result, verb: To arise as a consequence, effect, or conclusion from some action, process, etc.; to end or conclude in a specified manner. [Adaptation of Latin result-are, “to spring or leap back,” formed on re+saltare.]
—Oxford English Dictionary
Result: . . . This labor of spirit to know itself, find itself, this activity is spirit, the life of spirit itself. Its result is the concept it grasps of itself; the history of spirit the clear insight that spirit willed all this in its history.
—Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy
Result: . . . Belief in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. . . . Final Result: . . . It is always and everywhere the hyperbolic naiveté of man, positing himself as the meaning and standard of value for things.
—Nietzsche, The Will to Power, no. 12 B
In the second volume of his Nietzsche, Heidegger argues that Nietzsche’s “revaluation of all values” tries to win results from the history of nihilism and that it therefore remains nihilistic—in the sense of passive, reactive, or incomplete nihilism (NII, 60; cf. 85–90). The very will to a new valuation, the compulsion to rescue beings as a whole and establish positive results for their history, is a metaphysical—hence nihilistic—will: it betrays a kind of thinking that Nietzsche ought to have overcome, a “value thinking” that is too busy calculating results to confront the nihil, das Nichts. Heidegger himself eschews valuative-calculative thinking. In his “Letter on Humanism” he derides the elevation of beings to “values” as the most noxious of nihilisms (BW, 228). However, does Heidegger’s thought too hope to establish results in and for the history of philosophy, precisely in its constant appeals to primordial beginnings and irrevocable ends? Is its circling about “origins” and “outcomes” in service to some transcendent standard, hence forgetful of the ontological difference? Is its yearning for results yet another instance of metaphysical nostalgia? And if the histories of metaphysics and nihilism do coalesce, as both Nietzsche and Heidegger claim, would not Heidegger’s thought be nihilistic?
The final section of Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy bears the title Resultat, “Result” (20, 454). The “result” of Hegel’s history may be understood in two very different ways, either as the conclusive concept, spirit in and for itself, which would be the attained goal and absolute end of the history of philosophy, or as the ongoing deed or activity of thought, “eternally producing its opposite and eternally reconciling itself to it,” which would be absolute postponement of the end and result. Most interpreters, especially in England and America, have adopted the first interpretation. At the same time countless commentators have raised the question I have been pursuing throughout these intimations of a history of Being, namely, that of the relation between the Hegelian and Heideggerian views of history. The guiding suspicion has been that Heidegger’s “history of Being” is a mere inversion—not a radical deconstruction—of Hegel’s “history of spirit.” Replacing the itinerary of remembrance would be the entropy of oblivion-of-Being; but the fated or predestined character of such oblivion, its historical necessity, would render oblivion as absolute as Hegelian recollection. The result would be that Heidegger’s thinking of history cannot shatter the ontotheological constraints it is everywhere on guard against, and that in this respect his efforts come to nothing—they constitute one more episode in the history of passive nihilism. Heidegger himself tries to quell this suspicion, as we have seen, by insisting that his thought executes a step back “out of metaphysics into the essence of metaphysics” (ID, 38–41). Yet is that not an Hegelian claim, one that ties archē to telos, guaranteeing secure results? Does the stepping back genuinely surrender all counterfeit finalities or does it cling to conclusions—results? Does it continue to confront the nothing that makes its own interpretation transitional, “metabolic,” finite? If not, there is no way it can recover from the embarrassment of an exaggerated sense of self-importance. In philosophy that illness is terminal.
Richard Rorty faults Heidegger with a fatal overestimation of the importance of philosophical work in general.1 He would agree with John B. Yeats, who asserted that “all contemplative men were in a conspiracy to overrate their state of life.”2 Rorty finds it ludicrous for Heidegger to suggest “that our present troubles are somehow due to the Plato-Nietzsche tradition . . . , that our fate is somehow linked to that tradition” (258). “Who but a philosophy professor, after all, would think that the drama of twentieth-century Europe had some essential relation to the Vollendung der Metaphysik?” (251).
