enowning

2009-11-08T07:31:00.000-08:00

Letter to the LRB, re: "Heil Heidegger", 1989 vintage.

In asking the ‘Why’ question, Heidegger seeks to understand the meaning of existence on the basis of the ontological difference between ‘being’ – overwhelmingly human being, Dasein – and ‘Being’, Sein, Sein transcends Dasein, but occasionally ‘irrupts’ into human existence in what Heidegger refers to as an ‘event’, Ereignis. When this takes place, the ontological difference between Sein and Dasein is understood as a relationship – rather than an arbitrary distinction – in which the meaning of human existence is revealed. What is at the heart of Heidegger’s thought, therefore, is an event-theory of revelation in which the meaning of human existence comes to light out of darkness, and which is conceptualised in terms of this distinction between ‘Being’ and ‘being’. In this sense, Heidegger’s phenomenological reductions, in which he analyses the conditions of human existence, are, in fact, tangential to the philosopher’s primary task, which is to think the ontological difference as event of revelation.

2009-11-06T20:51:00.000-08:00

Vico and the ontological difference.

Vico recognizes that beings are not the starting point of an original for of metaphysical thought, but rather that beings appear as unconcealed in the light of "ingenious images," through the claim of Being. In Vico's attempt to clarify the essential difference between beings and that which Ingenium reveals we find that insight which, in our terminology, has been called the ontological difference. Vico writes: "Ingenium and nature meant the same thing for the Italians. This is because the human Ingenium is itself the nature of man... Those who excell in this capacity were called by the Italians 'ingegneri.'" Metaphorical activity plays a central role in this process. It provides, on the basis of the recognition of similarities, the images in whose light we "read" reality.

P. 74

Engineers excel. Sweet.

2009-11-06T10:54:00.000-08:00

Radical Notes on Learning Truth Telling Beyond Neoliberal Education.

[Heidegger] attempts to show that the learnable is beyond the factual, the experimental and the measurable. By 'beyond' is meant that the 'learnable' is not determined by any of these three concerns of science, and at the same time in its absence, the notion of the 'learnable' science is no longer 'discovering research'.

This is perhaps when science becomes the slave of politicians and finance capital.

What does Heidegger have to say about the "learnable".

That it is mathematical.

2009-11-03T12:52:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

More on Faye, Rosenbaum, and other pseuds at Lawrence Helm's Blog and The American Scene.

2009-11-03T11:49:00.000-08:00

From an interview with poet Ron Price, the affinity of Thoreau and Heidegger.

I: For Heidegger an intricate and mysterious connection existed between finding a sense of self and the natural world. He sought refuge from the pervasive hauntings of the idle chatter of town and group life. This was also true of Thoreau. This is also true in your poetry as well, is there not, a search for solitude, a fatigue with chatter?

P: Yes, both Thoreau and Heidegger sought refuge in withdrawal from the social domain, into nature, into solitude, into silence, into reflection, into writing, into moments of vision of what it means to be human, to ask the questions in order to situate oneself in the world, to pluck the finer fruits of life, to move beyond the factitious cares and the superfluously coarse labours of life, beyond the slumber, the mindless mechanical motions of living, and so enter the poetic, the divine life. In a perpetual openness, like Thoreau and Heidegger, my life becomes my stage and I become both actor and audience. And involvement in what Horace Holley calls 'the social religion' requires the kind of solitude and silence I am talking about here from time to time. In life one needs both: the social and the solitary.

2009-11-03T06:31:00.000-08:00

Continuing the excerpt from Derrida's Politics of Friendship.

These same questions should lead, by way of the Gespräch between the thinker and the poet, the Gespräch that always supposes some sort of friendship, toward two types of texts: on the one hand, those addressed to Hölderlin (“Wo aber sind die Freunde?,” in Andenken), on the other, those addressed to Trakl, to the figures of “the friend who follows the stranger,” of the brother and sister, precisely around this motif of the Geschlecht.

