The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology after Metaphysics

IT IS ONE THING TO DETERMINE AND DESCRIBE THE OPINION OF PHILOSOPHERS. IT IS AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT THING TO TALK THROUGH WITH THEM WHAT THEY ARE SAYING, AND THAT MEANS, THAT OF WHICH THEY SPEAK. THUS, IF WE ASSUME THAT THE BEING OF BEING ADDRESSES ITSELF TO PHILOSOPHERS TO THE EXTENT THAT THEY STATE WHAT BEING IS, IN SO FAR AS IT IS, THEN OUR DISCUSSION WITH PHILOSOPHERS MUST ALSO BE ADDRESSED BY THE BEING OF BEING.

—MARTIN HEIDEGGER, WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? (1956)

FOR MANY INTERPRETERS OF HEIDEGGER, HIS GESTURE OF raising again the fundamental problem of Being should not be understood only as the repetition of the forgotten inauguration, origin, anfang of thought but also as evidence that he was searching for the original experience of Being. This original Being would signify that behind the Greek language there is another “unthought language” that presupposes an archioriginary intactness that has been forgotten and that we should appropriate. Such a Being would represent a founding and controlling principle. If this were the case, then Heidegger was actually looking for the one and only adequate description of the meaning of Being, because the notion of Being as presence handed down to us by metaphysics and any new understanding of it in the future would be incomplete, partial, and somehow inadequate. Thus the prior question would be the only right way to describe Being as it is really given, and all the other interpretations, including the metaphysical one, would be erroneous. But as some attentive readers of Heidegger have pointed out, namely Otto Pöggeler, Robert B. Pippin, and Gianni Vattimo,¹ this is not the case, because Heidegger also extensively criticized the conception of truth as correspondence—veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus—which presupposes this same idea of Being as Grund, as an insuperable first principle that reduces all questioning.² This meditation on the insufficiency of the idea of truth as the correspondence of judgment to the thing that confirms it is not the only proof that Heidegger could not have been searching for an originary Being; there is also his constant emphasis on philosophy’s need to “work out Being for itself anew”³ because “truth happens only by establishing itself in the strife and space it itself opens up.”⁴ If Heidegger criticized this truth formulation that implies an originary Being, suggesting that truth is a happening and that Being must be worked out “anew,” then he could not believe in an originary first Being that should be found; this would presuppose the same truth formulations he criticized. If the so-called turn after Being and Time is not taken literally,⁵ it becomes clear that his ontology cannot in any way be taken for a kind of existentially phrased neo-Kantianism where the structure of reason falls into the thrownness and finitude of Dasein’s project, becoming the correct vision of the original, first, or even natural Being. It is not the authentic, original, or true Being that is at stake here but, on the contrary, the thought of Being. It is the thought of Being that Heidegger recovered from oblivion. The essential philosophical factor here is not that the originary Being has occurred, not even in the earliest moments of Greece, but that it continues to happen.

What has induced many interpreters to imagine Heidegger’s search for the originary Being is the oblivion of the ontological difference. But if we read carefully, this oblivion only refers to the difference between Being and beings, not to a forgetfulness of an origin that must be reappropriated, because the “oblivion of Being is oblivion to the difference between being and the Being.”⁶ Being’s destiny begins with the oblivion because it is the thought of Being that has been forgotten, not a particular Being, and this thought consisted in forgetting the difference. The “destiny of Being begins with the oblivion of being so that Being, together with its essence, its difference from the Being, keeps to itself. The difference collapses. It remains forgotten.”⁷

“To remain, says Heidegger, means: not to disappear, thus, to presence”;⁸ in other words, remains are those pieces, scraps, and fragments that are not only left after use but also survive. The enduring, surviving Being for Heidegger is not the strongest but, on the contrary, as we have seen, is the worn out, the used-up term, a vaporous word of which there is nothing as such and that is never exhausted in the present of its inscription. We may now overcome metaphysics, because Being can be experienced as “something forgotten only if it is unveiled along with the presencing of what is present; only if it has left a trace, which remains preserved in the language, to which Being comes.”⁹ Derrida has rightly explained that:

The remainder is not, it is not a Being, not a modification of that which is. Like the trace, the remaining offers itself for thought before or beyond Being. It is inaccessible to a straightforward intuitive perception (since it refers to something wholly other, it inscribes in itself something of the infinitely other), and it escapes all forms of prehension, all forms of monumentalization, and all forms of archivation. Often, like the trace, I associate it with ashes: remains without a substantial remainder, essentially, but which have to be taken account of and without which there would be neither accounting nor calculation, nor a principle of reason able to give an account or a rationale (reddere rationem), nor a Being as such. That is why there are remainder effects, in the sense of a result or a present, idealizable, ideally iterable residue.¹⁰

As we can see from this passage, the remains of Being we will encounter in Derrida will be the “trace,” which not accidentally has much in common with Heidegger’s concept of the worn out: both refer to something else; both have been used and are remainders. All six varieties of the remains of Being that I will bring forward will resemble Heidegger’s worn-out Being, because they are all an understanding of Being after the destruction of metaphysics. Also, note from the last line of Derrida’s passage the reference to the “result” or the “present residue,” because this anticipates the theme of my third chapter, where not only do interpretations generate new Being, as I have said, but these same remains of Being also generate new interpretations, just as Heidegger’s worn-out Being generated, indirectly, the Being recognizable in the following six authors. Although the remains of Being have the duty to recall Being, the origin, they will also “effect” more potential interpretations. This is why Derrida believes that the “dispersion of the remainder effects . . . different interpretations.”¹¹ But in order to pursue this theory of interpretation further, philosophy must first recall the remains of its origin, hence Being.

In this second chapter, I will seek the remains of Being, the state in which Being addresses itself, through six philosophers who worked after Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics, under the admonition that philosophy must work out Being for itself anew. In other words, philosophy must apply the fundamental question I mentioned earlier—how is it going with Being?—in order to understand the way Being happens. Because, as Heidegger said, Being addresses itself to philosophers to the extent that they express what Being is, my discussion with these philosophers must follow the question of how it is going with Being within their works. In this way, we will both know the remains of Being and how “Dasein says Being.”

The following six worn-out conceptions of Being are consequences of Heidegger’s destruction and, most of all, of newly worked out Being, since productive interpretations generate Being (as I will analyze and develop in the third chapter). It is important to emphasize the ontological meaning of the term “generation,” because the remains of Being will actually be “generational,” that is, offspring at the same stage of descent from a common ancestor. A generation is not something concluded but rather the process of bringing into Being, reproducing progenies indeterminately. Although it is only through interpreting the end of metaphysics that Being is newly generated, this same new generation of Being only occurs within metaphysics, thus as the remains of Being, because, as we have seen, metaphysics can only be overcome through “incorporation.”¹² From Schürmann, Derrida, Nancy, Gadamer, Tugendhat, and Vattimo I will render this incorporation, that is, the remains of Being, in such a way that each Being will be worked out for itself anew. As I explain in the introduction, most of these authors both have taken very seriously Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics and have gone beyond imitation or repetition, generating new Being, new ways to put forward the remains of Being.¹³ Although all of these authors (except Nancy) have devoted entire books to Heidegger, I will not pay particular attention to their specific interpretations of Heidegger (such as Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question or Gadamer’s Heidegger’s Ways), instead focusing on their philosophy of the remains of Being, which is, nevertheless, dependent on Heidegger’s notion of destruction. Also, note that the remains of Being do not follow any sequential order, hierarchy, or chain in order to produce a scale, as with the Aristotelian categories; neither can they be catalogued within a system or an effective history, because, although the remainders refer to Being, this reference is dependent on generational interpretations. These six remains do not follow a logic (or scale) of quantity, quality, or any other determination of Being but only the ontology of remnants. This ontology, as I have said, depends only on the remnants “from” and “of” Being, that is, “from” the generations that have produced it and “of” the generations it will produce. Although this difference will become clearer by way of the following sections, it is the only justification that can be given to the “order” in which I situated each philosopher’s remnant. As we can see, this logic does not depend on a scale or structure but only on its own happening of and from its own self-determination, constituted by Heidegger’s destruction.

