Richard Polt
Heidegger Circle, May 2024
“Being is presence,” writes Heidegger. This “decisive experience of my path of thinking cannot be remembered often enough” (GA 98: 278).
But on its own, the assertion that “being is presence” leaves us in the dark. What does “being” mean? What does “presence” mean?
And what is the meaning of the “is” in “being is presence”? Is the “is” meant phenomenologically, so that Heidegger is describing a firsthand experience? Historically, so that he is characterizing the philosophical tradition? Or does this distinction break down in his thought?
Does being necessarily have to be presence? Or is this contingent? Or is it a contingent necessity for the Westernized world: our destiny? If so, how does the concept of presence help us understand the history of Western metaphysics?
Are there alternatives to presence? If so, is Heidegger seeking them? Does he want to expand the sense of being beyond presence—or even leave presence behind altogether?
Although the insight into being as presence was a “decisive experience” for him, is it the focus of his thought? Or is it a provocation that led him to more fundamental issues?
Beyond the daunting challenge of understanding Heidegger, there is the question of whether he’s right. Is being truly presence?
And hovering above all these questions there is the question of what difference they make. Are they academic issues, of interest only to a few specialists—like us? Or—Heidegger is sure of this—do they affect the future of the world?
We can’t simply solve these questions in a linear order, since they rebound on each other. Above all, if we are in the history of being as presence, it would be too crude to define presence conceptually or phenomenologically, and then apply this definition to the history of philosophy. Phenomenology without history is naïve, just as history without phenomenology is mere doxography. The questions concerning presence hang together as a problematic whole.
To designate this entire complex of problems, we can use a vague Heideggerian locution: How does it stand with presence?
I’m sure we all have views on what Heidegger’s position is. But I’ve found that we often disagree on this fundamental interpretive issue, and that we don’t bring our disagreements into the light. Some of us (including me) have long believed Heidegger is critiquing the identification of being with presence, while others believe that he is trying to appreciate and preserve presence in its richest form. I first read Heidegger in the mid-eighties, when Derrida’s attack on “the metaphysics of presence” was in the air; did this prejudice me?
Clearly, this very basic topic in Heidegger needs revisiting. But as I try to revisit presence, I’m faced with still more conceptual and textual obstacles.
One obstacle is that Heidegger’s voluminous texts describe “presence” in narrower and broader terms.
The narrower the sense of presence becomes, the more provocative the claim “being is presence”—but also the less plausible. The narrowest sense of presence would be bounded, uniform, necessary being in an eternal “now.” A line from Parmenides’ Fragment 8 offers the classic statement of this vision of being: “neither was it nor will it be, for it is now, all together, one, continuous.” We can call this the Eleatic sense of presence.
If this is what “presence” means, the phenomenological claim “being is presence” seems to be obviously false; the Eleatic vision is precisely a rejection of the phenomena. As a historical claim about the philosophical tradition, “being is presence” would be provocative, aggressive, critical—and again, seemingly false. One can even doubt whether Parmenides himself embraced the views that he puts into the mouth of a goddess; and surely, very few later thinkers have joined in the Eleatic rejection of all so-called nonbeing. The atomists claim that nonbeing is (as void). Plato’s Sophist defends nonbeing as difference. Aristotle’s Metaphysics defends nonbeing as potency and change. Nietzsche celebrates becoming more radically. And we could go on.
The broadest sense of presence, then, would include all these non-Eleatic phenomena: emptiness, otherness, potential, becoming, and so on. All these phenomena are “present” in the sense that they show up in some way, they make a difference to us. Absence itself can be vividly present: just think of the question, “Where’s my phone?” If these phenomena weren’t present at all, we couldn’t even refer to them.
Now the claim “being is presence” is far more flexible and plausible. But the problem is that it’s so plausible that it seems trivial. How could this triviality be a “decisive experience” for Heidegger? What would be its critical edge?
If neither of these extremes is right, what we’re looking for is a claim that packs a punch and lands a blow: a provocative, questionable, but defensible claim that has both historical and phenomenological resonance.
Or maybe the punch of Heidegger’s thought doesn’t lie in the claim that being is presence, but in a claim about what makes presence possible: in his earlier work, time; in his later work, appropriation. Of course, these words are just as much in need of interpretation as “being” and “presence.” And there are more puzzles here: are time and appropriation phenomena? If so, aren’t they also present in the broad sense, so that presence rather than they would be most fundamental? Or if they aren’t phenomena, then how can we think of them or refer to them at all?
