The Sage of Being

The final piece included in Volume 4 of Heidegger's Nietzsche doesn't actually have much to do with Nietzsche at all.  However, the 1945 essay Nihilism as the History of Being that Heidegger composed in the wake of his various lecture series on Nietzsche does encapsulate what he took away from this encounter for his own thinking.  Obviously, Heidegger thinks that Nietzsche was a nihilist, notwithstanding the latter's claims to have overcome that problem.  But, to ask it as Heidegger would, "what is the essence of nihilism?"   

In trying to answer this question, Heidegger weaves a long and winding trail that is significantly more densely written than the lectures; this essay was clearly not meant to be read aloud.  So I feel the need to trace back over the main twists and turns of his thought process in order to get a handle and what otherwise risks degenerating into world salad like this:

The authenticity of nihilism historically takes the form of inauthenticity, which accomplishes the omission of the default by omitting this very omission. (H.4.220)

I contend that this monstrosity of a sentence actually means something, and not even something as complicated as Heidegger seems to want to make it appear.  But to get to the point where we can read this stuff, we have to start at the beginning and systematically translate his German Philosophy into Plain English.  As this is our first foray into the new GPiPE market segment, certain glitches with the technology are to be expected.  Bear with me here.

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Heidegger is convinced that Nietzsche was a nihilist.  As I said before, I think Heidegger willfully misconstrues Nietzsche's philosophy.  In fact, I don't believe any part of his whole history of philosophy stands up to a close reading of the original works, at least it doesn't with the ones I'm familiar with.   But rather than argue, I find it more interesting to just focus on the way his interpretation of Nietzsche and others functions within Heidegger's philosophy.  So 'Nietzsche' in this context is going to mean exclusively 'Heidegger's Nietzsche'.  

'Nietzsche's' particular brand of nihilism is important to Heidegger because it represents the culmination of a certain type of nihilism, one that, as we'll see, Heidegger proposes to supersede.  Nietzsche's nihilism is still metaphysical.  What Heidegger means by this is that Nietzsche does not think about Being in itself, but only thinks of it as a value for "the" being.  Being versus the being is the great divide that always obsesses Heidegger.  Usually we take "the" being, any particular being, for granted as our starting point.  Then we compare it to other beings, maybe to ourself as a being, and try to figure out what these beings have in common that makes them "be".  This is what Heidegger means by the "Being of beings", which for him always amounts to a philosophical slur.  Metaphysics only talks about the Being of beings, where Heidegger is interested in the forgotten question: what is Being "as such" or "in itself"?  Nietzsche is a nihilist because he explicitly thinks that the Being of beings is nothing because the being as will to power is the sole ultimate fact.  For Nietzsche, the Being of beings is just an empty abstract concept made up by some sicko priest-type being looking to buy a bigger yacht.  For Heidegger though, this form of nihilism is still metaphysical, because it only deals with the nothingness of the Being of beings, and not with Being in itself.  A more essential nihilism would say that there is nothing to Being itself.  

But, you perceptively ask, what the fuck is Being?  In fact, why do we even think there is such a thing as Being?  What does Being mean for Heidegger?  This is a good question, but I want to postpone it for a moment.  The point right now is just that this question can't even come up in come up within metaphysics because it only thinks about the Being of beings.  Therefore, metaphysics can't see, much less overcome, the true essence of nihilism.  So Nietzsche's form of nihilism is the most complete version of a certain, metaphysical, type of nihilism, but it is merely a way station along the path towards a more essential nihilism.  

