I must first explain myself as to the title of this course, as to its very letter, which is important to me.
(1)1 I say: the question of Being and not ontology, because the word ontology is going to appear more and more inadequate, as we follow Heidegger’s tracks, to designate what is in question in his work when the question is that of being. Not only is Heidegger not here undertaking the foundation of an ontology, not even of a new ontology, nor even of an ontology in a radically new sense, not even, in fact, the foundation of anything at all, in any sense at all—what is at issue here is rather a Destruction of ontology. Section 6 of Sein und Zeit establishes as a primordial task the destruction (Destruktion) of the history of ontology. Here—only here—the destruction is destruction of the history of ontology. That is, of ontology as it has been thought and practiced throughout its entire history, this history being already described by Heidegger, from the beginning of Sein und Zeit, as a covering-over or a dissimulation of the authentic question of Being, under not ontological but ontic sedimentations.
We understand this task as the destruction of the traditional content of ancient ontology which is to be carried out along the guidelines of the question [24] of being [literally: taking the question of being as guiding thread: am Leitfaden der Seinsfrage]. This destruction is based upon the original experiences in which the first, and subsequently guiding, determinations of being were gained.2
As to this notion of destruction, a few remarks are necessary. (1)3 Destruction does not mean annihilation, annulment, rejection into the outer darkness of philosophical meaning. It does not even mean critique or contestation or refutation within a theory of the knowledge of Being. The point is not to say that all the thinkers of the tradition were wrong or committed an unfortunate error that would need to be corrected. We shall see later that what might superficially be interpreted as an error about being or a forgetting of being has its basis in a fundamental errancy that is a necessary movement of the thinking of Being and of the history of being. In destroying the history of ontology, Heidegger never refutes. Refutation in the sense in which it can be understood in the sciences or in common parlance has no meaning for thinking. And here, already, we have broached the very content of our problem. The concept of refutation belongs—implicitly—to an anti-historical metaphysics of truth. If it is possible to refute, this is because the truth can [25] be established once and for all as an object, and only particular conceptions of truth, more or less valid approximations to this ahistorical truth, belong to history. Only knowledge, and not truth, would on this view be historical, and it would be so only to the extent of its distance from truth, that is in its error. But, as Hegel had already shown, there is no simple error in philosophy once truth is historical. The metaphysics of refutation thus floats on the surface of a truth without history, which is to say that it is futile. Refutation is futile in Heidegger’s view. But that does not mean that on this point Heidegger simply agrees with Hegel. You know that Hegel meditated a great deal on this difficulty of refutation (Widerlegung) in philosophy. He was led naturally to do so by his fully historical concept of truth and of philosophy. “Philosophy,” according to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, “draws its origin from the history of philosophy, and conversely. Philosophy and history of philosophy are mirror images of one another. The study of the history of philosophy is the study of philosophy itself, and especially of its logical aspect.”4 And especially of its logical aspect.
