If the discipline of history is lacking, that is no evidence against the historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) of Dasein; rather it is evidence for this constitution of being (Seinsverfassung) in a deficient mode. Only because it is “historic” (geschichtlich) in the first place can an age lack the discipline of history (be unhistorisch). (Being and Time, 20)
It is in the opening of this assertion, rather than by convoking the assertions of historians or ethnologists—who in their considerations on the subject of so-called historical societies or so-called societies without history presuppose at least that clarity has been reached on the essence of historicity and all the problematics attached to it—it is in the opening of this assertion of Heidegger’s, and the better to understand it, that we tried to determine the place where it might “destroy” the Hegelian-Husserlian metaphysics of historicity. This last expression merited the precautions and the scare-quotes I spoke of last time, before tying together five Husserlian themes about which, each time, the Heideggerian difference was repeated.
The first four, the only ones I had time to develop, were the following:
(1) Husserl’s teleology of historicity is a transcendental idealism organized [194] around a concept of subjectity that Heidegger shows is both foreign to the world (i.e., non-historical) and intra-worldly (i.e., thought according to the model of a Vorhandenheit, of the object subsisting in the world), which is another way of missing any history that is not empirical. Remember, too, what we said about Husserl’s transcendental reduction, that it was both illegitimate and insufficiently radical. Transcendental phenomenology is presented as having transformed into an intra-worldly thing the very thing it was claiming to protect against worldization, or reification or naturalization. I forgot on this subject to point out the fact that the word consciousness (Bewusstsein ≠ Gewissen) is not used in Sein und Zeit.1
(2) Husserl’s teleology remains a humanism.
(3) The content of this teleology is recognized on the basis of the idea of science (historicity = absence [uncertain word] of the past).
(4) The description of the Lebenswelt, a theme that is, however, very close to Heidegger’s intention, allows to circulate in it concepts such as those of nature and culture that import into it numerous latent and derivative metaphysical significations that, in any case, come in much later when seen from the historical originality of Dasein that Heidegger is trying to thematize.
We developed these four themes at length, taking many precautions and trying not to be unduly schematic.
[195] <Page skipped in the manuscript.>2
< . . .> surrounding world whatever, taking this Apriori as the point of departure for a systematic explication of human existence and of world strata that disclose themselves correlatively in the latter. (Cartesian Meditations, 138)
A genealogical claim, a claim of paternity to which, in advance as it were, Heidegger had thought he should respond with a claim of independence that I quote for its anecdotal interest. In the section devoted to the everydayness of the Umwelt, on [German] page 72, Heidegger writes in a note,
The author would like to remark that he has repeatedly communicated the analysis of the surrounding world and the “hermeneutic of the facticity” of Dasein in general in his lecture courses ever since the winter semester of 1919–20. (Being and Time, 71)
That is an element in the historico-politico-university background of our problem.
[196] In any case, to close this third point,3 you see that for the very reasons that push Heidegger to go back behind the subject-object correlation and any history that would stick with it, he cannot be satisfied with a thematization of history that takes science as its guiding thread and scientific knowledge as its Telos.
Not that he judges Husserlian-type descriptions to be false and useless. Quite the contrary. Simply, they remain locked in the closure that we have been reconnoitering from the start.
(4) The other form of the same closure on which I shall not linger is, this time even if one stays within the descriptions of the Lebenswelt, the slightly precipitate opposition, of uncertain origins, between nature and culture—not that this opposition is useless, but it is so derivative, so laden with historical and metaphysical alluvia that one cannot seriously claim to discover the originary historicity of Da-sein by using these tools.
(5) Finally—and here I think we are getting to what is most important and most difficult—Husserl’s thematics of historicity remains, to put it bluntly, a worldview. The accusation is serious and it has a meaning that does not immediately betray itself. What does it mean? To understand the gravity and the scope of the accusation, one must keep clearly in mind the whole Husserlian critique of the idea of worldview, of Dilthey’s theory of Weltanschauung. This critique is developed in Philosophy as Rigorous Science (1911) and it is a centerpiece of phenomenology. In a word, Dilthey affirmed that each epoch has its worldview—that is, an idea that unified the organic and structural totality of its world, a sort of Gestalt in which art, religion, mythology, political and philosophical conceptions all held together. This theory of Weltanschauungen thought of itself as taking the historicity of meaning seriously. Husserl protests vigorously against the imperialist claims of this theory. Not that he denies the existence of such Weltanschauungen, such [197] ideological Gestalten, but in his view trying to make the whole of science and philosophy, the idea of science and of philosophy as science, enter into them is to miss the very meaning of truth, and first of all the meaning of the truth claimed by the theory of Weltanschauung. The idea of truth, the idea of science, the project of science have as their meaning the claim to escape relativity. Truth is not historical in the Diltheyan sense, insofar as it is truth, precisely, only if it is universally valid, ad infinitum, and so forth. During this period, Husserl is above all concerned to mark the independence of truth with regard to history. And the history of truth that he will later make into a theme presupposes this reduction of the empirical historicity of truth.
Consequently, to make of Husserl’s philosophy of history a Weltanschauung or a Weltbild is a particularly heavy and at first blush unsustainable accusation. It looks like a shocking assimilation of Husserlianism and Diltheyism. For it to be something else, a certain path must be followed, a path along which I’ll merely point to certain pathmarks. This path is followed in Sein und Zeit—one can recognize its trace everywhere—but it is in a 1938 text, Die Zeit des Weltbildes, that it is most clearly summed up.
Heidegger wants to show here that the very concept of world-picture belongs to a picture of the world, to an epoch. Not to a world-picture among others but to the world-picture. What does this mean? There are not world-pictures in history; there is one epoch that had a world-picture and it is the very one that forged the concept of world-picture and wanted every epoch to have its own. Before the epoch of metaphysics inaugurated by the Cartesian moment, there was no world-picture. The Greeks, the Romans, Medieval Europe did not have a world-picture. That means that for them the world was not a totality of beings organized according to the representation and the production of the subject-man. The fact that modern times look for the possible world-pictures of other epochs signifies first and foremost that [198] the world is determined by modern times in such a way that one can have a world-picture. Before modern times—here before the Cartesian point of reference—the Greek world and the Medieval world were, to the contrary, thought in such a way that the very idea of a world-picture was necessarily and essentially impossible and untenable. What Heidegger says here is perfectly consistent with the theme of the radical historicity of the world. The world, as it worlds itself on the basis of the transcendence of Da-sein, is historical through and through. It thus has a different meaning at every epoch. But that it lend itself at a given moment to a concept of world-picture is proper to one epoch, our epoch, in which the world is thought in such a way that it lends itself to this concept.
