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CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER’S BEING (SEIN)

Paul Gerard Horrigan, Ph.D., 2014.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)1 critiques the history of metaphysics from Plato onwards

as being guilty of formalism and essentialism, and of forgetting Sein or Being, the Being of the

1 Studies on Heidegger: M. GRENE, Martin Heidegger, Hillary House, New York, 1957 ; T. LANGAN, The Meaning of Heidegger, Columbia University Press, New York, 1961 ; A. CHAPELLE, L’ontologie phénoménologique de Heidegger. Un commentaire de Sein und Zeit, Editions universitaires, Paris, 1962 ; W. J. RICHARDSON, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, Nijhoff, The Hague, 1963 ; R. SCHMITT, Martin Heidegger on Being Human: An Introduction to Sein und Zeit, Random House, New York, 1969 ; J. MACQUARRIE, Martin Heidegger, John Knox Press, Richmond, VA, 1969 ; W. MARX, Heidegger and the Tradition, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1970 ; J. M. DEMSKE, Being, Man, and Death: A Key to Heidegger, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 1970 ; J. JAHL, Verso la fine dell’ontologia: studio sull’Introduzione alla metafisica di Heidegger, Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 1971 ; A. DE WAELHENS, La philosophie de Martin Heidegger, Nauwelaerts, Louvain, 1971 ; M. STASSEN, Heideggers Philosophie der Sprache in Sein und Zeit und ihre philosophisch-theologischen Wurzeln, Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, Bonn, 1973 ; C. F. GETHMANN, Verstehen und Auslegung: Das Methodenproblem in der Philosophie Martin Heideggers, Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, Bonn, 1974 ; G. PRAUSS, Erkennen und Handeln in Heideggers Sein und Zeit, Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg and Munich, 1977 ; G. STEINER, Martin Heidegger, The Viking Press, New York, 1978 ; M. MURRAY (ed.), Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1978 ; R. WATERHOUSE, A Heidegger Critique: A Critical Examination of the Existential Phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, Harvester Press/Humanities Press, Sussex/New Jersey, 1981 ; M. BLITZ, Heidegger’s Being and Time and the Possibility of Political Philosophy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1981 ; C. GUIGNON, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge, Hackett, Indiana, 1983 ; J. J. KOCKELMANS (ed.), A Companion to Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, Washington, D.C., 1986 ; F.-W. VON HERMANN, Hermeneutische Phänomenologie des Daseins: Eine Erläuterung von Sein und Zeit. Band I: “Einleitung: Die Exposition der Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein,” Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt, 1987 ; F.-W. VON HERMANN, Hermeneutische Phänomenologie des Daseins: Ein Kommentar zu Sein und Zeit. Band 2: “Erster Abschnitt: Die vorbereitende Fundamentalanalyse des Daseins,” § 9-27, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt, 1987 ; E. F. KAELIN, Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reading for Readers, University Presses of Florida/The Florida State University Press, Tallahassee, 1988 ; G. FIGAL, Martin Heidegger: Phänomenologie der Freiheit, Athenäum, Frankfurt, 1988 ; M. GELVEN, A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Northern Illinois University Press, De Kalb, IL, 1989 ; M. MARASSI, Ermeneutica della differenza: saggio su Heidegger, Vita e Pensiero, Milan, 1990 ; J. J. KOCKLEMANS, Heidegger’s Being and Time: The Analytic of Dasein as Fundamental Ontology, Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America, Washington, D.C., 1990 ; W. BIEMEL, Heidegger, Rohwolt Taschenbuch Verlag, Hamburg, 1991 ; H. DREYFUS, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time,’ Division I, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991 ; M. FLEISCHER, Die Zeitanalysen in Heideggers Sein und Zeit: Aporien, Probleme und ein Ausblick, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, 1991 ; H. DREYFUS and H. HALL (eds.), Heidegger: A Critical Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992 ; G. BERTUZZI, La verità in Martin Heidegger: dagli scritti giovanili a “Essere e tempo,” ESD, Bologna, 1993 ; T. KISIEL, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993 ; C. GUIGNON (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993 ; J. GREISCH, Ontologie et Temporalité: Esquisse d’une interprétation intégrale de Sein und Zeit, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1994 ; T. KISIEL and J. VAN BUREN, Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought, SUNY Press, Albany, 1994 ; L. VOGEL, The Fragile “We”: Ethical Implications of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1994 ; S. MULHALL, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and Being and Time, Routledge, London, 1996 ; C. MACANN (ed.), Critical Heidegger, Routledge, London, 1996 ; M. INWOOD, Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1997 ; J.-M. SALANSKIS, Heidegger, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1997 ; M. INWOOD, The Blackwell Philosopher Dictionaries: A Heidegger Dictionary, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999 ; W. D. BLATTNER, Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999 ; R. POLT,

