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Heidegger and the Will
On the Way to Gelassenheit
by
Bret W. Davis
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...The Passenger is concerned with the critique of journalism and the media. This critique in turn is closely linked to the idea of "the passenger" — a link that may be traced to Martin Heidegger's discussion of the inauthentic, public mode of being he calls "the 'They.'" Introducing this term in Being and Time, Heidegger unites the two themes that give The Passenger its two alternate titles: "In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services like the newspaper, every Other is like the next."
It is my belief that, philosophically, Anaximander's apeiron represents an originary moment in thinking - a moment more pluralistic than Heidegger's alêtheia, and not as delimiting - a moment that, once thought, is not repeated, but remembered, held close in thought as the uncanny immanence of the eternal flow of Becoming. Was this apeiron forgotten, then, or lost in later conceptualization, like alêtheia, according to Heidegger, was lost behind the idea of truth as correctness in representation?
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I should like to treat the matter genealogically and resort (like Heidegger) to the pre-Socratics as the default position for contextualizing the global economy. Let's appeal to Anaximander's notion of the apeiron, the unlimited, "the first principle of things that are, a 'that' from which the coming-to-be of things and qualities takes place and to which they return making reparation according to the order of time."
[M]odernity is that age when the human being has developed its powers for thinking in such a way that beings are thought now to have taken complete “priority over Being.” It is apparent from these words that understanding Heidegger’s Auseinandsetzung with Nietzsche is significant for grasping the development of Heidegger’s greater confrontation with the whole of Western metaphysics and its consummation in modernity.
[T]here are moments—only moments, for Heidegger—of authentic being-in-the-world, of relating with the awareness of one's own being toward death, of finitude, that awakens us to true discourse, of recognition of the "event of Being," the "event of appropriation" as the happening of the truth of Being.
A consensus is gradually emerging in Heidegger studies that there are not two, but, rather, three distinct phases of his thought: the early phase of the analytic of Dasein (Sein und Zeit); the middle phase of the assertion of heroic historicity (from the conference “What is Metaphysics?” to the manuscript Vom Ereignis – the key published text Introduction to Metaphysics); and the last phase of the withdrawal from technological nihilism into poetry and thought, under the sign of Gelassenheit. In his first phase, Heidegger ignores the phenomenon of the Will; in the second phase, it is forcefully asserted, and well beyond Heidegger’s Nazi engagement (in Vom Ereignis manuscript, which is usually read as the beginning of late Heidegger, he still speaks of the “will to Ereignis”); in the last phase, as the result of Heidegger’s confrontation with Nietzsche, Will is, on the contrary, posited as the very core of modern subjectivity, and thus as that which has to be overcome if mankind is to leave behind the nihilism that threatens its very essence.
Philosphy is still a primal science for Heidegger that uncovers the a priori categories of factic life. With his concern for avoiding a philosophy of consciousness that leads to the solitariness of a disembodied cogito, Heidegger substitutes a broader conception of Dasein as a finite being-in-the-world.
So beings have Being. However, what is concealed in this revealing is the way in which Being has beings --in a manner of speaking somewhat alien to the Heideggerian idiom (Being is said to eyeball beings, address them, claim them, etc. in various later works). Indeed, It is exactly this that the later Heidegger set out to describe in my estimation, and language was the clue to the flip side of the ontological difference (and one cannot listen to both beings and Being at once, any more than one can listen to both sides of a tape recording at once).
Strauss's critique of existentialism is that rather than escaping from modernity, it forms modernity's third and most radical "wave." Strauss argues that Nietzsche and Heidegger have misdiagnosed the character of contemporary nihilism. For Strauss, nihilism resides not in the loss of an originary or authentic encounter with Being or the abyss, but in the loss of contact with nature in our moral and political lives--the discovery for moderns that no particular way of life has inherent worth. The pursuit of authenticity, far from being a road to release from modernity, is a symptom of modernity bereft of all connection with nature.
‘Heidegger’ the sole objective is therefore a Wiederholung or Ereignis, a “retrievingrepeating” of the propriativity that is (human) being. It is a process of re-petition (reseeking) by which one becomes what one is, an appropriation of the movement of appropriation that gathers together Entschlossenheit and Gelassenheit, resolving to release oneself to the projecting that we must do in order for beings to be.
[U]pon my arrival at the [Heidelberg] university I was somewhat astonished to find that although the course offerings included the standard fare in the history of philosophy and specific seminars on Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Jaspers, the name of Heidegger was conspicuously absent from the catalog of lecture courses and seminars. But I was soon to learn that all of the offerings were on Heidegger!
If art criticizes society it submits to the same rules that govern this very society; instead art purportedly offers one of the few gateways to the universe of truth, of unconcealedness, which Heidegger later on complemented with a philosophical discourse that emulated the semantic indeterminacy of poetry.
Under Heidegger’s beliefs, characters such as Jof and his wife Mia who avoid facing death would never experience “authentic existence.” Heidegger views this in a negative light as Jof and his family would not enjoy the freedoms from social conventions that come from acknowledging death. However, Bergman’s presentation of these sequences seems to indicate that he does not share the same view. By closing The Seventh Seal with Mia’s casual denial of Jof’s haunting vision, Bergman adds an uplifting mood to the movie.
Where Hegel speaks of the Idea, the being of beings, as the divine Absolute, Heidegger prefers reticence, but this may amount to the same thing, for Hegel himself underscores many times that the Absolute, a placeholder for God, is itself merely an empty name whose meaning is given only through what is predicated of it by speculative-dialectical thinking, and these predicates are precisely the ontological concepts for the worldliness of the world.
Lest we misconstrue Ereignis as a factual occurrence set in linear time, we need appreciate the character of Heidegger's formulation. Ereignis is a relational and dynamic understanding as opposed to a reified and static concept. It is an imaging of the origin of Dasein as continuously occurring, concurring with the advent of the world. It is not a primal origin, set once upon a time, but the perpetual happening of Dasein's being called into its existing, its being called upon to be. Being, as understood in Ereignis, is no-thing--not a thing whose presence Dasein is set upon revealing. Instead it is the dynamic coming-into-presence which sets forth any and all things as present before us, the coming-into-presence which prevails upon us to preserve what has been presented.
