Joseph S. O'Leary homepage

Theological Resonances of "Der Satz vom Grund"

Is God the ground of the universe, the ground of our being? Has this question any meaning? Like so many religious questions it is tantalizingly obscure. Under analysis each of its terms dissolves into the thinnest of mists, which we no longer much like to hail as the thickest of mysteries. What is God? What is ‘the universe’? What is ground? What is ‘our being’? The tone of these questions is now more likely to be one of irritated puzzlement than one of reverent wonder. One is tempted to jettison all these determinations as survivals of an older metaphysical culture, or to regard them as only murky expressions of religious sentiment: Faust’s Gefühl ist alles;/ Name ist Schall und Rauch. Some theologians attempt to rethink theism by dissolving God into Buddhist emptiness or into the Lacanian Real. God then becomes a quality of things rather than their creative foundation and cause.

In this crumbling of theistic language, it is natural that we should turn to the philosopher who has most devoted himself to topics considered beyond the pale of reason and speech. If metaphysics cannot give precision and grip to our God-language, perhaps a really profound phenomenology can? The remedy is a risky one, but the power of the phenomena at the heart of religion assures us that the turn to a thinking led by the phenomena cannot be fruitless.

.

Heidegger’s essentialism

The word that came most easily to Heidegger’s lips was: Wesen (essence). The method and content of his work can be summed up under the rubric: a thinking of essence. Whenever he brings the essence of something into view, in a phenomenological Wesensschau, in the course of one of those stubborn, patient analyses where he has us think – ‘into the wind of the matter’ (GA 13:78), the result is so illuminating that we are likely to overlook the rarefied character of his constructions. History, to the X-ray vision that cuts through mere contingencies and distracting loose ends, knows no other movement than a parade of shining essences, e. g.:

.

The metaphysical beginning of the modern period is a transformation in the essence of truth, of which the ground remains hidden… In the beginning of the modern period the beingness of beings undergoes a transformation. The essence of this historical beginning resides in this transformation. (Nietzsche, Pfullingen, 1961, II, pp. 295-6)

.

Beginning, essence, transformation, ground… if these constructions have any validity at all they can only benefit from being reinserted in the pluralistic texture of empirical history.

Heideggerian essences replace metaphysical foundations. We can see them only when – by a step back, or a leap of thinking – we relinquish our clinging to foundations. The dominant figure in the science of Heidegger’s time is that of the field. His own thought moves in the field of essences (the open, the region) mapping its topology. He suggests an affinity with Einstein’s space-time field in naming the open in which being is given to thought, the four-dimensional Zeit-Raum (Zur Sache des Denkens, Tübingen, 1969, pp. 14-17). For the theological equivalent of this, one can point to Karl Barth, a phenomenologist of the Word of God, whose field of thought was the truth of revelation, grasped in its essential topology. Barth knew well the plurality of forms that Christian discourse had taken, the plurality of ways in which the divine Word made itself heard across the oblique testimonies of Scripture and church tradition. But all these forms are under judgment, and the Word which judges them is a unitary, essential instance. The judgment falls particularly heavily on non-Christian religions, seen as deluded human constructs, whereas Christianity in its essence is not a religion, but the hearing of the Word in faith. At the heart of the other religions lies no such essential revelatory and salvific event.

Today, a pluralist theology is in the making, which bears the same relation to Barth as the post-modern novel does to Proust or as the pluralistic music of Zimmermann or Stockhausen bears to Wagner. The great works of this pluralism are not cathedrals which contain and unite everything, but crossroads open to an irreducible variety of divergent cultural realms. Theology is learning to celebrate a pluralism of religious systems based in different cultural forms of life, and to see Christianity itself as a vast congeries of local theologies. Religion becomes as polymorphous as art and all its experiments are granted legitimacy, subject only to the criterion of quality, which, as in the case of art, eludes universal formulation and presents itself in a different guise in each new cultural or historical context. The tension between essentialism and pluralism in Heidegger’s thought - which is a cathedral of being, but also, to a lesser extent, a potential crossroads of dialogue – resonates with the most basic tension in religious thinking today.

The problem of theologians is: how retain the depth of Barth’s meditation, the firmness of his sense of Christian identity, while embracing a pluralism that sees divine truth at work in all authentic religions? The problem of philosophers may be: how retain the depth of Heidegger’s meditation, his sense of having a foothold in being, while recognizing the pluralism of philosophical languages and allowing a1l unitary categories to be dissolved into the multiplicity of disparate usages which they feebly attempt to mask?

For it is increasingly apparent that the luminous meanings Barth and Heidegger established cannot be immunized against the floods of information about cultural and anthropological diversity which provide the element in which reflection of a humanistic order is today obliged to move, Heidegger’s and Barth’s essences are swallowed up and relativized in that pluralistic element. Their passion for the essential is alien to the more open-ended world of post-structuralism and chaos theory, where reason pursues cross-disciplinary connections, fascinated by its own margins and the dissolution of established identities. Intelligibility in this economy of thought is not the constitution of an essence but the grasp of connections. The passion for the essence of the Word of God has been abandoned by theologians who are more impressed by the historical diversity of religions and see their own tradition as an amalgam just as impure as any other. Heidegger’s passion for the truth of being is seen as the last dam built by the West against its dissolution in the pot-pourri of emergent cultural holism.

There is a tension between his sense of the finite historicity of Western tradition and the implicit claim to universality in the way he talks about being. In a philosophy centered on reason such a claim is indispensable, since it is of the essence of reason that it aims at universality. But no such imperative is inscribed in Heideggerian wonder at the coming to presence of beings. This discourse on being has the radiance of an aesthetic tradition - it is universal more as Mozart is than as Euclid is. J. Beaufret stresses the finitude of being and takes it to mean that ‘being’ is conceived historically as the theme of Greek reason: ‘Heidegger has too much respect for the “other” to pretend to resolve the still enigmatic unity of Western thought, or the infinitely more enigmatic problem of the possible unity of the human species’ (Encyclopaedia Universalis 11:261). Indeed he is the thinker who has most vividly revealed the pluralism within Western culture and between the West and other cultures, for the differences he indicates are differences that count, irreducible epochal and cultural essences, not a mere encyclopedic assortment. He is a pluralist in that he is aware of the existence of other fields and is content to let them be; but he focuses his own thought on the field of Western metaphysics conceived as a unity.

Beaufret’s association of the finitude of being with history applies in the case of the limited mittences of being that happen in the course of the history of being, but as far as I can see the field of being that is brought into view in the thought of the Ereignis is not finite in any historical sense, but only in so far as its dimensions are those of a world, a dwelling for mortals, on whose mindfulness it depends for its radiant deployment. As a prophet of the Ereignis Heidegger shows no modest sense of the limits of Western tradition. The word is put forward as a name for the very essence of reality itself, and Heidegger boldly suggests that its status and scope are comparable to the Chinese Tao. In alluding to the world-formula sought by Heisenberg (Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 1) he betrays the immoderate ambition to think time, space and being from their unifying origin. I feel that he overreached himself at this point. In erecting the Ereignis as the caput mortuum of his thought he consigned his critical reprise of Western metaphysics to a closed system of essence instead of opening it out into a pluralistic dialogue. Still the variety of trails that lead to this dogmatic summit exhibit the pluralistic texture of Heidegger’s own thinking, and his efforts to force them to converge remain blessedly inconclusive. A pluralistic reprise of Barth might show the same thing.

Heidegger’s brooding on the essence of metaphysics and of what metaphysics conceals is strongly defended against empirical falsification or even modification. Whenever he is so imprudent as to step outside the phenomenological theater of the essentializing operations, his vacuous and reactionary pronouncements on politics, culture and (in the seminars with Medard Boss) psychotherapy reveal the ‘blindness’ on which his’insight’ depends. At those embarrassing junctures the thoughtful differentiation of essences gives way to crude identifications - of Russia and America, or - most scandalously - of Nazism and technology. The clairvoyance with which he summons forth the essence from philosophical or poetic texts or certain phenomena of existence turns into pathetic delusion in those realms of cultural or political judgment in which one cannot make declarations about the essence without immersing oneself in a study of the facts. But even within the limits of a pure phenomenology of being, does not his refusal of pluralist solicitation entail a narrowing or a premature arrest of thought?

In what follows I shall try to discover possibilities of a pluralistic loosening up of Heidegger’s style of thinking in connection with four topics: (1) his account of the essence of metaphysics, onto-theology, the history of being; (2) his proposal of a leap of thinking or a step back a from metaphysics to its forgotten origin; (3) his account of that origin itself, the truth of being, the Ereignis; and (4) the implications for theology. In spoiling the purity of Heidegger’s essences, we must take the risk of losing the colour and relief of his vision and falling into a mere encyclopedic indifferentism. That danger has menaced the efforts of post-modernist theoreticians to think pluralism and difference more thoroughly than Heidegger’s essentialism allowed. (Deleuze and Foucault, through diligent empirical study, have escaped this danger better than Derrida, Lyotard or De Man.) The pullulation of differences cannot have the power and strength that comes from insight into essence. Yet it seems that a relinquishing of essence is an imperative of contemporary thought in every field - in literary and religious studies and even in science. In forfeiting the unity of the Ereignis and rejoicing in a plurality of finite human worlds - many ‘clearings’ rather than a single one – do we devalue the world in which we live, making it just one among many possibles, and thus a mere fiction? Or is this multiplicity of the essence of human worldhood, so that the pathos or splendor of its finitude cannot be tasted without it? In any case there is not a choice; we are obliged to be tolerant under pain of being fanatical - the fate of not a few dogmatic Heideggerians.

.

The plurality of reason

Heidegger’s project of ‘overcoming metaphysics’has been the most popular of his philosophical proposals, especially among theologians, literary critics and theorists of the post-modern. A critical reconsideration of this project can never be superfluous; for even the most zealous overcomers can hardly deny that justice must be done to the metaphysical tradition and its rational claims. It may be claimed that Heidegger’s most mature and serene enactment of an overcoming of metaphysics is found in Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen, 1957), and that it is also in this work that the questionable aspects and the limitations of his thought are most apparent.

(Linguistic problems, which I cannot discuss here, begin with the translation of the title. The vision of essence that comes to speech in Heidegger depends heavily on the contingencies of the German language and the lucky accidents of his own manipulations of it. In translation it invariably loses much of its imposing force, Thus cultural relativity gnaws away at the pretensions of essence. Religious thinking is also at the mercy of the contingencies of language; even the basic dogmas of the Church are unthinkable except in Greek. Translation plays the same treacherous role for Christianity as for Heidegger.)

The notion of ground was one of Heidegger’s central preoccupations, rehearsed with references to Aristotle, Leibniz, Crusius, Kant, Schelling and Schopenhauer in 1928-9 (GA 26; GA 9:123-75). Many of the historical queries one might pose while reading Der Satz vom Grund turn out to have been touched on, if not fully resolved, in these earlier discussions. In Der Satz vom Grund academic issues are left behind, leaving us free to follow a clear line of thought according to the rhythm of thought itself. But does the tangled history of the philosophy of causes and reasons admit of being grasped in such a serene play of thinking? Can thought gain access to a single perspective in which everything falls into place? Perhaps Heidegger’s meditation needs to be refocussed as merely one possible way of viewing the question, a modest clearing in a jungle it cannot pretend to master.

An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) opens with a striking phenomenological evocation of the inevitability with which the question ‘why does anything exist rather than nothing?’ emerges in human experience (GA 40: 3-32). The ‘rather than’ (potius quam) carries the existential thrust of the principle of sufficient reason, a principle on which the being of beings depends. It imposes itself not only with a logical necessity and universality, but also at the existential level, emerging in the deepest human experiences. It is not surprising that this renewal of the why-question was taken up as the point of departure for the transcendental Thomist arguments of Karl Rahner. But Heidegger never sought to answer the question along such metaphysical lines; the answer is rather a leap away from the question, toward a different way of thinking the being of beings, not as indebted to a cause or reason, but as freely granted, as a ‘there is’ which is ‘without why’. Aristotle’s aition, ‘that to which a thing is indebted for its being that which it is’ (GA 9:245), is apprehended as a letting-be of beings (Vorträge und Aufsätze, Pfullingen, 1954, pp. 15-19).

In Der Satz vom Grund this shift is ingeniously anchored in Leibniz’s formula, when we hear it in a new way: instead of ‘nothing is without ground’ it becomes ‘nothing is without ground’. We listen, successively, to the harmonics of the two accentuations of the proposition. The basic chord of the atomic age undergoes an enharmonic shift into the basic chord of a post-metaphysical thinking. This eschatological reversal is of the same order as the shifts effected by the characteristic Heideggerian chiasmus of the type: ‘The essence of speech is the speech of essence’.

The first question we must put is this: does Heidegger so absolutize the principle of reason – in both the first and the second accentuations – as to project a simplistic and rigid picture of the history of metaphysical thinking? We can pursue several aspects of this query: (1) the self-evidence and universality attributed to the principle; (2) the way in which the principle is claimed to point beyond itself by its own enigmatic character: (3) the role of the principle in metaphysics grasped as onto-theology and history o! being.

 

I Is there a unitary principle of reason?

 

1 Simplistic treatment of Leibniz

Heidegger’s notion of ground is a unitary one not only at the metaphysical level but in his own essential thinking. The metaphysical unity of ground is secured by Leibniz’s historic enunciation of the principle of sufficient reason. Henceforth, ground is no longer in danger of falling apart into a variety of causes and principles. Yet the perfection of Leibniz’s principle serves to highlight the lack of the essential thinking of ground, which Heidegger intends to provide. ln 1928 the principle simply occluded the essence of ground: it was ‘questionable whether the problem of the ground coincides with that of the “principle of ground” and whether it is posed at all by this principle’ and discussion of the principle served only to ‘provide the occasion and mediate a first orientation’ for thinking of the essence of ground (GA 9:125-6). The later Heidegger’s more radical method of ‘looking metaphysics in the face’ (GA 29/30:5) forbids such facile leaps and obliges him to come to more intimate grips with the power of the principle of reason. (J. Greisch, in his contribution to these volumes, seems to confine Heidegger’s attempt to revision metaphysics to the period from 1928 to 1936, but the programmatic text he quotes – GA 65:176 – looks forward as well as backward. Even if the thought of the Ereignis became a higher priority, pursued independently of metaphysics, Heidegger never ceased to return to the question of the essence of metaphysics.)

Yet there is a limit to his engagement in both periods, in that he glosses over the immense variety of forms this principle has taken in the contexts of different philosophers’ systems. Heidegger already begins to reduce the variety of historical discourse on causes and grounds to a single monolithic ‘essence of ground’ when he attempts to discover what unites the four aitiai of Aristotle (GA 9:124-5, 273-94). He describes a variant Aristotelian set as ‘four manners of possible grounding, laying and giving of ground: essence, cause, argument (in the sense of “a truth”, motive’ (GA 26:127). U. Guzzoni has criticized this unitary and dynamic account which apprehends the aitiai under the rubric of production (Herstellen), which was not Aristotle’s concern (Grund und Allgemeinheit, Meisenheim, 1975). Heidegger admits that the origin and order of the Aristotelian aitiai are obscure, but maintains nonetheless that they indicate that ‘to being belongs ground’ (GA 26:138). Isn’t this rather massive utterance an imposition on the pluralism of Aristotle’s analyses?

As one historian remarks: ‘“sufficient reason” acquires its meaning more from the context in which it is used than from any established definition attached to the words themselves’ (J. E. Carr, The Principle of Sufficient Reason in Some Scholastic Systems, Marquette UP, 1959, p. 161). Schopenhauer notes ‘its extremely varied applications, in each of which it acquires a different meaning’ (SW, Munich, 1912, III, p. 4). Before Leibniz, one might cite many discussions of causality which implicitly recognize the validity of some such principle, perhaps allowing a variety of retrospective formulations of it for each of them. There are a plurality of formulations in Leibniz himself: it is a logical principle: all predicates are precontained in the notion of the subject; it is a principle underlying events: everything that happens is a consequence of the notion of the monadic substance to which it happens; as a principle grounding existence, it is the (determinative, rather than merely sufficient) principle of the most perfect; in the physical world it is a principle of efficient causality, which has merely phenomenal status. (See C. D. Broad, Leibniz: An Introduction, Cambridge, 1975, pp. 6-12; B. Mates, The Philosophy of Leibniz, Oxford UP, 1986, pp. 154-5.)  ‘The cause in things corresponds to the reason in truths. That is why the cause itself is often called reason’ (Leibniz, New Essays IV, 17, 3). Spinoza subjected cause to reason; Malebranche ‘established an irreducible duality of inefficacious rationality and unintelligible efficacity. That efficiency alone assures and assumes intelligibility was the Cartesian thesis that these great post-Cartesians reject, and Leibniz sees as clearly as they the difficulty of the Cartesian axiom... Far from subjecting purely and simply the efficient cause to the reason (causa, id est ratio) or radically dissociating them (causa aut ratio), he attempts to make them coincide’ (V. Carraud, Causa sive ratio, Paris, 2002, pp. 391-2).

Heidegger gives a nod to this diversity but tries to put it aside as a merely historical problem:

 

Admittedly the principle is subject to… manifold interpretations and evaluations. For the present purpose, however, it is convenient to take the principle in the version and role which Leibniz first explicitly gave it. But just here it is controverted whether the principium rationis was for Leibniz a ‘logical’ or a ‘metaphysical’ one or both. (GA 9:128; see GA 26:135-6)

 

Here we seem to catch Heidegger eluding the plurivocity of the notion of ground; it is presumed that some unitary instance underlies the diverse interpretations; the suspicion that the diversity of interpretations sheds doubt on this unity is repressed. The principle of reason is declared to be much too rich to fit into the current distinctions made concerning it (GA 26:145). It can be lit up only in that region in which the nature of the logical and the metaphysical, truth and ground, are first to be determined. Just as the essence of truth (unconcealment) cannot be adequately grasped in Leibniz’s formulations in terms of subject and predicate, so the essence of ground eludes the terms of the principle of sufficient reason. ‘The problem of the ground finds its home only there whence the essence of truth derives its inner possibility, in the essence of transcendence’ (GA 9:135). Though this Dasein-centred topology is later abandoned, the realm of the truth of being remains the locus of the authentic sense of ground. Both early and late the task of thinking the essence of ground from its origin presupposes some unitary sense for the expression ‘ground’ which is never put in question. Since the same can be said for the expressions ‘truth’ and ‘being’, one may well have qualms about the project of grasping phenomenologically how being, truth, and ground belong together. And when it came to the crunch, Heidegger himself, we suspect, let this project drop in favour of loose variations on Heraclitean notions of Logos and cosmic play.

No effort is made to clarify the principle by descending to its applications, with the result that the principle retains an almost oracular obscurity – in both accentuations, it is a word from being, which casts hypnotic spell. As Vincent Descombes points out, Leibniz’s principle applies primarily to matters of contingent existence – justifying them as the best states of affairs possible (Philosophie par gros temps, Paris, 1989); whereas Heidegger, in accord with his usual practice of listening to metaphysical texts with an ear for the repressed wonder at ‘the marvel of all marvels: that beings are’ (GA 9:307), wants the principle to be an utterance about being. Even in raising the question ‘why are there beings rather than nothing?’ Leibniz wants to justify the contingent existence of things whereas Heidegger wants to deepen a sense of the mysterious fact that ‘beings are’. Has Heidegger understood Leibniz better than he understood himself, or is he interested in understanding Leibniz at all? Either his thinking of being grounds and masters reason or it is a skilful avoidance and oblivion of reason. Perhaps Heidegger’s thought will remain fruitful and challenging only as long as we are unable to decide this issue, only as long as the mutual solicitation, the tug-o’-war, between reason and thinking maintains its tension.

In hailing Leibniz as paradigmatic, Heidegger tones down the idiosyncratic speculative charge the principle carries for the great rationalist. He sees that ‘the Leibnizian derivation of the principium rationis from the essence of propositional truth thus reveals that a quite determinate idea of being in general lies at its basis’, namely, ‘the monadologically understood “subjectivity” of the subjectum (substantiality of substance)’ (GA 9:135; cf. GA 26:86-123; Nietzsche II, pp. 436-57). However, in Der Satz vom Grund he gives prominence to versions of the principle that sound quite innocuous and seem self-evident (helped by Wolff and his successors who had released the principle from Leibniz’s speculative web). Shorn of its dazzling speculative applications the principium grande risks becoming a banality. Its rational force is simplified to an existential claim that hangs over ground-seeking humanity at all times. It becomes the heart-beat of the modern world. Aspects of modernity that do not fit it are glossed over.

 

2 Simplistic account of science

Leibniz’s reduction of cause to reason is quite anti-modern in its opposition to Hobbes’ and Newton’s reduction of causality to merely efficient causality. ‘The principle demands that everything that happens to a thing, including the causations, have a reason’ (G. Deleuze, Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque, Paris, 1988, p. 55). This is a retrieval of Plato’s glorification of the forms as the supreme aitiai. Leibniz invokes the key passage, Phaedo 97C, in his polemic against a causality not reducible to reasons (Discourse on Metaphysics par. 20, pp. 35-6; see G. Vlastos, ‘Reasons and causes in the Phaedo’’, in Vlastos, ed. Plato I, New York, 1971, pp. 132-66). Heidegger takes Leibniz to equate causes and reasons, but there are texts in which Leibniz distinguishes cause as the ‘reason outside the thing’ from reason as inherent. (see R. Allers, ‘Heidegger on the principle of sufficient reason’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 20, 1958-9, pp. 365-73).

 

Seen from the point of view of its cosmological application the principle of reason is less modern than is claimed. We see that it is a compromise, an effort at conciliation [between modern rationality and] the possibility of a musical experience of the world. (Descombes, p. 113)

 

In presuming that the modern universe is tightly bound in a network of Leibnizian deductive intelligibility, Heidegger gives an impoverished account of the texture of contemporary science. The law of universal causality is for positivists no more than a piece of methodological advice on what regularities to expect (thus J. Powers, Philosophy and the New Physics, London, 1982, p. 43). Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle (1927) seemed to make a breach in the stability of causality within science, though his view is criticized as a positivistic inference from the impossibility of knowing the cause of a given event to the meaninglessness of talking of its cause (see Heisenberg, GW, vol. C 1, Munich, 1984, pp. 29-39). Heisenberg wrote: ‘If we wanted to know why the alpha-particle was emitted at that particular time we would have to know the microscopic structure of the whole world including ourselves, and that is impossible. Therefore, Kant’s arguments for the a priori character of the law of causality no longer apply’ (Physics and Philosophy, New York, 1962, p. 90). H.-J. Engfer states:

 

Modern theory of science seems to exclude any conclusive sufficient or adequate grounding of what is known: the principle of sufficient reason has now as a causal principle only the status of a hypothesis which can neither be verified nor falsified, a ‘pragmatic presupposition’ of research. (Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie 7:1132-3)

 

One wonders if Heidegger has not chosen the wrong target in making so much of a principle which has so questionable a hold on the contemporary mind. Yet his critique stems from the cultural milieu in which ‘acausality was being espoused years before the enunciation of Heisenberg’s Principle, which was seized upon as a triumph rather than a disaster’ (Powers, p. 150). He might accept all the scientific criticisms of causality and still maintain that they only verify the powerful hold of the principle of reason.

 

The recently much-treated controversy about the nature and scope of the validity of the principle of causality has a basis and ground only through the fact that the participants in the controversy all stand under the same claim for the delivery of the sufficient reason of our representations. (Der Satz vom Grund, p.99)

 

The principle of sufficient reason, because not interrogated in its essential claim, functions all the more smoothly and powerfully in scientific and technological discourse. The ‘only fruitful way’ out of this rationalism’ leads through modern axiomatic representation and its hidden grounds’ (p. 42).

But how is this maxim compatible with the leap that Heidegger actually makes? He leaps from the principle of reason to the source from which it springs; but he does so from relatively abstract versions of the principle, never descending into the details of modern axiomatic thinking. He apprehends this thinking very globally as taking place at the behest of the principle of reason, which is ‘something other than science itself’. ‘The drive and the urge to remove contradictions within the multiplicity of conflicting theories and irreconcilable states of affairs stem from the claim of the principium reddendae rationis’ (p. 59). This is a wooden and monochrome account of scientific activity. Heidegger is merely vehiculating a common belief about the nature of science, which can do no justice to the vast complexity of the textures of causes, reasons and explanations in scientific discourse or in philosophical discourse including Leibniz. In attempting to make this belief operative as an analytic principle he falls headlong into a journalistic rhetoric about the ‘atomic age’.

 

3 The pluralism of religious conceptions of ground

If this essentialist conception of ground cannot do justice to the complexities of Western philosophy and science, still less could it handle the no less complex notions of cause and reason in Indian and Chinese thought, notably the many varying accounts of ‘dependent co-arising’ in the Buddhist tradition. Nor can it deal with the variety of languages in which the biblical God is spoken of as maker and cause of the universe. Heidegger’s understanding of this tradition is a threadbare one: religious thinking has often been hampered by simplistic notions of cause and reason, but Heidegger himself is simplistic in what he says of the creator God of the Bible and the Scholastics (which he tends to conflate).

‘Behold the heavens and the earth: they cry out that they have been made’ (Augustine); that is superb, but it needs to be thought through in a way that does justice to the plurality and the obliqueness of the ways in which the world intimates its divine ground. In so far as the history of metaphysics and theology does conform to the rigid structure of onto-theology that Heidegger imposes on its variety, the notion of God as first cause enjoys a stability to which it is not entitled and which occludes the enigmatic polyvalence with which the world speaks to us of that great mystery which lies at its ground.

 

4 The existentializing of the principle of reason

Heidegger’s unconcern with the pluralism in the history of the principle of sufficient reason is due to his primarily existential interest in the human quest for grounds and the modern rationalization of the universe in terms of grounds. It is a Kantian rather than a Leibnizian or even Wolffian version of the principle of reason that is uppermost in his mind, for it is in Kant that the principle as shaping existence and the human world comes most clearly into perspective.

 

What Kant says of the Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason, that it is ‘a remarkable pointer to investigations which are still to be carried out in metaphysics’, holds true equally of his own highest principle of all synthetic knowledge, insofar as therein the problem of the essential interconnection of being, truth and ground lies hidden. (GA 9:136)

 

Being, truth and ground here have little in common with scientific notions of existence, fact, cause or explanation. Kant is stretched into existential-phenomenological shape in accord with the existential resonances of his mapping of the relation between reason and world.

Kant followed Crusius in restricting the principle to the phenomenal realm, eventually reducing it to an epistemological matter, which Heidegger translates as the grounding activity of Dasein. Things in themselves elude the principle of reason. Kant’s noumenal space is thus a predecessor of the Heideggerian realm of being as groundless ground. Heidegger’s existential translation of Kant permits him to eschew discussion of the epistemological or logical detail of the quest for grounds and to focus on its most simple features. However, it would not be correct to say that Heidegger accepts Kant’s reduction of the principle to an epistemological, subject-centred one; for to Heidegger Kant’s subject-centredness is a distortion of the phenomenality of being; the search for grounds is an aspect of that phenomenality and as such cannot be seen as merely subjective. There is no objective ground beyond Dasein’s apprehension of being as ground, not because of an epistemological phenomenalism, but for quite the opposite.reason: being is truly manifest in its phenomenality; it cannot be meaningfully distinguished from its phenomenality; there is no being-in-itself beyond the phenomenality of being. Kant has served to break the power of the principle of reason, its power to point to unknown, hidden causes and grounds. Heidegger venerates the principle as an existential phenomenon and wrestles with it to regain access to the authentic phenomenality of being. But it seems that his method of thinking is inherently unable to do justice to the metaphysical reach of why-questions. It can demystify such questions in their historical forms (including especially the theological ones) by showing how they overleap the phenomena at their base; but it cannot repress the stirrings of reason that prompt their recurrence in an unpredictable variety of forms and contexts.

The phenomenology of the ‘Why?’ is less dramatic, more mundane, in Der Satz vom Grund than in An Introduction to Metaphysics. The focus is on everyday thinking, not on privileged moods in which the question ‘why?’ sounds in the depths of the soul:

 

Human understanding itself everywhere and always, where and when it is active, is forthwith on the lookout for the ground on the basis of which that which encounters it is as it is… The understanding demands a basis for its statements and its assertions. Only statements with a basis are comprehensible and sensible. (Der Satz vom Grund, p. 13)

 

There is nothing ambitious or questionable about this description, which provides a solid point of departure for Heidegger’s meditation.

 

Without being rightly aware of it, we are always in some manner or other claimed by and called to the task of attending to grounds and the ground… Our behaviour in every case takes into account what the principle of sufficient reason says. (pp. 13-14)

 

Many classics of metaphysics begin with such declarations on the essence of the human The opening of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, on the universal desire to know, is echoed in that of the Critique of Pure Reason, on the way human reason is forced by its own nature to pose questions to which the answers lie beyond its capacities. The opening of Der Satz vom Grund in turn echoes both texts. All three are stylized sketches of the mind and its activities, shaped by the scientific and theoretical practices of the cultures to which they refer. A pluralist account of human dealings with principles and reasons could undermine at the base the universality and necessity here claimed for the Leibnizian principle. But it might also make these dealings less amenable to any pretence to have mastered their upshot from the vantage of a more originary kind of thinking.

 

5 The incubation period

Implicit in all our behaviour and ever echoing in our ear is the statement: ‘nothing is without a ground’. Why then did it take over two thousand years of philosophy before Leibniz was able to enunciate that proposition explicitly ‘How strange, that a principle that lies so near to hand, and that – unarticulated – guides all human representation and comportment everywhere, should have taken so many centuries to be articulated’ (Der Satz vom Grund, p. 15). The principle of identity as signifying a dialectical self-relation also had a long incubation period: ‘For it is the philosophy of speculative idealism, prepared by Leibniz and Kant, that first establishes through Fichte, Schelling and Hegel a lodging for the intrinsically synthetic essence of identity’ (Identität und Differenz, Pfullingen, 1957, pp. 11-12). In both instances, Heidegger may be making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, isn’t identity already recognized as dialectical self-relation (auto d’heautô tauton) in Sophist 254D and doesn’t Timaeus 28C (‘what has come to be must necessarily have come to be by some cause’) come close to formulating the principleof reason? (Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds echoes Timaeus 30A: ‘all things should be good and nothing evil as far as possible’, cf. 41B, 46D.) If the principle of reason is sleeping here, its sleep seems of the lightest.

Moreover, when Leibniz rethinks ground or Hegel rethinks identity, are they bringing to light something concealed over millennia, or are they not rather inventing a new style of thinking, a style that in our day may seem rather old-fashioned? Heidegger preserves as much as he can of the timeless and monolithic character of these principles by treating their historical formulation as a revelation of what has always lain hidden. What makes this view doubly implausible is that the emergence of the principles sends being into a still deeper sleep, while one awaits the true enunciation of the essence of identity and ground in the recovered light of being, which Heidegger brings. But looking at these proceedings naturalistically, should we not say that Heidegger, too, is inventing a new style of thinking, within a certain cultural and historical context, a style that is also already taking on an old-fashioned air?

Before Leibniz, Heidegger claims, the sheer generality and self-evidence of the search for grounds prevented us from stepping back and viewing it in its unity as a principle. But this coming to prominence of the principle of reason is not an unambiguous advance into the light. It throws into deeper darkness the unquestioned fringes of the principle of reason. We do not seek to understand the principle of reason since it shapes all understanding; thus the step to its explicit formulation is a dizzying self-apprehension of the light in which all our thinking takes place. Yet when the light becomes self-reflexive it becomes less light; the self-apprehension fixes it and dims it.

A pluralistic reading of these claims could sight here a variety of processes whereby reflection dims the light of immediacy, but would at the same time refuse a stylized dialectical ordering of these processes in the manner of Hegel or a reduction of these processes to a single one, the forgetting of being, in the manner of Heidegger. Similarly, the move beyond reflective insight to a more originary apprehension is a simplification; there is a bundle of such possible moves in different contexts; and each of them is the creation of a new language, not a stepping back to some primitive immediacy. Both the reflective grounding of metaphysics and the essential thinking of Heidegger are epochs within the complex texture of human awareness, bracketings of its complexity in order to explore its possibilities in a stylized form. When thinking opens itself to an awareness of its own complexity, pluralism and irrepressible creativity, then it puts aside the props of these metaphysical and neo-metaphysical orderings.

 

II Is the principle of reason inherently enigmatic?

 

1 A self-contradictory principle?

The principle is so obvious that any intellectual puzzling about it seems superfluous and unnatural. ‘And yet – perhaps the principle of reason is the most enigmatic of all possible propositions’ (Der Satz vom Grund, p. 16). Heidegger has been teasing at such apparent self-evidence at least since his querying of banal notions of being at the beginning of Sein und Zeit, and his suspicions already focused on the self-evidence of the basic laws of thought: ‘Suppose that it belongs to the essential character of philosophy to make just that which is self-evident into something incomprehensible, and that which goes without question into something questionable!’ (GA 26:6). It is not just petrified philosophoumena that are open to question, but the everyday understanding of being, and the everyday routine of seeking reasons for things; unquestioned, this routine tightens into a tyranny, as the principle of reason extends its sway into every department of life.

