Theodore Kisiel
With the recent publication of the already well-known lecture of January 31, 1962 entitled “Time and Being,” Heidegger's thought seems to have at last officially come full circle, and appears to bring some degree of completion to all that Heidegger had announced he would undertake in his prospectus in Being and Time (SZ, 39), though not exactly as it was announced there. The second part of this prospectus, dealing with the “phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology,” has proliferated far beyond the announced three divisions, notably in the Nietzsche volumes and including some of the lectures and essays most recently collected in Wegmarken. The outstanding omission has always been the third division of the first part, entitled “Time and Being,” which was to have completed the chain begun by the two divisions published as Being and Time. These two divisions, which concluded by showing that temporality was the Being of the being which understands Being, of Dasein, was to have been completed by “the explication of time as the transcendental horizon of the question of Being.” In the Letter on Humanism, Heidegger explains that this division was withheld because the available language of metaphysics (presumably including such phrases as “transcendental horizon”) was inadequate to express the turn from “Being and Time” to “Time and Being” (PW, 72). This is not to say that no breakthrough to the articulation of this turn was made until the recent lecture on the issue. In the same letter, Heidegger indicates that the lecture On the Essence of Truth (1930-1943) already gained a measure of insight into this turn. And according to Heidegger, the pivotal “concept” of this turn, das Ereignis (the appropriating event), was already at work in his thought during this period (US, 260), appearing thematically in the Holderlin essays and in The Origin of the Artwork (1936), although it received no sustained treatment in his publications until Identity and Difference (1957) and Underway to Language (1959).
The incubation period was evidently necessary in order to develop a language suitable to express the issues and relationships involved in the turn. Not that the long preparation and waiting period for the necessary transformation is over. Heidegger continues to reiterate that he is still “underway to language.” The 1962 lecture still proceeds “cautiously” and “with foresight” (ZS, 20), without hindsight back to metaphysics and its readily available language, groping its way toward a remarkable realm that does not readily yield to articulation. Not that an entirely new language of neologisms must be invented to bring the domain of the appropriating event to the fore. Rather, what Heidegger seeks is “a transformed relationship to the essence of the old language.”1
Heidegger’s use of language has long been a philosophical notoriety. Carnap’s parody of Heidegger’s “propositions” on Nothing has become a stock in trade in the positivistic debunking of metaphysics. Heidegger's response to such critiques are characteristically comprehensive. For him, the linguistic standards of logical positivism are simply the natural conclusion of a long tradition of the metaphysical approach to language, and hence themselves metaphysical. The first step in transforming our attitude to language is then to “destroy” the logical-grammatical interpretation of language, centered on the proposition and its subject-predicate relationship, that a metaphysics of substance and of subject has conveyed to us, in order to clear the way for orienting language to the pre-predicative realm which is its source. It is in this re-orientation that Heidegger looks for new possibilities of expression that would hold themselves closer to this source. It is to some of these linguistic strategies that at once turn from metaphysical ways of speaking and toward a more fundamental penetration of the origins of language that we wish to address ourselves here. The choice of possibilities are manifold, e.g., Heidegger’s interest in poetry and in Oriental ways of speaking, but the focus of our attention will be on the language of the event. Since the appropriating event lies at the very center of Heidegger’s thought, the most basic traits of the transmutation of language that he seeks are to be found here. A more detailed characterization of the background and the approaches to this domain will help point the way in our investigation. Special emphasis will be placed on the linguistic devices used in these approaches, the first of which is the vicarious role which the “and” plays in Being “and” Time.
It is often said that Heidegger is a man of one thought: Being. To say this relates him to a long tradition of Western philosophy, but it does not truly indicate what his unique question is. What we must do is to get a glimpse of his central concern, of that one thought which has troubled him from the beginning, that draws him over and over again to the effort of thinking and that gathers all of his reflections together. What we are after is what Heidegger himself calls die Sache, “that which concerns thought, that which for thought never ceases to be a question, that which is the very point of the question” (FP, 183).
His answers to Fr. Richardson’s questions concerning his Denkweg are particularly enlightening on this point. Referring to the Aristotelian statement that “being is said in many ways,’ which opens Brentano's inquiry into the manifold sense of being in Aristotle, the book which led him from the gymnasium into philosophy, Heidegger tells us that “latent in this phrase is the question which determined my Denkweg: what is the pervasive, simple, unified determination of Being that permeates all of its multiple meanings?”2 But before the “common origin” of the polyvalence of Being can be established, a prior question must first be answered, namely, “whence does Being as such (not merely being as being ) receive its determination?”3 The phenomenological character of the quest for the source of the Sinngebung implied in this question only came to the fore later when Heidegger came in contact with the phenomenological “method,” which he interprets for himself in terms of the basic Greek senses of phainesthai (to show itself) and logos (to make manifest). This he identifies as the first of three decisive insights that clarified the venture of considering the Beingquestion as a question which seeks the sense (Sinn) of Being. The second was the interpretation of aletheia as unconcealment, gleaned from reading Aristotle, and the third the recognition that presence is the fundamental trait of Being as ousia. And Being as presence develops into the question of Being in terms of its time character.
