Before we go any further I would just like to return to something from the last session, since I have heard that I may not have made myself sufficiently clear on the point in question, and it is very important to me that you really understand the quite fundamental considerations that we need to introduce in this connection. And it concerns what I am saying about the problem of circular reasoning in philosophy, and specifically about Heidegger's claim that the task in philosophy is not to avoid such reasoning but to get into it at the right place. You may recall that I conceded this proposition in the general terms in which Heidegger formulates it1 and that I pointed out to you that there is indeed no philosophy which actually fails to acknowledge this. The idea of a philosophy ex nihilo, a form of thinking which produces itself simply from its own resources, an actus purus – this is not a demand, as some may naively imagine, that we should make of any philosophy. For this presupposes a very specific philosophical standpoint that deserves to be criticized in its own right. This is the standpoint of an absolute identity philosophy which claims that being and beings can be grasped adequately and completely by pure thought without remainder. And this particular thesis, which is indeed the basic thesis of idealism in the strict sense, is one which is extraordinarily controversial in philosophy generally. On the contrary, one must admit that philosophy begins somewhere – and I would add that philosophy cannot establish its beginning purely from itself. I would also concede that, to a certain extent, there is something circular about this, for the demonstrations that philosophy offers in its own distinctive way are demonstrations which generally lead to what in a certain sense has already been posited as a thesis from the beginning. Thus when we begin – and once again I turn to Kant to illustrate what I mean – in the Critique of Pure Reason by assuming that there are synthetic a priori judgements – in other words, that there is such a thing as pure mathematics and pure theoretical physics – then the argument of the work amounts in large measure to showing that there are indeed such synthetic a priori judgements. For the question how synthetic a priori judgements are possible – where indeed Kant himself admits their givenness, the thema probandum itself – is developed in the demonstration provided by the first Critique in such a way that the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements is thereby meant to be proved; what is at issue is the substance of synthetic a priori judgements and not merely the modus of such judgements, as the question itself might initially suggest.2 Yet the procedure of Heidegger's philosophy, by comparison, is different in one rather essential respect. Perhaps we could put it like this. When he affirms the general thesis of the priority of what he likes to call the question of being over against all particular beings – and the answer to this question or this thesis will be the heart of what I am trying to say in this course of lectures – then he would have to incur a certain obligation if he really wants to enter into the virtuous or legitimate circle, as he says he does. This is the obligation, once the experience that basically sustains this thinking has been presupposed, to unfold all this in a way that does full justice to the sustaining experience. Now the methodological objection which I raised at this point – and this is the methodical difference between the dogmatic existential ontology of today and every critical or dialectical philosophy – is precisely this: that Heidegger never fulfils this obligation to unfold his argument but, rather, sets up what we might describe psychologically as a taboo, or describe politically as a kind of ‘terror’, so that any approach which does not involve this priority of being with respect to beings is already rejected ab ovo and defamed as inferior, as a failure, as a betrayal of the real question. His paradoxical claim that philosophy should attempt not to avoid the circle but to enter it at the right point is indeed quite right, yet he falls short of his own thesis to the extent that he actually remains caught up in a merely circular argument. In other words, we are constantly presented with the same invocation, variation or repetition of this premise, namely the priority of being with respect to beings, while the premise itself is not explored in terms of genuine argumentation at all. And this approach is methodologically encouraged by a contempt for argument as such, and ultimately a contempt for thinking in general, which is so highly characteristic of this particular thinking. This is actually the fundamental objection that I would have to raise here. And this will also already suggest the method which I shall pursue throughout the following discussions. For I shall make good, or try to make good, what this kind of thinking withholds from us. And in encouraging, so to speak, the self-reflection of this very premise regarding the priority of being with respect to beings, I hope to show you that the premise does not actually hold – to put it bluntly, is not true. This is the task I have set myself here. And I hope I have perhaps already indicated, at least in this particular regard, something of the difference between thinking of this Heideggerean type and thinking of the Kantian type, which I introduced all too briefly in the last session. As for the substantive implications of this difference, this is something about which I shall perhaps have more say today, or certainly in our next session.