Our question—how is it going with Being?—receives an articulated response in Reiner Schürmann’s work, because he centered his philosophy mainly on the consequences of Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics, where “measures remain, although radically temporalized, but the standards perish.”¹⁴ The remains of Being in Schürmann can be found in the differences between metaphysical and postmetaphysical thinking. Unlike Derrida, Schürmann sharply distinguishes between “destruction” and “deconstruction.” While the subject matter of the first was philosophical systems and its goal was to retrieve the thought from which each of the inherited ontologies was born, the subject matter of the second “is provided by the constellations of presencing that have succeeded one another throughout the ages,” and its goal is to uproot Being “from domination by the idea of finality, the teleocracy where it has been held since Aristotle.”¹⁵ As we will see, deconstruction is more than just the method for stepping back from the historical modalities of presence (Anwesenheit) to presencing itself as the “event” (in order to assign metaphysical grounding a site of competence within contingent fields and epochs). It also recalls that its own legitimation is always referring to something else, making the ontological difference the central issue.

The ontological difference of metaphysical thought is such that it allowed “the securing of foundations for beings, reasons for propositions, [and] a ‘why’ for action.”¹⁶ These securing foundations are nothing but a posteriori objectifications applied through metaphysical standards of Being such as “man,” “God,” or the “principle of ideality.” After deconstructing metaphysics, the ontological difference becomes a distinction between “presence” and “letting presence”; in other words, it is a difference that does not ground anything. Instead “of a ground,” says Schürmann, “it leads to an abyss, instead of pointing to the ‘why’ (warum) of phenomena, it points to their ‘since’ (weil).”¹⁷ This abyss will overcome the traditional teleological measures that have assigned ends to whatever is to be known or done, and it also constitutes the very strength and essence of Western civilization, because it is placed under the control of metaphysical “stamps” (Prägungen) that Schürmann specifically called “epochal principles.” Although in this culture philosophers have been called upon to secure end-setting and tele-thetic measures, the deconstruction of metaphysics (through the temporalization of Being) has discovered and delegitimized all the representations of measures as they undergo a displacement through their own constellation of events. Each epoch is dominated by what is “first caught” in it, by its primum captum, and “in each historical-cultural epoch.” Schürmann explains:

The network of phenomenal interconnectedness that always situates us anew diachronically, is a measure for acting and thinking, but it is not a standard. Although it determines every possible occurrence, it does not set any ideal to which whatever occurs is to be referred. It is not man’s other. It transcends him, but more like a system of transcendental conditions than like a transcendent model. That transcendentality likens the measure to a structural a priori, but one that allows for a posteriori objectification.¹⁸

In this way, we objectify past epochal measures when we speak of Greece, the Middle Ages, modernity, or postmodernity, especially if they seem to yield any sort of order or canon. These canons would be in constant transition through breaks, ruptures, and divisions, because the epoché cannot be a measure rational to the communities it posits. Once we recognize that these epochal canons, measures, or principles draw to a close, another shape of presencing must take over from within each epochal unconcealment. Schürmann, in order to explain this change of epochal presencing and to interpret Being as the mere epochal sequence of representations, recovers, following Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), the concept of “event,” which also “designates the originary time phenomenon, which is the condition for historical as well as ecstatic time.”¹⁹ Since the previous quest for principles was nothing more than a quest for ultimate ontic referents, once these ultimate referents lose their credibility and philosophy has nothing else to conform itself to but the event of presencing, the remains of Being do not designate either some noumenal in-itself or a mass of raw sense data but instead the event of presencing that implies the “end of indubitably first referents.”²⁰

Schürmann’s originality consists in his combining the terms “economy” and “presence” into “Anwesenheit,” the first word to refer to the constellations of concealing-unconcealing, that is, to aletheiological constellations and later to being as it appears in a given context, that is, to beingness. But if presence is a historical mode of presencing, Anwesen, there must be many “economies of presence” that may be either metaphysical, ruled by an epochal principle, or postmetaphysical, thus “an-archic.” Although an economy is only the fabric of relations according to which the ingredients, principles, or entities of an epoch unite, this unity does not occur as a given for consciousness but by “acting systemically on one another.”²¹

The step from metaphysics (explaining beings) to postmetaphysics (thinking beings) is actually the step into the “other” thinking, the one that shows both how metaphysical grounding is always located epochally and that ultimate foundations have a determinate age and where “much remains for us to think but little for us to know.”²² It is here that Being becomes the epochal unconcealedness as it arises, ever new, out of concealment. “What is permanent, what belongs to all epochs, is this interplay of phuein, showing forth, and kryptein, hiding—hardly a ground to legitimize action from.”²³ It is this interplay of differences that gives and sends the various figures of epochal economies, because “difference destines, sends, time and Being. That is, the difference plays itself out in irreducibly manifold, finite, arrangements of phenomena.”²⁴ To understand being through its economic traits is not to understand it in terms of any groundedness in entities but in terms of beingness, which, as a set of conditioning historical loci, “grounds nothing.” In other words, when a historical world falls into place, its beginning automatically assigns a new economy that becomes the birth of an epoch that is not history founding but the presencing by which phenomena appear within a given order. This Being, or presencing, is actually the “synchronic emergence” within the order. As an emergence, it determines not only presence but also absence, out of which emergence takes place, because “presencing-absencing is the a priori event that makes it possible for any such order to spell itself out of history.”²⁵

Schürmann uses the destruction of metaphysics, the transition from a “principal economy” to an “anarchic economy” of presence, to prepare “an anarchic economy of being” that will give thinking over to its sole and unique task: “gathering up the economic traits of presence so as to retrieve presencing as such.”²⁶ While ontic sciences study the modes in which a given era corresponds to its epochal principles, philosophy will think by complying with the economic mutations of presencing. But what does this anarchic economy look like? First of all, it is essential to understand that by “anarchy” he means “absence of rule, but not absence of rules,”²⁷ because in our anarchic economy thinking and acting espouse fluctuations in the modalities of presencing; that is, the only standards for feasible things is the event of mutual appropriation among entities. In this condition, temporality of the event can neither be reducible to epochal stamps nor be understood from man’s projected world but only to “the coming about of any constellation of thing and world.”²⁸

Although the subjective command over objects has been the predominant form in the West, by responding to the principial command over the economies, Schürmann’s analysis suggests that man can no longer appear in the posture of a legislator over entities but, on the contrary, must be the guard who thinks. If principial or archic economies enjoined man to master all that there is, an-archic economies enjoin us to think in the sense of thanking, of submitting to economic mutations. Man is epochally summoned to summon entities that conform to his reason in order to guard aletheiological constellations. The issue for thinking is an investigation into the history of reversals “so as to discover the traits of Being.”²⁹

If Being, after destruction, occurs in a groundless ground, that is, in epochal constellations of absence and presence that call upon man to exist in a certain way, then philosophy will become a “response to historical constellations of truth as ‘aletheia.’” ³⁰ According to Schürmann, the meaning of Being can be found in the “interplay of differences,” thus in Heidegger’s “aletheiological theory”: the theory of historical-cultural disclosures as successive epochs and modes of truth. In this way, if deconstruction depends upon the constellations of presencing that have succeeded one another throughout the ages, philosophy must become a response to the mode in which things present are present, thus a response to the epochal order of things in which we live, which is nothing more than the epochal constellation of unconcealedness and concealment. If an entity is true as it enters into presence, then its manifestation must be its only truth, because the field in which there is truth is the difference between “a modality of presence and presencing, or between the given and the giving.”³¹ This aletheiological theory allows us to see how the ontic beings that imposed their economy on finite orders of presencing irrevocably vanish from preceding epochs with the rise of new constellations of truth, because “as an epoch comes to an end, its principle withers away.”³² In this constellation of events, postmetaphysical philosophy must have an attitude of readiness for new possible folds in the history of epochs, because epochal truths set themselves into work “with a leap, that is to say, in a sudden flip of historic fields.”³³

Within these new folds of constellations of truths, it is impossible to understand the origin either as the Aristotelian arché (the beginning that starts and dominates a movement) or as the principium (as that which is gotten hold of first) but instead only as a “multifarious emergence of the phenomena in a field provisionally opened by the difference.”³⁴ If the origin of Being is a mere showing, a mere contingent coming forth, which cannot be drawn to an arché, then the deconstruction of metaphysics has individuated the origin as an-archic, because until now things have been frozen around a first rational principium. Schürmann understands Being as the epochal order of presencing that, because of its essential contingency, would simply be another way of expressing the groundless ground, the appropriating event in which finite constellations of truth assemble and disassemble themselves. This discovery of the origin as essentially an-archic depends on Heidegger’s usage of the phrase “It gives” (“Es gibt”), which shows how Being is given differently at each epochal reversal, because the sudden advent of an new order “gives also a new modality of presence.”³⁵

