The “saga” (Sage) of being (EM76/55) is told in the ode as the story of the human relationship to nature, phusis.13 For Heidegger, phusis names
12 For further discussion of the similarities and diff erences between the two analyses, see Miguel de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias (New York: Routledge, 1998), especially Chapter 5, “Before Politics”; Richard Capobianco, “Heidegger’s Turn toward Home: On Dasein’s Primordial Relation to Being,” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 10:1 (2005): 155–173, and Engaging Heidegger (Toronto: University of To-ronto Press, 2010), especially Chapter 3, “The Turn towards Home”; Véronique M. Fó ti,
“Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Sophoclean Tragedy,” in Heidegger toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s, ed. James Risser (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); Clare Pearson Geiman, “Heidegger’s Antigones,” in A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. Richard Polt and Gregory Fried (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and Jacques Taminiaux, “Plato’s Legacy in Heidegger’s Two Read-ings of Antigone,” in Heidegger and Plato: Toward Dialogue, ed. Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005).
13 Even though Heidegger is here attempting to think being without the human being—
as “the overwhelming coming-to-presence that has not yet been surmounted in thinking”
(EM64/47, my italics), the human being is still part of the story of being. Thus in an inter-view with Richard Wisser, Heidegger says, “[T]he question of Being and the development of this question needs, as a prior condition, an interpretation of Dasein, i.e., a defi nition
‘nature’ in a very specifi c way: “Precisely what prevails as all-powerful for immediate experience claims the name phusis for itself. Yet such is the vault of the heavens, the stars, the ocean, the earth, that which con-stantly threatens man, yet at the same time protects him too, that which supports, sustains and nourishes him; that which, in thus threatening and sustaining him, prevails of its own accord without the assistance of man”
(FCM30). Or again: “We translate [‘phusis’] with ‘nature’ and think little enough about it. For the Greeks, physis is the fi rst and essential name for entities themselves and as a whole. For them the entity is what fl ourishes on its own, in no way compelled, what rises and comes forward, and what goes back into itself and passes away. It is the rule that rises and resides in itself.”14
From one perspective, ‘phusis’ refers to a specifi c set of entities distin-guished from the human being and its creations. But in a broader sense, it refers to everything—all that is, in its coming-to-pass. Thus ‘phusis’ is a name for being (HI108/135); it names what it takes to be rather than not.
And this is an overwhelming, sustaining and threatening, prevailing. Hei-degger calls it the emerging, abiding sway: “phusis means the emergent, self-upraising, the self-unfolding that abides in itself. [ . . . ] This sway is the overwhelming coming-to-presence that has not yet been surmounted in thinking” (EM64/47). By looking at what this is and how it works we can thus address the question with which Heidegger opens EM: how does it stand with being? (“Wie steht es um das Sein?”) (EM35/25). One way to do this is to look at the way that phusis is poetized in the choral ode, which speaks of sea, earth, and living thing. Each is a way of naming being—as that which emerges (sea) and that which holds sway (earth) in entities (the living thing).
Being is that by virtue of which entities are (and are as they are) rather than not (SZ6). Crudely, being is what makes entities be. This is ex-pressed in the ode’s passage about the earth:
of the essence of man. And the fundamental idea of my thinking is exactly that Being, relative to the manifestation of Being, needs man and, conversely, man is only man inso-far as he stands within the manifestation of Being. Thus, the question as to what extent I am concerned only with Being, and have forgotten man, ought to be settled. One cannot pose a question about Being without posing a question about the essence of man.” Martin Heidegger in Conversation, ed. Richard Wisser, trans. B. Srinivasa Murthy (New Delhi:
Arnold-Heinemann Publishers, 1977), 40.
14 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 81. ‘Entity’ and ‘entities’ have been substituted for
‘the being’ and ‘beings’ as translations of ‘das Seiendes.’
