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2The Event without Reason

ONE CAN TRACE the twisting free of the event from the categories of causality, reason, and subjectivity in Nietzsche’s destructive genealogy of the philosophical tradition, as well as in Heidegger’s deconstruction of the principle of reason. If the event in its eventfulness has been neutralized in the metaphysical tradition, enframed in an entire metaphysical and epistemological apparatus, then Nietzsche is a key figure in the task of thinking the event: for it was he who endeavored to provide a deconstructive genealogy of this tradition so as to reveal the processes and events that subtend it. Nietzsche’s destructive genealogy of metaphysical concepts consists in exposing their fictitious nature and overturning the values they carry while returning to the origins of the metaphysical tradition’s pathological formations in order to determine how its concepts have been constructed, for what purpose, and with what motives. It is a matter for Nietzsche of evaluating the value of our values, following the thread of life. “What are our evaluations and moral tables worth? What is the outcome of their rule? For whom? In relation to what?—Answer: for life.”¹ Our concepts are symptoms of a certain state of life, and metaphysical constructs are to be read as a reaction against life, if it is the case that the “true world” “has been constructed by contradicting the actual world.”²

Nietzsche’s deconstruction of our metaphysical concepts is first a critique of conceptuality as such. A concept is never the grasp of some essence, of some objective fact, but a human, all-too-human invention, a creation of our mind that is then accepted by convention. By definition, a concept has no objective validity, no “truth-claim.” In a sense, a concept is from the outset, as a concept, something “false,” what Nietzsche calls a “lie.” This recognition cannot but cast a doubt on our traditional beliefs in our concepts and their objectivity. The reliance upon the traditional concepts of objectivity and truth finds itself shaken: our concepts are beginning to appear as beliefs, as constructs. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche explains that “man has for long ages believed in the concept and names of things as in aeternae veritates,” that “he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world.”³ Of course, only much later did it dawn on humans that “in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error” and that we do not possess categories that would give access to a world in itself. This passage indicates the intimate relation between the formations of concepts and the constitutive role of language. Knowledge, concepts, truth itself are here referred back to language, conceived of as a sort of symbolic activity performed for the sake of life’s needs. The name “truth” is the designation of such conventional agreement deposited in language. “That which shall count as ‘truth’ from now on is established. That is to say, a uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and the legislation of language likewise established the first laws of truth.”⁴ The link between language and a corresponding objective reality finds itself severed, as it immediately appears in Nietzsche’s questions: “And besides, what about these linguistic conventions themselves? Are they perhaps products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth? Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” (OTL, 81). Clearly, for Nietzsche, they are not, and it is not.

Conceptuality proves to be a linguistic phenomenon. In fact, for Nietzsche reason is nothing but a metaphysics of language, a “crude fetishism” with respect to language. “In its origin, language belongs to the time of the most rudimentary type of psychology: We encounter a crude set of fetishes when we become conscious of the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language—or, to put it plainly, reason” (TI, 20). Language finds itself severed from any ideal meaning that would anchor it: it is but a material, physiological production: “What is a word? It is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus” (OTL, 81). The origin of language is not an ideal sphere of intelligibility, but a material production, a radically subjective phenomenon. In one statement, Nietzsche has posited both the material basis of language (nerve stimulus) and the metaphoricity of sense (copy or image). Further, this metaphoricity of sense is as it were unhinged, for it is not anchored in any proper, literal, ideal meaning. The referentiality or transference inherent in metaphor (a word for another) is not about connecting a word with a reality, but rather heterogeneous and always subjective realms. “To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image: first metaphor. The image, in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one” (OTL, 82). Between these spheres, there is no relation of causality, but rather of translation and invention: “For between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue—for which there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force” (OTL, 86). One notes in this transference the radical absence of any necessity (whether natural or otherwise): “even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one” (OTL, 87). Both the material basis of language and the metaphoricity of sense collapse the possibility of an objective causality. This is why Nietzsche is able to state that to infer from the nerve stimulus a cause outside of us is a prejudice of reason, of the principle of sufficient reason: “the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a cause outside us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the principle of sufficient reason” (OTL, 81). No natural connection whatsoever with sense is here allowed. Arbitrary designations are mistakenly taken to be the exact descriptions of the things themselves. However, when one returns to the material genesis of language and sense, one can no longer invoke such thing in itself. “The ‘thing in itself’ (which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and something not in the least worth striving for,” concludes Nietzsche (OTL, 82). One can see how, ironically, it is the activity of the mind that invented such fictions as “objectivity,” “essences,” and “causes,” precisely on the basis of a forgotten metaphorical activity. A metaphor is mistakenly taken for a nonmetaphor, and that oblivion is what is called a concept! Man “forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves” (OTL, 86). Hence Nietzsche’s celebrated passage on truth, where truth is declared nothing but a fluid complex of metaphors: “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins” (OTL, 84).

We may believe that through our linguistic designations, through our concepts, we know things as they truly are, as if we could know “something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers”; in fact, “we possess nothing but metaphors for things—metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities” (OTL, 83). A concept is the result, the trace, or the residue of a metaphor, and the formation of concepts is an artistic creation. “Anyone who has felt this cool breath [of logic] will hardly believe that even the concept—which is as bony, foursquare, and transposable as a die—is nevertheless merely the residue of a metaphor, and that the illusion which is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the mother, then the grandmother of every single concept” (OTL, 85). Indeed, a concept must erase the individual experience from which it was formed. As a general representation, it necessarily negates “the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin” so that “we obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual” (OTL, 85). This negation of life through concepts takes place precisely as the concept also embraces and includes within it “countless more or less similar cases—which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal” (OTL, 83). Each concept “arises from the equation of unequal things” (OTL, 83), abstracting from the differential uniqueness of experience. In fact, as Nietzsche emphasizes, “one leaf is never totally the same as another,” which is another way of saying that the concept “leaf,” as any concept, does not exist and only has an imaginary existence. The greatest paradox, of course, is that such a nonexistent notion is then taken to be what is most real! Nietzsche points to this paradox when he notes that “the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition to the leaves, there exist in nature the ‘leaf’: the original model according to which all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted—but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen turned out to be a correct, trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model” (OTL, 83). A concept kills and mummifies metaphorical life, and it has been philosophers’ “idiosyncrasy” to essentialize, dehistoricize, and eternalize metaphorical life. These abstractions—concepts—are ways for humans to secure a stable “conventional” construct of reality on the basis of a forgetting of the primal unstable and creative metaphoricity of life; they are like the hardening, petrification, or congealing of life. “Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose, security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency” (OTL, 86).

Any concept is a construct, an invention, a fiction, what Nietzsche calls an “error.” By “error,” of course, Nietzsche does not mean a falsehood or untruth that could be corrected: rather, it points to the fictitious nature of any concept whatsoever. Nietzsche’s critique does not consist in denouncing the falsity of a concept or a judgment: rather, it is to expose the lie as lie. In Ecce Homo, he writes: “I was the first to discover the truth by being the first to experience lies as lies—smelling them out.”⁵ Conceptuality, along with the “fictions of logic,” rest for Nietzsche on assumptions “with which nothing in the real world corresponds” (HH, 16), as, for instance, the assumption of the equality of things, the identity of the thing, causality or the I-cause, free will, agency, intention and accountability, and so on. These categories, which have become idols of worship and belief in the Western tradition (along with the other prejudices of reason that force us “to posit unity, identity, duration, substance, cause, thinghood, being,” making us “entangled in error, forced into error” [TI, 20]), are exposed as fictions by way of a deconstructing genealogy that will consist in dismantling idealistic fictions in order to uncover the processes—the events—at play within them. Each time, Nietzsche will attempt to reveal the events that subtend our conceptual fictions. Now, two fundamental errors stand in the way of letting the event come forth in its eventfulness: the reliance on causality and the belief in the subject.

The Event without Cause

As we saw, for Nietzsche a concept is an imaginary entity. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes the claim that, over “immense periods of time,” the intellect “produced nothing but errors”⁶ and that such a concept as that of causality, that is, the duality of cause and effect, “probably never exists” (GS, 172). In fact, cause and effect are not in the least properties of things, but interpretations. They are to be taken as useful instruments, but not for explanation: “one should use ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ only as pure concepts, that is to say, as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication—not for explanation.”⁷ There is no causality as some objective order or lawfulness. Rather, cause and effect are fictions that we have invented. “It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed ‘in itself,’ we act once more as we have always acted—mythologically” (BGE, 29). Nietzsche emphasizes the artificial character of cause and effect “explanation,” stressing how one separates in the flux of life “two separate things,” cause and effect, whereas there is but “a manifold one-after-another.” Nietzsche sees the flux of becoming whereas metaphysical rationalist thought invented a causal order, that is, the abstraction of a cause distinguished from the effect. However, causality does not exist: “Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which we isolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only as isolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it” (GS, 173). Ultimately for Nietzsche, the cause and effect structure is a construct concealing the manifold continuum of life, an artificial construct that we impose on the flux of life. “The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us; actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddenness there is an infinite number of processes that elude us. An intellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a flux and not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division and dismemberment—would repudiate the concept of cause and effect and deny all conditionality” (GS, 173).

