This essay highlights the default of questioning, along with logic and critical reflection, on techno-scientific principles and philosophical and theological questions. Heidegger’s reflections on questioning and on technology are read alongside Günther Anders’ reflections on the “antiquatedness” of the human being. In the wake of modern techno-science, what is most “question-worthy” is that we do not question – heightened in an age in which critique has come under attack and citizens are urged to “trust,” without questioning, what is called “the science.”

In Country Path Conversations, Heidegger relates both subjectivity and evil to rebellion or insurgency (Aufruhr, Aufstand). In other places (e.g., “Why Poets?”), Heidegger insinuates that the relation between subjectivity and a rebellion against the open is not accidental. In this essay, I lean on the Schellingian roots of the relations among subjectivity, evil, and rebellion as these appear in Heidegger’s 1936 lecture course and offer a further Beyng-historical interpretation of the source and the essence of evil. In this light, I view the un-grounded usurpation of metaphysical will to power in terms of a rebellion that seeks to posit the subject as the universal ground of beings and interpret the turn of the Event as a meta-ethical transformation of humanity in which the rebellious subjectivity is being overcome.

Many scholars have noted the importance of place in Heidegger’s philosophy. Heidegger himself agreed with this assessment, saying that his thinking has always been an attempt to think the same thing – first through meaning, then truth, and finally place. The importance of place and its rich entanglement with ontology can be understood through several valences of rootedness and belonging that are present in Heidegger’s thought. These valences can be productively considered through three figures: the dweller, the nomad, and the settler. Such figures do not exist as well-defined textual characters, but establishing them as a methodological practice allows careful consideration of Heidegger’s apparent concordance with both National Socialism and global projects of settler-colonialism and conquest. Those of us who find valuable tools and resources in Heidegger must take these resonances seriously and grapple with the way they may indicate a close relationship between our own philosophical commitments and violent possibilities.

This article first retraces the history of Heidegger’s “The Argument against Need” and situates it in the context of extant notes from his never-completed introduction to the Gesamtausgabe titled “The Legacy of the Question of Being.” It then argues that, for the later Heidegger, Brauch (“need,” “use”) becomes another name – indeed one of the most important, albeit neglected, names – for being in its deepest sense. To appreciate Heidegger’s legacy and that of the question of being, it is crucial that we (1) critically assess the argument against Brauch qua “need” – i.e., the argument according to which the being of certain entities, such as those that predate Homo sapiens, does not depend on the human – and (2) understand the ontological sense of Brauch qua “use.” We must not only recognize that Dasein is needed for the safeguarding of truth, but also move beyond this and see being in its independent use.

“The argument against need” that is countered by Heidegger in his text by that name is likened to Samuel Johnson’s effort to “refute” Berkeleyan idealism by kicking a stone. Heidegger’s position is compared to ideas in Plato, Kant, and Scheler. The Heideggerian correlation or “need” between being and the human cannot be refuted by facts about entities such as stones, but the argumentum ad lapidem does retain a certain right as an experience of resistance.

This essay examines the way in which the being-in-itself of beings is articulated as an open-ended problem in Heidegger’s remarks in “The Argument against Need.” It then considers how this problem is addressed in Heidegger’s early phenomenological accounts of the being-in-itself of beings from 1927 to 1929, followed by some brief remarks on Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) and “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936). The essay argues that Heidegger provides a positive interpretation of the being-in-itself of beings that remains fundamentally consistent across his corpus, while undergoing certain shifts of emphasis and articulation. As Heidegger’s phenomenological account develops, the being-in-itself of beings is increasingly thought as the letting be (Seinlassen) of beings, in which beings are released to themselves in the event of unconcealment.

Heidegger’s text from the 1950s “The Argument against Need” reveals a new twist in his thinking of need; the focus shifts from the relation between being and Dasein, to that of being and the mortal. This move to mortality is prepared in the Black Notebooks volumes of the period (Four Notebooks, ga 99, and Vigiliae, ga 100). In this essay, I trace this shift in Heidegger’s thinking of need from his works of the 1930s to the 1950s. I then turn to the specific context of “The Argument,” i.e., the scientific faith in an independent reality, to show how Heidegger’s thought rebuffs this conception, but also how it informs the dialogic nature of an “argument” with science more broadly, one that no longer seeks its resolution in simple “agreement.”

In the recently published manuscript “The Argument against Need” (ca. 1963), Heidegger discusses the notion of being-in-itself (Ansichsein) with regard to entities that predate the existence of knowers. Section 1 introduces the problem of so-called “ancestral facts,” which Meillassoux and Boghossian have used to argue for a specific form of realism. Sections 2 identifies a specific understanding of time as the basis for their argument. Sections 3–4 show how Heidegger rejects this account of time. Section 5 describes the general form of ontologies that deny entity independence (dependence ontology). Section 6 turns to Heidegger’s account of a resistance to ontological sense-making in what he calls “beingless” (seinlos) entities. Discussing work by Haugeland and Wrathall, I conclude in section 7 that Heidegger’s response to the “argument against need” is to reject the idea of unidirectional dependence in favor of a triadic interdependence between being, entities, and us.