Complicated Presence

Heidegger and the Postmetaphysical Unity of Being

Jussi Backman

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781438456485, 9781438456492
• eBook ISBN: 9781438456508
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

From its Presocratic beginnings, Western philosophy concerned itself with a quest for unity both in terms of the systematization of knowledge and as a metaphysical search for a unity of being—two trends that can be regarded as converging and culminating in Hegel's system of absolute idealism. Since Hegel, however, the philosophical quest for unity has become increasingly problematic. Jussi Backman returns to that question in this book, examining the place of the unity of being in the work of Heidegger. Backman sketches a consistent picture of Heidegger as a thinker of unity who throughout his career in different ways attempted to come to terms with both Parmenides's and Aristotle's fundamental questions concerning the singularity or multiplicity of being—attempting to do so, however, in a "postmetaphysical" manner rooted in rather than above and beyond particular, situated beings. Through his analysis, Backman offers a new way of understanding the basic continuity of Heidegger's philosophical project and the interconnectedness of such key Heideggerian concepts as ecstatic temporality, the ontological difference, the turn ( Kehre ), the event ( Ereignis ), the fourfold ( Geviert ), and the analysis of modern technology.

1

From the First Inception to the Other

Metaphysics and the Unity of Being

In the present study, Heidegger’s key writings are approached first and foremost in the light of his historical narrative of Western metaphysics. Accordingly, this chapter introduces the basic outline of this narrative, with a focus on the notions of the “first inception” (situated by Heidegger in the thinking of the Presocratics Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus), the “first end of the first inception” and the beginning of metaphysics proper (in Plato and Aristotle), the end of metaphysics (Hegel, Nietzsche), and the ensuing possibility of another, postmetaphysical inception of Western thought. All of these historical key points will be elaborated with an emphasis on the role of the unity of being therein. This chapter should therefore not be read as an independent or systematic study of the respective thinkers, but rather as a general summary of their positions in the Heideggerian narrative. However, it will not introduce Heidegger’s numerous and nuanced interpretations in detail but rather seeks to summarize some of the essential claims of Heidegger’s scattered and often incomplete readings and remarks in a way that sometimes goes beyond the explicit scope of these readings in order to “flesh out” their most important aspects.

The First Inception: The Unity of Being in Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus

Anaximander

At the outset of his 1934–35 lecture course on Hölderlin’s hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” Heidegger defines the pregnant sense in which he understands an inception (Anfang), as opposed to a simple beginning (Beginn).

A beginning [Beginn] is that with which something starts; an inception [Anfang] is that from which something arises. […] The beginning is at once left behind; it disappears in the course of events. As for the inception, the origin, it comes to the fore first and foremost in the course of events and is fully there only at its end. (GA 39, 3)

In the 1942–43 course Parmenides, this distinction is applied to early Western philosophy.

With regard to the early thinking in the Occident, among the Greeks, we distinguish between beginning [Beginn] and inception [Anfang]. “Beginning” designates the outbreak of this thinking at a determinate “time.” […] The “beginning” refers to the advent and emergence of thinking. By “inception” we mean something else. The “inception” is what, in this early thinking, is to be thought and what is thought. (GA 54, 9–10/P, 7; tr. mod.)

The beginning is an extrinsic determination, the chronological fact of the coming to be of thinking at a certain point of time. The inception, by contrast, refers to the content, topic, or issue that dominates and defines this beginning. Anfang is Heidegger’s counterpart for the Aristotelian archē, the start that governs what it starts, the origin that provides a guideline for what it originates.¹ It designates an outset or point of departure that is not left behind in the process or development unfolding from it. The inception is what literally “takes up” (fängt an, as in the Latin incipere, from capere “to seize”) and sets out what is to follow. For Heidegger, what properly sets about in the inception of Western philosophy is not the philosophical activity of the early philosophers or their intellectual accomplishments; it is not the inceptual thinkers who simply take up the topics defining the inception. It is rather the thinkers themselves who are “taken up” by the topic with which they are faced and which motivates their work. The inception is the philosophical “mission” or “commission” of the first philosophers, the task assigned to them in the beginning of philosophy.

