Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living

Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living

Edited by

Vrasidas Karalis

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

 Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living, Edited by Vrasidas Karalis

This book first published 2008 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2008 by Vrasidas Karalis and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-84718-506-1, ISBN (13): 9781847185068

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED TO CATHERINE RUNCIE, THE PRESIDENT
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................... vii

Vrasidas Karalis

1. Heidegger and the Philosophy of Emancipation...................................... 1

Gianni Vattimo

2. Cutting Poets to Size – Heidegger, Hölderlin, Rilke ............................... 8

Anthony Stephens

3. Geography, Biology and Politics: Heidegger on Place and World........ 25

Jeff Malpas

4. Heeding Heidegger’s Way: Questions of the Work of Art.................... 45

Elizabeth M. Grierson

5. The Pitch Black Night of Human Creation: Calling Heidegger’s

Philosophy of Terror to Account ............................................................... 65
Peter Murphy

6. Martin Heidegger and the Philosophy of Negativity ............................. 79

Paolo Bartoloni

7. The Interpretation of Da-sein as a Transformative, Poetic and Ethical

Being ......................................................................................................... 95
Jane Mummery

8. Moods That Matter: Heidegger, Affect and Wallace Stevens’

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”............................................ 112
Peter Williams

9. Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and the Question

of Heideggerian Cinema.......................................................................... 126
Robert Sinnerbrink
viii Table of Contents

10. Reflections on Heidegger’s Saying: “The way what is questioned

essentially engages our questioning belongs to the innermost meaning
of the question of being” ......................................................................... 142
George Vassilacopoulos

11. Art, Truth and Freedom: Contemplating Heidegger’s Categorial

Vision....................................................................................................... 157
Colin Hearfield

12. The Work and the Promise of Technology........................................ 165

John Dalton

13. The An-Denken of Existentialism: Vattimo’s Heidegger

and the Aesthetics of Living.................................................................... 189
Ashley Woodward

14. Martin Heidegger and the Aletheia of his Greeks.............................. 208

Vrasidas Karalis

Contributors............................................................................................. 228

Index of Names........................................................................................ 232

 INTRODUCTION

VRASIDAS KARALIS

In December 2005 the Sydney Society for Literature and Aesthetics

organised the first ever international conference in Australia on Martin
Heidegger. The present volume contains a selection of the papers given in
revised form. They address a wide range of issues without aiming to be
exhaustive. What connects them is the unifying theme of the consequences
of Heidegger’s mode of philosophizing for the way we understand
philosophy today.
Most of the contributions avoid the well-known controversies on his
political involvement with Nazism, and offer a critical but ‘post-
politicized’ interpretation of his work. Indeed, the issue with Heidegger
today is not primarily to discuss his personal involvement with the
political ideologies of his era. In general, the papers address the issue of
what is “livable” within Heidegger’s work and what constitutes the
aesthetics that emanate from his work as a new breathing space for
philosophical inquiry. One might claim that, after his connection with one
of the most brutal regimes in the history of humanity, what is “livable” in
his work is of extreme importance for the understanding of his past impact
and his continuing influence. Indeed the main problem his philosophy has
at the beginning of the 21st century is that it suffers from an excess of
uncritical exegesis, especially in the English-speaking world. Because of
approaches which verge on the hagiographical it might be said that
Heidegger is everywhere except in his own philosophy, since his own way
of philosophizing has been idolised and fetishised, losing its radical
character in the process.
The scope of this volume is thus to present a general overview of the
consequences of Heidegger’s philosophy for various disciplines, notably
cultural studies, literary interpretation, aesthetic discourse, ethics,
theatrical performance, film studies, philosophy and, more precisely, the
history of philosophy. The need for such a detached and dispassionate
assessment of his work is evident today after the intense debates of the 80s
and 90s about his political involvement, which tended to obscure the
intricacies of his work and to create instead the mutually contradictory
x Introduction

myths of an ‘evil philosopher’ – or else of a cult-figure in the mould of the

Gnostic Demiurge or even a philosophical super star.
The collection represents a moderate and cautious de-mythologisation
of Heidegger’s hermeneutics – not based on the notoriety of the man but
on the complex nature of his work. Its main purpose is to elucidate its
complexities and insights and present their significance for thinking today
in various fields and disciplines. Certainly, it is a conscious departure from
the aim of such volumes as The Heidegger Case (eds. Tom Rockmore and
Joseph Margolis), Heidegger toward the Turn (ed. James Risser),
Heidegger and the Greeks (D.A. Hyland & J.P. Manoussakis) and A
Companion to Heidegger (H. L. Dreyfus & M. A. Wrathall) that aspire to
addressing aspects of his philosophy in an exhaustive and systematic way.
In our perception individual contributions should engage in a creative
dialogue with specific texts, aspects and problems discussed or delineated
in Heidegger’s own work with the conscious intention of avoiding the
trend to enforce harmonies on it, but rather of detecting the creative
ruptures his philosophy contains.
With this in mind, the essays in the volume are extremely diverse in
their approach, addressing Heidegger’s work from various disciplinary
standpoints. Some of the articles are written by scholars who have
published extensively on 20th century philosophy in other languages
(German, Greek, and Italian) and analyse the relation of Heidegger’s
philosophy to these specific traditions without the mediation of
translations – although the authors have provided them for this volume.
Their freedom from dependence on the standard English versions helps
shed new light on Heidegger’s own interpretation of various texts and
directs the reader towards a fresh approach to his sources.
As mentioned above, the book is focused on a conscious effort to de-
politicize Heidegger’s hermeneutics and promote a nuanced appreciation
of the structure of his philosophy. The structure of his thinking is so multi-
layered that contradictory readings may lay claim to equal validity. Yet
one must try to identify the dominant structures and trans-textual
configurations that give his thinking cohesion and continuity. The early
Christian Heidegger appears in direct conflict with the idea of ‘Dasein’s
thrownness’ for example, although one might claim that Heidegger’s
thinking is in many ways a translation of Christian concepts into the realm
of secular apocalyptics. Yet the translation itself changes the meaning of
what is translated: the semantic fields that surround specific terms develop
unexpected connections with apparently unrelated ones, so that in the new
text that results, the same terms indicate completely incongruous realities.
The same can be claimed about his ideas of ‘inauthenticity’, ‘fallenness’,
 Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living xi

‘anxiety’, ‘dying’, ‘death’ and ‘nothingness’ which, despite their religious

origins, acquire new meanings and implications within his philosophical
discourse.
This may be identified as the creative element in Heidegger’s thinking.
That he proceeded with a trans-signification of language was made
necessary by historical circumstances, a process that must be seen as both
innovative and inevitable. Such a trans-signification had already taken
place in the theological discourse of Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans
(2nd edition 1922), while in Anglo-American philosophy A.N.
Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929) had established the need for a
new form in philosophical thinking. Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927)
seems to complete the triptych of works that changed the idioms and
scopes of philosophising during that crucial decade.
This book tries to restore the balance between Heidegger’s philosophy
and the elements of National Socialism he temporarily annexed for
purposes of his own that were not part and parcel of his short-lived and
abortive political affiliation. Hence it addresses ‘intrinsic’ problems of his
philosophy, such as the essence of the work of art (Elizabeth M. Grierson),
ethics (Jane Mummery), his dialogue with great poets (Anthony Stephens,
Peter Williams, Colin Hearfield), the problem of temporality (Peter
Murphy), spatiality (Jeff Malpas), the question of historicity (Ashley
Woodward), technology (John Dalton) and culture (George
Vassilacopoulos) as well as his relation with contemporary visual artists
(Robert Sinnerbrink), philosophers (Paolo Bartoloni), as well as the
question of aletheia (Vrasidas Karalis). The book challenges Heideggerian
studies, as they have developed in English-speaking countries in the last
thirty years, by re-grounding his work in the contextual realities of his era
and by applying to it new frames of reference. Furthermore, in an era of
post-modern semantic nihilism, which was to a certain extent Heidegger’s
own creation, it proposes a humanistic re-reading of his philosophy.
The main argument implicit in most contributions pursues the line that,
despite his renunciation of European humanism, Heidegger was himself,
in reality, one of its most important proponents in the 20th century, with
all the contradictions and the antinomies that follow from this and which
are essential to this philosophical tradition. We cannot see humanism as
simply identified with technologisation, Cartesian rationalism, modern
positivism or analytic philosophy. Humanism is a more fundamental
ground of thinking and being; humanism is not about the autonomy of
reason and the dominance of logic but about the reasons of and for human
autonomy. Humanism is about the lived experience of the human as it
wrestles to reconcile itself to its own autonomy. Heidegger’s philosophical
xii Introduction

development has to be seen as addressing this extremely important

question and the forms of thinking that proceed from it, even if his
ontological foundationalism seems to negate any such autonomy and any
justification for it.
The presence of Heidegger’s philosophy, and indeed the mythifying of
his personality, have already become part of the canon of intellectual life
in the 20th century. Despite his philosophical idiom, or perhaps because of
it, Heidegger seems first of all to have played a therapeutic role within the
context of that Anglo-American philosophy, which was strongly
dominated by the traditions of analytic and empiricist thinking. Within the
context of Continental philosophy also, it seems that his work and
personality were of critical importance for the establishment of new
movements, for the re-interpretation of western thinking from the pre-
Socratics to his day. His creative interaction, albeit in negative terms with
such major thinkers as Karl Popper or Gianni Vattimo, is discussed in two
contributions in this volume.
Heidegger’s personal quest can be clearly seen in his philosophical
‘turns’ and ‘counter-turns’ until the end of his life, as we may observe in
his biography by Rudiger Safransky. What one cannot see there is the
presence of certain changes of mind during the fateful decade of the 30s in
his life. ‘Turn’ does not seem to mean ‘metanoia’ in his thinking, a
specific Greek and Christian notion totally absent from his mental
universe.
By totally rejecting his contribution, as George Steiner has done, is like
trying to forget his historical influence, which has been obvious and
indisputable, even if one wants to avoid it. Philosophically, Heidegger is
an antidote to the scholasticism and the hair-splitting frenzy of the analytic
tradition. After its introduction into Anglo-American academia, his work
has inspired new problematics, new forms of articulating experience, and
new pathways of interpreting the immediacy of being in history. His
philosophical presence has indeed been of historic consequence and has
re-shaped the ways philosophers address issues anew against the
background of a moribund and sterile analytic tradition. Yet, by being so
influential, his work has obscured the whole philosophical tradition that
Heidegger was interpreting and continuing. The truth is that his overall
philosophy from his early period to the last is a mixture of genuine
problems and far-reaching insights with suggestions of a symptomatic and
circumstantial nature, dependent on the historical context around them and
on the ways that Heidegger himself was able or unable to communicate
with it.
 Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living xiii

Amongst others, two issues stand out as extremely contentious and

have to be discussed elsewhere in detail: first, his concept of the
concealment of being after Plato, and second his post-war anti-humanism.
Despite its Promethean aura, the first is ultimately a somewhat schematic
interpretation of western European philosophy which ignores or
deliberately quashes the contribution of great thinkers after the classical
period of Athens. It is erroneous to suggest that the Stoics, the Epicureans,
the Skeptics, Plotinus, the Christian fathers of the fourth century, the
Christian philosophers of the pre-modern period, the Hebrew prophets, the
Jewish thinkers of the Diaspora, or the Arab Aristotelians had concealed
the history of being as presencing and originary experience. It is rather
simplistic to suggest that Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant
could not see being in its pure emergence and presence. The idea that
being exists beyond its manifestations is pre-eminently anti-Heideggerian,
as we find his thinking in Being and Time. The impurities of being, its
very facticity, its ‘readiness-to-hand’ create the possibility of the
conceptual and experiential recuperation of the originary experience of
being. By discarding them as inauthentic or even nihilistic, the unity of
their being as real presence is rendered impossible. It is the specificity of
real beings, the actualisation of their nature, the antinomic consequences
of their relations that make Being the ultimate essence of their reality.
Such disregard for history is indeed anti-philosophical and transforms
philosophy into geometric shapes that substitute abstractions for beings.
One might indeed claim that, despite his professed love for the pre-
Socratics, especially Parmenides, Heraclitus and Anaximander, Heidegger
is closer to the Pythagorean vision of elemental harmonies and the
‘acoustic’ nature of beings. The pre-Socratics thrived on the material
gravity of beings; even Parmenides’ Being is dense, thick and substantial,
in a way that has some affinity to the mythical version of Einstein’s
finite/infinite, curved and yet massive space. What was inexplicable to
them was not the way beings are, but how they change (how they were and
were-not at the same time) and what remains in them from their interaction
with others. Hence the interesting thing about the first Greek philosophers
is how they succeeded in escaping from the ritualised and hierophantic
natural theology of oriental civilizations and addressed issues of change,
identity and transformation in terms of their cognition and knowability.
The correlation between what has changed and the mind that understood it
was probably the most dynamic element introduced by them into the
process which created and established European philosophy.
It is simplistic to suggest that humanism may be equated with
technology which, according to Heidegger, is negative and disastrous, as if
xiv Introduction

technology as such were not the creative externalization of human capacity

to create material forms. For example, art and language are also forms of
mental technology, and the machine itself stands for an expansion of
physical capacities. Fire, writing and clothing are similar forms of mental
technologies which, according to Heidegger’s own belief, ‘gather’ together
people and offer ‘home’ and ‘housing’ to their being.
Some of Heidegger’s own ideas simply do not attain the level of his
overall philosophical orientation and remain lost in a no man’s land of
half-truths. Indeed, Heidegger has to be seen within the context of his own
Germanic tradition and most of his work to placed within the framework
of a conscious attempt to criticize and refute what might be called “the
metaphysics of anti-presence” that was dominant in Germany during the
Weimar Republic and earlier. Against the search for invisible entities,
structures, drives and atoms, hidden within things, the mind and
experience or within human semantic networks of communication,
Heidegger tried to bring to the fore the actuality of the mind, the thing as
is-ness, experience and meaning as they appear without frameworks of
appropriation or enclosed by utilitarian ethics. He abolished the Platonic
and Neoplatonic distinction between inner and outer and, by abolishing it,
he succeeded in introducing new forms of articulating the content of
experience and expanded the representational potential of their existence.
His concept of ‘Dasein’, being-ness in his later writings, which may
well stand for the totalising gaze connecting the complexity and
multiplicity of beings within the conditions of their mortality and
humanity, also has ambiguous consequences. Multiplicity has always been
a tantalising problem for German thought after Hegel. Heidegger seems to
have tried to overcome the confusion caused by the ‘un-intelligibility’ of
beings in their plural manifestations together with the intentionality in the
universe of human artifacts. His critique of modernity shows a strange
reluctance to come to terms with the non-ordinary, the un-predicted and
the novel. Thus the philosopher who purported to dissect ordinary,
everyday existence, was completely immersed in the fear of its opposite.
In that respect, his technophobia might be seen as a sentimental reaction to
the background of Nazism and post-war German reconstruction, eras
dominated by mechanized forms of social engineering. Also, Heidegger
the thinker had technologised himself at the moment he published his
books and irrevocably so when he put on the Nazi uniform, or indeed the
gown of the university professor. The technological is another being-with,
especially in complex and stratified societies. The very complexity of
societal forms invents new hearths for Mitsein, new points of convergence
 Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living xv

and intersubjectivity. The eyes meet on the television set and the new
divinities of history emerge from their osmosis.
Hence, his critique of the modern always misses the point of what
precisely makes modernity another form of being-ness and not a condition
of being that has meaning solely by contrast to older, mainly Greek,
conceptions, practices and experiences. In a sense, Cornelius Castoriadis’
suggestion that the task of philosophy is to enhance human autonomy
against the pervasive heteronomy imposed by societal structures and
human creativity is itself a Heideggerian idea never envisaged by
Heidegger. Yet in order to understand the implications of such a
suggestion one must consider the importance of the human subject itself as
existing, and hence must have reflected on the anthropic as a principle of
being-ness. There are thus many philosophical ‘elements’ missing from
Heidegger’s thought. His early rejection of psychology shows a profound
misprision of the nature of language as collective creation and its function
within semantic fields of cultural and trans-cultural validity. Indeed, one
could argue that despite its international eminence, Heidegger’s
philosophy is equally important for what it omits, passes over in silence
and conceals and that, in a sense, his own critique of modernity, rationality
and humanism is also a critique of his own philosophical enterprise. The
most important task of a new approach to his works is to see what is not
and cannot be reduced to the individual and what can become a cultural
hypothesis of wider validity. Heidegger’s work already suffers from an
ever-growing industry of commentaries which, instead of elucidating the
presuppositions and the consequences of his work, concoct an obscure
mythology around his name and about his philosophy. The only fair way
to assess his work is to see it within its limitations and explain what
transcends them and what can be conducive to different forms of thinking
by expanding the limitations of their semantic structures.
As with every philosopher we must try to focus on the consequences of
their questions and not the accuracy of their answers. Furthermore we
must try to understand the interplay of meanings that made such questions
possible and thereby to locate their explanatory value, indeed – one might
say: their anthropic value. For, even within his critique of humanism,
Heidegger’s thinking can be extremely humanistic in its implications and
highly provocative in regard to its anthropological underpinnings. Indeed,
one could claim that anthropological reflection was impossible within his
thinking because he never addressed the question of the tragic as a
dimension of self-understanding and self-articulation. Historically it is
interesting that even the collapse of Germany, or the Holocaust, or the
destruction of Europe were never understood by Heidegger as tragic
xvi Introduction

events or inauthentications of being. The mythologisation of war, as found

in his admiration for Ernst Jünger, did not lead to the investigation of the
ethical significance of war, or the moral meaning latent in acts of war. The
most momentous event in his life time seems to have had no impact on his
own thinking, except by leading him to withdraw into a pre-historic view
of the forces that instigate destructive drives within history. One could
claim that the fourfold constellation of earth, sky, mortals and divinities
that appears in the end of his philosophical project is a very
anthropomorphic escape from the impasse that he himself had created by
the absence of tragedy from his philosophy of thinking and dwelling.
Humans and especially poets abide by the tragic predicament of being:
tragedy is the most immediate way through which humans experience
their existence and give meaning to their presence out there. The
overcoming of tragedy is by all means the task of the philosopher, as it
was so well understood by all thinkers from Socrates onwards.
It is therefore anomalous that Heidegger never indicated that there can
be no ‘historicity’, ‘temporality’ and ‘being’ without tragedy in their self-
articulation. His primordial experience of ‘Seyn’ sounds more like the
experience of nature by animals before the emergence of humans than as
lived by humans who give speech to Being. We cannot see the real
without its history in exactly the same way that we cannot use language
without remembering its past. ‘Dasein’ throws its ‘pale cast of thought’ on
itself and hence can perceive its being-ness: through such punctures
humans make Being authentic. Heidegger’s critique of humanism, or
indeed of metaphysics, tends to underestimate the fact that humans act, or
exist, not simply in order to know but in order to be known as well, and in
order to create meaningful forms of communication and forms of self-
understanding. His rejection of western metaphysics throws into oblivion
the very fact that there can be nothing more metaphysical than a critique of
metaphysics. Even the idea that we can have ontology without the human
in its plurality is tantamount to spiritual solipsism, substituting for the
creative principle of godhead the pure and authentic vision of the
philosopher, while expressing at the same time the detachment of the
divine gaze before the emergence of life. Indeed one could claim that
Heidegger’s ‘Being’ reflects the untroubled stillness and unity of life
before the appearance of humans and the choices they had to make. It is
the ‘pale cast of thought’ that makes us ‘custodians’ of ‘Being’ and not
simply ‘users’ of things. Through thinking we dwell in history. The
opposite is not a mystical vision of the real, as has been claimed by certain
serious students of his work; it is rather the abolition of the human as
presence and self-reflexivity.
 Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living xvii

Thus one could claim that the lack of an elaborated anthropological

vision made Heidegger’s philosophy after the ‘turning’ philosophically
anti-Hellenic. The quest for ethics and moral distinctions that have
bedeviled the students of his work must be incorporated within a quest for
a complete anthropology delineated by his works, an anthropology that
would look at Being in its anthropic re-creation of the silence of nature
and the absence of god. Only then will the ethical consequences of the
“livable” part of his philosophy become apparent and Heidegger’s
philosophy regain the moral authority to reveal the essence of being.
Heidegger’s philosophy is arguably the most daring hypothesis about the
human condition in recent centuries; yet his answers somehow do not do
justice to the questions he poses and show the unredeemed debt that he
himself owed to his society, class and personality. Yet the hypothesis
remains valid and still spurs thinking on; indeed it makes philosophical
thinking immerse itself into the ‘thick questions’ of the mind and helps
reformulate important aspects of the European tradition. Indeed,
Heidegger’s thought has stimulated great Japanese thinkers like Keiji
Nishitani, Nishida Kitaro and Masao Abe and has contributed to the re-
interpretation of Dogen and to a degree of Nagarjuna himself. Thus it
builds bridges for inter-cultural communication that express a new
understanding of the anthropic in history. The cross-pollination of his
philosophy leads to a new anthropological vision of being in history and
time above and beyond the cultural limits of the philosopher’s origins. For
to philosophise does not simply mean to ask “why there are beings rather
than nothing?” but “why beings that are experience nothing?”. Then Being
ceases to be mute and becomes the true being of the human presence.
These essays address Heidegger’s contested contributions to a wide
range of issues and especially the question of his legacy, enquiring how
such an important philosophical statement may transcend its own
limitations and refract many problems of thought in unexpected directions.
 HEIDEGGER AND THE PHILOSOPHY
OF EMANCIPATION1

GIANNI VATTIMO

It is probably useful, when we talk about the role of philosophy in late-

modern and post-modern societies, to underline the analogies that exist
between writing such as The Open Society and its Enemies by Karl Popper
and the ideas that Heidegger discussed in many of his works, especially in
a lecture concerning The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thought
(1964). This is obviously a paradoxical approach, especially because
Heidegger does not exactly seem a “democratic” thinker. But the reasons
that push Popper to line up against Plato are basically the same that move
Heidegger in his polemic against metaphysics, and, as he writes –
significantly – in the opening statement of that lecture, it is always
Platonism, extending from ancient times up to Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche,
that is opposed. In fact, if, instead of Popper’s expression “open society”,
we write the Heideggerian term Ereignis, “event”, we do not betray either
the intentions of Popper or those of Heidegger, even if both would not
have been happy about this small hermeneutical “act of violence”. Popper
maintains that Plato was a dangerous enemy of the open society because
he had an essentialist concept of the world: all that is real corresponds to a
law that is given as a structure of being, and society too must simply
conform to this essential order.
As the philosopher is the one who knows the essential order of things,
it is to him that the duty of having command over society will be given.
The function that philosophers – and today scientists, technicians, experts
– have claimed for themselves during the centuries, that of the preeminent
advisors of princes, is closely linked to this basic conviction: that
individuals and societies should always correspond to an order objectively
given, and therefore valid as the sole possible moral code. A modern
principle such as that one that says “auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem” –

1
An earlier version of this article appeared in the journal Micromega under the
title “Heidegger filosofo della democrazia”, vol. 5, 2003.
2 Heidegger and the Philosophy of Emancipation

not truth but authority makes the law – has always been subject to
rationalist criticism inspired by metaphysics, even when this was
motivated by the best revolutionary intentions.
Everywhere we are faced with “truth” in politics, the danger of
authoritarianism begins, precisely that “closure” that Popper stigmatizes in
his work. Now, what Heidegger calls “metaphysics” is exactly the idea
that being is an order - objectively given once and for all. This is also the
substance of Nietzsche’s criticism of Socrates, when he sees in him the
inceptor of modern decadence, guilty of having killed the great tragic spirit
of the ancients. If being is a stable structure given once and for all, there is
no possible openness in history nor any freedom.
Obviously, such a vision is much more reassuring than the tragic one
which – so we assume – characterized the pre-Classical Greeks; but any
such reassurance, we suggest, is particularly meaningful for those who are
already secure in the prevailing order, and who, for this reason above all,
recognise it as rational and worthy of remaining valid forever. (Here, I
call your attention not only to Nietzsche but also to Benjamin’s theses on
the philosophy of history.) I remind you that, in the first pages of the
lecture on the end of philosophy I mentioned previously, Heidegger cites,
in immediate proximity to the name of Plato, that of Karl Marx, as one
who has – well before Nietzsche – already overturned metaphysics and
thus also Platonism.
By pointing this out, I do not want to say that it is possible to bridge
the gap between the Marxist overturning and that “overcoming”
(Überwindung), for which Heidegger tries to prepare the way by his work.
But it is not entirely arbitrary, in our view, to recall Marxist ideas on the
origin of alienation in the social division of work when we try to
understand – with Heidegger – why and how metaphysics has established
itself in such a radical way in the history of our world. Here I leave aside
the debate on the “historical” or “eternal” nature of metaphysics in the
thought of Heidegger, which would probably lead us to invoke his
dependence on the biblical myth of Original Sin, a myth he could never
completely get rid of.
Although the notion of metaphysics is meant by Heidegger in a rather
peculiar way, I think that the analogy with Popper – even if it is
paradoxical – could clarify the sense in which it is also shared by much
contemporary philosophy; obviously, it should not be difficult to
recognize it in Wittgenstein (“Die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist.”
“The world is everything that is the case”: Tractacus, 1), and, of course,
in the context of pragmatism and neopragmatism. I know some
philosophers are still talking about metaphysics in a way that is concordant
 Gianni Vattimo 3

– as far as terminology is concerned – with both the continuance of

classical thought and of the Neoscholastic tradition. Furthermore, it
pervades that peculiar Neoscholastic school that is analytical philosophy –
in which metaphysics is identified with a set of rigid “regional
ontologies”, i.e. the formal structures, or conditions, of knowledge,
deprived of that elasticity and historicity still recognizable in the
transcendental concepts of Kant and also of Husserl. But it is quite clear
that, at least in a great deal of contemporary philosophy, metaphysics in
its Heideggerian sense, as the identification of true being with a stable
structure, objectively recognizable and the source of rules, is largely
rejected, even without any explicit reference to Heidegger himself.
It is exactly on the basis of the rejection of metaphysics understood in
that way – a rejection that may be motivated either with Nietzschean or
with Heideggerian reasons, or with Wittgensteinian ones, or with the
arguments of Carnap or Popper – that I propose to start talking about the
problem of the end of philosophy in the era of democracy. Or, to phrase it
more clearly: going beyond both Heidegger and Popper, we could simply
identify the end of metaphysics with the affirmation, practical and
political, of democratic regimes.
Wherever we find democracy, it is not possible to find a class of
holders of the real “truth” who either exert directly the power of Plato’s
philosopher-kings or give the sovereign the rules for his behaviour. That is
why – I repeat – I think that it is appropriate to recall Marx when we read
the pages I quoted before from Heidegger’s lecture. In those pages, the
discourse concerns the end of philosophy as a consequence of the
dissolution it undergoes in the specializing of particular sciences, from
psychology to sociology, anthropology, logic, logistics and semantics,
right up, to cybernetics (today’s computer science). It’s easy to understand
that this is in no sense an abstract theme: those among us who teach
philosophy in schools and universities can experience this progressive
dissolution of philosophy every day.
In the universities, where new courses of psychology, anthropology
and computer science are set up, the enrolment in philosophy courses
decreases rapidly. Funds at the disposal of philosophical studies are
reduced as well. Ultimately, all this is very reasonable, but unpleasant for
many of us and especially for our students. Anyway, the phenomenon
appears to be one aspect of the end of philosophy that has nothing to do
with democracy, being a simple concomitant of the increased autonomy of
the human sciences. But, as Heidegger also says, it corresponds to a
growing social power and prestige of specialists, which means a much
4 Heidegger and the Philosophy of Emancipation

greater “scientific” – and less democratic – control on the various aspects

of communal life.
In view of all this, it is understandable that the end of philosophy
leaves an open gap that democratic societies must take into consideration.
On the one hand, philosophy, intended as the sovereign function of the
wise ones in the government of the polis, is dead. On the other hand – as
is suggested by the title of Heidegger’s lecture, which speaks of a “task of
thought” after the end of philosophy – the problem, a specifically
democratic problem, remains: that the authority of the philosopher-king
should by no means be usurped by the uncontrolled power of the many
technicians in the different sectors of social life. This latter is a much more
dangerous power, because it is more deceitful and fragmented – so much
so, that the revolutionary purpose of “striking the heart of the state”
becomes totally unrealistic, as the power is distributed into so many
centres. If we wanted to use a psychiatric metaphor, we might say that,
with philosophy reaching its end in the specialized sciences, our world
runs the risk of becoming a schizophrenic society, where sooner or later a
new supreme power will arise. It will be a requisite of making collective
life possible at all, even at the cost of freedom.
We should then change the title of Heidegger’s lecture into: The End of
Philosophy in Democratic Societies and the (Political) Task of Thought.
The sovereign role of the philosopher is finished, because sovereigns are
finished. It is not easy to say if these “ends” are linked by a cause–effect
relation. Like Marx, Heidegger would say that the end of metaphysics and,
consequently, the end of the claims of philosophy to sovereignty, did not
happen just because of the philosophers. In his view, all this is an event
of being to which the philosopher has to “correspond”. But here his
difference from Marx looks rather slight: where does that being speak to
which the philosopher must answer? Not in the economic-materialistic
“structure” of society, as Marx would say; or – in any event – not just
there. But Heidegger’s call to not be satisfied with the “daily presentation
of what is present as Vorhandenes” (die vorhandene Gegenwärtigung des
Anwesenden; in Zur Sache des Denkens, Niemeyer, 1969: 79; also 179)
recalls in a significant way the Marxian critique of ideology, that “school
of suspicion” which is expressed, for example, in Brecht’s slogan – “what
always happens, do not find it normal”.
Moreover, the possibility I am developing here, namely to propose
interpretations which see an analogy between Heidegger’s rejection of
metaphysics and Popper’s defence of the open society, and which until
twenty years ago would have appeared absolutely scandalous – even this
possibility does not represent a “theoretical” discovery. To the extent it is
 Gianni Vattimo 5

arguable, it simply accords with the new conditions of our time. Compared
with the epoch in which Heidegger and Popper wrote their works, the
world of today is much more strongly “rationalized” and “scientifically
organized”. The phenomenon of the end of philosophy and the
schizophrenia of the specialized sciences and technologies, with the
possible consequence of a new authoritarianism – I am thinking of Bush’s
America, of course, but not exclusively – is infinitely more visible and
pervasive.
When I propose the thesis of the relatively paradoxical nearness of
Heidegger to Popper, I am not claiming that this is the definitive truth, I
am just trying to offer an interpretation that corresponds with present
events, to the concrete situation in which I think we live.
Following Heidegger and Marx, maybe not Popper as well (although I
could argue this case for him also), the task of thought in this situation is
to think what remains hidden in the “everyday presentation” of what
usually happens. For Marx what matters is the dialectic concreteness of
the interrelations which are concealed by the false consciousness of
ideology; for Heidegger, the truth as alétheia, the basic openness of a
horizon – (we might speak of a paradigm) – which makes possible all truth
meant as correspondence to the state of affairs, be it a verification or a
falsification of propositions. As I said, it is not immediately clear that this
effort to think what remains hidden in the everyday presentation of the
world also corresponds to Popper’s idea of the task of philosophy; I don’t
want to pursue this problem further here.
As far as Heidegger and Marx are concerned, the question is: may we
talk of the hidden alétheia which Heidegger has in mind as if it were
identifiable with the concreteness of the economic and social interrelations
of Marx’s materialism? In other words: how shall we imagine the task of
thought in the epoch in which philosophers no longer (believe that they)
have a privileged access to an eternal truth, on the basis of which they
would be entitled to govern society or to be the advisors of the sovereign?
If we followed Marx exclusively, we would return to a metaphysical and
rationalistic historicism, in which the task of the philosophers would be to
express the definitive truth of history – something known clearly only by
the proletariat, which also makes it real in the form of revolution. If, on the
contrary, we had to follow exclusively Heidegger, we would find
ourselves entangled in that “groundless mysticism, bad mythology,
dangerous irrationalism” (grundlose Mystik, schlechte Mythologie,
verderblicher Irrationalismus: Zur Sache des Denkens, ibid.) which he
sees as a risk related to his theory.
6 Heidegger and the Philosophy of Emancipation

In order to avoid these risks, which are not only Heidegger’s, but those of
several contemporary philosophies as well – certainly of those which are
unwilling to become merely harmless complements of the specialized
human sciences – one has to step forward on the path of the “urbanization
of the Heideggerian province” (I call your attention here to Habermas’
famous definition of Gadamer’s hermeneutics). This means, for me, to go
back to a undeveloped passage of Heidegger’s lecture on “The Origin of
the Work of Art” (1936).
On a page of that essay, Heidegger – as you know – defined the work
of art as the “putting into work of the truth”, in other words as the place in
which the event of being happens, opening up an epoch, etc. From that
moment on, Heidegger developed his “ontology” mainly, if not
exclusively, on the basis of this idea of the event: he tried again and again
to catch the event of being by listening to the inaugural words of poetry, of
the ancient wisdom (for example: Der Spruch des Anaximander), etc. But
in the essay of 1936 he also named, without further explanations, other
ways of the opening of truth, i.e. of the event of being. Among them, also
“the foundation of a state”, or politics. It is very likely that an additional
reason he did not develop his meditation on this point was his unhappy
adventure with Nazism. For me, it is nevertheless important to recall this
allusion to politics as a possible place for the event of being, because what
I want to suggest is that, in the epoch of democracy, the inaugural event of
being might no longer be the work of art, but, in some sense, the political
agorà.
It was in the epoch of metaphysics that the event of being happened in
those privileged moments which were the great works of art; not forgetting
that the great works of art have always had something to do with the
power of the sovereigns (painting, architecture, theatre, music; even
poetry, in many senses). In those privileged expressions, being speaks still
in the form of an “essential” truth which still entitles, or claims to entitle,
the philosopher to sovereignty.
My provisional conclusion would then be that, if we want to
“correspond” to the event of being in our specific historical situation, we
should try to discern its voice in something which has much more to do
with politics than with art, or with any kind of profound invisible
announcement. I have ventured the proposal that we describe this kind of
thought with a term of the late Foucault, “ontologie de l’actualité”,
ontology of the immediate present, as it were. The event of being to which
thought is challenged to correspond in the epoch of democracy is the way
in which being gives itself, from time to time, in collective experience.
What is hidden and tends to remain un-thought in the specialization of the
 Gianni Vattimo 7

sciences is the “on he on”, being as being, the wholeness of the individual
and social experience. This wholeness is to be liberated from
technological schizophrenia and not to be allowed to relapse into
authoritarian social discipline. If one still speaks here of ontology,
entrusting once more the task to the philosophers – no longer as
sovereigns or as advisors of the sovereign – it means that one has to
imagine a new and still undefined social role of the “intellectual”, closer to
that of the artist and of the priest than to those of the scientist and of the
technologist. At any rate, it should be a priest without a hierarchical
church, or else a street artist. In a less picturesque way, we might describe
this role as that of a historian and a politician – somebody who does
ontology insofar as he helps in connecting current experience with those of
the past and with those of other cultures and societies, building and
rebuilding a continuity which is the very meaning of the term logos, dis-
course. (I think again of the idea of the philosopher as a Dolmetscher, a
“translator”, proposed by Habermas). Does all this have anything to do
with “being”, one might ask. But: is being anything different, more
profound and hidden, than this, its “event”?
 CUTTING POETS TO SIZE –
HEIDEGGER, HÖLDERLIN, RILKE

ANTHONY STEPHENS

From the outset I must make it clear that I am writing here not as a
philosopher, but as a scholar of German literature. This implies that all the
texts I treat will be seen as having literary status, regardless of any other
claims implicit in them or claims made for them. This impinges on
Heidegger’s tendency to accord a special privilege to certain poetic texts,
especially the late poems of Hölderlin. Few scholars writing in English on
Heidegger show any awareness that Hölderlin’s late poetry did not
become accessible to the general reader until the publication of the fourth
volume of Norbert von Hellingrath’s edition in 1916 and that Heidegger
was making a radical departure from the customary reading of Hölderlin’s
late work by taking a hagiographical approach to precisely this phase of
his creativity. He has given this a theoretical basis in numerous places,
notably in the essay Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks (The Origin of the
Work of Art) of 1935-1936. From a literary perspective, however, this
often results in his lifting segments of text from their origins, in effect:
decontextualising them. A great deal of writing on Heidegger in English
simply accepts this practice without enquiring into what implications this
change of status may have. It has resulted in the reception of Hölderlin by
Heidegger and Heideggerians constituting a separate preserve, isolated
from the mainstream of scholarship on the poet both in Germany and
elsewhere. My intention in the following is to restore something of the
literary perspective. For the sake of consistency and accuracy, all
translations into English in this essay are my own. References to
Heidegger and other authors are to texts in the original language.
Taking this approach means suspending the special privilege
Heidegger accords to certain poems. Hence all such texts as may be seen
as having a claim to other than fictional status, including philosophical
writing, will be discussed as fictions. To cite one example of this
approach, Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative contains a chapter
called “Sacred History and the Beginnings of Prose Fiction” in which
 Anthony Stephens 9

texts, which many regard as non-fiction, are analysed precisely as fiction

(Alter, 1981: 23-47). This approach also means that no one fictional genre
will be privileged above others. Historically, there have been attempts to
regard, say, poetry or tragic drama as qualitatively superior literary
expressions to novels or comedies, but the outcome of much theorising has
been that it is a matter of how such texts are received, rather than of how
they are constituted.
If one comes to the authors Hölderlin and Rilke from the background
of German culture and scholarship, then they tend to appear quite
differently from their guise in contexts where Heidegger discusses them.
The window onto Hölderlin’s work opened by Heidegger’s texts is a very
narrow one. Hölderlin was publishing poems from 1791 onwards, and also
wrote a novel Hyperion oder der Eremit in Griechenland (Hyperion or
The Hermit in Greece), but Heidegger cites very little from before 1800.
After 1806, mental illness prevented Hölderlin from continuing to write at
all in his late hymnic mode, and 1803 is usually accepted as the date of the
last hymn he was able to complete, Mnemosyne. To read what are termed
the “hymnic fragments”, the often rambling drafts of late poems Hölderlin
could not finish, is a very moving experience, since occasional jewels of
vivid imagery or coherent statement are found among the incomplete
sentences, disordered syntax, large gaps in the text and other signs of
mental breakdown.
Heidegger is not averse to lifting such “jewels”, such terse, obscure
statements from their quite disunified contexts without revealing their
origin. In like manner, he quotes lines the poet ultimately rejected in the
final version of a poem as if they were independent sayings. The likely
reason for this practice is that such quotes tend to sound very like the
preserved fragments of the Pre-Socratics. Running through Heidegger’s
texts is the quite explicit thesis that Hölderlin’s language and thought have
an especial affinity with the Pre-Socratics. In this sense, in his
commentary on Hölderlin’s hymn Der Rhein, first delivered as a lecture in
early 1935, Heidegger states:
With this eighth strophe, the poet’s thought attains one of the highest and
most solitary peaks in Western thought, and this means at the same time:
of Being. [...] On the mountain-peak he has now reached, Hölderlin dwells
in proximity with the thinkers of the inception of our occidental history,
not because Hölderlin is dependent on them but because he is inceptively
an inceptor – an inceptor of that inception, which has been awaiting vainly
both today and through the ages its coming to power. (Heidegger, 1980,
269)
10 Cutting Poets to Size – Heidegger, Holderlin, Rilke

An echo of the times is audible in the word Heidegger uses for “coming to
power”, Ermächtigung, since the law giving Hitler dictatorial powers was
the Ermächtigungsgesetz of 23 March 1933. Here Heidegger also touches
on the enigma of the “history of Being”, and I shall return to this puzzle
later. What Heidegger’s focus on a small number of texts from about five
years of Hölderlin’s productive life achieves is to make Hölderlin appear
much less typical of his own age than is the case. Hölderlin’s artistic
development is steeped in German Hellenism and German Idealism, with
all that implies in terms of metaphysics. It was no coincidence that
Hölderlin received his higher education in the Tübinger Stift, a protestant
seminary, in the company of Hegel and Schelling and that they together
composed a text, since called Das Älteste Systemprogramm [des deutschen
Idealismus] (The First Systematic Program [of German Idealism])
(Hölderlin, 1969: 2, 647-49). The draft manifesto, a fragment of which is
preserved in Hegel’s handwriting, was composed in the years 1795-97
(Kreuzer, ed., 2002: 38ff.).
Heidegger was more willing to admit Hölderlin’s congruity with the
metaphysics of his age in 1934-35 than he was later:
But history is always the unique history of the people in question, in this
case of the people to which this poet belongs, the history of Germania.
Now and to the extent we know who this man is in his essence, we have
attained that which we were seeking: the metaphysical locus of Hölderlinic
poetry. That is the centre of Being itself, the Being of the demigods, the
Being of the man, of our poet. We recall what the latter says of himself
[...]: “But now day breaks! I waited, saw its coming,/ And let what I saw,
the Holy, be my word” (Heidegger, 1980: 288).

Certainly, there is a movement in Heidegger’s texts away from this

position and towards seeing selected passages from Hölderlin as the very
antithesis of metaphysics – notably in Wozu Dichter? (To What End
Poets?) of 1946 – but the lectures and essays of the mid-thirties, when
Heidegger turned to Hölderlin with a vengeance, should not simply be
ignored. The point is that the more Hölderlin is isolated from the context
of his whole work and the context of his own age, the easier it becomes to
present him as an honorary Pre-Socratic, knowingly “belonging to
Heraclitus’ understanding of Being” (Heidegger, 1980: 123).
The problems raised by Heidegger’s treatment of those few texts by
Rilke he cites are quite different. In section 8e of his lectures on
Parmenides in early 1943, Heidegger castigates Rilke severely for
misunderstanding – in the eighth Duineser Elegie – the concept of “the
Open”:
 Anthony Stephens 11

What Rilke terms “the Open”, principally in the eighth of his Duino
Elegies, has nothing but the sound of the same words in common with
what the thinking of the essence of DOKTHLD comprehends in the term “the
Open”. A brief explanation of what Rilke means by “the Open” can assist
us to form a more stable concept and to be ready for a more clarified
contemplation of what is thought in the essential realm of DOKTHLD by
means of a resolute differentiation from the Rilkean word. [...] It is
necessary only to point out unambiguously, that Rilke’s naming of “the
Open” is different in every respect from what is conceived concerning “the
Open” in its essential relation to DOKTHLD and from what is to be
conceived in terms of a conceptual question (Heidegger, 1982: 227).

This is a topic to which he will return in his essay of 1946 on Rilke, Wozu
Dichter?, in the essay collection Holzwege – an essay that allegedly set
out to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Rilke’s death – but, by and
large, recurs to the strictures of the lectures on Parmenides. In point of
fact, what Heidegger claims as his “discoveries” with regard to the relation
of poetic language to the world of objects and common experience had
already been anticipated in print by Rilke in his essays on aesthetics
between 1898 and 1903 (Stephens, 1976: 94-114), and Rilke, essentially,
had done no more than draw his own original conclusions from the
questions already posed by French Symbolism. Heidegger appears to have
been blissfully ignorant of them – a sine qua non of his denigration of
Rilke. Had Heidegger taken the trouble to read Mallarmé, then he could
have scarcely presented his essentially old-fashioned poetics with the
panache he does. But then, he had, quite arbitrarily, selected Hölderlin’s
latest poetry as the apogee of Western poetic achievement, and in this
template there was no room for what European poetry had accomplished
since Baudelaire. The hagiography that has attached itself to Heidegger’s
poetics has no defence but wilful ignorance.
I have retranslated the poem by Rilke, Wie die Natur die Wesen
überläßt […], that Heidegger discusses at length in Wozu Dichter?, since
the translation by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes in Off the Beaten
Track makes the German syntax of the closing lines very ambiguous, and
quite unnecessarily so:

As Nature leaves its creatures to the daring

of their blunt drive to pleasure, chooses none
to protect among earth-clods or boughs: so we
are no more cherished by the primal
ground of our being; it dares us. Only we
go with this daring, further than plants or beasts,
and will it; sometimes we dare even more
12 Cutting Poets to Size – Heidegger, Holderlin, Rilke

(and not because we’re drawn by selfishness)

than life itself dares, just a breath’s span more daring...
This gains us, in our unprotectedness,
a safe place there, just where the gravity
of pure forces takes effect; in the end, what
shelters us is our exposure, and, when we saw it turn
threatening, that we faced it towards the Open,
so that we might affirm it somewhere in
the furtherst round, where law impinges on us

(Rilke, 1996, 2: 324)

In Off the Beaten Track the “it” which ends the translation of this poem
offers a choice of antecedents: “law”, “the open”, “our defenselessness”
(Young and Haynes, eds., 2002: 207). The real antecedent in the original
text is “Schutzlossein”, which I have rendered at that point as “exposure”
to avoid a repetition of the more literal, close synonym “unprotectedness”
earlier in the text. This is an untitled poem written on 4.6.1924, and not
published in Rilke’s lifetime, as a dedication in a copy of Rilke’s novel
Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (begun 1904, published
1910). The copy was sent on behalf of Rilke’s wife Clara to Hellmuth
Freiherr Lucius von Stoedner. In this poem, written more than two years
after the eighth Duineser Elegie, there is nothing to say that Rilke is
working with the same understanding of “the Open” that he develops
there, where it is used as a conjectural foil to bring out the limitations of
human perception of the world, which is evoked – in opposition to what
animals may experience – as being “closed” in various senses (Stephens,
1972: 178ff.; Engel, ed., 2004: 380ff.). Indeed, the third last line suggests
human consciousness may here indeed have some access to “the Open”,
which the text of the eighth Duineser Elegie emphatically denies.
However that be, underlying all Heidegger’s strictures on Rilke is the
assumption that Rilke, like Hölderlin, strove to reflect in his work one
unified world-view. In the tradition of German Idealism, Hölderlin did for
as long as he was able. Rilke did not, and this is one of the oldest
conundrums of scholarship on Rilke.

Three years before Heidegger’s lectures on Parmenides, a British scholar,

Eudo C. Mason, had published in German, indeed in Weimar, a very lucid
monograph showing that not only did Rilke’s work not offer a coherent
vision of life, but that he did not even make the effort to fake one (Mason,
1939). Mason’s book is carried by a tone of sustained indignation, since he
is writing from a Christian point of view and sees Rilke’s works as
mimicking Christianity, but with a lack of religious commitment. Mason
 Anthony Stephens 13

was addressing a problem that was already endemic in Rilke-criticism,

namely that it was easy to represent Rilke as espousing virtually any
world-view current at the time – so long as one did not demand absolute
consistency. Rilke is a kind of intellectual chameleon, taking on the
conceptual structures of many discourses of his times, but using them
purely for aesthetic purposes. Within the individual poem, Rilke’s
consistency of thought is perfect. One must, however, exercise extreme
caution in assuming that the same word or semantic cluster has a meaning
that is transferable out of one context and into another. Rilke’s poems are
entirely lacking in warning signals to the reader. One perceptive critic
summed up the resulting dilemmas by stating that “Rilke’s poetry is so
constituted as to be able to respond to philosophical questions”, with the
disconcerting implication that it does not matter greatly which questions
one asks (Hamburger, 1966: 179). In a previous study on Rilke, I glossed
what Rilke had termed – at the age of twenty-four – his quest “to find
images for my own transformations” by stating: “here it is important to
realise that [...] intellectual structures may function precisely as images”
(Stephens, 1972: 193).
The key to this unusual quality of Rilke’s work was available to the
general reader as early as 1931, when his letters and diaries from the years
1899-1902 were published. In a diary entry from 1900, Rilke boldly set
forth his lack of esteem for the law of contradiction: “I fear within myself
only those contradictions that have a tendency towards resolution.... ”
(Rilke, 1931: 203). He was to sustain and exemplify this attitude through
every phase of his work.
How all this relates to Heidegger’s attacks on Rilke in the lectures on
Parmenides and the essay of 1946, when Rilke had been dead since 1926,
is best summed up by the fact that – in terms of Rilke’s poetic practice –
Heidegger was tilting at windmills. Rilke simply had not aspired to have a
stable concept of “the Open”. In his one attempt to explain what he may
have meant by it in the eighth Duineser Elegie, he is extremely tentative
and speaks of the concept he has “attempted to suggest” (“vorzuschlagen
versucht habe”) – thus claiming no ultimate conceptual validity for it
(Betz, 1938: 291). Rilke came relatively late to discover and admire
intensely the work of Hölderlin, and set forth in a poem entitled An
Hölderlin (To Hölderlin), written in 1914 when Rilke was 38 and first
published in 1934, eight years after his death, his understanding of
Hölderlin’s imperative towards a wholeness of vision and his own quite
opposite situation. The poem reads in part:
14 Cutting Poets to Size – Heidegger, Holderlin, Rilke

To linger, even at what is most familiar,

is not given to us; from fulfilled
images the mind plummets to ones waiting for sudden fulfilment; lakes
exist only in the eternal. Falling is here
what we achieve best. From the feeling we’ve mastered
to plunge down into that we anticipate, further.

But to you, you splendid one, to you, you conjurer, a whole life was given
to feel as an urgent image, when you spoke it out,
each line closed like destiny, death was
even in the gentlest, and you entered it; but
the god who preceded you led you out and above it

(Rilke 2, 1996: 123).

Since this poem was published in the same volume as the dedicatory
poem, Wie die Natur die Wesen überläßt [...], on which Heidegger did
comment in detail, the fundamental difference between the two poets had
been clearly spelled out by one of them in a book Heidegger read, but
Heidegger simply chose to ignore the fact. Why?
I suggest that it stems from a fiction Heidegger terms “the history of
Being”, whose strong agenda makes it necessary for Rilke’s poetry to
“remain back behind that of Hölderlin on the course of the history of
Being as far as rank and position are concerned” (Heidegger, 1950: 276)
The word Heidegger uses for course, Bahn, implies linear movement, in
time since it occurs in the German words for race-track, ghost-train, tram-
line and, of course, Autobahn. Does this “history of Being” run backwards
in time? It appears so in Heidegger’s essay on Rilke, Wozu Dichter?. Here
Hölderlin is called the “precursor” whom “no poet of our age can
overtake”. Why? “The precursor does not [...] disappear into a future, but
he arrives from the future in such a manner that it is only in the arrival of
his word that the future achieves presence” (Heidegger, 1950: 320).
My answer to this puzzle is that Heidegger posits two different
“histories of Being”, and that one of them does reverse time-sequences.
For Heidegger pulls the same trick on Nietzsche in 1935, as he does on
Rilke in 1946. At the conclusion of his lectures on Der Rhein in 1935,
Heidegger states:
What Hölderlin here sees as the essence of historical being, the emotional
intensities in conflict between what is an endowment and what is a task,
was rediscovered by Nietzsche and termed the Dionysian and Apollonian,
but not in such simplicity and purity as Hölderlin; for in the intervening
time Nietzsche had had to traverse all those fatal circumstances that are
denoted by the names Schopenhauer, Darwin, Wagner, and the term
 Anthony Stephens 15

“founding years” [of the German Empire]. [...] The hour of our history has
now struck. [...] The force of Being must now once more and in reality
become a question for our powers of comprehension (Heidegger, 1980:
294).

Coming later in time, Nietzsche’s “discovery” has to be inferior. As

Heidegger reiterated in his interview with Der Spiegel in 1966: “I do not
consider Hölderlin to be just any poet, whose work literary historians also
treat together with many others’. Hölderlin is for me the poet, who points
into the future, who awaits the god” (Thomä, ed., 2003: 214; Wolin ed.,
1993: 112). Thus we have one qualitative “history of Being” proceeding
backwards in leaps from the future god, to Hölderlin, to the Pre-Socratics
and – conceivably – to the mythic age posited in Hölderlin’s later poems,
when gods and humans mingled.
Michel Haar, in his work La Fracture de l’Histoire (The Breaking of
History) refers to the present-day disjunction in historical thinking, which
he characterises as a:
[...] breaking apart, or being cast loose from one another, of two Histories,
previously distinct from but strictly coordinated with one another [...]: on
the one hand empirical history, the entanglement of facts; on the other,
epochal History, the development of the principles of intelligibility,
“Universal history” in Hegelian terms, “the History of Being” according to
Heidegger (Haar, 1994: 10).

