1

Heidegger and the Aporia of History

Introduction.

It is striking to note that when the question of history first emerged in Heidegger‘s path of

thinking, namely in the 1915 essay, ―The Concept of Time in Historical Science,‖1 it was in

contrast with and in opposition to the motif of nature and natural sciences; as if history in its

proper being could only be accessed from such a break with nature, an ―other‖ of history that

nonetheless will continue to haunt Heidegger‘s conceptualization of history. Nature will figure as

history‘s aporia, and will be visible including and perhaps especially when Heidegger attempts to

subordinate nature to (historical) time: it is in order to overcome the aporia that Heidegger

attempts to ontologize history away from the natural, the biological, the ontical. In Heidegger‘s

attempts to think what is most proper to historical time and to reappropriate the ontological

senses of history, one can still read this original aporia and its persistent effects, through the

transformed oppositions of the mobility of life (Beweghteit) versus natural movement

(Bewegung), the break with the theoretical and the grasping of historicity as Life‘ s self-

reflexion, historicized facticity versus natural factuality, the Geschichte/Historie distinction,

authentic temporality versus inauthentic or natural time, time of the psyche versus natural time.

This original tension, if not contradiction, constitutes both the origin of the thinking of the

1
Martin Heidegger, ―The Concept of Time in the Science of History,‖ translated by Thomas
Sheehan, in Becoming Heidegger, edited by Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 207), pp.60-72. Essays from this volume will hereafter be
cited as BH, followed by page number. I wish to thank Andrew Johnson for his telling comments
on a draft of the essay.
 2

historical in Heidegger‘s work and its very aporia: History remains in a relation to nature as to a

non or pre-historical ground that both threatens it and makes it possible. I will attempt to follow

this aporia, from its first articulation in the 1915 lecture through Heidegger‘s overcoming of the

epistemological horizon of the question, and the eventual subordination of nature under historical

time in Being and Time. I will make forays in later texts from the thirties with the introduction of

the notion of earth -- that some commentators have claimed point to an archaic pre- or non-

historical ―nature‖ or ―essence‖ – and question the reversal that one notes in Heidegger‘s

thinking with respect to the relation between nature and history: far from being subjected to

historical time, nature as ―earth‖ will be said to be the ―ground‖ of history. Ultimately this raises

the question, if not of the historicity or nonhistoricity of the human, of the aporia of history itself

as an inappropriable event, as we will see this original aporia reinscribed in the seizing of history

as eventfulness, and its happening from a withdrawal. It will ultimately appear that we are no

longer facing an opposition or an aporia, but the secret origin of historical time as such, always

originating from an opaque ground, a withdrawal and a mystery, designated in the thirties by

Heidegger as earth. History would be here ―primal history,‖ emerging ―from nature as earth,

which is deeper and more mysterious than the nature discovered by science.‖2 This is why the

opposition between nature and history ultimately proves inadequate, still too representational and

epistemic: The opposition between nature and history was but the ontic characterization of the

ontological being of history as arising out of a secret ground.

2
Richard Polt, ―Being and Time,‖ in Martin Heidegger. Key Concepts (Durham, UK: Acumen,
2010), p.76.
 3

I. The Access to Historical Time: The Break with Nature.

In the formal trial lecture which he delivered in Freiburg on July 27, 1915, ―The Concept

of Time in the Science of History‖ (―Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft‖), Heidegger

leaves behind the logical questions that had occupied him in earlier works (whether in The

Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism or in his 1916 habilitation thesis, The Theory of

Categories and Signification in Duns Scotus) to focus on the motif of the historical, first grasped

in a concrete, pre-phenomenological manner. For the concept of time in historical science rests

upon a lived, phenomenological and concrete experience, which Heidegger begins to explore in

an otherwise epistemological essay. This is why it is to correct to state that even though these

reflections take place within an epistemological horizon, they nonetheless already anticipate the

ontological inquiries of the twenties regarding the being of time and history.3 In fact, in his

opening remarks, Heidegger from the outset draws the limits of an epistemological approach, as

he explains that the ―emphasis on epistemological problems is born out of a legitimate and lively

awareness of the need and value of critique, but it does not permit philosophy‘s questions about

ultimate issues and goals to achieve their intrinsic significance‖ (BH, 61). Thus it is legitimate to

note that if Heidegger does share with Dilthey the view that there is a radical difference between

the methods of the natural and human sciences, yet ―over and above the purely epistemological

3
In fact, one could claim that this early essay anticipates several key aspects of Being and Time
(where it is mentioned by Heidegger), and significantly echoed in the contrast between original
versus natural time. See John van Buren‘s clarification in his Editor‘s Introduction to
Supplements (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002), p. 5. Also, in his editor‘s Introduction to
Becoming Heidegger, Theodore Kisiel stresses appropriately that this essay represents ―the
proto-development of the distinction between the originative time of the unique self and the
derivative time of science and the clock‖. Becoming Heidegger, Editor‘s Introduction, p. xviii. I
will return to the question of original time versus natural and clock time later in this essay.
 4

problem, some ontological considerations already appear about what constitutes ‗true‘ time,

which is not physical time, and which is characterized by diversity and heterogeneity.‖4

Heidegger begins by defining the object of his inquiry, namely, the determination of the

concept of historical time: ―we shall single out and clarify a specific individual category (or basic

logical element): the concept of time.‖ More specifically, ―What we need to articulate is this

determination of the concept of ‗time in general‘ as the concept of ‗historical time‘‖ (BH, 62).

Significantly, Heidegger proposes to access the meaning of historical time in contrast with the

concept of time in natural sciences: ―The peculiar structure of the concept of time in the science

of history will no doubt stand out more clearly if we contrast it with a very different articulation

of the structure of time. To do so, we shall briefly characterize the concept of time in natural

sciences – specifically physics‘ (BH, 63). One finds there the first characterization of the time of

historical sciences, which is defined in distinction with the time of natural sciences.5 At issue is

to approach the concept of time in a way that is irreducible to a ―purely logical or chronological

apprehension‖ (Jollivet, p. 26). Historical time is not reducible to the logical, but points to life

itself in its specific eventfulness. As we indicated, this represents both the origin of a reflection

that will always seek to think the specific and proper being of historical time, and a constitutive

internal limit through which historical time is each time confronted by an aporetic situation: the

relation to and distinction with nature. At every stage of Heidegger‘s reflections on historical

4
Françoise Dastur. Heidegger and the Question of Time, trans. François Raffoul and David
Pettigrew (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1998), p.2.
5
Servanne Jollivet stresses the irreducibility of historical time from the paradigm of nature:
―Purely qualitative, this usage [from historical science] excludes the simple transposition of the
method proper to natural sciences.‖ Servanne Jollivet, Heidegger, Sens et Histoire (Paris, PUF,
2009), p. 27.
 5

time, one will encounter this aporia, necessitating the analyses to always more distinguish proper

ontological history from inadequate, ontic or inauthentic representations. In this first essay,

Heidegger thus finds access to the problematic of history through a break with nature, that is, in

the context of epistemological questions and disciplines, with natural sciences. More precisely,

Heidegger attempts to determine the specific nature of the concept of time which intervenes in

historical science, in contrast with the concept of time one finds in natural sciences. While time

in the natural sciences is constituted as a homogenous, spatialized universal flow, allowing for

measurement of motion (―the relation of motion and time has to do with measuring motion by

means of time‖, he explains, BH, 65), and therefore reduced to being ―a mere parameter,‖6

historical time is characterized by a qualitative heterogeneity, engaging a lived meaning.

