2 - The Death of Metaphysics and the Birth of Thinking, or Why Did Being and Time Fail to Answer the Question of Being?

Summary

Let us add another item to the long list of lessons still to be learned from Being and Time: We need an ontology of philosophical failure. What is failure in philosophy? I am not asking about failing at philosophy either by failing to do it or by doing it badly. I mean the more deeply puzzling phenomenon of doing philosophy as well as it has ever been done and yet failing in that philosophy, nonetheless. What does it mean to say, rightly, that Being and Time fails, or that it is (in Kisiel’s words) “a failed project”? In what way can and should the most influential philosophical work of the twentieth century be considered a failure, judged by the most sympathetic standards of an “internal” or immanent reading (that is, by its own lights or on its own terms) rather than by some measure “external” to the text itself? What did Being and Time set out to accomplish, and why did it fail to achieve that goal? Is this a failure Heidegger could have avoided or rectified if he had had time to complete the book in the way he originally planned? Or is this a necessary failure, one that follows from some inexhaustibility inherent in the subject matter of Being and Time itself, and so from the impossibly ambitious nature of its attempt to answer “the question of being”? In what way must philosophy fail itself (to employ a polysemic locution), necessarily falling short of its own deepest, perennial ambitions? What is the lesson of such necessary philosophical failure?