You will recall how in our last session I drew attention to the tautological characterization of ‘being’ in the Letter on ‘Humanism’ where we learn that ‘it is itself’, and how I pointed out that it was not enough simply to identify this tautology, since the real task – which I have already started to undertake – is precisely to explain the tautology in question. Not exactly of course to deduce the tautology, for any attempt to deduce tautologies would instantly lead to considerable logical difficulties, but rather to explain for you exactly why we end up with this tautology. And let me just say in advance that the peculiarly elusive character of the philosophy of being is not the least source of its attractiveness, for it is extraordinarily difficult to argue with this philosophy without immediately encountering the charge that this or that is not actually what was meant at all. Now this is intimately connected with the tautological character we have been talking about. But in order to get at the root of this tautological character it might be a good idea if I do not focus simply on Heidegger's own words, which of course already exhibit that elusive quality of which I have spoken several times already. Rather, I shall try and trace this tautological character back to two principal theses already advanced by his teacher Husserl. As I believe I have shown in detail in my book Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie,1 Heidegger was far more deeply indebted to Husserl, and had far more in common with him, than he felt it wise to admit either in the immediately pre-fascist period or especially at the height of the fascist era. I am speaking here of the mature and extremely influential philosophy of Husserl's middle period, when he published the discussion of ‘categorial intuition’ from the second volume of the Logical Investigations and in particular the first book of his Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, the text which has remained the most decisively influential part of his work. For in Husserl's philosophy here you will come across two claims which are ultimately incompatible with each other, although this was not clearly realized at the time. One of these claims is evident from the very title of Husserl's principal work, namely Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology. To put it rather crudely, the concept of purity is to be understood here in a Kantian sense. Now I do not wish to go into the nuanced point that this doesn't entirely cohere with the Kantian approach, because Husserl upholds the idea of a material a priori in addition to the formal a priori which is acknowledged by Kant2 – although this too is echoed in what I described as the wavering character of Heidegger's concept of being. Thus the ‘purity’ of which Husserl speaks is supposed to be the same as that ascribed by Kant to ‘the pure concepts of the understanding’ or to ‘the pure a priori synthetic judgements’. Now from what are all these supposed to be free exactly? They are supposed to be free from anything empirical or transitory that might destroy the pure a priori character of these determinations by sharing it in any way with beings that merely exist. But the path which Husserl takes to attain this purity is completely different, methodologically speaking, from the Kantian one. And I would argue that this specific modification remained binding for Heidegger as well. In terms of the history of philosophy I should point out that Husserl was a student of Franz Brentano, and Brentano's philosophy represented a very distinctive synthesis of features of the scholastic tradition – he was originally a Catholic priest, although he later abandoned the calling – with elements of empiricism, and especially with psychological and other empirical findings. And, if you wish, you could even trace the whole aporetic structure of Heidegger's philosophy of being back to this remarkable constellation of scholastic ontology and empiricism. It would be an extremely rewarding task for anyone attempting to write a rational history of philosophy to explore these connections in detail. Husserl certainly conceived the concept of purity in the scholastic sense insofar as he understood this purity in terms of the priority of the concept over the real phenomena which it comprehends. In this respect he reinvented the approach of medieval realism and indeed – as is often the case with reactive movements (and that of Brentano and Husserl was certainly a reaction against the nominalism which it nonetheless also acknowledges) – he emphatically affirms the priority of the universalia over the res. In this respect we can see how the mediating position of Aristotle, and to a certain extent that of Aquinas as well – both of whom claimed that the essences of things are present within the actual beings or things themselves – was effectively marginalized here.3
