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Elliot R. Wolfson
UC Santa Barbara

Volume 17, 2025

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Here atheism and nihilism—there theologizing and mysticism. All of this is because one has no idea what the question is and searches for nothing and is capable of nothing, not even of raising the question.

Martin Heidegger, On My Own Publications 

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I begin this study with Martin Heidegger’s argument in Das Wesen des Nihilismus (1946-1948) that from Friedrich Nietzsche we can deduce that nihilism conveys that “the nihil (nothing) exists essentially in what it names [was we nennt, das nihil (nichts) wesentlich ist].”¹ Prima facie, this statement seems quite banal. How, after all, can the nothing exist except by being the nothing it names, and if this so, what could the nothing name apart from the nothingness that cannot be named? What, then, is the philosophical implication of this outwardly transparent comment? Heidegger went on to explain that Nietzsche credited Western philosophy with the insight that nihilism means that “there is nothing with respect to beings [Seienden], and by no means just with respect to this or that being, rather there is nothing with respect to beings as such as a whole [sondern nichts ist es mit dem Seienden als solchem in Ganzen].”² The task, then, is to think nihilism—identified by Nietzsche as the state wherein the highest values are devaluated³—from the assessment of the nothingness of being,⁴ that is, from the place where beings are contemplated under the guise of the closure implied in the infamous statement that “God is dead,”⁵ a proclamation that entails both the gnostic-like negation of the physical world⁶ and the obliteration of a metaphysical realm beyond the senses whence we may infer, in turn, that “the self-consciousness [Selbstbewußtsein] of the human being makes itself the basis of everything by measuring all objectivity in accordance with the self-certainty of self-consciousness. The truth about all objectivity becomes the certainty of subjectivity.”⁷   

Drawing out the further repercussions of Nietzsche’s nihilism and the construction of the self-assertive subject that is indispensable to the categorization of modernity as “the age of the fulfillment of metaphysics” (das Weltalter der Vollendung der Metaphysik)⁸, Heidegger wrote:

The entire horizon of the supersensible [Übersinnlichen] is wiped away because it has become that which is posited by the representing subject’s act of self-positing. … The supersensible is robbed of its power to nourish, support, form, and stimulate. It becomes lifeless. … The killing of God consists in the positing of the idea as the objectum for the subject. In this way, the reign of the appearing of that which comes to presence [Aussehens des Anwesenden], which essences from out of itself, is dispelled.⁹

I surmise that Heidegger was alluding here to Nietzsche’s appropriation of the Kantian claim that the noumenal truth is not attainable to the human mind; all we have access to is the phenomenal appearance that Kant believed was adequate to the truth, since he maintained that appearance, too, is shaped by universal categories of reason. Heidegger may have been alluding to this point when he observed in Aus einem Feldweggespräch über das Denken that in the horizon of things (Horizont für die Dinge), which is distinguished from the horizon of releasement (Horizont für die Gelassenheit), the things may be experienced either as objects (Gegenstände) or as things-in-themselves (Dinge an sich).¹⁰ Notwithstanding the distinction that is made between objects, which stands for beings as they appear, and the things-in-themselves, the latter can be thought only in reference to the former.¹¹ From Nietzsche’s perspective, however, the epistemological contrast of the thing-in-itself and the appearance is untenable because the former at bottom is the subject-in-itself, which is fictitious; it follows, therefore, that being is to be identified as becoming and the notion of appearance itself disappears in the awareness that what is apparently real is really apparent.¹² “The most extreme form of nihilism,” wrote Nietzsche, “would be that every belief, every holding-to-be-true, is necessarily false: because there simply is no true world. Thus: a perspectival illusion whose origins lie within us (inasmuch as we have constant need of a narrower, abridged and simplified world).”¹³

The only truth we can ascertain is the truth veiled in the veil of untruth, that is, the truth manifest in the dissimilitude of its nonmanifestation, the doubling of illusion characteristic of the dream to which we assign the status of reality.¹⁴ As Heidegger expressed it, for Nietzsche, “truth deteriorates into a necessary illusion [Schein], into an unavoidable stabilization introduced into beings themselves, which are determined as ‘will to power.’”¹⁵ To some degree, Heidegger acknowledged his indebtedness to Nietzsche’s rejection of any transcendental ground in the following explication of Sein und Zeit from 1941: “By claiming that human Dasein is Being-in-the-world [In-der-Welt-sein], being human is now arbitrarily limited to that which is on-this-side [auf das Diesseits eingeschränkt], and the beyond is simply denied [das Jenseits einfach geleugnet]. The doctrine of the ‘nothing’ naturally goes together with the one-side [einseitig] , this-side ‘world view’ [diesseitigen ‘Weltanschauung’] represented in Being and Time, because of course the anthropological glorification [anthropologische Verherrliching] of the human being necessarily leads to nihilism.”¹⁶ To be sure, Heidegger would protest that his understanding is predicated on seeing being-in-the-world as a consequence of Dasein, but I do not think he can escape the charge of anthropocentrism and the casting aside of the suprasensible foundation of meaning in the sensible realm. 

Heidegger judiciously noted that the act of killing God is a feat too great for human beings to arrogate even though we have implicitly heeded this undertaking to the extent that we understand ourselves in modernity as the primary agents of subjectivity, an agency that consists of taking hold of our essence as the rational animal (à la Aristotle’s definition) whose animality is realized in the self-willing of the Übermensch that is proportionate to the will to power,¹⁷ the essence of all beings subject to the eternal recurrence of the same, that is, the actuality (Wirklichkeit) of the willfulness that “always appears the same and yet differently [aus der je gleichen aber verschieden erscheinenden],”¹⁸ an interpretation of Nietzsche that corresponds to Heidegger’s own musing that the difference [Unterschied] is “where precisely the ‘common’ [Gemeinsame], the same [Selbe], is held fast; and in relation to it what is differentiated [Unterschiedenen].”¹⁹ In the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), composed between 1936-1938, Heidegger wrote that the wish to navigate the course of the question of being, in the hope of recuperating the lineage of antiquity, can be fulfilled only if one comprehends that the matter of repetition (Wiederholung) means “to let the same [das selbe], the uniqueness of beyng [die Einzigkeit des Seyns], become a plight again and thereby out of a more original truth. ‘Again’ [‘Wieder’] means here precisely ‘altogether otherwise’ [ganz anders].”²⁰ 

Relatedly, as he put in his comments on Sein und Zeit, written in July-August 1936, the retrieval of the question of being (die Wieder-holung der Seinsfrage) is a “thoughtful remembrance” (denkerische Erinnerung) or a “creative thinking that recollects” (andenkendes Erdenken), which means “bringing it afresh into our actualization,” but the retrieval of the “again” is “not merely a cheap imitation of the same” because we can never be the earlier ones as the distance that lies between us necessarily makes us different. Nevertheless, the retrieval is a “transformation” (Verwandlung) that imbibes the paradox of being “the same and yet not the same” (das selbe und doch nicht). Hence, the retrieval, properly speaking, is “the will to the second inception,” which is a return to what is yet to be, the ground whence beings unfold “out of themselves, above and beyond themselves” in the truth of beyng.²¹ It is in this sense, moreover, that what is nearest determines in advance what is furthest.²² 

Parenthetically, I note that Heidegger stressed that the superhumanity (Übermenschentum) to be adduced from Nietzsche is beyond the national and the international, since the latter is invariably a corollary of the former.²³ I suppose that everyone with an open mind would concur that such a statement is hardly insignificant given the time of its utterance. Perhaps one might counter with the proverbial “too little, too late,” but it is hard not to detect here a criticism of the tendentious use that the Nazis made of this Nietzschean idea. This example would corroborate the thesis proffered by Fred Dallmayr that in his private notebooks written between 1936-1948—which includes the text on the essence of nihilism we are presently discussing—Heidegger’s critique of National Socialism was more unambiguous and unequivocal than his public pronouncements.²⁴ Others have made a similar argument and my own intervention on this matter can be found in The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (2018). Be that as it may, the crucial point for this analysis is that Heidegger extracted from Nietzsche the truism that the madman, who proclaimed the death of God, demonstrates that he is actually a seeker of God. This line of interpretation lends support to Karl Löwith’s conjecture that attending to the unsaid in Nietzsche’s word that God is dead allows us to take stock of the fact that, for Heidegger himself, the place from which to investigate the loss of the gods is the “skeptical knowing” and “obedient faith” implied by a thinking that “in itself is devout and pious but which is neither philosophy nor theology. Then the truly faithful one would be the one who—this side of faith and non-faith in an extant God—binds oneself back to Being and is ‘religious’ to the extent that he adheres to ‘questioning’ as the ‘piety of thinking.’”²⁵ 

The ambivalent relationship between thinking and faith, which colored Heidegger’s palette, is the logical outcome of Nietzsche’s allegation that for the genuine nihilist, nihilism can only be overcome nihilistically by living nihilism to its end and entering into the labyrinth of the future—an explication that is reminiscent of the affirmative self-overcoming of nihilism attributed to Nietzsche by Keiji Nishitani in opposition to what the latter deemed to be the interpretation advanced by Heidegger²⁶—whence it follows that the negative must always be superseded by a positive. Here it is propitious to recall Maurice Blanchot’s comment on Nietzsche’s remark²⁷ that the most extreme form of nihilism is the recurrence of nothingness eternally:

Until now we thought nihilism was tied to nothingness. How ill-considered this was: nihilism is tied to being. Nihilism is the impossibility of being done with it and of finding a way out even in that end that is nothingness. It says the impotence of nothingness, the false brilliance of its victories; it tells us that when we think nothingness we are still thinking being. Nothing ends, everything begins again; the other is still the same. … Nihilism thus tells us its final and rather grim truth: it tells of the impossibility of nihilism.²⁸  

Blanchot derives from this impossibility a more basic hermeneutic that may be applied to all modern humanism, the work of science, and the planetary development: “nothingness unmasks itself in the being that cannot be negated.”²⁹ I surmise that a similar intention, albeit with a more modest objective, motivated Heidegger to encourage the reader to forsake the fallacious classification of Nietzsche as a naked atheist.³⁰ The one who must scream that God is dead is assuredly not liberated from the God so fanatically repudiated. And yet, the superhuman, when viewed from the prevailing horizon of existing humanity and the attendant acceptance of the metaphysical world, appears to be de-ranged (ver-rückt), and hence he is labeled the madman. But it is especially from the standpoint of this disarrangement (Verrückung) that one can understand that the essence of humanity is to be sought in the consummation of the subjectivity of the will to power. From Nietzsche’s discernment that the truth of beings appears as the will to power effectuated in the eternal return of the same, we can deduce the maxim that subjectivity—exemplified in the ego cogito, the I that thinks—will for the first time be brought to an unconcealedness (Unverborgenheit) that is commensurate to it.³¹

Cast more broadly, the criticism that Heidegger leveled against Nietzsche, which can be extended to all forms of nihilism, consists of the fact that the effort to surmount nihilism is itself nihilistic in accord with the inherently deconstructive meaning of the word. It is beneficial to cite Heidegger’s words verbatim:

The will to overcome nihilism misrecognizes itself because it shuts itself out of the manifestness of the essence of nihilism as the history of the omission of being [der Offenbarkeit des Wesens des Nihilismus als der Geschichte des Ausbleibens des Seins], unable to recognize its own deed. The misjudgment of the essential impossibility within metaphysics of overcoming nihilism, even if it is through its inversion, can go to such lengths as to take the denial of this possibility [of overcoming nihilism within metaphysics] immediately for an affirmation of nihilism or indeed for an indifference [Gleichgültigkeit], which looks on at the course of nihilistic decay without intervening in any way.³² 

The sign of the dominance of the corrupted essence (Unwesen) of nihilism, and the fall of humankind into the state of the unhistorical (Ungeschichtliche), is the emergence of historiography, which claims to be the authoritative idea of history.³³ Heidegger thus utilized his well-known distinction between history (Geschichte) and historiography (Historie) to account for the will to nihilism and the will to its overcoming. Indeed, both of these phenomena 

move in the realm of the historiographical accounting of historiographically analysed spirit and world-historical situations [in der historischen Verrechnung historisch analysierten Geistes und weltgeschichtlicher Situationen]. What history is, is sometimes also asked in historiography, but always only as an “also,” and hence, at times belatedly, at times as an addition and always as if historiographical representations of history with a sufficiently expanded generalization could yield us the definition of the essence of history. However, where philosophy interrogates and an ontology of the occurrence of history is interrogated, there one remains within the metaphysical interpretation of beings as such. History as being, proceeding simply from the essence of being itself, remains unthought [ungedacht].³⁴

The historiological portrayal of history, which privileges a linear conception of time prone to explain the past as a causally verifiable nexus of effects that supposedly fashions an objectification of facts and leaves one with the misguided impression of facticity, is the conceptual framework within which we must tackle nihilism and its overcoming.  

What has remained unthought is the philosophical interrogation of history from the vantage point of the essence of being itself. I suspect this is what Heidegger was thinking when he wrote in his explication of Ernst Jünger’s “Über die Linie,” published as “Zur Seinsfrage” in 1955, that “an assessment of the human situation in relation to the movement of nihilism and within this movement demands an adequate determination of the essential.”³⁵ The only way to reflect on the essence of nihilism is through a discussion of the essence of being, which alone sets one on the path to discuss the question of the nothing, a discussion that requires relinquishing the language of metaphysics because the latter prevents one from thinking the question concerning the essence of being, which is the essence of the nothing.³⁶ If the essence of nihilism lies in its inability to think the nihil, as Heidegger overtly wrote in his letter to Jean Beaufret from November 23, 1945,³⁷ then its overcoming would consist precisely of thinking the nothing–which is equiprimordial (gleichursprünglich) with being³⁸–in a thinking that distends beyond thinking, a thinking of the unthinkable, which encapsulates the essence of the human to be more than merely human, if the latter is defined as the animal rationale, that is, the impoverished surplus—the less that is more—related to the ek-sisting counterthrow of being (der ek-sistierende Gegenwurf des Seins) that allocates to the human being the mission to be the shepherd of being (der Hirt des Seins) as opposed to the lord of beings (der Herr des Seienden).³⁹ Moreover, the determination of this essence must occur through an examination of history that requires an alternate construal of temporality whereby the present harbors the possibility of the future retrieval of the past that is always yet to come. The flux of time, on this score, can be designated as the return of the same in which the same is the duplication of difference and hence the future is to be envisioned as a repetition of a past that has never been. The sense of history that Heidegger sought to reclaim contests the commonplace belief of historiography that the future does not flow into the past through the present or that the past is not as much impelled by the future as the future is by the past. 

Viewing time as a string of now-points, which privileges the presence of the present, is the standard calculated time that “veils the beyng-historical essence of time [seynsgeschichtliche Wesen der Zeit], time-ness [Zeit-tum], which itself belongs in ‘time-space’ [Zeit-Raum], i.e., it belongs in the ‘clearing’ [Lichtung] of the there as the ap-propriation of beyng [des Da als die Er-eignung des Seyns], by twisting free in the inception.”⁴⁰ The temporality (Zeitlichkeit) of Dasein, whence the temporal experience of being (Seinserfahrung) is revealed—veering off the wood path (Holz-weg) by which one delves into the emptiness (Leere) of the beyng of beyng (das Seyn des Seyns), the contestation of the event (Bestreitung des Ereignisses)⁴¹—is the presupposition bolstering the hermeneutical phenomenology that informed Heidegger’s espousing the prospect of a reversible timeline such that the present may be reckoned as the cause of the past as the past may be reckoned as the cause of the present. In spite of the historiographical ascription of temporal remoteness to the beginning, the proper historical heedfulness to the beginning shows that it is closer to us than what we are wont to regard as the most proximate.⁴² Indeed, “the beginning is an arising [Aufgehen], a bestowal [Verschenkung], that is never lost or ended, but is always only a more magnificent beginning [herrlicherer Anfang], a more primordial intimacy [anfänglichere Innigkeit].”⁴³ 

From Hölderlin we learn that the poet’s calling to speak the holy “never signifies the empty endurance of something present at hand [Vorhandenen]: It is the coming of the beginning [das Kommen des Anfangs]. … As coming, abiding is the primordiality of the beginning before which nothing else can be thought.”⁴⁴ Drawing the broader temporal implications of this conception of the primordial abiding that is interminably enduring and therefore perpetually coming, Heidegger spoke of the “essential transformation of the essence of time” (wesentliche Verwandlung des Wesens der Zeit) allowing the present to disappear (die Gegenwart verschwinden) out of the power of a future that is the power of the past.⁴⁵ Heidegger distinguished that which has been (Gewesene) and its having been (Gewesenheit) from that which is past (Vergangene) and its being past (Vergangenheit). Apportioning this distinction specifically to the “gods of old” (die alten Götter), Heidegger emphasized that they are present “in the renunciative Dasein … as having been [die Gewesenen], i.e., as still being [noch Wesenden]. In being absent, they come to presence precisely in the absence of that which has been [Abwesend wesen sie gerade in der Abwesenheit des Gewesenen].”⁴⁶ 

Foreseeing a prevalent concern of his so-called later thought after the turn (Kehre), Heidegger speculated that the essence of nihilism is related to the history of the eclipse of being in the appearance of beings.⁴⁷ In the Beiträge, Heidegger noted that Nietzsche’s nihilism relates to the forgetfulness of being (Seinsvergessenheit) and even more deeply to its ground in the abandonment by being (Seinsverlassenheit), also rendered by the alternative spelling as the abandonment by beyng (Seynsverlassenheit), which gives beings “the appearance that they themselves, without needing anything else, are now there to be grasped and used;” that is, the truth of beyng has abandoned beings and thus they appear as independent objects, which exclude and preclude the event (Ereignis) of beyng.⁴⁸ Moreover, the abandonment of beings by beyng is cloaked in the ills of modern society identified by Heidegger as “the increasing authority of calculation [Berechnung], speed [Schnelligkeit], and the claim of the massive [Anspruchs des Massenhaften]. The obstinately distorted essence [Unwesen] of the abandonment by being is hidden away under this cloak, and it makes the abandonment unassailable.”⁴⁹ Beyng has so radically abandoned beings that it has left them to the subjection of machination (Machenschaft)  and lived experience (Erleben) such that all “cultural politics” and “apparent attempts at saving Western culture must necessarily become the most insidious form of nihilism and thereby its highest form.”⁵⁰ It is because we have “blindly hung onto the beings of metaphysics that the beingless [Seinlose] and the parting [Abschied] seem to us precisely that which we have to block as soon as possible; for nihilism certainly seems, now, to be overflowing into infinity.”⁵¹ But this abundance of scarcity, induced by the abandonment, prepares the ground for the overcoming of nihilism through fostering the letting go of the belief in teleology and progress, arrogating instead the “complete senselessness” realized by Dasein meditating on the nature of beyng as the refusal and the appropriating event.⁵² The “genuine overcoming of nihilism” is thus the “realization that refusal pertains intrinsically to the essence of beyng,” which is the knowledge that “thinks nihilism still more originarily, all the way down to the abandonment by being.”⁵³ The overcoming of nihilism so conceived anticipates Heidegger’s resolve that the event of appropriation is concomitantly a disappropriation (Ereignis ist Enteignis), the remembrance (Gedächtnis) that is the essence of thinking comporting as the “responsive conjoining” (Fügsamkeit) that ambles “towards the countering secret” (entgegen des Gegnenden Hehls), the way (Weg) of the footbridge (Steg) that “opens itself at the proper time.”⁵⁴ 

Clarifying the implications of this critical aspect of his idea of appropriation in Über den Anfang (1941), Heidegger noted:

Beinglessness is the disappropriation of beings [Seinlosigkeit ist Enteignung des Seienden]—but disappropriation is not simply nihilation [Vernichtung], for it is more essential and more inceptive than mere nihilation and destruction. Disappropriation lets “stand” in the being-less [Ent-eignung läßt im Sein-losen “stehen”]. … The beingless is knowable only in being and knowable only in the manner of an “essence.” But here the innermost nihilating [innerste Nichtung] of being itself first reveals itself: that it is not in itself only concealment [Verbergung] and refusal [Verwehrung] but rather, as receding, is disappropriation. Disappropriation is the ultimacy of the intimacy [Innigkeit] of refusal; it is the parting [Abschied], not only of beings, but the parting of their own essence.⁵⁵

As untruth belongs to the essence of truth, and unconcealment to the essence of concealment, so disappropriation belongs to the essence of appropriation in the form of the innermost nihility of the beingness of being, a transience that is not merely nihilation or destruction but rather the letting stand of beings in their beinglessness. Hence, the disappropriation is not to be construed as concealment or refusal but as that which recedes in the intimacy of withholding that is the dismissal of the essence of beings in the inceptual event of beyng.⁵⁶ Such a reading places Heidegger’s view on our way of being in relation to other things in close proximity to the Buddhist construct śūnyatā and the praxis based thereon,⁵⁷ the emptying of the nihilizing emptiness⁵⁸ through the eradication of the illusory autonomy of the ego by the “opening up of the self to the temporality of Being,” whose ground “is discovered to be nihility—and it is this sense that philosophy as existential understanding has nihilism in its foundations.”⁵⁹ Analogously, the mystical nihilism I elicit from Heidegger stipulates that nothingness is the metaontological precondition of self-existence, which paradoxically entails that the self can possess itself only through its own self-negation.⁶⁰ 

