2 flowers in Heidegger's Black Forest or the “wild thyme unseen” in TS. Etiot’s East Coker. Such limp romanticism is surely not what Heidegger had in mind, or if he did he was wrong. To let entities be means to let them be present, that is, to take them as endlessly appropriable. And one ‘does that precisely by endlessly appropriating them, and, yes, by letting them be submitted (0 the domination of the worker in the inevitable humanization of nature and naturalization of man. If one follows Heidegger’ thinking consisiently, there is no promise of escape from that Herrschaft, no nostalgia for a time before we crossed over the line into “too much” rechne, no hope for a new age when the balance might allegedly be set right again. Or better, if there & such nostalgia and such hope, its philosophical valence is that of avoidance, flight, and inauthen- ticity, a refusal 10 face and accept the historical fatedness of Greck- Western existence that is captured in Parmenides’ word 10 autos ‘The troubling conclusion that niilism is inevitable follows ineluctably, in Heidegger's thinking, from the fact that realty—as it has been envisioned from archaic Greek piysis through classical Greek ousia, all the way down to Janger’s notion of work as the actualization of Gestalt and Herrschaft in planetary technologyhas always been experienced as Anwesung or Anwesenheit, the “turning-to-man.” Heidegger writes to Tanger: In the presence [that announces itself in the Will to Power] and in the re-presentation [or reproduction of the worker that Junger discusses] there is manifested the basic trait of what has revealed itself to Western thinking as Being. From the dawn of the Greek world down to the dusk of our own century “Being” has meant one thing: presence. Every kind of presence and presentation stems from this event of presentness [dem Ereignis der Anwesenheit), (ZS, 21) But if every kind of presence stems from this Ereignis, this dispensation of Being that retreats beneath erasure, then nihilism is not only inevitable: it is inescapable. It is, in fact, empowered by the essence of Being and cannot be “overcome,” at least (here is Heidegger's caveat) not by any effort on the part of human beings. v ‘The other word in Heidegger's key phrase, the adjective bestandig, points t0 the question of time. Bestandig is usually translated into English either as “stable” or as “constant,” neither of which, as we shall see, is adequate, What does the adjective bestandig add to Anwesung or ousia, to the experience of reality as “presence”? Is it merely a chance addition 10 a the noun? Or does it contain the whole secret of the turn into the essence of nihilism? Heidegger explicates the meaning of besianig by means of a reflection ‘on the meaning of the Greek adverb aei, “eternally,” and the adjective adios (a contraction of aeidios), “eternal, everlasting.” This procedure appears logical enough, for do not stability and constancy point in the direction of eternity? But for Heidegger it does not work that way. Heidegger's explanation of aei and consequently of bestdndig comes in his commentary on Physics B, 1 at the point (Wegmarken, 337-340) where Aristotle argues for the priority of morphe over hyle as the meaning Of physis by rejecting what Heidegger calls Antiphon’s “materialism,” a materialism which, interestingly enough, was intimately bound up with Antiphon’s radical repudiation of techne. By way of anticipation we may ‘say: Antiphon saw the constancy of presence as the hallmark of the really real and thus as the touchstone for discerning what was truly physis, Antiphon’s approach does point out one way 10 escape fechne and the nihilism implied in it: Even though one must live with techne insofar as fone is human, one must be ever in retreat from techne towards physis insofar as one is a philosopher. In fact, is that not Heidegger's program as well? Antiphon’s thesis is that it is the primary and most unshaped elemental matter (fo arythmisron provon: earth, water, air, and fire) that most deserves the name piysis, and not anything (such as iron or wood or flesh) that derives from or is a reshaping of those primary elements, and 4@ fortiori not anything further shaped from those secondary reshapings, such as artifacts, It would be hard to find a more absolute rejection of technology. And Antiphon’s reason for declaring the most basic elements to be physis is that they are aidia: they do not change (ou gar einai ‘metabolen autois, 193 a 27). From Antiphon’s use of the word, which Aristotle apparently accepts, it would seem that aidion must mean “eternal” or “everlasting.” The most constant and most stable would be the ‘eternal and ultimately the divine. And even though Antiphon and Aristotle radically disagree on the content of that ultimate “theological” centity—‘materialistic” in the one case, “idealistic” on the other—they nonetheless agree on the form of the theological: eternal self-presence, Antiphon’s retreat from a “humanistic” sechne in the direction of a chthonic physis is a negative mirroring of Aristotle's sublation of human techne in the direction of an Olympian physis, But Heidegger confounds those simple certainties. In attempting 10 show how that is the case, Iwill not go into the way Aristotle incorporates Aatiphon, as Unwesen, into his own interpretation of physis at 193 a 21- 31. (You will recall that, to put it most briefly, Aristotle “wresis” from Antiphon’s arrythmiston proton his own very different notion of prote hyle,44 prime matter.) Rather, I will present only the gist of Heidegger's own radical reinterpretation of the meaning of aei in that same passage. Heidegger begins by noting the astonishing ambivalence of the words ‘ei and aidion. At one end of the lexicographical spectrum these two words can mean “forever” with all the connotations of eternity and necessity which that word bears: “that which is always the case.” However, at the other end of the spectrum, they can refer simply to “whatever happens to be the case at a given time,” as in Herodotus’ ho aei basilon, “the currently ruling king” (Historiai, IX, 116). The same ambivalence is found in the English word “ever,” which we use in translating ael and aidios. “Ever” can ‘mean, on the oné hand, “always” and “eternally,” with overtones of necessity (compare the Latin necesse, “unyielding”). Or the word can refer, ‘on the other hand, to any specific and non-perduring occasion: “Did you fever see so-and-so?” That latter meaning continues in the suffix of words like “whoever,” “whenever,” and “however” (as an adverb and a conjunc- tion) where it has the sense of “any at all, from among infinite pos- sibilities,” as in the aforementioned phrase from Herodotus (ho aei basilon = “whoever happens to be king”), a meaning certainly quite removed from any notion of eternity or necessity. For Heidegger aidion and “ever” can, of course, refer to time, but they do not necessarily do so and above all need not refer to eternity or endless duration. Rather, Heidegger