Such is the complex of questions and insights which sets the stage for the problematic of Dasein posed in 1927 under the title Being and Time, in which “the ‘and’ in this title holds within itself the central problem. Neither Being nor time have to give up their hitherto constituted meanings, but a more original interpretation must establish their justification and their limits” (KM, 219). That Being is related to time is already contained in “the possibilities prepared for us by the ‘ancients,’” (SZ, 19) who conceived Being as permanence in presence (aei on, ousia, parousia) and the whatness of beings as “that which has always been,” which in tum was one form of a priori and hence “earlier” (KM, 216-17). And time has long functioned as a criterion for distinguishing realms of Being into the temporal, atemporal and supratemporal, so that even eternity was interpreted as a nunc stans, a permanent now. And yet why Being should spontaneously be conceived in terms of time has never really been made an explicit theme of philosophical inquiry. In opposition to this obliviousness, Heidegger sets himself the task of showing “that and how the central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time, when rightly seen and rightly explained” (SZ, 18). In order for metaphysics in its entire history to be properly founded, one must make explicit the hidden relations of Being and time, the terms in which the very first thinkers of the question spontaneously expressed the issue, in which terms present thinkers continue to express themselves, manifesting that “the understanding of Being in Dasein almost of itself projects Being upon time” (KM, 219). The most apparent juncture of Being and time, at least in 1927, is then Dasein itself.
The issue of Being and time seems to resemble the well-known metaphysical distinctions of Being and becoming, Being and appearance, and Being and thinking. But the “and” of the metaphysical distinctions is disjunctive: Being and not. . . . It serves to introduce something other than Being, which delimits Being and still somehow belongs to it. But “in the formula “Being and time’, ‘Being’ is not something other than ‘time’ inasmuch as ‘time’ is named as the forename for the truth of Being, where truth is the essencing of Being and therefore Being itself’ (WM, 17). Therefore, the essence of time considered within the question of Being points toward a completely different realm of inquiry than the metaphysical distinctions (EM, 157). And yet the most consequential of these metaphysical distinctions, Being and thinking, can be turned in the very same direction by investigating thinking not as a power of men but as a power of aboriginal Being, as the first essay in Identity and Difference does.
All of Heidegger is then an attempt to read Being and time into one another. Being and time are “convertible” terms, i.e., they “turn together.” And the thrust of the later Heidegger converges on a focus of thought in which Being “and” time are read into one another to such a degree that they become One in a simple center which is the source of both. This “and,” left unspecified by the early Heidegger, is now given the singular and proper name of das Ereignis and described as the e-vent that appropriates Being and time, the It that gives both, the third that has always been first, and as such, the secret power hidden in both Being and time and holding the two in a relationship of reserve. But the two terms being unified have also developed in the course of the Denkweg. Hence he now states that “the task of thought better perceived now needs a more appropriate determination of the theme which had otherwise been indicated under the title Being and Time. The title ought now to read Presence and Clearing (Anwesenheit und Lichtung)” (FP, 173).
It is in these deepened terms that Heidegger finally understands his preliminary question, “Whence does Being as such receive its determination?” and its answer: “Being is determined by the reach of time.” And in reply to the first question, it appears that the simple unified “determination” of Being, the “common origin” which pervades all of its multiple meanings is now the event out of which Being as presence and time as clearing become apropos to each other. If instead of “time” we substitute: clearing of the self-concealing of presenting (Anwesen), then Being is determined by the reach of time. This comes about, however, only insofar as the clearing of self-concealing assumes in its want a thought corresponding to it. Presenting (Being) belongs in the clearing of self-concealing (time). Clearing of self-concealing produces presenting (Being). ... this belonging and producing rest in an ap-propriation and are called event.4
Now that the direction of Heidegger’s thrust into the “and” has been pointed out, we must follow through with a brief development of the content of its two poles. As already indicated, the two terms cannot be considered different from one another. Both refer to the essence of time. Both describe the process of unconcealment, the truth of Being. Both accordingly bear a reference to the ultimate concealment. The presenting process (Anwesen) is at once an absenting process (Abwesen). Essence (Wesen) for Heidegger is accordingly understood verbally in terms of an interplay of presence and absence. And clearing is always understood in terms of the background of obfuscation from which it frees itself.
