Mehta (1976) – Diferença

(Mehta1976)

The step back out of metaphysics into the source which generates the whole sphere in which metaphysical thinking can function leads to that which makes the central question of metaphysics—What is the essent in its Being?—itself possible. This is the ‘Difference’, so termed “provisionally and unavoidable in the language of tradition,”¹ between Being and beings, the twofoldness (Zwie-falt) of essents and Being. The participation (methexis) of the essent in Being (as idea), of which Plato speaks and into which, following him, the entire history of philosophy inquires, already presupposes, Heidegger says, such twofoldness of Being and beings. To speak of Being is to speak of the Being of essents and to speak of the essent is to speak of the essent in its Being. The one is implied in the other. “We speak,” as Heidegger says, “always on the basis of the twofoldness. It is always already given, for Parmenides as much as for Plato, for Kant as much as for Nietzsche. The twofoldness has already laid open the sphere within which it becomes possible to represent the relation between essents and Being,”² either as the Platonic chorismos or as transcendence—both of these presuppose the distinction or twofoldness and therefore cannot themselves generate it. Accordingly, Heidegger argues, Being should be thought in its difference from the essent and the latter in its difference from Being. For, “Being as well as the essent, in their different ways, emerge from and through the Difference.”³ When we [430] thus think of Being in terms of Difference, of Being as Difference, Being shows itself in the character of going over to the essent, as coming down to it and revealing it and the essent appears as that which, through such descent of Being, comes into unhiddenness and appears as if it were by itself unhidden. As against the traditional conception of transcendence as the movement from Dasein to Being (in terms of which he mentioned the Ontological Difference earlier), Heidegger thinks of the Difference now as the interplay and resolution (Austrag) of Being’s descent into beings and the latter’s emergence into unconcealedness. Being is the revealing descent (entbergende Überkommnis) and the essent is the coming into and enduring in the haven of unhiddenness, the arrival (sich bergende Ankunft) which hides its own self in this unconcealedness. Both emerge, as thus differentiated, from the Difference, their identical source. The Difference between Being and essents is not just a static and formal ‘relation’ between two terms but the interplay, the working out or the process of resolution (Austrag) of the two opposed movements of revealing (descent) and concealing (arrival). This conception οf Austrag carries Heidegger into a dimension more basic than the differentiation of Being and the essent on which metaphysical thought rests, “beyond Being” (the Platonic epikeina, but in a more fundamental sense!), a dimension into which entry is rendered almost insuperably difficult by the inherently ‘metaphysical’ character of the Western languages themselves. As Heidegger remarks, “What is called here Austrag, leads our thinking into a realm, to speak about which the principal terms of metaphysics, Being and essent, Ground and the grounded, do not any longer suffice. For what these words name, what the mode of thinking governed by them conceives, originates, as the Different (that is, the Being of what is in general and as the highest), from the Difference, of which the genesis is beyond the purview of metaphysics and cannot be thought in its language.”⁴

Just as a consideration of the Difference leads Heidegger beyond the ‘Being’ of metaphysics, so also does reflection on the Identity between the essence of man (as a thinking being) and Being itself.⁵ The unity of a thing with itself, its identity (which is never a bare, abstract unity but is always [431] self-mediated and complex) constitutes, according to the whole tradition of European thought, a principal feature of the Being of all that is. But, as Heidegger points out, the earliest Greek utterance in which this Being is expressly mentioned, namely, the saying of Parmenides that Being and apprehension (thought) are the same (to gar auto noein estin te kai einai), expresses something entirely different. As against the traditional doctrine of metaphysics, according to which Identity belongs to Being, Parmenides suggests that Being inheres in an Identity, that thinking and Being belong in the Self-same, that they belong together through this Self-same. The sameness of to auto, the Self-same, lies, according to Heidegger, in a belonging-together, though a belonging-together which must be interpreted otherwise than in terms of the later metaphysical conception of Identity as a feature of Being, for here Being itself is regarded as a feature of this Identity. Without taking the Parmenidean conception of belonging-together as the last word on the identity of thought and Being, Heidegger proceeds to consider what belonging-together in the sense of mediated Identity means.

1. Identität und Differenz GA11, p. 46 (E.T., p. 50).[]
2. Was heisst Denken? GA8, p. 174 (E.T., p. 227).[]
3. See “Die Onto-theo-logische Verfassung der Metaphysik” in Identität und Differenz GA11 for the whole of this paragraph.[]
4. Identität und Differenz GA11, pp. 69-70 (E.T., p. 71).[]
5. For the following, see “Der Satz der Identität” in Identität und Differenz. This lecture, Heidegger points out in his “Foreword,” glances both forward and backward: ahead into the sphere with which the lecture on “The Thing” is concerned and back into the sphere of the Difference from which metaphysics derives its essential character.[]