In our last session we introduced certain elementary considerations about the meaning of the word ‘ontology’ and the so-called question of being – all of this in order to give you a really precise idea of what is actually at issue here. I drew your attention to one of the fundamental themes of ontological philosophy, and one which is by no means peculiar to the ontological philosophy of our own times, namely the relationship between ‘being’, τὸ ὄν [to on] (though that is hardly a literal translation of the Greek), and ‘beings’, τὰ ὄντα [ta onta], the particular things that actually exist, the realm of fact that we are accustomed to contrast with that of essence, that which is individuated in space and time. I have already pointed out that the question of ontology not only involves the doctrine of being in the purest sense, namely in the sense that radically distinguishes the concept of being from that of beings in principle. For ontology also understands itself as the question regarding the being of beings – and this expressly implies that the theme of ontology is concerned not simply with that pure being that you read about in the later writings of Heidegger in particular, but also with the relation between this remarkable category of being and the beings that are interpreted so differently with respect to the former. And in this sense the question of being, according to a quotation from Heidegger that I read out and interpreted for you, is actually supposed to be the question regarding the meaning of beings, or the question regarding the being of beings. Ontology in the usual sense, in this extremely radical and critical sense of something that precedes all beings, is understood to include the ‘ideas’, for example, the highest concepts of all possible particular regions – in other words, the structural categories which serve to constitute particular fields as such. In this sense we could speak of an ontology of ethics as the epitome of the highest ethical principles or, again, of an ontology of physics (even if natural scientists would understandably resist this language) as the epitome of the axiomatic principles of theoretical physics, if it actually has such principles. I drew your attention to the problem of the relation between ontology and these highest regional unities when I claimed that ontology generally involves a double perspective: the question regarding the so-called structure of being and also the question regarding the concept of being itself. In the form which ontology has assumed in Heidegger, and which most of you will almost certainly associate with the concept of ontology today, this very relationship between the structure of being, between the fundamental categories of beings in general or the particular realms of being, and the concept of being itself is problematic and is indeed the real issue. When Heidegger describes his ontology as ‘fundamental ontology’, this involves the distinctive claim that there is a further fundamental question to be addressed with respect to the ontologies of the particular sciences and particular fields of knowledge – or as I would put it with respect to the ontologies concerned with beings, a fundamental question upon which these particular ontologies themselves depend. It is therefore specifically characteristic of the metaphysical and philosophical claim mounted by contemporary forms of ontology that the so-called ontological question regarding the meaning of being itself is prior to the question regarding the being of beings which ontology also understands itself to be. This priority ascribed to the question regarding being – over against the highest regions, the highest and most universal concepts of all possible classes of beings – is what is decisive here, as you will see, precisely because it really involves the problem of the possibility of ontology as such – namely whether such a pure doctrine of being can be thought as such independently of the doctrine regarding the order of beings. That is why you must clearly recognize this distinction – between ontology as a question regarding the meaning of being and the equally ontological question regarding the specific regions of beings – because the central critical considerations we shall raise about ontology depend precisely on this heightened or intensified concept of ontology. In other words, they depend on whether the question regarding being as such does indeed precede the investigation of the being or the mode of being that belongs to beings. For the question regarding the possibility of ontology itself ultimately depends on this question, on the possibility of this question, and on the answer that is so intimately bound up with it.
Before I attempt to clarify this for you with reference to an important passage in Heidegger – and I know this is rather challenging, but there is no way round it if you seriously want to understand the basic ontological problem and are unwilling to accept mere chatter in this regard – before I explore the question more closely to help you understand what we are talking about here, for you can reflect critically on these things only when you have actually grasped what is at stake – before all this, I would just like to correct a small terminological omission for which I was responsible in the last session. I was trying to clarify the distinction, fundamental for all ontology, between τὸ ὄν [to on], ‘being’, and τὰ ὄντα [ta onta], ‘beings’, or also between εἶναι [einai], or ‘to be’, as it is expressed in a particularly famous passage in Aristotle,1 and particular beings. In this context, since Heidegger, it has become quite common to talk, in what is a rather helpful terminological innovation, about the problem of this difference between being and beings, which is reflected in our language in the apparently simple and seemingly almost arbitrary difference between an infinitive (sein) and a participle (das Seinde); in other words, it has become common to speak of this difference, or the problem of this difference, as the problem of ontological difference.2 Ontological difference is therefore understood to mean the difference between being and beings. Now this difference signifies a distinction but also, in the view of ontology, a connection between the two moments precisely because beings are supposed to possess a special and significant character for ontology. On the other hand, according to Heidegger, without the ‘understanding of being’ we cannot come to any understanding of beings, and therefore of the so-called particular regional ontologies. Thus, whenever I use the expression ‘ontological difference’ in what follows, we are talking about this difference between being and beings in the concept of being itself, in the framing of the ontological question itself. I would ask you to bear this carefully in mind throughout. For you will be able to understand what is at issue for us only if you are quite clear, from the start, about this specific – though in itself rather arbitrary – terminological point.