In the lecture “Nietzsches Wort ‘Gott ist Tot,’” (1943), Heidegger put it this way: “Thought in terms of the destiny [Geschick] of being, the nihil of nihilism means that there is nothing going on with being [daß es mit dem Sein nichts ist]. Being does not come to the light of its own essence. In the appearance of beings as such, being itself stays away.”⁶¹ Rather than hearing only a “discordant note” (Mißton) when the word nihilism is spoken, Heidegger ascribes to it a familiar, albeit “discomfiting” (mißliche), nuance as the medium to prompt our remembrance (Andenken) by which we can ascertain “the being-historical determination of nihilism” (die seinsgeschichtliche Bestimmung des Nihilismus). By repossessing this historical—as opposed to historiographical—sense of nihilism, we discern that “the nihil (the nothing) is, and is in an essential way, in what it names [daß in dem, was er nennt, das nihil (nichts) wesentlich ist]. Nihilism means: with everything in every respect, the nothing is going on [Es ist mit allem in jeder Hinsicht nichts].”⁶² What is necessary is not to overcome the inauthenticity of the essence of nihilism, the nonessence that is interpreted as the exclusion of beyng in the unconcealment of beings, but to encounter beyng by assuming a thinking encouraged by beyng itself, that is, a thinking that rests on the recognition that beyng recoils in a manner that divulges to Dasein the directive to abandon metaphysics by stepping back to confront and to combat beyng in its self-withdrawal (Sichentziehen), the abdication that remains the mode of the advent (Ankunft) of beyng’s revealing unconcealment (enthüllende Unverborgenheit).⁶³ The proviso, which Heidegger applied to Jünger, can be applied more generally to any thinker: the wish to no longer partake of an active nihilism, conceived in a Nietzschean sense as oriented toward the overcoming of nihilism, as he put it in “Zur Seinsfrage,” does not mean that one stands outside of nihilism, “especially not if the essence of nihilism is nothing nihilistic and if the history of that essence is older and remains younger than the phases of the various forms of nihilism, phases that can be ascertained historiographically.”⁶⁴ In a subsequent passage from that essay, Heidegger specified the reversal of time implied in his understanding: “The essential possibilities of nihilism can be pondered only if we think back toward its essence. I say ‘back’ because the essence of nihilism prevails ahead and thus in advance of individual nihilistic phenomena, gathering them into its consummation [Vollendung]. Yet the consummation of nihilism is not already its end. With the consummation of nihilism there first begins the final phase of nihilism.”⁶⁵ By pondering the zero-line [Null-Linie] of the zone of the end-phase of nihilism, one appreciates that the consummation is the end wherein the not yet visible commencement becomes apparent. Insofar as the human essence belongs to the essence of nihilism, and thereby to the phase of its consummation, the human being is part of the zone of being that is at the same time the zone of the nothing, a paradox conveyed by Heidegger’s signature crossing out the word Sein with an X.⁶⁶

To state the obvious, Heidegger’s explanation of nihilism led him to prioritize the anthropocentric nature of beyng by insisting that what it means to be human—the transition (Übergang) or leap-into (Einsprung) the being-there of Dasein, the essential consequence of which is being-in-the world⁶⁷—is to think of the presencing (Anwesen) of there-being as the “presencing out of the truth of presencing,”⁶⁸ a presencing predicated on the presence that is omnipresently absent, that is, the mystery of beyng that withdraws from the beings it endows. The evental appropriation of beyng is thus in every respect the nothing that is going on. But how do we confabulate the contours of beyng understood as the happening of nothing that can appear only as inapparent? How does the nothing transpire as nothing without being the nothing that can be only by not being? By posing this question, we can be cognizant of the impact of the apophaticism of the mystical tradition on Heidegger’s own path of thinking that is abandoned to namelessness (Namenlosen), as he put it in “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache – Zwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden,”⁶⁹ the fictionalized account of Heidegger’s actual meeting with Tomio Tezuka at the end of March 1954 in Freiburg.⁷⁰ I have investigated this topic at great length elsewhere,⁷¹ but in this context, I will cite one particularly notable passage from Heidegger’s notebook annotations to Das erste Feldweggespräch: 

Saying as the pliant safeguarding of the unsayable
         The saying of thinking

It does not describe; it does not explain; it indicates toward hints, follows these, and then it transforms itself into the “silence”—the creative silence—of the unsayable only in pure saying. Its purity consists in the gentleness of hesitant advising on the basis of releasement. Beyng is the un-sayable for saying and for the word; because word of the … secret!!⁷²

Heidegger captured succinctly the interplay of the apophatic and the kataphatic that is essential to the gesture of uttering the unutterable embraced by mystics of various traditions including Christianity. Thus, the silence (Schweigen) of which he speaks is the pure saying (reinen Sage) that safeguards the unsayable (Unsag-baren),⁷³ a language that does not describe (beschreibt) or explain (erklärt) but only indicates (deutet) by innuendo (Winke), and this is the character of the secret (Hehl) linked to the matter of releasement (Gelassenheit), the disavowal of the somethingness of beings and the avowal of the nothingness of beyng.

Here we arrive at the neighborhood where the paths of poetry and thinking crisscross in the simulation of their dissimulation,⁷⁴ two forms of saying that bespeak the cardinal truth of language, “Every primal and actual naming states something unspoken, and states it so that it remains unspoken” (Jedes anfängliche und eigentliche Nennen sagt Ungesporchenes und zwar so, daß es ungesprochen bleibt).⁷⁵ Poetizing (Dichten) is thus delineated “as a telling in the manner of a making manifest that points [ein Sagen in der Art des weisenden Offenbarmachens] …. poetizing means placing the Dasein of the people into the realm of these beckonings [Winke],⁷⁶ that is, a showing [Zeigen], a pointing [Weisen] in which the gods become manifest, not as something referred to or observable, but in their beckoning.” The privileging of the poetic experience with the word imparts that language, in its most essential task, gives us a meaningful hint⁷⁷ that shows the unshowable and thereby preserves the unsaid in the said. Properly heard, the saying (die Sage) is that which lets appear and lets shine in the manner of hinting⁷⁸ and hence the word is both and therefore neither voiced nor unvoiced. The hint is the verbal gesticulation—the beckoning stillness (rufenden Stille)⁷⁹—that confers “the message of the veiling that opens up” (die Botschaft des lichtenden Verhüllens).⁸⁰ The nature of language as saying brings about the “real dialogue” (eigentliche Gespräch) that is characterized “with more silence than talk,” by which Heidegger did not intend to sanction talking or writing about silence—acts that produce “the most obnoxious chatter” (verderblichste Gerede)—but rather to espouse the need to be silent about silence (Schweigen zu schweigen), for it is only in this manner that one may speak the “authentic saying” (eigentliche Sagen), which is “the constant prologue to the authentic dialogue of language” (das stete Vorspiel zum eigentlichen Gespräch von der Sprache).⁸¹ The gesture of saying, on this accord, is a speaking-not, that is, a speaking that is at once speaking and refraining from speaking. The very same benchmark, I contend, is conspicuous in Heidegger’s use of nihilism to delineate the presence of the absence that is neither present nor absent.

It is worthwhile recalling Heidegger’s explication in Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, the 1927 lecture course given at the University of Marburg, of the statement in the tractate Von der Übervart der Gotheit, attributed to Eckhart but now assumed to be part of the Pseudo-Eckhartiana that made use of many of Eckhart’s terms and themes, that the word “God” does not have the same sense as it is not in the concept of all creatures, “So ist Gott im selben Sinne nicht und ist nicht dem Begriffe aller Kreaturen.”

Thus God is for himself his “not” [So ist Gott für sich selbst sein Nicht]: that is to say, he is the most universal being [allgemeinste Wesen], the purest indeterminate possibility of everything possible, pure nothing [reine Nichts]. He is the nothing over against the concept of every creature, over against every determinate possible and actualized being. Here, too, we find a remarkable parallel to the Hegelian determination of being and its identification with nothing. The mysticism of the Middle Ages or, more precisely, its mystical theology is not mystical in our sense and in the bad sense; rather, it can be conceived in a completely eminent sense.⁸²

In the course of time, Heidegger would distinguish the juxtaposition of being and nothing in his own thought—that is, the belonging-together (Zusammengehörigkeit) of the antinomies upheld in the sameness of their irreducible difference—from their dialectical sublation in Hegel.⁸³ According to the latter, the matter of thinking concerns “Being with respect to beings having been thought in absolute thinking, and as absolute thinking,” whereas, for Heidegger, the matter of thinking concerns “the Same [das Selbe], and thus is Being [somit das Sein]—but Being with respect to its difference [Differenz] from beings [Seienden]. Put more precisely: for Hegel, the matter of thinking is the idea as the absolute concept. For us, formulated in a preliminary fashion, the matter of thinking is the difference as difference.”⁸⁴ From Heidegger’s perspective, Hegel’s discourse about being mistakenly understood the term “in the sense of a genus, an empty generality under which the historically represented doctrines of beings are subsumed as individual cases.”⁸⁵ To step back and to be absolved from the oblivion produced by the ontological difference between being and beings, we must think that difference “as the perdurance [Austrag] of unconcealing overcoming [entbergender Überkommnis] and of self-keeping arrival [sich bergender Ankunft],” an unconcealing that is a keeping concealed and an arrival that is a departure.⁸⁶ In thinking the difference as the perdurance that is the essential origin of the ontotheological constitution of metaphysics, we can remember the forgetfulness that has been obscured and thereby forgotten, the oblivion that has been rendered oblivious.⁸⁷ Applying this mode of thinking difference as difference to the specific question of the relationship between being and nothing, Heidegger moved closer in spirit to Schelling’s idea of ontological freedom as the first beginning, the eruption of the Abgrund, the groundless ground, which acts through the negativity of the absolute eventality of the Ereignis, the es gibt that transforms the quiescent nothingness of the standing-reserve into the dynamic nothingness of being that makes beings happen.⁸⁸ To speak meontologically of Seyn as Nichts, the nothing that is neither being nor nonbeing, is the logical outcome of the nihilistic orientation that is incapable of thinking the nothing unfettered to the ontological grip of metaphysics. ⁸⁹

Since I have addressed this subject in other publications, I will not elaborate here, but let me cite one decisive passage from Was ist Metaphysik? (1929):

The nothing does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings [das unbestimmte Gegenüber für das Seiende] but unveils itself as belonging [zugehörig] to the being of beings [Sein des Seienden]. “Pure Being and pure Nothing are therefore the same” [Das reine Sein und das reine Nichts ist also dasselbe]. This proposition of Hegel’s (Science of Logic, Book I: Werke, vol. III, p. 74) is correct. Being and the nothing do belong together [gehören zusammen], not because both – from the point of view of the Hegelian concept of thought – agree in their indeterminateness [Unbestimmtheit] and immediacy [Unmittelbarkeit], but rather because being itself is essentially finite and manifests itself only in the transcendence of a Dasein that is held out into the nothing [in der Transzendenz des in das Nichts hinausgehaltenen Daseins offenbart].⁹⁰

Nothing is thus not to be construed as the antithesis to beings but rather as that which is juxtaposed essentially to the being of beings. Ostensibly, Hegel’s statement about the equivalence of pure being and pure nothing is correct. However, the explanation offered by Heidegger undermines the Hegelian position. Being and nothing are not identical because they concur dialectically in their indeterminateness and immediacy but because they are aligned dialetheically by virtue of Dasein’s capacity for transcendence—that is, the being-there of Dasein entails that it is the being that is beyond beings as a whole—which is dependent on enowning the clearing that is the nothing: 

Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing [Hineingehaltenheit in das Nichts]. … Without the original manifestness of the nothing [ursprüngliche Offenbarkeit des Nichts], no selfhood [Selbstsein] and no freedom [Freiheit]. … For human Dasein, the nothing makes possible the manifestness 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 [Im Sein des Seienden geschieht das Nichten des Nichts].⁹¹

Not only is the nothing not simply the counterconcept to and hence the negation of beings, but it is the nihilation that belongs to their essential unfolding. We are driven to speak paradoxically of the originary disclosure of the nothing, the unconcealment that is concealed through the seeming (Schein) of being that not only lets beings appear as what they really are not, and thereby distorts the beings whose seeming it is, but also covers itself as this very seeming inasmuch as it shows itself as being that is distinguished from not-being (Nichtsein).⁹²   

In Einführung in die Metaphysik, based on the lecture course at the University of Freiburg in 1935, Heidegger deduced from the Parmenidean distinction between the path of being (der Weg zum Sein) and the path of not-being (der Weg zum Nichtsein)⁹³ that it is a misunderstanding of being if one turns one’s back on the nothing with the commonsensical assurance that nothing obviously is not (das Nichts sei offenkundig nicht). Granted that the nothing is not a being (das Nichts nicht etwas Seiendes ist) but this does not prevent it from belonging to being in its own manner (daß es auf seine Weise zum Sein gehört).⁹⁴ Several years later in the Beiträge, Heidegger reevaluated this preponderant dimension of his thinking and thus commented on the aforecited passage from Was ist Metaphysik?, “The fact that the proposition from Hegel’s Logik, ‘Being and nothingness are the same’ [Sein und Nichts ist dasselbe], is quoted in ‘What is Metaphysics?’ … signifies—and can signify only this—a general agreement with regard to bringing together being and nothingness [die Zusammenbringung von Sein und Nichts]. For Hegel, however, ‘beyng’ is not only a determinate, first stage of what is to be thought in the future as beyng, but this first stage, as the un-determined [Un-bestimmte] and un-mediated [Un-mittelbare], is already precisely the pure negativity of objectivity and of thinking (beingness and thinking).”⁹⁵  

The Hegelian identification of being and nothing is the direct consequence of the history of metaphysics whereby being “is always grasped as the beingness of beings [Seiendheit des Seienden] and hence as these beings themselves. … Accordingly, nothingness is always grasped as a nonbeing [Nichtseiende] and thus as negativum.”⁹⁶ The consummation of such a conception of nothingness inescapably is a “pessimistic nihilism” and a disdain for every weak philosophy of nothingness. However, to cogitate nothingness from the vantage point of the truth of beyng transmits the knowledge that nothingness “is neither negative nor a ‘goal.’ Instead, it is the essential trembling [wesentliche Erzitterung] of beyng itself and therefore is more than any being.”⁹⁷ As Heidegger expressed the matter in Die Negativität, Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Hegel aus dem Ansatz in der Negativität, composed between 1938-1939 and 1941, Hegel’s sense of negation “is not a negativity [Negativität] because it never takes seriously the not [Nicht] and the nihilating [Nichten],—it has already sublated the not into the ‘yes’ [das Nicht schon in das ‘Ja’ aufgehoben hat].”⁹⁸ Returning to this point in Über den Anfang, Heidegger wrote, “Beings [Seiende] remain so decisively differentiated from, through, and over against beyng [Seyn] that not even the nothing [Nichts] remains to them as their own; for only beyng unfolds essentially as nothing. Beings are the nothing-less [Nichtslose].”⁹⁹ Whereas beings are, quite literally, nothingless, that is, less and hence more than nothing,¹⁰⁰ the essential occurrence of nothingness belongs to beyng insofar as beyng and nothing, in the strict Heideggerian sense, are the same in virtue of being different. Beyng is the nothing “not because each is equally as undetermined [unbestimmt] and unmediated [unvermittelt] as the other, but because they are one and yet ‘fundamentally’ different! They are that which first opens up a ‘decision’ [Ent-scheidung].”¹⁰¹ The import of the decision is illuminated further by Heidegger’s assertion that the identification of beyng and nothing connotes that the abyss (Abgrund) of the clearing (Lichtung)—the “refusal of the ground” [Versagung des Grundes] that “is the highest granting of the need for decision [Entscheidung] and differentiation [Unterscheidung]”—is “both the nothing and the ground. The nothing is what is a-byssally distinct from beyng  as nihilation and … of the same essence [ab-gründig Verschiedene vom Seyn als Nichtung und deshalb … seines Wesens].”¹⁰² Attunement (Stimmung) to the openness related to this correspondence guides thought to the nothingness that is the truth of beyng.¹⁰³ 

In the 1941 elucidation of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger reexamined the point in a cogent manner that is worthy of full citation:  

Being and nothingness belong together [Sein und Nichts gehören zusammen]. Initially, we stand perplexed before this fact and take it to be generally intelligible that non-Being [Nichtsein] stands opposed to Being, whereby it remains opaque whether and to what extent Being itself points ahead into the nothing. Even here we need to pose questions based on the question of the meaning of Being and consider this: Being manifests itself to us initially and everywhere in the form of the nothing [Das Sein selbst offenbart sich uns zunächst und überall in der Gestalt des Nichts], an event [Ereignis] that we never take seriously enough as we are still always cowardly enough to turn our gaze away the very next time we encounter Being itself, in the event that we have ever turned our gaze toward this encounter, even just briefly. … By contrast, if we try to grasp Being, so as to demonstrate it like an object [Gegenstand], then we reach into emptiness [Leere], into that which is not a being [in das, was nicht ein Seiendes “ist”], into the nothing. But at the same time even this nothing, which is a nullity [Nichtiges] when calculated according to beings [Seienden], essentially occurs, indeed it does so as that which is already claimed by every being as that which allows [gewährt] beings to be beings. Being essentially occurs as the nothing, and yet, what would a being be without Being [Das Sein west wie das Nichts und dennoch, was wäre ein Seiendes ohne das Sein]? But it is one thing just to have, historically, mere historical knowledge of the fact that the question about beings for the most part also includes non-beings [Nichtseiende] in the vicinity of its thinking; it is another thing to consider in an interrogative way what is veiled in this, that Being and nothingness already turn toward each other inceptually [daß Sein und Nichts anfänglich schon einander sich zuwenden], and to think about where this kinship [Verwandtschaft] has its ground.¹⁰⁴

For beyng to manifest itself in the form of nothing—der Gestalt des Nichts, a curious phrase indeed as the form of nothing must be nothing and therefore formless—denotes the sameness of their difference¹⁰⁵ in a way that is to be distinguished from the Hegelian idea whereby the antinomy of being and nothing is sublated in the convergence of their divergence. In the logic adopted by Heidegger, which is to be distinguished from what he regarded as the illusionary character of the syllogistic logic that has dominated Western philosophy,¹⁰⁶ beyng occurs as the nothing, and thus cannot be objectified as a being, but no being can be without the nihility of beyng. The nothing, therefore, “is never what is ‘null and naught’ [Nichtige] in the sense of what is merely not present-at-hand [Unvorhandenen], not effective [Unwirksamen], not valuable [Unwertigen], non-being [Un-seienden], but the essential occurrence of beyng itself as that which nihilates a-byssally—abyssfully [ab-gründig-abgrundhaft Nichtenden].”¹⁰⁷ Nothingness, in other words, is not integrated into beyng as the negation of being, that is, as the limit concept of what is and what is not, but it is rather the affirmation of nonbeing that facilitates the coming-into being of all beings, the something that reveals itself in the concealment of the somethingness of its revelation. 