If we consider the first act of that drama, the First World War, reviewing Sidney Bradshaw Fay’s classical analysis of its immediate and distant causes—the struggle for world markets, the colonial rivalries, the fateful early alliances, the xenophobias flourishing on propaganda and the popular press, the circus of Kakanian (Austro-Hungarian) government, the nightmare of Russian plans for general mobilization, the bizarre Willy-Nicky telegrams—it all seems a part of that anonymous adversity that Merleau-Ponty perceives at the heart of our political life, more a nexus of ineluctable and incomprehensible stupidities than anything one could define as “subjecticity,” “will-to-will,” “calculative thought,” or “Ge-Stell.”3 Yet might not trade warfare, mobilization, Realpolitik, and all the rest, even the unbelievable bungling, conceal “some essential relation” to the way Europeans think and have thought; and would it be utterly ingenuous to believe that the history of metaphysics has had at least “some essential relation” to such thought? One of the most astute observers of events leading to the Great War—Robert Musil, in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften—would surely cite as one of the immediate causes the failure of the Parallelaktion to found an “International Committee for Precision and Soul.” (Such a committee doubtless would have formulated the question of the meaning of Being!) As for our “present troubles,” as Rorty cites them, “the strip mines of Montana, the assembly lines of Detroit, and the Red Guards of Shanghai,” they doubtless have more to do with the given material and social forces of production, or with structures of sublimated gratification, than with “forgetfulness of Being” (252).
Heidegger is aware that the very question of Being is anomalous, that to raise it is to appear overweening and professorial. But the thought of Being as refusal, withdrawal, closure, and oblivion, insofar as it evokes a critique of unbridled manipulation and exploitation of beings by an insatiable will-for-more—does that thought leave Anaconda and General Motors altogether untouched? True, such a thought has no vote at stockholders’ meetings; but if that is our standard, I wonder how much Dewey tempers their doings? Rorty argues that “Heidegger’s weakness is that he cannot escape the notion that philosophers’ difficulties are more than just philosophers’ difficulties. . .” (258). While I thrill to the jaded tone, I cannot help thinking of the way in which our most up-to-date medical handbooks reproduce Descartes’ Traité de l’homme in all methodological and conceptual essentials; one does not have to be a Jungian to realize that Descartes’ difficulties are now everybody’s headache. Is Descartes simply an exception? John Dewey’s own plea for reconstruction in philosophy attests to the possibility that philosophers’ difficulties—if the philosophers are more than academicians and the difficulties more than quibbles—may be everyone’s problems, whether everyone knows it or not. And especially when no one knows it.
Rorty repudiates the “hope” that Heidegger invests in Denken—in a moment we will see Jacques Derrida refer to that same “hope”—because he takes it to be not only risible but also ominous in its political implications:
Heidegger’s hope is just what was worst in the tradition—the quest for the holy that turns us away from the relations between beings and beings (the relations, for example, between the ghastly apparatus of modern technology and the people whose children will die of hunger unless that apparatus spreads over the rest of the planet). Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique. . . . [256]
Heidegger’s preoccupation with “the holy” is indeed discomfiting. I too get dizzy in the “mirrorplay of the Fourfold,” which is a bit like being “Lost in the Funhouse.” Yet it is wrongheaded to confuse Heidegger with holy pictures. For him the holy has to do with the daimonic, the nothing which finite transcendence must confront in anxiety.4 Even so, das Nichts, as a substitute for the holy, will hardly satisfy Rorty’s complaint. He wants results. For the children’s sake. I too want these results, and so does Heidegger. Yet Heidegger is not convinced that the spread of the ghastly apparatus will save the children. True, he has nothing more efficacious to suggest. Pursuing the thought of Being (better: the thought of alētheia, revealing and concealing) rescues us from no painful quandaries; it in no way promises relief from the complications of technology and the frustrations of politics.5
Because however the planetary reign of technology constitutes in Heidegger’s view the single most significant result of the history of Being, the scope of the present discussion ought to be expanded somewhat. A careful reading of Heidegger’s “The Question concerning Technology” is surely called for; but I will here allow the discussion to take the direction Rorty has chosen. In a paper entitled “Heidegger against the Pragmatists,” an early version of a chapter planned for a forthcoming book on Heidegger, Rorty pursues the question of Heidegger, technology, and politics. The fifth section of the paper, “Pragmatism as the Poetry of Technology,” contrasts Heidegger’s sense of the danger in technology to Dewey’s celebration of technological progress. While Heidegger can only hope—as we saw in chapter six—that the essence of technology as a totalizing mode of revealing will some day turn mankind toward revealing as such, Dewey more pragmatically hopes for the liberation of mankind from toil and the universalization of leisure. My own view of the chances for liberation from toil waits upon a decisive refutation of Sartre’s analyses of the economy of scarcity in his Critique of Dialectical Reason. While other-directed Americans, borne on the crest of Riesman’s “second revolution” and reveling in an economy of abundance and consumption, can readily dismiss scarcity as the mere birth pangs of homo oeconomicus, I am dubious about an abundance that remains so unevenly distributed and so tenuous even where it seems secure. As for leisure, I declare myself a latter-day Thorstein Veblen, albeit without the requisite talents. Nevertheless, my dissatisfaction with (Rorty’s) Dewey does not imply complete satisfaction with Heidegger.
