In the first section of this chapter 1 contrast the Time of being with the timeliness of Dasein, giving particular attention to Kant as the first philosopher to glimpse the issue which grounds the distinction. Section 5.2 provides a concrete illustration of the Time of being with a discussion of 'presencing,' the way being has disclosed what-is in the history of metaphysical thinking, and suggests its contrast with the mythological way of taking being. Section 5.3 expands on Heidegger's notion of the 'Appropriation' which places Time and being in relationship.1
From the perspective of his 1962 essay Time and Being," Heidegger can say that the interpretation of time in Being and Time aims primarily at 'the timeliness of Ossein, at the ecstatic element which in itself already contains a reference to truth, to the clearing, to the unconcealment of being qua being, even though this is not explicitly spoken of in the published portion . . .' (TB 28/30). Since the published portion only articulates the meaning of Dasein's being as an understanding of being, that is, as the 'there' in which being is disclosed, this analysis of timeliness does not provide an explicit answer to the question of the meaning of being itself. However, as Heidegger indicated even in the Introduction to Being and Time, 'the ground will have been prepared for obtaining such an answer' (17).
The completion of the analysis of Dasein as timely and historical will bring us to the point where we 'cannot fail to see that the inquiry into being is itself characterized by historicality.' Thus we will find that the elaboration of the question of being demands that we inquire into the question's own history (20f.). This investigation of the history of the question of being will, Heidegger says, enable us to 'appropriate' the past as our own so that 'we may bring ourselves into the fullest possession of the ownmost possibilities of the question' (21).2 Because of Dasein's unique character, the ownmost possibility of the question is not just that we should raise it anew but that we should answer it anew. Temporality is the condition for the possibility of the history of being in the same way that timeliness was the condition for the possibility of Dasein's historical happening.3
With such remarks it is apparent that even in Being and Time Heidegger thought that the phenomenological turn from Dasein to being, which was required by the matter under investigation, would also prepare us for the turn that is a leap of thought bringing about a new understanding of being.4 However, at the end of the published portion of Being and Time, leading into what would have been the missing section 'Time and Being,' Heidegger remarks that in the analysis so far the conflict in the interpretation of being has not yet been enkindled and therefore cannot be allayed (437). Presumably in that proposed next section he would have shown such an historical conflict in the interpretation of being by examining the ontologies of Kant, Descartes, and the scholastics, and Aristotle. The conflict would make us see the need for a decision and also lead us to wonder why Western civilization has had such a distinctive cultural history. The decision puts us in touch with the Temporality of being while our curiosity seeks an answer to its nature.
Looking back at his early works, Heidegger says that we would not see the direction that his later thought on the 'destiny* of being would take if we limited ourselves to thinking only about Dasein's historically or represented the destiny of being only as something that happened to Dasein or as series of occurrences in some ordinary sense. 'In contrast, the only possible way to preview the later thought on the destiny of being from the perspective of Being and Time is to think through what was presented in Being and Time about the destructuring of the ontological doctrine of the being of what-is' (TB 9/9). No longer just Dasein's 'happening-with,' now 'destiny' refers to the Temporal happening of being.
Of course, Being and Time only offers sketchy introductory remarks about this 'destructuring' of ontology, this analysis of its origin and character, and the task was not begun in the published book. But Heidegger's comment is instructive nonetheless. True, as John Caputo points out, the Temporal structures of being presented in the later essay 'Time and Being' are 'patently isomorphic' with those of Dasein's timeliness. But Heidegger's suggestion that we look to the destructuring of ontology rather than Dasein to understand the destiny of being is not therefore 'misleading.'5 The similarity between timeliness and Temporality does not mean that we are talking about the same structures or the same thing. What studying the structures of Dasein's timeliness or its historically does not adequately bring to light is the priority of the disclosure of being, upon which Dasein's timeliness is dependent, and the way Dasein's understanding of being changes. Presumably both issues would have been clarified in the missing sections of Being and Time. Until we see the conflict in the interpretation of being and the horizon of Time against which it is disclosed, we cannot grasp what Heidegger means by the 'destiny' and 'Temporality' of being or even fully grasp the timeliness of authentic Dasein.
As the description of Part Two of Being and Time tells us, this phenomenological 'de-structuring' of the history of ontology would take 'the problem of Temporality' as its clue (39). Since we are now trying to understand Heidegger's conception of the Time of being, perhaps we can reverse this procedure and, as he suggests in 'Time and Being,' take as our clue for understanding the destiny and Temporality of being his remarks about what he wanted to show in his investigation of the history of ontology.
In particular, we should consider Heidegger's remarks about Kant's failure to grasp the problematic of Temporality. He says:
The first and only person who has gone any stretch of the way toward investigating the dimension of Temporality or has even let himself be drawn there by the coercion of the phenomena themselves is Kant. Only when we have established the problematic of Temporality can we succeed in casting light on the obscurity of his doctrine of the schematism... In the end those very phenomena which will be exhibited under the heading of Temporality in our analysis are precisely those most covert judgments of the 'common reason' for which Kant says it is the 'business of philosophers' to provide an analytic.
Heidegger expects to show why the problematic of Temporality remained closed off to Kant, who 'shrinks back, as it were, in the face of something which must be brought to light as a theme and a principle if the term 'being' is to have any demonstrable meaning' (23).
Heidegger claims that his analysis will show 'why Kant never achieved insight into the problematic of Temporality.' Such remarks indicate that Temporality is quite a different matter than consciousness of things in time or the character of these things since, of course, accounting for these occupied Kant very explicitly. Besides, Heidegger indicates that the problematic of Temporality deals with what Kant saw as the most covert judgments of the 'common reason,' not just with time and space as forms of intuition. It deals with our understanding of being, not just with our experience of time. According to Heidegger. Kant failed to achieve insight into Temporality because he neglected the problem of being and did not provide an ontology of Dasein or, in Kant's terminology, of the subjectivity of the subject (24). That Kant takes for granted the nature of this subjectivity is Symptomatic of his failure. At best Kant provides only an analysis of one epoch of Dasein's 'fallen' timeliness, that of subjects and objects, and perhaps only of the time-consciousness derivative from it.
Being, or what it is to be, was never seen as a problem by Kant because he took for granted a particular understanding of being and saw its fundamental categories as necessary for the very existence of 'subjectivity' or unified representational consciousness. For Kant, nature was necessarily Newtonian nature. Only because we experience Newtonian nature, with its quantifiable and controllable objects, can we experience ourselves. The conditions necessary for subjectivity are 'forms' of both intuition and understanding which we impose on our experience, and so the being of what-is was not only immutable, it was a 'product' or 'posit' of human activity, as Heidegger frequently puts it. For Kant, the being of what-is is under the domination of human subjectivity, but paradoxically what-is has to be in a certain way in order for that subjectivity to be at all.
Heidegger thinks that Kant failed to see that being is problematic and reveals itself to as in different ways at different times, This is precisely the 'problematic of Temporality' as the meaning of being. Heidegger indicates that in his own analysis he does not want to supply Kantian ontology with a foundation that it neglected to supply for itself by, for example, showing that human beings must be subjects. Rather he wants to show that what is 'fundamental' in his own fundamental ontology of being 'is incompatible with any building upon it' (TB 32/34). What we arrive at when we discover the Temporality of being is not an immutable ground guaranteeing that being or human beings must be in a certain way but rather an abyss of possibility.6 Heidegger's 'de-structuring' of the history of ontology would have shown, and indeed did show when he carried it off in other works, that the understanding of being in Ancient Greece or the Middle Ages was very different than the understanding of being found in Kant's philosophy. In order to account for this difference Heidegger directed our attention to the Temporality of being.
