Last <time>, we continued to reflect on what I called the running out of breath at the end of Sein und Zeit, on the signs of it, on its architectonic manifestation, on its motifs, which prevented one from thinking of the unfinished character of Sein und Zeit simply as an impasse or simply as a turn or simply as a pause. I will not go back over that again, any more than over everything we were saying about Entschlossenheit, and about Heidegger’s destruction of the Present and of a metaphysics of temporality dominated by the privilege—in itself and philosophically irrecusable—of the present. Philosophy or onto-theology being basically nothing but the dominance of the present and the presence of the present.
Searching—with difficulty—for some new and original concept in Sein und Zeit allowing us to distinguish historicity from the temporality in which historicity is rooted, we found almost none. The notion of Sichüberlieferung which at least in name presented itself as original, referred us to the theme of time as the other, pure affection, which made us take a long detour via Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, whose strange relationship with the end of Sein und Zeit we pointed out.
Then we got into §74, the only section in which Heidegger plans to set out from the authentic historicity of Dasein, whereas, as I had tried to announce the time before, it seemed, paradoxically, that it was not a matter of historicity [300] properly speaking—that is, authentic historicity—in Sein und Zeit, and perhaps not even that of Dasein.
Because the authentic historicity of Dasein depends, as does the authentic temporality in which it is rooted, on Entschlossenheit, we paused over this concept. In spite of the suspicions I tried to justify with respect to it, we did our best to recognize its originality and to avoid all the possible misunderstandings that threatened to arise if one understood it within the horizon of morality, of psychology or of metaphysics in general. In the same way, we interrogated the related concepts of Schuldigsein, of Geworfenheit, of Entschluss, and navigated safely around the Sartrian shoals. This necessarily led us to the theme of the finitude of temporality. This alone allowed historicity to be made into an existential and not merely existentiell (factical) structure and the present to be made no longer the originary and absolute form of experience but the past of the future, a product constituted on the basis of the to-come [l’à-venir] and a future [avenir] made finite—in an original sense of the word finite that is difficult to think—by death. This led us to the difficult concept of being-toward-death and, after a long digression on the function of metaphor in philosophical discourse and in Heidegger’s thought, we returned to the primary condition of authentic historicity: namely, first of all not merely Entschlossenheit but the auto-traditionality of Entschlossenheit that alone can open up a Schicksal (destiny: a notion still to be rethought) and a Schicksal which originally, and to be a Schicksal, can only be a Geschick—that is, a co-destiny. No Geschehen without Geschick. And once again we had to have Heidegger dialogue with Hegel. That detained us for the entire second part of the session. We chose as arbiter—as a bad and provisional arbiter—of this dialogue Kojève, and a particular remark in his book comparing Hegel, Marx and Heidegger on the themes of being-toward-death, struggle and labor. I do not have the time to summarize what we said about this in order to mark, beyond some noteworthy affinities, the radical and decisive differences. Hegel and Aristotelian time (the Present). And I concluded: (1) with the [301] proposition according to which the hidden ethics (“ethics” in scare-quotes) that was putting Heidegger’s discourse into motion here was none other than the one that put into motion discourses which, like those of the Marxist, Nietzschean and Freudian type, could not refer to a motivation whose concept was borrowed from the philosophy they were destroying. Simply, Heidegger makes a theme of this motivation which is elsewhere a driving force. (2) With the concept of repetition (Wiederholung), which is doubtless the only concept that is truly original and proper to a thematic of historicity in Sein und Zeit. It still had to be understood appropriately and without misunderstanding. It still had to be understood as authentic transmission—that is, as we saw, deepening the enigma of temporality and historicity, and of the privilege of a past that is not a past present.
Let’s continue. Having thus announced to us in its very enigma the site of the authentic historicity of Dasein, Heidegger will schematically operate a sort of ontological deduction—a descriptive deduction, a derivation rather than a deduction—(1) of what he calls Welt-Geschichte (world history); and (2) of historical science.
What is important is the sense, the direction of the derivation. The historiality of the world is not before the historiality of Dasein. It is not a prior site or milieu in which a more determinate historicity, that of Dasein, would happen. Welt-Geschichte can only be thought on the basis of the historicity of Dasein as being-in-the-world, in the specific sense we have granted this expression. Furthermore, history, historical science, as we already saw, is not what allows history to be thought; it presupposes history and is rooted in it in a very determinate way.
I’ll move rapidly over the origin of Welt-Geschichte in the historicity of Dasein. If one has followed Heidegger when he showed that the world is not a milieu in itself in which Da-sein would be immersed (which presupposes being outside the world), but that the world worlds in the transcendence of Dasein, which is in an original sense In-der-Welt-sein, one will understand that the world, both in the sense of nature, or else in the form of culture, in [302] the form of Vorhandenheit or Zuhandenheit, that equipment, works, books, buildings, goods for production or consumption, institutions, and so on, have a history only on the basis of the ek-sistence of Dasein that must be conceived of neither as simple activity nor as simple passivity. This refers to earlier analyses that I cannot and do not wish to revisit here. I shall take from §75 only the following point, which once again connects all these themes with the destruction of the so-called vulgar concept of time, especially in its Aristotelian-Hegelian form.