Whether the hazard or the promise of technology consists in “a destiny of revealing” is too high-flying a question for me to answer. But flying high often seems a form of escape. The question of technology is after all one of and for the human community; if not merely mortal in its provenance, it is surely mortal in its effects. And when all is said and done it is clear that Heidegger offers little constructive insight into matters of human community. Even though Rorty is careful not to allow the “they self” to be interpreted as though it were a chapter in Ortega’s Rebellion of the Masses, one is still left with either the dreariness of public life in Being and Time, the more disturbing “deeds which found the state” of the 1930s, the cautious resistance or intransigent silence of the 1940s and 1950s, and the self-serving interviews of the 1960s. As Rorty insists, there is no good reason why Heidegger should not affirm a Deweyite conception of authentic communal Dasein with its groups of finite creatures joined in a common endeavor without eternal guarantees. Unfortunately, as commentators like Schwan, Harries, Pöggeler, and Arendt agree, Heidegger in the 1930s was far more likely than Dewey to reopen secret negotiations with Eternity (posing as Results in History) in order to seek such guarantees. The old undigested potato dumpling of the Schillerian-Hegelian Staatsidee.
Nevertheless, while I have no sympathy for the latter, no stomach for it, Dewey’s “bourgeois liberal democracy” hardly seems substantial enough for our own ravenous times and places. It is easy to laugh at Heidegger’s nostalgia for Greek pastorale. It is harder to laugh over our own bourgeois illiberal pejorocracy, utterly enthralled as it is by its mythic “Frontier” past, its Puritan confidence in the identity of wealth and grace, its Lone Ranger approach to political conflict, and its Yankee Doodle Dandy sense of finitude and restraint. Like Rorty, I would prefer to live in a world that is being systematically reshaped in order to provide human beings with enough to eat. I am less convinced than he that our present world essentially is such. Like Rorty, and unlike Hannah Arendt and Heidegger, I am ready to propagate the democratic civitas pelegrina among the stars, if not to paint Coke signs on the moon; I am ready to board Kubrick’s stunning spaceships, if not Pynchon’s sterile ones or Kilgore Trout’s seedy ones. Yet I am not as sanguine as Rorty about Dewey’s curious amalgam of science-fiction and the adventure of Christian civilization. The most judicious recent account of the results of that adventure I take to be Stanley Elkins’s The Living End. It is certainly possible that the saving power has risen behind Heidegger’s back, in the pragmatic USA, but that would only mean (reading Hölderlin’s as a speculative proposition) that North Armorica is also the site of the gravest danger, the danger that Heidegger in “What Calls for Thinking?” refers to as “devastation.”
The devastation of hectic thoughtlessness is of course not restricted to the Western Hemisphere, and Rorty is correct when he insists that Heidegger is the last one who could claim that he has gotten history right. While I cannot share Rorty’s dew(e)y optimism, I do share many of his suspicions about Heidegger’s politically undifferentiated condemnation of technology. However, I would shift those doubts from the realm of epistemological skepticism to the historical theme of nihilism in our public life and our technological and economic structures and institutions. And my suspicions would try to become interrogations.
