The writing of Aletheia : Martin Heidegger in language 9781788746717, 1788746716

Table of contents :
Introduction: language: housing being --
The language of ontology: being and time --
The performative text: contributions to philosophy (from Ereignis) --
Recalling the originary: Parmenides --
What thinking is given to think: on the way to language --
The triumph of ratio: the question concerning technology.

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PETER LANG VOL. 45

C S D L : L I T E R A RY A N D C U LT U R A L S T Y L I S T I C S

THE WRITING OF ALETHEIA MARTIN HEIDEGGER IN LANGUAGE

Martin Travers

Martin Heidegger was engaged in a continual struggle to find words – new words, both descriptive and analytical – for his radical form of philosophy. This tendency can be traced from Being and Time, where he elaborated an entirely new vocabulary for his ontological enquiry; to Contributions to Philosophy, which saw him committed to a transformation of language; to later essays on poets such as Rilke and Trakl in On the Way to Language.

The Writing of Aletheia is the first study to appear in either English or German that provides a full account of Heidegger’s language and writing style. Focusing not only on his major philosophical works but also on his lectures, public talks and poetry, this book explores the complex textuality of Heidegger’s writing: the elaborate chains of wordplay and neologistic formations; the often oblique, circuitous and regressive exposition of his ideas; the infamous tautologies; the startling modification of grammatical rules and syntax; the idiosyncratic typography of his texts; the rhetorical devices, imagery and symbolism; and the tone and voice of his writing. All of these aspects betray not only his will to structure and his assertiveness but also his ongoing self-questioning and reflectiveness about the ultimate goal of his philosophical quest.

MARTIN TRAVERS is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Humanities, Griffith University, Brisbane. He was educated at the universities of East Anglia, Tübingen and Cambridge and has published widely in the areas of German and comparative literature. He is the author of books on Thomas Mann, the literature of the Conservative Revolution and Gottfried Benn.

www.peterlang.com

C S D L : L I T E R A RY A N D C U LT U R A L S T Y L I S T I C S

THE WRITING OF ALETHEIA

VOL. 45

Martin Travers

PETER LANG

THE WRITING OF ALETHEIA

THE WRITING OF ALETHEIA

MARTIN HEIDEGGER IN LANGUAGE

Martin Traver

CONTEMPORARY STUDIES IN DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS LITERARY AND CULTURAL STYLISTICS VOL. 45 Edited by PROFESSOR GRAEME DAVIS & KARL A. BERNHARDT

PETER LANG

Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles New York Wien •

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Martin Travers

THE WRITING OF ALETHEIA MARTIN HEIDEGGER IN LANGUAGE

PETER LANG

Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles New York Wien •

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Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National­ bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Cover design by Peter Lang Ltd. ISSN 1660-9301 ISBN 978-1-78874-671-7 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78874-672-4 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78874-673-1 (ePub) • ISBN 978-1-78874-674-8 (mobi) © Peter Lang AG 2019 Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom [email protected], www.peterlang.com Martin Travers has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

Contents

Acknowledgements   vii Introduction

Language: Housing Being   1 Chapter 1

The Language of Ontology: Being and Time   11 Chapter 2

The Performative Text: Contributions to Philosophy (from Ereignis)   61 Chapter 3

Re-calling the Originary: Parmenides   105 Chapter 4

What Thinking Is Given to Think: On the Way to Language   141 Chapter 5

The Triumph of Ratio: “The Question Concerning Technology”   183 Bibliography   221 Index   233

Acknowledgements

Two sections of this book incorporate and rework material that has already been published: the third section of Chapter 4 initially appeared as “‘Die Blume des Mundes’: The Poetry of Martin Heidegger” in Oxford German Studies 41 (2012): 82–102. The third section of Chapter 5 appeared as “Trees, Rivers and Gods: Paganism in the Work of Martin Heidegger” in Journal of European Studies 48 (2018): 133–143. I would like to thank the editors of those journals, T. J. Reed and John Flower respectively, for their constructive contribution to those articles. Thanks also go to my wife, Ann, for her meticulous editorial work and for being able to see not only the wood but the trees. I dedicate this book to her and to my three daughters, Charlotte, Isabel and Lucie.

Introduction

Language: Housing Being

His philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting that language is here running riot. — Bertrand Russell, Wisdom of the West (New York, 1989)

“Every path of thought leads in a strange way, more or less perceptively, through language”, Heidegger tells us in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” (“Die Frage nach der Technik”) (GA 7: 7).1 We might be tempted to view this statement purely as a theoretical generalisation, a tenet in a lingustic philosophy describing how we engage with the world through language. But these same words also apply, and apply supremely, to Heidegger’s own philosophy and to his own way of philosophising. Language was not only at the conceptual centre of his work: it constituted the very medium through which that work was possible. From his early magnum opus, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), in which he attempted to bring into view an ontological realm for which “not only most words were lacking but, above all, grammar” (GA 2: 52), to his next major work, the Contributions to Philosophy ( from Ereignis) (Beiträge zur Philosophie (von Ereignis)), where he strove for a re-formation of language in order to push “into realms that are still closed off to us” (GA 65: 78), through to his later writings celebrating the transformative power of the word in the essays On the Way to Language (Unterwegs zur Sprache), where the discourse of philosophy moves both thematically and formally towards the poetic, Heidegger was involved in a struggle to find forms of expression, descriptive and analytical, for his ideas, seeking, as he noted in one of his earliest lecture courses, “to allow Being to be investigated and come to language” (GA 63: 1). 1

All references are to Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann), and cited as GA in the text and bibliography.

2 Introduction

The result was a body of texts that pushed the conventions, both semantic and grammatical, of what we must (temporarily at least) call ordinary language to previously unseen limits. Even those readers, such as Karl Jaspers, who could not accept much of the content of Heidegger’s philosophy found themselves enthralled by his language. As Jaspers remarked after his initial reading of Being and Time in 1927, “now I had before me a work that, through the intensity of its execution, the constructivist nature of its conceptuality, the accuracy of an often-illuminating new use of words, made an immediate impression” (98).2 Not all of Heidegger’s contemporaries responded with such enthusiasm. In 1931, Rudolf Carnap, exponent of the logical-positivist school in philosophy, published “The Overcoming of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language” (“Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache”). His target in this essay was what he regarded as the semantically vacuous nature of metaphysical statements, which are “pseudo-statements”, because the language they use to describe the world is incapable of verification or objective assessment. The “meaning” that such language generates is a false and illusionary one, the result of a figurative and stylistic légèreté de main. As Carnap argues, “the meaningless words of metaphysics usually have their origin in the fact that a meaningful word is deprived of its meaning through its metaphorical use” (230). As an example, Carnap gives a passage from Heidegger’s lecture “What is Metaphysics?” (“Was ist die Metaphysik?”), which includes the phrase “nothing nothings” (“das Nichts nichtet”) (229). This sentence, Carnap argues, represents a “violation of logical syntax”. It is meaningless, and for two reasons: firstly, because it is “based on the mistake of employing the word ‘nothing’ as a noun (instead of simply using it as a predicate of ‘is’, as in ‘there is nothing in the room’), and secondly, it fabricates the meaningless word ‘to nothing’, which has no dictionary status”. Such statements are neither true nor false, and hence tell us nothing about the world because “a hypothesis must be capable of entering into relations of deducability with (true or false) empirical statements, which is just what pseudo-statements cannot do” (232). Because Heidegger’s words

2

Emil Staiger, a student of Heidegger in Freiburg, also tells how he was “irresistibly captivated by the dark power” of Heidegger’s language (Pöggeler 242).

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do not correspond to the requirements of a verifiable empirical statement or to the terms of propositional logic, they are, quite literally, non-sense.3 And then in 1964 appeared the most trenchant critique of Heidegger and his language: Theodor Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity (Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie). Adorno depicts Heidegger here as a representative of a broader movement in contemporary German thinking, existentialism, a movement that included not only Heidegger but also Karl Jaspers and Martin Buber, along with lesser known figures such as Otto Friedrich Bollnow and Ulrich Sonnemann. These are the promoters of a “cult of authenticity” that seeks to establish a realm of pure interiority within what it regards as the debased and valueless culture of modernity (8). But instead of providing an objectively informed analysis of this culture, Adorno argues, their work simply mystifies the problem by promoting a counter ideology made up from nebulous quasi-religious terminology, sacerdotal words such as “transcendence”, “inwardness” and “authenticity” (10). This is a “jargon”, “untouched by history” (9 and 8), which simply obscures the real plight of modern culture, which lies in the commodity values of late capitalism. It is “ideology as language” (132). Heidegger is the high priest of this movement. In his arcane and mystifying terminology, “Heidegger cannot get enough of ritual preparations for the ‘step into the temple’ […] Heidegger is by no means incomprehensible, as one might gather from the marginalia of the positivists, but he lays around himself the taboo that any understanding of him would simultaneously be falsification” (79). Adorno looks behind Heidegger’s magisterial persona, and the assertive language through which it is promoted, and finds both an 3

Carnap’s critique had, in fact, already been anticipated by the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle in his review in 1929 of Being and Time. Like Carnap, Ryle saw in Heidegger’s philosophy a tendency to “self-ruinous subjectivism and a windy mysticism” (370). Ryle, nevertheless, realised that Heidegger was attempting something radically innovatory, particularly in the language of philosophising. As he observes, “in the course of the book Heidegger sets himself to the construction of a new philosophical terminology”, and he adds, “Heidegger imposes on himself the hard task of coining, and on us the alarming task of understanding a completely new vocabulary of terms – most double-barrelled compounds of everyday ‘nursery’ words and phrase – made to denote roots and stems of Meaning more primitive than those used by previous philosophers” (362 and 364).

4 Introduction

authoritarian personality and a discourse of domination. It is not simply a matter of the demagogic assertiveness of Heidegger’s language (his refusal to meet his readers on their own level of intelligibility), but of substance, of the absence of social and historical relevance, and his lack of concern for the concrete individual that reveals, according to Adorno, a fundamental anti-humanism (129).4 Heidegger stands condemned by Carnap from the position of logical-positivism and by Adorno from a political perspective that is (in the characteristic fashion of the Frankfurt School) both aesthetic and ethical. It is understandable, therefore, why some readers should wish to elevate Heidegger beyond all such pragmatic discourses, arguing that “Heidegger’s unique terminology tends to make him immune to external criticism” (Thomä 33). We should, however, be wary about where such an argument leads. It would be a mistake to retrieve Heidegger from accusations of wilful mystification and political reaction by turning him into a post-structuralist avant la lettre, arguing that his “obscurity” is the result of a strategy of decentring and subversion, where his language “exceeds the order of signification, together with the human share in this ‘excess’ that is the (non) ground of history and the material site of all relationality” (Fynsk 1). Seen from this point of view, our task in understanding Heidegger would be to explore “language’s relation to the ‘quasi-transcendental’ that is the event of its opening”, and which is revealed in the “strange opacity” of Heidegger’s writing (2). It is an exploration that resists any final hermeneutic closure, where we might finally say what Heidegger means, for “as long as we are interpreting, we are not yet reading” (4). But how can we bring Heidegger into language for ourselves and for others, in an experience of reading that is not interpretation, or come to terms with a language that “exceeds the order of signification”? (Or perhaps we should not try, and simply fall silent in the presence of that of which one cannot speak?) One answer is that we should respect the integrity and uniqueness of Heidegger’s writing and not, according to Ivo De Gennaro in his Weirdness of 4

Adorno’s work has been highly influential. Its terms of reference form the basis of Trawny (2010). Even those, such as John Richardson, who are in broad agreement with Heidegger feel it necessary to warn their readers about “the elaborate new jargon” they can expect to find in his writing (3). For a defence of Heidegger’s “Heideggerese”, see Williams (7).

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Being (2013), offer a commentary (a discursive translation) but rather a “saying again” or a “saying anew”, in which Heidegger’s other beginning “can be experienced and posited (freed) in its otherness”, its weirdness (134). New language must be found in English for this to happen, language that is alive to the nuances of Heidegger’s original German and able to re-create these nuances in English. De Gennaro demonstrates what he is trying to achieve by quoting a passage from Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism”, where the philosopher is discoursing on the trope of “possibility” (Möglichkeit) as the “quiet force” of being: As the element, being is the “quiet force” of das mögende Vermögen, that is, of das Mögliche. Of course, our words möglich and Möglichkeit, under the dominance of “logic” and “metaphysics” are thought solely in contrast to “actuality”; that is, they are thought on the basis of a definite – namely, the metaphysical-interpretation of being as actus and potentia, a distinction identified with the one between existentia and essentia. When I speak of the “quiet force of das Mögliche” I do not mean the possible of a merely represented possibilitas, nor potentia as the essentia of an actus of existentia; rather, I mean being itself, which, in its Mögen, vermag über, that is, holds the capacity over thinking. (21)

Heidegger wishes to emphasise here that the “quiet force” of Being abolishes the distinction between das Mögliche as a potentiality (that which moves into the future) and as an actuality (that which is now). His concept of the mögende Vermögen is an attempt to unite both modalities. In explicating Heidegger’s notion of das Mögliche, De Gennaro seeks to find an alternative translation to the common dictionary translation of das Mögliche as “possibility”. For De Gennaro, “possibility”, however, does not convey “the unique manner of dwelling in the mother-language” that we find in the word “likely” and “likelihood”, and he tells us why the latter are preferable to the Latinate word: “likely” and “likelihood” say the biding becom(e)ingness that initially likes anything to abide in its fair and comely uniqueness. That which is likely (a likely house, a likely mountain, a likely mortal, a likely god, etc) thus appears in the fair measure of the initial favour – the “please” of “being (cut)” breaking as the time-play-space toward a soothful abiding, but also – in the obliviousness of the cut – towards the soothless abiding in the unleashed dominance of contingency (possibility-potentiality-power). (26)

De Gennaro “re-says” Heidegger’s möglich as “likely”, and explores the word in terms of its extension as “like” and “likelihood”, in order to capture the

6 Introduction

unity of the potentiality and actuality of Being that adheres to the German word Vermögen (which means both “to make possible” but also when used, as it is in the passage from “Letter on Humanism”, as a noun, “power” and “wealth”). Rather than attempting to explain Heidegger’s use of the word, De Gennaro reconstructs its semantic provenance in his own words, in a neo-Heideggerian style using brackets, hyphens, extended compound nouns, and un-idiomatic expressions (a “likely hill”?), in a style that strains the conventions of discursive intelligibility. The result is not a commentary but rather a fantasy or meditation, in which the descriptor “likely” runs iteratively through the passage, to reach its destination in the mysterious “soothful abiding”. The reader is now faced with two tasks: understanding Heidegger and understanding De Gennaro. We can agree that “Heidegger’s attempt to draw on words in the multiplicity of their meanings cuts across the usual dichotomy of literal and nonliteral” (Malpas 2006: 36). Indeed, we can also agree that “the whole ‘metaphysical’ view of language as composed of sensible signs and supersensible meanings fails, for Heidegger: some language eludes it”, and that “Heidegger exposes the invalidity [of ordinary language] not by argument, but by presenting to his readership linguistic realities that cannot be ‘grounded’ by ordinary understanding – viz. unclarifiable words, non-syntactic utterances, and unjustifiable propositions” (McCumber 1979: 386). But how ordinary does “ordinary” understanding have to be? Is it not possible for “ordinary” language to come to terms with “unclarifiable words, non-syntactic utterances, and unjustifiable propositions”? Heidegger would have said, indeed tells us on many occasions in his work, that it can. Even in his Contributions to Philosophy, the most difficult work of his “Turning” phase, where he was at his most critical of the restrictions of ordinary language, he is careful to add the following clarification: “only one thing counts: to give voice to the most nobly formed language in its simplicity and essential power, to express the language of beings as the language of Be-ing” (GA 65: 78).5 Elsewhere in his work, Heidegger repeatedly tells us that it is clarity and 5

As he had already observed, “in the end, the business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself ” (GA 2: 291). This is a point that is accepted even by Parvis Emad who, whilst arguing for the uniqueness of Heidegger’s idiom, and hence the impossibility of its literal translation, nevertheless

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intelligibility that he is seeking. Indeed, when he is compelled in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology”, to introduce the “eerie” (schaurig) neologism Ge-stell (“en-framing”, meaning the imposition of technorationality), he apologetically explains his need to depart from “ordinary usage”, knowing that his new coinage must seem to confirm “the arbitrariness with which words of a mature language are thus misused”. But as Heidegger goes on to make clear, he has coined the word Ge-stell to fulfil a specific function, the purpose of which is not to alienate or to mystify but to bring into view a phenomenon that is “so familiar to us” but for which we have no name (GA 7: 23). Ultimately, “we are bound to the language of Saying and we are bound to our own native language” (GA 5: 328). We can and should, as Theodore Kisiel argues, work within the riches of “ordinary language” before reinventing Heidegger’s discourse at another level (2005: 279). To understand Heidegger, there is no need to make him and his language more difficult than he or it is or appears to be. That there is a recognisable, and a recognisably difficult texture to Heidegger’s writing, and a texture that changes from work to work (we should be wary, therefore, of talking about “Heidegger’s language”, as if this were a static entity), we can all agree. This texture shows through in his many neologistic formations that produce words of striking unfamiliarity, in his etymological quarrying of Greek and Latin, in his cultivation of contradictory and paradoxical tropes of the non “logical”, which open up rather than foreclose meaning, in the narrative exposition of his ideas, which is often oblique, circuitous and regressive, and in his use of figurative language, of symbols, tropes and tactile images, particularly spatial tropes such as “topos” and “way”, which allow him to conceptualise consciousness as a movement within and through place. The readings of Heidegger’s language made by Carnap, Adorno and by Heidegger’s other detractors pose critical questions that can be answered only through a detailed study of the trajectory of Heidegger’s writing, which went through various formations as a textual practice in the different phases

recognises the origins of that idiom in the “basic words of philosophical tradition” and the “untapped richness of the originary philological roots” of Heidegger’s “mother tongue” (2007: 23).

8 Introduction

of his philosophy.6 Such a study must involve not only an analysis of his conceptual terminology, vocabulary and the rhetoric of his writing, but also his grammar, syntax and sentence structures, now assertive, now convoluted as the exposition requires, and even the typography of his works, the internal spaces within pages, the organisation of chapters, of subdivisions and headings. Part and parcel of all this is Heidegger’s own voice in this writing, the frequent modulations in his position of speech, which includes that often imperious tone that so alienated Adorno and others, but also moments where doubt and self-questioning emerge. Must analysis, exegesis and explication of this type kill the “spirit” of Heidegger’s writing? Does approaching Heidegger in this way mean ignoring his philosophy or reducing it to a linguistic exercise?7 Jacques Derrida would almost certainly have answered: “no”. In his study, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Questions, Derrida committed himself to concentrating on what was “left hanging, uncertain, still in movement and […] yet to come” in Heidegger’s work (8). His essay is not an act of homily. Derrida takes his deconstructionist methodology deep into the heart of Heidegger’s philosophy, following the “trace of Heidegger’s spirituality” (8) that leads from the metaphysical distance that pervades Being and Time to what Derrida (as with so many of Heidegger’s political critics) regards as his “spiritualisation of National Socialism” (39) in the years 1933–1934. Unlike Adorno, however, Derrida does not homogenise Heidegger’s language as a monumentalist ideology but excavates that language from within, by “following modestly the itineraries, the functions, the formations, and regulated transformations, the presuppositions and the destinations” of Heidegger’s writing (5). Derrida focuses not only on the key tropes of Heidegger’s language, including the 6

7

For that reason, we should resist the temptation to read Heidegger’s language out of any single work or single constellation of his works. The incisive and thoughtprovoking study by Krzysztof Ziarek (2013) draws its focus almost exclusively from GA 71 and GA 74, leaving the broader range of Heidegger’s writing out of account. Williams (2017), which is largely a study of Heidegger’s theories of language, may lack the analytical acumen of Ziarek’s study but it helpfully draws on a wider cross-section of Heidegger’s work, although regrettably the latter is cited only in translation. This is not to deny that the linguistic exercise may have its role in explicating the valence of Heidegger’s writing. For such attempts, see Wilson (1981) and Botet (1997).

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provocative-elemental Geist [spirit], but also the related and (only) apparently more incidental terms such as Vermeiden [avoid], Geschick [destiny] and Versammlung [collecting], as well as its textuality, the “artifices of writing” (29) that include the revealing titles of Heidegger’s work, his recourse to etymology, his use of quotation marks and the hyphen, and even matters relating to translating. In such an approach, the signified is not lost in the signifier (as they are in so many post-structuralist readings of Heidegger), nor do the two stand in opposition to each other. The signified is exactly what is produced through the practice of writing. Textual analysis of this kind does not mean losing the ludic energy of Heidegger’s philosophy, its sense of quest and movement, its rhetorical energy or its commitment to interrogation and self-interrogation. On the contrary, as has been argued, “Being is play; thinking is playing: intimating, symbolising, poeticising, associating, hinting, revealing, concealing” (Caputo 1970: 44). Reading Heidegger is an experience with language, with the “disclosive power of language, of the determining (defining) function of basic, distinctive (hermeneutically situated) words and telling expressions” of his “vocabulary and diction”. Language is what makes Heidegger’s philosophy possible. Philosophy and language cannot be separated. It is an experience “with” language; but also an experience “in” language (Kovacs 2011: 98).

Chapter 1

The Language of Ontology: Being and Time

Wording the World: In a Phenomenology of Deskription Heidegger’s first major work was Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). It appeared in 1927 as Volume 8 of the Annual for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Research (Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Forschung), a journal edited by Edmund Husserl (Heidegger’s professor at the University of Freiburg, to whom the work was dedicated), before being published in book from the same year with the Niemeyer Verlag in Halle. Being and Time brought to fruition a project that had long been in the making.1 Heidegger had intended his work to be in two parts, each with three sections. The first part was to be an interpretation of Dasein in terms of temporality as the transcendental horizon for the question of Being.2 The second part was to provide the basis for a critical 1

2

Being and Time might best be seen as a work-in-progress, as one among several attempts that Heidegger made (albeit the most systematic one) to provide a structure for his analysis of Being, an analysis that he never completed. Indeed, as the motto placed at the beginning of the first volume of his Collected Works (Gesamtausgabe) indicates, Heidegger saw his entire oeuvre as a “way” or a “path” towards knowledge rather than a philosophical system. The conceptual genealogy of Being and Time is analysed in detail in Kiesel (1993). As Erasmus Schöfer explains, the concept of Dasein appeared in the seventeenth century as an equivalent for the Latin word existential, and in common language it came to acquire the general connotation of “life” (82). According to Wahrig Deutsches Wörterbuch, Dasein means “being present, existing, existence, life, particularly the simplest preconditions for it”. Dasein is a complex configuration that (using nonHeideggerian language) we might describe as uniting the particular and the universal aspects of authentic human existence. In their translation of Sein und Zeit, Macquarie and Robinson gloss it in the following way: Dasein stands for “the kind of Being that

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Chapter 1

re-evaluation of the history of ontology, focusing on Aristotle, Descartes and Kant. This part was never completed, and the book bore the description “First Part” until its 1960 edition, after which that description was dropped because, as Heidegger explained in its preface, “after a quarter of a century, a second part could no longer be added without a revision of the first part”. Nevertheless, as he added “the direction that the first part took can still even today be seen as a necessary one, if our Dasein is to be moved by the question of Being” (GA 2: vii).3 Heidegger conceived of Being and Time as a Destruktion of the foundations of metaphysical thinking, which had dominated the Western mind since Aristotle and Plato, arguing that the guiding concepts of that tradition were no longer capable of grasping the issue at the heart of genuine philosophy: the nature of Being.4 What this tradition has bequeathed to us, as Heidegger observed in his Introduction to Metaphysics (Einführung in die Metaphysik), is a rigid set of distinctions “between Being and becoming, Being and seeming, Being and thinking and Being and the Ought”, antimonies that face one another in a spirit of arid confrontation (GA 40: 208). Within this model, Being has simply become a function of something else, an accident of time, space, nature or thought, depending upon the philosophical

3

4

belongs to persons”, and more specifically yet “for any person who has such Being, and who is thus an ‘entity’ [him or herself ]” (27). The Da component of the word stresses the importance of the physical location in which it deploys itelf (“there” or “here”). As Mark Wrathall observes, “Dasein always has a ‘there’, a place in which it understands how to comport itself, and within which it has meaningful relationships to other entities” (Heidegger 11). Rather than translate Dasein as “There-being”, I follow Macquarie and Robinson and retain Dasein in its original German. I translate Sein as “Being” rather than “being” to avoid it being mistaken as a participle of “to be”, and I translate Seiende as “entity”, which comes from the medieval Latin entitas, and is formed from the Latin esse, meaning “to be”. All translations here and elsewhere from the German are my own. Heidegger borrows Destruktion (which is not a word in German) from the French “la destruction”, which is taken from the Latin destruere, “to unbuild” or “to tear down”. It is commonly translated by Heidegger’s commentators as “destruction”, but this in German means vernichten, to destroy in the sense of to annihilate. Heidegger was not intending to destroy Western metaphysics (an impossible task), but to “de-structure” it in order to bring its conceptual premises and structures to the surface so that they might be critically analysed.

The Language of Ontology: Being and Time

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school in question. As a concept, it had become indeterminate and empty: “Being” itself has ceased to exist. And yet questions of Being pervade all that we know or attempt to know, our thinking and our actions, even when such questions are not expressed explicitly. It can be no other way, for “how it stands with Being also proves to be the question of how it stands with our Dasein in history, of whether we stand in history or merely stagger” (211). Philosophy has a task to perform, and Heidegger was quite clear about how he had to tackle that task: “asking the question of Being in an originary [ursprüngliches] way, in a way that has grasped the task of unfolding the truth of the essence of Being, means facing the decision regarding the concealed powers in these divisions and returning them to their original truth” (209). Heidegger was not alone in attempting to move philosophy in this direction. In the early years of the century, Edmund Husserl, the founder of Phenomenology, had sought to break with the school of philosophy then dominant in Germany, Neo-Kantianism, a philosophy which (as has been argued) represented the continuation of “German idealism into the culture of the twentieth century” (Crowell 23). Philosophers such as Heinrich Rickert and Paul Natorp had refined the central tenets of Kant’s philosophy, producing a new version of the latter, where concept-formation and reflective judgement were regulated by ideals that could not and need not be empirically proved, and where statements about the world were dependent on metaphysical deductions made from single absolute principles. Indemonstrable axioms, whether deductive or inductive, were perceived as self-evident, and space and time were regarded as a priori invariants of human understanding (Köhnke 281). Husserl, coining the catchphrase “back to things themselves!” (“zu den Sachen selbst!”), rejected Neo-Kantianism and sought, through a process of phenomenological enquiry, to forge a direct link between consciousness and the external world by returning to “the primary sources of direct intuition and to the insights into essential structures derived from them”.5 As he 5

Thus according to the statement that prefaced each edition of Husserl’s Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Forschung. Quoted in Spiegelberg (5). The first volume of the journal appeared in 1913. “Phenomenon” is a transliteration of the present participle of the Greek word “phainomenon”, which is formed from the verb

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wrote in the Introduction to his Ideas pertaining to a pure Phenomenology and phenomenological Philosophy (Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie), “a pure or transcendental phenomenology will be established, not as a science of facts but as a science of essential Being (as ‘eidetic’ science); a science which aims exclusively at establishing ‘knowledges of essences’ and absolutely no ‘facts’”, and he added “the phenomena of transcendental phenomenology will be characterised as nonreal (irreal). Other reductions, the specifically transcendental, ‘purify’ the psychological phenomena from that which lends them reality and, with that, their place in the real ‘world’. Our phenomenology is to be an eidetic doctrine not of phenomena that are real, but of phenomena that are transcendentally reduced” (xx). Husserl termed this process “epoché” (meaning “suspension” or “cessation” in Greek). This was a philosophical position that sought to abolish the “natural standpoint” (the perspective of naïve realism) and allow the perceiving subject to bracket out of all judgements concerning the immediate appearance of things in the world. According to Husserl, “epoché” yielded a purified type of consciousness, forming a self-contained realm of Being into which nothing could penetrate and from which nothing could escape, a realm that has no external spatio-temporal dimensions and cannot be part of any spatio-temporal context, and which cannot causally influence, or be casually influenced by, anything, “a region of being which is of essential necessity quite unique” (65). Heidegger owed much to the phenomenology of Husserl. As he wrote in Being and Time, “the title ‘phenomenology’ expresses a maxim, which can be formulated thus: ‘back to things themselves!’ – it is against all purely abstract systems and all incidental discoveries, against the adoption of concepts that only apparently have been proven, and against those pseudo issues that have through generations posed themselves as ‘problems’” (36–37).6 In

6

“phaino” (φαίνω), meaning “to bring to light”, “to show forth” or “to make appear”. The verb used in an intransitive sense can also mean “to shine” and “to gleam”. Liddell and Scott (854). The middle voice of the verb is “phainesthai”, which communicates the sense of “self-showing”. Thus a “phenomenon” might be translated as “a thing that shows itself by or through itself ”. For Heidegger’s account of the word, see GA 2: 38–39. To paraphrase Heidegger, we might say that phenomenology rejected all systems of philosophy that were dependent on a priori axioms, such as Kantianism. It also opposed

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his Prolegomena to a History of the Concept of Time, Heidegger spelt out the core components of the phenomenological method: its emphasis upon the primacy of the material world, its promotion of intentionality and categorical intuition (which Husserl called “ideation”), its concern with reflection, that is, a formal interrogation of the “phenomenological field to be derived”, its focus on temporality, and finally its descriptive method, which does not seek to deduce or induce observations of the external world from theoretical axioms, but to record it from experience without presupposition (131–139). In spite of appreciative references to Husserl in Being and Time, Heidegger had major reservations about his mentor’s philosophy, and although he does not openly engage with Husserl’s ideas there, it is clear that Being and Time was intended as a critical rejoinder to that philosophy.7 In particular, Heidegger remained unconvinced by the notion of the “epoché” and the model of a consciousness, the “transcendental ego” that has been cleansed from all assumptions about the world upon which it was based. Husserl, through his notion of a “pure” phenomenology, had, Heidegger felt, simply created yet another subject-centred philosophy, which in positing a split between subject and object, perceiver and perceived, was repeating the same mistakes as previous philosophers within the metaphysical tradition.8 For “how is it at all possible”, he queried in his 1925 lecture course, Prolegomena to a History of the Concept of Time (Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs), “that this sphere of an absolute position, this pure consciousness […] is at the same time united with reality in the unity of a real human being, who himself occurs as a real object in the world?”,

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empiricism, with its scientific “discoveries”, Positivism, which it regarded as founded on dubitable assumptions, and metaphysics, with its perennial questions that remain abstracted from concrete experience. As Husserl himself recognised, writing in a letter of August 1927, “on the face of it [Being and Time] distances itself entirely from my analytic phenomenology” (Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology 23). “In spite of Husserl’s achievement, the cogito sum and its certitudo are, in fact, at work in an even more fundamental sense in him, so that it comes less than ever here to an explicit enquiry into the ontological character of consciousness”. Heidegger (GA 17: 270). For in Husserl’s philosophy, “there yawns a veritable abyss of sense between consciousness [res cogitans] and reality [res extensa]” (GA 58: 175–176).

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adding “how can it still be said that consciousness has its ‘own essence’, an essence particular to it. That it is a self-contained continuity?” (139 and 134). In a further lecture course, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles [Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle], Heidegger had already made it clear that “one’s own world must not be identified with the ‘ego’. The ‘ego’ is a category with a complex form, and I do not at all need to encounter it as such in my care over my own world, over ‘myself ’ in the factical, concrete sense. In one’s own world, the ‘myself ’, for which I care, is experienced in determinate kinds of meaningfulness, which emerge in the full-life world where, along with one’s own world, the shared world and the surrounding world are always present” (94). Phenomenology is not a matter of describing how the surrounding world might be reconstructed through the intentional activity of consciousness, but of allowing things as they are (in a way that was still to be determined) to appear immediately as distinctive phenomena.9 This is what “phenomenology” means, and Heidegger formulates its guiding principle in a succinct definition: “that which is given and explicable [explizierbar] in the way we encounter a phenomenon is called ‘phenomenal’” (GA 2: 49). But what is “explicable” can only be explicable in and through language, and this is something of which Heidegger shows himself critically aware 9

Heidegger describes a phenomenon as “das Sich-an-ihm-selbst-zeigende” (GA 2: 38). This is a difficult phrase to translate. Both Joan Stambaugh (hereafter cited as S) and Macquarie and Robinson (M/R) translate it as something that “shows itself in itself ”. This translation does not, however, communicate the sense of an external showing. The preposition an in German does not mean (indeed, in one sense, is the opposite of ) in. As Werner Schmitz explains, an is employed in German “where auf and in are excluded”, being used to indicate an object’s propinquity to another object, with the sense of “close to”, “beside” or “at” (53). An is closer to the English preposition “by” as it is used in statements such as “you can see by his girth that he eats too much”. What Heidegger is saying is that we should take the external presence of objects seriously (the way they look), and not treat them as mere appearances under which the “real” object exists, in the manner of Kantian “noumena”. It later becomes clear that for Heidegger the Being of objects consists in what they do rather than what they appear to be (however this is construed), when they are used in factive contexts as “equipment” (Zeug). Indeed, we might conclude that, in general terms, as his exposition develops in Being and Time, Heidegger moves increasingly away from phenomenology of any type towards his own version of a pragmatic ontology.

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throughout Being and Time.10 Towards the end of section 7c, for example, where he has just outlined the methods and goals of phenomenology, he observes: With regard to the awkwardness and “inelegance” of language in the following analyses, we may remark that it is one thing to report narratively about entities, and another to grasp entities in their Being. For the latter task, not only are most words lacking but, above all, “grammar” […] Since the area of Being to be disclosed ontologically is far more difficult than that which presented itself to the Greeks, the intricateness of our concept-formation and the severity of our language will be that much greater. (52)

That the rejuvenation of philosophy requires the rejuvenation of the language of philosophy Heidegger had already made clear in his 1920 lecture course Die Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens [The Phenomenology of Religious Life]. Here he had observed that philosophical concepts are “vacillating, vague, manifold and fluctuating”; they always “remain uncertain” (3). We routinely use words like “origin”, “idea” and “concept” as if their meanings were self-evident: But what does “origin” mean; what is an “idea”? What are we to understand by “placing under an idea” or by “following a tendency”? What, in fact, does “science” or the “science of the life of the spirit” denote? What does it mean “to grasp life in concepts”, “to clarify meanings”, “expressing what has been clarified and the clarification”, or “to put into words”? (3)11

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And not just in Being and Time. In an earlier lecture course, Heidegger had declared, “this lecture has no philosophical aim at all; it is concerned with understanding basic concepts in their conceptuality. The aim is philological, in that it intends to bring the reading of philosophers somewhat more into practice”. “For if philology means the passion for knowledge of what has been expressed, then what we are doing is philology” (GA 18: 6 and 5). Heidegger was relentlessly critical of other philosophers, such as Karl Jaspers, who did not show this same self-reflexivity in their use of language. In his review of Jaspers’ The Psychology of Worldviews, Heidegger took issue with the lack of critical thought given in that work to the formulation of key concepts such as “consciousness” and “I”. As he points out, “the essential character of the explicata involved here is found in the fact that they are hermeneutical concepts to which we have access only in a continual renewal of interpretation that begins forever from the beginning”. Heidegger (GA 9: 32).

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A language, Heidegger concludes, must be created that is “tailored to our surrounding world”, and which will allow us to grasp entities within a framework of intelligibility that is appropriate to them, even if this involves a process of linguistic de-familiarisation (GA 58: 3). As he tells us in Being and Time, whenever he rejects formulations such as “life” and “man” he is not being arbitrary or idiosyncratic: he is simply attempting to look deeper behind these conventional designations to establish what they mean in terms of their relationship to Being (62). “If acts of [linguistic] violence are committed in this field of enquiry, it is not out of arbitrariness but out of a necessity grounded in the facts” (432). We are in the world, and we have words to describe our presence there. We “move”, “feel”, “plan”, “judge”, “speak”, “hope”, “fear”, “desire”, and all of these dispositions manifest themselves when we have to do with something, “to produce, order and take care of something, to use something, relinquish something or neglect it, to undertake and accomplish something, find out, ask about, observe, speak about, determine something” (76). But, as Heidegger argues in section 12, “A Preliminary Sketch of Being-in-the-World”, to describe actions that move across these discrete bodily or mental dispositions, or emerge as inflections within these diverse dispositions, we need new words and new ways of relating those words to one another. Heidegger shows us immediately what is required by looking at one such common word, besorgen. Although besorgen in everyday German means “to manage” or “to deal with”, its stem is Sorge [care], and this forms a crucial existential for Dasein. Care for Dasein is concern for itself as an entity. It means that Dasein must accept that it is in the world and must carry out the projects that define it and for which it is responsible. Besorgen means acting upon that understanding, and involves Dasein in acquiring the material means to accomplish its tasks (an activity indicated by the mobilising be prefix). Semantically this prefix moves the ambit of the word from the dispositional to the pragmatic, where it points to a fundamental aspect (an “existential”, existenzial), of Dasein’s engagement with the world, which is its being-towards-the-world, its disclosedness as a “here” or “there” (Da) (76–77).12 The discursive linking of the activity

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Heidegger makes a distinction between an existenzial and an existenziell analytic of Dasein. The former describes the ontic, the incidental qualities of Dasein’s experiences;

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of managing or getting things done to the existential “care” will later form a major component in Heidegger’s disclosure of the ontology of Dasein.13 To rewrite philosophy, we must rewrite the language of philosophy, and Heidegger shows in Being and Time how this must take place.14 In the second section of his first chapter, he seeks to establish the importance of the question of the meaning of Being. Before doing so, however, he must clarify what belongs to “a question” and to the procedure of “questioning”: Jedes Fragen ist ein Suchen. Jedes Suchen hat seine vorgängige Direktion aus dem Gesuchten her. Fragen ist erkennendes Suchen des Seienden in seinem Daß- und Sosein. Das erkennende Suchen kann zum “Untersuchen“ werden als dem freilegenden Bestimmen dessen, wonach die Frage steht. Das Fragen hat als Fragen nach … sein Gefragtes. Alles Fragen nach … ist in irgendeiner Weise Anfragen bei … Zum Fragen gehört außer dem Gefragten ein Befragtes. In der untersuchenden, d.h. spezifisch theoretischen Frage soll das Gefragte bestimmt und zu Begriff gebracht werden.

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it does not require that “the ontological structure of existence should be theoretically transparent” (17). The latter is the task of an existenziell. The standard translations of Besorgen are “concern” (M/R) and “taking care” (S). Both of these, however, suggest an almost ethical responsibility for the world that is not there in Besorgen, which is a quite practical activity meaning to “attend to”, “deal with” or simply “get”. As M/R explain, “‘Besorgen’ stands for the kind of ‘concern’ in which we ‘concern ourselves’ with activities which we perform or things which we procure” (Being and Time 83). When the word is used in its participle form as an adjective (as it often is) as besorgend, it might be best translated simply as “purposeful”. My preference is for “managing”, which combines the practical component of “doing” (“he managed to do his homework”) with the Sorge component of “looking after” (as in “the manager looked after her employees”). Because it is clear that Heidegger wishes us at certain times to hear the caring component of the word, and at other times its functional, handling element, rather than choose a single translation for Besorgen, or add yet a further new word to the existing range, I will use whichever translation seems the most appropriate in the context, citing at the same time the German original. Even the very title of Heidegger’s book constitutes an artful mini-text, and is evidence of Heidegger’s linguistic self-consciousness. It is unusually brief for philosophical works of the period and without the obligatory subtitle (Husserl’s 1913 book, for example, reads Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie). The three words, Sein und Zeit, form a compact symmetry, and the simple conjunction, the sibilance of the initial letters of the two substantives and the alliteration of the “ei” vowel, effectively link the two central concepts of the work even before they have been developed.

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Chapter 1 Im Gefragten liegt dann als das eigentlich Intendierte das Erfragte, das, wobei das Fragen ins Ziel kommt. Das Fragen selbst hat als Verhalten eines Seienden, des Fragers, einen eigenen Charakter des Seins. Ein Fragen kann vollzogen werden als “Nur-sohinfragen“ oder als explizite Fragestellung. Das Eigentümliche dieser liegt darin, daß das Fragen sich zuvor nach all den genannten konstitutiven Charakteren der Frage selbst durchsichtig wird. (7) [All questioning is a seeking. All seeking receives its initial direction from what is being sought. Questioning is a perceiving seeking for an entity in its here-and-now-Being.15 Perceiving seeking can become an “investigation”, in a way that reveals the determination of what the question is about. Questioning has as questioning about … that which is being asked about. All questioning into … is in some way an asking about … To questioning belongs also, beyond what is being asked about, a sounding out. In the matter to be investigated, i.e. in the specifically theoretical question, that which is being asked about must be identified and conceptually clarified. In that which is being asked about lies then what is really being aimed at, i.e. that which is to be ascertained, through which questioning reaches its goal. Questioning, as the activity of an entity, the questioner, has its own quality of Being. Questioning can be accomplished as an asking that is “by the way” or as an explicitly formulated question. What is peculiar about the latter is that the questioning becomes clear only after all the above-mentioned constitutive considerations have themselves become clear.]

The passage articulates a process of clarification and definition. The pivotal terms, “seeking” (suchen) and “questioning” (fragen), both noun infinitives, are laid down assertively in an apodictic fashion without qualification and brought into alignment through repetition and parallel formation in the manner of an accumalatio in classical rhetoric. The main verbs are either the copula “is” or simple facilitators such as “can” and “have”. The text moves forward in a dialectical fashion, propelled by the diverse transformations 15

Erkennend is translated as “knowing” by S, and “cognizant” by M/ R. Neither of these translations, however, quite works. “Knowing” is the present participle of “to know”, and in English can only be used about what is already known. This is also the case with “cognizant”, which means “being aware of ”, “having knowledge of ” (OED). Erkennend, however, comes from the verb “erkennen” and is related to Erkenntnis, which certainly means knowledge, as in the German term for epistemology, Erkenntnistheorie, but it does not mean knowledge in the common sense of wissen, which simply means to know something about something. The verb erkennen means “to make out”, “to discover”, “to detect” or “to recognise”. It describes thus a movement towards that which is the goal of a knowing activity, a sense that is conveyed through er prefix.

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of the root verb fragen [to question], a process that is effected through the addition of the prefixes Ge, Be and Er. The latter generate a network of neo-logistic formations, such as Gefragtes, a noun formed from the past tense of fragen, meaning “that which has been asked about”, Befragtes, from befragen, “to question” or “to sound out”, and Erfragte, from erfragen, “to enquire about”. These new terms take their place in a narrative of explication that focuses upon the task of questioning.16 We might translate these words as “query”, “enquire” or “interrogate”, but in doing so we would lose the family likeness that Heidegger wishes us to see between them (and for that reason suchen is best rendered by its German-related English cognate, “seeking”, and not through “enquiry”). To keep his description as concrete as possible, Heidegger avoids abstract terms that he might have used, such as Analyse and Methode, in favour of native German formulations. Heidegger, in fact, would soon banish entirely from his vocabulary words such as das Intendierte (a neologistic nominalisation of the French intendieren). The logic of the passage is compelling. The cumulative pressure of the text traces a determined movement towards its object, a process reflected in the frequent use of ellipsis “(…)”, suggesting aporia, a space of knowledge to be filled, and hence a direction that the questioning process must take. The insistent development of the text is reinforced by the parallelism of the sentence structure and by alliteration, which links the key moments of Heidegger’s explication. We have described such a procedure as “dialectical”, intending that term to characterise a style of writing in which individual terms are played off against each another in a process of mutual definition.17 This style belongs to the 16

17

“Question” and “questioning” became increasingly important tropes in Heidegger’s philosophy. As he had already argued in his earliest lectures, philosophy must possess “a passion for questioning”, the development of which has “its own time and tempo”. The questioning mind is not free of prejudice (that is an impossibility) but must be “free for the possibility of giving up prejudice”. Questioning is the antidote to “lethargy towards knowledge”, a refusal to accept knowledge “as a collection of material that has already been worked over” (GA 17: 2). There are, indeed, sections in Being and Time where the question mark entirely dominates Heidegger’s exposition. See, for example, 282–283 and 300–301. Perhaps in the manner of a conversation or debate. This is how Heidegger reads the term in his lecture course, Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität) [Ontology – The

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broader hermeneutic methodology that Heidegger follows in Being and Time, and which forms a major tool in his ontological enquiry.18 As he explains in section 7c, “The Preliminary Concept of Phenomenology”, the phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutics pursued as in the original meaning of the word, according to which it refers to the business of interpretation (Auslegung). Indeed, “the meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation” (50). Heidegger describes what is involved in this process: Every interpretation has a primary intention, is clear about what it wants to do and anticipates an outcome. When such an interpretation becomes the explicit task of a process of enquiry, then the totality of these “initial premises”, which we call the hermeneutical situation, needs to be clarified and put on a firm basis at the outset, both in terms of the fundamental experience of the “object” that is to be disclosed and in terms of that experience [of disclosing]. (308)19

In his lecture course, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, Heidegger had introduced the concept of hermeneutics to indicate a unified manner

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Hermeneutics of Facticity], where he notes that the original meaning of the Greek διαλεκτική (“dialektike”) involves “discussing the world as we go about dealing with it” (GA 63: 10). As David Kleinberg-Levin observes, “Heidegger’s ‘wordplay’ demonstrates thinking in the very process of being born” (233). “Hermeneutics” comes from the Greek “ermeneia” (“ἑρμηνεία”), meaning “explanation” or “interpretation” Liddell and Hart (315). Hermeneutics grew out of biblical exegesis before becoming a philosophical methodology in the eighteenth century in the work of, amongst others, Schleiermacher. The first sentence of the passage reads in German: “jede Auslegung hat ihre Vorhabe, ihre Vorsicht und ihren Vorgriff ”. Both M/R and S, wishing to retain the vor prefix, translate these terms as “fore-having, fore-sight, fore-conception”, and hence unnecessarily mystify what are common expressions in Heidegger’s original German. Vorhabe comes from the verb vorhaben, which simply means “to intend” or “plan on doing” something. Vorsicht means “precaution” or “being careful”, and Vorgriff commonly translates as “anticipation”. Heidegger’s point is that we do not need a complicated theoretical framework in order to enter upon a hermeneutic study; we just require a number of starting positions or initial assumptions that our enquiry will either confirm or not confirm. By translating vor (which is a common prefix in German) with the prefix “fore” (which is not common in English) we are sacrificing intelligibility to a misguided search for authentic equivalence. The adjective “initial” or “preliminary” conveys the sense of vor more accurately. For Macquarie’s comments on his rationale, see Macquarie (2005).

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of engaging, accessing, questioning and explicating facticity. He had outlined there the origins of hermeneutics as a method of explanation in the work of Plato and Aristotle, and then subsequently in the writings of the Scholastics, where it had been practised in the form of biblical exegesis. Like the rhapsode in Plato’s Ion, the hermeneutical interpreter is someone “who communicates, makes known what another person ‘means’ or who, through such communication, conveys, reproduces this announcement” (63). Heidegger had concluded his discussion by appropriating hermeneutics for his own purpose: it would allow him “to interpret facticity, through which the latter can be encountered, seen, grasped and conceptualised” (14).20 Although Heidegger broadens the meaning of hermeneutics in Being and Time well beyond this methodological-exegetical model to constitute it as a mode of self-understanding for Dasein, the earlier reading of hermeneutics as an interpretative practice remains central to his methodology, to his attempt to bring the “factive” world to expression in order, as he explained elsewhere, “to allow Being to be investigated and come to language” (GA 63: 1). Certainly, he is aware that the theoretical integrity of hermeneutics has not gone unquestioned: its critics have argued that it is circular in its methodology, because it presupposes a matter and then interprets that matter accordingly in terms of that presupposition (GA 2: 417).21 But what, 20 It is a cognitive-interpretative process that Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann glosses in the following way: “hermeneutic understanding remains within living enacted experience, and brings us through the modification of expression into a position to interpret the experience of the surrounding world in the sense of its full enactment” (Hermeneutik 32). 21 Richard Sembera has criticised “the peculiar lack of organisation that Being and Time exhibits” (33). This, however, is to misunderstand the nature of the hermeneutic methodology, which takes place in the form of exploration (of, as we have seen, a “seeking”), and which proceeds through incremental definition, clarification and repetition, and often involves a return in the text to earlier discussions of concepts, which are now seen in a different light. As Hubert L. Dreyfus observes, the hermeneutic process has its own characteristic way of progressing: “one must move back and forth between overall interpretation and the details that a given reading lets stand out as significant” (36). Criticising the formal structure of Being and Time is also to misunderstand the genesis of the text, which was always a work-in-progress, something that took shape in stages and in a variety of forms, including lecture notes and occasional papers. Heidegger was aware of these matters, and subjects himself throughout Being and

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Heidegger asks, does “presupposing” mean in this criticism? In positing the idea of existence are we really putting forth some proposition from which we can deduce further propositions about the Being of Dasein according to consistent formal rules? Or “does this pre-supposing have the character of a pro-jection that recognises in precisely that way that the interpretation from which this understanding is formed lets what is to be interpreted be put into words for the very first time” (417). This task of interpretation in which hermeneutics is involved is no less than the task of describing the world, and this is necessarily a question of language.22 At the very beginning of his third chapter, “The Worldhood of the World”, explaining how his phenomenology intends to confront the facticity of the world, Heidegger poses a vital question: What can it mean to describe “the world” as a phenomenon? It means to let us see what shows itself in “entities” within the world. Here the first step is to enumerate the things that are “in” the world: houses, trees, people, mountains, stars. We can depict [abschildern] the “external appearance” of these entities and give an account of [erzählen] occurrences in them and with them. But this is obviously a pre-phenomenological “business”, which can be of no phenomenological relevance whatsoever. Such a description is always confined to entities. […] To describe the world phenomenologically means to exhibit and to formulate [fixieren] in a conceptually categorical way the Being of those entities that are present-to-hand within the world. (85)23

Describing the world is a problem, and when Heidegger returns to this issue just a few pages later he feels compelled to put “description” (Beschreibung) in inverted commas to indicate the insufficiency of the word, for “the task

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Time to a continual process of self-interrogation about his methodology, at times characterising his attempts apologetically as “unsatisfactory” (unzureichend). See, for example, 411. As Jeff Malpas observes, “the character of the hermeneutical, as connected to a fundamental mode of appearing or showing, and the way this might be tied to the bearing of a message or tidings, clearly brings to the fore the relationship between hermeneutics and language, and with it the question of the understanding of language that might be at work here” (Beckoning: 211). The fact that neither set of translators can agree on the right words for Heidegger’s key descriptive terms suggests that we are dealing with a complex representational issue. For abschildern, erzählen and fixieren, M/R use “depict”, “give an account of ” and “to fix”; while S prefers “describe”, “tell of ” and “determine”.

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of a phenomenological ‘description’ of the world is so far from clear that its adequate determination already requires essential ontological clarification” (87).24 Indeed, Heidegger during the course of his analysis in Being and Time abandons the term Beschreibung altogether, replacing it with Deskription. The latter term now forms the crucial concept in his hermeneutics, and it will reveal that “the phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutic in the original meaning of the word, where it signifies the work of interpretation” (50).25 This, however, had always been the goal of phenomenology, as Heidegger had understood it. In his Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, in a lecture covering “The Task of Definition”, he had already outlined the essential premise of the phenomenological recovery of the world: “what is initially important is only this: that the idea of determination, where the logic of the grasping of the object, and the conceptuality of the object in its respective definitional determination, must be drawn out of the manner in which the object becomes originally accessible” (GA 17: 20). And this is precisely the achievement of Being and Time. In his later “Letter on Humanism”, Heidegger criticised himself for remaining within “the language of metaphysics” in Being and Time (GA 9: 328). By “language”, Heidegger could only have meant the broader discourse of his work, including its compartmentalised organisation, its structuring of ideas and its formal layout, which sustains a developmental logic, a logic that he rejected in his later work. It is true that in Being and Time Heidegger largely works within

24 The stem of beschreiben is schreiben, which is the verb “to write” in German, just as in English the stem of “describe” is the Latin scribere, likewise meaning “to write”. To “describe” (and the German equivalent, beschreiben) have, however, come to acquire connotations of a purely factual registering of events. It asks the enunciant to remove himself or herself from the object of the discourse, and selflessly give an “objective” account of matters, as if he or she were simply, as in the mode of a mimetic literary realism, holding up a mirror to the external world. Heidegger, however, means something different with “description” and to foreground that difference, when he uses the word Beschreiben he places it in quotation marks. 25 An interpretation that is, at the same time, a seeking. As Jean Grondin argues, “externalized language is the site of a struggle that must be heard as such. There is no ‘preverbal’ world, only world oriented to language, the world which is always to be put into words, though never entirely successfully. This is the uniquely hermeneutic dimension of language” (xv).

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the framework of traditional grammar, retaining in his sentence structure conventional syntax, with its periodic progress of subject and predicate and main and subordinating clauses. But in the broader scope of his writing, Heidegger was pushing language to the limits of its descriptive capacity, breaking thoroughly with accepted usage, restructuring components of standard everyday expressions, often dislocating their stems from their prefix or suffix through hyphens to create entirely new words. These neo-logistic formations gradually come to form an explicative repertoire that allows Heidegger to develop the profile of Dasein through ever-more inflected shades of definition and modification, in which the etymology and derivation of words are excavated to create multiple meanings, semantic parallels established between the cognate forms of words, ambiguities within existing concepts teased out, familiar phrases used in unfamiliar ways, conventional meanings modified or even reversed, colloquial expressions employed to foreground the “everydayness” of ontic realities, and neologisms created from the back-formations of adverbs or adjectives to create new concepts. It is a language to which we must also add the tone and rhetoric of Heidegger’s writing, not only its will to structure and its assertiveness but also the frequent moments of self-interrogation, self-questioning, expressions of doubts and the recognition of only partial analytical success. These too belong to Heidegger’s descriptive ontology and to a style of writing that has been termed “archaeological” in its attempt to excavate the conceptual terrain of a factive world (Frede 54).

Determination, Extension, Kinesis: Being as Thing Being is the central concern of Being and Time: phenomenology and hermeneutics are simply the paths that take Heidegger to it. As a concept, “Being” had long engrossed Heidegger, ever since his student days when he had read Franz Brentano’s book, On the Manifold Meaning of Being according to Aristotle (Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles). On the first page of that book, Brentano had quoted Aristotle’s phrase: “a being becomes manifest (with regards to its Being) in many ways”. As Heidegger

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later explained in a letter to William Richardson, “latent in this phrase is the question that determined the path of my thought”, and he outlined the questions that lay along that path: What is the simple, unified determination of Being that pervades all of [its] various meanings? This question raises the following ones: what does Being mean at all? To what extent (why and how) does the Being of beings unfold in the four modes that Aristotle constantly affirms [in his Metaphysics], but whose common origin he leaves undetermined? (Richardson Letter x)

These questions were posed retrospectively, but they nevertheless frame Heidegger’s first engagement with ontology: his postdoctoral dissertation, The Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus (Die Kategorienund Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus, 1915). The dissertation focuses upon one of the major works of medieval scholasticism: Scotus’ On the Modes of Signification of Speculative Grammar (Tractatus de modis significandi seu Grammatica speculativa).26 Scotus belonged to a school of speculative grammarians called the “Modists”, who “represented the synthesis […] of the two lines of grammatical thought which had dominated antiquity – the logical-philosophical grammar of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, and the literary grammar of the Alexandrians, Donatus and Priscian – but with this difference, that they restated the categories and forms of grammar in terms of the current metaphysical theories of reality” (Bursill-Hall 22). The Modists were so called because they believed that linguistic meaning consisted of three separate but mutually interdependent forms of representation: a form of signifying (modus significandi), a form of understanding (modus intelligendi) and a form of Being (modus essendi). The principles of grammar (the modi significandi) were derived from mental acts of signifying (modi intelligendi), which reflect the way things are in reality (modi essendi). Irrespective of the category to which they belong, objects in the real world are characterised by a single universal quality, which guarantees their Being. In the final pages of his study, Heidegger describes it thus:

26

This work was later found to have been written not by Scotus but by Thomas of Erfurt in the first decade of the fourteenth century.

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Chapter 1 Duns Scotus shows that in the area of reality certain universal determinations can be discovered, universal ways of being. One such is the modus entis. Every real thing, irrespective to which of the many areas [of the modes of Being] that it may belong, is a what, an object. This what-Being, which comes to expression in the modus entis, Scotus characterises more precisely as a habitus, and indeed as a “permanent” one, to which every object belongs to the extent that it is. It is the inceptual quality of everything that is an object or can become an object. (GA 1: 346)

The issues that Heidegger engaged with in his Scotus study: immanence and the tension between the notion of “this-ness” (haecceitas, from the Latin haec, meaning “this”, a concept that points to the immediate presence of things), the coherence of transcendental categories of explanation, the role of comprehension (indeed, the role of the intending self ) in assigning significance to objects, and the complex relationship between a generalist notion of Being and individual forms of being, and the problem of finding categories for these forms, were further developed in Heidegger’s subsequent lecture courses and came to form the basis of an extended “konkrete Auserarbeitung”, a concrete or tangible working-out of the ontological manifestions of the world, in Being and Time (GA 2: xv). For “everything we talk about, all the intentions we have, everything we respond to in this way or that, is Being. What we are is Being, and so is how we are. Being lies in that which is in such and such a way, in reality, in what is present, in substance, in validity, in existence, in ‘there is’” (9). It was a task that involved Heidegger in a “raising” or “lifting” (Abhebung) of Being from single moments of being in order to explicate Being itself (36). It would be a process of “ontological recovery”, a matter, as he explained in setting out the framework of his approach, of discovery, and would begin with no more than the most rudimentary premises: we must work towards what we are seeking; we cannot posit it in advance.27

27 As Heidegger explains, “‘Ontology’ means doctrine of Being”, and involves a “questioning and defining that is directed towards Being as such” (GA 63: 1). The stem of “ontology” is the Greek “on” (ὤν), which is the first-person neuter of the Greek noun for “Being” and is formed from the verb “einai” (ειναι), “to be”. With the definite article “to” (tó), “to on” translates as “Being” and the plural “ta onta” (tá ὄντα) as “the beings” or “the entities”. Richardson points out that, because the Greek “on” can mean either “Being” in German (Sein) or “beings” (Seiende), the word is intrinsically ambivalent

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Being should not be viewed as a substance (in the manner, for example, of Aristotle’s “ousia”). It is not, as Thomas Sheehan has observed, “a metaphysical super-entity” but a still-to-be-defined quality of the world that must be brought into view (Heidegger’s Topic 616).28 For this reason, we will look in vain in Being and Time for anything approximating the totalising definitions of “Being” that had informed earlier philosophical systems.29 Being is an active agency, and this is reflected in the form of the word sein, which functions in German both as a noun, Sein [Being] and as a verb, sein [to be]. We encounter it most often in Being and Time as Sein, as the initial substantive in a compound noun that is followed by a preposition such as zu [“to” or “towards”], as in Sein zum Tode [being towards death], where Sein suggests something that makes emergence possible or brings that which is within an entity to full light. Sein generates a complex web of associated terms in Heidegger’s analytic, which allows the original concept, through modification, adaption and repetition, to intensify itself even where its primary sense is not immediately clear or directly involved. In his descriptions of these aspects of the world, Heidegger builds in the descriptor Sein to locate these aspects within the broader matrix of “Being” itself. These descriptors act as an imperative: to (Richardson “Heidegger and the Problem of Thought” 65). For a comprehensive account of the different meanings of “being” in Greek, and the importance of the distinction between the copulative, existential and veridical senses of “is” in that language, see Kahn. 28 In spite of his tendency to anthropomorphise the concept of Being (treating it as an active agent), J. L. Mehta’s words are instructive: “Being shows itself in the character of going over to the essent [Seiende], as coming down to it and revealing it and the essent appears as that which, through such descent of Being, comes into unhiddenness and appears as if it were by itself unhidden” (206). Jean Grondin puts it equally succinctly: “the emergence of Being is necessarily also the revelation of something, and thus of an entity that arises within presence and offers itself to a gaze” (Question of Being 26). 29 This has not prevented other Heidegger readers from attempting to find a general unified meaning for Sein. For William J. Richardson, Being is “the lighting-process by which beings are illumined as beings – this is what Heidegger understands by Being”. And he adds, it is also “the domain of openness, because it is the lighting-process by which beings are lighted-up” (Problem of Thought 60 and 61). Sheehan himself defines Beingness as “the intelligible presence of things” (Heidegger’s Topic 623).

