[123] Last time we dwelt at length in the problematic field of what I called the first assurance of the question of Being, namely the Faktum of the pre-comprehension of the signification of the word be. The original Faktum of a language, of language, in which the presence of being has always already operated if this language is a language.
Along the way, and especially in conclusion, we wondered about the enigmatic signification of proximity, proximity to self in the I am, proximity of the Da in Da-sein: everything we said about this—and that I cannot go over again here, even schematically— prepared, as I announced, the problem of the second assurance that we are broaching now. Second ≠ other assurance / common root of the two assurances. Let me recall briefly however that we are developing this question of the two assurances under the aegis of the general question I posed during the session before last, namely: Why, what necessity justifies that the question of Being as History, of Being/History should pass via the preliminary moment of an analytic of the historicity of Da-sein? And what does this preliminary signify here?
The Faktum of language sketched out the response—with the difficulties that we encountered. Since Being is not, nor comes forth, nor appears, outside language, it is history, yes, but it comes forth through (and I leave this through to all its enigmatic power) a speaking being, a speaking being [124] who poses or to whom or by whom or through whom the question of being precisely poses itself. And posing itself thus immediately constitutes thereby the originality of the being to which or through which or for which it poses itself. The reflexivity of “poses itself,” here, which seems to make Being the subject of the question, must not be, through another falsification, a pretext to think that Being is another Being, a subject, a God who addresses it to such and such a being, as it happens the being in the form of Dasein, and that in so doing it constitutes it as Da-sein. [Illegible sentence added in the margin.] Because Being is not a being, there is no chance for such a metaphysical hypostasis of the initiation of the question to come about, except of course if it is given the opportunity by some misrecognition function.
Other ways of proceeding—that one would not expect to see here compared to those that are occupying us at the moment and that I mention only for . . . amusement—are indeed threatened by metaphysical hypostasis, just when one would expect it least, and this is because of a failure to pre-criticize philosophically the notions in question. These ways of proceeding are familiar enough to us for me to be content with three quotations in which the grammatical function of what Heidegger would call the language of being is occupied in these propositions by symbol or myth and in which the (speaking) Dasein becomes man, as if one knew at that point already what one was speaking about under these three names (symbols, myths and men).
I believe I read the first two quotations very rapidly last time. So let me re-read these sentences.
(1) “The symbol’s order can no longer be conceived of as constituted by man but must rather be conceived of as constituting him.” (Lacan, Écrits, 34)
(2) “Man thus speaks, but it is because the symbol has made him man.” (Lacan, Écrits, 229)
(3) “I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how [125] myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.”1
I return to Heideggerian prudence and, finally, to the second assurance taken in this text which is almost forty years old.
Let us remind ourselves of the structure: Gefragtes, Befragtes, Erfragtes. Being is the questioned, the Gefragtes of the Fragen. If Being is the Being of a being, the Befragtes, the interrogated of the question can only be a being, a being interrogated as to its being. But in order that, when interrogated, it reveal the questioned appropriately to us, it must be appropriately interrogated and our access to the interrogated must be the right access.
Beings are interrogated, but beings are everything that is and anything at all. Being comes forth in all the forms of beings. The forms of beings—which must not be confused with the regions of being—are very numerous: there are beings in the form of what is called existence, the fact that something is, the that (Dass-sein), beings in the form of essence (of what the thing is, of the such that it is—So-sein). In the form also of the Res (Realität), in the form of permanent object-being before us (Vorhandenheit: “subsistent being,” as <the> Gallimard <edition> translates it),2 in the form of content, or constancy (Bestand), in the form of Being-there (Dasein), in the form of value (Geltung), in the form of the there is (es gibt).3
The very fact that Heidegger wonders to what form of being he should address himself, the fact that he remarks that the question is worth posing, however rapidly and discreetly he does so here, is the sign of a vigilance that has never appeared as such in the history of ontology. All ontologies (with the sole exception of what one could, with caution, call Husserl’s ontology) implicitly chose as their guide such and such a type of being without making a theme or a question of their choice. And according to Heidegger it is most often in the form of Vorhandenheit (of the object, if you like, and by what is merely an alternation in the form of the subject) which has served as the exemplary form of being. Cf. §6 on Kant and Descartes ([French] p. 45, Being and Time, 23–24).
Now it is precisely the problem of exemplarity that Heidegger does not [126] want to dodge here. He writes in §2, [French] p. 22, I translate:
On which being is the meaning of being to be read (An welchem Seienden soll der Sinn von Sein abgelesen warden), from which being is the opening up (Erschliessung) of being to get its start (soll ihren Ausgang nehmen)? Is the starting point arbitrary, or does a certain being have a priority (Vorrang) in the elaboration of the question of being? Which is this exemplary being and in what sense does it have priority? (Being and Time, 6)
A problem, then, of exemplarity, a de jure problem, of the justification of exemplarity, of privilege.
A remark on the passage I have just read. Heidegger says “on which being is the meaning of being to be read” (reread the German). And Heidegger does not pause over this notion of reading that is functioning here in a muted way . . . .
So one might wonder: to what extent is this metaphor of reading innocent? To what extent innocent the definition of a question that makes—at least by metaphor — of the questioned Gefragtes a meaning (Sinn, the meaning of being) and of the Befragtes, of the interrogated, a text on which the meaning is deciphered? Which transforms, at least metaphorically—but what a metaphor—the Sinn into a Bedeutung. And it is Da-sein (often too rapidly translated as man) that will be determined as the right text, without the use of this metaphor being as naïve as that of Hobbes in the introduction to the Leviathan, where it has one think “That Wisdome is acquired, not by reading of Books, but of Men”;4 the other forms of being will, then, be determined as bad texts for the deciphering of the meaning of being, as apocryphal texts: that is, as bad crypts, as crypts which conceal by distancing (apo-kruptein), whereas Dasein will be the good crypt that still hides, of course, but in such a way that it does not distance us but brings us close to the meaning it gives us to read. And this metaphor of reading that makes of being a meaning legible in a text—as if the text or the book were not itself a form of being much more [127] determinate still than Dasein—this metaphor of reading, however discreet its appearance here, is in no way an accident of Heidegger’s style, any more than it has ever been, I believe, wherever it has functioned, which is to say, I believe, everywhere, everywhere in the entirety of Western discourse at least, from Plato to Heidegger (Plato, Phaedrus). Freud recommends in the Traumdeutung ([German] p. 98)5 that we beware the metaphor of the text, of the metaphor making of the unconscious an original text of which consciousness would be merely the Umschrift (transposition, translation, falsification). He seemed in so doing to refuse the metaphor of the text only when it is a question of one type of writing (phonetic). For in some later texts (comment: FS?).6 In the Notiz über den “Wunderblock” (vol. 14, [German] pp. 3–8),7 he does not fail to compare the unconscious to those blocks of wax with which you are perhaps familiar, which are protected by a transparent plastic film. One writes with a stylus on the transparent film, the signs are inscribed on the grey wax, and it then suffices to pull back the transparent film for the visible writing to be erased. But the invisible traces remain inscribed in the depth of the wax. Here inscription and not text.