It may well be that Heidegger—thinking of technology and the nihil—remains as trapped in destructive nihilism as any of us. When he declares to the editors of Der Spiegel that “only a god can rescue us now,” is it courageous acceptance of our common fate or capitulation before the task of twentieth-century political life on earth? Is it a halfway romantic yearning for salvation, a culpable blindness to those interests whose investments feed technology and so propel its essence? When he denies that any current political system has the least inkling of what the technological will-to-will has in store for humankind, is it unclouded insight into what is happening in both Germanies, in China and India alike, in Cuba as well as in the wretched lands of the junta? Or is it a refusal to recognize genuine differences among political systems, a refusal that tacitly serves one particular system and so remains “German Ideology”? When he condemns contemporary art and literature in the West for their “homelessness,” insisting that all things “essential and great” must be rooted in a “homeland,” can that be anything more than the last vanishing wisp of romantic nationalist nostalgia, that is to say, incomplete nihilism? For must not “homelessness” be the site of Heidegger’s own intimations? Finally, when he denies philosophy any role at all in efforts to alter “the world situation,” is it clearsighted perception of the end of philosophy, a candid recognition of limits, or is it merely a negation of illusory totalizing alternatives, and thus passively nihilistic to the core? The “silence” of the “other kind” of thinking: does it hold secret converse with Hölderlin and let all the rest drop, in what Nietzsche calls a “Buddhism of the deed”?
I mean none of these questions rhetorically. Neither can I answer any of them quickly and so put them aside. It may be that none of the questions refers any more to Heidegger than to myself. Such questions do make a difference, not merely for the future of Heidegger’s thought but for the present of our own. They are pragmatic questions, however precipitous they may be. They are questions, as I think Rorty’s paper shows, for Heidegger and (not against) the pragmatists.
But let me return now to Rorty’s earlier paper, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey.” For Rorty’s fullest statement of his complaint against Heidegger (I have abridged it here) ends with an important claim:
Heidegger’s attachment to the notion of “philosophy”—the pathetic notion that even after metaphysics goes, something called “Thought” might remain—is simply the sign of Heidegger’s own fatal attachment to the tradition: the last infirmity of the greatest of the German professors. . . . No matter how much Heidegger seems to have overcome our professional urge to compete with the great dead philosophers on their own ground, no matter how much he may try to distance himself from the tradition (not to mention his fellow professors), he is still insistent that the tradition offered us “words of Being.” He still thinks that the place where philosophy was is the place to be. He thinks that to cease thinking about what Plato and Kant were thinking about is to be diminished, to lose hold of what is most important, to sink into darkness. If he were true to his own dictum that we should “cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself,” he would have nothing to say, nowhere to point. The whole force of Heidegger’s thought lies in his account of the history of philosophy. [256–57]
The complaint must be amended somewhat. Heidegger does hold that the tradition offers us “words of Being.” Yet these turn out to be bare traces, hints that the tradition preserved in spite of itself, leaving them unthought. Hence Heidegger’s ceaseless preoccupation with and criticism of the tradition. It is not that “the place where philosophy was is the place to be.” That place is gone: no one realizes that more clearly than Heidegger, not even the hero of reconstruction in philosophy. Nor is it a question of the fear “to cease thinking about what Plato and Kant were thinking about.” Heidegger’s fear is that we have not yet really begun to think with them. What were Plato and Kant thinking about? Can we be sure it makes no difference, that we can dispense with them, before knowing what they were about?
