What Is the Problem of the Meaning of Being? > 65
as a happening or event and so because ultimate, without a possible logos, but the ground of any logos, itself groundless; that is, a mere happening. Commentators sometimes have been misled by the relatively theological-sounding language that the later Heidegger uses to make this point, when he insists on the “mittance” (a common translation of Seinsgeschick)47 or bestowal or “gift ” of being. As noted previously, when he notes that the availability or familiarity of beings has a condition for its possibility, he means to emphasize in this sense that beings are made available in distinct ways across historical time; how beings are available in their “familiarity” changes across historical time because they are made available in different ways at different times (in different “clearing-locations,” I would assume, or as illuminated by different sorts of light), in a way that cannot be taken in by any logos (as ratio) because any determinate logos is “grounded” in how any beings are made available at a time. This is a source or ground that cannot itself be made available in any logos because it must serve as the source of any availability at all. Being does not do anything or give any gifts. These are metaphorical ways of insisting that for beings to be available to us, they must be made available by a kind of illumination that is “beyond being” because it is itself not any being, into which we find ourselves contingently thrown. But such is the distinct historical “emptiness”—and herein the paradox: both distinct, a determinate moment, like the technological framing in modernity, and empty, even abyss-like—necessary for beings to be available at all.48 (Hence the formulation we saw above: “This open center is, therefore, not surrounded by beings. Rather, this illuminating center itself encircles all beings—like the nothing that we scarcely know” [OWA, 30].)49
Given all of this, although Heidegger does not make this distinction, he would seem to be referring to three different ontological levels. There is
47. For example, PR, xvii and xviii.
48. We don’t decide that contemporary art objects—Hollywood films, graphic novels, downloaded songs—now show up originarily as commodities. Aft er a certain point in the late nineteenth century, this began to happen and finally prevailed. A contrasting memory of what had been available as a Bach fugue allows, by this contrast, manifestness as such to become salient.
49. Note this formulation from FCM: “This transformation lends a properly primordial historicity to the occurrence of the history of philosophizing, a historicity which makes its own demands (sacrifice, being overcome). We cannot comprehend this historicity and will never be able to get a grasp of it if, for instance, we associate it with the notion of history derived from the sensational historical accounts we find in the newspapers. The historicity of the history of philosophy, and correspondingly, albeit in quite a different way, the historicity of the history of art and of religion are intrinsically and wholly divergent” (FCM, 175).