6

Heidegger’s World

It is necessary not to want to see the world as being more disharmonious than it is!

(Nietzsche 2011: 9)

The radicalism of Heidegger’s thought of world is that being-in-the-world is before the being of the world as a totality. Heidegger does not deny that the world as the totality of beings is, but what there is is not all. World is what is left when the totality has been accounted for, except that world is not a residual category but rather absolutely primary. World comes before the totality and, in this sense, gives the totality itself. As we have seen, Nietzsche too dethrones cosmos, but inasmuch as he starts with the totality rather than with time or history, then the significance of being-in-the-world remains largely latent in his thought. As far as Heidegger is concerned, this is because Nietzsche shares Parmenides’s prejudice that the road of non-being leads nowhere. What has no being, for Nietzsche (2005: 168), is being itself, which is only the last wisps of vapour of an evaporating reality – beings, not being, is what is real.

In Heidegger’s thought, by contrast, world always signifies not beings, not even all beings (the totality), but the openness, or ‘clearing’ (Lichtung), of Being, which is not a being, not something present, at all (hence the capitalization of Being, to avoid the confusion with beings which are present at hand). This is Heidegger’s summary of the meaning of world for him in his later ‘Letter on Humanism’ from 1949, where he snorts at the idea that human being could ever be considered to stand ‘on the hither side of the world as a “subject”’ looking on (Heidegger 1998a: 266). As early as the winter semester of 1924–25, Heidegger (2003: 405) had indicated that he already understood world in this sense. Human existence is always set within a universal context of phenomena, but this context itself is ‘ultimately grounded in Being-in, in the antecedent uncoveredness of the world’ (2003: 411). Our experience of the totality of beings, although it seems as if this is all there is, is not what is primary; rather, ‘Being-in-a-world is a basic phenomenon and is not resolvable further’ (2003: 256). The transcendence offered by Being-in-the-world is presupposed in any and every experience of beings in the world. The disclosure of world, the disclosure that is world, comes before everything else.

The mortal existence that is Being-in-the-world Heidegger calls Dasein. Dasein is the Da, the there, of being (Sein). As Heidegger insists in his ‘Letter on Humanism’, Dasein is not human being but the co-implication of world and human being. Indeed, at least for the later Heidegger, it is the priority of the former – human being depends upon the clearing of being that is world (Heidegger 1998a: 248–9). Although human being ‘sustains’ Dasein, Dasein is the ‘throw’ of Being that gives to human beings their ‘destinal sending’, namely their historicity (1998a: 256). Thus the difference between metaphysical being and Dasein is that being-there is only its there – the particular ‘clearing of being’ that is the history of a people – rather than some substance or subject that subsists beneath that ‘there’. Against all metaphysical subjectivism, Heidegger is clear that ‘only so long as the clearing of being propriates does Being convey itself to human beings’. Referring back to Being and Time, Heidegger (1998a: 256) quotes his earlier work: ‘Being is the transcendens pure and simple.’ This means that human being is ‘more’ human to the extent that it is considered less from the standpoint of subjectivity: ‘The human being is not the lord of beings’ (1998a: 260).

Being-in-the-world

It is famously in Being and Time (1927) that Heidegger develops his thesis that being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) is the fundamental constitution of Dasein. World itself is not a thing, no ‘inner-worldly being’, and yet it is so determinate for the beings that we find in the world that they could not even show themselves otherwise. Beings manifest themselves ‘because “there is” world. But how “is there” world?’ (1996: 67–8). Heidegger’s answer to this question starts with a demonstration that being-in-the-world is a compound, the parts of which cannot stand alone. Dasein is not somehow given and then put in a relation to world (1996: 54); it is always already in-the-world. This means that even nature, as that which is supposedly most objective about the world, can only be discovered in a definite mode of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world such as, for example, the Romantic mode and its attendant concept of nature (1996: 61). Things, even natural things, appear only in our caring about them in a particular way, paradigmatically in finding them useful as tools: ‘World is that in terms of which things are at hand for us’ (1996: 77). Thus it is not only in the context of tools such as paper and desk that the pen can appear as what it is, but also the ‘forest is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock’. Even nature, then, is ‘discovered in the use of useful things’, although how it is discovered will vary (‘the botanist’s plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow’) (1996: 66).

World in Being and Time is then the totality of reference (what Heidegger calls Bedeutsamkeit, ‘significance’) within which beings can appear, a totality that only comes to light when something in that world becomes unusable, revealing the totality in the process (1996: 81, 70, 71). When the hammer loses its head, the purpose of the hammer becomes apparent, a purpose which is tied up with the totality of what is produced by the hammer and what that production is in turn used for (and so on up to the totality of world within which the hammer appears). This ‘total relevance’ of the hammer, as with any being which is able to appear in a world, always refers back to Dasein (to being-in-the-world), to a ‘dwelling’ (Wohnen) rather than to anything objectively given (1996: 78). Beings, including the being it itself is, are encountered by Dasein in a context of relevance, and this context is the phenomenon of world (1996: 80–1). The normal run of things is for world to recede into the background, unnoticed, assumed. Indeed, the world not making itself known is the deeper reason why what is at hand, for example the hammer, largely does not emerge from its inconspicuousness (1996: 81). For the hammer to be what it is, it is not enough that there be a subject (e.g. the carpenter) and the hammer as an object for that subject. What makes this subject–object relationship possible in advance, and thereby takes up both ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in a deeper unity, is an understanding of Being. For both the hammer and the carpenter to be what they are there must first be dwelling.

Just as much as it produces beings, world also allocates places. Place is defined not by the ‘random objective presence of things’ but always through the belonging there of useful things. Useful things are placed, set up, ordered in relation to their use (1996: 95). Thus ‘above’ is on the ceiling while ‘below’ is on the floor. Place refers back to purpose, to the ‘what for’ of Dasein, not to space. This is why finding something that is not in its place can open the region of that place as something explicit rather than only implicit (1996: 96). When Peter sat down with gentile believers to eat he was no longer in his place, and the question of the right relation to Jewish law in messianic time became a problem.

But the beings of a world are mostly in their place. To use one of Heidegger’s own examples (1995: 340) from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (the lecture course of 1929–30), I only apprehend the blackboard as what it is if first, and quite apart from my individual perceptions, I am familiar with the place of the blackboard’s appearing – in this case in the university lecture theatre with everything that this means. Unlike a piece of wood from a broken branch, the blackboard has a purpose, which is not attached to the blackboard as something external but which thoroughly determines what and how it is. Being is inseparable from, is nothing other than, the understanding (de-concealment) of being (2002b: 86–7). World, not consciousness as in phenomenology, is what is first necessary in order for the blackboard to appear. World, as meaningful, is therefore always also historical. The question of Being is always a question of the history of being.¹ The blackboard cannot appear as such unless there be a history, in this case the history of a certain kind of education and everything that this education is in turn inextricably linked to – the history of the modern state, for example. The power of the Weltgeist (world spirit) ‘goes its ways to the end, while we remain its small satellites’ (1988: 74).

Time is what unifies the existence of the blackboard and its essence. To be capable of identifying the ensemble of materials that make up the blackboard as a blackboard is to be able to connect a present existence with an essence that is already known. Time in the form of recollection is what gives the being of the blackboard, is what makes existence and essence coincide in the object. That the being of the blackboard, as all being, is historical in this way means that my experience of the blackboard, though not objective in the usual sense of the term, is certainly not subjective either. For even if I am sitting to one side of the lecture theatre and it appears badly positioned to me, the point is that the blackboard cannot even appear as badly positioned absent this history of Being: ‘already manifest in the board’s bad position correctly considered [is] the lecture theatre as a whole. It is out of the manifestness of the lecture theatre that we experience the bad position of the board in the first place’ (1995: 345). My ‘subjective’ experience of the board is in reality ‘utterly objective’ since my judgement does not concern an isolated object but rather speaks out of the whole that it already finds itself in (1995: 346–7).

