of presence possible. When being is considered in this background function, as a temporally differing context that gives temporal presence as contextually meaningful, it is designated by fundamental ontology as the sense of being.
Being3: being as beyng (being). Nevertheless, even the characterization
of being as not-a-being, as the “other” of beings, is only a negative and transitional
stage on the way to a more “positive” postmetaphysical approach.
Being in the third and most comprehensive sense is precisely the differentiation
of background and foreground as such. It is the “temporalization”
of a present in the ecstatic unity of timeliness, the emergence of something
against the background of the nothing, the complication of the multidimensional
background into the complicated unity of the foreground. Speaking
of “being” in this third sense, the later Heidegger most consistently spells
it with the obsolete and “archaic” eighteenth-century orthography used by
Hegel and Hölderlin, Seyn (perhaps best rendered with the equally obsolete
Early Modern English variant “beyng,” used interchangeably with “beynge,”
“beinge,” and “being” in the sixteenth century), supposedly in order to
indicate that it is the “origin” or productive source of being1, its presupposition,
and in this sense “older” than the being known to metaphysics. In
“On the Question of Being” (1955), Heidegger crosses out “being” (Sein)
in order to emphasize the way in which this meaning-generating difference
refuses to be conceptualized and designated in the manner of a determinate
entity—and also, he tells us, in order to indicate by typographical means
the way in which what is traditionally named by “being,” i.e., presence,
points beyond itself toward the four background dimensions of the fourfold
(Geviert; see Chapter 5; WM, 410–12/PM,
310–11). Seyn/beyng is
simply a name for the postmetaphysical perspective on being into which
the beingness traditionally pursued by metaphysics—presence as such in
its various metaphysical configurations—is incorporated as a foreground
aspect that is constantly differentiated from a background dimension of
radical nonpresence. Ereignis, event, is accordingly a name for the specific
postmetaphysical historical experience and articulation of beyng in terms
of this dimensionality.
The “ontological difference” thus turns out to be a preliminary name for beyng (being3) itself insofar as the latter is approached from the framework of fundamental ontology, in which “being” generally means being1 and “sense of being” means being2. As the happening of ecstatic timeliness in its complicated unity, Dasein’s existence is precisely the process whereby beyng as ontological difference is continually carried out as the present is disclosed as a complicated unity of the temporal dimensions. In this sense, as Heidegger explains in his 1940 Nietzsche course, the “foundation” or