned], that is, integrated into the totality of entities which Heidegger designates as the ‘fourfold’ . . . the four prototypes of entities,” Der Gott der neuzeitlichen Metaphysik (Pfullingen, 1957), pp. 55 f. The fourfold is not the totality of entities, nor are the earth and the sky, the divinities and the mortals types, even less prototypes. The “fourfold” is one term among many in Heidegger that allow him to think presencing as coming to presence, as the “play” of regions, without regard for entities that are present, be it to the senses or as archetypes.

William Richardson proposes two translations for Geviert, “Quadrate” and “four-fold polyvalence” (Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought [The Hague, 1963], p. 570). While the second, taken up in PLT, is a happy choice not only for the metaphor of “folds” but also for the insistence on the manifold, the first is misleading. It is not the number four that is important, nor any hint at geometry.

“Geviert” designates first of all the essence of language insofar as it gathers (dichtet, verdichtet), i.e., as it is poetic. But Heidegger also says “Vierung,” translated as “the fouring, the unity of the four” (VA 179/PLT 180). Vierung is a term from the history of architecture. It is the name for the intersection of the nave and the transept in a basilica. Their crossing gives light to the entire edifice since it is surmounted by a dome (Vierungskuppel) and a lantern. The four aisles meet there, so that it is also the point from which the whole interior can be seen. The Vierung or Geviert is the heart of the whole cathedral where it is good to stay: it is where the altar of the holy one (der Heilige) should be who heals (heilt) and who, by restoring integrity (das Heile), also grants salvation (das Heil). “Fourfold” is a happy translation since it suggests both the junction of enclosures and the bend or ply with which, in Heidegger, thinking and acting are to com-ply. A further connotation, both in English and German, has to do with the cardinal points: a Gevierthof is a yard surrounded by four buildings, forming a farm. The farmyard orients or situates the stable, the barn, etc., by placing them in relation to one another. It is this sense of orientation—traditionally established in reference to the earth’s two poles and sunrise and sunset—that Heidegger retains in the word “Geviert.” It suggests what is essential about a thing (VA 163 ff./PLT 163 ff.), namely, bringing the regions of the world near. The examples of the bridge and the jug (VA 152–155 and 164–172/PLT 152–154 and 166–174) are meant to indicate just that. Such “nearing” is the main characteristic of the fourfold (see also below, sec. 38).

159. SD 46 f./OTB 43.

160. “Bewegtheit” (SD 44/OTB 41).

161. Thomas Sheehan, “Getting to the Topic,” Research in Phenomenology, VII (1977):299–316. The author wishes to interpret “Heidegger’s so-called ‘Being-as-such’ in terms of’sense-assuch’ and his ‘Being of beings’ in terms of the ‘meaningfulness of beings’ ” (p. 303). The price paid for such a return to a philosophy of meaning is that ‘sense’ as directionality remains a movement “which happens only in man’s essential proper existence” (p. 313). Heidegger had renounced the vocabulary of meaning, shortly after BT, precisely to avoid understanding the event of presencing as what Sheehan calls “meaningful presence” experienced by man (ibid.). Cf. VS 73.

162. This reading has been put forth in several essays by Albert Hofstadter: Agony and Epitaph (New York, 1970), pp. 34–54 and 199–257; “Ownness and Identity,” Review of Metaphysics XXVIII/4 (1975):681–697; “Consciousness, Thought, and Enownment,” Psychiatry and the Humanities II (1977):85–109; “Enownment,” in W. Spanos, ed. Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature (Bloomington, 1979), pp. 17–37. The author opposes Heidegger’s “Ereignis” (which he translates as “enownment”) to Hegel’s “alienation.” Enownment comes to designate identification, recovery of self, self-consciousness, reconciliation. Ereignen would then mean “making my own” what is at first other than I. Thus the “very issue” (die Sache selbst) of Heidegger’s phenomenology would remain, after all, the self as a referent for consciousness.

163. “Wesenhaftes Zueinander” (Hw 250/PLT 93).

164. Ibid. The expressions that suggest the “originary oneness” of the fourfold—“play,” “ring,” “mirror-play,” “ringing” (VA 178 f./PLT 179 f.)—may have to be read in connection with Dionysus, too.

165. All quotes from SD 44/OTB 40 f.

166. As I have indicated, the double step back toward the ‘originary’ parallels the one described in BT and KPM. The move from things present to their epochal order of presence and from there to presencing as such constitutes the three-tiered temporal difference (n. 128 above).

167. SD 44/OTB 41.

168. St. Augustine’s time concept—“the presence of things past, the presence of things present, and the presence of things to come” (Confessions XI, 26)—is thus just as ontic as Aristotle’s. See below, sec. 23.

169. “Die Seinsvergessenheit ‘hebt’ sich ‘auf’ ” (SD 44/OTB 41). Heidegger’s insistence on the notion of Aufhebung obliges translating it so as to retain the three Hegelian moments. On the historical-systematic locus of dialectics, however, see below, sec. 46, n. 98.

170. SD 66 f./OTB 60.

171. SD 44/OTB 41.

172. Ibid.

173. SD 46/OTB 43.

174. In the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” this link is not entirely clear. The “originary event of truth” in a field of presence such as a community, a work, etc., seems to be the advent, the beginning, “the founding deed” that opens such a field (Hw 50/PLT 61 f.). This fusion of the original and the originary explains, to a large extent, the slanted readings of that essay (see above, sec. 5, n.2). To understand given historical fields of phenomena through their beginnings—e.g., to understand Marxism or psychoanalysis through their founders—is to trace what is original in them. The discourse on the originary will never yield any lineage of principia, justifying the reign of some princeps, or a lineage of archai, justifying an archon of some sort. Heidegger’s focus on the founding deed, in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” tends to blur the contours between Beginn, Anfang and Ursprung. This essay does not suffice therefore to understand that even recourse to initial deeds, e.g., those of some Founding Fathers, cannot legitimate rule. Heidegger’s critique of such epochal figures and their sway appears only from his genealogy of principles and the hypothesis of closure.

175. SD 44/OTB 40 f.

176. SD 67/OTB 60. Heidegger suggests that the ‘principle’ of the contemporary era is atomic energy (SvG 199/PG 213 f.). In a 1962 seminar, he indicated the ambiguity of the Gestell: on one hand, this word stands for the last among what I call the epochal principles, and in that sense this notion does not allow one to “think being without entities”; on the other hand, Gestell is the anticipatory phenomenon of the event of appropriation (“Vorerscheinung des Ereignisses”). However, “the necessity as well as the possibility of this contradiction were not elucidated any further” (SD 35/OTB 32).

177. SD 67/OTB 60.

178. “Fundamentum concussum” (SD 34/OTB 32); “Zeitspielraum” (SvG 129 f.).

179. SvG 186. Eugen Fink has shown that a phenomenology which renounces construing ultimate foundations (“Die Welt ist grundlos”) has to understand the world as a “play without players”: Spiel als Weltsymbol (Stuttgart, i960), pp. 233–239.

180. Ibid.

181. In some texts, Heidegger characterizes the Ursprung by the two traits traditionally ascribed to archē: “that out of which” and “that by which” something occurs; commencement and commandment. He integrates that Aristotelian pair in a regional phenomenology. “Ursprung signifies here that out of which and by which something is what it is and as it is” (Hw 7/PLT 17). Needless to add that the causal thought patterns, which, as I have said, determine the notion of archē, are left inoperative. That out of which and by which something is what it is, according to the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” is its regional mode of presence. The work of art opens and institutes the region “art,” and the political deed, “the political.” This regional conception of the origin is entirely given up in OTB.

182. “According to the history of being, the origin (Ursprung) of the dominance of truth as certitude lies concealed in the re-lease (Entlassung) of its essence from the original (1anfänglicher) truth of being” (N II 423/EPh 21). It is the most decisive contingent fact of Western history, according to Heidegger, that only the original thinkers formerly thought the originary truth. This truth has therefore to be gathered from the Presocratic key words. All subsequent forms of truth—the theories of conformity (Aristotle), of coherence (Leibniz, Spinoza), of identity (Hegel), of self-evidence (Husserl), or of pragmatic consensus (Peirce)—have been conceived from the standpoint of the knowing subject.

183. Karl-Otto Apel, Toward a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby (London, 1981), pp. 136–179, on Letztbegründung. Ultimate foundation grounds both theory and practice, it “does not allow maintaining the difference between theory and praxis . . . in order to set up the foundation of critical social sciences” (ibid., p. 145, trans. modified). All of Apel’s work aims at establishing a transcendental philosophy of language as first philosophy capable of founding both critical theory and emancipatory practice. Even when the Aristotelian heritage (the reference to a first philosophy) in the theories of legitimation is less explicit, the very notion of legitimation includes the pros hen reference, the reference of subjects to a norm-bestowing authority. For the so-called Frankfurt School, this authoritative point of reference is the utopian voluntary and rational agreement of all members of society.

184. If post-modernity is to be characterized by the fragmentation of the origin, it is perhaps necessary to date its rise back to Marx’s German Ideology (cf. above, sec. 7 and 8).

185. Wm 191/BWr 239. For Heidegger’s understanding of “rules,” see below, sec. 47.

186. “There is being only in the specific disclosedness that characterizes the understanding of being. . . . There is being only if truth, that is, if Dasein exists” (GA 24 24 f./BPP 18 f.).

187. SZ 212/BT 255.

188. “Being becomes destiny in that It, being, gives itself” (Wm 166/BWr 215, see also SD 46/OTB 43). Heidegger’s self-interpretation is as violent as his interpretations of other writers on this point: “Is it not said in Being and Time (p. 212), about the issue of the ‘there is’: Only as long as Dasein ‘is’ . . . ‘is there’ being’? Indeed. That means: Being delivers itself over (übereignet) to man only so long as the clearing of being occurs properly (ereignet)” (Wm 167/BWr 216). Within phenomenological transcendentalism, the ‘there is’ has changed its sense. While in the early writings, the a priori is being in as much as it is mine, here the a priori becomes presence as it gives itself over to man, i.e., as it is pre-understood in any historical setting. The “Letter on Humanism,” from which these lines are taken, has been aptly described as “the most important document of Heidegger’s self-interpretation,” von Herrmann, Die Selbstinterpretation Martin Heideggers, p. 7.

189. “In a work, truth is thrown toward (zugeworfen) . . . a historical human community” (Hw 62/PLT 75). The “adjectival” (from ad-icere, Latin, to “throw toward”) structure of the ‘original’ is only a trait accompanying the “projection” of an order; in that it differs from the ‘originary’ Zuwurf that establishes neither work nor any order.