Reflection on aletheia, on the emergence of forms of understanding into the lighting of Being is alone the appropriate subject for philosophical reflection. Consequently the specific events of everyday moral experience are not a relevant subject for philosophical reflection. Nor is there any philosophical significance to moral principles or to standard logical inference.
[F]rom a Heideggerian standpoint, it is highly significant that Thomas follows the couple into a clearing rather than watches them in a small city square, and that this is the point where the open and receptive mode of vision registered by the camera at the beginning of the scenes in the park comes to an end. At the most literal level, the clearing in the park is where Thomas can get the best light. But the changed setting also corresponds to what Heidegger referred to as the "lichtung," or forest clearing, his metaphor for the opening where Being reveals itself by coming into the light[.]
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Introduction [PDF]
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The phenomenological continuity of Heidegger’s analysis of the equipmentality of the shoes qua equipment turns upon and into the same evidential quality of the obvious – what is made manifest via Heidegger’s earlier phenomenological analysis of things in use in Being and Time. Equipment recedes, disappears, withdraws or vanishes from conscious intrusion in use: this is the intentional utility of equipment as such.
The way to understanding the nature of ‘being-with’ in the student nurseteacher relationship requires a thoughtful attunement to questions regarding the meaning of being that are posed by these philosophers, phenomenologists, and others. Living the questions and eventually living into answers is the work of one who engages in hermeneutic phenomenology. A ‘to and fro’ with the text created by students and teacher, authentic being in the tension of living “in-between,” sensitivity, and an interpretive dance leads to possibilities for greater understanding of the nature of ‘being-with.’
The recognition of the ineffectuality of a political or social response to technology leads [Heidegger] both to move away from the call for a violent recapturing of a primordial techne, and to suggest instead that within the enframing essence of technology lies an opportunity to once again experience the disclosure of a sense of limitation. As he explains in the passage quoted above, in the dominance of technology “something is being announced . . . namely a relationship of Being to man—and . . . this relationship, which is concealed in the essence of technology, may come to light someday in its undisguised form. I do not know whether it is going to happen!”
As the being that is always in a mood, always moving into various possibilities, and is essentially fallen into ‘what one does,’ Dasein is proximally and for the most part not itself. In the everyday understanding of das Man, Dasein’s possibilities are principally ‘what one does,’ what some ambiguous and literally unidentifiable self is supposed to do.
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According to Heidegger, we do not encounter reality in the stance of a cognitive subject, but rather we always already practically cope with the world in such a way that it is given to us as a field of practical significance. The concept that Heidegger employs in order to characterize the structure of this kind of practical relation to the world is “care.” This concept provides a link to Lukács’s own attempts to extract a broader concept of praxis by contrasting it with behavior that is merely detached and contemplative.
What 'eventuates' in ereignis is the enactment of decision, the 'decisive' moment is one in which something is decided. Such a moment 'makes a difference’ something is changed radically in a determined resolution, it is brought to fullness in a satistactory conclusion. This is the meaning of kairos, the appropriate moment for action duly considered and using the knowledge of one's experience and technical expertise, the moment of decision. Resolute action brings to Presence or discloses what this moment holds.
The relation between Dasein and Being is a reciprocal one, characterised as ereignis. Dastur draws attention to the fact that ereignis in German literraly means to eye, and in the context in which it is used by, it signifies bring to ownness by making visible. Ereignis does not have the structure o a self-hood but can only be thought as a sending, or a giving, where in the very moment of giving it holds itself back and withdraws.
Heidegger's attempt to gather things together in the Ereignis may be incompatible with the intrinsic pluralism of language, and the Ereignis may reflect a Greco-Germanic sense of being which is but one historical possibility among others, even within Western culture. His effort to step back from Western philosophical tradition to uncover its fundamental bearings, by a phenomenological bringing into view of matters that this tradition occludes, may suffer from a narrow purism in its focus on the being-question.
Thinking together transcendence, freedom, and Being-with (Mitsein), Heidegger suggests that Dasein's purposiveness must be understood as the capacity to choose for the sake of the other's freedom. Dasein's purposiveness, its capacity to choose, is only possible in the realm of freedom, which Heidegger argues, is the realm of Being-with.
In the text he wrote for his course planned for 1941-42 (Nietzsche’s Metaphysics), Heidegger detaches himself much further from Nietzsche. Nietzsche is said to have turned man, for the first time in the history of philosophy, into a Gestalt and a ‘type’ (typus). That in this reproach aesthetical categories are at stake again, appears from the fact that Heidegger takes this Nietzschean idea of a ‘type’ to entail a ‘self-moulding’ (Selbstprägung), a forming, fixating or stamping into a self, as if man could be the sculptor of himself. Only on the grounds of this concept of ‘self-moulding’ the principle of Rassenzüchtung, the breeding and correction of a race, is thinkable, Heidegger says. In other words, Nietzsche’s aesthetics is accused of containing the foundations of racism.
For all the care to avoid invoking a philosophical meta-text, or departing from our immersion in the cinematic Sache, we find ourselves talking of the way things presence, their luminous appearance, their revealing of a world that we do not master or control, that reveals the mystery of finitude and the calm releasement towards time, death, and the mystery of Being/Nature. Hermeneutic banana skin or not, it seems difficult to avoid talk about Malick's cinematic 'letting be' without invoking, at least implicitly, the Heideggerian thought of Gelassenheit,
The issue for Heidegger is obviously not the individuality of truth and how it is identical in essence with the individuality of freedom. In fact, it seems that wherever Heidegger comes across individual freedom, he diagnoses a hopeless case of subjectivist metaphysics.and
But to know oneself as possibly insignificant to oneself is at the same time to know oneself as ultimately responsible for one’s own significance. Knowing ourselves as finite, as beings among beings, we also know ourselves as having a finite interest, in pursuit of which we have already spoken carelessly (have taken no responsibility for our word). But we can know this only because we find ourselves to be commanded (or “called”), and therefore to be (possibly) free.
