This is a collection of Heidegger’s lectures on metaphysics and Dasein from 1935. He begins with the big question, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question.” He continues, “Philosophizing, we can now say, is extra-ordinary questioning about the extra-ordinary.”
Phusis is a big deal to Heidegger’s conception of metaphysics. He states, “The sway, phusis, first comes to to stand in what comes to presence. Beings as such now first come into being. This becoming-a-world is authentic history. Struggle as such not only allows for arising and standing-forth; it alone also preserves beings in their constancy.” We must look again to the nature of Being. “So the “universality” of “Being” in regard to all beings does not imply that we should turn away from this universality as fast as possible and turn to the particular…. The fact that for us the meaning of the word “Being” remains an indeterminate vapor is counterbalanced by the fact that we still understand Being, and distinguish it with certainty from not-Being—and this is not just another, second fact, but both belong together as one.”
Uncanniness is another critical concept for Heidegger. “The human being is, in one word, to deinotaton, the uncanniest….. The deinon is the terrible in the sense of the overwhelming sway, which induces panicked fear, true anxiety, as well as collected, inwardly reverberating, reticent awe. The violent, the overwhelming is the essential character of the sway itself…. But on the other hand, deinon means the violent in the sense of one who needs to use violence—and does not just have violence at his disposal, but is violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing, but of his Dasein…. We understand the un-canny as that which throws one out of the “canny,” that is, the homely, the accustomed, the current, the unendangered…. But human beings are the uncanniest…. They step out, move out of the limits that at first and for the most part are accustomed and homely, because as those who do violence, they overstep the limits of the homely, precisely in the direction of the uncanny in the sense of the overwhelming…. To be the uncanniest is the basic trait of the human essence.”
Heidegger does go off on what would seem to be some tangents. Many are still fruitful. He rants on the state of modernity, “The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline…. For the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free have already reached such proportions throughout the whole earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable.” He continues, “When the creators have disappeared from the people, when they are barely tolerated as irrelevant curiosities, as ornaments, as eccentrics alien to life, when authentic struggle ceases and shifts into the merely polemical, into the intrigues and machinations of human beings within the present-at-hand, then the decline has already begun. For even when an age still makes an effort just to uphold the inherited level and dignity of its Dasein, the level already sinks. It can be upheld only insofar as it is always creatively transcended.” Where is he going with this? What does it have to do with metaphysics?
Finally, Heidegger brings in how logos interacts with phusis, “In the inception, this is what happens: logos as the revealing gathering—Being, as this gathering, is fittingness in the sense of phusis—becomes the necessity of the essence of historical humanity. From here one need take only a single step to grasp how logos, so understood, determines the essence of language and how logos becomes the name for discourse. Being-human, according to its historical, history-opening essence, is logos, the gathering and apprehending of the Being of beings.” He concludes, “Being and the understanding of Being are not a present-at-hand fact. Being is the fundamental happening, the ground upon which historical Dasein is first granted in the midst of beings that are opened up as a whole…. Being, in contradistinction to becoming, is enduring. Being in contradistinction to seeming, is the enduring prototype, the always identical. Being in contradistinction to thinking, is what lies at the basis, the present-at-hand. Being in contradistinction to the ought, is what lies at hand in each case as what ought to be and has not yet been actualized or already has been actualized. Endurance, perpetual identity, presence at hand, lying at hand—all at bottom say the same: constant presence, on as ousia…. The mere determinateness of Being is not a matter of delimiting a mere meaning of a word. It is the power that today still sustains and prevails over all our relations to beings as a whole.”
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