called ‘harmony’; and the union of the two is called ‘a performance by a chorus’”
( Laws, 665a). In this sense, the term is also used, particularly by lyric poets, to define the proper form and character of each individual: “know what rhythm
governs human beings” ( gignoske d’ oios rhythmos anthropous echei; Archilocus),
“do not praise a man before knowing his sentiment, his rhythm, and his charac-
ter” ( orgen kai rithmon kai tropon; Theognides).
Mode expresses this “rhythmic” and not “schematic” nature of being: being
is a flux, and substance “modulates” itself and beats out its rhythm—it does not
fix and schematize itself—in the modes. Not the individuating of itself but the
beating out of the rhythm of substance defines the ontology that we are here
seeking to define.
Hence the peculiar temporality of mode, on which it is appropriate to reflect.
The adverb modo means in Latin “a short time ago, just now, recently.” This in-
dicates, in the “now,” a small temporal gap, which is not a chronological past so
much as a non-coincidence of the moment with itself, which obligates it to stop
and take itself up again. We could say, then, that the temporal form of mode is
neither the past nor the present nor even less the future: it is the mode rn, on condition of restoring to this discredited word its etymological meaning from modo and
modus (present to some extent even in the related Italian term moda, “fashion”).
Since its first appearance in a letter of Gelasius I, which distinguishes the
admonitiones modernae from antiquae regulae, the term modernus always implies a tension with regard to the past, as if the present could grasp and define itself
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only in a gap with respect to itself. That is to say, the modern is intimately histor-
ical and archaic, because it has need of the ancient to refer and, at the same time,
to oppose to itself. Analogously, the temporality of mode is not actuality: it is,
in present existence or in the actual, the gap that impedes their coinciding with
themselves—the operative time in which the flux of being pulsates and stops,
takes itself up and repeats itself and, in this way, modulates itself in a rhythm.
Insofar as it demands to preserve itself in its being, substance disseminates itself
in the modes and can thus take form in time. The “being that it was” and its
resumption in thought, existence and essence, substance and modes, past and
present are only the moments or the figures of this rhythm, of this music of
being: ductus sub aliqua figura servatus.
The person who is properly modern, in this sense, is not the one who op-
poses the ancient so much as the one who understands that only when some-
thing “has done its time” does it become truly urgent and actual. Only at this
point can the rhythm of being be known and grasped as such. Today we are
in this extreme epochal situation, and yet it seems that human beings do not
manage to become aware of it and continue to be cut and divided between the
old and the new, the past and the present. Art, philosophy, religion, politics have
done their time, but only now do they appear to us in their fullness, only now
can we draw from them a new life.
א Developing the Neoplatonic idea of emanation, Avicenna conceives of being as a
flux ( fayd ). The first principle acts neither by will nor by choice but simply exists and, from its existence, accomplishes and “flows into” the world. The fact that in the image
of flux what is in question is a tendential neutralization of the concept of cause, in the sense of the reciprocal immanence between causing and caused, is implicit in the way in
which Albert the Great takes up this idea: “Only that can flow in which flowing and that
from which it flows are of the same form, as the river has the same form as the source
from which it flows. . . .” (Lizzini, pp. 10–11). If one maintains the image of flux, then the most adequate form for thinking mode is that of conceiving it as a vortex in the flux
of being. It has no substance other than that of the one being, but, with respect to the
latter, it has a figure, a manner, and a movement that belong to it on its own. The modes
are eddies in the boundless field of the substance that, by sinking and whirling into itself, disseminates and expresses itself in singularities.
3.27. In order to correctly think the concept of mode, it is necessary to con-
ceive it as a threshold of indifference between ontology and ethics. Just as in
ethics character ( ethos) expresses the irreducible being-thus of an individual, so also in ontology, what is in question in mode is the “as” of being, the mode in
which substance is its modifications. Being demands its modifications; they are
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its ethos: its being irreparably consigned to its own modes of being, to its “thus.”
The mode in which something is, the being-thus of an entity is a category that
belongs irreducibly to ontology and to ethics (which can also be expressed by
saying that in mode they coincide). In this sense, the claim of a modal ontology
should be terminologically integrated in the sense that, understood correctly, a
modal ontology is no longer an ontology but an ethics (on the condition that we
add that the ethics of modes is no longer an ethics but an ontology).
Only at this point does a confrontation with Heideggerian ontology become
possible. If the difference between essence and existence becomes a crucial prob-
lem in Being and Time, in the sense that “the essence of Dasein lies in its exis-
tence” (Heidegger 1, p. 42/67), the characteristics of this entity are not, however,
to be conceived according to the model of traditional ontology as “properties”
or accidents of an essence but “always and only as possible modes [ Weisen] of
being.” Therefore, “when we designate this entity with the term ‘Dasein,’ we are
expressing not its ‘what’ (as if it were a table, house, or tree) but its being” (ibid.).