This metaphor of the text does not appear by chance in Heidegger; one can almost say that he resolutely takes it on in spite of all the later Nietzschean-style protests against grammar and writing. He takes it on, since a little later, when he is defining, as you know, his method as phenomenology, phenomenological ontology, and as apophantic phenomenological ontology, repeating history and reactivating the history of phainesthai and logos, Heidegger specifies that phenomenology as science of the being of beings, as ontology, and specifically insofar as it takes as its theme the privileged being that is Da-sein, [128] has as its methodological meaning Auslegung, which is translated [into French] as “explicitation” [and into English as “interpretation”]—which is indeed what it means.8 It is indeed the action of unfolding that spreads out and turns over what is enveloped—but it is also the word used to designate exegesis—for example of sacred texts—and interpretation: hermēneuein. An act of deciphering reading. And this is indeed how Heidegger understands it, [German] p. 37, §7:
The logos of the phenomenology of Dasein has the character of hermēneuein, through which the proper meaning of being and the basic structures of the very being of Dasein are announced (kundgegeben) to the understanding of being that belongs to Dasein itself. (Being and Time, 35)
And Heidegger goes further in this direction: not only does he feel that he is not transposing into a more originary order an operation (the interpretative reading of a text) that would be proper to a quite particular and quite determined field of science, but, on the contrary, it is the hermeneutics he is talking about that he thinks is hermeneutics in the proper sense, from which would be derived what is called more complacently, and with a sense of security, hermeneutics—namely, the method of deciphering by reading documents in other fields, in the other humanistic disciplines: for example: history, literary history, theology, and so on, [German] p. 38:
To the extent that this hermeneutic elaborates the historicity [Geschichtlichkeit] of Dasein ontologically as the ontic condition of the possibility of the discipline of history [historical science: Historie], it contains the roots of what can be called “hermeneutics” only in a derivative sense: the methodology of the historical humanistic disciplines. (Being and Time, 35)
Here we encounter a schema that will interest us on its own account later: [129] since there would be no historical science without the historicity of Dasein (no Historie without Geschichte), the hermeneutics that gives us to read or think the historicity of Dasein is the condition of possibility of hermeneutics as the method of historical science. Of course this gesture is very heavy with consequences and it is a discreet if not fragile link in the chain of Heidegger’s propositions, and one on which those interested in anti-Heideggerian strategy or tactics would have every reason to put some pressure.
The point is indeed to find out if the reversal of the metaphor, the legitimacy of which we tried to prove last time around the notion of dwelling, can be justified here. Is hermeneutics as reading of a text, in the sense in which this operation is familiar to us, a gesture that not only can be transposed when we are dealing with the meaning of being, but one that is itself rooted in the first reading of that same text? Da-sein, first letter to Being [première lettre à l’Être]. Can one say that Da-sein is itself a text, when one would be tempted to think that since in fact it alone writes texts, it is not itself text? Can the meaning of being in general be deciphered in a text, if one not only doubts that Da-sein is a text, but if one further thinks that the text is a highly particular form of being, which is in the world and does not even have the privilege of Da-sein? Even supposing that the analytic of Dasein is legitimately a phenomenology and an apophantics (a pre-judicative apophantics, let us be clear, with Heidegger)—legitimately because Da-sein is language, has as its proper essence the fact of being structured as the possibility of language—it still remains to be ascertained if from speech to text the consequence follows; and whether this passage poses no problem as to the method of reception (i.e., allows no decisive and essential difference to emerge between hearing and reading meaning); and whether one can speak without risk of a reading of spoken meaning (Dasein language only [several illegible words in the margin]).
Heidegger seems to think so and one can imagine his response here. On the one hand he would judge us unduly sure of our knowledge of what a text is, and what a reading is, when we say that the text in general is in the world, [130] that it is a highly determinate and derivative form of being and that it calls for a quite particular operation [illegible interlinear phrase]. He would also say that we do not know what a text is without reference to the possibility of speech (which is no doubt, we would reply, to limit oneself to models of alphabetic or in any case phonetic writing—that is, ones whose structure is controlled by the representation of speech. But here it must be confessed that the problem is too complex for one to be able to untangle clearly what, even in ideo- or pictographic writings, is interpretation of speech). Then, Heidegger would add that to speak of a writing independent of speech is to think it “independent” of voice and not of speech in general, which designates the possibility of signification and of language in general. Gesagtes ≠ Gesprochenes. So much so that one could not speak of deciphering a text—however determinate this notion may be—without the possibility of deciphering, of the hermeneutics of signification in general already having conditioned it. Finally, for Heidegger, the passage from vocal speech to inscription is not the emergence of an essentially new mode of language. For two reasons.
(1) Because Heidegger, in a very traditional manner—here I mean Platonic—thinks that the emergence of writing, the modification of speech into writing is more of a degradation, a lethargy, and thus already a dimming, a forgetting of living speech. And already the beginning of chatter (forgetting and Plato, Phaedrus).For example, in Was heisst Denken?, p. 47 of the French translation, Heidegger mentions the becoming-chatter that threatens Nietzsche’s scream [cri] once it has to become written [écrit]:
Even so, a man who teaches must at times grow noisy. In fact, he may have to scream and scream, although the aim is to make his students learn so quiet a thing as thinking. Nietzsche, most quiet and shiest of men, knew of this necessity. He endured the agony of having to scream. [ . . . ] But riddle upon riddle! What was once the scream “the wasteland grows . . . ,” now threatens [131] to turn into chatter. [ . . . ] Script easily smothers the scream, especially if the script exhausts itself in description, and aims to keep men’s imagination busy by supplying it constantly with new matter. The burden of thought is swallowed up in the written script, unless the writing is capable of remaining, even in the script itself, a progress of thinking, a way. About the time when the words “The wasteland grows . . .” were born, Nietzsche wrote in his notebook (GW XIV, p. 229, Aphorism 464 of 1885): “A man for whom nearly all books have become superficial, who has kept faith in only a few people of the past that they have had depth enough—not to write what they knew.” But Nietzsche had to scream. For him, there was no other way to do it than by writing. That written scream of Nietzsche’s thought is the book which he entitled Also sprach Zarathustra.9
To think writing as a chattering degradation of the scream or of speaking thought is thus to be wary of grammar and the grammatical model. And this is indeed what Heidegger does—Heidegger who, just like Nietzsche, here, accuses (if I can say that, improperly, for it is anything but an accusation), reawakens the quasi-somnambulistic gesture by which Western metaphysics let itself be guided without knowing it by the grammatical model—that is, by what it gave, in the strong sense of the words, to living speech, its status, its station, its stance—while attempting to listen without body and without substance. The fixity of grammar (i.e., its inscriptibility), has fascinated philosophy, which has thought the possibility of language on the basis of the possibility of grammar and therefore the possibility of thought on the basis of the possibility of grammar. Whence the tendency to think being in grammatical categories and . . . you know this problem. See p. 74 of the [French] translation of the Einführung . . . :
We said that language, too, is conceived by the Greeks as something in being and thereby as something in keeping with the sense of their understanding of Being. What is in being is what is constant and as such, something that exhibits itself, something that appears. This shows itself primarily to seeing. The Greeks examine language optically in a certain broad sense—namely, from the point of view of the written word. In writing, what is spoken comes to a stand. Language is—that is, it stands in the written image of the word, [132] in the written signs, in the letters, grammata. This is why it is grammar that represents language as something in being, whereas through the flow of talk, language drains away into the impermanent. And so the theory of language has been interpreted grammatically up to our time. The Greeks, however, also knew about the oral character of language, the phōnē. They founded rhetoric and poetics. (Yet all of this did not in itself lead to an adequate definition of the essence of language.) The standard way of examining language is still the grammatical way. (Introduction to Metaphysics, 67–68)
This wariness with regard to the written and to grammar often shows up elsewhere in Heidegger, in prefaces where he says, for example, that “what was spoken no longer speaks in what is printed,” (Introduction to Metaphysics, xxix) (Einführung), and so on. With this wariness Heidegger is more than Platonic. I said a little while ago that he was Platonic. In fact, it would be easy to show that Plato, like all the Greeks that the Heidegger text I just quoted talks about, submits in spite of the protestations of the Phaedrus to the model of writing; he submits to it without realizing it and here too in the metaphorical register since he says he prefers to sensory writing, to the invention of the God Thot, the writing of the truth inscribed in the soul. True discourse is, he says at 276a, “a discourse that is written with knowledge (hos met’ epistēmēs graphetai), in the soul of the learner”10 (fixity of knowledge).