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look, to find presence and weight in an entity.30 Such formations include Seinsbestimmtheit [determination of Being], Seinsbezug [relationship of Being], Seinsganzheit [totality of Being], Seinsbestand [contents of its Being], Seinsbezirk [domain of Being], Seinsverhältnis” [relationship of Being] and An-sich-sein [being-in-itself ].31 Some of these terms, such as Seinsbezirk and Seinsbezug, which make but a single appearance in Heidegger’s exposition, function largely as synonyms, and suggest that Heidegger was still working towards a terminological resolution to problems that adhered to his task. Some of these new formations are subject to frequent permutations. The core component of An-sich-sein, for example, undergoes a variety of transformations, which include An-sich-vorhanden-sein [being-present-in-itself ], as well as the simpler cognates, An-sich [in-itself ] and ansich [in itself ]. The function of these concepts is to clarify a particular inflexion within an entity at a particular juncture in Heidegger’s developing discourse. In the case of not-being-itself, for instance, the term refers to a mode of existence for Dasein that is somewhere between authenticity and inauthenticity. Although Heidegger conceives of it as a form of not-being, not-being-itself is, nevertheless, a “positive possibility of that entity which, in its essential concern, is absorbed in the world” (233). All of these diverse Sein constructions are used to disclose aspects of the world when these aspects can be said “to be”.32

30 In other words, we must understand how “sein” functions discursively in the text, how it appears at specific points in Heidegger’s analysis, which is not always through definition but through gesture and signalling. In his earlier writings, Heidegger had introduced the term “formal indication” (formale Anzeige) to characterise this pointing and directing capacity of language. As he had explained in “Ontology of Hermeneutics”, in hermeneutics, “everything depends upon our understanding being guided from out of the indefinite and vague but still intelligible content of the indication onto the right path of looking” (GA 63: 80). 31 In such formations, “‘being’ is no longer a passive-durative, but is, in a certain way, something that acts” (Schöfer 92). 32 As Taylor Carman has argued, it is best perhaps to think of these modes or inflections of Being as having an “analogical” relationship between themselves (a recognisable but loose correspondence, in the way of a family likeness) rather than as converging on a single notion of “Being”. For “we do [in Being and Time] have a vague generic understanding of being as such, which embraces the kinds of being pertaining to those diverse entities, but that generic, unrestricted notion is not prior to, more basic, or

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Heidegger’s goal is not to define Being so that it may take its place as a category in a purely descriptive ontology: that was precisely the Aristotelian tradition that he was seeking to de-struct.33 Rather, his aim is to describe and account for its agency, in whatever mode it appears, because it is only out of the practical questions that arise when we attempt to treat things themselves as things that a discipline of understanding can develop. For, as has been argued, “if what is being enquired into in the question of Being is Being, and Being means the Being of entities, then, in order to give thematic substance to Being, we have to enquire into entities and ask after their Being”. If “Being” is to reveal itself as facticity, it must reveal itself in (if not as) entity, and these belong as much to the object world as they do to the human sphere (von Herrmann, Hermeneutische Phänomenologie I: 65). Husserl had already exhorted philosophers to return “to things themselves!” (Logische Untersuchungen 10).34 But what are “things”? In Husserl’s work, they have largely a theoretical presence; they exist as objects of perception, inert until they come to the focus of consciousness, to the individual mind. Tangible examples are rarely given and when they are, as in one evocative allusion to blossoming apple trees from section 88 of his Ideas (214), this cannot hide the fact that it is purely their generic quality (their status as exempla) that is of interest to Husserl. They are passive entities to be ordered by the intentionalist mind.35

more readily intelligible than the several specific, restricted senses” (The Question of Being 90). 33 Heidegger held Aristotle and Plato responsible for promoting the technical interpretation of thinking in the form of “theoria” (GA 9: 314). The secondary literature on Heidegger’s position on Aristotle is extensive. For an account that focuses specifically on the de-structive, anti-metaphysical moment of that position, see McCumber (21–70). 34 But are Sachen necessarily “things”? The German language makes a distinction between Sache and Ding. It is only the latter that typically conforms to the sense of the English word “thing”, as in something that is a tangible, physical object. When Husserl used the term Sachen, he may have meant no more than philosophy should return to “concrete matters” or “real issues”. 35 “Objects are for me, and are for me what they are, only as objects of a real and possible consciousness” (Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen 99).

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But in Being and Time things come to us. The moon shines, the car indicator indicates, hammers hammer and chalk chalks. There are houses, trees, people, mountains, stars. There are shoes made for wearing, clocks made for telling the time. And there are materials: leather, nails, thread and similar things, which are either manufactured or come from nature: stone, rocks and wood, some transformed into timber, steel, iron. Dasein moves within this world of objects: they are part of its facticity; indeed, they make Dasein as an entity possible.36 Objects may be banal, quotidian (indeed, they are necessarily so because they belong to everyday experience), but they define all that we do: they are acted upon and they act upon us. Heidegger puts the matter succinctly: “everyday Dasein is always already in this mode: e.g., in opening the door, I make use of the latch” (91). Things, however, are not merely objects that we make contact with through touch, taste, smell and sight: that is simply their immediate (unmediated) reality, a reality that has traditionally been approached in terms of “substantiality, materiality, extendedness, side-by-sidedness” (291). To communicate the broader ontology of their Being, Heidegger uses the term Zeug [“material” or “equipment”]. It is a common word in German, a substantive that is cognate with verbs such as zeugen [to procreate] and erzeugen [to manufacture]. In standard German, Zeug is ususally found as the final element in composite formations such as Werkzeug [tool], Fahrzeug [vehicle] and Schreibzeug [writing material].37 For Heidegger, equipment never simply “is”: to its Being there always belongs a collective environment of equipment that allows a certain piece of equipment to be what it is as it performs a specific function in that environment. Seen within this context, equipment is “something that is in order to …”, and the various types of

36

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Dasein “finds itself primarily and normally in things because, tending them or being distressed by them, it always in some way or other rests in things. Each one of us is what he or she pursues and cares for. In everyday terms, we understand ourselves and our existence by way of the activities we pursue and the things we take care of ” (GA 58: 226–227). As a self-standing noun, Zeug translates into English as “material” or, sometimes with slightly derogatory overtones, “stuff ”. Heidegger wishes us to see the more productive connotations of the word that adhere to in its verbal form, zeugen, hence “equipment” is the more appropriate translation in this context.

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“in-order-to”, such as serviceability, adaptability, useability and handiness, constitute this environment (92). Things are not thoughts, and for that reason they need to be approached not through theoretical grids but how they are encountered in terms of practical activity through their physical use. Heidegger calls this “engagement” (Umgang), a term that comes from the verb umgehen [literally “to go around” something], but which typically means “to engage” with something or “to associate” with someone (90).38 In section 15, Heidegger gives us an example of how engagement interacts with one particular object: the common hammer. A hammer is a certain type of thing defined by its generic relationship with other things within its equipmental environment, where it exists as this type of equipment rather than another. This generic relationship does not, however, define its Being. That is constituted by its Umgang, the way that it is dealt with or engaged with, as is the case with a common piece of equipment, a hammer: Der je auf das Zeug zugeschnittene Umgang, darin es sich einzig genuin in seinem Sein zeigen kann, z. B. das Hämmern mit dem Hammer, erfaßt weder dieses Seiende thematisch als vorkommendes Ding, noch weiß etwa gar das Gebrauchen um die Zeugstruktur als solche. Das Hämmern hat nicht lediglich noch ein Wissen um den Zeugcharakter des Hammers, sondern es hat sich dieses Zeug so zugeeignet, wie es angemessener nicht möglich ist. In solchem gebrauchenden Umgang unterstellt sich das Besorgen dem für das jeweilige Zeug konstitutiven Um-zu; je weniger das Hammerding nur begafft wird, je zugreifender es gebraucht wird, um so ursprünglicher wird das Verhältnis zu ihm, um so unverhüllter begegnet es als das, was es ist, als Zeug. Das Hämmern selbst entdeckt die spezifische “Handlichkeit” des Hammers. Die Seinsart von Zeug, in der es sich von ihm selbst her offenbart, nennen wir die Zuhandenheit. (93) [The form of engagement [Umgang] that has been specifically tailored for an individual item of equipment, so that it is only here that the latter can genuinely reveal itself in its Being, as in e.g. hammering with a hammer, does not register this entity explicitly as a thing that calls for attention, nor is the structure of that piece of equipment known as such even in its use.39 Hammering does not merely have knowledge of the equipment

38 39

Both M/R and S translate Umgang as “dealings”, but that word is normally only found in the phrase “dealings with”. As a self-standing noun, “dealings” has connotations of a financial transaction conducted, for example, on the stock market. The German thematisch, which Heidegger uses on a number of occasions, is translated by both M/R and S with the rather mysterious “thematic” (the adjective of “theme”), presumably on account of the surface similarities of the two words in English and

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Chapter 1 character of the hammer; it has appropriated this equipment in the most suitable way possible. In such practical forms of engagement, managing [Besorgen] subordinates itself to the in-order-to that is constitutive of the equipment in question. The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more clearly is it encountered as that which it is, as equipment. Hammering itself discovers the specific “handiness” of the hammer. This type of Being in equipment, in which it reveals itself from within itself, we call readiness-to-hand.]

Because this passage seems to be simply giving us one example of how a certain type of equipment is being used within a practical context, it is easy to overlook the audacity of what Heidegger is saying: that the activity of the hammer (its “hammering”) seems to be taking place quite independently of human agency. Indeed, the hammering is endowed with human attributes, such as the capacity to have knowledge (Wissen) of its handiness. Human involvement, it is true, is evident in the presence of managing (Besorgen), but that soon disappears into yet a further existential of the object world, the Um-zu [the “in-order-to”], a conjunction turned into a noun, which lends a monumentality to an entity that seems to exist over and beyond human intentionality. We do not choose how to use a hammer; its normal usage determines our engagement with it. The hammer hammers with a purpose that belongs to what it is as an entity, and this is reflected in the free-flowing language of the passage, in the consistent alliteration, the assibilation, the “z” and “s” sounds, for example, which communicates a sense of network and interdependence, and syntactically in causative constructions and correlative conjunctions such as “not only … but also”, “the less … the more”, and “the more … the more”, German. In English, however, “theme”, from Greek “tema”, “tematos”, denoting that which has been “placed”, has a narrower set of meanings than it has in German, being largely restricted in the former language to referring to a recurring item in a piece of music or literature. In German, Thema has a broader use, commonly appearing in statements such as “das ist kein Thema für mich” [that is not an issue to me]. The English word “systematic” or “explicit” translates Heidegger’s sense more accurately here. The vorkommen in “vorkommendes Ding” is translated as “occurring” by both S and M/R. Vorkommen, however, means to “come to the fore”, as in being salient. Heidegger is saying that the hammering process does not require that we should be self-conscious about the material (Zeug) being used.

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balanced phrases that underscore the logical momentum of the text. The break with Husserlian phenomenology is rudely clear: hammering is not only not anthropomorphised; as Heidegger also makes clear, it takes place without even the rudiments of theoretical knowledge (we are told what it doesn’t “know” in three places): it simply does. As Heidegger tells us at the end of the above passage, “hammering itself discovers the specific ‘handiness’ of the hammer”. This essential quality of equipment, which makes it the entity that it is, he calls “readiness-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit), an existential that has affinities with its associated formation, the “present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit). Appreciating the distinction between the two terms is critical to our understanding of the ontology of equipment. Vorhanden is a common word in German, meaning “available” or “extant”, and often simply translates as “is”.40 In these forms, vorhanden has lost its tactile connotations, its connection with “hand”, becoming a purely abstract concept that merely specifies the presence of something. The difference between vorhanden and zuhanden is already evident in their respective prefixes: “vor” indicating general placement, whilst “zu” suggests a more specific proximity.41 It is in the mode of readiness-to-hand that equipment reveals its significance for Dasein, which is in its use. Or, perhaps, in its non-use. For Heidegger is quick to alert us to the potential for dysfunctionality in the ready-to-hand. Things break or fail to work either at all or as they should do, and there may be occasions when equipment may simply be the wrong type for the job. On these occasions, equipment becomes “unusable” (unverwendbar), and in doing so becomes “conspicuous” (has Auffallen) (98). In this state, it appears as if the tool has lost its ready-to-hand quality and has returned to the innate object world of the mere present-at-hand. But it has

40 Denis McManus (53–56) looks at the full array of translations of vorhanden, which include “presence”, “substance”, “material” and “reality”, and concludes that the concept is incoherent. But there is surely a recognisable family likeness between these terms. 41 Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit are translated as “handiness” and “objective presence [of things]” by S, and “readiness-to-hand” and “presence-at-hand” by M/R. In translating Sein und Zeit into French, Emmanuel Martineau uses à-portée-de-la-main and sous-la-main (97–98). The distinction is between the factual presence of an object, on the one hand, and its availability for use, on the other.

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not, because we recognise what has caused the problem and attempt to fix it, and in doing so keep its ready-to-hand status firmly in mind. There are, however, other times when we cannot do this; when the tool or equipment is simply not there, is missing. It is in this state that the ontological distinction between ready-to-hand and the merely present-to-hand threatens to lose its identity: Der besorgende Umgang stößt aber nicht nur auf Unverwendbares innerhalb des je schon Zuhandenen, er findet auch solches, das fehlt, was nicht nur nicht “handlich”, sondern überhaupt nicht “zur Hand ist”. Ein Vermissen von dieser Art entdeckt wieder als Vorfinden eines Unzuhandenen das Zuhandene in einem gewissen Nurvorhandensein. Das Zuhandene kommt im Bemerken von Unzuhandenem in den Modus der Aufdringlichkeit. Je dringlicher das Fehlende gebraucht wird, je eigentlicher es in seiner Unzuhandenheit begegnet, um so aufdringlicher wird das Zuhandene, so zwar, daß es den Charakter der Zuhandenheit zu verlieren scheint. Es enthüllt sich als nur noch Vorhandenes, das ohne das Fehlende nicht von der Stelle gebracht werden kann. Das ratlose Davorstehen entdeckt als difizienter Modus eines Besorgens das Nur-noch-vorhandensein eines Zuhandenen. (98–99) [Caring engagement [besorgende Umgang] does not only come up against unusable things within what is already ready-to-hand. It also comes across things that are missing, which are not only not “handy” but are not “to hand” at all. To miss something in this way reveals once again, as a discovery of an unready-to-hand of a present-at-hand, a certain kind of only-just-present-to-hand. When we notice what is unready-to-hand the ready-to-hand takes on the mode of obtrusiveness. The more urgently the missing thing is required and the more authentically is it encountered in its unreadiness-to-hand, all the more obtrusive does that which is ready-to-hand become, so much so indeed that it seems to lose its character of a readiness-to-hand. It reveals itself as something that is merely present-at-hand, which cannot be removed from its place without the thing that is missing. Standing clueless before it uncovers in us a deficient mode of managing of the only-just-present-at-hand of a ready-to-hand.]

Heidegger is in the process of determining a new language for his philosophical thinking, and that determination is reflected in the form of this passage, which possesses a definitional monumentality. The insistent normalisation of the grammar (such as the conversion of the verb vermissen into a noun) ontologises what are in all other respects everyday types of action. The passage is structured around the word “hand”, which is used here in a variety of ways, literal and metaphorical. The hand is the conventional means for grasping equipment, but that possessing can be done

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literally, through a tactile activity, or cognitively, through a recognition of the function of equipment. Heidegger, in fact, would wish us to see these two modes as coterminous as, for example, in the word “handy” (handlich), which both refers to an object that is literally graspable by the hand, but which also describes something that is useful, conveniently situated in its location. The stem of “hand” is extended throughout the passage into a complex array of formations, which includes the declined noun Zuhandene [something that is ready-to-hand] and the abstract noun Zuhandenheit [the concept of things being ready-to-hand]. Heidegger’s use of the “hand” trope ranges from familiar expressions such as “handy” and “to be to hand”, to two major existentials of equipment, the ready-tohand and present-at-hand, to which he adds the further defining category of the “only-just-present-at-hand” (Nurvorhandensein). It is not simply the semantic diversity of the uses of this hand motif that sustains Heidegger’s analysis but the fact that these various uses are brought for the reader (almost provocatively) into such immediate and direct syntactic alignment, and placed with such grammatical exactitude in the text.42 A crucial concept in the passage is “obtrusiveness” (Aufdringlichkeit), which is a mode of equipment that appears when the ready-to-hand declines into the mere present-at-hand. In this mode, what constitutes the Being of equipment is something that is not there, does not happen, is, in short, an absence that “presses” itself upon us. For that reason, Heidegger’s analysis of obtrusiveness forms itself around a series of verbs of concealing and revealing, such as (to give them in their infinitive forms) fehlen [to be absent], entdecken [to discover], vorfinden [to come upon] and sich enthüllen [to reveal itself ]. Although obtrusiveness suggests a negativity (what we are looking for in equipment is not there), it is, nevertheless, “a positive phenomenal character of the Being of what is initially to hand” (101). Obtrusiveness is an instance of the (apparent) paradox of an absence revealing the truth about Being, an existential that Heidegger elsewhere characterises through the Greek word, 42 Heidegger’s terminology is studiously impersonal, and most translators have found the sense of this passage difficult to communicate without introducing a human subject into these activities through the pronoun “we” or the possessive adjective “our”. It is not, therefore, for Stambaugh, ein Vermissen [literally, “a missing”] that discovers the absent or broken tool, but “our missing”.

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“aletheia” (ἀλήθεια), meaning truth as the revelatory play of concealment and unconcealment.43 This complex network of modes of visibility, relations and purposes, in which equipment comes to presence, Heidegger calls “involvement” (Bewandtnis), a polysemic word that is one of the most challenging in Heidegger’s vocabulary.44 Involvement covers an array of procedures that define and make possible the activity of objects in the world. It incorporates the relevance of equipment to its task, its capacity to carry out that task and the way that equipment is used. These pragmatic modes are ontologically defining of entities, objects and people, where their Being consists in doing. Involvement makes its entry in section 18, where Heidegger describes how “an entity is discovered, as the entity that it is, when it is referred to something. It has with it and alongside something as its involvement. The character of the Being of the ready-to-hand is involvement” (112). Because in this environment of functionality entities possess a complex instrumental logic that cannot be captured in the language of conventional thinking, Heidegger must develop a new vocabulary, and find new words for entities 43 Although “aletheia” constitutes a central term in Heidegger’s later philosophy, it appears briefly in Being and Time, and largely in its privative form as “a-letheia” [unhiddenness]. See, for example, 291. 44 Bewandtnis and its accompanying verb bewenden are normally only found in German in idiomatic expressions such as “es dabei bewenden lassen” [let’s leave it at that], where the stem of the word, wenden, meaning “to turn”, and the be prefix, suggest an action that is in the process of being completed. As Christoph von Wolzogen notes, “Bewandtnis is authentically German but it looks foreign. In Grimm’s Dictionary, the various meanings of the word are given as bewenden (‘to allow involvement’), anwenden (‘to apply’) and verwenden (‘to use’), pragmatic concepts, therefore, and all with the sense somewhat of ‘in oder zu etwas verwenden’ (‘in or to use something on something’)” (Wolzogen 4). Last accessed 22 June 2018. Bewandtnis has received differing translations, including “relevance” (S), “connection” (Sembera), “appliance” (Kisiel), “affordance” (Wrathall) and “involvement” (M/R), which is the only translation that preserves, by drawing on the Latin volvere [to turn over], the wenden or “turning” component of the word. In French, Bewandtnis is translated by Martineau as tournure [bustle], and Bewendenlassen as laisser-retourner [letting-return] (311). Here as elsewhere, rather than choose a single translation for Heidegger’s term (or add yet a further new word to the existing range) I will employ whichever translation seems the most appropriate in the context, and at the same time cite the German original.

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within the phenomenal world that have, as yet, not been described. Such a necessity produces a radical break with standard linguistic practice, as in the following passage where Heidegger attempts to describe how involvement takes place within a specific temporal framework: In der einfachsten Handhabung eines Zeugs liegt das Bewendenlassen. Das Wobei desselben hat den Charakter des Wozu; im Hinblick darauf ist das Zeug verwendbar bzw. in Verwendung. Das Verstehen des Wozu, das heißt des Wobei der Bewandtnis, hat die zeitliche Struktur des Gegenwärtigens. Des Wozu gewärtigt, kann das Besorgen allein zugleich auf so etwas zurückkommen, womit es die Bewandtnis hat. Das Gegenwärtigen des Wobei in eins mit dem Behalten des Womit der Bewandtnis ermöglicht in seiner ekstatischen Einheit das spezifisch hantierende Gegenwärtigen des Zeugs. (467–468) [Letting something be involved [Bewendenlassen] is part of the simplest handling of equipment. The where-by of this has the character of the what-for, with regard to which the equipment is usable or already in use. Understanding the what-for, i.e. the whereby of involvement [Bewandtnis], has the temporal structure of a making-present.45 In the making-present of the what-for, caring [Besorgen] can at the same time return in itself to something that has involvement. The making-present of the where-by, in unison with the retaining of the with-which of involvement, permits in its ec-static unity the specific handiness of the making-present of equipment.]

Heidegger wishes to emphasise that entities in the object world move within a temporality of circumspective concern that possesses its own distinctive logic, which makes possible an “ecstatic unity”, a unity that “stands out of ” (from the Latin exstare) time, and in which past, present and future coalesce. To find words for this temporal and logistical complexity, Heidegger extends his neo-logistic coinages, which has so far been largely used on a substantive level as nouns, into the realm of common grammar and syntax. Consequently, temporal qualifiers, adverbial participles and prepositions, 45 Both S and M/R translate Gegenwärtigen” as “awaiting”, but that word term more accurately translates wärtigen. “Awaiting” suggests a deferral of activity, and this is exactly the opposite of what Heidegger intends here. What he is describing is a certain type of absorption (Aufgehen) by care in the world, a disposition or attitude (as M/R gloss it) “of being prepared to reckon with that which one awaits” (386). Martineau more accurately translates Gegenwärtigen as the verb présentifier [to bring in to one’s consciousness the recognition of something that is absent] and as a noun présentification (313).

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many of which possess a “where” component, in order to conflate location and time, now appear as nouns to indicate position, purpose and direction. These include the Womit, the “with-which”, for example, of an item of equipment, the Wozu, the “what-for”, the end goal of an action, the Wobei, the “where-by”, the process involved and, elsewhere in Being and Time, in the same mode of configuration, the Worumwillen, the “for-sake-of-which”, and the Wofür, the “for-what”. These are amongst the most challenging of Heidegger’s neologistic formations, and the most difficult to translate. Nouns formed out of adverbs or conjunctions, they represent Heidegger’s attempt to find the most succinct and most concrete terms for activities that involve instrumentality and facilitation, without tying those processes to a human subject. The adverb wozu is a common, if slightly archaic word in German, meaning “what for?” or “why?” Heidegger had introduced the term in section 15 as the “towardswhich” or “what-for” of equipment, to convey its end goal in the production process (perhaps with the Greek “telos” in mind, as in Aristotle’s discussion of causation in his Metaphysics) (94). Womit is a relative adverb, meaning in English “with which” or “by which”, that Heidegger now turns into a noun, where it becomes a with-what or with-which. As with Wozu, Womit is an existential of Bewenden lassen, which describes the freeing up of an entity for involvement or relevance. In all cases, what is being described is the relationship between knowledge and its use in the practical context of the being-in-the-world of Dasein. Context qua context is evident in the third and most important term in the passage: Wobei. In its normal usage in German as a relative adverb, wobei is used in phrases such as “Ich las den Brief noch mal, wobei es mir klar wurde …” [I read the letter again, and by doing this it became clear to me …], meaning that as a result of the reading or during the process of reading something became clear to me. Wobei, the adverb now used as a noun, is an attempt to find a single designation for what is both a causative and a processional action, and one which has its ultimate purpose only in the context in which it takes place as it unites with the “with-which”. The standard translations reflect this fluidity of meaning (at the same time as they point to the difficulty of adequately conveying this fluidity as a state), defining Wobei as “that in which

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it is involved” or “in which”, “is about”, or simply “context”.46 In the above passage, the semantic complexity of these neologisms is further enhanced by the fact that syntactically they follow one another at short intervals in the text, an effect that forces the reader to bring them into alignment, and in doing so cognitively move abruptly across different modalities of place and placement. Although managing (Besorgen) marks the presence of Dasein in this passage, the real subject is equipment. Throughout his analysis of worldhood, Heidegger takes pains to depict the independence of the latter: no number of idealist philosophies can undermine its status as a reality that does not depend upon our perception (intentional or otherwise) for its existence. Being is something that does or is done. In the world of equipment, the managing that Dasein brings with it to its activities is simply one component of a greater functionality that is already present. On such occasions, epistemology has no ontological relevance. The world opens itself to us through use, not through analysis; the latter is there simply to support the former, for as Heidegger notes, recapitulating his argument, “if we look at things just ‘theoretically’, we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them, this activity is not necessarily a blind one; it has its own way of seeing, which directs our manipulation and from which it acquires its specific thing-character. Within the realm of forms of engagement [Umgang], equipment subordinates itself to the manifold directives of the ‘in-order-to’. The viewing of such an accommodation is circumspection [Umsicht]” (93).47 Umsicht [literally “around-sight”] combines (as does its English translation, “circumspection”, from the Latin circum and spectare), both ocular and cognitive capacities. It is the primary mode in which the world is “opened 46 The first translation is from M/R; the other three are all possibilities floated by S, although the obvious translation “where-by” (for once an English term that is lexically close to the German original) contains all these variations. 47 This is yet a further gesture of distantiation from Husserl. On Heidegger’s assertion that “a regard that looks at things only ‘theoretically’ fails to understand their usefulness”, Husserl had commented, as he was reading Sein und Zeit, “but naturally a theoretical look at the implement is required if we are to grasp and have it objectively and to explain it descriptively”. For Husserl’s comments on Sein und Zeit, see Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology (315). “To have it objectively” is, however, for Heidegger, not a phenomenological form of understanding.

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up” (erschlossen) to Dasein. Circumspection does not only notice what is there: the physical existence of objects or their absence. It is also the mechanism through which Dasein can both recognise what equipment is for, its Um-zu, and notice when equipment is absent from its totality. Without the circumspection of Dasein, the object world has no function: it cannot be used. Circumspection is a form of understanding that utilises anticipation and memory (a facility that translates exactly into the English phrase “to be circumspect”). Circumspection is developed in Being in Time in tandem with a series of cognate terms, all of which contain sicht as their stem. In section 31, we are told: Das Verstehen macht in seinem Entwurfcharakter existenzial das aus, was wir die Sicht des Daseins nennen. Die mit der Erschlossenheit des Da existenzial seiende Sicht ist das Dasein gleichursprünglich nach den gekennzeichneten Grundweisen seines Seins als Umsicht des Besorgens, Rücksicht der Fürsorge, als Sicht auf das Sein als solches, umwillen dessen das Dasein je ist, wie es ist. Die Sicht, die sich primär und im ganzen auf die Existenz bezieht, nennen wir die Durchsichigkeit. (194–195) [In its pro-jective character, understanding constitutes existentially what we call the sight of Dasein. This existentially-being sight is, with the disclosedness of the There, co-foundational for Dasein in accordance with the basic forms of its Being, which is the circumspection of caring, the considerateness of solicitation and sight onto Being itself, for whose sake Dasein always is what it is. The sight that relates primarily, and as a whole, to existence we call perspicacity.]

In this passage, the trope sicht generates a repertoire of perceptual positions through which Dasein understands the world. They include here Rücksicht, Umsicht and Durchsichtigkeit, with Vorsicht and Einsicht used elsewhere in Being and Time. In each case, Heidegger seeks to retain the literal meaning of the prefix so that the sense of the stem word, sicht, is not lost in its conventional dictionary definition where, for example, Vorsicht (whose elements separated would give us the English equivalent of “foresight”) would simply be read as “caution”.48 In the above passage, these sicht items take prefixes that suggest 48 In their use by Heidegger, “Vorsicht and vorsichtig have no connection with the usual meaning ‘prudential’. They have been newly formed out of vor-sehen (‘fore-see’) and vorhersehen (‘predict’) in the sense of praevisio” (Schöfer 108).

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the placing of sight in space, Rück [back], Um [around] and Durch [through], emphasising that Dasein looks at the world always from a quite specific position within it. Indeed, in the manner of its pro-ject, Dasein always looks out to the world and out to its presence in the world. Durchsichtigkeit is conventionally translated as “transparency”, but that word pertains to an object or phenomenon that is transparent, such as glass. It is not a mode of seeing and this, Heidegger emphasises in the sentences that immediately follow in the passage, is precisely what he intends here by the word. He wishes us to view the -keit suffix simply as a substantiation of the primary seme, Durchsicht, meaning looking through, sighting or testing. Durchsichtigkeit is an active existential of the mind, which corresponds to the faculty of perspicacity. And what does this perspicacity tell Dasein? It tells Dasein that in the world of equipment it loses as much as it gains, that there are moments when it must register an unbroachable distance between itself and the world as present-at-hand, where it must recognise the Nichtgegenwärtigen [nonpresencing] of its activities. Here circumspection is compelled to address “what is inconvenient, disturbing, hindering, endangering or, in general, resistant in some way” (470). These are, however, more than just practical inconveniences, a case of something simply not working properly, a broken hammer, for example. Heidegger makes it clear that what we are talking about is an ontological not ontic state. We can not reckon on something else taking the place of what is missing: non-presencing is not the absence of a presence but the making un-present of an entity, its “missingness” (Vermissen), which resides in what is possible. It is a deficient mode of the present that belongs to the everyday content of the factically disclosed world. In its use in the present and in the pro-jecting of that use into the future, equipment finds its temporal integrity confirmed, where it is both in the present and in the future. But when involvement is disrupted, the present refuses to move into the future, and at such moments Dasein is “surprised” (Überraschtwerdens) out of its understanding of its temporal horizon. No manner of action can address this negativity, neither “procuring or producing something”, nor “avoiding, keeping a distance or shielding oneself ” (470).49 The progress

49 Heidegger consciously brings into alignment the two terms Gegenwärtigen and wärtigen to emphasise the difference between them. Indeed, the discomfort of Dasein in

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of Dasein stops here, with its recognition of the disruption of linearity: when the world falters, progress does not take place. Disappointment is both spatial and temporal. Dasein is forced out of the rhythm of familiar temporal patterns to contemplate the failure of its connection between self and world. As Heidegger observes, “only in so far as something resistant has been discovered on the basis of the ec-statical temporality of concern, can factical Dasein understand itself in its abandonment to a ‘world’ of which it never fully becomes master” (471).

And that Path was my Own: Being in the World: Dasein Dasein is unique amongst entities because, as Heidegger tells us at the very beginning of Part One of Being and Time, this is an entity “which in every case we ourselves are, and which includes inquiry among the possibilities of its Being” (10). Dasein is the ontological manifestation of ontic personhood, mediating between subject and object, by being part of the world that it is attempting to understand. This does not mean that Heidegger abandons the phenomenological focus on selfhood or human intentionality; on the contrary, as he had already noted (as if he was anticipating Husserl’s objections), “no inner sphere is abandoned when Dasein dwells alongside the entity to be known” (83). What is abandoned is the privilege of the inner sphere, not its existence, which we must now attempt to approach in terms of Dasein’s practical engagement with the world. As Heidegger explains, “a commercium [a term from Roman law relating to trade and the exchange of goods] between the subject and a world does not get created for the first time by [abstract] knowing, nor does it arise from some way in which the world acts upon a subject. Knowing is a mode of Dasein founded upon being-in-the-world” (84). Heidegger analyses being-in-the-world in three discrete stages: a questioning of the ontological structure of the world; a phenomenological

a non-functioning world takes place in the gap between these terms, between “presencing” and “awaiting”.

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explication of the “who” (wer) of Dasein in its everydayness; and an analysis of the ontological constitution of “Being-in” (In-sein). As so often in Heidegger’s writing, a simple preposition plays a vital role in his analytic that is equal to the apparently more important substantive words that surround it. When we typically use the word “in” regarding an object, we descriptively place that object “in” something else: the water is “in” the glass, the coat is “in” the wardrobe. But this simple spatial designation is insufficient to capture the ontological status of “in” as it appears in the designation “in-theworld”. Purely spatial definitions will not do, because they do not account for the quality of in-ness that constitutes the being-in-the-world of Dasein. Heidegger initially explicates that quality by uncovering the etymology of the word: “In” stems from “innan-”, to live, habitare, to dwell. “An” means I am used to, familiar with, I take care of something. It has the meaning of colo in the sense of habito and diligo [Latin for “I choose one apart from others”]. The entity, to which being-in in this sense of the phrase belongs, we have described as the entity that is what I myself am. The word “am” [bin] is related to “bei”, and so “ich bin” means I reside, I dwell alongside … the world, as something that is familiar to me in such and such a way. “To be” (Sein), as the infinitive of “I am” (ich bin), i.e. understood as an existential, means to reside alongside … , to be familiar with … (73)

Sein has a purpose and this purpose secures its facticity in the world; Dasein has an awareness of that presence and that purpose. In its facticity, Dasein joins Being to being-in-the-world, as is reflected in the grammatical constitution of the word Dasein, which consists of the adverbial form “there” (da) (which can in certain contexts also mean “here”) and the infinitive verb “to be” (sein). Although Dasein embraces the experiences of humankind, Heidegger is careful not to conflate it with the “individual” or the “person”, because these latter designations reflect ontic qualities such as gender, age or race (indeed, entities are often defined by such qualities), which are accidentals that do not belong to what Dasein is. Just as equipment exhibits itself in its capacity to fulfil its Being through its instrumental deployment, so Dasein fulfils its Being through recognising the ontological determinants of its existence: “care” (Sorge), “anxiety” (Angst) and “disposedness” (Befindlichkeit). But being-in-the-world is not simply a place for Dasein; it also involves a presence that Heidegger calls Sein bei [“being-at” or “being-together-with”], which

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he defines as “being absorbed by the world”.50 It is this absorption that gives Dasein its facticity, which is the condition of its inmost Being “in the sense of a certain ‘factual objective presence’ [Vorhandensein]” (75). The beingin-the-world of Dasein is characterised by this facticity, which allows it to disperse itself through ways of “being-in”, which include “to have to do with something, to produce, order and manage something, to use something, to give something up and let it get lost, to undertake, to accomplish, to find out, to ask about, to observe, to speak about, to determine [something]” (76). Dasein also understands itself as a “being-with” (Mitsein). It is in this mode that Dasein meets with what some might call the “human” component of the world, which is an essential part of Dasein’s common or shared environmental whole. Later in Being and Time, Heidegger will go on to delineate those existentials of Dasein that constitute its authentic singularity, most notably “thrownness” (Geworfenheit), “conscience” (Ruf des Gewissens) and “being-towards-death” (Sein zum Tod). In these existential states, Dasein is alone. But in the pages of section 26 Heidegger seeks to bring together the components of Dasein into what is recognisably a union with other entities based on what we might designate as “sympathy”. Here it is not equipment that matters but (and it is a word that he would never have countenanced using) “people”. Certainly, the latter can appear object-like as mere “others” in, for example, the work environment, where they may simply be “standing around”, involved in their own tasks (160). But even when a clear sense of affiliation is missing, Dasein is still a being-with, because “the other can be missing only in and for a being-with”. It is this absolute propinquity, the ontological imperative of the otherdirected mode of Dasein, that Heidegger seeks to capture in his concept of

50 Bei is a crucial preposition in Heidegger’s writing. In standard German, it is used to indicate proximity of place and translates as “next to” or “near to”. Bei also possesses overtones of familiarity, and is often found with substantive infinitives, which indicate participation in a process or activity (“beim Essen”, “whilst eating”, for example) (Schmitz 31–33). Heidegger wishes to retain all of these connotations in order to suggest the participation of Dasein in a world that is already close and familiar. As with his use of the preposition in, it is quite possible that he was drawing upon the observations made by Jacob Grimm in his Kleinere Schriften, where Grimm sees bei as a cognate of bin [I am] and baue [I build] (249–250).

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“care” (Sorge). When Dasein is grounded in the nearness of the world, it is through care that Dasein as a with-being is defined. Heidegger had discussed care earlier in his exposition as the central concept of Besorgen, as a managing or caring engagement with the world of objects. But now in section 26, Sorge comes to form the centre of Fürsorge [solicitation], that component of Dasein that constitutes a bond with those within the human realm who are, so to speak, the alter egos of Dasein. By acting through care, caring for others, Dasein affirms not only its being-towards-the-world; it also asserts its authentic Being towards itself, revealing a capacity within itself that is ontologically defining (163). At the beginning of Chapter Five, Heidegger pauses in his exposition to take stock of the progress in his analysis of Dasein, and he opens his comments characteristically in the form of a question, asking “what more is there to be brought to light (aufgezeigt, literally ‘shown up’) about being-in-the-world, beyond the essential relations of being-alongside-the-world: care (Besorgen), being-with (Mit-sein) and being-a-self ?” (175). The question is purely tactical, because what remains to be analysed is no less than the constitution of Dasein as it must manifest itself in its ontologically defining environment: the everyday world. Heidegger divides his analysis into two parts: (a) the existential constitution of the “There” (Da), and (b) the everyday Being of the “There” and the entanglement of Dasein. What needs to be explicated is the movement of Dasein in the world, its position in space, its movement between defined locations, physical and cognitive, where it must respond to and seek to understand itself within these locations. In particular, Heidegger focuses in part (a) on the “disposedness” (Befindlichkeit) of Dasein and upon a category of understanding that he calls “openness” (Erschlossenheit), and in part (b) sets out the dangers posed to the authenticity of Dasein through “degeneration” (Verfallenheit), “curiosity” (Neugier), “hear-say” (Gerede) and “ambivalence” (Zweideutigkeit). Heidegger’s explication of being-in-the-world represents a new way of conceptualising the presence of what might elsewhere be called “subjectivity”.51 51

Heidegger uses the term “subjectivity” (Subjektivität) rarely in Being and Time, and when he does he normally makes it clear that he is referring to someone else’s employment of the term (Kant’s, for example), or else he puts the concept in inverted commas to indicate his distance from it. See 32 and 142.

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It is an explication that will seek to move beyond psychology, that “positivistic science of the psychical”, for “an existential analysis of Dasein must precede all psychology” (60). Psychology works within a static and restrictive cognitive model, positing the human psyche as an essential self that is largely a reactive entity, whose fixed constitution responds in a mechanistic way to the impact of its environment, where there is no mediation between stimulus and response. Psychology fails to see the mind as something that is in a process of making and self-making, where consciousness is not a reflex of the workings of the neural system but is (as Heidegger notes on his comments on Wilhelm Dilthey) part of the greater voluntative totality of selfhood (278). To describe the movement of this totality of selfhood Heidegger must find an appropriate terminology. In section 24, he begins by analysing the foundations of the spatial dimensions of being-in-the-world. It is a key moment in his exposition, because Heidegger wishes to show here how Dasein is located in space and how it must recognise both its varying dependence on, and independence from, other entities in that same space. What Heidegger is trying to do here is reconfigure the familiar concepts of “interaction” or “relationship”, and he is compelled to find new words for them: Dasein hat als In-der-Welt-sein jeweilig schon eine “Welt” entdeckt. Dieses in der Weltlichkeit der Welt fundierte Entdecken wurde charakterisiert als Freigabe des Seienden auf eine Bewandtnisganzheit. Das freigebende Bewendenlassen vollzieht sich in der Weise des umsichtigen Sichverweisens, das in einem vorgängigen Verstehen der Bedeutsamkeit gründet. Nunmehr ist gezeigt: das umsichtige In-der-Welt-sein ist räumliches. Und nur weil Dasein in der Weise von Ent-fernung und Ausrichtung räumlich ist, kann das umweltlich Zuhandene in seiner Räumlichkeit begegnen. Die Freigabe einer Bewandtnisganzheit ist gleichursprünglich ein ent-fernend-ausrichtendes Bewendenlassen bei einer Gegend, das heißt Freigabe der räumlichen Hingehörigkeit des Zuhandenen. In der Bedeutsamkeit, mit der das Dasein als besorgendes In-Sein vertraut ist, liegt die wesenhafte Miterschlossenheit des Raumes. (147) [As a being-in-the-world, Dasein on all occasions has already discovered a “world”. This discovery, which is founded on the worldliness of the world, is one that we have characterised as a freeing-up of entities for a totality of involvement. This freeing-up of the opportunity-of-involvement takes place in the form of a circumspective directing of attention that is grounded in a previous understanding of what is significant. It is now clear: circumspect being-in-the-world is spatial. And only because Dasein is spatial through de-distancing and orientation can what is ready-to-hand in the surrounding

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world be encountered in its spatiality. The freeing-up of a totality of involvement is co-foundational with de-distancing and points to an opportunity-of-involvement in a particular area, i.e. the freeing-up of the spatial belonging of what is ready-to-hand. It is in that significance, with which Dasein as a managing [besorgendes] in-being is familiar, that the essential co-disclosure of space lies.]

The tone of the passage is firmly expository. The sentences are short and compact with a simple subject-predicate structure and follow one another in sequential fashion. The verbs are largely facilitating or auxiliary: “have”, “lies” and, above all, “is”. Their function is to sustain the analysis by bringing to view through formulations of polysemic compression the real substantive focus of the text, entities that are entirely new: “worldliness” (Weltlichkeit), “totality of involvements” (Bewandtnisganzheit), “allowing for involvement” (Bewendenlassen), “directing of attention” (Sichverweisens), “co-disclosure” (Miterschlossenheit) and (“de-distancing” (Ent-fernung). A number of these new formations, such as Weltlichkeit, are back-formations from adjectives (weltlich, meaning “worldly”); others are past participles that have been turned into nouns through the addition of a prefix, as in Miterschlossenheit, which has been formed from erschlossen [“opened up” or “disclosed”] and the prefix mit. Such prefixes and participles are used throughout Being and Time to qualify or extend stems to allow entirely different meanings to be produced. This is the case with Ent-fernung. Its stem is fern [distant], which is a self-evident descriptor of space and location. But what Heidegger is looking for is a concept that will suggest not the presence of distance but its absence, or more accurately, the process of the closing or abolition of distance, which may be both physical and cognitive. The unfamiliar hyphen and the use of the hyphenated Ent- prefix remove the word from its familiar meaning, Entfernung [distance], producing connotations that entirely contradict the conventional denotative sense of the word. It is a semantic restructuring that compels us to recognise that descriptors such as “close” and “distant”, “here” and “there”, are not sufficient to describe Dasein’s complex experience of its physical environment. Many of Heidegger’s neo-logistic coinages exploit the ambiguity that is created through their internal syntax. In the passage quoted above, Sichverweisens clearly looks back to the process of “referring” (verweisen) that Heidegger had already described in the context of how a manufactured work

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might refer to or indicate its function (94). In section 18, “Involvement and Significance”, however, verweisen appears in a reflexive form as Sichverweisens. Here we are told that “that in which Dasein has previously understood itself in the mode of a directing of attention, that is the for-which that has permitted the previous encountering of entities” (“Worin das Dasein sich vorgängig versteht im Modus des Sichverweisens, das ist das Woraufhin des vorgängigen Begegnenlassens von Seiendem”) (115). But does “directing of attention” here signify a mode of self-reflexivity, where Dasein is directing itself to itself ? Or is directing of attention an involvement with the world? In other words, is this an activity or is it (as it might be described in other contexts) a form of self-consciousness?52 However we answer such questions, it is important to see the ambiguities thus created as moments in the expository drive of Heidegger’s text, which is seeking to clarify the position of Dasein within a collective space that it shares with other entities and to explicate its understanding of its position in that space and with those entities. Heidegger achieves this effect in the passage above by coining terms that suggest inclusion and co-propinquity, such as Miterschlossenheit, which expands the normally purely individual experience of recognition (as something being opened up, erschlossen, to a person) to an unspecified broader collective subject through the addition of “with” (mit), and Hingehörigkeit, which means not only to belong but specifically to belong here or there. Heidegger also uses devices such as the multiple hyphen, as in ent-fernend-ausrichtendes Bewendenlassen [a “dedistancing-directing of an allowing of opportunity for involvement”], where the hyphens turn definition into a process; prefixes such as voll in vollziehen (whose connotations of plenitude and consummation are lost when we translate it simply as “occur”), and repetition, a technique used three times in the passage with different words, as in the separable prefix um [around]. These coinages are intended to explicate the activity of Freigabe, which means a clearing or an opening up of space (although the initial seme of frei, “free”, suggests a possible broader existential goal), delineating a location in 52

Or perhaps both? M/R translate Sichverweisen as an act of understanding that involves “referring or assigning oneself”. S describes it as “self-reference”. Through the formulation “directing of attention”, I have attempted to capture both possibilities, the active and the cognitive.

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which Dasein can unfold itself, not as a detached transcendental ego but as an agency in a world that is inhabited by others. The descriptive formation of Dasein in Being and Time proceeds through such neo-logistic definition and refinement. What began in the introduction, with Heidegger’s explication of being-in-the-world as the foundational constitution of Dasein, develops into a fully inflected existential analytic in the first chapter of Part One. Heidegger here sketches the contours of a journey of self-formation, and it is a highly personal one, for it is our own: “we ourselves are the entity, whose task it is to analyse. The Being of this entity is always mine” (56). Dasein is an entity for whom Being matters, and from that fact two consequences ensue: firstly, its “essence” (Wesen) lies in its “to-be” or “towards-being” (Zu-sein). Dasein is directed at the world, and directed towards a future that it intends. It is not simply present (vorhanden), as many objects are. Secondly, Dasein is not just an example or special case of some genus. Heidegger insists (without using the word) that Dasein is an individual. Indeed, “one must always use a personal pronoun when one addresses it: ‘I am’, ‘you are’” (57). As Heidegger tells us in Chapter Five, where he sets out to delineate the existential constitution of the “There”, the “Da” component of Dasein, the two ways that are co-foundational (gleichursprünglich) to the constitution of the There are its “disposedness” and “understanding”. Both are ways of making sense of the world; the latter in the form of cognitive and linguistic interpretation, which Heidegger calls Rede [“speech” or “discourse”]; the former through Stimmung [mood], a pre-cognitive mode of engagement that cannot be described through conventional categories but which is, even though, or precisely because of that, the most important of the two to our understanding of the constitution of Dasein. Most of the actions that interest Heidegger take place at a pre-cognitive level: they are reactive, mediated through habit and repeated exercise, and emerge through a form of consciousness that has been neglected by traditional philosophies, which have typically worked within notions of intentionality, rationality or selfexpressivity. Dasein is Being with “understanding-Being” (Sein-Verständnis), a concept that includes, but is not coterminous with “consciousness”, if we understand the latter in the traditional sense as the mental centre of interiority. Understanding-Being is part of a more complex grouping of receptive and response mechanisms, foremost amongst which is “disposedness”, a form

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of attentiveness that allows things to be encountered in a “circumspective managing way” (183). With disposedness, Heidegger is seeking to identify a fundamental existential of Dasein: mood. By “mood”, Heidegger means something that is more defining than those familiar everyday ontic dispositions, the transitory emotional states of being in a good or bad mood, in high or low spirits. Mood, rather, is a condition of our engaging with the world as something that matters. Dasein is always in a mood, gestimmt, “attuned” to the world in a certain way, even if that mood, or the fact that it is in a mood at all, may not be evident to it. Because of its a-morphous character and its resistance to conventional analysis, finding a term to convey what disposedness is requires a reformulation of the archaic Befindlichkeit, whose dictionary meaning is “state of mind”. Befindlichkeit possesses both an affective and a situational inflexion. Affectively, as a verb, befinden means “to judge”, “to consider”, to have an opinion on something. In a reflexive mode, and in the context of human agency, sich befinden means “to feel”, as in feeling well or not well. Similarly, as a noun, Befinden refers to a state of well-being or health and possesses, depending on the context, both a cognitive and dispositional component. The situational meaning of befinden is only found in the now somewhat formal guise of sich befinden, used to describe the place of objects, where it means to be located, to be “in” somewhere. As an adjective, befindlich means “in that position”, currently there at present (Wahrig 594–595). If we retain its archaic meaning and translate Befindlichkeit as “state of mind”, we lose both the fluid quality of its agency, its ability to adapt, adjust, acclimatise, and the active role that it plays in placing consciousness in the world. One alternative translation, “attunement”, captures the responsive, affective dimension of the term and finds support through association with Gestimmtheit, which is used to describe the tuning of a musical instrument.53 Neither, however, communicates the situational dimension of this existential fact of Dasein: that it is called forth by its position in the world. We might paraphrase the merging of the affective and the situational and define Befindlichkeit as “how Dasein finds oneself disposed, situated, positioned 53

M/R for the former translation; S for the latter. Martineau translates Befindlichkeit as affection, suggesting that Heidegger’s concept has its origins in his attempt to interpret Saint Augustine’s affectio (310).

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in and by the world”. This would allow us to form the neo-logistic substantive, “disposedness” and, more specifically yet, a “disposedness to the world ordered by the moods that it elicits” (Kisiel, The New Translation 67–68 and 74). It is also possible that Heidegger had in mind one further inflexion of Befindlichkeit, which has its source in the basic German word finden. If we were to emphasise the transitive nature of this verb, it would lead us to the formation be-finden, an activity that converts Befindlichkeit into something like “that which is launched into a process that finds Dasein as itself ”. For as Heidegger tells us, “in disposedness, Dasein has always already been brought before itself, has already in all cases found itself, not as a recognition that it is there, but as one finds oneself in attunement” (180). Certainly, this should not be read in psychologistic terms as a form of introversion, as if consciousness has turned inwards in the mode of introspection seeking an identity distinct from the world. Disposedness means attunement: it is an outward direct channel of self-understanding. What disposedness reveals to Dasein is that it is irretrievably placed in the world; indeed, has been “thrown” (geworfen) into it, geworfen being the past participle of the verb werfen, “to throw” or “to cast”. The nominal suffix -heit, appended to the participle, communicates the fact of being thrown (Geworfenheit) and allows thrownness to be seen as an existential of Dasein. Although some have read “thrownness” as the equivalent of “being born into” and link it to ancestry, race or social background, those categories are merely ontic. What Heidegger stresses in his account of thrownness is that it is a mode of Being and, hence, like “anxiety” (Angst) and death, is ontologically defining. In thrownness, Dasein is deprived of a past, a Woher, and a future, a Wohin, for “even in the most indifferent and harmless everydayness this Being of Dasein can break forth as a naked ‘this is it’ and it must be this way. [On these occasions] the pure ‘this is it’ shows itself, but the wither and whence remain obscure” (178). Disposedness is the existential mode of Dasein, in which it is continually surrendered to the world both to greet it and evade it. The existential constitution of the latter mode Heidegger calls “degeneration” (Verfallenheit). Originating in fallen [“to drop down” or “to come down”], degeneration is the state in which Dasein seeks to avoid authenticity by allowing itself to be determined by a mundane world inhabited by an anonymous collective: the

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“They” (Man).54 The They is not a thing or an object, but in its anonymity it acts like a thing or an object. In German Verfall as a noun denotes physical or biological decline; as the verb verfallen, it means falling a prey or succumbing to bad habits or to temptation. Although Heidegger initially uses the term in a non-judgemental way (he is simply describing Dasein engrossed in intermundane activities in the ambit of its concern), it soon becomes clear that verfallen is the central concept in his analysis of “inauthenticity” (Uneigentlichkeit). It is one of the existentials of Dasein that it possesses the tendency to lapse from authenticity into inauthenticity. As Heidegger tells us in section 38, “falling prey to the ‘world’ means being absorbed in beingwith-one-another” as it is formed by existential structures such as “curiosity” (Neugier) and “ambivalence” (Zweideutigkeit) (233). These are forms of the “public mode” (Öffentlichkeit) of the They, which manifest themselves not only as social conventions and norms but through the communication and consolidation of such norms in “hear-say” (Gerede).55 Hear-say is social discourse as it circulates in the form of “common sense”, communal “wisdom” and general perceptions of what is held to be “normal” by the They. Unlike “discourse” (Rede), which belongs to the existential constitution of Dasein, hear-say does not keep being-in-the-world open but closes it off. As second-hand “knowledge”, hear-say circulates in an effortless and apparently spontaneous way: it seems to emerge from nowhere but spreads in ever wider circles and takes on an authoritative character. Things are so because “one” says so. Hear-say is the possibility of “understanding” without any individual, appropriative grasp of the primordial discourse by those involved (224). For Dasein to take its bearings from the They, and from the public mode that it occupies, is to surrender its authenticity and to lapse into

54 The German impersonal pronoun Man means “one” in English, but it cannot be translated by that word because of confusion with the numeral. 55 Gerede is translated by M/R and S as “idle talk”. “Idle”, however, means “ineffective”, “having no special purpose”, “indolent” (OED). Gerede, on the contrary, is stealthy and insidious (and hence not obvious in its agency), but it certainly has a purpose and is, on a deep structural level, highly active as a persuasive discourse, shaping and governing the social mind, in the same way that gossip asserts itself on a personal interactive level.

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inauthenticity. For Dasein to be in inauthenticity is to lose that which is its “own” (eigen, meaning belonging to one’s own person), and that quality of “constant-mineness” (Jemeinigkeit) that is a defining existential of Dasein, constituting its singularity and its, what might in other contexts be called, “individuality”. Heidegger tells us (rather disingenuously) that the inauthenticity of Dasein does not signify any lesser degree of Being; on the contrary, inauthenticity can characterise Dasein in its “fullest concretisation, when it is busy, involved, excited and capable of pleasure” (57–58). And yet we know that these are all forms of degeneration and belong to the world of the They, who lack the self-definition that Dasein requires. Authenticity, on the contrary, remains within the ambit of a personhood that is within Dasein rather than beyond it, for, as Heidegger has more than once made clear, “Dasein is an entity, which I myself am” (56). Being authentic requires that Dasein should both understand the world and caringly engage with it. In that caring, it comports itself as it knows it must. This is a form of knowledge that has its source in the “call of conscience” (Ruf des Gewissens), which directs, indeed, compels Dasein, to be itself. At other times, however, Dasein engages with the world through the recognition of a mystery that it cannot fathom, confronting something that resists analysis. Here disposedness can only relate to the world in one form, that of “anxiety” (Angst). Whereas fear has an objective cause (it is fear of something), with anxiety what is threatening is already there, and yet it is nowhere: anxiety is fear of nothing, but it is “so near that it is stifling and takes the breath away” (248). Anxiety is the deepest form of interiority: it needs no contact with the world: it is a recognition of an ultimate homelessness. Not only do the activities and priorities of the They disappear from view for Dasein, so does facticity itself, which had given weight to its presence, but which now loses its purpose. When Dasein is in this mode of Being, “the totality of involvement discovered within the world, of that which is readyto-hand and that which is present-at-hand, is, as such, completely without relevance. The distinction [between the two] collapses into itself. The world has the character of complete insignificance” (247). These words seem to suggest that anxiety is a form of nihilism, in which nothing (or, perhaps, not even nothing) matters. But as with the philosophy of nihilism, anxiety is a state that clears the ground for future possibilities, because “anxiety reveals in Dasein its being towards its own-most potentiality for Being, that

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it, its being free for choosing itself and taking hold of itself. It brings Dasein before its being-free-for … (‘propensio in …’), the authenticity of its Being as a possibility, which it always already is” (250). Dasein has always understood itself, and always will understand itself, in terms of its possibilities, which pull its present into the future through the existential structure of “pro-jectedness” (Entwurf).56 Pro-jectedness is, both conceptually and linguistically, the counter state to throwness; it is a reversal of the latter. Whereas the prefix “Ge“ in the German of thrownness (Geworfenheit) suggested a finality that naturally adheres to the past tense of a verb, indicating something that has been completed, the “Ent” prefix of Entwurf (which comes from entwerfen, which the dictionary defines as “to sketch” or “to draw up” but which literally means “to throw away”) suggests, once the prefix is stressed, a movement away from something: a moment of liberation even.57 Throwing (Werfen) is now something that is directed outwards, towards authentic possibilities, or possibilities for authenticity, which reveal to Dasein, even before they take place, what Dasein is. Because “in the pro-jectedness of its Being upon the for-sake-of-which, together with the pro-jectedness of its own Being upon significance (world), lies the disclosedness of Being in general. An understanding of Being is already anticipated in the pro-jecting upon possibilities” (196). Pro-jectedness provides both the context of Dasein’s understanding of the world and the prerequisite for its engagement with it. Whereas disposedness suggests a receptive faculty, a self-situating within restrictive parameters, projectedness implies laying the foundations for Dasein’s freedom to act upon and to manage that which is to hand. This does not mean that Dasein is in control of its pro-jectedness either through understanding or physical engagement; on 56

57

From Latin, projicio, “a casting or putting forward”. I follow S. in preferring “projectedness” to “projection” (as in M/R), which loses the sense of planning for the future entirely. By hyphenating the word, the forward momentum of the act of placing, not just spatially but temporally, is emphasised. The same sense of liberation is found in a number of other German words possessing the ent prefix, such as entgehen, where the addition of ent transforms, for example, the common word for movement, gehen [to go], into “escape”. This mechanism of expansion is further evident in Heidegger’s concept of Entschliessen [resoluteness], which is the key existential of Entwurf. That which was once “opened up” (erschlossen) to Dasein now imposes itself upon the world through a moment of decisiveness. Entschliessen, in short, represents the culmination, the realisation of Erschliessen.