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things that are (das Sein des Seienden). Focusing on the Being of beings should be the chief preoccupation of metaphysics, as did the pre-Socratics, Heidegger says, but instead, with Plato onwards, the history of metaphysics shows that metaphysicians merely concentrated their efforts on a description of being (ens) or substance (substantia). From Plato onwards, metaphysics, claims Heidegger, was now firmly committed to the exclusive consideration of the ‘to on’ or ‘ens’ of ‘that-which-is,’ namely ‘das Seiende.’ So, in the history of metaphysics Heidegger asserts that we find metaphysicians claiming that they are investigating the nature of being, whereas their affirmations really bear upon this being, a being, beings or the totality of ‘that-which-is.’ In contrast, the Sein of beings (entia) has been obscured in the effort to explore and universalize some particular region of being. In consequence, metaphysics, which is supposed to be a study of Being (Sein), has instead, according to Heidegger, become an ‘ontology,’ namely, a study of ‘that-which-is,’ when it should instead have been an ‘einai-logy,’ i.e., a study of the ‘to be’ of being, as opposed to a investigation of beings (entia). For Heidegger, what this unfortunate history of metaphysics from Plato onwards reveals is that, from almost the beginning of the history of metaphysical speculation, the thought of Western man has been bound to things,

Heidegger: An Introduction, Routledge, London, 1999 ; M. WRATHALL and J. MALPAS (eds.), Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, volume 1, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000 ; G. PATTISON, The Later Heidegger, Routledge, London, 2000 ; M. WRATHALL and J. MALPAS (eds.), Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, volume 2, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000 ; D. O. DAHLSTROM, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001 ; A. LUCKNER, Martin Heidegger: Sein und Zeit: Ein einführender Kommentar, UTB, Stuttgart, 2001 ; C. E. SCOTT, S. M. SCHOENBOHM, D. VALLEGA-NEU, and A. VALLEGA (eds.), Companion to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 2001 ; T. CLARK, Routledge Critical Thinkers: Martin Heidegger, Routledge, London, 2001 ; G. CROWELL, Husserl, Heidegger and the Space of Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Phenomenology, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2001 ; M. KING, A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time, SUNY Press, Albany, 2001 ; T. RENTSCH (ed.), Heidegger: Sein und Zeit. Reihe Klassiker Auslegen, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 2001 ; H. DREYFUS and M. WRATHALL (eds.), Heidegger Reexamined, 4 volumes, Routledge, London, 2002 ; G. HARMAN, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Open Court, Chicago and La Salle, IL, 2002 ; J. YOUNG, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002 ; L. ALWEISS, The World Unclaimed: A Challenge to Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl, Ohio University Press, Athens, 2003 ; T. CARMAN, Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in ‘Being and Time,’ Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003 ; M. WRATHALL, How to Read Heidegger, Granta, London, 2003 ; F.-W. VON HERMANN, Subjekt und Dasein: Grundbegriffe von Sein und Zeit, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt, 2004 ; S. OVERGAARD, Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2004 ; F. RAFFOUL, À chaque fois mien: Heidegger et la question du sujet, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 2004 ; M. WRATHALL, How to Read Heidegger, W. W. Norton, New York, 2005 ; S. MULHALL, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and ‘Being and Time,’ Routledge, London, 2005 ; R. POLT (ed.), Heidegger’s Being and Time: Critical Essays, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2005 ; C. J. WHITE, Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2005 ; H. DREYFUS and M. WRATHALL (eds.), A Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006 ; C. GUIGNON (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006 ; H. CAREL, Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger, Rodopi, New York and Amsterdam, 2006 ; J. MALPAS, Heidegger’s Topology, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006 ; W. BLATTNER, Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reader’s Guide, Continuum, London, 2007 ; S. G. CROWELL and J. MALPAS (eds.), Transcendental Heidegger, Sanford University Press, Stanford, 2007 ; R. SEMBRERA, Rephrasing Heidegger: A Companion to ‘Being and Time,’ The University of Ottawa Press, Ottawa, 2007 ; P. GORNER, Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007 ; D. R. CERBONE, Heidegger: A Guide for the Perplexed, Continuum, London, 2008 ; J. J. SANGUINETI, Il destino dell’essere: Fabro in dialogo con Heidegger, in Crisi e destino della filosofia: Studi su Cornelio Fabro, edited by A. Acerbi, EDUSC, Rome, 2012, pp. 353-377 ; P. P. RUFFINENGO, Differenza ontologica e actus essendi: con san Tommaso oltre Heidegger, “Divus Thomas,” 116.2 (2013), pp. 171-209.

