HEIDEGGER: What Is Metaphysics? (1929*)

1. “What is metaphysics?” The question awakens expectations of a discussion about metaphysics. This we will forgo. Instead we will take up a particular metaphysical question. In this way it seems we will let ourselves be transposed directly into metaphysics. Only in this way will we provide metaphysics the proper occasion to introduce itself. Our plan begins with the unfolding of a metaphysical inquiry, then tries to elaborate the question, and concludes by answering it.

I. The Unfolding of a Metaphysical Inquiry

2. From the point of view of sound common sense philosophy is in Hegel’s words “the inverted world.” Hence the peculiar nature of our undertaking requires a preliminary sketch. This will take shape about a twofold character of metaphysical interrogation.

3. First, every metaphysical question always encompasses the whole range of metaphysical problems. Each question is itself always the whole. Therefore, second, every metaphysical question can be asked only in such a way that the questioner as such is present together with the question, that is, is placed in question. From this we conclude that metaphysical inquiry must be posed as a whole and from the essential position of the existence [Dasein] that questions. We are questioning, here and now, for ourselves. Our existence—in the community of researchers, teachers, and students—is determined by science. What happens to us, essentially, in the grounds of our existence, when science becomes our passion?

4. The scientific fields are quite diverse. The ways they treat their objects of inquiry differ fundamentally. Today only the technical organization of universities and faculties consolidates this burgeoning multiplicity of disciplines; the practical establishment of goals by each discipline provides the only meaningful source of unity. Nonetheless, the rootedness of the sciences in their essential ground has atrophied.

5. Yet when we follow their most proper intention, in all the sciences we relate ourselves to beings themselves. Precisely from the point of view of the sciences or disciplines no field takes precedence over another, neither nature over history nor vice versa. No particular way of treating objects of inquiry dominates the others. Mathematical knowledge is no more rigorous than philological-historical knowledge. It merely has the character of “exactness,” which does not coincide with rigor. To demand exactness in the study of history is to violate the idea of the specific rigor of the humanities. The relation to the world that pervades all the sciences as such lets them — each according to its particular content and mode of being — seek beings themselves in order to make them objects of investigation and to determine their grounds.

6. According to the idea behind them, in the sciences we approach what is essential in all things. This distinctive relation to the world in which we turn toward beings themselves is supported and guided by a freely chosen attitude of human existence. To be sure, man’s prescientific and extrascientific activities also are related to beings. But science is exceptional in that, in a way peculiar to it, it gives the matter itself explicitly and solely the first and last word. In such impartiality of inquiring, determining, and grounding, a peculiarly delineated submission to beings themselves obtains, in order that they may reveal themselves. This position of service in research and theory evolves in such a way as to become the ground of the possibility of a proper though limited leadership in the whole of human existence. The special relation science sustains to the world and the attitude of man that guides it can of course be fully grasped only when we see and comprehend what happens in the relation to the world so attained. Man — one being among others — ”pursues science.” In this “pursuit,” nothing less transpires than the irruption by one being called “man” into the whole of beings, indeed in such a way that in and through this irruption beings break open and show what they are and how they are. The irruption that breaks open in its way helps beings above all to themselves.

7. This trinity—relation to the world, attitude, and irruption—in its radical unity brings a luminous simplicity and aptness of Dasein to scientific existence. If we are to take explicit possession of the Dasein illuminated in this way for ourselves, then we must say:
That to which the relation to the world refers are beings them selves—and nothing besides.
That from which every attitude takes its guidance are beings themselves—and nothing further.
That with which the scientific confrontation in the irruption oc curs are beings themselves—and beyond that nothing.
But what is remarkable is that, precisely in the way scientific man secures to himself what is most properly his, he speaks of something different. What should be examined are beings only, and besides that — nothing; beings alone, and further — nothing; solely beings, and beyond that — nothing.

8. What about this nothing? The nothing is rejected precisely by science, given up as a nullity. But when we give up the nothing in such a way don’t we just concede it? Can we, however, speak of concession when we concede nothing? But perhaps our confused talk already degenerates into an empty squabble over words. Against it science must now reassert its seriousness and soberness of mind, insisting that it is concerned solely with beings. The nothing — what else can it be for science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right, then only one thing is sure: science wishes to know nothing of the nothing. Ultimately this is the scientifically rigorous conception of the nothing. We know it, the nothing, in that we wish to know nothing about it.

9. Science wants to know nothing of the nothing. But even so it is certain that when science tries to express its proper essence it calls upon the nothing for help. It has recourse to what it rejects. What incongruous state of affairs reveals itself here? With this reflection on our contemporary existence as one determined by science we find ourselves enmeshed in a controversy. In the course of this controversy a question has already evolved. It only requires explicit formulation: How is it with the nothing?

II. The Elaboration of the Question


10. The elaboration of the question of the nothing must bring us to the point where an answer becomes possible or the impossibility of any answer becomes clear. The nothing is conceded. With a studied indifference science abandons it as what “there is not.”

11. All the same, we shall try to ask about the nothing. What is the nothing? Our very first approach to this question has something unusual about it. In our asking we posit the nothing in advance as something that “is” such and such; we posit it as a being. But that is exactly what it is distinguished from. Interrogating the nothing — asking what and how it, the nothing, is — turns what is interrogated into its opposite. The question deprives itself of its own object. Accordingly, every answer to this question is also impossible from the start. For it necessarily assumes the form: the nothing “is” this or that. With regard to the nothing question and answer alike are inherently absurd.

12. But it is not science’s rejection that first of all teaches us this. The commonly cited ground rule of all thinking, the proposition that contradiction is to be avoided, universal “logic” itself, lays low this question. For thinking, which is always essentially thinking about something, must act in a way contrary to its own essence when it thinks of the nothing. Since it remains wholly impossible for us to make the nothing into an object have we not already come to the end of our inquiry into the nothing — assuming that in this question “logic” is of supreme importance, that the intellect is the means, and thought the way, to conceive the nothing originally and to decide about its possible exposure?

13. But are we allowed to tamper with the rule of “logic”? Isn’t intellect the taskmaster in this question of the nothing? Only with its help can we at all define the nothing and pose it as a problem — which, it is true, only devours itself. For the nothing is the negation of the totality of beings; it is nonbeing pure and simple. But with that we bring the nothing under the higher determination of the negative, viewing it as the negated. However, according to the reigning and never challenged doctrine of “logic,” negation is a specific act of the intellect. How then can we in our question of the nothing, indeed in the question of its questionability, wish to brush the intellect aside? Are we altogether sure about what we are presupposing in this matter? Do not the “not,” negatedness, and thereby negation too represent the higher determination under which the nothing falls as a particular kind of negated matter? Is the nothing given only because the “not,” i.e., negation, is given? Or is it the other way around? Are negation and the “not” given only because the nothing is given? That has not been decided; it has not even been raised expressly as a question. We assert that the nothing is more original than the “not” and negation.

14. If this thesis is right, then the possibility of negation as an act of the intellect, and thereby the intellect itself, are somehow dependent upon the nothing. Then how can the intellect hope to decide about the nothing? Does the ostensible absurdity of question and answer with respect to the nothing in the end rest solely in a blind conceit of the far-ranging intellect? But if we do not let ourselves be misled by the formal impossibility of the question of the nothing; if we pose the question in spite of this; then we must at least satisfy what remains the basic demand for the possible advancing of every question. If the nothing itself is to be questioned as we have been questioning it, then it must be given beforehand. We must be able to encounter it.

15. Where shall we seek the nothing? Where will we find the nothing? In order to find something must we not already know in general that it is there? Indeed! At first and for the most part man can seek only when he has anticipated the being at hand of what he is looking for. Now the nothing is what we are seeking. Is there ultimately such a thing as a search without that anticipation, a search to which pure discovery belongs?

16. Whatever we may make of it, we do know the nothing, if only as a word we rattle off every day. For this common nothing that glides so inconspicuously through our chatter, blanched with the anemic pallor of the obvious, we can without hesitating furnish even a “definition”: The nothing is the complete negation of the totality of beings. Doesn’t this characterization of the nothing ultimately provide an indication of the direction from which alone the nothing can come to meet us? The totality of beings must be given in advance so as to be able to fall prey straightaway to negation — in which the nothing itself would then be manifest.

17. But even if we ignore the questionableness of the relation between negation and the nothing, how should we who are essentially finite make the whole of beings penetrable in themselves and especially for us? We can of course conjure up the whole of beings in an “idea,” then negate what we have imagined in our thought, and thus “think” it negated. In this way we do attain the formal concept of the imagined nothing but never the nothing itself. But the nothing is nothing, and, if the nothing represents total indistinguishability, no distinction can obtain between the imagined and the “genuine” nothing. And the “genuine" nothing itself — isn’t this that camouflaged but absurd concept of a nothing that is? For the last time now the objections of the intellect would call a halt to our search, whose legitimacy, however, can be demonstrated only on the basis of a fundamental experience of the nothing.

18. As surely as we can never comprehend absolutely the ensemble of beings in themselves we certainly do find ourselves stationed in the midst of beings that are revealed somehow as a whole. In the end an essential distinction prevails between comprehending the ensemble of beings in themselves and finding oneself in the midst of beings as a whole. The former is impossible in principle. The latter happens all the time in our existence. It does seem as though we cling to this or that particular being, precisely in our everyday preoccupations, as though we were completely abandoned to this or that region of beings. No matter how fragmented our everyday existence may appear to be, however, it always deals with beings in a unity of the “whole,” if only in a shadowy way. Even and precisely then when we are not actually busy with things or ourselves this “as a whole” overcomes us — for example in genuine boredom. Boredom is still distant when it is only this book or that play, that business or this idleness, that drags on. It irrupts when “one is bored.” Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole.

19. Another possibility of such revelation is concealed in our joy in the present existence — and not simply in the person — of a human being whom we love. Such being attuned, in which we “are” one way or another and which determines us through and through, lets us find ourselves among beings as a whole. The founding mode of attunement [die Befiridlichkeit der Stimmung] not only reveals beings as a whole in various ways, but this revealing — far from being merely incidental — is also the basic occurrence of our Dasein.

20. What we call a “feeling” is neither a transitory epiphenomenon of our thinking and willing behavior nor simply an impulse that provokes such behavior nor merely a present condition we have to put up with somehow or other. But just when moods of this sort bring us face to face with beings as a whole they conceal from us the nothing we are seeking. Now we come to share even less in the opinion that the negation of beings as a whole that are revealed to us in mood places us before the nothing. Such a thing could happen only in a correspondingly original mood which in the most proper sense of unveiling reveals the nothing.

21. Does such an attunement, in which man is brought before the nothing itself, occur in human existence? This can and does occur, although rarely enough and only for a moment, in the fundamental mood of anxiety. By this anxiety we do not mean the quite common anxiousness, ultimately reducible to fearfulness, which all too readily comes over us. Anxiety is basically different from fear. We become afraid in the face of this or that particular being that threatens us in this or that particular respect. Fear in the face of something is also in each case a fear for something in particular. Because fear possesses this trait of being “fear in the face of” and “fear for,” he who fears and is afraid is captive to the mood in which he finds himself. Striving to rescue himself from this particular thing, he becomes unsure of everything else and completely “loses his head.”