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the contrary, this would be to narrow the existential authenticity of its projecting, for pro-jective understanding is the mode of Being of Dasein in which it is “its possibilities as possibilities” (193). Pro-jectedness is an existential of Dasein that Heidegger identifies as “being-ahead-of-itself ” (Sich-vorweg-sein), because Dasein is continually more than it actually is, belonging to the future as much as it belongs to the present. Or rather, the two coalesce in it: “Dasein is its past in the manner of its Being which, to put it crudely, always happens to it out of its future” (27).58 Dasein understands the world and its presence in the world in terms of the possibilities that are open to it. Even its final act, dying, will take place in the present, in the form of a completion of what is a category of expectation. For the They, death is a brute fact of nature, experienced as pure loss: it is a simple negativity because it leads to something which is not. For the They, the everyday being-towards-death is a constant flight from death, an evasion of death, a concealing of it (337). This is an inauthentic (if understandable) approach to death and Heidegger treats it with compassion. But for Dasein, “being-towards-the-end [is] being towards one’s own most, non-relational and unsurpassable potentiality-of-Being” (341). Biological death is something that must be expected, but in that expectation lie the roots of an authentic attitude that Dasein can adopt towards the present. For: Der Tod ist eine Seinsmöglichkeit, die je das Dasein selbst zu übernehmen hat. Mit dem Tod steht sich das Dasein selbst in seinem eigensten Seinkönnen bevor. In dieser Möglichkeit geht es dem Dasein um sein In-der-Welt-sein schlechthin. Sein Tod ist die Möglichkeit des Nicht-mehr-dasein-könnens. Wenn das Dasein als diese Möglichkeit seiner selbst sich vorbesteht, ist es vollig auf sein eigenstes Seinkönnen verwiesen. So sich bevorstehend sind in ihm alle Bezüge zu anderem Dasein gelöst. Diese eigenste, unbezügliche Möglichkeit ist zugleich die äußerste. Als Seinkönnen vermag das Dasein die Möglichkeit des Todes nicht zu überholen. Der Tod ist die Möglichkeit der schlechthinnigen Daseinsunmöglichkeit. So enthüllt sich der Tod als die eigenste, unbezügliche, unüberholbare Möglichkeit. Als solche ist er ein ausgezeichneter Bevorstand. Dessen existenziale Möglichkeit gründet darin, daß das Dasein ihm selbst wesenhaft erschlossen ist und zwar in der Weise des Sich-vorweg. (333)

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“Heidegger would show that the absential moments of temporal movement (the socalled ‘past’ and ‘future’) are the co-efficients of that which allows beingness as presence” (Sheehan, Heidegger’s Topic 629).

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Chapter 1 [Death is a possibility for Being, which Dasein itself has at all times to accept. With death, Dasein stands before itself in a potentiality for Being that most truly belongs to it. In this possibility, what is at stake is nothing less than the being-in-the-world of Dasein. Its death is the possibility of a no-longer-being-able-to-be-there. When Dasein stands before itself as this possibility, it is entirely apprised of its most truly possessed potentiality for Being. When it stands before itself in this way, all of its connections with other types of Dasein are undone. This possibility of a most truly possessed disconnectedness is at the same time its most extreme one. As a potentiality for Being, Dasein cannot outstrip the possibility of death. Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. Thus, death reveals itself as the possibility of the most truly possessed, disconnected possibility that cannot be outstripped. As such, it is a defining form of the imminent. Its existential possibility is based on the fact that Dasein is disclosed to itself in its essence, and, indeed, in the form of a being-ahead-of-itself.]

Death is the ultimate challenge that Dasein must take upon itself if it is to be authentic.59 This task is a necessity, but it is one that opens up for Dasein a further and crucial possibility for Being (and the term Möglichkeiten, “possibilities”, reoccurs as a leitmotif throughout the passage). Heidegger’s language follows a line of argumentation, whose goal it is to incorporate death into a realisation of what it means to be alive.60 The terms of his argument are assertive and possess an axiomatic force. Most sentences begin with a preposition, such as “in” or “with”, which impart a firm sense of placement to his analysis, and their grammatical structure is simple and without qualifying

59

That by “death” Heidegger meant something greater than the individual fact of personal extinction is argued by Carol J. White, who views “existential death” as occurring “when old worlds die and new ones are born” (89). Hubert Dreyfuss in his introduction to that work offers the following gloss on White’s words: “ontological death does not have to do with the finitude of individual lives at all, but solely with the fact that there have been a series of understandings of being in our culture, a series of cultural worlds, and each has died, that is, become impossible and given way to another” (xxx). Heidegger, however, makes it quite clear (as in the above passage) that death represents a potentiality that is at the “inmost” core of the Being of Dasein, belonging, in other words, to its mineness. For a balanced discussion of the competing interpretations of Heidegger’s treatment of death, see Thomson (2013). 60 As Taylor Carman summarises, death “is manifest finitude of my existence, temporally coextensive with my life, from beginning to end” (2015: 138).

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subordinating clauses. The truth is self-evident: this is a place that Dasein is in now, and in which it finds the purpose of its journey. The situation is an extreme one, and in this passage Heidegger pushes language to its limits. Internally, the coherence of the passage is established through self-reflexive formations such as sich and selbst, which make it clear that Dasein must look within itself to clarify its calling. Death constitutes an absolute position in its development, and only by confronting it can Dasein be dis-closed to itself. In this state, references to other types of Dasein are not only unnecessary but impossible. This is Dasein’s “most truly belonging, disconnected possibility that cannot be outstripped”, and Dasein finds itself in an instance of crucial time which Heidegger signifies through the modest adverb je [“each” or “ever”]. This is the moment of kairos, where the broader sweep of time is suspended, to be concentrated on the individual moment, the imperative of “now”. Heidegger communicates this temporal-existential absoluteness by using a number of superlative forms, such as Eigenst, a word coined from the common adjective eigen, meaning “own”, “proper” or “distinctive”. Eigenst looks back to the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, where it was made clear that the latter state involved a loss for Dasein of that which is its own (eigen), of that which is constitutive of its true self (236). The word is now turned into a superlative to form an existential of Dasein, as it confronts the constant-mineness of death. Heidegger exploits to the full the stylistic range that he has made his own in Being and Time. Everyday terms such as schlechthin, meaning “in general” or “simply”, are used in combination with newly coined expressions such as Bevorstand, a word does not exist in standard German, but its use here as a new noun is intended to convey the substantiality of both the brute experience and the inescapable facticity of death. The origins of the word lie in the verb bevorstehen, which means “to be approaching” or “to be lying ahead”, but it also contains suggestions of “to be in store for”, as in an impending catastrophe. Bevorstehen is, therefore, far from being a neutral term: its connotations are ominous. That which stands before us is fate and what fate brings: that which will ultimately arrive. This arrival is, however, not in the future: it is with us now, and to foreground its immanence Heidegger turns the verb into a noun to produce the neo-logistic

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Bevorstand. That which was an abstract presence in the future is a reality in the present.61 Death is a fate that must be grasped, and in the final pages of this section Heidegger summarises what the authentic, existentially pro-jected being-towards-death is. Dasein must adopt a positive comportment towards death, which Heidegger defines as a running on ahead towards possibility (“Vorlaufen in die Möglichkeit”). Vorlaufen is conventionally translated as “anticipation”, but this is too passive a description of this existential, and it fails to pick up on the central seme in the word, laufen.62 What Heidegger is saying is that Dasein must actively build death into the life of the present, as an event “that points to the possibility of the measureless impossibility of existence” (348). Vorlaufen means a running on ahead towards this possibility, which reveals to Dasein how the present can be turned into a future, not in terms of what some might call actual time but in terms of an authenticity of the present. Dasein is launched here into a possibility that is unique to it and which will bring it “face to face with the possibility of Being itself, primarily unsupported by managing solicitude, but in being itself in a passionate, anxious freedom towards death, which is factical, free of the illusions of the They and certain of itself ” (353).

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And perhaps a thing that represents an exercise of power that is impersonal. Behind Heidegger’s neo-logistic coinage of Bevorstand, the German-speaking reader may well here hear the substantive Vorstand, which means “committee” or “directorate”. As White observes, “‘anticipation’ only suggests a mental expectation of a known possibility”. She suggests “forerunning” as an alternative translation (89).

Chapter 2

The Performative Text: Contributions to Philosophy (from Ereignis)

Inceptual Thinking: The Leap into Be-ing In his “Letter on Humanism” (“Brief über den Humanismus”, 1947), Heidegger looked back to Being and Time and judged it largely as a failure. In that work, he had remained within “the language of metaphysics”, simply explicating the conditions under which Being could be said to exist rather than allowing Being itself to manifest itself. Everything had been mediated by a need for systematic and categorical exactitude, almost in the fashion of Aristotle’s systems of classification, which had sought to find ever more precise inflexions for being-in-the-world. Such a methodology had been a mistake, because “all ‘contents’, ‘opinions’ and ‘itineraries’ within particulars must necessarily take us away from the heart of the matter” (GA 9: 328).1 It was, paradoxically perhaps, within the context of the history of philosophy, precisely the most original, the most radical quality of Being and Time, its de-structive moment, that was the problem. The attempt made there to locate “the essence of truth (in opposition to correctness in re-presenting and asserting) as the ground of Da-sein itself had to remain insufficient, for it had been carried out in the spirit of rejection and so always took its orientation from what had to be rejected” (GA 65: 351). In the final analysis, Being and Time had closed down rather than opened up avenues to Being. What Heidegger was unable to find words for in Being and Time, he concluded in his “Letter on Humanism”, was the “ground experience of the oblivion of Being”, an experience that, in a further edition of the same essay, 1

Heidegger charts his retrospective confrontation with Sein und Zeit in (almost obsessive) detail in the notebook entries collected in GA 82.

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he glossed as “oblivion – lethe – concealment – withdrawing – ex-propriation: Ereignis” (“Vergessenheit – λήθη – Verbergung – Entzug – Ent-eignis: Ereignis) (328). And it is precisely Ereignis that forms the central concept in Heidegger’s thinking after Being and Time, inaugurating a new stage in his philosophy that subsequent commentators have described as the “Turning” (Kehre).2 Unlike the earlier foundational notion of Sein, which demarcated the parameters of an ontology of Being (the world as it is), Ereignis represents the emergence of Being, its movement into and within the world as “the happening of ‘Seyn’ (‘Be-ing’) itself ” as event (Polt 1).3 Ereignis stands at the heart of the most important work that Heidegger published after Being and Time: Contributions to Philosophy ( from Ereignis) (Beiträge zur Philosophie 2

3

It is called the “Turning” because it represented for Heidegger (as he later noted) a turning away from the descriptive analytic of Being and Time, in an attempt “to think Being without regard to it being grounded in terms of entities” (Zur Sache des Denkens 2). As Laurence Paul Hemming observes, “‘Ereignis’ and ‘Kehre’ stand as explaining each other and belonging together. As ‘Ereignis’ is the delivering over of man and being one to another, so ‘Kehre’ is that delivering in (the saying of ) its taking place” (407). John Sallis sees the “Turning” as an abandonment by Heidegger of systematic theorising in favour of an exploration into the agency of language, where “language is now brought into connection with the pre-ontological understanding of Being” (Language and Reversal 144). Rather than translate Ereignis, I have decided to leave it in its original German, just as Dasein was treated in Chapter 1. For that reason, the tropes related to Ereignis are expansive, and associated with terms such as “lighting”, “the clearing” and “presencing” (Young 2002: 106). Linguistically and etymologically, Ereignis is a complex concept. Eigen in German has the sense of “own”, as in, for example, “one’s own ideas”, but also “to be proper” or “to be suitable”. The prefix er gives these formations an active quality, as in a bringing forth or a bringing about of that which is or can be owned. Emad and Maly in their translation (hereafter cited as E/M) of the Beiträge see Ereignis as embodying the notions of “event”, “appropriation” and “befitting”. They translate Ereignis as “enowning”, but that ungainly neologism has been discarded by others in favour of the more familiar “appropriation” (although Heidegger may not have approved of such a Latinate formation). If this latter translation is accepted then we should, following Heidegger’s own practice, consider highlighting the privative prefix “a-” and write the word “ap-propriate” to indicate that an active process is involved. Both translations lose, however, the all-important sense of “event”, which is its standard meaning in German. Heidegger clearly did not want this to happen. In his The Origin of the Work of Art essay, he replaced Geschehen [happening] in the earlier editions of the text with Ereignis in the later editions (GA 5: 73).

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(Vom Ereignis)), written between 1936 and 1938.4 Contributions is a work of challenging conceptual and linguistic complexity. The text possesses an episodic form that resembles at times an accumulation of notes and aperçus rather than a finished study, as if Heidegger is working towards a resolution of an impasse but has as yet not arrived there. Grammar and syntax are frequently dislocated, blocks of writing juxtaposed in ways that disrupt linearity and resist integration into any overriding narrative, and pivotal words such as eigen, gründen and scheiden are fashioned and refashioned to take on radically new meanings, often by the addition of simple prefixes. It is these textual features and others, such as the frequent repetitions and structural recalls that allow key concepts to echo through the text in an almost circular fashion, the use of figurative tropes and tactile imagery, and the continual rhetorical interpellation of the reader, the call to participate in the endeavour and to share the vision, that gives substantive form to a work in which there resounds the “attempt to say Be-ing’s historical occurrence” (Vallega-Neu, Poietic Saying 77).5 Underwriting Contributions is Heidegger’s conviction that in the age of modernity language has lost its ability to speak the life of the mind. Both humankind and language belong to Be-ing equally in their origins, but that close relationship has been broken by the calculative machinations that 4

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Contributions was the first manuscript to appear in the third division of the series “Unpublished Treatises: Addresses – Ponderings” (“Unveröffentliche Abhandlungen: Vorträge – Gedachtes”). Heidegger prefaced his book with the comment, “here is made fast, in an indicative way, what was held back in long hesitation as the straight edge of a configuration”. Contributions was composed from a series of occasional writings, “lectures, courses, seminars, essays and papers of very diverse intentions” (Powell 15). In the first scholarly mention of the manuscript, Otto Pöggeler promoted the still unpublished volume as “Heidegger’s major work” (104–105). George Kovacs (2006) has lauded the “philosophical depth and expressive power” of Heidegger’s language. Reiner Schürmann, however, criticises the “ponderous” style of the Contributions which, he maintains, has at its centre a fundamental contradiction: the work claims to be beyond systems, and yet it elaborates in the course of its rambling exposition its own monstrous system. As he argues, “the double level of writing (for the public and for the initiate), the tactics for mastery on both levels, the calculation of dates, the conjunction of preparatory knowledge […] all of these are obviously for a system and a ‘system’ in just the sense that Heidegger has tirelessly sought to dismantle” (321–322).

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prevail in a period where language has come to be treated simply as a “tool” used by the animal rationale, the “zoon logikon” of Aristotelian metaphysics, a creature of logic and functional thinking (6). If we wish to speak of an “other beginning” (andere Anfang) for philosophy and thinking in general, language must be transformed so that it may “proceed into realms that are still closed off to us, because as yet we do not know the truth of Be-ing” (78). And yet pushing beyond conventional usage does not lead Heidegger in Contributions to more arcane or convoluted terminology. On the contrary, “only one thing counts: to give voice to the most nobly formed language in its simplicity and essential power, to express the language of entities as the language of Be-ing” (78). Consequently, while at a conceptual level Contributions is a challenging and even provocative text, at the linguistic level it is characterised by clarity and a simplicity of exposition. The disruptive neo-logistic formations that characterised Being and Time find little place in this later work: concepts such as Ereignis and Seyn (a rewriting of the earlier Sein), may move within a polysemic ambit that resists easy interpretation, but they are not, as so many crucial terms in that earlier work were, entirely alien lexical items, which were often brought into ungainly grammatical formations in a quest for ever increasing nuances of ontological description, but common recognisable words that are being treated in a radically new fashion.6 Ultimately, the difficulties that Contributions pose for the reader lie not at a semantic level but in the challenging discursive shape of the work, in its open structure and complex textuality, in its style of writing that has been called “poietic” (Ziarek 64). Because “the age of systems is over”, Heidegger 6

To make his break with the earlier notion of Sein clear, Heidegger writes this new appropriation of Being as Seyn, an archaic term in German that was widely used as an alternative to Sein up to the eighteenth century. In English translations of Contributions, Seyn is translated either as “Beyng” or “Be-ing”, to move it from an ontological-existential to a transformative-potential axis. As Alejandro Vallega argues, “for Heidegger the question of beyng is outside the logic and necessity of presence: Beyng is not any thing. The abrupt leap from Nietzsche to Heidegger is marked by the ‘y’ of ‘beyng’ (Seyn). Heidegger’s return to the archaic spelling of being (Sein) marks this leap. This leap opens the question of beyng anew: Beyng is not to be thought now in terms of presence but as nothing” (51). For an analysis of the semantics of “Be-ing” and its articulation in Heidegger’s text, see Kovacs (1996).

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conceived of Contributions as a “transitional” work between the philosophy of the past and the philosophy of the future (5). Accordingly, the central concepts of Contributions emerge gradually through spaces within that work, moving, developing, mutating and acquiring fresh associations and realignments in a way that resists any clear form of classification or mode of appropriation.7 It is a process that involves a “questioning along the way”, which Heidegger will later describe as eundo assequi, a mode of exploration that is “simply through movement to attain something along the way, to achieve it through walking along a path” (GA 12: 159). It has been argued that Heidegger wrote Contributions for himself alone, that “Heidegger [was] only talking with Heidegger” (Schmidt 33). Both the history of its publication, the fact that it was for so long a private document and published only after his death, and the often epigrammatic and explorative quality of the writing, would seem to confirm this. Heidegger’s position of speech in Contributions is, however, far from solipsistic. The text is consistently other-directed, as if it is intended as a “directive” (Weisung) (7). Contributions is, in fact, amongst the most rhetorically focused of Heidegger’s works, and written in a style that frequently moves from a descriptive or analytic axis on to a performative or affective one, and which posits throughout an implied reader who shares Heidegger’s values and is in sympathy with his mission of philosophic renewal.8 This collective subject is invoked throughout Contributions,

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As Heidegger observes, “even the successful attempt must […] keep its distance from every false claim to be a ‘work’ in the previous style. Future thinking is a course of thought, on which the hitherto totally concealed realm of the occurrence of Being is traversed” (GA 65: 3). Indeed, Heidegger confessed in his contemporaneous work, Mindfulness (Besinnung), that he experienced the attempt to find the right form for Contributions a struggle, “for here a new style of thinking had to make its appearance” (GA 66: 427). Daniela Vallega-Neu calls this aspect of the text that enlists the hermeneutic participation of the reader its “performative aspect”; it is that which happens “as one follows the motions of thinking that are written into it”. As she explains, “in order to listen to the ‘grand fugue’ of the Contributions, we need to perform repetitions of thinking in such a way that what is repeated occurs for us and with us each time anew” (2003: 2 and 31). E/M argue in a similar mode that “Heidegger enacts being-historical-thinking, as a thinking that is endowed by being in its historical unfolding” (v). Indeed, Heidegger

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often simply through the use of the third person pronoun, “we”, in a process where the author aligns himself with his readers, those “few individual ones”, who will make the necessary transition from “philosophy” to the other beginning of inceptual thinking, and it is these same readers who will be required to remember the frequent references to ideas gestured at but left unformulated in earlier sections of the work, and to fill in the spaces of indeterminacy in Heidegger’s narrative, with its moments of hesitation, its ambiguities and carefully chosen paradoxes. Contributions posits precisely such readers as its recipient, readers who have dedicated, or will dedicate, themselves to the vital task at hand, knowing that they must find their own way on this path of thinking. For as Heidegger makes quite clear at the very beginning of his work, “those who will someday grasp this [the ‘danger of failure’], do not need ‘my’ attempt, for they must have already paved their own way to it. They must believe it comes to them from afar but is, nevertheless, truly their own, to which they are appointed as ones who are needed” (8). The reader is addressed throughout Contributions by a distinctive voice, a voice that is evident throughout as a directing presence that questions and exhorts, not only others but also itself through a persistent mode of self-reflexivity. Indeed, the issue of a discursive subject, of the “who” that is propelling this project and making this journey, is one that Heidegger repeatedly addresses. Section 19 is specifically devoted to this matter. Here Heidegger argues that “meditation on Be-ing is a meditation on oneself ”, but then he quickly asks: who is this self, and who is asking the question? In fact, who are we? “Whom do we mean in talking about a ‘we’?” (c.f. p, 34 Logic [a reference to a 1934 lecture series]). Ourselves, those of us at this moment objectively present, those here and now? But where should

himself tells us at one point that the inner connection between his concepts “can only be experienced in [their] thinking-through” (“wird nur erfahren im Durchdenken”) (14), and on one further occasion he makes it quite clear that in Contributions he has moved from a descriptive to an affective practice of language, which does not seek “to describe” but “to bring into effect [erwirken] the whole of inceptual thinking” (395). In other words, Heidegger thinks through Ereignis during the process of formulating it in Contributions, and we, as readers, think through Heidegger’s thinking as we read the text.

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the enclosing circle be drawn? Or do we mean ‘humankind’ (Mensch), in general?” (48). And Heidegger continues, “even this question reflects the Turning. It is a question that cannot either be asked or answered in any straightforward fashion” (49). But there can be no other way. Even if we do not know how to answer these questions, they nevertheless need to be asked; indeed, it is exactly because we do not know how to answer them that they need to be asked. For it is the task of inceptual thinking to put us in a position where we can find the right questions and identify what is “question-worthy” (Frag-würdig). Thinking must pass through the ontological difference, so that the necessity of asking the grounding question of Be-ing can be made manifest, and “and this is a task that cannot be avoided as long as there is still some way that can be secured that leads out of the still very inadequate tradition of metaphysicallyinquiring thinking into the necessarily [up to now] unasked question of the truth of Be-ing” (467). Heidegger’s questions open up a space of enquiry for his investigation into Be-ing: this will be his contribution to philosophy. As for the title of his work, he notes, “the official designation of the book must necessarily sound dull, ordinary and empty, and will give the impression that it is dealing with ‘scholarly’ ‘contributions’ to the ‘advancement’ of philosophy” (3).9 It is, however, precisely the banality of the title, which is

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The description of the work as “contributions” is, however, not inappropriate, for as Heidegger goes on to explain, “in the age of transition from metaphysics to the thinking of Being in its historicity, no more can be ventured than an attempt at thinking which would arise out of a more originary basic position within the question of the truth of Be-ing”. But are these “contributions” “from” or “of ” Ereignis? Translating the preposition von in the subtitle has proved problematic. E/M in the original translation opted for “from”, whereas Rojcewicz and Vallega-Neu (hereafter cited as R/V-N) in the second translation of the work prefer “of ”. The latter conversion is seen as an improvement by Wayne J. Froman, who notes, “in rendering ‘vom’ as ‘of ’, the translators have made use of a standard form for a title in such a way that ‘of the Event’ is in apposition, in effect, to ‘Contributions to Philosophy’, elevating the importance of ‘of the Event’ in accord with Heidegger’s specification” (80). An alternative explanation is that Heidegger was thinking of von as a translation of the Latin preposition de, which was conventionally used in the philosophy of the medieval period to convey the sense of “about” or “concerning”. This is how

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a pastiche of contemporary scholarly jargon, that draws our attention to the crisis in which philosophy finds itself, a crisis that has been brought about, as Heidegger tells us on the first page of his work, by a destruction of its genuine relation to language. The note of urgency that Heidegger sounds here and throughout the Contributions comes from a voice that is committed to a critical reading of the Western mind at a vital juncture in its history. Not only has philosophy degenerated into a “system”, but the very integrity of its thinking, whose mission lay in its interrogative, piercing engagement with Being, has disappeared in an era of unself-critical monumentality and sterile quantification. The degeneration of language is a theme that Heidegger returns to throughout Contributions, both in order to analyse it and to offer his own pathway of thought as a response to it. In doing so, he brings to the fore the element of Zeitkritik that had been evident in Being and Time but had remained in the margins of that work. There, through his analysis of degeneracy (Verfallenheit), Heidegger had sought to demarcate the ever-impinging parameters of a world given over to inauthenticity, and although he had emphasised that his aim was to describe rather than to judge (inauthenticity is simply a mode of Being and connected to other ontological categories), a tone of approbation could clearly be heard. In Contributions, that tone expands into a clear and determined voice, where it gives expression to an incisive critique of modernity, an age in which the mind is blighted by “the rejection of genuine knowledge, the dread of questioning and the avoidance of meditation” (110). The crisis is twofold: not only do we find ourselves blighted by vacuous abstraction and a mechanical mindset; we have also lost the intellectual sensitivity to recognise this situation. This is the greatest threat: the plight of a sense of a lack of plight. Such myopia anchors us in a present that is without past or future, where the horizons of thinking are fixed, static. There is no he uses von in his 1931 lecture on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, which is titled in German “Von Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft”, which we might translate in English as “Concerning …”, or simply, “The Nature and Reality of Strength”. However, in his first reference to the title in Contributions, Heidegger writes, “vom Ereignis er-eignet ein denkerisch-sagendes Zugehören”, which can only be translated as “from [and not “of ”] Ereignis there happens a thinking-saying listening” (3).

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movement forward, because we no longer possess the will to renew: all is constrained within the prison house of the already-thought. We have failed to learn from the past, where we sought in vain to find Be-ing in external circumstances, “reality”. And Heidegger asks the pressing question: “have we understood the great lesson that the first beginning and its history has shown us: the essence of Be-ing as refusal and the most extreme refusal in the great public sphere of machinations and of ‘lived experience’”? (112). Heidegger’s project (he calls it a “projectedness”, Entwurf, retaining thus an important thematic link with Being and Time) is to move beyond this plight, beyond the realm of “the system”, “metaphysics”, into an “other beginning” of and for thinking. As he describes it in his preview, “through a simple thrust of essential thought, the happening of the truth of Be-ing must be transposed from the first beginning to the other beginning, so that in the forward play [Zuspiel] the wholly other song of Be-ing will resound” (8–9). That such a project will, necessarily, exclude any classifying or analytical-descriptive methodology, such as he had employed in Being and Time, Heidegger makes clear in the opening words of his book. Inceptual thinking bears no resemblance to “philosophy” as it is conventionally understood, as in, for example, the German Idealist or British empiricist-analytical traditions, and when he refers to these traditions, Heidegger is careful to place “philosophy” in inverted commas. Inceptual thinking, however, does not decry the significance of “first thinking”. Rather, it seeks to work through and out of this tradition in order to open a sway for the other beginning. Contributions is not “about” something; nor is it an attempt to present something in an “objective” way (3). Heidegger will, in fact, subject theories of re-presentation and objectivity to withering scrutiny in the pages of his work; indeed, in section 79, where they appear in the guise of scientific “laws”, he subjects them to caricature. Contributions attempts to move beyond such theories, committing itself to a “seeking” (Suchen) that holds open not only the initial terms of its enquiry but also its ultimate destination. Seeking is not a development that remains unfulfilled until it locates what is being sought; it is an attitude, a dis-position, a bearing towards the truth that the seeker already has: it is a place in which he or she already is. Seeking means holding oneself in the truth, in the open

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realm of self-concealing and self withdrawal: it is the opening of truth in its bearing of silence (Erschweigung) (79). It is “bearing silence”, because it is not resolution that is being sought, something that has traditionally been thought of as “truth”.10 The re-presentationalist methodology of the latter simply returns us to the object-subject division of the earlier metaphysical model of a “finder” and a “found” that Heidegger had already destructured in Being and Time. Seeking is finding where we are, which may be nowhere. As he explains, “‘thinking’, in its conventional sense, means the re-presentation of something in its ‘idea’ as ‘koinan” [the ‘commonplace’], the re-presentation of something general”. In this form, thinking is wedded to the “objectively present”, to that which is already given as datum, and to which thinking can only come retrospectively. The goal of this type of thinking is to describe and organise that which is in front of it into categories, into a logic of placement. Inceptual thinking, on the other hand, holds itself distant from the concerns of the objectively present: it facilitates thought rather than forces it through to a conclusion.11 It is non-conceptual, preferring the image to logical argument, suggestion to definition, the connotation to the denotation of words, and opens rather than closes deliberation, choosing the forward momentum of the continuous activity of questioning to the resting place of false surety. Answers cannot be expected. As Heidegger explains at one point, where he celebrates the energy and movement of inceptual thinking, “by opening up what is most question-worthy, it carries out the honouring and thereby the highest transfiguration of that in which questioning rests, i.e. does not stop” (57).12 The philosophy of the other beginning prepares us for the creative reception of thought: it is not a mode of

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As Robert E. Woods comments, silence is an agency that “focuses upon the uniqueness of what opens up in the mode of letting things be as opposed to conceptual mastery” (258). Commenting on the root of anfängliches (fangen [to catch]), Vallega-Neu notes, “inceptual thinking is a thinking which, as it were, ‘catches’ what is thrown to it. It ‘catches’, or takes over, the ‘throw’ (Zuwurf) of be-ing, and in doing so inceptually unfolds this throw” (2003: 33). As Polt observes, “his goal is not to establish and defend propositions but to keep reinterpreting the issue indicated by the question of being” (40).

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production leading to yet another system. Its goal is “to find and make appear the simple sights and native forms in which the essential occurrence of Be-ing is sheltered and taken to heart” (72). Inceptual thinking works with the experience of thinking rather than with conceptual grids, committing itself to activities that register the movement and impact of thought, which it seeks to take up through the dispositions or founding moods of “shock” (Erschrecken), “restraint” (Verhaltenheit) and “awe” (Scheu) (14). These are modes of attunement, which allow us to grasp the world as if it were for the first time. They may be judged to be simple mechanisms; indeed, they may be condemned as weak, erratic or unclear, because they are pre-theoretical. But precisely because of that, they open a space for the direct impact of Be-ing as Ereignis, where thinking does not see in the object an otherness to be analysed, because thinking and the thinker is that object (303). It is an endeavour of intellectual renewal that involves no less than the essential transformation of mankind, a re-formation of its essence, and this is a task that is given alone to “those eminent and distinctive ones, whom we call the future-ones” (6).13 It is the future-ones, the Zukünftigen, who, “on the essential paths of grounding Da-sein (poetry–thinking–the deed–sacrifice), ground in advance the sites and moments for the realms of entities. In this way, they create the essentially recurring possibility for the various shelterings of truth in which Da-sein becomes historical” (96). These are the founding spirits of the other beginning, and they are called “the ones to come” because “they are those to-wards whom comes (‘zukommt’) ‘the hint and onset of distancing and nearing of the last god’”.14 13

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At one point, Heidegger designates his task as a Kampf [struggle], which was a key term in Nazi ideology, as in Hitler’s memoir, Mein Kampf (1925). Contributions has, indeed, been read by many as a political text which, while not espousing explicit politics, nevertheless embodies assumptions and values that, within the historical context of its writing, might be deemed political and even supportive of Nazism (Rockmore 176–201). Heidegger, however, explicitly distances himself from the ideologues of the Nazi Party (without, of course, naming them), who “by bringing in [to their thinking] the ‘political’ and ‘racial’ provide for themselves a previously unseen gloss to the old display items of academic philosophy”. Heidegger also rejects their notion of the Volk (19 and 42). Vallega-Neu (2003: 97). Her quotation is from GA 65: 395.

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The future-ones build out of nothing other than their will to build and their recognition of the necessity of building, so that Be-ing may return to the world. They work not according to a logical assessment of what may be achieved but through direct involvement in the task of building, which involves a “leap”. This is the defining act. As Heidegger explains, “the question of Being is the leap into Be-ing, the leap carried out by humankind as the seeker of Be-ing, in so far as it is a creative thinker” (11). The leap is an experiment without limitations, a grasping of the inceptual, of the unthought and what is possible in thought. It is greater than the de-structive process enacted in Being and Time, because its focus is the future not the past. As the word suggests, the leap is a sudden venture, a leave-taking without the surety of arrival, because those who take it have abandoned the conventional assumptions of first philosophy and the selfevident “truths” that they offered. Without these supports, we remain, so to speak, suspended in flight, continually in motion towards our goal, without having as yet reached it. The ambit of the leap is absolute: “the extreme projectedness [Entwurf] of the essence of Be-ing is of such a kind that we place ourselves in what is thereby opened up, become steadfast and, by being ap-propriated, come to ourselves for the first time” (230). This is a vision of transcendence brought forth by an empowerment in which Da-sein finds its greatest moment of fulfilment, and Heidegger seeks an image that is appropriate to this experience: “the last god”. This is a last “god” and not, following Nietzsche, the last “God”. (Heidegger consciously distances himself from a “Christianisation of God”.) The last god is not the product of an anachronistic wish for an actual deity, but is the invocation of a spirit, whose “passing-by” (Vorbeigang) will be felt once Be-ing has been attained. Although the last god constitutes a culmination in the history of thought when “the few and their allies will seek and find one another”, Heidegger also makes it clear that this is no triumphal resolution to the conceptual journey of the age (414). “The last god is not an end” (416). “Last” refers neither to time nor to sequence (as if there might be a “first god” or a “second from last god”). “Last” is an epithet of urgency: it is “last” because it constitutes the first imperative, the imperative for human kind to embrace the philosophy of the other beginning, and the thinking of Ereignis. The last god allows the “empowering of humans to their necessity” (414).

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Enjoinings-Unjoinings: The Space of Writing in Contributions to Philosophy In section 28 of Contributions, Heidegger writes, “[inceptual] thinking and the order it unfolds are outside the question of whether a system belongs to it or not. ‘System’ is only possible in the wake of the dominance of (in the broadest sense of the term) mathematical thinking […] Inceptual thinking in the other beginning has a quite different type of rigour: the freedom of the joining of its junctures. Here one thing is joined to the other on the basis of the mastery of the questioning way of belonging to the call” (65). Contributions consists of six main junctures (Fugen) and one prefatory juncture, which are sub-divided into a total of 281 sections.15 When earlier, in section 2, Heidegger had sketched an outline (Aufriss) of these junctures and, hence, of his entire work, he had made it quite clear that this outline was not intended as an “introductory description of a progression from what is below to what is above”, as if what was being posited was a linear development that would culminate in the disclosure of Be-ing (6). Contributions does not cultivate any such sequential logic: it has no conventional beginning, middle and end. No hypotheses are projected to be later substantiated, and no premises are stated to be later developed into an argument. Rather than offering a “philosophical” work, Heidegger constructs his exposition around short, self-contained units that forgo elaboration into a mainstream narrative. Heidegger is not attempting to describe something that exists; he 15

A musical fugue is “a contrapuntal compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject (theme) that is introduced at the beginning in imitation (repetition at different pitches) and recurs frequently in the course of the composition, whose articulation is fixed in a number of melodic strands called voices” (Scholes 376). The fugal structure of Contributions has been much discussed. For Iain Thomson, the fugal composition of the work “polyphonically conveys its own underlying theme: ‘enowning’”; “it is this underlying contrapuntally developed theme that harmonizes the text as a whole” (59). Polt, on the other hand, reads Fuge as “joint”, as in carpentry, and relates it to the “junctural order” of the text, its “well-adjusted arrangement” (133). The fugal analogy might, perhaps, best be seen in analogical terms, as a metaphor that highlights the salient structure of the book, most notably its use of comparison, contrast and repetition.

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is rather exploring what is possible to say about what is as yet unsaid, that which is without pre-scription. Contributions is “a preliminary sketch of the free play of time-space, which the history of the transition first creates as its own realm” (6). In section 39, Heidegger gives that sketch greater substance, configuring the contents of Contributions through a series of succinct delineations of its key concepts: Intoning [Anklang] draws deeply out of what has happened and will happen, and it thereby exerts its power of impact on the things of the present through forward-play. Forward play [Zuspiel] takes its necessity only out of the intoning of the plight of the abandonment of Being. Intonings and forward play provide the ground and the terrain for the initial run-up of inceptual thinking to its leap [Sprung] into the essential occurrence of Be-ing. The Leap opens up in advance of anything else the untrodden expanses and concealments into which the grounding of Da-sein, that which belongs to the call of Ereignis, must penetrate. All of these junctures must be constituted in such a unity out of the steadfastness [Inständigkeit] of Da-sein, which characterises the Being of the future-ones. The latter take over and stow away the belonging that has been awakened by the call into Ereignis and by its turning, and have come thus to stand before the intoning of the last god. (82)16

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There is general agreement on how Sprung, Gründung, the Zukünftigen and letzte Gott should be translated. Anklang und Zuspiel, however, present problems. Heidegger’s outline posits a direction, a “leap” towards a goal, and thus these terms should be seen as facilitating concepts that move towards that goal, in a process that begins with a “before” (vor) and culminates in a “last” (letzte). For that reason, it is important that both Anklang and Zuspiel are translated in a way that communicates, in the case of the former, the early suggestion of knowledge, and in the case of the latter, a movement towards the future. These qualities are lost in the E/M version, which translates Anklang as “echo”, and which also fails to capture the musical connotations of the word, and hence its allusion to a fugue. For that reason, R/V-N prefer “resonating”, but this does not convey the initial stirrings of ideas and events that come to the subject. Anklang, as Holger Granz notes, describes “a sound that can be heard but is not as yet fully developed” (191). For that reason, I prefer “intoning”. Zuspiel is translated as “playing-forth” by E/M and “interplay” by R/V-N. The idea of play is, indeed, crucial to Heidegger’s meaning here, but so is the sense of positionality. The literal and more extended translation of Zuspiel might be read as “that which has been played or performed up to this point”, meaning the heritage of Western philosophy.

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Heidegger described Contributions as a “preliminary exercise” (Vorübung), an attempt (Versuch) to think through Be-ing in its historicity (3). Contributions is, however, not a single Versuch but a multiplicity of Versuche, a series of attempts to reconstitute the different graduations and developmental turnings of Be-ing as it emerges in inceptual thinking.17 Although inceptual thinking, which thinks this joining of the junctures, is without system, it is not, however, arbitrary or formless. On the contrary, “inceptual thinking in the other beginning has a rigour of its own kind: the freedom of joining its junctures”: it is the “through-thinking [Er-denkung] of the truth of Be-ing” (65 and 56).18 Heidegger initially describes inceptual thinking in terms of what it is not. It is not “new” or “timeless”. These are clichés used to lend purpose and status to received ideas and concepts. Neither can inceptual thinking be viewed as “re-presentational” or “evaluative”. The latter are familiar categories in Kantian epistemology, but precisely for that reason incapable of leading to new paths of thinking (58). Inceptual thinking may seem useless and irrelevant because it does not provide resolutions to the issues it raises or answers to the questions it poses. But it does not attempt to provide answers to these questions. In inceptual thinking, the hegemony of 17

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In section 39, Heidegger provides his own numerical gloss on the structure of the work: “1. No exactitude has been omitted from the structure of the jointure, just as if it were imperative – and it is imperative in philosophy – to attain the impossible: to grasp the truth of Be-ing in its full development of its grounded essence. (2) What has been permitted here is access to just a single path that an individual might take, foregoing the possibility of surveying other perhaps more essential paths. (3) The attempt must clearly show that it realises that both the jointure and the access remain a dispensation of Be-ing itself, of the intimating and withdrawing of its truth, and not something that can be compelled” (81). As Vallega-Neu observes, “Heidegger describes such a thinking in which what is thought first comes as ‘er-denken’, which in German usually means ‘to think something up’. But since, for Heidegger, ‘er-denken’ is rooted in Be-ing and the hyphenated er prefix marks both the path character and the opening character of thinking, one may translate ‘erdenken’ as ‘opening thinking’”. Such thinking is “essentially a questioning” (2003: 32 and 36). Er-denken has been translated in different ways. For E/M it is “enthinking”; for R/V-N it is “inventive thinking”; and for Polt “bethinking”. I have translated erdenken as “through-thinking” to emphasise its processional nature. It is clear that for Heidegger Er-denken is not thinking about an idea or concept, but the thinking of these concepts themselves. He treats the term, thus, as if it were an intransitive verb.

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logic, of propositional statement and argumentation, no longer holds sway. In its place comes “a grounding, collecting and retaining power” that is capable of “opening the most question-worthy [Fragwürdiges]” (57). Inceptual thinking is the enactment of resonating, forward-play, leap and grounding in their unity: it involves challenging, querying, postponing conclusions, living with enigma, exercising patience, retaining distance, working without assumptions and, above all, being open to the unsaid. Inceptual thinking is grounded in mindfulness (Besinnung), an understanding that is alive to perspective, approach, attitude and mood (66).19 Heidegger names these dispositions “shock”, “restraint” and “awe”, and he brings them together under the rubric of “presentiment” (Ahnung). He describes them as dispositions (Stimmungen) in order to emphasise that they exist outside the conceptual realm of “philosophy” (14).20 These dispositions look back to the non-theoretical forms of understanding such as “disposedness” (Befindlichkeit) that Heidegger had analysed in R/D-V translate Besinnung as “meditation”. This term, however, has come to be identified with a particular form of mental practice, in which the individual clears the mind of distraction to reach, as in the practices of Buddhist meditation, a state where selfconsciousness is expunged. However, as the constituent terms of the word suggest, with the affective Be- component (denoting an agency) followed by sinnen (meaning “to reflect on”), Besinnung involves an active form of thinking, a process of sifting and assessing that is more accurately reflected in the title of the translation by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary of Heidegger’s later work Besinnung as “Mindfulness”. 20 E/M suggest “startled dismay”, “reservedness” and “deep awe” and R/V-N “shock”, “restraint” and “diffidence”, respectively. It could be argued that these dispositions are aesthetic as much as philosophical, or, at least, that the latter are informed by the former. Indeed, Heidegger notes at one point the importance of “thinking about style” (Stilgedanke) (69), and it is surely significant that during the composition of Contributions, in the winter semester of 1936 in Freiburg, he was teaching Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen). In his twenty-third letter, Schiller makes the following argument: “the transition from a passive state of feeling to an active state of thinking cannot take place except via a middle state of aesthetic freedom”, adding “through the aesthetic modulation of the psyche the autonomy of reason is opened up within the domain of sense itself, the dominion of sensation already broken within its own frontiers, and physical man refined to the point where spiritual man only needs to start developing out of the physical according to the laws of freedom” (Schiller 161 and 163). Something of that “aesthetic modulation” seems evident in Heidegger’s dispositional concepts. 19

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Being and Time, but unlike those forms the dispositions adumbrated in Contributions are, befitting the transition from Sein to Ereignis, active, outward-looking and ap-propriating. Even with regard to the apparently withdrawing disposition of restraint, Heidegger is quick to emphasise its dis-positional quality, the fact that it is something that “turns towards”, as a Zukehr, in this case towards hesitating self-refusal as the “essential occurrence” (Wesung) of Be-ing (15).21 In section 5, Heidegger describes these dispositions in greater detail: “to be shocked means being taken back out of the familiarity of customary behaviour and returned to the openness of the surge of self-concealing, to an openness in which what was for so long familiar reveals itself, at one and the same time, as estranging and confining” (15). Shock proceeds from a welcoming receptivity, from a dis-position that allows the alien or the discomforting (what Heidegger would later call the “uncanny”, Ungeheuer) through to consciousness (GA 54: 175). It is a willing acceptance of the uncanniness of Be-ing, a disposition better captured in the German original of the word, the verb erschrecken, meaning “to terrify”. Shock confronts but it does not destroy, because it is accompanied by the filtering and accepting presence of “restraint” (Verhaltenheit). Restraint is not a passive facility: it exists both to register and to assess, to gather what the world is, and to move forward with this assessment. It provides the centre for the other dispositions. Its modes are stillness and gathering and, as such, restraint acts as the basis upon which Dasein, now reconfigured as Da-sein, can find itself in Be-ing.22 Restraint is the precondition for the final disposition, which is awe, which is “the way of drawing near 21 22

And for this reason, the translation of Stimmung by R/V-N as “disposition” seems more accurate than “attuning” chosen by E/M. The shift from the Dasein of Being and Time to the Da-sein of Contributions is reflected in the all-important hyphen. Da-sein represents a movement away from an essentialist notion of the subject (its ontology, however conceived) to a “characterization of the human essence in terms of possibility and futurity” (Colony 285). Although the construction Da-sein emphasises the opening, the “There”, that must be occupied through Ereignis for Be-ing to be achieved, we must, according to Heidegger, think of Da-sein as already “fulfilled” as the existing preparation for the transition into an other history of mankind (309). As Miguel de Beistegui observes, Da-sein “signals the ‘to come’ within the human, the possible that is already there” (134).

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and remaining near to what is most remote as such”.23 Awe consolidates the dislocation of shock into a feeling of wonder for what is alien, for that which does not belong, for that which cannot be accommodated into the philosophies of the first beginning. Awe allows us to draw near to the other beginning: it establishes “the opening of the simplicity and greatness [of Be-ing], and the originally compelled necessity of securing in entities the truth of Be-ing” (16). Contributions is an enquiry into Be-ing. It is a path of an exacting investigation, and this involves a struggle to find the right way forward, a struggle that is reflected in the form of the work, in its challenging semantics, its fragmented structure and its disruptive textuality. Its sections differ radically in length, ranging from four lines in section 48 to the sixteen pages of section 259, and from the two sentences of 178 to the listing of the twenty-seven components that make up Heidegger’s account of Hegel’s concept of the “Idea” in section 110. Questions continue to be asked long after answers have been given. The query “what is decisiveness?” for example, comes nineteen pages after the concept has already been discussed (84 and 103).24 At other times, as in section 257, key concepts are simply listed in appositional form without verbs, compelling the reader to make the conceptual linkage. Elsewhere, the same words are italicised and left un-italicised in the same passage, as in section 80, and brackets are used to highlight words and to lift them from the main text. Techniques such as analepsis and prolepsis serve to extend, support and qualify the main exposition by directing the reader’s attention backwards to preceding materials in the text, and forwards to materials that have not as yet appeared.25

R/V-N translate Scheu as “diffidence”; E/M as “deep awe”. The former term suggests an intensification of restraint, a timidity and shyness even, an interpretation that Heidegger explicitly warns us against (15). “Deep awe”, however, suggests almost reverential fear. The simple “awe”, if it is understood in the sense of “veneration”, is perhaps the most appropriate translation, suggesting a certain piety, a withdrawal of the self, that is involved in thinking. 24 For Heidegger’s “circular answers”, see Caputo (Being 31). 25 This takes place internally within the main text but also externally through the footnotes, which constitute a subsystem in the book and frequently, as on page 105, send the reader to Heidegger’s other writings. 23

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The trajectory of Contributions is shaped through repetition, modification and restatement.26 As Heidegger explains in section 39, “each of the six junctures of the conjuncture stands for itself, but only to make the essential unity more emphatic. In each of the six junctures the attempt is continuously made to say the same of the same, but in each case from within a different essential domain, which Ereignis names. Seen externally and fragmentarily, one can easily find ‘repetitions’ everywhere. What is most difficult, however, is to carry out purely, and in accordance with the juncture, an abiding with the same, which would be a testimony to the genuine steadfastness of inceptual thinking” (81–82).27 The repetitions in Contributions are both formal and thematic. The opening words of section 1 reappear on page 80, whilst section 182 ends with virtually the same words as 122. Content also seemingly repeats itself. Heidegger allocates the identical title to a number of quite different and spatially discrete sections in his book. “Vom Ereignis” provides the title of 3, 4, 7, 8 and 10, and forms, with Ereignis, alone or qualified, the title of a further nine sections; whilst “Be-ing” likewise appears, singly or in combination with other terms, in the title of forty-eight sections. Indeed, certain sections follow on immediately after preceding ones with the same heading, such as 157 and 158, both of which are called “The Fissure and the Modalities” (“Die Zerklüftung und die Modalitäten”), whilst section 81, “Forward play” (“Zuspiel”), is followed by 82, which has exactly the same title (169).28 Such structural recalls in the text reflect the agency of Wider-holung, the “fetching-again” of the “unique happening” (Einmalige), because it is here 26 Heidegger speaks of the “turnings, circles, cycles” that adhere to the emergence of Ereignis (407). 27 The junctures form an “interlocking web [of ] poly-imaging, poly-nodes” (Maly 1985: 113). “The text’s six different fugings [Thomson’s preferred translation of ‘juncture’] join together to develop a complex but unified philosophical vision” (Thomson. 60). Polt, however, would disagree. He sees Contributions as “a group of fragments that are only on the way to becoming a book”, in which “parts of the text resemble a quarry whose blocks have fallen at random” (131 and 138). We should, however, keep the following words of Heidegger in mind when discussing the issue of the text’s unity: “the outline of these ‘contributions’ toward the preparation of the transition is taken from the still un-mastered ground plan of the historicity of the transition itself ” (6). 28 “Nor is there any sense of hierarchy within the junctures” (Maly 1985: 112).

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that Ereignis dwells: in the thinking recovery of the present of the inceptual. At the beginning of section 21, Heidegger describes what this means: Der Anfang ist das Sichgründende Vorausgreifende; sich gründend in den durch ihn ergründeten Grund; vorausgreifend als gründend und deshalb unüberholbar. Weil jeder Anfang unüberholbar ist, deshalb muß er stets wiederholt, in der Auseinandersetzung in die Einzigkeit seiner Anfänglichkeit und damit seines unumgehbaren Vorgreifens gesetzt werden. Diese Auseinandersetzung ist dann ursprüngliche, wenn sie selbst anfänglich ist, dies aber notwendig als anderer Anfang. (55) [Beginning is the self-grounding forward-advancing; grounding itself in the ground that it itself has fully grounded; forward-advancing as grounding and therefore unsurpassable. Because every beginning is unsurpassable it must, therefore, when it is encountered, be continually repeated, be placed in the uniqueness of its inceptuality and in that of its incontrovertible forward-advance. When this encountering is inceptual, it is then originary, and this necessarily so as the other beginning.]

“Beginning” (Anfang) is the foundational concept of Be-ing, and Heidegger takes pains in this passage to emphasise that its origins lie within the terrain of its own thinking, which is not determined by external influence and inherited concepts.29 Historically the beginning of every new stage in thinking is unique, possessing its own terms of reference that cannot be surpassed, because each constitutes a paradigm that is in and for itself, with its own grounds. Although the terms of that innovatory paradigm cannot be repeated, innovation as a principle of thinking can. Indeed, the latter is a necessity. This new beginning will possess its own grounds, assumptions, premises, modes of explanation, and its own dynamism, its “forwardadvance”. For that reason, the passage is dominated by tropes of temporal positionality, such as the foundational “beginning” (Anfang and anfänglich), which is deepened into a moment of occasion through its “uniqueness” (Einzigkeit) and further extended by its “originary” (ursprüngliche) moment that possesses both a temporal and logical status. 29 It is important that we see this as an “other” beginning (E/M) and not simply as “another” beginning (R/V-N), that is, just one more “beginning” or movement in the history of Western philosophy, in the way, for example, that nineteenth-century German Idealism, that of Kant, may be said to have represented “another” beginning following eighteenth-century British empiricism.

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Both the basis of this foundational leap, the necessity of the leap, and the fact that it must be continually repeated, are established in the passage through the reiteration of the trope Grund, which appears not only as a substantive but also both as the stem of the present participle, “grounding” (gründend), and as the past participle, “fully grounded” (er-gründeten). The hyphen after the prefix er- in the latter word emphasises the thorough, attained dimension of the process of grounding, very much as the prefix in er-denken achieves the same goal, describing a thinking that has been thought through.30 “Process” is the pivotal term, for Heidegger makes it clear that the beginning is something that is happening now, indeed, has already happened. It is a dynamic activity, and in the initial sentence of the passage he couples the present participle with the neologism “forwardadvancing” (vorausgreifend) to allow the present to meet the future in one semantic unit, and then finally to be linked to the past through “fully grounded” (er-gründeten). As is clear both from the temporal adverb “continually” (stets) and the verb “repeats” (wiederholt), the notion of repetition is central to the other beginning.31 This may seem paradoxical; but it is not the context of the beginning that is to be repeated but the driving force of the spirit of philosophy, which in its “uniqueness” thrives on confrontation with the non-inceptual: the established models of metaphysical thinking. The beginning must be “repeated” (literally “collected again”, as in wiederholt), but it cannot be superseded or surpassed, because inceptual thinking does not pretend that it is culminating in a conclusive resolution. Its ambit is both more modest and more incisive: it seeks through its agency to lay open creative energies, those that question, problematise, explore and are capable of living with the ambivalent and the unresolved. Heidegger, therefore, deliberately uses the present participle, the selfgrounding forward-advance (Sichgründende Vorausgreifende), rather than the past or future tense, or even the present indicative, to emphasise that the other beginning is a question of originary movement rather than a quest for attainment. 30 The er prefix in German broadly corresponds to the “en” prefix in English, which “conveys the sense of ‘enabling’ or ‘bringing into the condition of ’” (Emad 2007: 157). 31 For Heidegger’s discussion of wieder-holbar, see 55.

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As we have seen, Contributions draws on the structure of the musical fugue. We also find in certain sections of the work internal fugues within individual junctures, where repetition has elided from the macro-level of the exposition, the progressive organisation of ideas within the work as a whole, to the micro-level of their articulation where, as a structural principle, the fugal form acts as a means to establishing the coherence of an individual section. This is the case in section 220, “The Question of Truth” (“Die Frage nach der Wahrheit”). Earlier Heidegger had made it clear that he could not accept either the classic correspondence theory of truth or its coherence equivalent. In both, truth is treated as something “made fast” (Festgemachte), where a definitive statement on the world has been reached, and in which tensions and contradictions have been resolved (331). In section 220, Heidegger offers an alternative form of truth, sketching the briefest of designs in language that is both dense and elliptical: Grund hier: 1. das, worin geborgen, wohin einbehalten; 2. wodurch ernötigt; 3. wovon durchragt. Das Wahre: was in der Wahrheit steht und so seiend bezw. unseiend wird. Wahrheit: die Lichtung für die Verbergung (Wahrheit als die Un-Wahrheit), in sich strittig und nichthaft und ursprüngliche Innigkeit (vgl. Gründung und Frankfurter Vorträge*), und dieses, weil Wahrheit: Wahrheit des Seyns als Ereignis. Das Wahre und das Wahre sein zugleich bei sich das Unwahre, das Verstellte und seine Abwandlungen. Die Wesung der Wahrheit. (345) [Ground here: 1. That in which sheltered, into which withheld; 2. through which compelled; 3. from which looms forth. The True: what stands in truth and so becomes being or non-being. Truth: the clearing for concealment (truth as non-truth), in itself contentious and nullifying and the originary inwardness (c.f. Grounding and Frankfurt lectures* [“Origin of the Work of Art” essay]), and this because, Truth: Truth of Be-ing as Ereignis. The True and to be the True at the same time as the non-true, the distorted and its variants. The essential occurrence of truth.]

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The ground of “truth” is sounded as if it were a ground in a musical fugue. It contains (to retain the musical analogy) three key signatures: that in which something is sheltered or retained; that in which something is compelled or made necessary; and that from which something looms forth. In the text, the base of the ground is laid out through simple prepositional adverbs without main verbs, thus leaving the passive-active identity of the ground unspecified: does the ground shelter, provide a place for sheltering or is itself sheltered? All of these modes may, in fact, be co-foundational in “the essential occurrence” (Wesung) of ground. From this base, all that concerns truth is developed as a counterpoint in the subsequent parts of the passage, appearing in the manifold guises of “truth” and “the true”. Truth is granted no secure place of verity in Heidegger’s cryptic account: it exists in a space between positions that are now positive, now negative and, at certain points, both at the same time. Truth contains its opposite, and it seems at moments to negate itself, a fact that accounts for the dialectical shape of the text, the placing of definition against counterdefinition. Heidegger is attempting here to demarcate as economically as possible the role of truth in inceptual thinking, and this aim is reflected in the typography of the passage with its almost bullet point distribution of statements that execute a single movement, from the initial grounding of truth to its “essential occurrence” through Ereignis. No arguments are adduced; no proofs are given. Where emphasis is needed, to draw our attention to the different modes of “truth”, Heidegger simply highlights the relevant words through italics. He does not elaborate a new model of truth; on the contrary, Heidegger chooses the form of the fragment to expound his views, and should we require further elaboration on the subject he directs us to his other writings. What we are being given is the inner structure of a model rather than the model itself. Section 220 receives its conclusive shape through the statement, restatement and elaboration of the matrix concept “truth” and its derivatives. This is the technique of point-counterpoint that Heidegger uses throughout Contributions to give form to the provenance of the other beginning, which is inherently bound to recurrence as the re-formation of thought. This technique provides the resolute structure of section 23, “Why thinking out of the beginning?”, which comes at a central point in the preview. In the midst of his exposition, Heidegger pauses to ask a

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series of questions, and these must be posed with an insistence that only repetition can achieve: Weshalb ursprünglichere Wiederholung des ersten Anfangs? Weshalb die Besinnung auf seine Geschichte? Weshalb die Auseinandersetztung mit seinem Ende? Weil der andere Anfang (aus der Wahrheit des Seins) notwendig geworden? Warum denn überhaupt Anfang (Vgl. Überlegungen IV über Anfang und Übergang)? Weil nur das größte Geschehen, das innigste Ereignis, uns noch retten kann aus der Verlorenheit in den Betrieb der bloßen Begebenheiten und Machenschaften. (57) [Why a more originary repetition of the first beginning? Why mindfulness of its history? Why the confrontation with its end? Because the other beginning (out of the truth of Being) has become necessary? Why then a beginning at all (cf. Considerations IV with respect to beginning and transition)? Because only the greatest event, the most inward Ereignis, can still save us from the desolation of the commotion of mere occurrences and machinations.]

Heidegger is following here the rhetorical practice of quaestio, where an argument is constructed through an insistent posing of questions, in this case, through the interrogative adverb weshalb, meaning “why”, “wherefore”, “for what reason”, which is used anaphorically at the beginning of successive statements. Inceptual thinking is self-interrogative: it is a thinking that is concerned to understand its own foundations. It lays itself bare, so that it can free itself from assumptions and the modus operandi of previous philosophies. It is mindful about where it has come from, because it is an “other” beginning to the first beginning, and it is mindful about where it wishes to go. To secure a foundation for the journey, questions are more important than answers. Indeed, the procedure of questioning is so insistent in this passage that it is easy to overlook the fact that the sentence beginning with “because” is, in fact, yet another question. Heidegger is responding to his own questions, providing them, in a technique known as apocrisis, with a single oneline answer to each. He creates thus a sense of closure that balances the openness produced by the activity of self-interrogation that otherwise dominates the passage.

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Heidegger’s goal in Contributions is to establish the “ground” of the other beginning as im-mediately as possible: he is, as he says at the beginning of section 257, “quarrying from bedrock” (421). In section 81, which opens the joining “Forward Play”, Heidegger explicates the framework in which the other beginning must progressively move, and he does so with an impressive monumentality: Die Auseinandersetztung der Notwendigkeit des anderen Anfangs aus der ursprünglichen Setzung des ersten Anfangs. Die Leitstimmung: Die Lust der fragenden wechselweisen Übersteigung der Anfänge. Hierzu alles über die Unterscheidung von Leitfrage und Grundfrage; Leitfragenbeantwortung und eigentliche Leitfragenentfaltung; Übergang zur Grundfrage (“Sein und Zeit”). Alle Vorlesungen über “Geschichte” der Philosophie. Die Entscheidung über alle “Ontologie”. (169) [Confronting the necessity of the other beginning from the originary positing of the first beginning. The guiding disposition: the desire of surpassing the beginnings through alternativelyindicating questioning. For this purpose, everything regarding the difference between the guiding question and the basic question; answer to the guiding question and the actual unfolding of the leading question; transition to the basic question (Being and Time). All the lecture courses on the “history” of philosophy. The decision regarding every “ontology”.]

The passage is structured around simple apposition, consisting as it does of a series of substantives that are brought into alignment without grammatical or logical connection. In spite of the absence of verbs, the text possesses, nevertheless, a discernible momentum, which is achieved both by its internal logic, its movement towards a conceptual goal, and by the consistent use of the “guiding” (leit) trope, which is employed both in its participle form and as an adjective and, sometimes, as both. In the absence of explanatory connecting links, the reader is forced to make sense of what appear to be indeterminate statements, and to confront issues, both specific and general, regarding referential intelligibility that such a reading produces. What, for example, is the status of “separation” (Auseinandersetzung, a word that also means “confrontation”) in the first line? Are we to see this as something that has happened, is happening, is about to happen, or simply should happen?

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Even more open to interpretation is the “everything” (alles) that appears later in the passage. Does this refer to ideas, concepts, approaches, or does it refer to questions or answers relating to the guiding disposition? And are we talking of something that is being brought to bear, can be brought to bear or will later be brought to bear on the issue? As Heidegger argues in section 42, “every essential questioning, each time it poses its questions more originally, must radically change itself. There is no gradual ‘development’. Even less is there that special relationship between the later and the earlier, in which the later would already be enclosed in the former. Because everything in the thinking of Be-ing adheres to the unique, it is overturnings [Umstürze] that are the rule!” (84–85).32 Such overturnings appear throughout Contributions. They are evident in its grammar and typography, such as the white spaces and gaps that often frame lexical items; in the use of hyphens to separate prefix from the root stem in nouns; in quotation marks that both define and hold in abeyance the meaning of concepts; in the incongruous device of itemisation and listing; in the diagrams; in the frequent use of ellipsis and parenthesis; and in the various typographic styles, including italics and bold formatting. Semantically, such overturnings typically emerge in non-sequential statements, which are often formed through the technique of asyndeton (the omission of conjunctions), a practice that compels the reader to make points of contact between ideas whose interdependence in other forms of philosophising would have been made explicit.33 To centralise his concepts and ensure their coherence, Heidegger employs devices such as typographic linking, as in section 64, diagrams (sections 65 and 188) and the technique of enumeratio, where key terms 32 33

Polt calls it a “restless style” (43). Karen Feldman’s words on Heidegger’s characteristic use of language in Being and Time are even more applicable to linguistic practices in Contributions: “the words of the text behave like the unhandy tool described in the text. Heidegger’s use of italics, hyphenation and scare quotes are likewise techniques by which the words of the text are rendered broken, hence visible, and are brought into presence-at-hand rather than being merely used as handy tools. In other words, the very words of the investigation into being are wrested out of readiness-to-hand, in part by devices such as italics, scare quotes, hyphenation, invention and etymology, which thematise or make conspicuous the word-character of words” (88).

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are listed in block formation (as in section 257). Such radical typographical effects contribute to a style of writing that is intended to facilitate our discursive launch into inceptual thinking: they are transformative of meaning, disrupting and challenging, and force the onus of interpretation onto the reader, functioning as distancing effects, keeping the reader removed from a non-reflective assimilation of the same, opening a space for thought, allowing dynamic relationships of both denotive and connotative meaning to disclose themselves in the reading of the text.34 Such overturnings do not, however, lead to formlessness or indeterminacy. On the contrary, their centrifugal energy is held in check by other techniques that provide containment and measure. In section 269, for example, Heidegger stresses that Be-ing moves within realm of displacement, and this constitutes its inner core as Ereignis: Die Ent-setzung aber ereignet sich nur aus dem Seyn selbst, ja dieses ist nichts anderes als das Ent-setzende und Ent-setzliche. Die Ent-setzung besteht in der Er-eignung des Daseins, so zwar, daß im so sich lichtenden Da (dem Ab-grund des Ungestützten und Ungeschützten) die Er-eignung sich entzieht. Ent-setzung und Entzug sind des Seyns als des Ereignisses. Dabei geschieht nichts innerhalb des Seienden, das Seyn bleibt unscheinbar, aber mit dem Seienden als solchem kann geschehen, daß es, in die Lichtung des Un-gewöhnlichen gerückt, seine Gewöhnlichkeit abwirft und sich zur Ent-scheidung darüber stellen muß, wie es dem Seyn genüge. (482) [Dis-placement eventuates, however, only out of Be-ing itself; indeed, this is nothing other than that what dis-places and de-ranges. Dis-placing consists in the ap-propriation of Dasein, and indeed in such a way that in this self-illuminating There (the away-ground of the unsupported and unprotected), ap-propriation withdraws. Dis-placement and withdrawing belong to Be-ing as Ereignis. Nothing occurs through this within entities; Be-ing remains inconspicuous. But with an entity as such it can happen that, having moved into the lighting of the un-usual, it throws off its everydayness and must put to itself the de-cision on how best to measure up to Be-ing.]

Heidegger is attempting to find words to describe the experience of the unusualness, the otherness of Be-ing. It is an experience that involves a

34 Hence one common opinion that Contributions is “unreadable” (Schmidt 32).

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confrontation with the unsettling, the abnormal, the uncanny, a condition that he typifies as Aus-einander-setzung [literally a “placing-out-of-oneanother”]. This is something that is disruptive of composure, and produces a radical impact upon selfhood (Selbsheit) that cannot be captured by the standard dictionary definition of Auseinandersetzung as “contestation”. Heidegger, seeking a formulation that will turn this state into a process, coins the word Ent-setzung, which is the movement of confrontation as a positive possibility for Be-ing (although without the hyphen the word entsetzen means “to terrify”).35 Here Da-sein finds itself within an abyss, unsupported and unprotected before being granted the light that may lead it forward. In the passage, articulating these contrasting modes generates a conceptual and linguistic tension, where the use of the Ent- prefix in the central concepts, Ent-setzende and Ent-setzliche (which come from verbs of displacement meaning literally “to withdraw” and “to throw off ”) seems to take us, on a semantic level, increasingly further away from Be-ing; whilst, on a grammatical level, prepositions such as in and mit suggest placement and stability.36 The oscillation and reciprocation between the concepts in the passage are sustained through the frequent use of alliteration (the sibilance in the final lines, for example), and through the assonance of ei and ie in Seyn selbst and ja dieses. This process continues down to the phrase “the lighting of the un-usual” where, in a qualitative upsurge in Heidegger’s exposition, the crucial moment of human endeavour, “de-cision” (Ent-scheidung), is brought into play. Consequently, the initial sound patterns give way to the tighter umlauts ö and ü, as in gerückt and genüge, which are focused phonemes that indicate that the human entity has reached a defining moment in its engagement with Be-ing.

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Translating the word involves deciding on whether Ent-setzung is largely a positive or negative phenomenon. E/M translate it as “setting-free”, while R+V/N prefer “unsettling”. Ent is a crucial prefix in Heidegger’s writing. In standard German, the prefix communicates the sense not only of moving away from something or inclining to the opposite of something, but also to begin or cause something, as in, for example, entflammen, “to set alight”. For the use of the ent prefix within the context of the Contributions, see Maly (2007: 61–65).

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The Word Must Tell: Semantic Archaeology Contributions possesses no “didactic aims”: Heidegger’s intention is neither to describe nor explain, to promulgate or to teach. Contributions is a “preliminary exercise” (Vorübung), whose medium is not “philosophical” language but “Saying” (Sagen), in which “speaking is not something over and against what is to be said but is itself as the essential occurrence of Be-ing” (4). The first beginning must accept the framework of standard language, but it proceeds to transform it from within, using the very familiarity of conventional words as a foil for their dis-location, accommodating itself to current meaning in order, at the right moment, to bring about a reversal of that meaning. But this reversal “is not a ‘formal’ trick in the inversion of the meaning of mere words”: Heidegger is not seeking to broaden the vocabulary of philosophy for its own sake, to simply make it more subtle or insightful. Beyond this expansion lies a greater goal: the transformation of the human subject from animal rationale into the thinker of the other beginning (84). In section 43, Heidegger gives an example of how these new words can be created with Entscheidung [decision]. Heidegger recognises its conventional meaning, which belongs to the anthropological discourse of human action and intentionality. Treating Entscheidung as “decision” does not, however, exhaust its semantic potential. Entscheidung, within inceptual thinking, represents a moment of choice which, when enacted, make possible for the individual into a “de-cisive” grasping of time that allows a severing of the past from the future. To disclose this dimension of the word, Heidegger rewrites it as Ent-scheidung, the prefix Ent- foregrounding the motion of the separation that is contained in the stem of the word, scheiden, which means “to cut” or “to sever”. Configured in this way, Ent-scheidung “has nothing in common with what we call making a choice or the like, but refers to severance itself, which separates and in separating allows to come into play for the first time the ap-propriation of precisely this severed open realm as the clearing for the self-concealing and still un-decided” (88). Heidegger does not, however, abandon the familiar definition of Entscheidung entirely. On the contrary, in section 44 he lists the choices facing human kind, such as whether it will remain a mere subject divorced from the object world around it including (as he would later make clear

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in his essays on technology) from nature, or whether it will develop into Da-sein, the subject reunited with its presence in the world. Such vital “decisions” (and Heidegger places the word in inverted commas to indicate that we are talking about a distinctive use of the term) should not, however, be seen as acts of individual volition or as manifestations of a will to power in the spirit of Nietzsche (indeed, Heidegger voices his reservations about the philosopher midway through his discussion in section 43).37 On the contrary, such decisions are dependent upon the emergence of the other beginning which, opening a space for Ereignis, allows de-cision to happen. De-cision is the primal energy of an encountering with Be-ing, providing an open space for this encounter and for that which has remained up to that point undecided. De-cision alone will determine the transition from the modern era into the other beginning. De-cision belongs to Ereignis, into which it is taken up and brought to completion. Ereignis is the guiding light of Contributions, “the self-establishing and self-mediating centre, into which all of the coming into presence of the truth of Be-ing must in advance be thought back” (73). It is called Ereignis because, as the happening of Be-ing it both ap-propriates and is appropriated, defines and empowers, being grasped by those who have opened themselves to the task of renewal, the future-ones capable of walking the path of the other beginning. Ereignis is the seminal point in the development of this other beginning, and its moment is not only philosophical but also historical. Framed against the corrosive impact of modernity, it alone shows the way forward: it is the “secure light of the coming into being of Be-ing in the furthest horizon of the most inward plight of present [geschichtlichen] humankind” (31).38 37

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And yet without Nietzsche there would be no Contributions, as Heidegger fully realised. As Vallega notes, “when we look at the beginning of Contributions, we can see that Heidegger’s thinking begins at the closure of metaphysics, i.e., at the limit of Nietzsche’s thought of nihilism” (49). Nowhere in Contributions does Heidegger use the term “modernity” (Modernität), preferring instead to talk about the present “age” (Zeitalter) (181). But when he comes to identify the negative moments of the modern period (those that prevent the emergence of Be-ing) as “liberalism – industrialisation – technology”, he is identifying phenomena that caused widespread concern amongst conservative circles in early twentieth-century Germany. Resistance, intellectual and political, to these phenomena

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Ereignis is not a new type of knowledge, but the making free of knowledge itself. It gathers into itself (Heidegger speaks of “the call of Ereignis”) the defining moments of Be-ing, which is “hesitant refusal as (not-granting): ripeness, fruit and bestowal” (29). It contains and is contained in plenitude. It is an event of completion, for “Ereignis always means Ereignis as ap–propriation [Er-eignung], de-cision [Ent-scheidung], en-counter [Ent-gegnung], dis-placement [Ent-setzung], withdrawal [Entzug], simplicity [Einfachkeit], uniqueness [Einzigkeit], solitude [Einsamkeit]” (471).39 Ereignis facilitates: it makes possible the grounding experience of Be-ing, and in section 187 Heidegger outlines the framework in which this grounding takes place: 187. Gründung ist zweideutig: 1. Der Grund gründet, west als Grund (vgl. Wesen der Wahrheit und Zeit-Raum). 2. Dieser gründende Grund wird als solcher erreicht und übernommen. Er-gründung: (a) den Grund als gründenden wesen lassen; (b) auf ihn als Grund bauen, etwas auf den Grund bringen. Das ursprüngliche Gründen des Grundes (1) ist die Wesung der Wahrheit des Seyns; die Wahrheit ist Grund im ursprünglichen Sinne. Das Wesen des Grundes ursprünglich aus dem Wesen der Wahrheit, Wahrheit und Zeit-Raum (Ab-grund). (307) [187. Grounding is twofold in meaning: 1. The ground grounds, develops into Being as ground (cf. the essence of truth and time-space). 2. This grounding ground is attained and taken over as such. Through-grounding: (a) to allow the ground to develop into Being as grounding. (b) to build upon it as the ground, to bring something onto the ground. The originary grounding of the ground (1) is the essential occurrence of the truth of Be-ing; truth is ground in its originary sense.

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gave rise to a movement that has been called the “conservative revolution” (Woods 1996). This is a remarkable constellation of concepts. Some are linguistically marked by their prefixes, “ent”, which take us away from existing placements, while others possess the unifying marker, “ein”.

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Following Heidegger’s fugal analogy, we might see this section as a theme and variation on the subject of “grounding”. Grounding follows two trajectories: it provides the base, the temporal-spatial but also conceptual conditions, if we discern in “Grund” the cognate terms “cause” and “reason”, for the leap; in this and as such it is taken over as the coming to presence of Be-ing. Heidegger wishes us to hear the two meanings of the word (“base” and “cause”) as one, hence the consistent, indeed almost circular nature of the passage. Tightly organised, with a brevity of an almost syllogistic compression that moves assertively from tautology to the simple apposition of its key terms, this short piece charts a movement that begins with the most “grounded” statement, the “the ground grounds”, and culminates with the “the essence of truth, truth and Time-Space (Ab-yss)”.40 Grounding moves, thus, in two directions: it turns back on to itself to generate its own conceptual base, but it also anticipates that which has not as yet arrived. In the passage, a procedure of relational clarification and expansion is secured through verbs of attainment such as “taken over” (übernommen) and “bring” (bringen). Gründung and Grund appear, italicised and non-italicised, in their nominative, accusative and genitive cases, and in the plural form, Gründen. Grund also provides the matrix from which gründet, gründend, Er-gründung and Ab-grund are formed. Although each of these terms emerges in contrapuntal fashion out of, and casts a reflection upon, the primary concept Grund, they effectively move in the course of Heidegger’s exposition away from that concept, almost as if they are now (to retain the musical analogy) in a

40 The “ground grounds” highlights the role of tautology (from the Greek “to auto”, “the same”) in Heidegger’s work. Heidegger thought of tautological thinking as “the originary meaning of phenomenology”, adding that “this type of thinking keeps itself on this side of any possible distinction between theory and practice … In this respect, it must be fully recognised that tautology is the only possibility of thinking that which dialectical thought obscures” (GA 15: 399 and 400). In other words, the tautological statement, by collapsing a noun with a neo-logistic verb, produces a single unit of meaning, and in doing so establishes the integrity of both the object described and the process of description.

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different key.41 The hyphenated er- prefix has the effect of mobilising Grund into Er-gründung, thus allowing it to present itself as a coming into ground as a through-grounding. Er-gründung means empowerment; it makes possible a return to the originary, as Heidegger’s use of ursprünglich indicates, which appears in the passage both adjectivally and adverbially to define the provenance of Grund. The conceptual trajectory of this passage culminates in Abgrund. Heidegger’s use of the word departs significantly from the conventional meaning of “abyss” as a bottomless chasm.42 Abyss is the grounding that forms “the original unity of space and time”. Ab-grund, which Heidegger also writes as Ab-grund, stressing the stem of the word in order to suggest a moment of movement away from the source, is a “leaving empty” (Leerlassen), a self-withholding (Sichversagen) (379). Through the rewriting of the conventional definition of “empty” (leer), the moment of vacuum that adheres to that definition is made into a productive space for the coming of the other beginning, allowing for a withholding of Be-ing which is, at the same time, a potential for Be-ing. Abyss is a “ground that remains while it stays away” (Emad 2001: 236). In the above passage, the substantive Grund acts through variation and expansion as a medium for the articulation of a foundational concept. This exploitation of simple nominal forms is part of a practice of semantic distillation that Heidegger makes throughout Contributions, and which helps secure the stylistic monumentality of his writing. Elsewhere in the work, however, words are less foundational, and are freed from their substantive solidity to proliferate and form alliances with other words. There, juxtapositions are made, connotations extended, to produce complex intertexts, texts that form themselves from other textual items.43 This is the case in section 80, the 41 William J. Richardson, in his analysis of this passage, describes its overall sense as “convoluted” (Dasein 40). His description is possibly meant negatively, but the term “convolution” comes from the Latin verb volvere meaning to “turn over”, “envelop” and “unroll”, actions that are apposite to Heidegger’s style here. 42 In abyss, there is “the securing of a sense of the presence of-in-absence of the encompassing mystery for which every authentic world of dwelling has a place but which is increasingly absent in ours” (Woods: 265). 43 As Roland Barthes defines them, intertexts are “woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages”, in a process “in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text” (169).

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final section of the “Intoning” (Anklang) juncture. Earlier in Contributions, Heidegger had focused on the sway of science and mechanical rationality in the age of modernity, deploring its functionality and quantifying mindset, its “machinations” (Machenschaft) (57). In section 80, he turns to look in detail at the practical centre of the scientific mind: its use of experiments. In the earlier discussion, Heidegger had engaged with the philosophical foundations of scientific methodology in a recognisably analytical way, but now he moves into a deconstructive mode, pulling apart the premises of its modus operandi from within, and the style of his writing changes accordingly. The penultimate section of section 79 ends with the following brief enquiry, before eliding into the more extended study of section 80. Heidegger is conducting his own “psychological” experiment: Nicht um zu zeigen, was ein Experiment ist (dies auch), sondern um zu zeigen, welche andere Richtung und Stufe der Vergegenständlichung. Worauf jetzt zu sehen? Tatsachen Worauf nicht? und Welcher Unterschied? Gesetze Wozu und warum dieses “Experiment”? In welchem Fragezusammenhang steht es? 80. experiri – experientia – experimentum – “Experiment” Erfahren, auf etwas stoßen, etwas stößt einem zu, ich habe meine Erfahrungen gemacht, “schlechte”. Im Mittelalter und früher schon Unterschied zu “logos” gegen sermo (componere scripta aliqua re), gegen das nur Gesagte, Mitgeteilte, in Wirklichkeit aber nicht Gezeigte, gegen das autoritativ Verkündete und als solches überhaupt nicht Zeigbare. Dagegen das Zu-sehen und Zugehen darauf, ausmachen, dabei immer ein Gesuchtes, je nachdem, was gesucht, ein Erproben. Mit Hilfe einer Zurichtung, Einrichtung, instrumentum, oder ohne dieselbe. Z. B. erproben, ob das Wasser warm oder kalt, woher der Wind weht. Ein eigenes Vorgehen, um etwas zur Gegebenheit zu bringen. Die Frage ist aber, “was” und “wie”, ob einfach ein So und So, quale, oder ob das Bestehen einer Beziehung: wenn-so, “Ursache–Wirkung”, woher, warum? (Gebrauch der Lupe, Mikroskop). Und wieder, ob diese Beziehung noch quantitativ bestimmt: wenn so viel – dann so viel. (165) [Not in order to show what an experiment is (although this too), but in order to show another direction and stage of objectification.

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What to look at now? facts What not to look at? and What is the difference? laws Why and what is the purpose of this “experiment”? In what context of questioning does it stand? 80. experiri – experienta – experimentum – “Experimentation” Experiencing, coming across something, something confronts one. I have had experiences, “bad ones”. In the Middle Ages and even earlier, different from “logos”, opposed to sermo (componere scripta de aliqua re), opposed to what was merely said or communicated but not demonstrated in reality, to what was authoritatively proclaimed and because of that something that could not be shown at all. In contrast, in-specting and approaching something, figuring it out, in which there is always something that is being sought, and depending upon what is being sought, an investigation. With the aid of an appliance, a device, instrumentum, or without these. E.g. testing whether the water is warm or cold, or which way the wind is blowing. A proper procedure in order to give something actuality. The question is, however, “what” and “how”, whether it is a matter simply of such and such, quale, or instead the existence of a connection: if-so, cause-effect, from where, why? (Use of the magnifying glass, microscope) And again, whether this connection can be determined quantitatively: if so many of these, then so many of those.]

Section 79 constituted a reductio ad absurdum both of the experimental principles pursued by the empirical mind in the early period of its development and the interrogative terrain on which those experiments were conducted, where laws were mechanically derived from “facts” in a linear mode of mechanical calculation. Through his disruptive syntax, Heidegger reversed this scientific methodology, construing a procedure where in the text answers move progressively away from questions as the latter proceed, in lines that conclude without full points. It is as if the distance between facts and laws must remain unbridgeable; indeed, the intrusive and spurious und, which occupies a ludicrous position stranded in mid-space, seems to suggest this. Heidegger himself offers no opinion; indeed, the voiced questions do not come from any discernible enunciating subject. Everything is achieved through typography, through the use of “white spaces” (the notable gaps between lexical items), and through a questioning and answering mode that, once again, suggests the counterpoint of a musical fugue.

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Heidegger concluded section 79 by asking: “in what context of questioning does [the experiment] stand?” His answer follows in section 80, which is both a free-playing fantasy, an intertext formed around the trope “experiment”, and a remarkable exercise in semantic archaeology, a study in miniature of the discourse of science as it emerged in the early modern period. Science was a cosmopolitan movement that embraced a new intellectual elite in Europe, from Newton in England to Galileo in Italy, and Heidegger’s discourse moves seamlessly across German, Latin and Greek terminology, highlighting words that are ciphers of successive stages in a development that took more than 400 years to come to fruition. Science rejected the abstractions of the scholastic philosophy of Aquinas and the theological dogmas that supported such philosophy, the “sermo (componere scripta aliqua re)” [I deliver my words, and texts are produced out of them], which were doctrines “only said and communicated but not demonstrated in reality”. The scientific mind, however, was not without its own rigidity, as Heidegger goes on to detail in section 80. The very title of this section constitutes in itself a compressed and self-standing text, as Heidegger positions the various terms of his experiential study, “experiri – experientia – experimentum – Experimentation”, into appositional alignment. The order in which the terms are stated establishes a semantic relationship with the modern “experiment”, a concept that has its origins in the Latin experiri and gives us the common English word “experience”. The concatenation of motifs formed out of “experience” provides the nucleus for all that follows. The opening assertive verbal noun, Erfahren [experience], immediately grounds the text in the realm of the empirical, where knowledge is gained through the senses, in this case a tactile manipulation of the world. Heidegger’s account of early science is laconic and impersonal: there are no verbs in the passage, with the exception of the simple linking copula, to suggest momentum of purpose, and the unusual use of verbal forms as nominalisations, such as the incongruous “in-specting” (Zu-sehen), has the effect of reifying and depersonalising the events depicted, as if they were merely part of an anonymous movement in the history of ideas. This effect is further heightened by the use of italics to stress individual components, whilst the bleak use of interrogative pronouns, was and wie, and quantifying adverbs such So und

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So and quale, suggest the mechanical mindset of early scientific thinking.44 And, once again, Heidegger dispenses with any notion of a grammatical or philosophical subject: even the rare instance when a personal statement appears, as in Galileo’s dictum, “the most useful experiences that one makes are the bad ones”, it is left unattributed. In this pastiche of the discourse of early science, language moves within a realm that is mechanistic and functional, and whose foundational principle is the crude paradigm of cause and effect, a paradigm that helped create the philosophy of the first beginning, which continues to dominate the Western mind. As Heidegger consistently argues in Contributions, the way beyond this discourse necessitates a language that can respond to the openness and free-playing of Be-ing. Heidegger does not claim that what he is doing in Contributions achieves this; he continually reminds us that this is a transitional work and that we are still moving forward towards the future (3). Nevertheless, the movement and energy that propels his narrative, and the persistent will to find a space in his language for new forms of thinking, receives forceful inscription in the writing of Contributions, where Heidegger moves beyond analysis towards a responsive vision that can do justice to the vital presence of the object world, its resonance, its generative potential, “where plants, animals, stones and the sea can possesses Be-ing, without declining into reification” (293). This expansive vision displays itself throughout his work, in its eruptive energy, in its holding open of linguistic resolution, in its challenging grammar and syntax and in its figurative language. Such figurative language is used both on a thematic and structural level to impart an important materiality to his concepts, to concretise them, to “ground” the coming into Be-ing of Being, so that it can manifest itself beyond the distance of abstraction that philosophy, in the first beginning, moved. In section 121, “Be-ing and Entities”, for example, Heidegger wishes to dramatise the fact that the tension between the future projection of Be-ing and all things extant (“entities”) is hanging in the balance. Heidegger presents 44 “Science itself is intrinsically drawn to a heightening of the priority of procedure and method over the material domain itself ” (148). Heidegger would return to what he saw as the dangerous limitations of the scientific mind in his later work, most notably in The Question Concerning Technology (Die Frage nach der Technik, 1954).

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the predicament as clearly as possible, as if this crucial moment of de-cision is being weighed on scales in a market place, and he reaches towards a concrete image, directly addressing the reader as he does so: “put on to the pan of a set of scales all things and that which is at hand, including machinations, in which these are congealed and entrenched, and put into the other pan the projection of Be-ing”. The scales will, Heidegger pessimistically concludes, come down in favour of brute facticity. And yet: “who is doing the weighing?”, he asks, developing his apposite image yet further (237 and 238). Philosophy finds itself in the commercial politics of the market place, where everything is determined by gross weight. But where are the scales that can weigh “the unweighable”, that which cannot be quantified because it belongs to the quality of Be-ing? And are those involved in this business of weighing the people who, as Heidegger had already explained, “glory in the shallow pools of lived experience”, for they are surely not equipped to travel “the long path of the founding of truth” (19). Nor will they be able to withstand “the brightness of lightning”, which both illuminates and threatens on that journey (21). As Heidegger tells us, “grounding grounds”. Such images from the physical world play a crucial role in the symbolic framework of Contributions, acting to secure, as in, for example, the “fissure” (Zerklüftung) and the “abyss” (Abgrund), the structural foundations of Heidegger’s thinking. Similar images are employed throughout the text. In section 6, he describes attunement as a spraying forth [Versprühung] of the trembling of Be-ing”, the “preservation of the spark, in the sense of the clearing of the There”, using a trope that imbues a cognitive disposition with the vitality of a natural force (21). The great philosophies are lauded as “towering mountains, unclimbed and unclimbable. Yet they bestow on the land its highest [peaks] and point down to its primeval stones” (187). Indeed, Heidegger’s conceptual journey in Contributions takes him through this elemental world of “sky”, “light”, and “breath”, where “the truth of Be-ing [is] only in sheltering, sheltering which grounds the ‘between’ in entities: the sundering of earth and world” (29). There is one metaphor, in particular, that encapsulates the intellectual trajectory of Heidegger’s project: the leap (Sprung). Heidegger describes it as that “most daring venture in the course of inceptual thinking, [which] jettisons and leaves behind everything conventional”, and which embodies an energetic forward momentum, the propulsion of transition (227). The

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leap, however, is not the product of a simple will to advance, to progress from one position to another. On the contrary, the leap takes place in advance of motion, as the securing of place, of position, of locus. The leap “is the extreme projection of the essence of Be-ing, which is of such a kind that we place (ourselves) in that which has already been opened up, become of firm constitution [inständig], and by being ap-propriated come to ourselves for the first time” (230). The leap transcribes a self-reflexive motion: it returns to itself: it is a movement of dis-position rather than of action. Although what is encountered may not be new, it is not alien, for the leap is also a leap of self-revelation. “The leap is the completion of the leap [Er-springung] of preparedness for the belonging to Ereignis” (235). In the leap, we stay where we are, although the “we” has changed. Heidegger’s advocacy of the other beginning in Contributions is sustained by a tone of portentousness and high solemnity, which is the solemnity both of thought and the solemnity that accompanies the belief in a mission. Religious imagery and the idiom of religious sentiment also play a major role in sustaining this belief. Heidegger’s query in section 7, “On Ereignis”, “how remote from us is the god that appoints us ones, we who ground and create because the god’s essence needs this?”, is just but one instance of a voice that is seeking to move beyond traditional philosophising into the ambit of oracular presentiment (23). It is within this context that the “future-ones” play their role. The latter represent a final moment in Heidegger’s vision, for in spite of the ethereality that surrounds them they embody the militant spirit of the other beginning, and their shadowy presence pervades Heidegger’s entire work. It is not, however, until section 248 that the future-ones find a tangible form. They are: Jene Fremdlinge gleichen Herzens, gleich entschieden für die ihnen beschiedene Schenkung und Verweigerung. Die Stabhalter der Wahrheit des Seyns, in der sich das Seiende erbaut zur einfachen Wesensherrschaft jeglichen Dinges und Atems. Die stillsten Zeugen der stillsten Stille, in der ein unvernehmlicher Ruck die Wahrheit aus der Verwirrung aller errechneten Richtigkeiten züruckdreht in ihr Wesen: das Verborgenste verborgen zu halten, die Erzitterung des Vorbeigangs der Götterentscheidung, die Wesung des Seyns. (395) [Those strangers alike in their hearts, alike in their commitment to the bestowal and the refusal that has been assigned to them. The guardians of the truth of Be-ing, in which entities are led up to the simple essential mastery of every thing and every breath. The

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Chapter 2 most silent witnesses of the most silent stillness, in which an imperceptible pull returns truth back from out of the confusion of all calculated correctness into its essence: to hold in concealment the most concealed of all, which is the trembling of the passingby of the decision of the gods, the essential occurrence of Be-ing.]

Heidegger’s voice ranges over a wide linguistic register in Contributions, from exhortation and oracular assertion (let us embrace the truth: the age of the systems is over), through to quizzicality (why Be-ing? why the gods?) and pathos (no one understands; no one comprehends), through to stringent analysis and judgement (on, for example, the dead end of thought in the modern period). Even the title of his book, “Contributions”, can be read as an example of irony (the actual work is exactly the opposite: it constitutes the critical undermining of “philosophy”). In this passage from section 248, Heidegger’s tone is elevated, elegiac even, as he evokes those who will eventually come to take possession of the other beginning. They are called Stabhalter [“guardians”, literally “rod holders”], a name given to judges and other senior officials in the medieval period, a designation that supports the atmosphere of solemnity that surrounds their comportment and actions. Heidegger sees them as the “the most quiet witnesses of the most quiet stillness”.45 The future-ones form a community of like-minded spirits, bound together as witnesses to a common cause. Not rational calculation and even less self-interest have brought them here, but conviction and feeling (“hearts”). They are spectral figures, like ceremonial officiates in a monastic order, following an ethos founded on silence and a mission, which is to hold in concealment that which is the most concealed of all: Be-ing. The future-ones do not seek to impose themselves on others; they are neither agitators nor proselytisers: they are simply part of a movement of thought through which Be-ing may return to the world. Their spiritual equipoise is reflected in Heidegger’s language in this passage: in the tranquillity and balance achieved through alliteration and through periodic formations, 45 The source of the term is Psalm 35, where David pleads to God that he should protect those who are “living quietly in the land” against “false accusations”. Heidegger may also have been thinking of the example of the adherents of the pietistic revivalist Gerhard Tersteegen who, alienated by the progressive religious movements of their time, chose to live a life of detachment in their home town, Moers, in the Wesel district of the Rhine, and were known as “The Quiet in the Land”.

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such as the chiasmus of the first sentence, and through the use of past participles without auxiliary verbs (the future is already in the present). These are techniques that establish a mood of stasis that conforms to the agency of the future-ones: to hold and to be held in concealment is a matter of what we are rather than what we do. The future-ones are the guardians of the final vision: a vision that is still as yet to be brought to fruition through words, and in a work that has charted the struggle of thought to find expression, as it moves from the first to the other beginning, it is appropriate that Heidegger should end Contributions with a meditation on language. The final section, “Language (its Origins)”, follows a section called “The Transitional Question”. There Heidegger had decided that the ultimate question relating to Be-ing had not been answered, because the question had not as yet been asked. He now asks that question: Wenn die Götter die Erde rufen und im Ruf eine Welt widerhallt und so der Ruf anklingt als Da-sein des Menschen, dann ist Sprache als geschichtliches, Geschichte gründendes Wort. Sprache und Ereignis. Aufklang der Erde, Widerklang der Welt. Streit, die ursprüngliche Bergung der Zerklüftung, weil der innigste Riß. Die offene Stelle. Sprache, ob gesprochen oder geschwiegen, die erste und weiteste Vermenschung des Seienden. So scheint es. Aber sie gerade die ursprünglichste Entmenschung des Menschen als vorhandenes Lebewesen und “Subjekt” und alles Bisherigen. Und damit Gründung des Da-seins und der Möglichkeit der Entmenschung des Seienden. Die Sprache gründet im Schweigen. Das Schweigen ist das verborgenste Maß-halten. Es hält das Maß, indem es die Maßstäbe erst setzt. Und so ist die Sprache Maß-setzung im Innersten und Weitesten, Maß-setzung als Erwesung des Fugs und seiner Fügung (Ereignis). Und sofern die Sprache Grund des Da-seins, liegt in diesem die Mäßigung und zwar als der Grund des Streites von Welt und Erde. (510) [When the gods call forth the earth and when in that call a world resounds and so the call resonates as the Da-sein of human being, then language comes to be the historical word that grounds history. Language and Ereignis. Sounding forth of the earth, resounding of the world. Strife. The originary sheltering of the fissure, because of the innermost rift. The open place. Language, whether spoken or held in silence, the first and most extensive humanising of entities. Thus it seems. But it is precisely that which is the most originary dehumanisation of man as an actual living being and “subject” and of everything that went before. And through this the grounding of Da-sein and the possibility of the dehumanisation of entities.

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Chapter 2 Language grounds in silence. Silence is the most concealed holding of measure. It holds the measure in the sense that it first sets the measure. And language is thus measuresetting for the most inward and the most expansive, a measure-setting for the attainment of the essential occurrence of the joining and its juncture (Ereignis). And insofar as language is the ground of Da-sein, there lies in Da-sein a moderation, and indeed one that is the grounding of the struggle between world and earth].

The passage contrasts two mutually exclusive conceptions of language: language as “the most originary dehumanisation of mankind as the present form of life”, which is the medium for mankind as animal rationale, who is only capable of grasping language as propositional statement, as an informational instrument; and language as it remains within “silence”, silence here understood as the terrain of inceptual thinking, which is grounded in questioning and hesitation, and in an inflexion of mind that is characterised by a reluctance to close down meaning through definition and classification. The latter is language that hears rather than speaks. For that reason, this passage is dominated by aural motifs: “calling” (rufen) and “echoing” (anklingen), re-presenting the resounding of the world as it is through presence, and Heidegger invokes the moment of kairos (“when”, “then”) in the opening words of the passage to emphasise that the time is ripe to heed its call. It is now that Ereignis must be heard, in the open place of the struggle between “world”, between the facticity of what is present, and “earth”, that which promises a ground. In such a place, language finds itself in silence, a state that sets the measure for that which is “most inward and expansive”: the attainment (Erwesung) of essence.46 As if in recognition of this attainment, the passage articulates a clear trajectory that follows the thematic line: language – silence/ silence – measure/ measure – measure/ and language – measure. “Measure” (Mass) provides the nodal term, appearing in various guises as “measure”, “measurement” and “restraint” (Mässigung). The few main verbs used in the text find themselves embedded within blocks of noun clusters that are formed through simple 46 Erwesung is a formation from Wesen, and this is its only use in the book. E/M translate it as “essential enswaying”, but this does not register its difference from “Wesen”. R/V-N recognise this difference in their translation by adding the term “originating” to “essential occurrence”. The ung suffix, however, suggests a state that has been attained by the process of Wesen rather than the source of that state.

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apposition, their ultimate meaning left undetermined. The sentiments, however, are far from vague. The tone of the passage is apodictic, magisterial even, as if a final stocktaking is being made, a clearing of the way for the future, and a further foundation established for the “ground”. Consequently, sentence construction, most notably in the opening and concluding parts of the passage, is classically firm in its subject, predicate and object form, its monumentality further underlined by the syndeton structure (the uses of “and” (und) in the final paragraph), and the two invocations of “silence” (Schweigen), which are paired through a neat chiasmus. That a work that has emphasised throughout the importance of language to its quest should end with an exordium on silence may seem paradoxical. But it is not, and it is fitting that, in a text that has extolled repetition and circularity, and has held itself distant from notions of progress and development, the key to this final section should lie 260 sections back in section 13. There we were told that silence does not mean the absence of language: on the contrary, it provides the very condition for its articulation. As Heidegger explained there, “words fail us”, but “this failing is the inceptual condition for the self-unfolding possibility of an originary, poietic, naming of Be-ing”. This can be found only in the centre of that which has, as yet, not been said. Language, and particularly the language of “philosophy”, has so far merely talked over its true subject, in words that have obscured rather than brought to light the presence of Be-ing. And Heidegger concludes his monumental work by evoking, and once again in his preferred mode of simple apposition, the ultimate goal: “language and the great silence, the simple nearness of coming to presence [Wesen] and the bright remoteness of entities, when words once again are effective. When will such a time come?” (36).

Chapter 3

Re-calling the Originary: Parmenides

To (Re)think the Beginning: In the Revealing of “Aletheia” In his Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger attempted to provide a framework for “inceptual thinking” (anfängliches Denken), thinking that allowed for the disclosure of Being, where thought was “full-appropriation and collection” (Ver-nehmung und Sammlung), a “bringing together of the concealment of that which seeks to rise to appearance and is constantly present” (GA 65: 198). For Heidegger, inceptual thinking belonged, above all, to the early Greeks, the Pre-Socratics, and it was to them that he now turned after that work. Out of their writing, he drew a cluster of concepts that came to form the basis for a new direction in his philosophy: “logos” (λόγος), the meaning of Being that has become possible through language, “phusis” (φύσις), nature as the primal coming into presence of Being, and “aletheia” (ἀλήθεια), the uncovering of the play between the hidden and hiddenness of truth. It was upon this modest conceptual foundation that Heidegger sought to affect a thinking-recall (Andenken) of the grounds of Being.1 It was to the figure of the Eleatic philosopher, Parmenides, that Heidegger initially looked for a grounding of this foundation. Heidegger had briefly discussed Parmenides in Being and Time, invoking him as the author of the line “for one and the same thing are knowing and being”, which Heidegger had interpreted as “Being is what shows itself in pure perceiving understanding, and

1

The dictionary defines Andenken as “memory” or “remembrance” but, as Heidegger explained in his 1942 lecture on Hölderlin’s hymn of the same name, Andenken is not simply something brought into the present as a “substitute for the past”. What is remembered “vaults over the present and suddenly stands in the future. It comes to meet us and is still somehow unfulfilled” (GA 52: 54).

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only this seeing reveals Being”, words that he had used as a point of reference for his own project of ontological recovery. It was not, however, until a series of lectures given at the University of Freiburg in the winter semester of 1942–1943 that Heidegger moved Parmenides into the centre of his work.2 In these lectures, he focused on Parmenides’ poem “On Nature” (“Peri Phusis”), the only surviving text from that philosopher’s work, composed between 470 and 460 BC, a fragment consisting of nineteen stanzas in three disconnected sections, written in dactylic hexameters, some only a few lines long. The first section of that work, the proem, describes a youth (possibly a youthful Parmenides) ascending by chariot to a goddess in her heavenly mansion.3 When the youth arrives, he is greeted by the deity, who exhorts him to choose the path of true thinking in his life. The Greek text, lines 28–32, reads, Χρεὼ δέ σε πάντα πυθέσθαι ἠμέν Ἀληθείης εὐκυκλέος ἀτρεμὲς ἦτορ ἠδὲ βροτῶν δόξας, ταῖς οὐκ ἔνι πίστις ἀληθής. Ἀλλ΄ ἔμπης καὶ ταῦτα μαθήσεαι, ὡς τὰ δοκοῦντα χρῆν δοκίμως εἶναι διὰ παντὸς πάντα περῶντα. (Diels 30)

Heidegger provides the following translation: Not aber ist, daß du alles erfährst, sowohl der Unverborgenheit [aletheia], der wohlumringenden, unverstellendes Herz, als auch das den Sterblichen scheinende Erscheinen, dem nicht einwohnt Verlaß auf das Unverborgene. Doch gleichwohl auch dieses wirst du erfahren lernen, wie das Scheinende (in der Not) gebraucht bleibt, scheinmäßig zu sein, indem es durch alles hindurchscheint und (also) auf solche Weise alles vollendet. (GA 54: 6)

2

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Manfred Frings, who prepared the lectures for publication in the Gesamtausgabe, has argued that Heidegger’s lecture course deviates so substantially from its proposed topic that designating it as a study of Parmenides is misleading: “long stretches of the lecture hardly deal with Parmenides himself, and Heidegger seems to get lost in a number of areas that do, prima facie, appear to be irrelevant to Parmenides” (15). But, as Robert Goff points out, “rather than trying to understand a thinker [Parmenides] on his own terms, Heidegger is trying to take up a thinker’s quest”, which provides the context for his own project (62). For a reading that establishes parallels with Parmenides’ own journey of intellectual discovery, see Palmer (50–51).

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[It is, however, necessary for you to experience everything, both the stable heart of well-enclosing unconcealment [aletheia], as well as the manifesting that manifests itself to mortals, who are not accustomed to set great store by the unconcealed. Also this, however, you will learn to experience: how manifesting (when it is necessary) remains called upon to make use of the mere apparent, while it manifests itself through everything and (thus) in that way brings everything to perfection.]

Parmenides’ poem has been read as an allegory of an “ontological education”: “the youth is to learn how to think properly according to the divine; his thinking will be removed from mortal thinking and brought to think ‘to eon’ [‘Being’] properly” ( Jacobs 188). He will achieve this by learning from the goddess what truth, “aletheia”, means. Consequently, Heidegger explores during the course of his lectures the nature of that concept, explicating its past uses, literary and philosophical, in an attempt to establish its foundational centrality to “inceptual thinking”. The first lecture, a discussion of the goddess “Aletheia”, is followed by an enquiry into the conditions required to regain contact with the originary meaning of truth as “aletheia”, and a disquisition on how the methods of conventional translation are insufficient to achieve this. In his second and third lectures, he discusses the various forms of “aletheia” as “unconcealedness” (Unverborgenheit), and how these manifest themselves in “forgetting”. This is followed by an analysis of the conflicting notions of “truth” in Greek and Latin, and a critique of the historical dominance of the latter in Western culture. The fourth and fifth lectures focus on “the multiplicity of the opposites of unconcealedness”, notably those connected with “lethe”. In the lecture that follows, Heidegger exhorts us to return to the “rich essence of concealedness” and, in furtherance of this, to be prepared to make contact with “aletheia” through hand and eye, as we open ourselves, as the Greeks did through their art and literature, to the experience of the “uncanny” (Ungeheuer). Parmenides concludes with two lectures that chart the movement of “aletheia” into the “open and free space of Being”, before concluding with a return to the journey that the hero of the poem has undertaken. Parmenides has none of the monumentality of Heidegger’s earlier works: it possesses neither the taxonomic methodology of Being and Time nor the proselytising ambitions of Contributions to Philosophy. It is both

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a more intimate and less daunting text. The lecture format facilitates an expository clarity in Heidegger’s language: there is no slackening of theoretical vigour, but there is a greater ease and latitude in its articulation. Certainly, Heidegger is aware of the epochal significance of what he is advancing: the need to reinstall inceptual thinking to Western philosophy, a cause that he advances with some urgency, for “a moment of history is approaching” that will force us to rethink the basis of thought (241). But we must start not with systems, new or old, nor with elaborate theories that seek to rewrite the conditions of our understanding of the world, but more modestly with words, single words, those fundamental concepts of the “immediate self-expression of the Greek experience” (37). Consequently, compared with his earlier works, grammar and syntax in Parmenides are simpler, and the neo-logistic coinages that had enthused Being and Time are absent. Concepts that required extensive methodological and definitional deliberation in that work are here used largely according to their dictionary meanings, allowing an accessibility that is supported by a tone of familiarity that is established through the frequent use of the pronouns “I” and “we”, in order to include the reader or listener in the journey of discovery. And Heidegger’s impressive erudition appears in a more modest and facilitating guise: his references to other philosophers are brief and focused, and largely made to lend support, in the way of exempla, to the demonstration of specific points and, significantly, many are drawn from literary rather than philosophical sources. Parmenides has been described as a “lecture course [that] proceeds in circles”.4 Circularity, however, is the essential medium of inceptual thinking because, as Heidegger had already made clear in his Contributions to Philosophy, inceptual thinking does not progress along the sequential lines of analytic philosophy, where hypothesis is followed by logical demonstration in the mode of a linear exposition. Inceptual thinking is “essentially of another kind and distinct from the knowledge of the sciences and from any kind of practical knowledge” (10). It emerges through exploration and investigation, through a confrontation and challenging of the object of its

4

“The lecturer seems to introduce new themes again and again, quickly digressing from each only to return to some, but not to all, of them” (Heller 247).

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enquiry, wresting significance from what may otherwise be impervious to analysis or explication. For “‘truth’ is never ‘in itself ’ available by itself, but must be gained by struggle. Unconcealment is wrested from concealment, in a conflict with it”. “The task is to experience properly the conflict occurring within the essence of truth” (25). Heidegger’s goal is to trace “aletheia” back to its originary articulation, for “essential thinking must always say only the same, the old, the oldest, the inceptual, and must say it inceptually” (114). This is not, however, a case of a mere retrospective rapprochement, as if the thought of the present is simply recouping the thought of the past. Such temporal divisions are illusionary. Chronology may belong to the formation of thought (we cannot deny that Parmenides wrote in time before Heidegger), but it tells us nothing about the Being of thought. The beginning does not lie in the past: the beginning is now and in the future. And “because it is not something that belongs to the past but is in advance of what is to come, the originary again and again turns out to be precisely a gift to an epoch” (1–2). Heidegger does not, therefore, seek to provide an account of the thought of the Eleatic philosopher in the manner of a scholarly study: he is not thinking about Parmenides; he is attempting to think through him. Heidegger must follow the track of the unspoken, which leads out of Parmenides and then back again towards him. This cannot simply involve an interpretation of Parmenides’ words. In accordance with his project of philosophic renewal, Heidegger must himself think the originary presence of thinking, removing, through an activity of etymological recovery, the patina of false meaning that has accrued through time to the words.5 What must be attempted is the recovery of the expressive range of those words as they were used in their original environment, within the conceptual and linguistic framework peculiar to the Greeks, committing ourselves to “thinking Greek thought in a Greek fashion” (GA 5: 336). It is

5

“Etymology” has its own etymology, deriving from “etemos” meaning “true”, and “logos” meaning “word” or “language”, or, in this case, “study”. Etymology is a practice of semantic recovery that represents, a search for “historical depth”: it is an attempt “to hear being in words when they are spoken” (King 282 and 284). For Goff, etymological translations are “proposals for speaking”, by which he means that such translations open up for the reader a space for interpretation that is not there when the word is confined to its modern dictionary definition (62).

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a task of expansion and reconstruction: a creative re-reading of the past for a creative philosophy for the future. Heidegger calls this approach to language “heedfulness” (Achtsamkeit), which has little in common with what we understand by “translation”. Whereas translations often modify the nuances and complexities of the original meaning of words in accordance with contemporary usage, heedfulness seeks to engage with words as if we are encountering them for the first time. Heidegger foregrounds the difference between the two approaches by making a distinction between “übersetzen”, the normal meaning of “to translate”, and “übersetzen”. The latter does not represent a conversion into an equivalent but a conveying or ferrying over of something to another place of meaning, a translation, in effect (something that is reflected in the Latin derivation of “translation”, which comes from the past participle of transferre, meaning “to carry over” or “to carry across”). As Heidegger explains, “these newborn words transport us [setzen uns] every time over [über] to a new shore. So-called translation [Übersetzen] and paraphrase always come after and follow upon the transporting [Übersetzen] of our whole Being into the realm of a transformed truth. Only if we are already appropriated by this transposing [Übersetzen] are we in the care of the word” (18).6 In Parmenides, Heidegger begins his exercise of originary recovery with “aletheia”. As he explains in his first lecture, “what the Greeks name ‘aletheia’, we ordinarily ‘translate’ with the word ‘truth’”, but this translation “consists simply in patterning our word so that it corresponds with the Greek word”, and hence fails to capture the graduations of meaning and the connotations 6

As Heidegger writes elsewhere, a translation is faithful “only when its terms are words that speak from the language of the subject matter itself ”, adding that a translator (and a reader) should be “governed by the knowledge of what in early times was thought or thinkable in such a choice [of words], as distinct from what the prevailing notions of recent times might find in them” (GA 5: 322 and 339–340). Heidegger does not “refer to the correctness of a translation, but rather to its honesty or legitimacy, which is decided in terms of whether access to the thought of the author of the text is gained in translating” (Groth 123). As Marcus Zisselsberger notes, this form of translation involves understanding what is possible within one’s own language and, as such, “seeks to respond to the ‘claim’ of language itself ” (313).

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that the word possessed for its first users (16).7 These connotations can only be recovered by returning to the mode of experience out of which the Greeks and, in particular, Parmenides, formed the word. This is no easy task, for in his poem Parmenides never moves beyond an allegorical mode: the meaning of “aletheia” remains, ultimately, a mystery. As Heidegger later queried, “who or what is ‘Aletheia’? Parmenides names her. His thoughtful telling speaks from out of a listening to her address. […] And yet, Parmenides does not interrogate the essence of ‘Aletheia’. He no more asks about the essential provenance of ‘Aletheia’ than does any other Greek thinker. Yet presumably they all […] think everywhere under the umbrella and protection of ‘Aletheia’ in the sense of the unconcealment of that which is present in the presencing” (Heidegger in Jacobs 180).8 In Parmenides, however, Heidegger does ask the essential question regarding the provenance of “Aletheia” as “aletheia”, the goddess as the principle of truth, and begins to answer the question by considering which of two German words, Entbergung [uncovering] or Unverborgenheit

7

8

That Heidegger was highly selective in his reading of the term “aletheia” (indeed, in his reading of Greek terms in general) has been frequently argued. Arthur W. H. Adkins prefers “interpretation” to “translation” to describe Heidegger’s approach (233). Adkins bases his criticisms on the views of the historian of philosophy Paul Friedländer, according to whom “aletheia” has “nothing to do with the hiddenness of being” but rather means “non-crooked, not-falsified, not-diluted”. In Friedländer’s opinion, the initial “a” should not be seen as a privative because it does not represent a taking-back of the stem “lethe”, arguing that “aletheia” is closer to the modern concept of “truth” than Heidegger would have us believe (229). Friedländer, however, draws his examples exclusively from Being and Time, and does not register the far more complex presentation of “aletheia” in Parmenides. The terms of the debate are rehearsed in Nwodo (1979). Scholars of Greek have, on the whole, sided with Heidegger. See for example, Boeder (1959) and Helting (1997). Palmer suggests that rather than translate “aletheia” with “truth”, the substantive and its adjective “are better translated as ‘reality’ and as ‘real’ or ‘genuine’, or if it is truth it is ‘truth’ only in the sense of what is ‘true reality’”. This is, indeed, the inflection that Heidegger wishes us to hear in the word (89 and 91). Translation modified. Heidegger, in fact, answers his own query shortly afterwards in his essay on “Moira”, where he returns once again to what Parmenides leaves unsaid. As Heidegger points out there, Parmenides’ contemporaries would have needed neither the mythic background nor the exact meaning of the goddess to have been explained (GA 7: 252).

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[un-concealedness], comes closer to the Greek original. The Ent prefix of the former suggests precisely that moment of emerging-diverging movement that Heidegger sees as the essence of “aletheia”, and the fact that the primary meaning of Entbergung is connected to salvaging (Bergung) further supports the idea of something being wrested from a state of potential loss. “Unconcealedness” (Unverborgenheit), nevertheless, is ultimately chosen, both because it gives fuller expression to the quality of hiddenness and concealment that are the standard meanings of verborgen in German, and because it retains the un prefix, which is the more accurate reconstruction of the privative “a-” in the original Greek.9 In his third lecture, Heidegger describes what he understands by unconcealedness: “first, un-concealedness refers to concealment. Concealment hence pervades the inceptual essence of truth. Secondly, un-concealedness indicates that truth has been wrenched from concealment and is in conflict with it. The inceptual essence of truth is conflictual, although what ‘conflict’ means here remains an open question. Thirdly, un-concealedness, in accordance with the above-mentioned definitions, refers to a realm of ‘oppositions’ in which ‘truth’ stands” (38). In the lectures that follow, Heidegger seeks to explicate the manifold domain in which unconcealedness moves, for “the Greeks experienced and expressed concealment in many ways, not only within the sphere of their everyday engagement with and observation of things, but also from the ultimate perspective of forms of Being as a whole. Death, night, day, light, the earth, the subterranean and the super-terranean are pervaded by disclosure and concealment and remain embedded in this essence. Emergence into the unconcealed and submergence into concealment dwell inceptually everywhere” (99). Unconcealment is the way in which the world presents itself in a form that allows us to experience the revealing-withdrawing of “aletheia”, which must always be won out of its absence. But because such absence has traditionally been viewed as a negativity, as something that is not, the productive component of “lethe” in “aletheia”, the counter concept to “aletheia” associated with the stem “lath”, has not been recognised. This, however, is not an

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Heidegger makes it clear, however, that “the ‘a-’ in ‘a-letheia’ in no way simply represents an undetermined universal ‘un-’” (GA 54: 183).

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irreparable loss, for we are already familiar with the content of “un-truth”, and know that much can be wrung from what appears on the surface to be purely negative. As Heidegger observes, the productive component of “lethe” was found by the Greeks in many common experiences and everyday mental states, such as “lanthanomai” (λανθάνομaι). Its standard translation in English is “to forget”, but for the Greeks “lanthanomai” was not the function of a state of the mind, simply related to the non-recollection of the past, but an existential dimension of thinking selfhood, and in his second lecture, citing its use in Homer’s Odyssey, Book 8, Heidegger subjects the core component of the word and its related forms to detailed analysis: “first of all, we need a clarification of ‘lanthanein’. ‘Lanthanou’ means ‘I am concealed’. The aorist participle of this verb is ‘lathoon’, ‘lathon’. Here we find the counter-word to ‘alethes’ that we have been looking for. ‘Lathon’ is the form of Being that is concealed” (33). “Lanthanomai” is the middle voice of that word, a tense that in English would occupy a space between the subjunctive mood and the present participle, suggesting the fluidity of movement rather than the fixed nature of a definite state.10 In his third lecture, Heidegger explores in detail its etymology: Thought in the Greek manner, “lanthanomai” means this: I am concealed from myself in relation to something that would otherwise be unconcealed to me. The latter is, for its part, concealed, just as I am in my relation to it. The form of Being sinks away into concealment in such a manner that with this concealment of Being I remain concealed from myself. Moreover, this concealment is itself concealed. Something similar occurs when we say: I have forgotten such and such. In forgetting not only does something slip away from us, but the forgetting slips into concealment, and in such a way that we ourselves fall into concealedness, precisely in our relation to what is forgotten. Therefore, the Greeks say more precisely “epilanthanomai” in order to

10

The middle voice in Greek has a flexibility that is able to “fluctuate between intransitive notions of entering into a state or condition or activity, and transitive notions indicative of actions being performed upon the grammatical subject” (Conrad), eliding the distinction between active and passive. “Epilanthanomai” describes something well beyond a simple mental mechanism, meaning “to cause to forget a thing”, “to let a thing escape one, to forget, to lose thought of ” (Liddell and Scott 295). As Thomas Cole remarks, regarding the root word, “lanthano”, “the distinction between unintentional forgetting or failure to notice and intentional ignoring is not strictly observed” (8).

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Heidegger’s reading of “lanthanoumai” is not intended as a study in cognitive psychology: he is not seeking to advance a theory that would explain why we forget; he is providing a phenomenological account of the place of forgetting in our loss of a sense of Being. Throughout the passage, “forgetting” and “concealment” are played off against one another to extend the meanings of both in a development that reaches its goal in “epilanthanomai”, which means not only for something to escape a person’s notice, be hidden, be unnoticed or cause to forget; it also embraces the seemingly paradoxical mechanism of forgetting “wilfully”. Within this context, forgetting means not only not being in possession of an object of knowledge; it also means losing oneself as a subject: when we forget the world, we are led into a concealment of ourselves.11 It is precisely this non-directed quality of forgetting that Heidegger is attempting to capture in the passage: the fact that it emerges out of a state of Being called oblivion (Vergessenheit [literally “forgottenness”]), which is related to “lethe”, from “letho”, meaning “I escape notice”, “I am hidden”, but also “I am sleepy”. As he explains in his fifth lecture, “forgetting itself occurs already in oblivion. If we forget something, we are no longer with it, but instead we are already ‘away’, ‘drawn to one side’. If, in forgetting, we were still with the thing, then we could and would have to always retain what is forgotten, and then forgetting would never happen at all. Forgetting must already have pushed us out of our own essential realm, so that we can no longer dwell with that which is to fall into oblivion” (120–121). Oblivion would seem to constitute the final abyss of “lethe”, being not only (as in the passage above) a forgetting but a forgetting of forgetting, in which all traces of selfhood are expunged. But yet even here, Heidegger wishes us to see that the negative must also contain a positive, and he concludes

11

In other words, “‘Lanthanestai’ does not mean ‘to forget’ in the modern sense of a ‘subject’ forgetting an object. Rather, it implies that what has been forgotten ‘sinks’ into the concealment in such a manner that the one forgetting himself sinks into concealment. He who thusly forgets is concealed from and to himself and simultaneously in regard to what he forgets” (Frings 25).

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his analysis with the following observation: “this complexity of veiling and letting-disappear makes manifest unequivocally enough the provenance of the essence of ‘lethe’. Its form is nocturnal. The night veils. But the night does not necessarily conceal by drawing everything into the blackness of mere darkness. Rather, the essence of its veiling consists in the fact that it relegates things and people, and both in their relationship to one another, to the abode of concealment” (130). What borders “lethe”, providing not only its parameters of intelligibility but also its generative potential, are time and space. These categories had typically formed the focus of metaphysical systems such as the Kantian, but Heidegger wishes to move back before these systems to explain what they meant to the Greeks. In his eighth lecture, he quotes two short lines from a work by Sophocles: “for the broad, incalculable sweep of time lets emerge everything that is not open, but also that which has appeared it conceals (again) in itself ” (Sophocles, Ajax, V, lines 646–647) (209). Heidegger then analyses the quotation in detail, beginning with the word “kruptesthai”, “to hide”, before moving on to his central concern: “kronos”, “time”: “Kruptesthai” means: to take back into oneself, to hide back into oneself, to hide back into oneself and conceal. This is the way that “kronos”, “time”, conceals. “Time” is inceptually for the Greeks always and only the “right” or “wrong” time, the appropriate or inappropriate time. That means each form of Being has its time. “Time” is in every case the “time in which” this or that occurs, i.e. the “point in time”, which does not mean the “punctual now” but the “point” in the sense of the place, the locality, to which an appearance in its appearing belongs temporally at any “time”. “Time” is here not a “series” or “sequence” of indifferent “now-points”. On the contrary, time is something that in its way bears forms of Beings, releases them and takes them back. (209)

“Kronos” has nothing in common with our modern understanding of time as linear progression, the “before”, “now” and “after” of the chronological. “Kronos” for the Greeks meant time as an absolute of the now, what we might call (although Heidegger would not have accepted the Latin base of this term) “the occasion”, which is not simply an immediacy but a particular type of immediacy, that moment where Being is allowed to manifest itself. Time is that which makes possible the oscillating emergence of truth, because that is how Heidegger understands “aletheia”, as an unfolding of what does and yet does not appear. It is a generative process, and, in one remarkable

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passage, Heidegger brings “kruptesthai” into alignment with “phusis”: both allow the phenomenal world to emerge into plenitude: Doch “kruptesthai”, in sich züruckverbergen, kann die Zeit nur das, was erschienen ist: “phanenta” – das Erschienene. Das Anwesende, Seiende, das durch den “Fortriß” der Zeit in die Abwesenheit verborgen wird, ist hier vom Erscheinen her gefaßt. Das Erschienene und Erscheinende ist aber nur, was es ist, sofern es hervorkommt und aufgeht. Solches muß daher wesen, was das Erscheinende aufgehen läßt: Die “phusis”, “phuein” (vgl. Oben “lethe” – Mythos) wird gesagt von der Erde “i ge phei” – die Erde läßt hervorgehen. Man übersetzt “phuein” oft und auch richtig mit “wachsen”, aber man vergißt dabei, dieses “Werden” und “Wachsen” griechisch zu denken als ein Hervorgehen aus der Verborgenheit des Keimes und der Wurzel im Dunkel der Erde an das Licht des Tages. Auch wir sagen noch, freilich mehr nur in einer Redewendung: Die Zeit bringt es an den Tag; jedes Ding braucht (zu seinem Hervorkommen) seine Zeit. Das “phuein” der “phusis”, das Aufgehenlassen und Aufgehen, läßt das Aufgehende in das Unverborgene erscheinen. (211–212) [Thus time can “kruptesthai”, hide back into itself, only what has appeared: the “phanenta” – that which has appeared. That which is coming into presence, those forms of Being, which through the “sweep” of time are hidden in absence, are grasped here by appearance. What appears and has appeared, however, are what they are only insofar as they come forth and emerge. Something must, therefore, have come to presence [wesen] allowing what is appearing to emerge: “phusis”, “phuein” (see above “lethe”–myth) is said of the earth, “i ge phei” – the earth lets come forth. We often and quite rightly translate “phein” as “growing”, but in doing so forget to think this “becoming” and “growing” in the Greek manner, as a coming forth out of the concealedness of the germ and out of the root in the darkness of the earth into the light of the day. Even now we still say (although, to be sure, only as a figure of speech): time will bring it into the light of day: every thing needs (in order to come forth) its time. The “phuein” of “phusis”, the letting come forth and the emergence, lets what is emerging appear in the unconcealed.]

“Lethe” partakes of the darkness of oblivion, but it does so in the form of a productivity, even of a reproductivity, that has its source in “phusis”, the driving fecundity of nature. Aufgehen, which appears throughout the passage, is the pivotal word, its rich connotations making it possible for Heidegger to draw the generative components of emerging “phusis” into a system of relations. As a verb, aufgehen means not only “to open” and “to unfold”, as, for example, a flower would, or “to sprout”, hence the reference to root. It also means “to dawn”, as in the breaking of day, and in human activities for people to be “taken

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up by”, fully absorbed in something, to the point where the subject of the action loses its individual identity and dissolves into something else. Heidegger retains all of these senses of the word in his description of how time makes possible the becoming and growing out of the darkness of “lethe”, as something that will have presence in the light of day, indeed, as that which involves a bringing to light. For, as he concludes, it is “phusis”, understood as that primal urge of an activity that lets what is emerging appear in the unconcealed. The passage is formed around verbs of movement such as (to give them in their infinitive form) “to appear” (erscheinen), “to come forth” (hervorkommen) and “to emerge” (aufgehen). They reflect the temporal mode in which aletheia comes to presence, which is never something static, a monolithic and immobile truth confronting an equally monolithic and immobile non-truth. Aletheia is a process of revelation that moves gradually between darkness and light, and Heidegger’s writing in this passage seems to reflect this. The sentences flow with subordinating clauses and supple syntax, as Heidegger attempts, adding one organicist image to another, to find ever greater shades of meaning for the “becoming” of truth through time. This emergence of “aletheia”, as an oscillation between self-appearance and self-concealment, leads Heidegger to bring into the centre of his account the mechanism that above all makes that experience possible: “looking” (Blicken). Sight is crucial to the human encounter with “lethe”.12 In an earlier lecture, he had noted that in “ordinary seeing”, which is moulded by an “impatience of seeing”, we neglect the world as it presents itself to us in its immediacy, in the local vibrancy of the here and now, because we seek to filter what we see as information. This leads us to close, occlude, limit what we allow ourselves to see. The result is not simply an impoverishment of our visual engagement with the world, but the relegation of our selfhood to a delimiting space, where we no longer recognise ourselves within the world because we are unconscious of our viewing (201). “Looking” for the Greeks meant something much greater. The Greeks were “visual people” (Augenmenschen) (215), and in lecture 8 Heidegger describes in greater detail what “looking” meant for the Greeks:

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For further discussion of the use of “aletheia” as the object of verbs of perception, see Cole (24).

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The common Greek word for “seeing” was “horáō” (ὁράω), a grasping of the material reality through sight. “Theaomai” (θεάομαι), however, meant to view the object world in a contemplative, meditative fashion (“to behold” it), in a way that allowed a bond to be established between viewer and the viewed. It was an activity that took them beyond the notion of consciousness as a privileged mode of engaging with the world, for “anything resembling the self-certitude of the self-conscious subject is alien to the Greek spirit” (27). The subject-object division of the metaphysical tradition, “I am here; that is there”, belongs purely to the modern period does not allow for the complex way that objects enter our vision and are understood, because objects, as Heidegger had demonstrated in Being and Time, are not simply a part of our world; they also are a part of us as we use them or move around them. “Theaomai” is not something that exhausts its agency in a mapping of “subjective” vision onto “objective” things, because the self in “theaomai” is not the self of wilful imposition. Looking is the medium through which the looker places him or herself in the world, and comes to know that self in the form of “self-showing” (sich-zeigend). This looking-self exists as an openness that allows the perceiver to attain self-understanding in a process of recognition with the world. It is this activity that forms the centre of the experience of “aletheia”, where “truth” must be understood not in static terms, as something that is simply there, but as a movement across perceiver and perceived “that can go on infinitely, in some unknown way, into the objectless” (232 and 234).

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For the Greeks, “looking” was to gaze into thinking about what is possible in the world, and Heidegger describes the destination for this gazing as “the open” (Offene). As he explains in lecture 8, “the open is the light of the self-luminous. We name it ‘the free’ and its essence ‘freedom’” (221). In the openness “everything, particularly the mutually related, comes into shining. Lighting is, therefore, more than illuminating, and also more than uncovering”. Lighting not only reveals; it structures, “it not only illuminates what is present but gathers it together and secures it in advance in presencing” (283 and 285). The open has an inceptual quality that was alien to metaphysical thinking, and to the model of the animal rationale that it has given rise to. It was not, however, alien to a quite different form of thinking that embodied for the Greeks the plenitude of looking: art. It is in Greek art that Heidegger finds the completion of “theaomai”. For the Greeks, art was not a product of cultural taste, but the bringing into material form of the unconcealedness of Being: it represented the holy, the divine and gave substantive presence to the “immanence of the gods”, the self-opening of Being, its arrival in the world (170).13 For, in spite of its pull to transcendence, Greek art (most notably in its tragic drama) takes us not further away from the immediate presence of the world but closer to it making us aware of the innate strangeness, the extra-ordinary, the awe-provoking qualities of that which resides in the darkness of concealment, which some might designate as the “Other”, and which Heidegger, drawing upon the Greek “daimonion”, calls “the uncanny” (Ungeheuer) (175). The uncanny forms the focus of lecture 6. Here, Heidegger comments on a phrase in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics describing “daimonion” (δαιμόνιον), which Aristotle viewed as embodying the excessive, the astounding, the macabre, everything that went beyond what is geheur, namely that which does not remain within the limits of Being, within probability and the self-evident (148).14 Those who are at 13

14

As Heidegger observes in his “The Origin of the Work of Art” essay, “insofar as a work [of art] is a work, it makes space for spaciousness. Making space means here specifically: to liberate the free space for openness and to establish it in its structure” (GA 5: 31). According to Wahrig, Deutsches Wörterbuch, “geheur” comes from the Middle High German gehiure, meaning sanft, behaglich [soft, cosy].

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home in the world do not see beyond this placid surface; they only see forms of Being but they do not see Being. The latter remains concealed. However: Wo dagegen das Sein in den Blick kommt, da meldet sich das Nicht-Geheure, das “über” das Geheure wegschwingende Überschwängliche, das durch die Erklärungen aus dem Seienden nicht Erklärbare: das Un-geheure, wörtlich verstanden und nicht in dem sonst geläufigen Sinne, wonach es eher das Riesige und Noch-nie-Dagewesene meint. Denn das recht verstandene Un-geheure ist weder riesig noch winzig, weil mit dem Maß der sogenannten “Ausmaße” überhaupt nicht zu messen. Das Un-geheure ist auch nicht das Noch-nie-Dagewesene, sondern das immer schon und im voraus vor allen “Ungeheuerlichkeiten” Wesende. Das Un-geheure als das in alles Geheure, d.h. das Seiende, hereinscheinende Sein, das in seinem Scheinen oft nur wie ein lautlos ziehender Wolkenschatten das Seiende streift, hat nichts Monströses und Lärmendes. Das Un-geheure ist das Einfache, Unscheinbare, für die Greifzange des Willens Ungreifbare, allen Künsten der Rechnung Sichentziehende, weil alles Planen Überholende. (149–150) [But, on the other hand, where Being comes to sight, there the non-commonplace announces itself, the excessive thing that soars “beyond” the ordinary, that which is not to be explained by explaining forms of Being. This is the uncanny, literally understood and not in the otherwise usual sense, according to which it means rather the immense and that which-has-never-been-present-before. For, the uncanny, correctly understood, is neither immense nor tiny, since it is not to be measured at all with the measure of so-called “measurement”. The uncanny is also not that which-has-neverbeen-present-before, but that which has always been present in advance of all “uncanniness”. The uncanny, as that which is in everything commonplace, that is the Being that shines into forms of Being, and in its shining often grazes forms of Being like the shadow of a cloud silently passing by, has nothing in common with the monstrous or the alarming. The uncanny is the simple, the insignificant, that which is ungraspable by the claws of the will, that which withdraws itself from all artifices of calculation, because it surpasses all planning.]

Ungeheuer conventionally translates as “immense”, “monstrous”, “dreadful”, qualities that pertain to the alien, to what is threatening, to that which does not “belong”, to the “uncanny”, in short. It is a phenomenon that has historically been banished into a distant otherness by the mechanics of measurement and proportion, those “artifices of calculation” that have so bedevilled the Western mind. Heidegger argues that strangeness, that which comes out of “lethe”, belongs naturally to us, and he chooses

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the formation Un-geheure to describe it, submitting the meaning of the word geheuer in this passage to a series of neo-logistic transformations, where it appears as the “not-canny” (Nicht-Geheure), the “canny” (that which is known to us, the Geheure), “Uncanniness” (Ungeheurlichkeiten, here given in its plural form) and the “un-canny” (Un-geheure) itself, and Heidegger hyphenates the word to stress what it is not. All of these terms testify to the ineluctable presence of the Other in the midst of the everyday world. For the uncanny precedes uncanniness: it is already with us. In Heidegger’s reading of the term, the ungeheuer is “lethe” freed of its obscurity, and in that freeing Being emerges, if only in a moment of a brief shadowy presence. The uncanny is that which concealment has occluded and, for those who face it, it is a matter of receptivity rather than analysis: the uncanny is lighted-darkness, the something else that is familiar but not quite understood, and it is experienced, as Heidegger points out at the beginning of this passage, through the gaze that opens into “aletheia”. The uncanny belongs to humankind, not in the form of a purely internalised component of selfhood, as a private spirit, the inner voice or “daimonion” found in Platonic-Socratic writing, nor as “conscience”, as it appears in Christian thinking, but as a form of selfhood that has expanded into the Other and has accepted unconcealedness. In their grasping of the otherness of “aletheia”, the Greeks allowed the gods to appear, a fact that Heidegger excavates from the alignment of “seeing” (“thein”) with “god” (“theos”) (154). “In the Greek experience it is mankind, and only it, that is in essence and according to the essence of ‘aletheia’, the god-sayer. Why this is the case can only be contemplated and understood from out of the essence of ‘aletheia’, to the extent that the latter prevails in advance throughout the essence of Being itself, throughout the essence of divinity and the essence of humanity, and throughout the essence of the relation of Being to man and of man to forms of Being” (166). This is the reason why Parmenides’ youth has made his journey to the higher realm of the divinity. “‘Aletheia’ is ‘thea’, ‘goddess’” (240). She is “the destination toward which the inceptual thinker is underway” (242), namely to the home of the goddess, the point of departure for the course of thinking that bears out all relations to Being, the first place on the journey of thinking, and its last.

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Regno: The Discourse of Domination: Latin Heidegger must struggle in Parmenides to find adequate words to describe “aletheia”, not only because the word is internally complex, but because its meaning has been obscured by definitions of “truth” inherited from a culture and language that for centuries dominated the thinking of the Western mind: Latin. It was a language with which he had formed a relationship, both personal and scholarly. Latin was both the language of Heidegger’s Catholic faith as a child, and the lingua franca of his first course of study: theology.15 Latin provided a medium in which the young Heidegger worked as a matter of course, a medium that allowed him in his earliest work, such as the student essay “The Problem of Reality in Modern Philosophy” (“Der Realitätsproblem in der modernen Philosophie”), a discussion of Bishop Berkeley’s principle of esse-percipi [to be is to be perceived], and the book review “Through Death into Life” (“Per Mortem ad Vitam”), a review of the memoir, Bekendelse [Confession] of the modernist Danish writer, Johannes Jørgensen, to move at will between the discourses of the liturgical and the philosophical. These two modes merge in the short prose work, “Reflections on All Soul’s Day” (“Allerseelenstimmungen”, 1909). Its narrative depicts the inner turmoils of a young man who, suffering from the confusions and the turpitude brought about by the collapse of values in the age of modernity, flees, in an attempt to still his mind, into a church where a requiem mass (invoked in the story as a synecdoche of religious faith) is being performed. During the course of the mass, the young man is brought to recognise that those rationalistic, calculating, purely self-focused paradigms of the modern mind will not help him out of his plight. The concluding words of the story, Huis ergo parce Deus [Therefore, Oh God, spare him], taken from the Dies irae section of the mass, are intended to offer solace not only to the young man, but to all who seek a path out of the travails of modernity (2004 18–21). 15

Although Heidegger’s debt to the Greek language has been well documented, there is little scholarship on Heidegger’s use of Latin. This is all the more remarkable given the extensive body of secondary literature on his relationship with the tradition of Scholasticism. As examples of the latter, see Caputo (1982) and McGrath (2006).

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Latin was the language of medieval scholasticism, and it was in this area that Heidegger chose to work for his postdoctoral dissertation, The Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus (Die Kategorien-und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus). Here, Heidegger applied the methodologies of the Marburg Neo-Kantians, Emil Lask and Heinrich Rickert, to medieval logic, in an attempt to make visible the complicated and largely untheorised interrelationship between language, logic and metaphysics that had underscored scholasticism. That applying this analytical perspective to scholasticism would eventually lead Heidegger to adopt a more critical position on its philosophical foundations is clear from a review that he published at this time of one of the standard theological textbooks of this period: Joseph Gredt’s Elementa Philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae. Taking issue with Gredt’s formulaic account of the Thomist tradition, Heidegger argues that theology has nothing to offer modern philosophy when it is presented as a “settled summary of doctrinal theses”. If theology is to retain its philosophical integrity, it must be seen as “a continuous struggle for truth”, where questions matter as much as answers (2004 155). And he draws a clear conclusion: “scholastic logic should be set free from its rigidity and supposed finality” (GA 16: 29). In his “Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle”: Report on the Hermeneutical Situation” (“Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristotles: Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation”), known as the “Natorp Report” (“Natorp Bericht”), Heidegger significantly deepened his critical position on scholasticism. As he made clear there: What is initially necessary is that we understand the exegeses and commentaries of medieval theology (i.e. its scholarly structure) as interpretations of life conveyed in a particular mode. Theological anthropology needs to be traced back to its founding philosophical experiences and motives, so that with reference to them we can make sense of the force of influence and the kind of transformation that issues from the particular basic religious and dogmatic positions of their time. (2005 370)

The “Natorp Report” has been seen as “an act of defiance” (McGrath 9), and it might be argued that this act of defiance formed the starting point for Heidegger’s first major work, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927). Throughout this work, Heidegger subjects the metaphysical heritage of Western philosophy to a critical analysis. Scholasticism was part of this

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tradition, and Heidegger takes issue with one of its central epistemological tenets: its version of truth as the principle of adaequatio intellectus et rei. This principle, which had originated in Aristotle’s Metaphysics to receive further elaboration in the Summa Theologica of Aquinas, contended that “the intellect of the knower must be adequate to the thing”, and rested on two assertions: “1. The ‘locus’ of truth is the proposition (judgement); 2. The essence of truth lies in the ‘agreement’ of the judgement with its object” (GA 2: 284). The “Prima Pars”, Question 16, Article 2, of the Summa Theologica reads: Now since everything is true according as to whether it has the form proper to its nature, the intellect, in so far as it is knowing, must be true, so long as it has the likeness of the thing known, this being its form, as knowing. For this reason, truth is defined by the conformity between intellect and thing; and hence to know this conformity is to know truth. [Cum autem omnes res sit vera secundum quod habet propriam formam naturae suae, necesse est quod intellectus, inquantum est cognoscens, sit verus inquantum habet similitudinem rei cognitae, quae est forma eius inquantum est cognoscens. Et propter hoc per conformitatem intellectus et rei veritas definitur. Unde conformitatem istam cognoscere, est cognoscere veritatem.]

The adaequatio theory was clear and economical to the point of being axiomatic, but it represented (Heidegger argues in Being and Time) a purely analytical exercise, a “composing and dividing”, carried out by an active subject on a passive object. Those who propounded this theory showed no awareness of its premises nor of the broader context in which “true” statements are in practice made. For “what is tacitly co-posited in the relational totality – ‘adaequatio intellectus et rei’? What is the ontological character that is being co-posited here?” Heidegger queries, continuing “it is not sufficient for the clarification of the structure of truth simply to presuppose this relational totality, rather we must go back and ask about the context of Being which supports this totality as such” (286). This totality cannot be accommodated in the adaequatio theory because adaequatio intellectus et rei is a correspondence theory of truth and, as such, posits an artificial separation between subject and object. But, as Heidegger contends, “to say that a statement is true means that it discovers Being in itself. It asserts, it shows, it lets forms of Being ‘be seen’ (‘apophansis’) in their discoverdness. The being-true [Wahrsein] (truth) of a statement must be understood

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as a Being of discovering [entdeckend-sein]” (288). As Heidegger argues in Plato’s Theory of Truth (Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit), this form of truth, as the revelation of the self-disclosing quality of the world, takes manifold forms: “truth means, in the first place, something that has been wrung from the hidden. Truth as such wresting appears, therefore, continually in the fashion of dis-covery. Concealment can in these cases be of different types: closing shut, keeping hidden, disguising, covering, masking, dissemblance” (32). It is this fluid understanding-engagement with the world that the adaequatio model cannot accommodate, and neither can the language in which it was framed, Latin. Latin sheers off excess in the service of exactitude: it is not capable of grasping the richness, the material array of language of seeing language as a form of praxis, its place within experience. The goal of Latin is definition, demarcation and finality of judgement, which it seeks to achieve through “merely formal notions” (GA 40: 71). Latin proceeds by Abstraktion (it ab-strahiert), and this is evident even in its grammar, tenses and moods, such as the Imperfect Conjunctive, the Perfect, the Imperative, the Participle and Infinitive. These are terms that are “technical instruments that we have used mechanically to dissect language and establish rules. Wherever a more originary relation to language continues to stir, one feels how dead these grammatical forms are as mere mechanisms” (57).16 Through the increasing political and military hegemony of the Roman Empire, Latin came to replace Greek as the lingua franca of the civilised world. It represented a decline, a fall from philosophical grace: words that had once been part of the conceptual experience of lived life degenerated into vacuous abstractions: Hupokeimenon [the “underlying thing”] became subiectum; hupostasis [“beneath-standing” or “underpinning”] became substantia; sumbebekos [attribute] became accidens. [This was by no means an innocent development]. Beneath these seemingly literal and thus faithful translations, there was concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. Roman thought took over the Greek words without 16

And Heidegger gives particular instances: “we are asking about the word form that the Latins call the infinitivus. The negative expression, modus infinitivus verbi, already points to a modus finitus, a mode of limitedness and definiteness in verbal meaning” (GA 40: 63).

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Words such as extensio, substantia and natura suffered the same fate. Extensio, from extendere, meaning “to make even” or “to make straight”, was a concept that had been entirely foreign to the Greeks, who thought of space as “topos”, as place, as “that which belongs to the thing itself ”. That feeling for locality was lost in the Latin word, which conceptualised space in purely abstract terms, as something that possessed an exclusively geometrical quality (hence our modern notion of “extension”) (GA 40: 70). The Latin translation of substantia for the Greek “ousia” was likewise damaging. For the Greeks, “ousia” meant constant presence, Being as process. This sense of the word was erased in the medieval period through its degradation into the notion of “material”, which is reflected in our modern word “substance”, meaning matter that is essentially inert, a conversion that represents, Heidegger argues, a “mathematicized degeneration” of the original word (203). The concept of “nature”, in particular, has suffered. For the Greeks, nature meant “phusis”, and “‘phusis’ says what emerges from itself […], as the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance of such unfolding and, in it, holding itself and persisting in appearance – in short, the emerging-abiding of prevailing” (16). This dimension of a self-emerging plenitude was lost in Latin. As Heidegger explains, “we use the Latin translation, natura, which really means ‘to be born’, ‘birth’. But with this Latin translation, the originary content of the Greek word ‘phusis’ is already thrust aside, and the authentic philosophical naming force of the Greek word destroyed” (15).17 This debasement of “phusis” into natura was reflected in the work of early modern scientists, such as Newton and Galileo, who saw nature as a purely material entity, as a mere mass of quantifiable energy, “as a relationship between moving bodies, between forms of Being, whose main character lies in their extension in space, in which movement is conceived as nothing more than a change of position in time” (GA 27: 187). The philosophers of the Enlightenment inherited this mechanical model, in which 17

Heidegger’s monumental epochal thinking has not gone uncriticised. See, for example, Karl Baier, who criticises what he regards as the narrow basis of Heidegger’s scholarship and the “one-sidedness” of his approach to Latin (29).

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forms of Being were “determined in mathematical-physical thinking” (GA 40: 206). In the modern period, we have added yet a further component of (mis)representation. “Nature” has remained something that through the science of physics is a calculated entity, but in more general terms “nature” and “the natural” have come to represent entities that exist in contradistinction, even in opposition, to the cultural achievements of society and civilisation, their otherness encapsulated in a crude list of dichotomies that now dominate our thinking: nature versus art, nature versus history, nature versus the spirit (GA 9: 240–241). Within this historical context of discursive (mis)representation, the notion of “truth” became critically degraded. As Heidegger observes in Parmenides, “pseudos” meant for the Greeks a hiding of the truth: but not its opposite or its negation. This is, however, exactly what the word has come to mean when it is translated in German as falsch and in English as “false”, both of which come from the Roman word falsum. “Pseudos” has come to acquire an entirely negative set of connotations, which are not only philosophical but ethical and even political in their provenance. “Pseudos” is no longer thought of as a mode of concealing, and has lost thus its positive component within “aletheia”. As Heidegger explains, “the stem of the Latin word falsum (fallo) is ‘fall’ and is related to the Greek word ‘ophalla’, i.e. to overthrow, bring to a downfall, to fell, make totter” (GA 54: 57). And he adds, “in the Latin fallere, to bring down, as subterfuge, there resides ‘deceiving’; falsum is treachery and deception” (61).18 Falsum was integral to the power-politics of the Roman Empire, where the Roman veritas, as Heidegger observes, citing Nietzsche, became “the ‘justice’ of the will to power” (78). Within the provenance of the Imperial, “truth” was simply a pragmatic component of an orthodoxy exploited by

18

Heidegger is looking back to Nietzsche, but he is also anticipating Michel Foucault, who argues in his essay, “Truth and Power”, that “truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true, the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true from false statements” (131). For a succinct account of the Foucaultian moment in Heidegger’s analysis of “truth discourses”, see William V. Spanos (2001: 91–92).

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religious and political authority to secure social order. Its natural provenance was not philosophy but law and the legal system, which ensured its version of truth through rules and dictate. The degeneration of truth into a function of power is demonstrated by the history of the concept of the “political”. The latter has its origins in the “polis”, which for the Greeks meant a community with shared values and culture that allowed for equal participation in its government by its male citizens, “polites”. As a cultural and ethical entity, the “polis” was founded on ideals such as the development of the individual and the promotion of free speech: it was “the essential abode of historical man … the ‘where’ from which order alone was ordained to him and in which he was ordered” (141). Citizens of the “polis” found their identity by observing the moral universe (“dike”), which generated the laws of the greater whole of which the individual citizen was ethically and socially a part (136–137). In the “polis”, the distinction between the security of the state and the freedom of the individual did not exist. The latter was not possible without the former; indeed, the very terms that make up this distinction belong exclusively to the modern period: they are literally un-thinkable in Greek. As a consequence of the administrative requirements of an expanding imperial Rome, the principle of the “political” came to be subsumed into the exercise of civic power, of influence and control, a governance of others that had at its centre the command: obey. Underscoring the institution of power and providing its legitimation was an institution that had provided the ultimate seat of authority in the medieval age: The Church. This possessed its own equally oppressive version of “truth”: The Roman world in the form of the ecclesiastical dogmatics of the Christian faith has contributed essentially to the consolidation of the essence of truth in the sense of rectitudo. The same realm of Christian faith introduces and prepares the new transformation of the essence of truth, the one of verum into certum […] As a concept of medieval ideology, iustitia is rectitudo rationis et voluntatis – correctness of reason and will. Rectitudo appetitus rationalis, the correctness of the will, the striving for correctness, is the basic form of the will in its willing. Iustificatio is already, according to medieval doctrine, the primus motus fidei – the basic stirring of the disposition of faith. The doctrine of justification, indeed, the question of the certainty of salvation, becomes the centre of evangelical theology. (75–76)

In the Church, the imperial was embodied in the curial of the Roman pope, whose domination was likewise grounded in command: the command of

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ecclesiastical dogma. Orthodoxy defined what was “true” for believers as well as what was “false” in the faith of the heretics (68). It was a form of “truth” that (as Heidegger wryly observes) culminated in the most effective truth machine of all: the Spanish Inquisition. At one point in Parmenides, Heidegger observes, “the essence of truth as veritas and rectitudo elided into human ratio. The Greek ‘alethenein’, to disclose the unconcealed, which in Aristotle still pervades the essence of ‘techne’, became transformed into the calculating self-establishment of ratio”, and he adds “ratio became counting, calculating, calculus, a self-establishment of what was correct” (GA 54: 74).19 This for Heidegger represented nothing less than a “transformation of the essence of truth and Being” (62). In a later work, “The Question Concerning Technology” (“Die Frage nach der Technik”), Heidegger described how this transformation has continued into the modern period, and how the mental mechanisms associated with ratio, measurement, quantification and calculation, have come to constitute a new intellectual hegemony, one that is no longer primarily associated with the discourses of civic governance or with religion but with a new imperial paradigm: technology and the technological mindset, “en-framing” (Ge-stell) (GA 7: 20). It is here, in en-framing, that the heritage of Latin, in the form of ratio, celebrates its greatest triumph: in a modern mind dominated by ratiocinated pragmatism and functional instrumentality.

“Logos” Regained: Heraclitus and the Provenance of the Word In Parmenides, Heidegger described how the Romans banished the Greek notion of “zoon logou exon” [animal that has logos] and replaced it with that of the animal rationale, the mankind of reasoned intellect, which can only grasp the world through calculation and planning and relegates all 19 “Ratio belongs to the verb reor, whose guiding sense is […] ‘putting something in order for something’, ‘to take one’s bearings from’. This is the sense of our verb rechnen. To reckon with something, to take something into account means to keep one’s eye on it and to act accordingly” (GA 10: 148–149).

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else into the otherness of the “irrational”.20 In doing so, the Romans travestied one of the fundamental concepts of Western thought: “reason”. As Heidegger explains, “through the Roman re-interpretation of the Greek experience of the essence of man, ‘Logos’ (λόγος), i.e. the Word, became ratio. The essence of the word was, thus, banished from its ground and from its essential locus” (GA 54:101). Through this transformation in the conceptual status of “logos”, ratio became “reason” and “reason” became the discipline of logic (GA 8: 214). The decline of “logos” into “logic” formed a central focus within Heidegger’s de-structionist critique of Western metaphysics. Logic, as in formal logic, may appear to be a neutral descriptive model that is simply providing a system for appropriate forms of reasoning, but in its broader affectivity this model is supported by a normative idea of “rigorous” thinking that judges all statements according to criteria such as consistency, coherence and completeness, dismissing pronouncements that fail to meet these criteria as forms of falsehood and distortion. “As a science of thinking in general, logic simply does not consider thinking qua thinking of this or that object of such-and-such properties. It does not attend to the special what and how of that to which thinking relates” (GA 26: 3). Logic has forgotten its origins in the originary meaning of “Logos”. In his essay “Logos (Heraklit Fragment 50)”, Heidegger summarises the history of the problem: Since Antiquity, the “logos” of Heraclitus has been interpreted in different ways: as ratio, as verbum, as “cosmic law”, as the logical necessity of thought, as meaning, as reason. Time and time again, reason is invoked as the criterion for the correct approach. But what can reason do, when, together with un-reason and anti-reason on the same level, it persists with the same mistake of forgetting to think through the essential origins of itself, and refuses to recognise this mistake? What can we expect of logic (“logike”) (“episteme”) of any type, if we fail to begin to respect “logos” and follow it in its inceptual form? (GA 7: 214)

20 As Heidegger argued elsewhere, “‘irrationalism’ is simply what rationalism cannot grasp, and grows out of the same simplistic antinomy between homo humanus, which is firmly identified with animal rationale, and the model of homo barbarus that the Enlightenment inherited from the Classical period, where what was deemed to be non-rational’ acquired the status of the ‘non-human’” (GA 27: 320).

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In Being and Time, Heidegger had already described how “logos” had degenerated into abstract terms such as “reason, judgement, concept, definition, ground, relation” (GA 2: 43). This development has threatened to destroy the self-revealing characteristic of “logos”, that dimension of thinking that permits “an entity to be seen out of itself ”, and allows us “to say how that entity comports itself ” (290). The task now is to follow the path of “thoughtful questioning” in order to retrieve the originary sense of “logic” in “logos”.21 What came after Being and Time were, consequently, a series of attempts to deconstruct logic from within, through a process of enquiry in which “the very idea of ‘logic’ will dissolve in the whirl of a more basic questioning”.22 And to achieve this, Heidegger returned to the work of the Pre-Socratics, most notably to Parmenides and Heraclitus. As he wrote in his Introduction to Metaphysics, “among the ancient Greek thinkers, it is Heraclitus who was subjected to the most fundamentally un-Greek misinterpretation during the course of Western history, but who, nevertheless, in more recent times has provided the strongest impulse to the rediscovery of what is authentically Greek” (GA 40: 135). Heraclitus, the protagonist of fire as the source of all the elements, the exponent of eternal flux (“panta rhei”), conceived of Being as Becoming, believing that essence is change and that unity finds itself in its opposites. What we know of his philosophy comes entirely from a collection of fragments inherited through the offices of antiquity.23 A number of them, such as “we can never step into the same river twice” (no. 12) and “a man’s

21 22 23

Liddell and Scott give two sets of cognate terms for “logos”: (a) “statement”, “speech”, “word” and “that which is stated, a proposition, position, principle”, and (b) “reason”, “ratio”, “thought”, “account” (477). Heidegger as quoted by Courtine (1999: 30). These are fragments because “concept and system alike are alien to Greek philosophy” (GA 8: 216). It appears, however, that these fragments were originally part of larger narratives that have since been lost. As Jonathan Barnes observes, as texts they possess their own integrity: their “connection of thought is visible despite the lack of connectives” (105). Eugen Fink summarises their style thus: “the language of Heraclitus has an inner ambiguity and multidimensionality, so that we cannot give it any unambiguous reference. It moves from gnomic, sentential, and ambiguous-sounding expression, to an extreme flight of thought” (10). For Heidegger’s discussion of “the obscurity” of Heraclitus’ fragments and the absence of “an all-articulating unity in their inner structure”, see GA 7: 265.

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character is his fate” (no. 119), have become popular sayings. Others, such as “concerning the size of the sun: [it is] the width of a human foot” (no. 3), “the death of fire is the birth of air, and the death of air is the birth of water” (no. 76), “the sun is new every day” (no. 6), and “what opposes unites, and the finest attunement stems from things bearing in opposite directions, and all things come about by strife” (no. 8) reflect the primal symbolic thinking of the Pre-Socratics and the source of that thinking in their animistic grasp of the universe that saw the cosmos caught in a state of flux made up from conflicting but ultimately reciprocated elemental energies.24 Of greater significance to Heidegger were those fragments that contained statements on the “logos”, most notably nos. 1, 2, 50, 72 and 108. Some, such as fragment 108, “of all people whose discourses I have heard, there is not one who attains to recognizing that the wise is set apart from all”, celebrate the universal meaning of “logos”, which although revealed to all is recognised only by the few.25 Others, such as Fragment 50, suggest how this connection between meaning and Being may be recognised. In the Greek it reads: οὐκ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἰδέναι.

In his 1944 lecture course on Heraclitus, Heidegger translates the epigram, giving alternative readings of the key words: Habt ihr nicht bloß mich angehört, sondern habt ihr (ihm gehorsam, horchsam) auf den “Logos” gehört, dann ist Wissen (das darin besteht) mit dem “Logos” das Gleiche sagend zu sagen: Eins ist alles. (GA 55: 243)26

24 Translations are from Kahn (1979: 53, 81, 51, 47, 51, 63 and 85). Some translations have been modified. 25 For comments on the apparent paradox of a universal truth that is known only to a few, see Hahn (1983). As he observes, “the logos [Heraclitus] has to offer is true forever; everything happens in accordance with it, and so it is public or ‘common’ before he has said a word. Yet his audience is not expected to understand it at first hearing. So the book [of fragments] is designed, if not as an oracle, at least as a riddle, which will require much thought and reflection if its meaning is to be grasped” (117). Kevin Robb prefers “orational” for such texts, for they are utterances “in poetized speech, the diction of which has been shaped by the needs of ear and memory” (199). 26 Bruno Snell translates Heraclitus’ words thus: “when you have listened not to me but to the Meaning, it is wise within the same Meaning to say: One is All” (Heidegger,

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[If you have not been merely listening to me but (obediently and attentively) listening to the “logos”, then is knowing (which lies in that) saying the same as “logos”: One is All.]

Both the individual words of the fragment and its grammatical structure permit a variety of readings. Much hinges on “sophon” (σοφόν), which forms the allimportant object of Heraclitus’ sentence. Heidegger translated it differently in different contexts, either as (as in this passage) “knowing” (Wissen), or sometimes as “wise” (weise) and elsewhere as “providential” (geschicklich).27 These different versions are, however, not incompatible. What Heidegger is ultimately seeking is a translation that might read: “acceptance of ‘logos’ is wise because it amounts to a wisdom that is providentially given to us by a higher law”. Heraclitus argued that the unitary nature of the world could only be recognised by those who have learnt to think with “logos”, those who have attuned themselves to its saying. In this fragment, he exhorts his listeners not to heed his words but to listen to this higher source of truth: it is not a literal listening that is required (Heidegger adds in his translation the deprecatory bloß, “merely”, to the original Greek text), but the opening of selfhood to “logos”. The same verb, ἀκούσαντας “to listen to”, governs both literal and intellectual listening, and Heidegger analyses in detail what this different concept of listening entails: Unser Horchen aber ist jeweils in sich schon in irgendeiner Weise horchsam auf das Zu-hörende, bereit dafür oder auch unbereit, irgendwie ein Gehorsam. Das Ohr, das nötig ist zum rechten Hören, ist der Gehorsam. Das Hörbare, das horchsame Vernehmbare braucht nichts Lautliches und Geräuschhaftes zu sein. Worin der Gehorsam besteht, können wir so leicht nicht sagen. Aus dem Spruch des Heraklit entnhemen wir nur, daß im horchsamen Hören auf den “Logos”, der im Unterschied zur menschlichen Rede des Denkers wohl keine Verlautbarung ist, das Wissen entspringt, welches Wissen besteht im “omologein” – das Gleiche sagen, was ein anderer, d.h. hier, was der “Logos” sagt. Das Gleiche sagen meint hier nicht nachschwätzen, sondern so nachsagen, daß in verschiedener Weise das Selbse gesagt wird, und zwar in einer Weise, durch die das Nachsagen dem Vorgesagten nachfolgt und “folgt”, d.h. gehorcht und folgsam ist: gehorsam. (GA 55: 260)

27

1975: 59). An alternative translation by Kahn reads: “it is wise, listening not to me but to the report [‘logos’], to agree that all things are one” (1979: 45). For the various translations and their sources, see Maly and Emad (1986: 158–159). Maly and Emad translate geschicklich as “fateful”, which captures the sense of fate (Geschick) but surely with negative connotations.

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Chapter 3 [Our hearing is, however, always in itself, in some manner already, a hearing attentiveness to what has to be listened-to (whether we are ready for that or not), and in some way a submission to it. Our ears, which are necessary if we are to hear correctly, are that submission. What we hear, the audible element that we gather through that hearing attentiveness, does not need to be a sound or a noise. What this submission consists in is not easy to say. The only thing that is clear from Heraclitus’ axiom is that in this attentive hearing of the “logos” (which, in contradistinction to the human discourse of thinking, is certainly not a statement) knowing emerges, a knowing that consists in “omologein” – saying the same what another says, i.e. here what the “logos” says. To say the same does not mean to parrot something, but to repeat it in such a way that the same thing is said but in a different way, and indeed in such a way that this repetition follows on from what has been said and “follows”, i.e. hears and obeys it: submits to it.]

The passage is structured around the trope of horchen which, from the opening sentence, generates a series of cognate terms, such as the neologistic horchsam, describing an attentive attitude to what needs to be listened to (the “Zu-hörende”), as well as the more recognisable Gehorsam [obedience]. These terms reflect the provenance of the parent word, horchen, which expands the purely physical action of “hearing”, which otherwise might generally be thought of as a passive registering of sound, a picking up of the mere hörbar, into an activity that involves a thinking response to “logos”, a response that Heidegger calls Gehorsam.28 To be gehorsam in German means “to obey” or “to submit to” something or someone, but Heidegger wishes us to recognise its affinity with hören. Listening, hearing correctly, is to obey what is said. This should not be understood as passive reiteration, a nachschwätzen [a parroting], but as nachsagen [responding], perhaps in the manner of a response in a religious ceremony. Heidegger sees nachsagen as a “following” in language, a word whose complexity can for once be retained in English. For to follow “logos” is both to understand it and to obey it, and Heidegger concludes by expanding the concept through related forms such as folgsam [to be obedient] and nachfolgen [to follow on], as in becoming a successor to, becoming a disciple of, “logos”. 28 David Kleinberg-Levin, discussing these various formations of hören, observes that Heidegger’s notion of authentic hearing, as formulated in this essay and elsewhere, “is Da-sein letting itself be appropriated by the appeal of the sonorous field, the ‘clearing’ through which language passes” (246–247).

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The unity that exists between these Greek foundational concepts is effected in the text in Heidegger’s own language. The passage is a poised, highly structured and formally self-conscious piece of writing. Not only are key terms stated, to be repeated with or without modification, as with nachsagen [literally an “after-saying”], which appears initially as a verb, semantically as the “following” of language, but then later in the text as the noun Nachsagen, but such terms are brought into further alignment through positional prefixes such as vor and nach, which impart a consequential interrelationship to them. Such techniques reflect the equipoise and integrity of the “Same”, which Heidegger sees as the provenance of the “logos”. If we are to understand, or to “hear” “logos” properly, we must re-call its originary meaning. In What Is Called Thinking? (Was heißt Denken?), Heidegger explains what this will entail, beginning with an overview of the etymology of the word: The name “logic” is an abbreviation of the complete title which, in Greek, runs “episteme logike” – the understanding of that which concerns “logos”. “Logos” is the noun of the verb “legein” (λεγειν). Logic understands “legein” in the sense of “legein ti kata tinos”, to say something. The something about which a statement is made is in such a case that which lies beneath it. […] The “logos”, as “legein ti kata tinos”, is the assertion of something about something. (GA 8: 158)

And Heidegger adds, “this has long been known, perhaps for too long, so that we no longer allow ourselves to give thought to the definition of thinking as ‘logos’” (159). To give ourselves a space for “logos” as thinking rather than assertion, we must regain the originary meaning of the word, where the verb “legein” (λεγειν) can be seen as related to both the Latin legere, meaning “to read”, and to the German word “to lie” (liegen). This does not exclude the idea of speaking; but it broadens the meaning of the word into a more expansive positioning of knowledge. Seen from this perspective, legere ceases to be merely a medium for factual communication, as if knowledge is being passed from one source to another in the form of information. Rather, legere means opening a space for what may happen with language. As Heidegger had explained elsewhere, “lego, legein, Latin legere, is the same word as our lesen [to collect]: gleaning, collecting wood, harvesting grapes, making a selection; ‘reading [lesen] a book’ is just a variant of ‘gathering’ in its authentic sense” (GA 40: 132). In “Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50)”,

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Heidegger goes into greater detail, arguing that “to lay is at the same time to place one thing beside another, to lay them together. To lay is to gather [lesen]”. And he continues, uncovering the complex etymology of the word: Das so zu denkenden Lesen steht jedoch keineswegs neben dem Legen. Jenes begleitet auch nicht nur dieses. Vielmehr ist das Lesen schon dem Legen eingelegt. Jedes Lesen ist schon Legen. Alles Legen ist von sich her lesend. Denn was heißt legen? Das Legen bringt zum Liegen, indem es beisammen-vor-liegen läßt. Allzugern nehmen wir das “lassen” im Sinne von weg- und fahren-lassen. Legen, zum Liegen bringen, liegen lassen bedeutete dann: um das Niedergelegte und Vorliegende sich nicht mehr kümmern, es übergehen. Allein das “legein”, legen, meint in seinem “beisammen-vor-liegen-Lassen” gerade dies, daß uns das Vorliegende anliegt und deshalb angeht. Dem “legen” ist als dem beisammen-vorliegen-Lassen daran gelegen, das Niedergelegte als das Vorliegende zu behalten (“Legi” heißt im Alemannischen das Wehr, das im Fluß schon vor-liegt: dem Anströmen des Wassers). (GA 7: 216) [However, the gathering that must be thought in this way is not simply associated with laying. Nor does the former simply accompany the latter. Rather, gathering has already been incorporated into laying. Every gathering is already a laying. Every laying is of itself gathering. Then what does “to lay” mean? Laying brings to lie, in that it lets things lie together before us. All too readily we interpret this “letting” in as an omitting or letting go. To lay: to bring to lie, to let lie, would then mean to concern ourselves no longer with what is laid down and lies before us, to ignore it. However, “legein”, to lay, by its letting-lie-together-before means exactly this: that that which lies before us touches us and hence concerns us. Laying, as a letting-lie-together-before, is concerned with retaining whatever is laid down as that which lies before us. (In the Alemannic dialect, legi means a weir or dam that lies ahead in the river: against the water’s current).]

Heidegger explicates the provenance of three lexically related terms, lesen, legen and liegen, through the use of antithesis, where homophonic (or near homophonic words) are juxtaposed and contrasted. Lesen, legen and liegen are all tropes of inclusion and positioning.29 The verb lesen means, in this 29

Not explication but a systematic re-writing and misinterpretation of the Greek for his own purposes is how Wolfgang Ullrich views Heidegger’s modus operandi here. As he says, “in the end, Heidegger takes things so far that Heraclitus’ vocabulary becomes his own, until the two cannot be distinguished” (55–56). More positive are the words of Robert Mugerauer: Heidegger “makes these thoughts his own, he passes through them to arrive at his own originary thinking” (240). As Heidegger repeatedly tells

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context, “to pick” or “to gather”, as in harvesting, but its more usual use, which is “to read”, is also meant to be heard. Legen means “to lay flat”, as in put down and place something on something. The relationship of lesen and legen is explored throughout the passage. They initially confront one another but then merge, for legen is the permitting of lesen into liegen.30 Grammatically, legen is the factitive of liegen, meaning “to cause to lie”, but Heidegger seeks to emphasise the self-propelling quality of this activity, which he does by introducing lassen [to let] as an auxiliary verb, producing an effect that is close to the middle voice in Greek, which possesses a grammatical form between active and passive (Morwood 60). Together with legen, Liegen is also subject in the text to systematic transformation to produce, through the addition of positional prefixes such as vor-beisammen-vor- and nieder-, a complex mosaic of neo-logistic formations. As if to balance the abstruse quality of these words, Heidegger embeds them in simple grammatical structures formed around short, conventional almost colloquial supporting words and phrases: “all too readily …”, “in no way … ”, “not only …”, and supports them with terms drawn from his local Alemannic dialect. The abstract is informed through the physical, creating a symbiosis through which Heidegger, here as elsewhere in his work, intends to return us to the unity of the thinking mind of the Greeks. The above passage initially seems simply to be about the placing of “logos” in space, a placing that is secured both by the use of prepositions such as “beside” (neben) and “together with” (beisammen), and by verbs that take dative forms, as in “incorporated into laying” (dem Legen eingelegt). This descriptive procedure looks impersonal, as if it might be purely a structural quality that is being delineated here, but this is not the case. The spread of “logos” is described in such spatial detail because “logos” ultimately broadens its ambit by incorporating the human subject into its unfolding, opening a

us, he is not attempting a simple exegesis of these Greek words. He wishes, rather, to think them from within, remaining alive to their connotations as much as to their translatable meaning. It is a matter of “co-respondence” (Ent-sprechung) rather than interpretation (GA 7: 200). 30 As Boeder notes, “collecting gathers up what is dispersed, brings it in, assembles it at its most appropriate place … It provides the many with a shared place and thus a shared presence” (84).

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space of meaning in the world that we are able to occupy through language. As Heidegger points out in the concluding words of this section, the two components of the word, “legein”, saying and laying, are connected: Saying is “legein”. This sentence, if it is considered properly, now sloughs off everything facile, trite and vacuous. It names the inexhaustible mystery, namely that the speaking of language eventuates [sich ereignet] out of the unconcealment of what is present, and determines itself according to the lying before of what is present as the lettinglie-together-before. (218)

Heidegger goes into greater detail towards the end of his account of “logos”, quoting from Heraclitus’ Fragment 32, where Heidegger’s creative reading of the text produces a distillation of meaning, in which the two senses of “legein”, “to gather” and “to name”, are fused: That the aphorism under consideration concerns “legesthai” in its immediate relation to “onoma” (the naming word) indisputably points to the meaning of “legein” as saying, talking, naming. […] To name means to call forth. That which is gathered and laid down in the name, by means of such laying, comes to light and comes to lie before us. The naming (“onoma”), thought in terms of “legein”, is not the expressing of a word-meaning but rather a letting-lie-before in the light in which something stands in such a way that it has a name. (228)

As Heidegger wrote in his “The Essence of Language” (“Das Wesen der Sprache”), the word “logos” “speaks simultaneously as the name for Being and for Saying” (GA 12: 174). In this essay, Heidegger set out to explore the possibility of having an experience with language, and he approached his task in terms of poetic subjectivity and its relationship to language, using the poem “The Word” (“Das Wort”) by Stefan George as the framework for his investigation. George’s poem charts the journey of a poet who ventures into a “distance or dream” (“ferne oder traum”) in search of material for his writing. He returns home, but the treasure he has brought back immediately disappears. The poem ends with the lines “so sadly I learnt renunciation:/ no thing exists where the word lies broken” (“so lernt ich traurig den verzicht: Kein ding sei wo das wort gebricht”) (153). Heidegger comments: “the poet has learnt renunciation. He has undergone an experience. With what? With the thing and its relationship to the word”. This is a relation that goes beyond “mere designation”, for “it is only

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the word that creates Being for a thing” (158 and 154). The poet in George’s poem should have expected his disappointment for, as Heidegger had already made clear, “language is not merely a tool which we possess alongside many others; rather, it is language that grants the initial possibility of standing in the midst of the openness of forms of Being. Only where there is language is the world” (GA 4: 37–38). The treasures of language are not to be willed into existence. Language certainly opens a space for meaning in the world, but its productivity cannot be controlled: “we may never say of the word that it is, but rather that it gives – not because words are given by an ‘it’, but that the word itself gives” (GA 12: 182). Language means “showing, making appear, lighting and concealing, setting free, as a proffering of what we call the world. The lighting and hiding, the veiling riches of the world, are the coming into Being of Saying” (188). It is this power of revelation that the Greeks celebrated in “logos”, seeing it not as a capacity that defines, demarcates or requires surety of proof or demonstration, but as something that reveals the inner mystery of the universe, and in the concluding pages of his essay, Heidegger evokes the Word as “logos” in tones of celebration: The rule of the Word springs to light as that which causes a thing to be a thing. The Word begins to shine as the gathering, which alone can bring what is present to its full presence. The oldest word for the rule of the word thus thought, for Saying, is “logos”: Saying which, in showing, lets beings appear in their “it is”. (224)

In the early pages of Parmenides, Heidegger emphasised that inceptual thinking “does not reside back in the past but lies in advance of what is to come” (GA 45: 1). Inceptual thinking pulls us into the future by being, in Heidegger’s terms, “question-able” (frag-würdig), by posing questions that must be answered before Being can be countenanced. Seen from this perspective, we might read “Logos” as thought-language, language that has resisted integration, language that has become the word of thinking. It is a language that is ultimately both transformative and enlightening: “the word of thinkers knows no authors, in the sense of writers. The word of thinking is not picturesque; it is without charm. The word of thinking rests in the sobering quality of what it says. Just the same, thinking changes the world. It changes it in the ever-darker depths of a riddle, depths which as they grow darker offer a promise of a greater brightness” (GA 7: 234).

Chapter 4

What Thinking Is Given to Think: On the Way to Language

Meeting Language: On the Path and in its Region In his essay “The Essence of Language” (“Das Wesen der Sprache”), Heidegger voices the following conjecture: “assuming that the moving spirit that holds the world’s four regions in the single nearness of their face-to-face encounter rests in Saying [Sage], then only Saying confers what we call by the tiny word ‘is’, which it then echoes. Saying releases the ‘is’ into lighted freedom, and thereby into the security of its thinkability” (GA 12: 203). These were sentiments that looked back to Heidegger’s treatment of “logos” within the originary thinking of the Pre-Socratics in Parmenides and in his Heraclitus lectures, but they also signalled a major “Turning” in his philosophy that took place in the 1940s, when Heidegger came increasingly to focus on the relationship between thinking and language, that “founding of Being through words, only through which things acquire their radiance”, and which he found most fully in poetry, where there “first comes into the open all that which we are” (GA 4: 41 and 43). “The Essence of Language” was the first of a series of essays that Heidegger published in 1959. in a collection called On the Way to Language (Unterwegs zur Sprache). The volume also included two studies of the poetry of Georg Trakl, “Language” (“Die Sprache”) and “Language in the Poem” (“Die Sprache im Gedicht”), as well as an imagined debate between Heidegger and a Japanese professor about the integrity of words and their ability to describe the world, titled “From a Dialogue on Language” (“Aus einem Gespräche von der Sprache”). This in turn was followed by “The Essence of Language” (“Das Wesen der Sprache”), and “Das Wort” (“The Word”), an analysis of a poem by Stefan George. The volume concluded with “The

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Way to Language” (“Der Weg zur Sprache”), where Heidegger returned to the concept of “ap-propriation” (Ereignis), to describe how we possess and are possessed through language. The dialogistic structure of “From a Dialogue on Language” provides (implicitly, at least) the framework for all the essays in the volume, which move forward through statement and response, query and rejoinder, expansion and qualification, question and answer, in a process that Heidegger described as “way-making” (Be-wëgung) (GA 12: 249).1 Heidegger’s approach throughout is tentative, but necessarily so, for, as he queries in “The Essence of Language”, “how are we to put questions to language when our relation to it is confused or, at the very least, undetermined. How can we enquire about its essence [Wesen] when it may immediately become a matter of dispute about what essence means?” (164). Indeed, during the course of that essay, he feels it necessary to question the very terms of his enquiry, even its title, pausing at one crucial point to look at what the words in that title might mean: the questioner must question his questions, because only by doing so can he make a fresh beginning on the basis of a tabula rasa, where there will be no assumptions and nothing will be taken for granted. Heidegger is seeking to transform his essay from a statement to an enquiry, and the transformation begins by “removing the title’s presumptuousness and its triteness by adding question marks, which will question both language and essence, and will turn the title into the query: the essence? – of language?” (170). This act of bracketing allows Heidegger to reach a point of scrutiny that precedes definition, as if, as he adds, this could ever be a straight-forward matter of simply finding the rights words to describe an entity called “language”. “Transforming the title in this way means that it will disappear. What will then follow will not be a dissertation on language

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Or do these texts move “forward” at all? As a sequence, the essays ultimately return to the same points of enquiry and to the same avenues of explanation. As the inquirer explains in the “From a Dialogue on Language”, “the lasting element in thinking is the way. And the ways of thinking are mysterious in that we can walk them forwards and backwards and, in fact, only the way backwards will lead forwards” (94). Indeed, as he approaches the very end of his volume of essays, which were written over a period of ten years, Heidegger decides that he is “only within sight of the way to language, barely on its traces” (245).

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under a different heading. What will follow will be an attempt to take our first step into the region [Gegend] that holds for us possibilities for a thinking experience with language” (170–171).2 Heidegger must break with approaches to language that view it either as a medium of individual expression or simply as a means to describe the external world. As he tells us, such views of language have a long history, stretching from Aristotle’s notion of “semeia” [that which shows] through to the writings of Alexander von Humboldt who, in his On the Diversity and Structure of Human Languages (Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus, 1836), defined language as an “intellectual effort” whose goal it was “to make articulated sound capable of expressing thought” (235). Heidegger rejects Humboldt’s theories, for they are dependent on a subjectobject model (in Humboldt’s case taken from Leibniz) that sees language “not merely as a medium of exchange for mutual understanding but as a true world that the intellect must set between itself and objects by the inner labour of its power” (237). As Heidegger comments, “the essence of language conceived in this light does not thereby show its essence as language, i.e. show the manner in which language as language comes to Being, that is, abides, that is, remains gathered in what language grants to itself, to its own idiom, as language” (238). Language is not a tool or a medium for something else: language is the self-articulating provenance of Being. It is something that we must experience from within, and this means moving not only beyond metaphysical thinking but also beyond the technical discourses that are used to talk about language. Scientific and philosophical analysis of language is one thing; the 2

Gegend [region] is a trope that is both generative and demarcating, qualities that, for Heidegger, do not oppose one another. As he later explains, “Gegend comes from an older word, [‘that which meets’]. It names the free expanse. Through it, the open is compelled to allow all things to unfold through a reposing in themselves. And this means at the same time: preserving the gathering of things in their belonging together” (GA 13: 207–208). “Region” is the standard translation of Gegend, but Heidegger wishes us to hear the root of the word in gegen [“towards”, “against”], and possibly even begegnen [to meet]. This is appropriate because Gegend also means “Landschaft”, “countryside”, and has, according to Wahrig Deutsches Wörterbuch, its origins in the Middle High German contrate meaning “facing terrains” Perhaps for this reason, Hertz changes “region” to “country” midway through his translation.

