The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology after Metaphysics

THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION, “WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?” CONSISTS IN OUR CORRESPONDING TO [ANSWERING TO] THAT TOWARDS WHICH PHILOSOPHY IS ON THE WAY. AND THAT IS—THE BEING OF BEING. IN SUCH A CORRESPONDENCE WE LISTEN FROM THE VERY OUTSET TO THAT WHICH PHILOSOPHY HAS ALREADY SAID TO US, PHILOSOPHY, THAT IS, PHILOSOPHIA UNDERSTOOD IN THE GREEK SENSE. THAT IS WHY WE ATTAIN CORRESPONDENCE, THAT IS, AN ANSWER TO OUR QUESTION, ONLY WHEN WE REMAIN IN CONVERSATION WITH THAT TO WHICH THE TRADITION OF PHILOSOPHY DELIVERS US, THAT IS, LIBERATES US. WE FIND THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION, “WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?” NOT THROUGH HISTORICAL ASSERTIONS ABOUT THE DEFINITIONS OF PHILOSOPHY BUT THROUGH CONVERSING WITH THAT WHICH HAS BEEN HANDED DOWN TO US AS THE BEING OF BEING.

—MARTIN HEIDEGGER, WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? (1956)

TODAY, IN 2009, ONLY THIRTY-THREE YEARS AFTER HEIDEGGER’S death, and while we are still waiting for more than twenty volumes of his complete works (from a total of 102 volumes, not counting his correspondence)¹ to be published, there is no question that his thinking has changed philosophy forever. This is not because there is more secondary literature on him than on any other philosopher of the twentieth century,² including Ludwig Wittgenstein, nor because every philosopher after the publication of Being and Time had to, directly or indirectly, come to terms with his thought, including Wittgenstein himself,³ nor even because Heidegger invented a new philosophy, hermeneutics,⁴ able to “amend”⁵ past positions. Instead, it is because he brought philosophy back to its essential realm: the difference between Being and beings.

This first chapter is entitled “Being Destroyed” because it should raise the problem of whether the genitive of Being is objective or subjective. Is it we who are destroying Being (objective), or is Being being destroyed independently from us (subjective)? This same problem arises with the Seinsvergessenheit, the oblivion of Being, because the question is whether it is we who have forgotten Being (objective) or Being that has forgotten us (subjective). Who is in the driver’s seat, Being or us? In order to elucidate this problem, it is necessary to put forward first the destruction of metaphysics to retrieve the “question” of Being, since “questions are paths to an answer.”⁶ “The question of Being attains true concreteness only when we carry out the destructuring of the ontological tradition.”⁷

The term “Destruktion” was probably borrowed by Heidegger from Luther,⁸ who used it in order to dismantle the tradition of the ecclesiastical schools that prevented original Christianity by conceptualizing it in terms of Greek philosophy (in other words, Luther used Destruktion to refer to a sort of critique of institutional theology in the name of the original authenticity of the evangelical message). Heidegger used it for the first time in the 1920s, in his lecture courses in Freiburg and Marburg and then in Being and Time.⁹ My belief is that this term is at the center of Heidegger’s philosophy and that all his thought should be understood as a destruction of metaphysics, because it is through this destruction that Heidegger discovered that “Being is determined as presence by time.”¹⁰ Retrieving the question of Being from the underground of metaphysics was also a sort of destruction, because it tried to polish a term and tradition in order to retrieve its ontological dimension. Although he used this concept rarely in his writings, and though it is impossible to discuss it without also analyzing the problem of “repetition,” “dialogue,” or “conversation,” “destruction” is not an isolated word within his works; it stands for the totality of a way of accounting for a path to follow: the history of Being.

The mistake of traditional metaphysics has been to apply categories developed for the regions of objective nature to the region of Dasein. Heidegger explained that destruction in Being and Time did not mean “dismantling as demolishing but as purifying in the direction of freeing basic metaphysical positions.”¹¹ But what are these “basic metaphysical positions”? What are we supposed to destroy? Philosophy must destroy all that covers up the sense of Being, the unproven concepts, the functional context, the structures piled on top of one another that make the sense of Being unrecognizable, in order to reveal hitherto unnoticed possibilities. These structures can be found in the passages in which the question of existence, of the “Being in beings,” is touched on or is unconsciously implicit. Heidegger wants to deconstruct the metaphysical categories in order to recognize their negative and positive consequences, compelling them back to their forgotten source. It is from this source that we will learn how they dominate, through their grammatical third-person-singular Being, the ground configuration. Because the “the concept of Being that has been accepted up to now does not suffice to name everything that ‘is,’” ¹² we will have to “work out” new forms and interpretations of Being without the intention of naming everything that “is.” In his course from 1927, Heidegger gave a very clear indication of the goal of destruction, showing its relation to the problem of construction in philosophy:

Construction in philosophy is necessarily destruction, that is to say, a de-constructing of traditional concepts carried out in a historical recursion to the tradition. And this is not a negation of the tradition or a condemnation of it as worthless; quite the reverse, it signifies precisely a positive appropriation of tradition. Because destruction belongs to construction, philosophical cognition is essentially at the same time, in a certain sense, historical cognition.¹³