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to objects. Hence, the task to re-discover the Sein of beings (entia) by means of Dasein (man or human existence), who is the “shepherd of Being.”

Nevertheless, even though Heidegger is credited with the critique of the history of

Western metaphysics from Plato onwards as being guilty of essentialist formalism and of forgetting Being (although these charges cannot be attributed to the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas as Heidegger wrongly maintains), Heidegger’s own version of metaphysics (which will instead be for him a fundamental ontolology, which is a phenomenological ontology), like that of most of modern philosophy, is nonetheless immanentistic. Fabro explains in Dall’essere all’esistente (From Being to the Existent): “Existentialism’s program is essentially that of The Critique of Pure Reason: restoring consistency to the doctrine of being by means of the foundation of an experience of being itself; the method is also similar, this is the resolution of ens or the immediate objectivity into the transcendental structure of the subject which makes the appearance of the existent (essente) in being possible; the result is also similar, namely, the recognition of the ‘finiteness’ of the being of existents as a whole and of the constitution of truth as ‘freedom’[…]. All this is profoundly Kantian and is continually insisted on in recent philosophy.”2

Heidegger’s immanentism is manifested by his operating within the sphere of

phenomenological ontology in his philosophical elucidations of his fundamental ontology, which critiques the history of essentialist and formalist metaphysics. He does not attain to being as act in the manner of St. Thomas Aquinas, who works upon the principle of act bequeathed by the Stagirite; rather, Heidegger remains on the level of being as given to thought. So, for Heidegger, Being (Sein) would be phenomenological, the act of presence of the existent in Dasein (man or human existence). It is not, for him, the act of being (actus essendi) of the existent being (ens) as it is in St. Thomas.

In Heidegger, Being (Sein) suffers a reduction to ‘presence to Dasein,’ a ‘presence’ of

Sein is revealed in the form of an illumination (Lichtung). Being (Sein), for him, would be this ‘presence’ as illumination (Die Lichtung selber ist das Sein). However, the truth of Being (Sein) remains veiled in the tradition of metaphysics (which deals with the ontic), he says, and must be brought out by means of fundamental ontology, which is a phenomenological ontology.

From the perspective of Dasein (as subject), Sein is the primordial awareness of the

‘presence’ of all that is present to Dasein. From the perspective of the object, Sein is the gathering together of the truth of Sein in the act of illumination (Lichtung). Insofar as Being (Sein) involves a certain openness and aptness to manifest itself to Dasein, it belongs to the essence of Dasein. ‘Presence’ as such is always and in a certain manner ‘presence’ to the essence of Dasein, insofar as ‘presence’ is a summons which in a certain way makes an appeal to the essence of Dasein.