Although a thought for Schürmann is nothing other than the dawn of an economy, once epochs introduce fluidity into a given economy, the “constellations of truth” break principles, producing broken hegemonies.³⁶ But how is this fluidity individuated? It is individuated, as I have said, through deconstruction, which is the method for stepping back from the historical modalities of presence to presencing itself as event. This step, however, does not come out of the blue, because it is bound by rules within history that can be indicated as the “traits of Being.” For Schürmann, these “traits” are those economic mutations that, by giving shape to the event, must be “retained as the only measure for thought”³⁷ and, for us, as the only remains of Being. Traits, just like Derrida’s “traces,” are distinguishing features, as of a person’s character or a genetically determined characteristic, which are discovered after a long period of time. But traits can also be those systemic features that connect epochs by indicating rules, self-regulations, and ruptures within history that traverse history:

The originary traits of being appear in the effort of disengaging thinking from metaphysics. Hence the importance of a historical deduction of the categories of presence. It shows what happens in epochal breaks such as the arrival of modernity: a play of differences determines anew something that remains the same across the ages. But what remains the same is only a fabric of categories. This excludes any remnant of an in-itself, which would transcend becoming, as a candidate for what endures through history. The historical deduction of the categories of presence is essential not only for establishing that “thinking of being” cannot outgrow the deconstruction of history, but also for insuring that Being is not conceived as something noumenal, as quasi-divine; that it is “one” only formally, as a law of economic functioning. The first rule for understanding Being is to wrest from history the traits of epochal self-regulation.³⁸

If, as this significant passage indicates, in order to understand Being we must “wrest” from history the traits of epochal self-regulations (“wresting” signifies obtaining something not only by forceful pulling, twisting, and extracting movements but also from within and through it), then Being once again becomes the forgotten source, the lost treasury, or even the remnant of a possession we must appropriate, as I explained in the introduction. Although Heidegger did bring back the question of Being, Being itself resists categorization and full grasp because the event of Being, specifies Schürmann, “joins presencing with absencing”; in other words, it is “Being, which is a verb . . . [that] designates the self-manifestation of an entity out of and against absence.”³⁹ This is an indication of philosophy’s obligatory task once the principal constellations of presence lose their credibility, hence after metaphysics, because it must unlearn its age-old reflex of searching for invariable principles and standards. These have always been the reference points of legitimation for praxis that philosophers used to imprint, impose, and inform; now philosophers are the ones who have only to respond thoroughly to the phenomenal disposition enclosing and situating them. Thinking becomes essentially compliant with the flux of coming-to-presence, with constellations that form and undo themselves following the event of appropriation.

At the beginning of Of Grammatology, one of his most significant books, Jacques Derrida explicitly points out, referring to Heidegger, that “one does not leave the epoch whose closure one can outline,” because “the movements of belonging or not belonging . . . are too subtle, the illusion in that regard are too easy, for us to make a definite judgement.”⁴⁰ If philosophy is inherited by a language and, at the same time, inhabited by this same language, the philosopher must not avoid this problem but, on the contrary, work within it. Philosophy “always reappropriates for itself the discourse that de-limits it”⁴¹ because, as Heidegger explained, we always conduct our activities in an understanding of Being that we do not comprehend; in other words, philosophy is de-limited by its own question, which comprehends (since we always have a vague, average understanding of Being) but cannot fix conceptually through communicative meaning. “It remains,” says Derrida, “that the meaning of these ‘limits’ is given to us only on the basis of the question of the meaning of Being.”⁴²

Derrida is a philosopher who has been better able to overcome metaphysics through “incorporation” since he began to emphasize how the fundamental concepts of philosophy are all tied to the history of certain languages and how there comes “a moment in which one can no longer dissociate the concept from the word in some way.”⁴³ This is why, for Derrida, the philosopher is above all the “guardian of memory”: someone who asks himself questions about truth, Being, and language in order to keep. But what does the philosopher keep? The philosopher, says Derrida, “keeps keeping, ‘garde,’” ⁴⁴ because one cannot keep oneself. Keeping is always confided to the other, just as Hermes was the divine messenger, the one who brought the message of destiny, with respect to preserving a message in order to gather in, to bring to others what is concealed within the old.

When one writes, one accumulates as much as possible a certain reserve, a treasury of traces, whatever they may be, whatever they’re worth; but for them to be more safely protected or guarded, one confides them to the other. If one writes them, if one puts them on tape or on paper, or simply in the memory of others, it’s because one cannot keep oneself. The keeping can only be confined to the other. And if one wants to keep everything in oneself, at that moment it is death, poisoning, intoxication, turgidity. To keep means to give, to confide: to the other.⁴⁵

This treasury of traces is Derrida’s idea of philosophy that can be achieved through deconstruction, which is a “thinking of Being, of metaphysics, thus a discussion that battles with, ‘s’explique avec,’ the authority of Being.”⁴⁶ Being seems to be what we “keep keeping,” or even a “treasure as a treasury of traces,” since metaphysics can only be overcome through incorporation. But more than using deconstruction in order to analyze the system, foundation, or architectural structure of traditional ontology, Derrida’s philosophical goal was also, among other things, to individuate another writing of the question of Being, which for us means more “remains of Being.”

As I pointed out in the first chapter, although Derrida’s notion of deconstruction is quite different from Heidegger’s destruction, he explained several times how all his work would not have been possible without the German master’s questions and, most of all, without “the difference between Being and beings, the ontico-ontological difference such as, in a way, it remains unthought by philosophy.”⁴⁷ The fundamental problem for the French philosopher is to find a way to explicate what has remained unthought in philosophy, hence what is unveiled along with the presencing of what is present. But this is only possible, as Heidegger indicated, if this unthought thought “has left a trace to which Being comes”; therefore, all the determinations, names, or interpretations of this trace belong to the Being that shelters the trace but not to the trace itself. “There is no trace itself, no proper trace” says Derrida, since the ontological difference cannot appear as such.

The trace of the trace which (is) difference above all could not appear or be named as such, that is, in its presence. It is the as such which precisely, and as such, evades us forever. Thereby the determinations which name the difference always come from the metaphysical order. This holds not only for the determination of difference as the difference between presence and the present (Anwesen/Anwesend), but also for the determination of difference as the difference between Being and beings. If Being according to the Greek forgetting which would have been the very form of its advent, has never meant anything except beings, then perhaps difference is older than Being itself.⁴⁸

Derrida, through an original and detailed analysis of Heidegger’s 1946 essay “Anaximander’s Saying,” reached the conclusion (which is actually the start of his philosophical investigation) that difference must be older than Being because Being has never meant anything other than beings. Not only does the oblivion of Being belong to the essence of Being, but the dawn of the destiny of Being is nothing other than this same oblivion. Being keeps to itself its own oblivion together with its distinction from beings.

Thus the distinction collapses, and the two differences, what is present and presencing, das Anwesende und das Anwesen, reveal themselves without distinction, as simple presence. This presence, explains Derrida, “far from being, as is commonly thought, what the sign signifies, what a trace refers to, presence, then, is the trace of the trace, the trace of the erasure of the trace.”⁴⁹ The erased distinction and the traced trace, or better, the early trace of difference and that which maintains it as a trace, belong to the tradition of metaphysics but not to the trace itself. This is why Derrida, in the passage quoted above, insists upon the idea that this trace cannot be named because the “trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has no site—erasure belongs to its structure.”⁵⁰

Metaphysics maintains the mark of what it has lost through the erasure of the early trace of difference, but this early trace has become by now the same tracing through metaphysics, because “the present becomes the sign of the sign, the trace of the trace.”⁵¹ If the presence (or metaphysics) has become the function of generalized reference in which the early trace of difference is sheltered and retained, the fundamental problem for Derrida is to find a way to name the trace that has vanished in the destiny of Being or that “unfolds,” as Heidegger said, “in world-history as Western metaphysics.”⁵² To name the difference of the essence of Being (in the beginning of Being’s oblivion) signifies reference to something beyond the history of Being, which, by being beyond language, becomes also outside texts. How can we name what is other than the texts of Western metaphysics? If the trace quickly vanishes through the metaphysical destiny of Being, escapes every determination and every name it could receive, and ends by being sheltered, dissimulated in these same names without appearing in them as the trace itself, then the trace will become that which “threatens the authority of the as such in general, of the presence of the things itself in its essence.”⁵³ Although the trace is not a substance, a present existing thing, but is instead a process that is changing all the time, there “is no presence without trace and no trace without a possible disappearance of the origin of the said trace.”⁵⁴