In questioning the principle, Heidegger never invokes the plurality of its possible forms or interpretations, which might cause its unity to unravel. Rather, he seeks to subvert it by finding an enigma in its essential structure; an enigma which can be resolved only by a more originary clarification of this essential structure. The enigma is one that bothered post-Leibnizian philosophers: namely, that the principle of sufficient reason lacks a sufficient reason, and is thus intrinsically placed in contradiction with itself (Der Satz vom Grund, p. 37).

To accentuate the enigma, Heidegger dwells on the necessity and universal scope of the principle. ‘What it posits, it posits as something necessary. This it utters as something un-circumventable through the double negation “Nothing… without…”‘ (p. 18). He never considers the view that

 

the principle of sufficient reason may be applied to everything save to itself and to such elements of discourse as function as explainers in a given context. Such a limitation of the range of the principle of sufficient reason, far from curtailing the programme of attaining a rational understanding of the world, is rather a condition for its consistent fulfilment, for it avoids both vicious circles and the assignmentof a fictitious ‘final reason of things’. (M. Bunge, Causality, Harvard UP, 1959, p. 246)

 

Does he resolve the puzzle? He claims to do so by a step back into the light: ‘On what is the principle of ground grounded?... What light does the principle need in order to be luminous? Do we see this light?’ (p. 18). Compare 1928:

 

It is easily seen that this thesis, namely, the principle of reason taken in its broadest sense, itself requires to be grounded. And that this grounding is clearly only to be attained with the clarification of the essence of being in general. (GA 26:138)

 

To this one may object that if the essence of being grounds the principle of reason it does so with a quite other kind of grounding than that which the principle in its first accentuation so imperatively demands. The inner contradiction of the principle is thus not resolved; unless by a complete collapse of the principle in its first accentuation in favour of the looser connections of the second.

 

2 Much ado about nothing?

‘The principle of ground is the ground-principle of all ground-principles. This indication ushers us with a scarcely perceptible push into the abyss of riddles that yawns about the principle and about what it says’ (p. 21). The principle of identity, for example, can be interpreted as ‘the belonging together of different things on the ground of the same. On the ground? The same comes into play here as the ground of the belonging-together’ (p. 22), so the principle of identity appears to depend on the principle of reason. But the principle of reason ‘presupposes that it is determined what a reason is, that it is clear in what the essence of reasons consists’ (p. 23). How can a ground-principle take something so essential for granted?

The abysses Heidegger finds here are scarcely hinted at in most discussions of sufficient reason. Indeed, Heidegger’s awe presupposes that the question of ground is one that governs human existence through and through and that involves the whole of being. Is he transposing onto a logical puzzle the pathos that properly appertains only to the sense of the ungroundedness of existence that one has in the experience of anxiety? Or is he exploiting an apparent antinomy, somewhat as Kant did, in order to dissolve the metaphysical question of ground into an existential vertigo? Infiltrating the riddles of reason with the obscurities of existence, he risks losing a precise grip on both.

The self-evidence of the principle could have been undermined by a more prosaic logical analysis, which would have whittled down its claimed necessity and universality rather than forcing it to a paroxysm in which it begins to undermine itself. The detected antinomy could be dissipated if one showed that the unitary principle, rather than rendering transparent their essential law, occluded a great variety of grounding activities, which are irreducible to a single rubric. A similar plurality might also be uncovered in everyday searches for reasons and grounds.

‘The principle of ground is the ground of the principle… Here something coils in on itself, yet does not close itself off, but at the same time unbolts itself. Here is a ring, a living ring, something like a snake’ (p. 31).The vertigo induced by these reflections indicates something like a black hole of thought into which reason cannot proceed without becoming twisted. Metaphysics is thus overcome by its own devices. Yet is this the trail back to the origin that Heidegger actually follows? The change of accentuation engineers a shift from representational thinking of beings to contemplative listening to being. The logical riddles of the basic pinciples play at most the role of disabling metaphysical thinking as it tries to reach back to its ultimate grounds.

Having used logical antinomies to launch the leap of thinking, Heidegger leaves them unsolved. Did he really take them seriously or were they a mere pretext?

 

Heidegger took reason seriously all his life. [To echo Carlyle: ‘Egad, he’d better!’] True, but now we can see that he did that in order to make a leap out of its domain into the play. He took reason seriously just long enough to show that there is a sphere of play outside the reach of the principle of reason. (J. D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics, Indiana UP, 1987, p. 225)

 

This seems an accurate description of Heidegger’s strategy – but can one choose to patronize reason in this way?

 

3 The strict formulation

Heidegger turns to the strict formulation of the principle of reason as the principium reddendae rationis, the principle that ‘for every truth (that is, according to Leibniz, for every true proposition) the ground can be given back’ (p. 44). Allers objects that this is not the stricter version for Leibniz, but a methodological version; whereas the looser version is ontological. Moreover reddere means simply to give, rather than to give back, and principium grande means simply ‘big’ rather than ‘mighty’ principle. Here, as in the ontological reading of ‘the rose is without why’, Heidegger’s attention to the archaic or etymological undertones of words can be defended for its fertility in launching thought. Descombes points out that reddendum does not have the imperative thrust Heidegger gives it, and does not justify the transition marked in a comment of Derrida’s rendering of Heidegger’s account: ‘From the moment that reason can be delivered [reddi potest], it must be’ (Cahiers du Collège International de Philosophie 2, 1986, p. 16).

 

How explain this leap in the modalities? Since when has the possibility of something sufficed to determine its necessity? This transition is still more astonishing than that of the so-called ontological argument… For we see here, in addition to the illegitimate transition from a weak to a strong modality, a personal (‘destinal’) surcharge of the necessity in question.

 

One might justify such exegesis on the basis that ‘The immoderateness of metaphysics demands that the translator always choose the meaning which is most serious, most difficult and which bears most consequences’ (Descombes, pp. 102-3). Heidegger is always on the alert for the great world-shaping forces indicated by a mere rustle in the language of the texts he studies. What is only a gentle hint in Leibniz is pregnant with the immoderate demands of Reason that will sound ever more mightily in Kant, Hegel, Marx, contemporary science and technology. It is because we find ourselves under the sway of this unconditional demand of the principle of reason that we are sensitive to the faintest intimations of its force in the Leibnizian text. However, Descombes rejects this way of reading Leibniz as a surrender to the very immoderateness it aims to overcome. Heidegger allows the awesome claim of the principle of reason to swallow up all philosophical reasoning in a single massive call from being. Had he instead relativized the principle of reason by putting it back in its historical context in Leibniz and others, he might have found a more serene path beyond the darkening of the world in technology, one more practicable and more convincing than the apocalyptic leap to which he finally invites us.

  Our representations do not become genuine knowledge unless their ground can be delivered (Der Satz vom Grund , p. 45). Is this second version of the principle confined to cognition only? No, it insists that the object of cognition must be something grounded (p. 46). It means: ‘Something “is” only, that is, is identified as a being, when it is stated in a proposition that satisfies the ground-principle of ground as the ground-principle of the giving of grounds’ (p. 47). It is a requisite for existence. The might of the demand for the delivery of the ground, which dictates whether anything deserves to be recognized as a being, lays claim on everything that is. ‘Only that which is brought to a stand in a grounded representation can qualify as being’ (p. 54). Again, the metaphysical force of this is brunted by Heidegger’s focus on its implications for the phenomenaliry of being and world.

‘Whence speaks this claim of the ground to its own delivery?’ (p. 57). To hear the language of this claim we must attend to it phenomenologically rather than continue to obey it somnambulistically, as the ultimate force behind the ‘atomic age’: ‘The claim to the delivery [Zustellung] of the ground is for science the element in which its cogitation [Vorstellen] moves as the fish in water or the bird in air’ (p. 59). But to realize this is more difficult than to be aware of the radioactivity of the atmosphere, which we have instruments to measure (p. 57). An element of nuclear panic or paranoia seems to be associated with this magnification of the power of the principle of reason. This power is uncanny, unhomely; it takes away from contemporary humanity the ground under their feet; the more we blindly comply with its claim, the less we can build and dwell in the realm of the essential (p. 60). This play between delivery of the ground and withdrawal of the ground under our feet (Entzug des Bodens) is our sinister epochal variant of the ‘play of being’, to which reference is made later (pp. 109, 188).

All of this now has a fifties air to it, and seems inapplicable to the contemporary condition, which we cannot see as explicable from a single principle. If our consumerist world-culture were so firmly in the grip of a principle, then the promised leap and reversal would be attractive. But its uniformity has nothing to do with metaphysical reason; it floats detached from any claim of the ground; we can leap from the ground all too lightly, but with little hope of landing in a play any more substantial than that which is going on. The pluralistic texture of our experience dissolves the claim of unitary grounds, and also of unitary leaps. What path of thinking can negotiate the promise and threat of this state of affairs?

 

III Metaphysics as onto-theology and history of being

 

1 A phenomenological perspective

Heidegger’s gaze on metaphysics is a phenomenological one; that is why he pays so much attention to the obstacles to this gaze, the natural tendency to turn one’s eyes away from any deeper apprehension of the metaphysical enterprise. The plot is thickened from the fact that metaphysics itself is an effort to look in the face a truth that everyday reason looks away from. By bringing into one’s gaze the shape of one’s thinking – not of any ordinary thinking, but that thinking that has attained metaphysical status – one finds that metaphysics itself is constitutionally inadequate to the phenomenon of being; that being is manifest in metaphysics as that which remains withdrawn. What comes into view is the finitude and brokenness of thinking, not in the sense that the grasp of reason fails to seize its object or that its systems crumble, but in the sense that the more it succeeds the more the truth of being eludes it.

Heidegger projects an essence of metaphysics, most tightly formulated as onto-theology, which need not be perfectly congruent with the empirical development of the history of philosophy. Great historical hypotheses are not falsified by a few facts that fail to fit; indeed their greatness is shown by the number of such discordant facts that they can take in their stride. Heidegger’s hypothesis is sufficiently well-grounded and illuminating to be immune to random empirical objections; it will lose its force only when replaced by a better one. The objection that he ignored the Hebraic component in the history of philosophy should be expanded to embrace his systematic ironing-out of all pluralistic interferences in his focusing of the Greek essence, an essence that has sufficient autonomy to support Heidegger’s constructions, which can be replaced only by a better account of what metaphysics meant.

Starting from a sense of the pluralistic texture of intellectual history, how might we revise, or eventually replace, Heidegger’s constructions so as to make them more fruitful for our own intercultural regime of thinking?

 

2 What is onto-theology?

Onto-theology is the supreme self-grasp of the intelligibility of being. It is a product of the question of ground.

 

Since being appears as ground beings are the grounded, but the highest being is that which grounds in the sense of the first cause… . The onto-theological constitution of metaphysics stems from the sway of the difference, which holds apart and together being as ground and beings as grounded-grounding. (Identität und Differenz, p.63)

 

The authentic phenomenology of being and beings in their difference resides in

 

a realm which the leading words of metaphysics, being and beings, ground-grounded, no longer suffice to say. For what these words name, what the way of thinking led by them represents, stems as the different from the difference. Their source no longer allows itself to be thought in the field of vision of metaphysics. (ib., pp. 63-4)

 

The onto-theological constitution of metaphysics originates from the effort to think about ‘being’ and ‘beings’ in terms of identity and causal or explanatory grounds (cf. GA 42:87-8, 130-47). For metaphysics, being is that which all beings have in common, being-as-such. Thought of in its generality, being-as-such is an identity in difference which provides the horizontal ontological dimension; thought of as a whole, being-as-such is referred to a supreme being, the apex of the vertical theo-logical dimension, who unifies beings-as-a-whole. Both lines of thought proceed in mutual dependence.

 

Metaphysics thinks the being of beings both in the foundational  [er-gründend] unity of the most general, i.e., that which everywhere amounts to the same, and in the founding [begründend] unity of totality, i.e., that which is highest over all. Thus the being of beings is thought of beforehand as grounding ground. (Identität und Differenz, p. 49; cf. GA 9:378-9; Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 62)

 

Metaphysics seeks the being of beings by grounding it in a highest being (the cause of existence) or an exemplary mode of being (the ground of essence, e.g. the Kantian subject as the condition of possibility of all objectivity); the transcendent, theo-logical and transcendental, onto-logical modes of grounding coincide in the Hegelian ‘determination of the highest being as the absolute in the sense of unconditioned subjectivity’ (Nietzsche II, p. 347). What is afoot here is no wooden construction but the self-constitution of reason, faithful to its own most intimate principle.

Heidegger makes much of the notion of causa sui, which Pierre Hadot defines as the production of God’s existence through his essence (Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie 1:976-7). Heidegger sees causa sui as the logical culmination of onto-theo-logy, a kind of death’s head before which it is impossible to pray (Identität und Differenz, pp. 51, 64). He presented an attractive version of the idea in Schelling’s account of the interplay between ground and existence in God, with its echoes of Eckhart and Boehme (GA 42:204) and its basis in the paradox that while God, the ultimate reason for the existence of anything at all rather than nothing, himself depends on the principle of reason, the mighty working of the principle must itself have a cause: ‘The principle of reason is valid only in so far as God exists. But God exists, only in so far as the principle of reason is valid’ (Der Satz vom Grund, p. 55). The controverted status of the causa sui within metaphysics – a metaphorical expression in Plotinus (S. Breton, in Heidegger et la Question de Dieu, Paris, 1980, pp. 235-6), replaced by divine aseitas in the Scholastics, rejected by Kant, treated as a simple expression of the purity of being in the later Schelling – is ignored by Heidegger, who probably sees it as a failure of metaphysics to recognize its own logic.

‘When Christians have asked such questions as ‘What is the ground of God’s being the ground of creation?’ they have tended to answer by radicalizing the grounding nature of God, but not by saying that God is causa sui. The question of ultimate grounds in Christian thinking leads to the abyss of divine freedom; his actions are grounded in free decrees whose motives are ‘unsearchable’ (Romans 11.33). All theology can do is defend God’s actions against the charge of absurdity or contradiction and meditate on their appropriateness (convenientia) to divine goodness and justice. Such an ‘overcoming of metaphysics’ based on the ‘difference’ of divine transcendence and freedom is of no interest to Heidegger. His aim is to overcome metaphysics from within, tracing the inner transformations of its essence. Measured against the pattern of onto-theology isolated by Heidegger, all traditional metaphysicians (Leibniz and Hegel included) provide impure amalgams of metaphysical reason and mythical or biblical factors.

If for one moment the possibility is admitted that this distillation of the essence of metaphysics is only a possible interpretation among others, then the project of overcoming metaphysics by tackling its essential structure falls to the ground, and a more flexible and mobile strategy must be devised, one that recognizes the irremediable impurity of the tradition and the impossibility of moving to a less pluralistic level of thinking’ The refusal of the onto-theological possibilities of thinking then becomes one of the possible tactics whereby one moves from a vaguely defined ‘metaphysical’ regime of thought to a dimly apprehended post-metaphysical economy. In each case one identifies possible schemata of ‘metaphysical’ thinking, whose limits can be discerned, and one tests the styles of thinking that may emerge when one leaps beyond these schemata. In the context of such a project of conquering new spaces for thought it is a matter of secondary importance whether the schema to be overcome ever had any identifiable embodiment in history or whether it subsisted only in an irreducible plurality of guises. The fragility of Heidegger’s reconstructions of the essence and history of metaphysics argues for such a pluralistic reinterpretation of his experiments in overcoming.

 

3 The history of being

‘The leap [away from metaphysics] is a backward-looking leap. It looks back intb the realm from which it has leaped away, in order to keep it in view’ (Der Satz vom Grund, p.129). After the leap of thinking we may revisit the various detours which have prepared it and bring into view their inner connection (p. 96). ‘In leaping, the leap becomes a thoughtful appropriation of the destiny of being’ (p. 158). The first major theme to be reviewed is that of.the incubation period, now seen in a new light in view of the fact that ‘what the principle truly says, being, is really still sleeping’ (p. 97). The incubation period is now revealed as an epoch in which being as being withdrew itself. The emergence of the principle in the strong form of the principium reddendae rationis is seen as a change in the destiny of being, the release of the full might of the principle; but this release brings with it the complete eclipse of the possibility that the principle can be grasped as a ‘Satz ins Sein’ (leap into being) (p. 98), and entails a still more decisive withdrawal of being as being.

The question ‘whence speaks the demand of the ground for its delivery?' (p. 100) also appears in a new light. What holds sway in this all-prevailing demand is ‘the destiny of being in a previously unheard manner… Thought first brings into view the essence of being in the extremest withdrawal of being' (p. 101). The leap which places us on the way to an exploration of the ‘place' of the principle of reason is a leap away from a region which can now be surveyed from the distance this leap has accorded (p.107). Then the destiny and withdrawal of being come into view: ‘being destines itself to us in withdrawing itself’ (p. 108), that is ‘being turns to us comfortingly and becomes clear and in this becoming clear grants the temporal space of play in which beings can appear' (p. 109).

Heidegger sees the historical necessity of Kant's leap or of his own as dependent on the ways in which being grants itself from epoch to epoch.Similarly, ‘it would be foolish to say that the medieval theologians misunderstood Aristotle; rather, they understood him differently, in accord with the different way in which being granted itself to them'(p. 136). Such language is defensible only if the successive grantings of being are in each case rigorously demonstrated by phenomenological studies of characteristic thinkers of the epoch. That would demand a tentative and open-ended quality to the characterization of the epochs. Heidegger's language seems to posit at the heart of each epoch a single founding event, a granting-cum-withdrawing of being, which shapes and gives unity to the whole epoch. A more open-ended and tentative account of the shifting ontological sensibilities of the West could have increased the phenomenological power of Heidegger's analyses while dismantling the eschatological myth in which he wraps them. His benchmark identifications and discriminations of the characteristic phenomenological upshot of various styles of thinking are caricatures when they shift from the register of description to that of prescription, when instead of noting that Plato tends to think being as eidos he goes on to pronounce that Plato cannot think being except as eidos, or when instead of noting that the modern age tends to grasp being as objecthood for the subjectivityof reason (p. 138) he makes this the sole central truth of the modern age, its very being.

The history of being depends on a definitive grasp of the essential nature of the mittence of being characteristic of successive epochs. This is an impossibly rigid expectation, which omits all the diversity of the interpretations to which every great thinker is exposed. However the strictly phenomenological focus of Heidegger’s account reduces the scandal of his historical essentialism. Heidegger’s governing phenomenological inquiry to the great metaphysical systems is not the merely preliminary one: ‘what is the texture and structure of the thinking afoot here?’ but rather: ‘How stands it with being?’ (GA 40:36). The sequence of the answers to this inquiry forms the ‘history of being’, and provides a solid enough phenomenological core to this theorem, to which the critique developed by Habermas and others fails to do justice.

The historical picture of a progressive withdrawal of being and forgottenness of being is a stylization rendered implausible by its suggestions of the mythic. Yet no other language seems to Heidegger to capture the phenomenological essence of the process of forgetting of being. The notion that metaphysics has reached its culmination and its end in German idealism (p. 114) and in technology also seems to need demythification, which would entail reducing the grandiose project of ‘overcoming metaphysics’ to the modest one of a critical questioning of metaphysical tradition in view of its occlusions; the massive opposition of metaphysics and the thinking of being as being could similarly be broken down into a series of local critical engagements. Finally, instead of awaiting an eschatological turn-about in which ‘being as such awakens in such guise that it gazes at us from its awakened essence’ (p. 97), thinking should attend to the great variety of modes in which one is addressed by being, none of which can be established as pure or definitive or as a historical moment of arrival. We can practise Heidegger’s art of listening all the better if we abandon his hope of picking up pure signals of being.

‘The history of Western thought rests in the destiny of being. That, however, in which something else rests must itself be rest’ (p. 143), that is, the gathering of movement. Not only is each epoch unified by its central principle as identified by the historian of being, but the entire history is unified by reference to being itself whose destining presides over it. One’s doubts redouble at this further leap to a position of such extreme generality which totally eludes verification or falsification. That the history of thought rests in the destinings of being, Heidegger insists, is not a mere opinion, but is received from being. A partial verification can be found in our subservience to the claim of the principle of reason (including its transcendental and dialectical forms) and the withdrawal of being that coresponds to this. We stand in the clearing of being as those taken into the claim of the being of beings; we find ourselves caught up in a project of being (p. 146).

‘Through the fact that the being of beings grants itself as the objecthood of objects the destiny of being brings itself to a previously unheard of decisiveness and exclusiveness' (p. 149) to which corresponds ‘the most extreme withdrawal of being' (p. 150). This continues to beg the question. Heidegger makes much of the indefinability of being,though insisting that we understand somehow the sense of the words ‘being' and ‘is' (pp. 153-5). But his theory of the history of being has given concrete determinations to the notion of being that seem to have little to do with the everyday phenomenon of being. Withdrawal(Entzug) may indeed characterize the phenomenon of being, but a historical sequence of grantings and withdrawals introduces elements into the notion of being that quite clutter and distort its phenomenality. That being somehow is, one quite recognizes, but that it somehow acts, in an ordered sequence, seems a drift into inappropriate categories.

Philosophical thinking moves from ‘what is more manifest to us’ to ‘what is more manifest in itself' (Aristotle, quoted, p. 112). But its stylization as one from beings to being as such is only one of the possible languages that can serve as vehicle and stimulus of this movement. Sankara's movement from atman to Brahman or Nagarjuna's from conventional truth to ultimate truth or Lao-tse's from things to void cannot be reduced to the ontological schema nor is the converse reduction possible. This plurality of paths must limit the bearing of Heidegger's sketch of the history of being. Moreover, it leaves open alternative perspectives on the history of Western thought, notably those which can be constructed in the light of the biblical heritage and its influence. Jewish and Christian constructions of history have been even more myth-bound than Hegel’s and Heidegger's (which are in part a sublation of those constructions): the conflict of myths reveals history as a battiefield or warring interpretations; acceptance of this pluralism opens a new conversation about history, as an open field of possibilities rather than the cumulative revelation of a pattern. This conversation is oriented by concern for the future rather than desire to conquer the past.

 

The questionable nexus

1 The leap of thinking

In the discussion of Leibniz in the first lectures (broken off at p. 81), Heidegger engages quite firmly the conceptual and argumentative texture of metaphysical thinking. The core of Heidegger's thinking is phenomenological, going behind or beyond the level of thinking to which concepts and arguments belong. Yet unless it engages with concepts and arguments the strength of such phenomenological thinking cannot be demonstrated. At a certain point, however – with the introduction of Angelus Silesius’ rose (68), the emergence of the second accentuation, ‘nothing is without ground’ (p. 75), and the ‘leap of thinking’ concealed in this abrupt change of accent (p. 95) – Heidegger forsakes such critical argumentation as he listens for what lies unthought in the principle of reason, the way in which being announces itself as ground. It is here that the central rift in Heidegger’s thinking comes into view.

Does he at this point fall away from this concentrated interrogation of Leibniz into a pot-pourri of his favourite myths and dogmas? This danger certainly looms and Heidegger himself shows an awareness of it in the care with which he maps out the implications of the leap, going back over earlier questions from the new vantage it yields. As Greisch remarks:

 

The operation of detachment which permits the transition to the other way of thinking paradoxically appears as both simple and complex. It is simple, for all that is asked is the performance of a ‘leap of thinking’. It is complex, for this leap itself has to be thought. (La parole heureuse, Paris, 1987, p. 227)

 

It is on this leap that his thinking stands or falls. Heidegger has certainly put his best foot forward on this occasion, dramatizing the event of the leap with great art, shoring it up with sober and persuasive reflections, and finding felicitous words to speak of its strangeness, its necessity, the freedom it yields, the landscape it opens up. If the leap were simply a leap away from reason it might not be easy to argue with Heidegger, though it would be easy to dismiss him. But the leap is a leap to the ground of reason. Not however to a metaphysical ground, but to an apprehension of the phenomenological essence of truth to which reason belongs, in which reason finds its dwelling, its home. However, though Der Satz vom Grund approaches it via the notion of being as ground, the goal of Heidegger’s thinking back is not adequately named by this expression: the Ereignis which grants being is rather to be thought of as a phenomenological focusing of the truth of being. To see Heidegger as tracing ‘a return back into the ground, the origin’ (Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 33) is a misreading of his thought according to the metaphysical pattern.

The leap of thinking is not a leap away but a leap home to the Ereignis in which being and thinking fundamentally belong. Just this claim conceals, I suspect, the central weakness of Heidegger’s thought. The questionable stylization of the metaphysical tradition we have queried in the previous section is motivated by a vision of reason, metaphysics, as a derivation from and a decline from originary contemplative thinking. Whenever Heidegger tries to explain how metaphysical notions arose on the basis of the forgetting of this originary domain there is an unconvincing gap in the account. Its two ends don’t meet. Conversely, whenever he vaults beyond reason to the region of thinking his feat of transcendence fails to exemplify the status he claims for it. It is not a leap back to the ground, the origin, but rather a leap elsewhere, related to the rational tradition only in an oblique, marginal or tangential way. Heidegger has attained a realm from which the tradition of metaphysics can be questioned and helped to open itself to its phenomenological context – which is far richer than Heidegger is prepared to envisage, so rich that it eludes the control of the thinker of being just as much as that of the metaphysician. Heidegger has not attained a vantage point from which the history of metaphysics can be controlled and mastered in its ‘essence’. Rather, reason and its processes maintain their autonomy alongside and in tension with contemplative thinking. Nor can the thinking of being pretend to have such privileged insight into the essence of these processes that it knows what scientists and logicians are doing in advance of any study of their work. Rather than seeing reason as a ‘stiff-necked adversary’ (The Question Concerning Technology, New York, 1977, p. 112) to be overcome, thinking had best acquire a sense of its own limits, recognizing that if its privilege is to attend to things that elude the mastery of reason, reason’s privilege is to penetrate where poetic thinking can never follow.

Heidegger has allowed its full force to the Leibnizian principle, never contesting its claim, yet slowly negotiating a space of freedom beyond the grasp of the principle, a space in which Christian theologians will surely find an occasion to rediscover divine freedom as well. Having led us into the darkest secrets of the atomic age by his musings on the might of the principle of reason, he suddenly produces a poem about a rose: ‘The rose is without why; it blossoms, since it blossoms, attends not to itself, asks not if it is seen’ (p. 68), This introduces the turn (Kehre) in the argument, the step back or the leap away from the dominance of ‘why’ to the granting of ground indicated by the word ‘since’.  ‘Why’ seeks the ground; ‘since’ provides a ground, in a new sense (p. 70). ‘Between the blossoming of the rose and the ground of its blossoming there intervenes no attending to grounds, whereby the grounds could first come to be as grounds’ (p. 71).

Is Heidegger eluding the principle whose power he has so eloquently evoked? Or does he rather allow the principle its unrestricted sway, while indicating its inherent limits (which correspond with the limits of metaphysical reasoning): no being can be without a ground, yet this does not begin to exhaust the phenomenality of a being. ‘The principle is valid of but not for the rose; of the rose in so far as it is an object [Gegenstand] of our representation; not for the rose in so far as the latter stands in itself, is simply rose’ (p.73).

Being is given; it is the ground of beings in a sense that is missed if we busily go in search of their grounds. The question ‘why’ puts the ground at a distance; the answer ‘since’ reveals its nearness. The rose’s avoidance of the principle of reason and its provision of ground in a different sense reveals that ‘The principle of ground [in its first accentuation] says nothing about the ground’ (p. 75) and prompts us to listen to it in the second accentuation, which indicates being and ground as imponderables lurking in the apparently so transparent principle.

‘The principle of ground, understood in the usual way, is not a statement about the ground but about a being in so far as it is in each case a being’ (p. 82). This discovery brings us into ‘a critical zone of thought’ (p. 84) where every step exposes us to errance. The principle now says; ‘To being belongs something such as ground. Being is groundlike, ground-ish… Being deploys its essence in itself as grounding’ (p. 90). ‘Being “is” in its essence: ground. Therefore being can never now first have a ground, which would ground it’ (p. 93). This independence of ground makes being the Ab-Grund (‘abyss’). What is the accord between these two propositions: ‘Being and ground: the same. Being: the Ab-grund’ (p. 93)?

 

2 Can thinking ground reason?

In naming being as a ground that does not need to be further grounded has Heidegger resolved the riddle of the principle of reason? The faulty nexus between thinking and reason in Heidegger can be discerned in the unbridged gap between ground in the normal logical and metaphysical sense and being-as-ground. Similarly, what is called ‘truth’, ‘error’, ‘being’, ‘nothingness’, ‘identity’, ‘difference’, ‘logos’, at the level of the thinking of being has but an equivocal relationship to what these terms denote in metaphysical discourse. To begin with they have a plurality of senses in their use in metaphysical argument, as in everyday usage, whereas Heidegger adheres to a univocal sense for each of these terms and so can discourse freely on their ‘essence’.

It may be that, starting from a particular example of ‘truth’ or ‘ground’ in a particular context, one can think back to the more essential depths of the phenomenon which thus comes into view. But the paths of such thinking back do not converge in a single bourne – the region of the Ereignis. They are trails of exploration as diverse as the styles of artistic creation or of religious imagination. A single unifying idea fails to impose itself. The big words, the transcendentals – being, good, beauty, ground – are only gasps before the immensity of things. Nor is ‘God’ a unified concept. The meaning of the word is inherently, thoroughly, contextual, as is the meaning of the word ‘being’. There are contexts in which neither word has any meaning and in which the universal features of ‘everyday understanding of being’ or sense of the absolute have deployed and dispersed themselves in quite different verbal universes. When people ring the changes on ‘God’ and ‘being’ they are doubly blinding themselves against the pluralism of the stories through which humans create and explore their worlds. The ‘God’ that is dead is the univocal God; language about God retains its sense as a constantly self-correcting, self-renewing language, variant from culture to culture, from context to context, changing at its margins into other varieties of religious language, such as language about the absolute, emptiness or the Tao.

It may be that the basic tenet of the phenomenality of being is based on a misappropriation of Husserl’s categorial intuition; gradually it becomes apparent that the major phenomenological Sache for Heidegger is not being but world, the open realm of manifestation. The forgetfulness of world in the natural attitude (everydayness) or in metaphysical world-constructions cannot be translated directly into an oblivion of being as being. The two lines of criticism fall apart and the latter is never given a firm phenomenological content. (See K. Held, ‘Heidegger und das Prinzip der Phänomenologie’ in Heidegger und die praktische Philosophie, Frankfurt, 1989, pp. 111-39). But Heidegger might accept that the phenomenon which conceals itself in the presence of being can be called ‘world’ just as well as ‘being’. Descombes notes the ‘defect of construction’ (p. 127) of the question of being which he sees as condemning Heidegger’s search for the ‘unthought’ of Western metaphysics to remain a pipe dream.

But do these criticisms rest on a careful consideration of Heidegger’s development of a ‘phenomenology of the unapparent’? (See J.-L. Marion, Réduction et donation, Paris, 1989, pp. 90-7. Unconvincing is Marion’s claim, on pp. 217-40, that Husserl was engaged with the Seinsfrage; ontology was in the air at that time, but Husserl’s discussion of it centres on matters having nothing to do wiht what for Heidegger was the unicum necessarium, and which he found hinted at in the categorial intuition of Logical Investigations VI.) What Descombes proposes instead is merely the ‘ontological clarification of the presuppositions of an epoch’ (p. 124). But this remains on the level of conceptual thinking, affords little scope for the liberating leap to a contemplation of the Sache selbst. How does one explicate the ontological implications of a poem? Whatever the inadequacies of Heidegger’s commentaries, they have opened up a meditation on the essence of literature – in Maurice Blanchot for example – which can never be recalled to the platitude Descombes recommends, which risks being absorbed by the ‘cybernetic’ (Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 64). ‘The dialogue of thinking with poetry is long. It has scarcely begun’ (GA 12:34). Heidegger’s meditative thinking has an autonomy and a strength which is independent of his constructions of being and its history. Beneath all great philosophical utterances lies a fathomless unthought and Heidegger is the one thinker who has provided us with a compass for exploring that dimension. The aporias of his thought are a challenge to pursue its project along new lines.

Heidegger’s search for originary phenomenological senses of ‘being’ and ‘true’ is in tension with the emergence of non-phenomenological senses in ancient Greece contemporaneously with scientific and philosophical thinking. Being, within metaphysics, figures as ground, in a sense that is not primarily phenomenological (see Zur Sache des Denkens, pp. 2, 36-7), and that cannot be reduced to the phenomenological (as Der Satz vom Grund seems to attempt). Even at the humble everyday level from which both types of discourse begin, there is a gulf between the phenomenological sense of being as presence and the logical functioning of the word ‘to be’. If one says: ‘it is true that three and three are six’ one has to draw on senses of ‘to be’ and ‘true’ that are autonomous in regard to such phenomenological matters as presence and concealment. These senses of being and truth neither transcend nor fall short of the phenomenological senses. They are simply other.

