Last time I attempted in a quite preliminary way to justify in its literality the title of this course. I first had to make clear why this title said the question of being and history and not ontology and history. This led us to explain how and why Heidegger’s thought was not and did not wish to be, whatever people say and write, an ontology. Whatever people write, because not only are people writing everywhere about Heidegger’s ontology, but the author of one the two fattest books (which are not the best books) written on Heidegger in French, one of these authors, who is the co-translator of Sein und Zeit, writes an essay entitled Paths and Impasses of Heidegger’s Ontology,1 without realizing that Heidegger’s path—which moreover Heidegger would not represent as an impasse, Heidegger not caring much, and for profound reasons, about the arrival of paths, those that do not arrive, like Holzwege, not being the worst paths of thought—is precisely, as we saw, the search for a way out of ontology in general. Which means that it is difficult to see how one can speak of a Heideggerian ontology and a fortiori of its impasse, and a fortiori of several impasses, for the word is in the plural in the title, an unconscious homage to a thought whose richness consists in arriving at [46] several impasses at once (aporia of SZ).2 The other, Chapelle, devotes 250 pages to what he calls Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology.3 It is true that this is a commentary of Sein und Zeit alone, in which, as we saw, the step beyond ontology is only announced.
To show that Heidegger’s thought was not an ontology, we had to dwell on the problem of what Heidegger, in the opening pages of Sein und Zeit, calls the Destruktion of the history of ontology. Destruktion that meant neither annihilation nor demolition (we specified these concepts), nor critique, nor refutation of an error. Not even a refutation in the sense that Hegel gives this word. And to make this clear, we had to be attentive to the difference, which could sometimes appear to be null, between Hegelian Widerlegung — with the total extension that Hegel gives this notion which allows him to logicize the totality of the negativity in being—a difference that could appear to be null between Hegelian Widerlegung and Heideggerian Destruction.
Nonetheless, Hegel’s definition of history as the development of “Spirit” is not untrue (unwahr). Neither is it partly correct and partly false. It is as true as metaphysics, which through Hegel first brings to language its essence—thought in terms of the absolute—in the system. Absolute metaphysics, with its Marxian and Nietzschean inversions, belongs to the history of the truth of being. Whatever stems from it cannot be countered or even cast aside by refutations. It can only be taken up in such a way that its truth is more primordially sheltered in being itself and removed from the domain of mere human opinion. All refutation in the field of essential thinking is töricht [senseless, foolish, mad, verbose, crazy].4
This allowed us, in passing, to perceive another covering-over, and, scarcely perceptible but decisive, another displacement between the Hegelian concept and the Heideggerian concept of the last, and of the last philosophy. And why Hegel, even though he refutes it and fulfils it totally, belongs to the metaphysical ontology that Heidegger wants to destroy—that is, to deconstruct, de-structure, shake (solicit), to bring out the thinking of being that is hiding under the ontic sedimentations. We followed in three passages this destruction of the Hegelian moment: Hegel who reduces the thinking of being to the concept of being, and Hegel who always determines being as a whole as voluntarist subjectivity (on the basis of Cartesianism), as will to will, absolute idea, God and the concept, as will to manifest itself—the Hegelian ontology or the Hegelian metaphysics which, as Hegel says himself, merges into logic and onto-theology. These precautions as to the scarcely perceptible but decisive difference between Hegelian ontology and Heidegger’s thinking of being allowed us to hear in its true resonance the passage from paragraph 6 of Sein und Zeit in which Heidegger defines the Destruktion of the history of ontology in terms that closely resemble those that Hegel uses to define the Widerlegung in philosophy in the passage we read (Lectures on the History of Philosophy). The scarcely perceptible character of the difference is what allows us to avoid those spectacular overturnings of Hegelian metaphysics that, as we well know, qua overturnings remain, unbeknownst to themselves, prisoners of what they would like to transgress (Nietzsche and Marx). All of this only partially justified the fact that the course should [48] be entitled “The Question of Being and History” and not “Ontology and History.” For the Destruktion that Heidegger talks about at the beginning of Sein und Zeit is a Destruktion of the history of ontology and not of ontology. So I tried to show that this Destruktion of the history of ontology is explicitly the Destruktion of ontology itself.
I could also have cited a fourth text that confirms this movement of a passage beyond ontology that does not lead to a new ontology, to a new ontological proposal or to the new proposal of an ontology. This is a passage from the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” in which, speaking of the relation between Ethics and Ontology, Heidegger affirms that, I quote: “ontology always thinks solely the being (ὄν) in its being” (Pathmarks, 271).
“Ontology thinks solely the being of beings or the being in its being”:5 that’s a proposition that is difficult to understand and that is replete with many possible confusions. “The being of beings”—this expression can mean two things. One often hears tell that Heidegger is not interested in the being but in the being of beings. Yet here, he seems not to be satisfied with an ontology that only ever thinks the being of beings. What does this mean? The point is that one can understand and articulate the of in “the being of beings” in two ways. When he understands it in the sense of the metaphysical ontology that he wishes to “überwinden,” overcome, Heidegger understands by the being of beings the being-a-being of beings, the being of beings qua beings, if you like the beingness of beings [l’étantité de l’étant] (Seiendheit). Traditional metaphysical ontology limits itself to what makes of the particular being or of beings in their totality, or of beings in general, a being (on). But it does not pose the question of the being of beings as a question of the being of beingness. At a pinch, one can also speak of the being of beings but being no longer has here the same meaning as in the homonymic expression of a moment ago. We are not here dealing with the being of beings as beingness of the being, but, through a further degree of questioning regression, of the being of beingness in general. This is what Heidegger also calls the truth of being, an expression that also presupposes a whole itinerary wrenching the notion of [49] truth away from its classical determination as the truth of a judicative statement, as adequation. We shall have to speak of this again. What was called fundamental ontology in Sein und Zeit and what will subsequently no longer even be called ontology wants to be a regression to a point not only prior to beings but even prior to the being of beings as beingness, toward the truth of being itself. In the passage from the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” that I have just explicated, this is clearly stated by Heidegger, who appears to be very concerned to justify retroactively this title Sein und Zeit, the incompletion of which people often try to transform into an impasse and try to oppose to the later writings, either to prefer it, or to make of it an inconsequential misstep.
I quote, [French] p. 145:
For ontology thinks solely the being (ὄν) in its being. But as long as the truth of being is not thought all ontology remains without its foundation. Therefore the thinking that in Being and Time tries to advance thought in a preliminary way into the truth of being (das Denken, das mit Sein und Zeit in die Wahrheit des Seins vorzudenken versuchte) [comment] characterizes itself as “fundamental ontology.” It tries to reach back into the essential ground from which thought concerning the truth of being emerges. By initiating another inquiry this thinking is already removed from the “ontology” [in quotes] of metaphysics (even that of Kant). “Ontology” itself, however, whether transcendental or precritical, is subject to critique, not because it thinks the being of beings and in so doing reduces being to a concept, but because it does not think the truth of being and so fails to recognize that there is a thinking more rigorous than conceptual thinking. (Pathmarks, 271)
Naturally we shall have to repeat concretely and effectively this movement of the destruction of the history of ontology as destruction of ontology, a movement in which all we have done is to propose a few reference points.