Derrida’s philosophical operation here was both to explain that the limitation of the sense of Being within the field of presence (that is, Western metaphysics) was produced through the domination of a linguistic form “derivative with regard to difference” and to question “what constitutes our history and what produced transcendentality itself.”⁵⁵ For Derrida, the sense of Being is not transcendental or transepochal but “a determined signifying trace,” because the ontological difference and its grounds are not only not originary but actually derivative with regard to what he calls “différance,” “differance.” Derrida has altered the French word différence (difference) by substituting an a for the e, producing a modification that remains purely graphic: “it is read, or it is written, but it cannot be heard.”⁵⁶ But why is this useful for Derrida’s deconstruction? It “marks the movement of this unfolding”⁵⁷ of the ontological difference and allows him to refer to an order (of the trace) that no longer belongs to sensibility nor intelligibility, to the ideality that is not fortuitously affiliated with the objectivity of metaphysical understanding. In other words, this is an order that resists the founding “opposition of philosophy between sensible and intelligible.”⁵⁸ Différance is not only what in the presence of the present does not present itself, hence, a way to name the trace that does not present itself, but is also the same condition that exposes what is present, because

the (pure) trace is differance. It does not depend on any sensible plentitude, audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being-present outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign (signified/signifier, content/expression, etc.), concept or operation, motor or sensory. This differance is therefore not more sensible than intelligible and it permits the articulation of signs among themselves within the same abstract order—a phonic or graphic text for example—or between two orders of expression.⁵⁹

The trace serves Derrida as a way to overcome the very condition of the illusion of the presence of Being, which presupposes that any being, element, or concept can be present in and of itself, that is, referring only to itself because “no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. . . . There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces,”⁶⁰ because each being appearing on the scene of presence, just like the signified concept, is always related to something other than itself or inscribed in a “system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of the systematic play of differences. Such a play, différance, is thus no longer simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptuality.”⁶¹ Experience, for Derrida, is always an experience of trace.

By deconstructing the originary presence of Being, naming, and individuating the nonpresent (différance) difference from the ontological difference as “something that remains without remaining, which is neither present nor absent, which destroys itself, which is totally consumed, which is a remainder without remainder,”⁶² Derrida has responded to our question, “How is it going with Being?” He has named the remains of Being “traces,” “cinders,” and “ashes,”⁶³ creating a new “order” that no longer belongs to Being as presence, although “it transports it” and “includes ontotheology.”⁶⁴

Before showing the remains of Being in the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, and therefore how he responds to our question, I must outline how philosophy for the French master is not authentic “philosophizing” when it limits itself to undertaking a classical problem from its tradition but only when “it grasps the fact that existence unfolds in the midst of an understanding of Being.”⁶⁵ In other words, the gesture of thinking after metaphysics does not consist in a theoretical investigation where philosophy would be decisive for the understanding of Being. On the contrary, it is itself a gesture of the existent as such. The ontological difference for Nancy lies neither in its being this difference, nor in its being in a specific way, but only in that it is to come, to arrive, to emerge in the properness of its own event. “Being is nothing outside of or before its ‘own’ folding of existence.”⁶⁶ Nancy, by operating a fusion between the “event” of aletheiological constellations and the “writing” of the ontological difference, has brought forward a “finite thinking of the finitude.” This thinking depends upon our finite existence, because from the moment that we exist we already have not only an understanding of Being, as Heidegger explained in Being and Time, but, even more so, an understanding of the finitude of Being. Understanding does not mean grasping a determinate concept; it means entering from within the very ontological dimension of understanding, that is, “relating to some particular sense.”⁶⁷ Philosophy is not a matter of building or constructing but of contemplating “the world, the spacing of its there is.”⁶⁸

According to Nancy, metaphysics may only be overcome from the inside, because its deconstruction is a possibility that belongs to its own traditional constitution. In other words, if metaphysics is of a deconstructive nature, it is because it is constantly relating to its own origins. “To deconstruct,” explains Nancy, “means to dismantle, to loosen up the assembled structure in order to bring into the play of its pieces the various possibilities from which it stems but which, as a structure, it covers over.”⁶⁹ Although Nancy follows Schürmann and Derrida in using deconstruction to loosen the assembled metaphysical structures, his originality consists in emphasizing how it is no longer a question of destroying something in order to make room for something else, as many believe, but of “bringing the templum to the spacing of being.”⁷⁰ In other words, he insists on explaining how deconstruction does not indirectly build another world, because one always already dwells and departs from the world: “only from within what is constituted by and on the basis of the distension of an opening can there be anything like a sense to be sought and dismantled.”⁷¹

Nancy also calls this “distention of an opening” “existence,” because before all scientific representations, religious beliefs, and even philosophical reflections there is that: the that of, precisely, there is. But “there is” is not itself a presence to which our demonstrations might refer, since it is always, already there, though not in the mode of “being” as a substance nor in that of “there” as presence. It “is in the mode of being born: to the degree that it occurs, birth effaces itself, and brings itself indefinitely back. . . . To be born is the name of being.”⁷² The essence of “birth” is that coming that effaces and brings itself back just like the constitution of Derrida’s differance. The remains of the ontology of finite Being describe nothing less than what all of us always already understand from our finite constitution, that is, understanding that being is the essence of finitude. Finitude depends on the fact that existence understands that being does not rest on the foundation of an essence “but uniquely responds to and from the there is of Being.”⁷³ Nancy characterizes the birth of Being through its existence and event because it is something that happens: “Being happens, but it does not happen on itself and it does not reduce or return to itself—not without a remainder.”⁷⁴ He goes on to specify that

what remains thus, or what is coming and does not stop coming as what remains, is what we call existence. It is “the existence of being,” not in the sense of a predicate distinct from its essence, but in the sense of being that is transitively existence, or that ex-ists. Being exists the existent: it does not give the existent its sense as presupposition and end, but, rather, it is sense given with existence, as existence, more than a gift, being toward the world, where the world is not construed as a surrounding space, but as the multiple tracing out [frayage] of the singularity of existence.⁷⁵

If existence is what comes and does not stop coming, hence a remains, it can do so only if it is based on a “there is [il y a] of something,” that is, on Being. In this way, Being cannot be anything outside, before, or beyond its own folding of existence, because it is an existence that has no limit, no outside, but only the gift of itself. “Being is, in a transitive sense, ek-sisting.”⁷⁶ But after having being deconstructed from all metaphysical categorizations, transcendentalisms, and idealizations, the eksisting Being “remains abandoned”⁷⁷ because it (the abandoned Being)⁷⁸ remains the sole predicament of Being. But why is it that what provokes meaning is the fact that there is being, that there are beings, and that we are as a community? This question finds an answer in Nancy’s 1996 masterpiece Being Singular Plural.

The minimal ontological premise is that the meaning of Being is put into play as the “with” that is absolutely indisputable, because “Being is put into play among us; it does not have any other meaning except the dis-position of this ‘between.’” ⁷⁹ But how can this disposition become explicit in order to name the essence of Being? Nancy explains that Being is singularly plural and plurally singular not because it constitutes a particular predication of Being as if it had a certain number of attributes, but, on the contrary, the singular-plural constitutes the essence of Being because it is a constitution that automatically undoes every single, substantial essence of Being itself. Being singularly plural is an essence of Being that by being beyond any prior substance or preexistent existence remains only as “coessence.” In other words, coessence, or being-with, designates the essence of the cum, the “co-” itself in the position of an essence. But this is not simply an addition. It operates in the same way as a collective power that is neither interior nor exterior to the members but rather consists in their collectivity.

But how can these three words—“Being,” “singular,” and “plural”—constitute the essence of Being if they have no determined syntax?⁸⁰ Since none of these three terms precedes or grounds the others, each designates the coessence of the others, and this same coessence puts essence itself in hyphenation, “being-singular-plural,” which becomes a mark, explains Nancy, “of union and also a mark of division, a mark of sharing that effaces itself, leaving each term to its isolation and its being-with-the-others.”⁸¹ If, instead of beginning (as the metaphysical tradition was accustomed to) from the Being of being and proceeding to being itself with-one-another, one starts rather from being determined in its Being as being with-one-another, one will note that this, once again, is not a question of any supplementary property of Being but rather of the singular plural. The “singularity of each is indissociable from its being-with-many and because, in general, a singularity is indissociable from a plurality. . . . The concept of the singular implies its singularization and, therefore, its distinction from other singularities.”⁸² The singular is primarily “each one” and therefore also “with” and “among” all the others, just as the Latin term singuli indicates: the plural that designates the “one” that belongs to “one by one.”