radically overturns the common interpretation by reading bestdndige Anwesung (ousia aidie) not primarily as stable, abiding self-identity, not as constant presence, but rather as ‘autonomously initiated sell-presentation: Im aci ist es auf das Verweilen und zwar im Sinne der Anwesung ‘abgeschen; das aidion ist das von sich her ohne sonstiges Zutun und deshalb méglicherweise standig Anwesende [...] [D]as Enischeidende liegt vielmehr darin, dass das eigentlich Seiende von ihm selbst her anwest und deshalb als das je schon Vorliegende-hypokeimenon proton-angetrof]- en wird... (Wegmarken, 339) What one has in mind with the word aei is Verweilen [being around for a while”), specifically in the sense of becoming present. Something is aidion to the extent that it becomes present of itself and without ‘other assistance and for that reason might possibly be a constantly present emtity [...] The decisive factor is that real entities become resent of themselves and therefore are encountered as that which in every instance is already there in front of you—Aypokeimenon proton. [Emphasis added] In this remarkable passage we watch the meaning of the so-called 45 “stability” or “constancy” of self presentation—that is, of physi, Kinesis, and Phainesthai—side from “eternity” to “autonomy,” only to end up as the “apriority” of accessibility, here discussed under the temporal guise of the ‘always-already-ness” of presence. This is the same issue we saw in Anwesungiousia, The confluence of these two topics gives us a hint of what it means to “turn into the essence” of nihilism. In the passage just cited, Heidegger claims an entity is aidion to the degree that it initiates its own self-presentation or, in other words, is per se accessible. The factor of “alreadiness” in an entity’s being “already present” indicates not some time-factor but the entity's intrinsic intel- ligibility, that is, the a priori status of its intelligibility. However, we must ask: When Heidegger discusses the movement of an entity's self-presenta- tion and, therefore, of its appropriability in terms of apriority, where does ‘he think this apriority lies? The answer is more complex than might scem at fist. On the one hand, itis clear that for Heidegger the self-presenta- tion of an entity~its being rendered appropriable—is prior to any human bbeing’s actual appropriation of that entity. All appropriation of the real is always already an evoked appropriation, a response to the appropriability of whatever is, But then on the other hand, the appropriabiliy of an entity-that is, its Being-is always correlative to the human ability to appropriate, otherwise knowing and Being, lacking any intrinsic connection, would merely bump up against each other, only occasionally and always accidentally. Further, this Being, while distinct from the human essence, cannot be separated from it. And finally, insofar as the human essence “goes to make up “Being” [ZS, 27], the human ability to appropriate cemities even in fact co-constitutes the appropriability of entities. Heidegger obviously knew, and refused, the traditional answer to the question of the origin of the relatedness of Being and knowing, namely, that they ukimately are interchangeably one-and-the-same in God and therefore that the meaning of Being is that particular form of time called “eternity” (cf. Confessions, VII, 11). And yet he approaches that solution asymptotically, In the text cited above, Heidegger argues that the autonomy and apriority of self-presentation, which is indicated in its character of aidiotes or Bestindigkeit, is the priority not of entities (or of the “Being of entities”) over human knowing or of human knowing over entities, but rather is the factical priority of the comelation of noein and einai over either of the two correlata, Insofar as appropriation is always evoked, it is ultimately evoked not exactly by the accessibility of entities but more precisely by the fated and unexplainable cogeshemess “between” accessibility and the ability to have access, “between” the Being of entities and the Being of Dascin. If there is any necessity, constancy, and stability which “temporally” determines the meaning of Being, it is nothing but the “alreadiness,” the inexplicable fatedness, of this correlation, the fact that46 the correlation is the always-presupposed, the always-operative par ‘excellence: das Gewesene. This facticty cannot be explained. The most one can say of it ist “It just happens that way: Es ereignet.” This a priori “time,” this unique facticity that Heidegger sometimes calls “the abyss,” is that which empowers, and hence is the meaning of, all the dispensations and formations of Being, Therefore, the supposed “constancy” of coming-to-presence, the aci- factor that serves as the touchstone of ousia in the Greck version of “Being and time,” in no way undoes the “ad hominem” status of that Presence. In fact it reconfirms it with the weightiest of inevitabilities. We might have thought that in the physis-centered cosmos of Antiphon and of Aristotle, the most real instance of reality would turn out to be that which is most removed from men and women insofar as it would be the mos ‘ternal, whether in the form of Antiphon's pre-technological “elemental” (anythmiston proton) ot in the form of Aristotle's meta-technological divine. But Heidegger has argued that the ruling issue in the analogical structure of coming-to-presence is not eternity but apriarty in the sense of the ineluctable fatedness of the correlation between noein and einai: das Gewesene as das Ereigns. Which, at the other end of Greek-Western history, means the ineluctable fatedness of niilism. If T have spent so much time on Antiphon's “Solution” to the problem of technology, itis because Antiphon's response to technology is both consonant with and in fact prototypical of what I call the “Right Heideggerian” response to nihilism.” It is clear that neither of these Solutions works, a least not if one follows Heidegger consistently. To take only Antiphon: Like the Right Heideggerians in response 10 fulfilled nihilism, so too Antiphon in response to reehne tries to find something untouched or relatively untouched by human beings, a physis without any overlay of rechne. Antiphor’s strategy is to deny intrinsic reality t0 recine, to back away from it towards physis as he searches for a world where Being is defined by unchanging stability. But in Heidegger's teling, that strategy is self-contradictory. In the first place, the supposed unmovedness or eternity of Antiphon's underlying elemental stuff denies the very reality of the physis that he is tying to find. Physi means. “movement-into-presence-to-the-human- essence” (dn-wesung, parcousia) whereas Antiphon’s elemental stuff does not move at all, least of all towards human beings. Any appropriation of physis—for example, into a technei on—is for Antiphon a violation of physis. Like the Right Heideggerians who follow his logic to its ultimate historical conclusions, Antiphon becomes