What is this concept? Let’s analyze the expression Weltbild. What does world signify and what does picture signify? World designates the totality of beings: Cosmos, nature, history and principle of the world. Picture is first of all representation of the totality, but it is more than reproductive representation; it is the world itself with which we have dealings and of which we have an idea, as to which we are fixed. Heidegger plays here on a German expression: “wir sind über etwas im Bilde” (Weltbild) which means we are fixed with respect to something, we know how things stand with it, what to do and how to orient ourselves. We are quite ready, in the picture. To be able to say this of something, the thing must be before us, available and reassuring, in such a way that I orient myself with respect to it.4 “Weltbild,” says Heidegger, “the world measured by a conception,”
does not mean “picture of the world” but, rather, the world grasped as picture. Beings as a whole are now taken in such a way that a being is first and only in being insofar as it is set in place by representing-producing humanity. [199] Whenever we have a Weltbild, an essential decision occurs concerning beings as a whole. The being of beings is sought and found in the representedness of beings. (Off the Beaten Track, 67–68)
(We’ll be getting back to what we’ve been saying about representation in Husserl these last two weeks.) Let me specify that this determination of the being of beings as being-represented exhausts in Heidegger’s eyes the totality of the world. There is not for him a world that would be sometimes determined this way and sometimes that way without itself being affected by these determinations. The World is entirely, through and through, what it is determined. There is not another world—a lived world—with respect to which the transitory determinations of each epoch would be more or less accurate images. The world is entirely in the epoch; it is nothing else.
This modern conception of the world as “representation” was impossible in the medieval world for which a being was primarily an ens creatum, belonging to a determinate order of creation and corresponding to the conception of God, to the idea of the understanding of God. God had a conception of the world (i.e., an understanding in which he thought what he created or had created). But the being of beings was never thought in its origin, in its essence, as an object for man, available for knowledge and action.
It was even less so for the Greeks. I refer you here to what Heidegger says about this on [German] p. 84 [Off the Beaten Track, 68–69]. But I want to hold especially on to the qualification he makes at the end of this analysis: although there could not have been a Greek Weltbild, Plato’s determination of the beingness of beings as seen eidos (aspect) is the distant, historial, summary condition withdrawn in a secret mediation, for the world (Welt) to have been able to become an image (Bild). Which means that in spite of the differences between the Greek, Medieval and Modern epochs, there is a unity, the unity of one great epoch of the world, ruled by philosophy as destiny of Europe [200] and that sees the deployment of the world as objectity, from Plato to Husserl. What was announced with Plato becomes more specific with the God of the philosophy of the Middle Ages, comes to its accomplishment after Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, and modern science and technology. Metaphysics and technology in their radical complicity determine the world as an object and thus as available for an action and a conception. And Heidegger’s entire analysis of this mediation, to which I must refer you, has Descartes’s search for Sicherheit (certainty—security), the primary motif of Cartesianism that itself represents and inaugurates an epoch and that one would have no difficulty also finding in Husserl—Heidegger has the motif of Sicherheit communicate with the transformations of science and technology, especially in the twentieth century, with the modification they entail in the structure of science, of the university, of literature, of aesthetics, and so forth. The move to the value of Research (Forschung) which takes the place of classical science is an important theme. Why does the concept of Research rule the University today when it would have seemed very strange only last century? The idea of calculability is also at the center of this analysis. Calculability is the perfection of objectivity (i.e., of beings determined as available, predictable, etc.). And the privilege accorded by Heidegger to journalists in the possibility of historicity could come along to illustrate this theme perfectly.
(Heidegger warns us against any reactionary interpretation of his analysis. The point is especially not to condemn modern times or turn away from them.)
And you can see clearly that to the extent that Husserl’s attempt remains Cartesian, that it determines historicity on the basis of the Telos of philosophy as science, that it accords the purest historicity to the exact sciences, that it remains a philosophy of the constituting subject, and so on, it indeed does belong to the age of the world-picture. It is enclosed in it. And to the extent that it does not think this closure as such, the historicity it is talking about is not historicity itself but a determination, an epoch of historicity itself, however [201] immense and present this epoch might be. It was during this Weltbild that Husserl was able, in a necessary but limited gesture, to criticize Dilthey’s thesis of Weltanschauung. This was the fifth point of rupture with Husserl’s phenomenology of historicity.
The end of the text to which I have just referred and in which, for that matter, Husserl was not named, warns us against the reactionary interpretation. The point is not at all to try to condemn modern times, to turn away from them, to want to escape from them toward another world and another epoch, to deny the progress of science and technology, and so forth. Quite the contrary. Simply, the fact that modern times, our epoch, could think its meaning, appear to itself as what it is, for example through the voice of Martin Heidegger (but also some others), this fact presupposes that it escapes from itself, that it is not simply one with itself and that already a shadow divides it from itself, through which its present meaning appears to it and its future is announced. A certain relation to the incalculable is the shadow that allows the motif of calculability to be thought as what it is. That is where the question on the essence of metaphysics and of modern times takes off. This question—a question without a response for the moment, as the response will have to be an epoch—this question as the in-between epochs of being opens onto a historicity that is no longer enclosed in one epoch, onto historicity in general, the historicity of being, as the movement and linking of epochs. This question is possible only if the one posing it no longer simply belongs to an epoch (i.e., to the totality of beings), but to the difference between being and the totality of beings. Comment. Historicity of being itself = life [uncertain word].
Before concluding on this necessary break with those two representatives of the metaphysics of history that Hegel and Husserl still are, a break that is necessary to gain access to the question of historicity itself before all epochal determination, before beginning to follow the henceforth unencumbered analysis of the historicity of Dasein, I will end by reading these few lines that [202] all but close Die Zeit des Weltbildes.
Read [French] p. 86:
*This incalculability becomes the invisible shadow cast over all things when man has become the subjectum and world has become picture.
Through this shadow the modern world withdraws into a space beyond representation and so lends to the incalculable its own determinateness and historical uniqueness. This shadow, however, points to something else, knowledge of which, to us moderns, is refused. Yet man will never be able to experience and think this refusal as long as he goes around merely negating the age. The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, achieves, in itself, nothing, is merely a closing the eyes and blindness towards the historical moment.
Man will know the incalculable—that is, safeguard it in its truth—only in creative questioning and forming from out of the power of genuine reflection. Reflection transports the man of the future into that “in-between” in which he belongs to being and yet, amidst beings, remains a stranger.* (Off the Beaten Track, 72)
We shall soon come back to this in-between, in a slightly modified sense.
The stage we have just completed was, then, negative and critical. Now, what are the positive results of Heidegger’s move? How will the concrete description of the structures of Dasein’s historicity be enriched or at any rate made more rigorous for having gone through these destructions?
