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the clearing or lighting process itself, the most general notion of possible manifestness as such. There is then what appears to be a historical inflection of this rendering available, like ens creatum or representationalism or “standing reserve,” but which is not a true rendering available, since it actually makes unavailable the true nature of what makes the available available. And then there are the beings available as the beings they are, given such a “dispensation” historically.

The most dramatic word for this picture of an ever-shifting source of availability would simply be chaos.50 As he puts it in POR, “The Geschick [destiny] of being, a child that plays, shifting the pawns: the royalty of a child—that means, the arche, that which governs by instituting grounds, the being of beings. The Geschick of being: a child that plays” (POR, 113).

This would mean a wholly contingent shifting from beings available as substantial in one period, “enduring through some sequence-of-nows-conception-of-time,” to, in another, beings available as created beings, to beings available only as represented for a subject, to being available only as material for technological manipulation. These possibilities are not like regional ontologies, the way entities show up as what they are given in the delimitation of a specific world, like the world of music, or the world of politics, wherein entities are available as what they are only in such delimited worlds and are relatively nontransferable. They are rather all attempts at a determination of Being as such, simpliciter, where that, as manifestness or meaningfulness, is always Dasein-inflected, asked as only “for Dasein.” However, all of these represent moments of manifestness as such that also work to obscure any proper comportment towards there being such manifestness. These various modalities in how beings can be said to be at all sound like responses to the basic question, accounts of manifestness as such, but Heidegger will want to say that they all presume without acknowledging they assume, manifestness as such, and so, in being offered as fundamental, actually obscure true fundamentality. In other words, the “concealing” in these cases is or promotes a kind of being-forgetting (Seinsvergessenheit). The Greek notion of ousia (which Heidegger insists is already connected to property, material for use, disposability), the medieval focus on ens creatum, the post-Cartesian notion of represented-being, and the technological orientation all involve a kind of concealment (and therein lies a crude summary of Heidegger’s entire history of metaphysics)51 that must be different


50. This is something emphasized at length in Rosen 1993.

51. “Crude” is the operative word. Heidegger’s remarks about the “epochal” phases of the “history of Being” are clearly not meant to be anything more than shorthand characterizations of public “worldly,” implicit orientations at various times. His whole project resists formulaic summaries of possible sources of meaningfulness in thematic terms. These shorthand summaries sound like commonly held “beliefs” and that is the farthest thing from Heidegger’s intentions. Any determinate thematic articulation of meaning always already depends on a source beyond articulation in that way, even though, nevertheless, not wholly unavailable (as in, for example, the experience of artworks).


The Culmination by Robert Pippin