by Henry Piper (all rights reserved)
Introduction: a New World
In our philosophical journey from Plato and Aristotle to Hume and Kant we have traversed an historical period of more than 2000 years. It is my hope and conviction that we can look back on it all and acknowledge that, remarkably, much if not all of it remains as vital and relevant today as when it was lived and written; yet, as we approach our own historical time, we may feel as though this whole history of philosophy has been but a dream or simply an historical relic, interesting, perhaps, but a matter now best set back on a shelf, or laid upon the coffee table for casual perusal or as the stuff of idle conversation. Is it because our own historical period has witnessed such a rush of scientific progress and technological innovation that we have outrun the need for the quiet contemplation of what may seem to be the arcane musings of philosophy? Perhaps we have simply run out of time—is it too late to hope to discover any meaning in the rush of “civilization?” Has our mindless onrush into universal personal computerization doomed us to eventual absorption into a single, digital mass?
These contemporary conditions have been prefigured, perhaps, in Hume and Kant, for whom the traditional pursuits of epistemology and metaphysics have come to a kind of impasse according to which the very possibility of their continued pursuit is suddenly brought into question. Following them, the 19th Century produced the remarkable figures of Hegel and Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, each of whom clearly warrants his own chapter, for, to be sure, each is a towering figure in the history of philosophy. Hegel and Marx, though theoretically opposed as the exponents of historical Idealism and Materialism respectively, are essentially akin in their reliance on the premise of historical progression as each undertakes to excavate and evaluate the entire progress of human history in terms both of human consciousness and freedom and of the material and intellectual conditions of human existence; moreover, both philosophers lend themselves, fairly or not, to interpretations that would imply a historical inevitability to the advance both of consciousness and of material conditions according to which we might seem to be left to the mercy of that mass digitalization to which I adverted above.
In reaction to, and also perhaps in fulfillment of, Hegel and Marx come the figures of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, themselves precursors to Heidegger and Sartre and numerous other philosophers struggling with the tumult of modern times. At the fore of their concerns, specifically, are the questions of who I am, of what I must do, of what I can do. In Kierkegaard and Nietzsche these questions assume an intensely self-conscious urgency: Kierkegaard raises to philosophical significance “the category of the single individual,” alone before an inscrutable God, and Nietzsche strips that individual even of that God before which she might stand. It is thus that the 19th Century echoes with the themes of self-recognition turning to self-alienation, faith turning to despair, and a new understanding of human freedom forged in anxiety and dread.
Reviving the Human Spirit
In short, characteristic of all of all these philosophers has been an effort, consciously, self-consciously or otherwise, to come to terms with an entirely new world and with an entirely new human situation, for it is hardly debatable, it seems to me, that the changes in human mobility, communications, society, warfare and commerce brought on by the industrial, technological and digital revolutions―and more particularly, the attendant changes in our collective attitude toward these enterprises―have fundamentally altered the conditions of human existence itself and have left us effectively without any meaningful time for reflection, for simply taking it all in. There has, in the course of human history, always been change and “progress” of various kinds, occasionally even dramatic and rapid change; but there has surely never been the sort of relentless, qualitative upheaval witnessed over the past two centuries, the relentlessness of which is, in the new electronic age, only accelerating.
It is thus that we turn now to Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who writes, ominously, “The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline and to appraise it as such.” By “spiritual decline” Heidegger by no means refers to any particular religious tradition; as one devoted to philosophy, in the terms in which I describe it in this book’s Introduction, the term “spiritual” refers generally to what is not comprehensible to the physical sciences and, by extension, what is uniquely characteristic of human beings. Thus, by “spiritual decline” Heidegger refers to a basic loss of the uniqueness of authentic humanity, a loss or failure of human freedom, a renunciation of the possibility of discovering or creating meaning and value in an otherwise indifferent and, indeed, seemingly hostile world. We are doomed to remain strangers in the world, strangers to each other and even to ourselves―strangers, in short, to our authentic possibility―as long as we fail to assert ourselves as the uniquely human beings that we are. As we permit ourselves to be swept and swallowed up in the onrush of technological mechanization, which is undertaking to mechanize humanity itself, warns Heidegger, “on the earth, all over it, a darkening of the world is happening. The essential happenings in this darkening are: the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the preeminence of the mediocre…, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free.”
In the simplest of terms, Heidegger argues that this crisis, a crisis that consists in the very loss of what it means, or might mean, to be a free being―an origin and source of meaning and value―can be traced directly to a misinterpretation of the meaning of human spirit. Today, argues Heidegger, human “spirit” has been reduced to “intelligence, and this as mere astuteness in the examination, calculation and observation of given things”; but, says Heidegger, “Mere ingenuity is the semblance of spirit and veils its absence.” Such technical “ingenuity” has in turn been “reduced to the role of a tool in the service of something else, a tool whose handling can be taught and learned.” Even “pure” science itself, says Heidegger, which is in principle committed not to some technical profit or material advantage but to the pure advancement and fulfillment of human wonder, has been reduced to a cultural commodity “that one publicly trots out and exhibits as proof that one does not want to deny culture in favor of barbarism.”
