Peter Warnek
The unfolding of the fullness of being in its transformations looks at first like a history of being. But being has no history in the way a city or a people has a history. What is historical about the history of being is to be determined clearly and solely through the way being happens, which means … from out of the way there is/it gives being [Es Sein gibt].
(TB 8 = ZSD 7–8, trans. mod.)
The short lecture “Time and Being”, in which this dense passage is found, contains Heidegger’s final attempt to address in a sustained and explicit manner a central topic of his thinking.1 Yet in this passage we find him questioning precisely the historical character of the history of being. On the face of it, this is indeed an odd question: what are we to make of a history that is not historical in the way that all other histories are considered historical? In its unique way of being historical, the history of being remains unlike every other history and breaks somehow with the entire class of histories.
Heidegger is clear. If we want to achieve what he calls here a determination of the uniquely historical character of the history of being, we must attend to the way in which being happens in its utter singularity; and this means, he says, as a giving or a sending, or even as a “destiny”.2 How are these statements to be understood? Strictly speaking, we cannot say that being is, since such a formulation only reverts to the language of being itself. To say that being is only assumes in advance what must not be taken for granted, and thus only passes by what still needs to be thought. Heidegger asks instead that we think the way in which “it gives” being. Here he exploits the sense of a German idiom that is without exception rendered in English as “there is”, but can also be heard, if one attends to its literal sense, to speak of a giving.3
Admittedly, this literal sense of the idiom for the most part receives no consideration. But if we follow Heidegger and consider being in this way, it becomes possible to distinguish three important moments: (i) being as a gift, namely, as given; (ii) that which gives what is given; and (iii) the giving itself. And if we then proceed to ask what gives being, at first we are at a loss as to how to approach such a question without already turning what gives being into something present, in other words, into something that once again takes being for granted. In this impasse, however, we become aware of the need for a “step back” from a metaphysical tradition that has long been preoccupied with being only as something given, and we are turned towards the question of the event of the giving itself.
Near the end of this lecture Heidegger offers a word for such a giving:Ereignis. This word may be translated for now as “event of appropriation” or as “enowning”, as long as such translations are taken with enough indeterminacy to let the matter show itself in a way appropriate to it (TB 20 = ZSD 21; see also Chapter 10). At first there is no need to posit in advance any definitions. What is important is to find a way to experience appropriation appropriately. At the same time, it is not insignificant that in the attempt to experience appropriation appropriately we already find ourselves caught up in the language of appropriation. Yet if we are to experience the uniquely historical character of being, Heidegger is clear that the way leads to Ereignis. “[T]he singular task of this lecture consists in gaining a glimpse of being itself as Ereignis” (TB 21 = ZSD 22, trans. mod.).Ereignis is not offered as another name for being, another attempt to say what being is. Rather, in the encounter with being as Ereignis what emerges is the “belonging together of being and time” (TB 19 = ZSD 20).
That the task of achieving a determination of the historical character of being would call for a transformation or an estranging of our ordinary sense of history and time should come as no surprise, especially if we consider that in the foreword to the same lecture Heidegger emphasizes that we should expect great difficulties in understanding him. We are warned from the very beginning that a thoughtful encounter with the lecture demands somehow placing in abeyance our prevailing expectations with regard to how we might receive what he has to say. This difficulty that concerns the reception of Heidegger does not have to do primarily with the conceptual complexities of his thinking, nor does it simply concern his notorious habit of exploiting and twisting ordinary words, but is rather first of all connected to the task introduced above: namely, the difficulty of determining the history of being solely from the way being happens as a giving or destiny. Yet Heidegger’s warning also implies that such expectations carry a certain inevitability, however inappropriate they may be to the matter at hand. The implication is that we are caught up in these expectations, and they cannot simply be dispensed with, or ejected by edict. This fact alone should give us pause.