[F]ollowing Heidegger, poetry will be undertood as a happening (Ereignis), allowing Dasein its projection (Entwerfen) into the Open and as 'the advent of truth'.
The enframing is not machines and it is not technological, it is rather the true essence of technology. The enframing is the gathering that reveals the being of man, in this technological age, as the being who orders the entities of the world as standing reserve. It is what reveals the being of man as orderer, and in turn reveals the other entities of the world as ordered. Enframing is the mode of revealing that holds sway, that is to say it is the mode that is chief and unassailable in the essence of modern technology.
[I]f, instead of the expression of Popper “open society”, we write the Heideggerian term Ereignis, we do not betray neither the intentions of Popper nor the intentions of Heidegger, even if both of them would not be content of this small hermeneutical “violence”.
In retrospect, we can say that Heidegger did first glimpse the way being itself exceeds the current understanding of the being of entities in his existential analysis of death in Being and Time, but to say (as Heidegger himself and White like to) that Heidegger already understood this back in Being and Time is to succumb to an illusion of hermeneutic hindsight and so to read him anachronistically, that is, timelessly, without sufficient sensitivity to the very real breaks, ruptures, and discontinuities through which his work passed as it underwent its fascinating evolution.
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April 19th through 20th, 2007
New School for Social Research, New York, New York
April 27th through 29th, 2007
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April 28th, 2007
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Despite the formidable obstacles presented to us in our time, an age dominated by calculation and commodification, authentic existing always remains a possibility—and a choice. Admittedly, the existential importance of choosing is often veiled in the later Heidegger’s vigorous polemic against our “willful” modern age; yet, surely, his own life’s work continues to give eloquent testimony to the choice that is a possibility for all human beings. The choice to release thinking to recall in astonishment that all beings—including ourselves—unfold in Being.
[W]hat emerges is that it is a matter of starting points, not ending points, and that thos starting points point in a direction to be taken. The direction indicated must be done in an empty and most general way. This direction, follwing from the character of the method, is incomplete, wanting completion in a concrete context although there is not enough in this direction itself to satisfy that want. That want must be satisfied by those who appropriate the text in an existential way.
[T]he post-Hegelian, postmodern world—the stage upon which Heidegger makes his appearance, and so the most significant context of his thought—is defined by the rupture of the ideal and the natural self.
For Heidegger, the earlier Luther simply failed to finish the radical divide between metaphysics and theology which he initiated in his early deconstructive theology. As such, the early Luther offers an incomplete breakthrough which Heidegger realizes and seeks to carry forward.
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We can thus consider Heidegger’s work as a development of pataphysics in conformity with the principles of Sophrotates the Armenian, and of his first disciple, Alfred Jarry. The great resemblences, memorial or historical, concern the Being of phenomena, planetary technology, and the treatment of language.
I would lile to maintain that this little section containing Hyginus' "Myth of Care" represents, in a very special sense, a high point or culmination of Being and Time. It seems the first step toward fulfilling this claim must be to reveal the circumstances under which Section 42 'comes on the scene', in Being and Time.
The 'collection of things' concept of reality leads directly to scepticism [doubt that the world is meaningful] and thereby to nihilism [faith that the world is meaningless]. It also hides the fact that, far from being a bunch of stuff, the world is actually a web of assignments and references (qv) - the world, in other words, is a meaningful whole. If this wasn't the case, and if the world as a world wasn't disclosed by our being in it, then we wouldn't even be aware that the world contained things; we wouldn't know, in other words, that there was an external world to have doubts about.
Despite Heidegger’s attempt to disambiguate being and beings, his conception of the ontological difference does not reach the sub-representational and the informal. It does not reach singularities and therefore genuine differences. While Heidegger’s conception of the ontological difference is neither an indentiy nor a duality, it still centers on an idea of the same.
The Heideggerian inversion replaces the Modern and Critical eras’ “observer” with a pragmatic and existential human “actor.” This actional being is, moreover, a materialized or existential being. Finally, this materialized being is also peculiar, in that he or she is technologically involved with and extended into his or her immediate environment. The Heideggerian existentialization of the human being simultaneously materializes and technologizes action. It is a distinctly non-Platonic perspective.
The work of art is held to be the origin of things in such a way that the "thingliness" both of the work and of the thing is held to be, in effect, an abstraction from the self-secluding of the "earth" within the "world" opened up by the work-–this is, one can say, the moment of severance or distantiation that appears as such only under the condition of de-severance or de-distantiation. Here again Heidegger is concerned to trace the logic of this into the work itself, so the work appears as, in its inmost structure, a "rift"–say, an establishing of distance as the very means of the work's intimacy with itself (what one might call its autonomy).
Heidegger’s ‘political’ and philosophical enthusiasm seemed to carry him back to a point where his interrogation of the openness of being had not yet began. Being as such, more in particular the being of a whole people, was read as coinciding with one leader and his policy.
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We have to abandon thinking the world as a representation, the world as Bild, as Heidegger explains in Die Zeit des Weltbildes. The world as Bild is, according to the German philosopher, the result of a modern, Cartesian subject trying to represent the world as an object, as a representation of the consciousness.
As something “worked” art is appropriable by the metaphysical system which presupposes a direct correlation between the visible and invisible realms. Heidegger offers an alternative to the metaphysical or rational explanation. The alternative is poetic, and it is given in the presumably opposing, even mutually exclusive, literary terms of symbol and allegory.
what [Heidegger] means by Being is thoroughly different from that found in ontology. As we know, Being in ontology is the most universal con-cept or the most general category. But for Heidegger, Being is neither a category, nor even a concept. To put it more clearly, for Heidegger Being is not "what" it is, but that what which "is".
Whether or not onto-theology is the truth about metaphysics, it is not the truth about the divine, and if it has reached its conclusion, its end is not the fate of the gods. In our witnessing the return of the gods we begin to see, against Heidegger, that for much of our history metaphysics as onto-theology did not contain or subdue the divine.