In short, we might infer, Heidegger is suggesting here that our attitude to science and technology today has become indistinguishable from our attitude toward human beings themselves, including our own selves: we have effectively repudiated the province of human spirit in favor of an attitude toward human beings that renders us mere mechanical tools in service of the smooth running of a vast, mechanized, economic and political machine. But, properly understood, “Spirit is what sustains and rules, the first and the last, not a merely indispensable third element.” Heidegger seeks to reclaim the meaning and dignity of the human spirit, for “Spirit is neither empty acuity, nor the noncommittal play of wit, nor the understanding’s boundless pursuit of analysis, nor even world reason, but rather spirit is originally attuned, knowing resolution to the essence of Being.”
Reviving the Meaning of Being
So for Heidegger, the loss of the authentic meaning of human spirit can be traced to our forgetfulness of the meaning of Being. The question of Being is a philosophical question, and, more particularly, a metaphysical question, argues Heidegger. We are prone today to look, without even a thought, to technological science to save us, but technology cannot save us, and we must look to philosophy to reassert itself as the bearer and champion of value, of meaning, of human spirit, of human being itself. As we noted in the Introduction, philosophy, like science, is a means of knowledge, but a sort of knowledge fundamentally distinct from that of science―in Heidegger’s words, “Metaphysics and philosophy are not science at all.” And though in today’s technological age we might ignore philosophy in favor of science, or for that matter in favor of blind faith, it is to philosophy that we must look to reclaim the meaning and value of the human.
In his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), Heidegger opens with what he refers to as “the first of all questions,” and “the fundamental question of metaphysics,” which is, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” which might also be phrased, “why is there something and not, rather, nothing?” Heidegger emphasizes that this “is not the first question in the chronological sense”: it is not the first question that comes to the mind of most people or of anybody, for that matter, since we all have a lot more immediate questions to deal with in life starting with basic necessities and survival. Indeed, says Heidegger, “Many never run into this question at all, if running into the question means not only hearing and reading the interrogative sentence as uttered, but asking the question, that is, taking a stand on it, posing it, compelling oneself into the state of this questioning.” The fact that “many may never run into this question at all,” however, is not because we are incapable of it, much less because the question is not supremely important; on the contrary, no more important question can be imagined, and it is the nature of the human spirit itself to pose and indeed to exist in this question. So it is Heidegger’s purpose to reawaken the human spirit, which enables our consciousness of the world and our consciousness of ourselves as part of the world and also, in freedom, enables us to be responsible for this world.
The Being of Dasein
Heidegger uses the German term “Dasein,” otherwise routinely translated into English as “existence,” to represent the being of human beings, who are beings that exist in the awareness of and assertion of their existence; the term literally combines the German da meaning “there” (or, perhaps, “open”) with sein meaning “to be,” thus rendering Dasein as “there-being,” or as the being who is there in the sense of being aware of its there-ness and positively asserting itself over against other beings, or the being open to, or aware of, itself and other beings in their Being. For Heidegger, it is the essential mark of human beings, as distinct from all other beings in the universe, that we are able to pose and to wonder at and to “take a stand on” this question, in short, to ask of ourselves and of all existence, “why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”
Today of course, as we have noted, given the hectic, confused and often stressful pace of technological life, we may rush right past this question. “And yet,” writes Heidegger,
we are each touched once, maybe even now and then, by the concealed power of this question, without properly grasping what is happening to us. In great despair, for example, when all weight tends to dwindle away from things and the sense of things grows dark, the question looms. Perhaps it strikes only once, like the muffled tolling of a bell that resounds into Dasein and gradually fades away. The question is there in heartfelt joy, for then all things are transformed and surround us as if for the first time, as if it were easier to grasp that they were not, rather than that they are, and are as they are. The question is there in a spell of boredom, when we are equally distant from despair and joy, but when the stubborn ordinariness of beings lays open a wasteland in which it makes no difference to us whether beings are or are not―and then, in a distinctive form, the question resonates once again: Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?
In short, the question “looms” always, for it is at the root of our own Being, at the root of our own question, “why am I here?” even if, in our haste and inattention, we tend to rush right past it.
The Broadest, Deepest and Most Originary Question
However, while it is not the first question in our daily attention, it is “the first question in another sense―namely, in rank… as the broadest, as the deepest and finally as the most originary question.” It is the broadest question, says Heidegger, because it encompasses all beings or “beings as a whole;” in other words it is “the broadest in scope” and “It comes to a halt in no being of any kind whatsoever. The question embraces all that is, and that means not only what is now present at hand in the broadest sense but also what has previously been and what will be in the future.”
It is the deepest question, says Heidegger, for it asks, “Why―that is, what is the ground?... The question does not ask this or that about beings―what they are in each case, here and there, how they are put together, how they can be changed, what they can be used for, and so on.” The “why” to which Heidegger refers here, in other words, is not the “why” of science, which looks no farther than to another being when answering “why”; science, as we noted in the Introduction, concerns itself with the observable causes of the physical world, so to ask the scientific “why” is invariably to seek the prior material being or physical motion that caused the questioned being to be the way it is. When, as here, we pose the philosophical question, “why are there beings at all instead of nothing?,” by contrast, the “why” is seeking the “ground” on which all beings as beings can ever be. Here, in other words, “The questioning seeks the ground for what is insofar as it is being.” If we were inquiring scientifically about why the oak tree is here, our answer would reside in another, prior being or beings that caused it to come about as it has, thus our answer would consist of acorn (and its DNA), soil, sun, earth and rain. But when we pose the philosophical question about the oak tree, we are asking a deeper question, namely the question of how this being, as a being, came to be, that is, we are considering individual beings not as the beings they are, but insofar as they are beings as such. We are asking, in other words, how any being could have come to be; for, after all, isn’t it perfectly likely that there might just as well have been nothing rather than something? That, in the event, there is something no one will deny, and if we were content to stop with scientific questioning we would inquire no further and be satisfied to accept the simple there-ness of things; but as we pursue the deeper, philosophical question we are bound to recognize the very real possibility of the non-being of what is—that, in other words, rather than being there could very well have been nothing.