The fusion of the copulative, existential and veritative senses of ‘is’ constitutes a grammatical mistake. The effort to hold them together in a unitative way under the rubric of the pollachôs legetai does not work phenomenologically – it forces Heidegger to gloss over the ‘wonder’ of the veritative sense (‘it is’ = ‘it is true’) and dismiss it as mere correctness (Richtigkeit) or as simply ‘ontic’. The veritative sense can be brought into view phenomenologically only as something that gives the slip to phenomenology. Faced with the fact that some simple utterance – ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’ – is true and not false, phenomenology finds it has nothing to say, whereas reason may find here a starting point for deep metaphysical probings. Conversely, the sense of being as presence, of truth as unconcealment, eludes the kind of reasoning that deals in logical and factual truths. This mutual eluding of the phenomenological and the rational, neither of which can ground the other, is a situation no more enigmatic than the mutual eluding of, say, chemistry and music. We do not have a world-formula that can reveal these various perspectives unfolding from a single unitary instance.

Thinking of being does not succeed as ‘an endeavour which brings the essence of metaphysics to the fore and thereby brings it within its limits for the first time’ in view of an ‘originary appropriation’ of the metaphysical tradition (GA 12:103-4). Thinking can open up new realms but it is not qualified to declare a closure on the range of reason.

 

3 The supremacy of play

What grounds a being is nothing that can be cast in the form of a rational account, but is the donation of its presence from the event of being. This grounding phenomenon loves to conceal itself: ‘Being conceals itself as being, namely in its initial destinal belonging-together with the ground as logos... As it conceals its essence, being allows something else to come to the fore, namely the ground in the form of archai , aitiai, rationes, causae, principles, causes and rational grounds’ (Der Satz vom Grund, p. 183) to all of which aitaches a character of self-evidence that masks their forgotten origin. Being can now no longer be explained by reference to a ground; as grounding it is itself groundless; so to thought remains the duty of corresponding to the measure of being, not by any unsuitable procedures of reckoning or measuring, but by thinking being as being (p. 185). To think thus is to be drawn into the play of the world, a play ‘without why’. ‘Being as ground has no ground, plays as the non-ground, abyss, of that play which as a destiny plays to us being and ground’ (p. 188). The cryptic conclusions demand to be supplemented by Heidegger’s discussions of Heracritus in GA 55 (cf. Vorträge und Aufsätze, pp. 207-29; GA 15:9-226).

A question remains, as with all Heidegger’s reductions of metaphysical principles to pre-metaphysical openings of being: does the principle of sufficient reason rearly derive from the play of the world? Does reason not have an autonomous force independent of the aesthetics of play? Has Heidegger in his step back really restored metaphysics to its forgotten essence, or has he lost it from view? Is the emergence of the principle of reason governed by a destining of being, that is by a phenomenological instance of manifestation and withdrawal or does it emerge like the laws of mathematics and logic through a process of thinking which cannot be brought under the aegis of the phenomenological? Does the principle of reason cast the truth of being in the shade by its very nature or only because it is applied ruthlessly in matters where it cannot be normative or adequate?

Some later texts (Zur Sache des Denkens) may show a willingness to let metaphysics go its own way, as the effort to ground scientific reason in the most strenuous reflection possible, and to abandon the effort to found such rationality in the contemplative attention to the phenomenality of being. Scientific philosophy may be one of those ‘sieves which let through only quite particular aspects of the matter’ (GA 55:229) – but the same may be equally true of contemplative thinking. When Heidegger claims that only Seinsdenken grasps the truth of what is and that it has an essentiality and radicality from which merely rational thinking is barred by its very constitution, is he not in fact appealing to a form of that absolutism which he so often undermines in the work of his predecessors? To be sure, mystics and Zen masters depreciate the devices of reason in a similar style, but do they go so far as to claim that all rationality derives ultimately from Zen or mystic insight? It is this extra claim that allows Heidegger to take his place among the great metaphysicians. But the step back to ‘thinking’ may exact the relinquishment of any claim to such a place. To have retrieved the contemplative dimension of philosophy is enough; it is exorbitant to claim to have retrieved the foundation of its rational dimension as well. If reason marches on, oblivious of Heidegger’s intervention, that is not necessarily a great tragedy. The thinker of being like the mystic can perhaps flourish only in marginality. Sufficient to have planted seeds of reflection which may have here and there a greening effect on the landscape if science and philosophy (cf. Identität und Differenz, p. 67). His thought, attuned to the one thlng necessary, may afford a place of retreat when one tires of the struggle to grasp the world by reason. But it does not seem that its role is to criticize and direct the operations of reason. Its relation to them can only be an oblique one.

There is a version of reason which reduces the being of beings to what can be mastered by concepts and definitions. ‘Now this easy intelligibility becomes the standard for what obtains or can obtain, and that now means for what may be or be called a being’ (GA 65:336). Reason which makes itself small makes reality small as well. If there are occasions on which metaphysical, logical and scientific reason must reassert its dignity over against Heidegger’s depreciation, it is also a mark of true rationality to recognize the value of Heidegger’s mapping of the margins of the rational. If in his attempt to restore reason to its fuller context, Heidegger tended to bring philosophy down the blind alley of a pure thinking of the phenomenon of being, none the less he struck out on paths that free reason from a self-ideal of dispassionate objectivity, giving it a more contextual and participatory notion of its own operations. Conscious of the presence of Seinsdenken as its other, reason moves more humbly and more soberly, instead of chattering loudly in self-obsessed arrogance; the effect is similar to that produced on Christianity by an awareness of its coexistence with Judaism and Buddhism.

 

Pluralism at the origin

1 The deconstructive opening-up of Heidegger

Derrida undoes Heidegger’s essentialism by focusing on the fact that Heidegger uncovers the originary as ‘different’, as inherently other, thus unsettling the grounding and founding movement of his return to the essence. For the essence as Heidegger locates it is always marked by heterogeneity in regard to that of which it is the essence – the essence of technology is not anything technological, the essence of truth is non-truth, being comes into view as non-being. Derrida characterizes Heidegger’s ‘powerful thinking repetition’ as ‘a retreat or an advance towards the most originary, the pre-archi-originary which thinks… no other content than that which is there, be it as the promise of the future, in the heritage of metaphysics’ (De l’esprit, Paris, 1987, p. 183). In thus bringing being into view – as given and possibilized from out the e-vent of being (Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 8) – Heidegger invents a new sense of the originary, one which is hétérogène à l’origine, heterogeneous to anything metaphysics thinks of as origin, not a fundamentum inconcussum but one which is concussum (ib., p, 34), one which always reveals itself as other, as a rift. It looks then as if Heidegger himself is aware of the questionability of his claim to ground metaphysics in the thinking of being, and that the grounding progressively turns into its opposite, an ungrounding, an uncovering of irreducible enigma at the heart of the basic notions of metaphysics throughout its history.

Yet for Heidegger enigma retains a quiet authority that teases us out of thought. It is the essential heart of things, and remains immune to pluralistic dissemination. Ludic and an-archic readings of Heidegger, such as those of Caputo and Reiner Schürmann (Heidegger on Being and Acting, Indiana UP, 1987) may find much to nourish them in the final pages of Der Satz vom Grund, which create a sense that we have moved from a prison to a playground; but such readings miss the degree to which the Logos – however enigmatic it has become – remains a principle, an essence, a unifying factor; only as such does it retain the quiet power that can overcome the might of the principle of reason.

 

Whither leaps the leap away, when it leaps away from the ground? Does it leap into an abyss? Yes, in so far as we only think of the leap and in the field of vision of metaphysical thinking at that. No, in so far as we leap and release ourselves. Whither? To the place into which we have already been released: in belonging to being. Being itself however belongs to us; for only with us can it be as being, that is, be present. (Identität und Differenz, p. 20)

 

Being is abyss, Ab-grund, only because it is itself Grund, ground (Der Satz vom Grund, 185). The play of being is ‘free of all arbitrariness’ (p. 186), so much so that Heidegger can retrieve in a new key Leibniz’s ‘Cum Deus calculat fit mundus’ which he translates ‘While God plays, world becomes’ (p. 186).

Caputo dilutes this sense of order when he writes:

 

There are no hidden comforts, no hidden assurances, no steadfast guarantees concealed in this play. The play has the improbability of a child at play and an uncertainty which is marked by the question [‘whether and how, hearing the movements of this play, we play along with and join in the play’ (Der Satz vom Grund, p. 188)].

 

There seems to be little uncertainty about the serene order of the play of being, as far as its essence is concerned, though our failure to participate may imperil its actualization. It is misleading to say that by our participation in the play we ‘deny it rest and arrest’ as Caputo goes on to say; metaphysics, as an arrest of thinking, is to be overcome, but thinking itself rests in the play of being. It has nothing of the arbitrary improbability of a game of chance. To say of the dominant epochal terms that ‘there is no grounding of these elemental words’ and ‘they cannot lay claim to anything more than a certain historical aptness’, a situation which is ‘one of the most embarrassing things in the history of metaphysics’, is to smuggle into Heidegger’s thought something that it conspicuously lacks: an emphasis on the contingent pluralism of the historical languages of metaphysics.

Heidegger’s ‘destinal formations’ (Identität und Differenz, p. 58) replace Hegel’s epochs and Nietzsche’s theory that ‘as the law [Gesetzlichkeit] of history nihilism unfolds a series of different stages and forms of itself’ (Nietzsche II, p. 279). Their sequence is not a chance one, though it is also not a necessary one (Zur Sache des Denkens, p. 9). For Heidegger, the law underlying the nihilistic sequence of the mittences of being is the Ereignis which is their principle; thought of the Ereignis ends the history of being by recalling it to its source (ib., p. 44). ‘The Ereignis is the law, in so far as it gathers mortals in the appropriation to their essence and keeps them therein’ (GA 12:248). It is the true Grund. The strangeness and otherness of this Grund which turns out to be an Ab-grund does not license Caputo’s interpretation, that ‘everything is caught up in a certain fortuitousness’, nor his suggestion that ‘television and advanced forms of communication will spread the message… of the apocalypse without truth and revelation’ (Radical Hermeneutics, pp. 202, 203, 225, 226).

Schürmann, who tries to think with Heidegger beyond Heidegger in seeing the movement to the archê as betraying an an-archic thrust, does not do justice to the primacy, strongly affirmed in Heidegger, of identity – the belonging together of being and thinking in the Ereignis – over difference. Far from being a differential pullulation the Ereignis is a gathering of things into their essence. Heidegger remains a traditional metaphysician to the degree that the Ereignis is the truth, the ground, the essence of all that is. It first dawned on him as a great revelation in the 1936-8 manuscript (Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis), which rather than being thought of as Heidegger’s second masterpiece or even as his one true masterpiece (thus Otto Pögge1er in various publications) should rather be seen as the magma from which his masterly later writings were to emerge. It is clear that Heidegger is constructing a first philosophy:

 

The truth: ground as abyss [Abgrund]. Ground not: whence, but wherein in the sense of belonging. Abyss: as time-space [Zeit-Raum] of the struggle; the struggle as struggle of earth and world, since relation of truth to what-is!... [Truth] is the ground as what takes back and what pervades, which towers above the hidden without abolishing it; the affective tone which sounds as this ground. For this ground is the Ereignis itself as deployment of the essence of being. (GA 65:346)

 

The Ereignis is what lies at the heart of the simple there-isness of being, the ‘il y a’ of one of Rimbaud’s Illuminations (Zur Sache des Denkens, pp. 42-3). Beings do not emerge into presence in the medium of flat objecthood nor of Husserlian transcendental consciousness. Teasing at the mode of the givenness of being Heidegger moved beyond all former apprehensions of objectivity and subjectivity and came up with his own apprehension of the event of being, one which cannot be adequately expressed in propositions (ib., p. 25) but only in the visionary simplicity of the poetic word as found in the essential poets. And the heart of this word is a silence, which is inscrutable. The difference emergent here is of a contemplative order, which deconstructionism no less than metaphysical rationalism is quite incapable of espousing.

 

2 Mutual irrecuperability of faith and thinking

But it seems that in mapping the world according to the Ereignis Heidegger glossed over the pluralistic texture even of such contemplative simplicity, and hypostatized a unitary element in which all things fall into their proper place, in which ‘the world worlds’ and ‘the thing things’ according to their proper natures. Even the deconstructive version of the Ereignis as essentially difference, unless it is worked out in terms of a concrete pluralism, still risks projecting a unitary instance which undercuts all religions and philosophies as the unnameable other.

In some ways theologians are in a better position than philosophers when it comes to detecting the pluralistic texture of reality even at the depths involved here. Perhaps some theologians have identified their own radicality with that of Heidegger, misread in a still metaphysical sense, as Derrida suggests in the humorous closing pages of De l’esprit. The more alert, however, have stumbled on the differentiations inevitably emerging in any encounter between biblical thought and the thinking of beingl The dialogue between Heidegger and the theologians does not converge on the celebration of a single bedrock reality, beneath being and Spirit alike. Rather it is an experience of difference, of a gulf between the radicality that proceeds from the metaphysical tradition of naming being and the biblical tradition of naming God (and there are other gulfs, notably with the Buddhist tradition of emptiness). When abyss speaks to abyss in this way, a relativization is inevitable.

Heidegger cannot be recuperated in a theological scheme, such as that which seeks in the Es gibt the presence of the Creator who ‘gives’ beings (M. Villela-Petit, Heidegger et la question de Dieu, p. 95). Such religious constructions spoil the integrity of the phenomenon, and are a failure to let being be being. The Ereignis, the granting of being, is a gracious event, a constant source of wonder; but the invocation of the Creator to provide that wonder with a ground seems only to undermine it, to rationalize it. Here then is a depth of which theology cannot speak. Conversely, the Bible cannot be recuperated in a Heideggerian scheme, despite his attempts to bring it under the rubric of the Sacred – and thus is broken the imperialismof the thinking of being. As both traditions tealize their finitude the question of an ultimate originary instance becomes more profoundly obscure. One can practise ‘faith’ and one can practise ‘thinking of being’; the coexistence of the two practices can involve a greater or lesser degree of interaction. To claim the all-importance of one and the relative triviality of the other (as Heidegger presumed theologians would have to do) is a formula for fanaticism.

The hypothesis of a singie unitary granting of being and world certainly provided a grand theme for phenomenology; but it seems destined to dissolve into acceptance of the infinite plurality of human worlds as historically constituted. One may talk of an abstract form of worldhood in general, but this is something far more tenuous than the richly furnished world on which Heidegger meditates. There is a biblical experience of world on the basis of a vivid sense of dependence on the Creator which is neither reducible to onto-theological ratiocination nor assimilable to the Greek experience of world (Heidegger’s alternative ways of dismissing it). A tension between different forms of the worlding of world, worked out in different cultures, may be constitutive of the post-modern experience of the worlding of world. Within each culture the way the world worlds is undergoing constant modification. There is then no step back from the technological world to a unitary experience of the ‘fourfold’, but only an opening-up to a great variety of ways of being-in-the-world. This variety blurs any unitary notion of the truth of being and any unitary notion of God. Philosophical and religious languages, like artistic and literary ones, multiply according to the laws of historical and cultural pluralism.

It is misguided to set up a Pascalian clash between the Ereignis and the God of Abraham (see Heidegger et la question de Dieu, pp. 172-3) since both ‘God’ and Ereignis are unstable notions that dissolve into a plurality of historically constructed contemplative perspectives. The dialogue of theology with Heidegger (or of the biblical with the philosophical tradition) is much like the dialogue with literature: it offers a great variety of points of encounter and a great variety of points of tension, much as any exchange between human beings does. The pluralistic coexistence of the thinking of faith and the thinking of being cannot be reduced to a simple pattern by the imposition of an approved Christian evaluation of Heidegger’s thought or of an approved Heideggerian reading of Christian tradition. That is not to say that the dialogue will not occasion many firm judgements, both positive and negative; but the mutual solicitation is inherently open-ended, a space of thought whose contours cannot be rigidly demarcated – just as the contours of the encounter between Christianity and Platonism cannot be demarcated, even today.

 

3. For a general theory of pluralism

The acceptance of pluralism both in reason and in thinking does not invalidate the movement, the basic inspiration, of Heidegger’s thought – the reaching back from convenient conceptual lucidities to the obscure wonder of thi presence of things – but it diversifies this movement into a great variety of local and contextual paths of thinking. Each of these can be the critical overcoming of some form of blindness or forgetfulness and the bringing to light of some ‘essential’ phenomenon. Within the great religions such thinking back will try to renew the original impact of the revelation from which the tradition lives, but of course all such retrievals are recreations; even in the Pentateuch what a gulf there is between Deuteronomy and the earlier traditions it repeats! Any discipline may be inspired by the orientation of Heidegger’s depth-hermeneutic of retrieval/recreation; thus his influence may extend as his doctrines wither.

Heidegger’s insight into the Ereignis is not a pure intuition of essence. It is a cultural product, the fruit of an engagement with poetic and mystical traditions. Greisch finds a lack of coherence between the phenomenology of the Ereignis as simple, ineffable ‘identity’ – in which being and thinking (Identität und Differenz), or being and time (Zur Sache des Denkens), belong together – and the phenomenology of the carrying out (Austrag) of the dif-ference between being and beings (‘Identité et différence dans la pensée de Martin Heidegger’, RSPT 57, 1983, pp. 71-111). He suggests that the coherence can be found by pursuing the matter further, entering more fully into the simplicity of the Ereignis and leaving the question of the dif-ference to metaphysics; but it seems the destiny of any phenomenology of ‘world’ or of ‘being’ to come undone in a pluralism of perspectives. The Ereignis, as ‘the post-metaphysical name of the Pre-Socratic alêtheia’ (Greisch, La parole heureuse, 305), as ‘the most unapparent of the unapparent, the simplest of the simple, the nearest of the near and the farthest of the far’ (GA 12:247) – and as too much else besides – is a rubric under which a variety of contemplative perspectives are forced into unity.

As for the next grand principle, the fourfold, subordinate to the Ereignis almost as the Nous is to the One in Plotinus, it, too, seems to patch together into a dreamlike unity phenomenological quantities that are more convincing when left separate – mortal Dasein as the ‘there’ of being, and the struggle between the concealment of ‘earth’ and the openness of ‘world’, make perfect sense in certain particular contexts, but the gracious dance of earth, sky (‘world’ in the first version, GA 65:310), mortals and gods is just pleasantly poetic; can one believe that it lights up a structure at the heart of things, one of universal import? Had Heidegger attended more to the particularity of the worlds of his poets (instead of fusing them into a single phenomenological amalgam dominated by Hölderlin – as Heidegger interpreted him) he would have relinquished the search for a unified phenomenology of world, as Paul Ricoeur in Time and Narrative relinquishes the search for a unitary phenomenologv of time. Or at least he would have been more prudent in expounding the form of the phenomenality of world, refraining from giving it such charged concrete content.To justify the identification of being with world Heidegger has to posit that being is always manifest in a time-space, as the ‘abode of the moment [Augenblicksstätte] for the founding of the truth of being’ (GA 65:32), a moment of destiny in which the space of history is concentrated.

 

4 The theological leap to a pluralism of origins

Theological imitations of Kant's transcendental leap ground. Christian revelation in a metaphysics of human spirit opening onto the divine; they remain within the realm of subjectivity, subjectivity not in the sense of subjectivism but as ‘the essential law-character of the grounds which sufficiently provide the possibility of an object' (Der Satz vom Grund, p. 137)'. This, too,must be relinquished in the thinking leap to the truth of revelation (this phrase, too, is shorthand for a variety of contemplative perspectives), a leap which can only happen as a response to the call and claim of the divine Word. Barth is the one who his succeeded best in such a naming of the essence of Christianity, eclipsing the previous efforts.of Schleiermacher, Feuerbach or Harnack. What is lacking in Barth is the. Pluralism which opens the truth of revelation to the truth of the other ‘great beginnings' in the religious sphere.

What is the element in which the great beginnings can encounter one another? Is it the element of being? Of Buddhist emptiness? Of the biblical Holy Spirit? Of dialogue? Of an ethos of liberation? It is not, at least, any of the metaphysical elements that have been proposed as the ground of theology: the transcendental consciousness of Rahner, the Hegelian realm of spirit, the Whiteheadian realm of process, or the older Augustinian and Thomist ontologies. Nor is it the kerygmatic-existential element of Kierkegaard, Barth or Bultmann,for this demands to be released from its narrow isolation and exposed to the wider sweep of religious and human reality. Nor is it any discourse that savours of old ecclesiastical wineskins. Great as are the historical constructions of the churches, they appear in the light of the present interreligious horizon far too shrivelled and sectarian to serve as vehicles of spirit. They, too,are to be overcome.

The dimension towards which we must think is one in which all the great religious texts can speak their essential truths with the maximum resonances.It must be pneumatic, ‘empty’, liberational,dialogal in the strong sense of mutual solicitation. Only so can it allow the essence of religion to be released from its counter-essence of sectarianism, intolerance, fanaticism, fundamentalist sclerosis. What is the unifying elementin which these qualities can flourish? These qualities are not ahistorical attributes. They emerge with a special force at this specific historical moment in a conversion away from sectarian traditions, in a movement of expropriation that brings us into a new communality. How name this process? Just as the new realm of the thinkable opened up by Heidegger’s leap can be discerned only in light of the previous history of thinking, now seen for the first time as a destining of being, so the new realm opening up in religious awareness can be grasped only in a critical retreival of religious traditions as happenings of revelation, happenings always intrinsically pluralistic and open-ended.

 

5 God as Creator in a pluralist perspective

Heidegger raged throughout the thirties and forties against the reduction of beings to ‘products’ which the belief in a creator brought about. (H. Ott, Martin Heidegger, Frankfurt, 1988, makes much of this, tending to undersetimate the intellectual validity of Heidegger’s critique of scholasticism and ‘Christian philosophy’.) Beaufret objected to the monopoly enjoyed by God in the Christian view of being:

 

In the beginning God created, or rather created for himself, the heavens and the earth and finally his man. Everything is there, Heidegger says: the earth, the heavens, humans, the God – except the essential… For in the scriptural narrative three of the four depend on a Primus who is their origin and their centre as well. In place of the divine priority or primacy, Heidegger names a Fourfold or rather Uni-fourfold of which the centre is none of the four. (Heidegger et la question de Dieu, pp. 28-9)

 

The centre of the Fourfold is the holy as the chaos which yawns.

K. Rosenthal remarks that ‘the subordination of the God or the gods to chaos is the contrary of what is intended in the creation narrative’ (‘Martin Heideggers Auffassung von Gott’, Kerygma und Dogma 13, 1967, pp. 212-19; p. 224). But Beaufret points out that Heidegger is using the term ‘chaos’ in a special sense ‘in the closest connection with an originary interpretation of the essence of alêtheia, as the bottomless as it initially opens up’ (Nietzsche I, p. 350), the Open as it first opens to bring everything into its grasp, to accord to each differentiated being its presence within limits’ (M. Haar points out that Hölderlin only once uses ‘the holy’ as a substantive and that ‘the idea of a genesis of the gods from the Sacred is visibly unilateral and excessive’ (in Friedrich Hölderlin, ed. J.-F. Courtine, Paris, 1989, p. 504). Marion sees here an idolatry of being and the sacred as a screen against the sovereignty of God (Heidegger et la question de Dieu, pp. 60-6). M. Villeia-Petit defends Heidegger on the grounds that in the Bible God appears as a being, so that the experience of God depends on a prior experience of being (ib., pp. 91-2). Heidegger does not present being as the ground for God but as the space in which God is encountered (ib., p. 94). He is clearing the space for a renewed encounter with God, though his way of putting this is highly misleading, e. g. ‘the divinity as it deploys its essence receives its origin from the truth of being’ (GA 13:154). One might add that Marion’s project of thinking God as love ‘outside’ the question of being, and his dismissal of the play of being as mere inanity, could undercut the human basis for a full-blooded encounter with the divine. His Pascalian gesture of putting being at a distance – the distance measured and granted by the Cross – seems phenomenologically tenuous. But the entire framework of this debate is undercut if we register the historical texture both of the scriptural language of creation and the Heideggerian language of being.

Marion intends to verify this Pascalian subordination of the order of being to the order of charity on the purely philosophical plane through a phenomenology of love. One gathers that love will continue to let being play, but will judge its play to be ‘inane’. Pascalian ennui, in its indifference to beings, ‘suspends the claim of being and by that very fact confirms that the claim precedes being and alone makes it possible. The pure form of the call comes into play before any specification, even of being.’ This is rather dizzyingly rarefied; in prising the claim structure apart from being and siting it ‘beyond being’ is Marion making an apologetic attempt to discern the presence of a Creator through a depreciation of being? In ascribing such powers to ennui Marion seems to betray a notion of being as a projection of Dasein, a quasi-idealistic understanding from which Heidegger increasingly distanced himseif, and to miss the simplicity and undeniability of the Es gibt.

Dasein’s refusal to hear the call of being reveals a new existential, ‘a counter-existential, which suspends Dasein’s state of being destined to being’ to which corresponds ‘a new abyss, anterior, or at least irreducible, to being’, namely ‘the pure form of the call’ which is the unrecognized ‘condition of possibility of Heidegger’s call of being. Here it seems that a unitary logic that insists on the primacy of a single principle, whether being, or the call in general, or love, or the other, or God, suppresses the plurality of forms which each of these take and the ample room for interaction between them. Is not the human being always addressed by many calls, irreducible in their variety: the quiet call of being, the urgent call of duty, the cry of the oppressed, the lure of the beautiful; this variety of calls is found within the biblical kerygma alone - which is not exhausted by the ‘Hear, O Israel!’ of Deuteronomy 6.4. (See Réduction et donation, pp. 297, 283, 296, 295).

A more originary language of faith is not to be constructed from a general unitary form – whether the Ereignis or the pure form of the call or the Word of God. It can emerge only from a plunge into the concrete texture of the world of faith, both in its past sources and its present enactments. One might distil pure forms of logic or ontology independently of the complexities of the metaphysicai tradition, but there are no such pure forms in the world of faith, because that world is not a unitary realm. There is no eidetic science of the religious, either to be read off from a privileged tradition (the form of love from Christianity, the form of spiritual liberation from Buddhism), or to be constructed a priori and later filled with concrete content. In this respect faith is more like art or literature than like ontology or logic.

Not only does Christian identity vary from epoch to epoch and from culture to culture but it is constitutionally dependent on its others: the question what Christian faith is cannot be thought through to the end without an ongoing reference to Judaism, Islam, modern secularism, Hinduism, Buddhism. This means that the question is never fully thought out. Christian faith remains an open-ended project, intersecting with many other open-ended projects. God is revealed and is at work in Christianity, but not in such a way as to curtail or disrupt its dialogal dependence on the other traditions that coexist with it; and by Christian principles God is revealed and at work in all those other traditions as well. Christianity is far more a diachronic adventure than a synchronic system of tenets.The involvement with metaphysics is an important part of this story, which cannot undone by a single leap el sewhere. It is a story to be told and retold, therapeutically. Its significance cannot be encapsulated in a single definitive Wesensschau.

These remarks may apply also to Levinas’s reduction of ontology to a prior foundation in the claim of the other person (Heidegger et la question de Dieu, pp. 238-47). That claim seems to arise in an ontotogical desert – to the point that being lacks the certainty of its ‘justification’, which it can find only by attending to the moral claim which alone is ultimately or originally significant. But a quarrel of precedence between ethics and ontology supposes that both are grasped as unitary instances. The radical pluralism to which the ethical tear in the texture of ontology points is missed when one talks of grounding ontology in ethics. This unconvincing hierarchy of grounding relationships – metaphysics founded on Seinsdenken founded on the ethical – must yield to a pluralistic autonomy of all three instances, each an end in itself, or rather, each a language in itself, intersecting the others richly, but not in a way that admits a synthetic concord of the three languages. There is a touch of absolutism in the refusal of Heidegger, Levinas and Marion to entertain such a possibility. Heidegger does dally with it a little, in leaving the relation of his thought to theology and to ‘the other great beginnings’ open-ended; but usually only to quickly add the Parmenidean warning that whatever is ‘comes to pass in the dimension of being’ (GA 15:437).

To set this dimension against the creation.perspective is to be deceived by abstractions. If one lets both languages melt back into their historical contexts, it may be found that both have valuable functions, but that neither can serve as an all-purpose explication of the world. Unless this is done each style of thought is doomed to wage iconoclastic war against the other. Thus Beaufret has to repress the biblical Creator: the music of Bach, though used to celebrate the divine primacy, ‘speaks of the relation of the divine to the Uni-fourfold rather than of its isolation as supremacy over the rest of what is’. ‘Being in the Greek sense opens no possible access to the God of the Bible, but to a “theology” completely other than that of the Creator of heaven and earth’ (Heidegger et la question de Dieu, pp. 31, 34). Heidegger tries to bring Christ, the prophets and the Holy Spirit under the aegis of a Hellenic and Hölderlinian notion of the sacred (Vorträge und Aufsätze, p. 183). This effort to grasp the biblical in terms of the fourfold never succeeds; it is feit to be the imposition of an idolatrous screen cutting short the movement of faith which the phenomena evoke. But the converse imposition of the creation-perspective on other poetic apprehensions of nature may equally lack phenomenoiogical justice.

M. Zimmerman makes a suggestion which Heidegger himself does not explicitly rule out:

Does this conception of God exhaust the Jewish tradition of the Creator? Or does the Jewish tradition have a non-productionist, non-metaphysical experience of God, one that was ‘corrupted’ at the hands of St. Paul, St. John and other early Christians influenced by Greek metaphysics, especially Platonism? If the Jewish God may be construed as non-metaphysical then perhaps there is another possibility for renewing the West: an originary encounter with the God of the Old Testament. (Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity, Indiana UP, 1990, p. 183) (Zimmerman’s discussion of ‘productionist metaphysics’, like so many discussions of onto-theology, fails to engage Heidegger‘s critique of the principle of reason and his awareness of the force of that principle.)

One should add: an originary encounter with the God of St Paul and St John, who is essentially Spirit, and only to a minor degree shaped by Hellenistic conceptions; and indeed with the God of Christian faith of all periods, who is always in tension with the metaphysical constructions of his nature. ‘Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these? He who brings out their host by number, calling them all by name’ (Isaiah 40:26, RSV). In such texts the event of creation (of absolute divine Lordship) is in resonance with the election and liberation of Israel and the confounding of the might of the nations and their false gods. There are many other traditional ways of imagining creation, each of which deserves close literary and phenomenological study. None of them are simply reducible to productionism, not even the Johannine ‘all things were made (egeneto) through him’ (Jn 1:3) or the Pauline ‘since the creation of the world his invisible nature… has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made’ (Rom. 1:20), though in this latter text a Greek metaphysical component is undeniable.The rhetoric of Creation seems to license talk of God as ground, usually in a sense that would be more pleasing to Samuel Clarke than to Leibniz; but closer phenomenological analysis of it may show that it frustrates the quest for grounds. The multiplicity of ways of conceiving the Creator dissolves the unitary notion of ground into a plurality of projections of the absolute or the supreme real. Our thought, our faith, are drawn toward this realm, but can never reach a point of arrest; they reach out into the plurality of the mystery as art reaches out. It turns out that the inherited conceptions of God are only starting-points in the dialogue about that reality to which talk of God points, a reality that can henceforth be explored only in dialogue with Buddhism. That reality is in some sense ‘grounding’ but how this is to be said and thought remains more than ever an open question.

 

From C. Macann, ed. Critical Perspectives: Martin Heidegger, Routledge, 1992.

Heidegger and Indian Philosophy

I: IS THE QUESTION OF BEING UNIQUE TO THE WEST?

Inspired by Heidegger’s ontological questioning of Western tradition, Wilhelm Halbfass attempts to retrieve comparable ontological dimensions of Indian thought, which have been neglected by other scholars. He sees “no good reason to adopt Heidegger’s own exclusion of his ideas from the interpretation of non-Western traditions” (On Being and What There Is, SUNY Press, 1992, p. 25). If for Heidegger, the being-question is present in a latent or repressed way in Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche and the early Husserl, although they do not formally discuss being qua being, why should it not be equally present in Indian thought?

Using Heideggerian phenomenology to apprehend what is afoot in Indian tradition in a discreet, suggestive and non-dogmatic way, Halbfass shows a sophisticated awareness of the problematic aspects of Heidegger’s enterprise. The “history of being” which Heidegger distilled out of a selective focus on the ontological implications of past philosophical debates tends, though powerfully illuminating, to a determinism or fatalism which is implausible and paralyzing. Halbfass calls this construction into question by insisting that being is a universal concern, not a distinctively Western one, and that “being is one of the central and pervasive themes of Indian thought’ (OB, p. 21).