the mad ecologist, the Green gone berserk, who has t0 leave the earth in order to preserve it. Secondly, the supposed unmovedness or eternity of Antiphon's physis is also the guarantee of its pseudo-mysteriousness, its ultimate 47 ‘unknowability. Insofar as true physis, in Antiphon's scheme of things, does not move at all and keeps entirely to itself it resists all appearance and escapes behind any attempt to shape it into morphe and eidos. The most real is the most unknowable, a kind of prime matter without form, a “something” without appearance. It is, therefore, an unknowable something, and thus in effect a nothing. Yes, Antiphon's physis is the forerunner of the Right Heideggerian’s leshe: a something that is really nothing, or better, a nothing that has 10 be something insofar as it performs such acts as hiding itself, dispensing epochs of beingness, evoking post-metaphysical thought, sliding under erasure, articulating the call of the , and so on. This nothingsomething cannot be known and yet somehow evokes memory of itself (at least among Heideggerians) by dropping hints of its withdrawal, arousing suspicions of its return, calling ‘out, leaving traces, spreading scents: the ultimate Cheshire eat VI ‘We have considered both aspects of the key phase that Heidegger ‘thinks captures the Greek notion of Being and time, and from either side (of hestiindige Anwesung the conclusion that presses to the fore is that nihilism is inevitable. If the word Anwesung pointed to the endlessness of the human ability to appropriate entities, the word Bestandigkeit, once freed from its supposed reference to eternity, reinforced that endlessness by showing its a priori status. We may now take the last step on our short cut by taking the three presuppositions that have guided Heidegger's reading of the relation of piysis and techne and tracing them back to their natural end: the theological We have argued that the three presuppositions of naturalism, kincticism, and phenomenology entail one another in an intricate perichoresis. According to the first presupposition, insofar as reality in Aristotle's cosmos is diffused analogically and without rupture, every- thing-from the Unmoved Mover if there is one, down to prime matter if er impossible one could speak of it as existing—is to one degree or another physis. But this fact in turn entails another: that everything in the world is somehow self-presentative or it is not at all. And finally, the measure of the degree of that self-presentation is the entity's degree of physis, which means its degree of movement and specifically the degree of its movement of return unto itself. All pysis, including the plysis of God, is, Aristotle says, a hodos eis physin, a direct or indirect, perfect or imperfect, return to itself, what the medieval philosophers would later call reditio in seipsum. ‘The imperfectly natural entity is an incomplete return to itself, and the perfect natural entity (if there is one) is a complete return. In fact, for48 Heldegger the thoroughgoing kineticism of Greek thought is not con- tradicied by but rather fulfilled in the notion of God as perfectly at rest in himself (cf. energeia akinesias: Nichomachean Ethics, H, 14, 1154 b 27) insofar as “rest” here is the in-gatheredness (Innehalten) of motion into its felos and hence not the opposite of motion but its highest instance (Wegmarken, 354). Perfectly self-coincident in his return to himself, God is the perfection ‘of nature, movement, and disclosure~theos ize physis eite Kinesis eite letheia—and as such sets the pattern that is imitated by entities lower than God. Thus on the one hand, an entity of incomplete return to itself is also, because of that very incompleteness, imperfectly self-presentative. In turn, this imperfection marks the impossibility of final and full appropriation, whether by itself or by another, and the consequent inevitability of endless appropriability. The perfectly natural entity, on the other hand, would be the one that is entirely self-presentativeto itself and to others—precisely because of its complete return to itself, a unity which we may image not just a5 a circle (cf. RB. Onians, The Origins of European Thought, Cambridge U.P., 1951, 1988, p. 442-443) but in fact as 4 dot: pure self-coincidence. The already achieved self-coincidence of such an entity is what makes it the most intelligible and most appropriable, 1o ‘malista episteton, (Metaphysics, A.2, 982 b 5). ‘This analogical circumincession of nature, movement, and disclosure underlies the transcendent vision of human wisdom celebrated in the Prooemium to the Metaphysics. Aristotle prefaces that vision with a viderur quod non: If itis the case that sopkia is knowledge of the first principles (982 a 1 and b 10) and if such knowledge must finally be knowledge of God (for “God is thought..to be a fitst principle,” 983 a 9), then it would seem to follow necessarily, to quote the poet Simonides, that “God alone can have this privilege” of knowing himself (982 b 30f.). Moreover, the Poets tell us that “the divine is by nature jealous” (pephyke phihonein 10 theion, 983 a If) and certainly if God is jealous of anything, he would be jealous of his privilege of being the only theologian, the only one to know God himself. Therefore, it seems that the human being would do well t0 seek only the knowledge that is correlative to his or her nature (kath’ hau- ‘on). Anything else, surely, would be unfitting (ouk axion), and moreover, given God's jealousy, all who excelled in theologia would be dystycheis, very unlucky indeed But Aristotle refutes the objection. Not only is God not jealous (“poets tell many a lie,” Aristotle says: 983 a 4-5), but more important, in the analogical unruptured cosmos of Aristotle, everywhere there is nature (Ch. physei at 980 2 22 and 27) there is the desire to see, to know, 10 imitate, and thus, analogously, to be God. Can this desire be fulfilled? While Aristotle does not answer the question unambiguously, he does 49 imply (as he must, given the analogical nature of physis) a human participation in the self-knowledge of God. Sophia or theologia, he says, is a knowledge that “either God alone can have, or God above all others” (683 a 9-10). Aristotle's claim is momentous. He had opened the Metaphysics with the assertion “All human beings by nature [pfysel] desire to know,” and by the second chapter of the Prooemium we learn that the object of that ‘unlimited desire is God. Human beings can, to some degree, know God the way he knows himself, because in fact they participate in the very same reality as God. But this means that, whether or not the project is ever actualy fulfilled, Aristotle has opened up to human beings the possibilty Of the total appropriation of everything that is insofar as itis. Aristotle's theology is the first technology, and modern technology is only the last theology. The “death of God” begins with the first sentence of the Metaphysics, and after it nihilism will be only a mopping-up