We should also reread, from this perspective, the 1943—44 course on Heraclitus on the interpretation of philia in the name philosophy (philia tou sophou) or of philein in the Heraclitean saying (“Der Spruch Heraklits: phusis kruptesthai philei”). Here Heidegger interprets philia as favor (Gunst), a benevolent protection or happiness for (Gönnen, Gewähren). “In der physis waltet die Gunst” (132). “In physis benevolence reigns—that which accords or is in agreement, like the favorableness of a favor.” Or again “Wir verstehen das philein als die Gunsi und das Gönnen”: “We understand philein as favor or solicitude.” Philia is here the essential and reciprocal or alternating (wechselweise) relationship between the raising, opening, or becoming-open (Aufgehen) and the decline (Untergehen) or self-dissimulation (Sichverbergen) of physis. Physis as philia is accord granted, this solicitude for revelation and self-dissimulation, this self-accord of the Aufgahen and the Untergehen. It has a relationship to itself which is at once generous and jealous, if one can say this, which means that it loves to hide. One of Heidegger's concerns is to avoid anachronism in this understanding of philia and philein. This anachronistic deafness would above all consist of anthropologizing, psychologizing, subjectivizing philein. Heidegger appears to hold a modern, or at any rate post- Christian, metaphysics of subjectivity responsible for this. I find it difficult to follow him in this epochal scansion, especially when he excludes Aristotle from this anthropologization of philia or of philein. It would be one thing to call the subject-object point of view anachronistic, another to say that the anthropological, or even the psychological point of view was foreign to Aristotle. It is true that for Heidegger what in modernity is called anthropology or psychology would be entirely dependent on a metaphysics of subjectivity, on an interpretation of man as subject. It is this that allows him to say, in the same passage, that Christianity constitutes the preparatory stage of an education in the passions, and even of a psychology: “For the Greeks, there is no psychology. Aristotle’s treatise Peri Psykhès has nothing to do with 'psychology.’ In the completion of metaphysics, metaphysics becomes ‘psychology,’ in other words psychology and anthropology are the last words of metaphysics. Psychology and technics go hand in hand. (Im Griechentum gibt es keine Psychologie. Die Abhandlung des Aristoteles Peri Psykhès hat mit “Psycholgie” nichts zu tun. In der Vollendung der Metaphysik wird die Metaphysik zur “Psychologie”, d.h. die Psycholoie und die Anthropologie ist das letzte Wort der Metaphysik. Psychologie und Technik gehören zusammen wie rechts und links)".

Whatever one might say about this epochal distribution and the problems it poses. one has to conclude, at any rate, that when Heidegger evokes the friend or friendship, he does so in a space which is no longer or not yet that of the person, the subject, the anthropos of anthropology, or the psychè of psychology.

When Heidegger, in the rather late text on Was ist das—die Philosophie? (1956), attempts to return to an experience of speech or of language (Sprache) originary enough to precede, in some way, questioning itself (das Fragen): when he recalls that this questioning, namely the very movement of research, knowledge, philosophy, presupposes a certain acquiescence, an accord granted to Sprache and engaged in it, he perhaps rediscovers this region of accord or of philein which has not yet become philosophia, a questioning tension, the eroticization of a Streben, a jealous, nostalgic, mournful, or curious contraction of Eros.

2009-11-02T19:43:00.000-08:00

Leo Strauss on receiving needed instruction, from Philosophy As Rigorous Science.

There is no room for political philosophy in Heidegger's work, and this may well be due to the fact that the room in question is occupied by gods or the gods. This does not mean that Heidegger is wholly alien to politics: he welcomed Hitler's revolution in 1933 and he, who had never praised any other contemporary political effort, still praised national socialism long after Hitler had been muted and Heil Hitler had been transformed into Heil Unheil. We cannot help holding these facts against Heidegger. Moreover, one is bound to misunderstand Heidegger's thought radically if one does not see their intricate connection with the core of his philosophic thought. Nevertheless, they afford too small a basis for the proper understanding of his thought. As far as I can see, he is of the opinion that none of his critics and none of his followers has understood him adequately. I believe that he is right, for is the same not also true, more or less, of ail outstanding thinkers? This does not dispense us, however, from taking a stand toward him, for we do this at any rate implicitly; in doing it explicitly, we run no greater risk than exposing ourselves to ridicule and perhaps receiving some needed instruction.

2009-11-02T13:56:00.000-08:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Philosophy 251: Visions of the Self explains zuhanden and vorhanden.

2009-11-02T07:49:00.000-08:00

From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the abject shallowness of celebrity tidbits.