History is not and cannot be historical linkage, Zusammenhang, cannot link modifications of objects or sequences, Folgen, of subjective experiences. History has its place in the linking, Verkettung, of subject and object. But as this linking can be originary only if it does not link in a secondary manner an object and an already-constituted and therefore ahistorical subject, this linking is the very origin of the two terms it links. “The thesis of the historicity of Dasein,” says Heidegger,
does not say that the worldless (weltlose) subject is historical, but that what is historical is the being that exists as being-in-the-world. The occurrence of history [historizing of history: Geschehen of Geschichte] is the occurrence [historizing] of being-in-the-world. The historicity of Dasein is essentially the historicity of the world which, on the basis of its ecstatic and horizontal temporality, belongs to the temporalizing of that temporality. In so far as Dasein factically exists, it already encounters that which has been discovered within the world. With the existence of historical being-in-the-world, the Zuhandenes [available beings] and the Vorhandenes [substantively present beings] have always already been drawn into the history of the world. Equipment and works, for example books, have their “fates”; buildings and institutions have their history. And even nature is historical. (Being and Time, 369)
What does this mean, that nature is historical? This does not mean taking the [303] opposite position to the Hegelian or Husserlian assertion according to which nature has no history, according to which natural history is a contradictory concept, according to which nature is at bottom the non-historical itself, subject to a model of iterative repetition that excludes that other model of repetition, the historical model. No, Heidegger is not here taking the opposite position to the classical thesis, and also denies that he is doing natural history. But nature, insofar as its meaning as nature is constituted on the basis of the ek-sistence of Dasein, its nature-meaning as landscape, as field of cultivation, place of worship, field of battle or conquest, raw material, and so on.1 To this extent nature is historical (no life). So the totality of the world is historical, whether one designate by “world” the world of nature or the world of culture; the world is historical; that means that the world is not, but worlds in the ek-static transcendence of Dasein, in the historialization of Dasein. A fundamental historialization on the basis of which alone one will be able to define different types of production of historical meaning, different lines of historical productivity.
And each determinate historicity, each determinate historial line, has its irreducible originality, its own movement and temporal rhythm: the historicity of equipment, of technology, the historicity of institutions, the historicity of works of art, and within the historicity of art, the historicity of different types of art, and so on. All these historicities have their meaning, and their own type of concatenation, their own rhythm, their fundamental inequality of development [one added illegible word], an inequality without reference to a common Telos (I tried to show, in response to a question from Tort2 a few weeks ago, why and how there is no teleology in Heidegger, such that here one should not even say inequality but anequality, inequality presupposing a defect or a shortcoming with respect to a measure or a telos, to a common entelechy, to a measure of all things. The concept of anequality is the only one [304] able to respect this originality, and the radicality of the difference of which Heidegger was always primarily concerned to remind us, an originary difference: that is, one not thinkable within the horizon of a simple and initial or final unity.) So, an irreducible multiplicity of historicities. But this irreducible multiplicity does not signify that historicity in general has no meaning. To speak of historicity in general is not to affirm that there is a general history; it is to affirm that there is a meaning to historicity, not a meaning of history, but a meaning of historicity without which I could not even speak of determinate historicities. Without at least implicit reference to this meaning of historicity in general, I could not even affirm that there are histories. Because a young interlocutor of Socrates could not, as Socrates points out to him, say that there are sciences ( . . . )3 without reference to the scientificity of science.4 To speak of a meaning of historicity in general is no more to affirm that there is a general history than to speak of the meaning or the question of the meaning of being in general signifies for the beingness of Being in general. Being in general is nothing, but the multiplicity of beings and of types of beings could not be thought as such, beings could not be thought as such without pre-comprehension at least of the meaning of being in general.
So, just as there is meaning of being, just as the meaning of being comes about only because Da-sein ek-sists, so the historicity of history and therefore of histories only comes about because Dasein produces it and is produced (both things have to be said at once) in the historicity of its In-der-Welt-sein. Precomprehended meaning of historicity and not of history in general.
As historicity in general does not signify general history, there is no common history (any more than there is, to pick up the scholastic expression, any common ens); each line, each type, each mode of historical productivity has its style of movedness and its own time. And consequently it would be pointless to think historical movedness on the basis of a common type of mobility. [305] And this is what I wanted to get to. Heidegger says this: the things that are in the world, not in the sense of ek-sistence but <in the> banal <sense> of in-sistence (for example, bodies, equipment, etc.), have not only their own general innerwordly history (equivocal Welt-Geschichte)—and historicism (I showed at length a little while ago how Heidegger criticized it) consists not only in that, but also in interpreting the historicity of Dasein and of being on the basis of this determinate model of inner-worldy histories—but have each their own type of ontological movement, of movedness: Bewegtheit. And this Bewegtheit does not answer to what is believed to be the general concept of Bewegung, of movement. For example, the movement of production and circulation of equipment and work as such, says Heidegger expressly on [German] p. 389,5 has a proper, original character of Bewegtheit (einen eigenen Charakter von Bewegtheit), which has for a long time remained in total obscurity (der bislang völlig im Dunkel liegt). This movement is not a simple change of place. For example, a ring, says Heidegger (and I suppose he chooses this example because of its simplicity and its complexity, the ring being both a bodily thing, a made object, an object of precious metal, a symbol of fidelity and union and a circular object that is made, given and worn), is affected by a movement, is even constituted in its very being by a movement, by a circulation that is not merely a change of place. And it is historical only to that extent. Which signifies that the historical movedness or sequence (the movedness of historizing, of historical production: die Bewegtheit des Geschehens) in which something happens, historializes itself (geschieht), cannot be thought, grasped, on the basis of movement (Bewegung) as change of place. And the enigma of the Geschehen toward which Heidegger calls us back is this Bewegtheit unthinkable on the basis of Bewegung. For what we have just said about the ring can be said of the totality of what are called historical events or advents.
