Dasein has a special, technical meaning in Heidegger’s philosophy. We are the only creatures who are not absorbed by the moment, and by preoccupation with particular things. We also have the ability to stand outside the moment and, as described earlier, register Being. In short, we ex-ist, where “ex” means outside and “ist” means to stand or abide. We are Da-sein because we are the only creatures who have an experience of being there, and registering Being. For Heidegger, what chiefly characterizes us and distinguishes us from all other living things is our preoccupation with Being.
5. THE FALL OF DASEIN
But how Dasein has oriented itself toward Being—in philosophical reflection and in daily life—has changed over the course of time. Heidegger’s position, in fact, is that Dasein has fallen away from a primal openness to Being enjoyed by the ancient Greeks. He views modern Dasein as thoroughly degenerate, though he never announces this in such strong terms. At all times, Heidegger maintains a position of objectivity, seldom seeming to pass judgment on the times. He positions himself as a kind of detached “historian of Being.” It is clear, however, that Heidegger regards modern Dasein as defective, and that he seeks some way to bring about an orientation toward Being that would approximate that of our ancestors. Introduction to Metaphysics is a particularly valuable text, among other reasons, because it is here that Heidegger makes some of his strongest and most explicit anti-modern statements.
As a model for a healthy, pre-modern Dasein Heidegger looks continually—and exclusively—to the Greeks (a problematic move, as I will discuss later). He tells us that for the Greeks Being was essentially phusis (sometimes also transliterated physis, from which we get “physics”). This word is normally translated “nature,” but Heidegger takes the position that our cultural falling away from the “originary” Greek confrontation with Being has been facilitated by the translation of Greek words into Latin ones. And “nature” comes from the Latin natura—so we must be cautious in understanding phusis as “nature” and leaving the matter at that.
The basic difference between phusis and natura is that the latter basically connotes a kind of static collection of entities that surround humanity—the non-human world of animals, plants, minerals, elements, etc. The concept of phusis, on the other hand, suggests something dynamic and moving. Heidegger points out that the noun phusis is derived from the verb phuein, which means “to generate or grow.” Thus, “nature” for the Greeks was not simply the set of non-human-built things around us; rather it was a dynamic process. Heidegger writes:
Now what does the word phusis say? It says what emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in appearance—in short, the emerging-abiding sway. Phusis is the event of standing forth. Arising from the concealed and thus enabling the concealed to take its stand for the first time.157
Phusis is what emerges out of potentiality or out of absence (the rose blossoming, the caterpillar becoming a butterfly, the storm emerging from the heavens) and becomes present and actualized—then disappears back into wherever it is such things emerge from. Phusis is this continual unfolding, emergence, and return. And Heidegger tells us that “Phusis is Being itself, by virtue of which beings first become and remain observable.”158
Contrary to popular belief, Heidegger’s main objective is not to “define Being.” In these passages of Introduction to Metaphysics and elsewhere, Heidegger sets out very clearly what he thinks “Being” means, and makes it clear that he believes the standpoint of the Greeks (who equated Being with phusis) is basically correct. Heidegger’s main interest is actually in Dasein: in the being for whom Being is an issue; in how Being becomes an issue for us, how we have responded to Being, and the history of how our orientation toward Being has changed over time.
Now, Heidegger’s identification of Being with phusis allows him to make some interesting observations about physics and metaphysics. Physics deals with beings: with the things that have emerged from the abiding sway of phusis/Being (including not just “things,” but forces), and with the laws governing their interactions. Metaphysics points us beyond beings to Being itself (and indeed “metaphysics” literally means “beyond physics”). However, the entire history of Western metaphysics—really, from the pre-Socratics on—has confused metaphysics with physics and treated Being as if it were some special kind of being (as discussed earlier). This means that when Heidegger refers to “the Greeks” as having the proper conception of Being as phusis, he is really not thinking of the Greek philosophers. In fact, he is drawing his account of the Greek understanding of Being primarily from their poetry and drama. But that is a story too complicated to tell here.
Heidegger speaks of the “oblivion of Being,” that begins with the Greek philosophical treatment of Being as another kind of being, and has as its final consequence modern decadence. We have lost the original Greek wonder in the face of Being.159 Even the medieval period, soaked in religious piety, was disconnected from Being. The Judeo-Christian tradition treats God as an exalted being and the world as an artifact constructed by him. And, as the Good Book says, God has given man dominion over all the beings of this artificial world. Judeo-Christian religiosity is preoccupied with transcending this world, so as to be reunited with God—not with wonder in the face of the “emerging-abiding sway.” The formula for creating modernity out of medievalism is simple: retain the idea of our having dominion over all the earth (i.e., all this as raw material for human use) and simply remove God from the picture. The result is a life without wonder, in which we are preoccupied exclusively with this thing or that, focused on the manipulation, quantification, and acquisition of things.