Rorty’s claim, however, is correct. The whole force of Heidegger’s thought lies in his account of the history of philosophy—as the history of Being as presencing (Anwesen, ousia), named but not thought in the history of metaphysics. Yet the force of Heidegger’s thought is deflected by two powerful ambiguities. First, the tradition is rooted in the meaning of Being as presence, Vorhandenheit, Anwesenheit, and so on, yet the tradition nowhere thematizes these; Heidegger’s own relation to the tradition is therefore ambiguous, in the sense that his interest lies precisely in what the tradition did not think. Second, the fundamental experience of Being and Time—oblivion of Being and the finitude of Dasein—compels Heidegger’s hermeneutics of the tradition to be both radically destructive (that is, dismantling and subverting) and constantly aware of its own limitations in language and in thought, due to its long gestation in the tradition. Even the young Heidegger knows, as Richard Rorty and John Dewey do not seem to know (perhaps it would be Un-American to know it), that all courageous and forthright decisions to abandon metaphysics result in naive reduplications of its patterns of thought. The passion to be original, to start from scratch, to roll up our sleeves and attack our “present troubles,” dissipates itself in second-hand and third-rate replays.
Jacques Derrida has not simply decided to quit the House of Being and let it fall to ruin; he wavers between the call to preserve the tradition and the need to escape it. However, such wavering is not indecision but strategy, a strategy that animates all his work. The need to escape the tradition is impressed upon Derrida by Nietzsche, who throws the histories of spirit and Being into turmoil precisely by locating them in the context of the history of nihilism. If Derrida has a word to oppose to Spirit and Being it is différance, which is not a concept, not a term reducible to the metaphysics of presence. Yet Derrida is wary of this word as well, which he intentionally disfigures, alters in the writing, in order to prevent its becoming a name.
There will be no unique name, not even the name of Being. It must be conceived without nostalgia; that is, it must be conceived outside the myth of the purely maternal or paternal language belonging to the lost fatherland of thought. On the contrary, we must affirm it—in the sense that Nietzsche brings affirmation into play—with a certain laughter and with a certain dance.6
It is precisely “nostalgia”—one thinks of Camus’ critique of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology: “Cette nostalgie d’unité, cet appétit d’absolu”7—that Derrida sees in Heidegger’s quest for Being, “the quest for the proper word and the unique name.”8 He also calls it “Heideggerian hope”—one thinks of Richard Rorty’s “such a faint, modest, and inarticulate hope” (256). Derrida extinguishes that hope by tracing the play of simulacra or signs in “the text of metaphysics.” He jots notes in the margins. Just as the simulacra of the text efface themselves, so too is Derrida’s work self-effacing yet distracting, marginal yet penetrating, silent yet obtrusive. One of the consequences of his thought is the dislocation of all talk about “epochs” and “outermost points” in the “history of Being” by which one would establish unequivocal, eschatological, apocalyptic results. Nevertheless, the following passage cannot suppress the claim that différance is “older” than the history of Being (or: “‘older’” in quotation marks!), and cannot avoid mention of the present “age” (without markings):
Perhaps we must try to think this unheard-of thought, this silent tracing: namely, that the history of Being (the thought of which is committed to the Greco-Western logos), as it is itself produced across the ontological difference, is only one epoch of the diapherein. Then we could no longer even call it an ‘epoch.’. . . Thus, in a particular and very strange way, differance [is] ‘older’ than the ontological difference or the truth of Being. In this age it can be called the play of traces.9
The Heideggerian text cited most often in Derrida’s “Différance” is “The Anaximander Fragment” (1946; EGT, 13–58). One should not be deluded into thinking that this text is “representative” of Heidegger’s views on the history of philosophy: a remarkably different view would result if one were to study “the existential origin of history in terms of the historicity of Dasein” (SZ, section 76), on the one hand, or “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” and “Hegel and the Greeks,” on the other. It may well be that “The Anaximander Fragment” is the least typical of Heidegger’s essays on the history of philosophy.10 Yet much of what I have discussed so far—the questions of Heidegger’s thirst for results in the history of philosophy, nihilism, the overestimation of philosophy, the possible abandonment of the House of Being for the play of traces—arrives at a critical juncture in this essay.
Near the outset of “The Anaximander Fragment” the following passage appears:
But what entitles antiquity to address us, presumably the latest latecomers with respect to philosophy? Are we latecomers in a history now racing toward its end, an end which in its increasingly sterile order of uniformity brings everything to an end? Or does there lie concealed in the historical and chronological remoteness of the fragment the historic proximity of something unsaid, something that will speak out in times to come?