The noblest of gods, as well, the earth, the indestructibly untiring, he wearies, overturning her from year to year driving the plows this way and that with his steeds. (EM156/112)
The earth is described as a god, indestructible and untiring. Earth is not merely soil or dirt but what we might call ‘Mother Earth’ or ‘capital-N Nature.’ Nature in this sense governs all life—it presides over the birth, growth, and death of natural entities. It is an all-encompassing life force or spirit—or, in a less pagan and more scientifi c vein, an all-encompassing, life-enabling system. What does this tell us about being? Just as the earth governs all life and death, so too being governs all that is and is not. It is what makes the diff erence between what is and what is not. In determin-ing this, bedetermin-ing ‘holds sway’ over entities just as nature ‘holds sway’ over natural entities. Heidegger thus calls being ‘the sway’ (Walten).
As thus governing, being is not apart from entities. It is not an entity itself but is always of entities (SZ6). This is particularly clear if we under-stand being as intelligibility, which must always be the intelligibility of something. So to understand what it takes for entities to be (intelligible), we need to understand how being or intelligibility comes to be of entities.
Entities are intelligible only if we make sense of them. Heidegger puts this by saying that the human being “draw[s] [or tears] [reißen] being into entities” (EM171/123). He uses the same word when he describes the domestication of the animal: the human being “tear[s] [reißen] this life away from its own order” (EM165/118). This is expressed in the second stanza of the ode:
Even the lightly gliding fl ock of birds he snares, and he hunts
the beast folk of the wilderness and the brood whose home is the sea, the man who studies wherever he goes.
With ruses he overwhelms the beast
that spends its nights on mountains and roams, and clasping with wood
the rough-maned neck of the steed and the unvanquished bull
he forces them into the yoke. (EM156–157/112)
The horse is ‘captured and subjugated’ (EM165/118) by the human be-ing, who encloses it in a paddock and harnesses it under bridle and bit.
So too, being is ‘captured and subjugated’ by the human being. Intelli-gibility is harnessed to entities, such that it becomes the intelliIntelli-gibility of something.15 This is what Heidegger calls ‘discovery’ and it means that the human act of making intelligible is an essential part of the story about how entities come to be. (More on this later.)
Before turning to the human being’s role in this story, we must ask how it stands with being. What must being be like such that all this is possible? The opening stanza of the ode tells us that we can grasp being as like the sea:
He fares forth upon the foaming tide amid winter’s southerly tempest and cruises through the summits
of the raging, clefted swells. (EM156/112)
Notice that the sea is not described as a large body of water—as the plac-id, untiring source of intelligibility. This is a diff erent characterization of being than that which we fi nd in the invocation of the earth, and it is a more primordial characterization. The sea is a “foaming tide”—raging, stormy waves. The human being ventures out into this tempest—but only on the summits of the waves. It does not venture into the depths of the sea. As Heidegger reads it, the ode says of the sea that it “constantly drags up its own depths and drags itself down into them” (EM164/118).
This surfacing and submerging, to summits and depths, characterizes be-ing. Being is that which forcefully and violently emerges. It struggles to come into appearing, emerging into unconcealment in a struggle with concealment.
This is a very dynamic way of talking about being. The word ‘being’ is a gerund, and so it can be heard statically, like a noun, or dynamically, like a verb. Thus far, we have seen being characterized statically: being is the intelligibility that entities have. Both the earth and the animal pas-sages express being statically. But the opening lines about the sea address being as dynamic, as something that happens or is in process. Being is still what makes the diff erence between entities being (intelligible) and not, but instead of describing this as something that entities have or are governed by, a dynamic approach grasps what makes this diff erence as an activity or event. If an entity is (intelligible), then it shows up (as intelligible). Be-ing is this event of showBe-ing up. As Heidegger puts it: beBe-ing is presencBe-ing,
15 Heidegger considers this to happen primarily in the work of art. See, e.g., EM170/122 and “The Origin of the Work of Art” (in Basic Writings).
coming-into-presence, appearing, unconcealing. To grasp being, we must grasp how this showing up, presencing, or unconcealing happens.
‘Unconcealing’ is an important term for Heidegger because it suggests that the showing up of entities is grounded in an ontologically prior concealment. This is not merely a linguistic claim or game about the form of the word ‘unconcealment,’ although Heidegger often gives this impression—particularly when addressing unconcealment as the Greek a-lētheia (conventionally, ‘truth’), which pairs the alpha privative (a-) with lēthē (forgetfulness or concealment). The insight is that the appear-ing or presencappear-ing of entities (beappear-ing) is not simply given or there but is (i) a happening (‘essencing’) which has articulable moments and which (ii) does not itself come to presence.