6. MODERNITY & THE OBLIVION OF BEING
Heidegger describes this “oblivion of Being” as “the spiritual fate of the West” and offers the following striking description of our present predicament:
When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously “experience” an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for?—where to?—and what then?160
These words call to mind René Guénon’s thesis of the “reign of quantity.” The technology Heidegger is referring to, obliquely, is the airplane, telegraph, radio, and motion picture. But it is impossible to read these words today without thinking for a moment that Heidegger is referring to satellite television, supersonic jets, and the internet. His words read like an uncanny prophecy of today’s world. Heidegger is identifying trends which are not recent, but woven into the fabric of modernity itself. What we live with today appear to be the most extreme outcomes of those trends (though it is always dangerous to make such claims: things may get far worse!).
Heidegger writes, further:
The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline [which is meant in relation to the fate of “Being”]161 and to appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with cultural pessimism—nor with any optimism either, of course; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free has already reached such proportions throughout the whole earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable.162
Though Heidegger refers here, tantalizingly, to “the flight of the gods,”
he is no neo-pagan. But there is something about Heidegger’s ideas that definitely resonates not only with what we know of traditional pagan thought, but also with the theology of the modern (or post-modern) neo-pagan movement. The “flight of the gods” refers to an old idea that the gods have withdrawn themselves from the land, due to people’s non-belief (i.e., their conversion to Christianity). One of the key elements in Heidegger’s understanding of modernity is the idea of the “self-withdrawal of Being.” Something has changed about Dasein, and as a result Being has concealed itself from us—just as the gods have departed on account of men no longer being true to them.163 (It is interesting that Heidegger draws on the language of paganism, rather than Christianity, as a poetic way to express this idea.) His reference to “the destruction of the earth” suggests the ways in which Heidegger’s critique of modernity intersects with deep ecology. (This is especially apparent in later essays like “The Question Concerning Technology.”)
Although in these passages Heidegger refers to the modern “decline of the earth,” he sees this mainly as a Western phenomenon, and his concern is with the fate of Europe. He sees Europe as caught between the two great juggernauts of American capitalism and Soviet communism, both of which offer mere variants of the exact same modern forms of decadence described earlier:
This Europe, in its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the rootless organization of the average man.164
This is what has come to be known as Heidegger’s assertion of the “metaphysical identity” of capitalism and communism. The words “seen metaphysically” are crucial here. There are (or were), of course, many differences between the US and USSR, but seen metaphysically Heidegger claims that they are identical. Both rest upon a materialistic metaphysics which sees the generation of material prosperity as the key to human happiness. Both, in one way or another, treat all things (including people) as manipulable commodities. Both are irreligious, in the broadest sense of that term (the US implicitly, the USSR explicitly), preoccupied with beings and closed to the mystery of Being. (Heidegger’s thesis of the metaphysical identity of capitalism and communism is one of the keys to understanding why he embraced National Socialism, a point to which I will return later.)
Echoing Guénon (who Heidegger never read), he adds later that in modernity (as exemplified by American capitalism and Soviet communism) “the prevailing dimension became that of extension and number.” And, further:
In America and Russia, then, this all intensified until it turned into the measureless so-on and so-forth of the ever-identical and the indifferent, until finally this quantitative temper became a quality of its own. By now in those countries the predominance of a cross-section of the indifferent is no longer something inconsequential and merely barren but is the onslaught of that which aggressively destroys all rank and all that is world-spiritual, and portrays these as a lie. This is the onslaught of what we call the demonic [in the sense of the destructively evil].165
Unsurprisingly, while Heidegger is concerned with the threat of American capitalism and Soviet communism to European civilization, more narrowly he is concerned with the fate of Germany. Though he is cagey about this. He writes: “We live in the pincers. Our people, as standing in the center, suffers the most intense pressure—our people, the people richest in neighbors and hence the most endangered people, and for all that, the metaphysical people.” Though this is said in the context of a discussion of Europe, it is apparent that Heidegger means that the German people are the metaphysical people. What this means is not entirely clear, but Heidegger seems to see the German people (or Germanic peoples?) as having the potential to play the world-historical role of restoring to us an authentic orientation toward Being.