So I think I have explained why I did not use the word ontology in the title [50] of this course. But I have not explained why I said “the question of being” and not “being” or “the truth of being.” But that belongs to the order of justifications that cannot be preliminary. I could do it insufficiently and purely indicatively by radicalizing what I’ve just said about the history of ontology and ontology: namely, that there is also a project of destruction—in the very precise sense of this word—of the notion of being itself and of the word being itself. I could do so indicatively but very precisely by pointing to a short text from 1955, offered to Ernst Jünger, the second version of which has as its title Zur Seinsfrage, “the question of being,” a text in which, from [German] page 30 onward, das Sein is always written under a crossing-through that has the form of a cross, a cross, a Durchkreuzung, a kreuzweise Durchstreichung that leaves being present, visible, and legible behind the negative cipher that neutralizes it especially, says Heidegger, as an object in the subject-object relation or as a concept of the totality of beings.
But I prefer to let this justification mature, in its own time. The same goes for the justification of the term question, the word of in “the question of being,” and the word and that links the question of being to history as well as the syntax that allows this expression to be read. These words being the most important and the most problematic.
The question that will guide us today, then, in a very preliminary way, will be the following, very simply stated. What does history have to do with the question of being, in the sense in which Heidegger appears to understand it?
It would be easy to show, and I will not dwell on it, that never in the history of philosophy has there been a radical affirmation of an essential link between being and history. Ontology has always been constituted through a gesture of wrenching itself away from historicity and temporality, even in Hegel, for whom history is the history of the manifestation of an absolute and eternal concept, of a divine subjectivity that, in its origin and in its end, seems to gather up its historicity infinitely—that is, to live it in the total presence of being with itself (i.e., in a non-historicity). History is phenomenology [51] and not ontology or logic, at least if one considers Hegel literally and limits oneself to a standard reading. After Hegel, philosophy’s thematizing and taking history seriously took the form, precisely, of giving up on the problem of being. The most serious attempt to think the historicity of being, after Hegel, is the Marxist attempt which, according to Heidegger, has never been taken seriously as such. In defining Entfremdung, alienation, Marx attained an essential dimension of history as Geschichte which goes much further, says Heidegger in the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” than the banal and common concept of history. And Heidegger adds,
But since neither Husserl nor—so far as I have seen till now—Sartre recognizes the essential importance of the historical in being, neither phenomenology nor existentialism enters that dimension within which a productive dialogue with Marxism first becomes possible. (Pathmarks, 259)
The dialogue is possible and can be fruitful only if, notes Heidegger,6
(1) one liberates oneself from naïve representations and cheap refutations;
(2) one stops seeing in materiality the simple affirmation that everything is only matter; and
(3) one understands it as the metaphysical determination of beings in general as the material (Material and not Stoff) of labor.
In doing this, however, and reaching the essence of historicity on the basis of the essence of labor, Marx remains a prisoner of the Hegelian metaphysical determination of labor: Hegel had already thought, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the metaphysical and modern essence of labor as sich selbst einrichtende Vorgang der unbedingten Herstellung, as a process organizing itself in unconditioned production:
The modern metaphysical essence of labor is anticipated in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as sich selbst einrichtende Vorgang der unbedingten Herstellung, as the self-established process of unconditioned production, [unconditioned production here meaning that labor and the force of production, productivity, [52] are not defined by derivation on the basis of other conditions, but are grasped in an absolute originality with regard to any other concept or signification from which one might try to derive them] which is the objectification of the actual (Vergegenständigung des Wirklichen) through the human being, experienced as subjectivity (durch den als Subjektivität erfahrenen Menschen). (Pathmarks, 259)
This last sentence means that the originary concept of labor or production, in Marx, cannot be uncoupled from an essential relation to man as subject of labor. Humanism, subjectivity and metaphysics are indissociable, as Heidegger will show later, and ultimately, on this view, Marx, in his concept of labor, however profound the penetration of historicity allowed by it, remained an inheritor of Hegelian metaphysics, in the form of the subjectivizing voluntarism we were speaking of last time, and ultimately of a humanist anthropologism. To free oneself from it and truly think labor (and therefore history) outside the horizon of Hegelian metaphysics, it would have been necessary to think the essence of technology sheltered and hidden in this notion of labor. See [French] page 101 of the “Letter on ‘Humanism’”:
The essence of materialism is concealed in the essence of technology, about which much has been written but little has been thought. Technology is in its essence a destiny within the history of being (Die Technik ist ihrem Wesen ein seinsgeschichtliches Geschick) and of the truth of being, a truth that lies in oblivion. For technology does not go back to the τέχνη of the Greeks in name only but derives historically and essentially from τέχνη (sie stammt wesensgeschichtlich aus der τέχνη) as a mode of ἀληθεύειν, a mode, that is, of rendering beings manifest. As a form of truth, technology is grounded in the history of metaphysics, which is itself a distinctive and up to now the only surveyable phase of the history of being [Derrida’s italics]. No matter which of the various positions one chooses to adopt toward the doctrines of communism and to their foundation, from the point of view of the history of being it is certain [53] that an elemental experience of what is world-historical (was weltgeschichtlich ist) speaks out in it. Whoever takes “communism” only as a “party” or a “Weltanschauung” is thinking too shallowly, just as those who by the term “Americanism” mean, and mean derogatorily, nothing more than a particular lifestyle. (Pathmarks, 259)
If the foundational concepts of technology or labor or production or alienation or objectification belong to the history of metaphysics, as Heidegger says here, and if this history of metaphysics—or of ontology—is only a phase—an important phase and the only one we can see in its entirety as a tradition—a phase of the history of being, then the profound historicity to which Marxism gains access is not yet the history of being itself, and it is this metaphysical closure that prevents Marxism’s concept of history from going beyond the ontic sphere; it is this closure that prevents Marxism from radicalizing the historicity (that it nonetheless thinks) as history of being itself and of the truth of being itself. And this at bottom because, as for Hegel and Nietzsche, being is for Marx only the indeterminate object of the poorest concept. If the most serious attempt to radicalize the thinking of history was unable to escape from metaphysics and from the history of ontology, one must therefore think this and that links the question of being and history at a depth that has always been closed off—that is, presupposed but unthought. How then do matters stand between the question of being and history?
We can gain an entrance for ourselves into this problem by opening up the following question, which is only apparently extrinsic or simply methodological: In which language will it be possible for the question of being in its relation with history to be expounded and treated, to the degree of absolute radicality that Heidegger has chosen—that is, at the depth of the [54] originarity that on the one hand the destruction will have laid bare, and, first of all and on the other hand, on the basis of which the destruction itself was able to be undertaken<?>
Whence are we to draw the concepts, the terms, the forms of linking necessary for the discourse of Destruction, for the destructive discourse? Clearly we cannot borrow them simply from the tradition that we are in the process of deconstructing; we cannot simply take them up again, that much is obvious. But neither can we, because destruction is not a demolition or an annihilation, erase them or abandon them in some conceptual storage room, as definitively outdated instruments. Because Destruktion is in its gesture like a Wiederholung, a repetition, it can neither use, nor simply deprive itself of the traditional logos.7 Simply to deprive oneself of it would be “precisely” to give to traditionalism a meaning that is exactly the one that Heidegger does not want and that belongs to a moment of metaphysics—namely, the meaning of a beginning again from zero in the ahistorical style of Descartes or perhaps (things are less simple) of Husserl. Not that the Descartes of the Discourse or Husserl in his Cartesian vein decided to create from scratch a new language to escape from the historical heritage. In any case, if that had been practically possible, one can suppose that they would have done so and that nothing in their philosophical intention was opposed to it. And when they use received words, they indeed have the certainty—no doubt a naïve one in Heidegger’s eyes—that the new intention animating them suffices to liberate them from their historical weight. Heidegger cannot and precisely does not want to accept the comfort of this ahistorical radicalism and, planning to destroy the history of ontology and ontology, he is always vigilant in making the most radical question of being and the most radical historicity communicate intrinsically and essentially. The problem of language that he faces is thus formidable and it goes without saying that it has no general solution, no principial solution, no solution of principle. There is no operative [55] schema that will allow in each case the resolution of this difficulty on the basis of a rule. At every moment, uneasily but vigilantly, in the work of analysis, in the corrections and crossings out, the crossings out of crossings out, one will proceed slowly within the received logos, sometimes modifying it by itself, correcting itself by itself, and in this sense the destruction will always be an auto-destruction of the logos of ontology, and of philosophy by philosophy. I say of philosophy by philosophy because it goes without saying that the destruction of ontology is for Heidegger the destruction of philosophy itself (see the end of the “Letter on ‘Humanism’”). Because of this problem of language, the destruction of philosophy will always be surprised in philosophy, surprised by philosophy, enveloped by philosophy at the very moment that it wants to destroy philosophy, if only because it is the philosophical logos that is undertaking its own destruction. Sometimes, one will forge new words, new concepts, drawing on the resources of the language, on certain resources of the language that are, ought to be younger than philosophy, later arrivals on the scene than philosophy.