In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant comments that 'the schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover and to have open to our gaze.'7 However, we can at least know the conditions for the possibility of this schematism, if not how we actually do It. For Heidegger, the 'art' of categorizing things as dogs and triangles is buried in our skills at dealing with them, and our finitude prevents it from being brought before our conscious gaze. In Dasein's world the paths that guide its resolute decisions about what it is to be are already cleared by being itself through the ways things show themselves in our dealings. An authentic decision bases itself on something not mastered, on something concealed (PLT 55/42), something not open to a gaze directed at either ourselves or things. Our finitude prevents us from transcending this limitation by turning the background practices into explicit knowledge. 'So profoundly does finitude entrench itself in existence that our ownmost and deepest limitation refuses to yield to our freedom' (WIM 108/118).
Thus, in Heidegger's version of a 'metaphysics of metaphysics,' unlike in Kant's, we do not acquire absolute knowledge about the relative conditions for knowing objects. The whole problem of 'laying the foundations of metaphysics' becomes the problem of Dasein as finite existence standing open for being (KPM 238/223). For Heidegger, the finitude of knowledge is an essential structure of knowledge that limits it even when it is turned back on itself rather than toward 'things in themselves.' Contrary to what Kant thought, we cannot know 'knowledge in itself either. The essential finitude of the structure of knowledge is not a matter of the shortcomings of knowledge such as the instability, inexactness, liability to error, and so on, of our beliefs (KPM 27/21). Rather the finitude of knowledge is a matter of its grounding in an understanding of being which cannot be taken up in conceptual judgments. We should give up our quest for not only an absolute knowledge of things in themselves, as Kant thought, but also for explicit knowledge of the source of our knowledge (KPM 245/229f.). The goal of knowing the presuppositions of our knowledge, so devoutly pursued by Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and every other metaphysician, is unattainable.
But the finitude of Dasein's understanding of being is not the only finitude at issue now. We are moving from the finitude of Dasein's being to the finitude of being itself. When Heidegger first spoke of the finitude of being in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, he says later, he was thinking of it as finite in contrast with infinite. In the framework that Kant sets up, the finitude of the appearance of being in our world was a result of our own limitations. Being can appear to us in only one way. Infinite being belongs to the inaccessible noumenal world. At this stage in his work, Heidegger was interested in showing, against Kant, that there is no 'being in itself,' infinite or otherwise, and no immutable appearance of this being, just the various ways things show themselves as what they are.
Heidegger's later philosophy, however, comes to focus more and more on the limits of being. The concealed, dark realm of being does not reserve infinite or 'limitless' possibilities for us. Rather, in the contemporary epoch, the history of being as presence is coming to an end as its possibilities run out. Now the end of metaphysics is upon us. Here Heidegger's notion of the 'end' draws on another one of its meanings: a conclusion or the termination of a lease.8 If Dasein is the 'site' in which being is revealed, then the end of metaphysics shows that we are just renting this ground and can be evicted at any time. Just as the timeliness of Dasein demonstrated our limitations, the Temporality of being shows its limitations.
Authentic timeliness is the impetus for fundamental changes in the way we deal with things, but this timeliness is dependent on the Temporality of being which lets things show up in different ways. Timeliness and Temporality are not distinct, independent phenomena. In the discussion of the notions in the Introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger emphasized the distinction, thus making timeliness seem to be a unique instance of Temporality in one specific domain of what-is, that is, of Dasein. In contrast, in the contemporaneous Basic Problems of Phenomenology he said that he will call timeliness 'Temporality' in considering its role as the 'condition of the possibility of the understanding of being, both pre-ontological and ontological' (BPP 274/388). Here we see more clearly that the two phenomena are essentially related and that, without Dasein's timeliness, there would be no Temporality. Dasein's timeliness is the vehicle through which the being of what-is manifests itself in a Temporal way both in our dealings with things and in the works of the creators.
In Being and Time this 'realm of the determination of being' is 'caught sight of from the clearing of Da-sein' (TB 27/29f.). After examining timeliness as the condition for the possibility of Dasein's view of being, Heidegger's original plan required us to reverse our perspective, as he did in the late essay 'Time and Being,' in order to 'anchor' this 'primordial time' in the 'more primordial relation' between Time and being generated by the 'Appropriation' (TB 27f./30). According to Heidegger's later account, the finitude of being is a manifestation of the finitude of this Appropriation (TB 54/58).
What prompted Heidegger to place time and being together? He answers:
From the dawn of Western-European thinking until today, being means the same as presencing speaks of the present. . . being is determined as presence through time.
(TB 2/2)9
Heidegger thinks that the Greeks took being as presencing in two senses: 'to be' was to be present at some here and now and 'to be' was to be something with which we could be involved or at-home-with.10 Western civilization has remained within the circuit of this original understanding in which being was 'determined through time' in these two distinct though related senses.
At least since the days or Aristotle, we have taken 'to be to signify 'to endure through time.' We can also attribute the view to Plato since the Ideas or Forms, though not in time, remained a constant presence through it, and the idea of a thing was its essence which endures. In later epochs even God is real in an eternal 'now' which encompasses all worldly 'nows.' Something was not taken to be 'really' real unless it is at some moment of time, that is, unless it has presence at some present.
We might take the claim that being is determined as presence as an obvious truism. Of course, we say, for something to be it must be present at some moment of time in which it was, is, or will be the present. But this is not what Heidegger means by saying that being is Temporal. Indeed, he is critical of the predominance of this sort of view. The traditional characterization of the being of what-is as temporal, timeless, or supratemporal is an ontic interpretation which treats time as an entity, as if it were a sort of container, and reduces being to the being of what-is, as if it were a property of things (BPP 306/434). In fact, in pointing out that we have taken being as presence disclosed in the horizon of the present dimension of time, Heidegger is suggesting that it could be otherwise. Our way 'to be' is only one possible way 'to be.'
In our culture we have been so long immersed in our own understanding of being that we find it difficult, if not impossible, to imagine an alternative way of understanding things. Jorge Luis Borges, the great Latin American author of philosophical fantasies and perceptive literary criticism, suggests such an alternative, and we can explore it to help to break the grip of presence upon us. Borges reports in one of his essays that 'a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge' divided animals into:
(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those thai are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they are mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (i) others, (in) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.11
Michel Foucault comments that his book Les Mots et les Chases grew out of his laughter and astonishment at this taxonomy which demonstrates at the same time the 'exotic charm of another system of thought' and 'the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.'12
For Heidegger the Temporality of being has to do with the way that a unified historical context is set up in which we take what-is as being in a certain way, in our case, as presencing. One reason we resist accepting the taxonomy of the 'certain Chinese encyclopedia' as an alternative way of categorizing animals is that it involves no enduring being of what-is united across past, present, and future or specifiable in some 'now.' Animals could change categories moment to moment or fall into many 'species' at once. Science both ancient and modern is founded on the understanding of the being of what-is as presencing. Things stay put in their nature, no matter at what present moment we examine them.
To glimpse what it would be like to take being as something other than presence, we need to try to think of cultures radically different from our own, though perhaps not ones as fanciful as that depicted in the Chinese encyclopedia. Granting Heidegger's idea that being is displayed against a Temporal horizon, what would be a realistic alternative to presencing, then? What would it be like, for example, to disclose being against the horizon of the past, of having-been? We should look to the understanding of being that is evident in societies once or still immersed in a mythological view of the world where what is 'really real' happened 'once upon time' but yet in a time which cannot be systematically placed in any actual 'now' of human experience.13 The mythological entities and events of this always-past past may be 'more real' than the events of the present, and the events of the present may derive their reality from a re-invocation of the power of this past through rituals and ceremonies.
In a discussion of the mythological tales of the Saulteaux natives of Canada, the anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell comments: 'On the whole, then, events that are believed to have taken place "long ago" are not systematically correlated with each other in any well-defined temporal schema. They are discrete happenings, often unconnected and sometimes contradictory. Yet the past and the present are part of a whole because they are bound together by the persistence and contemporary reality of mythological characters not even now grown old.' He adds that such characters 'in fact are actually more "real" than distant human ancestors no longer remembered.'14 For such cultures, the mythological past may be 'more real' than anything merely having presence at some present. As Heidegger comments about the understanding of being in mythically oriented cultures: 'The past as such shows itself to be the genuine and ultimate "why" of all-which-is.'15
A different view of ordinary time may derive from this different Temporal disclosure matrix, for example, a time which is cyclical and not homomorphic in contrast to our notion of a linear time made up of identical 'nows.' Each year's rituals again invoke the 'past' into the present, starting the cycle of the seasons all over. The present loops back to rejoin the past rather than, as in our view, marching steadily into an unknown future. The rituals and royalty of a mythological culture get their authority from their participation in the past, not from how well they help us cope with the present.