But let me return to the historical aspects which I went into last time with a very specific intention in mind. Let me come back, in other words, to the point (to repeat this in one sentence) that the so-called question concerning being, often dubiously expressed by Heidegger simply as ‘the question of being’, in the form in which it has come down to us actually goes back to Aristotle. It goes back to the question raised in the Metaphysics: What is ‘being’, properly speaking? And behind this Aristotelian formulation there stands the Platonic problematic of the doctrine of the Ideas, namely the distinction between that which truly possesses being and those beings which are consigned to the realm of mere ‘opinion’ and identified with the sensible world, a world that is ultimately characterized by Plato as simply that of non-being, as τὸ μὴ ὄν [to mē on]. This Platonic view itself (if you will allow me to take the historical account a little further back) presupposes the Eleatic tradition which indeed Plato basically took up into his own philosophy and thereby liberated, so to speak, from the abstract universality that formerly belonged to it. And that was the thesis – already found in Xenophanes but fully developed only in the great poem of Parmenides – that nothing really exists but being, and that all specific and particular beings, by contrast, ultimately belong to a purely deceptive world that does not properly exist at all. This doctrine of Parmenides, whom Heidegger indeed declares a pre-eminent thinker, underlies all ontology and is repeated by Heidegger in this archaic form, in a form, we might say, that has not yet been differentiated through enlightened reflections or conceptual determinations of any kind. Now it is important to me that you should be quite clear about the achievements of the Eleatic tradition – which incidentally finds its direct contrapuntal response in Heraclitus and his own universal and comprehensive principle of becoming – since the Eleatic doctrine actually involves an unparalleled advance in philosophical consciousness. And the progressive aspect here is this: in the context of older Greek speculation, amongst the first of the pre-Socratics – for Parmenides and Heraclitus already belong to the last pre-Socratic generation – and thus before these two, the earlier thinkers had always posited various more or less arbitrarily conceived fundamental principles at the basis of everything. These principles had initially assumed the form of something like primal ‘life forces’, although they subsequently tended to undergo a kind of rejuvenation, as it were, becoming ever thinner but also more comprehensive in the process. Thus the ancient doctrine of the ἀρχή [archē] was supplanted by the doctrine of being itself as the ground and essence of all things. Now the word ἀρχή [archē] already enjoyed a double meaning, one which returns again and again in ancient ontological speculation and in later ontological philosophies as well. On the one hand the word relates to the concept of ‘origin’. For ἀρχή [archē] means ‘the First’, what is there first of all, the immemorially old. This is the archaic sense of the word. But ἀρχή [archē] also means ‘principle’ in the specific sense of the most universal and all-embracing principle on which the constitution of any beings whatever, or indeed any particular realm whatever, is supposed to rest. And the same double meaning returns in the Latin translation of this word as principium and prevails throughout philosophy in the sense it assumed with the Aristotelian expression, or the expression perhaps introduced by the Aristotelian scholiasts, namely πρώτη φιλοσοφία [prōtē philosophia] or ‘first philosophy’.3
I referred to the extraordinary advance achieved by consciousness in arriving at this concept of being as the utterly original principle in contrast to the particular and relatively arbitrary principles that were posited before – whether it was the ‘water’ of venerable Thales, the ‘air’ of Anaximenes, or again τὸ ἄπειρον [to apeiron], the unlimited space of Anaximander. But of course, in saying that the newly acquired concept of being was an extraordinary advance for consciousness, I have already turned against a thesis of fundamental ontology itself. I have not offered this entire rather cursory account of what we might call the primordial history of ontology out of a merely historical interest in the story of philosophy. For the interest that governs these lectures, if we follow the usual dichotomy, is a systematic interest, one concerned solely with the truth of the matter in question rather than with how something or other has come to be. Nonetheless, I cannot avoid pointing out how enormously fruitful and helpful it would be for the understanding of the so-called ontological problematic if someone did undertake to write something like a history of the concept of being in the grand style. I presented this little historical excursus for substantive reasons, and specifically in relation to a Heideggerean thesis which I think can be challenged in the very field where Heidegger has established a kind of dictatorship, namely in that concerned with the connection between philosophy and classical philology or with the history of ancient philosophy. If, as the history of early Greek philosophy genuinely appears to me to show, the concept of being is indeed the product of reflection rather than what lies at the beginning, then this implies in any case, historically speaking, that the experience of being is not prior with respect to the experience of particular beings in the way that Heidegger associates this with ancient philosophy, and especially with the earlier pre-Socratics. Much