The import of Heidegger’s deviation from Hegel in his affirming the parity of beyng and nothing is made clear as well in the following passage from the 1943 postscript to Was ist Metaphysik?:

Being, however, is not an existing quality found in beings. Unlike beings, being cannot be represented or brought forth in the manner of an object [Das Sein läßt sich nicht gleich dem Seienden  gegenständlich vor- und herstellen]. As that which is altogether other than all beings, being is that which is not [Dies schlechthin Andere zu allem Seienden ist das Nicht-Seiende]. But this nothing essentially prevails as being [Aber dieses Nichts west als das Sein]. We too quickly abdicate thinking when, in a facile explanation, we pass off the nothing as a mere nullity [bloß Nichtige] and equate it with the unreal [Wesenlosen]. Instead of giving way to the haste of such empty acumen and relinquishing the enigmatic ambiguities of the nothing, we must prepare ourselves solely in readiness to experience in the nothing the pervasive expanse of that which gives every being the warrant to be. That is being itself.¹⁰⁸

For Heidegger, the claim that beyng is nothing is meant to criticize the ontological assumption that being is the primum signatum, the signified that requires no signification. This is the implication of another comment in the 1943 postscript: “The nothing, as other than beings, is the veil of being [Das Nichts als das Andere zum Seienden ist der Schleier des Seins].”¹⁰⁹ In the 1949 edition, Heidegger glossed the last line: “The nothing: That which annuls, i.e., as difference, is as the veil of being, i.e., of beyng in the sense of the appropriative event of usage [Das Nichts: das Nichtende, d. h. als Unterschied, ist als Schleier des Seins, d. h. des Seyns im Sinne des Ereignisses des Brauchs].”¹¹⁰ That the nothing is the veil of being means that being is revealed through the nothing by which it is reveiled. Being is thus not to be conceived metaphysically as the presencing unmasked as the absence that is absent as presence or as the presence present as absence. On this reading, the difference of which Heidegger wrote is conceptually akin to what Derrida would later mark as différance; that is, that which “is never presented as such” and “never offered to the present,” but which nonetheless “makes possible the presentation of being-present.”¹¹¹ The différance thus “in no way implies that the deferred presence can always be found again,” but rather “maintains our relationship with that which we necessarily misconstrue, and which exceeds the alternative of presence and absence.”¹¹² This is precisely what Heidegger intended when he wrote of the nothing as the difference, the veil of beyng that unveils beings in the veiling of its own unveiling. Beyng is the sign that evinces the nothing we encounter in the world.¹¹³ 

What is most germane for the present discussion is that Heidegger’s relatively early account of what he thought was the authentic position of Eckhart tallies with what became his signature idea of the demarcation of beyng as the indiscriminate nothing that is set over and against the beingness of all discriminate beings. Many have written on Heidegger and Eckhart, but methodologically the use of the latter by the former was aptly summarized by Reiner Schürmann in his 1970 essay on Gelassenheit in the two thinkers: “Whenever Heidegger mentions Meister Eckhart, the context is a development of Heidegger’s own essential thought.”¹¹⁴ This is surely the case with respect to the topic we are discussing. Consider the following passage in the Beiträge, “The preparation for overcoming nihilism is paved by the basic experience that the human being, as the one who grounds Da-sein, is needed by the godhood of the other god. What is most inescapable and most difficult in this overcoming is the knowledge of nihilism.”¹¹⁵ The way to overcome nihilism is through undergoing nihilism, which is inculcated through the knowledge of nihilism that consists of the recognition of the abandonment by being as the essence of the godhood of the other god, der Gottheit des anderen Gottes. Needless to say, Heidegger’s formulation can be translated into the mystical terminology of Eckhart. What concerns Heidegger is not the theistic god of a personal volition but the Godhead beyond god—the atheological ground that resists being subsumed under the ontotheological nomenclature, the absolute nothingness of “the point within God where God is not God himself”¹¹⁶—that wills with a willfulness outside the distinction between activity and passivity, the will of nonwilling that is not merely the denunciation of the will but the nonwilling of the will that does not pertain at all to the will. In Eckhart, Heidegger found a stimulus for his own conjecture that beyng itself is nothing other than the nothing that is the enveloping munificence that bequeaths being on every being. Hence, nothing prevails as being, not in the dialectical identity of the nonidentical but in the dialetheic preservation of the nonidentity of the identical.  

Heidegger alluded to this matter when he noted that the ultimate truth is that “even nothingness itself is not present without being.”¹¹⁷ That nothingness cannot be without being is not to say that nothingness is a reifiable being that is presently absent but rather that nothingness and being are juxtaposed in the coincidence of their noncoincidence. In his lecture course on Nietzsche’s will to power and European nihilism taught at the University of Freiburg in 1940, Heidegger laid the foundation for his unique understanding of nothing as the being of beings and not their negation:

In its literal sense, “nihilism” surely says that all being is nihil, “nothing,” and presumably a thing can only be worth nothing because and inasmuch as it is already null and nothing in itself. … “Nothing” implies a thing’s not being at hand [Nichtvorhandensein], its not being [Nichtsein]. “Nothing” and  nihil therefore mean beings in their Being [das Seiende in seinem Sein] and are concepts of Being [Seinsbegriff] and not of value. … At any rate, according to the concept of the word, nihilism is concerned with the nothing and therefore, in a special way, with beings in their nonbeing [das Seiende in seinem Nichtsein]. But the nonbeing of beings is considered to be the negation [Verneinung] of beings. We usually think the “nothing” only in terms of what is negated. … Or is it the case that it does not need to be sought and found at all, because it “is” that which we least—that is to say, never—lose? The nothing here signifies, not the particular negation of an individual being, but the complete and absolute negation of all beings, of being as a whole. But, as the “negation” of everything “objective,” nothingness “is” for its part not a possible object.¹¹⁸ 

Making a similar point in the Beiträge, Heidegger wrote that nothingness should not be conceived as nonbeing (Nichtseiende) in the sense of a negative determination (negative Bestimmung) that is the nullity (Nichtige) of beings; it is rather the negativity of beyng (Nichthaftigkeit des Seyns) that is the “highest gift” (höchste Schenkung), the origin of the creating of all beings that come to be more fully,¹¹⁹ the excess of appropriation in the essence of beyng that is the giving granted as the self-withdrawing (Sichentziehen) or the self-concealing (Sichverbergen) of the refusal to give.¹²⁰ The conferral of the refusal is thus accorded the status of the nothing that is the highest and hardest disclosure of being. To apprehend that nothing is beyng itself, the negating of the negation that cannot be materialized as the nothingness of something or as the somethingness of nothing, which is to say, the nullity that is neither being nor nonbeing, one must cease representing beyng as an object, and this includes representing oneself as a subject. Heidegger insisted, therefore, that beyng cannot be clarified and cannot be derived as the effect of a cause because it “is not at all a being” (nichts Seiendes).¹²¹  

To think beyng, therefore, is to think nothing, a point that Heidegger explicitly stated in “Brief über den ‘Humanismus’” (1946):

Nihilation [Nichten] unfolds essentially in being itself … Being nihilates – as being [Das Sein nichtet – als das Sein]. … The  nihilating [Nichtende] in being is the essence of what I call the nothing [das Nichts]. Hence, because it thinks being, thinking thinks the nothing [Darum, weil es das Sein denkt, denkt das Denken das Nichts].¹²² 

The mode of thinking apposite to this apprehension of the advent of being (die Ankunft des Seins)—the thinking related to being as what arrives (das Ankommende; l’avenant)¹²³—is to contemplate nonrepresentationally, that is, without concepts or images, the inceptual thinking (anfänglichen Denken) or the mindfulness (Besinnung) by which Dasein, in emulation of the enowning of beyng as the origin that “first de-cides [ent-scheidet] and ap-proriates [er-eignet] gods and humans,” becomes acclimated to the being-historical essence of the decision (seynsgeschichtlichen Wesen der Entscheidung), that is, the decision that proceeds to the innermost center of beyng and thus has nothing in common with the moral-anthropological sense of making a choice that prefers one thing and sets aside another, a mistake that Heidegger imputes to many readers of Sein und Zeit who have failed to view Dasein from the vantage point of “grasping truth as openness and resoluteness as the temporalizing spatialization for the temporal-spatial playing field of beyng [die Wahrheit als Offenheit und die Ent-schlossenheit als die zeitigende Einräumung des Zeit-Spiel-Raumes des Seyns zu begreifen].”¹²⁴ 

In a notebook entry with the heading Denken und Nichts, Heidegger noted that understanding (Verstand) and thinking (Denken)—understood in the established sense of the dominance of logic within philosophy that privileges the characterization of thinking as a mode of representing something as something, what Heidegger called in another entry “mere thinking” (bloße Denken) in contrast to thinking (Denken) as such, the former involving the logical apodicticity (logische Apodiktizität) of representational thinking and the latter the “thinking of Being” (Denken des Seins) in relation to which logic is “already an error or oblivion of Being” (schon ein Irrtum oder eine Seinsvergessenheit)¹²⁵—are not the means “to grasp the nothing originarily [das Nichts ursprünglich] and make a decision about its possible unfolding [Entfaltung].” What is necessary rather is to contemplate the nothing from the vantage point of Dasein, which means “the essential occurring of the truth of beyng itself; i.e., the original essential occurring of truth on the basis of beyng; i.e., apart from ranking beings and their beingness [des Seienden und seiner Seiendheit].”¹²⁶ Hence, as the “initial metaphysical interpretation of thinking,” logic “can never know beyng, because metaphysics comes up against beingness.”¹²⁷ Glossing the passage in Was ist Metaphysik?, “The nothing is more original that the not and negation” (Das Nichts ist ursprünglicher als das Nicht und die Verneinung),¹²⁸ Heidegger wrote, “beyng is the essential ground of ‘thought’ and of ‘thinking’ [das Seyn ist Wesensgrund des ‘Gedachten’ und des ‘Denkens’].”¹²⁹ This, I submit, is the phenomenological basis of Heidegger’s contention that being is expressed through but is irreducible to the discrete beings of the world, or to be even more precise, the former is disclosed in the latter to the extent that it is occluded by the latter. Thus, as Heidegger wrote in “Der Spruch des Anaximander” (1946), “By revealing itself in the being, being withdraws [Das Sein entzieht sich, indem es sich in das Seiende entbirgt]. … By bringing the being’s unconcealment [Un-Verborgenheit des Seienden], it founds, for the first time, the concealment of being [Verborgenheit des Seins].”¹³⁰ 

I should add that in the Grundprobleme, Heidegger expounded authentic statements of Eckhart to anchor the view that medieval Christian mysticism transformed the idea of essence (Wesen), which is the ontological determination of beings (Seienden), the essentia entis, into the ontological ground of a being (einem Seienden) that is properly actual (eigentlich Wirklichen). The possibility of mystical speculation rests on this alteration of essence into a being. Referring specifically to Eckhart, Heidegger proposed that he spoke mostly of the “superessential essence” (überwesentlichen Wesen) because what interested him was not, strictly speaking, the provisional object that is God (Gott) but rather the Godhead (Gottheit), not deus but deitas, not ens but essentia, not nature but what is above nature, the essence in relation to which every existential determination (Existenzbestimung) must still be refused and from which every addition of existence (additio existentiae) must be kept at a distance.¹³¹ The attentive ear will hear in these words an anticipation of Heidegger’s insistence on the obfuscation of the ontological difference between being and beings, a theme to which he often returned. The veiling (Verhüllung) and concealment (Verbergung) of this difference is the unthought (Ungedachten) that continually gives us thought (das zu-Denkende), the oblivion (Vergessenheit) that belongs to the difference (Differenz) because the difference belongs to the oblivion.¹³² Indeed, nihilism is a direct outcome of the essential failure of metaphysics to understand this difference, taking as equivalent our relationship to beyng and our relationship to beings and thus ignoring that it is only because we stand in relationship to the former that we can comport ourselves to the latter, that is, experience beings as being.¹³³ Nihilism obscures the metaphysical features of beings, the essentia and the existentia, in their origin and in their truth.¹³⁴ In this regard, nihilism and metaphysics overlap in what Heidegger called the history of the secret that is the omission of the default of being in the thought of beings as such that constitute the history of the unconcealment of beings.¹³⁵ Heidegger may not have been interested in what is above nature, but his descriptions of the bestowing-withdrawal of Seyn in relation to Seienden can be easily traced to Eckhart’s apophatic identification of the Godhead—in no small measure, continuing the Dionysian tradition carried forward by Eriugena—as the abysmal ground (Abgrund), the unknown nothingness in virtue of which all beings must be adjudicated as naught. And here it is advantageous to recall the comment of Gadamer that Heidegger was completely fascinated with the 1924 publication of Eckhart’s Opus tripatitum, “evidently because the dissolution of the concept of substance in regards to God pointed in the direction of a temporal and verbal sense of being, when it was said that: ‘Esse est Deus.’ At that time, Heidegger may have suspected an ally in the Christian mystic.”¹³⁶

Further support for my interpretation may be culled from Heidegger’s letter to a young student written on June 18, 1950: 

The default of God and the divinities is absence [Der Fehl Gottes und des Göttlichen ist Abwesenheit]. But absence is not nothing [Abwesenheit ist nicht nichts]; rather it is precisely the presence [Anwesenheit], which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness of what has been [der verborgenen Fülle des Gewesenen] and what, thus gathered, is presencing [und so versammelt Wesenden], of the divine in the world of the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus. This no longer [Nicht-mehr] is in itself a not-yet [Noch-nicht] of the veiled arrival [der verhüllten Ankunft] of its inexhaustible nature. Since Being is never the merely precisely actual [da Sein niemals das nur gerade Wirkliche ist], to guard Being can never be equated with the task of a guard who protects from burglars a treasure stored in a building. Guardianship of Being is not fixated upon something existent.¹³⁷

Absence is not nothing, that is, the negation of presence, but rather the presence of the hidden fullness of the being that can never be rendered as something actual or existent, the being that is always suspended between no longer and not yet. It is telling that in this context Heidegger adopts a ecumenical tone and relates his notion of the veiled presencing of being to the pagan divinities of Greece, the epiphanies of the divine in prophetic Judaism, and the spirit of God conjured by the preaching of Jesus. Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology—from delineating the temporal nature and historicity of Dasein in relation to the manifestation of every phenomenon as nonmanifest to the temporal nature of the being made present in the absence of its beingness, culminating finally in the self-concealing revealing of the event of beyng—was in search of an ontology that shaped the key dimension of what it is to be human.  As Derrida astutely observed, “Heidegger tries to subordinate all the sciences and regional ontologies to fundamental ontology. He tries to insist on access to the as such (the essence) as the  distinguishing mark of humanity.”¹³⁸ It is noteworthy that the ontological—or perhaps it would be more suitable to speak of the anontological, to borrow the neologism that John Krummel has applied to the appropriation of Buddhist concepts by Nishitani, prominent member of the Kyoto school of philosophy and disciple of its founder Kitarō Nishida, to signify the midpoint between the affirmation of being and the negation of nonbeing, thereby avoiding the polarities of ontological reification and meontological disintegration¹³⁹—is subsumed under the hermeneutical insofar as access to the essence as such—the beyng that is nothing—is restricted to human beings through an act of interpretation. 

Building on Heidegger’s insights, Vattimo correctly noted that to think hermeneutically in the wake of Nietzsche is to uphold that hermeneutics is a nihilist vocation, since it rests on the assumption that truth is a matter of interpretation rather than fact.¹⁴⁰ Nihilism can be used synonymously with hermeneutics insofar as the dissolution of any ultimate foundation implied by the former corresponds to the awareness of the latter that any attempt to establish transcultural truth must occur within the contours of a historically and culturally situated context. Nihilistic hermeneutics, therefore, can be viewed as an emancipatory force to the extent that it liberates one from the specious idea of universality that is not dependent on a particular viewpoint.¹⁴¹ As Nietzsche himself mused in an entry to one of his notebooks, “there are many different ‘truths,’ and consequently there is no truth.”¹⁴² But if the truth is that there is no truth, then this truth is true only if it is false and false only if it is true. In a different but related terminological register, Altizer educed from Nietzsche that “modernity culminates in a historically inevitable and eschatologically ultimate nihilism,” that is, a nihilism that “necessarily calls forth its reversal and transcendence in an absolute apocalypse.”¹⁴³ What Altizer intended is that the consequence of the nihilism enacted by Nietzsche is that God becomes the Nothing in an absolutely inverted thinking such that the death of God is the death of the God of death, the event of the absolute apocalypse where nihilism calls forth its own negation in revealing that there is nothing to reveal but the revelation of nothing. In Altizer’s own words, “Yet this is the very death releasing a final and ultimate nihilism, a nihilism that is the tomb of God, and a nihilism that is the very arena of the ecstatic affirmation of a uniquely modern or postmodern Eternal Recurrence.”¹⁴⁴ While I am reluctant to embrace Altizer’s conviction of an apocalyptic resurrection, I take his point that nihilism of logical necessity is a negation that must procure its own negation.¹⁴⁵ And here it is well to recall the opinion of Adorno that “true nihilists” do not succumb to the negative way of identifying with nothingness, but they are rather “the ones who oppose nihilism with their more and more faded positivities, the one who are thus conspiring with all extant malice, and eventually with the destructive principle itself.”¹⁴⁶ Adorno’s stance informed Gillian Rose’s thinking, which likewise hinges on the belief that the path beyond nihilism is through nihilism, an undertaking that is to be distinguished from her diatribe against the disengagement of the nihilistic utopianism of poststructuralism and postmodernism, which she assessed as a deliberately mendacious attempt to coverup the goallessness by pursuit of goals that are goalless. The mourning that Rose affirmed exceeds melancholia, whose denial of the efficacy of law results in sheer violence and the incapacity to explore the legacy of ambivalence and the working through of the contradictory emotions aroused by bereavement. However, in my estimation, her sense of the mournful, which is inexorably linked to the breaking of the broken middle, does not elude the clasp of nihilism if the latter is understood chiefly as the recognition of the paucity of goals and the ensuing repudiation of a teleological view of history.¹⁴⁷

At this juncture, I will turn to the comment concerning nihilism offered by Susan Taubes as it will shed further light on the structural doubling of negation that is vital to my argument. In a letter to Hugo Bergman, written on September 18, 1950, Susan opined on the cultic ritual and secular existence as follows:

The ancient mystery religions offered their initiates rebirth, whether this rebirth meant primarily rebirth into the life after death our concern is rather with rebirth in this life. In being born we are not yet initiated into life; we are not yet in full possession of essential forms and forces of our life, since we can exist simply nihilistically as if nothing mattered, nothing was of any worth, as if life and death were the same. The cult initiates into life and prepares the human being for meeting its phases and crises. The secular existence is like a limbo between the sacramental and the nihilistic worlds and those who pass their lives in this limbo… taste neither pure light nor pure darkness. Surely we all move in this limbo and in this sense have only a glimmering of the sacramental and the nothing, but the limbo is open to both ways. Both heaven and hell exist, nihilist. possibility is not to be refuted, it is legitimate in its own right. … An illumination of total darkness. That only the necessary is necessary, is nihilism. Because finally nothing is necessary; and because reason commands to love only what is necessary, nothing is worthwhile: what is of worth, what is necessary becomes nothing.¹⁴⁸

Susan compared secular existence to a “limbo between the sacramental and the nihilistic worlds.” Those who pass their lives in this limbo “taste neither pure light nor pure darkness.” However, since the limbo is “open to both ways,” it follows that to dwell therein—which is the common lot of humanity—is to be positioned betwixt heaven and hell, and thus one has only “a glimmering of the sacramental and the nothing.” Enlightenment, accordingly, consists of the illumination of total darkness, which entails embracing the premise expressed by Dostoevsky in the “Possessed” that only what is necessary is necessary. But what is meant by this tautological statement? Does the illumination of darkness imply that the darkness is dispelled by light, or does it mean that the light is illumined by darkness? I am inclined to the second option whence we can presume that the darkness reveals the light by making apparent the truth that what is necessary is necessary. From this tautology, which Susan identified as the taxonomy of nihilism, one apprehends that “finally nothing is necessary,” which further occasions the verdict that “nothing is worthwhile,” and hence “what is necessary becomes nothing.” Nihilism and faith are conjoined in their disjunction: in conformity with, but pushing against, the avowal that nothing is necessary because it is necessary that there is nothing, the “life sacrament creates its own necessity from and against nothing,” and the ones “who are not caught and won by the light remain darkness in the dark shadow in the shadow of the limbo.”¹⁴⁹

Susan’s focus on the liminal state of limbo, tellingly demarcated as the shadow of the shadow and not as the shadow of the light, coincides with her embrace of the existential-ontic provision of being at home as an irrevocable condition of homelessness,¹⁵⁰  a sensibility that explains her passionate interest in Heidegger and Weil. Whatever the differences between these two seminal thinkers, and of course they are considerable, in Susan’s mind, they both averred a negative theology predicated on the keen awareness of the absence of God and the gnostic estrangement from the world that served as the basis for a more authentic way of being in the world,¹⁵¹ passing through history as an innate state of expatriation to get beyond history, suffering the void of the infinite nothingness whose luminosity is the specter of nonbeing at the nub of all being. The desire to abscond from life by one’s own volition might be viewed as insane, but it is logical if “homelessness, insecurity and fear” are declaimed as the strongest bonds that tie people together.¹⁵² This stark pessimism is the abyss that molded Susan’s mytheological thinking, the poetic mandate to perceive the shadow not as the absence of light but rather as its hidden incandescence. As Susan instructed Jacob in a letter written on December 15–16, 1950, in the almost total darkness of the present, “we must be able to learn to see in the night.”¹⁵³ To see in the night requires that one see the night, that is, to fathom the unfathomable as the epistemic condition of what is fathomable, to sense the sensation of limit at the limit of sensation. The seeing of the nocturnal, the nonphenomenal that makes all phenomena visible by eluding visibility, can be viewed as a protracted critical engagement with Heidegger’s supposition that history is a fallacy that of necessity emerges from the forgetfulness of being, an obliviousness that is not incited by human negligence but belongs rather to the essential destiny of being that is concealed in the very beings in which it is revealed.