In natural sciences, as Heidegger states, ―the function of time is to make measurement

possible‖ (BH, 66), and time ―is a necessary moment in the definition of motion.‖ Indeed, as

Heidegger expresses it ―concisely put‖, the ―object of physics is law-governed motion‖ (BH, 65).

In such an approach, time becomes a homogeneous flow, reduced to a ―homogeneous ordering of

points, a scale, and a parameter‖ (BH, 66). Time becomes the measure of motion. Further, time

in this context is reduced to simply function as the ―condition of possibility for mathematically

determining the object of physics (i.e., motion)‖ (BH, 66). This in fact is harmonious with the

traditional metaphysical account of time, which is always understood in terms of the

measurement of motion, within the general context of a philosophy of nature (hence Bergson‘s

critique of spatialized time). Heidegger makes the point is the Kassel lectures: ―Time, says

Aristotle, is what is counted in motion with respect to the before and after. This definition has

6
Françoise Dastur. Heidegger and the Question of Time, p. 2.
 6

remained essentially unchanged into modern times. Kant, too, determines time by starting from

an apprehension of nature‖ (BH, 270).

In contrast to this ―natural‖ time, time in history engages events, Heidegger also

specifying that the object of the science of history ―is human beings‖ (BH, 68). Indeed,

Heidegger uses the word Ereignis in the 1015 essay to name such historical event (BH, 71). He

makes the claim that time-reckoning systems in calendars always begin with a historically

significant event (he gives the examples of the founding of the city of Rome, the birth of Christ,

the Hegira), that is, with a ―historically significant event [Ereignis]‖ (BH, 72).7 The starting-

point of time-reckoning is a qualitative event. Heidegger then differentiates historical time from

the time of physics by such reference to the event: ―Consequently, the concept of time in the

science of history has none of the homogeneity characterizing the concept of time in the natural

sciences. That is also why historical time cannot be expressed mathematically by way of a series,

for there is no law determining how the time-periods succeed one another‖ (BH, 71). Heidegger

thus severs historical time from a quantitative approach, and approaches it in terms of a

qualitative eventfulness. ―Time-periods [Zeiten] in history are distinguished qualitatively‖ (BH,

71). Certainly, Heidegger concedes, the historian works with a concept of time as a certain

―ordering of points,‖ that is, he or she works with historical dates, with ―quantities‖ such as the

number 1515 for the battle of Marignan. Yet, these numbers are not treated as a quantities (that

is, as an element within the numerical series from 1 to infinity, or as a number per se), and the

7
Compare with that passage from the 1934 summer semester course: ―History [Geschichte] is an
event [Ereignis], insofar as it happens‖ [geschieht]. Logic as The Question Concerning the
Essence of Language (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), p. 74. Hereafter cited as GA 38,
followed by the page number of the translation.
 7

historian is not interested in dates as dates, but considers them only insofar as they refer to

meaningful events.8 A date thus has ―meaning and value within the science of history only as

regards its historically significant content‖ (BH, 71).

Such content is given by the event, which Heidegger also thematizes as the presence of

life in history, as when he explains that the ―qualitative factor of the historical concept of time is

nothing but the congealing – the crystallization – of an objectification of life within history‖

(BH, 71). A decisive passage, as Heidegger clearly states that the concept of historical time

needs to be grounded in the phenomenological event of life itself, and that the concept itself is

grounded in a phenomenological pre-theoretical domain. Therefore, the question ―when‖ has two

different meanings in history and in physics. When asking about the ―when‖ of a historical event

(Ereignis), ―I am asking not about its quantity but about its place in a qualitative historical

context‖ (BH, 71). What is specific to the concept of time in history is that it designates an event:

―Thus the concept ‗the famine in Fulda in the year 750‘ indicates a very specific individual event

[Ereignis] and accordingly is a historical concept‖ (BH, 67). This is why historical dates are only

―convenient tokens for counting,‖ but in themselves have no meaning. What gives them meaning

is a qualitative determination. This also implies that history as a science, as historiography, rests

upon and presupposes historical reality itself (which still demands to be elaborated and clarified

ontologically), making necessary Heidegger‘s distinction between Historie and Geschichte.

8
We leave aside here the whole discussion in section 79 of the so-called ―datability‖
(Datierbarkeit) that Dasein deploys in its concernful existence in the world (and the time-
reckoning that is the ground for such dating), and which is the existential basis for historical
dating. See SZ, p. 407.
 8

II. The Break with the Theoretical: The Historie/Geschichte Distinction.

This original determining distinction between history and nature will be radicalized in the

following years in Heidegger‘s ontologizing of the problematic of history. For the

epistemological horizon proves inadequate to the appropriate raising of the question of historical

time. Indeed, as early as 1919, in an early Freiburg lecture course, Heidegger explained that ―the

theoretical itself and as such refers back to something pre-theoretical,‖ so that, on the way to an

originary phenomenology of the facticity of life, later renamed Dasein, ―the primacy of the

theoretical must be broken.‖9 Such pre-theoretical basis is approached by Heidegger as life, and

more precisely factical life, so as to avoid any psychologism, a life that will be characterized as

―ultimate fact.‖ What is indeed most striking is how in that period Heidegger identifies life as the

fundamental Fact, the central concern of his thought, the very matter of phenomenology.

Phenomenology, for Heidegger at that time, is a phenomenology of life itself. In

Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, Heidegger states from the outset: ―‗Factical life‘:

‗life‘ expresses a basic phenomenological category; it signifies a basic phenomenon.‖10 Far from

reducing it to an ontic, regional domain, subordinated to a prior, more originary, ontological

level, Heidegger on the contrary approaches life as the fundamental fact -- indeed as ―something

ultimate‖ (PIA, p.62) --to which all thought must return as to its ground. He also places himself

explicitly within the tradition of life-philosophy in its various forms, which is the foreshadowing

9
Martin Heidegger. Toward the Definition of Philosophy (GA 56/57), trans. Ted Sadler
(London: Continuum, 2002), p.50.
10
Martin Heidegger. Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle (Bloomington, Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 61. Hereafter cited as PIA, followed by pagination of the
translation.
 9

of a genuine phenomenology of what he terms ―factical life‖. He recognizes, for instance, that

some of his analyses ―came forth already in modern life-philosophy‖, a philosophical movement

which he praises in these terms: ―I understand [life-philosophy] to be no mere fashionable

philosophy but, for its time, an actual attempt to come to philosophy rather than babble idly over

academic frivolities‖ (PIA, p.61).

Heidegger thus seeks to establish that life in its givenness is not a theoretical object, does

not take a theoretical distance with itself, but rather interprets itself in a radically immanent

manner.11 Such life is ―lived life‖ (Toward the Definition of Philosophy, 40), not in the sense of

a psychical process, not as Erlebnis, but indeed and already as Er-eignis, appropriative event.