And it is precisely because, for Hegel but not for Heidegger, philosophy is, in a profound and radical sense of the word, a logic, that, even while radically historicizing meaning, Hegel cannot purely and simply abandon the notion and value of “refutation.” Being unable to abandon it, he extends its signification, inflates it to the point of making it signify the moment of negativity in general. And we know that this negativity is essential to historical production, to the production of history in general, to production, to productivity in general:
The philosophies have not only contradicted one another, but also refuted one another. To what extent? What in them is open to refutation? What is the meaning of this reciprocal refutation? The answer is given by what has just been said. Only the fact that some principle or some concrete mode of the idea, the form of the idea, now has validity as the highest idea, and as [26] the idea as such. In its own era it is, to be sure, its highest idea; but because we have grasped the activity of thinking as self-developing, what was highest steps down, no longer being the highest, although it remains a necessary element for the following stage. So the content has not been refuted; all that has been refuted is the philosophy’s status as the highest, the definitive, stage. So the refutation is just the demotion of one determination to a subordinate role, to being an element. Thus the principle of a philosophy has not been lost, for it is essentially preserved in what follows, except that its status is now different. Nothing gets lost; only the relative position changes. This refutation occurs in all development, hence also in the development of a tree from the seed. The blossom is refutation of the leaves, such that they are not the highest or true existence of the tree. Finally, the blossom is refuted by the fruit. The fruit, which is the last stage, comprises the entire force of what went before. In the case of natural things these levels occur separately [Derrida’s emphasis], because there nature exists in the form of division. In spirit too there is this succession, this refutation, yet all the previous steps remain in unity. The most recent philosophy, the philosophy of the current age, must therefore be the highest philosophy, containing all the earlier philosophical principles within itself. (Lectures, 59)
Let me pause for a moment in the middle of this quotation. You have seen that the natural example, the example of the tree, functions here only by analogy. In truth we have here only an inferior form of refutation, refutation in the form of division. Nature is the form of division, and what is left behind or refuted, the seed for example, has simply expired, and is not present as such in the tree, the flower is not present in the fruit. In spirit, on the contrary, and philosophy is the highest form of spirit thinking itself, refutation is preserved in presence—what one can call by a term that is not Hegelian, but that does not, I believe, betray Hegel’s intention, sedimentation — and the sedimentation of forces (Hegel talks here of forces) is a phenomenon not natural but spiritual. It is spirit itself. With this passage from Hegel, and many other [27] passages (those from the phenomenology on error, for example) the sense of what in general is meant by last philosophy is clarified. Last philosophy as highest philosophy, superior philosophy, does not of course mean the last in date in the contrived succession of systems. In this regard, the recent is far from being always the last, and Hegelian philosophy is much more last than many philosophies that have followed it “in history,” as they say. The Hegelian concept of “last philosophy” does not translate an empiricism of the fait accompli that leaves the last word to the one who speaks last. If one speaks to no purpose, or without understanding what has already happened, without following the philosophical conversation from its origin, one may well continue to hold forth, but one is not representing the last word or the last philosophy. The last philosophy, in the authentically Hegelian sense, is a philosophy that comprehends in itself the totality of its past and inquires after its origin or endlessly attempts to. To have the last word, one must truly speak last, and not just chatter on after the last speaker.
And it could well be that the philosophy that was the first to understand as such what is meant by the last, the being-last of the last philosophy, it could well be that such a philosophy—that of Hegel—was not only the last philosophy in its time but the absolutely last philosophy. This is often said, but we still have to understand what it means without giving in to the stupidities circulating around and about on the death of philosophy, on Hegel who believed that history would stop with him and the Prussian people, whereas, as people do not fail to add in this case, he was wrong since history continued after him, there have been several world wars, twenty-five systems of philosophy, and—ultimate proof that history continues—we are here, we exist and we are speaking and doing philosophy, as if all that were obvious, as if all that were important, and as if it had the slightest refutational relevance where Hegel stands when he declares the Last. It suffices to read him and to see in him something other than—let’s say here precisely—a retard: it goes without saying that the end of history and of philosophy does not [28] mean for Hegel a factual limit after which the movement of history would be stopped, arrested, but that the horizon and the infinite opening of historicity has finally appeared as such, or finally been thought as such, that is, as infinite opening—the absolute infinite opening being thought as such. This is indeed the end and the closing of something, but of anything but history. To come back to our specific theme of refutation, it is perhaps possible that the last philosophy is indeed the one that, not content to refute, tries to think the essence of refutation and the essence of the last. Hegel’s philosophy was not the last philosophy in the same way that Aristotle’s, Descartes’s, or Kant’s (perhaps) were in their time the last philosophies; Hegel’s philosophy as last philosophy was the philosophy that thought in itself the essence of last philosophy in general, of what “last” meant in philosophy. The last is not the last so long as it does not appear as such. The eschaton as such is thus said in Hegel’s philosophy of refutation, and Hegel’s logic is indeed an eschatology. This eschatological logic of Hegel’s is, as you know, an ontology. To say that ontology is here eschatology is to say that the essence of being, the appearing of being in its essence is eschatological. This is what Heidegger says in Der Spruch des Anaximander (a text from 1946 collected in Holzwege, where it is translated as “Anaximander’s Saying.” Spruch, in fact, is a sentence, a judgment pronounced, Decision, in the strong sense of this word). In particular, Heidegger writes this:
As geschicklich [translated as destining, being as destining, dispensating Destiny] being is inherently eschatological. We do not, however, understand the word “eschatology” in the phrase “eschatology of being” as the title of a theological or philosophical discipline. We think of the eschatology of being in the sense in which the phenomenology of Spirit is to be thought, i.e., from within the history of being. This phenomenology itself represents a phase in the [29] eschatology of being inasmuch as being gathers itself, in the extremity of its essence hitherto struck by the seal of metaphysics, as the absolute subjectivity of the unconditioned will to will.5
I make no commentary on that last sentence to which we shall return a little later.