This whole is the ‘as’, the world of meaning whereby we take beings as the beings they are (as pencils, blackboards etc.). Indeed, this ‘as’ is the ground of ‘is’ (propositional statements). The ‘as’ and Being are inextricably connected such that it is only the ‘as’ structure that even ‘makes it possible to get a glimpse of something like being’ (1995: 338).² The unity of the ‘as’ – we can never take a being as the being that it is in isolation from how all other beings are given by this same ‘as’ – is ‘that which lies together, lies together before us, that which I can refer to as together’ (1995: 325). And that which lies together in the form of the ‘as’, in the form of a relation to beings as a whole, is world: ‘The question of how things stand regarding being cannot be posed without asking about the essence of the “as”, and vice-versa’ (1995: 334). We can see in all of this how Heidegger keeps his earlier reflections on Paul in mind. The primacy of the logos – of the propositions ‘is’ and ‘is not’ – established by Greek philosophy was tied up with the invisibility of the ‘as’ of world. But if metaphysics from Aristotle fatefully steered the question of Being towards the ‘is’ (1995: 323), then in Paul the more original ‘as’ comes to light. Paul’s comportment towards beings in the form, not of the ‘is’ and ‘is not’, but rather in the form of the ‘as not’ (hos me), enables them to appear differently. In Christ, slaves become free men and free men slaves.

Where is this ability for comportment towards beings grounded? As an ability for precisely comportment [Verhalten], for taking a stance, it can be grounded only in nothing – or, put otherwise, in freedom, in ‘being free for beings as such’ (1995: 339). Heidegger makes this point repeatedly at this stage in his lecture. Logos is dethroned because, as assertion, it is possible ‘only where there is freedom’. Likewise, the revealing and concealing of logos, the very possibility of true and false itself, ‘is to be found only where there is freedom’ (the possibility of something having the binding character of truth likewise).³ In all his propositional discourse, man ‘must have leeway [Spielraum] in advance’ for the comparative to-and-fro of truth or falsity. Propositional truth is by no means the fundamental form of truth. The prior of predication is world, and world can always be, must always be able to be, other. For while world is determining of beings it is founded in its being open, in freedom; hence the ‘necessity of a destructuring [Destruktion]’ which gets behind the ‘is’ in each and every one of its specific determinations (1995: 341).

Heidegger’s world is not a cosmos. Although, like cosmos, world is pure immanence – we only ever ‘speak out of the whole and into it’ (1995: 353) – world is nonetheless (un)founded in freedom rather than in cosmic necessity, and in this sense ‘has nothing to do with any pantheism’ (1995: 354). Unlike cosmos, which, in its attention only to beings, arrays different regions of being alongside, above or behind each other as if in a vacuum, Heidegger’s world finds these regions of being to be what they are ‘only within and out of a prevailing of world’ (1995: 354). This means that although the being of, say, a man and a horse may be entirely undifferentiated (as the metaphysicians argue, being is that which is most abstract or universal), our comportment towards these beings is entirely different in each case (1995: 354). In this capacity for comportment, we thereby live in – are – the difference between Being and beings, a difference invisible to metaphysics since it is not found among beings and also because we are always already in it (1995: 356; see also 1998a: 246).

World is any one mode of this ontological difference between Being and beings, that which expresses this difference in a particular yet all-encompassing way. Ontological difference is thereby not only an ‘essential moment’ of world, but, indeed, is the moment from which the problem of world becomes comprehensible (1995: 358).⁴ It is not that first there is the being of beings (ontology) and then there is world as an expression of this. Rather, world (ontological difference) lets being be: ‘The ontological difference is the difference sustaining and guiding such a thing as the ontological in general, and not a particular distinction that can or must be made within the ontological’ (1995: 359).⁵ For this reason, it is never a matter of first having something and thereafter the possibility of taking that something as something, but rather the reverse: ‘something first gives itself to us only when we are already moving [. . .] within the “as’” (1995: 365). Or as Heidegger makes the same point in his lectures on Nietzsche (1991, III: 69): We always ‘take beings in advance, in the way we have determined what is decisive in our relation to them’.

In On the Essence of Ground (1998b) from 1929, Heidegger continues his reflections on comportment as the way in which we relate to beings, including to the being that we ourselves are. What makes beings available for comportment towards them is an understanding of the Being of beings. The unveiled-ness of Being is what first makes possible the manifest-ness of beings (1998b: 103). Comportment requires that Dasein must always already have surpassed beings as a whole. This is not a theoretical grasping of things but rather Dasein just is the surpassing of beings. And in surpassing beings, Dasein reveals itself as not aiming at beings at all: ‘We name world that toward which Dasein as such transcends’, and, as such, ‘determine transcendence as being-in-the-world’ (1998b: 109). Again, we are being asked to interpret world not as everything that is, as the totality, but rather as that in which what is appears (1998b: 110).

Heidegger finds a decisive moment here, albeit an ‘inexplicit’ and ‘dawning’ one (1998b: 112), in some of the commencing statements of ancient philosophy. Kosmos in the Presocratics is not only a reference to a being in itself nor to the totality of beings. It can also mean ‘a “state of affairs”, i.e. how beings, and indeed beings as a whole, are’. ‘This world’ (κόσμος αὐτούς) does not point to one domain of beings as opposed to another, but rather ‘this world of beings as distinct from another world of the same beings’ (1998b: 111). The world is not put together from its various parts, through the addition of different regions of beings up until the whole, but the partitioning of beings always rather requires the whole (1998b: 111–12):

(1) World refers to a ‘how’ of being of beings, rather than to these beings themselves. (2) This ‘how’ determines beings as a whole. In its grounds it is the possibility of every ‘how’ in general as limit and measure. (3) This ‘how’ as a whole is in a certain manner prior. (4) This prior ‘how’ as a whole is itself relative to human Dasein. The world thus belongs precisely to human Dasein, even though it embraces in its whole all beings, including Dasein.

If this understanding of world is implicit in Presocratic philosophy, then it becomes clearer in the ‘new understanding of existence’ that was the irruption of Christianity. The relationship between kosmos and Dasein is experienced more sharply in Christianity, to the extent that (as we saw in Chapter 3) kosmos now refers directly to a particular kind of fundamental human existence. ‘This world’ in the apostle Paul, as seen in the first letter to the Corinthians and also in his epistle to the Galatians, refers not to an external world but rather to the ‘situation of the human being, the kind of stance he takes towards the cosmos, his esteem for things’ (1998b: 112).⁶ Kosmos is now the pejorative name for human beings turning their backs on God, a historical time to be distinguished from the new one that has already arrived. This sense of world as the ‘how’ of human existence, specifically of a stance facing away from God, then pervades the entire Christian tradition, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and thereby to Scholasticism (1998b: 113–15).

For Heidegger (1998b: 120–1), both the natural concept of world and the personal concept of world (the former as ‘the totality of natural things’ and the latter as the cosmopolitan community of all human beings) are therefore erroneous. World rather points to an understanding of Dasein ‘in its relation to beings as a whole’. In this reaching ahead and embracing of beings as a whole, Dasein surpasses beings ‘in the direction of world’. World is then ‘that from out of which Dasein gives itself the signification’ of the beings towards which it can comport itself. Dasein exists for and is the source of itself in the sense that Dasein has to be, to exist, in some way. World is that ‘for the sake of which Dasein exists’ (1998b: 121). Being-there is to have the significance of world.