Do we stand in the very twilight of the most monstrous transformation our planet has ever undergone, the twilight of that epoch in which earth itself hangs suspended? Do we confront the evening of a night which heralds another dawn? . . . Will the land of evening11 overwhelm Occident and Orient alike, transcending whatever is merely European to become the location of the more originally destined history that is coming? . . . What can all merely historiological philosophies of history tell us about our history if they only dazzle us with surveys of its sedimented stuff; if they explain history without ever thinking out, from the essence of history, the fundamentals of their way of explaining events, and the essence of history, in turn, from Being itself? [EGT, 16–17]
I cite this passage—which consists entirely of questions—at length because it focuses on the hermeneutical problem of history as such, on the vast span between antiquity and modernity (beginning and end, the respective “places” of initiators and latecomers), and on the vaguely felt possibility that the future may disclose something concealed and “unsaid” in and about the very beginnings. Heidegger descries the twilight of a new epoch, although he knows that it is twilight of evening, an evening facing a night. A scenario of hope, but also of hazard. He ventures to hope (or to hazard) that the new dawn will somehow reenact or perhaps enact for the first time the dawn of Ionia, the original illumination (as Hegel would say) of the Abendland. Beginning and end would somehow converge, then vanish:
The antiquity pervading the Anaximander fragment belongs to the dawn of early times in the land of evening. But what if that which is early outdistanced everything late; if the very earliest far surpassed the very latest? What once occurred in the dawn of our destiny would then come, as what once occurred, at the last (eschaton), that is, at the departure of the long-hidden destiny of Being. The Being of beings is gathered (legesthai, logos) in the ultimacy of its destiny. The essence of Being hitherto disappears, its truth still veiled. The history of Being is gathered in this departure. The gathering in this departure, as the gathering (logos) at the outermost point (eschaton) of its essence hitherto, is the eschatology of Being. As something fateful, Being itself is inherently eschatological. . . .
If we think within the eschatology of Being, then we must someday anticipate the former dawn in the dawn to come; today we must learn to ponder this former dawn through what is imminent. [EGT, 18]
What could be the object of such an eschatology? The last things—the ultimate results? Can we really expect to find in our cybernetics and cyclotrons, our world trade and global wars, simulacra of dikē/adikia, “order” and “disorder”? And if we do find convergences, does it mean anything more than that we are bound to read into an ancient text the preoccupations of our own time? Can Heidegger truly be trying to think eschatology the other way round—to think genesis and phthora, coming-to-be and passing-away “according to the ordinance of time,” as somehow informing our own frenzied world? Can it be more than the rhetoric of pedagogy when he asserts that Anaximander is ahead of rather than behind us? Once history has been turned around in such fashion, how are we to know whether we are coming or going? Matters are apparently worse than Rorty even suspects.