So let me pick up again the reading of Hegel’s text where I left off ([French] pp. 150–51).
The most recent philosophy, the philosophy of the current age, must therefore be the highest philosophy, containing all the earlier philosophical principles within itself. Refutation is the negative side. Hence it is far easier than justification; to “justify” means [to] discern the affirmative element in a determination and to call attention to it. So, on the one hand the history of philosophy displays the limitation, or the negative, of the principles, but on the other hand, the affirmative side too. There is nothing easier than exhibiting the negative side. Doing so gives one satisfaction, or the consciousness of one’s superiority to that on which judgment is passed, which flatters one’s vanity. In contrast, it is more difficult to recognize the affirmative side. By refutation one disposes of something easily, that is, has not fathomed it. The affirmative consists in fathoming the object and justifying it, which is far more difficult than refuting it. Insofar, then, as the philosophies are shown to be refuted in the history of philosophy, they are also shown to be preserved. But what has been refuted is not the principle, but the fact that it is the ultimate, the absolute and that it should have as such an absolute value; the point is to reduce a principle to the rank of a determinate moment in the whole. The principle does not disappear, but merely its form as absolute, ultimate. That is what refutation in philosophy signifies. (Lectures, 60)
In spite of the immense progress marked by this concept of refutation, as soon as one wishes to take seriously what a history of truth and a history of [30] philosophy can be, in spite of the proximity between this Hegelian relation to the history of philosophy and the Heideggerian relation to the history of philosophy, there remains a decisive difference over which I would like to pause for a moment, to verify for the first time but not the last that, as is indicated by Heidegger’s itinerary and the increasing number of his references to Hegel, it is in the difference between Hegel and Heidegger that our problem is situated.
The Destruction of the history of ontology is not a refutation even in the Hegelian sense.
First of all because the Hegelian philosophy of refutation, that ontological extension of a refutation that is usually understood as a discursive and logical operation (refutation is properly speaking a discourse, a dispute), that extension is dictated by a logic and a philosophy of the Idea or the Concept in which Heidegger himself sees a moment in the history of ontology, the last moment, the moment of blossoming and of “summation” but which still remains a dissimulation of being beneath beings. Already in the first paragraph of Sein und Zeit, Hegel’s logic is invoked as the last moment in a tradition of classical ontology that goes back to Plato and Aristotle, but as a last moment belonging to that tradition, recomprehending it, summing it up, but not taking that step beyond it—i.e., just as much back from it—that Heidegger wants to take. Speaking of the necessity of an explicit repetition of the question of being, Heidegger writes,
This question has today been forgotten—although our time considers itself progressive in again affirming “metaphysics.” All the same we believe that we are spared the exertion of rekindling a γιγαντομαχία περί τῆς οὐσίας [“a Battle of Giants concerning Being” (Plato, Sophist 245e6–246e1)]. But the question touched upon here is hardly an arbitrary one. It sustained the avid research of Plato and Aristotle but from then on ceased to be heard as a thematic question of actual investigation. What these two thinkers achieved has been preserved in various distorted and camouflaged forms down to Hegel’s [31] Logic. (Being and Time, 2)
And a little later, examining the three prejudices that up until that point had obscured the question of being, he cites first the prejudice that makes of being a concept and the most general concept, and he accuses Hegel not only of having determined being as the poorest concept, as the indeterminate immediate at the beginning of the Phenomenology and the Logic, and as a basis for all the later developments, but even, in doing this, of having neglected or forgotten, “given up” he says, the problem posed by Aristotle as to the unity of being as a non-generic generality, as transcending generality, as transcendental in the forced sense the scholastics gave to this expression to express what Aristotle understood by the analogical unity of being (Being and Time, 2).