We are sure of this vocation [as the metaphysical people]; but this people will gain a fate from its vocation only when it creates in itself a resonance, a possibility of resonance for this vocation, and grasps its tradition creatively. All this implies that this people, as a historical people, must transpose itself—and with it the history of the West—from the center of their future happening into the originary realm of the powers of Being. Precisely if the great decision regarding Europe is not to go down the path of annihilation –precisely then can this decision come about only through the development of new, historically spiritual forces from the center.166
But how is Germany (and, by extension, Europe) to be spiritually awakened? By asking the question of Being. To repeat: wie steht es um das Sein? What about Being? What is required is a spiritual shift away from preoccupation with beings—and the analysis, quantification, and commodification of beings—toward Being itself, toward the emerging-abiding sway; the mystery from which beings come forth, and from which flow art, poetry, drama, and all else that makes us truly human.
Asking about beings as such and as a whole, asking the question of Being, is then one of the essential fundamental conditions for awakening the spirit, and thus for an originary world of historical Dasein, and thus for subduing the danger of the darkening of the world, and thus for taking over the historical mission of our people, the people of the center of the West. Only in these broad strokes can we make plain here to what extent asking the question of Being is in itself historical through and through, and that accordingly our question, whether Being is to remain a mere vapor [i.e., empty idea] for us or whether it is to become the fate of the West, is anything but an exaggeration and a figure of speech.167
7. THE GRAMMAR & ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORD “BEING”
I hope the foregoing has helped readers get a clearer idea of the nature of Heidegger’s philosophical project, and how it involves a critique of the modern situation. However, much else is probably still unclear. The chief problems readers will likely have are with Heidegger’s understanding of Being as phusis, and with his idea that a recovery of this understanding of Being will somehow spiritually renew the West.
Fortunately, the second chapter of Introduction to Metaphysics is devoted to a further elucidation of the meaning of Being by way of a discussion of its grammar and etymology. This approach to things is uniquely Heideggerian. Frequently in his work, Heidegger sheds light on a philosophical issue through a discussion of the origins of certain words.
The most famous example of this is his analysis of the Greek word for truth, aletheia. Heidegger argues that the word is derived from Lethe, which was one of the five rivers in Hades and also the name of a daimonic being mentioned by Hesiod. The name is variously translated as “oblivion,” “concealment,” or “forgetfulness.” Heidegger understands the “a” at the beginning of aletheia to be an alpha privative, which negates what comes after it. Thus, aletheia means “unconcealment,” “cancellation of oblivion,” etc. And, accordingly, Heidegger understands the ancient Greek conception of truth as meaning bringing something out of concealment or oblivion and, so to speak, into the light. (Many linguists, incidentally, have supported Heidegger’s etymology of aletheia.)
In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger applies the same approach to our words for Being, in order to recover the “originary sense” of these words: what our ancestors were thinking of when they coined them. Note that I said words for Being, as we have a number of them and they are quite different. In English, the most basic one, of course, is “be” as in the infinitive “to be.” But note that none of the different conjugated forms of the verb employs “be”:
I am We are
You are You (pl.) are
He, she, it is They are
All of this changes in the past tense, of course, the forms of which are “was” (first and third person singular) and “were” (all the rest). Forms of “be” show up in the past participle: e.g., “I have been.” And in the present participle: “being.”
In German things are, if anything, more com
plicated. The present tense conjugation of the infinitive sein is:
Ich bin Wir sind
Du bist Ihr seid
Er, sie, es ist Sie sind
The past tense forms are all variations on war. The past participle is very curious: gewesen, from which was derived the noun Wesen, which can mean “being” (as in a being) or “essence.” The present participle is seiend (from which Heidegger gets das Seiende).
Now, needless to say, we could consider other Indo-European languages. But an examination of English and German actually suffices to give us the basic “word forms” used to express Being (again, in Indo-European languages): the “is/ist form” (think also, for example, of Spanish es or French est), the be/bin/bist form, and the was/gewesen/Wesen form. Heidegger (relying on very sound etymologies) traces these to three Proto-Indo-European stems (which, following standard German practice, he refers to as Indo-Germanisch):
1. The oldest stem word is es, from which is derived Sanskrit asus which means life or the living. To this stem also belong the Sanskrit verb forms esmi, esi, esti—and we can clearly see that this too is the origin of “is,” es, ist, etc.
2. Another Indo-European root is bhú or bheu. Out of this we get “be,” “been,” bin, and bist. Significantly, from this root also comes the Greek phuein (to grow, emerge) and phusis. The Greek term phainesthai is also derived from this root. This word means “show” or “display,” and “phenomenon” is derived from it.
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