Heidegger undertook his destruction of the history of ontology in terms of the history of Being in order to destroy the layers covering up the original nature of Being, those layers that metaphysical thinking has constructed. This destruction will bring forward a new fundamental question that will be expressed in terms of “remains” by the six philosophers I will analyze in the second chapter. But before analyzing Heidegger’s destruction, it is necessary to distinguish it sharply from Derrida’s idea of déconstruction,¹⁴ because although the terms have much in common, the French master developed and modified Heidegger’s term in a way that should be immediately elucidated so as to avoid confusion. Derrida explained that although his deconstruction “is also a thinking of Being, of metaphysics, thus a discussion that has it out, s’explique avec, the authority of Being,”¹⁵ it “is not a philosophy”¹⁶ and can be reduced “to neither a method nor an analysis.”¹⁷ When he developed it for the first time, he had the feeling that he was translating two words from Heidegger’s vocabulary: “Abbau” and “Destruktion,” but he still thought that deconstruction “is not demolition or destruction,”¹⁸ because it is not reducible to the Lutheran or Heideggerian tradition, because it is political; it is an effort “not yielding to the occupying power, or to any kind of hegemony”¹⁹ that implies the memory of the weak or the powerless—in other words, it is “a way of reminding the other and reminding me, myself, of the limits of the power, of the mastery.”²⁰ This limit is a recognition that there will always be an unequivocal domination in our mode of thinking, communicating, and living over the mode of others, and vice versa, thus that all our thought is structured in terms of dichotomies (such as Being versus nothingness or even man versus woman) not simply opposed in their meanings but organized in such a way as to give the first term cultural, political, and institutional priority. Derrida uses deconstruction as a development of Heidegger’s destruction in order to show how both the Western philosophical tradition and everyday thought, language, and culture are structured and dependent from these dichotomies. If Heidegger, as we will see, has used destruction to show that Western philosophy, in its search for the answer to the question of Being, has always determined Being as presence, Derrida went further beyond ontology to demonstrate how this same presentness also determined the referred dichotomies. Although most of Derrida’s deconstructionism is intended to dig out forces of signification and undo them within the text itself in order to deconstruct not the meaning but the claim of unequivocal domination of the first signifier over the second, he has also developed a remains of Being that I will analyze in the second chapter.

The “destructuring of the history of ontology,” says Heidegger in Being and Time, “essentially belongs to the formulation of the question of Being and is possible solely within such a formulation,”²¹ because the goal is not only to achieve clarity regarding the concept of Being but also regarding the question of Being, thus “to reach the point where we can come to terms with it in a controlled fashion.”²² Heidegger achieved such clarity both because he exposed the intrinsic nature of Western thought (metaphysical or representational knowledge) and reformulated the fundamental question of philosophy (why are there beings at all instead of nothing?) and because he used these two factors to bring forward a question capable of responding to the end of metaphysics. The intrinsic nature of metaphysics has been exposed through the foundation of ancient ontology in light of the problem of temporality. In one of the most important passages of Being and Time, he explained that the ancient interpretation of the Being of beings was oriented toward the “world” in the broadest sense and that it gained its understanding of Being from time.

The outward evidence of this . . . is the determination of the meaning of Being as “parousia” or “ousia,” which ontologically and temporally means “presence,” “Anwesenheit.” Beings are grasped in their Being as “presence”; that is to say, they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time, the present. . . . Dasein, that is, the Being of human being, is delineated as zoon logon echon, that creature whose being is essentially determined by its ability to speak. Leigen is the guideline for arriving at the structures of Being of the beings we encounter in speech and discussion. . . . The possibility of a more radical conception of the problem of Being grows with the continuing development of the ontological guideline itself, that is, with the “hermeneutics” of the logos. . . . Aristotle “no longer has any understanding” of it for this reason, that he places it on a more radical foundation and transcends it. Legein itself, or noein—the simple apprehension of something objectively present in its pure objective presence [Vorhandenheit], which Parmenides already used as a guide for interpreting Being—has the temporal structure of a pure “making present” of something. Beings, which show themselves in and for this making present and which are understood as genuine beings, are accordingly interpreted with regard to the present; that is to say, they are conceived as presence (ousia).²³

This passage represents the core of Heidegger’s so-called revolution in philosophy, because it is from here that the “radical transformation, Wandel, of the human being’s historical position toward Being”²⁴ begins, that is, the overcoming of metaphysics. Although Being is not a thing, nothing temporal, from the dawn of Western European thinking Being was determined by time as presence: it means the same as presencing, and presence speaks of, from, and for the present. It is with Plato that metaphysics begins, where the distinction of essence (whatness) and existence (thatness), the difference between Being and beings, is obscured, and Being as such is exclusively thought in terms of its relation to beings as their cause (causa prima, causa sui) and thus itself as the highest of those beings (summum ens). When the distinction of essence and existence arises, it is always the first that prevails; the priority of essence over existence leads to an emphasis on beings, on essence as what factually exists here and now. The original meaning of existence as physis, originating or arising, is lost, and Being is set up as the permanent nominal presence. Through this interpretation, metaphysics also becomes the history of the oblivion of Being. This oblivion had various consequences, such as translating the “substrate,” what came to presence, what lies there beforehand, what lies-in-front, known by the Romans as subjectum. But subjectum has nothing to do with the subject in the sense of an “I” (Ego), and in the Middle Ages subjectum was used for everything that lies-in-front, Vorliegende. How did the ego (“I”) get the distinction of being the only subject, the only underlying reality? Heidegger explained that this distinction of the ego appeared for the first time with Descartes, because he was searching for certitude:

Descartes was looking for a fundamentum absolutum inconcussum. But this can only be one’s own I. For only I myself am present everywhere, whether I think, whether I doubt, whether I wish, or whether I take a position toward something. Therefore, when searching for an absolute secure foundation in thinking, the I becomes what lies-in-front [Vorliegendes] in an outstanding sense because it is something indubitable. From then on, “subject” progressively became the term for I. Object now became all that stands over against the I and its thinking, by being able to be determined through the principles and categories of this thinking.²⁵

Destroying these layers covering up the original nature of Being, the layers that metaphysical thinking has constructed, has been undertaken in terms of the history of Being, because what is present in its presence became the completion of the extreme possibilities of the oblivion of Being. By retrieving the meaning of Being and formulating a new question capable of corresponding to its meaning, Heidegger opened the way to think Being from now in such a fashion that the oblivion essentially belongs to it instead of affecting it.

In the introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger immediately stated that “it is constitutive of the being of Dasein to have, in its very Being, a relation of being to this Being.”²⁶ And in his dialogue with Professor Tezuka in 1954, he emphasized this “relation” as the “hermeneutical relation” with “respect to bringing tidings, with respect to preserving a message.”²⁷ Although this message obviously is the Being of beings, which is what calls man to his essential Being, why did Heidegger emphasize that this relation had to be hermeneutical? This relation had to be called hermeneutical “because it brings the tidings of that message.”²⁸ If philosophy is the way toward the tidings of the Being of beings, toward the tidings of the difference between Being and beings, and even toward the tidings of that which has been handed down to us as the Being of beings, then “a loosening of the sclerotic tradition and a dissolving of the concealments produced by it is necessary.”²⁹ This is the philosophical task of destructuring metaphysics.

Metaphysics thinks Being as a whole, in the manner of representational thinking, which justifies principles such as Leibniz’s principle of reason, nihil est sine ratione, or foundations such as Descartes’ fundamentum absolutum inconcussum. But after Leibniz and Descartes, in all modern thinking, humans have started to experience themselves as an “I” that relates to the world in such a way “that it renders this world to itself in the form of connections correctly established between its representations—that means judgments—and thus sets itself over against this world as to an object.”³⁰ If Being’s grammatical category that dominates our understanding is the third-person singular or the present indicative “is,” it must be through this same “is” that we have conceptualized for ourselves the infinitive “to be.” This grammatical hierarchy, this articulated third-person-singular ontology, which we could also call “authority,” has governed Western historical Being since antiquity. Determined as objectness, Being has been forgotten in favor of what is called “the condition of the possibility,” hence the rational ground of beings, creating a way of looking at the world based on metaphysical-scientific authority. Philosophy must examine science not for its own sake but because it is involved in the abandonment of Being, in its conception of Being as representation where only what is made and what we can make is valued. Science and technology’s objectivistic nature, which Heidegger calls Ge-Stell (best translated as framing, frame), the Christian dogma, “which explains all beings in their origin as ens creatum,”³¹ and Descartes’ man-centered metaphysics all have in common man’s essence “framed, claimed, and challenged by a power which man himself does not control.”³² It is this rational way of looking at the world that has made unavoidable the alienated, unhoused, persistently violent state of modern technological human beings. In the globalized world, where rapid ecological and political changes have been implemented by these scientific applications, in order to increase social divisions that favored two World Wars (today we call them oil wars), the problem of Being becomes essential,³³ because it is the only way to seek the ground of these issues and because “every way of thinking takes its way already within the total relation of Being and man’s nature, or else it is not thinking at all.”³⁴

According to Heidegger, it is essential to raise again the question of Being not only because it is a long-forgotten question and it is prior to other questions about knowledge and the sciences, but mostly because it is part of Dasein’s³⁵ nature. But in order to raise it again, it is necessary to recognize how it must be approached by way of an analysis of Dasein, since it is Dasein that asks the question about Being. In asking this question, it finds itself “in between” the subject and the world. Dasein is not the world, the subject, nor a property of both; it is the relation, the in-between that does not arise from the subject coming together with the world but is Dasein itself. Dasein unifies the traditional tripartition of man into body, soul, and spirit in order to avoid locating its essence in a specific faculty, in particular that of Reason, of the rational animal. Dasein is not rational; its central feature (along with “thrownness” and “fallenness”) is “existence,” because it has to decide how to be.³⁶ It is this essential characteristic that makes Dasein not a rational being but, more profoundly, a relationship to Being, upon which man must decide if he wants to exist as a predator of objectivity or as a preserver of the tidings. In Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Heidegger also specified Dasein as “the ‘between’ which has the character of a mid-point that is open and thus sheltering, between the arrival and flight of gods and man, who is rooted in that ‘between.’” ³⁷ In other words, Dasein exists for the sake of Being, since it is essentially the guardianship of being. Being cannot be defined by attributing beings to it that derive from higher concepts or lower ones, because it is a self-evident concept used in all knowledge, practices, and actions. Science uses it all the time. Biology’s propositions do not describe the intrinsic reality of beings, because what science in general describes is secondary to another sense of being, without which we could not even develop the most elemental natural science. Unlike the being of quantum physics, this other sense of being upon which the sciences depend is precisely the one we all understand. Who does not understand that “the paper is white” or that “I am in love”? The problem does not only lie, as Heidegger explained in Being and Time, in the fact that “we live already in an understanding of Being” or the fact “that the meaning of Being is at the same time shrouded in darkness,” which “proves the fundamental necessity of repeating the question of the meaning of Being,”³⁸ but also in its contrary:

Presuming that we did not understand Being at all, presuming that the word Being did not even have that evanescent meaning, then there would not be any single word at all. We ourselves could never be those who say. We would never be able to be those who we are. For to be human means to be a sayer. Human beings are yes- and no-sayers only because they are, in the ground of their essence, sayers, the sayers. That is their distinction and also their predicament. It distinguishes them from stone, plant, and animal, but also from the gods.³⁹

Instead, we do have an understanding of Being. We are those who say, and we may distinguish ourselves from stones, plants, animals, and gods on the basis of this same saying, which helps “man in his thinking to find the path of his essential Being.”⁴⁰ Explicitly raising the question of the sense of Being again presupposes both a clarification of its meaning and a way to “work out adequately the formulation of the question.”⁴¹ But in order to work out this formulation, we must know what the meaning of Being is, or at least how past philosophers asked and answered this question. Heidegger, following Plato’s Sophist, where perplexity is raised over the meaning of what we mean by Being, notices how we must start by elucidating the semantic constitution of this question: what do we mean when we use the term “being” (seiend), and in what sense do we speak of Being (Sein)? According to Heidegger, we no longer know in what meaning to tackle Being, because this difference between Sein and Seiendes, the so-called ontological difference,⁴² has been neglected. The emphasis that metaphysical thinking has placed on Being thought exclusively as the ground of Being has made philosophy incapable of thinking this difference and therefore of thinking the relation between “identity” and “difference” in terms of what differs rather than how it was traditionally thought—as a static, abstract equation. The metaphysical tradition, particularly the medieval one, equated the difference; hence Being was understood as the essence of beings, of what exists (existentia), of the essence in the sense of the universal One that unifies everything. For Heidegger, the essence-existence distinction actually belongs to the tradition on the side of Being. Neglecting the ontological difference has increased the failure both of Western philosophy and Western civilization, because it devalued the contemplation of Being in favor of a technical use of beings. But why did science take the place of what properly should be called ontology, the study of Being?

The fundamental task of ontology is to work from within the ontological difference in order to remember that the Being of entities has been forgotten because, since Plato, it has failed to ask how it is that things are intelligible at all. It has failed because the tradition has understood knowledge as resulting from the effect, Einwirkung, of the world on a subject, even though it is actually just a mode of Dasein that is founded in being-in-the-world. The whole history of ontology has determined being in the perspective of one singular mode of time, the mode of the present; the best way to explain this is through Descartes, for whom the world consisted of objects that are already there as such before they are investigated. If this were the case, our thought would only have to re-present objects in search of objective accounts. But such a philosophy implies that we all have an impossible God’s-eye view for which the truth of things exists in the form of a timeless presence. Descartes’s conception of ontology depends upon the mathematization of the world by modern sciences, which aimed at a timeless description of the way the world really is. By being founded in being-in-the-world, Dasein, is, in contrast, essentially temporal and historical, since all our thoughts and actions take place in a temporal horizon from which we cannot step outside. Such an ontology based on the material objects of natural sciences fails to comprehend that this is just a historically specific understanding of Being as presence.

Heidegger believes every discipline—history, chemistry, or anthropology—deals with a certain area of what Being is through a certain regional ontology, thus with different sets of questions and methods. But in doing so, they are not clear about the sense in which they allow Man to be Being. Following the interpretation of Being as presence, these disciplines function spontaneously, as if it were possible to get Man as a whole into focus as if he were like any of the other objects in the world. This is a tendency constitutive of Dasein, to “understand its own being in terms of that being to which it is essentially, continually, and most of all closely related—the ‘world’ . . . in terms of what is objectively present.”⁴³ If Dasein would conceive itself on the basis of what is objectively present, then it would imply it is finished, determined, and completed, as an object might be; instead, Dasein, as long as it lives, always remains open for the future because it implies Möglich-sein, being possible, possibilities. In contrast to the rest of the objects of the world, Dasein has a relationship with its own Being, called “existence,” because it is a self-relationship, thus a Being-relationship, as we have seen. “The ontic distinction of Dasein lies in the fact that it is ontological.”⁴⁴

Now that Dasein is conscious of being ontological, aware of the ontological difference, unlike other entities, it must venture into a historico-theoretical inquiry of the Being of beings. But this is only possible because of its preontological understanding of Being, which, as a philosopher, it depends upon in order to attain a conceptual understanding. Heidegger’s task has been to restore man to his original relationship to Being because his conceptual understanding is not independent of what he does, says, and thinks but constitutively dependent on it; in other words, since Dasein is historical, its questioning about Being must also be historical.