And later, in paragraph 6, devoted precisely to the destruction of the history of ontology, Heidegger insists on this belonging of Hegelianism to the ontological tradition that he wishes, precisely, to destroy. The history of ontology that emerged from Greek ontology shows that (I quote) “the ontology that thus arises deteriorates into a tradition, which allows it to sink to the level of the obvious and to become mere material for reworking (as it was for Hegel)” (Being and Time, 21). And further on: “In the scholastic mold, Greek ontology makes the essential transition via the Disputationes metaphysicae of Suárez into the ‘metaphysics’ and transcendental philosophy of the modern period; it still determines the foundations and goals of Hegel’s Logic” (Being and Time, 21).
Why is Hegel’s enterprise, so close for that matter to Heidegger’s, still enclosed in the circle of classical ontology? This is a question that will not [32] leave us in peace throughout these reflections, but already the reply has peeped through in the two passages I have just read: (1) the passage on the prejudice one could call conceptualist, the prejudice that makes of being a concept, or of the thought of being a concept, and (2) the passage on the eschatology of being in “Anaximander’s Saying,” the last sentence of which I read again:
This phenomenology itself represents a phase [so only a phase, in other words the access to Absolute Knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit, when spirit is finally gathered into itself] in the eschatology of being inasmuch as [this is why it is only a phase] being gathers itself, in the extremity of its essence hitherto struck by the seal of metaphysics, as the absolute subjectivity of the unconditioned will to will. (Off the Beaten Track, 247)
What does this mean? It implies that the gathering of being, what passes itself off as the gathering of being, is still only the gathering of an ontic determination of being, in the form of the subjectivity of the will. On the modern foundation of Cartesianism, Hegel determined the absolute as subject. Substance becomes subject as he says himself—and as voluntarist subjectivity, deciding, willing its manifestation. Subjectivity and voluntarism stamp with their seal Hegelian teleology: the Idea wants to manifest itself, and spirit is this will to epiphany. Being is the Idea, Being is subjectity, Being is the will to will, Being is God as totality and the determinations of Being are still epochal dissimulations (Comment: read Holzwege [French], p. 275: *“This illuminating, keeping to itself with the truth of its essence, we may call the ἐποχή of being. Here, however, this word which is taken from the language of the Stoics does not mean, as it does for Husserl, the methodological setting [33] aside of the act of thetic consciousness in objectification. The ἐποχή of being belongs to being itself. We think it out of the oblivion of being.”*)6 of the meaning of being itself (Off the Beaten Track, 254). Why is this seal the seal of metaphysics: why does “being gather itself in the extremity of its essence hitherto struck by the seal of metaphysics” (Off the Beaten Track, 247)? Because metaphysics is, for Heidegger, the name of the determination of the being in general or of the excellent eminent being par excellence, that is, God, metaphysics is onto-theology. Hegel’s logic did indeed, moreover, present itself as Metaphysics. In paragraph 18 of the Encyclopedia (among other places) Hegel writes, “Die Logik fällt [ . . . ] mit der Metaphysik zusammen” (Logic thus coincides with metaphysics).7
One might be tempted to think that what Heidegger says here about the Phenomenology of Spirit as a phase, as only a phase in the eschatology of being, would no longer be valid for the Logic . . .8 since the Phenomenology of Spirit represents the moment of the becoming-phenomenon of spirit, the moment of consciousness—in truth, this moment of reflection or the subjective articulation of the Idea. This would explain why the dialogue that Heidegger undertakes with Hegel always privileges the Phenomenology of Spirit. In truth, this determination of Being as subjective, as Idea in itself for itself, persists (in the Logic). We shall return to these problems.
