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LATER HEIDEGGER
propriation reverts, nothing in terms of which it might even be explained” (Heidegger, BW 415); instead, “it can only be experienced . . . as that which grants” (415). In order to experience this, we need a change in attitude or perspective that instills a new way of relating to the world: “If the answer could be given it would consist in a transformation of thinking, not in a propositional statement about a matter at stake” (Heidegger, BW 431; see also Heidegger, TB 25–26).
What prior to everything else first grants unconcealment is the path on which thinking pursues one thing and perceives it: . . . that presencing presences. The clearing grants first of all the possibility of the path to [2] presence, and grants the [3] possible presencing of that presence itself. We must think aletheia, unconcealment, as the clearing that first grants Being and thinking and [mutual interdependence] their presencing to and for each other. (Heidegger, BW 445, bracketed comments added)Whereas explanatory reason can apply to beings within an epochal understanding of Being, we need a profound shift in order to think about Being itself, which is another reason Heidegger needs a new conception of thinking. “What alone is singularly decisive is the experience of that which is not a being and cannot be a being and yet above all raises beings as beings unto the openness of its sway” (Heidegger, Mi 333). The proper attitude to take toward these sendings is not to analyze them for an inner logic, but to respect their “inexhaustible mystery” (Heidegger, EGT 64; see also Heidegger, BW 238) by resisting our natural tendency to explain and control: “We never know a mystery by unveiling or analyzing it to death, but only in such a way that we preserve the mystery as mystery.”81
Although technological thinking tries to capture everything there is through comprehension and explanation, the source of rationality cannot be grasped this way. Heidegger rejects Hegel’s attempt to order and comprehend history and reason, claiming instead that the changing of an epoch or “the surmounting of a destining of Being . . . each time comes to pass out of the arrival of another destining, a destining that does not allow itself either to be logically and historiographically predicted or to be metaphysically construed as a sequence belonging to a process of history.”82 All that we have is the Unmoored proliferation of epochs of Being, not a rational explanation of any one of them, the combination of them, or the fact that they exist at all. Seeing these radically heterogeneous modes of Being together imparts Heraclitus’s insight that eternity is a child playing where “the ‘because’ withers away in the play. The play is without ‘why.’. . . As the abyss it plays the play that, as Geschick, passes being and ground/reason to us.”83 The important thing is to stay open to the mysterious
81. Heidegger, EHP
43;
see also Heidegger, QT
45;
Heidegger, EGT
51,
93;
Heidegger, PT 56;
Heidegger, BW 136,
448;
Heidegger, Pm
310;
Heidegger, OWL
13.
82. Heidegger, QT
39;
see also 44;
Heidegger, PR
108;
Heidegger, BW
335;
Caputo 1987, 115, 180–81;
Caputo 1993, 30;
Schürmann 1987,
130.
83. Heidegger, PR
113.
Hegel again anticipates both Heidegger (and Derrida)
here. Since there is nothing outside of Spirit’s self-creation, there can be no
goal external to the process to make it “serious.” Furthermore, the act of creation
leads to the reabsorption of what is created. Thus Hegel describes all of reality
as a kind of play: “The movement of the notion is as it were to be looked upon
merely as play: the other which it sets up is in reality not an other” (Hegel, HL
225, §161R).