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of the experience of anything not already contained in the repertory of monotony, it coins
immutability into the idea of something eternal, that of transcendence. The emancipated
consciousness, which indeed noone has in a state of unfreedom; one, which had control
of itself, as truly autonomous as it hitherto only pretended to be, would not be constantly
afraid of losing itself to an Other secretly, to the powers which rule it. The need for
support, for the alleged substantial, is not as substantial as its self-justification would like;
rather, the sign of the weakness of the I, familiar to psychology as a typical injury
nowadays of human beings. Whoever was no longer oppressed from without and from
within would not seek support, perhaps not even from themselves. Subjects, who might
rescue something of freedom even under heteronomous conditions, suffer less from the
lack of support than the unfree ones, who charge this only too happily to freedom, as
freedom s fault. If humanity no longer had to make themselves into the equivalents of
things, they would need neither a thingly [dinghaft] superstructure, nor would they have
to designate themselves, following the model of thingliness [Dinglichkeit], as invariant.
The doctrine of invariance eternalizes how little has changed, its positivity as what is bad.
To this extent the ontological need is false. Probably metaphysics would dawn on the
horizon only after the fall of invariants. But the consolation is of little help. What would
be right on time, has no time to spare, there is no waiting on what is decisive; whoever
relies on this, encounters the separation of the temporal and the eternal. Because it is false
and nevertheless the answers, which it requires, are blocked by the historical moment, all
questions which have to do with consolation have an antinomical character.
II. Being and Existence
Immanent Critique of Ontology 104-107
The critique of ontological need drives towards the immanent one of ontology. Nothing
which attacks the philosophy of being generally, from outside, would have any power
over it, instead of meeting it on its own turf after Hegel s desiderata, turning its own
power against itself. The motivations and results of Heidegger s thought-movements
permit their reconstruction in retrospect, even where they are not expressed; to be sure
hardly any one of his sentences lacks positional value in the functional context of the
whole. To that extent he is the successor of the deductive systems. The latter s history
already has a wealth of concepts realized from the course of thought, even when one
cannot put a finger on the matter-at-hand [Sachverhalt] which would correspond to them;
the speculative moment of philosophy originates out of the necessity of forming them.
That which is petrified in the thought-movement is to be rendered fluid once more, by
repeatedly following up on its validity, as it were. It does not suffice to demonstrate to the
philosophy of being that, in regards to what it calls being, there would be no such thing.
For it postulates no such giving [Geben]. Instead, such a blindness of being would need
to be deduced in reply to the claim of irrefutability, which employs that blindness. Even
the meaninglessness, whose establishment stirred the triumphal cry of positivism, is
meaningful in the philosophy of history. Because the secularization of the theological
content once deemed objectively binding is not to be revoked, its apologist seeks to
rescue it through subjectivity. The Reformation s doctrine of belief already virtually did
so; it was surely the defining figure of the Kantian philosophy. Since then Enlightenment
has progressed irresistibly, subjectivity has itself become drawn into the process of
demythologization. The chance for rescue sank thereby to a limit-point. Paradoxically its
hope has been ceded to its sacrifice, to an unconditional and at the same time self-
reflecting secularization. Heidegger s approach is true, to the extent that he submits to
this in the negation of traditional metaphysics; he becomes untrue, where he, not at all so
different from Hegel, speaks as if what was thereby to be saved was immediately present.
The philosophy of being fails as soon as it proclaims a meaning in being, which that
thinking dissolved according to its own testimony, to which being itself is still attached as
the conceptual reflection, ever since it has been thought. The meaninglessness of the
word being, at which sound common sense is wont to sneer, is not to be ascribed to
thinking too little or to an irresponsible scattershot thinking. Deposited in it is the
impossibility of grasping or producing positive meaning in the thought, which was the
medium of the objective dissolution of meaning. If one sought to complete the
Heideggerian distinction between being and its logically circumscribing concept, one
would be left, after the subtraction of the existent as well as the categories of abstraction,
with something unknown in hand, which has no advantage over the Kantian concept of
the transcendental thing in-itself except the pathos of its invocation. Therein however the
word thinking, which Heidegger may not renounce, becomes as devoid of content as
what is to be thought: thinking without the concept is nothing of the sort. That this being,
whose thinking would according to Heidegger be the true task, blocks itself off from
every thought-determination, hollows out the appeal to think it. Heidegger s objectivism,
the curse of the bane over the thinking subject, is the true reversed-image of such. In
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