190. N II 377/N iv 233.

191. SD 19/OTB 18.

192. SD 18/OTB 17.

193. US 193 f./OWL 87 f.

194. This twofold retrieval has a curious corollary: If the original “repeats,” in an entirely secularized way, the sacred, the originary properly forms the nucleus of Heideggerian “piety”—a piety that, like Nietzsche’s, remains decidedly faithful to the earth. Just as the originary seems to have once been thought in words such as phusis, logos, alētheia, so man’s attitude before pure presencing also found its denominations among the ancients: ϑαυμάζειν, wonder (WPh 24–26/WPh 79–85), ήϑος (Sophocles and Heraclitus spoke of “ethos more originally than Aristotle’s lectures on ‘Ethics’,” Wm 184/BWr 232 f., cf. EiM 112 f./IM 146 f.) and above all αἱδώς, Scheu, awe. Awe is opposed, first of all, to what the will can accomplish: what inspires awe escapes our control. But awe appears in the face of what is most familiar, most intimate to us: “It clears and tends that site within which human being is at home” (Wm 103/EB 355). Still, this feeling indicates that what is most intimate also escapes us: “Awe is the knowledge that the originary does not let itself be immediately experienced” (Höl 124). It makes us hesitate to approach presencing directly, for in awe we know that presencing also means absencing. It is like the index for that duality of hiding-showing, which is why it is a feeling dear to thinking (Höl 137). But if it thoroughly animates thinking, it nevertheless remains mute (EiM 115/IM 149). Since the notion of the sacred belongs in the context of the original, it keeps historical connotations: the sacred is “the trace of the fugitive gods,” leading toward their possible return (Hw 250 f./PLT 94). On the other hand, awe and piety, since they accompany the phenomenon of the originary, direct thinking toward that event, presencing, which is not at all historical.

195. In the contemporary age, for example, beingness “becomes machination” (N II 486/EPh 80). For “machination,” cf. below p. 183; for “beingness,” sec. 34, nn. 50 and 52.

Part Four: Historical Deduction of the Categories of Presencing

1. WhD 144 f./WCT 237. Perhaps by mistake, instead of “concealedness” in these lines, the German text has a pronoun referring to “unconcealedness.”

2. WhD 136/WCT 224.

3. WhD 145/WCT 238.

4. The “history of the epochs according to Heidegger” has been described, for example, by Peter Fürstenau, Heidegger, das Gefüge seines Denkens (Frankfurt, 1958), pp. 101–168; Jean Wahl, Sur l’interprétation de l’histoire de la métaphysique d’après Heidegger (Paris, 1952); and Katharina Kanthack, Das Denken Martin Heideggers (Berlin, 1959).

5. IuD 66/IaD 67.

6. These expressions are from Mikel Dufrenne and Paul Ricoeur, Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence (Paris, 1947), pp. 364, 372. I cite the authors’ polemic against Heidegger and in favor of Jaspers to show that commentators as attentive as Dufrenne and Ricoeur simply do not seem to have noticed the new transcendentalism in Heidegger’s thinking (see also ibid. pp. 327–333), a transcendentalism that Ricoeur was to describe later, but in a different context, as “a transcendentalism without a subject,” Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, trans. and ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, Ill., 1974), p. 53.

IX. Table of the Categories of Presencing

§20. The Categorial, the Noumenal, and the Empirical

1. FD 82/WTh 106.

2. Werner Marx, Heidegger and the Tradition, trans. T. Kisiel and M. Greene (Evanston, Ill., 1971), p. 190. W. Marx was the first to raise the problem of being in Heidegger in terms of categories. He distinguishes between two categorial classes: the categories of the “first beginning,” that is, those that Heidegger repeats or retrieves from preclassical Greek thought, and those of “the other beginning,” which he anticipates in today’s “crisis” in history. Among the first are έόν, φύσις, ἀλήϑεια and λόγος (pp. 125–159), and among the second, “world,” “thing,” and “speech” (pp. 183–207). Marx opposes these determinations of being in Heidegger to the “fundamental traits” of Aristotelian ουσία and to the traits of being in Hegel. Marx’s aim, although stated in a different vocabulary, is indeed to understand categorially the reversal in the history of being undergone in the twentieth century. But the distinction between erstanfängliehe and andersanfängliche categories, if it enables one to “comprehend the unfolding of essence [das Wesen des Wesens] such that novelty can appear” in history (p. 9, translation modified), nevertheless deprives one of criteria for ‘deducing’ the second group of categories. Marx’s distinction helps suggest how this second group is related to the first (pp. 173–179 and 205 f.), but it is unfortunate that he can only invoke Heidegger’s alleged solitary experience of thought to justify the traits of “the other beginning.” In what name can one postulate a shift in the categorial continuity that runs from the Presocratics through Aristotle and Hegel to Heidegger, the shift which is the post-modern ‘turning’? That is the question to which the distinction between two beginnings, as W. Marx applies it to the problem of categories, does not contribute any response. The very polarity of a double beginning becomes yet another ideal construct. Instead of drawing them from two historical beginnings (from two ‘original’ origins), the categories of presencing have to be developed from a transcendental starting point if they are to account for a historical possibility: from the distinction between ‘original’ and ‘originary’. This will not only allow for their justification or deduction, but will also yield a table of them much more developed than the indications provided by W. Marx.

3. EiM 131/IM 172 and Fd 38/WTh 50.

4. Gemeinwesen, N I 194/N i 166. About Menschentum, cf. above, Sec. 10.

5. N I 275; FD 38 and 143/WTh 50 and 183; Hw 311 f./EGT 27.

6. Wm 224 f./QB 55.

7. Many commentators have noticed the elimination of “standards” by Heidegger’s early—and even more his later—project, see for example Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York, 1968), p. 82. Aside from the fact that a similar charge could be waged against both Husserl and Wittgenstein, it must be remembered that Heidegger in no way renounces criteria for setting apart principial hubris from economic obedience. On the practical consequences of this distinction, see below, Part V.

8. The expression is Max Weber’s, for whom it designates the function of the ideal types or models that can motivate rational submission to one or another form of authority. See, for example, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen, 1920–21), vol. I, pp. 3083, and Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Tübingen, 1921), vol. I, pp. 122–124. It introduced here merely for reasons of conceptual convenience.

9. Ever since Otto Pöggeler’s article, “Sein als Ereignis,” in Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, XIII (1959):597–632, it has often been repeated that the ‘Verbindlichkeit’ of Heidegger’s thought comes to him “from the Western tradition which determines us all,” cf. the conclusion of that essay. Still, the whole question is to know how this tradition “binds” us.

10. Critique of Pure Reason B 116. Whereas in his early writings on Kant, Heidegger denounces this distinction as a “slogan” having produced “a heap of misunderstandings” (GA 25 213; cf. KPM 66/Kpm 73), he later accepts it as what is “originary” in the first Critique (FD 94/WTh 121).

11. SD 75/OTB 68.

12. It is true that in BT Heidegger uses this Kantian phrase to express precisely the common understanding of being and therefore everyday existence (SZ 4/BT 23). But he himself recognizes the violence of such an interpretation (KPM 196/Kpm 207) and later abandons it.

13. SZ 44 and 7/BT 70 and 27. There has been much speculation on the reasons why “the attempt in Being and Time ended in a blind alley” (Wm 173/BWr 222). It has been said that in B the question of being is raised from the standpoint of being-there, while after the Kehre, it is addressed directly, so that being-there can then be thematized only as a consequence; for example, Pöggeler, in “Sein als Ereignis,” p. 621; James M. Demske, Being, Man, and Death (Lexington, 1970), pp. 87–91. This way of accounting for the unfinished state of BT draws only one methodological conclusion from the ‘turning’ (Kehre) instead of understanding the new perspective opened after 1928 as the discovery of aletheiological temporality (cf. VS 73).

14. One example that illustrates the impossibility of, as it were, purifying presencing of all empirical beginnings in the ‘history of being’ can be found in Heidegger’s interpretation, before and after the Kehre, of the ‘supreme principle of all synthetic judgments’ in Kant. At first this principle provides Heidegger with one way of stating the finite transcendence of the entity we are, that is, of being-in-the-world (KPM 11/Kpm 123). Later that same supreme principle expresses, to the contrary, the original mode in which being is disclosed in the modern age: “Whoever understands that proposition comprehends Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Whoever comprehends the Critique comprehends not only one book among the writings of philosophy but masters a fundamental position of our historical being-there” (FD 143/WTh 183, italics mine). While Henri Declève, Heidegger et Kant (The Hague, 1970), pp. 275 ff., reads these two passages without noting the radical shift in context, the transference accomplished by the Kehre is made perfectly clear by H. Hoppe, “Wandlungen in der Kant-Auffassung Heideggers” in Vittorio Klostermann, ed., Durchblicke: Martin Heidegger zum 80. Geburtstag (Frankfurt, 1970), especially p. 307. At any rate, Heidegger’s recognition of the necessary detour through history takes the edge off Paul Ricoeur’s polemic against his presumed “short route”: “The short route is the one taken by an ontology of the understanding, after the manner of Heidegger,” Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, p. 6.

15. “Ganzseinkönnen” (SZ 309 and 326/BT 357 and 374).

16. E.g. N I 455 f., 462–472 and N II 168, 174, 189, 421/N iv 119, 123, 136 and EPh 19.

17. Jacques Derrida describes Heidegger’s “ontico-ontological difference” as an “intrametaphysical effect of deferment” because it thematizes, he claims, “being” as “belonging” and as “maintaining,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1982), p. 22. What is thereby obliterated for the sake of “la différance” is the temporal difference from which Derrida, with an undeniable talent for gleaning catchwords from Heidegger, first developed his understanding of “deferment”: “On a certain face of it, deferment is, to be sure, only the historical and epochal unfolding of being or of the ontological difference” (ibid.). The obliteration leaves Heidegger entertaining the sole questions of the “meaning or the truth of being” (ibid.), to the exclusion of the topology (cf. above, sec. 2, the epigraph) which articulates precisely the temporal difference.

18. In Werner Marx’s interpretation (see above, n. 2), Heidegger speaks as an advocate of that “highly creative presence” which, he claims, characterized the age of the Greeks and in which man was a “violent co-creator” (Marx, Heidegger and the Tradition, p. 244, cf. pp. 139–141). His reading is humanist and romantic because it substitutes the distance between two instances of the original (erstanfänglich and andersanfänglich) for the difference between the original and the originary. While the two instances of the original—marking the beginning and the end of the metaphysical era—are mutually exclusive, the difference between original and originary applies throughout the history of being. As a result, the categories will have to be deduced, not from some anticipatory thought that has no locus of verification but itself, but from the concrete phenomena of transition in history. Therefore we need appeal, neither to some privileged experience of Heidegger’s, nor to the violence of a “few really creative men” (Marx, p. 238), nor to the “ever so few authentic things” (p. 245). Nor need we follow Marx in his condemnation of technological “reification” more severe than anything to be found in Heidegger himself (pp. 244 f.). These simplifications can be avoided if one refuses to construe an opposition between two beginnings such that, when all is said and done, nothing really new has happened in the West during more than two thousand years.

19. KPM 73/Kpm 80.

20. This title is from Gustav Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger (Einsiedeln, 1959), p. 28. See analogous formulations, to the point of identifying the Heideggerian “being” with “God,” in Johann Baptist Lotz, Das Urteil und das Sein (Munich, 1957), pp. 181–200, and idem, “Denken und Sein nach den jüngsten Veröffentlichungen von M. Heidegger,” Scholastik, 33 (1958):81֊98.

21. These perplexing statements are from Reinhart Maurer, Revolution und ‘Kehre’ (Frankfurt, 1975), pp. 30, 35. But the champion of such metaphysical ‘co-opting’ of Heidegger is Walter Schulz. See especially “Über den philosophie-geschichtlichen Ort Martin Heideggers,” Philosophische Rundschau, I (1953/54):65֊93 and 211–232, reprinted in Otto Pöggeler, ed., Heidegger (Cologne, 1969), pp. 95–139. Schulz intends to show that Heidegger’s thought is situated, not “counter to” modern metaphysics, but at its very heart. Heideggerian “being” is called a “principle of Christian origin” and is said to verify the “fundamental dialectical law” of metaphysics, namely, that finite subjectivity in its effort to grasp itself experiences that it is carried by its Other, divine Subjectivity. The same arguments have been developed by Schulz (to Heidegger’s exasperation, it may be added) in Der Gott der neuzeitlichen Metaphysik (Pfullingen, 1957), pp. 48–58, and in Philosophie in der veränderten Welt (Pfullingen, 1972). In this last work, being is ultimately called the “Initiator of history” (pp. 531 f.), the “Subject of history” (p. 538). Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (New York, 1966), takes a similar stand: “Heidegger’s statements about being are really, at least in part, ontic, not ontological, whatever his protestations. . . . For surely, a ‘being’ that acts must be; that which takes the initiative must exist . . . as vis-à-vis . . . some sort of subject” (p. 252).