22. Anxiety does not let such confusion arise. Much to the contrary, a peculiar calm pervades it. Anxiety is indeed anxiety in the face of... ,but not in the face of this or that thing. Anxiety in the face of . . . is always anxiety for . . . , but not for this or that. The indeterminateness of that in the face of which and for which we become anxious is no mere lack of determination but rather the essential impossibility of determining it. In a familiar phrase this indeterminateness comes to the fore.

23. In anxiety, we say, “one feels ill at ease [es ist einem un heimlich].” What is “it” that makes “one” feel ill at ease? We cannot say what it is before which one feels ill at ease. As a whole it is so for him. All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather in this very receding things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole that closes in on us in anxiety oppresses us. We can get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this “no hold on things” comes over us and remains. Anxiety reveals the nothing.

24. We “hover” in anxiety. More precisely, anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole. This implies that we ourselves — we who are in being — in the midst of beings slip away from ourselves. At bottom therefore it is not as though “you” or “I” feel ill at ease; rather it is this way for some ‘‘one.’’ In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto, pure Dasein is all that is still there.

25. Anxiety robs us of speech. Because beings as a whole slip away, so that just the nothing crowds round, in the face of anxiety all utterance of the “is” falls silent. That in the malaise of anxiety we often try to shatter the vacant stillness with compulsive talk only proves the presence of the nothing. That anxiety reveals the nothing man himself immediately demonstrates when anxiety has dissolved. In the lucid vision sustained by fresh remembrance we must say that that in the face of which and for which we were anxious was “really — nothing. Indeed: the nothing itself — as such — was there.

26. With the fundamental mood of anxiety we have arrived at that occurrence in human existence in which the nothing is revealed and from which it must be interrogated. How is it with the nothing?

III. The Response to the Question

27. We have already won the answer which for our purposes is at least at first the only essential one when we take heed that the question of the nothing remains actually posed. This requires that we actively complete that transformation of man into his Dasein which every instance of anxiety occasions in us, in order to get a grip on the nothing revealed there as it makes itself known. At the same time this demands that we expressly hold at a distance those designations of the nothing that do not result from its claims.

28. The nothing reveals itself in anxiety — but not as a being. Just as little is it given as an object. Anxiety is no kind of grasping of the nothing. All the same, the nothing reveals itself in and through anxiety, although, to repeat, not in such a way that the nothing becomes manifest in our malaise quite apart from beings as a whole. Rather we said that in anxiety the nothing is encountered at one with beings as a whole. What does this “at one with” mean?

29. In anxiety beings as a whole become superfluous. In what sense does this happen? Beings are not annihilated by anxiety, so that nothing is left. How could they be, when anxiety finds itself precisely in utter impotence with regard to beings as a whole? Rather the nothing makes itself known with beings and in beings expressly as a slipping away of the whole.

30. No kind of annihilation of the ensemble of beings as such takes place in anxiety; just as little do we produce a negation of beings as a whole in order to attain the nothing for the first time. Apart from the consideration that the expressive function of a negating assertion remains foreign to anxiety as such, we also come always too late with such a negation which should produce the nothing. The nothing rises to meet us already before that. We said it is encountered “at one with” beings that are slipping away as a whole.

31. In anxiety occurs a shrinking back before . . . which is surely not any sort of flight but rather a kind of bewildered calm. This “back before” takes its departure from the nothing. The nothing itself does not attract; it is essentially repelling. But this repulsion is itself as such a parting gesture toward beings that are submerging as a whole. This wholly repelling gesture toward beings that are in retreat as a whole, which is the action of the nothing that oppresses Dasein in anxiety, is the essence of the nothing: nihilation. It is neither an annihilation of beings nor does it spring from a negation. Nihilation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself nihilates.

32. Nihilation is not some fortuitous incident. Rather, as the repelling gesture toward the retreating whole of beings, it discloses these beings in their full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radically other — with respect to the nothing. In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings — and not nothing. But this “and not nothing” we add in our talk is not some kind of appended clarification. Rather it makes possible in advance the revelation of beings in general. The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that it brings Dasein for the first time before beings as such.

33. Only on the ground of the original revelation of the nothing can human existence approach and penetrate beings. But since existence in its essence relates itself to beings — those which it is not and that which it is — it emerges as such existence in each case from the nothing already revealed. Dasein means: being held out into the nothing.

34. Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we call “transcendence.” If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out into the nothing, then it could never be related to beings nor even to itself. Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom.

35. With that the answer to the question of the nothing is gained. The nothing is neither an object nor any being at all. The nothing comes forward neither for itself nor next to beings, to which it would, as it were, adhere. For human existence the nothing makes possible the openedness of beings as such. The nothing does not merely serve as the counterconcept of beings; rather it originally belongs to their essential unfolding as such. In the Being of beings the nihilation of the nothing occurs.

36. But now a suspicion we have been suppressing too long must finally find expression. If Dasein can relate itself to beings only by holding itself out into the nothing and can exist only thus; and if the nothing is originally disclosed only in anxiety; then must we not hover in this anxiety constantly in order to be able to exist at all? And have we not ourselves confessed that this original anxiety is rare? But above all else, we all do exist and relate ourselves to beings which we may or may not be — without this anxiety. Is this not an arbitrary invention and the nothing attributed to it a flight of fancy?

37. Yet what does it mean that this original anxiety occurs only in rare moments? Nothing else than that the nothing is at first and for the most part distorted with respect to its originality. How, then? In this way: we usually lose ourselves altogether among beings in a certain way. The more we turn toward beings in our preoccupations the less we let beings as a whole slip away as such and the more we turn away from the nothing. Just as surely do we hasten into the public superficies of existence. And yet this constant if ambiguous turning away from the nothing accords, within certain limits, with the most proper significance of the nothing. In its nihilation the nothing directs us precisely toward beings. The nothing nihilates incessantly without our really knowing of this occurrence in the manner of our everyday knowledge.

38. What testifies to the constant and widespread though distorted revelation of the nothing in our existence more compellingly than negation? But negation does not conjure the “not” out of itself as a means for making distinctions and oppositions in whatever is given, inserting itself, as it were, in between what is given. How could negation produce the not from itself when it can make denials only when something deniable is already granted to it? But how could the deniable and what is to be denied be viewed as something susceptible to the not unless all thinking as such has caught sight of the not already? But the not can become manifest only when its origin, the nihilation of the nothing in general, and therewith the nothing itself, is disengaged from concealment. The not does not originate through negation; rather negation is grounded in the not that springs from the nihilation of the nothing. But negation is also only one way of nihilating, that is, only one sort of behavior that has been grounded beforehand in the nihilation of the nothing.

39. In this way the above thesis in its main features has been proven: the nothing is the origin of negation, not vice versa. If the power of the intellect in the field of inquiry into the nothing and into Being is thus shattered, then the destiny of the reign of “logic” in philosophy is thereby decided. The idea of “logic” itself disintegrates in the turbulence of a more original questioning.

40. No matter how much or in how many ways negation, expressed or implied, permeates all thought, it is by no means the sole authoritative witness for the revelation of the nothing belonging essentially to Dasein. For negation cannot claim to be either the sole or the leading nihilative behavior in which Dasein remains shaken by the nihilation of the nothing. Unyielding antagonism and stinging rebuke have a more abysmal source than the measured negation of thought. Galling failure and merciless prohibition require some deeper answer. Bitter privation is more burdensome.

41. These possibilities of nihilative behavior — forces in which Dasein bears its thrownness without mastering it — are not types of mere negation. That does not prevent them, however, from speaking out in the “no” and in negation. Indeed here for the first time the barrenness and range of negation betray themselves. The saturation of existence by nihilative behavior testifies to the constant though doubtlessly obscured manifestation of the nothing that only anxiety originally reveals. But this implies that the original anxiety in existence is usually repressed. Anxiety is there. It is only sleeping. Its breath quivers perpetually through Dasein, only slightly in those who are jittery, imperceptibly in the “Oh, yes” and the “Oh, no” of men of affairs; but most readily in the reserved, and most assuredly in those who are basically daring. But those daring ones are sustained by that on which they expend themselves — in order thus to preserve a final greatness in existence.

42. The anxiety of those who are daring cannot be opposed to joy or even to the comfortable enjoyment of tranquilized bustle. It stands outside all such opposition — in secret alliance with the cheerfulness and gentleness of creative longing. Original anxiety can awaken in existence at any moment. It needs no unusual event to rouse it. Its sway is as thoroughgoing as its possible occasionings are trivial. It is always ready, though it only seldom springs, and we are snatched away and left hanging.

43. Being held out into the nothing — as Dasein is on the ground of concealed anxiety makes man a place-holder of the nothing. We are so finite that we cannot even bring ourselves originally before the nothing through our own decision and will. So profoundly does finitude entrench itself in existence that our most proper and deepest limitation refuses to yield to our freedom. Being held out into the nothing — as Dasein is — on the ground of concealed anxiety is its surpassing of beings as a whole. It is transcendence.

44. Our inquiry concerning the nothing should bring us face to face with metaphysics itself. The name “metaphysics” derives from the Greek meta ta physika. This peculiar title was later interpreted as characterizing the inquiry, the meta or trans extending out “over” beings as such. Metaphysics is inquiry beyond or over beings which aims to recover them as such and as a whole for our grasp.

45. In the question concerning the nothing such an inquiry beyond or over beings, as being as a whole, takes place. It proves thereby to be a “metaphysical” question. At the outset we ascribed a two fold character to such questions: first, each metaphysical question always encompasses the whole of metaphysics; second, every metaphysical question implicates the interrogating Dasein in each case in the question. To what extent does the question concerning the nothing permeate and embrace the whole of metaphysics?

46. For a long time metaphysics has expressed the nothing in a proposition clearly susceptible of more than one meaning: ex nihilo nihil fit — from nothing, nothing comes to be. Although in discussions of the proposition the nothing itself never really becomes a problem, the respective views of the nothing nevertheless express the guiding fundamental conception of beings. Ancient metaphysics conceives the nothing in the sense of nonbeing, that is, unformed matter, matter which cannot take form as an informed being that would offer an outward appearance or aspect (eidos). To be in being is to be a self-forming form that exhibits itself as such in an image (as a spectacle). The origins, legitimacy, and limits of this conception of Being are as little discussed as the nothing itself. On the other hand, Christian dogma denies the truth of the proposition ex nihilo nihil fit and thereby bestows on the nothing a transformed significance, the sense of the complete absence of beings apart from God: ex nihilo fit — ens creatum [From nothing comes—created being]. Now the nothing becomes the counterconcept to being proper, the summum ens, God as ens increatum. Here too the interpretation of the nothing designates the basic conception of beings. But the metaphysical discussion of beings stays on the same level as the question of the nothing. The questions of Being and of the nothing as such are not posed. Therefore no one is bothered by the difficulty that if God creates out of nothing precisely He must be able to relate Himself to the nothing. But if God is God he cannot know the nothing, assuming that the “Absolute” excludes all nothingness.