But the creation of new concepts, and of new concepts not as new philosophical concepts, but as concepts new with respect to any possible philosophy—this creation of new concepts, even when it is possible, will be quite insufficient to solve our problem of language. For this problem is not only a problem of concepts and words. It is not only a problem of philosophical lexicology, but it is a problem of syntax which concerns the forms of linkage of concepts. For example, hermeneutics will be unable to satisfy itself with either a purely descriptive language, with a continuous and serene explication, or with a synthetic or deductive language. Description and deduction are methods the value of which is not self-evident, and which belong to the history of metaphysics.
— hyphen and rupture:8 at certain moments of the subject-attribute relation so as to link their signification (for example Being and history).
[56] — Substantivation of preposition (the there . . .).
— Double genitive [history] (the question of being, the thinking of being). See Humanism, p. 27. Read.
Thinking is l’engagement par l’Être pour l’Être [engagement by being for being]. I do not know whether it is linguistically possible to say both of these (“par” and “pour”) at once in this way: penser, c’est l’engagement de l’Être. Here the possessive form “de l’ . . .” is supposed to express both subjective and objective genitive. In this regard “subject” and “object” are inappropriate terms of metaphysics, which very early on in the form of Occidental “logic” and “grammar” seized control of the interpretation of language. We today can only begin to descry what is concealed in that occurrence. The liberation of language from grammar into a more original essential framework is reserved for thought and poetic creation. (Pathmarks, 259–60; French as in Heidegger’s original text)
This question of the language in which the destruction will operate is not a question that I am posing to or imposing on Heidegger. It is posed by Heidegger himself at the end of the introduction to Sein und Zeit, which is entitled “Exposition of the Question of the Meaning of Being.” It is posed in an added remark, which is a little surprising and, if I have forced Heidegger’s thinking, it is by placing this added remark in the foreground.
Well, Heidegger lays out a problem that is analogous, but not identical, since this time it is a matter not of this or that concept but of the totality of the philosophical logos. I’ll translate this remark and you’ll see the new entry it gives us into our problem. End of §7.
With regard to the awkwardness and “inelegance” of expression in the following analyses, we may remark that it is one thing to tell stories about beings [literally, to report narratively: über Seiendes erzählende zu berichten] [57] and another to grasp beings in their being. For the latter task not only are most of the words lacking but above all the “grammar.” If we may allude to earlier and in their own right altogether incomparable researches on the analysis of being, then we should compare the ontological sections in Plato’s Parmenides or the fourth chapter of the seventh book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics with a narrative passage from Thucydides. Then we can see the stunning character of the formulations with which their philosophers challenged the Greeks. Since our powers are essentially inferior, and also since the area of being to be disclosed ontologically is far more difficult than that presented to the Greeks, the complexity of our concept-formation and the severity of our expression will increase. (Being and Time, 36–37)
Ontic metaphor.9
The language difficulty hangs, then—even before all the reasons for it I just gave—on the fact that for the first time we are going to forbid ourselves resolutely and absolutely from “telling stories.” The writing that tells stories is easy, narration is easy and philosophy, in spite of appearances, has never deprived itself of it. The point is to break with the philosophical novel, and to break with it radically and not so as to give rise to some new novel. The philosophical novel, philosophical narration, is of course, but is not only, the history of philosophy as doxography that recounts, reports, gathers and lays out the series of philosophical systems. “Telling stories,” in philosophy, is for Heidegger something much more profound and that cannot be so easily denounced as doxography. The Novelesque from which we must awaken is philosophy itself as metaphysics and as onto-theology.
What does this mean? And why, at the very moment at which historicity [58] must finally be taken absolutely seriously, must one stop telling stories? Why, at the moment when the question of history has the same dignity as—and not merely a dignity equal to that of—the question of being, must one stop telling stories? And why in a certain way had Plato and Aristotle also “told stories” and hadn’t broken radically with the narration of Thucydides? Why would narrative and mythology and the stories of metaphysics [several illegible words] withdrawn being and history? Before attending to what in Heidegger’s gesture—dismissing stories at the moment he poses the question of being—before attending to what in this gesture is singular and difficult, we must first recognize in what way it is classical.
Heidegger is aware of this classicism. It turns out that each time in philosophy someone wanted to establish an ontology, or to renew ontology, they began by bidding farewell to stories. But it turns out that each time it was from historicity in general that one thus took one’s leave.
Heidegger gives only one reference in this regard but one can give others and I shall do so in a moment.
Before examining this reference, I would like to say a few words about the status of historical reference, reference to the history of philosophy in Heidegger, from the point of view that interests us. When Heidegger says (§6) that “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” (Being and Time, 22), he means that references to the history of ontology (or of philosophy) are neither rhetorical or literary ornaments of the discourse elaborating the question of being, nor a methodological preamble, nor, in whatever sense, a preliminary or extrinsic phase of the elaboration of the question of being. This latter happens in the destruction of the history of ontology. What one cannot imagine, what is impossible or would have no sense, is a question of being, a positing of the question of being that [59] would happen before or independently of a destruction of ontology—that is, which essentially, in its essence, could do without historical reference to the past of philosophy. That means that the transgression of philosophy that happens with the question of being must find and maintain its support in philosophy. The question of being—beyond all regional ontologies and general ontology—has no sense if it does not question on the basis of beings and the beingness of beings in their entirety, therefore the entirety of its history and in the entirety of its explication in philosophy (as metaphysics or onto-theology). As being is not a being, it is nothing outside beings, it is not another being, therefore it is nothing ontically—outside its ontic determinations, therefore outside its totality and the totality of its history. Thus to ask questions about being outside historical reference to the totality of its ontic determinations and their explication in the history of metaphysics is to miss the meaning of being itself.
This is why Sein und Zeit, in a style which is anything but that of doxography, and at the very moment when Heidegger refuses to tell stories, begins with a reference (Sophist) and strings references throughout the length of its journey. Closing this parenthesis on references, I come back to the first reference I announced concerning “storytelling.”