Now Heidegger here indeed seems to be wary of the grammatical model in general. Through this wariness (the first of the two reasons I announced, for which Heidegger would not accord any original dignity to the written form), one might believe that Heidegger ought to abstain also and especially from the idea of hermeneutics, which appears to be rigorously dependent on it.
But the second reason I announced will remove this objection.
(2) Writing is indeed not the irruption of something new in speech, it is not a mode of essential rupture with speech, even if it is its first degradation, [133] because living speech, legein, saying, was always already a text, even if it was not an inscribed text, engraved in solid exteriority. A text, as its name indicates, is a tissue, written or not, printed or not. A tissue means a synthetic multiplicity that holds to itself, retaining itself [se retenant elle-même]; there is text as soon as there is phrase—that is, a synthetic and significant unity of several organized words. The logos is thus always a text in this sense; it links and gathers significations and retains them. (The retaining [retenir] must be thought before the distinction between soul and body on the basis of which the difference between text and logos is commonly thought.)
Retains them—what does that mean? It means first of all holds them together, gathers them (legein). And there would be no phrase, thus no discourse, without that. The text, here, is the tissue of the sumplokē, of the interweaving of nouns and verbs, that Plato says is the constitution of the logos. But retain them also means, and by the same token, retains them in a memory, in a retention that properly constitutes the condition of the text. There would be no sentence if at the end of the spoken sentence I did not retain its beginning, and the anticipation thus made necessary would not be possible without this retaining and gathering of past meaning. This essential and originary necessity of the Trace, of the engramme, one might say, in non-written language itself, this necessity of the trace means that speech is always already writing, always already text, that the text does not make an irruptive appearance, does not surprise speech, and thus may possibly also translate and express it in writing properly so-called. If speech were not already text, no text could transport any speech. (The text is the union of soul and body not thought of metaphysically as suture, but originarily.)
What I am thus calling the second reason does not contradict the first and does not disallow the initial wariness with regard to graphein. It simply signifies, and this is coherent with all of Heidegger’s thought, that degradation, forgetting, chatter, the moment of the text, are all essential possibilities that are always already present at the heart of speech, that inauthenticity does [134] not supervene on authenticity, does not surprise it from the outside but is its essential, permanent and necessary accomplice. It is the complicity or the duplicity that is fundamental; difference, and not virgin and mythical authenticity.
This second reason that could, then, come to ground and legitimate the hermeneutical scheme, also explains the occasional praise of the letter that one can find here and there in Heidegger, and which one might think at first blush contradicts the passages I read a moment ago. So, in the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” speaking of the chatter that threatens language on the truth of being and on the history of being, Heidegger, apparently contrary to what he seems to say elsewhere, sees in the return to a craftsmanship, to a patience of writing, a guard-rail against over-hasty expression. The truth of being, he says ([French] p. 109, [Pathmarks, 272]) would in this way be withdrawn from mere opinions and conjectures and be handed over to the craftsmanship of writing become so rare today (rar gewordenen Hand-werk der Schrift). Or else again, at the end of the “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” appealing to the humility of the slow-footedly traced furrow, Heidegger writes:
What is needed in the present world crisis is less philosophy, but more attentiveness in thinking; less literature, but more cultivation of the letter. (Pathmarks, 276)
That is why Heidegger could legitimately speak of “reading” the meaning of being in a privileged and exemplary being. I here close my remark on this word reading and this hermeneutical method.
How does Heidegger reply to the question of the exemplary being? The point is to choose the exemplary being in a way that is not metaphysical or philosophical, which implies no presupposition of any sort. The only thing we have the right to have at our disposal when we choose this exemplary being is the question itself: the question of being itself and its first assurance: namely, [135] language that allows the question to be spoken. The exemplary being from which we will set out will have to be determined in its exemplarity by the sole possibility of the question. The being—guiding thread and transcendental guide of the question of being—will have to be prescribed by the question alone. This is why Heidegger determines the Befragtes, the interrogated, as a questioning being.
The only presupposition of the question is that it be posed and the privileged being of the question of being will be the questioning being, posing the question of being; this being determined in its relation to its being by the possibility of the questioning—and of questioning concerning being—is we ourselves.
[ . . . ] the being we inquirers ourselves in each case are (des Seienden, das wir sind, die Fragenden, je selbst sind). Thus to work out the question of being means to make a being—one who questions—transparent [make clear (durchsichtigmachen), bring to light] in its being. (Being and Time, 6)
What Heidegger wants to avoid is letting a gap open between the meaning of being and the privileged being, between the question and the example, a split through which some presupposition or metaphysical option could slip and, by dictating the choice of example, predetermine the whole enterprise. For there to be a suturing of this split between the question and the example, which is the first beginning of the response, the example must not simply [uncertain word] be chosen but prescribed on the basis of some absolute proximity. This is where we again come across this enigmatic signification of proximity that gave us food for thought last time.
Here the proximity can appear to be double.
(1) On the one hand, it is the immediacy of the passage from the question to the questioner. Nothing is closer to the question than the being that is questioning. It is the question itself that is interrogated; it is in the question [136] and in the proximity of the question to its questioning origin that the questioned meaning is sought. The response will never take the form of an object coming to fill or satisfy an expectation or a desire, coming to espouse (the responsa being a promise of marriage) the hollowed-out form of the question. One must stop hoping, from the question here in question, for a response in the form of an object that one could grasp hold of and of which one could say: voilà, eureka, that’s the formula we can write on the board. Here the question lets us expect nothing of the sort, nor expect anything in general, except its own awakening that has never ceased to wake up to itself. By choosing as exemplary the being in which the question is spoken and produced, Heidegger is thus claiming to remain as close as possible to the meaning of the question and never bury it in the slurry of the response.
(2) On the other hand, the absolute proximity we are speaking about is our proximity to ourselves. “This being, which we ourselves in each case are and which includes inquiry among the possibilities of its being [ . . . ]” (Being and Time, 7). This is where the second assurance is taken out. This is what I will call the Faktum of the we are. The we are is here still totally in-determinate. We do not yet know what we are. The we does not designate any human community, any sociality determined in one sense or another. It is not yet even determined by the category of the Mitsein that will be discovered later. The we are is determined only by the proximity of the question. We are in the process of questioning and dialoguing in the question. “We are” means here: we are questioning. We are questioning, we are in the question, we are in question. We are in the proximity of the question. But in so doing we are and the we are is the expression of proximity of the question as proximity to ourselves. “We are” means we are close to ourselves.
Now, at the beginning of chapter 2 of the introduction to Being and Time, [137] §5:
True, Dasein is ontically not only what is near or even nearest—we ourselves are it, each of us. Nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, it is ontologically what is farthest. (Being and Time, 15)
What does this mean? Literally, it means the ontic proximity of Da-Sein to itself, to ourselves, is ontological distancing. Comment. [Illegible marginal sentence.] This identity in a different relation of distancing and proximity, introduces us to the problem of the hermeneutic circle.
I would not fix on the hermeneutic circle, whose problematic accompanies what we are here calling the second assurance, if it were not to install us definitively in the heart of that historicity of the question of being that is here our theme. The hermeneutic circle could by this fact take for us the following form: I can access the meaning of Being-History only by setting off from the structures of historicity of a being determined as Da-Sein. But I can determine these structures only on the basis of the meaning of being and the anticipation of this meaning of being. But before the circle is determined in this way, it takes a much more general form, which would be the following.
