Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) by Vallega-Neu Daniela Rojcewicz Richard Heidegger Martin

Author:Vallega-Neu, Daniela, Rojcewicz, Richard, Heidegger, Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253001276
Publisher: Indiana University Press

145. Beyng and nothingness

In the entire history of metaphysics, i.e., in all previous thought, “being” is always grasped as the beingness of beings and hence as these beings themselves. Today still, for every “thinker” the identification of being with beings is something that precedes, so to speak, and the reason is indeed an incapacity for drawing distinctions on the part of all philosophy.

Accordingly, nothingness is always grasped as a nonbeing and thus as negativum. If “nothingness” in this sense is even posited as a goal, then “pessimistic nihilism” is consummated, the disdain for every effete “philosophy of nothingness” is legitimated, and, above all, one is exempted from any questioning, while the “heroic thinkers” are distinguished precisely by their promoting of this exemption.

There is not the least in common between all this and my questioning of nothingness, which arises out of the question of the truth of beyng. Nothingness is neither negative nor a “goal.” Instead, it is the essential trembling of beyng itself and therefore is more than any being.

The fact that the proposition from Hegel’s Logik, “Being and nothingness are the same,” is quoted in “What is Metaphysics?” [Was ist Metaphysik?] signifies—and can signify only this—a general agreement with regard to bringing together being and nothingness. For Hegel, however, “beyng” is not only a determinate, first stage of what is to be thought in the future as beyng, but this first stage, as the un-determined and un-mediated, is already precisely the pure negativity of objectivity and of thinking (beingness and thinking).

As difficult as it will be for the future to extricate itself from “metaphysical” thinking, just as inaccessible to it will at first be “nothingness,” which is higher than everything “positive” and “negative” in the totality of beings.

Thoughtful questioning must first have attained an original power to say “yes,” which resides essentially beyond all optimistic bravado and all programmatic heroism, in order to be strong enough to experience as the most concealed gift the nihilating in beyng itself, which alone genuinely un-settles us into beyng and into its truth. Then we will indeed recognize that nothingness can never be reckoned, or balanced, against beyng, e.g., as what is to be shunned or denied, because beyng (i.e., nothingness) is the “between” for beings and for divinization and can never become a “goal.”

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