That Being is being-with, absolutely, this is what we must think. The with is the most basic feature of Being, the mark [trait] of the singular plurality of the origin or origins in it. Undoubtedly, the with as such is not presentable. . . . But if the unpresentability of “with” is not that of a hidden presence, then it is because “with” is the unpresentability of this pre-position, that is, the unpresentability of presentation itself. “With” does not add itself to Being, but rather creates the immanent and intrinsic condition of presentation in general. Presence is impossible except as copresence.⁸³

Since Being gives itself as singular plural (because there is no appearing of oneself except as appearing to another), the “with,” concludes Nancy, “is the fullest measure of (the) incommensurable meaning (of Being).”⁸⁴ Nancy believes that it is Heidegger’s destruction that for the first time has put us on the right way (chemin) to reconfigure fundamental ontology, through an analysis that states how the being-with (Mitsein, Miteinandersein, Mitdasein) is essential to the constitution of Dasein itself. But Dasein is not a “man,” a “subject,” or an isolated and unique individual but rather “always the one, each one, with one another, l’un-avec-l’autre.”⁸⁵ In Being Singular Plural, Nancy reminds us that throughout the whole history of philosophy, ontology occurred only at a speculative and abstract (metaphysical) level reserved for principles where “being-with” was subordinated to Being. But ontology, after deconstruction, as we have seen, primarily means a thinking of existence that is “globalness [mondialité] as such,”⁸⁶ that is, not according to an essence where Being could be presupposed and given to us as a meaning. “Being, explains Nancy, does not have meaning. Being itself, the phenomenon of Being, is meaning that is, in turn, its own circulation—and we are this circulation.”⁸⁷ Dasein circulates in the community, sharing the meaning of Being, which cannot be anything else than the being-with-one-another-in-the-world.

In this condition, the remains of being in Nancy will depend on the fact that no positing of beings may be imposed on being and no sovereignty over beings may be attributed to being, because “sense does not add itself to being, does not supervene upon being, but is the opening of its very supervenience, of being-toward-the-world.”⁸⁸ “In-the-world” refers to the realm in which Dasein is thrown, abandoned, offered, and set free together with the other Dasein that constitutes the community.⁸⁹ In this community of singular-plural Dasein, the world is Mitsein, a shared world, because Being, insofar as it is “in the world,” is constitutively being-with and being-according-to-the-sharing. “The originary sharing of the world,” explains Nancy, “is the sharing of Being, and the Being of the Dasein is nothing other than the Being of this sharing.”⁹⁰ It is in this world, conceived as a “with,” that the remains of Being find their place after metaphysics, because the world does not represent the exteriority of objects or a common substance that we all share but instead a sphere to work out Being anew, to put Being into play, hence “to be exposed together to ourselves as to heterogeneity, to the happening of ourselves.”⁹¹ From these analyses, Nancy concludes that “there is no ultimate language, but instead languages, words, voices, an originarily singular sharing of voices without which there would be no voice.”⁹² And it is this realization that provides an introduction for the remains of Being in the work of Gadamer, Tugendhat, and Vattimo.

Like Nancy, Hans-Georg Gadamer also believes there is “no ultimate language” or “language of metaphysics,” because language is not only “the house of Being,” as Heidegger emphasized, but also das Haus des Menschen, “the house of the human being, a house where one lives, which one furnishes, and where one encounters oneself, or oneself in others.”⁹³ For Gadamer, language is a “we” in which we are all assigned a place in relation to one another, but although this “place” is a community, as in Nancy’s thought, community for Gadamer “is living together in language, and language exists only in conversation.”⁹⁴ Language is the “element in which we live, as fishes live in water . . . in linguistic interaction we call it a conversation.”⁹⁵ Although Gadamer’s well-known dictum states that “Being that can be understood is language,”⁹⁶ it is not “language” that the remains of Being in his philosophy will refer to but “conversation.” If “Being that can be understood is language,” then language might seem at first to be Being’s remnant, but since “conversation is the medium in which language alone is alive,”⁹⁷ the remnant of Being is the conversation that takes place through language. Gadamer, like Schürmann, Derrida, and Nancy, also believes that the only reason the understanding of Being is possible at all is because there “is a ‘there,’ a clearing in being—i.e., a distinction between being and beings. Inquiry into the fundamental fact that this ‘exists’ is, in fact, inquiry into being.”⁹⁸ This inquiry will always depend upon the condition that we all stand in the ontological difference and will never be able to overcome it. Gadamer specifies:

What Being really means remains obscure, despite all the poems about the experience of one who was brought up in the thinking of the West and its religious horizon. What does “it is there” mean? This is the secret of the “Da,” [there], not a secret of what is there, or that it is there. It does not mean the existence [Dasein] belonging to human beings, as in the term “struggle for existence,” but rather it means that the “there” arises in the human being, and yet despite all its openness it remains at the same time hidden, concealed.⁹⁹

Gadamer, by following Heidegger, who “modified the overcoming (Überwindung) of metaphysics and replaced it with a coming to terms with (Verwindung) metaphysics,”¹⁰⁰ was able to emphasize how philosophy can never totally and completely be cut loose from its historical heritage. Thus Gadamer believes “that there can never be ‘philosophy’ without metaphysics. And yet philosophy is perhaps only philosophy when it leaves metaphysical thinking and sentence logic behind it!”¹⁰¹ Destruction was not meant to point back to a mysterious origin, an arché, or to repudiate this history but to “recover” from metaphysics in order to set thinking free, because the goal of destruction was only “to let the concept speak again in its interwovenness in living language” and had “nothing to do with obscure talk of origins and of the original.”¹⁰² Being is on the way to language because language’s nature is conversational, and only through conversation can Being be understood, because it comes into language in conversation and not the other way around. If conversation is the essence of language, it goes also beyond Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s “very ownness” (Jemeinigkeit) and fallenness (Verfallenheit) into the world, because it “represents a more important experience: namely, conversation.”¹⁰³

Before venturing into the remains of Being in Gadamer, it is important to clarify the difference between the English terms “dialogue” and “conversation,” as this will also introduce the remains. Although, literally, the German Gespräch should be translated as “discussion,” Dialog as “dialogue,” and Unterhaltung as “conversation,” most translators of Gadamer’s works have rightly translated Gespräch always as “conversation,” not because of linguistic arbitrariness but because of a philosophical demand implicit in the meaning of Gespräch. When Gadamer refers to Gespräch, he is not alluding to something programmed, conducted, and organized in advance under the direction of a subject matter where the partners leave aside their particular points of view. On the contrary, a genuine Gespräch is never the one we wanted to conduct but rather the one we fall into and become involved in as it develops; we are led by it instead of being the leaders of it. In this way, the conclusion or truth reached by the Gespräch is actually produced through its own unprogrammed modalities, which we never have under control, and most of all this end is achieved without our knowing we would even reach it. Gadamer’s Gespräch is closer to what in English we call “conversation,” not “dialogue,” which is a more specialized kind of conversation dedicated to finding the truth about something, as in the Platonic dialogues; in these dialogues, the interlocutors controlled the subject matter and the dialogue’s outcome. To conduct a conversation instead means to allow oneself to be led by the subject matter, since what happens in a conversation is really without a goal. Since truth is not the main concern in a “conversation,” we could speculate that if Gadamer had written in English he probably would have used “conversation” and not “dialogue” to refer to these open exchanges of the Gespräch, which are surrounded by positive tones of interchangeable views and not truth values.¹⁰⁴

But why does Being, or any other word, exist only in conversation, that is, as the totality of a way of accounting by means of speaking and answering, but never in isolation? Gadamer brought the logic of conversation forward to go beyond linguistically fixed assertions that limited language to matters of fact, Sachverhalte. We need conversation, says Gadamer, because “our own concepts threaten to become rigid.”¹⁰⁵ He explained in his magnum opus, Truth and Method, that even in the silent monotony of the Eleatic principle of being and noein, Greek thought followed the fundamental factualness of language; then, in overcoming the Eleatic conception of being, Plato saw the element of nonbeing in being as what really made it possible to speak of the existent at all.