Without resolving this enigma, one can thus already define its place and [306] exclude some models of reading. For example, if one still does not forget that temporalization is the root of historialization, well, it is already obvious that the time of this Bewegtheit that cannot be thought on the basis of Bewegung, the time of this movedness which is not yet movement or mobility—that this time cannot be an Aristotelian-type time, a time thought of as the number of movement that is, in any case on the basis of movement as change of place (in the world). Now onto-theological metaphysics never called into question this Aristotelian determination of time. No break with Aristotle on that score. And not even when for the first time history was taken seriously in this metaphysics: that is, with Hegel. Hegelian historical time, says Heidegger, is wholly inherited from Aristotle’s Physics. In its relations with space, in the dominance of the now, in the idea of punctuality, and so on. I cannot here go into the final pages of Sein und Zeit and especially §82 entirely devoted to the Hegelian concept of time as a derived and vulgar concept. I refer you to it. These pages are perhaps the least spectacular but philosophically the most decisive in the book. Recapitulating the comparison between Aristotle and Hegel, a comparison the systematization of which he hopes to pursue elsewhere, Heidegger summarizes things thus in a table of concepts on [German] p. 432:
Aristotle sees the essence of time in the nun; Hegel in the Jetzt. Aristotle conceives the nun as horos; Hegel interprets the now as “Grenze.” Aristotle understands the nun as stigmē; Hegel interprets the now as Punkt. Aristotle characterizes the nun as tode ti; Hegel calls the Jetzt das “absolute Dieses.” Aristotle connects khronos with sphaira, in accordance with the tradition; Hegel emphasizes the “Kreislauf” of time. (Being and Time, 410n)
And so forth.
And this more or less dogmatic and inherited determination of time [307] governs in Heidegger’s eyes the whole of Hegel’s thought since it governs, as Heidegger goes on to show, the concept of negativity and the relations between time and spirit, negativity and spirit.
Same for Bergson. (Would have to be looked at. Take up not taken up [reprendre pas repris: uncertain words] after Sein und Zeit.)6
You see by this indication the architectonic necessity in which Heidegger found himself at the end of Sein und Zeit, to return very rapidly, after a foray in the direction of inauthentic historicity, to the temporal root—that is, to inauthentic temporality—the they—the present and history. Past on the basis of the present ⇒ Telos ≠ Entelechy. Aristotle. History ≠ telos.
This was the point I wanted to emphasize apropos Welt-Geschichte. I believe that the problem of Bewegtheit as non-Bewegung was the most important problem in the eyes of Heidegger himself. Naturally, his gesture is here merely destructive. Heidegger tells us only that historical movedness is not movement, that the concept of history must be liberated from that of movement. But he does not tell us here what the Bewegtheit proper to Geschehen is. He situates the enigma and, once more, for the second time in this chapter, he calls us back to the enigma. But it is still in the general enigma of the question of being that this enigma of history happens. The appeal to the vulgar temporality of movement was not an accidental and local misstep on the part of traditional ontology. It governed or was of a piece with the whole traditional determination of the being of beings. So one has no chance of seriously re-discovering the meaning of historial Bewegtheit without systematically destroying classical ontology and without thinking historicity in the open horizon of the question of being. It is to that question that we are called back by the end of this §75, which I will now translate. It will at the same time bring us to the question of the ontological origin of historical science. [German] p. 392:
The existential interpretation of the historicity of Dasein constantly gets [308] caught up unexpectedly in shadows. The obscurities are all the more difficult to dispel when the possible dimensions of appropriate questioning are not disentangled and when everything is haunted, sein Wesen treibt [<pro>verbial expression: is up to its tricks, is at work, is on the job] by the enigma of being (das Rätsel des Seins) and, as has now become clear, of movement. (Being and Time, 372)
And Heidegger goes on, bringing us to another question:
Nevertheless, we may venture an outline of the ontological genesis of historiography (Historie) as a science in terms of the historicity of Dasein. (Being and Time, 372)
And this is what he undertakes in §76 of Sein und Zeit, entitled: “The Existential Origin of Historiography from the Historicity of Dasein.” Let’s note first of all that Heidegger intended this project to be generalized and extended to all the sciences. The question of the origin of all the sciences and of each science must be posed on the basis of the ontological analytic of Dasein. Heidegger says so expressly at the beginning of the section. But naturally, historical science has in this regard a privilege to the extent that it gives itself out to be the element through which, for example, all questions as to the origin and the history of the other sciences must pass. The history of science presupposes the possibility of the science of history, and historical science must be appropriately thought, and primarily in its origin, in order to be able to give rise to a history of science. If the history of science already presupposes that Dasein is historical and that historical opening is possible for it, this is a fortiori presupposed by the science of history. [Comment]
The origin of the sciences, says Heidegger, is still not very transparent (durchsichtig). And if, he says further on, “the being of Dasein is fundamentally [309] historical, then every factical science evidently remains bound to this historicity.” But it is in a particular and privileged way that historical science presupposes the historicity of Dasein.
In this project of an ontological genesis of historical science, I shall merely pick out a few reference points.
(1) Historical science is historical: it has a history. It is not; it historizes itself and its object is historical. And it can have an object only if Geschichte precedes it, as it were. As Hegel said, the twin possibilities of history and Geschichte are of a piece, but, says Heidegger, history is in its essence belated with respect to Geschichte. It is constituted as this belatedness itself.