But each of the terms makes it appearance in the Heideggerian opus in a different way, from a different source, in different contexts, and therefore carrying differing nuances, which is precisely the source of the difficulties of bringing them together in the turn. Presence and its presenting process are the temporal terms for Being which Heidegger finds in the Western tradition and accepts as such, while constantly mulling the secret essence of time which lies hidden and unthought in these terms. Presence more often than not is used as a variant expression of the ontological difference of Being and being, viz., the presenting of what is present, which emphasizes its association with a long tradition of metaphysics concerned with beings to the neglect of Being. And the various missions of presence sent by the appropriating event constitute the history of metaphysics.
Clearing, on the other hand, is that within which beings can present themselves, the free and open space which grants us access to the beings which we are not and to the beings which we are, the leeway and playing field of the world. More basically, when verbally understood, clearing is the regioning of a region, the expansive opening which permits an outlet for free play and enables presenting to take place and thus lets being be. As the enabling element, the clearing is not only that within which beings present themselves, but also that by which things appear. As the site of openness, it is the here of Being, Da-sein.
Dasein was the preliminary pivotal concept of the first part of Heidegger’s original prospectus for executing the turn to the event, just as its second part was to “destroy” the traditional conception of time in order to prepare the ancient conception of Anwesen for the turn. In Being and Time, Dasein as Being-in-the-world is identified with the clearing, in the introduction to the well-known sections which elaborate the constitution of the here as the thrown and projected linguistic realm of meaning which is man’s understanding of Being (SZ, 133). Here, it is also pointed out that a long tradition of Lichtmetaphysik has described this understanding figuratively as a lumen naturale. But the light of reason interpreted as a reified power somehow implanted in us is precisely what Heidegger from the beginning strives to surpass, in order to establish the ontological ground for any act of illumination or intuitive seeing. Such a backtracking ultimately leads to a reading of the traditional definition of man, the living being possessing logos, instead as the being possessed by logos, where logos is now (among other things) the indigenous field of language in which he lives, moves and has his Being.
Furthermore, even though Lichtung suggests Licht and hence has been translated as “lighting-up process,” Heidegger strives to surpass the Lichtmetaphysik from Plato on and to backtrack into the ground that precedes as well as makes possible such an interpretation. The clearing as such is neutral with regard to its medium and mode of reception, and sets free sounds, for example, as well as sights. For Heidegger, even more basic than the Licht of Lichtung is its metaphorical reference to a clearing in the wood which is first cleared by a process of lightening rather than lighting, a thinning of the thicket (FP, 170-71, 190-91). Obstacles must first be cleared away before obscurities can be cleared up. The disencumbering disclosure is first necessary to release the clearing for illumination. Parenthetically, it may be noted how the spatial metaphor which permeates language through and through continues to crop up in any attempt to discuss time, where, for example, the clearing continues to be described as a “temporal playing field” (Zeit-Spiel-Raum).
From the beginning, the clearing process was conceived as temporal through and through. Being and Time concludes that it is ecstatic temporality which originally clears the here of Dasein and which unifies its articulated structure in terms of the three dimensions of time (SZ, 351). As the ekstatikon pure and simple, temporality is the condition of the possibility of the ex-sistence that Dasein is. Time is the primordial “ex” that extends Dasein in its scope and limits, which determines the kind of understanding of Being which man has, appropriate to his time. “With the disclosure of the ‘here’ grounded in ecstatically stretched temporality, a ‘time’ is allotted to Dasein” (SZ, 410).
This tensile character of time and its tenses is maintained in the 1962 lecture “Time and Being” in the way time is given in the event, as an offer of presence that reaches (Reichen) and that thereby defines the reach (Reichweite) of a region (Bereich). The three time dimensions constitute three different modes of reaching and of offering presence. In reaching to one another, the three dimensions of time not only establish a play of presence and absence, but clear for themselves a temporal playing field. This reciprocal interplay is under the sway of a fourth dimension in which the unity of authentic time reposes, an incipient offering and reaching-extending which clears the three dimensions by holding them apart and together in proximity, a proximating proximity which at once denies what has been and restrains what is to come and so conceals as well as clears, and clears only when the time is “ripe,” appropriate (ZS, 46-49). For “the proximity which proximates is itself the appropriating event” (US, 196).
And its last word is silence. For the event is not a permanent presence, but instead gives itself by withdrawing itself. It is this withdrawing mystery which provides the permanent origin of all clearing. Accordingly, the clearing itself is not a fixed stage with its curtain always raised where the play of beings runs its course, but a shifting scene that fades into the background only to emerge anew. Because the event withdraws, it is still the indeterminate “There is” of the Ur-phenomena of Being and time, the Lethe at the very heart of aletheia that continues to draw thought forward.