Heidegger invites our ridicule. Yet as we smirk, particular segments of the Anaximander fragment begin to disturb us, especially the phrase kata to chreōn, “according to necessity,” which nowadays sounds more like a leaden curse than a hymn to spirit. (And which sound would be closer to Anaximander’s sense?) To Heidegger, chreōn signifies the “usage” according to which beings emerge from unconcealment, linger awhile in presence, then disappear in order to leave space for others; another name for the usage is “the jointure of order,” by which presence is “handed over” (cf. hē cheir, “hand”) to beings, but which itself never becomes present; hence a third name, “the self-veiling essence of Being” (49–52). The usage and jointure of order (dikē) leave only traces in the text of metaphysics. When the Being of beings is called actualitas (a futile effort to render Aristotle’s energeia), the granting of presence slides unobtrusively yet irremovably into the realm of what is taken for granted—present beings. The event of presencing itself withdraws: necessity becomes the lidless eye of spirit or the blind impetus of billiard balls, becomes theology, then classical physics and history. The two last yield results in the areas of technology and scholarship, although they do not touch the mystery:
Man has already begun to overwhelm the entire earth and its atmosphere, to arrogate to himself in forms of energy the concealed powers of nature, and to submit future history to the planning and ordering of a world government. This same defiant man is utterly at a loss simply to say what is; to say what this is—that a thing is. [EGT, 57]
In Heidegger’s view the implacable will-to-will of modern technology and the oblivion of Being spawned in ancient times are two sides of the same coin—better, two readings of the Gestaltist’s perceptual puzzle. By tracing the outlines of the first he is led to the second; by meditating on the second he claims insight into the essence of the first. His inquiry into Anaximander employs historiographical and philological tools, measures out the historical distance. Yet genuine engagement with the fragment occurs in another way: “Curiously enough, the saying first resonates when we set aside the claims of our own familiar ways of representing things, and ask ourselves in what the confusion of the contemporary world’s fate consists” (57). The “familiar ways of representing things” are those taken by the scholarly discussion of Anaximander, the tradition of “Presocratic” philosophy, and our understanding of the history of ideas as what lies behind us, available as results for research. To inquire into contemporary confusions, however, rather than rely on tried and tested academic supports—that is a risky undertaking whose principal presuppositions, namely, that contemporary problems and the ancient inscription or palimpsest stem from the same source, and that the source will show itself more or less undisguised in each, can in no way be validated.
“Eschatology of Being” nonetheless embraces both presuppositions: the logos or gathering at the outermost point or eschaton is a gathering for departure. The departure involves the long-concealed fate of Being, the “essence” and provenance of Being as such, which now vanishes, “its truth still veiled.” And yet if the epoch of Being closes upon its own secrets, reticent to the end, whence the confidence that what once was will show itself again? Whence the putative identity of the two dawns in our present dusk? How are we to anticipate “the singularity of the dawn in the singularity of what is coming,” when what is to come first of all is the closure of night? Does such anticipation foist its own obscurities onto Anaximander? Dawn and dusk both bestow twilight, but twilight is an ambiguity, not an identity; and it is Heidegger himself, as we shall see, who warns us not to try to turn night into day (VA, 151). Or does Heidegger mean that it is the reticence of Being itself, the pervasive ambiguity then as now, which we are to experience? If that were the case then all results in the history of philosophy would become utterly tenuous; the history of Being as withdrawal would recoil on every effort to interpret both dawn and dusk. Would such recoil frustrate all historical meaning, disperse the hardwon results of all historiological toil?
Hannah Arendt suggests that the secret of Heidegger’s “anticipation of the former dawn in the dawn to come” is actually that in “The Anaximander Fragment” there is “no place for a ‘History of Being’. . . ; Being, sheltered in its concealment, has no history.”12 Again: “Being, in its enduring withdrawal,” because it is absent, has “no history in the realm of errancy,” that is to say, the realm of human history.13 The result would be what we heard Michel Haar claim earlier, in chapter seven, namely, two histories, a secular and a sacred; it would make of Heidegger not so much the secretary to Being (“Thinking says what the truth of Being dictates”) but its inspired high-priest (“The poetizing essence of thinking preserves the sway of the truth of Being”). Ingenious as Hannah Arendt’s account is, and as troubling as its consequences undoubtedly are—since the division into two histories would simply ape the Platonic chōrismos and thus collapse into incomplete nihilism—it falters in that according to Heidegger Being reveals itself within our sole history, if only through traces, as withdrawn; errancy is the only history we have, and the thinker of “the truth of Being” safeguards those traces of presencing as intimations of the history of Being. “Truth” (Wahrheit) has no other sense than the “preserve” (die Wahr, Wahrnis) of those traces (H, 321; EGT, 36). In this “historic dialogue between thinkers” no one is privy to the Word, no one is secretary by appointment, and all the high-priests, like Zarathustra’s pope, are “retired.” Nevertheless, the problem of our proximity to the preserve, to those traces that have to be identified, deciphered, and interpreted, looms as gigantic and insoluble as ever. For traces, preservations, are results.