In the elaborate articulation of the logos of the eidos, the question of the real being of language could not be properly developed, since Greek thought was so full of the sense of the factualness of language. By pursuing the natural experience of the world in its linguistic form, it conceives the world as being. Whatever it conceives as existent emerges as logos, as an expressible matter of fact, from the surrounding whole that constitutes the world-horizon of language. What is thus conceived of as existing is not really the object of statements, but it “comes to language in statements.” It thereby acquires its truths, its being evident in human thought. Thus Greek ontology is based on the factualness of language, in that it conceives the essence of language in terms of statements.¹⁰⁶

Gadamer instead conceives the essence of language in terms of conversation, of live exchanges within the living community, because language’s “human” origin means that man’s being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic and, therefore, “whoever has language ‘has’ the world.”¹⁰⁷ All human knowledge of the world has always had to be worked out again, because we do not live in it neutrally, separately, and independently but through what has been handed down to us. Heidegger’s destruction enabled Gadamer to show that metaphysics conceived language as an element of Being itself rather than an activity of the subject. While Dasein’s knowledge, through all classical and medieval philosophy, was incorporated in statements, language was not only left aside but also separated from thinking as something independent. Instead, language is inseparable from thinking, because, as Gadamer said, it is “the universal medium in which understanding occurs. . . . All understanding is interpretation, and all interpretation takes place in the medium of a language that allows the object to come into words.”¹⁰⁸ Gadamer, through language, has shown how Being is never fully manifest, not only because each word leads to another constituting language but also because understanding never stands over against an “object”: “understanding and interpretation are always intertwined with each other. Explication in language brings understanding to explicitness.”¹⁰⁹

What, then, is philosophy for Gadamer? Philosophy is a knowing that is quite “restricted and circumscribed by limits. This . . . is why we have hermeneutics—why we have a transcending of these limits. It’s the same for Heidegger—we never know what Being is. It always seems to be a topos, an unattainable place that never becomes accessible.”¹¹⁰ The given is only the result of an interpretation, and the “given” itself cannot be separated from interpretation, because only within processes of interpretation is an observation expressible. An inevitable question arises at this point: does understanding come before interpretation, or is the reverse true? “Understanding,” clarifies Gadamer, “is always already interpretation, and an interpretation is only a ‘correct’ interpretation if it emerges out of the performance of understanding.”¹¹¹ As I explain in the introduction, hermeneutics is above all the art of understanding, and since understanding, by its very nature, is an occurrence in which history is operative, the task of hermeneutics for Gadamer is to demonstrate the “principle of effective history [Wirkungsgeschichte].” This principle is essential for our fundamental question of remnants, because it explains how the consciousness is always already affected by history and therefore “more Being than consciousness,” as “it is not so much our judgments as it is our prejudices that constitute our Being.”¹¹² We are so subject to history that even if all understanding is also an application, whenever we understand and interpret something, history affects Dasein’s interpretative horizons in such a way that we cannot either clarify it or distance ourselves from it.

The German master of contemporary hermeneutical philosophy has explained, referring to Derrida’s thought (on which he generously commented in several essays), that he took “conversation” as his starting point because “this is where the ‘differance’ is realized—through conversation, in question and answer, the alterity of the true [die Alterität des Wahren] is brought to recognition.”¹¹³ Truth may emerge only from a conversation where the presentness of Being is dissolved in the question and answer and not based on it. Although conversations are always directed toward agreements, it is important to note that Gadamer is referring to an “agreement” not about content but rather about the maintenance of a common language of an endless conversation. This is why philosophizing “does not just start from zero but rather has to think further and speak further the language we speak.”¹¹⁴ Many have accused Gadamer’s emphasis on language of “panlinguisticism,” since his dictum seemed to mean that “Being,” “understanding,” and “language” were completely interwoven with one another, but he explained that he only meant to indicate that “Being speaks,” in other words, that only through language can Being be understood. This formulation was indicated to Gadamer by Heidegger, who once explained to him that “Die Sprache spricht” (“language speaks”), and it speaks because when a person is speaking, he is also always restricted by language, and therefore one must “not think against language but with language.”¹¹⁵ The main point is not that everything is language but only that Being that can be understood, insofar as it can be understood, is language, because what cannot be understood poses an endless task of finding the right word. For these reasons, Gadamer believes that the real question of Being and Time was not in what way Being can be understood but in what way understanding is Being, since the understanding of Being represents the existential particularity of Dasein.

According to Gadamer, this is the starting point of Being and Time—Dasein’s understanding of itself in its Being—which leads thought to overcome traditional metaphysical self-consciousness, based on the presentness of presence considering itself as an object. Dasein, by understanding itself in its Being, instead is an understanding that always places itself in question, “which is not only grounded on the ‘mine-ness’ of my being that is revealed in the possibility of death, but at the same time encompasses all recognition of oneself in the other, which first opens up in conversation.”¹¹⁶ Gadamer, following Heidegger’s destruction of the nature of metaphysics, whose question about the “whatness of beings” has obscured the question of the “there of Being,” goes further, considering the notion of conversation as the most adequate mode of Being on the way to language, because it leaves behind the metaphysical subjectivity of the transcendental ego and especially the meaning-directed intention of the speaker. Now, if the “conversation” is all we have left, then we can conclude from Gadamer’s analysis that conversation, thus Being, defines itself precisely “in what aims at being said beyond all words sought after or found,”¹¹⁷ because “in a conversation, it is something, that comes to language, not one or the other speaker.”¹¹⁸ In this way, focusing on language, Gadamer has admitted that one can proceed in various ways, and he provides an introduction to my next section by saying that

The Anglo-Saxon tradition sought to work out the immanent logic of actually spoken language and in this way to challenge the artificial word-idols of traditional philosophical concept formation with a new analytic conscience. Here the work of Quine was very influential—and on the German scene the especially useful book by Ernst Tugendhat, Traditional and Analytical Philosophy: Lectures on the Philosophy of Language.¹¹⁹

Tugendhat’s treatment of our question—how is it going with Being?—is outlined in the book he dedicated to Heidegger, Traditional and Analytical Philosophy,¹²⁰ and in essays such as “Language Analysis and the Critique of Ontology” and “The Question About Being and Its Foundation in Language.” These titles immediately give an idea of the significance of language for Tugendhat because, as we will see, “the ontological question about being as being turns out to be a question about the understanding of sentences.”¹²¹ Tugendhat does not object to metaphysical philosophy because it orients itself toward objects through a prelinguistic relation and therefore conceives this relation in an overly simple fashion; rather, he finds the problem in that “it fails to take account of the fact that we refer linguistically to objects by means of expressions which—as singular terms—belong to a certain logical (formal-semantical) sentence-structure.”¹²²

Tugendhat, like Gadamer, believes that philosophy “is an activity which only becomes what it is in the process of being introduced,”¹²³ because it does not strive to explain something “that is not yet understood, but the clarification of what is already understood.”¹²⁴ And what is already understood is Being, since all human understanding is grounded on an understanding of Being. Being happens in the “meaning of sentences” for Dasein because, in order to understand the meaning of a word, we do not need to see anything through a word. And even if there were something to see, it would be of no service in attaining intersubjective understanding. Tugendhat, like the other philosophers of the remains of Being, tried to find a way to eliminate a metaphysical mode of speaking about philosophy “from within,” because he also believes that it is “the metaphor of seeing that dominates all traditional thinking, since this is the fundamental metaphor to which one can appeal in using any other metaphor.”¹²⁵ For Tugendhat, philosophy is primarily ontology, a study of beings as such, but contrary to metaphysical ontology, the transfer of ontology to the sphere of language means that the problem of objects as such is actually investigated only when one questions how to refer to them linguistically. This transfer of ontology to the sphere of language takes us beyond the ontology of presence toward an analytical philosophy of language that “contains in itself the idea of a semantic ontology capable of taking on inherited ontology and transcendental philosophy.”¹²⁶ If Being that can be understood is language, then analytical philosophy’s goal is not to denounce the traditional philosophical problems as false, nor to clarify them through the explanation of their correspondence to expressive rules, but only to understand them better through what Tugendhat considers the natural successor of ontology: formal semantics.