This critique of causality is pursued in “The Four Great Errors” in Twilight of the Idols, where Nietzsche shows that the belief in the fictions of consciousness or the ego as “internal fact” rests upon the belief in the will as an efficient cause. Of all these myths regarding such internal facts, Nietzsche singles out the belief in the will as cause, “Of these three ‘internal facts’ which seemed to vouch for causality, the first and most convincing is the ‘fact’ of will as cause” (TI, 32), the so-called internal causality. Causality, and in particular the inner causality of the will, is for Nietzsche a pure invention: “In every age we have believed that we know what a cause is: but where did we get our knowledge, or more precisely, our belief that we have knowledge about this? From the realm of the famous ‘internal facts,’ none of which has up to now proved to be factual” (TI, 31). Ultimately, the issue for Nietzsche is “whether we really recognize the will as efficient, whether we believe in the causality of the will” (BGE, 48). In fact, he claims, “Today we don’t believe any word of all that anymore” (TI, 32). The will is not the cause of the event, but an epiphenomenon, a mere superficial accompaniment. “The ‘internal world’ is full of optical illusions and mirages: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, so it no longer explains anything either—it just accompanies events, and it can even be absent” (TI, 32). The will loses its role as motive to become a surface phenomenon, an accompanying thought: “The so-called ‘motive’: another error. Just a surface phenomenon of consciousness, an accessory to the act, which conceals the antecedentia of an act rather than representing them” (TI, 32). A similar inversion as that of the belief in causality is at play in our belief in the will as cause. Nietzsche explains that we believe ourselves to be “causal in the act of willing; there, at least, we thought that we were catching causality in the act” (TI, 31). As will be covered, the belief in the will gives us the certainty that we are the cause of our actions, giving rise to our belief in the subject.

This position of a cause is an error in several senses. There is first the error, the confusion, or the inversion of cause and effect. In the opening lines of “The Fours Great Errors,” Nietzsche insists, “There is no error more dangerous than confusing the effect with the cause” (TI, 30), an inversion that is of course the symptom of a more fateful inversion, that of values with respect to life, an inversion that condemns and negates life. This confusion of cause and effect, which Nietzsche calls “the genuine corruption of reason,” and one of “humanity’s oldest and most contemporary customs,” historically bears the name of religion and morality: “Every statement formulated by religion and morality contains it” (TI, 30). The error lies in the denial of the material basis of life and the idealization of an abstract principle, constructed after the fact, and mistakenly and retroactively posited as cause and origin. The inversion of cause and effect reflects the inversion of material existence into an ideality, an inversion that Nietzsche in turn would precisely seek to invert. Based on such inversion and abstraction, causality is made to play the role of the foundation of events. How does this happen? Through the imaginary position of a cause beneath the event, through the retroactive imputing of such cause to the event. Of course, and I will return to this question shortly, one needs to bear in mind that the doer as such is also a fiction and that in fact the very opposition between a doer and a deed is an error. This error itself rests upon what appears here as a retroactive attribution of a cause to an event by way of an inversion of temporality.

The error of causality pertains to this phenomenon of a retroactive assigning of the cause to the event, which Nietzsche describes as an inversion of temporality, an Umkehrung der Zeit. The focus of Nietzsche’s analysis bears on the peculiar temporality of cause assigning and the reversal of temporality that takes place in the process of an a posteriori imputation of a cause. Nietzsche calls this phenomenon the error of “false causality,” once again pointing to the invention of an imaginary causality to give an account of the event. This delusion lies in the retroactive assigning of a cause, presenting the paradoxical temporality of an after-the-fact (re)construction that is then posited as having existed before the event. “I’ll begin with dreams: a particular sensation, for instance, a sensation due to a distant cannon shot, has a cause imputed to it [untergeschoben] afterwards [nachträglich]” (TI, 32–33). Once the cause has been introduced, after the event, then, it is then said to exist prior to the event, an occurrence that has now been given an intelligibility: “In the meantime, the sensation persists in a kind of resonance: it waits, as it were, until the drive to find causes allows it to come into the foreground—not as an accident anymore, but as ‘meaning’” (TI, 33). As Nietzsche explains, the sensation then becomes part of “a whole little novel in which precisely the dreamer is the protagonist.” Everyone knows the experience in a dream when the dreamer hears a sound that then becomes included in the narrative in a causal way. What was first a sheer event, perceived outside any causal network, is then integrated in the dream and reconstructed as causal origin in the narration. The event has been reconstructed and is now said to be happening according to causality (one recalls here Kant’s analogies of experience, in which it is “deduced transcendentally” that events occur according to the law of causality). Of course, the cause was produced after the fact and then reinjected as that from which the event occurred. “The cannon shot shows up in a causal way, and time seems to flow backward. What comes later, the motivation, is experienced first, often with a hundred details that flash by like lightning; the shot follows. . . . What has happened? The representations generated by a certain state of affairs were misunderstood as the cause of this state of affairs” (TI, 33).

Now, one must invert this inversion of temporality and posit that the event happens before the cause. Only after something has happened can one begin to look for causes. That something happens is the original fact. In that sense, there is nothing before the event. This is why Claude Romano states, in Event and World: “Pure beginning from nothing, an event, in its an-archic bursting forth, is absolved from all antecedent causality,”⁸ or also: “An event has no cause, because it is its own origin” (EW, 42). It is traditionally admitted that events are determined by prior causes, and we saw how Kant insisted that “everything that happens presupposes a previous state, upon which it follows without exception according to a rule.”⁹ But do events simply follow predetermined sequences? If this was the case, would they still be events in the proper sense? Instead, there is the possibility of recognizing that an event, “worthy of the name,” as Derrida would say, represents the surge of the new through which precisely it does not “follow” from a previous cause. By introducing the new in the world, indeed by bringing forth a new world, does an event not disqualify prior causal contexts and networks? To that extent, an event could not be “explained” by prior events because its occurrence has transformed the very context that existed and introduced a new one. Indeed, as Claude Romano explains, “an event is nothing other than this impersonal reconfiguration of my possibilities and of the world” (EW, 31). With the event, a new self and a new world come to be. Therefore, as Jean-Luc Marion writes, the event is disconnected from the cause, has no cause: “the event does not have an adequate cause and cannot have one. Only in this way can it advance on the wings of a dove: unforeseen, unusual, unexpected, unheard of, and unseen.”¹⁰ The event in the proper sense exceeds causal orders, “any horizon of meaning and any prior condition. . . . It is a pure bursting forth from and in itself, unforeseeable in its radical novelty, and retrospectively establishing a rupture with the entire past” (EW, 42). A new understanding of temporality is here called for: not a ruled sequence unfolding from the past to the present, but a surge coming from the future, transforming the entire complex of temporality, and indeed transforming the past itself. Ultimately causality proves inadequate to the eventfulness of the event. Does the very eventfulness of the event not precisely point to a certain excess with respect to the enframing of causality? Can an event worthy of its name be even conditioned by a causality? Or should one not assume, as Jean-Luc Marion invites us to do, the excess of the event with respect to causality? Marion speaks of “the character and the dignity of an event—that is, an event or a phenomenon that is unforeseeable (on the basis of the past), not exhaustively comprehensible (on the basis of the present), not reproducible (on the basis of the future), in short, absolute, unique, happening. We will therefore call it a pure event.”¹¹