―The experiences are appropriative events in so far as they live out of one‘s ownness, and life

only lives in this way‖ [Die Erlebnisse sind Er-eignisse, insofern sie aus dem Eigenen leben und

Leben nur so lebt] (Toward the Definition of Philosophy, p. 64, tr. slightly modified). And since

life understood as Ereignis constitutes the essence of the historical as such,12 one can see how the

opposition between quantitative time and qualitative historical time from the 1915 lecture finds

11
On this point, see my ―The Facticity of Life and the Need for Philosophy,‖ in Rethinking
Facticity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), in particular pp. 73-77.
12
We thus read in this 1919 course that life ―is itself historical in an absolute sense‖. Toward the
Definition of Philosophy, p. 18. One notes here the clear break with Husserl and a certain
anhistoricity of Husserlian phenomenology, which Heidegger explicitly denounces in the 1923
summer semester course, Ontology. The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1999), p. 59. Referring to ―the absence of history in phenomenology,‖
Heidegger pokes fun of its presuppositions: ―one naively believes that the subject matter will, no
matter what the position of looking at it, be obtained in plain and simple evidence.‖ However,
phenomenology must become a historical method, and ―for this it is necessary to disclose the
history of the covering up of the subject matter,‖ Heidegger adds, anticipating on the Destruktion
as method of ontology which will be thematized in Being and Time and The Basic Problems of
Phenomenology.
 10

itself rethought in terms of an originary hermeneutics of factical life: historical time now

designates life‘s proper motion (Beweghteit) – distinguished from the Bewegung or natural

movement of natural entities -- in its restlessness and self-unfolding, which Heidegger also calls

a relation of effectuation or enactment (Vollzug).13 He calls this movement ―historicity‖

(Geschichlichkeit), borrowing the term from Count York via Dilthey. In fact, one needs to

approach life essentially as a motion, a specific movement. Heidegger writes: ―In our rough

characterization of life, we have often spoken of actualization, nexus of actualization. Elsewhere,

people speak of process, stream, the flowing character of life. This latter way of speaking is

motivated by and follows a fundamental aspect in which we encounter life, and we take it as a

directive toward the ensemble of the basic structures of life as movement, motility‖ (PIA, 85).

Also: ―The movedness [Bewegtheit] of factical life can be provisionally interpreted and

described as unrest. The ‗how‘ of this unrest, in its fullness as a phenomenon, determines

facticity‖ (PIA, 70).

Implicit in these distinctions is a critique of the reliance on the metaphysical and

epistemological primacy of natural sciences, as well as the beginning of an ontological derivation

of nature as such. Heidegger takes issue with the positioning of objectivity -- and nature -- as the

13
On the historicity of life as enactment, see Martin Heidegger‘s ―Comments on Karl Jaspers‘s
Psychology of Worldviews,‖ in Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill (NY: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), p. 28. As Eric Nelson notes, ―Heidegger first discussed history in terms
of the priority of event (Ereignis) and enactment (Vollzug), which are used in his early lecture
courses in opposition to the traditional concepts of subject and object, and in terms of the
difference between ―lived history‖ (Geschichte) and historical science (Historie) in the situation
of crisis and engagement with Lebens- and Existenzphilosophie after the First World War.‖
―History, Event, and Alterity in Heidegger and Levinas,‖ in Between Levinas and Heidegger,
edited by Eric Sean Nelson and John Drabinski, under contract with SUNY Press. The emphasis
is placed on ―historical life‖ in its motility and facticity as opposed to the science of history,
which presupposes it while ignoring it.
 11

standard model for being. He articulates such a critique in the following way: ―It is not the case

that objects are first present as bare realities, as objects in some sort of natural state, and that they

then in the course of our experience receive the garb of a value-character, so they do not have to

run around naked. This is the case neither in the direction of the experience of the surrounding

world nor in the direction of the approach and the sequence of interpretation, as if the

constitution of nature could, even to the smallest extent, supply the foundation for higher types

of objects. On the contrary, the objectivity, ‗nature,‘ first arises out of the basic sense of the

Being of objects of the lived, experienced, encountered world‖ (PIA, 69, my emphasis).

Objectivity, nature, are here derived from a more primordial sense of being, namely, life in its

facticity.

For Heidegger, this break with the theoretical, with the epistemological, in a new

approach that he referred to in the 1919 course as a ―primordial science‖ (Urwissenschaft)14,

appears clearly in the opening pages of the 1925 summer semester course, History of the

Concept of Time, the sub-title of which reads: ―Prolegomena to the Phenomenology of History

(Geschichte) and Nature (Natur)‖. Heidegger begins by noting the epistemological horizon of the

very distinction between nature and history, through their respective empirical disciplines,

natural sciences and human sciences. However, he immediately raises a doubt with respect to the

self-sufficiency or legitimacy of this scientific approach: for on the one hand, ―history and nature

would be accessible only insofar as they are objects thematized in these sciences,‖ which would

not give us ―the actual area of subject matter out of which the thematic of the sciences is first

14
Martin Heidegger. Toward the Definition of Philosophy, in particular pp. 17-26.
 12

carved;‖15 and on the other hand, due to this situation in which history as a science misses the

―authentic reality of history,‖ one may stress that ―it might well be that something essential

necessarily remains closed‖ to the scientific way of disclosure. Second, Heidegger attempts to

refute the opposition between nature and history, treating it as a strictly scientific division (―the

separation comes first from these sciences‖), one which would not be validated

phenomenologically (―the separation of the two domains may well indicate that an original and

undivided context of subject matter remains hidden,‖ HCT, 2). Instead of remaining with the

―fact‖ of these scientific divisions, it is a matter of leaping ahead ―into the primary field of

subject matter of a potential science and first make available the basic structure of the possible

object of the science‖ (HCT, 2, slightly modified). This does not mean, Heidegger clarifies, a

phenomenology of each of these disciplines, nor a phenomenology of their respective areas,

domains of being or subject-matter: ―Here it is not a matter of a phenomenology of the sciences

of history and nature, or even of a phenomenology of history and nature as objects of these

sciences‖ (HCT, 2). In other words, the scope is neither a phenomenology of science, not an

investigation as a regional ontology.

It is a matter instead ―of a phenomenological disclosure of the original kind of being and

constitution of both‖ (HCT, 2). How can this be achieved? Heidegger answers: ―by disclosing

the constitution of the being of that field‖. This would constitute the ―original science‖ of which

Heidegger spoke in the 1919 course (here referred to as ―a productive logic,‖ HCT, 2), because it

15
Martin Heidegger. History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (GA 20). Trans. Theodore
Kisiel (Bloomington, In: Indiana University Press, 1985), p.1. Hereftaer cited as HCT, followed
by page number.
 13

investigates a domain prior to its scientific thematization. And what is that primary field prior to

the domains of nature and history? Original Dasein. Indeed, sciences must receive ―the

possibility of their being‖, Heidegger tells us, ―from their meaning in human Dasein‖. And

original Dasein means: original historicity and temporality. This is why the next section is titled,

―Prolegomena to a phenomenology of history and nature under the guidance of the history of the

concept of time‖ (my emphasis), as both nature and history can be said to stand under the

horizon of time. The task is to reveal the horizon within which history and nature can be set

against, and find the ―actual constituents which underlie history and nature‖ (HCT, 6). Thus,

what Heidegger seeks to achieve is a grasp of nature and history before scientific thematization

(―We wish to exhibit history and nature so that we may regard them before scientific

elaboration‖, HCT, 5). This requires an overcoming of the theoretical or epistemological.