In Heidegger's strategy, the Pre-Socratics were deployed largely in order to deconstruct Plato and, as a side-effect, to plot the emergence of the system of metaphysics. Does Lacan conduct a similar operation? The answer is complex.
[W]e can go forward to Heidegger, and ask ourselves what constitutes the moment of appropriation of the modern era, of which he writes. Is there an event within our times, which is comparable in its impact on thinking to the invention of linear writing two and a half thousand years ago? If we ask ourselves this question, than without doubt we will have to accept that indeed, such event happened in recent times, and it is the invention of photography.
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[T]here is neither sufficient nor convincing textual evidence to maintain that [Heidegger] ever considered Ereignis as a more fundamental matter for thought than das Sein, that is, Being thought in an originary and fundamental way as the temporal, finite and negatived, unconcealing of beings (das Seiende) in their beingness (die Seiendheit) as made manifest meaningfully by Dasein in language.
Contemporary postmodern thinking about architecture—and about the arts more generally—remains dominated by the metaphor of the dispersion of meaning over an infinite surface and very much opposed to Heidegger's metaphor of the inexhaustible gathering of meaning in a defined place.
Between its past and the future stands, not a presence, but rather an absence. In Heidegger’s terms, it is precisely because I am neither “present to hand” nor “ready to hand,” that my being is an issue for me. My non-presence or absence on this ontological level is at the heart of my projective being.
[A]cting has two times: (1) the position (instant or interval) it occupies before and after other events and (2) its stretchedness between a future (end) and past (something mattering). Acting is an occurrence that at once occupies a place in the successions of objective reality and exhibits an existential past and future. Heidegger marked the significant difference between these two types of time by describing succession as “time” (Zeit) and marshalling the term “temporality” (Zeitlichkeit) for existential dimensionality.
The project or design that is set to work in this or that particular work is always an openness or unconcealment of beings that “casts itself toward us,” an unfolding that “is cast ahead into the rift of the figure.” This clearing of the unconcealment of beings, “happens only when the openness arriving within thrownness is in turn projected.” Yet this arrival is not accomplished by human thought, nor by human agency or subjectivity: it is the antecedent claim of a destining or designing that first calls upon us to think, or to respond to the historical claim of a world along the lines of a certain path, of a gathering of possibility.
A specialist on Descartes and Renaissance humanism, and himself a staunch rationalist, Faye sees Heidegger’s philosophical critique of Cartesianism and modern rationalism merely as an ideological mask for a perverted politics. Those who adopt elements of Heidegger’s critique are dubbed politically naïve or, worse, suspect--a judgment Faye passes on Derrida and even Habermas without further ado.
Heidegger ends his discussion on technology with the sentence, “For questioning is the piety of thought.” And so we are left with a significant ambition, that being to pursue the creation of technology, any technology, with the mandate of inquiry, questioning and thoughtfulness to achieve the presence of that technology as a poetic revealing.
[I]t would be misleading to say that Being has no definite ‘is’ for Heidegger. While it is the nature of Being to hide and reveal itself, this in itself is an ‘is’. Just as for Heidegger it is our nature to have no nature, so too is it the Being of Being to have no definite Being. In this sense, Being is not ‘stuff’, but the rising-up of the possibility for encountering anything at all.
For Heidegger, then, our existence in a World is ‘spread’ over the people who are in the place with us, and the ‘things’ that share these places. In Heidegger’s later work, this notion of Being-in-the-World is extended to include the notion of ‘dwelling’. With dwelling, our self, ‘stretched’ in time and place, exists in a manner that cares for the people and ‘things’ that are incorporated into this ‘stretching’.
Other philosophies have become anthropologies: that is part of the illness of our time. But his work is something else. Anthropological, psychological, ethical, epistemological analyses: all these are what he calls ontic, existentiell. His method and his matter are not of this kind. But let us ask once again, what can really be meant by the contrary of ‘ontic’ and ‘existentiell’.
Heidegger describes being as a process of misunderstanding the authentic self. Caught up in an everyday world of all that appears closest and most familiar to us, we believe that our existence can be explained by what we know well. But ontologically, our most authentic selves lie in what is most mysterious and strange—what appears to be furthest from us. Confronted with authentic being, we feel a sense of terror in the face of the unknown. The dangerous lover narrative makes the same argument about ontology—that our “true” selves reside in what is most strange and enemy-like, in the dangerous other.
In this World, Being ‘stands out’ for us, as if in a ‘cleared space’. For this ‘space’, Heidegger uses the term ‘lichtung’, which simultaneously refers to a ‘clearing’ and ‘light’. Thus, as Dreyfus writes, “things show up in light of our understanding of being.”
The papers from a symposium, on Laurence Paul Hemming's book Postmodernity’s Transcending: Devaluing God, with the author.
The individual papers and responses are linked here.
These two links had disapeered a few years ago, but are now back.
"To the things themselves" is not to be confused with the reductionist search for things-in-themselves. On the contrary, it means the search for the "whatness" of things as manifested on the stage of everyday life (Lebenswelt). It means the search for the manifold of meanings dynamically impressed on our "compromise" with the world. It means, as we shall see later, to study things "distinguishing" them from what they are not.
It is Autumn 1933, and over Berlin Radio can be heard an unusual address. An unsuspecting listener scanning the frequencies might have been surprised to hear the airwaves graced by a philosopher, especially one so famously wary of modern technology. But this was a unique broadcast. The unsuspecting listener would have been treated to an audience with the Freiburg philosopher Martin Heidegger, and his account of his decision to refuse a professorship at the University of Berlin.
In order to bring about a hermeneutic transformation of philosophy, Heidegger substitutes the ontological difference for the empirical/transcendental distinction. The ontological difference (the distinction between being and beings) is established by Heidegger in such a way that it follows that there can be no access to entities without a prior understanding of their being.
Being ‘historical’ points to the effort to unseat and overcome tradition and not to the mere contemplation of the events from the past which according to Heidegger is ‘inexhaustible.’ It is here that Heidegger will claim to live authentically is to be mindful of history and change, not chronology.