But I suggest we must see Heidegger’s “history of Being” as having two

different versions which are placed in no clear relationship to one another.
There is the one philosophers prefer that does no violence to
chronology. As Emil Angehrn sets it out in the Heidegger-Handbuch, one
of a series of recent and authoritative compendia on major German authors
and thinkers:
In this sense metaphysics is to be regarded as a basic historical process –
not as a misguided manner of thought and doctrine – and nihilism as its
essential form deriving from the “fate of Being itself” [...]. What is
demanded of humankind is not to invent new forms of thought, but an
openness to that which comes towards it, and to let itself be spoken to by
what [...] reveals itself. [...] The processuality of the history of Being does
not mean that it takes place anywhere else than in the medium of human
creations – in science, technology, art, politics. [...] Only that openness to
being addressed, which includes the “courage to feel essential anxiety” (as
the locus of the experience of nothingness, and thus also of Being), is what
is required of humankind” (Thomä, ed., 2003: 274ff.).
16 Cutting Poets to Size – Heidegger, Holderlin, Rilke

In such a scenario, Hölderlin’s poetry as a revelation of truth, interrupting

the progressive descent into complete nihilism, plays no part at all, and,
indeed, the American scholar Jeffrey A. Barash published in 2003 the
second edition of an informed and detailed study called Martin Heidegger
and the Problem of Historical Meaning without mentioning Hölderlin in
the context of a rearranging of history at all: for Barash the chronological
process moves with its wonted linearity and with no reversals.
Why does Heidegger need the other version? In the final sections of
Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) Heidegger first sees Dasein as being
potentially integrated in a positive sense into a community (Wolin, 1990:
54-58). Heidegger’s enthusiasm for National Socialism in the years 1931-
1934 has two consequences: firstly, there appears that subordination of the
present to a glowing future he articulates in his letter to Elisabeth
Blochmann a week after Hitler’s Ermächtigungsgesetz was passed: “We
shall find it [the new ground] and, at the same time, the vocation of the
German in Occidental history only when we expose ourselves to Being
itself in a new mode of experiencing and assimilating it. Thus I experience
the present purely in terms of the future.” (Heidegger, 1990: 60).
Secondly, in the same letter to her, the German Volk can be named as the
best of all possible communities: “Present events have for me [...] an
enormous concentrating power. To be active in the service of a great
mission enhances the will and the certainty of helping to construct a world
that is based in the people [volklich]” (ibid.; Thomä, ed., 2003: 525). As
James Phillips rightly states: “In 1933, Heidegger attempts to lead the
masses of National Socialism to the confrontation with classical ontology
from which the Volk might have been born” (Phillips, 2005: 131).
Heidegger’s failure as a Nazi politician is immediately followed by
the celebration of Hölderlin in his lectures (Risser, ed., 1995: 5ff.).
Hölderlin’s poems after 1800 abound in visions of ideal, future
communities. Hence there is a clear element of displacement from the
grubby arena of party politics to the pristine spaces of the poetic word.
Heidegger denies in 1934 that lecturing on Hölderlin was a personal
choice at all, rather: “This choice is no capricious selection from among
the poets available. This choice is an historical decision”. Why? Because
Hölderlin, he says, is not only the greatest poet of the German nation, but
also because his light is still hidden, and: “for this reason he has not yet
become the power in the history of our people. Because he is not it yet, he
must become it. To participate in this process is ‘politics’ in the highest
and genuine sense [...]” (Heidegger, 1980: 214).
The celebration of Hölderlin is thus proclaimed to be “political”
activity in a more exalted sphere than the one in which Heidegger has just
 Anthony Stephens 17

signally failed. Since Hölderlin envisages the future return of the gods, the
dominance of a radiant future over present and past does not have to be
abandoned. His installation of Hitler as the authority that guarantees the
future in the letter to Elisabeth Blochmann of 30 March 1933 – “So I
experience the present wholly in terms of the future” (Heidegger, 1990:
60) – stands in clear parallel to his subjection of the present to
Hölderlin’s poetry in the introduction to his lectures on Germanien and
Der Rhein: “We do not wish to make Hölderlin accord with our own age,
but, on the contrary: we wish to subject ourselves and those to come to the
measure of the poet” (Heidegger, 1980: 4).
The only problem is that, between Heidegger’s own era and the few
years at the start of the 19th century when Hölderlin wrote the poems
Heidegger refers to endlessly, there is a kind of temporal trough of about
140 years into which the achievements of Nietzsche and Rilke fall. Both
have to fail in comparison with Hölderlin, because Hölderlin’s only true
peers are the Pre-Socratics. Thus, from 1934 onwards, Heidegger becomes
more and more critical of Nietzsche, and, in 1946, Rilke, whose prestige in
Germany as a poet in the 40’s rivalled that of Hölderlin, has to be again
put down and presented as a Hölderlin manqué, although Heidegger had
access to all that was needful for him to avoid this distortion of Rilke’s
work – most of all the poem quoted above in which Rilke himself is both
unstinting in his admiration of Hölderlin and perfectly clear as to the
fundamental difference between their two poetic projects. Instead, he still
quibbles as to the right understanding of the concept of “the Open”, so as
to show Rilke as being helplessly entangled in “present-day metaphysics”,
hence lagging behind Hölderlin.
I suggest therefore that Heidegger’s portrayal of Hölderlin and Rilke
is dictated by the fictional structure of that alternative “history of Being”
that is subordinated to a vision of future salvation. The poets are thereby
cut to size in the sense that they are shaped to fit a pattern that has its
origins outside the work of either of them. At its most basic, Heidegger’s
doubling of the “history of Being” can be seen as an oscillation within his
apocalyptics. When he wishes to accent the positive, soteric aspect,
Hölderlin’s poetry is necessary as an anticipation of the world to come,
and this means that time has to be rearranged so that Hölderlin is “the
precursor” who “arrives from the future” (Heidegger, 1950: 320), thus
assigning to the poet the same role Hölderlin himself had assigned to
Christ in his great elegy Brod und Wein (Bread and Wine). What this
might have to do with philosophy in the 20th century eludes me, but it is a
standard pattern in German Romantic visions of an ideal futurity, which,
in turn, revive early Christian eschatology. When Heidegger’s
18 Cutting Poets to Size – Heidegger, Holderlin, Rilke

apocalyptics lack the soteric dimension and are weighed down by his
pessimism as to the increasing dominance of technology in history, then
they rather follow the Old Norse pattern of history degenerating into the
Fimbulvintr, the Great Winter presaging the end of the world, with no
redemption and no prospect but catastrophe. This variant leaves
chronology unscathed.
The esoteric history of Being has staying power. In the interview with
Der Spiegel in 1966 Heidegger insists: “only a god can save us”. We can
see this “history of Being” as a sublimation of the hopes he had initially
placed in Hitler’s regime. When he states late in his life: “Hölderlin is for
me the poet who points into the future, who awaits the god” (Thomä, ed.,
2003: 214), then Hölderlin has had transferred onto him the whole burden
of futurity – but at what cost?
Ultimately none, since most recent writing on Heidegger seems to live
happily with two different “histories of Being”. As for the poets, only
those readers who approach them solely through Heidegger’s texts will
face grossly selective, exaggerated or distorted versions of their work. The
question is rather: what does it say about a philosophy that it depends on
dual versions of the same “history” and that one of them is anchored by an
irrational conception of part of the achievement of one poet?
Heidegger’s impact on the reception of both poets in Germany was
greatest in the 50’s and early 60’s of the 20th century and diminished
sharply with the swing to the left of the “1968 generation”. Once the short-
lived Marxist dominance in German literary scholarship was over, there
was no return to Heideggerian positions and terminology. Recent German
scholarship on the topic of Heidegger and Hölderlin tends to cast a cold
eye on Heidegger’s glorification of the poet. Thus Kathleen Wright states
in the recent Heidegger-Handbuch:
Heidegger explicitly makes a hero of Hölderlin – indeed both during and
after the Hitler-era, by assigning the leading role to Hölderlin and poetry
(and only to Hölderlin’s poetry) in the drama in which the destinies and
the future of Germany and Europe unfold. At the same time he magnifies
himself since he gives his own thought (and only his own thought) the
only important minor role in the same unfolding drama (Thomä, ed., 2003:
214).

In the corresponding Hölderlin-Handbuch of 2002, Iris Buchheim notes

that it is no surprise that many influential German literary scholars can
find only Heidegger and no Hölderlin in the former’s writings, given “the
persistent rejection of all scholarship, the isolation of Hölderlin from his
Idealist, indeed ‘metaphysical context’, which is accompanied by an
 Anthony Stephens 19

increasing conflation of Hölderlin’s poetry with his own thinking on the

‘history of Being’” (Kreuzer, ed., 2002: 437).
The renaissance Heidegger is currently experiencing in the English-
speaking world does not seem to have caught on in Germany. The most
significant recent essay in Heideggerian aesthetics, Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht’s Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey
(Gumbrecht, 2004) is the work of a scholar trained in Germany, but
teaching at Stanford. It was written in English and addresses an English-
speaking readership. The question of whether a Heidegger renaissance is
possible in Germany is in part a linguistic issue. Heidegger’s German style
is so excessively idiosyncratic that it polarises readers. The ‘50s of the last
century saw a good deal of literary criticism written in what was
effectively a Heideggerian dialect, and it is difficult to write with the
current of Heidegger’s thought without lapsing into some such mode of
discourse. It sits very oddly with contemporary German usage.
Translations of Heidegger into English perforce normalise his style to a
great extent, because his etymological word-plays and range of
neologising have no direct equivalents in English. Translation must needs
sacrifice some of the resonances of Heidegger’s German for the sake of
intelligibility, and this disguises a lot that is quintessentially Heideggerian.
Rilke scholarship in Germany underwent the same phase of a strong
Heideggerian influence in the 50’s and 60’s, of which Else Buddeberg’s
book Denken und Dichten des Seins (Thought and Poetry of Being) is a
characteristic example (Buddeberg, 1956). It is written in a Heideggerian
style, and is so much of its times that it does not rate even a mention in the
brief bibliography on Rilke and Heidegger in the Rilke-Handbuch of 2004
(Engel, ed., 2004: 164). Even studies such as Buddeberg’s have an
ambivalent approach to Heidegger’s relegation of Rilke to a lowly status
in Wozu Dichter?. While writing in a Heideggerian mode, the impulse is
tacitly to contradict Heidegger’s evaluation of Rilke by showing that he
was, after all, a true “poet of Being”. It was with a certain sense of relief
that Rilke scholars greeted the change in the intellectual climate of
Germany around 1968, since, while Marxist criticism had little time for
Rilke, it had even less for Heidegger and thus broke the hagiographical
nexus once and for all.
Rilke has survived as the major poet writing in German in the 20th
century, and the issues raised by Heidegger in his lectures on Parmenides
and his interpretation of Wie die Natur die Wesen überläßt [...] have no
presence in Rilke-scholarship today. This leads to the conclusion that
Heidegger’s treatment of both poets ultimately reveals more about
Heidegger than it does about them – indeed it offers an external point of
20 Cutting Poets to Size – Heidegger, Holderlin, Rilke

view on Heidegger’s modes of thought at a time when writing on him in

English is by no means free of hagiography. The agenda of the “history of
Being” that exalts the late Hölderlin and denigrates Rilke is very revealing
of Heidegger’s compulsive behaviour. Taking advantage of the twentieth
anniversary of Rilke’s death in 1946 to resolve a spurious debate on the
true nature of “the Open” at Rilke’s expense and in Hölderlin’s (and thus
implicitly his own) favour is, in one sense, a reversed re-enactment of the
political battles he lost in 1933-34.
In the decades following on the collapse of Nazism, Heidegger’s voice
was heard loud and clear in Germany. Indeed, he had very little
competition. The displacement that had attended his withdrawal from Nazi
politics and subsequent celebration of the late Hölderlin can be seen as an
escapist strategy that was to have its own appeal in a country devastated
by war. One reason for the popularity of the poetry of both Hölderlin and
Rilke during and after the second World War – irrespective of what
Heidegger thought of either – was that both their poetic worlds, as
different as they are, offered a refuge from grim realities. This appeal was
not lessened in the two post-war decades, and it is an interesting
phenomenon that the turning of young West Germans to Marxism did not
occur until the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) had been
accomplished.
That Giorgio Agamben should revive the difference of viewpoint
between Heidegger and Rilke on the concept of “the Open” in his work of
2002 challenges us to speculate whether this is a sign of things to come or
mere nostalgia. In any event, Agamben gets his philology wrong. The term
does not originate in Rilke’s eighth Duineser Elegie, as he claims
(Agamben, 2004: 57), but was likely taken over from one of Hölderlin’s
best known poems Brod und Wein: “So komm! daß wir das Offene
schauen/ Daß ein Eigenes wir suchen, so weit es auch ist” (“So come! that
we may look upon the Open/ That we seek something of our own, far
distant though it may be”) (Hölderlin, 1969: 1, 115). In its original setting
the term connotes a realm of freedom for the imagination and correlates
later in the same stanza with the fantasy of a voyage of the spirit back to
Ancient Greece: “Drum an den Isthmos komm! dorthin, wo das offene
Meer rauscht/Am Parnaß und der Schnee delphische Felsen umglänzt
[...]” (“Therefore come to the Isthmus! there, where the open sea
surges/By Parnassus and snow shines about the Delphic cliffs [...]”
(ibid.)). Both Rilke and Heidegger would have been aware of this.

Rilke had made the acquaintance of Norbert von Hellingrath, the editor of
the pioneering Hölderlin edition, in 1910 and was in contact with his
 Anthony Stephens 21

editorial project from 1911 onwards. It may thus be the case that lines in a
poem finished by Rilke in 1912, Perlen entrollen (Pearls are spilled) is an
early reminiscence of Brod und Wein with none of the later connotations
of the concept in the eighth Duineser Elegie at all: “O wie ein Golf hofft
ins Offne/und vom gestreckten Leuchtturm/ scheinende Räume wirft [...]”
(“Oh, as a gulf hopes towards the Open/ and from its stretched
lighthouse/throws luminous spaces [...]” (Rilke, 1996: 2, 38). The sea-
imagery and the evocation of vast spaces seem to establish a connection to
Hölderlin, but one looks in vain for the epistemological concerns of the
eighth Duineser Elegie. This illustrates how careful one must be in dealing
with Rilkean concepts from poem to poem.
Heidegger was not careful at all, and so, as Agamben must
acknowledge (Agamben, 2004: 57ff.), he comes to represent Rilke, in his
lectures on Parmenides, as an ignoramus: “Rilke knows and suspects
nothing of DOKTHLD; he knows and suspects as little as does Nietzsche.
Accordingly Rilke is entirely confined within the borders of the traditional
metaphysical definition of human and animal” (Heidegger, 1982: 231).
But Rilke continues to be read and esteemed – as does Heidegger, for all
that he knew and suspected nothing of the nature of poetic fictions.

Bibliography
Agamben, 2004
Giorgio Agamben, The Open. Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Alter, 1981
Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, London & Sydney: Allen
and Unwin.
Angehrn, 2003
Emil Angehrn, “Kritik der Metaphysik und der Technik. Heideggers
Auseinandersetzung mit der abendländischen Tradition”. In
Heidegger-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Dieter Thomä:
268-279: Stuttgart & Weimar: Verlag J.B Metzler.
Barash, 2003
Jeffrey Arnold Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of
Historical Meaning. 2nd. rev. ed.. New York: Fordham University
Press.
Betz, 1938
Maurice Betz, Rilke in Frankreich. Erinnerungen, Briefe, Dokumente.
Wien: Reichner Verlag.
22 Cutting Poets to Size – Heidegger, Holderlin, Rilke

Buchheim, 2002
Iris Buchheim, “Heidegger. Hölderlin als 'Geschick'”. In Hölderlin-
Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Johann Kreuzer: 432-438.
Stuttgart &Weimar: Verlag J.B.Metzler 2002.
Buddeberg, 1956
Else Buddeberg, Denken und Dichten des Seins. Stuttgart: Verlag J.B.
Metzler.
Engel, 2004
Manfred Engel, ed., Rilke-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung.
Stuttgart & Weimar: Verlag J.B.Metzler.
Gumbrecht, 2004
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence. What Meaning
Cannot Convey. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Haar, 1994
Michel Haar, La Fracture de l’Histoire. Douze essais sur Heidegger.
Grenoble: Editions Jérôme Millon.
Hamburger, 1966
Käte Hamburger, Philosophie der Dichter. Stuttgart: Ernst Klett
Verlag.
Heidegger, 1950
Martin Heidegger , “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1935/36)”. In
Holzwege: 1-74: Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
Heidegger, 1950
Martin Heidegger, “Wozu Dichter?”. In Holzwege: 248-320: Frankfurt
am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
Heidegger, 1990
Martin Heidegger, Elisabeth Blochmann, Briefwechsel 1918-1969, ed.
J. W. Storck, Marbach am Meckar: Deutsaches Literaturarchiv.
Heidegger, 1980
Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen "Germanien" und "Der Rhein".
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 39, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
Heidegger, 1950
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio
Klostermann.
Heidegger, 2002
Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track [Holzwege]. Trans. and ed.
Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002.
Heidegger, 1982
Martin Heidegger, Parmenides. Gesamtausgabe, vol. 54, Frankfurt am
Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
 Anthony Stephens 23

Hölderlin, 1969
Friedrich Hölderlin, Werke und Briefe, eds. Friedrich Beißner and
Jochen Schmidt, Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag.
Kreuzer, 2002
Joachim Kreuzer, ed., Hölderlin-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung.
Stuttgart and Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler.
Mason, 1964
Eudo C. Mason, Lebenshaltung und Symbolik bei Rainer Maria Rilke,
Weimar, 1939. 2nd ed.. Oxford: Marston Press.
Phillips, 2005
James Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk. Between National Socialism and
Poetry. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Rilke, 1931
Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe und Tagebücher aus der Frühzeit. Leipzig:
Insel Verlag.
Rilke, 1996
Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke, vol. 2, Gedichte 1910-1926, eds. Manfred
Engel and Ulrich Fülleborn. Frankfurt am Main & Leipzig: Insel
Verlag.
Risser, 1999
James Risser, ed., Heidegger. Toward the Turn. Essays on the Work of
the 1930s. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.
Stephens, 1972
Anthony Stephens, Rainer Maria Rilke’s "Gedichte an die Nacht". An
Essay in Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stephens, 1976
Anthony Stephens, "Ästhetik und Existenzentwurf beim frühen Rilke".
In Rilke heute [II], eds. Ingeborg H. Solbrig and Joachim Storck: 95-
114. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Stephens, 2003
Anthony Stephens, “Duineser Elegien”. In Rilke-Handbuch. Leben –
Werk – Wirkung, ed. Manfred Engel: 365-384. Stuttgart & Weimar:
Verlag J.B.Metzler.
Thomä, 2003
Dieter Thomä, ed., Heidegger-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung.
Stuttgart & Weimar: Verlag J.B Metzler.
Wolin, 1990
Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being. The Political Thought of Martin
Heidegger. New York & Oxford: Columbia University Press.
24 Cutting Poets to Size – Heidegger, Holderlin, Rilke

Wolin, 1991
Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy. A Critical Reader.
Cambridge, Mass. & London: The MIT Press.
Wright, 2003
Kathleen Wright , “Die 'Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung' und die
drei Hölderlin Vorlesungen (1934/35, 1941/42, 1942). Die
Heroisierung Hölderlins”. In Heidegger-Handbuch. Leben – Werk –
Wirkung, ed. Dieter Thomä: 213-230. Stuttgart & Weimar: Verlag J.B:
Metzler.
 GEOGRAPHY, BIOLOGY AND POLITICS:
HEIDEGGER ON PLACE AND WORLD

JEFF MALPAS

I.
Heidegger claimed that one of the unique features of his thinking in the
1920s was his discovery, or rediscovery, of the problem of world. The
concept of world figures prominently in Part One, Division One, of Being
and Time, but Heidegger remained dissatisfied with his treatment of the
matter there, frequently returning to the problem in his work in the period
immediately following the publication of Being and Time – most
obviously in the 1929 lectures on The Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics. In those lectures Heidegger responds to the problem at issue
by exploring the difference between the mode of being proper to the
animal and the human, and, in so doing, he draws upon a range of
biological and zoological studies from the previous forty years or so
including the work of figures such as the experimental embryologist
Wilhelm Roux, the Czech biologist Emmanuel Radl, the neo-vitalist
biologist Hans Driesch, and the pioneering ethologist, Jakob von Uexküll.
The way Heidegger draws upon these scientific sources, and who he
draws upon (most of these figures form part of the anti-materialist
movement in German science that is the subject of Anne Harrington’s
excellent Reenchanted Science1), is itself of interest for what it tells us
about Heidegger’s knowledge of the scientific thinking of his time. In his
own more recent examination of the relation between the human and the
animal, the essay, The Open, Giorgio Agamben discusses von Uexküll’s
work, in particular, with specific reference to Heidegger, but he also
connects that work, both that of von Uexküll and Heidegger, with the work
of two prominent geographical theorists, Paul Vidal de la Blanche and
Friedrich Ratzel. Agamben writes:

1
Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from
Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
26 Geography, Biology and Politics: Heidegger on Place and World

The studies by the founder of ecology follow a few years after those by
Paul Vidal de la Blanche on the relationship between populations and their
environment (the Tableau de la géographie de la France is from 1903),
and those of Friedrich Ratzel on the Lebensraum, the ‘vital space’ of
peoples (the Politische Geographie is from 1897), which would
profoundly revolutionize human geography of the twentieth century. And
it is not impossible that the central thesis of Sein und Zeit on being-in-the-
world (In-der-Welt-sein) as the fundamental human structure can be read
in some ways as a response to this problematic field, which at the
beginning of the century essentially modified the traditional relationship
between the living being and its environment-world. As is well-known,
Ratzel’s theses, according to which all peoples are intimately linked to
their vital space as their essential dimension, had a notable influence on
Nazi geopolitics. This proximity is marked in a curious episode in
Uexküll’s intellectual biography. In 1928, five years before the advent of
Nazism, this very sober scientist writes a preface to Houston
Chamberlain’s Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts
{Foundations of the Nineteenth Century}, today considered one of the
precursors of Nazism’.2

It is this passage that constitutes the starting point for my discussion

here – and it does so, not because I want to treat of Heidegger, or
Agamben’s, discussion of the relation between the human and the animal
(the topic that has preoccupied most commentators), but rather because of
the way Agamben’s comments point towards a range of issues concerning
te relation between the geographical and the political in Heidegger – more
specifically, the connection between themes in Heidegger’s thinking and
supposedly problematic elements in earlier geographical thought from the
nineteenth and early twentieth century, as well as the way that Heidegger’s
thought has interacted with aspects of cultural geography over the last
thirty or so years.
These issues clearly connect up, as Agamben’s comments imply, with
the ongoing argument concerning the political associations of Heidegger’s
thought and its proximity to National Socialism. In this latter respect, it
also connects with a set of questions concerning the possible political
associations of those elements of geographical thinking with which
Heidegger is here brought into connection. However, in taking, these
geographical connections as the focus here, my main aim is to open up an
exploration of certain aspects of the role played by ideas of place and
space in Heidegger’s work, and, with this, the possibility of an expanded
dialogue between the philosophical and the geographical. To make the

2
Giogio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004), pp.42-43.
 Jeff Malpas 27

connection with the main theme of this volume explicit: the aesthetics of
dwelling that we find in the later Heidegger, and that is already prefigured
(although in a less than integrated fashion) in elements of the earlier
thinking, has to be understood in terms of the centrality to Heidegger’s
thinking of a concept that is also central to cultural-geographic thought,
namely, the concept of place or ‘geographic’ space – topos, Ort,
Ortschaft3. Agamben’s comments highlight this connection through their
juxtaposition of Heidegger’s philosophy with the geographical thought of
Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche (which is not to ignore the important
connection with von Uexküll). In so doing, however, Agamben also
indicates the way in which it is precisely the connection between, as we
may put it, the philosophical and the geographical that can be seen as
reinforcing the politically problematic character of Heidegger’s thinking.
Yet not only is the manner in which Agamben draws this connection
highly misleading in this regard, but it also neglects any real consideration
of what might be at issue in the centrality of the ‘geographical’, or better,
the topological, in Heidegger’s thought. Indeed, notwithstanding
Heidegger’s own personal political engagement, there is reason to think
that the role played by the concept of place in his thought actually runs
counter to the associations that are often taken to belong with it.

II.
One of the important developments within cultural geography in the
last quarter of the twentieth century has been the rise of a movement often
referred to as ‘humanistic geography’ that draws heavily on the work of
Husserl as well as Heidegger, and that has given a special emphasis to the
concept of place as a central and determining notion in geographical
inquiry. The key figures in this development include writers such as Yi-Fu
Tuan, 4 Edward Relph,5 Anne Buttimer and David Seamon,6 and their

3
For a more detailed account of the topological character of Heidegger’s thinking
see my Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 2006).
4
See, for instance, Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).
5
Relph’s Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976) is a particularly
influential text in the area.
6
See, amongst other works, Anne Buttimer and David Seamon (eds.), The Human
Experience of Space and Place (London: Croom Helm, 1980); also David Seamon
and Robert Mugerauer (eds.), Dwelling, Place, and Environment: Towards a
Phenomenology of Person and World (New York: Columbia University Press,
28 Geography, Biology and Politics: Heidegger on Place and World

work has not been restricted in its influence to geography alone. Indeed,
humanistic geography has come to be allied with a mode of place-oriented
environmental thinking that encompasses writers in a wide range of
disciplines from sociology to psychology, from anthropology to
architecture. Within this broad field, Heidegger’s ‘Bauen Wohnen
Denken’ (‘Building Dwelling Thinking’)7 has often appeared as a key text.
Moreover, that tradition is also one that can be seen to connect up with,
and draw upon, the work of Vidal de la Blanche – a point that might be
thought to confirm the associations suggested by Agamben. Yet, in fact,
the way in which Vidal de la Blanche plays a role here is itself indicative
of the need for a certain degree of caution in attempting to delineate the
connections and lines of influence that might be thought to be at stake,
since the Vidalian tradition as it appears within American geography is
itself often counter-posed to Ratzelian thinking rather than being allied
with it – and this so in spite of the Ratzelian influences on Vidal de la
Blanche himself. Moreover, humanistic geography draws heavily on
phenomenology, on Husserl as much as Heidegger, as well as on writers
such as Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty. How are we to situate that broader
phenomenological tradition, within which the idea of a close connection
between human being and space or place is also a recurrent theme
(especially as developed in the work of Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty), in
terms of the problematic set of connections sketched out by Agamben?
As Agamben presents matters, Heidegger, von Uexküll, Ratzel and
Vidal de la Blanche all share the same basic commitment to a conception
of human being as essentially bound up with its environment or world – in
Heideggerian terms, human being is being-there (Da-sein) which is being-
in-the-world. Such a commitment, as I indicated a moment ago, is also one

1985). For an excellent survey of recent articles on humanistic geography see Paul
Adams, Steven Hoelscher and Karen E Till (eds), Textures of Place: Exploring
Humanist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). It
should be emphasized, however, that this is not the only route through which
Heidegger’s influence has been felt in contemporary geography. Heidegger has, of
course, had a major impact on geographic thinking simply in virtue of the
enormous impact he has had on twentieth century thought in general, but
Heidegger’s specific focus on concepts and space and place has also had, in
addition to the immediate effect of essays such as ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’, a
significant indirect impact through its effect on key thinkers as Foucault and
Lefebvre – see, especially, Stuart Elden, Mapping the Present: Heidegger,
Foucault and the project of a spatial history (London: Continuum, 2001).
7
In Vorträge und Aufsätze (Stuttgart: Günther Neske Verlag, 1954); the English
translation appears in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New
York: Harper and Row, 1975).
 Jeff Malpas 29

that we take to be a central element in the work of Bachelard and Merleau-

Ponty, although Agamben makes no such connection. While it remains
only at the level of suggestion, and is never spelt out, Agamben implies
that this commitment is itself one that brings Heidegger, von Uexküll,
Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche into close proximity to Nazism – a
proximity that Agamben takes as given special emphasis, not only by
Ratzel’s supposed influence on Nazi ideology (and presumably by
Heidegger’s own Nazi affiliations), but also by von Uexküll’s
endorsement of Chamberlain. The latter, of course, not only draws these
thinkers into the domain of National Socialism as a broad political
movement with a range of different associations, but, more specifically,
into proximity with National Socialist racialism and anti-Semitism.
The drawing of such connections and associations is not peculiar to
Agamben, but is an often implicit, and sometimes explicit, assumption in
the work of many writers who engage critically with the ‘geographic’
elements in Heidegger’s thinking. Heidegger’s preoccupation with ideas of
rootedness and belonging, his apparent preference for the world of peasant
and farmer, and his frequent appeal to notions of origin and home, have all
been seen as tied to a conservative and even reactionary politics of a sort
evident, not only in Heidegger’s entanglement with Nazism, but even in
his admission late in his life, in the interview with Der Speigel magazine
in the 1960s, of his lack of faith in democratic politics. With such ideas
clearly in the background, the historian Troy Paddock also draws an
explicit connection between Heidegger and Ratzel. Arguing that
Heidegger distinguished between two concepts of space, the mathematical
or geometric and the geographic, Paddock claims that, taken in this latter
sense, Heidegger:
…does not consider space as an abstract entity but as part of a larger
environment. Borders help give space a specific location, and
consequently a specific function, creating a space that is grounded in the
specific building, bridge, or jug… Heidegger’s conception of space bears
striking parallels to views expressed in the late nineteenth century by the
geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who suggested that there was a connection
between the physical space that a people inhabited and their culture.8

Although Paddock seems to equivocate on the connection between

such views and fascism,9 he nevertheless claims that Heidegger’s adoption

8
Troy Paddock, ‘Gedachtes Wohnen: Heidegger and Cultural Geography’,
Philosophy and Geography 7 (2004), p.237-8.
9
In this respect, the comments in Paddock’s reply seem to be rather weaker, and
certainly less clear, in the connection they assert between Heidegger, Ratzel and
30 Geography, Biology and Politics: Heidegger on Place and World

of such a view of space reveals ‘a continued ideological affinity with basic

tenets of Nazi ideology’.10 Paddock makes quite clear that part of his
interest in Heidegger’s ‘geographic’ conception of space derives from the
way in which Heidegger’s thinking has been taken up by contemporary
environmentalists, and the clear implication is that such thinking has
dangerous affinities with key elements of Nazi ideology, and should,
therefore, be treated with extreme caution, if not altogether shunned.
Humanistic geography, and the environmental modes of thinking with
which it is associated, would seem to turn out, on this account, to be
reactionary and politically dangerous. Indeed, such modes of thinking,
inasmuch as they do emphasis a special relation between human being and
place, often appear in popular, and not merely academic, thinking, as
carrying strongly romantic and conservative associations, even if the
connection with fascist thinking is not always so evident.
Leaving aside, at least for the moment, some of the broader issues that
are at stake here, it should be noted that, in the case of Heidegger himself,
the simple fact of his connection with Nazi politics is indisputable –
Heidegger was a paid-up member of the Nazi Party from 1933 onwards,
and was appointed by the Nazis as Rector of Freiburg University in that
same year, resigning one year later. What remains open to dispute is
exactly how that connection should be interpreted, what significance
should be given to it, and, more particularly, how deeply it can be
connected with Heidegger’s philosophical thought. In the early 1930s,
Heidegger certainly seemed prepared to use ideas and images of
autochthony and rootedness that appeared to bring his thought into close
alignment with Nazi ideology and rhetoric.11 Yet in terms of the specific
claims advanced by such as Paddock, it is notable that while a
‘geographic’ conception of space is indeed present in Heidegger’s works
up to and including the early ‘thirties (although usually expressed in terms
of notions like that of ‘rootedness’), it is actually in the works after his

Nazism, than those to be found in his original article – see Paddock, ‘In Defense
of Homology and History: a Response to Allen’, Philosophy and Geography 7
(2004), pp.257-8.
10
Paddock, ‘Gedachtes Wohnen’, p.248.
11
See, for instance, Charles Bambach’s discussion of the role of the idea of
‘rootedness’ (Bodenständigkeit), and associated notions, in Heidegger’s writings
and speeches form the 1930s in Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism,
and the Greeks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp.12-68. Bambach
argues that the preoccupation with rootedness and autochthony is present
throughout Heidegger’s thinking, not only in the 1930s, and that these notions are
always marked by the logic of exclusion.
 Jeff Malpas 31

resignation from the Rectorate in 1934, and so at a time after his attempt to
establish himself as the intellectual leader of a National Socialist Germany
had clearly failed, that such a conception, as developed explicitly in terms
of place, seems to become much more important.
There is certainly a clear shift in Heidegger’s thinking that first occurs
in the ‘thirties, and intensifies around the late ‘forties, towards an explicit
concern with place and related concepts – concepts that include those of
‘dwelling’, the ‘Fourfold’ and, I would also argue, of the Event (das
Ereignis) – my own view is that this shift towards the ‘geographic’ or
‘topological’ is itself closely tied to the famous ‘Turning’ or ‘Reversal’ in
Heidegger’s thought12). There is good reason to suppose that this shift is
itself connected to Heidegger’s own failed engagement with Nazism, not
in the sense that it derives from Nazi ideology, but is instead formed in a
reaction to it.13 Significantly, it is in his engagement with Hölderlin in
1934-35, immediately after his resignation of the Rectorate, that ideas of
place and dwelling that lie at the heart of the ‘geographic’ conception of
space that concerns Paddock begin to emerge more explicitly (though still
in a relatively undeveloped form) as a focus for Heidegger’s thinking.
Thus one finds, at the same time as Heidegger’s thought orients itself more
towards ‘geographic’ or ‘place-based’ conceptions, a shift away from, and
sometimes direct criticism of, key elements of associated with Nazi
ideology. One might argue, of course, that this shift is simply a result of
the failure in Heidegger’s own political ambitions, and so to treat it as a
kind of ‘sour grapes’ response, and while there may be some truth in this
from a biographical perspective, it should not be allowed to obscure the
philosophical issues that are nevertheless also involved. Indeed, as we
shall see shortly, there is a deep tension between ‘geographic’ modes of
thinking and the type of thinking that is characteristic of Nazi ideology,
and this tension becomes apparent, not only in Heidegger’s thinking, but
also in the work of Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche.

12
See my discussion of this in Heidegger’s Topology, chapter four.
13
One might argue that such a reading can be drawn, in part, from James Phillips’
argument in Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005), although Phillips focuses more on the idea of
‘the people’ and the role of poetry in Heidegger’s thinking in this period, than on
place as such (see, however, Phillips’ discussion of the ‘uncanny homeland’ –
‘unheimliche Heimat’ – on pp.169-217).
32 Geography, Biology and Politics: Heidegger on Place and World

III.
Just as a closer examination of Heidegger’s own involvement with
Nazism complicates the attempt to discern a simple line of connection
between Heidegger’s own fascist politics and his thinking of space and
place, so too does a closer examination of the intellectual history that
involves Heidegger, Ratzel, Vidal de la Blanche and von Uexküll lead to a
more complex picture than that which Agamben implies. To what extent
Heidegger’s concept of ‘being-in-the-world’ is actually indebted to or
influenced by von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt seems to me debateable –
nowhere have I seen any evidence that would demonstrate any direct
influence from one to the other as opposed to some convergence of what
were otherwise independent lines of thought, although Harrington, for
instance, speculates on the possibility of such influence. Heidegger was
certainly familiar with von Uexküll’s work at the time he wrote The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and, as Harrington points out, von
Uexküll himself drew attention to apparent similarities between his
thought and that of Heidegger in a 1937 paper.14 Yet while the exact
nature and extent of any influence of between von Uexküll on Heidegger
may be uncertain,15 there can be no doubt of the connection between von
Uexküll and Chamberlain. Indeed, what Agamben omits to tell us,
somewhat surprisingly perhaps, is that not only did von Uexküll write a

14
See Harrington, Reenchanted Science, pp.53-4; Harington refers to Uexküll `Die
neue Umweltlehre. Ein Bindeglied zwischen Natur- und Kultur-Wissenschaft’, Die
Erziehung: Monatschrift für den Zussamenhang von Kultur und Erziehung im
Wissenschaft und Leben 13 (1937), p.199.
15
My own view is that the influence is likely, if it exists at all, to be at a fairly
general level simply because of the neo-Kantian subjectivism – which I discuss
further below – that is such a central element in Uexküll’s thinking, and which
Heidegger clearly attempts to avoid, if not entirely successfully, even in Being and
Time. Heidegger and Uexküll may have both accept a holistic construal of the
relation between the human, or animal, and the world, but they differ significantly
in the way that holistic relation is understood (the analogy between ‘being-in-the-
world’ and the idea of the animal in its ‘umwelt’ is thus somewhat superficial, even
though both can be seen as exemplifying a similar holistic tendency). The interest
in Uexküll that is evident in the lectures that make up Heidegger’s The
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics seems to be underpinned partly by
Heidegger’s desire to connect his own thinking with contemporary biological
thought, and especially with the holist and anti-mechanist tendencies in that
thought, and partly, as I discuss below, by the problem that is presented by
Uexküll’s talk of the animal as having a world at all – talk that seems in conflict
with Heidegger’s own account of the animal as ‘poor in world’.
 Jeff Malpas 33

preface to Chamberlain’s book, but he was himself a close and long-time

friend of Chamberlain, having similar anti-Semitic and racist view
(although those views were not always apparent in von Uexküll’s
academic writing). Thus, Harrington quotes from a letter from von
Uexküll to Chamberlain in which von Uexküll writes: ‘The cohesive
power of the Jewish state is admirable. For that, the Jews are completely
incapable of building a state. All they produce is just a parasitic net that
everywhere corrodes national structures and transforms the Volk into
fermenting piles of pulp’.16
Although Heidegger cites von Uexküll’s work in The Fundamental
Concepts of Metaphysics, he does so, as I noted earlier, along with a
number of other prominent biologists and zoologists with similar anti-
materialist commitments. Moreover von Uexküll is discussed, not so much
because of the possibility of a convergence between his view of the
relation between animal and environment, and Heidegger’s conception of
being-in-the-world, but rather because his approach may be thought to
provide a scientific counter to Heidegger’s claim that the animal is poor in
world – what von Uexküll’s work may be taken to show is that the animal
does indeed have a world, contrary to Heidegger, albeit a different world
from the human. While Heidegger is generous in his estimation of the
significance of von Uexküll’s work, as of that of the other biologists he
discusses (and that generosity may well derive from Heidegger’s own
sympathies towards their holistic and anti-mechanistic approach), he also
concludes that there remains ‘a fundamental question whether we should
talk of the world of the animal – of an environing world or even of an
inner world – or whether we do not have to determine that which the
animal stands in relation to in another way’.17
Heidegger’s discussion of von Uexküll in 1929 stands within the
essentially Kantian frame of much of Heidegger’s thinking from the late
1920s. One of the problems that leads Heidegger away from that Kantian
frame is what he comes to regard as its incipient tendency, in spite of
Heidegger’s own efforts to counter that tendency, towards a form of
subjectivism or idealism. Thus, in commenting on a passage from the 1936
essay, ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art’, Heidegger writes that ‘Here lies
concealed the relationship of being to human being. This relationship is
inadequately thought even in this presentation – a distressing difficulty
that has been clear to me since Being and Time, and has since come under

16
Letter to Chamberlain, April 10, 1921; quoted in Harrington, Reenchanted
Science, p.60.
17
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, p.264.
34 Geography, Biology and Politics: Heidegger on Place and World

discussion in many presentations’.18 The inadequacy of the presentation

seems to lie in the possibility that the relationship at issue might be
construed as one in which being is somehow grounded or based in human
being – as Heidegger writes elsewhere concerning the way Dasein appears
in Being and Time, the presentation ‘still stands in the shadow of the
“anthropological,” the “subjectivistic,” and the “individualist,” etc.’ 19
Although Heidegger does not himself formulate any criticism of von
Uexküll along these lines in 1929 (and at that stage was only on the verge
of formulating such a criticism of elements of his own work), von Uexküll
does himself stand within a Kantian or better, neo-Kantian, frame of
thinking of the sort that Heidegger came increasingly to view as
increasingly problematic because of its subjectivist tendencies.
In this latter respect, while one can certainly view von Uexküll’s
concept of the organism in its world as a major development towards a
more integrated conception of the relation between organism and
environment, it nevertheless stands in clear distinction from the more fully
‘ecological’ conception of the relation between mortals and their world
that appears in later Heidegger, and may even be viewed as already
standing somewhat apart from early Heidegger’s conception of being-in-
the-world. Indeed, for all that Heidegger comes to regard Being and Time
as hampered by certain Kantian elements, it should be quite clear that part
of his intention in thinking of Dasein as ‘being-in-the-world’ is to avoid
any idea of the world either as standing apart from Dasein (as some pre-
given realm of ‘objectivity’) or as being constituted or constructed by
Dasein (as a function of a pre-given ‘subjectivity’). Von Uexküll’s account
of the animal in its environment, however, stands in a significant contrast
here, since it gives priority to the animal as determinative of its world,
treating each such world as a self-enclosed domain that is strictly speaking
inaccessible from outside, and so von Uexküll’s account remains
essentially subjectivist or phenomenalist.
Harrington draws explicit attention to the subjectivist character of von
Uexküll’s work, citing von Uexküll’s account of his sudden recognition,
on seeing a beech tree in the Heidelberg woods, that ‘this is not a beech
tree, but rather my beech tree, something that I, with my sensations, have

18
‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Off the Beaten Track (English translation of
Holzwege), trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), p.55.
19
Contributions to Philosophy, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p.208; see also the comments in
’’European Nihilism’, in Nietzsche, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1979-87), Vol IV (Nihilism), p.141.
 Jeff Malpas 35

constructed in all its details. Everything [about the beech] that I see, hear,
smell or feel are not qualities that exclusively belong to the beech, but
rather are characteristics of my sense organs that I project outside of
myself’20 The same subjectivism is also clearly evident in von Uexküll’s
published work – for instance, in his 1934 book, A Stroll Through the
Worlds of Animals and Men, von Uexküll invites us to:
…first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its
own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows. When we
ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is
transformed. Many of its colourful features disappear, others no longer
belong together but appear in new relationships. A new world comes into
being. Through the bubble we see the world of the burrowing worm, of the
butterfly, of the field-mouse; the world as it appears to the animals
themselves, not as it appears to us. This we may call the phenomenal
world or the self-world of the animal.21

Each world, according to von Uexküll, is thus a function of the

organism’s own nature, and so each world is determined biologistically,
one might say, rather than geographically. Indeed, that this should be so is
an important element that undoubtedly fed into von Uexküll’s racism and
anti-Semitism: different races form the world in different ways, and the
world of the Jew is therefore a different world from the world of the
Nordic Aryan. Yet it is not merely the idea of a connection between the
organism and its space, between the human being and its place, that is at
issue here, but the exact nature of that connection. The emphasis in von
Uexküll, and in many racial theorists from the same period, 22 on the
determining role of the organism in its species nature – which, in the case
of human beings, also means in its racial nature – stands in sharp contrast
to those positions that see the organism as determined by its environment,

20
Quoted by Harrington, from Uexküll’s unpublished autobiographical notes, in
Reenchanted Science, p.41.
21
‘A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men’, in Claire H. Schiller (ed.),
Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept (New York:
International Universities Press, 1957p.5.
22
Thus Ludwig Clauss writes in Die nordische Seele: Eine Einführung in die
Rassenseelenkunde (The Nordic Soul: An Introduction to Racial Psychology), that
“The manner in which the soul reaches out into its world fashions the geographical
area of this world into a ‘landscape’. A landscape is not something that the soul
alights upon, as it were, something ready-made. Rather it is something that it
fashions by virtue of its species-determined way of viewing its environment” –
Clauss, Die nordische Seele: Eine Einführung in die Rassenseelenkunde (Munich:
J.F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1932), p.19.
36 Geography, Biology and Politics: Heidegger on Place and World

or with positions that see organism and environment as mutually

determining or interdependent.

IV.
It has been common to assimilate racialist thinking of the sort
exemplified in Uexküll, with its emphasis on the difference between the
racial types associated with different regions or ‘spaces’ to Ratzelian
geographic ‘determinism’. In fact, Ratzel stands quite apart from writers
such as von Uexküll, and other racial theorists in general, simply on the
basis of his very different understanding of the nature of the connection at
issue here. It is indeed as an environmental or geographic determinist –
one who puts the emphasis on the human as determined by the
environment or geography – that Ratzel has been most commonly read, if
not entirely accurately, within English-speaking circles; and it is notable
that Ratzel also placed himself in clear opposition to the racist doctrines
that were common in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He thus
writes that ‘The task of ethnography is …to indicate, not in the first
instances the distinctions, but the points of transition, and the intimate
affinities which exist; for mankind is one though very variously
cultured’.23 Ratzel’s notion of Lebensraum, living space, was an
expression of his commitment to the idea that the forms of human
organisation were always bound to their own geographic space, and could
not be understood in separation from that space. As Robert Dickinson
writes:
Ratzel…thought of the anthropogeographic unit as an areal complex
whose spatial connections were needed for the functioning and
organisation of a particular kind of human group, be it the village, town or
state. The concept of lebensraum deals with the relations between human
society as a spatial (geographic) organisation and its physical setting.
Community area, trade area, milk-shed and labour-shed, historical
province, commercial entity, the web of trade between neighbouring
industrial areas across state boundaries – these area all subsequent
variations of the concept of the ‘living area’.24

Although Ratzel believed that the development of states would imply

an increase in the state’s Lebensraum, he did not take the idea of

23
Ratzel, History of Mankind, trans. A. J. Butler from 2nd German edn., 3 vols
(London: Macmillan, 1896-8), p.4.
24
Robert E. Dickinson, The Makers of Modern Geography (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1969), 71.
 Jeff Malpas 37

Lebensraum as providing any justification of territorial expansion as such.

It was the later deployment of the term within the ‘geopolitics’ of Rudolf
Kjellen and Karl Haushofer (who was himself keen to assimilate Ratzel to
his own camp) that led to its instrumentalist use within Nazi ideology.
Moreover, Ratzel’s opposition to racialist theory can be seen, in fact, as a
direct consequence of his prioritisation of environment and geographic
space – although he also held, quite independently, it seems, that ethnic
mixing itself contributed to the vigour of a society (a view that he may
have developed during his early experiences in the ‘new’ societies of
Mexico and the United States).
Ratzel’s emphasis on the importance of geographic space in social,
cultural and ethnographic analysis can be seen as an important precursor to
more recent ideas, not least those of writers such as Deleuze and Guattari,
as well as Foucault, concerning the spatialized character of social,
economic and cultural formations. Within French geographic thought,
Ratzel was especially influential, and the work of the founder of French
‘regionalism’, Paul Vidal de la Blanche, can be seen to arise directly out of
Ratzel’s geographical approach to human history and ethnography, and as
a continuation of the Ratzelian idea of ‘human geography’ or
anthropogeography. Like Ratzel, Vidal de la Blanche also rejects
biological determinism, but whereas Ratzel emphasises the role of the
physical environment in human history and culture, Vidal de la Blanche
takes a more interactive approach. The regional geography that he initiated
was based on the study of the interplay between the cultural and the
environmental, but the place or region was primarily to be defined in
cultural terms – in terms of the way the environment was shaped by
human interaction – rather than as determined by natural topographic
features alone. The physical environment is seen as opening a range of
possibilities for human interaction rather than as determining that
interaction – hence Vidal de la Blanche’s commitment to a geographical
‘possibilism’ rather than ‘determinism’. Interestingly, Henri Lefebvre was
strongly influenced by Vidal de la Blanche, and his early work on the
Pyrenees can itself be seen as containing important elements of Vidalian
geographic practice.25
In both Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche, the emphasis on a conception
on geographic space is not only crucial to the theoretical positions they
advance, as well as to their significance within the history of geography,
but also to the differentiation of their thought from that of von Uexküll and

25
See J. Nicholas Entrikin and Vincent Berdoulay, ‘The Pyrenees as Place:
Lefebvre as guide’, Progress in Geography 29 (2002), p.143
38 Geography, Biology and Politics: Heidegger on Place and World

others like him. It also marks, of course, a key point of differentiation from
Nazi ideology, and, in this respect, Heidegger must also be positioned
alongside Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche. Moreover, it is not just the
emphasis on the role of the geographic (although what is meant by that
will also require some further examination) as opposed to the biologistic
that is at issue here. What characterises the work of von Uexküll, as well
as Nazi racial theorists, is the tendency to understand the nature of the
animal or human ‘world’ as based in certain general forms of species-
nature, ‘racial stock’ or racialised ‘soul’. Such a tendency is already one
that diminishes the significance of geographic space or place – it is the
general type that is important in such thinking, in contrast to which the
thinking that is oriented toward place typically gives emphasis to the
regional and the local.
This latter issue turns out to be a crucial point of difference when one
looks to the way Nazi ideology is related to the German ‘Heimat’
tradition. The idea of ‘Heimat’ – a term usually translated as ‘Homeland’
(though the translation does not capture the richness of the original
German) – is connected with ideas of one’s place of origin, the place in
which one belongs, not only in the sense of the region from which one
comes, and in which one may still dwell, but also in the sense of one’s
childhood home. In its academic form, the focus on Heimat and
Heimatskunde, was part of the same orientation towards an understanding
of human life and culture as it stood in relation to space, and so to region
and landscape, as is evident in Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche. Thus
Ratzel’s Deutschland: Einführung in die Heimatkunde,26 which was a
standard text in German schools in the early part of the twentieth century,
essentially consisted in a regional ethnography of Germany. Elements of
the Heimat tradition were themselves appropriated by the Nazis appearing
in Nazi propaganda and rhetoric as well as in work of racial psychologists
such as Clauss – elements of local and regional tradition and culture could
be seen as a reflection of the racial stock associated with that locale or
region. Yet the emphasis here is not on the local and regional as such, but
rather on the local and the regional as they stand in relation to the racial
and the national. The totalising politics of the Nazi state was not about
strengthening local or regional associations and culture, but rather about
the creation of a political apparatus geared to the satisfaction of a set of
universalising desires and ambitions.27 It is thus that Nazism, for all its
romantic anti-modernist elements, can also be seen as the instantiation of

26
F. Ratzel, Deutschland. Einführung in die Heimatkunde (Leipzig: Grunow
1898).
27
See Heidegger’s Topology, pp.25-6.
 Jeff Malpas 39

something essentially modern – the attempt to reshape the world in a

certain ideal image, to impose one’s will upon that world, and to make it
one’s own. Here the sort of ‘subjectivism’ that one finds in von Uexküll
appears to have developed into a determinate political form – the
geographical becoming itself subject to the racial and the psychological.
This is not to say, of course, that the Heimat tradition, or other
traditions and discourses that draw on notions of place and belonging, are
always innocent of problematic tendencies or elements. The point is rather
that such spatially or ‘geographically’ oriented traditions and discourses
should not themselves be construed as inevitably tied to certain particular
political tendencies or movements. Thus one may well find notions of
place and belonging appearing in association with reactionary and
exclusionary forms of politics – one need only look to events in present-
day Palestine, in the Balkans, or even on Sydney’s Cronulla Beach – but
one also finds such notions being drawn on in conjunction with politics of
a more progressive and inclusive character. Much current discussion of
sustainability, for instance, is based around the attachment and connection
between individuals, communities and the local or regional environments
in which they live; while indigenous politics, especially in Australia, but
elsewhere in the world also, gives a central role to the need to recognise
indigenous connection to country, and, sometimes, to find ways of
articulating or re-articulating modes of connection that might be relevant
to the non-indigenous.28 That the spatial and ‘geographic’ concepts that
are at issue here are indeed so ubiquitous, irrespective of the particularities
of political commitment, is itself indicative of the centrality and
significance of those concepts.

V.
It is often claimed that to take human being as standing in an important
relation to place or geographic space is already to presuppose a
homogeneity of culture and identity in relation to that place, as well as to
exclude others from it. This the core of the argument that is often used to
demonstrate the supposed politically dangerous character of ‘geographic’

28
For an exploration of some of the complex network of issues that is at stake
here, with particular, but not exclusive, reference to the Australian context, see
Linn Miller, Being and Belonging (PhD dissertation, University of Tasmania,
2006), and also, though from a somewhat different perspective, Peter Read,
Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000).
40 Geography, Biology and Politics: Heidegger on Place and World

thinking (an argument that appears, for instance, in Levinas,29 but is also
assumed, apparently as self-evident, in many other writers). Yet this claim
is usually only advanced in specific instances – it is frequently directed
against Heidegger, for instance, but is seldom deployed against indigenous
forms of thought that similarly prioritise place or geographic space – and
typically depends on already construing ‘geographic’ thinking in a way
that assumes its problematic political associations rather than exhibiting or
proving them (and seldom delves too deeply into the actual historical and
philosophical details that might be relevant here). What the work of
thinkers such as Heidegger, as well as of Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche,
and the broader tradition of humanistic geography, brings to prominence is
the very question of place or geographic space as such.
In Heidegger’s work the questionability of place is already evident, if
indirectly, in Being and Time, in terms of the problematic status accorded
to spatiality within the structure of ‘being-in-the-world’ at the same time
as ideas and images of space and place constantly emerge as central
elements within the overall analysis (in, for instance, the very idea of
‘being-in’, as well as the notion of the ‘Da’, the ‘There’, of Dasein).30
Much of Heidegger’s later thinking can be seen as itself a sustained
attempt to elucidate the nature of place or topos, hence Heidegger’s own
characterisation of his thinking as a ‘topology’ of being.31 In his thinking
of place, Heidegger can also be seen as urging a re-thinking of space.
Thus, in the very late essay ‘Art and Space’ (written in conjunction with
the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida whose contributions was in the form
of series of lithographs), Heidegger urges an understanding of space, in
terms, not of the ‘physical-technological’ space of ‘Galileo and Newton’,
but rather of ‘clearing away’ (Räumen) – the sort of ‘clearing away’ that
opens up a region for settlement and dwelling.32 While space is that which
Galileo and Newton theorise, it is also, that clearing away and opening up,

29
See Levinas, ‘Heidegger, Gagarin and Us’, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on
Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp.
231-34 – in this essay Levinas writes, for instance, that 'One's implementation in a
landscape, one's attachment to Place, without which the universe would become
insignificant and would scarcely exist, is the very splitting of humanity into natives
and strangers. And in this light technology is less dangerous than the spirits of
Place.'
30
See Heidegger’s Topology, chapter three.
31
See ‘Seminar in Le Thor 1969’, Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and
François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp.41 & 47.
32
Martin Heidegger, ‘Art and Space’, trans. Charles Seibert, Man and World 1
(1973), p.4; from ‘Die Kunst und der Raum’ (St Gallen: Erker Verlag, 1969), p.6.
 Jeff Malpas 41

that ‘spacing’, that allows for the possibility of appearance, and that occurs
always and only in relation to specific places. It is this sense of space,
itself closely associated to geographic rather than purely geometric space
(to use Paddock’s contrast) that turns out to be so important in the later
Heidegger’s meditative thinking on the happening of the Fourfold, and
with it the ‘aesthetics’ (we might also say, with an eye to the place of ethos
here, the ‘ethics’) of dwelling.
The space and place at issue here is not, however, a space or place
already determined by, nor simply determinative of, human being. Instead,
it is that within and on the basis of which human being is itself brought to
articulate and meaningful appearance. Thus, in the account of the Fourfold
in essays such as ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’, place is that which is
established in and through the gathering together of earth and sky, gods
and mortals, in the thing, while it is also that within and on the basis of
which the thing itself appears, as it is also that which allows the
appearance of the elements of the Fourfold as such – the sky is that very
sky which arches above us, and the earth that which lies beneath our feet,
here, now, in this place, and it is also here, in ‘this’ place, and only here,
that the encounter between mortals, and between mortals and gods
(whether in their absence or presence) also occurs. Mortals thus play a role
in the coming to be of places, although not exclusively so, and places
themselves play a role in the appearing of mortals. On this basis, place
might be viewed in terms somewhat reminiscent of Plato’s conception of
the chora (a term sometimes equated with space, but also with place) as
the very matrix of becoming – although unlike Plato’s chora,33 which
remains always indeterminate, place itself comes to appearance, and so
appears in a singular and determinate form (as just ‘this’ place) in the
happening, the Ereignis, of place that is also the happening of the
Fourfold.34
Although there has sometimes been a tendency within humanistic
geography to treat place is ways that sometimes assume a certain
‘subjectivism’ in relation to place – place is thus viewed as a function of
human experience (a tendency that is sometimes evident in, for instance,
Tuan’s work35) – there is nevertheless a complexity and indeterminacy that
has also merged as a key element in the geographical understanding of
place as that has developed over the last century or so, particularly in the
line that derives from Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche, and that

33
See Plato, Timaeus, 48E-52D
34
For a more detailed account see Heidegger’s Topology, chapter six.
35
See my brief comment on this in Place and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p.30 n.33.
42 Geography, Biology and Politics: Heidegger on Place and World

encompasses such as Tuan, Relph and others. J. Nicholas Entrikin, for

instance, emphasises the ‘betweenness of place’36 (an emphasis also
present in Heidegger), while Doreen Massey, at the same time as she has
been critical of a certain rather caricatured version of the Heideggerian
position,37 has nevertheless also argued for the centrality of a conception
of place articulated through notions of process, interconnection, and
diversity.38 Places are thus understood as dynamic structures that allow for
the interaction between the human and the environmental, and as
themselves determined in and through such interacting, at the same time as
they also participate in it. Such a view is far removed from the conception
of place as determined by the racial and the biological that is to be found
in the work of such as von Uexküll and Clauss, and to which, to reinforce
the point, Heidegger must be seen as opposed. The rise of place as a
central concept in contemporary thinking within cultural and human
geography – a rise to which Heidegger has himself contributed – should
thus be seen as a function, not of the increasing dominance of a
reactionary and deterministic conservatism, but quite the opposite – as the
opening up of place as the proper site for the questioning of ourselves, our
world, and our locatedness within it.
In the Parmenides lectures from the early 1940s, Heidegger comments
on the Greek topos as follows:
ȉȩʌȠȢ is the Greek for ‘place,’ although not as mere position in a manifold
of points, everywhere homogeneous. The essence of the place consists in
holding gathered, as the present ‘where,’ the circumference of what is in
its nexus, what pertains to it and is ‘of’ it, of the place. The place is the
originally gathering holding of what belongs together and is thus for the
most part a manifold of places reciprocally related by belonging together,
which we call a settlement or a district [Ortschaft]. In the extended
domain of the district there are thus roads, passages, and paths. A
įĮȚμȩȞȚȠȗ ȉȩʌȠȢ [‘daimonios topos’] is an ‘uncanny district.’ That now
means: a ‘where’ in whose squares and alleys the uncanny shines
explicitly and the essence of Being comes to presence in an eminent

36
See Entrikin, The Betweeness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990).
37
See Doreen Massey, ‘Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place’, in Jon
Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson and Lisa Tickner (eds),
Mapping the Futures (London: Routledge, 1993), pp.64-67.
38
See Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994), especially pp. 117-72.
 Jeff Malpas 43

sense.39

That place should appear in this way as ‘uncanny’ ought to indicate

how far Heidegger is from viewing place as merely some ‘given’ that is
already secure and determined. Indeed, in the ‘Letter on “Humanism”’
from 1947, commenting on one of his earlier essays, Heidegger writes:
In the lecture on Hölderlin’s elegy ‘Homecoming’ (1943) [the]… nearness
‘of’ being, which is the Da of Dasein …is called the ‘homeland.’ The
word is thought here in an essential sense, not patriotically or
nationalistically, but in terms of the history of being. The essence of the
homeland, however, is also mentioned with the intention of thinking the
homelessness of contemporary human beings from the essence of being’s
history….Homelessness…consists in the abandonment of beings by being.
Homelessness is the symptom of oblivion of being.40

The ‘Homeland’ (Heimat) that is invoked here is not some place of

safety and familiarity. It is the same place that Heidegger refers to in the
passage from the Parmenides lectures as that ‘uncanny district’ in which
‘the essence of Being comes to presence’. And why should it be uncanny?
– because the coming to presence of being is not a matter of the coming to
be of some being, but is rather the coming to presence of the
questionability that belongs to being essentially. In Heidegger, therefore,
homecoming names the turning back to the questionability of being, which
is also the questionability of our own being. It is this return to
questionability that is also at issue in the turn to place, and it is what marks
Heidegger’s ‘geography’ from the deterministic subjectivism and
biologism of such as von Uexküll.