If we think of 'telling tales' as part of the art of a culture, a form of its poetry, say, we see changes in the art, that is, the sort of tale that is told, correlated with changes in the culture's conception of time in the way Heidegger implies they should be. In his book The Shapes of Times Peter Munz suggests:
The gradual transformation of mythical tales of the past into historical tales of the past is . . . linked to the invention of chronological schemes. The crux of the whole matter lies in the ability to index time, not in the ability to distinguish tall tales from true stories and to adhere to rigid standards of credibility.16
Munz also argues that historically based myths, as distinct from myths about the 'eternal return' of mythical characters, are 'the most fertile soil for the development of ordinary history.' He points out that it should be no surprise that the two cultures in which 'ordinary historical narratives emerge,' Greece and Israel, were 'the two places where bards had accustomed people to historical myths.'17 Historical myths had already accustomed people to placing heroes in some previously present moment of time rather than the never-never-land of 'once upon a time.' Going from historical myths to stories about real people is an easy slide, not like the leap from myth to history. The time framework of the Iliad, for example, contrasts significantly with the 'Enuma Elish,' with its 'once upon a time' character, and reflects a significant difference in the understanding of time and history in the culture which gave it birth. The Greek ground is prepared for Herodotus and Thucydides.
This orientation toward the past or present indicates one sense in which being is 'determined through time.' However, since, as we have seen, Heidegger argues that the notion of time on which this version depends is derivative, the other sense in which being is 'determined through time' is more fundamental. This sort of time is the Time which holds together the cultural practices and gives us the stable horizon against which their changes are played out. This Time is the 'meaning of being' in general. Here presencing is not identified with some momentary 'now,' although the Temporal horizon of the present ecstasis of timeliness, or 'praesens' as Heidegger calls it, has a special prominence in this way of Temporalizing, as did the past in the alternative orientation just described.18
Nonetheless, presenting is not the present or any one horizon or ecstasis of time. It is a specific instance of what Heidegger calls the fourth dimension of time or 'nearing.' Nearing is the way the other three dimensions come together to create a unified context for the understanding of being,19 and presencing is the specific way of nearing in our culture's understanding of being. In analogy, perhaps, I suggest we call the specific instantiation of the fourth dimension of mythological cultures, or their way of nearing, 'pasting.'
In mythological cultures reality is displayed against the 'once upon a time' horizon of the past, and it seems to us to be remote, implacable, awesome, mysterious, and unpredictable. In contrast, praesens as the horizon schema of being 'determines primarily the timing of the timeliness of all dealings with the ready-to-hand' (BPP 308/ 438). The understanding of being as presencing takes what-is as something with which we can deal, something here and now which we can literally grasp, turn to and fro, modify to suit our needs, and so forth. The new orientation toward the ready-to-hand which arose in Ancient Greece is, according to Heidegger, a clear break from myth.
Heidegger pictures the transition from 'pasting' to presencing occurring in two steps. The culture moved from nature myths to the intermediate stage of culture myths, such as Homer's stories presumably, and then to an orientation toward tools and the famous Greek 'discovery of mind' or 'subjectivity.' He remarks:
The further process of the disclosure of 'subjectivity' and its comportments is realized in the transition from nature myths to the culture myths, to finally the stage of manipulation of tools, which is more or less free from magic. At this stage of the process, the ontological context of things by itself becomes manifest as more independent in that man frees himself from magical bondage to things and, by stepping back from the world, it is possible for him to meet things objectively.30
The 'ontological context' that becomes manifest is one in which the cultural background practices let us encounter things as what they are, that is, 'objectively.' Such an ontological context does not exist for mythological Dasein, where connections between things are made by myth and magic, not use, and hence are evanescent and resistant to consistent manipulation - two features essential to our notion of objectivity.21 Perhaps in a mythological culture we could say that things are encountered as what they are not, as, for example, a bear might refer one to an ancestor or a mountain to a god and in an important sense 'really be' one. Or, at least so it seems to us with our orientation toward tools and tasks.
As early as Being and Time Heidegger commented that 'Perhaps even readiness-to-hand and equipment have nothing to contribute as ontological clues in interpreting the primitive world; and certainly the ontology of thinghood even less' (82). The ontology of thinghood in which the enduring, definite present-at-hand shoves the ready-to-hand into the unnoticed background is even more removed from the world of myth and magic.
Presencing has a special relationship to the present, but, nonetheless, it is not the present or any one horizon or ecstasis of time. Presencing is a specific instance of what Heidegger calls the fourth dimension of the Time of being or 'nearing.' Nearing is the way the other three dimensions come together to create a unified context for the understanding of being, and presencing is the specific way of nearing in our culture's understanding of being. In analogy I suggest we call the specific instantiation of the fourth dimension found in mythological cultures, or their way of nearing, 'pasting.'
Presencing as a kind of nearing involves the way the future, having-been, and the present are related to each other. Heidegger suggests that both what-has-been and what-is-to-come have 'a manner of presencing and approaching which does not coincide with presencing in the sense of the immediate present . . . Not every presencing is necessarily a present' (TB 13/14). Presencing holds onto what-has-been but in a sort of 'denial'; it holds onto what-is-to-come but in a sort of 'withholding.' Heidegger adds that this nearing, with its character of denial and withholding, 'unifies in advance the ways in which what has been, what is about to be, and the present reach out toward one another.' In doing this, nearing 'preserves what remains denied in what-has-been, what is withheld in what-is-to-come' (TB 16/ 16). Such 'denying' and 'withholding' are, I would argue, distinctive to historical happening. Mythological cultures do not happen historically and thus have no past to deny or future to withhold.
We should not think of this 'holding together' of what-has-been and what-is-to-come as that which keeps an individual object 'together' across time past, present, and future, as if it were some sort of inner gravity or species form. Heidegger speaks on the ontological level, the level of our changing understanding of being, not the ontic level of the continuity of specific things such as a particular plant or animal. True, Heidegger sometimes uses ontic examples to illustrate points about our timely dealings with things, and, since three of them are used in essays about Aristotle's conception of phusis and causality, it may seem as if his own notion of how things show themselves as presencing is similar to the Aristotelean notion of form as the inner principle of change or is indicative of how things come and go in the momentary present.
However, if we look closely at these examples, such as wine turning to vinegar, a bicycle turning up missing, a silver chalice being made, and a book appearing from a publisher, we can discern an ontological point of quite a different sort. The wine that turns to vinegar and the bicycle that turns up missing become 'absent' or "missing" in a way that indicates the distinctive Temporal character of what-is ready-to-hand and the way things shift from being ready-to-hand to being unready-to-hand or present-at-hand (AP 266/296f.). The 'form' according to which the silver chalice is made indicates how nature can be converted to the ready-to-hand, or how something is made for a purpose, and the nature of a work of art.
In the case of the silver chalice. Heidegger notes that its creation - its coming to be - is ultimately dependent on the revealing which the Greeks called 'aletheia.' This unconcealing lets nature, the ready-to hand, and art works show up as what they are (QCT 1 lf./15). The being of one single thing, the silver chalice, is dependent on the whole network of cultural practices which articulates the interrelationships of natural material and artifacts, household wares and ceremonial objects, everyday activities and religious rituals, class status and occupational roles, and so forth. Similarly, a book can appear and in its presence provoke our concern (WICT 202/ 123) because of the whole network of authors, publishers, freight carriers, bookstores, advertisers, readers, and so on.
