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
