The attempt to appropriate or enter the experience underlying Heidegger's journey towards Being leads to the following conclusion. We may agree with Heidegger's motivation perception of the concealed presentation of Being within beings. Equally plausible is his substitution of Being-in-the-world for Husserlian intentionality. But we should not be swayed by his longing to avert the human gaze from beings to Being. Heidegger himself gives a perfectly explicit account of why this is impossible:

What happens in the history of Being? We cannot ask the question in this way, because then there would be a [process of] happening and that which happens. But happening itself is the only event [Geschehnis]. Being alone is. What happens? Nothing happens, if we are persuing that which happens in happening. Nothing happens, event e-vents [Das Ereignis er-eignet].

P. 485

I stated previously that Heidegger never discusses nobility. I can underline this point by citing from the same passage, a few lines later, the following assertion:

The eventing origin is honor [or "dignity":die Würde] as the truth itself as that which towers in its absence. Honor is the noble [das Edle] that e-vents, without requiring effects [ohne des Wirkens zu bedürfen].

It follows that the effects or events of the e-venting of Being are themselves dishonorable or ignoble at worst and void of merit at best. Despite Heidegger's continuous assertion--or implication when he is not asserting--that the quest for Being will illuminate our experience of beings, I believe that the opposite is the case. The more we meditate on Being, the less we see of beings.

On the other hand, the more carefully we inspect beings, the more clarity we achieve about Being. This clarity may be analytical and it may be mythical. But it is clarity about Being, and not some inferior construct called "the Being of the existent" or the being of beings. This is because there is no difference between the Being of beings (as distinguished from being qua being) and Being. On Heidegger's own testimony, the event of Being is an e-venting in which nothing happens. Even on Heideggerian grounds, the event (or the e-vent) is the worlding of a world; and Being is the process by which worlds come to be, not some process in addition to this by which nothing comes to be. Metaphysics goes beyond ta phusika or onta in thinking the whole. But this thinking, as it is found in Plato, is not a science of being qua being. It is the attempt to understand the implications of our capacity to do what we believe to be best. One such implication may well be that we are required to consider being qua being. But the more important question is the place of such an investigation within the totality of human existence and therefore of my existence because "human existence" does not itself exist except as a derivative of the existence of you and me. And there is not some other world to which we aspire as metaphysicians, but only a better version of this world. we conclude, as we begin, not in the hermeneutical circle, but in the circle of the everyday, which resists all our attempts to transform it into a derivative not of the will to power, but of the decadence of the emancipated will. The last stage of European history, which is of course last only in the sense that it is our stage, is not the will to will, but the illusion of the spontaneity of the imagination. The clarification of this illusion is the next task that is posed by the question of Being.

P. 314-315

¶ 6:10 PM