Nietzsche, however, was not the first nihilist.  In fact, Heidegger believes that the entire history of metaphysics is the history of the development of nihilism.  Metaphysics has always begun with the particular, individual being.  For Plato, the essence, the whatness, of beings was the Forms. This whatness is the only thing that truly exists, truly is; the beings are only granted their Being through the Forms.  With the theory of Forms, and particularly with the Form of the Good, the Being of beings is understood as the most universal a priori given principle that underlies all beings.  This meta-physical move essentially converts it into a particular being, basically God, which becomes the transcendent cause of all beings.  So metaphysics merges ontology and theology into what Heidegger calls "onto-theology".  Metaphysics always finds the Being of beings through transcendence, but always starts with and returns to the being.  It never thinks Being in itself, so Being remains 'nothing' for it.  Thus, metaphysics is a type of nihilism, even though it doesn't believe itself to be.  So, yeah, he's saying that Plato was a nihilist.  This description applies all the way up through Nietzsche, who reverses Plato by explicitly takes the Being of beings as nothing in itself, nothing more than a value for the being.  For Nietzsche, particular beings, determined as the will to power, are the only thing that truly is, and what we call "Being" is just a projection of the needs of those beings.  While this at first seems to make Being itself a complete nothing, we've seen how it really just makes the Being of beings a meaningless power grab.  Somehow, all of Western philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche has failed to ask about Being in itself.

But now let's come back to the question of what is Being for Heidegger?  To me, the word Being sounds an awful lot like God.  And not just the God of the philosopher's either.  Heidegger will constantly talk about Being in terms that tend to go beyond just generally anthropomorphizing it and move towards actually personifying it.  It seems to have some sort of unity and way of acting, even some needs, though all these descriptions turn out to be pretty paradoxical.  In fact, reading Heidegger we can easily get the impression that Being itself is the only thing that truly is, and the only actor in all of history.  And yet we just laid out Heidegger's critique of "onto-theology".  How can we reconcile these views?  On some level, this is an insoluble problem, because Heidegger himself claims that, "Any discussion of "Being itself" always remains interrogative." (H.4.201)  Nevertheless, Heidegger obviously needs to have some idea of what Being is, or at least what it's not, to tell us about the problems with metaphysics.  If we want to read generously, I think we could try to interpret Heidegger's pre-idea of Being as simply the intuition that there is something more to reality than just particular individual beings.  We suspect that there is something more than what's right in front of us all the time, a suspicion that seems immediately confirmed when we try to consider the reality of past and future, or more generally, the reality of possibility.  The quest to understand this something more, something beyond or behind or between, is of course exactly what launched metaphysics.  But metaphysics tries to solve this problem without first really understanding what the problem is, whereas H would just like us to see it, and leave it, as a problem.  So in this here story I'm about to unfold, we can try to hear "Being itself" as whatever would respond to this vague hunch that there is something more to the world than meets the eye.

Given this context, Heidegger's sudden decision (H.4.212) that Being is presence, unconcealment, aletheia, makes more sense.  Instead of starting with beings as a given and asking what they share or what grounds them, Heidegger wants to begin straightaway with Being itself.  If we take this "something more" as a given (even if we're not quite sure what that means yet, and this given is only given as a question) and look through the eyes of Being, as it were, the first thing we see is exactly what metaphysics took for granted and never thought about -- the fact that Being reveals itself as beings.  That is, what we actually find are particular beings that somehow appear out of the mist of this "something more".  Of course, Heidegger would object to this way of phrasing it because he wants to think of Being as the (sorta?) solid starting point, without the implication that it is 'beyond' beings which the phrase "something more" conveys.  From what I gather, this attempt to shift to a Being-first perspective is the central move in all Heidegger's later philosophy.  It's as if he proposes to channel Being for us, showing us what Being looks like from its own perspective rather than the perspective of beings, or of one particular hairless chimp type being.   

Shifting perspective like this puts on odd twist on the critique of metaphysics that Heidegger has just given us though.  Before, we might have though he was smugly saying that all earlier philosopher's were stupid and he was smart -- he was going to finally think Being first.  But if we begin with Being, then the fact that metaphysics never thinks about Being itself must be accounted for as something other than a failure of human metaphysics.  If Being is presence, sheer disclosure, then how did a particular being lose touch with this light that is literally always in right in front of it and all other beings?  To blame the mistakes of metaphysics on humans is to look from the perspective of the being.  Instead, Heidegger is trying to see how Being itself created the possibility for this error, namely, the forgetting of Being that occurs when metaphysics focuses on beings.  Seen in this light, historical metaphysics is not a human creation, but just part of the unfolding of the essence of Being.  As I suggested before, it's as if Being is the only actor that creates all of history.  This results in a huge paradox though, because it means that Being, which is unconcealment, goes through a historical phase, so to speak, in which it conceals itself.  In this phase, Being unconceals beings, but conceals that fact that it itself is the principle of this unconcealment.  We call this phase "metaphysics".  We can also call it "nihilism", because during this phase Being itself will cease to be a question and instead be converted into a pre-given first principle or ultimate fact that transcends beings -- it will become the Being of beings.  That is, since metaphysics focuses on beings, Being in itself will go unexplored, unthought, and be as if it were nothing.

