So last time we were trying to understand Heidegger’s work as a prophet (in the Old Testament sense) of the meaning crisis. We took a look at this notion of “the thing beyond itself” and “realness” as simultaneously the shining into our framing and the withdrawing beyond our framing in a deeply interpenetrating manner. We took a look at this deeper notion of truth—not truth as correctness, but truth as aletheia, that which grounds the agent-arena relationship in attunement and allows us the potential to remember being by getting into an attunement with its simultaneous disclosure and withdrawal.
But we can forget that; we can get into a profound kind of modal confusion and this is the history of metaphysics as the emergence of nihilism. We can forget the being mode, we can get trapped into the having mode in which the metaphysics is a propositional project of trying to just use truth as correctness, and we misunderstand being as a particular being. We try to capture the unlimitedness aspect of being, but we only do it at the limit (which Heidegger is deeply critical of). So we understand being in terms of a Supreme Being, a being at the limit, and beyond the limit. This is ontotheology; we understand God as the Supreme Being and this is deeply enmeshed (for Heidegger) with nihilism, because this ontotheology, this version of theology from classical traditional theism, this way of understanding being gets us into the deep forgetfulness and modal confusion that is the hallmark of nihilism.
Of course, we could perhaps remember the being mode, and this is what Corbin (following Heidegger) talks about as gnosis.
Episode 47: Heidegger