The event happens first. The cause is added after the fact. “In summa: an event is neither effected nor does it effect. Causa is a capacity to produce effects that has been super-added to the events” (WP, 296). There are no causes: the cause is added after the fact as an interpretation (Nietzsche speaks of an “interpretation by causality” as a “deception,” WP, 296) insofar as it is sought. The law of causality “has been projected by us into every event.” For Nietzsche, what he significantly calls the “drive to find causes” arises out of a need. Causality is not the order of things but a subjective quest, a subjective need. The drive to produce a cause arises out of a perception of a lack (lack of intelligibility, lack of understanding) that needs to be supplemented. In fact, the event manifests the lack of cause in such a way that we are driven to seek it at all costs: “It’s never enough for us just to determine the mere fact that we find ourselves in such and such a state: we admit this fact—become conscious of it only if we’ve given it some kind of motivation” (TI, 33). The cause itself is lacking. An event, in its eventfulness and givenness, is indeed happening devoid of a cause: it happens first, from and as itself. Phenomenologically, the event happens in a noncausal way, in an anarchic irruption disrupting any order (we recall here how Kant described freedom as rebellious to causality, as lawless), with a meaning that is either missing, partial, or delayed, still to come, en souffrance. The response to this “suffering” is the drive to find causes, or rather, causal interpretations. We never “find” actual causes (there are no such things), but invent causal (mis)interpretations, which ultimately are nothing but memories and mental associations with other past events. Causality is a remembering. “Memory, which comes into play in such cases without our knowing it, calls up earlier states of the same kind, and the causal interpretations that are rooted in them—but not their causation” (TI, 33). Nietzsche sees a lack of reason at the root of all our cause-seeking: “Most of our general feelings—every kind of inhibition, pressure, tension, and explosion in the play and counterplay of the organs, and in particular the state of the nervus sympaticus [sympathetic nervous system]—arouse our drive to find causes: we want to have a reason for feeling that we’re in such and such a state—a bad state or a good state” (TI, 33). It is not enough to simply stay with the fact that has occurred. What is lacking is a reason, a ground, a cause, for our existence and our feelings. What is felt is then nothing else than the groundlessness of existence itself, and a cause would provide a ground that could provisionally suture the lack. A cause then becomes the placeholder of a lack, the placeholder of a nothing.

The need for causes arises out of a fear. If causality is rooted in the drive to find causes, in turn this drive responds to a fear, and finding a cause appeases our fears. This is why Nietzsche insists that knowledge is about seeking to make the unfamiliar familiar, reducing the alien character of the pure event and thereby increasing our sense of control. “There is no such thing as a sense of causality, as Kant thinks. One is surprised, one is disturbed, one desires something familiar to hold on to” (WP, 297). The drive to causality is the drive to transform something unfamiliar into something familiar, a motivation that lends itself to a psychological analysis and genealogy by Nietzsche: “A psychological explanation of this error.— Tracing something unfamiliar back to something familiar alleviates us, calms us, pacifies us, and in addition provides a feeling of power. The unfamiliar brings with it danger, unrest, and care—our first instinct is to do away with these painful conditions. First principle: some explanation is better than none” (TI, 33). What is considered “true” is most often what makes us feel good, and the first representation that explains the unknown as familiar feels so good that one considers it true: “Proof of pleasure (‘strength’) as criterion of truth” (TI, 33). In The Gay Science, Nietzsche further characterizes this making-familiar of knowledge. In paragraph 355, for instance, entitled “The origin of our concept of ‘knowledge,’” Nietzsche asks: “What is it that the common people take for knowledge? What do they want when they want ‘knowledge’? Nothing more than this: something strange is to be reduced to something familiar” (GS, 300). Even in the philosophical tradition, Nietzsche insists, knowledge is a factor of appropriation of the unknown, that is, the unfamiliar. “And we philosophers—have we really meant more than this when we have spoken of knowledge? What is familiar means what we are used to so that we no longer marvel at it, our everyday, some rule in which we are stuck, anything at all in which we feel at home” (GS, 300). What could drive such a quest? Clearly no longer in this context some disinterested concern for knowledge as objective truth about things in themselves. Rather, a fear before the alien and uncanny character of the pure event. “Look, isn’t our need for knowledge precisely this need for the familiar, the will to uncover under everything strange, unusual, and questionable something that no longer disturbs us? Is it not the instinct of fear that bids us to know? And is the jubilation of those who attain knowledge not the jubilation over the restoration of a sense of security?” (GS, 300–301).

Causality is a fiction created out of fear. “Thus, the drive to find causes is conditioned and aroused by the feeling of fear” (TI, 34). The question “why,” the leading question of the principle of reason, is born out of that fear. The cause alleviates that fear. A proof of this is that the cause given is always something familiar, something we already know, so that “the new, the unexperienced, the alien, is excluded as a cause” (TI, 34). And the “fact that something already familiar, something we have experienced, something inscribed in memory is posited as the cause, is the first consequence of this need” (TI, 34, trans. slightly modified). What matters in the position of a causality is to suppress the feeling of the strange, that is, the eventfulness of the event as ungrounded. This is why another motif in the tradition that has served to suppress the groundlessness of the event is that of the subject, a subjectum or ground. It will also be necessary to deconstruct the notion of the subject in order to think the event in its eventfulness.

The Event without Subject

One of the constitutive errors of the metaphysical tradition’s reliance on causality is the imposition of causes on every existence, on every event, as their substratum: causality is the alleged substrate of the event. The belief in causality involves the belief in the subject. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche stresses the fictitious nature of the ego, which is only a word: “And as for the ‘I’! That has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has completely and utterly ceased to think, to feel, and to will!” (TI, 32). Nietzsche recalls that these concepts are products of our invention; “There are simply no mental causes at all! . . . We have invented a world of causes, a world of will . . . we have constituted the ego as a cause” (TI, 32). Events are constructed as actions; actions, constructed as deed, are distinguished from doers. A doer is then constructed as subject: an agent distinct from the act is invented. All happening “was a doing, all doing the effect of a willing; for it, the world became a multitude of doers, a doer (a ‘subject’) was imputed to everything that happened” (TI, 32). This belongs to the prejudices of reason, which “sees actors and actions everywhere” (TI, 20), which “believes in the will as an absolute cause,” which believes in the “I,” and so on. Ultimately, an ontology of causation is enforced everywhere, by which “being is thought into things everywhere as a cause, is imputed to things” (TI, 20). Nietzsche insists that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming,” that the doer “is merely a fiction added to the deed.”¹² In paragraph 17 of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche analyses the supposition of a subject under thinking and denounces it as a fiction. There is a threefold belief: that motives are the antecedents of an act; that thoughts are caused; and that the I is such a cause. First, in a quasi-phenomenological observation, describing a “small terse fact,” Nietzsche notes that a thought does not come from some I-substrate but instead originates from itself, and comes when it comes. “With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to concede—namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish” (BGE, 24). It is false to state that the I is the cause of thinking, or even that the I is in a position of subject. The notion of the “I think” as principle and foundation, as it has been established in modern philosophy since Descartes, is said by Nietzsche to be contrary to the facts: “it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’” (BGE, 24). Even the “it” (in the expression “a thought comes when it wishes”) is misleading, for it might suggest that there is some entity, that is, some substrate, at the basis of thinking. “It thinks: but that this ‘it’ is precisely the famous old ‘ego’ is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty’” (BGE, 24). The notion of an underlying subjectivity is contrary to the facts, an unphenomenological construction.

The alleged “simplicity” of the “I think” is likewise deceiving, a seduction of words. Nietzsche challenges the reliance on the notion of an immediate certainty (the immediacy and evidence of the “I think”). In Beyond Good and Evil (paragraph 16), Nietzsche speaks of the belief of those “harmless self-observers” in the superstition of the “I will” or the “I think,” “as though knowledge here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as ‘the thing in itself,’ without any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object” (BGE, 23). However, the very expressions “immediate certainty,” “absolute knowledge,” and “thing in itself” all involve a contradictio in adjecto, a contradiction in terms, since all certainty is constructed, all knowledge is for us and therefore not absolute, and the thing in itself cannot be “in itself” since that would mean absolutely independent from us to the point where we would not even notice it! If one analyzed the process that is expressed in this sentence, ‘I think,’ one would find many claims therein that are impossible to establish or even less prove, “for example, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ‘ego,’ and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking—that I know what thinking is” (BGE, 23). Unlike what Descartes asserted, the “I think” is anything but “simple.” In fact, these “simple truths” are more like decisions, “for if I had not already decided within myself what it is, by what standard could I determine whether that which is just happening is not perhaps ‘willing’ or ‘feeling’? In short, the assertion ‘I think’ assumes that I compare my state at the present moment with other states of myself which I know, in order to determine what it is; on account of this retrospective connection with further ‘knowledge,’ it has, at any rate, no immediate certainty for me” (BGE, 23). Instead of immediate certainties, there are the following questions: “From where do I get the concept of thinking? Why do I believe in cause and effect? What gives me the right to speak of an ego, and even of an ego as cause, and finally of an ego as the cause of thought?” (BGE, 24). All these notions are constructs for Nietzsche, which he understands in terms of the constitutive role of language in thinking. The subject begins to appear as a linguistic construct.