exercise. Whether God exists or not, whether God is the object of faith, reason, denial, or indifference, henceforth in Western thought thos, the highest instance of physis, will be a symbol for the goal and scope of technological appropriation: the humanization of nature and the naturalization of man. “God” will be the metaphor par excellence for “der ‘unendlich feme Mensch’* God as “the infinitely distant man": With those words the ni born in the theological technology of Aristotle's Metaphysics comes to maturity. That phrase, published posthumously in 1954, had been jotted down sometime between 1934 and 1937 by Edmund Husserl. It is found in an extraordinary passage in Die Krisis der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transcendentale Phanomenologie, p. 66 (English translation, p. 67) in which Husser! reflects on the relation between God, mathematics, and philosophy, and in which, in grounding the infinite appropriability of the real in God, he not only addresses but celebrates what Heidegger, at about the same time, was beginning to call the fulfilled essence of nihilism. From its Greek beginnings, Husserl writes, philosophy has pursued the ideal of the complete rationality of the real, ideally expressible in a universal science. However, the fulfillment of that ideal became possible only with the discovery of modern mathematics. “Is not nature in itself thoroughly mathematical?” Husserl asks. “Must it not also be thought of as a coherent mathematical system?” (E-T., 55). The answer is yes, because in some way the complete mathematical rationality of the world, as a created world, is grounded in God's achieved comprehension of everything. ‘Compared to the absolute knowledge we ascribe to God the creator, one says 10 oneself, our knowledge in pure mathematics has only one lack, ic., that, while itis always absolutely self-evident, it does requirea systematic process in order to bring to realization as knowing, i, explicit mathematics, all the shapes that “xis” in spatiotemporal form. [ibid] This universal science corresponding 10 this new idea [of rational, scientific philosophy|—what would it be, when conceived of as complete, except omniscience? This is for philosophy a truly realizable though infinitely distant goal—though not for the individual or for a given community of researchers but certainly for the infinite progression of the generations of their systematic researches, The world is in itself a rational systematic unity... Only its particularity Femains to be determined and unfortunately [!] this is possible only ‘through induction, This is the path—infinite, to be sure~to omniscience [-wherein} all of the totality of what is will be known as it is “in- itself"in an infinite progression. [65] And accompanying this progress in knowledge is a progress in technical mastery: ‘Along with his growing and always more perfect cognitive power over the universe, man also gains an ever more perfect mastery over his practical surrounding world one that expands. in an unending progression. This also involves a mastery over mankind as belonging 1o the real surrounding world, Le, a mastery over himself and his fellow man, an ever greater power over his fate, and thus an ever fuller “happiness'—"nappiness” a rationally conceivable for man. All this lies within the horizon of this rationalism as its obvious consequence for man. Man is thus truly an image of God. In a sense analogous to that in which mathematics speaks of infinitely distant points, straight fines, ec, one can say metaphorically that God isthe “infinitely distant man.” For the philosopher, in correlation with bi mathematizaion of the world and of philosophy, has ina certain Sense mathematically idealized himself and at the same time, God, (66) It would be difficult to find a clearer vision of the theologian as ‘mathematical technician, in this case, as philosopher marching shoulder to shoulder with Janger's worker into the infinitely distant goal of the God- ‘man. But the vision had already begun to come into focus at least a full century earlier. David Strauss saw himself as merely drawing the inevitable conclusion from Hegel when he wrote at the end of Das Leben Jesu’ When it is said of God that he is a Spirit, and of man that he also st is a Spirit, it follows that the two are not essentially distinct... I not the idea of unity of the divine and the human natures a real one in a far higher sense [than in traditional Christology), when I regard the whole race of mankind as its realization... (The Life of Jesus, London: Chapman, 1850, pp. 777 and 780, emphasis added) And Feuerbach, in the first of his Grundsaze der Philosophie der Zukunft reduced the whole of metaphysics—and not merely (as he thought) the program of modernity—to an epigram if not an epitaph: ‘The task of the modern era [indeed, of Greek-Western history] was the realization and humanization of Godthe transformation and dissolution of theology into anthropology. (Gesammelte Werke, Berlin: Akademie, 1970, IX, 265) It_is this theological-technological-nihlistic project that comes to expression in the formula: vollendeter Nanuralismus = Humanismus, vollenderer Humanismus = Naturalismus (MEGA, 12, 263} The crux of the matter is the endlessness of endless appropriability, its finite infinity, grounded in the togetherness of self-presenting entities and the disclosive human essence. But where is that taufores, that “sameness” or “togetherness” of einai and nocin, grounded? Perhaps in that point of achieved coincidence that is called “God.” Or perhaps the question is unanswerable, and all we can say is “It just happens that way"=es ereignet, es gibt. Heidegger attempted to show experientially and phenomenologically that the essence of the tauotes, the “origin” of the Correlativity between ability-to-appropriate and appropriability, is an unfathomable givenness, in fact a “meta-givenness” insofar as itis the very siving of the mutual givenness of entities and human beings to each other. This meta-givenness or a priori facticity of the correlativity of noein and einai is the point towards which Heidegger's thinking was always moving and at which it reached its atelic telos. And from this point, where man’s essence has its most authentic dwelling or ethos, there flows Heidegger's Protreptic, the closest he can come to an ethics. The proper response to nihilism, he says in his letter to Jonger, is to “take the turn into” (cinkehren) the unfathomable mystery of that meta-givenness, into a night that not only is darker than fulfilled nihilism but also is its very essence. The point is to give up on naive attempts, like JUnger’s, to “overcome” nihilism and rather to let the essence of nihilism “come over” us, But this “letting” requires no Promethean effort on our part. Rather, itis a matter of letting-be what is already the case, a matter of, in Pindar’s phrase, “understanding and thus becoming what you already arc" (genoi hoias ess, ‘mathon, Pythian Odes Il, 72). For in Heidegger's