The elaboration of the question of being must therefore receive its directive to inquire into its own history from the most proper ontological sense of the inquiry itself, as a historical one, that is, to become historical in a disciplined way in order to come to the positive appropriation of the past, to come into full possession of its most proper possibilities of inquiry. The question of the meaning of Being is led to understand itself as historical in accordance with its own way of proceeding, that is, as the provisional explication of Dasein in its temporality and historicity.⁴⁵

Since the appropriate attitude toward the past is essential for retrieving the question of Being, Heidegger uses the term “Wiederholung,” repetition or retrieval, which comes from “wiederholen,” which can either be understood as “to repeat, reiterate, say again” or “to retrieve, to get back.” In Being and Time, he uses the word in its first sense, but in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), he explains that by the retrieval of a basic problem we must understand the “opening-up of its original, long-concealed possibilities, through the working-out of which it is transformed,”⁴⁶ because in this way it comes to be preserved in its dimension as a problem. Either way, what is essential is that we retrieve the question of Being because, since Plato and Aristotle, it has fallen into oblivion. It has fallen into this oblivion because it was taken for granted as what is objectively present, forgetting the ontological difference. “Retrieve is explicit handing down,”⁴⁷ that is, going back to the possibilities of Dasein, to ask again the question of Being, in order to overthrow the metaphysical and scientific traditions that have concealed the ontological nature of Being in favor of the ontic nature of beings. Heidegger, by retrieving the ontological question through a detailed historico-traditional analysis of the ontological difference, established that philosophy must dialogue with what has been handed down to us as the Being of being. Note that the term “dialogue” (originally from the Greek dialegesthai), which involves an Auseinandersetzung, discussion, if it is referred to its Latin source, discutere, means to “smash to pieces,” and it will be used by Heidegger in order to bring back, through interpretation, what is “primary and originary, to that which, as the essential, is itself the common, and thus not needful of any subsequent alliance,” because “philosophical dialogue is interpretation as destruction.”⁴⁸

Since Dasein is a “hermeneutical relation,” with respect to preserving a message, Heidegger used the Latin concept of traditio, tradition, because its roots refer not only to “surrender” and “handing down” but also to tradere, to “handing over” a message. Heidegger probably chose this concept because he knew that tradere was originally transdare, to give (dare) over (trans), which would allow us to free not only tradition but also ourselves from covering the message. Being free from something “does not mean somehow pushing it aside and leaving it behind us. Rather all liberation from something is genuine only when it masters and appropriates whatever it is liberating itself from. Liberation from the tradition is an ever new appropriation of its newly recognized strengths.”⁴⁹ Destructuring serves to appropriate the tradition in order to free ourselves from it. This same appropriation will liberate us from traditional concepts in which the question of the “Being of beings” is concealed; in other words, when Heidegger inquires about the question of Being, he is not waiting for a specific answer but instead pointing at a certain direction of inquiry that, although it has been forgotten—or perhaps just because it has been forgotten—is the fundamental one.

It is in section 6 of Being and Time, entitled “The Task of a Destructuring of the History of Ontology,” that the term “destruction” acquired the status of a philosophical concept for the first time in the history of philosophy. The method of destruction Heidegger put forward is related not only against some cardinal concepts of the tradition but also against our understanding of ourselves as a reflection of what is objectively present: either in the sense of what is purely present, Vorhanden, or in terms derived from the world of artifacts, Zeug, Zuhandenheit. Although the metaphysical tradition determined human self-understanding in this secure way, Dasein cannot be adequately understood in categories derived from the world, because those categories prevent it from interpreting its innermost Being. “Ontologically,” explained Heidegger, “existentia means objective presence [Vorhandenheit], a kind of being which is essentially inappropriate to characterize the being which has the character of Dasein.”⁵⁰ Heidegger has shown that this metaphysical interpretation must be overcome, because by interpreting Dasein as a raw material of production it has reached the highest peak of objectification, because “science” was involved in the “abandonment of Being,”⁵¹ where “everything is functioning” and where “technology tears men loose from the earth and uproots them.”⁵² Heidegger has gone beyond modern subjectivism through destruction in order to recover the primordial Greek experience of Being, by exposing its objectiveness.

Being and Time revolutionized philosophy by explaining how beings have been grasped only in their Being as presence and by showing how every question “returns to existence.”⁵³ Existence for Heidegger is the actuality of neither the ego cogito nor the subjects who act for each other in order to become who they are. Instead, in fundamental contrast to every existentia and existence, it is “ek-static dwelling in the nearness of Being. It is the guardianship, that is, the care for Being.”⁵⁴ The task of destruction was primarily to try to draw the concepts of the tradition back to their original Greek language in order to find their hidden true origin, but Heidegger, by interpreting Western philosophy, regressing into the historical foundations of thought, questioning questions that were still unasked, and analyzing concepts such as Dasein, Being, and truth and authors such as Aristotle, Heraclitus, Kant, Hegel, became indirectly conditioned and determined by destruction.⁵⁵ It is this same destruction that unconcealed the actual state of Being, “a word which is of long standing, traditional, multifaceted, and worn-out.”⁵⁶ The first thing he has shown us is that the fundamental question of philosophy is the question of Being; second, that man must try to answer it because he has an understanding of it; and third, that this question characterizes his essence. But, although it characterizes his essence, nevertheless it has fallen into oblivion because he has interpreted Being as presence. The problem today is that we are living in the forgetfulness of the question because we have failed to acknowledge the ontological difference. Because philosophy, until now, has endorsed the traditional ontology of presence, the new task of the philosophers after retrieving and raising again the question of Being is to destroy this same tradition, in order to turn upon an original question adapted to the state of Being today.

