O que é que significa “viver” (numa) compreensão do ser? Poderemos alguma vez compreender esse “viver”, se o próprio viver engloba (entre parêntesis) a compreensão? Poderá o viver saltar por cima da sua própria sombra?
Quer possamos ou não compreendê-lo, esse viver numa compreensão do ser, assegura-nos Heidegger, é um fato (SZ:5: ein Faktum). Assim, a estrutura formal da questão relativa ao ser produz uma facticidade particular e um certo movimento ou deslocação. Movemo-nos (wir bewegen uns) numa compreensão vaga e mediana do ser, não na medida em que teorizamos e construímos ontologias, mas simplesmente por estarmos vivos. Essa animação ou, melhor, animacidade (a forma passiva de Bewegtheit, “movência”, não deve ser negligenciada) é a principal preocupação de Heidegger, tanto antes como depois de Ser e Tempo, desde o período da sua hermenêutica da facticidade (aproximadamente de 1919 a 1923) até ao da sua biologia teórica (1929-1930) e muito para além disso. Além disso, a nossa animação fáctica no seio de uma compreensão do ser, que é uma compreensão (em) que vivemos, dirige-nos para algo muito parecido com o ser. Nietzsche, numa nota que se tornará importante tanto para Heidegger como para Derrida, escreve o seguinte: ” ‘Ser’ — não temos outra noção dele senão a de ‘viver’ — pois como pode ‘ser’ algo morto? ”
Needlessness, heedlessness. Lack of need, lack of heed. Why heed the question of being? Who needs it? Why heed it, and how? A perverse, remorseless reflexivity and recoil characterize oblivion, as though oblivion were the very air we breathed. If the question of being makes no sense it is because we have never even had to remember to forget it. Oblivion replicates itself and achieves a lethal perfection by which we have always already forgotten being. Oblivion (35) seems to seal the fate of Dasein as unneeding, unheeding. Like Nietzsche’s herd of cows at pasture and child at play, like Kafka’s ape roaming the rainforest before the circus troupe captures him, oblivious Dasein is indifferent to the question of being. A remarkable complacency (Bedürfnislosigkeit) surrounds the question with an impenetrable fog; a remarkable lack of need (Unbedürftigkeit) characterizes the “they” in their quotidian concerns (SZ, 177, 189). The tradition of philosophy exhibits such complacency in its neglect of the question of being (21, 46); it is as though philosophers too were Cartesian extended substances (92), more like mindless, indifferent stones and animals than vital thinkers.’
However much Dasein declines to heed and neglects to need the question of being, it moves within and is animated by something like an “understanding of being.” Not a theoretical observation of entities or a scientific comprehension of their being, to be sure, but an understanding (in) which Dasein lives. Being is not only the most universal and undefinable concept, but also the most evident one: “That we in each case already live in an understanding of being and that the meaning of being is at the same time veiled in obscurity demonstrates the fundamental necessity of fetching back again (wiederholen) the question concerning ‘being’ ” (4).
What does it mean to “live” (in) an understanding of being? Can we ever understand such “living,” if the living itself encompasses (parenthetically) understanding? Can living leap over its own shadow?
Whether or not we can ever understand it, such living within an understanding of being, Heidegger assures us, is a fact (5: ein Faktum). Thus the formal structure of the question concerning being yields a particular facticity and a certain movement or motion. We move (wir bewegen uns) in a vague and average understanding of being, not insofar as we theorize and construct ontologies, but simply by being alive. Such animation or, better, animatedness (the passive form of Bewegtheit, “movedness,” is not to be overlooked) is Heidegger’s principal preoccupation both before and after Being and Time, from the period of his hermeneutics of facticity (roughly 1919 to 1923) to that of his theoretical biology (1929-1930) and well beyond. Moreover, our factical animatedness within an understanding of being, which is an understanding (in) which we live, directs us to something very much like being. Nietzsche, in a note that will become important for both Heidegger and Derrida, writes as follows: “ ‘Being’—we have no other notion of it than as ‘living.’—For how can something dead ‘be’?”
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