As I have already said: although Dasein is originarily historical, and historical through and through, the description of its historicity, the theme of its historicity is not primary in Sein und Zeit. Because Dasein’s originary historicity cannot be thought without the In-der-Welt-Sein of Dasein and because it is on the other hand rooted in the movement of temporalization, the problem of [203] worldhood and the worlding of the world and of temporalization had to be thematized. In the first two divisions of the first part of Sein und Zeit (the only part published), a first part that is entitled, I remind you, “The Interpretation of Dasein in Terms of Temporality and the Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon of the Question of Being,” in the first divisions of that first part, it is first a question of the world, in the preparatory fundamental analysis of Dasein, then of temporality itself (in the second division). It is during these extremely rich and difficult analyses, of the world, of being-in-the-world and of temporality, that a certain number of concepts appear about which there was a lot of talk at a given moment but, it must be said, at the level of public rumor and especially of unscrupulous translations that often did not trouble themselves even with reading. These concepts, those of authenticity and inauthenticity, of care, of fallenness, of being-toward-death, of anxiety, and so forth, will be presupposed by the fifth chapter of the second division on temporality and historicity, which comes then almost at the end of part 1, and in which we shall take a special interest. To do this right, one would have to avoid leaping, as we shall unfortunately have to do, over the explication of these concepts, taking them as though all of you here had read carefully the whole of Sein und Zeit. We should especially have to give back their true meaning to the analyses of world and time and wrest them from the mist of romantic pathos in which they have been enveloped. I say “enveloped,” as with a rich coat that would hide the skeletal body of a philosophical intention, whereas if pathos there be—and there is—it hangs on an ontological re-understanding of affectivity, which is no longer being understood by way of metaphysics as an accident of sensibility foreign to reason, and so on. So one would need to get back to the rigor of the preparatory analyses. As we shall not have time to do that here, we shall try to limit the damage from the abstraction in which we are going to indulge by picking out the analyses devoted to historicity. We [204] shall limit the damage on occasion by taking a few indispensable glances back.
· · ·
For example, and it is by this looking back that I will begin, the first chapter had thematized (1) being-toward-death or toward-the-end; (2) the possibility for Dasein to be a whole (Ganzsein). By placing in relation the time of essential incompleteness or the essential mode of the not yet that is proper to Dasein—and which cannot be compared to any other incompleteness of things in the world after the manner of Vorhandenheit—placing, then, in relation this essential incompleteness and that strange completion that is always-anticipated death, Heidegger shows in particular that not only does the essential incompleteness not prevent Dasein from forming a whole or rather from anticipating its proper totality; not only does it not prevent that, but it is the very form of this anticipation of Ganzsein.
Well, it is via this notion of Ganzsein that we are going to broach the concrete thematic of the historicity of Dasein. Up until now, Heidegger points out at the beginning of §72, the power to anticipate its own totality—a power structurally proper to Dasein—has been described only in the ek-stasis of the future, as being-toward-the-end and being-toward-death, as a being for which the possibility of projecting itself toward its own death was an original power that determined the very being of Dasein as finitude. Determined its being (i.e., not supervening upon it or waiting for it like an external event), as the whole of metaphysics thought one way or another, against a background of infinitude or finitude but always making of mortality the predicate of a being called man (and this is still how Sartre thinks of it, for example), but here indeed as the very being of Dasein. I cannot here dwell on that, and I refer you to the corresponding passages. So up until now the anticipation of the totality was precisely described as anticipation, a project toward my future in the dimension of a not-yet that determines the very structure of the present. Well, one describes historicity itself when one brings out as no [205] less essential in the structure of this totalization the resumption, as it were, of birth. Once again, this presumption and this resumption are not forms of Bewusstsein or of Selbstbewusstsein but of a transcendence that is not yet determined as intentionality of consciousness.
So we move to the theme of historicity when we consider the totalizing synthesis, or the totalizing transcendence, no longer as we have until now, unilaterally (einseitig), as anticipation of my death, but as relation to my birth and therefore as Erstreckung, as ex-tension between my death and my birth. The possessives here do not have an existentiell-empirical meaning but an existential one. Dasein is always mine, essentially Dasein as self-relation, a not necessarily subjective and conscientious self-relation in Jemeinigkeit.
This Erstreckung, this extension of the ek-sistence of Dasein that stretches out from birth to death—how original, they’ll say—is what is called life, the course of life, the continuity of life, the concatenation of life. Zusammenhang des Lebens. Now the fact is that however banal it be and perhaps because that’s how it seems, this “continuity of life” has never penetrated as it should have, and in its authentic meaning, the history of philosophy. The historical unity of this Zusammenhang has always been missed. Either, let’s say schematically, by empiricism that refused it any pure and essential possibility, the identity of the self having nothing substantial about it, or by a philosophy of the pure identity of the ego. Whether it take the form of a Cartesian substantialism of the res cogitans or a Kantian or Husserlian-type transcendentalism. In all these latter cases, the possibility of a history of Dasein, the possibility of the Zusammenhang, is entrusted to a ground that is not itself historical. That’s obvious and goes without saying as far as the Cartesian cogito is concerned, and the extrinsic and fallen character of memory with regard to the understanding would be merely a sign of that. But it is obvious too in the case of the formal I think in Kant’s sense, as a principle of unity whose relations with the temporality of experience pose the difficult problems of which you are aware and which are broached by Heidegger in [206] Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. But it is again obvious if one considers the ego cogito in the Husserlian sense. One might indeed be tempted to think that, this time, given that the ego cogito is a temporal phenomenon, it is not going to organize the unity of temporal lived experience, the totality of the concatenations of life or experience—it is not going to organize them from the outside, as a formal transcendental agency itself stable and ahistorical. And yet we have seen recently—and the right thing would be to study for themselves, here, §58 and §§79–81 of Ideen I to which I refer you—we have seen recently, then, that the I think, although temporal, had a permanence that was not affected by the flux of lived experience, by the continuity of the life of consciousness, to which it really did have to be transcendent, Husserl would say, if it was to be able to recognize itself in its identity and allow for the synthesis of lived experience. This was the theme of the transcendence of immanence that we encountered several times. How is this transcendence of immanence—which is simply situated and recognized by static phenomenology—genetically constituted? This is something Husserl will often wonder about later, but only in unpublished analyses, most of them after Sein und Zeit. Here Heidegger, without contesting Husserl’s description, nor the earlier descriptions and their specific aim, takes explicitly and phenomenologically as his theme a region of ek-sistence that is more originary than this constituted permanence of the egological nucleus, as organization and unification of the Zusammenhang des Lebens and, above all, the unity of the totalization he is seeking is not a cogito, an I think or a consciousness. Bergson too is seeking—for example, in his introduction to La pensée et le mouvant (1934)5—a unity of the concrete self that refuses humanist empiricism, without falling into transcendentalism and the stable identity of the formal transcendental subject. This is a seductive attempt that one might compare to Heidegger’s if Heidegger did not refuse to speak, unlike Bergson, of the concrete unity of a self, and especially of a psychological self whose life, or pure becoming, would be affected in its purity only by a reflection toward [207] the upsurging of life or spirit as an anonymous being or force.
So we encounter again here the necessity of thinking the continuity of life, the Erstreckung or the synthesis that makes of the time of Dasein a history, the necessity of thinking this synthesis without rushing toward the horizon of a consciousness or a cogito—or conversely, of an un-conscious or a force simply borrowed from the model of Vorhandenheit.