Traditional ontology itself points beyond to a new conception of the formal science, which, in the shape of a formal semantics, underlies all sciences. Formal semantics is, on the one hand, a language-analytical undertaking: it is semantics, it analyzes the meaning of linguistic expressions. On the other hand, it is formal, in the sense that ontology was formal; and because it removes weaknesses of ontology, which are incapable of immanent resolution, it can lay claim to being ontology’s legitimate successor.¹²⁷

If Gadamer, through language, “works out” conversation, Tugendhat, also through language, works out “propositions,” because “we never simply refer to objects, but always in such a way that we make predicative statements about them.”¹²⁸ But contrary to Gadamer, Tugendhat brought forward a “semantization” of Heidegger’s ontology that consisted in dissolving Being into the realm of semantics: statements, sentences, and propositions. “Dissolution,” explains Tugendhat, “means that reflecting on objects gives birth to reflection on what is more than a pure object, and these are statements, or also the meaning of statements.”¹²⁹ Tugendhat is convinced that there is no such thing as a reference to an object that is detached from a context of sentences, because the relation between language, or, better, linguistic signs, and reality depends upon the ontological function that sentences have for Dasein. Since linguistic signs are not representatives of other functions that would also be possible without them, that is, objects that signs would stand for, they represent the last ontological ground for knowledge. For Tugendhat, Being may only be given to us through linguistic usages that are not based, as in Gadamer, simply on “language” but rather on “linguistic signs” that are not mere signs but that “one understands and which many can understand in the same way.”¹³⁰ This is why he specifies that “language does not mean anything; we have ‘many’ words and ‘many’ linguistic structures that we should understand.”¹³¹

Metaphysics, for Tugendhat, has, from the beginnings of Greek philosophy up to Husserl, neglected language-analytical reflection and only operated within “a sensuous and even optical model”¹³² because, as Heidegger taught us, Being has always been interpreted as being-present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit). And this optical model is also guilty of the “nominalization” that Tugendhat identifies not only in the entire metaphysical tradition but also in Heidegger’s insights, which Heidegger dissolved in order to translate into controllable statements. They had to be thus translated because, although Heidegger “went much farther than analytical philosophy,” says Tugendhat, “his descriptive method lacked a criterion of verifiability.”¹³³ Tugendhat, following Heidegger’s destruction, has shown how, in the traditional ontological terminology, Being primarily has been captured in an objective or Platonic nominal perspective. He believes that it must now be reconsidered as a linguistic problem.

Even though the question of being appears to be the problem of the meaning of the word “is” in its different linguistic meanings (because “meanings do not exist in a Platonic heaven; they are meanings of sign”),¹³⁴ Heidegger talks as if all human understanding is based upon an understanding of Being. But if the meaning of Being is only found in linguistic signs, then it “appears to be that the understanding of a certain word—the word Being—somehow underlies all other understanding.”¹³⁵ Tugendhat, examining Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?”¹³⁶ noticed that in this lecture the “understanding of Being” only occurs in conjunction with an understanding of “nothing.” He also found that if the metaphysical tendency (which Heidegger shares with the tradition) to speak only in substantives is semanticized, a response to the question of whether Being only occurs in sentences is possible. Tugendhat’s originality consists in replacing the talk of the “nothing” with the word “not,” since the word Being, as we just noticed, only occurs in sentences. This replacement shows how Heidegger indirectly wanted to grasp the “extension of the word is in strict correlation with the use of the word not. . . . Thus, according to his conception, it is the connection between affirmation and negation—the yes/no—that underlies the understanding of sentences.”¹³⁷ Although it is this connection between the words “yes” and “no” that confirms that the ontological question about being as Being depends on the understanding of sentences, it must still be explained why Being is only found in the “meanings of sentences.” Language is not a simple medium between us and the reality of objects, because in its semantical dimension there are some determinations that do not depend on mere objectivity but contribute to their own understanding. Tugendhat demonstrates this through the general function of the predicate.

If the predicate must stand for something, and if this something must be capable of being represented, it cannot be a matter of sensory intuition, because we would have to represent something that corresponds to the entire scope of the predicate, that is, corresponds also to nonsensible representations. While Plato and Aristotle tried to call this nonsensible representation “noein,” and Husserl, through the eidetic abstraction, tried to give a foundation to the existence of intuitions of such essences, Tugendhat instead explained:

We do not need such a representation to understand the understanding of predicates. We explain to someone the meaning of a predicate (and thereby reconstrue our own understanding) not by pointing to a general essence but by applying the predicate to different objects, whereby we explain the extent of its classificatory function, and by refusing its application to other objects, whereby we explain the extent of its discriminatory function. Understanding the meaning of the predicate does not consist in seeing something but in mastering the rule which determines the application of the predicate. The generality of the predicate is a rule-generality, not a “general object.”¹³⁸

Tugendhat is suspicious as to whether the predicate, in a sentence such as “the sky is blue,” also stands for something, in this case the “blueness” of the sky. Although blueness is indeed something that may be designated as a being, Tugendhat notices that in moving from “the sky is blue” to “the blueness of the sky,” a change occurs in the form of the expression: “the predicate ‘is blue’ has been changed by a so-called nominalization into the singular term ‘the blueness.’” ¹³⁹ What is expressed in the verbal sentence as an essence of the object is, in the nominal sentence, set off by itself as a real content and established as a condition or state. But with this change (nominalization), the nominalized form (the blueness, that is, an abstract object) is still semantically secondary relative to the predicative form (is blue), because “we do not represent objects to ourselves, we mean objects.”¹⁴⁰

What makes the expression “Being” so difficult, according to him, is its connection with the ambiguous verbal expression “is,” because we may either employ it as a singular term,¹⁴¹ or as a pronoun and without a supplementing predicative expression (as in the sentence “John is”), or as the so-called copula in a predicate sentence (as in “the sky is blue”). The problem lies in the fact that when one speaks of “a being,” only the use of “is,” in the sense of “exists,” is involved, since “a being” means “something that is”: when the word “is” is used without a supplementing predicative expression, the substantival expression “being” is univocal and has the same sense of “existent.” All traditional metaphysical philosophers were oriented toward the copulative “is,” because they understood it as the “is” of a “being.” Aristotle, for example, took “being” to be that for which the predicate stands, in other words, the being-thus-and-so (Das So-seiend-Sein) of the object.

Since our understanding constantly transcends its articulation in sentences, we must now ask: what is the dimension through which we pass from sentence to sentence? According to Tugendhat, it is not possible to answer this question because every naming of entities, objects, or sentences remains within language, which is always embedded in sentences. Note that Tugendhat reaches the meaning of sentences as the only indication of Being’s remains after Heidegger’s destruction not by questioning what “language means in Being” but by asking what “Being means in language,” because the “universal dimension in which we live with understanding is not primarily a world of objects, entities, of facts, but a world of sentences, of unities of meaning.”¹⁴²

More so than in Schürmann, Derrida, Nancy, Gadamer, and Tugendhat, of all the evidence for the remains of Being that I have outlined in this book, Vattimo’s work is probably the one that best responds to Heidegger’s call to “work out Being for itself anew” and “grasp its last remnant of a possession,” because, as I explained in the introduction, Vattimo is the architect of this ontology of remnants. What I call the “ontology of remnants” he named the “ontology of actuality,” and its fundamental question for him is also very similar to ours: “ontology of actuality is used here,” he explained in Nihilism and Emancipation, “to mean a discourse that attempts to clarify what Being signifies in the present situation.”¹⁴³ His answer to this question is the “event of weakness,”¹⁴⁴ which also finds a productive space in our question, “How is it going with Being?” The answer Vattimo gives is this: if Being has been able to endure so long, it is not “because of its force . . . but because of its weakness.”¹⁴⁵ I am treating the remains of being in Vattimo last because his is an indirect fusion of the other five systems of remains (since Vattimo is the only one who has commented on all of them and therefore appropriated some of their ideas) and because he provides a useful way to introduce the next part of my study.

According to this Italian philosopher, we have not been able to answer the fundamental question of philosophy—why is Being, and why is there not rather nothing?—because “Being lacks a reason”: there is no reason sufficient to explain why Being is. This implies the weakness of Being, because “if Being had a strong reason to be,” explains Vattimo, “then metaphysics would have significance, would have strength. But as things are, Being . . . is historical and casual, happened and happening.”¹⁴⁶ For these reasons, Vattimo believes that philosophy is weak thought, an ontology of weakness, and thus philosophical effort ought to focus on interpretation as a process of weakening the objective weight of the presence of Being.