Thus, presencing 'holds together' as past, present, and future not individual things but the whole network of practices embodying our understanding of being and the different domains of what-is with their own ways of being present and absent. The sort of 'coming to be' at issue is ontological, not ontic, but it is also historical and not just concerned with the relations within the different domains of what-is. The understanding of being changes across time; being itself is Temporal. Nearing as the fourth dimension of the Time of being has to do with the way our understanding of the being of what-is 'hangs together' through the centuries, giving us a culture rather than a chaos and a history rather than a jumble of events. Being reveals itself in a Temporal way in the being of what-is, not just in the domains of what-is. Idea, ousia, actualitas, ens creation, subjects confronting objects, and the will to power all come to presence, not just the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand, nature and language, or chalices and vinegar.
As noted above, Heidegger describes nearing, the fourth dimension of the Time of being, as having the character of 'denial and withholding.' It 'keeps open the approach out of the future by withholding it in the coming of the present.'22 Nearing also 'preserves what remains denied in what-has-been' (TB 15/16). As we have seen, the future dimension contains concealed possibilities which lay out the path our understanding of being may follow. But the dimension of having-been is not put behind us as something over and done. Our understanding of our 'to come' encompasses where we have 'come from.' These two dimensions make each other what they are, and their reciprocal relation releases the present (TB 13/14).
We can illustrate this sort of Temporal 'holding together' of future, past, and present with an example from the recent history of being. Heidegger remarks about Nietzsche's insight into the being of what-is:
Nietzsche uses 'nihilism' as the name for the historical movement that he was the first to recognize and that already governed the previous century while defining the century yet to come, the movement whose essential interpretation he concentrates in the terse sentence 'God is dead.'
(N4 4/32f.)
Nihilism was already governing the cultural practices of the previous century, yet even Nietzsche's contemporaries clung to the belief that God gave a purpose to everything. What-has-been as God's creation still had a hold on people, though their own activities 'denied' this view 'in practice' while they insisted on it 'in theory.' People still gave lip-service to the old beliefs, still attended church, and so on, but it was evident from their daily life that the world was no longer a sacred place. Correlatively, their daily practices in the wake of the Industrial Revolution gave a glimpse of the technological domination of nature that was yet to come.
We should recall Heidegger's claim that only because ontological propositions are Temporal propositions 'can and must they be a priori propositions.'23 The different domains of what-is show up in the cultural practices as having a particular being before they are recognized as such by the authentic insight of Dasein: 'we recognize being only later or maybe even not at all' (BPP 324/462). Thus, things must have been showing up in a nihilistic way before Nietzsche could have his insight into the burgeoning practices of the late nineteenth century. It is not obvious what it means to say that things show up in a nihilistic way, so perhaps a simpler example should be drawn from the beginning of the modem epoch rather than the end, and I shall leave a detailed discussion of nihilism until Section 7.2. Descartes and Galileo did not just invent the idea that the essential characteristics of things could be translated into numbers. The cultural practices, especially in the economic realm, had already started to treat things as mathematically quantifiable. The breakdown of the medieval barter system, which exchanged quality for quality, and the increasing use of money, which translated goods into numerical quantity, prepared the ground for the subsequent insight into the being of what-is.24
The Temporality of being is the source of the historical revelation of the being of what-is, which, for the last 2500 years has moved within the circuit of presencing. Why presencing? As we have seen, in a way this is to ask for an explanation of the new orientation toward the ready-to-hand, and Heidegger seems to think that there is ultimately no answer to this question. It is also to ask why we thought 'to be' was to be here and now. An answer to this must also consider the shift from taking things as ready-to-hand to contemplating them as present-at-hand since here lies the origin of our conception of time as a series of 'nows' in which things are observed. And Heidegger does offer us an explanation, or at least a description, of this transition, which is the transition from pre-Socratic philosophy to Plato which we will examine in Chapter 6.25
It is worth noting now, however, that any general explanation, or even just description, of our understanding of being as presencing must consider that, during the 2500-year history of being as presencing, philosophy rather than a work of art or poetry has been the primary, or even sole, vehicle for the insight into what-is. Heidegger comments that we are bound to the characterization of being as presencing from the time of its unconcealment as 'something which can be said, that is, can be thought' (TB 7/6).
Perhaps the focus on presencing is a result of expressing the insight into being in words, as the Greek thinkers began to do, or of taking what-is present-at-hand as the model for every sort of entity, both intimately tied to philosophizing with its reflective stance toward things. We will examine this issue in the next two chapters.26 But Heidegger insists that it would be a mistake to think that the being of what-is means, for all time, the presencing of what-is-present. Not that he himself investigates the other ways that the being of what-is might appear in other, for example mythic, cultures. He implies that determining the nature of presencing is quite enough to keep him busy (WICT 2351/143).
Now that we have some concrete idea of what Heidegger means by presencing and the Time of being, his notion of the Appropriation will not seem quite so obscure. Indeed, this idea does not really add anything new to our discussion but rather provides us with a way of talking about certain aspects of the phenomena that we have already examined.
The primordial Time which determines being as presence is not, Heidegger argues in 'Time and Being,' the mysterious 'it' of one of his favorite expressions concerning being, 'it gives being,' This sentence indicates that being 'is' but avoids this verb that comes into question in the inquiry into being.27 Taking the grammar of his German colloquialism too seriously, Heidegger argues that the 'it' which 'gives' being also gives Time; it gives both being and Time in their interrelation. The 'it,' he concludes, is 'the Appropriation.' Heidegger says: "What determines both time and being in what is proper to them, that is, in their belonging together, we call the Appropriation' (TB 19/20).28
Explicit discussion of the Appropriation is unique to Heidegger's later works, but the idea of something more fundamental which puts Time and being into relationship is not incompatible with anything said about either element in Being and Time. Indeed, if he had gone on to discuss Temporality as the meaning of being, the plausible next question could have been, what is the meaning of this primordial Time, that is, what makes it possible? As Heidegger remarked in the Introduction to Being and Time:
In any investigation in this field where the 'thing itself is deeply veiled,' one must take pains not to overestimate the results. For in such an inquiry one is constantly compelled to face the possibility of disclosing an even more primordial and more universal horizon from which we may draw the answer to the question, what is 'being'?
(26f.)
As he later commented: in the question of being, horizons form only to dissolve.29
Heidegger may have only glimpsed this deeper level and not have been prepared to push the investigation of Being and Time back to it when he sketched out the project of that work. He does later say that the 'relations and connections constituting the essential structure of the Appropriation' were not worked out until 1936-1938 (TB 43/46). We should take this idea of 'constituting' quite literally: the Appropriation is not some kind of thing, not even a 'thing' in the loose sense of an event in time, as Heidegger's term 'Ereignis' suggests. It is a matter of certain 'relations and connections,' and these were at least adumbrated in Being and Time even if they were not brought to light explicitly.
Heidegger announces that the term 'das Ereignis" can no more be translated than the Greek 'logos' or Chinese 'too' (ID 36/101). This seems presumptuous. The word itself is quite ordinary; in common speech it means 'event' or 'occurrence.' Heidegger picks it for its etymological resonance and turns it into his own technical term. What the term names may he ineffable or inexpressible in propositional speech, as Heidegger argues it is, but yet the word itself is a term of art without the traditional infusion of meaning which makes 'logos' and 'tao' so hard to translate. What an English word cannot duplicate and what makes 'Ereignis' hard to translate is precisely its etymological resonance. For better or for worse, to grasp its meaning we must deal with these reverberations and wade through a thicket of Heideggerian language.
