| 7 | BEING |
Not only have we forgotten what Being means, we have forgotten that we have forgotten. Heidegger places this sentence from Plato’s Sophist at the beginning of his Being and Time, the book with which he forced himself onto the attention of the philosophical world and the general culture at the end of the 1920s.
Heidegger reads Nietzsche, and as he does, he reconstructs the history of Plato’s Ideas down to modernity, to today, meaning down to positivistic scientific experimentation, which for Heidegger is the height of the forgetting of Being.
I began to worry at this problem, and it’s the thread running through all my philosophical work.
Heidegger, I found, was contradictory about this. Or, at any rate, he didn’t succeed in drawing out all the consequences of his own intuitions. Right there was the starting point of all my own research, my personal reading, my interpretation, of Heidegger, and naturally of Nietzsche. It still is.
Heidegger doesn’t really know how to solve this problem of the forgetting of Being. He oscillates between nostalgia and awareness that the whole history of philosophy in the West, metaphysics, is over and that it’s a good thing it is. Time to move on. Because on one hand, Being is the most important thing there is; it’s precisely what allows man to be, it’s what illuminates reality. Yet at the same time Plato’s Being, the Ideas existing in Hyperuranium, which then become the Cartesian cogito, the absolute truth, the Christian paradise, and so on down to scientific positivism, all these putatively objective truths are the negation of Being and so deserve merely to die.
Nietzsche rejoices in this dissolution of the “real world,” because for him it means liberation: finally we are living in a world in which there are no more objective limits, and precisely in order to bear this liberty we have to become overmen.
Nietzsche registers the death of God without any nostalgia. As though he were heaving a sigh of relief, he writes “God is dead, now we wish that many Gods may live.”
In sum, whereas Nietzsche is quite content to be a nihilist, Heidegger is a little less so. In fact, he wishes he weren’t. Actually he is, and will be all his life.
There is a general misunderstanding to the effect that Nietzsche’s strong affirmation that “God is dead” is a profession of atheism. That’s not it. Nietzsche does not affirm that God does not exist. He could never affirm that, because it would amount to another absolute truth entirely equivalent to the affirmation that “God exists.” It’s the point of view that is different. Wherever there is an absolute there is still always metaphysics, meaning a supreme principle, exactly what Nietzsche has discovered has become superfluous. “God is dead” signifies that there is no ultimate foundation.
Though Heidegger doesn’t want to acknowledge this, Nietzsche’s affirmation has the same meaning as his own polemic against metaphysics, in other words against the whole European philosophical tradition from Parmenides on, that believes it can grasp an ultimate foundation of reality in the form of an objective structure located outside of time and history. Heidegger’s great revolution is the refusal, in the name of liberty, of a stable, objective, structural conception of Being. If we are bearers of hopes, feelings, fear, projects . . . finite beings, with a past and a future, and not just appearances, then Being cannot be thought in terms of objectivistic metaphysics.
For me this is the first step, a beginning, nameless but crucial, of what twenty years later would be called “weak thought.”
You breathe good air up there at three thousand meters. The oxygen sometimes makes you feel drunk. I was through forever with any form of Thomism, drunk on freedom.