If we are to understand the conditions in which human existence or Dasein might be free, we must understand the conditions in which it is not free, that is, the nature of the conditions whereby Dasein’s freedom is constricted. In this paper I explore the idea that at best Heidegger’s ontology might support a picture of freedom somewhat akin to Spinozan freedom: in the right conditions we might to a greater or lesser degree act in a way aligned with our own being. In the post-Kehre Heidegger of the 1930s and early 40s, this would take the form of existing in a way properly grounded in – or rather, aligned with our ground in – beyng (Seyn) as event (Ereignis). If this is the case, to understand the conditions whereby we are not free – at least at an ontological level – means to understand the nature of our alienation from our ground in beyng as event. In this paper, I examine Heidegger’s account of the nature of this alienation in Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). In that text, this alienation is described in terms of our condition within an alienated configuration or ‘epoch’ of history – that of metaphysics – a configuration defined by ‘Seinsverlassenheit’ (‘abandonment by being’), expressed in terms of ‘Machenschaft’ (machination), ‘Vor-stellung’ (representation), and ‘Erlebnis’ (lived experience).
If we are to understand the conditions in which human existence or Dasein might be free, we must understand the conditions in which it is not free, that is, the nature of the conditions whereby Dasein’s freedom is constricted. Now, I have little confidence that in Heidegger’s picture Dasein is free in the sense of having the ability to deliberate about, decide upon, and perform an action such that a different action could have equally been chosen and performed. Rather, it seems to me that in the best-case scenario, Heidegger’s ontology can support a picture of freedom somewhat akin to Spinozan freedom: in the right conditions we might act in proper accord with or in a way aligned to a greater degree with our own being. In the pre-Kehre Heidegger of Sein und Zeit, we might understand this in terms of the distinction between inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) and authenticity (Eigentlichkeit). In the post-Kehre Heidegger of the 1930s and early 40s, this might take the form of existing in a way properly grounded in – or rather, aligned with our ground in – beyng (Seyn) as event (Ereignis). If this is the case, to understand the conditions whereby we are not free – at least at an ontological level – means to understand the nature of our alienation from our own being (in the pre-Kehre instance) or of our alienation from our ground in beyng as event (in the post-Kehre instance).
In this paper, I focus on the latter. More specifically, I examine Heidegger’s account of the nature of our alienation from beyng in Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936-38).1 In that text, this alienation is described in terms of our condition within an alienated configuration or ‘epoch’ of history – that of metaphysics – a configuration defined by ‘Seinsverlassenheit’ (‘abandonment by being’), expressed in terms of ‘Machenschaft’ (machination), ‘Vor-stellung’ (representation), and ‘Erlebnis’ (lived experience). Elsewhere I argue that there are in fact two concepts of ‘event’ in Heidegger’s Beiträge: one historical and one properly ontological. While Heidegger’s ontological concept of event is a concept for beyng, his concept of an historical event describes a transformative rupture in the historical framework of metaphysics such that the structural alienation of that framework from its ground in beyng is resolved and Dasein is realigned with or re-grounds itself in beyng (as event in the ontological sense). In the terms laid out above, this means that the historical event would be one securing a greater degree of freedom for Dasein.
Heidegger’s post-Kehre account of the alienation defining the configuration of history in which we live (the epoch of metaphysics) and his account of an historical event resolving that alienation are generated via an evolution along an axis of ground (which I call a ‘diagenic’ axis) that proceeds from the formulation of Dasein as the condition for the possibility of ontology in Sein und Zeit. Yet, one of the defining features of Heidegger’s Kehre is its shift from explaining being on the basis of Dasein’s existence to explaining Dasein’s existence on the basis of being. We can make sense of this by applying a diagenic distinction: the turn happens when Heidegger’s methodology drives him beyond the existential analysis of Dasein to a more profound level of ground at which he begins to articulate being in terms of features, structures, or processes diagenically and ontologically prior to Dasein.2 As an extension of Heidegger’s shift, the alienation belonging to metaphysics is no longer understood as simply grounded in Dasein’s existence and preserved in artifacts of the Mitwelt as it was in Sein und Zeit, but rather as part of the ontological and ontic make-up of the field or world itself in which Dasein exists.
