The Grounding1 of Traditional Western Metaphysics: De-constructing2 Our Understanding of being3: ever since philosophy took its first steps, the question of being, though misguidingly framed as “why is there something rather than nothing”, is undoubtedly the most prominent of its preoccupations. It is the issue which stood out above all others to meddle the minds of great thinkers of every age, and which, according to Martin Heidegger4, evaded most and remained hidden. Therefore, this paper, heavily relying on his reflections, endeavors to show how the history of metaphysics5 as prescribing a particular way of understanding being, as a source of intelligibility by announcing various styles or background practices that fix our place in this world and what stands out as something along different historical epochs, is characterized by a forgotten-ness of the very structure that constitutes it and to re-awaken an alternate understanding of being that is better suited for letting ignite being in its richness. Unlike Heidegger, there are some, like Jacques Derrida, despite being influenced by Heidegger in many respects, who are suspicious of the latter project stressing that it is likely to be snared into the traps of metaphysical thinking it desperately tries to avoid. Be this as it may, laying aside this dispute for another discussion, the task of this paper restricts itself to bringing its readers to attention and taking a closer look into the condition that allowed for the possibility of metaphysical thought.
Throughout his career, with various degrees of modification as his thought progressed, Heidegger stressed the importance of making a distinction between being and being(s)6. Beings are everywhere, we are constantly in their presence and engage with them in our world of preoccupation. “World”, as opposed to the prevalent meaning of world as the sum totality of everything in the universe, is the whole context of shared equipment, roles, and practices on the basis of which one can encounter entities and other people as intelligible. Chalks means something in so far as there are desks, blackboards and textbooks towards which it is assigned or referred and as long as it is not desks, blackboards and textbooks. Heidegger strongly believed that there are no such things as “raw feelings” or “bare facts”. Rather, all human experience is only possible within a “world”, a world which is already articulated in referential wholes or web of matrix of relations. So, for example, one encounters a hammer as a hammer in the context of other equipment such as nails and wood, and in terms of social roles such as being a carpenter, a handyman, etc., and all such sub-worlds as carpentry, homemaking, etc., each with its appropriate equipment and practices, make sense on the basis of our familiar everyday world. Heidegger calls this background understanding, “our understanding of being”. In our most average/ordinary engagement and comportment towards beings, what thrusts to our transparent circumspection are equipment’s in their manipulability or usability. The involvement or rather the absorption that is characteristic of this directedness excludes any form of subjectivity that retrospectively institute a conscious state as rule-following-subject, where a person acts according to a rule must either be obeying the rule, in which case it becomes explicit for the agent, or merely acting in conformity to a rule falling into a regular perhaps casual patters without awareness. At this stage of absorbed coping when circumspection7 is guided by concern8, the fissure between subject and object is dissolved and with it, a phenomenon emerges as a kind of structure that belongs to man, i.e. being-in-the-world, which Heidegger also calls “da-sein” in German, roughly translated as being-there or the-there, a place of unfolding, where the light of being shines so that beings stand out in its brightness to shine forth. For the sake of brevity and avoiding complexity at an early stage, discussion over the mode of being of man is deferred for another article.
Harking back to structure of beings, we are reminded that each equipment doesn’t stand on its own to give itself a positive content, rather is equipment in so far as it assigns itself to other equipments within its constellation or equipmental whole. The assignment or referential relation within a certain whole of equipments is a structure that is tightened together, as it where, by the set of skills that lets or frees individual equipments as what they are, like hammer is primarily a hammer only when it is hammered with. Analogous structure is found in Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics where each signifier stands in opposition to all other signifiers, i.e. the system of differences. Take for instance the English alphabet as constituted with system of differences. The letter “a” is only “a” in so far as and if and only if it is not the rest of the letters that comprise the alphabet and this applies to all the letters. The implication of this line of thought is to lead us into thinking that signs are not different with one another because they have a positive content as their determinative attribute but precisely because they are pervaded witha lack, with negativity, with “not”, that they get their positive content as being different from one another. This “not” is also the reason why they have the potential to be otherwise than what they already are within a different charge of differences or signification. But for a particular system of difference to be fixed and give a stable meaning, the negativity that structures it as being both its possibility and impossibility (the instability/indeterminacy of the same structure) must be hidden and disguised. The same structure is witnessed as a condition of possibility for each equipment to be what it is or to stand out as something to shine forth, must as of necessity withdraw from sight taking some equipment to retreat to the background. The skills and practices manipulate in every instance equipment from equipment guided by concern, bringing forth some and hiding others. Now the structure outlined so far has the character of hiddenness that nonetheless functions as a presence in which what is present occurs. Thus far, we tried to lay down some groundwork to introduce a strange notion of truth used by the pre-Socratic where “truth”14 takes the role of wrenching entities from unintelligibility or hiddenness to intelligibility or un-concealment. Here Heidegger employs the term “a-lethea” ancient