FORGETTING BEING

The impasse we find ourselves in, writes Heidegger in the opening pages of Being and Time, arises from the same perplexity as that experienced by the Eleatic Stranger and Theaetetus in Plato’s Sophist. “The designated question has today been forgotten . . (SZ, 2). “Today,” whether in 400 B.C. or 40 A.N. (Anno Nietzscheani), the question of the meaning of being ist in Vergessenheit gekommen, has come or gone into oblivion. The perfection of our tradition consists in its having always already forgotten its matutinal question. However, that the tradition has to be dismantled, destructured, and scrutinized betrays the fact that an incipient remembrance is now at work: Heidegger too can feel the anchor at the bottom of the sea break loose, can feel it rising, can almost imagine, though not yet fully descry, the distance traversed. A certain resistance is at work in Heidegger—or a counterresistance—opposing perfect oblivion. Later we will hear him call it counterruinance. He is not without need, not unbedürftig; complacency (Bedürfnislosigkeit) is the last thing one would attribute to him. Yet the legacy of the tradition is a prevailing and apparently all-consuming complacency. All access to the “original experiences” that once served as the sources of our philosophical concepts and categories appears to be effectively blocked. Phenomenology is the discipline that would shatter complacency and grant access to what-has-been.

Well, then, what has been? Above all else, to repeat, a forgetting and a complacency that are all but perfect. Against oblivion and all other creature-comforts Heidegger seeks in that questioning being he calls Dasein or “being-there” a provisional answer to the question as to how “something like being” can be understood—and that means remembered—at all. His discipline will require of him that he not foist any given concrete “idea” or “ideal” of existence onto being-there, that he let the structures of human existence show themselves of themselves as they are “at first and for the most part” in their undifferentiated state. His discipline will exact of him remembrance of how it is with being-there.

Well, then, how is it? He cites Augustine’s treatise on memory (Confessions, X, 16; SZ, 43-44): “But what could be closer to me than I myself?” Augustine finds that the answer “must be”: “Surely it is I who toil here, and that in which I toil is myself: I have been made to be stony soil for myself, and I am dripping with sweat.” Heidegger does not pause to wonder at the fact that Augustine is tilling the stony soil of a cavern black as night; does not mention the perfervid search for a father or the massive monument to a mother. For Augustine is one of the proto-phenomenologists, the other being Aristotle. Their discipline should teach us to resist the tendency of what is at first and for the most part our quotidian lot: flight in the face of our ownmost being, escape into average dailiness, forgetting our being-thereJune 2, 1910 When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch as such, the tendency to exist inappropriately, uneigentlich.

Yet what if the discipline of remembrance and our resistance to the way in which we at first and for the most part exist were themselves spawned by a particular ideal of existence; what if discipline and resistance were the most unsubtle and pervasive forms of conceptual foisting, rather than a phenomenological letting come to the fore? What if the very opposition of appropriate and inappropriate modes of existence were the imposition of a familiar yet highly particular possibility of an all-too-human existence; what if the Augustinian legacy were itself precisely that proclivity to flight and forgetting? It would be foolish to suppose that these doubts do not rise in and for Heidegger himself. They loom not only after Being and Time but also precisely in the very construction of that text. And they are more than mere doubts: they are perhaps better described as the chasms into which every reader of Being and Time has to plummet, even though every page in that book has a number and we read complacently from one numbered page to the next from the beginning to the end.²

In section 13, “Exemplifying being-in in a founded mode: knowing the world,” which is the second half of the very brief chapter that tries to grasp the global phenomenon of being-in-the-world before it is analyzed into its component parts, Heidegger says something strange about forgetting (SZ, 62). If knowing the world is a founded (not a founding) mode of being-in-the-world, being-there is always already “out there” in the world; it is never encapsulated in an “inner sphere” (such as transcendental subjectivity) from which consciousness might sally forth and to which it would return with epistemic booty. Even when I am merely brooding in my cavern or my cage I am no less “outside” among beings in the world than when I am “grasping” something in an originary way “inside.” “Even the forgetting of something, in which every ontological relating [Seinsbeziehung] to what was previously known is apparently extinguished, must be grasped as a modification of the original being-in, and so in the same way must all deception and every error” (SZ, 62; the emphasis is Heidegger’s). One is reminded of the way in which Heidegger in his logic courses always has recourse to the revelatory character of errors and mistakes: only when we are deceived do we take the trouble of asking what is true, what is. What Heidegger in Being and Time calls ursprüngliches In-Sein, “original being-in,” is thus the seedbed of all originares Erfassen, “originary grasping”: all theoretical behavior and every thematizing, including that of Heidegger’s own fundamental ontology, springs from something that goes before, something prior, something forgotten and concealed, of which it is a mere modification.³ Which would mean, as we have just heard, but do not yet comprehend, that remembering is a modification of some sort of protoforgetting, and not the other way around. While the discipline of phenomenology may pride itself on its originary grasping, our pristine state of oblivion is actually closer to the origin of human being. Why must that be remembered, remembered above all else? And how can it be remembered in a way that remains true to the oblivion that characterizes being-in (which is not merely, not preeminently, knowing) the world?

I cannot summarize here the structure and movement of Heidegger’s existential-ontological analysis of Dasein.It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. . . . I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.I shall instead make four insertions into the second

division of that analysis, “Dasein and Temporality,” which is itself a reprise of the provisional analysis of quotidian Dasein in Division I. Division II inquires into the most appropriate possibility of human existence viewed originally and as a whole. My four insertions will be into (1) section 65, “Temporality as the ontological meaning of care”; (2) section 68, “The temporality of disclosedness in general,” and especially (3) section 68b, on the temporalization of “disposition,” Befindlichkeit; and (4) sections 73-76, on “having-been” as the historicity of Dasein.

(1) We remember that time is to be the horizon on which the meaning of anything resembling being will loom. What will claim our attention is the temporalization of a resolute openedness that somehow runs ahead, eine vorlaufende Entschlossenheit; an openedness that does not so much anticipate death as let it come to the fore in all its overwhelming power; and thus the temporalization of anxiety, which serves as the portal to that openedness; inasmuch as ent-schlossen means not tightfistedly resolute but opened up, unlocked. We have every right to be bemused about how such a temporal analysis will answer all the questions that have accumulated in sections 53,58, and 64, concerning freedom unto death, willing to have a conscience, guilt, and steadfastness of self; and how it will resolve all the methodological quandaries portrayed so brilliantly, so ruthlessly, in sections 45,61, and 63, on the possible being-a-whole of finite Dasein, on ontic attestation and ontological conceptuality, and on proper access and adequate originality. Heidegger girds his loins at the outset of section 65, “Temporality as the ontological meaning of care,” by summoning the “unbroken discipline” of a “gaze” that will “understand existentially” the whole of Dasein’s appropriate being without dispersion or distraction (SZ, 323): Im unzerstreuten, existenzial verstehenden Blick. . . . That unblinking Blick will of course have everything to do with the moment, der Augenblick, in which there-being twists free from oblivion and remembers who it is. Yet how will such a gaze differ from the insistent gape of theory? How will such a moment or blink of an eye differ from the traditional phenomenological presentification that in Heidegger’s own view is egregiously inappropriate? What happens when we gird the loins?Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.Why do we do, or claim to be doing, fundamental ontology? What does it mean to remember being, to recover and reiterate a forgotten question?

In the present context of memory, reminiscence, and writing, I shall focus on the temporal ecstasis of having-been. And yet something like the perfect comes to the fore even in the structures of future and present. If the future “lets” Dasein “arrive at itself,” if it is Sich-auf-sich-zukommenlassen (SZ, 325), such arrival involves an ecstatic recoil of Dasein back onto itself. The zu is a zurück. The name Heidegger chooses for the instant of ecstasis, the temporalizing of existence in each ecstasis as such, is Entrückung, “rapture.” Its seizures are not unidirectional. They move not merely forward into some linear future but also backward. Rücken is in fact two words, with two apparently distinct origins: der Rücken, “the back,” zurück, “behind” (the English word “ridge” is a member of its family); and the verb rucken (or rücken), “sudden movement” (the English verb “to rock” is apparently related to it). The “sudden movement” of ecstatic temporality is not simply a forward leap into future possibilities; it is simultaneously a movement back or recoil to that from which Dasein is thrown. The sudden rocking movement of time, Ent-rückung, is a kind of whiplash effect by which the wave of the future bends back over itself even as it tosses its crest ahead, as though the force behind it were too strong for simple progress. It is almost as though time itself confronted that Tragheit or neural inertia that is the cornerstone of Freud’s “scientific psychology.” The horizon formed by the raptures of temporality, the upon-which of projection, is thus both all-encompassing and inherently unstable; like Zarathustra’s disconcerting avenue of the future it returns as past to the gateway “Moment.” We can summarize Heidegger’s account of the temporal ecstases simply by repeating that the futural auf-sich-zu is simultaneously an auf-sich-zu-rück, a rocking back or recoiling of time.

Whatever difficulties might attend the ecstatic analysis of future and present—and they are legion—let me focus on having-been in section 65. For here the forward-thrusting brunt of the wave, the resolute openedness that runs ahead (die vorlaufende Entschlossenheit) reverts to the force that is always already behind it. Heidegger writes: “The openedness that runs ahead understands Dasein in its essential being-guilty. Such understanding implies that being-guilty is taken over existingly by being the thrown ground of a nullity” (SZ, 325). Here he reminds us of the essential steps taken in section 58, “Understanding the call [of conscience], and guilt.” That section is to demonstrate in a “self-interpretation” of our being-there and by means of “ontic-existentiell attestation” the possibility that Dasein can be—and can be interpreted ontologically as—a whole. The passage continues: “But taking over thrownness means that Dasein should properly be in the way it already in each case was. And taking over thrownness is possible only if futural Dasein can be its ownmost ‘how it already in each case was’; that is, can be its ‘having been’ ” (SZ, 325-26). In this mysterious passage, the imperfect was undergoes a metamorphosis to the perfect having-been. Where there was was, there shall have been the perfect, Gewesen. Present perfect, as the text goes on to specify: “Only to the extent that Dasein in general is as I am having-been [ich bin -gewesen] can it come to itself futurally by way of coming back. Properly futural Dasein is properly having been.” Eigentlich zukünftig ist das Dasein eigentlich gewesen. The English translation has to fracture the perfect tense, ist gewesen, into a third-person present indicative of to be and a perfect participle employing the auxiliary to have. Yet Heidegger is here struggling to express the unity of time’s temporalizing in and as Dasein. There never was a time of being-there that was not simultaneously futural and always already perfect. More radically, futural time itself, to which I come, is that time back to which I have always already come. The order of implication, the transcendental order of a priori propositions of a priori temporal science (as Heidegger elsewhere calls fundamental ontology), is forcefully stated: only insofar as (insofern) Dasein is at all, and that means is at all as present perfect, can it precisely in its running ahead into an open future come (back) to itself. That Dasein ist gewesen means that it exists zukünftig . . . zukommend. . . zurückommend . To arrive at a future necessitates coming back onto oneself, auf sich selbst zurück, as one has been. Yet at the very end of the passage Heidegger shifts the emphasis back to the future, as it were, in order to shore up his thesis concerning the inappropriateness of the present and the primacy of the (finite) future:

Running ahead into one’s uttermost and ownmost possibility is the understanding retrogression [das verstehende Zuruckkommen] to one’s ownmost having-been. Dasein can properly be having-been [again the translation shatters the German phrase “gewesen sein,” in which the italicized sein is heard both as an auxiliary and as the infinitive] only insofar as it is futural. Having-been springs in a certain way from the future.