After having defined and criticized the three prejudices that obscure the question of being—namely, <(1)> the prejudice that makes of the thinking of being an absolutely general concept; (2) the prejudice that dismisses the question of being on the pretext that being is by definition indefinable (Pascal: “We cannot undertake to define being without falling into the same absurdity: for we cannot define a word without beginning with the word it is, either expressed or understood. To define being, therefore, it is necessary to say it is and thus to employ the word defined in the definition”);10 and (3) the prejudice that dismisses the question of being on the pretext that being is a self-evident (selbstverständlich) concept and that, consequently, it merits no supplementary explication.11 So, after having denounced these three prejudices, Heidegger lays out what he calls the formal structure of the question [60] of being. The formal structure of the question of being is what, in its structure, is analogous to the structure of any question in general. One must know what a question in general is to determine what the question of being must be. This structure cannot be drawn without the three poles of the Gefragtes, the Befragtes and the Erfragtes.12 What does this mean?
Every question is a seeking and as such it has an object (Gesuchten) about which it is concerned. Every question has an object asked about [two illegible words] in general. “Das Fragen hat als Fragen nach sein Gefragtes [ . . . ]” (Sein und Zeit, 4). But every question also inquires of something (here the [French] translation is unintelligible—Heidegger does not say “address a question to” but “inquire of something” (Anfragen bei). “Zum Fragen gehört ausser dem Gefragten ein Befragtes” (Sein und Zeit, 5). “Besides what is asked about, what is interrogated also belongs to questioning” (here the asked about, Gefragten, is being, the interrogated (Befragtes) is beings) (Being and Time, 4). And then the intention that guides the question, what makes one pass from the Befragtes to the Gefragtes, from what is interrogated to what is asked about, if you like, is the Erfragtes, translated [by Stambaugh] as “what is to be ascertained.” This fundamental and formal structure which is that of any question is further determined if one thinks that it can be a question posed just like that, in passing, in the vacuity of chatter that does not think about the word, or, to the contrary, an explicit and authentic question. It is on the basis of this Fact that what is asked about (das Gefragte) comes into question. The Gefragtes, being, is always already pre-comprehended and that is necessary for a being to appear to us and to be determined as a being. This horizon or this opening of being in which every being whatsoever appears can quite obviously not itself be a being. In our pre-comprehension of what is asked about (Gefragtes) we already know that being is not itself a being since it is that on the basis of which every being is what it is. We know, then, that the Gefragtes (being) is not the Befragtes (a being interrogated as to what makes it a being). Our question is launched, then, in the difference between [61] the Gefragtes and the Befragtes, and thus already—although Heidegger has not yet used these words—it is launched in the only space that is proper to it, the difference between being and beings (ontico-ontological).
Now, what is it to tell stories? To tell stories is to ignore this difference and confuse the Gefragtes and the Befragtes, it is to ignore the Erfragtes, it is to assimilate being and beings, that is, to determine the origin of beings qua beings on the basis of another being. It is to reply to the question “what is the being of beings?” by appealing to another being supposed to be its cause or origin. It is to close the opening and to suppress the question of the meaning of being. Which does not mean that every ontic explication in itself comes down to telling stories; when the sciences determine causalities, legalities that order the relations between beings, when theology explains the totality of beings on the basis of creation or the ordering brought about by a supreme being, they are not necessarily telling stories. They “tell stories” when they want to pass their discourse off as the reply to the question of the meaning of being or when, incidentally, they refuse this question all seriousness. When the sciences or theology or metaphysics say, “We’re dealing with beings, with the beings in this region or beings in their totality or beingness without needing to pose the question of the truth of being,” then these discourses are content to tell stories, and those who speak them refuse to pose the question of knowing what they are talking about and to make explicit the meaning of their language. Whether this gesture be that of metaphysics, of theology, or of science, it is, at root, the very expression of obscurantism itself; of an obscurantism in which science is complicit with theology and metaphysics, that humanism which, as we shall see later, is always associated with this refusal of the question of being.
Let me make clear again, for one is never prudent enough when one touches on these questions, one never sufficiently forestalls one’s reflexes, even if the intentions—here Heidegger’s intentions—are already clearer here: let me make clear, then, that all this does not come down to condemning metaphysics, theology or science (especially not science since that is the [62] sensitive point) under the name of obscurantism. There is obscurantism not in the ontic explanation as such, but when those who practice it refuse, refute or repress the question of the meaning of being that is prior—and not only theoretically—to their activity. And it also goes without saying that of course the question of being is in no way a paralyzing reaction with regard to the progress of ontic research, whatever it be. Not only does it exercise no paralyzing reaction but, of course, it is necessary to the movement of ontic research. It is all the more necessary as the question of the meaning of being in general in that it is already necessary as a determinate ontological question concerning this or that type of being as object of this or that science. See for example what Heidegger says about this in paragraph 3 of Sein und Zeit. I’ll read directly from the [French] translation, pages 24 to 25.13
*[Up to now the necessity of a retrieval of the question was motivated partly by its venerable origin but above all by the lack of a definite answer, even by the lack of any adequate formulation of the question. But one can demand to know what purpose this question should serve. Does it remain solely, or is it at all, only a matter of free-floating speculation about the most general generalities—or is it the most basic and at the same time most concrete question?
Being is always the being of a being. [The totality of beings can, with respect to its various domains, become the field where particular domains of knowledge are exposed and delimited. These domains—for example, history, nature, space, life, human being, language, and so on—can in their turn become thematized as objects of scientific investigations. Scientific research demarcates and first establishes these domains of knowledge in a rough and ready fashion. The elaboration of the domain in its fundamental structures [63] is in a way already accomplished by the prescientific experience and interpretation of the region of being to which the domain of knowledge is itself confined. The resulting “fundamental concepts” comprise the guidelines for the first concrete disclosure of the domain. Whether or not the importance of the research always lies in such establishment of concepts, its true progress comes about not so much in collecting results and storing them in “handbooks” as in being forced to ask questions about the basic constitution of each domain, these questions being chiefly a reaction to increasing knowledge in each area.]
The real “movement” of the sciences takes place in the revision of these basic concepts, a revision which is more or less radical and lucid with regard to itself.] A science’s level of development is determined by the extent to which it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts. In these immanent crises of the sciences the relation of positive questioning to the matter in question becomes unstable. Today tendencies to place research on new foundations have cropped up on all sides in the various disciplines.
The discipline which is seemingly the strictest and most securely structured, mathematics, has experienced a “crisis in its foundations.” The controversy between formalism and intuitionism centers on obtaining and securing primary access to what should be the object of this science.]* (Being and Time, 8–9)
“Telling stories,” then—that is, giving oneself over to a mythological discourse (I’m finally arriving at the reference I announced)—is something one tried to renounce for the first time in philosophy precisely at the moment when the problem of being announced itself as such. Heidegger does not multiply references; he merely cites this “first time” when storytelling was dismissed in the face of the problem of being. This is Plato’s Sophist (242e). Paragraph 2:
The first philosophical step in understanding the problem of being consists [in the present and not in the past as in the French translation, “Philosophy took its first step when . . .”: Heidegger is not referring to Plato as in the past, but to indicate the necessity of a gesture that always threatens the question of being, yesterday, now and tomorrow] in avoiding the muthon tina diēgeisthai (keine Geschichte erzählen), that is, not determining beings as beings by tracing them [64] back in their origins [the origins of beings qua beings] to another being—as if being had the character of a possible being [Seienden]. As Gefragte [what is asked about], being thus requires its own kind of demonstration which is essentially different from the discovery of beings. (Being and Time, 5)
This is Heidegger’s second reference to the Sophist in the space of three pages. The first is the epigraph to Sein und Zeit. Read the Greek and the translation in the German text.