The inception is not something dependent on the favor of these [inceptual] thinkers, something with which they proceed in such and such a way, but, rather, the reverse: the inception is that which takes something up [etwas anfängt] with these thinkers, occupying them in such a way that an extreme resignation before being is required of them. The thinkers are the ones taken up by the inception [die vom An-fang An-gefangenen], seized by it and gathered upon it. (GA 54, 11/P, 7–8; tr. mod.)

It is noteworthy that Heidegger regards the inception of the philosophical tradition as not only conceptually but also chronologically distinct from its beginning. There are early Western thinkers who are part of the tradition but do not face its inception, its initial experience: “[…] [N]ot every thinker at the beginning of Western thinking is, by that very fact, also an inceptual [anfänglicher] thinker” (GA 54, 2/P, 2; tr. mod.). A prominent example would be Thales of Miletus, who flourished in the early sixth century BCE and has since Plato and Aristotle been designated as the first philosopher.² Thales, to be sure, prefigured the philosophical enterprise by attempting to refer all beings back to a unifying and universal principle (for him, water) that is somehow accessible to a rational study of beings as such. For Heidegger, however, this does not yet qualify Thales as an “inceptual” thinker, as a thinker of the inception in the pregnant sense. For him, the earliest inceptual thinker is Anaximander, a younger contemporary and compatriot and, reportedly, pupil of Thales.³

Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus are the only inceptual thinkers. They are this, however, not because they initiate and begin Western thinking. There “are” thinkers already before them. They are inceptual thinkers because they think the inception. (GA 54, 10/P, 7; tr. mod.)

What is it, then, that so decisively distinguishes these two contemporaries and compatriots, Thales and Anaximander?⁴ Thales still seeks the principle for all beings among beings and points to a determinate being, water. According to doxography, Anaximander, on the other hand, considered the principle to be what he referred to as the indeterminate or indefinite (to apeiron)—i.e., precisely that which is not a determinate being. Aristotle attributes to Anaximander the view that contraries are differentiated or discriminated from a prior unity in which they are initially contained, implying that this unity itself is indeterminate and above determinate oppositions.⁵ Basic elements such as air or water are determined in terms of their mutual oppositions, and if one of them were to be absolute, it would annihilate the other, contrary elements. In thus refusing to identify the absolute principle with any specific element, Anaximander would have been the first to realize that the principle and ground for all determinate beings cannot itself be a determinate being.⁶

This is the insight that Heidegger attempts to convey in his readings of the short fragment Anaximander B 1,⁷ possibly the earliest surviving philosophical fragment considered to be (to some extent, at least) authentic.

(That from out of which [ex hōn] coming-to-be [genesis] is granted to beings [tois ousi] is also that into which passing-away [fthoran] takes place,) according to necessity [kata to chreōn]: for they reckon with one another [didonai … dikēn] and give retribution [tisin] to one another for their transgression [adikias] (in accordance with the order of time).⁸

In this fragment, Anaximander seems—at least from the Heideggerian perspective—to be giving an account of the way in which beings emerge into determinate presence by reciprocally organizing and articulating one another into ordered relationships (“reckoning with one another and giving retribution to one another”), thereby overcoming the fundamental lack of definite proportion (adikia “unrighteousness, transgression”) from which they emerge. What ultimately designates the being of the beings named in this fragment, Heidegger suggests, is the expression to chreōn “necessity,” “requirement,” or (following the basic sense of the medial verb chraomai “to need,” “to have use for,” “to use,” “to enjoy”) “enjoyment,” “fruition,” or “usage” (Brauch). Heidegger interprets to chreōn as the very process of instantiation that determines the emergence and articulation of determinate beings from their indeterminate background and thereby “requires” and “makes use” of beings by “coming to fruition” in them. To chreōn is the oldest name for the being of beings, for “the way in which being itself abides [west] as the correlation [Beziehung] with what is present.” It is that which “de-termines [be-endet] what is present” and “hands out limits” to present beings, remaining itself to apeiron, that which is without limits (HW, 363, 368/OBT, 274, 277).