Now you must clearly recognize that Husserl's method consisted in intuiting the concept on the basis of the given being or entity, on the basis of the particular instance which we behold, and which is perceptibly ‘given’ to us in the usual epistemological sense – for in this respect Heidegger never really ceased to consider himself a follower of Husserl. The specific point here is that one was not supposed to derive the relevant concept by a process of comparative abstraction – that is, by taking a range of objects, abstracting from all the respects in which they differ, retaining everything they have in common, and identifying the latter as the general or universal concept. On the contrary, all we allegedly have to do is to attend to any particular being or entity in its givenness in order to apprehend its essence in each case. But in Husserl this apparent immediacy, which is already implied in the concept of categorial intuition or the intuition of essences, has a moment or aspect which does not deny, and to Husserl's credit does not wish to deny, the activity or subjectivity which is involved in conceptuality. According to Husserl, all you have to do, if you wish to intuit the essence of a particular object or comprehend its essential character, is something quite simple which amounts to a kind of abstraction, namely to bracket or ignore its facticity. Thus if some object or other is ‘given’ before your very eyes, you simply need to cancel the thesis of its actuality, its individuated reality in space and time, and attend to the object precisely as it is given to you as the object of your thought, as the specific object of an ‘intentional act’, without undertaking to affirm anything at all regarding its spatio-temporal existence. What remains after this simple process of subtraction, in other words, what remains of this blackboard if you completely ignore its particular spatio-temporal character at this point in time in this particular lecture room – that is supposed to be simply identical with the essence of this blackboard. And this essence is supposed to be pure, to be binding and independent of all actual experience. Yet at the same time this essence – which is the whole point of this philosophy, which has derived the essence from just such a particular being or entity – is supposed to retain this very quality of givenness and perceptibility. And this brings me to the second desideratum of this philosophy, which we could describe as an empirical one or, if you prefer, as an empirical desideratum at the second level. For these pure essences, these a priori features, which are supposedly independent of space and time and resemble Platonic Ideas in being uniform, immutable and without beginning or end – these essences are also taken to be immediately accessible, to be immediate objects of primordial experience or, as Husserl himself usually puts it (although he also employs the expression ‘primordial experience’),4 to be ‘given in originary intuition’.
This is the constellation of elements which characterizes this entire school. And I would really emphasize that this specific character actually provides the key for understanding what Heidegger means by the concept of being as such, and how these mutually exclusive predicates of immediate givenness and intuitive immediacy on the one hand and purity and a priority on the other are both fulfilled at once. It also helps us to understand how we are supposed to reach this pure and a priori level through a relatively simple act, namely by setting aside the spatial and temporal determinations of whatever is intuited in any given case. In order to be precise, I should also add that this theory of subtraction, this process of abstracting from concrete individuation, is not the only interpretation which Husserl provides in this regard. For in an earlier and perhaps even more important text for the reception of these things – the sixth investigation in the second volume of the Logical Investigations – he adopted a rather different approach. Here he develops a theory of categorial intuition according to which we can become directly aware of categorial matters or intellectual states of affairs just as we can directly intuit perceptible phenomena. Husserl never came to a clear decision between these two not entirely concordant theories because it is clear from his later writings – although this can already be traced back to the writings of his middle period – that the entire construction did not really satisfy him, and because he believed that he would have to ground insights into intellectual states of affairs through a theory of transcendental subjectivity, in other words, in a traditional Kantian epistemological sense after all. But we can leave this particular question aside for now.5 You will easily discover that this distinctive and, as I am tempted to put it, antinomic structure which attaches to the givenness of intellectual states of affairs in Husserl – which appears antinomic because that which is essentially mediated, that which is thought and conceived as such, is also supposed to be independent in its own right. And I claim that this same antinomic structure recurs in Heidegger's philosophy, and indeed especially in his doctrine of being. What appears in Husserl under the name of purity, under the name of the intuited essence, or εἶδος [eidos] (which is just the old Platonic name for essence), is reproduced in Heidegger's concept of being, in the notion of the separation of being from the entire realm of beings. I would just point out in passing that the ambiguity we find in Husserl is simply perpetuated in Heidegger's philosophy, for, while ‘being’ is supposedly contrasted with and expressly distinguished from ‘beings’, it is not supposed to be a pure concept, or something else again. On the contrary, it is supposedly something which precedes all this, which ultimately cannot be expressed at all, which is itself indifferent to the distinction between being and beings.
