10 < CHAPTER ONE


highly metaphorical agentive language by invoking Being as itself taking a turn, that Being has “awakened and taken a turn” (POR, 55). The fact that presuppositions about various ontic claims, about beings and their ground, should at some point become initially apparent and then further pursued is not in itself mysterious, and Heidegger has no stake in showing exactly why that took twenty-three hundred and not twelve hundred years. He is dealing with the history of Western thought as it is and is suggesting only that what he is pointing to has been implicit (“hidden,” “concealed”) until a thinker formulated it. Moreover, this explicitation is only minimally and initially on view in Leibniz. It is only the beginning of the realization of the meaningfulness of Being as cognizability, the objectness of objects, and so the assumption eventually of modem science and technology: “The sovereignty of the principle of reason begins only now in the obvious sense that all cognition thoroughly responds to the demand that sufficient reason be unconditionally rendered for every being” (POR, 55).

And so eventually, “Being as the objectness of objects gets distended [eingespannt] into the relation between cognition and the subject. From then on, this relation between subject and object counts as the sole realm wherein a decision about being is solely made about beings regarding their being, the realm wherein a decision about being is always made solely in terms of the objectness of the object but never about being as such” (POR, 55).

That the full implications of Plato’s understanding of the meaning of Being as Idea or of Leibniz’s principle require gradual exfoliation over time until, finally, Hegel, is all we need to get minimally in view this notion of destiny, Geschick. And, as the last quotation indicates, this dynamic of hiddenness and disclosure can be said to culminate in the disclosure of what had always remained hidden, even if decisive in the tradition: the disclosure of the complete hiddenness from us of the meaning of Being at issue in our dealing with beings. That is what Hegel “accomplishes.” And there is little doubt that Hegel thinks of himself as signing on to the principle of cognizability as the meaning of Being. Consider the remark opening his lecture course in Berlin in 1818: “One cannot think highly enough of the greatness and power of spirit; the sequestered nature of the universe harbors no power which can oppose the courage of cognition; it is necessary that it open itself before one and lay its riches and its profundities before one’s eyes and bring joy to them.”14


14. Hegel 1956, 101–2. Quoted by Heidegger in POR, 85.


The Culmination by Robert Pippin