This overcoming of the theoretical or epistemological -- as well as the exhibiting of the

ontological basis of historical time -- is achieved through Heidegger‘s problematizing of the

distinction between the terms Historie and Geschichte, a distinction which he had not made in

the 1915 essay, and which we find for the first time addressed by him thematically in the 1925

Kassel lectures,16 although already in the 1920-1921 winter semester course on the

Phenomenology of Religious Life, we read: ―We mean the historical in the way we encounter it

16
Martin Heidegger. ―Wilhelm Dilthey‘s Research and the Current Struggle for a Historical
Worldview‖, in Becoming Heidegger, pp. 238-274. It is interesting to note here that indeed
Heidegger had used the terms – in particular the adjectives geschitlich and historish --
interchangeably in earlier courses and lectures, for instance in the 1919/1921 ―Comments on
Karl Jaspers‘s Psychology of Worldviews‖ [translated by John van Buren in Pathmarks, pp. 1-
38; see note 2, p. 365 for clarifications]. Heidegger wrote of ―life as History (Geschichte)‖ (GA
58, p. 81), but also of ―historisches Leben‖ or of life as being historical (historish) in GA 56/57,
p.21, tr. p. 18. I owe this last observation to Sophie-Jan Arrien, in ―Vie et Histoire (Heidegger
1919-1923),‖ in Philosophie, Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 2001, n. 69, p.57, note 20.
 14

in life; not in the science of history‖.17 The problem lies in the fact that the question of history is

usually approached from historical science (Historie), a discipline which for Heidegger does not

master its own subject matter, historical reality itself (Geschichte). In The History of the Concept

of Time, for instance, Heidegger reminds the reader hat ―the historiological sciences are

currently troubled by the question of historical reality itself,‖ a situation presumably made worse

by the fact that ―historiological sciences generally dispensed with any philosophical reflection‖!

(HCT, 14). One could add here that Historie is an investigation of ontic ―facts‖ while Geschichte

designates the being of history. Historie presupposes Geschichte, while missing it.18

One knows how in §74 of Being and Time Heidegger makes the distinction between

Geschichte and Historie, history as eventfulness of Dasein‘s being and history as the science of

objectively present objects (Objektsgeschichte). History as Geschichte designates the absolutely

originary history (ursprüngliche Geschichte schlechthin) whereas History as Historie designates

the objectification of Geschichte. Thus, ―whereas Geschichte refers to history articulated from

the horizon of the question of the meaning of being, which is rearticulated as the history of the

event and truth of being, Historie refers to the models of history found in the ordinary

understanding of history as presence and re-presentation, and which continue to inform

17
Martin Heidegger. The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans Matthias Frischt and Jennifer
Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington, In: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 23.
18
In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger returned to this question and reasserted that ―the
science of history does not at all determine, as science, the originary relation to history; instead,
it always already presupposes such a relation.‖ Martin Heidegger. Introduction to Metaphysics,
translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p.
46.
 15

historiography and the philosophy of history.‖ 19 Further, as Nelson stresses, the ordinary

understanding of Historie ―presuppose the ‗vulgar concept of time‘ analyzed in Being and Time

as underlying everyday and philosophical understandings of time—whether linear or cyclical.

These understandings block access to the history of being, obscuring rather than clarifying the

history that we ourselves are‖ (art.cit, ibid)

We find in this distinction the opening of an access to ontological time, to a historical

time ―which we ourselves are,‖ an expression used frequently by Heidegger, and also echoed in

the famous question from the 1924 lecture, ―The Concept of Time‖: ―Am I time?,‖ ―am I my

time‖? (Supplements, 213). At issue in this distinction is the radicalizing of historical time, from

an external object of inquiry (Historie, from the Greek historein, to enquire), to history as an

event (Geschichte, from the verb geschehen, to happen), indeed as ―the happening that we

ourselves are‖ (BH, 271). This happening is to be distinguished from a natural happening, or

Vorgang (from vorgehen, as in the processes or vorgänge of nature). It is striking in this respect

that in a later critique of historical science, Heidegger makes the point that such a discipline

takes as its model natural sciences and its objectifications.20

This expression, the history ―that we ourselves are‖ (or ―We ourselves are history‖), ―we

are history‖ (Wir sind Geschichte) is borrowed from Count Yorck, and is to be found used as a

leitmotiv in the Kassel lectures, which engage Dilthey‘s philosophy of history as they pursue a

19
Eric Nelson. ―History, Event, and Alterity in Heidegger and Levinas,‖ art.cit.
20
Martin Heidegger. ―The Age of the World Picture,‖ in Off the Beaten Track, edited and
translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (NY: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 62.
Let us recall here the distinction made by Heidegger in the 1934 course among three types of
change: One speaks of ―flow‖ [Ablauf] for the earth, of ―process‖ [Vorgang] for life, and of
―happening‖ [Geschehen] for human beings. GA 38, tr., p. 75.
 16

phenomenological inquiry into the senses of life and the ―being of the human being.‖ Heidegger

in these Kassel lectures begins by lamenting the fact that in post-Kantian philosophy, the

question of the sense of historical being ―died out,‖ due to the predominance of the mathematical

natural sciences, and the reduction of philosophy to epistemology. The question concerning the

being of history became all the more pressing, and Heidegger credits Dilthey for having revived

such an inquiry, although Dilthey was not able to sufficiently distinguish his approach from the

epistemological, and as a consequence could not raise the question of the being of history

phenomenologically. As Heidegger puts it: ―It is a matter of elaborating the being of the

historical, i.e., historicity and not the historical, being and not beings, reality and not the real. It is

therefore not a question of empirical research in history. Even a universal history still would not

deal with historicity. Dilthey made his way to the reality that is properly historical and has the

sense of being historical, namely, human Dasein. Dilthey succeeded in bringing this reality to

givenness, defining it as living, free, and historical. But he did not raise the question of

historicity itself, the question of the sense of being, the question of the being of beings. It is only

with the development of phenomenology that we are in a position to raise this question overtly‖

(BH, 255). A few pages later, Heidegger emphasizes that ―Dilthey never raised the question of

the reality of life itself,‖ never ―had an answer to the question of what it means to be historical‖

(BH, 258).

In order to gain access to the being of the historical, it became necessary to break with the

theoretical or epistemological perspectives, and distinguish more fully between historical science

and history as such. This is what Heidegger attempts in the following way. He first recalls the

phenomenological scope of his analyses, clarifying that the ―fundamental attitude of

phenomenological research is defined by a principle which at first seems self-evident: to the

matters themselves‖ (BH, 256). The issue is to reveal the phenomenon of history. This is all the

more necessary since the ontological structure of historicity is concealed by history as a

science.21 In terms of the question of history, it becomes a matter ―of bringing historical reality

itself to givenness so that the sense of its being can be read off from it‖ (BH, 256). This

phenomenological task is only misleadingly self-evident, for the matters themselves are covered

over by the unphenomenological representations concerning historical time, the epistemological

perspective and the reductive outlook on natural time. ―By way of preparation,‖ Heidegger then

proceeds to distinguish Historie from Geschichte, noting that those terms, although from an

entirely different origin, can ―yet both get used interchangeably‖. History as Geschichte

designates ―a happening that we ourselves are,‖ whereas historical science, from its etymological

source, is an ―ascertaining and reporting [of] what has happened,‖ and means ―a knowledge of a

happening‖ (BH, 271). The being of the historical is thus the happening that we ourselves are

(―History happens to me; I am this happening‖22), while historical science is the thematic

investigation of such happening. To this extent, it is not simply a matter of distinguishing those

two terms, but of showing how one is grounded in the other, Historie as we saw presupposing

Geschichte.23 This ontological foundation is further developed in Being and Time, where

21
As Jean Greisch explains, ―what is thus forgotten or concealed (passé sous silence) is the
phenomenon of historicality which is such that, before the invention of a historical science,
which only came to be at then end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th century, human
existence was already constituted in a ‗historical‘ manner in its ontological structure‖. Jean
Greisch, Ontologie et Temporalité (Paris: PUF, 1994), p. 357, translation mine.
22
We find a similar expression in The Phenomenology of Religious Life, p.124, where we read:
―History hits us (Die Geschichte trifft uns), and we are history itself‖
23
As Peter Warnek explains in his essay, ―The History of Being,‖ ―history, or more precisely
‗historiology‘ (Historie) as a domain of research, operates within a pre-given sense of being, a
determination of what it is that it investigates‖. In Heidegger. Key Concepts, p. 162.
 18

Heidegger proposes to reveal ―the ontological genesis of historiography as a science in terms of

the historicity of Da-sein.‖24 This will involve, as we will see, a subordination of nature to

historical time.