Yet so much of our every day life – conversations in queues, reading newspapers, watching television – is routinely superficial. It involves little reflection or analysis. It's what German philosopher Martin Heidegger called "groundless floating" – a sort of existential treading water, which adds little to our character.

We lose ourselves in daily interaction with things and people, rarely questioning the fundamental ideas or values we're upholding – perhaps they're a little frightening.

And the entertainment media feed on this, of course. If it's 'idle talk' we want, magazines like New! will supply it: a few minutes of distracted bliss, where the abstract failures or triumphs of famous strangers can take us away from ourselves.

Jordan's sex life is a vaporous lure for groundless floating.

But when, then, does the shallowness end? What moments offers us retreat from surfaces and reflexes? For someone like Heidegger, it presumably ends with philosophy or poetry – with some radical authenticity, or re-envisioning of Western civilization. Others have replied with God, art or revolution.

But with Jordan in mind, I'm suggesting intimacy.

2009-11-01T21:55:00.000-08:00

The New Republic's Damon Linker comes out against book burning: Why Read Heidegger.

By now, scholars have demonstrated beyond just about any reasonable doubt that, judged from moral and political standpoints, Heidegger was a pretty despicable human being.

But here's the thing: Heidegger also possessed the most powerful philosophical mind of the twentieth century. If he had written nothing besides Being and Time (1927), he would deserve to be recognized as Europe's greatest philosopher since the death of G.W.F. Hegel in 1831. (I realize that for many philosophy professors trained in the Anglo-American tradition, the judgment contained in the previous sentence is absurd on more than one level.) But Heidegger wrote much more than Being and Time. His collected works--including previously published books, transcripts of university lectures, private notebooks, and much else--will eventually run to over 100 volumes. There's a lot of redundancy in those books, some of it is impenetrable, but there are also frequent flashes of philosophical brilliance that rival the profoundest passages of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. And that means that rendering a global judgment of Heidegger and his legacy is extremely complicated.

Unless, that is, you're Carlin Romano.

2009-11-01T20:22:00.000-08:00

A local bookclub is doing Montaigne's On Friendship this week, and while reading up on it, I came across this in Derrida's Politics of Friendship.

Will one say, in a rather Aristotelian gesture, that this friendship has merely an accidental and analogical relation with friendship in the strict or proper sense? Or with friendship which is “perfect of its kind” (Montaigne)?

The question thus becomes: “What is friendship in the proper sense?” Is it ever present? What is presence for this philia protè or for this teleia philia, whose aporia we have caught a glimpse of? “What is the essence of friendship?” If we are not close to answering this question, it is not only because of the very large number of philosophical difficulties still before us, which we are going to try to approach. In a preliminary, principal way, at once simple and abyssal, it is because the question “what is? (ti estin),” the question of essence or truth, has already unfolded itself, as the question of philosophy, starting from a certain experience of philein and philia.

There is not enough space here to tie this question to the elaboration that Heidegger proposes of it, notably in Was ist das—die Philosophie? This elaboration concerns the moment in which the philein of Heraclitus’ philein to sophon, after having been determined as originary accord (ein ursprünglicher Einklang, harmonia) would have become an orientation toward research, a jealous and tense inquisition or striving (strebende Suchen) “determined by Eros” (50—51). It is only with this eroticization of the questioning about beings (“was ist das Seiende, insofern es ist?”) that thought (das Denken) would have become philosophy. “Heraclitus and Parmenides were not yet philosophers” (52—53). The “step” toward philosophy would have been prepared by the Sophists and finally achieved by Socrates and Plato. Guided by a vigilant reading of this interpretation, we might attempt to follow the very discreet thread of an incessant meditation on friendship in the path of Heidegger's thought. The meditation passes, in particular, by way of the unexpected and isolated allusion to the “voice of the friend (Stimme des Freundes) that every Dasein carries within itself” (Sein und Zeit §34, 163). The existential analytic of Dasein that “carries (trägt)” this voice in itself, let us not forget, is neither an anthropology, nor a sociology, nor an analytic of the subject, consciousness, psyche, or the ego—neither a morals nor a politics. All these disciplines presuppose it. This loads the allusion to the voice of the friend—and thus friendship itself—with a very particular ontological signification, in the chapter on “Dasein und Rede, Die Sprache” (160-67) and not even in the analytic of Mitsein. This strange “voice,” at once both internal and from elsewhere, perhaps has some relation to the “voice” of conscience (Gewissen) of which Heidegger also proposes an existential analytic (§57). The provenance of the call, its Woher, is an Unheimlichkeit (§58). The voice of the call is, moreover, experienced as an alien, non-intimate voice (unvertraut—so etwas wie eine fremde Stimme) by the everyday “they” (§57: 277). Since the sex of this “friend” is not determined, I would also be tempted to graft onto this reading the questions I have elsewhere posed on the word Geschlecht and sexual difference in Heidegger (Derrida "Geschlecht: différence sexuelle, différence ontologique" and "La main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II)").