None of this means that human beings can posit their own worlds. Heidegger’s is not a subjective definition of world (see also 2003: 324 for a restatement of this crucial point). World is subjective to the extent that it ‘belongs to Dasein’, but since it is not a being, nothing objective, that does not make it the object for some ‘subjective’ subject. World is ‘objectively’ subjective in the sense that Dasein never explicitly grasps what has been projected as world and, indeed, always already exists in the shadow of this projection. Apart from this overshadowing by world in which Dasein is ‘temporalized’ (finds it time), beings could not manifest themselves. Dasein is ‘world-forming’, but is also itself part of what is formed by world (1998b: 123). The metaphysical tradition has missed this double movement of world because it has held being either to be what most truly ‘is’ in beings – as that which is most objective in the sense of everlasting – or as innate to a subject that relates to the world in an unmediated way through reason (1998b: 124–5). World, by contrast, is neither objective nor internal to a subject, neither eternal nor directly graspable.

Freedom and finitude

If world always already casts its shadow over Dasein, coming therefore ‘before’ Dasein, then any particular act of will, any specific comportment towards beings (such as judging, representing or enjoyment of beings), is referred back to the transcendence which allows these various forms of surpassing of beings in the first place. Indeed, such ‘surpassing in the direction of world is freedom itself’ (1998b: 126). In this sense, ‘Freedom is freedom for ground’ or ‘Freedom is the ground of ground’ (1998b: 127, 134). Returning to this theme a year later (1930) in The Essence of Human Freedom, Heidegger (2002b: 93) writes that freedom is ‘prior even to being and time’ and, as such, is not the property of man but man is rather a possibility of freedom. As this ground of possibility, freedom binds, indeed is ‘obligation in general’.

Freedom is a strange sort of ground since it is nothing other than the absence, ‘the abyss’ (Ab-grund), of ground in Dasein (1998b: 127, 134). Although this abyss is ‘overcome’ in factical existing, it is never eliminated (1998b: 134). That freedom is the Ab-grund of all grounding – namely of all worlds – means that the projection of possibilities (the possibilities of existence) that is Dasein always exceeds what is projected as possible in any world: ‘In the projection of world an excess of possibility is given with respect to which ... the “why” springs forth’ (1998b: 130).⁷

But despite the irreducibility of this ‘why?’ (Why in this way? Why this? Why anything at all?), there is no way of living in the pure possibility that gives rise to such questioning. To the contrary, Dasein’s facticity means that other possibilities are always and necessarily withdrawn from it in such a way that the particular projection of world within which it finds itself is binding (1998b: 128–9). The ‘ontological truth’ of our situation is that our sense of Being supplies ‘the ultimate and primary grounding of things’. Without the illumination provided by our understanding of Being things could not even manifest themselves as the beings they are (1998b: 130). Freedom as the final ground of world is available to us only in the form of the withdrawal of that freedom within a world (existence is always some comportment towards beings, never the abstract possibility of comportment). This withdrawal is ‘a transcendental testimony to the finitude of Dasein’s freedom. And does not the finite essence of freedom in general thereby announce itself?’ (1998b: 129; see also 135)

Nonetheless, although world is the withdrawal of possibility ‘itself’, it remains the case that world gives rise to a sphere or range of possibilities. World gives the character of possibility a particular determination rather than being determining as such. If world was a determination of beings themselves then there could be no taking up of a comportment towards them. As Heidegger says in his Introduction to Metaphysics (2000: 70) from 1935, that ‘wherein the things that are becoming are set must precisely not proffer its own look and its own appearance’. It must rather be ‘that which separates itself from every particular, that which withdraws and in this way admits and “makes room” precisely for something else’.

This means that, for Heidegger, ‘even Nothing “belongs” to “Being”’ (2000: 89). Being is not only dwelling. The restlessness of those who philosophize is a homesickness, a not being at home anywhere. But this lack reveals something positive: we always find ourselves ‘called upon by something as a whole. This “as a whole” is the world’ (1995: 5). In addition to the totality of reference constituted by dwelling, world is also that being as a whole to which human beings are driven, a sojourning which even defines human being given that we have ‘always already departed’ on our way towards it. Given our essential finitude, this whole can never be reached. We are always underway; indeed, we are this transition (1995: 6).

That freedom is only the withdrawal of the ‘whole’ of possibility within the particular possibilities of a world is an indication of the essential finitude of freedom (1998b: 133). Freedom is not that which is beyond finitude, that which finitude is incapable of, but, rather, finitude is the very ground of freedom. Apart from in Being and Time, it is in Heidegger’s book on Kant (1929) that the theme of finitude is made most visible. Controversially, Heidegger reads Kant’s Copernican Revolution in philosophy as founded upon an implicit awareness that finitude is not so much a limit on human knowledge as the condition for any appearing whatsoever. Transcendence ‘is finitude itself’ (1990: 62). For Heidegger, the utility of this reading is that it enables him to put forward his own, this time explicit, account of finitude as the condition of possibility – the transcendental – of the ‘taking as’ (care) structure which he identifies as unique to Dasein.⁸ To take something ‘as’ something is already to have the being of beings opened in some way, but opened in some way which concerns me (1990: 49). The transcendental of care (Sorge, which in Being and Time Heidegger identifies as the essence of human being) is finitude (1990: 163; see also 1998b: 132–4).

Heidegger’s appropriation of Kant’s Copernican Revolution involves arguing that Kant was the first to reveal that finitude is found in the very structure of knowledge itself (1990: 15). That appearing is only appearing for us shows the dependence of knowledge on finitude. But this essential finitude of knowledge is just as clear in the fact that what appears has to be given to us. In Heidegger’s Kant, finitude is the transcendental of knowledge of beings (1990: 64).

Heidegger illustrates this dependence of ontology on finitude by contrasting it with infinite, divine knowledge. Would divine knowledge be absolute if it depended on a being that pre-existed its representation of it? No. Infinite representation of the being is what brings the being into existence. An absolute intuition, having first created the being, simply sees through it in advance (1990: 16). There is no place for thinking in divine intuition. Thinking is already ‘the mark of finitude’, since thinking is always, unlike intuition, to know limits, namely that the being is not created by my thinking it: ‘finite intuition of the being cannot give the object from out of itself. It must allow the object to be given’ (1990: 17; see also 82 and 155–6).

An object that is given, the being that shows itself, is an appearing, even appearance itself. Appearance is nothing other than the being as object of finite knowledge, or, to put it the other way round: ‘only for finite knowledge is there anything at all like an object’ (1990: 20). Only finite knowledge could be ‘delivered over to the being which already is’; objectivity is always a ‘Being-in-opposition-to’ (1990: 20, 74). Infinite knowledge, which can never be opposed by any being to which it must conform, can have no such object. To conform to an object would be dependency on the object, and therefore finitude rather than the infinite (1990: 20). Far from appearance being illusory, only the being in appearance (namely for a finite knowledge) can be a being in itself, can become an object. For absolute intuition, on the other hand, the being is only inasmuch as it is coming into being – it is the being as Being itself, and not as an object (1990: 21). It is not, then, that human knowledge can never know the thing in itself, but that the thing in itself can only be for finite human knowing (which nonetheless does not create it), can only be as appearance. The thing in itself can only be as appearance because it is not a being but no-thing. But the nothing understood as not a being is something. It is the pure horizon of time, the ‘original truth’, against which beings stand (appear as beings) – finitude (1990: 84–5).