We are now touching on, we are now brushing up against, the Root of the problem. Everything—everything: that is, not only this or that gesture of the destruction of Metaphysics but the totality of the destruction and the meaning that directs it as a whole—everything is played out around the meaning of the Present and the privilege accorded by the whole of philosophy to the present. Philosophy, what Heidegger wants to transgress, is in its entirety a philosophy of the Present, privileges the Present. First we are going to see, via a narrow access point, how this theme functions at the point we have reached.
Let’s begin by reading a few lines from §72 in which Heidegger puts in question the classical philosophical descriptions of the continuity of life, that thing that is so banal and supposedly so trivial.
My translation, [German] p. 373:
Must we not take back our point of departure of temporality as the meaning of being of the totality of Dasein (Daseinsganzheit), even though what we addressed as the Zusammenhang [continuity, power of linking] between birth and death is ontologically completely obscure? Or does temporality, as we set it forth, first give the foundation on which to provide a clear [or univocal, eindeutig] direction for the existential and ontological question of that “continuity”? Perhaps it is already a gain in the field of this inquiry if we learn not to take these problems too lightly. (Being and Time, 356)
To take them too lightly is just as much to refuse the problem on the pretext that we are dealing with something trivially self-evident—what is better-known [208] than that: the continuity of life, the passage from life to death, and so on? It is thus just as much to refuse the problem as to pose it in empiricist terms—an appeal to what people think they know under the name memory, habit, the social frameworks of memory and all the other notions that govern empirical geneses while presupposing the given self-evidence of the very thing for which they are to account. For what does memory or any concatenation of experience whatsoever mean so long as the existential-ontological problem of temporality has not been posed as such? But at a more critically elaborated and more vigilant level, the problem is also taken lightly when one speaks of a transcendental, formal or concrete, intemporal or temporal, Kantian or Husserlian permanence supposedly responsible for this continuity of life. It is this superior form of taking lightly that Heidegger especially has in his sights in the text the translation of which I will pursue. You will see appear in it the link between the permanence of the identity of the self (Selbst) and the privileging of the present.
What seems “more simple” than the nature of the “continuity of life” between birth and death? Es besteht aus [emphasize stehen—con-sistency], it consists [implied: or so one thinks] of a succession of experiences (Erlebnissen) “in der Zeit” “in time” [in quotes]. If we pursue this characterization of the continuity in question and above all of the ontologischen Vormeinung: the ontological assumption [if you will, the pre-intention, the ontological pre-interpretation hidden behind this apparently innocent description. Comment.] behind it in a more penetrating way, something remarkable happens. In this succession of experiences only the experience that is present [and note that “present” here is vorhanden. Comment: this is not by chance] [open quotes] “each time now,” (im “jeweiligen Jetzt” vorhandene Erlebenis), is “really” “real,” (“eigentlich” “wirklich”). (Being and Time, 356)
What Heidegger is describing here is not only the point of view of common sense but also that of existentialism or transcendental idealism for which [209] presence (Vorhandenheit) and the present, the present lived experience (vorhandene Erlebnis), or in Husserlian language the living Present (lebendige Gegenwart), are the very form of real, authentic, effective, full experience. It must be clearly understood that this absolute privileging of the Present and the Presence of the Present that Heidegger must destroy or shake up in order to recover the possibility of historicity cannot be destroyed by him the way one criticizes a contingent prejudice. It must be clearly understood that what he is going to solicit (I prefer this word to “destroy”: comment) in this privilege of the Present is the self-evidence, the assurance, the most total and most irreducible ground of the totality of metaphysics itself; it is philosophy itself. If we had the time we could show this on the basis of any philosopher by following this or that indication of Heidegger’s; in particular we could show it of Hegel in whom Western philosophy is summed up and for whom the movement of experience is the movement of presence and of the presence of the vorhanden object and of consciousness as consciousness of the presence of the object or presence to self ceaselessly taking itself back up into itself in a such a way that ultimately absolute knowledge has the form of the absolute self-consciousness of self-presence in parousia, and so on. And the text Hegel’s Concept of Experience shows how, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the theme remains the presence of the present, the presentness (Anwesenheit) of the present. The Present is the proximity of beings (ens), and the presence of the present is therefore the proximity of beings qua beings; it is the proximity of beingness, of the being-being of beings (Seiendheit—ousia). And Heidegger points out that
[t]he beingness of beings—which from the beginning of Greek thinking to Nietzsche’s theory of the eternal return of the same has happened as the truth of beings—is for us only one mode ( . . . ) of being which by no means must necessarily appear exclusively as the presentness of what presences.6
We shall be returning to this passage. But without getting involved in Hegel again here, and in order to privilege, for reasons I gave last time, the relation [210] to Husserl, it is clear that Husserl, here, is still a metaphysician of the Present (i.e., a metaphysician). This not only for reasons we have already encountered, but for his very thematic of the Living Present. The living Present is, he says, the absolute, absolutely universal and unconditioned form of experience, the ultimate, irreducible and fundamental form of all evidence and of all meaning. And we must first understand the philosophical invulnerability of this Husserlian affirmation if we are to grasp the audacity of Heidegger’s gesture. Why invulnerable? Well it is evident, it is self-evidence itself that any experience is only ever lived in the present and that everything of experience that comes about, everything that appears in it, presents itself in it, as meaning or as self-evidence, is present. We have the absolute certainty that however far back in time we go, in our own time or in that of humanity or in time in general, no experience has been possible that was not had in the present. And we know a priori—and if there was only one thing in the world we did not need to learn it is this one—however distantly we anticipate the future, we know a priori that in millions of years, if there is an experience, a thought in general (human or not, divine or not, animal or not), it will be in the present, as we are in the present now. My death and the present. Living Present more fundamental than the I. Unpublished texts.7An assertion that is perhaps trivial but irrecusable: we never leave the Present. Life—life in the sense in which life is the opening of the difference that allows appearing—life, animal life or the life of consciousness, life in general (and people have tried to say that Husserlianism is a philosophy of life . . .)—life is living only in the present and the Living Present is a tautological expression in which in any case one cannot tell a subject from a predicate. Ultimate foundation of our being-together. This philosophy of the Living Present does not mean [211] that all temporal differences or modifications are erased in the present.
In particular, all Husserl’s analyses of the constitution of time—analyses that are dominated by this concept of the Living Present—all these analyses show the greatest respect for the original experiences which refer us to the past and to the future. But precisely the primary condition of this respect is not to forget that
(1) [t]he past is lived as past only if it refers us to a Present past that the Past comprises in its very signification since it was present.
(2) The future is lived—anticipated—as what it is (i.e., future) only if one knows, only if one experiences a priori that what is anticipated is a future Present; there would be no anticipation if the very thing anticipated were not a present to come. What is anticipated in anticipation is a present, the to-come of the future [l’à-venir de l’à-venir] is a present just as the past of the past is a present. And what is true of thematic memory and anticipation is also true of immediate retention and protention, incessant modifications of the Living Present, but modifications such that, without them, there would be nothing modified (i.e., no Living Present). That is the originality of Hegel and Husserl.