In fact, ontically, we are absolutely close to what we are, we, questioning beings, but our point of departure can only be justified retroactively, when we will have replied to the question of the meaning of being. Or, conversely, does not claiming to begin by determining Da-sein in its being before knowing and in order to know what being means, lead a demand that was supposed to be absolutely radical and without presupposition into a vicious circle?
This impression could appear to be all the more justified in that the name Heidegger gives to the questioning being that we are is introduced in the most abrupt way, without the least show of explanation. Heidegger, who in general is careful to guarantee patiently every one of his moves, never [138] explains in this opening of Sein und Zeit the choice of the expression Da-sein. And moreover he will never explain it as a concept but as a mysterious and enigmatic focal point, with complex inflexions, separating more and more Da from Sein, making Da not simply determinative of Sein, adjective or adverb, but a sort of noun-verb as originary as Sein (Being-the-there: Beaufret).
In Sein und Zeit this denomination intervenes like a decree. Several times Heidegger says this is what we shall call this exemplary being that we are: Da-sein. See [German] p. 7: “This being, which we ourselves in each case are and which includes inquiry among the possibilities of its being, we formulate terminologically as Dasein” (Being and Time, 7).
And Heidegger goes on without explanation. Beginning of §4: “We define this being terminologically as Dasein” (10).
This apparent arbitrariness hides a profound necessity even if the necessity does not absorb into itself all the arbitrariness. A necessity not to determine being-there too soon by another category. “No arbitrary idea of being and reality,” says Heidegger, “no matter how ‘self-evident’ (selbstverständlich) it is, may be brought to bear on this being in a dogmatically constructed way; no ‘categories’ prescribed by such ideas [comment] may be forced upon Dasein without ontological deliberation” (Being and Time, 16). The there of Da-sein would be the only difference between an X and the first category of Dasein. And it is the only one that determines the exemplary being from the sole point of view of the question that it is the possibility of posing; namely, the question of being. In this question, being comes forth, is there, in the being that we are, being comes forth as such, enigmatically (i.e., as a question), it [139] is there, without the there yet being clearly understood, without it being decided whether this there of the being that we are is a proximity or a distancing, it being highly probable that this Da, which does not have any spatial sense, designates rather a movement, the transcendence that, moving from the being to the being of the being, delivers the meaning of being itself. The question is there. Being in question is there.
In any case, the initial indetermination and its apparent un-justification guarantees against any anthropologistic precipitation in the determination of being-there. It must be said that this precipitation has rarely been avoided, and it is tempting. It is what gets Heidegger accused of anthropologism by Husserl (in his annotation to Sein und Zeit—which is dedicated to him—but also in his Nachwort). It is what got Dasein translated by that properly catastrophic locution human-reality11 and which spread its damage far beyond the first true translation of Heidegger, but into Being and Nothingness and into the whole problematic current in the same intellectual circles after the war.
Da-sein is not man. What does that mean? It does not mean that Da-sein is something other than man but that one does not gain access to Da-sein, to the being of the being called Da-sein, on the basis of what one thinks one knows under the name of man, on the basis of what common sense and metaphysics have already determined as man: animal rationale, zōon politikon, or whatever you will.
The question of knowing what we are and what man means is thus held in reserve when we are talking about Da-sein. And when Heidegger on two or three occasions lets it be understood that for him Da-sein is man, he shows that the illumination of the definition goes from Dasein to man and not the other way around. When, for example, on [German] page 11 he writes, “this being’s (the human being’s) kind of being” (Being and Time, 10), the function of the parenthesis is both to show that on the one hand, the humanity of Da-sein [140] is bracketed for now, or on the other to say: Da-sein (or, if you will, what we call man without yet knowing what that means). When, to take another example, Heidegger writes, [German] p. 25: “Dasein, that is, the being of human being,” (Being and Time, 24) the that is has two functions: on the one hand, the point is to specify in the context in which this sentence is inscribed what being-there was for Greek ontology:
The problem of Greek ontology must, like that of any ontology, take its guideline from Dasein itself. In the ordinary and also the philosophical “definition,” Dasein, that is, the being of human being, is delineated as zōon logon echon, that creature whose being is essentially determined by its ability to speak. (Being and Time, 24)
On the other hand, the that is, inasmuch as it carries beyond the Greek context, clearly shows the direction of the passage: even if man is another name for Dasein, the true meaning of this name is said only as Dasein and after the explication of Dasein. This order of implication, in its formal and methodological aspect, must be rigorously maintained, failing which, in practice the most serious and most undetectable flaws of reasoning are to be feared. One could become aware of this very rapidly by delving into what many pre- and post-Heideggerian philosophies are made of. Philosophical anthropology, necessary though it is, must lean on this analytic of Dasein and come after it if it wants to rest on a satisfactory philosophical base, as Heidegger notes on [German] p. 17 (Being and Time, 17).
See also the important §10, which deals with the relations between the analytic of being-there and anthropology, biology or psychology.
After having indicated what still remained non-questioned, non-criticized in the notions used by these sciences, and in particular in that of the subject (even when it is determined with Cartesian/Husserlian rigor), Heidegger [141] writes,
Thus we are not being terminologically idiosyncratic when we avoid these terms as well as the expressions “life” and “human being” in designating the beings that we ourselves are. (Being and Time, 45)
What, then, of the accusation of a circle? This accusation is from the start and as a matter of principle invalidated, once one considers that it refers to a logical model, to a logic of proof and a deductive structure of reasoning that are not the ones we must follow here. They are not the ones we must follow here, not because we are going to follow an in-coherent logic that spurns every deductive path and affirms what cannot be proved. What cannot be proved, if it emerges, will not be what, “within” a logic of proof, contradicts norms, but what, prior to the deductive procedure and to logic in general, asks questions in particular about the origin of logic, of logos (i.e., about the being that makes it possible). And this interrogation is pre-deductive because it is phenomenological or apophantic. “Such ‘presupposing,’” says Heidegger,
has nothing to do with positing a principle from which a series of propositions is deduced. A “circle in reasoning” cannot possibly lie in the formulation of the question of the meaning of being, because in answering this question it is not a matter of grounding by deduction, but rather of laying bare and exhibiting the ground (aufweisende Grund-Freilegung). (Being and Time, 7)
[Perhaps that is the beginning of a response to the question you were asking the other day, Tort,12 speaking about the “logic of proof.”]
This response to the objection that there is a circle is a response of principle, [142] a formal response to a formal objection. Now, more concretely, why is there no circle in Heidegger’s way of proceeding, or if there is a circle, in what way is the circularity of this circle something other than an error, and in fact the very process of hermeneutic explication? “Beings can be determined in their being without the explicit concept of the meaning of being having to be already available” (Being and Time, 7). The anticipation, which is not the conception, the implicit anticipation of this meaning of being, the pre-comprehension of the meaning of being, is not only sufficient for this but is necessary, as we have seen, for the question of being in general, and of the being of Da-sein, to emerge. Every ontology must presuppose, must have presupposed, this implicit meaning of being in order to look for an explicit concept. And this presupposition or this pre-comprehension, far from being a logical error, belongs to the very being of Da-sein, what makes it precisely an ontological being as Heidegger also says, but it is even what allows this logical question to be posed. This pre-comprehension or this pre-supposition is precisely what constitutes the privilege of being-there. Being-there is to have already begun to understand the meaning of being and thus to be able to pose the explicit question of the meaning of being. That is a clarification, at least, of the expression Being-there: in being-there, the meaning of being is already there, announces itself in the possibility of the question that concerns it explicitly.
If there is a circle, this circle is thus not the iterative sterility of “going round in circles” in a syllogism, but the very movement whereby we are already caught, surprised, drawn into the question of the meaning of being. Given this, as Heidegger says elsewhere, I forget where,13 one must not try to break the circle but try to find out how best and precisely to enter into and move in it, to situate oneself in it and get one’s bearings in it.
