Being and History, Our History and Nihilism

Even in specifying, in Being and Time , that historicity is constitutive of individual human being, Heidegger was implying something about being itself and its relationship to the history that impinges on us as individuals.^[21] If human being is this, if individual experience is this, then what can we say about the world, the particular world that comes at us and to us, affording the horizons within which we live our lives? As his focus changed, Heidegger began drawing out certain implications from his analysis of the structure of Dasein. What needed to be understood was not so much the anxiety of personal experience

[18] For examples of the reflexivity and sense of historical specificity prominent in Being and Time , see pp. 19, 21, 28, 32, 35. See also Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation , pp. 143, 147–148.

[19] John Caputo, for example, plays down the sharpness of the break in his Radical Hermeneutics , 85–86, arguing that the sources of Heidegger's own "radical hermeneutics" were already evident in Being and Time . For Heidegger's own retrospective, which links the Kehre to the holding back of pt. 1, div. 3, of Being and Time , see "Letter on Humanism," 207–208, 235–236.

[20] Gianni Vattimo, La fine della modernità (Milan: Garzanti, 1985), 182; Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation , 147–148.

[21] Barash, Martin Heidegger , 231, points toward this understanding of Heidegger's "turn" from the quest for a fundamental ontology. See also Ott, Martin Heidegger , 179–183, on Heidegger's divergence from Husserl.

but the collective, supraindividual dimensions of finitude, projection, and care.

Being and Time brought individual human being together with others in some historically specific situation or collective historicity, which Heidegger characterized as Geschick (destiny). Human being entails belonging to some tradition, which is particular by definition. The moment of individual choice is a particular historical moment in which Dasein confronts the particular historical possibilities it has inherited. Thus, as Caputo has put it, "Dasein's temporalizing (Zeitigung ) is historicizing, and its historicizing is cohistoricizing in and with its 'generation.'"^[22] And in Being and Time Heidegger explicitly linked care to authentic historicality. Moreover, the analysis of Dasein in Being and Time , showed that human being is the "there" in which being can appear.^[23] Human being is a clearing for the coming to be of a particular world in history.

In emphasizing the "belonging together" of human being and coming to be, Heidegger was dissolving the old dualistic separation between human being, mind, or language, on the one hand, and the world, reality, or "what is," on the other—just as I discussed in chapter 3. Only by "moving away from the attitude of representational thinking," he insisted in a 1957 lecture, can we do as we must and start with neither being nor man but with their relationship.

Man's distinctive feature lies in this, that he, as the being who thinks, is open to Being, face to face with Being; thus man remains referred to Being and so answers to it. Man is essentially this relationship of responding to Being, and he is only this. . . . Being is present and abides only as it concerns man through the claim it makes on him. For it is man, open toward Being, who alone lets Being arrive at presence. Such becoming present needs the openness of a clearing, and by this need remains appropriated to human being. . . . Man and Being are appropriated to each other. They belong to each other.^[24]

This relationship is such that what "there is" is history. Whatever there is has come into being in this openness or clearing. Such coming into being is a kind of particularizing—coming into being as something in particular , as finite, as this and not that. Thus Heidegger would come to emphasize that a holding back or withdrawal accompanies every coming to be, every sending of being, a notion that will be crucial for us in what follows.

[22] Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics , 87–89; the quote is from p. 89. Caputo goes on to note that "it is just this historical dimension of authentic Dasein, the historicity which is essential to authenticity, that is often overlooked in the usual renderings of Being and Time ." See Being and Time , 41, 436–447, for indications of Heidegger's interest in the generation as a form of cohistoricizing.

[23] Heidegger, Being and Time , pp. 436–447; Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation , xxii, 21. As will become clearer below, the question was not how entities appear or disclose themselves—the question that leads to a preoccupation with technology—but how particular worlds come to be in history.

[24] Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference , trans. Joan Stambaugh (new York: Harper and Row, 1969; orig. German ed. 1957), 31–32.

In moving beyond Being and Time , Heidegger began positing history as totality in the post-Hegelian mode discussed in chapter 3. The coming to be of a historical world is a single event or happening, a destiny or destining (Geschick), but destining is not to be conflated with fate (Schicksal ), some sort of inevitability or unalterable course. Heidegger was not positing some predetermined logic of history, Hegelian or otherwise.^[25] The history of being, the coming into the open, is a sending or giving in language: "Words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are."^[26] So language does not represent some preexisting reality but rather discloses, or allows to come to be. And thus language is not simply one human capacity among others: "Rather, language is the house of Being in which man ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of Being, guarding it."^[27] Language, then, is fundamental both to what we are and to the coming to be of whatever comes to be.