If addressing the history of being is a possibility at odds with customary expectations, then such a task cannot be isolated from the way in which it already finds itself situated in a time and place. Our ability to be receptive to Heidegger’s thinking, in other words, is already framed or conditioned by a metaphysical lineage that we have inherited but not chosen. This means that before history and being can be taken up as questions in an explicit way, the very posing of these questions finds itself claimed by history, or caught within history. What does such a situation, as historical, have to do with the history of being as it would twist free from ordinary history?
The situated character of the lecture, as it owns up to operating within certain ineluctable hermeneutic prejudices, is presented initially as an obstacle or as a hindrance to our understanding, in so far as we are asked to prepare ourselves to move beyond the limits it would otherwise impose. In attempting to overturn or dismantle our historical prejudices, the lecture thus seeks to enact what Heidegger designates as a destruction or, perhaps better, a de-structuring of the metaphysical tradition, but in doing so it seeks to direct us to something entirely unanticipated and unheard of. The transformation into the estranging sense of the history of being thus calls for a destruction that would reveal how history ordinarily taken covers over and obscures being as a giving, sending or destiny. “Only the dismantling of the coverings – this means the destructuring – offers to thinking a provisional glimpse into what then reveals itself as the destiny of being” (TB 9 = ZSD 9, trans. mod.).
We should note, however, that this strange sense of destiny or history does not emerge from a place that is simply external to our situation, no more than the shared horizons of understanding can be viewed simply as limits, or mere deficiencies. If the operative limits of our understanding can be surpassed or broken apart, this occurs first of all by accepting them as they unavoidably impose themselves upon the hermeneutic situation and grant a starting-point to the lecture. As limits they can be grasped as positive and enabling because they are already related to the possible appearance of something else, something other.
The task of achieving a determination of Ereignis as it reveals the history of being can be said, then, to be one of dismantling or breaking down the limits of philosophy as metaphysics in order to make available what is harboured within such limits. The history of being thus lies concealed within a history that already claims us. While on the one hand the appearance of the history of being breaks with what first began as the history of metaphysics, on the other hand this first beginning also already belongs to an other beginning as it remains concealed in the first beginning.4 Metaphysics is thus a history caught in the “oblivion” or forgetting of being.
Thinking the history of being exposes this oblivion or concealment as a certain failure, but not in order to remove the concealment. In the protocol to the seminar that followed the lecture “Time and Being”, it is made clear that the heretofore forgetting of being is not to be overcome or negated. The forgetting is not to be surpassed by a recovery of something forgotten; “the previous non-thinking is not a neglect, but is to be thought as something that follows from the self-concealing of being” (TB 29–30 = ZSD 31–2, trans. mod.). What is at stake here is thus the un-concealing of an ineluctable concealment. And the history of being emerges only when we become attentive to the oblivion as such, when we begin to think in the oblivion and attend to it thoughtfully. At the same time, it becomes clear that thinking in this way does not attempt to offer merely another account of history. In attempting the de-structuring that would open up the granting of being itself, or being as Ereignis, by exposing the oblivion, such thinking also prepares itself for an actual historical transformation. This transformation entails nothing less than the ending of philosophy in an exhaustion of the metaphysical project that has sought to say what being is. The task of thinking thus emerges in the ending of philosophy. But our relation to this possible transformation remains merely preparatory; it is not to be regarded as new founding (TB 60 = ZSD 66). Strictly speaking, one may not undertake to “produce” the transformation, because any attempt at enacting such a poiësis must already rely on an i nterpretation of being that once again reverts to the legacy of metaphysics. Production becomes possible in the anticipation of what is to be produced and thus such anticipation is always first of all grounded in the being of what is to be produced (TB 45–6 = ZSD 49).