For those of us who are trying to think through these issues in English, there are further obstacles. I count over twenty expressions in Heidegger that could be translated as “presence,” “présent,” or “presént.” Whenever we consider his thoughts on the topic we have to ask: Which word is he using, and does it make a difference?
To further confuse matters, the verb wesen has sometimes been translated as “to presence.” Das Seyn west becomes “beyng presences.” But is wesen really equivalent to anwesen? Heidegger writes in the Contributions to Philosophy, “The first inception thinks beyng as Anwesenheit on the basis of Anwesung, which constitutes the first flaring up of one Wesung of beyng” (GA 65: 31). “Wesung, not grasped as such, is Anwesung” (GA 65: 189). I would avoid translating Wesung as “presencing”; otherwise, statements such as these make no sense.
Of course, I’m far from the first to consider these problems. To mention just a few highlights in the secondary literature, being as presence was debated in some fine articles by Taylor Carman and Frederick Olafson in the 1990s. Juan Pablo Hernández tries to resolve their dispute in an article that argues that Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander leads him to accept presence, in a rich and flexible sense, as the meaning of being. Jussi Backman published an excellent book, Complicated Presence, in 2015, which approaches the issue in terms of the unity of being. In 2019, I invited Carman and Backman to participate in a symposium on the topic in Gatherings, along with Dan Dahlstrom, Graham Harman, and Michael Marder.
Now I am rethinking the issue from the ground up, taking into account as much of the Gesamtausgabe as I can, including the large mass of private texts that have appeared in the last decade. I’ve promised to write a (supposedly short) book on the topic for the Cambridge Elements series on Heidegger that Dan is editing with Filippo Casati. Today I just want to lay out some of the questions that are involved and a few pieces of evidence. I don’t have time to provide context for most of this evidence, and context is all-important; so various interpretations are possible, and I invite you to challenge me with your questions and perspectives.
Let’s return to Heidegger’s “decisive experience”: Being is presence. We can begin with the first word in the statement. What does “being” mean here? I agree with Tom Sheehan that we don’t discuss this basic question enough in the Heidegger Circle. “Basic” does not mean easy, and by avoiding this tough issue we end up speaking at cross purposes, or not even knowing what we mean.
So I owe you some explanation of what I think “being” means, but it has to be rather brief and dogmatic. According to Being and Time, an understanding of being is already at work in every experience of beings, although it usually stays in the background; and being is given only for Dasein—no Dasein, no being. I think that view endures for the rest of Heidegger’s life. For instance, in the 1966 Spiegel interview he says, “What I call … ‘being’ needs humanity; being is not being unless humanity is required for its revelation, preservation, and formation” (GA 16: 672).
Keeping these points in mind, I think Sheehan’s equation of being with “meaning” works well: entities show up as meaningful; they do so thanks to established ways for them to mean something to us; and they have no meaning unless there is someone for whom they are meaningful. We should add that meaning shifts; that it is constantly challenged by the threat of meaninglessness; and that even though there is no meaning apart from Dasein, we do not make meaning from scratch. It happens for us, given the kind of entities we are. Then we may expand it, creatively appropriate it, or challenge it.
Another take on being that I’ve long found useful is to think of it as the difference it makes that there is something instead of nothing. Again, this makes a difference only to someone—no Dasein, no difference—but that is not to say that we create the difference.
One reason I like this phrase is that it emphasizes the so-called existential sense of “being”: what Heidegger calls “that-being.” For him, that something is embodies what it is and how it is: an artwork, for instance, has its own way of being something instead of nothing, and this is crucial to the kind of entity that it is.
The impact of the being of something—its meaning, the difference it makes to us—is all-important to how we experience it, how we think of it, how we behave toward it, and even to our own identity. Show me the difference being makes to you, and I’ll show you who you are. What we accept as a being is what we admit as valid, actual, relevant, real, something to be reckoned with. What counts as nonbeing is what we reject or ignore as the nugatory, the worthless, “nobody” or “nothing.” So the question of the meaning of being matters—because, as Robert Pippin says, the very question concerns mattering.
One more feature of my phrase is that it’s not a definition of being—it’s just a circumlocution. The locution literally goes in a circle, since it uses the word is to express being. But this is an advantage: it keeps the meaning of being empty, so that we can genuinely ask what being means.
If my approach is right, then if we claim that being is presence, we are saying that something is meaningful to us, makes a difference to us, distinguishes itself from nothing, only if we accept it as present.
This may look tautologically true. But in that case, Heidegger’s “decisive experience” would be nothing but a triviality. He insists that the claim “being is presence” is not “a lexical trifle,” but “the turn in the destiny of being” (GA 98: 163).
It’s now a commonplace that “being” means presence. … But … presence as the basic characteristic of being has nowhere been properly thought …. Why would it have been necessary [for me] to dedicate all [my] reflections to this one point and to think of the “temporal” character of being qua presence?
Being and essence “mean presence, obviously.”—Obviously? I don’t think so! (GA 98: 232-33)
“Being is presence” is supposed to be a rich and provocative claim. This means that “being” and “presence” cannot be synonyms. To say that something is present “speaks more clearly” than just calling it a being. It says something more. But “how so” (GA 73.2: 1230)?
To answer that question, we have to do phenomenology: we have to pay close attention to how beings show up as present, and to the deeper factors that enable them to do so. But this project is also a historical one—and increasingly so, as Heidegger’s thought develops: we have to retrieve the Greek experience of being as presence at the inception of philosophy
If we ever manage to think what is named in the word “presence” in its entire fullness and breadth, which flowered in the Greek experience of the world, then and only then may we, instead of “presence,” also say: being. Otherwise … the word “being” remains an empty sound. (GA 79: 148)
Let’s turn, then, to Heidegger’s descriptions of presence, some of which are primarily phenomenological, others primarily historical. Again, I think these two approaches cannot ultimately be teased apart in Heidegger: every phenomenon has a heritage, and in turn, our heritage remains opaque unless we approach it with our own experience in view, trying to rediscover the experiences that motivated the tradition.
First let’s look at some of his narrower accounts of presence, which above all qualify it as beständig—standing, constant, or enduring.
At an extreme, this enduring presence can amount to eternity, the standing “now,” as in Parmenides’ Fragment 8. “For the Greeks, being means being present [Anwesendsein], being in the present [Gegenwärtigsein]. This is why what is always in the now is what really is” (GA 19: 34). “What is meant by οὐσία is actually nothing but constant presentness … what is always at hand” (GA 31: 52).
Heidegger claims that the “entirety of Western metaphysics” insists on this concept of being as constant presence (GA 31: 114). This sense of being is eminently contestable: “With what right does one assert that ‘being’ that has no ‘not’ in it, not passing away, not becoming— the ‘eternal’—is pure being? … why does being = constant presentness?” (GA 91: 259).
Heidegger sometimes highlights other features of presence in a narrow sense. According to this passage, for instance, what is present seems to be identical with what is because showing, apparentness, crowds out concealment. Concealment itself gets concealed, and it seems that all that is left is presence.
Why does beyng not disclose itself as concealment and sheltering? Why does only disclosure disclose itself at first, and only as what is disclosed—in such a way that the disclosed, as soon as it shines and glows, grants what is present as such the essence of being that which is? (GA 76: 8)
For the Greeks, presence also involves definition, limitation. “What is in being is what is formed [geprägt] in limitation and is thus present and constant in such presence. Being [means] formed, stable presence” (GA 36/37: 93). What is present is delimited against what is absent. The Greeks “call form, as opposed to formlessness, what is. For them, what is is what delimits itself, in contrast to the limitless and evanescent” (GA 45: 136-37).
A different, but no less narrow interpretation of presence takes it as presence-at-hand. Of course, the word Vorhandenheit does not actually include a word for presence, so I’m going to translate it as “at-handness.” But there is a connection: “The beings within the environment that are already present are the ones we designate as what is at hand, in contrast to the ready-to-hand” (GA 20: 270). The at-hand does not have to be eternal, or even particularly durable—it can come and go—but as a whole it precedes our activities and is independent of them. We tend to take the present-at-hand as what “really” constitutes the world: “the vulgar understanding of being understands ‘being’ indifferently as at-handness” (SZ 389). Is this the core of the metaphysics of presence?
Finally, and very importantly, what is present appears in the temporal present (die Gegenwart). Past and future are then interpreted as defective presence, as what is no longer or not yet present. “How does the present have this privilege? Don’t past and future have just as much right? Doesn’t being have to be grasped on the basis of the entirety of temporality?” (GA 22: 314).
If past and future are to be called absent, then we must say that “being absent [Ab-wesen] is richer, more powerful, and has a more original essential force than the exaggerated presence. Absence as essential having-been [Ge-wesenheit] and as future. Both as the original splitting of essence and of essencing unity. And finally, presence [is] just a forgetting of this unity” (GA 94: 81).
To sum up, the bits of evidence we’ve considered so far make it seem that “presence” has a tightly defined scope: what is present is a circumscribed object at hand, showing itself in the now, durably or even eternally.
In that case, “being is presence” is a polemical description of the tradition, and the Heideggerian line of attack is strong and clear. As he puts it in the conclusion of Introduction to Metaphysics: “the concept of being that has been accepted up to now does not suffice to name everything that ‘is.’ Being must therefore be experienced anew, from the bottom up and in the full breadth of its possible essence” (GA 40: 213).
But is this attack on the tradition plausible? As I pointed out, the narrower his concept of presence is, the less convincing it is as a historical claim. So far, it would seem that he simply disregards all the attempts in Western metaphysics to overcome the Eleatic concept of being. It sounds as if Heidegger were—unwittingly—just one among many thinkers who have fought against the priority of permanent substance, including Nietzsche, Bergson, and Whitehead.
However, a case can be made that although most Western conceptions of being are not reducible to a narrow sense of presence, and they even often fight against it, they still end up taking it as the ideal of full being, whether they know it or not.
The atomists admit void, but their atoms are still indestructible substances.
Plato admits otherness, recognizing “the presentness of what is not,” as Heidegger puts it (GA 19: 193), but he remains fascinated by the eternal forms as that which “beingfully is” (τὸ ὄντως ὄν).
Aristotle admits potency, but he gives actuality the upper hand, and his supreme being is unmoved, pure actuality.
Nietzsche celebrates becoming and power, but he eternalizes becoming and absolutizes power, ending up in yet another metaphysical worldview (in Heidegger’s harshest reading, which of course may be unfair).
In our current technological age, beings are no longer durable objects but manipulable resources. But even this, one could argue, is a variant of narrow presence: as standing reserve, resources are held steady, ready to be plugged into the system, supplying a constant stream of energy and effectiveness.
In my conclusion, I’ll return to the relevance of Heidegger’s critique to our own times. But first, let’s consider some passages where he understands presence more broadly.
Heidegger’s narrower accounts of presence coexist with some much more generous, capacious accounts. These passages may well make us ask whether his goal is not to overthrow presence, but to establish a richer sense of presence, perhaps by recovering the original Greek experience of “presencing” (Anwesung). His enemy may not be presence at all, but its over-narrow interpretation, and the statement “being is presence” may be more phenomenological than historically critical, if it leads us to a description of sufficiently rich presence.
First and most generally, there are varieties of presence. “Not everything that is in some way is present in the same way” (GA 8: 239). “Presence differs according to the character of the entity that is supposed to be present” (GA 33: 182). “Being as presentness [Anwesenheit] can show itself in various ways of presence [Präsenz]. What is present does not have to become an object” (GA 9: 78).
A particularly dramatic, even paradoxical way to broaden the sense of presence is to say that it must include absence. Heidegger, in fact, affirms this in a number of texts. For instance, in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, he takes presence and absence as modes of a broader phenomenon that he designates Praesenz (GA 24: 433). Praesenz is the horizonal schema opened by the ecstasis of the temporal present. Within this horizon, both absence and presence make sense to us (GA 24: 436).
But why call the broader horizon Praesenz, then, if it transcends presence and absence? Heidegger addresses the issue in 1930, in a historical register: For the Greeks, and ἀπουσια, presence and absence, are not merely variants of an οὐσία that transcends the distinction; οὐσία itself is a more primordial παρουσία (GA 31: 61-62). To support this claim, Heidegger tries to show that being as actuality, being as essence, and being as truth all involve parousia in Plato and Aristotle. But he does not try to make his position depend purely on an analysis of the ancients; he says that his interpretation of the history of philosophy depends on a philosophical grasp of the matters at issue (GA 31: 74). Let’s turn, then, to some phenomenological claims from 1932. “Being is presence, nonbeing absence; but even the absent can be!” (GA 34: 295n). To expand on this note:
What do we mean by present and absent? … Here [da] and away! Where is here? Here before our eyes; here at hand, where we can just reach out and grab something, what lies in our immediate reach. But how far does this reach extend? … Where is the boundary between what is still here and what is already away? My hat, say, is not at hand here, it’s away—in another room, maybe. It’s away from here, but it’s over there in the university … What is far away may be “here” on the telephone or radio. Evidently there is no fixed boundary between here and away, everything is both … depending on—what? What is not immediately accessible to our senses, what is away, is nevertheless here for immediate presentation [Vergegenwärtigung], such as the Black Forest, the North Sea, Berlin. … Is there anything absent at all, then, if we take the sphere of what is present so broadly, and even more broadly, so that everything is at hand at once? If there is something absent … then it can be absent only in a sphere of presentness [Anwesenheit]. (GA 35: 176)
Heidegger comments, surprisingly: “And that is what Parmenides wants to say!” (GA 35: 176). Maybe Parmenides is not as narrow as he seems.
And he is not the only Greek who admits absence into presence. In Heidegger’s reading of Pindar’s saying that man is the dream of a shadow, he asserts that “all presencing is also in itself absencing. What is present as such—not just subsequently and incidentally, but according to its essence—extends into absence” (GA 52: 117). In a reading of Antigone, he defines uncanniness as “presencing in the form of an absencing” (GA 53: 92). This uncanny way of being can also characterize the gods (GA 73.1: 319).
Heidegger develops the connection between presence and absence most fully in his reading of Anaximander.
What is present outside the temporal present [ungegenwärtig] is the absent. As such, it remains essentially tied to what is presently present [das gegenwärtig Anwesende], insofar as it either comes forth into the region of unconcealment or departs from it. Even the absent is present, and presences into unconcealment as what is absent from it. … It is precisely what is presently present and the unconcealment that holds sway in it that pervade the essence of the absent as the non-presently present. (GA 5: 347)
This is certainly an important text. For Juan Pablo Hernández, it’s the turning point between Heidegger’s early critique of presence and his later acceptance of a rich sense of presence as the meaning of being. Presence is adequate as the meaning of being as long as it is taken broadly, and enriched by phenomena traditionally considered “absent.” But an alternative interpretation of Heidegger’s text is possible. Perhaps his point is that presence has such power in our tradition that it retains the upper hand over absence, dominating and distorting the absent—right down to the name “absent,” which of course is conceived in terms of presence.
Many of Heidegger’s descriptions of broader senses of presence are subject to these two very different readings. For instance, in “Time and Being” he sums up the history of metaphysics in terms of presence, in a way that looks quite critical; but then he adds that “we perceive presence in every simple, sufficiently unprejudiced reflection on the at-handness and readiness-to-hand of beings.” (Note that the ready-to-hand is also present—a frequent claim.) He continues: “The reach of presence shows itself to us in the most pressing way [am bedrängendsten] when we consider that even and precisely absence remains determined by a presence that is sometimes intensified to the point of uncanniness” (GA 14: 11). Is he simply saying that we ought to notice that even the absent is present, as a phenomenological fact? Or is he suggesting that there is something oppressive and strange about the way presence envelops all our experience?
Let’s look briefly at a few more phenomena that are included in presence, broadly conceived.
Even though Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander stresses “the presently present,” he also says in various texts, both early and late, that presence in the broad sense is not limited to the temporal present. “Not all presence [Anwesen] is necessarily the present [Gegenwart]” (GA 14: 18). Past and future are “modes of the unpresently present” (GA 5: 346). What is “not yet presencing, but coming [is] a distinctive kind of Präsenz” (GA 20: 395). And “what is no longer in the temporal present is immediately presencing in its absence, namely, as what has been and concerns us” (GA 14: 17).
Again, there is more than one way to take these statements. Is Heidegger acknowledging and accepting the presence of the future and the past? Or is he hinting that the hegemony of the present fails to do justice to the genuine future and past?
If past and future are present, so is becoming: presence is not limited to Eleatic eternity. To make this point, Heidegger sometimes favors the word Anwesung over Anwesen or Anwesenheit. “What I mean is not mere at-handness, nor in general what exhausts itself in constancy, but presencing in the sense of coming forth into the unconcealed, placing itself in the open. Mere enduring does not capture presencing” (GA 9: 272). “Mere presence in the sense of at-handness has already set limits to presencing, coming forth, and so has given up presencing” (GA 51: 113). But he also sometimes uses Anwesenheit in a sense that includes “the transition from presence to absence, arriving and vanishing, arising and passing away—that is, movement” (GA 16: 624).
A crucial point here is that insisting on the being of becoming does not depart from being as presence in its broader sense. The priority of becoming is one metaphysical position among others, which has a long line of defenders. As I indicated earlier, Nietzsche’s will to power and the flux of resources in the age of technology are instances of being as presence, and perhaps even being as constancy. To say that “being is becoming does not deny being. To the contrary, the preordained fulfillment of its inceptive essence (φύσις—ἰδέα—οὐσία) is achieved … through beingness as machination” (GA 66: 26). The insistence on becoming “seeks the constancy of the ever different, and still wants to rescue change and disappearance into being” (GA 66: 92). These passages have an unmistakable polemical tone.
Presence also includes potency, δύναμις. Aristotle’s insight that there is a kind of actuality of potency, or “actual presence of capacity,” is a high point of ancient thought (GA 33: 219).
Presence includes multiplicity and relation, or “copresence”: “Strictly speaking, nothing unique and individual can ‘be’ as a being on its own, for as a unique individual it already lives, as it were, by excluding everything absent, and thus in connection with it.” (GA 36/37: 115).
Finally, as I already noted, presence includes readiness-to-hand (even though we might expect the ready-to-hand to be a more futural phenomenon, since we understand it in terms of what we can do with it). “The understanding of relevance that the use of equipment makes possible is a retained expectation [Gewärtigen] in which this particular equipment is made present [gegenwärtigt]. In the making present that expects and retains, the equipment is encountered, becomes present [anwesend], comes into a present or a waiting-toward [Gegenwart]” (GA 24: 416).
Where are we?
To say that being is presence is to say that presence is the difference it makes to us that there is something instead of nothing. But what is presence? Some of Heidegger’s characterizations of presence are very narrow, even Eleatic. But in other passages, presence includes change, absence, and other non-Eleatic phenomena. This is not necessarily an inconsistency: Heidegger has a narrative about the degeneration of presencing into static presentness. This account can take both phenomenological and historical forms. But this leaves us with the question of whether there is still a critical edge to his statement “being is presence” if we take presence in the broad sense of presencing. Is there a problem with presencing?
Let me remind you of a few key thoughts on presence in Heidegger’s early philosophy, which clearly does have a critical edge, before turning to a few thoughts that are characteristic of his middle and late periods to see whether that edge gets blunted.
In the 1940s, Heidegger looks back on the thought of being as presencing as “the sole thunderbolt that struck my thinking Dasein” and inspired Being and Time (GA 82: 355). This thought gave him “the decisive hint that being, in some concealed way, stands in the clearing of time” (GA 16: 424).
The fundamental idea is there in “The Concept of Time,” the 1924 text known as the first draft of Being and Time. “What is present is encountered in the present, i.e. it is encountered by the disclosure and interpretation of the world that says ‘now.’” The now-saying Dasein “interprets itself”—that is, misinterprets itself—“on the basis of the world as what is accessibly present” (GA 64: 74).
Being and Time develops this critique. Time is triply ecstatic, but we tend to fall into one ecstasis—the present. We get fascinated by what we are doing now and what stands before us.
Essentially falling, temporality loses itself in making-present [Gegenwärtigen]. Not only does it understand itself circumspectively, in terms of the ready-to-hand entities with which it is concerned, but it derives its guidelines for articulating what is understood and interpretable in understanding in general from that which making-present constantly encounters as present [anwesend]: spatial relations. (SZ 369).
In this way, we tend to understand everything merely as something to be manipulated or observed, and we misunderstand ourselves as mere manipulators and observers.
“We are usually lost in the present, and it seems as if the future and the past—or more precisely, having-been—have dimmed down, as if Dasein were leaping into the present at each moment. This is an illusion” (GA 24: 376)—because without the future and past ecstases of time, the present ecstasis would be impossible. This is clearest in Heidegger’s description of authentic temporality: “Futurally coming back to itself, resoluteness brings itself into the Situation as it makes present. Having-been arises from the future, in such a way that the future that has been (or rather, that is been-ing [gewesende]), releases the present from itself” (SZ 326).
One effect of our immersion in the present is that we interpret time itself in terms of presence. We measure time as if it were present-at-hand (SZ 417). We take the future as not yet present, the past as no longer present (GA 64: 101). This perspective inevitably misconstrues our own way of being as temporal entities.
When we turn to Heidegger’s middle period, the thirties and early forties, we find a good deal of continuity with his earlier critique of presence. For instance, in his 1934 Logic lectures, he says, “The understanding of being itself has [traditionally] been taken from time. … The now was taken as the core of time, so to speak, while the future was the not yet actual and the past the no longer actual. … But now that we have established how time temporalizes from the future and from having-been, we have leapt over the present as the evanescent. Here a complete transformation of the essence of being comes to light” (GA 38: 123). In Besinnung (1938-39) he writes, “The only ‘being’ that metaphysics knows, the constancy of presencing, is only a still ungrounded selection of one essential moment of being, presentness [Gegenwärtigkeit], which is never recognized in its essencing as ‘temporality’” (GA 66: 394). In 1945 he writes, “What is now present [das Gegenwärtige] first arises from the encounter [Entgegenkunft] between future [Zukunft] and provenance [Herkunft]. This is what apparently leaps out of the encounter and spreads open on its own, creating the illusion that only what is now present is a being” (GA 50: 147).
This is all consistent with Heidegger’s work in the twenties, but new ideas also come in during the thirties—notably, das Ereignis. As a sample, consider this sentence from the volume Zum Ereignis-Denken. “But presentness stems from presencing, which arises from the futurizing-beening, captivating-transporting in the time-space of the strife between world and earth as the clearing concealing of the there—insofar as Da-sein becomes steadfast on the ground of appropriation by the (event)” (GA 73.1: 96).
There is too much in this sentence for me to interpret today. I’ll just say that in my readings of Heidegger in the thirties, I take guidance from his statements in the Beiträge that Ereignis is short for das Ereignis der Dagründung (GA 65: 183, 247). What is at stake is the grounding of a “there” within which we can be-there. Note that Heidegger says “presencing … arises from” the happening that he’s trying to put into words. This happening, then, is prior to all presence.
Several statements in the Black Notebooks of the thirties and forties confirm that Heidegger’s stance toward presence is still critical. For instance: “The mood of the inception [is] the concealed deep mourning over the veiled decay [Ver-wesen] of essence into being as presentness” (GA 94: 72). “A long faded gleam of essencing is presence” (GA 97: 218).
Let’s turn now to a few features of Heidegger’s late, postwar thought, which according to some interpreters abandons the critique of presence.
The evidence now becomes particularly hard to put together. First, some texts still seem to say that being should be extended beyond presence: “We would fall prey to an error if we wanted to believe that the being of what is means only, and for all times, the presence of what is present” (GA 8: 239).
But elsewhere, Heidegger sounds more tentative. “Does being exclusively, or at least with such priority, amount to presence, so that its other characteristics can be ignored? The priority of presence remains an assertion in the lecture ‘Time and Being,’ but as such it is a question and a task for thinking, namely, to consider whether and whence and to what extent the priority of presence subsists” (GA 14: 42).
Other passages sound confident that the question of being as presence has been settled in the affirmative. “Being itself—this means: the presence of what is present” (GA 12: 116). “But where do we get the right to characterize being as presence? The question comes too late. For this formation of being has long been decided without our contribution, let alone our merit. Since then, we are bound to the characterization of being as presence” (GA 14: 10). “Have we invented being (as presence)? Or has it long been found for us, although the find has not been appropriated in the way that befits it?” (GA 73.2: 1319). In short, being as presence is a historical necessity—our destiny.
But does that mean that no other destiny of being is conceivable? Or, if no alternative meaning of being is available, can we perhaps shift our focus away from being?
A passage in the Black Notebooks from around 1950 is particularly pertinent:
The awkward and misleading talk of how presence does not constitute the only way of “being.” (Necessary for a first understanding! But is that needed?) In this way, “being” is held fast, raised to an even higher level, instead of the twisting free (and crossing out)— and even that is insufficient. (GA 98: 326)
If we turn away from being—what do we turn to? “Twisting free of being (presence) as such into expropriation [Enteignis]. Vanishing of being; completion of the destiny of being; its end” (GA 73.2: 1356).
Heidegger’s 1955 open letter to Jünger states the matter more clearly:
Presence (“being”), as presence, is always presence to the human essence, insofar as presence is a summons that in each case calls to the human essence. The human essence as such listens, because it hears and belongs to the calling summons, the presence-to [Anwesen]. This, which is the selfsame every time, the belonging together of call and listening—would that then be “being”? What am I saying? It is in no way “being” anymore—if we try to think through “being” as it holds sway in our destiny, namely, as presence, which is the only way we can correspond to its destinal essence. Then we would have to let go of the isolating and separating word “being” just as decisively as the name “man.” (GA 9: 408)
What we must primarily consider is not being or presence, but the source of our intimacy with presence, the source of our belonging with it.
With the end of philosophy—philosophy understood as the comprehension of what is present in its presence—“presence as such becomes questionable” (GA 16: 628). Nonphilosophical thinking attends to how presence is made possible. As Heidegger repeatedly says, we are to turn our attention from Anwesen to Anwesen-lassen: letting-presence, allowing presence (e.g. GA 14: 9, 46; GA 15: 365).
We can call what allows presence the clearing—understood not as light, but as a free space that permits passage.
The clearing, as the affording of free space for presence, and for the lingering of what is present, is neither something present nor a property of presentness. … That and how the clearing affords presentness: considering this belongs to the question of the determination of the matter for thinking. (GA 16: 630)
We can also speak of letting-presence with the word Ereignis and its cognates, as when he writes, “‘Being,’ that is, presentness, is taken back into the appropriating that is already owning in advance within presentness [das in der Anwesenheit schon vorweg eignende Ereignen]” (GA 91: 690). “Only in the suddenness of the appropriating of the difference does the ‘is’ take place [ereignet sich], as does the presence of the present” (GA 99: 53).
Now for a final twist. If letting-presence is thought as appropriation, then “what is
present will itself be transformed into what is appropriated [das Ge-eignete]—what is fitted in
the fitting [Befugte der Befugnis] of the fourfold—what is present [crossed out] in the fourfold is
‘the thing’” (GA 73.2: 1295).
Summing up: At a certain stage in his thinking, Heidegger lets being be equivalent to presence, because that is its historical destiny. He turns his attention to what allows presence. But this kind of thinking may also transform what is present into “things” within the fourfold. Now, if we take “being” not as a mere synonym for presence, but as the difference it makes to us that there is something instead of nothing, then this experience of “things” would be a transformation of being—a new kind of disclosure of that which is. So it turns out that Heidegger does want to expand the meaning of being beyond presence, after all.
Where does all this leave us?
I consider this an investigation in progress. I haven’t reached any firm conclusions, and I’m curious to hear your views. But first let me express a hypothesis.
I think Heidegger never gave up his critical stance toward the tradition. Even when he most sympathetically and deeply appreciates the original Greek experience of presencing, he is doing so with a view to inaugurating a different kind of questioning, which asks about the granting of presencing. Even if he accepts presence as our destined and inescapable meaning of being, presence is enabled by a mysterious—let us say—“event” that lets things come to the fore while it itself keeps quiet. Thinking of this “event” may in turn transform our understanding of things so that they no longer fit any traditional sense of presence.
Furthermore, we can apply Heidegger’s critique of narrow presence to the contemporary world in a way that should make it clear that “How does it stand with presence?” is far from a merely academic question. Today’s dominant sense of presence is dangerously narrow in its understanding of being, even as it’s dangerously broad in its ambition to embrace all that is. Ted Kisiel used to translate Ge-stell, with tongue only partly in cheek, as “GPS.” We inhabit a global positioning system, a quickly spreading and indefinitely extendable regime of tracking, surveillance, and management. Everything, including us, is treated as an object to be datamined, monetized, and controlled. Nothing seems to resist our digital systems of representation. Everything leaves rich trails of information, which can be used and reused—even “scraped” up by generative AI to create seemingly new objects. Our attention, desires, and behavior are continually channeled into this system. Again, just think of that sinking feeling when you ask yourself: Where’s my phone?
But if Heidegger’s “thunderbolt” is right, even the sum total of information about a person—assuming for the sake of argument that it could all be collected—would omit Dasein, would omit the distinctive way in which we make a difference. Facts characterize only what is present-at-hand—not its presencing, and not what enables presencing. Whether we name that “time,” “appropriation,” or “the clearing,” it resists the seemingly irresistible spread of information technology. It lies at the heart of who we are—even if it leaves us in the dark, or perhaps precisely because it resists the glare of presence.
As Heidegger says (apparently quoting Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad-Gita1), “Light is not a clearing anymore if the clear dissolves into mere brightness, ‘brighter than a thousand suns’” (GA 79: 93).
1 Heidegger may have been inspired by Robert Jungk, Heller als tausend Sonnen: Das Schicksal der Atomforscher (Stuttgart: Scherz & Goverts, 1956). See Andrew Mitchell, translator’s note to Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 88-89.