But this means that finite human being, as finite, has a ‘certain infinitude in the ontological’ (in the sense of the understanding of Being), while infinite being, as infinite, can have no ontology because no understanding (only an accomplishing) of Being: ‘ontology is an index of finitude. God does not have it’ (1990: 175).⁹ Heidegger (2002b: 94) makes the same point, only more vertiginously, in The Essence of Human Freedom. As that being wherein alone occurs the understanding of Being, human being ‘is awesome in a way that a god can never be, for a god must be utterly other. This awesome being, that we really know and are, can only be as the most finite of all beings.’ The ‘greatness’ of this finitude has been obscured by a false infinity in such a way that we now see finitude and greatness as antonyms rather than the synonyms they really are. For only in mortal ‘man’ can truth – the unveiling of Being – be. The gods can have nothing to do with truth.

Neither can the gods have world, and for the same reason. That which opens up world, which makes beings visible as beings, is finitude, which is therefore, contra all anthropology, ‘[m]‌ore original than man’ (1990: 156). Finitude is constitutive of human being, or we ourselves ‘are’ our time. It is not the subject that is temporal but time that is ‘subjective’ (1990: 129). Heidegger thereby rereads Kant’s exclusion of the self from time (‘For the standing and lasting I [of pure apperception] constitutes the correlate of all of our representations’ [Kant 1998: 240]) as saying not that the self is outside of time but that it is time (1990: 131). I am not in time as something separate because I am only my time. Finitude ‘forms the horizon of selfhood within which what is objective becomes experienceable as the same throughout change’ (1990: 132).¹⁰

The Nothing

While finitude allows the manifestation of beings, it does not explain the refusal of beings that we experience. In Being and Time (1996: 315) anxiety (Angst) – the fear of nothing in particular, of no being – is identified as the mood (Stimmung) in which this withdrawal of beings takes place. In anxiety, beings are no longer ‘relevant’, no longer have anything to ‘say’ to us: ‘the world in which I exist has sunk into insignificance’. Angst is anxious precisely in the face of this nothingness, in awareness of its thrown-ness. In the lectures that make up The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1995: 145), Heidegger also identifies boredom – the Langeweile (long while) in which all beings recede into an equal indifference – as a fundamental mood that reveals nothingness. What entrances us in profound boredom is not beings, but rather the no-thing of the temporal horizon ‘itself’ (1995: 147). Boredom is an experience of the fundamental openness of Being, that ‘[w]‌hat gives itself and how it gives itself remain open’, as Heidegger writes elsewhere (1990: 101). The ‘lengthening of the while manifests the while of Dasein in its indeterminacy that is never absolutely determinable’ (1995: 153). World is not the totality of beings but rather the open expanse of the whole that we become dimly aware of, and are oppressed by, in boredom (1995: 279). World is that emptiness in which we find ourselves always among beings but not necessarily, at least when profoundly bored, preoccupied with them (or captivated by them, as Heidegger’s animals will always be).

If world means the accessibility of beings then Heidegger (1995: 199) concedes that animals have world too. However, Heidegger’s animals are always, indeed in their very essence, fully captivated by beings (thus unaware of the Being of beings, their being ‘as such’) which means that, while the animal has an environment, only ‘man’ can be properly said to have a world. While the stone is ‘worldless’ and the animal ‘poor in world’, man is ‘world-forming’ (1995: 282, 269, 177; see also 1998a: 248 for a later statement). If this thesis stands, then understanding the concept of world is the same thing as grasping the essence of man (1995: 211). As human beings we are held captive by our ‘living nature’ in a particular way, namely we are not what that nature makes of us, but rather what we make of our living nature arrives ‘from out of our essence’ (1995: 278).

Since world cannot be found outside of man, it must lie deeper in him still, in his very essence: ‘We indicated this essence by way of a thesis: that man is world-forming’ (1995: 341). Yet contrary to the subjectivism of idealist philosophy, we must re-emphasize not only that man shapes world but also, and especially, that world forms man. The thesis that man is world-forming should not imply that world is ‘something subjective’, that it is nothing other than what man makes of it. ‘For it is not the case that man first exists and then also one day decides amongst other things to form a world. Rather world-formation is something that occurs, and only on this ground can a human being exist in the first place’ (1995: 285). If human being is world-forming, then, as we have seen, it is in the sense of the ‘as’ by which the ‘is’ comes to be expressed in some meaning or other (1995: 337).

The ‘as’ in the sense of meaning or significance, however, is itself dependent on the ‘as’ in the sense of manifestness. This ‘as’ is awareness of the Being of beings, of the being as such of beings. Animal behaviour, by contrast, is never an apprehending of something as something. Inasmuch as this ‘as’ is refused to the animal, so too the phenomenon of world is withheld from it (1995: 287, 311; see also 349). Human beings alone can attend to beings in the sense both of letting be and not letting be – comportment. However, the not letting be (negation) is possible only on the basis of the former. Contra dialectics, it is the letting be of beings – the awareness of their being – that is primordial (1995: 274).¹¹ Although this awareness comes to be in man, it is not rooted in him but in Being. Beings are only accessible because beings themselves ‘allow and enable’ their manifestness (1995: 279).¹² Does this then mean that world ‘is’ only beings that are manifest, Heidegger asks? ‘No, it means the manifestness of these beings’ that are manifest in each case (1995: 280). This manifestness is something we will never come across in itself, it is not to be found in beings as beings; but neither is it above and beyond the realm of beings. World, manifestness, is not something that arises ‘before’ beings, but neither can beings be without world. If man is world-forming, then beings cannot be without man (1995: 280). The question concerning world-formation, which is the question of Being, can only then be a question ‘concerning ourselves’ (1995: 281).

It is only that the Dasein, the being-there, in us manifests itself that allows this questioning. In being-there we are set before beings as a whole and this setting is an attunement by which ‘we are in such and such a way’ (1995: 283). World turns out not to be that which is furthest away, as is cosmos with its valorization of the superlunary, but that which is closest to us, so close in fact ‘that we have no distance from it that would allow us to catch sight of it’. World is never such that we could look on it directly (1995: 284, 292, 297–8; 2002b: 127). Yet for all this closeness, world also forms the whole. Quite apart from the ‘naive concept of world’ as beings, Heidegger’s claim is that world is neither the manifestation of beings, nor even the manifestation of the Being of beings, but rather the ‘manifestness of beings as such as a whole’. However obscurely, ‘world always has a characteristic wholeness, something somehow rounded out’ (1995: 284). Finding ourselves in-the-world we encounter beings, that beings are, in the context of completeness.

Completeness of being is not something positive, however. Counter-intuitively, our sense of the whole is really our awareness of the nothing. How would comportment, as opposed to passive adaptation (the stance required by wisdom), be possible unless the ‘not’ of beings opened up the possibility of an otherwise? The nothing should therefore be understood as having an ‘innermost power’. The nothing is not the empty nothingness of nihilism (where man has nothing and consequently is nothing), but is rather ‘that power which constantly thrusts us back, which alone thrusts us into being and lets us assume power over our own [being]’ (1995: 299). The nothing is not a black hole that allows nothing to be present but rather that giving power that lets beings be. The nothing in Heidegger has nothing to do with nihilism. The nothing is not something present at hand, an emptiness in man that could somehow be filled. The nothing does not appear as something separate from how beings are given in a world. Rather, it is an openness for beings as they are. The nothing as a being-open-for is ‘a free holding oneself toward whatever beings are given there in letting oneself be bound’ (1995: 342). This being bound by beings as ability and comportment should be contrasted with the capacity and behaviour that are rather the realm of ‘instinctual drives becoming disinhibited while remaining captive’ (ibid.). Heidegger has the animal in mind here.