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experience we undergo with it is another (150–151). Heidegger is not denigrating linguistic analysis; he is seeking, rather, to reach an understanding of language that is prior to analysis, following in the spirit of the phenomenological reduction that he had pursued in Being and Time. Just as we were there invited to understand Being as it shows itself from within, so too in the essays of On the Way to Language, we are exhorted to approach “the simplicity of the essence of language reflectively, that is, by entering personally into its move-ment [Be-wëgung], instead of trying to form a concept of language” (250).3 What Heidegger intends is to bring us face to face with the possibility of having an experience with the essence (Wesen) of language.4 And he is quite clear about what this entails: “to have [machen, ‘to make’] an experience with something – be it a thing, a person or a god – means that something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms and transforms us. When we talk of ‘having’ in this phrase, we do not mean that we bring it about by ourselves; ‘having’ means: undergoing, enduring, receiving that which has befallen us, in so far as we submit to it. Something comes about, comes to pass, happens” (149).5 The sentiments are radical, provocative: we are as far from a theory of language as a communicative instrumentality as is possible to be. Not only have we have removed human agency as the subject of language and replaced it by language itself; we have endowed the latter with transformative powers that suggest that it – and, possibly, it alone – has the capacity to remould the human subject. But how is this possible? How can we, who use language as a mode of communication, come to be within language, become, in fact, a part 3 4

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As the inquirer asks his Japanese interlocutor in the “Dialogue”: “do you need concepts?” (82). The German title of this tripartite lecture series is “Das Wesen der Sprache”, which is translated by Peter D. Hertz in the English edition as “The Nature of Language”. Wesen, however, is derived from the archaic verb wesen, which means, as per Wahrig, Deutsches Wörterbuch, “sich aufhalten, dauern, geschehen” [to dwell, to endure, to happen]. Heidegger wishes Wesen to communicate the sense of a process, of a comingto-Being or into-Being, in this case the emergence of language into its essential state where it endures. And this is an experience that we as readers empathetically reconstruct as we follow Heidegger’s discourse, for Heidegger’s “three long lectures stage a countering reception of language that would bring it to speech” (Fynsk 40).

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of language? Although in the act of communication we speak and write with intention of mind and, in doing so, produce, or seem to produce, statements and formulations that are ordered and considered, the source of language, indeed, its productive essence, exists to one side of such intentionality: the essence of language lies not in what we are able to write or say, but in what we are able to write and say, but don’t. Indeed, “there is some evidence that the essence of language flatly refuses to express itself in words” (175). There are times when we become aware of this, when we realise that we are not saying what we mean or that we are unable to say what we mean. These are occasions “when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, transports us, oppresses or enthuses us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it further thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential Being” (151). It is on those occasions that we become most aware of language; that we see it rather than through it. But now the question prompts itself: how and where do we find this language that refuses to disclose itself as language? Working towards an answer, Heidegger chooses to avoid the idiom of technical and conceptual analysis, because to use it would already be to work within a model of explication that it is precisely his intention to undermine. But neither does he wish to bestow a mystical quality upon language, to “elevate language into a fantastic, self-sustained Being”, as if it were something that exists beyond our capacity to grasp it (244). To understand what language is we must start by asking questions about language and by listening to what Heidegger calls the “pledge” (Zusage) (165).6 Language speaks to us, above all, when we are in a state or mode of enquiry about its essence, trying to be clear about what we are looking for. It is, however, not simply a matter of beginning to question in the hope of finding an answer; we have already begun to question, and we

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Hertz translates Zusage as “grant”, a word that according to the OED means that which has been “formally conferred”. This, however, does not convey what Heidegger is saying here, which is that we must listen to what is prompting us to ask questions about language, and think about what that process of questioning entails. Although he concludes (in a famous phrase) that “questioning is the piety of thinking” (165), it is the prompting to question rather than the questioning itself that forms the inceptual movement of the pledge.

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many never find the answer. It is the will to exploration and the process of exploration that is essential, not the possibility of discovery. Once we have become aware of this, once we have started upon this journey of exploration, we are on a “path that takes us back out of merely metaphysical representations to where we heed the hints of that message, whose proper messengers we would like to become” (137). “Path” is a crucial trope in Heidegger’s writing.7 Heidegger more than once describes himself as being on a “journey (Wanderung)” into a region, an expansive locality where the limits, scope and potential of language will be encountered as he moves down or along a path.8 The essays in On the Way to Language chart this journey, even if it is journey that is without the clear destination that a “journey” implies. Ultimately, however, what is important is not the destination but the experience of journeying and what we obtain along the way in the form of eundo assequi.9 There is no thought of arrival: the latter is a distant conceptual projection; whilst the experience of the journey is something immediate and tangible. Applied to our grasp of language, it is that which allows thinking (even in its formulation as the substantive “thought”) to be what it is: an activity rather than a system. 7

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Heidegger would wish us to see “the path” as something more than a mere metaphor because, as he explains elsewhere, “the idea of metaphor is based upon the distinguishing, if not complete separation, of the sensible and the non-sensible, as if the two realms subsist on their own. The setting up of this partition between the sensible and the non-sensible, between the physical and the nonphysical, is a basic trait of what is called metaphysics, and which normatively determines Western thinking” (GA 10: 72). In other words, hermeneutically object and meaning belong together. The path is something we walk on, and in the walking understand what it is to walk on that path, indeed, on a path. We do not see it purely as a symbol of something else, as in “I am walking on a path and this is like a journey of intellectual discovery”. That thought simply removes us from the experience of walking on the path. The German language has two words for the thoroughfare that Heidegger is describing: Weg and Pfad, which translate as “way” and “path”. The German Weg, however, retains far more of a sense of the concrete reality of the path than the English “way”, which is often simply means “method” or “means”. Eundo in Latin is the gerund of ire meaning “to go”. Assequi is the present active infinitive of assequor, meaning “to obtain, procure”.

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Heidegger had taken this path before, in a volume of essays titled Holzwege (1946) (literally Forest Paths but translated as Off the Beaten Track). In its short preface, he described the significance of its title: Wood [Holz] is an old name for forest. In the wood there are paths, mostly overgrown, which come to an abrupt end where the wood is untrodden. They are called Holzwege. Each goes its own way but remains in the forest. It often seems that each one is the same as the other, but it only looks that way. Woodcutters and forest keepers know these paths. They know what it means to be on a forest path. (GA 5: frontispiece)

Forest paths are simple rough tracks used by foresters to convey felled trees from one place to another, and are normally un-signposted, leaving their destination unclear. Paths that had once been open were often later covered by vegetation: they could still be safely taken, but only by those who were familiar with their erstwhile direction. These paths follow a logic of their own: “sie gehen in der Irre. / Aber sie verirren sich nicht” [they go into unknown areas / but they always know where they are going [literally: they never get lost]] (GA 13: 91). The allegory is clear: thinking holds all in abeyance, including its own processional momentum, which may or may not move forward; it may even return to where it began. It is also quite possible that Heidegger too “goes” nowhere in his journey. Commenting upon the phenomenon of “nearness”, he notes “as soon as we try to reflect on the matter [of “nearness”, Nähe], we have already committed ourselves to a long path of thinking. At this point, we shall succeed only in taking a few steps, and these do not lead forwards but backwards, back to where we already are” (GA 12: 197). Nevertheless, we should and do continue on our journey.10 Our first step is to choose the path; once this step has been taken, we and the path are one. We go where it goes: we do not determine its direction. Heidegger continues in the same section of his essay to emphasise the agency of the path as it goes through the region: 10 Heidegger in a later essay offers the following advice: “any path risks going astray, leading astray. To follow such paths requires practice. Practice needs craft. Stay on the path, in genuine need, and learn the craft of thinking, unswerving yet erring” (GA 7: 187).

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Chapter 4 Der Weg ist, hinreichend gedacht, solches, was uns gelangen läßt, und zwar in das, was nach uns langt, indem es uns be-langt. Wir verstehen freilich das Zeitwort “belangen” nur in einem gewöhnlichen Sinne, der meint: sich jemanden vornehmen zur Vernehmung, zum Verhör. Wir können aber auch das Be-langen in einem hohen Sinne denken: be-langen, be-rufen, be-hüten, be-halten. Der Be-lang: das, was, nach unserem Wesen auslangend, es verlangt und so gelangen läßt in das, wohin es gehört. Der Weg ist solches, was uns in das gelangen läßt, was uns be-langt. […] Die Gegend ergibt als Gegend erst Wege. Sie be-wëgt. Wir hören das Wort Be-wëgung im Sinne von: Wege allererst ergeben und stiften. Sonst verstehen wir bewegen im Sinne von: bewirken, daß etwas seinen Ort wechselt, zu- oder abnimmt, überhaupt sich ändert. Be-wëgen aber heißt: die Gegend mit Wegen versehen. Nach altem Sprachgebrauch der schwäbisch–alemannischen Mundart kann “wëgen” besagen: einen Weg bahnen, z. B. durch tief verschneites Land. (186–187) [The path, properly considered, is something that lets us reach something, and indeed to reach that which concerns us, that which summons to us. Certainly, the verb “to summons” [belangen] is normally only understood in its usual usage, meaning to take someone into custody, to an interrogation. It is, however, possible to think of “summons to” [Be-langen] in the higher sense of to summons to, call to, come to shelter and offer containment. The summonsing to is that which, in accordance with our inner Being, reaches out to it, requires and lets that to arrive where it belongs. The path is that which lets us reach where we have been summonsed to. […] It is only the region as region that yields paths. It makes paths. We should hear the word “making-paths”, meaning to yield and provide paths right from the beginning. In other contexts, we understand “to move” as to cause something to move from its place, to increase or decrease, to undergo a change in general. “Making-paths”, however, means: to provide the region with paths. In traditional Swabian-Alemannian idiolect, “placing a path” can mean: to put down a path, e.g. across countryside covered in deep snow.]

The passage is an extended meditation on the trope of the “way” or “path” (Weg). We normally see a path simply as a thoroughfare, as a demarcated space, an inert surface upon which a walker walks: it is the object rather than the subject of the activity of walking. Heidegger seeks to disrupt this reading, encouraging us to view the path as an entity that plays a defining role in the walker’s journey (although as the frequent use of “let” (“lassen”) suggests, this is not a material determination but the freeing up of a personal potentiality).11 Accordingly, he allocates a series of active verbs to the path 11

Indeed, the path changes as we do. “We experience the way to language in the light of what happens with the way itself as we proceed in our journey” (229).

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that will illustrate the path’s effect upon the walker, using langen [“to be enough” and “to extend”] as the matrix for a series of cognate words such as gelangen [“to reach” something], verlangen [“to require” or “to demand”] and, particularly, belangen [to be of concern], which he transforms into the neo-logistic be-langen. Used as a verb, be-langen joins with other related verbs in the passage such as be-rufen, be-hüten and be-halten to demarcate a series of actions (all indicated by the separable prefix be-) that define those who have chosen the way of the path. Without this prefix, these words would translate as “to call”, as in being called to a political office or being called upon to play a role, and “to protect” and “to retain”. A similar use of the prefix allows us to read be-rufen as “summons to” or “to call to”, “be-hüten” as to come “to shelter” and be-halten, “to offer containment”. The noun from belangen is Belang, and this is subject to a similar neologistic transformation, providing the nodal term around which all other langen words revolve. In its dictionary definition it means “concerns” or “interest”, but Heidegger adds a hyphenated prefix to the word to generate more complex meanings, in a way reminiscent of the portmanteau formulations found in Being and Time. In this passage, Be-lang combines three variants of langen, notably auslangen, which is hyphenated into aus-langen, verlangen and gelangen. When combined, the words result in an extended meaning that allows a possible cumulative reading of Be-lang as a “summonsing to that which in accordance with our inner Being, reaches out to it, requires and allows that to arrive where it belongs”. Heidegger wishes us to see that taking the way of language is not an abstract process dependent upon conceptual thinking but a tangible experience, something that is close to us, even if we do not always have the words to describe it. It is something as familiar as a walk through snow-covered countryside. To emphasise its rootedness, its convergence with place, Heidegger draws upon Middle High German, whose terminology was still present in his local Swabian dialect, to recover the word “bewëgen”, meaning “to make paths”.12 It is Be-wëgen that represents the possibility of the path, the terms of its existence; what it provides is langen, that which draws us down the 12

“To clear a path, for instance across a snow-covered field, is in the Alemannic-Swabian dialect still called wëgen even today. This verb, used transitively, means: to form a path, and, in forming it, to keep it ready. Be-wëgen (Be-wëgung) understood in this sense no

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path, that which calls us forth to make the journey. Langen is the occasion that wëgen makes possible: movement into the region, an area that has been made visible through our thinking about language, where we have been assigned to language, and language that has been freed from its in-orderto.13 By separating the stem of the word from its prefix, Heidegger is able to expand the meaning of Bewëgen to generate not only the “providing of paths” but also the “preparing of the path”, that which allows the attainment of the path. In Middle High German, bewëgen also means “to make a decision”, and Heidegger wishes to retain this aspect of the word in its modern reconstruction, expanding it to cover an entirely new range of activities. The phonetic connotations of the word bring into play activities such as “to weigh”, “to dare” and “to surge”, all of which accompany our decision to join the path and follow its trajectory. That trajectory is formally sustained in the writing of the passage through its periodic construction and the continuous alliteration of the “w” consonant, which produces a feeling of movement, of flowing motion. As we walk the path, we enter the region, although this is not a destination (as in the end of a journey) but rather a space into which we are drawn or called, so that we can appreciate the conditions of our enquiry. Heidegger is attempting to sketch out as graphically as possible a terrain, where we find ourselves in language rather than are simply using it. The passage has as its subject a path and an “us”, both of which stand in or, more accurately, move in a mode of mutual appropriation. Coming to the region involves a journey; but this is also (as Heidegger repeatedly makes clear) a homecoming. Indeed, in one sense, we have never really left home: the destination has always been with us, for “the path allows us to reach what concerns us, in that domain in which we

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longer means to move something up or down a path that is already there. It means to bring the path [ … ] forth first of all, and thus to be the path” (249). But what has become visible? What is in this region? Marc Froment-Meurice asks. And “how can we say that it is language itself that carries out this assigning? With what speech? Is it language or us lending this goldsmith’s hand? Does the wall mark its own lines, the earth its own furrows?” (78). One answer suggests itself: we have arrived somewhere where we can finally ask these questions. For further comments on the “freeing and sheltering” function of the region, see Williams (131).

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are already dwelling. Why then, one may ask, should we still seek a path to it? Answer: because where we already are, we are in such a way that, at the same time, we are not there, because we ourselves have not actually reached what concerns our Being” (188). What we have gained from this circular journey is not knowledge (as we might conventionally understand it, as a learning about something), but the recognition of the need for knowledge, an understanding of what is still required. The difference is important: coming to terms with language means coming to terms with the presence of language, and what it says and what it doesn’t say. The latter may be contained in the former. In the final section of “The Essence of Language”, Heidegger takes stock of where the path to language has led him. He summarises his conclusion in a short dictum: Das Wesen der Sprache: Die Sprache des Wesens. [The Being of language: The language of Being.] (189)

Heidegger subjects this brief antithetical construction to detailed analysis, stressing the importance of the colon and the inversion of the terms that allows the maxim to reveal its dynamic play of meaning. As he explains, “within the whole [of the maxim], there exists a disclosure and a beckoning, which points to something that we, after reading the first turn of phrase, do not expect to find in the second; but that second phrase is more than just a rearrangement of words in the first”. It is “more” because Heidegger uses the word Wesen in the first phrase as coterminous with “nature” or “essence”; whereas in the second, he intends the same word to be understood as Being. Understanding the distinction between the two forms of Wesen is crucial to our understanding of how language acquires and maintains its presence in the world: Aufgelockert sagt dann die Wendung vor dem Doppelpunkt: Das, was die Sprache ist, begreifen wir, sobald wir uns dorthin einlassen, wohin der Doppelpunkt gleichsam den Ausblick öffnet. Das ist die Sprache des Wesens. In dieser Wendung hat “das Wesen” die Rolle des Subjekts, dem die Sprache eignet. Das Wort “Wesen” meint aber jetzt nicht mehr das, was etwas ist. “Wesen” hören wir als Zeitwort,

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Chapter 4 wesend wie anwesend und abwesend. “Wesen” besagt währen, weilen. Allein die Wendung “Es west” sagt mehr als nur: Es währt und dauert. “Es west” meint: Es west an, während geht es uns an, be-wëgt und be-langt uns. Das Wesen so gedacht, nennt das Währende, uns in allem Angehende, weil alles Be-wëgende. Die zweite Wendung im Leitwort: “Die Sprache des Wesens” besagt demnach: Die Sprache gehört in dieses Wesende, eignet dem alles Be-wëgenden als dessen Eigenstes. Das All-Bewëgende be-wëgt, indem es spricht. (190) [When its meaning is opened up, the phrase before the colon says then: we shall comprehend what language is as soon as we enter into that which the colon, so to speak, opens up to us. That is the language of Wesen. In this phrase, Wesen assumes the role of the subject, which appropriates language. However, the word Wesen does not mean here that something is. We hear Wesen as a verb, as in “being present” and “being absent”. Wesen means enduring, staying. But even the expression “it brings about” [es west] says more than “it endures” or “it remains”. “It brings about” means: it presents itself, it endures as a matter for us, it makes a way and is a concern for us. Wesen, thought of in this way, names the enduring, that which concerns us in all things, because it is way-making. The second phrase in the dictum: “the language of Wesen” asserts accordingly: language belongs to this enduring-Being, and appropriates as its very own the all-way-making power. The all-way-making power makes a way as it speaks.]

The passage centres on the crucial term Wesen, which is something that is (as in the first line of the dictum) and something that does (the second line). Wesen, as a substantive, means that which “endures” and “remains”. Language always exceeds its specific moment of articulation: it feeds on a broader temporality. Heidegger draws our attention to the fluidity of its provenance by developing it grammatically both as a gerund (das Wesen) and as a present participle (wesend), which operates in the same way as related words such anwesend [being present] and abwesend [being absent]. Textually, Heidegger consolidates this provenance by an extended alliterative linking of the key terms through their shared “w” phoneme. This interrelating cohesiveness is reinforced in the grammatical expansion of the common temporal adverb während [during] into the verb währen [to endure] and the substantive Währende [enduring]. But Heidegger also sees wesen as a Zeitwort (in grammatical terms a “verb”, but literally a “time word”), and he uses it in its archaic form, es west, which means literally “it essences” or, less literally, “brings about”. Through the archaic form of es west, wesen translates into a form of movement that

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is cognate with be-wëgen und be-langen, denoting the making of pathways that will allow our encounter with Being. The trope of be-wëgen reappears again, but now we are intended to think of it alongside its homonymic cognate, bewegen, whose standard meaning is “to move” or “to affect” but here refers to the opening up of the possibilities of language (their “ways” or “paths”). Within this etymological complex, Heidegger’s dictum (in which the second line reverses the terms of the first, but as expansion rather than as contradiction) describes a moving power that forms itself through language and which brings the latter into enduring presence. Heidegger seeks in his maxim to encapsulate the transfigurativelyenabling movement of language. To identify the primal condition for this movement, he returns in the final pages of his essay to a concept that had supported his earlier attempts to explain how Being necessarily must emerge from within itself: Ereignen [ap-propriating]. Language calls us into Being, as we, in turn, call language into Being. This is the meaning of ap-propriation, which is a form of reciprocation.14 Recognising this has allowed us, the enquirers into the essence of language, to reach the critical point of our journey, where language is now speaking on its own terms, acquiring a “monological” character: language has come to speak as language.15 But does this not mean that we have simply abandoned the reciprocity that has linked us to language, and which constituted our place in language? Heidegger asks the question and, in the final pages of his essay, he answers it: Language released, therefore, into its own free realm, can be concerned solely with itself. This sounds as if we were talking of an egotistical solipsism. But language does not insist upon itself in the mode of a purely self-centred, disregarding medium of self-admiration. As Saying [Sage], the essence of language is an ap-propriating-showing that exactly disregards itself in order to free that which is shown into its authentic appearance. (251)

14 “Language needs and uses humankind because humankind is needed and used by Ereignis in such a way that language is first set under way toward human speaking. There is no ‘essence’ of language without the appropriation of the essence of humankind that is in some sense ‘other’ than it” (Fynsk 101). 15 As Zierek observes, “what language promises is specifically its word as the turn of the event [Ereignis], that is, as the event unfolding as the language of being” (140).

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Ereignis “tears open” (aufreißt) the often obscured potentiality of language.16 That liberation of language is also our liberation. By grasping the integrity of language, we come into Being, in a process where the unselfconsciousness of the subject submits to language as to something beyond it, which is the condition of its possibility. It is in our attempts to ap-propriate the autonomy of language (and, perhaps, in our failure to do so) that we open up the world to us. When we too have reached appropriation, we reach the essence of language, which lies in its forever disclosing connotative potential, its formal richness and semantic complexity, its tendency to ambiguation, the resonance of its imagery and symbolism, its resistance to unified meaning, and in the way that it allows us to pose questions, whilst compelling us to accept the complex and often deferred resolutions of the same. This is the achievement of language as Saying: it is a polysemic valence that belongs to Vieldeutigkeit rather than to Eindeutigkeit (71–72).17 It is an experience of language that requires a capacity for reception rather than for analysis or interpretation (both of which seek to convert our response to language into something else), and the desire to stay with the opening up of the word through Saying, rather than tolerate the closing down of its promise through definition or demarcation. On our journey, it may be that we enter this region of language without ever definitively arriving. We find ourselves drawn into language through song, empowered by language without ever mastering it: 16

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The matrix concept here is Riß [“rift”, “tear” or “cleft”], which Heidegger aligns with further lexical items such as Umriss [“outline” or “contour”], Grundriss [“ground plan” or “layout”]. Transmuted into Auf-Riß, Riß becomes “the totality of all the aspects of that pattern that structures and prevails through the unlocked freedom of language. It is the pattern of the essence of language, the framework of a showing in which are joined speakers and their speaking, the spoken and the unspoken, and all that is addressed in language” (240). For an explication of the various Riß formations, see Hillis Miller (12–15). Eindeutig normally translates as “clear” or “unambiguous”, but Heidegger wishes to stress the “ein” component and have us read the word as “single meaning”. Although the standard translation of vieldeutig is “ambiguous”, the word literally means having “many meanings”. As Heidegger explains in his lecture on Hölderlin’s hymn “Andenken”, “in truth, every genuine word has a hidden and manifold vibrating space” (GA 52: 15).

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The Saying which resides in ap-propriation (Ereignis) is as Showing the most actual form of ap-propriating. This sounds like a philosophical statement. If we only hear these words as a statement then they will not tell us what has to be thought out, which is: Saying is the mode in which ap-propriation speaks: mode not so much as modus or manner, but as melodic mode, as “melos”, song, which in speaking sings. For appropriating Saying brings the properties of all things present to light – it praises, that means it allows them into their own. (255)

The Word Transcending: Reading Hölderlin, Stefan George and Trakl We take the path to language: walking the path defines the journey, as it defines us. As we move “forward”, we learn what language is and what it is not, not as not-language but as something that language withholds although gestures to, a capacity to construct a world that never entirely belongs to us. We hear the word being named, naming itself, but we do not name the word. This is the task of a thinking in language that has the capacity to grant meaning through its re-call of the “originary” mission of language as Saying: poetry. Poetry is the home-coming of language: it is that which makes possible the revelation of our thinking-presence within Being, because “poetry first of all admits man’s dwelling into its very essence. Poetry is the originary admission of dwelling” (GA 7: 206). Therefore, “in order to uncover a possibility of undergoing a thinking experience with language, let us seek out the neighbourhood in which poetry and thinking dwell […], which now means the encounter of the two facing each other” (GA 12: 173 and 176). It was a task that Heidegger had already embraced in his extensive writing on Friedrich Hölderlin. Heidegger saw Hölderlin as an epochal figure, the voice of “the great beginning that may possibly come”, who drew his poetry “from the shining of earth and heaven, in the holy which conceals the god, in the poetizing-thinking Being of mankind” (GA 4: 176 and 162). Hölderlin gave expression to a personal cosmography in which the customs, beliefs and myths of the Greeks continued as living realities into the present, in the sanctified rituals and customs that celebrated nature, the simple flowing of night

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and day, death and regeneration. In poems such as “Bread and Wine” (“Brot und Wein”), “As when on a holy day …” (“Wie wenn am Feiertage …”), “To the Fates” (“An die Parzen”) and “Der Ister” and “Germanien” (to which Heidegger devoted two extensive lecture courses in 1941 and 1942), Hölderlin looked forward to what poetry and thought, thought as poetry, might become through their eventual unity in a “new time”, a future of the mythic mind that would link “the time of the gods who have fled and of the god who is coming” (47). Heidegger found the essence of Hölderlin‘s vision where it burnt most brightly: in the “exceptional poem”, the poem that was “marked out [ausgezeichnet], meaning that it alone fatefully concerns us, because it shows us in its poetry the destiny in which we stand, whether we know it or not, whether we are ready to submit to it or not” (182–183). And Heidegger sought to “hear” such poems through the viaduct of a single resonating word, as he had “heard” the pre-Socratic philosophers through “logos” and “aletheia”. These were words that sometimes could only be found in a variant or in an earlier draft of a poem, but nonetheless (or perhaps because of that) allowed for “abrupt, deeply penetrating insights into the proper character of the poem” (184). It was here that thinking was enjoined with the poetic, the text becoming, as one commentator has noted, the “meeting ground of an interlocution or Zwiesprache that expropriates both poet and thinker” (Fóti 45). Hölderlin’s “Ceremony of Peace” (“Friedensfeier”) was one such exceptional poem. In his essay, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”, Heidegger had asked: “how does language happen (‘wie geschieht die Sprache’)”? In his reply, he had quoted the central lines from the poem, “Conciliator, who never believed …” (“Versöhnender, der du nimmergelaubt …”), a preliminary draft of the later more famous “Ceremony of Peace”. In his reading of the poem, Heidegger cites a stanza that includes the word Gespräch: Viel hat erfahren der Mensch. Der Himmelischen viele genannt, Seit ein Gespräch wir sind Und hören können voneinander. (GA 4: 38) [Much has mankind experienced, Named many of the celestial ones, Since we have shared our words And are able to hear from one another.]

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Heidegger attempts to reconstruct the meaning of the poem (its “inner sense”) by focusing on the connotations of the word Gespräch which, unlike its English equivalent, “conversation”, contains the stem Sprache [language].18 Highlighted by its totalising “Ge” prefix, Gespräch connotes involvement and inclusion for those who are bound together through the shared experience of language as “dialogue”, as a “sharing of words”: We are a conversation [a sharing of words], and that always means at the same time that we are a single conversation. The unity of a conversation consists in the fact that in the essential word the One and the Same are manifest upon which we agree and on the basis of which we are at one and thus are authentically who we are. Conversation and its unity bear our Being [Dasein]. (39)

Conversation, the sharing of words, is the mode of language in which language establishes the presence of “the One and the Same”, and through which we can retain our selfhood while we are in a community of others. Heidegger returns to the same theme in his essay on “The Essence of Language”, but here he discusses the final draft of the poem, where the focus is not upon “conversation” (the exchange of words, however intimate) but upon “song”. For, as he had already observed in his Hölderlin essay, “the gods have brought us into conversation” and now we must name them; indeed, we must bring them to voice, not through words alone but through song (40). To foreground the essential difference between these two modes of language, Heidegger now quotes the same lines from the final version of “Ceremony of Peace”, noting that one crucial word has been added: Viel hat von Morgen an, Seit ein Gespräch wir sind und hören voneinander, Erfahren der Mensch; bald sind aber Gesang (wir). (GA 12: 171) [From the morning and onwards humankind much has learnt since we enjoined ourselves in speech and listen to another. Soon, however, soon [we] shall be song.]

18

Timothy Clark describes this as a “mode of dwelling with or in” a text. As he explains, “Heidegger’s readings of poetry perform a slow-motion fragmentation of texts that effectively renders them paratactic in an analogous way. This teases out of individual words and phrases their specific ‘dichterisch’ force” (43).

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Conversation forms a bond between humans, but the gods can only be sung into existence, for “those who ‘have heard from one another – the ones and the others – are people and gods. The song celebrates the advent of the gods – and in that advent everything falls silent. The song is not the opposite of spoken exchange [Gespräch] but rather the most intimate connection with it; for the song, too, is language” (171–172). The word has been found, and the heart has been opened. Transcendence requires pure expression, and Heidegger finds an appropriate voicing of these sentiments in Hölderlin’s poem, “Walk in the Country” (“Der Gang auf das Land”), quoting in his essay its central stanza: Darum hoff ich sogar, es werde, wenn das Gewünschte Wir beginnen und erst unsere Zunge gelöst, Und gefunden das Wort, und aufgegangen das Herz ist, Und von trunkener Stirn’ höher Besinnen entspringt, Mit der unsern zugleich des Himmels Blüthe beginnen, Und dem offenen Blik offen der Leuchtende seyn. (194) [Therefore, I even hope it may come to pass, When we begin what we wish for and our tongue loosens And the word has been found and the heart has been opened, And from an ecstatic brow springs a higher thinking, That the sky’s blooms may blossom even as our own. And the luminous sky opens to opened eyes.]

The lines describe the loosening of the tongue into flight, celebrating an expansion of selfhood that involves all that belongs to the body: “heart”, “brow” and “eyes”, which are opened to receive a “higher thinking”. Language as poetry is the “flower of the mouth”, which only comes into its fullness when it is formed by the “ecstatic brow” of the poet and brought to voice by a god (194). Neither man nor poet can be content with the mere riches that the material world offers; what is dearest (Liebstes), as we discover in “Bread and Wine”, is something that is ineffable, and Hölderlin leaves it in that poem undefined: it may be an experience or a poetic achievement, or perhaps a way of living in or a grasping of the world, but it is a precious entity, and it must remain without substance until we can find words for it:

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So ist der Mensch; wenn da ist das Gut, und es sorget mit Gaaben Selber ein Gott für ihn, kennet und sieht er es nicht. Tragen muß er, zuvor; nun aber nennt er sein Liebstes, Nun, nun müssen dafür Worte, wie Blumen, entstehn. (195) [Such is man: when wealth is there, and no Less than a god in Person tends him with gifts, blind he remains, unaware. First he must suffer; but now he names his dearest Possession, Now for it words like flowers leaping alive he Must find.]

In Heidegger’s essays On the Way to Language, Hölderlin is depicted as an inspirational figure, an oracular voice. In his hymns and odes, Hölderlin invoked the gods and in doing so became, in his own way, extra-mortal. We would not, however, be justified in thinking that the mission that he so eloquently pleaded for does not belong to the terrestrial. On the contrary, the region that Hölderlin inhabits is a region where the spiritual is imminent, and to which every poet journeys in his poetry, and to which we also travel on our way to language. But how can the poet name such a region? What, in fact, Heidegger asks in the concluding pages of his essay, “The Poem”, “does ‘naming’ in general mean? Does ‘naming’ consist simply in imposing a name upon something?” (GA 4: 188). These are questions that concern the creative potency of language (what it makes possible), but also its dangers and limitations (what it refuses to make possible). In his essay “The Essence of Language”, Heidegger uses them to explore Stefan George’s poem, “The Word” (“Das Wort”, 1914): Wunder von ferne oder traum Bracht ich an meines landes saum Und harrte bis die graue norn Den namen fand in ihrem born – Drauf konnt ichs greifen dicht und stark Nun blüht und glänzt es durch die mark … Einst langt ich an nach guter fahrt Mit einem kleinod reich und zart

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In “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”, Heidegger had written, “the poet names the gods and names all things as they are. This naming does not consist in providing something that is already known simply with a name; rather, by speaking the essential word that thing only then becomes what

19

Translated by Hertz. His translation is impressive but is not without the occasional oversight. In the final stanza of the German text, the poet does not “renounce”; rather, he “learns renunciation”. The distinction is important, because George wishes the reader to see that the poet has undergone an experience that has brought him knowledge; that he has, in fact, gained something through his failure.

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it is through this naming” (GA 4: 41). This is both the de-fining but also the liberating aspiration of the word. But what can we say about the word itself ? Heidegger is aware that we will not be satisfied with generalisations, and consequently he asks in his essay “The Word” the following questions: “what are words, that they have such power? What are things that they need words in order to be? What is Being here, that it appears like an endowment, which is dedicated to the thing from the word?” (GA 12: 209). Heidegger does not seek to answer these questions in any theoretical way, but rather attempts to show how they constitute themselves as themes in “the mysterious landscape” (160–161) of Stefan George’s “The Word”. Written in seven rhyming couplets of short tetrameter lines, the narrative of the poem is structured around movement and exploration, voyaging and the crossing of boundaries, and the events depicted take place in an atmosphere of fabulation that is reminiscent of the German Märchen. The poet is, or has been, a traveller to distant lands, in search of wonders, of raw materials that he will transform through the poetic process, materials that reside both in the external world (ferne) and in his imagination, his mind (traum).20 The poet’s confidence in his ability to acquire names, to, in effect, control language, is reflected in the decisive form of the poem, whose discursive trajectory is formed out of seven two-line rhyming stanzas of short lines and couplets written in largely dactylic meter. The poem tells a story, charts an experience and, ultimately, develops an argument. The poet’s journey and the discoveries he makes are outlined in strong active verbs, “brought” (bracht), “waited” (harrte), “could” (konnte) and “grasp” (greifen), which are stated in assertive spondaic feet. The purposeful and repeated and possibly habitual nature of the poet’s actions is underscored by the temporal qualifiers “once” (einst) and “straight away” (worauf), and by the regularity of the aa/bb/cc/dd/ee/ ff/gg rhyming scheme. On his return from his voyage, the poet waits for the goddess, Norm, the arbiter and higher power of the Muse, to provide him with a name for the experience that he has brought back. He must, however, wait in vain. Norm cannot find the name, but without the name there is no poetry. The

20 The trope of the voyage was a familiar one in Symbolist poetry, as in Baudelaire’s “Invitation to a Voyage”.

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surety of the poet’s quest is now dramatically undermined in the bleak peripeteia of the final couplet: “So I renounced and sadly see:/ Where the word breaks off no thing may be”. Heidegger glosses the line in the following way: “breaks off means: it is lacking. No thing is where the word is lacking, namely the word that names the given thing”, adding, “something is only where the appropriate and, therefore, adequate word names a thing as Being, and so establishes the Being in question as such” (153 and 155). That we have entered a different realm, one of elemental truth, is indicated in the final words of the poem by the replacement of the previous bountiful terminology of “treasure”, “rich” and “frail” (precious terms meant perhaps to reflect the over-refinement of fin de siecle sensibility) by the simple stark substantive, “thing” (ding), that is stated in a concluding line whose residual force is emphasised through a series of accented syllables.21 As if to undermine the surety of the poet’s quest still further, the poem moves from the indicative tense to the subjunctive, “may be” (sei), leaving the poet, and the reader, suspended in the realm of the tentative, the conditional, the unresolved.22 Stefan George’s poem poses a series of compelling questions: where does the poet’s and our experience of the world end and the use of language begin? And is the former possible without the latter? The poet is brought to a realisation that the essential relationship between language and the world does not allow itself to be mastered. Could the confidence exhibited by the poet ever have been justified? Can we speak of treasure when we have not as yet named it? Can names be willed into existence? Heidegger would have us answer in the negative throughout. Things cannot be formally willed into existence. Willing, the poet’s conviction that language can do what he wants it to do, is not, as the concluding lines of the poem tell us, commensurate

21 22

For “Being – bestowing language” cannot be captured by “poeticising diction” (von Herrmann 1999: 174). Herz’ translation links the final to the penultimate line in a firmly consequential way, but in the German text there is a lacuna between the two lines, so that the concluding sentiments come as a stark and unexpected resolution. This uncompromising resolution is essential to the meaning of the poem. For as Jussi Backman notes, “whereas naming words always more or less inevitably directs our attention to the beings that they name, the breakdown of the word makes us receptive to the unnameable ‘is’ [sei], the event of Being that lets beings be present” (66).

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with poetic sensibility or the poetic vocation. The poet’s distant voyage is a voyage too far. We must remain here, as must the poet, and “relinquish the claim to the assurance that he will, on demand, be supplied with the name for that which he has posited as what truly is. This positing and that claim he must now deny to himself. He must renounce having words under his control as the portraying names for what is posited” (215).23 The poet must renounce naming; but in doing so he opens himself to a richer potentiality for greeting the world through language, which Heidegger calls “Saying” (Sagen or Sage, from the Old Norse, sagan, meaning “to let be seen and be heard”) (242). As Heidegger observes elsewhere, Saying “abides in a game which, the more manifold it develops itself the stricter it remains within its hidden rules” (GA 9: 423). Saying insists on the autonomy of language, and when we come to speak of Saying we should not, Heidegger argues, consider it “exclusively or even decisively as the property of human activity” (GA 12: 242). Forming language within Saying involves us in recognising the resistance of objects to definition, in accepting failure.24 Heidegger concludes “The Essence of Language” with a final comment on George’s poem, returning once again to its final enigmatic couplet. But what he does now with these lines is something quite radical: he rewrites them. As he observes: In the neighbourhood of Stefan George’s poem, we heard it said: Where the word breaks off no thing may be. We remarked that the poem leaves a thought-provoking residue, i.e. what it means to say “a thing is”. Equally thought-provoking to us was the relationship between the word that is sounded (because it is not lacking) and the word “is”. 23

But this is a gain, not a loss: “the poet retains [the] hidden verbal essence of the word in so far as he assents to the mystery of the word in his renunciation” (McCormick 15). 24 “Saying” mobilises the conative potency of language rather than its conceptual denotative function and accepts the contradictory nature of what may result from that. Saying allows “the very rhythm of language, which may become song, in which repetition enables articulation, and in which differentiation of sound and script makes possible a unity of sense” (Malpas 2016: 216). For William Waters, Saying amounts not only to forgoing the naming of the world but also to renouncing certain ways in which the world is experienced. Saying “consents to the loss of whatever cannot be put into words” (46).

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It is precisely “the ringing of stillness” that Heidegger found in the poetry of the Austrian Expressionist, Georg Trakl. Trakl occupies a special place in Heidegger’s thinking on poetry, with two essays in On the Way to Language being devoted to the poet: “Word” (“Das Wort”) and “Language” (“Die Sprache”), which is given over to the analysis of a single poem by Trakl, “Winter Evening” (“Winterabend). The poem reads: Wenn der Schnee ans Fenster fällt, Lang die Abendglocke läutet, Vielen ist der Tisch bereitet Und das Haus ist wohlbestellt. Mancher auf der Wandershaft Kommt ans Tor auf dunklen Pfaden. Golden blüht der Baum der Gnaden Aus der Erde kühlem Saft. Wanderer tritt still herein; Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle. Da erglänzt in reiner Helle Auf dem Tische Brot und Wein. (14–15) [When snow falls against the window, Long tolls the evening bell, The table is for many laid, And the house is well apportioned. Many on their wanderings Come to the door from darkened paths. Golden blooms the tree of Grace Out of the earth’s cool sap. A wanderer quietly steps within; Pain turned the threshold to stone.

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There, glowing in limpid brightness Upon the table bread and wine.]25

“Winter Evening” describes the arrival of a mysterious stranger to a cottage in the midst of winter. In the opening stanza, the cottage is depicted as a refuge from the pressing elements of cold and snow, its welcoming bountifulness established through the expansive tropes of “many” (vielen) and “well apportioned” (wohlbestellt). Even time itself, which is “long” (lang), partakes of this plenitude, a theme that is carried over into the second stanza. Now darkness, which is that of the evening but also that of the path that the wanderer has taken, turns to light with the glowing of the tree. With “comes” (kommt), the stasis of the first stanza gives way to movement to prepare the theme of arrival and possibly that of the quenching of (a spiritual) thirst. Then abruptly in the third stanza a single word, “pain” (Schmerz), transforms what might have remained a simple rural vignette into a poem of existential disquiet. “Pain” (without any defining article) appears from nowhere, incongruously forming a subject at the beginning of the second line of the stanza: it is a dramatic and enigmatic personification. Is this the pain of the wanderer or does its source lie elsewhere? It seems an entity in its own right, a totalising presence that in crossing the threshold of the cottage has turned it to stone.26 Even the tense of the verb (“turned … to stone”, versteinerte) is disconcerting. We might accept the word in the present tense, when its association with the wanderer would be unambiguous, but putting the verb in the imperfect, which is the only such use of the tense in the poem, suggests a history of unsettling obscurity.

My translation. For alternative translations, see Hofstadter (Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought 194–195), and Williams (110). 26 Andrew J. Mitchell sees this as a positive moment in the poem: stone does not represent “an insensitive hardening and numbed deadening at the threshold” but on the contrary, because it is linked to pain shows forth “a softness or sensitivity” (91). This reading involves putting the emphasis on the stem of the word, stein. Versteinerte, however, is the past tense of “to petrify” or “to ossify”, and its connotations are exclusively negative in German. 25

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“Winter Evening” has been read as a poem about Christian salvation.27 The poem, undeniably, contains religious imagery: “Abendglocke” is an “evening bell” and possibly a vesper bell; there is a “tree of Grace”; and its final images are of bread and wine, which gesture towards the sacrament of the Holy Communion. Such imagery might seem to indicate that the poem possesses a message of spiritual redemption. And yet, “Winter Evening” moves within an atmosphere of disquiet and foreboding that works against such a reading. We can understand the positive implications of a stranger arriving after journeying along dark paths, but the world that he is entering is curiously impersonal: the cottage, although well-apportioned, shows no sign of habitation; indeed, the human element is entirely missing until the wanderer himself appears at the threshold. Thematically, much is left unclear, including, and most important of all, where the wanderer has come from, what his purpose is and whether he will ultimately avail himself of the bread and wine (there seems no interest on his part; indeed, does he see what is in front of him?). The form of the poem also resists clear definition or resolution. There are no sentient verbs of feeling or perception, and there is an absence of conjunctions or coordinating clauses that might establish an interrelationship between the components of this scene. The three quatrains are written in short trimeter lines and possess an abba/cddc/effe rhyming scheme, which is supported by a compact and containing trochaic metre. But where we would most expect to find this comforting metrical form to be present, in the opening stanza, it is noticeably lacking. Instead, we have a scheme made up from half rhymes (fällt / wohlbestellt, läutet/ bereitet), a metrical form that suggests disorder and dislocation. It is, however, precisely this figurative oscillation between darkness and light, between the mood of ethereality that surrounds place and person and the brooding suggestiveness of the poem, that points to the presence of a form of Being that Heidegger had described elsewhere: the “uncanny” (Ungeheuer). For as “Being comes to sight, there the non-commonplace announces itself, the 27

According to Eduard Lachmann, the reference to bread and wine indicates that what is depicted is “not a peasant cottage but a village church”. The wanderer is, in fact, “a Perceval figure, and the pain is his wound of longing for Christ” (26). Herbert Lindenberger sees the poem “moving toward the assertion of a human order in which divine grace directly intervenes” (104).

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excessive thing that soars ‘beyond’ the ordinary, that which is not to be explained by explaining forms of Being. This is the uncanny”, and he added, “the uncanny: that is the Being that shines into forms of Being, and in its shining often grazes forms of Being like the shadow of a cloud silently passing by” (GA 54: 149–150). The uncanny is the plenitude of darkness that dwells amongst the ordinary, a disclosure of Being that requires a particular vision that is capable of “calling” or “bidding” this form of Being into existence. This is what Trakl accomplishes in his poem, in a text where “the calling calls unto itself and is, therefore, always here and there – here into presence, there into absence” (GA 12: 18). Accordingly, Heidegger frames his reading of “Winter Evening” around this relationship between nearness and absence, the immanent and the transcendent, and the coming together of the two as they are “called into” the world, to find their presence in everyday entities. As Heidegger notes midway through his exposition: What does the first stanza call? It calls things, bids them come […] It invites things in so that they may bear upon men as things. The snowfall brings men under the sky, which is darkening into night. The tolling of the evening bell brings them as mortals before the divine. House and table join mortals to the earth. The things that were named, thus called, gather to themselves sky and earth, mortals and divinities. (19)

Indeed, the entire poem can be read as an act of invocation: The first stanza of the poem bids [ruft] the things to come which, thinging, bear world. The second stanza bids the world to come which, worlding, grants things. The third stanza bids the middle for world and things to come: the carrying out of the intimacy. (23)

Heidegger continues, “the third stanza calls world and things into the middle of their intimacy. The seam that binds their Being toward one another is pain”, which is “the joining agent in the rending that divides and gathers. It is the joining of the rift”. “Pain”, however, should not simply be seen as a literary figure: pain is the revelation of the “worlding” (weltend) of the object world as it is in its place.28 Consequently, Heidegger continues his reading

28

“Pain is the very difference between the thing and the world; lacking that difference, there could be no relation between them [as the order of things]” (Halliburton 190).

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of the poem in terms of its depiction of texture, space and structure, those conditions that allow the physical world “to world”: The speaking of the first two stanzas speaks by bidding things come to world, and world to things. The two modes of bidding are different but not separate. But neither are they merely coupled together. For world and things do not subsist alongside one another. They penetrate each other. Thus, the two traverse in a middle. In it, they are at one. (21–22)

This singular inter-penetration of material elements depicted in “Winter Evening” Heidegger calls “di-fference” (Unter-Schied), which he defines in the following way: Di-fference is neither a distinction nor a relation. Di-fference is at most a dimension of the world and of things. But in this case “dimension” is also no longer a precinct already existing for itself, in which this or that comes to settle. The di-fference is the dimension, insofar as it measures out world and things in their inner quality [Eigenes]. It is only such a measuring out that opens up the coming together and coming apart of world and things. Such opening up is the way in which di-fference spans the two. The di-fference, as the middle for world and things, metes out the measure of their Being [Wesen]. (23)29

Di-fference represents an arrival at a boundary; hence the significance of the image of the threshold in the poem. The threshold is a point where two worlds intersect, and in their intersection forms a place that confirms the worldling of the world.30 It is place of demarcation: di-fference brings For Fynsk “the ‘pain’ that hardens into stone in the threshold names the essence of language as a tracing out and gathering of the difference between world and thing” (24). 29 Hertz translates Unter-schied as “diff-erence”. If we keep this formation, we should more appropriately write it as “di-fference”, retaining the Latin stem ferrere [“to bear”, “to tend”]. The German scheiden does, indeed, have that sense, but its meaning also includes “to dissolve”, “depart” and “separate”. 30 Viewed from the point of view of di-fference, Trakl’s poem is not a moral and far less a religious allegory of suffering and redemption, but a showing of the elemental world as pained self-manifestation that emerges, in the case of this poem, through “the bidding of language” (26). This does not mean, however, that “the language of the poem foregrounds itself as language” or that the poem possesses a “peculiarly ‘reflexive’ character” (Fynsk 32 and 33). The poem is not “about” language; the poem is a bidding of the world through language.

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things home to what they are, to the self-sufficiency (Innigkeit) of their Being, their “stillness” (Stille), which Heidegger locates in “the simple one-fold of the pain of intimacy” (27). Pain is a bringing into place of a necessary convergence, which is the precondition for intimacy. It is a calling into Being, and as such it is a characteristic of things within the world that have attained a certain relationship to themselves, a certain motionless (reglose) quality, which gestures to the immanence of transcendence, even as a dark and possibly disturbing enigma in the mundane world, “the presence sheltered in absence” that Trakl’s poem gives voice to (26). In his reading of “Winter Evening, Heidegger is not attempting a literary analysis, although he is aware of what such an analysis would entail.31 Instead, he is exploring the conditions under which we might approach an understanding of the poem through what he terms “co-respondence” (Ent-sprechung), a reading of the poem that is a receptive listening to its evocative language and tone (29).32 We hear Trakl’s poem, and Heidegger suggests how we must hear it: as the sharing of an intimacy.33 It is a communion with what is said and what is not said, as we remain alive to the resonance of the images without seeking to allocate precise meaning to them. This activity is not intended to take us away from the poem (as if we were interested only in our response but not the text itself ), but further into it, into what Heidegger calls in his later essay, “Language in the Poem”, its “place” (Ort), that central cluster of tropes or themes around which the poem revolves. In “Winter Evening”, Heidegger identifies as the place of the poem the “apartness” (Abgeschiedenheit) of the wanderer, who has departed from his homeland, leaving behind its values of stability and security (70).34 31 32 33

34

Heidegger was fully capable of conventional literary analysis, as he demonstrated in his debate with Emil Staiger regarding a poem by Mörike. See Staiger (1951). For “the last and also the most difficult step of every interpretation consists in its disappearing, along with its elucidations, before the pure presence of the poem” (GA 4: 8). “Hearing is not simply the registering [aufnehmen] of the word. Hearing is above all a harkening [horchen]. Harkening is being fully alone with what is coming. Harkening is a collecting of the single broad reaching out into to the realm of arrival that has not as yet become familiar” (GA 4: 13–14). The dictionary definition of abgeschieden is “secluded”, which in turn relates to Abschied “departure”. Abgeschiedenheit, however, clearly looks back to Unter-schied [dif-ference],

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Trakl’s wanderer finds transfiguration in his new experience of openness to the world, and Heidegger, in his broader reading of Trakl’s poems, seeks to follow that transfiguration, charting the path of the change that the wanderer takes, bearing a “brow of a head marked by consummate pain”, becoming in his journey “the madman who dies away into the early and who now from his apartness, by the music of his footfall, calls to his brother who also follows him” (70). In his essays on Trakl, Heidegger undertakes a journey of response, committing himself to a creative listening to Trakl’s words that will involve him meeting the mystery of night and stars and dusk, absorbing the transcendent colour blue and recognising the holy elements of earth and grave. These tropes constitute the “place” of Trakl’s writing, where language forms a centre of expression and articulation, which is the total work around which the individual poems revolve. Heidegger follows Trakl, and we follow Heidegger, as in the final pages of his essay the analytical becomes the lyrical, and interpretation culminates in strophic celebration. It is a transformative moment in Heidegger’s essay, but it is not an inappropriate one, for it is in this place that poetry and thinking, language and philosophy, which has come to understand the word from within, belongs. Here: The language of the poetry, whose site is apartness, answers to the home-coming of unborn mankind into the quiet beginning of its stiller essence. The language that this poetry speaks stems from this transition. Its path leads from the downfall of all that decays over to the descent into the twilit blue of the holy. The language that the work speaks stems from the passage across and through the ghostly night’s nocturnal pond. This language sings the song of the home-coming in apartness (70).

with which it shares the root stem of scheiden [to separate], connoting the state or consequence of separation as a place of Being. Apartness has traditionally been understood as a quality of the recluse or hermit. It characterises those who are seeking spiritual transcendence, who have “freed themselves from their baser selves, want nothing for themselves and expect nothing, even from God, but have moved beyond time” (Ritter I: 5).

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“The Flower of the Mouth”: The Poetry of Martin Heidegger Heidegger concludes his reading of Trakl’s poetry by following the ascent of “the rising song into our echo of the music of the ghostly years, through which the stranger wanders, the years which the brother follows, who begins dwelling in the land of the evening” (77–78). Is this paraphrase, lyrical observation, creative reconstruction; or is it something else? Is it perhaps an ascent by Heidegger himself through his writing into the idiom of the poetry of apartness? Is this, ultimately, where Heidegger is moving on his own path to language, not to the writing of “philosophy”, but to poetry itself ? Indeed, is this possibly where all philosophy of the “new beginning” is destined to find its true voice? The fact that Heidegger himself wrote a substantial body of verse suggests that we should, at least provisionally, answer throughout in the affirmative. Heidegger began publishing poetry in 1910 at the age of twenty-one, and produced his final poem in 1976, the year of his death. His poems were written at important and, occasionally, at critical points in his life, and published in journals, pamphlets or as slim volumes with local publishers. These poems stand in an oblique relationship to his philosophical writing, now expanding, now deepening, and sometimes problematising, intentionally or not, that writing.35 Heidegger’s earliest poems, such as “Dying glory” (“Sterbende Pracht”), “Distant Land” (“Fernes Land”), both 1910, and “We shall wait” (“Wir wollen warten”, 1911), were written while he was a theology student in Freiburg. Introspective and autobiographical in ambit, they belong to the idiom of late Romantic nature poetry. In them, Heidegger recalls his past and his experience of childhood often, as in “Distant Land”, with a sense of longing: (“[I] seek, seek childhood joy”) (GA 81: 6). Other poems of this period are confessional in tone, such as “Hours on the Mount of Olives” (“Ölbergstunden”), published in 1911, which registers a crisis in Heidegger’s religious faith:

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To the thirty-three poems that had already appeared in GA 13, the four poems published in GA 16 and the nine in GA 66, have been added those of GA 81, which contains more than 500 poems (or, more accurately, texts that may be read as poems).

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Chapter 4 Ölbergstunden meines Lebens: im düstern Schein mutlosen Zagens habt ihr mich oft geschaut. Weinend rief ich: nie vergebens. Mein junges Sein hat müd des Klagens dem Engel “Gnade” nur vertraut. (GA 13: 6) [It is now my time on the Mount of Olives: in gloomy light of dispirited vacillation you have frequently seen me. Weeping I called out: never in vain. My young being is tired of complaint, is to the angel of “mercy” only entrusted.]

In The New Testament, the “Ölberg” is Gethsemane, an olive garden into which Christ came following his teaching in the temple, to pray and look for guidance from God on the eve of his betrayal and crucifixion. In the account given in the Gospels, Christ is described as “troubled and deeply distressed” (Mark 14: 33). Even after the appearance of the angel, his agony continues, his sweat falling “like beads of blood” to the ground (Luke 22: 44). In the poem, Heidegger’s persona too has reached a nadir, which has brought him to near extinction (the “dispirited vacillation” of line 3). The poem’s form reflects this vacillating mood. Although the abac/abac rhyming scheme is regular across the two stanzas, supporting the tight discursive nature of the poem, its confessional message, its overall form is unconventional and gives rise to an unease and restlessness, which is reinforced by the differing line lengths and changing metre. It is noticeable that when spiritual relief comes in the mercy dispensed by the angel it is placed in inverted commas: redemption and religious faith are securities that have been hoped for rather than achieved. In 1941, Heidegger published the volume Beckonings (Winke), and this was followed in 1947 by the collection From the Experience of Thinking (Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens). In the latter volume, he warned the reader

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against approaching these works as “poetic texts” (Dichtungen), adding “the beckonings are words from a process of thinking” (33). Indeed, many are closer in form to jottings, aphorisms and aperçus than poems, as the latter are conventionally understood.36 That Heidegger should have been defensive about this writing is understandable: even in those texts that are unambiguously “poetic” there are signs that he was striving for something that he found difficult to attain. This is witnessed both by the fact that a number of them have the same heading (“Beckoning” (“Winke”), for example, is used as a title, or part of a title, thirteen times), and that they rework the same themes and employ the same imagery (there is an entire series, for example, devoted to meditations on the notion of “Be-ing” (Seyn) (GA 81: 67–69) . Nevertheless, all of these texts are informed by a guiding intellectual spirit, the origins of which lie in Heidegger’s philosophy as it developed after his “Turning”, where he came increasingly to emphasise the role of language in making the border regions of thought visible. The intellectual energy released through this Turning, and his optimism about its potential for philosophical renewal, comes to the fore in the first poem in the Beckonings volume, “Other Thinking” (“Das andere Denken”), written in the summer of 1938: Nimm die letzte Glut der Segnung erst vom dunklen Herd des Seyns, daß sie zünde die Entgegnung: Gottschaft – Menschentum in Eins. Wirf die Not der kühnen Lichtung zwischen Welt und Erde als Gesang aller Dinge zur Errichtung frohen Danks an Fug und Rang. Birg ins Wort die stille Kunde eines Sprunges über Groß und Klein und verlier’ die leeren Funde jähen Scheins im Gang zum Seyn. (GA 13: 23)

36 “Homecoming” (“Ankunft”), for example, consists of a single line: “es fehlen heilige Nahmen” [holy taking is absent], with Nahmen possibly punning on Namen [names] (GA 81: 38).

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Chapter 4 [Take up first the final glow of blessing from the dark hearth of Be-ing, so that it should ignite the encounter: Godhead – Mankind in One. Throw the plight of the bold clearing between world and earth as a song to all things establishing a cheering thanks for all that stands and stays. Conceal in the word the quiet tidings of a leap over large and small and lose the empty residue of that brittle light on the way to Be-ing.]

The three stanzas, all in quatrain form, begin with an assertive imperative: you (the reader, but certainly Heidegger himself ) should execute a “leap over great and small” to prepare a clearing of the ground on the path to Be-ing. The exhortation is intended to motivate, to prepare the philosopher and those who will accompany him for a venture of renewal. The tone of the poem is missionary and sustained by liturgical imagery, “blessing” (Segnung), “Godhead” (Gottschaft): Heidegger exhorts us in inspirational fashion to embrace as song the energetic overcoming of this “empty residue” of uncertain knowledge in a direct encounter with “Be-ing”. This sense of vigorous direction is reflected in the flowing enjambments (there is just one sentence in each of the three stanzas), suggesting the energy of renewal. It is, however, an energy that is fully contained in the form of the poem, whose metre is largely dactylic, reflecting the affirmative nature of the process, and is framed within an abab/acac/dede rhyming scheme. The philosophy that the poem advocates is not the product of excess, but represents the culmination of a carefully thought-through conviction. The sixteen sections of From the Experience of Thinking can best be read as extended meditations on the subject of “Be-ing” (Seyn) and its related attributes: “aletheia” (the disclosing of truth), Gelassenheit (balance and composure) and “logos” (the shining forth of the Word). These concepts are returned to time and again in a kaleidoscopic fashion that allows nuances of meaning to emerge out of what is essentially a singular entity. Some of the sections are short: the fourth, “Sonata sonans”, contains four poems;

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the following section contains only one: “I love, and want you to remain yourself ” (Amo: volo ut sis), while others such as “Turning”, section 3, and “Beckonings”, section 8, are longer, a textual practice that sustains Heidegger’s conviction that truth can emerge only through gradual self-revelation. This conviction is emphatically voiced in the poem “Harvest” (“Ernte”), from the section “Turning”, which possesses an insistence of expression that reveals a mind bent on self-definition: Erst wenn Dein Denken dieses Lassen ist: Seyn-lassen, nämlich: Seyn in dessen eigenen Schrein, ist Denken dorthin eingebracht, woher es einstig zugedacht, ist Denken Ernte, die Dich von Dir selbst entfernte, ist dein Denken nicht mehr Deines, ist es reines Opfer. Ist … Andenken, das sich selbst vergißt. (GA 81: 81) [Only when your thinking is this letting-be: letting-be of Be-ing, namely: Be-ing in whose own shrine thought has been brought, from where it had once been thought, is thinking a harvest, that removes you from yourself, is your thought no longer yours, is pure offering. Is … a thinking-recall, which is a forgetting of itself.]