[This whole shifting to the perspective of Being might sound a little mystical, and in some sense I think it is.  The more I consider Heidegger's vision of Being and the history of Being (which really is Being itself), the more I am reminded of the non-dual idea of spacious awareness.  Everything occurs within this awareness, even though this awareness is not itself a thing.  "Looking from the perspective of Being" sounds a lot like being in touch with a non-dual awareness prior to the subject and object.  From this perspective beings, including our selves, are seen as empty, fabricated, constructed.  Lest we confuse this with Plato's idea of the Forms, we should note that emptiness is not a synonym for non-existent.  Emptiness is the middle way between Being and Nothing, a type of non-Being without negation.  And the problem that Heidegger is encountering here is exactly the problem that Mahayana Buddhism wrestled with -- if everything is already enlightened Buddha-nature, why is it that we don't immediately realize this?]

Heidegger calls this concealement of unconcealment the "default" (the lack or absence) of Being.

   In the meantime, it has become clearer that Being itself occurs essentially as the unconcealment in which the being comes to presence.  Unconcealment itself, however, remains concealed as such. With reference to itself, unconcealment as such keeps away, keeps to itself. The matter stands with the concealment of the essence of unconcealment. It stands with the concealment of Being as such. Being itself stays away.
   Thus matters stand with the concealment of Being in such a way that the concealment conceals itself in itself. The staying away of Being is Being itself as this very default. Being is not segregated somewhere off by itself, nor does it also keep away; rather, the default of Being as such is Being itself. In its default Being veils itself with itself. This veil that vanishes for itself, which is the way Being itself essentially occurs in default, is the nothing as Being itself.  (H.4.214)

As you can see, Heidegger's language is complicated, but the idea is fairly simple.  What we call history, the world, everything, basically arises from Being hiding what it is while at the same time revealing beings.  Since the Being of Being, so to speak (H seems to avoid this circumlocution, presumably because it suggests thinking of Being as a being), is defined by this hiding, Being itself is not what is; it is other than what it is; it is the nothing.  So, in fact, the history of Being, the history of the unfolding of Being as hiding the fact that it is unhiding, is really the history of a super-revelatory Nothing.  History is the autobiography of Nothing.  

At this point we've become so deeply wrapped in paradox that we can't really even say what Being or the Nothing is or even whether they're different.  So Heidegger briefly tries calling whatever-it-is that hides its revelation simply the "It" -- das Es, precisely Freud's term for the unconscious.  

The essence of nihilism proper is Being itself in default of its unconcealment, which is as its own "It," and which determines its "is" in staying away. (H.4.216)

Heidegger doesn't make much of this connection in his essay, which is a shame because there's an obvious link between the structure he's trying to describe and the psychoanalytic idea of repressed material.  This unconscious material is 'forgotten' in such a way that it exerts a constant impact on our lives.  Insofar as most of our reactions stem from our unconscious relation to situations, the world we consciously find arrayed around us is a construction that appears in the wake of something we don't have access to.  Heidegger, however, knows to his very core that the only interesting discipline is philosophy, and he doesn't want his pure talk of Being polluted with some discussion of the merely human unconscious.  If he's going to somehow insert humans into this history of pure Being in itself (ie. the world), it will have to be from the ground up.