With Heidegger’s Kehre comes a terminological distinction between ‘Dasein’ and ‘Da-sein.’ While the former continues to refer to the human being, the latter is a technical term for both (1) the field or world in which Dasein lives, which in the epoch of metaphysics is a field of alienation, but in another epoch might be quite different and (2) the ontological features of that field or world that are diagenically prior to Dasein and make its structure of existence possible. As Heidegger puts it, ‘a history [Geschichte],’ that is, an historical epoch, is ‘a style of Da-sein.’3 It is important to emphasize the position of this field in the ontology Beiträge presents: ‘Da-sein has its origin [Ursprung] in the event and in the turning of the event.’4 This means that ultimately we must understand the constitution of Da-sein in terms of the structure of beyng as event – i.e., of his ontological concept of event (I attempt to do this elsewhere). More specifically, as Heidegger’s post-Kehre work comes to designate the event’s onto-genesis of worlds of beings in terms of the ‘essence of truth’ or ‘truth of beyng,’ ‘Da-sein is to be grounded only as, and in, the truth of beyng.’5
We must be careful, though, for this ‘grounding’ has two senses, both of which are important. In one, it is indeed the story of the onto-genesis of Da-sein. But there is another sense: in the epoch of metaphysics Da-sein is a field alienated from its ground and, in this context, grounding additionally refers to the process whereby that alienation is resolved and Da-sein is realigned with or set back into its ground. Moreover, since Da-sein comprises the structures of beyng that make Dasein possible, while Dasein’s alienation is an alienation from its own being (narrowly) and from beyng (broadly), the remedy to Dasein’s alienation is directly related to the grounding of Da-sein in the second sense. ‘The grounding – not creating [Erschaffung] – is, from the side of humans…, a matter of letting the ground be [Grund-sein-lassen]. Thereby humans once again come to themselves and win back selfhood [Selbst-sein].’6
To be sure, ‘self’ and ‘selfhood’ here refer in no way to a metaphysical subject identical with ‘itself’ through the duration of time. In Heidegger’s use, I take ‘selfhood’ to mean Dasein’s existence in a state of minimal self-alienation, previously expressed in Sein und Zeit in terms of authenticity. In the sense discussed above, we might then take Dasein’s winning back its selfhood to be a winning of a greater degree of freedom. I take ‘self’ to refer to Dasein’s ground in the form of what Heidegger calls ‘das Eigentum’; as he puts it, ‘the origin of the self is the domain of what is proper [Eigen-tum].’7 Das Eigentum is the structure of propriety that makes selfhood possible – a structure generated in the logic of beyng as event, namely, its ‘Er-eignis’ or ‘appropriation.’ But more on this elsewhere.
Heidegger’s ‘event’ at the historical level is a function of the alienation emblemized by metaphysics – namely, it is a transformative rupture in which that alienation is remedied. In Beiträge the prime terms describing the field of distortion in which alienated Dasein lives, that is, describing Da-sein as constituted in the historical epoch of metaphysics, are Seinsverlassenheit (‘the abandonment by being’) and its counterpart, Seinsvergessenheit (‘the forgottenness of being’). While ‘the abandonment by being’ applies especially to forms of the self-alienation involved in the structure of being, ‘the forgottenness of being’ names the abandonment of being insofar as it is manifested in human thought and experience; it is the abandonment by being that is operative in human existence. The two can be distinguished diagenically: ‘the abandonment by being is the ground of the forgottenness of being.’8 Both are expressed in a variety of modes, the most central of which are machination, lived experience, and representation.
These modes are consequences of a more originary distortion essential to the structure of beyng as event itself. Namely, according to Heidegger, the abandonment by being has ‘arisen from the distorted essence of beyng [Unwesen des Seyns] through machination.’9 Explaining the precise nature of this distorted essence will be a task for another time.10 For now, the important idea is that the different modes of the abandonment by being ‘are merely emanations [Ausstrahlungen] from an intricate and obdurate dissimulation [Verstellung] of the essence of beyng, especially of its fissure [Zerklüftung],’ a dissimulation that results from a tendency structurally inherent to beyng.11 This tendency is a counterpart of the event’s logic of Er-eignis or appropriation, namely, that of ‘Enteignis’ or ‘expropriation.’12 While ‘Er-eignis’ names the genesis of structural propriety (das Eigentum), ‘Enteignis’ names the genesis of a corelative structural alienation. Together these are the basic lattice of Da-sein. The tendency belonging to the logic of the event to generate self-distortion and alienation is what Heidegger calls the ‘distorted essence’ of beyng. And just as appropriation serves as the ground for whatever selfhood Dasein might attain, expropriation serves as the ground for the different modes of historical alienation. At the historical level, referring in part to Nietzsche, Heidegger writes that ‘in this era [of metaphysics], “beings” (that which we call the “actual,” “life,” “values”) are expropriated [enteignet] of beyng.’13 Beings – especially Dasein – are in a state of expropriation from their ground (beyng or the event).