(2) The guiding thread for this ontological genesis of historical science cannot be borrowed from existing history, such as it is practiced in fact by historians. And this for de jure reasons. First because nothing tells us that the practice of historians corresponds to what an authentic historical science should be. And in truth to judge what the de facto practice of historical science is worth I have to refer to the Idea (in the sense of the Idea of [illegible word] authentic history.
(3) The problems that are called problems of historical objects and objectivity, however important and decisive, are secondary. Secondary with regard to what? Here things are more difficult.
As we have said, for historical science to be born, the path toward the past must already be open. And this is possible only insofar as a relation to the past in general is possible for Dasein in the ek-static movement of temporalization. Now, as we also saw, the Gewesenheit that lets itself be discovered is not a past present, a past now, it is, as present, the past of a future, the past object, it is something possible determined in return on the basis of a future bounded by death. What I grasp as past present is a movement of Dasein— [310] that is, a present secondarily constituted as the past of a future.
Consequently, because history is rooted in time, what will be grasped under the name historical past is something that will never have been first present, but possible and past of a future, what is called past present being merely the dissimulation of this past of the future, which is what is originary. What by a metaphor and a dangerous false concept one calls the field and object of historical science is thus a certain possible. But as the movement of historical science is itself a projection and a certain resolute deployment of the possible, the relation of the historian to what is called the historical past will be the relation of a certain possible to a certain possible, of a certain projection to a past projection of Dasein (project ≠ consciousness). It is on this condition alone that there could later emerge and be derived a problematic of the positive historical fact, of historical objectivity, of the available historical material. Things, monuments, documents, and so forth, can become historical material only on this condition and because they are comprehended within a historical world. It is not the work of the historian (gathering testimony, critique and elaboration of these testimonies, etc.), that opens the historical field, but the opposite.
It follows that the value of a historical science, if such is its origin, depends primarily on the authenticity of the historical repetition that—before seeking or finding “positive facts” (Tatsachen), “a positive presence” (Being and Time, 375) resuscitated—will place itself in relation with the silent force of the possible without which there would be no Dasein and no Gewesenheit. This possible, if one understands it correctly and not as indeterminacy, freedom, individual potential, and so on (metaphysical determinations), is the true theme of history. It is in this direction that one must seek the “positive,” the authentic Tatsächliches. It is on the basis of the future that the historian must repeat, and he must repeat toward a past that was also an opening toward the future, which never was a present and positive fact.
Only the opening of this repetition, the very possibility of repetition, creates a primordial element of generality or universality. Historical repetition can [311] open only in language and it is therefore from the outset general in a certain sense. And with respect to this fundamental generality that appears as soon as a repetition is possible, and even when historical repetition is dealing, as always, with something of the origin—with respect to this primordial generality the classical problems of generality and singularity, of law and singular event, of the model or the structure and concatenation of singular facts, and so forth—all these problems, however important and inevitable, are derivative and at bottom superficial. And when one takes them to be the problems of the historicity of history, they are simply false, factitious and illusory.
Consequences of this are: first point, a certain engagement of the historian, a certain decision, a certain choice that is always already pronounced, always already necessary for historical science to open, and this engagement, far from affecting the research with what is called the subjectivity of the historian, is the sole condition of any historical “objectivity” (in scare-quotes). It is the audacious and resolute authenticity of the repetition, more than the so-called rules of historical objectivity, that will guarantee the opening of the past. It could easily be shown that the now classical theo-ontological historical science that claims to be so concerned with objectivity, with neutrality, and so forth, is itself guided in advance by an implicit and determinate choice. (Hegel already said similar things in the Lectures.) And this reminds us that history is historical, that the science of history has its tradition, its auto-transmission, that it ceaselessly explicates itself in its work, that it has its epochs, and that it hides or dissimulates itself from itself: for example, without speaking of the historicism that was criticized elsewhere by Heidegger, historism (i.e., the imperialism of the historical preoccupation), is an epoch of historical science and is not necessarily the most authentic from the historical point of view. It is not in moments of historizing fever that there is the most authentic history. Just as there can be aestheticism and romanticism in the claim to get to the bottom of the Weltanschauung of an epoch, there can be an authentic historical projection in the work of the historian who is content simply to publish sources. Just as the historicity of a time preoccupied [312] with extending its historical science as far as possible in time or in space, with citing so-called primitive cultures, can manifest an inauthentic historicity, so can epochs ignorant of historical science be historical, understand, mark and form history more profoundly.
If with respect to this place of origin thus designated the internal problematic of historical objectivity is highly derivative, then all the questions about the use, the good or bad use of historical science, will be still more derivative. Must one be a historian or not? This is a question the meaning of which can be understood only if it is referred to the place of origin thus designated.
Here Heidegger performs, on the basis of the movement of the Geschehen of Dasein, a sort of deduction of the three possible types of science and historical interest. He begins by referring to an earlier triplicity or ternary distinction. Not Hegel’s. You know that, at the beginning of the introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, in a passage that André is going to explicate during a seminar on Hegel and History,7 Hegel distinguishes between three sorts of history: original history, reflective (pragmatic and critical) history, philosophical history. I will not dwell on this since we shall have to speak about it again and since Heidegger is not referring to it. Heidegger is referring to Nietzsche, and to the second of his Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, entitled “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.”8 You are aware of Nietzsche’s hostility towards the historicizing fever of his epoch and the sign of degeneracy, the threat to life, that he saw in it. And without advocating animal forgetfulness of the past, he is trying to determine the moment and the stage at which history threatens life and becomes destructive.