First of all, we should ignore the ordinary meaning of the term 'treignis: The Appropriation is not an event or occurrence in the usual sense. It does not happen in time, and its happening cannot be marked off by a span of time, even one with indefinite boundaries. Rather than meaning 'event,' Heidegger says, the term 'Ereignis' should be taken as indicating an extending and sending which opens and preserves (TB 20/21). The Appropriation sends being which opens and preserves the clearing that is Dasein.30
This jargon simply points to the fact that at a time in our past our cultural practices lead to the raising of the question of being and the delimitation of a range of possible answers, and, ever since then, we have continued to raise and answer the question anew in response to the changing configuration of what-is. The notion of the Appropriation does not explain why the changes come about; it only gives us a way of talking about them that connects with other elements in Heidegger's typology. In this discussion we will go with the How of Heidegger's story, saving reflections on the usefulness of its vocabulary until Section 7.5.31
The most obvious etymological connection we should keep in mind when thinking about the meaning of'Ereignis' is its relation to 'eigen,' which means 'proper,' 'own,' or 'characteristic.' We already encountered this word as the root of'Eigentlichkeif ('authenticity') and 'eigensf ('ownmost'). We should remember the root meaning of'eigen as 'proper' for our translation of 'Ereignis' as 'Appropriation.' The related verb 'eignen means 'to be adapted for' or 'to be characteristic of' or 'to belong to.' The meanings of two other derivative verbs also come into play: 'ereignen' means 'to occur' or 'to come to pass,' and 'anaignen' means 'to appropriate' or 'to acquire.' Thus 'Ereignis' suggests a coming to pass in which something comes into its own or into that which is proper to it. Drawing on these meanings Heidegger comments:
In the phrase 'being as Appropriation,' the 'as' means: being, to let-presencing, is sent in the coming to pass, of Appropriation, time is handed over in the coming to pass of Appropriation. Time and being come into their own in the Appropriation,
(TB 22/22f.)
Time and being come to pass by coming into their own in the Appropriation.
Through the Appropriation we also come into our ownmost being as Dasein. The Appropriation must appropriate it:
Because being and time are there only in appropriating, the Appropriation has the specific character of bringing man into his own as the one who becomes aware of being by standing in authentic time. Thus appropriated, man belongs to the Appropriation.
(TB 23/24.)
Thus appropriated, human being becomes authentically Dasein.
Again Heidegger intends to capture this aspect of the activity of the Ereignis by the etymological connections of the term.'Er-eignen may visibly appear to be derived from 'eigen as 'own' or 'proper,' but Heidegger also connects the verb to an etymological source in an archaic verb 'eraugnen.' Formed from 'augen' or 'eyes,' 'eräugnen means 'to place before the eyes' or 'to catch sight of.' Heidegger says that 'ereignen' means primordially 'er-äugnen, d.h. erblicken, im Blicken auf sich rufen, an-eignen.'32 The er-eignen that brings Time and being into their own involves a catching sight of. that is, a perceiving, a summoning of insight, an appropriating. As Heidegger says elsewhere, playing on the etymological associations: 'Appropriation is a bringing to sight that brings into its own (Ereignis ist eignende Eräugnis) (QCT 45/44).
In this way the archaic word 'eräugnen serves as the etymological bridge connecting the Ereignis and the Augenblick or moment of insight. Insight is in fact the 'happening' in which Dasein lets itself be taken up in the Appropriation of being. It is not so much that the Appropriation and the moment of insight are two different phenomena as that they are the same phenomenon viewed from the two different perspectives of an investigation of being and an investigation of Dasein. Dasein comes into its own in the moment of insight, and being comes into its own in the Appropriation; but the two phenomena are at least mutually dependent, and we could not have one without the other. In one passage Heidegger even seems to equate the two: in one sentence he refers to 'the Appropriation of the thought of the eternal recurrence,' and in the next sentence he describes Nietzsche's eternal recurrence as the 'temporality of the Augenblick (moment of insight)' (N2 140/402). In another work, a marginal note attached to a discussion of the term 'authenticity' instructs us to think of Eigentlichkeit as the 'Eignen des Er-eignen,' that is, as belonging to the coming to pass of the Ereignis (LH 212/332). The Ereignis elicits the cultural practices into which the Augenblick gives us insight when we make them our own by bringing them into explicit focus in a creative work.
As the 'it' which gives being, the Appropriation 'rules as the destiny of being. Its history comes to language in the words of the essential thinkers' (LH 215/335). The Appropriation sends itself to Dasein, and Dasein receives it explicitly in the moment of insight:
That which has the character of destiny moves, in itself, at any given time, toward I special moment of insight which sends it into another destiny, in which, however, it is not simply submerged and lost.
(QCT 37/37f.)
The spccial moment involves both a new projection of being and hence furthers destiny, and a repetition of having-been and hence a preservation and continuity of destiny. The ways of world-building 'at work' in authentic historicality can be seen as the coming to pass of Appropriation. For example, in the addendum to the Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger comments: 'Art is considered neither an area of cultural achievement nor an appearance of spirit; it belongs to the Appropriation by way of which the "meaning of being" can alone be determined' (PLT 86/73).
Now we may well take this language of 'giving' and 'sending' with a grain of salt, hut it seems relatively harmless when we explore the way in which the Appropriation brings about the destiny of being. In Heidegger's later thought, as we saw above, destiny does not indicate some mechanical determinism but rather the way in which being is revealed to us in the Appropriation. Neither the Appropriation nor being is some particular thing that endures through changes. Being does not have a history in the same way that a person or a plot of land has a history. What is history-like in the history of being is determined by the way in which being happens, that is, as Heidegger would put it, by the way the Appropriation gives being (TB 7f./8). Imitating him further, though, we could also say that there is nothing - no thing - which gives or sends. The Appropriation refers to the whole configuration of being and Time.
Western culture did not just invent metaphysics back in Ancient Greece; it has lived metaphysics for 2500 years. The unfolding of this history lies in what Heidegger describes as the way the Appropriation gives being as Temporal: 'In every phase of metaphysics there has been visible at any particular time a portion of the way that the destiny of being prepares a path for itself over and beyond whatever is in sudden epochs of truth' (QCT 54/210). The truth to which Heidegger refers is truth as aletheia, unconcealedness. The 'epochs' of this disclosure are not discrete spans of time to be measured by years but rather the changing ways being shows itself. The immediate locus for this showing is the cultural practices, to which respond the works of art, thinking, poetry, and statecraft which explicitly set forth the changing understanding of being and give us insight into it.
Heidegger picks the term 'epoch' to describe these revelations of being because its Greek ancestor 'epoche' indicates a 'holding back,' in particular a 'holding back of itself.' Being reveals itself by holding itself back, This notion is amplified by Heidegger in a number of ways. First, the destiny of being as 'what-has-been-scnt'33 always includes 'more' than the way being reveals itself in any particular understanding of being. As Heidegger says, 'in its openness being itself manifests and conceals itself, yields itself and withdraws; at the same time, the truth of being does not exhaust itself in Dasein . . .' (Way 271/373f.). Being is more than just the 'what it is to be' revealed in Dasein's 'there.' As suggested above, Heidegger thinks that being always prepares a path for itself over and beyond whatever is at any particular lime, a process we glimpsed in the case of nihilism. The cultural practices point us in a certain general direction. Authentic Dasein finds itself on this path when it discovers what can be in a time and makes the future present.
Thus, the revelations of being do not come in discrete succession. As Heidegger puts it: 'In the destiny of being, there is never a mere sequence of things one after another.' We did not have a discrete Greek world and then a medieval one, next the modern world and then finally the contemporary technological one. Rather than these isolated worlds, Heidegger goes on to add, 'there is always a passing by and simultaneity of the early and the late' (PLT 184f./177). Worlds overlap; having-been and the 'to come' both are held in presencing, even if in the mode of denial and withdrawal. This is why Dasein can have one existentiell understanding of being, finding its world and what-is articulated by one way to be, and then, in authentic-insight, discover being revealed in a new way. The new world which is coming to be is disclosed to authentic Dasein as already there. Heidegger remarks that 'The Greek thinkers already knew this when they said: that which is earlier with regard to the arising that holds sway becomes manifest to us only later' (QCT 22/26).
Heidegger does not mean to suggest that there is any kind of causality or determinism operating 'between' the epochs of being. We cannot say why the history of being is in such a way, only that it is (TB 52/56). Heidegger comments: 'The epochs can never be derived from one another or even reduced to the course of a continuous process.' What continuity the epochs do have comes from their source in the Appropriation and 'does not run between them like a ribbon connecting them.34 The primordial leap which brought being into question let being come to pass in a way that prepares the ground for all future revelations, but, dependent on being as we are, we are never in a position either to predict the next revelation or to see the past as necessary.