With its principle of zu den Sachen selbst, phenomenology has acclimated us to a movement of radical regression which strives to undercut the constructions of the natural attitude, science and metaphysics in order to manifest the fundamental experiential structures that found them. The most fundamental and all-pervasive structure is that of intentionality, at once constituting and intuitive, productive and revelatory, active and receptive, and variously described by Husserl as a transcendental life experiencing the world in a “living present,” by Heidegger as the event of unconcealment in which thinking and Being are the “same” in a point of intimacy between Being and man which precedes all distinction, by Sartre as a prereflective action of revealing the world, by Merleau-Ponty in terms of the active human body perceiving a world of ambiguity. Not that these formulations exhaust the issue. As Heidegger puts it in his foreword to Husserl’s lectures on time constitution, “the term ‘intentionality’ is no all-explanatory word but one which designates a central problem.” In Husserl’s words, we are standing before “the deepest essential bonds between reason and being in general, the puzzle of all puzzles.”5
The regress takes us to the root of human experience itself, in a radical effort to get to the bottom of things which ultimately reaches a point where the bottom falls out and gives way to an abyss (Abgrund), an undifferentiated and indeterminate chaos, “the chasm out of which the Open opens itself” (HD, 61). Chaos here is thus not to be taken in the static sense of sheer disorder and confusion, but as a “drive, flow, and motion, whose order is hidden and whose law is not immediately known” (N, I, 566), “the hidden, self-overflowing, unmastered excess of life” (N, L 568). We are before a radical beginning that posits itself beyond all distinction, as the immediate, the simple, the element, the Lethe of aletheia.
The drive to grasp experience by its umbilical cord takes us back to the moment of incipient pregnancy where meaning first takes hold in human experience, the original upsurge of “reason” in experience, a fullness of meaning to be found in. the very immediacy of experience, the ultimate Sinngebung whose immediacy and spontaneous genesis of meaning at once find their apt expression in the double-entendre of the German Es gibt. Following what he considered to be a more faithful adherence to the phenomenological prescription zur Sache selbst, it was Heidegger who radicalized Husserl’s quest for the most original givenness of beings into the question of the origin of givenness pure and simple.6 And yet this region of absolute giving is itself not given. “The immediate, therefore, is never and nowhere ‘given’; it must always be reconstructed; and to ‘ourselves,’ that is to our most intimate life, we have no access.”7 “For the ‘primal experience, upon which our experiences are grounded, has always passed irrevocably away by the time our attention is directed to it.”8 Here is the essence of the finitude of man, to whom life poses “the colossal aporia, the insoluble dilemma”9 of glimpsing an immediate which is never accessible immediately (HD, 59-61). For consciousness always arrives too late to seize that which seizes it, the immediate present. “Consciousness is senescence and a quest of things past.”10
And yet the immediate in its withdrawal is precisely what draws thought by calling out to be thought. The draw of its unthought is the very food for thought. It “wants” thought, and “gives” thought its sustenance, and in this way “uses” thought to reveal itself. The lure of the ineffable, the call of the wild and aboriginal is the very provocation of thought. It is what sets thought on its way, its very incipience. It evokes thought, appeals to be thought — and therefore “speaks”! Though it always holds itself in reserve, its silence is infinitely suggestive. Its draw is like the gesture of a finger pointing the way to the secret of our Being, of our time, of what is most appropriate to us. Accordingly, in its gestation of what is most timely and original for us, it guides the course of our thought and of our history. And yet all this goes on surreptitiously, behind the scenes, as it were, outside of the arena of earth-shaking historical occurrences. The inaugural event of Being is not newsworthy. For, as the most immediate and comprehensive of our experiences, it is always with us as the element and background of all of our particular experiences, and in this sense quite ordinary. “Nothing” really happens in this event (N, II, 485) — which is why it is the most extraordinary and potentially devastating of our experiences when it does come into the foreground. Consider, for example, this description of the poet’s venture into the ineffable immediacy (“the holy”): “The shock of chaos, that offers no support, the terror of the immediate, that frustrates all intrusion, the holy is transformed through the tranquillity of the shielded poet into the mildness of the mediate and mediatizing word” (HD, 68-69).