Here the order of implication is reversed: rather than understanding zukommen on the basis of a zuruckkommen, futurity is now made the basis for all coming back. Whether the entspringen (“springing from”) to which Heidegger appeals here involves the degeneration he will soon invoke (SZ, 334: “The ontological origin [Ursprung] of the being of Dasein is not ‘slighter’ than that which springs from it; rather, it towers over it in power from the start, and all ‘springing from’ in the field of ontology is degeneration”) is an arresting question. Such “springing” will no doubt occupy us from now on. Yet we should be on guard about these leaps, springs, and somersaults in the direction of wonted origins. For something can be original, resisting all derivation from everything else, and nonetheless be manifold. The ontologist who insists on tracing everything back to some “primal ground” or Urgrund (SZ, 131) should not study the ways of time. For precisely here Heidegger will insist that all talk of “springing from” is out of place, that the ecstases are equally original, “equiprimordial,” gleichursprünglich (SZ, 131, 329, 350). The upshot is that the “situation” of being-there can scarcely be demarcated by the language of “springing from,” the language of derivation, order of implication, or transcendental condition of possibility. Yet no other language stands at Heidegger’s disposal, so that the genesis of the perfect ecstasis can only be described as follows: “Having-been springs from the future in such a way that the future that has been [die gewesene . . . Zukunft] (better, that is having-been [gewesende]), releases the present from out of itself” (SZ, 326). The gravity of the crisis in the language is felt as soon as Heidegger tries to distinguish the vulgar understanding of temporality (which “springs from” an “inappropriate temporality” and which thus has “its own proper origin,” ihren eigenen Ursprung) by saying that it is abkünftig, “derivative.” What is the difference between abgeleiteten, abkünftigen, and entsprungenen temporalities or ecstases? How can the vulgar understanding of time have its proper origin in inappropriate temporality and yet be derivative “without gaps” (lückenlos) of “original and proper temporality”? If all “springing from” is degeneration in the field of ontology, and if the equiprimordiality of the temporal ecstases makes it impossible to derive one from the others, can fundamental ontology sustain the derivation of inappropriate from original temporality? The derivation of the time of forgetting from the time of remembering? And if the time of forgetting were, as Heidegger has suggested, the more original time? Or if, as seems more likely, the derivation of the two were radically undecidable? Would not Heidegger’s derivation be as bewildering as the Demiurge’s “generation” of quasi-immortals and mortals, or his iconography of the “moving image of eternity,” that is, time? For Heidegger these questions stand and fall with the possibility of showing that resolute openedness and fully appropriate care as a whole are “but a modality of temporality” (SZ, 327). The unity of the structure of care would have to become visible in the temporalizing of temporality as such. As though (the time of) forgetting and remembering were one, and these two phenomena thoroughly indistinguishable. As though not only the particular souvenir were guarded by oblivion, as Merleau-Ponty says, but also remembering as such. As though remembrance could only be on the verge.

Again Heidegger emphasizes that neither future nor having-been can be understood in terms of the not-yet-present or no-longer-present of some thingThen I could hear the watch againat hand. And again the ecstatic analysis makes all derivationThe hour began to strike problematic. While the primary sense and direction of existentiality is futural, the primacy of having-been seems to be more primary than the primacy of the future: “Only because care is grounded [gründet] in having-been can Dasein, as the thrown being which it is, exist” (SZ, 328). Dasein “finds itself” always and only as thrown factum. Its disposition to be, Befindlichkeit, is always as having-been. “The primary existential sense of facticity lies in having-been.” Thus the very finitude of original temporality rests on the odd alternating current of future and perfect, and not on the future alone. The futural Auf-sich-zu exists as “the impassable [unüberholbare] possibility of nullity” (SZ, 330). It exists ecstatically not so much as an opening but as closing, schliessen, inasmuch as the ability to be of Dasein is perfectly circumscribed. Such closing and closure will soon induce Heidegger to write of remembering and forgetting.

The impassable possibility is the futural possibility of being a nullity. How is the impassability of death related to the possibility that emerges from having-been—the ontological possibility of recovery, reprise, repetition? How do Unüberholbarkeit and Wiederholbarkeit abide one another? That is the question I shall now take up, turning to section 68, “The temporality of disclosedness in general.” Yet it is important to note that Heidegger’s detailed analysis of the temporality of disclosedness itself constitutes a repetition (Wiederbolung) of the existential analysis as a whole, indeed a “more original repetition”; the “tasks” implied in this more original repetition themselves “spring from” temporality itself. The title of section 66 is “The temporality of Dasein and the tasks springing from it that relate to a more original repetition of the existential analysis.” At the end of that section (SZ, 333), Heidegger concedes that the repetition now to be undertaken may well itself need to be repeated in terms of Sein as such and in general; he will repeat this warning at the very end of the book (SZ, 43 7) as a way of introducing what was to have been Division III of Part One, “Time and Being.” Even though the scope of such “repetitions” expands and dilates beyond all possibility of containment, I am interested here precisely in the closure-of-horizon that impassability (Unüberholbarkeit) implies: let me contract my own inquiry quite sharply, focusing solely on one aspect of repetition, namely, its relation to the anxiety in which we confront the possibility of nullity, the possibility of an oblivion that is total.

(2) In the opening paragraph of section 68 Heidegger stresses that the various “structural moments” of disclosedness—understanding, disposition, falling, and discourse—are to be traced back to “the one temporality” (SZ, 335), regardless of what he may have written earlier concerning the “proper origin” of inappropriate temporality (SZ, 326). Indeed, that one temporality shines through each of the structural moments (such as understanding, discussed first in 68a) with each of its ecstases. Thus the temporal elaboration of Verstehen involves not only the future ecstasis but also the present (both as the appropriate moment of vision and as inappropriate presentification) and having-been as well. The analysis of having-been, which we are now to pursue in the direction of anxiety, here introduces—in a way one could not have anticipated—phenomena normally associated with remembering and forgetting.

Having introduced Gewesenheit into the analysis of understanding, Heidegger writes:

The proper coming-to-itself of the openedness that runs ahead is at the same time [zumat] a coming back to one’s ownmost self, thrown into its individuation. This ecstasis [i.e., having-been] makes it possible for Dasein, resolutely open [entschlossen], to take over the being that it already is. In running ahead, Dasein fetches itself again [holt sich das Dasein wieder], carries itself forward into its ownmost ability to be [in das eigenste Seinkonnen vor]. (SZ, 339)

The inextricability of the temporal ecstases, especially of future and having-been, here manifests itself in the monstrous neologism and oxymoron sich vorwieder-holen. Again something of the rocking motion of Entrückung or rapture comes into view. Repetition is not simply the taking up of something past. To fetch back again is to carry existence foward. This is the appropriate way for Dasein to be. However, Dasein usually forgets its having-been (shades of Hegelian natural consciousness!) and, instead of conducting itself forward to its ownmost possibility to be, fritters its life away in a wholly inappropriate present. The passage continues:

We call the proper being of having-been [das eigentliche Gewesen-sein] repetition. Yet inappropriate self-projection upon possibilities drawn from the things we take care of and presentify is possible only because Dasein has forgotten itself in its ownmost thrown ability to be [dass sich das Dasein in seinem eigensten geworfenen Seinkonnen vergessen hat].

The last phrase is of course ambiguous. Has Dasein forgotten itself inasmuch as it has neglected its ownmost, thrown being-able-to-be? Or has it forgotten itself precisely in that being thrown, in such a way that oblivion is precisely its ownmost way to be? To insist on such ambiguity would no doubt be perverse—the former sense is surely the one Heidegger would want us to glean from the phrase. Yet can we be altogether clear here about what forgetting and remembering might signify? If in section 13 Heidegger desired to subordinate forgetting to the global phenomenon of being-in, oblivion now seems to assume an uncanny preeminence:

Such forgetting is not nothing, nor simply the lack of remembrance [Fehlen von Erinnerung]; rather, it is a proper, “positive,” ecstatic mode of having-been. The ecstasis (rapture) of forgetting is characterized by a disengagement in the face of one’s ownmost having-been, a disengagement that is closed off to itself. This occurs in such a way that the disengagement in the face of . . . ecstatically closes off that which it faces and thereby at one and the same time closes off itself.

In this passage—whose every phrase resists translation—the ecstatic analysis broaches a repetition of the analysis of anxiety. Forgetting is no mere lack of remembrance. It is an “own,” eigener, a “positive,” and even an “ecstatic” mode of having-been. This doubling of the perfect ecstasis of Gewesenheit into remembering and forgetting ought to give us pause: having-been, itself an ecstasis of temporality, has the further ecstatic modes of remembrance and oblivion. Heidegger focuses on the latter. He attaches to it the word Entrückung, which always and everywhere describes the instantaneous movement of temporalization as such; yet if there is “rapture,” Entrückung, in oblivion, there is surely also “rupture,” “evasion,” Ausrücken, an abrupt turning away or—as I have rendered it here—disengagement. From what? Ausrücken ecstatically closes off, verschliesst, that which faces it, obfuscates its Wovor or projected horizon, and thereby occludes itself.

We should be astonished at this ecstatic closure. Virtually everywhere else in Being and Time and in the Marburg lecture courses ecstasis is taken to be the horizon of disclosure, the opening up of beings in general.⁴ Whatever appears to close off proves to be a horizon, an Umschluss rather than a Verschluss, a frame of reference rather than a stockade or barricade. Why on this page (SZ, 339) do we have to trace a zigzag line from verschliesst (“closes off”) to “erschliesst” (“discloses” in quotation marks) and back to verschliesst (see lines 15, 25, 30)? No doubt the closure and its obfuscated Wovor have to do with anxiety: the structure of the “in the face of which” (Wovor) is central to the analyses of anxiety in sections 40 and 68b, to which I shall soon turn. But only after completing the reading of section 68a. I broke off at the following point (SZ, 339): “Oblivion [Vergessenheit] as inappropriate having-been herewith relates to one’s own thrown being [Sein]; it is the temporal sense of the manner of being [Seinsart] in accord with which at first and for the most part I have—been.” Once again, only a pun on the German bin and the English been seems to capture the perfect of the original: zunachst und zumeist gewesen—bin. I am having been (in my average everyday existence) oblivious of my own (thrown) being. No wonder the question of being has to be not so much repeated as fetched forward, and that the very sense of such a question will have to reawaken! Yet how reawaken, and from what, if oblivion is its own, positive, ecstatic mode of having-been? Oblivion seems to be the ground on which alone being can rise; yet if oblivion be perfect, how can anything rise? “And only on the basis [auf dem Grunde] of such forgetting can the presentification that takes care of things and readies itself for them retain [behalten] those beings unlike Dasein that we encounter in our environment. To such retaining there corresponds a not-retaining, which represents a ‘forgetting’ in the derivative sense.”⁵

We can perhaps now understand why section 66, on the repetition of the existential analysis, closes by insisting that the being of Dasein “first receives its comprehensive ontological transparency in the horizon of the clarified being of beings unlike Dasein . . .” (SZ, 333). And why Heidegger’s lecture courses immediately after Being and Time try to reinterpret the very first existentials—those relating to the beings that are “handy” (zubanden) or “at hand” (vorbanden) around us. For both ways of taking up beings unlike Dasein appear to be rooted in oblivion. Section 68a concludes by emphasizing the closure and oblivion that infect perfect having-been, releasing from it a present that can only be a falling, an utterly inappropriate drifting, if not a foundering:

Just as expectation is possible only on the basis of readiness [Gewartigen], so is remembering] die Erinnerung] possible only on the basis of forgetting, and not the other way around. For in the mode of oblivion [Vergessenheit], having-been “discloses” [“erschliesst”] primarily the horizon into which [in den hinein] the Dasein that is lost in the “externality” of the things it takes care of can remember itself.

Here a classic model of the inside/outside opposition appears, qualified only by a set of “scare-quotes.” Dasein is at first and for the most part lost, forlorn, and abandoned to the outside of an external, extrinsic, and superficial world, a world of things “unlike Dasein.” Against such “Ausserlichkeit” Dasein will struggle to find a horizon into which it can interiorize itself: sich erinnern kann. Only the quotation marks rescue the passage from what would be total surrender to the ontotheology of the inward journey, the Hegelian voyage into interiority; the raison d’etre of Heidegger’s existential analysis of being-in-the-world, as the fundamental ontology of Dasein, hangs entirely on those scare-quotes. Or does the accusative in den hinein perhaps suggest that Dasein can “interiorize” only by advancing into the world of its concerns in a new way? The problem then would be how this new way through oblivion would “disclose” itself, and why the scare-quotes about “disclosure” are needed. The passage—and with it section 68a—ends thus:

Forgetting-presentifying readiness [vergessend-gegenwärtigende Gewartigen] is a proper ecstatic unity. In accord with it, inappropriate understanding temporalizes with regard to its temporality. The unity of these ecstases closes off proper being-able-to-be; it is consequently the existential condition of the possiblity of vacillating occlusion [Unentschlossenheit]. Even though the inappropriate understanding that takes care of things is determined by the presentifying of what is taken care of, the temporalizing of understanding is nevertheless fulfilled primarily in the future.