Two more from
Insofar as Heidegger sometimes uses Sein (and Anwesen) in the seminar to refer to the various forms of Seiendheit (or Anwesenheit) offered in the history of metaphysics, then, indeed, there can be no “room” for the very name “being” in thinking the fundamental matter of the letting or giving of beings. But, insofar as he explicitly and precisely names his ownmost concern Being as Being (Sein als Sein) as letting and as giving—which in turn is to be understood as appropriating event (das Ereignis), then, quite clearly he did not abandon the name Being for die Sache selbst [the fundamental matter for thought].
In the present age, human beings are “in flight into the unhomely,” and this flight takes the form of the rush to fill up time with gadgets and activities that, in the end, leaves us profoundly bored and bewildered. A “puzzling” (rätselhaft) and “unsettling” (unheimlich) way of life has overpowered human beings in the technological age, and this has left us “unhomely” and suffering from “homesickness” (Heimweh). Nonetheless, this very homesickness confirms the abiding presence of home. We are longing for home.
Inasmuch as saying is a presencing of what is present, and presencing (das Anwesen) cannot be included as what is present (das Anwesende). Inasmuch as the saying of what is said cannot be included as what is said. Then how does one know the presencing of what is said? One might say that, in addition to what is said, Heidegger points it out, but this pointing out--this showing of the saying of what is said as the presencing of what is present--would be indicative of a semantics that remains unsaid.
It is ... not possible ‘to move from the one to the other’ (a phrase with fundamentally different meaning depending upon its analog or digital context) without already instantiating one of them in doing so. Since it is exactly the point of Beckett and Heidegger to put forward the discontinuous, ie digital, thesis, any appreciation of their work must already be digital in order to achieve this possibility (a remarkable enough phrase and suggestion). The same is true of Wittgenstein.
The 'potential movement' of emotion implies that emotion engenders a fundamental transformation of the world. That is, in emotion, how things matter, in terms of my world projects, changes. The world, for Heidegger, is the "referential context of significance" of things and others as they are encountered within the context of a "referential totality" -- the "in-order-for-the-sake-of" which implicitly guides Dasein in her "circumspective" understanding of what matters.
Heidegger thinks that the assertion is a derivative form of interpretation which has had too strong and exclusive a hold on the philosophical imagination. The categories of signification that it entails presume an understanding of being as presence-at-hand.
Heidegger asserts that if human beings were to disappear entirely, there would be no “being” to things. Clearly what he means by “being” is not ousia or esse or any other ontological constituent of things. “Being” shows up only in correlation with human interests and concerns, whether those are practical, political, theoretical, aesthetic, religious, or whatever. As far as Heidegger’s work goes, all “being” (Sein) is being-as-humanly-engaged, and all “entities” (Seiendes) are things-as-humanly-engaged, to on hôs alêthes. Heidegger’s focus is on that hôs, the as-factor or relationality between whoever and whatever is encountered and the human involvement with that whoever and whatever.
Immediately it becomes evident that Heidegger’s overall project is not existential but ontological in character. Its over-riding goal, unchanged throughout his philosophical career, is to re-awaken a long forgotten theme: That of the meaning of Being.
Heidegger has just argued that ‘temporality’ is a verb masquerading as a noun; even though it is used as the subject of predication it shouldn’t be, because ‘temporality temporalizes’, it never just ‘is’. Taking this together with the notion of the ‘ecstatic’ which brings together “‘outside-of-itself’” with “in and for itself”, I want to suggest an interaction between the way any given text performs time, in a performance that is ‘ecstatic’ in relation both to its environment and ‘itself’, and that engages thereby with temporalities beyond its own.
The nothing cannot be an object of thinking. When we think, we are thinking of something; and that to think of the nothing is contrary to the essence of thinking, Heidegger argues.23 Logic cannot be our basis in inquiring into the nothing.
The Vor-griff, or what can be accomplished by the inquiry geared towards a destructive narrative, cannot be articulated in a way that is preconfigured by representational knowing— such as proving or refuting a hypothesis, or solving a problem. Instead, it can only purport to explore our present in its contingency. Thus, the question formed in the preface ‘what has happened?’ is an ethical question, since it cannot be responded to with a description of actors, events, connections, nor by allocating responsibility veiled as causality between abstractions. It is ethical, in that it reminds by indicating something, which otherwise would have been forgotten, despite its consequences, and despite its meaning.
The ordinary conception of time lacks significance because the inauthentic person no longer looks at temporal signs as signs; rather, they confuse the signs for the actual passing of time. For example, clocks and watches are nothing more than signs, reminding us over and over again of the old Latin phrase: tempus fugit. However, most people act as if time is actually fleeing on the face of their timepieces. They confuse the jerk of the second hand for a “now.” Sixty “nows” in a minute, 360 “nows” per hour, 8640 “nows” in a day, 3,153,600 “nows” every year. Like with the lack of datability described above, the assumption is that these “nows” are passing independent of us; after all, we have clocks.
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An outline.
Both in Vol. 4 of Harvest Moon.
According to Heidegger, what is special about the specifically human capacity of using language for communication is its world-disclosing function. By virtue of sharing a natural language, speakers do not just share a system of conventional signs. More importantly, they share the same way of talking about (i.e., articulating, understanding, describing, conceptualizing) everything that can show up within their world. Thus, understanding a language is never just a matter of hearing noises, but of understanding ways the world is or may be. Knowledge of the language and knowledge of the world are inseparable.
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At the ontic level, phenomena are entities, and appearances are entities that refer to other entities, which appear through them (like measles does through spots). At the ontological level, all appearances should be seen as “mere appearances” in that they refer to the transcendental conditions that a finite entity like Dasein needs to be able to access anything. Correlatively, the phenomenon in the ontological sense is identified with these conditions, which are hidden by the entities themselves and can only become accessible to the phenomenologist. This means that while all entities are phenomena (in the first sense) and structurally involve the phenomenon (in the ontological sense), not all phenomena are entities (since the transcendental framework is not ontic).