The purely negative fact that human beings are not captured by their animal instincts, then, is really the difference between the human being and the animal. In becoming bored, the human animal awakes from its natural captivation by beings. It is freed from its instincts only in their no longer binding it, not in any positive sense, not for something. If human being is only the inoperativity of animality, then what is grasped in Dasein (recalling that Dasein is not just human being simpliciter) is just this suspension of animal captivation. This is why boredom is the Ur-Stimmung, the ‘ground’, of all moods or attunements. We are only capable of various modes of captivation by beings because we have first, in boredom, been exiled from captivation as such (Agamben 2016: 90–1 and 186–8).¹³ With instincts voided, we are capable of moods. Only by way of the negation of our animal environment do we find ourselves in the world. The open of world is the non-openness of beings in boredom. The whole of world, then, is in no way the totality of cosmos but rather the Nothing.

Nihilism

Heidegger’s thesis on world enables us to gain a better purchase on his critique of metaphysics and the nihilism that this opens on to. If world is what brings beings to perception then, in the lectures that constitute his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger (2000: 14–19) argues that this understanding of Being is what the Greeks named phusis. As we have seen already, Heidegger suggests that phusis should not be translated as nature. Greek phusis, as what becomes, is rather that by which beings first emerge and endure for a time. Heidegger’s Greeks therefore saw in natural processes only one aspect of phusis. Only because beings are first disclosed in phusis could the Greeks point to nature as something ‘physical’ (2000: 16).

It is the loss of this sense of Being that Heidegger pins on Plato’s theory of forms or ideas:

The word idea means what is seen in the visible, the view that something offers. What is offered is the current look or eidos of whatever we encounter. The look of a thing is that within which, as we say, it presents itself to us, re-presenting itself and as such stands before us; the look is that within which and as which the thing comes-to-presence – that is, in the Greek sense, is. (2000: 192)

What starts to go missing here for Heidegger is the awareness of Being (phusis) as that something comes to presence in favour of a sense of being (eidos) as what comes to presence (2000: 193). In this barely noticeable shift is concealed the origins of the metaphysical subject as that being which alone is necessary for beings to appear (rather than that being which is able to apprehend beings only because of what has already been given by Being). Where phusis is being that ‘comes to presence of itself’, the look of a thing (its eidos) is rather how it appears to a subject that apprehends it. The ‘standing-there in itself’ of phusis is now the standing ‘opposed to a seeing’ of eidos (2000: 193 and 194). Prior to the Platonic fall that made eidos the measure of all things, Parmenides’s saying is already that ‘Being and apprehending’, namely what is seen and seeing, belong together. Something seen doubtless belongs to seeing, but this does not mean that its being seen can alone determine its coming to presence. Parmenides’s saying is that seeing is ‘for the sake of’ Being, not that Being is to be conceived on the basis of seeing. ‘Apprehending should open up beings in such a way that it sets beings back into their being, so that apprehending takes beings with regard to the fact that they set themselves forth as what’ (2000: 195).

The transformation of the sense of Being from self-showing phusis to what is possessed through being taken in as eidos is also the hidden origin of the distinction that comes later between existentia and essentia, existence and essence. Ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings, starts from this point on to be reduced to the difference between existence and essence. But these later terms, as well as the difference between them, is really only internal to (now concealed) Being ‘itself’ (2000: 195). What is given in Being as self-standing phusis is both the existence and the essence, the that-ness and the what-ness, of beings. The difference between a being as something that is, and also what it is, is itself within Being – both being and being-thus are. When eidos, which is a consequence (albeit an essential one) of Being, is made into the essence of Being itself, then ‘[t]‌here is a fall’. ‘What remains decisive is not the fact in itself that phusis was characterized as idea, but that the idea rises up as the sole and definitive interpretation of Being’ (2000: 194).

The sense of Being as eidos is also what accounts for metaphysical timelessness. If Being only concerns existents then what a thing is becomes the only question to ask of it (see also Heidegger 1998c: 173). But if Being is not only what is unconcealed in existence but also, and primordially, that unconcealedness ‘itself’, then time comes to light. Beings do not remain in Being – just as they appeared out of nothing so they will also pass into nothing. While the what-ness of a being (e.g. a human being, with the predicates, such as biped, which come attached to this kind of being) may be more or less enduring, that it is remains subject to time – to creation and decay. Human being persists across time, but human being is mortal.

In fact this ‘human’ of humanism that endures over time turns out to be a pure abstraction. Human being determined in a certain way as a timeless entity ‘is’ not. Only mortal human beings exist. In other words, to repeat the point: making the essence of a thing its eidos or what-ness is what creates the difference between existence and essence in the first place. Human being is not something separate, or indeed separable, from existence. To say that a human being fundamentally unfolds not in and of herself but only according to a fixed essence (e.g. as a ‘rational animal’) is to miss what makes her human. The distinction between existence and essence makes no sense with regard to human being, and this is also the nub of Heidegger’s later critique of Sartre in his Letter on Humanism. It is not a matter of reversing the metaphysical prioritization of human essence over existence since the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains metaphysical. Rather, human being, uniquely, is an essence defined by existence, a form of being for which Being is precisely a question (rather than an answer). The difference between essence and existence in human being is no difference at all:

The determination of the human essence that is required here is not a matter for a free-floating anthropology, which at bottom represents humanity in the same way as zoology represents animals. The question about human being is now determined in its direction and scope solely on the basis of the question about Being. Within the question of Being the human essence is to be grasped and grounded [. . .]. (2000: 219)

Another malign outcome of the elevation of the idea to the very essence of being is that all beings become but a poor likeness of the idea (form), which really ‘is’ in a way that now imperfect beings never can be. Beings lose their weight (seriousness) even as the matter that they materialize is associated with semblance, with a mere ‘participation’ in being (2000: 196–7). The loss of Being, which is the loss of world, brings beings down with it. Beings themselves now only appear as an imitation of true being; they become mere phenomena. In other words, the appearance of beings, no longer the very essence of Being, is now the appearance of something else. Beings become shadows cast by the forms. The loss of Being is also the loss of beings.

For Heidegger, this inceptive nihilism also needs to be grasped in terms of the sense of truth at work in it. Indeed, the transformation of the sense of truth is nothing other than the ‘inner ground’ of the alteration of being from phusis into eidos (2000: 203). Marking this shift, Heidegger suggests, is the change in the meaning of logos from that which is grounded in, and remains in service to, phusis (i.e. logos as participating in the truth of being as unconcealment) to that which, as assertion, becomes the very place of truth, which is now understood as correctness (2000: 199). Originally truth, as unconcealment, was an event of beings themselves, beings that thereby ‘hold sway’. Now, however, what is proper to truth is only logos. In being reduced to assertion, truth not only changes its place but its essence also shifts. Truth is now only the ‘correctness’ of logos. Having once been included in originary unconcealment, the logos now breaks away, standing solitary and sovereign, such that the truth of beings themselves is now referred back to it alone: ‘and not only decisions about beings but even, in advance, about Being’ (2000: 199).

Where truth is dependent on the showing of beings characteristic of world, with the rise of metaphysics it now becomes possible to judge world itself as if from the outside. This new truth is bought at the price of an extraneousness to world that is of the very essence of nihilism. This truth Nietzsche is right to charge with lying. But Heidegger means to say that there is another, more primordial, truth that Nietzsche missed. Truth only lies when truth stands apart from, and in judgement on, world. But when truth is itself opened by world, is the opening of world, then nihilism as the death of truth finds no hold.