Here I would just like to say a word about Heidegger's concept of ontological difference, which I have already mentioned in various contexts. For you might object here – and many formulations in Heidegger would certainly encourage you to do so – that the charge I have repeatedly levelled against Heidegger, namely that of ontologizing the ontic, is baseless precisely because he himself already expressly emphasizes the distinction between being and beings in his own doctrine of ontological difference. But this is merely an illusory claim. For it turns out – as I could easily show you in relation to numerous formulations on the part of the later Heidegger, and perhaps we shall get to discuss this – that he sets up the concept of ontological difference only in order to do away with it. And he does so with a relatively simple argument that is also relatively easy to see through, for he claims that the ontological difference itself, namely the difference of being and beings, can only be understood by analysing the meaning of being. In other words, this difference lies in the character of being itself; it belongs to being to reveal itself or to appear in the context of beings. Thus the ontological difference which is announced with such a fanfare is simply reabsorbed by the indifferent concept of being. I would ask you to believe what I am saying here, since at this particular point I do not really wish to pursue what you could call philological proof for the correctness of this thesis. But I can promise you that I will not fail to provide such detailed proof in due course, if only in the form of future publications.6
Then again we see as well how the concept of immediacy or primordial experience which Husserl ascribed to the intuition of essences also returns in Heidegger when he explicitly and indeed emphatically says that ‘being’ is not a universal concept, not even the most universal concept of all. I can substantiate this directly with a quotation that I have to hand, although it would not be difficult to find many others of the same tenor. Heidegger writes:
But now the question is whether the assessment of being as the most universal concept reaches the essence of being, or whether it so misinterprets being from the start that questioning becomes hopeless. The question is whether being can count only as the most universal concept that is unavoidably involved in all particular concepts, or whether being has a completely different essence, and thus is anything but the object of an ‘ontology’, if one takes this word in its established meaning.7
This formulation reveals something that we find in several other writers, including Sigmund Freud, where certain theses or distinctions are introduced in an apparently tentative and problematic form even when a very specific thesis is actually intended. Thus it is quite clear from other passages in Heidegger that he emphatically denies the conceptual character of what he calls ‘being’. On the one hand you have the claim that being is non-conceptual, the demand to acknowledge its immediacy, and thus the demand for a primordial experience of being in this regard. We are repeatedly assured that everything depends on some such primordial experience – although Heidegger gives a characteristically objectivist twist to this idea by insisting that this experience is not ultimately down to us at all. The process is mythologized when we are told that whether we come to experience being lies at the disposal of being itself, that being reveals or unveils itself, that being lights up for us, and indeed only for us; and, furthermore, that its hiddenness – in other words, the impossibility of immediately perceiving it – already belongs to its ontological character. On the other hand, being is supposed to be pure, or entirely independent of any individual or determinate being or entity. In other words, being is supposed to enjoy every advantage of the conceptual in comparison with the content of experience, and every advantage of immediate experience in comparison with the conceptual. The only difference from Husserl – and there is a certain objective irony here – lies in this: what was still intended by Husserl in an essentially epistemological sense as an explanation of specific states of affairs, of our capacities for specific types of insight, is now withdrawn, with a distinctive Heideggerean twist, from the subject altogether. It is thus interpreted objectively, if you will allow me to put it like that, in terms of ‘being’, which is now completely emancipated from the subject. What I would really like you to think about, now that I have recited these fundamental determinations or enactments of Heidegger's for you – and enactments seems the right word here, since they actually read like decrees – is precisely that being is not supposed to be a concept, not something that has been brought about in any way. For those of you who are following these things with direct reference to Heidegger's texts, I would like to point out that what I describe as a concept, or in Hegelian terms as something posited by the subject, is described by Heidegger in terms of teutonic neologisms or archaisms (whatever you prefer): as a realm of fabrication or ‘machination’, of that which is made merely by the subject. This kind of expression can be traced in many of Heidegger's later writings.8 In this regard the moment of subjective mediation, to which I have repeatedly drawn your attention, is already downgraded – as if it simply belonged to the superstructure of consciousness, as if it were something which a busily interfering and superfluous consciousness externally introduces and imposes, thus sacrilegiously disturbing or contaminating the purity or givenness of being itself. And Heidegger even responds to this sense of sacrilege in an objectivistic way by expressly locating this very sacrilege within the history of being. In other words, he defends the claim that being itself hardly permits any other historical relationship to it than this sacrilegious approach and the forgetfulness of being which accompanies it. We are thus eventually driven to downright Gnostic speculations about the character of being itself, as if it were a sort of Evil Demon that has already destined human beings to mistake their own relationship to it.