obeisance has now been paid to the idea that in every ancient philosophy, whether we are talking about Parmenides or Heraclitus, or indeed, as I have recently learnt, about Empedocles, we invariably encounter nothing but the same thing: being, being, and being. In his famous address What is Metaphysics?, which is amongst the first of his texts that enacts a radical turn to the question of being independently of its relation to Dasein, a famous piece that was republished in 1949, Heidegger says, and I quote: ‘By recalling the beginning of that history in which being unveiled itself in the thinking of the Greeks, it can be shown that the Greeks from early on experienced the being of beings as the presence of what is present.’4 And here he can certainly appeal to certain passages in the poem of Parmenides that speak of ‘presencing’, although I do not wish to go into these points now. I do not cite this passage from Heidegger because we already have to decide about concepts such as ‘perceive’ and ‘perceivability’ and ‘presencing’, about whose alleged concreteness I hope to say something later on. I cite it simply in relation to Heidegger's thesis that the history of philosophy, the beginning of the history of philosophy, is just the question concerning being, and indeed that everything that comes later is a kind of decadence, as they would say in the East. I want to say that this thesis is untenable precisely because the concept of being itself has only been attained through a process of reflection stretching over centuries, or, let me say directly, through a certain abstraction, a process that for its part arises from the manifest inadequacy of earlier more or less arbitrary particular principles or kinds of stuff (whatever they may be) that the earliest thinkers invoked in order to explain everything that exists. For what we are talking about here are indeed attempts at explanation in the face of the variety and multiplicity of phenomena. And the unity of Western consciousness, if there is such a thing, lies precisely in this kind of explanatory principle. In other words, it is an attempt to discover a unified ground for the multiplicity of appearances. And the greater the multiplicity, the greater the need for an explanatory ground that is ever more universal and all-embracing. And the concept of being now steps in to provide the requisite universality. I should add in parenthesis that the concept of ground that is deployed here naturally has something very problematic about it. In other words, the more universal these principles of explanation become, the more they end up as a mere synthesis, a mere summary description, a mere form for what they encompass. And throughout the history of philosophy we may repeatedly observe how the most universal form of that which is to be explained in each case is conflated with the ground through which it is meant to be explained. One of the greatest achievements of Hegel's Science of Logic – the second volume of which, contrary to common assumptions, actually belongs within the context of the entire European Enlightenment – is precisely that it provides a particularly stringent critique of this conflation of the most general or universal concept of things with the ground that is supposed to explain them.
Now the Heideggerean school, of course, would strenuously object to the account of early Greek philosophy as I have just presented it to you. Here I would simply remind you that the celebrated dictum of Parmenides – which does not play that much of a role in Heidegger, since it hardly fits in with his own conception, and which he constantly tries to reinterpret through one device or another – namely the dictum that being and thinking are the same,5 actually confirms what I was saying earlier. It confirms, in other words, that the concept of being we are talking about is, we could say, a result, a historical result, something that was attained only through a process; that this concept of being in the first instance is nothing other than the highest abstraction, as we would describe this today in language very alien to antiquity; and this abstraction, precisely because it turns away from all particular beings, is no longer anything more than pure thought. Thus pure abstraction, as it appears objectively in the concept of being, is supposed to be identical with the thinking which has produced this abstraction, and which is all that is still present, all that still remains, in this abstraction. To this extent, therefore, I believe that this decisive dictum of Parmenides, which essentially provided the ground for the subsequent identification of the Ideas or the highest ontological categories with Reason, with the λόγος [logos], fully supports the interpretation which I have suggested – namely that the concept of being itself was attained by philosophy, that this concept is something mediated (in the first instance historically mediated, namely through an ongoing act of abstraction). I am well aware that the interpretation I have offered here can only be anathema in orthodox Heideggerean circles, that they will say that I am still caught up in the European rationalist tradition which was never able to understand the pre-Socratics and their central ‘concern’ – and this is indeed the word people like to use here, and it is certainly the right place for it. In this connection Heidegger or his adepts would claim it is a misunderstanding to connect these vanished ἀρχαί [archai] with elemental material forces or substances, or with universal concepts. For what they mean, what they allegedly must have meant, is, of course: being, being, being – even though the concept of being is not yet found here. For the