In a lecture course Heidegger delivered at Freiburg in the winter semester of 1941 (published for the first time in 1981), we find in section 11, entitled “Being Is the Most Worn-Out and at the Same Time the Origin,” the following statements, which give us an update not only of the state of Being after destruction but also how its new state, condition, or shape (being worn out) will respond to the new fundamental question of philosophy with which we will deal now.

For we lay claim to being everywhere, wherever and whenever we experience beings, deal with them and interrogate them, or merely leave them alone. We need being because we need it in all relations to beings. In this constant and multiple use, Being is in a certain way expended. And yet we cannot say that Being is used up in this expenditure. Being remains constantly available to us. Would we wish to maintain, however, that this use of being, which we constantly rely upon, leaves Being so untouched? Is it not Being at least consumed in use? Does not the indifference of the “is,” which occurs in all saying, attest to the wornness of what we thus name? Being is certainly not grasped, but it is nevertheless worn-out and thus also “empty” and “common.” Being is the most worn-out. Being stands everywhere and at each moment in our understanding as what is most self-understood. It is thus the most worn-out coin with which we constantly pay for every relation to beings, without which payment no relation to beings as beings would be allotted us.⁵⁷

Heidegger gave several names to Being after the destruction of metaphysics that are all determined by the way metaphysics could be overcome, by the so-called end of philosophy, by the recognition of the completion of science, and by the acceptance of the ontological difference. All these determinations of Being have the characteristic of expressing both the objective and subjective genitive of Being, because there is nothing to Being as such; Being is “worn out” and “needs man for its revelation, preservation, and formation.”⁵⁸ Since “worn” is the participle of “wear,” meaning affected, exhausted, or spent by long use or action, “worn out” describes something that is used until becoming threadbare, valueless, or useless. Now, is it Being that is used until exhaustiveness (subjective), or is it affected by something that has reached its threadbareness (objective)? Although we are not yet capable of answering this question, because we need first to find the question adapted to the new state of Being, from the point of view of thought, “thinking is of Being inasmuch as thinking, propriated by Being, belongs to Being.”⁵⁹ In other words, the genitive says something twofold: thinking is of Being insofar as thinking listens to Being. The end of the destruction of metaphysics blends with the end of the search for Being, because philosophy, after having retrieved the question of Being through a reappropriation of its tradition, recognizes how we are only left with the many different descriptions, interpretations, and remains of Being framed within metaphysics. Recognizing being framed within metaphysics does not mean that philosophy has come to an end but rather that “the distinction, which stems from metaphysics, between theory and praxis, and the representation of some kind of transmission between the two, blocks the way,” says Heidegger, “into an insight into what I understand by thinking.”⁶⁰ Although it is clear that Dasein must be the “guardianship”⁶¹ of Being at all times, Heidegger emphasizes that Being is never “used up in this expenditure,” giving Being the priority over Dasein. This is also why “précisément nous sommes sur un plan où il y a principalement l’Etre. We are precisely in a situation where principally there is Being.”⁶²

Thinking has nothing to do with reflextion, which was a concept favored by Husserl, or with Descartes’ cogito, which is essentially self-reflexive, “cogito me cogitare,” “I think that I think,” because thinking forms a hierarchy. This hierarchy is not based upon the authority of the scale but upon the difference of dealing with questions or problems, because “subjectivity, object, and reflection,” says Heidegger, “belong together. Only when reflection as such is experienced, namely, as the supporting relation to beings, only then can Being be determined as objectivity.”⁶³ The scientist, by thinking within a fixed horizon and boundary, which he does not see, works out solutions to problems that are objectified, timeless entities. Problems exist only on the basis of an explicit philosophical standpoint that is not a body of truths but the condition upon which problems work out their solutions; in other words, the answers to the questions science discovers are never cut-and-dried propositions as they appear at first. The questioner who thinks develops as the questioning proceeds, because it “does not have a firm line on the map. The territory first comes to be through the pathway and is unknown and unreckonable at every stage of the way”;⁶⁴ in contrast, the questioner who responds to problems stands still and is satisfied. So what is called thinking? To think “requires that we settle down and live within it.”⁶⁵ This call to settle down and live within the question also emphasizes that we have reached the point “where one can no longer ask questions” and must remain within the unfinished, just as Being and Time does.

The original plan of Being and Time consisted of two parts in three divisions, but although only the first two divisions of part 1 were published, Heidegger did carry out in the form of a lecture the third division, entitled as planned Time and Being.⁶⁶ Part 2, which was to accomplish the phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology with the problematic of temporality as a guide, likewise was not published in Being and Time but absorbed throughout Heidegger’s later writings. Although Heidegger did develop in many other works, especially Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics and Introduction to Metaphysics, the goal he wanted to achieve in Being and Time, he said he was held back because thinking failed “with the help of the language of metaphysics.”⁶⁷ After having destroyed metaphysics, we have to settle down within the language of metaphysics, because it is something we cannot overcome in the sense of überwunden, defeating and leaving it (for example, a pain) behind, but only in the sense of verwindung, recovering, twisting, or incorporating (learning to live with it). “Overcoming is worthy only when we think about incorporation.”⁶⁸ To overcome metaphysics means to incorporate it, to appropriate it, but if metaphysics and its question become something we cannot eliminate by answering the question, then philosophy finally becomes an “appropriation,” an appropriation of what remains from the destruction of the history of Being. A “regard for metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics. Therefore, our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself.”⁶⁹ In this way, the ontological difference, or the distinction between theory and praxis, will finally become accessible.

