FREEDOM TO FAIL: HEIDEGGER’S ANARCHY
standing-reserve of technicity and the economy. Everything pertaining to technicity and economics can be planned and organized. For Heidegger even science belongs to such planning, since it is necessarily related to objects.
Yet beyond these appearing objects, action is also related to concealment itself. The human being forgets this relation, he must forget it, since he is constantly occupied with what appears. For Heidegger, to forget the relation to concealment means “erring.”46 Yet concealment must necessarily be forgotten. Attention to concealment is hardly imaginable. Erring is therefore not a mistake of thinking or action. For the philosopher, errancy is rather the “open site for and ground of error.” In this passage, Heidegger’s feeling for language becomes evident. For “error” is “the kingdom (the dominion) of the history of those entanglements in which all kinds of erring get interwoven.” What predominates in history is error and errancy. All so-called facts are only the surface of a depth of meaning that withdraws. The narrative begins.
There are various kinds of erring in which thinking and acting become entangled. Heidegger cites the “most ordinary wasting of time,
46 Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” in Wegmarken (GA 9), 196f; “On the Essence of Truth,” in Pathmarks, 150f.
29