Byung-Chul Han
Translated by Daniel Steuer
The keyhole in the threshold.
Peter Handke
For the most part, Heidegger’s world remained dialectical. For him, hyperculture would be the end of culture as such.1 He repeatedly laments the loss of the homeland [Heimat]. The media, too, are blamed for the disappearance of the homeland, and ultimately also for the disappearance of the world. They turn human beings into tourists:
And those who have stayed on in their homeland? Often they are still more homeless than those who have been driven from their homeland. Hourly and daily they are chained to radio and television. Week after week the movies carry them off into uncommon, but often merely common, realms of the imagination, and give the illusion of a world that is no world.2
The media only simulate a world, which is in truth ‘no world’ but only pretence. But what makes the world what it is? Where do we find the world if not in our ideas? Is there a realm of Being that is more primordial, even more world-like, than that ‘common’ realm of ideas? Heidegger has in mind a ‘being-in-the-world’ that would reveal itself antecedently to the world of ideas and images. Heidegger uses the term ‘facticity’ to signify a being-in that comes before ideas. The images of the media apparently lack this primordial being-in-the-world. Heidegger sees the danger of the media in the fact that they de-facticize the world, that is, destroy the world’s worldliness, the being-in-the-world that is antecedent to images and information.
In Heidegger’s famous, tellingly titled lecture ‘Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?’ – which could very well be read as an anti-globalization pamphlet – there is an interesting hint about Heidegger’s world. The world only is ‘when one’s own Dasein stands in its work’.3 For someone watching a film or for a tourist, for those who do not work but only behold, the world does not exist. There world is where
the gravity of the mountains and the hardness of their primeval rock, the slow and deliberate growth of the fir trees, the brilliant, simple splendour of the meadows in bloom, the rush of the mountain brook in the long autumn night, the stern simplicity of the flatlands covered with snow – all of this shifts and pushes.4
Heidegger’s world is the site [Ort] that mediates a dialectical, rural and also material closeness. From this perspective, a hyperculture mainly made up of signs and images which shift and push each other in a de-sited side by side would be poor in world. Hyperculturality de-facticizes, de-materializes, de-naturalizes and de-sites the world. The hypercultural simultaneity of diverse things also removes any ‘stern simplicity’ from the world. The emptiness of these ‘flatlands covered with snow’ gives way to the hyperspace of signs, forms and images.
We learn also about Heidegger’s world from those ‘things’ which he repeatedly invokes as the bearers of world. In ‘The Thing’, Heidegger puts things into four categories: 1. ‘the jug and the bench, the footbridge and the plow’, 2. ‘tree and pond … brook and hill’, 3. ‘heron and roe deer [Reiher und Reh], horse and bull’, 4. ‘mirror and clasp, book and picture, crown and cross’.5 The nature of the thing, according to Heidegger, is that it reflects the world in itself. It is therefore worth taking a closer look at his collection of things. This will tell us which world Heidegger inhabited and wanted to inhabit. The arrangement of the things already suggests, as does – in the German – the alliteration, a strict and perspicuous order. The illusion of simplicity is also created at the level of syllables. Most of the named things have, typically enough, only one syllable. They thus appear simple even at the level of language. We get the impression that the strict simplicity of Heidegger’s world is chiefly of a linguistic nature.
The first group of things, consisting of man-made objects, reflects the bright rural world. But it has little to do with the real world of the peasants. Rather, it is a counter-world designed by Heidegger as a reaction to a world dominated by modern technology, and then projected on to the world of the peasants. It resembles very much that romantic counter-world to which the tourists, criticized by Heidegger, are on their way. In a certain respect, Heidegger is himself a tourist, a pilgrim-tourist. After all, Heidegger, like the romantic tourist, is on a pilgrimage to an imaginary There.
The second and third groups of things represent a strict selection of organic and inorganic natural objects. Only native and harmless animals are included. There are also no insects, or vermin [Ungeziefer] (literally: animals not suitable to be sacrificed).6 And the animals have to submit to alliteration and assonance, that is, to the linguistic order. Again, their names do not exceed two syllables, as if longer names would already destroy the strict, simple order of the world. The sole animal name with two syllables, heron [Reiher], is only included in the world of the monosyllabic animals on account of its assonance.7 In his collection of things, Heidegger wouldn’t want to include Benjamin’s butterflies, with their multicoloured, polysyllabic names: the ‘Camberwell beauty’, ‘red admiral’, ‘peacock butterfly’ or ‘orange tip’.8 It is also not a coincidence that Heidegger avoids composite words. They would be too complex for the simple order of the world. They would hyphenate the world, that is, destroy its ‘stern simplicity’.
The fourth group is a set of cultural things. But unlike the things in the first group, which are also man-made, they not only have a use value but also a significant symbolic value. ‘Crown’ and ‘cross’ point towards a hierarchical and religious order. Significant, too, is the ‘book’. Heidegger’s world, in the end, is a world of the ‘book’, that is, a world with a closed, stable, repeatable order. Heidegger has little time for plurality or diversity. Heidegger’s ‘book’ represents that ‘nomos’9 which brings ‘each thing to that place where it belongs’, keeps it ‘in good order’, ‘straightened up and tidied’.10 The image suggests that the order of the world is also visible and perspicuous. The image differs fundamentally from those media images which only simulate the world. Heidegger has in mind an image-like, mythical world in which, according to Flusser,
Time puts everything in the place it deserves. If a thing leaves its place, then time puts it right: it rights it. The world is therefore full of meaning: full of Gods. This righting of the world by time is just (‘dike’) because it again and again puts everything in order (‘cosmos’).11
According to Flusser’s classification, the hypertextual, hypercultural world would be a ‘universe of points’ in which there would no longer be any comprehensive order; it would therefore be a ‘patchwork universe’, one that maybe would consist of coloured panes or windows.
