Death and Philosophy by Jeff Malpas & Robert C. Solomon

Author:Jeff Malpas & Robert C. Solomon [JEFF MALPAS AND ROBERT C. SOLOMON]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we call ‘transcendence’. If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out into the nothing, then it could never be related to beings [which means, nothingness and Being are the same,]30 nor even to itself.31

The identity of Being and nothingness thus represents no failure of logic on Heidegger’s part, although it does demand of us a form of thinking that goes beyond the conventional. The identity of Being and nothingness turns out, in fact, to be crucial in understanding the structure of the revealing that occurs in anxiety. We have seen that in anxiety Dasein comes to see that no thing is of relevance to its Being and that finally only nothingness and Being endure. However, even though this reading of the Heideggerian position appears to be correct, it nevertheless still does not encompass the full truth (to be ‘correct’, as Heidegger would say, is not yet to penetrate to the essence of the matter). Ultimately the unveiling of the mystery surrounding Being must occur through Being itself—for there is certainly nothing other than Being through which such revealing could occur in any fundamental sense. To put the point slightly differently: Being in its mysteriousness must be able to render things, including itself, intelligible (and this must be so, notwithstanding Being’s own tendency, emphasized in Heidegger’s later thought towards self-withdrawal and self-concealment). Such disclosure of Being, however, happens, not on Being’s own account alone, but is instead conditional upon Dasein’s confrontation with nothingness. When that condition is realized, Dasein and Being are positioned to unveil beings and Being is able to reveal itself to Dasein.

From this perspective—a perspective that incorporates the fact of Dasein’s own disclosive capacity in relation to Being—we can offer some further elaboration of the phrase ‘nihilation of the nothing’. The ‘nihilation of the nothing’ is not a process of destruction, as one may think if one attends only to the word ‘nihilation’, but is rather an opening up in which beings are seen differently and yet not as mere ‘nothing’. And by what is this ‘nihilation’ ‘brought about’? Nihilation is just the revealing of the nothingness that grounds beings; a revealing that in nihilating or ‘destroying’ beings as they ordinarily appear and ordinarily preoccupy us, also unconceals Being by disclosing it as ‘something’ beyond beings. Moreover, since Being and nothingness cannot be separated, neither can we treat one or the other as exclusively that which is revealing or that which is revealed. In the interplay between Being and nothingness, both are revealed, and revealed as two aspects of the same ground; a ground that is revealed in the nihilating of the everyday appearance of beings and, more positively, in the shining forth of Being as transcendence; a ground that can be understood both as nothingness and as Being.

Yet what now remains

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