With this insight we come at last to the topic of mystical nihilism and the skepticism of faith. Studying kabbalistic lore for over a half a century has led me to encounter repeatedly the paradox of the world as the place where infinity is revealed by being concealed. The nature of nature, therefore, can be circumscribed as that which hides the light of the essence disclosed therein to the extent that it is hidden. All of reality is a manifestation of the unmanifest essence that has no essence, the unnameable nihility at the nucleus of existence, the invisibly visible transcendence underlying the visibly invisible immanence, the one that is continuously reconfigured by the manifold in which it is both incarnate and disincarnate, the nonbeing that is present in being by virtue of withdrawing from being. The simultaneous omniabsence of the infinite and its omnipresence yields the enigma that God is present in the world from which God is absent, that is, present because absent and absent because present. 

This paradox undergirds what Scholem called the “mystical nihilism” (mystische Nihilismus) that has informed kabbalistic metaphysics. The import of this locution may be extrapolated from the essay “Shi‘ur Komah: The Mystical Shape of the Godhead” wherein Scholem argued that inasmuch as “the formless substance” (die gestaltlose Substanz) of Ein Sof is manifest in every stage of emanation and creation, “there is no thoroughly shaped image [durchgestaltete Gestalt] that can completely detach itself from the depths of the formless.” It follows, therefore, that the “truer the form the more powerful the life of the formless within it. To delve into the abyss of formlessness [den Abgrund des Gestaltlosen] is no less absurd an undertaking for the Kabbalists than to ascend to the form itself; the mystical nihilism that destroys any shape dwells hand in hand with the prudent moderation [die Besonnenheit] struggling to comprehend that shape.”¹⁵⁴ Reflected here is a basic tenet in Scholem’s approach to mysticism, informed by a long-standing orientation in the German theosophic tradition: the mystical experience is an encounter with the absolute or infinite, the “shapeless abyss” (der gestaltlose Abgrund), and thus that experience is potentially nihilistic inasmuch as its formlessness threatens to undermine the forms propagated by the texts and rituals of the traditional authority.

Invoking Benjamin, albeit referred to anonymously as “a great thinker” (ein großer Denker), Scholem postulated that the kabbalists, by comparing the theory of emanation with the linguistic theory of the name of God, were able to appreciate that imagelessness is the refuge of all images.¹⁵⁵  Scholem was undeniably correct to detect that Benjamin’s claim that the yearning that crosses the threshold of the image to the imageless refuge of all images in the power of the name reverberates with the kabbalistic standpoint.¹⁵⁶ Equally pertinent is another observation of Benjamin that the imagination plays a game of dissolution, since there is always a deformation (Enstaltung) of the image that has been formed.¹⁵⁷ These words shed light on the critical conundrum of kabbalistic theosophy accentuated by Scholem, and one that echoes the aforementioned appraisal of Heidegger regarding the refusal of beyng in relation to the beings it bestows, an idea, as we have seen, that accords with the mystical worldview linked to Eckhart. Just as beyng retreats from the beings upon which it is granted—in the renowned dictum attributed to Heraclitus, φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῑ,¹⁵⁸ which, in Heidegger’s rendering, insinuates that the proper essence of the emerging (Aufgehen) of nature unfolds from out of the proper essence of the self-occluding (Sichverschließen),¹⁵⁹ that is, beyng reveals itself in the self-revealing (Sichentbergen) that is the withdrawal of the self-concealing (Sichverbergen)¹⁶⁰—so the imagelessness of Ein Sof is manifestly concealed in the concealedly manifest images of the sefirot and, by extension, in all of the worlds that constitute the cosmological chain. 

The particular dynamic that Scholem extricated from kabbalistic theosophy served as a model for his hermeneutic of mystical experience more generally. Thus, as he famously argued in the introductory lecture of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, “there is no such thing as mysticism in the abstract, that is to say, a phenomenon or experience which has no particular relation to other religious phenomena. There is no mysticism as such, there is only the mysticism of a particular religious system, Christian, Islamic, Jewish mysticism, and so on.”¹⁶¹  Translated into the taxonomy used predominantly by scholars of mysticism for the last several decades, we can position Scholem as opting for the constructivist or the contextualist viewpoint. This does not mean, however, that he denied the notional basis for a comparative mysticism. On the contrary, seemingly siding with the essentialism affirmed by the perennialists, Scholem argued that there is a “common characteristic” that can be displayed through a comparative analysis, an essence of mystical experience identified as the ecstatic encounter with the divine presence. To be sure, mystics in different traditions attempt to transform the mediation of the God of their particular liturgical communities in light of this immediate experience. Indeed, this transformation allows us to speak of mysticism as an historical phenomenon. The parameters of the experience are shaped by the given ideology of the mystic’s religious affiliation, but the phenomenological nature of that experience is formless inasmuch as the object of that experience—if indeed we can still use the language of objectivity in any meaningful way—is the utmost formlessness. Here again we note a curious affinity between Heidegger and Scholem: the self-showing of every phenomenon coincides with a presence that does not show itself and hence being covered up is the counterconcept that is essential to a proper apprehension of the phenomenon that is uncovered. Every disclosure is a concealment, every truth an untruth. 

Elaborating on the formless nature of mysticism, Scholem observed that

the mystic’s experience is by its very nature indistinct and inarticulate. … Indeed, it is precisely the indefinable, incommunicable character of mystical experience that is the greatest barrier to our understanding of it. It cannot be simply and totally translated into sharp images or concepts, and often it defies any attempt to supply it—even afterward—with positive content. Though many mystics have attempted such “translation,” have tried to lend their experience form and body, the center of what a mystic has to say always remains a shapeless experience, regardless of whether we choose to interpret it as unio mystica or as “mere” communion with the divine. But it is precisely the shapeless core of his experience which spurs the mystic to his understanding of his religious world and its values, and it is this dialectic which determines his relation to the religious authority and lends it meaning.¹⁶²

Scholem further related the “formlessness of the original experience” to the possibility that the mystic may nihilistically discard all forms of expression, including, most significantly, the institutionalized forms of the mystic’s specific religion. Thus, Scholem links what he identified as the phenomenological core of mystical experience to the inherent “revolutionary” or antinomian element of mysticism. This innovative pole is balanced by the “conservative” one that is related to the need to lend structure and form to the amorphous experience. In this secondary stage, one retrieves the contextualist orientation informed by a structuralist attitude regarding the universal elements present in different forms of mysticism. As I argued many years ago, Scholem’s model provides an antidote to the extremes of essentialism and contextualism.¹⁶³  

I should add that the effort to strike a balance between essence and context is buttressed by the view of neuroscientists that what appears to be putatively homogenous turns out to be experimentally heterogeneous. To cite one illustration, in Minding the Brain: A Guide to Philosophy and Neuroscience, Georg Northoff observed that we cannot infer that there is “one homogeneous function called memory. Instead, the concept of memory is classified as an umbrella concept that covers heterogeneity of different functions and processes associated with different neural mechanisms and regions on the brain.”¹⁶⁴ I see no reason to doubt the validity of this statement, but it still seems defensible to maintain that heterogeneity is discernible only against the backdrop of homogeneity. Indeed, the cerebral processing of information precludes positioning the two antinomically; we could not mentally recognize experiential disparity without postulating ideational uniformity. Be that as it may, what is expedient for our purposes is to underline again that the viability of a comparative orientation can be considered intrinsically nihilistic insofar as it rests on the belief that the universalizable facet of mystical experience is its innate formlessness. Paradoxically, the lack of essence is what allows one to speak of an essence—the essence, that is, consists of there being no essence.

I conclude the essay with the following celebrated words from “The Snow Man” of Wallace Stevens:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.¹⁶⁵

If one perceives existence as it is, then the nothingness that is not there and the nothing that is both name the vacuity at the hub of all things irreal that we envisage to be real. Hence, I would tweak the poet’s words by challenging the need to dichotomize the nothing that is not there, on the one hand, and the nothing that is, on the other hand. In my mind, the nothing that is not there is the nothing that is, the self-emptying emptiness that is the fullness of the suchness that is neither and therefore both empty and nonempty.  

The proverbial query “why is there something rather than nothing,” the metaphysical question par excellence, demands no answer because it is based on the erroneous assumption that something and nothing are antithetical and thus fails to take hold of the middle excluded by the logic of the excluded middle wherein and whereby the alleged opposites are the same in the congruence of their incongruence. Kabbalistically, the equivalent of Seyn is Ein Sof whose essence consists of its being verily the nothing that is in virtue of not being the nothing it is not. Alas, there is nothing beneath but also not beyond nothing, for in nothing there coheres no-thing but the nothing that is everything, or as Heidegger infamously put it in Was ist Metaphysik?, “The nothing itself nihilates,” Das Nichts selbst nichtet.¹⁶⁶ If one is not sensitive to the fact that Nichts is tantamount to Seyn, then Heidegger’s remark is indeed trivial, tautological, and perhaps, as Rudolf Carnap notoriously argued,¹⁶⁷ logically nonsensical and thus should be delineated as a pseudo-statement inconsistent with logic and scientific thinking. However, if one is properly attuned to Heidegger’s intent, then it is plausible that his point was to affirm—as he indeed elucidated in the gloss added to this statement in the fifth edition of 1949¹⁶⁸—that, in abounding as nothing, the nothing is the nihilation that grants nothing clandestinely unveiled as something in the veil of being.¹⁶⁹ As Heidegger put it in Über den Anfang, the truth of beyng as event (Ereignis) and inception (Anfang)—also denominated as the singular essential realm of the most singular (einzigen Wesensbereich des Einzigen)¹⁷⁰—is what “enables one to say that ‘beyng is’ [das Seyn ist].”¹⁷¹ The nature of that isness, however, is such that, as the abyssal ground  (Abgrund) of the inceptive appropriation (anfängliche Aneignung), beyng “unfolds as the clearing [Lichtung], veiled by the veil of the nothing [den Schleier des Nichts überschleiert ist].”¹⁷² In the precise Heideggerian elocution, the beyng veiled by the veil of nothing is the same as the nothing unveiled by the veil of beyng.    

I refer once more to the 1943 Postscript to Was ist Metaphysik?, wherein Heidegger elaborated on this point, invoking the ontological difference between being and beings:

No matter where or to what extent all research investigates beings, it nowhere finds being. It only ever encounters beings, because from the outset it remains intent on explaining beings. … Without being, whose abyssal but yet to be unfolded essence dispenses the nothing to us in essential anxiety, all beings would remain in an absence of being [bliebe alles Seiende in der Seinlosigkeit]. Yet such absence too, as being’s abandonment [Seinsverlassenheit], is again not a null nothing [nichtiges Nichts] if indeed the truth of being entails that being never prevails in its essence without beings, that a being never is without being.¹⁷³

The nothing is the being (Sein) that unveils itself as that which is distinguished from all beings (Seiende) and thus, precisely because it cannot exhaust itself as an empty negation (leeren Verneinung) of beings, it must always be assessed as that which is not a being.¹⁷⁴ This does not imply that being is a mere nullity (bloß Nichtige) to be equated with the unreal (Wesenlosen) but rather that as nothing, being is the pervasive expanse (Weiträumigkeit) that engenders and is thus present in the plethora of beings from which it is always absent.¹⁷⁵ To say that the nothing nothings, consequently, is not incoherent babble; it is rather an articulation of the pristine truth that being and nonbeing are the same in light of their difference.

To invoke another poet, let us recall the legendary words of Bob Dylan, “When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”¹⁷⁶ Read exoterically, the nothing undoubtedly is no-thing, thereby marking a sense of impoverishment, but read esoterically, the nothing is better deciphered as the being that is everything, translated into Heidegger’s language, the fecundity of the es gibt that gives in a giving that is coincidentally an ungiving insofar as what is sent forth is always held in reserve. In possessing nothing, therefore, the mystic has nothing to dispossess but the nothing that alone can be possessed. The nothingness of the kabbalistic Ein Sof, as the nothingness of the Heideggerian Seyn, is not itself nothing if what is meant by the latter term is the representational reification of the absence of being, that is, conceiving nothing as a something that is not. Rather, the nothing is the nihilating nonground of which it must be said that it exists to the extent that it is nonexistent and is nonexistent to the extent that it exists.

We can return now to Scholem’s remark regarding mystical nihilism and the nebulous nature of the nothing of infinity. Insofar as every form that this formlessness assumes is ipso facto a distortion, a concealing of the concealment, we may infer that the nihilistic proclivity of the mystical communicates to us the melancholic gnosis that there may be nothing but the being of dissemblance behind which there is nothing but the dissemblance of being. In the simulacrum of this pretense—the mirror that mirrors itself—what appears to be real is refracted as really apparent. This platitude engenders an appreciation for the proposition that there is no truth without the subterfuge of untruth, no formation of the formless that is not a deformation, no revelation of the concealed without a concealment of the revealed, no way to depict what is beyond depiction but through the mantle of metaphorical artifice, no seeing of the faceless but through the façade of the face.¹⁷⁷ I will desist elaborating on the political ramifications of this perspicacity, including the politics of the academy, but let me underscore that one of the enduring lessons I have learnt from the assiduous investigation of Jewish mystical texts coupled with the sustained reading of Heidegger these many years is that to speak of the configuration of the secret is always also a disfiguration, an uncovering that is recurrently a recovering, that is, a retrieving of what has been laid bare in the obscuration of its disclosure.

In this matter, as I have argued in a previous publication,¹⁷⁸ kabbalists would concur with Heidegger’s declaration that the unveiling of the mystery is ineludibly a veiling. To cite one striking enunciation of the point:

If the essence of truth is to be sought in the manifestness [Offenbarkeit] of beings, then concealment [Verborgenheit] and veiling [Verhüllung] prove to be a particular way that is proper to manifestness. The mystery [Geheimnis] is not a barrier that lies on the other side of truth, but is itself the highest figure [Gestalt] of truth; for in order to let the mystery truly be what it is—concealing preservation of authentic beyng [verbergende Bewahrung des eigentlichen Seyns]—the mystery must be manifest as such. A mystery that is not known in its power of veiling is no mystery [Ein Geheimnis, das in seiner verhüllenden Macht nicht gewußt wird, ist keines]. The higher our knowing concerning the veiling and the more genuine the saying of it as such, the more untouched its concealing power remains. Poetic saying of the mystery is denial [Verleugnung].¹⁷⁹

The mystery—as the concealing preservation of authentic beyng—can be revealed only to the extent that it is concealed, and hence, if the mystery hypothetically is completely exposed, it no longer assumes the role of mystery. It is in this sense, therefore, that the mystery of the mystery is predicated hermeneutically on the affinity between Geheimnis and Unheimlichkeit, the presence of being at home that is always simultaneously the uncanny absence of being homeless.¹⁸⁰ The poetic affirmation of the mystery—the apophatic utterance that discloses the essential nature of language as the house of being,¹⁸¹ or to be more precise, the essential nature of the German language in particular and especially in its phonological and philological capacity to retrieve the philosophical capacity of ancient Greek to poetize and to say being in its unsayability¹⁸²—perforce is an abjuration. Revisiting this idea elsewhere, Heidegger wrote, “A mystery is a mystery only when it does not even come out that mystery is at work.”¹⁸³ Utilizing this motif, Heidegger identified the meaning hidden in technology as the openness to the mystery whose essential trait is that it “shows itself and at the same time withdraws.”¹⁸⁴ The showing and the nonshowing are not to be construed as occurring successively but rather concomitantly and thus the bestowal is itself a withholding and the withholding a bestowal. Responding to Medard Boss in the seminar held in March 1969, Heidegger reiterated this pivotal aspect of his thinking, “The mystery is itself the revealing concealment as such,” Das Geheimnis ist die sich entbergende Verborgenheit als solche.¹⁸⁵ Based on the hermeneutical premise that the secret is elucidated by way of its mystification, we can postulate that the unconcealing is manifestly concealed in the concealedly manifest unconcealment. From this paradox we can further deduce that the mystery exhibits nothing but that there is no mystery to exhibit insofar as the mystery can only be exposed in the hiddenness of its exposure.

The point is formulated vividly in Heidegger’s idiosyncratic translation and interpretation of the statement of Heraclitus transmitted by Diogenes Laertius, ψυχῆς πείρατα ἰὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐξεύροιο πᾶσαν ἐπιπορευόμενος ὁδόν οὕτω βαθὺν λόγον ἔχει, “You will not find out the limits of the soul by going, even if you travel over every way, so deep is its report.”¹⁸⁶ The maxim was translated twice with slight variation by Heidegger: “Der Seele äußerste Ausgänge auf deinem Gang nicht wohl kannst du sie ausfinden, auch wenn du jeden Weg abwanderst; so weitweisende Lese (Sammlung) hat sie,”¹⁸⁷ and as “Des einholenden Ausholens äußerste Ausgänge auf deinem Gang nicht wohl kannst du sie ausfinden, auch wenn du jeden Weg abwanderst; so weit gewiesen ist ihre Sammlung.”¹⁸⁸ Heidegger’s German renderings were translated into English respectively as “The outermost extremities of the soul you will surely not be able to find on your course, even if you were to wander down every single path: so far-reaching is its harvest (gathering),”¹⁸⁹ and “On your course, you will surely not be able to find the outermost extremities of the drawing-in drawing-out, even if you were to wander down every single path: so far-reaching is its gathering.”¹⁹⁰ What is paramount to our discussion is Heidegger’s effort to debunk the accepted decoding of the Heraclitean statement that the soul has a logos as anticipation of the definition of the human as ζώον λόγον έχον, that is, the animal (or living being) that has reason.

Against the temptation to impose this metaphysical understanding of the human essence as ratio back into the thought of Heraclitus, Heidegger offered the following explication:

For the saying speaks about the λόγος of the human soul from another perspective, insofar as it would like to express that this λόγος which the human soul has is ‘deep’ [tief]. However, one immediately refuses to think-after [nachzudenken] the essence of the depth [Tiefe] of the human λόγος further. One therefore goes no further than taking this utterance of Heraclitus’s merely to be a comment on the fact that the human soul is difficult to plumb, owing to its depth.¹⁹¹

In lieu of interpreting the reference to the logos in this saying as denoting assertion, meaning, and concept, or presuming that the primary subject matter is the limitations and difficulties of psychological research, Heidegger wished to elicit from Heraclitus that the soul’s activity of the logos—understood as “the originary essence of λέγειν in the sense of gathering and harvesting”¹⁹²—is deeper than the activity of intellect or reason. “The soul—i.e., that which animates [Beseelende]—is the essence of the living thing insofar as ‘ensoulment’ [Beseelung] means precisely this: that through it a being arrives and abides in such a manner of being that, as emerging [Aufgehen], it unfolds into the open and, thus unfolding, gathers the open and what is encountered in the open to itself.”¹⁹³ Through the metaphysical understanding of the logos, we are conditioned to think of the thingification of being such that any self-referential entity is demarcated as either a subject or as having the characteristics of an I. According to Heidegger’s reading, however, the logos of the soul to which Heraclitus alluded denotes an imponderable depth, the wonder and mystery that marks humanity’s inability to take measure of its own essence.¹⁹⁴  

The mystery is intensified in another Heraclitean fragment preserved by Hippolytus, which Heidegger juxtaposes to the aforementioned dictum, οὐκ ἐμοῦ ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναι, “It is wise, listening not to me but to the report, to agree that all things are one.”¹⁹⁵ In Heidegger’s translation, “Habt ihr nicht bloß mich angehört, sondern habt ihr fügsam auf die ursprüngliche Versammlung geachtet, dann ist (das) Wissen, das darin besteht, auf die Versammlung sich zu sammeln und gesammelt zu sein in dem ‘Eins ist Alles’,”¹⁹⁶ “If you have listened not merely to me, but rather have obediently regarded the originary forgathering, then (the) knowledge (which subsists therein) is to gather oneself toward the forgathering and to be gathered in the ‘one is all.’”¹⁹⁷ Purportedly, in contrast to the maxim that emphasized the inability to comprehend one’s own essence, this saying demands that “the human take measure of his own essence by gathering himself in this measuring by reaching beyond himself and joining himself to the Λόγος, therein achieving the gathering of his essence in the Λόγος, i.e., in the originary forgathering.”¹⁹⁸ There is no contradiction, however, since the taking measure (Durchmessung) is a venturing beyond oneself by which the principle of the logos in each individual is attached to the logos as such whence the soul apprehends the mystical truth that one is many, but this is so precisely because sameness here implies that the many beings are differentiated from the one being.  