*dēlon gar hōs humeis men tauta (ti pote boulesthe sēmainein hopotan on phtheggēsthe) gignōskete, hēmeis de pro tou men ōometha, nun d’ ēporēkamen (Plato, Sophist, 244a).
Denn offenbar seid ihr doch schon lange mit dem vertraut, was ihr eigentlich meint, wenn ihr den Ausdruck “seiend” gebraucht, wir jedoch glaubten es einst zwar zu verstehen, jetzt aber sind wir in Verlegenheit gekommen.*14
Now precisely this passage on the aporia (244a) comes up a brief moment after the passage on the “muthon diēgeisthai” (242c). It is starting from the moment when one gives up, when the Stranger in the Sophist and his interlocutors give up on telling stories, that they enter into the aporia of being, that they broach the real difficulties.
What is going on here? Heidegger does not explain his reference; he quotes the Platonic expression, gives the idiomatic German equivalent and that is all. But I think it would be a good idea to dwell a little on the Sophist to understand clearly what is at stake in this problem. After the refutation of Parmenides and the parricide, the Stranger mentions those who carelessly (eukolōs) plan to determine how many beings (onta) there are and what they [65] are. And this is the beginning of a little history of philosophy:
Every one of them seems to tell us a story (muthon tina hekastos phainetai moi diēgeisthai), as if we were children. One says there are three principles, that some of them are sometimes waging a sort of war with each other, and sometimes become friends and marry and have children and bring them up [here it’s the history of being as told by the presocratics, or the sophists, the history of being as a family history, as a family tree]; and another says there are two, wet and dry or hot and cold, which he settles together and unites in marriage. And the Eleatic sect in our region, beginning with Xenophanes and even earlier, have their story that all things, as they are called, are really one. Then some Ionian and later some Sicilian Muses (Empedocles) reflected that it was safest to combine the two tales [ . . . ].15
The Stranger enumerates in this way all the past ontologies, those that say that Being is one or multiple, or both, that it is heat or cold, movement or rest, and so forth, of the materialists or of the sons of the earth, of the friends of the forms, and in the midst of the Gigantomachia that arises between them—a Gigantomachia that is also mentioned at the beginning of Sein und Zeit — there arises the aporia of being, in the form of the question of the triton ti. The schema of the question of being here is the following: you say that being is this or that, this and that (movement or rest, etc.). But what is the being which you say is this or that and what is the being of the is that allows you to say that being is this or that? What is this third term, being itself, which does not let itself be determined by a discourse but on the contrary allows all the determinations that come about in it? To stop telling stories, you must stop replying to the question “What is being?” in the form of “There is being as movement, there is being as rest, there is being as sensory matter, there is being as eidos.” A schema analogous to that of Theaetetus [66] on science. [Comment.] Telling scientific stories. [Uncertain word] We need, then, a minimal and austere answer to the question, “What is being?” Now, here are the two passages in which non-mythical discourse surfaces as the question of the meaning of being in the initial form of the question on the signification of the word being.
Read Sophist 243a–244b, [French] pp. 346 to 348.
*STRANGER: When one of them says in his talk that many, or one, or two are, or have become, or are becoming, and again speaks of hot mingling with cold, and in some other part of his discourse suggests separations and combinations, for heaven’s sake, Theaetetus, do you ever understand what they mean by any of these things? I used to think, when I was younger, that I understood perfectly whenever anyone used this term “not-being,” which now perplexes us. But you see what a slough of perplexity we are in about it now.
THEAETETUS: Yes, I see.
STRANGER: And perhaps our minds are in this same condition as regards being also; we may think that it is plain sailing and that we understand when the word is used, though we are in difficulties about not-being, whereas really we understand equally little of both.
THEAETETUS: Perhaps.
STRANGER: And we may say the same of all the subjects about which we have been speaking.
THEAETETUS: Certainly.
STRANGER: We will consider most of them later, if you please, but now the greatest and foremost chief of them must be considered.
THEAETETUS: What do you mean? Or, obviously, do you mean that we must first investigate the term “being,” and see what those who use it think it signifies?
STRANGER: You have caught my meaning at once, Theaetetus. For I certainly do mean that this is the best method for us to use, by questioning them directly, as if they were present in person; so here goes: Come now, all you [67] who say that hot and cold or any two such principles are the universe, what is this that you attribute to both of them when you say that both and each are? What are we to understand by this “being” (or “are”) of yours? Is this a third principle besides those two others, and shall we suppose that the universe is three, and not two any longer, according to your doctrine? For surely when you call one only of the two “being” you do not mean that both of them equally are; for in both cases they would pretty certainly be one and not two.
THEAETETUS: True.
STRANGER: Well, then, do you wish to call both of them together being?
THEAETETUS: Perhaps.
STRANGER: But, friends, we will say, even in that way you would very clearly be saying that the two are one.
THEAETETUS: You are perfectly right.
STRANGER: Then since we are in perplexity, do you tell us plainly what you wish to designate when you say “being.” For it is clear that you have known this all along, whereas we formerly thought we knew, but are now perplexed. So first give us this information, that we may not think we understand what you say, when the exact opposite is the case.—If we speak in this way and make this request of them and of all who say that the universe is more than one, shall we, my boy, be doing anything improper?*(Sophist, 359–63).
After this aporia the doxography picks up again, at a higher level. And then we see file past the unitarist and materialist doctrines, those of the friends of the forms, the partisans of movement and of rest, and to these naïve ontologies that are still telling stories, the same question is posed: that of the triton ti at 250b.
Read [French] 359.
*STRANGER: Being, then, you consider to be something else in the soul, a [68] third in addition to these two, inasmuch as you think rest and motion are embraced by it; and since you comprehend and observe that they participate in existence, you therefore said that they are. Eh?* (Sophist, 389)
Being is other than the determinations of the onta. Which does not mean that it is another on. And one must become conscious of this alterity which is not a difference between onta in order to transgress mythology when one asks what is the origin of beings in their being. This is the condition for ceasing to speak as if we were children. Adult philosophical discourse, then, presupposes that one takes seriously the question of being. And it is remarkable, let it be said in parentheses dedicated to Georges Lapassade,16 that in all the philosophical discourses that may have presented themselves as radically new, one finds an explicit allusion to a childhood left behind. Why the value of philosophical discourse is spontaneously measured by the yardstick of adult maturity is a question to which it is not so easy to reply seriously. Why, fundamentally, is an adult’s discourse better than a child’s discourse? And why would philosophy make common cause with maturity?
