52 UNITY
What is asked about in the question to be elaborated is being, thatwhich determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings have always been understood no matter how they are discussed.
Heidegger came to the conclusion that this question could not be answered. The being of something could only be shown, not said. But in the process, he contradicted himself.
This is precisely what one should expect given our answer to the question of being. As we have just established, the being of an object is its gluon. And gluons (at least, proper gluons), we know, are not objects. As Heidegger puts it (p. 5):
The being of beings ‘is’ not itself a being.The first philosophical step in understanding the problem of being consists in avoiding telling the mython tina diegeisthai, in not ‘telling a story’, that is, not determining beings as beings by tracing them back in their origins to another being—as if being had the character of a possible being.
Heidegger infers that one cannot say what the being of something is. For to say anything of the form ‘the being of such and such is so and so’ is precisely to treat it as an object. Heidegger illustrates the problem at one place as follows:11
If we painstakingly attend to the language in which we articulate what the principle of reason [Satz vom Grund] says as a principle of being, then it becomes clear we speak of being in an oddmanner that is, in truth, inadmissible.We say: being and ground/reason [Grund] ‘are’ the same. Being ‘is’ the abyss [Abgrund]. When we say something ‘is’ and ‘is such and so’, then that something is, in such an utterance, represented as a being. Only a being ‘is’; the ‘is’ itself—being—‘is’ not. The wall in front of you and behind me is. It immediately shows itself to us as something present. But where is its ‘is’? Where should we seek the presencing of the wall? Probably these questions already run awry.
But the being of something, being its gluon, is a thing. Hence one can say things about it. I have just done so, and so does Heidegger. (See, for example, a number of the passages I have already quoted.) Even to ask the question ‘what exactly is the being of something?’ refers to it as a thing.
Heidegger, then, contradicts himself. But he does this precisely because what he is talking about is contradictory.The gluon of a partite object is and is not an object. So, it would seem, one can and cannot talk about it. Such is the contradictory nature of gluons.12
11 Heidegger (1991), p. 51f.
12 I will return to the matter of ineffability in Section 13.6.