disclosively thought, and the abyss is to be grounded, in a way appropriate to Da-sein.9 All “consciousness” and all being conscious of something are the filling up of the abyss of the clearing of beyng, | along with a contemporaneous claim upon this abyss—without at all experiencing its open domain as such and certainly not as abyssal. The final expedient remaining to a metaphysical “grounding” of “consciousness” lies in the direction of a reduction of what is in consciousness to what is in the un-conscious, whereby the previous interpretation of consciousness becomes limited to the representation of objects, and representation itself is grasped as the “I am representing . . .”
Metaphysics, in its time-immemorial and necessarily practiced withdrawal from the question of the essence of truth, is incapable of seeing how decisively the “consciousness of something” harbors precisely the clearing of beyng—as an unfathomed ground. Nor can it see that this ground is more originary and more abyssal than all very superficial “depths” of the “unconscious” which is sought, following psychology, in strivings and instincts rather than in the act of representation— without their rootedness in disposition (which is to be grasped in relation to the clearing) surmised even here in the least. The explanation of the “unconscious” on the basis of consciousness is as impossible as the characterization of “consciousness” as a mere epiphenomenon of the unconscious, which is now determined as urge, now as will to power. (Leibniz—Schelling—Nietzsche.) It cannot be contested that a | departure from “consciousness” (ego cogito [“I am thinking”]) and a remaining in “consciousness” (Hegel) leave something essential undecided. The question is only whether the reversion to the “body” and to “life” does bring or can bring what has not been decided to a decision. The obvious one-sidedness of every standpoint of consciousness seems to justify immediately and definitively the transition to the unconscious as the properly real.
The first question, however, must stress the problematic character of “consciousness” as such: how it—as a domain of metaphysical thinking—is insufficient and why. The task is to see how the standpoint of consciousness is entirely an essential consequence of the interpretation of being which takes its guideline from “thinking” and to grasp that therefore also and a fortiori the reversion to preconscious “life” receives its impetus from that which grounds metaphysics, namely, the priority of thinking and its role as guideline. All
9. [Dasein, in the most literal sense “thereness,” is Heidegger’s term for the beings we ourselves are, thematized specifically as places (da) where occurs an understanding of what it means to be (sein) in general. The hyphenated term stresses this thematizing of humans in relation to being.—Trans.]