Heidegger emphatically emphasizes that the concept of existence that is in
question here is not that of traditional ontology, which is founded on the clear
distinction of essence and existence. The reference to the “modes of being” and
the specification “every being-thus [ Sosein] of this entity is primarily being” (ibid.) should have made us understand that the ontology of Dasein, even if Heidegger
does not pronounce it explicitly, is a radical form of modal ontology, even if not a
clearly thematized one. The lectures of the summer semester of 1928 at Marburg,
which contain such precious comments on passages from Being and Time, suggest
this unreservedly: Dasein “designates the being for which its own proper mode
of being [ seine eigene Weise zu sein] in a definite sense is not indifferent” (Heidegger 8, p. 171/136). Dasein is not an essence that, as in Scotus and the scholastics, is
indifferent to its modifications: it is always and only its mode of being, which is
to say, it is always radically mode (paraphrasing the Scholastic motto according to
which “horseness is only horseness,” Dasein is mode and nothing more). Dasein
is the mode of a being that coincides completely with mode.
It is not possible here to specify the reasons that drove Heidegger not to
make the modal character of his ontol
ogy explicit. It is probable that it was pre-
cisely his prolonged adherence to the Aristotelian apparatus that did not allow
him to understand that the ontological difference must be completely resolved
into the being-modes relation. In any case, it is a matter of the same difficulty
that constrained him to avoid up to the end a confrontation with the philosophy
of Spinoza.
Intermezzo II
1.In the latter half of the thirties, while he was writing and compiling
the remarks that come together in the notebook Beiträge zur Philosophy
( Contributions to Philosophy, inappropriately designated by the editors of the
Gesamtausgabe as one of his Hauptwerke), Heidegger insistently returns to his concept of Dasein (which he now always writes as Da-sein), and in revisiting
the existential analytic that he had sketched in Being and Time, he newly de-
fines the relationship between the human being and what that term was to
designate. In Being and Time, he suggests, the concept was still thought in too
anthropological a way, which could allow for equivocations. The term does
not mean the human being or a characteristic or structural property of the
human being (precisely this is what still seems to him to lend itself to “easy
misunderstandings” in Being and Time): it is, rather, something that one must
assume and “take up” ( übernehmen; Heidegger 9, p. 297/235) and in which one
must “be steadfast” (ibid., p. 319/252–253). As such, it indicates “a possibility of
the human being to come,” the “ground of a determinate future being of the
human being, not the ground of ‘the’ human being as such” (p. 300/237), that
is, of the human being who “endures being the Da, the ‘there’” and conceives
himself as the “steward of the truth of being” (p. 297/235). Dasein does not
mean “presence in some place or another” or simply “turning up” ( Vorkommen)
but rather “steadfast enduring [ inständige Ertragsamkeit] as grounding the
‘there’” (p. 298/235), “persistence [ Beständnis; bestehen means “to tenaciously overcome a test”] in the truth of Being [ Seyns]” (p. 311/246). In the 1929–30
course Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Dasein is defined still more figu-
ratively as a “burden” that the human being must take upon himself.
Let us reflect on the terminology with which Heidegger seeks to define Da-sein:
“taking up” ( übernehmen), “possibility,” “steadfast endurance,” “persistence.” That is to say, we are dealing not with something that is always already present in the
human being and which the human can have at its disposal but instead with a task
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or a test that the human being must take up and endure—and it is an arduous
task, if it is true that, as the title for §5 reads, it remains reserved for the “few and
rare” ( Für die Wenigen—Für die Seltenen).
Da-sein here seems to be not a substance but something like an activity or
a mode of existing that the human being must assume in order to approach the
truth (his own and that of being)—something that he therefore can also possibly
miss. But how can that in which the very truth of being is in question remain
entrusted solely to the uncertainty and contingency of a “test” or a “task”?
2. Here Heidegger is coming up against a difficulty that was already pres-
ent in Being and Time. There the circular ontological constitution of Dasein,
that is, of the entity for which being itself is at issue in its being, entails a “pri-
ority” ( Vorrang; Heidegger 1, p. 13/34) and a “distinctiveness” ( Auszeichnung; p. 11/32) of Dasein, which in its very structure—insofar as it “has a relation of
being with its being”—is “in itself ontological” (p. 13/34). In this sense, Da-
sein is the “ontico-ontological condition for the possibility of any ontology”
(p. 13/34). At the beginning of §4, the relation between Dasein and the human
being had, however, been defined by Heidegger, at least in a hurried way, in
these words: “As ways in which the human being behaves, sciences have the
manner of being [ Seinsart] this entity—the human being itself—possesses.