III. The Subordination of Nature to Historical Time.

In Being and Time, Heidegger notes once again the ambiguity of the term ―history,‖

which designates both ―‗historical reality‘ as well as the possibility of a science of it‖ (SZ, 378).

However, Heidegger‘s focus is neither the science of history nor even history as an object of

such science. Instead, Heidegger is interested in thinking ―this being itself which has not

necessarily been objectified,‖ namely, the historical itself. Heidegger explains in paragraph 72

that the problem of history cannot be raised from historical science or historiography, because in

such an approach, history is taken as an object of science. The basic phenomenon of history is

―prior to the possibility of making something thematic by historiography and underlies it,‖ so

that the question of the relation between the two becomes the following: ―How history

[Geschichte] can become a possible object for historiography [Historie], can be gathered only

from the kind of being of what is historical [Geschichtlichen], from historicity and its rootedness

in temporality‖ (SZ, 375). Heidegger makes this point in three different ways in this section 72:

first, by defining historiography as an existentiell possibility of Dasein (―from the kind of being

of this being that exists historically, there arises the existentiell possibility of an explicit

24
Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1953), 392. Hereafter cited as SZ following
the German pagination; all citations of the work are from Being and Time, trans. Joan
Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996).
 19

disclosure and grasp of history‖), which betrays that it presupposes an existential basis that needs

to be fleshed out. Second, by characterizing historical science as the ―thematizing‖ (proper to any

science) of a pre-given domain, as Historie is ―primarily constituted by thematizing‖ (SZ, 392).

Third, by characterizing this discussion in terms of ontological foundation (―the existential

interpretation of historiography as a science aims solely at a demonstration of its ontological

provenance from the historicity of Da-sein‖, SZ, 376).

This ontological foundation is of course the task of paragraph 76 of Being and Time,

which is concerned with showing the ―existential origin of Historiography from the Historicity of

Dasein‖ and proposes to ―inquire into the ontological possibility of the origin of the sciences

[and here of historical science] from the constitution of being of Da-sein‖ (SZ, 392), an

existential derivation already posited in paragraph 3 of Being and Time. The presuppositions of

the historicity of Dasein by historiography are several: one can for instance note from the outset

that the very possibility of disclosing the past through historiography presupposes that ―the ‗past‘

has always already been disclosed in general‖ (SZ, 393). Although this may seem obvious,

Heidegger stresses that the fact that ―something like this [the fact that the past must be open to a

return to it] and how it is possible is by no means obvious‖ (SZ, 392). Things such as

―antiquities‖ can become historiographical objects only because they are already in themselves

historical. As Heidegger explains, the historical character of antiquities is ―grounded in the ‗past‘

of Da-sein to whose world that past belongs‖ (SZ, 380). This means that the historiographical

disclosure (Heidegger uses the term Erschliessung) of history ―is in itself rooted in the historicity

of Da-sein in accordance with its ontological structure, whether it is factically carried out or not‖

(SZ, 392). This is why historiography should not be given a positivist interpretation, as its

objects are not ―the facts‖ in their positivity, but rather the having-been of historical Dasein.
 20

This is why, one notes in passing, history does not designate ―the past‖ (Vergangenheit)

in the sense of what has gone by, the bygone, das Vergangene, but rather the world of Dasein has

having-been, das Gewesene, which ultimately for Heidegger is yet to come, and thus futural.

―We see that beenness [Gewesenheit], insofar as it reaches over us and comes toward [zukommt]

us, has future [Zukunft]‖ (GA 38, tr. 98). For Heidegger, history as happening ―is determined

from the future,‖25 or as he would also state in the ―Letter on Humanism‖: the ―history of being

is never past, but stands ever before‖ (BW, 194). Indeed, if the possible itself is the very meaning

of Dasein‘s existence, should not one see ―behind‖ those alleged facts the presence of the

possible itself? ―Does historiography thus have what is possible as its theme? Does not its whole

‗meaning‘ lie in ‗facts,‘ in what has factually been?‖ (SZ, 394). In this sense, as Heidegger

would state in that 1934 course, ―we mean by ‗history‘ not the past, but the future‖: ―To enter

into history means, therefore, not simply that something that is bygone, merely because it is

bygone, is classed with the past. Yes, it is, generally speaking, questionable whether the entering

into history always means to be sent to the past, as it were… we mean by ‗history‘ not the past,

but the future‖ (GA 38, tr. 71). Decades later, in the Zollikon seminars, Heidegger would return

to this question, maintaining the distinction between an ontic past and an ontological ―having

been,‖ and claiming that the confrontation with such having-been – no mere ―retaining‖ --

engages the future: ―The present confronts what has been in relation to what is coming [das

Künftige]‖.26 For Dasein to be ―factually‖ does not point to ―facts‖ but to a world-history. This is

why remains, monuments, records, are all possible material for historical research and ―can

25
Martin Heidegger. Introduction to Metaphysics, p.47.
26
Martin Heidegger. The Zollikon Seminars (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press,
2001), p. 220
 21

become historiographical material ―only because they have a world-historical character‖ (SZ,

394); that is to say that the acquisition, sifting and securing of material ―does not first bring about

a return to the ‗past,‘ but rather already presupposes historical being toward the Da-sein that has-

been-there‖ (SZ, 394). The object of historical science is not ―the facts‖, but historical Dasein.27

This in turn presupposes the historicity of the historian‘s existence, as one can also note further

that a thematization of the past (historiography) presupposes the historicity of Dasein. This does

not indicate a subjectivism in Heidegger‘s analysis, but rather the fact that historiography is a

possibility of existence: as Heidegger puts it, the central theme of historiography ―is always a

possibility of existence that has-been-there,‖ and thus rests upon the historicity of Dasein‘s

existence.28 In short, the fundamental concepts of historiographical sciences – the

epistemological problematic of the social sciences – ultimately ―are concepts of existence‖ (SZ,

397). As we see, the epistemological problematic of historiography (Historie) rests upon and

presupposes the ontological constitution of history (Geschichte). The question of the relation

between history and nature is thus displaced from the epistemological horizon of the 1915 essay,

to the ontological level.