Precisely how the future can rescue Dasein from the closure of an inappropriate present, itself oblivious to and cut off from the past; precisely how the perfect possibility of occlusion can be countered or resisted; precisely how this occlusion differs from the closure of horizon experienced in an appropriate confrontation with the finite future; precisely how the ecstatic unity of a disengagement in which we are exposed to everything that can be presentified can be broken, so that the oblivion that closes off our proper being will yield to a remembering, to a new and resolute advance through oblivion out into the world—none of this, to say the least, is clear. Rescue and remembrance seem unlikely.

(3) In section 68b Heidegger turns to the temporality of disposition or Befindlichkeit, “how we find ourselves to be.” It may be worth noting that his reprise of the fundamental structural elements of being-in reverses the order in which they originally appeared: in Division I Heidegger discussed Befindlichkeit first (see §§29—30), presumably because mood is a more original and more comprehensive kind of disclosure than understanding. Why does the temporal reprise begin with the narrower form of disclosure, to wit, understanding? Has the tendency to theory and conceptual comprehension in Heidegger’s ontological analysis engineered a reversal of priorities? An unthematized reversal, to be sure. However that may be, Heidegger reaffirms the “far more original” disclosure of the thrownness and facticity of Dasein in disposition, mood, or attunement (Stimmung). Precisely what these have to do with time is obscure. It is insufficient to say that they come and go in time, but neither can some sort of deduction or schematism derive dispositions and moods from the ecstases of time. However, the one demonstration that will have to succeed if the ontological analysis is to proceed at all is that of the difference between fear and anxiety. If anxiety is the founding disposition of existence, temporal analysis should once again be able to distinguish it from fear (as the provisional analysis did in §§30 and 40). And it should also be able to show us how the closure within oblivion of our appropriate ability-to-be is shattered—by the temporalizing of temporality itself and as such.

The very temporality of fear is inappropriate, inasmuch as it snags, forcing us to remain fixed on some present being that confronts and threatens us. “Its [i.e., fear’s] existential-temporal sense is constituted by a self-forgetting [ein Sichvergessen]: the confused disengagement [Ausrücken] in the face of one’s own factical ability to be . . .” (SZ, 341). We may be surprised to see the existential structure of forgetting being introduced in the context of disposition, whereas earlier it seemed (quite plausibly) to pertain to understanding. Or will we allow references to the totality of the care-structure, the global phenomenon of being-in-the-world, and the unity and equal originality of the ecstases to allay our suspicions? At all events, Heidegger (342) cites Aristotle’s reference to fear as tarakhe, something that oppresses and confuses us. Such oppression, Gedrucktheit, is a depression or dulling of the senses, a confusion that causes one to lose one’s head and to forget. “Confusion is grounded in a forgetting.” Oppression and confusion close off (verschliessen) Dasein’s thrownness. Caught in a house ablaze, Dasein will lose its head and grab the handiest and most banal things, carrying them to safety. Its proper having-been is blocked in a confused presentifying. Fear is just another way of slamming the door in the face of what-has-been (26, 267). In anxiety, on the contrary, Dasein is brought back to its ownmost ability to be. That in the face of which and that about which Dasein is anxious are coextensive; they “cover” one another perfectly, and the being that “fulfills” the Wovor and Worum of anxiety is Dasein itself as being-in-the-world. Yet what is the temporality of this most phenomenological momentThe quarter hour sounded. I stopped and listened to it until the chimes ceasedin fundamental ontology? “Anxiety becomes anxious about naked Dasein, thrown into uncanniness. It brings us back to the pure ‘that’ of our ownmost, individualized thrownness. Such bringing back does not have the character of a disengaging forgetting; yet neither does it have the character of a remembering.” Here Heidegger distances himself from any straightforward counterposing of oblivion and remembrance, outside and inside, alienation and recuperation. The analysis becomes considerably more intricate.

However, just as little does anxiety already imply a taking over of existence into resolve by way of repetition [eine wiederholende Ubernahme der Existenz in den Entschluss]. Rather, as opposed to that, anxiety brings us back to thrownness as possible-repeatable. And in this way it unveils also the possibility of an appropriate being able to be. Such being able, in repetition, with repetition as futural, must come back to the thrown “there.” The specific ecstatic mode of having-been, which constitutes the disposition of anxiety, brings us to confront repeatability. (SZ, 343)

Vor die Wiederholbarkeit bringen: to bring face-to-face with or to cause to confront the recoverability or repeatability of having-been. This is the proper, appropriate relation of Dasein to its Gewesenheit. How does it temporalize? In a way that parallels and yet is opposed to forgetting. If Vergessen was earlier designated as a proper (eigener), “positive,” ecstatic mode of having-been (SZ, 339, lines 11-12), Wiederholbarkeit is now attributed to the “specific” ecstatic mode of having-been, the mode of temporality that “constitutes” anxiety. How does anxiety temporalize, anxietyAnd Father said That’s sad too, people . . . cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful todayinstead of fear, anxiety enabling and opening up an appropriate relation to having-been?

Anxiety temporalizes as a kind of hold, not on things, and not as In-halt, but on one’s insurmountable possibility both to be and not to be. Anxiety temporalizes as a hold on the impassability (Unüberholbarkeit) of death. Anxiety temporalizes as recovery of what is forgotten in everyday preoccupations and even in exceptional moments of fright—recovery of the utter nonrecover-ability of Dasein in death. Yet the temporalization of anxiety, as the hold on this slipperiest of all amalgams, Wiederholbarkeit/Unüberholbarkeit, will resist phenomenological depiction. Indeed, a gap will open here (on page 344 of Sein und Zeit) that the remainder of the book will persistently fail to bridge or close. It is perhaps the deepest of those chasms Heidegger refers to in his Schelling book (see note 2, above), those gullies into which every attentive reader must plunge. Plummeting, falling without hold, the reader will perhaps experience fear: limitless possibilities for distinguishing anxiety from fear, the appropriate from the inappropriate, the ownmost from the alien, will hurtle confusedly by. None of them will grant a hold. The attentive reader of Being and Time will therefore experience something like animal fear in the gorge that threatens to swallow SZ, 344.

Anxiety presumably temporalizes as a hold on the ecstasis of having-been, a grip on the thrownness of factical Dasein. Such a hold makes anxiety present. However, even though the appropriate Gegenwart of anxiety is held, “it still does not of itself have the character of the moment [Augenblick] that temporalizes in resolve [Entschluss].” Rather:

Anxiety only brings us into the mood of a possible resolve. Its presence [Gegenwart]holds the moment when anxiety itself alone is possible, holds the moment poised for the leap.

Die Angst bringt nur in die Stimmung eines moglichen Entschlusses. Ihre Gegenwart halt den Augenblick, als welcher sie selbst und nur sie moglich ist, auf dem Sprung.

Anxiety induces a mood or attunement in which resolute openedness becomes possible. In anxiety, the glance of an eye or moment of vision in which Dasein confronts its mortality is possible, yet not actual. When does the eye truly see? When does mortal vision penetrate into the open? When does the moment of mortality lunge? When do mortals remember no longer to forget?

Anxiety arises from being-in-the-world as thrown being-unto-death. Yet how does its riseAnd maybe when He says Rise the eyes will come floating up too, out of the deep quiet and the sleep, to look on glory. And after a while the flat irons would come floating uptemporalize? “The future and present of anxiety temporalize from an original having-been in the sense of a bringing back to repeatability.” And yet, as we have seen, having-been releases both oblivion and resolute reprise. How then does temporalization release the latter rather than the former; how in the thick of oblivion does it induce recovery? How does ecstatic temporality achieve what no mere “choice” of “will” could ever achieve? Or does ecstatic analysis rest on a suppressed yet massive voluntarism and decisionism? At the top of SZ, 344 we heard that anxiety “only brings us into the mood of a possible resolve.” Toward the bottom of the page, on the far side of the gorge we will never escape, we hear:

But anxiety can properly arise only in a resolutely open Dasein.

Eigentlich aber kann die Angst nur aufsteigen in einem entschlossenen Dasein.

Anxiety makes resolute openedness in the face of thrown being-toward-death possible; anxiety can properly arise however only in a Dasein that is already resolutely open. This is not in any obvious sense a hermeneutical circularity. Nor is it a mere ambiguity in the exposition. It is an indication of the happenstance that anxiety does not temporalize, or that it is always only on the verge of temporalizing. The analysis of ecstatic temporality will not support the binary opposition of appropriateness/inappropriateness upon which the whole of Being and Time is constructed.⁶

Heidegger’s analysis terminates in a profusion and confusion of ecstases: “Although both modes of disposition, fear and anxiety, are grounded primarily in a having-been, their origin with a view to their own temporalizing in the totality of care differs in each case.” How the origin of a temporalizing can differ from its ground is obscure. “Anxiety springs from [entspringt] the future of resolute openedness. . . .” Yet the future of a possible resolute openedness, as we have just seen, awaits the hold that anxiety alone can bring. Anxiety, for its part, will never spring from any future if it is not already poised to leap. The resolute openedness that runs ahead will be manacled by an infinite series of readinesses. And, at all events, is not all Entspringen in the field of ontological analysis degeneration? Heidegger will soon thematize this leaping-from (SZ, 347—48), but it will be difficult to see in it anything more than “a waxing oblivion” (SZ, 347, line 6 from the bottom).

The final irony: even if anxiety were able to temporalize, even if by keeping a stiff upper lip or an unlocked heart a resolutely open Dasein were able to influence time in its proper unfolding, the result might be less edifying than one might imagine. Almost equidistant between the impossible verges of SZ, 344, between anxiety-as-possible-resolve and resolve-as-possible-anxiety, appear the words benommen, Benommenheit, “dazed,” “benumbed,” “bedazzled,” and their corresponding nominatives. They are used to describe the peculiar power of anxiety to shock human beings into remembrance of their proper uncanniness. Heidegger writes:

In the peculiar temporality of anxiety, by which anxiety is grounded originally in having-been, with future and present temporalizing out of it alone, we find confirmation of the possibility of the might [Mächtigkeit] that makes the mood of anxiety so exceptional. In it Dasein is fully brought back to its naked uncanniness and is benumbed by it [zurückgenommen . . . benommen}. Yet this benumbing not only takes Dasein back out of its “worldly” possibilities but also gives it at the same time the possibility of an appropriate ability to be.

The dual action of Benommenheit takes (nimmt) and gives (gibt) Dasein its possibilities. Its emphatic giving (gibt, geben) mimics the very granting of time and being. Ereignis dazzles. Yet who is Ereignis for? For beings like Dasein. Which beings are icons of Dasein? Two years after the publication of Being and Time, in a lecture course in which Heidegger struggles to distinguish human comportment from animal behavior, he rigorously organizes his vocabulary in such a way as to segregate animality from humanity. Whereas human beings adopt a stance toward beings, taking hold of them and of themselves, sich verhalten, dumb animals are dazed, bedazzled, and benumbed by their world: benommen. (Descartes would have said hébété, thinking of dullwitted creatures whose pineal glands are corrugated and rutted with traces.) What in Being and Time constitutes the most human of all human possibilities, namely, Benommenbeit, a giving taking, is two years later predicated of a deprived and impoverished animality. Anxiety, crouching on the verge, utterly motionless, poised to spring, is both daimon and beast.⁷

(4) I have by no means exhausted the problem of memory and oblivion in Being and Time. One would have to continue to confront “the power of forgetting” (SZ, 345), the “waxing oblivion” (SZ, 347, 354) of inappropriate dailiness, tracing the experience of such oblivion in Heidegger’s writings both before and after (but also within) Being and Time.