Continued.

2009-10-31T07:51:00.000-07:00

Otto Pöggeler explains stuff.

Heidegger believes that the nothing in non-being-- truth is concealed and as non-ground--must be a thought as belonging to Being. The nothing which belongs to Being is not, of course, the absolute nothing which can only be an ens rationis. Rather, is it a no-thing in relation to beings; that is the Being to which nothing belongs to is not a being, nor a property of beings, nor controllable by any being. Being is the truth of beings only as a ground which is their non-ground. As a twofold negativity, Being is not all controllable; it is the history over which we do not dispose. Being is indeed the truth of beings but in its own truth, it is the uncontrollable and temporal history, the event of Appropriation, Ereignis. In the event of Appropriation, the temporal history and "giving"-character of the truth of Being shows itself.

P. 178

Translated by Parvis Emad, in Thomas Sheehan's Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, 1981.

2009-10-30T16:25:00.000-07:00

Wozu Dichter?

Poetically, Man Dwells

Those whose dung-boots
still reek
of freedom;
still fit the soil
as perfectly
as the glove
that holds them

2009-10-30T15:17:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Things Syntactical cooks Sein und Zeit.

2009-10-30T11:49:00.000-07:00

An article on Slate explores the perversity of Arendt.

In a long, carefully documented essay, Wasserstein cites Arendt's scandalous use of quotes from anti-Semitic and Nazi "authorities" on Jews in her Totalitarianism book.

Wasserstein concludes that her use of these sources was "more than a methodological error: it was symptomatic of a perverse world-view contaminated by over-exposure to the discourse of collective contempt and stigmatization that formed the object of her study"—that object being anti-Semitism. In other words, he contends, Arendt internalized the values of the anti-Semitic literature she read in her study of anti-Semitism, at least to a certain extent.

So Arendt, a committed Zionist, was also an anti-semite. It appears that it is getting harder for anyone of any intellectual import to meet the requirements of political correctness in our dark times.

2009-10-30T07:08:00.000-07:00

Things still thing in the age of digital reproduction.

Collectors of stamps or baseball cards could have their entire collections scanned so that they could look at them on the computer, but I’m sure most collectors of those items would find that thought absurd. They would much rather have them out on display to look at and show people.

So why would music collectors find this any different? There is an intangible joy about being able to hold the object in your hand. By doing this, it feels like it’s yours to keep and to own.

2009-10-30T05:20:00.000-07:00

Erik Morse interviews Peter Sloterdijk in Frieze Magazine.

EM For those readers who are unfamiliar with your theories of bubbles and foams, what do you see as the fate of the traditional house in this larger progression or digression of dwelling in the 20th century?
PS My ‘foam city’ is a theory of living in an apartment. An apartment is obviously a place that contains the means of communication to link you with the outer world, yet it is also a spatialized immune system. It immunizes you against the influences of the outer world but it simultaneously links you to the Mitwelt [‘social world’], which is a form of ‘connected isolation’ – a term coined by Thom Mayne, an American architect, in the early 1970s. ‘Connected isolation’ could be a Heideggerian concept. It is probably one of the most profound concepts that has ever been developed within modern architectural theory because it contains a judgment on the modern way of life. I don’t believe in Heidegger’s hypothesis of modern times as the time of homelessness. What I see is a transformation in all these traditional complaints about modern homelessness into a language of immunology. For me, practical metaphysics has to be translated into the language of general immunology because human beings, due to their openness to the world, are extremely vulnerable – from a biological level, to the juridical and social levels, to the symbolic and ritual levels.