22. Karl-Otto Apel, Transformation der Philosophie (Frankfurt, 1976), vol. I, pp. 270 and 40 (not included in the English translation). According to Apel, what he calls the “hypostatizations” in Heidegger’s language—primarily “being”—would be purely metaphysical inasmuch as their criterion for meaning lies exclusively in praxis (ibid., p. 333). The project of the ‘history of being’, in abandoning transcendentalism (p. 43), would have to be content with tracing the positivity of past constitutions of meaning. Apel does recognize Heidegger’s “step back” from propositional to aletheiological truth, but instead of acknowledging the genuinely transcendental quest for a priori conditions in that step, he dilutes it into a radical relativization of truth.

23. Wm 162/BWr 210. It is true that elsewhere in a disconcerting text he speaks, on the contrary, of “the god of being” (N II 29), which is however not the God of monotheism. The gods, it will be recalled, are not only one variable in the ‘fourfold’, they also come in the plural. “The” god of being is “a” god, just as only “a god” can save us (Sp 193/ISp 5).

24. VA 80/EPh 93. The rejection of historicism is a constant in Heidegger, although for different motifs, from the early to the last writings (cf. SZ 396/BT 448 and SD 69/OTB 62). The deduction of categories, which establishes what remains “all-pervasive” in history, suffices to disprove the charge of historicism, particularly in connection with the perplexing additional charges of “individualism” and “metaphysical neutrality” as, it seems, Leo Strauss would have it in Natural Right and History (Chicago, 1953). According to one of Strauss’s flock, indeed, that entire book was meant as “a response to radical historicism—to Heidegger.” “It was only radical historicism that reconciled historical individuality and temporality, or ‘being and time’, by abandoning the plane of theoretical understanding” (Richard Kennington, “Strauss’s Natural Right and History,” Review of Metaphysics XXXV (1981):62, 65). All this lacks any base in Heidegger.

25. In BT, the characteristics of the first type are called “existentials,” and only those of the second, “categories” (SZ 44 and 54/BT 70 and 79). It is obvious that this distinction establishes a division within the categorial problematic as such.

26. N I 529.

27. KPM 97/Kpm 106. On the role of the schematism in the constitution of “ontological knowledge” according to Kpm, see also Charles Sherover’s exposition, Heidegger, Kant and Time (Bloomington, 1971), pp. 102–120.

28. KPM 100/Kpm 108 f.

29. The young Heidegger first speaks of “places” in a context of propositional logic, either to adopt that terminology (FSch 132) or to show the dependence of language and propositions on being-there (SZ 166 and 226/BT 210 and 268 f.). In the second period, he speaks of place, Ort, especially in the context of Erörterung, localization, of the epochal stamps of alētheia (for example, IuD 64–66/IaD 66–68). To “situate” the poet’s word (cf. Höl 90–94) is another instance of aletheiological topology. Lastly, in the third period, the paradigmatic instance of “locus” is that of the reversals: “To localize the event of appropriation” is to prepare oneself for a possible imminent reversal (SD 58/OTB 54). As Heidegger describes the itinerary of his thinking through those three stages (VS 73), the difference between locus and locality, Ort and Ortschaft, remains non-temporal unless recast in terms of presencing (as in VA 255/EGT 99).

30. EdD 23/PLT 12. See also Heidegger’s quotation from Aristotle, “it appears, however, to be something overwhelming and hard to grasp, the topos” in KR 5/AaS 3.

31. Whereas, in SZ 44/BT 70, Heidegger had translated ϰατηγοϱείν very literally by “to accuse publicly, to impute right in the face” (cf. FD 48 f./WTh 63 f.), in commenting on early Greek thinkers, he translates the noun ϰατηγοϱία more freely by “suggestion, manifestation” (Her 261/H 162).

32. FD 82/WTh 106.

33. EdD 15/PLT 8.

34. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), p. 293 (translation modified).

§21. A Reversal Undergone by the Puma-Shaped City

35. SvG 153.

36. Nathan Wachtel, La vision des vaincus. Les Indiens du Pérou devant la Conquête espagnole (Paris, 1971), p. 63. In addition to this study, I have used the following works by George Kubier: “A Peruvian Chief of State: Manco Inca,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 24 (1944):253֊276; “The Behavior of Atahualpa,” ibid., 25 (1945):413֊427; “The Neo-Inca State,” ibid., 27 (1947): 189–203: “The Quechua in the Colonial World,” Handbook of South American Indians vol. 2 (Washington, 1946), pp. 331–410; and lastly his essay, The Shape of Time. Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven, 1962).

37. Wachtel, op. cit., p. 131.

38. Ibid., p. 53.

39. Kubier (1947), pp. 189–203 and (1944) especially pp. 257 f.

40. Wachtel, op. cit., pp. 63, 60.

41. Ibid., p. 134.

42. Ibid., p. 146.

43. Cited ibid., p. 221.

44. Ibid., p. 49. Concerning the novelty of writing, the episode of Cajamarca is relevant: the Spaniards present the Bible to Atahualpa and tell him that it contains the word of God. Atahualpa opens it, presses it against his ear, but hears nothing. With disdain, he throws it to the ground. Pizarro arrests the Inca and has his followers massacred. See Kubler (1945), op. cit., especially pp. 418 f.

45. Ibid., p. 210.

46. Ibid., pp. 55 and 64. All of the categories of transition from the Inca empire to colonial Peru that follow are borrowed from Wachtel. For the general concept of era, and to an extent that surpasses the Peruvian context, I am, however, indebted to Kubler’s The Shape of Time. The author calls a “shape of time” “those durations which either are longer than single human lives or which, as collective durations, require the time of more than one person. The smallest family of such shapes is the annual crop of costume fashions. . . . The largest shapes, like metagalaxies, are very few: they dimly suggest their presence as the giant forms of human time: Western civilization; Asiatic culture; prehistoric, barbarian, and primitive society. In between are the conventional periods” (p. 99). From these distinctions, it is apparent that a “shape” of time is indissociably qualitative and quantitative. Its concept surpasses mere periodization as well as a simple opposition between synchrony and diachrony.

47. Wachtel, p. 235.

48. Ibid., p. 241. Cf. Kubler (1944), pp. 275 f.

49. “By the term ‘destructuration’, we designate the survival of ancient structures or of partial elements thereof, but severed from the relatively coherent context where they used to be situated: after the Conquest, fragments of the Inca State remain in place, but the cement that united them has disintegrated” (ibid., p. 134).

50. Ibid., p. 74.

X: At the Presocratic Inception: The Prospective Categories

1. N I 169/N i 144. The last words of this text directly contradict Werner Marx’s distinction between “erstanfängliche” categories and “andersanfängliche” categories, cf. above, ch. 9, n. 2.

2. “What help are impressive-sounding epithets like ‘basic word’, if the bases and abysses of Greek thinking so little concern us that we cover them up with labels picked at random from representational quarters that have become common for us?” (VA 268/EGT 111).

3. George J. Seidel, Martin Heidegger and the Pre-Socratics: An Introduction to His Thought (Lincoln, Neb., 1964) examines Heidegger’s use of most of these words. His exposition, although introductory indeed, has the merit of guarding the reader against confusing “Heidegger’s own notion of being with the meaning of being which he finds among the Greeks” (p. 40), which is to say that “there is a theory of both history and language behind his historical exegeses” (p. 156).

4. WhD 140/WCT 232 (emphasis added).

5. N II 486/EPh 79.

6. Cited in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York, 1975), p. 199. In BT Heidegger described the being of Dasein as self-interpretation, Selbstauslegung (SZ 312/BT 360).

§22. Eon

7. For an example of that received opinion, see Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers, trans. E. S. Robinson (Cambridge, 1947): “True Being can have nothing in common with Not-being. Neither can it be many. . . . Thus there are no onta in the plural, but only a single on” (p. 102).

8. WhD 133/WCT 220.

9. χϱὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεɩ̃ν τ’ἐὸν ἔμμεναι, Parmenides, frag. VI (cited in WhD 105/WCT 171). G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven translate: “That which can be spoken and thought needs must be,” The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1971), p. 270. This translation obfuscates the duality that Heidegger wishes to stress in rendering τ’ἐὸν as das Anwesende, “the present,” and ἔμμεναι as anwesen, “presencing” (WhD 141/WCT 233).

10. WhD 143/WCT 236. In Parmenides, these two verbs occur in the plural of the present participle (frag. IV). Kirk and Raven translate: “things present”—“things far off” (op. cit., p. 275).

11. The same experience of a dual motility is preserved in the words γένεσις and φ𝛝οϱά in Anaximander (Hw 315/EGT 30 f.). With Plato, Heidegger charges on the other hand, under the domination of the ‘idea’ as pure visibility, φ𝛝οϱά, the movement of withdrawal, falls into forgottenness (Wm 135/PDT 264). With Aristotle, γένεσις and φ𝛝οϱά come to be restricted to the movement of the form, that is, to generation and corruption as analyzed in physics (Wm 358/Phy 259).

12. In 1973, Heidegger translates Parmenides’ εὔϰυϰλος, on the contrary, by the difference “present-presencing,” so that this word comes to equal ἐόν (VS 134 and 137).

13. VA 255/EGT 100.

14. These two distinctions do not entirely overlap. For Thomas Aquinas, the entitas, on one hand, “is divided into ten predicaments” (Summa Theologica, P. I, q. 48, a. 2, ad 2), and then this term appears to translate the Aristotelian on; but on the other hand, “there are various degrees of entitas” (Disputed Questions on Truth, q. 1, a. 1 c.), and then this term translates ousia.

15. Hw 162/HCE 107. What begins with that separation, Heidegger adds, “is only one specially adjusted interpretation of that early duality in the on.”

16. See above, the epigraph to Part IV and my remark in the accompanying note 1. Paradoxically, the reference to time in the Western understanding of being becomes explicit only with the beginning of metaphysics. When, “at the end of Greek philosophy, with Aristotle” (EiM 157/IM 206), substance is called τὸ τί ήν είναι, “that which has always been” (KPM 233/Kpm 249), being’s permanence is thereby stressed rather than a movement of arrival and withdrawal.

17. Cf. EiM 157/IM 205 f. “If the ἐὸν ἔμμεναι did not unfold as the presencing of what is present, Kant’s thinking would have no space in which to utter even a single statement of his Critique of Pure Reason” (WhD 142/WCT 234).

18. WhD 145/WCT 238. Therefore, metaphysics only carries out “the hidden injunction [received] at the inception” (EiM 156/IM 205).

