The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (112 page)

To overcome the alienation – to let Being itself, in all its familiarity, become an object of attention – is classic phenomenology. It is to let that which shows itself properly be seen. It is also to let Being, in its own distinctive way, properly be.
⁴⁷

I said at the end of the previous section that Heidegger’s conception of his own project is very largely a matter of how he situates it in the history of metaphysics. We are now in a position to see why. He sees it as a
recalling
of something forgotten. Much of his work is accordingly devoted to an exploration of how ancient thinkers managed to do what we should now be trying to do (e.g. ‘Anaximander’ and ‘Logos’). But not only that. Much of it is also devoted to an account of what has happened in the interim. And so it must be. For although the aim is to recall something, this recalling has to be accomplished in the position in which we now find ourselves. We cannot simply put our circumstances to one side, as though the past two thousand years had never been. We must work through what has happened. We must work
with
what has happened. The project is in one sense very straightforward: to let that which is already fully visible be seen. But given that we are still not looking properly, the project is in another sense very far from straightforward.
⁴⁸
We are like the sailors in Neurath’s image.
⁴⁹
We must refashion our ways of making sense of things
while continuing
pro tempore
to make sense of things in those very ways. Here is Heidegger:

The ontological investigation which we are now conducting is determined by its historical situation and, therewith, … by the preceding philosophical tradition. The store of basic philosophical concepts derived from the philosophical tradition is still so influential today that this effect of tradition can hardly be overestimated…. [All] philosophical discussion, even the most radical attempt to begin all over again, is pervaded by traditional concepts and thus by traditional horizons and traditional angles of approach…. It is for this reason that there necessarily belongs to the conceptual interpretation of Being and its structures … a
destruction
– a critical process in which the traditional concepts, which at first must necessarily be employed, are deconstructed down to the sources from which they were drawn….

… This is not a negation of the tradition or a condemnation of it as worthless; quite the reverse, it signifies precisely a positive appropriation of the tradition…. ‘History of philosophy’, as it is called, … belongs to the concept of phenomenological investigation. (
Basic Problems
, pp. 21–23, emphasis in original)
⁵⁰

Much of Heidegger’s historical work is concerned with thinkers with whom this book too has been concerned. Thus Descartes’ model of representation, Leibniz’ idealism, Kant’s subject-based conception of objectivity, and Hegel’s belief in the subjectivity of the infinite all come under his scrutiny. All are symptomatic for Heidegger of a failure to reckon with Being and a consequent attempt to find relations between beings and/or properties of beings that can do its work (see e.g. §§6 and 82 and ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’).
⁵¹

There is one respect in which the case of Hegel is especially instructive. Heidegger holds that
Dasein
always enjoys a radical particularity. As he himself puts it, ‘
Dasein
has in each case mineness’ (p. 68/p. 42, emphasis removed). That is why ‘one must always use a personal pronoun when one addresses it: “I am”, “you are”’ (ibid., emphasis removed). Not so for Hegel. Hegel believed in a ‘who’ that was a universal, not a particular. This ‘who’ had (historically situated)
instances
, or moments, which brought it to a full
knowledge of itself (Hegel (
1979
), ¶¶793 and 797). From a Heideggerian point of view it could be regarded as a being drafted in to do the work of Being.

In another respect too the case of Hegel is especially instructive. By not registering this fundamental difference between Being and beings, still less any of the differences between kinds of Being, and by placing so much emphasis on the subject’s progression from self-identity to self-knowledge, Hegel clearly lined up on one side of what has come to be a crucial dichotomy in this narrative: he prioritized identity over difference (cf.
Ch. 15
, §7(b), and
Ch. 16
, §4). Heidegger questions this prioritization (see e.g. ‘Identity’ and ‘The Constitution of Metaphysics’).

But the philosopher whose position in the prior history of metaphysics has greatest apocalyptic significance for Heidegger is Nietzsche, with whom he engages at especially great length (
Nietzsche 1
to
Nietzsche 4
). He argues that it was here in the history of metaphysics that traditional metaphysics really came to an end, not because Nietzsche managed to leave it behind, nor yet because he ensured that it would thereafter be left behind, but rather because he practised it in what had by then become the one remaining form that it could still take: an utter repudiation of anything transcendent; an utter revolt against Plato (see e.g.
Nietzsche 1
,
Ch. 1
;
Nietzsche 2
, Pt One, passim; and
Nietzsche 4
, Ch. 22). Traditional metaphysics had now ‘gone through the sphere of prefigured possibilities’ (‘Overcoming Metaphysics’, §XII). Nietzsche did not himself properly confront Being, then. But his idea of eternal return, which Nietzsche described as ‘the closest approximation of a world of becoming to a world of being’ (Nietzsche (
1967b
), §617, emphasis removed) was in Heidegger’s view ‘Nietzsche’s attempt to think the Being of beings’ (
Thinking
, pp. 109–110). And it prepared the way, through its exhaustion of what had prevailed thus far, for something radically new.
⁵²

Heidegger’s excursions into the history of metaphysics, together with the anti-naturalism of which they are an expression, may suggest that what he is trying to reverse is something fundamentally intellectual. Not so. In fact, one thing that epitomizes what he is trying to reverse, if indeed it does not exhaust it, is
technology
. To be sure, Heidegger has an extremely broad conception of technology, which he takes to be (the use of) any means to some end, or (the instrument of) any human activity (‘Technology’, pp. 311–318).
⁵³
That embraces the intellectual, certainly. But it embraces much else besides.