But is everything opened by world indifferently true? Is everything what it ‘appears’ to be? Heidegger’s thought on the being of appearing, of convention or doxa, is complex. On the one hand, the polis is the very site of Being as that which ‘grounds and preserves’ the unconcealment of beings in a particular world (2000: 204). Unlike metaphysical beings, which are already present at hand, the unconcealment of beings depends upon the work: ‘the work of the word as poetry, the work of stone in temple and statue, the work of the word in thinking, the work of the polis as the site of history that grounds and preserves all this’ (2004: 204). Yet at the same time as the state is the site of historical being, what is preserved in this site is doxa – ‘seeming’. Doxa is not external to Being in the sense that, as seeming, it appears (is within unconcealment). And yet as well as being that which proffers itself, doxa is also the views that human beings have of things, views which can become fixed in a way that obscures underlying appearing (Being). Dasein easily ‘settles in’ to such doxa, reproducing them blindly such that they come to obstruct a view of beings as the beings they themselves are. When this occurs, beings ‘are deprived of the possibility of turning themselves toward apprehension’, of appearing in their own right. ‘The dominance of views thus distorts beings and twists them’ (2000: 205).

Heidegger goes on to consider the struggle for the ‘untwisting’ of doxa as a struggle against distortion (pseudos) and for unconcealment (phusis). However, by making unconcealment the opposite of twisted or distorted seeming, Being is thereby transformed into that which is straight and undistorted, which endangers the originary experience of truth as unconcealment: ‘For the undistorted is reached only when apprehending and comprehending turn to beings without twisting, straight on – that is, when apprehending and comprehending are directed by beings. The way to truth as correctness lies open’ (2000: 205–6). Where beings should be understood to be given by Being – such that all beings are in semblance – here beings give themselves with nothing in addition. Being, that ‘in’ which beings first appear, is occluded. Heidegger’s point is that seeming is Being also, but that ways of seeming can, over time, fossilize and obscure the deeper truth of seeming itself – that it appears at all.

The outcome of Platonism, although only embryonically present in Plato’s thought itself, is the sense of Being as ousia, that is as substance or essence. Unlike Heidegger’s Being, which is appearing rather than what appears, and which is therefore not something present at hand, ousia is Being in the sense of constant presence (2000: 206). This effects a radical transformation in the meaning of Being: from that which ‘is’ not (time), Being is now understood as what always is (eternity). That which comes to presence rather than that in which there is presence is the metaphysical sense of Being. The being, which once stood in its own light, becomes nothing more than an object for a subject. Indeed, such a being exists only to the extent that it can ‘stand up to’ the thinking of an independent logos (2000: 207). Being becomes calculable, and beings a standing reserve for human exploitation. The meaning of Being as that which is constantly present, as enduring substance or immutability, is then that by which everything else is defined – so becoming, far from being, positively, that ‘in’ which beings come to unconcealment, is reduced to the not enduring, to mere privation. Similarly, seeming and semblance, no longer properties of Being, are demoted to that which lacks the transparent visibility of Being proper.

By forgetting Being as the measure of all things, and instead making the ideal being (the idea or form) that measure, the problem is created of what determines the Being of these ideal beings? By stopping with beings (something) rather than Being (Nothing), the problem is one of infinite regress: what is the cause of that being in turn? No God can solve this conundrum. Indeed, starting with Plato’s agathon (the Good) and continuing with Gnosticism (the deus alienus) and negative theology, the only way out is to posit that the final cause of beings is itself beyond Being (2000: 211). Plato’s Republic (509b) reads: ‘The good therefore may be said to be the source not only of the intelligibility of the objects of knowledge, but also of their being and reality; yet it is not itself that reality but is beyond it, and superior to it in dignity and power.’

Rather than Being lying ‘beneath’ beings as the Nothing that ‘grounds’, this metaphysical Being is above and beyond beings in its absolute potency. This gives to beings a lack that they never had before, a deficit of existence that is the first face of nihilism. The ‘beyond Being’ then has to make up for this lack, which is nihilism’s second face. Nihilism is then also, third, the source of the ‘ought’ as something separate from Being – beings ought to be more like that which is beyond Being, which of course they can never be (2000: 211). The ‘ought’ is first lack and then impossibility, a process which reaches its high point in Kant, where the moral law is opposed to nature and remains entirely empty of content (2000: 212). Indeed, contra Nietzsche, who sought the positing of new values as an antidote to Platonism, values per se are now shown to be the children of Plato: ‘Plato conceived of being as idea. The idea is the prototype, and as such it also provides the measure. What is easier now than to understand Plato’s ideas in the sense of values, and to interpret the Being of beings on the basis of the valid?’ (2000: 212).¹⁴

The sense of Being as substance means that to be now means endurance, identity and presence: all the things that Being is not (2000: 216). This determination of Being as substance is not a matter only for philosophy since, as the metaphysical history of the West, it ‘is the power that today dominates all our relations to beings as a whole, to becoming, to seeming, to thinking, and to the ought’ (2000: 217). Where, then, is the nihilism at work, Heidegger finally asks?

Where one clings to current beings and believes it is enough to take beings, as before, just as the beings that they are. But with this, one rejects the question of Being and treats being as nothing (nihil), which in a certain way it even ‘is’, insofar as it essentially unfolds. Merely to chase after beings in the midst of the oblivion of Being – that is nihilism. [. . .] In contrast, to go expressly up to the limit of Nothing in the question about Being, and to take Nothing into the question of Being – this is the first and only fruitful step towards the true overcoming of nihilism. (2000: 217–18)

All that which was separated out from Being in the metaphysical divisions (namely becoming, seeming, thinking and the ought), which is essentially time, turns out not to be nothing after all, which must mean that it ‘is’ itself in Being. The concept of Being in the metaphysical tradition is thus insufficient ‘to name everything that “is”’ (2000: 220, 218). Being, as time, must be ‘experienced anew’, which means dissolving the metaphysical divisions into the ‘originary division’, a disjunction which sustains history itself, namely the ontological difference between Being and beings (2000: 218–19). In metaphysics, time ‘itself’ is brought under the rule of presence in the sense that each time is conceived starting from the now – thus the past is no longer present while the future is not yet present.¹⁵ Rediscovering the sense of Being as time means not counting time but rather knowing the ‘right time – that is, the right moment and the right endurance’ (2000: 221, emphasis added). We find ourselves back with Paul, this time with his kairos or opportune moment.

***

Our discussion of Heidegger’s sense of world will draw to a close with his reading, in his lectures on Parmenides (1992a) from 1942 to 1943, of the myth of Er. This myth, in telling of the immortality of the soul, concludes Plato’s Republic. It is one of the key moments in the Platonic oeuvre, a moment where the metaphysical devaluation of this world appears to gain a footing. Plato tells here of how the warrior Er, killed in battle, came back to life on the funeral pyre to tell of what he had seen ‘there’ (ἐϰεῑ, often taken to be ‘the other world’) after his ‘soul’ left his body.

As we know well by now, Heidegger thinks that Plato’s thought is the beginning of metaphysics, but Heidegger’s Plato is also the end of a Greek thinking that was in no way metaphysical, and this thinking is not yet silent in Plato (see also Heidegger 1998c: 172)¹⁶. In this light, Heidegger notes, first, that the myth of Er takes place at the conclusion of a discourse on the politeia (Republic is, of course a Latin transcription of this very different Greek term), and that this is no accident. As we might expect, Heidegger reads the Greek polity as, in its essence, nothing political (in fact, the Greeks are held to be essentially ‘utterly unpolitical people’ [1992b: 96]). Instead, the polis, as polos or pole, is the place around which, for the Greeks, all beings turn, that which allows them to come into unconcealment (1992b: 89). The polis is therefore fundamentally connected to the Greek Being of beings; between the polis and Being ‘there is a primordial relation’ (1992b: 90). Indeed, if the polis is that space by which beings come to stand in unconcealment, then it is nothing other than the topos, the place, of Being ‘itself’.