I think I have now shown you how these determinations of purity and immediacy really constitute the fundamental constellation of Heidegger's thought. And I believe it is not very difficult to realize the incompatibility of these two basic determinations, since the history of this incompatibility is, to put it bluntly, identical with the history of philosophy itself. For that which is pure and free from all contamination by experience cannot actually be regarded as something immediate precisely because immediacy is experience itself, something which involves a kind of primary evidence. But that which is immediately present to us is not itself pure, is not something a priori – unless the subject, the moment of reflection, also comes into it, yet this further moment of subjective reflection is precisely what is repudiated by Heidegger and fundamental ontology. In short, the construction of the concept of being, which is meant to meet these contradictory demands, cannot be redeemed if we apply a two-valued logic,9 which seems right only for a two-valued philosophy such as Heidegger's. When I claimed that it was impossible to think anything whatsoever under the term ‘being’, that this concept is entirely empty, that it eludes any further determination, this is a consequence of the aporetic reasoning which I have presented for you. In other words, I have shown, or I hope I have shown, that nothing determinate can possibly be thought here precisely on account of the contradictory character of the construction in question. For every determinate thought of what being could mean would inevitably compromise one or other of these demands – either the purity of being as distinct from beings or the primary experience or self-manifestation of being. Thus the emptiness or inconceivability of the concept of being, what I have called the elusiveness of this concept, is not merely an intellectual error but something grounded in the very structure and approach of this kind of thinking. These two contradictory demands can only be brought together in the word being – for I do not believe that we should employ the concept of being here – once every determinate distinction within being has been ruled out. And it is only by means of such determinate distinctions that we can really secure any meaning for this concept at all. Heidegger's own procedure – and once again this belongs in the realm I have rather disrespectfully described as strategic – is precisely to elevate the inconceivability or incompatibility of the moments that essentially constitute his concept of being into a distinctive advantage and particular merit on the part of this concept. Now this is connected with a rather ancient theme in the history of philosophy, which we also find in Hegel and indeed in almost all philosophies in one form or another. I am talking about the idea of a kind of original ‘Fall’ occasioned by the emergence of thought itself. This is the idea that we can no longer immediately share in some full and undivided unity on the part of being or beings, a unity which has effectively been ruptured by thought. Thus the emergence of ‘reflection’ intellectually mirrors the original Fall in the most literal sense, the process through which we have learnt to distinguish good and evil, the punishment for eating of the Tree of Knowledge, as we read in the Old Testament.10 And this philosophy interprets the punishment for eating of the Tree of Knowledge as something that essentially afflicts the process of knowing itself. In other words, the knowledge that we have subsequently acquired is inevitably forgetful of being precisely because it is a dividing, separating and distinguishing form of cognition associated with the reflective understanding. In other words, this is supposed to be an emphatically false kind of knowing. Now although this particular construction cannot be found in Heidegger in so many words, I nonetheless believe that it captures the atmosphere of his entire oeuvre. This is directly connected with the characteristically aporetic construction of the concept of being in the sense that this very lack of determinate distinction, the lack involved in our inability to think being at all, is expressly claimed by Heidegger as the privilege of such being, as the privilege which belongs to this thinking of being over and beyond all our usual and merely reflective knowledge. He acts therefore as if the practice of evocation could overcome the original Fall of reflection. Once he has ascribed this Fall itself to the history of being in a rather Gnostic way, as I pointed out before, he does not ask precisely how, if all of us, including him, are caught in a stage of mere reflection, we can possibly find the strength to revoke this approach, to share once again, at a stroke, in the undivided truth of being that, according to him, we have already forfeited for essential reasons. Instead he presents all this as a message which he allows his exegete Beaufret11 to proclaim to all the world: this turn to being, in direct contrast to all merely reflective thought, involves a ‘turning’ – not a turning simply in philosophy or the realm of knowledge but one in being itself. This looks like the crudest act of hubris which philosophy has allowed itself since time immemorial and far surpasses anything that once offended theology – which seems so well disposed to Heidegger – in the later writings of Nietzsche, such as Ecce homo.