47. This cursory historical review shows the nothing as the counter-concept to being proper, that is, as its negation. But if the nothing becomes any problem at all, then this opposition does not merely undergo a somewhat more significant determination; rather it awakens for the first time the genuine formulation of the metaphysical question concerning the Being of beings. The nothing does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but reveals itself as belonging to the Being of beings.

48. “Pure Being and pure Nothing are therefore the same.” This proposition of Hegel’s (Science of Logic, vol. I, Werke III, 74) is correct. Being and the nothing do belong together, not because both — from the point of view of the Hegelian concept of thought — agree in their indeterminateness and immediacy, but rather because Being itself is essentially finite and reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein which is held out into the nothing.

49. Assuming that the question of Being as such is the encompassing question of metaphysics, then the question of the nothing proves to be such that it embraces the whole of metaphysics. But the question of the nothing at the same time pervades the whole of metaphysics, since it forces us to face the problem of the origin of negation, that is, ultimately, to face up to the decision concerning the legitimacy of the rule of “logic” in metaphysics.

50. The old proposition ex nihilo nihil fit is therefore found to contain another sense, one appropriate to the problem of Being itself, that runs: ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fit [From the nothing all beings as beings come to be]. Only in the nothing of Dasein do beings as a whole, in accord with their most proper possibility — that is, in a finite way — come to themselves. To what extent then has the question of the nothing, if it is a metaphysical question, implicated our questioning Dasein? We have characterized our existence, experienced here and now, as essentially determined by science. If our existence so defined is posed in the question of the nothing, then it must have become questionable through this question.

51. Scientific existence possesses its simplicity and aptness in that it relates to beings themselves in a distinctive way and only to them. Science would like to dismiss the nothing with a lordly wave of the hand. But in our inquiry concerning the nothing it has by now become manifest that scientific existence is possible only if in advance it holds itself out into the nothing. It understands itself for what it is only when it does not give up the nothing. The presumed soberness of mind and superiority of science become laughable when it does not take the nothing seriously. Only because the nothing is manifest can science make beings themselves objects of investigation. Only if science exists on the base of metaphysics can it advance further in its essential task, which is not to amass and classify bits of knowledge but to disclose in ever-renewed fashion the entire region of truth in nature and history.

52. Only because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder — the revelation of the nothing — does the “why?” loom before us. Only because the “why” is possible as such can we in a definite way inquire into grounds, and ground them. Only because we can inquire and ground is the destiny of our existence placed in the hands of the researcher. The question of the nothing puts us, the questioners, in question. It is a metaphysical question.

53. Human existence can relate to beings only if it holds itself out into the nothing. Going beyond beings occurs in the essence of Dasein. But this going beyond is metaphysics itself. This implies that metaphysics belongs to the “nature of man.” It is neither a division of academic philosophy nor a field of arbitrary notions. Metaphysics is the basic occurrence of Dasein. It is Dasein itself. Because the truth of metaphysics dwells in this groundless ground it stands in closest proximity to the constantly lurking possibility of deepest error. For this reason no amount of scientific rigor attains to the seriousness of metaphysics. Philosophy can never be measured by the standard of the idea of science.

54. If the question of the nothing unfolded here has actually questioned us, then we have not simply brought metaphysics before us in an extrinsic manner. Nor have we merely been “transposed” to it. We cannot be transposed there at all, because insofar as we exist we are always there already. “For by nature, my friend, man’s mind dwells in philosophy” (Plato, Phaedrus, 279a). So long as man exists, philosophizing of some sort occurs. Philosophy — what we call philosophy — is metaphysics getting under way, in which philosophy comes to itself and to its explicit tasks. Philosophy gets under way only by a peculiar insertion of our own existence into the fundamental possibilities of Dasein as a whole. For this insertion it is of decisive importance, first, that we allow space for beings as a whole; second, that we release ourselves into the nothing, which is to say, that we liberate ourselves from those idols everyone has and to which he is wont to go cringing; and finally, that we let the sweep of our suspense take its full course, so that it swings back into the basic question of metaphysics which the nothing itself compels: ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?

Heidegger and Foucault on the Subject, Agency and Practices

Hubert L. Dreyfus

Introduction

Whatever their similarities and differences, one thing that Heidegger and Foucault clearly have in common is that both are critical of the Cartesian idea of a self-transparent subject and the related Kantian ideal of autonomous agency. Yet neither denies the importance of human freedom. In Heidegger's early work the subject is reinterpreted as Dasein -- a non autonomous, culturally bound (or thrown) way of being, that can yet change the field of possibilities in which it acts. In middle Heidegger, thinkers alone have the power to disclose a new world, while in later Heidegger, anyone is free to step back from the current world, to enter one of a plurality of worlds, and, thereby, facilitate a change in the practices of one's society. Likewise, for early Foucault, the subject is reduced to a function of discourse; for middle Foucault, writing can open up new worlds, and in later Foucault, freedom is understood as the power to question what is currently taken for granted, plus the capacity to change oneself and, perhaps, one's milieu. In short, while both Heidegger and Foucault reject the Enlightenment idea of an autonomous subject, they have a robust notion of freedom and action. And it will turn out for both thinkers that each person can modify his or her cultural practices by openness to embeddedness in them. All this needs a great deal of explanation. We need to determine, on the one hand, just what each rejects and why, and, on the other, what series of understandings of the self and its possibilities for action each introduces.

I. Early Heidegger's Substitution of Dasein for the Cartesian Subject

Heidegger's determination to break out of the philosophical tradition is focused in his attempt to get beyond the subject/object distinction. Heidegger opposes the Husserlian claim that a person's relation to the world and the things in it must be mediated by something in the person's mind: beliefs, desires, experiences, etc. -- what philosophers call "intentional content." As he puts it:


The idea of a subject which has intentional experiences . . . encapsulated within itself is an absurdity which misconstrues the basic ontological structure of the being that we ourselves are.

He seeks to undermine this view by returning to the phenomenon of everyday skillful activity. He finds that, when everyday coping is going well, one experiences something like what athletes call flow, or playing out of their heads. One does not distinguish one's experience of acting from one's ongoing activity, and therefore one has no experience of oneself as a subject causing that activity.

Phenomenological examination shows that, in a wide variety of situations, human beings are related to the world in an organized purposive manner yet without the constant accompaniment of a subjective state which specifies what the action is aimed at accomplishing. Indeed, at times one is actually surprised when one's action is accomplished, as when one's thoughts are interrupted by one's arrival at the office. A huge amount of our lives -- working, walking, talking, eating, driving, etc. -- is spent in this non-mediated coping mode and only a small part is spent in the deliberate, purposeful, subject/object mode. Yet the reflective is, of course, the mode we tend to notice, and so it has formed our common-sense concept of action and has been studied in detail by philosophers.

To consolidate his rejection of the primacy of the self-sufficient subject, Heidegger rejects the Cartesian terminology which expresses it.


Because the usual separation between a subject with its immanent sphere and an object with its transcendent sphere -- because, in general, the distinction between an inner and an outer is constructive and continually gives occasion for further constructions, we shall in the future no longer speak of a subject, of a subjective sphere, but shall understand the being to whom intentional comportments belong as Dasein. (BP, p. 64)

So far we have seen that in non-deliberate activities we experience ourselves only as an open responsiveness to what solicits our activity. Heidegger now adds that such unthinking activity provides the background both for specific acts of ongoing coping and for deliberately focusing on what is unusual or difficult. The basic idea is that for a particular person to be directed toward a particular piece of equipment, whether using it, perceiving it, or whatever, there must be a correlation between that person's general capacity for skillful coping and the interconnected equipmental whole in which the piece of equipment has a place. For example, when I enter a room I normally cope with the tables, chairs, etc. What enables me to do this is not a set of beliefs about rooms, it is a socialized set of skills for dealing with such equipmental wholes that I have developed by crawling and walking around many rooms.

In Being and Time, Heidegger describes this general coping as familiarity. And just as in ordinary cases of coping, where Dasein is absorbed in its activity with no experiences of itself as an action-directing subject, so when Dasein is simply at home in its situation, there is no separation between Dasein's disclosing comportment and the world disclosed: "Self and world are not two entities, like subject and object . . . but self and world are the basic determination of Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world".

It is important to realize that our general background coping, our familiarity with the world, is what Being and Time is all about. Indeed, Heidegger says explicitly that "this familiarity with the world . . . goes to make up Dasein's understanding of being." This understanding of being provides a background understanding of what matters and of what it makes sense to do.. Moreover, this background coping gives us a space or a clearing in which things and people can show up as mattering and meaningful for us.


Only this clearing grants and guarantees to human beings a passage to those entities that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are. (PLT 53, G 5 39-40)

Dasein does not produce the clearing by some act of choice. Rather the background coping gives Dasein its sense of what sort of being it is. And since individual Daseins can act only within this background that determines what can show up as making sense to do, Dasein can never be the fully lucid source of its actions postulated by the modern understanding of the subject and of autonomous agency.

II. Early Foucault on the Disappearance of the Subject

Foucault makes a similar discovery. After Madness and Civilization through the period of The Order of Things and The Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault came under the influence of French Structuralism. He was never, strictly speaking, a structuralist since the structures he studied were historical and changed abruptly from epoch to epoch, but he did share with structuralism a determined effort to eliminate the Cartesian subject. He did not deny, any more than did Heidegger, that human beings were conscious and did things. But, like Heidegger, he argued that the subject as a lucid, autonomous agent, was a product of particular practices and so could not have the causal agency our culture attributed to it.

For Foucault, in this period, the subject is a function of discourse. Statements have to be attributed to some speaker, but what is essential about any statement, Foucault argues, is its role in a system of other statements. This role is independent of the psychological fact that the statement was uttered or written by someone. Foucault concludes that "the different forms of speaking subjectivity [are] effects proper to the enunciative field."

In The Order of Things, Foucault undermines our tendency to think that each of us is a self-sufficient, meaning-giving cogito by recounting the history of the construction of the Cartesian subject and the Kantian agent. On Foucault's account both turn out be the product of a "warped" and "twisted" form of reflection he calls the transcendental/empirical double. Foucault notes that when man sees himself as involved in the world and also as a transcendental source of meaning, he enters into a strange relation with his own involvements. His use of language that he does not master, his inherence in a living organism he does not fully penetrate with thought, and the desires that he cannot control must all be taken to be the basis of his ability to think and act. But if man is to be a lucid transcendental source of meaning, this unthought must be ultimately accessible to thought. And if he is to be autonomous, this unthought must be dominated in action. Yet insofar as this unthought in its obscurity is precisely the condition of the possibility of thought and action it can never be fully absorbed into the cogito. Thus the lucid subject is not only undermined by the realization that it is a construction of our modern discursive formation and so has no causal power; the Kantian autonomous agent is an internally contradictory ideal.