Most significantly for our concern, this ontological foundation of Historie in Geschichte

has radical consequences for an understanding of the relation between history and nature as it

27
This is why, as Heidegger states, ―what is philosophically primary is neither a theory of the
concept-formation of historiology nor the theory of historiological knowledge, nor yet the theory
of history as the Object of historiology; what is primary is rather the Interpretation of
authentically historical entities as regards their historicity‖. SZ, 10.
28
Heidegger at that point refers to Nietzsche‘s essay on the ―advantages and disadvantages of
historiography for life,‖ and the three senses of historiography that Nietzsche retains -- the
monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical -- to the historicity of Da-sein (―The threefold
character of historiography is prefigured in the historicity of Da-sein.‖ SZ, 396).
 22

leads to a grounding of nature in historical time. Indeed, as Heidegger explicitly states, ―even

nature is historical‖ (SZ, 388). Not historical in the sense of ―natural history,‖ for, as he would

say in the 1934 course, it is senseless and vacuous to speak of natural history. Nature, Heidegger

insists, has no history, and ―only the human being has history‖ (GA 38, tr. 67). Nonetheless,

nature is in a certain sense historical when it appears as within the world, as an intraworldy

object: ―nature is historical as a countryside, as areas that have been inhabited or exploited, as

battlefields and cultic sites.‖ (SZ, 388-389)29. The ontological foundation of historical science in

historicity thus also implies the subordination of nature to history, via the reference to the world,

or, to be more precise, the so-called ―secondarily historical,‖ ―World History‖ or the ―world-

historical‖ (das Weltgeschichtliche). As Heidegger explains, Dasein is the ―primarily historical,‖

and the ―secondarily historical‖ is ―what is encountered within the world, not only useful things

at hand in the broadest sense, but also nature in the surrounding world as the ‗historical ground‘‖

(SZ, 381). Nature gives itself against the background of the world, which itself is unfolding

temporally.‖With the factical disclosedness [Erschlossenheit] of Dasein‘s world, nature has been

uncovered [entdeckt] for Dasein‖ (SZ, 412). Whereas Dasein is ―disclosed,‖ nature is

―uncovered,‖ marking here the ontological distinction between the two.

Dasein‘s concern, which is always thrown, surrendered to night and day (for Heidegger

nature thus also designates thrownness, and in fact will be described a few years later, as earth,

29
One also finds in Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant‘s Critique of Pure Reason
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 14, the same characterization of nature as
an intraworldy being.
 23

as that in which historical Dasein is already thrown, schon geworfen30), is connected to the

environment it is involved with, such as ―the rising of the sun‖ (SZ, 412). What is significant in

this description is that nature, i.e., the sun, gives itself in terms of and on the basis of concernful

time: ―Then, when the sun rises, it is time for so and so‖ (SZ, 412). Now, the time of concern, or

the counting of time, is what Aristotle understood time to be, the counting of natural movement:

the counting of time becomes ―the counting of the now in relation to the now that is no longer

and the now that is not yet. Time is thus that which is numbered in movement encountered in the

horizon of the earlier and later, which is precisely the Aristotelian definition of time in Book IV

of The Physics‖ (Françoise Dastur, HCT, 49).

What is significant here is that this conception of time as number of movement takes

place within ―the natural understanding of Being as Vorhandenheit‖ (HCT, 49). There is thus a

profound affinity between the time of concern and the sphere of the natural. This is why it should

not come as a surprise if Heidegger then defines ―nature‖ as a kind of ready-to-hand, that is, an

intra-worldly entity that is encountered within a world that has been disclosed under the horizon

of temporality. ―Concern makes use of the ‗handiness‘ of the sun, which sheds forth light and

warmth‖ (SZ, 412, modified). The sun is used in terms of the time-reckoning of Dasein: ―The

sun dates the time interpreted in concern‖ (SZ, 412, modified), such ―natural clock‖ constituting

the origin, Heidegger tells us, of ―artificial clocks‖ as such (as these artificial clocks must be

―adjusted‖ to the natural clock). The natural concept of time is hence a derivative mode of

30
Martin Heidegger. ―The Origin of the Work of Art,‖ in Basic Writings, rev. and exp. edition,
ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), p. 200.
 24

temporality, a mode of Dasein‘s concern with entities within-the-world. Natural time is

derivative, vulgar time. Time as measured refers to Dasein‘s time-reckoning, also a function of

concern. ―The disclosedness of natural clock belongs to the Dasein which exists as thrown and

falling‖ (SZ, 415). This reduction of natural time is further emphasized in the text, for not only

does Heidegger refer it to public fallen time, but he then also assigns it to so-called ―primitive

Dasein,‖ as opposed to so-called ―advanced Dasein‖! ―Comparison shows that for the ‗advanced‘

Dasein the day and the presence of sunlight no longer have such a special function as they have

for the ‗primitive‘ Dasein on which our analysis of natural time-reckoning has been based‖ (SZ,

415, emphasis mine). Natural time is in any case fallen temporality, and represents the leveling

down of original temporality (Nivellierung der ursprunglischen Zeit). One knows how, in section

82, Heidegger is careful to note that time has traditionally been interpreted, from Aristotle to

Hegel, within a philosophy of nature, which denotes the inauthentic approach to the concept of

time, how ―since Aristotle, time has been defined as physical time, the time of the objective

world.‖31 Time is approached from within an ontology of the present-at-hand, to which nature

belongs. As such, it is subject to a phenomenological destruction.

Nature thus gives itself within the world (the secondarily historical), and is thus grounded

on Dasein‘s historicity, i.e., the primarily historical! Therein lies the reduction of nature, which

in fact could lead, in Heidegger‘s most extreme formulations, to an expulsion or rejection of

nature outside of the realm of history and historical Dasein. For instance, in On the Essence of

Truth, Heidegger states: ―Only the ek-sistent human being is historical. ‗Nature‘ has no

31
Françoise Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, p. 7.
 25

history.‖32 One finds a similar claim in the 1934 summer semester course, where Heidegger

states that ―nature is without history‖ (GA 38, tr. p.113). Certainly, nature can be in-time, as we

saw, but it is not historical, it is outside history. As Heidegger states, one never speaks of a past

or futural nature! (GA 38, tr, p. 85). Heidegger insists at length on this point, reiterating that, ―In

nature there is neither historicity nor unhistoricity, but it is without history [geschichtlos], not

dependent on the happening [Geschehen]. Nature is without history because it is atemporal

[Zeitlos]‖ (GA 38, tr.113). Certainly, he concedes, ―natural processes are measurable and

ascertainable by time. Nature, insofar as it is measurable by time, is in a certain manner in time‖.

But one needs to distinguish between ―being-in-time‖ [in-der-Zeit-Sein] and ―being-temporal‖

[Zeitlich-Sein], ―which befits only the human being‖ (GA 38, tr., p. 113). Nature is within-

timely, the human being -- and, as we saw, only the human being --- is Temporal.33

IV. The Earth as Ground of History

And yet, this early reduction of nature, subordinated to history, if not rejected in the

nonhistorical, will lead to a paradoxical reversal of Heidegger‘s hierarchy between nature and

history, as nature will be said a few years after Being and Time, as earth, to be the ground

32
Martin Heidegger, ―On the Essence of Truth,‖ in Pathmarks, translation John Sallis, p. 146.

33
Certainly, Heidegger concedes, ―the occurrences on the earth, in plants or animals are certainly
flows and processes in the framework of time, but stones, animals, plants are themselves not
temporal in the original sense as we ourselves‖. GA 38, tr. 110. Only the human being is
historical, and the natural occurrences within the human being (―the changing of the gastric
juices, of the blood circulation, the graying of the hair‖, GA 38, tr. 72) do not constitute history.
 26

[Grund] of the world, and thus of history if it is the case that ―entrance into world by beings is

primal history pure and simple‖.34 In ―The Origin of the Work of Art,‖ Heidegger would speak

of the earth as the ground and native soil (heimatliche Grund) of the world and of historical

Dasein, ―that on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth‖

(BW, 168, my emphasis). The work of art reveals that the world rests upon the earth, which itself

―emerges as native ground‖ (BW, 168). In this way, ―upon the earth and in it, historical man

grounds his dwelling in the world‖ (BW, 172). This paradoxical reversal might be the indication

of a concealed aporia, the very aporia structuring Heidegger‘s thought of history as contrasted

and opposed to the natural. It is as if all these repeated attempts by Heidegger to subordinate

nature to history might ultimately be aimed at overcoming or suppressing the aporia of an

irreducible nature that could not be derived from historical time. Such an aporia would also

threaten the ontological hierarchies that Heidegger sets up in Being and Time. At this point, as

one commentator remarked, ―one might try to resist Heidegger‘s subordination of natural, linear

time to the Temporality of Dasein‖.35 In fact, we note such resistance in Heidegger‗s texts

themselves.