To understand this, compare the showing up of entities to the perform-ing of a play. The characters and story of the play show up to us only if something does not show up—namely, the way that the characters and story are brought into view, through the acting of the actors, the stage management, and so on. The mechanics of the production, in the broad sense, must withdraw or conceal themselves for the dramatic action to be manifest. Similarly for the showing up, or being, of entities. For an entity to be, to show up intelligibly, what allows this to happen must be con-cealed. What allows it to happen is the event of showing up (being) itself.
So being must be self-concealing or self-withdrawing. We have encoun-tered this before: the self-veiling of (our) being. Here, however, what veils itself is not the world qua a meaningful context but the event of meaning or showing up itself, and this veils itself essentially and constantly, not just in everyday life. Expressed statically: for entities to be intelligible, we must encounter intelligible entities and not intelligibility itself. We see the things that make sense and not how they make sense. Or again: entities show up intelligibly only if they show up and their showing up does not itself show up. Like acting, being must withdraw or conceal itself.
As in a play, this concealing is prior to showing up or unconcealment.
It does not happen beforehand (i.e., temporal priority), but it is a prereq-uisite (i.e., ontological priority). It is a condition of an entity being that its being withdraw. As Heidegger says elsewhere, “The concealment of entities as a whole, un-truth proper, is older than every openedness of this or that entity. It is older even than letting-be itself, which in disclos-ing already holds concealed and comports itself toward concealdisclos-ing.”16
16 Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” trans. John Sallis, Pathmarks, ed. Wil-liam McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 148. I have modifi ed the translation to read ‘entities’ or ‘entity’ instead of ‘beings’ or ‘being’ for ‘das Seiendes’.
This ontological priority means that concealment lies at the ‘origin’ of all unconcealment.
Further, to say that concealment is older than letting-be itself is to say that it is not eff ected by Dasein. Dasein’s comportment presupposes with-drawing, and this withdrawing is something that happens to Dasein or something to which it is subject. It is not that we conceal being; rather, being conceals itself. It is the metaphorical agent of its own withdrawal:
self-withdrawing, self-concealing.17 Another way to put this is to say that concealing is a positive phenomenon of being or belongs to it. Heidegger calls it the “un-truth that is most proper to the essence of truth.”18 Hera-clitus, he thinks, says the same thing when he says, “phusis kruptest-hai philei” (conventionally: nature loves to hide). As Heidegger reads him, Heraclitus here says, “being [phusis] intrinsically inclines toward self-concealment” (EM121/87). So, in sum: “Being means: to appear in emerging, to step forth out of concealment—and for this very reason, concealment and the provenance from concealment essentially belong to being. Such provenance lies in the essence of being, of what appears as such” (EM121/87).
As self-concealing presencing, the happening of being is a struggle.
There is a struggle within being between its tendency towards unconceal-ment and its tendency towards concealunconceal-ment. This is a peculiar kind of struggle. The happening of being is presencing, but presencing is not the vanquishing or overcoming of concealment. As we have seen, presencing requires concealment. Thus it cannot struggle against concealment for the sake of obliterating it. The presencing of entities takes place only in being’s self-concealment, and this concealment takes place only in the presencing of entities. So being’s two opposed tendencies struggle against each other not for the sake of negating one another but precisely in order to allow one another to take place. Their struggle must be conceived as a productive tension or reciprocal interplay between the opposed yet sym-biotic forces of concealing and unconcealing.19 Presencing arises out of,
17 Some scholars distinguish being qua unconcealment from being qua unconcealing-concealing by using a capital ‘B’ for the latter (Being) and a lower case ‘b’ for the former (being). I do not follow this convention because I consider it to be unnecessary (since the context of the discussion usually serves just as well to indicate what is meant) and mislead-ing (insofar as a capital letter implies a reifi cation of bemislead-ing). However, I have retained the capital ‘B’ in all quotations, unless otherwise noted.
18 Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” 148.