In the summer of 1970, Heidegger answered in writing some questions formulated by J. Glenn Gray and Joan Stambaugh for the publication of a collection of his writings and explained what he meant by “appropriation”:⁷⁰

Being itself means: The Appropriation can no longer be thought as beings in terms of presence. Appropriation no longer names another manner and epoch of Being. Being thought without regard to beings (i.e., always only in terms of, and with respect to, them) means at the same time: no longer thought as Being (presence). If this happens, then the thinking thus transformed thinks the following: the ontological difference disappears in the Appropriation through the step back. It loses its decisiveness for thinking and is thus given up in a certain way in thinking.⁷¹

After the destruction of Being understood in terms of presence, philosophy becomes the appropriation of the remains of Being, both because metaphysics cannot be overcome and because “only what has already been thought prepares what has not yet been thought.”⁷² But this preparation does not have, as does the earlier history of philosophy, the Hegelian character of the Aufhebung, elevation, but of the step back. While the elevation is a mediating concept, in the sense of an absolute foundation in the sphere of the whole reality, it leads to the heightening area of truth posited as absolute certainty of self-knowing knowledge. Instead, the step back indicates the realm that until now has been forgotten and from which the essence of Being becomes worthy of thought. This realm is the ontological difference. The step back goes from this unthought difference “into what gives us thought,”⁷³ and it does not “consist in a historical return to the earliest thinkers of Western philosophy.”⁷⁴ What gives us thought, or “the matter of thinking,” is always Being, the Being of beings: “Being remains constantly available to us.”⁷⁵

The innovation of having destroyed metaphysics consists in appropriating the ontological difference in order to “enter what has been. In that metaphysics perishes, it is past. The past does not exclude, but rather includes.”⁷⁶ It is essential to understand that the matter of thinking, thus Being, remains even though its traditional metaphysical interpretation has come to an end. But this end is not null and void but rather the beginning of an accomplishment, because accomplishing means to unfold something into the “fullness of its essence, to lead it forth into this fullness—producere. Therefore only what already is can be accomplished. But what ‘is’ above all is Being.”⁷⁷ Heidegger’s main point is that “Es gibt”: “there is Being—not beings—only insofar as truth is.”⁷⁸ This “it” that “gives” is Being itself, because it is Being that grants its truth. Granting is donation, and “as the gift of this ‘it’ gives, Being belongs to giving. As a gift, Being is not expelled from giving.”⁷⁹ The meaning of giving is determined by what is sent forth in destining, because when Plato, for example, represented Being as idea or Nietzsche as will to power, these were not descriptions advanced by chance but rather “words of Being as answers to a claim which speaks in the sending concealing itself, in the ‘there is, It gives, Being.’” ⁸⁰ But what does this “It” mean? The “It” that gives in “It gives Being” “proves to be Appropriation.”⁸¹ In other words, if the matter at stake here (Being), which we must think prohibits our speaking of it by way of descriptive objective statements, then Being can only be brought before us as the event of Appropriation. Heidegger justifies all this by explaining how “Appropriation means a transformed interpretation of Being which, if it is correct, represents a continuation of metaphysics,”⁸² because, as I already explained, metaphysics cannot be abandoned like an old, worn-out garment. On the contrary, it is precisely as an old, exhausted, worn-out garment that Being continues to be Appropriated. It is important to take into consideration that Appropriation is not an encompassing general concept under which Being (and time) can be logically subsumed but is rather the form, without the relation of Being to beings, with which to trace Being back from its oblivion.

Heidegger is certain that the last saving grasp of philosophy will always be “aimed at the most worn-out—at Being. Therefore Being can never become worn-out to the point of complete exhaustion and disparagement,”⁸³ because the understanding of Being will always belong to Dasein. In this way, the twofold excluding possibility between Being and Nothingness in the fundamental question of metaphysics—why are there beings at all instead of nothing?—finishes by favoring Being, because it is Being that first “lets every Being as such originate. Being first lets every Being be, that means to spring loose and away, to be a Being, and as such to be itself.”⁸⁴ Philosophy is not an issue regarding the possibility that one side might be but is rather the condition, amount, or state of Being. Having said this, in order to think Being without regard for metaphysics, thus without beings, in its actual worn-out state, it is necessary to modify the fundamental metaphysical question in such a way as to properly question Being after its destruction in terms of appropriation.

Heidegger, in the preface to the seventh German edition of Being and Time in 1953, after claiming that “the question of Being is to move our Dasein,” specifies that for an “elucidation of that question the reader may refer my Introduction to Metaphysics.”⁸⁵ This text represents the lecture course that he delivered at the University of Freiburg in the summer semester of 1935. It is important to remember that Heidegger, among the dozens of manuscripts of lecture courses he held over the years of his teaching career, chose in 1953 to present this one first for general publication. Contrary to many distinguished interpreters of Heidegger, I believe that this is both the most significant of Heidegger’s texts after Being and Time and the essential text of Being and Time. Although in the 1927 magnum opus the central concern is the question of Being, it is in the 1936 text (as Heidegger himself indicated in the preface to the seventh edition) that this same question is finally “elucidated.”