Both the public lecture of 1924, “The Concept of Time,” and the Freiburg lecture course of 1921—22, “Introduction to Phenomenological Research,” betray the need to recover what has been, to resist a kind of ruination in which the past sinks into oblivion. “History can wind up in oblivion; the tradition we bring to expression can break off” (61, 42). Recovery is therefore everything: “ ‘Wiederbolung’: everything hangs on its meaning. Philosophy is a fundamental manner [ein Grundwie] of life itself, so that in each case it properly fetches life back [wieder-holt], guiding it back from its decline. This guiding back, as radical research, is life” (61, 80). Recovery alone produces phenomenological evidence, repeats the “primal decision” by which alone life escapes the play of masks, the carnival in which it is caught up; recovery alone resists the plunge (ruina, Ruinanz) by means of a counterthrust, a movement within life yet counter to life’s own tendency to fall. Heidegger calls such recovery counterruinance (61, 80, 88, and 153—54). Counterruinance would be Heidegger’s first word for the overcoming of complacency and oblivion, his first word for commemorative thinking.

Furthermore, we would have to follow the transformations of the temporal analysis in chapter five of Division II of Being and Time. For “Temporality and historicity” brings Heidegger to confront our “being toward the beginning,” our birth as well as our death, and the stretch of time between commencement and end (SZ, 373). The “emphatic function” of the past in the historical happening that is Dasein would also take us to those passages that try to transform what is bygone (Vergangenes) into what—as the perfect of being-there, Da-Gewesenes—still has an impact on the present and future (SZ, 379—80). Here we might be able to rescue from oblivion the earlier and more modest forms of those brave words in Being and Time (SZ, 384-85) that so disturb us: readiness for anxiety—forgetting for a moment that without a covert voluntarism anxiety can never temporalize—becomes readiness to assume a national identity and destiny (Geschick), to invoke the historic happening of a people (Geschehen . . . des Volkes), thus transforming finitude and even impotence (Ohnmacht) into a surfeit of power (Übermacht). The fundamental ontologist goes to join his “generation” in “communication” and “struggle,” chooses his “hero,” elects a murky liberation of “struggling successors” and an equally murky “fidelity to what is recoverable.” No doubt Heidegger means it all spiritually rather than nationalistically, politically, or brachial-brutally. In which case it would simply be a matter of remembering what spirit has meant.⁸

Remembering spirit, animality, and anxiety in the context of Heidegger’s account of historicity in Being and Time, let me now expand my fourth point of insertion and focus on one intriguing passage in which the fundamental ontologist goes to confront Nietzsche. At the end of section 76, which relates the scholarly discipline of history to the happening of Dasein in time, Heidegger recollects in some detail Nietzsche’s On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, the second of his Untimely Meditations.⁹

REMEMBERING TIME

“The beginning of his [Nietzsche’s second Untimely] Meditation allows us to surmise that he understood more than he was telling.” Thus Heidegger on Nietzsche’s On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life. By the “beginning” he presumably means not Nietzsche’s Preface but the following:

Observe the grazing herd as they pass before you: they do not know what yesterday and today are; they frisk, feed, doze, digest, and frolic again; they do so from morning to night and from day to day, taciturn about their pleasures and unpleasures; that is to say, fettered to the peg of the moment [Augenblick] and therefore never melancholy or world-weary. This is a hard thing for a man to see, because he boasts of his humanity in the face of the animal and yet gazes jealously upon the latter’s happiness—for that alone is what he wants: like the animal neither to be world-weary nor to live with pain; and yet he wants it in vain, because he does not want to be like an animal. (1, 248-49)

Does not want to be benumbed like an animal. Heidegger too insists that human beings are separated from animals by an abyss of essence, ein Wesensabgrund. Animals are more like stones than human beings, “life” to the contrary notwithstanding. Nietzsche too apparently knows that animals are in a daze as they graze; although he always knows more than he tells, always “ruminates.” The bucolic fable he is now spinning has a dazzling quality about it; one is stunned by the beauty of the prose and the gentle, lowing irony. Nietzsche’s bovine “beginning” continues as follows:

The human being once asked the animal, “Why don’t you tell me of your happiness, why do you only gaze at me?” The animal did its best to answer and to say, “That’s because I always forget straightway what I wanted to say,” but then it forgot this answer too and was silent: so that the human being stood in amazement.

The cow would make a bad phenomenologist, but a marvelous writer. It is caught up in what Hegel, Husserl, and perhaps Heidegger too would call “the natural attitude.” Yet while Nietzsche’s human being is capable of bracketing the natural attitude, thus indicating his or her solidarity with the human beings of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, that is not what causes amazement, not at the moment when we are confronting the herd:

Yet he is also struck by amazement at himself, at his being unable to learn how to forget, at his clinging always and everywhere to the past: no matter how far or fast he travels, he drags his chain with him. It is a wonder: the moment, whoosh! it’s here, whoosh! it’s gone, previously a nothing, afterwards a nothing; yet it returns as a ghost to disturb the tranquillity of a later moment. Again and again a sheet is separated from the roll of time, slips out, flutters on—and suddenly flits back into a man’s lap. Then the man says, “I remember” [“ich erinnere mich”], and is envious of the animal, which forgets instantly and sees each moment actually die, sinking back into fog and night, extinguished forever.

Humanity is thus a child at play, whose aeon is interrupted by the dominion of time. The genesis of time fascinates Nietzsche, not only in this early text but also in the second treatise of his On the Genealogy of Morals, to which I shall turn at the end of the chapter. For the moment, let me return to the playing child not knowing any better and the fatal interruption:

And yet his play will have to be disturbed: well before his time [nur zu zeitig] the child is summoned out of oblivion. Then he learns to understand the phrase “it was,” an incantation that unleashes struggle, suffering, and weariness upon man, in order to remind him of what his existence at bottom is—an imperfect that is never to be brought to completion.

We recognize the es war, the “it was” of time, as that which will present the gravest obstacle to the will and spur the thought of eternal return.¹⁰ Here the imperfect introduces time to the living creature, and the resulting interruption is humankind. To be sure, Nietzsche also introduces the perfect. Yet the perfect is by no means an improvement on the imperfect. It is instead, as we shall now witness, a monument to human finitude, an “uninterrupted has-been” that is sealed by death: “If death finally brings the oblivion for which we yearn, it also at the same time embezzles both the present [Gegenwart] and existence [Dasein]; it thereby sets the seal on the insight that existence is but an uninterrupted has-been [ein ununterbrochenes Gewesensein], a thing that thrives on denying, devouring, and contradicting itself.”

So much for the “beginning” thatI went to the dresser and took up the watch, with the face still down. I tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser and caught the fragments of glass in my hand and put them into the ashtray and twisted the hands off and put them in the tray. The watch ticked on. I turned the face up, the blank dial with the little wheels clicking and clicking behind it, not knowing any betterknows more than it lets on. Perhaps its duplicity hinges on the ambiguity of Gewesenheit, Gewesensein: for Heidegger, not only in Being and Time but also in his later writings, “having-been” rescues Dasein from an absolute past and secures for it a significant future; for Nietzsche, “has-been” suggests the irremediably bygone, which Beyond Good and Evil (numbers 269 and 277) calls das ewige leidige “Zu spät!”—the wretched, eternal “too late!” (5, 223, 229). The resonance of Nietzsche’s “perfect” is thus eminently imperfect. (Heidegger comes closer to that resonance in his 1924 lecture, Der Begriff der Zeit, than he does in Being and Time—as we shall see later in the chapter. The lecture emphasizesI passed a jeweler’s window but I looked away in timethe time of Dasein as an experience of the Vorbei!—”gone,” “over and done with,” “bygone.”)

Nevertheless, Heidegger’s use of the Nietzschean text in Being and Time is a far more “constructive” one than readers could have anticipated: it attempts to integrate the second Untimely Meditation into the essential structures of existential-ontological analysis. Because oblivion and remembrance are crucial to fundamental ontology, we might well examine the entire passage (SZ, 396—97), interrupting only in order to comment briefly. Heidegger begins: “The possibility that the discipline of history can in general be either of ‘use’ or a ‘disadvantage’ ‘for life’ is grounded in the fact that life is historical [geschicht-lich] in the root of its being; so that, as factically existing, it has always already decided for appropriate or inappropriate historicity.” We might well wonder what sort of “decision” life has in each case already made (noting the perfect), inasmuch as the temporalization of the shift from (inappropriate) fear to (appropriate) anxiety is precisely what the ecstatic analysis could not demonstrate. In section 9 Heidegger introduces the structures of appropriateness and inappropriateness by insisting that Dasein “has always already somehow decided [hat sich schon immer irgendwie entschieden] in what way Dasein in each case is mine” (SZ, 42). We need only remind ourselves of the familiar and much-discussed circular “grounding” of Uneigentlichkeit in Eigentlichkeit (SZ, 189, 259) and vice-versa (SZ, 130, 179, 317). If the primal, perfect decision has been in favor of oblivion, how will appropriateness spring from it? Further, if the factical ideal of self-possession and assumption of responsibility for one’s own living and dying is itself a traditional ontotheological ideal, what can prevent the thorough contamination of the appropriate by the inappropriate? Would one not have to be always on the verge of a decision? And is this not the tendency of Heidegger’s own later thought on the Ent-scheid, which treats decision not as a matter of the individual or collective will but as a kind of watershed (cf. Wasserscheide) where one willy-nilly finds oneself?

A second region of problems awaits us in Heidegger’s reference here to “life,” the use or disadvantage “for life.” Life is little in evidence in Being and Time. Whatever problems Jaspers’s philosophy of existence may have had, it seemed to rescue fundamental ontology from the embarras of philosphy of life. “Life is a mode of being all its own, even though it is accessible for essential reasons only in Dasein,” namely, by way of a “privative interpretation” (SZ, 50, 58, 194). Yet the meaning of “just-plain-life,” which is neither a being at hand nor Dasein, hounds the analysis of Dasein from beginning to end. Each time human embodimentThere was a clock, high up in the sun, and I thought about how, when you don’t want to do a thing, your body will try to trick you into doing it, sort of unawares. I could feel the muscles in the back of my neck, and then I could hear my watch ticking away in my pocket and after a while I had all the other sounds shut awayis discussed (although it is discussed rarely and from a vast height: see SZ, 56, 97, 346) or an effort is made to distinguish animal “demise” from human “dying” (see SZ, 240-41, 316) it is always with reluctance and discomfiture. Indeed, the problem of “life” and “nature” lies at the heart of the ontological problem of the “reality of the external world”; and even before the splendid but failed effort of 1929—1930 Heidegger knows that “the fundamental ontological analysis of ‘life’ cannot be inserted subsequently [nachtraglich]” into analysis of Dasein “as a substructure [Unterbau]” (SZ, 210). All of which induces us to ask the following question of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s “Leben”: By what right can Heidegger claim that “life” itself is geschichtlich, historical in the profound sense? (See also 29/30, 386.) Is he not merely assuming that by Leben Nietzsche here means human life, the life of Dasein? As long as the question of life, “just-plain-life,” is not raised explicitly, Heidegger has no basis for his reading of Vom Nutzen und Nachteil. Nevertheless, I continue to cite:

Nietzsche recognizes what is essential concerning the “Use and Disadvantage of History for Life,” in the second of his Untimely Meditations (1874), and says it unequivocally and compellingly. He distinguishes three kinds of historical discipline; the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical, without however explicitly demonstrating the necessity of this trinity and the ground of its unity. The threefold character of the discipline of history is prefigured in the historicity of Dasein. Such historicity enables us to understand how the proper discipline of history must be the factically concrete unity of these three possibilities. Nietzsche’s distribution is not contingent. The beginning of his Meditation allows us to surmise that he understood more than he was telling.