What then is Being (Sein, esse) for Heidegger? It is clear that Being (Sein, esse), for

Heidegger, is not the existent itself (the Seiende, ens), but is rather something that lights up the existent, the being (ens), and grounds it. For Heidegger, Sein (esse) is the ‘self-presentation of the present,’ the ‘here’and-now self-showing’ of something to Dasein or man. Heideggerian Sein 2 C. FABRO, Dall’essere all’esistente, Morcelliana, Brescia, 1965, p. 338.

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(esse) is reduced to the present temporality lived by Dasein or man from moment to moment. Ontic being is packed in the ontological being of Dasein, which is again a falling into the pit of immanentism and historicism. So, the esse or Sein of Heidegger is very different from the act of being (esse) of St. Thomas Aquinas. For the Angelic Doctor, esse can be infinite or finite; the former is God the unparticipated Pure Act of Being by essence, whereas the latter regards finite esse by participation. Concerning Heidegger’s approach, Fabro writes in Dall’essere all’esistente (From Being to the Existent): “With regard to the Aristotelian concept of ἐνεργὲια, both Heidegger and St. Thomas resist the formalistic temptation, but in opposed directions. For Heidegger, the only meaning of being in its original position of ἐνεργὲια is that of ‘presence,’ of the ‘being present’ of something to consciousness, and Dasein or man’s reality in act is the finding oneself in this presence at the mercy of being. Therefore, the existentia of traditional metaphysics, which was contingent and extrinsic, becomes Dasein, which is interior and constitutive of the being of man and, in the new reality, gathers the demands of both ontological realism and the Bewusstsein of modern thought. In this way, for Heidegger, only of man can it be said that he ‘ex-sists,’ insofar as he is a consciousness that insists in a finite being: minerals, plants and animals are, they do not exist…”3

Heidegger’s ‘presence of the present’ is the being-in-act of the consciousness of Dasein

and could benignly be interpreted as the being inasmuch as it is ‘intentioned’ by thought, as is the intellect described by the Stagirite comes to be brought to act thanks to the intentional presence of the intelligible in act. Thus, Heidegger’s description of Being (Sein) is too much rooted in human thought and unilaterally linked to the truth dimension of being relative to man, not grounded in the primacy of transcendental being (ens). In the final analysis, Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology is not capable of breaking out of the immanentism of the pervasive and influential Kantian transcendentalism, wherein one remains within the internal cognitive conditions of the appearances of being. Though he laudably wished to center his philosophy on the Being (Sein, esse) of beings (entia) and break out of the long history of formalist essentialism, nevertheless, the immanentist Heidegger, with his fundamental ontology which is a phenomenological ontology, had been unable to accomplish an absolute surpassing of the modern Cogito principle of immanence initiated by the father of modern philosophy Descartes.

Jason Mitchell explains that, “in the end, Fabro judges that Heidegger arrests his

‘discourse on foundation’ after an ontic and ontological study and apparently goes no further: ‘Having thus exhausted the ontic and ontological discourse of foundation, the metaphysical discourse of the act of being should begin: but Heidegger stops here and gives no indication of wanting to go further. He stops, then, at being in the sense of ‘presence,’ namely as being-in-act’ and does not yet know the ‘being-act’ which is esse in the sense of St. Thomas’s actus essendi.’4 What is more, Heidegger’s ‘presence of the present’ is the being-in-act of consciousness. So when Heidegger critiques formalism and the principle of consciousness, his own conception of the reality of presence is ‘nothing more than the actualistic version of the identity of esse essentiae and esse existentiae affirmed by anti-Thomistic Scholasticism (especially Scotistic).’5”6

3 C. FABRO, op. cit., pp. 409-410. 4 C. FABRO, La determinazione dell’essere tomistico, TPM, p. 259. 5 Ibid. 6 J. MITCHELL, Being and Participation: The Method and Structure of Metaphysical Reflection According to Cornelio Fabro, Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, Rome, 2012, p. 217.