“There is,” he says, “a degree of sleeplessness, of Wiederkäuen, of repetition, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thing, whether this living thing be a man or a people or a [313] culture.” (Untimely Meditations, 62)
The point, then, as always with Nietzsche, is to define in terms of intensity, degree of force, the degree and the limit (Grad und Grenze) at which
[ . . . ] the past has to be forgotten if it is not to become the Totengräber des Gegenwärtigen, the gravedigger of the present, one would have to know exactly how great the plastische Kraft [plastic power] of a man, a people, a culture is: I mean by plastic power the capacity to develop out of oneself in one’s own way, to transform, to transfigure (umzubilden) and incorporate into oneself (einzuverleiben) what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate broken moulds. (Untimely Meditations, 62)
We are indeed dealing with the limit of a force and of an intensity, of a power to tolerate and assimilate history, to such an extent that one must not simply abandon oneself to destructive history nor refuse it. Nietzsche’s principle is therefore the following: das Unhistorische und das Historische ist gleichermassen für die Gesundheit eines einzelnen, eines Volkes und einer Kultur nötig: “the unhistorical and the historical are necessary in equal measure for the health of an individual, of a people and of a culture” (Untimely Meditations, 63).
Life for Nietzsche must always protect itself within a kind of haze of absence of historical sense. When this haze, this atmosphere, dissipates, life is destroyed. But as the ignorance of history can also threaten life, life must make use of history, subjugate history to itself. History must belong to the living. “History pertains to the living man in three respects,” says Nietzsche:
It pertains to him (1) as a being who acts and strives [Strebenden: is ambitious], (2) as a being who [is] Bewahrenden und Verehrenden, preserves (wahren) and reveres, (3) as a being who suffers and seeks deliverance. This threefold relationship corresponds to three species of history—insofar as it is permissible to distinguish between a monumental, an antiquarian (antiquarische: archeological) [314] and a critical species of history. (Untimely Meditations, 67)
Monumental history is a history from which one draws teachings, examples, and models, an authority to create great things today. Antiquarian history is a history of veneration of the past qua past, and is always a pious history, as it were. (If time, read [French] p. 239.)
*History thus belongs in the second place to him who preserves and reveres—to him who looks back to whence he has come, to where he came into being, with love and loyalty; with this piety he as it were gives thanks for his existence. By tending with care that which has existed from of old, he wants to preserve for those who shall come into existence after him the conditions under which he himself came into existence—and thus he serves life. The possession of ancestral goods changes its meaning in such a soul: they rather possess it. The trivial, circumscribed, decaying and obsolete acquire their own dignity and inviolability through the fact that the preserving and revering soul of the antiquarian man has emigrated into them and there made its home. The history of his city becomes for him the history of himself; he reads its walls, its towered gate, its rules and regulations, its holidays, like an illuminated diary of his youth and in all this he finds again himself, his force, his industry, his joy, his judgment, his folly and vices. Here we lived, he says to himself, for here we are living; and here we shall live, for we are tough and not to be ruined overnight. Thus with the aid of this “we” he looks beyond his own individual transitory existence and feels himself to be the spirit of his house, his race, his city. Sometimes he even greets the soul of his nation across the long dark centuries of confusion as his own soul; an ability to feel his way back and sense how things were, to detect traces almost extinguished, to read the past quickly and correctly no matter how intricate its palimpsest may be—these are his talents and virtues. (Untimely Meditations, 72–73)*
Critical history is the history of the one who judges and condemns in order [315] to be able to live. Critical history summons the past to appear before its tribunal, interrogates it without mercy and readily condemns it. Always condemns it. The tribunal of history, here (objective genitive) is the tribunal that judges history and always condemns it, for, Nietzsche says, every past deserves to be condemned. To be condemned not by a theoretical or practical verdict, by knowledge or by morality, but by life, by its obscure, driving, power (Macht), insatiably avid for itself. The judgment of life on the past is always dangerous both for life and for the epochs and the people who pronounce this judgment. “[ . . . ] history can be borne only by strong personalities [ . . . ]” (Untimely Meditations, 86).
So one must understand critique here in a sense that has nothing to do with historical critique as guarantee of objectivity. We are dealing here with a critique that demolishes, with an active and destructive critique that is not the respectful gesture of the historian. And it is even primarily the critique of historical objectivity. Historical objectivity is the disease, the degeneration of life, its disinterest, and so forth. Just as—analogically — for Heidegger, historical objectivity is a derivative preoccupation with respect to the original repetition of history, so—analogically—for Nietzsche, objectivity is a derivation of life, or rather a failure, a setting adrift of life. In the very narrow sense of this word = something like a castration. The objective attitude is castrating; it castrates both the one who assumes it and what it is aiming at. What’s more, we must not say that the objective attitude is castrating: it is castration itself; castration is access to objectivity. To say that castration is objectivity is to say that it is neither masculine nor feminine, but that it is the privation of sex . . . And it would be difficult to say whether, in Nietzsche’s eyes, critical history (in the sense he intends it [non-objective]) is masculine or feminine. One might be tempted to think that it is masculine, since it considers objective historians to be eunuchs, but one might think just as well that critical history is feminine since history (Geschichte = reality) is masculine for [316] Nietzsche and can therefore be exhausted and critically destroyed only by a woman. This means that the masculine and the feminine are one and the same thing which, in objectivity, is affected by castration.
