of Dasein, which as existing transcends,” Heidegger adds “But Dasein and beyng itself? Not yet thought, not until Being and Time, Part II. Da-sein belongs to beyng itself as the simple onefold of beings and being; the essence of the ‘occurrence’—temporalizing of Temporality [Temporalität] as a preliminary name for the truth of beyng.”64
It is the articulation of this “simple onefold of beings and being” that is the focus for much of Heidegger’s later thinking, in which it is no longer a matter of understanding being-there’s transcendence as such, but rather of grasping the way being-there already belongs to the truth of being. Indeed, in the later thinking, the emphasis on the simple onefold (which is sometimes also presented as a simple, a unitary, “twofold”65) of the happening of the truth of being goes so far as even to leave behind, in a certain fashion, the ontological difference between being and entities that figures so often in the writings of the 1930s.66 The way in which this thinking focuses directly on the articulation of unity—although a unity that is itself always differentiated—is indicative of the way in which the idea of ground is itself clarified, and to some extent, transfigured, in the course of Heidegger’s thinking. The idea of ground is always, in Heidegger, closely tied to the idea of unity—to ground is to exhibit the unity of that which is grounded—the unity at issue here is also a unity that is always differentiated. The question of ground is, one might say, the question of the essential unity of unity and of difference. Heidegger is sometimes led to take up this question of ground, particularly when it is understood in relation to the notions of transcendence and the transcendental, in ways that also seem to compromise the nature of the unity at issue here (whether through the implicit reliance on a notion of hierarchical dependence, or through a tendency toward subjectivism or idealism). Still, the question of ground as such is never relinquished, for the question of ground is the question of being. As Heidegger tells us in 1957: “Being and ground/reason belong together. Ground/reason receives its essence from its belonging together with being qua being. Put in the reverse, being reigns qua being from out of the essence of ground/reason.”67 As ground, being is not itself in need of ground, and so is neither grounded nor groundless.68 It is, says Heidegger, like the rose of which Angelus Silesius says, it is “without why; it blooms because it blooms/It cares not for itself; asks not if it’s seen.”69 This understanding of the intimacy of the relation between being and ground, as well as the understanding of ground that is implicated here, is also indicative of the intimate relation between being, ground, and place. To speak of ground is to speak of that on which one stands, that which preserves and sustains, which shelters and protects, and which does so in
64. “On the Essence of Ground,” marginal note, p. 123a (GA 9:159a). Note that here “beyng” (the translator’s rendition of Heidegger’s use of the archaic form “Seyn”) seems to refer to this simple onefold as such, and so to be distinct from being.
65. See the reference to the “becoming one” of “the twofold of what is present and of presence” in “Cézanne,” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, ed. Hermann Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 13 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983), p. 223.
66. See “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” pp. 60–61 (GA 15:366); see also Heidegger’s comments in Joan Stambaugh, “Introduction,” in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. xii–xiii. See also Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, p. 154.
67. The Principle of Reason, p. 51 (GA 10:76).
68. “Insofar as Being ‘comes to presence’ as ground, it itself has no ground. It is so, not because it grounds itself, but because any grounding—not excluding, but, indeed, rather including its own grounding—remains inadequate to being as ground. . . . Being as being remains groundless. Ground—namely as ground which grounds being—stays away from being. Being is an abyss.”—The Principle of Reason, p. 111 (GA 10:166).
69. “Die Ros’ ist ohne Warum; sie blühet, weil sie blühet,/Sie ach’t nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet,” Angelus Silesius (1624–1677), Cherubinischer Wandersmann (Bremen: Carl Schünemann, n.d.), p. 37 (I, 289).