(3) It must not be forgotten that not only do the two modifying openings that open onto the past and the future open onto a past present and a future present, but that the opening itself, what opens onto the other presents, is already a Present. The Present is thus form, and the form of all experience and all self-evidence. And according to Husserl, to respect the movement of temporalization is to respect this a priori unconditionality of the Present. But what is true of temporalization is also true of historicity. For Husserl—as for Hegel for that matter—there is historicity only insofar as the past and the origin can be made present, can be transmitted; insofar as I can for example reactivate—that is, render the past manifestation active and current again—that is, therefore, insofar as a meaning can be transmitted across a chain of Presents in such a way that I can reawaken another presence in my living present. Cf. Krisis. Presence would thus be the condition of historicity [212] and its very form. But that means that in itself the form of historicity is not historical and that the condition of historicity is a certain ahistoricity of history, a certain intemporality of time. The present being all at once temporal and intemporal and omnitemporal. There would be no history according to Husserl without the omnitemporality of ideal objects that can be transmitted as the same. But this transmission of the same would itself be impossible without this fundamental form of the same as the form of manifestation; namely, the Present.
There is something irrecusable about this. In the name of what present self-evidence, in the name of what, then, can one shake the self-evidence of self-evidence? In the name of what fact? One might for example appeal to some psychopathological experiences, some cases, some experiences in which this supposed norm of norms would supposedly be contradicted, by the fact of an anomaly: the anomaly of the patient who does not live “in the present,” of a fixed experience like a schema of repetition in which a past scene supposedly imposes its meaning on the so-called present experience . . . . You see where this is going.
Well, it goes without saying that presented in such a way, an argument of this type that appeals to facts is far from being probative. It will easily be shown that the facts appealed to do not contradict but merely modify—and thereby confirm—the transcendental structure of the Present. It is in the form of the Living Present that the content of lived experience can be given the pathological signification of non-presence. It is obvious that the so-called “patient” lives in the present, in an unmodifiable transcendental present, the very thing that is apprehended or experienced as a past repeating itself, and so on. And this community of the present of every experience—the fact that we always live in the same present and that the ground of this we is the Present—this community cannot be affected by the separations, the inadequations, be they infinite, between two experiential contents. Absolute non-community, the most radical [illegible word] rupture takes place in the form [213] of the common Present that is its very condition of possibility.
Such would be the self-evidence of self-evidence and no science of facts—historical or psychological facts, no science of normal or abnormal facts—can, qua science of facts, belie it. And this self-evidence of self-evidence as presence is the form of the rationality in general of meaning in general.
Well, this is what is to be, not criticized or refuted on the basis of an irrationalism or a non-self-evidence that would be the contrary of self-evidence, but brought out as such on the background of a shadowy zone against which it stands out, this—the self-evidence of self-evidence—is what is to be solicited as a determination or as a historical epoch, that is to be subjected qua epoch to an epoch, epokhē that is to be subjected as epoch of ratio to the epoch of Thinking (thinking goes beyond Ratio for Heidegger), to subject that epoch to this epoch in order to bring out, bring out neither as a present self-evidence nor as another form of evidence, for there are not two forms of evidence—bring out in the sense of giving to think . . . what? Historicity itself.
To define the meaning of being as presence is quite clearly to reduce historicity. At the very moment that one is claiming to make it possible or respect it, as for Hegel and Husserl, by showing the absolute Present to be the condition of historical concatenation and traditionality, one is summing history up [on résume l’histoire]. This summation or this reduction of history in the Present is not the gesture of a philosopher, a gesture for which this or that philosophical subjectivity, this or that philosophical system, would be responsible; it is the very form of historialization that is constituted by dissimulating itself in the very presence of appearing. In the Present, history is erased or summed up and that dissimulation resounds in philosophical discourse qua metaphysics of the Living Present. And in a way, this metaphysics that reduces history, even when it claims to be thematizing it, cannot be overcome, just as the Present and the Presence of the Present cannot be overcome.
Nevertheless, one can pose the question of self-evidence and presence and wonder whether the self-evidence of the presence of the present does not [214] refer to a meaning of experience the historicity—that is, the character as past—of which would be the very thing that, while determining meaning in the Presence of the Present, would itself radically and definitively escape the form of the Present. In other words, experience would have a meaning that by its essence would never allow itself to be phenomenalized in the form of the living present. This meaning—which would never phenomenalize itself in the form of the living present—would never phenomenalize itself and would never come to experience as such. Comment.
It is clear that without the possibility of this meaning of being or of experience that would never come forth in the form of presence or would never be exhausted in it, one would never think historicity itself. In particular, one would never think the origin and the end, birth and death as such; as such: namely, as being unable to appear in the form of presence or appearing as what cannot appear. The certainty of the living Present as absolute form of experience and absolute source of meaning, presupposes as such the neutralization of my birth and my death. What I grasp when I think the a priori necessity of the living Present is the possibility of a temporalization without me, without a me the status of which—empirical or transcendental—is moreover difficult to specify. In any case, holding to the Present as the foundation and the source of meaning is to affirm infinity and eternity as the foundation of meaning and possibly of the historicity of meaning. The Present is essentially what cannot end. It is in itself ahistorical. Even if it is purely temporal, as in Husserl, the present can only open a temporality and a temporalization that are infinite. That is, non-historical. This is why it will appear to be so indispensible to Heidegger, when he is trying to get back to a buried depth of historicity, to begin by affirming the originarily essential finitude of temporalization. That is, of a movement of temporalization that would not reduce birth and death, and would even be opened on the basis of the anticipation of death and a certain relation to birth. In a passage we shall study later, Heidegger writes (§74), “Only authentic temporality that is [215] at the same time finite makes something like destiny (Schicksal), that is, authentic historicity, possible” (Being and Time, 366), and later, “Authentic being-toward-death, that is, the finitude of temporality, is the concealed ground of the historicity of Dasein” (Being and Time, 367).
One sees why the analytic of historicity comes in Sein und Zeit after that of temporality and why the being-toward-death structure of Dasein was the first chapter of the second division, devoted to Dasein und Zeitlichkeit. One cannot gain access to authentic temporalization outside the horizon of death and of freedom-for-death; that is, one can gain access to authentic temporalization only in the horizon of finitude, and one gains access to authentic historicity only on the basis of a finite temporality. There is no history if temporality is not finite. Hegel and Husserl were in a certain way saying the opposite. So one might be tempted to say—and this is the path Heidegger will take—that the philosophy of the Presence of the Present misses history. The immense difficulty here is that the philosophies of the Present, philosophy itself, can very well and with very good reasons claim for itself access to historicity.