What I am saying is not over-embroidering. It is Nietzsche who says this, or very nearly so, in the pages I am going to read, [French] 277–81:
*[ . . . ] history can be borne only by strong personalities, weak ones are utterly extinguished by it. The reason is that history confuses the feelings and sensibility when these are not strong enough to assess the past by themselves. He who no longer dares to trust himself but involuntarily asks of history “How ought I to feel about this?” finds that his timidity gradually turns him into an actor and that he is playing a role, usually indeed many roles and therefore playing them badly and superficially. Gradually all congruity between the man and his historical domain is lost; we behold pert little fellows associating with the Romans as though they were their equals: and they root and burrow in the remains of the Greek poets as though these too were corpora for their dissection and were as vilia as their own literary corpora may be. Suppose one of them is engaged with Democritus, I always feel like asking: why not Heraclitus? Or Philo? Or Bacon? Or Descartes? —or anyone else. And then: why does it have to be a philosopher? Why not a poet or an orator? And: why a Greek at all, why not an Englishman or a Turk? Is the past not big enough for you to be able to find nothing except things in comparison with which you cut so ludicrous a figure? But, as I have said, this is a race of eunuchs, and to a eunuch one woman is like another, simply a woman, woman in herself, the eternally unapproachable and it is thus a matter of indifference what they do so long as history itself is kept nice and “objective,” bearing in mind that those who want to keep it so are forever incapable of making history themselves. And since the eternally womanly will never draw you upward, you draw it down to you and, being neuters, take history too for a neuter. But so that it shall not be thought that I am seriously comparing history with the eternally womanly, I should like to make it [317] clear that, on the contrary, I regard it rather as the eternally manly: though, to be sure, for those who are “historically educated” through and through it must be a matter of some indifference whether it is the one or the other: for they themselves are neither man nor woman, nor even hermaphrodite, but always and only neuters or, to speak more cultivatedly, the eternally objective. If the personality is emptied in the manner described and has become eternally subjectless or, as it is usually put, objective, nothing can affect it any longer; good and right things may be done, as deeds, poetry, music: the hollowed-out cultivated man at once looks beyond the work and asks about the history of its author.* (Untimely Meditations, 86–87)
Naturally, our great castrator, as Nietzsche recognized, is God the father or his philosophical pseudonym, Hegel. Hegel is ultimately, for Nietzsche, the name or the origin of historicism and objectivism, of the historical devotion of the eunuch who bows down before the positive, objective fact, acknowledges it from a distance as untouchable. So much so that the hour of absolute historical objectivity would be the final hour of history. Objective history, respected like a virgin by a eunuch, would be sterile, sterilized and paralyzed. Now this devotion before the objective fact [fait] is also a devotion before the fait accompli, a history that is not critical in the Nietzschean sense because it is trying to be too critical in the philosophical sense or in the sense of historical methodology. This philosophical or methodological hypercritique becomes dogmatic because it is content to affirm and to believe without destroying, and it becomes empiricist because it is content to record the fact, what it takes to be the virgin fact. As though one could know virginity without violating it.
Nietzsche sees in this historical degeneration which signals or signifies itself as Hegelianism, as end of philosophy or German ideology, a degeneracy of life and a phenomenon of vulgarity. For Nietzsche, Hegel is philosophy as vulgarity. To which Hegel would no doubt retort that that is a vulgar reading of his philosophy, as he often did preemptively, pointing out the schemas that ought not to be followed in order to read him, and that are [318] often the very ones that his detractors, Feuerbach for a start, followed with an infallible and instructive assuredness. One can imagine for example what Hegel would say about the vulgarity of Nietzsche’s interpretation of absolute knowledge. And since we were talking about this last Friday9 and were wondering how such a flat reading of the end of the Phenomenology had managed to become dominant, I shall read you this passage from Nietzsche that shows it in a glaring light. Read [French] p. 331–37:
*[ . . . ] Even if we Germans were in fact nothing but successors—we could not be anything greater or prouder than successors if we had appropriated such a culture and were the heirs and successors of that.
What I mean by this and it is all I mean is that the thought of being epigones, which can often be a painful thought, is also capable of evoking great effects and grand hopes for the future in both an individual and in a nation, provided we regard ourselves as the heirs and successors of the astonishing powers of antiquity and see in this our honour and our spur. What I do not mean, therefore, is that we should live as pale and stunted late descendants of strong races coldly prolonging their life as antiquarians and gravediggers. Late descendants of that sort do indeed live an ironic existence: annihilation follows at the heels of the limping gait of their life; they shudder at it when they rejoice in the past, for they are embodied memory yet their remembrance is meaningless if they have no heirs. Thus they are seized by the troubled presentiment that their life is an injustice, since there will be no future life to justify it.
But suppose we imagine these antiquarian latecomers suddenly exchanging this painfully ironic modesty for a state of shamelessness; suppose we imagine them announcing in shrill tones: the race is now at its zenith, for only now does it possess knowledge of itself, only now has it revealed itself to itself—we should then behold a spectacle through which, as in a parable, the enigmatic significance for German culture of a certain very celebrated [319] philosophy would be unriddled. I believe there has been no dangerous vacillation or crisis of German culture this century that has not been rendered more dangerous by the enormous and still continuing influence of this philosophy, the Hegelian. The belief that one is a latecomer of the ages is, in any case, paralysing and depressing: but it must appear dreadful and devastating when such a belief one day by a bold inversion raises this latecomer to godhood as the true meaning and goal of all previous events, when his miserable condition is equated with a completion of world-history. Such a point of view has accustomed the Germans to talk of a “world-process” and to justify their own age as the necessary result of this world-process; such a point of view has set history, insofar as history is “the concept that realizes itself,” “the dialectics of the spirit of the peoples” and the “world-tribunal”, in place of the other spiritual powers, art and religion, as the sole sovereign power.