If my comments here take the form of doubts and misgivings – most of which have surely occurred to Halbfass himself –, the reason is not only my hesitancy to make positive statements about Indian philosophy, of which I know so little, but also a sense that, given the promise of Halbfass’s approach for the mutual clarification of Indian and Western thought, such misgivings need to be aired as fully as possible lest the process be short-circuited by hasty identifications. This merely dubitative posture may not save me from mistakes, but I am happy to think that Professor Halbfass’s corrections will provide the surest of safety-nets.

My principal misgiving concerns Halbfass’s scepticism about the Heideggerian question of being, a scepticism which facilitates his claim that ontology is a universal enterprise, but at the same time risks robbing this enterprise of any major philosophical interest. Certainly, Heidegger’s view of Western thought needs to be demystified to some extent. In part, his construal of the meaning of being is a modern, idiosyncratic reflection, and this may relativize his claim to retrieve the buried truth of the entire philosophical tradition. The word “being” itself may be incapable of sustaining the edifices of systematic metaphysics or even a unitary reflection on the meaning of being pursued in phenomenological style.

Heidegger’s attempt to gather things together in the Ereignis may be incompatible with the intrinsic pluralism of language, and the Ereignis may reflect a Greco-Germanic sense of being which is but one historical possibility among others, even within Western culture. His effort to step back from Western philosophical tradition to uncover its fundamental bearings, by a phenomenological bringing into view of matters that this tradition occludes, may suffer from a narrow purism in its focus on the being-question. Perhaps the Heideggerian path of questioning has no future unless opened out fully to historical pluralism and relativity. Just as one may take over Hegel’s dialectical negativity without adopting his system, so one may best do justice to the Heideggerian path of thinking by giving it such a pluralist inflection. Just as orthodox Hegelians have been an almost insignificant strand in the Wirkungsgeschichte of Hegel in comparison with heretics such as Marx or Kierkegaard, so the future impact of Heidegger may have little to do with orthodox Heideggerians, perhaps already an anachronistic species.

The being-question may not be as monolithic or as absolutely central as Heidegger supposes. Yet if one sees his concern with it as misguided, and surrenders to “growing doubts concerning the meaning and relevance of the topic itself” (OB, p. vii), the evident richness of Heidegger’s thought is left untapped. If the language of being turns out to be an inadequate vehicle for this richness, then a better one needs to be constructed. Despite my doubts about particular features of Heidegger’s construction of the “history of Being,” I consider that the basic thrust of his thought – the step back from rationalism to the phenomenality ofbeing – opens the most fundamental perspective now available for the assessment of Western philosophy. As sunlight falling on old stone carvings brings out their forms with a startling warmth of presence, so Heidegger’s reading lights up the most intimate concern of Western philosophy. His analysis of metaphysics as onto-theology applies squarely to the definition of that science in Aristotle, Aquinas, and Suarez, but it also sheds light on the ontological depth of German idealism, as the Erkenntnistheorie of Heidegger’s academic elders had failed to do (see GA 42:156-163). The Western philosophers respond to Heidegger’s reading as the pages of Beethoven or Chopin do to the fingers of a great if sometimes eccentric pianist, and his reading of the history of philosophy will retain its authority until those who query it come up with a more illuminating story. However, – and this is my second misgiving about Halbfass’s enterprise – it seems that Indian philosophy does not respond comparably to Heideggerian readings; the question of being has no thrilling resonance for it; its harmonies are not fully awakened by the Western touch.

(a) The Question of Being

The title On Being and What There Is sounds as Greek as Greek can be. Is it appropriate for a work on Indian ontology? The legitimacy of this transference becomes doubtful if we recall how rare and strange the question of being is, even in Greece: “The problem of being – in the sense of the question ‘What is being?’ – is the least natural of all problems, one which common sense never poses, one which neither pre-Aristotelian philosophy nor the immediately posterior tradition posed as such, one which is never sensed or glimpsed in non-Western traditions” (P. Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, PUF, 1991, pp. 13-14). It may be excessive to say that the question of being is not even glimpsed in non-Western traditions. Yet unless it is brought into sustained, explicit focus, it is a question that tends to evaporate. Indian reflection on the logic of being-words seems not to have attained this focus, not being firmly anchored in Parmenidean wonder at the fact that beings are.

[2006: To counter the misinterpretation that I am claiming in colonialist style that Indians are incapable of thinking of being, let me quote Arvind Mandair’s recent essay, “The Politics of Nonduality: Reassessing the Work of Transcendence in Modern Sikh Theology”, JAAR 74, 2006, pp. 646-73. He argues that confidence in the universality of metaphysics has led to the imposition of Western notions of ethical monotheism on Sikh tradition, leading to an “eclipse of nonduality”. Heidegger is cited as an anti-colonial resource: “far from being a term that can be applied without prejudice to all cultures, metaphysics is rooted in a specific religio-cultural tradition whose contours reveal themselves through the combination and continuity of the Greek (onto), Christian-scholastic (-theo) and secular-humanist (-logical) traditions” (649). I would stress, however, that the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics is there in essence in Aristotle, against the tendency of French Catholic philosophers to date it to Duns Scotus or later, which would undercut the use of Heidegger for a critical interrogation of patristic and scholastic ontotheology.]

For Heidegger, this wonder is the founding event of Western thought: “Esti gar einai – ‘For there is being’ – in this saying lies hidden the initial mystery for all thinking” (GA 9:334). As early as 1922 he found here “the historical paradigm for the immediacy of the encounter with Being”:

“Whatever is encountered is. Dasein is the basic trait of its look [eidos]. The overriding experience here, which has a way of obtruding upon what a being is, is that it is. It is in this sense that any being in its look of be-ing is simply one. Parmenides’ thesis is the expression of an original encounter with being itself. The force, simplicity, directness, and so the underivability of this encounter of an entity for itself and from itself correspond to the latent difficulty of illuminating and exposing such a Being” (T. Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, University of California Press, 1993, 245-6)

Aristotle, unlike Parmenides, is a thinker of form, but as Heidegger shows in Vom Wesen und Begriff der Phusis (GA 9:239-301) form is not mere stuff or shape, but the concentrated actuality of being. Dismissing Antiphon’s conception of nature as underlying matter (e.g. wood as the nature of the bed), Aristotle defined phusis as “the shape or form of things which have in themselves the source of their motion” (Physics 193b). Only when phusis is grasped in terms of form is it “adequately grasped as ousia, as a species of coming to presence” (GA 9:274). Aristotelian form (morphê, eidos) is not a mere attribute but a mode of being. Form and matter are in a relation of actuality and potency, and each of these terms is defined ontologically. When being is interpreted phenomenologically as coming to presence, form or entelecheia is grasped as the event of the coming to presence of an entity. Form as an ontological idea (in Plato) answers the question, “How does the entity qua entity look? As what does the entity itself show itself, when I contemplate it not in view of a given quality but only as an entity?” (GA 22:252). To grasp forms in a merely logical, objectifying way is to be blind to what is nearest to hand: “Corresponding to the colour-blind there are also people who are blind to phusis. And when we consider that phusis is qualified as a mode of ousia (beingness), then the phusis-blind are but a variety of the blind to being” (GA 9:264). Banal conceptions of stuff and shape, matter and form, are the “Allerweltstrasse” of Western thinking (GA 9:214); Heidegger presents these as a decline from originary Greek insight, but they may well belong to the ordinary stock of notions latent in the grammar of Indo-European languages. The question “ti to on?” (Metaphysics 1028b) – “what is a being qua being in its being?” – invites two sorts of reply. The first reply, a rational, speculative one, analyses the characteristics of being as such, and founds being in its ultimate cause, the supreme being. This reply constitutes onto-theo-logy, the distinguishing structure of Western metaphysics, fully explicit in Descartes and Leibniz (GA 40:88). What is wrong with onto-theo-logy is that, as onto-logy, it flattens out the phenomenological apprehension of the being of beings, eventually reducing it to an abstract and colourless ens commune. Concomitantly, as theo-logy, in grounding being in a supreme first cause it subjects being to the principle of sufficient reason; beings are now explained, in a rationalistic way, and are not allowed to flourish “without why” like the rose of Angelus Silesius (see Der Satz vom Grund, GA 14). Just as Voltaire’s Pangloss, caught up in the Lisbon earthquake, has only one question: “What could be the sufficient reason of this phenomenon?”, so one might imagine a caricatural ontotheologist examining a rose: “Aha! A being! And its ground? Why, being as such, being in general, ens commune (onto-logy). But is this sufficient? Must we not pose a supreme being which is the source of its being and the unifying ground of beings-as-a-whole? And this we call God (theo-logy).” in this construction is lost not only the fragrance of the rose, but the phenomenality of being and the authentic otherness of God [as revealed in Scripture].

Heidegger overcomes onto-theology by his retrieval of the Aristotelian question as a hermeneutical and phenomenological interrogation of the coming to presence of beings. He himself interrogates the experience of being (our everyday understanding of isness; our search for authentic existence; our wonder at the fact that there are beings rather than nothing) and the language of being (the everyday uses of “is”; the languages of philosophical and poetic tradition) in order to discover the meaning of being or the truth of being, which he ultimately names the Ereignis – the “event’ which grants the being of beings, which enables “the worlding of world” and “the thinging of things.” This is not a metaphysical foundation but the phenomenological essence of the givenness of beings. The vocabulary of being is inadequate, a culture-bound Western product, to what is emerging here, so that Heidegger has to develop his own style of quasi-metaphorical saying.

The basic step in ontology is to distinguish “being” from “beings” so as to clarify their relationship. Halbfass accepts Quine’s question “what is there?’ as “the fundamental ontological question” (70), thus reducing ontology to a merely ontic “inventory of what exists’ (49). Such an inventory will, to be sure, carry an implicit ontological commitment (a notion of what being is). But if this commitment is not thematized, or if its thematization is seen as impossible, then we do not have ontology in Aristotle’s or Heidegger’s sense. Crude thematizations – e.g. “what exist are just physical things” – lack a sense of the question of being. Even loftier thematizations – e.g., “all that exists is Brahman” – may not have glimpsed the question of being. The issue may have been decided in an ontic contest between different descriptions of what there is, rather than in an ontological clarification of what it means to be. Even if, with Nietzsche, one dismisses inquiry into being as a mist, it does seem to be a distinctively Western mist.

Analytical philosophers may deplore Heidegger’s “use and misuse of ‘systematically misleading expressions’” (OB, 11), yet have they produced critical studies of Heidegger’s language and thought-patterns that could measure the strength and limits of his revival of the being-question? That would require some basic sympathy with his concern for the authentic phenomenality of beings. Full-blooded positivists dismiss the entire ontological tradition as based on systematically misleading expressions. They could be answered by a logical clarification which retrieves and justifies the discourse on being or, in Heideggerian style, by a study of the phenomenological content of being-language. It can happen that a philosophical classic reveals weaknesses when approached in the logical way, while retaining its power in the phenomenological perspective. Thus Parmenides confuses different senses of the word “is”, and the logical reading shows him at best as forming the notion of a pure existence without qualities, which replaces Thales’s water or Heraclitus’s fire in the role of ultimate explanatory principle. The phenomenological approach on the other hand retrieves coherence and depth in his thought by reading him as a thinker of the event or phenomenon of being.

Heidegger is aware that the term “being” is a tricky one. He envisages its multivocity as a weave or skein, a Geflecht, translating the Aristotelian “to on legetai pollachôs” (Met. 1003a. 1028a) in phenomenological terms as “Das seiend-Sein kommt vielfältig zum Scheinen, The coming to manifestation of being is manifold” (Was ist das – die Philosophie?, 1956, 46). His own use of the vocabulary of being acquires its coherence from its rigorously phenomenological character. The precise bearing of his explorations can be measured only in terms of the matter with which they are concerned – not the logic or conceptuality of “being” but the concrete modes of the presence or givenness of beings in their being. However, it is misleading to say that the later Heidegger withdrew “into poetry, myth, and capricious etymologies” and “does not even attempt that kind of historical and systematic clarification that we find in Heidegger’s earlier statements” (OB, 10). The critiques of Leibniz and Hegel in the mid-fifties show that he kept up his quest for a clear overview of the history of the being-question.

(b) A Distinctively Greek Question

The Greek question of being is foreign even to Western ears. It points to what is nearest at hand yet farthest from our reflective grasp. The question is doubly foreign to Indian ears. The Parmenidean wonder at being was not a foundational event in Indian thought, and so the subsequent Aristotelian question “What is being?” was never posed in the same sense, nor did India produce a metaphysics in the sense of a science of being qua being. There is a fit between the being-question and the history of Western metaphysics which makes its illumination central and foundational; the light it can shed on Indian thought may introduce distorting emphases. To ask what destiny of being lies behind Indian thought, as J. L. Mehta does, is to risk forcing it into shapes suggested by the Western story (while drawing on questionable reaches of Heidegger’s thought).

Heidegger would probably agree that blindness to being is universal- and not only because of the Westernization of the earth through technology. Attention to being must then be equally universal. But it is only in the West that such attention has been thematized as a central concern, by a rare handful of powerful thinkers. The other traditions have different languages for awakening to the reality of the things themselves. As a distinctive thematization of a universally latent problematic – a thematization which in its concrete elaboration has of course many parochial, non-universal features – Western philosophy has an irreducible identity. Thus Heidegger writes, as early as 1939: “Philosophy is Western philosophy; there is no other, for the essence of the West and Western history has been determined through what is called philosophy. Ignoring all academic notions and historical accounts of philosophy as a cultural phenomenon, we should understand it as: reflection on what there is as such as a whole; in short – though this too is indeterminate because polyvalent – asking the question of being. “Being” is the ground-word of philosophy” (GA 68:9). It could not be said that “being” is the Grundwort of any Indian philosophy. Some of Heidegger’s strongest pronouncements on the specificity of metaphysics date from the mid-fifties: “The style of all Western/European philosophy – there is no other, neither a Chinese nor an Indian – is determined from the twofold, “beings-being.” Its dealings with this twofold take their normative shape from the Platonic account of this twofold” (Was heisst Denken?, 1954, 136). The word “style” here suggests that there is a contingency to the development of philosophical and religious traditions comparable to that of artistic styles, so that what seems normative and natural within one culture may remain unthought of in another. The concept of being is a cultural construction just as much as is that of moksa or karman. Our present insight into cultural pluralism (as Dilthey understood) forces us to renounce the illusion that these great words are transparent namings of the real.

Metaphysics, for Heidegger, is not a system but “that knowing in which Western historical humanity preserves the truth of the relation to beings-as-a-whole and the truth about beings-as-a-whole” (GA 9:241). Western philosophy is “einzigartig” and “eindeutig” (Was ist das – die Philosophie?, 14) because of the unusual question that guides it, the question of the being of beings: “Philosophy is underway to the being of the entity, that is, to the entity in regard to being” (25). This very simple, but also quite confusing question about beings in their being is one that occurred to the Greeks and that only they pursued in depth: “Just this, that the entity remains gathered in being, that in the manifesting of being the entity appears, this plunged the Greeks, and them first and only, in amazement” (22). It is in this sense that the question, “What is that?” is “an originally Greek question” (17), for it is pushed back to its ontological basis: ‘What is this being qua being?”

If Heidegger had embarked on a dialogue with India, he might have been as unwilling to talk about being as he was when in dialogue with theology, or with Japan. This is perhaps less an “exclusion” (OB, 25) than a sense that, however fruitful inquiry into the ontological aspect of Indian thought may be, we need to go beyond this if the Indian “great beginning” is to put us in question in light of its own foremost concerns. Even in the case of Western sources which use the Greek language of being correlations with Greek ontology can be treacherous. I am thinking of the Johannine vocabulary of Logos, einai, aletheia, pneuma and how entirely it would be falsified if one tried to bring it into direct connection with metaphysical or Heideggerian concerns. Via Philo of Alexandria, John inherited Platonic vocabulary, yet the remarkable thing is how he frees this vocabulary of any associations with the demiurge of the Timaeus or any other theme of philosophical ontology.

The claim that the question of being is uniquely Greek does not imply ignorance of the fact that there have been Indian debates about “being,” with logical procedures similar to those of the West. “His assertion that the ‘question of being’ is the one and only question of philosophy seems as excessive as his stubborn insistence that not only ontology, but philosophy in general, is a uniquely Greek-European phenomenon” (OB, 11). But in Heidegger’s defence it should be noted that he is reducing Western philosophy to a local, historical tradition with a specific question, the question of being; there is no suggestion that India lacked logical analysis and speculative penetration. While Greek thought, at its most distinctive, bathes in the light of being, in other traditions it is not under the aegis of the being-question that logic, ethics, causally based cosmology, theories of truth and of beauty are developed, but in light of some other distinctive opening for thought, such as the question of spiritual liberation. Though much of Indian thought is oblivious of spiritual liberation just as much of Western thought is oblivious of the being-question, the topic of liberation exerted on some of India’s greatest thinkers a magnetic attraction comparable to that which being has had at high points of Western philosophy. It is not on the question “what is being qua being?” that Indian philosophical radicality converges, and India has largely been spared the intellectual headaches this question has always caused.

Heidegger is the opposite of a Eurocentric imperialist, for his awareness of the historical contingency of Western ontology clears the path to a radical pluralism of what he calls the “great beginnings,” though to be sure there is a certain essentialism in the way he tries to cleanly differentiate these traditions (notably the Hellenic and Semitic traditions in the West). His discovery that Greek ontology is but a province of thought makes him a pluralistic thinker in principle, not a provincial one. To stress the commonalities between India and Europe to the point where these differentiations are flattened out is to regress from this dialogal openness. J. N. Mohanty, whose criticism of Heidegger’s view of history resembles Halbfass’s, seems to court this danger: “To hold that, since the specific question about the meaning of Being (raised by Heidegger) was not asked in the Indian tradition that tradition’s concern with Being cannot yield ontology, would be misleading, for not all those who thought about metaphysics and ontology in the Western tradition asked the Heideggerian question about the meaning of Being… Metaphysical or ontological thinking is not Greek in origin: a certain variety of it is” (Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought, OUP, 1992, p. 152). But it is precisely the generic similarity between Indian and Greek philosophy that Heidegger wants to get beyond. The Greek “variety” is not one among others. It is a grasp of being (subjective and objective genitive) which did not come to pass in this insistent, determining way in other traditions, despite their random and tentative broodings on the sense of the word ‘being.’

Mohanty (289) thinks that the importance of the subject-object distinction in Indian thought confutes Heidegger’s view that it belongs to the Western destiny of being; but Heidegger sights Cartesian subjectivity and objectivity in terms of their ontological upshot within Western thought; he does not deny that analogous distinctions may have been made in other traditions, but there they do not play a role in the unfolding of the question of being. How little Mohanty appreciates the strength of Heidegger’s reading of the Western metaphysical adventure can be gauged from his misunderstanding of the term “onto-theology”: “Heidegger continued to look upon the Kantian Transcendental unity of apperception, the Hegelian Geist, the Fichtean Ego as but secularized versions of deeply theological notions. Not surprisingly, Heidegger characterized Western metaphysics as onto-theological” (297).

II: ONTOLOGICAL THEMES IN INDIAN THOUGHT

(a) The Analysis of “Being” is not Central

The intense logico-linguistic discussion about the words “as/asti (corresponding to the Latin est, Greek esti, English is, etc.) and bhū/bhavati (which has an intriguing etymological kinship with Greek phyô/physis)” (OB, 22) does not necessarily amount to focussing the question of being as a basic one, in the manner of metaphysics. Still less does it amount to attending to the phenomenon of being, as the Greeks did in their “wonder” at the enigma of being and as Heidegger attempts to do more explicitly by means of phenomenological hermeneutics or poetic thinking. (Poetic thinking could be seen as a more refined and rigorous version of phenomenological hermeneutics, in that it is less encumbered with metaphysical conceptuality and more attuned to the thing itself.) Even if the darśanas intensively discuss being and substance (bhâva,sattâ, astitva, dravya), this may be no more than a scholastic clarification of abstract concepts, of which “being” may be just one among others. The distinction between sattâ (being) and the second order concept of astitva – “is-ness,” “irreducible identity, identifiability” (OB, 144), which can apply even to non-existence – is a lucid clarification of ideas, but does it reflect an experience of being? Has the notion of being sufficient valency in Indian thought to be invoked as a solution to the problem of evil, as in the Augustinian teaching that evil is nothing substantial, but a mere defect of being? Never more than a pallid universal – whether conceived as an abstraction or as a primal stuff –, it cannot serve to name the concrete actuality of entities in their analogous diversity.

The verbs for “to be” in Sanskrit are “commonly treated as verbs expressing a peculiar kind of process or action” (OB, 22). So is the verb sein in Heidegger. But the process or action in question is exclusively the presencing of beings in their being, and confusion with any other kind of process or action is scrupulously avoided; hence the diffrculty of Heidegger’s language, which is at the service of a basic simplicity. Does the Indian discussion of “to be” bring into view the phenomenon of being in a comparable way? Such topics as occurrence, durable presence, genesis, change, manifestation, actuality/potentiality are ontic rather than ontological unless their specifically ontological import is isolated. Heidegger’s exegeses of Aristotle go one step further, descrying the phenomenological core of the ontological statements. Similarly, the logic and semantics of nonbeing and-negation do not necessarily amount to a metaphysical question (“why are there beings rather than nothing?”) or, still less, to a thoughtful grasp of the phenomenon of nothingness.

The “horizon concepts’ or “mythical projections under which being itself is subsumed” (OB, 23) suggest that the question of being never acquired autonomy and primacy in Indian thought. It could easily be treated lightly and subordinated to other concerns. When Erich Frauwallner finds parallels between the movement in India from myth, to home-made “scientific’ explanations of natural phenomena, to the introduction of a doctrine of categories, and the Greek progress from myth, to Pre-Socratic “science,” to Platonic-Aristotelian categoriology, these parallels throw into relief what is missing at every stage: the ontological interest which prevails in the greatest Greek thinkers. As cosmologists, logicians, category-analysts, the Indians are close to the Greeks; but the elusive question of being remains the distinctive trait of the latter. Moreover, the proto-scientific dimension of Indian thought never flourished, for lack of empirical observation; “in this domain Indian philosophy doesn’t even come near the attainments of Greek philosophy” (Frauwallner, Geschichte der indischen Philosophie, II, 1956, p. 7). Could there be a connection between the non-emergence of the question of being and this lack of empirical curiosity about bodily substances? The Greek wonder at being inspired the interrogation of beings; the Indian readiness to treat the external as secondary or illusory leads to a volatilization of the being-question in favour of issues of spiritual release.

No doubt Sanskrit, just as much as Greek, lends itself to a speculative development and precise analysis of being-language. But isn’t there an extra twist in the Greek fascination with being that has no equivalent in the Indian world? Systems of thinking of different cultures may freely intermingle at their lower reaches – in logical or ethical discussion – but when one traces them back to their fundamental motives their difference appears. As the Seinsfrage loses its specifically Greek contours it can blend with a more general commonsense puzzling about the logic of “to be” found also in Indian tradition.

Greece is more worthy of question than India on the topic of being: “As Indo-European, Sanskrit also is in some measure ‘metaphysical,’ as distinct from the languages of the Far East, with the notions of Being embedded in it grammatically and conceptually. It is metaphysical in being representational, concept-generating, and in being productive of ontological speculation about Being as the ground of all that is… Since this possibility of thinking has been fulfilled in its amplest and purest form in the Greek tradition, Heidegger is not interested in how Sanskrit speaks.” (J. L. Mehta. “Heidegger and Vedanta”, in G. Parkes, ed. Heidegger and Asian Thought, Honolulu, 1987, p. 27).

On other topics, however, India may be the privileged dialogue-partner. Sanskrit shares with Greek “a common stock of philosophical problems, insights, and confusions” (OB, 129) in the discussion of universals. Such logical topics were perhaps only imperfectly integrated with the ontological question in the West, and ontological presuppositions may have been a barrier to the development of logic.

Again, Indian epistemological discussions were often in advance of the West, perhaps because they were not clogged by Western commitments to substantial being. In the West, it is only with Kant that epistemology and logic are foregrounded to supplant ontology in the manner of Udiyana’s (11th century) definition of astitva as “being the object of affirmative awareness” or “ascertainability without reference to a counter-entity” (OB, 156-157), or his definition of dravya as “what is not the locus of the utter absence of qualities” or “the substrate of three layers of inherence” (93). The Vaiśeṣika thinkers know that “objectivity and cognizability as such cannot establish the distinction between being and nonbeing” (157), but this again sights the reality of being only in a logical perspective and offers no distinct positive conception of its nature.

In the treatment of perception, the rival claims of phenomenalism, representationalism and direct realism could be discussed all the more lucidly in that the ontology of substance was not hovering over them as a daunting enigma. Heidegger is a direct realist; he would say: “I see the tree in the garden, not the representation of the tree,” but with an ontological, Aristotelian twist, quite absent in India – “I apprehend the tree in its being, either letting it be in poetic, meditative thinking, or cramping its being in technological, calculative objectifications.” Merely epistemological clarification of perception cannot fulfil the Western philosopher’s thirst for being, to which Heidegger recalls the tradition, and which he retrieves beneath the epistemological burrowings of Descartes and Kant. A parallel argument that Indian epistemology is led by the tacit question of being would be less persuasive.

Again, many themes in the philosophy of mind as developed in the West seem to have been explored more radically in India, so that here one cannot afford to neglect “how Sanskrit speaks.” Conversely, it would be hard to discuss Yogâcâra, for example, without drawing on the resources of a Hegelian or Husserlian phenomenology of consciousness. Yet the “selective affinities” (G. Larson and R. Bhattacharya, Classical Samkhaya, Delhi, 1987, p. 641) between parts of both traditions do not amount to identical problematics. In any case they do not concern Heidegger’s question; he uses the term “consciousness” only for the modern medium of the apprehension of being, which, since Descartes, entails an occlusion of the authentic phenomenality of being. On the theme of consciousness, India may challenge Europe, whereas on the theme of being, it is Europe’s force that challenges India.

Reference to India certainly introduces a broader horizon, bringing our own puzzling ontological legacy into a fuller perspective. But it may be instructive above all as showing how a great intellectual tradition can get on without the question of being. Analogously, what makes Buddhism instructive to Christianity is the way it gets on without the question of God. The “relativistic detachment” (OB, 12) such comparison induces may weaken our commitment to the frameworks of our own tradition, but it is likely also to confirm that our tradition is local and idiosyncratic- that monotheism is characteristically Jewish and that ontology is characteristically Greek, even if one does find notions of God and of being in other traditions.

(b) Being as Stuff and as Abstraction

The Indian notion of being wavers between reification and conceptualism, both of which occlude at base the phenomenon of being. There is no higher understanding of being whereby a critique of these notions could be carried out, though they may be transcended towards an absolute beyond being. Some Samkhya statements look like universal ontological theses, e.g.: “There is no origination for what is not, nor destruction for what is” (OB, 59). But these may amount to no more than a principle of conservation of the material universe. Thinkers who see sat, pure being, as “the universal substrate” (ib.) may likewise think of being only as a stuff; the Chandogya Upanisad’s teaching that “In the beginning my dear, this world was just Being” (OB, 26) glides swiftly into an evolutional unfolding, of which being is no more than the undifferentiated point of departure.

Prabhâkara (Mimamsa) rejected the general concept of existence on the ground that “we do not in fact perceive things as merely existing. The true sense of existence is merely the individuality of things (svarūpa-sattâ); it is not a true class character” (A. B. Keith, The Karma-Mimamsa, Delhi, 1978, p. 58; see OB, 156). The apperception of being qua being, in its transcendental, analogous character – which is neither an empirical datum nor an abstract concept – is again missed here.

In Vaiśeṣika, ontological thought was arrested by a fundamental option for ontological realism (Frauwallner, 119) and especially by the treatment of sattâ as a “reified universal” (OB, 150). For OB, the notion of inherence (samavâya) has ontological status as “the one pervasive structure of our universe that constitutes the condition of the possibility of concrete, qualified entities and of contingent existence” (148). A faint suspicion: do the refinements sighted here depend on a Kantian lens? Others view this notion of inherence as another reified abstraction. But if we see inherence as a pervasive ontological structure, comparable to Buddhist dependent origination or Vedantic mâyâ, we may still ask whether these structures which govern the emergence and relations of beings ever bring into focus their being qua being. A causal and logical ordering of things may trace their origins without interrogating their being, as happens in the sciences for example. The extra step which raises the question of being may be a step back or away from sensible logical or causal thinking. It is doubtful if Western discourse on being is a harmonious continuation of logical and causal investigation; it seems rather to introduce a troubling cloudiness; and even when being is finally tamed to logic and grounds it seems unhappy in its onto-theological abode, as if itching to break out again. In India the analysis of being never clouds over in this way. Buddhism and Vedanta also take a step into realms irreducible to logic or common sense, but led by other issues than the question of being. The energy of fundamental questioning is captured by these issues, and being as such is not what becomes problematic.

Again, defences of stable identity against Buddhist doctrines of universal momentariness and flux are not properly ontological. The concept of “practical efficiency” (arthakriyâ) as a criterion of being focusses on the problem of distinguishing reality from appearance (OB, 152) rather than on the question of what being as such is. If the Buddhists used it to give a reductive account of being-language, this again is not ontology but a discrediting of ontology. On the Buddhist side, being had only conventional reality, and did not become a subject of contemplation for its own sake; on the other side, the defence of robust ontological realism against Buddhist subversion left little leisure for disinterested musing on the enigmatic character of being. Such musing remains a peculiarly Greek pastime and to pursue it today one has to think as a Greek rather than as an Indian.

Vyomaśiva (c. 800-850 CE) expresses the Vaiśeṣika ambition thus: “I shall enumerate everything in the world that has the character of being”(OB, 69). Does this mean that an ontological understanding – “one comprehensive horizon of being” (70) – underlies the task of categorization? The idea of being (bhâva) at work here may be an unexamined one, just an everyday commmonsense notion of what is real. If one proceeds from it to the listing, never returning back to thematize the enigmatic aspects of the notion itself, one has not embarked on ontology in the sense of a questioning of being. The explicit discussion of bhâva in Vaiśeṣika resorts to abstract universals immediately: “existence is a universal only” (sûtra I.2.4; OB, 140); “that genus which is not a species lying under any superior genus” (K. Potter, The Tradition of Nyâya-Vaiśeṣika up to Gangesa, Delhi, 1977, p.140). “‘Reality’ (sattâ) constitutes the ‘ultimate universal’ or ‘supreme generality.’ It is all-inclusive and pervades all substances, qualities, and motions” (OB, 117).

“Being is one, because of the uniformity of its mark ‘is,’ and because of the absence of any mark of differentiation”; “Being is not a substance, because it possesses one substance. It is neither a motion nor a quality, because it exists in qualities and motions. Also because of the absence of genus and species in it, Being is known to be different from substance, quality, and motion. For the same reasons, substanceness, qualityhood, and motionhood are known to be different from substance, quality, and motion” (Potter, 213-14). Being here is a pure abstraction, comparable to substanceness or motionhood. Aristotle, in contrast, rejects the interpretation of being as supreme genus (OB, 2, 140); only in doing so can he keep open the question of being in its multivocity, and glimpse the irreducibility of being as the transcendens schlechthin (GA 2:51; 9:336-7), in its qualitative difference from entities (the ontological difference). Phenomenologically, existence is not a universal, a predicate universally applied, but in each case the distinctive act or event of existing – energeia. Here Vaiśeṣika finds nothing worthy of thought. The readiness to identify bhâva as the supreme genus cuts off the question of being at its roots. In the West, when being is thought of in this abstract way it represents a forgetfulness of the question; in India it represents a failure of the question to emerge. We have at best an undetermined sense that “as the supreme universal it is also something over and above, and different from, the particular and perishable entities in which it occurs” and “imperishable and permanent” (OB, 140)

(c) Shared Themes

1. Form. There is a wonder at form in Indian thought. But again it is not clear that this carried the charge of a wonder at being. Is there any Indian notion of form that plays the specifically ontological role that eidos has in Plato and Aristotle? Even the “form itself is emptiness” of the Heart Sutra grasps phenomena in their phenomenality, not specifically in their being. A phenomenology of the empirical world in view of emptiness is quite a different matter from one in view of being. Though one might find in Plotinus, Spinoza, Berkeley, Bradley, or Bergson some rough analogies to Madhyamaka and Advaita notions that the objective world with its differentiations has a merely conventional reality, or that all empirical objects are merely superimpositions on the pure undifferentiated ultimate reality, nonetheles such ideas are still, after two centuries of Western exposure to Vedânta, experienced as foreign and unsettling. The Western concern with being and form seems to have worked against a radicalization of the question of appearance and reality. This concern was reinforced by the Christian metaphysics of creation which stressed the distinct existence of finite created substance, and by the doctrine of Chalcedon (451 CE) which, by insisting on the integrity of Christ’s human nature, formed a bulwark against emanationist or absorptionist accounts of the relation of human and divine (see H. U. von Balthasar, Kosmische Liturgie, Einsiedeln, 1988, pp. 35-41; he refers sweepingly to “asiatische Auflösung”, p. 122). To Western thinkers, Indian reflection on mâyâ and emptiness initially seems but an inchoate groping toward their own mastery of logical determinations. But if these Indian worlds of thought could be tucked neatly away in the folds of Hegel’s Logic, they would not be worth our study. Their cultural and historical roots make them more than mere intellectual contructions. As living paths of thought they elude our mastery and summon us to open dialogue.