Here, the pause we are going to make around this formidable and decisive point will allow us to open by anticipation the question, the question of being and history, will allow us to perceive the place in which ultimately everything is played out between Heidegger and philosophy, and above all allow us to understand why Sein und Zeit is still on the threshold of this question in spite of the immense amount of work done in it.
Let’s move forward patiently: philosophy—I shall now say “philosophy” to designate metaphysics, onto-theology or phenomenology, which are all ways of thinking the Present and the presence of the present—philosophy, especially in its Hegelian-Husserlian form, can then legitimately show that [216] it alone lets history be what it is and respects it in its meaning.
(1) There would be no history without the present, without the chain of transmissibility ensured by the formal identity of the presence of the present. I will not go over this again. Phenomenology of spirit and Husserlian phenomenology.
(2) In a way that is perhaps less immediate, philosophy could show that to ground everything on the Presence of the Present is to affirm or recognize finitude, and that there is no historicity without a passage via finitude. Which is, moreover, obvious. How does the affirmation of ground as presence recognize finitude? Because it also consists in affirming the impossibility of getting out of the present—history being born of this impossibility of living, this impossibility for an experience to happen other than in the form of the present, such that it does not reach the past as present but as past. It maintains this, while knowing a priori that it is dealing with a past present, but it does not grasp it in itself insofar as it is only ever in the present that one could be in the past. Here the finitude and infinitude of memory [uncertain word] coincide to define the historicity of experience. And this is why theological infinity is on the horizon especially of the Hegelian-Husserlian thinking of history. And this is why Hegel can affirm in his most profound texts the unity of the finite and the infinite. (Abandonment of this notion by Heidegger). [Illegible word.]
And it is incontestable that a certain historicity is thus respected and correctly described by philosophy.
But—and this is what Heidegger begins to say in Sein und Zeit, although he does not yet articulate it, cannot yet articulate it clearly, for an essential reason—but, then, the historicity described by philosophy is not the historicity of the being of beings; it is the history of beings in their beingness and, more narrowly still, so to speak, of beingness determined as presence and appearing since the Greeks, and still more narrowly since Descartes, as presence in the [217] form of consciousness, in the form of re-presentation. In other words, historicity is described in the closure of beings and even of a determinate form of beings that is the present being, the presentness of the being: experience or experience of consciousness. Outside this closure, the being of beingness and consequently the being of consciousness is not thought in its truth, and still less thought in its historicity. The hidden horizon of being—which allows beings to appear as what they are, in their beingness—this horizon is withdrawn from history. Although the origin of the meaning of experience is historicized by Hegel and by Husserl, the origin of this origin, the origin qua being of the beingness of presentness escapes Hegeliano-Husserlian history. It escapes the history of philosophy, the history of philosophy (i.e., historicity as it is thought in philosophy—and therefore in the whole history of philosophy). The history spoken of by philosophy, in the final analysis and even when it speaks best about it, is the limited history of one epoch of being. An epoch in which being is determined in absolutely general fashion as a being, in more determinate fashion by one epoch in the epoch as presence, and in still more determinate fashion as presence in representation. Epoch of being, which means both period and suspension, epokhē, suspensive withdrawal through which being, in its epoch, withdraws and hides, brackets itself in a historial movement, under its determination, ontic determination in general, and, following that, other more determinate determinations.
In this sense, Sein und Zeit announces the end of this epoch but still belongs to it in that the historicity it describes, it doubtless indeed describes in the now explicit horizon of being—and that’s progress: the question of being is posed as such from the opening pages of Sein und Zeit. But—and in this respect it still remains within the epoch of metaphysics—the description of historicity in Sein und Zeit still concerns the historicity of one form of beings, beings qua Dasein. It is still in a way history as experience (in a sense that, in spite of everything, still relates to that of phenomenology—that of Hegel or that of Husserl). It is still, as he says himself, a phenomenology. [218] And no doubt, in order to begin to understand Heidegger’s path, one must think together and clarify, one for the other, the abandonment or the incompletion—I do not say renunciation—of Sein und Zeit, and a text such as Hegel’s Concept of Experience in which the idea of phenomenology and the theme of the presentness of the present as determination of the beingness of beings, dissimulating the truth of being, are recognized and repeated, “destroyed.” And it is not by chance that the word phenomenology which, with something of a new inflexion, remained a watchword in Sein und Zeit, and the rule of its methodology, is progressively abandoned by Heidegger. The history of being cannot be thought in a phenomenology, which can only think an epoch and I would say the epoch itself, the dissimulation and the greatest epoch itself of being.
Having resituated Sein und Zeit in this way, let’s come back to it. In spite of the limitation I have just indicated, Sein und Zeit begins, then, to shake up, to solicit the epoch that dissimulates the history of being under the history of beingness determined as presentness. It begins to do this precisely in this §72 from which we started out. You will remember that, in the passage I broke off translating at a given point, the point was to show how the unity of the Zusammenhang des Lebens had always been delegated as much by metaphysical idealism as by transcendental idealism to an ahistorical agency. And precisely this ahistorical agency is both—not by chance—subjectivity and Present, subjectivity as unalterability of the presence of the present. It is this ahistorical agency that for classical metaphysics ensures the unity of the totalization—that is, of the history, this ahistorical agency that is at bottom without a past because it is the present of the present, the nowness of the now [la maintenance du maintenant].
So let me pick up my translation:
What seems “more simple” than the nature of the “continuity of life” between birth and death? It consists of a succession of experiences (Erlebnissen) [219] “in der Zeit” “in time.” If we pursue this characterization of the continuity in question and above all of the ontological assumption behind it in a more penetrating way, something remarkable happens. In this succession of experiences only the experience that is present “each time now,” im “jeweiligen Jetzt” vorhandene Erlebenis, is “really” “real.” (Being and Time, 356)
I emphasized a moment ago that present is vorhanden. One now sees the same intention of Heidegger as egoical [uncertain word] on the basis of this notion. Philosophy as philosophy of the present—in the sense defined just now—is a philosophy pre-determining being as Vorhandenheit (being before me subsisting as an object).