Apart from those enigmatic passages in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology where

Heidegger states that ―intraworldliness does not belong to nature‘s being,‖ a being ―which on its

own part already always is,‖ and which ―is, even if we do not uncover it, without our

34
Martin Heidegger. The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. M. Heim (Bloomington, In:
Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 209.
35
Richard Polt, ―Being and Time,‖ in Martin Heidegger. Key Concepts, p. 74.
 27

encountering it within our world,‖36 the difficulty of deriving nature from history already

appeared in the discussion in Being and Time of the relation between original temporality and

within-time-ness, history and historiography (and time-reckoning). As we saw, Heidegger

claimed that Dasein exists historically before historiography, that what is world-historical is

always already there ―in the occurrence of existing being-in-the-world even ―without being

grasped historiographically‖ (SZ, 389). However, what would it mean for this discussion if

historical science was not simply an existentiell possibility but a constitutive feature of the

phenomenon of history, if historiography was not simply derived from the ontological basis of

history? Heidegger himself asks that question, when clarifying in the 1934 summer semester

course the relation between ―lore of history‖ (Geschichtskunde) with Geschichte: ―History

[Geschichte] is an event [Ereignis], insofar as it happens [geschieht] A happening [Geschehen] is

historiographical, insofar as it stands in some lore, is explored [erkundet] and manifested

[bekundet]. Is that which is historiographical only a supplement to the historical? Or is history

only where there is historiography, so that the statement ‗No history without historiography‘

comes about?‖ (GA 38, tr. 74). Heidegger is constrained to admit that long before the invention

of historical science, Dasein, as a historical being, was using calendars and clocks that measure

time and provide a structure to social time. While insisting on the ontological priority of

historicity over historiography, insisting as well that world-time is derived from Dasein‘s

temporality, and that the time of concern, clock-time, is based on such original historicity

(Dasein‘s temporality is said to pre-exist all instruments that may measure it), Heidegger also has

36
Martin Heidegger. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, translation by Albert Hofstadter
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 169.
 28

to concede that the intra-temporality of the time of concern – and thus natural time -- is

―equiprimordial‖ with historicality: ―But since time as within-time-ness also ‗stems‘ from the

temporality of Da-sein, historicity and within-time-ness turn out to be equiprimordial‖ (SZ,

377).37 Now, nature is clearly at the center of this problem, since for Heidegger nature is

included within-time-ness: ―In the same way, the processes of nature, whether living or lifeless,

are encountered ‗in time‘‖ (SZ, 377). Heidegger‘s attempt to posit an ontological derivation of

nature from history aporetically runs into the claim of an equiprimordiality between the two!

It becomes impossible to maintain – and this is indeed the very aporia that this essay is

concerned with -- the ontological hierarchy between history and nature, and to secure the

foundation of nature, as intra-worldly, in history. This aporia, which threatens Heidegger‘s very

ontological analysis, including the paramount distinction between original and vulgar time,

ontological and ontic time, opens this unavoidable question: if original temporality cannot unfold

without the intra-worldly, natural time, what prevents us from radicalizing this proposition (and

our understanding of the natural) and assert that in this case it may be nature that turns out to be

that from which the historical itself emerges? Thus radicalized, would nature not represent an

―archi-ontical‖ origin of historical time, an original sense of nature that Heidegger would name, a

few years later, earth? Further, doesn‘t the dimension of thrownness, itself rethought from the

truth of being itself, raise anew the question of the origin of history, if it is the case, as we saw

above, that the earth is described in ―The Origin of the Work of Art‖ as that from which

historical Dasein is thrown?

37
This is why, as he concedes in the 1934 course, ―assuming that lore [Kunde] belongs to the
inner constitution of the historical happening, then we must make clear from the happening, to
what extent something like lore can belong to this kind of being [Seins]. GA 38, tr, p. 81.
 29

The question remains of how to conceive of such natural being, how to conceive of this

non-derivation of nature from history: does it point to a metaphysical ground outside of the

disclosedness of Dasein? Does it point to a non-historical ground of human existence, as Michel

Haar argues in his two volumes on the earth and the human?38 In these two books, Michel Haar

seeks to claim that there is a non-historicality or even extra-historicality of humans as earthy

beings. He is constrained at first to recognize that for Heidegger the human being is essentially

historical and that ―Heidegger maintains that man is entirely and exclusively historial‖ (HEM,

176).39 However, this is to immediately challenge this view, by suggesting that beneath history

there remains a ―preexisting situation,‖ leaving the trace of ―prehistorial man‘‖ (HEM, 177). In

fact, Michel Haar understands such element as a non-historical permanence, as ―every

transformation requires something that persists‖ (HEM, 177). For instance, he argues, although

each epoch has its own fundamental mood, ―the fact of finding oneself disposed and

experiencing corporeal being-in-the-world according to constantly changing moods belongs to

every human being in every epoch‖ (HEM, 181, my emphasis). Haar also appeals to a

―transhistoriality‖ of Western man, as we are capable today of accessing the Greek epoch of

astonishment or wonder. It should be noted that Haar supports his argument by appealing to the

―nonhistoricity‖ of Ereignis (SE, p.3). However the term used by Heidegger in the passage cited

by Haar is ungeschichtlich, a term that is not synonymous with atemporal or outside history

38
Michel Haar: The Song of the Earth, translated by Reginald Lilly (Bloomington, In: Indiana
University Press, 1993). Hereafter cited as SE, followed by page number. Heidegger and the
Essence of Man, Translated by William McNeill (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993). Hereafter
cited as HEM, followed by page number.
39
Indeed, Heidegger wrote in his ―Letter on Humanism‖ that the ―thinking that thinks into the
truth of bring is, as thinking, historical‖ (BW, 238), and also: ―the history of being is being
itself‖! The End of Philosophy, trans. J. Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 82.
 30

altogether, but is a mode of historicity, as Heidegger explained in Logic as the Question on the

Essence of Language (GA 38, tr. 113).

Haar believes that this extrahistorical or permanent element is represented in Heidegger‘s

thought by the notion of earth. For, as he puts it, ―Generally speaking, the nonhistorial is always

linked to the Earth‖ (HEM, 179). Earth, he continues, constitutes ―the limit of history‖ (ibid).