The notion of "formal indication" means that the terms used to describe existence require a specific and unprescribable process of appropriation on the part of the reader, or listener. This process is not contained in the concept itself, it can only be awakened, encouraged, admonished by it.
[Heidegger] argues that the practices in the background of understanding can function only if they remain in the background. The background itself opens up the very possibility of a foreground, for it is only against something that another something can be focused, or call for attention. Thus, that which is most vital in functioning must be that which is closest to us; so close, as not to be seen because it belongs to the background, not the foreground.
Heidegger says the notion of truth as correspondence is “unverständlich,” but he also says in the same pages that it’s merely “unverstanden,” which can simply mean misunderstood. Could it be that all Heidegger wants to assert is that we do not yet have a proper understanding of the kind of correspondence that constitutes propositional truth?
Why is it that "logic" - as found pervasively in Information Technology - cannot grasp essential thinking? Because logic cannot be other than itself. A system of logic defines its own boundaries and therefore cannot move outside those boundaries. In order to grasp essential thinking a sense of the same process by which humans are aware of themselves as self-conscious is required. It is a requirement for a way of thinking that can realise that it is thinking.
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Even “not knowing” or “forgetting” is part of Da-sein’s being-in-the-world (as deficient modes). The question of knowledge is not a question of how an “external” “physical” world is experienced and understood by an “internal” “mental” process. The question of knowledge is ironically not an epistemological issue. It is a (fundamentally) ontological one. Therefore, the existential analysis of Da-sein, focusing on the existential “being-in-theworld,” is prior to any epistemological inquiry. This means that epistemology in light of Being and Time must undergo a major shift in focus.
In a gesture, Agamben writes: "Whatever...is the event of the outside". This event as it is im/properly named (Ereignis) is the Heideggerian event of the withdrawal of Being (assurance, foundations, of meaning and communication), or what I call the withdrawal of the negative. Agamben explains: "what takes place is simply a movement of concealment without anything being hidden or anything hiding, without anything being veiled or anything veiling - pure self-destining without destiny, simple abandonment of the self to itself".
That speaking to others in the attempt to win them over and persuade them is ontologically an uncertain enterprise means in particular that this phenomenon and technique falls outside the ambit of those arts that for Heidegger will develop through Western history into modern technology with its total, planning precalculability. This indicates that the other human being as a free other and individual site of truth eludes the foreknowing, calculating reach of technological machination. The importance of this cannot be over-estimated, for it is the Achilles’ heel in Heidegger’s thinking on technology.
This disclosure or revelation has been described in various ways: the emergence of being, the meaning of being, the truth of meaning, the coming-to-pass of being. Heidegger at times used the word Ereignis for this process. This word can be translated as "event" or "happening". In English, there is "happening" as a noun, close in meaning to "event", and "happening" as a participle, as in "I saw it happening" or "what's the chance of that happening?", close to "taking place".
Heidegger's concept of the fourfold provides a schema at least as perplexing as Blake's fourfold vision. According to Heidegger, certain things—and note that "things" is the exact term used by Heidegger—are capable of gathering together the fourfold of earth, sky, gods, and mortals. A chalice, for example, can be a spiritual object designed with the gods in mind. The wine it contains brings together the earth that produced the grapes and the sky that provided rain for the vines. Finally, the chalice is designed to contain nourishment for mortals, and it is used by mortals to celebrate one another's company, and to worship the gods. In the chalice, then, we see the gathering of the fourfold.
What [Schürmann] finds is that the beginning is not a single unified beginning of philosophy in the One (as Parmenides has usually been interpreted: see below), but a tragic knowledge, a knowledge of our mortality and its contrary (championed, in Parmenides’ work, by the goddess). This interpretation shatters the sedimentation of father Parmenides. This new parricide reincarnates Parmenides again as thoughtworthy at the end of metaphysics (in Heidegger’s sense), when philosophy as ontology, theology and logic has withered away. I use the word reincarnated with twofold significance: a) the beginning is always ahead of us, which is a point Heidegger makes tirelessly, and b) this reading also restores the human life-span, as a philosophical issue, to the time between birth and death.
In the background, we engage in ‘silent thought’. What is most significant in our lives is not easily accessible to reflection - it is not visible to intentionality. Being is self-interpreting and is necessarily involved in and dependent upon the world. We exist amid a world of shared meanings and understandings in the social context as a mode of being human which exists factically.
From Heidegger’s point of view, the hermeneutical circle is not a method, rather, it is the existential character of human understanding, so, he describes the circle in terms of an existential grounding. The hermeneutical circle is the existential condition of human understanding and is an essential attribute of Dasein’s knowledge. Thus the circle of understanding is not a methodological circle, making it unnecessary for us at the end of the process of interpretation, but it describes an element of the ontological structure of understanding.
The "placing" into "place" of a being is the event of appropriation. The "placing" into "place" is the internally referential orderability that is always a particular being, a 'this'. The "placing" into "place" is the 'End' of a being, an end that is not the stopping point of external movement if mass at some coordinated point of infinite homogenous space. Rather, the 'end' is "the beginning of being-moved as the ingathering and storing up of movement" such that a being is internally self-originating in order to be itself, to be its end, to be what-was-it-to-be a finally appropriated being.
The conversation between a scholar, a teacher, and a scientist addresses the nature of knowledge, and explores a new kind of learning. The answer is not in what Heidegger calls representing (vorstellen, literally, to place in front of) which “places before us what is typical of a tree…as that view into which we look when one thing confronts us in the appearance of a tree.” Instead the conversation suggests that objects appear out of a “openness which surrounds us.” This openness is not a vacuum, but rather the space of being out of which all phenomena arise: “a region [Gegend], through whose magic [Zauber] everything that belongs to it returns to that in which it rests.”
The concept of “the worldhood of world” provides a possibility for us to think how we can transcend the world of significations toward the world of meaning, or better: transcend the world of inauthentic meaning toward the world of authentic meaning.
Through this refusal of struggle, man does not renounce violence, but rather commits the most terrible violence against Being and against himself. By avoiding struggle, Dasein shuts itself off from the unconcealment of Being, refusing to open itself up as the site for Being’s disclosure. Dasein thereby prevents itself from asserting its creative power, its possibilities, in the world, affirming itself as the negation of Dasein, not-Dasein.
