questioning and protects itself against taking the text as a pretext for questions that would be “ours.”
The second question raised in the last hour, but left undeveloped, is then taken up again: “Can one speak of a unity before the tearing?” The first question (concerning the driving force of the dichotomy) was treated in a historical-philosophical manner. The second question now requires of us a pre-philosophical approach. However, to pose this question on the basis of our reading of Hegel, Heidegger again relies on the sentence from page 14/91: “When the power of conjoining, etc. . . .” The question is then:
When the power of conjoining disappears, what is experienced in this type of experience along with the disappearance of the unity? It is the unity itself. Thus one not only can but must speak of unity before the dichotomy. Certainly, the answer: “unity” is a theoretical one. Now the question requires of us a pre-philosophical approach. Heidegger invites us to such a preparation, phenomenological in a more authentic sense.
Let us take this example: “Night falls, it is no longer day,” and in this particular region where night brusquely succeeds the day, in such a way that the example directs us to the experience of a relation of strong opposition. Where does the passage from day to night take place? “In what place” does it take place? What is the unity whose splitting-in-two this transition presents? What is the Same in which the day passes into the night? In such an experience, human beings stand in relation with something which is neither day nor night, even if not expressly thematized.
And that is? World, light, space, time, etc., these all too general answers attest to a phenomenological difficulty. The example seemed too massive. So, another example: a pot which breaks apart. To be able to see the parts (as such) there must be a relation to the unity. If we consider that, since Heraclitus, this unity is called ἕν, and that, since this inception, the One is the other name for being, then we are referred back to the understanding of being spoken of in Being and Time.
At this juncture, Heidegger recalls the criticisms that followed the publication of Being and Time. Heidegger was accused of having derived “being” from “is” and then of having developed his “philosophy” from this “abstraction.” To these critiques, he answers still today that “being is not an abstraction drawn from the ‘is’; rather, I can say ‘is’ only in the openness of Being.”
We return to tearing, understood on the basis of what is torn apart, of the rift [Riß]; the experience of which is only possible in a certain “return to” unity: this is so much the case that in Hegel it must be there. In fact, page 16/93: “In the struggle of the understanding with Reason the understanding has strength only to the degree that Reason foresakes itself.”49 If we understand Reason in the Kantian sense (as faculty of principles, faculty of unity), reason is renounced in favor of the
49 TN: Heidegger’s analysis will largely focus on the closing paragraphs of the section entitled “The Need of Philosophy” and the opening paragraphs of the following section “Rejection as Instrument of Philosophizing.” These paragraphs are reproduced here in their textual order:
In the struggle of the understanding with Reason the understanding has strength only to the degree that Reason foresakes itself. Its success in the struggle therefore depends upon Reason itself, and upon the authenticity of the need for the reconstitution of the totality, the need from which Reason emerges.
The need of philosophy can be called the presupposition of philosophy if philosophy, which begins with itself, has to be furnished with some sort of vestibule; and there has been much talk nowadays about an absolute presupposition. What is called the presupposition of philosophy is nothing else but the need that has come to utterance. Once uttered, the need is posited for reflection, so that [because of the very nature of reflection] there must be two presuppositions.
One is the Absolute itself. It is the goal that is being sought; but it is already present [vorhanden], or how otherwise could it be sought? Reason produces it, merely by freeing consciousness from its limitations. This sublation of the limitations is conditioned by the presupposed unlimitedness.
The other presupposition may be taken to be that consciousness has stepped out of the totality, that is, it may be taken to be the split into being and not-being, concept and being, finitude and infinity. From the standpoint of the dichotomy, the absolute synthesis is a beyond, it is the undetermined and the shapeless as opposed to the determinacies of the dichotomy. The Absolute i s the night, and the light is younger than it; and the distinction between them, like the emergence of the light out of the night, is an absolute difference—the nothing is the first out of which all being, all the manifoldness of the finite has emerged. The task of philosophy, however, consists in uniting these presuppositions: to posit being in non-being, as becoming; to posit dichotomy in the Absolute, as its appearance; to posit the finite in the infinite, as life.
It is clumsy, however, to express the need of philosophy as a presupposition of philosophy, for the need acquires in this way a reflective form. This reflective form appears as contradictory statements, which we shall discuss below. One may require of statements that they [17] be justified. But the justification of these statements as presuppositions is still not supposed to be philosophy itself, so that the founding and grounding gets going before, and outside of, philosophy.
REFLECTION AS INSTRUMENT OF PHILOSOPHIZING
The form that the need of philosophy would assume, if it were to be expressed as a presupposition, allows for a transition from the need of philosophy to the instrument of philosophizing, to reflection as Reason. The task of philosophy is to construct the Absolute for consciousness. But since the productive activity of reflection is, like its products, mere limitation, this task involves a contradiction. The Absolute is to be posited in reflection. But then it is not posited, but sublated; for in having been posited it was limited [by its opposite]. Philosophical reflection is the mediation of this contradiction. What must be shown above all is how far reflection is capable of grasping the Absolute, and how far in its speculative activity it carries with it the necessity and possibility of being synthesized with absolute intuition. To what extent can reflection be as complete for itself, subjectively, as its product must b e, which is constructed in consciousness as the Absolute that is both conscious and non-conscious at the same time?
Reflection in isolation is the positing of opposites, and this would be a sublation of the Absolute, reflection being the faculty of being and limitation. But reflection as Reason has connection with the Absolute, and it is Reason only because of this connection. In this respect, reflection nullifies itself and all being and everything limited, because it connects them with the Absolute. But at the same time the limited gains standing precisely on account of its connection with the Absolute.
[Differenzschrift, 16–17/93–94; tm]