Indeed, an underlying substantial ego is not a phenomenological fact, but a metaphysical idol, and ultimately for Nietzsche a linguistic prejudice. The substantialist egology of the Cartesian tradition harbors an implicit metaphysics of grammar. “One infers here according to the grammatical habit: ‘thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently—’” (BGE, 24). Metaphysical idols are but grammatical structures: “formerly, one believed in the soul as one believed in grammar and the grammatical subject” (BGE, 67). The difference between a doer and the deed, that is, the position of an agent or subject beneath the event, is made possible by a “seduction of language.” Nietzsche clarifies this dependency of a metaphysics of subjectivity on language in The Will to Power. Starting with a critique of the positivists’ view that “there are only facts,” Nietzsche recalls that precisely all there is are not “facts,” but interpretations. The statement that claims that everything is subjective is also an interpretation (this is why, I should note in passing, the statement “there are only interpretations” does not mean “everything is subjective,” and Nietzsche’s perspectivism is not a subjectivism or a relativism). By claiming that all there is are interpretations, and that even the subjective is an interpretation, Nietzsche is casting doubt on the belief in the subject. This is why he continues by stating that an interpretation does not require an interpreter. “Finally, is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis” (WP, 267). The subject is “not something given,” that is, not a fact. What is the subject in this case? It is, it is “something added and invented and projected behind what there is” (WP, 267). In the following paragraphs, Nietzsche approaches the notion of “subject” as both the Cartesian metaphysical cause of thought and as a word, that is, as the linguistic “I,” in each case in order to stress their fictitious nature. He states, “However habitual and indispensable this fiction [of the subject] may have become by now—that in itself proves nothing against its imaginary origin” (WP, 268). The metaphysical notion of subjectivity as substrate rests upon the linguistic motif of the subject, and not the other way around: “The concept of substance is a consequence of the concept of the subject: not the reverse!” This means that the metaphysician notion of substance rests upon the subject as a linguistic construct. Nietzsche had previously established that the “I” is a word that we set up “at the point at which our ignorance begins,” a horizon of our knowledge and not a truth. This is why, after recalling the metaphysical Cartesian motif of (belief in) substantiality (“‘There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks’: this is the upshot of all Descartes’ argumentation. But that means positing as ‘true a priori’ our belief in the concept of substance”), he adds that such a belief “is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed” (WP, 268).

This impersonality here revealed (“there is” thinking), an impersonality that is constitutive of the event as such, leads us to consider impersonal, subjectless sentences such as “it rains.” If the event has no subject underlying it, whether as a cause or substrate, then the danger is to substantify the “it” in such expressions, as if it designated some substrate distinct from the happening. As noted prior, the position of a substrate beneath the event is apparent in Kant’s first analogy of experience, which states that “in all change of appearances substance persists” (CPR, A 182/B 224, 299). This substance can also be the ego, the “subject,” as cause of its effects, the agent as cause of its actions, or the doer as cause of its deed. All these are for Nietzsche grammatical-metaphysical fictions, prejudices, along with the “fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it” (GM, 45). Just as the “popular mind” distinguishes the lightning from its flash, just as it reifies the “it” in the “it rains,” just as it conceives of the event as an action requiring a subject (as if behind the manifestation of strength, there was an indifferent substratum that would have the freedom to be manifest strength or not), just as it “doubles the deed” (“it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect,” GM, 45), the metaphysician distinguishes a subject from its effects. “If I say: ‘Lightning flashes,’ I have posited the flashing once as activity and once as subject, and have thus added on to the event [Geschehen] a being that is not identical with the event but that remains, is, and does not ‘become’ [nicht wird]. __ To posit the event as effecting [Wirken], and effect [Wirkung] as being: that is the twofold error, or interpretation, of which we are guilty.”¹³ In fact, Nietzsche proclaims forcefully: “there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (GM, 45). “The deed is everything,” this expression would require and call for another conception of the event in which such event would no longer be anchored in a cause-substrate, but happening from itself and yet happening to someone.

The subject, the substantial I, are only habits, and Nietzsche writes that “perhaps some day we shall accustom ourselves, including the logicians, to get along without the little ‘it’ (which is all that is left of the honest little old ego)” (BGE, 24). The “I,” the “it,” are interpretations added to the event. What this critique reveals is the radical absence of substrate and authorship in an event. After his deconstruction of the imaginary causes and subjects, Nietzsche is able to question the very notion of authorship, whether divine or human, and declares that there is no author for what happens. The event displays a radical absence of ground. This groundlessness thus exposed will lead to a deconstruction of the principle of reason, which claims to establish a rational foundation for events.

The Event without Reason

This critique of the subject, that is to say, of the subjectum or substrate underlying events, reveals the abyss beneath any event: an event is always groundless. This is what Heidegger shows in his lecture course from 1955–1956, The Principle of Reason (Der Satz vom Grund), a title that immediately reveals the proximity between reason and ground, as Grund names both reason and ground. Heidegger states in the Address, “In all founding and getting to the bottom we are already on the path to a reason,”¹⁴ as he points to the translation of ratio in German as Grund. “But Vernunft [Reason], just as much as Grund [grounds] speak as translations of the one word, ratio.” Therefore, “ratio speaks in the word Grund and indeed does so with the dual sense of Reason and grounds” (GA 10, 145/PR, 98. Also GA 10, 171–173/PR, 102–104). For Heidegger, the principle of reason is ultimately about foundation, as our existence is ruled by this demand for reasons and grounds: “We have an eye out for grounds in all that surrounds, concerns, and meets us. We require a specification of reasons for our statements. We insist upon a foundation for every attitude” (GA 10, 171/PR, 117). The principle of reason is ultimately concerned with foundation, and the principle of sufficient reason with a sufficient grounding. Derrida evokes “the proximity between many of the figures of reason and those of the bottom or the ground, the foundation, the groundwork, the principle of sufficient reason, the principium rationis, the nihil est sine ratione as Satz vom Grund, the Satz vom zureichenden Grunde of the Leibnizian theodicy and its reinterpretative repetition by Heidegger.”¹⁵

Now, what is most striking in that course is how Heidegger reveals the groundlessness of the event of being by following the very principle that is meant to provide a foundation for events: the principle of reason. More precisely, it is the very claim of the principle of reason, that is, that all events must founded in reason, that will turn out to be itself groundless. I recall that principle, as enunciated by Leibniz: “Hanovre le 14 juillet 1686: il faut tousjours qu’il y ait quelque fondement de la connexion des termes d’une proposition, qui se doit trouver dans leur notions. C’est là mon grande principe, dont je croy que tous les philosophes doivent demeurer d’accord, et dont un des corollaires est cet axiome vulgaire que rien n’arrive sans raison, qu’ont peut tousjours rendre pourquoy la chose est plustost allé ainsi qu’autrement.” In translation: “it is always necessary that there be a foundation for the connecting of the parts of a judgment, in whose concepts these connections must be found. Precisely this is my grand Principle about which, I believe, all philosophers must concur—and this common axiom remains one of its corollaries-that nothing happens without a reason that one can always render as to why the matter has run its course this way rather than that” (cited in GA 10, 175–176/PR, 119). The foundation turns out to be itself without foundation, perhaps even requires its own self-deconstruction. Heidegger enters the very heart of the principle of reason to show how it self-deconstructs, as it were, from within. For, he asks, if the principle of reason states that everything that happens must have a reason, what then is the reason for the principle of reason? Indeed, if everything must have a reason, then the principle of reason (which is something) must also have a reason. “Indeed the principle of reason is, as a principle, not nothing. The principle is itself something. Therefore, according to what the principle itself tells us, it is the sort of thing that must have a reason. What is the reason for the principle of reason?” (GA 10, 17/PR, 11). Does the principle of reason have a reason? Nothing could be less certain: “Nihil est sine ratione. Nothing is without reason, says the principle of reason. Nothing—which means not even this principle of reason, certainly it least of all. It may then be that the principle of reason, that whereof it speaks, and this speaking itself do not belong within the jurisdiction of the principle of reason. To think this remains a grave burden. In short it means that the principle of reason is without reason. Said still more clearly: ‘Nothing without reason’—this, which is something, is without reason” (GA 10, 27/PR, 17, emphasis mine). Further, through this question, “Does the principle of reason have a reason?” it becomes apparent that reason itself does not rest upon a rational basis.