Yet in the same foreword to the lecture we are told that while the task of thinking remains provisional and preliminary, it also cannot be circumvented or bypassed. The encounter with what is strange asserts itself unavoidably, with a kind of necessity. Heidegger asks in this context that we attempt to follow what he says not as a series of propositions that contain or present a content. Instead, he asks that we follow the lecture as a series of what he calls indications: we are to look for what shows itself through a kind of pointing.5 What is at issue here cannot be presented directly but calls for a possible response or participation on our part. The text does not stand simply as a container of meaning, but solicits our response, and is to be decided in our receptivity (TB 26 = ZSD 27–8). It thus cannot be assumed that Heidegger has a philosophy (TB 48 = ZSD 51). As attentive readers, we cannot bypass a responsibility as participants or interlocutors in the matter Heidegger seeks to address.
What, then, is the strange necessity opened up in venturing to think the history of being? If the being of beings has always been understood as the essence of beings that is always present, and if such presence has been thought thereby to precede and transcend the coming to be and passing away of beings, what business does anyone have speaking of its history? What could be more out of place than to speak of the history of what is ever present as it is? How, then, is being as such actually given?
The only answer that philosophy – and this, according to Heidegger, has always meant metaphysics (TB 55–6 = ZSD 61) – has been able to offer to this last question is that being is given in so far as beings are. This is to say, along with Heidegger, that being has been thought since the Greek beginning as the being of beings, or as the ground of beings. While on the one hand beings in their transiency must be grounded in some sense of being, on the other hand being itself is thought to refer only to the ongoing presence of what is.
This difference between being and beings, as a mutual implication or intimacy between transiency and presence, is always presupposed when being is taken as presence. At the same time, such presence itself – what it is and how it might be said – has since the Greek beginning never ceased to be a question. Philosophy has never been in a position to do away with this question of “ontological difference”. The simple fact that being continues to assert itself as a question, that it is always encountered in this way – even if in the mode of denial, when, for example, in positivism or when it is claimed to be the “emptiest of all empty concepts” (TB 6 = ZSD 6) – already means that it is also not simply given. It remains an intractable matter that philosophy cannot relinquish or bypass, but as such it also continues nonetheless to withhold itself from us. Being continues to elude us, to retreat in the mode of asserting itself. This experience of the withdrawal of being, as it continues to claim human thinking ineluctably, offers a decisive starting-point for gaining a determination of what is said with Ereignis: to the appropriation of being there always belongs an inevitable expropriation, an erasure in the granting of being.
Moreover, that metaphysics takes being as the presence of beings over and against beings as they emerge and dissolve in time means also that a determination of time unknowingly sustains ontological difference. Every metaphysics of presence already operates within a given understanding of time, one that privileges presence, and takes the past as the no longer present and the future as the not yet present. But to think the presence of being in its withdrawal, to attend to the expropriation that belongs to the sending, calls for a reconfiguring of time itself, in which presence emerges as only one mode of time among others. This reconfiguring of time Heidegger calls “true time”, in which there is an “extending of time” beyond presence and the opening up of the pre-sencing of beings (TB 10–17 = ZSD 10–18; see also Chapter 5).
Still, we must exercise extreme caution in claiming that a history can be found in the experience of such a withdrawal or withholding. As I have already pointed out, Heidegger warns us in the passage with which I began against confusing the history of being with our ordinary ways of thinking history. It is evident that Heidegger is not at all interested in the history of a concept or idea. There is no doubt that, viewed as a practice, thinking the history of being is carried out through a reading of texts, but the history of being, as Heidegger attempts to think it, must not be mistaken for some kind of doxography that would chronicle the various things philosophers have claimed or asked about being. It should not in any way be confused with a mere history of philosophy that would be developed and determined through the lineage of the question of being as it begins with the Greeks and has been inherited from them. Heidegger asks us to avoid representing the history of being as a lineage of interpretation or as a sequence of events (WCT 164 = WhD 103).