So far, we have been discussing the way being conceals and reveals itself in the epochs of its history, but we have not fully captured Heidegger's notion of being's self-withdrawal in the Appropriation. His second point is that being never really reveals itself, at least not as itself or as the background practices. It holds itself back 'in favor of the discernibility of the gift, i.e., of being in regard to the grounding of what-is' (TB 9/9). What the Appropriation sends is being, but what is revealed is not being itself. Being lets what-is show up as what it is, but being gives its gift while itself remaining concealed. The contribution of the background practices recedes unnoticed in favor of the things that are.
Even the way being shows up as the being of what-is, for example, as idea or will to power, involves a self-concealment. The being of what-is docs not show itself in the same way things do. As we have been seeing, this being is something that changes from epoch to epoch. Heidegger comments:
As the ground, being brings what-is to its actual presenting ... In accordance with the actual kind of presence, the ground has the character of grounding as the ontic causation of the real, as the transcendental making possible of the objectivity of objects, as the dialectical mediation of the movement of the Absolute Spirit, as the historical process of production, as the will to power positing values.
(TB 56/62)
With Kant, for instance, the transcendental unity of apperception made possible the objectivity of objects and our experience of them, but this transcendental unity could not itself be experienced. It is not an object in the field of our experience but what makes that field possible. Being gives us the being of what-is which in turn gives us individual things, but neither sort of being reveals itself directly in the way that things do. Only the particular things show themselves as what they are. Grasping the being of what-is requires a special kind of insight, not just eyes and ears. Heidegger credits the pre-Socratics with recognizing the necessity of this insight, as we will see with our explication of Parmenides's notion of noein in Section 6.3.35
Now this may make it sound as it the reason that the being of what-is can change and that the Appropriation can 'send' it in different ways is that it is only a fanciful idea of ours to begin with, that there is really 'nothing' there. But Heidegger is not an idealist or a subjectivist who thinks that what-is is simply the product of the activity of our own minds or our overheated imagination. There are, to draw another example from the above quote, 'ontic causes' and real relationships between things. But a certain kind of context of concern had to 'come to pass' before we noticed such things. As Heidegger comments about Newton's laws:
Through Newton the laws became true; and with them what-is became accessible in itself to Dasein. Once what-is has been uncovered it shows itself precisely as what already was beforehand. Such uncovering is the kind of being which belongs to 'truth'.
(227)
Truth as unconcealedncss sets up a context of concern in which truth as correspondence holds sway. These contexts change with the Temporal disclosure of being, but this does not mean that we perceive reality as changing. We are already dealing with things in a certain way when we come to notice their being, and, when we do, we perceive it as having been there all along. Plato, the first metaphysician, noticed the character of thisobjectificationof our Temporally a priori understanding of being and described it as 'recollecting' (BPP 326/463f.). Nietzsche, the last metaphysician, described it as the 'eternal return of the same.'
Newtonian science, to pursue the above example, rests on a particular revelation of the being of what-is which presents things as knowable and calculable in a particular way. Sounding like Thomas Kuhn. Heidegger claims that the particular terms and theories of ancient and modern science are not comparable given the underlying difference in their understanding of reality. Greek science, for example, the study of nature in Aristotle, cannot be called 'inexact' in contrast to the exactness of modern science since, given the ancient understanding of what-is, it could not and need not be exact. Heidegger continues:
Neither can we say that the Galilean doctrine of freely falling bodies is true and that Aristotle's teaching, that light bodies strive upward, is false; for the Greek understanding of the essence of body and place and of the relation between the two rests on a different interpretation of what-is and hence conditions a correspondingly different kind of seeing and questioning of natural events.
He adds that, just as we would not presume to say that Shakespeare is a better poet than Aeschylus, we should not assume that the modem understanding of what-is is more correct than that of the Greeks (QCT 117/77).36
Obviously this sort of relativism may leave Heidegger open for the same sort of criticism that has been leveled against Kuhn by Suppe, Scheffler, Shapere, and others.37 Whether these criticisms arc compelling, or even directed at an accurate version of Kuhn's position, is another question. In Heidegger's case, we should at least note that he does not reject the notion of truth as correspondence, and therefore he allows for scientific statements to be true or false in regard to 'fitting the facts." He just argues that this notion of truth depends 011 a more basic notion of truth as unconceaiment. 'Facts' or states of affairs only appear in a background context in which things show up as mattering in one way or another. Relative to a given context, for example, the one in which there is concern for efficient causcs, Newton's science is true and Aristotle's is false. Heidegger is really only claiming that the contexts themselves cannot be judged as corresponding to the facts or more accurately representing the way things are.
What interests us here, however, is not Heidegger's theory as a philosophy of science, adequate or inadequate, but rather how theories relate to an understanding of being. In this regard, Kuhn notes an important connection when he says that the theory that all natural phenomena could be explained by reference to corpuscular size, shape, motion, and interaction, which came into dominance after Descartes's scientific writings, involved a 'nest of commitments' both 'metaphysical and methodological.38 These commitments are not just in the theory but in practice.
The corpuscular theory of nature had been originally proposed by the Greek atomists. Why didn't the view take hold then, amongst thinkers, poets, and the people at large, in the way that it did in the seventeenth century? Heidegger's tacit answer is that the practices both to back up the theory and authentically set it forth were missing. The theory was conceivable as an idea, but it could not be put 'into practice' because it was not 'there' in the practices to begin with. What-is was simply not showing itself as quantifiable or calculable in advance as it later would, forming an accommodating background for the corpuscular theory whose postulated entities are defined by their numerical weight, shape, and motion. In the seventeenth century not only philosophers and scientists but people in general had started treating things differently; what-is had started presenting itself differently.
In regard to these contexts of concern, we can summarize the essential points conveyed by Heidegger's notion of the Appropriation of Time and being in three propositions: (1) the contexts of Western culture all share a Temporal orientation toward the present and items of use; (2) they change historically; and (3) they do so in a process of ordered, Temporal development.
Elaborating upon this last point by bringing in one of Heidegger's less familiar notions, we can say that the 'appropriation' is complemented by 'expropriation.'39 Expropriation is not something other than Appropriation but rather how Appropriation 'moves itself along.' Heidegger comments:
Insofar as the destiny of being lies in the extending of time, and time along with being lies in the Appropriation, Appropriation makes manifest its peculiar property, i.e., that it takes away that which is, its own from boundless unconcealment. Thought of in terms of the Appropriation, this means: in that way it expropriates itself from itself. Expropriation belongs to Appropriation as such. By this expropriation. Appropriation does not abandon itself but rather preserves what is its own.
(TB 22f./23)
Expropriation indicates a kind of 'motion" in the Appropriation that keeps the history of being moving.40 Once the conflict in the interpretation of the being of what-is has been engendered in a work which takes one stance toward being rather than another, it cannot be put to rest. Every interpretation leaves out something about the appearance of being and thus leaves something unsaid which the next creator will try to say. Yet in this saying the new creator preserves the old creation.
The notion of the Appropriation and its complementary expropriation refers us to the fact that Western civilization has kept 'moving' - not to say 'progressing' - as no other civilization has. We may be inclined to think of this history as a joint product of accident and invention, as if certain fortuitous technological discoveries have carried the momentum of social change, for example, the development of iron and other metals, steam power, the compass, and so on. Yet China, for example, had gunpowder, steel, pistons, and looms hundreds or even thousands of years before the West did, and their use remained isolated and restricted and the culture relatively static. Heidegger's notion of Appropriation and expropriation does not really explain why Western culture has been so distinctive but rather directs our attention to the 'relations and connections' that have made this movement not just possible but inevitable. We will explore this idea in the rest of the book.
