origin ontologically. By seeing only the "originary rootedness" (ursprüngliche Verwurzelung)56 of the being question in human existence, one ends up inevitably reading Heideggerian transcendentalism as yet another sequence of degrees that still lead to an ultimate condition of possibility and therefore a principial referent. The Kehre would then only push the search for ultimacy further back beyond Dasein and Verstehen into what the later Heidegger calls the "clearing,"57 which he says "is being."58
To the extent that the "clearing" is a field of epochal economy constituted prior to all human projects, this term does designate an a priori to the existential structures. But to understand Heidegger is to understand that with him philosophy has rid itself of all ultimate a priori referents. That the clearing is not one such referent appears from his ontological notion of origin, without which the search for transcendental conditions of possibility would continually rebound. In the last text published during his life, Heidegger, as if the ultimate instance of the question of being had still not been reached, suggests one step further in "the attempt, undertaken ever anew since 1930, to shape the question of Being and Time in a more initial way."59 He asks: "But whence and how is there the clearing?"60 On the final page of his work, he thus seems to inquire about the horizon that encloses the opening in which entities "presence, " the horizon that makes their mutual presencing possible and in which "there is [es gibt] being." What seems to be ultimate, then, is the "there is" itself-capitalized, moreover.61 The "There is" makes the clearing possible, which makes understanding possible, which in turn makes Dasein possible, which alone allows one to ask what is being qua being, from which degree of derivation one might finally ask what beings are. . . .
But the stages that lead to the "there is" do not constitute such "a gradation in the sense of an ever greater originariness."62
The originary pursuit of the ontological question, then, must be supplemented by the ontological pursuit of the originary. The ontic question of origin has received plenty of answers throughout history. Sensible substance, later the first nature at the top of the essential order, then the principle of reason that orders reasoning, are just so many ways of designating a particular entity that institutes and commands the totality of present things for a time. The ontological question (in the sense of the Seinsfrage) of origin has shown itself to be tied to the deconstruction of the economies and the reversals through which principles rise and wither. It is obvious, then, that presence 'comes about' in two ways: according to phenomenological construction, as the emergence of entities constituting a world, as their synchronic 'there is'; and according to phenomenological deconstruction, as the instituting of an order of entities on the threshold that separates diachronically one world from another.
Raising together the ontological question of origin and the originary question of ontology is to reformulate the debate about transcendental
56. SZ 377/BT 429. The allusion to Kantian transcendentalism and to the common root of the "two stems of our knowledge" (KPM 132 and 190/Kpm 144 and 201) is too evident for me to take at face value Heidegger's claim that BT enabled him to interpret that root as the "originary self," as opposed to Kant enabling him, in BT, to speak of "originary rootedness" (GA 25 394).
57. According to BT, the "clearing" is opened by human existence: "ecstatic temporality clears the 'there' originarily" (SZ 351/BT 402, cf. SZ 133 and 408/BT 171 and 460). After 1930, however, the clearing is understood out of being itself, as the opening of a field of presence. The word Lichtung then no longer signifies the natural light (SZ 133/BT 171)—disclosedness as man's ontological structure—but a "lightening": "to make something light, free and open" (SD 72/OTB 65, with the English translator's note). On this transformation of the notion of clearing, see the concordant remarks of Werner Marx, "Das Denken und seine Sache" in H .-G. Gadamer, W. Marx, G. F. von Weizsacker, Heidegger. Freiburger Universitiitsvortriige zu seinem Gedenken (Freiburg, 1977), p. 25; of Ernst Tugenthat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin, 1967), pp. 275-277; and of F. W. von Herrmann, Die Selbstinterpretation Martin Heideggers (Meisenheim am Glan, 1864), pp. 61-63.
58. Wm 163/BWr 211.
59. SD 61/OTB 55.
60. SD 80/OTB 73.
61. SD 5/OTB 5.
62. SD 48/OTB 45.