not the sending of Being

Concerning the earlier history of philosophy posts from this evening, it occurred to me that someone might make the following objection. If I wish to de-emphasize the importance of individual philosophers and individual arguments, and make the history of philosophy a matter of essentially inscrutable ideas around which clusters of philosophers orbit, is this not the same as Heidegger’s “sending of Being,” in which humans wait around as passive shepherds for something to happen?

No, for two reasons.

First of all, “sending of beingS”, plural, would be more accurate. I’m not saying that being itself is what hides from the groups of thinkers who attempt to articulate it: I don’t even believe in anything like “being itself.” In each case it is a highly concrete, specific idea, but concrete in such a way that no verbal or conceptual articulation ever quite translates it adequately. It is an object, in my own sense of the term.

Second, the fact that philosophers cannot exhaustively describe it by no means implies that it was not generated by human activity. Quite the contrary. An idea isn’t sent mystically from being; the way is paved for it by a lengthy human intellectual and cultural history that precedes it. And human commitment and/or laziness can obviously help speed or slow the emergence of ideas. So, we don’t passively wait for being itself to move the history of philosophy along. But it is also not the case that the history of philosophy is found by summing up the writings of philosophers, any more than the reality of be-bop is exhausted by the total discographies of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. You’re never going to find the perfect incarnation of be-bop in any one song, and neither will you find German Idealism itself in any particular text. Other be-bop tunes could have been written, and 3 or 4 more great German Idealists might well have been squeezed into the same basic time frame without substantially altering the nature of German Idealism. (Just as 100 extra people might have watched the Ali-Frazier fight without altering the fight.)