When the polis is understood in this properly Greek way, Heidegger argues, then the myth of Er, and the ‘there’ that it points to that is away from ‘here’, far from being an unrelated appendage to Plato’s discourse on the politeia, is in fact its true dénouement. If the polity reveals the Being of beings then Being ‘itself’ is that which can never directly be brought to light. This is Plato’s ‘there’ of which Er tells. Heidegger’s entire thesis on aletheia as the truth of Being is recapitulated here. In the Parmenides lectures, Heidegger struggles to articulate aletheia as an unconcealment that also conceals. At a late point in his discussion he reintroduces disclosure (Erschlossenheit, a word first used in Being and Time in the context of world disclosure) as another term for this event of Being, since what disclosure cancels is closure (1992b: 133). Being can only be disclosed in a disclosure, and this is what the polis, as the pole that also encloses, does. But Being as such cannot be disclosed, hence the myth of Er appropriately concludes a discourse on the politeia by pointing towards that ‘there’ which cannot be seen in the polity but is nonetheless its very ground. The ‘there’ names not the other world but Being.

Heidegger’s Plato finishes the Republic with the myth of Er not because the polity, being found only ‘here’, is ultimately nothing compared to what is ‘there’. Rather, Er tells of the ‘there’ (Being) which, though it ‘is’ nowhere, is always already ‘here’, primordially in the polis that, for the Greeks, founds the ‘here’ itself. To the extent that the ‘soul’ (psuke, a word which Heidegger believes to be untranslatable) is said, at death, to travel to the ‘there’, then this is only because the Greeks, in Heidegger’s estimation, understood the soul as the capacity, shared only by humans who have logos, to be in relation to beings as beings, which is the same as the capacity for truth (1992b: 99). And this relation, in turn, is only found because of the primordial capacity of human being for a relation to the Being of beings (by which beings stand out as beings in the first place).

The soul that, in death, journeys to the ‘there’ is nothing other than that receptivity to the unconcealment of Being that is the essence of human being itself in Heidegger. Plato’s ‘there’ is not only other than the metaphysical-Christian beyond in form and content, but even its Being is in a different mode (1992b: 97). The Greek ‘there’ is not what is furthest away and least worldly but that which is closest, but also most uncanny – the very worldliness of the world itself. The ‘there’ to which Er’s ‘soul’ travels, as ‘the district of the uncanny’:

Is neither on ‘earth’ nor in ‘heaven’. Quite to the contrary, in this district there are such things, and only such things, which point to the subterrestrial, the supraterrestrial, and to what pertains to the earth. The subterrestrial and the supraterrestrial are the places whence the ‘demonic’ shines up upon, or down upon, the earth. They are the places of the gods. (1992b: 118)

And what are the Greek gods? Far from those that dominate Being as with the metaphysical God beyond Being, ‘they are Being itself as looking into beings’ (1992b: 111, emphasis added). The Greek gods are not outside of the world, condemning it by their otherness from it; rather, they are world itself as that in which beings come to appear. They are that same light of which Plotinus (in Hadot 1993: 49) would write: ‘Even in this world, we must say that beauty consists less in symmetry than in the light that shines upon the symmetry, and this light is what is desirable.’

Heidegger’s alternative to metaphysical cosmos, then, is a new vision of world-order (recalling that, unlike Nietzsche, Heidegger does not find chaos anywhere) in which the beings that appear within a world (through the ‘letting be’ of that world) stay only awhile and, for this very reason, are not abandoned to being ‘sheerly persisting constituents’ (Heidegger 2002a: 272). It is this persisting beyond their while that causes beings to violently seek to expel each other – hence cosmos, with its eternal beings and everlasting places, is the very death of world. In contrast to this cosmic fixity, philosophy, as the thinking of Being, is ‘constant transformation’ not because it changes its mind about everything but because its very questioning and knowing is a transforming (2002b: 126).

We have encountered world in Heidegger in two different aspects:

1.As the totality of reference, the complete context of meaning or significance, which gives the ‘how’ of beings as a whole – that gives beings as the beings they are. This is world as historical Being.

2.As the Nothing or the freeing absence of ground, which, constituted by finitude rather than ‘man’, is what gives the being of beings. This is world as transcendence of beings, as the whole not of beings but of Being. It is world as revealed in the fundamental moods of anxiety or boredom.

These two faces of world in Heidegger are not separate, of course. Historical being-in-the-world, as time, is no-thing, just as this nothing of temporality is revealed only in historical being-in-the-world. The way in which beings are given in a world is not separable from the giving of the Being of beings in the nothing. But that there are two faces to Heidegger’s world is instructive, nonetheless.

We should recall at this point that, for Heidegger (1995: 358), ontological difference, the difference between Being and beings, is not only an essential moment of world, but, indeed, is the moment from which the problem of world becomes comprehensible at all. Ontological difference, then, is equally fundamental to both of these senses of world, but in World 1 ontological difference is expressed as an immanent principle, as historical, while in World 2 it rises to a transcendental principle, namely is expressed as a difference as such; as a difference which, in being understood, brings awareness of Being. Driving this significant difference of emphasis is Heidegger’s ambivalence as to whether world is opened by Dasein (World 1) or, conversely, whether Dasein is opened by world (World 2). While this ambivalence is deliberate in the sense that Heidegger wants to underline the co-implication of Dasein and world (hence the hyphens in Being-in-the-world), it is worth exploring its implications further.

Instructively, in Being and Time and the lectures that make up The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (i.e. until 1930 at the least) the strong sense of ontological difference – as awareness of Being as other than beings – is revealed only in anxiety or boredom (the former where I find myself fearful of nothing in particular, the latter where beings slip away into the nothing of a generalized indifference). Heidegger (1990: 177) is explicit about this in his Davos lectures from the same period (1929): ‘the Nothing is thought of only as an idea which has also been grounded in [the] disposition of anxiety. It is only possible for me to understand Being if I understand the Nothing or anxiety’. The ‘why?’ that stems from the awareness of Being first requires that I be anxious. To be sure, historical being-in-the-world is also revealed only when things go wrong, but here the revelation is not of the Nothing but of world as meaningful. That awareness of Being as such is dependent upon those moods when I am no longer at home in the world raises the question of whether Heidegger’s thought at this point is internal to nihilism rather than its overcoming.

Can the question of Being be a question of anything other than the living of a life? Is the addition to this living of anything at all (even the Nothing) a shadow of the true world? Is the strong sense of ontological difference, the awareness of Being, an away from here? As a student of Heidegger who nonetheless seeks to overcome Heidegger, this is why Agamben is so insistent that the messianic life is only the destitution of historically determined vocations and not some new vocation.¹⁷ Heidegger makes this same point himself in his early reading of Paul. But why then does he come later to describe the human being as the shepherd of Being (Heidegger 1998a: 252)?

Does the true world abide in Heidegger’s world (and is the abandonment of beings by Being a lament for it?)? If so, then his attempt to overcome Nietzsche must be in question. Nietzsche, after all, is content to celebrate the death of the true world, with nothing in addition. This is why Nietzsche has to acknowledge, if grudgingly, the significance of Spinoza, who had already very nearly killed off the true world by identifying it (if incompletely) with its modes, its ways of being. As Agamben (2016: 175) points out, Heidegger, by contrast, never did engage Spinoza. Perhaps this is because in Spinoza’s thought of the blessed life, unlike in Heidegger’s with its call of a Being that has been forgotten, the true life is already here.