VI.
Agamben’s juxtaposition of Heidegger with von Uexküll and, perhaps
more importantly, Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche, turns out to be
significant for reasons rather different from those that Agamben himself
may have had in mind. It not only directs attention to the complexities of
the intellectual connections that we may trace out between Heidegger and

39
Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p.117.
40
‘Letter on “Humanism”’, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp.257-58. See, once again, James Phillips’
discussion of this idea of the ‘uncanny homeland’ (‘unheimliche Heimat’) in
Heidegger’s Volk, pp.169-217.
44 Geography, Biology and Politics: Heidegger on Place and World

other thinkers, but also to the way in which Heidegger’s thought connects
up with a number of important elements in geographic thought that centre
on notions of ‘geographic’ space, and to the complexities that surround
those notions. One of the core questions that emerges here is not merely
whether the idea of a connection between human being and place is itself
politically problematic, but just how that connection should be understood.
Is it a matter, as von Uexküll, Chamberlain or Clauss would have it, that
place and space, and so also world, are themselves functions of the
biological, of a racially determined human nature, of a certain sort of soul?
Or is it rather that the world is itself worked out in and through place, and
that place provides the proper and only frame within which the animal and
the human can come to appearance, within which they appear as animal
and as human?
This latter question can be seen to bring us back within the ambit of
Agamben’s original comments, since they return us to the question of the
relation between place and world, as well as the relation between the
human and the animal, but they place the issue of place, and of space, at
the centre of that discussion, whereas it remains relatively peripheral in
Agamben. There is, in fact, good reason to suppose that we cannot begin
to understand the being of the human or of the animal unless we can first
address the relation between world and place. In that case, and contrary to
the position developed by Agamben, the open does not name that which
stands between the animal and the human, but rather the open, but
bounded, space, the place, within which an encounter between the human
and the animal is itself possible. Agamben has his own reasons, of course,
for wanting to shift the concept of the open in the way that he does, but in
so doing he shifts the discussion away from the very question that he also
opens up through the associations that he suggests between Heidegger,
von Uexküll, and the geographical tradition that includes Ratzel and Vidal
de la Blanche.
 HEEDING HEIDEGGER’S WAY:
QUESTIONS OF THE WORK OF ART1

ELIZABETH M. GRIERSON

The work of art, an event and a disclosure

I was walking along a path with two friends
the sun was setting
I felt a breath of melancholy.
Suddenly the sky turned blood-red
I stopped and leant against the railing,
Deathly tired
Looking out across flaming clouds that hung
Like blood and a sword over the
Deep blue fjord and town.
My friends walked on — I stood there
Trembling with anxiety
And I felt a great infinite scream
Pass through nature.
(Edvard Munch, in Wood, 1992: 96)

Edvard Munch and The Scream (1893) has just hit the headlines. “Outrage
at ease of Scream theft” announces yet another art heist from a public
museum. “No alarms rang as the robbers threatened a security guard with
a gun, forced people to lie down, and removed the painting, worth about
$80 million” (The New Zealand Herald, 24 August, 2004: B1). In the
report the work of art is described as “one of art’s best-known treasures”;
“one of the most instantly recognisable images in art”; one of “four
versions of The Scream which was part of a series called The Frieze of
Life”; a “howling figure”; and “the world’s most famous and most
frequently reproduced painting”. Each of these statements acts as a mode

1
This essay has been developed form an earlier version that appeared in ACCESS:
Critical Perspectives on Communication, Cultural & Policy Studies, 22 (1 & 2),
2003.
46 Heeding Heidegger’s Way: Questions of the Work of Art

of representation serving to categorise the object or artwork. What is

interesting in this account is that the work of art as we know it, as art, is
not the major interest of the report. In six columns of reportage there are
only a few scattered references to “the art” itself (but what is “the art”? we
might ask.). The main attention is devoted to the event as an object of
examination and representation, which includes an account of the poor
security of the gallery and humiliation of the Oslo gallery custodians (“the
ease with which they took [the painting] was embarrassing in the
extreme”); the language spoken by the thieves (“they spoke Norwegian”)
during the robbery; and the location of getaway car and smashed frame
(seen as “identification clues”); some quantifiable information such as the
painting’s worth (“about $80 million”) and comparative visitor statistics at
the Munch Museum (“more than four million visitors”). In addition to the
factual periphery, and in the interests of activating the popular
imagination, there was a report of the curious mix of personnel involved in
solving the mystery of a previous theft of The Scream (National Gallery,
February, 1994), named as “a Scotland Yard detective, a top football
player [in] a sting operation as audacious as the original theft”. Such
equivalences brought sting, theft, and audacity into correspondence with
each other to comprise the primary object of interest for the public: this
was an audacious theft operation.
What these phrases and references represent to us is a world of “art”
that has become a world of something else that is not art, and yet … this
starts to be perplexing. If it is not “art”, but “event”, then what is the
event-world that this entity called art inhabits and gathers around itself?
From what has been written of the robbery, perhaps it is true that “we get
the picture”. But in “The Age of the World Picture” Heidegger asks
(Heidegger, 1977b: 129), “What does ‘picture’ mean?” He then answers
his own question with, “‘Picture’ here does not mean some imitation, but
rather what sounds forth in the colloquial expression – ‘We get the
picture’ (literally, we are in the picture) concerning something”.
Heidegger’s thinking on ‘world picture’ reveals that “representation” is at
work here – “what is, is set before us, is represented to us”, but also “what
is stands before us – in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in
it – as a system”. So the circles are widening here, to include systems in
the world, events of thought and perception. We, as the perceivers, are
brought into the moment of perception as we “get the picture”. It “throbs
with being acquainted with something, with being equipped and prepared
for it”. So we are in a world of preparedness as we "set in place" the
"picture" that we say we get.
 Elizabeth M. Grierson 47

Reading further, we find that Heidegger is taking us beyond

“representation” as “the character of subjective perception” (Heidegger,
1977b: 131) to see “the one who – in company with itself – gathered
towards presencing, by that which opens itself” and he takes the question
of language back to the Ancient Greeks with, “in order to fulfill his
essence, Greek man must gather (legein) and save (sözein), catch up and
preserve, what opens itself in its openness and he must remain exposed
(alëtheuein) to all its sundering confusions” (ibid.). If the “picture” that we
get in the event of an art heist is represented to us via the language of the
news media, then its “object-being” may be separating us from a gathering
“towards presencing” in the Heideggerian sense of Being.
This discussion has started with a work of art, an event and a
disclosure. The way we are accessing these three things is by writing
through a discourse event. In the picture of this discussion there is a work
of art, namely The Scream, variously described in a range of genres as
modes of representation. In a moment’s event (23/8/04), The Scream has
been represented in a way that befits a technological age of heightened
informational exchange in the twenty-first century, in a named location
(Oslo, Norway), as an object in a world of locatable objects, categories
and events. Thus it is represented as a thing with significant capital value
that should have been well-secured and was not; a thing that has caused
embarrassment to others who were looking after it; a thing that re-
inscribes public interest and talk; a thing that signifies the general interest
people have in technologically inscribed things and events in the world.
This is the picture that we get through the reportage – The Scream as a
rationally (dis)ordered object, a technologised event through which we are
juxtaposed in a rationally ordered relationship through the process of
linguistic and visual representation of the work of art as an object in a
world of objects.

Public talk, language and being

The Scream as a “work” of art, an aesthetic object, a painting, one hundred
years old, has been presented in different ways in discourses of art history,
and publicly, by diverse people in diverse settings, as a metaphor of
modern life. “We get the picture”, they say, and generally seem to agree.
This discussion will address the question of modern life and its apparent
destitution shortly as it works its way back towards the work of art.
However, first let us consider this: what is the implication of “publicly” in
the way Munch’s work of art may be known? Heidegger’s Ontology–The
48 Heeding Heidegger’s Way: Questions of the Work of Art

Hermeneutics of Facticity (Heidegger, 1999a) may throw some light on

this question.
In his Lecture Course from the Summer Semester of 1923 at Marburg
University, where he taught from 1923 to 1928, Heidegger (Heidegger,
1999a: 24-27) addresses the question of “Facticity as the being-there of
Dasein in the awhileness of temporal particularity. The ‘today’”
(Translator’s footnote #1: “H’s heading: ‘Hermeneutics of the Situation’”)
(Heidegger, 1999a: 24). In this section Heidegger (Heidegger, 1999a: 25)
draws the reader into a consideration of the way that “[t]he being-there of
Dasein has its open space of publicness and its ways of seeing there. It
moves (a basic phenomenon) around a definite mode of discourse about
itself: talk (technical term)” (Heidegger’s emphasis).
How is it that The Scream can be known in the sorts of terms that are
publicly agreed (by “everyone”)? Heidegger (Heidegger, 1999a: 26)
speaks of “publicness” in relation to being:
publicness is the mode of being of the ‘every-one’: everyone says that…,
everyone has heard that…, everyone tells it like…, everyone thinks that…,
everyone expects that…, everyone is in favor of. […] The talk in
circulation belongs to no one, no one takes responsibility for it, everyone
has said it.

Thus “publicness” is not an “out-there” objective situation when Dasein as

a “temporal particularity” (Heidegger, 1999a: 24) is considered. Rather
“publicness” is a particular “mode of being”; and in that “mode of being”
Dasein is “being-interpreted in the today” (Heidegger, 1999a: 26).
Heidegger is drawing us into our own present:
the awhileness of temporal particularity is the today – in each case
whiling, tarrying for a while, in the present, in each case our own present.
(Dasein as historical Dasein, its present. Being ‘in’ the world, being lived
‘from out of’ the world – the present – everyday.) (Heidegger, 1999a: 24).

It may seem that this discussion is getting sidetracked into an interpretive

analysis of Heidegger’s Dasein (there/here-Being; to be there; being there)
in its present-ness, rather than talking about the work of art in question, or
the question of modern life and its apparent destitution. However, it is
attempting to show Heidegger’s fundamental and enduring concerns for
his philosophy of Being and his profound questioning of the forgetting of
the question of Being in Western metaphysics. Such forgetting is an
inscribed practice via philosophy’s post-Cartesian emphasis on
epistemology and the Western world’s constructions of causality. For
Heidegger, any questions to do with truth, reality and being are already
 Elizabeth M. Grierson 49

infused with deeply entrenched ontological pre-suppositions in Western

thought, to which he returns again and again as fundamental flaws of
transcendental idealism, technological determinism, and teleological
thinking/being. In productionist metaphysics the resources of thinking and
things (technological) become as “standing-reserve” for Heidegger
(Heidegger, 1977a: 17) to be stored-up for later possible use. But even as
we store-up, the possible becomes “standing-reserve” for later capitalisation.
Thus the world and its entities (even entities of thought) are objectified for
our use and separated repetitively from the time of being. Thus the Being
is represented as the Being-of-knowledge, the Being-of-belief, the a priori
Being-of-presence. Heidegger turns towards the Being of the being in time,
in the temporality of our existence, and speaks through a new language of
possibility of the b/Being that has not been thought prior to the act of
thinking.
Here is a critical spirit; a way of working towards some sort of
disclosure through the very act of language with its paradoxes and poetics,
as a “gathering” of the world, a “clearing of being”, a “revealing” of the
world in relation to finality, one’s death and the finitude of being-in-the-
world. In his writing, Heidegger seeks language that displaces entrenched
propositions and philosophical assumptions, “invent[ing] his own
technical terminology” (Roberts, 1966: 147), which many readers find
difficult if not alienating. However, working through this language with its
particularities and poiësis can be an illuminating experience. As Otto
Pöggeler put it (1963), “Heidegger’s thought must be understood as a way.
[…] Heidegger has always understood his thinking as going along a way
[…] into the neighbourhood of Being” (cited in Krell, 1999: 31).
The discussions from the Marburg seminar (1923) are pre-Being and
Time (Heidegger’s magnum opus of 1927) and they reveal how his
thinking on the central question of “being” (Sein) has been, since the
Greeks, through Medieval scholasticism, and the Western Enlightenment,
ill-matched with the question of time. By asking questions of the being of
Being, Heidegger’s engagement with ontology is a “fundamental
ontology” that seeks to get underneath the questions posed by specific
ontologies of history or nature. Heidegger’s Dasein is not of biological
origin, nor of consciousness; not contingent nor conditional; not pre-
determined in essence nor rationality; not confined to time or place; but is
in and of time and place, a disclosing thing in the world – “from the outset
a question concerning truth, understood not as the correspondence of
propositions to states of affairs, but as disclosure, unconcealment, and
what Heidegger later called ‘the clearing of being’, die Lichtung des
Seins” (Urmson and Rée, 1995: 129).
50 Heeding Heidegger’s Way: Questions of the Work of Art

Hermeneutical explication in the today

In his early lectures (1923), Heidegger (Heidegger, 1999a: 25) took us
further into the question of talk as a statement of “publicness” and the
need for us to be “wide-awake” for and in “today”, as he draws attention
to the attempts “to get a grasp of the today hermeneutically through wide-
ranging and longwinded discussions which provide entertaining portraits
of the so-called most interesting tendencies of the present”, which he
identifies as “hermeneutical explication”, but one that “must constantly
struggle against the possibility of getting sidetracked…” (ibid.). The
“ontology of Dasein must be hermeneutical, that is, aware of its own
historical formation and indefatigably attentive to the problem of
interpretation” (Krell, 1999: 21).
The early Heidegger, while largely influenced by Husserl’s
phenomenology and Dilthey’s hermeneutical investigations, questions the
limits of transcendental phenomenology as a way of understanding being-
in-the-world. He questions philosophy’s reliance upon “traditional
epistemologies and metaphysical systems that appeared to have forgotten
the salient features of human being as being-in-the-world” (Urmson and
Rée, 1995: 129). In this forgetting, philosophy has forgotten the question
of being in the being who questions. His approach towards hermeneutics,
which is engaged in a deeper sense in Being and Time (1927), is
demanding a reappraisal of hermëneuein (to interpret), and hermëneutike
(technë) (the art of interpretation), by interpreting the being who interprets
texts in the world, including, and by example (in his later writings), works
of art as the work of art.
If art as work has the potential to reveal a strife of being-in-the-world,
then there must be a calling up, an unfolding or revealing of the world
beyond what might simply be the interpretive public talk about the work
as object/event. However, in the institutionalisation of the art as aesthetic
object, “hermeneutical explication” has become a dominating facet of “art
world” representations with their dependence on interpretation of aesthetic
and cultural values.
This is a fundamental characteristic of disciplinary and public talk that
underlies the interpretive disciplines that have become institutionalised
and publicly normalised, in which the work of art is positioned and from
which institutional and public practices feed. For example, Art History,
Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and even the Creative Arts (visual arts,
dance, music, performance) have largely depended upon such interpretive
qualities of discourse for their legitimating technologies of method,
manner and meaning in the making, positioning and evaluating of the
 Elizabeth M. Grierson 51

work of art as a representational practice or product. This is not to say that

representation per se has not been thoroughly deconstructed and
reconsidered through post-Heideggerian, poststructuralist engagements on
the dominance of “what is seen”. Yet it is fair to say that there appears to
be, in education as in the art world, a continuing re-inscription of
interpretive frameworks by which self-validating scaffolds of the
disciplines are built, and by which the work of education, and the work of
art, might be positioned in a metaphysically inscribed world of categories.
In this sense, in our institutional practices with their pragmatism and
accountabilities, we are conditioned to respond, no doubt neutrally, to a
productionist demand. The command is determined by, and determines,
the need to labour towards order, to sort out the world technologically and
work (with)in it as a rationally ordered Being coursing teleologically
through history towards a “better” future. Are we, in fact, Enframed by
well-intentioned and self-perpetuating typologies and truths around which
institutional discourses construct (manufacture) a series of propositions
that are accountable to logic? Is this Heidegger’s identifiable “danger” in
the technologised constructions of thought, knowledge and truth?
Rather than assuming correspondence with a series of logical
propositions, Heidegger works through questions concerning technë and
poiësis as a way of revealing the “danger” and a possible “saving-power” of
technology. Heidegger’s concern for technology as an Enframing and
ordering forth of causality, as discussed in “The Question Concerning
Technology” (Heidegger, 1977a: 12), proposes a way of thinking through
the essence of technology, which Heidegger says is “by no means
anything technological” (Heidegger, 1977a: 4). “So long as we represent
technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it.
We press on past the essence of technology” (Heidegger, 1977a: 32). In
seeking its “essence”, Heidegger turns to the German poet Hölderlin: “But
where danger is, grows/ the saving power also” (Heidegger, 1977a: 28 &
34). And from Hölderlin he shows that “the essence of technology must
harbor in itself the growth of the saving power”; then almost immediately
asks, “In what respect does the saving power grow there also where the
danger is?”; and then, “we have said that in technology’s essence roots and
thrives the saving power” (Heidegger, 1977a: 28-29). Heidegger’s way of
working through these questions on the essence of technology is a way of
movement, a way of disclosure through the temporality of process; and in
that process there lies his work of revealing. “Technology is a way of
revealing”, he writes; and, “It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing,
that technë is a bringing-forth” (Heidegger, 1977a: 13).
52 Heeding Heidegger’s Way: Questions of the Work of Art

Accepting the task at hand is to recognise the “bringing forth” in the

work of art and education, we might then ask of Heidegger, how might
such “bringing forth” be brought forth? And Heidegger might reply,
“Technology comes to presence … in the realm where revealing and
unconcealment take place, where alëtheia, truth, happens” (Heidegger,
1977a: 13), and “the revealing that brings forth (poiësis) is also a way that
has the character of destining” (Heidegger, 1977a: 29). We might then ask,
what of truth? Of truth, explains Heidegger (Heidegger, 1977a: 11-12),
“[t]he Greeks have the word alëtheia for revealing”, which was translated
by the Romans to veritas, and in modern language, truth, usually
understood as “the correctness of an idea”. And then we will see that
throughout his writings Heidegger seeks to move “truth” further towards
the Ancient Greek conception of “revealing”.

Dasein and interpretation

Letting beings be, which is an attuning, a bringing into accord, prevails

throughout and anticipates all the open comportment that flourishes in it.
(Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth”, 1999b: 129).

If we seek a “bringing-forth” of truth in the world then we might return to

Munch. He was walking across a bridge and at that moment in time “the
sky turned blood-red”; he stood there “[t]rembling with anxiety”. His
words, in his diaries of the 1890s, tremble with poiësis. And these words
are ultimately thrown out to the world to be interpreted and represented
into something else, forms or objects to be made into meaningful
metaphors of the fin de siècle of the nineteenth century.
How might Dasein be at work in the work of art (in the painting as in
the words) as a way of opening or dismantling re-presentation and opening
the space of disclosure to something other? In his lectures on the work of
art (at Freiburg, Zurich and Frankfurt, 1935-36), later published (1950) as
the full and richly written essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art”,
Heidegger argues, as explained by David Krell in his introduction to the
English translation (Heidegger, 1999c: 141), that “revelation belongs to
every work of art: the work erects a world which in turn opens a space for
man and things”. How might such a space be opened to the work of
“revelation” as a “clearing of being”, in the work itself, we might ask?
Krell then notes that perhaps the greatest challenge of “The Origin of the
Work of Art” is “how through the work of art we are to envisage the
creative strife of world and earth” (Heidegger, 1999c: 141). Heidegger is
thus moving us beyond the work of art as a “standing-reserve” (Heidegger,
 Elizabeth M. Grierson 53

1977a: 15), as an object of aesthetic enquiry, interpretation or judgement,

or a material object of interest primarily for its making as an event of
technë. He is moving us beyond these modes of form and objecthood,
which separate us as subject from them as object, to a way of relating,
knowing and being in the world. He is moving us elsewhere, other than the
mode of concealing the very poiësis that may be entailed in the work of
art, and turning us towards a “revealing which in the sense of poiësis, lets
what presences come forth into appearance” (Heidegger, 1977a: 27). Thus
Heidegger is moving us towards ergon that “characterizes the manner of
presencing […] to presence-as-work (presence understood verbally) in the
work of work-ness” (Heidegger, 1973: 5).
The Scream may compel us by its “creative strife”, as the moment of
recognition of terror (that which presences) “comes forth into
appearance”. Munch’s moment of terror comes forth during a walk at
sunset on a trip to Ekebergsåsen. Is that the sort of presencing Heidegger
speaks of, where the mask-like face of one solitary figure, with open
mouth, hands clutched to side of head, opens “what presences” in and to
the world?
If we turn to art historical discourses, we find that terms like
“presencing” are not liberally scattered in the way this work of art has
been interpreted or understood. More likely are we to find lineages and
links back to past things or forward to future events – a schema of
progressive thought in the relations of Idea and Energeia, Whatness and
Thatness (Heidegger, 1973). For example, this death-mask of Munch’s
may be traced epistemologically through textual inter-connections, such as
those suggested by art historian Robert Rosenblum, in the influences of a
Peruvian mummy at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (see Bischoff, 1990:
53-55); and also to literary sources such as Dostoyevsky and philosophies
of Kierkegaard, whose outlook brings impending natural disaster into a
soul “so heavy that no thought can uplift it any more. Oppressiveness and
anxiety are brooding over my inner being, sensing an earthquake to come”
(cited in Bischoff, 1990: 54). And there is the possible forward link to
Rainer Maria Rilke who, in 1920, refused to write on Oskar Kokoschka on
the basis that “Munch’s lines already included this constructive power of
terror – but there was infinitely more of Nature in him than in Kokoschka,
and so he was always able to reconcile the opposites of preservation and
destruction in purely spatial terms, to blunt their edge in an image or
picture…” (cited in Bischoff, 1990: 54-55). However, from whence
springs this language by which Munch’s work is represented? Could it be
the framing echoes of the humanist art historian tracing the referential
content of the work, seeking always to locate its place and position in
54 Heeding Heidegger’s Way: Questions of the Work of Art

historical time as an intellectually stabilising gesture? What else, or other,

might be at work in the “work-ness” of our present undertaking, and what
else might be spoken by the other who speaks?
In the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Heidegger speaks of Van
Gogh’s painting of a pair of old, well-worn shoes2. “But what is there to
see here?” he asks. “Everyone knows what shoes consist of” (Heidegger,
1999c: 158). Thus in emphasising what is commonly known he is
effectively problematising the given-ness of art as a visual field of
representation that corresponds to some object or other “out-there” in the
world. He is addressing the endless interpretations of content and form
that art commentators are given to, that come under the umbrella of
“representation” – locating through image and language the known objects
or entities in the world of appearances. “Form and content are the most
hackneyed concepts under which anything and everything may be
subsumed”, iterates Heidegger (Heidegger, 1999c: 153); and then takes us
further in our considerations by stating, “The work makes public
something other than itself” (Heidegger, 1999c: 145). So, it is the
“something other” in the work, or elsewhere, that we must be open to
when confronted with art.

Midnight is never far away

Heidegger seeks to “discover the essence of the art that actually prevails in
the work” (Heidegger, 1999c: 144) when he asks: “What happens here?
What is at work?” This is a fundamental question for consideration by the
educator in the disciplinary fields of art, be they visual or fine arts, media
arts or music, dance or drama, written or oral, poetry or novel, design or
new-media, histories or technologies. When the arts per se are
encountered (made, considered, disseminated, engaged, performed or
revealed) what happens, what prevails? Skills and technologies?

2
Art historian Meyer Schapiro disputes Heidegger’s statement that the shoes
painted by Van Gogh are indeed peasant shoes. Although the shoes play a central
role in Heidegger’s arguments regarding the “equipmental being of the equipment”
as dwelling in the time of being and belonging to the earth, Schapiro wrote to
Heidegger in 1965 to point out that he (Heidegger) had overlooked Van Gogh’s
own concerns for painting the shoes as a “sacred relic” of his own life. (See
discussion in Berman, 1996). Clearly Schapiro approaches the shoes with the art
historian’s search for historical accuracy and truth to the artist’s intentions and
subjective presence, whereas Heidegger has allowed the shoes to enter the realms
of his heuristic unfolding of a philosophical argument. Two different discourses
are thus at work with the “peasant” shoes as the problematised signifier.
 Elizabeth M. Grierson 55

Manipulation of methods and media? Aesthetics and appreciation?

Interpretations and judgements? Exhibitions and events? Idea and
Energeia? What is being brought into proximity with what? What
distanced? What processes or assumptions are at work here? Heidegger
confronts the “pair of concepts, matter-form” (hyle, matter; morphë, form),
when he says, “the distinction of matter and form is the conceptual schema
which is used, in the greatest variety of ways, quite generally for all art
theory and aesthetics” (Heidegger, 1999c: 153). Questioning the schema is
crucial to Heidegger’s project. Where lie the historical separations, we
ask; and Heidegger answers, “The metaphysics of the modern period rests
on the form-matter structure” (Heidegger, 1999c: 156); and we see we are
working through a dismantling of historically embedded prescriptions of
thought-systems and ways of “knowing/being” in the world, as we work
towards an opening space of ergon.
In “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics” we read: “Every
sort of thought […] is always only the execution and consequence of a
mode of historical Dasein, of the fundamental position taken toward Being
and toward the way in which beings are manifest as such, i.e., toward
truth.” (Heidegger, 1999d: 295-296). The historical modes whereby formal
categories are constructed are so patently functional in the production and
interpretation of art, as in the production of knowledge, and the production
of corresponding understanding in education, work, and in the world at
large. Reading through Heidegger, it soon becomes apparent that his
project is re-thinking the division of matter and form in the dismantling of
Western metaphysics; re-thinking the question of being and time, to
overcome aesthetics and appreciation with their objectifying of the work
of art, (for an analytical approach to aesthetics, see Dickie, 1997), to
overturn the limiting of technë to technocratic, technological means-end
thinking; and to question instrumentalist technology by re-thinking it in
more human terms. Yet our dominant world-models of technology,
institutional, public and educational practices, including the arts and
education, have been founded and formed on such causal demands of
work as labour, a progressive means-end relationship. The formulation of
selves as subjects within these demands and their demanding ends is
exacerbated via the new formulations of knowledge economies and
knowledge societies, heavy with the politics of accountability in
production and management – be it teaching or research, business or
marketing, arts or engineering, science or health, or in the fundamentally
social acts of working and living in neighbourhoods (societal groupings).
Even the industries of care and hospitality, entertainment and media, sport
and religion have been folded into this means-end instrumentalism in a
56 Heeding Heidegger’s Way: Questions of the Work of Art

highly pragmatised worldview in which no one/thing/event/work is

outside the defining métier. By these means we are enframed, as in
Hediegger’s enframing technologies (nothing technological). What is this
“work” of living, of technology, of education, of public discourse, that we
perform and by which we are shaped? How might we, and the work, come
into some other relational mode of being in the temporality of our
meeting?
If work “as a world” opens a space to something other than itself as an
“object-being” to be represented, and according to Heidegger it does, then
working towards an understanding of this process might be liberating in
some way. In the shadow of technologised demands, institutional practices
are disciplined by economic governance, frameworks, and newly devised
necessities (always newly, for the future). The Enframed present inscribes
new modes of “being creative”, aligning art with industry in the category,
“Creative Industries” as a productive category for future economies. Now
these alignments correspond with new political truths by which the world
will be known. In the means-end worldview of economic predictions, even
time is brought sharply into teleological focus, pairing art with industry as
a perfect correspondence of economic labour.
In such calculative thinking does the foot fit the slipper; and how long
will the fit last? Is the technology of productionist thought the “danger” or
“saving power”? Are we, as the everyman, in the words of Nietzsche
(1874), “ringed around with frightful abysses, and every step he takes
ought to make him ask: Wither? Whence? To what end?” (Breazeale,
1997: 35, cited in Grierson, 2000: 109). The time for questioning is now,
as midnight is never far away. It is in the work of art that we might recall
the questions to ask: “What happens here? What is at work?”

The work of art and unconcealment

What else might be at work in “the realm where revealing and
unconcealment take place, where alëtheia, truth, happens” (Heidegger,
1977a: 13) if “the revealing that brings forth (poiësis) is also a way that
has the character of destining” (Heidegger, 1977a: 29)? It seems that we
have now come beyond art as a thing to be represented, as we move
towards the question of revealing as truth in the work; and with that we
have emerged from the reliance on the correspondence theory of truth into
another process of truth happening in the work of art. All these questions,
and more, are worked-through by Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work
of Art” where, in his customary style of circularity, he started with the nub
of the problem concerning the origin of the work of art – “The artist is the
 Elizabeth M. Grierson 57

origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without
the other” (Heidegger, 1999c: 143), and circled through questions of
“Thing and Work” (Heidegger, 1999c: 146-165), “Work and Truth”
(Heidegger, 1999c: 165-182), “Truth and Art” (Heidegger, 1999c: 182-
203) (following his three lectures), ending with an Epilogue referring to
“the riddle of art” and noting that his foregoing reflections “are far from
claiming to solve the riddle. The task is to see the riddle” (Heidegger,
1999c: 204). So what sort of riddle, what sort of “disclosure” is taking
place here? For the reader there has been no easy solution, no
correspondence in questioning the question of truth. The reader has been
set to work as the truth is set to work in the work of language and thought.
What happens, in Heideggerian terms, through the work of art, as in
the writing and reading of the text, is an unconcealment of questions of
concealment, “where alëtheia, truth, happens”. The relations of reader and
viewer, writer and artist, text and image, are inflecting each other when
brought into relations through language as a way of being. For Heidegger
the work of art is neither “present-at-hand” nor “ready-to-hand” as the
entities in Being and Time. As Smeyers explains (Smyers, 2002: 82), “The
work of art is neither of these but rather an entity through which the truth
of beings is disclosed – it has a privileged relation to Being, similar only to
that accorded to Dasein”. Krell writes of Heidegger’s later thoughts on this
relation in “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951):
To the thing as technological component and as scientific object
Heidegger opposes the thing as the place where the truth of Being,
disclosedness, happens. In the work of art such disclosedness is
compellingly experienced – perhaps most of all in the work of poetry
(Krell, 1999: 344).

So in Munch’s work of art something more than experiencing art as

categorised thing or entity, aesthetic object or cultural document is to be
considered possible. The work opens a space where the world might be
pictured in different ways. Firstly, the art work has been represented in its
referential object-being, via the image content of a man by a fjord,
overwrought with anxiety, metaphorised in terms of Man in a
contemporary state of being in a destitute Western world at the end of the
nineteenth century, a time of modernity in crisis. Secondly, the picture of a
man overcome with anxiety is brought, in its “workly character”, into
relation with the world in a way that “presences”, that “gather[s] towards
presencing, by that which opens itself” (Heidegger, 1977b: 131) to the
world of strife. In the first, via epistemological processes of representation,
Munch was in correspondence with the clutter, confusion and over-
58 Heeding Heidegger’s Way: Questions of the Work of Art

occupation of social and personal spaces of anxiety. He was surrounded by

mortality and angst; the evidence records it; and he thereby expressed it in
a painting whose iconography was later interpreted in the language of
historical liberalism as the sublime moment of terror before Nature. As
Bischoff (Heidegger, 1990: 53) put it, “the fear and loneliness of Man in a
natural setting which — far from offering any kind of consolation — picks
up the scream and echoes it beyond the bay unto the bloody vaults of
heaven”. Then there is the media interpretation of The Scream as an object
of correspondence in the contemporary event of an art heist.
However, Heidegger’s way of thinking about the work of art and its
relation to Dasein involves something more, in the work, that perhaps we
have not yet located. If his way of thinking raises the question of Dasein,
as an essential relation to questions about the work of art, it follows that
Dasein is well-embedded in these historically inflected discussions where
lies “the constellation in which revealing and concealing, in which the
coming to presence of truth, comes to pass” (Heidegger, 1977a: 33).

The destitution of modernity

The Scream stands historically as an iconic work of the modern world’s
sense of anxiety, but what of its “presencing”? Heidegger was not alone in
his diagnosis of modernity as a sickness. Commentators place him
alongside Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard (see, for example,
David Roberts on Heidegger and Existentialism, 1966; although Lovitt
(Lovitt, 1977: xiii) writes, “Heidegger is not an ‘existentialist’. He is not
concerned centrally or exclusively with man”).
Heidegger’s concern was deeper than an epistemological arena of
enquiry. His concern was with “the relations between man and Being, with
man as the openness to which and in which being presences and is known”
(Lovitt, 1977: xiii). His project was deeply historical as it sought to
deconstruct the determinations of historical Being in its a priori
conceptions, from the metaphysical lineage and sovereignty of Aristotle
and Kant in Western thinking. Working through this project, Heidegger
located the question of truth through three junctures of history: “in the
human or divine intellect” (Thomas Aquinas); “nowhere but in the mind”
(Descartes); and “in the epoch of the incipient consummation of the
modern age” (Nietzsche) (citing from Nietzsche, Krell, 1991: 252).
Where, then, lies the potential for “the incipient consummation” as the
working through of “truth” in the “presencing” of the work of art; and how
could such presencing be a process of revealing what is, and in what way
truth presences? In Heidegger’s work there is deep underlying concern
 Elizabeth M. Grierson 59

with a “sickness” of the modern world with its calculative thinking and
“extinction of ‘the divine radiance’” (Young, 2002: 35). What is at stake
here? Heidegger (Heidegger, 1977a: 33) puts it this way:
The coming to presence of technology threatens revealing, threatens it
with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and
that everything will present itself only in the unconcealedness of standing-
reserve. Human activity can never directly counter this danger. Human
achievement alone can never banish it.

A grave danger is identified, that of the extinguishing of revealing through

the consuming ordering of technology, and the technological thinking of
productionist metaphysics, as “standing-reserve”. This Heidegger sees as a
destitution. Heidegger “identifies three leading symptoms of modernity’s
spiritual ‘sickness’: loss of the gods, the ‘violence’ of technology, and loss
of ‘dwelling’ or ‘homelessness’” (Young, 2002: 3). These fundamental
concerns for the modern world – the Western world of productionist
metaphysics – underlie Heidegger’s project with its acute awareness of
Dasein’s “own interpretive origins [as] a ‘destructuring’ or dismantling of
the transmitted conceptual apparatus, a clearing of the congested arteries
of a philosophical tradition that has all the answers but no longer
experiences the questions – especially the question of its own provenance
and purpose” (Krell, 1999: 21) – hence, the “diagnosis”.
Firstly, there is “loss of the gods” (Young, 2002: 32), which entails
“loss of community” (Young, 2002: 32-33). Then the inability of man to
“dwell”, that is “loss of being at home in the world, loss of ‘homeliness’ in
the sense of the German heimisch – which Heidegger takes to constitute
the ‘plight’ of modern humanity (BDT, p. 161)” (Young, 2002: 33). In this
loss there is “modern man’s inability to ‘own’ death (WPF, p. 96)”. This is
significantly the source of our anxiety as a “fundamental way of being-in-
the-world” as we are fundamentally “insecure” and “homeless”, and as
“we cannot own death, and since pain is an intimation of death, we cannot
own pain either” (Young, 2002: 33).
The third major symptom, “‘the violence’ of modern technology – its
violation of both non-human and human nature”, reduces all to “‘raw
material’ for the process of production and consumption, a process which
has no purpose other than its own self-perpetuation […] and to fill up the
emptiness left by the meaninglessness of modern life”, noting that this is
particular to Western modernity (Young, 2002: 33). And Heidegger
(Heidegger, 1977a: 17) turns us to face the ordering of the world and its
work: “Everywhere, everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately
60 Heeding Heidegger’s Way: Questions of the Work of Art

at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further
ordering […]. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand]”.
So by these diagnoses man in the generalised sense is a sorry state in a
world of over-technologised “standing-reserve” which is the danger and
the destitution; and from there Heidegger proposes a “saving power” that
could be accessed through the work of art in its revealing of
spatial/temporal relations beyond its mere “object-being”. “The whole art
industry, even if carried to the extreme and exercised in every way for the
sake of works themselves, extends only to the object-being of the works.
But this does not constitute their work-being”, says Heidegger (Heidegger,
1999c: 166) as he turns to a particular work of art to show more clearly the
“work” of “disclosure”: Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes, which are,
according to Heidegger, “a pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And
yet” (Heidegger, 1999c: 159).1 He then shows, by his way of working
through his text, that the painting “is the disclosure of what the equipment,
the pair of peasant shoes is in truth. This work-being emerges into the
unconcealment of beings, alëtheia” (Heidegger, 1999c: 161). In this
section of his essay he makes clear that we must not just settle for seeing
or imagining “a pair of shoes in general, or simply look at the empty,
unused shoes as they merely stand there in the picture” (Heidegger, 1999c:
159). What we are seeking to discover is “what the equipmental being of
the equipment in truth is” (ibid.). So the being, Dasein must be interpreted
in its moment of time and being as it brings the relations of time and being
into proximity as a mode of “belonging”. This has a sense of dwelling in
the time of being as a way of living in the world. “From out of this
protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself”
(Heidegger, 1999c: 160).
He presents the exemplar of “the old wooden bridge” (in Heidegger,
1977a: 16; and Heidegger, 1999e: 354) spanning the river from bank to
bank, which “brings stream and bank and land into each other’s
neighbourhood” (Heidegger, 1999e: 354), as belonging in and with itself
and gathering all into earth. The bridge “dwells” thereby in the relations of
its being rather than dominating technologically as object in the landscape.
Heidegger speaks also of the relational quality of the Greek temple that
“makes visible the invisible space of air” as it “illuminates also that on
which and in which man bases his dwelling” – that is earth, “the sheltering
agent” (Heidegger, 1999c: 168). The Temple reveals a relational space of
being: “The temple-work, standing there, opens up a world and at the
same time sets this world back again on earth” (ibid.); and he takes this to
the work of art and asks, “what, then, does the work-being of the work
consist?” (Heidegger, 1999c: 169); and brings us to see a work of art that
 Elizabeth M. Grierson 61

is “set up” in a collection or exhibition in terms of its work-being relations

rather than its object-being, and he asks, “What does the work, as work,
set up?” And he answers this way: “Towering up within itself, the work
opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force” (ibid.).

The work follows the movement of showing

as a way of concluding
Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential
reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen
in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and,
on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art. But
certainly only if reflection on art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the
constellation of truth after which we are questioning (Heidegger, 1977a:
35).

This essay has been questioning as it seeks to disclose something about the
work of art and education, something about presencing in the work-being
of work, something about being in time, in and with the world. There is
something very temporal about this discussion in the process of its writing
and reading. It appeals to no sense of transcendental hope that it will be
grabbed and disseminated as the ultimate answer for a new approach to
art, education or living. If there is a “heeding [of] Heidegger’s way” in the
process of its writing and reading, then a process of “revealing and
concealing, in which the coming to presence of truth, comes to pass”
(Heidegger, 1977a: 33) may be at work.
Heidegger said, “the work erects a world which in turn opens a space
for man and things” (Heidegger, 1999c: 141). If there is a clearing, an
opening, through which “the truth of beings has set itself to work”
(Heidegger, 1999c: 162) in the “workly” character of work, then
technology might be at work here as “no mere means” but as “a way of
revealing”. We are reminded by Heidegger (Heidegger, 1977a: 33) that,
“The coming to presence of technology threatens revealing, threatens it
with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering”. So it
would seem there is something here to heed. “If we give heed to this, then
another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to
us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth” (Heidegger, 1977a: 12).
If the work-being of the work of art, and the work of writing, can open
up spaces for unconcealment of relations in the world, as a horizon of
disclosure of both the “danger” and “saving power”, then we may seek a
similar mode of unconcealment in our work of being in the world. We
62 Heeding Heidegger’s Way: Questions of the Work of Art

may set ourselves to work as the “setting forth” of being and disclosure in
the horizons of our labour.
We may thus set ourselves to work as a work of art in Heidegger’s
sense. In art, as in education, we may then open spaces “not to listen to a
series of propositions but rather to follow the movement of showing”
(Heidegger, On Time and Being, 1972). Then we might find a way to
dismantle the pre-suppositions embedded in our metaphysicality of
thinking, being and doing in Western frames of knowing the world. Rather
than the Enframing of such correspondences in the world of work and
living, we might heed Heidegger’s way of throwing light upon the
fundamental limitations of subject-object separations as a way of being in
and with the world. Then, hearing Heidegger, we might set ourselves to
work in such a way that exposes those limits and “in the sense of poiësis,
lets what presences come forth into appearance” (Heidegger, 1977a: 27).
And here lies the project of this discussion, to “pay heed to the way” as a
“way of thinking” (Heidegger, 1977a: 3), and to reveal something of “the
constellation of truth after which we are questioning” (Heidegger, 1977a:
35) in the time of poiësis in our work-being.

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M. Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art". In Basic Writings, ed.
David Krell: 139-212. London: Routledge.
Heidegger, 1999d
M. Heidegger, "Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics". In
Basic Writings, ed. David Krell: 267-305. London: Routledge.
Heidegger, 1999e
M. Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking". In Basic Writings, ed.
David Krell: 343-363. London: Routledge.
Krell, 1999
D. Krell, "General Introduction. The Question of Being". In Basic
Writings, ed. David Krell: 1-35. London: Routledge.
Lovitt, 1977
W. Lovitt, "Introduction". In The Question Concerning Technology
and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt: xiii-xxxiv. New York: Harper
& Row.
Roberts, 1966
D. Roberts, Existentialism and Religious Belief, ed. Roger Hazelton.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Smeyers, 2002
P. Smeyers, "The Origin: Education, Philosophy, and a Work of Art".
In Heidegger, Education, and Modernity, ed. Michael Peters: 81-101.
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
64 Heeding Heidegger’s Way: Questions of the Work of Art

The New Zealand Herald

New Zealand Herald (Tuesday, August 24, 2004). [Newspaper].
"Outrage at ease of Scream theft". World, B1.
Urmson and Rée, 1995
J. O. Urmson and J. Rée, eds., The Concise Encyclopedia of Western
Philosophy and Philosophers. London: Routledge.
Young, 2002
J. Young, Heidegger’s Latest Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Wood, 1992
M.-H. Wood, ed., Edvard Munch: The Frieze of Life. London: National
Gallery.
 THE PITCH BLACK NIGHT OF HUMAN
CREATION: CALLING HEIDEGGER’S
PHILOSOPHY OF TERROR TO ACCOUNT

PETER MURPHY

I.
The Greeks were the first historical people. At least Heidegger thought
so. They were the first to create themselves in time, the first to break the
rule of the habitual, the first to be original. The title of Heidegger’s 1935
lecture on “The Origin of the Work of Art” sums up in three words—
origin, work and art—the emergence of an historical people.1 The “work”
of the work of art is to open up a world. The “origin” of the work of art is
the beginning, the advent in time, of such a world. This emergence in time
is historical. “Art’s” work is to create a world historical people.
The first historical people, the Greeks, were the beginning of all
beginnings. Their beginning lay in the art of the Greek temple. This art
work opened up a “world” (Heidegger, 1971: 41-43). This act of world
creation was both an act of art and an act of nature. This aesthetic nature
was the self-generating creating coming forth of things for the first time.
“The Greeks”, Heidegger muses, “called this emerging and rising in itself
and in all things phusis” (Heidegger, 1971: 42).
As we’ll see, this is both true and untrue. But, for the moment, let us
just continue to follow Heidegger along.
“To be a work means to set up a world” (Heidegger, 1971: 44). To set
up means to open up. To open up means to “to come forth for the very first
time” (Heidegger, 1971: 46). The work of art opens a world by bringing
forth all the fundamental distinctions of things—the remoteness and
nearness, the scope and limits, of things. The rockiness of rocks, the
glimmer of metals, the spaciousness of space, the colour of things—in
short, the qualities of things, the self-subsistence of things, their is-ness,
their being, originates when art opens a world. All of this comes forth

1
See “The Origin of the Art of Work” in Heidegger, 1971.
66 The Pitch Black Night of Human Creation: Calling Heidegger’s
Philosophy of Terror to Account

from where? It comes forth from concealment, from self-seclusion, from

what it is that shutters, protects, hides and conceals. In the case of stone
and metal, that means the earth. Heidegger, the master of paradox, has the
work of art—in other words, the work of world creation—bring forth the
earth. “In setting up a world, the work sets forth the earth” (Heidegger,
1971: 46).
The work of art that begins a world does so by opening and revealing.
It opens up both what is hidden away and what hides away. Even the
earth, which conceals and hides, is brought forth by the work of un-
concealment. Heidegger is determined to show what is concealed but in a
very peculiar way. He is a master of paradox, do not forget. He is
fascinated by a kind of truth that is an untruth (Heidegger, 1971: 60).
There is no enlightenment intended here. The truth of un-concealment is
intimately bound up with concealment, while openness brings forth denial
and evasion. What is most open is what is most concealed, what is most
disclosed is what is most shuttered.
The notion that truth is an untruth is, at first glance, perplexing. But in
fact it is not unusual, and certainly the idea is not peculiar to Heidegger.
Art is a fiction or an artifice, and yet it can tell the truth. It can reveal and
show things that otherwise are obscure to us. Yet Heidegger is not talking
about fiction or artifice or imagination. He is talking about some other
truth.
This truth reveals what it reveals through evasion and denial. It unveils
by concealment. This is the truth of war. It is the truth that is a war, with
all of the characteristics of war not least evasion and deceit mobilized
against openness and honesty. Truth, though, is not identifiable with one
side or the other of this war. Truth is neither honesty nor deceit but rather
the battle of the two. It is at war with itself. In this war, truth harbours
concealment, and concealment is brought forward by revelation
(Heidegger, 1971: 49). But this is not, Heidegger insists, slyly brushing off
the Pre-Socratics, an “empty unity of opposites” (Heidegger, 1971: 49).
Rather, truth is a war marked by “essential striving”. This is where “the
opponents”—unveiling and concealing—“raise each other into the self-
assertion of their natures” (ibid.). In this war, the work-being of work—the
nature of the work of the art of creation—“consists in the fighting of the
battle between world and earth”, openness and closure.
One wonders whether this tells us something about Heidegger’s own
nature as well. Was the nature of his own self, a battle ground between
openness and concealment?
Whatever the case of Heidegger personally, the war of concealment
and revelation is a strange battle. It is paradoxical battle. For in this battle,
 Peter Murphy 67

enemies are friends and friends are enemies. When Heidegger asks Pilate’s
cynical question—“what is truth?”—he answers it simply enough: truth is
untruth (Heidegger, 1971: 60). Openness is concealment. That is simple
enough. But how does Heidegger get to that point?
Well, Heidegger says, the Greek word for truth, alƝtheia, means the
unconcealedness of being (Heidegger 1971: 36, 51, 59). For the present,
let us not worry that it means nothing of the kind. Greek truth, alƝtheia,
was not revelation but the overcoming of oblivion. Truth was the
antipodes of the mythical Hades and its river of Lethe, the source of
deadly sleep. Greek truth negated the negation of the lethal soma because
it stood aside, apart, from the birth and death of things in time. Greek truth
signified what was imperishable or immortal.
Still, we should not argue about this, not yet anyway. Let us for the
moment simply accept Heidegger’s declaration at face value: Truth is un-
concealment. So how then can truth also be concealment?
The sting in the tail, Heidegger declares—and Heidegger is a master of
declaration—is that un-concealment was, for thought, the most concealed
thing in Greek existence. The middle term of this conundrum was art. The
work of art—which originates worlds, bringing them forth by opening
them up—manages in this act of un-concealment to bring forth
concealment. To explain this, Heidegger draws an analogy. Un-
concealment is like a clearing in the midst of being. Thanks to this
clearing, beings are revealed. But this has the effect that beings are
concealed as well. Heidegger notes, and quite reasonably so, that
everything we encounter, every presence we meet, always withholds itself
(Heidegger, 1971: 53). This is the “curious opposition” of presence. Every
time a being opens up, it also hides, obscures and conceals itself. It
conceals, it denies, it dissembles (Heidegger, 1971: 54-55). Truth is
untruth.
There is something in this. Revelation is not pretty. When we insist on
the truth, when we demand that someone “tell me the truth”, we often
expect the worst. We expect something bad—sometimes something
terrible—to be revealed. “Truth time” exposes bad things. We hide bad
things. Truth exposes what has been hidden.

II.
Enough, for the moment, about truth—what about art? Art is a work
that brings forth a world. The work is the bringing forth. Bringing forth is
creation (Heidegger, 1971: 58). That which is created is the being that
grows out of its own nature by its own accord. Creation is phusis—that
68 The Pitch Black Night of Human Creation: Calling Heidegger’s
Philosophy of Terror to Account

Greek word again (Heidegger, 1971: 59). Creation is the outgrowth of a

self-growing, self-organizing nature. Creation is an “emerging and rising
in itself and in all things”. That is a very Greek notion. We recognize the
echoes of Plato and Aristotle in it. In Heidegger, though, self-organization,
self-movement, and self-ruling are also self-originating in the sense of
genesis. Preoccupation with genesis or origin is not characteristically
Greek. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” is far
removed from Plato’s demiurge that imitates the patterns of the forms of
the cosmos. The work of art, the work of creation—in Heidegger’s
account—is the work of origin or genesis. This hints at a Creator God. But
Heidegger’s account is not theistic. Rather it is aesthetic. In other words,
to the extent that it is religious, it is a kind of art-religion. It is the work of
art that creates. It does so through the unmediated character of a beginning
(Heidegger, 1971: 76). Origin, origination, and incipience are central to
the work of art. Worlds are created through beginnings.
Such beginnings are an emergence in time out of nothing. There are no
media or forms out of which worlds emerge, which is to say also that there
is no mediation by immortal, durable, persistent forms. There is no
metaphysics. This is so, Heidegger insists, because worlds are beginnings,
and a beginning cannot begin in something else, determined by something
else. It cannot be mediated through something else. This is so because
beginnings—true beginnings which are also untrue beginnings—are world
historic. History is the advent of what has no precedent.
Now a brief word of qualification: Such elemental beginnings,
Heidegger maintains, have nothing to do with what is primitive. The
primitive is futureless and endless. It remains outside of history’s time. In
contrast a beginning contains in itself its own end. Origin thus supposes
extinction. This is a paradox of creation. What is primitive in contrast
doesn’t have this paradoxical character. A beginning thus is a beginning in
time. It is an act of temporal differentiation as opposed to temporal
repetition. This act discloses itself in a massive polemos. Creation is an
upsurge in the midst of a titanic struggle of powers. It is destructive and
constructive. As a consequence, worlds that have grown old are
demolished, while other worlds, new worlds, worlds that are truly new,
emerge in their place.
A beginning in time ferments strife. It does so because a beginning, an
opening, is both unfamiliar and extraordinary. It is unfamiliar because it is
new, and what is new, truly new, undoes what precedes it. This undoing is
what makes that which is truly new also preternaturally extraordinary. It is
extraordinary because it creates a world both that has a precedent (the
Greek beginning) and that has absolutely no precedent whatsoever. World
 Peter Murphy 69

historic creation is thus torn—it is impossibly, almost inconceivably torn.