We obtain a clearer sense of Heidegger’s interpretation from the somewhat altered translation of the dictum οὐκ ἐμοῦ ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναι: “Habt ihr nicht bloß mich angehört, sondern habt ihr, Ihm gehorsam, auf den Λόγος (die ursprüngliche Versammlung) geachtet, dann ist das eigentliche Wissen, das darin besteht, in sich gesammelt zu sammeln die Anwesung des Einzig-Einen alles Einenden (d. h. die Gegenwart der ursprünglichen Versammlung).”¹⁹⁹ The German is thus rendered into English: “If you have not listened merely to me, but have listened compliantly to the Λόγος (i.e., the originary forgathering), then the essential knowledge thatsubsists therein is (while gathered in itself) to gather the presencing of what, asthe sole-One, unites all (i.e., the presence of the originary forgathering).”²⁰⁰ Commenting on this Heraclitean aphorism, Heidegger wrote: 

The Ἓν-πάντα hides within itself a hint regarding the essence of the Λόγος itself: the Λόγος is the Ἓν, i.e., the sole-One [Einzig-Eine] that unfolds precisely as the One because it unites. It does not do this retroactively [nachträglich], but rather originarily [ursprünglich]—that is, before all else. The Λόγος is the Ἓν πάντα: the originary forgathering [ursprüngliche Versammlung], the presence [Gegenwart] in which all that is present presences [in der alles Anwesende anwest], the being in which all beings are [das Sein, worin jegliches Seiende ist]. … The Λόγος and Ἓν πάντα are not two separate things, but rather the same singular essence of being [das Einzige Selbe Wesen des Seins]. Ἓν πάντα is the originary λέγειν. However, λέγειν as harvesting unites all, and does so in the sense of the safeguarding, sheltering, uncovering gathering.²⁰¹

Rejecting the prevailing interpretation, Heidegger insists that the logos in Heraclitus does not have the significance of a saying (Ausspruch) that accords meaning (Sinn) to the postulate that one is all (Eins ist Alles). Rather, the logos has the same connotation as the words ἓν πάντα, which is to say, the logos is the harvesting—the uncovering gathering—that unites all beings in the singular essence of being.²⁰² The logos, accordingly, “is the One to and for the all, and is the one sole uniting unifier” (das Eins zum All, das Eine Einzige Einigende Ver-einende).²⁰³  

Focusing on the precise Greek expression ἓν πάντα εἶναι, Heidegger noted that this is meant to herald the adage that “one and the same is all” (Eins und das Selbe ist Alles).²⁰⁴ In translating εἶναι as das Selbe, Heidegger likely had in mind his understanding of sameness (Selbigkeit) as the belonging-together (Zusammengehörigkeit)²⁰⁵ that preserves difference in contrast to identicalness (Gleichheit) in which difference disappears.²⁰⁶ Hence, rather than contemplating the same as the oneness of “the indifference of an empty, endlessly repeatable identity [das Gleichgültige der leeren, endlos wiederholbaren Identität]: A as A, B as B,” sameness is to be thought “in the sense of what in essence belongs together [im Sinne des Zusammengehörens im Wesen],” indeed, as that which “bursts the indifference [Gleichgültigkeit] of what belongs together, even more it holds them apart in the most radical dissimilarity [äußerste Ungleichheit]; it holds them apart and yet does not allow them to fall away from each other and hence disintegrate. This holding-together [Zusammenhalten] in keeping-apart [Auseinanderhalten] is a trait of what we call the same and its sameness.”²⁰⁷ That this is the philological underpinning of Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus is reinforced by the surmise that ἓν πάντα εἶναι cannot imply “the effacement of all difference” (die Auslöschung aller Unterschiede), for then we would have to infer that the all would “be comprised out of that which has no differentiation” (Unterschiedlosen). In order to avoid positing this sense of indifference (Gleichgültigkeit), which “belongs to the emptiness of nullifying nothingness” (der Leere des nichtigen Nichts), Heidegger resisted explaining the one as “the one of the numerical one” (die Eins der Einzahl) or as “the one of sameness” (das Eins der Selbigkeit), opting instead to explicate it “in the sense of unifying” (Einen); that is, the one, which is the unifying of all (das Einende von Allem), is that which “unifies itself with what has been united in such a way that it cannot be said to wrap itself around it or be above it, but rather incorporates itself into, and binds itself to, what has been united.” From that point of view, the unifying one (einigende Eine) is “the singular [Einzige], which excludes all else, but that excludes in such a way that it still precisely thereby manages to include the other (πάντα).” The one, therefore, is “a simple uniting of the manifold [ein bloßes Vereinigen des Mannigfaltigen],” which “would not merely be a holding together of multiplicity [ein Zussamenhalt des Vielen], but rather the unity that originally retains all in its ‘unifying’ [sondern das Vereinen, das ursprünglich Alles in seinem ‘Einen’ einbehält].”²⁰⁸ 

The logos, therefore, is the singular one that includes the other in its exclusivity, the unity that incorporates multiplicity in its unifying oneness.²⁰⁹ That Heidegger was acutely aware of the impulse to cast this mystically-inflected depiction in theistic terms is evident from the following explicit warning: “We must attempt to think the Λόγος in the way that it is said, without at the same time allowing any notions of Spirit, personhood, godhood, or providence (or similar such things) to creep into our thinking in such a way that we and our conventional thinking have an easier time quickly and effortlessly imagining something in regard to the Λόγος.”²¹⁰ To reify the logos in this manner is not to listen to what is said in the primal sense of legein, that is, to harvest and to gather all beings in the unity of being that defies the traditional theistic personifications. Temporally speaking, the logos is the present by which all that is present presences but this is only possible insofar as it withdraws from being present. In stereotypical parlance, logic “understands thinking to be the representation [Vorstellen] of beings in their being, which representation proposes to itself in the generality of the concept.” By contrast, “meditation on being itself [Besinnung auf das Sein selbst],” that is, the thinking that thinks the truth of being, “alone reaches the primordial essence of λόγος, which was already obfuscated and lost in Plato and in Aristotle, the founder of ‘logic.’ To think against ‘logic’ does not mean to break a lance for the illogical but simply to trace in thought the λόγος and its essence, which appeared in the dawn of thinking.”²¹¹ The mystery of being is thereby sheltered precisely on account of our intimate relation to and constant compulsion to exhume the being of that mystery through this meditative thinking.²¹² 

The singularity of being implies that it can never be adequately represented by our linguistic abstractions or by our discursive conceptualizations:

But even when we speak merely of a general meaning [Allgemeinheit], we have thought of Being in an inappropriate way. We represent Being in a way in which It, Being, never gives itself [sich niemals gibt]. The manner in which the matter of thinking—Being—comports itself, remains a unique state of affairs [bleibt ein einzigartiger Sachverhalt]. Initially, our customary ways of thinking are never able to clarify it more than inadequately. This we shall try to show by an example, bearing in mind from the start that nowhere in beings is there an example for the active nature of Being [daß es für das Wesen des Seins nirgends im Seienden ein Beispiel gibt], because the nature of Being is itself the unprecedented exemplar [das Wesen des Seins das Spiel selber ist]. … It is still infinitely more impossible to represent “Being” as the general characteristic of particular beings.²¹³

The Heideggerian Seyn, as the kabbalistic Ein Sof, denotes a presence that is always a nonpresence, a presence that can be present only by not being present, the mystery manifest in the nonmanifestation of the mystery, the nothing about which one cannot speak in contrast to there being nothing about which to speak. The mystery, accordingly, necessitates the linguistic performance of speaking-not—the denial of the poetic saying—as opposed to the repudiation that we may label not speaking. Consonant with the kabbalists, Heidegger grasped that insofar as the disclosure of the hidden essence consists of its refusal to be disclosed, it can be said of beyng that it reveals itself as the nihilation of beyng. Heidegger’s assertion that “as refusal, beyng is not mere withholding and seclusion,” and hence the “refusal is the intimacy of an allocation,”²¹⁴ well expresses the paradox of the kabbalistic doctrine of ṣimṣum, the self-contracting expansion of the self-expanding contraction.²¹⁵ The kabbalistic doctrine implies not only that the perpetual tension of the cosmic process dialectically entails that every expansion is preceded by withdrawal, as Scholem put it,²¹⁶ but the more paradoxical presupposition that the expansion is itself a withdrawal just as every disclosure is a concealment, since what is disclosed is the concealment and the concealment cannot be disclosed as concealment unless it is concealed. Hence, we can say of both the Heideggerian Seyn and the kabbalistic Ein Sof that they illumine—each from its distinctive vantage point—all that can be seen but are themselves never seen, the luminescence that facilitates the appearance of all phenomena but itself does not appear phenomenologically. Insofar as the invisible can be disclosed only as the event of presence in excess of and persistently withdrawing from the spectacle of being present, we must be prepared to speak of a phenomenology of the nonphenomenalizable, or in the locution that Heidegger used in the Zähringen seminar of 1973, the phenomenology of the inapparent (Phänomenologie des Unscheinbaren).²¹⁷ 

It is noteworthy that already in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger opined that the self-showing of a phenomenon coincides with a presence that does not show itself. “Appearance, as the appearance ‘of something,’ thus precisely does not mean that something shows itself; rather, it means that something which does not show itself announces itself through something that does show itself. Appearing is a not showing itself [Sich-nicht-zeigen]. … What does not show itself, in the manner of what appears, can also never seem.”²¹⁸ Of the various meanings that we can attribute to the word “appearance,” the most elemental is “that which in its self-showing indicates the nonmanifest [Nichtoffenbare]—as what comes to the fore in the nonmanifest itself, and radiates from it in such a way that what is nonmanifest is thought of as what is essentially never manifest.”²¹⁹ Patently disputing Husserl’s delineation of the ultimate data of transcendental phenomenology as the givenness of the appearing (die Gegebenheit des Erscheinens) and the givenness of the object (die Gegebenheit des Gegenstandes),²²⁰ which together constitute the two poles of self-givenness in the absolute sense (Selbstgegebenheit im absoluten Sinn),²²¹ Heidegger proffered that “it is precisely because phenomena are initially and for the most part not given that phenomenology is needed. Being covered up is the counterconcept to ‘phenomenon.’”²²² Implicit in the final sentence is a central theme that informed all stages of Heidegger’s thinking, the paradoxical identification of self-showing as a form of not showing. In his later work, Heidegger expands this theme in his discussions of the phenomenology of the nonphenomenon, that is, the nonphenomenalizable event of being as the clearing of the unapparent that enables the appearing of all beings but which itself is nothing but the nothingness that evades appearance. Following the logic of the givenness without a given, the invisible can be said to appear only to the extent that it is precluded from appearing. The invisible contemplated by Heidegger is not to be understood as a potentially visible phenomenon that is presently occluded, but rather as the nonphenomenal that makes all phenomena visible by eluding visibility. The same can be said about the infinite for the kabbalists, the light of being that manifests all beings but is itself unmanifest. The unconcealment of beings is what secures the concealment of being. Even the eschatological promise that one may mine from kabbalistic sources, to gaze upon the light without the encumbrance of any garment, amounts to realizing that it is not possible to behold the light but through the garment that is light. The goal on the mystical path may be described as the removal of all barriers to vision—to polish the heart like a translucent mirror, as Sufis are wont to say—but the greatest of barriers is to think that all barriers may be removed. Nothing is revealed to be the truth of which nothing is revealed but the possibility of something to be revealed. 

Mysticism persists to occupy our scholarly ruminations, it seems to me, because it compels us to grapple with the inscrutability of infinity, an impenetrability that opens the path to the unsettling axiom that beneath the surface lies more surface, the nihilistic wisdom—as opposed to knowledge or information or even artificial intelligence—that undermines the noematic distinction between appearance and reality insofar as there is no reality to imagine apart from what is imagined to be real. In the end, as Heidegger emphasized, the greatest nihilism is “the deliberate turning of a blind eye to human goal-lessness [Ziel-losigkeit der Menschen],” a purposelessness that induces the dread of the decisive domains of beyng and nonbeyng that have nothing to do with teleological expectation or theopolitical enhancement.²²³ As Heidegger adamantly affirmed in his response to Jünger, “With regard to the essence of nihilism there is no prospect [Aussicht] and can be no meaningful claim of healing [Heilung]. … The essence of nihilism is neither healable [heilbar] nor unhealable [unheilbar]. It is the heal-less [Heil-lose], and yet, as such, a unique pointer toward the salutary [Heile]. If thinking is to approach the realm of the essence of nihilism, it must necessarily become more precursory [vorläufiger], and thereby become other [anders].”²²⁴ 

The alternative thinking required is predicated on discerning that precisely because the essence of nihilism is without any assurance of healing, it can serve as a harbinger that foretells the way to such recuperation. Put differently, insofar as Heidegger identified nihilism as “the promise of Being in its unconcealment in such a way that it conceals itself precisely as the promise,”²²⁵ the overcoming of nihilism holds the potential to deliver us from the semblance of futility and sheer errancy,²²⁶ which are provoked by the misleading characterizations of Dasein’s comportment in this world. The distinction between promise and telos dovetails with Heidegger’s claim that the historical epochs of the Geschick of being, which “suddenly spring up like sprouts,” can never “be derived from one another much less be placed on the track of an ongoing process. Nevertheless, there is a legacy [Überlieferung] from epoch to epoch. But it does not run between the epochs like a band linking them; rather, the legacy always comes from what is concealed in the Geschick, just as if from one source various streamlets arise that feed a stream that is everywhere and nowhere.”²²⁷ The promise that conceals itself as promise corresponds to this sense of legacy, the torrent of tradition that lies hidden in the destiny of being and is thus simultaneously ubiquitous and elusive. 

We can apply to Heidegger’s vision the term nocturnal seeing, which instructs us that enlightenment in the unredeemable world consists of casting light on the shadow so that the shadow is illumined as light. Departing from the Platonic bedrock of the gnostic mythos, there is no escaping the shadowy world by fleeing to the realm of radiant and everlasting truth. The task of the great thinker, Heidegger reminded us, demands jumping over one’s shadow, for only through the leap does one surpass the shadow.²²⁸ The surpassing, however, involves abiding within rather than dispelling the shadow. What is dark, Heidegger conjectured, is not dissolved in brightness; it remains concealed and comes to appearance in the light as the nonapparent. True thinking dwells inceptually in the essential space of a luminal darkness. By radiating that dark light and uncovering the shadow as shadow, one is emancipated and thereby reveals that in the showing of the unhidden, being hides itself; what is finally disclosed is the concealment concealed in its disclosure. The decidedly nonteleological tenor of the futurity, which is implied in the political undertone of the apocalyptic vision grounded in and targeted toward the nothing, necessitates, as Slavoj Žižek remarked, “a delicate balance between reading the signs from the … future and  maintaining the radical openness of that future: openness alone ends in a decisionist nihilism that impels us to leap into the void.”²²⁹ There can be no bottom to the void and consequently there can be no culmination to the leap. The end that is here imaginally fabricated has no end and the plunge into nothingness paves the way to a future that returns one inevitably to where one has always never been. Ironically perhaps, the Heideggerian posture resonates with the following statement of the French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser, “philosophy is that strange theoretical site where nothing really happens, nothing but this repetition. To say that nothing happens in philosophy is to say that philosophy leads nowhere because it is going nowhere.”²³⁰ The skepticism of this faith—the repetition of there being nothing to be repeated—delimits the limit of the faith of the skepticism that has always and hopefully will continue to be safeguarded by the discipline of philosophy in its steadfast quest to unearth the being of truth in the truth of being.  