According to this account, the inception of Western thinking that distinguishes Anaximander from his predecessors and connects him to Parmenides and Heraclitus is the insight into the being of beings as the indeterminate and undifferentiated presence as such that is articulated into the multiplicity of present beings as its determinate, differentiated, and relative instances. In other words, Anaximander would be the first thinker to operate within the scope of the ontological difference between beings and being (GA 35, 31–32; GA 78, 248–72).⁹ The first inception of Western thinking in ancient Greece is thus the experience of being as an absolute unity, over against the multiplicity of determinate instantiations unified by it. For Heidegger, this basic unifying function is characteristic of all the fundamental names for being as presence in Greek thought.

Energeia, which Aristotle thinks as the basic feature of presencing [Anwesens], of the eon; idea, which Plato thinks as the basic feature of presencing; Logos, which Heraclitus thinks as the basic feature of presencing; Moira, which Parmenides thinks as the basic feature of presencing; Chreōn, which Anaximander thinks as that which abides [das Wesende] in presencing; all of these designate the selfsame [das Selbe]. In the concealed richness of the selfsame, each thinker thinks, in his own way, the unity of the unifying One, the Hen. (HW, 371/OBT, 280; tr. mod.)

In the first inception, being is designated as the indeterminate unity of presence, in contrast to all determinate instances of presence. In this initial contrasting, however, the contrast as such, i.e., the difference between indeterminacy and determinacy, between absolute unity and relative multiplicity, remains unarticulated. In contrast to beings, being is understood in negative and privative terms (a-peiron, a-dikia), but the precise positive character of this negation and privation, Heidegger maintains, remains unthought from the beginning (GA 78, 244–47). Due to this omission, philosophy is led to think being in terms of beings, as their being-ness, the universal presence, thereness, or is-ness in everything that is there as present, and as that which unifies beings as their common element. This is what Heidegger means by the “forgottenness of being”: the oblivion of that which ultimately distinguishes being from beings.

[…] [W]hat matters for being is to be the being of beings. The linguistic form of this enigmatically ambiguous genitive designates a genesis, a provenance [Herkunft] of what is present [Anwesenden] from out of presencing [Anwesen]. Yet, together with the essence of each of these, the essence of this provenance remains concealed. Not only that, but even the very relation between presencing and what is present remains unthought. From earliest times it appears as though presencing and what is present were both something for themselves. Unawares, presencing itself becomes something present. When presencing is represented in terms of what is present, it becomes that which is present over and above all present things and, thereby, that which is supremely present. As soon as presencing is named, something present is already represented. Presencing as such is basically not distinguished from what is present. […] The essence of presencing, together with the distinction [Unterschied] between presencing and what is present, remains forgotten. Forgottenness of being [Seinsvergessenheit] is the forgottenness of the distinction between being and beings. […] The forgottenness of the distinction, with which the destiny of being begins, […] is the event [Ereignis] of metaphysics. (HW, 364,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations of Heidegger’s Works
• Introduction
• 1 From the First Inception to the Other: Metaphysics and the Unity of Being
• 2 Being and Time: The Complicated Unity of Dasein
• 3 The Turn and the Emergence of the Fourfold
• 4 Contributions to Philosophy: The Singular Simplicity of the Event
• 5 Insight Into That Which Is: From the Uniform Presence of Technicity to the Complicated Presence of the Thing
• 6 Identity and Difference: Differential Identity as the Ground of Unity
• Conclusion: The Simplicity and Complexity of Presence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover