Destiny

Laurence Hemming

In making destiny our aim we could forget from whence, as a question, historically it springs. Destiny, das Geschick, gets little attention at all in Being and Time. Early in Macquarrie-Robinson’s translation Geschick is reduced to the “vicissitudes” of life (GA 2: 22/SZ 16), and it only reappears properly at the end of Being and Time, with the question of history and the researches of Dilthey and Yorck. For Hegel human destiny had reached its end and was assured. It is in Dilthey’s confrontation with the collapse of Hegel’s system, Dilthey’s lifelong “restraining himself” (GA 59: 153/121) from systematic conclusions, that the ground is laid for the question of being to emerge. This theme appears repeatedly in the years before Being and Time.

Our present reception of Heidegger, and of his now vast Gesamtausgabe, increasingly tends to fragment the study of Heidegger into time-stamped sections (“the Heidegger of the 20s,” “Heidegger’s Nietzsche,” etc.), which we presume connect one to another, but somewhat loosely, through the disjunctions that separate them. We miss the point: Heidegger returns us again and again to the “single thought” that haunts the thinker as what is given to him (or her) alone to think. The unity of the whole is what lets the parts be seen for themselves and brings them into relief.

We might recall here Zeno’s “paradox” of motion (or dichotomy): it remains a paradox only because in concentrating on the infinity of half-way points, the end disappears. But the “half,” dichotomy, always depends on the end: I can only know I’ve reached half-way because I have the end in view, in relation to the beginning. The point I’ve reached is not measured-off from the start, but from the end I’m aimed at back. I reach the actual half-point by in some sense already having secured the destination. The destination presences in the half as what it is halfway to. That human being is mortal – thnetos – borne “toward death” – says no more than this.

The meaning of destiny properly appears in Being and Time when Heidegger addresses how Hegel connects the understanding of time with Geist. Hegel makes primary the “now”, each present point, which makes “an outrageous claim” (GA 2: 569/SZ 431) to priority: Heidegger is quoting Hegel’s Encyclopaedia. This priority of the “now” is at once the priority of eternity itself. The outrageousness of the claim is revealed only as the grandest claim of all. Individual Geist must realize absolute Geist, in the present. The destiny of human being is to assume the place of God, not eventually, but presently, in the here-and-now.

This connection between present-now and eternity’s-present-presence shows up the essential connection between Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s metaphysics. For Hegel’s outrageous claim for every present now is a mirror-form of the highest will to will. And the present immediacy of eternity as “being entire” anticipates the doctrine of eternal return, bearing down on the present such that it might crush me.

Heidegger argues that his interpretation of the relationship between time and being, and so his interpretation of human destiny, is opposite in orientation to Hegel’s (GA 2: 536/SZ 405; GA 32: 209): Hegel interprets time in terms of being: Heidegger understands being through time. Heidegger’s opposite is not merely an inversion: it is the overcoming of Hegel’s identity of eternal, final, absolute destiny with the present.

Hegel recognizes history as the singular story of the destiny of human being as a whole. His “end of history” (which Fukuyama faithfully recapitulates) is that all history leads up to the destiny of the present. To do this Hegel must explain not only the destiny that is fulfilled in the present – in the modern liberal state, as the actuality of absolute subjectivity, even the “path of God through the world” (Rechtsphilosophie §258) – but also those places on the earth, those nations, those races, those for whom this present is not yet fulfilled. Their history is either relative to the destiny of the present (their history not yet realized), or worse, they are, in his baleful judgement, geschichtslos, without history, and so outside destiny, the destiny presently fulfilled. They are the negation of the present.

Heidegger never came closer to Hegel than when he considered the question that the state is the “being of the nation [Volk]” (GA 38: 165–66; GA 86): when he rejects the idea of the nation, since there is only a people (among peoples), he decisively repudiates Hegel’s history of the present as a totalization of present (human) being.

This Hegelian word, geschichtslos (from the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History), appears at decisive moments in Heidegger’s oeuvre, from 1919 (GA 56/57: 130) onward. Cautiously considered in his lectures on Dilthey in 1925 (GA 80.1: 110, 155), it takes on new sharpness immediately after Heidegger’s resignation from the rectorate. Here we find a lengthy – polemical – confrontation with an understanding of history that is utterly Hegel’s, in a thinly veiled assault on historicism and the Nazi state (GA 38: 79–118). Heidegger’s argument – if we can see it – is simple: if the destiny of humanity is singular, namely to seize upon the whole planet and its inhabitants and have it in its grasp, then the realization of this human destiny in the present must in turn act to negate every other actual negation of that destiny that it identifies. Freedom becomes perverse, as the fulfilment required in advance (its destiny) that every subject must actualize in the present. This exerts the most extreme “moral” force: every wayward act of the subject is a negation of absolute subjectivity’s actualizing itself. To posit the totalitarian triumph of an all-conquering biological mastery is entirely in accord with Hegel’s claim that there are history-less peoples. Every humanism makes the outrageous claim that humanity is destined to be “better.” Geschichtslos comes to appear for Heidegger (GA 69: 136) not in the history of the destiny of the present, but on the way to the history of the future: the history and destiny, not of the human being, but of being, presencing, itself (GA 4: 176ff.). He speaks here of the truth of beyng. He asks how, with a technicized humanity, do we avoid the presentation of absolute history and the history-less (GA 100: 220)? “Human being was never even until now Da-sein” (GA 82: 56) means not that our destiny is yet to be fulfilled, but that our present destiny is ever and always “to be ‘not yet’”: never absolute, ever in question. Heidegger persists throughout in understanding that the fundamental phenomenon of time is futural (GA 64: 118). To be presencing, not immediate or final presence, is our fate, which opens us to risk, to urgency, to need: to need to decide. Ours, the destiny of the futural history of being.