Thus, to the extent that Hegel persists in obscuring the question of the meaning of being under onto-theo-logy, the destruction of the history of [34] ontology is also a destruction of Hegelianism, is even especially a destruction of Hegelianism as the “summation” of this whole history; and in spite of troubling resemblances, Heideggerian destruction is not Hegel’s “recollecting” refutation. It is distinguished from it by a nothing, a slight trembling of meaning that we must not overlook, for the whole seriousness of the enterprise sums up in this its fragility and its value. A slight trembling, for Heidegger says nothing else after the Hegelian—that is, Western—ontology that he is going to destroy. He says nothing else, he does not propose another ontology, another topic, another metaphysics, and his first gesture is to claim that he is not doing so. In this sense he does confirm the Hegelian consciousness of the end of philosophy. But he confirms it by adding no other proposition, that is to say he surrounds it with an ontological silence in which this Hegelian consciousness will be put into question, will be solicited (i.e., shaken); will tremble and let be seen what it still dissimulates in that trembling, will let be heard that on the basis of which it can still be questioned from a place that is neither outside it nor in it.
The difference between interiorizing refutation, between refutation as Hegelian Erinnerung and Heideggerian destruction, is thus as close as possible to nothing. Like Hegelian refutation, Heideggerian destruction is neither the critique of some error, nor the simply negative exclusion of some past of philosophy. It is a destruction—that is, a deconstruction, a de-structuration, the shaking that is necessary to bring out the structures, the strata, the system of deposits. As Heidegger said in the passage from a moment ago, sedimentations of the ontological tradition—sedimentations that have, according to a certain necessity, always covered over the naked question of being—covered over a nudity that in fact never unveiled itself as such.
It is, then, while remaining attentive, with the most acute vigilance, to this slight, flimsy, almost immaterial but decisive displacement that happens between Hegelian refutation (Widerlegung) and Heideggerian Destruction, that one must hear the few lines I am going to read, in which Heidegger, [35] playing as Hegel does with the concepts of positive and negative, forewarns against a misinterpretation of his project of destruction. You will see how this passage resembles the Hegel passage I read a moment ago. I quote §6:
This demonstration of the provenance [Nachweis der Herkunft, search for, justification of the provenance] of the fundamental ontological concepts, as the investigation which displays [Ausstellung: ostention, monstration] their Geburtsbrief [letter of nobility, says the [French] translation, letter of birth, civil status, mark of origin] has nothing to do with a vicious relativizing of ontological standpoints. The destruction has just as little the negative [emphasized] sense of an Abschüttelung [the [French] translators say rejection, but it is much more concrete and eloquent: of the demolition which brings down, which brings to ruin by blows brought to bear from outside: a Cartesian operation and metaphor of a methodical destruction to find new foundations, to begin again a primis fondamentis on the unshakeable ground and security in certainty]. The destruction has just as little the negative sense of such a demolition of the ontological tradition. On the contrary, it should stake out, measure [ab-stecken: here the [French] translation makes a pig’s breakfast of the text: ab-stecken becomes “unveiling”] the positive possibilities in that tradition, and that always means to stake out its limits. These are factically given each time [not translated] with a specific formulation of the question and the prescribed demarcation of the possible field of investigation. Destruction does not relate itself in a negative way to the past: its critique concerns “today” and the dominant way we treat the history of ontology, whether it is conceived as the history of opinions, ideas, or problems. Destruction does [36] not wish to bury the past in nullity; it has a positive [emphasized] intent. Its negative function remains tacit and indirect.
The destruction of the history of ontology essentially belongs to the formulation of the question of being and is possible solely within such a formulation. Within the scope of this treatise, which has as its goal a fundamental elaboration of the question of being, the destruction can be carried out only with regard to the fundamentally decisive stages of its history. (Being and Time, 21–22)
Which means that the principles of a systematic and exhaustive destruction are here present and that Heidegger does not exclude this possibility.
