Isn’t this a reproposal of the poverty of language and thought, that penuria nominum and that abundance of homonyms that used to torment theoreticians of the universals, complicated by the fact that language is now subject to the «dispositions of the body»? And how will we be able to have complete trust in this somatotypic language, when it claims to speak (in terms of geometric order!) of being?
This left one last possibility: as being had been separated from the essence and the essence from existence centuries before, all that remained was to divorce being from itself.
1.6 The Duplication of Being
When Heidegger, in What is Metaphysics?, wonders, «Why is there being rather than nothing?,» he uses Seiende, not Sein. Heidegger thought that the trouble with metaphysics was that it was always taken up with the entity but not with its foundation, that is to say, being and the truth of being. By questioning the entity as an entity, metaphysics has avoided turning to being as being. It has never concentrated on its own foundation: it was part of metaphysics’ destiny that being would elude it. Metaphysics has referred to the entity in its totality in the belief that it was talking about being as such; it dealt with the entity as entity while being manifests itself only in and for the Dasein. And so we cannot talk about being if not in reference to us, insofar as we are thrown into the world. To think being as being (to think of the truth of being as the foundation of metaphysics) means abandoning metaphysics. The problem of being and the unveiling of it is not a problem for metaphysics as the science of the entity, it is the central problem of existence.
And so enter the idea of Nothingness, which «comes together» with the idea of the entity. It springs from feelings of dread, or angst. This angst makes us feel out of place in the entity and «robs us of speech.» Without speech there is no more entity: as the entity flees, there arises the nonentity, in other words, nothingness. Angst reveals Nothingness to us. But this nothingness is identified with being (Sein), as the being of the entity, its foundation and truth, and in this sense Heidegger can fall in with Hegel’s remark to the effect that pure being and pure nothingness are the same thing. From this experience of Nothingness arises the need to consider being as the essence of the foundations of the entity.
And yet, non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate, especially notions as primitive as the entity, being, and nothingness. It is hard to separate Heidegger’s thought from the language in which he expresses himself, and he was well aware of this: proud as he was of the philosophical nature of his German, what would he have thought had he been born in Oklahoma, with an extremely vague to be and a single Being for Seiende and Sein? If there were still any need to repeat that being appears to us only as an effect of language, the way in which these two words (Seiende and Sein) are hypostatized into two Somethings ought to suffice. The two entities are created because there is a language, and they can be maintained only if the aporia of being as described in Aristotle is not wholly accepted.
While for Heidegger the entity (ens, Seiende) corresponds to substances, of which Aristotle had no doubt (nor does Heidegger have any, because, despite all his yarn-spinning about nothingness, like Aristotle and Kant he never doubted that things are and offer themselves spontaneously to our sensible intuition), there certainly might be something vaguer and more original that lingers on beneath the illusory idea of naming substances univocally. But up to this point we would still be at Parmenides’s diffidence with regard to the onomata. It would be enough to say that the way in which until now we have segmented the Something surrounding us does not account for it at all, it does not account for its unfathomable complexity, or absolute simplicity, or uncontrollable confusion. If being is really said in many ways, the Sein would still be the viscous totality of the entities, before they are subdivided by the language that says them.
But then the problem of the Dasein, inasmuch as it is the only one of the entities able to ask itself the question of being, would be precisely this: to realize its circular relation with the totality of the entities it names—a realization sufficient to arouse angst and a sense of not-belonging, but one which in no way would help us get out of the circle into which being-there finds itself thrown.
To say there is something that metaphysics has not yet interpreted, i.e., that still has not been segmented by interpretation, implies that that something is already the object of segmentation, in that it is defined as the whole of that which is yet to be segmented.
If being-there is the entity that fully recognizes the semiosical nature of its relation with the entities, it is not necessary to duplicate Seiende and Sein.
It is useless to say that the discourse of metaphysics has built us a world of entities in which we live in an inauthentic fashion. This would induce us at most to reformulate a discourse that is fallacious. But this could still be done by starting from that horizon of the entity into which we are thrown. If the set of the entities is not identified solely with the set of the utilizable objects, but also involves the ideas and the emotions, then angst and the feeling of not-belonging are also a constituent part of the ontic universe they ought to dissolve.
Being’s awareness of death, angst, and the feeling of nothingness open our minds to nothing that is not already the horizon into which we have been thrown.
The entities that come toward us are not only «utilizable» objects; they are also the keyboard of the passions we know so well, because they are the way in which others have apprised us of our being involved in the world. The feelings that seem to open our minds to the Sein are already part of the immense territory of the entities. Again, if Nothingness were the epiphany of an obscure force that opposes the entities, in this inexpressible ontological «black hole» we might perhaps meet that traveler through a negative universe which is das Sein. But no, Heidegger is not so naive as to hypostatize a mechanism of thought (negation), or the feeling that reality is vacillating, and to transform it into the ontological «reality» of Nothingness. He knows very well, as did Parmenides, that being really exists, but Nothingness does not exist (DK 6). What could he make of a term that has not only null intension but also null extension? The sensation of nothingness is not a simple tonality of passion, a contingent, chance depression, a mood, but a «fundamental affective situation» (Heidegger 1973: 204). Not the appearance of another Something, but passion.
And so what is it that not-belonging arouses, if not the awareness that our being-there consists of having to talk (to chat) about the entity? Once divorced from the entity of which we are talking, being flees. But this is not an ontological or metaphysical statement, it is more a lexical observation: no meaning corresponds to this word, das Sein, as opposed to das Seiende. Both terms have the same extension (unlimited) and the same intension (null). «The entity is known to us—but being? When we try to determine, or even just to grasp such a notion, are we not seized by vertigo?» (Heidegger 1973: IV, B, 41). It is exactly the same vertigo that seizes us when we want to say what the entity is as an entity. Terms of equal intension and extension (the only instance of absolute synonymy!), Seiende and Sein both indicate the same Something.
The Sein always appears in Heidegger’s discourse as an intruder, as the substantivized hypostasis of a verbal usage typical of ordinary discourse. Being-there finds itself again, becomes aware of itself insofar as it is assigned to the entity,