But how does this event of language come about, if the immediate itself is ineffable, and can never be apprehended immediately? Even though the immediate is inaccessible in its immediacy, as the comprehensive event which permeates all particular experiences, it is at once the mediation of all mediated beings, and so can be glimpsed in and through its mediations. It is the word which articulates these relations among everything actual, and so itself is the mediation which holds and retains beings in Being. “Without the holding and relating word, the totality of things, the ‘world,’ sinks into darkness” (US, 177). Language accordingly institutes the network of relations which is our historical world in its particular differentiations and bounded by its particular horizon. Its welcome capacity to domesticate the aboriginal in the “mildness” of the word can nevertheless tranquillize the elemental power of its mediating ground into oblivion, as the current technological modulation of language has done. But it is always possible to revive the relationship of the event, “the relation of all relations, the hold of all holds” (US, 267), since the horizon of our linguistic world “is not a wall that encloses man; on the contrary, the horizon is transparent, it points as such to the non-established, becoming, and capable of becoming, to the possible” (N, I, 574). “The horizon throughout its transparent permanence lets the chaos appear as chaos” (N, I, 575). Accordingly, the existing languages in which we find ourselves “thrown” are always open to orientation toward this aboriginal language which “speaks” in silence. And it is to our creative poets and thinkers that we look to find the words which somehow intimate the ineffable, old and familiar words long in use made to speak anew their relationship with the very source of language. This process of listening for the unsaid to be said in what has already been said has long been called hermeneutics.
To summarize, “the intangible experience in itself cannot be apprehended nor mastered, but it manifests something to us, an appearance: says something, an utterance. The aim of science, therefore, is to understand this logos; essentially, science is hermeneutics.”11 The mediatizing immediate which itself is unmediated, the ground which itself is an ungrounded abyss, the differentiating, articulating, unconcealing process which itself is undifferentiated, ineffable and concealed, such is the ultimate character of Being in its most archaic sense. Its concealment (Verbergung) is the very shelter (Bergung) of the aboriginal language, which speaks in its own time and its own unexpected way, according to which the hermeneute must bide his time.
The language which orients itself to the silent event thus warrants being called a hermeneutical language. Being and Time situated the hermeneutical “as” in a pre-predicative involvement in the referential relations of the world of gear preceding the theoretical predications of the apophantic “as.” Later, the “as” structure of “something as something” appears again in the history of the metaphysical interpretations from Being as idea to Being as will. But “the hermeneutical does not first signify the explicit interpreting that lays out, for even before this there is the bringing of the message and tidings” (US, 122). The hermeneutical language most basically is oriented to the “primal tidings” of the aboriginal event, which “speaks” silently, by withholding itself. To be true to its ineffable source, such a language leaves more unsaid in what it actually says. Its seminal, germinal, suggestive probing calls for a logos oriented to silence, a “sigetic” logic.12 “Every incipient and authentic naming utters the unspoken, and indeed in such a way that it remains unspoken” (WD, 119). The unsayable is somehow said!
Such a hermeneutical language necessarily reaches beyond the resources of the current logical and grammatical conception of language, whose final court of appeal is the judgment and whose basic structure is the subject-predicate relation. For that about which one speaks here is no longer the self-givenness of a subject, but the self-withdrawal of the event. We are no longer dealing with the An sich of things on hand, but the Ansichhalten, the holding-to-itself of the basic mystery. Whereas the apophantic language arrives at a predicate which bestows a definite character on a subject that already stands out, the hermeneutical language, groping in the most. primordial pre-predicative realm, culminates in the “saying that does not say” (sagenden Nichtsagen) (ID, 72). In it, purely declarative sentences are no longer possible, its assertions take on a peculiarly non-assertive character, its propositions amount to a leap13 to which the usual logic of the substantive does not apply. It is no wonder that Carnap found in Heidegger a particularly rich source of what for logical positivism can only be meaningless assertions or pseudo-statements, like “nothing itself nothings.” “A sequence of words is meaningless if it does not, within a specified language, constitute a statement.”14 It is precisely such a closed system of language, with its strictly defined rules of formation and rigidly fixed vocabulary, that Heidegger seeks to “destroy.” How he does this, what linguistic strategies he employs, is what we now wish to examine.
Generally speaking, it can be prefatorily stated that Heidegger’s resorting to these peculiarly non-assertive assertions arises from his attempt to think Being itself, Being as such. The following quotation strikes the pervasive keynote: “Yet Being — what is Being? It is itself. This is what future thinking must learn to experience and to say. ‘Being’ — it is not God nor a world-ground. For being is further than any being, be it a rock or an animal, a work of art or a machine, an angel or God. Being is the nearest. Yet the near is what is farthest for man” (PW, 76). And later: “The appropriating event is the most unpretentious of the unpretentious, the simplest of the simple, the nearest of the near and the farthest of the far, within which we mortals sojourn and live our temporal life” (US, 259). As the simplest of the simple which is nearest in immediacy and farthest in accessibility, Being as such signalizes a new principle of identity toward which all converges and out of which all emerges, the self-given in a strictly terminal sense, at once self-withdrawn. Thus, echoes of the old tautological A is A are constantly heard in Heidegger's meditations. These apparent tautologies serve as bases for a leap into a new dimension of identity which in its immediacy defies articulation. Accordingly, we are told that the sentence “language is language, speech is speech,” apparently “a tautology which says nothing” (US, 12) and its verbal iterative, “speech speaks,” can lead us to an abyss which opens onto the place of the essence of speech and of the speaking being, man. Far from being a meaningless tautology, such an iterative sentence serves to turn us away from thinking about language in terms other than itself, as an externalization of inner feelings or as an activity of man, for example, in order that we may consider language as language, in terms proper to it as such. It thus turns our attention to the power of language itself to reveal, to let beings be, and more profoundly, to the silent source of this power, to whose “air” we as speaking beings are called upon to listen, to whose elemental modulation we already find ourselves attuned.