If the history of being is not a history in any recognizable way, it might be helpful to consider briefly how history is ordinarily conceived. Historical thinking looks into the historical grounds of beings and so exposes their contingency. To speak of history, to raise the question of the history of something, is to assume a time when that something did not yet exist, just as it is already to assume, at least implicitly, the possibility of its no longer being. To write a history of sexual practices, or to enquire into the history of a sovereign state, to offer two examples, is already to delimit in some way the unquestioned legitimacy these historical beings otherwise enjoy. By recounting and anticipating the origination and ending of things, historical thinking thus assumes that events have context, and that in order to be understood they must be taken as situations framed by conditions that surpass the events themselves. While the conception of causality operative in history undoubtedly differs from that of physics, the beings under historical investigation are nonetheless grasped only in so far as they fall within the influence and determination of such heterogeneous conditions. In its own way the principle of reason holds sway in historical thinking no less than in logic and other forms of research.
When history erupts with unexpected revolutions, when it interrupts itself with the emergence of something unheard of, previously unthinkable and unanticipated, this does not at all derail the convictions of historical research and historiological thinking. These events only compel such thinking to reinterpret and to reconfigure the narratives and grounding principles that had dominated beforehand. Historiology, in fact, cannot abide the incoherence of a pure interruption, and must categorically refuse the appearance of something like an unconditioned causality. Yet who can deny that the movement of history has nevertheless always been defined precisely by such strange moments of impossibility, by turning points that mark, as Hannah Arendt might say, the birth of the new? From this perspective, it remains true that we are always travelling headlong towards something unimaginable, towards what we never saw coming as a possibility, and that this horizon of impossibility defines the future. We know that we are now the past for this future, and such a future past will be left unthought by us, will have been unthought. Yet the predictive claims of historical understanding continue to persist because they permit and even demand endless reinterpretations within such transformative upheavals. We witness again and again how even the most fanatical forms of eschatology permit endless postponements and revisions. The predictive claims of historiology will never be abandoned because our familiarity with the world we live in today presupposes and relies on such an understanding of what is possible, a trust in our everyday convictions. No doubt this familiarity with the world, the trust we have in the ground we walk on, is itself a function of being historically situated, but history also makes us aware of the contingency of every situation.
Historical thinking thus has an undeniably subversive consequence: it exposes how all human institutions are able to stake out a claim to absolute authority only through a terrible pretence that seeks to deny their historical character. The inevitable contingency of all things historical, the realization that everything in history appears only as a part of an endless chain of passing conditioned conditions, is often countered by the appeal to a natural or divine order. One might be willing to concede that human values have their genesis in time while also insisting that the true ground of such values transcends these merely historical beginnings. The right of a political cause, for example, does not have to wait for popular confirmation, no more than the veracity of a geometric demonstration depends on an act of intuition by the geometer, no more than the regularity of the earth’s gravitational force on the objects on its surface depends on the insights of a Newton or a Galileo.
We thus see that history, or more precisely “historiology” (Historie) as a domain of research, operates within a pre-given sense of being, a determination of what it is that it investigates. Being as the ground of beings is always already operative in every historical determination, even if the study of history does not actually investigate or question the being of things in this sense. Whereas historiology implicitly assumes a fixed transcendental or metaphysical sense of the being of historical events, every determination of history according to a destiny or destination must remain provisional and subject to revision based on the transformations of history itself. The grounding of history in an implicit sense of being thus only masks an abyss that is the movement of history itself. Heidegger is drawing a crucial distinction here between two German words, both of which generally get translated into English as “history”:6Historie (historiology as an objectification of the ontic events of history) and Geschichte (history as the “sending” or Geshick that first determines the ontological meaning of those events). Whereas Historie remains implicitly determined by being, Geschichte is to be thought as the disclosure of being itself. The former still implicitly relies on a transhistorical ground, whereas the latter opens up being in its historical transformations.