It is torn because it emerges in and out of an explosion of forces, each of
which both obliterate and become the other. Thus, of necessity, this
emergence contains strife—unimaginably tensile strife.
It is hardly surprising then that emergence is a state of emergency, and
the beginning, the advent, is a war. Heidegger declares that beginnings
begin in a war with the familiar and the ordinary. Art unleashes this war. It
is a war of truth against itself. It is a war of truth that is fictional and of lies
that reveal things. It is also a war between revelation and concealment. In
this war, what is hidden is exposed and what is revealed hides itself from
the world. Along the rim of this paradoxical volcanic rift occurs the act of
foundation. Visceral paradoxes, like the paradox of the opening of the
earth, help to elucidate the impossible-possible event of a ground-laying
grounding (Heidegger, 1971: 76). In such a beginning, founding, or
ground-laying occurs an act of history or, more precisely, the founding act
of an historical people (Heidegger, 1971: 76-77).
This is Adventist History. According to Heidegger, this “in the
beginning” has happened three times. The first time was in ancient Greece,
“when Being was set into work, setting the standard”. The second time
was in the Middle Ages when the realm of beings that Greece opened up
was “transformed into a being in the sense of God’s creation”. Note the
awkwardness of Heidegger’s expression when he talks about the medieval
era. The third time of founding was the Modern Age—when beings
became objects (Heidegger, 1971: 77). Heidegger’s philosophy is full of
anticipation of the coming of a fourth time.
In each of these cases, history begins. It starts over but without
repetition, even if the Greeks “set the standard”. Whenever the work of art
does its work, a thrust enters history. Art does the work of truth at war
with itself. It founds, it originates.

III.
In all of this, there are some things to agree with Heidegger. Yes, art is
world making. Yes, acts of creation are paradoxical. Yes, there are a
handful of societies that have managed to install paradox at their heart.
Yes, the ancient Greeks and the Modern European West would be
included in this cluster. It is doubtful, however, if the Middle Ages would
make the grade—and, even if Heidegger would protest it, Rome and
America also belong in this cohort, possibly Japan as well. All of these are
societies driven by deep, deep paradoxes, sometimes almost unfathomable
70 The Pitch Black Night of Human Creation: Calling Heidegger’s
Philosophy of Terror to Account

paradoxes, and all them thus capable of acts of world making not seen, and
more to the point not possible, in other less ambidextrous societies.
But, as for Heidegger’s account of creation, I’d take issue with that in
almost every aspect. What Heidegger offers is a philosophy of “creation
out of nothing”. The beginning that interrupts history, which starts and re-
starts it yet without repeating it, is a disclosure of Nothing. Creation brings
forth the something that is nothing, or the nothing that is something. I
happily accept that this is not per se nonsensical or rather it is a non-sense
that makes sense. Creation and creativity rely on the force of paradox. This
force might be thought of as the engine of creation. Paradox is essential to
the nature or phusis of creation. What is at issue is not this generality, but
rather the specific creationist paradox of the “creation of something out of
nothing”—the creation of determinations out of indetermination.
To see where the creationist paradox leads Heidegger, let us turn our
attention to the lecture series that he gave in the winter semester of 1941
(Heidegger, 1993). There, in those lectures, we begin to see clearly the
menace of the idea of creation out of nothing, and the ominous
implications of creation forged in the battle of the unfamiliar with the
familiar amidst the strife of truth at war with itself.
This is the battle of a truth that is untruthful. It is war and, in war,
warriors deceive. They survive on cunning and ruse. So creation out of
nothing in the first instance is the hiding of truth that begins things by the
un-concealing of them. Un-concealment, alƝtheia—that which for the
Greeks had been the overcoming of the oblivion of death of the river lethe,
the a-lethal act—in Heidegger’s account hides the truth. Hiding the truth,
lying, is the work of art. It reveals first by hiding a (dreadful) truth—the
truth of obliteration that is the essence of Being. To this end Heidegger
invokes Nietzsche: “One who tells the truth ends by realizing that he
always lies” (Heidegger, 1991: 215). Thus “we have art so that we do not
perish from the truth” (Heidegger, 1991: 216). “We need the lie in order
that we achieve victory over this reality […] in order to live” (Heidegger,
1991: 217). Still rehearsing Nietzsche, Heidegger says of art: it is the will
to semblance. It is illusion, deception, and untruth. Art lies. The art of war
is the art of lying. The lie of Nietzsche’s artist, however, is not just
strategic in nature. Its rationale is not just to attain victory over the enemy.
More fundamentally the lie hides what is shocking, namely the works of
lethe. It shelters us from the experience of its horror. It shields us from
seeing what is dreadful. The lie is necessary so that we do not look into the
abyss. We cannot cope with the unimaginable concealed in the abyss.
Heidegger, though, is not Nietzsche. For just as much as Heidegger
admits to the power of the aesthetic lie, he also doesn’t (really) believe in
 Peter Murphy 71

it. Rather he wants us, mortals, to confront, engage, and be annihilated by

the fatal truth of the abyss. This is why he says that truth is at war with
itself. This is not truth in the Greek sense of a-lethal knowledge, the
unvarnished counter to oblivious death. Heidegger’s truth is not the Greek-
Christian death of death (Carroll, 2001). It is not even the consoling
untruthful truth that Nietzschean artists mint. It is not their coddled play
with transgression and fictitious horror. Ordinary works of ordinary artists
are works of imagination. Creation is the work of the unimaginable. This
is the truth that succumbs to oblivion and that desires, or has us desire,
death. It is a truth that throws back the shutters to reveal a petrifying
pitiless nothingness. Truth is horror, truth is terror. Truth is the scream. If
art hides it or prettifies it, then philosophy reveals it and sanctifies it. It
does so not to silence the screams but in order to amplify them—for the
scream is the unspeakable speech that is the sign, the confirmation, and the
validation of the coming of annihilation. Heidegger’s philosophy speaks
truth to death when it calls up the obliteration that is the essence of being.
Obliteration, not just negation, on this account is creation. Only by
destruction can new worlds be created. Thus, Heidegger reasons, human
beings must become apolitical: “without city and place, lonely, strange
and alien... without statute and limit, without structure and order, because
they themselves as creators must create all this”.2 Only in nothing, and
only through the overpowering power of struggle, strife and polemos that
leads to the unutterable un-doing of things, do position, order and rank,
cleavages, distributions and joints, in short, the world, open up. And only
this type of world-becoming is creative.
Creation is originary or incipient (Heidegger, 1993: 5-6). This,
Heidegger proposes, is the significance of the Greeks. They begin the
beginning. They perform the first act of incipient creation, where the
beginning contains the future or the end. When Heidegger says that “the
inception of our history is the Greeks”, what he means is that the Greeks
are the beginning of beginnings, the foundation of foundations (Heidegger,
1993: 13). Let us all be “struck by the incipient”, he declares (Heidegger,
1993: 17).
I am not sure that exposing ourselves to the thunder-bolt of the
incipient is, at all or in any respect, a good idea—at least if we place any
value at all on our lives. We will soon enough discover that, so far as
incipient creation is concerned, the act of creation requires our destruction.
This is the concealed truth of the beginning and subsequent re-beginnings

2
This comes from Heidegger’s 1942 lectures on Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”.
The translation is taken not from the standard English language translation,
Heidegger (1996), but from Ward (Ward, 1995: 192).
72 The Pitch Black Night of Human Creation: Calling Heidegger’s
Philosophy of Terror to Account

of historical peoples. What is hidden, understandably, is that creation

requires our annihilation.
This is so because Nothing corresponds to Being (Heidegger, 1993:
44). Being is the being that grows of its own accord… out of nothing.
What is nothing? Heidegger insists that it is not something “indifferently
negative” (Heidegger, 1993: 45). Nothing is not just “nothing”
(Heidegger, 1993: 45). Nothing rather is the paradoxical empty something
that invokes Terror. It calls up the horror of standing before the Nothing
that is nihilation (Heidegger, 1993: 45). It derives meaning from the terror
unleashed by extermination.
Nihilation is not just a metaphor. Out of the terror of the beginning, the
history of a world emerges. Heidegger explains this with casual brutality:
“[…] the Nothing does not need beings in order to be the Nothing as a
result of their elimination” (Heidegger, 1993: 46). This, remember, is
1941. And should the auditor have missed the point, Heidegger
immediately reiterates with emphasis: “The Nothing does not need beings”
(Heidegger, 1993: 46).
Put another way: Being is empty. It is the emptiest emptiness
(Heidegger, 1993: 46). It is also an emptiness that is a surplus. This is an
inverted Neo-Platonism. It is the inverse of the Neo-Platonic plenitude that
overflows. It is a barrenness that generates a surplus. Should anyone still
be unsure of what Heidegger is getting at, he announces a little further on
in his lectures that: “in the extremity of the desired annihilation of all
beings, and precisely here, being must appear” (Heidegger, 1993: 52).
In case you missed that, I’ll repeat it: “in the extremity of the desired
annihilation of all beings, and precisely here, being must appear.”
Are you still not sure that Heidegger means what he says? Then
consider that still further on in the 1941 winter lectures, he again warms to
the theme that there is nothing ordinary and everything terrifying about
Nothing. Indeed, so extraordinary is it, this is a horror that exceeds our
capacity to imagine it: “[…] to us the Nothing is not a nullity. To recoil in
terror of annihilation and to be horrified by devastation is to shrink back
from something that cannot be addressed as mere imagination, as
something baseless” (Heidegger, 1993: 61). Heidegger often returns to the
point that “nothing” is not a mere negative. In his 1942 lectures on
Höderlin’s “The Ister”, he equates nothing with the uncanny, with what is
frightful, powerful and in-habitual, with what overpowers and unmakes
the home (Heidegger, 1996: 63-87). This un-homeliness is the act of a
being, the human being, which proceeds towards its own death
(Heidegger, 1996: 75). This is a being that comes to nothing. This is the
being whose nature is “un”. This “un” is the nature of a being that destroys
 Peter Murphy 73

its homely self in the drive for what is in-habitual and extra-ordinary. The
“un” is not just a negation but an overpowering of things. This
overpowering, this uncanny power, towers above humanity, revealing
itself in horror and terror. In order to create, this power must annihilate.

IV.
In works of fiction, horror is left to the imagination. In the works of
uncanny bestiality, however, the horror is unimaginable. It can be
prosaically reported and meticulously recorded but the imagination is
repelled by it. Take for instance the recorded works of that attentive
student of Hitler and Stalin, the Baath Party leader and psychopath
Saddam Hussein. Even professionals collecting evidence on Saddam’s
torturers find the videos of their deeds almost impossible to watch.3 To
watch means having to imagine unimaginable horror. It means having to
imagine the endless repetition of such horror. The human mind flinches
and turns away from such thoughts. The imagination shudders, in
revulsion, as the video clip:
opens amid Saddam’s elite troops, Saddam Fedayeen, chanting ‘With
blood and spirit we will redeem you Saddam.’ The Fedayeen stand barking
and clapping in a courtyard. A blindfolded prisoner, forced to his knees
and held in position, has his arm outstretched before him along a low
concrete wall. A masked member of the Fedayeen raises high a three-foot-
long blade and ferociously slams down on the man’s hand, slicing through
his fingertips. The victim is wailing, screaming in agony. The swordsman-
torturer, not sufficiently satisfied with his first effort, raises the sword
again and drives down once more on the man’s immobile hand. This time
he severs the fingers closer to the knuckles as the blood spurts from his
hand spilling over and down the concrete slab. The victim emits a wail I
have never heard—could never imagine hearing—from a grown man, this
time louder, harder than the first (Shawcross, 2005).

Such terror of annihilation as this cannot be grasped, or long

contemplated, by the imagination. For terror of this kind is
unimaginable. It is not the terror of the sublime imagination that we are
familiar with, say, from Kant’s Third Critique. Rather, in the case of
the unimaginable, we are on the terrain of the French Revolution where

3
The following is drawn from the account by the great reporter and broadcaster,
William Shawcross (2005). The quotes are from the documentary producer Nick
Schulz who recounts how he was “unable to sit through these clips at first, having
to turn away several times[...]”.
74 The Pitch Black Night of Human Creation: Calling Heidegger’s
Philosophy of Terror to Account

the guillotine has replaced the imagination, and horror is enacted on a

mass scale. Such terror is not the work of ruthless statecraft that
torments its enemies but rather it is the commission of social
desecration on a scale that is beyond imagination. This is a world, or
perhaps more exactly an under-world, or an un-world, where day after
day, in endless procession, tens of thousands of times:
a hooded and blindfolded prisoner is led to a room where he is forced to
kneel, hands tied behind his back. Another man sits before the prisoner
with thick metal tweezers and a scalpel. With his left hand he grabs the
prisoner’s tongue with the tweezers and pulls it forward from his head.
With the scalpel in his other hand, he slices through the prisoner’s tongue,
cutting it from his mouth and then dropping it on the floor (ibid.).

In the works of the unimaginable, when deeds such as this are repeated an
incalculable numbers of times, there is an unmistakable strain of social
necrophilia. When the power of the unimaginable became explicit, for the
first time, in the Terror of the French Revolution, death is transformed in
status from a violent political means to a necrotic social end. Death’s
works are enacted on an all-consuming social scale.
The germ of this necrotic strain threaded its way for centuries through
the Faustian art-culture and art-religion of the European West. It mutated
from the Gothic era via the Baroque to Romanticism. But it is not until the
French Revolution that the threshold between grisly imagination and the
unimaginable is finally crossed over. What made the difference? Most
crucially, the all-devouring overpowering of state and society found a
justification—in the act of creation.
As Heidegger later put it, creation cannot abide structure and order,
statute and limit because creators must create all of this. The radicalism of
Heidegger is evident when he quotes from a letter that Hölderlin wrote to
his brother (Heidegger, 1993: 62). Hölderlin puzzles about whether the
assault of Nothing on society and humankind should be opposed?
Heidegger’s answer to this question is a mocking rhetorical counter-
question. What if the Nothing that horrifies man and displaces him from
his usual dallying and evasions were the same as Being? If this was the
case, Heidegger reasons, then Being would have to announce itself as
something horrifying and dreadful. For anything else is an avoidance of
Being. There is no doubt that Heidegger thinks that the time has come for
this announcement. It is too late for any more equivocation.
So no wonder that disclosure, un-concealment and truth function to
hide, cover up and conceal something dreadful. This is the secret of
nihilation that ordinary humanity, sensibly, evades. To be shaken from this
 Peter Murphy 75

evasion is to be confronted with the horror and dread of Nothing. Out of

this Nothing and the fear and trembling it breeds comes new worlds. The
new originates in dread and fear. Creation out of nothing is the vocation of
those who do not evade the horrifying and the dreadful but who embrace
and enact it. It is the vocation of those who contemplate, not the beauty of
forms, but the works of devastation and holocaust. It is the vocation of
those who wish for the worst not the best.
Heidegger very pointedly states in his 1942 lectures on Hölderlin that
the Nothing of the unimaginable belongs to evil (Heidegger, 1996: 78).
Extraordinarily, he instructs us to understand this evil not as something
morally bad, that is as something characteristic of human behavior, but as
an essential trait of Being itself within whose realm human beings journey.
He divines that what is morally reprehensible in human beings is evil but
not immoral in the context of Being. This is an appalling distinction yet
one that, in various guises, has been remarkably influential from the epoch
of the French Revolution onwards via Communism and Nazism to
Islamofascism. Perhaps in understanding Heidegger’s distinction, chilling
as it is, we might move a step closer to making some sense of this long and
disturbing passage through the pitch black night of human creation. The
conundrum of modern life is not so much that necromanticism exists,
although that is puzzling enough, but that the desire for abysmal
nothingness has continuously reinvented itself in ever more gruesome
ways in the last two hundred years and, in the course of these
reincarnations, has attracted endless followers who see mass murder as an
evil that is not immoral, a license to commit the worst of crimes and yet
have them exculpated.4

4
That Heidegger’s philosophy should have become a court philosophy for Iran’s
theocratic state should not surprise us. The messianic death fixation of that regime,
which sacrificed hundreds of thousands of its subjects in the apocalyptic primitive
slaughter of the Iraq-Iran War, has uncanny parallels with Germany in the 1930s.
When Jurgen Habermas made his 2002 sojourn to Iran, he observed: “During the
1990s, Martin Heidegger and Karl Popper provided the key terminology for a
debate between Reza Davari Ardakani on the one side and Abdolkarim Sorush on
the other. Davari is now president of the Academy of Sciences and classed with the
‘postmodernists’. The latter were particularly drawn to the analysis of the ‘nature
of technology’ in Heidegger’s later writings and linked it to the Iranian critique of
Western modernity. Sorush, meanwhile, who is currently spending a semester as
guest lecturer at Harvard, personally tends toward a mystical branch of Islam, but,
as a Popperian, is a resolute adherent of a cognitive division of labor between
religion and science. If I understood it correctly, during this dispute Davari rose to
the status of philosophical spokesman of the Shiite orthodoxy, while Sorush
76 The Pitch Black Night of Human Creation: Calling Heidegger’s
Philosophy of Terror to Account

V.
The refrain of those who march to the tune of “evil but not immoral” is
that what begins, ends, and what ends, begins. In both cases, the end is
annihilation and only the time of destruction can give birth to worlds.
Time casts a deep shadow across the body of Heidegger’s philosophy. The
conjugation of “being and time” is the most powerful leitmotif of his
work. Historical time is the midwife of precocious acts of creation. These
acts are undetermined. Nothing, nihil, “causes” them. They are
unmediated. These miraculous beginnings in time are preceded by nothing
and are destined to expire in nothing. Nothing is the emptiness that is
filled up with the pure difference of “un”. Time creates through “un”-
doing. The “un”-doings of historical time precede and postdate creation.
The constant alteration of time’s “un”-doings is the only constant left us. It
is the only (ironic) trace of the metaphysical.
Heidegger repeatedly and insistently attributes creation, creation out of
nothing and into nothing, to the Greeks. But Greek nature or phusis, the
coming forth or originating of something out of itself, was not ever, and
could not ever be, creation out of nothing. The notion of an emergence out
of nothing is shaped by the theistic creation mythology of the Middle East.
It underpins the biblical account of genesis. The Greeks had no interest in
genesis thinking. For the Greeks, phusis implied durable, imperishable
form. Creation, which was usually understood as a kind of making,
occurred when the material stuff of self, society and nature was molded by
form, reason or spirit. From the Pre-Socratics through Plato, Aristotle, the
Stoics and the Epicureans, there were lively arguments about the nature of
this nature. But mostly it was agreed that phusis was a kind of self-
propelling morphology. Whatever was said in these debates, no one ever
equated the morphology of form, reason or spirit with nothing—whether
this was the nothing of birth or the nothing of extinction.
Heidegger understood the morphological nature of Greek phusis
perfectly well. In the first volume of his Nietzsche lectures, he gives a very
fine account of Platonism (Heidegger, 1991: 162-199). He describes how
the Greek phusis brings forth form or morphe, the limit or the boundary,
the configuration of a being. He also describes how one’s delight in art
arises from logical, mathematical feelings—from the feeling for letting
one’s mood be determined by order, boundary and overview. Yet, for
Heidegger, the lure of destruction, change and becoming, or rather their

continues, albeit with dwindling influence, to favor an institutional division of

political and religious realms” (Habermas, 2002).
 Peter Murphy 77

continuum, is irresistible. The durability and constancy of Platonic

metaphysical being cannot trump the seduction of alteration and
destruction. Nor can it separate the one of these (alteration) from the other
(destruction).
Here we have before us two models of creation, two concepts of
phusis. For Heidegger, point blank, “the origin of something is the source
of its nature.” This is an opening shot from his 1935 lecture. According to
this view, art is the un-concealment of the source, founding or beginning
of things. Historical peoples emerge from such beginnings. They are a
genesis out of the Nothing that terrifies. This view of things does not
belong to the form thinking of the Greeks but to the genre of genesis
thinking that meanders from pre-modern theistic creationism to modern
necromanticism and its philosophies of Terror (Murphy and Roberts,
2004). Genesis thinking equates origin (a beginning in time) and nature.
The counter-view, the Classical Greek view, is that nature is phusis not
arche. Phusis, from which all things emerge, is a set of immutable
aesthetic qualities—like symmetry, proportionality, harmony, and rhythm.
Such metaphysical, Platonic qualities underpin the grandest expressions of
cosmos, society and self.
When historical peoples turn against metaphysics, besotted by the lure
of genesis, the result is nihilism and necromanticism. The point made here
is precisely the contrary of Heidegger’s egging-on of the German
catastrophe. The antidote to such catastrophes is proper respect for phusis,
for the timeless super symmetry symbolized by Nature. Nature’s forms are
immutable. They are the antithesis of a truth that has become historical.
This historical truth is a leap that begins in time. It originates like a
Creator God does, and this origination supposes annihilation. It creates
strife—a rift in continuity. It is this, the destructive advent of historical
time, which reveals the equation of Being and Nothingness.
Such an equation is a heady justification of art, just as sublime
aesthetic obliteration is a heady explanation of social invention and world
creation. It excites and it enthralls. But once the intoxication passes, there
is the aftermath of terrible creation-termination to consider. The signs of
aftermath are Faustian exhaustion and necromantic devouring of society
and art. As we pick our way through the wasteland of social obliteration
littered with deathworks, products of abject imaginations that have fallen
disastrously in love with the unimaginable, we begin to understand a final
awful merciless equation—that out of nothing comes nothing.
78 The Pitch Black Night of Human Creation: Calling Heidegger’s
Philosophy of Terror to Account

Bibliography
Carroll, 2001
J. Carroll, The Western Dreaming: The Western World Is Dying For
Want Of A Story. Sydney: HarperCollins.
Habermas, 2002
J. Habermas, “The Unrest is Growing: Habermas in Iran Interview
with Juergen Habermas on his visit to Iran”, Public Theology, reprinted
from the June 18, 2002 issue of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung at:
http://www.pubtheo.com/page.asp?pid=1073 Accessed June 2006.
Heidegger, 1971
M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language and Thought. New York: Harper and
Row.
Heidegger, 1991
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1. San Francisco: Harper.
Heidegger, 1993
M. Heidegger, Basic Concepts. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana
University Press.
Heidegger, 1996
M. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”. Trans. William McNeill
and Julia Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Murphy and Roberts, 2004
P. Murphy and D. Roberts, Dialectic of Romanticism. London:
Continuum.
Shawcross, 2005
W. Shawcross, “Saddam Removal: Why the U.S. had no alternative”,
The American Spectator, September 2005, reprinted at:
http://www.williamshawcross.com/
Ward, 1995
J. F. Ward, Heidegger’s Political Thinking. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press.
 MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND THE PHILOSOPHY
OF NEGATIVITY

PAOLO BARTOLONI

1.
The reflection on language as “the house of Being” permeates Heidegger’s
work from “Letter on Humanism” [1946] (1993) onwards. Heidegger
returns insistently to this reflection, especially with regard to poetic
language, and the affinities between poetic language and thinking.
Heidegger is said to believe that philosophy does not begin with thought,
but with astonishment, surprise, errancy (Safranski, 1998: 1); in a word,
with poetry. And in fact, the entrance into philosophy through poetry
gradually becomes Heidegger’s favourite route to thinking and for
thinking. It is no accident, then, that his attention and investigation of
poetry increase dramatically from the mid 1930s, especially from the
1934-1935 lectures on Hölderlin’s hymns to Germany and the Rhein
(1980). It is in the poetry of Hölderlin first, and later in that of Rilke,
George and Trakl that Heidegger looks for that unique trigger to his
thought. It does not come as a surprise either if, in the same period, also
known as Kehre, Heidegger’s dealings with pre-Socratic thought,
especially Parmenides, Heraclitus, Anaximander, assume the character of
poetic readings. It is also perhaps because of Heidegger’s penchant for
poetry – and of course, because of his “poetic” style of philosophising –
that some commentators have labelled him, and not always favourably, a
poet rather than a philosopher (Megill, 1985; Gottlieb, 1990).
In the collection of lectures/essays delivered in 1957-1958 and brought
under the title of On the Way to language (Unterwegs zur Sprache) we
find a text which is of particular interest in the discussion of the relation
between poetry and thinking. I am referring to “Words” (Das Wort). This
lecture is a close reading of a poem by Stefan George, “The Word” (Das
Wort). It is also a further attempt on the part of Heidegger to think the
80 Martin Heidegger and the Philosophy of Negativity

meaning and the significance of the statement “language is the house of

Being” that he made in Letter on Humanism.
“Words” starts with a puzzling reference to a place (Ort): “From where
we are now (von diesem Ort)”, writes Heidegger, “let us for a moment
think what Hölderlin asks in his elegy ‘Bread and Wine’…” (Heidegger,
1982: 139). The first inclination is to interpret “place” as the locus where
the thinking is occurring, in this case Heidegger’s On the Way to
Language. We look at the book to see which essay precedes “Words”. In
the English translation the essay in question is “On the Way to Language”,
which is therefore assumed as the place from which the thinking of
Holderlin’s elegy, and Heidegger’s subsequent investigation, ought to
start. The two lectures seem to dovetail rather nicely since the last two
pages of “On the Way to Language” engage explicitly with the relation
between language and Being in ways that are germane to “Words”. Not
only does Heidegger insist on the connection language/Being, but he
explains it by arguing that “Language is the house of Being because
language, as Saying, is the mode of Appropriation” (Heidegger, 1982:
135).
Through Saying language appropriates Being by keeping being, the
thing, present. But in order to achieve the presencing of being – Heidegger
also calls this presencing “face to face”, whose resemblance with
unconcealment and aletheia is not without significance – humans must
attain a special relation to language, which also implies a transformation
of language. “In order to pursue in thought the being of language and to
say of it what is its own, a transformation of language is needed which we
can neither compel nor invent” (Heidegger, 1982: 135). In other words,
through Saying language guards being. But in order to turn this
concealment in language into an unconcealment in language, Heidegger
invites humans to accomplish a particular exposure to language, which
requires a transformation of the relation with language. Language must be
approached differently.
It is rather instructive that in order to bring his argument to a close,
Heidegger chooses to quote a passage from Wilhelm von Humboldt that
seems to contradict his entire conceptualisation. Here is the quotation:
“Without altering the language as regards its sounds and even less its
forms and laws, time – by a growing development of ideas, increased
capacity of sustained thinking, and a more penetrating sensibility – will
often introduce into language what it did not posses before” (Heidegger,
1982: 136).
Everything seems to fit apart from the last significant statement: “time
will often introduce into language what it did not possess before”, which
 Paolo Bartoloni 81

means that for Humboldt Being is not at home in language. It might be

introduced into it as long as changes of knowledge and sensibility are
brought to bear on language. What kind of place is this from which
Heidegger farewells us to greet us again at the following station as if
Humboldt had never been mentioned?

2.
And, in fact, this is not the place. If one looks at the German edition of
Unterwegs zur Sprache (1975), one soon realizes that Das Wort is
preceded by Das Wesen der Sprache (“The Nature of Language”) and
followed by Der Weg zur Sprache (“On the Way to Language”). This is
the original order of the three lectures, which has been radically altered in
the English translation for reasons that one can only speculate about. Was
it perhaps thought that “The Nature of Language” and “Words” were too
similar, the latter being almost a repetition of the former? Would perhaps
the reader in English object less to the book, should the uncanny
similarities between “the Nature” and “Words” be mitigated by
interspersing them with “On the Way”?
In “The Nature of Language” Heidegger sets the tone for the three
lectures on language, which he considers as individual parts of a whole. In
“The Nature of Language” he expressly says that the purpose of these
lectures is to “undergo an experience with language” (Heidegger, 1982:
57) which might be “helpful to us to rid ourselves of the habit of always
hearing only what we already understand” (Heidegger, 1982: 58).
Heidegger wishes to experience, and perhaps write, a language, whose
relation with him is different from the one he has with traditional – one
might be tempted to say metaphysical – language. In other words,
Heidegger intends to experience a meeting with a language which,
remaining the same, says things differently. It is in this sense that the
preposition “a” before language is strictly incorrect. This is not another
language, it is instead the same language that relates to us, and us to it,
differently. Heidegger explains this further: “In experiences which we
undergo with language, language itself brings itself to language. One
would think that this happens anyway, any time anyone speaks. Yet at
whatever time and in whatever way we speak a language, language itself
never has the floor” (Heidegger, 1982: 59).
As we now see, in Heidegger’s terminology “a language” is not
language. Language is that which speaks “itself as language”. When does
this happen? “Curiously enough”, answers Heidegger, “when we cannot
82 Martin Heidegger and the Philosophy of Negativity

find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away,
oppresses or encourages us” (ibid.).
As an example of the coming of language to itself, Heidegger
discusses Stefan George’s poem Das Wort, whose final line reads: “Where
words breaks off no thing may be.” What is at stake here is precisely what
Heidegger draws attention to when he refers to the breaking of words in
the face of “something that concerns us”.
This is the place from where Heidegger can continue his analysis of
George’s poem, together with his investigation of thinking and poetry. As
Heidegger tells us, Stefan George first published “Words” “in the 11th and
12th series of “Blatter fur die Kunst” in 1919”. (Heidegger, 1982: 140) He
later included it “in the last volume of poems published in his life-time,
called Das Neue Reich (ibid.).
George’s poem is about the poetic journey, and the experience of
confronting the mystery of life, in the hope of giving this mystery
concreteness through language. But this hope is destined to remain
unfulfilled since not even the depth of poetry, its magic and inspiration,
can say the unsayable. So while the poet holds the mystery in his hands,
waiting for poetic language to transform the mystery into the reality of a
presence, the mystery slips away, as the poet learns that there is no word
that can “enfold these depths.” The last two stanzas read: “And Straight it
vanished from my hand,/ The treasure never graced my land…/ I then
sadly learned renunciation:/ Where word breaks off no thing may be (So
lernt ich traurig den verzicht:/ Kein ding sei wo das wort gebricht).”
Heidegger’s investigation focuses on the last two lines, and especially
on the notion of renunciation (verzicht). The question and the
philosophical problem that Heidegger engages with is whether this
renunciation simply leaves the poet empty handed, and sadly melancholic
in the face of negativity and emptiness.
What takes place in the following pages is a great feat of rhetorical and
philosophical bravura through which Heidegger turns the notion of
renunciation from negative into positive. This reversal of fortune might
not say very much about George’s poem, but may say a great deal about
Heidegger’s philosophy and its insights into ontology. In other words,
while the connection between philosophy and literature remains here
ambiguous and not totally convincing, the conclusions at which Heidegger
arrives are striking and of outmost importance, especially in relation to a
philosophical trend characterising the second half of the twentieth century,
including the work of Blanchot and Agamben.
 Paolo Bartoloni 83

3.
One might wish that Heidegger had chosen a more consonant poem for his
discussion. One that comes straight to mind is the “Buried Harbour” by
Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. This poem was written in 1916, only
three years before George’s Das Wort. It reads: “The poet goes there/ then
returns to the light with his songs/ and scatters then/ Of this poetry there
remains to me/ that nothing/ of inexhaustible secrecy” (Ungaretti, 1990:
26). George’s and Ungaretti’s poems are similar. They both present a
journey into other lands from which the poet returns with precious
treasures which, however, soon turn into nothingness. And yet the
nothingness in Ungaretti “remains” present as “inexhaustible secrecy”.
Heidegger would very likely equate this secrecy with a near remoteness.
But let us quote Heidegger on this very crucial point. “As a mystery,” he
writes glossing George’s poem, “the word remains remote. As a mystery
that is experienced, the remoteness is near. The perdurance of this
remoteness of such nearness is the nondenial of self to the word’s
mystery. There is no word for this mystery, that is, no Saying which could
bring the being of language to language” (Heidegger, 1982: 154).
And yet the mystery is not gone, is not negative. It is rather present
through its withdrawing. It remains located in the space between poetry
and thinking; and from where we are we can try to listen to it by thinking
with poetry and through poetry. I have just paraphrased the last paragraph
of Heidegger’s lecture Das Wort, which reads: “In order that we may in
our thinking fittingly follow and lead this element worthy of thought as it
gives itself to poetry, we abandon everything which we have now said to
oblivion. We listen to the poem. We grow still more thoughtful now
regarding the possibility that the more simply the poem sings in the mod
of song, the more readily our hearing may err” (Heidegger, 1982: 156).
Besides, “singing” and “songs”, these two concepts so central to
Heidegger’s discussion of George’s Das Wort, are also vital to Ungaretti’s
“The Buried Harbour”. Let us remember that in Ungaretti the poet returns
to light with his “songs” (canti).
For Heidegger it is not, however, a matter of choosing the right poem
since he is not interested in engaging with a process of exegesis, whose
aim is to illustrate and elucidate the meanings of a given poem. Rather,
Heidegger is interested in using the poem as the preferred path to an
experience with language. Strictly speaking, he is not so much reading the
poem as listening to it.
Heidegger’s interpretations of Hölderlin, George, Rilke, Trakl are not
literary interpretations in the conventional sense of the word. There is not
84 Martin Heidegger and the Philosophy of Negativity

much we can learn from these readings if they are understood as

exegetical readings. They are instead examples of an original experience
of language and being undergone by Heidegger together with poetry
(Bruns, 1989).

4.
But how is it that “renunciation” becomes positive, and therefore
ontologically relevant and consubstantial to Heidegger’s mode of
thinking? The key to this question must be looked for in the verb that
accompanies renunciation in George’s poem: “to learn” (So lernt ich
traurig den verzicht). According to Heidegger the poet in Das Wort is not
simply renouncing, he has learned renunciation (Heidegger, 1982: 143).
To Heidegger the difference between “renounciation” and “learning
renunciation” is of paramount importance. To him learning means “to
become knowing” (ibid.), that is, to enter a process of active engagement
with thinking, and, in this particular case, with language. This process
Heidegger equates with a journey, and with a movement of discovery. The
subject places himself underway through the action of learning. But what
is it that the poet learns? He learns renunciation. For Heidegger, this
renunciation translates into the active affirmation of the predisposition to
experience language as language. While it is true that the thing remains
unsaid, it is also true that it remains close to language, adhering to
language unsaying. Heidegger’s punch line comes a little later in the essay
when, as already discussed, he argues that language’s Saying resides
precisely in its non-saying:
Because this renunciation is a genuine renunciation, not just a rejection of
Saying, not a mere lapse into silence. As self-denial, renunciation remains
Saying. It thus preserves the relation to the word. But because the word is
shown in a different, higher rule, the relation to the word must undergo a
transformation. Saying attains to a different articulation, a different melos,
a different tone. The poem itself, which tells of renunciation, bears witness
to the fact that the poet’s renunciation is experienced in this sense – by
singing of renunciation (Heidegger, 1982: 147).

It is this qualification that allows Heidegger to distinguish between a

lower tone of language (the saying with a small “s”) and a higher tone of
language (the Saying with a capital “s”). The latter is brought about
through a special exposure to language that is achieved through
renunciation. It is this availability to be with language as language that,
according to Heidegger, brings about the coming “face to face with what
 Paolo Bartoloni 85

is primevally worthy of thought, and which we can never ponder

sufficiently” (Heidegger, 1982: 155). Hence the philosopher, thanks to the
self affirmation of the poet through renunciation, can contemplate and
listen to the mystery of the word, whose echo resounds in the singing of
the language that has renounced its saying.

5.
This is, as Gianni Vattimo has argued, the Heidegger who has been
interpreted as the philosopher who experiences Being by withdrawing
Being – as opposed to the Heidegger who chases Being in order to
reconnect with it (Vattimo: 1994).
But exactly what is this renunciation; is it the romantic celebration of
losing oneself in contemplation? It might very well sound like a mystical
experience in which, paraphrasing a romantic Italian poet, Giacomo
Leopardi, the shipwrecking of the subject in the mystery of life becomes
sweet. And yet in Heidegger this sweetness is not so much romantic as
phenomeno-ontological. As early as the beginning of the 1920s, at the
time when he was considered the “child of phenomenology”, Heidegger
was lecturing about the need to place oneself before the world (Heidegger,
1987: 113), which meant to resist, and indeed abolish, reified and
culturally institutionalised attitudes to things. He preached the
philosophical significance of looking at things as such in order to regain
them to their “worldiness” (Heidegger, 1987: 71-72). In the lecture Das
Wort, Heidegger uses a similar term, “bethinging” (die Bedingnis), which
becomes the higher rule of the word “which first lets a thing be as thing.”
(Heidegger, 1982: 151) In reality Heidegger never let his
phenomenological education to wander too far off from him.
Renunciation, suspension, destruction and errancy will recur again and
again throughout Heidegger’s work with the same meaning, that is,
opening oneself, unconcealing oneself to a higher experience of the world.
It is in this sense, for instance, that the philosophical potency of
destruction in What is Philosophy [1956] (1963), resembles the discussion
of renunciation: “Destruction does not mean destroying, but dismantling,
putting to one side the merely historical assertions about the history of
philosophy. Destruction means – to open our ears, to make ourselves free
for what speaks to us in tradition as the Being of being. By listening to this
interpellation we attain the correspondence” (Heidegger, 1963: 73).
While here destruction initiates a correspondence with the origin of
philosophy, in Das Wort renunciation introduces a correspondence with
86 Martin Heidegger and the Philosophy of Negativity

the origin of language. Both experiences set the subject free –

unconcealed and open – to undergo an experience of the Being of being.
There is a final philosophical element to the lecture Das Wort that is
worth mentioning, also because it reconnects and dovetails superbly with
the notion of renunciation: I am referring to the notion of potentiality. We
have to remember, in Heidegger’s invitation to the reader, is that in
renouncing the word the poet does not renounce the Saying, he rather
renounces himself to the saying. Heidegger follows this clarification by
stating that: “He has allowed himself – that is, such Saying as will still be
possible for him in the future – to be brought face to face with the word’s
mystery, the be-thinging of the thing of the word” (Heidegger, 1963: 151).
In other words, by suspending the saying, the poet is brought in the
proximity of the mystery, face to face with it.
Is renunciation, then, a kind of scholastic bridge between reality and
the origin of reality, between the ontic and the ontological, between the
end of metaphysics and the origin of metaphysics? What is it that we have
learned, that reality is much more than what we think it is? In a sense yes,
but also that our relationship with the world is open to an active
potentiality, whose affirmation and action are explicitly articulated by
Heidegger. And yet, this articulation generates more questions than
answers, leaving the significance of renunciation suspended within an
opaque, indeterminate and ultimately unresolved philosophical event.

6.
Those who follow Heidegger and interpret and study his work have long
been dealing with this indeterminacy in the attempt to bring it to fruition.
Again, it useful here to remember Vattimo’s distinction between the
interpretations of Heidegger from the left and those from the right.
Vattimo places himself on the left, especially if one considers the
significant philosophical project known as pensiero debole (weak
thought). In pensiero debole Vattimo investigates the affirmative and
potentially constructive elements of what has also been termed the
negative existentialism of Heidegger.
Another Italian philosopher on the “left” of Heidegger is Giorgio
Agamben. Agamben’s articulation of biopolitcs is informed by ontological
and aesthetic issues which can be traced back to Heidegger’s discussion of
potentiality as the renunciation or suspension of Being. As we now know
this renunciation does not give Being up, it rather clings to Being by
thinking of a higher ontological event.
 Paolo Bartoloni 87

It is interesting to remember here that in Heidegger, too, we encounter

the notion of nakedness (die Nacktheit) interpreted as the moment where
things are reclaimed to their wordliness, that is, to their state before the
world (Heidegger, 1985: 91). For Heidegger, nakedness is life as such,
phenomenologically pure and unadulterated. Nakedness is the necessary
step towards undergoing a higher experience of the world. It is in this
sense that renunciation and destruction, unconcealment and truth
(aletheia) might also be seen as means towards an experience of life as
such.
Whoever is familiar with Agamben’s thought will immediately
recognize strong semantic similarities. Nakedness is also part of
Agamben’s vocabulary; and so are potentiality, destruction and
suspension. What changes, though, is that in Agamben nakedness is not
necessarily positive. In fact, within the context of modern politics and
society the most vulnerable moments of life are inscribed in nakedness.
According to Agamben nakedness is the life that can be killed with
impunity (Homo Sacer, [1995] 1998) A naked life is a life that lacks
juridical rights and that can therefore be treated by suspending the law, as
in cases of emergencies (The State of Exception, [2003] 2005). Whereas
for Heidegger naked life is the apex of the philosophical endeavour, for
Agamben is a dangerous state between life and non-life, the moment when
sovereignity abuses sovereignity by simultaneously retaining juridical
legitimacy.
That is, of course, if we look at naked life from the perspective of
biopolitics. And yet, biopolitics is only a recent concern of Agamben,
starting from Homo sacer in 1995. Up to the Coming Community [1990]
(1993) the discussion of nakedness articulated around the coextensive
terms of suchness, suspension and destruction retains the affirmative
characteristics that it has in Heidegger. In Infancy and History [1978]
(1993), for instance, Agamben reads the significant and revolutionary
experiences of modern literature through the lens of destruction, whose
relations to Heidegger’s destruction are far from being casual. In
Language and Death [1982] (1991), Agamben investigates language,
especially poetic language, whose similarities with Heidegger’s notion of
experiencing language as language are explicitly detailed and discussed.
In The Coming Community, suchness becomes the starting point for a re-
evaluation of identity and community through questioning a set of
determining conditions of belonging.
Throughout the 1980s, Agamben’s significant discussion of
potentiality is based on a lucid and original analysis of renunciation,
88 Martin Heidegger and the Philosophy of Negativity

climaxing with his important essay on Melville’s Bartleby, “Bartleby, or

on Contingency” (Agamben, 1999).
It is in a more recent book, The Open [2002] (2004), that the
affirmative and negative approaches to nakedness appear to coalesce in an
interesting as well as puzzling way. What Agamben attempts in The Open
is to go further in his discussion of naked life by investigating the process
through which life as such might be brought about. The Open is a further
stage needed to clarify to Agamben’s readers (and perhaps to himself too)
the event of naked life together with its political and ontological
implications. When is it, Agamben asks, that human life meets and
encounters animal life? But most importantly, and this time we are asking
the question, does this moment of indistinction and indeterminacy equates
with nakedness? Agamben does not posit nor answer the second question.
However, and given the philosophical context in which The Open is
written and responds to, I believe that this question is not only pertinent
but also necessary. Agamben’s answer to the first question is that the
indistinction human/animal is brought about by undergoing an experience
of the open, whose definition and discussion revolves around Heidegger’s
famous lectures of the late 1940’s, later included in the volume
Parmenides (1992).

7.
In those lectures Heidegger states his concept of the open in relation to
and against Rilke’s poetisation of it in the eight Duino Elegy. For
Heidegger, Man is in the open – which also means face to face with Being
– when Man frees himself from reified and constructed possibilities in
order to come closer to the original possibility, which in this renunciation
remains near despite its spatial and temporal remoteness. Boredom, argues
Heidegger, is one instance in which this experience might take place. In
those instances, that is, in which life loses its conventionality and opens
itself to a possibility of worldiness, and life as such. Agamben adheres
closely to Heidegger’s open, locating the area of indeterminacy between
humans and animals in the space of boredom. Agamben also calls this
space the zone of désœuvrement (unemployment/worklessness),
borrowing a term coined by Maurice Blanchot. In other words, Agamben
appears to use two affirmative philosophical processes, Heidegger’s and
Blanchot’s – we will come to Blanchot’s work shortly – to describe an
event of great vulnerability and danger.
Things, however, are not really that simple. At the end of The Open
this event of indeterminacy is cited as a possible alternative to the aporia
 Paolo Bartoloni 89

of contemporary political life, and to those enacted by the anthropological

machine (that is, the distinction between humans and animals on which
humanity has been predicated upon).
It is here that one might come to see through Agamben’s philosophical
project. If on the one hand Agamben is tracing the negativity of naked life
in the context of current society and politics – which are based on the
institutionalisation and preservation of the anthropological machine – on
the other he is positing the positive potentiality of naked life in the context
of a society and of a politics that have done away with the anthropological
machine. In this society life as such might no longer be seen as vulnerable
and lawless; it might have regained, instead, a truer and original state.

8.
It is hard to conceptualise, let alone imagine, what kind of society this
might be. The problem is compounded by Agamben’s conspicuous silence
on this matter. He might retort that the task of philosophy is not so much
that of giving answers as that of generating questions. And yet this
philosophical stance – which again resembles very much the one taken by
Heidegger – leaves Agamben’s philosophy vulnerable to similar criticism
as those articulated with regard to Heidegger’s. Let us take for instance
the intelligent and balanced book, Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language,
Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writing, by Gerald Bruns. Towards the end
of Bruns’ book we find this comment, which is also a methodological
reservation, that might be easily extracted to describe Agamben’s work:
The folly of trying to follow closely Heidegger’s thinking […] comes out
very forcefully when you try to stop, because there is no natural stopping
place, no place of arrival where everything falls into place and you can
say, ‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’ Instead, the movement
you get into is that of going back over what has been said in order to pick
up on what is missing or what has been left out of account. So you are
always starting over with something familiar, and then going astray as you
try to finish or complete what you think you have in hand. This is why,
after a while, repetition and confusion are likely to appear the distinctive
features of anything you have to say about Heidegger (Bruns, 1989: 174).

One way to approach the gaps left behind by individual philosophers is

to compare and contrast them with other thinkers, whose work resonates
with similar concerns. It is in this sense that Agamben’s work might also
be used to fill gaps in Heidegger’s thought and vice-versa. The same
applies to the work of Maurice Blanchot, whose famous pauses and
90 Martin Heidegger and the Philosophy of Negativity

silences are, to a great extent, informed by Heidegger’s philosophy, and

whose affirmative passivity can at once be reconnected with Heidegger’s
existentialism, but also employed to supplement Agamben’s articulation
of suspension.

9.
In Blanchot désœuvrement is synonymous with renunciation. This is
certainly the way in which Agamben appears to understand it. Blanchot’s
worklessness is at once action and no-action. Its emergence decrees an
insubordination, a stop a “suspension” in which “society falls apart
completely. The law collapses: for an instant there is innocence; history is
interrupted” (Holland, 1995: 250). The similarities between Agamben and
Blanchot are obvious, as obvious is the way they have arrived at this
postulation by following Heidegger beyond Heidegger. The stop Blanchot
refers to is something that must be learned and enacted deliberately.
Should this action which refuses action be embraced by the community,
then the law will collapse and history (the anthropological machine) will
grind to a halt. Innocence, for which one could very well replaced
nakedness, will emerge and triumph.
The 1960s, and also a section of the Italian operaismo in the
1960s/1970s were an explicit attempt to bring about a dramatic change in
society by way of renouncing accepted values and norms. While
innocence was at the core of the hippy movement, insubordination as
political and social struggle was the driving force of theoretical and
practical activism in Italy. Let us think for instance of the writing of Mario
Tronti and Antonio Negri in the 1960/1970s. Their idea of politics was
nothing other than a politics of withdrawal. On this point is worth quoting
at length from an essay by Brett Neilson:
The fundamental move of these Marxist intellectuals whose work
provided the theoretical backbone for a whole generation of protest
movements in Italy, was to reverse the classical relationship between
labour and capital. By arguing that capital is essentially a social power
that requires productive labour, and which evolves through a series of
attempts to control or co-opt workers, they introduced the notion that the
withdrawal of labour and/or refusal to collaborate with capital in the
organization of labour (e.g., by making demands that could not be
possibly be met) would function to destroy the capitalist system. And, in
so doing, they invented a new form of politics that considered the denial
of action or, as Tronti (1966) famously called it, “the strategy of refusal.”
(2006: 131-132).
 Paolo Bartoloni 91

It is worth pausing on the example that Neilson uses to exemplify the

“strategy of refusal”. This could be achieved, Neilson says, by “making
demands that could not possibly be met”. There are analogies between
“demands that cannot possibly be met”, and the discussion of renunciation
as seen in Heidegger, Agamben and Blanchot. But while for Heidegger
renunciation is the path towards the freedom to experience language as
language, for Tronti renunciation is the path towards political
empowerment, and while in Heidegger renunciation remains a solipsistic
and almost mystical experience, in Tronti it becomes a collective process
of political and social affirmation. What about Blanchot?

10.
In The Writing of the Disaster [1980] (1986) Blanchot distinguishes
between two types of refusal or renunciation. The first he calls a deliberate
and voluntary refusal, which “expresses a decision”. This refusal,
according to Blanchot, “does not yet allow separation from the power of
consciousness” (Blanchot, 1986: 17). Next to this conscious refusal
Blanchot speaks of a refusal “which is not so much a denial as, more than
that, an abdication” (ibid.). The ultimate example of this latter refusal is
Bartleby. Blanchot states that Bartleby’s abdication is in reality a
“relinquishment of identity” (ibid.), leading to a loss of being and thought.
With Bartleby, intimates Blanchot, “we have fallen out of being, outside
where, immobile, proceeding with a slow and even step, destroyed men
come and go” (ibid.).
Blanchot’s distinction is of considerable significance. Firstly it tells us
that renunciation can be either positive affirmation (an example of which
might be operaismo) or passive nakedness (Bartleby). Secondly, it appears
to announce a problem that might very well be the central one engaging
Agamben’s thought; that is, renunciation as consciousness and
renunciation as nakedness. While in the first instance renunciation works
within the context and the framework of the status quo in order to subvert
it, in the second one renunciation abdicates, insubordinate, yet deferent to
the status quo. It is in this sense that the act of conscious renunciation
might destabilize society and history (the anthropological machine), and
yet retain it as its guiding principle. The other possibility (Bartleby), is
abdication as the bringing forward of an existence without being, whose
individual sacrifice might be born out only at the level of the individual,
like in the case of Bartleby and his employer.
Clearly, Agamben operates within a different contextual framework.
He is aware that acts of conscious renunciation, as those experienced in
92 Martin Heidegger and the Philosophy of Negativity

the 1960s and the 1970s, are improbable in today’s society, given the deep
structural and technological changes undergone in the last thirty years.
Abdication of life, the other side of the coin, is precisely what Agamben
regards as the extreme danger of contemporary societies, and the very
cause for the implementation and success of the state of exception.
What is left to think is a nakedness that does not abdicate, but which,
through a suspension of history, introduces not so much, and not only a
political struggle, as an ethical and philosophical turn the outcome of
which might as well fall into a mystical and messianic heap or into
constructive ethical practices, as, for instance, those announced by Gianni
Vattimo in his essay “Heidegger and the Philosophy of Emancipation”.

Bibliography
Agamben, 2005
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago:
Chicago University Press.
Agamben, 2004
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, 1999
Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or on Contingency”. In Potentialities:
Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen: 243-
271. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, 1998
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, 1993
Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Agamben, 1993
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of
Experience. Trans. Liz Heron. London and New York: Verso.
Agamben, 1991
Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity.
Trans. Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press.
Blanchot, 1986
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
 Paolo Bartoloni 93

Bruns, 1989
Gerald L. Bruns, Heidegger’s Estrangements: Languages, Truth, and
Poetry in the Later Writings. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gottlieb, 1990
Anthony Gottlieb, “Heidegger for Fun and Profit”. New York Times
Book Review, January 7.
Heidegger, 1993
Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism”. In Martin Heidegger: Basic
Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell: 213-265. London: Routledge.
Heidegger, 1992
Martin Heidegger, Parmenides. Trans. André Schuwer and Richard
Rojcewicz. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, 1987
Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. Mit einer
Nachschrift der Vorlesung “Uber das Wesen der Universitat und des
akademischen Studiums”. Gesamtausgabe, band 56/57, ed. Bernd
Heimbuchel. Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann.
Heidegger, 1985
Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles
/ Einführung in die Phänomenologische Forschung. Gesamtausgabe,
band 61, ed. Waler Bröker and Käte Bröker-Olmanns. Frankfurt:
Vittorio Klostermann.
Heidegger, 1982
Martin Heidegger, On the Way to language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. San
Francisco: Harper and Row [Unterwegs zur Sprache. Stuttgart: Verlag
Günther Neske Pfullingen, 1975].
Heidegger, 1980
Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymmen "Germanien" und "Der Rhein.
Gesamtausgabe, band 39, ed. Susanne Ziegler. Frankfurt: Vittorio
Klostermann.
Heidegger, 1963
Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy? Bilingual edition. Trans. W.
Kluback and J. T. Wilde. London: Vision.
Holland, 1995
Michael Holland, ed., The Blanchot Reader. London: Basil Blackwell.
Megill, 1985
Allan Megill, Prophet of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Faucault,
Derrida. Berkeley: University of California Press.
94 Martin Heidegger and the Philosophy of Negativity

Neilson, 2006
Brett Neilson, “Cultural Studies and Giorgio Agamben”. In New
Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory, eds. Gary Hall & Clare
Birchall. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Safranski, 1998
Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Trans.
Ewald Osers. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press.
Ungaretti, 1990
Giuseppe Ungaretti, The Buried Harbour. Trans. Kevin Hart.
Canberra: Leros Press.
Vattimo, 1994
Gianni Vattimo, Oltre l’interpretazione. Roma/Bari: Editori Laterza.
 THE INTERPRETATION OF DA-SEIN
AS A TRANSFORMATIVE, POETIC
AND ETHICAL BEING

JANE MUMMERY

[M]any times, even ad nauseam, we pointed out that this being qua Dasein
is always already with others and always already with beings not of
Dasein’s nature (Heidegger, 1984: 19).