The development I’m bringing to an end here was supposed to explain in the most preliminary way why I had entitled this course The Question of Being and History and not Being and History or Ontology and History. But this explanation is only beginning. For what we have invoked to support it is the Destruction of the history of ontology and not the destruction of ontology itself. One might imagine, at this point, that Heidegger, destroying the tradition of ontology, would have to save or found an authentic ontology and that he would thus think that there is some chance for ontology outside the tradition or beyond the tradition, that ontology has been obscured and that one can at last return it to its true light.
Well, this is not the case; the destruction of the history of ontology is a destruction of ontology itself, of the entirety of the ontological project itself. What I’m saying goes against appearances and against public rumor, and it is true that it is in the name of an ontological point of view and, especially in Sein und Zeit, using the word ontological, that Heidegger destroys the tradition and conducts his analyses. But if these destructions mean to be ontological, what he wants to constitute is anything but an ontology. Here we must consider Heidegger’s thought in its movement; or here, rather than his thought, his terminology. There is no doubt that in Sein und Zeit the term ontology is taken positively and what Heidegger wishes to awaken is a fundamental ontology slumbering beneath special or general metaphysics, [37] which is interested only in beings and does not ask the question of the being of beings. He wants to awaken the fundamental ontology under metaphysical ontology and the ontological under the ontic. But immediately after Sein und Zeit, and increasingly as he advances, the word ontology will seem more and more dangerous to him, both because of its traditional use and the meaning that at bottom legitimates this traditional use, ontology meaning not thought or logos of being (double genitive on which he will insist in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’”) but discourse on the on9—that is, on the being in general, on the being qua being (general metaphysics).
To follow this progressive abandonment of the notion, and this destruction of the history of ontology as destruction of ontology itself, I will pick out three reference points in the path of Heidegger’s thinking in this regard.
First reference point: The opening of Sein und Zeit (1927). In §3 of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger defines the primacy of the question of the meaning of being in relation to the regional disciplines, the particular regional ontologies, each of which concerns a particular type of being. To each science, to each particular discipline, mathematics, physics, biology, historical sciences, theology and . . . ,10 there must correspond an ontology that determines in advance the meaning of the being, the being of the being that is its object. A particular positive science can unfold its theoretical field and determine the unity of its theoretical field only by presupposing that clarity has been achieved as to the meaning of the being or of the particular type of being that it has as its object. One must know what is the meaning of the being of the physical being, of the being as physical thing, in order to constitute a physics. Knowledge is in fact for the physicist always a foreknowledge, a non-thematic pre-comprehension, but one that is indispensable, and this pre-comprehension must be brought into the light of the explicit. Each regional science will therefore have to be the object of an ontological question as to [38] the meaning of the being it treats. A movement parallel to the one specified by Husserl himself. And the reference to Husserl is almost explicit in §3. Husserl also defined the need to fix the meaning of the objects corresponding to each regional or material ontology. The difference here, and it is decisive, is that the material regions or ontologies that Husserl is talking about delimit domains of objects; beings are objects determined by a transcendental consciousness, a transcendental subject. The regional ontologies constitute the domains of objectivity. The world is the totality of regions, and thus the totality of objects appearing to a nonworldly consciousness, the region of consciousness not being one region among others but the UR-Region, the UR-Kategorie. And formal ontology concerns not the structure of objectivity of a region but the structure of objectivity in general, referred to something like an object in general for a consciousness in general. Clearly, Heidegger claims to be more radical in refusing to take on all this transcendental idealism, the whole thematic of the reduction, and so forth, which predetermines the being in general as an object in general. For Heidegger, the object in general is merely a determinate type of being and the same goes for its correlate, the subject or consciousness in general. We shall return to this. With the exception of this fundamental difference, the movement he effectuates here is analogous, if not identical, to that of Husserl. Once particular ontological questions have determined the meaning of the different regions of the being, it will be necessary to pose the question of being itself, of nonregional being itself. Regional ontological differences presuppose, whether they speak of the being of such and such a being or such and such a domain of beings, they presuppose the meaning of being; they have an implicit knowledge of what the word being means when they ask what is the physical being, the biological being, the mathematical, historical, being, and so on. This implicit knowledge must become explicit.