The circularity is historicity: that is, the gravity of an already-there that weighs down and gives its place, its center, to the question of being that has always already begun to provoke us, that surprises us not like the unforeseeable caprice of a new fashion, of a new or simply future mode [d’une nouvelle mode, d’un mode nouveau ou simplement futur] of posing questions, but [143] surprises us because it is not at our disposal, because it has already begun, because we cannot get around it, because we are caught in it and it has us at its disposal without subjecting us. This circle and this commencement in the pre-ontological, which is neither the non-sense of being nor the explicit concept of the meaning of being, account for this unity of the near and the far, of a Da which is a here and an over there, and first of all the movement that gathers them, and of what metaphysical logic can no longer think as other than contradictions. The contradictions are historicity: that is, the impossibility of a pure point of departure in the absolute proximity of the ontic or the ontological, the impossibility of such a point of departure and the necessity, therefore, of setting off from the pre-ontological; this—apparently methodological—necessity of setting off from the pre-ontological indeed refers to, and confirms, the ontico-ontological difference, the difference between being and beings as more “fundamental” (in quotation marks because it is not a fundament) than being and than beings, more fundamental than both proximity and distancing. There is proximity and distancing only through difference. Which is why, before leaving this question of the circle, I am going to translate two brief passages from Sein und Zeit.
First this, §5:
The ontic-ontological priority of Dasein is therefore the reason why the specific constitution of the being of Dasein—understood in the sense of the “categorial” structure that belongs to it—remains hidden from it. Dasein is ontically “nearest” to itself, ontologically farthest away; but pre-ontologically [onta/on] certainly not foreign to itself. (Being and Time, 16)
That is the circle and that is why there is no logical circle.
[144] And now here is the second passage. End of §2, [German] p. 8.
“Circular reasoning” does not occur in the question of the meaning of being. Rather, there is a notable “Rück oder Vorbezogenheit,” a retro- or pre-reference [pre-ference][a retrospective or anticipatory reference] of what is asked about [Gefragten] (Sein) to asking as a mode of being of a being. The way what is questioned essentially engages our questioning belongs to the innermost meaning of the question of being. But this only means that the being that has the Charakter of Dasein has a relation to the question of being itself, perhaps even a distinctive one. (Being and Time, 7–8)
I’m closing here the development concerning the second assurance: namely, the point of departure in Da-sein. It is time now, since we must begin with the analytic of Da-sein, to wonder what the historicity of Da-sein signifies and how it introduces us into the meaning of Being-History. Well, following the thread of this question, we are going to see reappear, in an apparently surprising way, at a certain decisive turn in our path, grounded in necessity, a connotative signification of what a moment ago I called the text or the originary texture. Texturology, as J. Dubuffet says. We are going to wait for it and see it coming, coming back.
The historicity of Da-sein appears as a theme in Sein und Zeit at only two points, of unequal importance. First of all, very rapidly and quite briefly in §6 (i.e., in the introduction). Then, taking up again systematically and at length the introductory outline, throughout the whole of chapter 5 of division 2 of Being and Time in its five sections—chapter 5 entitled “Temporality and Historicity.” In these two series of developments, §6 of the introduction and chapter 5 of division 2 of Being and Time, and as is signified by the title [145] of chapter 5 (“Zeitlichkeit und Geschichtlichkeit”), the theme of historicity is grafted onto the theme of temporality. Section 5 had just taken on the theme of temporality as the transcendental horizon of the problem of being, before §6 takes up that of the historicity of Dasein. And the third and fourth chapters of division 2 were devoted to authentic and inauthentic temporalization, before the fifth chapter takes on the relations of temporality and historicity. The problem of historicity is grafted onto that of temporality—that signifies, of course, that historicity is not temporality, and that the confused concept of becoming should not obscure their specificity, but this graft signifies above all that historicity can be thought in its root only on the basis of the movement of temporality, of an ontological interrogation into what the temporality of Da-sein signifies.
You know that Sein und Zeit does not claim to provide a complete or even definitive analytic of being-there. Relative to the subsequent project of a philosophical anthropology resting on an adequate philosophical base, Sein und Zeit, says Heidegger, presents merely a few “fragments” (Stücke), “even if these fragments are essential” (Being and Time, 17). Now the most essential “fragment” is here the explication of the meaning of the being of the being named being-there as temporality. The explication of being-there as temporality does not suffice to provide a response to the principal question, that of the meaning of being in general, but it is an ontological point of departure to this response. If, precisely, being-there is a pre-ontological being—that is, a being that has as its being to understand being and to be able to pose the question of being—an important step will have been taken if one shows, as Heidegger intends to show in Sein und Zeit, that that on the basis of which, the horizon on the basis of which being-there pre-comprehends being is what is called time.
It follows that the very project of Sein und Zeit takes the following form: originary explication of time as the horizon of the understanding of being, an explication that sets off from temporality as the being of the being that understands being.
For this explication to be originary supposes in particular that the concepts [146] of time as they are inherited from metaphysics, from Aristotle to Bergson via Kant and Hegel, must be reduced or destroyed. This is what, directly or indirectly, through historical references or through descriptions, the first part of Sein und Zeit, the only one published, tries to do. For reasons of economy and by reason of our initial choice, we are going to have to operate an abstraction; our attention is going to have to extract from Sein und Zeit this theme of history that I said was grafted. Naturally the image of the graft would be very infelicitous if it made you think of an implantation or an importation, of the domestication of a foreign concept. By graft, we here must think of a secondary branch that has grown with a relative autonomy and that we are here obliged to consider a little to the side. But we shall see how the graft necessarily sends us back to the root.
The root is the condition of possibility. The being of Dasein has its meaning in temporality. Temporality is, I quote §6, “the condition of the possibility of historicity as a temporal mode of being of Dasein itself” (Being and Time, 19) (temporal mode of being: zeitliche Seinsart). That means historicity is a mode, a certain mode of temporality, which explains in particular that this mode is modified, modalized according to structures that are those of temporality itself, in particular that the significations of authenticity and inauthenticity will be found again in it.
And then, here is the first gesture that appears necessary when one wants to gain access to the originary historicity of Da-sein.
This gesture is one of re-duction or re-gression: reduction or regression to a point earlier than two histories, than two significations of the concept of history that are too often considered as primary and foundational, whereas they are derivative and ought to refer to the historicity of Da-sein as their condition of possibility.
(1) These are, first, universal history, the history of the world (Weltgeschichte). One can speak of a history of the world only if one already knows [147] what history and world mean and on what conditions a history and a world are possible and can appear. Now one of the essential features of the most important analyses of Sein und Zeit (chapter 3 <of division 1>) is to show what world means, what the being of world is, the worldhood of the world which is constituted in Da-sein’s relation to being-in-the-world. I cannot get into those important analyses here. I simply point out that on the pretext of describing historicity, one is describing the history of the world, the history of the universal totality of the events of the world, one is already presupposing knowledge of what totality and world and the being-world of the world mean. This presupposition is never criticized by universal histories or philosophies of history that claim to say the whole of what is happening in the world before even having asked questions about world-being (Hegel?). Now this question about Weltlichkeit can be developed only on the basis of an analytic of Da-sein guided by the question of being. Now this analytic of Da-sein shows that the world is not, that it is not a container or a total content but that it worlds (weltet) on the basis of the transcendence and freedom of Da-sein in its power of projecting itself toward the whole, of anticipating beyond the totality of beings, therefore toward the Nothing; this movement of anticipation being linked to the very movement of temporalization. You can find this linking in Sein und Zeit as well as in Vom Wesen des Grundes (1929), an essay translated by Corbin and collected in Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? [in English in Pathmarks].