§23. Phusis

19. EiM 11/IM 14 (italics added). Heidegger recognizes that Aufgang, “blooming” or “dehiscence,” is a poor translation of phusis (Wm 329/Phy 237). The botanical metaphor, precisely because it is only a metaphor, is however less misleading than Werner Marx’s attempt to interpret the term as “creative occurrence” (Heidegger and the Tradition, Evanston, Ill., 1971, p. 139). The violence of the “creators” (EiM 47/IM 62) is indeed one way among many of stopping the free emergence called phusis. The praise of creativity presupposes “an essential reversal in the concept of phusis” parallelling its use in Aristotle’s doctrine of motion (FD 64/WTh 83). As a category, phusis makes “the poets, the thinkers, the statesmen” (EiM 47/IM 62) appear as variables in a game of universal economic self-manifestation.

20. EiM 11/IM 14.

21. Of these two time notions, one Aristotelian (Physics IV, 11; 219 b 1) and the other Augustinian (Confessions, XI, 26), only the first is really overcome in BT. Augustine’s text, on the other hand, serves as the point of departure for determining the temporal “ecstases” (SZ 427/BT 479f.). The temporality of phuesthai is more radical, not only than these received notions, but also than the Temporalität of being as it was to be worked out from the standpoint of the Zeitlichkeit of being-there (SZ 39/BT 63). The Augustinian background of the temporality of being as reached through that of Dasein is palpable, too, in Heidegger’s identifying time and transcendental apperception (KPM 186/Kpm 197). Ecstatic temporality remains partly embedded in the tradition of the inwardness of time that runs from Neoplatonism to critical transcendentalism.

22. Frag. 123 (VA 270 f./EGT 113 f. and Wm 370 f./Phy 269).

23. It is paradigmatic since, as I have said, every inception contains what will eventually emerge from it and to which it remains superior.

24. VS 69.

25. It is neither “for all time,” nor everywhere “in the same way” that present things “presence” (WhD 143/WCT 235 f.).

26. Phusis is, “at the inception of Western thought, the rise of the concealed into unconcealment”; with Plato, on the other hand, a thing’s aspect “determines what can then still be called unconcealment” (Wm 139/PDT 267).

27. Hw 324/EGT 38 f.

28. Hw 325/EGT 39. For Moira, see also VA 255/EGT 100.

29. Physics II, 1; 192 b 7 (cf. Wm 315 and 358 f./Phy 226 and 259 f.; FD 63–66/WTh 82–85).

30. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason B 479 (cf. N II 165 and 188 f./N iv 115 f. and 134; FD 175/WTh 225 f.).

31. Hw 100/QCT 149, cf. below, sec. 46.

32. SvG 154. The modern languages preserve something of the original sense of phusis—presencing—inasmuch as the word ‘nature’ derives from nasci, to be born. Thus, “even we, when we speak of the ‘nature’ of things, the ‘nature’ of the state, the ‘nature’ of man . . . we mean the being and the way to be of entities in general” (Wm 370/Phy 268).

§24. Alētheia

33. VA 258/EGT 103. This is not the place to trace the various senses of the word alētheia through Heidegger’s writings and their stages (see the entry “alētheia” in the Index of Greek Terms in William Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought [The Hague, 1963], p. 728). Suffice it to recall that in BT it is being-there that constitutes unconcealment and, in that sense, the Lichtung, clearing (SZ 33 and 133/BT 56 and 171). In the early texts, alētheuein, to disclose, is even called “a basic comportment of the psychē” (GA 24 103/BPP 73; see also Wm 84 and 158/BWr 127 f. and 207). While it is generally admitted that alētheia is a ‘privative’ construct, its etymological opposition to lēthē seems less assured. Paul Friedländer (Platon, 2 vol. [Berlin, 1954], vol. I, pp. 233–242) had first criticized Heidegger’s position on this issue, but retracted his criticism in the third edition of his book (Berlin, 1964), on which the English translation (3 vol., [Princeton, 1969]) is based (cf. vol. I, pp. 224 f.). Bruno Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes (4th ed., Göttingen, 1975), adopts the translation Unvergessenheit, “unforgottenness,” but accepts also Unverborgenheit, “unconcealedness” (not included in the translation by T. G. Rosenmeyer, The Discovery of Mind [Cambridge, Mass., 1953]). Gerhard Krüger, “Martin Heidegger und der Humanismus,” in Studia Philosophica IX (1949):93–129, on the other hand, considers the opposition alētheia-lēthē to lack any philological foundation. It seems to me that Heribert Boeder (“Der frühgriechische Wortgebrauch von Logos und Alētheia,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, IV [1958]) has put the issue in proper focus: “It is the ‘transitive’ lēthein that determines the sense of alētheia. . . . This eliminates any opposition between alētheia and lēthē . . . which indicates that the interpretation of alētheia as ‘unconcealment’ cannot genuinely rely upon the original sense of the word” (pp. 98 f.). The pertinent opposition would be between lēthein, to conceal, and “to grant alētheia,” i.e., to show. In the epic tradition that opposition would be limited to the domain of speech (pp. 92 f.). It is evident that Heidegger shifts the very terms of the debate: “It is not for the love of etymology that I stubbornly translate the name alētheia as ‘unconcealedness’ “(SD 75 f./OTB 68).

34. Hw 38 f./PLT 50 f. and SD 72/OTB 65 (the translator notes: “The meaning Heidegger intends is related to ‘lever’ [i.e., to alleviate, lighten a burden]”). “Lightening means: to lighten, to weigh anchor, to clear. . . . What is so lightened is the free, the open” (Her 260 /H 161).

35. Parmenides, frag. I (cited SD 74/OTB 67), with Heidegger’s commentary (ibid.).

36. SD 78/OTB 71. Later Heidegger retracted that interpretation of Parmenides: “What is said there [in OTB] is not correct” (VS 133). Werner Marx considers such belonging together of truth and error “extremely perilous,” op. cit., p. 251. It may however appear less so if man as “co-creator” and alētheia are understood to be mutually exclusive from the viewpoint of the ‘history of being’: the unity of truth and untruth yields no apologia for wrongdoing.

37. The expression “Wesenswandel der Wahrheit” can be found in N II 430/EPh 27 (cf. Wm 109, 124, 136/PDT 251, 257, 265). For the displacement of truth from the economic struggle to human comportment, see Wm 137 and 270/PDT 265.

38. Wm 138 f. and 142/PDT 266 f. and 269. The last ten pages of Ernst Tugenthat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin, 1967), pp. 396–405, suffer, it seems to me, from the absence of this historical perspective. I agree that the conflictual (gegenwendig) essence of alētheia “buries the very possibility of the question of truth” understood as the question of the “regulative idea of a measure” (p. 398). Truth is indeed rendered inoperative as a standard for “choice.” But this is not to say the “question of truth need no longer emerge” in Heidegger’s later writings (p. 399). On the contrary, the concept of truth as ‘measure’ has changed. “No formal rule is given” (ibid.). Not quite: for the era marked by the hypothesis of metaphysical closure, material rules are the epochal principles; for a possible economy after the ‘turn’, the formal rule can only be ‘presencing’, or phuesthai (see Part V). What Tugenthat does not see is that the “leeway (Spielraum) which is unconcealment” yields an economic measurement because unconcealment has a history whose possible closure transmutes truth from ideal to event-like (ereignishaft).

39. N II 458/EPh 55.

40. N II 318.

41. “Seinsgeschichtliche Züge” (SvG 154).

§25. Logos

42. These examples are cited by H. Boeder, op. cit., p. 84. Cf. VA 208/EGT 60 and EiM 95/IM 124 f. For the etymological connection between legein, legere and legen, see WhD 121/WCT 198 f.

43. Since Karl Reinhardt, Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (Bonn, 1916), pp. 217 ff., it is generally admitted that the ordering enacted by the Parmenidean logos is irreducible to either some ‘objective’, world organizing principle, or any ‘subjective’ law governing discourse, education, thought. Heidegger has often underscored this contribution of Reinhardt’s to the understanding of krinein logo, discriminating between unveiling and veiling (SZ 223/BT 494; Wm 38/ER 49; VA 275 f./EGT 117; EiM 82/IM 107).

44. “More originarily than ‘speaking’, logos means ‘letting presence’ ” (VS 70).

45. Klaus Held, “Der Logos-Gedanke des Heraklit,” Durchblicke, op. cit., pp. 162–206, commends Karl Reinhardt and Heidegger for having cut short inherited debates of logos in terms of such alternatives as its ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ sense (pp. 166 f.), but the translation or paraphrase he finally offers—“sprachlich sich darlegender Verhältnisvollzug,” a “relational process laying itself out linguistically” (p. 198)—lodges legein within yet another classical either-or, namely, opinion and knowledge, Ansicht and Einsicht (pp. 191 f.). This is but one illustration of how difficult it is to dissociate the understanding of legein from essentially cognitive issues. To be sure, one need not speak, as I am suggesting, of economic layout, but some idiom should be reachable that helps to retain logos as koinon, all-pervasive (cf. the texts cited by Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, p. 19) while avoiding representations of both cosmic laws ruling natural processes and interlocutory laws ruling deliberative processes (for the latter, i.e., logos as the law of Socratic dialegesthai, see Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 331)

46. VA 220/EGT 70. Heidegger’s steady retreat from any “humanistic” understanding of logos becomes evident if one compares section 7 A of BT (“The Concept of Logos,” SZ 32–34/BT 55–58) with the essay in EGT, “Logos.” In BT it is still the Aristotelian standpoint that prevails: logos is located in discourse, it is “apophantic,” it “lets something be seen by pointing it out” and as such “reveals what is ‘at issue’ in a discourse.” In BT, this same disclosive function of speech also establishes the way logos belongs to alētheia. In the subsequent texts, when logos and alētheia turn into traits of presencing, they have for that very reason to be dissociated from human discourse.

47. GA 55 295 f.

48. GA 55 329 and 353 f., cf. VA 215/EGT 66.

49. GA 55 329 and 353 f.

50. GA 55 371.

51. GA 55 394, cf. 330.

52. GA 55 360.

53. “The present [die Gegenwart], usually unfolding as absent, of ‘the Logos’—that is, of being itself—becomes one that is presencing [zu einer anwesenden]” against “hubris, [that is, against] our own potential, forgetful of being” (GA 55 356).

54. GA 55 279.

55. VA 217/EGT 68. The middle term of this acrobatic slippage is the German word “geschickt”—“skillful,” but also “sent.” In early Greek, sophia would designate the know-how that renders skillful, the experience through which “one knows the ins and outs, knows one’s way about” things unconcealed. “Originarily sophia had the same signification as technē” (GA 55 247). Platonic philo-sophia, for example, would consist in knowing how to proceed so as to resemble the good, how to escape from the cave. Know-how is also the first sense of the German geschickt. The other sense, the past participle of the verb schicken, to send, has, however, no connection with the Greek sophon. The artifice enters this text from EGT when Heidegger describes practical knowledge as knowing one’s way about the epochal arena in which things can at all be experienced. The know-how is then called geschicklich inasmuch as it consists in responding to a given order of presence “sent” by destiny. The emphasis on skill in this description of sophia goes to the heart of the Heideggerian argument about Plato: philosophia is the knowledge of entities in their being which is the Idea and which is attainable through homoiōsis, assimilation. But if the word sophon has indeed a practical meaning—o that a captain or a charioteer can deserve this epithet (cf. Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes, p. 277)—the connection with “destiny” is devoid of all textual basis in either Heraclitus or Plato. The categorial slippage is prompted by the German, not the Greek.

56. “Das eigentlich Geschickliche” (VA 221/EGT 72).

57. VA 227/EGT 76. Whereas elsewhere Heidegger takes care to distinguish any ‘occurrence’ (Geschehen) that founds history (Geschichte), from Ereignis, ‘event of appropriation’ (which is therefore called geschicklos, “without destiny,” SD 44/OTB 41), this text in EGT confounds the terms of that major distinction.