Now let me turn to that particular passage in Heidegger where so-called fundamental ontology, in the sense of the question concerning being or the question of being, is distinguished from other kinds of ontology in the sense of the doctrine of the highest concepts and propositions that can be applied to beings, of the highest domains of objects – such as the concept of ontology that in recent times was reintroduced into philosophy by Husserl.3 I shall come back to this pre-ontological concept of ontology (if I might put it like this) in much more detail shortly, so that here too you will come to understand the relationship and the difference between Heidegger's philosophy and phenomenology in particular. The passage I mentioned comes near the beginning of Heidegger's principal work, Being and Time, and you will find it on page 11 of the sixth edition (of 1949). I shall read it out for you: ‘But such inquiry [and here he means ontology as an inquiry into constitutive truths, rather in the way that Aristotle or Aquinas ask after such truths] – ontology taken in its broadest sense without reference to specific ontological directions or tendencies – itself still needs a guideline. It is true that ontological inquiry is more original than the ontic inquiry of the positive sciences.’4 Now I would clarify this for you as follows. You must clearly distinguish between three levels here. First, there is the level of ontic inquiry. Put simply, this is the level of naive immediate scientific questions about what is the case: what law governs the duration of sound; what particular mathematical propositions hold or perhaps hold only with specific qualifications; what historical events can be said with certainty to have transpired at what time. These are the kinds of questions which may initially be described as ontic in character. Then there is the level of ontological questioning in a rather naive sense, if you want to put it that way, namely questions concerning the highest principles that are constitutive in each case for a particular science or form of inquiry. Here, for example, we ask questions such as these: What are the fundamental principles that hold for history in general? What is history itself? What do we mean by motivation in history? What is causality in history? What do we mean by relevance in the context of history? Or, again, what principles or regularities are operative in philology? Or, to take an example I mentioned earlier, what are the immutable axioms of theoretical physics, if indeed there are any? This is what Heidegger calls ontological questioning in the naive sense: the question concerning the basic truths that, as truths about beings, are supposed to underlie all beings or entities that are investigated by particular disciplines, and here we are thinking specifically of scientific disciplines. This ontological questioning, according to Heidegger, is certainly more ‘original’ than the ontic questions of the positive sciences – the simple questions about what is the case which I mentioned before. He continues: ‘But it remains naive and opaque if its investigations into the being of entities leave the meaning of being in general undiscussed.’5 Thus, according to Heidegger, you can certainly ask about the being of beings in the context of the particular sciences. In other words, instead of simply asking about historical facts, you can ask about what historical change means, about what history itself is. Or, to put this really simply and to set aside the elaborate terminology, you can ask any of these kinds of questions within the context of science or systematic knowledge itself. As a scientist or researcher you can reflect internally upon the knowledge you possess; you can think about what such knowledge means and about the highest and most general propositions which it presupposes. But, according to him, if you do actually think in this way about the being of beings, if you ask, for example, what makes a historical datum into something historical as such, and even if this question is, for him, more original – i.e. is constitutively deeper than any particular historical questions – this questioning is itself still naive. It is still unreflectively caught up in the business of particular scientific knowledge, or in the business of everyday consciousness, unless you also specifically think about the concept of being that is bound up with it – about what is constitutive for history, or what is constitutive for physics – and do so in such a way that you confront the meaning of being in general – in other words, what being in general actually means.