Finally, “as the broadest and deepest question, it is the most originary.” Notable here are two things. First, the origin of beings as considered here, philosophically rather than scientifically, seems simply to come out of the breadth and depth of the inquiry; thus, it would seem that nothing new is added by referring to the question as most originary for the question is one of breadth and depth, thus we are asking about “beings as a whole and as such.” Having said that, however, Heidegger adds that though in questioning beings “as a whole” we include all beings, without preference, “Still, it is remarkable that one being always keeps coming to the fore in this questioning: the human beings who pose the question.” In other words, we cannot avoid noticing that the question of being is one that owes its origin, as a question, to Dasein; but, continues Heidegger, this should not blind us to our own inconceivable insignificance in the context of the whole of Being itself: “And yet… any being counts as much as any other.” For, Heidegger says, “consider the Earth within the dark immensity of space in the universe. We can compare it to a tiny grain of sand…; on the surface of this tiny grain of sand lives a stupefied swarm of supposedly clever animals, crawling all over each other, who for a brief moment have invented knowledge.” Thus, Heidegger suggests, “Within beings as a whole there is no justification to be found for emphasizing precisely this being that is called the human being and among which we happen to belong”; and yet, to repeat, no question of beings would ever have come up were it not for the existence of this one, particular being, Dasein, which thus enjoys the distinction of being that being to which the questioning of being as such owes its origin.
The Leap, “the Mysterious Ground of Freedom”
So, puny and inconsiderable as we may be, Dasein is vital in the context of the question of Being as it is precisely Dasein, by virtue of our there-ness, our openness to being, that the question of being can ever be posed. When Heidegger asks, “Why the why?,” a big part of the answer is precisely because Dasein is: it is precisely by virtue of Dasein’s openness to being that the question of “beings as a whole and as such” is ever asked in the first place. And “through this questioning, beings as a whole are first opened up as such and with regards to their possible ground, and they are kept open in the questioning.” Thus, while Dasein may have no privilege among beings as beings, still it provides the ground of questioning itself: Dasein has no privilege in being, but it is the sole being who questions concerning being.
So part of the answer to “Why the why” is, because Dasein is there to pose the question. “But if this question is posed, and provided that it is actually carried out,” says Heidegger, “then this questioning necessarily recoils back from what is asked and what is interrogated, back upon itself.” In other words, if one truly engages this basic question of philosophy, to inquire concerning the very ground of “being as a whole and as such,” then one is oneself implicated in the questioning, for though Dasein is unique in being the one being that can and does pose this question, it is not at all unique in another sense, namely that it is just another being that could also not be. Thus in posing this question, Dasein puts its own being into question along with the rest of being and thus Dasein in essence engages in “a leap” away from itself, a leap away from the comfortable assurance that all that is, including itself, simply is as it is, a leap into the reality that all that is, including itself, could very well not be. So “this distinctive why-question has its ground in a leap by which human beings leap away from all the previous safety of their Dasein, be it genuine or presumed.” The most simple and basic awareness that this entails, for us, is the possibility, and indeed the inevitability, of our own death, of our “there-being” being no longer there; it is thus that the leap in its essence removes us from “the previous safety” of our ground, of being there, to not being-there, the ultimate “leap” from being, which only Dasein, of all beings, makes. Indeed, it is precisely the awareness of my own death that makes my being real to me, that brings my being home to me as the being that it is, for without some awareness of my own death I would have no reason to bother any time soon, or any time at all, being the being I am, since I could do that any time; but since I am going to die, I have no choice but to be whatever being I am going to be now, while I have the chance―now or never.
Finally, it is only in leaping away from the ground of my being that I become aware of my ground as my ground, just as, we might say (this is my analogy, not Heidegger’s), it is only when humans first left the literal ground of the Earth to view that ground from space that we suddenly became aware of the beauty and fragility and wonder of our earthly ground as but a tiny planet, a tiny jewel brightly but tentatively glittering in the vast, dark expanse of the cosmos. Just as the physical leap into space gave us perspective on the physical ground of our origin, so the psychic leap of Dasein into the contemplation of the possibility of its own non-being gives us perspective on the extraordinariness of our existence as human beings. Heidegger at times expresses the term “existence” as “ek-sistence” to emphasize the literal meaning of existence, which is “to stand forth,” that is, to leap from what we have been toward what we might become. Thus the very term “existence,” which typically translates Dasein and which Heidegger uses to refer to the unique kind of being that is human, contains within itself the leap, the sense of being apart from itself, of standing forth from itself.