58. SvG 182; Wm 323 and 345 f./Phy 232 and 250; FD 121/WTh 155.

59. SD 7/OTB 7 and WhD 101/WCT 156. These two texts show the disjunction of what remained united until Heraclitus, namely, the law of the kosmos and the law of discourse.

60. SvG 184.

61. WhD 102/WCT 163 (cf. SD 63–65 and 79/OTB 57–59 and 72; N II 487/EPh 80). Angriff is the technological figure of the conceptual ‘grasp’ through the Begriff. (Cf. the text cited above, sec. 23, n. 31, and below, sec. 46, passim.)

62. These two senses are affirmed of logos, VA 227/EGT 76 f. It is called a leading word, Leitwort, SvG 184.

63. EiM 100/IM 131; VA 221/EGT 71.

§26. Hen

64. HW 340/EGT 55.

65. See, for example, Her 203. Ta panta does not signify only “entities in their totality,” but “each and every” entity, and more precisely, their opposites, a certain number of which Heraclitus enumerates (cf. K. Held, op. cit., pp. 177 and 190): cold-warm, night-day, upward-downward, good-evil, etc.

66. IuD 67/IaD 69. This is an explanatory comment by Heidegger on frag. 32: “One thing, the only truly wise, does not and does consent to be called by the name of Zeus” (trans. Kirk and Raven, op. cit., p. 204) (cf. VA 222–224/EGT 72–74).

67. Frag. 64 (cf. Her 29/H 15 and VA 222/EGT 72). Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers (Oxford, 1947), p. 233, comments: “That expression [‘pilot’] is used frequently in a figurative sense of the activity of the wise ruler or king. The fire . . . takes the place of the divine ruler.” This type of explanation levels the difference between the economic and the divine One. Among the most valuable results of the Heraclitus seminar held by Heidegger and Fink is the precision with which they disentangled these two senses (Her 77 and 188/H 46 and 117). That was possible due to their notion of aletheiological temporality, which characterizes the economic hen (Her 193 / H 120).

68. Her 189/H117. On the double sense of ‘light’ and ‘lighting’—’brightening’ as well as ‘alleviating’—see above, sec. 24, n. 34.

69. Her 203 and 219 / H 126 and 136.

70. Her 73 and 76/H 43 and 45. The difficulty with this agonistic notion of hen—or rather the necessity of distinguishing it from the economic notion—comes from the apparent grammatical inaccuracy of frag. 57. At a first reading, Heraclitus is criticizing Hesiod for not having seen that day and night are of the same essence. But the second reading proves to be more difficult: the verb ‘to be’ is in the singular: esti gar hen. This cannot be translated as “They are one.” The problem can be skirted by paraphrasing: “night and day, which Hesiod had made parent and child, are, and must always have been, essentially connected and coexistent” (Kirk and Raven, op. cit., p. 190). The fragment could then be translated: “He did not recognize day and night: for that is just one” (my translation). But one may also surmise that “something entirely different is meant, which does not show itself at first sight” (Her 73/H 43): “not the coincidence of distincts, but the hen of the double region. ‘There is the hen’: hen, now, is the subject of the sentence” (Her 79/H 47). The unity of the “double region” (Doppelbereich) results from the conjunction of presencing and absencing. The agonistic notion of hen could then be described this way: There is the hen—the totality of the present (economic hen) against the totality of the absent. The strife mentioned in other fragments (πόλεμος, frag. 53; παλίντονος, frag. 51) would be expressed here by the movement of presencing against absencing.

71. Her 160/H 99.

72. VA 223/EGT 73.

73. VA 272/EGT 114. One of the fragments on “struggle” that can be read in this aletheiological-agonistic perspective is frag. 8: “Contrary is agreement; from discordances is born the most beautiful harmony, and everything develops in struggle.”

74. Cf. Her 176/H 110.

75. Ν II 420 and 463/EPh 19 and 59.

76. For example, FD 143/WTh 183 and GA 55 272 and 318–321. As this last text indicates, austragend is Heidegger’s translation of διηνεϰω̃ς (Heraclitus, frag. 72)—“stretching out,” “reaching far”—conjoined with the verb διαφέϱειν, “carrying through.”

77. SvG 188. The ‘play’ notion of time, as it addresses the motility in alētheia, is worked out in SvG from frag. 52 of Heraclitus: “Time is a child that plays, shifting the pawns: the royalty of a child.” For this fragment and the πάντα ϱεɩ̃, see N I 333 f.

78. Her 38/H 21. In OTB, on the other hand, hen and logos seem to be treated as exclusively Presocratic names for presencing: “Presencing shows itself as hen, the unique unifying One, as logos, the gathering that preserves the All, as idea, ousia, energeia, suhstantia,” etc. (SD 7/OTB 7). Read in this way, hen and logos are not categories any more than the other titles listed, since they then designate the traits applicable only to a single epoch.

79. Phainotaton (N II 458/EPh 55 and Wm 134/PDT 263).

80. FSch 157.

81. Her 38/H 21 (cf. N II 460 f./EPh 57 f.). For other modern versions of hen, viz. in Leibniz and Hegel, see Hw 324 f./EGT 39.

82. N II 278. To view modern technology as the latest offspring of the Heraclitean hen is first to make evident technology’s global character; then to dispel any instrumentalist concepts of it; and lastly to set apart technology and the essence (Wesen in the verbal sense) of technology (cf. VA 31/QCT 23).

27. Nous

83. Hw 162/HCE 107. Already in BT, noein—“simply receiving something present in its sheer presence”—helps to oppose Aristotle’s “ontology” to “the interpretation of being” in Parmenides (SZ 25 f./BT 48. Contrary to the translators’ footnote in BT, Vorhandenheit in this passage signifies “presence,” and not, as further on in the book, “subsistence” or “given for handling,” e.g., SZ 98/BT 130). As pure reception, noein is never liable to error. It matches legein, “letting something be seen” (SZ 33 and 44/BT 56 and 70), so that “any entity is encountered” in the junction of noein and legein (SZ 44/BT 70). The ‘noetic’ in the narrow sense coincides with the traditional preeminence of one region of entities, subsistent objects (SZ 147/BT 187). But in the larger sense, it designates the reception of what logos “appresents.” In the subsequent works legein and noein are integrated in another context of thought, dehumanized, but their reciprocal relation remains fundamentally the same.

84. In a series of three remarkable studies, Kurt von Fritz has traced the development of the words noos and noein in the epic and Presocratic philosophic traditions: “Noos and Noein in the Homeric Poems,” Classical Philology, XXXVIII (1943):79–93; “Nous, noein and their Derivatives in Presocratic Philosophy (Excluding Anaxagoras),” ibid., XL (1945):223–242, and XLI (1946):12–34. At each stage of this evolution, the reference to man predominates: in Homer, noein primarily signifies “realizing a situation” by grasping its implications. A person blunders into an ambush, and suddenly he understands the strategem to which he has fallen victim. Suddenly seeing what a situation is all about is the primary sense of the verb noein (von Fritz [1943], especially pp. 85 and 91). The distinction between an organ and its function is not found in the Homeric Greeks, “but if they had made this distinction, they probably would have considered nous to be a function rather than an organ” (ibid., p. 83). Already in Homer this word comes charged with numerous secondary significations: nooi as diverse as individuals and nations; “plan” or “project”; a “volitional element”; a “deeper understanding of things”; the unicity of nous; “imagination” (von Fritz [1945], pp. 223 f.). All of these deal however with man. In Heraclitus, nous “must” be coordinated to the divine law (a play on the words xun noō—xunō, ibid., pp. 232 f.), which makes it “something humans possess only rarely” (p. 234). Lastly, in Parmenides nous displays, on one hand, a natural affinity to eon (and only from this viewpoint can nous “never be false,” SZ 33/BT 57) and, on the other, it is the capacity of spelling out the “logical deductions” through which that affinity becomes articulated ([1945], pp. 238). Throughout these various senses, what endures is the reference to man. Nous, says Snell (Discovery of the Mind, pp. 11 f.) in summarizing von Fritz, is always both a human organ and a human function.

85. VA 140. The translation of Parmenides’ frag. VIII, 34, which follows in VA 141, reproduces that of von Fritz (noein = “to perceive” [1945], pp. 237–42). Understood this way, noein suggests ‘letting-be.’ Indeed, to “perceive” an entity—to “be in touch with it,” says von Fritz—is “to let it stand or lie before us, in whichever way it is standing or lying” (VA 140).

86. VA 242 f. and 245/EGT 88 f. and 91. When logos becomes the act of nous, this order of priority is inverted (cf. SZ 226/BT 269).

87. WhD 125/WCT 209.

88. N II 450/EPh 46.

89. WhD 128, 139, 145 f., 172/WCT 207, 211, 231, 239 f. A full understanding of Parmenides’ frag. V on the identity of noein and einai can therefore be gained only in the light of frag. VI on legein and noein. Due to this conjunction, Parmenides “most often merely says noein instead of legein te noein te”(WhD 146/WCT 240).

90. Hw 162 and 193/HCE 107 and QCT 54. In Parmenides, nous is opposed to doxa as presencing is to the present. Doxa designates the various relations between present entities taken heed of and man heeding them as present, as ‘laid out’. With the Platonic turn, that conjunction between nous and logos is replaced by the one between nous and idea (Wm 131 and 136 f./PDT 262 and 265 f., see also SD 49/OTB 46).

91. N II 295.

92. N II 474/EPh 69. Contrary to what Heidegger implies in this text, idein is already synonymous with noein in several Homeric passages (cf. von Fritz [1945], p. 233 and [1946], p. 31). It is true that in those passages it is a question not of a vision aiming at unobstructed theōrein—with the exteriority between contemplating and contemplated this term connotes—but of a vision that is not “the proper activity of the eye”; “the ego is not isolated, but a field of open forces” (Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes, pp. 23 and 296).

93. N II 295 and 320.

94. SZ 11/BT 31 (“Sachlogik”.)

95. Wm 57/ER 97.

96. SD 79/OTB 72.

XI. At the Technological End: The Retrospective Categories

1. N II 256/N iv 196.

2. “The name ‘technology’ is understood here in such an essential way that its meaning coincides with the term ‘completed metaphysics’ ” (VA 80/EPh 93). It is curious that Henri Mongis, Heidegger et la critique de la notion de valeur (The Hague, 1976), should not have recognized this substitution. For Mongis, “the last metaphysical way station” of the truth of being is Nietzsche (p. 22), while elsewhere he describes that same “way station” in terms applicable to twentieth century technology alone (for example, p. 211).