In anticipation of the discussion to follow, though, we should note that Heidegger thinks that in the contemporary age we stand in need of the Appropriation, not just a new epoch in the metaphysical understanding of the being of what-is. He thinks that the history of being as presenting has run its course and that we have run out of possibilities for new metaphysical conceptions of the being of what-is. The modern epoch is in need of a new infusion of life, and Heidegger hopes that it will come in a transformation of being.
Heidegger indicates in his essay 'Time and Being' that we must carefully distinguish two different senses of the phrase 'transformation of being.' On the one hand, there are the various 'transformations' of being in the history of being as presencing or the 'epochal' stages of metaphysics. On the other hand, there is the transformation of being itself or of being as presencing which would send us out of the metaphysics of presence and into the Appropriation. What comes into question in Heidegger's later work is being as presence, and the leap which is under consideration there is as radical a leap as that of the primordial beginning which launched Dasein on the path of metaphysics. In comparison, the authentic insight of the thinkers, artists, poets, and statesmen of the last 2500 years have been small steps on a continuous path. In the later works Heidegger does not just describe how those small steps came about; he tries to prepare us for the radical leap of thought.
We might be tempted to say that we will be transformed by a new or another Appropriation, another and different Appropriation of Time and being. Heidegger insists, however, that the Appropriation is not and cannot be numerically plural: 'What it indicates happens only in the singular, no, not in any number, but uniquely' (ID 36/101). The Appropriation is not something that can be discriminated as a kind of thing or something of which there could be more than one. To do this, we would have to be able to identify what it is or understand its being, but of course this is precisely what is given by the Appropriation. The Appropriation makes what-is what it is, and thus it itself cannot be something which is. We cannot even say what the Appropriation 'is.' Heidegger can only point at it but not say anything about it in communicative statements, which of course are couched in subject-predicate form and make use of the verb in question (TB 25f./27). Nonetheless, Heidegger comments that 'The Appropriation is that realm, vibrating in itself, through which man and being reach each other in their essence ...' Both being and humankind will win themselves anew by 'losing those qualities with which metaphysics has endowed them' (ID 37/102). When this happens, we will find ourselves in a new beginning.
It is not surprising that Heidegger has to resort to such allusive language in order to talk about the relationship between being and Dasein since ultimately the relationship intrinsically involves the articulate order upon which all speech is based. Language is not very well equipped to talk about the conditions for its own functioning. Ordinarily, we just let language function and do not attend to its workings. As John Searle comments, making a similar point: 'The price we pay for deliberately going against ordinary language is metaphor, oxymoron, and outright neologism.'41
Language, says Heidegger, is 'the house of being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.' (LH 217). In an interview he suggests to his Japanese interlocutor that, with their different languages, their cultures occupy different such houses and hence belong to a different truth of being (OWL 5/90). In Heidegger's use, the term 'language' refers ambiguously to both language in the ordinary sense and the articulated cultural ordering which was called 'discourse' in Being and Time42 and which we might now, after the turn to being, view as the ordering of being to which discourse responds.
Even within Western culture this articulated order has changed dramatically and hence our use of language has undergone revolutions. For Heidegger, it is no coincidence that literacy begins in Greece about the same time as metaphysics, that a new, Christian understanding of being changes our relationship to the written word and invests it with ultimate authority, or that printing arises about the same time that modern philosophy and science do. If these new relationships to language do not build new houses of being, they at least extensively remodel the inherited one. The nature of the connection between these changes in our use of language and our particular understanding of being would require an extended discussion, one for which we will not take time in this book.
Not surprisingly, even language bears an essential relationship to death:
Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought.
(OWL 107/215)
Language can draw us into its possibilities of significance and transform us just as death can. Heidegger comments that 'Language is much more thoughtful and open than we are' (HS 127/203). But there will always remain something 'unthought' about language, as about being. We dwell in language in the same way we dwell in our skills. That we cannot know the nature of language, at least not know it according to the traditional concept of explicit cognition, is not a defect in our abilities any more than finitude itself is. In fact, says Heidegger, it is an advantage by which we gain admittance to that special realm where we can dwell as mortals (OWL 134/ 266).
For Heidegger language is not simply the utterance of a living creature, and its essence can never be adequately thought if we only pay attention to its symbolic character or its ability to signify. He is far, far from thinking that, as Quine claims, the 'two basic purposes of language' are 'getting others to do what we want them to, and learning from others what we want to know.'41 Instead, Heidegger calls language the 'lighting-concealing advent of being itself' (LH 206/326).44 This language is not brought to words in everyday speaking, but only because of it can we speak a language 'and so deal with something and negotiate something by speaking.' This fundamental language manifests its linguistic character precisely when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us (OWL 59/161). We perceive an articulate order that we cannot find the words to describe. Here, too, there is a 'saying' but one without words, a saying which is essentially a showing. 'All signs arise from a showing within whose realm and for whose purposes they can be signs' (OWL 123/254).
When the issue is to put into language something which has never yet been spoken, 'then everything depends on whether language gives or withholds the appropriate word. Such is the case with the poet' (OWL 59/161f.). The thinker, too, we might add. This is not just a case of finding words in the ordinary sense but the deeper one of an articulate showing as well. Heidegger argues that the greatest thought of both poet and thinker is the 'unspoken' and 'unthought' message of his writings.45 Authentic insight lies deeper than the spoken or written word, and it has already become the banal chatter of the Anyone by the time it can be stated in mere words. Poets themselves do not, as is often thought, use a higher form of ordinary language, says Heidegger. Rather everyday language is a kind of 'fallen' poem expressing the now well-worn understanding of being.46
Heidegger thinks that Greek language in both the sense of showing and saying was extraordinarily rich with 'appropriate words' or it never would have provoked the attempt to put the unthought into words. Heidegger is often criticized for arguing that the requisite appropriate word is Simply the copula verb 'to be.'47 Derrida, for instance, is right to point out the difficulty of proving that 'to be' is unique to Indo-European languages or of determining whether other languages do or do not have an equivalent linguistic device.48 Even in Greek and Latin one can omit the copula and express a proposition by simply juxtaposing a name and a general term. Hebrew and Chinese supposedly have no copula verb at all. Yet Heidegger's position is more subtle than these criticisms suggest. He himself argues that no language can exist without expressing the 'to be' in some way. Speaking about things at all presupposes that we understand their being (IM 82/62). So we must look deeper than this if we are to find what was special about the Greeks.
1 In Section 5.4 below we will discuss the meaning of Heidegger's own term, 'das Ereignis.' and the web of meaning in which the term is embedded.
2 Here 'appropriate' translates 'Aneignung.'
3 Formy translation of 'Temporalität' as Temporality,' see the section Texts and Translations'.
4 The distinction between the phenomenological turn and the turn that is a leap of thought was examined at the end of Section 1.4.
5 Caputs, 'Time and Being in Heidegger," Modem Schoolman, L(May 1973), p, 334.
6 As Heidegger says, not a 'Grund' but an 'Ab-gnmd.'
7 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St Martin's Press, 1965), p. 183. See A141.
8 Heidegger's term is 'Ende
9 'Anwesen' will be translated with the participle 'presencing' to remind the reader of the verbal connotations suggesting 'being' which it acquires from its association with 'wesen,' the archaic verb meaning 'to be.' We will also be able to preserve its difference from 'Anwesenheit,' which will be translated as 'presence.'
We should keep in mind that, when Heidegger says that 'presencing' speaks of the 'present,' his German words 'Anwesen' and "Cegenwart are not as lexically related as our English terms are, and we should not be too quick in connecting the terms. Presencing is not simply the way all things show up in any Dasein's present, as many commentators seem to suggest. While the 'present' is an existential dimension of any Dasein, 'presencing' is the master existenliell form of Dasein's understanding of being in Western culture, a point for which this section argues.
See footnote 10 below for a discussion of the etymological and philosophical connections of 'Anwesen.'
10 Heidegger's term 'Anwesen' is etymologically analogous to the Greek 'parousia,' Aristotle's 'second substance.'The Greek term 'ousia has come to be translated as 'substance,' but, Heidegger argues, in pre-philosophical speech it meant 'real estate' or 'premises,' that is, familiar territory, as does 'Anwesen' (IM 61/46).