Distinguishing Philosophy and Religion
So it is human beings alone who question their very existence and question Being itself, and because such questioning “recoils… back upon itself,” in essence it demands of human beings as such a leap away from “the previous safety of their Dasein.” Moreover, essential about this leaping is this lack of “safety,” a recognition of the uncertainty and contingency of our existence. Without the recognition of, and the existing in, such uncertainty―without this attitude of the questioning of our origin and of Being itself―human beings are not being honest with our true nature or with reality or with Being itself, we are not being true to our authentic selves.
Thus Heidegger argues that “anyone for whom the Bible already is divine revelation and truth already has the answer to the question, ‘Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?’ before it is even asked: beings, with the exception of God Himself, are created by Him.” What this means, however, is that such a believer takes refuge in the safety of divine revelation and thus never puts Being into question, indeed never recognizes that there is a question to be posed. Thus, “One who holds to such faith… cannot authentically question without giving himself up as a believer.” By this Heidegger does not mean to degrade religious faith as such, but only to point out that a belief in divine revelation cannot in fact constitute an answer to the question of Being, as a question; moreover, such belief cannot be the ground for genuine knowledge since it doesn’t even pose the question as a question much less seek to think it through. It is thus that Heidegger says that there is no such thing as a “Christian philosophy,” since philosophy seeks knowledge of what is not known, whereas religion begins with a belief in divine revelation which, by nature, exists independently of the need or possibility of its justification as knowledge, whether scientific or philosophical. However, Heidegger affirms that “one can thoroughly question and work through the world of Christian experience―that is, the world of faith. That is then theology.” But for all the historical or ethical interest that theology might offer, it cannot produce philosophical knowledge because it has no philosophical ground on which to stand; and that ground is, precisely, the posing of the question, Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?
Thus Heidegger goes on to say, “if such faith does not continually expose itself to the possibility of unfaith, it is not faith but a convenience”; that is, such “blind faith” (we might call it, not to disparage it but simply because it doesn’t question or even look for its own ground) is an easy way to avoid the authentic question of human existence and of being. The problem then is not with religion at all, but with the person with “blind faith” who fails to question the foundation of religion itself and to recognize that the genuinely religious attitude, and genuine faith, is a commitment, a decision, and requires a risk of oneself, a leap into the unknown, for it is emphatically not some sort of privileged knowing. If we know something, there is no room for faith; in short, to have an authentic faith is precisely to commit to a belief in something that one does not know.
Thus such authentic faith, which may be termed “a leap of faith” in that its essence is the questioning of its own ground, is altogether consistent with the questioning attitude that Heidegger insists is what distinguishes human being, Dasein, from all other being. Human beings are the beings who question, in other words, who seek not only the knowledge of science, which is accessible to us through the senses and thus at least in principle immediately present to us, but also the knowledge of philosophy, which questions precisely concerning what is not present; science deals with the ordinary, whereas, says Heidegger, “philosophizing is questioning about the extra-ordinary.” And as we have already noted, “this questioning recoils back upon itself, and thus not only what is asked about is extraordinary, but also the questioning itself.”
What is Philosophy?
“Philosophy,” writes Heidegger, “is not a kind of knowledge which one could acquire directly, like vocational and technical expertise, and which, like economic and professional knowledge in general, one could apply directly and evaluate according to its usefulness in each case.” Thus, says Heidegger, philosophy cannot offer “a foundation for building culture,” nor even can it be said that philosophy “makes it easier to build up culture.” Indeed, “according to its essence, philosophy never makes things easier, but only more difficult.” What philosophy does accomplish, says Heidegger, is more aptly characterized as a “burdening” in that it forces us to the awareness of the bottomless mystery of our own being and of Being itself, it makes us aware of the contingency of our existence and the uncertainty of our ground. But it is only with such awareness that we can come to ourselves as the beings who question and thus, ultimately, the beings whose meaning is our own. “The burdening of historical Dasein, and thereby at bottom of Being itself, is rather the genuine sense of what philosophy can achieve. Burdening gives back to things, to beings, their weight (Being).”
To seek in philosophy some practical or technical utility is to confuse it with science; it is a “distortion” of philosophy’s true nature. Philosophy is a quest for knowledge and truth, but it is not a matter merely of “information”; rather, “to know,” says Heidegger, “means to be able to stand in the truth,” and “Truth is the openness of beings. To know is accordingly to be able to stand in the openness of beings, to stand up to it. Merely to have information, no matter how wide-ranging, is not to know.” It may well be said, then, that “‘nothing comes’” of philosophy; ‘you can’t do anything with it.’” Heidegger readily acknowledges the “indisputable correctness” of such a view; but that is to miss the point of philosophy, for “even if we can’t do anything with it, may not philosophy in the end do something with us, provided that we engage ourselves with it?”
Thus, genuinely to stand in the openness of beings is precisely not to view beings in terms of what we can do to them, but to become aware of how we belong to them: it is not Being that belongs to us, after all, but we that belong to Being.
Phusis, and the Meaning of Metaphysics
For Heidegger, “to know means to be able to learn.” It is this, perhaps, that philosophy might “do with us,” namely, render us open to the “unfolding,” or “the emerging, abiding sway,” of beings. To philosophize is to leap into the unknown; it is to be open to beings, “to stand in the openness of beings.” In order to know, one must be willing to learn; moreover, one must commit one’s own being to Being itself, that is, one must be “resolute.”