Art is necessary as the ‘countermovement to nihilism,’ because, in the legislation of new formal perspectives, it allows the living creature to ‘surpass’ itself. It is in this sense that ‘art is worth more than the truth,’ that is, art has a greater value for life then truth in so far as it, unlike truth, is a “stimulant to life.”
Heidegger did not give an exhaustive account of Being, nor would he claim to have done so, (accordingly, the last lines of the book are questions). The question of Being is one which shatters all attempts at solution, along with the claim that this is all there is to say about the matter. In the first lines of the book, we find the declaration of a newfound bewilderment in the face of Being.
Because being holds the initiative in Ereignis, we cannot prescribe how it will enown Dasein as ground for the truth of being. We can only describe a pathway in which Dasein turns from a preoccupation with its own death to the "nothing" and via the "nothing" to the truth of being itself. That being eludes us "in the end" is not failure of our thought process but, to the contrary, is a sign that we have arrived at the site of its clearing.
[B]eyond Epictetus' proposal that indifference is the appropriate comportment to a death that can mean nothing to us. As Dasein's 'ownmost possibility', and a 'way to be', Being-towards-death offers the possibility of an authentic existence rather than a fallen and contingent one in which a person might simply dribble toward annihilation. In this sense, awareness of death is a call toward meaning.
It is true, and self-admitted, that Heidegger did not overcome subject and horizon in Being and Time, however, while he does not use the word Other in the same manner as Levinas, his preservation of the mystery of Being has the connotation of Other—never fully within our reach—always more than we can comprehend. I put forth that his struggle with question of Being was in fact a struggle with Otherness—an otherness that continues to reappear at the margin between the languages of philosophy and theology.
Heidegger says that we live in, and in fact are nothing but, a "clearing" (Lichtung) in the midst of Being, which seems to imply that around this clearing Being is still a dark jungle. What is more, it is not given to human being or thinking to force its way into Being, but it is primarily Being itself which reveals itself to thinking by its own initiative, its speaking to us (Zuspruch).
What is one trying to know when one poses the question of Being? Heidegger answers: the meaning of Being. A mysterious formula, but it will receive a rather prosaic sense: the point is not, we are assured, to bring to light the meaning of existence, but solely to elucidate what is comprised in the notion of Being by bringing it to conceptual clarity.
Part of the methodology [Heidegger] used in Being and Time was hermeneutics and he is responsible for rekindling this methodology in the twentieth century. In the methodological section of Being and Time, he says, "Phenomenology of human existence (Da-sein) is hermeneutics in the original signification of that word . . ."
Technology is our destiny; it cannot be stopped, overcome, or uprooted. Yet even as we accept technology as fundamental to what we now are, we might find a way of relating to it that does not affirm it, participate in it, or carry it forward. Our situation at the hinge, then, came to seem more paradoxical than ever; we can be released from the grip of technology only insofar as we recognize we are in its grip, accepting it as our destiny, and leave aside any compulsion to master or overcome it.
One of Heidegger’s main discoveries with regard to the question of Being was that for metaphysics the sense of Being is presence. Being presence – together with past and future – a dimension of time it follows that time is the hidden horizon of the metaphysical interpretation of Being. According to Heidegger metaphysics “forgets” temporality in its full three dimensionality by holding only to the one-dimensional sense of “standing presence-at-hand.”
Hyper-Heidegger, then, a thinker who makes of himself both a 'danger' and a 'saving-power,' who makes of the effort of reading Heidegger both a form of 'unconcealedness' and 'openness'.
Thinking about the Greek Lethe, which is inseparable from the Greek idea of Aletheia, as Heidegger constantly reminds us, suggests that every memory has its source in a primal immemorial, an originating origin (Ursprung), distinct from the beginning pure and simple. It is in this sense that we might speak of a ‘founding forgetting’ that makes possible historical memory itself. Far from being synonymous with destruction, forgetting thus assumes a positive meaning.
My projecting forward into a future is not something I will as such, but rather is how I could even know myself at all, how I could have the view that driving forward is the driving of my will. I am driven into the future because the present, through ruinance, decays into the past and leaves me with an absence, a nothing, which demands to be filled.
Attentiveness and inattentiveness become for Heidegger the two stances Da-sein can have toward the reality of ontic immediacy. Which direction, to what extent, and how to dis-cover and measure the variables of a phenomenal world are always already Da-sein’s decision, if Da-sein decides to make the effort or has the demand.
If Dasein created itself, Dasein would be something that is added to the furniture of the world. Precisely because Dasein cannot be reified, it does not create itself, but is tied to a world in which it is realized. Consequently, the possibilities for Dasein’s existence are tied to a physical world. Their content – that is, what possibilities they are – derives from a physical world, and they are carried out in a physical world.
Heidegger's conceptualization of the open is arrived at through an original rendition of the pre-Socratic notion of aletheia (which might be translated as "truth," "uncovering" but also, although more metaphorically, as the "fight against oblivion"). Heidegger thinks of aletheia as unconcealment, as the freedom "to-be-there." Humans' freedom, their breaking from the concealed closure in which all creatures are housed is, according to Heidegger, achieved through language.
Ethical phenomena such as decision, conscience, anxiety, guilt, authenticity, alienation and involvement are examined in order to show that the essence of humanity is found in our existence as finite temporal relational beings for whom Being is an issue. This explodes the rationalist logic based on the false subject/object dichotomy. Dasein must recognise its temporality to become authentic, which means the contrasting worldviews of religion and science require ontological deconstruction in favour of an engaged existential openness.The individual chapters can be found here.
How can we understand properly such expressions of Heidegger as the following: "Appropriating has the peculiar property of bringing man into his own as the being who perceives Being by standing within true time. Thus Appropriated, man belongs to Appropriation," or "Being itself already names Appropriation." In my opinion the meaning is very simple: Being is not any single being, but is a process of human being toward the authentic (appropriate, ereignete: ereignen) openness (Erschlossenheit). This happens only through true temporality, namely through an authentic resoluteness, not through any logical thinking.