Greeks used to designate truth. A-lethea is a privative of “lethea”, the not-hidden, the un-covered, the unconcealed. Yet equally essential to Heidegger’s thinking on truth is the claim that un-concealment also involves concealment, hiddenness. The truth of being should not be mistaken for a thing or an event but rather the disclosing structure of entities, distinguishable from entities but neither reduced nor separated from them. On the other hand, entities render themselves intelligible on their own accord in the clearing, in the open, in the lighting-up process of being. The disclosed-ness of entities as being-in-the-open is the truth of being. The truth of being cannot successfully be made into an object of experience. This is because it is not an object at all, whether of experience or itself. It is not. Rather it is a concealed space in which objects can be. But if the truth of being can never be an object of experience, how can it be indicated or pointed to? It can’t be ostensively determined, it cannot be distinguished as this as opposed to that, and it cannot be defined in terms of some particular being. There cannot be direct access to the truth of being, no uncovering of the truth of being as such occurs at the same level as beings. The basis for this access is not “experience” rather being. This distinction is blurred and forgotten when “being” begun to be understood in terms of beings.
This can be explicated further through the scheme of “time-space”15. Time-space is a kind of presence, showing itself in terms of the present and absence. As opposed to the traditional understanding of the present as a now point in a sequence of now points, Heidegger interprets the present as that which concerns man, the entity made manifest in concern. Pre-sence as a constant abiding that approaches man and as that which lasts in concern, involves more than the present ordinarily understood. It necessarily also involves absence, the absence of that which-has-been, and of that which-is-coming-towards-us. That which is “past” and “future” for Heidegger is equally present, but only in the sense of being in the temporal now. There is a presence of “past” and “future” precisely in so far as they are absent from the now, i.e. as having been and coming towards. Heidegger’s preoccupation however is not with that which is present, past or future rather with “temporality” itself or the opening in which that which is temporal can be so. How should the notion of space be characterized in this scheme? That which is closest to us, that which is given, in our concerned coping, does not necessarily entail the proximity we maintain towards the arrangement of things in their spatial juxtaposition. What determines phenomenologically the closeness or apartness of beings is first and foremost the circumspection that guides our activity or the tasks and occupations in which we are involved.
Time-space now is the name for the open-ness which opens up and in which the present and absent beings can be, however, only in that past, present and future are both related to each other and at the same time distinct. Within this distinction lies a withholding of past and future. The past and future are present only through their absence. An altogether different metaphor of light could be entertained here to make the issue more accessible. As the light enters a room and shines on what is inside clearing the darkness away, each is brought to attention with all its singularity and distinction from the other as what it is, i.e., such as chairs and tables. Now, the lighting-up event is not a thing like chairs are, nor is a general attribute every one of them shares or possesses or even a kind of higher entity causing them to appear in the sense of creating them. Rather, it is an opening, like an opening or clearing in the forest, from which they emerge and to which they are concealed. It is not present in the same way that things are but rather is a presence in the form of absence presenc-ing what is present and precisely for the same reason of presenc-ing, remains absent. But it is not in the sense of no-longer being present. It is important to point out at this juncture that the truth of being, the lighting-up process, pre-sence, the open, the clearing, time-space (temporality) are but the same. The truth of being is the clearing in which beings can appear and in which being as presenc-ing of pre-sence can manifest itself. The clearing is analogous to horizon.16 As such it is the concealed possibility of un-concealment, the truth of being. Further, the opening is temporality as it presents, retaining its absence, what is present.
Heidegger believes that the ancient Greeks were inspired to think about what-is (beings) as a whole which manifests a certain being not just by their language’s copula verb but by the ambiguity of a single verbal term: the Greek word “on.” As both participle and noun, this word says “being” in the sense of to be something-which-is and at the same time, it names something-which-is. In the duality of the participial significance of on, the distinction between ‘to be’ and ‘what-is’ lies concealed. Heidegger adds that what seems like grammatical hair-splitting is “the riddle of being”. If metaphysics has its beginning in the emergence of the duality of to-be and what-is from “the self-concealing ambiguity” of the term “on,” then, Heidegger argues, metaphysics begins with the pre-Socratic thinkers. They were the first to think explicitly about the nature of everything with which they dealt. The emergence of the duality is the emergence of the “ontological difference”17 between to-be and what-is. However, the emergence of the difference between what-is and to-be does not guarantee that they emerge explicitly recognized as distinct. In fact, Heidegger says that at no time, presumably until he came along, has the distinction between what-is and to-be been properly identified as such. He argues that, from the beginning of thought about what-is, being has been forgotten and the oblivion of being is the oblivion of the distinction between to-be and what-is. Thus, the original oblivion of the distinction between being and what-is is not the complete oblivion of being and what-is as such but the oblivion of the distinction between them. The early Greek thinkers thought about being insofar as they thought about the being of what-is which “unconcealed” itself to them. But they did not think explicitly about being itself or its relation to the things which show themselves as being in a certain way.
