Summary: Being and Time (page 9)

We have seen that the being [of Dasein] finds its meaning in temporality ¹; it is therefore inscribed within a history—or, to speak in ontological terms, historiality is the temporal mode of being of Dasein itself.

Here again, 'historiality' (or 'historial') is an ontological term, as opposed to 'historical', which remains on the ontic level.

Let us clarify the relation between these different terms:

Temporality is the condition of possibility of historiality: it is because Dasein appears in time that it has a history.

Historiality is itself the condition of possibility of history and of what is historical: The determination of historiality comes before what we call history (the course of world history). Historiality designates the constitution of being of Dasein's "having-come-down-to-itself" as such, a provenance on the basis of which alone something like a "world history" and a historical belonging to that history is possible.

If Dasein has a historial mode of being, then it is not quite right to say that the human being has this or that past; in truth, it is its past: Dasein is each time, in its factical being, as and "what" it already was. Whether explicitly or not, it is its past; and it is not so merely in the sense that its past, as it were, "trails along behind" it, that it "has" a past as a piece of equipment ready-to-hand which would now and then display its effects in it. Dasein "is" its past in the mode of its being.

Dasein is its past, if only because it already finds itself caught up in an understanding of itself—of what a Dasein is—inherited from the past. This understanding shapes its actions to some extent, in that it provides a model and, with it, norms—thus shaping its present and its future: In every guise of being that is proper to it, and therefore also in the understanding of being that belongs to it, Dasein is caught up in a traditional interpretation of Dasein, and has grown up in it. It is on the basis of this interpretation that it first understands itself, and, in a certain sense, constantly understands itself. This understanding opens up the possibilities of its being and governs them.

Dasein may forget or neglect this fundamental historiality of its being. But it may also become the object of deeper interest, of explicit appropriation, of study, or even of a kind of claim. This is where we encounter the concept of tradition:

Dasein can discover tradition, preserve it, explicitly hand it down further. The discovery of tradition, the opening-up of what it "hands down" and of the way in which it does so, can be taken up as an independent task.

If Dasein has a history, then the question of being—which is a distinctive possibility of Dasein—has one as well. It is then the philosophical tradition that must be interrogated, as the bearer and vehicle of this history.

The problem is that this tradition hands this history down while at the same time covering it over. It distorts what it transmits, if only because it severs an idea or a theory from its origin. A concept is then used as though it were self-evident, as though it went without saying, with no awareness of where it comes from or how it has reached us:

In thus attaining supremacy, tradition, far from making what it "hands down" accessible, first and for the most part covers it over. It delivers this transmitted content over to "self-evidence" and blocks access to the original "sources" from which the traditional categories and concepts were once drawn, in part authentically. Tradition even goes so far as to plunge such provenance completely into oblivion. It suppresses even the need to grasp the necessity of any such return.

Tradition uproots the historiality of Dasein to such an extent that Dasein moves only within an interest in a thousand forms of types, trends and philosophical standpoints such as can be found in even the most distant and foreign cultures, and seeks, through this interest, to conceal its own lack of ground.

This magnificent passage probably made a deep impression on Gadamer, one of Heidegger's earliest students at the University of Freiburg in 1923, four years before the publication of Being and Time. Gadamer would devote a large part of his later work to the notion of tradition, seeking to rehabilitate it against his master.

For what Heidegger calls for is nothing less than a destruction of the ontological tradition. By this he does not mean a pure and simple jettisoning of that tradition, nor some facile relativising of ontological standpoints. To make himself understood, he turns to a metaphor drawn from metallurgy: the task is to re-animate the hardened tradition. What does this mean?

A piece of iron heated to white heat hardens as it cools, losing the 'life'—the heat—that animated it and allowed it to take on any form. In the same way, when a concept first emerges in a particular age and society, it carries within itself a life bound up with its act of birth. Then the age changes, and the concept is passed on by tradition. Uprooted, it loses the life that once lent it legitimacy: it comes to resemble that cooled piece of iron—still usable, but dead.

What Heidegger is aiming at is to re-animate the hardened tradition—to recover the life a concept bore within itself at its origin, in its own time. The point is not to discard tradition, or to relativise it, but to revive it—to rediscover the original fire that has gradually been extinguished in the process of transmission.

Heidegger therefore invites us—rather than turning to 'exotic' thought from other cultures such as Zen Buddhism—to recover the original meaning of the words we ourselves use: truth, being, beauty… The results, he suggests, will be every bit as surprising and 'exotic'. We think we possess the meaning of these words, without realising that their original meaning has been lost in the very process by which it has been handed down to us. We must understand, for example, how the term 'truth' that we commonly use derives from the Greek aletheia: how this notion, transmitted to us across the centuries by tradition, has at the same time been so profoundly transformed as to become what we now call 'truth'.

We might put it this way: our most familiar concepts may well be the ones furthest from us.

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Heidegger: A Close Reading