2. Causality. In Indian thought a fascination with causality has given rise to theories at least as subtle as those of the West. However, this causal reasoning was not applied to being qua being, but only to entities – cosmic or psychological – in their arising and passing away. Cause, in India, is not the Aristotelian aition, namely “that which is responsible for the fact that a being is that which it is” (GA 9:246). We do not find in India “Parmenides’s persistence. in holding fast to the purity and simplicity of the experience contained in the single Greek word Esti (‘it is’), by the sharp repulsion of the obtrusive tendency to address being in terms of doxa, as coming to be and passing away” (Kisiel, 246). Descending from the Eleatic acropolis one may indeed retrieve the world of coming to be and passing away as a worthy theme of specifically ontological thought; but this was not the Indian experience.

In the West, causal arguments for the existence of God quickly become ontological. The arguments from motion or design can be reduced to the argument that finite or participated being requires to be grounded in Being itself. The arguments of Udayana in the Nyâkakusumânjali sometimes have a familiar feel to Western readers, for instance the temporal argument against self-causation: “Nor can things be self-caused, since a thing cannot both originate at a certain time and yet exist prior to that time, and the causal relation involves temporal succession” (Potter, 559); compare Aquinas:  “nihil est causa semetipsius; esset enim prius seipso, quod est impossibile” (Contra Gentiles I 18). Yet as he develops his causal reasoning, it is striking how rarely he alights on the ontological notions that would immediately suggest themselves to the Western mind. “Causation just means regular connection between something prior to the effect and the appearance of that effect” (Potter, 560). There is a touch of Humean refinement to this, but no sense of the production of an effect as an ontological (rather than merely ontic) event – no glimpse of the cause as bringing the effect from potency to act in virtue of its own actuality. This might give Udayana a modern cast, prompting comparison of his arguments with Western discussions of causality since Leibniz. Most of his arguments are epistemological: “we need the hypothesis of God to justify the initial acceptance of the Vedas by reasonable men” (Potter, 574). Epistemological acuity seems to crowd out talk of being. Again, when Udayana plays with the notions of “latent causality, potentiality, and manifestation” (OB, 58) in his dialectical refutation of the sheer actualism of the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness, it does not appear that these acquire any properly ontological consistency for him.

Earlier, Vyomaśiva had defined the production of objects as “connection with their own causes and reality” rather than merely “(coming into) existence after prior nonexistence” (ib., 193); this had some ontological bite. Udayana regresses to the view that “‘Being an effect’ is simply the state of being of something that did not exist before” (ib.). His disregard of the earlier stress on sattâdsambandha, “connection with reality,” may reflect a major ontological reorientation as OB suggests. But sattâdsambandha, as originally used by Prasastapâda (6thcentury), ‘does not answer or even address the question what being, reality, or existence is.” It has the merely logical, classificatory sense of “having reality as a predicate” (ib., 170, 174). It seems that discussion of causality never made the breakthrough to a radically ontological treatment.

3. Act and potency. Halbfass claims that the debate between Sankhya satkâryavâda and Vaiśeṣika asatkâryavâda – between “actualization of the nonactual” and “production of new actualities out of preexisting underlying actualities” (186) – is not merely about causation but is “a genuinely ontological debate,” albeit marked by “a certain refusal to address each other’s basic premises concerning the nature of being and the different meanings in which the words sat and asat are used” (58). The “being” from which things originate in Samkhya is a kind of being that Vaiśeṣika does not recognize at all, characterized by “potency, potentiality, latency, indefiniteness, and subtleness” (185). There is a contrast in ontology here, but if the two darśanas did not join battle on this topic, then the specifically ontological question was eluded.

Even if the Vaiśeṣika sattâ could be seen, in the light of the Samkhya pradhâna, as “a mere storehouse of potentialities or as potentiality par excellence” (177), the potentiality in question is not purely ontological dunamis but the concrete evolutional substrate, the “indefinite, nonmanifest, nonactualized ground” of the cosmos” (185). Criticizing the language of modern Samkhya scholars who talk of effects as “specifications of the inherent generativity of primordial materiality” (Larson/Bhattacharya, 68), Halbfass says such language does not address the fundamental ontological issue” (59); but it may be an Aristotelian lens that enables him to sharpen the ontological focus. If the Samkhya sources did not in fact get beyond a material image of evolutionary transformation, we must not read back into them Aristotelian conceptions of dunamis, entelecheia and final causality. These notions can be applied to Samkhya from outside, but they have a transcendental generality that the Samkhya notions lack. Since they capture aspects of being qua being, they apply to any being whatsoever, from God to the abstractions of mathematics or logic. True, a general concept of potency, applicable to everything, is found in Vaiśeṣika; but its ontological foundation is not securely grasped. To stress Udayana’s concern with “potentiality” (58, 65) is to underline the fact that he does not reflect on potentiality as a state of being. To conceive of the potential and the actual in a general commonsense way, or merely as abstract logical categories, is not to attain the Aristotelian insight into potential being and actual being.

In Yoga, “Transition from potentiality (śakti) to actuality (abhivyakti) in the mental sphere means change from an unconscious, ‘unnoticed’ (aparidṛṣta) state to a conscious, ‘noticed’ (paridṛṣta) one” (60-1): here there is no reference to being. “Present phenomena are manifest, that is, actual; past and future phenomena are subtle, that is, potential… The concepts of actuality and potentiality are thus used in an attempt to clarify the nature of time” (61). Again, the contrast between subtle and manifest is not the equivalent of the Aristotelian focus on being in potency and in act. It seems misleading to see here an insight into “the enigmatic relationship between being and time” (62). Nor do Bhartṛhari’s questions – “How does the verb be (bhū), how does the noun reality (sattâ) refer to time?... How can ‘being’ itself in its verbal sense, as an act or process, be there?” (207) – rise from the logico-ontic to the ontological level. Again, Bhartṛhari’s thesis that time (conceived as a substance) activates “those powers and potentialities (śakti) that constitute the condition of the possibility of all actual, particularized existence,” or that “reality itself (sattâ), the highest universal, is unleashed and manifested in those lower universals (jâti) which are the eternal prototypes and potentialities of all particulars” (205-6), is a speculative construction that does not entail a phenomenological meditation on the interplay of being and time.

4. Time. The closest one comes to such a phenomenology in India is in the Buddhist tendency to “an increasingly radical and explicit fusion of being and time or temporality” (221). But even here Nâgârjuna uses the mutual dependence of past, present and future to prove that none of them has real existence; this demonstration of emptiness shows little puzzling over the phenomenon of time for its own sake. For Advaita, “time appears as fundamentally incompatible with reality in the true sense” (221), whereas Western thought, even in Neo-Platonism, has dwelt attentively on the being, or half-being, of time. The Greek way of posing the question “What is time?” or any other “What is” question is honed by a focus on essence or being. Indian definition, in contrast “has no relation with what we would call the essence of a thing… Because I read the universal in the concrete, at the very level of the concrete, I am dispensed from thinking that universal, from conceptualizing it, from defining its essence” (M. Biardeau, Journal Asiatique 257, 1957, pp. 373,375). Indian analysis was not answerable to a strict, authoritative regime of essence (as even Christian theology has been); its starting points and its goals were of varied religious or speculative kinds, each determining a style of analysis only rarely coincident with the “scientific” and “philosophical’ attitudes central in the West. Heidegger is the heir of Aristotle (and Augustine) whose aporetic interrogation of the most salient phenomenological features of time set the agenda for Western thought on the subject. Rather than dissolve time in true Being he focusses more sharply the phenomenon of being by bringing into view the inevitable temporality of its play of presence and absence.

(d) Categories.

Halbfass’s account of the Vaiśeṣika categories confirms the impression that categories in Indian thought do not carry the same ontological intention as in Aristotle. Aristotle’s categories are rooted in a full apprehension of substances in their being; there are few of them and they lend themselves to empirical, phenomenological exposition and interrogation (as in the Physics); Vaiśeṣika categories are abstract and multiply, to fill out a system, more by logical distinction than by reference to phenomenological aspects of observed entities; if they map out “what there is,” they do so with little attention to the being of what there is. Udayana’s attempt to derive and justify the Vaiśeṣika categories (79) stresses the primacy of substance (dravya) in a commonsense way, but does not attempt to order them in terms of being. Heidegger was aware of the categorical genius of the Sanskrit language: “A kategoria is a word in which a thing is “indicted” as what it is’ This prephilosophical meaning of kategoria is far removed from that which the casual and superficial foreign word category still retains in our language. The Aristotelian usage just cited corresponds much rather to the spirit of the Greek language which, as tacitly philosophical and metaphysical, distinguishes Greek, along with Sanskrit and cultivated German, above all other languages” (Nietzsche IV, San Francisco, 1982, p. 37, modified). But the “special affinity between ontology and categoriality” (OB, 139) does not mean that a developed system of categories necessarily implies a profound ontology; indeed the question of being can throw one’s categories into confusion, whereas dexterity in handling categories can go hand in hand with forgetfulness of being.

Kanâda’s six categories do not include “isness”; neither do Aristotle’s ten, but ousia is related to einai, whereas dravya (substance) is not related to sat or astitva. To be sure, among the six, substance, quality, and activity are singled out as connected to being (sattâ). In the list of ten we find śakti and aśakti, potentiality and nonpotentiality. There is confusion as to whether the universal, sattâ, applies to all positive categories or to the first three only. In any case since the three following categories (universal, particularity, inherence) inhere in the first three, and since quality and activity inhere in substance as their substrate, there is a strong identification of substance with being, as in Aristotle. So in this sense “explicit conceptualization of being” does indeed “emerge out of the enumeration and classification of what there is” (OB, 139). But does it emerge as just a formal abstraction? Is it an especially thought-provoking concept, a source of wonder – or is it merely an occasion for logical clarifications? “Is the Vaiśeṣika ontology an epiphenomenon of its categoriology? Is there an understanding of being which is prior to, and the condition of, its project of categorial analysis and enumeration?”(ib.). “A sense of ‘being’ that implies, above all, enumerability and identifiability” (220) is a very undeveloped notion of the meaning of being – and one that is “internally inconsistent, theoretically unfeasible” and “soteriologically irrelevant or counterproductive” (70). Even if other Indian thinkers formulated such negative evaluations of the ontological upshot of enumerability, they did not necessarily do so from an ontological concern of the sort that we are likely to import into the Indian framework. Neither the positive nor the negative implications of Vaiśeṣika ontology bring it into the neighbourhood of the highest Western thematization of being.

Even if Indian thought lends itself to Heideggerian exegesis in a way that biblical thought, for example, does not, what the exegesis yields is much less rich than in the case of Western sources and also much less illuminating as regards the internal dynamic of Indian thought. In Western thinking led by the question of being the categoriology is a fleshing out of the prior understanding of being (even in philosophers such as Hegel who have “forgotten” being as the Greeks saw it). The tendency to enumeration, so tiresome in Abhidharma, Samkhya and Vaiśeṣika, never took hold among the Greeks, because their overriding philosophical interest was not the multiplicity of beings but their unity in being. Vaiśeṣika enumeration aims to be an exhaustive catalogue of the many; some Vedantin critics insisted that “an understanding of Being cannot be gained through an enumeration and classification of different entities. True, absolute being transcends and precedes all distinctions, including the distinction between being and nonbeing” (OB, 159). But do even the Vedantins linger in meditation on the hen panta in terms of the being of beings? Does their quest for unity get beyond an ontic totalization? Having identified the principle of cosmic unity, do they go on to interrogate it, and to dwell on the enigmatic interplay of the one universal reality of being and the many distinct individual entities? Their monism is the obverse of Vaiśeṣika enumeration, and equally suggests a forgetfulness of being: they “argue against the very possibility of defining entities, of establishing them in their individual identity, and of defining and establishing being itself in its distinction from nonbeing” (232). The failure to focus being as being is in both cases due to an overriding concern with spiritual liberation. Multiplicity, for the Abhidharma or Vaiśeṣika, is of interest primarily as a map of the obstacles or aids to liberation, while the Vedantins’ stress on unity also has a primarily soteriological purpose; whether controlled by categorization or totalized and dissolved in some form of monism the many ceases to obstruct liberation.

When Western metaphysics declines into representational thinking, used as a means of technological mastery of the earth, an expression of the will to power, this should not be equiparated with vaguely similar features in Indian thought:

“‘Representational,’ ‘objectifying’ thought is fully present in the Vaiśeṣika system of categories, in its enterprise of enumerating and classifying whatever there is, and above all, in its conceptualizations of being. To be sure, it is not a Cartesian attempt to establish man &s the master and owner of nature; but it is an attempt to put the world at our intellectual and conceptual disposal, to explain it once and for all through a process of comprehensive enumeration and classification. Being itself is either objectified and appears as an entity among entities or it accompanies the process of enumeration as its receding horizon or expanding shadow.” (OB, 231)

Here a Heideggerian lens allows one to find a phenomenon of rationalistic decadence in Indian scholasticism, and at the same time this casts doubt on Heidegger’s claim to explain such phenomena in the West exclusively in terms of the destiny of the thinking of being. But what also emerges is that the Indian phenomenon lacks the distinctive ontological import that it has in Western rationalism; it even appears to suffer a certain aimlessness in comparison with the intense determination of the Western rational project. The fixational character of Vaiśeṣika categorizations, criticized by Sankara (OB, 231), contrasts with the dynamic thrust of Western rationalism precisely in this: that the West is haunted by the quest for Being (however narrowly conceived) whereas Vaiśeṣika is trapped in the enumeration of beings. In short, Vaiśeṣika thinking is ontic, not ontological. Or if it has an ontological upshot, this is clarified by reference to the Greek tradition, just as the relevancy of Western philosophy to the attainment of moksa could be clarified only by reference to the Indian tradition.

(e) The Absence of the Question of Being in Nâgârjuna and Sankara

The Indian style of thought which effects a “simultaneous de-objectification of the objectified” may make Indian philosophy “a treasure house of direct promise to the Heideggerian quest” (Mehta 44). But to conflate it with the Heideggerian tension between calculative and meditative thinking is to slur over the basic difference between the thought of being and the nondual apprehension of Brahman or śūnyatâ. Nâgârjuna and Sarikara, in their overcoming of the conventional in the name of a different kind of thinking or apperception which reaches highest truth, recall Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysical and technological reason in the name of the thinking of being. In both cases what is to be overcome is allowed validity in its proper sphere; though in both cases there is a certain ambivalence toward the realm of the conventional that is never quite resolved. But the ultimate truth aimed at in the Indian thinkers is of a loftier order than the contemplative apprehension of beings in their being, and they do not have any time to linger on the latter occupation. Advaita overshoots the thought of being to affirm instead “the nondual state of âtman/brahman that is prior to, and the condition of, all apparent dichotomies and alternatives, including those between being and nonbeing” (233), and the same may be said of the Madhyamaka affirmation of emptiness. The contemplative nonduality both cultivate cannot be equated with Heidegger’s goal, the togetherness of being and thinking in the Ereignis.

Halbfass claims that in addition to the negative ontology – “beyond being and non-being” – Indian thought also apprehends the character of being in a positive way in a kind of “soteriontology.” Sankara’s concept of liberation and Nâgârjuna’s emptiness have “an undeniably ontological dimension” (39). The trouble is that any transcending of beings to their ground or to their true identity has an implicit ontological dimension, but its explicit thematization is likely to remain vague or inadequate unless the question of being has been elaborated beforehand. To what extent is Halbfass’s focus on the ontological upshot of Sankara’s or Nâgârjuna’s language the product of his schooling in Western ontology?

Unlike earlier Buddhist analysis, which stopped at the identification of dharmas as its end-point (54), Nâgârjuna’s question about the ultimate reality of these dharmas and his diagnosis that it is emptiness offer a semblance of the Western question of being. But is the doctrine of emptiness established by ontological inquiry into the being of dharmas and is it presented as an answer to such inquiry? There is a dialectical dissolution of the dharmas’ claim to substantial identity, so that they are no longer obstacles to the vision of emptiness, but the topic of the being of these entities does not emerge prominently. When Nâgârjuna treats objective categorizations as “part of the conventional world of samvrti and vyavahâra” to be surpassed in “the transcendence of is and is not..., the disappearance of our preoccupation with being and nonbeing” (233), he takes conventional notions of being and non-being as they stand, and then transcends them towards a condition to which ontological language does not apply; he does not interrogate them for their own sake; the idea of being is undone not by a leap back to its origin (the Ereignis) but by a leap forward to nirvâna.

The transcendence of both sat and asat was typical of higher Indian speculation from Vedic times (OB, 32) and prevented a focus on beings in their beingness. “The sense of transcending the entire ‘ontic’ realm, which we find not only in Vedic-Upanisadic thought, but also, though in a radically different style, in Buddhism (most notably in Nâgârjuna’s śūnyavâda)” (43), is not something distinctively ontological: it overleaps the phenomenon of beingness in favour of Brahman or emptiness. To say that “negative ontology, deliberate silence about being and nonbeing, radical critique of worldly notions of being and identity may, indeed, be reflections and expressions of an intense search for, and commitment to, being and identity” (233) is an impossibly vague statement that only confirms that Nâgârjuna never embarked on the discourse of the question of being; Heidegger’s critique of worldly notions of being is indeed ontologically motivated, but Nâgârjuna’s motivation is radically different, however one describes it. David Loy believes that “Buddhism includes a strong ontotheological element” which Nâgârjuna seeks to deconstruct. He explains the Madhyamaka distinction between conventional and ultimate truth in Derridian terms: ultimate truth “points beyond language and therefore beyond truth, raising the question of ‘the truth of truth’ and the very possibility of truth in philosophy” – the ‘higher truth’… is that there is no truth” (“The Deconstruction of Buddhism,” in H. Coward and T. Foshay, ed., Buddhism and Negative Theology, SUNY Press, 1992, pp. 227, 241, 244). Such loose analogies blur the specific contours of what Nâgârjuna was doing in the second century and what Heidegger and Derrida are doing in the twentieth. The Indian “‘tension and balance’ between objectification and its transcendence” follows a spiritual dynamic as remote from Greek ontology as it is from Christian mysticism. The Indian “meaningful silence about being” (OB, 234) is a silence that is not really about being but about that of which the language of being cannot speak. Heidegger never gives up the effort to bring being to speech, even if the names he finally comes up with are no longer ontological ones. Indian categorization lacks ontological bite, and its move to silence is a further move away from the being-question.

III: QUASI-HEIDEGGERIAN OVERCOMING IN INDIAN TRADITION

(a) Can Heidegger’s quest for a regrounding of thinking in a contemplative presence to being and beings, world and things, be extended, mutatis mutandis, to Indian philosophy. Analogous extensions of Heideggerian overcoming to Christan theology, favoured by Heidegger himself in his dialogue with theologians, have had a twofold character. The first stage has been an overcoming of the metaphysics in Christian tradition, implementing the Heideggerian critique not for the sake of the “truth of being” but for the sake of the biblical revelation, compromised by its ontotogical explication. The intra-Christian differentiation of original, authentic Christianity from the various forms of occlusion or forgetfulness which it has fallen into is not a distinctively Heideggerian path of overcoming, but a structural similarity allows us to call it “quasi-Heideggerian.” The movement from occluding secondariness back to the primary and originary, whether in Heidegger, in Christianity, or in Indian thought, can become too sweeping. But whatever demystification or deconstruction is required need not entail an invalidation of its basic concern. If deconstruction makes of the ontological difference only one difference among others, in a general play of différance’, “weaving ontological difference’s traits into the quasi-synthetic arrangement of difference” (R. Gasché, Inventions of Difference, Harvard UP, 1994, p. 105), or if it treats the quest for a more faithful phenomenological grasp of the event of being or the event of revelation as the product of a delusive metaphysics of presence, then deconstruction itself becomes a rationalism sunk in forgetfulness of being.

Since Indian philosophy was not affected by Greek thought, Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics has no direct application to it, apart from inspiring a general attentiveness to the alienating character of abstract formalism and suggesting a method of historical genealogy. An intra-Indian differentiation of the authentic depths of Indian thought from alienated traditions does not have to wrestle with the Western fate of rationalism and technology, but with whatever fate hangs heavily Indian history. (Of course India has to struggle with the modern West as well, and may appropriate the Heideggerian critique.)

Halbfass evokes “the Vedic sense of the openness of space and what we may call a primeval metaphysical clearing,” and “a sense of wonder and amazement about that which appears in this extended openness, the spatial and temporal things that emerge in it… experienced in the sheer amazing presence and inexplicable coltingency of their existence” (30-1). As Heidegger finds traces of a primordial unhiddenness in the Pre-Socratics, the Vedas reveal in its first immediacy the Indian experience of the “worlding of world.” Yet the topics of wonder, contingency, and the clearing (Lichtung) are perhaps still too Heideggerian to match the intrinsic phenomenoiogical lineaments of the Vedic world. One remembers Heidegger’s comment on Bultmann’s existential interpretation of New Testament categories: “That’s too Heideggerian for me!” Again, how serviceable are the Heideggerian elements in this statement?: “One may say that Brahman and Âtman are the ground-words of the Indian tradition, not just words or concepts, but the very embodiment of that primordial unhiddenness in the light of which the Indian mind thenceforth breathed and thought” (Mehta, Philosophy East and West 20, 1970, p. 305). “Primordial unhiddenness” has a specific phenomenological thrust in Heidegger, as a description of the originary truth of being; but it is devalued when used indiscriminately to describe the other “great beginnings.” Similar applications of Heideggerian language in Christian theology have the same doubly falsifying effect. The central Indian phenomena are the depths of the mind or the supreme simplicity of emptiness, themes remote from Heidegger as the otherworldliness of Neo-Platonism is.

The Indian love of concept and speculation is too close to what Heidegger was fleeing from, and does not offer the refreshing contrast provided by the Chinese use of characters and aphorisms to name things in their concreteness. It is with Daoism, and the Daoist element in Zen Buddhism, that his thought finds the most vibrant affinities. His recall to living in the present world, to letting things be in a wise passivity, and his use of paradoxical language to awaken to here-and-now reality, are quickly understood by Asian readers. The vast spaces of Chinese paintings are conjoined with an intensively this-worldly sense of mortals in their finitude and of the thereness of things, and thus invite Heideggerian attention. Regrettably, his dealings with the East were thwarted by the language-barrier: “The greatest difficulty in this enterprise always lies, as far as I can see, in the fact that with few exceptions there is no command of the Eastern languages either in Europe or the United States’ (quoted, W. E. Nagley, Philosophy East and West 20, 1970).

Both Christianity and Indian thought can learn from the Heideggerian quest for the phenomenal, worldly reality which grounds Western metaphysical language. The overcoming of metaphysics puts in question its basic frameworks, such as the distinction between being and becoming, and questions back to what underlies these frameworks and is occluded by them. In Indian thought, the distinction between the world of karman and transmigration and the salvific goal of release constitutes a basic framework that has perhaps been grasped in ways that occlude its original significance. To bring to light the unthought of this tradition, an overcoming should focus not on “forgetfulness of being” but on “forgetfulness of release” – in this respect Buddhism and Vedânta play a quasi-Heideggerian role.

If Buddhism, in its concern with liberation, neglects the being of the beings it analyses as “empty of self-nature, it may be that Heidegger, conversely, in his fascination with the “thinging of things” neglects the realm of transmundane spiritual freedom. Each tradition is pursuing its own overcoming from within, in an irreducible variety of ways – Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida on the one hand; different forms of Vedânta and Buddhism on the other. When the Eastern and Western styles of overcoming meet, the resulting hybrids may be superficial academic constructions or a convincing new departure. The gesture of overcoming has on both sides to be released from its doctrinaire sheath – Buddhist, Vedantic, and Heideggerian orthodoxies are relativized as they are brought to bear on traditions remote from their original field of application.

(b) Heidegger’s reading of the history of metaphysics digs beneath homonyms to discover the quite different ontological horizons presiding over, say, the principle of contradiction in Aristotle, Leibniz, Hegel, and Nietzsche: “The principle says something essential not only about ‘contradiction’ but about the being as such and about the kind of truth in which the being as such is experienced and projected” (Nietzsche IV, 112). Can we bring the tired doxography of histories of Indian philosophy into such an enlightening perspective, by differentiating the horizons within which theses and principles are generated? An obstacle to this is the relative stability of Indian intellectual history. Heidegger overcomes metaphysics as a history that has run its course; only the completion of this history allows us to step back to what could not be thought by any system within the tradition. Has Indian thought also completed a historical trajectory that now opens up a space for more radical questioning? Whereas Heidegger’s many targets – the Platonic dualism between soul and body, literal and figurative, medieval creationism, the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics, the increasing hegemony of the principle of sufficient reason, the objectivation of beings and the dominance of narrowly defined Cartesian subjectivity, the technological reduction of being to the functional, the latent nihilism of metaphysics – are united under a single rubric: the story of being’s self-concealment in the various formations of metaphysics, it is hard to tell a similar over-arching story of Indian thought. The major systems persist with little change from the time of their consolidation. Even if Sankara or Râmânuja represent a transformation in the essence of Vedânta or the Mahâyâna sutras and philosophies are a revolution within Buddhism, these developments are not matched by contemporaneous events in the other traditions.

Heidegger’s story of how metaphysics moves through various transformations of its essence, as destined by being, belongs to a tradition of such stories (Hegel, Dilthey, Nietzsche). The composition of the tale is helped by its narrow setting – philosophical Europe, dwindling after Descartes to Germany alone – and by the cult of progress and sense of historicity that have increasingly marked Europe. India is too big, and the social distances between its schools and religions too wide, for a tidy story to be told, nor does it help the teller by any innate sense of its own historicity. Indian thinkers laboured at an eternal tradition, rather than worrying, with Hegel, that their works would be sold off at the next book fair. In the age of the cathedrals, as the scholastics unrolled their commentaries on Aristotle and the Sentences, Europe may have briefly enjoyed that boundless intellectual peace which was the Indian norm. Perhaps one of the results of exposure to India will be that history will lose the hegemonic status it enjoys in Hegel and Heidegger (and in theology in its relation of mutual influence to these thinkers).

(d) The foundational Indian texts – the Vedas, the Upanisads, the Buddhist Sutras, the Bhagavadgitâ – raised questions about being only incidentally to cosmological, psychological and soteriological debates. In the darśanas, there is inverse proportion between scholastic analysis of the concept of being and existential concern with deliverance. In Vedânta and Mahâyana the soteriological reflection on the status of the samsaric world generates a functional ontology, but this is not developed for its own sake. When Greek philosophy came under the sway of soteriological concern, in Neo-Platonism, its ontological heritage was simplified: the question of being yielded to an ordering of being in terms of transcendence – strongly oriented to the One beyond being. Something similar happened in India, except that the ontological basis was overshadowed from the start.

Biblical theism also generated a special sense of being: the conviction that things are sustained in being by God at every moment, that in their finitude they reflect God’s glory. This is a large component in the ontological interpretation of causality in the West, along with Neo-Platonic interpretations of Aristotle. Heidegger does little justice to the power of this biblically-inspired ontology when he denounces Christian philosophy as a square circle, on the grounds that faith is qualitatively different from philosophical questioning (GA 40:9; GA 9:379). He might have similar misgivings about the Indian philosophies that appeal to Vedic authority, though it would be hard to apply his purist ideal of the autonomy of philosophy and his rigid notion of faith and its authority to the looser relations prevailing between the Vedas and Indian philosophy. Philosophy always has contingent cultural matrices in which it is embedded, though it aims to free itself from them; these generally include a dialogue with religion. Heidegger half-freed himself from Christianity only to hitch his thought to a Neo-Hellenic religious tradition refracted by Hölderlin.

Heidegger saw theism as occasioning an arrest of the ontological quest: the question of being is curtailed when one immediately answers the question, “Why are there beings rather than nothing?” by referring to God the creator, the source of all being (see GA 40:8-9). He would probably see the Naiyâyika arguments for the existence of God (see Potter, 100-11) as reducing the world to a thing made, thus closing access to its being. Brahman in Vedânta is Being (sat) as is God in medieval theology (ipsum esse subsistens): the theologically radical character of this thought may be at the expense of ontological questioning. When Bhâsarvajnâ (c. 860-920) invokes “divine cognition” as a framework and receptacle of reality in the widest sense – wider than the highest universal, sattâ, and encompassing also astitva, the common denominator of all six categories” (OB, 219), he may seem to transcend the abstractness of the Vaiśeṣika concept of being, but the concreteness he introduces is a theological rather than an ontological one; the truth of being is more remote than ever.

The thirst for the Absolute, both in Christianity and in India, has been in tension with the consideration of being, for the being of beings – whether approached phenomenologically or in speculative reflection – is not something absolute; neither is it relative; it simply is – “Es ‘ist’ Es selbst” (GA 9:331). Vaiśeṣika began as a pure natural philosophy, yet already Prasastapâda presents understanding of the six categories of the Vaiśeṣikasutras, their similarities and dissimilarities as a condition of release (Potter, 283); attempts to explain cosmic process in karmic terms, and with reference to an omnipresent invisible soul, increasingly drew this school into the soteriological drift characteristic of Indian philosophy (Frauwallner, 90-105). The connection between knowledge and salvation here is external, paying lip-service to the general Indian ideal of philosophy as salvific. Classical Nyâya, in contrast, is a doctrine of salvation; its twelve objects of knowledge are soteriological key themes (ib., 27-8, 73-6); “body,” for instance, is focussed not as an objective, physical datum but as an element of personhood, mistaken for the self because of the delusion of “mineness” (G. Oberhammmer, “Der Frühe Nyâya,” in A. W. van den Hoek, et al., ed., Ritual, State and History in South Asia, Leiden, 1992, p. 245).

Philosophical salvation was a feature of the Greek philosophies – Stoicism, Epicureanism, Neo-Platonism and some aspects of Plato’s own teaching – but after Judaism, Christianity and Islam drafted philosophy into their service, an autonomous philosophical doctrine of salvation was not recovered until Spinoza; even the German idealists could not draft a philosophical path of salvation independent of Christianity. Schopenhauer replaced Christianity in this role with Indian doctrines of salvation. Since then, Nietzsche and Heidegger come closest to creating an autonomous philosophical soteriology. Heidegger’s message of a right relation to being can be a bridge to the soteriological philosophies of India, permitting a demystified access to them which should also shed light on the problems of interreligious dialogue.

From: Beyond Orientalism, ed. Eli Franco and Karin Preisendanz. (Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities vol. 59). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997.

Heidegger's Estrangements

Heidegger's Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings. By GERALD L. BRUNS. Yale University Press, 1989.

ln this. thoughtful, telling, and very valuable work, Bruns, a literary critic, demolishes many of the cliches about the later Heidegger which circulate among philosophers and focusses - in an audition of some of Heidegger's most pregnant texts - on the unsettling strangeness which these cliches are designed to repress: "philosophers are so stewed in their prejudices concerning poetry that they have pretty much closed themselves off to what the later Heidegger is about - frequently they don’t even have the general drift" (xvi). The heart of the book is an airins of two texts from Unterwegs zur Sprache, "Language" (Chapters 2 and 3) and “The Way to Language" (Chapters 4 and 5). The author proceeds slowly and elaborately, with a tendency to repetitiveness. His is an exemplary commentary in that it allows the reader to hear what Heidegger has to say with all its overtones. Along with Derrida's "The Retrait of metaphor" (1978) Bruns’ book is now the essential companion to these texts.

Contrary to a bland vocabulary of "unconcealment,' and “dwelling” Bruns teases out the most central strand in Heidegger's meditation on language: "Dichten as the letting-goof language, as the experience of being utterly bereft of language, as that which is exposed to the uncanny" (xxii). Bruns brings a calm and ripe Gadamerian notion of hermeneutics to his reading of Heidegger: "understanding Heidegger is not to be thought of simply as… getting inside or behind the 6lck of Heidegger. Understanding goes on in front of the text in the encounter with the Sache of thinking. The task of the text is to open thinking to this encounter by shaking it loose from the cozy ground of its concepts” (8). Bruns listens with exemplary patience to what Heidegger is saying, but, more importantly, he allows himself to be addressed by the matter with which Heidegger's texts are concerned.