Precisely what technology has done in the past, Heidegger argues, and precisely what it increasingly does nowadays, is to make beings manifest
in a way that allows Being to remain concealed. It presents beings – even ‘whos’ – as nothing but an ever-available
resource
, or what Heidegger calls ‘standing-reserve’ (e.g. ‘Technology’, p. 329) And, as a result, it blinds us to what it is about them, namely their Being, that marks them out as more than that and that makes any of them worth caring about. It rams beings themselves, sometimes quite literally, down our throats. Indeed it does this so relentlessly that not only do we fail to reckon with Being, and in particular with our own Being, we place that very Being in jeopardy. Technology has the power to obliterate us altogether.
⁵⁴
But even if it does not do that, there is something else that it both has the power to do and does do. It subjugates us and assimilates us to itself, reducing us to ‘whats’ rather than ‘whos’ (‘Overcoming Metaphysics’, §XXVI). It militates against that questioning of Being which is of our essence. As Heidegger puts it, in a sentence that will resonate in all sorts of ways within contemporary academia:

An age which regards as real only what goes fast and can be clutched with both hands looks on questioning as ‘remote from reality’ and as something that does not pay, whose benefits cannot be numbered. (
Introduction
, p. 206)

That
is the sort of thing that Heidegger is trying to reverse. (See ‘Truth’, §5, and ‘Technology’, passim.) It is in this vein that Heidegger is prepared to identify technology, in the form that it has nowadays assumed, with ‘completed metaphysics’ – where by ‘metaphysics’ he means traditional metaphysics, and where by ‘completed’ metaphysics he means, as we saw earlier, metaphysics that has exhausted all its possibilities, not metaphysics that will no longer be practised (‘Overcoming Metaphysics’, §X; cf. ibid., §XII).
⁵⁵

What is needed, then, is a restoration of metaphysics as it should be.
⁵⁶
We need to let Being be, which is as much as to say that we need to let Being be seen to be. We need to ‘shepherd the mystery of Being’ (‘Overcoming Metaphysics’, §XXVII). This in turn requires us to be open to what Heidegger calls ‘
Ereignis
’. This German word is standardly translated as ‘event’. But for Heidegger it serves as a technical term to designate the very givenness of what is given. The temporal overtones of the word are not lost, because
what is given is given in time. But
Ereignis
is not itself an event, as ordinarily understood. It is what makes such events possible. (Cf. ‘Time and Being’, pp. 17–19.) And it creates a metaphorical space in which all that can appear can appear. If we enter that space and look properly, then metaphysics ‘can return transformed, and remain in dominance as the continuing difference of Being and beings’ (‘Overcoming Metaphysics’, §II, transposed from the third-person singular to the infinitive).

The demand to restore metaphysics as it should be is an ethical demand. It is a demand for us to make sense of Being, including, centrally, our own Being, and thereby to be true to ourselves. This is reminiscent of Spinoza, Fichte, Bergson, and especially Husserl (see
Ch. 17
, §7). Heidegger would agree with all four of these thinkers that practising metaphysics well is of a piece with living well. And he would agree in particular with Husserl that it brings us to ‘the problems … of death, of fate, and of the possibility of a “genuine” human life,’ in such a way that ‘the Delphic motto “Know thyself!” gains a new signification’ (Husserl (
1995
), §64, slightly adapted). The connections are however even more intimate for Heidegger than they are for Husserl. Heidegger believes that

metaphysics belongs to the ‘nature of man’…. [It] is the basic occurrence of
Dasein
. It is
Dasein
itself. (‘What Is Metaphysics?’, p. 109; cf.
Being and Time
, p. 96/p. 67 and
Kant
, p. 251)
⁵⁷

Metaphysics, properly conducted, is
Dasein
’s most authentic interrogation of its own Being. (This is why, just as
Dasein
has its own nature as one of its central problems, so too metaphysics has its own nature as one of its central problems. These very reflections bear witness to that.) Metaphysics is a profoundly self-conscious discipline. It is, to reclaim the word from Bernard Williams that I used in
Chapter 13
, §4, a profoundly ‘humanistic’ discipline.

5. Heidegger as Metaphysician

At the end of §3 I implied that there should be no doubt that Heidegger’s project is a metaphysical one, by my lights. If anything counts as trying to make maximally general sense of things, this does. Someone might object that Heidegger is trying to make sense of Being, not of things. This objection, were it to have any force at all, would have to rest on an equation of ‘things’ in my formula with ‘beings’. But, quite apart from the fact that Heidegger’s project has significant implications for beings as well as for Being, such an equation would afford far greater determinacy to ‘things’ than was ever intended. My formula is to be taken in an utterly schematic way, precluding
at most the kind of high-level work in semantics that is the prerogative of the (philosophical) logician. (See Introduction, §4.) So I am happy to repeat that Heidegger’s project is a metaphysical one.

That is, it is metaphysical on
my
conception of metaphysics. But what about on Heidegger’s own conception? In the previous section I several times quoted Heidegger’s views about what he calls ‘metaphysics’, without pausing to consider whether he uses the term in the same way as I do. This will alarm many people. Does not ‘metaphysics’ serve as a derogatory term for Heidegger, standing for something from which he wants (us) to advance, not something to which he could cheerfully see his own work as a contribution?
⁵⁸
(Consider for example the very title of his essay ‘Overcoming Metaphysics’.
⁵⁹
) Ought we not to say that, whether or not what he is doing counts as metaphysics on my conception, it does not on his own?

Yes and no. It is true that Heidegger often uses the word ‘metaphysics’ for something that is to be superseded. But the situation here is akin to that which we have witnessed with other philosophers. When he uses the word in this way he is using it elliptically to stand for metaphysics of the kind that has actually prevailed in the past two thousand years, what I called in the previous section ‘traditional’ metaphysics and what might also be called, more clumsily, ‘bad’ metaphysics.
⁶⁰
There really should be no doubt, in view of the material from which I quoted towards the end of that section, that Heidegger acknowledges the possibility of ‘good’ metaphysics as well.
⁶¹