If the question interests you, well then, note the following references: apart from Plato whom we have just read, apart from the well-known texts by Descartes and Comte, one can find this critique of childhood and childishness in Bergson (introduction to La pensée et le mouvant)17 and in Husserl (Formal and Transcendental Logic, end of paragraph 95, where the fear of methodological solipsism and the refusal to understand transcendental egoity are presented as an issue for children philosophers.)18
When Heidegger says that the question of being should impose silence on stories and he reads Plato, this does not mean that in his eyes Plato did not, at the end of the day, also tell stories. I do not wish to go down that path here: [69] we can discuss it later if you wish. Without, for that matter, even going via Heidegger’s reading of Plato—a reading according to which the eidos and above all the agathon, which were supposed to answer the question “What is being?” are not being but beings par excellence, beings that are truly beings (ontôs onta), at the very moment when the agathon is presented as epekeina tēs ousias—without even going via this reading, one can invoke many texts by Plato that are unequal to the breakthrough and the promise of the Sophist. Very remarkable in this respect is the Timaeus, in which, when it comes to explaining the origin of the world, the origin of the beings that appear to us, the origin of the ordered system (Cosmos) of phenomena, Timaeus, responding to Socrates who was asking for a true story (alēthinon logon) at last, and not a muthon, announces (29 c–d) that, when it is a question of the origin of beings, a philosophical discourse adequate to the question is impossible, a true and exact discourse is impossible, and one must be content to recite, to unroll like a genesis, like a becoming-real of things, something that is not becoming, but the origin of things. One must unroll the Archē like a genesis. One must produce a discourse, a narrative in terms of becoming, in what is already there, already born, even though one would need to speak of the origin and of the birth of the world. This, he says, is because “both I who speak and you who judge are but human creatures, so that it becomes us to accept the likely account of these matters (ton eikota muthon) and forbear to search beyond it.”19
A resignation that can also be interpreted as the principle of an ironic answer to the question of being—in Heidegger’s sense—the question of the origin of beings in their being. Basically, Timaeus seems to be saying that it is pointless to want to say anything about being that concerns it itself. On the subject of being which in itself is nothing, one can only tell stories—that is, ontic or worldly discourses (here, cosmological, metaphysical, without the Demiurge). One can only . . . (i.e., men, philosophers qua men, can only . . .) “We are only human [both I who speak and you who judge are but human [70] creatures],” he says (29c), which means that those who would like to proffer a philosophical—and not anthropological—discourse about being and the origin of beingness deceive themselves and rave even more than those who are content with plausible stories, with good myths. That is, with science: for it is science, the content of scientific knowledge, that Timaeus is unfolding in this dialogue.
It is true that this resignation to the plausible myth is not the only intention of this passage from the Timaeus. There is also, briefly suggested, the theme of an esotericism, an outcome that contradicts it a little. One must content oneself with the plausible myth—here ontic narratives, Heidegger would say—when one does not have the rare luck, possibility or merit to gain access to the origin of the world of beings in their being. “Now to discover the Maker and Father of this Universe were a task indeed; and having discovered Him, to declare Him unto all men were a thing impossible” (Timaeus, 51). Telling stories—in the sense we are now giving to that expression—is thus a necessity when one is addressing everybody; it is an expository necessity when the philosopher chosen by God or the philosopher with the patient eye of the Eagle, or in any case the philosopher who has broken with the natural attitude and non-philosophy, wants to transmit the question of the origin to those who do not yet have access to it. Necessity of the ontic metaphor.
This is not, by this comparison with the Timaeus, to transform the question of being or of the origin of beings and of their being into a question of initiation, and to transform Heidegger’s thought into a gnosis. To the contrary, the possibility of acceding to the question of being beyond the natural attitude, naïve sciences, and even critical but regional ontologies, is the most radically universal. But it is first of all a possibility that can only be made explicit in a break with the natural language and attitude.
So, rather than play on this similarity to help you understand this break, [71] and by comparison, rather than invoking Husserl who would have us understand it within the horizon of a transcendental idealism, I would rather refer once again to Hegel. Hegel (for example §88, remark 3 of the Encyclopedia) tries to have us understand what he means by the unity of being and pure nothingness. This proposition that being is nothingness appears to be contradictory to common sense which cannot understand it, which cannot understand it because it cannot think being outside all determination, outside this or that. The passage to the thinking of pure being, which is a break with determination in general, and which makes us understand that being, being no being in particular, is nothing, this passage to the thinking of being as a thinking of nothingness is the beginning of philosophical knowledge, and presupposes a break with the attitude of natural consciousness or scientific consciousness which is also a natural consciousness imprisoned in determination. Faced with the incomprehension of natural consciousness, “there is nothing further to be said than this, namely that philosophical knowledge is indeed of a different sort from the kind of knowledge one is accustomed to in ordinary life, as it also is from what reigns in other sciences” (Encyclopedia, 142). Hegel seems, then, to determine the difference between natural, common or scientific knowledge, and philosophical knowledge, between the thinking of determinate beings and the thinking of pure being as nothingness—Hegel seems to determine this difference as a difference that is a break, a difference that can be overcome only by a violent movement of conversion. But at the same time, in what immediately follows in the same text, Hegel shows that what natural knowledge claims it does not understand—namely, pure being—it has always already understood, that it has an “infinite number of representations” (Encyclopedia, 142) of the unity of pure being and pure nothingness and that, each time that thinking determines, it has already thought the being of determinate beings. It has thought it without thinking it, but in order to think what it has thought, it suffices that it reflect and make explicit what it has always already done qua determining thinking. In other words, the conversion or the break that supposedly moves us from [72] the naïve knowledge of the determination to the philosophical knowledge of pure being—this conversion is an explication. The Difference between difference as break and difference as interval of explication, the difference between difference as break and difference as explication, is according to Hegel a false difference, an indifferent difference; and the problem connected with it—we would still need to understand why—is a false problem.
You see, in any case, from the Timaeus to Heidegger, what can be meant by this secret of the question of being that one cannot share with those who do not have access to it, without running the risk, in traversing the language common to natural consciousness and philosophical consciousness, of “telling stories.” And yet nothing is less secret than this secret. Nothing is more widely shared.
Now, however close Hegel’s text and intention, as I have just invoked them, may once again be to Heidegger’s intention, this should not leave us with the illusion that Heidegger, who is not saying anything different, is saying the same thing. An identical thing. While one must indeed go via this identity of pure being and pure nothingness in order to understand that being is not a being, is not one being or the totality of determinate beings, in order to understand the difference between being and beingness, for Heidegger being is however not merely non-beingness or rather indeterminate beings, it is not only indetermination, indeterminacy, and if the expression pure being is not Heideggerian this is not by chance. Being, once again, is not for Heidegger the abstract poverty of an empty concept preceding possible experience and beings [three uncertain words]; it is concrete and the presence of the present. The question of being, says Heidegger in paragraph 3 of Sein und Zeit, is the most basic and the most concrete (and Heidegger underlines these words).
So much so that Hegel’s proposition of the identity of pure nothingness and pure being, however necessary it may be, is still a preliminary proposition, an ontic and metaphysical proposition, which negatively pronounces being to be indeterminate beingness. That Hegel’s proposition should be in Heidegger’s eyes a metaphysical or ontic proposition, still blind to the truth of being, is what appears in Was ist Metaphysik? (1929), the guiding thread [73] of which is the question of nothingness, and anxiety as the fundamental experience of nothingness. In Was ist Metaphysik? Heidegger writes this (the point is to show that experience of nothingness does not have its origin in logical negation):
This cursory historical recollection shows the nothing as the counter-concept to that which properly is, i.e., as its negation. But if the nothing somehow does become a problem, then this opposition does not merely undergo a somewhat clearer determination; rather, it awakens for the first time the proper formulation of the metaphysical question concerning the being of beings. The nothing does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but unveils itself as belonging to [attached to: zugehörig zum Sein des Seienden] the being of beings. “Pure Being and pure Nothing therefore are the same.” This proposition of Hegel’s20 is correct. Being and the nothing do belong together, not because both—from the point of view of the Hegelian concept of thought—agree in their indeterminateness and immediacy, but rather because being itself is essentially finite and manifests itself only in the transcendence of a Dasein that is held out into the nothing (in der Transzendenz des in das Nichts hinausgehaltenen Daseins offenbart).21
Not only does Hegel’s proposition remain a metaphysical proposition dominated by a logic of negation but, even within metaphysics, Heidegger contests its scope. It is true but not in the sense that Hegel believed.