3. N II 486/EPh 80.

4. TK 38–41/QCT 38–41; SvG 41.

5. N II 165/N iv 116.

6. Hw 94/QCT 142.

7. SvG 199/PG 213 f.

8. HW 267/PLT 112.

9. VA 90/EPh 102.

10. IuD 48/IaD 51 f.

11. VA 81/EPh 93.

12. Heidegger makes his own the results Nietzsche had already reached in his deconstruction of epochs (although in a different idiom), only then to label Nietzsche the last metaphysician. It seems that today Jacques Derrida is engaged in a similar game with Heidegger. In Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1982), Derrida distinguishes between “two styles of deconstruction . . . the style of the first is mostly that of the Heideggerian questions, and the other, mostly the one that predominates in France today” (p. 135, trans. modified). Heidegger, then, “attempts an exit and a deconstruction without changing terrains,” which makes him risk “sinking into the autism of the closure.” What the “French” style attempts—an attempt presumably not foreign to Derrida himself—is “to change terrains, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion, by brutally placing oneself outside and by asserting an absolute break and difference” (p. 135, trans. modified). Asserting an absolute break and difference was precisely what Derrida had done in saluting “the world that is ineluctably to come . . . beyond the closure of knowing” (see above, sec. 1, n. 11). Heidegger reads Nietzsche “as the last of the great metaphysicians,” writes Derrida, only to add rhetorically: “Are we to understand the question of the truth of being as the last sleeping shudder of the superior man,” who “is abandoned to his distress in a last movement of pity”? (pp. 135 f., emphasis added). If Derrida feels authorized to do (partially, cf. p. 123) unto Heidegger as Heidegger has done unto Nietzsche, the price he pays is equally high: he must negate the difference between presence and presencing in Heidegger (p. 132), reduce “the question of being [to] an intrametaphysical effect” (p. 22), turn Heidegger’s quest for an understanding of the verb to be’ into a quest for “the ultimate proper name” (p. 27), to say nothing of tendencious translations such as “sceller” (to seal) for “prägen” (to stamp or mark) which coopt what Heidegger calls the “early trace” (of the ontological difference in Anaximander) and make it into yet another version of full presence, of the “proper” in which “the very loss is sheltered, retained” (pp. 24 f., trans. modified). In Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), he is more straightforward: “Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger proceeded within the inherited concepts of metaphysics.” After this summary confinement, Derrida seems to step outside the destruction game and watch “the destroyers destroy each other reciprocally—for example, Heidegger regarding Nietzsche, with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction, as the last metaphysician.” One cannot help thinking that Derrida steps back into that game and speaks of himself when he adds: “One could play the same game with Heidegger himself, with Freud, or with a number of others. And today no exercise is more widespread” (pp. 281, trans. modified). Indeed.

13. VA 22–26/QCT 14–19.

14. Automation technology is not “the mere application of modern mathematical physical science to praxis” (Hw 69/QCT 116).

15. VA 63 f./QCT 174 f.

16. Wm 146/BWr 194. It is not my purpose here to trace how Greek technē became modern technology (cf., for example, Wm 321 f., 326 f., 359 f./Phy 231 f., 235, 260 f.).

17. VA 82/EPh 94.

18. Hw 91/QCT 139.

19. N II 264 and 232/N iv 176, and elsewhere.

20. N II 287. “Logos indicates the essence of the suppositum” as “permanence.” “Metaphysics proper begins” with that Gepräge (N II 431 and 403/EPh 28 and 4). See, in the same sense, GA 55 223.

21. N II 287.

22. N II 40/N iv 9.

23. N II 260 (cf., N II 329). I will not pursue the difficult parallels Heidegger draws between the will to power and the metaphysical concept of essence as well as between the eternal return and that of existence. These parallels are not rendered more intelligible when Heidegger adds: “In Nietzsche’s metaphysics the difference between essentia and existentia disappears” (N II 476/EPh 70; see below, sec. 31). Furthermore, it is not always apparent if it is the will to power that corresponds to ti, was, and the eternal return to hoti, dass, or the reverse (see also N I 425 and 463 f. and N II 14–17, 345/N iv 206 f.).

24. Hw 196/QCT 57.

25. N II 277 (Heidegger’s emphasis).

26. N II 459/EPh 56.

27. N II 132 and 467/N iv 89 and EPh 63. Elsewhere (for example, Hw 226/QCT 90), that quest for sure salvation is described instead as a proper trait of modernity, beginning with Luther.

28. On the sequence logos-ratio-Grund-Vernunft, cf., for example, SvG 177 f.

29. On the fixity of the nunc stans (“standing now”) as a categorial incidence of the eternal return, see N I 28/N i 20.

30. N II 163/N iv 115 (the translation of “impending” for Überlagerung misses the crucial point, categorial over-determination).

31. Ibid.

32. N I 633.

§28. The Will to Power

33. N I 26/N i 18 and Hw 223/QCT 86.

34. Hw 94/QCT 142. “The epitome [of the will to power] consists in its positing its own conditions” (N II 324, emphasis added).

35. N II 268.

36. N II 272.

37. N II 273.

38. N II 141 and 435/N iv 96 and EPh 31; cf., Hw 98/QCT 147 f.

39. The term Subjektität (for example, Hw 236/QCT 100) signifies subjectivity inasmuch as it is “the being of entities” (ibid.) for the modern age.

40. N II 297.

41. N II 303.

42. Hw 100/QCT 150.

43. “The intellect must be free from all admixture to be able to dominate [ϰϱατεɩ̃ν], that is, to know,” Aristotle, On the Soul, III, 4; 429 a 19.

44. Ν II 272 and Hw 258/PLT 102.

45. Hubris (the act of applying a false measure, “Vermessenheit”) consists for man in “taking the measures (Masse) of his thinking and doing from the entities that impose themselves on him” rather than from “being itself, the sole measure” (GA 55 326). Etymologically, however, hubris stems from huper, ‘beyond’, and signifies a transgression, not a misapplication.

46. For example: “The willing at issue here is a pro-ducing, and this in the sense of an objectification purposely asserting itself’ (Hw 266/PLT 110).

47. Hw 272/PLT 117 (emphasis added).

§29. Nihilism

48. N II 343/N iv 205.

49. Ibid.

50. Ν II 338/N iv 201, cf. Hw 239/QCT 104.

51. With the Platonic turn, phusis ceases to be understood (as it is in Heraclitus) “in its own essence” and starts to be conceived “in view of its relation to humans who either grasp or do not grasp it” (GA 55 140).

52. N II 342/N iv 204.

53. Nihilism is the Grundgeschehen—“that which happens at bottom”—of Western history (Ν II 275 f., cf. Hw 201/QCT 62). Metaphysics as such has a nihilistic historical essence: “dieses nihilistisch-geschichtliche Wesen” (N II 292).

54. Hw 193/QCT 53.

55. In terms of the history of being, only the commutation, described earlier, between the Nietzschean discourse and the technological economy gives coherence to Heidegger’s frequent remarks that “Nietzsche’s metaphysics” is “inverted Platonism.” Therefore, in texts like the following, it is necessary to read “technology” wherever Heidegger says “Nietzsche”: “The inversion of Platonism, according to which the sensuous becomes for Nietzsche the true, and the suprasensuous, the untrue world, remains lodged entirely within metaphysics” (VA 79/EPh 92). It is clear, at least, that the ‘fundamental position’, where all the historically earlier ones join as in an estuary because it exhibits most plainly the “danger” in the “forgottenness” of being, is technology:, “The essence of enframing (Gestell) is the danger. As the danger, being turns about into the forgottenness of its essence, turns away from this essence, and in that way simultaneously turns against the truth of its essence” (TK 40/QCT 41; cf., Wm 221/QB 49).

56. N II 278.

57. Hw 193/QCT 53.

58. N II 395/N iv 248. The text continues by describing technological nihilism: “Needlessness (Notlosigkeit) in relation to being hardens in and through the increased demand for entities.” Technology appears here as the effort to compensate by ontic accumulation the nothingness of transcendence.

59. N II 50 and 54/N iv 20 and 22.

§30. Justice

60. HW 36/PLT 47.

61. N II 431/EPh 28 and SvG 167 and 193/PG 209. The Nietzschean concept of justice, Gerechtigkeit, says Heidegger, is best understood by looking at the subsenses suggested by the word. “ ‘Recht’, rectus, is what is right,” i.e., what fits; hence the connotations of “richten” and “ausrichten,” adjusting, straightening, equalizing (N I 637). Justice, in Nietzsche, thus appears like a late version of truth as conformity.

62. SvG 210/PG 222. Heidegger expressly denies any kinship between Nietzschean “justice” and Heraclitean δίϰη. Nietzsche’s concept springs from “the historical determination which the last metaphysician of the West obeys.” The concept of justice translates “truth as ὁμοίωσις” for the age of closure (N I 632 f.).

63. N I 636 f.

64. N I 637. “Retaining ὁμοίωσις as the essence of truth and interpreting it as justice amount, for the metaphysical thought that effects such an interpretation [Nietzsche’s], to fulfilling metaphysics” (ibid.).

65. N I 643 and 648. “Life” is here another name for “entities in their totality.”

66. N II 320. In the same sense: “Justice is the attainment of self-mastery through the constructive ascent to the highest heights. This is the very essence of the will to power” (N II 323). “This highest will to power, the transformation of entities in their totality into stock, unveils its essence as justice” (N II 327).

67. N II 318 f.; cf., N II 325.

§31. The Eternal Return of the Same

68. N I 26/N i 18 (emphasis added). On the translation of Sinn as ‘sense’ (directionality), see above, p. 13.

69. Ν I 27/N i 19. Obviously this particular going-back to origins, no more than anything else said here about the eternal return, must not be understood in the Pythagorean fashion, as a cyclic process perpetually restoring the same events, entities or configurations throughout world history.

70. N II 23. This thesis of the collapse of rationality into animality entails an identification of existence and essence (cf. above, n. 23), analogous to the one construed in Scholastic speculations on the simplicity of the divine nature. Here it serves to describe the counterfeit of that simplicity, the technological homogenization of earthly nature.

71. N I 258 f.

72. N I 407.

73. About that turn from Heraclitus to Plato as the birthplace of anthropocentrism, see the text quoted above, n. 51.

74. N I 369 and 380. This allusion to the young Marx, whether deliberate or not, is all the more perplexing since the notions of “nature,” “planet,” “globe,” retain a strong, if only occasional, romantic overtone in Heidegger himself.

75. N I 394 (emphasis added). “That truth of entities” designates here everything as stabilized by the thought of the eternal return: “What is the true according to Nietzsche’s conception? It is what is made fast in the constant flux and change of things becoming” (N I 388). Needless to add that, for Heidegger, this stabilization by humanization is “the danger for truth” understood as unconcealment (N I 381).

§32. The Transmutation of All Values and the Death of God

76. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 383.

77. N I 433 f.

78. “Prior to the transvaluation of all values until now, which Nietzsche takes on as his metaphysical task, a more originary reversal takes place, namely, that the essence of all entities is at the outset fixed as value” (N I 539).

79. Hw 200/QCT 61.

80. TK 46/QCT 49.

81. See above, n. 24.

82. N I 469.

83. N II 18 (cf., Hw 214/QCT 75). “The inversion is the transformation of the lowest, the sensory, into ‘life’ in the sense of the will to power”; it is “the transformation of metaphysics into its last possible form” (N II 16). Heidegger’s texts on the transmutation as an inverted Platonism are numerous (see for example N I 177, 181, 231, 433, 464–469/N i 151, 154, 200). What is at issue for Heidegger in all these passages is to establish that the inversion of the “two world doctrine” is “the most hidden and extreme consequence of the first inception of Western thought” (N I 547).

84. N I 188/N i 160 f.

85. N I 547.

86. F. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, 1954), p. 486.

87. “The true world is the changeable, the apparent world is the solid and the permanent. The true and the apparent world have exchanged places, ranks and kinds; but in that exchange and inversion what is preserved is precisely the distinction between a true and an apparent world” (N I 617).