Now metaphysics commences a thought that establishes for the next twenty-five hundred years a new way of philosophizing when being becomes the Being of beings. Metaphysics is not simply the esoteric concern of philosophers isolated in their ivory towers, but that, on the contrary, it grounds an age by providing successive “epochs” of unified intelligibility of our historical understanding of “what-is”, for anything to be at all. Now being is the Being of beings in so far as each being is in demand of, so that it is rather than nothing. Metaphysics then has increasingly come to see Being in this sense, i.e. Being of beings, as the ground of beings and of Itself. Metaphysics has taken being to mean as both what is most general, that which every being possesses in that it is, and as that which supplies the ground for all such beings. Metaphysics thinks of the Being of beings both in the ground-giving unity of what is most general, what is indifferently valid everywhere, and also in the unity of all that accounts for the general, that is, of the All-Highest.
Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is directed at “metaphysics” in the sense in which it constitutes a certain way being has been understood since Plato. In effect, Heidegger’s initial endeavor to reawaken the allegedly lost sense of being was an attempt to recall traditional metaphysics from its obliviousness to its own origins- the thought of being. He was persuaded initially that the traditional categorical treatment of being failed to articulate clearly what is meant for a thing “to be” in general. He argued that the criteria which sustained an approach to being (indefinability, universality, and self-evidence) are not simply inadequate but are themselves the result of an inadequate account of being and are derived from the discursive speech articulation to beings, to entities. Every major philosopher attempts to make being become a word, to encapsulate it into language or rather to grasp being in the fangs of time. What characterizes metaphysical thinking which grounds the ground for beings is the fact that metaphysical thinking departs from what is present in its presence and thus represents it in terms of its ground as something grounded. From this perspective, the history of western metaphysics is then the summons of being, the manifold ways in which being becomes presence as absence and absence as presence. Therefore, the “epochs” of being, as the stages of the history of being, is not characterized by what is positive in a way metaphysical thesis is in regard to being. Rather, it is determined by what is absent, held back, in that position. The history of being is a history of hiddenness, not of presence. It is a history of the specific ways in which the place and truth of being have been forgotten. Each successive stages or epoch in philosophical development is, as finite, determined by its limit. A philosophical system is as it is because it fails to incorporate within its own thought something which is nonetheless necessary for itself. This other, its limit, is both the determination and possibility of the possibility and, ultimately, its impossibility.
The fact that Heidegger rejects metaphysics in the way he does, does not commit him to the position that metaphysics is wrong in its characterization of being (but some might incline to say, with good reason, that it is “wrong” in so far as it is oblivious to being). We can no longer do metaphysics not because it is wrong but rather because it has ended in, and been continued by, technology and the positive sciences. If the parable of the madman18 is to be made sense at all, it should be read as a lamentation with horror and awe as to the crumbling of the entire edifice of metaphysics as onto-theology that used to ground what it means to-be as our source of intelligibility. Now the latter project envisaged at the beginning of this article to announce a different way of doing philosophy is unfortunately left for the readers to contemplate on their own as to what it might be. But this requires a sound understanding of what lays at the heart of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics. Thus, the author implores his readers to read and re-read this text not for the sake of reaching closure with clarity and solution to the problematic of being but rather to be struck by the question with all its strangeness and wonder to enter into the path of thinking which Heidegger has inaugurated.
