The Whole of Heidegger’s Philosophy - Contributions 136
Philosophy is like a hologram: each of its “parts” contains the whole. The whole of Heidegger’s thinking from his middle period is contained in Contributions to Philosophy, section 136.
We are inclined to think that Being must be all the time. If there were no Being, no beings would show up. Heidegger starts by breaking this illusion: “Beyng—the remarkable erroneous belief is that beyng must always “be”.” (Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), Section 136)
Not just that it is not necessary for Being to be all the time, “but beyng “is” not at all; instead, it essentially occurs.” (ibid.)
That is just terminological pedantry, we might say, the substitution of the word “occur” for the word “be”. Nevertheless, we might argue, Being must occur all the time. If Being did not occur, there would be no beings. But that is not what Heidegger is saying. He says that Being is “the most unique” and possesses the “utmost rarity”. No one can truly esteem the few moments in which it occurs.
Being occurs only rarely and for a moment, if ever. In the twinkle of an eye. The occurrence of Being is a real phenomenon, even though it is not a being. It is an ontological phenomenon.
The occurrence of Being is not evenly distributed among all people. There are people who are more ontologically inclined, and people less prone to ontological phenomena. There are people who spend their lives in a larval state of Being-blindness. We know that from personal experience: for a long period of our lives, we were Being-blind. There is no moral judgment about this: a larval life is no less worth living, and there is no practical use for the occurrence of Being.
If we are Being-blind, there is no point in reading about Being. Reading will not make Being occur; all that it can do is help us make sense of the experience we already have and see that we are not alone.
For beings to step forth, Being must keep itself back in self-concealment. We find ourselves in the street, surrounded by buildings, roads, trees, cars, and streetlights. But there is no Being.
We might repeat a Heideggerian mantra: the self-concealment of Being is its occurrence. But Heidegger warns us about that: “to leave beyng in concealment is radically different from experiencing beyng as self-concealing.” (ibid.) To leave Being in concealment means precisely that Being does not occur. The occurrence of Being is something completely different.
Beings are, yet there is no Being. Beings are devoid of Being. Are the beings then annihilated in the occurrence of Being? No, on the contrary! “They become beings in the more proper sense, i.e., they occur more essentially in the essential occurrence of beyng.” (ibid.)
Then it all comes down to the relationship between the human being and Being, we might jump to the conclusion. A human is an empty place where Being occurs. Once again, Heidegger breaks this illusion. There is no separate “human” and “Being”, so there can be no relationship between them. “To speak of the relation… makes it seem as if beyng essentially occurred, with regard to the human being, as something over and against, as an object.” (ibid.) As if there is Being and it occurs to humans. But there is no Being. “Being itself” is just one name for the occurrence of Being.
Human being is the t/here of Being—it is where Being occurs, and nothing else. Larval life is a mode of this “being the t/here for the occurrence of Being”—but that does not mean leaving Being in concealment is the occurrence of Being. Just as a person can go blind because humans have the ability to see, but we would not say that blindness is “how someone sees.”
On the other hand, there is no Being prior to its occurrence. Being occurs to humans, and in no other way. Its truth, the unconcealment of Being, “essentially occurs only if sheltered in art, thinking, poetry, deed.” (ibid.) If there were no sheltering, Being would not occur at all; it would be left in concealment and completely forgotten. Then the only possible mode of life would be a larval one. We would eventually lose our organs for perceiving ontological phenomena, and our Being-blindness would become incurable. That is a real, threatening possibility, the utmost danger, and perhaps the most likely outcome of the progress in which we live.
For millennia we have been interpreting Being from beings, and that is the best-known Heideggerian taboo. Maybe that is why precisely what Heidegger does in this section is interpret Being from beings: “If it is still allowed, for the sake of a preliminary orientation, to characterize beyng on the basis of “beings,” then we will call upon the actual as what genuinely is.” (ibid.) Scandalous! Not only does he say that he is going to “characterize Being on the basis of beings”, but he focuses on the actual. And we all know that the actual is what is constant in presence. By that logic, Being would be constant presencing.
But there is a twist: “What is actual, i.e., what is, is first that which is remembered and that which is still the prepared.” (ibid.)
There is nothing more actual than Sophocles' tragedies and future revolutions. The present “has already been borne and pervasively disposed by memory and preparedness.”(ibid.) The present is then the unique moment, the singular point in which memory meets preparedness, in which Sophocles’ tragedies are staged for the revolution that is on its way. That is how sheltering works; these unique moments in which memory meets preparedness are when Being occurs.
Of course, it goes without saying that it is not as though humans “produce” Being in the present. These unique moments are not under our control; they are exactly what breaks our illusion of control.