History understood in this Hegelian fashion has been mockingly called God’s sojourn on earth, though the god referred to has been created only by history. This god, however, became transparent and comprehensible to himself within the Hegelian craniums and has already ascended all the dialectically possible steps of his evolution up to this self-revelation: so that for Hegel the climax and terminus of the world-process coincided with his own existence in Berlin. Indeed, he ought to have said that everything that came after him was properly to be considered merely as a musical coda to the world-historical rondo or, even more properly, as superfluous. He did not say it: instead he implanted into the generation thoroughly leavened by him that admiration for the “power of history” which in practice transforms every moment into a naked admiration for success and leads to an idolatry of the factual: which idolatry is now generally described by the very mythological yet quite idiomatic expression “to accommodate oneself to the facts.” But he who has once learned to bend his back and bow his head before the “power of history” at last nods “Yes” like a Chinese mechanical doll to every power, whether it be a government or public opinion or a numerical majority, and moves his limbs to the precise rhythm at which any “power” whatever pulls the strings. If every success is a rational necessity, if every event is a victory [320] of the logical or the “idea”— then down on your knees quickly and do reverence to the whole stepladder of “success”! What, are there no longer any living mythologies? What, the religions are dying out? Just behold the religion of the power of history, regard the priests of the mythology of the idea and their battered knees! Is it too much to say that all the virtues now attend on this new faith? Or is it not selflessness when the historical man lets himself be emptied until he is no more than an objective sheet of plate glass? Is it not magnanimity when, by worshipping in every force the force itself, one renounces all force of one’s own in Heaven and upon earth? Is it not justice always to hold the scales of the powers in one’s hands and to watch carefully to see which tends to be the stronger and heavier? And what a school of decorum is such a way of contemplating history! To take everything objectively, to grow angry at nothing, to love nothing, to understand everything, how soft and pliable that makes one; and even if someone raised in this school should for once get publicly angry, that is still cause for rejoicing, for one realizes it is intended only for artistic effect, it is ira and studium and yet altogether sine ira et studio.* (Untimely Meditations, 103–5)
You see what is signified by the accusation of vulgarity that Hegel and Nietzsche are flinging, or would fling, at each other. Now you know that if, as we saw, what governs the whole of Hegelianism in Heidegger’s view is a vulgar (his word) concept of time as intra-temporality, worldly temporality thought in the mode of the movement of Vorhandenheit, Heidegger says elsewhere, in passages I read at the beginning of the year, that Nietzsche is merely a reversal of Hegel: that is, he still belongs to the sphere of metaphysics in which this reversal takes place. He too, then, would be a victim of Hegelian vulgarity.
Let’s leave this general schema and approach more closely this Nietzschean theme of the three histories. Heidegger proposes a repetition of it, seeking to get back to the common root of these three histories and explaining how, starting from this common root, the triplicity Nietzsche talks about comes about. According to Heidegger, Nietzsche thematized only the triplicity but he thought more than he was saying, and it is this unspoken thought [321] that Heidegger wants to repeat. He thinks more than he says and this unspoken thought will be the thought spoken by Heidegger who writes, for example, at the beginning of this repetition, that the triplicity (Dreifachheit) of history (Historie) is prescribed, pre-scribed (vorgezeichnet), in the historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) of Dasein. And, he says, “Nietzsche’s division is not accidental. The beginning of his Betrachtung makes us suspect that he understood more than he made known” (Being and Time, 376).
The unspoken thought is the rootedness of historical science in historicity and of this latter in temporality. It is in the unity of the three temporal extases that the three histories are rooted, in the unity of the three Entrückungen, the three ways of taking a distance, of getting outside oneself:
Dasein exists as futural authentically in the resolute disclosure of a chosen possibility. Resolutely coming back to itself, it is open, in repetition, for the “monumental” possibilities of human existence. The historiography (Historie) arising from this historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) is “monumental.” As having-been (gewesendes), Dasein is delivered over to its thrownness. In appropriating the possible in repetition, there is pre-scribed at the same time the possibility of reverently preserving (Bewahrung) the existence that has-been-there, in which the possibility taken up became manifest. As monumental, authentic historiography (Histoire) is thus “antiquarian” (antiquarisch). Dasein temporalizes itself in the unity of future and the having-been as the present. The present, as the Moment, discloses the today authentically. But insofar as the today is interpreted on the basis of the futurally repetitive understanding (zukünftig-wiederholenden Verstehen) of a possibility taken up from existence, authentic historiography (Historie) is de-presentification of the today (Entgegenwärtigung des Heute); that is, it becomes the painful way of detaching itself (Sichlösen) from the entangled publicness of the today [a precise concept for Heidegger]. As authentic, monumental-antiquarian historiography [322] is necessarily a critique of the “present.” (Being and Time, 376–77)
(You see how the anti-Hegelian theme of the destruction of the present as parousia and the critique of the present as engaged critique of the today and decision in the situation, as refusal of the fait accompli and empiricist passivity and so forth, are united here.) This is nothing short of saying that this powerful anti-empiricist movement that Hegelianism is, no doubt the most powerful in the whole history of philosophy, is an empiricist movement. And Heidegger concludes the paragraph that I am translating thus:
Authentic historicity is the foundation (Fundament) of the possible unity of the three kinds of historiography. But the ground on which authentic historiography is founded (der Grund des Fundaments) is temporality as the existential meaning of being of care. (Being and Time, 377)
What Heidegger has just sketched out in this way on the basis of the origin of historical science must be re-commenced according to him for the origin of all the human sciences, for everything that since Dilthey was called the sciences of spirit as opposed to the sciences of nature, just as understanding was opposed to explanation. But because the origin of each science of spirit refers back to the history and the historicity of Dasein, well, the theory of the sciences of spirit always presupposes a thematic existential interpretation of the historicity of Dasein. This common root not only does not reduce the originality of each science and its proper history; on the contrary, it makes it possible.