This question of the meaning of being in general (which is not a constructed generality) is what, in Sein und Zeit, he calls fundamental ontology. In Sein und Zeit, he accepts the word ontology to designate this endeavor.
[39] See for example the end of §3. (Comment.)
But such inquiry—ontology taken in its broadest sense without reference to specific ontological directions and tendencies—itself still needs a guideline. It is true that ontological inquiry is more original than the ontic inquiry of the positive sciences. [Comment.] But it remains naïve and opaque if its investigations into the being of beings leave the meaning of being in general undiscussed (unerörtert). And precisely the ontological task of a genealogy of the different possible ways of being (a genealogy which is not to be construed deductively) requires a preliminary understanding (Vorverständigung) of “what we really mean by this expression ‘being’ (‘Sein’).” (Being and Time, 10)
And here is the articulation of fundamental ontology with the regional ontologies, and of these latter with determinate ontic sciences.
Die Seinsfrage thus aims not only at an a priori condition of the possibility of the sciences, which investigate beings as this or that kind of being and which thus always already move within an understanding of being, but also at the condition of the possibility of the ontologies which precede the ontic sciences and found them. (Being and Time, 10)
And now notice that in this first text, Heidegger while accepting for the moment ontology and the term ontology, nonetheless begins to refer it to the higher authority that is the question or the thinking of the meaning of being. This movement, which will be confirmed later, is here only announced. I continue my translation:
All ontology, no matter how rich and tightly knit [tightly interlocked: fest verklammertes] a system of categories it has at its disposal, remains fundamentally blind and perverts its innermost intent if it has not previously clarified [40] the meaning of being sufficiently and grasped this clarification as its fundamental task. (Being and Time, 10)
Some eight years later—and this would be our second reference point—the same movement is repeated, but this time it presents itself as a movement beyond. Beyond ontology and the word ontology.
In the Einführung in die Metaphysik, which is a course from 1935 that Heidegger considers as a sort of complement to Sein und Zeit, Heidegger again poses the question of the meaning of being, and again, this time directing his protest against Nietzsche (being = illusion) rather than against Hegel—Nietzsche and Hegel being the two thinkers in the privileged proximity of whom Heidegger makes his own difference heard—he shows that the thinking of being is not the concept of being. Just as any general concept can be constructed and fixed only if it is guided by a pre-comprehension of the meaning of that of which one wishes to form the concept, here too the concept of being, for there is a concept of being, refers to a prior thinking of the meaning of being itself. And this is the moment at which, restricting the extension of the word ontology to its signification and its de facto usage in the tradition, he proposes to abandon it. I will read you this passage, [French] pages 49–50.
*Of course, one can show oneself to be very clever and superior, and once again trot out the well-known reflection: “Being” is simply the most universal concept. Its range extends to any and every thing, even to Nothing, which, as something thought and said, “is” also something. So there is, in the strict sense of the word, nothing above and beyond the range of this most universal concept “Being” in terms of which it could be further defined. One must be satisfied with this highest generality. The concept of Being is an ultimate. [41] And it also corresponds to a law of logic that says: the more comprehensive a concept is in its scope—and what could be more comprehensive than the concept “Being”?—the more indeterminate and empty is its content.
For every normally thinking human being—and we all want to be normal—such trains of thought are immediately and entirely convincing. But now the question is whether the assessment of Being as the most universal concept reaches the essence of Being, or whether it so misinterprets Being from the start that questioning becomes hopeless. The question is whether Being can count only as the most universal concept that unavoidably presents itself in all particular concepts or whether Being has a completely different essence, and thus is anything but the object of an “ontology,” if one takes this word in its established meaning.