And sure enough, Heidegger's next move is to explain how, starting from Being, there could come to be thinking beings who could think up metaphysics, which as we saw is precisely the history of not thinking about Being.  Essentially, his answer is that Being differentiates itself into places.  Or at least, it differentiates itself by providing one place, an abode which defines man as da-sein, Being-there, the place where Being reveals beings but hides itself.  

... in staying away, there comes to be a relation to something like a place, away from which the staying away remains what it is: the default of unconcealment as such. That place is the shelter in which the default of unconcealment essentially persists. But if it is precisely concealment that remains in the staying away of unconcealment as such, then the staying of concealment also retains its essential relation to the same place. (H.4.217)

I imagine the abode of Being as a small clearing in the forest that when you stand in it seems to somehow magically expand all the way to the horizon and consequently leads you to forget that you happen to be standing in a clear spot in a forest.  Specifying the relationship of this place to the rest of Being is what Heidegger means by thinking.  And since humans are essentially defined by this place where the opening of Being closes itself off, it seems it is only humans who can think (H also seems to consider language as somehow indispensable to thinking).  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that humans are thinking.

As the relation to Being, whether it is to the being as such or to Being itself, ecstative inherence in the openness of the locale of Being is the essence of thinking. (H.4.218) 

So just to recap.  Being is revealing.  But revealing hides itself in plain sight.  Human thinking is the relationship between this place where things are revealed but the force that revealed them is hidden.  At this point a new problem arises. Now we begin to wonder exactly how Heidegger can himself be a thinking human if his own thinking reveals the concealment of revealing.  If thinking only happens when Being hides itself but reveals beings, then when Heidegger "thinks Being as such" he should be revealing that there's something hidden.  But then the hiding place, and consequently the thinking, would seem to have evaporated.  If thinking consists in articulating the relationship between the place within Being marked "human" -- a place from which Being has withdrawn itself -- and the rest of Being, then Heidegger's philosophy itself almost doesn't seem to count as thinking.   Of course, in Heidegger's mind, he's really the only one that truly thinks, so his preliminary definition of thinking as any relation between Being and the "locale of Being", which would include metaphysics' inability to see the hiding of Being, is a bit of a put on.  

We probably shouldn't be surprised then when the next thing Heidegger does is introduce the idea of authentic and inauthentic nihilism.  The Western metaphysical tradition that culminates in Nietzsche is of course the inauthentic form of nihilism.  Despite all the fuss it makes about the Good, or a priori subjectivity, or the will to power, it is never able to think about Being in itself, but only about Being insofar as it relates to beings, as something those beings value.  So while Being seems to always be an important question, the history of metaphysics is the story of Being in itself getting ignored or only considered as the Being of beings.  Hence metaphysics is nihilistic without knowing that it is nihilistic; it is inauthentically nihilistic.  But since, as we've seen, the story of metaphysics is the unfolding of the history of Being itself, this inauthenticity is not really the fault of metaphysics, but a result of Being hiding itself in disclosure.  What metaphysics really is then, seen from the perspective of Being, rather than from its own perspective rooted in the human being, is the authentic unfolding of nihilism as the absence of the question of Being.  In short, metaphysics is authentically inauthentic.  It's genuinely clueless that it's an unconscious asshole.  Naturally, by contrast, Heidegger's thinking, since it knows that Being is hiding itself in its unconcealment, is authentic.  

So is Heidegger then the one true authentic nihilist?  That's obviously the set-up here.  But wait, isn't nihilism, you know, bad?  Don't we want to overcome it?  Isn't that the whole point of Heidegger's project here, to directly think Being itself, and not forget about it?  But now it has turned out that Being itself is something other than itself.  That instead of simply being light, Being itself is the hiding of the fact that it lights beings.  In short, the Being Heidegger has described unfolding in the history of metaphysics is a Nothing that unfolds as a Something which hides the fact that it was Nothing.  Which makes Heidegger the supreme nihilist who, as we put it last time, believes in the Nothing.  

So Heidegger has no intention of overcoming nihilism.  As if he would ever dream of taking your bullshit nihilism!  Truly overcoming nihilism would be tantamount to erasing the entire history of Being that he has described. 

