Ontology and Questioning

Being and Time and Being and Nothingness both begin with a discussion of the process of Questioning, each preparatory to their respective introductory analyses of the 'question of Being'. Each treatment is surprisingly generic--their similar characterizations of Questioning as a transition from indeterminacy to determinacy can be found in, for example, Dewey's definition of 'Inquiry'. Specifically lacking in both is an Ontological account of Questioning, of the caliber of the painstaking derivations to which both submit other activities, e. g. Heidegger's 'Being of Understanding'. In Heidegger's case, Dasein's fundamental experience of Being is the awareness of the call of conscience. Hence, the Questioning of Being can only be a phase or mode of a response to that call, for, otherwise the absence of Being cannot be experienced as questionable at all, and can never arise as an object of inquiry. Furthermore, the answering of the question of Being, i. e. the arrival at an understanding of Being, can be achieved only insofar as Being becomes revealed, not insofar as it is discovered, just as the perception of a dawning sun is not the result of a search for it that had begun at midnight. In other words, in Heidegger's Ontological scheme, the Questioning of Being cannot be more than an ontical process which, upon completion, is revealed, in hindsight to have been a misinterpreted response to the call of Being. As for Sartre, his initial Questioning of Being is eventually revealed to have abstracted from a preceding phase, namely the becoming-questionable of Being. For, his eventual presentation of Being-for-itself, as the negation of Being-in-itself, demonstrates that the former intrinsically renders the latter questionable. In other words, the Questioning of Being is, in his scheme, more precisely, the perpetually recurrent fundamental structure of the relation between Being-for-itself and Being-in-itself. As such, it is a transition not from indeterminacy to determinacy, but, to the contrary, from the determinacy of Being-in-itself to the indeterminacy of Being-for-itself. More than either of these two Ontologists explicitly do, Deleuze accords Ontological status to Questioning, though he seems to attribute to Heidegger what is actually Sartre's position.