- Here the term “grounding” should not be mistaken for a firm foundation like an entity or substance up on which another less fundamental entity is established or, in other words, some primal cause producing things in general, but rather the stand metaphysics takes towards
being, in its obliviousness, as a condition of possibility on the basis of which entities are what they are and already understood. This notion will be thematized in its own right further on. ↩︎ - For the sake of dispelling any prior misconception, the notion of “De-construction” is not employed in an entirely pejorative sense of total dismantlement of metaphysics as we know it, like many suggest. It is rather dedicated in laying bare the ontological structures that were oblivious and veiled to the very historical epoch they wish to ground. The task then is on the one hand takes the form of hammering down the ontic dimension of the tradition and separate it from the ontological. ↩︎
beingis on the basis of which beings are always already understood and intelligible, without which they cannot even be said at all. The word is written under erasure, crossed over, because of its inadequacy to wholly capture the notion it refers but remains visible out of necessity as the constraints of our language offer nothing better and, because the notion itself resists symbolization, cannot offer. This can be extended as Jacques Derrida does to the problem of presence and absence, which will be elaborated as we progress, to include the notion that erasure does not mark a lost presence, rather the potential impossibility of presence altogether — in other words, the potential impossibility of univocity of meaning ever having been attached to the word or term in the first place. ↩︎- Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher who was born in 1889, worked and died in 1976. ↩︎
- Metaphysics is conventionally understood as a stream within philosophy discipline that deals with the study of phenomena beyond the empirical, sensible world such as the notion of “freedom”, “God” and “immortality of the soul”. But we are not interested in this textbook definition. Throughout this paper, we take metaphysics to mean not only ideas that were primarily the concern of philosophers in exclusion to the general public but also determines and gives to shape our understanding of “what is”, what it means for something “to be”. By codifying and disseminating an understanding of what beings are, and by providing an account of the ultimate source from which beings issue, metaphysics supplies intelligibility with a kind of foundational justification which is characterized as theological, alas Heidegger’s label “onto-theology” to signify western metaphysical thinking. ↩︎
- Being(s) stands for everything that which-is, that which shows itself as what it is. Background practices that accompany these beings reveal them as what they are, like the skill of hammering revealing hammers, nails and wood. We call the mode of being of these equipments which are ready-to-hand, “available-ness”. Another mode of being as “occurrent-ness" comes to fore when our absorbed coping with equipments is interrupted and entities begin to emerge as metal and hard objects with determinate mass and impenetrability. ↩︎
- Circumspection is a kind of sight that is employed amidst our coping by the task to-be-achieved and for-the-sake-of-which it is intended in the context of background practices ↩︎
- Concern, as the structure of da-sein, signifies the way in which da-sein's being, in its being, is an issue for it ranging from the most absorbed coping to the sheer disinterested staring. This notion is deliberately left in the dark as the task of this paper does not cover the issue of da-sein, so the readers are not expected to be aware of it but are highly encouraged to do in their own time. ↩︎
- Here, it's imperative to point out that “truth” understood as correspondence in the epistemological sense -adequatio rei et intellectus- while applicable to ontic discourse, to talk about entities or beings, is incapable of grasping
being, the emergence within which beings come to be. Ontic discourse is aboutbeing, as will be shown, characterize the history of philosophy as metaphysics. Truth devolves, historically, from aletheia (pre-Platonic), to orthotes (the "correct" discourse about things), to adequatio intellectus et rei (medieval period), to certitude (Descartes), to error (Nietzsche). The revelatory essence of truth is allegedly subservient to correct speech, in Plato. "Correctness" then evolves its own career; from medieval correspondence to Cartesian self-evidence in which mathematical certainty serves as paradigm of truth, to Nietzsche's extraordinary claim that truth is the sort of error, the sort of falsification of fluid becoming, without which human beings could not live. Because of the sharpening of truth in the epistemological sense,beingdevolves from the pre-Platonic pre-sence of emergence, to Idea (Plato), to transcendence (God), to "will" (modern period). ↩︎ - Those of you who have an acquaintance with the positive sciences are warned not to import quantum mechanics or metaphysical thinking into the notion of time-space or rather temporality, which for Heidegger is a condition for any understanding of time or space. ↩︎
- The conventional meaning of horizon as the farthest region one can perceive and possibly reach like a line of dawn as getting nearer to a city one wishes to arrive, should be abandoned in this context. Horizon is interpreted to mean something like a background as a condition of possibility for a figure to appear having its distinctive qualities (note the relation between background and figure). It is the pervading, all-encompassing practices beyond which we cannot go and within which we always already find ourselves. For instance, while playing a video game, one notices that there is a background stationed at the back of the game such as a landscape or desert or city which can never be fully experienced and no matter how far one travels drifting from the prescribed mission, he can never succeed in reaching it. If he were to reach it, it ceases to be a background at all. It is also surprising to find out that when the player is involved in passing the mission, he never pays attention to the background that constitutes the game. ↩︎
- Ontological difference signifies the difference between beings and
being. ↩︎ - Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882, 1887) para. 125; Walter Kaufmann ed. (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp.181-82.] ↩︎