    If we heed the essence of nihilism as an essence of the history of Being itself, then the plan to overcome nihilism becomes superfluous, if by overcoming we mean that man independently subject that history to himself and yoke it to his pure willing. Such overcoming of nihilism is also fallacious in believing that human thought should advance upon the default. 

    Instead of such overcoming, only one thing is necessary, namely, that thinking, encouraged by Being itself, simply think to encounter Being in its default as such. Such thinking to encounter rests primarily on the recognition that Being itself withdraws, but that as this withdrawal Being is precisely the relationship that claims the essence of man, as the abode of its (Being's) advent. The unconcealment of the being as such is bestowed along with that abode.  (H.4.225)

 

But what do we do if we can no longer overcome nihilism, but merely wallow in it as the lack or default of Being?  Heidegger proposes that we "step back" from the problem entirely.  We cannot overcome nihilism and force Being to appear.  This is precisely the mistake Heidegger thinks that Nietzsche made in forcing Becoming into the mold of Being with eternal return and the will to power.  Instead, all we can really do hope to is rather passively "encounter" Being in its self-withdrawal.  It's as if Being withdrew, but left us a trail of breadcrumbs indicating that something was here.  We can't find what was here, what left the breadcrumbs, but we can at least authentically know that something was lost, and that our own being and thinking somehow appeared out of this disappearance.  

If, instead of stepping back, we pursue Nietzsche's desire to actively overcome nihilism, we only get more deeply entangled within nihilism without ever thereby reaching its true essence.  Nihilism acts like quicksand because any effort to overcome it can only come from a particular being, and no particular being can even see the withdrawal of Being itself, much less overcome it.  Overcoming nihilism would mean overpowering a Being which has somehow already escaped.  If we force Being to appear, it can only appear in the form of the values created by a particular being who seeks to bring literally everything into the glaring light of its power.  The will to power (according to Heidegger at least) is the final defenestration of Being itself and the enthroning of a human subject as the central being in a world of beings whose only reality is now their use-value as objects for us.  The attempt to overcome nihilism creates the most perfectly, authentically, inauthentic nihilism.

In the occurrence of the default of Being itself, man is thrown into the release of the being by the self-withdrawing truth of Being. Representing Being in the sense of the being as such, he lapses into beings, with the result that by submitting to beings he sets himself up as the being who in the midst of beings representationally and productively seizes upon them as the objective. In the midst of beings, man freely posits his own essence as certainty for and against the being. He seeks to accomplish this surety in the being through a complete ordering of all beings, in the sense of a systematic securing of stockpiles, by means of which his establishment in the stability of certainty is to be completed. (H.4.233)

However, we still need to remember that in a sense none of this is our (or Nietzsche's) fault.  Even his extreme and authentically inauthentic nihilism that attempts to overcome rather than acknowledge itself is really just a phase in the unfolding of Being.  Nevertheless, that phase has consequences for us.  Since human existence, da-sein, is, roughly speaking, a designation for the place where Being hides, our inability to see this hiding place is equivalent to our inability to see our own essence.  It seems we are a sort of blindspot within the vision of Being, and reciprocally, Being is a blindspot within our own vision.  We cannot know ourselves in some essential sense.  Which is a bummer man.  And so we end up anxious about it, in an existential dread kinda way.  Only this dread isn't really a product of some flaw in "human nature" so much as the action of the very lack that defines us as part of the history of Being.  This anxiety, this abyss that we simply are at our core, leads us to do everything we can to secure ourselves as beings.  Basically, it sounds a whole lot like the first two noble truths.  Not surprisingly, when we are so anxious and insecure that we turn everything into a means for trying to fill the bottomless whole of our metaphysical lack, we tend to fuck shit up.  Here's what that looked like around the time H was writing this essay. 