Speech speaks in order to summon the world and things to their essence, whereby the world worlds and the thing things. In thinging, the thing draws the world near and gathers it. The world in turn worlds by granting the thing its nexus for gathering. In reciprocal intimacy and with the articulation of the difference between them, each comes into its own. Issuing out of the e-vent of appropriation, each receives its unique essence.
Speech speaks—the world worlds—the thing things — why these verbally iterative sentences (to which others can easily be added from the Heideggerian opus)? For one thing, such iterations stress the verbal over the substantive, and develop a series of iterative verbs designed to overcome the static permanence which the “is” has acquired. Moreover, we are in the proximity of a family of phenomena to which the “is” is to a large extent not applicable, for Being “is” not a being, nor “is” time. Finally, such a linguistic strategy serves to emphasize the phenomenon itself (die Sache selbst), “as such,” in its unique essence and essential uniqueness. From his early interest in Scotus’ notion of haecceity to his ultimate selection of Er-eignis as his theme-word, Heidegger’s concern for a uniqueness which is at once universal is everywhere apparent, as in the concreteness of the “here” and the temporal riddle of uniqueness. All of these iterative verbs therefore seek to express how the “proper” nouns, speech, the world, the thing, etc., “essence.” In opposition to a tradition of static and eternal essences, Heidegger seeks to develop a verbal conception of essence. The iterative sentence accordingly points to an identity and sameness which permits difference, to an essence which is self-changing and historical, appropriate to its time.
This transmutation in the conception of essence is especially expressed in the following two turning sentences:
The essence of truth is the truth of the essence (WW, 26).
The essence of speech: the speech of the essence (US, 200).
In each case, the first essence is understood traditionally as quiddity, while the second is taken verbally and refers to the enduring abiding that makes way, i.e., the appropriating event. The other terms follow their contextual suit in the turn of phrase. Accordingly, the turning sentences now read: what truth as knowledge is emerges from the unconcealment of the event that appropriates; speech as human activity finds its incipience in the silent saying of the event. Both turns terminate in the appropriating event. The colon which breaks the second sentence serves to symbolize the leap that is necessary to execute the turn.
The way leading to the direct articulation of the event itself also traverses a linguistic evolution. It centers on the attempt to find a suitable way of speaking of the It which gives the Being which is there when we say “there is Being.” At first, the It is simply identified with Being itself in its self-giving, so that “Being gives Being” (PW, 80-81). But this way of putting it still has the disadvantage of suggesting that Being somehow “is” like a being. Later, the giving of Being is identified with the sending of the mission of presence in the history of Being, which must be considered together with the giving of time as the extending of a clearing. The substantifying effect of the It, which is now identified as the appropriating event, must then give way to the verbal impact suggested by these two modes of giving. For the event is nothing but the giving itself. It is unacceptable to say that “the event is,” since it is not a being, or that “it gives the event,” since all giving issues from the event. Both expressions therefore reverse the proper direction in which the event is to be thought, which in its giving always retreats into its abyss. The best that can be said is: “The appropriating event events by appropriating” (Das Ereignis ereignet), not as a mere sentence subject to the questioning of logic, but as a touchpoint of meditation on the mysterious comings and goings and abiding character of the central concern of thought. Even to speak of Being as the event, which certainly is true in its general intent, risks placing what is thought here on the same level as the metaphysical interpretations of Being as idea, as will, etc. But the event is not a kind of Being subordinated to the basic concept of Being. And the reverse is no less objectionable: Being is not a kind of event, for the event is not a generic concept to which Being and time are subordinate. Relations of a logical order say nothing to us here. Being and time disappear into the event out of which they are appropriated and thus come into their own. The “as” here is simply the giving appropriation of Being and time, the eventing of the event itself. The event events. All comes back to saying the same, going from the same and returning to the same, which at once is always different, the principle of uniqueness itself (ZS, 54-66).