How, then, can being itself, or being as such, be historical? Thinking the history and happening of being as a giving, or as Ereignis, is a matter of thinking an origination or an event in such a way that the iteration of being itself – as the being of beings or as the ground of beings – is not already taken for granted.7 Yet the passage cited at the beginning of this chapter does tell us that we are concerned with an unfolding and that this unfolding does look at first like a history because it involves an abundance of transformations. Heidegger is referring here to the history of Western thinking as a lineage of attempts to name being as presence. Arguably, Heidegger’s entire philosophical career is devoted to elaborating and carefully questioning this lineage. In the texts published along with “Time and Being” and within the lecture itself, we find several passages that chronicle these metaphysical determinations that have prevailed. The names offered include, among others, the Greek hen of Parmenides, the Platonic/Aristotelian logos, Aristotle’s energeia and medieval actualitas, the monad of Leibniz, Kant’s transcendental making possible of objectivity, Hegel’s dialectical mediation of absolute spirit, Marx’s historical process of production and Nietzsche’s will to power.8 Given that such lists refer in compressed form to the entire scope of Western thinking, it is not possible to overstate the simplification that is enacted through the mere rehearsing of these names.
But the history of being does not show itself immediately in such a history of the naming of being. This is why Heidegger says that the transformations only look at first like a history of being. The history of being does not show itself at all in the unfolding of these transformations, unless one attends to the withdrawal of being as it becomes manifest in the transformations, which is to say, unless one sees what remains hidden in the giving or sending of being. Only in a destructuring do the transformations as such make evident an oblivion of being that is not said in the names themselves, and thus point to the Ereignis character of being as a sending that withdraws. The sending and the withdrawal do not occur as two distinct moments.9 What appears in the history of metaphysics, then, is an absence. It is in this precise sense that Heidegger speaks of the “epochs” of the history of being: each of the epochs is established through a totalizing name for the ground of what is. Yet what is decisive is that every such name also obliterates or obscures a remainder or an abyss and, precisely as the totalizing and grounding name that it presumes to be, it must leave this remainder or abyss unthought. This necessity is precisely what is meant by the destiny of the being.10 The word “epoch” in this context does not refer, then, only to an era in which a certain name for being holds sway; rather, if one hears the original Greek sense of epoche, the epochs of being refer also to a withholding that holds sway throughout the history of metaphysics.11
The epochal transformations of the history of being show that in each attempt to name being, to say what it is as the ground of beings, being itself undergoes an erasure or falls into oblivion. In other words, being as such remains unthought within the epochs, in so far as what defines an epoch is its singular way of taking being for granted as presence, as something already given, as the being of beings. The different names for being – precisely in their difference – all have in common, then, this distinctive trait, namely, that they enact a covering over of the retreat in the becoming manifest of being as ground. As a history, then, it can be said that being shows itself as ground only by hiding itself as a groundless sending from nowhere.
Heidegger thus says that the epochs overlap – which is to say, that they have an affinity and are connected – but also, again attending to the literal expression, that they cover over or obscure each other in a difference that determines all of them precisely as a sending withdrawal. There is an untranslatability that prevails between the epochal groundings, a moment that eludes each of them in their totalizing claim and yet reveals that they belong together in such an excessive strangeness. Thus, the destiny in question here is not first of all a lineage, in the sense that it can be determined according to a logic. It is not a sequence of events determinable in the opposition between necessity and chance. The epochs do not “belong together” except in the step back into the destined withdrawal, in which what becomes evident is the belonging together of the strange as strange.