eschatological vision of92 things, in our own time Being has perfected its turning towards us precisely by letting rechne entirely dominate physis. vii I began this paper by indicating what I see as the horizon of Heidegger's discourse on nihilism: his ontological and ultimately meta- ‘ontological contextualization of the problematic. Both these contextualiza- tions of “reductions” have to do with the withdrawal of Being, but in two different though complementary senses. Fitst, the question of nihilism reduces to the matter of Being insofar as there seems to be a forced withdrawal of Being under the pressure of the technological domination of the world by the form of the worker. Or, more precisely, we seem to witness not the withdrawal of all modes of Being but only of the “natural” mode, physis, in favor of tkveinjrechne, human creation, The result is the historical phenomenon of nihilism. But, secondly, Heidegger reduces the question of nihilism to the meta-ontologi- cal level when he argues that it is of the very essence of Being to withdraw fon its own (piysis Aayptesthai phile’) and to do so in favor of the “ad hominem" status of entities, which the tradition calls their “inteltigibiliy.” ‘This is aboriginal nihilism: not the withdrawal of physis under the pressure of the historical growth of the powers of fechne but an essential withdrawal and an essential nihilism, one which in fact empowers (“sends” or “gives") historical nihilism. The withdrawal of Being is the condition for the ad- hominem status of entities, Piysis, insofar as it “loves to hide,” marks the death of God as noesis noeseos. In the place of this highest entity Heidegger celebrates the kenosis kenoseos, a groundless self-emptying in favor of the possibility of universal rechne. Therefore, niilism as a whole is not a zero-sum game in which the advances of humanization comport the forced retreat of Being. Rather, Heidegger's discourse on the fulfilled phase of nihilism, despite its dark tones, is in fact a hymn, an Ambrosian Exultet to the felie culpa of a historical nihilism that at last opens our eyes to the essential nihilism that is the essence of Being. Enough, then, of the ugubrious rhetoric that Heideggerians are so easily given to when discussing technology and nihilism. Such affected threnodies are simply inconsistent with Heidegger's point, not to mention the facts. ‘Aller sketching out the horizon of Heidegger’s discourse, we took 2 short-cut to the heart of the issue of nihilism by discussing Heidegger's reading of Aristotle's Physics B, 1, with a focus first on the three presuppositions underlying that reading and then on the two key words that lie at the heart of that text: ousia and aei. I wish to draw some conclusions from that discussion. 33 First, whereas the sell-presentative nature of entities does have to do with the putting forth of their specific natural forms or eide, it does not follow that these forms must be respected in the sense of being left ‘untouched, Aletheia bespeaks the intrinsic appropriability of entities, and that appropriability in turn points to the fatedness and unfathomability of the relation between noein and einat: das Gewesene. What is more, the fatedness of the correlation is a two-fold invitation. On the one hand, it is an invitation, even a mandate, for human beings to appropriate the ‘world endlessly. On the other hand, itis an invitation, even a command, to recognize the incomprehensibility of the “origin” of that endless appropriability. A mandate 10 appropriate the world and a command to recognize that we will never understand why that is possible. “This double invitation—which is what Heidegger means by the “call of Being”—can be articulated in a sentence that captures the essence of the question of nihilism: Everything is comprehensible except the comprehensibility of everthing. This formulation might seem to raise the specter of eventual closure and totalization, but in fact it asserts the very opposite. It salvages the Lethe from its senseless positioning on some vertical axis that supposed- ly intersects and interrupts history, and it reinscribes that leske where it belongs: as the factor of endlessness and untotslizability within the horizontal project of the historical appropriation of the world. The lerke becomes the “economized lethe.” This reinscription confirms the finitude Of the human essence precisely by opening up the inlunity of possibilities ‘of the human appropriation of the world. In this reinscription the feshe no longer lies beyond in another world, or over the edge of this world at the point where human performance allegedly runs out of steam. Neither does it lie back behind rechne, whether bebind artifacts in some pristine physis, as Antiphon would have it, or behind the human being as worker in the area of some non-technological Dasein, as Heidegger himself would seem 10 argue. Rather, the mystery inhabits technology, propels the appropriation of the world, empowers historical nihilism. ‘That is its gift. Therefore, we live into the mystery not by being less nihilistic but more. Second, just as the axis of the locus of the mystery shifls to the horizontal and historical, so too the discourse about nihilism shifts from the “what” to the “how,” from the question about the essence of nihilism 10 the question of how best 10 carry out its endless tasks. While this clearly not Heidegger's own move, it should be our own. From his early course on the phenomenology of religion in 1920-21 up through his last ‘writings, Heidegger's work remained always focused on the eschatological and its essence.” That focus, which began with Hieidegger’s interest in the Pauline expectation of the parousia, developed very soon in the direction Of Sein zum Ende and Sein zum Tode, and finally ended up as the three- fold issue of his later thought: 1) the fatedness of endless appropriation,ty of historical nihilism, and 3) the meta-ontological essence of nihilism as a self-withdrawal of “Being.” However, when it came to the question of what is to be done, the best Heidegger could offer was either a meta-ethical redoubling of that schema, by saying that the human being’s abode is within the mystery (ethos anchropoi daimon) or an empty (Luse the word in a non-pejorative sense) protreptic to Gelassenheit, to letting oneself be released into the pull of the mystery. Formally speaking, those are necessary moves, but they are hardly sufficient to the claims made on us by the Sache of thinking and acting, and I mean that not just in terms of political responsibilities but first of all in terms of philosophical ones. Heidegger's own reflections on the essence of nihilism demand, on their own philosophical terms, the economization of the lerhe, the dismantling of the ahistorical utopia in which Heideggerians leave the eschatological, and instead its reinscription in the concrete ethical, social, and political. And that non-utopic topos, the place of that reinscription, is where the future of nihilism will