2. The first of these two routes is traced by the project of the young Heidegger in Being and Time: from the initial fact of immersion in entities, from being-in-the-world, existential analysis steps back to progressively more elementary conditions of such facticity. The phenomenological project of a transcendental construction51 discloses, if not in fact, at least by right, the temporality of being. Being as time is its guiding pre-understanding.
Later, the second route is traced by the phenomenological project of epochal deconstruction. The focus is on those entities that have been held as ultimate rulers in the course of our culture because they institute and command a given economy. Presencing is then no longer only adumbrated, it is reached by an "enabling leap."
The constructive task of raising the ontological question more originarily is historical in the sense that the problematic of an a priori is inherited directly from Kant and indirectly from PlatoY The deconstructive task, on the other hand, of raising the question of origin ontologically is historical in an entirely different way. It is historical as a working through, thus an overcoming, of that problematic of the a priori inaugurated by Plato—as the retrieval, therefore, of an understanding of presencing to which the philosophy of archai and principia could hardly do justice. For Heidegger, to raise the ontological question originarily (before the Kehre) meant to ask again, after the Greeks, τί τὸ ὄν, and to do so by analyzing being-in-the-world. Later, to raise the question of the origin ontologically (after the Kehre) meant to transgress Plato so as to recover presencing from Presocratic thought, and simultaneously to transgress the ultimate referents so as to recover presencing as a possibility53 for thought today.
This rather complex structure of the repetition of presencing—repeating the question of first philosophy, exhibiting the existential structures, returning to the Milesian and Eleatic beginnings, and retrieving the nonstatic at the core of everything present—must be preserved intact if the origin is to be understood in the full sense of Ursprung. The first task mentioned, i.e., raising the ontological question more originarily and making it "fundamental,"54 cannot be pursued independently. Inquiring into more and more originary conditions would lead to the illusion of a hierarchy of grounds-the very fallacy that Heidegger denounces in the metaphysical quest for principia. It is true that at the same time he seems to outline just such a hierarchy when he sketches a transcendental retrogression that leads from the question, What is being? to that of 'being qua being', then to that entity who asks such questions, and finally to the very structure of the understanding where these questions are articulated. At a first reading of Heidegger's early writings, then, to think the origin 'originarily' means to step back from the τί τὸ ὄν to the ὂν ᾗ ὄν, to Dasein, to Verstehen.55 Many of the misunderstandings concerning Heidegger are explainable by the exclusive attention paid to his effort to raise the ontological question originarily, without noting his simultaneous effort to think the
51. GA 24 30; KPM 40/Kpm 46.
52. The "unrelenting pursuit of originariness" (dieses unausgesetzte Drängen auf Ursprünglichkeit, KPM 121/Kpm 133) in Heidegger is part of a long lineage: the Aristotelian quest for the πρότερον (πρὸς ἡμάς or φύσει) opposed to the ὕστερον, the Cartesian quest for cur ita sit opposed to quod ita sit, the Kantian search for the universal and necessary conditions of experience as opposed to its empirical conditions. . . . In every case the a priori is a "source" of concepts (see GA 24 31/BPP 23).
53. In BT the retrieval, Wiederholung, was already described as the repetition of a possibility: not only of the question of being as a possibility (SZ 2-4/BT 21-24), but also of authentic resolution (SZ 308 and 339/BT 355 and 388) and of existence as such (SZ 391/BT 443). Moreover, both before and after the "turning," the reference to Nietzsche is obvious in the context of the retrieval "The authentic retrieval of a past possibility of existence-that being-there choose its hero—is grounded existentially in anticipatory resoluteness" (SZ 385/BT 437). This formulation is comparable to the description of "monumental" history in Nietzsche, that attitude for which "what is highest in one moment of the distant past be for me still alive, bright and great," F. Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. P. Preuss (Indianapolis, 1980), p. 15. Heidegger links his concept of retrieval or repetition explicitly to that of monumental history (SZ 396/BT 448). Later, the temporal mode of authentic retrieval, the instant (SZ 385/BT 438), is expressed in the vocabulary of the eternal recurrence. The Nietzschean phrase "collision of the future and past [in which] the instant returns to itself" (NI 312) then replaces the Wiederholung of SZ and KPM.
54. The inherited ontologies "take their rise" (entspringen) from fundamental ontology (SZ 13/BT 34). In more Kantian language, laying the foundations of metaphysics is to trace its origination (Ursprung) to the essence of knowledge in general (KPM 20/Kpm 26 f.) as finite intuition and dependence on the intuited.
55. KPM 216-219/Kpm 230-233.