Yet we see that when Heidegger speaks of the destiny of being, it is also the case that he finds, in the withdrawal that prevails throughout the epochal sendings, a kind of trajectory towards a greater oblivion: “what is appropriate shows itself in the belonging together of the epochs. The epochs overlap each other in their sequence so that the original sending of being as presence is more and more covered over in different ways” (TB 9 = ZSD 9, trans. mod.). And precisely because our age is determined by the ultimate oblivion of being, as the age of technology, in which all beings are at the disposal of the wilful subject and determined according to the mere “framing” or positing by this subjective will (see Chapters 12 and 13), our age is uniquely positioned to experience the sending as withdrawal, as a groundless grounding. This is why Heidegger says that the encounter with being as Ereignis is now necessary, not according to a logic of history, but according to the destined withdrawal of being in which every possible necessity and logic of history collapses. The history of metaphysics, in other words, since its beginnings with the Greeks, has led to a culmination or an exhaustion of the possibilities for naming being. The ending of metaphysics and philosophy – from its beginning with the Greeks, and as it first culminates in Hegel’s systematic logic, but also as it attains a more thorough exhaustion in Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism – appears precisely in the ultimate epoch of metaphysics. The groundless withdrawal of being announces itself most explicitly in the most totalizing project.
Our interpretation of history no less than that of being is still connected to this Greek legacy.12 The engagement with metaphysics that is enabled through destructuring the history of being is both necessary and at the same time only the transition to another thinking. The lecture thus ends with the remarkable statement that the overcoming of metaphysics itself must be abandoned and left to itself (TB 24 = ZSD 25). From the perspective of the step back, the only thing necessary is that every historical necessity and logic has been exhausted. All that can be said is that the history of metaphysics reveals a destiny in which the oblivion of being finds itself increasingly covered over. The history of being is thus the destiny of the West only if one thinks destiny as the necessity of withdrawal and withdrawal as expropriation.
Yet Heidegger also suggests at times that thinking the history of being becomes a necessity because without such a thinking we have no chance of gaining a perspective on our situation today.
What counts here is to say something about the attempt to think being without regard to its way of being grounded in beings. The attempt to think being without beings becomes necessary, because otherwise, it seems to me, no possibility prevails for actually bringing into view what today is encompassing the earth, to say nothing of a satisfactory determination of the human relation to what for a long time has been called “being”.
(TB 2 = ZSD 2, trans. mod.)
But this claim, namely, that thinking the history of being can have a privileged bearing on our historical moment, must at first be held apart from the unique difficulties connected with thinking the happening of being as such.
Hence, in addition to the distinction between historiology and history, we must conclude that there are also two distinct senses of history that assert themselves in Heidegger’s thinking; and, even if they are not entirely separable, it is imperative to maintain an awareness of the difference between these. On the one hand, it often seems that Heidegger is not only making a descriptive claim about our historical situation as it is delimited by the oblivion of being in an age of technology, but also making prescriptive and even predictive claims about our response to this situation. On the other hand, however, the withdrawal of being cannot be put to work in this way, and must not be mistaken for some kind of predictive logic. As Heidegger would be the first to remind us, the history of being can only be thought by way of meditative recollection (besinnliches Andenken), and it is inevitably distorted when it is subjected to any kind of pragmatic planning or calculative control. Failing to maintain this distinction can only have disastrous consequences for understanding Heidegger’s thinking of the history of being. We are otherwise likely to take the history of being as an attempted mythology of Western thinking, and thereby to import particular cultural and historiological prejudices into what Heidegger wants to think as the abyssal event of being itself. The danger persists, in other words, that we will reason simply from our understanding of our situation to the history of being, rather than understanding ourselves – which means also the horizons of our understanding and the limits of our powers of reason – as situated within a clearing of the historical destining of being. Admittedly, Heidegger himself may not have always succeeded in making clear this distinction between the happening of being and a mythos or grand narrative of the West.13
1. A summary of the development of “the history of being” in Heidegger’s thinking would have to consider at the very least the discussion of “historicity” as it emerges towards the end of Being and Time (in which the disclosure of being is said to be historical) as well as the prolonged engagement with the history of metaphysics throughout the 1920s and 1930s, especially as it is dealt with in Introduction to Metaphysics and in Contributions to Philosophy, as this leads to his first thorough elaboration of the thought of the history of being in the second volume of Heidegger’s Nietzsche (N4 200–250 = NII 335–98; and also NII 399–490). For a translation of these latter texts, see EP.