This entity we grasp terminologically [ fassen wir terminologisch] as ‘Dasein’”
(p. 11/32).
What is thematically confronted in the Beiträge zur Philosophie is precisely
the problem of this “terminological grasp.” Is it the human being who, in as-
suming its Da, is the “projector of Being” ( Entwerfer des Seins; p. 299/236), who opens its clearing and safeguards its truth, or is it, rather, Being that “uses”
(p. 318/251) the human being to this end? That is to say, is Being, the open, a
performance of the human being as Dasein, or is Dasein (and the human being
it entails) a performance of Being?
3. In the Beiträge, these questions never stop resonating, and it can be said
that Ereignis (understood etymologically as “appropriation”) is the apparatus
through which Heidegger seeks to resolve the aporia that is expressed in them.
This is clearly confirmed in the explanation of the title that opens the book:
what is in question here is “to let oneself be appropriated in appropriation
[ Er-eignis], which is equivalent to a transformation of the human being: from
‘rational animal’ ( animal rationale) to Da-sein. The fitting rubric is therefore
Of [ von] Ereignis” (Heidegger 9, p. 3/5).
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The paragraphs of section V, which bear the title “The Grounding,” return
constantly to the problem of the relation between Dasein and the human:
Who is the human being? The one used [ gebraucht] by Being for the sake of
withstanding the essence [ Wesung] of the truth of Being.
As so used, however, humans “are” humans only inasmuch as they are
grounded in Da-sein, i.e., inasmuch as they themselves, by creating, become the
ones who ground Da- sein.
Yet Being is also grasped here as appropriation [ Er-eignis]. Both belong to-
gether: the grounding back [ Rückgrundung] into Da-sein and the truth of Being
as appropriation-event [ Ereignis].
We grasp nothing of the direction of the questioning that is opened up
here if we casually base ourselves on arbitrary ideas of the human being and of
“beings as such” instead of putting into question at one stroke both the “human
being” and Being (not simply the being of the human being) and keeping them
in question. (Ibid., p. 318/252)
Ereignis is what allows one to think the co-belonging and reciprocal foundation
of human being and Dasein and of Dasein and Being. If the relation of co-
belonging between Being and Dasein (the Da, the “there” as opening of Being)
is already in Being and Time and even more in the Beiträge in some way analyzed and defined, that of the human being and Dasein and the transformation of the
living human being, of the animal rationale into Da-sein that is in question in
it remain, by contrast, problematic to the end. Being is “grounded back” into
Dasein, but whether Dasein in turn needs a foundation or a place (a Da) in the
human being is left vague. In what way does Dasein entail the human being in
itself, so that Being, in appropriating Dasein to it
self, can also appropriate to
itself the human being? And what happens, in the event of appropriation, to the
living human being as such?
4. Benjamin once defined Heidegger’s style as “angular,” in the sense that
it betrayed the philosopher’s fear of running up against a corner, that is, prob-
lems that he had not been able to get to the bottom of. That Heidegger does
not manage to get to the bottom of the co-belonging of the human being and
Da-sein, that the problem of the living human being remains in some way un-
resolved, is obvious in the obscurity and vagueness that characterize the style of
the Beiträge every time Heidegger comes up against this theme. Paragraph 175
is among those in which the question is precisely invoked. The question here is
that of exceeding “the first reference to Da-sein as the grounding of the truth of
Being” that in Being and Time had been achieved by means of asking about the
human being, conceived as “the projector of Being [ der Entwerfer des Seins] and
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thus as detached from all ‘anthropology’” (p. 299/236). And yet what is equivocal
here is that it seems that Dasein can be understood only with reference to the
human being. Instead, when thought starting from the truth of Being, “Da-sein
moves . . . away from the relation to the human being and reveals itself as the
‘between’ which is developed by Being itself so as to become the open domain
for the beings that protrude into it, a domain in which beings are at the same
time set back on themselves. The ‘there’ is appropriated and made to happen
[ ereignet] by Being itself. The human being, as steward of the truth of Being,
is subsequently appropriated and thus belongs to Being in a preeminent and
unique way [ in einer ausgezeichneten einzigen Weise]” (ibid.). How this “preem-
inent and unique” appropriation of the human being on the part of Being can
happen is not in any way explained, unless it is with the word “subsequently,”
which remains all the more problematic insofar as Dasein has just been moved
away from any reference to the human being.
At this point it is not surprising that the paragraph concludes with a sen-
tence in which the angular stylistics are neutralized and leave the problem en-
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