188 < CHAPTER EIGHT
too, Being gives itself only in the light that cleared itself for Hegel’s thinking. That is to say: the manner in which it, Being, gives itself, is itself determined by the way in which it clears itself. This way, however, is a historic, always epochal character which has being for us as such only when we release it into its own native past. We attain to the nearness of the historic only in that sudden moment of a recall in thinking” (ID, 67).
Heidegger fully realizes that his own position holds something like the “belonging together” of man and being. Although as his thinking develops, he pays less attention to the mode of attentiveness necessary for Being to be available to Dasein, and more and more frequently considers Dasein as simply a site, an openness, there is still no sense to the question of the meaning of Being except with reference to the being for whom things can mean at all. But he denies that the right way to think about Dasein is as a subject in the Kantian and Hegelian sense—at its most distinctive, self-conscious pure thinking. He notes, referring to what might be a tu quoque objection: “It has indeed oft en been remarked that there cannot be an unconcealment in itself, that unconcealment is aft er all always unconcealment ‘for someone.’ It is thereby unavoidably ‘subjectivized’” (HG, 334).
But he responds,
Nevertheless, must the human being—which is what is being thought here—necessarily be determined as subject? Does “for human beings” already unconditionally mean: posited by human beings? We may deny both options, and must recall the fact that aletheia, thought in a Greek manner, certainly holds sway for human beings, but that the human being remains determined by logos. . . . The human being is the being that, in saying, lets what is presencing lie before us in its presence, apprehending what ties before. Human beings can speak only insofar as they are sayers. (Ibid.)
This emphasis on the priority of disclosure is also put another way by Heidegger: that in order to remain true to the original manifestation of the meaning of Being, we need to reconceive philosophical thinking as something other than discursive rationality. However, his main question and the critique it is based on are only weighty, fundamental in his sense, if it does not remain a kind of black box of chaotic indeterminate, unsayable revelations across historical time. What is this new sort of thinking? What would it mean in this post-culmination or post-Idealist context to struggle to under stand the meaning of Being, to resolve obscurity about what meaning is disclosed, to avoid simply leaving us with this very general notion of dependence? Without some answer to such a question, it is Heidegger who