Something further and truly elegant must be added to this picture, even if it cannot be unpacked here. In Heidegger’s ontology, ‘Er-eignis’ and ‘Enteignis’ name the very same logic of the event [Ereignis] – namely, a logic of difference – insofar as it simultaneous generates propriety or ‘self’ and alienation from propriety. Propriety and alienation from propriety are codeterminate: each is what it is insofar as it is differentiated from the other. But this means that each has a constitutive structural reference to the other, without which it would not be at all. The consequence for Dasein is that its ‘self’ is co-constituted by alienation from that self; its ‘self’ is rooted in both propriety and alienation, and thus it is fractured from the ground up. Better said, Dasein’s ‘self’ is a tension or distension between propriety and alienation, each constituting and simultaneously undermining the other. This is the logic at the root of Dasein’s ‘disclosedness’: to exist, for Dasein, is to be continuously torn apart.14 This also means that ultimately we must understand Dasein’s alienation not simply in terms of expropriation from propriety, but in terms of expropriation from the structural distension or self-problematizing logic upon which Dasein is grounded, that is, the obscuration or concealment of that distension. Such an obscuration is found, for example, in the metaphysical conception of Dasein as a self-identical subject persisting through time (a stable domain of propriety of which various attributes can be predicated).15
In the epoch of metaphysics, machination, representation, and lived experience are the core modes of alienation determining Da-sein and, consequently, Dasein. To reconstruct Heidegger’s basic account of this historical alienation – and thereby the historical conditions of Dasein’s unfreedom – we must explain the nature of these modes.
For Heidegger, beyng as event is essentially self-problematizing and structurally incomplete – it is not objectively present, fully determinate, or exhaustively representable. Because of this, it is interminably question-worthy. The idea here is not simply that questioning beyng leads to rich results, but rather that any ontology produced as an answer to the question of beyng is necessarily incomplete and, if its method is properly grounded, is perpetually driven to question again and again. Machination is the obscuration of this problematic or question-worthy character of beyng that is enabled by the distorted essence of beyng and manifested historically in a prevalence of the Seiendheit of beings and their ontic presence, determinacy, representability, measurability, and makeability: in short, as Heidegger puts it, ‘within machination, there is nothing question-worthy.’16
The eclipse of beyng and its question-worthy character is expressed and reinforced in a variety of ways that contribute to the overall dominance of machination. These revolve around the determination of everything there is on the basis of ontic ποίησις (‘making’ or ‘bringing-forth) in correlation with τέχνη (‘know-how’). I shall distinguish ‘ontic poiesis’ from ‘ontological poeisis’: the former has a negative connotation and refers to the makeability of beings as such within the framework of techne; the latter has an affirmative connotation and refers to the genetic character of beyng and to the ways in which human beings can articulate and preserve that character in creative works like art, poetry, and philosophy. When beyng is obscured by the presence of beings, the ontic poietic character of beings as such – that is, in their Seiendheit – is freed to dominate. In the age of machination ‘everything “is made” and “can be made,” if only the “will” to it is summoned up.’17 As Vallega-Neu emphasizes, Heidegger’s conception of machination is rooted historically in Greek thought: ‘in the overpowering of phusis through techne.’18 Nonetheless, Heidegger suggests that the historical dominance of machination becomes total for the first time in Christianity.
In Christianity, God is the ultimate craftsman. He takes on the role of an absolute foundation for beings, a foundation that – in place of the self-problematizing character of beyng – is not intrinsically problematic or self-destabilizing at all. Despite theological claims to the contrary, the traditional characteristics assigned to God are characteristics of Seiendheit carried to the maximal degree: if every being must be one, God is perfectly simple; if every being must be self-identical through the duration of its existence, God is self-identical to such a degree that He is beyond duration; if beings have causal power, God is perfectly powerful and the cause of all that exists; if beings might have only imperfect knowledge, God has perfect knowledge; and so on. As a being, God is the prime ontic cause of the universe and its beings, which are His product: ‘every being is explained in its origin as an ens creatum, the creator is what is most certain, and beings are the effect of this cause which is most eminently.’19 To be a being, in other words, is to be something essentially makeable and made by another being, and reality is understood on the basis of an ultimate principle of ontic production.