Perhaps not unexpectedly, then, Van Gogh’s shoes provide the leverage for Heidegger to then show how the truth of an entity comes in the work to stand in the light of its being; how the art work finds both dynamic unity and repose through the paradoxical mixture of conflict and design, rest and motion, ‘setting up’ and ‘setting forth’, that we find where truth in art is ‘setting-itself-to-work’ in the Riss of earth and world.Glossary
[I]n Heidegger's Aristotle, the situations in which we find ourselves, which comprise the world in which we live, call us to live our particular lives by imposing themselves upon us as highly charged emotional moods; and we move about in the world, becoming ourselves, by articulating responses to those moods which seem "appropriate" in our life with others.
For, Heidegger believed it possible, in a "moment of vision," to step back from the heroes we have "always-already" chosen, adopt a second-order perspective on those choices, and choose again, in full awareness that we are choosing a hero, and that doing so lucidly can help us own our own lives in a way that will restore our sense of the meaning, weight, and integrity of our actions.
At stake is the cave itself, and whether transcendence from it is imaginable, possible or desirable. For Heidegger, Platonic idealism, the vision of philosophy that sees everything completely in the full light of day, is a form of nihilism. Such philosophy wants to transcend the world as a finite, bounded whole; it wants to deny the earth its due and bring a total enlightenment back to every shadowed corner of the cave. But if the cave is our world, our only world, such a longing for transcendence and ideals will destroy the only dwelling we will ever have: the finite, historically circumscribed existence of earth-bound human beings.
The ultimate ground is now being, which is itself groundless. Because the sendings of being are themselves groundless, they are, according to Heidegger, a "game". The leap from the ground of the principle of reason is therefore a leap into the groundlessness of a game "into which we mortals are brought by dwelling near to death".
Agamben understands thought, as Heidegger did, as the appropriation that lets beings be, which lets there be a world. Agamben even calls thought “the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context as form-of-life,” so that only where there is thought can there be a form-of-life “in which it is never possible to isolate something like [bare] life,” clearly echoing Heidegger’s claim that thought is a way of dwelling whose essence is “being-in-the-world.”
For Heidegger there is no real distinction between instrumental rationality and the dawn of the democratic revolutions. Both are phases in the unfolding tide of nihilism that culminates in the technological fury of the present age. Not until we have released ourselves from the enervating grip of so-called “progress” will we have learned how to think in a manner reminiscent of the philosopher of Being.
Heidegger's danger relates to technology's ability to encourage in its users a forgetfulness of the quality and extent of the mediated withdrawal from Being that technology represents. Technology encourages us to withdraw from recognising that technologies' mediation represents a withdrawal from authentic Being: a withdrawal from withdrawal. In Baudrillard, “withdrawal from withdrawal” assumes a much more material form since symbolically loaded family heirlooms are transformed into objects of an industrial process that enframes and systematically removes symbolic elements from our life world introducing a gap of im/materiality between traditional Being and technologically-mediated existence.
Heidegger opposes the mathematical on the basis of its direct effects, and not because it fails to achieve some simplistic, pre-modern, primordial “holism” which would serve as the polar opposite of mathematics as a science – otherwise he would not have repeatedly distinguished the Cartesian “mathematical” from mathematics as such, would not have endorsed the work of specific schools of mathematics (to which we will turn momentarily), and would not have allowed for the restricted appropriateness of the mathematical itself.
Heidegger’s account of technology is precisely a matter of recognizing that the separation of ends and means by which until now technology has been imagined has, in the contemporary situation, been exposed. And that, consequently, the future of human being, framed by an evolving technological situation ungoverned by any ends, lies in the form of its technologically mediated being-together.
Where Heidegger saw the creative imagina-tion as the possibility of rescuing philosophy from The Age of the World Picture, in which the world has become a mere image, Blanchot demands that this reversal in poetic space be even more radical. Where Heidegger thinks he hears the setting-to-work of truth in art, Blanchot sees art as the experience of errancy.
All that mortals can do to remedy the plight of homelessness is to build, dwell, and think in a way that prepares the way for the future truthdisclosing event (Ereignis). Only when the absent gods return of their own accord will mortals finally be enabled to achieve homecoming in a technological age.
Both Heidegger and Derrida enact the thing's release from the confines of conscious representation, but whereas the former wishes to reclaim the independence and the self-identity of the thing, the latter conjoins, hinges and unhinges, the plentitude of the thing on the abyss.
Decades of study into the history of philosophy afforded Heidegger an eminent grasp of the origins of contemporary science and technology, and he saw in both powerful machinations merely the finished product of the failure of that way of living befitting us as mortals. Heidegger did not lament the fact that science became basically technological and that from its beginnings as knowledge of theoria free of delimiting purpose or ends it then became restricted to a rationalistic, narrowly construed misappropriation of the world; instead, he was the first to analyze it.
For Heidegger, one must be sure to recognize that this conflict or struggle does not consist of a mere replenishment of the old with new, but rather the upbringing of the unheard and unsought into the open space. Moreover, this struggle not only bring beings out of concealment, but "it also preserves the essent in its permanence"
Lefebvre's use of habiter is a direct translation of Heidegger's wohnen. Indeed, in a number of places, Lefebvre cites Hölderlin's poem "poetically man dwells", and mentions Heidegger's discussion positively. Lefebvre's suggestion that inhabiting [habiter] has been reduced to the notion of habitat [habitat] parallels Heidegger's notion of a crisis in dwelling. As Lefebvre notes, explicitly following Heidegger, this crisis "springs from a strange kind of excess: a rage for measurement and calculation".
Putting the claim in phenomenological terms, we may say that the seriousness of philosophical intent would show itself in the speech of the philsopher, by means of the capacity of the speech to make evident, to "show" in a way that can be clearly seen, that the speaker goes beyond the mere appearance of brilliance and reasonableness, to truly bring about an understanding of the matter at hand: In this case that rhetoric is the antistrophos of philosophy.