Historicizing the revelation of being within the borders of metaphysics understood in this way is thus in a certain way still to “tell stories.” And Hegel would in this sense have been one of the great storytellers, one of the greatest novelists of philosophy, the greatest no doubt, and you can see how The Phenomenology of Spirit and the Lectures on the History of Philosophy [74] could come to illustrate this remark. To liberate the question of being and history, one must, then, stop telling stories, which is to say that one must take a step beyond ontic history. This step, which can look like an exit from history in general toward the ahistorical, is in truth the condition of access to a radicalization of the thinking of history as history of being itself. One must, then, constantly and firmly maintain the distrust of historicism in order to think history as the truth of being, in order truly to think history at the level of the truth of being. So there is in Heidegger—without of course everything coming down to this, but there is underlying in him—the classical distrust of history and historicism, a distrust that belongs to a Cartesian vein (think of Descartes’s distinction in the Regulae between philosophical knowledge and historical knowledge: Descartes too is someone who wanted to be finished with novels and the childishness of “storytelling”), a Cartesian vein and therefore a Husserlian vein. For his part, Husserl, without beating about the bush, thought that all Hegel had done was tell stories and that metaphysics consists in telling stories (example: dialectics) [comment].
Before even entering, as we shall have to do, into the problem of the relations between Husserl and Heidegger, from the point of view that interests us, it is certain that Heidegger’s gesture is here entirely analogous—I do not say identical—to Husserl’s: reduce historicity, refuse to “tell stories,” bracket the real ontic or practical genesis in order then to grasp in its profound originality the historicity of meaning. For it is not by chance that, in the history of thought, the only book, along with Sein und Zeit, that explicitly begins with the refusal to “tell stories” is, not the Sophist, which does not begin with this refusal, but in fact Ideen I. The first note in the first section of the first chapter of Ideen I expresses this refusal. I’ll read from Paul Ricoeur’s translation. The note comments on the text’s use of the word original:
No stories will be told here. Neither psychological-causal nor historical-developmental [75] genesis need be, or should be, thought of when we speak here of originality. What other sense is meant will not become reflectively and scientifically clear until later.22
And what is translated here as “No stories will be told here” is the common German expression, “We aren’t going to tell stories.” Husserl writes, “Es werden hier keine Geschichten erzählt,”23 the very expression used by Heidegger.
We must now understand how, in the elaboration of the question of being by Heidegger, taking advantage precisely of the keine Geschichten erzählen, the theme of historicity is introduced.
It will be difficult and slow, and one can already say (very summarily) that the theme of the historicity of being itself, of the historicity of the truth of being, does not really belong to Sein und Zeit. The historicity that is an important theme in Sein und Zeit, which provides on this subject Heidegger’s fullest and most systematic developments (contained in the fifth chapter <of division 2> of the published part, a chapter that has not yet been translated [into French]), the historicity in Sein und Zeit is the historicity of Dasein and not of Sein (i.e., of the privileged being that affords us privileged access to the truth of being). The historicity is, if you will, that of the Befragtes (of the being interrogated with a view to being) and not of the Gefragtes (of what is the asked about of the question, being itself). However important and revolutionary the analyses devoted to historicity in Sein und Zeit are, they are preliminary; they belong to the hermeneutic of Dasein which is only an introduction into the question of being. Historicity of Dasein and not of Sein.
[76] But we will have patiently to follow this preliminary phase both because of its intrinsic importance and because here the preliminary is perhaps more than the preliminary and there is not, between Dasein and Sein, between the Befragtes and the Gefragtes, a simple relation of means to end, a route accessible to all, or a move from the threshold to beyond the threshold.24
If one wants to measure from a great distance and a great height the immensity of the itinerary that must lead to the question of the history of being itself, one must first realize that the question of the historicity of Dasein (or of Existenz), which is only a question preliminary to that of the historicity of Sein, itself constitutes an immense step forward. An immense step forward not only with regard to anti-historical idealisms, but even with regard to what one might consider to be the question of the historicity of transcendental subjectivity in Husserl. It is at the price of an immense effort and at the end of a long path that transcendental historicity was discovered by Husserl, and even then it affected only the historicity of meaning and affected it merely with a concern. If one bears in mind that Heideggerian Dasein is a notion that takes us back before the distinctions proper to transcendental idealism (activity-passivity, consciousness, subject, object, etc.), distinctions that are laden with metaphysical presuppositions, then speaking of the historicity of Dasein already goes a long way, even if only in a preliminary way.
So, opening here the first major part of this course, we ask ourselves the following question.
What is the necessity that links the Gefragtes to a given Befragtes? That is, in other words, Why does the question of being pass through an analytic of [77] Dasein? And, closer to what interests us, Why does the question of the historicity of being pass through the question of the historicity of Dasein? I do not say of beings.
This is the very general question we must try to answer before describing this historicity of Dasein.
Having, in the passages I have already mentioned, destroyed the prejudices that were obscuring the question of being, having drawn out the formal structure of the question of being (i.e., the structure that it has in common with all other questions), Heidegger begins to open the path proper to the question of being itself.
To do so, he must obviously give himself at the outset no metaphysical presupposition of any sort, no metaphysical proposition of any sort. His question must be in this regard absolutely radical and radically inaugural, de jure. But de jure already, Heidegger gives himself, thinks he has to give himself, two . . . let’s say vaguely and in quotation marks, using a word that is improper, two “assurances” in which the fully historical character of the question of being appears.
As always happens, what a question that is absolutely radical when it is historical in its radicality must give itself—that is, the two assurances that I have just announced—it gives to itself in the form of an Already, or rather of an always already.
And we would have to meditate on the grammatico-philosophical meaning and function of this expression always already (toujours déjà, an expression that is not French, that shocks French syntax, and I would even say French philosophical syntax, which would perhaps tell us a great deal about the relations between this French philosophical logos in its relations with history: the expression always already was only used in French texts in the wake of the translations of immer schon, the German always already).
The signification of “always already” is the historical translation or rather the historical foundation of the signification “a priori.” The always modifies the already in such a way that the already does not depend on this or that contingent situation, but has a value of unconditioned universality. The always [78] wrests the historicity of the already from empiricity.
Here the essential already is unconditioned, the always already is thus the form in which Heidegger must, not give himself or simply encounter presuppositions, but begin in the sense of repeating the beginning of a question which in fact has never been posed but which has always already been made possible. We will see later—or next time—why the presence of an Already in a questioning that is claiming to be radical is not a circle, in the sense of vicious circle or faulty reasoning.
What, then, are the two assurances that, far from compromising the radicality of the question, make it possible qua radicality?
(1)26 Given the formal structure of every question, the question of being must be guided by the very thing in view of which it questions. As Heidegger says, insofar as it is a Suchen (seeking, quest), the question needs to receive a prior direction from the Gesuchten (from what is sought, and not from the object of the seeking, as is translated in a translation that is not innocent, since it makes of Being the object of a question: it is what is sought in the seeking). For the question of being to receive prior direction from the very thing in view of which it is questioning, it is necessary, as Heidegger notes, that the meaning of being be already in a certain sense verfügbar (“Der Sinn von Sein muss uns daher schon in gewisser Weise verfügbar sein” [Sein und Zeit, 5]): “accessible” in the [French] translation, which thus implies that we already know it. In fact verfügbar means “available,” available in a certain way, not available like an object at our disposal but welcoming, disposed to let itself be understood, to let itself be approached in some way, close to us (we do not yet know what we need to understand by this us—neither understanding nor reason nor man) in a certain familiarity.