The term “ontology” was first coined in the seventeenth century. It designates the development of the traditional doctrine of beings into a philosophical discipline and a branch of the philosophical system. But the traditional doctrine is the academic analysis and ordering of what for Plato and Aristotle, and again for Kant, was a question, though to be sure a question that was no longer originary. The word “ontology” is still used this way even today. Under this title, philosophy busies itself with the composition and exposition of a branch within its system. But one can also take the word “ontology” “in its broadest sense without reference to specific ontological directions and tendencies” (cf. Being and Time, 1927, p. 11, top). In this case “ontology” means the effort to put Being into words, and to do so by passing through the question of how it stands with Being [not just with beings as such]. But because until now this question has found neither an accord nor even a resonance, but instead it is explicitly rejected by the various circles of academic philosophical scholarship, which pursues an “ontology” in the traditional sense, it may be good in the future to forgo the use of the terms “ontology” and “ontological.” Two modes of questioning which, as is only [42] now becoming clearer, are worlds apart should not bear the same name. We ask the question—How does it stand with Being? What is the meaning of Being?—not in order to compose an ontology in the traditional style, much less to reckon up critically the mistakes of earlier attempts at ontology. We are concerned with something completely different.*11
Third stage. This time Heidegger is no longer content to give up on the term ontology because it is charged with an equivocation due to a certain usage that was in fact made of it in history. This time Heidegger will consider that the concept of ontology itself can only be inadequate, for reasons not of fact but of essence. The very word ontology cannot designate anything other than a discourse directed toward beings, either the totality of beings or beings in general, or the being of beings (beingness, étantité) but not being itself. Ontology concerns the on and not the einai. Ontology has therefore no privilege with respect to metaphysics, at least with respect to general metaphysics. Whereas at the beginning Heidegger wanted to ground metaphysics in ontology, he now thinks that onto-logy is metaphysical. Now—that is, eight years again after the Einführung, sixteen years after Sein und Zeit, in the lecture given during the war, in 1943, entitled “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God Is Dead,’” on the basis of the Nietzsche lectures given from 1936 to 1940. This is a meditation on Nietzsche’s Metaphysics. In spite of Nietzsche’s demolition of classical metaphysics, there is a metaphysics in Nietzsche, and one that is not simply to one side of his aesthetics, of his theory of knowledge, and so forth.
This metaphysics, like all metaphysics, wants to determine being qua being; here it is a metaphysics of being as value, a metaphysics of value, and pursuing the explication of this metaphysics of value, Heidegger tries to show that being as such in its essence is will to power and in its existence “Eternal Return of the Same.” But this dissociation between essentia and existentia has not been meditated on by the metaphysics that lives off this inheritance without posing the question of the unity of the meaning of being before the rupture of the ens qua ens, of being as being, as essence and existence. A rupture [43] that came about after Aristotle and his [illegible word]. And Nietzsche is imprisoned in this metaphysical limitation.
The essential relation between the “will to power” and the “eternal return of the same” must be thought in this way; however we cannot yet represent it here directly because metaphysics has neither considered nor even inquired about the origin of the distinction between essentia and existentia.12
Well, this metaphysics as determination of the being qua being, and blind to the originary question of being, this traditional metaphysics that Nietzsche wanted to demolish but was unable to destroy—Heidegger also calls it ontology in this text, consecrating this time not the depreciation (for there is none) but the limitation attributed to this concept: read [French] pages 173–74:
However, even for Nietzsche thinking means: to represent beings as beings. All metaphysical thinking is onto-logy [in two words joined by a hyphen] or it is nothing at all. (Off the Beaten Track, 158)
You see that Heidegger was not content with the project of “destroying” the history of ontology; he really did want to destroy ontology itself, which is one with its history. That is what I wanted to show today through these remarks which are not yet even prolegomena and by which I wanted to justify the first part of the title of my course: the question of being—and not ontology—and history. Next time we shall have to speak of history, that is, first of the and, that is, of the place of communication and the passage between Being and History, this passage, this et being the very place of our problem, [44] this et about which it is not yet decided whether we will write it et or est [is]. All the words of the title will not thereby have been justified: there is still the question here, and especially the of of the question of being. But we shall concern ourselves with that only periodically and well after the Prolegomena.
Questions.13