19 Since the struggle produces not a third term but the two original terms, this interplay cannot be understood as a Hegelian dialectic. Heidegger is consistently critical of Hegel’s dialectic, and he claims that it is inconsistent with true fi nitude (FCM209). Just how dif-ferent the two are will emerge as we proceed, and it will be especially clear in Chapter 5.
or takes place in, this tension. Thus Heidegger follows Heraclitus again in interpreting being’s internal struggle as a productive or originary pol-emos or confrontation (Auseinandersetzung): “Confrontation [polpol-emos]
is indeed for all (that comes to presence) the sire (who lets emerge)”
(EM65/47) (conventionally: War is the father of all).
Since it confronts itself and struggles against itself in this way, being is violent. But here, ‘violence’ (Gewalt) does not mean ‘brutality and ar-bitrariness,’ ‘disturbance and off ense’ (EM160/115). Rather, violence is the ‘tenseness’ in the tension between concealing and unconcealing, “the strife of the striving” between them (EM120/87). Thus Heidegger’s talk of violence, struggle, and confrontation in EM is not a glorifi cation of aggression or strength over pacifi sm or quietism. It is instead a way of expressing the tense opposition within being between its powers of con-cealing and unconcon-cealing. Being is essentially violent because it maintains itself in the internal tension of its struggle with itself.
The ode poetically expresses this polemos in the fi gure of the sea.
The inherent confl ict between concealing and unconcealing is “the win-ter storm” of the sea. The tempest is the tension and inwin-terplay between being’s two opposed tendencies. Thus the sea “constantly drags up its own depths and drags itself down into them” (EM164/118). This restless dragging up to the surface and dragging down into oblivion is the double movement of concealing and unconcealing. Being, as the sea, drags up its own depths in allowing entities to show up and drags itself down into those depths in concealing itself. The human being rides only on the crests of the waves and does not venture into the depths of the sea. This is to say that we encounter only the intelligibility of entities and not (except perhaps in special circumstances) being itself as concealing and uncon-cealing. Described thus, the sea names being in its emerging—as dynamic coming-into-unconcealment and sinking-into-concealment.
This, then, is the story of being as presencing. It culminates in the presencing or intelligibility of entities and begins with two key char-acteristics of being. First, as earth, presencing is something continuous and unchanging that underlies all ontic change and becoming (“the con-cealed presencing of stillness and tranquility amid constant and uncon-cealed absencing and presencing, that is, amid the appearing of change”
(HI72/88)). Second, as sea, presencing is not the static property of bare presence but an event with its own dynamic power. It is to be understood in terms of the tempestuous sea (pelagos), which “stirs itself of its own accord and thus does not fl ow away but remains and abides within itself in its surging” (HI72/88).
Being is thus both constant (earth, sway) and dynamic (sea, polemos).
Being is a constant presencing: a continuous, irruptive happening. To ex-press these two characteristics, the word that Sophocles uses for ‘to be’ in the ode is not the usual ‘einai’ but ‘pelein.’ ‘Pelein’ is the verb used in the ode’s opening lines, usually translated as ‘is.’ It originally referred to a be-ing-in-motion (‘to go,’ ‘to come,’ ‘to rise’) and came to mean ‘to be’ in the sense of ‘to become.’ Heidegger’s translation seeks to preserve this motil-ity. He translates ‘pelein’ as “ragend sich regt” (EM: “bestirs itself, rising up beyond”; HI: “looms or stirs”).20 The one exception is in HI, where he renders it ‘walten’: ‘prevails’ or ‘holds sway’ (HI52/65). This latter trans-lation makes clear that pelein is to be identifi ed with phusis (HI108/135):
being as coming-into-presence, which in EM is grasped as the overwhelm-ing sway (überwältigenden Walten). ‘Pelein’ means “to emerge and come forth of its own accord, and thus to presence” (HI71/88).
But ‘pelein’ is not just another word for being. In the opening lines of the ode, it is the verb that tells us that the human being is uncanny. Thus it expresses what it takes to be uncanny. As Heidegger puts it, the deinon is in the manner of pelein: “[t]he uncanny ‘is’ in the manner of a coming forth (looming), and in such a way that in all its stirring it nonetheless abides within the inaccessibility of its essence” (HI74/90). This gives us two important clues for understanding the human essence as deinon.
First, as the most deinon entity, the human being must be characterized
First, as the most deinon entity, the human being must be characterized