42	IN HUMAN CONVERSATION

Among the passages from Hölderlin cited most frequently by Heidegger, there’s a particularly beautiful one: “Because mankind has named many gods since we have been a colloquy.”

If Being eventuates in history, it eventuates in historical languages, and so in language, in the dialogue among humans, in the human conversation.

This word “conversation”—which I like a lot more than “dialogue”—has recently been foregrounded by Santiago Zabala. I find it a brilliant intuition, drawn a bit from Rorty, a bit from Gadamer, but a fascinating novelty. These openings occur in language, in the historical languages.

Here you can see the full meaning of the title of my book Essere, storia e linguaggio in Heidegger, which closely interweaves these three elements: Being, history, language.

Heidegger is one who no longer thinks of Kantian reason as something eternal, with a capital R, but as something historically given. Kant’s a priori are given to us in the historical language that we speak. When we predicate being of something—the donkey is, or the donkey has four hooves—we are producing a theory of it, using time, space, and the categories.

When I predicate being of a thing—such and such a thing is—truth lies in the assertion, not in the single word. If I say “unicorn,” I’m not saying anything. If I say, “The unicorn is or is not,” I am saying something. This also means suspending the peremptoriness of that which we say “is.”

For Kant, time, space, and the categories are equal in all men; therefore science (in his case, Newtonian science) has universal value. But not for Heidegger. Not by a long shot.

Nothing eludes historicity, least of all philosophy and thought. So it follows, not that Heidegger was more intelligent than Kant, but that he came 120 years after Kant. And in that stretch of time there arose cultural anthropology, psychology . . . sciences, ways of knowing that cause the idea that reason is always the same in all epochs and in all humans to crumble.

Heidegger takes this into account in putting the problem of what Being means, whether it is supposed to function even for us, who are finite entities that are born, die, have problems. The upshot is that Being, for Heidegger—well, to tell the truth, I don’t exactly know what it is, and neither does he. He does know for sure that it cannot be an object. Ultimately it’s this “thing” in quotation marks that announces itself in the languages of the cultures within which we are always already thrown.

Being therefore eventuates in language. But how? In conversation. In the living language, that is, that a humanity speaks. Naturally it—Being—isn’t an offshoot of language, but that’s its mode of occurrence.

And if Being is eventuation, we may further suppose that Being is nothing other than this: the meaning of the word “Being” in the history of our language, and in the use we make of it.

And indeed, where else would Being be, if not in the history of the word?

One of my great “finds”—the one that caused Gadamer to remark that I was a real philosopher—has been this idea that to rethink Being, as Heidegger does in Being and Time, is to shift the ground from under that which we take to be grounded, set it in relation to a history without end.

You’re like an ape in a cage. The cage is the a priori of your epoch, but when you set it in relation to history, go back in history, move back and forth, what do you accomplish? It’s not that you find a more stable cage to go to; all you are doing is shaking your cage.

And here is where Heidegger uses expressions such as “to leap into the abyss,” “to leap into Being as abyss.” But the abyss is really abyssal, in the sense that you never get to a more stable point, far from it.

Philosophy winds up being a sort of suspension of the peremptoriness of the things that eventuate, that are there. Plato thought of philosophy as that which grounded the other knowledges. I think of philosophy—I, not Heidegger—as that which shifts the ground from under knowledges. In the sense that it causes them to be seen as dependent on this historicity of Being that is, as it were, lost in origins that are never very clear, in myth. . . . Gianbattista Vico might have agreed with me.

From this perspective, not even science is an enemy any longer—I grasped this more clearly reading Gadamer—but it does have to be dominated politically. Philosophy must regulate relations, just as everyday language must govern specialized languages, and common political ethics must impose rules on the sciences.

Once again Santiago Zabala has summed it up well in his introduction to the “dialogue” between me and Rorty on the future of religion: “Wherever there is an authority that, in the guise of a scientific or ecclesiastical community, imposes something as objective truth, philosophy has the obligation to proceed in the opposite direction: to show that truth is never objectivity, but always interpersonal dialogue which takes effect in the sharing of a language.”