The iterative and circular “syntax” of the hermeneutical language serves to de-emphasize the predicativé structure of our inherited languages, and therefore tends to concentrate our attention on its keywords within a pre-predicative context. The hermeneutical process ultimately focuses on the most fundamental words of our language, in order to listen to their changing modulations and mutual resonance. By way of summary and conclusion, an attempt will be made to unravel the strands of meaning knotted into the notion of Ereignis from a somewhat different perspective. And the translation of Ereignis as “appropriating event” has yet to be justified.
In officially introducing Ereignis as the very centerline of his endeavors, Heidegger rather grandiosely asserts that “it can be translated with as little success as the Greek keyword logos and the Chinese Tao” (ID, 29). If we bracket the Teutonic pomposity of this declaration, it does suggest that we can expect in this word the same manifold convergence of connotations that Heidegger himself has unraveled from the Greek logos. In fact, he later specifies the Ereignis as the one and only, unique and simple subject matter of thought, inaccessible in its simplicity, approachable only through a manifold thought, and ipso facto through a manifold language.15 This accounts for the structure of the Heideggerian opus, aiming at a single center, approached along numerous “forest trails,” some of them perhaps dead-ends.
As a first approximation to this unique Sache, Heidegger takes the phenomenological path. Recall the great circle of Heidegger, that it is first necessary to anticipate and acknowledge what is to be explicated, namely, the total situation where emergent Being shows itself. Once in the circle comes the problem of finding a suitable language to describe this process of emergence, the relations within it between man and the Being of beings, and finally the enabling element which is the condition of the possibility for such emergence and such relations. This enabling element is ultimately termed the Ereignis. Difficulties to this project are soon encountered in a language rendered opaque by a long tradition of metaphysics. In the face of this, Heidegger does not suggest that we take to neologisms, but rather calls for “a transformed relationship to the essence of the old language.”16 What sort of a conversion? A phenomenological one, and to the extent that phenomenology calls for complete honesty, an ethical one as well. And if phenomenology is a matter of letting “things” speak for themselves, then its most refined phase, thought, is a matter of letting language speak for itself. Indeed, at the aboriginal level of the Ereignis, language and Sache are one for Heidegger.
In what ways then does this aboriginal language speak of itself? I submit that a manifold of major linguistic constellations can be distinguished in Heidegger’s own descriptions of the Ereignis. If indeed Ereignis is the common source of emergence of the manifold senses of Being that Heidegger wants it to be, then one should expect all the heavy-duty stems of our most archaic language to tend to merge here. Heidegger’s own reflections on the convergent senses of logos, physis, aletheia, and the other old Greek words which somehow named the unnameable prefigure our discussion here, and in some sense are to be repeated for the sake of a new beginning in the event. The process of instituting Ereignis as a “guiding word in the service of thinking’ (ID, 29) in fact continues the reflection on the most fundamental words of our language in an attempt to approximate the archaic simplicity of the aboriginal language. What follows then is a highly condensed “linguistic analysis” of Heidegger’s most basic language in terms of the main linguistic constellations that thread through his conception of Ereignis:
1) The language of coming and going, used to express the dynamics between man and Being. On the basis of such descriptions, Ereignis becomes the event of the advent of Being overcoming man through intervention in his ventures. Certainly no ordinary event, limited to a moment or period of time, but one that is momentous and periodic, or better, that which makes events momentous and periodizes them.
2) The suggestions of intermittence in the comings and goings of the event are countered by a second linguistic group of stasis words, of standing and bringing to stand, posing and positing, setting and fixing, in which man stands out into Being in a holding attitude that holds himself and beings in ex-sistential place. This incipient state-of-affairs ultimately points back to the Ereignis as the “holding that holds to itself, the relation of all relations, the hold of all holds.”
3) Insofar as aboriginal Being holds to itself, it holds back, withdraws, and in so doing draws man with it. We are now approaching the language of hide and seek, and the chiaroscuro interplay of hide and show. This always appears as Heidegger's last word on Ereignis, as the concealment.
4) Closely tied to but significantly distinct from the language of hide and show is the language of closing and opening. Opening as clearing constitutes a releasing, a freeing, permitting an out-let for free play. Thus appears that all important Heideggerian word, lassen, and Ereignis becomes the dimension enabling the emergence of beings and providing viability to man.
5) But the last word in Heidegger is still the closure of disclosure. That which grants access is itself inaccessible. Confronted with the ineffable opaqueness of the abyss of aboriginal Being, all that can be said is that “there IT is,” or — and here English fails to keep pace with the German — Es gibt. Ereignis as the indeterminate “there is” which gives and promotes a language of give and receive, or more vehemently, in keeping with the violence of man and Being that Heidegger finds expressed in the Antigone chorus, give and take.