I continue my translation:
The experiences past and just coming, on the other hand, are no longer or not yet “wirklich,” “real.” Dasein traverses the time-span allotted to it between the two boundaries in such a way that it is “real” only in each now, and durchhüpft, hops, so to speak, through the succession (Jetztfolge) of nows of its “time.” For this reason one says that Dasein is “temporal” (zeitlich). The self (Selbst) maintains itself in a certain sameness [Selbigkeit: le Selbst maintains itself in its Selbigkeit] throughout this constant change (Wechsel) of experiences. Opinions diverge as to how this persistent (dieses Beharrlichen) self is to be defined and how one is to determine what relation it may possibly have to the changing (Wechsel) experiences. (Being and Time, 356)
(In other words, the polemic that animates philosophy in its own field, as to the meaning of this per-sistence, the polemic that opposes empiricism to Kantianism, Kantianism to Cartesianism, and Husserlianism to Kantianism and Cartesianism, etc., etc.) This polemic opposes interpretations [220] of this descriptive schema that is itself according to Heidegger never called into question, is itself the common and intangible axiom of objective rationalism, of empiricism, and of the transcendental idealisms. I think that this affirmation of Heidegger’s does not have to be commented on or illustrated: it is entirely self-evident. So the origin of this descriptive schema, and the being-meaning of this structure, are not interrogated: they remain indeterminate. Heidegger continues:
The being of this verharrend-wechselnden Zusammenhangs von Erlebnissen, of this persistently changing continuity remains undetermined. At bottom, however, and whether one admits it or not, ein “in der Zeit” Vorhandenes, aber selbstverständlich “Undingliches;” something objectively present [Vorhandenes] “in time,” but of course “unthinglike,” has been posited in this characterization of the continuity of life (Lebenszusammenhang). (Being and Time, 356)
Now, so long as one holds onto this Vorhandenheit, not only, as Heidegger will say later, does one have no chance of describing ontologically, of finding an ontological sense to the Erstreckung, to the extension of Dasein between birth and death, but one even has no chance of posing the ontological problem of this extension. This extension is nothing, then; it is merely the empirical and fallen and inessential multiplicity of a presence, of a persistent Vorhandenheit. Philosophy, as philosophy of the Presence of the Present (tautology) cannot therefore take seriously the Erstreckung, the totalizing extension between birth and death.
I note, no doubt needlessly but as a supplementary precaution, that with the theme of this Erstreckung between birth and death we are not in the field of an individual description, of something that would be an individual [221] Dasein. First because we never have been. The notion of individuality was never used by Heidegger. Next because by the time we are dealing with historicity, in the fifth chapter of the second division, Heidegger has already described the structure of Mitsein as an originary existential structure of Dasein. So we are dealing just as much with the birth and death of what we call an individual as of a community or the totality of beings in the form of Dasein, the totality of Dasein even before its possible determinations as individuals, as more or less broad groups and communities, as humanity, from birth to death, and so forth. The question of knowing whether Erstreckung as historicity is the Erstreckung of this or that example of Dasein is for the moment quite irrelevant; it is a derivative question with regard to the originarity of the analysis. When this analysis is complete, perhaps we will know what an individual is, what an intersubjective community, or humanity is. For the moment we do not know. I close this parenthesis.
The point, then, is to pose the ontological question of the Erstreckung on the basis of this destruction of Presence. Dasein ek-sists. “But,” says Heidegger,
it does not ek-sist as the sum of Momentanwirklichkeiten, the momentary realities of experiences that succeed each other and disappear. Nor does this succession [this Nacheinander] gradually fill up a framework. For how should that framework (Rahmen) be present (vorhanden), when it is always only the experience that one is having “right now” that is “real,” and when the boundaries of the framework—birth that is past and death that is yet to come—are lacking reality? At bottom, even the vulgar interpretation of the “continuity of life” does not think of a framework spanned “outside” of Dasein and embracing it, but correctly looks for it in Dasein itself. When, however, one tacitly [silently] regards this being [Dasein] ontologically as “in der Zeit” Vorhandenen, something present “in time,” an attempt at any ontological characterization of the being “between” birth and death gets stranded. (Being and Time, 357)
At bottom, as we shall see, it is in the passage, the in-between, in that nothing that the present in-between seems to be that the movement of historicity [222] must be recognized. This is what Heidegger does now in the first finally . . . positive gesture of this passage, in order to define what the Geschehen is.
Dasein does not first fill up a vorhandene (present) path or stretch “of life” through the phases of its momentary realities, but stretches itself along, erstreckt sich selbst [so it does not run over a present expanse], it stretches itself along [it is its path] in such a way that its own being is constituted beforehand as this stretching along. The “between” (the Zwischen) of birth and death already lies in the being [emphasized] of Dasein.” (Being and Time, 357)
So the in-between is not an empirical transition, a transitory modification of a presence of the First and the Last, such that the first can coincide substantially with the last, the principle with the end once the transition has passed, as is the case in Hegelian speculation; here the in-between belongs to the being of Dasein. Which comes down to saying that in this in-between, the past and the future are not simply left behind as past present or future present but more than that, are still or are already, but in a still or an already that no longer have the sense of presence. Dasein is its past and is its future, is its birth and its death. But the is [est] here designates a Being that can absolutely not have the form of presence or phenomenality. We are dealing here with an estance of being that does not have the form of consciousness. And really to understand this, and really understand the passage I shall translate in a moment, in which Heidegger shows that Dasein is its past and its future without summing them up in presence or in consciousness, to situate clearly the originality of this proposition we must once again recall Hegel. Hegel too says that the in-between, the movement of passage, defines historicity—the dia and the dialectic as experience of consciousness itself—is the historicity of consciousness. And in commenting on the Introduction to the Phenomenology [223] of Spirit, Heidegger both brings out the originality of this dia, the between-two-consciousnesses—natural consciousness and the philosophical consciousness that knows what the past natural consciousness was—Heidegger brings out both the originality of this dia, and the fact that this dia is still only the dia of the experience of consciousness—that is, of a determinate form of Being as presence and more precisely as presence in the form of representation. I shall simply read a few lines of this commentary without claiming to enter into it systematically.
First passage. Repeating the exchange, the movement of consciousness as the unity of the dialogue between natural consciousness and philosophical consciousness, Heidegger writes,
In this ambiguity, consciousness betrays the fundamental trait of its essence: at the same time, to be already that which it is not yet. Being in the sense of being-conscious, consciousness (Bewusstsein), means: to reside in the not-yet of the already, and to do this in such a way that this Already presences in the Not-yet. This presence is in itself a self-referral into the Already. It sets off on the path to the already. It makes itself a path. The being of consciousness consists in the fact that it moves on a path. The being which Hegel thinks as experience has the fundamental trait of movement. (Off the Beaten Track, 138)
A little later:
Consciousness, as consciousness, is the movement of consciousness, for it is the comparison between ontic/pre-ontological knowledge [let’s translate: natural consciousness] and ontological knowledge. The former exerts its claim on the latter. The latter claims that it is the truth of the former. Between (dia) the one and the other, is the articulation of these claims, a legein. In this dia-logue, consciousness ascribes truth to itself. The dialegein is a dialegesthai. However, the dialogue does not stand still in one shape of consciousness. As the dialogue that it is, it goes through (dia) the entire realm of the shapes of consciousness. In this movement of going-through, it gathers [224] itself into the truth of its essence. Dialegein, thoroughgoing gathering, is a self-gathering, dialegesthai. (Off the Beaten Track, 138)
Never is Heidegger so close to Hegel. Or in any case, Sein und Zeit to the Phenomenology of Spirit. One could almost literally inscribe what Heidegger is describing here—and is describing without interpreting (the passages I have just read are an unexceptional and uncontroversial paraphrase of Hegel)—one could almost literally, at the point in Sein und Zeit where the in-between is mentioned as the already of the not yet and the not yet of the already that are the very structure of the movement, of an eksistence that is its own path and does not follow a path assigned in advance, one could almost transcribe, I was saying. Almost. For the difference appears precisely when Heidegger says Ek-sistence instead of experience (i.e., in the Hegelian sense: experience of consciousness).