As we all know from Heidegger’s writing, we are not meant to translate

Da-sein as the traditional metaphysical self-present and self-knowing
subject – an autonomous being that is both just one entity among others,
but able to comprehensively know these others. Such a subject, Heidegger
thinks, is a dream left to us by the great metaphysical narratives.
Furthermore, the being of such a subject is not what any of us feel when
we consider ourselves and our actual being. In contrast, Da-sein,
Heidegger suggests, is what we do feel, a sense of “there-being” (if we are
literal in our translation) disclosed always and already in terms of our
factical being-in-the-world, a sense that is also strongly tied up with our
feeling of having a world.1 As he stresses, “Da-sein is not also extant
among things with the difference merely that it apprehends them. Instead
the Da-sein exists in the manner of Being-in-the-world, and this basic
determination of its existence is the presupposition for being able to
apprehend anything at all” (Heidegger, 1982: 164). That is, Da-sein is not
at all in the world as a chair is in a house – and remember here also that
Heidegger stresses, on several occasions, that Da-sein is not simply a
“what”.2 Rather, Heidegger means that Da-sein’s experience of itself and

1
As Frederick Olafson puts it, Da-sein is “the kind of entity that eksists in the
sense that it transcends its own spatiotemporal envelope and can thus be said not
only to be in but to have a world” (Olafson,1998: 97).
2
Heidegger writes in History of the Concept of Time that “When we ask about this
entity, the Dasein, we must at least ask, Who is this entity?, and not, What is this
entity?” (Heidegger, 1992: 237).
96 The Interpretation of Da-sein as a Transformative, Poetic
and Ethical Being

the world always takes place from a situatedness within, which is also a
disclosure of, the world. Overall, Heidegger argues that Da-sein is our
way of being, a way that is not separable from the world, instead marking
a “disclosive weddedness to the world” (Thiele, 1995: 45).
Exploring some of the implications of Heidegger’s depiction of Da-
sein is thus the aim of this paper. To begin with, as I will demonstrate, Da-
sein’s way of being, in escaping categorization in terms of any particular
‘what’, points instead to a ‘how’ and an open and transformative
potentiality, a potentiality that is best exemplified by a certain mode of
being-with. This, however, has implications broader than just the
transformation of our understanding of Da-sein’s way of being-in-the-
world. Specifically, I suggest that it is this understanding of Da-sein’s
potentiality that not only mirrors but underpins and enables Heidegger’s
later delineations of the ethical and aesthetic potentiality of thinking itself.
Like Da-sein, or perhaps due to Da-sein, thinking is depicted as being able
to escape its traditional or common forms and constraints. These
possibilities, however, raise in their turn a series of important questions
with regard to the very possibility of thinking – in particular, questions
concerning whether we do in fact need to dwell in order to think. Such
questions, as I will show, have some interesting implications with regard
to the possibility and efficacy of ethical thinking.3

Da-sein plus anxiety equals potentiality

and transformation
This designation Dasein … does not signify a what. The entity is not
distinguished by its what, like a chair in contrast to a house. Rather this
designation in its own way expresses the way to be (Heidegger, 1992:
153).

Given, then, that it “does not signify a what”, Da-sein, as Heidegger

makes clear, stands for a “potentiality-for-Being” (Heidegger, 1995a: 275;

3
Of course, in using the Heideggerian project to assess ethical thinking, I am going
against the tenor of Heidegger’s own argument. As Silvia Benso puts it, it is “well
known” that Heidegger saw his thought as needing to be “free of any practical
concern” (Benso, 1994: 159). In Heidegger’s words, his thinking – given that it is
of Being rather than beings – “has no result. It has no effect. It satisfies its essence
in that it is” (Heidegger, 1998: 272). Nonetheless, as a range of thinkers have
stressed, Heidegger’s project has important implications for attempts to develop
non-systematised ethics (see, for instance, Benso, 1994; Caputo, 1993a; Gasché,
2000; Hodge, 1995; Lewis, 2005; Olafson, 1998).
 Jane Mummery 97

Heidegger, 1996: 214). It is, Heidegger thinks, “essential to the basic

constitution of Dasein that there is constantly something to be settled”
(Heidegger, 1995a: 279; Heidegger, 1996: 219). Certainly Da-sein may
not always be aware of or attentive to this potentiality, and Heidegger tells
us that when this is the case Da-sein has fallen into the comfort and
tranquility of inauthenticity. In this mode of being-in-the-world, Da-sein
forgets about its own always present potentiality, and lets itself be
determined and understood in terms of its everyday involvements and
absorption with others and things. As Heidegger puts it:
This Being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into
the kind of Being of “the Others” […]. We take pleasure and enjoy
ourselves as they [man] take pleasure; we read, see, and judge about
literature and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the
“great mass” as they shrink back; we find “shocking” what they find
shocking. The “they” […] prescribes the kind of Being of [Da-sein’s]
everydayness. (Heidegger, 1995a: 164; Heidegger, 1996: 119).

Inauthentic Da-sein, in other words, realizes itself in terms of the common

or public world of everydayness. Its mode of being is given and accepted,
and is seemingly fixed, changing only under the apparently authoritative
influence of the “they”. As Heidegger puts it, in this mode of being the
“they” “supplies the answer to the question of the ‘who’ of everyday
Dasein”, and has in effect “disburdened” Da-sein of its ownmost being
(Heidegger, 1995a: 165-166; Heidegger, 1996: 120).
Despite the very real attractions of the ‘they’ and the everyday world,
however, Da-sein can of course be brought back to an awareness of its
own actually undiminished potentiality-for-being – an awareness
Heidegger calls an authentic mode of being (Heidegger, 1995a: 232;
Heidegger, 1996: 187)4. Now Heidegger suggests that this coming to such
an awareness – what he elsewhere calls an attunement of Da-sein – can
best be enabled by Da-sein’s experiencing of such moods as anxiety (in
Being and Time) and boredom (in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics).
In other words, such moods can disclose Da-sein to itself as itself. Now
what this really means is that such moods as anxiety and boredom can
disclose in Da-sein a certain unease and sense of uncanniness with regards
to its own being-in-the-world. In experiencing such moods, Da-sein finds

4
It is important to realize that Heidegger is not making value judgements with
regards to the modes of being-in-the-world of authenticity and inauthenticity.
Indeed, it is fair to say that inauthenticity and authenticity simply describe whether
Da-sein’s life is its own in any real sense. That is, they are descriptive rather than
prescriptive terms.
98 The Interpretation of Da-sein as a Transformative, Poetic
and Ethical Being

it difficult to maintain itself comfortably in the “they”. What is normally

part of Da-sein’s world, and important to it, seems to no longer be so. And
this means that the experiencing of anxiety and boredom can disclose to
Da-sein a certain “not-at-homeness” in its world as part of the “they” as
well as with itself (Heidegger, 1995a: 234; Heidegger, 1996: 177).
Anxiety and/or boredom thus mark the scene of Da-sein’s being
transformed from thinking that it’s part of the “they” to conducting itself
into its “there” of potentiality – a “there” that Heidegger elsewhere
describes as being essentially open, “transcendent” and “ec-static” (see
Heidegger, 1982: 298, 267).5
This, however, is only part of the story of Da-sein’s recognition of its
ownmost potentiality. The other key aspect that needs clarification is that
of Da-sein’s constitution as a being-with. For a start Heidegger, as we
know, denies from the very outset that Da-sein describes that independent
metaphysical subject who is “encapsulated within itself” (Heidegger,
1992: 243). Da-sein, rather, as a being-in-the-world is necessarily a being-
with – a being-with not only things in the world, but other Da-seins: “the
world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt], Being-in is Being-with-others”
(Heidegger, 1995a: 155; Heidegger, 1996: 112). Now what is important to
note here is that Da-sein’s mode of being-with works, in effect, as a form
of world disclosure. How we understand ourselves as being-with, whether
it’s with other Da-seins or other entities or things, is constitutively a
depiction of how we see the world, and ourselves as in the world. Now the
transformative potentiality of this can best be understood with reference to
the way Heidegger describes Da-sein’s modes of being-with in terms of
techne. On the one hand, Heidegger says that techne typically unfolds as
Da-sein’s objectifying and dominating relation with the world – where its
disclosure of the world is one of understanding and enframing (Ge-stell)
the world in terms of its use-value. This calculative mode of being-with is
thus one of Da-sein readying the world and things – and perhaps even
ourselves and others – for technical manipulation, seeing everything
thereby as a “standing-reserve” (Heidegger, 1977: 17).6 In this mode of

5
“The term ‘ecstatic’ has nothing to do with ecstatic states of mind and the like.
The common Greek expression ekstatikon means stepping-outside-self. It is
affiliated with the term ‘existence’. It is with this ecstatic character that we
interpret existence” (Heidegger, 1982: 267). Heidegger also designates this ecstatic
stepping-beyond as the non-absolute transcendence constitutive of Da-sein’s
existence as Da-sein: “the being that we ourselves in each case are, the Dasein, is
the transcendent” (Heidegger, 1982: 298; cf. Heidegger, 1998: 108).
6
Heidegger suggests this in his infamous comparison of the business of
concentration camps with that of agriculture: “agriculture is now a motorized food
 Jane Mummery 99

being-with, Heidegger states, for example, that “even the Rhine itself
appears as something at our command […] the river is dammed up into the
power plant. What the river is now, [is] namely, a water power supplier”
(Heidegger, 1977: 16).
Similarly, we can see this sort of model of being-with played out in
Da-sein’s inauthentic relationship with the “they”. Specifically, the “they”
are also perceived by an inauthentic Da-sein in terms of their use-value.
The “they”, after all, are useful insofar as they provide an answer to the
question of Da-sein’s being. The “they” frames Da-sein, keeping it from
anxiety and/or boredom, keeping it busy and involved and without the
chance of reflecting, except complacently, upon its being-in-the-world. As
Heidegger puts it, the “supposition of the ‘they’ that one is leading […] a
full and genuine ‘life’, brings Dasein a tranquility” (Heidegger, 1995a:
222; Heidegger, 1996: 166). Da-sein is as such reassured by simply being-
with the “they”. Further, such being-with the “they” provides Da-sein with
a sense of certainty with regards to how to approach and understand
everything and everyone else. Through “idle talk”7, in particular, Da-sein
sees itself as gaining a general understanding of everything, an
understanding that is authoritative simply because it is commonplace.
Nevertheless, in contrast to this mode of being-with that perceives the
world and things in terms of their possible usages, Heidegger says that Da-
sein can also disclose the world by “dwelling” in it, where dwelling in no
way implies ownership or control. Rather it suggests a transformative
relation with the world, others, and things. In other words, insofar as it
dwells, Da-sein is in the world differently. Not only does dwelling
disclose the world differently, but it changes the way in which Da-sein as
being-with is with others. This mode of being-with is also described by
Heidegger as a matter of ethos, where ethos both describes and suggests a
transformation of “the open region in which the human being dwells”
(Heidegger, 1998: 269). Ethos, we could say, is and suggests relations of
“releasement” and “letting be” (Gelassenheit)8, where Da-sein is able to

industry – in essence the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers

and the extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations,
the same as the manufacture of atom bombs” (cited in Neske & Kettering, 1990).
7
In Being and Time Heidegger describes three of the commonplace aspects of Da-
sein’s everyday being-with the “they”: idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity. These
different aspects all comprise and sustain Da-sein’s inauthentic and comfortable
being-in-the-world. (See Heidegger, 1995a: sections 35-37).
8
For an interesting discussion of the relation of Gelassenheit and ethos, see
Caputo’s Against Ethics. Here he argues for Gelassenheit as the basis of an “ethics
of dissemination, a veritable postmodern ethics” (Caputo, 1993: 1).
100 The Interpretation of Da-sein as a Transformative, Poetic
and Ethical Being

“[l]et the Others who are with it ‘be’ in their ownmost potentiality-for-
Being, and to co-disclose this potentiality in the solicitude which leaps
forth and liberates” (Heidegger, 1995a: 344; Heidegger, 1996: 274). In this
case, then, Da-sein’s being-with marks a disclosure of the world in terms
of a possible mode of belonging together that does not desire or descend
into either unification or mastery. That is, such a dwelling being-in-the-
world is a recognition of the point that Da-sein’s own needs and interests
are not, in fact, necessarily paramount. The modesty of this form of world
disclosure is additionally stressed by Heidegger when he describes this
being-in-the-world in terms of the belonging together of the fourfold –
a.k.a. the “earth and sky, divinities and mortals” (Heidegger, 1971: 149) –
where what matters is first Da-sein’s recognition of itself as not being “the
lord of beings” (Heidegger, 1998: 260), and, second, Da-sein’s recognition
of the importance of letting things be. Dwelling, then, itself marks a
significant transformation of Da-sein’s mode of being-with, where things,
others and the world – and, of course, Da-sein’s own being – cannot
simply be delineated in terms of use-value.
All of this, however, encompasses and implies far more than simply
reminding us of the range of worldly possibilities open to Da-sein.
Certainly this outline of our possible depictions of the relation between
self and other, along with Heidegger’s subsequent affirmation of an
authentic being-with, can be recognized in any number of self-help books,
but Heidegger is making some much more basic points here. For a start,
we need to remember that this possibility of dwelling is inextricable from
Da-sein’s potential for authenticity. Da-sein as dweller in the world is the
Da-sein who resolutely chooses itself, “deciding for a potentiality-for-
Being, and making this decision from one’s own self” (Heidegger, 1995a:
313; Heidegger, 1996: 248). That is, Da-sein as dweller is the Da-sein
who withdraws from absorption in the they, thereby demonstrating that the
possibility of dwelling, and thereby of ethos, is tied to that of authenticity.
More on this later. The second basic point that Heidegger makes here is to
remind us that the way we understand Da-sein to be will also give us a
picture of how we expect thinking to be. Indeed, I would suggest that it is
Da-sein’s possible transformative attunement to its own potentiality
through anxiety or boredom that makes Heidegger’s ongoing project re the
transformation of philosophy and thinking itself possible, a transformation
that can furthermore be seen to have implications for ethical and aesthetic
thinking. The question, however, is how exactly?
 Jane Mummery 101

The being-with of interpretation: the ethical

transformation of philosophy
[I]f heretofore the reigning essence of thinking has been that
transcendental-horizonal re-presenting from which releasement […]
releases itself; then thinking changes in [this] releasement from such re-
presenting to waiting upon that-which-regions (Heidegger, 1966: 74).

The proposed transformation of Da-sein thus brings us to Heidegger’s

transformation of thinking, where, just like Da-sein’s way of being,
thinking is depicted as being able to be opened to a much greater
potentiality than typically anticipated. Now thinking – as Heidegger sets it
out – is, as I’ve already mentioned in reference to Da-sein’s own modes of
thinking, typically seen as possessing a strong calculative element. And
this means that it has a tendency to disclose everything in the world in
terms of some already accepted principle or formula. This is, of course,
exemplified by our everyday thinking – whether this is economic
rationalist, scientific, pseudo-scientific, and so on – but Heidegger argues
that it also encompasses the thinking of the philosophical – and here read
metaphysical – tradition. After all, as Heidegger stresses, when we
consider in philosophy what he calls the “fundamental metaphysical
positions”, our tendency is to do so “according to the various doctrines and
propositions expressed in them” (Heidegger, 1991: 191). And this, in
effect, closes this thinking down. Metaphysics, he argues, is a
“transcendental-horizonal re-presenting” where the aim is to ground,
delimit and enframe everything that is in a particular way (Heidegger,
1966: 74). In other words, metaphysics – and by this we include every
possible metaphysical system – works as a type of ordering, a calculation
that makes sense of things for us but which forgets to question its own
grounds. And this, Heidegger says, means that metaphysics basically
forgets that which is “most worthy of thought” (Heidegger, 1969: 55).
Because of this, then, Heidegger’s proposed transformation of thinking
is initially set out in terms of his countering of metaphysics – a countering
he terms “interpretation”. Indeed, as he put it in his “Der Spiegel
interview”, his “whole work […] has been mainly simply an interpretation
of western philosophy” (Heidegger, 1990: 59). However, it’s important to
stress that Heidegger here understands interpretation to be far more than
just a reprisal or reiteration within given and accepted limits. At the same
time though, it in no way means the absolute rejection or overcoming of
the tradition, a point that Heidegger is also keen to stress, telling us that to
expect or want this is grotesque. In his words:
102 The Interpretation of Da-sein as a Transformative, Poetic
and Ethical Being

Here something else takes place than a mere restoration of metaphysics.

Besides, there is no restoration which could merely accept something
handed down to it, as someone gathers the apples which have fallen from
the tree. Every restoration is an interpretation of metaphysics. Whoever
believes that he [sic] can penetrate and follow metaphysical questions
more clearly today in the entirety of their nature and history, should, since
he likes to feel so superior as he moves in clear regions, consider one day
whence he has taken the light to enable him see more clearly. It is hardly
possible to surpass the grotesqueness of proclaiming my attempts at
thinking as smashing metaphysics to bits and of sojourning at the same
time, with the help of those attempts, on paths of thinking and in
conceptions which have been derived – I do not say, to which one is
indebted – from that alleged demolition (Heidegger, 1958: 91, 93).

Interpretation thus effects a radicalizing of that which it engages with,

unfolding as a “reciprocative rejoinder to” the philosophical tradition
(Heidegger, 1995a: 438; Heidegger, 1996: 353). It is thus no new thing to
assert that Heidegger’s conception of interpretation is inextricable from
processes of both repetition and destruction, although we do of course
need to remember that Heideggerian destruction is much more of a
transforming – a making strange – of that which it engages with than a
discarding of it9. Interpretation, then, is essentially dialogic, but dialogic in
a way that is not synthetically dialectical, with Heidegger stressing that he
sees his work as a series of “thinking conversations” (Heidegger, 1969:
45) with various of the thinkers of the philosophical tradition10.
Furthermore, despite the risk of being “accused of disdain for all sound

9
Heidegger stresses that the aim of his destruktion is positive (see Heidegger,
1995a: 44; Heidegger, 1996: 20). This point is reiterated by Caputo, who writes:
“The recovery of the meaning of Dasein, and ultimately of Being itself, cannot be
effected without deconstructive violence, even as deconstructive violence is not to
be undertaken except in the service of a positive program of retrieval” (Caputo,
1987: 65). Although I concur with Caputo’s point here, there is of course an oft-
cited problem with describing Heidegger’s notion of destruktion as a form of
(Derridean) deconstruction which has to do with what each of these terms makes
possible: destruktion, a sort of gathering or enabling; deconstruction, more of a
disabling. Derrida, of course, discusses this issue in his Of Spirit: Heidegger and
the Question.
10
Hodge has argued that Heidegger’s readings of the philosophical tradition
“demonstrate the contribution of these previous thinkers, then show their
limitations and then seek to break elements of their work free to be used in the
[his] new formation. It is the overriding importance of developing this new form of
thinking which for Heidegger justifies his impositions onto the texts of Kant, of
Leibniz, or indeed Aristotle” (Hodge, 1995: 149).
 Jane Mummery 103

reason” (Heidegger, 1958: 79), Heideggerian interpretation as such

thinking conversation is exemplified by an oft-stated lack of interest in
finding or promoting any particular answer (Heidegger, 1991: 192). To put
this otherwise, interpretation – when depicted this way – marks simply an
opening – indeed an overcoming – of the usual constraints and
expectations of thinking.
Now there is a second way that we can understand interpretation, and
this is as a type of “letting-be” which has the potential to further suggest a
radical transformation of thinking itself. More specifically, interpretation
might suggest that calculative and/or metaphysical thinking can become,
when questioned in a particular way, thinking conversations. Such latter
thinking, as Heidegger describes, is not only a radicalizing destruction but
perhaps also a listening and waiting that remains responsive to the other.
Such thinking would thereby be essentially a dwelling, but a dwelling that
is open both to metaphysics and to what metaphysics forgot. Further, we
could also see this dwelling as an authentic or ethical being-with in its
concern to first show and second sustain the potentiality and openness of
both what it interprets and its relation with what it interprets.
Interpretation, in other words, has the potential to open itself up as a
dwelling in the same way that Da-sein does with regards to its being-with
the world, things, itself and others. And it is in clarifying this notion that
Heidegger comes to talk of this thinking as meditative and poetic – that is,
thinking as a dwelling comportment with the world, exemplified by Da-
sein’s non-totalising, non-metaphysical disclosure of the interplay of the
earth and sky, divinities and mortals – a.k.a. the fourfold. Indeed,
Heidegger comes to describe this notion of thinking/dwelling in terms of
Da-sein’s being simply a “shepherd” – as opposed to, say, a director – of
this interplay (see, for example, his “Letter on Humanism”: Heidegger,
1998: 252). It is this shift in the depiction of thinking – from calculation
and use-value to dwelling and letting-be – that is important here. After all,
as Heidegger claims elsewhere, “If releasement toward things and
openness to the mystery awaken within us, then we should arrive at a path
that will lead to a new ground” for thinking (Heidegger, 1966: 56-7).
Heidegger, of course, finds this “new ground” in poetic and meditative
thinking, the thinking that he sees Hölderlin or Rilke, say, as both
engaging in themselves and engaging us in when we come to their work.
As such he argues that “the letting happen of the advent of the truth of
what is, is […] essentially poetry” (Heidegger, 1971: 72). We do,
however, have to remember here that Heidegger is primarily concerned
not with poetry itself but with a certain “poetic character of thinking”
(Heidegger, 1971: 12), and this, as Ziarek puts it, concerns that “rigour of
104 The Interpretation of Da-sein as a Transformative, Poetic
and Ethical Being

language that would preserve or translate into our discourses its world-
disclosive properties as opposed to its objectifying tendencies” (Ziarek,
1995: 384). Poetic thinking, in other words, is disclosive thinking, able to
go beyond the metaphysical methodology of enframing things to one of
releasing them, letting them be.
And it is this that reminds us again that these conceptions of
questioning and dialogic interpretation, and poetic and meditative
thinking, are very much inextricably tied up with Da-sein’s actual being-
in-the-world11. For a start Heidegger emphasizes that it is only through an
“analytic of the Dasein” (Heidegger, 1995a: 37; Heidegger, 1996: 14) that
the problematic of philosophical questioning can be reopened as a
question and re-attuned from calculative to meditative thinking –
philosophical questioning, after all, only has meaning as a “human
activity” (Heidegger, 1995b: 19). To put this another way, we could say
that the horizon of the problematic of philosophical questioning can
necessarily only be Da-sein itself. And, further, that the only way to
develop this problematic “still more radically”, and to let these “ancient
fundamental questions spring forth anew”, is to ground it and them in a
rethought human existence (Heidegger, 1995b: 359, 350). This point is, I
think, also demonstrated by Heidegger’s realization of the necessary
interconnectedness of the “what” and the “how” of his methodology. As
he puts it in his conversations with Nietzsche:
Our reflections make it clear that in thinking […] what is thought cannot
be detached from the way in which it is thought. The what is itself defined
by the how, and, reciprocally, the how by the what (Heidegger, 1991: 119).

Now this, I suggest, makes it clear that Heidegger’s objective in

transforming philosophical thinking – his “what” – is absolutely
inextricable from the “how” of human existence, where existence can only
mean Da-sein’s actual modes of being in and with the world. After all, as
Heidegger has stated, “the question of being” – and this of course is the
guiding question of his whole project – is in itself, correctly understood,
“the question of man” (1984: 17).12

11
For instance, note how Heidegger draws on Da-sein’s experiences of facticity in
his essays in Poetry, Language, Thought.
12
In full, Heidegger writes: “[T]he question of being, is in itself, correctly
understood, the question of man. Yet, the important thing is to raise the question of
man in view of the problem of being […]. This fundamental philosophical question
about man remains prior to every psychology, anthropology, and characterology,
but also prior to all ethics and sociology” (Heidegger, 1984: 17, my italics).
 Jane Mummery 105

This has some interesting implications. Is Heidegger suggesting here

that the transformative potential inherent in Da-sein’s attuned and
authentic being-with – whether considered in terms of Da-sein’s being-
with things, itself, others or the world – actually enables the transformative
potential inherent both in his depiction of interpretation as “thinking
conversation”, and in his later conceptions of ethical and/or poetic
thinking? Do we need to be authentically and resolutely attuned to our
ownmost potentiality in order to even embark on a bona fide thinking
conversation? Is the methodology and practice of a dialogic interpretation
the inevitable result of our acceptance of our open potentiality? Do we
need to dwell in order to really think, let alone to think ethically? (And of
course when we try and think these through in terms of Heidegger himself
we soon hit problems with regards to his infamous being-with Nazism.) It
is these questions, then, that I want to explore for the remainder of this
paper.

Thinking equals dwelling: some implications

If the name “ethics”, in keeping with the basic meaning of the word ȒșȠȢ,
should now say that ethics ponders the abode of the human being, then that
thinking which thinks the truth of being as the primordial element of the
human being, as one who eksists, is in itself originary ethics (Heidegger,
1998: 271).

For a start, as the above quote suggests, Heidegger sees ethics quite
differently to what we commonly associate with ethical thinking. Most
simply, he describes the usual understanding of ethics as just one more
example of calculative thinking, specifically concerned with prescribing
and calculating rules for living, mores, and appropriate levels of praise and
blame. Such calculations, he argues, are dissociated from what really
matters which is ethos, and Da-sein’s potential for being-in-the-world in
terms of dwelling and letting be. Finally, of course, Heidegger suggests
that this potential for dwelling is itself played out in meditative and poetic
thinking, thinking which can also be seen as a sort of revitalized ethical
thinking highlighting the practices of letting be, releasement, and waiting.
It is at this point, however, that I want to go back to an issue I flagged
earlier, that of the relation between dwelling, ethos, ethical thinking, and
Da-sein’s authenticity. That is, is Heidegger suggesting that only authentic
Da-sein can dwell and think ethically? And if so, is this problematic?
To begin with, I would argue that Heidegger does seem to quite
explicitly connect authenticity with ethos, dwelling and thinking. For
instance, in his rectoral address of 1933, “The Self-Assertion of the
106 The Interpretation of Da-sein as a Transformative, Poetic
and Ethical Being

German University” (1985), he describes the thinker (Führer)13 in such a

way as to also draw upon his description of authentic Da-sein in Being and
Time14. That is, in both the rectoral address and Being and Time, a key
mode of being for both the Führer and authentic Da-sein is “resoluteness”
(Entschlossenheit), described by Heidegger as the “authentic Being-one’s-
Self” (Heidegger, 1995a: 344; Heidegger, 1996: 274). More specifically,
resoluteness stands for the actual committed choosing (and rechoosing, as
this is never a final choice) of authenticity and of the concurrent
withdrawal from absorption and lostness in the they. It is resoluteness,
then, that enables the bringing of “the Self right into its current concernful
Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand, and pushes it into solicitous Being
with Others” (Heidegger, 1995a: 344; Heidegger, 1996: 274). In other
words, resoluteness also describes and enables Da-sein’s possibilities for
dwelling and thinking.
The thinker as dweller, then, is constitutively the Da-sein of resolute
authenticity, a mode of being that in turn makes possible thinking
conversation and a revitalized ethics. The trouble here, though, is that
Heidegger very explicitly does not place any moral value on Da-sein being
authentic as opposed to inauthentic. There is, as Vadén notes, “no ‘should’
in authenticity” (Vadén, 2004: 413). Now although this lack of imperative
for authenticity is important for Heidegger’s attempt to describe Da-sein’s
actual being, it seems rather problematic when we come to the possibility
and function of ethical thinking. That is, if we accept the connection
between authenticity and dwelling as thinking, ethical thinking is also not
something to be preferred and promoted over calculative thinking. Surely
though ethical thinking, by definition, should be preferred over other non-
ethical modes. In addition, Heidegger himself most certainly does seem to
come down on the side of thinking as dwelling. He suggests, in fact, that
preparing for and enabling this latter form of thinking is itself the “task” of
thinking (Heidegger, 1993: 436; cf. Heidegger, 1998: 276). How then
should these issues be resolved?
To begin with, we need to remember Heidegger’s refashioning of
ethics. Basically, as we have seen, he substitutes ethos for ethics –
dwelling disclosure for prescriptions and mores. And this marks a shift
from what we could call an ontical ethics to an ontological – or, in

13
Note that whilst Heidegger did of course infamously identify this figure of
thinker with a determined historical person, such identification is not, in fact,
necessary or inevitable.
14
Benso makes this point clearly in ‘On the Way to an Ontological Ethics’ (see
Benso, 1994: 165-166).
 Jane Mummery 107

Heidegger’s words, “originary” (Heidegger, 1998: 271) – ethics. Now,

with regards to how to resolve the paradox noted above, what this means
is that instead of ethics standing for a system telling Da-sein how to
behave, it stands for how Da-sein actually is. That is, ethos, like
authenticity, is itself simply a description of Da-sein’s being, allowing us
to say that there is also no “should” in ethos. Nevertheless, Heidegger
would argue that the methodology of thinking tied up with ethos is
preferable to that of calculative thinking because ethos is itself a better
description of Da-sein. That is, whilst inauthentic Da-sein certainly
believes that thinking is essentially calculative, Heidegger would argue
that he, along with authentic Da-sein, knows better. We only believe
thinking to be calculative because we have blinded ourselves to how
things really are. Now this means that Heidegger can coherently describe
calculation as one of Da-sein’s modes of being/thinking, whilst still
arguing that dwelling and ethos are the mode of being/thinking that most
correctly describes how Da-sein is in the world. After all, as Heidegger
puts it:
Through [the calculative thinking of enframing] the other possibility is
blocked, that man [sic] might be admitted more and sooner and ever more
primally to the essence of that which is unconcealed and to its
unconcealment, in order that he might experience as his essence his
needed belonging to revealing (Heidegger, 1977: 26).

Now in the above quote Heidegger can of course be seen as developing his
argument as to Da-sein’s role in the revealing-concealing of Being – a role
also delineated by him through his discussions of thinker as shepherd
and/or poet. Da-sein as thinker in both of these cases is in effect the
medium by which Being comes to the world15, and the realization of this
stands for Da-sein’s ownmost potential. In other words, ethos stands for
and describes Da-sein’s potential essential being-in-the-world. Thinking
ethically for Heidegger, then, is thinking Da-sein’s essential being, or,
putting this otherwise, it simply describes Da-sein’s dwelling being-with.
This, of course, brings us right back to the beginning where Heidegger
argues that what matters in understanding our being is that we realize that
our being is as a “how” as opposed to a “what”.
Finally, then, there is one more point that I wish to make that is
resultant from some of the ideas I’ve put forward here. That is, I would

15
More specifically, the language of Da-sein as thinker is this medium. Far from
being mere communication or speech, language “is the house of Being, which is
propriated by Being and pervaded by Being” (1998: 254).
108 The Interpretation of Da-sein as a Transformative, Poetic
and Ethical Being

argue that it is this recognition of poetic thinking being Da-sein’s possible

dwelling in and with the world that heads off another common critique of
Heidegger’s project with regards to his challenge of the metaphysical
tradition. Basically, taken at face value, the proposal that we can – and
should – arrive at a new ground for thinking – or, to use Heidegger’s
earlier language, that we can actually overcome metaphysics – seemingly
points to a paradox. That is, this “new” form of thinking would itself be
open to charges of forgetting its own being as that of being simply a
dwelling letting-be – charges that Derrida and Caputo, for instance, have
made on several occasions, and that are very common among critics of the
post-metaphysical project16. This, however, is, I think, to misconstrue
Heidegger’s delineation of meditative and poetic thinking. That is, as Da-
sein’s potential of dwelling in and with the world, poetic thinking simply
cannot found or exemplify a new system – a “what” – systems, after all,
are the domain of calculative and/or metaphysical thinking. Indeed, it is
due to this insight that Heidegger consistently stresses first that his
thinking is only a “stumbling” and second that meditative thinking – to be
meditative thinking – can only ever display a “preparatory” rather than
“founding character” (Heidegger, 1993: 436). Overall such thinking
simply consists of two potential attunements that might be representative
of Da-sein’s dwelling in and with the world. First the potentiality of
remaining constitutively open to the danger inherent in that ordering and
calculative enframing which “drives out every other possibility of
revealing” (Heidegger, 1977: 27), and, second, that of remaining
constitutively open and responsive to the interplay of the fourfold, a
responsiveness that can by nature never become complacent. It is this,
then, that I suggest might in fact exonerate Heidegger when we push
through the question of the relation of his ownmost dwelling and thinking.

Bibliography
Benso, 1994
Silvia Benso, "On the Way to an Ontological Ethics: Ethical
Suggestions in Reading Heidegger", Research in Phenomenology,
XXIV: 159-188.

16
To mention only two key texts, Caputo critiques Heidegger’s project in terms of
its mythologizing “tendencies” in his aptly named Demythologizing Heidegger
(Caputo, 1993b: 1); whilst Derrida engages critically and productively with
Heidegger in his Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Derrida, 1989).
 Jane Mummery 109

Caputo, 1993a
John D. Caputo, Against Ethics. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press.
Caputo, 1993b
John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger. Bloomington &
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Caputo, 1987
John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics. Bloomington & Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press.
Derrida, 1989
Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans.
Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago & London:
University of Chicago Press.
Gasché, 2000
Rodolphe Gasché, "Toward an Ethics of Auseinandersetzun". In
American Continental Philosophy: A Reader, eds. Walter Brogan and
James Risser: 314–332. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press.
Heidegger, 1998
Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, 1996
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Heidegger, 1995a
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Heidegger, 1995b
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Trans.
William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington & Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, 1993
Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. Trans. David
Farrell Krell. New York: HarperCollins.
Heidegger, 1992
Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time. Trans. Theodore
Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, 1991
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volumes I and II.. Trans. David Farrell
Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins.
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and Ethical Being

Heidegger, 1990
Martin Heidegger, "Der Spiegel Interview". In Martin Heidegger and
National Socialism, eds. Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, trans. Lisa
Harris: 41-66. New York: Paragon House.
Heidegger, 1985
Martin Heidegger, "The Self-Assertion of the German University:
Address, Delivered on the Solemn Assumption of the Rectorate of the
University Freiburg". Trans. Karsten Harries. Review of Metaphysics
38: 470-480.
Heidegger, 1984
Martin Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Trans.
Michael Heim. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, 1982
Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans.
Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, 1977
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York & London: Garland.
Heidegger, 1975
Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy. Trans. Joan Stambaugh.
London: Souvenir Press.
Heidegger, 1971
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert
Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row.
Heidegger, 1969
Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference. Trans. Joan Stambaugh.
New York: Harper and Row.
Heidegger, 1966
Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson
and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row.
Heidegger, 1958
Martin Heidegger, "The Question of Being". In The Question of Being,
trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback: 32-109. New Haven,
Conn.: College and University Press.
Hodge, 1995
Joanna Hodge, Heidegger and Ethics. London & New York:
Routledge.
Lewis, 2005
Michael Lewis, Heidegger and the Place of Ethics: Being-With in the
Crossing of Heidegger’s Thought. London & New York: Continuum.
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Neske and Kettering, 1990

G. Neske and E. Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National
Socialism; Questions and Answers. Trans. L. Harris. New York:
Paragon.
Olafson, 1998
Frederick A. Olafson, Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of
Mitsein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thiele, 1995
Leslie Paul Thiele, Timely Meditations: Martin Heidegger and
Postmodern Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Vadén, 2004.
Tere Vadén, 'Ethics and gods: How is local ethics possible?',
Continental Philosophy Review, 37.4, 407-438.
Ziarek, 1995
Krzysztof Ziarek, "The Ethos of Everydayness: Heidegger on Poetry
and Language", Man and World 28: 377-399.
 MOODS THAT MATTER:
HEIDEGGER, AFFECT AND WALLACE
STEVENS’ “THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING
AT A BLACKBIRD”

PETER WILLIAMS

There is much discussion about mood in cognitive theory, but it seems

to be generally agreed, for the moment anyway, that mood is a higher
order functional and dispositional state that stands in a determinative
relationship to both emotions and behaviour. Moods therefore possess a
primordial quality, or Being as Heidegger would perhaps say, that cause
behaviours “directly and immediately, as well as indirectly through the
mediation of our emotions and the modification of broad areas of our
nervous system” (Griffiths, 1997: 251). Moods therefore possess manifold
potentials, among them the ability to absorb agency by distancing what I
would term “dispositional modes of being” from volitional activity and to
assist it by negotiating and managing its practical interactions with the
world, with the “aroundness of the environment.”
It is probably useful here to abide by Heidegger’s distinction between
“world” and “aroundness of the environment” which he equates with the
specific spatio-temporal qualities of entities, bodies, objects and things in
a specific domain or environment (Heidegger, 1962: 134-135). “World”,
on the other hand, is a concept encompassing the sum total of all possible
“meanings” in regard to all ontic things. He provides the example of
mathematics, among others, when he says, “when one talks of the ‘world’
of a mathematician, ‘world’ signifies the realm of possible objects of
mathematics” (Heidegger, 1962: 93). “World” then is the concrete
historical structure in which Being shows itself and hides itself at the same
time, and it is the “world” that determines in what ways things will be
things.
On a more microscopic level, if the neuroscientific picture develops
according to its present state, then the effects of moods would modify the
probability of transmissions between a given, perhaps sensory, input, an
 Peter Williams 113

existing internal state and an output or response. Emotions, for example,

are implemented by neural states. For a neurologist like Antonio Damasio
who investigates the shared balance of powers between body and mind
which constitute our emergence as conscious, affective beings, emotions
are nerve activation patterns that correspond to a state of our internal
world1. He terms brain patterns “cognitive representations”, so thinking
then could be considered a pattern of nerve cell activation. Particular
thoughts represent particular patterns of activation. A mood is a
neurochemical condition which modifies the propensities of one neural
event to bring about another so it thus alters the functional or behavioural
description realised in an affective response.
Moods, as I think Heidegger characterises them, without the help of
contemporary knowledge of the neurological bases of behaviour and the
critical roles played by neurotransmitters such as serotonin,
norepinephrine and dopamine, stand in their “primordial state” or what
cognitive theorists call “higher order dispositions”2. I will in this
discussion prefer the Heideggerian “primordial” state to “higher order
dispositions”, although I see both as primary, originary states of being or
modes of existence that are prior to emotional, cognitive or intentional
states; both predispose us to certain ways of feeling and behaving.
The important point for neuroscientists, cognitive theorists and
philosophers alike is that moods overwhelm us; their source is as
indeterminate as their compass, yet they hold a power over our subjective
intensities and experiences that is even stronger than our ideas,
conceptualisations, representational thinking and, often, our volitional
activities. To illustrate, I will attempt to trace the contours of my own
mood when reading Heidegger to show how it positions me in different
critical attitudes and frameworks with respect to Heidegger’s work and
then to how my understanding of the primordiality of mood reflects upon a
reading of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen ways of Looking at a Blackbird”.
I come to Heidegger late in a diffident, ambivalent mood. He
exasperates me with the density of his language – his “nesses”, his

1
Damasio claims that “[b]rains can have many intervening steps in the circuits
mediating between stimulus and response, and still have no mind, if they do not
meet an essential condition: the ability to display images internally and to order
those images in a process called thought” (Damasio, 1994: 89).
2
First introduced by C.D. Broad (1933). Broad’s ideas were taken up by Vincent
Nowlis (1963) who suggested that moods are higher-order dispositions and
emotions lower-order dispositions. Moods therefore, according to this view, are
dispositions to have emotions. Griffiths points out, however, that moods pre-
dispose us not only to emotions, but also to actions.
114 Moods That Matter: Heidegger, Affect and Wallace Stevens’
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

“clearings”, his “beings” and his “callings”. I find myself putting my

responses to him into scare quotes, as if they might be the source of
constant and repetitious bracketing and qualification. Like Derrida in his
“Retrait of Metaphor”3 I too experience a mood of withdrawal, and I am
doubtful if I can translate myself into Heidegger in the way that I would,
say, a foreign language. Still, rational metaphysics teaches that man
becomes all things by understanding them, and that we understand
ourselves and the world in which we live as translated through these
rational frameworks.
Heidegger locates this source of knowledge in the disclosedness of
Dasein as being-in-the-world, but he also holds that Dasein itself is
disclosed in the moods we inhabit. Dasein then is Heidegger’s term for the
structure of an individual consciousness aware of its contingent state, as
mine is now aware of being-in-the-world yet struggling to exercise its
capacity for affective possibilities – perhaps even boredom and
disinterestedness. I would be relieved if I could “master my mood”, which
is certainly possible, and probably even desirable, “through knowledge
and will”. Mastery is signified in certain states of being that prioritise
volition and cognition. Heidegger warns, however, that we must not be
seduced by these moments of mastery into denying that “ontologically
mood is a primordial kind of Being for Dasein, in which Dasein is
disclosed to itself prior to all volition and cognition, and beyond their
range of disclosure” (Heidegger, 1962: 75). Furthermore, in those
moments when we master a mood, we do so with some other mood, with a
counter-mood. We are then never free of moods; moods cascade and
agglomerate to form what Merleau-Ponty might refer to as “Depth”, the
dimension of the hidden and the “simultaneous” without which “there
would not be a world or Being” (Merleau-Ponty, 1973: 219). These
“depths” are unintentional and beyond the control of the rational mind;
they are simply states we experience as “indeterminateness comes to the
fore” (Heidegger, 1977: 101).
Mood then is a modality of presence. Our mood has already disclosed
Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct
ourselves towards something in the “aroundness of the environment”.
Mood constitutes the weight of the time, place and Being surrounding and
traversing our cognitive activity, and pre-disposes us to certain emotions,
feelings and behaviours. My Dasein, for example, my being-in-the-world,
is disclosed in my “turning away” from Heidegger – I maintain my
distance, and embrace my reserve and refusal. I am now, in Heideggerain

3
First published in Enclitic 2, 1978: 5-33.
 Peter Williams 115

terms, like “[a] stone [that] has instantly withdrawn again into the same
dull pressure and bulk of its fragments” (Heidegger, 1971: 46-47); I am
pressing downward and manifesting my heaviness. My mood has
positioned me, and for me to live authentically I must embrace the ethics,
the mode of existence, of my “stoneness” which, like the earth itself,
“shrinks from every disclosure and constantly keeps itself closed up”
(Heidegger, 1971: 47).
When I ground my existence in my mood, when I submit to my
“stoneness”, I open myself to a strange but compelling doubleness. One
aspect of my consciousness observes myself from the outside, becoming
appalled at how I have surrendered myself to a situation in which the ego
loses its autonomy and renounces its active, willing powers. Yet from
within my mood, from my inhabiting of the mood, such reflective or
ethical judgements seem almost small, irrelevant and certainly gross
because they fail to comprehend and contain the immense expansiveness
that moods afford. Moods overcome us and cause global changes in
propensities to occupy other affective and behavioural states and to
respond to external stimuli and sensory provocations.
I feel that by embracing and expanding my “stoneness” I stand in the
same relation to Heidegger as Heidegger stands to poetry. The nature of
this relationship could be called “estrangement”. Accompanying this
feeling of estrangement is a certain amount of anxiety, a primordial mood
and an overwhelming affect with which Heidegger is inevitably
concerned. Anxiety, a mood that has no object and no propositional
content (as opposed to an emotion like fear that has a particular source and
object, usually “within-the-world”) functions for Heidegger as a reminder
of our “throwness” into the world, and that our life and death, our Being,
must be confronted. In the mood of anxiety, for example, “one feels ill at
ease” (Heidegger, 1977: 101), and nothing in particular is the source of
this feeling. It is perhaps Heidegger’s interest in the “nothing” that, in its
everyday usage and in its metaphysical context, connects his earlier and
later works. “The nothing” names the source of all that is perhaps dark and
troublesome in existence, that which seems to rise from nowhere and
return to it, but it also expresses the disclosure of Being as such and the
illumination surrounding whatever this disclosure brings to light. In this
sense, anxiety is not just negative and empty, but also positive and full.
Nothingness is fullness. Nothing is the characteristic of Being and is what
Heidegger terms “equiprimordial” which implies fullness because without
the originary revelation of the nothing there would be, according to
Heidegger, “no selfhood and no freedom” (Heidegger, 1977: 103).
116 Moods That Matter: Heidegger, Affect and Wallace Stevens’
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

Heidegger’s analysis of the mood of anxiety here is important because

it reveals the limitations that occur when an individual tries to reduce a
mood to specific emotional dramas shaped by a concept like fear.
Epistemic culture easily converts anxiety into fear, thereby reducing the
primordial to the pragmatic. Treating situations as if they were shaped by
the affect of fear narrows the subject’s field of concern to what can be
dealt with in the practical present. On the other hand, it is in the nothing of
anxiety that the original openness of beings as beings is revealed. In the
nothing, Heidegger says, beings recognise themselves as “beings – and not
nothing”. Anxiety therefore attunes us to aspects of situations that fear
suppresses or sublimates because anxiety does not produce a single
(intentional) object with which one can engage, and is not therefore a call
to action. The general feeling of being “down”, for example, does not
require that we be down about anything in particular. Rather than finding
itself defined by the need to act, anxiety is bereft of just such reasons and
motivations, and so instead illuminates the primordial gulf between the
subject’s desires and the objective conditions that might justify or satisfy
them.
The mood of anxiety therefore takes on complex values for Heidegger:
its negative function is to free consciousness from any illusion that it can
find the meanings it desires in either objective structures of the world or in
its own practical abilities. Anxiety dramatises the emptiness that each
subject must embrace in order to give meaning to his/her own mortality.
But this “negative” function must itself be understood in terms of its own
limitations. Anxiety itself reveals a power of spirit that finds positive
values for this lack of groundedness because, acutely aware of the lack of
external determinants, subjectivity can embrace its own contingency and
identify with its own particular modes of discovery and disclosure of self
and world. This identification constitutes “care” for Heidegger, which is
itself most poignantly felt in the phenomenon of anxiety.
Heidegger’s embrace of primordiality relies on the interrelatedness of
opposites – nothingness and fullness, being and not-being, truth and
untruth. Once the foundations for a rationalist metaphysics have been
ungrounded in this way, Being begins to make sense as the constitutive
possibility of not-being any longer. Being cannot therefore be considered
as presence, since the only organ that can actualise it, thought, remembers
being as what has already disappeared, a void moment of absence. Being
is then a trace of past language and presence is absence. Cast in these
terms, primordiality is aligned with what we might term “prereflective
experience” which avoids the inevitable distortions propagated by reality’s
reflection on the mirror of the mind. The “aroundness of the environment”
 Peter Williams 117

is then perceived in its phenomenological aspect of constant

transformation, of constant becoming, which resists reduction to the
grammatical rules of language and logic, and rejects what I would term the
“grammaticalisation” of conceptual categories. This process, of returning
thinking to its natural, primordial element (Being) is called by Heidegger
“irrationalism” and, for him, thinking comes to end when it exceeds or
loses its element.
If Heidegger’s relationship to poetry could be called estrangement, and
if the anxiety of estrangement is a nothingness or a “without thinking” in
the “technical-theoretical” sense (technƝ, a “mode of knowing”) that is
itself primordial, then it may be reasonable to think that for Heidegger
poetry might itself be something primordial. In his Letter on Humanism,
Heidegger says, “But the world’s beauty is heralded in poetry, without yet
becoming manifest as the history of Being” (Heidegger, 1977: 223).
Poetry is a means for the disclosure of Being. Perhaps this idea is not
unlike Vico’s sense of “poetic wisdom” (sapienza poetica) which governs
the power of human culture to cast experience in terms of “imaginative
universals”. For Heidegger and Vico alike, poetry is primordial, like a
mood, and is temporally and logically prior to abstract thought. It is a
necessary mode of expression:

When the wind, shifting quickly, grumbles

in the rafters of the cabin, and the
weather threatens to become nasty….

Three dangers threaten thinking.

The good and thus wholesome

danger is the nighness of the singing
poet.

The evil and thus keenest danger is

Thinking itself. It must think
against itself, which it can only
seldom do.

The bad and thus meddling danger

Is philosophizing

(Heidegger, 1971: 8).

Poetry, like mood, is an originary state that first makes language

possible and it becomes the primitive language of a historical people.
118 Moods That Matter: Heidegger, Affect and Wallace Stevens’
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

Rather than a rationalist metaphyics Vico, and perhaps also Heidegger for
whom knowledge and rational opinions are only one kind of disclosure, at
least the Heidegger of “Holderlin” and “What Are Poets For?”, proposes
an imaginative metaphysics that becomes all things by not understanding
them. Vico says, “for when man understands he extends his mind and
takes in all things, but when he does not understand he makes things out of
himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them” (Vico,
1961: 156).
The power of poetic language thus derives from its ability to say
something by not saying it, or to say it by pointing to something else, or
even by its indicating the opposite of what the poet intends to say as found
in rhetorical figures such as metaphor and metonymy. And if we return to
the primordiality of anxiety, we could say that the poet’s anxiety results
not from influence, as proposed by Harold Bloom, but from the
subjugation of the guts, the seat of the aesthetic dimension according to
Nietzsche4, to the rules of an external reality. Nietzsche emphasises the
physicality of the poet when he says that artists, “if they are any good, are
(physically as well) strong, full of surplus energy, powerful animals,
sensual; without a certain overheating of the sexual system a Raphael is
unthinkable” (Nietzsche, 1967: 421). For Heidegger, however, the poet
penetrates and communicates with the reader by dwelling within the
“spirit of the words” which awakens in the reader his or her own
imaginative universals. This spirit is a reference to the essential dimension
of language itself which is as original a structure of being-in-the-world as
mood, and the language of poets discloses Being as least as authentically
as the language of thinkers. Yet poeticizing and thinking, as demonstrated
by Heidegger’s poem (above) are not the same.
In his later work, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Heidegger goes on
to state that “Self-assertion of nature, however, is never a rigid insistence
upon some contingent state, but surrender to the concealed originality of
the source of one’s being. In the struggle, each opponent carries the other
beyond itself” (Heidegger, 1971: 49). This description of the opposition
between earth and world reminds us of the Kantian sublime and the leap-
frogging struggle, triggered by imagination, between understanding and
reason in which the sublime ultimately reminds us of the incompatibility
of rational ideas and sensory presentation. The sublime’s end is to lead us
to feel a purposiveness in ourselves that is independent of nature, and to
discover a faculty of resistance that encourages us to measure ourselves

4
Nietzsche claims that aesthetics is “physiology”, perhaps again aligning cognitive
states with visceral patterns more than even he would acknowledge.
 Peter Williams 119

against the apparent omnipotence of nature. For Kant, then, the sublime is
a movement or a migration – a displacement from a threatening nature to
the capacity of reason and thinking to rise above the threat of extinction.
By emphasising a similar struggle, Heidegger seems to be moving us
towards more heterogenous notions, such as the multi-dimensional nature
of the conflict between world and earth that stands behind his
estrangement. This conflict, he says:
is not a rift (Riss) as a mere cleft that is ripped open; rather it is the
intimacy which opponents bring to each other. This rift carries the
opponents into the source of their unity by virtue of their common ground.
It is a basic design, an outline sketch that draws the basic features of the
rise of the lightening of beings. This rift does not let the opponents break
apart; it brings the opposition of measure and boundary into their common
outline. (Heidegger, 1971: 63. Emphasis mine).

It may be in the intimacy of this rift between earth and world, in the
tear and the sketch that, while feeling the downward weight of my
“stoneness”, I also feel the rising lightness of my acknowledged,
contingent state of being. The establishing of a world and the setting-forth
of the earth belong together in the unity of a poem’s or an artwork’s being;
the two, like my own weightiness and lightness, are essentially different to
one another yet never separate. And yet this same rift manifests in a work
of art as something itself primordial, like a mood or an atmosphere,
through which the artwork or poem comes radically into its own – when it
becomes so solitary or singular that we as beings feel like we loosen our
connection with it5. Think of the language of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake or
the recalcitrance and withdrawal of minimalist artworks that mirror
nothing we can recognise except, perhaps, a reconfigured reflection of our
own selves. This singularity is manifested in the work’s originality,
materiality and absoluteness, and we cannot forget Adorno in this respect
when he says: “If it is essential to artworks that they be things, it is no less
essential that they negate their own status as things, and thus art turns
against art. The totally objectified artwork would congeal into a mere
thing, whereas if it altogether evaded objectivism it would regress into an
impotently powerless subjective impulse and flounder in the empirical
world” (Adorno, 1997: 175).