be decided. ‘This “philosophical-potitical” reinscription of the eschatological docs not require in the first instance the elaboration of new political philosophies or schemata of ethical normativeness. Those will come in their own good time. The first step, rather, is to recognize that whereas the essence of nihilism can be worked out in the realm of thought, the actual course of nihilism, the future of the humantzation of nature and naturalization of man, is decided not in classrooms, not in libraries or texts, and, with all due respect, not in conferences like this. It is being decided in the boardrooms and the workplace, in the hills and in the streets. Anything philosophy might have to say must come as a reflection on that. Finally, to return for a moment to Heidegger’s demand that he be ead as a homo philosophicus rather than as a homo politicus, the present reflection on the essence of nihilism via a reflection on physis and techne seems to me to force the conclusion that what Heidegger has to say about the essence of nihilism—momentous though it is—cannot realistically serve as a philosophical platform for grounding political options. One would no more want to take Heidegger's reflections On the essence of nihilism as the basis of a concrete political program than one would want to take the apocalyptic discourses attributed to Jesus of Nazareth as the basis for deciding how to carry out a revolution. You may not like technology or its products, the possibilities it opens up or the ones it closes off, you may not like the current constellation of the management of technology or the distribution of its effects. But Heidegger's ideas on technology and nihilism—for all the light they may cast on the question of “what” or essence—will not help you one bit to change that constellation, Taken strictly, they do not even encourage you to work to change it. His thought cannot help you with the “how.” For that, other strategies and other $8 lactics are required. And they come not from Heidegger.” For my part, this essay has sought 10 be only one thing: the beginnings of a philosophical propaideutic to understanding Heidegger's political “error” of 1933. If we bracket for now the other and more interesting reasons that Heidegger may have had for joining the National Socialist German Workers Party, if we focus only on the philosophical justifications that he gave ex eventu for his choice, it seems Heidegger joined the Nazis because he thought they could help to overcome nihilism. If we remain at the superstructural level of philosophical discourse, we ‘may say that his error consisted not in the fact that he picked the wong party for overcoming nihilism but that he thought nihilism could or should be overcome at all. NOTES "There are at least three overlapping ways that Heidegger discusses nihilism, and even though they are inseparable, they are not always easy to distinguish. First, Heidegger’s discourse on nihilism sometimes refers to the fact that, under the growing pressure of the humanization of the world throughout Western history, “nature,” taken as the Being (ousia, Seiendhcit) of natural eutities, seems 1 be forced 10 withdraw, Secondly, he also uses the word nihilism 10 refer to the fact that the “power of Being” (Ereignis), that which empowers or “gives” all modes of the Being of entities, is no longer an obvious concern of human beings, that it seems to have been forgotten, This is the so-called “oblivion of Being” in the first and less important of its two meanings. Third, nihilism refers to the intrinsic withdrawnness of the “power of Being,” which Heidegger finds named in Heraclitus’ dictum that physi, of and by itself, hides (Fragment 123). This is the “oblivion of Being” in its primary sense, By the phrase “power of Being” I mean not the Being (ousia) of natural or artifi entities—which, as I show below, is ultimately their “availability"—but rather the unfathomability and untotalizability which is inscribed at the heart of such availability in the asymptotic tautotes of noushnoein and on/einai and which is named in the word lerhe. I shall argue that the so-called “forced withdrawal of Being qua nature due to the increased humanization of the world is the gift of the lethe, and that the withdrawaness of the power of Being comes into its own as the total availability of the world 10 man. If Being itself loves to hide, it also loves to turn the world over to human beings. Therefore, to awaken from the oblivion of Being would be simply to wake up to the fact of the economized Lethe.56 21 seems preferable to shelve the discourse of the “overcoming” (Uber- windung) of metaphysics and of the nism that is its Tufillment, insofar as such “overcoming” seems to promise that if and when human beings at last come to understand, with Heidegger, the history and meaning of the Gesiell as the construct of the current epoch of disclosure, they will thereby take a step towards a “better daw” when Being might again “turn towards” the human essence and when the current economic, social, and Political configuration of power might thereby begin to change, That is an Iusion, and is illusorines fs not mitigated by the fact that iti shared by so many Heideggerians. Its also a misreading of Heidegger, who finally prefers the discourse of a Verwindung of metaphysics and nihilism, a liberation from the blindness that characterizes metaphysics: blindness to the original nisl that isthe power of Being. According to Heidegger, that nihil iS the human destiny, and not to accept it (or “enter upon” it einkehven) would be to refuse one’s destiny. But the more important point 1s that this Verwindung, as an “accepting” of original nihilism, provides not the slightest clue to how one might set about the tasks of solving the concrete material problems of human Dasen, This use of “meta-ontological” might seem questionable to those for whom everything marked with a “meta.” has to be suspect. But clearly for Heidegger not every use of “eta” need be metapnysical in the “bad” sense of that term: for example, 1) the “meta.” of merabole, a word Heidegger reads as the equivalent of alerheia; 2) the “meta-” of his earlier use of “metaphysics,” which he interprets as the movement meta ta physika cis ten physin, that is, a move to Being (ousia); 3) and on an equal footing there is the “epi-” of epagoge, which Heidegger translates as Hin-fuhrung, the leading of one's vision “beyond” entities to Being (Wegmarken, 313, 334). In any case, I take the ontological to be a reflection on entities with 4 view to asking for their “ground,” ic, their givenness, and I take the meta-ontological to be a reflection not on the givenness of entities but on the giving of that givenness. The “meta.” in that case does not point to some Platonic “Beyond” but to the very core of human comportment with entities, ic. the correlation between Dasein and worldly entities such that one can sce both the fact that and the way in which Being “is given” in any concrete situation. A