One recalls here how Kant speaks of a drive to reason, a Trieb, or also an “interest” of reason (Interesse der Vernunft; for instance: CPR, 496–502, 576, 593, 603–604, 614, 645), which reveals a certain nonrational basis of reason, leading Derrida to ask the following questions about the value and even honor of reason, all revealing the nonrational origin of reason: “The honor of reason—is that reason? Is honor reasonable or rational through and through? The very form of this question can be applied analogically to everything that evaluates, affirms, or prescribes reason: to prefer reason, is that rational or, and this is something else, reasonable? The value of reason, the desire for reason, the dignity of reason—are these rational? Do these have to do wholly with reason?” (R, 120). Is reason rational? Is the principle of reason rational? Does reason have a reason? One already sees here how the principle of reason is situated in a circle (What is the reason of the principle of reason? What is the foundation of a foundation?) that will throw it into a self-deconstruction, that is, into the abyss of its own impossible foundation. Or should one say, instead, that any foundation, as a foundation, must itself be without foundation? This led Deleuze to speak of the paradoxical nature of the logic of grounding, of the “comical ungrounding” of the principle of reason: “But who still speaks of a foundation, when the logic of grounding or the principle of reason leads precisely to its own ‘ungrounding,’ comical and disappointing.”¹⁶ The principle of reason will collapse (“run aground”) at the very place of its impossible foundation, “there where,” as Derrida puts it in Rogues, “the Grund opens up onto the Abgrund, where giving reasons [rendre-raison] and giving an account [rendre-compte]—logon didonai or principium reddendae rationis—are threatened by or drawn into the abyss” (R, 122). Heidegger reveals this self-deconstruction of the principle of reason by following the question “why,” which, in its infinite quest for a ground, actually accentuates its own lack of foundation: “Whenever we pursue the ground/reason of a being, we ask: why? Cognition stalks this interrogative word from one reason to another. The ‘why’ allows no rest, offers no stop, gives no support. The ‘why’ is the word for the tireless advance into an and-so-forth that research, in the event that it simply and blindly belabors itself, can take so far that it perforce can go too far with it” (GA 10, 185/PR, 126).

Before dwelling on this paradoxical self-undermining of the principle of reason, I begin by stressing that Heidegger considers our present age to be entirely ruled and “held in the sway of the fundamental principle of rendering sufficient reasons” (GA 10, 187/PR, 128). This principle states that “‘for every truth’ (which means, according to Leibniz, every true proposition) ‘the reason can be rendered’” (GA 10, 34/PR, 22). This principle in fact defines what science answers to (although science does not reflect upon it but is rather driven by it), as Heidegger makes the claim that “the demand to render reasons is, for the sciences, the element within which its cognition moves, as does the fish in water and the bird in air” (GA 10, 46–47/PR, 30). In fact, science as such rests upon and answers to the demand of the principle of reason: “Science responds to the demand of ratio reddenda and does so unconditionally. Otherwise, it couldn’t be what it is” (GA 10, 47/PR, 30). Indeed, the principle of reason permeates and rules our entire human existence and historical age to such an extent that in fact it not only rules science but philosophy as such. “The principium rationis as thought by Leibniz not only determines, by the sort of demand it makes, modern cognition in general, but it permeates in a decisive manner that thinking known as the thinking of thinkers—philosophy. As far as I can see, the full import of this fact has not yet been thought through” (GA 10, 64/PR, 43). Further, Heidegger stresses that the scope of the principle of reason is not limited to “the demand of reason to be rendered . . . as an abstract rule of thinking,” for it involves the “practical” scope of an ordering and transformation of nature itself as well as humanity. “The demand was bepowering in a strange way, namely, that the energies of nature as well as the mode of their procurement and use determine the historical existence of humanity on earth” (GA 10, 83/PR, 56).

It is matter of rendering reasons to a demand for a reason. Heidegger insists on the “demand-character of reason,” of ratio as ratio reddenda. “What is bepowering about the principle of reason is the demand that reasons be rendered” (GA 10, 42/PR, 27). And therefore, the reddendum, “the demand that reasons be rendered, now speaks unabatedly and without surcease across the modern age and out over us contemporaries today. The reddendum, the claim that reasons be rendered, has insinuated itself between the thinking person and their world in order to take possession of human cognition in a new manner” (GA 10, 37/PR, 24). Ultimately, Heidegger considers the “reign” of the “mighty” principle of reason—the demand to render (sufficient) reasons—to be the great uprooting of authentic humanity. Commenting upon the “strange” normative power that the principle of reason has on our lives, he writes: “When I use the word ‘strange’ [unheimlich] here, I mean it not in a sentimental sense. One must think it in both a literal and substantive sense, namely, that the unique unleashing of the demand to render reasons threatens everything of humans’ being-at-home and robs them of the roots of their subsistence, the roots from out of which every great human age, every world-opening spirit, every molding of the human form has thus far grown” (GA 10, 47/PR, 30). His critique is quite severe, as he continues by claiming that “the claim of the mighty Principle of rendering reasons withdraws the subsistence from contemporary humanity” (GA 10, 47/PR, 30) and that “the more decisively humans try to harness the ‘mega-energies’ that would, once and for all, satisfy all human energy needs, the more impoverished becomes the human faculty for building and dwelling in the realm of what is essential” (GA 10, 47/PR, 30–31). In short, as he concludes, the demand to render reasons amounts to a “withdrawal of roots” (GA 10, 47–48/PR, 31). In fact, the dominance of the principle of reason corresponds to “the most extreme withdrawal of being” (GA 10, 83/PR, 56). This withdrawal corresponds to the project of total calculability of the real, which goes hand in hand with the project of reducing the event, that is, what is eventful in the event.

This discussion will proceed step by step. Heidegger begins by recalling what the principle of reason states, namely that nihil est sine ratione: nothing is without a reason. It asks for a reason so that nothing is without a why: “Nihil est sine ratione. Nothing is without reason. There is nothing—and here that means everything that in some manner is—that is without reason” (GA 10, 6/PR, 5). The principle of reason is a statement about beings as a whole, affirming that every being has a reason, as well as a cause, since Heidegger reminds states that Leibniz had included in the principle of reason a principle of causality. Now, the expression “nothing is without a reason” (or a cause) can be heard positively or negatively. “Nothing is without a sufficient reason, which demands to be rendered. In the affirmative form this means that every being has its sufficient reason, which must be rendered. In short: ‘nothing is without reason’” (GA 10, 75/PR, 50). This last expression contains a double negation, which Heidegger understands as concealing an affirmation regarding the meaning of being: “What immediately strikes us about this formulation of the principle of reason is that it contains two negations: Nihil-sine; nothing-without. The double negation yields an affirmation: nothing that in any manner is, is without a reason. This means that everything that is, every being whatsoever, has a reason” (GA 10, 6/PR, 5, emphasis mine). There must be a reason why there is something rather than nothing. “There is a reason in the nature of things why something exists rather than nothing” (GA 10, 42/PR, 27). The principle of reason demands that everything that happens be founded in reason. This principle is first of all a request, a demand, a claim and a command (Anspruch), a call to render reasons, the call of the ratio reddenda: that everything, every being, shows or reveals its reason or foundation. The principle of reason is a demand for foundation, for an ultimate Grund. The rendering of reason is a response to a demand, the demand to establish a sufficient foundation for all that is. “Sufficient” here means, as Heidegger states in the Address, the “completeness of a foundation” (GA 10, 177/PR, 121). The rendering of reason amounts to a rendering of grounds. “Accordingly, the strict formulation of the principium rationis as the principium reddendae rationis contains a very specific and decisive explanation of what the unrestricted principle of reason says: nothing is without reason. This now says: something ‘is,’ which means, can be identified as being a being, only if it is stated in a sentence that satisfies the fundamental principle of reason as the fundamental principle of founding” (GA 10, 36/PR, 23, emphasis mine). The call for foundation is the true calling of the principle of reason. This is indeed why the principle of reason has an ontotheological structure as it refers to an unconditioned and ultimate foundation for all beings or nature, namely God. Heidegger clarifies that for Leibniz the principle of reason participates to the ontotheological structure of metaphysics, which posits a supreme being at the foundation of all beings and accounts for beings by appealing to yet another being: “However, because Leibniz and all metaphysics come to a halt with the principle of reason as a fundamental principle about beings, metaphysical thinking requires, according to the fundamental principle, a first reason for being: in a being, and indeed the being that is most of all” (GA 10, 184/PR, 125). As Heidegger explains, for Leibniz there is in the nature of things “a reason why something is rather than nothing. As the first existing cause of all beings, God is called reason” (GA 10, 42/PR, 27). Thus, “what is to be posited as the ultima ratio of Natura, as the furthest, highest—and that means the first—existing reason for the nature of things, is what one usually calls God” (GA 10, 42/PR, 27). At the same time, this ontotheological structure of the principle opens onto a circle: “So the principle of reason holds only insofar as God exists. But God exists only insofar as the principle of reason holds. Such thinking moves in a circle” (GA 10, 43/R, 28).