5
The distinction between “artwork” and “poem” is probably unnecessary.
Heidegger claims in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that “[…] all art is in essence
poetr,” (Heidegger, 1971: 73). He also says that “the nature of art is poetry”
(Heidegger, 1971: 75).
120 Moods That Matter: Heidegger, Affect and Wallace Stevens’
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

The primordial work of estrangement is radically different from

formalist, structuralist or poststructuralist notions of “defamiliarisation” in
which the familiar is experienced with a new innocence, or a new
awakening of the senses, a new affect or an enlightened consciousness.
Instead, it is a sort of annihilation related to poetry and to the “slipping
away of beings” which returns us once more to the mood of anxiety.
Anxiety is the counterpart in experience for the “slipping away of beings”.
In the aesthetics of the “Origin of the Work of Art” there is essentially
nothing for the subject to experience – our relation to the work of art and
its work is not that of experiencing subjects. So what are we? What
affective hold or relationship can we then have with artworks? According
to Heidegger, art disconnects beings from the hold we have on them,
beings “slip away in the clear night of Nothing”. If artworks emancipate
anything it is not our affective dispositions, our consciousness, our
subjectivity or even our mood, but rather the “world” itself. Art overturns
the will-to-power, it takes the world out of our hands and allows it to come
into its own.
How do we feel about a world taken away from us that cannot be
represented in a narrative of crisis or rupture or loss? As a way or
responding to this sort of question, I’d like to take a quick look at Wallace
Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” as a way of
teasing out its possibilities for showing thinking’s ability to “spring and let
go”, as Heidegger would say, under the whimsical but non-determining
influence of a primordial mood. Stevens has often been described as a poet
“of the imagination” – a formulation which, to my mind, exaggerates his
links to romanticism if we understand “imagination” as an abstract,
autonomous, self-legislating faculty of fancy in the romantic sense. If we,
however, revise our notion of imagination so that it becomes a faculty
more contingently related to “world”, “the aroundness of the environment”
and the artist’s own peculiar physiology, then imagination becomes
something more like an organising principle that is both originary and
mediated. It is then self-regarding, demonstrating all the modalities of care
in terms of coming towards its authentic self, but also dwells on things
outside the self by engaging with what Heidegger calls the three
“ekstases” of time: future, past and present. According to this version of
the imagination, the poetry must be emptied of the idea of the poet as
expressive, imaginative hero in order to locate a site in which
“poeticising” can emerge. Since for Heidegger truth is the clearing and
concealing of beings as such, truth is revealed while it is being poeticised.
“All art”, he says, “as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what
is, is, as such, essentially poetry” (Heidegger, 1971: 72). Poeticizing
 Peter Williams 121

therefore is not only the art of poetry, but also that primordial quality in
which all forms of art find their essence in the poetic coming-to-presence.
Stevens himself seems to give a similarly circumscribed role to
imagination that is not quite Heideggerian but that also reflects the idea
that imagination has its sources and dependencies in things outside of and
external to the self. Instead of the idea of the imagination as autonomous
and self-constituting, Stevens also emphasises the contingency and
dependence of imagination when he says in a 1936 letter, “Imagination
has no source except in reality, and ceases to have any value when it
departs from reality. Here is a fundamental principle about the
imagination; It does not create except as it transforms[…]. Thus reality =
the imagination, and the imagination = reality. The imagination gives, but
gives in relation” (Stevens, 1972: 364). Stevens’ claims about imagination
here align well with Heidegger’s own when he says: “[…] it becomes
questionable whether the nature of poetry, and this means at the same time
the nature of projection, can be adequately thought of in terms of the
power of imagination” (Heidegger, 1971: 72-73). Both would reject the
view that imagination realises a distinctive content, symbolically charged
with visionary meanings or composed to generate moral effects.
In his “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (Stevens, 1990: 20-
22), Stevens predisposes us to “let things be” by moving us away from the
symbolic valencies of imagination and representational thinking and
towards imaginative processes as the apprehension of estrangement. Under
the auspices of mood, imagination then breaks open a space, a “clearing”,
in which language brings into being primordial scenes in which things
come into their own for the first time as things in all their singularity, in all
their self-possession.
The poem’s opening tercet is a still scene, the minimalist quiet of a
primordial “coming into existence” or an oriental painting brushed with
haiku and imagist delicacy:

Among twenty snowy mountains

The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird

This opening could be read or even viewed as synecdoche for the activity
of the reader/viewer and a metaphor for the work of the poet where the
moving eye signifies the initial impulse for the thirteen ways of looking. It
is important to recognise, however, the way that the movement of the
entire poem is propelled by the indecipherability of mood as articulated in
Stanza VI:
122 Moods That Matter: Heidegger, Affect and Wallace Stevens’
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro
The mood
Traced in the window
An indecipherable cause

Stevens here identifies with the provisional nature of this indecipherable

mood and how it positions the blackbird itself differently in each of the
thirteen stanzas, as if the blackbird is language itself coming into
existence. The poem therefore does not allow us to build a coherent,
consistent picture of the blackbird by cumulatively applying what we
understand of it from each of the thirteen stanzas. Instead, in a process
similar to Heidegger’s “clearing and concealing of being” the linguistic
function of the one constant in the poem, the word “blackbird”, keeps
shifting according to the mood or perspective of each stanza. It may be
part of a poetic figure in one stanza (“I was of three minds,/ Like a tree/ In
which there are three blackbirds”, a more or less literal reference in
another (“At the sight of blackbirds/ Flying in a green light”).
These positionings are the work of estrangement, a withdrawal of the
poem form a universal sense of truth or reality, from a metaphysic, to a
perspectivism in which “truth” and “reality” are confined to and restricted
by the moments in which they are sensed or read. The multiple
perspectives reflect the adjustments that reflect the impossibility of
achieving a traditional metaphysic, but that instead grant the mind’s
permission to “spring and let go”. In each of the thirteen stanzas, Stevens
re-creates a reality, a truth, according to the ontology of a different mood
or frame-of-mind. The poem’s “meaning” then becomes its reflection
through thirteen stanzas of how its various moods correlate with Stevens’
particular perspectives on the blackbird and “blackbirdness” and how
those dispositions predispose us to understand those perspectives and
things becoming what they are. If I can return to Damasio’s model of brain
functioning, I would like to claim, without any empirical evidence, that
Stevens’ language here represents not only the emergence of Being in a
Heideggerian sense but perhaps also triggers patterns of neural events in
the reader’s body that are “thought” by the mind as an emergence of the
blackbird itself, in all of its thirteen forms and contexts.
The speculative mood of Stanza V might support such a reading. Here
the blackbird itself becomes a certain kind of language that mediates the
“inflections” and “innuendos” constituting the vicissitudes of the speaker’s
preferences:
 Peter Williams 123

I do not know which I prefer,

The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Language functions here like an interrogative mood that predisposes us to

a range of tonal cadences and linguistic forms that might for Heidegger
constitute a “breaking open”, a coming into being of decidedness and
vacillation, of sound and silence and of beauty and nothingness. For
Stevens, this mood functions to illuminate and organise these states of
being by placing the speaker inside them, by inhabiting them as one would
inhabit a “world” thus exposing the attributes and patterns fundamental to
these states of intimacy and care.
This primordial perspectivism comes closest to being thematised by
Stevens in Stanza IX:

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge
Of many circles.

Each sense of the blackbird, marking “the edge/ Of many circles” defines
a new perspective on “blackbirdness” that holds only until the blackbird
crosses its next horizon, when the reader broaches the next stanza of the
poem. Horizons are, according to Nietzsche, what “[w]e measure the
world by” and “within which our senses confine each of us”. Thus a
“concentric circle is drawn around every being” (Nietzsche, 1903: 122) in
much the same way that Stevens’ blackbird traverses the stanzas of his
poem and crosses the horizons of its own forms of being.
My original “stoneness” relates to my authenticity of mood. Mood is a
fundamental way in which my Dasein is aware of its being-in-the-world,
and it is not reason that gives Dasein its basic access to being, but moods6.
The authenticity or inauthenticity of my mood is determined by whether it
discloses the truth of my Dasein or conceals the truth. Authenticity is
resoluteness and resoluteness demands for Heidegger the willingness to
have a conscience. My mood of anxiety before Heidegger disclosed my
Dasein and in anxiety Dasein is brought before itself and so my
authenticity is understood. Heidegger says:

6
Nietzsche asks, “How did reason come into the world? As is fitting, in an
irrational manner, by accident. One will have to guess at it as at a riddle”
(Nietzsche, 1976: 81).
124 Moods That Matter: Heidegger, Affect and Wallace Stevens’
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

The disclosedness of Dasein in wanting to have a conscience, is thus

constituted by anxiety as a state-of-mind, by understanding as a projection
of oneself upon one’s ownmost being-guilty, and by discourse as
reticence. This distinctive and authentic disclosedness, which is attested in
Dasein itself by its conscience – this reticent self-projection upon one’s
ownmost Being-guilty, in which one is ready for anxiety – we call
‘resoluteness’” (Heidegger, 1962: 343).

“Stoneness” therefore relates my mood to my authenticity, and it is in this

authenticity that I position myself in relation to the combination of
potentialities that both my mood and Heidegger offer. Authenticity is not
then a construction, but a fact of how particular contexts take form in
mood and resoluteness. This resoluteness arises not from the deliberate
action or willing of a subject, but from the opening up of a being to its
primordial captivity in a mood, which moves towards the openness and
truth of Being. This is an ethical state that accrues a kind of knowing that
is essential to our “care-ful” dealing with and understanding of ourselves,
others and things. The importance of these relationships is perhaps better
expressed in another poem by Wallace Stevens, “The Poem That Took the
Place of a Mountain”:

It reminded him how he needed

A place to go in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,

Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,

Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness

Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged

(Stevens, 1990, 374).

Bibliography
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T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann.
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C. Broad, Examination of McTaggart’s Philosophy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
 Peter Williams 125

Damasio, 1994
A. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human
Brain. New York: Quill.
Derrida, 1978
J. Derrida, “Retrait of Metaphor”, trans. F. Gasdner, B. Iginla, R.
Madden and W. Best. Enclitic 2: 5-33.
Griffiths, 1997
P. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Heidegger, 1962
M. Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarie and Edward
Robinson. New York: Harper and Row.
Heidegger, 1971
M. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter.
New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, 1977
M. Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Krell. New York: Harper
Collins
Merleau-Ponty, 1968
M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
Nietzsche, 1903
F. Nietzsche, Dawn of Day. Trans. Johanna Volz. New York:
MacMillan.
Nietzsche, 1967
F. Nietzsche, The Will To Power. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J.
Hollingdale. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
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F. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New
York: Viking.
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W. Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens. New
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G. Vico, The New Science. Trans. Thomas Bergin and Max Fisch. New
York: Anchor.
 TERRENCE MALICK’S THE THIN RED LINE
AND THE QUESTION
OF HEIDEGGERIAN CINEMA

ROBERT SINNERBRINK

In his 1979 foreword to The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of

Film, Stanley Cavell remarks on the difficulties presented by the
relationship between Heidegger and film (Cavell, 1979: ix-xxv). Cavell
does so with reference to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), a film
that not only presents us with images of preternatural beauty, but also
acknowledges the self-referential character of the cinematic image, the
way it manifests the play of presence and absence that is inherent in the
experience of the world viewed (Cavell, 1979: xiv). As Cavell remarks,
Days of Heaven does indeed have a metaphysical vision of the world, but
“one feels that one has never quite seen the scene of human existence—
call it the arena between earth (or days) and heaven—quite realized this
way on film before.” (Cavell, 1979: xiv-xv). This raises a difficulty for the
philosophically minded viewer of film. To ask film theorists to think about
Heidegger, as Cavell observes, is to ask them to endorse an “embattled”
perspective in Anglophone culture, one “whose application to film is
difficult to prove” (Cavell, 1979: xvi). On the other hand, to ask academic
philosophers to think about film through Heidegger is to ask them to grant
film “the status of a subject that invites and rewards philosophical
speculation, on a par with the great arts,” a concept that is itself brought
into question by film, as Walter Benjamin observed long ago (Cavell,
1979: xvi-xvii). Yet it is undeniable, for Cavell, that the films of Terrence
Malick—student of phenomenology and translator of Heidegger—have a
beauty and radiance that suggest something like a realization of
Heidegger’s thinking of the relationship between Being and beings, the
radiant self-showing of things in luminous appearance (Cavell: 1979: xv).
In what follows, I shall accept Cavell’s invitation to think about the
relationship between Heidegger and film—indeed the relationship between
philosophy and cinema—by looking at Terrence Malick’s 1998
masterpiece, The Thin Red Line. One question I would like to explore is
 Robert Sinnerbrink 127

whether we can talk of a “Heideggerian cinema,” and to ask what such talk
might mean. Another is whether we should describe The Thin Red Line as
“Heideggerian Cinema”, as some recent critics have argued, and to
examine what this might mean. Along the way I discuss two different
approaches to the film, a “Heideggerian” approach that takes it to be
unquestionably an instance of Heideggerian cinema (Furstenau and
MacEvoy, Kaja Silverman), and a “film-as-philosophy” approach, which
argues that, while the film is philosophical, we should refrain from
grounding the film in any specific philosophical framework, even that of
Heidegger (Simon Critchley). In conclusion, I offer some brief remarks on
how the film can indeed be regarded as a case of “Heideggerian cinema”,
not because we need to read Heidegger in order to talk about our
relationship to mortality, authentic existence, or to Being, but because
Malick’s film performs a cinematic poesis, a technological revealing of
mortality and world through image, sound, and time.

What is “Heideggerian Cinema”?

At first glance, the idea of a Heideggerian thinking of cinema seems
unthinkable. Heidegger’s few remarks on the subject make it clear that he
considered cinema (and photography) to be forms of technical image-
making signifying the "end of art" in the age of technology. For all that,
the only passage where Heidegger explicitly discusses a particular film is
remarkably suggestive. In “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese
and an Inquirer”, two interlocutors, the Inquirer and his Japanese guest,
converse on the relationship between Western rationality and its
dominance over the East Asian sense of art and world (Heidegger, 1982:
15-17). The Inquirer warns against the tendency to follow Western
conceptual thought, for all its technological achievements, because this
will blind us to the increasing “Europeanization of man and the earth
[which] attacks at the source everything of an essential nature” (Heidegger,
1982: 16). As an example of this all-consuming Westernization, the
Japanese guest suggests, surprisingly, Akiro Kurosawa’s Rashomon
(1950). The inquirer is perplexed, for he found Rashomon utterly
enchanting, above all its subdued gestures: “I believed that I was
experiencing the enchantment of the Japanese world, the enchantment that
carries us away into the mysterious” (Heidegger, 1982: 17). The Japanese
guest explains that the film was overly realistic, particularly in the battle
scenes, which makes it far removed from the tradition of Japanese art and
drama. It is not the realism of metaphysics, he hastens to add, but a realism
pertaining to the ontological characteristics of the cinematic image. It is
128 Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and the Question
of Heideggerian Cinema

the fact that the Japanese world is filmed at all, “captured and imprisoned
at all within the objectness of photography”, that makes Rashomon an
example of the process Western techno-rationalisation (Heidegger, 1982:
17). Regardless of the film’s undoubted aesthetic qualities, “the mere fact
that our world is set forth in the frame of a film forces that world into the
sphere of what you call of objectness” (Heidegger, 1982: 17). And this
“objectification” of world through the technological media of photography
and film is “already a consequence of the ever wider outreach of
Europeanization” (Heidegger, 1982: 17). The Inquirer (a stand-in for
Heidegger, one presumes) thus begins to understand his interlocutor’s
concern: far from presenting the “enchantment of the Japanese world”,
Kurosawa’s Rashomon shows us the incompatibility between this non-
Western sense of world, still replete with a sense of Being, and the
Westernised, “technical-aesthetic product of the film industry” that suffers
from a loss of the sense of Being (Heidegger, 1982: 17). In short,
cinematic art intensifies, rather than reverses, the process of
"objectification" of beings that is symptomatic of the Western forgetting of
Being.
While intriguing, particularly for its implicit criticism of Western
"orientalism", this passage is hardly a promising start for thinking about
the relationship between Heidegger and cinema. Indeed, it suggests that
there is little to be said other than that cinema is a pernicious manifestation
of Western technological enframing. It is also a disappointing discussion
of Kurosawa’s work, given the latter’s explicitly hybrid character, fusing
Japanese with Western literary traditions (Shakespeare), and its
revitalization of the Western action genre by combining it with martial
aspects of Japanese drama1. Given Heidegger’s evident skepticism
concerning film, what are we to make of the frequent talk of
"Heideggerian cinema" that Malick’s work seems to provoke?
For some viewers of Malick there is no real question here to ponder.
According to a recent essay by Marc Furstenau and Leslie MacEvoy,
Malick’s The Thin Red Line is clearly an instance of “Heideggerian
cinema” (Furstenau and MacEvoy, 2003). This follows firstly, they
suggest, from the biographical facts of Malick’s career. Malick studied
philosophy as an undergraduate with Stanley Cavell, and briefly taught
philosophy at the MIT, even teaching courses for Hubert Dreyfus. Malick

1
As Julian Young notes, "Kurosawa, who had studied Western painting, literature,
and political philosophy, based Yojimbo on a Dashiell Hammett novel, Throne of
Blood on Macbeth, and Ran on King Lear. He never pretended otherwise than that
his films were cultural hybrids" (Young, 2001: 149).
 Robert Sinnerbrink 129

travelled to Germany in the mid 1960s to meet with Heidegger, and

produced a scholarly translation of Vom Wesen des Grundes (The Essence
of Reasons) for Northwestern University Press in 1969. Malick’s
promising career as a phenomenologist came to an abrupt halt, however,
when he abandoned philosophy to become a film-maker2. A philosopher
turned film-maker is surely a rare and fascinating creature. Thus we can
readily understand Furstenau and MacEvoy’s confident claim that Malick
clearly “transformed his knowledge of Heidegger in cinematic terms”
(Furstenau and MacEvoy, 2003: 175), a knowledge that came to fruition in
his first film, Badlands (1973), in Days of Heaven (1978), and in The Thin
Red Line (1998).
While Malick’s biography, according to Furstenau and MacEvoy,
provides one reason to regard his work as Heideggerian, his films’
philosophical complexity and aesthetic texture provides a stronger reason.
Citing Cavell, they point to Malick’s philosophical concern with the self-
reflexive character of the cinematic image, the way the structures of
presence and absence which shape metaphysical thinking are reenacted
through the technology of the cinema. The reflexivity of the cinematic
image involves a play between presence and absence, presenting a being
through the image that is nonetheless absent, for us, as a being. Malick,
according to Cavell, artistically explores this play between presence and
absence, or the difference between (present) beings and their (concealed)
Being. Hence the parallel that Cavell points to between metaphysical and
cinematic representation. This conscious exploration of this parallel and its
implications, for Furstenau and MacEvoy, is precisely what makes Malick
an exemplary philosophical film-maker: “The task of a philosophically
engaged cinema is to address both the inherent reflexivity of the film
image, as well as the potential consequences of the transformation of the
world into image” (Furstenau and MacEvoy, 2003: 176).
Malick’s Heideggerianism, however, is not just a matter of the
reflexivity of his cinematic work, or even a consequence of the
technological transformation of reality into a stock of representational
images. Echoing Heidegger on Hölderlin, they suggest that we should
regard Malick as a cinematic poet responding to the destitution of
modernity: “Malick has assumed the role of poet-philosopher […]
revealing through the use of poetic, evocative imagery the cinema’s
unique presencing of Being” (Furstenau and MacEvoy, 2003: 177). Much
like Hölderlin and Rilke, Malick’s cinema would be a form of poetic

2
See Critchley (2005: 138) for a succinct resume of Malick’s fascinating
biography.
130 Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and the Question
of Heideggerian Cinema

revealing or bringing-forth, a way or reawakening our lost sense of Being,

of finitude and mortality, in a technological world transformed into world-
image.
There are two points I would like to make regarding this strongly
"Heideggerian" approach to Malick. The first is that we should be wary of
reading the film solely through the lens of Malick’s biography. The second
is that recognizing the "Heideggerian" aspects in the film shouldn’t blind
us to other dimensions of its aesthetic and philosophical complexity. That
Malick was a teacher of philosophy and translator of Heidegger need not
prompt us assume that he makes "Heideggerian" films. Nor should the
powerful treatment of themes such as mortality and finitude, the
possibility of authentic existence, and our relationship with Being, blind us
to the way that Malick also belongs, for example, to the tradition of
American transcendentalism, embracing figures such as Emerson,
Thoreau, or even Cavell. Rather than using Malick’s Heideggerian
background to reduce the film’s complex imagery, style, and themes to a
Heideggerian content, the relationship between Malick’s films and
philosophy, or in particular between Heidegger and The Thin Red Line,
should remain a question rather than a presupposition for any reading of
his work. This question is avoided in Furstenau and MacEvoy’s framing of
the film within Heidegger’s thinking of Being. For what disappears from
view is the film as a film, the detail of its narrative structure, the
significance of its characters and their situation, the complexity of its
sound and imagery.

Malick as phenomenologist of finitude

Kaja Silverman presents a more cinematically grounded approach to the
film in her essay, “All Things Shining”, a reading that also emphasizes
Malick’s Heideggerian vision of mortality and finitude (Silverman, 2003).
If Furstenau and MacEvoy read Malick as a Heideggerian poet in destitute
times, Silverman interprets Malick as a Heideggerian "existential"
phenomenologist concerned to evoke “the Nothing” [das Nichts] in our
experience of finitude and indeed of Being itself. While Furstenau and
MacEvoy rely on the later, post-Kehre Heidegger of “What are Poets
For?”, “…Poetically Man Dwells …”, and “The Question Concerning
Technology”, Silverman focuses instead on the Heidegger of Being and
Time, Division II, and the famous 1929 Freiburg lecture, “What is
Metaphysics?” (Heidegger, 1993: 93-110). Silverman’s Malick is not the
post-metaphysical thinker of Being, but rather the "existential"
phenomenologist concerned to disclose, through our experience of
 Robert Sinnerbrink 131

anxiety, the encounter with nonbeing at the heart of our finite temporal
existence. Malick’s concerns are in any case philosophical rather than
conventionally narratological (Silverman, 2003: 324), which explains the
perplexity many critics and viewers experienced when confronted with
Malick’s idiosyncratic version of the war film genre3.
Indeed, Silverman too regards Malick’s film as philosophy, a vision
that is very much grounded in Heidegger’s account of authentic being-
toward-death (as explored in Being and Time, Division II) and the
encounter with “the Nothing” (examined in “What is Metaphysics?”).
Indeed, Heidegger’s being-toward-death, as Silverman remarks, is less an
account of a limit to existence than a way of existing in the world as finite,
as grounded in the Nothing (Silverman, 2003: 334); it is less a way of
embracing death than a way of affirming life by "living toward" death.
Malick’s exploration of this theme, moreover, invokes what Silverman
calls a singular affectivity, a simultaneous negativity and affirmation:
“both a darkness verging on total eclipse and a radiance brighter than the
sun’s return” (Silverman, 2003: 324). The film subjects us to the shattering
experience of an almost unbearable negativity that permeates both our
psychic core and our bodily being (Silverman, 2003: 324).
Indeed, The Thin Red Line, Silverman suggests, takes phenomenology
to a place where Heidegger himself was not capable of bringing it: “the
battlefield” (Silverman, 2003: 326). It is precisely here, as Heidegger
hints, that we encounter finitude in its rawest sense; the experience of “the
nothing” that dissolves our spurious independence, our generic das Man-
Selbst subjectivity, and thereby reveals to us our "groundless" mortality4.
To be sure, one hears echoes here of the "existentialist" theme of war as an
authentic encounter with mortality, the Front-Erlebnis celebrated by
writers such as Ernst Jünger. Far from exulting in negativity and violence,
however, Malick’s explorations of mortality and the meaning of authentic
Being-toward-death are oriented by philosophical, ethical, even spiritual
concerns. Private Witt’s journey is one towards Being, the Nothing, that
transpires through an authentic affective relationship to his own mortality,
his “confrontation with the nonbeing that grounds him” (Silverman, 2003:
331). This is a confrontation that is manifested through his affective
relationship with death, that is, through his calm, or what the later

3
One film critic notoriously gave the film a rating of four question marks; not an
inappropriate rating for such a "Heideggerian" work!
4
See Heidegger’s enigmatic remark in Being and Time that Da-sein can attain its
authenticity as anticipatory resoluteness by “running under the eyes of death”; in
so doing, it can “take over completely the being that it itself is in its thrownness”
(Heidegger, 1996: §74, 350).
132 Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and the Question
of Heideggerian Cinema

Heidegger called Gelassenheit or releasement. The metaphysical

dimension of The Thin Red Line is centred on this affective encounter with
non-being and finitude; an affective experience, disclosed through
cinematic images, that might reawaken a sense of Being itself in its
plurality and plenitude.
Indeed, the real conflict in The Thin Red Line, as Silverman suggests,
is not the physical conflict of war, but rather “the affective conflict that
knowledge of mortality precipitates in every human psyche” (Silverman,
2003: 336). It is knowledge of mortality that is the real source of the
violence so manifest in the film, which is concerned with “death in general
and not war in particular” (Silverman, 2003: 328). The significance of
mortality is revealed through state of mind or mood rather than knowledge
or action; for, “it is through one’s affective orientation to death and not
through a bodily collapse” that one either meets mortality or else fails to
meet it (Silverman, 2003: 327). This is an important point for
understanding Malick’s art: the real drama in The Thin Red Line is
existential and phenomenological rather than physical or historical; it is
ontological rather than ontic, so to speak. In this respect, I would venture
that The Thin Red Line is not really a war film at all; it presents rather a
phenomenology of the experience of mortality, of different attitudes
towards our own finitude, the encounter with the Nothing disclosed in the
varying modes of fear, anxiety, indifference, aversion, egoism, and
violence.
Witt’s opening question, in voice-over, sets the scene for this
meditation on violence and mortality: “What is this war at the heart of
nature?” Silverman eloquently describes what follows as we might call
Witt’s phenomenological journey, his experience in locating the conflict
first in nature, then attributing the conflict to an external invading force,
this “evil” that possesses us, “mocking,” as Witt says, “what we might
have known”. Witt learns, however, that this violence that stains our being
is not due to a nature at odds with itself, or to a corruption of our own
nature, but rather to our failure to confront our own mortality, our
fundamental finitude as living-toward-death. War has an existential-
ontological basis, rather than a psychological, historical, or political one:
“we kill each other like this because we have not yet succeeded in
apprehending in the indeterminateness of the ‘nothing’ the
indeterminateness of being” (Silverman, 2003: 337). Cut off from Being,
“like a coal thrown from the fire”, we revert to this brutal violence as a
way of making manifest the disturbing, uncanny nature of the Nothing
from which we flee or distract ourselves.
 Robert Sinnerbrink 133

The counterpoint to violence is wonder, the openness to Being,

manifested in Malick’s extraordinary images of nature that punctuate the
film, granting it a unique poetic resonance and contemplative mood. The
Nothing that appears to be the source of life and death, however, can also
give rise to what makes us most human, to what Silverman calls the
“affirmative affects”; as Witt enumerates, to “glory, mercy, peace, truth …
calm of spirit, understandin’, courage, the contented heart” (Silverman,
2003: 337). Malick succeeds admirably in presenting cinematically this
experience of the Nothing, an affective orientation to death that is also the
source of life, where "affective" means something like mood or
attunement. This is not merely a psychological feeling or private emotion
so much as a shared Heideggerian Stimmung: a world-disclosing mood
that is also a mode of understanding and of practical orientation towards
the world. The Thin Red Line evokes such moods—anxiety, boredom,
dread, despair, wonder, joy, love—as ways of disclosing our authentic
finitude or being-toward-death, which, as Silverman repeats, is less a way
of dying than of living through our mortal end.
Thus, for example, it is the affect of calm that provides the appropriate
mood or Stimmung for apprehending our finitude, a mood that pervades
the extraordinary sequence depicting Witt’s mother’s death, and Witt’s
own confrontation with finitude in facing death calmly as a way of saving
his fellow soldiers. Witt’s death is also the conclusion of his
phenomenological journey; having understood the nature of this mortal
conflict at the heart of nature, which is really a conflict with our own
mortal nature, Witt literally runs forward into death, embracing it calmly
as coextensive with the life of the jungle forest clearing in which he is
shot. “O my soul, let me be in you now” the dead Witt intones, over
images of the wake of the patrol boat departing from the island over dark
waters. “Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All
things shining.” With these final words, as Silverman remarks, Witt
returns us to the finite world, now illuminated by wonder. His final lesson
is profound: we can affirm Being, encounter the Nothing, only by
experiencing this phenomenal world and our own mortality within it;
moreover, this philosophical or existential insight can only be experienced
affectively from a particular point of view. As Silverman puts it, The Thin
Red Line literally shows how “we can affirm the world only through a
very particular pair of eyes” (Silverman, 2003: 340).
There is much in Silverman’s reading of the film that is enlightening,
such as her subtle observation that Witt’s mother’s death scene in fact
shows us her experience of calm in the face of death rather than Witt’s
own recollection of the event (note that his voiceover describes witnessing
134 Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and the Question
of Heideggerian Cinema

his mother’s death but seeing nothing glorious in it) (Silverman, 2003:
328). The sequence, with its gently singing bird and silent poetic gestures,
ends with the camera panning up towards the roof, giving way to the blue
of the sky, which “becomes part of the sea, land, and oceanscape of the
Solomon Islands” (Silverman, 2003: 328). “‘Openness to the world’”, as
Silverman observes, “is the dominant trope invoked by these last images”
(Silverman, 2003: 328). Another important observation is that Witt’s
utopian-romantic vision of the harmonious life of the Melanesian
community is his subjective fantasy, rather than Malick’s orientalising
naivety, a fantasy shattered by the violence of war and the reality of
domination, disease, and discord. There is no question that Silverman’s
emphasis on Witt’s “journey toward Being”, his decision “to live
‘toward’” his finitude through his early meditation upon his own death,
enriches our cinematic and philosophical understanding of the film,
particularly Malick’s decision to make Witt the central character, and to
turn the manner in which Witt faces his own death into the film’s narrative
climax (in James Jones’ novel, Witt is a minor character, ignorant and
racist, and he certainly does not die).
At the same time, however, Silverman’s approach presupposes that we
can talk about Malick’s cinema, and The Thin Red Line in particular, as
"Heideggerian" in a straightforward sense. Although they emphasise
different aspects of Heidegger’s thought, Furstenau, MacEvoy, and
Silverman all assume that the film can be subsumed within a philosophical
framework that would explain its thematic content and aesthetic style. This
strongly "Heideggerian" approach applies philosophy to film or reads film
in light of a given philosophical framework, without, however, raising the
question of the relationship between philosophy and film, which is what a
reading in the spirit of Heidegger’s thought, I would suggest, might be
expected to do.

Malick as cinematic philosopher

This remark parallels an objection made by Simon Critchley in his essay,
“Calm: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line” (Critchley, 2005).
Indeed, Silverman, Furstenau and MacEvoy, all risk slipping on what
Critchley dubs the three "hermeneutic banana skins" confronting any
philosophically-minded viewer of Malick’s work: 1) fetishising Malick the
enigmatic auteur; 2) being seduced by Malick’s intriguing relationship
with philosophy; and 3) reducing the matter of Malick’s film to a
philosophical meta-text that would provide the key to its meaning. As
Critchley remarks, doing film-philosophy is a risky undertaking: “To read
 Robert Sinnerbrink 135

from cinematic language to some philosophical metalanguage is both to

miss what is specific to the medium of film and usually to engage in some
sort of cod-philosophy deliberately designed to intimidate the uninitiated”
(Silverman, 2005: 139). Sobering words for any aspiring philosophical
reader of film! Critchley’s point, however, is a serious one: a philosophical
reading does not mean reading through the film to a framing philosophical
meta-text, but rather presenting a reading of the film as itself engaged in
philosophical reflection. A philosophical reading does not rely on a pre-
given philosophical framework but remains rather with the cinematic
matter or Sache selbst. This "film as philosophy" approach, in short, is one
that takes film seriously, as “a form of philosophizing, of reflection,
reasoning, and argument” (Critchley, 2005: 139).
So what of Critchley’s philosophical approach to The Thin Red Line? It
offers a strongly immanent reading of the film, eschewing explicit
recourse to given philosophical frameworks and foregrounding instead its
textual, thematic, and narrative elements5. The narrative, Critchley
suggests, is organized around three central relationships, each consisting
of a conflict between two characters, and each articulating one of three
related themes: 1) Loyalty, the conflict between Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte)
and Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) over loyalty towards the commands of
one’s superiors versus loyalty towards the men under one’s command; 2)
Love, explored in Private Ben’s (Ben Chaplin) devotion to, and ultimate
betrayal by, his wife Marty (Miranda Otto); and 3) the question of
metaphysical Truth, an argument, in the fullest sense, between Sergeant
Welsh (Sean Penn) and Private Witt (Jim Caviezel), a struggle that spans
the entire length of the film.
For Critchley, the most important theme is that of truth, the search for
which shapes the complex relationship between Welsh and Witt. The
question, as Critchley puts it, is whether there is a transcendent
metaphysical truth: “is this the only world, or is there another world?”
(Critchley, 2005: 140). In an early dialogue, Welsh informs Witt that, “in
this world, a man himself is nothing … and there ain’t no world but this
one.” Witt disagrees, replying that he has seen another world, beyond the
merely physical realm. “Well,” Welsh replies, “you’re seeing something I
never will.” This argument is elaborated throughout the course of the film.
Welsh maintains that the war is ultimately about nothing more than
"property", which means that the best a man can do is to "make himself an
island" and simply survive. Witt, by contrast, claims to see beyond the lie

5
Critchley thus discusses the ways in which Malick departs from James Jones’
gritty 1963 novel and the 1964 film version by Andrew Marton.
136 Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and the Question
of Heideggerian Cinema

of war, finding amidst the violence and brutality the possibility of selfless
sacrifice; he seeks an encounter with "the glory", with the moment of
immortality that arrives in facing one’s death with calm.
Their relationship thus takes on the character of a philosophical
disputation, Welsh’s “nihilistic physicalism”, as Critchley describes,
clashing with Witt’s “metaphysical panpsychism” (Critchley, 2005: 141).
Welsh’s assertions are confounded by Witt’s questions: “What is this war
in the heart of nature?” “Where does this evil come from?” “Maybe all
men got one big soul, that everybody’s part of—all faces are the same
man, one big self”. Welsh’s dispirited resignation is contrasted with Witt’s
affirmative spark: Witt survives the war, but is deadened; Witt dies but in
an enlivened state, calmly sacrificing himself for his fellows. Who is
"right" about the metaphysical truth of war? There can be no answer to
this question, the ambivalence of the experience of war, as a confrontation
with mortality, being precisely Malick’s point: it "poisons the soul" but
also "reveals the glory".
These metaphysical reflections on truth, mortality, and humanity, are,
for Critchley, what makes Malick’s film a philosophical work. The key to
the film and to Malick’s work generally, he suggests, is calm: the calm
acceptance of death, of this-worldly mortality, a calmness present not only
as a narrative theme but as a cinematic aesthetic. Malick’s male
protagonists, as Critchley observes, “seem to foresee their appointment
with death and endeavour to make sure they arrive on time” (Critchley,
2005: 142-143). Witt is one such character, recklessly putting himself in
situations of extreme danger, fascinated by the intimacy of death, but with
an anticipation of it that brings not fear but calm. Early in the film, Witt
describes his initially fearful response to his mother’s death as follows: “I
was afraid to touch the death that I seen in her. I couldn’t find anything
beautiful or uplifting about her going back to God. I heard people talk
about immortality, but I ain’t never seen it”. Witt then wonders how it will
be when he dies, what it would be like “to know that this breath now was
the last one you was ever gonna draw”. And it is here that he finds his
answer about the relation between immortality and mortality: “I just hope I
can meet it the same way she did, with the same … calm. Because that’s
where it’s hidden, the immortality that I hadn’t seen”.
As Kaja Silverman points out, however, this scene actually presents
Witt’s mother’s sense of calm, rather than Witt’s own recollection of his
mother’s death. For Witt recalls the fear he felt in seeing his mother
"going to meet God". Yet it is her moment of calm before death that gives
Witt a clue as to how to experience his own authentic being-toward-death
(Silverman, 2005: 328). Be that as it may, the thought Malick presents
 Robert Sinnerbrink 137

here, Critchley remarks, is that immortality can only be understood as this

calm before death, the moment of eternal life that can only be imagined as
inhabiting the instant of one’s own death6. This surely tempts one to think
about what Heidegger describes as authentic being-toward-death, as
Silverman does in her reading of The Thin Red Line as a meditation on the
Heideggerian Nothing. Indeed, Critchley himself points to the parallels
with Heidegger’s being-toward-death, the Angst that can be experienced as
a kind of Ruhe, as peace or calm; yet to do so, he maintains, would be to
slip on one of those hermeneutic banana skins mentioned earlier.
Can we avoid such hermeneutic slips? I suspect not, nor should we, for
the Heideggerian context of The Thin Red Line necessarily resonates
within the film, whether we embrace or eschew it, providing a horizon of
thought and meaning that is impossible to bracket completely. Heidegger
has, after all, left an indelible mark on our horizon of philosophical
thinking. Indeed, the reflections in the film on death, mortality, finitude,
and our relationship with Being, I suggest, gain at least some of their
philosophical resonance from their distinctly Heideggerian tenor. In this
respect, Critchley’s strictly "immanentist" reading of The Thin Red Line
risks foreclosing the very horizon of thought that nourishes much of the
film’s speculative and metaphysical vision.
This difficulty of avoiding Heidegger becomes clear in Critchley’s
concluding reflections on the ethical significance of The Thin Red Line.
Here the theme in question is being open to the presencing of Nature, just
letting things be, what we might describe, though Critchley does not, as an
attitude of "releasement" in both an ethical and aesthetical sense. Witt’s
calm in the face of mortality is framed by the massive presence of nature,
dwarfing the human drama of war, of physical violence and historical
conflict. This beautiful indifference of nature, Critchley observes, might
be viewed as a kind of fatum for Malick, “an ineluctable power, a warring
force that both frames human war but is utterly indifferent to human
purposes and intentions” (Critchley, 2005: 146). According to Critchley,
this indifference to human concerns, which differs from the enchanted
nature of animism, follows from Malick’s broadly naturalistic conception
of nature: “Things are not enchanted in Malick’s universe, they simply
are, and we are things too” (Critchley, 2005: 146). Things simply are,
luminous and shining, remote from our purposes and strivings, being just
as they are, “in all the intricate evasions of ‘as’” (Critchley, 2005: 147).
Malick’s camera thus takes on a neutral perspective, calmly revealing their
presence not for us but despite us.

6
Critchley also mentions Blanchot’s L’Instant de ma mort in this context.
138 Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and the Question
of Heideggerian Cinema

Malick is in this respect more akin to a poet like Wallace Stevens than
to a thinker like Heidegger, though Critchley leaves the nature of this
relationship tantalizingly open. In the end it is the poet Stevens who
"frames" Critchley’s reading of The Thin Red Line, which opens with
Stevens’ “The Death of a Soldier” and closes, aptly, with a quotation from
“The Palm at the End of the Mind”—lines resonating with the final image
of a coconut shoot emerging from out of the sandy shallows. As with the
later Heidegger, we defer to the poet rather than the philosopher when it
comes to that mode of poetic revealing which exceeds the philosophical
framing of the film, or indeed the framework of philosophical discourse
itself.
Surely here, philosophically anxious viewers might exclaim, we are
talking of an experience evoking Heidegger’s Gelassenheit! For all the
care to avoid invoking a philosophical meta-text, or departing from our
immersion in the cinematic Sache, we find ourselves talking of the way
things presence, their luminous appearance, their revealing of a world that
we do not master or control; an experience that reveals the mystery of
finitude and the calm releasement towards time, death, and the mystery of
Being. Hermeneutic banana skin or not, it seems difficult to avoid talk
about Malick’s cinematic "letting be" without invoking, at least implicitly,
the Heideggerian thought of Gelassenheit, about which Critchley remains
silent. Is Critchley’s reading here not a touch "Heideggerian" after all?
Surely it reveals, in a phenomenological manner, the way the film
thematises death, finitude and our proper relationship with Being.
Interestingly, however, Critchley does not mention the theme that, in
my view, is most central to the film: the confrontation with mortality and
different attitudes towards our own finitude as mortal and finite beings.
My suggestion would be that it is the, dare one say, properly
"Heideggerian" theme of mortality that pervades the other themes of
loyalty, love, truth, and indeed our relationship to Nature, lending these a
philosophical subtlety and poetic richness. In this sense, reference to
Heideggerian phenomenology seems indispensable, since what we are
watching is nothing less than a phenomenology of mortality; one that
demonstrates the distinctive experiences of mortality—our success or
failure to confront it—in the stories of the different characters’ experiences
during the battle of Guadalcanal. This also means that the question of what
we mean by “Heideggerian cinema” presents itself once again. Whereas
Furstenau and MacEvoy’s approach threatens to subsume the film within a
"Heideggerian" framework, Critchley’s avoidance of such a framework
might be taken as another kind of avoidance of the question of the
 Robert Sinnerbrink 139

relationship between Heidegger and cinema—even where this relationship

becomes, as it does with Malick, marvelously thought-provoking.

A Cinematic Poesis?
In conclusion I want to offer some brief remarks suggesting an alternative
way of approaching the question of "Heideggerian cinema". As discussed
earlier, Heidegger’s thinking on film, such as it is, remains overwhelmingly
negative: film is a powerful instance of reductive technological en-framing
that only intensifies the Western obliteration of Being. We should recall
here, however, that Heidegger’s claim that en-framing or Ge-stell as the
essence of technology—the revealing and ordering of beings as a totality
of available resources—is a thoroughly ambivalent process: it not only
presents the great danger of a destructive reduction of human beings to
manipulable resources, but also presents the possibility of a "saving
power"—of a new relation of appropriation between Being, beings, and
human beings that might emerge from within the technological world
(Heidegger, 1977). What would be the artform most essential to the
technological age? Surely cinema: the technological en-framing of reality
that enables us to reveal luminous appearances in time. If we take cinema
to be the artform most appropriate to the age of technology, then such
ambivalent possibilities must also be present in cinematic art, despite the
dominance of standardised Hollywood conventions, which often do reduce
film to a "worldless" aesthetic resource.
Despite the undeniable instrumentalisation of modern experience,
technological en-framing also opens up the possibility of a new way of
revealing world, namely through film as a form of cinematic poesis. By
this I mean a revealing or bringing-forth through sound and image that
displaces the conventional representational and narrative focus on
presenting objects in their presence within the action-directed,
motivational schemas of self-willing subjects. One need only compare The
Thin Red Line with Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) to understand
the contrast I am proposing here. Such an anti-representationalist account
of cinematic poesis could supplement the readings of Malick’s film
offered by Critchley and by Silverman, bringing these into a reflective
relationship with Heidegger’s thought without thereby reducing the
meaning of the film to a Heideggerian meta-text, or else foreclosing the
question of the relationship between Heidegger and cinema altogether.
Heidegger’s general complaint against cinema is that it remains
irreducibly "metaphysical" in the sense of only ever being able to present
beings in their massive presence. It is beholden to a metaphysical realism
140 Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line and the Question
of Heideggerian Cinema

intrinsic to the cinematic image as presenting beings to perception rather

than revealing the luminous play between Being and being. Malick’s
films, I suggest, provide a practical refutation of Heidegger’s complaint.
The Thin Red Line is an enactment of this cinematic poesis, revealing
different ways in which we can relate to our own mortality, to the finitude
of Being, the radiance of Nature, as well as depicting, from multiple
character-perspectives, the experiences of loss, of violence, of humanity,
and the ethical stance of just letting things be. This showing is enacted not
simply at the level of narrative content or visual style; it involves the very
capacity of cinema to reawaken different kinds of attunement or mood
through sound and image, revealing otherwise concealed aspects—visual,
aural, affective, and temporal—of our finite being-in-the-world.
A "Heideggerian" approach to Malick’s work can embrace many ways
of being, from the thematic and reflexive to the philosophical and poetic.
All of these approaches, however, presuppose that we have already
considered the question of the nature of the cinematic image and its
capacity to provoke thought. Broaching these questions cinematically is
one of the remarkable achievements of Malick’s The Thin Red Line. It
performs a cinematic revealing of world, staging the poetic difference
between saying and showing, yet also questions our violent mode of
dwelling in modernity. It presents a phenomenology of mortality,
depicting, through various characters the experiences of anxiety, despair,
indifference, violence, and sacrifice that Malick presents as different ways
of confronting, or failing to confront, our fundamental finitude as mortal
beings. This mortal violence at the heart of nature is a failure to confront
our own mortal nature. Only Witt traverses this phenomenological journey
from darkness to light, from ignorance and naivety to wisdom and insight.
He learns the secret of the immortality he failed to glimpse in his mother’s
death, the calm Gelassenheit that signals the true acknowledgement of
one’s mortality. Witt’s openness to the world—his calm embrace of
finitude through visual and tactile releasement—shows that even in the
most devastating capacity for destruction there might also be the
possibility of ethical transformation, a way of being in which we might
experience the joy of "all things shining"7.

7
My thanks to the participants of the Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living
Conference, University of Sydney, December 12-14, 2005, and to Daniel Ross for
his many thoughtful comments.
 Robert Sinnerbrink 141

Bibliography
Cavell, 1979
Stanley Cavell, “Foreword to the Enlarged Edition”. In The World
Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Critchley, 2005
Simon Critchley, “Calm: On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line”. In
Film as Philosophy. Essays on Cinema after Wittgenstein and Cavell,
ed. R. Read and J. Goodenough: 133-148. Basingstoke and New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Furstenau and MacEvoy, 2003
Marc Furstenau and Leslie MacEvoy, “Terrence Malick’s
Heideggerian Cinema: War and the Question of Being in The Thin Red
Line”. In The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America,
ed. H. Patterson: 173-185. London: Wallflower Press.
Heidegger, 1977
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”. In The
Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt:
3-35. New York: Harper and Row.
Heidegger, 1982
Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and
an Inquirer”. In On the Way to Language, trans. P. D. Hertz: 1-54. San
Francisco: Harper and Row.
Heidegger, 1993
Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” In Basic Writings. Revised
and Expanded Edition, ed. D.F. Krell: 93-110. San Francisco: Harper
and Row.
Heidegger, 1996
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. J. Stambaugh. Albany: State
University of New York.
Silverman, 2003
Kaja Silverman, “All Things Shining”. In Loss: The Politics of
Mourning, ed. D. L. Eng and D. Kazanjian: 323-342. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Young, 2001.
Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
 REFLECTIONS ON HEIDEGGER’S SAYING:
“THE WAY WHAT IS QUESTIONED
ESSENTIALLY ENGAGES OUR QUESTIONING
BELONGS TO THE INNERMOST MEANING
OF THE QUESTION OF BEING”

GEORGE VASSILACOPOULOS

I. Introduction
For Heidegger thinking is “the historical process in which a thinker arises,
says his word, and so provides to truth a place within a historical
humanity” (Heidegger, 1998: 7) and, of course, in his own case this
historical process begins with the question of the meaning of being. Parvis
Emad (2002) has recently argued that for the most part commentators have
neglected the guiding significance of this question in their appropriations
of Being and Time. He offers an analysis of the structure of the question
with two purposes in mind: the first is to show how commentators have
misunderstood Heidegger and the second is to show how the structure of
the question of the meaning of being “guides and reaches into Heidegger’s
hermeneutic efforts which distinguish his fundamental-ontology and
being-historical thinking from traditional pre-occupation with being”
(Emad, 2002: 15). Whether we take Heidegger’s central focus to be the
question of being or instead “what brings about being” (Sheehan, 2001: 5),
an appreciation of the way in which Heidegger’s philosophical project is
activated calls for careful consideration of what “belongs to the innermost
meaning of the question of being” (Heidegger, 1996: 7). Emad makes the
point that “when Heidegger stresses the need for an exposition and
conceptualization that are peculiar to being and its meaning he alludes to
the language of being”. Moreover, “this shows that as early as the analysis
of the structure of the question of being Heidegger ‘speaks’ that language
of being” (Emad, 2002: 15). My focus in this paper is to ask: what
precisely is it to “speak” this language in an analysis of the structure of the
 George Vassilacopoulos 143

question of the meaning of being?

My approach is to engage with Heidegger in his own terms in order to
clarify some of his more crucial insights that he presents without
discussing fully how they spring from the question of being. This is an
exercise in what can be termed a disciplined preparation for receiving and
recreating the phenomenological text, and for that matter also Heidegger’s
project after Being and Time, in an entirely immanent manner to the
fundamental question of being. The analysis of the structure of the
question of being shows why and how the thinker must begin the analytic
of Da-sein with Da-sein’s dealings with handy things as a requirement of
the radical demands guiding the question of being and it suggests how the
question of being guides not only the starting point of the
phenomenological text but also the main developmental stages of Being
and Time. I aim to show that prior to the actual development of Being and
Time one must be able to arrive at the starting point of the
phenomenological text via a process that is informed by the guidance of
being as the asked about of the question of being. It is only after moving
from the formal question, through a strict analysis of its formal elements,
to the concrete world of an understanding of being that everything will
have been cleared for a second movement from what is concrete to the
concrete recapturing of the question of being. Basically this means that in
Being and Time thinking moves from one stage to the next immanently to
the analytic of Da-sein by allowing such immanent development to be
guided by the already transcending perspective of the question of the
meaning of being and the overall task that the question dictates. The
argument forms part of a broader investigation of the radical demands of
the question of being as Heidegger poses this question in order to explore
the idea that his thought radicalises Da-sein at the expense of appreciating
the potential radicality of things – a radicality that I would argue depends
upon an appreciation of the disclosing power of the property relation
understood in Hegelian terms (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, 1999:
16-21).

II.
Heidegger's contention is that his thinking deals with what is fundamental.
Dealing with what is fundamental suggests a fundamental encounter with
it. The encountering is never simply a result of the coming together of
already self-sufficient beings. It is there from the very beginning; or rather
it is itself the beginning. What is encountered and the agent of the
encounter are made sense of in terms of the encounter itself. This is why
144 Reflections on Heidegger’s Saying

in his most important statement about the question of being – the question
being the form of the encounter between being and Da-sein – Heidegger
draws attention to the interrelation between the asking and the asked
about:
[...] there is a notable "relatedness backward or forward" of what is asked
about (being) to asking as a mode of being of a being. The way what is
questioned essentially engages our questioning belongs to the innermost
meaning of the question of being. But this only means that the being that
has the character of Da-sein has a relation to the question of being itself,
perhaps even a distinctive one (Heidegger, 1996: 7-8).

Let us begin by noting that these insights not only emerge within the
dynamics of the question of being but they merge with the question. That
is, in giving shape to the question they allow the question to emerge and
unfold. Heidegger’s statement should not be read as an externally derived
description but as part of the question’s essential engagement of the
questioned with the corresponding questioning. Accordingly, from the
point of view of the thinker there is nothing, so to speak, beyond the
question, since it is through asking and as asking that “the being that has
the character of Da-sein” becomes an issue. Everything, including the
question as a whole, becomes an issue through the question. Moreover,
there is in the question a kind of spontaneity that determines a theoretical
vision which is made sense of in terms of the dwelling of the thinker “in”
being, that is, according to the challenge that being poses in and through
the question of its meaning.
So, the thinker emerges as a thinker insofar as he or she realises that
within the framework of the question this challenge is not simply to think
in an external and conventional manner. Rather, thinking is determined by
the willingness of Da-sein to dwell in the question of being, thus allowing
the asking to be fully determined by what already determines it, namely
being as the asked about. Heidegger thus draws our attention to the radical
nature of asking, a radicality that emanates exclusively from the encounter
with being. In the question of being, asking “loses” its status as a formal
faculty of a subject already present to itself and indifferently applied to
any “object”. In other words, the questioned as questioned is not passive
or indifferent to a questioning that exclusively belongs to the subject who
might activate it at will. On the contrary, within the framework of the
question of being the asking seems to be passive only in the sense that it
appears as the “mode of being” of Da-sein that emerges through its
dwelling in the question of being and its association with being as the
asked about. As Heidegger puts it, “asking this question, as a mode of
 George Vassilacopoulos 145

being of a being, is itself essentially determined by what is asked about in

it-being” (Heidegger, 1996: 6). Indeed it is by taking the form of the
opening within which being, as the asked about, is already located and
becomes accessible that Da-sein encounters itself as asking, hence
Heidegger’s introduction of Da-sein through the mode of being of asking.
Accordingly, from the very beginning of its encounter with itself, and
because of being’s engagement with Da-sein, the Da of Da-sein as asking,
is “being the open” (Sheehan, 2001: 8) that permits being as the asked
about to become an issue.
At the same time, Da-sein encounters itself in terms of an aim: in so
far as it accepts the challenge of being it must become, or embrace what it
already is, namely its Da as asking. To be (sein) its Da, that is, to open the
opening that Da is, becomes its philosophical vision and mission. Let us
investigate this last point in more detail since it relates to the task that
Heidegger characterises as “the guiding task of working out the question
of being” (Heidegger, 1996: 15). Once it becomes available, the question
of being itself sets this task given that as the question of being it must be
“explicitly formulated and brought to complete clarity concerning itself”
(Heidegger, 1996: 5).
Heidegger indicates that once the question of being becomes an issue
and generates the framework within which the agent of questioning and
what is questioned encounter one another, a further question poses itself.
This second question concerns the being that is suited for interrogation for
the purposes of “the elaboration of the question of being” (Heidegger,
1996: 5). By “elaboration” Heidegger means the “explicit and lucid
formulation of the question of the meaning of being” (Heidegger, 1996: 6).
So the concern with this second question relates to the status of the
question of being as question rather than with the terms of an answer that
would take us beyond the question. For, initially, the question of being is
given formally and hence in a state of radical incompleteness that conceals
its meaning. The formal question of being is only an “assurance”, so to
speak, that the question can be actively and concretely asked.
At the same time, the formal question also poses the challenge to be
asked. In other words, being as the asked about challenges Da-sein that
finds itself immediately, and hence passively, in the mode of being of
asking, to actively and concretely engage itself in the asking. How does
Da-sein respond to the challenge of being? Raising the question of the
being suited to the interrogation signals Da-sein’s acceptance of the
challenge of being to which the question of being gives rise. By asking
this second question Da-sein actively situates itself within the framework
of its asking about the meaning of being and thereby posits itself as the
146 Reflections on Heidegger’s Saying

“obvious” candidate for interrogation. More specifically, the question as

to the appropriate being for interrogation already incorporates the answer
in its very asking simply because it is Da-sein that asks the question. That
is, in the question of being Da-sein is already the agent of asking, which
asking is, in turn, already determined by being as the asked about. In other
words, in the light of the fact that being is the asked about, being can
become an issue as the asked about, and hence make the question of being
into an issue, only through the kind of being that is involved in the asking
as asking, namely Da-sein for whom asking is a mode of being.
It follows from this mutually informing encounter that inquiring as to
the suitable being for interrogation is the first act of freedom through
which Da-sein embraces the task of becoming what it already is, namely
the agent of questioning in the question of being. This is an act of
freedom, not in the conventional sense of choosing amongst a number of
available options, but in the sense of taking up the challenge that the
question of being poses and thus becoming the active situated-ness, or
dwelling, of Da-sein in its given relation to being, as its mode of being.
This is Da-sein’s embracing of its “Da”, or its opening, as asking. It is in
this way that the formal analysis of the formal question of being points to
the need for an “analytic of Da-sein” that is “wholly oriented toward the
guiding task of working out the question of being” (Heidegger, 1996: 15).
Once the formal structure of the question of being brings Da-sein to
the fore both as that which is to be interrogated and as that which is
related to being, thinking immanently to the question of being calls for
attention to this relation. Recall from our initial quotation, that Heidegger
refers to this relation as the “‘relatedness backward or forward’ of what is
asked about (being) to asking as a mode of being of a being” (Da-sein).
So not only is it the case that Da-sein’s interrogation is inseparable from
the “relatedness” that Heidegger mentions here but also in guiding us this
relatedness is inseparable from the question of being precisely because the
question is itself a matter of this relatedness. In other words within the
framework of the question of being, to interrogate Da-sein is at once to
interrogate Da-sein’s relatedness to being. As Heidegger notes, “the
normative issue is emphatically and solely the experience of There-being
with a constant eye to the Being-question” (Richardson, 1963: xviii). If
this is indeed the case, then the relatedness of the asked about to the
asking, a relatedness that takes the form of a “backward or forward”
relating, cannot but involve the question as a whole. Let us explore the
precise meaning of this involvement in some detail.
Notice firstly that the relation of being as the asked about to Da-sein in
the mode of being of asking involves a double act of disclosing and
 George Vassilacopoulos 147

concealing. Being actively and explicitly renders an issue of that which it

is, namely concealed or withdrawn. That is, as the asked about, being
comes out of its concealment and through the question of being addresses
its state as one of concealment. Indeed, in the asking of the question of
being what is overcome is not concealment itself but the very concealment
of concealment. At least, this is what the question implies in being asked.
The question of being treats itself as the “truth” of being’s state of
concealment when through the relation between the asked about and the
asking it explicitly thematises being’s concealment and treats this
thematisation as belonging to being as concealment.
This explains why Heidegger makes the point that the question of
being (in which, as I have just suggested, being makes its concealment an
issue) grows from an understanding of being wherein being is “totally
ungraspable”. For, according to Heidegger, the question of being “grows”
from an understanding of being that is marked by a lack of
conceptualisation of being even if it is “not completely unfamiliar”
(Heidegger, 1996: 4):
[…] we are always already involved in an understanding of being. From
this grows the explicit question of the meaning of being and the tendency
towards its concept (Heidegger, 1996: 4).