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Notes

1. Martin Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus: 1. Die Überwindung der Metaphysik,   2. Das Wesen des Nihilismus [GA 67] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), p. 177; idem, Metaphysics and Nihilism: 1. The Overcoming of Metaphysics, 2. The Essence of Nihilism, edited by Hans-Joachim Friedrich, translated by Artun Iyer (Cambridge: Polity, 2022), p. 145. ↩︎
2. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, p. 177; idem, Metaphysics and Nihilism, p. 145 (translation slightly modified). ↩︎
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, edited by Rüdiger Bittner, translated by Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 146. For an alternative version, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and Reginald John Hollingdale, edited, with commentary, by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), § 2, p. 9. ↩︎
4. On metaphysics and the nothing, see Louis P. Blond, Heidegger and Nietzsche: Overcoming Metaphysics (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 31-53. ↩︎
5. See the chapter “The Interpretation of the Unsaid in ‘Nietzsche’s Word God is Dead’” in Karl Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism, edited by Richard Wolin, translated by Gary Steiner (New York: Columba University Press, 1995), pp. 96-127. Löwith’s hypothesis is summarized on p 114: “Nietzsche’s word of the death of God does lie at the center of Heidegger’s interpretation, though not as an individual doctrine but instead as a leitmotiv on the basis of which the other fundamental words in Nietzsche get illuminated: ‘nihilism,’ ‘life,’ ‘value,’ ‘will to power,’ ‘eternal return.’ … According to Heidegger, ‘God is dead’ means that the metaphysical world of ideas, ideals, and values is no longer alive and that metaphysics is thereby at its end.” See also Blond, Heidegger, pp. 99-122, and Robert B. Pippin, “Heidegger on Nietzsche on Nihilism,” in Political Philosophy Cross-Examined: Perennial Challenges to the Philosophic Life – Essays Honor of Heinrich Meier, edited by Thomas L. Pangle and J. Harvey Lomax (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 173-187. ↩︎
6. See Stanley Corngold, “Nietzsche: Nihilism and Neo-Gnosticism,” in Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, edited by Jeffrey Metzger (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 37-53.
   ↩︎
7. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, p. 181; idem, Metaphysics and Nihilism, p. 149. Compare Bogdan Costea and Kostas Amiridis, “The Movement of Nihilism as Self-Assertion,” in The Movement of Nihilism: Heidegger’s Thinking After Nietzsche, edited by Laurence Paul Hemming, Bogdan Costea, and Kostas Amiridis (London: Continuum, 2011), pp. 8-24. ↩︎
8. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, II (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1961), p. 256; idem, Nietzsche, vol. 4: Nihilism, translated by Frank A. Capuzzi, edited, with notes and analysis, by David Farrell Krell (San Franciso: HarperCollins, 1991) p. 196. ↩︎
9. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, pp. 181-182; idem, Metaphysics and Nihilism, p. 149. ↩︎
10. Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Stuttgart: Günther Neske, 1959), p. 54-55; idem, Discourse on Thinking, translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, with an introduction by John M. Anderson (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 76. ↩︎
11. See William J. Richardson, S. J., Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, preface by Martin Heidegger (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), p. 503. ↩︎
12. Compare Martin Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen [GA 82] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2018), p. 178: “Sein (und Nichts) das ‘Erste’. Nietzsche: Sein als ewige Wiederkehr, als Werden, als Schein! Die Umkehrung.” English version in Martin Heidegger, On My Own Publications, translated by Scott M. Campbell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2025), p. 139: “Being (and nothingness) are ‘first.’ Nietzsche: Being as eternal recurrence, as becoming, as appearance! The reversal” (emphasis in original). ↩︎
13. Nietzsche, Writings, p. 148 (emphasis in original). Compare idem, Will to Power, § 15, pp. 14-15. ↩︎
14. On the nexus of illusion, appearance, metaphor, and the creative inclination of the artist in Nietzsche’s thought, see my brief remarks in Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011), pp. 43-45, 79, 153-154, 200-201. ↩︎
15. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [GA 65] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), § 102, pp. 200-201; idem, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 157. ↩︎
16. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, p. 291; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 226.  ↩︎
17. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, p. 183; idem, Metaphysics and Nihilism, p. 150. ↩︎
18. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, p. 184; idem, Metaphysics and Nihilism, p. 151. ↩︎
19.  Martin Heidegger, Hegel [GA 68] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2009), p. 28; idem, Hegel, translated by Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), p. 22. Compare Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in Die Philosophie [GA 27] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996), p. 91: “Verhalten zu Selbigem schließt nicht aus, sondern sogar ein, daß das Verhalten verschieden ist.” English version in idem, Introduction to Philosophy, translated by William McNeill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2024), p. 65: “Comporting oneself toward the same does not preclude but rather even entails that the comportment is different.” The comportment to what is the same, which means to what is different, is essential to the character of being with one another (Miteinandersein) that is distinctive to human beings. As Heidegger clarified in the continuation of this text, the connotation of sameness (Selbigkeit) is to be distinguished from identity (Identität) even though the two words are commonly treated as synonymous. See below n. 206. The routine criterion of identity—the claim that a thing is identical with itself—is insufficient to furnish the information necessary to grasp the meaning of sameness in the statement that people comport themselves toward the same in the comportment of being with one another. By comporting ourselves toward the same, we each see the very same thing differently. Sameness, therefore, does not exclude change or difference. On the contrary, the quality of difference is what makes possible the comporting to the same that is essential to our being together. In a word, sameness designates that which is always original in its diversity. Insofar as the same is the same—as opposed to identical—for each Dasein, the essence of sameness is marked by a sense of relationality that does not revert to a single being construed monolithically, but leads away in the direction of numerous people. See Heidegger, Einleitung, pp. 92-97; idem, Introduction, pp. 66-69. ↩︎
20. Heidegger, Beiträge, § 33, p. 73; idem, Contributions, p. 58 (emphasis in original). ↩︎
21. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, p. 16; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 14 (emphasis in original). ↩︎
22. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, p. 169; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 132. ↩︎
23. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, p. 184; idem, Metaphysics and Nihilism, p. 151. Compare the comment in “Brief über den ‘Humanismus’” in Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken [GA 9] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), pp. 341-342: “Jeder Nationalismus ist metaphysisch ein Anthropologismus und als solcher Subjektivismus. Der Nationalismus wird durch den bloßen Internationalismus nicht überwunden, sondern nur erweitert und zum System erhoben. Der Nationalismus wird dadurch so wenig zur Humanitas gebracht und aufgehoben, wie der Individualismus durch den geschichtslosen Kollektivismus. Dieser ist die Subjektivität des Menschen in der Totalität. Er vollzieht ihre unbedingte Selbstbehauptung. Diese läßt sich nicht rückgängig machen.” English version in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 260: “Every nationalism is metaphysically an anthropologism, and as such subjectivism. Nationalism is not overcome through mere internationalism; it is rather expanded and elevated thereby into a system. Nationalism is as little brought and raised to humanitas by internationalism as individualism is by an ahistorical collectivism. The latter is the subjectivity of human beings in totality. It completes subjectivity’s unconditioned self-assertion, which refuses to yield.” ↩︎
24. Fred Dallmayr, “Heidegger on Macht and Machenschaft,” Continental Philosophy Review 34 (2001): 247-267. ↩︎
25. Löwith, Martin Heidegger, p. 113. Compare the interesting personal reflection that Löwith offered, ibid., pp. 213-214: “That Heidegger’s extraordinary success as an educator and the unusual influence of his hard-to-understand book drove Heidegger himself beyond the limitation he first had in mind and made a fashion out of him, was certainly against his own intention though it was also a natural consequence of his work as a transposed preacher. He influenced us not by anticipating a new system, but rather by means of the substantive indeterminacy and simple appeal of his philosophical willing, his spiritual intensity and concentration on ‘the one thing which is needful.’” ↩︎
26. Keiji Nishitani, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, translated by Graham Parkes with Setsuko Aihara (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 45-68. See Bernard Stevens, Kyoto School in Comparative Perspective: Ideology, Ontology, Modernity (Lanham:  Lexington Books, 2023), pp. 85-86. ↩︎
27. Nietzsche, Writings, p. 118. Compare idem, Will to Power, § 55, p. 36. ↩︎
28. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, translation and foreword by Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 149. ↩︎
29. Ibid. See Peter van Zilfhout, “Traces of Nihilism,” in Enduring Resistance: Cultural Theory after Derrida, edited by Sjef Houppermans, Rico Sneller, and Peter van Zilfhout (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 99-117, esp. 103-106. ↩︎
30. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, p. 195; idem, Metaphysics and Nihilism, p. 160. For a similar point, albeit framed rhetorically, see the passage in “Brief über den ‘Humanismus’” in Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 347: “Weil auf Nietzsches Wort vom ‘Tod Gottes’ hingewiesen wird, erklärt man ein solches Tun für Atheismus. Denn was ist ‘logischer’ als dies, daß derjenige, der den ‘Tod Gottes’ erfahren hat, ein Gott-loser ist?” English version in Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 264: “Because we refer to the word of Nietzsche on the ‘death of God’ people regard such a gesture as atheism. For what is more ‘logical’ than that whoever has experienced the death of God is godless?” ↩︎
31. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, p. 186; idem, Metaphysics and Nihilism, pp. 152-153. ↩︎
32. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, p. 245; idem, Metaphysics and Nihilism, p. 199. ↩︎
33. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, p. 245; idem, Metaphysics and Nihilism, p. 199. For a critical assessment of history, historicality, and the destining of being, see Löwith, Martin Heidegger, pp. 69-95. ↩︎
34.  Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, p. 246; idem, Metaphysics and Nihilism, p. 200. ↩︎
35. Heidegger, Wegmarken, pp. 386-387; idem, Pathmarks, p. 292.  ↩︎
36. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 405; idem, Pathmarks, p. 306. ↩︎
37. Martin Heidegger, Questions III et IV, translated by Roger Munier (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 130: “L’ essence du nihilisme tient au contraire en ceci qu’ il est incapable de penser le nihil.” Concerning this letter, see Pierre Jacerme, “The Thoughtful Dialogue Between Martin Heidegger and Jean Beaufret: A New Way of Doing Philosophy,” in French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception, edited by David Pettigrew and François Raffoul (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), pp. 61-62. On the communications between Beaufret and Heidegger, including the letter on humanism, see Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger in France, translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), pp. 51-55, 68-72, 78-81. See also Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France 1927-1961 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 157-206. ↩︎
38. Martin Heidegger, Das Ereignis [GA 71] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2009), p. 133; idem, The Event, translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), p. 113. ↩︎
39. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 342; idem, Pathmarks, p. 260. ↩︎
40. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, p. 395; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 308. ↩︎
41. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, p. 171; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 134. ↩︎
42. See Martin Heidegger, Parmenides [GA 54] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982), p. 9: idem, Parmenides, translated by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 6. ↩︎
43. Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung [GA 4] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981), p. 75; idem, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, translated with an introduction by Keith Hoeller (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000), p. 96. ↩︎
44. Heidegger, Erläuterungen, p. 75; idem, Elucidations, pp. 96-97. ↩︎
45. Heidegger, Der Anfang der Abendländischen Philosophie: Auslegung des Anaximander und Parmenides [GA 35] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2012) p. 46; idem, The Beginning of Western Philosophy: Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides, translated by Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015) p. 36. ↩︎
46. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” [GA 39] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999), p. 107; idem, Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), p. 98. ↩︎
47. Methodologically, I do not assume a sharp contrast between the so-called earlier and later Heidegger, as we find epitomized in Dominic Kelly, Beyond Nihilism: The Turn in Heidegger’s Thought from Nietzsche to Hölderlin (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). I concur with Kelly’s thesis that in the 1930s Heidegger moved away from the metaphysical framework of the traditional philosophical way of thinking, but I am not convinced that this is a move beyond nihilism as much as it is a postmetaphysical reinscription of nihilism by offering a poetic-mystical account of the nihil as the nothingness of being that is the beingness of nothing. My approach can be usefully compared to Akihiro Takeichi, “On the Origin of Nihilism—In View of the Problem of Technology and Karma,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, edited by Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1987), pp. 175-185. ↩︎
48. Heidegger, Beiträge, § 55, p. 115; idem, Contributions, p. 91. ↩︎
49. Heidegger, Beiträge, § 57, p. 120; idem, Contributions, p. 95 (emphasis in original). ↩︎
50. Heidegger, Beiträge, § 72, p. 140; idem, Contributions, p. 110. ↩︎
51. Martin Heidegger, Über den Anfang [GA 70] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005), p. 123; idem, On Inception, translated by Peter Hanly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023), p. 99. ↩︎
52. Heidegger, Beiträge, § 72, p. 140; idem, Contributions, p. 110. ↩︎
53. Heidegger, Beiträge, § 87, p. 175; idem, Contributions, p. 138. ↩︎
54. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, pp. 371-372; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 286. ↩︎
55. Heidegger, Über den Anfang, p. 122; idem, On Inception, p. 99 (emphasis in original). ↩︎
56.  Compare Heidegger, Das Ereignis, p. 132: “Wir müssen aber auch lernen: über die Nichtung des Seienden zurück noch das Seinlose au denken, das allem metaphysischen Vorstellen, das nicht einmal das Nichts zu denken vermag, verschlossen bleibt. Der Unterschied scheidet das Sein und das Seinlose. Die Sein-losigkeit aber ist ein Ereignis des Seyns selbst. Die Sein-losigkeit ist der erste Abglanz vom Glanz des Rätsels, das im Ereignis sich verbirgt …. Das Seyn unterscheidet sich vom Seinlosen und dies ist das anfängliche Ereignis. Die Seinlosigkeit des (Seienden) ist das anfängliche Ereignis der Enteignung; die anfängliche Enteignung im Sinne des Vorenthalts. Diese Enteignung ist anfängliches noch unentwundenes Rückwesen in den grundlosen Anfang” (emphasis in original). English version in idem, The Event, p. 112: “We must, however, also learn to think what is beingless, back beyond the negativity of beings; beinglessness is closed to all metaphysical representation, which is utterly unable to think nothingness. The difference distinguishes being and what is beingless. Yet being-lessness is an event of beyng itself. Beinglessness is the first reflection of the luster of the riddle which is concealed in the event …. Beyng differentiates itself from what is beingless, and this differentiation is the inceptual event. The beinglessness of (beings) is the inceptual event of the dispropriation; the inceptual dispropriation in the sense of withholding. This dispropriation is an inceptual and still undisentangled reversal into the groundless beginning” (emphasis in original). ↩︎
57. For an extensive discussion of nihility and śūnyatā, see Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, translated with an introduction by Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 77-118. ↩︎
58. Ibid., p. 34. ↩︎
59. Nishitani, Self-Overcoming, p. 162.  ↩︎
60. Kitarō Nishida, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, translated with an introduction by David A. Dilworth (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1987), pp. 82-83. ↩︎
61. Martin Heidegger, Holzwege [GA 5] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2003), p. 264; idem, Off the Beaten Track, edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 197. ↩︎
62. Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 265; idem, Off the Beaten Track, p. 198. ↩︎
63. Heidegger, Nietzsche, II, pp. 370-371; idem, Nietzsche, vol. 4, p. 227. ↩︎
64. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 391; idem, Pathmarks, p. 296. ↩︎
65. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 393; idem, Pathmarks, p. 297 (emphasis in original). ↩︎
66. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 412; idem, Pathmarks, p. 311. ↩︎
67. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, pp. 56-57; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 45. ↩︎
68. Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 263; idem, Off the Beaten Track, p. 196. ↩︎
69. Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache [GA 12] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), p. 114; idem, On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 29. ↩︎
70. See Tomio Tezuka, “Eine Stunde mit Heidegger,” in Japan und Heidegger: Gedenkschrift der Stadt Meßkirch zum hundertsten Geburtstag Martin Heideggers, edited by Hartmut Buchner (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1989), pp. 173-179; idem, “An Hour with Heidegger,” in Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influence on His Work, translated with a complementary essay by Graham Parkes (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 59-64.  ↩︎
71.  See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Heidegger’s Apophaticism: Unsaying the Said and the Silence of the Last God,” in Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy, edited by Nahum Brown and J. Aaron Simmons (New York: Palgrave, 2017), pp. 185-216; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019), pp. 299-311. See also David R. Law, “Negative Theology in Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 48 (2000): 139-156. In the chapter “Being’s Tragedy: Heidegger’s Silence and the Ring of Solitude” in Elliot R. Wolfson, The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the Jewish Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), pp. 109-130, I argued that Heidegger’s infamous reticence regarding his support for Hitler and the Nazi ideology, and the inability to take full responsibility for his actions and words publicly, should be analyzed in light of the role of silence in his thinking. Many others has written about this topic, but consider the recent  approach offered by Elad Lapidot, The Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2025), pp. 17-33. According to Lapidot’s analysis, which focuses on the essay “Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache – Zwischen einem Japaner und einem Fragenden,” Heidegger’s text performs a dialogue that proffers the collapse of dialogue, or, alternatively, the logos performs logoclasm, a language that is simultaneously an act of silencing. Lapidot casts this dynamic as well in theological terms as the death of logos, which stems from the death of dialogue, followed by a resurrection of logos based on the resurrection of dialogue (see p. 23). For my reading of that text, which offers a somewhat different approach, see the comments below in n. 79. ↩︎
72. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, p. 550; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 443 (emphasis in original).  ↩︎
73. Many have written on this theme in Heidegger. For instance, see David Nowell Smith, Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013); Daniela Vallega-Neu, “Heidegger’s Reticence: From Contributions to Das Ereignis and toward Gelassenheit,” Research in Phenomenology 45 (2015): 1-32; Brandon Absher, “Speaking of Being: Language, Speech, and Silence in Being and Time,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30 (2016): 204-231; Wanda Torres Gregory, Heidegger’s Path to Language (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016); idem, Speaking of Silence in Heidegger (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021). Consider as well the hypothesis proffered by Răzvan Săftoiu, “To Speak or Not to Speak: Notes on Silence as a Dialogic Speech Act,” Revista Română de Lingvistică 63 (2018): 115-131. See also James Risser, “Speaking from Silence: On the Intimate Relation Between Silence and Speaking,” Journal of Applied Hermeneutics (2109): 1-14. ↩︎
74. Heidegger, Unterwegs, p. 190; idem, On the Way, p. 95. Heidegger remarked that the guide word—the being of language: the language of being—“gives us a hint … that … points only to what defines the neighborhood [Nachbarschaft] of poetry and thinking as a neighborhood. Neighborliness, dwelling in nearness, receives its definition from nearness. Poetry and thinking, however, are modes of saying, indeed preeminent modes. If these two modes of saying are to be neighborly in virtue of their nearness, then nearness itself must act in the manner of Saying. Then nearness and Saying would be the Same [das Selbe].” It behooves us to recall that das Selbe, for Heidegger, denotes the sameness that preserves difference. See below, nn. 105 and 206. On Heidegger’s notion of hiding the secret as a movement of dissimulation, concealment, and sheltering, which makes possible the mystery (Geheimnis) of the more general phenomenon of  secrecy, see Jacques Derrida, Répondre – du secret. Séminaire (1991-1992). Secret et témoignage. Volume I, edited by Ginette Michaud and Nicholas Cotton (Paris: Seuil, 2024), p. 136.  ↩︎
75. Martin Heidegger, Was Heißt Denken? [GA 8] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), p. 199; idem, What Is Called Thinking?, translated by Fred W. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, introduction by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 196 (translation slightly modified). ↩︎
76. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen, pp. 31-32; idem, Hölderlin’s Hymns, pp. 30-31. ↩︎
77. Heidegger, Unterwegs, p. 181; idem, On the Way, p. 87. For a fuller discussion of the notion of the beckoning of the hint, see Heidegger, Unterwegs, p. 191; idem, On the Way, pp. 95-96. ↩︎
78. Heidegger, Unterwegs, p. 133; idem, On the Way, p. 47. ↩︎