[79] Without this familiarity with the meaning of being or this pre-understanding of the meaning of being, the explicit question of the meaning of being could not even arise. So there is an already of the question of the meaning of being, a reference to an always already, to a past that is always already buried but still having an effect that allows the most radical, freest, most independent, most concrete question, the first and last, to arise. The weight of the already in the originary signifies already the absolute and originary historicity of the question of being, signifies that the question of being is fully and originarily and through and through historical.
The pre-understanding or the familiarity of the meaning of being that guides our question as soon as it arises—this familiarity is a Fact (Faktum), but of course a fact that is unique of its kind. We could fix the originality and uniqueness of this Faktum according to two themes. But to do so, I must translate a few lines from Heidegger, on which I shall rely subsequently: [German] p. 5 of §2:
As a seeking, questioning needs prior guidance from what it seeks. The meaning of being must therefore already be available [comprehensible?] to us in a certain way. We intimated that we are always already involved in an understanding of being. From this grows the explicit question of the meaning of being and the tendency toward its concept. We do not know [wissen emphasized] what “being” means (was Sein besagt). But already when we ask [and not “as soon as we ask”], “was ist “Sein”?” what is [emphasized] ‘being’?” we stand in an understanding [comprehension, Verständnis . . .] of the “is” without being able to determine conceptually what the “is” means (ohne dass wir begrifflich fixieren könnten, was das “ist” bedeutet). We do not even know the horizon upon which we are supposed to grasp and pin down the meaning. (Being and Time, 4)
(A very important sentence: this means that we cannot even anticipate what will soon reveal itself as the transcendental horizon in which the meaning [80] of being is determined in the first part of Sein und Zeit—namely, time. This first part, the only one that was published, is entitled, as you know: “The Interpretation of Dasein in Terms of Temporality and the Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon of the Question of Being.”) And apropos the transcendental horizon: “The ‘transcendental’ meant there does not pertain to subjective consciousness; instead, it is determined by the existential-ecstatic temporality of Being-there,” and so forth (Einführung . . . , [French] p. 26) (Introduction to Metaphysics, 19–20).
I continue the translation I had begun: “This [and not “a” as in the [French] translation] average and vague understanding of being (Seinsverständnis) is a fact (Faktum [emphasized]) (Being and Time, 4).
And a little later: “What is sought in the question of being is not completely unfamiliar, although it is at first totally ungraspable” (Being and Time, 5).
I announced that the originality of this Faktum enveloped in the question of being could give rise to two determinations.
(1) It is always obvious that our pre-comprehension (as Heidegger says elsewhere: Vor-verständnis) of the meaning of being is not a Fact among others, is not a contingent or empirical fact, for the good reason that the content of this fact is access to the meaning of being itself which will subsequently allow the determination in general of any fact in general. Understanding, even confusedly, the signification of the word being, is an absolutely irreducible Faktum, out of reach for any determinate science, for any science of fact, in particular for the sciences most hungry for that flesh—namely, the human sciences: for example, all the sciences of the psyche (be that science a logic or something else) whatever their style, or a philology or a linguistics, and so on—and to the extent that the very exercise of their scientific activity [81] and all the scientific determinations and all the propositions that they could produce presuppose as the ground of their validity, as the source of their value the very thing that they would like to account for:—namely, the understanding of the meaning of being, since all their explanatory propositions naively appeal to it. Naturally this does not mean—as one might a bit stupidly be tempted to think would crush Heidegger—that the Desire that moves these sciences, being deprived of the essential thing—namely, of accounting for the meaning of the signification being—would be deprived of everything. That does not mean, then, that all the activity mobilized by scientific desire would be vain or sterile. Quite the contrary—it can be very fruitful. It is fecundity itself and it is necessary and legitimate. All the psycho . . . (of the psyche), philological, linguistic, grammatical exploration throwing itself into an assault on the word be is an indispensable task, even if one can say a priori that it will ultimately run out of breath before the very meaning of being, not out of impotence or some limit of the rationality that animates it, out of some irrationality, but because the meaning of being is the very thing that allows it to speak, to form any proposition; it is therefore the origin and the possibility of its desire for science and research; and if the scientist happened to question as to this ultimate origin and the dawn of his Desire, then his question would no longer be simply scientific, without for all that becoming anti-scientific. On the contrary, the anticipation of this limit, which has nothing negative about it and must even be the most positive stimulant of science, and the neo-scientists by profession who refuse to ask themselves about the foundations of science, on the pretext that those foundations mean going back before science and that therefore they are non-scientific, on the pretext that they run the risk of a crisis of science—those ones, those neo-scientists are obviously the first to betray the demand of science. The authentic demand of science ought to allow one to distinguish between the pre-scientific as foundation of science and the pre-scientific as irrationality [three illegible words] [82] of the illiterate and fearful stuttering.
(2) The Faktum from which we are starting and which we are speaking about is determined by Heidegger as a phenomenon of language and it is not by chance if the pre-comprehension of the meaning of being is first presented as a pre-comprehension of the signification of the word being. The pre-comprehension of the Sinn is illustrated and even demonstrated by the pre-comprehension of the Bedeutung of the “is” in the sentence. Heidegger indeed says,
We do not know what “being” [in quotes, the word “being”] means (besagt). But already when we ask, “was ist ‘Sein’?” we stand in an understanding of the “is” [in quotes] without being able to determine conceptually was das “ist” bedeutet. (Being and Time, 4)
You already see the immensity of the problems and the implications to which this gesture of Heidegger’s leads back, this gesture the necessity of which we must understand; the necessity of which will never cease to be understood, and that the later developments of Heidegger’s thought will, precisely, merely lay out. For it is quite obvious that, giving himself language and the possibility of a language or a tongue in which the verb to be would be de facto or de jure, virtually or virtually27 what makes language come to its true essence (cf. Einführung . . . , [French] p. 64: “but essence and being speak in language” [Introduction to Metaphysics, 57]; [French] p. 92: without the word Being, all words would disappear)28—giving himself that, Heidegger is not simply giving himself a premise, or a principle, or a facility (Introduction to Metaphysics, 86). He is giving himself only the possibility of a question and he ties the possibility of the question to that of language. That is a right that one might wish to contest: for my part I believe—and I’m saying this to put this formidable problem at least provisionally aside (and not to hide from these questions)—that this contestation has not yet been undertaken at the [83] necessary level and with the necessary means, that it demands an immense itinerary, one scarcely imaginable, and that it will not arise seriously tomorrow, except in the mode of a vague desire that can sometimes be very talkative and voluble, and that, for my part, I prefer to hold in reserve here. We shall be encountering this problem again. For the moment, I shall be content to refer you to the Einfuhrung . . . (grammar and etymology of the word being). All I wish to emphasize here is that starting from the Faktum of language, and of a language in which the word be is heard, precise and unavoidable, Heidegger ties the possibility of his question and therefore of his whole subsequent discourse to the possibility of history. For there is no language without history and no history without language. The question of being is the very question of history. It is born of history, and it takes aim at history. It is the absolution of history itself on itself as history of being.
The Faktum was, then, the first of the 2 “assurances” that I had announced. Assurances that are not “contracted for” but always already present when a discourse begins and even when a questioning discourse begins.
The 2nd is the one which, with the Gefragtes, the questioning, gives itself the Befragtes, as questioning. The being interrogated, Befragtes, in view of being, is us, namely the questioning being. And this us is determined as Da-sein. Well, it is the necessity of this gesture that will interest us as we begin next time. Then we will be ready to study the structures of the historicity of the questioning Dasein, interrogated in view of the historicity of Sein, the ultimate questioned of the question.
Cf. Einführung . . . , [French] p. 80 for what follows.29