Since, an understanding of being neither reveals the meaning of being nor

makes explicit the need to deal with the issue of this meaning – the issue
that is raised exclusively by the question of being – we should read
Heidegger’s direction-giving statement as deriving strictly from the
structure of the question of being. Accordingly, from within the structure
of the question of being, being must point in two directions, so to speak.
Insofar as being explicitly emerges as concealed (in being asked) it relates
directly both to its meaning and to its state of concealment. This, I think,
is the precise meaning of the statement that “there is a notable ‘relatedness
backward or forward’ of what is asked about (being) to asking as a mode
of being of a being”. Whereas the question of being gives rise to the state
of the disclosing of being’s concealment as concealment, an understanding
of being marks being’s implicit or immediate state of concealment or
withdrawing.
If this is indeed the case, then already in the initial formulation of the
question of being in which the question of being “grows” from an
understanding of being an issue arises as to the question’s own
presupposition. This issue of a presupposition is not, of course, an issue in
the sense of calling for argumentation to demonstrate its validity, but in
the sense of traversing a path, of “growing”, in a way that already belongs
148 Reflections on Heidegger’s Saying

to the question of being via the fact of its appearance. Accordingly, the
challenge for the thinker is in the enactment of the question out of the
reality of an understanding of being. This means that the thinker must
remain alert to the guidance of being within the framework of the question
of being. Ultimately, it is only through enacting the question in this sense
that the formality of the question may be overcome in order to enable Da-
sein concretely to deal with its mode of being as questioner. More
specifically, being’s double act of referring directly both to its implicitness
and to its disclosure makes possible Da-sein's corresponding double act.
In other words, when being discloses itself as concealed in the form of the
asked about its intimate relation to Da-sein in the mode of being of asking
also makes Da-sein’s disclosing possible and necessary. At the same time,
being’s state of concealment that is identified by being’s “backward”
relatedness to Da-sein makes possible and necessary Da-sein’s
concealment. Somehow the thinker dwells at one and the same time in
both the question of being, which is a form of being’s disclosing, and in
the concrete reality of concealment, that is the reality of an understanding
of being. The thinker becomes a thinker by withstanding this tension.
So far I have drawn attention to the mutually informing state of
concealment that the relation of being and Da-sein discloses within the
framework of the question. Following Heidegger we can read the question
of the precise nature of this mutually informing state of concealment as a
matter of how to gain the appropriate access to Da-sein:
[…] the first concern in the question of being must be an analysis of Da-
sein. But then the problem of gaining and securing the kind of access that
leads to Da-sein truly becomes crucial. Expressed negatively, no arbitrary
idea of being and reality, no matter how “self-evident” it is, may be
brought to bear on this being in a dogmatically constructed way; no
“categories” prescribed by such ideas may be forced upon Da-sein without
ontological deliberation. The manner of access and interpretation must
indeed be chosen in such a way that this being can show itself to itself on
its own terms. And furthermore, this manner should show that being as it
is initially and for the most part-in its average everydayness (Heidegger,
1996: 14-15).

According to Heidegger, this “average everydayness” that is the “correct

point of departure of the analytic of Da-sein” is “that constitution of being
which we call being-in-the-world” (Heidegger, 1996: 49). In his effort to
interpret the “unified phenomenon” of being-in-the-world ontologically,
Heidegger repeatedly emphasises that Da-sein is “‘(b)eing together with’
the world in the sense of being absorbed in the world” (Heidegger, 1996:
51). So he identifies being-in-the-world and the “absorption” of Da-sein
 George Vassilacopoulos 149

in it as the fundamental state of being from which the question of being

“grows”. Still, he does not tell us how precisely being-in-the-world
manifests the concealment of both being and Da-sein. Even though Being
and Time presents its analysis of being-in-the-world as flowing from the
demands posed by the question of being, this process is not articulated in
any detail. Heidegger does not say enough about the thinker’s explicit
engagement with the question as a fundamental task that precedes the
activation of the phenomenological text. What I want to suggest next is
that the formal recognition of the task under consideration poses yet
another task. Paradoxically, before one can begin to traverse the required
path, the structure of the question calls for a preliminary step to be
undertaken. If it is indeed the case that the question of being “grows”
from “an understanding of being” then it must also be the case that the
formal structure of the question itself leads us to the site of this
understanding1. I move now to an elaboration of this process.

III.
What is the meaning of being as the asked about and what is the
corresponding meaning of the asking? Turning to the first part of this
question note that by asking it we register an interest in providing a formal
answer to the formal question of the meaning of being. That is to say, we
register an interest in being’s formal meaning that is already presupposed
in so far as being performs the role of the asked about. Posed more
precisely, the first part of our question is: what is the meaning of being
insofar as being makes its meaning an issue within the framework of the
question of being?
One obvious strategy in response is to analyse the role that being
performs as the asked about. We know that being makes itself an issue as
the asked about – being is disclosed as concealed – through engaging with
the asking incorporated in the question of being. In other words being is
disclosed as questioned in the disclosing provided by the corresponding
questioning. Simultaneously, however, and through a reversal of roles due
to the mutual informing of the questioned and the questioning, as

1
On Parvis Emad’s analysis of the structure of the question of being we move
from the discovery that the being to be interrogated is situated in an understanding
of being to the “conjoined appearance of questioning and understanding of being”
and from this we see that being essentially determines questioning and the
questioner as the mode of being of a being (Emad, 2002: 20). However, it is not
clear from Emad’s discussion how he thinks that the structure of the question
renders this visible.
150 Reflections on Heidegger’s Saying

disclosed in the disclosing that asking is, the asked about is transformed
into a disclosing in which asking is disclosed. Consequently, both the
asked about (being) and the asking (Da-sein) function as disclosing and
disclosed. The asked about is the asked about and it also engages with the
asking only if, by being disclosed in asking, it discloses what discloses it,
namely asking. Being incorporates into itself the asking by becoming the
disclosing of the asking and, as a result, itself becoming the asked about as
disclosed.
It follows from this line of thinking that, immanent to being, there is a
differentiation: being is both disclosed as concealed and disclosing. What
is the significance of this? Since it belongs to the essence of the asked
about to be disclosed in the disclosing of the asking by engaging with its
own disclosing of the asking, what is asked about in the asking, or what is
questioned in the question, is disclosing. It is disclosing that, as the
disclosing of the asking in the question of being, withdraws and thus
transforms itself into the undisclosed disclosing, that is into formal, or
empty disclosing. As disclosing of the asking and thus as disclosed in the
asking, the asked about that is being as concealed is both as disclosing and
as remaining undisclosed in its own disclosing. It is the disclosing that
discloses the questioning of itself. Being’s self-relation then is a self-
withdrawing, a self-emptying. Heidegger refers to the “nothingness of
being” (Heidegger, 1996: 6, ft) and to the question of being as the “most
universal and the emptiest” (Heidegger, 1996: 35). Below, when we
discuss the meaning of the asking we will see precisely how the formality
of disclosing is manifested. Here, the point to note is that the disclosing
that the asked about is – in disclosing the asking that makes it disclosed as
undisclosed – shows itself to be disclosed as undisclosed disclosing.
So, the question of the meaning of being is the question of the meaning
of disclosing which disclosing makes itself an issue through its own
formality, or the active emptying out of itself. The disclosing in question
here is pure disclosing, disclosing as such for the reason that, as the asked
about, being directly engages with the asking, insofar as it functions as the
disclosing of its own questioning. It becomes what it is by actively
incorporating into itself what makes it what it is, namely asking. In other
words the asked about is the asked about as such, or the concealed as such.
As questioned, being belongs to itself, so to speak, and not to something
else that might somehow qualify it as questioned through an independent
questioning. Because of this, the undisclosed disclosing is disclosing as
such, or as I suggested above, formal disclosing. Here then disclosing
itself is the asked about. In other words, being engages with questioning
because being is disclosing and disclosing, as the asked about in the
 George Vassilacopoulos 151

asking, refers to the meaning of disclosing, that is the disclosing of

disclosing; it thus refers to itself as the undisclosed disclosing.
Now if the meaning of the asked about is indeed undisclosed
disclosing as such, and if the asking is disclosed as asking in the disclosing
provided by the asked about, what is the meaning of the asking? If it is
true that asking is disclosed in the disclosing of the asked about, then it
must also be the case that asking discloses itself in disclosing the
withdrawing of disclosing as such, which withdrawing takes place through
the asking. But this suggests that there is a tension here since the asking
discloses itself in the withdrawing of disclosing as such that occurs
through the asking. How is it possible for asking to relate in a disclosing
manner to the “disappearance” of pure disclosing? Heidegger notes that,
as the questioner actively asking the question of being, Da-sein is “being
held out into the nothingness of being, held as a relation” (Heidegger,
1996: 6 ft). I suggested above that being’s withdrawing in the form of the
asked about is its self-disclosing. We might think of this as being’s
disclosing in the radical sense of disclosing and preserving itself in the
“nothingness” of its own night, so to speak. Now, as the questioner, Da-
sein is absolutely claimed by being’s radicality understood as the bearer of
this “nothingness”. This is because the withdrawing of pure disclosing
takes place in the disclosing that the asking is. Being the site of such
withdrawing and thus of disclosing of pure disclosing, asking discloses
itself as disclosing in the form of radical individuality, that is, in the form
of a radically qualified disclosing. This is why Heidegger refers to the
being of Da-sein as self-concern, or as always being “mine” (Heidegger,
1996: 35). At the same time though, it is the kind of disclosing that is not
absorbed in its individuality but has a relation of freedom with it since, as I
suggested above, it immanently refers to disclosing as such. Its
individuality is the form of being’s “nothingness” in which being as
disclosing manifests itself.
Through this reading we can make sense of the following statement
that Heidegger makes in the “Introduction” to Being and Time:
The question of the meaning of being is the most universal and the
emptiest. But at the same time the possibility inheres of its most acute
individualisation in each particular Da-sein (Heidegger, 1996: 35).

In the asking of the question of being, and as the asking, Da-sein discloses
its being as disclosing. But whereas being’s disclosing happens as its
“nothingness”, Da-sein’s disclosing involves Da-sein’s being as a whole.
As the questioner that belongs to what is questioned, Da-sein is posited as
the most disclosing, as the disclosed disclosing. Here, in the mode of
152 Reflections on Heidegger’s Saying

being of asking, the essence of Da-sein is revealed as disclosing in the

sense of actively engaging with disclosing as such. Despite its formality
from the outset being uncompromisingly claims Da-sein. The asking of
the question of being implicates the whole of the questioner’s being. The
question of being can be concretely asked by Da-sein only if it radically
involves the totality of Da-sein’s being in the concreteness of its
individuality.
It follows that a proper reconstruction of the question of the meaning
of being, one that takes us from its formal formulation to its concrete
development, must involve the structure of Da-sein's disclosing as a
whole. Here then, in the formal formulation of the question of the
meaning of being, we can already identify one of the major tasks of Being
and Time, namely coming to terms with Da-sein's being as a whole. One
must come to terms with the meaning of Da-sein’s disclosing, since this
disclosing, and with respect to its being disclosed in disclosing as such,
discloses itself only if its meaning becomes available. The question of
being can be asked concretely if Da-sein already has the answer to the
question of the meaning of Da-sein's being. This task is worked out in
“Division Two” of Being and Time, and Heidegger refers to it as the
“primordial interpretation of the meaning of being of Da-sein” (Heidegger,
1996: 216).
Still, we are left with the question of from where Da-sein might derive
the meaning of its being or the meaning of its disclosing. The
interrogation of this disclosing guided by what being demands in the
question of being supplies the answer. Guided by the aim of coming to
terms with its being as a whole, Da-sein needs its being in order to create
its meaning out of it as a pre-condition for fully engaging with the
question of being as the questioner. Still the task of interrogating Da-
sein’s being in order to extract its meaning through a “primordial
interpretation” already points to the state of Da-sein’s “understanding” of
being in which, as participants in the question of being, both being and
Da-sein withdraw.

IV.
Although we have moved some way toward the point of activation of the
concrete phenomenological process of the analytic of Da-sein, our
elaboration of the question of being has not yet brought us to this point of
departure. Even though, as that from which its meaning will be extracted
in a self-interpreting manner, Da-sein’s being manifests the withdrawing
of the question out of which the question “grows”, this manifestation is not
 George Vassilacopoulos 153

yet radical enough because it does not capture what the question of being
demands, namely, the withdrawing of Da-sein’s being as a whole. If this is
indeed required, a further step that would lead us to the state of
withdrawing, not just of Da-sein’s meaning but of Da-sein’s being as well,
is warranted here. Let us consider where and how this withdrawing is
manifested.
We know from our analysis of Da-sein's encounter with being in the
asking of the question of the meaning of being that Da-sein's being is
disclosing. Bearing in mind that Heidegger refers to Da-sein as self-
concern given that Da-sein’s being is always “mine” (Heidegger, 1996:
35) we can ask: what precisely is involved in this disclosing for the being
whose essence it is to be concerned with its being in its being? Now the
characteristic of Da-sein’s concern is that it contributes ontologically to
that about which it is concerned. From this it follows, rather dramatically,
that Da-sein withdraws in its concern as concern when its concern is
directed to something other than Da-sein, in a way that Da-sein’s concern
with it directly contributes to this other’s being. Here Da-sein's concern
needs to be directed elsewhere than to Da-sein. This calls for an object to
which Da-sein is related in a way that takes one beyond the metaphysics
of the subject/object dichotomy. This non-metaphysical encounter must
disclose the being of the object in and through Da-sein's concern. That is
to say, it must disclose it, not as something that pre-exists its encounter
with Da-sein, but as something that takes shape in the very act of Da-
sein’s concern.
In and as this act of concern the object's being is made explicit as no-
concern. No-concern and concern thus merge into a mutual non-reflective
belonging. The object's being becomes an issue through the non-
becoming of an issue of Da-sein's being. In such an encounter Da-sein is
concerned, without however encountering its concern in the sense of
coming back to itself, so to speak. Consequently, in its concern with
beings other than itself, Da-sein's whole being is involved without Da-sein
being its whole. Da-sein's being is completely withdrawn, or “absorbed”,
in Da-sein’s concern with beings other than itself. It is withdrawn in that
its withdrawing is itself withdrawn. Here, of course, we can refer to Da-
sein’s preoccupation with the handiness of handy things and to the
instrumentality of the instrument (Marion, 1991: 237) forming part of
being-in-the-world, and whose analysis marks the initial developmental
stages of Being and Time. Accordingly, the thinker begins the analytic of
Da-sein with Da-sein’s dealings with equipment, not because this is what
is most obviously and naturally observable around him or her, but because
154 Reflections on Heidegger’s Saying

this is strictly warranted by the radical demands guiding the question of

being.
This said, having an appreciation of Da-sein’s withdrawing in its
dealings with handy things is only one aspect of the withdrawing of the
question of being. As already suggested, the other aspect is the
withdrawing of being itself. The concealment of Da-sein’s individual
disclosing must be linked to the concealment of disclosing as such. Recall
that we need to try to think the site of both the withdrawing of being and
that of Da-sein’s being as a whole in concrete terms. Along with the
meaning of Da-sein’s “absorption” in its dealings with handy things, what
else do we need to know in order to appreciate the withdrawing of being?
Given that, as suggested above, being is disclosing as such whose
withdrawing takes place in the individualised disclosing of Da-sein, in its
concrete dealings with handy things Da-sein already incorporates such
withdrawing for it is already equipped with an understanding of being in
the terms we discussed in the previous section. Basically what this means
is that before engaging with specific handy things Da-sein already refers
itself to the totality of handy things. In other words, through its Da Da-
sein refers to the totality of potential dealings with things; it refers to the
“world” as the network of such dealings. As being-in-the-world Da-sein
has always already detached itself from individual entities as a
precondition for encountering them. Da-sein has access to handiness as
such which cannot simply be reduced to the handiness of individual
entities. Handiness relates to the entities’ situatedness in the world of
entities and access to this world makes it possible for Da-sein both to
encounter individual entities and not to exhaust itself in particular
encounters. Da-sein is an inexhaustible source of encountering given its
being-in-the-world and the entities’ referential status.
If this is correct, then an adequate appreciation of the withdrawing of
being and Da-sein involves an appreciation of Da-sein as being-in-the-
world. At the same time, it also involves an appreciation of the equally
fundamental plurality of Da-seins. As with everything else in our analysis
so far, we can derive the fact that in the world Da-sein deals with other
Da-seins directly from the demands of the question of being. As we noted
above, Heidegger introduces this plurality in referring to each particular
Da-sein (Heidegger, 1996: 35). The essence of Da-sein is not only for its
disclosing to be individual but also for its being to be particular. Why?
Given that what withdraws is being as pure disclosing, and that its
withdrawing takes place in disclosing, being breaks up, so to speak, into a
potentially infinite number of individualised units of disclosing, that is,
into a plurality of Da-seins, the “they”. Potentially, every one of these
 George Vassilacopoulos 155

Da-seins might ask the question of being. Yet actually asking it requires
radicalising Da-sein’s individuality by transcending the state of the “they”
in the way that Heidegger attempts in Being and Time.
If our analysis so far has merit, it follows that in the developmental
momentum of the thinker’s engagement with being-in-the-world, the next
radical step is the liberation of Da-sein's being from its “absorption” in the
world (Heidegger, 1996: 51). This raises the question of how one moves
from a perspective internal, so to speak, to the withdrawing of Da-sein's
being as concern in its dealings with entities, to concern itself? The task
that the question of being dictates here is for Da-sein to return to itself by
ridding itself of its being's withdrawing that is registered in the encounter
with beings other than Da-sein. This task has two aspects or moments:
Da-sein needs to liberate itself and, at the same time, to locate from within
the site of its liberation the fundamentals of its being. Given Da-sein’s
radical “absorption” in the world, such liberation could only be achieved
through an equally radical crisis. This crisis would need to be powerful
enough to disconnect Da-sein's being from this association with the world
by turning violently against its withdrawing in the world. This can be
achieved only if it is possible for Da-sein to incorporate into itself the no-
concern that belongs to the being of entities and to associate this with its
concern. In other words, Da-sein must be in a position to liberate its being
from entities as the being that it is by showing that this being is the no-
concern of concern. Consequently, it must make its being withdraw as a
precondition for being disclosed as disclosing from within itself. The no-
concern of concern is expressed by Angst whose radicality, as Heidegger
suggests, is expressed in the fact that it has no particular object. For this
reason Angst introduces a fundamental change of direction in the
development of Being and Time, one that is more radical than that between
“Division One” and “Division Two”.
I have argued that for its initial and fundamental disclosing Da-sein is
guided by being and being guides itself through what it provides to Da-
sein since asking emanates from the asked about which asked about comes
to be in the enactment of the asking. This appearance of being in the form
of the asked about, and its role in the question of being, is what Being and
Time, and for that matter the whole of Heidegger’s project, requires for its
activation. Precisely because we gain access to being as that which is
asked about through the question of the meaning of being it is the formal
structure of the question that reflectively situates us in an understanding of
being and in being’s guiding significance.
156 Reflections on Heidegger’s Saying

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Emad, 2002
Parvis Emad, “The question of being: Foremost hermeneutic pre-
condition for interpreting Heidegger”, Enrahonar 34: 11-29.
Heidegger, 1996
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Trans. J. Stambaugh. Albany:
SUNY Press.
Heidegger, 1998
Martin Heidegger, Parmenides. Trans. A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Marion, 1991
Jean-Luc Marion, “L’Interloque”. In Who Comes after the Subject?,
ed. E. Cadava, P. Connor, J.-L. Nancy: 236-245. New York and
London: Routledge.
Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, 1999
Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos, Hegel and the
Logical Structure of Love: An Essay on Sexualities Family and the
Law. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Richardson, 1963
William J. Richardson, Heidegger Through Phenomenology to
Thought. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Sheehan, 2001
Thomas Sheehan, “Kehre and Ereignis: A Prolegomenon to
Introduction to Metaphysics”. In A Companion to Heidegger’s
Introduction to Metaphysics, eds. R. Polt and G. Fried: 3-16. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.
ART, TRUTH AND FREEDOM: CONTEMPLATING
HEIDEGGER’S CATEGORIAL VISION

COLIN HEARFIELD

A. Categorial Vision
Categorial vision may seem a strange, if not erroneous way of naming the
manner in which Heidegger discloses the ontological essence of art, truth
and freedom. For with Heidegger, the term "categorial" pertains solely to
the ontological characteristics of things present-at-hand (Heidegger,
1962a: 79); that is, things which remain categorially distinct from the
temporal structures or "existentialia" of Dasein. Furthermore, categorial
vision is usually associated with Husserl’s scientifically nuanced
phenomenology concerning the intuited revelation of objective essences
beyond the psychological relativism of subjectively constituted facts. Yet
Heidegger’s ontology of Being, despite its more poetic, hermeneutic mode
of thinking, is nonetheless closely modeled on Husserl’s anti-idealist
attempt to overcome the intractable dualism of subject/object relations
through the categorial vision of pre-reflective essences. Both are
concerned with dismantling the transcendental conditions of categorical or
conceptual identity, what Heidegger refers to as the metaphysics of
presence dominant since Plato.
The aporia of a finitely constituted yet infinitely constituting
transcendental subject blocks the path to an intuitive, categorial vision of
the truth of what is. Accordingly, for both Husserl and Heidegger, what is
imperative in this process is to allow what is other, the things themselves,
to speak for themselves. This becomes possible, at least for Heidegger, in
an appreciation of the ontological difference between being and not-being,
in the fact that what is is rather than is not. Now insofar as the vision of
the essential truth of being emerges from this unprovocative letting-be of
what is and gives it projective expression then it is categorial. This claim
may be set in relief by way of brief reference to Kant’s transcendental
schematism. Without delving into the imagistic complexities of these
158 Art, Truth and Freedom: Contemplating Heidegger’s Categorial Vision

transcendental schemata, suffice it to say that such schemata are the

intuited products of a transcendental imagination. They are that which
make possible the synthetic and so categorical application of concepts to
objects intuited in space and time. While refusing the transcendental
character of Kant’s schematism, Husserl and Heidegger nevertheless
invoke a categorial schematism, more in keeping, according to Adorno,
with the manner "in which Kant thought of our senses as affected by
transcendent things-in-themselves" (Adorno, 1940: 16).

B. Truth and Art

In his later Letter on Humanism, Heidegger is expressly critical of
lingering metaphysical modes of thinking in Being and Time, indicating
that Being had not yet been thought in terms of its own temporal/historical
dimensions (Heidegger, 1962b: 280). This means that Being needs to be
thought not so much through the ahistorical historicity or temporal
"existentialia" of Dasein but rather through those things present-at-hand
which bestow on people a particular historical task or outlook. And for
Heidegger that historical endowment, or what he also refers to as "the way
in which truth comes into being" (Heidegger, 1971: 78), occurs pre-
eminently through exemplary works of art. Heidegger indicates the
manner in which he sees the essential belonging together of art and history
in the following words:
Whenever art happens – that is, whenever there is a beginning – a thrust
enters history, history either begins or starts over again. History means
here not a sequence in time of events of whatever sort, however important.
History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task as entrance
into that people’s endowment. […] Art is history in the essential sense that
it grounds history (Heidegger, 1971: 77).

Now this vision of art as the essential ground of history is not to be

confounded, Heidegger later notes, with the traditional idea of art as a
form of cultural achievement or manifestation of spirit. Rather, as the
essential ground of history, art is that through which Being discloses its
appropriation of truth over and against its historical oblivion in the techno-
metaphysical rationality of the constituting subject.
Techno-metaphysical rationality, what Heidegger also refers to as the
metaphysics of presence, has staked out a number of claims concerning
the thingness of a thing, or the truth of what is, none of which, however,
allow the thing to appear in its "independent and self-contained character"
(Heidegger, 1971: 25). That the thing is a substance with various
 Colin Hearfield 159

properties, that it is the unity of a manifold of sensations, or that it is a

synthesis of matter and form, all these modes of apprehending the truth of
a thing effectively distort that truth through the mediating idea of scientific
correctness. Heidegger contrasts this with the mere contemplation of a pair
of peasant shoes in Van Gogh’s well-known painting. In pondering their
practical use, or what Heidegger calls their equipmentality, the essential
truth of those shoes, namely their reliability, unexpectedly comes to light
in an intuitive vision. As Heidegger puts it, "this painting spoke"
(Heidegger, 1971: 35). And so while we are no closer to knowing the
"thingly character"(Heidegger, 1971: ibid.) of the shoes, what they are in
themselves, we do know there is a disclosure of truth happening in the
work. Hence what is represented in the art-work is not just a representation
of some-thing, but rather "the thing’s general essence" (Heidegger, 1971:
37). The question then becomes, how does truth "set itself to work" in the
work of art such that there is a "happening of truth" in the work
(Heidegger, 1971: 36, 38)?
In response to this question Heidegger turns to a specifically non-
representational work of art, namely an ancient Greek temple. Apart from
extrapolating more fully the categorial schemata of how truth happens in
the work of art, what, we might ask, is the significance of this shift? This
question arises in view of comments made in the epilogue to "The Origin"
essay. Here Heidegger signals a cautious accord with Hegel’s thesis that
works of art, following the neo-Classical period, are no longer sites where
truth occurs. In light of the passage previously cited, this means, more
specifically for Heidegger, that modern art does not ground history. It may
thus seem odd that Heidegger takes the painting of the peasant shoes by
Van Gogh, clearly a modernist work, as a site where the essential being of
those shoes comes to be intuited. While this remains perplexing, it is not
an issue I intend to pursue, at least for the moment. What it does indicate,
however, is that Heidegger’s turn to the Greek temple occurs from the
perspective of it not being a modern work of art. Moreover, it is a turn to
what Heidegger regards as a great work of art, insofar as great works,
unlike modern works, are the revealed truth of a people’s historical
destiny. This distinction between great and modern works of art may be
further elucidated by way of reference to aesthetics. For aesthetic
judgement, in Heidegger’s view, arises as a post-script to the death of
great art, first evident in post-Hellenic Greece (Heidegger, 1979-1987: 80),
particularly with Plato and again in the aftermath of European neo-
Classicism, with Kant. Aesthetics participates in the metaphysics of
presence, in a synthesis of form and matter, where, for Kant at least, taste
is the singular condition of beauty and art the work of genius. Aesthetics
160 Art, Truth and Freedom: Contemplating Heidegger’s Categorial Vision

thus remains unable to think the essential truth of art as the historical
shaping of community. Heidegger, however, also perceives signs of a
distinctly non-aesthetic, non-metaphysical approach to art in both Plato
and Kant; and it is precisely this attempt to clarify what might constitute a
non-aesthetic approach to art which motivates "The Origin" essay
(Bernstein, 1992: 131).
Heidegger’s account of the happening of truth in the Greek temple is
prefaced on Plato’s view of the beautiful. And Heidegger interprets Plato’s
view of the beautiful in the following manner; he states:
[t]he beautiful is what advances most directly upon us and captivates us.
While encountering us as a being, however, it at the same time liberates us
to the view upon Being. The beautiful is an element which is disparate
within itself; it grants entry into immediate sensuous appearances and yet
at the same time soars towards Being; it is both captivating and liberating.
Hence it is the beautiful that snatches us from oblivion of Being and grants
the view upon Being (Heidegger, 1979-1987: 196).

This "felicitous discordance" between being and presence is again evident

in Kant’s assertion that what is beautiful comes to us in a judgement of
disinterested delight. Again in Heidegger’s words:
Comportment toward the beautiful as such, says Kant, is unconstrained
favoring. We must release what encounters us as such to its way to be; we
must allow and grant it what belongs to it and what it brings to us
(Heidegger, 1979-1987: 109 [Heidegger's italics]).

Heidegger translates what is at stake in both passages as the event of

unconcealing, the revealing of the truth of the work in an intuited vision of
beauty; albeit a beauty which changes with the changing nature of history
and truth. The manner in which this unconcealing vision becomes possible
is nonetheless dependent on certain categorial schemata; not those
produced in the transcendental imagination of the genius-artist, however,
but those produced in the "illuminating projection" or "projective saying"
of the great work itself. In the context of his claim that all art is essentially
poetry, Heidegger says:
Projective saying is […] the saying of world and earth, the saying of the
arena of their conflict and thus of the place of all nearness and remoteness
of the gods. […] Projective saying is saying which in preparing the
sayable, simultaneously brings the unsayable as such into a world. In such
saying, the concepts of an historical people’s nature, i.e., of its belonging
to world history, are formed for that folk, before it […]. Such saying is a
 Colin Hearfield 161

projecting of the clearing, in which announcement is made of what it is

that beings come into the Open as (Heidegger, 1971: 73-74).

This now gives us an initial glimpse into our earlier unanswered question
as to how truth sets itself to work in the Greek temple. Indeed "the lighting
projection of truth" (Heidegger, 1971: 73) occurs precisely as those
categorial schemata present in the work, namely "the setting up of a world
and the setting forth of earth" (Heidegger, 1971: 48).
Setting up a world is the opening of a clearing, which grants passage to
an understanding of beings we are not and of our own essential being. This
opening or "lighting" is in varying degrees an unconcealing of the
historical scope of a people’s destiny. For a work to set up a world,
however, it must do so through earthly materials, which, whether stone,
wood, pigment or linguistic utterance, all pertain to the setting forth of
earth in the work. In setting forth the earth, the work sets itself back on the
self-dependent yet self-secluding character of earth. As self-secluding,
earth remains in some measure a concealing of both itself and what we
encounter in the world opening before us. This concealing concerns a limit
or refusal of knowledge beyond the historical clearing opened by the work
as well as a dissembling of truth where what appears in the clearing is at
times deceptive or obscured by other beings in the clearing. Without being
wholly reduced to untruth, earth is nevertheless the source of untruth.
Insofar as setting up a world is dependent on the setting forth of earth, then
this double concealment is itself a condition and limit of the unconcealing
happening in the work. The manner in which truth sets itself to work in the
great work of art now reveals itself as a constant striving of earth and
world against the other; a battle between what is concealing and
unconcealing, between the absence and presence of truth.
The question, however, of how truth establishes itself or makes itself
known in the "primal conflict" (Heidegger, 1971: 60) of world and earth
remains unanswered. Truth is established or brought forth, Heidegger
indicates, when earth and world "move apart because of [their conflict]"
(Heidegger, 1971: 61). What is brought forth in this opening is the specific
createdness of the work; a truth which itself engenders the conflict of earth
and world and which stands fixed in the figure or shape of that conflict as
the work’s createdness. The schematic image of this establishment of truth
as the createdness of the work is articulated as rift.
This rift carries the opponents into the source of their unity by virtue of
their common ground. It is a basic design, an outline sketch, that draws the
basic feature of the rise of the lighting of beings. This rift does not let the
opponents break apart; it brings the opposition of measure and boundary
into their common outline (Heidegger, 1971: 63).
162 Art, Truth and Freedom: Contemplating Heidegger’s Categorial Vision

The rift, then, establishes the intimate belonging together of earth and
world within their difference. As the schematic image of a work’s self-
appropriating createdness, the rift "must be set back into the earth"
(Heidegger, 1971: 64). For only in this way, Heidegger continues, will the
work’s createdness stand out from what is created in the work. The rift-
design, as Bernstein indicates, is Heidegger’s displacement of the
potentiality for the schemata of world and earth away from the
transcendental imagination of Kant’s genius-artist to the work of art itself
(Bernstein, 1992: 122). Indeed the schemata of world and earth made
possible by the rift-design are the categorial transfiguration of Kant’s
transcendental aesthetic schemata of form and matter (Bernstein, 1992:
118). While both situate the hidden origin of this schematic design in
earth/nature, for Heidegger it does not manifest in the transcendental
imagination of the artist but rather in the createdness of the work itself
(Heidegger, 1971: 70).

C. Art and Freedom

The truth of the work of art is preserved by those who, as Heidegger puts
it, resolutely stand-within "the extraordinary awesomeness of the truth that
is happening in the work" (Heidegger, 1971: 68). Standing-within, as
Heidegger reiterates with reference to Being and Time, is the "entrance
into and compliance with the unconcealedness of Being" (Heidegger,
1971: 67); or what, in the context of the "The Origin" essay, is at once an
entrance into and compliance with the historical truth grounded in the
work. Resoluteness, as Heidegger also reminds us, is "the opening up of a
human being, out of its captivity in that which is, to the openness of
Being" (Heidegger, 1971: ibid.). Compliance and release from captivity,
like earth and world, here strive the one against the other in what now
appears, however, as a paralyzing ambiguity concerning our place in the
historical opening of truth in the art-work. Indeed Heidegger speaks of the
vision of a work’s truth as a "standing within the conflict that the work has
fitted into the rift" (Heidegger, 1971: 68). Standing-within the historical
destiny given voice in the work is at once, however, and more essentially,
a standing-out of the affiliated community of preservers from the
unconcealing truth, the historically legislative authority of the work.
Freedom is the freedom to comply with "a destiny always already sent"
(Bernstein, 1992: 128); to a destiny already occurring within our midst,
and yet always behind our backs. Bernstein makes the further point that
while "[reliant] on the modern experience that connects freedom and
history" (Bernstein, 1992: ibid.), Heidegger’s emphasis on the unconcealing
 Colin Hearfield 163

truth made possible in pre-aesthetic works paradoxically suppresses the

critically creative thrust of modern aesthetic works. Moreover, the
historical destiny revealed in great art is no longer that of the modern
world, which leaves us wondering to what extent modern aesthetic works,
for Heidegger, could ever critically reveal the demise of poiesis in the
technological enframing of modern social relations of production. The
absent presence of Being in the modern epoch may have some affinity
with what Adorno perceived as an absent politics, however, it is precisely
autonomous works of modern art, Adorno argues, which make that
critically evident.
In the pre-reflective ontological difference between our being and not-
being, between artists/preservers and art as Being, Heidegger abrogates
any mediation of our historical destiny through the critical reflections of a
community of subjects. Despite the claim to an epochal philosophy of
history, Being as art remains hypostatized in a transcendent realm beyond
the grasp of any mediating judgement. Yet such a judgement would seem
implicit in the very postulation of Being qua Being. The reflective
spontaneity of thought which names the essential Being of beings is
nonetheless passed off as the schematic vision of a transcendent thing-in-
itself. No less immediate than the categorial character of things present-at-
hand, Being thereby reveals itself as an isolated "categorial fact, offered in
alleged purity and raised to the supreme formula" (Adorno, 1973: 81).
Heidegger constructs this hermeneutic transfer on the basis of an
indeterminate difference, prevalent in pre-Socratic philosophy, between
the ontic immediacy of things present-at-hand (WRGH WL) and the essential
presence (RXVLD) of that being. By way of this indeterminate inter-change,
this hermeneutic circle, Heidegger dispenses with synthetic judgements
and what he considers their mediating violation of things present-at-hand.
Heidegger’s ontology thereby manifests an affinity with the scientific
positivism of which it nevertheless purports to be the critical, pre-
reflective essence. Equally, Heidegger’s quasi-theological faith in Being
suggests an affinity with the incontrovertible certainties of religious belief.
Seen in this light, Heidegger’s doctrine of categorial vision emerges as an
absolute objectivism; a realism all the more abstract and ideal the less it
concedes the mediating transmissions of a self-reflective subject.
164 Art, Truth and Freedom: Contemplating Heidegger’s Categorial Vision

Bibliography
Adorno, 1940
T. W. Adorno, "Husserl and the Problem of Idealism", The Journal of
Philosophy 37(1): 5-18.
Adorno, 1973
T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics [1966]. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New
York: Continuum.
Bernstein, 1992
J. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to
Derrida and Adorno. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Heidegger, 1962a
M. Heidegger, Being and Time [1927]. Trans. J. Macquarie and E.
Robinson. New York: Harper and Row.
Heidegger, 1962b
M. Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism" [1947]. Trans. E. Lohner, in
Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, eds. W. Barrett and H. Aiken, 4
vols., vol. 3: 271-302. New York: Random House.
Heidegger, 1979-1987
M. Heidegger, Nietzsche [1961]. Trans. D. F. Krell, 4 vols., vol. 1. San
Francisco: Harper.
Heidegger, 1971
M. Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" [1936]. Trans. A.
Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought: 15-86. New York: Harper
and Row, 1971.
 THE WORK AND THE PROMISE
OF TECHNOLOGY

JOHN DALTON

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

—LeWitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art

The theme of “Heidegger and the aesthetics of living” recalls Le

Corbusier’s most famous architectural proclamation—“Une maison est
une machine-à-habiter”. “Language is the house of being” is perhaps also
Heidegger’s unqualified rejoinder to the modernist champion of mass
production and humanist urbanisme. We could also recall Le Corbusier’s
statement: “to create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order?
Function and objects.” Heidegger’s contempt may have been palpable1.
Despite this, Le Corbusier’s injunction remains compelling. In the fifth
book of the Metaphysics, Aristotle writes: “arts (IJİȤȞĮȚ) are also called
“beginnings” (ĮȡȤĮȚ), especially the architectonic arts”. Prior to mimesis,
the function (ergon) that is put into order is given the place of a beginning,
a space to be. The making of an origin—the spacing of an event, the
emergence of something new—gives contour to an ontology of technics
that thinks from the event of techne, or as the present work will attempt to
outline, from the techne of the event2. To this end, Heidegger’s thinking of

1
Though according to Young, despite Heidegger’s general disdain for modern art
as intergrated into the destitution of modern techno-science, he is said to have had
a “great love” and high esteem for Le Corbusier, alongside a range of other
modern artists and figures. At any rate, an examination must await another
occasion. See Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
2
Technics and technology are not synonymous. Technics (Techne, “la technique”,
“die Technik”) refers to the meaning or Wesen of technology, while technology
refers to artefacts or domains of technical action (industry, science, linguistics,
cyberspace, digital media, etc). These objects or domains need not be mechanistic,
digital, etc., but are formed or structured by a logistics that is “technical” (e.g.,
analytic language). However, this model of technics is derived from technology.
The thinking of technics here is technics as repetition/iteration, and so does not
166 The Work and the Promise of Technology

art and technology can be rehearsed so as to fashion, in outline at least, an

alternative account of technics. The reading here will critically address an
“originary technicity” as developed by Stiegler. It will be necessary to
touch upon certain moments of Heidegger’s relation to Aristotle, as well
as revise the problem of modern aesthetics so as to finally arrive at a
thinking of technics irreducible to, yet the condition of, history and
politics3.
Between an “aesthetics” of life and a “machine for living” lies the
purported discordance of the human and the technical, the organic and the
artificial. Yet it is no longer controversial to insist that biogenesis is as
much “natural” or given as it is coded and architectonic. Forms of
repetition—whether evolutionary, improvised, performative, structural—
remain the possibility of both life and machine. The body, self and other,
reflexivity, “spirit”, language and meaning, may be admitted to the
economic-technical systems of difference, and accordingly, to a techne of
form that entails a temporal logistics or calculation of variable
reproducibility.
What then determines the typological difference—conceptual,
historical, essential—between the human and the technical? A desire to
preserve—or invent—the excellence of humanity beyond or without
calculation, to sustain humanity as the self-affirming transcendence of the
exemplary? If technics is on the side of life, it is as the figure of the
prothesis that technics signifies the incompletion and incapacity of
anthropos. Technics is therefore on the side of death and finitude, and
would itself promote the desire for the unicity of humanism. Technics,
though, is also the possibility of the human. Technics is not reducible to
the tool, but must be thought of as iteration and code.
The distinction between art and aesthetics remains dominated by the
concept of humanism and the ethico-political consensus required by the
concept of “political community” (sensus communis). If art is aligned with
freedom, the aesthetic is but the memory of this freedom. Art becomes the
place of truth for a subject once it has assumed the sign of ontological
alienation. The aesthetic becomes the problem of judgement—what is
“art”? In turn, this question is the mimetic of the self-defining subject—

presuppose any model or historical type of technology (the “type” itself

presupposing the problem of iteration).
3
Much has omitted from the reading, however. Despite the evident threads, it is
not possible to rehearse Lacoue-Labarthe’s writings on form, the figure, and
mimesis, nor less cover Benjamin on technical reproducibility. Likewise, the
theme of the work in German Romanticism—crucial for understanding
Heidegger’s thinking of the artwork—must also be left aside.
 John Dalton 167

the question of how to form and judge oneself as a “who” among a “we”?
Already too late, the aesthetic saves itself by way of a recursive fixation
with its own epistemological crisis. Aesthetics becomes critique of
aesthetics, sustaining itself in the dialectic of judgement wherein art and
literature become the apologists for philosophy’s (Idealism’s) finitude.
Aesthetics figure the redemptive unity of art and life for which it
prophetically longs, yet interminably defers. For the Heidegger of The
Origin of the Work of Art, aesthetics forecloses its own ontological
dimension. The end of art is the loss of art as a historically meaningful
way of being. The frame for the later thinking of art and technics can be
found as early as the 1936-1938 Beiträge (as well as the Nietzsche
lectures, which cannot be addressed here). The decision for art becomes
again one of historical necessity and recovery—“whether art is an
exhibition for lived experience (Erleben) or the setting-into-work of truth”
(Heidegger, 1999: 63).
As a reflective judgement in search of its concept, the aesthetic
signifies the form of finality apart from the representation of an end. Yet
the contrary is affirmed. Art becomes a moral-politics insofar as it
assumes the legislative form of judgement. As a “philosophy” of art,
aesthetics is concerned with the condition of the possibility and the limits
of the concept of “art”. We are immediately engaged in the Kantian
problematic. Human reason, Kant insists, is by nature architectonic. If the
schematism should translate categories of understanding into forms
intuitable by sensibility, the architectonic falters on the very Idea of the
subject. The subject is but the regulative Idea of the unity of its own
representations. The Kantian aesthetic is rather the crisis of the
presentation of the Idea of the subject. Art gives an adequate presentation
of the Idea only on the basis of the relation between judgement and
transcendental imagination (Einbildungskraft). Yet aesthetic judgement
lacks a concept. Understanding and sensibility can only achieve a unity
through the external form of consensus—through the Idea of nature as
purposive yet represented by the form of a historical community. The
aesthetic is a formative work, and thereby, technical (this, it should be
noted, leads into Romanticism and the themes of aesthetic education and
the state as a work of art)4. Art becomes the ergon of the unique and
redemptive expression of life or matter. As the technical prothesis of
redemption, aesthetics becomes the via negativa of representation, the
figure of alienated modernity. Another thinking of technics may, on the

4
To pursue these themes in the detail they require, see J.M Bernstein, The Fate of
Art (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).
168 The Work and the Promise of Technology

contrary, displace the theme of alienation and locate in technics and

technology the possibility of ethics and aesthetics.
We can begin to rethink technology by attempting to address its
ontological form. To risk simplification, technology may be posited as the
very figure of futurity. Technology stands out as technology on the basis
of its temporality—it promises or threatens the future. A thinking of how
technology temporalizes provides access to the ontology of technics.
Technology certainly confronts us with our own finitude. The future will
be more technologically sophisticated than the present. Technology will be
revised, updated, outdone. This, however, remains thinkable within the
existential of anticipation (as do both the concept and the critique of
progress). Another thinking of technics needs to account for the technicity
of anticipation itself. To think technology on the basis of an originary
technics requires engaging with technics as an ontological, or rather, pre-
ontological term. The account, however, faces a significant challenge.
Technics itself, as the condition of time, has no intentional temporality.
Technics itself is neither anticipatory nor mnemonic.
The necessary condition of both art and technology is repetition.
Technology is never the absolutely unique or irreplaceable, but is
repeatable and changeable. This is precisely true of language, meaning,
any system or code of signification or text. Only what can “be” is what can
be repeated, what can signify, if nothing else, its own repeatability. What
“is” is what always already signifies, and signifies prior to intention or
consciousness (and consciousness, the I, as modes of self-reflection are
forms of reflective repeatability, the re-presentation of experience, etc).
What “is” signifies its own finitude (that it comes and goes) prior to
denoting any referent or meaning. This “always already” given sign of
finitude is a potentiality: what “is” is what may repeat its own form in
future variation (this variability affirms the différance between the finite
and the infinite: neither a given finitude nor a determined infinity,
repetition invents itself as the “aporia of the origin”). This much situates
Derrida’s thinking of the gramme, iterability and supplementarity, the
general economy of the text and différance, as the forms of technics as
such.
The question then emerges of the “originary” status of technics and
technology. We can say—and only in the most preparatory fashion—that
technics temporalises time on the basis of repetition. Yet the temporality
of repetition remains undecidable. Whereas in the substantial form of the
individual Dasein or subject, memory certainly addresses the future, and
where substantial technology is indeed a system of prediction and
calculation, the repeatable action or predictable effect, technology
 John Dalton 169

absolutely addresses futurity. Technics, we may say, is precisely a means

or form through which time becomes meaningful. Yet repetition is not
itself a physis. Repetition does not unfold a potentiality that is self-
presenting or self-interpreting, and so cannot be thought of on the model
of Ereignis or es gibt. In-itself, repetition is meaningless. Repetition has
no intentional direction. It does not redeem itself according an end that
would gather and constitute a telos. What or who repeats or is repeated,
and in what form and when, is the question of technology (and in turn, the
question of a discursive politics of technics). How we understand
substantive technology (tools, computers, logic, any system of calculation)
traces the pre-ontological form of technics as a system of (in)finite
repetition. For this reason, a thinking of the temporalization of technics
can only take place within the factical and historical interpretation of
technology, yet must also delimit and exceed historical categories in order
to properly approach an “originary technics”, or rather, a “potentiality of
techne” that is itself irreducible to a horizon of meaning.
The critique of technology as the devastation of the “here and now” or
the rendering of time as a fitful and impoverished set of distractions, or the
domination of calculated clock-time, remains the consequence of a critical
thinking that fatefully preserves the default or fault of being and the
moral-aesthetico-political project of the critique of modernity; that
modernity is at fault, that our condition is indeed that of a technological
(metaphysical) planetary nihilism (a theme whose vocabulary regularly
intones a quasi-apocalyptic anxiety). It is necessary to distinguish a
research into the critical potential of technics from the worn critique of
rationalization, industrial society and consumerism. The repetition-
compulsion of the negative dialectic of modernity and the theoretical-
political mourning play of the once-again traumatized subject must be
discarded. Another thinking of the technicity of repetition and finitude is
required (such that we find in Stiegler, though Stiegler remains within this
problematic). The “problem” of technology is the status and meaning of
any possible “humanity”. Again, a qualification is necessary. This is not to
reduce technics to a politics of humanism, casting technics once again as
the inhuman other of a familiar humanist narcissism. Nor is it to rehearse
the refrain of a hyper-technological post-modernity. What needs to be
addressed is the philosophical-political form of the inter-relation of the
human and the technical and the form in which technics becomes
thinkable.
The general critique of modern technology holds that technology and
technical systems represent a crisis of decision. Technology presents us
with a power of calculation and rationalisation commensurate with
170 The Work and the Promise of Technology

destructive exploitation and objectification. To more define the problem of

modern technology, we can thematise technology as addressing the very
possibility of decision itself, the decision for decision. The meaning of
technology is not found in an ability (to transform, to free) or an
incapacity (the loss of humanity, the forgetting of being), but in its
potential to make possible the place of decision—that technology today
presents us with a decision for our own future and continuity. Yet every
decision and every event of responsibility presupposes a relation of the
calculable to the incalculable. Decision is already a technics. The decision
for decision is not only the problem of the techne of how to decide or
judge, but the problem of the facticity of decision itself, how “we”
understand ourselves in the form of a “we”. Technology is said to deprive
us of decision, transforming spontaneity and freedom into automata. In a
deterministic fashion, technology would decide for us, in place of us,
deciding without deciding in programmatic, ritualized manner (yet without
spirit), rational yet without reason. Technology today bears upon the very
possibility of facticity and the available forms of decision and
responsibility, political meaning and ethical sense. It is, accordingly, from
out of and against the Heideggerian “questioning” of technology that an
alternative presents itself—a technics that is not limited by epochality, and
therefore, reducible to the history of metaphysics, and in turn the critique
of modernity. If “decision” itself, and by extension, the “humanity” of
decision is already a technics, a calculation, this dramatically engages the
exigency to think and rethink the question of technology.

Art and Technics

Before engaging more fully with Heidegger’s thinking of art and
technology, it is necessary to clarify the early Heidegger’s ontological
project. Heidegger takes over Aristotelian categories where they offer a
proto-phenomenological standpoint without the form of the modern
subject5. Here, kinesis is the most significant. Kinesis is the possibility of
Dasein’s transcendence. Dasein is both ahead itself and ahead of entities
(always already being out ahead—Immer-schon-vorweg-sein) as the

5
It is not possible to offer a detailed or historico-philosophical account here of
Heidegger’s relation to Aristotle—rather, certain general or structural features of
both early and later Heidegger can be addressed. For good accounts of Heidegger’s
relation to Aristotle, see Ted Sadler, Heidegger and Aristotle: the Question of
Being (London and New Jersey: Athlone, 1996) and Walter A. Brogan, Heidegger
and Aristotle (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 2006).
 John Dalton 171

possibility of the disclosure of possibility. In disclosing a being “as” a

being, the hermeneutical “as-structure” is thought first of all a mode of
kinesis rather than substance, presence, or actuality. It is a “nullity” or
absence that clears the space for which beings can be as beings of a certain
kind and within a “world” of significance. Dasein is the “there” or the
“openness” to the “as”. This must be thought in temporal rather than
spatial terms. Time may be thought as the “nothing” in and for which
beings may be. Without covering the Heideggerian thinking of
temporality, we can at least seek to clarify that what at stake for Heidegger
is the kinesis of temporalized potentiality6.
Heidegger’s thinking against the “aesthetic” (against the aesthetic
reflective judgement of the subject) by developing an original ontological
thinking of the artwork is not a recovery of a concept of “life” or form of
life. Resolutely delimiting a substantive concept of “life” on the basis of
the priority of Existenz entails that “aesthetics” itself is delimited as an
existentiell, a mode of understanding that presupposes self-interpreting
existence (facticity). Heidegger’s abiding question is not that of “being”,
but the question of what “gives” or “dispenses” being. As being is always
the being of entities, beings are disclosed in their ways of being (Wesen).
The question of the meaning of being is the question of this disclosure.
Ontology attempts to think the kinesis (movement) of the disclosure of
beings. Hence a fundamental ontology of Dasein is privileged insofar as
Dasein is that being that has its being as a question for itself. This is given
on the basis of the kinetic giving or dispensation of being
(temporalization). The later thinking of Ereignis attempts to think this
dispensation itself.
To return to the distinction between “art” and “life”. This distinction is
already technical. It requires the formal division of genre, the demarcation
of a region of being, specialization, the spatialisation of a subject of
experience. It already requires the “biopolitical” distinction—because
organized around the concept of a humanism—between a humanities and a
science, the domain of an informatics and a logistics of labour and capital.
Neither art nor life, nor the reflection of one into the other by means of a
dialectic of unity can take place without the economisation and repetition
of technics.
Where art is identified with the creative and the expressive, art is as yet
never without its technicity or calculation, its formal rules, the selection of

6
For a more precise account see Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger’s Philosophy of
Mind,” Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey, ed G. Floistad, vol. IV,
Philosophy of Mind: 237-318 (Nijhoff: The Hague, 1984).
172 The Work and the Promise of Technology

materials, the “transformation” of force into figure. An “aesthetics of

living” set over and against the “machine for living” is accordingly too
late. The potentiality of decision is always a “yes” to repeatability and
iteration (itself the possibility of a Kantian sensus communis and the form
of universality). To be exceptionally reductive, though no less exact, we
may trace this separation or distinction to the difference between a “good”
and a “bad” repetition. The bad repetition is pure seriality, whereas the
good repetition returns to itself, changes, perfects itself, affirms or creates
more possibility, more difference, and so more creativity7. For any mode
of repetition, a promise is at work. Although pure seriality is without
ontological futurity, it is still promissory—though it promises nothing
more than more of itself, sustaining and negating its own promissory
force. The “good” repetition promises more—an as iterability, it promises
variation, overcoming, beginning again. It structures the possibility of a
promise of futurity. For both Freud and Heidegger, one’s repetition is
one’s truth—that which a self must confront and work through
(“becoming who you are”). This evaluative distinction between seriality
and iterability, however, exhausts itself. Iterability is both already serial,
yet there is no pure seriality, no infinitely faithful repetition. Temporally,
there is never an identical moment of signification or interval of
difference. What discursively separates the good from the bad repetition is
some form of decision or responsibility, some figure of temporalizing a
here and now that bears upon a future. Repetition becomes a techne in the
form of calculation, judgement, making something matter, being re-
markable or significant, worth repeating into the future as the potential for
a new event—the singular example being the artwork.
Repetition itself, however, does not itself determine technology as a
philosophical problem. The question to ask is: how and why is technology
a problem, or specifically, how and why is technology a modern problem?
It is immediately necessary to question the distinction between a modern
and a traditional or an ancient technology. It remains to be seen whether an
essential difference should pertain. Although there may indeed be a
profound difference of degree, of scale and capacity, it is equally
necessary to insist that there is nothing specifically “modern” about
technicity today, or indeed, there is nothing “modern” about technics as
such. Technics is not reducible to the anthropological use of a tool, nor to
any particular instance of a substantive technology. The distinction
between a traditional or ancient technology and modern technology would
itself only be meaningful according to a certain form of history. Indeed,

7
Space prohibits the valuable exploration of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.
 John Dalton 173

the problem of history and historicity—the form or frame of history—

itself presupposes the problem of technicity8.
What defines the modernity of the modern is realization of history as a
form. History becomes meaningful as the reflexive problem of its own
form (hence the distinction between ancient and modern, the place of the
“now” and the “new”, etc). At this point, we can begin to properly engage
with Heidegger’s thinking of technology. In the late Le Thor seminar
(1969), Heidegger suggests that:

Enframing is, as it were, the photographic negative of enowning (Ereignis)

(Heidegger, 2003: 60).