§33. The Overman

88. N II 305.

89. N II 291 f.

90. N II 308.

91. N II 308 and 166/N iv 117; cf. N II 310.

92. N II 295.

93. N II 300 f.

94. N II 307.

95. N II 309.

96. Hw 232 f./QCT 97 (emphasis added).

97. The distance between Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s concepts of overman has been shown in some detail by Michel Haar, “Heidegger et le surhomme,” Revue de l’enseignement philosophique, XXX, 3 (1980): 1–17. Haar also hints at the categorial dependence of the ‘overman’ on the ‘will to power’ and the ‘eternal return’: “It is only indirectly and as a consequence that the overman comes to represent [in Heidegger] completed subjectivity” (ibid., p. 6).

98. WhD 69/WCT 72. On the shift in Heidegger’s understanding of the overman, see Haar, op. cit., pp. 15–17.

99. Haar, op. cit., p. 16.

XII. At the “Turning”: The Transitional Categories

1. MHG 73/IW 38.

2. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1976), pp. 130 f.

3. To the four transcendentalist rules, “words and things,” “pure form of knowledge,” “ideality,” and “fundamental [philosophical] project,” Foucault opposes four classes of rules that regulate discourse: “the formation of objects,” of “enunciative modalities,” of “concepts,” and of “strategies” (ibid., pp. 40–70). If these “rules of formation” determine discourse in each and every shape, they are truly necessary and universal, and at least in that respect not foreign to the transcendental tradition.

4. See above, ch. 11, n. 12. To make good his promise to “change terrains, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion” (quoted ibid.), Derrida had to arrive at “a new writing.” Indeed, “the simple practice of language ceaselessly reinstates the ‘new’ terrain on the oldest ground.” He had to “speak several languages and produce several texts at once” (Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago, 1982], p. 135)—more precisely, two languages, metaphysical and extra-metaphysical. He has attempted such “new writing” in Glas (Paris, 1974). The point is that discontinuity and abruptness are not easy if “metaphysics” is equatable with “our tongue” (Margins of Philosophy, p. 121). For Derrida, too, then, despite the desire to simply change terrains, natural languages and their grammar make it impossible to reject any continuity in “transgressing the closure of metaphysics” (Margins of Philosophy, p. 172).

5. Hw 300–302 and 309/EGT 17 f. and 25. Kostas Axelos has described Heidegger as an “indicator of future thought,” Einführung in ein künftiges Denken (Tübingen, 1966), p. 3. This is in agreement with Heidegger’s own understanding of eschaton as metaphysical closure, and of the task of thinking today. But Axelos goes overboard in his construction of a continuity between past and future thought since he conjoins the “new destiny of being” with its metaphysical destiny by way of a dialectic (ibid., pp. 16–35). Between utter dissemination and dispersion, as in “French deconstruction” and dialectical co-optation, the road most frequently taken in the Heidegger literature is that of dismissing the essentially ambiguous nature of technology as the age in which the “turning” has become possible. Gerold Prauss thus denounces a “utopian backward orientation” in Heidegger’s understanding of history. The latter amounts to “the extremest irruption of antiquity into the modern and contemporary world” (Erkennen und Handeln in Heideggers “Sein und Zeit” [Freiburg, 1977], p. 103). Thus the key feature of the Gestell, its bi-frontality, simply gets discarded.

6. It is Nietzsche’s expression “philosopher of the future” that apparently accounts for Heidegger’s phrase “thinking yet to come,” künftiges Denken. In an equally Nietzschean vein, the deconstructive advance toward a non-metaphysical site of thought has the characteristics of a Denkversuch: an attempt at thinking another economy and, perhaps, a temptation. Leo Gabriel, “Sein und Geschichte; Martin Heideggers geschichtsontologischer Denkversuch” (Wissenschaft und Weltbild, IX [Vienna, 1956]:25–32) suggests such a reading of the “ontology of history” as a Versuch, as a trial in both senses of the word, a tentative and a test.

7. By Heimat, “home”—meaning ‘dwelling-place’ as well as ‘native land’—and Heimkunft, “homecoming,” Heidegger designates a possible fold in the unfolding history of being. These words, borrowed from Hölderlin, thus stand in opposition to the historical “errancy,” Irre, subsequent to the Greek inception. The anticipatory incidence of the transitional categories brings home, back to our oikos, the nomos rendered foreign—estranged—under the sway of ultimate representations. This eco-nomic retrieval is ignored in the two best studies on the Heideggerian meaning of wohnen, “dwelling”: Beda Allemann, Hölderlin und Heidegger (Zürich, 1954, especially pp. 119–161), and Walter Biemel, “Dichtung und Sprache bei Heidegger,” Man and World II, 1969:478–514. As shown by the transitional categories, to retrieve a nonprincipial economy by no means amounts to reiterating the Greek mode of presence. The transitional traits are irreducible to the prospective ones. Only the polymorphous, Heraclitean, habitat is to be reclaimed and every edifice conceived as timeless, to be destabilized.

8. TK 41/QCT 42; VA 36 and 43/QCT 28 and 34; Hw 273/PLT 118.

9. VA 20, 22, 34/QCT 12, 14, 26.

10. VA 40/QCT 32. The “essential connection between truth and freedom” had been established since 1930 (Wm 83/BWr 127).

11. TK 41/QCT 42.

12. Quoted above as epigraph to sec. 18.

13. Heidegger only seeks to situate that line. He leaves it to the novelist Ernst Jünger to transgress it. However: “Your assessment of the state of affairs under the title trans lineam and my quest for its site under the title de linea belong together” (Wm 214/QB 37). Here is how situation and transgression belong together: “Where the danger is as the danger, there also thrives what saves. The latter does not occur incidentally. The very danger is what saves, when it is as the danger” (TK 41/QCT 42; for Heidegger’s interpretation of Ernst Jünger’s essay, Über die Linie, see Jean Michel Palmier, Les écrits politiques de Heidegger, Paris 1968, pp. 169–227). The point is that one cannot describe the line of closure as separating danger from possible salvation without having transgressed it already; without having “in a certain way left metaphysics behind” (Wm 197/WGM 208).

14. “Vorläufig” in the double sense of provisional and anticipatory (cf. SD 38/OTB 35).

15. See the text quoted below, n. 26.

16. Karl Löwith writes: “Heidegger will only be able to convince of the necessity of his thought those who believe, as he does, that his thinking has been destined to him by Being itself, that it is a ‘sending’ of Being, and that, as such, it tells ‘the dictation of truth about Being’. Such a claim cannot be examined rationally.” Heidegger, Denker in dürftiger Zeit (2nd ed., Göttingen, 1960), p. 59.

17. To illustrate a frequently held opinion, here is the assessment of one commentator who, in the end, finds in Heidegger no more than an “alternative” to technology “which amounts to an open regression”: “In its return to the Presocratics, [Heidegger’s thought] explicitly abandons reason and surrenders to the illusion that salvation from misfortune can only come from reverting to that primitive state,” Winfried Franzen, Von der Existenzialontologie zur Seinsgeschichte (Meisenheim, 1975), pp. 163 and 150.

18. Wolfgang de Boer, “Heideggers Missverständnis der Metaphysik,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, IX (1955):500–545, correctly remarks that Heidegger’s interpretations of metaphysics and technology are “in no way presuppositionless” and that they “serve to prove the legitimacy of his being question.” This legitimation can be gained, he adds, only before “the forum of history” (p. 500). Here, then, the legitimating source of Heidegger’s undertaking is acknowledged, but he stapds accused of having denatured that source: “Has Heidegger understood or misunderstood Western metaphysics?” (p. 507). Answer: he has misunderstood it. As proof, the author points to “the radical ontological separation Heidegger establishes between human and divine being . . .” (p. 520). The interest that lies behind this criticism is the same that guided the postwar Neothomists, namely a rehabilitation of ontotheology. Only, in the Neothomists, that interest gave rise not to a critique but to co-optation; see: Max Müller, Sein und Geist (Tübingen, 1940), and Existenzphilosophie im geistigen Leben der Gegenwart (3rd ed., Heidelberg, 1964), especially pp. 95–139; Johann Baptist Lotz, “Das Sein selbst und das subsistierende Sein nach Thomas von Aquin” (in Martin Heidegger zum 70. Geburtstag, Pfullingen, 1959), especially p. 182; and Gustav Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger (Einsiedeln, 1959), especially pp. 21–31 and 361–372.

19. To quote only two representatives of the “Frankfurt School”: in 1928, Herbert Marcuse wrote that with BT “philosophy finally has come back to its original urgency. Henceforth it only concerns itself with existence alone, its truth and its fulfillment. . . . It is admirable to watch how, proceeding from there, all philosophical problems and solutions that have become rigid are set into dialectical motion and side with the concrete people who have lived and live in them” (“Beiträge zu einer Phänomenologie des historischen Materialismus,” reprinted in H. Marcuse and A. Schmidt, Existenzialistische Marx-Interpretation, Frankfurt, 1973, p. 59, italies added). More recently, Karl-Otto Apel has spoken of a “new version of the belief in destiny” in Heidegger’s philosophy of the history of being. This philosophy would, “in the end, like to deduce its own legitimation from the kairos of the destiny of being as it comes to pass” (Transformation der Philosophie, vol. I, Frankfurt, 1976, p. 41). The anticipatory structure of technology as revealed by the historical deduction of the transitional categories precludes dialectical constructs of a forward march since there is no entity, collective or single, that could function as the subject of such a march; and it allows one to speak of kairos only if that term is applied to what I have called the reversals in history—an application however in total contradiction with its original biblical sense, taken up in the 1920s by Paul Tillich and the Berlin “religious socialists,” which always designates the irruption of the eternal into the temporal, of “theonomy” into human “autonomy.” No such dualism is construable in Heidegger.

20. MHG 73/IW 38.

21. Since BT, Heidegger has kept denouncing “aprioristic constructs” in phenomenology (see for example SZ 16, 50 ftn., 302 f./BT 37, 349 f., 490). His terms recall Marx’s labeling of Schelling as “traveling salesman for all constructors, Musterreiter aller Konstruktoren” (The German Ideology, Moscow, 1976, p. 146; trans. modified).

22. SD 67/OTB 60.

23. Hw 245/QCT 111.

24. “For us, the most readily experienced correspondence to the epochal character of being is the ecstatic character of being-there. The epochal essence of being appropriates in an event [ereignet] the ecstatic essence of being-there” (Hw 311/EGT 27). These lines sum up the three moments of Heidegger’s itinerary sketched above in the epigraph to sec. 2. By implication, they also summarize the three-tiered temporal difference between things present, their historical mode of presence, and the event of presencing.

25. Hw 246/EGT 111.

26. VA 183/PLT 184 f.

§34. Ontological Difference/World and Thing

27. The following three fragments of Parmenides must be read conjointly if one wishes to see how he inaugurates the ‘transcendental’ (in the sense assigned to this term in BT) articulation of the ontological difference: “It is necessary to both say and think that being is; indeed, being is, but nothing is not” (frag. VI, 1; see above, sec. 22, n. 9); “the same is, indeed, both thinking and being” (frag. Ill; see above, sec. 18, n. 95); the third text would be the entire fragment VIII on the unicity of being. The first of these texts can be read as indicating being’s self-sameness; the second, the transcendence of thought toward being; and the third, the unicity of being.

