argues (1980: 19–21), antiquarianism sometimes serves a vital purpose (helping us cherish our roots), but all too often it becomes dead weight. And since our past was itself historical – appropriating what we had been for the sake of who we might be – merely antiquarian documentation does not even succeed in genuinely preserving the past.
Since being requires Dasein, in a sense “being happens as the history of humanity, as the history of a people” (GA34, 1931–32: 145). But the history of being is not simply human history. “Da-sein is historical only because [history is] essentially and properly the grounding of the truth of beyng as appropriation” (GA69, 1938–40: 94). The engagement at issue in the history of being is not just our own appropriation of who we have been; we are engaged, appropriated, by the very happening of being.
I have used the word “happening” to describe the history of being, just as Being and Time uses Geschehen for how Geschichte occurs (SZ: 375), and Heidegger frequently speaks of Seinsgeschehnis in the 1930s. But his later thought is allergic to this term. “In appropriation, nothing happens” (GA97, late 1940s: 382). Seinsgeschichte “has nothing to do with a process of happening” (GA91, 1955: 458). I would emphasize the word “process” here. Like its synonym Vorgang in an early lecture course (GA56/57, 1919: 75–76), a Prozeß is a parade we watch as bystanders, a procession of entities that enter and exit presence in “the sequence of before and after” (GA79, 1957: 83). Happening in a deeper sense grips us.
But it also abandons us: The happening of being yields “epochs of presence” (GA91: 663), where “epoch” means holding back (epochē). The source of presence remains in darkness. “Metaphysics . . . is the history of the self-withdrawal of what sends in favor of the sendings . . . of a particular letting-presence of what is present” (GA14, 1962: 50/41). “The expression ‘history of being’ says that the still concealed event [Ereignis] of the difference [between being and beings] sends what is present into presence (then the oblivion of the difference takes place)” (GA83, 1950–51: 220). “The oblivion of being” is not “a defect, an omission,” but “the destiny of the clearing of being, for being as presence can become apparent and determine all beings only if the clearing . . . holds to itself” (GA13, 1974: 234). We are given presence, but not given an encounter with the giving itself – perhaps because what we can encounter is, precisely, what is present. The giving can only be intimated through an experience of the deep contingency of the gift.
Every phase of metaphysics is an answer to an implicit “ontotheological” question (e.g., GA88, 1937–38: 139): What are the general characteristics of what is present, and which entity should be represented as most truly present? (The phrase “metaphysics of presence,” which Heidegger never uses, is