JUSSI BACKMAN: THE POSTMETAPHYSICAL COMPLICATIONS OF PRESENCE

In its first, Presocratic beginning, Heidegger tells us, philosophy started out as a quest for that which unifies the diverse things that are meaningfully accessible – in other words, present – to thinking and perceiving: their presence (Anwesenheit), or, rather, their active “presencing” (Anwesen), their process of self-presentation (GA 5: 371/280). This is most explicit in the Poem of Parmenides, where a nameless goddess exhorts the narrator-thinker to consider all determinate things, whether present or absent in space and time, in terms of their unifying, indeterminate, and homogeneous intelligibility, their ability to be grasped in thought: “Being-aware [noein] and being-there [einai] are one and the same,” and “even absent things [apeonta] are steadfastly present [pareonta] to awareness [noos].”¹ This pure intelligible presence is as such absolutely self-sufficient and self-immanent, devoid of any relation or reference to non-presence, which must mean simply absolute inaccessibility and with which philosophical thinking can have no involvement.

The being of beings is thus conceived as the presence of what is present. Accordingly, Heidegger maintains, the Platonic-Aristotelian key term ousia, “beingness,” is fundamentally understood as parousia, (constant) presence. In what Heidegger characterizes as the “ontotheological,” hierarchical metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, the focus shifts from indeterminate presence as such to referring all beings back to a supreme and perfect, most complete and most constant, instance of presence. The most fundamental criteria of this presence are, again, completeness and self-sufficiency: in Aristotelian-scholastic theology, the divinity is pure and necessary actuality (energeia), purely identical with its essence, and absolute in the sense of being absolved from all constitutive relations to anything beyond itself.

In the Heideggerian narrative, in modern philosophy since Descartes the Archimedean point gradually shifts to the immediate presence of the thinking subject to itself. This shift culminates in Nietzsche’s metaphysics of subjectivity as will to power, as life’s self-referential and self-immanent drive to self-preservation and selfenhancement. The permanence of this will that ultimately wills only itself is of a peculiar kind: it consists in a permanent state of becoming without external end, in a change for the sake of change that amounts to an “eternal recurrence of the same.” As Heidegger puts it, its essence is a “making-constant [Beständigung] of becoming in presence [Anwesenheit],” which, for him, amounts to the extreme unfolding of the Greek understanding of being as constant presence (GA 6.1: 591–92/N3 155–57). Nietzsche opens a view upon the “apparatus” or “setup” (Gestell) of late modern Western technical reality as a domain of pure instrumentality and of resources available for disposing and allocating (Bestellen).² The metaphysics of presence thus culminates in a matrix of total availability and disposability.

Metaphysics, for the later Heidegger, was not a mistake but rather an “inevitable” development: an inquiry into the encounter between being and thinking could only start with the fact of intelligible presence (GA 7: 75–76/EP 90–91). However, from the outset, metaphysics entailed an implicit restriction, limitation, or exclusion, voiced by Parmenides’ goddess: “Being-there is there [esti gar einai], and nothing is not there.”³ The focus is on presence exclusively; any other-than-presence is absolutely excluded from philosophy’s scope. This exclusion amounts to an intensifying “forgetfulness” of being in the wide sense: metaphysics is oblivious to the meaning-constituting processes that are never in themselves immediately present but rather provide the dynamic background context against which the foreground of meaningful presence is possible.

In Complicated Presence: Heidegger and the Postmetaphysical Unity of Being (2015), I have argued that the core topic of Heidegger’s postmetaphysical thinking – what in the period of fundamental ontology is addressed as the meaning or “sense” (Sinn) of being and later as the “truth” (Wahrheit) of being – is precisely this dynamic background context ignored by metaphysics. Heidegger’s fundamental project consists in placing pure presence (ousia, the beingness or presence common to determinate beings) into a multidimensional, referential background that does not itself become immediately present as a determinate being (and is accordingly referred to by Heidegger as “nothing”), but simply backgrounds and contextualizes presence. In the most comprehensive perspective, it is precisely the dynamic interaction between these two aspects – their differentiation, on the one hand, and their referential intertwining, on the other – that “grants” and “gives” presence as meaningful and is designated by Heidegger as “discharge” (Austrag) and, more importantly, as event (Ereignis).

As I see it, we find two successive key models in Heidegger for articulating this dynamic background/foreground structure of presence. The first is the account of the ecstatic temporality (Zeitlichkeit) of Dasein in Being and Time and the abortive attempt to correlate it with the temporality (Temporalität) of being as its horizon. In this model, access to the temporal present as a meaningful singular situation (“presenting,” Gegenwärtigen) is oriented by a dimension of open possibilities and orientations (futurity or “forthcoming,” Zukunft) that itself grows from a factical historical and cultural background (already-having-been, Gewesenheit). The second is the enigmatic fourfold (Geviert), which Heidegger gradually develops since the mid-1930s and fully announces in his 1949 Bremen lectures. The thing encountered as meaningful here becomes an intersection of two background axes, divinities/mortals and sky/earth, which can be interpreted as standing for 1) ultimate aims and purposes vs. the finite cultural and linguistic community that shares them and for 2) the open space of visibility and determinate and articulated appearing vs. inarticulate materiality. The temporal contextuality of Being and Time has here been complemented with spatial connotations.

Both models present meaningful presence as a node of references to dimensions that in themselves irreducibly transcend determinate and immediate presence, yet orient, contextualize, and configure presence, thus making it meaningful in a dynamic and singular manner. While for the philosophical tradition since Parmenides, the ideal of presence was self-sufficient, homogeneous, and self-identical – in a word, simple – Heidegger’s contextual models render presence fundamentally relative, heterogeneous, and self-transcending – radically complicated, in the literal sense of an intertwining or folding-together (Latin complicare) of multiple background dimensions, a “onefold of four,” as Heidegger puts it (GA 7: 175/PLT 171, tm). Complicated presence would thus be a possible title for Heidegger’s attempt to rethink the hidden background that the Western metaphysics of presence ultimately presupposes but has failed to address, his attempt to answer the neglected “basic question” of metaphysics, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” by considering the no-thing that allows a some-thing to be meaningfully present in the foreground. Another possible title would be radical contextuality.

Both of these titles, one can add, also characterize post-Heideggerian philosophical hermeneutics and poststructuralist thought as a whole. Putting presence in context, insisting on the irreducible situatedness and relationality of singular instants of meaningful access to things that resist the type of absolutization and absolution of presence that was always at the heart of ontotheological metaphysics, has become one of the principal topics of philosophical late modernity from Gadamer to Derrida.

Notes

1 Parmenides, 28 B 3, 4; in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker: Griechisch und deutsch [DK], vol. 1, 6th ed. (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1951).

2 On Gestell as “apparatus” and as a Foucauldian “dispositif,” see Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 12.

3 Parmenides, DK 28 B 6.