(2) The historicity of Dasein is also prior to history in the sense of historical science. It is pointless to go to the historian qua historian and ask him what historicity is. The historian is the scholar who is already dealing with a delimited scientific field that is, precisely, called historical reality, Historie as a field that is Geschichte, and the historian has an object he deals with and that he calls the historical object. But as to the origin and the conditions of possibility of this field of objectivity, the historian qua historian, in his historical practice, can tell us nothing. But that does not mean that it is enough [illegible interlinear addition] to take a simple reflective and critical step back, a transcendental regression in the classical sense toward the conditions [148] of historical objectivity in order to discover this origin of historicity toward which Heidegger is trying to bring us back. Indeed, Heidegger is not here following everything one could call the critiques of historical Reason, such as flourished in Germany before and around Heidegger, in Dilthey (Dilthey is an author as present in the wings of Sein und Zeit as Husserl), in Simmel, in Rickert, critiques of historical Reason that wanted, as it were, in neo-Kantian style, to reawaken the question, On what conditions is historical science possible? Reawaken it in a neo-Kantian style—that is, not by asking in the scientifically dispiriting form that is Kant’s in the Conflict of the Faculties: “But how is it possible to have a history a priori? The answer is that it is possible if the prophet himself occasions and produces the events that he predicts.”14 But in a more fruitful form, one more in tune with all the progress and historical optimism of the nineteenth century: On what conditions have historical knowledge and objectivity been possible, with people like Dilthey, Rickert, Simmel, and so forth, being or believing themselves to be with respect to historical science in the situation of Kant with respect to physico-mathematical science?
But these questions, which are of the order of historical epistemology, and which are marked by the stepping back of a theory of historical knowledge, leave us as helpless as is the historian before the question of historicity itself. For these questions, qua epistemological questions, are guided by the idea of science and of scientific object. They emerge when the historical can begin to be thematized by science. One could say, to take up the Husserlian schema used in Formal and Transcendental Logic and that seems to me to function here in a perfectly analogous way: history and the epistemology of history deal with the objective thematic face of science but they do not think to go [149] definitively searching for the pre-scientific origin of science. In the same way, to take up again another analogous schema: just as Husserl wants to redo a transcendental aesthetic that does not let itself be guided by already constituted science, by geometry and mechanics, as was the case with Kant, but to come back to the space and the prospective time of perception, in the same way, Heidegger wants to get back before the question of historical objectivity that would already give itself the historical object and that predetermines the historical as object. On [German] page 375, §72 (Being and Time, 358), he plays on the difference between Objekt and Gegenstand in order to sketch the interval that separates his questions from those of history and epistemology. These latter, in their Fragestellung, concern themselves only with the Objekt qua accessible to a science, qua theme (and like Husserl, Heidegger says “theme” here, object of an absolutely scientific theme). But in dealing with the Objekt, they do not ask themselves how history can at a certain moment—for it is not so from the outset and always—become what stands opposite, the Gegenstand, the objective thematic face of science. They cannot ask themselves this, and they cannot reply to it, for the response can only come from the side of a pre-scientific, pre-epistemological analytic of the historical and of historicity and of its rootedness in temporality. There is in the structure of historicity something that allows it at a certain moment to become a scientific object and one must descend below the scientific project to know this.
We have just distinguished two levels of superficiality or rather of derivation with regard to what is in question for Heidegger. The level of Weltgeschichte or of the philosophy of history and the level of historical science which itself was differentiated into the scientific activity of the historian and the critical reflection of the epistemologist. Let’s note that the level of Weltgeschichte and the philosophy of history is that of the greatest naïveté since they both rely or at least claim to rely on a historical truth delivered by science. They are both certain that something like historical truth is possible, that an opening that gives us access to the historical past is possible, whatever the [150] critical work one then proceeds to carry out on documents, signs, monuments, archives, and so on. The critical work presupposes the very thing it is trying to protect: namely, the possibility of historical truth. What is being aimed at here is the type of construction or reconstruction of the historical world carried out by Dilthey. Using the very words of the title of a book by Dilthey, Heidegger writes that thematization—that is, historical unveiling, unveiling by historical science (die historische Erschliessung) of history (Geschichte)—is the presupposition of any possible “Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften”15 (Being and Time, 359).
We shall have to encounter again, in the proper place of its derivation, the problem of objectivity and of historical science, which, besides many remarks here and there, is treated for its own sake in §76 of Sein und Zeit. For the moment, we have to come back to the historicity of Da-sein as a structure grounded in temporality as the meaning of the being of Da-sein. We shall follow a few indications from §6 and the analyses of the whole of chapter 5 <of division 2>.
Historicity as the constitution of the being of Da-sein is what Heidegger calls Geschehen. Here we are going to have some difficult translation problems. In the Gallimard edition,16 Corbin sometimes translates it as historial, sometimes, as do Boehm-de Waelhens, as accomplissement; these two translations are equally unsatisfactory, but one must admit that it is very difficult to replace them. We shall not translate it and we shall try to clarify it, to translate it by analysis and not by definition, by analysis and by the play of its functioning in Heidegger’s discourse, and by the system of significations associated with it: Geschichte and Geschick (Fate). The Geschehen is the originary movement, the emergence of what is subsequently called history, Geschichte. It is the supervening, advening, to-coming [à-venir], all these words being dangerous insofar as they run the risk of being contaminated [151] by the notions of event or advent that are in history. The most neutral but not the least ridiculous would be historying [historier], which would have the advantage of keeping the verbal form and consequently the synthetic operation that is produced in the Geschehen which is precisely a gathering (Ge-), a sketch of a totalization that has its possibility in the synthesis of temporalization, precisely. [Illegible interlinear sentence.] The Geschehen as structure of Da-sein is recognized by the following fact: “In its factical being Dasein always is how and ‘what’ it already was” (Being and Time, 19). This formula of Heidegger’s, “Das Dasein ist je in seinem faktischen Sein, wie und ‘was’ es schon war” (Being and Time, 19), this formula, which the translators are right to suggest is trying to allude to the enigmatic past that inhabits Aristotle’s definition of quiddity (to ti ēn einai), needs to be understood prudently. This presence of the past in the present being, in the ist of Dasein, obliges us to shake the naïve confidence we have in our language when we say “I was,” “he was,” when we put a verb referring to Dasein into the past tense. Unless we re-comprehend what past means in this case, we would be closing off for ourselves the possibility of history itself. Obviously, here too, it is not grammar that can teach us what the past of the verb be is.
So what is meant by the sentence that says, “Being-there is what it was, it is its past, seine Vergangenheit” (Being and Time, 19)?
Naturally, any category coming from the world of nature and of vorhanden or spatial objects would miss the meaning of being-past as the being of Da-sein. Dasein is its past: that means that its past is not passed by [dépassé], that it is not behind it like another place or another force that would still have causal efficacy and would maintain an influence on the present. The past does not follow the present like a ball and chain dragged along by Dasein’s ankle. Dasein is intrinsically its past: the ist is intrinsically constituted by Vergangenheit, without which Da-sein would not be essentially historical (formal I think). The past does not follow, that means that in every Geschehen [152] that “historizes” by projecting into the to-come—and there is history only through this exiting of the past, of ek-stasis toward the to-come—every Geschehen opening the future is already not followed but pre-ceded by the past that my being is. The Pre-ceded. Comment.
There is here an irreducible elementary structural nucleus within which the movement of the Geschehen appears to be isomorphic with the movement of temporality. Irreducible nucleus because if one undid its synthesis, Zusammenhang, tissue (Text, texture, fundamental phrases) one would lose all chance of understanding history other than as an empirical accident foreign to the movement of truth (Kant and time).