6) “To appropriate” says both give and take, as well as the all important propium (eigen) and adapting (eignen) of the Ereignis. Heidegger’s persistent useo f these cognates and their variants suggest that these connotations were uppermost in his choice of this “guiding word in the service of thinking.” Evidently Ereignis is to be the mutually appropriating realm of the give and take of uniqueness.
Zygmunt Adamczewski17 has suggested “bearing” as a translation for Ereignis, which helps to bring out some of its further ramifications. For one thing, it intuitively brings to the fore another linguistic constellation, the language of genesis so time-honored in religion, philosophy and phenomenology. It thus emphasizes the perpetual pregnancy and fruitfulness of the engendering phenomenal ground. Bearing as begetting, carrying and delivering accentuates the creative character of aboriginal being, which Heidegger himself develops in his reduction of causality to a bringing forth or pro-ducere. It also suggests the carry-over and deliverance of the inheritance of tradition (Überlieferung). Hence no one can deny that “bearing” is a very fertile term. It furthermore suggests not only originating but also sustaining power. But here it is on a par with the holding action and staying power already indicated as proper to aboriginal Being. Likewise, some of the other nuances of “bearing” are present and perhaps better expressed in the other linguistic groups. For example: forbearance is also withstanding and the ability to “take it”; bearing as an attitude is also a stance or posture, an approach (Angang) or the now-cliched openness. On the debit side, bearing suggests the teleology of the originating process to such a degree that it also connotes meaning and direction (Sinn), so that it in fact obscures its archeological character and the concomitant concealment at the heart of the “e-vent,” as an occurrence that comes from afar. And where are the closure and withdrawal that leads to degeneration and the intermittent need for regeneration? Finally, even though bearing suggests relevance, and hence implies the pertinence that belongs to the appropriate, it nevertheless verbally interrupts the profound resonance between the “ownness” or proprium of the appropriate and the owing of a debt to my own existence to which I ought to own up, so well brought out by Adamczewski in his paper.
Not that we should reject the suggestions of gestation that “bearing” brings to the understanding of the Ereignis. It suggests for instance that heavy-duty English root stemming from the Latin verb for “bearing,” ferre, which gives us that all important Heideggerian term, difference. In closest harmony with the Ereignis, Heidegger places the Austrag (ID, 10) which he roughly interprets as a “bearing out.” In Identity and Difference, Austrag is the differentiation between Being and beings. In Underway to Language (22-95), it is also the gestation of the gestures of language, especially in the primordial articulation between world and thing. We are now evoking the language of identifying and differentiating, which conjures the most difficult of Heidegger’s problems, the modulation of uniqueness, involving at once the exclusivity of selfhood, the disjunction of temporal epochs, and the historical discursivity of language.
Such is the language of the event in terms of its most primeval linguistic groups, which attempt to sound the most primeval event of language. The language of the event: the event of language. If we recall the double play of the “of” that Heidegger emphasizes in other contexts, these two turns of phrase should ultimately be one and the same, at least in the sense of belonging together and corresponding to each other. In the metaphysics of grammar, “of” is the genitive of possession; for Heidegger, it is the genesis of the proper, once again the appropriating event itself. More than once, he refers to an Eigentum des Er-eignisses (ID, 31; N, I, 484; US, 265; ZS, 62-64). And what we have just surveyed in terms of linguistic groups are those very “properties” of verbal essence, or better, the propia of aboriginal Being.
1 According to his letter published in the preface to William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), p. XXIII.
2 Ibid., pp. X-XI.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., pp. XX-XXI.
5 Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der Europdischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie, Husserliana VI, ed. W. Biemel, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962) p. 12.
6 Ernst Tugendhat, Der Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl und Heidegger (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Co., 1967) p. 242.
7 7G. Van Der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology (New York, Harper Torchbook, 1963) vol. II, p. 672. The chapter being cited is entitled “Phenomenon and Phenomenology.”
8 Ibid., p. 671.
9 Ibid., p. 672.
10 Emmanuel Levinas, “Intentionalité et sensation,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie (1965) nos. 71-72, pp. 34-54, Cf. p. 47.
11 Van Der Leeuw, op. cit., p. 676.
12 Otto Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers (Pfullingen: Neske, 1963) p. 276.
13 Heidegger’ often plays on the German Satz, which means both “proposition” and “leap.”
14 Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” tr. Arthur Pap, in Logical Positivism (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959) pp. 60-81. Cf. p. 61.
15 Richardson, op. cit., p. XXIII.
16 Ibid.
17 “Martin Heidegger and Man’s Way to Be,” Man and World (1968) vol. 1, no. 8, pp. 363-79. Cf. p. 869.
Theodore Kisiel - The Language of the Event: The Event of Language
from Heidegger and the path of thinking.