Everywhere, the being as such has brought itself into an unconcealment that lets it appear as what posits itself on itself and brings itself before itself. That is the fundamental trait of subjecticity. The being as subjecticity omits the truth of Being itself in a decisive way, insofar as subjecticity, out of its own desire for surety, posits the truth of beings as certitude. Subjecticity is not a human product: rather, man secures himself as the being who is in accord with beings as such, insofar as he wills himself as the l-and-we subject, represents himself to himself, and so presents himself to himself. (H.4.238)

In this final step in losing sight of the way Being hides itself, we turn ourselves into universal subjects who represent the world as objects. Basically, we reify everything, including ourselves, into a thing, a being, and then forget we're doing it, just as the non-dualists are always pointing out.  The world becomes a stockpile of stuff.

By this point, an astute observer can probably see that Heidegger keeps flipping back and forth between telling this story from the perspective of humans, and telling it from the perspective of Being.  While this naturally brings up the question of whether Heidegger is simply anthropomorphizing Being, part of this slippage is actually by design, and intended to place man and Being in an essential rather than accidental relation.  In the final pages of the essay Heidegger points out that since Being hides itself in its revealing, and since the locale or hiding place constitutes humanity, then Being actually needs humans for its essential unfolding.  But because of the metaphysical way Being unfolds, we can't see this need, and we vaguely think of Being as some simple and neutral underlying substratum, without any needs at all.  Being just is.  In place of Being's need for us we discover a world that is aimless and needless and valueless in the sense we commonly associate with nihilism.  In this sense, a human experience of this needlessness is the most pressing need of Being itself.  Being had to go to this point of extreme nihilism in which it most fully denies itself.  

Which just begs the question: what do you need that for dude?  Being had to make humans ... in order to be Being?  At this point it seems to me that Heidegger has so anthropomorphized Being that nothing can happen except by its divine grace, and yet somehow, miraculously, Being needs us.  Because of this theological tone (which peaks in a notable passage at H.4.248), I think we lose any ability to convincingly read Being as something like possibility in the way I proposed earlier.  Being seems to look and act just like us.  Our history and its history seem to be the same story told from two different, but nonetheless completely convergent, angles.  It seems to me that if Heidegger wanted to get out beyond beings into "something more" he has failed.  Neither his language nor his thinking are adequate to the task, so despite the great problem he raises, he basically just gives us back the psychology of existentialism disguised as a deep -- but don't call it metaphysical -- principle.

 

Maybe Heidegger's problem is exactly his idea that Being in itself should be "something more" than a mere being.  For all his critique of transcendence, he seems to have created an unbridgeable ontological difference between Being and beings.  We can never close this abyss; the best we can do is "step back" from the precipice.  But what is it that we are meant to understand when we step back?  It seems that this should just mean that we become aware of the whole history of Being that unfolds as a need for (human) beings.  The "something more" is actually just what's right in front of us.  It is us, and everything else.  The Being of Being is beings.  And the Being of those beings, our being, when understood authentically, is the history of Being itself.  The being is an expression of a Being which can be expressed in many ways, but all of these expressions are 'isomorphic' to what they express.  Each part expresses a whole which is nothing more than all the other parts expressing this same whole.  Like Leibniz, we see the world directly in every grain of sand.  This is the point of eternal return -- to think of Being in itself is just to return to the being again, exactly as it always could have been.  The "something more" that inspired this epic quest for Being in itself turns out to be just the possibilities of the world around us.  Paradoxically, this world is already something more than itself, just by being itself. 

Deleuze's idea of the univocity of Being is the closing of ontological difference.  Or, more accurately, it's the point where this difference in itself becomes repetition for itself.  Being is said in the same way of everything of which it is said.  The Being of Being is therefore no different than the Being of beings.  But this single voice 'says' all kinds of different things.  Perhaps the simplest way to understand this is to say that Being is a process which always happens in the same way; essentially, Being is the process of unfolding.  Everything that is, all beings, expresses this unfolding in the sense that they point to it, designate it as a process.  And the way beings point to this Being is always the same.  The Being of these pointers also lies in unfolding, which means that these beings are isomorphic with what they are pointing to.  They are not simply pointers, but they are also examples or instances of what they point to.  Which means that in pointing at Being, what they are pointing to is themselves.

It's only in point to the same thing in the same way that the pointers can each remain different.  The clarity and distinctness of this world, right here and now, passes through everything on its way back to itself.