Yes Pharoah, I remember discussing with you in part 3 your idea about the uniqueness of your personal being {?} or identity {?}, but it's good that you bring this forward again and attempt to give us a clearer sense of what you are claiming in terms of your independence from being and Being. I join Steve in asking you for a clearer exposition of your concept and its grounds.
This text by Heidegger may be useful to you in understanding the relevance of his thinking to your own:
A very helpful summary posted at amazon:
"Thinking the ground of metaphysics...
By Brian C. on April 3, 2011
This is a very short book composed of two essays (The Principle of Identity and The Ontotheological Constitution of Metaphysics). The actual text of the English translation is only around fifty pages which means the text is very dense and terse in formulation even by Heidegger's standards. In order to understand what Heidegger is up to in this text you either have to already be in possession of a basic understanding of Heidegger's later philosophy (especially Heidegger's understanding of the 'truth of Being', 'event of appropriation', and the belonging together of thought and Being) or you will have to find a good secondary source that deals with this text (there is a short but enlightening discussion of the two essays in this book in a book by Otto Poggeler titled Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking). While this is a very interesting book the fact that it is so short does not make it a good stand alone text, or a good general introduction, to Heidegger's late philosophy. I will attempt to summarize, to the best of my limited abilities, the two essays contained in this work. Anyone choosing to read my summaries should bear in mind that I am by no means an expert in Heidegger (yet) so these summaries should be taken as very provisional. If anyone spots what they consider to be errors in my interpretation please feel free to respond under the comments section of this review.
In the first essay Heidegger attempts to think through the principle of identity (A is A) which is often considered the highest principle of thought. This principle is not, however, merely the highest law of thought, the principle to which all thought must conform in order to be coherent, it is also supposed to say something about the Being of beings, namely: every being is in such a way that it is identical to itself. If beings were not encountered in their identity with themselves something like science would not be possible. The principle of identity as it applies to Being is, therefore, a necessary presupposition for something like science. But is this the most profound understanding of identity? Heidegger does not think so. Heidegger believes there is a more profound form of identity which underlies our ability to encounter beings in terms of the identity they bear towards themselves. In order to elucidate this more profound notion of identity Heidegger turns to one of his favorite sayings of Parmenides "For the same perceiving (thinking) as well as being" (pg27). This is a strange translation but what is being asserted here is an identity between perceiving (thinking) and being. This identity is no longer the identity which we represent as a characteristic of the Being of beings since Being is one of the terms of this identity (it cannot, therefore, ground the identity). Heidegger interprets this identity as a belonging together of man and Being. Being only is within the clearing that man provides while man is only the response to Being. Heidegger believes that Being becomes present to man today primarily in the form of technology. Beings present themselves as what is manipulable or representable. The most difficult aspect of Heidegger's later thought is that he no longer conceives this as a projection of man. In Being and Time Heidegger analyzed what he believed was an inherent tendency of Dasein to misunderstand the world in terms of merely present-at-hand things. This tendency could still be overcome, however, by providing a deeper ontology of Dasein and Dasein's various modes of comportment. But the later Heidegger (the Heidegger after the turn) no longer believes that things are quite this simple when he writes, "Technology conceived in its broadest sense and in its manifold manifestations, is taken for the plan which man projects [which would be the standpoint of Being and Time]...Caught up in this conception, we confirm our own opinion that technology is of man's making alone. We fail to hear the claim of Being which speaks in the essence of technology" (pg34). Reducing technology to a projection of man is itself part of the technological worldview which views everything in terms of its origin in the subject. Heidegger is attempting to understand how man is 'delivered over' to such a worldview which he calls the frame while not being the origin of this understanding. The frame, according to Heidegger, is "more real than all of atomic energy and the whole world of machinery" (pg35) but we are not aware of the frame because the frame itself determines the Being of beings as presence and the frame itself is not something that is present. It is not too difficult to understand the notion of an impersonal conceptual framework that determines our relation to beings (similar in its own way to Kuhnian paradigms). What is difficult to understand is Heidegger's insistence that this frame is a claim of Being which man is delivered over to in what Heidegger calls the event of appropriation (I believe that some of the post-Heideggerians attempt to overcome what might be called Heidegger's mystical understanding of the 'sendings of Being' by connecting these impersonal frameworks to more material structures like social practices and institutions and language). Heidegger does believe there is a way out of this impasse. If we are able to think technology and metaphysics in terms of the history of Being then we can pass onto an experience of the 'event of appropriation' which is the belonging-together of man and Being. We can, to some degree, free ourselves from the thinking which takes what is representable by the human subject as the measure of what is real and remain open to the mystery that is necessarily a part of every unconcealment of Being (since concealment belongs necessarily to every unconcealment). We can do this by thinking the more profound identity between thinking and Being which lies behind identity as a characteristic of the Being of beings. The goal of the first essay is precisely to think this more profound identity as the 'event of appropriation'.