Heidegger’s phrase, “emerging, abiding sway” refers essentially to beings as such, and by it Heidegger effectively renders what the ancient Greek philosophers referred to as phusis, which is obviously the origin of our modern term “physics.” Heidegger argues that phusis, properly understood, refers to “what emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in such appearance―in short, the emerging, abiding sway.” We can see in the two parts of this term the sort of synthesis, perhaps, of becoming and Being that we have previously observed as characteristic of Aristotle’s metaphysics; that is, Being, for Aristotle, essentially includes both an “abiding,” universal aspect characteristic of Plato’s Idea of Being, but Being also includes the characteristic of “emerging,” that is, coming to be from not being to being, from potentiality to actuality, or becoming. As Heidegger says, “This emerging, abiding sway includes both ‘becoming’ as well as ‘Being’ in the narrower sense of fixed continuity.” And we can also associate phusis with the literal meaning of existence, as “the event of standing forth, arising from the concealed and thus enabling the concealed to take its stand for the first time.”
Because we standardly translate the term phusis as “nature” via the Latin natura, it is all too easy, says Heidegger, to reduce and distort our understanding of phusis to mere physical nature, or the beings of the material world, which is indeed the subject matter proper to modern “physics;” however, the branch of philosophy known as “metaphysics” is clearly, and on its face, not limited to physical nature, but rather properly considers what is meta, that is, “over beyond” natural beings. In other words, we must not confuse physics, the study of beings, with metaphysics, which involves the consideration of the being of beings. It is this question of the being of beings that finds expression in “the fundamental question of metaphysics, namely, why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”
Unfolding the Question
As he turns to consider this “fundamental question of metaphysics,” Heidegger begins by “unfolding the question.” To begin with, we must be clear about what the object of our “interrogation” is, and what we are asking about that object. And clearly the object of the question is beings, and what we are asking about them is why, that is, “the ground.”
Added to this basic interrogation of the why of beings is the phrase, “instead of nothing,” and Heidegger wonders tentatively whether this adds anything or whether it is not rather a superfluous diversion from the real subject of beings. Specifically, Heidegger’s point is that, at least on the surface and speaking scientifically, “Nothing is simply nothing,” and “by bringing up Nothing we do not gain the slightest thing for the knowledge of beings.” That is, if our concern is with the being of beings—that is, if we are seeking knowledge about beings—it would seem that the last thing we need concern ourselves with is “nothing,” for that is exactly what beings are not: surely if we want to concern ourselves with beings, we should turn our back on nothing, take no account of it and leave it out of the question. Moreover, says Heidegger, not only does the introduction of Nothing into our question divert us from the subject of beings, but also it engages us in logical absurdity. “Whoever talks about Nothing does not know what he is doing. In speaking about Nothing, he makes it into a something. By speaking this way, he speaks against what he means. He contra-dicts himself.” In other words, not only does “nothing” have nothing to do with the subject of beings, but also even to speak of nothing is to engage in illogical talk, since even to take the word “nothing” seriously is to mistake it with precisely what it is not, namely something, a being, thus “to speak against” what we are trying to speak about, indeed, to speak against, “contra-dict,” ourselves. In short, to entertain the subject of Nothing as if it were something is simply absurd. Finally, says Heidegger, there is even a moral reason to exclude consideration of the Nothing, for “whoever takes Nothing seriously takes the side of nullity. He obviously promotes the spirit of negation and serves disintegration.” Thus, it would seem clear that consideration of the Nothing diverts us from the pursuit of the knowledge of being, leads us into logical absurdity and constitutes even a surrender to nihilism, a repudiation of the very value of beings; for “Whatever both disregards the fundamental law of thinking and also destroys faith and the will to construct is pure nihilism.” Accordingly, says Heidegger, “we will do well to strike from our interrogative sentence the superfluous turn of phrase ‘instead of nothing?’ and restrict the sentence to the simple and precise form: ‘Why are there beings at all?’”
However, no sooner does he reach this apparent conclusion than Heidegger pauses to reconsider whether his preliminary rejection of the consideration of the Nothing might not rest on a “misunderstanding.” It is indeed true, says Heidegger, that we cannot reasonably “talk about and deal with Nothing as if it were a thing, such as the rain out there, or a mountain, or any object at all: Nothing remains in principle inaccessible to all science.” This is because science, as we have noted, is limited to considering the “why” of beings in terms of physical causes; that is, science limits itself to considering beings simply as they are, “present at hand.” For science, it is altogether proper to limit its questioning to “why are there beings?,” for science takes beings as they are and does not and cannot even contemplate the ground of beings in terms of their origin as beings. It is left to philosophy to consider “beings as a whole and as such,” to consider the very being of beings, to inquire as to why any being is in the first place. Thus, “Whoever truly wants to talk of Nothing must necessarily become unscientific. But this is a great misfortune only if one believes that scientific thinking alone is the authentic, rigorous thinking, that it alone can and must be made the measure of philosophical thinking.” However, says Heidegger, “the reverse is the case”; that is, “Philosophy never arises from or through science. Philosophy can never belong to the same order as the sciences. It belongs to a higher order,” it “stands in a completely different domain and rank of spiritual Dasein. Only poetry is of the same order as philosophical thinking, although thinking and poetry are not identical.”