Dwelling, in particular, ―instantiates an essential mode of the nonhistorial‖ for in it ―something

immemorial persists: the shelter‖ (HEM, 178). Sheltering establishes an intimacy around a

hearth, a notion that once again is said to point towards the nonhistorial: ―Is it not the

immemorial character of the hearth that founds dwelling?‖ (HEM, 178). Dwelling around the

hearth would constitute Heidegger‘s reference to the non-historical: ―To the degree that

Heidegger writes that ‗being is the hearth‘, he himself acknowledges the nonhistorical aspect of

being‖ (ibid), or the archaic. This interpretation is pursued in The Song of the Earth, where Haar

claims that being is not reducible to its history, and that history conceals a reserve and an opacity

―which can never be exhibited‖ (SE, 2), which never sees the light of day. Without constituting a

substantial metaphysical ground, the earth, according to Haar, ―possesses… its own essence

which, in relation to being, can be thought at least negatively as the dimension that in itself

rebels against phenomenality, namely as the pre-historical or nonhistorical dimension‖ (SE, 100,

my emphasis). Arguing against the ontological derivation of nature in Being and Time, Haar

insists that ―the essence and genuine origin of this nature cannot, by definition, be situated ‗in the

world‘‖ (SE, 10) and he even go so far as referring nature to the tradition of the thing in itself!

―Just as the Kantian phenomenon leaves the residue of the thing in itself, the phenomenological

transparency of the world leaves a residue: the being of nature‖ (SE, 10).
 31

We are nonetheless allowed to ask: Is there such a permanent non or extra-historical

substrate in Heidegger‘s thought, a ―deep nonhistoriality of Dasein‖ which Haar does not hesitate

to describe as the ―quasi-eternity of embodied being-in-the-world‖? (HEM, 181). It is very

doubtful. Heidegger himself explains that nature, although atemporal and outside history,

nonetheless can in a certain sense ―enter into history.‖ How? In the sense that nature, for

instance, as a landscape, ―is site and abode of an historical process‖ (GA 38, tr, p. 113). The

earth, Heidegger explains, can neither enter into history, nor step out of it, because the earth ―has

nothing to do with history.‖ (GA 38, tr. 71). And yet, ―the southern Balkan peninsula entered

into history more than two thousand years ago. A mountain chain, a river can become [a[ site for

world-historical decisive battles. We speak of ‗historical soil,‘ [we] say that an entire region is,

as it were, laden with history‖ (GA 38, tr. 72). The earth is the soil (Der Erdboden] of history, a

soil which then ―also enters into history‖ (ibid). No substantial separation between earth and

history (the world is earthy, the earth is worldly), but a singular intertwining, indeed a strife

(Streit). As Heidegger explains in ―On the Essence of Truth,‖ ―Beings as a whole reveal

themselves as φύσις, ‗nature,‘‖ and history ―begins only when beings themselves are expressly

drawn up into their unconcealement and conserved in it‖.40 In that sense, the earth cannot

constitute a separate, substantial nonhistorical ground. This is what Heidegger shows in ―The

Origin of the Work of Art‖. The earth represents a self-secluding element and world the open

region, and yet they are essentially intertwined: the earth cannot subsist on its own without the

openness of the world and the world cannot float away from earth; the world is grounded on the

earth, the earth juts into the open region. Heidegger explains that ―World and earth are

40
Martin Heidegger. ―On the Essence of Truth,‖ in Pathmarks, p. 145.
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essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on

the earth, and earth juts through world‖ (BW, 174).41

Earth and world belong together as the co-belonging – and original strife, Urstreit -- of

clearing and concealing. That relation is one of tension and resistance. The world, resting on the

earth, attempts to overcome it; the earth, as sheltering and concealment, draws the world toward

it. In the creation of the world, the strife ―must be set back into the earth,‖ and the earth itself

―must be set firth and put to use as self-secluding‖ (BW, 189). Such strife is not destructive but

constitutive of both earth and world, for in ―essential strife, rather, the opponents raise each other

into their self-assertion of their essential natures‖ (BW, 174). The world ―lets the earth be earth‖.

In the end, history itself is rethought as the strife between earth and world, as the between of

earth and world, as Heidegger makes clear in The Contributions to Philosophy when he describes

history [Geschichte] as ―the strifing of the strife [Bestreitung des Streites] of earth and world.‖42

History happens in, and as, this original strife of earth and world. The earth thus cannot

constitute, as Michel Haar suggests, a prior, prehistorical, ―quasi-eternal,‖ metaphysical element.

For Heidegger, after the turn, history is no longer approached as Dasein‘s historicity but

as the history of being itself (Geschichte des Seins), as the between of world and earth. History is

41
In the highly evocative words of David Kleinberg-Levin, ―Nature is always historical, never
visible as such, never encountered outside the violent constructs of our historically situated
consciousness; conversely, however, the world that we have built, forging a historical existence
in irreconcilable struggle against Nature‘s forces of destruction, can never escape its violent
conditions and mortifying alembications.‖ David Kleinberg-Levin, Brochure for the Exhibition
of the Photographic Art of Olivier Mériel, Candace Dwan Gallery, September, 2008.

42
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and
Kenneth Maly (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 66.
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thought from Geschick, the sending (schicken) of being in its epoquality, an epochē which is a

withdrawal. As we saw, through a genuine Kehre in thinking, Heidegger claims in The Origin of

the Work of Art that earth (now no longer understood as nature giving itself within the world but

as counterpart to the world), constitutes the ground of history, as ―that which bears all‖ (BW,

188). What was constantly referred back to history as to its ontological ground now becomes the

ground of the historical. Neither historical nor unhistorical, the earth is without history in the

sense of being archi-historical, pre-historical, the ground of history, the ―obscure ground of our

abode‖ (Haar, SE, 57). But what kind of ground? The non-historical ground of history, as

Michel Haar suggests? Or as a ground that grounds insofar as it withdraws? Haar distinguishes

four senses of ―earth‖ in ―The Origin of the Work of Art,‖ the fourth one being that of ―ground‖,

or heimatlicher Grund. Haar notes that the choice of this term shows Heidegger‘s continuity with

metaphysics (the term is ―the same as the metaphysical term designating the foundation and

reason for being‖, SE, 61), although he also notes that for Heidegger Grund means rootedness in

the sense of a ground ‗containing a reserve, the nourishing soil‖ (ibid). In fact, the ―native‖

(heimatlich) ground is not tantamount to a natural basis, but points to the phenomena of home

and homelessness (Heimat, Heim, Heimlich, heimatlish, heimish, and also Unheimlichkeit,

heimatlosigkeit, Unheimischkeit), and thus of a historical dwelling, thereby engaging a human

and historical existence. The earth can thus be said ―prehistorical‖ only in the sense that it is the

site of history, but in no way does it constitute a metaphysical separate foundation ―before‖

history. Haar may thus be conflating the reserve of history, its proper withdrawal, with a non-

historical ground while absolutizing it. For what does Heidegger mean by the earth as ground?
 34

The earth grounds insofar as it withdraws. The earth in ―The Origin of the Work of Art‖

essentially withdraws. As Andrew Mitchell shows, in ―The Origin of the Work of Art,‖ the earth

―supports and bears precisely by withdrawing‖.43 The earth as a withdrawal of the ground, as a

remaining-away [Weg-bleiben] of the ground, as Ab-grund, a ―groundless ground.‖ It is the soil

for historical eventfulness to happen: the earth is the ground of history insofar as it withdraws in

its self-seclusion. History happens from a withdrawal, as Heidegger would claim with respect to

the sendings of the epochs of being. History does not rest upon the earth as on some substrate,

but occurs from the withdrawal proper to the ―sendings‖ of Ereignis. The aporia of history is in

the end the presence of such withdrawal as possibility and origin of historical happening. The

tension between nature and history turned out to designate the strife of earth and world, as the

very possibility of a history always marked by a certain opacity and withdrawal.

43
Andrew Mitchell. ―The Fourfold,‖ in Martin Heidegger. Key Concepts, p. 212.