Four Seminars

Seminar in Le Thor 1969

Seminar in Le Thor 1969 September 2 The text serving as a basis for the work is Kant’s “The Sole Possible Proof for a Demonstration of the Existence of God” (1763), more precisely , the “First Observation: Of Existence As a Whole.” This seminar aims to elucidate Kant’s text indirectly. Indeed, one must keep in view that Kant himself altered his interpretation of being twenty years later. The path our mediate elucidation will take is the question of being, the question concerning being, along with how it has unfolded from Being and Time to today. So we pose the question: what does the “question of being” mean? For, as a question, the question of being already offers numerous possibilities for misunderstanding—something con¤rmed by the continual failure to understand the book Being and Time. What does “the question of being” mean? One says “being” and from the outset one understands the word metaphysically, i.e., from out of metaphysics. However, in metaphysics and its tradition, “being” means: that which determines a being insofar as it is a being. As a result, metaphysically the question of being means: the question concerning the being as a being, or otherwise put: the question concerning the ground of a being. To this question, the history of metaphysics has given a series of answers. As an example: ìnèrgeia. Here reference is made to the Aristotelian answer to the question “What is the being as a being?”—an answer which runs ìnèrgeia, and not some ›pokeÖmenon. For its part, the ›pokeÖmenon is an interpretation of beings and by no means an interpretation of being. In the most concrete terms, ›pokeÖmenon is the presencing of an island or of a mountain, and when one is in Greece such a presencing leaps into view. ÎUpokeÖmenon is in fact the being as it lets itself be seen, and this means: that which is there before the eyes, as it brings itself forth from itself. Thus the mountain lies on land and the island in the sea. Such is the Greek experience of beings. For us, being as a whole—tä ªnta—is only an empty word. For us, there is no longer that experience of beings in the Greek sense. On the contrary, as in Wittgenstein: “The real is what is the case"65 (which means: that which falls under a determination, lets itself be established, the determinable), actually an eerie statement. For the Greeks, on the contrary, this experience of beings is so rich, so concrete and touches the Greeks to such an extent that there are 36 signi¤cant synonyms (Aristotle, Metaphysics A): tä jainímena, tä ålhqèa. For this reason, it gets us nowhere to translate tä ªnta literally as “the beings.” In so doing, there is no understanding of what is being for the Greeks. It is authentically: tä ålhqèa, what is revealed in unconcealment , what postpones concealment for a time; it is tä jainímena, what here shows itself from itself. A supplementary question regarding the ›pokeÖmenon is then posed. How is the experience of a being different when it is understood as ›pokeÖmenon from when it is understood as jainímenon? Suppose we look upon a particular being, for example a mountain in the Lubéron.66 If it is taken as ›pokeÖmenon, then the ›po names a katâ, more precisely the katâ of a lègein ti katä tiníV. Of course, the Lubéron mountain does not actually disappear if it is spoken of as a ›pokeÖmenon, but it no longer stands there as a phenomenon—no longer to be seen here as giving itself from itself. It no longer presences itself from itself. As ›pokeÖmenon it is that about which we speak. Here it is crucial to make a fundamental distinction in regard to speaking, namely by distinguishing pure nomination (ñnomâzein) from the making of a proposition (lègein ti katä tiníV.). In simple nomination, I let what is present be what it is. Without a doubt naming includes the one who names—but what is proper to naming is precisely that the one who names intervenes only to step into the background before the being. The being then is pure phenomenon. With a proposition, on the contrary, the one making the proposition takes part. He inserts himself into it—and he inserts himself into it as the one who ranges over the...