Heidegger continues: ‘And precisely the ontological task of a genealogy of the different possible ways of being (a genealogy which is not to be constructed deductively) requires a preliminary understanding of “what we really mean by this expression being”.’6 I would draw your attention to the fact, as I have already pointed out, that the concept of ‘meaning’ in this philosophy is ambiguous: while it sometimes refers to metaphysical meaning, it is sometimes used in a simply semantic-analytical sense, or is supposed to tell us what a technical term means. In this sense, at least according to the method, the semantic interpretation of being enjoys priority in the context of fundamental ontology. In other words, the question concerning the meaning of being here really implies nothing more – according to the good old phenomenological rules of the game – than that you should understand what is actually meant by the expression ‘being’. Yet in Heidegger we can see in the most remarkable way how all these categories begin to fluoresce, as it were, and in a certain sense always mean more and something other than they do in the place they occupy. This is very characteristic of the atmosphere of this philosophy and something which, from a dialectical perspective, is by no means simply a shortcoming. On the contrary, there is also, if I may say so, something positive and very deep here, for every individual concept that we employ, unless we are speaking according to the established scientific rules of the game, means more than it can mean simply in terms of its specifically defined place. Heidegger continues as follows: ‘The question of being thus aims not only at an a priori condition of the possibility of the sciences …’ As I have already pointed out, our understanding of the meaning of the word and the concept of being in general in this sense is prior to the fundamental categories and axioms, or the fundamental principles, which we find in the particular sciences, and therefore belongs to a sphere which, for this philosophy, is itself supposed to constitute the sciences and scientific thought in the first place. And not only the sciences ‘which examine entities as entities of such and such a type, and, in so doing, already operate with an understanding of being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their foundations.’7 We could thus describe this as a distinction between the ontologies of the ontic, that which makes particular regions of beings into what they are, and the genuinely ontological questions which are addressed to the concept of being itself. Heidegger goes on: ‘All ontology, no matter how rich and tightly knit a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains fundamentally blind and perverts its innermost intent if it has not previously clarified the meaning of being sufficiently and grasped this clarification as its fundamental task.’8 Thus the clarification of the meaning of being, of what being really signifies, is the essential task of ontology understood in this radical sense – and this is precisely what fundamental ontology is. This is the difference between fundamental ontology and the individual concretely conceived ontologies that we find so abundantly represented, for example, in Nicolai Hartmann or the modern neo-scholastic tradition.
And here I should already like to draw your attention to a problem within this particular passage from Heidegger, a passage which may have helped to clarify for you the distinctive approach that we are dealing with here. I have attempted to bring out certain principal themes of this approach and why they appear so plausible. But with regard to this approach as I have presented it to you, I must say right away that I simply cannot swallow it in the form in which it has been set forth. But here there are two questions I should like you to think about: when he says that ontological questioning is more original than the ontic questioning of the positive sciences, then to some extent this already implies – and you should pay very careful attention to this here if you are to become familiar with the atmosphere of this kind of thinking – already implies that the decision about the question Heidegger himself regards as the central question, as the so-called question of being, as the task of fundamental ontology, has itself been made. For it already implies that the ontologies of the individual positive sciences and their axiomatic systems are more ‘original’ than the empirical findings they comprise. Now one might respond to this with a genetic account – and I think this is just what every thoughtful scientist would do – and say that the path involved in these regional ontologies, these supposedly fundamental truths of the individual sciences, is generally in fact the reverse. In other words, in concrete scientific work, in actual investigation, they emerge as a structure that is subsequent to the findings about what is the case and from which they are then derived. From the genetic point of view, therefore, this question concerning the ‘origin’ looks very questionable at the least. We could also put this in a quite simple and straightforward way and say that most of the ontologies concerned with what concretely exists are actually abstractions which are themselves abstracted from the field of concrete beings. Now Heidegger, and every follower of Heidegger, would respond with extreme irritation at this point and vehemently insist that this is not at all what they mean by really original questioning. In other words, what is ‘original’ here is not to be understood as what is ‘earlier’ in any temporal or genetic sense. On the contrary, it means that what is more original is that which is ontologically more original – that is to say, is nearer to this enigmatic and remarkable ‘being’, is more immediately concerned with this being than anything else is. Yet if you try and escape this historically genealogical or genetic interpretation by tearing the concept of the ‘original’ away from time in this way, by referring it to ontology as something which is itself more original, then you have actually prejudged the very theme of the ontological problematic – in other words, precisely the priority of being with respect to beings. Thus at this central point in this philosophy we already find a petitio principii.9 What really needs to be shown – namely the priority of being with respect to particular regions of being, and pre-eminently with respect to particular beings – is presupposed as already harboured in the concept of what is truly ‘original’.