If the early Christian tradition universalized the framework of machination by grounding reality in God the maker, the early modern scientific revolution places the makeability of beings in human hands. The domain of beings becomes mathematically quantifiable, calculable, and manipulable down to the finest detail via human technology – at least in principle.
Simultaneously, representability gets pushed to a total saturation of reality. Machination is
that interpretation of beings as representable and represented. Representable means, on the one hand, accessible in opinion and calculation and, on the other hand, providable in production and implementation. All that is thought on the grounds that beings as such are the represented, and only the represented is a being.20
Leibniz’s reciprocal principles of sufficient reason and the identity of indiscernibles can help to explain the kind of infinite representability Heidegger has in mind.21 If Leibniz’s system understands determination in terms of the predication of a subject, while a concept is sufficient to the degree that it represents the subject’s infinite chain of predicates, then no things in reality are in principle unrepresentable. Indeed, according to these principles there is one sufficient concept for each distinct thing and one distinct thing for each concept, that is, for each thing there is a concept that has an infinite comprehension and an extension of one.22 For a concept to adequately represent its object it must have infinite comprehension: it must contain all the object’s predicates (in the right order). Since two things between which no difference can be discerned are in fact one and the same thing, such a concept applies to one and only one thing. In contrast, if a concept has a finite comprehension, that is, if it does not contain all its object’s predicates, its extension increases (in principle indefinitely, even if not in fact). The concept is no longer adequate to its object, since there are determinations in the object not represented in the concept. Any concept with an extension greater than one is therefore a generality: it ranges over any object bearing the concept’s predicates, but it is inadequate to any of them. The objects ranged over can be distinguished numerically as particular instances of the concept, but not adequately, since the concept fails precisely with respect to the differences individuating one from another. The goal of representation is thus to become total: to infinitely saturate the predicates of the beings represented.23
As a more current illustration, the ideal of machination is carried to the ‘gigantic’ (das Riesenhafte) in the Kardashev scale dreamt of by astrophysicists and sci-fi writers.24 This scale proposes to measure the development of a society according to three grand levels of energy control. The first marks a hypothetical society that has grown able to capture, store, and use all the energy radiated to its planet by the star at the center of its solar system. A ‘level two’ society could capture the energy produced by its star in total and control that energy – as well as the star itself – for its own purposes. A ‘level three’ society would have attained total control of the energy output of an entire galaxy. When carried to the logical conclusion – total poietic and technological control of the universe – the Kardashevian dream merges the modern image of the human being as poietic wielder of technology with the Christian image of God as maker. To compliment this image of machination at the level of the gigantic, Rick Sanchez’s car battery powered by a fabricated internal ‘microverse’ containing a ‘miniverse’ containing a ‘teenyverse’ carries it to the infinitely small.25 Both the Sanchez battery and the Kardashev scale express the idea of total poietic technological dominance over a reality made measurable and manipulable by the mathematical sciences.26
Within the framework of machinational metaphysics, the eclipse of the self-problematizing, question-worthy character of beyng goes hand in hand with a general view that there is nothing at all that is irreducibly problematic. As Heidegger puts it, for machination ‘there is no problem that is not solvable, and the solution is merely a matter of number applied to time, space, and force.’27 This view is opposed to what I call the ‘ontological realism about problems’ argued for by Albert Lautman and Gilles Deleuze (who, very much drew upon Heidegger to make their cases).28 Nonetheless, in Heidegger’s view the problematic, question-worthy character of beyng is structural and thus cannot be entirely eliminated from the world. Under the determination of machination, this question-worthy character is encountered in sublimated forms defined within the bounds of the machinery of representation. As is well known, Heidegger calls the kind of experience available within such bounds ‘Erlebnis’ or ‘lived experience.’29 In Beiträge Heidegger emphasizes the way lived experience expresses a transformed, tamed form of the self-problematizing, question-worthy character of beyng. Lived experience reduces the question-worthy and the inherently problematic to simple curiosities and the type of problems that disappear once their solutions are discovered.