“Harvest” consists of a single fourteen-line stanza: a preamble followed by an extended qualified statement, which in turn is followed by a flowing set

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of conclusions. In spite of what looks like careful, almost fastidious punctuation, conventional syntax is eschewed as the poem strains to articulate the consciousness of the lyrical subject, possibly the poet addressing himself as an Other – “yours”. The exertion evident in this process of enquiry is reflected in the structure of the poem, in its irregular metre, its uneven line lengths and unusual abccddeeaffgag rhyming scheme. The forward momentum of the poem reaches a climax in line 12 where an “is” is left suspended through an elision, the emphasis given to the word forcing the reader to look again at its employment in the preceding lines, and to see “is” not as a simple copula but as an attempt to capture the presencing of Be-ing. The tension of the poem, its sense of struggle, is the result of a paradoxical state that the poet is seeking to confront: the fact that his thought achieves maturity, bears fruit (a “harvest”), only when it becomes the self-less thought of Be-ing, freed from its connection to a thinking subject, including that of the poet. In this state (where “your thinking/ [is] no longer yours”), the poet’s thought simply “is”. To achieve this state of unselfconscious knowing, the lyrical voice surrenders itself to a process that is signified as a “letting”, where thinking becomes a “thinking-to” (Andenken), which means both to remember or to retrieve as a memory, in the manner of a souvenir, but also, as in Heidegger’s usage, to direct thinking towards an object (and hence Heidegger writes it as An-denken), but in a way that is without, as the concluding line of the poem testifies, any trace of mechanical purpose.37 In thinking-to, the wilful intentionality of zugedacht has been abolished. True thought takes place beyond self-consciousness: thought has given up its insistence to become a “letting” (Lassen). Thinking has moved to where it belongs. Many of the poems in From the Experience of Thinking are characterised by a stark impersonality of tone: no one is named, there are no interlocutors and the external world is bracketed out: “Be-ing” exists for itself, as a bastion of existence that the lyrical subject of these poems moves towards and around. “Gespräch” [Conversation], however, from the same “Turning” 37

As Heidegger had made clear elsewhere, “thinking is thinking of [Andenken]. But thinking of means something more than a fleeting recall of past events. Thinking of is a deliberation [bedenkt] of what matters to us”. Martin Heidegger, “Denken ist Andenken” (GA 16: 481).

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section, does look outwards, to an encounter with the Other. The Other may well be one aspect of Heidegger’s identity confronting a different aspect of that identity but, nevertheless, an encounter is taking place, which has as its subject communication: Daß zur Sprache erst die Sage komme, Ungesprochnes sich verhehle, daß aus Sage erst Unsägliches entwachse in ein Wachstum, nicht als Grenze, daran lauernd, weiterwollend wir uns stoßen, nein: als Fuge eines An-fangs in die Weltnis, weltende Ent-wendung des Gesagten in die Stille, die erfüllt von Ankunft aus dem Eigentum der frey Entschiedenen zum Hehl der Eignis – daß sich solches schicke, sey Gespräch. (91) [That Saying should first come to language, that the unspoken should conceal itself, that only out of Saying the inexpressible should grow out into growth, we do not wish to push on further, as if we were a border, lying in wait, no: as the juncture of a part-ing into worldhood, worlding turning-away of what has been said into the stillness filled with the presence from what belongs to those who have freely chosen the secret of true owning – that such should come to us, is spoken communion.]

“Conversation” begins and ends with the theme of language. Around that theme, it assembles a series of tropes: “Saying” (Sage) generates “unsaying” (Unsägliches) and the “the said” (Gesagten); “language” (Sprache) produces both “the unspoken” (Ungesprochenes) and “spoken communion” (Gespräch [conversation]). The innovative thrust of the poem makes itself immediately felt in Heidegger’s choice of vers libre. There are no stanzas: the entire poem consists of a single sentence, creating an energetic profusion that is

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supported by flowing enjambments, and there is no recognisable metre or rhyme, the internal coherence of the poem being secured solely through the alliteration of “w” and “e” phonemes. The poem also dispenses with conventional syntax, most notably main verbs. In their place, Heidegger uses the subjunctive mood, together with past and present participles, to suggest the fluidity and hypothetical nature of the process he is describing, in which the unsaid becomes the said. “Becomes”, however, may not be the right word, for the process is far from linear or definite. As the pivotal phrase “worlding turning-away” (weltende Ent-wendung) suggests, communication with others, but also, as in this poem, with oneself, means not only a covert appropriation, a purloining (the dictionary meaning of Entwendung) of the worldly content of what is said, but also a turning away from the same into the stillness of self-sufficiency and self-knowledge.38 It is only this protected interiority, chosen by those brave souls, those who have “freely chosen” (frey Entschiedenen), that guarantees, as the concluding words of the poem suggest, true communication through “spoken communion” (Gespräch). “Conversation” reflects Heidegger’s practice of forming new semantic units both by using neo-logistic formations, such as worlding (weltende), and by uncoupling words from their prefixes, such as Begin-ing (An-fang), and with Ent-wendung we have an example of both practices. In “The Essence of Language”, he wrote: “in experiences that we make with language, language brings itself to language” (GA 12: 151). In “Conversation”, language foregrounds itself through individual word formations and through the often enigmatic relationship between them, a relationship which defies clear interpretation. The reader is not only compelled to decipher words that are inherently and intentionally ambivalent, but also to make connections between these words, and in doing so trace the process of mental communion that is the theme of the poem. In 1955, Heidegger visited France to participate in a seminar organised at Le Thor in Provence. Here he met the French poet, René Char, whose 38

It is the potency of silence unleashed as a quality of language. As Heidegger noted in his “Beckonings” series of poems, “when the word falls silent/ language is grounded”. A beckoning is the product of language as gesture, which points not to concepts but to the gaps of meaning between concepts (GA 81: 127).

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Surrealist verse, published in volumes such as The Hammer without a Master (Le Marteau sans maitre, 1934) and Hypnos Waking (Feuillets d’Hypnos, 1945), had established him as one of the major poets of his generation. In 1963, Heidegger dedicated to Char seven poems in his volume The Fruits of Thought. In his dedication, he spoke of “the transformation of the manysided into the one-sided”, and “that leaving of presence [Abwesenlassen], through which the one-sided abides” (GA 13: 183). One of these poems, “Place of Abode” (Ortschaft), reads like a programmatic statement of these sentiments. Eschewing conventional poetic form in favour of vers libre (in this case heightened prose), Heidegger echoes the idiom of Char’s verse, both in the self-reflexivity of the poem, which brings to the surface of the text thinking about the conditions of that thinking, and in its use of loci, metaphors of place, reflecting the conviction that he shared with Char that poetry grows out of the specific environment of its writing. Thematically, the poem articulates a quest, a journey, and gestures at a destination that ultimately withholds itself: Die das Selbe denken im Reichtum seiner Selbigkeit, gehen die mühsam langen Wege in das immer Einfachere, Einfältige seiner im Unzugangbaren sich versagenden Ortschaft. (GA 13: 223) [Those who think the Same in the riches of its selfsameness walk the weary long paths into the ever clearer, simpler self-renouncing place, which refuses entrance.]

The poem describes a path, long and hard, that must be taken by those who have committed themselves to thinking through “the Same” (Selbe). Their goal is “the place of abode”, and the flowing syntax of the poem, which is formed out of a single sentence, seems to suggest that they need only to keep moving in order to reach it. But this is not the case. As we move forward, in the text and in our course of thinking, far from attaining our goal, we encounter its problematic nature, as the initial positive signs of simplicity and accessibility give way to our recognition that the

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place refuses us entrance: its self-renunciation will not broach compromise with an other. Martin Heidegger’s poetry ended when he did, with his death in 1976. Death had been a central concern in his philosophy, but he had always made a distinction between biological and ontological death (GA 2: 337). The former is physical extinction; the latter is death-in-life. It is the latter that we have difficulty confronting, not the former, because what ultimately destroys the individual is something existential, incompleteness, the failure of ripening, when Dasein has failed to exhaust its “specific possibilities” (333). Death is not the undone; it is the un-done. For that reason, perhaps, there is little in Heidegger’s final poetry that suggests a fear of death or dying. And yet the last, untitled poem of the The Fruits of Thought volume, in the section dated 1972–1975, is clearly intended as a leave-taking: Wage die Stille Stille die Waage Höre das Her Schweige das Hin Schwanke nichtmehr Danke und sinn Stille die Waage Wage die Stille. (GA 81: 45) [Dare stillness Still the scales Hear what approaches Leave silent that which departs No longer shake gratitude and purpose Still the scales dare stillness.]

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We must not assume that this was the last poem that Heidegger ever wrote, although it occupies the final place in the section of Gedachtes that is given over to personal poetic meditations on the past, his friends and his loved ones, and comes after those poems written late in 1974, four months before he died. Even if we cannot make this assumption, it is clear that the “stillness” with which the poem opens and closes represents the cessation of activity. The mood is terminal but not sombre: there is no hint of personal despair; indeed, there is no discernible subject, the familar enunciating “I” of lyrical verse. An irrevocable place in time has been reached and this is confirmed by a single temporal marker, “no longer”. A moment of critical decision has arisen, of kairos, and this accounts for the urgency of the voice that addresses itself throughout the poem in the imperative form. Vacillation and hesitation (Schwanke) are no longer possible: the poet will face the silence of the future (“Schweige das Hin”) on the basis of his surety of the past (“Höre das Her”). “Dare Stillness” gives voice to a lyrical subject positioned between stasis and movement. That the two, however, are ultimately related, indeed, are dependent upon one another, is confirmed by the form of the poem, which brings active and meditative verbs, “dare” (Wage) and “scales” (Waage), “hear” (Höre) and “leave silent” (Schweige), into alignment. This alignment is further sustained by the brevity of the lines, the pervasive alliteration (‘s’ and ‘w’ consonants) and, above all, by the homonymic clusters of the opening and closing stanzas, where verbs become nouns and nouns become verbs. A similar formal balance is reflected in the structure of the poem, which consists of four two-line stanzas of largely dactylic dimeter lines. There is no rhyming scheme, but each line (other than those of stanza 4) concludes with a substantive. It is in stanza 4, however, that the meditative core of the poem dwells: the exhortation to be thankful and to reflect. Although the recipient of these latter actions is unclear, this does not prevent us from seeing that what is being described is a process of self-scrutiny, which must accompany all ventures into the unknown. This process is an open one, which is reflected in the poem’s lack of punctuation, most notably in the absence any final sentence stops, and by its overall form, which rhetorically affects an inversio, the concluding stanza inverting the terms of its opening

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counterpart, confirming the sense of controlled finality that has formed the dominant tone throughout. Not resignation, but acceptance, knowing that this particular death can un-do nothing.39

39 Indeed, for those who feel they have moved beyond material linearity, it may even confirm the underlying pattern of life: “only death again/ corresponds/ in a circle/ to the early poem of Being” (“erst wieder Tod/ entspricht/ im Ringe/ dem Frühgedicht/ des Seins”) (GA 81: 129).

Chapter 5

The Triumph of Ratio: “The Question Concerning Technology”

Causa efficiens: Being En-framed In “The Essence of Language” (“Das Wesen der Sprache”), Heidegger argued that the thinking of language will necessarily involve a journey that will take us away from conventional ways of conceptualising the relationship between language and the world. At the end of this journey, we will enter what he describes as a “region” (Gegend), “so called because it gives its realm and free reign to what thinking is given to think. Thinking abides in that region, as it walks the ways of that region” (GA 12: 168). Not all thinking, however, takes this journey. The scientific mind, in particular, moves along a quite different path, one that is determined by ratiocination and calculation, where thinking is a mechanical means of gaining knowledge, and language simply a medium for information: the calculating ordering of saying is its goal and measure, its sole task the “computation of sufficient reason” (180). Here, not only is it impossible to grasp language: it is impossible to hear it at all. Science, by committing itself to its own particular way of viewing the world, to its own method of understanding, has, in fact, chosen not to see what language offers. Yet science in itself is driven by an even greater power, over which it exerts little control. As Heidegger explains, “the furious pace with which the sciences are swept along today – they themselves do not know where to – comes from an intensified drive of its method and possibilities, which is increasingly given over to the needs of technology, whose method contains all of the coercive force [Gewalt, ‘violence’] of knowledge” (168). The tone is pressing, urgent even, and reveals in Heidegger’s thinking a previously unseen concern with the material impact of practical knowledge upon the world. This concern with the province of technology forms the

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substantive link between the texts that Heidegger wrote in the final stage of his philosophy.1 These included “The Thing” (“Das Ding”), “En-framing” (“Das Ge-stell”), “The Danger” (“Die Gefahr”) and “The Turning” (“Die Kehre”), all of which were given as lectures in 1949 and 1950, and collected in the latter year under the title “Insight into That Which Is” (“Einsicht in das, was ist”).2 The second lecture, “En-framing” was expanded in 1954 with the title “The Question Concerning Technology” (“Die Frage nach der Technik”) and appeared in Lectures and Essays (Vorträge und Aufsätze) in the same year, and was together with the “The Turning” published as a book, Technology and its Turning (Die Technik und die Kehre), in 1962. “The Question Concerning Technology” goes well beyond the earlier lecture on en-framing by confronting technology not only as a material reality but as a defining and demanding intellectual agency in the modern world. The essay is a “question” into or about technology, an interrogation of its essence (Wesen). As Heidegger had queried in the concluding words of his earlier lecture, “technology comes to Being [west] as en-framing. What, however, governs in en-framing? How and from where does the essence of enframing eventuate?” (GA 79: 45). “The Question Concerning Technology” attempts to answer these questions. It incorporates much from that earlier lecture, but redirects and refashions its material, sometimes expanding and refining previous content, but at other times dispensing with it entirely. The discussion of machinery and the specific material manifestations of resource commodities found in the original en-framing essay is absent, as is the pointed vignette of workers co-opted (bestellt) into the work place, an episode which registers an important and perhaps rare moment of social sympathy in Heidegger’s work.3 Heidegger was, however, fully aware of 1

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A stage that is often characterised as the “late” or “later” Heidegger. Unlike the convoluted deliberations that sometimes attend attempts to identify a “Kehre” (“turning”) in Heidegger’s earlier works, the designation of “later” seems simply to refer to the culminating texts of his oeuvre. See, for example, Pattison (2000) and Young (2002). They are published together with a series of later lectures in Volume 79 of his Gesamtausgabe as Martin Heidegger, Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge: 1, Einblick In Das Was Ist. Bremer Vorträge 1949. 2. Grundsätze Des Denkens. Freiburger Vorträge 1957. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994. Heidegger has received criticism on this account but, as he clearly announces in the opening lines of “The Question Concerning Technology”, he clearly felt that he had to

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the human impact of technology. In “The Danger”, Heidegger had written, in tones verging upon the apocalyptic, of “immeasurable woes raging and spreading through the world. The tide of suffering continues to rise”, and Heidegger lamented the “dreadful impoverishment” that was the result of ever-increasing industrial growth and the ruthless exploitation of raw materials by modern technology (57). Everything has become raw material, merely a “disposable resource” (Bestand).4 Even the river Rhine, once celebrated by poets such as Hölderlin as the fountainhead of life, has degenerated into a mere store of hydraulic pressure used to produce electricity for power stations. A principle is at work that sees nature as a mere source of production: Das Entbergen, das die moderne Technik durchherrscht, hat den Charakter des Stellens im Sinne der Herausforderung. Diese geschieht dadurch, daß die in der Natur verborgene Energie aufgeschlossen, das Erschlossene umgeformt, das Umgeformte gespeichert, das Gespeicherte wieder verteilt und das Verteilte erneut umgeschaltet wird. Erschließen, umformen, speichern, verteilen, umschalten sind Weisen des Entbergens. Dieses läuft jedoch nicht einfach ab. Es verläuft sich auch nicht ins Unbestimmte. Das

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move away from the anthropological mode of his earlier lecture to an exposition that could uncover technology’s systemic control of Being. We can, thus, agree with Albert Borgmann that the later essay “is less immediate, less impassioned” than the earlier talk, but this does not mean that it is “less involved” or that its analysis is “simplified” (2005: 429). It could be argued that the same issues are addressed from a different, perhaps more methodologically sharper, angle, and involve a necessary shift of focus from the particular to the general. The standard translations of Bestand ([literally “stock” or “holdings”] are “standingreserve” (Lowitt), “resources” (Borgmann) and “disposables” (Rojcewicz). My preferred translation is “disposable resource”. Bestand is not simply an inanimate source of material that is exploited by technology, as the translation “reserve” might indicate, but a specific form of appropriation that represents a reification of that material in a process that defines, in a quite specific way, both the nature of the material and the relationship of the user to it. “Commodity”, which the OED defines as “a class of goods for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market”, also comes close to Heidegger’s configuration of Bestand. Heidegger’s translators (and Heidegger himself ) may well, however, have been concerned to avoid the Marxist overtones of this reading of the phenomenon. Heidegger does not see technological production as simply driven by a profit motif within any particular economic system, but as a process that defines the essence of Being in the modern world. As such, it is a characteristic of capitalist and non-capitalist societies alike.

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Technology is not a mere instrumentum, the technical means of achieving pragmatic goals; it is an underlying principle that determines, organises and defines our perception of and engagement with the world. This is its essence, its “Wesen”.6 Technology exercises that determination systematically through regulation, and Heidegger seeks in this passage to reproduce the systematic quality of its control in his writing. The sentence structure is classically sequential, the simple substantives are followed by main verbs in the present tense, suggesting a timeless absolute quality. The individual moments in this process of regulation are repeated and brought into alignment through rhetorical means such as the enumeratio (a listing of units) and the chiasmus, where one sentence ends in one form (as here in aufgeschlossen, meaning “unlocked” or “opened up”), while the next sentence begins in a similar form, in this case with that verb in the substantive, das Erschlossene [literally that which has been “unlocked” or “opened up”]. Verbs used in one

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The standard translation of Herausforderung is “challenge”, but the latter term might well be read as a positive invitation to a test of strength. For that reason, I prefer to translate herausfordern as “demand”, seeking to retain the sense of “require”, which is the meaning of fordern in German. For further comments on the use of “challenge” as a translation, see Rojcewicz (71). Heidegger uses the term Wesen in different ways to mean “essence” and “Being”, both of which are standard dictionary definitions. To these, Heidegger adds a further meaning of his own: “coming to Being” or “coming to presence”, at times wishing us to hear all four meanings in a single use of the word.

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sentence, such as “gesichert”, appear in the next sentence as nouns (Sicherung), and are held in alignment both semantically and through alliteration. Such devices allow Heidegger to communicate the systematic nature of en-framing, its monumental effectivity, which manifests itself as a series of activities that reshapes (umformt) the external world into the reshaped (das Umgeformte), and he details them just as those who are involved in these activities might do so: in purely quantifiable terms without qualification or judgement as “unlocking, reshaping, storing, distributing and redirecting”. These are all modes of revealing, forms of “aletheia”, and they constitute a fundamental shift in the Western mind, a shift that Heidegger had already confronted in his Parmenides lectures, although the “connection visible between ‘technē’ as a way of ‘aletheia’ and modern mechanical technique” could not be exposed in greater detail in that work (GA 54: 78–79). It was not until “The Question Concerning Technology” that Heidegger was able to attempt a full explication of this connection, and he began by returning to a familiar problematic: the Latin displacement of Greek as the dominant language in Western thought, focusing on ratio and the model of causation that it had supported.7 In this essay, Heidegger outlines in detail the fourfold basis of this model, discussing it within the context of the manufacture of a specific object: the making of a silver chalice for use in a religious service. For centuries, philosophy has taught that there are four causes: “(1) the causa materialis, the material, the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; (2) the causa formalis, the form, the shape into which the material enters; (3) the causa finalis, the end, for example, the sacrificial rite in relation to which the chalice required is determined as to its form and matter; and (4) the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, and which is, in this instance, the silversmith” (GA 7: 9). Heidegger asks himself: what does “cause” really mean here? And he answers: “causa, casus, belongs to the verb cadere, ‘to fall’, meaning that which ensures that something happens as a result in such and such a way” (10). This is a line of effectivity that reveals nothing about the essence of the object, and

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For Aristotle’s causative model, see his Metaphysics, Book 5, section 1013a, and Physics, Book II, section 154b.

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Heidegger takes issue both with the individual components of this causative model and with its overall value as a form of explanation, concluding that its mechanical terms of reference fail to capture the complex relationship between the raw material used in the process of manufacture, the purpose of the process, its “telos”, in this case the use of the chalice in a religious ceremony, and the role of human agency, of consciousness, in producing that object. In the traditional model, the silversmith is regarded merely as the causa efficiens, as a facilitator, but this neglects his centrality to this process. The latter can be fully understood only by going back beyond the Latin notion of causa to the earlier Greek notion of cause, because “what we call ‘cause‘, and the Romans ‘causa’, is called ‘aition’ (αἴτιον) by the Greeks, referring to that which something is indebted [verschuldet]” (10).8 The dictionary definition of verschulden is “to blame for something”, its key component being Schuld, meaning “blame”, “guilt” or “debt”.9 “Aition”, is used in contexts where “things are done for the sake of ” (Liddell and Scott 24). “Aition” refers to a factor or circumstance that helps bring something into existence, without presupposing the linearity of the Latin causa, which is familiar to us in the common formulation, “cause and effect”. When incorporated into the notion of Verschulden, “aition” suggests human agency, personal commitment even. Here we should not talk of cause as a form of determination but as an inceptive movement, which Heidegger calls (rewriting the common word veranlassen, which simply means “to cause” or “to induce”, by adding hyphens to its constituent parts) Ver-an-lassen, “starting-up”. The latter already contains within itself a sense of the destination towards which the object is moving and a sense of completion. Verschulden can now be read as “the cause of a starting-up” (12).

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Heidegger could well have taken his analysis further, pointing out that it is only in Aquinas’ gloss of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the In duodecim libros Metaphysicorum expositio, that “cause” receives such an insistent emphasis. In Aristotle’s original Greek text, “aiton” is used but once in the crucial section. Indeed, Aristotle’s original account is both more fluid in its description of the causative process and more responsive to the human factor than its traditional interpretation suggests. In his translation of Heidegger’s essay, William Lovitt translates verschuldet alternatively as “indebted” and “being responsible” (Heidegger 1977: 7). Rojcewicz translates verschulden as “being obliged” and Verschulden as “obligation” (17–18).

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Heidegger realises that his terminology may seem obscure, but he is quick to point out that what he is describing is a quite tangible activity: the making of something physical, in this case a chalice. To stress this, he brings into play the Greek notion of “poiesis” from Plato’s Symposium (205b), quoting the character Diotima, who at one point tells her interlocutors: “you are aware that ‘poiesis’ includes a large range of things: after all, what causes anything whatever to pass from not-Being into Being is all ‘poiesis’” (12). In “poiesis”, the lateral chain of cause and effect gives way to a vertical process that involves the broader practice of a “bringing forth” (her-vorbringen) that manifests itself, “comes to presence”, in the activities of the producer, in this case the silversmith, who brings his skill, his knowledge and his technical capacities to bear on the chalice.10 This convergence of the practical, the manual and the cognitive (the conception of the object that is to be made) the Greeks called “technē”, which provides the root of the modern word “technology”. Heidegger reminds us of the two different but related meanings of the original word: firstly, “that ‘technē’ is the name not only for the knowledge and the ability of a craftsman, but also for culture and the high arts. And secondly that ‘technē’ goes together with ‘epistēme’”. “Both words are names for knowing in the broadest sense. They mean to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it” (14).11 This intellectually facilitating dimension of “technē” is no longer to be found in “technology”. Modern technology not only gathers objects together into its system, it also co-opts mankind through a mechanism that Heidegger calls “en-framing” (Ge-stell).12 “En-framing means the gathering together of 10 Heidegger’s reading is confirmed by the dictionary, which defines “poiēsis”, in its infinitive form, as “to make, produce, prepare (as in food), to accomplish something, to bring something to pass” (Pape II: 645). “Poiēsis” broadens causality into “the active sense of letting, namely: nurturing, releasing, abetting, providing the proper conditions, encouraging, nudging, rousing” (Rojcewicz 29). 11 But this does not involve simply the application of a mechanical skill or is a technique that is imposed on an object. As Heidegger observed elsewhere, “for the Greeks, ‘technē’ meant neither art nor handicraft, but rather was that which made something appear within what was present, as this or that or something else” (GA 7: 161). 12 Borgmann suggests that Ge-stell should be translated as “Framing” or even “Setting up”, arguing that “en-framing” is a misleading and unnecessary neo-logistic coinage (1987: 109). Heidegger, however, deliberately writes the word with a hyphen to indicate that

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the claiming that is made on mankind, i.e. that it demands from mankind, that the real should be revealed as a mode of ordering” (21). It is in en-framing that ratio celebrates its dominance of the modern mind: as techno-rationality. Here, causality no longer reveals itself as a process; it has homogenised into a mechanical facticity that knows no past or future.13 “Causality now displays neither the character of the occasioning Veranlassens, nor the nature of the causa efficiens, let alone that of causa formalis. It seems as though causality is shrinking into reporting – a reporting demanding – of disposable resources that must be secured either simultaneously or in sequence” (24). The present never arrives but is continually absorbed into its ultimate destination: “the product”. The hyphenated Ge- prefix of Ge-stell reflects this totalising practice and, midway through his essay, Heidegger explains the source and importance of the prefix, noting how it is found in standard formulations such as Gebirg [mountain range] and Gemüt [disposition] (20). In everyday language, Gestell refers to a bookstand (Büchergestell), but Heidegger hyphenates the word to produce something quite different, drawing upon a quite specific inflexion of stellen, meaning “to apprehend”, “to grab” or “to stand to account”, as a criminal suspect would be in a police enquiry: hence the Herausfordern, the co-opting component of the term. This was how en-framing had been seen in his earlier en-framing lecture: as a force that corners nature, including human nature, in order to exploit it. In that lecture, Heidegger had sketched a vignette of a familiar context in which en-framing routinely operates: the industrial work force: Männer und Frauen müssen sich zu einem Arbeitsdienst stellen. Sie werden bestellt. Sie werden von einem Stellen betroffen, das sie stellt, d.h. anfordert. Einer stellt den anderen. Er hält ihn an. Er stellt ihn. Er fordert von ihm Auskunft und Rechenschaft. Er fordert ihn heraus. (GA 79: 26–27) [Men and women are compelled to present themselves to a work place. They are summoned. They are impinged upon by the summonsing, which imposes on them, in other words, requires something from them. The former imposes itself on the latter.

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he wishes to break with the standard form of the word as Gestell. Rojcewicz prefers “com-posing”, but the interference from its musical use detracts from its value (105). As Lovitt explains, “en-framing en-frames in that it assembles and orders. It puts into a framework or configuration everything that it summons forth, through an ordering for us that it is forever restructuring anew” (Heidegger 1977: 19).

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It detains it. It makes demands on it. It demands that they provide information about themselves and be accountable.]

En-framing positions men and women within a specific form of organisation, and this is reflected in Heidegger’s language, where grammatically the human subjects are deprived of active verbs: they have become objects, the disposable resources of an activity imposed from beyond them. Heidegger describes the domineering agency of the stellen process in short almost paratactic sentences, using simple grammatical subjects and main verbs. The sentences reflect the mechanical nature of the process. Here it is not a question of people, individual employers, for example, attracting workers to the workplace, but of an impersonal system of compulsion operating within its own impersonal laws. The anaphoric structure of the passage, which begins with “it” or “they”, and the repetition of the pervasive stellen word, which connotes, as in the opening verbal phrase, sich stellen, dealings with the police, further heightens the sinister effect of this mechanism.14 En-framing reflects the “dominance of a reified world” (“Herrschaft des Gegenständigen”), whose modus operandi is standardisation and whose outcome is what Heidegger calls the Gleich-Gültigen (25). Gleichgültig, without the hyphen, means in German “indifferent”; with the hyphen it acquires the sense of “same value” (and Heidegger wishes us to hear the former in the latter). In his earlier en-framing lecture, Heidegger had expanded the term into GleichGiltigen, to suggest a levelling-down of all material into the common denominator of quantifiable worth. In this process, objects lose their quality as presence. In the place of presence comes Erfolg, the successful provision of an object in accordance with its allocated function in the production process. Here the nature of the disposable resource is pre-determined (it does not develop from within itself ), for “‘provision’ [Gestellung] takes places according to its essence 14

In his One Dimensional Man (1964), Herbert Marcuse, extended Heidegger’s insights into a full-blown critique of industrial society “in which the technical apparatus of production and distribution (with an increasing sector of automation) functions, not as the sum-total of mere instruments which can be isolated from their social and political effects, but rather as a system which determines a priori the product of the apparatus as well as the operations of servicing and extending it”. Such a system produces its own mental culture, in which “the elements of autonomy, discovery, demonstration, and critique recede before designation, assertion, and imitation” (xv and 85).

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in secret and in advance. Only in that way can provision fully carry out its specific task of planning and put into place a definite instance of requisition” (28). En-framing forms the parameters to the way we live and to the way we think: it frames all we do. In one sense, it is our fate, our Geschick (GA 7: 25). As with Ge-stell, Geschick is a totalising noun, formed out of a familiar stem, in this case schicken, meaning “to send”.15 Although its standard meaning is “fate”, and hence refers to something that has already been determined (we cannot evade it), Heidegger wishes us to see his version of Geschick as a “destining”, the sending of a possibility: the possibility to understand en-framing and our place within it.16 It is “that sending-that-gathers [versammelnde Schicken], which first launches man upon a path of revealing”. For as Heidegger had already made clear, the power of en-framing lies not in its mechanical affectivity but in the fact that appears to be self-evident. The modern world is technological: what could be simpler? We do not, therefore, see en-framing as a form of Being (its modern form), but only as a system that makes possible the activity of certain entities, such as factories or power stations. But the closer we come to understanding en-framing as a form of Being, the more questioning we become, and the more clearly a way beyond it presents itself. For ultimately en-framing is the truth of the age, its “aletheia”, and like “aletheia” in its original Greek form it both obscures and reveals its Being. It is precisely this “ambiguity” that provides “the last step upon our way” to our coming to terms with en-framing. As Heidegger explains, as he moves towards a delineation of this saving power: The essence of technology is, in an elevated way, ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, that is, truth. On the one hand, en-framing coerces everything into that frenzy of ordering that distorts any insight into the ap-propriation [Ereignis] of revealing, and thus radically jeopardises its relation to the essence of truth.

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A totalising moment that is, once again, reflected in the Ge prefix, which “signifies a kind of ‘gathering’ that ‘primordially unfolds’ – not a mere collection but that which delimits the ‘essence’ or being of what is gathered, that which makes it what it is, ‘enables’ it” (Crowell 2001: 445). As Kleinberg-Levin notes, “whereas ‘fate’ names a future that the historical past has predetermined […] ‘destiny’ names a future that appeals to our freedom and calls upon our responsibility to realize the still unactualized inheritance” of the past (230).

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On the other hand, en-framing, for its part, happens [ereignet sich] in the granting that allows mankind to endure (something that it has not, as yet, experienced but perhaps will experience in the future) as that which is needed for the preservation of the essence of truth. It is here that the emergence of the saving power makes itself manifest. (34)

This is what constitutes the revealing moment of technology: its granting and emerging facility. It is precisely the all-embracing momentum of en-framing, its restless activity, that allows us to see it as something that changes and can be made to change, and in the “The Turning” (“Die Kehre”) Heidegger maps out the conditions in which this process might take place. Certainly, this will be no easy matter, and Heidegger does not talk about überwinden [“to overcome” or “to defeat”], as if the presence and threat of en-framing can simply be undone, but about verwinden, which means “to get over” something, “to pass through and beyond” (as in the memory of an unhappy event), but also “to twist” or “to contort” (as in applying a torsion to a wound) (GA 79: 71). As Heidegger explained elsewhere, Verwindung does not add something that is new, something that has not been there before; it is a bringing to light of a possibility within Being, something that has been “hidden” up to now, displaced from view (GA 71: 142). Verwinden reveals that the turning momentum of en-framing allows moments where Being is able to face itself and recognise its danger: Das Wesen des Ge-stells ist die Gefahr. Als die Gefahr kehrt sich das Sein in die Vergessenheit seines Wesens von diesem Wesen weg und kehrt sich so zugleich gegen die Wahrheit seines Wesens. In der Gefahr waltet dieses noch nicht bedachte Sichkehren. Im Wesen der Gefahr verbirgt sich darum die Möglichkeit einer Kehre, in der die Vergessenheit des Wesens des Seins sich so wendet, daß mit dieser Kehre die Wahrheit des Wesens des Seyns in das Seiende eigens einkehrt. Vermutlich aber ereignet sich diese Kehre, diejenige der Vergessenheit des Seins zur Wahrnis des Wesen des Seyns, nur, wenn die in ihrem verborgenen Wesen kehrige Gefahr erst einmal als die Gefahr, die sie ist, eignes anwest. (GA 79: 71) [The essence of en-framing is danger. As danger, Being turns away from its essence into the oblivion of its essence, and turns thus at the same time against the truth of its essence. In danger, there holds sway this turning away that has as yet remained unconsidered. In the essence of danger, there conceals itself, therefore, the possibility of a turning in which the oblivion of the essence of Being bears around so that with this turning the truth of the essence of Be-ing expressly turns into an actuality. However, this turning, this turning of the forgetting of Being to the preservation of the essence of Be-ing, will presumably only happen [ereignet sich] when the danger,

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Heidegger wishes to highlight the potential for turning that resides within en-framing. Consequently, the passage is formed, both semantically through its key tropes and syntactically through its involved grammar and elaborate subordinating clauses, in such a way to support the motion of turning. Sichkehren [self-turning] appears in the passage twice, once as a verb and once as a noun. The reflexive participle of the word suggests an internal mechanism, the existence of something within en-framing that allows it to generate from within itself an alternative to its mechanistic dominance, to produce the conditions, in fact, of its own sublating, allowing the forgetting of “Being” to re-emerge as the truth of “Be-ing”. Heidegger admits that identifying this liberating element will not be easy, and he uses qualifiers such as a “possibility” (Möglichkeit) and “presumably” (vermutlich) to qualify the potential of this mechanism. Indeed, Heidegger seems to have reached an aporia in his exposition, a ceiling of explanation that can only conclude with conjecture. But this discursive faux-naïveté has been well timed, for what follows the “perhaps” and “probably” in his essay is an extended and persuasive delineation of the conditions required for a reckoning with enframing. Heidegger must begin all over again to define these conditions, and to establish the terrain upon which he must do this he cites (knowing that the poetic must seem an unlikely source for an antidote to the threats posed by en-framing) two short lines from a poem by Hölderlin. Given the monumental severity of the problem, they are almost quixotic in the brevity of their message, for they simply tell us: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst Das Rettende auch. [Where, however, danger is grows the saving power also.] (GA 7: 29)17

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The lines are from the poem “Patmos”. Rettende is a noun formed from the present participle of the verb retten, a construction that is possible in the German language, but in English an appropriate noun must be found to accompany the participle, in this case either “power” or “force” or simply “thing”.

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What, however, is the “saving power”? Where can we find it? To answer these questions we need to look more closely at the word “Ge-stell”, focusing this time not upon its totalising prefix (Ge-) but upon its stem, stellen. Here we will see that, in spite of its controlling-dictating nature, en-framing is ultimately a form of “phusis”, for stellen not only gives us Ge-stell; it also provides a series of nodal terms for further stellen words that take us into a realm where technology might be seen as a productivity of the mind: Das Wort “stellen” meint im Titel Ge-stell nicht nur das Herausfordern, es soll zugleich den Anklang an ein anderes “Stellen” bewahren, aus dem es abstammt, nämlich an jenes Her- und Dar-stellen, das im Sinne der “poiēsis” das Anwesende in die Unverborgenheit hervorkommen läßt. Dieses hervorbringende Her-stellen, z.B. das Aufstellen eines Standbildes im Tempelbezirk und das jetzt bedachte herausfordernde Bestellen sind zwar grundverschieden und bleiben doch im Wesen verwandt. Beide sind Weisen des Entbergens, der “aletheia”. (21–22) [The word “demand” [stellen] in the name “en-framing” [Ge-stell] not only means to make a claim on something. At the same time, it retains the connotation of another use of “stellen” from which it comes, namely that of producing and presenting which, in the configuration “poiēsis” allows that which is present to come forth into unconcealment. This producing which brings something forth as, for example, in the erecting of a statue in a temple precinct, and the claiming-demand that we are now discussing, are indeed fundamentally different, and yet they remain related in their essence. Both are modes of disclosure, of “aletheia”.]

The passage revolves around stellen and its complex web of meanings. The standard meaning of stellen is “to put” or “to set in place”, but it is often extended into a compound verb though hyphenated prefixes such as Her-, Dar- and Auf-, to describe activities that are associated with making or bringing about, as in herstellen [to manufacture], darstellen [to depict] or aufstellen [“to compile” or “to establish”]. Heidegger sees these as all modes of “poiēsis”, which involve the bringing of an object out of concealment into visibility (hence the reference to “aletheia” in the passage) and which allow us now to see stellen, and hence Ge-stell, as a potentially productive phenomenon. This is the “saving” grace of technology: the fact that it cannot control or contain its own productivity. It is forever outgrowing its own parameters: it cannot avoid excess.

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Heidegger sees this superabundant quality as a generative potential within en-framing. That is its “other possibility”, and it is a possibility that he finds above all in art. Art is the excess of technology, its bright shadow, and it flourishes when the latter is at its peak. Art, however, should not to be understood simply in aesthetic terms, as a beautification of something, nor should it be thought of as distraction or sublimation. Art does not console; it transfigures and it provokes: it provides the site on which we can query, challenge that which would employ us as disposable resources (36). Art is the technology of the spirit: it is a mode of production that does not attempt to standardise or homogenise, to control or usurp or to erase the thing in the service of commodification, but retains a respect for the thing itself, for that which cannot be made or translated into something else. It is precisely because art has its sources in “technē” that it, and it alone, offers the greatest opportunity for a “decisive confrontation” with en-framing. For the present we can only encounter this possibility through the recognition of a potential, of a truth that is at present not evident. But is this not precisely how “aletheia” has always come to presence: as a revealingconcealing of Being? En-framing cannot be undone: it is the modern form of truth. What is required is not its abolition, but the will to think through the potential of the energies that it holds within it, both in a positive and negative way. For “the closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine, and the more questioning we become. For questioning is the piety of thinking” (36).

The Enactment of Philosophy: Rhetoric and the Spoken Text Between 1949, the year in which he gave the Bremen lectures, “Insight into That Which Is”, and 1964, when “The Question Concerning Technology” was published, Heidegger gave a series of public talks, seminars and radio presentations, not only in Germany but also in France and in Switzerland, in an attempt to bring home to a wider audience the dangers of technology and the threat of the technological mindset. These talks reveal a new proselytising animus and sense of mission in Heidegger’s work: he is aware that

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he is involved in an act of public communication and this awareness has a transformative effect upon his language and the style of his writing, calling forth a form of delivery that is highly wrought, formally self-conscious and, above all, rhetorically attuned to its reception. Heidegger gave one such talk in February 1951, at a poetry festival held at the Bühlerhöhe, a hotel and convention centre in the Black Forest, where he had been asked to speak about poetry and how poetry should best be understood. This short talk (barely two pages long in its published form) may be unremarkable in its content, but it demonstrates the extent to which Heidegger had become master of the idiom of public speaking. He begins by affirming the importance of poetry, asking the question: What in this inconstant world could be more dubious than a poem? What, in an age when all the abodes of “Dasein” are collapsing, is more audacious than an apparently popular poetry reading? But still! “… poetically dwells/ mankind on this earth” Even the essence and the dominance of technology live from the truth of these words. (GA 16: 470)

Heidegger’s clarion call to his audience takes the form of a series of questions delivered in the manner of an anthypophora (where a speaker asks a question and then immediately answers it). His answers are brief, assertive and delivered with the voice of authority. He points to the critical context in which he is asking these questions: the collapse of true thinking in the age of modernity, in which the very existence of poetry seems an impertinent irrelevance. It is, however, precisely here that poetry has its meaning and purpose, and Heidegger expresses this conviction not through elaborate argumentation but through the single assertive conjunctional phrase: “But still!” [Und doch!]. Heidegger’s grammar is simple because his message is simple: language should not be seen as a tool for the exchange of information; language is the revelation of the world and we must learn to head it: Both the liberation and this saving can only be achieved if for once we begin to learn to listen. In this, inceptual learning will be incorporated. It demands from us that we should pay heed to the essence of language, so that out of this heed we will be able to discern the purely spoken, and experience how this itself arises out of what is addressed to us. (471)

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We must be brought to understand that language nurtures, makes possible all that we are and do: it is the house of Being. That revelation can only take place through poetry, but first the latter must be freed from its subservience to Schriftstellertum: literature as an institution, which encourages not the internalisation of language but its passive consumption. The matter is urgent, and Heidegger foregrounds its urgency and the importance of his mission in the form of a stark parallelism. Our task is “to free poetry from mere Schriftstellertum”; “to save the earth for the world” (471). This mission concerns us all, and Heidegger subtly elides the subject of his discourse from the individual “I”, with which the talk had begun, to a collective “we”, an “us”. A note of crisis is now sounded in Heidegger’s talk, and its tone starts to assume an alarmist quality as the audience is interpellated into the lecture in the form of an involvement that is known rhetorically as “epideictic” (Sipiora 239). The “we”, those who must confront the domineering mindset of technology, have been given the task of “learning to hear”, of learning to read the signs posed by the dangers that surround us, a task that brings us to the present moment, the “here” and “today”, the immediate context in which poetry must seek to achieve its goals. Heidegger’s short talk reaches its climax (in rhetorical terms its culmination) in his exhortation to his listeners that they should embrace the liberating power of “pure Saying” (reines Sagen), of language that has been freed into song (471). We might be tempted to see the rhetoric of Heidegger’s speech simply as a necessary discourse, called forth by the occasion: temporary measures to meet a temporary need. His essay, “The Principle of Identity” (“Der Satz der Identität”), however, is an an important transitional work in his corpus. It is a text, as Heidegger observed in the opening words to its first presentation given in June 1957 on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the University of Freiburg, that “looks forward and backwards: forward into the realm out of which the subject matter of the lecture ‘The Thing’ (‘Das Ding’) came; backwards to the realm, where the essence of metaphysics has its constitution as determined by difference” (GA 11: 29). Heidegger’s “The Principle of Identity” might best be understood as a continuation of his “de-struction” of the metaphysical tradition that he had begun in Being and Time, in this case focusing upon Aristotelian logic and, specifically, its principle of identity, whose central tenets he lays bare in the opening words of the lecture:

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According to its conventional (geläufig) formulation, the principle of identity reads: A = A. The principle is regarded [gilt] as the highest law of thought. Let us think about this principle for a while. For we would like to find out through this principle what identity is. When thinking attempts to pursue something that has caught its attention, it can happen that as it progresses it undergoes a change. It is advisable, therefore, in what follows, to pay attention to the path of thought rather than to its content. To dwell at length upon content would simply be to block the development of the lecture. (33)

Heidegger defines the principle of identity, which he calls the “highest law of thought”, but goes no further into its source or its background, taking his terms of reference and the importance of his subject as read by his learned audience, who will know that he is discussing a matter worthy of serious philosophical consideration.18 Heidegger’s opening words constitute, in fact, an exordio, which formed in classical rhetoric the first part of a six-part exposition, dispositio, where the speaker outlined the main argument and placed it within its context. The exordio was conventionally followed by a narratio, which was the statement of the case, which detailed the terms of reference and specified how existing views on the subject might be modified.19 Stylistically, Heidegger’s exordium moves (as does his lecture in general) between an elevated and learned elocutio, in which the philosopher formally defines and redefines his concepts, and the informal idiom of genus humile, where he adopts a casual conversational tone. Heidegger handles this discourse adroitly, bringing his audience carefully on side by subtle gestures. In the very opening sentence, gilt [“regarded” or “is held to be”] and geläufig

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The principle of identity was one of Aristotle’s three laws of thought, as formulated in his Metaphysics, Book 5. The others were the law of the excluded middle, which states that a proposition is true or its negation is true, and the law of non-contradiction, which sees it as axiomatic that contradictory statements cannot both be true and false at the same time. There then normally followed a divisio or partitio, which named the issues in the dispute and listed the arguments that were to be used in the order that they would appear. Confirmatio subsequently formed the proof of the case, and confirmed or validated the material given in preceding sections. Confutatio rehearsed the refutation of possible opposing arguments against those advanced by the speaker. The conclusion or peroratio summed up the arguments, often asserting their superiority over opposing points of views. See Lanham (112–113).

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[“customary” or “standard”] already suggest that the principle of identity was an orthodoxy that depended largely upon accepted convention for its authority. Heidegger is seeking to challenge this authority, and he wants to involve his listeners in that challenge. Heidegger admits that his ideas may seem obscure; he is, however, taking pains to frame them in a language that will be accessible to all and, consequently, adopts an approach and a style that is relaxed and non-dogmatic. In the same passage, conversational phrases, such as “it can happen”, we would “like to find out what the issues are” and “it is advisable”, suggest that matters are still open, unresolved and in need of further clarification. The message is: it is not appropriate to fight dogma with dogma. Heidegger’s lecture subsequently develops, in the manner of a classic narratio, into a detailed consideration of the individual terms of the subject to hand. Aristotle’s principle of identity purports to be about “equality”, about “the Same”, but the simple equation, “A=A”, tells us nothing. Heidegger attempts, thus, to move the principle beyond what is a sterile tautology by converting the equal sign of the axiom into its linguistic equivalent: “is”. This might seem to achieve nothing more than confirming the self-evident character of the principle, but Heidegger introduces an important twist in the equation, which moves it into a more meaningful terrain. If we listen closely we will hear what it is: Even in its improved formulation, “A is A”, it is the abstract quality of identity that alone appears. Does it even get this far? Does the principle of identity say anything about identity? No, at least not immediately. Indeed, the principle presupposes what identity is and where it belongs. How do we find information out about this presupposition? The principle of identity gives it to us when we carefully listen to its underlying theme and respond to it, rather than just take up thoughtlessly the formula “A is A”. In fact, it says “A is A”. What do we hear in this? With this “is” the principle tells us what every being is, namely: it is itself the same as itself. The principle of identity speaks of the Being of a being. As a law of thinking the principle is valid only in so far as it is a law of Being, which says: to every being as Being belongs identity, the unity with itself. (35)

The passage is formed around an explicatio, where issues to be proved are clarified and terms defined. Heidegger argues that by rewriting the Aristotelian principle of identity we will be able to make a transition from logic to ontology, and hence to an investigation into Being (Sein).

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He indicates how this transition should take place through the simplest of means: by highlighting the central term in the principle of identity: the “is”. But now, this “is” no longer functions simply as a technical link between A and A; it points to a definite quality of existence, indeed to its essence. Once the equation has been converted into the foregrounded “is”, the principle of identity loses its abstract quality: it acquires presence, a dynamic quality, even.20 Heidegger takes us through his argumentation using classical rhetorical techniques such as the anacoenosis (asking the opinion of one’s audience: “what do we hear?”) and, once again, the anthypophora, which create not only an immediacy in his discourse, giving the impression that he is formulating such questions in situ, but also provide a medium of participation for his audience. To encourage this participation, Heidegger grammatically merges, at crucial points in his exposition, his position with theirs, to produce a collective subject for his discourse: a “we”. Summary statements that might, had they simply emerged from a single enunciating “I”, have come across as arcane ex cathedra assertions can now be accepted as necessary steps in a task of conceptual clarification in which all are involved. Heidegger’s expansion of “is” into “is” allows the principle of identity to be read as an ontological statement equivalent to “the Same” in preSocratic thought, and he quotes Parmenides, whose discussion of “to auto” “places us before an enigma that we may not sidestep” (36). It is an enigma that Heidegger must explore: The key phrase in the sentence from Parmenides, “to auto”, the Same, remains obscure. We will permit it to remain obscure. We will, nevertheless, permit ourselves at the same time to be given a hint from the principle at whose beginning it stands.

20 For Heidegger, the copula, which is normally a form of the verb “to be”, linking the subject to the predicate in a clause, stands at the centre of philosophical issues concerning “relating” and “binding”, and is a key element in the structure of synthesis that underscores much of his work (GA 2: 212). Heidegger treats “is” as a transitive term, and as such “it does not indicate an existential qualification, but rather the validity of a relation of logical identity” (Rampley: 210–211). In short, the copula ensures “identification, convergence: the essence of a statement and the truth of a statement” (Schöfer: 219–220).

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Chapter 5 In the meantime, however, we have already established the belonging together as the sameness of thought and Being. That was rash, although perhaps necessary. (37)21

Heidegger speaks with his characteristically authoritative voice, and it is one that can afford self-criticism. But there is just a suspicion that the master is playing a game with his audience. These words are obscure: I know that, but I have decided to leave them obscure, he implies, using the voice of a new reasonableness that is capable of recognising the tenuous nature of its own deliberations. Heidegger shares the incredulity of his audience (the first-person plural is used four times in the passage, in phrases such as “we must go back”, “we can do so”), agreeing that his exposition might justifiably be seen as nonsense, or at least an empty play with words. He freely admits that the conceptual basis for the movement he has just made in his argument is slim, and he expresses sympathy with those who find his argument difficult to follow or who are sceptical about the solidity of its premises. As he himself agrees, he has done little more than replace one empty signifier, the equivalent sign, apparently with another, the copula “is”. His audience should, nevertheless, bear with him, have patience: the steps are slow, but we are gradually progressing to our destination, which is the unravelling of “is” as the central term in an ontological statement. Parmenides talked about “belonging together (Zusammengehören) as the sameness of thought and Being”, for “belonging” is a fundamental quality of identity that it acquires when it is “placed into the order of a ‘together’ [Zusammen]” (37). In a later passage in his lecture, “belonging” and “together” form a matrix of cognate terms, which Heidegger systematically elaborates: Indes läßt sich das Zusammengehören auch als Zusammengehören denken. Dies will sagen: Das Zusammen wird jetzt aus dem Gehören bestimmt. Hier bleibt allerdings zu fragen, was dann “gehören” besage und wie sich aus ihm erst das ihm eigene Zusammen bestimme. Die Antwort auf diese Fragen liegt uns näher als wir meinen, aber sie liegt nicht auf der Hand. Genug, wenn wir jetzt durch diesen Hinweis auf die Möglichkeit merken, das Gehören nicht mehr aus der Einheit des Zusammen vorzustellen, sondern dieses Zusammen aus dem Gehören her zu erfahren. (38)

21

Parmenides’ discussion of “the Same” is taken from Fragment B, lines 20–31, of his poem, On Nature.

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[However, belonging together can also be thought of as belonging-together. This means: the together is now determined by the belonging. Of course, we must still ask here what the “belonging” means and how the together that is peculiar to it is determined by it in the first place. The answer to this question is not as far away as we think, but it is not an obvious one. It is enough for now that through this reference we draw attention to the possibility of no longer having to represent belonging in terms of the unity of the together, but rather are able to experience this together in terms of belonging.]

Heidegger is attempting to give content to the concept of the “Same” (“Selbe”), and he does so by emphasising the “gehören” component of “Zusammengehören”. It is an adroit shift of emphasis, because it highlights the semantic potential of both semes within the words “together” and “belonging”. This expansion allows Heidegger to foreground the adverb, “together”, and to reconstruct it as the substantive “the together”, producing the neologistic “together-belonging”. The semes of his new concept, “together” and “belonging”, are linked through the modest additive adverb, “also”, and the simple conjunction of time, “now”. The rhetorical logic of the passage is further sustained by everyday expressions such as “of course, we must still ask” and “not as far away as we think”. This might seem to many in his audience as simply an “empty play with words”, Heidegger admits in the manner of a concessio, but it is not. By stressing the second component in “together-belonging” we are able to see that the principle of identity points to an ontological condition, a relationship of Being (38). For mankind to experience this together-belonging what is required is a “leap away” from metaphysical thinking and a renunciation of its model of the animal rationale that has sustained it over the centuries precisely, for example, in the form of Aristotelian logic. Understanding the need for this leap will show us that “we do not as yet reside sufficiently where we actually already are” (42). We are not yet where we “already are”; we are somewhere else, and Heidegger concludes this part of his lecture by asking: where are we at the moment? In what constellation of Being do we find ourselves? In attempting an answer, he broaches a new area, one towards which he has almost certainly been heading from the first words of his lecture in his critique of the arid logical principle of identity. Now he finds in the contemporary world an analogical but infinitely more dangerous principle at work, returning to a theme that provided for him the paradigm of modernity: technology and its mechanism of “en-framing” (Ge-stell):

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Chapter 5 The name for the aggregation of demands that positions Mankind and Being in a relationship to one another, so that they mutually co-opt one another, is called “enframing” [Ge-stell]. Offense has been taken at this use of words. But if we say “to place” instead of “to put”, and find nothing amiss with using the phrase “legal framework” [Ge-setz], then why then not use “en-framing”, when this is required in order to highlight the matter more clearly? En-framing directly concerns us in every way. En-framing, if we may now use the word, has a more real nature than the entirety of atomic energy and the world of machinery, is more real than the power of organisation, communication and atomization. (44–45)

Although the formation Ge-stell departs from normal usage, linguistically it does no more than parallel a word such as Gesetz [law], which is formed out of setzen [“to place” or “to set in place”], a common formulation that we all accept. The neologistic Ge-stell is needed because it is necessary to bring to visibility something that thrives on its invisibility. Technology is the modern world, is modernity: what is there to question? This, indeed, is the greatest danger (although Heidegger does not use that word in this lecture) that en-framing poses: its seeming naturalness, its self-evident presence. Technology incorporates all we do into a totality (Ganze) that Heidegger frequently refers to in his lecture. Some may see its main threat as material as, for example, in the phenomenon of atomic energy, but it is not. Where then does its greatest threat lie? It lies, as he tells us elsewhere in the lecture, in its Anspruch, the claim it makes on us, as it seeks to incorporate mankind into its workings. Our whole human existence “sees itself everywhere under demand – now playfully, now urgently, now breathlessly, now ponderously – to devote itself to the planning and calculating of everything” (43). It might seem that en-framing is entirely irredeemable: it co-opts the human sphere within its machinations, controlling and dominating it. It might seem that this is purely a form of organised power in which an oppressor is exerting itself over the oppressed, and that the latter must comport itself in the manner of passive alienation. But this is not the case. Following in the spirit of his post-metaphysical attempt to dismantle the binary opposition between subject and object, Heidegger argues that en-framing and Being do not confront one another as alternatives: on the contrary, they make each other possible: we are part of en-framing, as en-framing is part of us, a system of interpenetration that Heidegger describes as a wechselseitige Herausforderung. Its standard translation is “mutual challenge”, but “mutual”

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is a static, purely relational term, and does not convey the dynamic quality of this relationship (“reciprocated” might be a more accurate translation, but “challenge, rather than “demand” is correct, capturing the provocation to act). The stem of wechselsetig is wechseln, which means “to change”, “to alter”, “to switch” and “to vary”. The word denotes a capacity of one thing to have an effect upon another. Without the involvement of Being, as it is “ordered” (bestellt) into Being, en-framing cannot exist: the two, the technological and the human, belong together. We are in en-framing, as en-framing is in us. Heidegger sees a cause for hope in this reciprocal demand. What is required is that we understand that and think through that relationship, that we experience it as Er-eignis, the sudden penetrating happening of understanding. The concept is a complex one: What we experience through modern technology in en-framing, as the configuration between Being and mankind, is a just a beginning for what we call Er-eignis. This does not necessarily adhere to this beginning. For in Er-eignis there arises the possibility of trans-figuring the simple governance of en-framing into a more originary process of ap-propriation [Ereignen]. Such a trans-figuration of en-framing out of Er-eignis would as such bring that which truly belongs to Er-eignis (i.e. that which cannot be brought about by people), i.e. the withdrawal of the technological world from a position of dominating to one of serving in a realm through which mankind could truly reach into Er-eignis. (46)

Heidegger’s tone in this passage is measured, as he moves into a definitional mode. Er-eignis makes possible a way out of en-framing, and Heidegger generates from the stem word, eigen, a network of directions for this path. The initial two sentences modulate the phonetic centre of eigen (the “ei” sound) to establish relations between different formations of the home stem. The semantic potential of Er-eignis is further enriched by its etymology, which lies in er-äugen, to bring to the eyes, that is, “to bring into sight, in looking to call to oneself, to ap-propriate” (45). That the word used in this way goes well beyond its dictionary definition (where sich ereignen in standard German means “to happen” or “to take place”). Heidegger is fully aware that his use of the term is a singulare tantum, a noun that has no plural form, a one-off formulation, and can no more be translated into conventional language than those other foundational words “logos” and “tao”. Er-eignis is clearly a visual mode of appropriation but, as with the related English word, “perception”,

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it expands with its cognate word Blicken into a form of cognitive comprehension: it represents eyes that are opened, and as such opens our eyes. Er-eignis “is a key term in the service of thought”, a dynamic quality within en-framing that allows for a trans-formation (Verwindung) of en-framing, a contortion or twisting of its positive core (although Heidegger makes it clear that this at the moment is merely a possibility by grammatically framing its potential in the subjective, “would bring”, brächte). For ultimately Er-eignis possesses a conditional, perhaps even tentative status: we cannot actively call it into existence: it is not “made solely by people”. Nevertheless, as Heidegger argues in the concluding words of this passage, it alone can take us beyond the demands of a technologised world. Where has our way led us in our analysis of the principle of identity? Heidegger then asks his audience, once again in the spirit of a question that already has an answer. The question constitutes a characteristic moment of self-reflexivity in his discourse, and a return to the pedagogic goal of his lecture, which reassuringly seems to point to an ultimate destination, “to the arrival (Einkehr) of our thinking in the simple”. We have arrived at Er-eignis, “the oscillating sphere, through which mankind and Being reach one another in their essence, achieve their essence, by losing those determinations that metaphysics has bestowed on them” (46). By being framed within the empowering context of Er-eignis, the principle of identity has shed its woeful status as a tautology. It is no longer the bearer of an equation whose second term is the mere mirror of the first. Heidegger has disrupted this linearity by subjecting its equal sign to ontological scrutiny. That sign rewritten as “is” now means “a leap that the essence of identity demands, because it needs it if the belonging together of mankind and Being is to attain the light of the essence of ap-propriation” (48). The happening of Er-eignis provides the essential mediation that was missing in the original axiom, and it now allows us to give a content to a principle that has remained up to now in philosophy an empty abstraction. It is a vital de-constructivist blow against the static unself-reflexive formally logistic heritage of traditional metaphysics, which has long dominated the Western mind. Consequently, Heidegger concludes his lecture with a retrospective framing of the problem, in which the present, on the eve of the future, now appears in order to relativise the past:

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It took more than two thousand years for thinking to recognise appropriately the simple relationship of mediation that exists within identity. Should we now argue that the return of thinking into the essential origin of identity can be achieved in a single day? It is exactly because this return requires a leap that it needs its own time, a time for thought, which is quite different from that of calculation, which today everywhere holds back our thinking. The computer [Denkmachine] is capable of calculating thousands of connections in a single second. In spite of their technical value, they tell us nothing essential. Whatever and however we attempt to think, we think within the scope provided by tradition. It is the directing force when it frees us to move from a backward thinking to a forward thinking, which is no longer to do with planning. Only when we direct ourselves in a thinking way [denkend] to what has already been thought will we be of use for that which is still to be thought. (49–50)

Heidegger’s final words in the lecture do not so much as provide a conclusion, a synthesis of his preceding arguments (as might have been expected in a classic peroratio), as suggest a framework in which we might reach an understanding of what is still required in our thinking, if we are to return to the essential origins of identity. The subject of the passage is time, time as it can best be used in the present, and how that present might relate to the past and the future. This movement across temporal foci is reflected in Heidegger’s language, particularly in his use of adverbial phrases such as “no longer”, “whatever” and “only when”, where Heidegger posits one temporal frame within another. The macro time of past, present and future belongs to a model of calculated and planned time, but this model cannot help us make sense of the time that is required for our re-entry into identity. What is required is a time of thought, an immersion into the moment that collapses past, present and future in the form of a leap into Er-eignis. We are all involved in this task, and we stand to be liberated by it. But if we are liberated (and these sentiments will seem paradoxical only to those who have not followed the logic of Heidegger’s argument in his lecture) we will be liberated not so that we may control this move into the future, but so that we can learn to follow it, to prove ourselves worthy of being used for future thinking. Heidegger consequently concludes his lecture with a homily on “thinking”, which consists, in one final rhetorical tour de force, of a single extended contrapuntal statement, as he subjects one variant of “thinking” (denken) after another to a transformation, to

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allow them to culminate in the final variant, denkend, which is significantly a participle form, indicating a process into the future, a movement that will have no end (50).