28. SZ 38/BT 62. Carl Friedrich Gethmann, Verstehen und Auslegung (Bonn, 1974), pp. 41–45, offers the most satisfactory exposition of the ontological difference in Heidegger. He insists especially on the necessity of understanding the ontological difference as a synthesis of three terms: entity, beingness, and being; or on, ousia, and einai. However, he does not seem to think that after 1930 Heidegger abandoned the transcendental concept of being for an economic one. That substitution, which the first transitional category seeks to render explicit, escapes even more the attention of those commentators who construe the ontological difference either as an “alternative” between entities and being, an alternative that can only be resolved by a “pure belief’ (Kurt Jürgen Huch, Philosophiegeschichtliche Voraussetzungen der Heideggersehen Ontologie, Frankfurt 1967, pp. 37 and 40), or as a clue “that being can exist without the human being” (Jean Wahl, Vers la fin de l’ontologie, Paris, 1956, p. 18; cf. Otto Pöggeler, “Jean Wahls Heidegger-Deutung,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung XII, 1958, p. 454), or as a regional linguistic formation (Johannes Lohman, “Martin Heideggers Ontologische Differenz’ und die Sprache,” Lexis I, 1948, especially p. 106), or, lastly, as a reminder of “the Wittgensteinian distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown” (Apel, Transformation der Philosophie, vol. I, p. 238). While all these interpretations may be viewed as acknowledging that the metaphysical difference functions inside the closure, they neglect the crucial fact that the three-tiered phenomenological difference in Heidegger serves to draw the line of that closure and that the function of even that three-tiered difference is therefore limited to the recapitulatory task.

29. GA 24 23/BPP 17.

30. SD 40 f./OTB 37.

31. VA 169/PLT 171. To understand this first transitional category I rely mainly upon the essay “The Thing.” A more detailed analysis of this category can be found in Werner Marx (Heidegger and the Tradition [Evanston, Ill., 1971], pp. 193–198) always from the double viewpoint of the “first beginning” and “the other beginning.” See also Heidegger’s description of it in terms of speech which “calls upon the thing and the world” (US 22–32/PLT 199–209).

32. VA 179/PLT 181.

33. See the first paragraph of BT (SZ 2/BT 21).

34. SZ 53/BT 79.

35. SZ 64 and 146/BT 92 and 187.

36. “Jedes Ding verweilt das Geviert in ein je Weiliges von Einfalt der Welt” (VA 179/PLT 181).

37. VA 172/PLT 173.

38. HW 33/PLT 44.

39. “Weisung” (VA 184/PLT 185).

40. TK 46/QCT 48.

41. VA 169/PLT 171.

42. VA 180/PLT 182.

43. VA 177/PLT 179.

44. VA 164/PLT 166.

45. VA 183 f./PLT 184 (cf. TK 40 f./QCT 41).

46. VA 180/PLT 181. According to OTB, this “step backward” does not only consist in acknowledging the condition of the conditioned, that is, the aletheiological fabric in which entities appear, but it “frees” them as phenomena so that they can show themselves in what makes them unique. “That step steps back before, gains distance from that which is only about to arrive” (SD 32/OTB 30). For such setting-free and the practical a priori in general, see below, sec. 40.

47. Certain similarities have often been noted between Heidegger’s technology critique and that of the early Frankfurt school. Despite Theodor Adorno’s polemics (The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will [Evanston, 1973]), this family resemblance between two modes of criticism, which popular wisdom still treats as extremes on the political spectrum, implies more than an agreement on the reification and objectification imposed on our entire culture by technology: it reaches the roots of that one-dimensionality, namely, conceptual thinking and its “identifying” nature as it has made the West since the Greeks (see T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming [New York, 1972], pp. 3–42). To that process of “repressive logic” the later Adorno opposes art as the one region of phenomena in which the particular cannot be repressed or suppressed (Aesthetic Theory, trans. G. Lenhardt [Boston, 1982]. But this opposition in Adorno between technical and aesthetic rationality (1) is obtained, not from within technology, but from its “negation,” ultimately from a utopia; (2) seeks an inroad of the particular into “reason” and “theory,” the very agents of the universal, and thereby gives the particular over to dialectical cancellation and sublation; (3) rests on selected entities, works of advanced art, and thus abandons everything else—institutions of administration, production, culture, law—to the grip of reification; (4) arises from an interest in re-enchanting the world artistically, after its disenchantment through modern science. Heidegger’s attempt at retrieving the particular, on the other hand, (1) results, as has been shown, from a phenomenology of technology itself; (2) calls not upon any form of ratio, but on ‘thinking’, understood as ‘thanking’, that is, as practical compliance with varying contexts; (3) is economy-wide and therefore not selective; (4) arises from an interest in the most “sober” (cf. above, sec. 8, n. 44) acquiescence to surface constellations. In a word, his first transitional category is not ‘another world and a few beautiful things’, but “world and thing.”

48. Otto Pöggeler (“Sein als Ereignis,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung XIII [1959], p. 599) aptly denounces interpretations of this substitution according to which “the central theme of Heidegger’s thought is not congealed and emptied being, but the ‘world’: the world as the ‘true world’, as the world which has left the whole of Western nihilism behind. Heidegger, we are told, rejects the old and decrepit world, Christian, metaphysical, bourgeois, and is awaiting the world to come, untouched and novel. In his last writings he supposedly even begins to proclaim its arrival. Read this way, Heidegger turns into a mythologist.” Pöggeler does not ascribe these interpretations to anyone in particular, but their kinship with Herbert Marcuse’s “Great Refusal” is striking. Elsewhere, Pöggeler stresses the continuity between the being-question, and that of ‘world’: “The world constitutes the proper issue toward which Heidegger’s thought frees itself through the insight into that which is,” Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, (Pfullingen, 1963), p. 247.

49. FD 130/WTh 166.

50. Here is an impressive list, compiled by Gethmann in Verstehen und Auslegung (p. 42), of the reduplicating versions of the metaphysical difference: “reality of the real” (Hw 136/HCE 60), “subjectness of the subject” (Hw 122/HCE 34), “absoluteness of the absolute” (ibid.), “truth of the true” (Hw 172/HCE 125), “historicity of history” (Hw 141/HCE 67), “effectivity of the effective” (Hw 186/HCE 146), “worldliness of the world” (Hw 187/HCE 147), “thingness of the thing” (FD 8/WTh 11), “objectivity of the object” (SvG 46), “substantiality of the substance” (Wm 291/KTB 21), “egoness of the ego” (SvG 132), “appearance of the appearing” (Hw 144/HCE 73). I am not convinced, however, that these are all instances of the difference between beingness (Seiendheit) and entities (das Seiende), since in the context of this transitional category, ‘thingness’ is to be understood as ‘thinging’, as event (cf. the following two notes).

51. FD 137/WTh 175 (cf. FD 92/WTh 118).

52. “If things had shown themselves each time already as things in their thingness, then the thing’s thingness would have become manifest. It, then, would have laid claim to thought. In truth, however, the thing remains denied, nil, and in that sense annihilated” (VA 169/PLT 170 f.). Here, as in WTh, it is obvious that Heidegger uses Dingheit not as an equivalent of Seiendheit, beingness, but of Sein, being.

53. FD 100/WTh 129.

54. TK 46/QCT 49.

§35. “There Is”/Favor

55. See especially SD 41–43/OTB 38–40. The deconstructive character of the “giving” in es gibt—in this case, deconstructive of the three traditional questions of metaphysica specialis—appears, for example, in Fw 7/Pa 39.

56. SD 44/OTB 41.

57. GA 55 372.

58. TK 42/QCT 43.

59. This term probably appears for the first time in the postscript to “What is Metaphysics?” (Wm 106/EB 359).

60. TK 42/QCT 43 (emphasis added).

61. SD 18 and 43/OTB 17 and 40.

62. SD 80/OTB 73. It is true that this text goes on to say: “But whence and how is the clearing given? What speaks in the ‘there is’?” But this conjunction of the recapitulatory and the anticipatory is only the double language to be held on the threshold of the closure. At the moment of transition, one must affirm both “the farewell from being and time” and the “there is” through which they “remain, so to speak, as the gift of the event of appropriation” (SD 58/OTB 54).

63. SD 2/OTB 2.

64. SD 42 and 43/OTB 38 and 40.

65. GA 55 127–139.

66. TK 42/QCT 44.

67. SD 58/OTB 54.

68. Ibid. Heidegger adds that “the new concept of finitude” is to be understood “from out of the concept of property” (ibid.). This remark, too, must be read as a reference to the topology.

§36. Unconcealment/Event

69. The transition under discussion breaks the conceptual concatenation by which alētheia, understood as truth, would be tied to some human comportment, which in turn—due to epochal errancy, Irre—would be inescapably prone to error. It is still in the name of an ideally true behavior that Werner Marx and others have been disturbed by statements such as this: “He who thinks greatly must err greatly” (EdD 17/PLT 9; cf. above, sec. 17, n. 39). Kostas Axelos has sought to articulate the transition from metaphysical to ‘future thinking’ as the transition from the pursuit of truth to the acceptance of its permeation with error: “Will some future thinking be enabled to experience ‘truth’ as ‘errancy’ and ‘errancy’ as ‘truth’, although not at all in that dichotomy?” Einführung in ein zukünftiges Denken, p. 19. This way of approaching the closure leaves the two chief values of metaphysics untouched, ‘man’ and ‘truth’. It thereby deprives itself of all means to draft even the contours for the self-assigned problematic, that of transgressing the line of closure.

70. TK 42 f./QCT 44 f. For the many sense of the word Ereignis see above (sec. 6, n. 37) the quote from Henri Birault.

71. TK 44/QCT 46. See also the texts from IW quoted above (sec. 2, n. 34 and ch. 12, n. 20). Those quotes from TK suffice to oppose, point by point, the interpretation of Ereignis put forth by Pöggeler (“Sein als Ereignis,” p. 621): “In its meaning or its openness and truth, being—the unmasterable destiny of being which is each time historical—shows itself as event. In this context, event no longer designates some particular occurrence or happening, as it still did within the terminology of Being and Time, but rather Dasein’s appropriation by being and being’s self-bestowal upon authentic Dasein.” At least from the perspective of Heidegger’s last writings, that raises four objections: (1) In OTB the event is precisely no longer understood as the historical-destinal reversal that establishes an epoch: “the entry into the event” (Einkehr in das Ereignis, SD 44/OTB 41) is the recognition of the temporality which makes epochal time possible. (2) The vocabulary of meaning is incompatible with that of event—it is at variance even with the vocabulary of the history of being, with destinal “openness and truth.” (3) The event of appropriation in no way suggests a reference to Dasein nor any bestowal upon it: I have shown that under the title of the ‘fourfold’ the role of human Dasein, then called ‘the mortals’, is reduced to one of the four functions gathered together by the event. (4) As an economic notion, event a fortiori no longer concerns “authentic Dasein.” One must add, however, that in 1959 Pöggeler may not have been acquainted with the lectures “The Turning” (delivered in 1949, published 1962) and “Time and Being” (delivered 1962, published 1969), although he had consulted the “Beiträge zur Philosophie” and “Das Ereignis,” both still unpublished in 1986.

72. SD 35 and 56 f./OTB 32 and 53.

73. “Einkehr in den Aufenthalt im Ereignis” (SD 57/OTB 53).

74. In the lecture courses on Nietzsche (N i-N iv) given during the war, the event of appropriation is described only retrospectively, as what accounts for the epochs in the history of metaphysics (cf. the lines quoted below in the epigraph to ch. 14). There is no hint yet of a possible ‘entry into the event’.

75. SD 44/OTB 41.

76. Ibid.

77. SD 46 f./OTB 43.

78. SD 46/OTB 43.

79. N I 28/N i 20 (emphasis added).

80. SD 46/OTB 43 (cf. VA 71/EPh 85).