The medium of poetry is, for Heidegger, a central theme of his entire philosophical project, indeed it is difficult to separate the domains of philosophy and poetry in Heidegger, as should be evident in the highly poetic quality of much of Heidegger’s own philosophical prose. Human beings, Heidegger might say, are not simply physical machines and therefore require, as humans, something beyond the daily bread of physical sustenance: for Heidegger, philosophy, alongside and in conjunction with poetry, is vital to the fulfillment of the human spirit. We might well, with due care to our natural origins, look to science to contribute to the sustenance of our bodies; but science cannot alone sustain our humanity and, given the overweening dehumanization characteristic of so much of modern technology, we can be sure that it will, without due care, overwhelm and utterly undermine that humanity. Thus we turn to philosophy, and poetry, to become and remain mindful of our origins, and the origins of all being as such, for “aside from the philosopher, the poet can also talk about Nothing… because, in comparison to all mere science, an essential superiority of the spirit holds sway in poetry,” since “the poet always speaks as if beings were expressed and addressed for the first time.” It is by “addressing beings as if for the first time” that we remain open to beings as they truly are, rather than in the instrumental, technological terms of what we might turn them into or how we might manipulate, control and possess them. For in our narrow-minded obsession with technologizing everything it may well be that we are today witnessing the “recoil” of our efforts back on ourselves so that it is we ourselves who have become not the subjects doing the manipulating, controlling and possessing, but ourselves who stand to be manipulated, controlled and possessed. In short, it may be that it is we who stand to become nothing, we whose spirit is threatened with annihilation in the face of our own machines, we who will become expendable as obsolete relics standing in the way of the total mechanization of nature itself.
So it may be that we would be advised to keep our eye on the Nothing, if only so that we do not become it.
The Nothing
In short, to bring the consideration of the nothing into our interrogation of being is not to add a merely superfluous appendage, much less to speak illogically or nihilistically; on the contrary, to inject the prospect of the Nothing into our consideration of beings enables us for the first time to be truly open to the wonder of beings in their being, as if we were encountering them for the first time, rather than simply taking them for granted as simply what is there, as simply “given.” For if we include the addition of the Nothing and “ask the question in the form of our original interrogative sentence―‘Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?’―then the addition prevents us, in our questioning, from beginning with beings as unquestionably given, and having hardly begun, already moving on to the ground we are seeking, which is also in being.” That is, the addition of the Nothing, which follows upon the “why are there beings?,” brings us up short, stopping us from passing directly into the matter of the beings as they are simply given, and thus passing over, without even noticing it, the extraordinary mystery, the inexplicable wonder, that consists in the very fact that there are beings at all and not rather nothing. Rather than overlooking the extraordinariness of being as such, with the introduction into our question of the Nothing,
these beings are held out in a questioning manner into the possibility of not-Being. In this way, the Why gains a completely different power and urgency of questioning. Why are beings torn from the possibility of not-Being? Why do they not fall back into it constantly without further ado? Beings are now no longer what just happens to be present at hand; they begin to waver, regardless of whether we know beings with all certainty, regardless of whether we grasp them in their full scope or not. From now on, beings as such waver, insofar as we put them into question.
This “wavering” of beings is simply the honest acknowledgment of the wonder that beings are at all. For its part, science takes as given the beings that are present; philosophy, by contrast, considers a truth that science is not capable of entertaining, namely that the beings now present might not have been and indeed that beings as such might never have been at all. “The search for the Why now… does not just try to provide a present-at-hand ground for explaining what is present at hand―instead, we are now searching for a ground that is supposed to ground the dominance of beings as an overcoming of Nothing.” For all the interest and utility of science, it is left to philosophy to consider the origins of being as such, which is a matter of acknowledging that beings, in order to be, have had to “overcome Nothing,” they had to become present before they could be present. Science, properly, limits itself to considering beings as they are; philosophy approaches beings from the shadow of their possible non-being.
Philosophy’s consideration of the Nothing also implicates the being of ourselves, of Dasein, since the shadow of nothingness falls first upon us: “Our Dasein too, as it questions, comes into suspense, and nevertheless maintains itself, by itself, in this suspense.” Through our confrontation with the Nothing, and the possibility—or rather the imminent reality—of our own nothingness, we for the first time come “into the open” for what we truly are; this, as we noted above, is the service rendered us by death. Following Kierkegaard, death is our sole existential certainty, an absolute and irrevocable given; however, it is also certain that its “when” is uncertain—it can happen at any moment, we know not when. The certainty of the uncertainty of death—itself our one certainty—is “the schoolmaster of earnestness,” says Kierkegaard, meaning that it is the uncertainty of the inevitability of the nothingness ahead that demands our attentiveness to the precarious wonder of our existence now. For all beings, including Dasein, says Heidegger, the possibility that the beings that are “could also not be” is not something that is just “added on by our thought,” for “beings themselves declare this possibility, they declare themselves as beings in this possibility,” and it is the questioning of beings with regard to this possibility “that pushes us into the open, provided that it itself, as a questioning, transforms itself (as does every genuine questioning), and casts a new space over and through everything.” And for Dasein, again per Kierkegaard, the nothingness of death is no mere possibility, for nothing could be more certain; but the certainty of the uncertainty of death means that the open is only open now and so only now can we stand in it since we must stand before the shadow of nothingness, which relentlessly stalks it, falls forever.