Heidegger makes a further—and decisive—claim: the principle of reason can be taken as a statement on beings, or else as it pertains to being as such. He writes: “We can hear the principle of reason in a twofold manner: on the one hand, as a supreme fundamental principle about beings, and, on the other hand, as a principle of being” (GA 10, 100/PR, 68). First, Heidegger begins by insisting on the ontological (rather than epistemological or metalinguistic) scope of the principle of reason. The principle of reason is a statement about being, not about reason or language: “What the principle of reason says does not come to language, namely, not to that language that corresponds to that about which the principle of reason speaks. The principle of reason is an uttering of being [ein Sagen vom Sein]. It is this, but in a concealed manner. What remains concealed is not only what it says; what also remains concealed is that it speaks of being” (GA 10, 73/PR, 49). Heidegger removes reason from the area of logic and language in order to situate it within the scope of being as such. “‘Nihil est sine ratione’: ‘Nothing is without reason.’ Every being has a reason. The subject of the principle of reason is not reason, rather: ‘Every being’; this is predicated as having a reason. The principle of reason is, according to the ordinary way of understanding it, not a statement about reason, but about beings, insofar as there are beings” (GA 10, 66/PR, 44, emphasis in the original). Referring to his earlier essay “On the Essence of Ground” (Vom Wesen des Grundes), Heidegger insists that the same thought was at play in that earlier text: “We can now apply what was briefly said about seeing, bringing into view, and overlooking to the case of the article entitled ‘On the Essence of Reasons.’ For in this article, it is plain as day that the principle ‘nothing is without reason’ says something about beings and doesn’t shed the slightest bit of light on what ‘reason’ means” (GA 10, 68–69/PR, 46). Thus, he concludes, “The principle of reason is a statement about beings. Accordingly, it gives us no information about the essence of reason” (GA 10, 69/PR, 46).

The principle of reason is a statement about beings. To that extent, it is also a statement about being itself, if it is the case that “the shining of being is in play in the appearing of beings” (GA 10, 81/PR, 54). If the principle of reason is at first heard as a statement about beings, it then resonates as a statement about being. For to state that every being has a reason implies a prior implicit reference to being: one cannot make any determination with respect to a being without having first decided about the being of that being. “The fundamental principle of reason says: every being has a reason. The principle is a statement about beings. But we experience a being as a being only when we attend to the fact that and how it is. Hence, in order to really hear the principle about beings we must become aware that the ‘is’ in the principle ‘nothing is without reason’ sets the pitch that tunes everything” (GA 10, 183/PR, 125). The principle of reason, even when heard ontically, is already harboring an ontological scope. The determining factor in the principle of reason is not ontical, but ontological. This is what allows Heidegger to evoke the other tonality of the principle of reason, the other way of hearing what the principle states, one that indicates the passage (the “leap”: Satz) from the ontical to the ontological scope of the principle of reason: “When we listen to it, that is, when we open ourselves to what really speaks in the principle, the principle suddenly intones differently. No longer ‘nothing is without reason,’ rather, ‘nothing is without reason’” (GA 10, 183/PR, 125). When heard in that way, that is, by highlighting the “is,” one passes (leaps) from the ontical to the ontological, from beings to being: “Whenever it speaks of beings, the tiny word ‘is’ names the being of beings” (GA 10, 183/PR, 125).

The saying of the principle of reason, Nihil est sine ratione, can thus be heard in two ways: “We can say: ‘Nihil est sine ratione.’ ‘Nothing is without reason.’ In the affirmative form this means: everything has a reason. Yet we can also set the pitch in this way: ‘Nihil est sine ratione.’ ‘Nothing is without reason’” (GA 10, 60/PR, 39–40). Heidegger emphasizes the “is” in the statement, associating the “is” with reason, revealing that Grund, reason/ground, belongs to being as such. “‘Nothing is without reason.’ When one paraphrases this customary formulation of the principle of reason, it reads: ‘Every being has a reason.’ With this, the reason that every being has is itself represented as some being. A reference earlier to a text of Leibniz was supposed to show this. The principle of reason is a statement about beings. In the other tonality, the principle of reason sounds like this: ‘Nothing is without reason.’ When paraphrased, this means ‘ground/reason belongs to being.’ Or ‘being and ground/reason-the same.’ Heard in this way the principle speaks of being” (GA 10, 111/PR, 75). If one hears the statement of the principle of reason as emphasized in this way: “Nothing is without reason,” one detects an affinity between being and reason itself: “The intonation allows us to hear a unison between the ‘is’ and ‘reason,’ est and ratio” (GA 10, 69/PR, 46). Now, Heidegger asks, “What do we bring into view when we think about the principle of reason in the tonality introduced here?” The statement, “Nothing is . . . without reason,” says: “‘Nothing,’ that is, no being whatsoever ‘is—without reason’” (GA 10, 72–73/PR, 49). No being is without reason: the “is” names being itself: “Even if it does so completely indeterminantly, the ‘is’ always names the being of some being” (GA 10, 73/PR, 49). This means that the statement of the principle of reason addresses beings in their being and is to be heard as an ontological statement. “So the principle of reason, which is offered as a statement about beings, says: to the being of beings there belongs something like ground/reason” (GA 10, 73/PR, 49). The principle of reason must be approached in its ontological (and not simply ontical) scope: “Consequently, the principle of reason proves to be not only a statement about beings; even more, what we bring into view is that the principle of reason speaks of the being of beings” (GA 10, 73/PR, 49). The new emphasis allows one to bring being into view and to reveal the proximity of reason with being: “But finally we heard the principle of reason in a different tonality. Instead of ‘Nothing is without reason,’ it now sounds like this: ‘Nothing is without reason.’ The pitch has shifted from the ‘nothing’ to the ‘is’ and from the ‘without’ to the ‘reason.’ The word ‘is’ in one fashion or another invariably names being. This shift in pitch lets us hear an accord between being and reason” (GA 10, 75–76/PR, 50).

This should be understood in its ontologico-historical significance, Heidegger evoking the “Geschick of being,” the destiny, sending, or dispensation of being, which always happens as a withdrawal: “being proffers itself to us while at the same time withdrawing its essence, concealing this essence in the withdrawal” (GA 10, 91/PR, 62). In such a withdrawal, which leaves reasons, causes, and grounds, being appears as ground. In the thirteenth lecture, Heidegger first recalls what he means by “Geschick of being,” namely that being gives itself as a withdrawal: “When we were led to say more clearly what the talk of the history of being as the Geschick of being is supposed to mean, we referred to the fact that being, in that it proffers, clears and lights itself, at the same time withdraws” (GA 10, 164/PR, 110). He then associates such withdrawal with the identification of being with reason/ground: “Now we can more clearly hear the words about the withdrawal of being. The words say that being conceals itself as being; namely, in its inaugural Geschick as logos being conceals its belonging-together with ground/reason.” The withdrawal of being brings reason and ground to the fore: “But the withdrawing does not exhaust itself in this concealment. Rather, inasmuch as it conceals its essence, being allows something else to come to the fore, namely ground/reason in the shape of archai, aitiai, of rationes, of causae, of Principles, Ursachen [causes] and Rational grounds. In withdrawing being leaves behind these shapes of ground/reason whose provenance goes unrecognized” (GA 10, 164/PR, 110). In its withdrawal, being gives itself as rational ground.