Heidegger does not explicitly cite the opening of the second section of Nietzsche’s text (1, 258) in which Nietzsche sets up the threefold structure of the monumental, antiquarian, and critical, relating it expressly to the three ways in which history pertains to life. History belongs to the living as “acting and striving” (monumental), as “preserving and esteeming” (antiquarian), and as that which “suffers and is in need of liberation” (critical). Nietzsche’s analysis of the monumental or memorable would conduct us to one of the first limnings of the thought of eternal return and also to Heidegger’s emphasis on the being of the possible (1, 260—61). Nietzsche’s analysis of the antiquarianThe place was full of ticking, like crickets in September grass, and I could hear a big clock on the wall above his head. “I broke my watch “would conduct us to Heidegger’s emphasis on the preservation of the work of art in the third and final section of Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1935), but also to the sense of preservation in the very hold (halten) or keeping (behalten)emphasized in fundamental ontology. Finally, Nietzsche’s analysis of the critical would conduct us to Heidegger’s deconstructive style of philosophizing: when Nietzsche criticizes contemporary historiography for its attempts “to adapt the past to timely trivialities” (1, 289), we sense what Heidegger will soon call the “depresentification of what is today,” Entgegenwärtigung des Heute. Heidegger will affirm Nietzsche’s avowal that “the genuine historian must have the force to transform ‘what everyone knows’ into ‘what is unheard of’ ” (1, 294). It is even possible that Nietzsche’s references to Holderlin here (1, 300) and in the notebooks (7, 680-81) will be instructive for Heidegger’s own uses of that poet, and plausible that Heidegger’s lifelong sense of being a “latecomer,” a “late arrival,” has much in common with this “untimely” meditation and its “eventide mood” (1, 303; 312). In the end, however, one must wonder whether Heidegger was able to absorb the core of Nietzsche’s account of critical history: “momentary forgetting” (1, 305), “the art and the energy that enables forgetting” (1, 330), quite beyond the compulsion to remember and the addiction to Wissenschaft, surely do not inform Heidegger’s own project of fundamental ontology as a “science of being.” In a moment we shall turn to the second treatise of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, where Nietzsche tells more about what he knows of forgetting and the genesis of time; for the present we continue with Heidegger’s adaptation of The Use and Disadvantage of History for Life, for that adaptation now turns explicitly to the question of temporality.

“As historical [geschichtliches], Dasein is possible only on the basis of temporality. Temporality temporalizes in the ecstatic horizonal unity of its raptures [Entrückungen].” One must interrupt in order to remind oneself that precisely this account of the raptures of time is riddled with difficulties.There were about a dozen watches in the window, a dozen different hours and each with the same assertive and contradictory assurance that mine had, without any hands at all. Contradicting one another. I could hear mine, ticking away inside my pocket, even though nobody could see it, even though it could tell nothing if anyone could.The putative primacy of the future, except for the temporalization of anxiety, where having-been is primary; the ostensible equiprimordiality of all three ecstases; the rapture of the instant or ecstatic moment as both horizon and rupture of horizon, as both overture and closure, as both revelation and radical concealment alike—we have already rehearsed these problems here and elsewhere.¹¹ The sole question now is whether the Nietzschean modes of historiography—”monumental,” “antiquarian,” and “critical”—will aid our understanding of the ecstases of time. “Dasein exists as properly futural in the resolutely open disclosure of a chosen possibility. Resolutely coming back to itself, it is by way of repetition open for the “monumental” possibilities of human existence. The historical discipline that springs from such historicity is ‘monumental.’ “

Whether resolutely open disclosure (entschlossenes Erschliessen) ever tem-poralizes we have good reason to doubt. Whether it temporalizes as heroism—as the “elevated procession of humanity through millennia” (i, 259)—might with good reason disconcert us. Whether for Nietzsche the “chosen possibility” is freedom unto death and nothing else we cannot yet say. It is worth noting, however, that that possibility is the crucial modality for both thinkers. Nietzsche writes:

What good is it for one who lives in the present [dem Gegenwartigen] to observe the monumental past, to be concerned with what is classic and rare in earlier ages? He will take from it encouragement that the magnificent things that once occurred there were possible at least once and therefore may well be possible again. He treads his path more confidently, because now the doubt that infected him in his hours of weakness—the doubt that he might be willing the impossible—has been soundly thwarted. (1, 260)

It is the possibility of a monumental history that now (1, 261) evokes one of Nietzsche’s earliest formulations of his “thought of thoughts,” eternal recurrence of the same. To think through that possibility as an eminently mortal possibility, as the closure of the ring of eternity, would take us to the heart of Heidegger’s 1937 lecture course on eternal recurrence: the thought of down-going. That thought in turn would take us back to Being and Time. While Nietzsche would be reluctant to assert that freedom unto death is the chosen possibility of human existence, he does employ the phrase himself (10, 21) and, more importantly, he devotes his every energy to the destruction of hinter-worlds and subterfuges of all kinds. Add to this Pierre Klossowski’s emphasis on eternal return as amnesia and anamnesis, and we are brought back to forgetting and remembering as the very possibility of mortality.¹²

No doubt the impassable possibility of mortality is the possibility on which we verge. Such verging would be what Nietzsche calls recurrence, Wiederkehr; Heidegger, recovery, reprise, recapitulation, or repetition, Wiederholung. However, what remains unclear is the Heideggerian sense of, and commitment to, life, which for Nietzsche is the ultimate horizon for any discussion of use and disadvantage. Not being unto death, but being unto life. (As if after Freud one could set them in simple opposition, outside of every economy, and beyond all contamination.) Nietzsche apparently opposes Heidegger by taking the present (‘Gegenwart) as the scene of life; yet for Nietzsche too much of the present is but the deformed and degenerate legacy of a forgotten past.Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.“Critical” history is as much Entgegenwärtigung as Gegenwart. Nietzsche would therefore be sympathetic to Heidegger’s analysis, perhaps because his untimely meditation informs Heidegger’s own in Being and Time—which continues as follows:

As having-been [gewesendes], Dasein is made answerable to its thrownness. In the recapitulating appropriation of the possible, we find prefigured at the same time the possibility of an esteeming preserving of an existence that has been [dagewesene Existenz], an existence in which the possibility that is taken up has become manifest [offenbar geworden]. As monumental, proper history is thus “antiquarian.”

The words “esteeming preserving,” verebrende Bewabrung, are taken directly from Nietzsche’s text (I, 258), indeed from that part in which Nietzsche lays out the tripartite structure of history, the part which I accused Heidegger of neglecting: Nietzsche attributes the antiquarian type of historical discipline to dem Bewahrenden und Verehrenden, “the preservers and esteemers.” One cannot help suspecting, however, that Nietzsche, as a philologist and a “pupil of more ancient ages” (I, 247), is more relentlessly reproving of his colleagues and brothers, Melville’s sub-sub-librarians, than is Heidegger: the piety of esteem and preservation is dearer to Heidegger than it is to Nietzsche, just as Heidegger will be harder on the active ones and strivers than Nietzsche will be. Heidegger writes:

Dasein temporalizes in the unity of future and having-been as present. The present [Gegenwart] properly discloses, as the moment [Augenblick], what is today [das Heute]. If what is today is interpreted on the basis of the futural-recapitulative understanding of a possibility taken up from existence, proper history becomes the depresentification of what is today [Entgegenwärtigung des Heute]; that is to say, it becomes a painful release [leidendes Sichlösen] from the ruinous publicity of what is today [von der verfallenden Öffentlichkeit des Heute]. Monumental-antiquarian history, as the proper historical discipline, is necessarily a critique of the “present.” Proper historicity is the fundament of the possible unity of the three kinds of historical discipline. But the ground of the fundament of proper history is temporality as the existential meaning of the being of care [Seinssinn der Sorge].

The “painful release” no doubt refers to Nietzsche’s dem Leidenden und der Befreiung Bedürftigen, “the one who suffers and needs liberation.” The need for such release and liberation has already been sketched out in the preceding section of Being and Time, where the word Entgegenwärtigung appears terminologically for the first time. In its inappropriate historicity, Dasein is dispersed and distracted in the present, oblivious of its destiny. “Ready for the next novelty, it has also already forgotten the old” (SZ, 391). As its public self, Dasein avoids choices, evades possibilities. It theorizes and speculates on “world history” by presentifying the past in terms of the trivialized present. “As opposed to this, the temporality of proper historicity, as the moment that runs ahead and recapitulates, is a depresentification of what is today and a weaning from the customary ways of the They.” Yet the secret of such painful release is well-kept. What the moment or glance of an eye may be which grants insight once and for all into the finitude of Dasein remains as recalcitrant for Heidegger’s temporal interpretation—his remembering time—as Nietzsche’s doctrines concerning the “health of life” and a “culture” that would be “a new and improved physis ” remain for his thought on will to power and eternal return (I, 331; 334).

Inasmuch as the three Nietzschean modes refer to history, the ecstasis of having-been embraces them all. Their tripartite structure bears no identifiable relation to the three temporal ecstases. Both the monumental and the critical modes have to do with the future and the present as well as with the past; the musty antiquarian has as much to do with an oblivious “today” as with a sentimentalized past. In short, these modes of history cannot be inserted into an account of ecstatic temporality; or at least if they are so inserted they will resolve none of the difficulties of that analysis. For the threefold ecstatic character of time continues to be bisected by the impossible line of Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit, which is the organizing axis of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. How the preeminently inappropriate antiquarian mode would temporalize from the appropriate monumental-critical modes, or how the latter could in time have degenerated into the first, remains inexplicable. Once more we are tossed back onto the insoluble quandaries of the ecstatic analysis. The truncated temporalization of anxiety out of having-been and resolute openedness out of the future remains precisely that, truncated, throughout the fifth and sixth chapters of Being and Time, Division II. However informative Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche’s second Untimely Meditation may be for Heidegger’s own hermeneutic of history and his later “history of being,” it does not help us to bridge the abyssesin darkness in silence the bridge arching into silence darkness sleep the water peaceful and swift not good-byeof Heidegger’s magnum opus.

MNEMOSYNE

It is surely no accident that in the lecture courses immediately following the publication of Being and Time Heidegger describes his project as “metaphysical remembering,” metaphysische Erinnerung (26, 186). The thinking of being is anamnesis, remembering back to the forgotten horizon of time. Time is the a priori condition of the possibility of something like being: as such it reposes beyond being, epekeina tes ousias. Time is not merely the “earlier,” the a priori of traditional metaphysics; it is “the earliest without qualification” (24, 401—5; 463—64; 26, 284). Hence one could depict Heidegger’s thinking of the 1930s and 1940s as metaphysical remembrance, or “remembrance back into metaphysics.”¹³

I shall nevertheless forego discussion of Heidegger’s work during the 1930s and 1940s, and turn directly to a text from the early 1950s, Was heisst Denken? “What is it we call thinking, and what calls for our thinking?” Heidegger opens his 1951-52 lecture course, the first course he was permitted to teach after the Freiburg University Senate required him to retire, as follows (WhD? 1):

We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves are thinking. If our attempt is to be successful, we must be ready to learn thinking.

As soon as we allow ourselves to become involved in such learning we have admitted that we are not yet capable of thinking.

Yet man is called the being who can think, and rightly so. Man is the rational animal. Reason, ratio, evolves in thinking. Being the rational animal, man must be capable of thinking if he really wants to. Still, it may be that man wants to think, but cannot. Ultimately he wants too much when he wants to think, and so can do too little. Man can think in the sense that he possesses the possibility to do so. This possibility alone, however, is no guarantee to us that we are capable of thinking. For we are capable of doing only what we are inclined to do. And again, we truly incline toward something only when it in turn inclines toward us, toward our essential being, by appealing to our essential being as what holds us there. To hold genuinely means to heed protectively, for example, by letting a herd graze at pasture. What keeps us in our essential being holds us only so long, however, as we for our part keep holding on to what holds us. And we keep holding on to it by not letting it out of our memory. Memory is the gathering of thought. To what? To what holds us, in that we give it thought precisely because it remains what must be thought about. What is thought is the gift given in thinking-back, given because we incline toward it. Only when we are so inclined toward what itself is to be thought about, only then are we capable of thinking.