Unfolding the Being of beings with Due Reference to Nothing: The Example of the Chalk
The task of questioning beings in their being, says Heidegger, “is simply a matter of not being seduced by overhasty theories, but instead experiencing things as they are in whatever may be nearest.” As Descartes considered a piece of beeswax that happened to be near, in order to see where its presence might lead his thought, so Heidegger, in language reminiscent of Descartes’s own, takes up a similarly simple and “near” object, a piece of chalk.
This piece of chalk here is an extended, relatively stable, definitely-formed, grayish-white thing, and, furthermore, a thing for writing. As certainly as it belongs precisely to this thing to lie here, the capacity not to be here and not to be so big also belongs to it. The possibility of being drawn along the blackboard and being used up is not something that we merely add on to the thing with our thought. The chalk itself, as this being, is in this possibility; otherwise it would not be chalk as a writing implement.
When Heidegger points out that these possibilities of not being “so big” and of being “used up” are qualities that belong to the chalk, he is emphasizing that these are essential aspects of what makes this chalk chalk, of what makes it the being that it is. “Every being, in turn, has this Possible in it, in a different way in each case. This Possible belongs to the chalk.” We do not merely “add on” these qualities “with our thought,” for, again, they already belong to the chalk as such. We observe these qualities of the chalk in simply letting the chalk be what it is, in observing it as it is, which includes its being as a writing implement; and the chalk, as writing implement, is used up in its being the writing implement it is. That is, in the chalk’s very being is concealed its non-being, indeed it is only as it tends toward its own non-being, as it is “drawn along the blackboard” and so engaged in the process of being “used up,” that it really is what it is: its authentic being is only revealed, only comes “into the open,” as it moves toward non-being.
Indeed, we lose touch with the being of the chalk if we look at it only as it is and fail to consider its essential tendency to be not. Someday soon, perhaps, we will relegate the chalk to a museum display, where it will have become a relic of a pre-digital age, and the chalk will be hermetically protected against degradation and diminution and thereby prevented ever from being used at all, much less used up; but then the chalk will have ceased to be the chalk that it is, it will have been torn out of its being as a writing implement and it will be, rather, a museum exhibit, and indeed a symbol and representative of a primitive, bygone epoch. So this chalk is only the being that it is as long as it is “wavering between not-Being and Being,” and its authentic being is only revealed in this wavering.
“We encounter beings everywhere; they surround us, carry and control us, enchant and fulfill us, elevate and disappoint us, but where in all this is the Being of beings, and what does it consist in?” In considering the simple piece of chalk, simply as it is, we are faced with the distinction between the individual, present-to-hand being of this piece of chalk, and the Being of this piece of chalk; this distinction is between “what at any time is in being,” on the one hand, and, on the other, “that which… ‘makes’ this be a being instead of a nonbeing,” the distinction between “the things themselves” and “their beingness, ousia [translated as “essence” or “substance,” as Aristotle would use these terms].” This distinction between beings and their Being may appear “questionable,” and it may seem as though it is “artificial and leads to nothing,” but these are the complaints of those for whom knowledge is reduced to mere information, for whom phusis is merely the name for a view of physical nature that is merely a medium of technological manipulation, for those who have lost touch with, or lost faith in, the very project that Heidegger is here taking up, namely the opening up of beings in their being and the openness of Dasein to the revealing of beings in their Being, the letting beings be.
But “if we persevere in the questioning, we are really already asking ahead, about Being in regard to its ground,” and this leads us beyond even the Being of beings to the question of Being itself. In other words, from our initial encounter with a simple being like the piece of chalk, we are led, with the acknowledgement of the non-being that belongs to that being as such, to the deeper encounter with the Being of this being, and this in turn must lead us to the consideration of Being itself. “So,” says Heidegger, “it turns out that the question ‘Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?’ forces us to the prior question: ‛How does it stand with Being?’”
More Examples to Illuminate the Unfolding of Being
Heidegger acknowledges that “we are not able to lay hold of the Being of beings directly and expressly,” so he turns to another example, one more subtle than the simple piece of chalk.
Over there, on the other side of the street, stands the high school building. A being. We can scour every side of the building from the outside, roam through the inside from basement to attic, and note everything that can be found there: hallways, stairs, classrooms and their furnishings. Everywhere we find beings, and in a very definite order. Where now is the Being of the high school? It is, after all. The building is. The Being of this being belongs to it if anything does, and nevertheless we do not find this Being within the being.
In short, says Heidegger, “Being does not consist in our observing beings,” and, “In addition, the Being of this building does not seem to be identical for everybody.”
For us, as observers or passers-by, it is not what it is for the students who sit inside, not just because they see it only from the inside but because for them this building really is what it is and how it is. One can, as it were, smell the Being of such buildings, and often after decades one still has the scent in one’s nose. The scent provides the Being of this being much more directly and truly than it could be communicated by any description or inspection.
In other words, we can inspect and describe the building, down to the minutest and most objective, scientific detail, with due account of all the beings that inhabit and furnish it; but no such observation and inventory will even begin to capture the high school in its Being, in terms of what it really is or what it means to its students and teachers, custodians and administrators, in short, to those for whom the Being of the high school is central to the Being of their own beings, their own Dasein. Who better could we consult about the Being of the high school than they, they for whom the high school most truly is?