Now Heidegger, who is an extraordinarily acute thinker, has naturally seen this problem too; and he has found an extraordinarily inspired expression for it in saying that the task for philosophy is not to escape this circle but to enter into it at the right point.10 I would concede that there is something quite right about this. In other words, the idea that one could simply start from scratch, or provide some absolutely first principle in contrast to anything merely derived – the idea that underlies this constant worry about circular arguments and petitiones principii – has something chimerical about it and leads ultimately to total subjectivism: the notion that an absolutely first principle can be derived from the pure determinations of thought. To this extent, therefore, I would accept Heidegger's argument, which I shall now present directly. But I also think there is a distinction or difference here: between the necessary qualification of continually asking back, and back, and back – something more characteristic of Heidegger, incidentally, than it is of dialectical philosophies – and a thinking which defends the concept of origin as utterly true and primal being. But such thinking basically already helps itself to the thema probandum, namely the priority of being with respect to beings that bestows its distinctive savour, through its definition of what originality in this context means. I want you to understand precisely what I mean here: I want to say that the counter-objection that Heidegger brings against the purely logical objection that I have raised at this point may well be valid in general but is not valid precisely here, where the content of philosophy itself that is at issue is presupposed in this way as something already given. This view of things, namely that philosophy is ultimately tautological, that it can only explicate what it already simultaneously posits – this is precisely the essence of the idealist philosophy from which, as we shall see, ontology seeks so emphatically to distance itself. This is why the thesis of the more original character of ontologies with respect to the merely ontic, and again of fundamental ontology with respect to individual ontologies, is so very problematic. Quite apart from this, I would also like to point out here that this cult of the concept of originality also suggests that the primal source to which everything else is led back in some kind of non-temporal manner involves a claim that is hardly unproblematic in itself. This is the claim – and here ontology really shows its rather traditional character despite its protestations to the contrary – that prima philosophia, that which is primary and originary, the ἀρχή [archē], is truer and better and deeper than anything which issues from it. It is the kind of thought that Nietzsche once ironically characterized as the superstition that truth cannot possibly have arisen, that what has not arisen, what is utterly original, must also inevitably be truer.11 I believe that the really decisive difference between ontological and phenomenological thought on the one side and dialectical thought on the other is to be discovered here. In other words, this primacy of the First, or, to put it paradoxically, this ‘Firstness’, this priority of the First, this idea of tracing everything back to what is ‘fundamental’, cannot be accepted in the way it is proposed by ontology. And I believe the nerve of any critique of ontology in general, of an immanent critique of ontology, is intrinsically bound up with the critique of this dogmatically posited concept of what is allegedly ‘original’ – a concept, moreover, with certain overtones which only a highly prejudiced perspective could regard as entirely unconnected with specific social and political tendencies.
It is tremendously important to me that you should see the things we are dealing with here very clearly and really understand what is involved, so let me restate the issue like this. Heidegger says: I do not deny that I am arguing in a circle, since all of the considerations and demonstrations that I present in order to show the more original character of being with respect to all individual ontologies, with respect to anything of an individual ontological or ontic character, already presuppose the project of fundamental ontology. But what I start with is that grain of the arbitrary and contingent, as it were, without which human thought cannot begin. And I would reply that Heidegger's argumentation is quite legitimate in principle but is too broad to capture what is really at issue here. As if Kant were to say: Of course, that there are categories and forms of intuition is prior, as it were, to the whole Critique of Pure Reason, and in the deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding and the transcendental aesthetic I cannot basically demonstrate anything but what I am really already presupposing. In one place Kant says that the fact that we have these categories and these forms of intuition rather than others is something that ultimately escapes the deduction itself – in other words, we are here confronted with something ultimate, something irreducibly given, something that has to be accepted. But this does not relieve him of the extremely arduous task of actually showing, if we just stay with Kant here, that space and time neither simply subsist nor inhere in the phenomena of our experience. Philosophy here assumes the serious task of clarifying and rigorously defending its own fundamental conception of the problem in intellectual terms. Yet this sort of commitment is essentially negated by Heidegger's approach. When you constantly read and hear that Heidegger's philosophy has gradually turned into a kind of mysticism, this should not be interpreted merely as the symptom of an aging philosopher increasingly mesmerized by the concept of being. For this turn to what is dubbed mysticism is indeed already implicit in that dimension which I have tried to describe for you. We could perhaps also express this by saying that this philosophy harbours