Since … machination dispels and eradicates question-worthiness and brands it as downright deviltry, and since this destruction … is perhaps at bottom not fully possible, therefore this age is still in need of that which allows – in the manner proper to the age, i.e., machinationally – some validity to what is worthy of question and yet at the same time makes it innocuous. That is the accomplishment of lived experience.30
Lived experience reinforces the alienation of Dasein by sublimating Dasein’s encounter with the pre-representational, problematic, question-worthy character of its self and of being and rendering it innocuous. The key is that it does this in forms of experience that are enticing enough to hold one’s attention (or that of a community), but that are captured within the machinational focus on Seiendheit and its apparatus of representation. Rather than being struck by the problematic character of oneself, one’s attention is captured by sky-diving or watching crime dramas on TV. Rather than looking into the question-worthy character of being, one becomes obsessed with conspiracy theories or solving logistics problems to make a business more profitable. ‘“Lived experience,” understood here as the basic form of representation belonging to the machinational and the basic form of abiding therein, is the publicness (accessibility to everyone) of the mysterious, i.e., the exciting, provocative, stunning, and enchanting.’31
Crucially, for Heidegger the domination by machination, representation, and lived experience extends to the form of truth predominant in our historical framework. As is wellknown, he describes part of the problematic, question-worthy character of being in terms of concealment, which – together with unconcealment – is one of the syngenic elements in his conception of the essence of truth. However, in machination the very fact of concealment is eclipsed: being conceals itself and its inclination to do so is carried into the modes of concealment shaping worlds of beings. In machination there is no room to recognize that this sort of thing has occurred. ‘Not only is it denied in principle that anything could be concealed; more decisively, self-concealment as such is in no way admitted as a determining power.’32 Consequently, machination entails an obscuration of the essence of truth and the predominance of a sublimated, derivative form of truth: ‘“machination” is the name for a specific truth of beings (of the beingness of beings). We grasp this beingness first and foremost as objectivity (beings as objects of representation).’33 In Heidegger’s view ontological structures of concealment and unconcealment form the diagenic ground of propositional truth. But with machination truth as propositional representation in the form of adequation, correctness, correspondence, and measurability reigns supreme and reinforces the modern ontic poietic view of reality. Precisely this is part of the reason Heidegger argues that to generate an historical event or rupture with the framework of machinational metaphysics our philosophical efforts must be directed to an inquiry into the essence of truth.
It must be emphasized that machination and its manifestation in derivative forms of truth are not simply products of human negligence. Their ultimate ground is not in Dasein’s existence, as that of historical alienation was in Sein und Zeit. Rather, they are grounded more originarily in the structure of beyng and expressed in the historical formation of Da-sein in which Dasein exists. ‘“Machination’ is at first a type of human comportment, and then suddenly and properly it means the reverse: the essence (distorted essence) of beyng in which the ground of the possibility of “undertakings” is first rooted.’34 In Heidegger’s post-Kehre conception of truth, the essence of truth is a dynamic of being that enables the determination of Da-sein and, in turn, worlds of beings. In this picture, machination is moreover a way in which the distorted essence or abandonment by beyng is determined in truth. ‘The abandonment by being is basically [im Grunde] an essential decay [Ver-wesung] of beyng. Its essence is distorted [verstört] and only in that way does it bring itself into truth, namely, [in the epoch of metaphysics] as the correctness of representation.’35
Heidegger’s account of the abandonment by being in terms of machination, representation, and lived experience offers a description of the state of historical alienation that conditions Dasein’s existence and renders Dasein alienated from its self or its ground in beyng. With this in mind, I would like to suggest that if we are to find a form of human freedom in Heidegger’s post-Kehre work, at the ontological level it will likely be something like a state of selfhood won back from this condition by resolving our alienation and re-grounding ourselves in the logic of beyng as event. In Beiträge, Heidegger describes the way we might do such a thing in terms of the process of ‘Er-gründung’ or ‘fathoming the ground,’ which in a core sense operates by an extended inquiry into the essence of truth. Though I do not think this is exactly what Heidegger had in mind when a few years earlier he wrote the essay ‘Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,’ I do think his statement there that ‘freedom is the essence of truth itself’ conceptually prefigures this idea.36
1 Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosopie (Vom Ereignis) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2003), GA65; English: Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniella Vallega-Neu (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012). I shall abbreviate this text as GA65 in endnote citations and as Beiträge in in-text mentions.
2 In a certain sense (though not with respect to the movement along a diagenic axis), this parallels the Schellingian shift from a transcendental idealism describing the subject to a Naturphilosophie that tells the story of the constitution or emergence of the subject on the basis of non-subjective ontological processes.
5 GA65 31/27.
6 GA65 31/27, italics modified.
7 GA65 319-320/253. This marks a slight difference between my interpretation and that of Vallega-Neu, who takes ‘the “self” Heidegger is thinking here’ to be ‘the authentic self which he also thinks in Being and Time, the self to which human beings come back only in resolute being-towards-death’ (Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003), henceforth HCP, 85). In their translation of GA65, Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu translate ‘das Eigentum’ as ‘domain of what is proper,’ but I use ‘domain of propriety’ or simply ‘propriety’ instead.
