Heidegger presents the fundamental ontology of Being and Time as clearing a path toward the question concerning “the” meaning of being (in general). Again, the book begins with a dramatic rhetorical question: “Do we today have an answer to the question concerning what we really mean when we use the expression ‘being’ (seiend)? Not at all” (GA2 1). Heidegger then proposes to “reawaken” and “work out” the question (GA2 1). But he never presumes to answer it; indeed, it is not even obvious that he thinks it can have a single, univocal answer. The most he says in Being and Time – indeed, the central thesis of the book – is that time is the “horizon of any understanding of being in general” (GA2 1), hence, a fortiori, “the transcendental horizon for the question of being” (GA2 39, 41). What Heidegger offers, then, is not an answer to the question of being, but an account of the hermeneutic conditions that render it intelligible.
It is only with the famous “turn” (Kehre) in (or toward) his later work that Heidegger drops all pretense of preparing the way for a systematic account of the meaning of being in general, in favor of a retrospective account of the history of metaphysics, or what he now calls the “history of being” (Seinsgeschichte), which is to say, a history of the dominant understandings of being that have grounded and guided Western thought since Greek antiquity.1 By the mid-1930s, that is, Heidegger has stepped back from the constructive “scholarly” (wissenschaftlich) project of Being and Time to look back over the metaphysical tradition from a vantage point he now regards as lying just beyond it, Nietzsche having marked the both the culmination and the end of that tradition.
Whereas it might seem as if he just happens to leave the question of being unanswered in his early work of the 1920s, Heidegger now emphasizes that the question of being is not strictly speaking an interrogative at all, that is, a “question” in the grammatical or illocutionary sense, a question corresponding to an answer. It is instead an “experience” (Erfahrung), a mood, an unsettling, subrational apprehension (in both senses of that word) of the sheer that and what of things, a sense of astonishment, awe, perhaps a vague sense of dread. That uncanny sense of being is not merely a psychological state motivating an articulate question for systematic inquiry, a problem we might one day solve; it just is the “question.”
In his later writings, then, rather than even pretend to set out in search of an answer to the question of being, Heidegger reads between the lines of the canonical texts of the metaphysical tradition with an eye to discerning the fundamental affects and understandings that constitute the history of being. His own philosophical contribution, he would later say, was to have articulated the question explicitly in the form of a question for the first time: “In the treatise Being and Time the question concerning the meaning of being is posed and developed specifically as a question for the first time in the history of philosophy” (GA40: 89/88).2 (CARMAN in WRATHALL
- Heidegger’s earliest references to the “history of being” appear in his 1936-8 Beitrage zur Philosophie, GA65, §161, et passim. Cf. “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being,” written around 1944-6. For a useful discussion of the emergence of the idea in Heidegger’s thought, see Charles Guignon, “The History of Being,” in A Companion to Heidegger, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 392-406.[↩]
- The translators have inadvertently omitted the words erstmals in der Geschichte der Philosophie.[↩]