This vulnerability to the Sache and its obscure, enigmatic aspects is demonstrated immediately as Bruns faces the Cerberus all readers of Heidegger must deal with: his involvement in Nazism. Bruns gravely points out that no thinking or study which has not artificially cut itself off from history can be totally pure: "historicality means more than intertextuality. It could be that no word can adequately serve this surplus meaning of historicality except miasma, the Greek word for defilement. One's life of study is always in question because one's texts for study can never be demystified, that is, can never be handled or dismantled in a purely analytical way" (15). Bruns does not, however, develop any critique of Heidegger's exclusively phenomenological approach to language and the poem in the course of the rest of the book. Severe words on Heidegger's moral autism merely serve to clear the ground for the admiring exegesis which follows. Cerberus is thrown the traditional sop.

The remainder of the first chapter revolves about “The Origin of the Work of Art" with strong emphasis on the artwork's "radical otherness, its reserve, its self-refusal" (42) which creates a salutary estrangement in the beholder or hearer, who is shaken out of the complacencies of everydayness._Art "breaks the will-to-power" and "the essence of poetry is to be found in its renunciation of the power of the word” (39). This interpretation reveals the inner strength of the later Heidegger’s ethos of "letting-be". However, Bruns seems infected with the narrowness of Heidegger's approach when he preaches against literary critics in the following caricatural vein: "The task of criticism is to make literature intelligible according to the norms of representational-calculative thinking, so that it becomes the ‘function’ of literature within the Ge-stell either to give us back an image of man, say the 'human form divine', or to disclose in its svstematic workings the mastercode of Western culture in any of its several symbolic, semiotic, ideological, logocentric or textual forms" (48). These sweeping statements reveal a non-dialogal attitude which. is more typical of what is worst than of what is best in the thinking of Heidegger.

"Language" deals with that happening at the heart of language, evokedin the slogan: "Die Sprache spricht”– a happening encountered “only in 'What is spoken purely [ein rein Gesprochenes]’, in contrast to what is spoken 'indiscriminately' any old way [nur bleibig Gesprochenes wahllos]" (61) – Note the gobbledygook in the second parenthesis here (bleibig should be beliebig), which reveals not only sloppy proof-reading (particularly noticeable in foreign words) but also an uneasy relationship between the author and the German tongue. He has gone to great pains to consult and expound the original, but he quotes only texts which have English translations, ignoring, for example, the Gesamtausgabe lecture series on Hoelderlin, Heraclitus and Parmenides, which are of great relevance to his theme. I had the impression that the author's references to Hoelderlin - e.g. “the romantic tradition of Hoelderlin" (106) - betray only a dim understanding of that poet and his significance for Heidegger. His judgment_that Trakl's "A Winter Evening" is "not a very prepossessing poem" (63) strikes me as an unpromising beginning to his discussion of Heidegger's commentary thereon, which is guided throughout by the spell that poem casts. He passes over Heidegger's reference to the beauty of the poem (Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 18).

To say that Trakl's poem "remains for Heidegger a dark saying which he picks up on without explicating anything that can be attributed to the text" and that "Heidegger draws his language for talking about language from what the language of the poem gives off in the way of hints" (70) perhaps underestimates the firmness with which Heidegger moves to the culminating account of language as vehicle of "the intimacy of world and thing" (Unterwegs, p. 25). Is Bruns in danger of idolizing the obscurity of poetic language at the expense of its communicative valency? Although Bruns writes excellently of the central Heideggerian theme of the two-fold and the "rift" between Being and beings, I feel that he does not sufficiently emphasize the centrality and the governing role of this topic. There is a tendency to introduce a deconstructionist slippage foreign to the mobility of Heidegger's phenomenal language: "Call rift, therefore,(loosely) a figure of indeterminacy in deference to all those cases in which things don't (or can't) quite get put into words, that is, cases where, for whatever reason, you stop or come up short conceptualizing things, or saying (exactly) what something means - cases, or say fallings or failings in which the darkness of Saying appropriates our discourse" (p. 161). Derrida is interested in deconstructing concepts, but Heidegger is not interested in concepts at all; his language moves exclusively on a phenomenological register at the service of the phenomenon of the ontological dif-ference. Derrida himself appears to share my misgivings about the Derridean character of Bruns' Heidegger (p. 223). Bruns is close to Reiner Schuermann (Heidegger on Being and Acting, Indiana University Press, 1987) in seeing Heidegger more as a thinker of anarchy and dissemination than as a namer of the essence of being (see Jean Greisch, La parole heureuse, Paris: Beauchesne, 1986).

In quoting Levinas on discourse as "the experience of something absolutelv other” and "a traumatism of astonishment" (96) doesn't he focus too much on the unhomeliness of language at the expense of its nature as "the house of being" - a phrase unjustifiably dismissed as the product of "a weak moment" (57)? Heidegger's approach to the essence of language is less an exercise in disorientation than Bruns suggests in saying that “Heidegger allows the word [dif-ference] to unfold in a series of wild substitutions - wild, because none of them fits in with the others to form anything like a coherent pattern" (89). The guidance of the Sache is what gives coherence to the sequence of Diaphora, Ereignis, Dimension, Schmerz, der Riss. They home in on a precise apprehension of the being/beings or world/thing dif-ference, on which he believes himself to have a firm phenomenological grasp. To say that dif-ference can no longer function as “a term of art in determining such things as the relation of Being and beings” (88) is misleading. One may query whether it is possible for a thinker concerned exclusively with the given phenomena to speak of Being or beings in a unitary fashion. (I put this problem to Jean Beaufret who answered that Heidegger thought of the unity of Being only as a "working hvpothesis".) Such a query may provide the starting-point for a deconstruction of Heidegger. but that is not the way he himself chose to follow. Bruns cites a hermeneutical remark of Heidegger's: "leave everything open" (p. 126), but misuses it to elude the determining character of that toward which Heidegger's thinking is oriented.

Can one say that Heidegger's Eroerterung never reaches a precise Ort - "without arriving at a final determination" (56)? Surely the Ereignis in which speech and the thing/world play are gathered into their essential determinations does present itself as such a final resting-place for the discussion. To say that "language for the later Heidegger is more forest than house" (57) seems to underestimate the housing capacities of the Ereignis. The characterization of Heidegger's texts as "curiously unrevised… - a thinking-out-loud in which there is no looking back… Heidegger takes up one figure after another without bothering to clean up after himself, leaving behind within the text itself instead of in smudged manuscripts in the desk drawer the Nachlass of uncorrected thoughts" (90-91), reads a post-modern drifting into the quite purposeful course of Heidegger's meditative path.

The discussion of "The Nature of Language" again focusses on "language in its reserve, its excessiveness with respect to the logos (to logical or propositional form), its wildness or waywardness" (120). The author rather one-sidedly celebrates this therapeutic liberation or alienation "from the very idea of language… linguistics, semiotics, various criticisms… social theory of language” (99). Is not Heidegger's. purism in this regard very close to abstractionism and obscurantism? Is it not in the end rather facile to say that the dimension of language that he has brought into view is "absolutely other", bearing only a relation of distance and distaste to more mundane understandings of language? To place Heideggerin relation to Beckett and Blanchot (105-6) restarts the all-too-human literary critical approach to texts which cannot be treated as mere incidental, any more than exegesis of the letter of Scripture can be treated as incidental to the hearing of the divine Word therein. Even if hermeneutics is essentially negative - "that which we seek to understand withdraws itself, holds itself back, eludes our grasp" (13O) - that discovery depends on plunging into the empirical details of language just as much as on listening to the peal of stillness. The author's own musing on the texture of Heidegger's style - "the 'woolgathering', 'dawdling', or 'lingering' form, in which the normal inferential movement of reason toward some conclusion, or final picture is replaced by what seem like endless reflections on a starting point that withholds itself'(136) - belongs, as he is aware, to a genre of commentary that closes the gap between speech as "absolutely other" and the empirical aspects of speech and writing. In leaping to the dimension of pure being, speech, thinking, Heidegger perhaps had to practise a haughty disdain for the realms of mere metaphysics, everyday language and calculative thinking. But a fruitful reception of his thought will have to overcome this haughtiness and institute an interplay between reason and thinking, technology and contemplation, linguistics and poetic speech.

The author insists too much on the obvious fact that Heidegger is "completely reactionary with respect to representational-calculative thinking" (136), and this perhaps hampers his engagement with his task of discerning the kind of sense that Heidegger's language makes. Occasional attempts at jokeyness are even less helpful (69, 134, 135, 137). One could also query the allusions to madness (71-72, 81-82, 142, 158) as typifying that "language itself is always speaking, always sounding, going on in its own way, independently of us, heterogeneous and wild" (143). I feel that this blurs the contours of the Heideggerian apprehension of the non-human eloquence of language. Again, a clearer distinction should be made between the ways the pun functions in Heidegger and in Finnegans Wake respectively. "Words put themselves into words only by punning, that is, in disseminations of the word as sound" (147). But in Heidegger the punsall speak to thought of the "region" (Gegend) and he takes no Joycan (or Freudian) delight in letting them run wild. Their dissemination is gathered towards an essential centre. Speech is the Logos binding everything together - "the relation of all relations" (Unterwegs, p. 215) - not a disruptive pullulation. I have said enough to indicate what a probing and thought-provoking study Bruns has given us. All students of Heidegger will read it with pleasure.

                                                    Joseph S. O'Leary

From: Hermathena 150 (Summer, 1991)

Heidegger, Platon et les limites de la phénoménologie

C’est dans une clef strictement phénoménologique que Heidegger poursuit une relecture de la tradition philosophique, en montrant que les discours historiques sur l’être ne se limitent pas aux registres logique et métaphysique mais contiennent aussi une entente implicite du phénomène de l’être. « Überall hat sich, wenn die Metaphysik das Seiende vorstellt, Sein gelichtet. Partout où la métaphysique représente l’étant, l’être s’est éclairci » (Gesamtausgabe 9.366). Ce n’est pas par une constatation tranquille que l’on perçoit cet éclaircissement de l’être, mais par un effort de pensée qui arrache la phénoménalité de l’être, dans ses diverses formes, des discours métaphysiques qui ont tout fait pour l’occulter. Cet effort, le « dépassement de la métaphysique », ne cherche à extirper celle-ci mais à la mettre dans la perspective d’une interrogation plus fondamentale de l’être.

On n’a pas encore bien mesuré la portée de ce projet ambitieux, sinon impérial, de reconduire toute l’histoire de la philosophie à la Sache selbst, en subordonnant toute autre forme de pensée à une pensée phénoménologique. Certains historiens français de la philosophie, tels Olivier Boulnois, Vincent Carraud, Jean-François Courtine et Jean-Luc Marion, s’inspirent de la vision historique de Heidegger, mais en se concentrant sur des penseurs comme Duns Scot, Descartes, Suarez, Leibniz, ils risquent de limiter la pertinence de la critique de l’onto-théologie aux temps modernes. En remontant à Platon, je chercherai ici à mettre en lumière le souci le plus fondamental du projet heideggérien et aussi d’identifier certaines difficultés auxquelles ce projet s’achoppe.

Je voudrais dès le départ marquer mes distances à l’égard des réquisitoires dirigés contre Heidegger par beaucoup d’auteurs qui n’ont pas saisi la nature de l’abord phénoménologique de l’être. Werner Beierwaltes, dans des nombreuses publications, présente Heidegger comme un métaphysicien qui aurait feint de ne pas voir que Plotin (pour d’autres ce serait saint Thomas) l’avait devancé dans la découverte de l’être dans son altérité par rapport aux étants : « si quelque part, à quelque moment dans l’histoire (non amputée et non masquée à bien des égards) de la métaphysique, la différence comme différence a été non seulement esquissée mais pensée en tout résolution et intensité conceptuelle, c’est bien dans la philosophie de Plotin ».[1] Bien de lecteurs heideggériens de Plotin trouvent quelques lueurs de la pensée de la « différence », ou de l’Ereignis, dans l’altérité de l’Un par rapport à l’Intellect. Mais la différence de l’Un par rapport à l’être ne concerne pas directement le thème heideggérien de l’être de étants, et l’ « intensité conceptuelle » est très loin du mode de pensée par lequel Heidegger aborde ce thème, à savoir, une pensée méditative qui cherche à élucider l’apport phénoménologique des constructions conceptuelles, et à remonter en-deçà d’elles vers la chose même.[2]

Heidegger et Plotin, dans l’optique de Beierwaltes, auraient poursuivi la même pensée de la différence, ce qui « lie objectivement Heidegger, de manière à plusieurs égards cachée et inavouée, à la métaphysique véritable (notamment à la métaphysique de type plotinien) bien plus étroitement et avec bien plus de conséquences que ce que celui-ci, avec son rude mouvement de rejet fondé sur sa propre reconstruction de la ‘métaphysique’ en vue d’un prétendu ‘nouveau commencement’ (anderer Anfang), voudrait bien admettre ».[3] Le mythe d’un Heidegger qui aurait jalousement tu ses « sources cachées », bibliques ou taoïstes ou néoplatoniciennes, trahit une méconnaissance de la spécificité de la question heideggérienne, celle de la phénoménalité de l’être. Heidegger est accusé de propager des « clichés » sur l’histoire de la métaphysique, là où Hegel, mieux instruit, aurait atteint « une évaluation fondamentalement différente de la signification historique du néoplatonisme ».[4] Hegel lit Plotin en termes strictement intellectualistes, en rayant toute la dimension de l’Un au-delà de l’Intellect. On ne voit pas comment son estime pour la puissance spéculative du néoplatonisme, que Heidegger n’a jamais niée non plus, puisse être présenté comme exemplaire là où on prétend que Plotin aurait devancé Heidegger. Si Heidegger avait fait une exégèse de Plotin, il aurait sûrement corrigé les taches aveugles de Hegel.

Le « rude mouvement de rejet » dont parle Beierwaltes est quelque peu caricatural. Il est vrai que Heidegger trace la genèse du nihilisme moderne à un oubli de l’être inscrit dans les procédés de la métaphysique dès son commencement, ce qui le fait résister aux prétentions de la métaphysique, surtout hégélienne, de pouvoir épuiser toute la tâche de la pensée. Mais il n’est pas évident que cela constitue un rejet de la métaphysique en tant que telle. Le pas en retrait ne sort de la métaphysique que pour entrer dans l’essence de la métaphysique : “Der Schritt zurück bewegt sich daher aus der Metaphysik in das Wesen der Metaphysik” (Identität und Differenz, Pfullingen, 1957, p. 47). On pourrait dire que Plotin a fait un pas analogue en pensant l’Un, une réalité omniprésente mais insaisissable par la pensée rationnelle. Heidegger ne s’y est pas intéressé, mais il a bien apprécié Maître Eckhart, chez qui les structures de transcendance plotiniennes reçoivent une charge phénoménologique plus évidente, nous ramenant aux choses mêmes.

Beierwaltes ne mesure pas comment la pensée heideggérienne dépasse le mode de pensée métaphysique. Mais il est probable que Heidegger pour sa part ne rend pas justice à la puissance et l’autonomie de la raison métaphysique par rapport à la pensée phénoménologique. Cette puissance est à l’œuvre dans la dialectique platonicienne, et la rend irréductible à la lecture phénoménologique qu’en donne Heidegger. La lecture heideggérienne est éclairante, et révèle dans le texte platonicien une richesse insoupçonnée de ceux qui suivent les ornières d’une lecture métaphysique. L’œil du phénoménologue, implanté en Heidegger par Husserl, fait vibrer les paroles de Platon de toute l’entente grecque de l’être, même si cette entente est déjà chez Platon en train de subir un tournant vers la métaphysique et de perdre son orientation première. Pour certains, cette théorie d’un oubli de la Grèce originaire chez Platon n’est qu’un mythe. Sans discuter cette question, je vais voir si l’appréciation phénoménologique de la pensée platonicienne est à même de saisir la force spécifique de cette pensée. Si elle ne l’est pas, alors la critique heideggérienne de Platon serait en partie au moins injuste, et cette injustice aurait des conséquences pour tout son projet de dépassement de la métaphysique.

.

PEUT-ON PARLER DE L' « ÊTRE » EN PHÉNOMÉNOLOGUE?

.

     La métaphysique aspire à saisir l’être de façon unitaire, l’être en tant qu’être, même si elle est contrainte d’y reconnaître une plurivocité irréductible. Pour l’abord phénoménologique, l’unité de l’être est encore plus difficile à nommer et à saisir. « Le phénomène de l’être » est une expression qui présuppose une saisie unitaire de l’être. Mais y a-t-il un tel phénomène? Si l’être ne peut se concevoir de façon cohérente que comme ce qui est commun à tous les étants – koinon pasi to on estin (Aristote, Mét. 1004 b20) – n’est-il pas quelque chose de si ténu, de si abstrait, et qui manque tellement de forme définie, que l’on ne saurait rien en dire de plus? Toute concrétion phénoménale qu’on y rattache nuit à son universalité et fait que ce n’est plus de l’être en tant que tel que l’on parle. Je ne connais pas de discussion explicite de cette difficulté chez Heidegger. Jean Beaufret, en réponse à cette question, me disait que l’unité de la notion d’être était une « hypothèse de travail » pour Heidegger. Si tel est le cas, il a exploité sinon vérifié l’hypothèse selon deux axes de recherche, par l’étude de l’« l ‘histoire de l’être » et par l’étude des étants concrets, avec une attention particulière à ce qui en eux est porteur de leur dignité ontologique, à savoir, leur forme (eidos).

.

(a) L’Être dans l’histoire

     « Il y a être seulement à chaque fois dans telle ou telle formation historique particulière. Es gibt Sein nur je und je in dieser und jener geschichtlichen Prägung : Phusis, Logos, Hen, Idea, Energeia, Substanzialität, Objektivität, Subjektivität, Wille, Wille zur Macht, Wille zum Willen. » (Identität und Differenz, p. 64). En méditant sur cette histoire, Heidegger vise à trouver une nouvelle vision de l’être dans son rapport à l’étant, telle qu’il l’esquisse dans les dernières pages d’Identität und Differenz, par exemple. Heidegger s’appuie sur la série historique des discours sur l’être, tout en cherchant aussi un discours de l’être qui serait autonome par rapport à cette tradition. Mais les présentations conceptuelles ou phénoménologiques qu’on a données de l’être au cours de l’histoire révèlent un pluralisme difficilement maîtrisable et qui pose problème à tout discours unitaire, qu’il soit spéculatif ou phénoménologique. Hegel réduit le pluralisme historique au processus du développement du concept; Heidegger voit dans les divers visages que l’être a présentés dans l’Occident une histoire scandée en époques qui dans son ensemble constituerait une révélation de la phénoménalité de l’être. Ainsi on évite le soupçon que le lien entre ce qu’on nomme être à chaque fois ne soit qu’une simple homonymie, la projection sur un écran vide des fantasies que l’esprit occidental aurait brodées autour d’un mot.

Grâce à son attention aux textes, on peut dire que Heidegger parle moins de l’être en général que d’une série de situations historiques dans lesquelles la pensée est aux proies avec quelque équivalent de ce qu’était la question de l’être pour Parménide ou Aristote. Exégète de cette histoire, il en tire certes une entente générale de l’être, dans laquelle on peut reconnaître une reprise de Parménide et d’Héraclite, avec des approfondissements dus à l’épreuve de la métaphysique qui aurait culminée dans le nihilisme. Ainsi la phrase « Es gibt Sein » sur lequel il médite dans Zeit und Sein (1962) reprend l’énoncé initial du discours de l’être, le esti gar einai de Parménide (texte qui le fascinait depuis 1922). C’est comme si Heidegger veut clore la carrière du discours occidental de l’être avec la phrase même qui l’avait commencée. Ce qu’a été l’histoire de l’être, ses éclaircies et ses oublis, et où se trouve l’homme occidental à la fin de cette histoire, dans un monde ou le mot « être » ne sert plus de boussole (voir Identität und Differenz, 69-70), telles sont les questions qu’il cherche à élucider.

Les lectures locales de textes particuliers par Heidegger restent pénétrantes et instructives, même si la macro-structure ontologique et historique dans laquelle il les insère porte moins de conviction, et ressemble de plus en plus à un mythe qui s’écroule. La violence des lectures heideggériennes dérive de son désir d’arracher aux textes leur portée phénoménologique et de montrer comment ils témoignent des tournants époquaux d’une histoire dans laquelle le sens de l’être s’est progressivement oublié. Il y a souvent une tension entre l’apport phénoménologique conquis par une herméneutique des textes, et le verdict historique qui s’énonce en termes négatifs et peut sembler contredire l’appréciation chaleureuse qui l’a précédée. Souligner la profondeur d’une pensée pour ensuite y déceler les semences du nihilisme est un geste paradoxal, particulièrement accentué dans la lecture heideggérienne de Platon.

Le phénomène de l’être veut dire le phénomène de la différence entre l’étant et l’être. Les étants se prêtent à l’examen phénoménologique. Il s’agit d’orienter cet examen vers une dimension particulière – de discerner dans l’étant ce qui est porteur de son existence la plus essentielle. Projet futile à première vue, mais l’histoire de la philosophie peut se lire comme une série de réponses à cette question, ce qui donne une perspective pour son renouvellement sous des meilleurs auspices. Il faut d’abord reprendre de manière plus « pensante » les discours sur le rapport entre être et étant dans la tradition, en signalant les oublis qui attendent chacune de ces « mittences » de l’être (Geschicke des Seins). Cela libère le terrain pour une interrogation contemporaine des étants en vue de leur être, dans lequel l’être n’est plus visé comme ce qui va de soi, ou qui est simplement présent, ou qui a le statut d’un fondement rationnel, mais comme ce vers lequel il faut questionner. L’étant lui-même, interrogé en vue de son être, devient une énigme. On met à côté tout ce que la pensée quotidienne ou scientifique peut comprendre de l’étant pour se concentrer sur ce qui échappe aux prises d’une telle pensée, sur la présence de l’étant tel qu’il surgit dans l’existence, son Ankunft qui porte l’Überkommnis de l’être (Identität und Differenz). L’être est une venue dynamique (kommen), jamais une donnée inerte. L’histoire de la philosophie devient le drame des métamorphoses de la différence entre être et étant, dont le rapport prend des aspects inattendus à chaque changement d’époque. Mais quelle que soit sa fascination, une relecture de l’histoire est toujours une question de réconstructions et d’interprétations en large partie spéculatives, de sorte qu’elle risque d’être spectrale. Pour cette raison Heidegger ne s’est pas contenté des méditation historiques mais a voulu aborder l’être par les étants actuels du monde vécu.

.

(b) Promesse ontologique de l’eidos

     Si on aborde un étant en vue de mettre en évidence le phénomène de son être, il faut chercher l’aspect de cet étant qui témoigne de la façon la plus prégnante de son être. Pour l’homme ce serait, en dernière analyse, le langage – cette « maison de l’être » qui fait de l’homme le « berger de l’être ». Ce thème n’émerge que peu dans Sein und Zeit, qui de ce fait reste un peu trop axé sur l’existentialité subjective. Le jeune Heidegger admet que le langage, pour nous, est « le mode le plus immédiat de réaliser l’alêtheuein » (GA 19.196), mais cette condition langagière est vue comme un pis-aller, et il entretient le désir d’une perception pure, « das reine Vernehmen », même en admettant son impossibilité. Le langage est craint comme puissance d’occultation, « parole malheureuse », et ce n’est qu’avec les lectures de Hölderlin aux années trente qu’il devient un sol nourricier pour la pensée comme « parole heureuse » enfin.[5]

Le phénomène du Dasein était probablement trop riche. Le Dasein s’interroge en permanence sur son être, face aux choses, au monde, à l’angoisse, à la mort, au temps et à sa liberté. Mais loin d’éclaircir le phénomène de l’être, conçu comme visée d’une transcendance de la liberté questionnante du Dasein, l’étude du Dasein tend à noyer la question dans les mille projets et projections qui hantent le cœur humain. Plus tard, Heidegger laissera les poètes parler pour l’homme, en choisissant celui qui aurait le mieux saisi, avec le plus de concentration, la posture essentielle de l’homme (moderne) devant l’être, ou devant le retrait de l’être, à savoir Hölderlin. La dimension anthropologique de sa pensée se concentrera dans la parole.

La chose est un objet d’interrogation bien plus maniable que le Dasein. Ici le problème de méthode peut être exploré à loisir : comment, par quel biais, interroge-t-on les étants en vue de leur être? Faut-il passer par leur rapport à l’existence humaine? Selon Sein und Zeit, c’est l’éclaircissement des structures fondamentales du Dasein qui dégage l’horizon « für jede weitere ontologische Erforschung des nicht daseinsmässigen Seienden, de toute investigation ultérieure de l’étant qui n’est pas de l’ordre du Dasein » (GA 2.50; tr. Vézin, p. 65). L’étude des choses dans les textes plus tardifs les rapporte à leur emploi par les mortels. Néanmoins, les choses possèdent un aspect propre, dans lequel se concentre leur dignité ontologique, et qui est précisément leur aspect même, leur visage ou leur vue, c’est-à-dire, leur forme. Ceci aussi est perçu par l’homme, et nommé et défini dans le langage humain, mais il garde une certaine autonomie par rapport au Dasein. Quand Heidegger se penche sur l’eidos platonicien et sur les analyses d’Aristote dans le deuxième livre de la Physique, on le voit fasciné par la venue en présence des choses, par le rayonnement de leur forme, événement d’être qui ne se réfère pas en premier lieu au Dasein.

Les choses, contrairement au Dasein, ne parlent pas. Mais ce qui en elles est la plus éloquente, et qui fait le plus parler d’elles, c’est leur forme. Si Heidegger rejoint les grecs en portant son attention au phénomène de l’homme comme être de la parole (logon echôn), il se laisse instruire par leur regard aussi en se penchant sur l’eidos, la morphê, comme ce qui confère aux étants muets leur dignité ontologique. Pour les Grecs, l’être se donne précisément dans la forme, l’eidos, des étants. Chez Aristote, la forme s’associe à l’actualité de la chose, son entelekheia, sa venue en présence. La forme n’est pas seulement ce qui définit l’étant, mais ce dans laquelle l’être de l’étant vient en présence. Tout en venant en présence dans la forme, il reste une énigme, et la forme elle-même à son tour devient énigmatique. On peut la définir dans ses limites ontiques, mais son aspect ontologique, la présence de l’être qu’elle porte, lui donne une dimension insondable. La forme comme réalité ontique est tout ce qu’il y a de plus solide et substantiel. Mais interrogée dans son être, elle perd l’évidence de sa substantialité, comme si la quête de l’être et de la vérité de l’être avait l’effet d’introduire une faille néantisante dans notre perception du monde.

La forme est produit, hergestellt, et elle témoigne de ce qui permet sa venue en présence, soit la phusis, soit chez Platon l’idea. Stanley Rosen, dans ses conférences à l’Institut Catholique de Paris à la fin de 2003, a prétendu que Heidegger impose sur le texte de Platon une métaphysique de la production. Mais ce qu’il faut voir d’abord c’est que la notion de l’être comme Hergestelltsein ou comme Werkheit (voir GA 45.84), que Heidegger découvre dans Platon (République X) et dans Aristote (Physique II), est au fond une phénoménologie de la phusis comme surgissement des étants dans la présence, qui commence à dégénerer en métaphysique seulement quand phusis, comme nom de l’être, est remplacée par ousia et puis par idea.[6] Ainsi Heidegger peut admirer Platon comme un penseur encore sensible à la production des étants au sens authentiquement phénoménologique, tout en marquant ses distances à son égard en tant que métaphysicien de la production des étants par une cause, l’idée du Bien. Heidegger peut même avoir deux approches du Bien, traité tantôt selon son aspect phénoménologique, qui n’est pas trop éloigné de la vérité de l’être telle qu’il la recherche lui-même, tantôt selon son aspect métaphysique, qui va dominer dans le platonisme et qui marque un oubli de la vérité de l’être. Ce double visage de la lecture heideggérienne permet un renversement de son rapport à Platon, « un nouvel investissment ou surinvestissement, une autre lecture ‘généreuse’ de la pensée de Platon, dans la direction de la Lichtung (éclaircie) ou de l’Es gibt », car « le corpus platonicien se prête toujours à une double accentuation, une double lecture ».[7]

La forme est pour ainsi dire la charnière entre l’étant et son être. Elle nous renvoie à la fois en deux directions : vers l’être et vers l’étant, ou vers l’être comme verbe et l’être comme substantif : « Le participe regarde en effet à la fois du côté du nom et du côté du verbe ».[8] Cette dualité peut se lire en clef phénoménologique ou en clef métaphysique. Le discours sur la forme peut renvoyer « en arrière » à une dimension phénoménologique originaire, ou « en avant » au monde intellectualiste de la métaphysique dans lequel cette dimension est oubliée. Si les textes de Platon en particulier sont tirés dans les deux directions, ce n’est pas surprenant que Heidegger à son tour, dans son jugement sur ces textes, oscille entre une célébration de leur densité phénoménologique et une dénonciation de leur rôle fondateur dans le régime de l’abstraction métaphysique. Il avait toujours du mal pour situer Platon, et il confessa un jour que « la structure de la pensée de Platon m’est entièrement obscure ».[9] (Mais il est loin d’être le seul dans ce cas.)

Ce malaise a des racines profondes. Il me semble que Platon échappe aux prises de Heidegger d’une manière qui révèle des virtualités, voire des actualités vivantes, aux fondements de la pensée occidentale que la phénoménonologie ne peut revendiquer comme siennes. Le texte platonicien résiste aux ambitions impérieuses de la phénoménologie, et au lieu de rentrer docilement dans la place qu’on lui assigne dans l’histoire de l’être, montre les limites du projet phénoménologique, qui n’aurait plus alors que le statut d’un chemin de pensée parmi plusieurs. Les incertitudes de Heidegger face à Platon font du thème « Heidegger et Platon » un véritable bourbier. Mais il vaut la peine de l’explorer, non seulement pour la lumière qu’il jette sur le développement de la pensée de Heidegger mais pour rendre compte des limites qu’il révèle dans le projet d’une phénoménologie entendant dépasser la métaphysique.

Platon phénoménologue

     Que l’eidos platonicien soit une idée abstraite semble s’imposer pour plusieurs raisons : (1) C’est quelque chose d’universel – l’eidos du lit, même dans les sens humble des premiers dialogues, avant la formation de la théorie des idées transcendantes, est ce que tous les lits possèdent en commun, donc manque la concrétude d’aucun lit particulier. (2) L’eidos est la définition de la chose, et non pas sa forme individuelle. (3) L’eidos, dans la théorie dévéloppée, est permanent et immuable, hors du temps, et les formes individuels n’en sont que de faibles images soumises au temps. (4) L’eidos est invisible : l’âme ne la contemple dans sa pleine vérité qu’avant la naissance et après la mort, et elle n’en a ici-bas qu’une vision fragmentaire et brouillée. (5) L’eidos n’est perçue que par la pensée reflexive : « Les uns, tu peux les toucher, les voir, tes autres sens peuvent t’en donner la sensation; tandis que les autres, qui gardent leur identité, il n’y a absolument pas pour toi d’autre moyen de les appréhender sinon la pensée réfléchie (tês dianoias logismô), les choses de ce genre étant bien plutôt invisibles (aeidê) et soustraites à la vision (oukh horata) » (Phédon 79a). Les formes sont ce qui fonde la connaissance dans sa différence d’avec l’opinion; elles sont objets de la seule intellection et les objects phénoménaux n’en sont que des imitations (Timée 50c-51e).

Mais tous ces aspects qui semblent soustraire l’eidos au registre du phénoménal trahissent en même temps la richesse phénoménale indiquée par le mot eidos et qui forme la base de toute la philosophie platonicienne. L’erôs de Socrate qui s’enflamme pour les belles formes est le point de départ de cette pensée. L’élévation de l’esprit vers l’universel et vers l’être intelligible soustrait au devenir sensible ne perd pas le souvenir de la vision passionnée initiale et se confirme par la jouissance d’une vision extatique du beau en soi ou du vrai en soi au sommet de l’échelle de la méditation philosophique. La philosophe commence et s’achève dans la contemplation de l’eidos. Le texte de Platon se prête ainsi à une lecture à contre-poil qui en sauvera l’apport phénoménal du cadre théorique dépassé.