As I must break this course off here, this course which will, then, have been no more than a long introduction to the introduction it promised to be, I will attempt, cutting a considerable number of decisive corners, to sketch out the conclusions toward which it is heading, toward which it would have traveled if, beyond Sein und Zeit, we had indeed patiently followed the path [323] along which we have nonetheless constantly proposed rapid reference points.
During the session before last, in a series of architectonic considerations, I tried to indicate what the move from Sein und Zeit to the other writings signified: notably the move from the Geschichtlichkeit of Dasein to the Geschichtlichkeit of Sein. We also recognized along the way what was signified by the epochal essence of being and, by the same token, the simultaneously unveiling and dissimulating essence of language. This essence opened us to the meaning of metaphoricity as such, before any linguistic determination of language, or any scientific or onto-theological determination of beings.
It was implied in all these considerations that Heidegger’s path of thought presented itself as epochal and historical: that is, as metaphorical. But here what is announced in the metaphor is the essence of metaphor, metaphoricity as such, metaphoricity as historicity and historicity as such. But it belongs to this as such that it hides what it announces (i.e., that it not reach proper meaning as such). There is history only of being and being is only history, but by its essence this proposition is still metaphorical.
Heidegger knows this and says so. No doubt the thinking of being announces the horizon of non-metaphor on the basis of which metaphoricity is thought. But it does not announce itself prophetically like a new day (prophets only ever announce other metaphors), as something that will be; it announces itself as the impossible on the basis of which the possible is thought as such (announce ≠ event here). One can call it death, the possibility of death essentially inscribed in the history of Dasein who knows better than ever today how the death of man, of the human, for example, is announced. So the thinking of being announces the horizon of non-metaphor. But the gesture whereby it announces this horizon, even though it denounces the entirety of past metaphor (onto-theology), happens in a metaphor about which it does [324] not yet know—because it is irreducibly to-come—what that metaphor is hiding. The thinking of being is even the only respect for the future as such, far from being a sentimental and nostalgic traditionalism. It is that on the basis of which all thoughts that claim to be progressive can arise as what they are. What is said in the Heideggerian metaphor does not belong to Heidegger but to the epoch and to the total pro-position of the epoch, to the total statement of the epoch, to its total saying. Heidegger says in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” ([French] p. 149), “Historically, only one saying [Sage] belongs to the matter of thinking, the one that is in each case appropriate to its matter” (Pathmarks, 272). Literally: “There belongs to the thing of thinking (thing in general: Sache des Denkens) only one saying (eine Sage) that is up to its Sachheit.” This is why, in particular, there is no Heideggerianism and no Heideggerian.
The metaphorical dissimulation of this statement happens, one might say, in that difference between meaning and signification that we recognized at the outset and whose particular character we recognized in the case of the meaning and signification of Being. To speak of a question of being is, by the simple elocution of the word being, to determine it, to determine metaphorically the cipher of non-metaphor. Determine it in what way? Well, for example, still by the linguistic determination to which one cannot fail to make appeal. And this linguistic determination still remains a determination by the present, by the presence of the present, at the very moment when, in the name of the question of being, one is destroying the domination of presence. Heidegger knows this and says it, very early—for example, in that passage from the Einführung . . . (1935) of which I spoke,10 where he lets it be understood that the infinitive form of the word be is thought on the basis of the third person present indicative. This irreducibly grammatical dimension of meaning, this writing, this necessary trace of meaning is the metaphorical process itself, historicity itself. And Heidegger’s remark showing that the [325] word be still belongs to a thinking of presence, finds confirmation in the well-known text to which I also alluded (Zur Seinsfrage, 1955), where I was explaining why Heidegger judged it necessary to cross out the word Being.11 This crossing out, this negative writing, this trace erasing the trace of the present in language is the unity of metaphoricity and non-metaphoricity as unity of language.12
Given this, if the signification be is still a metaphor and if the signification history is thinkable only as history of being, well, the signification history is also, like that of Being, a metaphor to be destroyed. This destruction will not be a philosophical gesture, of course, since it is in the destruction of philosophy that the question of being as history has been brought about. This destruction will not be a gesture decided and accomplished once and for all, by someone in a book, a course, in words or deeds. It is accomplished slowly, patiently, it patiently takes hold of the whole of language, of science, of the human, of the world. And this patience is not even ours, it is not an ethical virtue. It is the auto-affection of what one can no longer even call being. Being and history would thus still be metaphorical expressions. (Destroy the word metaphor = linguistics. Heidegger does not use it.)
If being and history are metaphorical expressions that are in the process of destroying themselves as such, well, one can speak of an end of history and a death of being that are, no less, what by another metaphor we call the [326] future itself. What is hidden under this other metaphor is the opening of the question itself: that is, of difference.
The title of this course was, I recall: “Heidegger: The Question of Being and History.” You remember that I tried at the outset to justify each of the words of this title. Each of them, even the name Heidegger, has turned out to be metaphorical. There is one word, perhaps you remember, that I did not try to justify, and that was question.