The grazing herd passing by at pasture returns from Nietzsche’s text to haunt Heidegger’s thinking. As a herd must be herded, heeded, and held from danger (büten/halten), so our thoughts must be shepherded by and in memory. Memory, Gedachtnis, is the “gathering of thinking,” Versammlung des Denkens. Such “holding,” “keeping,” or “retaining,” halten and be-halten, proved to be particularly elusive for Heidegger’s existential-ontological analysis of having-been. We will remind ourselves of these difficulties once again, as soon as we have glanced quickly through the remainder of the passage.

It is constructed on a series of word-associations, plays, and puns; yet nothing here is contingent, nothing has been left to chance. Heissen is of course the guiding play, for it means “to mean” as well as “command” and “call.” Thinking, commemorative thinking, will have to do with a call or invitation. Er hiess mich niedersetzen, says Heinrich’s father of the hospitable innkeeper in his dream. The call or invitation to which Heidegger refers is recollected later in the Zuspruch, “appeal” or “address,” that “holds us in our essence.” The call is a call to think, a call to learn thinking. Readiness to learn is as important to this project as readiness for anxiety was to fundamental ontology. And every bit as enigmatic. To be sure, thinking is a capacity, Vermogen, of human beings, the rational animals, as distinguished from the herd. Thinking is possible, moglich, for us; perhaps even like-ly, mog-lich. Thinking belikes us. We incline to it.¹⁴

What wrecks the playful relationship between possibility and likelihood is a certain willfulness, the very will to be the rational animal, a certain inflexibility and inability to respond—in a word, a voluntarism. Is it not easy, almost inevitable, to confuse resoluteness and decisiveness with inflexibility? As long as we resist the sense of ent-schlossen as unlocked, open, “resolutely opened,” such confusion is indeed all that is “likely.” Response to the Zuspruch, the claim, address, or appeal of what calls on us to think, cannot itself be rigid. A stiff upper lip belikes a thick head. And yet Heidegger here—as earlier in the project of fundamental ontology—is driven, as it were, to be rigid in his opposition to that sheer dispersion and distraction, Zerstreuung, that he invariably associates with humanity’s lapsing, falling, and ruination in the world. To the flux of dispersion he would contrapose containment, retention, and keepage—halten, das Haltende—a holding action that draws on the gathering power of memory. Das Gedachtnis ist die Versammlung des Denkens. No doubt the genitive is subjective as well as objective: it is thinking that does the gathering, not “us,” and what it gathers is the to-be-thought, das zu-Denkende. Heidegger appeals to the language of gift-giving and bestowal to describe the gathering of thinking. We keep what holds us by not letting it slip into oblivion, by bestowing on it commemoration, Andenken, and recollective meditation, Nachdenken. Such bestowal is not an intuition of names after the manner of Hegel; it is not Gedachtnis as the transition to conceptual thinking. Holding, embracing, gathering, and bestowing or gift-giving are the graces of Mnemosyne.

Behalten, retaining, we remember, designates in section 68 of Being and Time the essential mystery of escape from perfect oblivion. If oblivion is an autochthonous, positive, ecstatic mode of having-been, it must be the ground of retention. Dasein retains the beings it takes care of in its daily routine on the basis of a thoroughgoing forgetting of its own being as possible, moglich. It belikes Dasein, at first and for the most part, to forget.¹⁵ What bedevils fundamental ontology, and so intrigues us, is the relation between oblivious retention—the proclivity of Dasein to forget its own being precisely by clinging to beings unlike itself—and that memorious hold, halten, that prevents utter dispersion. Anxiety is said to temporalize as a hold on the present (Gegenwart) as having-been (Gewesenheit). It holds the moment poised, poised for a decisive leap. Resolve is that impossible poise verging on openedness. Yet if neither anxiety nor resolve can temporalize as such, if the analysis of ecstatic temporality cannot show how halten springs from behalten, one can understand why Heidegger’s later thinking about thinking continues to ponder this tenuous hold. Was uns in unserem Wesen halt, halt uns jedoch nur so lange, als wir selber von uns her das Haltende be-halten. “What holds us in our essential unfolding, however, holds us only as long as we ourselves for our part retain [or be-hold] what does the holding.” As in Being and Time, neither the holding nor the retaining yields up the secret of its essential unfolding.

What holds us, as what is most to be pondered, and what we dare not let slip from memory, is the fact, according to Heidegger, “that we are not yet thinking” (WhD? 2). What we must hold onto is the diversion or slipping away, the withdrawalThe half-hour went. Then the chimes ceased and died awayof what calls for thinking. WithdrawalWhile I was eating I heard a clock strike the hour. But then I suppose it takes at least one hour to lose time in, who has been longer than history getting into the mechanical progression of itis what we must own, is what propriates us, claims us: withdrawal is the propriative event of our time, Entzug ist Ereignis (WhD? 5). Preposterous. Perverse. Plausible. Persuasive.

Mortals are those who point toward the self-withdrawal of that which grants time and being, those who are caught in the wakeThe chimes began again, the half hour. I stood in the belly of my shadow and listened to the strokes spaced and tranquil. . . , with that quality of autumn always in bells even in the month of bridesof withdrawal, tugged along by it. Zeigen, Ziehen, Zug, Entzug, Zeichen: human being is a sign undeciphered. No engrammatology can glean and decode the traces of this withdrawal. The undeciphered sign appears in Holderlin’s drafts to that hymn entitled (or having as one of its titles) Mnemosyne. Heidegger takes some trouble to note that the German translation of the word as das Gedachtnis is problematic; on the model of die Erkenntnis, he suggests adoption of the feminine gender, “die Gedachtnis.” Preserving the feminine gender of the word will allow him to retain the mythic and poetic valences of memory, reminiscent of a time“Hear them swimming, sister? I wouldn’t mind doing that myself.” If I had time. When I have timewhen logos and mythos said “the selfsame”:

Mnemosyne, daughter of Sky and Earth, bride of Zeus, in nine nights becomes the Mother of the Muses. Play and music, dance and poetry are of the womb of Mnemosyne, Dame Memory. It is plain that the word means something else than merely the psychologically demonstrable ability to retain [behalten] a mental representation of something that is past. Memory [Gedächtnis] thinks back to [denkt an] what is thought [das Gedachte]. Yet as the name of the Mother of the Muses, “Memory” does not mean an arbitrary thinking of just anything that might be thought. Memory is the gathering of thought unto what everywhere and from the start would like to be thought. Memory is the gathering of commemorative thought [Andenken]. It harbors and conceals that to which at any given time thought must be given, in everything that essentially unfolds and appeals to us as having being [Wesendes] and having-been [Gewesendes]: Memory, the Mother of the Muses: thinking back to what is to be thought—this is the source and ground of poesy. (WhD? 7)

The gift of Mnemosyne, Mother of the Muses, returns. Returns and enters into circulation, not as a slab of wax, nor as a shapeless receptacle, but as the call to thinking. The incentive for thanking. Yet it is a return. For when Heidegger invokes the Mother of the Muses he is doubtless quoting Socrates, the purest thinker of the West, the thinker who incises nothing in wax, stains no papyrus sheet with ebon ink (WhD? 52). Also the thinker who, in Holderlin’s words, “loves what is most alive,” the erotic thinker who, Nietzsche says, nonetheless killed poetry with philtres of dialectic. Nietzsche and Socrates are the thinkers we shall have to remember as we invoke the following extracts from the third lecture hour of Part II of “What Calls for Thinking?” (WhD? 91—95). Here I shall let them stand without much comment, inasmuch as they too will return in chapter 7 under the aegis of memory and affirmation. For the moment, it is simply a matter of identifying the lineage of Behalten, “retention,” in a thinking that is a thanking. Heidegger asks: “What is named with the words ‘to think,’ ‘something thought,’ ‘a thought’? Toward what sphere of the spoken word do they direct us? Something thought—where is it, where does it stay? It [Gedachtes] needs memory [Gedachtnis]. To that which is thought and its thoughts, to the “Gedanc,” belong thanks [Dank]” (WhD? 91). At this point the translators insert remarks on the parallel to Gedanc, Gedanke, Dank in English: “The old English thencan, to think, and thancian, to thank, are closely related; the Old English noun for thought is thane or thonc—a thought, a grateful thought, and the expression of such a thought; today it survives in the plural thanks.” Heidegger’s own text continues:

But perhaps these intimations of memory and thanks in the word “think” are merely superficial and contrived [ausgedacht]. In any case, they still do not show what is designated by the word “thinking.”

Is thinking a thanking? What does thanking mean here? Or do thanks consist in thinking? What does thinking mean here? Is memory no more than a container [Behalter] for the thoughts of a thinking, or does thinking itself consist in memory? How do thanks relate to memory?

Heidegger turns to “the history of these words” in order to seek guidance and direction for his own thinking. Gedanc, the root of Gedanke, “thought,” means not merely an idea or representation but “primordially” and “incipiently” (anfanglich) “the gathered, all-gathering thinking that recalls [das gesammelte, allesversammelnde Gedenken].” He notes that Gedanc “says as much as” the German words Gemut, der muot, das Herz: perhaps (although Heidegger does not say so) what the Greeks called thymos, a kind of depth through the heart, or perhaps even ker, the heart itself. One is reminded of Mentor, in The Odyssey (2, 233), who addresses the suitors who plague the house of Odysseus: “Do none of those he ruled think thankfully on godlike Odysseus?” The German translation says, Denkt und dankt es keiner? in order to render the word memnetai. Eumaeus, the faithful sowherd, does remember. With thanks—and in mourning. Still believing that Odysseus is lost, and most probably dead, he tells the returned but disguised hero: “My heart is sad when anyone puts me in mind of [mnesei] our suffering master” (14, 169-70). After decrying the loss incurred when Gedanc becomes Gedanke, “the degeneration of the word” in academic philosophy and techno-science, Heideggerwhat have I done to have been given children like thesecontinues:

However, the word der Gedanc does not merely mean what we call Gemut and heart, the essence of which we can scarcely fathom. In Gedanc memory as well as thanks reside and essentially unfold. “Memory” does not at all initially mean the faculty of remembrance [Erinnerungsvermögen]. The word “memory” [Gedächtnis] names our entire Gemüt in the sense of a steadfast [steten], intimate [innigen] gathering unto what essentially speaks to us [zuspricht] in every thoughtful meditating. Memory originally suggests as much as a devoted thought to something [An-dacht], an uninterrupted, gathered remaining-with-something; indeed, not only with what is bygone [dem Vergangenen], but likewise with what is present and what may come. The bygone, the present, and the coming appear in the unity of an essential unfolding toward [or coming to presence: An -wesen] that is in each case unique.

Heidegger now follows the thread of An-dacht and An-wesen, devotion to what comes to presence in past, present, and future, toward the crucial notion of hold and retention. Such holding and retaining do not limit themselves to the past (dem Vergangenen), but encompass the three dimensions of time. To think the gathered holding without ceaseThen it was pastis the very gift or talent (Gabe) for which the mortals must be thankful, for it isDone in Mother’s mind, though. Finished. Finished. Then we were all poisonedtheir endowment, the dowry (Mitgift) thanks to which they are. One final, extended excerpt: “Inasmuch as memory, the gathering of Gemüt, devoted thought-toward, does not let go of that to which it is gathered, memory is imbued not merely with the trait of essential thinking back to something [An-denken an] but equally with the trait of an unrelinquishing and relentless retention [Behalten].’ Memory may not be a Behälter, a mere container, but its function is Behalten, a dogged, incessant retaining. But to continue, for the passage now sends us back to those strange thesauruses and memory theaters about which Frances Yates (cited at the outset of chapter 2) has written so eloquently:

Out of the memory, and within the memory, the soul then pours forth its treasury of images; that is to say, of visions by which the soul itself is espied. Only now, within the widely and deeply grasped essence of memory, the contrast emerges between that firm hold on things [Festhalten], which the Romans called memoria tenere, and evanescence [Entgleiten]. The firm hold by means of memoria refers as much to what is bygone as to what is present and to come. It is mostly occupied with the bygone [das Vergangene], because the bygone has fled [entgangen] and in a certain way no longer affords a hold [nichts Haltbares mehr bietet]. . . .