question of being, at least implicitly, is what is prior. Now I certainly do not want to make things too easy for myself with regard to this question, although the undifferentiated way in which any particular questions that philosophy might raise repeatedly provoke the same response should surely make us extremely sceptical about the form of the question itself. I have already pointed out that such an interpretation is contradicted by the historically rather late emergence of the so-called question of being in a period which can already be described as one of demythologization, of an advanced Greek ‘enlightenment’. But the thesis which might be raised in objection to me here would be right to claim that, with the ἀρχαί [archai] in their older form (in Parmenides and the Eleatics themselves we are already talking about something else), no distinction whatsoever is drawn between beings and being, between τὰ ὄντα [ta onta] and τὸ ὄν [to on] as the power at work in things. I would also draw your attention to the fact that this interpretation of being – that is, of the highest abstraction, as at once the effective power or original cause of all beings – a notion which looks very mythological to us, is still at work in Plato's thought, which can certainly no longer be described as archaic. For in Plato the Ideas are clearly conceived both as universal concepts and as effective powers, as powers which actually and originally generate the phenomena that are grasped under these concepts. In the ancient conceptions of the ἀρχή [archē] there is still no distinction between what I might call its ontological meaning – what it signifies as being, as an essential nature, independently of the beings that it includes – and its interpretation as the highest and most comprehensive category of beings, namely as some kind of material stuff. The earliest speculations of Western thought owe their distinctive aura to this fact that essence and being are here inseparably involved with each other, that the highest conceptions applied to particular beings appear at the same time as the essential natures that lie beyond all beings. This aura consists in the way these speculations are meant to be metaphysical and transcendent in character, to be more than merely factical description, while yet possessing something of that welcome concreteness that strikes us in such ideas and conceptions as water, air, the four elements of Empedocles, or whatever it happens to be. But to say that such distinction is still absent from the ἀρχαί [archai] implies that the reflection which actually yields the concept of being (what Heideggerean philosophy calls the question of being) has not really yet been accomplished in such philosophy. It implies, in other words, that, in such philosophy, the question of being did not actually precede, in a supposedly more ‘original’ fashion, the question concerning beings, that the distinction between being and beings is not yet made at all, that a tentative consciousness in search of explanation has not yet distinguished between being, as that which lies behind appearances, and the comprehensive categories that apply to particular beings. It is only when both of these moments have been differentiated, or only through a process of reflection, that the concept of being itself can arise at all. So let me formulate one of the fundamental theses which I have developed here in a basically historical rather than a systematic way: the concept of being itself is not the ‘original’ question that Heideggerean philosophy would have us believe that it is. It is a concept of reflection in the sense of those concepts that Kant subjected to criticism in his ‘Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection’ when they are hypostasized – in other words, when they are treated as an expression of true being as such. On this view of things, the concept of being is not, as we are encouraged to believe, something that is very ancient but something rather late – and here too I cannot help advising some scepticism towards the dogma that what is oldest, what has been there from the first, must inevitably therefore be what is more true. I believe I have already said something about this, and I should simply add here that I can hardly think of anything more fateful in our cultural and intellectual tradition than what Goethe in old age expressed in one of his last letters when he spoke of the ancient truth that we can allegedly never lose.6
But there is another aspect to this question of being, apart from the need for a more comprehensive explanation of the manifold character of experience than can be provided by simply plucking out particular features or characteristics of that manifold experience. And I would further like to draw your attention to this aspect because I believe that it is also relevant, in a very analogous way, to the modern ontology and the modern philosophy of being. For you must not simply isolate philosophy as one realm in the world of the mind. Even if, like Heidegger himself, we reject the idea of philosophy as a kind of particular science or discipline, we must not for that reason effectively detach philosophy from its relationship with the totality of conscious experience. Now it seems to me that the early history of philosophy, which ended up in questions concerning being in the Eleatic tradition and then in classical Greek philosophy itself, was motivated, for its part, by the history of science. Heidegger speaks very contemptuously both of the history of science and of the accompanying insight that these ancient principles, or ἀρχαί [archai], could no longer be reconciled with advances attained in the course of the Greek enlightenment. Thus