Concerned with the impasse to which Dilthey's thinking had led, Heidegger sought fully to embrace, as Dilthey had not, the inflation of hermeneutics that was a corollary of the inflation of history. What was ultimately at issue, in the hermeneutic emphasis on the ongoing growth of the tradition in language, was not how we know or understand but what there is to be known or understood, what the world must be like.^[28] Conversely, insofar as hermeneutics took on ontological weight, the epistemological issue needed to be radically reconceived—and might dissolve altogether. What we need is not some method for achieving a true representation of a previously existing reality. We simply need to understand that truth—some particular truth—happens with coming to language. Truth is neither correspondence nor coherence but a disclosure, depending on human being and its place in the world.^[29] Yet truth hardly seemed inevitable; the present outcome of our own tradition seemed to entail something like error instead.

[25] See especially Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays , trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, Torchbook, 1977), 24, on destiny as sending. For a particularly cogent discussion of the distinction between destiny and fate, see Richard A. Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 106.

[26] Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics , trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959; orig. German ed. 1953, based on lectures from 1935), 13.

[27] Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism," 213. See also Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought , trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, Colophon, 1975), 73–74; and Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language , trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, Perennial, 1982; orig. German ed. 1957), 133.

[28] Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics , 61–62. As Caputo puts it, hermeneutics was no longer a matter of epistemology but took on ontological weight.

[29] Ernst Behler, Confrontations: Derrida/Heidegger/Nietzsche , trans. Steven Taubeneck (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 34–35, is good on the sense in which truth for Heidegger happens through human being, understood as a historically specific clearing, but not through human agency. Behler here follows especially Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche , vol. 3, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics , trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 187–188.

The more dispassionate, theoretical side of Heidegger's concern with the temporality of being was entwined from the start with a more personal side, stemming from his experience of the present as debased and inadequate. Being is not historical in some general, abstract sense but always a particular history. So the "history of being" that we must ponder is our particular history, and this had resulted, so far, in a cultural situation that entailed a certain experience for Heidegger—and, it seemed obvious, not for Heidegger alone. Because the theoretical issue could not be separated from the sense of crisis that had stimulated his quest from the start, Heidegger no longer sought to be detached, objective, even "scientific" after Being and Time .

Indeed, Heidegger's new mode of inquiry included a strongly reflexive dimension. His own manner of questioning was part of the larger phenomenon, bound up with our particular historical experience in the West, that he was seeking to address. Only now, at this moment in our history, could these questions have imposed themselves.^[30] And because he had worked through what seemed the best thinking of his time, Heidegger could plausibly believe that his own inquiry and the sense of loss that prompted it were of general cultural import—indeed, were the culmination, so far.

Because something precious appeared to have been lost to us, Heidegger persistently charged that the present cultural situation was one of nihilism, stemming from forgetting: "To forget being and cultivate only the essent—that is nihilism."^[31] But what precisely are we forgetting, or losing, as we come to focus exclusively on the world that has actually come to be? Because nihilism, in one formulation, entailed a loss of experience of "the holy," our first impulse may be to understand it in terms of the "death of God." But virtually from the start Heidegger felt himself confronting something more basic than the failure of a particular, once-convincing idea of God to convince any longer. Nihilism stemmed from a deeper tendency that, among other things, had led us to invest our experience of the holy in a God that was bound to seem one being among others—and that thus could grow stale, wither, and die. The invention of that sort of God had simply been a step in the forgetting that was the real basis of nihilism. The nihilism of our time, Heidegger came to argue, is manifested in science and technology, on the one hand, and in anthropocentrism, humanism, and historicism, on the other.

The metaphysics that had decisively informed our experience in the West was what first required attention. Indeed, "metaphysics is the historical ground of the world history that is being determined by Europe and the West."^[32] Heidegger worked through that tradition again and again, most notably in the four lecture courses on Nietzsche that he offered at Freiburg from 1936 to 1940 and that became the basis of his four-volume Nietzsche , first published in 1961.

[30] Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics , 44–45.

[31] Ibid., 202–203.

[32] Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology , 109.

The metaphysical tradition entailed an ever more overtly manipulative and technological mode of relating to things. But this was ultimately because of the progressive forgetting of the distinction between presencing and presence, coming to be and existing. In response to our experience of the groundless "presence" of things, we seek some ahistorical grounding. We name presencing, so it becomes a thing, even as we take it as a grounding or foundation.

As soon as presencing is named it is represented as some present being. Ultimately, presencing as such is not distinguished from what is present: it is taken merely as the most universal or the highest of present beings, thereby becoming one among such beings. The essence of presencing, and with it the distinction between presencing and what is present, remains forgotten. The oblivion of Being is oblivion of the distinction between Being and beings.^[33]

In a sense, metaphysics had been the consequence, not the cause, of forgetting, because only insofar as we forget do we seek a transcendent "grounding" for what is, by seeking the being of beings. The forgetting of being involves a forgetting of how the things that are came to be. Our language makes it all "present," but secondhand, everyday, so that the original force, the primordial bite, is lost. And as the metaphysical framework crystallizes, we become enmeshed in logic, cause and effect, and a conceptual and representational approach to language.