Let the extract end here. Mnemosyne’s gift will continue to occupy us as the call for thanks and affirmation, but also asA face reproachful tearful an odor of camphor and of tears a voice weeping steadilythe call for caution and hesitation. The gift is a capital Gift, and we will not have left behind the danger of poison wherever the remedy is so confidently promised. Nostalgia for the hold permeates Heidegger’s Mnemosyne, in opposition to the ephemeral, the evanescence of things. Tenacious memory occupied with what has passed and is past, absent, bygone; occupied, preoccupied, perhaps even obsessedAll right I wonder what time it is what of itby it: Dem Festhalten macht vorwiegend das Vergangene zu schaffen. . . . The firm hold, Festhalten, so reminiscent of Festmachen (see note 12 of chapter 4), exceeds mere retention, Behalten, as though the cornucopia of Mnemosyne were after all a Behälter, a bin or bowl. Containing what? Icons or images (Bilder) that are themselves viewsThere was something terrible in me sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me I could see it through them grinning at me through their faces, it’s gone now and I’m sickon the soul: Anblicke, von denen sie selbst] die Seele] erblickt ist. Is the soul, die Seele, that which is always thought to, the term of all devotion? Byzantine devotion (An-dacht) to presencing (An-wesen), whether of what is past, passing, or to come? Are the intimations (An-klänge) devoted to steadfast, intense, and intimate (innig: Hegel’s word, Holderlin’s word) securities? Securities for which the heart gives thanks, about which it gathers, to which it clings? Das gesammelte, alles versammelnde Gedenken, a memorial that gathers relentlesslyNot that blackguard, Caddyinto a unity, never relinquishing its hold, never forgetting? Carved typographically, iconographically, and engrammatologically in granite? Which none of us yet, none of us, andFather I have committedme first of all, is remembering to think?

LET BYGONES BE BYGONES

Nietzsche is Heidegger’s “star-witness” in the inquiry into commemorative thinking, Nietzsche being the last thinker of the West (WhD? 61). Yet it is not Nietzsche’s genealogy of memory in treatise two of On the Genealogy of Morals that Heidegger turns to in lectures IX and X of the first part of Was heisst Denken? Instead, he offers an interpretation of the “It was” of time as it appears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra II, “Of Redemption.” (He says nothing, incidentally, about the “it was” of the second Untimely Meditation.) I will offer a brief account of Heidegger’s interpretation of time’s imperfection, its “It was,” and then turn to Nietzsche’s most explicit remarks on memory and time past in the Genealogy.

Perhaps the most important point to be made about Heidegger’s account of the “It was” in Was heisst Denken? and in the contemporaneous article “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” is that it is missing from the 1936—1941 lectures and essays gathered up into his Nietzsche and published in 1961. Why should the most thought-provoking and stellar thought of Heidegger’s star-witness be a supplement to Heidegger’s major inquiry into that thinker? Even the 1937 lecture course, on the eternal recurrence of the same, neglects to cite “Of Redemption” and its discussion of the “It was” of time.¹⁶ The supplement of the 1950s still retains the core of the earlier thesis on eternal return: that Nietzsche’s thought of thoughts designates the existentia of beings—what Heidegger here calls the primal being (Ursein) of beings, on the model of Schelling’s dictum Wollen ist Urseyn, “Willing is primal being.” Yet Heidegger’s emphasis on the transiency of time and time’s imperfect(ion), the “It was” of time, is new, and so is his discussion of the spirit of revenge (Rache) as the regnant genius of metaphysics. Revenge as the will’s ill-will toward time and its “It was,” as the stumbling block to all willing, appears now (that is to say, in Heidegger’s Nietzsche interpretation of the 1950s) as the culmination of a tradition that commences with Aristotle and Augustine. It is as though Nietzsche’s were an Aristotelian proposition touching the “essential determination of time” elaborated in Physics IV, 10-14 (WhD? 38-40; 78). For both Aristotle and Augustine, the essential unfolding of time, das Zeitwesen, is infected by nothingness: time is the not-yet-now (future) and no-longer-now (past). Only the cyclical motion of the aeon, the nunc stans ofshabby and timeless patience, of static serenityeternity, appears to escape time’s vengeance—until Nietzsche shows that “eternity” is the very expression of the will’s ill-will toward time, the cindered heart of vengeance exacted upon time.

Heidegger’s account of ill-will apparently speaks from the persona of Nietzsche, or of Western ontotheology from antiquity through Nietzsche, but perhaps also in propria persona.¹⁷ He writes:

How do matters stand with time “as such” (mit “der” Zeit]? They stand in such a way that time goes. And it goes by passing away [geht/vergeht]. The going of time is of course a coming, but a coming that goes by passing away. Whatever of time is to come never comes to stay but to go. Whatever of time is to come is always already inscribed [gezeichnet] by the sign of passing by and passing away [Vorbeigehen/Vergehen]. The temporal is therefore taken to be the transitory [das Vergängliche] without qualification. Hence the “It was” does not merely designate one division of time alongside the others. Rather, the proper endowment [Mitgift]that time dispenses and leaves as a legacy is what-is-past [das Vergangene], the “It was.” Time dispenses only what it has. And all it has is what it itself is.

The passing away of what passes in timeOne day you think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune Father saidconstitutes the temporal. The temporal is what a human being “blesses” when he or she departs from the world: das Zeitliche segnen (cf. WhD? 78). It is the Heidegger of Being and Time who more than any other thinker confronts without subterfuge this blessing of the temporal and who affirms Zarathustra’s desire: “That your dying be no blasphemy against humanity and earth, my friends: this I beg of the honey of your souls” (ASZ I, “Vom freien Tod”). It is Heidegger more than any other thinker who affirms the being of time as the radical past, the Vorbei! That is his message to the Marburg theologians in the lecture, “The Concept of Time,” delivered on July 25, 1924.

Dasein is a going ahead into its being bygone, ein Vorlaufen zu seinem Vorbei. The word Vorbei designates the possibility of Dasein that is ownmost and utmost, certain and undetermined at once: it will have been a matter of my own being bygone, als Vorbei von mir, that the “how” of my existence discloses itself. For the nonce, I am “tossed back” (zurückgeworfen) to the fact that I am still-being-there, Noch-Dasein. Being thus tossed back, I am “held” by the “how”and then I was hearing my watch and I began to listen for the chimesof my existence, running ahead to my own being bygone. There is something “Mephistophelean” about such “being bygone,” no doubt, which is a being tossed backward, thrown forward, and “held,” all at (or in, or as) the same time; and Goethe’s Faust (II, v, “Grosser Vorhof des Palasts,” lines 11,595—11,603) may be as important for this early notion of Heidegger’s as it is for the ontological meaning of Sorge, “Care” (cf. Faust, II, v, “Mitternacht”). In the mouth of Mephistopheles, Vorbei! proclaims the end of engrammat-ological “gleaning” and becomes a shadow of eternal return in its most dismal guise:

Yet the word Vorbeigehen, “passing by,” reminds us of quite a different context. In the mid-1930s Heidegger comes to associate what Holderlin calls divinity and the holy with Vorbeigang, passing by. In the very lectures we are considering (WhD? 67) he reminds us of the importance of this theme for him. When Holderlin in his late hymns sings the fraternity of Christ with Heracles and Dionysosthat Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sisterhe is announcing “a still unspoken gathering [Versammlung] of Occidental destiny in its entirety.” It is precisely that historic destiny of the West, its Geschick and Geschichte, that Heidegger tries to think in the 1930s as the passing, Vorbeigang, of “the last god,” des letzten Gottes. It is also worth recalling that the fundamental mood that dominates the “futural ones” who contemplate the approach and departure of “the last god” is Verhaltenheit, not merely an awful reserve, an amalgam of joy and mourning, but a “holding,” Ver-halt; it is related to the Hineingehaltenheit by which Heidegger in 1929 characterizes the mood of anxiety and no doubt to the Halten of Being and Time, as well as to the Behalten of Was heisst Denken? What the thinker must hold to, and hold out in, is the deathly silence of the Vorbeigang of the last god. Whether that passing by passes in review before us, so to speak, so that we can observe it; or passes on by us, and thus is forever behind us, as it were; whether like Zarathustra’s dwarf we squat on the sidelines and merely observe, or stand frontally in the gateway called the “Moment”; this unanswered question is what constitutes the stillness (die Stille) of the passing by of the ultimate god.

To what extent “passing by” recuperates what has been, das Gewesene, of Western history and destiny is the question we must now ask. No doubt Heidegger remains confident that even in our age of downgoing, Untergang, the arrival and departure of gods is removed from what is simply bygone, vergangen, and rescued to the perfect, gewesen. Vorbeigehen thus would decidedly not be vergehen. Passing by would not be passing away. By virtue of the perfect, das Gewesene, the end and commencement of our essential history would be bound in their essence, im Wesen. A path of retreat from being’s abandonment of beings would thus be located, surveyed, and paved, in accord with hints or signals (Winke) granted by the last god. Even if the principal signal should be Verweigerung, the refusal to arrive and become present, the very pace and footfall (Gang) of the godmajestical in the face of god gods. Better. Gods. God would be canaillewill lend a certain consistency (Bestandigung) to beings as a whole. No god of redemption, the last god will nevertheless provide a certain hold for the truth of being as Ereignis. Whether and how that “consistency” might differ from the “permanence of presence” (Bestandigkeit des Anwesens) that has characterized traditional ontotheological systems of metaphysics remains an arresting question. If the Augenblick is no longer the glance of a resolute Dasein in the face of its own bygone destiny, but the site of the last god’s passage, it nonetheless provides a hold for historical existence and a support for the thinker’s readiness, intensity, and steadfastness. If the last god overpowers mortals, mortals supersede the god. They bear the torchNow and then the river glinted beyond things in sort of swooping glints, across the noon and afterof the truth of being. They are the blessed.¹⁸

In the 1951—52 lectures, “What Calls for Thinking?” passing by, Vorbeigehen, is once again invoked, this time as the very essence of time as transiency, Vergehen. “It is time, high time, finally to meditate on this essence of time and its provenance” (WhD? 40). The avowal that in our time we are still not thinking points to time as the unthought ground of metaphysics. For metaphysics, being is presencing (Anwesen), hence, the present (Gegenwart). It is the unthought eminence of the Gegenwart that allows future and past to be marked and marred by the nothing, the not-yet and no-longer. Heidegger cites Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 38 (Migne, IV, 419a; WhD? 41): Nihil de praeterito revocatur, quod futurum est, transiturum expectatur. “Nothing of what is to come is called back from the past; rather, it is expected as what passes by [als Vorbeigehendes].” The temporal is the transitory, whereas being belongs to the constantly standing present. Heidegger now (WhD? 42—43) tries to get closer to the object of vengeance, the target of the will’s ill-will. “The ill-will [Widerwille]does not go to oppose mere passing away [Vergehen] ; it advances against passing away insofar as passing away lets what has passed be nothing more than past [nur noch vergangen\ lets it congeal in the paralysis of finality [die Erstarrung des Endgültigen].” Heidegger’s question is: What sort of bridgeI began to feel the water before I came to the bridgecan rescue us from the raging flood of vengeance? He knows that Nietzsche’s answer is the eternal return of the same. He also knows that Nietzsche’s thought of thoughts does not mean to repulse time as such: “For human beings time will not be cast aside.” Rather, the will is liberated from revenge against time and its “It was” when it becomes free for “the passage that is in passing away,” das Gehen im Vergehen. Such passage would not be sheer evanescence; rather, it would somehow bring back what is gone. The will constantly wills (standig will) the going and coming again of what passes. “The will becomes free of what is repulsive in the ‘It was’ when it wills the continuous recurrence [die ständige Wiederkehr] of the ‘It was’.” By shifting the modifier standig from the willing to the being of the willed, to recurrence as such, the thought of eternal return—through a kind of trompe d’oeil—achieves the Schellingian project of primal being. Wollen ist Urseyn. And the essential predicate of primal being (or of the absolute) is “eternity.” “The eternal recurrence of the same is the supreme triumph of the metaphysics of the will,” concludes Heidegger.