Why does Heidegger begin the last group of things with ‘mirror and clasp [Spiegel und Spange]’? Their significance is probably clear only at a more abstract level. They introduce inwardness, an inwardness that opens up the inner space of the ‘soul’ or the ‘house’. A mirror is not open. It is actually a counter-figure to the window, to the window of the hypertext. It reflects what is one’s own. That is what constitutes its inwardness. The circularity, the closedness, of the clasp has the same effect. The clasp is the figure of the return to oneself. The alliteration, which is very pronounced in this fourth group, strengthens the impression of order and inwardness. The acoustic repetition creates an impression of almost regressive archaism.
Heidegger’s world is also strangely mute or silent. There is no babel of voices. This silence intensifies the sense that the order of the world is simple. Like monads, the things reflect the world silently into the space ahead of them. They do not talk to each other. They do not look around. They have mirrors but no windows. ‘Windowing’ or ‘intertwingularity’ would be wholly alien to Heidegger’s things. All they signify is dispersal and decay.
Following Hölderlin, Heidegger points out the constitutive effect of the alien, that is, ‘wandering’ [Wanderschaft], for the formation of one’s own.12 But this ‘wandering’ is dramatically charged. The difference between what is one’s own and the alien is also burdened by the emphasis Heidegger puts on it. The ‘threshold’ to the alien is as heavy and hard as stone, so to speak, making the crossing of the threshold a dramatic act. Of the threshold, Heidegger says:
The threshold is the ground-beam that bears the doorway as a whole. It sustains the middle in which the two, the outside and the inside, penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between. What goes out and goes in, in the between, is joined in the between’s dependability. The dependability of the middle must never yield either way…. The threshold, as the settlement of the between, is hard because pain has petrified it…. The pain presences unflagging in the threshold, as pain.13
Etymologically, the threshold [Schwelle] is the ground-beam of a house which, as a load-bearing element, also runs across the door. Thus, the threshold guards the inside of the house, and carries the house itself. In Heidegger, the threshold becomes an in-between space in which the inside and outside meet. Despite the between, Heidegger remained the philosopher of the house. His openness towards the outside is limited to the openness of the threshold, which hesitates. The threshold is, after all, turned towards the inside. The hypertextual or hypercultural absence of thresholds is wholly alien to Heidegger. He could have extended his collection of things by including the threshold: … clasp, mirror and threshold, they all guard the inwardness or the intimacy of the house.
The human of the future will most likely not be crossing thresholds, his face contorted in pain. The human of the future will be a tourist, smiling serenely. Should we not welcome that human as homo liber? Or should we rather, following Heidegger or Handke, remain a homo dolores, petrified into a threshold?14 In his Phantasien der Wiederholung, Handke writes:
When you feel the pain of the thresholds, then you are not a tourist; the crossing is possible.15
1. For Heidegger, ‘culture’ (lest we forget, a foreign word) as such has negative connotations. The expansion of the term ‘culture’, in the shape of a ‘philosophy of culture’ for instance, would be a first sign of decay. Being and Time (p. 222) already said that ‘understanding the most alien cultures and “synthesizing” them with one’s own’ leads to ‘an alienation [Entfremdung] in which its [i.e. Dasein’s] ownmost potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it’. Hyperculture, which de-facticizes Dasein, leads to a radical alienation. Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein could also be interpreted as an attempt to re-facticize philosophy itself, as a defence against that thinking which, ‘without marrow, bones, or blood’[!], leads only a ‘literary existence’. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 11 and 75.
2. Martin Heidegger, ‘Memorial Address’, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, in Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, New York: Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 43–57; here p. 48.
3. Martin Heidegger, ‘Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?’, trans. Thomas Sheehan, in Martin Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981, pp. 27–30; here p. 27 (transl. modified).
4. Ibid. (transl. modified).
5. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’, trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 163–80; here p. 180.
6. Heidegger’s world is also a Western world insofar as insects do not figure in it. No other culture is more hostile towards insects than Western culture. In Japanese haikus, for instance (and every haiku reflects the world in itself), insects abound. In contrast to Heidegger, Issa would want to include many insects in his collection of things. Here is one of his haikus: ‘Into the wide world / the baby spiders scatter –/ Each makes a living.’
7. The literally monosyllabic things correspond to Heidegger’s monosyllabic peasants: ‘But in the evening during a work-break, when I sit with the peasants by the fire or at the table in the “Lord’s Corner,” we mostly say nothing at all. We smoke our pipes in silence. Now and again someone might say that the woodcutting in the forest is finishing up … The inner relationship of my own work to the Black Forest and its people comes from a centuries-long and irreplaceable rootedness in the Alemannian-Swabian soil.’ (Heidegger, ‘Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?’, p. 28; italics restored from German original). For Heidegger, hyperculture would be the definitive endpoint, even the total de-facticization, of life rooted in the soil. Hyperculture, incidentally, is very rich in words.
8. Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, p. 52 (transl. amended).
9. Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 239–76; here p. 274.
10. Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, p. 61.
11. Vilém Flusser, ‘Die Zeit bedenken’, p. 127.
12. See Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, p. 142: ‘The appropriation of one’s own is only as the encounter and guest-like dialogue with the foreign. Being a locality, being the essential locale of the homely, is a journeying [Wanderschaft] into that which is not directly bestowed upon one’s own essence but must be learned in journeying.’
13. Martin Heidegger, ‘Language’, trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 185–208; here p. 201.
14. In the late Heidegger, as is well known, human beings are called ‘mortals’. Death is thereby declared to be something positive, and thus transfigured. Part of de-facticization, by contrast, is the overcoming of the thrownness into death.
15. Handke, Phantasien der Wiederholung, p. 13.
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