FREEDOM TO FAIL: HEIDEGGER’S ANARCHY
making a mistake, and miscalculating,” “going astray” and “venturing too far in one’s essential attitudes and decisions.” The one thinking and acting errs whenever he forgets concealment and what is concealed. A relation to this concealment can therefore take place only in thinking. Concealment announces itself – if at all – in recognition [Erkenntnis].47 For Heidegger, the ethical precedence of thinking is grounded in this. Only he who thinks can actually act.
Errancy, the “open site for error,” is “the essential counteressence to the inceptual essence of truth,”48 to “unconcealment,” to ἀλήθεια. Errancy belongs to thinking. It is a counteressence [ein Gegenwesen], a counter- [ein Gegen], a region [eine Gegend], that belongs to the essence itself and is not the nonessence that Heidegger considers to be a “deformation.”49 The appropriative event of truth is not contingently, but necessarily likewise the appropriative event of errancy. Heidegger meant precisely this when he said: “He who thinks greatly must err greatly.”
The appropriative event of truth, the interplay of openness and concealment, is errancy. If that is possible, then Heidegger himself can still err
47 [Erkenntnis in German means both knowledge or cognition and recognition (in the sense of tragic recognition, for example). Depending on context, we have rendered the term differently, though these various valences should be borne in mind.]
48 [Trans. mod.]
49 Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” in Wegmarken (GA 9), 194; “On the Essence of Truth,” in Pathmarks, 148.
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