There are two questions that one will want to put to Heidegger’s supplement. First, if he acknowledges that eternal return is Nietzsche’s “most burdensome thought” (WhD? 46), and that one merely flees from it when one traces it back to earlier thinkers, can one be satisfied by Heidegger’s own carefully plotted Schellingian reading? Second, if ständiges willing of standiger recurrence betrays the fatal tie that binds Nietzsche’s thought to the spirit of revenge in Western metaphysics, how does such Ständigkeit relate to Heidegger’s own will to rescue the bygone in what has been, his own passion for Ständigkeit and Stätigkeit (SZ, 322; 378-82; 390-91; 423-24; cf. 427 n. 1), as well as for “consistency,” “constancy,” “permanence,” Beständigung? Is Heidegger’s the ancient dreamThat’s where the water would be, heading out to sea and the peaceful grottoesof the perfect(ion) of the imperfect? One could scarcely overestimate the consequences of such an affinity between the Heideggerian “hold” and metaphysical constancy and consistency. For holding is a challenging, ordering, and framing of beings. If Ge-stell is, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe reminds us, a word for the essence of the oblivion, seclusion, or withdrawal of being, then the Heideggerian “hold” on an essential “coinage of being” (die Prägung des Seins) is itself onto-typo-logical, hence a remnant of the thinking of memory that I have been calling typographic.¹⁹

Heidegger says that in Nietzsche’s view the imperfect “It was” is the proper endowment, Mitgift, of time. Time’s dowry is that of the wicked fairy, however: Mit-gift is the dose of benumbing poison that causes all that passes by to pass away. Heidegger would counteract the poison with gifts parcelled out by the Mother of the Muses, who like “a proper mother,” eine rechte Mutter (WhD? 19), teaches her son to obey. Dame Memory, die Gedachtnis, the gathering of thought, would be the balm to imperfection. However, in his essay for Ernst Jünger, “Toward the Question of Being,” Heidegger writes: “The human being, in his or her essence, is the memory of being—but of being.”²⁰ The poison is thus felt to do its work within memory itself, insofar as memory is the gathering of thought to the question of being. Commemorative thinking must be not a hold on beings—or even on being—but a letting be, even if the hope expressed in the continuity of having-been remains buoyant in it. And if the devastation of our own times can be described as the “high-velocity expulsion of Mnemosyne” (WhD? 11), as we heard at the end of chapter 2, Heidegger dare not be too quick to consign his star-witness to oblivion. The thought of eternal return is thought by the thinker in transition, der Hinübergehende, who is eminently the one who goes down, ein Untergehender (WhD? 26). The one who goes down knows of transition and the caverns and the grottoes of the seaand transiency.A quarter hour yet. And then I’ll not be. The peacefullest words. Peacefullest words. Non fui. Sum. Fui. Non sum.

Before we abandon the time of forgetting and remembering to too sanguine a perfect, too recuperative a Gewesenheit, too matronly a Mnemosyne, let us review one further Nietzschean text, not on the “It was” of time but on the provenance of memory and of time as such. If Heidegger’s description of the traditional metaphysical conception of time (see WhD? 40 and 78) seems to embrace Nietzsche’s fable about the roll of time that spins and releases a sheet of remembrance, nothing seems more foreign to that description than Nietzsche’s account of time in the second treatise of Zur Genealogie der Moral (5, 292—97; sections 1—3). Here Nietzsche mingles with the grazing herd that passes by at pasture, in order to meditate on the breeding of an animal that is able to promise. For that is the paradoxical task that nature sets itself when producing humankind. Human beings must have shared as fully as other animals in that active forgetfulness which dominates life. Not a mere vis inertiae, oblivion “is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of inhibition.” It ensures that we know as little of our wonted experience as we do of alimentation and ingestion: human beings are as little conscious of how things enter the psyche, “Einverseelung,” as they are of how they enter the body, “Einverleibung.” Only in blissful ignorance of what rules in their own bodies, only with “a bit of tranquillity, a bit of tabula rasa in consciousness,” can the human organism survive. In the language of Being and Time, remembering is a modification of forgetting, and not the other way around. Active forgetfulness is thus the Cerberus of the psychic order. One of the products of its guardianship, the only one that Nietzsche emphasizes, is the present, Gegenwart. However, rather than being the bearer and avatar of oblivion (as in Heidegger), the present is grounded in oblivion in a very different sense for Nietzsche. The human animal is not the resolute keeper of a lapsing and ruinant world; he or she is rather the “necessarily oblivious animal” whose forgetting has in a moment of exuberant health created a counter-faculty. Memory is a pendant to pervasive oblivion. “With its help, forgetfulness is to be suspended for certain cases—for cases in which a promise is to be made.” Memory isDon’t touch me just promisetherefore “by no means a merely passive inability to get rid of an impression once it is incised in us [des einmal eingeritzten Eindrucks].” Memory is not typography—except as the prehistory of pain. Rather, it is “an active willing not to get rid of something . . . , a proper memory of the will.” In this way, concludes Nietzsche, the human being promises something; in this way, he or she becomes futural. Not until tomorrow, remember. If human existence is preeminently cast into a future and is a vector of possibilities, it is only because the mysterious faculty of active forgetfulness has interrupted the flux with an instant of Gegenwart, and consequently an instance of memory. How does that interruption occur? That is the genealogical question.

In section 2 Nietzsche asks about the provenance (Herkunft) of responsibility, about the creation of a breed of animal sufficiently uniform and regular to be accountable to itself and to others. What Hegel calls die Sittlichkeit der Sitten is the proper work of human phylogenesis over vast aeons of time, “its entire prehistoric work” (5, 293). However, if the ripe fruit of that maturation process is the sovereign, autonomous individual who (ironically) has transcended ethical-ity and is “free” to give his or her word, must one not say that the free human being is nonetheless a slave to conscience (Gewissen)? Section 3 finds Nietzsche pausing over the phenomenon of conscience in the sovereign individual: Sein Gewissen? . . . During this pause the very myth of the sovereign individual is undone, just as the fabulous “blond beast” vanishes in the genealogy of the ascetic priest. For the history of autonomy is linked genealogically to the prehistory of inflicted pain. In his own way, in the dramaturgic-genealogical theater of prehistory, Nietzschetold me the bone would have to be broken again and inside me it began to say Ah Ah Ah and I began to sweatrecreates the story of memory as typography (5, 295): “ ‘How shall a memory be made for the human animal? How shall one imprint something on this somewhat dull, somewhat flighty intellect-of-the-instant [Augenblicks-Verstand] and bit of embodied oblivion, so that it will remain present [gegenwartig] ?’ ” Heidegger would no doubt insist that it is Aristotle who speaks here, enjoining the selfsame typography of metaphysics, for which being is the presence of what is presently present. Yet Nietzsche too is struck by the antiquity—even proto-antiquity—of the scene of memory:

This primeval [uralte] problem, as one can imagine, is not resolved with the gentlest of means and responses. Indeed, perhaps nothing is more terrible and uncanny [furchtbarer und unheimlicher] about the entire prehistory of mankind than its mnemotechnic. “One has to brand it in, in order for something to remain in memory: only what does not stop hurting perdures in memory”—this is the first principle of the very oldest (and, unfortunately, the longest-lasting) psychology on earth.

One is no doubt reminded here of the outrageand my mouth saying Wait Wait just a minute through the sweat ah ah ahthat directs the first reminiscences—and first repressions—envisaged in psychoanalytic theory, not only in the 1895 “Project” but also in the last writings on “civilization.” Nietzsche writes: “The past, the longest deepest hardest past, breathes on us and wells up in us whenever we grow ‘serious’.” “Serious” here means “memorious,” and memory remains incisive and violent:

It never happened without blood, martyrdoms, sacrifice, whenever human beings found it necessary to form a memory. The most horrific sacrifices and gages (among which belong the sacrifice of the firstborn), the most repulsive mutilations (for example, castrations), the cruellest forms of ritual in all religious cults (for all religions, in their deepest substratum, are systems of cruelties)—it all has its origin in that instinct which senses in pain the mightiest means of mnemonics.

We are apparently in a theater quite different from that of Heideggerian “Mnemosyne.” Yet a “proper mother,” eine rechte Mutter, “a right mother,” according to Heidegger, is the one who says to the son, to “her little boy, who does not want to come home”: “Just wait, I’ll teach you what it means to obey [was Gehorchen heisst]” (WhD? 19). Doubtless, the less she scolds, the more authority her teaching will have, and the more seriouslyyou will remember that for you to go to harvard has been your mother s dream since you were born and no compson has ever disappointed a ladyshe will be taken. “In a certain sense,” writes Nietzsche, “all asceticism belongs here: a few ideas are to be made inextinguishable, omnipresent, unforgettable, ‘fixed’. . . .” He thereby locates within the prehistory of mnemonics his own (unforgettable!) third treatise in the Genealogy, “What Do Ascetic Ideals Signify?” He also writes a few lines of the horrific history that will unite him with Heidegger, genealogical lines, painful lines, incisions never to be forgotten:

We Germans surely do not take ourselves to be a particularly cruel and hard-hearted people; even less do we take ourselves to be particularly carefree, the sort who just-take-it-as-it-comes. Yet one only has to examine our old penal codes to get a glimpse of the trouble it takes on this earth to breed a “nation of thinkers” (which is to say, the nation of Europe in which one finds even today the maximum confidence, seriousness, bad taste, and devotion to the matter at hand [Zutrauen, Ernst, Geschmacklosigkeit und Sachlichkeit], a nation whose qualities grant it the right to breed every species of mandarin in Europe). These Germans have made themselves a memory by virtue of terrible means, in order to master their squalid basic instincts and the brutal coarseness of those instincts [um über ihre pöbelhaften Grund-Instinkte und deren brutale Plumpheit Herr zu werden].

Nietzsche now catalogues these Germanic punishments. For our part, we perhaps need only recall again—as we did in the discussion of Hobbes—Kafka’s In der Strafkolonie and the machine that incises the flesh with the Law and the encouragement, “Be just!” We need now only take up one phrase from Nietzsche’s conclusion of section 3, not so much a conclusion as an apostrophe:

—and really! with the help of this kind of memory one finally came “to see reason”!—Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over the affects, the whole grim affair we call meditation [diese ganze dustere Sache, welche Nachdenken heisst], all these perquisites and treasures of mankind: how dearly we had to pay for them! how much blood and horror lie at the ground of all “good things”! . . .

Well, then, Was heisst Nachdenken? What calls on us to think back and remember the titanic, Teutonic cruelty that Heidegger’s mythic invocation of Mnemosyne appears to suppress? “Presuming we did not have to think back,” Nietzsche would say, reminding us of the genealogy of the genealogist, for whom interiorized cruelty is a way of life. If memory is the gathering of thought, that gathering is not without its prehistory of pain, and perhaps its painful posthistory as well. Mnemosyne is a right mother. A jagged bosomWe have sold Benjy’s pasture so that Quentin may go to Harvardwhether in full-front or lateral view.

Not that father and fatherland fare any better. Not if we remember the gynephobia of Timaeus and the task of thinking called khōra. To the extent that Heidegger resists the Vorbei! that announces the finitude of being and time, resists it by conjuring a perfect, a Gewesenheit that would be the inexhaustible font of the future and a “constant” source of presence, he seals the oblivionI put on my new suit and put my watch on . . . and wrote the two notes and sealed themhe is struggling to escape. Or at least risks sealing it. The matter is hardly certain. For Heidegger tries to abide by the judgment of Saturn, who in the Cura fable settles the question of humanity’s “temporal metamorphosis in the world [der zeitliche Wandel (des Menschen) in der Welt]” (SZ, 199). No amount of will or willfulness can make mortal transition and transience perfectly recuperable. The call to readiness, wakefulness, resolute openedness, and to an “other” kind of thinking dare not become a command to wreak vengeance on the “It was”there is nothing else in the world its not despair until time its not even time until it wasof time.

The hold ventured by thinking slips. Already in Hegel, we recall, where the “content” or “holding-in” (In-halt) slackens. The gathering power of memory is unequal to passing by, Vorbeigehen, and even the most anxious and earnest endeavors of thinking leave us on the verge. Of what? Not of laughter and forgetting, nor of mirth and mischief, butThen I remembered I hadn’t brushed my teethof mirth and mourning.