You may now be in a rather better position to understand the peculiar cachet of Heidegger's philosophy than you could before I offered the analysis that I have developed for you today. If the words of this philosophy sound so tangible – whether in a kind of artisanal or agrarian way, as I pointed out – such language reflects an immediate claim to tangible sensuous presence, such words draw on the conception of primordial experience, on the idea of the immediacy and incomprehensibility of being. At the same time, the distinctive ontological resonance of all these words – precisely what I called their metaphysical aura – draws on the idea of purity. On the one hand, such words relate to the immediacy of the empirical world, and without this relation they could not possess the immediacy they do. On the other hand, given their pure and a priori character, they are supposedly relieved of any confrontation with the material domain. Indeed the very idea of such a confrontation would be regarded as the crudest misunderstanding, and anyone who attempted such a sacrilegious thing could expect to be charged with forgetfulness of being, if not accused of something even worse – of being an ‘inauthentic’ human being consumed by chatter or ‘idle talk’. Now this notion of idle talk has something of ‘Stop thief!’ about it. It seems rather characteristic of this philosophy – which is not so far from the traditional idea of idle talk in the sense that it also uses concepts which are not really intellectually redeemed – that it looks down on the very thinking which insists that our talk should be redeemed in terms of determinate thought, and associates it with chatter, vulgarity, everydayness and ‘the They’. I do not actually wish to be unjust to Heidegger in this regard, for I believe this is the most serious point we have come to in our reflections so far. I do not even wish to deny that there is the kind of experience that he talks so much about in terms of the word ‘being’, although every attempt to pin down this experience or express it in so many words runs the risk of succumbing to the kitsch which I surely brought out for you, even if I did not exactly demonstrate it, in reciting Heidegger's poems. Now I believe there are very few people (you must forgive the somewhat questionable example here) who, in the right state of mind at least, would fail to feel, on hearing the rustling of leaves, that the leaves are speaking to us, that there is something like a language of nature, that we are the only ones who cannot understand it, although it is a very distinctive language. The experience of music involves something of what I am intimating here: something quite particular and distinctive is communicated to us, but it somehow eludes our concepts. It is entirely legitimate that thinking should also address such phenomena, that we should try and think about what is happening here, though far too little has actually been done in this direction. This would be a fitting task for a genuine aesthetics, and a central theme for aesthetics as such.12 Yet here I believe Heidegger is guilty of arresting and reifying a kind of experience which is graced and distinguished by its intrinsically fugitive character and can never become merely thing-like. He zealously protests, of course, that ‘being’ is anything but a thing – it cannot possibly resemble a thing or manifest thing-like features for there is not supposed to be anything remotely determinate about it – yet he turns the truth we sense in the rustling of leaves or the flow of music, which lies precisely in its fugitive and perishable character, into something merely positive in the concept of ‘being itself’ – into something that we can have and hold, into something which is, after all, essentially an object of thought. And it is in this move to positivity, where the content is thereby instantly converted to untruth, that the πρῶτον ψεῦδος [prōton pseudos] of this philosophy consists. For the truth of such experience is inseparable from its fugitive character. As soon as it is seized and arrested, as soon as it is transformed into a general structure, which is what Heidegger invariably does, it already becomes delusory, already becomes reified. And it is precisely here that we find a spurious aesthetizing of thought where forms of experience that are possible only in art, and then only by virtue of that semblance which belongs to art, are treated as if this semblance were immediately available to us in the realm of knowledge. And this parody of art in a false claim to knowledge is also the origin of false art.