Heidegger’s reference to the scent of the high school, moreover, emphasizes how ephemeral, and yet how immediate and even visceral, is the Being of a being like a high school. We must acknowledge, mustn’t we, that such Being, whatever it is, is real, indeed is the most real thing about the high school, the most meaningful and enduring. So Heidegger asks again,
How does it stand with Being? Can we see Being? We see beings―the chalk here. But do we see Being as we see color and light and dark? Or do we hear, smell, taste or touch Being? We hear the motorcycle roaring along the street. We hear the grouse flying off through the mountain forest in its gliding flight. Yet really we are only hearing the noise of the motor’s rattling, the noise that the grouse causes. Furthermore it is hard and unusual for us to describe the pure noise, precisely because it is precisely not what we generally hear. We always hear more. We hear the flying bird, although strictly speaking we have to say: a grouse is nothing we can hear, it is not a tone that could be registered on a scale.
We do not hear a bird or a motorcycle; rather, we hear sounds, and these sounds inspire in us a flight to the “more” that the sound is a mere sign or flash of, a catalyst for an encounter that encompasses a vision of whole worlds that the sounds themselves cannot comprehend, worlds that are themselves not present in sensation but that resound in the representations of consciousness, memory and experience. We are inspired to a flight, in short, toward the Being that such sounds imply.
A heavy thunderstorm gathering in the mountains “is,” or… “was” in the night. What does its Being consist in? A distant mountain range under a vast sky―such a thing “is.” What does its Being consist in? When and to whom does it reveal itself? To the hiker who enjoys the landscape, or to the peasant who makes his daily living from it and in it, or to the meteorologist who has to give a weather report? Who among them lays hold of Being? All and none.
In all such encounters with beings, what is present to any one person at any one time, what is there for any one Dasein who is being there now, is at most a mere glimmer or reflection or echo of the Being of the being; for the Being of each of the beings mentioned above consists of innumerable worlds of being, always at once revealing themselves even as they simultaneously conceal themselves, since what we see revealed of beings, insofar as we are open to the beings with which we are present, is only a small part of what there is to be open to, as the hiker, the peasant and the meteorologist each tend only to be open to their own perspectives on the being of the mountain and thus closed to the innumerable other possible beings that the mountain might be revealed as. Moreover, each of these persons is probably not truly open even to her own perspective on this being, since the beings with which each of us tend to surround ourselves are beings so familiar to us that we have already decided in advance what their being consists of, thus leaving us closed to the Being of these beings and leaving Being itself utterly concealed from us.
In short, the Being of even the most mundane of beings, and certainly Being itself, is ever open to our own openness to it and thus our own revealing of it; but even when we are open to the Being of the beings in our midst, there is so much more to the Being of these beings that we are not open to and that remains concealed, to the point that what is revealed of the Being of beings is almost nothing compared to what remains concealed. And as soon as we take a being in our grasp, as soon as we hold it and possess it and master it and bend it to our own technical needs, its Being is concealed again in the instrumental character we have imposed upon it: as soon as we grasp a being, its Being is nothing to us. And this is true to the point that Being itself “is almost like Nothing.”
We might then ask, if Being is “like Nothing,” does that effectively mean that Being itself is at an end, forever concealed and never again to be revealed?
Are We Witnessing the End of Being?
So Heidegger asks, “In everything we have mentioned, what is the Being of beings? Really, how is it that we can run around the world and stand around with our stupid pretensions and our so-called cleverness?” So elusive is the Being of beings, says Heidegger, that “Being remains undiscoverable, almost like Nothing, or in the end entirely so.” Perhaps, suggests Heidegger, Nietzsche was right that the traditional metaphysical obsession with Being constitutes a nihilistic denial of present reality. Or, asks Heidegger, is Nietzsche “himself only the final victim of a long-standing errancy and neglect, but as this victim the unrecognized witness to a new necessity?”
This obviously rhetorical question leads us to consider what this “new necessity” might be, and we can surely say at least that it involves, in a general sense, a rediscovery and revival of the question of Being, or perhaps the rescue of Being from Nothing. We, Dasein, are the beings who are there, in full or only partial awareness of our there-ness, depending on the extent to which we are open to the Being of beings and to Being itself. But clearly today Being has fallen into obscurity, and Heidegger wonders, “Is it Being’s fault that Being is so confused, and is it the fault of the word that it remains so empty, or is it our fault, because in all our bustling and chasing after beings, we have nevertheless fallen out of Being?” Perhaps, suggests Heidegger, “the fault is not our own… but rather is based in a happening that runs through Western history from its inception onward,” a loss of Being that has resulted in the tendency of Western culture to fix and categorize Being, to impose ourselves on beings by possessing and controlling and manipulating beings linguistically and technologically rather than remain open to beings as they reveal themselves. “What if it were possible,” wonders Heidegger, “that human beings, that peoples in their greatest machinations and exploits, have a relation to beings but have long since fallen out of Being, without knowing it, and what if this were the innermost and most powerful ground of their decline?”
Having witnessed WWI in his youth, having plunged into, and then having sought to extricate himself from, the Nazi party before WWII, and now writing shortly after the war and living in the midst of the Cold War facedown between Russia and the United States and looking ahead to an unimaginable advancement and proliferation of the technology of warfare, which speeds ever-faster ahead in our own time, Heidegger writes,
This Europe, in its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and the rootless organization of the average man. When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously “experience” an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for?―where to?―and what then?
These are big questions, to be sure. Is anyone there to pose them?
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