Martin Heidegger grounds all his philosophy in a central thesis: “‘Being’ was forgotten in the history of Western thought.” This obscure formulation can be stated in simpler terms: We have thought for centuries that the world was made of single objects having an eternal essence. This essence was accessible to thought from the very beginning, leading to the origin of science. The world was thus reduced to an object of knowledge. Now, we cannot separate scientific knowledge from technology. According to Heidegger, the purpose of technology is to predict and control the world. This leads to the reduction of Being to a stock of items available to satisfy our desires.
To counter this instrumental understanding of the world, Heidegger advocates distinguishing between being and beings. Beings are the determinate entities found within the world and thus belong to an ontic horizon. Being, on the other hand, is the source from which beings emerge. It is open and indeterminate, yet always engaged in a historical process of determination. Heidegger refers to this distinction as the ontological difference. At the same time, to overcome the scientific-technological understanding of the world as a “stock,” Heidegger argues that we must conceive of beings as constituting a world—a web of interconnected things that support our immediate practical life.
In a significant world, the spoon is related to the fork and the knife; both take their place on the table, which is accompanied by the chairs, and all these objects find a place in the dining room, etc. This constitutes a totality, only accessible to human beings. Beings exist only for humans and in the context of human affairs and their understanding of the world. This is what justifies speaking of a “totality of beings.” Otherwise, they would be scattered, or they would be linked to each other on their own terms, not according to subjectivity or the human sense. Beings would be indifferent to being understood. They would not be phenomena or representations, or not only. But because for Heidegger things are nothing outside the human world, they can be thought of under a single trait. This allows him to think about the history of Being according to its philosophical interpretations, without further consideration of individual beings. This coarse interpretation of Being leads to a flat world, where all beings share the same fate. The world becomes monothematic, flat, and total. Otherwise, it would not be swallowed in the depths of the subject’s horizon. It loses its own space and time, being forced to obey human time (history) and human space (their spatial existence as the center of the world, which becomes their surroundings). Heidegger fails to liberate beings from the dominance of human power and the overall human perspective.
In this ontology, beings lack genuine individuality, as they are always defined according to human intentions. Therefore, they lack independence, autonomy, self-consistency, and a proper fate. They are always part of human history, even when we do not master our own temporal existence. Things are not free; only humans are. Dasein is transcendence. Beings are trapped in immanence. The world is reduced to an empirical existence, contrasting with the transcendental nature of humans or thought, a purified figure of subjectivity. Heidegger retains the concept of the transcendental as opposed to the empirical world. We could refer to this as the transcendental difference. It is hierarchical (the transcendental over the empirical), unilaterally directed (it flows from the transcendental to the empirical, never otherwise), and dualistic (they never mix, they never confuse or reverse their relationships, as in dialectics). Now, his ontological difference is but a radicalization of the transcendental difference, retaining only the purest trait of subjectivity: freedom or transcendence. Being corresponds to transcendence and possibility; beings correspond to the deterministic and empirical world.
Heidegger saves subjectivity under the name of Dasein, keeping it safe from all objectification coming from philosophy, science, or technology, which wanted to tell us what things, and the subject, are supposed to be in the last instance. But Being is saved under the same premise as Dasein: it will represent possibility, openness, and historicity. Now, the world, as the space of beings, will adopt all the contrary attributes: determination, immanence, and closure. From this follows that the world is nothing. It is materia prima, something without form, without force, awaiting to be “discovered” by human language and human affairs. It is important to note that Heidegger consistently rejected the idea of subjectivity as a shaper of reality and a determinant of one’s destiny. However, his ontology remains rooted in the realm of subjectivity, albeit in a radicalized form. Being is an anonymous originary and free subjectivity before all determination. It retains fundamental traits of subjectivity: transcendental determination of the world, openness, historicity, totality… Being represents Heidegger’s final attachment (die letzte Anhänglichkeit…).
The inflation of a transcendental and free subjectivity (or subjective pre-subjectivity) comes necessarily at the expense of the world. This is how the oblivion of Being turns into the oblivion of beings, of the world and nature. Heidegger’s Being is not nature. Being is pure and absolute subjectivity, deprived of all determination, but with the powers of free/anarchic self-determination. It precedes all knowledge and yet can encompass all beings. It is not a representation, but it manifests itself in language. It is the power of (historical) institutions before all effective and actual institutions. This is why it can be equated with nothingness. Finally, it cannot be constrained because freedom obeys no external power.
But pure possibility is equivalent to concrete impossibility. It is pure disclosure, free givenness without restriction. Let us recall that Schelling’s absolute, understood as pure productivity, was sterile without a counterforce —a restriction embedded in matter —that guided abstract possibility. Where everything is possible, nothing is really and actually possible. Remember the Sufi parable of Buridan’s donkey: a starving donkey stands between two bales of hay. Both were equal in size and distance. They were practically identical. Equally possible, but also indifferent to each other. The donkey could not decide on a single piece of hay and so died of hunger.
The moral of the story is that all possibilities without further qualification are empty and meaningless. Additionally, where the fate of beings does not belong to the beings themselves, but to “meaning” or “sense,” they are not real beings, but rather phenomena and representations existing within the system of everyday life. They are significant things, words, or human values. Beings are thus deprived of all powers of individuation. It is not humans who wait for Being’s revelation, but things, for they are nothing and do not know what to do on their own. They are waiting, as in the Bible, for divine creatures to name them. This is the purest form of biblical revelation. The biblical allusions continue, as the world is deemed powerless and devoid of truth. This is because we live in a fallen state, and only transcendence can save us: a true word from beyond this corrupt world. The world is our prison.
Freedom is at least triple. Freedom from some external power (negative freedom), freedom to do something (positive freedom), and reciprocal freedom (intersubjective freedom). There can be no freedom where one person’s freedom comes at the expense of another’s. Similarly, there can be no subjective freedom if beings are not freed from the absolute subject’s power and control, even the depotentiated forms of meaning and language. Heidegger constantly hinted at these ideas, yet he remained nonetheless a philosopher of subjectivity, history, and language. To concede possibility and autonomy to beings beyond subjectivity would have required attributing to them certain traits of subjectivity. It would have been necessary to speak of nature and matter in such a way that Dasein and language would lose their ontological privilege. We would need to speak of rocks and plants, of fungi and electrons, of energy and work, and of animals beyond their alleged poverty of world.