an inner flaw, a moment of untruth, which it struggles to escape. On the one hand, it avails itself of language, of all the means of discursive logic, makes all the claims that thought, for God's sake, must ultimately make; yet it also constantly indulges in the esoteric gesture and implicitly utters a kind of abracadabra. While it acts as if it wants to be thought of as philosophy or, as Heidegger would rather say, to invite be-thinking, it actually suggests that thinking is ultimately inadequate – that, if you don't feel it, you won't get it.12 And even that mode of expression would still be far too ordinary. If being doesn't ‘unconceal itself’ or ‘illuminate itself’ for you, then it just stays in the dark. Now everyone has a right to esoteric doctrines, and I am the last person to deny this right, as long as these doctrines are honestly presented in the character they implicitly claim for themselves. What is so questionable here is just the way in which this esoteric aspect is fused with the rational claim that is necessarily bound up with philosophy and its conceptual language, with its method of drawing conceptual distinctions, above all with its fundamental method of analysing meaning.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, I would just like to say a few words about the historical dimension of the so-called question of being. I have no intention of offering you anything resembling a history of the concept of being, although this would be a rather tempting proposition, and one could indeed unfold the dialectic of philosophical thought itself in terms of the history of the idea of being. The emphatic question of the problem of being, as we find it in Heidegger, derives from a philosopher who plays a distinctive and decisive role for this whole way of thinking. Yet, while this way of thinking relates directly to this philosopher, it also repudiates the position in question from the start because it is not deep, radical and ‘original’ enough. I am talking about Aristotle, who posed this question of being in the famous formulas of τὸ τί ᾖν εἶναι [to ti ēn einai] and τί τὸ ὄν [ti to on].13 These expressions are usually translated in terms of the question as to ‘what being really is’, although there are two striking things to be observed here: what we find in the second formulation, instead of the infinitive εἶναι [einai], is the nominalized participial form ὄν [on], which is commonly understood to refer to the individual being or entity that is. This is something remarkable that fundamental ontology tends to pass over, since it hardly appears to confirm the idea that the less reflective ontology of the ancient philosophy neglected to thematize the ontological difference in the way that this appears in Heidegger. I shall say a few words later on about the particular way in which the ontological difference is a thematic issue in ancient philosophy as well. But what is even more remarkable in the first formulation here is the presence of the word ᾖν [ēn], which, literally translated, means ‘was’ rather than ‘is’. I do not want to go into the philosophical problems involved here, for these are certainly very difficult questions. This word ᾖν [ēn] naturally tempts us to interpret the question concerning being as what Goethe calls ‘the truth of old’14 – in other words, as that which has allegedly always and immemorially been what it is, with the notion of ἀρχή [archē] in the background. Indeed in very early Greek philosophy, in the pre-Socratics, the concept of ἀρχή [archē] already possesses this remarkable double meaning: on the one hand it means ‘the origin’, ‘the first’, ‘the most ancient’, and the adjective ἀρχαῖος [archaios] just means ‘very old’, while on the other hand it also means the highest and most general principles of whatever particular conceptions of the world we are talking about. It seems likely that this ᾖν [ēn] has exerted a certain influence here. And not enough attention has seriously been given to the question of whether this particular temporal construction of Aristotle's does not involve a regressive mythological aspect – i.e. one that has not been reflected upon philosophically – although in the Heidegger school these very features, these archaic aspects even of so-called classical Greek thought, have been opposed, and opposed in expressly positive terms, to the modern and enlightened character that is already so strong in Plato and certainly in Aristotle. The question as to what being really is, this famous and indeed fundamental question of Aristotle's Metaphysics, the question around which metaphysics in Aristotle essentially turns, goes back to Plato and the Eleatic tradition. And it ultimately only reflects the kinds of problems that had already emerged amongst these thinkers. For when Plato distinguishes that which possesses true being, or the Idea, from τὸ μὴ ὄν [to mē on], or non-being – in other words, from the individuated world and the world of space – that is basically a very similar distinction to that between τὸ ὄν [to on] or εἶναι [einai], namely being, on the one side and the τὰ ὄντα [ta onta], namely beings, on the other. This thematic of ontological difference is therefore already implicit in Plato, as it also is, in a very similar way, in Aristotle. And this seems to confirm what I was saying in the last session. In other words, the emphatic concept of being which you find in the new fundamental ontology is actually, sensu strictissimo, not the concept of being at all but rather the concept of essence. For this concept of being – as you can see precisely from the distinction between what truly is and the realm of non-being, space, τὸ μὴ ὄν [to mē on], the world of δόξα [doxa], of appearance – derives from the world of Ideas as conceived by Plato. Thus you will only properly understand the concept of being in modern ontology when you see it as an attempted reconstruction of the metaphysical concept of the idea that exists absolutely in its own right, as we find it in Plato, and which Plato himself inherited from the Eleatic tradition.