There is no doubt that in later years Heidegger grew more cautious about interpreting the truth of Being (a phrase he stopped using in the 1950s and 1960s), and especially about asserting identities in its history between an unknown future and an undisclosed past. His role for example in the Heraclitus seminar conducted by him and Eugen Fink in 1966–67 is almost exclusively a cautionary one: Heidegger reminds Fink and the participants again and again that the 2,500 years that separate them from Heraclitus are truly impassable, that there is no path to the world Heraclitus knew except the bumpy and interminable via negativa. The thesis of “Hegel and the Greeks” is every bit as modest: while for Hegel the Greeks have “not yet” discovered the full identity of substance and subject, for Heidegger the Greeks’ experience of alētheia has “not yet” been sufficiently pondered by us. Yet Heidegger never abandoned his conviction that these thinkers are of vital importance, that in spite of the great strides made by the philological sciences such thinkers still have everything to tell us, and that they dare not be relegated to the status of antique curios which from our advanced position we can observe with mixed curiosity and condescension.
But now to conclude, state results. It is surely pathetic to believe or hope that at the end of metaphysics some sort of “other thinking” will effect any real change in the world. Hollywood cowboys will still vie for the Presidency—and they will win. We will continue to learn the names of newborn nations from reports on infant mortality rates. The odd thing is that while Heidegger entertains no hope of dramatic change, he still insists that thinking—as a possibility—is the most important thing we possess. In “What Calls for Thinking?” (WhD?, 161) Heidegger writes:
Thinking—more precisely, the attempt and the task to think—is now approaching an era when the high demands which traditional thinking believed it was meeting, and claimed it had to meet, become untenable. The way of the question “What is called thinking?” lies even now in the shadow of this inadequacy, which can be described in four statements: (1) Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences; (2) Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom; (3) Thinking solves no cosmic riddles; (4) Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act. As long as we still subject thinking to these four demands, we shall overrate and overtax it. Both excesses prevent us from returning to a no longer customary modesty and from persisting in it, amid the bustle of a civilization that clamors daily for a fresh supply of the latest novelties, and daily chases after excitement. And yet the way of thinking, the way of the question “What calls for thinking?”, remains unavoidable as we go into the coming era.
Perhaps that too is pathetic. Yet it would be piteous to suppose that simple abstention from thought and neglect of Nietzsche, Parmenides, and all the rest would make our world more intelligent and intelligible. Here Heidegger, ornery and paradoxical as he may be, is right: when it comes to our ways of thinking, the past is omnipresent insofar as we are ignorant of it, and it is our future whether or not we inquire. The past is anything but passed.
If that is so, however, then all hopes of “overcoming” the tradition must be surrendered. Heidegger has attempted this through his “step back.” For Derrida the Schritt zurück becomes a leap rather than a mere step, not Kierkegaard’s leap of faith but a bound beyond the cloying piety of the House of Being, a leap in dance, a saltus of Nietzschean affirmation. Insofar as Heidegger’s intimations of a history of Being tend to seek necessary results by fixing on origins and ends, that history falls prey to the suspicion that it is but one more effort to rescue and restore the past, to find the concept and perform the deed, an effort ensconced in the history of reactive nihilism, dreaming all the old dreams. When Heidegger’s thought is most pious and insistent, least light-hearted and ironic, when it takes itself abominably seriously, Nietzschean/Derridean laughter is a welcome corrective. Yet the resaltus of deconstruction has its own limitations and dangers: the play of disciples can become self-indulgent, the “yes” of their ecstatic nihilism can become the hee-haw of the jackass (cf. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, IV, “The Awakening”). We are caught between tierischem Ernst and asinine hilarity. 14
“‘Results’ are given only where there is reckoning and calculation,” notes Heidegger (NII, 85; Ni 4, 48). More fitting than reckoning with results is that modicum of philosophy to which Whitman refers in his “Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads”: “I think I have at least enough philosophy not to be too absolutely certain of any thing, or any results.” More fitting than calculation of results where the history of philosophy is concerned is the renewed leap back, whether it be back to Plato or Kant or Dewey, whether it be sober (as Heidegger insists) or with levity (as Derrida suggests), back-tracking, double-checking, interrupting the endless conversation with an occasional question.