9	THE IMPOSSIBLE RETURN

So Heidegger “regrets” that we have forgotten Being. But he doesn’t see clearly how to get out of this. What to do?

Years later I succeeded in giving a relatively full answer of my own, going beyond Heidegger while remaining faithful to him in substance. Above all, I came to understand the moments at which the great German philosopher gives in to nostalgia and imagines a possible return of Being that wouldn’t openly contradict everything he has thought and written, and the points at which, on the contrary, he supplies a possible confirmation of my “nihilistic” reading.

Right from that first impact, though, I understood—and asked myself—a few things.

If you forget a telephone number, you have to try to remember it, end of story. But with Being? Heidegger speaks of metaphysics as the forgetting of Being because, instead of posing the problem of what Being means, it has reduced Being to an object, even when it calls it “God,” which may be the most perfect Being, but is still always an “object” among others.

So what are we to do? What does Heidegger want to do? Does he want us to remember Being? But can Being be remembered? I am not the only one intrigued and fascinated by this question. It torments all Heidegger’s interpreters, especially the ones who are reading Nietzsche at the same time.

It is a genuine problem. Because if Being is simply something that was, and that we have forgotten but might remember, at that precise moment it is no longer Being, it is like a potato, or any object whatsoever set there before us. So it is hard for Heidegger to imagine the way out of the forgetting of Being as the recovery of memory following amnesia, even centuries-long amnesia. To remember it means to appropriate it to oneself, and at that point we are back to objectivation.

Clearly Heidegger hates the idea of Being as something present, there in front of us, because that would make it an object. Therefore, he cannot think that it returns in that sense; all he can think is that Being itself alters its stance toward us, that it does eventuate for us again, not “in presence” but rather as rents in history that inaugurate new epochs. Great works of art—he privileges these, and I was swayed by that at first, though later I came to different conclusions—are primarily what inaugurate new epochs for Heidegger. But without continuity with the rest of history, with the illuminations that went before.

Therefore there never was a “before,” a before metaphysics, a before Plato, when Being was right in front of us, and which we ought simply to go looking for.

For Heidegger there can be only one answer: it is not we who are bound to remember; rather, it will depend on Being itself, in what might be called a logic of redemption, but also of social revolution, to change our situation of historical forgetting of Being.

My own answer, many years later, was: we cannot remember Being; all we can do is remember having forgotten it.

In any case, in order to respect the fundamental proposition of Heidegger—that is, the difference between Being and something objectively given, whether it be the Ideas of Plato, Paradise in the Christian ages, or the scientific experiment in the epoch of science—we simply have to suppose, even if Heidegger never arrived at this, that the only possible history of Being is the growing lighter, the losing weight (alleggerimento) of Being itself. The history of Being is the history of how objective truth gradually dissolves; therefore, it is nihilism, the history of nihilism as sketched by Nietzsche. Being is confirmed as that which illuminates things without being identified with things. A lamp that illuminates a chair, that allows the chair to “be there,” but that is not the chair. Growing lighter, therefore. But also: growing more distant.

How do we emerge from the forgetting of Being? Not through preparing for its return, only through thinking its history as that of something that is withdrawing, growing ever more distant. If there is a history of Being, it is a history of distancing, not of drawing closer. Being illuminates to the extent that it withdraws.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes to mind: “A God who is, is not.” Hard to get a grip on. But really beautiful.