Of course, it belongs essentially to this elementary structure not only to be indefeasible but—and because it is always already operative—to be able to pass unnoticed, as it does not only in everyday life and the vulgar conception of history but even in some philosophies of history or some philosophical conceptions of historicity.
What does this mean and what can one be thinking in saying this? Before giving examples—which Heidegger does not give—I am first going to translate two sub-paragraphs of §6.
This elemental historicity of Dasein can remain concealed from it. But it can also be discovered in a certain way and be properly cultivated. Dasein can discover, preserve, and explicitly pursue tradition. The discovery of tradition, and the disclosure of what it “transmits” and how it does this, can be undertaken as a task in its own right. Dasein thus assumes the mode of being that involves historical inquiry and research (historischen Fragens und Forschens). But the discipline of history [historical science, Historie]—more precisely, the historicity underlying it (Historizität)—is possible only as the kind of being belonging to inquiring Dasein, because Dasein is determined by historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) in the ground of its being. [So Historizität is only possible as scientific research undertaken by Dasein because Dasein [153] is determined by Geschichtlichkeit. Comment.] If historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) remains concealed from Dasein, and so long as it does so, the possibility of historical (historisch) inquiry and discovery of history is denied it. If the discipline of history (Historie) is lacking, that is no evidence against the historicity of Dasein; rather it is evidence for this constitution of being in a deficient mode. [A passage very badly translated in the Gallimard edition.] Only because it is geschichtlich in the first place can an age be un-historisch. (Being and Time, 19–20)
Paraphrasing, one could say that engaging in historical science and not engaging in historical science, posing historical questions and not posing historical questions, being aware of the tradition as such and not being aware of it, [three illegible words] historisch or not, supposes in both cases historicity (Geschichtlichkeit); these two behaviors are both modes of Geschichtlichkeit, the one as much as the other deficient and inauthentic. This is the claim I would like to comment on more patiently, but before coming back to it, I am going to translate the next few lines that link this claim to the question of the meaning of being.
On the other hand, if Dasein has seized upon its inherent possibility not only of making its Existenz transparent, but also of inquiring into the meaning of existentiality itself, that is to say, of provisionally inquiring into the meaning of being in general; and if insight into the essential historicity of Dasein has opened up in such inquiry, then it is inevitable (unvergänglich) that inquiry into being [questioning toward being: Das Fragen nach dem Sein], which was designated with regard to its ontic-ontological necessity, is itself characterized by historicity. The elaboration of the question of being must therefore receive its directive [die Anweisung vernehmen] to inquire into its [154] own history (seiner eigenen Geschichte nachzufragen) from the most proper ontological sense of the inquiry itself, as a historical one (historisch) [ . . . ]. (Being and Time, 20)
Here the Gallimard translation has taken no account of the very calculated use of these two words, and it is more free and approximate than ever. So I’ll paraphrase: The very meaning of the question of being demands interrogation of its Geschichte (i.e., the becoming historisch). I continue my translation:
[ . . . ] that means to become historical in a disciplined way in order to come to the positive appropriation of the past, to come into full possession [Aneignung] of its most proper possibilities of inquiry. The question of the meaning of being is led to understand itself as historical [historische] in accordance with its own way of proceeding, that is, as the provisional explication of Dasein in its temporality and historicity. (Being and Time, 20)
I now return, then, as I said I would a moment ago, to this problem of the absence of historical science or consciousness as a proof, not against, but of historicity, and as a deficient mode of historicity rather than a mode of non-historicity. This claim is laden with consequences and in conclusion today I would like to emphasize how original it is by beginning to confront it with claims by Hegel and Husserl that are close, but radically different once one pays attention.
Hegel first. I shall begin by proposing a very general point of comparison. Both of them, Hegel and Heidegger, insisted on the fact that historical science (Historie) presupposes, that historical truth presupposes Geschichtlichkeit. I have just said presupposes and already a difference is showing up between Hegel and Heidegger. For Heidegger the possibility of Historie presupposes the possibility of Geschichtlichkeit, but, as we saw, non-history, the absence [155] of historical consciousness, presupposes it no less; it is simply an inferior or deficient mode of it. For Hegel, though, the possibility of history (Historizität) does not presuppose but merges with Geschichtlichkeit, in such a way that the absence of historical consciousness or of historical science is the absence of Geschichtlichkeit pure and simple. Non-historicity as Un-historizität is for Hegel non-historicity as Geschichtslosigkeit. The difference is important and we are going to see how and why.
Let’s start by putting two passages side by side: the one, very well known, by Hegel, and the other, less well known, by Heidegger. They seem to mean the same thing. Before reading them, I recall that the word history, in its Greco-Latin root, goes back to historia, which comes from historein, which means to inquire, to inform oneself, to learn. And this is one of the branches of an etymological tree whose root nourished another branch which is episteme (science). So the word history was first determined on the basis of the idea of historical science and not of historical experience. Only later was the content of the narrative called history, the content that could be the object of a historical narrative. And these two significations are bound together in the word history that designates both event and narrative at once. So the Greco-Latin concept pulls toward science, pulls toward Historizität a signification that should not be reduced to it. It determines history on the basis of historical science, whereas, according to Hegel, they are inseparable and have no privilege of originarity, are not derived one from the other, while according to Heidegger it is historical science that is derived, that presupposes in its possibility a history that is not yet science. In other words, the Greco-Latin concept of historia either (according to Hegel) illegitimately privileges one of the two co-originary significations, or else (according to Heidegger) inverts the true relations and makes the derivative originary. This operation is not only a linguistic accident, it harbors a fundamental metaphysical operation and an operation that is, precisely, historico-metaphysical. The privilege accorded to historical science in the determination of history is itself a historical adventure that has a historical meaning, which is none other than [156] the philosophical or metaphysical conception of history: that is, a scientific conception, philosophy thinking itself from the start with Plato as episteme.
Now the Germanic notion of Geschichte escapes of itself from this scientifico-philosophico-metaphysical determination of history; it escapes from the historical determination of history. “Escape the historical determination of history” can be heard two ways because “historical determination” means two things. (A) It means a determination that took place historically: it is a feature of the history of thought that history was determined as it was on the basis of Greek philosophy. (B) It also means that this determination remains historical (in the sense of historisch as opposed to geschichtlich), and then the content of the determination is historical science. Of course the history of this historical determination escapes historical science as such; it is deeper and older than that science.
The German notion of Geschichte has come to designate history as science, has come to function as synonymous with the Greco-Latin term history-historia. But originarily, it designates not the narrative but the gathering of what befalls, of what is dispensed as a present and as a destining. Which means that the notion of Geschichte as such unites the two significations without a priori privileging the one or the other.
And by the same token it brings out the essential and necessary, in no way fortuitous, character of the unity of the two senses of the word history. Hegel and Heidegger both are conscious of this and before coming back to the difference I just announced, I will read, then, the two passages that echo each other.
Hegel: This is in the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, in the introduction, [French] p. 62 in the Gibelin translation:
In our language the word “history” (Geschichte) combines both objective and subjective aspects and signifies the historia rerum gestarum as well as the res gestae themselves, the historical narrative (Geschichtserzählung) as well as the events (Geschehene), deeds, and happenings themselves—aspects that in the strict sense are quite distinct. This conjunction of the two meanings should be recognized as of a higher order than that of external contingency: we must assume that historical narrative appears simultaneously with the [157] actual deeds and events of history, that they are set in motion together from an inner common foundation.17
Heidegger (beginning of §73 of Sein und Zeit, not translated):18
The most obvious ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit) of the term Geschichte has often been noted and it is by no means “vague.” It makes itself known in the fact that it means “historical effectivity” (geschichtliche Wirklichkeit) as well as the possibility of a science of it. (Being and Time, 360)
Having brought the two texts together, let’s come back to Hegel’s and let’s see what it means and how the intention animating it is different from Heidegger’s. Knowing how it is different means knowing how the non-fortuitousness, the essential necessity that is hiding behind this linguistic phenomenon, is thought differently by Hegel and Heidegger. Neither of them thinks it is a linguistic accident and Heidegger would no doubt even subscribe to a remark of Hegel’s, delighted, not about the term Geschichte, but Aufheben that unites in itself two contradictory significations (to suppress and to conserve), delighted then that the German language should have the privilege of this properly untranslatable—because contradictory—concept, and should thus be a language that is immediately speculative (in the Hegelian sense of this word).