The specific etymological play of 'An-wesen is important for Heidegger's meaning.' Wesen' as a noun now means 'entity,' 'essence,' 'reality,' or 'nature,' but Heidegger wants to connect the word with the archaic verb 'wesen' which means 'to be' and also 'to live,' 'to work.' In order to capture Heidegger's meaning a preferable translation for 'Wesen' would be 'way to be.' The German preposition 'an-' indicates 'at,' 'near.' or 'close by.' Then 'das Anwesen' could etymologically connote a 'way to be' disclosed in the 'neighborhood' of everyday life.
11 Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Analytic Language of John Wilkins,' in Other Inquisitions, translated by Ruth L.C. Simms with an introduction by James E. Irby (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), p. 103. As is frequently the case with Borges, one is left wondering if this 'certain Chinese encyclopedia' is real or as fanciful as its taxonomy.
12 Les Mots et les Choses is translated into English as The Order of Things (New York: Random House, 1970). For this quote, see the Preface, p. xv, of the Vintage edition.
13 This idea was first suggested to me by Professor Peter Manchester.
14 See A. Irving Hallowell, Temporal Orientation in Western Civilization and a Preliterate Society,' Culture and Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1955), p. 232. Note that Hallowell's way of putting his point with his reference to persistence may be biased by his own understanding of being as presencing,
15 Heidegger's remark is made with reference to Ernst Cassirer's account of mythic cultures. See his review of Cassirer's book Mythic Thought in The Piety of Thinking, edited with commentary by James Hart and John Maraldo (Bloominston: Indiana University Press, 1976). p. 35.
16 Peter Munz, The Shapes of Time (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University, 1977), p. 122.
17 Ibid., p. 126.
18 'Praesens' is to the Temporality of being as 'making present' is to the timeliness of Dasein. See the preliminary reference to the notion of praesens in Section 4.5.
19 We noted the isomorphism between the three dimensions of Temporality and those of timeliness in Section 5.1. There is a further parallel here. Nearing as the fourth dimension of time corresponds to discourse as an existential structure of Dasein. In Division Two's timely re-interpretation of the existential structures of foundedness, understanding, falling, and discourse, discourse is given the status of a fourth dimension of timeliness which underlies the other three. (See, for example, p. 349 in Sein und Zeit.) Thus, discourse articulates disclosedness with its three ecstases of timeliness, and it 'underlies' all three in a way similar to the way nearing as the fourth dimension of the Time of being underlies the three horizons of Temporality. The prominence of discourse indicates language's role as the 'house of being,' a claim to be discussed below in Section 5.5.
20 Heidegger makes this remark in the review of Ernst Cassirer's book Mythical Thought mentioned in footnote 15. See Piety of Thinking, p, 37.
21 Or so they seem to us. Here we could use a discussion of magic and the reason why it does not create an 'ontological context' in which things can appear 'objectively.' As far as I know, Heidegger docs not provide one, and I do not want to go off on a sidetrack of speculation which would take us away from our topic. Presumably, the basic point is that in a magical view of the world the relations between things are shifting and unreliable, perhaps as in the taxonomy of Borges' encyclopedia. In a sense, magical relations of significance are unintelligible because they are not fixed and determinable by any 'objective,' that is, public and verifiable, procedure. The relations are not simply between worldly things but rather between these things and an unseen, unfathomable dimension beyond this world, such as the past of myth. But, again, that is how it seems to us from within a different perspective, one which now has a 2500-year history to convince us of its obviousness.
22 The word "approach' translates Heidegger's 'Ankommen.' which plays off the future as 'to come' or Zukunft.'
23 For the introductory remarks about this notion, see Section 0.4.
24 We will return to these points in Chapter 7 when we discuss the modern epoch. [Chapter 7 is available online at: http://www.scu.edu/philosophy/CWhite.hl1n - Editor's note.]
25 [Chapter 6 is available online at: http://www.scu.edu/philosophy/CWhite.htm - Editor's note.]
26 [Chapters 6 and 7 are available online at: http://www.scu.edu/philosophy/CWhite.htm Editor's note.]
27 Heidegger says 'es gibt Sein' relying on a colloquialism. English does not have an idiom exactly comparable to 'es gibt." The English translation of the phrase as 'there is,' while adequate in meaning, makes use of the 'questionable' verb. But the expression is analogous to the English sentence it is raining.' (If we asked, 'what is the 'it' that is raining?,' we would be taking the grammar of the sentence too seriously, as Heidegger seems to do in his argument.)
28 'Appropriation' is the common translation of Heidegger's technical term Ereignis.' Its aptness is more a matter of its nested root 'proper' than its literal meaning; this root makes possible the wordplay apparent in this sentence. I capitalize the term 'Appropriation' in order to remind the reader of its technical origin.
29 David Farrdl Krell quotes this remark in his editorial remarks in his translation of one of the Nietzsche volumes. See N4, p. 284.
30 In Heidegger's words, the play in this sentence would be between 'schicken' (to send) and 'Geschick' (destiny).
31 [Chapter 7 is available online at: http:/www.scu.edu/philosophy/CWhite.htm - Editor's note.]
32 This sentence is left out of the English translation, perhaps because the wordplay is so difficult to capture in English. Compare ID, p. 36 and p. 100.
33 Remember that Heidegger's term 'Geschick' etymologically suggests this meaning.
34 Martin Heidegger. Der Satz vom Grand (Pfullingen; Neske, 1957), p. 154.
35 |Chapter 6 is available online at: http://www.scu.edu/philosophy/CWhite.htm - Editor's note.]
36 For the common philosophical reaction to the sort of claim Heidegger is making about the objectivity of science, see Richard Rorty's discussion of the anxiety of not being able to distinguish science from poetry, literature, and so on, in Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature, Chapter VII, Section 4, 'Objectivity as Correspondence and as Agreement,' pp. 3.33-342, and the quotation from his book which appears at the end of my Introduction's Section 0.3.
37 See, for example, Israel Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967) and 'Vision and Revolution,' Philosophy of Science. 39: 366-374; Dudley Shapere, 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,' Philosophical Review, 73: 383-394 and 'The Paradigm Concept,' Science, 172: 706-709 (14 May 1971); and Frederick Suppe, 1'he Structure of Scientific Theories, 2nd edition (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1977).
38 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 41.
39 In Heidegger's words, 'Ereignis' is complemented by 'Enteignis.'
40 In a later marginal note in Being and Time Heidegger correlates expropriation and the anxiety or 'not-at-home-ness' involved in Entschlossenheit or resoluteness (189,443*). Since the notion of Enteignis (Expropriation) does not really add anything to the notion of Ereignis (Appropriation), perhaps the term was prompted by the parallel with the 'Ent-' prefix of Entschlossenheit and by a desire to fill out the parallel between Temporality and timeliness mentioned in Section 5.1. Resoluteness is a kind of 'motion' in Dasein's being just as expropriation is a kind of motion in being. In resoluteness Dasein comcs into its own being, and the resolution of the moment of insight is its way of 'expropriating' its own being as the 'there' in which being is disclosed.
41 Scarle, Intentionality, p. 157.
42 Heidegger's word is 'Rede.'
43 W.V. Quine and J.S. Ullian, The Web of Belief (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 125.
44 The phrase 'lighting-concealing advent' tries to capture Heidegger's 'lichtend-verbergende Ankunft.'
45 For the comment about poets, see OWL 160/37f.; for the one about thinkers, see Der Satz vom Grund, p. 123f.
46 See PLT 208/31.
47 For a detailed example of such an argument in quite a different style, see Charles Kahn's 'The Greek Verb "To Be" and the Concept of Being,' Foundations of Language, Vol. 2. No. 3 (August, 1966), pp. 245-265, and his book-length study The Verb 'Be' in Ancient Greek (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1973).
48 See Jacques Derrida's 'The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy Before Linguistics,' Margins of Philosophy, translation and notes by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), pp. 175-205.