meta-ontological reflection probes that correlation for its factcity. “Thus it is wrong to say, as certain commentators do, that Heidegger's position in Sein und Zeit was that the meaning of physis is exhausted in “nature” (taken as, eg. trees for building houses or leather-for making shoes) and is merely something to be used and dominated. This is a trivial reading of physis, whereas its crucial meaning in Sein und Zeit is not as 7 “natural entities” within the world but as Dasein's temporal movement of world-disclosure, the opening up of human nature as disclosive and of the world as disclosed: physis as aletheia. To miss that is 10 risk missing the whole point of Heidegger's work on Aristotle during the period of fundamental ontology: “In this text 1 am using noeta (entities as intelligible) and pragmata (entities as usable) not in the narrow sense of Vorhandenes and Zuhandenes as Heidegger does in Sein und Zeit, but in the broad sense of “accessible entities,” a meaning that is consistent with both Parmenides’ ‘and Aristotle’s usage. When Parmenides says that noein is correlative with einai, he does not mean intellectual knowing alone but all modes of what Heidegger in Einfuhurung in die Metaphysik calls Vernekmen, the receiving Of entities, and that includes technological knowing as well. And when Aristotle in De Anima G speaks of the rautores between episteme and 10 Pragma, he is not referring to the mind’s knowing only of tools or usable ‘things. The word pragma there means “anything in question.” Moreover, even when noeta and pragmata are used in their specialized sense of Vorkandenes and Zuhandenes as happens in Sein und Zeit, the underlying and common issue is still that of accessibility, Zuganglichkeit, “The fact that the self to which the disclosed world is correlative is not a simple presence but a “self-absence,” the mortal “thrown project” that is Dasein, in no way undoes the endlessness of appropriability but in fact confirms it. However, the crucial question lies in the “how” of that appropriation. ‘The “what” is clear: The projectedness of Dasein is Dasein’s fatedness to being mortal, and this fatedness is structured as Dasein’s bivalent a Priori movement of 1) being bonded to its dying and 2) returning “from” that dying to the entities of its world. This bivalent movement is primordial logos, “existential” synthesisidiairesis, and it is essential to the ‘openness on which is scored the bivalent possibility of “linguistic” synthesis-diairesis in the original sense of Ansprechen, “relating 10 something as something,” whether conatively or cognitively. ‘The crucial question lies in the “how,” inasmuch as what was said above applies to Dasein essentially and specifically, that is, to Dasein in its essence as a species-being, an inter-communicating Social Mitdasein. Hence, to affirm that the world is “ad hominem” implies at least 1) that ideally (i.e, in essence) the entities of the world are available equally to all and, all else being equal, no Dasein has more claim than any other Dasein on the givenness of entities: Being is materially and formally democratic; 2) that entities are available to Dasein specifically in its mortality or, from the perspective of Ansprechen, that Dasein addresses entities from its mortality38 and “speaks” its own mortality co them; and 3) to refuse to address entities, this way, or better, to deny that in fact one always already does $0, is 0 relate to them, and eventually to accumulate them, from the illusory point of the self as foundationffonds/caput/capital—which is intimately bound up with a certain, and in fact historically relative, kind of appropriation. “In this centennial appraisal of Heidegger's work it is worth noting the brief history of the terms “Right Heideggerian” and “Left Heideggerian,” 2 history that reaches back to discussions John Caputo and I had in the late seventies and early eighties and that has seen the terms shift since then. In the late seventies I began using the term “Right Heideggerians” to refer to those who argued that the power of Being was exhausted in Presence and that even the lethe was Being as a hidden presence which either would emerge from hiddenness someday in the future (in the Parousial “new dawn”) or which, regardless of whether it would ever so ‘emerge, was already now constitutively present to itself in a transparent Bei-sich-sein, I claimed to find traces of such Right Heideggerianism in Caputo’s first two books on Heidegger and Eckhart and on Heidegger and Aquinas. At that time the term “Left Heideggerians” meant simply those who understood Being as an “absence” that allows the presence of entities. And, finally, in a discussion Caputo and I had in the Fall of 1982 1 tried to say something about how Derrida’s work pointed, albeit insufficiently, to a path beyond those two alternatives (Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, SUNY Press, 1985, pp. 201-218). But today those battles have been won and the spectrum has shifted. While there are still some fundamentalists out there who think that Heidegger was pointing towards a “new dawn” of the great presence of Being beyond technology, the major voices in Heideggerian scholarship have tong since shifted leftward towards the discourse of the lethic character of Being taken as an ultimately unknowable absence located “elsewhere,” beyond the reach of human projection. This is the current Rigi Heideggerian position, and I believe it represents the establishment, whereas the current Left Heideggerian position, having learned something from Derrida, maintains that the lethe is the untotalizability, inscribed in the correlation of nous and einai, that drives the horizontal, historical project of humanizing the world and naturalizing man. This current Left Heideggerian position, disabused of the mythology of a separated lethe, is 4 necessary but insufficient step towards opening the way to salvaging the potential latent in Heidegger's discourse: necessary insofar as it recognizes the concrete, open-ended historicity of the Parmenidean correlation, but insufficient insofar as it has no resources either for understanding theoretically or for changing in practice the real forces that move that 59 history. Left Heideggerianism remains merely another form of “German Weology.” "There are at least three interdependent ways of establishing the point that Aristotle’s theology isthe first technology and that modern technology is but the last theology: 1) from the nature of sheologia itself, 2) from what theologia and techne share in common, and 3) from the reduction of both theologia and techne, as forms of knowledge, to alesheia, Since 1 have dealt with the first way above, here I will merely allude to the second and third ways ‘The second way: What both Greek techne and Greek theologia share in common is the notion that the apprehension of an entity depends in some way on the proairesis or pre-apprehension of a projected ideal. (Even Heidegger takes this notion over, in