Vattimo has taken literally Heidegger’s indication that the new epoch of Being, after the destruction of metaphysics, would not depend on our decisions but rather on recognizing how we belong to this same destruction, that is, to “a philosophy of ‘decline,’ a philosophy which sees what is constitutive of Being not as the fact of its prevailing, but of the fact of its disappearing.”¹⁴⁷ Putting Heidegger’s Verwindung of metaphysics at the heart of his philosophical position, Vattimo’s remnant of Being is the “event of weakness,” which, as we will see, is the most radical development of this ontology of remnants, because it fuses Schürmann’s emphasis on the “event” and Gadamer’s insistence on “language” in such a way that it allows Vattimo to consider Tugendhat’s identification of Being and language as valid—although not enough, as he explains:

In Tugendhat, the Heideggerian identification of Being and language is valid. And precisely by seeking to avoid the “relativistic” outcome of this identification, one may also discover the other “identification” in Heidegger, that of Being with the event. Truth is only because and so long as Dasein is, but Dasein is historical and eventual and experiences truth only in the sphere of a historical horizon in which only every specific sentence gains sense.¹⁴⁸

Instead of Being and language, Vattimo couples Being and event, but in such a way that Being’s “eventual” nature will depend on the linguistic horizon that constitutes it. The term “Ereignis” (event), used by Heidegger to indicate (not define) Being in Contributions to Philosophy, was meant to mark, according to Vattimo, the new ontological approach that excludes all essentialist views of Being. Vattimo’s starting point is not only the end of metaphysics but the end of deconstruction: “what is ahead of philosophy as its goal, after deconstructionism, is a labor of stitching things back together, of reassembly.”¹⁴⁹ In this condition, Being becomes an event, because philosophy no longer corresponds to the Platonic agenda of understanding Being through the Eternal but rather seeks to do so through its own history; that is, it redirects itself toward history. But this is only possible if Being and event are fused together. Such a Being would derive not from Being “as it is” but from Being viewed as the product of a history of formulations, interpretations, and deconstructions that “are ‘givens’ of destiny understood as a process of trans-mission. They are points of reference we keep encountering each time we engage in thinking here and now.”¹⁵⁰ If Being for Vattimo consists in a trans-mission, in the forwarding and destiny (Ueber-lieferung and Ge-schick) of a series of echoes, linguistic resonances, and messages coming from the past and from others in the form of events, what is the philosophical position that responds to this process of the weakening of Being?

Hermeneutics is the philosophical position that grasps Being’s vocation of giving itself as the truth of human language, and therefore it presents itself as the most appropriate to the “thinking that corresponds to Being as event.”¹⁵¹ The “eventual” nature of Being is nothing but “the disclosure of historico-linguistic horizons within which beings (things, men, etc.) come into presence.”¹⁵² In this way, Being never really is but sends itself, is on the way, transmits itself. Having said this, one might think that language is something bigger or prior to Being; on the contrary, it is an event of Being itself. For Vattimo, this “eventuality” indicates that everything we see as a structure, essence, or theorem (such as the idea of truth as the conformity of the proposition to the thing) is an event, an historical aperture or disclosure of Being. Being presupposes this disclosure, which is not an object of philosophical research but rather that into which it is always already thrown.

The key teaching of Heidegger, according to Vattimo, is his idea of the ontological difference: the difference between being and beings. Although it is just on the forgetfulness of this difference that metaphysical thought was able to evolve into a strong thought, the destruction of metaphysics has not only produced a “weak thought” but has also dissolved Being into its own “becoming” interpretations. Being is not what endures, what is and cannot not be—as Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle would have it—but only what becomes because it “becomes” from the ontological difference. What becomes comes to life and dies and for that reason has a history, a permanence of its own in its concatenated multiplicity of meanings and interpretations. After having found Being’s “becoming,” thus its event, in the ontological difference, Vattimo goes on to specify that whereas “Being is not identifiable with beings, with the particular entities given to us in our experience (things, facts, persons),” it is “comparable to the light by which entities become visible.”¹⁵³ This light can also be understood as the linguistic horizon in which we are surrounded, because beings become visible to us only within a horizon that is historically determined, as it is impossible to attribute to it the immutable objectivity of the “objects” that appear within it. The “difference” of the ontological difference indicates that we can only truly distinguish Being from beings when we conceive “it as historical-cultural happenings, as the instituting and transforming of those horizons in which entities time and again become accessible to man.”¹⁵⁴ But how do they become accessible? Through language: all experience of the world is primarily a series of linguistic events that happen to Dasein as the being that is “in-the-world.”

Being-in-the-world does not mean being effectively in contact with all things that constitute the world but rather being always already (immer schon) familiar with a totality of meanings, that is, with a context of references, projects, or, as Heidegger says, tools. If Dasein exists and is in-the-world as a thrown project (geworfener Entwurf), then our existence would also always already be thrown into language, because Dasein exists in the form of a project in which things are only insofar as they belong to this project. And since this occurs only in the form of meanings, things become accessible because every act of knowledge is nothing more than an interpretation of this existence in-the-world, making the universal structure of knowledge interpretative: “to know” is always “to interpret.” This hermeneutic structure of existence helps Vattimo explain why “hermeneutics itself is a form of the dissolution of Being in the era of an accomplished metaphysics.”¹⁵⁵ In this context, the world of ontology becomes the world of active nihilism, where Being has an opportunity to reoccur in an authentic form only through its own weakening. As soon as Western philosophy realizes this, “it becomes nihilistic,” says Vattimo; “it acknowledges that its own argumentative process is always historically and culturally situated.”¹⁵⁶

Active nihilism is the vocation and nature of hermeneutics, according to Vattimo, because “Being, whose meaning we seek to recuperate, tends to identify itself with nothingness, with the fleeting traits of an existence enclosed between the boundaries of birth and death.”¹⁵⁷ In other words, Being as the “event of weakness” is a extension of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s nihilism. As the discovery that alleged that values, truths, lies, and metaphysical structures are just a play of forces, nihilism became, thanks to Nietzsche, the revelation of the will to power as that which dislocates and subverts prevailing hierarchical relations. In this condition, man was founded by rolling “from the center towards X” and Being as “nothingness.” As we know, Heidegger commented on Nietzsche’s nihilism as the process in which, at the end, “there is nothing to Being as such” and coined “Andenken” to refer to the thought that “lets go of Being as foundation” after metaphysics. For Vattimo, the outcome of thinking about nihilism and Andenken, and thus of Nietzsche and Heidegger, ought to be hermeneutical thought understood “as the effort to constitute the drift of that which is present on the basis of its connections with past and future.”¹⁵⁸

Although Vattimo recognizes that hermeneutics originally was a theory that legitimized its interpretations by demonstrating it could be a correct interpretation of a message from the past by reconstructing the history of a certain number of events, he is more interested in indicating how it can also be an interpretation from within, that is, from what it always already belongs to, “since this belonging is the very condition for the possibility of receiving messages.”¹⁵⁹ But this belonging is nothing else than the remains of Being, or in Vattimo’s words, the events of Being. Hermeneutic philosophy becomes the key for the future because interpretation is, in itself, a response to a message, an articulated response to its own belonging, tradition, and history from which it arises—because we always know, at least to a certain extent, where we are going. Because hermeneutics, then, is a theory that tries to grasp the meaning of the remains of Being that have been transmitted as a consequence of the destruction of metaphysics, I end this chapter with a passage from Vattimo’s magnum opus, Beyond Interpretation, that will introduce the next chapter and prepare the way for the consequences of the remains of Being, the investigation of the “generation” of philosophy.

In contrast to the metaphysical historicism of the nineteenth century (Hegel, Comte, Marx), hermeneutics does not take the meaning of history to be a “fact” that must be recognized, cultivated, and accepted . . . ; the guiding thread of history appears, is given, only in an act of interpretation that is confirmed in dialogue with other possible interpretations and that, in the final analysis, leads to a modification of the actual situation in a way that makes the interpretation “true.” . . . The novelty and the importance of hermeneutics ultimately consists in the affirmation that the rational (argumentative) interpretation of history is not “scientific” in the positivistic sense and yet neither is it purely “aesthetic.” The task of contemporary hermeneutics seems to be that of articulating in an ever more complete and explicit form this original inspiration; which means furthermore the task of corresponding responsibly to the appeal arising from its inheritance.¹⁶⁰