Cette dimension « érotique » retient peu l’intérêt de Heidegger, sauf dans une discussion de 1936 sur la beauté dans le Phèdre, salué comme le plus parfait des dialogues platoniciens, la plus riche en dimensions différentes, écrit à l’akmê de la carrière de Platon, et révélant le fondement sur lequel sont bâtis et la République et le Banquet (GA 6:1.170, 194; GA 43.205, 236). La beauté est « was im nächsten Anschein des Begegnenden zugleich am ehesten das entfernteste Sein zum Vorschein bringt, ce qui dans l’apparence la plus proche de ce qui se rencontre, en même temps porte le mieux devant nous l’être le plus éloigné » (GA  6 :1.170). « Nun de kallos monon tautên eskhe moiran hôst’ ekphanestaton einai kai erasmiôtaton (Phèdre 250d)… Das Schöne ist jenes, was am unmittelbarsten auf uns zukommt und uns berückt. Indem es uns als Seiendes trifft, entrückt es uns zugleich in den Blick auf das Sein. Le beau est ce qui nous vient et nous ravit de la façon la plus immédiate et nous ravit. En tant qu’il nous touche comme étant, il nous transporte en même temps dans le regard de l’être » (GA 6:1.199; GA 43.241 a Scheinendes en lieu de Seiendes).

Mais Heidegger souligne la faille dans cette situation si harmonieuse : « Weil das Sein für Platon das Nichtsinnliche ist, kann die Offenbarkeit des Seins, die Wahrheit, auch nur das nichtsinnliche Leuchten sein. Puisque l’être pour Platon est le non-sensible, l’évidence de l’être, la vérité, ne peut être elle aussi qu’un rayonner non-sensible » (GA 6:1.201; GA 43.247). C’est peut-être le reflet appauvri que la métaphysique peut donner de la lutte entre terre et monde, occultation et désoccultation, par laquelle l’œuvre d’art instancie l’événement de la vérité dans la vision de l’Origine de l’œuvre d’art que Heidegger est en train de développer. Il y a chez Platon un écart entre le rayonnement d’une belle forme et le rayonnement non-sensible de la vérité. Mais cet Abstand entre alêtheia et beauté n’est pas une division, une Zwiespalt (GA 6:1.190; GA 43.231). Malgré les limites de ce qui est donné dans le phénomène de la beauté, il reste aligné avec la vérité ultime, le Bien: « In der Entzweiung überwiegt der Einklang, weil das Schöne als das Scheinende, Sinnliche im voraus sein Wesen in der Wahrheit des Seins als des Übersinnlichen geborgen hat. Dans la séparation prédomine l’accord, car le beau comme ce qui rayonne, le sensible a d’avance caché son essence dans la vérité de l’étre comme le supra-sensible » (GA 6:1.202); cf. GA 43.248). « … muss die Eröffnung des Seins dort geschehen, wo, von der Wahrheit aus geschätzt, das mê on (eidôlon), das Nichtseiende west. Dies ist jedoch der Ort der Schônheit. L’ouverture de l’être doit avoir lieu là où, dans l’estimation selon la vérité, c’est le non-être, mê on (eidôlon), qui règne. Pourtant ceci est le lieu de la beauté » (GA 6:1.201; cf. GA 43.247). Non-être veut dire ici ce qui ne peut avoir le caractère plenier de l’être (« volle Auszeichnung als on »; GA 6:2.195; GA 48.294). Heidegger lui-même n’accepterait pas cette vision de l’art comme manque d’être, ou comme participation limitée à l’être. En tant que phénomène l’œuvre d’art est le lieu de la vérité, le processus d’a-lêtheia par lequel la forme de l’étant est arrachée du cèlement. La notion de beauté perd sa pertinence quand on saisit cet événement de façon radicale.

Ce n’est pas par une méditation de la beauté que Heidegger peut pénétrer le secret de Platon, car celle-ci renvoie à la vérité comme plus essentielle. Heidegger choisit donc d’aborder la doctrine de Platon sur la vérité, mais il le fera en phénoménologue. Cette instance non-sensible n’échappe pas à la phénoménologie, car son rayonnement, bien que non-sensible, se donne à appréhender comme phénomène. En suivant le chemin indiqué par l’allégorie de la caverne, on commencera par le rayonnement des formes que nous avons devant nos yeux. Les mots eidos et idea ont des rapports étymologiques avec la vision et la connaissance. Avant de signaler pour Heidegger la prédominance de l’intellectualisme, de la théorie et de l’idéalisme chez Platon, ces expressions indiquent le mode d’apparaître des phénomènes. Heidegger médite longuement tout ce que la notion d’eidos peut nous apprendre sur la phénoménalité des choses, même si à la fin c’est dans cette concentration sur la forme visuelle qu’il trouvera la limite la plus intime de la pensée platonicienne, qui la destinait à devenir une métaphysique.

D’abord, Heidegger enracine l’eidos dans l’ètre-au-monde, la vie pratique. Nous comprenons l’eidos d’une maison en y habitant et en devenant familiers avec elle. Deuxièmement, il est attentif au fait que chez Platon c’est le langage qui met en lumière l’eidos des choses, le discours cherche à épouser les articulations des formes. En-dessous du langage qui définit et catégorise, Heidegger laisse transparaître un autre logos qui adresse les formes individuelles dans un contexte relationnel et pragmatique. Son ambivalence à l’égard de Platon et du langage se montre dans les jugements qu’il porte sur le rôle du langage chez lui. En troisième lieu, cette articulation des formes laisse voir leur Jeweiligkeit, leur surgissement temporel. La temporalité n’est pas qu’une qualification accidentelle de la forme, comme une métaphysique rationaliste pourrait le croire, mais relève de l’essence même de la forme en tant que phénomène. Qu’une essence intemporelle se cache derrière cette forme temporelle et la fonde est une idée qui ne trouve guère d’accueil chez Heidegger, ou à laquelle il n’accorde qu’une place sécondaire, en dépendance de la réalité première phénoménale. L’ « aspect » d’une belle statue n’existe que comme surgissement temporel, et ne se laisse appréhender que comme jeweilig, comme la surprise perpétuelle de la venue à être. Séparé de cette temporalité, la forme, l’être même de la statue se perd.

En dernier lieu, et surtout, à partir de cette appréhension concrète de la forme, Heidegger laisse se déployer toute la force ontologique que Platon investit dans la notion. Il y reconnaît une pensée de la différence ontologique, qui n’est pas une construction abstraite mais la percée d’une entente de l’être. En 1926, la forme en tant qu’idée ontologique (chez Platon) répond à la question : « Wie sieht das Seiende als Seiendes aus? Als was zeigt sich das Seiende selbst, wenn ich es nicht hinsichtlich einer bestimmten Eigenschaft, sondern nur als Seiendes betrachte? Quelle figure a l’étant comme étant? Comme quoi se montre-t-il l’étant même, quand je le considère non en vue d’un attribut détérminé mais seulement comme étant? » (GA 22.252). En 1931-32 il écrit : « Die Ideen sind das Seiendste, weil sie das Sein zu verstehen geben, ‘in dessen Licht’, wie wir heute noch sagen, das einzeln Seiende allererst Seiendes ist und das Seiende ist, was es ist. Les idées sont ce qui plus est, puisqu’elles donnent à comprendre l’être ‘à la lumière duquel’, comme nous disons aujourd’hui encore, l’étant individuel est d’abord étant et est cet étant qu’il est » (GA 34.99). La lumière de l’idée est rapportée à l’être au monde par le rappel de notre usage actuel de l’expression « in dessen Licht ». L’existence et l’essence s’enracinent dans le don de l’entente de l’être accordé par l’idée. Même idée en 1940 : « Les aspects de ce que sont les choses elle-mêmes, les eidê, constituent l’essence, dans la lumière de laquelle chaque étant particulier se montre à nous comme ceci ou cela; et c’est seulement parce qu’elle se montre ainsi que la chose devient non voilée et accessible » (Questions, 446 [10]).

L’eidos est un nom époqual de l’être, et le phénoménologue peut laisser émerger toute sa profondeur ontologique. Il apprend à voir avant de montrer les limites de ce qui est vu. On se rappelle le dialogue entre Platon et Antisthène :

 

Antisthène : « Je vois bien le cheval réel, Platon, mais je ne vois pas de cheval-idée (hippotêta). »

Platon : « C’est que tu as de quoi voir le cheval réel, mais tu n’as pas encore l’œil avec lequel on voit le cheval-idée. »[11] 

 

Dans l’optique de Heidegger ce qui manquait à Antisthène n’était pas la capacité dialectique, la capacité de penser abstraitement, mais la sensibilité phénoménologique. Car pour Heidegger la vérité est une quantité phénoménologique, le non-cèlement, de sorte qu’il traduit « ho tên alêtheian mê eidôs, celui qui ne connaît pas la vérité » (Phèdre 262c) par « einer der die Sachen in ihrer Unverborgenheit nie gesehen hat, n’a jamais vu les choses dans leur désoccultation» (GA 19.328; tr. Courtine et al., p. 313). Trouver la vérité n’a que peu à voir donc avec la labeur conceptuelle, et moins encore avec le processus d’établir un jugement correct par l’emploi critique des concepts. Heidegger pratique une résistance perpétuelle, au niveau de la traduction même du texte, au rationalisme de Platon. Loin de lui la gymnastique recommandée par Parménide au jeune Socrate : « L’élan est beau et divin, sache-le, qui t’emporte ainsi vers les arguments (hê hormê hên hormas epi tous logous). Mais exerce-toi, entraîne-toi à fond dans ces exercices qui ont l’air de ne servir à rien et que le vulgaire appelle des bavardages (adoleschias) »; « la volonté de ne pas laisser l’enquête s’égarer dans les choses visibles et en faire ses objets, mais de l’appliquer aux choses qui sont par excellence objets de raisonnement et qu’au plus juste titre on appellerait des formes » (Parm. 135d-e). La pensée platonicienne vise les formes, et l’attention que cela exige est telle que la narration mythique peut servir de récréation (Tim. 59cd). Il ne s’agit évidemment pas d’une attention phénoménologique, mais d’un effort de pensée que si elle prend son point de départ des phénomènes et permet à la fin une vue éclairée des phénomènes s’oriente néanmoins vers la clarté conceptuelle, à établir par l’argumentation logique. En orientant sa lecture de Platon vers le phénoménal aux dépens de l’autonomie du rationnel, Heidegger défait le travail fondateur de Platon.

    Mais la situation est plus complexe que cela. Car Heidegger, dans ses conférences de 1924, préte une attention phénoménologique extrême au Sophiste pour trouver surtout dans la dialectique un art de mettre en évidence les phénomènes. Il cherche à montre que le dialegein platonicien cherche à faire la traversée du logos pour atteindre la dimension du noein. Ce faisant, il jette beaucoup de lumière sur le dialogue de Platon, mais il a peut-être eu l’impression en fin de compte que les détours de la dialectique étaient une méthode bien coûteuse d’aborder les choses mêmes. Une autre méthode de lire le dialogue aurait peut-être révélé des vertus de la dialectique qui ont échappé à Heidegger. Heidegger reconnaît que l’argument du Sophiste porte un fruit phénoménologique, en rendant le sophiste « dialektisch sichtbar ». Mais la longueur du chemin le confirme dans l’impression que la dialectique est un «  embarras philosophique », comme il l’appelle dans Sein und Zeit. Là encore il se réfère avec une sympathie résiduelle au legein comme guide pour « Gewinnung der Seinsstrukturen des im Ansprechen und Besprechen begegnenden Seienden, parvenir aux structures d’être de l’étant se rencontrant là où il s’agit de dire ce qu’il en est et d’en débattre ». Mais le noein direct d’Aristote a rendu la dialectique superflue. Les guillemets ironiques dans la phrase : «Aristote ‘n’y entendait plus rien’ parce qu’il l’installait et lui donnait place sur un sol d’une toute autre radicalité » (GA 2.34; tr. Vézin, p. 25), sont dirigés contre ceux qui déplorent la perte de la dialectique dans la rationalité systématique du Stagirite.

Dans la dialectique du Sophiste, il ne s’agit pas de classer le sophiste dans un genre, comme le long découpage ou diairesis de catégories d’occupation pourrait le faire croire. Il s’agit plutôt d’essayer une variété d’approches en vue du caractère ambigu et élusif du phénomène, « même le phénomène de départ est ici indéterminé » (GA 19.288). Pour Heidegger, si la dialectique vaut quelque chose, ce n’est qu’en tant d’auxiliaire à la vision phénoménologique. La dialectique commence par une prise en vue : « Es handelt sich darum, daß das, worüber gesprochen wird, der Tatbestand [...], die verschiedenen phänomenalen Aspekte desselben, gesammelt und zusammengesehen werden auf einen Grundbestand hin. Il s’agit de rassembler et de prendre en vue dans son ensemble l’état-de-fait [...] avec ses différents aspects phénoménaux dans l’optique d’une teneur-de-fond » (GA 19.331). Ainsi les définitions initiales du sophiste dans Sophiste 221c-232e sont autant de descriptions cherchant à prendre en vue le phénomène du sophiste tel qu’il paraît dans la vie quotidienne.

Platon procède en phénoménologue, mais c’est un phénoménologue concentré surtout sur le voir. Même en restant conscient de cette limite, Heidegger en poursuivant le thème de la vision dévoile une richesse phénoménologique dans le texte platonicien : sur sunorasthai, Phèdre 265d, il remarque : « beachten Sie die Betonung des Sehens, der eigentlichen Sacherfassung, notez bien l’accent mis sur la vision, sur la prise en vue de ce qui se donne à voir » (GA 19.330). Une traduction plus littérale de ces derniers mots : « l’appréhension authentique de la chose même », indique comment Heidegger voit en Platon un phénoménologue, même s’il est conscient d’une étroitesse qui va mener Platon à perdre le fil des phénomènes pour y substituer des idées.

Le dialogue conclut avec la définition enfin adéquate du sophiste (264d-268a). Le phénomène du sophiste est le point de départ du dialogue et il est pris en vue à la fin. Mais le centre d’intérêt en est la communauté des genres, thème éloigné de la phénoménalité. C’est ici que les chemins de Platon et de Heidegger se séparent. Nous aurions tort de suivre Heidegger aveuglément ici. Il faut peser le différend qui s’annonce ici, et faire justice aux motivations platoniciennes. Le phénomène, pour Platon, sert à faire penser un arrière-fond logique et ontologique, et à stimuler la recherche dialectique. En tant que fabricant d’illusions inexistantes le sophiste soulève une question ontologique; pour y répondre : « nous avons contraint le non-être à être, parce que cette existence était l’unique refuge de notre raisonnement » (Polit. 284b). L’intérêt suscité par le phénomène du sophiste concerne son caractère ambigu, ondoyant, énigmatique, qui recèle une promesse ontologique. Platon interroge le sophiste non pas en vue de son être en tant que tel, mais en vue de la question ontologique plus générale qu’il suscite, ou de la menace qu’il pose à la raison : « Communication sélective des Formes, discrimination entre des très grands genres, détermination du Non-être comme Forme : tout cela était nécessaire pour donner au logos le critère de sa vérité et de sa fausseté, pour assurer – avec l’existence de réalités multiples et différenciées – sa possibilité, et enfin pour garantir sa réalité. Il n’était pas possible d’encercler le sophiste à moindres frais, et encercler le sophiste, c’est sauver le logos et la philosophie ».[12]

Le thème du politique, dans le dialogue suivant, semble présenter moins d’intérêt ontologique et ne fournir qu’un prétexte « pour devenir meilleurs dialecticiens sur tous les sujets possibles » (Polit. 285d). « Les réalités incorporelles, qui sont les plus belles et les plus grandes, ne se peuvent montrer exactement que dans une raison, et dans rien d’autre (logô monon, allô de oudeni saphôs deiknutai) et c’est en vue de celles-ci que nous poursuivons [Diès : c’est de telles réalités que vise] notre discours actuel » (286a); l’on se penche sur la définition du politique en vue des notions qu’elle met en jeu. Ces notions n’ont qu’un rapport assez oblique avec les formes au sens sublime du Phédon, du Phèdre ou du Banquet, et se concrétisent principalement par l’identification des divisions correctes des choses : « Car il faut le découvrir [sc. le sentier du politique], et le bien séparer des autres pour le marquer d’un caractère qui n’appartienne qu’à lui (idean autê mian episphragisasthai), puis donner à tous les sentiers qui s’en écartent, une seule marque spécifique (eidos) différente » (258c). La diairèse, si elle est conduite avec art, met en évidence les formes – les variétés actuelles – des choses et leurs rapports naturels. Même ici, où l’on reste si près des données empiriques, il s’agit d’exercise de la raison logique plutôt que de vision phénoménologique.

S’élever des formes individuelles jusqu’à l’appréhension de leur forme en tant que telle est un premier apprentissage du mouvement essentiel de la pensée, telle que l’entend Heidegger, qui va des étants à la vérité de leur être. En fait, plutôt que d’une séquence nette entre apprécier le monde des eidê et en voir les limites, il faudrait peut-être parler d’une oscillation entre une vive participation au mouvement de pensée qui va des choses à leur eidos, où Heidegger travaille avec Platon comme avec un collègue en ontologie phénoménologique, et, d’autre part, une sournoise insatisfaction avec les procédés platoniciens qui lui semblent passer à côté de la chose même, car Platon se serait laissé figer dans une posture intellectualiste et n’aurait pas poursuivi ses intuitions phénoménologiques jusqu’au bout. Cette oscillation pourrait produire une herméneutique subtile et fructueuse des textes de Platon, mais Heidegger, après son cours de 1924 sur le Sophiste, n’a pas trouvé le temps nécessaire pour poursuivre systématiquement une telle lecture. C’est une tâche pour des heideggériens avec plus de patience et plus de sympathie pour Platon.

.

MÉCONNAISSANCE DE LA DIALECTIQUE

.

Heidegger prétend que son approche phénoménologique sert seulement à « rendre disponibles les horizons permettant de comprendre ce que Platon savait mieux que nous » (GA 19.278). « Das gerade ist das Charakteristische der Dichotomie und des temnein : daß etwas im Hinsehen auf ein anderes zur Bestimmung gebracht wird.[…] Das wesentliche bleibt das dêloun, das Aufzeigen und Offenbarmachen der Sachen selbst. Tel est précisément le trait caractéristique de la dichotomie et du temnein : quelque chose est progressivement défini eu égard à une autre chose.[...] L’essentiel reste le dêloun, à savoir de mettre en évidence et de rendre manifestes les choses mémes » (286-7). Heidegger dit que Platon transfère cette méthode de division des étants à l’étre même, ce qui témoigne d’une méconnaissance de la différence ontologique. Mais il s’agit dans les deux cas de distinctions au niveau du langage, d’abord; les distinctions qui y correspondent au niveau des choses peuvent bien se montrer ensuite de caractère très différent. Francisco Gonzalez remarque que pour Heidegger « l’abord de l’être par le logos et sa structure, comme dans la méthode de diairesis, ne peut que faire disparaître la distinction entre être et étants. Heidegger suggère en outre que les Idées ou Formes platoniciennes soient un produit de cette approche de l’être et de la confusion qu’elle cause (GA 19.287) ». Il défend Platon en maintenant qu’il « reconnaît pleinement la différence ontologique elle-même aussi bien que l’incapacité du logos, et de toute approché centrée sur le logos, à préserver et rendre justice à cette différence », ce qu’il fait en prenant sa distance du discours de l’être et du non-être dans le dialogue par « diverses stratégies, dont la plus générale est la forme du dialogue elle-même ».[13] Mais puisque Heidegger reconnaît dans l’eidos une percée de la différence ontologique chez Platon, il faut prendre ses critiques sur ce point dans un sens relatif. Que Platon reconnaisse « pleinement » la différence est peu probable, et le véhicule de la forme littéraire du dialogue ne semble pas apte à traduire une telle reconnaissance. Dire la différence, au sens phénoménologique, exigerait une autre pratique positive de la parole. « Platon ne comprenait les eidê commes des choses objectivement présentes : en fait, c’était précisément pour éviter d’objectifier les eidê que Platon s’est abstenu de donner une ‘théorie des Formes’ ».[14] Certes, la différence ontologique est à l’œuvre dans cette altérité des eidê par rapport aux choses (comme elle l’est d’ailleurs même dans l’onto-théologie la plus développée), mais elle n’y est pas pleinement articulée.

Heidegger voit dans la dialectique un art phénoménologique, mais c’est une phénoménologie limitée par sa concentration sur le voir. « Dieses Sehen der Wahrheit wird vollzogen in der Dialektik. Cette vision de la vérité s’accomplit dans la dialectique » (319).[15] Son point de repos est un « Nur-mehr-Hinsehen, la simple vision », « das schlichte Haben des atomon eidos, so zwar, daßf der ganze Zusammenhang des dialegesthai im Ausgang vom horan des hen bis zum Sehen des eidos ein in sich geschlossenes Sehen ist, ein Sehen der Herkunftsgeschichte des betreffenden Seienden, von dem gehandelt wird, la simple possession de l’atomon eidos, de telle sorte que l’ensemble tout entier du dialegesthai, depuis son départ dnas l’horan de l’hen jusqu’à la vision de l’eidos, est une vision arrêtée, une vision de l’histoire de la provenance de l’étant en question » (350). Mais il semble que c’est Heidegger lui-même, par son optique exclusivement phénoménologique, qui réduit la dialectique à une quête de la vision, en manquant sa mobilité et sa variéte.

Monique Dixsaut montre que la dialectique platonicienne est un exercice dialogal du logos, qui est loin de se figer en une méthode mécanique. Cette recherche des formes est une voie, qui prend des formes diverses selon les contextes et les questions particulières qui la lancent et selon l’inspiration créatrice de qui la pratique. Elle est d’une telle variété qu’elle ne se laisse pas résorber dans des notions postérieures de pensée dialectique, fussent-elles aussi compréhensives que celle de Hegel, et on a du mal aussi à la dompter par une logique systématique, telle le système des genres et des espèces établi à partir d’Aristote. Elle ne se laisse réduire non plus, peut-on ajouter, à un régime de pensée phénoménologique. La dialectique est menée par une sensibilité, une divination qui sait laisser apparaître les formes, et elle peut être couronnée par une vision intuitive de celles-ci. Cela invite la lecture heideggérienne selon laquelle la dialectique serait un essai (plus ou moins maladroit et tâtonnant) de laisser voir l’être des étants dans sa vérité.[16] Mais toute cette rhétorique de la vision des essences peut se lire d’une façon opposée, comme célébrant la puissance du rationnel. S’il a une dimension phénoménologique, elle est imbriquée avec d’autres dimensions. Pour bien peser ce que Platon peut nous dire sur la phénoménalité de l’être il faudrait maîtriser le contexte dans lequel cette phénoménalité affleure, celui d’une pensée dialectique d’une grande mobilité, subtilité et pluriformité. Heidegger se contente souvent d’ouvrir une brèche audacieuse dans le texte tel qu’on le comprend habituellement, laissant à ses successeurs le soin d’exploiter cette brèche dans une lecture prudente et différenciée. Il accentue la promesse du texte étudié pour une réflexion phénoménologique, mais n’affronte pas la question méthodique d’une relecture conséquente du texte qui mettrait l’aspect phénoménologique en rapport avec les autres aspects, les aspects éthiques ou logiques par exemple, tout en invoquant l’aspect phénoménologique refoulé pour surmonter les autres en tant qu’ils l’occultent.

Les Formes hantent le discours platonicien comme une mélodie élusive et elles sont abordées dans des perspectives et selon des stratégies multiples. Insister sur un abord strictement phénoménologique des formes, aux dépens de l’inventivité de la pratique dialectique, risque de les figer en quantités statiques, que l’on peut alors saluer comme une « mittence de l’être » en en signalant les limites, et en mettant Platon à sa place dans l’histoire de l’être. Il est vrai que selon Heidegger « Das Erblicken gelingt, wenn überhaupt, nur in der fragenden, lernenden Haltung [...] Nur in der Strenge des Fragens kommen wir in die Nähe des Unsagbaren. La vision s’accomplit seulement dans l’attitude qui questionne et qui apprend. [...] Seulement dans la rigueur du questionnement vient-on dans la proximité de l’indicible » (GA 34.97-8), mais il entend le questionnement aussi dans un sens purement phénoménologique qui n’entre pas dans le tissu actuel des raisonnements platoniciens (du moins après le cours de 1924).

« La dialectique est l’unique route, hodos ou methodos, vers l’essence; seule la puissance dialectique peut nous frayer un chemin vers l’intelligence de ce qu’une chose est en vérité.[17] » Le mouvement de l’esprit en tant que construction d’arguments intéresse Heidegger peu; il cherche plutôt comment cet élan de la raison s’enracine dans une ouverture du Dasein à l’être. Le langage platonicien empêche de réduire les formes à des simples définitions logiques. Si elle tend, par contre, à les objectifier, en en faisant des objets transcendants offerts à notre contemplation, le phénoménologue peut les sauver de ce destin en les ramenant au mouvement de l’esprit dans lequel elles ont pointé d’abord et au langage qui les a nommées. Les formes retrouvent ainsi leur signification comme ouvertures sur l’être. Platon aspirait moins vers une science des formes que vers l’exercice même de dialectiser, qui témoigne d’une ouverture de l’esprit porté par un éros inassouvissable, et qui permet à l’esprit de rester en contact avec le domaine des formes et du Bien. Heidegger a tendance à voir la parole comme une nomination poétique réalisé par un individu privilégié, mais pour Platon c’est le logos dialogal, le dia-logos, qui fait émerger les formes dans toute leur splendeur. Ainsi la vision du Beau dont il est question vers la fin du Banquet ne concerne pas seulement Socrate, mais peut être vue comme le sommet de toutes les discussions antérieures.

Le fait que Heidegger en fin de compte ne sait que faire de la dialectique platonicienne, et n’y voit qu’une étape préliminaire et confuse, dépassée par la vision aristotélicienne, peut s’interpréter comme révélant une limite de la pensée de Heidegger plutôt que de celle de Platon. Heidegger hébergeait une velléité de reprendre son étude du Sophiste et devait sentir qu’il n’avait pas rendu justice à « puissance dialectique » (dunamis dialektikê). Cette puissance ne se laisse pas subordonner sans reste à une vision des phénomènes. Elle échappe au contrôle de la puissance phénoménologique et rivalise avec elle. Le rapport des deux puissances n’est ni un rapport de préséance ni de complémentarité. Il s’agit de deux stratégies de pensée qui se développent selon leur propre autonomie et dont les entrecroisements et les frictions ne correspondent pas à une corrélation systématique, mais constituent une histoire contingente et pluraliste.

La méconnaissance à l’égard de la dialectique s’est aggravée entre le cours de 1924 et les discussions de l’allégorie de la caverne dans le cours de 1931-32 (GA 34). Heidegger n’y prête aucune attention au rôle joué par l’argumentation rationnelle dans l’identification du Bien comme « le telos de l’intelligible » (Rép. 532b). « En étant cause de l’intelligibilité totale des êtres qui existent vraiment, le Bien garantit à la puissance dialectique que ce qu’elle vise en posant des questions d’essence existe, et d’une manière telle qu’il est possible de répondre à cette question. [...] La ‘puissance naturelle’ qu’est l’intelligence en l’âme comprend que le Bien est cause à la fois de son désir de comprendre ce que c’est, et du fait que l’objet de ce désir existe. La question du Bien est donc une cause intérieure au cheminement dialectique : si on la pose sans emprunter ce chemin, du dehors, on n’attrapera du Bien que des images.[18] » Ni dans son appréciation ni dans sa critique du Bien Heidegger ne rend justice à la raison comme puissance en soi. Il caractérise de manière non-dialectique la correction logique visée par Platon en termes d’une phénoménologie de la vision :

 

Der Übergang von einer Lage in die andere besteht in dem Richtigerwerden des Blickens. An der orthotês, der Richtigkeit des Blickens, liegt alles. Durch diese Richtigkeit wird das Sehen und Erkennen ein rechtes, so daß es zuletzt geradeaus auf die höchste Idee geht und in dieser ‘Ausrichtung’ sich festmacht. In diesem Sichrichten gleicht sich das Vernehmen dem an, was gesichtet sein soll. (GA 9.230) Passer d’un état à un autre, c’est regarder d’une façon plus exacte. Tout est subordonné à l’orthotês, à l’exactitude du regard. Par cette exactitude, la vue et la connaissance deviennent correctes, de sorte que finalement elles visent directement l’Idée suprême, et se fixent dans cette ‘visée’. Ainsi orientée, la perception se conforme à ce qui doit être vu. (Questions, 459).

 

Aucune générosité herméneutique ne vient en aide à l’allégorie ici. Les métaphores visuelles sont prises comme trahissant une objectivation illégitime de la vérité. Regarder le Bien, c’est figer la vérité en simple lumière et manquer toute la tension de l’arrachement par lequel l’étant accède à la présence,. La métaphysique consiste en cet arrêt du processus de l’être. Elle impose une forme à l’être même, le figurant comme ens commune ou summum ens.

    Mais pour laisser voir l’eidos, chez Platon, il ne suffit pas de regarder avec attention. Il faut plutôt savoir poser des bonnes questions et conduire des arguments adroits : les formes ont une existence qui diffère de celle des chose sensibles et « qu’aucune expérience ne peut constituer et qu’aucune sensation ni aucune expérience sensible ne peut appréhender. Seulement une question ».[19] Vouloir toujours ramener les formes au niveau phénoménologique, c’est couper les ailes à la dialectique et imposer sur elle la fixité d’un regard correct. La dialectique est un exercice (meletê, Ménon 75a) de la pensée questionnante et la correction de son regard sur les formes veut dire la réussite d’une prise intellectuelle, ou plutôt la justesse d’un chemin de raisonnement qui suit l’intuition des formes. Une sensibilité aux phénomènes soit empiriques soit transcendantaux peut guider et ancrer cet exercice mais ne lui fournit pas toute sa substance.

Quand Heidegger invoque Platon contre Platon, un Platon phénoménologue contre un Platon rationaliste, pour secouer le joug de l’idée, la stratégie ne marche pas très bien, car pour saisir l’impact phénoménologique des textes de Platon il faudrait apprécier mieux que ne le fait Heidegger le travail dialectique comme ouvrant un espece de pensée, espace dans lequel les étants se manifestent dans la clarté d’une nouvelle entente intellectuelle. Au fond de cet espace se profilent les immenses figures éblouissantes des Formes et du Bien. Ce sont des ouvertures sur le réel, voire le réel ultime, dont on ne saurait limiter et bien définir la portée. En tant que visées de l’ultime leur signification dépasse l’aspect intellectualiste souligné par Heidegger. Elles émergent au cours de la dialectique vivante non comme un plafond ou un joug imposé sur l’ouverture de la pensée mais comme chiffres de cet obscur objet de désir dont la pensée est assoiffée. Le Bien est le thème fondamental des discussions de la République, qui toutes supposent une connaissance du Bien, qui peu à peu s’affine. Mais quand on demande une définition du Bien, Socrate s’esquive. Ce n’est pas pour garder le prestige d’une transcendance ineffable, mais en reconnaissant que le Bien, et peut-être toutes les Idées, servent à conduire la pensée à chaque pas mais ne se prêtent à aucune clôture conceptuelle.

Quand Heidegger prétend qu’une précompréhension de l’être comme présence guide les débats du Sophiste ou du République et limite par avance leur portée possible, c’est parce qu’il croit que l’ouverture du Dasein dans son sens de l’être primordial est une réalité qui dispose de l’orientation de la pensée et que la raison est impuissante à changer cette ouverture initiale. Chez les Grecs cette ouverture était portée vers l’être comme présence, comme son destin pour ainsi dire. Ainsi aucun des thèmes traités dans le débat dialectique ne doit dépasser les limites posées par cette orientation initiale (qui elle-même a un statut époqual, comme un destin historique inesquivable). L’être étant compris comme Anwesend-sein (GA 19.34), le sens de l’être comme tel reste ininterrogé. Mais cette présupposition empêche Heidegger d’exploiter les suggestions de profondeur ontologique dans l’aporétique du Sophiste au sujet de la notion d’être et dans ses références au caractère dynamique de l’être et a l’être comme dunamis, capacité des contraires (247d-249a).[20] Une oscillation entre une appréciation du caractère ouvert et questionnant de la pensée platonicienne d’une part et d’autre part la thèse sommaire du primat de l’être comme présence nuit à la consistance du jugement de Heidegger. Dans le cours de 1931-32 il pèche dans le sens opposé en dénoncant ceux qui pensent que Platon n’était pas sérieux quand il parlait du « dunamis-Charakter des Seins » : « Und eben da, wo Platon später im Fragen nach Sein und Wahrheit am weitesten vorgedrungen ist, im Dialog ‘Sophistes’, wird das Wesen des Seins in der dunamis gefunden, – in solchem, was nur Ermächtigung ist und weiter nichts (247 d-e). Et précisément là où plus tard Platon est allé plus loin dans la questionnement après l’être et la vérité, dans le dialogue Sophistês, l’essence de l’être serai découvert dans la dunamis – dans cela qui n’est que rendre-capable et rien d’autre (247 d-e) » (GA 34.110). Ici Heidegger semble oublier (ou corriger) ce sur lequel il avait insisté en 1924, que l’être comme capacité d’affecter ou d’être affecté – définition seulement provisoire en tout cas – suppose bien une présence de cette dunamis, un support qui serait de l’ordre de l’Anwesen.[21] Il semble que le va-et-vient subtil du dialogue platonicien infecte le commentaire de Heidegger d’une oscillation qui multiplie les incertitudes, et qu’il cherche à limiter parfois par des jugements péremptoires. Aucune prise en vue phénoménologique ne maîtrisera le rapport Heidegger-Platon dans toute sa complexité. Pour tirer au clair ses enjeux il faudrait en faire une lecture dialectique – dernière revanche sur le phénoménologue de la dialectique dont il a méconnu la puissance.