it is as if the original questions, the pure questions that belong to philosophy, were now being conflated with merely scientific questions. But you must not forget that the separation of sciences from philosophy itself, just like the transition to the concept of being, is a relatively late result. And I would say that these two processes – the detachment of philosophy from science and the concentration of philosophy on the question of what being really is or what true being is – are the same processes. One cannot simply deny, ad maiorem gloriam philosophiae, that the limitation set upon the material claims of philosophy is drastically connected with the way that more and more fragments are wrested from the clutches of philosophy by the individual sciences. Nor that the individual sciences have taken control of ever more numerous areas and emancipated themselves from the primacy of free and unfettered explanation and speculation. Whether this process is a blessing or, as the Heideggerean school certainly seems to think, ultimately a curse is not something I would like to decide on here. I would think that what we are dealing with is a model of the dialectic of enlightenment, where the advance in one decisive respect, namely in the progress of scientific knowledge, is paid for by an equally great loss as our awareness of the whole is splintered by the division of labour in the particular disciplines. In any case, this so-called question of being is actually a kind of residue: in the first instance, historically speaking, being is what is left over for philosophy. I would almost say, if you forgive the frivolity, that it is the one branch left to philosophy once the others – medicine, geography, or whatever other branches there were in antiquity – have robbed it of their specific claims with regard to particular beings. In the end, all philosophy has is ‘being’, which it now has to deal with. That may seem somewhat impoverished and monotonous, but at least its claim to being is not something that can be denied to philosophy. And, even today, amongst the most serious of scientists and the most advanced of physicists there are those who solemnly declare their agreement about the residue of being that is left for philosophy.7 This residual character of being, historical as it is, is remarkably concordant with the fact that the concept of being, in its logical genesis, is indeed what remains once we set aside all particular beings, namely everything that the sciences have arrogated for themselves. In one place, in a rather famous passage of special pathos, Heidegger says that ‘thinking has descended into the poverty of its provisional essence.’8 Now I believe that this ‘provisional essence’ is one thing we could talk about. But he is certainly quite right about the ‘descent into poverty’. This descent into poverty lies in the way that philosophy has been ever more deprived of its concrete content, has become a kind of residual philosophy. And our subsequent considerations will show that the question concerning being, even in its internal philosophical structure, reveals itself again and again as a residual philosophy. In other words, that the question concerning what is utterly ‘first’ is actually the question concerning what is supposedly left once the subjective production costs of thought have been subtracted from thought itself. The new ontology finds itself in a very similar position. For it stands, as I have already suggested to you, in pronounced opposition to scientism, and to the positive sciences, for the reason which you will already have understood from our earlier sessions: all of these sciences unfold in relation to beings that are already constituted and can therefore only be regarded as ‘forgetful of being’, as Heidegger puts it. In other words, they would always fail to remember being as that which is prior to anything else – which is very much what came to pass with the philosophy of being in ancient thought.
But I believe – and this is where I wish to close for today – that there is a kind of correlation between ontology on the one side, as that which is left once science has invaded philosophy at almost every corner and quarter, and the positive sciences on the other side. In other words, the ontological dimension, in that all-encompassing purity with which fundamental philosophy presents it to us, is itself quite impossible without the pressure exerted by scientism. Thus the relationship that obtains here is somewhat analogous to that between the process of abstraction in art and the rise of photography, without which this process is inconceivable and which this latter simultaneously negates. A student of Heidegger's – I am thinking of Bröcker in Kiel9 – has recently defended the claim that logical positivism, namely the most advanced method of the positive sciences, is the truth for the first level of consciousness, as it were, for the sphere of facticity, but that over and above that, as in the Christian paradox, there rises a sphere of pure being,10 as this is expressed by fundamental ontology. Now this is indeed a rather strange and absurd view of things which looks as if it is trying to resuscitate the old idea of a twofold truth, the doctrine of two kinds of truth, yet I have to say that there is a certain consistency here. If I may put it crudely, this rather lets the cat out of the bag and clearly reveals the thought that the mere facticity of reified consciousness, on the one side, and the extravagant and vacuous purity of ontological consciousness, on the other, do indeed correspond to each other, but that the one cannot be conceived without the other, that both belong together in a correlative fashion.