¹Heidegger’s history of Being does not, however, assume that there is one such history. Bergson, by contrast, makes being ‘historical’ in an absolute sense: ‘Not only does the past coexist with the present that has been [i.e. that passes in its very arising], but, as it preserves itself in itself (while the present passes), it is the whole, integral past; it is all our past, which coexists with each present’ (Deleuze 1991: 59). As Deleuze (1991: 81, 82) notes, ‘Bergson’s whole thesis consists in demonstrating that [the different fluxes of time] can only be liveable or lived in the perspective of a single time’. There ‘exists one Time and one Time only’.

²In his Introduction to Metaphysics (2000) Heidegger makes this same point as follows: ‘For saying beings as such involves understanding beings as beings – that is, their Being – in advance’ (2000: 86). Blindness to our openness to the being of beings is both the condition for and the outcome of ‘traditional’ metaphysics, which, in its fixation on beings and its forgetting of beings, ‘remains “physics”’ (2000: 149).

³This means that the idea, central to the metaphysical tradition, of man ‘having’ logos needs to be approached differently. Having logos is no longer being able to distinguish between true and false but having the very possibility of taking to be either true or false. Logos is now seen as an ability rather than a fixed capacity, the possibility of taking, rather than simply having, a comportment towards, or a relation to, beings as such. To possess logos, for Heidegger, is not to have some thing or property, but rather to have ‘a relating towards beings as such at one’s disposal’ (1995: 337).

⁴By contrast, the natural attitude is to treat being as undifferentiated, to erase the difference between the ontical (beings) and the ontological (Being) such that both are ‘understood, with equal indefiniteness, as “being”’ (2002b: 162).

⁵Agamben has argued (2016: 170) that the ontological difference between being and Beings is internal to language (‘in reality there is only ... sayability: the word and the thing are only its two fragments’). The presuppositional structure of language is that as soon as something is named the thing named has to be presupposed as extra-linguistic (and therefore in some sense as unnameable). Being is only a shadow cast by being-in-language. Although Heidegger came to acknowledge (1998a: 239) that language is the ‘house of Being’, in his earlier work he takes awareness of the being of beings to be in some sense ‘prior’ to language. In The Essence of Human Freedom (2002b: 30; see also 87 and 158), for example, Heidegger writes that ‘we can use the “is” and “was” and so forth because the being of beings is already self-evident to us prior to all speaking. In understanding the being of beings, we always already understand being as divided’. Indeed, even in the later ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1998a: 254, 248), Heidegger continues to hold that ‘Because plants and animals are lodged in their respective environments but are never placed freely into the clearing of being which alone is “world”, they lack language’. The ‘clearing’ of Being is prior to language even if it can only be disclosed in language: ‘Language is the clearing-concealing advent of being itself’, which means that language, as the house of being, is ‘propriated’ by being or that ‘being comes, clearing itself, to language’ (1998a: 249, 254, 274). For this reason, ‘the metaphysical-animal explanation of language’ can only cover up ‘the essence of language in the history of being’ (1998a: 254).

⁶Here we see once again the influence of Heidegger on Bultmann and Bornkamm.

⁷This identification of freedom with world is to be contrasted with Kant’s understanding of freedom as a kind of causality specific to human being (i.e. of which the human being is himself an original cause – a beginning or an unconditioned causality – in contrast to the chain of natural causality). By connecting freedom with a being in this way, freedom is wrongly conceived, Heidegger believes, as being-present. This ‘turns freedom into its complete opposite’ (Heidegger 2002b: 133). Because Kant works with a cosmic concept of world as the totality of beings, freedom must be understood on the basis of natural causality. The world is determined by natural causality but what brought the world into being? That the world started spontaneously, even if how it did so remains obscure (indeed, given the antinomies of pure reason, we cannot know that it even does have a beginning), is proof enough (viz., is a necessary regulative idea) that there can be self-origination of new series, and this is how human freedom is explained (basically, we decide for the thesis of human freedom against the antithesis of pure natural causality). In other words, human freedom for Kant is derived from natural causality rather than being treated on its own terms; it is a merely cosmological idea. Kant’s ‘problem of freedom belongs to the problem of world’ rather than, as in Heidegger, the problem of world belonging to the problem of freedom (Heidegger 2002b: 156). As Heidegger expresses this point (2002b: 205): ‘The problem of causality is a problem of freedom and not [as in Kant] vice versa.’

⁸There is an interesting contrast with the Epicurean gods, here, who Lucretius (1968: 161) describes as leading ‘lives supremely free of care’.

⁹Deleuze’s Bergson (1991: 49) thinks something similar: psychological duration is the ‘opening onto an ontological duration. Ontology should, of necessity, be possible’.

¹⁰In his famous second meditation on what remains the same in wax between its solid and liquid states, Descartes (1911: 11) had rather argued that neither the senses nor the imagination but only the understanding (my mind) can intuit that the same wax undergoes this change. Here the subject constitutes its time rather than vice versa.

¹¹The possibility of the thesis and antithesis of the dialectic is comprehendible only if we know what the logos is. The logos reveals or conceals, but what is the ground of this possibility of truth or falsity? It is an apprehending of that which forms a unity, since ‘whatever is to be pointed out must already be apprehended in advance in the unity of its determinations’ (Heidegger 1995: 313–14).

¹²‘How can man even come to a subjective conception of beings, unless beings are already manifest to him beforehand?’ (Heidegger 1995: 286; see also 287 and 341).

¹³In describing Heidegger’s world as ‘the inoperativity of the animal environment’, Agamben is aligning it with his messianic vocation, which is similarly the destitution of all biological (and social) conditions of life that in no way transcends these conditions.

¹⁴Heidegger often restates his belief in the nihilism of value thinking. For example in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1998a: 265), where he writes that ‘thinking in values is the greatest blasphemy imaginable against being’ inasmuch as, when we make something a value, we reduce it to an object for human estimation. Every valuing is therefore a subjectivizing which fails to allow beings to be. Also in ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’ (1998c: 174) we read that, to the extent that interpretation in terms of values sustains Nietzsche’s metaphysics, ‘Nietzsche is the most unrestrained Platonist in the history of Western metaphysics’. However, inasmuch as Nietzsche understands that valuing is necessary for life, even something posited by ‘life itself’, he manages to hold on to the Greek understanding of Being far more than those who absurdly seek after ‘intrinsically valid values’. In other words, valuing for Nietzsche stems from what is rather than from what ought to be, which means that at least he does not weigh the world according to values conceived as somehow above it.

¹⁵Deleuze’s Bergson (1991: 55 and 58–9) also warns against confusing Being with being-present. When Being is thought as being-present, then the past, no longer present, cannot be. But it is rather the present, as that which always and necessarily passes in its very emergence (since otherwise no new present could arise), that is never present; it is the present that ‘is’ ‘pure becoming, always outside itself’. The past, on the other hand, while it has ceased to be present has not ceased to be. ‘Useless and inactive, impassive, it IS, in the full sense of the word: It is identical with being in itself.’ Paradoxically, then, at the limit ‘the ordinary definitions are reversed: of the present, we must say at every instant that it “was,” and of the past, that it “is,” that it is eternally, for all time’.

¹⁶Deleuze (1994: 59) takes up this insight in Difference and Repetition: ‘the Heraclitan world still growls in Platonism. With Plato, the issue is still in doubt: mediation has not yet found its ready-made movement’. However, see pages 127–8 for a harsher judgement of Plato as the one who first subordinated difference to the power of the Same and the Similar.

¹⁷More recently, Agamben (2016: 30; see also 51–6) has expressed this idea through the concept of use: ‘every use is first of all use of self: to enter into a relation of use with something, I must be affected by it, constitute myself as one who makes use of it. Human being and world are, in use, in a relationship of absolute and reciprocal immanence; in the using of something, it is the very being of the one using that is first of all at stake’.