Although the present situation of nihilism was the culmination of the whole tradition, it stemmed most immediately from the break into modernity and subjectivism with Descartes. Despite some continued reliance on the Christian God, Cartesian subjectivism made human being the foundation as never before; the real obeys the principles that govern the human mind.^[34] Needing an alternative to the certainty of revelation, Descartes posited a human subject that decides what is knowable and that actively constitutes what is known.

With Kant, still more explicitly, the autonomous human subject plays a decisive role in constructing a meaningful world. Hegel's identification of the real with the rational took this subjectivism a step further. Though his direction was profoundly different from Hegel's, Husserl by the early twentieth century similarly ended up with subjectivity, or consciousness, as the matter of philosophy, now brought fully to presence.^[35] No more than Hegel could Husserl have raised the question of how there can be presence as such.

Although Husserl had most immediately occasioned Heidegger's effort in

[33] Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking , 50. See also Martin Heidegger, "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," in Basic Writings , 374. Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation , chap. 11, offers an especially effective summary of Heidegger's account of the history of Western metaphysics.

[34] Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology , 128, 132–134, 147–153. See also Ferry and Renaut, Heidegger and Modernity , 58.

[35] See Heidegger, "The End of Philosophy," 380–383, 389, on Hegel and Husserl as culminations of subjectivism. See also Barash, Martin Heidegger , 262–266.

Being and Time , Heidegger came to view Nietzsche as the nihilistic culmination of the whole tradition, including its final subjectivist phase. With Nietzsche, the Cartesian God, the Kantian thing-in-itself, and the Hegelian absolute spirit all fell away; being itself is precluded, is reduced to nothing. The human subject was limited by nothing outside itself, and nothing remained but sheer will, willing nothing but itself, seeking power for its own sake. The Nietzschean outcome revealed the meaninglessness of the whole metaphysical tradition, and it threatened to preclude definitively the renewal or recovery that Heidegger was seeking. Heidegger's questions about being simply could not be formulated from within the Nietzschean framework.^[36]

When translated into the world of practice, modern subjectivism led to the end of metaphysics and the triumph of science. As the empirical sciences split off from philosophy, establishing their independence, philosophy was left first with a temporary vestigial role, subservient to science, but then began to disappear altogether.^[37] By Heidegger's own time, science had come to seem the universalizing culmination of the whole philosophical tradition in the West. Thus Gadamer stresses Heidegger's insight "that science originates from an understanding of being that compels it unilaterally to lay claim to every place and to leave no place unpossessed outside of itself."^[38]

With the triumph of science, we can relate to the world only in one highly restricted way, so even when we approach our own history, for example, we insist on cause-and-effect explanation, precluding other modes of understanding.^[39] The world comes to seem a collection of objects, available as instruments for the human subject to measure and control. Thus the modern cult of technology and the manipulation of things that technology, conceived broadly, made possible. The emergence of this all-encompassing technology is the practical corollary of the completion of metaphysics. History reduces to the self-momentum of technology as it becomes ever less possible to argue that technology is an instrument for human ends. With the culmination of our metaphysical tradition, then, we move toward "the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man," bringing about a total and uniform technological rule over the earth.^[40]

[36] Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche , vol. 4, Nihilism , trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 202–203; Martin Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche: 'God Is Dead,'" in The Question Concerning Technology , 107–112. Behler's account of Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche is particularly helpful; see Confrontations , 17–48.

[37] Heidegger, "The End of Philosophy," 374–378.

[38] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science , trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), 163.

[39] See Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation , 80–81, on the difference between cause-and-effect explanation and the disclosure Heidegger envisioned. See also Bernstein, The New Constellation , 93–97, 104.

[40] Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," 152–153. See also Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking , trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, Colophon, 1969; orig. German ed. 1959), 43–57; Heidegger, "The Word of Nietzsche," 77–79; Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation , 172–173, 186, 201; and Michael Allen Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger, and the Ground of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 124, 128.

The present situation was thus paradoxical in the extreme. Although metaphysics had been the problem in one sense, its end did not in itself promise liberation but rather entailed nihilism and the danger of a definitive forgetting. Still, the end of metaphysics constituted a kind of hinge or pivot, making possible a new kind of questioning, including Heidegger's own. Moreover, the present extreme—the "heedlessness" that he found the peculiar greatness of the modern age—makes possible the preparation, at least, of something else for the future.^[41] But what else could there be, and how, more specifically, are we to prepare for it?

In his middle phase, roughly 1933 to 1945, the years of the Nazi regime in Germany, Heidegger responded in two complementary ways, actively addressing each end of our metaphysical tradition. He sought to work back through the tradition to retrieve what had been lost, but he also found scope for political action to overcome the present and bring about a new, nontechnological orientation. Only as both these approaches proved dead ends did he begin to outline the very different response of his mature third phase.