In the second essay Heidegger attempts to determine the nature of metaphysics as onto-theo-logical thought which is itself grounded in the oblivion of the ontological difference (the difference between Being and beings). Metaphysics does think the difference between Being and beings but it thinks it in terms of the difference between 'what-a-thing-is' and 'that-it-is', or as Otto Poggeler writes, "the true world of the permanent what-it-is is distinguished from the apparent world of the vanishing and transitory that-it-is" (pg120). Metaphysics thinks the Being of beings in terms of constant presence which serves as a ground for the transitory existence of beings. Plato, for example, thinks of the Being of beings as Idea, that which remains identical beyond the transitory and fleeting world of sense-perception. But as Poggeler observes this winds up destroying the unity between beings and Being (which is why Platonism winds up positing another transcendent world of Being in contrast to the world of becoming) and this difference remains merely ontic (a difference between two beings rather than a difference between Being and beings). Heidegger is attempting to rethink the ontological difference in a way that does not lead to the positing of another, true realm of reality in contrast to the world that we actually live in (he is, therefore, carrying forward a project of Nietzsche, namely, the overturning of Platonism, though he attempts to overturn Platonism in a way that is not a mere reversal of terms which is what he thinks Nietzsche does). For Heidegger the Being of beings is not a true Being that is separate from beings; rather, "the Being of beings means Being which is beings" (pg64). Heidegger argues that the 'is' in this sentence must be understood transitively. In other words, not in the sense of identity (Being is beings in the sense that they are identical which would obliterate the ontological difference), but in the sense that Being becomes present in the transition to beings (as a sidenote: this terse discussion by Heidegger of the nature of the 'is' as transitive when it relates Being to beings is a key to understanding Heidegger's discussion of Schelling and his relation to pantheism in his book on Schelling). This is a difficult thought to grasp but I think we can understand this thought with an example. The table that lies in front of me 'is', it has Being. But the table itself is not Being (it is not identical to Being, and this is the meaning of the ontological difference). On the other hand, Being (though different from beings) is not something that lies in another realm beyond the realm in which we live. The Being of the table is right in front of us; it does not reside in some inaccessible realm that we can only reach through thought (nor is Being a logical category which we can manipulate in thought). Being is the unconcealment of Being and is present as beings and yet it is not identical to beings nor is it a being (Lee Braver, in his book on Heidegger's later writings, expresses this by saying that Being is an adverb rather than a noun; it expresses a way Being, or a how, rather than a substantive Being; in this work Heidegger argues it is "impossible to represent Being as the general characteristic of particular beings," since, "there is being only in this or that historical character: phusis, logos, en, idea, energeia, substantiality, objectivity..." (pg66); these are the great epochal understandings of Being which determine the how of how we encounter beings; it is impossible to find a single, general concept of Being which would underlie all of these understandings of Being). This is what Heidegger means when he says that "the Being of beings means Being which is beings" (pg64) and that the 'is' in that sentence must be understood transitively. Being is always the Being of beings but it is also always a particular way of understanding beings which both reveals and conceals. This contrasts with metaphysics which attempts to think the Being of beings in the unity of what is general (ontology as the science of what is common to all beings, or, of being as being) and in the unity of the ground of Being (theology which conceives of the ground as God or the divine) (pg58). This is a circular dance according to Heidegger since we seek to ground beings in the general nature of Being and then wind up grounding the general nature of Being on a being (the highest cause). Metaphysics is lead into this circle because it follows the logos which is understood as the process of providing grounds, securing reasons, etc. (which ultimately leads to Hegel's Science of Logic in which Being is conceived as this movement of thought itself, or thought thinking itself; and it should be pointed out that Hegel's Science of Logic is the starting point of the second essay in this work). Heidegger, in other works, attempts to uncover a more original understanding of the logos as unconcealment which will move him away from metaphysics and logic (the giving of grounds, or the grounding of knowledge claims) towards poetry (the saying which uncovers the truth). It should be pointed out that metaphysics, for Heidegger, is inherently onto-theo-logy to the degree that it attempts to provide grounds for beings whether or not any particular metaphysical system winds up having recourse to an ultimate being in the sense of a self-caused being. Metaphysics is inherently onto-theo-logical whether or not it is explicitly theistic. The overcoming of onto-theo-logy is not, therefore, of necessity atheism but only the overcoming of a certain understanding of the divine in terms of a First Cause. But as Heidegger remarks, "Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god. The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus perhaps closer to the divine God" (pg72). This opens up the possibility of a new understanding of religion and the divine which, I might add, remains largely immune to the criticisms leveled against religion by the new atheism since it does not posit a highest being as the ground of Being.
In summary, this book is a very condensed discussion of some of the fundamental notions of Heidegger's later philosophy (the frame, the ontological difference, the essence of metaphysics as onto-theo-logy, etc.). While it is not necessarily the best introduction to these aspects of Heidegger's later thought due to its length and terse formulations it will prove a very enlightening text for anyone who already has some familiarity with Heidegger's later philosophy."