No longer saying experience, that signifies refusing to make of consciousness the form of this progression, and refusing to make consciousness the form of this progression is refusing to see it occur in the form of presence and as a prescribed progression, a progression to which is prescribed that it progress toward absolute presence, toward the parousia of absolute consciousness, absolute knowledge as absolute self-consciousness and being absolutely with itself—that is, toward a presence in which once again death is gathered up in Presence. If one considers that Presence is merely one determination of being, however privileged it be, well, to replace the notion of experience with that of ek-sistence-to-death is to destroy that determination and begin to shatter the epoch. I’ll read one last passage from Hegel’s Concept of Experience in which Heidegger defines consciousness or experience as one way of being.
Experience is what suffices to gain its attainment.8 Experience is a mode of [225] presence, i.e., of being. Through experience, phenomenal consciousness presences as phenomenal into its own presence with itself. Experience gathers consciousness into the gathering of its own essence. (Off the Beaten Track, 139)
The difference—apparently subtle but decisive—between Heidegger and Hegel being thus approached once again, we can, I hope, better understand the apparently so Hegelian passage in which Heidegger defines the proper field of an analytic of the historicity of Dasein.
This is still in §72, [German] pp. 374–75:
The “between” of birth and death already lies in the being of Dasein, [as we were just reading]. On the other hand, it is by no means the case that Dasein “is” [emphasized] real in a point of time, and that, in addition, it is then “surrounded” by the nonreality of its birth and its death. Understood existentially [comment], birth is never something past in the sense of Nichtmehrvorhanden [of what is no longer vorhanden: present], and death is just as far from having the kind of being of something outstanding that is not yet vorhanden but will come. Factical Dasein exists gebürtig [as native, as what has a—natural?—birth], and in being born it is also already dying in the sense of being-toward-death. Both “ends” (Enden) and their “between” are [emphasized] as long as Dasein factically exists, and they are in the sole way possible on the basis of the being of Dasein as care. In the unity of Geworfenheit [being-thrown] and the fleeting, or else anticipatory, being-toward-death [comment], birth and death zusammenhängen [are linked together] in the way appropriate to Dasein (Daseinsmäßig). As care, Dasein is the “between.”
But the constitutional totality of care has the possible ground of its unity in temporality. The ontological clarification of the “Lebenszusammenhang,” that is, of the specific way of stretching along, movedness (Bewegtheit), and [226] per-sistence of Dasein, must accordingly be approached in the horizon of the temporal constitution of this being. The movedness (Bewegtheit) of existence is not the movement (Bewegung) of a Vorhandenen [of something present]. It is determined from the stretching along of Dasein. The specific movedness of the erstreckten Sicherstrecken, stretched out stretching itself along [the self-constituting extension, the path that constitutes itself: method . . .], we call the Geschehen of Dasein: the historicity of Dasein. The question of the “Zusammenhang” of Dasein is the ontological problem of its Geschehen. To expose the structure of Geschehen and the existential and temporal conditions of its possibility means to gain an ontological understanding of historicity. (Being and Time, 357–58)
Three remarks in conclusion:
We have seen that the condition of this bringing out of Geschehen presupposed a solicitation or a destruction of the privileging of the Present in a philosophy or a metaphysics or an onto-theology that had even become the practice of this privileging. We are dealing there, then, with a privileging that is not a contingent, avoidable privilege, corresponding to an error of thought. We are dealing there with an inauthenticity the necessity of which is inscribed in the very structure of Dasein, in particular in the historicity of Dasein and, as we shall see, in the history of being. It belongs to the historicity of Dasein and being that this historicity should hide in philosophy and in its theme: the presence of the present.
My first point will then be the following: never forget what we said at the outset about the concept and operation of destruction. Destruction is neither a refutation nor an annihilation. The destruction of metaphysics, here the destruction of the privilege of the Present, could never erase them. There is an unsurpassable necessity in the dissimulation of the meaning of being in presence and thus in the phenomenality of consciousness. The best proof of this is that one cannot avoid making non-phenomenality appear in order [227] to speak it and to say of it that phenomenality and presence dissimulate it. At the very moment when Heidegger destroys metaphysics, he must confirm it, destroy it in its language since he is speaking and is making appear in the Present the very thing he is saying cannot be gathered up in presence. And so on.
Second: let me point out the attempt made by Levinas, claiming to go against Heidegger but in many respects still in his wake, to destroy this privilege of phenomenality and the Present. I do not want to get into this here. But let me point out that the latest stage of this enterprise—which otherwise remains caught in a traditional conceptuality that too often weighs it down unbeknownst to it—consists in elaborating a thematic of the Trace, as opposed to the Sign. The Trace being precisely the appearing of what, irreducibly and therefore infinitely, withdraws from phenomenality and presence, and that Levinas most often calls the infinitely other but also the Past, a past to which one has a relation as to an absolute past that can absolutely not be thought as past present, as a modification, in whatever sense, of the Present or of a consciousness.
But ⇒ non-history.
Third: every time one tries today, in the style of Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and so on (I’m not trying to assimilate them) to solicit the privilege of consciousness, to denounce consciousness as dissimulation and misrecognition, and so forth, it is obvious that, whatever fruitful and concrete results may be reached in empirical practice, the only chance of escaping the legitimate accusation of irresponsible empiricism coming from philosophy, and especially from a rigorous transcendental idealism, the only chance of escaping it is, from the outset, by making a theme of the signification of the Present and the Presence of the Present as the fundamental determination of being by metaphysics, making a theme of this dissimulation of the meaning of being in Pre-sence, making a theme of this dissimulation as history and therefore making a theme of the history of that dissimulation, especially of the move from a Greek form of dissimulation to the post-Cartesian form in which presence becomes consciousness and re-presentational consciousness, and so [228] forth. And therefore in making a theme of the epochs of Metaphysics and of metaphysics as epoch. One of the primordial conditions of this thematization is of course that one meditate especially on the moment when the epoch closes on itself and therefore begins to open, gives a glimpse of its end (i.e., on Hegel’s moment). Hegel whom it would be necessary to begin by reading, and reading without precipitation. Failing this thematization, all aggressive gestures aimed at metaphysics and transcendental idealism will remain imprisoned in what they are taking aim at, and will not get beyond the style of impotent and juvenile insult. Failing this patient and “destructive” theoretical thematization, the practical efficacy even of these gestures denouncing consciousness, however real and positive it may sometimes be, will for all that have only the kind of efficacy that characterizes somnambulism. Now we know at least two things about somnambulism:
(1) That its infallibility, however admirable it may sometimes be, is nonetheless at the mercy of an unforeseen breath of air;
(2) That somnambulism is perhaps the very essence of metaphysics. Here I refer you to everything that has already been said.