8 GA65 114/91, italics removed.
10 In fact, explaining its ontological constitution in terms of historical alienation is impossible, since the former is the ground making the latter possible.
12 I am aware of only two uses of cognates of ‘Enteignis’ in Beiträge (pages 120/95 and 231/182), but the idea is present throughout the text nonetheless and the term itself is used frequently in the subsequent private manuscripts through which the project of Beiträge extends.
13 GA65 120/95. I use ‘expropriated’ to translate ‘enteignet’ rather than Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu’s ‘dissappropriated.’
14 In Heidegger’s view, the logic of Er-eignis and Enteignis is also that of ‘Zeit-Raum’ (time-space), which generates temporality and spatiality. This, it is worth pointing out, is the Heideggerian analogue to Deleuze’s reading of Kant on the role of time in the constitution of the subject. According to Deleuze, for Kant ‘“form of interiority” means not that time is internal to us, but that our interiority constantly divides us from ourselves, splits us in two: a splitting in two which never runs its course, since time has no end. A giddiness, an oscillation which constitutes time’ (Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties [Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003] ix). In Différence et répétition he puts the point as follows: ‘it is as thought the I [JE] were fractured [traversé d’une fêlure] from one end to the other: fractured by the pure and empty form of time’ (Deleuze, Différence et répétition [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993]; English: Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton [New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994] 117/86). Deleuze takes Hamlet to supply the slogan for this idea: ‘The time is out of joint’ (Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy vii).
15 No doubt, this all sounds very mysterious without proper explanation, which would go beyond the limits of this paper. I will attempt to provide this explanation by reconstructing the logic of the event by way of Heidegger’s ontology of truth in Bahoh, Heidegger’s Ontology of Events (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).
17 GA65 108/86.
18 Vallega-Neu, HCP 62. ‘This process begins with the Greek experience of being as phusis, i.e., as an emerging of beings. But soon techne, the “know-how” to make things, determines the Greek approach to being so that being comes to be presented analogously to makeable beings. Consequently, being is determined as beingness (Seiendheit) and appears to be makeable and quantitatively calculable, like beings’ (ibid).
21 In Différence et répétition, Deleuze analyzes these ideas in terms of what he calls a ‘vulgarized Leibnizianism’ (Deleuze, DR 21/11). It is ‘vulgarized’ because it is something of a caricature. Nonetheless, it expresses a set of major ontological problems that both Heidegger and Deleuze target: the universalization of representation, the dominance of conceptual generality, and the reduction of difference to the kind of differences thinkable within the bounds of a representational concept. For Heidegger, these form part of the lattice of machination that texts like Beiträge aim to supplant, while for Deleuze they form organizing points for a history of insufficient ontologies that Différence et répétition works to overturn.
22 A concept’s comprehension is the extent to which it accurately represents its object, that is, the exhaustiveness of its predicates in matching up with the predicates belonging to its object, while its extension is the range of objects for which it is a concept.
23 Incidentally, this helps show part of why Heidegger argues that being is not a generality: mistaking being for a generality captures it within the machinery of representation.
24 The Kardashev scale illustrates Heidegger’s idea of the gigantic well, but I have seen no evidence that he was aware of it.
25 ‘The Ricks Must be Crazy,’ Rick and Morty (Cartoon Network: August 30, 2015) television.
26 Vallega-Neu again captures the idea well: ‘machination and lived experience are completed insofar as they encounter no more boundaries. In the gigantic, beings are discovered through their boundless calculability and makeability. Any being is always already discovered as quantitatively calculable. Indeed, what beings are, their quale, is understood as quantity’ (Vallega-Neu, HCP 61). Vallega-Neu is referring to a passage found at GA65 135/106.
28 See Bahoh, ‘Deleuze’s Theory of Dialectical Ideas: The Influence of Lautman and Heidegger,’ Deleuze and Guattari Studies 13.1 (2019), 19-53.
29 Heidegger of course critiqued lived experience in several contexts during his career and a full picture would require piecing together his engagement with post-Kantian philosophy. But this would take us far afield.
31 GA65 109/87.
36 Martin Heidegger, ‘Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,’ in [GA9] Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976); English: ‘On the Essence of Truth,’ trans. John Sallis, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 186/143.