By hearing the principle of reason in its ontological sense, Heidegger is able to stress the affinity between being and reason. Indeed, if beings are said to be founded in reason, and being is that which determines beings as such, then it appears that reason is one possible name in a certain historical configuration for being itself. Now, to state that there is an affinity between being and reason, or that reason “belongs” to being, or even that “being and reason: the same,” cannot mean that being itself has a reason or is grounded in reason. That never is the case. “‘Ground/reason belongs to being’—one might be inclined to understand this in the sense of ‘being has a reason,’ that is, ‘being is grounded.’ The popularly understood and presumably valid principium rationis never speaks of this” (GA 10, 76/PR, 51). Why? Because what is grounded in the principle of reason is never being but instead beings, the ontic itself. “According to the principle of reason, only beings are ever grounded” (GA 10, 76/PR, 51, emphasis mine). What, then, does the statement “reason belongs to being” mean if not that being itself is grounded in reason? Heidegger suggests that, if only beings are grounded, this means that, as being, being grounds so that beings are thus grounded in this way. “‘Ground/reason belongs to being’ is tantamount to saying: being qua being grounds [Sein ist als Sein gründend]. Consequently only beings ever have their grounds” (GA 10, 76/PR, 51). Indeed, if the principle of reason claims that all beings must be grounded in reason, then that means that the being of these beings is understood as reason/ground. “What does the principle say? The principle of reason says: to being there belongs something like ground/reason. Being is akin to grounds, it is ground-like [Das Sein ist grundartig, grundhaft].” This does not mean that being is grounded. “The sentence ‘Being is ground-like’ speaks quite differently than the statement ‘beings have a reason.’ ‘Being is ground-like’ thus in no way means ‘being has a ground’; rather, it says: being in itself essentially comes to be as grounding [Sein west in sich als grundendes]” (GA 10, 73/PR, 49). If beings have a ground, being is a ground.

At this point of the analysis, now that it has been established that the principle of reason is to be heard as a principle of being, what remains to be determined is the relation between being and ground. As stated earlier, only beings are grounded while being is said to belong with ground/reason. “Ground/reason receives its essence from its belonging together with being qua being,” and conversely, “being reigns qua being from out of the essence of ground/reason” (GA 10, 76/PR, 51). Being and reason/ground gather as the same (“Ground/reason and being (‘are’) the same”) since being, as being, grounds. Now, if being is ground/reason, then it cannot in turn be grounded. The ground, as ground, cannot be grounded. Being reveals itself as groundless. “Therefore being can never first have a ground/reason which would supposedly ground it. Accordingly, ground/reason is missing from being. Ground/reason remains at a remove from being” (GA 10, 76/PR, 51). Being is the abyss . . . as ground. “Being ‘is’ the abyss in the sense of such a remaining-apart of reason from being [Im Sinne solchen Ab-bleibens des Grundes vom Sein “ist” das Sein der Ab-grund]. To the extent that being as such grounds, it remains groundless.” Why? Because in fact being “does not fall within the orbit of the principle of reason, rather only, beings do” (GA 10, 77/PR, 51). The foundation, in order to be the foundation that it is, must itself be without foundation: this is how the principle of reason, which states that all events must be grounded, self-deconstructs. The event of being finds itself freed from the request for a foundation and opens onto an abyss. Heidegger insists on the latter point: being is groundless. Being has no ground “because every foundation—even and especially self-founded ones—remain inappropriate to being.” Why? Because grounding only applies to beings: as noted earlier, it is beings that can be grounded. This is why “every founding and even every appearance of foundability has inevitably degraded being to some sort of a being” (GA 10, 166/PR, 111). To consider being as grounded would be to treat it as a being. But, as Heidegger reminds us, it is a matter of “no longer explaining being by way of some sort of being” (GA 10, 100/PR, 68). As a consequence, being as such is groundless: “Being qua Being remains ground-less” (GA 10, 166/PR, 111). Ultimately, the ground “stays off and away” from being, and being remains without ground.

Heidegger is fully aware of the apparent contradiction between those two statements: on the one hand, being is the “same” as reason/ground; on the other, being is the “a-byss.” He for instance asks, somewhat rhetorically: does the claim that being is the “a-byss” “simply stand next to all we said earlier: being and ground/reason: the same? Or does one even exclude the other? In fact, it seems so if we think according to the rules of ordinary logic. According to these ‘being and ground/reason: the same’ amounts to saying: being = ground/reason. Then how could the other one hold: being: the a-byss?” (GA 10, 166/PR, 111). First, to state that being is the same as ground/reason, or that being and reason: the same, does not signify that being is simply equated with reason, cause, principle, or rational ground, but rather, as Heidegger here retrieves the original sense of ratio as Logos, that it is “a letting-lie-present that assembles” (GA 10, 165/PR, 110). This allows him to posit at once the two following propositions: “being and ground/reason: the same. Simultaneously this meant: being: the a-byss [Sein: der Ab-grund]” (GA 10, 165/PR, 110–111). Second, and most important, it is insofar as being is the ground that it has no ground: “This is what shows itself as what is to be thought now, namely, being ‘is’ the a-byss insofar as being and ground/reason: the same. Insofar as being ‘is’ what grounds, and only insofar as it is so, it has no ground/reason” (GA 10, 166/PR, 111). More than an abyss, one should here refer to being as a “groundless ground,” as an Ab-grund, groundless because it is ground. Further, Heidegger is able to claim that being is groundless on account of the distinction between being and beings: it is indeed the ontological difference that governs this discussion. In the Address, Heidegger recalls that in its classical understanding, the principle of reason demands that every being be founded in reason: “The fundamental principle of reason says: every being has a reason. The principle is a statement about beings” (GA 10, 183/PR, 125). This reveals that only beings are grounded. Now, Heidegger stresses an ontological understanding of the principle of reason, an understanding that was not pursued by Leibniz or the tradition because of their exclusive focus on beings. To that extent, the principle of reason must be heard as: nothing is without reason, which also reveals that being and reason must be heard together. This is why Heidegger writes: being/reason: the same, or also: “being and reason ring out as belonging together in one” (GA 10, 183/PR, 125). The principle of reason now says: “ground/reason belongs to being” (GA 10, 183/PR, 125) and is no longer the supreme fundamental principle of the cognition of beings. The principle of reason no longer speaks of beings but of being (“The principle of reason now speaks as a word of being,” GA 10, 183/PR, 125). Being does not have a reason but is (the same as) reason: this, indeed, is how one can understand how Heidegger is able to claim both that being/ground: the same and that being is the a-byss: being is the a-byss insofar as it is the ground, and as such, has no ground: “what, after all, does ‘being’ mean? Answer: ‘being’ means ‘ground/reason.’ Nevertheless, as a word of being the principle of reason can no longer mean to say: being has a ground/reason. If we were to understand the word of being in this sense, then we would represent being as a being. Only beings have—and indeed necessarily—a ground/reason. A being is a being only when grounded. However, being, since it is itself ground/reason, remains without a ground/reason” (GA 10, 184/PR, 125). The event of being is groundless and abyssal just as reason is groundless and abyssal.

The Rose Has No Why . . .

Nowhere is that contrast between the logic of foundation of the principle of reason and the groundlessness of being made so apparent than in Heidegger’s repeated invocations of the following saying from the sixteenth-century poet and mystic Angelus Silesius:

The rose is without why: it blooms because it blooms,

It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen

[Die Ros ist ohn warung; sie blühet weil sie blühet,

Sie acht nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet]

On the one hand is the statement that no being is without a reason; on the other hand, that the being has no why. There lies its eventfulness: it has no ground, rather it happens. In Marion’s words, the event “suspends the principle of reason” (BG, 160). The principle of reason concentrates in a request and a call for a reason, that is, it concentrates in the question “why?” “In the ‘why?’ we ask for reasons. The strict formulation of the principle of reason—‘Nothing is without rendering its reasons’—can be formulated thus: Nothing is without a why” (GA 10, 53/PR, 35). Heidegger contrasts the two statements. “First, one should recall the short formulation of the Leibnizian principium reddendae rationis. It reads: Nothing is without a why. The words of Angelus Silesius speak bluntly to the contrary: ‘The rose is without why’” (GA 10, 55/PR, 36). The principle of reason collapses with that provocative saying: “According to the words of the poet, the principle of reason does not hold in this field” (GA 10, 55/PR, 36). Nonetheless the following verse by Angelus Silesius states:

The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms.