The Fourfold (Geviert): The Antinomy of the Age Heidegger’s account of en-framing was typically formulated within the context of, and in contradistinction to, a second concept that was also woven into his narrative of modernity: the “fourfold” (Geviert). Throughout his later writings, the fourfold confronts en-framing as its paradigmatic antimony, representing a vision of spiritualised nature, a celebration of the immanence of the godhead in the physical world.22 The fourfold brings forth “a reverence for the presence of the elemental, for the hidden fullness of what has been and what, thus gathered, is presencing, of the divine”. Its four elements are the earth, sky, the immortal and the mortal (GA 7: 179–180). In “The Thing” (“Das Ding”), the first of his series of Bremen lectures, “Insight into That Which Is”, Heidegger explained that even the simplest of objects draws its unique presence, its internal selfhood, its Being, out of the four components of the fourfold, and he defined each of them: The earth is that which builds and carries, which bears fruit in bearing, and which tends waters and stones, plants and animals […] The sky is the course of the sun, the path of the moon, the shining of the stars, the seasons of the year, light and twilight of the day, darkness and brightness of the night, favour and desolateness of the weather, passage of clouds and the blue depth of the ether […] The immortals are the hinting messengers of divinity. Out of their concealed reign, the god appears in its essence, which withdraws from any comparison with what is present […] The mortals are the

22 The “Geviert” first appeared in the lecture “The Thing” (“Das Ding”, 1949–1950), which formed the basis for further discussions in “Language” (“Die Sprache”, 1950), “Building Dwelling Thinking” (“Bauen Wohnen Denken”, 1951) and “…Poetically Man Dwells …” (“… Dichterisch wohnet der Mensch … ”, 1951). In German, a Geviert is a quad or quadrangle, and hence refers to a division of space. Heidegger uses the term to represent the convergence of four elements in time and space.

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humans. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means being capable of death as death. Only the human dies. (GA 79: 17–18)

Although Heidegger’s fourfold came towards the end phase of his philosophy, it had its origins in texts written some twenty years earlier, such as Contributions to Philosophy (From Ereignis) (Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), 1936–1938). In that work, at one point in his analysis of Dasein, Heidegger tells us that the “breaking-out and abandonment, hint and returning [of Dasein] all belong together as the occurrences of ap-propriation, in which Ereignis opens itself ”, and he depicted this relationship by means of a diagram linking mankind and the gods, on a horizontal level, with world and earth, on a vertical (GA 65: 310). It was not, however, until his essays on Hölderlin that the fourfold acquired a detailed and defining presence in his work. These essays were written (typically as lectures) over a number of years, beginning with “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (“Hölderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung”, 1936), and culminating in “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven” (“Hölderlins Erde und Himmel”, 1959). In his exegesis of Hölderlin’s poem, “As When on a Holiday …” (“Wie wenn am Feiertag … ”), in an essay of the same name from 1939, Heidegger had noted that in Hölderlin’s cosmography “nature comes to presence [west] in human work and in the destiny of peoples, in the stars and the gods, but also in stones, growing things, and animals, as well as in streams and in thunderstorms” (GA 4: 52). This was a vision of nature as natura naturans, a generative plenitude called by the Greeks “phusis”, which for Heidegger meant “that rising-up which goes-back-into-itself; [phusis] names the coming to presence of that which dwells in the risingup and thus comes to presence as open” (56). In Heidegger’s later studies of Hölderlin, these occasional observations came to form the basis of a grounded philosophy, which was partly still that of Hölderlin but also clearly and increasingly that of Heidegger himself. Now nature is not simply viewed as an inchoate plenitude, its bountiful presence undefined and indefinable but as a reality that finds its identity in a tangible place: in land, in the earth and in rivers, such as the Ister, the pre-Germanic name for the Danube, in celebration of which Hölderlin wrote his hymn, “Der Ister”. In his interpretation of that poem, Heidegger describes the river as “a journeying”, as a movement through space: it demarcates the land as

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territory, “the locality of the locale” (GA 53: 35).23 As he further explains, “the journeying which the river is, prevails, and does so essentially, in its vocation of attaining the earth as the ‘ground’ of the homely”, and Heidegger cites a further poem by Hölderlin, “The Journey” (“Die Wanderung”), which celebrates “the river’s vanishing and flowing in relation to attaining mother earth” (35). Nature here has acquired a direction that takes it beyond the inchoate “phusis” of the eternally potential: The river now makes possible for the land a definite space and a circumscribed place of settlement, of traffic, and for the people a cultivable land that guarantees their immediate being-there. The river is not a watercourse that simply passes by the place of men. Rather, its flowing, as it forms the land, establishes the possibility of a founding dwelling for mankind. (GA 39: 264)

But where is the dwelling? Where is the land? For these entities are not mere abstractions, metaphors that point beyond themselves, symbols that simply carry meaning to something higher. As Heidegger had made clear at the beginning of his essay on “Der Ister”, “Hölderlin’s poetry [is] not concerned with images in a symbolic or metaphysical sense” (GA 53: 35). In Hölderlin’s poems, meaning remains within its expression: the symbolic is literal.24 The significance of the river, as with the other components of his cosmography, land, sky and woodland, lies in the quite tangible feeling for the wonder and mystery that was felt by the early Germans who inhabited this land, and Heidegger quotes at some length from the Roman historian, Tacitus, who had written about the customs and religious festivals of the Germans in his Germania. In this work, Tacitus describes one such festival centred on “Hertha”, the Germanic name for the terra mater, Mother Earth, who was worshipped in a “sacred grove with sacrificial offerings”. Tacitus tells how her image was brought to the grove by slaves who, after the ceremony, were swallowed up in a purification process in a lake. It was an act that represented 23

“The river as a location is not a fixed place, but exhibits a kind of openness and invitation to what lies around it … The river is also the connection between what has been and what is to come” (Mitchell 94). 24 For Heidegger, the native (das Heimische) is vouchsafed “only where the forces of surrounding nature and the echo of historical tradition remained conjoined” (Haar 63).

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for those involved, as Heidegger observes, the ultimate unity of man and nature (196). Jacob Grimm, philologist and cultural historian of German language and folklore, likewise set out to describe “the heathen consecration” of nature in his monumental German Mythology (Deutsche Mythologie), published in four volumes in 1834 (Grimm II: 586). Heidegger mentions Grimm but once in his essay on “Der Ister”, but the reference comes at a critical point in his narrative when the philosopher is attempting to delineate the “historical dwelling” provided by the river. Here Grimm tells us that “Hertha, growing verdant, is named together with her children, the sons of the earth”, most notably Braga, whom Grimm describes as “the god of language”, one of the gods that made up a pantheon in the pagan religion of the Germanic tribes (I: 161). As Grimm explains, for the pagan mind these gods were not simply colourful deities, the stuff of fiction or of legend, but expressions of the power and mystery of its most elemental reality: nature, which was enthused by the presence of the divine. Indeed, “all nature was thought of by the heathen mind as living”, in a world in which the spirit dwelt amongst “all-penetrating, all-absorbing primitive substances”: “water, the limpid flowing, welling up or running dry; fire, the illuminating, kindled or quenched; air unseen by the eye, but sensible to ear and touch; earth, the nourishing, out of which everything grows, and into which all that has grown dissolves” (II: 583). Even “stones and rocks” were manifestations of an indestructible holy presence (II: 465). Pagan worship took place within an enclosed space, a sacred precinct. Such a place “served the community as a model of the original centre, set up at creation when order emerged from chaos” (Davidson 25). It was a space that for the pagan mind, as Grimm describes it, embraced and united all elements of the physical world: “everything shews that the notions of time, age, world, globe, earth, light, air, and water ran very much into one another” (Grimm II: 582). This area demarcated a terrain that was set apart from the quotidian world by boundary markers.25 To enter it was to make a

25

As Heidegger observes elsewhere, “Man, as the message-bearer of the message of the twofold’s unconcealment [meant is sky and earth], would also be he who walks the boundary of the boundless” (GA 12: 129).

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“transition from the notion of time to that of space”, in which the absolute acquired immediate presence (790). This conceptualisation of space as a sacred area also became a key element in Heidegger’s later writing, emerging in various tropes such as the “place” (Ort), the “open” (Offene) and the “region” (Gegend), whose diverse provenance converged upon the concept of “topos”.26 For Heidegger, topos was not simply an area of demarcation, a state that “de-fines”; it was also an area that empowered, which permitted the gathering and extension of Being. Topos, when seen as “place”, indicated a transformative presence. As Heidegger explains: Originally the word “place” [meant] the point of a spear. In it, everything came together. The place gathers unto itself, supremely and in the extreme. Its gathering power penetrates and pervades everything. The place, the gathering power, gathers in and preserves all it has gathered, not like an encapsulating shell but rather by penetrating with its light all it has gathered, and only thus releasing the latter into its own nature. (GA 12: 33)

When we enter the place, we enter a realm of unconcealdness: “in this realm, mankind is allowed to look up, out of it, through it, towards the divinities. The upward glance passes aloft toward the sky, and yet it remains below on the earth. The upward glance spans the between of sky and earth” (GA 7: 198). Heidegger likened the place to an open space in a forest, when the canopy parts to reveal the light of the sun shining in a clearing (Lichtung). Here light makes clear the surrounding detail of the forest. It does not replace darkness: it illuminates it, revealing what is there. Clearing allows a penetration of existence, a visio beatifica, that transfixes the attuned self in space and time. It is this place of revelation that Heidegger divined in the fourfold, in which he celebrated the immanence of Being in the physical world. Heidegger saw this immanence in the simplest of objects, things that gathered the fourfold in a particular way as a locally manifest presence.27 In his essay “The 26 As David Farrell Krell has observed, “in the essays and treatises published immediately after Being and Time […] ‘open region’, ‘openness’, ‘the free’ and ‘freedom’ are preferred ways of advancing the question of Being (Anwesenheit) and Truth (Unverborgenheit)” (89). 27 “The fourfold allows Heidegger a way of articulating the desolidification or dis-closure of the thing, the interruption of the thing’s self-presence and self-identity whereby the thing passes into the world” (Mitchell 12).

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Thing” (“das Ding”), Heidegger attempts to show up that presence by using the example of a jug. He begins his exposition by posing the most basic of all questions: “a thing is a jug. What is a jug?” (GA 79: 5). The question raises a fundamental issue concerning the nature of what something is beyond its designation. Semantic history does not help us understand what a jug is, for as he tells us, “standing alone, the decisive element is in no way the historical meaning of the words that might be used to describe it: ‘res’, ‘Ding’, ‘causa’, ‘cosa’, ‘chose’ or ‘thing’, but something quite different that has not as yet been contemplated” (15). What this quite different something is, which has up to now not been contemplated, can only be made to reveal itself through a descriptive ontology (although Heidegger does not explicitly call it this) where the thingness of the thing, “das Dingliche am Ding”, will lay itself bare to show up the thing in itself as “das Ding an sich” (the Kantian analogue is not, however, broached). In the case of the jug, Heidegger decides that he cannot define it simply by describing its material constitution. The jug has sides, a bottom and a handle; but what is “essential” about the jug is that its inner core is empty. It is this void that Heidegger focuses on in his analysis, and he pursues the meaning of this emptiness with ever greater degrees of penetration, and in doing so opens up an entirely new way of seeing what a “thing” rather than an “object” is: Wie faßt die Leere des Kruges? Sie faßt, indem sie, was eingegossen wird, nimmt. Sie faßt, indem sie das Aufgenommene behält. Die Leere faßt in zweifacher Weise: nehmend und behaltend. Das Wort “fassen” ist darum zweideutig. Das Nehmen von Einguß und das Einbehalten des Gusses gehören jedoch zusammen. Ihre Einheit aber wird vom Ausgießen her bestimmt, worauf der Krug als Krug abgestimmt ist. Das zwiefache Fassen der Leere beruht so im Ausgießen. Als dieses ist das Fassen eigentlich, wie es ist. Ausgießen aus dem Krug ist Schenken. Im Schenken des Gusses west das Fassen des Gefäßes. Das Fassen bedarf der Leere als des Fassenden. Das Wesen der fassenden Leere ist in das Schenken versammelt. Schenken aber ist reicher als das bloße Ausschenken. Das Schenken, worin der Krug Krug ist, versammelt in sich das zwiefache Fassen und zwar in das Ausgießen. Wir nennen die Versammlung der Berge das Gebirge. Wir nennen die Versammlung des zwiefachen Fassens in das Ausgießen, die als Zusammen erst das volle Wesen des Schenkens ausmacht: das Geschenk. Das Krughafte des Kruges west im Geschenk des Gusses. (10–11) [In what way does the jug contain emptiness? It contains in that it holds what is poured into it. It contains in that it retains that which has been poured in. Emptiness contains in two ways: taking and retaining. The word “containing” has thus two meanings: the

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Chapter 5 taking of the pouring in and the keeping of the poured. These belong, nevertheless, together. Their unity, however, is determined by the pouring out, which establishes the jug as jug. The dual containing of emptiness resides thus in the pouring out. Only as such is the containing actually what it is. Pouring out from the jug is a bestowal. In the bestowal of the pouring comes to presence [west] the containing of the vessel. The containing requires emptiness as a container. The essence of the emptiness that holds is gathered in the bestowal. Bestowing is, however, richer than the mere serving. The act of bestowal, in which the jug is jug, gathers into itself the dual containing and does so in the pouring out. We call the gathering of mountains a mountain-range [Gebirge]. We call the gathering of the dual containing in pouring out (which only as a together constitutes the full essence of the bestowal): the gift [Geschenk]. The jugness of the jug comes to presence [west] in the giving of the pouring.]

Heidegger is exploring the paradox of a thing that has presence not through its substantive material qualities, those that we can physically see and grasp, but through the absence of such qualities: in the case of the jug, the absence is a space, a hole, an emptiness. Those parts of the jug that are made during the process of manufacture, the base and the sides, have the sole function of holding in place the void that is the essence (Wesen) of the jug. Consequently, tropes of containment, of taking in, releasing and giving, dominate the text in an iterative fashion, both in their verbal forms, as in “contain” (fassen), “hold” (behalten), “retain” (einbehalten) and “take” (nehmen), and in the neologistic substantives that are formed from participles, such as the “something taken up” (Aufgenommene), all of which culminate in the coming together of the jug’s qualities as a gathering (Versammlung). This initial group of structural terms, based on the trope of containment, is matched by a second liquid group such as “pour” (schenken) and “pour out” (ausgiessen). These terms, foregrounding the agency of the jug, describe the gift of pouring, which allows emptiness (Leere) to come to its self-realisation through the act of pouring out. It is here that the void demonstrates its ability to find its fulfilment as a jug, a fulfilment that Heidegger calls a “gift” (Geschenk), which is yet a further totalising noun formed through the addition of the “Ge-” participle to a common verb. The jug is not inert but acts upon the world. Following the logic of Heidegger’s exposition, we might say that the emptiness (Leere) of the jug is, in fact, its fullness (Fülle). Heidegger’s prose is assertive. The unusual grammar of the opening sentences (normally fassen is a transitive verb, requiring an indirect object) and the omission of the object “it” in “it gathers” have the effect of highlighting

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the state of containing as something that is apart from that which is being contained, as if it might exist independently of the liquid that is inside the jug. The sentences, which possess the classic grammatical form of subject, predicate, object, are short, because they chart an exposition, whose goal is to establish how a simple thing, a jug, is able to possess complex graduations of presencing in the world. The logic of this presencing is sustained by quantitative descriptors such as zwiefach [dual fashion] and zweideutig [two meanings], and by their strategic rhetorical positioning. The use of the chiasmus “ … pouring. In pouring …” (“… Schenken. Im Schenken …”), also helps the text to secure a system of relations that is capable of describing the jug as a totality. The gift of pouring represents a plenitude that has been made possible through the activity of the jug. It is in such plenitude that the fourfold dwells. Later in his essay, Heidegger evokes the activity of the gift of pouring almost in the form of a catechism: Im Geschenk des Gusses, der ein Trunk ist, weilen nach ihrer Weise die Sterblichen. Im Geschenk des Gusses, der ein Trank ist, weilen nach ihrer Weise die Göttlichen, die das Geschenk des Schenkens als das Geschenk der Spende zurückempfangen. Im Geschenk des Gusses weilen je verschieden die Sterblichen und die Göttlichen. Im Geschenk des Gusses weilen Erde und Himmel. Im Geschenk des Gusses weilen zumal Erde und Himmel, die Göttlichen und die Sterblichen. Diese Vier gehören, von sich her einig, zusammen. Sie sind, allen Anwesenden zuvorkommend, in ein einziges Geviert eingefaltet. (12) [In the gift of pouring, which is a libation, mortals abide in their fashion. In the gift of pouring, which is a potion, the divinities come to presence [wesen] in their fashion and receive back the gift of the giving as the gift of donation. In the gift of pouring, the mortals and the divinities come to presence in their different ways. In the gift of pouring earth and sky come to presence. In the gift of pouring earth and sky, divinities and mortals come to presence. These four, long since in accordance with one another, belong together. They are, coming to meet all that is present, folded into a single fourfold.]

Heidegger’s theme is the embedding of one form of potency within another, which the fourfold makes possible, and his discourse enacts that process on a textual level. The passage possesses a monumentality of theme and style. Its language seems to be purely explicative, with clearly articulated subjects linked to main verbs, but insistence of tone and repetition take it into a quite

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different linguistic register. The opening words of the initial sentences, “In the gift …” (“Im Geschenk …”) constitute a single extended isocolon, which allows Heidegger to hew out the structure of his exposition as if the individual words were self-standing entities. It is an approach in keeping with his goal, which is to secure the meaning of the elemental components of the fourfold. The repetition of key words underscores the fact that they share a single source, and this provides the basis of what is a dialectical composition formed around the notions of “gift” (Geschenk) and “pouring” (Gusses), whose terms are defined and redefined in a network of parallel appositions. These appositions are established through the insistent use of prepositions, particularly “in” (which is used throughout the passage) and through a small number of verbs, such as “come to presence” (wesen), the latter representing not a mere persistence, a material insistence, something that is simply empirically there in the present, but an essential dwelling for Being. The function of such language is to secure the jug firmly in place and time, as something whose significance lies in the immediate, and to provide a framework in which the major theme of the passage, the union of the fourfold, can be seen in the single act of pouring (its “gift”) as a “libation”.28 By thinking into this union of the jug with the fourfold, we ourselves join with the thing in its integrity: Wenn wir das Ding in seinem Dingen aus der weltenden Welt wesen lassen, denken wir an das Ding als das Ding. Dergestalt andenkend lassen wir uns vom weltenden Wesen des Dinges angehen. So denkend sind wir vom Ding als dem Ding betroffen. Wir sind die im strengen Sinne des Wortes Be-Dingten. Wir haben die Anmaßung alles Unbedingten hinter uns gelassen. (20) [If we allow the thing to come to presence in its thinging from the worldling world, we think the thing as the thing. Approached as thinking in this way, we allow ourselves to be touched by the worldling essence of the thing. Thinking in this way, we are affected by the thing as the thing. We are, in the strict sense of the word, the be-thinged. We have left behind us the presumption of everything that has not been be-thinged.]

28

I have followed Mitchell in translating Trunk as “libation”. It is a word, however, that connotes a Classical Greek or Roman environment, whereas Heidegger’s terminology is resolutely German and firmly down to earth, Krug, Trunk, Trank and schenken being common words in the inn trade.

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In Parmenides, Heidegger described how the Greeks conceived of “looking” as a means of establishing a bond between viewer and the viewed, where “‘Theao’ (looking) in no way meant ‘seeing’ as a cogitative looking upon and looking at, in which the viewer turns towards forms of Being as objects and comprehends them. ‘Theao’ is, rather, the looking in which the one who looks shows himself and ‘is there’” (GA 54: 152). This visual grasping of the object world, Heidegger has now made his own. The insistent grammatical presence of the “thing” and “thinging” (Ding and Dingen), which is used four times in the first sentence alone, and the short sentences that follow the initial conditional sentence, simply delineate the conditions that allow this way of looking to take place. Heidegger is not constructing an argument; he is describing what is gained by an activity through which we view the thing in its integrity by thinking, not about it, but through it, and through its place and our place in the fourfold. It is a thought-full fluidity that embraces both subject and object, and Heidegger captures the fluidity of that process by using not finite verbs but participles, “thinking” a thing, and “thinking” as a form of comportment (andenkend and denkend). “Letting” (lassen), a verb of facilitation, is used in successive sentences. By grasping the integrity of the object world in this fashion, we are not imposing ourselves upon it: we do not seek to make it ours, but allow it to be. And we too come to presence by granting the thing its thingness, by seeing it as a thing. As Heidegger makes clear in the sentences that follow, when we allow the thing to come to presence on its own accord as a “thinging” within the “worldling” of the fourfold, we are able to think the thing as a thing. In that state, it “concerns” us (although the German angehen has more tangible connotations, closer to “touches” us, as in “to be touched” emotionally), a personal engagement that Heidegger reinforces in the ensuing sentence with betrofffen, “to be affected” by, allowing the thing to reach us through a looking formed in thought. This union of subject and object is encapsulated in the neologistic Be-Dingten. The latter is a noun formed out of the past tense of the verb bedingen, which in English translates as “to determine” or “to condition”, but Heidegger’s Be-Dingten means the exact opposite of these standard translations. The dictionary definition of “to determine” is “to settle” or “to decide” (a dispute or a question), by an authoritative decision, or “to

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conclude” or “to ascertain” something after a process of reasoning; and “to condition” means to have a significant influence on the manner or outcome of something, its synonyms being “to constrain”, “to control” and “to govern”. All of these terms denote the activity of management and manipulation, and return us to the sterile subject-object relationship of metaphysics and to a valorisation of the human subject that Heidegger rejected. Heidegger rewrites bedingen, adding a hyphen between its prefix, be (a prefix that suggests activity), and the stem of the word Ding. Being be-Dingt means being open to the world un-conditionally. By thinking ourselves into the thing, we have become “be-thinged”: not “conditioned” (as one standard translation has it) but sublated into a fuller appropriation of the physical world. We have left behind us the presumption (and Anmaßung also means “pretension”) of all that has not been “be-thinged”, the presumption of ways of seeing that privilege the viewer or that relegate the thing to its purely functional place within the world of objects. The capacity of being “be-thinged” permits a non-conditional regaining of the integrity of both perceiver and perceived, and allows us access to that quality of wonder that adheres to the human and non-human alike within the fourfold. In 1949, in a talk, “The Pathway” (“Der Feldweg”), given in his birthplace, Meßkirch, Heidegger describes a walk that he used to take from his village into a nearby forest. The talk might have been an occasion for sentiment, a study in miniature in the genre of rural romanticism, but what he describes is not a sentimental journey but an excursion into the mystery of nature, a world and a mystery that he had celebrated throughout his writing. Nature and the life of the spirit are indistinguishable: one lives within the other. In his Teutonic Mythology, Grimm had described the pagan belief in the interchangeability of human and natural forms, known as “banning” (bahnen) or “conjuring up”.29 So too with Heidegger’s walk on his pathway: the wonder of the world lies everywhere. As he moves along the path, he tells us, “the old linden trees in the Schloss garden gazed after it from behind the wall”. The path responds: “along its edges the pathway 29 As Jacob Grimm notes, “what is banned becomes imperceptible, and can only on certain conditions become corporeal again, in the same way as invisible spirits can at will assume grosser material shapes” (II: 951).

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greets a tall oak under which stands a roughly hewn bench” (1956: 1). If we have ears to hear, we will learn much from a nature that is now given a voice: “the oak itself spoke: only in such growth is grounded what lasts and fructifies; growing means this: to open oneself up to the expanse of heaven and at the same time to sink roots into the darkness of earth” (3). Those who choose to take this path must simply open themselves to what is around them, because it is in such simplicity that the puzzle of what comes to presence and that which is great is conserved. The message of the pathway is quite clear but, of course, clarity can only emerge in the form of questions: “is the soul speaking? Is the world speaking? Is God speaking?” (7).

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Works by Heidegger in German: The Gesamtausgabe All references are to the Gesamtausgabe (GA), the collected edition of Heidegger’s works. The dates in square brackets indicate the year of first publication and/or year of composition. GA 1. Frühe Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978 [1912–1917]. Includes Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus [1916]. 133–354. GA 2. Sein und Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977 [1927]. GA 4. Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1955 [1936–1968]. GA 5. Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977 [1935–1946]. Includes “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” [1935–1937]. 1–74. GA 7. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000 [1936–1953]. Includes “Die Frage nach der Technik” [1954]. 5–36. GA 9. Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967 [1919–1961]. Includes “Anmerkungen zu Karl Jaspers Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919–1921)” [1921]. 1–44; “Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit” [1947]. 203–238; “Vom Wesen und Begriff der φύσις. Aristoteles, Physik B, 1”. 239–301; “Brief über den Humanismus” [1947]. 313–364. GA 11. Identität und Differenz. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006. Includes “Der Satz der Identität” [1957]. 29–50. GA 12. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985 [1950–1959]. GA 13. Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens: 1910–1976. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983. GA 15. Seminare. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1986 [1951–1973]. GA 16. Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges:1910–1976. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000. Includes “Erbetene Vorbemerkung zu einer Dichterlesung auf Bühlerhöhe am 24 Februar 1951”. 470–471. GA 17. Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985 [1921–1922].

222 Bibliography GA 18. Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002 [1924]. GA 20. Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1979 [1925]. GA 26. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978 [1928]. GA 27. Einleitung in die Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999 [1928–1929]. GA 39. Hölderlin’s “Germania” and “Der Rhein”. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1980 [1934–1935]. GA 40. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983 [1935]. GA 52. Hölderlin’s Hymne “Andenken”. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992 [1941–1942]. GA 53. Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister”. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993 [1942]. GA 54. Parmenides. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1982 [1942–1943]. GA 55. Vorlesungen 1923–1944: 1. Heraklit: Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens. 2. Logik, Heraklits Lehre vom Logos. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994 [1943–1944]. GA 58. Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992 [1919–1920]. GA 60. Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2011 [1920–1921]. GA 62. Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005. Includes “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristotles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation)”. 343–396. GA 63. Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität). Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995 [1923]. GA 65: Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989 [1936–1938]. GA 66. Besinnung. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1997 [1938–1939]. GA 71. Das Ereignis. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2009 [1941–1942]. GA 74. Zum Wesen der Sprache und Zur Frage nach der Kunst. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2010 [1936–1960]. GA 79. Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994 [1949–1957]. GA 81. Gedachtes. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007 [1910–1974]. GA 82. Zu Eigenen Veröffentlichungen. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2018 [1936–1964].

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Other Works by Heidegger in German “Allerseelenstimmungen” [1909]. Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens. Eds Alfred Denker et al. Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2004. 18–21. “Der Feldweg”. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1956 [1949]. Zur Sache des Denkens. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1988. Includes “Zeit und Sein” [1962]. 1–25.

Heidegger in Translation: Selected Works Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event). Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela VallegaNeu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012. Early Greek Thinking. Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Être et Temps. Trans. Emmanuel Martineau. Paris: Authentica, 1985. Identity and Difference. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. “The last, undelivered lecture (XII) from Summer Semester 1952”. Trans. Will McNeill. The Presocratics after Heidegger. Ed. David C. Jacobs. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 171–184. “Letter to Father William J. Richardson”. In Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974. ix–xxiii. Mindfulness. Trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. London: Continuum, 2006. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1971. Parmenides. Trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

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Index

a / a- (as privative prefix) 38, 62, 111 Ab-grund 87, 92–93 Abschied / Abgeschiedenheit 169–170, 171 ab-yss (see Ab-grund) Achtsamkeit 110 adaequatio intellectus et rei (correspondence theory of truth) 82, 124–125 Adorno, Theodor 3–4, 7, 8 adverbs (in Heidegger’s writing) 26, 39–40, 45, 59, 81, 83, 84, 93, 96, 152, 203, 207 Ahnung 76 Aletheia (ἀλήθεια) 38, 105–118, 121, 122, 127, 156, 174, 187, 192, 195, 196 alliteration 19, 21, 34, 88, 100, 150, 152, 178, 181, 187 analogical 73, 203 Andenken 105, 176 Andere (das) 119, 130, 177 andere Anfang 64, 66, 69–73, 75, 78, 80–85, 89–90, 93, 99, 100, 101 anfängliches Denken 61, 66–71, 73–76, 79, 81, 83, 84, 86, 89, 98, 102, 105, 107–109, 139, 197 Angst 45, 53, 55–56 Animal rationale 64, 89, 102, 119, 129–130, 203 Anklang 74, 94 Anwesen 116, 152–153, 195, 212, 215 anxiety (see Angst) apartness (see Abschied / Abgeschiedenheit) appellation of reader / audience (see Reader/ Audience) apposition 67, 78, 86, 92, 96, 103, 216 ap-propriation (see Ereignis) Aquinas 96, 124, 188

Aristotle 12, 16, 23, 25, 26–27, 30, 31, 40, 61, 64, 68, 119, 123, 124, 129, 143, 187–188, 198–200, 203 art / work of art 62, 82, 107, 119, 127, 189, 196 atomic energy 204 authenticity (see Eigentlichkeit) awe (see Scheu) Barthes, Roland 93 Befindlichkeit 45, 47, 51–53, 55, 56, 76 beginning (see other beginning) Being (see Sein) Be-ing (see Seyn) Being (coming into) (see Wesen / Wesung) belonging / belonging-together (see Gehören / Zusammengehören) Besinnung 76, 84 Besorgen (see Sorge) Bestand 185–191, 196 Bestellen 184, 205 Bewandtnis 38–40, 43, 48–49, 55 Be-wëgung 142, 144, 148–153 Bible 22, 23, 100, 172 Blicken / Schauen / Sicht 41–43, 48, 117–120, 205–206, 217–218 Brentano, Franz 26 bringing about (see Veranlassen) calling (see Rufen) care (see Sorge) Carnap, Rudolf 2–3, 4, 7 Catholic church 122, 128–129 cause / causation 187–188 clearing (see Lichtung) Char, René 178–179 Christianity 72, 121, 128, 166, 172

234 Index cogito 15 collecting (see Versammlung) conjunctions (in Heidegger’s writing) 19, 34, 40, 86, 166, 197, 203 connotation / denotation 11, 25, 32, 33, 35, 46, 49, 50, 59, 70, 74, 86, 93, 110, 116, 127, 133, 137, 150, 154, 157, 165, 170, 191, 195, 216 217 conversation (see Gespräch) co-opting (see Bestellen) copula (“is”) 20, 29, 96, 176, 200–202, 206 co-respondence (see Ent-sprechung) Da (in Dasein) 18, 45, 47, 51 Daimonion 119–121 danger (see Gefahr) Dasein / Da-sein 6, 11–13, 18, 23, 26, 30, 32, 35, 40, 41–60, 61, 62, 71, 74, 77, 87–88, 90, 101–102, 134, 157, 180, 197, 209 death (see Tod) de-cision (see Ent-scheidung) deconstruction 8, 94, 131 (see also Destruktion) demand (see Herausfordern) degeneracy (see Verfallenheit) departure / departing (see Abschied) Derrida, Jacques 8–9 Descartes, René 12 (see also cogito) destining (see Geschick) destruction / de-struction (see Destruktion) Destruktion 12, 31, 61, 70, 72, 130, 198, 206 dialectic / dialectical 20–22, 83, 92, 216 Dichtung 1, 9, 71, 132, 138–139, 141, 155–170, 171–182, 185, 194, 197–198, 208, 209–210 di-fference (see Unter-Schied) Ding / Sache 13–14, 26–44, 113, 116, 124, 125, 126, 136, 138, 139, 144, 160–163, 167, 184, 196, 198, 205, 208, 209, 212–218.

disclosedness (see Erschlossenheit) discourse (see Rede) disposition / disposedness (see Befindlichkeit and Stimmung) disposable resource (see Bestand) disposedness (see Befindlichkeit) di-stance (closing of distance) (see Ent-fernung) Duns Scotus 27–28, 123 Durchdenken 66 Earth (see Erde) eigen 55, 59, 62 63, 205 Eigenlichkeit / Uneigenlichkeit 3–4, 11, 30, 36, 46–47, 54–60, 68, 126, 157 emptiness (see Leere) en-framing (see Ge-stell) engagement (see Umgang) enownment (see Ereignis) Entbergung 111–112, 185–186, 195 Ent-scheidung 87, 88, 89–90, 91, 98 Ent-sprechung 137, 169 Entwurf 56–57, 60, 69, 72 epideictic 198 epistemology 20, 41, 75, 124, 130, 135, 189 epoché (bracketing/suspension of judgment) 14 equipment / tools (see Zeug) Erde 98, 101–102, 112, 116, 150, 155, 164, 167, 170, 173, 197, 198, 208–212, 215, 219 Er-denken 75, 81 Ereignis / Er-eignis 62, 66, 71, 72, 79–80, 83, 86, 89–91, 99, 101, 102, 142, 153–155, 193, 205–206. Erkennen / Erknenntnis 19–20 Erschlossenheit 18, 22, 41–42, 43, 47, 48–50, 56, 57, 73, 105, 167 Erschrecken 71, 76 essence (see Wesen) existential (see Existenzial) existentialism 3

Index Existenzial / Existenziell 18–19, 34, 42, 54. etymology (Heidegger’s use of ) 7, 9, 26, 45, 62, 86, 109, 114, 135, 136, 153, 205 eundo assequi 65, 146 event (see Ereignis) experimentation (scientific) 95–96 facticity (see Faktizität) Faktizität 22–23, 24, 31–32, 45, 46, 55, 59, 102 figurative language / imagery 2, 7, 63, 70, 72, 96, 97–99, 117, 146, 154, 165–170, 173, 174, 181, 210 Fluß 136, 185, 209–211 forest (see Wald) forgetting / forgetfulness (“lanthanomai” and “lethe”) 113–115 formale Anzeige 30 formal indication (see formale Anzeige) forward play (see Zuspiel) Foucault, Michel 127 fourfold (see geviert) Fragen 19–21, 66–67, 69–70, 76, 84, 86, 95, 101, 102, 142, 162, 184, 202, 206, 219 Frankfurt School 4 Fuge 65, 73–74, 79, 82–83, 92–93, 95, 101, 173, 177 fugue (see Fuge) future ones (see Zukünftigen) Galileo 126 Gefahr 184, 193194, 196, 204 Gegend 141, 143, 146–150, 154, 159, 183, 212 Gehören / Zusammengehören 202–203 Gehorsam 132–134 Gelassenheit 174, 216 Gespräch 157–158, 176–178 George, Stefan 138–139, 159–164 Gerede 47, 54 Geschick 9, 133, 192

235 Ge-stell 7, 189–196, 203–205. Geviert 164, 208–209, 212–218 God / Goddess (see Gott) Gott / Göttin / Götter 72, 74, 99–101, 106–107, 111, 119, 121, 122, 144, 155–159, 160, 161, 172, 208–209, 211, 215, 219 grammar (Heidegger’s grammatical forms and structures) 1, 2, 8, 17, 26, 27, 36–37, 39, 45, 58–59, 63, 64, 81, 85–86, 88, 97, 101 108, 113, 125, 133, 137, 152, 191, 194, 197, 201, 206, 207, 214–215, 217 (see also sentence structure and syntax) Greek language / philosophy / art 7, 13, 14, 17, 22, 28, 34, 37, 40, 92, 96, 101, 105–121, 122, 125–128, 129, 130–138, 155, 187–189, 192, 209, 217 Grimm, Jacob 38, 46, 211–212, 218 ground / grounding (see Grund) Grund / Gründend 47, 48, 61, 62, 67, 71, 74, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 82–83, 85, 91–93, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 105, 130, 174, 178, 209, 210, 219 Hand 19, 35, 37, 56, 107, 160 (see also Vorhandenheit / Zuhandenheit) hear (see Hören) hear-say (see Gerede) heedfulness (see Achtsamkeit) Heimisch 210 Heraclitus 129–138, 141. Herausfordern 184, 186, 190, 195, 204–205 hermeneutics 17, 22–25, 26, 30, 65, 146 hide (back into oneself ) (see Kruptesthai) 115–116 Himmel 98, 156, 158, 167, 208, 210, 211, 212, 215 Hölderlin, Friedrich 105, 154, 155–160, 185, 194, 209–210 Homer 114

236 Index Hören / Horchen 133–134, 156, 169, 180–181, 197–198, 219 Humboldt, Alexander von 143 Husserl, Edmund 11, 13–15, 19, 31, 35, 41, 44 hyphen (in Heidegger’s writing) 49, 56, 75, 77, 81, 86, 88, 93, 149, 188, 189, 190, 191, 195, 217, 218 identity (principle of ) 198–208 inceptual thinking (see anfängliches Denken) indebted (see Verschulden) italics 78, 83, 86, 92, 96 intertext 93, 96 intoning (see Anklang) involvement (see Bewandtnis) Jaspers, Karl 2, 3, 17 journey / quest motif 9, 51, 59, 64, 66, 72, 81, 84, 98, 103, 106, 107, 108, 121, 138, 146–155, 159, 161–163, 166, 170, 179, 183, 209–210, 219 juncture (see Fuge) Kairos (critical moment) 59, 102, 181 Kant / Neo-Kantianism 12, 13, 14, 16, 47, 75, 80, 115, 123, 213 Kehre 6, 62, 67, 74, 141, 173, 175, 176, 184, 193–194 knowing (see Erkennen) Kruptesthai 115–116 land 98, 159–160, 171, 209–210 language (Heidegger’s language / views on language) 1–9, 11, 16–21, 23–26, 30, 34–35, 36, 38, 58–59, 61, 62, 63–69, 86, 89, 97, 100, 101–103, 105, 108, 110, 122–123, 125, 134–135, 138–139, 143–155, 157–158, 159–163, 168–170, 171, 173, 177–178, 183, 187, 191, 197–198, 200, 205, 207, 211, 216

Lassen 91, 116, 148, 136–137, 148, 175–176, 189, 216–217 Latin 7, 11, 12, 25, 27–28, 38, 39, 41, 42, 45, 56, 62, 67, 93, 96, 107, 110, 115, 122–129, 135, 146, 168, 187–188 leap (see Sprung) legere 135–137 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 143 Lesen 135–137 Lichtung 62, 82, 87, 119, 134, 173, 212 lighting / clearing (see Lichtung) logic 2–3, 7, 25, 64, 70, 72, 73, 76, 85, 123–124, 130–131, 147, 198–199, 200, 201, 203, 206 (see also logos) logical positivism 2, 4 logos (λόγος) 94, 95, 105, 109, 129–135, 138–139, 141, 156, 174, 205 looking / the visual (see Blicken) Machenschaft 94, 98 machinations (see Machenschaft) Man, das 54, 57 Marcuse, Herbert 191 Marx / Marxism 185 Medieval period 12, 27, 67, 95, 100, 126, 128 metaphysics (the metaphysical tradition) 2, 5, 6, 12, 13, 15, 25, 27, 29, 31, 40, 61, 64, 67, 69–70, 81, 90, 115, 118, 119, 123, 124, 130, 131, 143, 146, 187, 188, 198, 199, 203, 204, 206, 210, 218 Middle High German 119, 149 mindfulness (see Besinnung) modernity 3, 63, 68, 90, 94, 100, 122, 127–129, 184, 185, 190, 192, 196, 197, 203–204, 208 modists 27–28 Möglichkeit 5–6, 57–58, 60, 71, 101, 193–194 mood (see Stimmung) myth / mythology 111, 116, 155–156, 211, 218

237

Index Nachsagen 134–135 Nähe 147, 167 National Socialism and Hitler 8, 71 Natorp, Paul 13, 123 native (see Heimisch) nature (see Phusis) nearness (see Nähe) Neo-Kantianism 13, 123 neologisms (Heidegger’s new word formations) 7, 21, 26, 39–40, 49, 51, 53, 59–60, 62, 64, 81, 92, 108, 121, 134, 137, 149, 178, 189, 203, 204, 217 Newton, Isaac 96, 126 Nietzsche, Friedrich 64, 72, 90, 127 nihilism 55, 90 obeying (see Gehorsam) oblivion (see forgetting) ontic (see ontology) ontology 1, 11–12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19–21, 26, 27–28, 32, 35, 36, 38, 41, 43, 44–47, 53, 58, 62, 64, 67, 68, 77, 85, 106, 107, 124, 180, 200–202, 203, 206, 213 Offene 119, 212 open (see Offene) ordinary language 2, 6, 7 originary / inceptual thinking (see anfängliches Denken) originary (see Ursprünglich) Ort 99, 148, 169–170, 179, 209–212, 217 Other (the) (see Andere) other beginning (see andere Anfang) Ousia 126 own (see Eigenlichkeit / Uneigenlichkeit) paganism 211–212, 218 pain (see Schmerz) Parmenides 105–111, 131, 139, 141, 187, 201–202, 217 path / way (see Weg) path / way-making (see Be-wëgung)

performative writing / thinking 61, 65–66 phenomenology / phenomenal 11, 13–17, 22, 24–25, 26, 35, 37, 39, 41, 44, 92, 114, 116, 123, 144 philology 7, 17, 211 phusis 90, 105, 116 126, 155, 190, 195, 209, 211, 217–208 place / topos (see Ort) Plato 12, 23, 27, 31, 121, 125, 189 pledge (see Zusage) 145–146 poetry (see Dichtung) poiesis 64, 189, 195 polis 128 positivism 15, 48 possibility (see Möglichkeit) post-structuralism 4, 9 prefixes (in Heidegger’s writing) 18, 20, 21, 22, 26, 35, 38, 43, 49–50, 56, 62, 63, 75, 81, 86, 88, 89, 91, 93, 112, 135, 137, 149–150, 157, 178, 190, 192, 195, 218 prepositions (in Heidegger’s writing) 16, 29, 39–40, 45, 46, 58, 67, 83, 88, 137, 216 presence-at-hand (see Vorhandenheit) presencing (see Wesen / Wesung) presentiment (see Ahnung) pre-Socratics 105–121, 131–135, 141, 156, 201 pro-jectedness (see Entwurf) pronouns 37, 51, 54, 66, 96, 108, 202 propositional statements 3, 76, 102 pseudos 127 psychology 14, 15, 17, 41, 48, 53, 94, 114 questions / questioning (see Fragen) rationality / Ratio 51, 94, 122, 128, 129–130, 131, 183, 187, 190 reader / audience 37, 41, 63, 65–66, 78, 85, 86–87, 98, 108, 110, 172, 174, 176, 178, 109, 144, 197–198, 199–200, 201–203, 206

238 Index readiness-to-hand (see Zuhandenheit) Rede 51, 54 region (see Gegend) religion 3, 17, 99, 100, 122, 123, 128, 129, 134, 166, 168, 171–172, 188, 210–211 (see also Bible and Christianity) repetition / circularity 7, 20, 23, 29, 50, 63, 65, 73, 78, 79–82, 84, 103, 108, 134, 151, 191, 215–216 responding (see Nachsagen) restraint (see Verhaltenheit) Rettende 194–195 revealing (see Entbergung) rhetorical tropes / techniques (in Heidegger’s writing) 7–8, 9, 20, 26, 63, 65, 78, 84, 86, 101, 103, 122, 177, 181, 186, 191, 197–198, 199, 201–203, 207, 215 Rickert, Heinrich 13, 123 rift (see Riß) Riß 101, 154 river (see Fluß) Roman Empire 125, 127 rufen Ryle, Gilbert 3 Sache (see Ding) Sagen 5, 7, 62, 63, 68, 89, 132–133, 134, 138, 139, 141, 153–155, 163–164, 177, 198 same (see Selbe) Sammlung (see Versammlung) saving power (see Rettende) saying (see Sagen) Schauen (see Blicken) Scholasticism 23, 27, 96, 122, 123–124 Scheu 71, 76, 78 Schmerz 165–170 science / scientific mind 14, 15, 17, 48, 69, 94–97, 108, 120, 126–127, 130, 143, 183 Schiller, Friedrich 76

Sein (as an ontology) 1, 5, 9, 11–60, 61–62, 64, 68, 72, 74, 82, 84, 90–91, 97–98, 105–106, 115, 118, 124, 125, 126, 127, 131, 144, 151, 153, 157, 161–162, 167, 185, 192, 193, 194, 200, 205–206, 208, 212, 216, 217 “Sein” (in Heidegger’s linguistic formulations) 29–30 Selbe 179, 203 sentence structures 2, 8, 20–21, 26, 49, 58, 84, 100–101, 103, 117, 151, 174, 177, 179, 181, 186–187, 191, 197, 207, 215–216, 217 (see also grammar and syntax) Seyn 6, 61–72, 73–78, 82, 86–88, 87–93, 97–98, 100–102, 173–176, 193–194 shock (see Erschrecken) showing (see zeigend / sich-zeigend) Sicht / Umsicht (see Blicken) sight (see Sicht) silence 70, 100, 101–102, 178, 180–181 sky (see Himmel) song 69, 154–155, 157–158, 163, 170–171, 174, 198 Sophocles 115 Sorge / besorgen 18–19, 33–34, 36, 39, 41, 42, 45, 47, 48–49 space / the spatial 7, 14, 43, 44, 45, 47–50, 52, 56, 74, 90, 91–92, 107, 115, 117, 119, 126, 135, 136, 137, 139, 148, 150, 154, 168, 208, 210–212, 214 (see also Ort) Sprung 61, 72, 74, 76, 81, 92, 98–99, 174, 203, 207 Staiger, Emil 2 standing reserves (see Bestand) Stimmung 51–53 stylistic register (of Heidegger’s writing) 2, 21, 26, 59, 63, 64, 65, 76, 86–87, 93–94, 100, 107–108, 131, 135, 142, 197, 199–200, 215–216

239

Index subject / object divide (Heidegger’s critique of ) 15, 44, 70, 89, 101, 114, 117, 118, 124–125, 143, 204, 217–218 Subjektivität 47 subjectivity (see Subjektivität) syntax (in Heidegger’s writing) 2, 6, 8, 26, 34, 37, 39, 41, 49, 63, 95, 97, 108, 117, 176, 179, 194 Tacitus 210–211 Tao 205 tautology (in Heidegger’s writing) 2, 92, 200, 206 technē 189, 196 technology / techno-rationality 7, 90, 97, 129, 183–196, 197, 203–206 Tersteegen, Gerhard 100 Thema 34 theme (see Thema) theology 96, 122–123, 124, 128–129, 171 theory (and “philosophy”) 1, 41, 62, 69, 71, 73, 76, 84, 85, 86, 97, 99, 100, 103, 171, 206 There / Here (see Da) They, the (see Man, das) Thing (see Ding) through-thinking (see Er-denken, Durchdenken and performative writing / thought) Tod 29, 46, 53, 57–60, 112, 122, 132, 156, 171, 180–182, 209 tone / voice (in Heidegger’s writing) 8, 26, 49, 58, 66, 68, 99, 100, 103, 108, 174, 176, 181, 183, 198, 202, 214–215 topos / topology 7, 126, 212 (see also Ort) torsion (see Verwindung) Trakl, Georg 141, 164–171 transcendental ego 14–15 translation (issues relating to) 6, 9, 11–12, 107, 110–111, 125–127, 133, 146, 162, 185, 205

truth (see Wahrheit) turning (see Kehre) typography 8, 83, 86–87, 95 Umgang 33, 34, 36, 41 uncanny (see Ungeheuer) unconcealedness (see Unverborgenheit) uncovering (see Entbergung) Ungeheuer 77, 107, 119–121, 166–167 ursprünglich 7, 42, 48, 67, 80, 84, 85, 91, 92, 93, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 109, 110, 125, 126, 130–131, 135, 136, 141, 155, 205 Unter-schied 168–169. Unverborgenheit 106–107, 111–112, 116, 195, 212 Veranlassen 188, 190 Verfallenheit 47, 53–54, 68 Verhaltenheit 71, 77–78 Vers libre 177, 179. Versammlung 9, 192, 213–214 Verschulden 188 Verwinden / Verwindung 193–194, 206 Volk 71 Vorhandenheit / Zuhandenheit 24, 30, 33–39, 41, 43, 46, 48–49, 51, 55, 86, 101 Wahrheit 2, 67, 75, 82–83, 84, 90, 91–92, 98, 99, 100, 105–112, 117, 118, 122, 123, 124–125, 127–129, 132, 133, 162, 174–175, 192–193, 196, 212 Wald 147, 212, 218 Weg 7, 11, 27, 75, 78, 79, 131, 148–153, 155, 179, 217–219 weltend 167, 177–178, 216 Wesen / Wesung / Anwesende 30, 38, 43, 51, 57, 62, 77, 83, 90, 91, 92, 102, 103, 105, 111, 116, 119, 120, 121, 126, 139, 144, 148, 151–153, 155, 157,

240 Index 162, 167, 176, 179, 184, 186, 189, 191, 193–194, 195, 196, 208, 209, 212–216, 219 word (see Wort) Wort 101, 138–139, 141, 157–158, 159–164, 173 wobei 39–40 womit 39–40 worlding (see Weltend) wozu 39–40

zeigend (sich-zeigen)14, 16, 24, 118, 139, 153, 155, 168 Zeug 16, 32–44, 45, 46 “zoon logon echon” (see Animal rationale) Zuhandenheit (see Vorhandenheit / Zuhandenheit) Zukünftigen 71–72, 74, 99–101 Zusage 14 Zuspiel 69, 74, 85

CONTEMPORARY STUDIES IN DESCRIPTIVE LINGUISTICS Edited by PROFESSOR GRAEME DAVIS, School of Humanities, University of Buckingham. KARL A. BERNHARDT, Research Fellow in the Department of English, University of Buckingham, UK, and English Language Consultant with Trinity College, London. This series provides an outlet for academic monographs which offer a recent and original contribution to linguistics and which are within the descriptive tradition. While the monographs demonstrate their debt to contemporary linguistic thought, the series does not impose limitations in terms of methodology or genre, and does not support a particular linguistic school. Rather the series welcomes new and innovative research that contributes to ­furthering the understanding of the description of language. The topics of the monographs are scholarly and represent the cutting edge for their particular fields, but are also accessible to researchers outside the specific disciplines. Contemporary Studies in Descriptive Linguistics is based at the D ­ epartment of English, University of Buckingham. The Literary and Cultural Stylistics subseries aims to explore the intersection of descriptive linguistics with the disciplines of literature and culture. The techniques of stylistic analysis offer a way of approaching texts both literary and non-literary as well as all forms of cultural communication. The subseries offers a home for this research, where literary criticism meets linguistics and where cultural studies meets communication. It welcomes a wide range of data sets and methodologies, with the intention that every book in the subseries makes a new contribution to the disciplines that support them.

Vol. 1 Mark Garner: Language: An Ecological View. 260 pages, 2004. ISBN 3-03910-054-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6295-0 Vol. 2 T. Nyan: Meanings at the Text Level: A Co-Evolutionary Approach. 194 pages, 2004. ISBN 3-03910-250-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7179-8 Vol. 3

Breffni O’Rourke and Lorna Carson (eds): Language Learner Autonomy: Policy, Curriculum, Classroom. 439 pages, 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-980-6

Vol. 4

Dimitra Koutsantoni: Developing Academic Literacies: Understanding Disciplinary Communities’ Culture and Rhetoric. 302 pages, 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-575-5

Vol. 5

Emmanuelle Labeau: Beyond the Aspect Hypothesis: Tense-Aspect Development in Advanced L2 French. 259 pages, 2005. ISBN 3-03910-281-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7208-5

Vol. 6

Maria Stambolieva: Building Up Aspect. A Study of Aspect and Related Categories in Bulgarian, with Parallels in English and French. 243 pages, 2008. ISBN 978-3-03910-558-8

Vol. 7

Stavroula Varella: Language Contact and the Lexicon in the History of Cypriot Greek. 283 pages, 2006. ISBN 3-03910-526-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7531-9

Vol. 8

Alan J. E. Wolf: Subjectivity in a Second Language: Conveying the Expression of Self. 246 pages. 2006. ISBN 3-03910-518-3 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7524-6

Vol. 9

Bettina Braun: Production and Perception of Thematic Contrast in German. 280 pages, 2005. ISBN 3-03910-566-3 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7593-9

Vol. 10 Jean-Paul Kouega: A Dictionary of Cameroon English Usage. 202 pages, 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-027-8

Vol. 11

Sebastian M. Rasinger: Bengali-English in East London. A Study in Urban Multilingualism. 270 pages, 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-036-0

Vol. 12

Emmanuelle Labeau and Florence Myles (eds): The Advanced Learner Variety: The Case of French. 298 pages, 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-072-8

Vol. 13

Miyoko Kobayashi: Hitting the Mark: How Can Text Organisation and Response Format Affect Reading Test Performance? 322 pages, 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-083-4

Vol. 14

Dingfang Shu and Ken Turner (eds): Contrasting Meaning in Languages of the East and West. 634 pages, 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-886-1

Vol. 15

Ana Rojo: Step by Step: A Course in Contrastive Linguistics and Translation. 418 pages, 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-133-6

Vol. 16

Jinan Fedhil Al-Hajaj and Graeme Davis (eds): University of Basrah Studies in English. 304 pages, 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-325-5

Vol. 17

Paolo Coluzzi: Minority Language Planning and Micronationalism in Italy. 348 pages, 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-041-4

Vol. 18

Iwan Wmffre: Breton Orthographies and Dialects: The Twentieth-Century Orthography War in Brittany. Vol 1. 499 pages, 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-364-4

Vol. 19

Iwan Wmffre: Breton Orthographies and Dialects: The Twentieth-Century Orthography War in Brittany. Vol 2. 281 pages, 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-365-1

Vol. 20

Fanny Forsberg: Le langage préfabriqué: Formes, fonctions et fréquences en français parlé L2 et L1. 293 pages, 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-369-9

Vol. 21

Kathy Pitt: Sourcing the Self: Debating the Relations between Language and Consciousness. 220 pages, 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-398-9

Vol. 22 Peiling Xing: Chinese Learners and the Lexis Learning Rainbow. 273 pages, 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-407-8 Vol. 23 Yufang Qian: Discursive Constructions around Terrorism in the People’s Daily (China) and The Sun (UK) Before and After 9.11: A Corpus-based Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis. 284 pages, 2010. ISBN 978-3-0343-0186-2 Vol. 24

Ian Walkinshaw: Learning Politeness: Disagreement in a Second Language. 297 pages, 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-527-3

Vol. 25 Stephen Bax: Researching Intertextual Reading. 371 pages, 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0769-7 Vol. 26

Shahela Hamid: Language Use and Identity: The Sylheti Bangladeshis in Leeds. 225 pages, 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-559-4

Vol. 27

Magdalena Karolak: The Past Tense in Polish and French: A Semantic Approach to Translation. 217 pages, 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0968-4

Vol. 28

Iwan Wmffre: Dynamic Linguistics: Labov, Martinet, Jakobson and Other Precursors of the Dynamic Approach to Language Description. 615 pages, 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-1705-4

Vol. 29 Razaul Karim Faquire: Modality and Its Learner Variety in Japanese. 237 pages, 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0103-9 Vol. 30

Francisca Suau-Jiménez and Barry Pennock-Speck (eds): Interdisciplinarity and Languages: Current Issues in Research, Teaching, Professional Applications and ICT. 234 pages, 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0283-8

Vol. 31

Ahmad Al-Issa and Laila S. Dahan (eds): Global English and Arabic: Issues of Language, Culture, and Identity. 379 pages, 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0293-7

Vol. 32 Xosé Rosales Sequeiros: Linguistic Meaning and Non-Truth-Conditionality. 266 pages, 2012. ISBN 978-3-0343-0705-5 Vol. 33 Yu Hou: A Corpus-Based Study of Nominalization in Translations of Chinese Literary Prose: Three Versions of Dream of the Red Chamber. 230 pages. 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-1815-0 Vol. 34 Christopher Beedham, Warwick Danks and Ether Soselia (eds): Rules and Exceptions: Using Exceptions for Empirical Research in Theoretical Linguistics. 289 pages, 2014. ISBN 978-3-0343-0782-6 Vol. 35

Bettina Beinhoff: Perceiving Identity through Accent: Attitudes towards Non-Native Speakers and their Accents in English. 292 pages, 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0819-9

Vol. 36 Tahir Wood: Elements of Hermeneutic Pragmatics: Agency and Interpretation. 219 pages, 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1883-9

Vol. 37 Stephen Pax Leonard: Some Ethnolinguistic Notes on Polar Eskimo. 292 pages, 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1947-8 Vol. 38

Chiara Semplicini: One Word, Two Genders: Categorization and Agreement in Dutch Double Gender Nouns. 409 pages, 2016. ISBN 978-3-0343-0927-1

Vol. 39 Raffaella Antinucci and Maria Giovanna Petrillo (eds): Navigating Maritime Languages and Narratives: New Perspectives in English and French. 320 pages, 2017. ISBN 978-1-78707-387-6 Vol. 40 Ali Almanna: Semantics for Translation Students: Arabic–English–Arabic. 226 pages, 2016. ISBN 978-1-906165-58-1 Vol. 41 Pablo Kirtchuk: A Unified and Integrative Theory of Language. 262 pages, 2016. ISBN 978-3-0343-2250-8 Vol. 42

Prafulla Basumatary: Verbal Semantics in a Tibeto-Burman Language: The Bodo Verb. 290 pages, 2017. ISBN 978-1-78707-339-5

Vol. 43 Claudio Grimaldi: Discours et terminologie dans la presse scientifique française (1699–1740). 234 pages, 2017. ISBN 978-1-78707-925-0 Vol. 44 Wojciech Wachowski: Towards a Better Understanding of Metonymy. 196 pages, 2019. ISBN 978-1-78874-345-7 Vol. 45 Martin Travers: The Writing of Aletheia. Martin Heidegger: In Language. 254 pages, 2019. ISBN 978-1-78874-671-7