The main concern of Introduction to Metaphysics was to ask: how is it going with Being “at the present”⁸⁶ for us and with our understanding of Being? Although in this text he does not use the term “abgegriffen,” “worn out,” or any variant of it to characterize Being’s state, Heidegger writes that Nietzsche is “entirely right when he calls the ‘highest concepts’ such as Being ‘the final wisp of evaporating reality,’” ⁸⁷ because Being is, after all, almost like nothing after metaphysics. But why does Being remain a “vaporous” word for us? Heidegger specifies that what matters is not that the meaning of Being remains worn out for us but rather that we have forgotten, fallen out of what this word was saying. But since the task of philosophy after its destruction is the appropriation, “the ameliorating continuation of what has been, by means of what has been,”⁸⁸ it is necessary to wider-holen, repeat and retrieve, the beginning of our historical-spiritual Dasein in order to transform it in another beginning. But in order to do this, it is necessary to recognize not only that Being “can never become worn-out to the point of complete exhaustion and disparagement” but most of all that precisely in this extremity of the desired annihilation that Being appears as something “unprecedented and untouched, from out of which stem all beings and even their possible annihilation.”⁸⁹

As the fundamental question of metaphysics, we ask: “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” In this fundamental question there already resonates the prior question: how is it going with Being? What do we mean by the words “to be,” Being? In our attempt to answer, we run into difficulties. We grasp at the ungraspable. Yet we are increasingly engaged by beings, related to beings, and we know about ourselves “as beings.” Being now just counts as the sound of a word for us, a used-up term. If this is all we have left, then we must at least attempt to grasp this last remnant of a possession. This is why we asked: how is it going with the word Being?⁹⁰

Heidegger has raised this prior question (how is it going with Being?)⁹¹ out from the fundamental question of metaphysics (why are there beings at all instead of nothing?), because Being and the understanding of Being are not a present-at-hand fact but “the fundamental happening, the only ground upon which historical Dasein is granted in the midst of beings that are opened up as a whole.”⁹² If this were not the case, then Being could be opposed to Nothing within the traditional metaphysical question, leaving aside the history of Being. But Being cannot be opposed to something: even if it appears as an empty word with an evanescent meaning, it still proves to be the most worthy of questioning in the extremity of the desired annihilation, because it “is the most worn-out and at the same time the origin.”⁹³ By being the origin, Being is the power that still today sustains and dominates all our relations to beings as a whole, and it must be experienced anew in the full breadth of its possible essence if we want to set our historical Dasein to work as historical, since “the essence of Being is intimately linked to the question of who the human being is.”⁹⁴

One would be tempted to believe that by extracting from the fundamental question of metaphysics the prior question, Vor-frage, Heidegger would be settling it outside the main question as something secondary. Actually, the preliminary question does not stand outside the fundamental question at all but is “the hearth-fire that glows in the asking of the fundamental question, the hearth at the heart of all questioning.” Only in this way may we restore the historical Dasein back to “the power of Being that is to be opened up originally.”⁹⁵ Thus we are solving the problem as to whether the genitive of Being is objective or subjective, because putting Being in the driver’s seat (in the prior question), almost as a personal agent, confirms that “we are precisely in a situation where principally there is Being.” In other words, since “language is the house of Being [and in this home] human beings dwell,”⁹⁶ Being remains the fundamental concern of Dasein. What matters is to bring out the Being of beings since this is what calls “him to its essential Being.”⁹⁷ This call consists in preserving the message, and the new question, by questioning the state, the ongoing state of Being, continues Dasein’s call to “bring tidings.” Dasein, by being the guardianship, that is, the one who cares for Being,⁹⁸ should not oppose it to Nothing but dwell in the nearness of Being, because philosophy does not have an object as sciences do. It is important to keep in mind that this destruction of metaphysics did not imply an end of the relation of thinking to Being or of subject to object but only the admission that when “we determine how Being and thinking stand opposed to each other, we are working with a well-worn schema.”⁹⁹ If Heidegger’s destructuring goal was to expose this “well-worn” schema (metaphysics) in order to formulate the prior question in such a way as to unfold, preserve, and maintain itself within the history of Being, then philosophy will “preserve its own historical import” and by “pursuing it, we will once again focus on the saying of Being.”¹⁰⁰ Through this question we will continue both the most intrinsic classical problem of philosophy and Dasein’s distinctive concern of guarding, preserving, and saying the message of Being, which is what it also calls its essential Being.

“Philosophy, concludes Heidegger, is a happening that must at all times work out Being for itself anew.”¹⁰¹ Working out Being anew is the essential obligatory task of Dasein, because if there were no indeterminate meaning of Being, or if we did not understand what this meaning signifies, there would be no language at all. Dasein is not only distinguished by the fact that in its very Being, Being is an issue for it, but mostly that through its comprehension it becomes the manifestation of Being. It is always a matter of naming Being, which is not a thing but a verb. In other words, if “our essence would not stand within the power of language, then all beings would remain closed off to us—the beings that we ourselves are, no less than the beings that we are not.”¹⁰² The fact that Being by now just counts as “a used-up,” “worn-out” term for us, that “this is all we have left,” and that we must at least attempt to grasp this last remnant of a possession” signifies that Being remains philosophy’s main concern, especially after being destroyed, because it becomes unpresentable, indeterminable, and ungraspable. Heidegger’s destruction did not destroy but instead set us free into the Ereignis, the happening or event of Being.