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Mitchell also observes, in his summary of Fabro’s interpretation of Heidegger’s Sein, that “Fabro also discerns a convergence-divergence between Heidegger’s Sein and St. Thomas’s Esse. Fabro writes that both thinkers see being as act, yet Heidegger’s being is subject to the flux of time, while St. Thomas’s being expresses the fullness of act: ‘Being for Heidegger, as for St. Thomas, is neither phenomenon nor noumenon, neither substance nor accident, it is simply act: but while Heidegger’s being is given in the flux of time by the consciousness of man, Thomistic being expresses the fullness of the act which possesses itself essentially (God) or which rests at the heart of every being, as the primordial participated energy which sustains it outside of nothingness.’7

“In conclusion, Fabro holds that Heidegger is a ‘prisoner of an unauthentic conception of

being which has its poles in the scholastic plexus of essentia-existentia and in the Einstellung or phenomenological framework (impostazione) of being as pure appearance, as presence of the present.’8 Secondly, ‘One understands then how for Heidegger Sein (or Anwesen) is radically finite. For St. Thomas, the existent is radically finite, but esse as emergent act (or esse per essentiam) is absolutely infinite and only with respect to pure esse does one comprehend the finiteness of the creature as participant in esse.’ Thus, Heidegger’s Sein is only presence and is not founded on God, Ipsum Esse Subsistens: for Heidegger the foundation is the ‘nothingness’ that makes the being of presence as presence of the world emerge.9”10

James D. Collins’s Critique of Heidegger on Metaphysics: “As Heidegger now

understands this science, metaphysics is the general theory of that-which-is as such and in its totality. This gives to metaphysics a valid but limited field of inquiry. It can no longer be accepted at its face value as the study of being as being; rather, it investigates the nature and field of that-which-is, die Seienheit des Seienden. In the course of such a study, being itself is connoted but never formally considered under its own conditions…In order to complete his ‘destruction’ or undermining of the history of ontology, Heidegger is sometimes compelled to minimize the significance of conflicts among different metaphysical systems. He remarks that it is futile to attempt to refute any particular system, since the pros and cons belong equally to that strife of things and thoughts which the early Greek philosophers perceived to be at the heart of the things that are. Hence Heidegger is unduly indulgent in accepting Hegel’s synthesis of all previous doctrines as a successful accomplishment rather than as a one-sided claim. He is anxious to recapitulate all Western speculation in a culminating philosophy and then to point out that this philosophy, along with all its subaltern systems, remains within the restricted sphere of that-which-is. No fair hearing is given to those who interpret the development of metaphysics in terms of a number of fundamental challenges, shifts of viewpoint, and genuinely total disagreements about being as well as about the things that are. Particularly unfortunate is Heidegger’s failure to consult the effort of St. Thomas to resolve the dualistic Greek view of metaphysics. In the Thomistic outlook, there is a fruitful and humanly unavoidable tension between the subject and object of metaphysics. Our mind finds being as exhibited under the

7 C. FABRO, Partecipazione e causalità, SEI, Turin, 1961, p. 43. 8 C. FABRO, Intorno al fondamento dell’essere, p. 234. 9 See C. FABRO, Dell’ente, dell’essere, del nulla, p. 241; C. FABRO, Il posto di Giovanni…, p. 57: “Heidegger himself, repeating Leibniz’s unsettling question, has opted for nothingness. ‘Nothingness is its founding reference’ as the depth or being of the foundation.’ 10 J. MITCHELL, op. cit., pp. 217-218.