For Hegel, this word Geschichte is not a linguistic accident, because historical effectivity appears at the same time as the possibility of narrative, and therefore of historical science. Historizität is not only one mode, a later and important modification of Geschichtlichkeit, it is contemporary and consubstantial with it. Living historically is possible only if one has language and if one has consciousness and if consequently one can gather—sum up—one’s [158] experience. Memory, in the profound and productive sense that Hegel gives to this word, is spirit itself, Mnemosyne and Geist: that is, the power to gather oneself, to inherit from oneself. This power of gathering and summation and re-citing [ré-cit] is the ground common to historical experience and historical science. An individual, a consciousness or a people are historical (geschichtlich) from the moment they are in a position to form the project of the narrative of their experience, once their experience is in a position to recite itself, to produce signs of itself (and in the Encyclopedia Hegel explains that Mnemosyne, memory, is the producer of the sign) and thus to produce signs, works, to produce itself in works—that is, in an objective a priori without which there would be neither Geschichte nor Historie. Which implies by the same token that there is no strictly individual history but only at the level of the people constituted as a state (i.e., a reasonable, rational and concrete institution), the individual being abstract. Which also confirms what Hegel says in the Phenomenology—namely, that animal life has no history even if the species evolves: the evolution of the species, incapable of summing itself up, of keeping the thematic memory of its becoming and its progress, is not historical. Only spirit and Reason have a history, only the state has a history and the individual separated from the state has the same status as the animal. The notions of history, spirit and culture, or of politics, and of objective morality (Sittlichkeit) rigorously entail one another. As a consequence, a people that does not constitute itself thematically and expressly as a rational State that is a guardian of institutions and of historical patrimony, a people that does not have the politics of its historical science—such a people has no history, is not geschichtlich. You see the Heideggerian difference dawning. Such a people for Hegel is not living in a deficient mode of Geschichtlichkeit: it is not geschichtlich at all. Its culture is not a culture; it is animal and it is nature.
In order to show this and make it more specific, I shall rely once more on the introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (pp. 62–63 [159] of the French translation). First point: the origin of history as origin of the state. “Family memorials and patriarchal traditions are of interest within the family or tribe. Their repetitiveness is no object worthy of memory” (115). Here, no memory at all, since on the one hand the course is uniform (i.e., repetitive, quantitative), and on the other hand, no project arises to carry through to rational universality, in the eyes of the world, the testimony of this becoming. Memories are still habits—that is, animal sedimentations not thinking themselves as such.
Hegel continues:
[ . . . ] although distinct deeds or turns of fate may inspire Mnemosyne to retain those images, just as love and religious feeling impel the fanciful imagination to confer shape upon such initially shapeless urges. But it is the state that first supplies a content that not only lends itself to the prose of history but also helps to produce it. (115)
This means that the State furnishes a material that is already universal and objective in its signification and to this extent already able to nourish the universal form of narrative and historical science.
Not only is the State able to gather up signs in monuments, libraries, depositories, not only does it organize rationally the circulation of signs and historical works, but it produces these signs and signs able to circulate in a fashion that is rational, transparent and universal and univocal (general will). I continue:
Instead of the merely subjective dictates of the ruler, which may suffice for the needs of the moment, a community in the process of coalescing and raising itself up to the position of a state requires commandments and laws, [160] general and universally valid directives. It thereby creates a discourse [of its own development], and an interest in intelligible, inwardly determinate, and—in their results—enduring deeds and events, ones on which Mnemosyne, for the benefit of the perennial aim that underlies the present configuration and constitution of the state, is impelled to confer a lasting memory. (115–116 [Derrida’s italics: the phrase in brackets is an interpolation by the English translator])
So the state is the origin of both historical reality and the historical account. Only the state is the origin of complete history. This is why, reciprocally, there is no state without history. A State cannot do without its own history, the consciousness of its own past. It is incomplete in itself without that. Whereas pre-State experiences (love, religion, etc.) are complete in themselves without needing the consciousness of their own past. They are actual in themselves, whereas the actuality of the State is incomplete without the consciousness of the past.
All deeper feelings such as love, as well as religious intuition and its forms, are wholly present and satisfying in themselves; but the external existence of the state, with its rational laws and customs, is an incomplete present, the understanding of which calls for incorporating the awareness of its past [history]. (116)
So much for the State as origin of historicity in general.
Now (2) peoples without a state, cultures without a state are not living in a deficient historicity but in a non-historicity. This is no more than the converse of what we have just been saying, but Hegel illustrates it with an odd and curious example that is worth our pausing over a little, if only as a contribution to the still burning question of societies said to be without history, which are often assimilated without further ado to people said to be without [161] writing. The example that illustrates Hegel’s intention here is the difference between China and India. I quote (it is what follows in Hegel’s text).
Read [French] pp. 63–64, and comment.
*It is obvious to anyone who begins to be familiar with the treasures of Indian literature that this country, so rich in spiritual achievements of a truly profound quality, nevertheless has no history. In this respect, it at once stands out in stark contrast to China, an empire that possesses a most remarkable and detailed historical narrative going back to the earliest times. India has not only ancient religious books and splendid works of poetry but also ancient books of law, something already mentioned as a prerequisite for the formation of history, and yet it has no history. But in this country the original organization that created social distinctions immediately became set in stone as natural determinations (the castes), so that, although the laws concern the civil code of rights, they make these rights dependent on distinctions imposed by nature, and they specify, above all, the position (in terms of injustices more than of rights) of these classes toward one another, i.e., only of the higher vis-à-vis the lower. The ethical element (Sittlichkeit) is thereby excluded from the splendor of Indian life and its realms.
Given this bondage to an order based firmly and permanently on nature, all social relations involve a wild arbitrariness, ephemeral impulses, or rather frenzies, without any purposeful progress and development. Thus, no thoughtful memory, no object for Mnemosyne presents itself, and a deep but desolate fantasy drifts over a region that ought to have had a fixed purpose—a purpose rooted in actuality and in subjective yet substantial (i.e., implicitly rational) freedom [ . . . ]* (Hegel, 116–17).
Of course this petrification and this naturalization of spirit or historicity is not an accidental phenomenon that has happened here or there, at one moment or another (in India for example). This is the threat that lies in wait for every community, people or nation, in the form of de-politicization or the natural or biological or organicist or even technicist conception of the political.
[162] Next time we shall be concerned with an analogous but already different intention in Husserl, concerning the origin of historicity and peoples said to be without history. Then we shall see how Heidegger breaks with this Hegelian-Husserlian metaphysics of history, this spiritualist metaphysics, this metaphysics of Geist too rapidly determining history on the basis of the possibility of knowledge and self-knowledge, of science and consciousness, and allowing itself to be dictated to by the categorial difference between nature and culture behind which Heidegger intends to go back, interrogating the historicity of a Da-sein that is not yet determined either as spirit, or as subject, or as consciousness, but as temporality, this temporality being for now the only transcendental horizon prescribed for the question of being from which we must not let ourselves be distracted.