“To stand in relation with something which is neither day nor night”: Temporal Overcoming and Heidegger’s Notion of Destiny

Elliot R. Wolfson

The publication of the Schwarze Hefte in recent years has cast a spotlight on the unsettling repercussions of the idea of destiny proffered by Heidegger. Especially disquieting is the presumption that the destiny of Dasein is predicated on the notion of an essence singularly enrooted in German soil and embodied in German language. Heidegger’s repeated reflections on the primacy of language, including the notorious claim that language is the house of being, must be interpreted in a particularistic as opposed to a universalistic register. Indeed, when Heidegger speaks of the house as a space opened up for a people as a place in which they can be at home, and thereby fulfill their proper destiny, he is ascribing preeminence to the German nation and to the soil of Germany, and by implication to the German language. The triangulation of land, language, and people is what drew Heidegger to aver that National Socialism had the potential to revive the German spirit, and even though his lectures and writings (including the infamous notebooks) attest that he became increasingly wary about the party, he never abandoned the belief in the supremacy and distinctive role of the German people to be actualized in their land and through their language.

The triangulation of which I speak undergirds Heidegger’s contention that the feeling of homeliness, which is the destinal essence bestowed by the homeland, materializes through the clearing (Lichtung) that is language. After the so-called Kehre, the poetic mode of language – the privileged means to bespeak the originary silence and thereby bring the unspeakable into being through the unsaying of what is said in the saying of what is unsaid – is attributed uniquely to the Germans, the nation that is signaled out as the ones with the capacity to create a new mode of thinking and a new logic. Heidegger insists that the German Volk is not determined racially or biologically but by an essentially collective destiny that is metapolitical. Even so, the path of his thinking is shaped by a coupling of semantic essentialism and ethnocentric chauvinism based on the privileging of a particular language as disclosive of the truth of being and on the consequent affirmation of a cultural legacy allocated to a particular ethnos that is the custodian of that language in the land of its origin. To the Germans, therefore, is assigned the genuine essence of philosophy, the allegedly universal calling to think historically, as opposed to calculating historiologically. As Heidegger brazenly put it in Parmenides, the lecture course offered during the winter term 1942–43 at the University of Freiburg (GA 54), German humanity represents the historical humanity that is called upon to poetize and to think as the ancient Greeks had done. Greek and German are delineated as the axes about which the history of being turns – the first beginning inaugurated by the Greeks and the other beginning entrusted to the Germans. The crucial players in the gnostic drama – the future ones called upon to sacrifice for the preservation and transformation of the essence of the truth of being – are the Germans; to them exclusively is ascribed the task of shepherding the essential occurrence of being that ensues from the grounding of historicality in temporality, a grounding that is realized not through positing a theory of history or a philosophy of history à la Hegel but rather by the questioning that guides one to appropriate and to be appropriated by the abyss of the time-space.

For Heidegger, as the locution time-space indicates, the temporal and spatial coordinates cannot be completely disentangled. Nevertheless, the tempocentric bias of his thought as it relates to the matter of the historical destiny of Dasein is evident. As Heidegger already put it in §74 of Sein und Zeit, destiny is the authentic historicity that is made possible by the finitude of authentic temporality. One of the more startling insights of his more mature thought is the apocalyptic avowal of the overcoming of the binary between the nocturnal and the diurnal. The idea was expressed by Heidegger in the following meditation in §142 of the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis):

The appropriating event and its joining in the abyss of time-space form the net in which the last god is self-suspended in order to rend the net and let it end in its uniqueness, divine and rare and the strangest amid all beings. The sudden extinguishing of the great fire – this leaves behind something which is neither day nor night, which no one grasps, and in which humans, having come to the end, still bustle about so as to benumb themselves with the products of their machinations, pretending such products are made for all eternity, perhaps for that “and so forth” which is neither day nor night. (GA 65: 263/207)

Heidegger returned to this issue in the seminar in Le Thor on September 2, 1968. In an effort to explain the experience of unity that is consequent to the disappearance of the power of conjoining, Heidegger proposed the example of the day passing into night. This passage of time – whereby the unity splits into two – occurs in the place of the Same. Through such an experience, humans stand in relation to something that is neither day nor night, a temporal state that cannot be expressly thematized.

Heidegger’s words are carefully chosen: the site of the moment in which there is a transition to that which is neither day nor night is the Same (das Selbe), a word that signifies, in contrast to the identical (das Gleiche), the preservation of difference in the belonging-togetherness (Zusammengehörigkeit) of what is juxtaposed. I propose that we can elicit from this theme a strategy to liberate Heidegger’s concept of destiny from its constricted sense of an inclusiveness whose inclusivity entails the inevitable exclusion of the marginalized other. Although not articulated explicitly by Heidegger himself, in the spirit of thinking what is unthought in his thought, we might say that the insight that there is neither day nor night has the potential to destabilize the rigid dualism underlying the chauvinistic distinction between the autochthonous and the foreign. By standing in the clearing of the time-space that is neither day nor night, one becomes attuned to the self-concealing event of the disclosure of truth as untruth, the unveiling of what presences in its absence, the nonessence that belongs essentially to the essence. Remembrance of this event engenders the anticipatory leap into the future that recollectively preserves the vestige of the past in the openness of the present in which the dichotomization of self and other collapses in the mirroring of the self as other and the other as self. On this score, destiny consists of recollecting what is to be and anticipating what has been. Poetic abiding provides the way to embrace a constellation that demonstrates the disarming correlation – as opposed to dialectical coincidence – of sameness through difference, that is, the identity of the nonidentical in the preservation of the nonidentity of the identical. One is appropriated to the other by remaining proper to the inappropriable distillation that is one’s own; the intimacy of confronting the other is neither a coalescence nor obliteration of distinctions, but rather preserving them in the belonging together of what is foreign – the time of the passing of day into night when there is neither day nor night because there is both day and night.