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categorical modes of finite, sensible being (the subject of metaphysics). The object of the metaphysical enterprise is to obtain as full an understanding of being as such, the diverse realizations of the act of being, and the supreme causes of being, as is humanly possible from the starting point in sense experience. A metaphysics of this sort is not a mere interlude between the Greeks and Hegel. Hence it is not properly dealt with in Heidegger’s historical criticism of metaphysics as a study of that-which-is.”11

Cornelio Fabro’s Critique of Heidegger on the Act of Being (Esse): “Heidegger includes

Thomist philosophy in his accusation of the ‘formalization’ of Being effected from the time of Plato and Aristotle (down to and including idealism and Sartre). (Cf. Sein und Zeit, § 20, p. 93; English translation, Being and Time, p. 126). Disoriented by Scotus, Heidegger has not managed to notice the major and salutary upset effected by St. Thomas with his own notion of esse, understood as an emergent intensive act, diametrically opposed to existentia, understood as ‘actualization of an essence’(Verwiklichung einer Essenz); nor has Heidegger grasped the radical implications of Aquinas’ concept of God as ipsum esse subsistens, when that concept is seen in the light of this Thomist notion of esse. (Cf. M. Heidegger, PLBH, p. 71).”12

Fabro on Why Heidegger’s Immanentism Makes Him Incapable of Answering the Question ‘Why is There Being and Not Non-being?’: “Heidegger stands entirely outside the Christian tradition of a Creator-God and is therefore precluded from any clear assertion concerning a creation on the part of God or on any question relating to the first origin of Being and of the spirit. After devoting the whole of his labor and energies to the denunciation of the forgetfulness of being occasioned by Western philosophy’s confinement of Being into the subjectivity of essence, Heidegger has himself found no better solution than to entrust the truth to a new form of subjectivity…the Hedeggerian Sein selbst (Being itself), as distinct from the Hegelian Sein selbst presented as the ‘definition of God,’ is atheistic in content, structure and position, inasmuch as it is the coming-to-presence of the finite by the instrumentality of a finite being condemned to a finite destiny like man’s. Heidegger’s Sein (Being)…simply affirms the finite. Heidegger’s Being still remains finite in its very structure, which is the structure of the phenomenal, of the coming-to-presence, of the ‘appearing.’ And so the basic question: Why is there being and not non-being?, remains unanswered.”13

Fabro on the Roots of Heidegger’s Immanentism of His ‘Fundamental Ontology’ in the

Immanentist Transcendental Idealism (‘Transcendentalism’) of Kant: “The Heideggerian assertion that Being is not a product of thought but thought rather an ‘event’ of beings, – this is not yet realism, although it is not idealism any more either, at least in the systematic sense. But it is still immanentism or loyalty to modern-style transcendentalism, in the sense that it bases truth on the a priori category of the subject who is man. The Heideggerian question itself already virtually contains the confirmation of this modern-style transcendentalism, drawn directly from Kant but identical with that radical doubt which forms the hidden ‘ground’ of the principle of immanentism, from which (as we have tried to show throughout the entire course of these, our investigations) there flows the absence of God in modern philosophy.

11 J. D. COLLINS, The Existentialists: A Critical Study, Henry Regnery, Gateway edition, Chicago, 1952, pp. 182-183. 12 C. FABRO, God in Exile: Modern Atheism, Newman Press, Westminster, MD, 1968, p. 927. 13 C. FABRO, op. cit., p. 929.

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“In classical realism, Being is not the ‘posited’ but the ‘positing’ in relation to consciousness, to mind: consciousness is actualized by being, not just anyhow but in a fashion clearly indicating that being is the true ground of consciousness: there is consciousness because there is Being and to the extent that there is being and in accord with the forms of being. Thus the primordial proposition of classical realism is an affirmation of being as self-sufficient and radically primal: Being, as such, suffices unto itself and thereby is the act and ground with respect to consciousness. In this first moment, wherein Being, as ground, actualizes consciousness, there does not and cannot enter into the equation any shadow of non-being, of nothingness, for Being is light and actuality of presence and therefore self-witnessing; and it is the consciousness of being that is ‘posited.’ A ‘being’ that would lead the enquirer back to the positing transcendentality of consciousness as its ground would necessarily be something posited by consciousness; and if being is posed by consciousness, it is already de-posed or subordinated to consciousness, to the mind as a function of consciousness, in accord with one or other of the forms of the principle of immanentism.”14

14 C. FABRO, op. cit., pp. 932.