It seems that one kind of reason (represented by the “because,” which clearly provides a reason), replaces another type of reason, the “why” that is being sought. Yet, Heidegger insists, there is no contradiction here (“Roughly put, the ‘without why’ says that the rose has no grounds. Contrary to this, the ‘because’ in the same verse says, roughly speaking, that the rose has a ground,” GA 10, 61/PR, 41) because the because is not the same as the why. More precisely, they have a different relation to ground. “Does this word not name the relationship to a ground by dragging one in, so to speak? The rose—without why and yet not without a because. So the poet contradicts himself and speaks obscurely. Indeed the mystical consists in this sort of thing. But the poet speaks clearly. ‘Why’ and ‘because’ mean different things.” What is the difference? The difference is in the relation to ground: “‘Why’ is the word for the question concerning grounds. The ‘because’ contains the answer-yielding reference to grounds. The ‘why’ seeks grounds. The ‘because’ conveys grounds” (GA 10, 55/PR, 36). To that extent, as Heidegger puts it, “something such as a rose can simultaneously have a ground and be without grounds” (GA 10, 61/PR, 41). In the “why,” the relation to ground is one of seeking. In the “because,” it is one of providing or conveying. A seeking of reason (the “why”) is replaced by a providing of reasons. “The ‘why’ and ‘because’ speak of a relationship of our cognition to grounds, a relationship that at times varies. In the ‘why’ we question, we pursue grounds. In the ‘because’ we retrieve grounds in giving an answer” (GA 10, 61/PR, 41). In the because, a reason is given.

But what kind of “reason” is here brought forth? Heidegger’s answer is most revealing: it is not a reason that is “other” than what it is the reason of (for in our ordinary understanding, “the ‘because’ is supposed to supply something else, something we can understand as the reason for whatever is to be founded,” GA 10, 63/PR, 43), but it is a reason that belongs to the thing itself: it is as if the meaning of the thing was entirely contained in the thing itself. When Angelus Silesius states that the rose blooms because it blooms, he indicates through this tautology the self-sameness of the event of the rose in its sheer appearing. “What does this mean, the rose ‘blooms, because it blooms’? Here the ‘because’ does not, as is ordinary, point off toward something else which is not a blooming and which is supposed to found the blooming from somewhere else. The ‘because’ of the fragment simply points the blooming back to itself. The blooming is grounded in itself, it has its ground with and in itself. The blooming is a pure arising on its own, a pure shining” (GA 10, 84–85/PR, 57). The reason here is the pure event of the blooming. Is anything said in the tautology beyond the empty repetition of the same, as Heidegger asks rhetorically: “But Angelus Silesius says: ‘It blooms, because it blooms.’ This really says nothing, for the ‘because’ is supposed to supply something else, something we can understand as the reason for whatever is to be founded” (GA 10, 63/PR, 42–43). In fact, this tautology, far from saying nothing, says all that is to be said: “But this apparently vacuous talk—‘it blooms, because it blooms’—really says everything, namely, it says everything there is to say here” (GA 10, 63/PR, 43). What is that “everything”? “Everything” here means the entire being of the thing in question, its whole event. The reason given is harbored entirely within the event of the being: “The ‘because’ names the ground, but in the fragment the ground is the simple blooming of the rose, the fact of its being a rose or its rose-being [ihr Rose-sein]” (GA 10, 84/PR, 57, trans. slightly modified), its “rose-hood,” so to speak. Tautology for Heidegger may be a thinking that is more “rigorous” than any scientific causal thought (we know how Heidegger claimed in the Thor seminar that tautological thinking is “the primordial sense of phenomenology,” der ursprüngliche Sinn der Phänomenologie),¹⁷ a kind of thinking that comes before scientific representations and the distinction between theory and praxis. Such are the stakes of Heidegger’s contrast between the why and the because: the event reaches further than reason, that is, the reason that asks “why.” In fact, the because precedes the why; the seeking of the why presupposes the prior giving of the because. Heidegger explains that “in order for the rose to bloom, it does not need reasons rendered in which its blooming is grounded. The rose is a rose without a reddere rationem, a rendering of reasons, having to belong to its rose-being” (GA 10, 57/PR, 37).

It would then be a matter of returning the reason back to the being in its happening, as when Jean-Luc Nancy suggests, with respect to the being of the world, that it is a fact without reason. With respect to the event of the world, he writes in The Creation of the World, it might be necessary to consider “a fact without referring it to a cause (either efficient nor final). The world is such a fact: it may well be that it is the only fact of this kind (if it is the case that the other facts take place within the world). It is a fact without reason or end, and it is our fact. To think it, is to think this factuality, which implies not referring it to a meaning capable of appropriating it, but to placing in it, in its truth as a fact, all possible meaning.”¹⁸ Nancy refers several times in this book to the “mystical” rose in terms of the fact of a world without reason and ground, devoid of any given principle or determined end, and he explicitly refers to Heidegger’s The Principle of Reason (CW, 47, 120, n. 20), associating it with Wittgenstein’s statement: “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists” (cited in CW, 52). The tautology of the because—the rose blooms because it blooms—indicates that the reason is resituated in the being of the rose and that in fact this might be its highest reason.¹⁹

Ultimately for Heidegger, the “because” bears the features of both being and groundlessness. (a) Of being, as Heidegger connects the “because” (das Weil) with the “while” of being. In fact, Heidegger goes so far as to claim that the “because” designates the “essence of being” (GA 10, 186/PR, 127). In what sense? Heidegger explains that weil is a diminutive of dieweilen, which means “whereas,” “while.” He then cites as a support the old saying, “One must strike the iron while [weil] it is hot.” To that extent, weil not only has the causal sense of the “because,” but also that of a temporal presence. “‘To while’ [Weilen] means: ‘to tarry,’ ‘to remain still,’ ‘to pause and keep to oneself,’ namely in rest” (GA 10, 186/PR, 127). Now, to while, to remain, to tarry, to last, all these terms designate the old sense of the word being. Indeed, Heidegger associates being with what lasts, wesen with währen, evoking that “assembling of what does not pass away, but which comes to be, that is, lasts [sondern west, d. h. währt]” (GA 10, 89/PR, 60, trans. slightly modified).²⁰ Thus weil does not mean “because” but “while” (dieweilen). “Here the ‘while’ in no way means: ‘since-because,’ rather ‘while’ denotes dieweilen [whereas], which means, as long as—the iron is hot—during. ‘To while’ [Weilen] means: ‘to tarry,’ ‘to remain still,’ ‘to pause and keep to oneself,’ namely in rest” (GA 10, 186/PR, 127). Further, elaborating on the contrast between “why” and “because,” Heidegger associates “whileness” and “perdurance” with the sheer presence of being upon which everything rests. “The while [weil] that every founding and every ‘why’ guards against names the simple, plain presence that is without why—the presence upon which everything depends, upon which everything rests.” The while names the presence of being as such. “But qua the Whereas, ‘whiling’ also names ‘the abiding’: being” (GA 10, 186/PR, 127). The while names both being and the ground, it names the abiding of reason as ground. This is how being and reason/ground: the same. Reason/ground and being hold together in the weil, both abiding and ground, both “because” and “while.” To that extent, weil also designates groundlessness.

(b) As stated prior, Heidegger opposes the because to the why. We are asked to leave the why for the because. He cites Goethe, who wrote: “How? When? and Where?—The gods remain mute! You stick to the because and ask not why?” (cited in GA 10, 185/PR, 126).²¹ What does it mean to “stick to the because”? Heidegger sees in the weil the abiding and lingering of a being in its being. Such abiding represents the being of beings, the ontological site for beings. As such, it represents the ground, ontologically understood, and no longer ontically. It is the ground in this following sense: “Ground is that upon which everything rests, that which is already present as what supports all beings” (GA 10, 186/PR, 127). This is the ground that the weil, as lasting presence, designates. The weil in this sense is the essence of ground, the ontological ground. “The ‘because’ names this supportive presence before which we simply pause. The ‘because’ points to the essence of grounds” (GA 10, 186/PR, 127). Insofar as being and ground/reason: the Same, then the weil represents the essence of being. Just as being, then, the weil is, as ground, at once groundless. In contrast with the why, always in quest of foundations, the because remains groundless. The “because” suspends the “why”: “What does ‘because’ mean? It guards against investigating the ‘why,’ therefore, against investigating foundations. It balks at founding and getting to the bottom of something. For the ‘because’ is without ‘why,’ it has no ground, it is ground itself” (GA 10, 186/PR, 127). The why yields to the because: “the force of the claim of the why submits to the enabling appeal of the ‘because’” (GA 10, 188/PR, 128). The event of being remains groundless, without reason, without a why. In the words of Heidegger, being “is groundless and therefore does not know any ‘why.’” Being is “sheer, pure event” (reines Er-eignis).²²

Freed up from the demands of reason, arising out of a withdrawal of essence and theological foundation, the event surges as a groundless happening. This lack of foundation beneath the event and the (self-)deconstruction of the metaphysical apparatus suggest that the event is to be taken as the original phenomenon. This opens the way for a new philosophical approach to the event, faithful to its eventfulness without attempting to reduce it to the demands of reason. It opens the way for a phenomenological investigation of the event, the task of the next chapter.