LE BIEN COMME PROTO-EREIGNIS?

.

La dialectique platonicienne cherche la vision des Formes et elle est guidée en dernier lieu par la notion du Bien, qui est le fondement du monde des Formes, l’Idée des Idées, le soleil du monde intelligible. De tout cela Heidegger offre une lecture résolument phénoménologique. Le Bien est ce qui « rend apte » le rapport des étants et de l’esprit que les perçoit, rapport de non-voilement, qui est le « joug » (zugon) entre l’ouverture des étants et l’entente de l’être. Cette pensée s’exprime moins chaleureusement dans l’essai de 1940, La doctrine de Platon sur la vérité, que dans le cours de 1931-32 sur « l’essence de la vérité », dont l’essai de 1940 est loin d’être un simple résumé. Quelque chose s’est passé entre ces deux dates. Il n’est pas facile de dire exactement en quelle mesure, comment, et pourquoi le rapport de Heidegger a Platon a changé, ni de porter un jugement critique sur ce changement. Le rôle joué par l’influence de Nietzsche, l’anti-platonicien par excellence, dont Heidegger s’est tant occupé de 1936 à 1941, est difficile à peser avec exactitude.

Comme Heidegger cherche à enraciner la notion de forme dans un sens premier et élémentaire d’ « aspect», de même il rappelle la notion du bien au sens très terre-à-terre d’aptitude, comme quand on parle d’une bonne paire de skis. Ainsi peut-on construire une vision phénoménologique du rôle du bien, comme ce qui rend la pensée et les étants aptes à leur rencontre. L’aspect éthique du Bien, qui impliquerait que la vision du vrai ne soit pas seulement un effet de paideia mais le résultat d’une conversion morale n’est pas pris en compte; l’allégorie de la caverne n’y invite pas, mais si l’on se rappelle le contexte de tout le dialogue, dont le thème est la justice, on pourra soupçonner que Heidegger laisse à côté ou exclut ici ce qui ne vient à la rencontre de son projet onto-phénoménologique. De même la notion que le Bien soit source ou cause des étants est congédiée comme une imposition tardive, platonicienne ou chrétienne, et sa causalité est réduite à une condition de possibilité d’ordre phénoménologique.

On a parfois déploré que Heidegger réduit la notion du Bien au sens plat de Tauglichkeit.[22] Dans un premier temps il le fait pour donner un sens phénoménologique concret à l’idée du Bien, devenue tellement abstraite dans la tradition du platonisme. Il s’oppose aussi à l’interprétation néokantienne de Natorp et de Lask, qui voient dans le Bien un Sollen idéal. Mais dans peu de temps cette lecture phénoménologique sert encore à discréditer le Bien platonicien : « Das epekeina kann deshalb nur als etwas bestimmt werden, was die Seiendheit nunmehr als solche in ihrem Bezug zum Menschen (eudaimonia) kennzeichnet, als das agathon, das Taugliche, alle Tauglichkeit Begründende, also als Bedingung des ‘Lebens’ der psuchê und somit deren Wesen selbst. Damit ist der Schritt getan zum ‘Wert’, zum ‘Sinn’, zum ‘Ideal’. L’epekeina ne peut donc être défini que comme quelque chose qui marque l’étantité dans son rapport à l’homme (eudaimonia), comme l’agathon, l’apte, qui fonde toute aptitude, donc comme condition de la ‘vie’ de la psuchê, et donc comme l’essence même de celle-ci. On a ainsi franchi le pas vers la ‘valeur’, le ‘sens’, l’‘idéal’» (GA 65.210). (J’ai éliminé la virgule après « Lebens ».)

Mais je crois reconnaître dans ce que dit Heidegger au sujet du Bien dans son cours de 1931-32 une virtualité herméneutique qui est aux antipodes de cette lecture méprisante qui noie le texte platonicien dans les clichés des commentateurs. Si les eidê représentent la percée chez Platon d’une vision de l’être dans sa différence de l’étant, on pourrait rapporter le Bien, l’idée des idées, à une différence plus fondamentale, celle entre l’être et l’Ereignis, comme ce qui « donne » l’être. Le Bien serait une espèce de balbutiement de l’Ereignis comme l’eidos serait une lueur partielle de la différence ontologique.

L’interrogation des étants en vue de leur être est continuée dans l’interrogation de l’être lui-même en vue de ce qu’on peut appeler les conditions phénoménologiques de sa possibilité. Heidegger entend une résonance insoupçonnée dans la phrase de Parménide, « esti gar einai ». Il refuse d’y voir un simple constat logique : il y a de l’être et il n’y a pas du non-être. Il croit plutôt y toucher à l’origine même de la philosophie dans l’étonnement que provoque le phénomène « que l’étant est ». « Esti gar einai – ‘Es ist nämlich Sein’. In diesem Wort verbirgt sich das anfängliche Geheimnis für alles Denken. ‘Car il y a être’. Dans cette parole se cache le mystère initial pour toute pensée » (GA 9.334). À mesure que Heidegger l’interroge, il émerge une différence entre le esti et le einai – une différence plus profonde que celle entre être et étant. Dans le esti on peut lire la possibilité – « la puissance tranquille du possible » (Lettre sur l’humanisme) – qui octroie l’être, le cèlement d’où l’être émerge dans le non-cèlement (Unverborgenheit). Cette méditation avance lentement, toujours exposée au soupçon de ne faire que répéter de façon illégitime la phénoménologie, elle-même très audacieuse, des rapports entre être et étant. Cette pensée trouve moins de garantis dans la tradition philosophique que celle de la différence ontologique, mais pour un temps Heidegger semble bien avoir entrevu une lueur de l’Ereignis dans la pensée platonicienne du Bien. Le Bien aussi représente un pas au-delà de l’être; non pas vers un non-être transcendant, mais vers l’essentialité le plus intime de l’être même. Dans le cours de 1931-32, répété dans le semestre d’hiver 1933-34 (GA 36/37), il est possible que la pensée naissante de l’Ereignis inspire l’intérêt de Heidegger pour le thème du Bien et guide sa démarche d’exégète. Ce cours fait partie de la période d’incubation de l’Ereignis pour Heidegger, qui est peut-être tenté de voir dans la pensée platonicienne du Bien une étape ancienne de l’incubation de cette idée. Heidegger cherche à penser le Bien comme une réalité immanente et phénoménale, comme le sera l’Ereignis, l’événement qui rapporte la pensée aux étants dans l’harmonie d’une rencontre intime qu’il appelle aussi Eräugnis (de Auge, œil). Heidegger voudrait que l’epekeina tês ousias ne soustraie pas le Bien au régime du phénoménal mais soit lui-même un énoncé phénoménologique. Il signifierait que le Bien est au-delà des étants en tant que surgissant dans la présence parce qu’il est lui-même la condition immanente de leur surgissement, plutôt qu’une transcendance posée par la déduction métaphysique. Dans le discours sur le Bien, Heidegger décèle une entente de l’ouverture de l’être, entente insuffisante parce que trop centrée sur la vision correcte des formes sous la dominance de l’idée la plus haute.[23] 

On peut donc trouver des anticipations de l’Ereignis dans des passages comme le suivant :

Daß die höchste Idee am ursprünglichsten und eigentlichsten dessen waltet, was ohnehin schon das Amt der Idee ist: mit-entspringen lassen Unverborgenheit von Seiendem und, als das Erblickte, das Sein des Seienden zu verstehen geben (keines ohne das andere). Die Höchste Idee ist jenes kaum noch Erblickbare, das überhaupt so etwas wie Sein und Unverborgenheit mit-ermöglicht, d. h. Sein und Unverborgenheit als solche zu dem ermächtigt , was sie sind. Die höchste Idee is also dieses Ermächtigende, die Ermächtigung für das Sein, daß es sich als solches gibt, und in eins damit die Ermächtigung der Unverborgenheit daß sie als solche geschieht. (GA 34.99). Que l’idée la plus haute gère de la manière la plus originelle et la plus authentique ce qui est en tout cas déjà l’office de l’idée : de laisser le non-cèlement de l’étant surgir avec, et de donner à comprendre l’être de l’étant comme ce qui est regardé (aucun des deux sans l’autre). L’idée la plus haute est cela qui ne se laisse guère regarder mais qui rend possible ensemble être et non-cèlement, c.-à-d. qui donne à l’être et au non-cèlement la puissance d’être ce qu’ils sont. L’Idée la plus haute est donc cette instance qui donne puissance, la puissance pour l’être qu’il soit donné comme tel et avec cela la puissance pour le non-cèlement qu’il arrive comme tel.

 

Dans l’essai de 1940 le ton est moins chaleureux, et la critique pointe dans l’accent sur l’aspect visuel :

 

Die «Ideen » machen daher, griechisch gedacht, dazu tauglich, daß etwas in dem, was es ist, erscheinen und so in seinem Beständigen anwesen kann. Die Ideen sind das Seiende jedes Seienden. Das, was jede Idee zu einer Idee tauglich macht, platonisch ausgedrückt, die Idee aller Ideen, besteht deshalb darin, das Erscheinen alles Anwesenden in all seiner Sichtsamkeit zu ermöglichen. Das Wesen jeder Idee liegt schon in einem Ermöglichen und Tauglichmachen zum Scheinen, das eine Sicht des Aussehens gewährt. Daher ist die Idee der Ideen das Tauglichmachende schlechthin, to agathon. (GA 9.228) Ainsi, pour la pensée grecque, les « idées » rendent apte à ceci, qu’une chose puisse apparaître en ce qu’elle est et puisse être ainsi présente en ce qu’elle a de permanent. Les idées sont, en chaque étant, ce qui est. Ainsi, ce qui rend chaque idée apte à être une idée, c’est-à-dire, en langage platonicien, l’Idée de toutes les idées, consiste en ceci qu’elle rend possible l’apparition de toutes les choses présentes dans leur entière visibilité. L’essence de toute idée réside déjà en ceci qu’elle permet de paraître, qu’elle rend apte à ce paraître qui accord une vue sur l’é-vidence. C’est pourquoi l’Idée des idées est ce qui rend apte purement et simplement : to agathon. (Questions, 455)

 

Le Bien, dans cet essai, est caractérisé surtout comme une Idée qui met l’alêtheia sous son joug, et lance ainsi la carrière de la métaphysique comme « idéalisme », aux dépens de l’ouverture de l’être. « L’alêtheia passe sous le joug de l’Idée. [...] L’essence de la vérité abandonne son trait fondamental antérieur : le non-voilement. [...] La vérité devient l’orthotês, l’exactitude de la perception et du langage » (Questions, 458-9).[24]

Si l’essai de 1940 est moins empressé que le cours de 1931-32 d’accueillir les résonances prometteuses de la langue platonicienne, c’est peut-être parce que Heidegger est conscient d’avoir prêté au Bien en 1931-32 quelques traits qui appartenaient à la notion de l’Ereignis, développée dans l’entre-temps (même si l’optique de 1931-32, encore centrée sur l’essence de l’homme, ne s’est pas encore ouverte aux dimensions de l’Ereignis). Les pages consacrées au Bien comme ce qui approprie la pensée à la vérité des étants en 1940 (Questions, 453-8) ne sont qu’une relique des discussions de ce thème en 1931-32, et elles sont vite suivies par des reproches dans lesquelles Platon est mis à sa place fatidique dans l’histoire de la métaphysique. Une fois la pensée de l’Ereignis mûrie, il ne veut plus l’associer de près à Platon; il est plus conscient que le texte platonicien ne tient pas sa promesse phénoménologique, et les quelques lueurs de l’alêtheia originelle qui puissent y subsister posent une tâche pour l’exégète qui devrait remonter en-decà de Platon.

L’événement essentiel dans l’allégorie de la caverne (République VII 514a-517a) est la venue des étants en présence – leur émergence dans la lumière de l’existence – conçue comme un arrachement du cèlement : « Wahrheit bedeutet anfänglich das einer Verborgenheit Abgerungene. Wahrheit ist also Entringung jeweils in der Weise der Entbergung » (GA 9.223); « À l’origine vérité veut dire : ce qui a été arraché à une occultation. La vérité est cet arrachement, toujours en mode de dévoilement » (Questions, 449) . Mais cette conception de la vérité affronte une autre conception dans le texte de Platon, qui a oublié le dé-cèlement en faisant de la vérité la rencontre lumineuse de la pensée et des choses illuminées. Sa philosophie est « nicht anderes als Kampf der beiden Wahrheitsbegriffe, rien d’autre qu’une lutte entre les deux notions de vérité » (GA 34.46). Les valeurs de visibilité et de correction du regard occultent l’événement de l’alêtheia comme décèlement. En 1940 l’accent sur les valeurs de visibilité chez Platon (Erscheinen, Sichtsamkeit, Sicht des Aussehens) est plus lourdement : « Das Wesen der Idee liegt in der Schein- und Sichtsamkeit (GA 9.225). L’être de l’idée consiste à pouvoir briller, à pouvoir être visible (Questions, 452). » Ce thème est ancien, car le « théorétisme » platonicien est dénoncé dans les premiers cours de Heidegger. Mais il devient maintenant le point d’entrée pour une vision très négative du rôle de Platon dans l’histoire de la philosophie. Cette critique de la prédominance du visuel chez Platon dérive peut-être d’une étroitesse importée dans le texte par le biais de l’insistance de Heidegger lui-même sur les racines visuelles de la terminologie platonicienne et par son transfert au monde des idées des associations de lumière et de visibilité phénoménologiques qui ne concernent proprement que les images sensibles offertes dans l’histoire de la caverne.

La critique de l’Idée du Bien est déjà formulée, en trois pages (GA 34.123-5), en 1931-32. Signe de la disparition de l’expérience originelle de l’alêtheia est le fait que « schon Platon die alêtheia fast als etwas, was dem Seienden zukommt, – derart, daß das Seiende selbst als Unverborgenes angesprochen wird, daß Seiendes und Unverborgenes in eins gesetzt werden und daß die Frage nach der Unverborgenheit als solcher gar nicht lebendig ist, que déjà Platon entend l’alêtheia comme quelque chose qui revient à l’étant, – de sorte que l’étant lui-même soit considéré comme non-celé, que l’étant et le non-celé sont posés comme un et que la question du non-cèlement en tant que tel n’est pas du tout vivant » (GA 34.123-4). La vérité ne concerne plus l’arrachement du cèlement mais se résume dans l’idée de l’étant ayant le degré maximum d’étantité, de présence, d’An-wesenheit. Ainsi le soleil qui se lève pour Platon, l’être suprême de la métaphysique occidentale, masque paradoxalement la vraie aurore de l’occident car il jette dans l’ombre le phénomène de la vérité dans son émergence dynamique. L’allégorie de la caverne ne représente que de façon déficiente le processus d’arrachement par lequel la vérité se manifeste, car il concerne seulement ceci, « was dazu gehört, daß das Seiende als solches unverborgen sei, ce qui relève du fait que l’étant comme tel est non-celé » (125).

Ainsi quand Heidegger, dans le même cours, a flairé derrière la situation évoquée par Platon le véritable phénomène de l’alêtheia, dans des remarques qui semblent anticiper la pensée de l’Ereignis, il s’agit d’une extrapolation qui va au-delà de Platon, non pour le sauver de lui-même par une charité herméneutique mais pour à la fin signaler de manière critique les limites de sa vision : « Wenn wir sagen, die alêtheia ist Entbergsamkeit, so ist das eine Auslegung, die auseinanderlegt, worin die Unverborgenheit selbst gründen muss. Die Unverborgenheit is also für Platon Thema und doch nicht. […] Das Ausbleiben der Frage nach der Verborgenheit als solcher, ist der entscheidende Beleg für die bereits anhebende Unwirksamkeit der Unverborgenheit im strengen Sinne. Quand nous disons que l’alêtheia est arrachement du cèlement, cela est une explication qui rend clair dans quoi le non-cèlement lui-même a nécessairement son fondement. Le non-cèlement est donc un thème pour Platon et pourtant ne l’est pas. [...] Le fait que la question du cèlement en tant que tel ne survient pas est l’évidence décisive de l’inactualité qui a déjà commencé à affecter le non-cèlement au sens propre » (125).

 

Eidos et physis

       La pensée de la forme n’échappe pas à la critique, car elle non plus ne peut rendre justice au non-cèlement. L’eidos, l’aspect de l’étant attire trop sur lui l’attention de la pensée, et la rend insuffisamment attentive au non-cèlement. Si Platon n’a pas pensé le cèlement impliqué dans la vérité comme a-lêtheia, s’il a manqué la dynamique selon laquelle l’entente de l’être est toujours un arrachement de l’oubli, c’est parce qu’il concentre l’être des étants dans leur forme, en tant que celle-ci est visible aux yeux de l’esprit, et qu’il assujettit les formes à leur tour à l’idée du Bien, lui-même conçue comme pure visibilité.

« Der europäische Nihilismus », texte contemporain de Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, contient les remarques les plus radicales de Heidegger sur l’idea, terme qui porte plus de connotations négatives pour lui que le terme eidos, à cause de sa plus grande abstraction. Mais même le terme eidos suggère une fixation platonicienne sur la vision, une tendance proto-théorique, qui serait à la racine de tout le théorétisme métaphysique. L’eidos tend à occulter des noms antérieurs et plus primordiaux pour l’être des étants, surtout le nom de phusis. La phusis est occultée par la nomination platonicienne et aristotélicienne de l’être comme ousia, qui signifie le commencement d’une reification de la phusis ou d’un aveuglement à la phusis. Phusis est un phénomène d’émergence, ousia un phénomène de présence qui dure, idea ou eidos un phénomène de visibilité dans un sens transcendantal élargi – ce qui est loin des pâles équivalents latins : natura, substantia ou essentia, idea ou forma. Tout en appréciant la richesse de chacun des ces régimes de phénoménalité, Heidegger remarque la tendance des régimes plus récents à faire oublier l’ouverture des plus anciens. Aristote respecte la phusis, l’émergence des étants dans leur être, bien plus que ne le fait Platon, et ne s’impatiente pas de la dépasser vers des fondements transcendants. C’est chez Aristote plus que tout autre que Heidegger cherche à voir la forme dans la pleine phénoménalité de son être. Platon conçoit l’être comme ce qui se donne à voir et ne remarque pas que cette forme visible n’est que le point d’arrivée d’un surgissement de l’étant des profondeurs, pour ainsi dire, du cèlement.

La temporalité d’ousia est celle d’un présent permanent, tandis que celle de la phusis semble échapper à cette limite. L’entente d’ousia comme idea fait du platonisme un ‘idéalisme’: « Metaphysik, Idealismus, Platonismus bedeuten im Wesen dasselbe. Métaphysique, idéalisme et platonisme signifient essentiellement la même chose » (Nietzsche II, 220). Ian Leask montre que dans le platonisme le réel ultime échappe aux prises de la raison et du langage (logos), et qu’il n’est donc pas une métaphysique totalisatrice.[25] C’est-à-dire que l’événement de pensée nommé Platon n’est pas la mise en place d’un système mais l’ouverture d’un espace, un espace que les thèses explicites de Platon et encore moins celles de ses successeurs ne suffisent pas à mesurer. Cette ouverture est maintenue non par une vigilance phénoménologique mais par la créativité de la pratique dialectique, (qui contient une part d’acuité phénoménologique que l’on pourrait extraire et jouer contre Platon pour élargir encore ses horizons). Heidegger insiste que les cadres de pensée mis en place par Platon restent normatifs même à l’égard des pensées anti-platoniciennes comme celle de Nietzsche. Pour surmonter ces cadres, il faut étudier leur genèse chez Platon, tout en cherchant des éléments dans l’écriture platonicienne qui s’y opposent ou qui les relativisent de façon subtile. Heidegger aurait pu trouver de tels éléments dans le caractère aporétique et questionnant des démarches de Platon, qui a légué aux néoplatoniciens aussi un soupçon à l’égard de la totalisation, la soif d’une ouverture dialectique sur une vérité échappant aux prises du concept. On pourrait même argumenter que la métaphysique, chaque fois qu’elle a été une pensée vivante, ne cessait pas de se nourrir de cette ouverture maintenue par Platon. Ses méthodes n’ont pas été celles d’une phénoménologie mais celles de la dialectique rationnelle, diversement comprise. Mais cela peut avoir tenu ouvert l’espace de l’entente de l’être bien plus que n’aurait fait un strict régime de méditation des phénomènes.

La démarche phénoménologique de Heidegger a profondément renouvelé l’histoire de la philosophie. Mais quand nous nous rendons compte que sa prise sur les textes anciens n’est que partielle, et que ceux-ci contiennent des ressources qui ne se laissent pas récupérer par une vision phénoménologique, nous nous trouvons confrontés au défi de penser la tradition en profondeur en suivant d’autres chemins que ceux battus par Heidegger. La réception critique du passé ne peut se confier à une seule méthode. Mais elle ne doit pas non plus retomber dans l’encyclopédisme stérile. Quelles que soient les limites du projet heideggérien, ou du projet hégélien, ils ont élevé l’histoire de la philosophie à la hauteur de la pensée. Même si l’engagement avec les textes anciens ne peut la plupart du temps se tenir sur ces hauteurs, et même si les phares heideggérien et hégélien risquent de nous désorienter autant que de nous orienter, ils nous auront fait entrevoir les enjeux de la tâche et rendu aux études historiques une profondeur potentielle qui leur donne une valeur inestimable.

.

NOTES

.

[1] W BEIERWALTES, « Le vrai soi », dans M. Dixsaut, dir. La connaissance de soi : études sur le traité 49 de Plotin, Vrin, 2002, p. 11-39; ici, p. 38.

[2] Voir explication de la différence entre l’Aufhebung hégélienne et le Schritt zurück heideggérien, dans HEIDEGGER Identität und Differenz, Neske, Pfullingen, 1957, p. 42-7.

[3] BEIERWALTES, « Le vrai soi », p. 39.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ce tournant a lieu en 1934; voir Jean GREISCH, La parole heureuse : Martin Heidegger entre les choses et les mots, Beauchesne, 1987, p. 105.

[6] La production de l’étant est sa Fertigkeit, en qui toute son histoire, sa Seinsgeschichte (!), se résume. Sur le to ti ên einai aristotélicien, Heidegger remarque : « Schon die Zusammensetzung deutet darauf hin, daß es sich hier um einen ganzen Komplex von Seinsbestimmungen handelt, den wir später ablösen wollen. Das Sein im Charakter des to ti ên einai ist das eigentliche Thema desjenigen logos, den wir als horismos jetzt besprechen. Dieser Seinscharakter ist der des hekaston. Jedes Daseiende in seiner Jeweiligkeit wird bestimmt durch das to ti ên einai… Ich sehe ein Daseiendes eigentlich in seinem Sein, wenn ich es in seiner Geschichte sehe, das so Daseiende, aus seiner Geschichte ins Sein gekommen. Dieses Daseiende als so da ist fertig, es ist zu seinem Ende gekommen, zu seiner Fertigkeit, genau wie das Haus in seinem eidos als poioumenon fertig ist. (GA 18.35). La composition indique déjà qu’il s’agit ici de tout un complexe de déterminations de l’être, que nous voulons désenchevêtrer plus tard. L’être dans le caractère de to ti ên einai est le thème authentique de ce logos que nous considérons maintenant comme horismos. Ce caractère est celui de l’hekaston. Tout étant dans son surgissement temporal est déterminé par le to ti ên einai… Je vois un étant authentiquement dans son être quand je le vois dans son histoire, comme issu de son histoire dans l’être. Cet étant, étant présent ainsi qu’il est, est prêt, il est venu à sa fin, à son être-prêt, exactement comme la maison est prête dans son eidos comme poioumenon. »

[7] Jean-François COURTINE, Heidegger et la phénoménologie, Vrin, 1990, p. 150, 157.

[8] Jean BEAUFRET, Dialogue avec Heideggéri, Éditions de Minuit, 1973, p. 93; voir GA 40.33-4; GA 55.76; Gottfried MARTIN, Platons Ideenlehre. De Gruyter, Berlin, 1973, p. 38.

[9] Cité, Francisco GONZALEZ, « Dialectic as ‘Philosophical Embarrassment’: Heidegger’s Critique of Plato’s Method », Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002), pp.361-89; p. 382. Gonzalez démontre comment dès ses premiers cours Heidegger opposait l’expression linguistique et la dialectique à la visée d’un pur noein, tout en doutant parfois de la possibilité de celui-ci et en attribuant à la dialectique du moins un effort de se libérer de l’emprisonnement linguistique pour indiquer les phénomènes. Gonzalez cite Jacques TAMINIAUX, selon lequel Heidegger, suivant une foi husserlienne dans le primat de la donnée intuitive, briguait “le statut d’un visionnaire ultime aneu logou” (cité, p. 370). Heidegger est héritier du choix ou du destin de Husserl, qui a tout investi dans l’intuitif, en s’éloignant de l’exercise du jugement tel qu’il se pratique encore dans les Recherches logiques (voir Jean-Christophe DEVYNCK, Logique du phénomène, Diakom, 2000, distr. Th. Devynck, 83 rue Amiral Mouchez, Paris 75013).

[10] Heidegger, Questions I et II, Gallimard, 1990.

[11] Voir Platon, La République IV-VII, trad. Émile Chambry, Les Belles Lettres 1975, p. 93-4; Simplicius, Cat. Ar. schol. 66 b45; cf. GA 15.377.

[12] Monique DIXSAUT, Métamorphoses de la dialectique dans les dialogues de Platon, Vrin, 2001, p. 226.

[13] Francisco J. GONZALEZ, « Confronting Heidegger on Logos and Being in Plato’s Sophist », dans G. DAMSCHEN et al., dir, Platon und Aristoteles – sub ratione veritatis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Gottingue, 2002, pp. 102-33; p. 102.

[14] Ibid.

[15] « Vor allem ist abzusehen […] von jeder äusserlichen technischen Ausdeutung der Dialektik. Das Wesentliche in ihr ist das horan. Die sunagôgê ist eine Weise des Sehens, nämlich des hen; und auch die diairesis ist als Aufdecken vollzogen aus dem ständigen Hinblicken auf das hen; die diairesis der eidê ist ein Abheben von Aussehen gegen Aussehen, was selbst nur im Sehen vollzogen werden kann. Ce qu’il faut avant tout écarter [...] c’est toute interprétation de la dialectique en termes de technique extérieure. Ce qui en est essentiel, c’est l’horan. La sunagôgê est un mode de vision, c’est-à-dire de l’hen; et en tant qu’acte de dé-couvrement, la diairesis s’accomplit également à partir de la prise en vue constante de l’hen; la diairesis des eidê consiste à mettre en relief tel aspect par contraste avec tel autre aspect, ce qui ne peut être accompli à son tour que dans ce qui ressortit au voir » (GA 19.349).

[16] Ainsi, par example, quand Socrate dit « que celui qui a le véritable amour de la science (ho ontôs philomathês) est naturellement disposé à lutter pour atteindre l’être (pros to on [...] hamillasthai), et que, loin de s’arrêter aux nombreux objets qui n’existent qu’en apparence (tois doxazoumenois einai), il le poursuit sans faiblir et ne se relâche point dans son amour qu’il n’ait atteint la nature de chaque chose en soi (autou ho estin hekastou tês phuseôs) par la partie de son âme qui est faite pour saisir les essences, à cause qu’elle est de même nature qu’elles, qu’enfin s’approchant par cette partie de l’âme de l’être véritable et s’unissant à lui (plêsiasas kai migeis tô onti ontôs), il engendre l’intelligence et la vérité (gennêsas noun kai alêtheian) » (Rép., 490a-b), chaque mot se révèle chargé de résonances ontologiques au sens de Heidegger, résonances méconnues par la philosophie analytique mais recueillies par l’écoute attentive du penseur de l’être. Essai de traduction : « Le desir de connaître reste superficiel s’il n’exprime l’ouverture fondamental du Dasein à la vérité de l’être. La lutte pour le savoir s’enracine dans une lutte vers l’être, un agon athlétique, voire une gigantomachie, pour arracher la vérité de l’être de l’oubli. Pour y entrer il faut cesser de se laisser occuper par les étants et leur différences, qui tels qu’ils apparaissent à la connaissance inauthentique, occultent la vérité de l’être. L’intérêt initial pour l’être doit prendre les proportions d’une passion ontologique (erôs) engagant toute l’existence du Dasein dans son ouverture à l’être. Le Dasein tirera à la lumière l’être authentique de chaque étant, en l’interrogeant quant à son être, et puis il s’élévera à l’entente de l’être en tant que tel, devenant lui-même comme un organe pour appréhender l’être, ou un moment dans l’événement de l’être. Se mettant ainsi en rapport avec l’être le Dasein dépasse la connaissance superficiel pour devenir entente de l’être. (nous) et lieu du non-cèlement ». Certes, un tel exercice devient vite un pastiche assez pénible. Il ne s’agit plus de lire Platon, à proprement parler, mais de retrouver Heidegger en Platon comme l’allégorisme des Pères retrouve le Christ dans la Bible juive. (Curieusement, après avoir écrit ce pastiche, je découvre que le même texte avait en fait attiré l’attention de Heidegger, qui en donne une traduction à sa manière à GA 34.67-8).

[17] DIXSAUT, Métamorphoses de la dialectique, p. 75.

[18] Ibid., p. 95.

[19] Ibid., p. 33.

[20] Voir GONZALEZ, “Confronting Heidegger”, pp. 120-31.

[21] GONZALEZ souscrit à la même exagération: “définir l’être comme dunamis koinônias, c’est évidemment faire du pros ti une structure ontologique universelle » (ibid., p. 126).

[22] Voir Maria VILLELA-PETIT, « Simone Weil, Martin Heidegger et la Grèce », Cahiers Simone Weil 23 (2003), p. 181-218; p. 199. Il ne faut pourtant pas souscrire à une lecture simplement éthique du Bien dans le contexte de l’allégorie de la caverne. La fonction éthico-politique du Bien est « maintenue tout au long des livres VI et VII, mais ce n’est là que l’action du Bien dans le lieu visible. Dans le ‘lieu intelligible’, il exerce un autre type de causalité. Parce que le dialecticien comprend que le trait essentiel, l’idea du Bien, n’est pas le bon (au sens éthique) mais l’intelligible, et est capable de reconnaître dans l’intelligible une valeur plus haute – la valeur la plus haute –, le Bien est son bien, il est le telos, but et achèvement de la dialectique » (DIXSAUT, Métamorphosess de la dialectique, p. 100-1).

[23] L’epekeina est affecté d’un qualificatif – « en ancienneté et en puissance » – qui en détermine et restreint la signification, en abolissant la contradiction avec les passages qui parlent du Bien comme une essence que l’intelligence peut saisir : «c’est par lui que leur viennent l’être et l’essence, alors que le Bien n’est pas une essence (ouk ousias ontos tou agathou), mais, par delà l’essence, il la surpasse encore en ancienneté et en puissance (presbeia kai dunamei) » (Rép., 509b, trad. Dixsaut). « Le Bien n’est pas une essence puisqu’il ‘procure’ l’essence, et s’il la surpasse, c’est sous le double rapport de l’ancienneté et de la puissance... Il est ‘plus vieux’ que toute autre essence, étant la cause du fait que les essences existent (et que n’existent pas seulement des choses sensibles en devenir)... D’autre part, [...] le Bien possède une puissance supérieure à celle de toute autre essence. Toute essence a la puissance de conférer son essence ou ses propriétés à une multiplicité de choses, et le Bien possède aussi cette puissance-là... Mais il possède également une sorte de causalité éminente qui consiste à rendre toutes les essences connaissables par l’intelligence » (DIXSAUT, Métamorphoses de la dialectique, p. 98-9).

[24] Il y a ici un mythe d’origine contestable; la vérité comme exactitude n’est sûrement pas le sous-produit d’un aveuglement de Platon. C’est en approfondissant l’expérience quotidienne du vrai comme correspondance exacte que Platon arrive à la pensée des formes et du Bien. Il les pense comme fondements, comme sources de la loi et de l’ordre dans le discours, la pensée et les choses mêmes – lointains précurseurs du principe de la raison suffisante qui pour Heidegger serait la clé de voûte de la rationalité métaphysique oublieuse du non-voilement de l’être.

[25] Voir Ian LEASK, Questions of Platonism, Belfast, 2002.