79.  Heidegger, Unterwegs, p. 133; idem, On the Way, p. 44. Heidegger informed the reader that the Japanese Iki denotes “the pure delight of the beckoning stillness,” related to the word Koto, which means both “thing” and “word,” and, in Heidegger’s rendering, denotes “that which uniquely in each unrepeatable moment comes to radiance in the fullness of its grace [das einzig je im unwiederholbaren Augenblick mit der Fülle seines Anmutens zum Scheinen kommt]… the appropriating occurrence of the lightening message of grace [das Ereignis der lichtenden Botschaft der Anmut] … the happening of the lightening message of the graciousness that brings forth [das Ereignis der lichtenden Botschaft der hervorbringenden Huld] … the happening holding sway [das waltende Ereignen].” The term Koto is linked to the expression Koto ba, which is presented as the Japanese equivalent for language (Sprache). The event of language is identified more specifically by Heidegger as the saying (die Sage), which he distinguished from human speaking (menschliche Sprechen). See Heidegger, Unterwegs, pp. 134-137; idem, On the Way, pp. 45, 47. Despite the cultural gap between the language of the Japanese interlocutor and the German inquirer, the former representing Tezuka and the latter Heidegger, the conversation about language closes this gap, albeit by keeping it open, and in that sense the conversation phenomenologically assumes the function of a bridge that connects what must remain apart. See Heidegger, Unterwegs, p. 116; idem, On the Way, p. 30. Suggestively, the Japanese interlocutor says to the inquirer, “Thus when I ask you about hermeneutics, and when you ask me what our word is for what you call language, we ask each other the Same.” The same, das Selbe, has to decrypted in the Heideggerian sense as the belonging together of that which is different. See above, n. 74, and below, n. 105; and the analysis in Lin Ma, Heidegger on East-West Dialogue: Anticipating the Event (New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 190-209. This is the import of the comment of the Japanese interlocutor that from a great distance he sensed a kinship (Verwandtschaft) between his word that gives a hint to the nature of language and Heidegger’s description of language as the house of being. See Heidegger, Unterwegs, p. 108; idem, On the Way, p. 24; and see the references cited below in n. 181. Compare Heidegger, Unterwegs, pp. 137-138; idem, On the Way, pp. 47-48. After Heidegger introduced his understanding of language as saying, the inquirer remarked, “but for that essential being which your Japanese word Koto ba hints and beckons: that which is like a saga [das Sagenhafte],” to which the Japanese participant responded, “and in whose beckoning hint I have come to be at home only now through our dialogue, so now I also see more clearly how well-advised Count Kuki was when he, under your guidance, tried to reflect his way through hermeneutics.” The path of hermeneutics—exemplified by the task of translation (Übersetzen decoded as Über-setzen, that is, trans-lating in the sense of passing over) that is the conceptual basis for a dialogical Sprachdenken as the unfolding of one’s own language by encountering a foreign language (Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister” (GA 53) [Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1984], p. 80; idem, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996], pp. 65-66)—is that which affords one the possibility to face the other and thereby understand oneself. Hence, the path is described as being long not “because it leads far away, but because it leads through what is near.” See Julia A. Ireland, “Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Eccentric Translation,” in Heidegger, Translation, and the Task of Thinking: Essays in Honor of Parvis Emad, edited by Frank Schalow (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), pp. 253-267, and Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 343-345, 352-354. Also relevant is Heidegger’s comment in his letter to Beaufret from November 23, 1945, citing and expounding the words of the latter, in Heidegger, Questions III et IV, p. 360: “Ce que vous dites de la traduction de ‘Da-sein’ par ‘réalité humaine’ est fort juste. Excellente également la remarque: ‘Mais si l’allemand a ses ressources, le français a ses limites’; ici se cache une indication essentielle sur les possibilités de s’instruire l’un par l’autre, au sein d’une pensée productive, dans un mutuel échange. … La pensée féconde requiert, en plus de l’écriture et de la lecture, la συνουσία de la conversation et de ce travail qui est enseignement reçu tout autant que donné.” See Jacerme, “Thoughtful Dialogue,” pp. 64-65. On the challenge to Heidegger’s Eurocentrism and his embrace of the intercultural other embodied in East Asian thought, see Steven Burik, The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative Thinking: Heidegger, Derrida, and Daoism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), pp. 11-47, esp. 33-35. See also Otto Pöggeler, “West-East Dialogue: Heidegger and Lao-tzu,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, pp. 47-78. On Heidegger’s interpretation of the Japanese Kotoba, see May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources, pp. 11, 15, 19, 60; Michael M. Marra, “On Japanese Things and Words: An Answer to Heidegger’s Question,” Philosophy East and West 54 (2004): 555-568; Ma, Heidegger, pp. 168, 177-178, 208, 236 n. 14; Wei Zhang, Heidegger, Rorty, and the Eastern Thinkers: A Hermeneutics of Cross-Cultural Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 54-65; Onur Karamercan,  “Locating Heidegger’s Kotoba between Actuality and Hollowness: The Way Towards a Thinking Conversation with Japanese Philosophy,” Journal of East Asian Philosophy 1 (2021): 43-61. ↩︎
80. Heidegger, Unterwegs, p. 133; idem, On the Way, p. 44.  ↩︎
81. Heidegger, Unterwegs, pp. 143-144; idem, On the Way, pp. 52-53 (emphasis in original). ↩︎
82. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie [GA 24] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975), p. 128; idem, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, translation, introduction, and lexicon by Albert Hofstadter, revised edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 91. ↩︎
83.  On the sameness (Selbigkeit) of being and nothing, see Richard Regvald, Heidegger et le Problème du Néant (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 131-164. Many have written on Heidegger’s criticism of Hegel, and here I will mention the relatively recent study of Robert B. Pippin, The Culmination: Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2024), pp. 139-201. ↩︎
84. Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Stuttgart: Günther Neske, 1957), pp. 36-37; idem, Identity and Difference, translated and with an introduction by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 47 (emphasis in original). On Heidegger’s deviation from Hegel related to this formulation, see Stanley Rosen, Nihilism:  Philosophical Essay (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999), pp. 86-89. ↩︎
85. Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, p. 41; idem, Identity and Difference, p. 51. ↩︎
86. Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, p. 59; idem, Identity and Difference, p. 67. ↩︎
87. Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, p. 60; idem, Identity and Difference, p. 68. ↩︎
88. For a more elaborate discussion of the Heideggerian being as nothingness and the Schellingian idea of ontological freedom, see Emilo Carlo Corriero, The Absolute and the Event: Schelling after Heidegger, translated by Vanessa di Stefano (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), pp. 127-153. ↩︎
89. I would thus take issue with the argument that the meontotheology of Heidegger conceives of being as something—to the point that he provides everything without giving anything—found in Connor Cunnigham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London: Routledge, 2002),  pp. xiii, 125, 132-142.  ↩︎
90. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 120; idem, Pathmarks, pp. 94-95. Compare Claude Romano, “Présentation de la Conférence de Heidegger: Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?” in Le Néant: Contribution à l’histoire du non-être dans la philosophie occidentale, edited by Jérôme Laurent and Claude Romano (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2006), pp. 513-524, and see my previous analysis in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 172-173. ↩︎
91. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 115; idem, Pathmarks, p. 91.  ↩︎
92. Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik [GA 40] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), pp. 116-117; idem, Introduction to Metaphysics, new translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 114-115. ↩︎
93. For the text upon which Heidegger’s analysis is based, see The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the Major Presocratics, part 1, edited and translated by Daniel W. Graham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 212-213; and the alternate translation in Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 42. ↩︎
94. Heidegger, Einführung, p. 119; idem, Introduction, p. 117. ↩︎
95. Heidegger, Beiträge, §145, p. 266; idem, Contributions, pp. 209-210. ↩︎
96. Heidegger, Beiträge, §145, p. 266; idem, Contributions, p. 209. ↩︎
97. Heidegger, Beiträge, §145, p. 266; idem, Contributions, p. 209 (emphasis in original).  ↩︎
98. Heidegger, Hegel [GA 68], p. 47; idem, Hegel, p. 37.  ↩︎
99. Heidegger, Über den Anfang, pp. 11–12; idem, On Inception, p. 5. The passage is analyzed in Daniela Vallega-Neu, Heidegger’s Poietic Writings: From Contributions to Philosophy to The Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), pp. 108–109. ↩︎
100. Compare Heidegger, Über den Anfang, pp. 121-122: “Das Seiende ist nicht – als das Seinlose und deshalb ist es auch nicht ‘nichts’. Weder kann gesagt werden, das Seinlose sei, noch es sei nicht. … In der Seinsverlassenheit (d. h . der Machenschaft des Seienden) ist das Seiende ganz außerhalb der Seinlosigkeit. Das Seinlose ist außerhalb des Nichts, denn im Nichts ist das Seiende schon im Sein und ist zunächst nur das Nicht-Seiende.” English translation in idem, On Inception, p. 98: “A being is not—as beingless, but therefore it is also not ‘nothing’. It can neither be said that the beingless is, nor that it is not. … In being’s abandonment (i.e., the machination of beings), beings are wholly outside beinglessness. The beingless is beyond the nothing, because in the nothing beings are already in being and are in the first place only non-beings” (emphasis in original).   ↩︎
101. Heidegger, Hegel [GA 68], p. 47; idem, Hegel, p. 37 (emphasis in original). ↩︎
102. Heidegger, Hegel [GA 68], pp. 47-48; idem, Hegel, p. 38 (emphasis in original). Compare the discussion of the abyss and mystery in Jean Vioulac, Apocalypse of Truth: Heideggerian Meditations, with a foreword by Jean-Luc Marion, translated by Matthew J. Peterson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), pp. 36-40.  ↩︎
103. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, p. 408; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 318. ↩︎
104. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, pp. 312-313; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 241 (emphasis in original). ↩︎
105. This would be consistent philologically with the distinction Heidegger made between the identical, das Gleiche, and the same, das Selbe: with respect to the former, difference disappears, whereas with respect to the latter, difference is sustained. See the passage cited below in n. 206. For analysis and citation of this passage and some of the other relevant sources, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 11-13, 39-40, 55 n. 102, 265; idem, Nocturnal Seeing: Hopelessness of Hope and Philosophical Gnosis in Susan Taubes, Gillian Rose, and Edith Wyschogrod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025), p. 266 n. 31.  ↩︎
106. Heidegger, Beiträge, §265, p. 461: “Vielleicht ist im Hinblick auf das Wesen des Seyns gerade die ‘Logik’ das am wenigsten strenge und ernste Verfahren der Wesensbestimmung und nur ein Schein, der freilich noch tieferen Wesens ist als der ‘dialektische Schein’, den Kant im Bereich der möglichen Vergegenständlichung des Seienden im Ganzen sichtbar gemacht hat. Die ‘Logik’ selbst ist mit Bezug auf die Wesensgründung der Wahrheit des Seyns ein Schein, aber der notwendigste Schein, den die Geschichte des Seyns bis jetzt kennt. Das Wesen der ‘Logik’ selbst, die ihre höchste Gestalt in Hegels Metaphysik erreicht hat, läßt sich erst aus dem anderen Anfang des Denkens des Seyns begreifen” (emphasis in original). English translation in idem, Contributions, p. 363: “In regard to the essence of beyng, perhaps ‘logic’ is precisely the least strict and least serious way of essential determination and amounts merely to an illusion, one indeed of an even deeper essence than the ‘dialectical illusion’ exposed by Kant in the domain of the possible objectification of beings as a whole. In relation to the grounding of the essence of the truth of beyng, ‘logic’ itself is an illusion, but the most necessary illusion the history of beyng has known up to now. ‘Logic’ itself, which attains its highest form in Hegel’s metaphysics, can be grasped in its essence only out of the other beginning of the thinking of beyng” (emphasis in original). ↩︎
107. Heidegger, Hegel [GA 68], p. 47; idem, Hegel, p. 38 (emphasis in original). ↩︎
108. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 306; idem, Pathmarks, p. 233. ↩︎
109. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 312; idem, Pathmarks, p. 238. ↩︎
110. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 312, note a; idem, Pathmarks, p. 238, note a. ↩︎
111. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, translated, with additional notes, by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 6. The Heideggerian underpinning of Derrida’s remark is buttressed by his comment that the word “is” in the statement, “différance is,” should be crossed out with an X; indeed, as he adds parenthetically, he is even inclined to cross out the “is” that is crossed out. The typographical gesture deployed by Heidegger is named sous rature in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 60, and see “Translator’s Preface,” pp. xvii-xviii. ↩︎
112. Derrida, Margins, p. 20. ↩︎
113. The matter is explored lucidly by Eric D. Perl, “Signifying Nothing: Being as Sign in Neoplatonism and Derrida,” in Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought, Part Two, edited by R. Baine Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 125-151. ↩︎
114. Reiner Schürmann, “Heidegger and Meister Eckhart on Releasement,” Research in Phenomenology 3 (1973): 96.  Although most scholars legitimately trace Heidegger’s idea of Gelassenheit to Eckhart, it is important to recall the hypothesis that this concept may also reflect a Taoist influence offered by Joan Stambaugh, “Heidegger, Taoism, and the Question of Metaphysics,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, pp. 79-91. See also Jay Goulding, “Heidegger’s Daoist Phenomenology,” in Daoist Resonances in Heidegger: Exploring a Forgotten Debt, edited by David Chai (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), pp. 47-101, esp. 62-63, 66-67, 89 n. 112.   ↩︎
115. Heidegger, Beiträge, § 72, pp. 140-141; idem, Contributions, p. 110. ↩︎
116. Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, p. 68. On the positioning of Eckhart’s theosophy in the conceptual space between theism and atheism, which is also identified as the standpoint of the Buddhist śūnyatā, see ibid., p. 99.  ↩︎
117. Heidegger, Erläuterungen, p. 149; idem, Elucidations, p. 170.  ↩︎
118. Heidegger, Nietzsche, II, pp. 50-51; idem, Nietzsche, vol. 4, pp. 18-19. ↩︎
119. Heidegger, Beiträge, § 129,  p. 246; idem, Contributions, pp. 193-194. The reader should be alerted to the fact that I have here corrected my previous interpretation of this passage in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 98, where I failed to note the crucial difference that Heidegger was making between Nichtige and Nichthaftigkeit; the former, which is characteristic of the scientific methodology, is erroneously applied to Seyn when it is evaluated from the vantage point of Seiende. Regarding this matter, see Ronny Miron, Hedwig Conrad-Martius: The Phenomenological Gateway to Reality, second edition (Cham: Springer, 2023), pp. 219-221. ↩︎
120. Heidegger, Beiträge, § 131,  p. 249; idem, Contributions, p. 196. On the Heidegger’s interpretation of nihilism as the manifestation of nothingness, understood as the negative mode by which beyng reveals itself in the beings from which it withdraws, see Martin Stephan Becker, “Nihil ‘overcomes’ Nihilism: A Study of ‘Nothing’ in Heidegger’s Being and Time and What is Metaphysics?,” MA thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2013. For an abbreviated version of this thesis, see Martin Stephan Becker Lorca, “The Counterintuitive Logic of the Nothing and the Gift of Nihilism: A Reading of Heidegger,” Tópicos, Revista de Filosofia 70 (2024): 221-249.  ↩︎
121. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, p. 104; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 83. ↩︎
122. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 360; idem, Pathmarks, p. 273. ↩︎
123. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 363; idem, Pathmarks, p. 275. ↩︎
124. Heidegger, Beiträge, § 43, pp. 87-88; idem, Contributions, pp. 69-70. Compare Heidegger, Beiträge, § 162, pp. 284-285; idem, Contributions, pp. 223-224. Commenting on his notion of being-toward-death in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger criticized as “pathetic and cheap” those who explained it as a crude worldview. The erroneous interpretation, in part, is explained by the fact that Heidegger’s speaking about the anxiety of there being nothing ultimately led to the “facile conclusion” that “being-toward-death, i.e., being-toward-nothingness” is “the essence of Dasein! And yet it is not supposed to be nihilism. But the issue is surely not to dissolve being human [Menschsein] in death and to declare being human an utter nullity. On the contrary, the task is to draw death into Da-sein so that Da-sein might be mastered in its abyssal breadth and thus the ground of the possibility of the truth of beyng might be fully measured.” See Heidegger Beiträge, § 117, p. 230; idem, Contributions, p. 181. In that context, Heidegger affirmed that in the grounding domain of the truth of beyng, which is apportioned uniquely to Dasein, “the uniqueness of death corresponds to the unusualness of beyng. … Only the human being ‘has’ the distinction of standing in front of death, because the human being is steadfastly in beyng: death the highest testimony to beyng.” To assert that death is the highest testimony to beyng is obviously related to Heidegger’s insistence on the inseparability of Seyn and Nichts. See also Heidegger, Beiträge, § 160, p. 282; idem, Contributions, p. 222: “being-toward-death conceals the essential belonging of the ‘not’ to being as such [die wesenhafte Zugehörigkeit des Nicht zum Sein als solchem], which here, in the Da-sein that is distinctive as grounding the truth of being, shows itself only in a unique sharpness” (emphasis in original). ↩︎
125. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, pp. 407-408; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 317. ↩︎
126. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, p. 443; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 348. See the passage from the Beiträge cited above in n. 106.  ↩︎
127. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, p. 443; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 349. Heidegger is here recapitulating the conclusion he drew from the premise that the nothing is the origin of negation, and not vice-versa, in Was ist Metaphysik? See Wegmarken, p. 117: “Wenn so die Macht des Verstandes im Felde der Fragen nach dem Nichts und dem Sein gebrochen wird, dann entscheidet sich damit auch das Schicksal der Herrschaft der ‘Logik’  innerhalb der Philosophie. Die Idee der ‘Logik’ selbst löst sich auf im Wirbel eines ursprünglicheren Fragens.” English translation in Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 92: “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 originary questioning.” ↩︎
128. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 108. For an alternate English translation, see Heidegger, Pathmarks, p. 86. Compare the slightly different formulation in Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics? Original Version,” Philosophy Today 62 (2018): 737, “Das Nichts ist ursprünglicher als die Verneinung und die Negation,” and the English rendering, “the Nothing is more primordial than denial and negation.” ↩︎
129. Heidegger, Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen, p. 443; idem, On My Own Publications, p. 349. ↩︎
130. Heidegger, Holzwege, p. 337; idem, Off the Beaten Track, p. 254. ↩︎
131. Heidegger, Grundprobleme, pp. 127-128; idem, Basic Problems, p. 90. ↩︎
132. Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, pp. 40-41; idem, Identity and Difference, p. 50. ↩︎
133. Heidegger, Nietzsche, II, pp. 205-206; idem, Nietzsche, vol. 4, pp. 151-152. ↩︎
134. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, p. 178; idem, Metaphysics and Nihilism, p. 146. ↩︎
135. Heidegger, Nietzsche, II, p. 370; idem, Nietzsche, vol. 4, p. 227. ↩︎
136. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Auf dem Rückgang zum Anfang,” Neuere Philosophie 1 (1986): 406, translated in Ian Alexander Moore, Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019), pp. 9-10. ↩︎
137. Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze [GA 7] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000) pp. 185–186; idem, Poetry, Language, Thought, translations and introduction by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 184.  ↩︎
138. Jacques Derrida, “On Reading Heidegger: An Outline of Remarks to the Essex Colloquium,” Research in Phenomenology 17 (1987):173 (emphasis in original).  ↩︎
139. See John W. M. Krummel, “Anontology and the Issue of Being and Nothing in Kitarō Nishida,” in Nothingness in Asian Philosophy, edited by JeeLoo Liu and Douglas L. Berger (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 263-283; idem, Nishida Kitarō’s Chiasmatic Chorology: Place of Dialectic, Dialectic of Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), pp. 71, 74, 94, 110, 200, 206-207, 247 n. 114, 261 n. 20; idem, “Nishitani Keiji: Nihilism, Buddhism, Anontology,” in The Dao Companion to Japanese Buddhist Philosophy, edited by Gereon Kopf (Dordrecht: Springer, 2019), pp. 649-679. See also Oda Kazuaki, “Why Did Kuki Shūzō Say That ‘Absolute Nothingness Is None Other Than Absolute Being’?” in The Dialectics of Absolute Nothingness: The Legacies of German Philosophy in the Kyoto School, edited by Gregory S. Moss and Takeshi Morisato (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2025), pp. 205-225. On Heidegger and the Kyoto school, see Elmar Weinmayr, “Denken im Übergang – Kitarô Nishida und Martin Heidegger,” in Japan und Heidegger, pp. 39-61; Bernard Stevens, “Histoire de l’être et nihilism dans la perspective de l’école de Kyôto,” Heidegger Studies 12 (1996): 57-82; idem, Heidegger et l’École de Kyôto: Soleil levant sur forêt noire (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2020); idem, Kyoto School, pp. 61, 79, 82-84, 90-94, 104, 133-134; James W. Heisig, Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School (Honolulu: Hawai‘i Press, 2001), pp. 108-110, 125, 135, 168, 175-176, 231. Numerous scholars have  discussed the affinities between Heidegger’s idea of nothingness and the Buddhist concept of emptiness, and the presumed sameness of being and nonbeing that we may elicit from these two paths of thinking. See Paola-Ludovika Coriando, “Substance and Emptiness: Preparatory Steps Toward a Translational Dialogue Between Western and Buddhist Philosophy,” in Heidegger, Translation, and the Task of Thinking, pp. 135-143; Nico Jenkins, Echoes of No Thing: Thinking Between Heidegger and Dōgen (Goleta: Punctumbooks, 2018), pp. 147-173; Ma, Heidegger, pp. 178-182; Graham Priest, “Nothingness and the Ground of Reality: Heidegger and Nishida,” in Non-Being: New Essays on the Metaphysics of Non-Existence, edited by Sara Bernstein and Tyron Goldschmidt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 17-33.  ↩︎
140. Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, translated by David Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).  ↩︎
141. Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law, edited by Santiago Zabala, translated by William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. xxv-xxvi; idem, “Nihilism as Emancipation,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5 (2009): 20-23. ↩︎
142. Nietzsche, Writings, p. 14. Compare idem, Will to Power, § 540, p. 291. ↩︎
143. Thomas J. J. Altizer, “Apocalypticism in Modern Thinking,” in D. G. Leahy and the Thinking Now Occurring, edited by Lissa McCullough and Elliot R. Wolfson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021), p. 123. ↩︎
144. Ibid., p. 125. ↩︎
145. See the fuller analysis in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Apotheosis of the Nothing in Altizer’s Kenotic Atheology,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 19 (2019-2020): 52-84. ↩︎
146. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B, Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 381.  ↩︎
147. Wolfson, Nocturnal Seeing, p. 101. ↩︎
148. Susan Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950-1951, edited by Christina Pareigis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011), pp. 47-48. ↩︎
149. Ibid., p. 48. ↩︎
150. Pertinent to this thematic connection is the study by Jeff Malpas, “Nihilism, Homelessness, and Place,” Phainomena 33 (2024): 185-208. See idem, “Nihilism and the Thinking of Place,” in The Movement of Nihilism, pp. 110-127. ↩︎
151. Compare the assessment of Susan Taubes’s writings offered by Sigrid Weigel, “Zur Edition der Schriften und zum Nachlass von Susan Taubes,” in Taubes, Die Korrespondenz mit Jacob Taubes 1950-1951, p. 8: “Neben der Dissertation waren das Beiträge zu einer ‘negativen Theologie’, in die die Erfahrungen der Moderne ebenso eingegangen sind wie die von Krieg und Holocaust: Aufsätze über Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, Simone Weil, die Gnosis und die deutsche Philosophie, im Anschluss an Nietzsche als ‘smuggled theology’ betrachtet. Leitmotiv dieser Arbeiten ist die Korrespondenz zwischen Denkfiguren des 20. Jahrhunderts, die der Erfahrung des abwesenden Gottes entspringen, und historischen gnostischen Bewegungen.” ↩︎
152. Cited from the Susan Taubes Archiv 150, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung
     Berlin, in Christina Pareigis, Susan Taubes: Eine intellektuelle Biographie (Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020), p. 303.  ↩︎
153. Taubes, Die Korrespondenz 1950-1951, p. 146. ↩︎
154. Gershom Scholem,  On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, edited by Jonathan Chipman, foreword by Joseph Dan (New York: Schocken, 1991), pp. 41-42; idem, Von der mystischen Gestalt der Gottheit: Studien zu Grundbegriften der Kabbala (Zürich: Rhein-Verlag, 1962), p. 34. ↩︎
155. Scholem, Mystical Shape, p. 55. ↩︎
156. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others, edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 269. ↩︎
157. See Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 280; Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 158 and 185 n. 179. ↩︎
158. Freeman, Ancilla, p. 33; Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 32–33, 105. For my previous discussion of Heidegger’s interpretation of this Heraclitean maxim, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), pp. 51-52, and references to other scholars cited on pp. 316-317 n. 129; idem, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 5 and 115. To the sources mentioned in these studies, see now the lengthy analysis of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Heraclitean dictum as the textual basis for his understanding of truth as the concomitant concealment and unconcealment of the mystery in Derrida, Répondre, pp. 127-140. ↩︎
159. Martin Heidegger, Heraklit. 1. Der Anfang des Abendländischen Denkens. 2. Logik. Heraklits Lehre vom Logos [GA 55] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979), p. 136; idem, Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos, translated by Julia Goesser Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), p. 103. ↩︎
160. Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund [GA 10] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997), p. 104; idem, The Principle of Reason, translated by Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 70. ↩︎
161. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken 1956), pp. 5-6. See ibid., p. 10.  ↩︎
162. Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken,  1965), pp. 10-11. ↩︎
163. See Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum that Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 56-58. ↩︎
164. George Northoff, Minding the Brain: A Guide to Philosophy and Neuroscience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014),  p. 85. ↩︎
165. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), p. 10. ↩︎
166. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 114; idem, Pathmarks, p. 90.  ↩︎
167. See Rudolf Carnap, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache,” Erkenntnis 2 (1931): 219-241, esp. 229-233; idem, “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” translated by Arthur Pap, in Logical Positivism, edited by Alfred J. Ayer (New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 60-81, esp. 69-73. Heidegger responded to this criticism in the 1943 Postscript to Was ist Metaphysik? See Heidegger, Wegmarken, pp. 308-311; idem, Pathmarks, 235-237. Concerning this debate, see Michael Friedman, “Overcoming Metaphysics: Carnap and Heidegger,” in Origins of Logical Empiricism, edited by Ronald N. Giere and Alan W. Richardson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 45-79;  idem, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), pp. x, 11-23; Jürgen Ludwig Scherb, “Nichtet das Nichts wirklich nicht? Analyse und Explikation – oder: eine deutsche Vorkriegsdebatte europäisch belichtet,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 115 (2008): 77-98.  ↩︎
168. See Wegmarken, p. 114 note b: “als Nichten west, währt, gewährt das Nichts.” And the English translation in Pathmarks, p. 90 note c: “Prevails essentially, endures as nihilation, grants the nothing.” ↩︎
169. See the passages cited above at nn. 109-110. ↩︎
170. Heidegger, Über den Anfang, p. 9; idem, On Inception, p. 3. ↩︎
171. Heidegger, Über den Anfang, p. 11; idem, On Inception, p. 5. ↩︎
172. Heidegger, Über den Anfang, p. 10; idem, On Inception, p. 4. Compare Heidegger, Das Ereignis, p. 68: “Das verborgene erstanfängliche Sprach-losigkeit ereignet sich in der Erfahrung dessen, daß das Seyn ist. Das ereig-nishafte Daß lichtet sich zuerst als ἀλήθεια. Im reinen ‘Daß’ ist das anfängliche Ereignis. Dieses erfahren, heißt ohne Stütze und Anhalt am Seienden, das Sein, daß es sich lichtet, daß Lichtung west, in seiner abgründenden Abgeschiedenheit ertragen und ohne ein Sagen sein” (emphasis in original). English translation in Heidegger, The Event, p. 55: “The concealed ineffability of the first beginning eventuates in the experience of the fact that beyng is. The event-related ‘fact that’ is illuminated first as ἀλήθεια. In the pure ‘fact that’ is the inceptual event. To experience this means to endure, without support or foothold in beings, the fact that being is illuminated in its abyssal remoteness, that a clearing essentially occurs; and it means to be without an utterance” (emphasis in original). Significantly, in the continuation, Heidegger wrote about the pain (Schmerz) of the inceptual separateness (anfänglichen Geschiedenheit), which is both the horror of the abyss (der Schrecken des Abgrundes) and the bliss of the departure (die Wonne des Abschieds); indeed, the inceptual pain (anfanghafte Schmerz) is said to be the original unity (ursprüngliche Einheit) of horror and bliss but not a compound (Zusammensetzung) of both. It is not the place to elaborate but I briefly note that Heidegger’s account displays affinity with the kabbalistic idea of the inceptual act of divine suffering that results in the splintering of the original unity of the light into the dyad of light and vessel to facilitate the coming into being of the other from that which is not other. While this matter deserves a separate study, the interested reader should consult my analysis of “Ṣimṣum, Lichtung, and Bestowing Refusal” in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 137-196. Regarding the kabbalistic motif, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading: Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Mythology,” in Suffering Religion, edited by Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 101-162. ↩︎
173. Heidegger, Wegmarken, pp. 305-306; idem, Pathmarks, p. 233. I have slightly modified the translation. Another part of this passage is cited above at n. 108.  ↩︎
174. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 305; idem, Pathmarks, p. 233. ↩︎
175. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 306; idem, Pathmarks, p. 233. ↩︎
176. Bob Dylan, Writings and Drawings (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), p. 184. ↩︎
177. On the primacy of metaphor as the movement of thought and the determination of meaning in Heidegger, see Johan Siebers, : ‘Myth means: the saying word’ / ‘The Lord said that he would dwell in thick darkness,’” in The Movement of Nihilism, pp. 144-154 ↩︎
178. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 4-5, 7, 159, 170-171, 304, 306. ↩︎
179. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen, p. 119; idem, Hölderlin’s Hymns, p. 108. For previous citation of this text, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 306.  ↩︎
180. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 6-7, 347-348, and the analysis in Derrida, Répondre, pp. 424-431. ↩︎
181. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 312; idem, Pathmarks, p. 239; idem, Unterwegs, pp. 85, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111, 156, 255; idem, On the Way, pp. 5, 21, 22, 24, 26, 63, 135. See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 6, 310-311.  ↩︎
182. Compare Heidegger, Heraklit, p. 123: “Das Wesen des Menschen ist aus den Fugen. Nur von den Deutschen kann, gesetzt, daß sie ‘das Deutsche’ finden und wahren, die weltgeschichtliche Besinnung kommen. Das ist nicht Anmaßung, wohl aber ist es das Wissen von der Notwendigkeit des Austrages einer anfänglichen Not. Wir müssen es lernen, vom flüchtigsten Flitter des flüchtigen Tages, vom Ordinären, das ‘ist’, bis in diese Not zu denken und im Ganzen ein einziges Geschick erfahren.” English translation in idem, Heraclitus, p. 92: “The essence of the human being is out of joint. A mindful consideration that is sufficiently world-historical can only come from the Germans, provided that they find and safeguard ‘the Germanic.’ This is not arrogance, but rather the knowledge of the necessity of bearing out an inceptual poverty. We must learn to let our thinking span from the most ephemeral flickering of the fleeting day—the pedestrian, the ‘is’—all the way into this poverty so that it may experience a single fate in its entirety.” Notwithstanding Heidegger’s insistence that his privileging of German should not be judged as arrogant, the ethnocentrism underlying his embrace of the triangulation of language, people, and land cannot be dismissed. For an extensive analysis of this dimension of his thinking in juxtaposition to a similar—albeit not identical—triangulation in kabbalistic literature, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 335-381. On the specific affinity between Greek and German, see the sources cited and discussed in Wolfson, Duplicity, pp. 61-64; and compare the discussion of the poetic dwelling as the homeland in James F. Ward, Heidegger’s Political Thinking (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), pp. 205-259. ↩︎
183. Heidegger, Unterwegs, p. 140; idem, On the Way, p. 50 (emphasis in original). See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 4. ↩︎
184. Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, 1910-1976 [GA 16] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), p. 528; idem, Discourse on Thinking, translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, with an introduction by John M. Anderson (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 55. ↩︎
185. Martin Heidegger, Zollikoner Seminare [GA 89] (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2018), p. 656. For a different rendering, see idem, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols—Conversations— Letters, edited by Medard Boss, translated and with notes and afterwords by Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), p. 183: “What manifests itself as the inaccessible is the mystery [Geheimnis].” As Heidegger further explained, “the clearing of concealment [Lichtung des Sich-Verbergens] means that the inaccessible shows and manifests itself as such—as the inaccessible” (emphasis in original). Precisely because the concealment is concealed, it is possible for one to keep returning to it. The paradox of the inaccessible revealing itself as inaccessible parallels the hermeneutic of secrecy that I have educed from kabbalistic sources. See, by contrast, Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 232: “It is bizarre to assume that one of the qualities of the Sefirot qua manifestations is their ‘hiddenness.’” Not only is it not bizarre to assume that the sefirotic gradations are manifest in their hiddenness, but this is a rudimentary hermeneutical tenet of the implicit esotericism of kabbalistic theosophy.  ↩︎
186. Kahn, Art and Thought, pp. 44-45, and compare the lengthy explication on pp. 126-130. For an alternate translation, see Freeman, Ancilla, p. 27: “You could not in your going find the ends of the soul, though you travelled the whole way: so deep is its Law (Logos).” ↩︎
187. Heidegger, Heraklit, p. 283. ↩︎
188. Ibid., p. 309. ↩︎
189. Heidegger, Heraclitus, p. 214. ↩︎
190. Ibid., p. 232.  ↩︎
191. Heidegger, Heraklit, p. 283; idem, Heraclitus, p. 214.  ↩︎
192. Heidegger, Heraklit, p. 314; idem, Heraclitus, p. 235. The relation of legein and noein, as it was expressed in the saying of Parmenides, reported by Simplicius, χρὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεῖν τ’ ἐὸν ἔμμεναι, “It is right to say and to think that what-is is, for being is [or: it is for being]” (The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy, pp. 214-215; compare Freeman, Ancilla, p. 43: “One should both say and think that Being is”) is discussed at length in Was Heißt Denken?, pp. 179-182, 185-194, 199-217; idem, What Is Called Thinking?, pp. 175-178, 182-191, 196-215. The Parmenidean aphorism is also analyzed in Heidegger, Anfang der Abendländischen Philosophie, pp. 120-124; idem, Beginning of Western Philosophy, pp. 92-95. And see especially Heidegger, Anfang der Abendländischen Philosophie, pp. 132-133: “λέγειν ist lesen, sammeln, auf Eines zusammenbringen und so vor sich hinstellen und einen Stand geben. Für das λέγειν ist nicht in erster Linie wesentlich das Wort als sprachliche Verlautbarung, sondern die Art der inneren Haltung beim Wortgebrauch … der λόγος und das λέγειν zu der Haltung des ersten Weges, auf dem das eigentliche Verstehen νοεῖν des Seins gewonnen wird. Und das ist der Grund, weshalb wir das λέγειν bereits angetroffen haben (D 6, 1): χρὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεῖν τ᾽ἐὸν ἔμμεναι. Das Vernehmen des Seins ist hinstellend durchsprechendes und so zugreifendes begreifendes Seinsverständnis auf dem Wege zum Seinsbegriff” (emphasis in original). English translation in idem, Beginning of Western Philosophy, p. 102: “λέγειν is gleaning, gathering, bringing together into unity and thus setting down before oneself and giving a fixed position. What is primarily essential for λέγειν is not the word as linguistic utterance but, instead, the type of inner comportment in the use of words …. λόγος and λέγειν belong to the comportment of the first way, on which the proper understanding, νοεῖν, of Being is acquired. And that is the reason we have already encountered λέγειν (D 6, 1): χρὴ τὸ λέγειν τε νοεῖν τ᾽ἐὸν ἔμμεναι. The apprehension of Being is an understanding of Being that thoroughly discusses in the manner of setting down and so seizes and comprehends Being on the way to conceptualizing Being” (emphasis in original). Heidegger does not deny that the connotation of legein is to state, to report, or to tell, but he attempts to uncover a more originary etymology. See Heidegger, Was Heißt Denken?, p. 201: “Aber λέγειν bedeutet unbestreitbar: sagen, berichten, erzählen. Gewiß. Doch wir Fragen zurück: was heißt denn in aller Welt ‘sagen’? … Die Bedeutung von λέγειν ist nicht notwendig auf die Sprache und ihre Geschehnisse bezogen. Das Zeitwort λέγειν ist das selbe Wort wie das lateinische legere und unser deutsches ‘legen’. Wenn jemand einen Antrag vorlegt, dann meinen wir damit nicht, daß er das Papier auf den Tisch befördert, sondern daß er den Antrag bespricht. Wenn jemand einen Vorgang erzählt, dann ist dies ein Darlegen. Wenn wir für uns eine Sache bedenken, überlegen wir sie. Vorlegen, darlegen, überlegen, alles hier und so genannte Legen ist jenes griechische λέγειν.” English translation in idem, What Is Called Thinking?, p. 198: “However, λέγειν undeniably means to state, to report, to tell. Of course. But we come back with the question: what in the world does ‘stating’ mean? … The meaning of λέγειν does not necessarily refer to language and what happens in language. The verb λέγειν is the same word as the Latin legere and our own word lay. When someone lays before us a request, we do not mean that he produces papers on the desk before us, but that he speaks of the request. When someone tells of an event, he lays it out for us. When we exert ourselves, we lay to. To lay before, lay out, lay to—all this laying is the Greek λέγειν.” For Heidegger, the Greek understanding of stating derives from this more primal meaning of legein as laying out or laying before, and thus the juxtaposition of legein and noein—when translated correctly—informs us that thinking consists fundamentally of the gestures of “letting-lie-before us” (Vorliegenlassen) and “taking-to-heart” (In-die-Acht-nehmen). See Heidegger, Was Heißt Denken?, p. 211; idem, What Is Called Thinking?, p. 208. Also pertinent here is another fragment of Parmenides, τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι, rendered in Freeman, Ancilla, p. 42, “For it is the same thing to think and to be.” On the interpretation of this dictum as articulating the belonging together (Zusammengehörigkeit) of thinking and being in the sameness of their difference, see Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, pp. 14-17; idem, Identity and Difference, pp. 27-30; and compare my previous discussion in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 12-13. The statement is alluded to as die ontologische These des Parmenides in Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993), §4, p. 14; idem, Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised and with a forward by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010),  pp. 12-13. The ontological thesis is connected to the dictum of Aristotle in De Anima, III.8, 431^b21, ἡ ψυχὴ τὰ ὄντα πώς ἐστιν πάντα, “the soul is in a way all existing things.” See The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 686. The transcription in Sein und Zeit, as Heidegger later acknowledged, inadvertently left out the word πάντα. See the reference cited in Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and The Confrontation with Heidegger (1927-1931), edited and translated by Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997), p. 285 n. 27. From the Aristotelian comment, and the interpretation thereof offered by Aquinas, Heidegger elicited support for his claim concerning the ontic-ontological priority of Dasein: “The soul (of the human being) is in a certain way a being [das Seiende]. The ‘soul’ which constitutes the being of human being discovers in its ways to be—αἴσθησις and νόησις—all beings with regard to their thatness and whatness [Daß- und Soseins], that is to say, always also in their being [Sein]. Thomas Aquinas discussed this statement—which refers back to Parmenides’ ontological thesis—in a manner characteristic of him. Thomas is engaged in the task of deriving the ‘transcendentals,’ the characteristics of being that lie beyond every possible generic determination of a being in its material content, every modus specialis entis, and that are necessary attributes of every something, whatever it might be. For him the verum too is to be demonstrated as being such a transcendens.” Consider the marginal note on this passage written by Husserl, Psychological, p. 285, “So there is a bit of Thomism embedded in Heidegger.” It lies beyond the scope of this note to analyze Heidegger’s remark and Husserl’s gloss in more detail. See also Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §36, p. 171; idem, Being and Time, p. 165. In that context, Heidegger inferred from the Parmenidean dictum, “Being is what shows itself in pure, intuitive perception” (Sein ist, was im reinen anschauenden Vernehmen sich zeigt). Elsewhere, Heidegger referred to this Parmenidean saying as the “guiding principle [Leitsatz] of Western Philosophy.” See Heidegger, Einführung, p. 154 idem, Introduction, p. 154. ↩︎
193. Heidegger, Heraklit, p. 301; idem, Heraclitus, p. 227. ↩︎
194. Heidegger, Heraklit, p. 309; idem, Heraclitus, pp. 232-233. ↩︎
195. Kahn, Art and Thought, pp. 44-45. ↩︎
196. Heidegger, Heraklit, p. 308. ↩︎
197. Heidegger, Heraclitus, p. 232. ↩︎
198. Heidegger, Heraklit, p. 309; idem, Heraclitus, p. 233. ↩︎
199. Heidegger, Heraklit, p. 376 (emphasis in original).  ↩︎
200. Heidegger, Heraclitus, p. 280 (emphasis in original). ↩︎
201. Heidegger, Heraklit, p. 376; idem, Heraclitus, p. 280. Compare the account of the metaphysical understanding of being, exemplified by Hegel, in Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, p. 48: “Das Sein manifestiert sich als der Gedanke. Dies sagt: Das Sein des Seienden entbirgt sich als der sich selbst ergründende und begründende Grund. Der Grund, die Ratio sind nach ihrer Wesensherkunft: der Λόγος im Sinne des versammelnden Vorliegenlassens: das Ἓν Πάντα.” English translation in Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 57: “Being manifests itself as thought. This means: the Being of beings reveals itself as the ground that gives itself ground and accounts for itself. The ground, the ratio by their essential origin are the Λόγος, in the sense of the gathering of beings and letting them be. They are the Ἓν Πάντα.” ↩︎
202. The depiction of the logos as the uncovering gathering is the key to understanding the following passage in Heidegger, Parmenides [GA 54], p. 218: “Aber die Griechen sprechen auch vom Gespräch ‘der Seele’ mit sich selbst (λόγος), und das Wesen des Menschen bestehe im λόγον ἔχειν. Wenn somit das Wesen der ‘Seele’ durch den λόγος bestimmt ist, und zwar gleichwesentlich wie durch das blikkende Vernehmen, wenn aber dieses im Lichten der ἀλήθεια west, dann muß auch das λέγειν der Menschenseele durch den λόγος gegründet sein, der in seinem Wesen nichts anderes ist als die ἀλήθεια.” English version in Heidegger, Parmenides, pp. 146-147: “The Greeks also speak of a conversation of ‘the soul’ with itself (λόγος), and the essence of man would consist in the λόγον ἔχειν. If, consequently, the essence of the ‘soul’ is determined by λόγος, and indeed in a way that is no less essential than the determination by the perceptual look, and if the latter occurs in the lighting of ἀλήθεια, then the λέγειν of the human soul must also be founded by the λόγος which in its essence is nothing else than ἀλήθεια.”  ↩︎
203. Heidegger, Heraklit, p. 396; idem, Heraclitus, p. 293. ↩︎
204. Heidegger, Heraklit, p. 261; idem, Heraclitus, p. 199. ↩︎
205. Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, p. 14; idem, Identity and Difference, p. 28. ↩︎
206. See Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, p. 35: “Allein das Selbe ist nicht das Gleiche. Im Gleichen verschwindet die Verschiedenheit. Im Selben erscheint die Verschiedenheit. Sie erscheint um so bedrängender, je entschiedener ein Denken von derselben Sache auf dieselbe Weise angegangen wird.” English translation in idem, Identity and Difference, p. 45: “But the same is not the merely identical. In the merely identical, the difference disappears. In the same the difference appears, and appears all the more pressingly, the more resolutely thinking is concerned with the same matter in the same way.” See above, nn. 19 and 105. ↩︎
207. Heidegger, Satz, p. 133; idem, Principle,  pp. 89-90. ↩︎
208. Heidegger, Heraklit, pp. 261-262; idem, Heraclitus, p. 200. ↩︎
209. It seems to me that what Heidegger articulated can be compared beneficially to the following comment in Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, p. 156: “But what about thought, when being – unity, the identity of being – has withdrawn without giving way to nothingness, that too easy refuge? What about thought when the Same is no longer the ultimate meaning of the Other, and Unity no longer that in relation to which the multiple is said? When plurality is said, without referring back to the One? Then, perhaps then, one might have a sense of the exigency of fragmentary speech, not as a paradox but as a decision: speech that, far from being unique, is not predicated of the one and does not say the one in its plurality. Language: affirmation itself, that which no longer affirms by reason of, nor with a view to Unity. An affirmation of difference, but nonetheless never differing. Plural speech.” The crucial difference is that, for Heidegger, the same is the ultimate meaning of the other insofar as sameness preserves the sense of dissimilarity, and multiplicity is gauged always in relation to the unity of the one insofar as the oneness sustains the sense of plurality. Consequently, we submit that Heidegger would assent to the assertion that language can be demarcated intrinsically as an affirmation of difference that is never differing to the degree that difference is dependent on what is the same.   ↩︎
210. Heidegger, Heraklit, p. 396; idem, Heraclitus, p. 293. ↩︎
211. Heidegger, Wegmarken, p. 348; idem, Pathmarks, p. 265. ↩︎
212. Richard Capobianco, In Heidegger’s Vineyard: Reflections and Mystical Vignettes (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2024), pp. 3-4. ↩︎
213. Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, pp. 57-58; idem, Identity and Difference, p. 66. ↩︎
214. Heidegger, Beiträge, § 123, p. 240; idem, Contributions, p. 189. ↩︎
215. For a more detailed analysis of ṣimṣum, Lichtung, and the bestowing refusal, see Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, pp. 137-196. It is of interest to compare my attempt to juxtapose the kabbalistic notion of the primal contraction and the Heideggerian idea of the originary clearing to the observation of Vioulac, Apocalypse, pp. 36-37: “Being—that is: the nothing, emptiness, the clearing, truth—is difference, fissure, fault, gaping. It is the spacing established within the primordial density by this fracture that allows beings to appear: the original event is the ‘fissuring’ (Zerklüftung) that opens the ‘clefts of Beyng’ (Klüfte des Seyns) within ‘the totality of beings that remain enveloped within themselves.’” Vioulac is citing from Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen, pp. 135 and 173; idem, Hölderlin’s Hymns, pp. 120 and 158. ↩︎
216. See my discussion of Scholem’s view in Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah, p. 157. ↩︎
217. Martin Heidegger, Seminare [GA 15] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), p. 399; idem, Four Seminars, translated by Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 80. On the use of the Heideggerian notion of the inapparent to impose a limit on the Husserlian phenomenology of the given, see Jodie McNeilly-Renaudie, “God Without God: A Divine Limit to ‘The Phenomenon,’” Phainomenon 26 (2017): 195-215, esp. 209-212. See also the relevant comments in Derrida, Répondre, pp. 225-229.  ↩︎
218. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, § 7, p. 29; idem, Being and Time, p. 28 (emphasis in original). ↩︎
219. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, § 7, p. 30; idem, Being and Time, pp. 28-29. ↩︎
220. Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie: Fünf Vorlesungen, edited and introduced by Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950), p. 11; idem, The Idea of Phenomenology, translated by Willia P. Alston and George Nakhnikian, introduction by George Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 9. The phenomenological domain is identified as “the sphere of what is truly given” in Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusststein, Erinnerung, Zur Phänomenologie der Anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898-1925), edited by  Eduard Marbach (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), p. 3; idem, Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925), translated by John B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), p. 3. For a reading of Husserl that emphasizes the interplay between presence and absence, givenness and withholding, see the discussion and citation of sources in Wolfson, Giving, pp. 94-95, 236 nn. 34-35. ↩︎
221. Husserl, Die Idee, p. 35; idem, The Idea, p. 28. This givenness, as Husserl went on to explain, “which rules out any meaningful doubt, consists of a simply immediate ‘seeing’ and apprehending of the intended object itself as it is, and it constitutes the precise concept of evidence (Evidenz) understood as immediate evidence.” ↩︎
222. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, § 7, p. 36; idem, Being and Time, p. 34. ↩︎
223. Heidegger, Beiträge, § 72, p. 139; idem, Contributions, p. 109. ↩︎
224. Heidegger, Wegmarken, pp. 387-388; idem, Pathmarks, p. 293 (emphasis in original). ↩︎
225.  Heidegger, Nietzsche, II, p. 369; idem, Nietzsche, vol. 4, p. 226. ↩︎
226. Heidegger, Beiträge, § 87,  p. 175; idem, Contributions, p. 138. ↩︎
227. Heidegger, Satz, p. 135; idem, Principle, p. 91. ↩︎
228. Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding: Zu Kants Lehre von den Transzendentalen Grundsätzen [GA 41] (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1984), pp. 153–154; idem, What Is a Thing?, translated by W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), pp. 150–151.  ↩︎
229. Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 128-129. ↩︎
230. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 55 (emphasis in original).  ↩︎