2009-10-29T22:19:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Reading the Maps on Benedict XVI's Spe Salvi Encyclical.

It seems to me that Ratzinger's interpretation of modern Western thought owes a great deal to Martin Heidegger, the controversial German philosopher who cut his teeth as a Catholic critic of modernity before turning against the church, falling in and out of love with Nazism, and retreating, in the last decades of his long life, into a sort of quietism.

...

It seems to me that, if the word 'God' were exchanged for the word 'being', then parts of Ratzinger's 2007 Enyclical could have been written by Heidegger. And it is not only in the passages of Spe Salvi that discuss Marx and modern Western thought that we find possible echoes of Heidegger.

...

If Ratzinger has adopted some key Heideggerian ideas, what does this tell us about him? It cannot be denied that Heidegger identified some very negative qualities in the modern world. He was a ferocious critic of the special type of alienation that is part of life in many urbanised nations, he despised the shallowness of consumer culture in capitalist nations, and he was horrified by the damage done to the environment by industrial technology. But Heidegger's wholesale rejection of modernity meant that he was unable to suggest any way of ameliorating the ills that he diagnosed, and he retreated into a quietism that was only punctuated by his brief but horrific flirtation with Nazism. In his last interview, given to the German newspaper Die Spiegel in 1966, Heidegger refused to support any political system, insisting that 'only the coming of a God can save us'.

There is a similar hopelessness implicit in Ratzinger's 2007 Encyclical.

2009-10-29T09:42:00.000-07:00

William J. Richardson on how prosopopeia grounds truth.

Lacan insists on one more point: the close correlation between truth and the function of language. For Heidegger, this correlation is based upon his interpretation of the meaning of lógos for the Greeks, as we have seen, for example in the work of Heraclitus (1975, 59-78). Although lógos from early on was associated with speech, the original sense of it for Heraclitus, Heidegger claims, came from legein, meaning "to gather" (as one gathers wood), or "to bring together" into some kind of unity, that thereby becomes manifest as what it is. Like phýsis, lógos was from the beginning associated with the coming to pass of alétheia, the unconcealment of everything that is. The task of human beings would be to collaborate with the process by letting beings be seen as what they are. Eventually, it became possible to think of this gathering process (the coming-to-pass of truth) as originary language and of the vocation of human beings as bringing it to expression in words. At any rate, the vocation of human beings as such would be to bring to articulation the language of lógos as process of alétheia, a task for which the poets serve as models. Psychoanalytically speaking, then, alétheia comes to pass through the lógos that functions in the very speaking through which "full" speech comes about. It is in this sense that "truth is grounded in the fact that it speaks and it has no other means of [being grounded]".

2009-10-28T19:23:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Back-to-front on the man not measuring up to the philosophy.

Heidegger wrote in Being and Time that resoluteness, again part of authenticity, is "letting oneself be called forth to one’s ownmost Being-guilty." He had in mind a sort of existential guilt (not unlike original sin, I suppose), in this part of Being and Time, but sees this existential guilt as the ground for all feelings of responsibility and guilt. Yet Heidegger refused to admit responsibility, or show any form of guilt, when it came to his Nazism and other blatantly immoral personal and professional behavior. His refusal to apologize to the very people he'd most directly harmed, his friends and students like Arendt, Jaspers, and Marcuse, shows this quite clearly. Is this Heidegger failing to live his philosophy, or at least an important aspect of it? It's difficult to draw any other conclusion.

2009-10-28T09:48:00.000-07:00

At the risk of taking cinema too seriously.

Heidegger proposed a resolution of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature which made thought and poetry into the twin summits of human achievement, different form one another but of equal dignity.

This goes together with the conviction that eminent works of art will repay a high level of attention by giving something back to the patient thinker. Heidegger sought to listen to poems in order to hear the echo of a primordial, forgotten truth. The poem knows something, and if you listen to it carefully enough it may be willing to share its knowledge with you.

This has nothing to do with traditional literary scholarship or commentary, though Heidegger drew on them when it suited him. Rather, Heidegger's devotion to poetry depended on the possibility of an intense encounter between thinker and poem which should take place outside restrictive academic norms.