Such considerations support Foucault's famous claim that "man," Foucault's name for the autonomous subject, is a recent invention and will soon pass away. Foucault sums up his view in this period in an interview from May 1969.


The death of man is nothing to get particularly excited about. It's one of the visible forms of a much more general decease, if you like. I don't mean by it the death of god but the death of the subject, of the Subject in capital letters, of the subject as origin and foundation of Knowledge, of Liberty, of Language and History.

III. Early Heidegger's Replacement of Kantian Autonomy by Authentic Resoluteness

Foucault is happy simply to look forward to the disappearance of the subject; Heidegger, however, wants to find out what can take its place. If Dasein is "thrown" into cultural practices what becomes of human freedom? This is the question Heidegger faces in Division II of Being and Time.

To begin with, one must accept that there is a structural limit to Dasein's autonomy. Heidegger calls this structural feature existential guilt. Existential guilt does not denote Dasein's moral lapses or its failure to choose for itself; it reveals an essentially unsatisfactory structure definitive of even authentic Dasein. Even if Dasein has done nothing wrong there is something wrong with Dasein -- it can’t be transparent to itself. For example, a particular Dasein does not choose to be brought up as masculine or feminine. Yet what is more important is that each of these roles is so pervasive, so much a part of any skillful comportment and the way various skillful comportments mesh together, that one can never get clear about all any such role implies. One will never be able to accept or reject it in toto. As Heidegger puts it, "Dasein cannot get behind its throwness" (p. 330) [p. 284]. Dasein must act on the basis of taken-for-granted practices that it can never fully grasp.

III. Authentic Resoluteness as a New Source of Freedom

Given its existential guilt Dasein has to give up the goal of Kantian autonomy, but in so doing it gains a new sort of freedom and responsibility. To be authentic, i.e. to own up to its own structure, Dasein must be what Heidegger calls resolute. Dasein must take responsibility for the understanding of being that it embodies but cannot know. For example, men and women must take responsibility for gender roles so pervasive and so much a part of bodily dispositions that they can never be spelled out as a belief system. But precisely in accepting this limit on its lucidity and autonomy, and thereby opening itself to the clearing in which it acts, authentic Dasein gains the possibility of a new, more powerful, freedom.

At this early stage Heidegger holds that Dasein expriences its thrownness and groundlessness in anxiety. If it resolutely holds onto anxiety, that is, if it accepts its ontological limitations, it will give up rigid roles and identities and become sensitive to marginal practices from the past. So, for instance, resolute women will be able to be sensitive to gender practices left in our culture from pioneer days. As Heidegger puts it:


The resoluteness in which Dasein comes back to itself, discloses current factical possibilities of authentic existing, and discloses them in terms of the heritage which that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over. (p. 435) [p. 383]

Marginal possibilities offer the individual non-banal ways of perceiving and responding to the current situation. Heidegger's idea seems to be that, by taking up such marginal practices from the past in its current coping, Dasein can innovate in an otherwise banal and closed world. Thus an individual can contribute to changing the shared world, i.e. the understanding of the issues and what to do about them, for his or her generation.

Freedom to change itself by modifying its background practices is the way Dasein can live a life worth living, even though it can never be a self-sufficient, lucid, autonomous subject. But can Dasein, by abandoning the illusion of subjectivity and autonomy, contribute to changing the structure of the background practices as a whole?

V. The Thinker's Role in the Establishment of Truth

For everyday practices to give meaning to people's lives and unite them in a community something must collect the scattered practices of the group, unify them into coherent possibilities for action, and hold them up to the people. The people can then act and relate themselves to each other in terms of this exemplar. And the object that performs this function best Heidegger calls a work of art. As his illustration of an art work working, Heidegger takes the Greek temple. The temple held up to the Greeks what was important and so established the meaningful differences such a victory and disgrace in respect to which they could orient their actions.

The style of the background practices as a whole change radically each time a culture gets a new art work. After such a change different sorts of human beings and things show up. For the Greeks, what showed up were heroes and slaves and marvelous things; for the Christians, saints and sinners, rewards and temptations. There could not have been saints in Ancient Greece. At best there could have been weak people who let everybody walk all over them. Likewise, there could not have been Greek-style heroes in the Middle Ages. Such people would have been regarded as prideful sinners.

Generalizing the idea of a work of art, Heidegger holds that "there must always be some being in the open [the clearing], something that is, in which the openness takes its stand and attains its constancy" (PLT 61, G 5 48). Let us call such special things cultural paradigms. A cultural paradigm is any being in the clearing that disclose a new world or, by refocusing the current cultural practices can disclose the world anew. Heidegger mentions five types of cultural paradigms--works of art, acts of statements, nearness of a god, and sacrifice of a god, and the words of a thinker-- but, for brevity's sake, we shall concern ourselves only with two, the founding political act and the thinker's words. The U.S. Constitution would count as a cultural paradigm for Heidegger. For it is just the sort of political act that establishes an understanding of what it is to be a state by articulating an understanding already in that culture. Once established, because it is so important to the people whose world it organizes, it becomes the center of a struggle to make it clear, coherent and complete. Heidegger calls this tendency in the practices to move towards clarity the world aspect. But any being resists being completely clarified. Heidegger calls this resitance the world aspect. The struggle between them sets up what he calls an outline which is the specific style of the culture. The struggle between various interpretations of the paradigm makes the culture historical since the present repeatedly reinterprets the past and sets up a new future.

The second cultural paradigm consists in the words of the thinker. The thinker, by being receptive to the current practices (both central and marginal), is able to reconfigure the practices and so bring about a new shared style or understanding of being or can articulate the understanding already in the practices in a diffuse way and so focus a world. Thinkers, in the course of Western history, have named being as physis, poesis, res, creation, and subjectivity/objectivity and standing reserve and have thus contributed to establishing a succession of historical worlds.


In the work, truth is thrown toward the coming preservers, that is, toward an historical group. . . . [It] is the opening up or disclosure of that into which human being as historical is already cast.

Founding such a new beginning, then, requires not genius, but openness and receptivity to the marginal practices:


All creation . . . is a drawing, as of water from a spring. Modern subjectivism, to be sure, immediately misinterprets creation, taking it as the self-sovereign subject's performance of genius.

The new beginning is a founding leap -- an Ur-sprung -- which by way of its grounding in the marginal practices from the past bestows a new clearing.


[T]his unmediated character of a beginning, the peculiarity of a leap out of the unmediable, does not exclude but rather includes the fact that the beginning prepares itself for the longest time and wholly inconspicuously.

Thanks to his total embeddedness in the current style of his culture and by virtue of his receptivity, the thinker has the most radical freedom possible for a human being. Heidegger calls this freedom, freedom to ground. Before we return to the way all human beings can, in effect, be mini-thinkers and change their local worlds, we need to follow a development, parallel to the one we have been following in Heidegger, in the writings of Foucault.

V. The Author's Role in Establishing Discursive Domains

We have seen that when Heidegger eliminated the subject he at the same time introduced the authentic individual. This step has no parallel in the thinking of early Foucault -- an omission he later came to regret. Rather than proposing a unified, relatively stable, resolute Dasein, Foucault was happy to find that the subject was replaced by a dispersed, unstable function. In the same interview on the death of the subject already quoted, Foucault continues:


In the rumbling that shakes us today, perhaps we have to recognize the birth of a world where the subject is not one but split, not sovereign but dependent, not an absolute origin but a function ceaselessly modified.

But just as Heidegger did not long confine himself to the narrow agency of resolute Dasein, so Foucault does not long retain his view of the wholly dispersed agent. Rather, in his essay, "What Is an Author?," Foucault develops the notion of a discourse founder who, like Heidegger's thinker, open up a domain--in this case a domain of discourse.

This essay is usually read as a continuation of Foucault's attack on the subject, and, indeed, in it Foucault like Heidegger rejects the idea of the author as a genius -- a psychological subject whose private meanings and public expressions are crucial to understanding his work and its effects. Rather,


writing unfolds like a game that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin down a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

The hermeneutic approach to the author as a subject with deep and original meanings has to be rejected since the author is only a social construction. Again, Foucault says of the author.


Critics doubtless try to give this intelligible being a realistic status, by discerning, in the individual, a "deep" motive, a "creative" power, or a "design," the milieu in which writing originates. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo.

Foucault thus seeks to "call back into question the absolute character and founding role of the subject."


In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse.

But something more powerful than an author emerges from Foucault's analysis. What Foucault discovers is a kind of writer who is able to establish a local clearing which one might call a disclosive space. Foucault calls such figures founders of discursivity. The open a new style of discourse.


They are unique in that they are not just the authors of their own works. They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts. . . . Freud is not just the author of The Interpretation of Dreams or Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; Marx is not just the author of the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital: they both have establish an endless possibility of discourse.

A founder of discursivity in opening a disclosive space sets up a struggle of interpretations which starts a new line of history. In contrast to a scientific founder like Galileo, whose work is made obsolete by the new science he opens up, founders of discursivity never loose their importance for their interpreters.


[T]he work of these initiators of discursivity is not situated in the space that science defines; rather, it is the science or the discursive practice which refers back to their work as primary coordinates.

How do the current interpreters relate to the founders? Not, Foucault insists, by looking for the deep truth hidden in their texts. That would be commentary, and he rejects commentary as endless and fruitless:


Commentary questions discourse as to what it says and intended to say; it tries to uncover that deeper meaning of speech that enables it to achieve an identity with itself, supposedly nearer to its essential truth.. For years we have been commenting on the language of our culture from the very point where for centuries we had awaited in vain for the decision of the Word.

Here Foucault seems to be criticizing Heidegger by criticizing Hans-Georg Gadamer's view of interpretation, but this may only show that Gadamer never understood Heidegger.

For Heidegger the cultural paradigm is an inexhaustible object of interpretation, not because the thinker was a genius or the text too full of meanings, but rather because there is a necessary absence in the cultural paradigm. One might think that just because the thinker manifests the current understanding of being, he names what is so pervasive and embodied it cannot be made fully explicit, but even this is a too Hegelian and Gadamarian way to put it. Since what the thinker manifests is the organization of the practices that constitute the background of all intelligibility, what he or she explicitly says in the text cannot be what is important. The understanding of being would pervade the work without being themartized. What is important is the way the thinker's words are attuned to the background. Heidegger's clearest formulation of this difficult claim is in his essay "Reflection in Metaphysics," (1941):


The thinking of thinkers is neither something going on in "heads" nor is it the product of such heads. One can always consider thought historiographically in accordance with such viewpoints, and appeal to the correctness of this consideration. However, one does not thus think thinking as the thinking of being. Recollection of the history of being returns to the claim of the soundless voice of being and to the manner of its attuning.

This attunement to being is not attunement to a positive but hidden truth. Rather the attunement manifests a necessary structural absence.


The thinker can never himself say what is most of all his own. It must remain unsaid, because what is sayable receives its determination from what is not sayable.

Heidegger adds:


The historicity of a thinker, which is not a matter of him but of being, has its measure in the original loyalty of the thinker to his inner limitation. Not to know this inner limitation, not to know it thanks to the nearness of what is unsaid and unsayable, is the hidden gift of being to the rare thinkers who are called to the path of thought.

There is, then, no hidden truth to explicate; the understanding of being is all on the surface in all the practices, and all over the text as its own background of intelligibility. The thinker in his receptivity experiences what is going on in the practices and is able in his work to focus what is going on, but unlike a lucid agent, a thinker is never able to explicitlyu articulate explicitly what he is experiencing. Yet precisely because his work is changing the understanding of being, the thinker is more perceptive than the most lucid subject and more effective than the most persistent agent. Likewise, the interpreter or preserver who returns to such founding thinkers can, by taking up practices from the heritage in a new way, contribute to changing the present practices.

Foucault in "What is an Author?" holds a view close to Heidegger's when he rejects commentary and introduces what he takes to be the right kind of return to the text of a founder of a domain of discursivity.


If we return, it is because of a basic and constructive omission, an omission that is not the result of accident or incomprehension. . . . It is always a return to a text in itself, specifically, to a primary and unadorned text with particular attention to those things registered in the interstices of the text, its gaps and absences.

Foucault also sees the effect such an interpretation can produce:


It follows naturally that this return . . . constantly introduces modifications and that the return to a text is not a historical supplement that would come to fix itself upon the primary discursivity and redouble it in the form of an ornament which, after all, is not essential. Rather, it is an effective and necessary means of transforming discursive practice.

Yet, Foucault seems to agree with Nietzsche and argue against Heidegger when he says, in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," that genealogy absolutely "opposes itself to the search for 'origins'" (p. 77). How can we understand how Foucault can reject any return to origins as he does in his discussion of Nietzsche and yet advocate a return to origins in the cases of the founders of discursivity? The answer is that what Nietzsche rejects as origins is the same rich truth that Foucault rejects when he rejects commentary, while what Nietzsche proposes is a return to the point of emergence, which Foucault defines as "the entry of forces . . . the leap from the wings to the center stage." This corresponds almost exactly to Heidegger's account of the origin of the work of art as the Ur-sprung, the originating leap-- a leap a thinker's thought brings about when, in that thinker’s saying, marginal practices become central and central practices marginal so that the understanding of being is re-gestalted. Foucault's account sounds like a more violent version of Heidegger's when he says:


If interpretation were the slow exposure of the meaning hidden in an origin, then only metaphysics could interpret the development of humanity. But if interpretation is the violent or surreptitious appropriation of a system of rules, which in itself has no essential [i.e. intrinsic] meaning, in order to impose a direction, to bend it to a new will, to force its participation in a different game, and to subject it to secondary rules, then the development of humanity is a series of interpretations.

These similarities between the thought of Heidegger and Foucault should not surprise us since it is really the Hegelian and Gadamarian metaphysical notion of the continuing, unfolding, of some positive cultural and personal identity that Foucault is opposing here -- a metaphysical construct first defined and opposed by Heidegger.

The notion of the origin as a originating leap, with its account of the emergence of incommensurate worlds, is meant precisely to reject this Hegelian teleological view of the implicit truth gradually becoming explicit. For Foucault's Nietzsche too:


The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation. It does not seek to define our unique threshold of emergence, the homeland to which metaphysicians promise a return; it seeks to make visible all of those discontinuities that cross us.

There is nonetheless, at this stage, a real difference between Foucault and Heidegger. Just as for Heidegger the nullified self can unify its life in resoluteness, the culture unifies itself each time there is a new beginning. Heidegger thinks that struggle is always stabilized in a world with an overall style, which for a time "gathers together all the paths of destiny." On Foucault's reading of himself and Nietzsche, there is no such tendency to stability.


Historical emergence designates a place of confrontation, but not as a closed field offering the spectacle of a struggle among equals. Rather, as Nietzsche demonstrates in his analysis of good and evil, it is a "non-place," a pure distance, which indicates that the adversaries do not belong to a common space.

The main difference between Heidegger and Foucault, then, is that Foucault sees Nietzsche as affirming a continual instability in the practices defining both the self and the culture, while Heidegger points to the importance of a non-metaphysical but nonetheless essential tendency towards gathering in the practices which he calls appropriation (Ereignis).

As we shall see Foucault is pulled both toward a Heideggerian account of gathering and also towards Nietzschean dispersion. But once we see, in passages like the above, that Foucault is arguing primarily against Hegel and not Heidegger, we will be prepared to understand how the Heideggerian picture of the way marginal practices coalesce to form stable unities comes more and more to dominate Foucault's account of the history of the West. Indeed, if we set aside the question of how stable cultural practices naturally are -- a question on which, if it makes any sense, Foucault and Heidegger deeply differ -- and ask how stable the practices of an epoch can in fact become, we will find Foucault's view approaching Heidegger's as the two thinkers focus their analysis on the understanding of being characteristic of modernity

VII. Heidegger and Foucault on the Modern Subject

[ In his account of modernity, Heidegger begins by telling us that "Metaphysics grounds an age, in that, through a specific interpretation of what is, and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed." Foucault says more narrowly: "In any given culture and at any given moment, there is only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice." Both view the emergence of representation in the Classical Age as the beginning of modernity that finally becomes explicit in Kant's interpretation of man.

Heidegger tells us of a radical transformation in our understanding of being which took place in the 17th century: "What is decisive is that man himself expressly takes up this position as one constituted by himself and that he makes it secure as the footing for a possible development of humanity."

This understanding of man is an understanding of the subject, not just as lucid and autonomous, but as the substitute for God, as the self-certain source of all meaning. The essence of subjectivity after Kant is to be the ground of all intelligibility. It follows for Heidegger that


Man as a rational being of the age of the Enlightenment is no less subject than is man who grasps himself as a nation, wills himself as a Volk, fosters himself as a race, and, finally, empowers himself as lord of the earth.

anthropological definition of technology." Modern technology, Heidegger tells us, is "something completely different and therefore new." It is a new ordering of background practices.

In "The Age of the World Picture," Heidegger interprets this new technological understanding of beings -- let us call it technicity -- by looking at one of its greatest achievements, scientific research. The direction of technological practices, Heidegger tells us, is toward total order for its own sake.


Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it standing-reserve [Bestand].

In other words, technicity tends towards the treatment of everything as resources to be ever more efficiently and flexibly ordered.

Heidegger seems to waver on the question whether, as technicity reaches its final stage, it will accentuate subjects and objects or eliminate them. In the end, however, he seems clearly to hold that technicity can most efficiently treat both people and things as resources when it ceases setting meaning-giving subjects over against objectified things. He observes that soon there will be no objects and no subjects, just "a system of information." and human beings will loose all freedom as they are "sucked up as standing reserve."

For Foucault, as for Heidegger, modern practices produce a new subject that is the source of truth, but not the truth about the whole world as in Kantian world picturing. Rather the Foucaultian modern subject is constituted as the source of a deep inner truth about itself.

In The History of Sexuality, Foucault tells a rather unNietzschean continuous story of how the gradual development of confessional practices in the West produced a very stable, unified subject -- a subject Foucault calls the man of desires. Such a subject is not only something self-sufficient standing over against objects as in Descartes, or the source of all meaning as in Kant; rather it is the locus of private desires and intentions over against public actions.

Foucault claims in The Care of the Self that the Christians took over for their own purposes an elaborate technology of self-examination that was already in place by the time of the Stoics. The Stoics separated deeds from their motivating desire and used techniques of self-care to control dangerous desires. But the Christian subject identifies itself not with its public deeds but with his most private intentions, desires, fantasies, and dreams. Moreover, since what one really desires might well be forbidden and therefore disguised in some other desire, this Christian subject has constantly to examine its desires to dredge up its true motivations. Foucault quotes an early confessional manual: "Examine . . . all your thoughts, every word you speak, and all your actions. Examine even unto your dreams, to know if, once awakened, you did not give them your consent. And finally, do not think that in so sensitive and perilous a matter as this, there is anything trivial or insignificant." This is the motto, he claims, of the suspicious, confessing, subjects we have all become.

When these confessional practices linked up with totalizing scientific practices in the early seventeenth century, they produced a new concern for the subject as a sexual being, and finally two centuries later, a science of sexuality that was supposed to hold the clue to human agency. Freud supplies the last stage in this constitution of the hermeneutic sexual subject. He sees the self as a subject that needs to recover the repressed truth of its desires -- the secret of its sexuality. He claims to have developed a science of the subject, understanding sexual desire as a natural kind about which we can discover laws of normal development, functioning and causal effects.

Foucault holds that this claim is unfounded.


The notion of "sex" made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle.

There is no such natural kind, Foucault claims. Like the Kantian autonomous subject, the Freudian sexual subject is an artificial construction of, what Foucault calls, Power. Consequently, Foucault says that for us,


[There are] two meanings to the word subject . . . The subject subjugated to the other through control and dependence and the subject attached to its own identity through consciousness or self-knowledge. In both cases the word suggests a form of power that subjugates and subdues.

So power is not exercised by modern subjects; it creates them. Thus the search for meaning is not liberating but enslaving. Just as sex is the illusory source of causation; the successfully analyzed subject is the illusory center of freedom.]

VI. How Can We Free Ourselves From Modern Subjectivity?

Both Heidegger and Foucault maintain that the current why the practices work is to coopt all deviation. Marginal practices are either trivialized or transformed so as to be efficient and enhance life. [Examples of playing with children, and back packing into the wilderness.] Heidegger has a modest proposal as to how, despite the tendency of current practices to coopt all deviation, we can modify, in small ways, the current understanding of being. Human begins should become preservers, that is they should cherish things which gather and focus local practices whether such things be old stone bridges or the latest autobahn overpass:


The old stone bridge's humble brook-crossing gives to the harvest wagon . . . the field path to the road. The highway bridge is tied into the network of long-distance traffic, paced as calculated for maximum yield. Always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and fro. . . . [Each] bridge gathers to itself in its own way.

Practices that produce such focal things as a celebratory meal or playing music together resist the push towards dispersion which is the flip side of technicity's tendency toward totalization.

Furthermore, for Heidegger our ability to open ourselves to the gathering of even technological things like the autobahn bridge is a way of getting in sync with the style of our technological practices. This getting in sync reveals our technological practices as a clearing or mode of revealing, not as the way things have to be, and so frees us from the compulsion to challenge all things into total ordering. At the same time it frees us to have a plurality of different local situations of relative stability and order. These various local worlds would be in a loose sort of agreement in multiplicity while resisting total coordination and mobilization. Such a loosely collected plurality of worlds would resemble the polytheistic practices Heidegger admires in the Homeric Greeks.

For late Heidegger, then, the resolute Dasein of Being and Time who can change the practices of its generation, and the thinker who can make marginal practices central has developed into a preserver of local practices -- a mini-thinker who by being open to the way practices gather other practices and resonate with each other, can create a plurality of worlds that resist the totalizing tendencies of technicity.

In the pluralistic later Heidegger there is no more talk of the history of being and hardly any talk of being at all. Indeed, Heidegger came to think that there is an essential antagonism between a unified understanding of being and local worlds. Given the way local worlds establish their own internal coherence that resists any imposition from outside there is bound to be a tension between the glorious cultural paradigm that establishes an understanding of being for a whole culture and the humble inconspicuous things. The shining of one would wash out the shining of the others. The tendency toward one unified world would impede the gathering of local worlds. Already in his "Thing" essay Heidegger goes out of his way to point out that, even though the original meaning of ‘thing’ in German is a gathering to discuss a matter of concern to the community, in the case of the thing thinging, the gathering in question must be self contained. The focal occasion must determine which community concerns are relevant rather than the reverse.

Given this tension, in a late seminar Heidegger abandoned what he had considered up to then his crucial contribution to philosophy, the notion of a single understanding of being and its correlated notion of the ontological difference between being and beings. He remarks that "from the perspective of appropriation [the tendency in the practices to bring things out in their ownmost] it becomes necessary to free thinking from the ontological difference." He continues, "From the perspective of appropriation, [letting-presence] shows itself as the relation of world and thing, a relation which could in a way be understood as the relation of being and beings. But then its peculiar quality would be lost." What presumably would be lost would be the self-enclosed local character of worlds focused by things thinging. It follows that, as mortal disclosers of worlds in the plural, the only comprehensiveness we can hope to achieve is our openness to dwelling in many worlds and the capacity to move among them.

Foucault allows for possible transformation too, but he does not seem to have followed Heidegger's move beyond subjects and objects. Whereas Heidegger, even in the Black Forrest, sensed that we are entering a post-modern world where we will treat ourselves as resources to be enhanced without appeal to subjectivity, Foucault who was teaching in Berkeley and should have known better, seems, rather, to have believed to the end that Christian and Freudian confessional practices and their product, a subject that examines itself for its deep truth and a science of desire, are the most important way bio-power subjectifies and so subjugates us. "The West has managed . . . to bring us almost entirely . . . under the sway of a logic of concupiscence and desire. Whenever it is a question of knowing who we are, it is this logic that henceforth serves as our master key," he tells us.

Anguish over the deep subject so strongly supported in France by Catholic and Freudian practices may be the source of what Foucault, at the end of his life, admitted was his mistaken attempt to avoid questions of agency and individual conduct throughout his work -- at least up to his last book, The Care of the Self. In his last interview he says of his work:


I tried to mark our three types of problems: that of truth, that of power, and that of individual conduct. These three domains of experience can be understood only in relation to each other and only with each other. What hampered me in the preceding books was to have considered the first two experiences without taking into account the third. By bringing this last experience [of individual conduct] to light, I had a guiding thread which didn't need to be justified by resorting to rhetorical methods by which one could avoid one of the three fundamental domains of experience.

Once he acknowledges the need for an ethics, Foucault hopes to break out of the regime of subjectivity by reappropriating the ancient practices of care of the self. In an interview he distinguishes the Greek individual from the modern subject:


Since no Greek thinker ever found a definition of the subject, never looked for one, I would simply say that there was no subject. Which doesn't mean that the Greeks didn't strive to define the conditions of an experience, but it wasn't an experience of the subject; rather, it was of the individual, insofar as he sought to constitute himself through self-mastery.

In The Care of the Self, Foucault describes these practices of self-mastery by means of which the Greek individual sought to transform himself.


It was [the] theme of the care of oneself, consecrated by Socrates, that later philosophy took up again and ultimately placed at the center of that "art of existence" which philosophy claimed to be. . . . Around the care of the self, there developed an entire activity of speaking and writing in which the work of oneself on oneself and communication with others were linked together.

The goal of such care was to work upon oneself so as to produce one's life as a work of art, not to find a deep inner truth.


It was a matter of knowing how to govern one's own life in order to give it the most beautiful form possible (in the eyes of others, of oneself, and of the future generations for whom one could serve as an example).

A self that is work of art will not be a lucid subject, an autonomous agent, nor a locus of deep self-analysis, but it presumably will have its own kind of relative unity and stability. And it will be based on taking over these old Socratic-Stoic practices.

Furthermore, as Alexander Nehamas notes in discussing Foucault's project, making one's life into a work of art can not consist in a retreat into a private subjective world. Art itself is historically situated. Artists always work within the limitations of a tradition handed down to them. What counts as a beautiful or admirable life is determined by current styles and so in return is able to change the sensibilities that make it possible. We have seen that Heidegger’s resistance is a receptive dwelling that preserves things and the practices they focus and keeps them from becoming objects or resources; Foucault proposes an active self-creation that resists letting the self be transformed into a subject. If he had lived to follow out this idea Foucault might have provided an account of how the self, in transforming itself into a work of art, could help to transform or at least displace the current clearing.

Thus in the end Heidegger and Foucault converge on the idea of a human being formed by the current clearing, but at the same time free by virtue of openness to and an understanding of this indebtedness. Each sees that a sensitivity to one’s current style as a style enables one to collect now-marginal practices from the past which in turn allows one to engage in a loosely ordered multiplicity of activities that give life meaning or beauty, while at the same time contributing to slowly changing the totalizing background practices that endanger human freedom.

Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault

Hubert L. Dreyfus

At the heart of Heidegger's thought is the notion of being, and the same could be said of power in the works of Foucault. The history of being gives Heidegger a perspective from which to understand how in our modern world things have been turned into objects. Foucault transforms Heidegger's focus on things to a focus on selves and how they became subjects. And, just as Heidegger offers a history of being, culminating in the technological understanding of being, in order to help us understand and overcome our current way of dealing with things as objects and resources, Foucault analyzes several regimes of power, culminating in modern bio-power, in order to help us free ourselves from understanding ourselves as subjects.

These rough parallels suggest that it might be illuminating to see how far the comparison of Heidegger's "Being" with Foucault's "Power" can be pushed. Do these terms designate equivalent functions? Do Heidegger's epochs in the history of being match Foucault's regimes in the genealogy of power? To what extent do these two interpretations of our history lead these thinkers to criticize our current cultural condition in similar ways? What does each see as the danger? How does each envisage resistance? And, of course, we must also ask whether these thinkers differ in any important ways?

After all, Heidegger's early support of National Socialism and later recommendation of political passivity seem totally opposed to Foucault's emphasis on social freedom and his political activism. Obviously Heidegger is some sort of conservative and Foucault clearly is on the left. But lest the striking difference between Heidegger's and Foucault's political attitudes makes this project seems hopelessly misguided, we must remember Foucault's comment on Heidegger in his last interview:

For me Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher ... My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger.

This last remark of Foucault's, when his immanent death freed him to tell the truth even in Paris, forces us to ask how Foucault, in spite of his radically different political ethos, can nonetheless claim, in some important sense, to be following Heidegger?

I. The Functioning of Being and Power.

It is important to realize at the outset that for Heidegger being is not a substance or a process. Being, in early Heidegger, is "that on the basis of which beings are already understood." One might say that the understanding of being is the style of life manifest in the way everyday practices are coordinated. A culture's understanding of being allows people and things to show up as something -- people show up as heroes in Greece and as Saints in the Middle Ages, for example, and things for the Homeric Greeks were flashing up to be admired, while for Christians they were creatures to be mastered and interpreted.

Put generally, the shared practices into which we are socialized provide a background understanding of what counts as things, what counts as human beings and what it makes sense to do, on the basis of which we can direct our actions towards particular things and people. Thus the understanding of being creates what Heidegger calls a clearing (Lichtung). Heidegger calls the unnoticed way that the clearing both limits and opens up what can show up and what can be done, its "unobtrusive governance (Waltens)."

For Heidegger the history of being in the West has been the history of misunderstandings of the clearing. From Plato on, philosophers have sensed that something beyond ordinary beings was responsible for their existence as anything, but since the clearing always stays in the background -- or, as Heidegger puts it, withdraws -- philosophers have replaced it with a highest being that is the ground of beings and the source of their intelligibility. For Plato the highest being was the good, for Aristotle the unmoved mover, for the Christians the creator God, and after the Enlightenment it was man himself. Heidegger calls all these attempts to replace the clearing with a "beingest being", onto-theology or metaphysics.

We will see later that, according to Foucault, power has suffered a parallel misunderstanding. In general, many of Foucault's difficult remarks concerning power make sense if we take him to be getting at a social clearing with an emphasis on the way the everyday practices of individuals and groups are coordinated so as to produce, perpetuate, and delimit what people can think, do and be. For Foucault, power, like Heidegger's being, is no fixed entity or institution, but is incarnated in historical social practices. "One needs to be nominalistic," he tells us, "power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society." This strategical situation arises from specific individuals and groups opposing one another. These actions, taken together, open a social space in which people, things, and the real are defined. Like the clearing, power is productive. Foucault tells us: "[P]ower produces; it produces reality," that is, it determines what it makes sense to believe and to do.

For Foucault, power, as opposed to violence, controls actions while nonetheless leaving them free:

Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments may be realized.

Like Heidegger, Foucault speaks of this non-violent way of guiding action as governance:

Basically power is less a confrontation between two adversaries or the linking of one to the other than a question of government. ... To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of action of others.

One might say, paraphrasing Heidegger, that power is that on the basis of which human beings already understand each other. As Foucault puts it:

In the idea of governmentality, I am aiming at the totality of practices, by which one can constitute, define, organize, instrumentalize the strategies which individuals in their liberty can have in regard to each other.

Since Foucault is not interested in how things show up but exclusively in people, "Power", which is normally used to describe the way governments govern people's actions, seems an appropriate, if perhaps misleading, name for what controls the way people understand themselves and others. It should be clear that some type of power in this ontological sense, like some particular understanding of being, is essential to any society. According to Foucault, "A society without power relations can only be an abstraction."

II. Seinsgeschichte and Genealogy.

Heidegger and Foucault agree that in the West the clearing that governs human activity by determining what counts as a thing, what counts as human, and what it makes sense to do, is not static, but can be seen as falling into a series of epochs or regimes.

Both Heidegger and Foucault, no doubt influenced by Nietzsche, begin their account of these epochs with a pre-history in pre-Socratic Greece. Heidegger devotes many pages to showing that, although the pre-Socratics did not think about the clearing, they did not deny it either. They sensed that showing up or presencing depended upon what was absent or withdrawn. But this understanding was lost when Plato took the Good to be the purely present ground of the phenomena, and truth to be the correspondence of theoretical propositions to an independent reality.

Foucault too points to the emergence of theory among the Greeks as the great turning point in our history. The pragmatic and poetic discourse of early Greek civilization was destroyed by the rise of theoretical truth: "The Sophists were routed ... [from] the time of the great Platonic division onwards, the [Platonic] will to truth has had its own history ..." This change in the style of the practices presumably altered all aspects of Greek life. For example, Foucault tells us that "[T]he West has managed ... to annex sex to a field of rationality ... [W]e are accustomed to such "conquests" since the Greeks ..."

According to Heidegger, in the next major stage, the Roman understanding of beings as finished works (res) -- produced rather than coming-forth or being-brought-forth -- set up the possibility of the medieval account of hierarchically ordered substances produced by a creator God.

For the Middle Ages ... to be in being means to belong within a specific rank of the order of what has been created ....

Foucault has less than Heidegger to say about Greek philosophy, but he has much more to say about how the Self was produced, worked over, and administered in Antiquity. He also gives, at the beginning of Discipline and Punish, his own brief description of the stage of hierarchical, top-down monarchical power.

[Notes on History of Being and Power:

I. Heidegger: on History of Being.

physis: coming forth. Heroes and Gods woosh up. Seers. Kairos -- doesn’t depend on you: seize the opportunity.
poiesis: a letting come forth. Craftsman -- wood. Aeschylus, Pericles, democracy.
techne: bringing forth. Plato covers up the clearing. The craftsman responds not to the grain of the wood, but to the needs of the community. Aristotle: training good habits. Shaping matter. Pure form. Unmoved mover.
production replaces training. Roman understanding as finished works. Administration.
ens creatum: Medieval understanding of Being as creation.
II. Foucault’s genealogy of regimes of power.

Foucault on seers: to say the truth is to make it happen.
Nothing on poiesis and Periclean democracy.
Foucault: Plato routs the Sophists. [the Sophists would turn everyone into seers. i.e. endow every one with the possibility of speaking the truth]. Oligarchy: caring for oneself in order to be able to care for the city.
The Stoics: management of the self-imposing form which is "universal law" on resistant self.
Medieval understanding of the self as a created being. Pastoral power: Hebraic shepherds shepherd the flock rather than individuals. The Christian shepherd cares for each sheep.]
Finally, Heidegger's and Foucault's concerns converge upon the transformation that issues in modernity and our current understanding of things and of human beings. Both view the interest in representation in the thought of the Classical Age as showing the emergence of new practices and as the crucial but unstable beginning of modernity -- a starting point that is not yet clear about its radically new subject-centered understanding of being. This understanding first becomes explicit in Kant's interpretation of man, and finally works itself out in our contemporary technological understanding of being.

At this point the parallel between the two thinkers comes into sharp focus, as we can see when we compare Heidegger's account of the origin of the notion of man in "The Age of the World Picture" and Foucault's account in The Order of Things. Heidegger tells us of a radical transformation in our understanding of being which took place in the 17th century. The change was implicit in Descartes’ introduction of representation. Kant then made Descartes’ unthought explicit in the centrality of his notion of Vorsetellung. The age of representation differs in fundamental ways from all other ages: "What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth." Heidegger emphasizes the fact that man objectifies everything:

To represent means to bring what is present at hand before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm ... What is decisive is that man himself expressly takes up this position as one constituted by himself and that he makes it secure as the footing for a possible development of humanity.

Foucault emphasizes that for Kant man also objectifies himself. So, for Foucault, "Man appears in his ambiguous position as an object of knowledge and as subject that knows."

With Kant, man becomes the source of the meaning of everything and so philosophy becomes anthropology. In Heidegger's terms:

[Anthropology] designates that philosophical interpretation of man which explains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man.

Anthropology is that interpretation of man that already knows fundamentally what man is and hence can never ask who he may be ....

For Foucault, philosophy, which Kant claimed to have awakened from its dogmatic slumber, thus falls into an anthropological sleep.

Both Heidegger and Foucault reach rhetorical heights as they look forward to the end of the humanistic understanding of being. Heidegger:

Man cannot, of himself, abandon this destining of his modern essence or abolish it by fiat. But man can, as he thinks ahead, ponder this: Being subject as humanity has not always been the sole possibility belonging to the essence of historical man, ... nor will it always be.

Or Foucault:

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared ... then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

But not long afterwards each thinker realized that man was, indeed, being erased, but that this post-humanism was not the liberating development each had expected. (Strangely, Foucault seems to have to repeat Heidegger’s mistakes, even though, by the time Foucault wrote, Heidegger had already corrected them.)

III. Our Contemporary Understanding of Being/Power.

Heidegger understands our current understanding of being by looking at one of its greatest achievements, scientific research. His account of modern scientific practices is similar to Thomas Kuhn's in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. What Heidegger calls research resembles what Kuhn calls normal science. Research operates by setting up a total interpretation of some region of reality and then attempts to show that the anomalies that emerge can be fitted into this total account. Heidegger’s researchers, like Kuhnian normal scientists, keep busy by taking for granted that their general plan is correct; that the anomalies it reveals have no truth to tell, so that in the end they must all be brought under the projected total order. Thus scientific research is made possible by Descartes’ unthought fully focused in Kant, that rationality consists in human beings imposing a total, systematic order on all that is. Heidegger calls this totalizing understanding of being, technological.

Like many current critics of the modern age, Heidegger at first failed to distinguish the of modern epoch that was coming to an end from the beginning of the post-modern epoch. Thus he was for a time under the illusion that the danger of technology was still that man was dominating everything and exploiting all beings for his own satisfaction. As if man were a subject in control, and the objectification of everything were the problem. He says in 1940:

Western history has now begun to enter into the completion of that period we call the modern, and which is defined by the fact that man becomes the measure and the center of beings. Man is what lies at the bottom of all beings; that is, in modern terms, at the bottom of all objectification and representability.

By 1946, however, Heidegger saw that the modern understanding of being was coming to an end. The exploitation and control was not the subject's doing, and "man" never was anything but an effect of other forces.

Even this, that man becomes the subject and the world the object, is a consequence of technology's nature establishing itself, and not the other way around.

In his final analysis of technology, Heidegger is critical of those who, still caught in the subject/object picture, think that technology is dangerous because it embodies instrumental reason. Modern technology, he insists, is "something completely different and therefore new." Heidegger describes the hydroelectric power station on the Rhine as his paradigm technological device because for him electricity is the paradigm technological stuff. He says:

The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew.

But we can see now that electricity is not a perfect example of technological stuff because it ends up finally turned into light, heat, or motion to satisfy some subject’s desire. Heidegger’s intuition is that treating everything as standing reserve or, as we might better say, resources, makes possible endless disaggregation, redistribution, and reaggregation for its own sake. As soon as he sees that information is truly endlessly transformable Heidegger switches to computer manipulation of information as his paradigm.

The goal of technology, Heidegger then tells us, is more and more flexibility and efficiency simply for its own sake. There is no longer, as there was in Kant, an onto-theological center that provides a goal for all activity. There is ordering but no orderer. Heidegger says:

Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand, i.e. resources].

Heidegger seems to waver on the question whether, as technology reaches its final stage, it will accentuate subjects and objects or eliminate them.

The subject-object relation thus reaches, for the first time, its pure "relational," i.e., ordering, character in which both the subject and the object are sucked up as standing-reserves. That does not mean that the subject-object relation vanishes, but rather the opposite: it now attains to its most extreme dominance.

In the end, however, he seems clearly to hold that technology can treat people and things as resources to be enhanced without setting meaning-giving subjects over against objectified things. A year after the previous remark about subjects and objects reaching extreme dominance Heidegger appears to retract his view about objects at least, in his observation that nature has become "a system of information" and a modern airliner is not an object at all, but just a flexible and efficient cog in the transportation system. Passengers are presumably not autonomous subjects either, but resources recruited by the tourist industry to fill the planes. Heidegger concludes: "Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object."

Foucault, in the social realm, like Heidegger thinking of natural things, went through a stage, expressed in Madness and Civilization, where he thought the problem was that some groups dominated and excluded others. He announces dramatically that:

The life of unreason no longer manifests itself except in the lightning-flash of works such as those of Hölderlin, ... of Nietzsche, or of Artaud ... resisting by their own strength that gigantic moral imprisonment which we are in the habit of calling ... the liberation of the insane.

Foucault felt he had to expose this sinister repression and liberate the repressed. Later he saw that repression, calling for liberation, was not the problem. He rejected:

the idea that underneath power with its acts of violence and its artifice we should be able to recuperate things themselves in their primitive vivacity: behind the asylum walls, the spontaneity of madness; through the penal system, the generous fever of delinquence; under the sexual interdiction, the freshness of desire.

For Foucault, postmodern power is not an instrument of exclusion, but a pervasive pressure towards ever greater inclusion. It does not serve to objectify, exclude, coerce or punish, but rather to order and enhance life. Power creates docile bodies and self-absorbed, deep subjects so as to produce ever greater welfare for all. The resulting practices embody what Foucault calls disciplinary bio-power.

It is a power working to incite, reinforce, ... optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.

Foucault, in a variation on Heidegger's account of research, sees that our current practices, supposedly grounded in sciences such as social psychology, produce anomalies, such as delinquents, and then take every anomaly, every attempt to evade them, as an occasion for further intervention to bring the anomalies under scientific norms. All this is done, of course, for the anomaly’s own good, so that everyone gladly accepts this order. Heidegger emphasized the tendency toward total ordering in technology by calling it, "total mobilization"; Foucault refers to the totalizing tendency of disciplinary power as "normalization."

Normalization is, of course, more than socialization into norms. Socialization into norms is the universal way the understanding of being or power governs the actions of the members of any society. In the new arrangement which has emerged more and more clearly since the Classical Age, however, norms are progressively brought to bear on "all aspects of life" What makes normalization different (and dangerous) is that it seeks to cover all practices. Heidegger, quoting Nietzsche, says, "the wasteland grows."

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault explains the way postmodern power is something entirely new. Unlike monarchical power, whose exercise was top-down, centralized, intermittent, highly visible, extravagant, and stable; postmodern power is bottom-up, diffuse, continuous, invisible, operating in the micro-practices, and constantly on the move colonizing new domains. In The History of Sexuality, Vol. I. Foucault adds:

Power's condition of possibility ... must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate ... Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.

This raises an important question. When Foucault describes power as "coming from everywhere" is he describing power in general, i.e. the social clearing, or is he describing bio-power, which is uniquely discrete, continuous and bottom-up?

This seeming problem is cleared up, I think, if we remember Heidegger's account of onto-theology. Like the understanding of being, power, always, in fact, "comes from everywhere," in that it is embodied in the background of everyday practices. But what these background practices have made possible up to recently is monarchical and state-juridical power, i.e. power administered from above. But now, Foucault tells us, things have changed:

To conceive of power [in these terms] is to conceive of it in terms of a historical form that is characteristic of our societies: the juridical monarchy. Characteristic yet transitory. For while many of its forms have persisted to the present, it has gradually been penetrated by quite new mechanisms of power that are probably irreducible to the representation of law.

Just as for Heidegger the technological understanding of being, by treating everything as resources, levels being to pure ordering, and so gets rid of all onto-theology --the idea that some entity is the ground of everything -- so bio-power reveals the irrelevance of questions of the legitimacy of the state as the source of power. Foucault says:

At bottom, despite the differences in epochs and objectives, the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king. Hence the importance that the theory of power gives to the problem of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty.

That is, just as total mobilization cannot be understood by positing subjects and objects, so normalization works directly through new sorts of invisible, continuous practices of control Foucault calls micro-practices. The everyday person to person power relations whose coordination produces the style of any regime of power are, indeed, everywhere. But in earlier regimes of power they are not micro-practices. Only disciplinary power works meticulously by ordering every detail. So, while for Foucault all forms of power are bottom up and the understanding of power as monarchical misses this important fact, nonetheless bio-power is bottom-up in a new and dangerously totalizing way, so that understanding power on the model of the power of the king (the equivalent of onto-theology) covers up an important change in how our practices are working.

[We can schematize the above relations as follows:

Heidegger: ontological: mode of revealing: (Gestell) enframing

style: challenging forth

ontic: the practices are so structured as to make beings show us as optimizable and flexible standing reserves, i.e. things show up not as objects but as resources.

Foucault: ontological: dispositive(apparatus) : subjugation/objectification

style = discipline

ontic: things are organized by the apparatus (e.g. exams) so that people show up as docile bodies to be managed and enhanced.]

Heidegger and Foucault are clear, then, that what is uniquely oppressive in our current practices is not that they are illegitimate nor that they cause ecological devastation. According to Foucault legitimacy is a red herring; our current society becomes more oppressive as it becomes more protective of rights and more permissive, and productive. Heidegger, on his part, distinguishes the current problems of technology -- ecological destruction, urbanization, nuclear danger, etc. -- from the devastation that would result if technology solved all our problems.

What threatens man in his very nature is the ... view that man, by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the energies of physical nature, could render the human condition, man's being, tolerable for everybody and happy in all respects.

Their common critique of techno/bio-power does not, however, lead Heidegger or Foucault to oppose the use of technological devices, nor specific welfare practices. Heidegger is clear that it is the essence of technology -- the technological understanding of being -- not technology, that causes our distress. That the technological understanding of being can be disassociated from technological devices is clear if one looks at contemporary Japan where a traditional, non-technological understanding of being -- or, perhaps better, no single understanding of being at all, but a pluralistic understanding of multiple realities -- exists alongside the most advanced high-tech production and consumption.

Heidegger’s goal is to use technological devices but, by thinking the history of the West, to free himself from the technological understanding of being. He claims:

We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature [as world disclosers and preservers].

Foucault, like Heidegger, is, of course, not opposed to modern welfare techniques, e.g. specific practices like mass vaccination. Late Foucault even has suggestions on how to improve the welfare state, but he is opposed to taking for granted that welfare practices, based on the social sciences, should, in the name of efficiency and optimization, be extended without critical questioning to all aspects of our lives. For both thinkers the danger seems to be that out current understanding of being and power leaves no place for marginal practices. Why this is a danger remains to be seen.

IV. What Resists and Why.

Neither Heidegger nor Foucault think that we can resist techno/bio-power directly because what ultimately needs to be resisted is not particular technologies nor particular strategies but rather a tendency in the practices towards ever greater order and flexibility that produces and sustains them. Thus the current understanding can only be resisted by first showing that it is not inevitable but is an interpretation of what it is to be, second by connecting our current style with our current discomfort and then by taking up marginal practices which have escaped or successfully resisted the spread of techno/bio-power.

Characteristically, Foucault is concerned solely with what is happening to people, while Heidegger focuses on what is happening to things. Each sees what is endangered as, at the same time, a source of resistance.

Middle Heidegger's basic idea was that Western human beings are essentially disclosers of a series of total worlds. One way to open new worlds is to reconfigure the practices by making marginal practices central and central practices marginal. This would result in a new understanding of being focused in a new god. So we can see why, for Middle Heidegger, the way Kant’s world picturing has worked itself out as total mobilization and so tends towards the incorporation of all marginal practices, is the greatest danger. It eliminates those very practices on the basis of which new worlds could be disclosed and dooms us to the eternal return of the same.

For Later Heidegger, the gathering of local practices around things such as a jug of wine or a family meal produces temporary, self-enclosed, local worlds that resist the totalizing and dispersing effects of the flexible and efficient ordering demanded by the technological understanding of being. Thus cultivating what Albert Borgmann calls focal practices gives a new center, or better new centers to our lives. Human beings still have the job of world disclosing and preserving, now called dwelling on earth

Foucault, for his part, bases resistance on the self. He finds in Antiquity a practice in terms of which to question the direction our current practices are taking, and to resist this trend. He explains:

[In Antiquity] it was a matter of knowing how to govern one's own life in order to give it the most beautiful form possible (in the eyes of others, of oneself, and of the future generations for whom one could serve as an example)."

He proposes "opposing to categories of the ‘law’ and of ‘prohibition’ those of the ‘art of living,’ ‘techniques of self,’ and ‘stylization of existence.’" Foucault grounds resistance in these "practices of creativity."

V. Conclusion

Now we come to the important difference between Heidegger's and Foucault's ontologies. For Heidegger, the basic way the background practices work is by gathering and so bringing things into their own. Human beings, as world disclosers, must preserve and respond to these practices. For Foucault, on the contrary, the background practices reveal, as they do in Nietzsche, a constantly shifting struggle. Thus there is no way to be receptive to them.

Thus finally when it comes to the difficult normative question, just why we should resist at all, Heidegger and Foucault take quite different paths, each of which has its advantages and drawbacks. Heidegger, as we have seen, understands our essence to be receptive to the way the background practices can gather to disclose new worlds. Foucault explicitly denies any appeal to our human essence -- even the weak claim that our essence is to be receivers and preservers of worlds. This saves Foucault from essentialism but, of course, denies him any account of why bio-power should generally be felt as distressing. In contrast to Heidegger, he holds that human beings must resist the current form of power without being able to give an argument why totalization is dangerous and with the realization that no form of power is without its problems. He thus adopts an attitude he calls "hyper and pessimistic activism."

There is, nonetheless, an important kind of resistance these two thinkers share. Thinking the history of being, for Heidegger, and the genealogy of regimes of power, for Foucault, opens a space for critical questioning by showing that our understanding of reality need not be defined by techno/bio power -- that we need not be dominated by the drive to order and optimize everything. They both show that we had a different relation to being and to power once which suggests that we could have again. Thus an understanding of our historical condition weakens the hold our current understanding has on us and makes possible disengagement from the direction our practices are taking. Both thinkers were once prophets of the dawning of a new world, but both gave up that stance. They both came to share later Heidegger’s modest claim that:

The thinking in question remains unassuming because its task is only of a preparatory, not of a founding character. It is content with awakening a readiness in man for a possibility whose contour remains obscure, whose coming remains uncertain.

Or, as Foucault put it in an interview:

My role ... is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed.

He wanted, he said, "to participate in the difficult displacement of forms of sensibility,"

Thus both emphasize the thinker's ability to enable us to think differently and thereby to get into a free relationship to the unique danger posed by our current practices. END

Further Considerations:

Foucault does not say much about the regimes of power before the modern one, but, since every social space is structured by power we can be sure there is something to be said. It is left for us to figure out what sort of power corresponds to physis and to poesis. Presumably the first is a loosely organized power of clans organized around heroes, who like the gods whoosh up at crucial moments and then subside. Poesis would correspond to the ideal of democracy we find in Aeschylus’s Orestiea where the power of Athenian democracy is that it is an expressive order that brings each thing out its own, even the Furies become humanities. It is easier to see what Foucault thinks of power in Roman antiquity. I presume the emphasis is not on the glorious monarchies but on the bureaucracy which administers the empire the way the nobles administer their selves. This imposition of order on rebellious matter is clear in Virgil’s account of how the leader is able to calm and control the mob. In Heidegger this is the period of the understanding of being as res which is the imposition of form on matter to produce a finished work. Finally, we see that for an understanding of being as createdness the mode of power will be parochial power where God and his envoys on earth are concerned with each and every soul.

Why isn’t Foucault interested in working out the different structures of different regimes of power before parochial power, or in discussing power at all, for that matter, after his detailed discussion of monarchical power and disciplinary power in his books after History of Sexuality Vol. 1? We might get a clue, as usual, from looking to Heidegger.

It is a striking, surprising, and little noticed fact, that in the late 50ies when Heidegger is writing about things and dwelling he never mentions being at all.. (With one single exception that I know of, where, when he is speaking of mortals, Heidegger reverts to the language of being and time.)

When he was thinking of modes of resistance to the technological understanding of being, Heidegger came to think that there was an essential antagonism between a unified understanding of being and local worlds. Of course, he always realized that there would be an antagonism between the style set up by a cultural paradigm and things that could only be brought out in their ownness in a style different from the dominant cultural style. Such things would inevitably be dispersed to the margins of the culture. There, they will shine in contrast to the dominant style but will have to resist being considered irrelevant or even wicked. But if there is a single understanding of being even those things that come into their own in the dominant cultural style will be inhibited as things. Already in his "Thing" essay Heidegger goes out of his way to point out that, even though the original meaning of ‘thing’ in German is a gathering to discuss a matter of concern to the community, in the case of the thing thinging, the gathering in question must be self contained. The focal occasion must determine which community concerns are relevant rather than the reverse.

Given the way local worlds establish their own internal coherence that resists any imposition from outside there is bound to be a tension between the glorious cultural paradigm that establishes an understanding of being for a whole culture and the humble inconspicuous things. The shining of one would wash out the shining of the others. The tendency toward one unified world would impede the gathering of local worlds. Given this tension, Heidegger abandoned in a late seminar what he had considered up to then his crucial contribution to philosophy, the notion of a single understanding of being and its correlated notion of the ontological difference between being and beings. He remarks that "from the perspective of appropriation it becomes necessary to free thinking from the ontological difference." He continues, "From the perspective of appropriation, [letting-presence] shows itself as the relation of world and thing, a relation which could in a way be understood as the relation of being and beings. But then its peculiar quality would be lost." What presumably would be lost would be the self- enclosed local character of things. It follows that, as mortal disclosers of worlds in the plural, the only comprehensiveness we can hope to achieve is our openness to dwelling in many worlds and the capacity to move among them. Only such a capacity allows us to accept Heidegger’s criticism of technology and still have a genuinely positive relationship to technological it.

The moral seems to be that, when one is looking for marginal practices that could support resistance to the dominant regime of power, rather than thinking of resistance as a new regime that is dawning or a new god that can save us, one should think of the marginal as what is outside power. It is precisely not power but things and selves which will be what one studies. Thus in the last works of Heidegger and of Foucault the discussion of epochal understandings of being drops out for Heidegger and discussion of the structure of regimes of power seem to drop out for Foucault. (By an odd quirk I can’t explain, Foucault seems to turn into middle Heidegger for a moment in the introduction to Care of the Self where he talks of studying the problematizations that "being gives us to be thought." I have no idea what being means for Foucault, unless it is a new way of referring to the problems in Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality.)