2. It is important to note the verbal affinity between “sending” (Schicken) and “destiny” (Geschick or Geschicklichkeit), which is lost in the English translation.
3. The verb in the German idiom, “es gibt…”, is geben, which means “to give”. The idiom appears in German in situations where in English one says “there is …”, for example when one says “there is water in the well” or “there are criminals in the government”. In the protocol to the seminar following the lecture “Time and Being”, Heidegger clarifies how the giving spoken of in “es gibt” opens up a host of relations and, in particular, tells us that this suggests an availability to humans for a possible appropriation. The “it” in question here and the sense of the “giving”, of course, still need elaboration, no less than the sense of appropriation. See TB 38–40 = ZSD 41–3.
4. Contributions to Philosophy offers an extended treatment of this relation between the first and other beginning.
5. For this reason, the protocol of the seminar that followed the lecture speaks of the lecture as an “experiment” that entails certain risks. “The lecture’s risk lies in the fact that it speaks in propositional statements about something essentially incommensurable with this kind of saying” (TB 25 = ZSD 27).
6. Note that the English word “history” ambiguously refers to both the events of history and the study of those events.
7. This is the precise difficulty Heidegger confronts in his attempt to think being “itself” or “as such”. “To think being itself appropriately requires us to relinquish being as the ground of beings in favor of the giving which prevails concealed in unconcealment, that is in favor of the It gives” (TB 6 = ZSD 5–6, trans. mod.).
8. This list could be expanded. Even Heidegger’s own lists are not exhaustive. See TB 56 = ZSD 62; TB 7 = ZSD 7; and TB 9 = ZSD 9.
9. In The Principle of Reason Heidegger writes: “In the destiny of being the history of being is not thought from the point of view of a happening that can be discerned through a movement and process. Rather the essence of the history of being is determined from out of the destiny of being, from out of being as destiny, from out of that which sends itself to us insofar as it withdraws itself from us. Both the self-sending and the self-withdrawing are one and the same, not twofold … Talk of the sending of being is not an answer but rather a question, among others the question concerning the essence of history, inasmuch as we think history as being and think essence from out of being. Initially the historical character of being is most bewildering …” (PR 62 = SG 109, trans. mod.).
10. “The history of Western thinking for its part must then give pointers which, if we were to follow them, would grant us a bit of a glimpse, even if still obscure, into what is here called the history of being. The history of being is the destiny of being, that sends itself to us insofar as it withdraws its essence” (PR 61 = SG108, trans. mod.).
11. “The history of being means the destiny of being; in such sendings both the sending as well as that which sends withhold themselves in the announcement of themselves. To withhold oneself in Greek is epoche. Hence the talk of the epochs of the destining of being …” (TB 9 = ZSD 9, trans. mod.).
12. “What was thought and poetized in the beginnings of Greek antiquity is today still present, so present that its essence, still closed to itself, confronts us everywhere and comes upon us, there most of all where we suppose such a thing least of all, namely in the domination of modern technology, which is thoroughly foreign to antiquity but nonetheless still has in antiquity its essential origin. In order to experience this presence of history, we have to free ourselves from the still prevailing historical representation of history. The historical representation takes history as an object, within which a happening transpires that at the same time passes away in its transiency” (QCT 158 = VA 43–4, trans. mod.).
13. See Heidegger’s clarification of the above extract in the Protocol (TB 32–3 = ZSD35). In the Protocol it is made clear that the history of being must be removed from every “anthropological concern”.
See Heidegger’s Being and Time (trans. Stambaugh), pts V and VI The End of Philosophy; Introduction to Metaphysics; Nietzsche: Vol. IV, Nihilism The Principle of Reason What is Called Thinking?
See de Beistegui (2003) Bernasconi (1985) Ruin (1994) Schürmann (1987).