Heidegger knew full well that he would seem to some to be pressing the poem too hard, seeking out nuggets of meaning through excessive, unregulated interpretive acts. Heidegger's point was that it is only by taking the poem seriously, at the risk of taking it too seriously, that it might consent to yield its secrets. Luckily for him, he didn't have to worry much about the constraints of peer review.

Whereas Heidegger thought mostly about poetry, it is only a small step to extend the same intense attention to other art forms, including cinema. Heidegger might not have liked this trivialisation of his approach, but it is in the nature of ideas to spin out of the control of any individual thinker, however prestigious he may be. High and low art are now scrutinised not just for what we might learn about them but also for what we might learn from them.

From Colin Davis on the ethical devastation of Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, in TPM Issue 47.

2009-10-28T02:58:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

First Things's Postmodern Conservative goes after new atheists.

[H]it the new atheists hard with the Heideggerian criticism of the vulgarity of their materialism. They cowardly avoid the question of being, of why is there is being rather than nothing at all, or of even why scientists or other free persons could come into being in a world eternally and wholly explained by an impersonal materialism (even or especially the evolutionists assume that this sort of explain has been and will always be true). Our creation by a personal Creator explains better human freedom, love, and creativity–especially artistic (in the broadest sense) creativity–better than assuming the eternity of matter and material causation or, of course, just begging off what might be the most important question for beings open to the truth about who they are. Atheistic materialists can’t explain the Christian revolution in our self-understanding about who we are and its effects on human history. Even the Nietzschean theory that Christianity was little more than expression of resentment about who we are (and the other animals don’t resent who they are!) can’t explain the marvelous and unprecedented monuments to the loving creativity of Christians.

Nietzsche wanted to get us over Christianity, and one criticism of his thought is that he wasn’t anti-Christian enough. Certainly he couldn’t purge himself of his whiny side about the abyss and all, and he, too, arguably attributed too much significance to human creativity. There might be some philosophers–such as Strauss and the later and more Buddhist Heidegger–who worked harder or more consistently in getting us beyond our claims for autonomy and/or being unique and irreplaceable. Are they engaged in mission impossible? Or are they our true scientists? What would be the moral and political consequences of their triumph?

Neat, that. If Heidegger was a Buddhist, then he wasn't an atheist.

2009-10-27T20:51:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

The Chasm spanks Brian Leiter.

Moreover, understanding the context of Heideggerian phenomenology in its beginning allows one to encounter why Heidegger moves to poetry. In fact, the language Heidegger adopts is provocative; it has a purpose beyond the lens put to language in any analytic framework. But again, one would have to understand the under-currents of Rilke, Holderlin, Heidegger's rejection of some central themes of the metaphysics of presence and the attempt to implement phenomenology as reasons for why Heidegger requires/uses language the way he does.

The charitability of Leiter's lapse is as charitable as a Protestant Minister's characterizing Leiter's work on moral psychology and Nietzsche. Just because Heidegger and those influenced by his philosophy look like something from the outside doesn't mean they are that way. This is a separate issue from whether or not Continental philosophers and supporters of Heidegger in general have done a good job of talking to outsiders. However, the outsiders must be willing to listen, and one good way might be to honestly represent Continental philosophy schools that are marginalized.

For what it's worth, Leiter is quite critical of Carlin Romano.

2009-10-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

Ork! Ork!

The Atlantic on Carlin Romano.

WHOM HEIDEGGER REMINDS HIM OF: Annie Leibovitz, particularly in her photos of Susan Sontag "in the latter's final battle against cancer"
...
WHAT ROMANO MAY HAVE FORGOTTEN FROM GERMAN CLASS: "Dasein"--even if it had a plural, which it does not--could not plausibly be pluralized with an "s"

Das Wesen des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz!

2009-10-27T17:38:00.000-07:00

In-der-Blog-sein

Deontologistics explicates the meaning of being.

The real value of the fundamental question is that in forcing us to think about a possible state of affairs without beings, it forces us to think this essential structure of ‘what is the case’, of the very fact that there is a state of affairs as such, independently of what beings there happen to be and what arrangements they happen to be in. The thesis that follows from this is that it is in thinking the essential structure of ‘what is the case’ that we think Being. Heidegger equates Being and Nothing precisely insofar as he holds to the ontological difference and claims that this essential structure is not an entity. Being is literally no-thing, and it remains in the absence of any-thing whatsoever.