a much transformed way, in Sein und Zeit.) In the first case the term of the proairesis is the envisaged form of the artifact to be constructed, the eidas proaireton. In the second case the term of the proaivesis is God himself as the most perfect separated form: theos proairetos, This notion of the necessity of pre-apprehension embodies the unspoken presupposition par excellence of Greek thought and of all traditional metaphysics, namely, that the imperfect is known through the perfect To take sheologia first (and I am expressing the tradition's theory, not my own): According to this notion, to know an entity is to know it through its form, ie, its relative perfection. However, the form is known, even if only implicitly, through pure and perfect form. For Aristotle (De Anima, G, 5, 430 a 14ft. and 8, 431 b 21) the psyeke is panca pos—in some way able to become all things. But the suppressed premise here is that hhuman beings are what they are insofar as they are in some way a mimesis tou theou, an aspiration for the divine. That aspiration is, in fact, the meaning of human nous, as is confirmed by the first two chapters of the ‘Metaphysics: Human beings, by nature, desire to know and see God, they are drawn towards the divine (Metaphysics L, 7, 1072 b 4: [theos] kinei hos eromenon) and already implicitly know God, even if only as the first principle of everything that is. T take it that this is the meaning of nous ;Poietikos. In Aristotle's vision of things, our anticipation of the divine ‘Opens up the whole world of entities as supplement, as the realm of possible objects for a nous pathetikas that runs behind nous poietikos. We can “have” entities only because we in some way “have” and indeed “are” God, the ultimate eidos proaireion. And here is the intimation of fulfilled technology: Our knowing of the world through God is modeled on God's knowledge of everything through himself: God has the world perfectly because he has himself perfectly, and we have the world imperfectly because we, as in via, have ourselves and God imperfectly60. And the same applies analogously to the kind of knowing that governs techne. To invert Vico: It is not that we know what we make but that we make what we know. But the knowledge that governs our making must be taken in its full sweep, right up to the divine apex. The ideal that governs doth the theological model of knowing the world and the technological ‘model of shaping the world is transparent self-possession—a theological ideal, Now to take up very briefly the third way: Insofar as both theologia and techne are “intellectual virtues,” they are both modes of disclosure or aletheia, as Aristotle implies at the end of Nichomachean Ethics, Z, 2. ‘Therefore, the issue common to them is that of the accessibility of entities in their ousia. In his early work (and also once at the end of Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik) Heidegger translated ousia by the German die Habe, the “hadness” of entities-as-had. The Being of entities does not lie behind or within entities or override them, but is simply the fact that and the way in which they are had at any given moment. But what theology shows is that the highest mode of disclosure is “self-disclosure,” and that the highest mode of “having” is “self-having,” noesis noeseos, which in turn functions as the desired paradigm for all modes of disclosure and all ‘modes of having which fall short of that ideal. ‘These three ways of establishing the thesis that theology is the first teeluiolvgy and iat technology is the last theology are but variations on Heidegger's theme of metaphysics as onto-theology. They allow us to sce the history of metaphysics, and therefore of nihilism, as the exfoliation of a theological secret. Die Technik as the last epoch of metaphysics is only the final form of theology understood as mimesis tou theou, and theology, as the knowledge of everything through God as the ultimate eidos Proaireton, is the governing paradigm of technology understood as a ‘movement towards complete possession of the world, *By “eschatology” here I do not mean the “eschatology of Being” that Heidegger mentions in his Anaximander essay (Holzwege, 3011), according to which the power of Being is supposed to have “sent” the most extreme of its possibilities. (That is the meaning the word has in the last sentence of section VI of this paper) Rather, here | employ the word “eschatology” in the context of Heidegger's 1920-21 course “Einleitung in die Phanomen- ologie der Religion” with regard to St. Paul's First Epistle to the Thes- salonians, In that course Heidegger reinterpreted the eschaton not as a mythical supernatural event at the end of time but rather as the Power by which Dasein is called and drawn, a power which is alvays arriving but remains utterly unfathomable, and in the face of which Dasein lives in a state of uncertainty. Of course, by the time one gels to Sein und Zeit Dasein's comportment of uncertainty before the incomprehensible escharon a has gotten transformed into Sein zum Ende and Sein zum Tode, the living into one’s own final end. When I use terms like “eschatology” or “the eschatological” in this section, I am invoking that notion of living into the eschaton, into the ultimately incomprehensible leche, which I have interpreted as das Gewesene or a priori, the fatedness of the power of Being in the asymptotic correlation between Dasein and innerworldly entities in the horizontal project of the humanization of nature and the naturalization of man. In short: Eschatology means Geschichtlichkeit. "Heidegger does have a ot to say about the concrete constellation of technology—for example, the massification of modern society the mechani- zation of production, oF to use one of his favorite tropes as a syneedache, the transformation of the Rhine into a waterway for barges. But none of these and his other personal opinions about modern society and politics, which are virtually always negative, have any philosophical or philosophical-poitical importance. Ifanything, they encourage a withdrawal from the theoretical and practical tasks that the current constellation of technology confronis us with. Of course, while Heidegger's personal ‘opinions about modern society, industry, and polities are not philosophically interesting, they do tellus a Jot about him=as a provincial personage from Toral southern Germany, as an unreconstructed Wilhelmian and discontented survivor of the First World War, as an unbending conservative with a particular political and social ideology. To get t0 the Philosophically interesting issues one must ask different questions, for ‘example: Does Heidegger's reflection on ninilism, for all is insightfulness, run the perennial metaphysical risk of confusing the “history of Being” with the concrete history of the human world? Did he confuse the s0- called Vervindung of nihilism with human liberation? Or if his thought is innocent of such confusion, what can it tell us about that latter topic?