And further:

In enowning, the history of being has not so much reached its end, as that it
now appears as history of being. There is no destinal epoch of enowning.
Sending is from enowning (Das Schicken ist aus dem Ereignen)
(Heidegger, 2003: 61).

If the history of being is revealed as a history, history itself stands out

as a frame. It becomes possible, then, to invoke an “end of history” as the
completion of the possibilities of metaphysics (and where “art” as world-
disclosure passes into commodification). In the age of modern technology,
this form or frame stands out as such. Beings are indeed “present”, as
framed, as standing at the ready. What stands out in the Gestell is the
framing itself. The Gestell, accordingly, is the prelude or preparation for a
thinking of Ereignis. The Gestell “brings into being” the very frame of
meaning. Technology is a making-manifest, and at the same time, the
oblivion of its own making-manifest. It allows beings to appear, but not,
for Heidegger, in their being, but as finite resources. Technology is
meaningful as “the self-revealing of the standing reserve (Bestand)”
(Heidegger, 1977: 19).
Enframing is the “photographic negative” of Ereignis insofar as
enframing reveals the historial (Geschichtlichkeit) place of the frame itself.
That history has an existential structure stands out in the historical moment
(modernity) where history (Historie) ceases to offer meaning. Every epoch

8
We cannot assume that ancient Greek technology did not engage the violence we
associate with modern industralization, etc. Here, Young makes the point that for
Heidegger, modern technology constrains objects and beings to appear as nothing
but resource. As will be argued presently, this depends upon the priority of poeisis
over techne. See Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy: 37-62 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
174 The Work and the Promise of Technology

has a certain frame—without a form or a frame, there is no “mode of

revealing” by which time and place assume meaning, or may enter into
what the translation of Ereignis as “appropriation” or “propriation” would
suggest. The modern Gestell does not only constrain beings to appear as
resource, it stands out as the only form in which beings can be approached.
Yet Heidegger insists that the Gestell conceals revealing itself. It does so
not by being taken for granted, but by disengaging its form from the event
of disclosure. Beings “stand” at the ready. Every possible mode of
disclosure, in turn, is apprehended only through a reduction to Gestell.
In order to properly explicate Heidegger’s thinking of technology, we
need to look back to certain moments of the Beiträge. Here, the concept of
Machenshaft9 (machination) anticipates the figure of Gestell, though at
this point, Heidegger did not think Machenshaft as a preparation for
Ereignis. As power over beings, Machenschaft names the representative
and productive mode of disclosure/concealment (or rather, abandonment,
Vergessenheit) in the age of technology. The world as the totality of
objects available to a representing subject for scientific experimentation
and practical manipulation is precisely what cannot be articulated as a
“world”. Machination ushers in the “epoch of the total lack of questioning
of all things and of all machinations” (Heidegger, 1999: 86). Dasein
understands itself to be productive of its own representations as a
planning-calculable subject: “The planning-calculable makes a being
always more re-presentable, accessible in the every possible explanatory
respect, to such an extent that for their part these controllables
(Beherrschbarkeiten) come together [...]”(Heidegger, 1999: 348).
Machination is a making (techne) determined by an ontology of beings as
makeable. This comportment “says that the self-making by itself is the
interpretation of ijȣıȚμȢ that is accomplished IJİȤȞȘ and its horizon of
orientation, so that what counts now is the ponderance of the makeable
and the self-making” (Heidegger, 1999: 88). Both naturalistic biology and
technological reproduction assume the makeability of beings (one could
extend this thinking to the human genome project, etc). The being as a
being is the represented object “[...] in the end so dissolved into
controllability that the being-character of a being disappears, as it were,
and the abandonment of beings by being is completed” (Heidegger, 1999:
348). Heidegger engages the same theme in The Question Concerning
Technology, but radicalises this at the end of the Le Thor seminar—here,

9
We should note the etymological connection between Machenschaft and Macht
(power), as well as Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht as the
apotheosis of the “nihilistic will-to-will”.
 John Dalton 175

technology is thought less in terms of production and “objectification” but

in the “revealing” of the standing reserve wherein the object itself
disappears—there is only the standing reserve and the already given
replaceability (Ersetzbarkiet) of resources. Being is no longer resource,
but being-replaceable (Heidegger, 2003: 62).
The phenomenology of machination comes down to the difference
between calculative experience and ontological disclosure. The
determination of truth as adequatio, the certainty of representation and the
calculability of scientific method, and the restriction of being to the
“experienceable”, consolidates the instrumental-anthropological-aesthetic
subject. In order to explicate this difference as a problem of form, and so
in turn, as the possibility of the ontological determination of the frame, we
need refer to the 1955 Der Satz vom Grund.
Der Satz vom Grund is contemporary to the Technology essay
published in Vorträge und Aufsätze (itself recapitulating and extending the
1938 The Age of the World Picture). Here, the ontological reading of
technology is more fully developed with regard to the history of being (if
not, in its own way, framed). Leibniz’s formalization of judgement
through which linguistic meaning assumes analytic validity entails, for
Heidegger, that relations of thought and meaning are derived from
material relations of technological and calculative logic. To cite two
passages from Der Satz vom Grund:

All that is needed is a ready and willing glance into our atomic age in order
to see that if God is dead, as Nietzsche says, the calculated world still
remains and everywhere includes humans in its reckoning inasmuch as it
reckons everything to the principium rationis (Heidegger, 1991: 101).

Being is experienced as ground/reason. Ground/reason is interpretated as

ratio, as an account (Rechenschaft) [...]. Accordingly humans are the
animal rationale, the creature that requires accounts and gives accounts
(Heidegger, 1991: 129).

The humanism of the measuring, representing animal rationale is the

same humanism required by the lived experience of aesthetic judgement.
Logos is no longer a kinetic gathering, but an instrumental account.
Derived from its own principle, the tautological form of the ratio is
prevented from engaging a phenomenological-ontological analysis that
would locate its own possibility in the historical emergence of techno-
science. The principle of reason becomes a principium reddendae rationis,
the technical production of reasons in the form of a recursive logistics of
cause. Ratio and Gestell separate physis from techne: both locate the
176 The Work and the Promise of Technology

technological “bringing forth” in terms of the causa efficiens, and likewise

humanise art as commodity. Technological techne is violence against both
physis and poiesis.
Perhaps here, it is necessary to interrupt the reading. We may, it is true,
remain unconvinced by Heidegger’s appeal to “thinking” and
“mindfulness” over and against the ratio. As it cannot be said, for
example, that wonder has a proper object, it likewise cannot be said that
scientific research and technicity is incapable of wonder, or indeed, being
wondrous itself. Heidegger’s emphatic accusation that science
predetermines its theme and analytic in advance as a calculable
Gegenstand not only deprives science of a rapport to wonder, but fixes—
frames—scientific activity; as if science is not a creative, open-ended
work that accordingly requires a different phenomenological explication of
its ontic practice (so as to precisely avoid its reduction at the hands of
philosophy to pure objectification and the exigencies of capital). The
intricate biogenetic form of the rose and the proliferation of biogenetic
diversity are in no way exclusive with respect to a poetic or ontological
rapport to the world. This much Heidegger does attempt to think in regard
to the ontological difference, the event, and more specifically, the free
relation to technology. Yet the later turn to the inception of being and the
other beginning begin to appear regressive with respect to the potential of
technological knowledge and experience and what may be opened for
relations to time and space (a theme that could be pursued is Benjamin’s
“new technological physis” invoked at the end of One Way Street). It is
beyond the present scope to address what shape this may take—suffice to
say, however, that it is the present incalculability of techno-scientific
invention that imposes a limit on the restriction of science to the modern
Gestell, and that in turn, situates our present responsibility and decision in
rapport to the technological promise of other, possible futures.
This indeed strikes at the heart of ontology—just which possibilities
are to be counted in the factical and historical time of Dasein? Just what
potential for being is indeed defined as a potential and within what form or
frame? Given that “possibility” always remains incomplete with respect to
finitude, it is not the task of ontology to provide a normative calculus of
“possible possibilisations” or “essential” decisions—what a being “ought”
to be according to a updated Aristotlean telos. But it would appear to do
precisely that. Yet decision, in Heidegger, is not for this or that existentiell
concern, but for the existential of decision itself. To look back to Being
and Time, Dasein’s finite or temporal transcendence presupposes a
“horizonal unity” of possible significance defined by what Dasein already
is and the world in which Dasein finds itself. The temporal exstasis of the
 John Dalton 177

future as not-yet and the past as having-been is delimited by finitude.

Anticipatory resoluteness in the face of finitude actualize Dasein’s
determinate possibilities for being. Yet the futurity of technology promises
the outstripping of the form of history itself, and accordingly, exceeds the
disclosive horizon of world. Technology may well present us with a “real”
of which we cannot make sense in the terms and language of
contemporary philosophy and/or current scientific thought. This is perhaps
the exceptional question with which to begin any thinking of technics
today. The truly urgent question is the shift from an ontology of memory
to one of futurity, where, to use Heidegger’s language, the existential of
the not-yet is disengaged from the schema of the exstasis—such that the
future is perhaps more exceptionally ecstatic. What must be thought are
modes of technical potentiality that outstrip the ontological bias of the
“always already” and the architectonic of the Geschichtlichkeit.
The question concerning technics comes down, for Heidegger, to
decision. Can another thinking emerge alongside or think otherwise than
calculative enframing?: “Answering this question decides what will
become of the earth and of human existence (das Dasein des Menschen)
on this earth” (Heidegger, 1991, ibid.). The place or event of this
decision, for Heidegger, cannot be ontologically posited in terms of
technicity. It is a “decision” that is without logistic “validity” because it is
not reducible to a casusality or normativity (the decision of a subject who
wills in regard to a “value for life”) that would sustain the humanization of
technology. To cite Die Frage nach der Technik:

Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential

reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen
in a realm that is on the one hand akin to technology and the other
fundamentally different from it (Heidegger, 1977: 35).

That realm is art, language and poetry. It is necessary to think within

and otherwise than the Sprachmaschine10. The degree or intensity of
fundamental difference, however, remains precisely in question.
Heidegger’s thinking is not to be read as a variation of cultural pessimism
or anti-modernism, or worse, a neo-apocalyptic ressentiment. Rather—and

10
In the 1962 essay Überlieferte Sprache und Technische Sprache, Heidegger
admonishes the “violence” against language in the form of linguistics,
functionalism, and analytic symbolism. Language becomes “information” spoken
by the Sprachmaschine (language-machine). Martin Heidegger, “Traditional
Language and Technological Language,” trans. Wanda Torres Gregory, Journal of
Philosophical Research, 23 (1998).
178 The Work and the Promise of Technology

this is precisely why Heidegger’s thinking asserts itself so forcefully

today—the philosophical task is called upon, or is freed to think, what it is
that gives—propriates—the possibility itself of the technical present. For
Heidegger, the “planetary dominance” of the Gestell is required so as to
throw into relief the completion of metaphysics. Whereas modern
technology cannot think its own techne and so does not think of itself as
an “event”, thinking itself is freed to think what makes epochality itself
possible—that is, the priority of Ereignis to any figure of ratio, frame, or
horizon. Yet to locate “epocality” or the signs of history as a technics, and
so prior still to Ereignis, is to depart from Heidegger toward a more
contemporary deconstructive thinking of technics (Derrida, Steigler).
The possibility of a “free relationship” to technology pivots on the
“becoming good” of technological repetition. The relationship to
technology, Heidegger writes at the beginning of The Question
Concerning Technology, “will be free if it opens our human existence to
the essence of technology” (Heidegger, 1977: 3). Responsibility lies in our
response to the Gestell. At stake is thinking otherwise than calculability.
The profound danger of technology is nothing less than absolute oblivion:
“The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially
lethal machines and apparatus of technology […]. The rule of enframing
threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter
into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more
primal truth” (Heidegger, 1977: 28). What may be lost, Heidegger argues,
is the very sense of our own temporality and possibilities for being. As a
standing reserve, the world is a permanent and perpetual present, the
emptiness or nihilism of an ad infinitum.
It is only at the end of The Question Concerning Technology that
Heidegger calls upon art to engage a decisive confrontation with the
technological Gestell. The saving-power that lies within technology is
located on the basis of a recovered sense of the Greek techne: art was not
derived from artistry, art works were not enjoyed aesthetically, and art was
not a sector of “cultural” activity. What then, Heidegger asks, was art:

perhaps only for that brief but magnificent time? Why did art bear the
modest name techne? Because it was a revealing that brought forth and
hither, and therefore belonged within poiesis. It was finally that revealing
which holds complete sway in all the fine arts, in poetry, and in everything
poetical that obtained poiesis as its proper name (Heidegger, 1977: 34).

For Heidegger, enframing blocks poiesis. Yet Heidegger’s “saving” of

techne itself presents significant problems. If the aition cannot be thought
according to a modern sense of causality, but rather, as form of
 John Dalton 179

“gathering” or occasioning, a bringing-forth (Her-vor-bringen), a

hermeneutic-ontological frame must come into play in order to historically
delimit both a Greek and a modern meaning. Because Heidegger
determines the event—and the event of language—as originary, techne
must be determined as originating in a pre-formative poeisis. The
ontological-hermeneutic of the history of being would hinge upon the
priority—not the co-orginary or complementary status—of poeisis over
techne: what is formed is later than what is formative: hence, even the
ontic/ontological difference as a methodological distinction is already a
form or a technics, and so subsequently cedes priority to Ereignis.
Here, it is necessary to read Aristotle against Heidegger. Aristotle
distinguishes between things made (poieton) and things done (prakton).
The difference lies in that poiesis aims at an end distinct from the action
(energeia), while praxis is the application of the action. Poiesis is not
epistemic because it brings into existence what was not already present11.
For Aristotle, techne is the inventive art or skill that allows for production
and manufacturing: it is the knowledge (logos) of how to proceed, how to
actualize a form. Indeed, Heidegger follows Aristotle insofar as techne is
not reducible to practical application. That is, techne is a potentiality. It
follows that for Aristotle, however, techne is the art of poiesis—that is, the
art or skill of doing—and not, as Heidegger would have it, that poiesis is
originary with respect to techne, that techne belongs within poeisis. For
Aristotle, techne is not purely practical—techne must already be a thinking
of the ergon, it is a doing that has its end in view, the function or the
setting-into-work of a dynamis. Here we locate the exigency, on
Heidegger’s behalf, to delimit the “essence” of technology as being
nothing technological, and so in turn, to locate in art as poiesis, making
rather than doing, the possibility of the original possibilization of the
kinetic and disclosive meaning of being without this origin being in any
way a repetition or a technics. If repetition lies at the origin of the
possibility of Ereignis, then an originary technics must be admitted and
the ontological project is no longer assured of its priority. This entails the
consequence that in the very thinking of origin, we must find calculation
and repetition. To cite from The Origin of the Work of Art:

The setting-into-work of truth thrusts up the extra-ordinary (Ungeheure)

while thrusting down the ordinary, and what one takes to be sure. The truth

11
“[...] the object of scientific knowledge is necessary. Therefore it is eternal,
because everything that is necessary, without qualification, is eternal, and what is
eternal does not come into being or cease to be.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics:
1139b.
180 The Work and the Promise of Technology

that opens itself in the work can never be verified or derived from what
went before. In its exclusive reality, what went before is refuted by the
work. What art founds, therefore, can never be compensated and made
good in terms of what is present and available for use. The founding is an
overflowing, a bestowal (Heidegger, 2002: 47).

At stake is the possibility of non-calculative decision “bestowed” by

the ontological freedom of “the open”. But—if techne precedes poiesis,
the possibility of thinking an originary technics prior to ontology begins to
properly take shape. The consequence is that Heidegger’s thinking of
technics is and must also be an enframing, or perhaps more exactly, also a
setting-into-work, but in a manner no longer faithful to Heidegger.
For Heidegger, the work of art pesents its own possibility. The work of
art would be nothing technical. It is not a mimesis, nor a produced thing.
The origin of art, and the origin of the work of art, must be distinguished.
The given historical origin of art tells us nothing of art as art—it is the
“as” accordingly, that must be thought. It is the “as” that is formative (in a
manner more originary that the distinction between form and content). The
work of art as a “setting-into-work” is the work that forms itself as work.
The work of art is thought from out of Ereignis. Heidegger again:

A work, by being a work, allows a space for that spaciousness. “To allow a
space” here means, in particular: to make free the free of the open and to
install this free place in its structure [...]. As a work, the work holds open
the open of a world (Heidegger, 2002: 23).

Heidegger clarifies his thinking at the very end of the Artwork essay.
He will not, at any point, mention Aristotle by name. He will, instead,
convict the translation of Greek into Latin: the forma of beauty that takes
it light from Being takes from a Being already thought as eidos. Form, or
morphe, is already predicated of the organon (work). In turn, actuality
becomes veritas, objectivity, lived experience and representation. And
finally, aesthetics.
But art and the work of art are not the formless. Art is not chaos. The
work of art is gathered into the ontological fold as presenting the very
difference or strife between being and beings, between world and earth. In
an extraordinary passage, Heidegger writes:

This strife which is brought into the rift-design, and so set back into the
earth and fixed in place, is the figure (Gestalt). The createdness of the
work means: the fixing in place of truth in the figure. Figure is the
structure of the rift in its self-establishment. The structured rift is the
jointure (Fuge) of the shining of truth. What we here call “figure” is
 John Dalton 181

always to be thought out of that particular placing (stellen) and placement

(Ge-stell) as which the work comes to presence when it sets itself forth
(Heidegger, 2002: 38).

The Riss brings world and earth, being and beings, into a shared
outline (Umriss). This shared outline cannot be thought any other way
than as the form of a relation, the structure or fundamental design
(Grundriss) of the ontological difference.
The truth of the difference, or the thinking of the being as a being, the
disclosure of the being in its ontological-eidetic meaning as the factical
implication of a historical world, is a placement or a framing of the very
method and logic of Heidegger’s ontology. At issue then is the technics of
originary thinking, its design or figuration of an “event” that makes
possible ontology itself. The very placement and framing of the Riss as
ontological difference is the framing (the placement and the form) of the
thinking of the origin itself, and in turn, Ereignis. Both the ontological
difference and the event may be read as a technics that sets-into-work a
kinetic poiesis as an ontologised techne.

Originary Technics?
A technics addressed as a setting-into-work of truth is a technics
thought ontologically and ethically. By thinking facticity as ethos,
technology is always already within a horizon of responsibility. What is
unique about modern technology, however, is that as a figure of futurity,
technology exceeds and so positions our horizon of responsibility. For this
reason, technology is the very “thing” that responsibility must bear upon.
Turning now to Stiegler’s Technics and Time (it is not, to say the least,
possible to rehearse the scope, significance and innovation of this work. It
is necessary to leave aside much of the demands of exposition and pass
over the “fault of Epimetheus” and the reading of Leroi-Gourhan), we can
critically focus on the essential claim of Stiegler’s argument. Indeed,
Stiegler’s account is haunted by the very anthropology it would otherwise
deconstructively delimit. Despite the brilliance of Stiegler’s reading of
Heidegger, Stiegler pushes the ontic/ontological difference and the later
thought of Ereignis back into a metaphysical anthropologism so as to
convict Heidegger of the exclusion of technics. Stiegler’s claim is that
Heidegger fails to think the question of technics adequately in that he
forecloses the role of technical supplementarity for Dasein’s finite
temporalisation. In particular, Dasein’s individuated and disclosive
temporal being-there requires the supplement of a mnemotechnics, a
182 The Work and the Promise of Technology

requirement not fully thought out in Heidegger’s account of equipment,

etc. What is needed, however, is a thinking of technics in terms of kinesis
and potentiality. If a critical reading of Heidegger misses kinesis, then the
question concerning technology—and how it may be rethought according
to a more radical thinking of kinesis—is compromised.
The apparent overdetermined technologization of the world today may
be traced to an originary technics given in the possibility of the
differentiations of matter. Stiegler argues that such a differentiation may
be thought according to a historicization of Derrida’s thinking of archi-
writing and différance. Technics itself is the invention of the human—the
event of “epiphylogensis” sets off a technologically differentiated
evolutionary process (technics as the pursuit of life by means other than
life). Technics is the possibility of time and memory: neither can we posit
the transcendence of consciousness nor a purely biogenetic origin of
humanity. What must be thought, Stiegler, insists, a truly aporetic origin:
the exteriorisation of the tool forms its own interior border, the co-
possibility of the “who” and the “what” as a stage of différance in the
history of life. The emergence of the tool-using human is a new kind of
“program” or code of différance:

Différance is the history of life in general, in which an articulation is

produced, a stage of différance out of which emerges the possibility of
making the gramme as such, that is, “consciousness”, appear [...]. The
passage from the genetic to the nongenetic is the appearance of a new type
of gramme and/or program. If the issue is no longer that of a founding
anthropos in the pure origin of itself, the origin of its type must be found
(Stiegler, 1998: 137-138).

Constituting the passage from the genetic to the nongenetic as a stage

of différance—yet where différance is at the same time the very history of
life—remains problematic. Not only can we not attribute the arrival of
finitude to the emergence of substantive forms of technology, we cannot
separate biogenetic evolution from “epiphylogenesis” (the memory of the
tool). If genetics is effectively a code and so a relation of the living to the
non-living, genetics is originarily a certain “technical” reproducibility.
What makes technics possible is not the exteriorization of memory, but
iteration. There is no technics and no epiphylogenesis without repetition.
Stiegler preserves anthropomorphism by presenting the human—Dasein—
as a rupture in the history of life. The specific difference of the human
may be located within the différance of life, but iteration and
supplemenatrity are not themselves dependant upon any given mnemo-
technical form. Epiphylogensis (whose scientific and philosophical status
 John Dalton 183

is dubious at best), represents less a differentiation of the evolutionary

process, but rather, another instance of inscribing the “autonomy” and
domination of technology over biological life and humanity. Or to
rephrase this, a technicity prior to “organised inorganic” beings—which
means the substantiative form of life of the tool-using being—must be
thought. If “organised inorganic” beings emerge on the basis of a technical
supplement whose forms preserve a mnemotechnics, and so, a calculation
that is constitutive of temporality and spatiality, this is a technics that
remains thought on the basis of substantive technical forms. The technics
of organised inorganic beings may pursue life by means other than life, but
it cannot be said that technics itself, or any form of iteration, necessarily
pursues any given end.
At any rate, if we regard différance and supplementarity as constituting
the possibility of a metaphoricity of a technics, an empirical account of
technics and its relation to genetics is not required to perform the
philosophical deconstruction of origin (the origin of the anthropos, time,
and language). An “originary technics” is a quasi-transcendental
“concept”, and so cannot perform the work of empirical or positivistic
insight. We can more effectively engage a genealogy of technics by
disengaging from the problematic of whether or not Dasein becomes
possible on the basis of technical supplementation, and in this manner,
reflect back upon the Heideggerian question concerning technology itself.
Indeed, an originary technics attempts to account for the origin of
genealogy—and conceptuality—themselves. Stiegler’s problems emerge
fundamentally from restricting technics—the gramme, writing-in-general,
iterability—to technology: tools, digital archives, recording processes, and
so on. Technics or originary technics is reduced to and essentially
understood as an anthropological prothesis. Biogenesis is preserved prior
to technics.
Where Heidegger claims that the Wesen of technics is nothing
technological, we may indeed say that Heidegger is both right and wrong.
Technics cannot be reduced to technology. Heidegger’s thinking of
technics is both non-technological—it concerns the meaning structure of
the Gestell—but must also be a technics; both Ereignis and the Gestell are
figures of the architecture of the Riss (ontological difference). Heidegger
preserves the form of the difference so as to ensure the priority of poeisis
over techne. For Stiegler, Heidegger’s exclusion of technics may be
genealogically traced to the problem of knowledge posed by Plato in the
Meno. As we may recall, the aporia of memory is solved by the a priori
form of anamnesis, recollection of the universal. The empirical-
transcendental divide, and accordingly, Western metaphysics, would begin
184 The Work and the Promise of Technology

at this point. The thrownness of Dasein’s “always already” may bare a

family resemblance, but we must remember that Heidegger’s ontology is
based upon Aristotelian kinesis. The “already” is not present in the form of
a memory, but effective as temporalized potentiality. Platonic anamnesis is
already constituted by a metaphysics attributable to the early Greek
inability to think nullity and facticity—the non-presence of the open as the
space where beings come to be (early Greek thinking, like technical
thinking today, does indeed think being-as-presence, the difference lying
in the mode of “emergence”. Neither modes of thinking think kinetic
absence—Ereignis). Indeed, the aporia solved by memory in the Meno is
attributable to the kinesis of the being of beings. Both Heidegger’s
ontology of technology and Stiegler’s deconstruction can be delimited by
a thinking of originary repetition as technics. To phrase this more
specifically, a temporal kinesis of iteration always may or may not
constitute a mnemotechnics. The only “necessary” condition of iteration is
its repeatability and variation. Iteration and différance do not provide a
telos that constrains potentiality to the realization of any given ontic form.
This has the consequence that a phenomenology derived from the
reflexivity of a being is required to normatively select and calculate on the
ends of that being. Techncity itself, however, does not provide kinesis with
an end.
There is only a technics if technics and technology are first of all
given in the mode of potentiality: that is, they are not fully present as an
ousiological determination, but are temporal (a becoming). In terms of
kinesis, substantial beings are always already their futural possibility,
given by a movement of temporalized potentiality. The necessity of
accounting for time on the basis of technics remains irreducible. A
contemporary ontology faces the challenge of thinking time as a
technicity, in the terms of the becoming space of time and the becoming
time of space in regard to the non-original iterability of différance. This is
indeed Stiegler’s project. But a rethought “technics” must itself go further:
we may indeed and necessarily locate futurity as the intentional feature of
Dasein or the subject, but we cannot do the same for technics itself. We
cannot, as such, contain technics within the horizon of memory, the
anthropos, nor less a politics.
Nonetheless, the Heideggerian thinking of the free relation to technics
does indeed assume a significant political and ethical telos. The Gestell
indeed affords this possibility, and it is in this possibility that Stiegler’s
own thinking can be situated. The genealogy of technical matter demands
“un poplitéus de la mémoire”, that is, a remembering or recovering of the
default of origin in which politics becomes the struggle to remember the
 John Dalton 185

history of the human and the technical as the possibility of the invention of
the new while simultaneously displacing the anthropomorphism of the
modern political citizen-subject and overcoming the philosophical
repression of technics (Heidegger included). But this reinscribes history
not as the history of difference (iteration, etc), but as constrained by the
critique of modernity and the spectre of the technologisied loss of
memory. To borrow the phrase, the thorough-going “technologization of
the life-world” assumes the thesis of a quasi-technological determinism.
Technology becomes autonomous, divorced from social agency, a source
of alienation that must be overcome. The “redoublement épochal”, the
active remembering of the default of origin, cannot be guaranteed,
however, by a revitalised or rethought technics. Technics itself does not
guarantee the intentional structure of a politics (the telos of a polis) nor
less temporality itself. Technics offers no end. Hence, a politics must also
be technical and construct a telos. Politics must affirm its technicity,
without as yet reducing itself to the category of means.
Indeed, if what is at issue is a politics that bears upon political
communities “to-come”, it is the memory of the future that is at stake—the
technological possibilities for the invention of new communities. Yet
Stiegler’s politics of memory is constrained to reinscribe the critique of
technology as the enabling frame of a new politics. To cite Stiegler from
the preface to Technics and Time:

The reactions, immediate or mediate and mediatized, “epidermic” or

calculated, that are provoked by the extraordinary changes characteristic of
our age, in which technics constitutes the most powerful dynamic factor,
must be imperatively overcome. The present time is caught up in a
whirlwind in which decision making (krisis) has become increasingly
numb, the mechanisms and tendencies of which remain obscure, and which
must be made intelligible at the cost of considerable effort of anamnesis as
much as of meticulous attention to the complexity of what is taking place
[...].
The frenzy of time is all the more paradoxical in that, although it should
open onto the evidence of a future, never before has the imminence of an
impossibility to come been more acute (Stiegler, 1998: ix).

The tropes of the critique of modernity articulate themselves with

clockwork regularity: memory and futurity, made possible by technics, are
as yet at risk. Certainly, a thinking of the technicity of time and memory
prevents us from opposing a non-technical concept. Technics must already
contend with kinesis, with finitude and repetition. The incalculable,
finally, cannot be opposed to the calculable as an alterity: this is indeed to
agree with Stiegler. But the overdetermination of the possible radical loss
186 The Work and the Promise of Technology

of the future is the direct consequence of improperly technologizing

technics on the basis of a forced concept of epiphylogenesis that in fact
preserves an originary biological unicity. As Beardsworth contends, “the
human lives through means other than life (technical objects and
prostheses), naming an originary “default of origin” supplemented by the
history of technics […] end up having the following somewhat ironic
consequence: biological life prior to, or in its difference from
anthropogenesis is removed from the structure of an originary technicity;
as a result biology is naturalised and the differentiation of technicity qua
technics is considered in its exteriorised form in relation to the process of
hominization” (Beardsworth, 2003: 49-50). A politics of technics
necessarily bears upon a humanist horizon. But if technics itself cannot be
thought within the ergon of hominization—the end for which a politics of
memory is predicated—then what is present is not the impossibility of
politics, but its radical potential to assume hitherto unimaginable forms. If
the technical promise of hominization should engage a radical
transformation of the human being, then a politics of memory is but one
possible (and not at all necessary) finite phase in the history of matter.
This would indeed profoundly engage technics with the Derridean and
Lévinasian theme of alterity (and here, contra Beardsworth’s caution)
beyond community, but perhaps even beyond the form or outline of the
“to-come”.
Technics does not present us with impossibility, but with modes of
potentiality. The event of technics is the form and force of potentiality as a
kinetic system of difference that temporalises and spatialises, but without
intentional sense. Technics must first be thought from its “event”, from its
taking place as finite repetition.
Reading technology, art, life, the body, and so on, in terms of a
generalised technics must also admit its historical threshold. In agreement
with Stiegler, the emergence of modern industrial and digital technology,
the ratio, structural linguistics and semiotics (or rather, grammatology) is
what, historically, makes such a thinking of technics possible. Without
contemporary technology and its horizon of sense, it would not be possible
to inscribe technics as a condition of possibility. This is not, however, to
assert the thorough-going technologization of “life” itself: such would
amount to a vulgar reduction. On the contrary, what is opened for a
contemporary thinking of technology is the potentiality of technics.
Outstripping the form of history necessarily turns the critical thinking of
modern technology to what gives form and history as such. Admitting the
technicity of humanity both accounts for and exceeds epocality. Admitting
the techne of the event entails thinking technics not as domination, but as
 John Dalton 187

the ontological or pre-ontological possibility of calculation as it

necessarily engages the incalculable.
If there is a horizon of responsibility within which the promise of
technology is meaningful, what as yet defines technology as a problem is
its capacity to outstrip our capacity to properly frame technology. Indeed,
our ethical sensibility is barely able to keep pace with techno-science (for
example, the resort to legal bans due to anxieties over embryonic stem-cell
research and genetic manipulation). Technological innovation expresses
the potential for profound and presently incalculable transformations of
human existence.
Opposing “art” to technology diminishes both. It is necessary that
technology have the freedom to be inventive. And this is Heidegger’s
point. As an art, techne is a kinetic disclosure of the factical world. But we
can turn this around. Art is a technics, a specifically creative event of
potentiality. If we can think technology as a setting-into-work of decision
and responsibility, then the ethos of technology is found in its potentiality
to make possible the place of facticity, as what gives the time and place of
our care and possibility. The ontology of technics is—that which gives
time. Technics gives time to time. It allows there to be more time. Yet
technics itself cares nothing for time. Time is what we engage as the
techne of our temporal being-there: time, then, as politics. But again,
technics itself offers no end or proper purpose for humanity. Technics
itself is iterable code or form—genetics, différance, repeatbility as such. In
this sense, both a politics of technology and or as the free relation to
technology are the reflex of human finitude: the necessary engagement of
rendering existence meaningful in a time and place with the general
economy of technics. This has neither an essentially anthropological or
ontological form: the general economy of technics is not reducible to
history or horizonality. Its potentiality, we must necessarily interpret as a
condition of responsibility, already structures the incalculable forms of
possible human evolution. This we must interpret as the present condition
of responsibility toward technology. It exceeds, however, the horizon of
politics. Technics becomes a political question on the basis of conserving
a certain “form of life”—the anthropological Dasein. A truly radical
thought of technics can look beyond this.
The task of thought today is to think how technics may indeed outstrip
its own factical possibility. This situates any possible ethics of technology.
A philosophy of technology must begin to think precisely its futurity, as a
“yes” to technics traced in the very technics of language in which we
engage technics itself. Technology is our art, our architectonic, that which
gives us the time and space to begin, and to begin again.
188 The Work and the Promise of Technology

Bibliography
Beardsworth, 2003
Richard Beardsworth, "Thinking Technicity". In Jacques Derrida, vol.
3. London: Sage Publications.
Heidegger, 1999
Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (On Enowning). Trans.
Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Indiana and Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Heidegger, 2002
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art". Trans. and ed.
Kenneth Hayes, in Off the Beaten Track. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Heidegger, 1991
Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason. Trans. Reginald Lily.
Indiana and Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, 1977
Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology". Trans.
William Lovitt, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays. New York: Garland Publishing.
Heidegger, 2003
Martin Heidegger, "Seminar in Le Thor 1968". Trans. Andrew
Mitchell and François Raffoul, in Four Seminars. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Stiegler, 1998
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus.
Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
 THE AN-DENKEN OF EXISTENTIALISM:
VATTIMO’S HEIDEGGER AND THE AESTHETICS
OF LIVING

ASHLEY WOODWARD

At the end of a chapter on the contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni

Vattimo in his book Prefaces to the Diaphora, Peter Carravetta suggests
that Vattimo’s philosophy of “weak thought” (il pensiero debole) offers us
“freedom to reopen the dossier of existentialism” (Carravetta, 1991: 235).
Carravetta does not expand on this suggestion, and it is one which may
strike the reader familiar with Vattimo’s works as unlikely, since in a
number of places he has explicitly indicated the obsolescence of
existentialism in contemporary life and thought. For example, in the essay
“The Decline of the Subject and the Problem of Testimony”, he writes
with approval that:

[t]oday’s philosophical climate shows little interest in [the existentialist]

subject and is in general unreceptive to the themes of "classic"
existentialism, such as the individual, freedom to choose, responsibility,
death, and Angst […] (Vattimo, 1993: 40-41).

Despite the seemingly unlikely nature of Carravetta’s suggestion,

however, I wish to take the theme of this book, which places the notion of
an “aesthetics of living” in relation to the thought of Martin Heidegger, as
an opportunity to explore it. I shall do so by developing the contention that
some of the implications of Heidegger’s thought for an “aesthetics of
living” have already been explored in fruitful ways by Jean-Paul Sartre, in
the classic, existentialist phase of his thinking.
Sartre’s existentialist thought has widely been considered
obsolescent since the rise of structuralism, and is still frequently regarded
as such today. Moreover, the reception of the later Heidegger’s works –
including his explicit rejection of Sartrean existentialism in the “Letter on
humanism” (Heidegger, 1993) – has been instrumental in deposing the
Parisian philosopher of the cafés from the influential position he once
190 The An-Denken of Existentialism: Vattimo’s Heidegger
and the Aesthetics of Living

held. More recently, however, scholars such as Christina Howells,

Tilottama Rajan, and Nik Farrell Fox have attempted to reassess Sartre’s
status in twentieth century philosophy, and in particular to reconsider his
relationship to deconstructionist, post-structuralist, or postmodern
philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault (Howells, 1988; Rajan, 2002;
Fox, 2003). Taking up this project of reassessment, I wish to argue that
Vattimo’s philosophy of weak thought might contribute in a significant
way to a reconsideration of Sartre. While many of the reassessments of
Sartrean existentialism are conducted as a history of ideas, which seek to
revise Sartre’s place in the genealogy of twentieth century French theory,
Vattimo’s weak thought – and in particular, its appropriation and
development of the Heideggerian concept of An-Denken – furnishes us
with an appropriate interpretive thread along which to reconsider Sartre’s
thought for its significance in the current situation. This interpretive
thread, I will argue, allows us to see a Heideggerian impulse at work in
Sartre’s existentialist “aesthetics of living”, and indicates its relevance for
contemporary life and thought. In the first section of this paper, I will
briefly reiterate the Heideggerian orthodoxy concerning Sartre, that he is a
metaphysician who remains in the oblivion of Being. In the second
section, I shall outline some of the key points of Vattimo’s reading of
Heidegger, before, in the final section, applying the interpretive thread
leading from this reading to a reconsideration – a rethinking, recollection,
or An-Denken – of Sartrean existentialism for an aesthetics of living. The
interpretive strategy I shall follow here thus shows both how a certain
reading of Heidegger allows us to reconsider Sartre’s thought, and how
this reconsideration allows us to read Sartre as a Heideggerian thinker (at
least in a restricted sense) who theorises an aesthetics of living.

The Heideggerian Orthodoxy: Sartre as metaphysician

As is of course well-known, in Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 1956) and
other existentialist writings, Sartre appropriates various aspects of
Heidegger’s early thought. Of particular note, he uses the French
translation of Dasein – realité humaine (human reality) – in his existential
interpretation of human existence, and applies the temporal, projectual
characteristics of Dasein to consciousness. As is also well-known,
Heidegger distances himself from Sartrean existentialism in the “Letter on
humanism”, where he claims that Sartre’s thought has nothing to do with
his own. This position on the relationship between Sartre and Heidegger
was subsequently adopted by a new generation of French Heidegger
scholars, and became reified as a founding gesture of what Tom Rockmore
 Ashley Woodward 191

calls the French Heideggerian orthodoxy1. The establishment of this

relationship has meant that the rise in popularity of Heidegger and more
recent French Heideggerianisms, such as Jacques Derrida’s
deconstruction, has been synonymous with the obsolescence of Sartrean
existentialism. Heidegger’s “Letter of humanism” is the text which lies at
the heart of this Heideggerian dismissal of Sartre, and which appears to
give it philosophical foundation. As such, it constitutes the challenge
which any contemporary rethinking of Sartre in the orbit of Heidegger’s
thought must face.
For Heidegger, of course, the fundamental philosophical problem is
how to think Being; he considers the history of Western philosophy to
consist in a progressive obfuscation of Being through a form of thought he
names metaphysics. Metaphysics makes the mistake of answering the
question of Being with theories about particular beings (existents or
entities), and thus obscures the question itself. According to Heidegger,
the obscuring or forgetting of the question of Being is the primary source
of the ills of the contemporary world, both intellectual and cultural. While
Heidegger’s arguments in the “Letter on humanism” are complex, the
kernel of his criticism of Sartre in this text is a characterisation of the
French philosopher as another metaphysical thinker who fails to think
Being. This criticism is given most succinctly in his analysis of the slogan
of existentialism, “existence precedes essence” (existentia precedes
essentia). This slogan is a reversal of the metaphysical doctrine,
introduced by Plato and influential throughout the Western philosophical
tradition, that essence precedes existence. Heidegger argues that despite
the apparent radicality of this reversal, Sartre fails to overcome what is

1
According to Rockmore this orthodoxy instituted by Jean Beaufret, is
exemplified by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Haar, and was
exported to the Anglophone academy largely through the dissemination of
deconstruction. Rockmore characterises this French “orthodox” approach to
Heidegger scholarship with three points: the tendency to interpret his earlier
writings from the perspective of his later work, to see Heidegger’s thought as
beyond philosophy, and to minimise the significance of his involvement with
Nazism (Rockmore, 1995: 121). Rockmore contends that, like any orthodoxy, the
French Heideggarian orthodoxy is based on an uncritical fidelity to presupposed
truth claims which are rarely, if ever, tested (Rockmore, 1995: 124). In my
invocation of a Heideggerian orthodoxy here, I follow Rockmore only to the extent
that the genealogy of Heidegger interpretation he proposes explains the widespread
uncritical acceptance of Heidegger’s characterisation of Sartre in the “Letter on
humanism”. Indeed, the view that Sartre was wholly mistaken in his reading of
Heidegger is one part of the orthodoxy which Rockmore himself seems to
uncritically accept.
192 The An-Denken of Existentialism: Vattimo’s Heidegger
and the Aesthetics of Living

decisive about metaphysics – its forgetting of the ontological difference

and obscuring of Being – because he does not enquire into the origin of
the categories of essence and existence. For Heidegger, Being must be
questioned at a more fundamental level and understood as that which
discloses such categories. Heidegger thus argues that with the slogan of
existentialism, “existence precedes essence”, Sartre “stays with
metaphysics in oblivion of the truth of Being” (Heidegger, 1993: 232).
Reflecting on Sartre’s popular lecture “Existentialism is a humanism”
(Sartre, 1975), Heidegger further criticises Sartre’s existentialism by way
of a criticism of humanism in general. This criticism attacks humanism as
a metaphysical way of thinking what it means to be human; a way of
thinking which decides the answer to this question in advance of essential
or ontological considerations. For Heidegger, to think human beings in an
essential or ontological manner is to understand them as Dasein, as the
particular beings to whom Being reveals itself. Because humanism in all
its traditional forms ignores Being and the human being’s relation to it,
Heidegger considers it a metaphysical form of thought which thinks only
about beings or entities, devaluing human beings themselves and
forgetting what is of primary significance in their existence, viz. the
capacity to reveal Being. Heidegger writes:

Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be

the ground of one. Every determination of the essence of man that already
presupposes an interpretation of beings without asking about the truth of
Being, whether knowingly or not, is metaphysical… Accordingly, every
humanism remains metaphysical’ (Heidegger, 1993: 225-6).

More specifically, Heidegger challenges Sartre’s statement, “we are

precisely in a situation where there are only human beings”2, asserting that
we should instead say that “we are precisely in a situation where
principally there is Being” (Heidegger, 1993: 237). The difference
between Sartre and Heidegger on this point can be understood in terms of
their respective understandings of phenomenology and the origin of
meaning in the world: for Sartre, the world is meaningless in itself, and is
only imbued with meaning through the meaning-conferring activities of
conscious human beings. For Heidegger, although human beings (as
Dasein) have an essential role to play in the revelation of meaning, Being
takes priority since Being is that by which, or from which, meaning is
given. Furthermore, from Heidegger’s perspective, Sartre’s central focus
on consciousness reproduces the subjectivism of modern metaphysics. In

2
Quoted by Heidegger in Heidegger, 1993: 237.
 Ashley Woodward 193

supposing that meaning issues entirely from consciousness, Sartre’s theory

of meaning remains blind to the way Being gives meaning and the way
things show themselves from themselves. Beyond the metaphysical
character of the slogan of existentialism, Sartre thus appears to Heidegger
to be a metaphysician oblivious to Being because of the humanistic and
subjectivising nature of his thought. In sum then, for Heidegger and the
orthodox Heideggerians, Sartre remains one more metaphysical
philosopher in a long line of philosophers who fail to think Being in its
essence, and who thus contribute to the contemporary cultural and
philosophical malaise coextensive with the decline of Being.

An-Denken: Vattimo’s reading of Heidegger

Since the dismissal of Sartre’s thought by Heidegger has been maintained
under the influence of the French Heideggerian orthodoxy, it will perhaps
not be surprising that I turn to an interpreter of Heidegger who is neither
French nor orthodox in order to question and displace this dismissal.
Gianni Vattimo’s philosophy lies at the heart of the trend in Italian
philosophy known as “weak thought”. This trend, which has been
characterised as an Italian counterpart to French deconstruction, develops
a more modest conception of reason based on interpretation rather than
deduction. Weak thought draws inspiration from Nietzsche, Wittgensein,
Gadamer, and, most significantly, Heidegger. As Daniel Barbiero notes,
“before there was weak thought, there was Vattimo’s relationship to the
work of Heidegger, which has provided weak thought with its most basic
conceptions of time and history” (Barbiero, 1992: 159). It is Vattimo’s
reading of Heidegger which furnishes weak thought with a theory of
interpretation, which, I will contend, allows us to see the contemporary
relevance of the links between Sartre’s and Heidegger’s thought, and
which enables a reconsideration of Sartre’s thought for an aesthetics of
living.
The crux of Vattimo’s reading of Heidegger is a concern to show that
he may be read as an anti-foundational thinker – that is, a thinker who
ceases to think Being as “ground” or “foundation”. This reading is
explicitly an unorthodox one3, since it depends on reading Heidegger
against many of his own self-interpretations. Vattimo characterises his

3
Unorthdox, but not unique. In fact, when Vattimo’s book The End of Modenity
(Vattimo, 1988) was translated into German, some commentators complained that
his reading of Heidegger was not original (Barbiero, 1992: 165).
194 The An-Denken of Existentialism: Vattimo’s Heidegger
and the Aesthetics of Living

own method of interpreting Heidegger as a “distortion”4 of Heidegger’s

thought, but one which betrays the letter of Heidegger’s texts in order to
be true to the spirit of his thought. More specifically, Vattimo develops a
selective interpretation which emphasises certain moments of Heidegger’s
thought and turns them against other moments. Vattimo contends that just
as a distinction was made between right and left Hegelianism, such a
distinction might be made in the contemporary scene of Heidegger
scholarship, and this distinction might serve to situate his own reading:

[r]ight, in the case of Heidegger, denotes an interpretation of his

overcoming of metaphysics as an effort, in spite of everything, somehow to
prepare a "return of Being" perhaps in the form of an apophasic, negative,
mystical ontology; left denotes the reading that I propose of the history of
Being as the story of a “long goodbye”, of an interminable weakening of
Being. In this case, the overcoming of Being is understood only as a
recollection of the oblivion of Being, never as making Being present again,
not even as a term that always lies beyond every formulation (Vattimo,
1997: 13).

Vattimo’s “left Heideggerianism” asserts that Heidegger’s thinking cannot

consistently be thematised as aiming towards a “return” or a
“remembering” of Being which would overcome metaphysical thinking
and institute a new foundation for thought. Vattimo argues that to think the
return of Being in a new foundation is to think it as something absent
which might be made present. However, thinking Being as presence is
identified by Heidegger as one of the primary marks of metaphysical
thought. Vattimo writes, "[t]he forgetting of Being that is characteristic of
metaphysics […] cannot be understood in contrast to a “remembering of
Being” which would grasp it as present" (Vattimo, 1993: 114)5.
As Heidegger notes in certain passages (Vattimo most frequently cites
the opening of On Time and Being (Heidegger, 1972) and the closing of
“On the essence of ground” (Heidegger, 1998b), it is a mistake of
metaphysics to think Being as ground or foundation – in the sense of
stable structure or enduring presence. For Vattimo, this foundational
interpretation of Being is in fact the dominant meaning of “metaphysics”
to emerge from Heidegger’s thought. Rather, Vattimo argues, Heidegger’s

4
See the explanation of Heidegger’s term Verwindung below.
5
On this point, we might recall Heidegger’s complaint, in “On the question of
Being”, that “[p]eople have tended to represent the 'oblivion of being' as though to
say it by way of an image, being were the umbrella that has been left sitting
somewhere through the forgetfulness of some philosophy professor” (Heidegger,
1998a: 314).
 Ashley Woodward 195

notion of Being as event (Ereignis), in which Being always “stays away”

or conceals itself in the process of bringing beings (entities) to presence
gives us an understanding of Being which can never itself be reduced to
presence .6
Vattimo’s anti-foundational interpretation of Heidegger’s conception
of Being is influenced in important ways by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s
hermeneutics7. Heidegger and Gadamer are generally recognised as the
two principal theorists of hermeneutic ontology. Vattimo characterises
hermeneutic ontology broadly as the thesis that there is an important
relationship between Being and language, and suggests that the difference
between Heidegger and Gadamer rests on which term they prioritise:
while for Heidegger Being is of primary significance, Gadamer focuses on
language. Vattimo interprets Gadamer’s well-known phrase “Being that
can be understood is language” (Gadamer, 1989: 475) as an identification
of Being with language, but insists that this interpretation must be
historicized. That is, Being is coextensive with the shifting interpretations
of the present and the past that take place in and through language.
Influenced by this reading of Gadamer, Vattimo argues that the
understanding of Being which Heidegger’s work has made available is one
in which the historical transmission of messages constitutes the
interpretive horizons of our world8. He writes that:

[a]ll we can say about Being at this point is that it consists in trans-mission,
in forwarding or destiny: Ueber-lieferung and Ge-schick. The world plays
itself out in horizons constructed by a series of echoes, linguistic
responses, and messages coming from the past and from others (others
along side us as well as other cultures) […]. Being never really is but sends
itself, is on the way, it trans-mits itself (Vattimo, 1984: 157).

On Vattimo’s interpretation of Heidegger, then, Being cannot in principle

be made present, or be thought as a stable foundation, since it consists in
the historical transmission of linguistic messages which form the horizon,
background or context of our interpretation(s) of the world. The web of
such messages has to recede into the background in order to make what
shows up in the foreground intelligible, and this background is always
changing as new messages are integrated into it, while others pass away
and are forgotten.

6
Vattimo develops this reading of Heidegger most fully in his paper “An-Denken.
Thinking and the foundation” in Vattimo, 1993.
7
This influence is unsurprising; Vattimo studied with Gadamer, and translated his
Truth and Method (Gadamer, 1989) into Italian.
8
For a concise statement of Vattimo’s reading of Gadamer, see Vattimo, 2002.
196 The An-Denken of Existentialism: Vattimo’s Heidegger
and the Aesthetics of Living

Vattimo is concerned to present this anti-foundational interpretation of

Being as the actual ontology of the contemporary world. Since, for
Vattimo, the Being of the Lebenswelt (lifeworld) is coextensive with
interpretation, Being itself has “declined” or “weakened” as the
foundational pretensions of ontology have been undermined from within.
Vattimo thus agrees with the “orthodox” reading of Heidegger as seeing
the history of Western philosophy and culture9 as the oblivion of Being
through the development of metaphysics, but argues that the current state
of ontology, in which there is very little of Being (in the sense of stable
ground or foundation) left, should be affirmed as the solution to
metaphysics (understood as foundational thought). Vattimo thus asserts
the value of a “weak,” anti-foundational conception of Being, and a “weak
thought” which aligns itself with the ontology of the current situation.
As a corollary to his “left”, anti-foundational interpretation of
Heidegger, however, Vattimo rejects the possibility that metaphysics may
be definitively overcome. He argues that such an overcoming necessarily
implies a new foundation. Since this in turn implies a thinking of Being on
the model of presence, it simply imposes a metaphysics of a new and
different form. Vattimo therefore resists positing the anti-foundational
interpretation of Being as a new beginning which leaves metaphysics
outside and behind. Rather, he writes that “[f]or Heidegger, as for
Nietzsche, thought has no other ‘object’ (if we may even still use this
term) than the errancy of metaphysics, recollected in an attitude which is
neither a critical overcoming nor an acceptance that recovers and prolongs
it” (Vattimo, 1988: 173).
Vattimo appropriates Heidegger’s concept of An-Denken to explain the
kind of “recollection” alluded to here. For Vattimo, An-Denken indicates a
kind of post-metaphysical thinking which is able to approach the anti-
foundational understanding of Being. Vattimo explains:

What is the characteristic feature of thinking as An-Denken? This thinking

that lets go of Being as foundation and manages to think Anwesen

9
While Vattimo often focuses his analyses on philosophical texts, he points to
other cultural factors as contributing to this ontology of decline. Indeed, one of the
most interesting aspects of Vattimo’s work is the way he traces relationships
between the philosophical developments of thinkers such as Nietzsche and
Heidegger and developments in culture. Vattimo relates the ontology of decline to
the end of colonialism and the rise of mass media in the “Introduction” to The End
of Modernity (Vattimo, 1988). More recently (and perhaps more contentiously), he
has related this ontology to the advent and development of Christianity (Vattimo,
1999).
 Ashley Woodward 197

[presence] as Anwesenlassen [letting-be-present], manages to move toward

thinking Being properly – why should it be Andenken? Because memory is
the way of thinking Schickung, the transmission or sending of Being as
sending (Vattimo, 1993: 120-1).

The term An-Denken implies a remembering, recollection, or

“rememoration” of the traditions passed on through history which form the
horizons of our world. With An-Denken, Being is not thought
metaphysically as something which might be grasped as present – rather, it
recognises that Being can only be remembered, that is, considered as
something which is always already gone, or passed away. An-Denken thus
corresponds to the thinking of a Being which gives, but which is never
itself given in the giving. Vattimo writes that “Schickung [transmission]
lets itself be thought only as always already having happened, as a gift
from which the giving has always already withdrawn” (Vattimo, 1993:
121).
For Vattimo, the interpretive horizons which constitute the Lebenswelt,
the world as it is given to us, are “interference patterns” produced by a
multitude of heterogenous messages echoing down to us from the past.
These messages cannot be retrieved or made present in the sense of being
made fully explicable and grounded, since the worlds in which they once
found their grounding have passed away. “For instance,” Vattimo writes,
“Plato’s works cannot be rethought today in terms of whether the doctrine
of Ideas is true or untrue, but only in terms of trying to recollect the
Lichtung [clearing] or preliminary geschicklich [opening] within which
something like the doctrine of Ideas is able to appear” (Vattimo, 1988:
175). This inability to grasp as present the ideas and traditions which
nevertheless form the horizons of the lifeworld is well expressed, Vattimo
suggests, in the “festivals of memory” evoked by Nietzsche in aphorism
223 of Human, All-Too-Human:

The best in us has perhaps been inherited from the feelings of former
times, feelings which today can hardly be approached on direct paths; the
sun has already set, but our life’s sky glows and shines with it still,
although we no longer see it (Nietzsche, 1984: 137).

Crucially, for Vattimo, since Being is understood as the historical

transmission of such messages, and the history of Being is the history of
metaphysics, then the current configuration of Being remains conditioned
by the metaphysical thought of the past (albeit in a weakened form).
However, An-Denken does not simply recollect metaphysical ideas in their
metaphysical form – i.e. with their claims to universal truth. Vattimo notes
198 The An-Denken of Existentialism: Vattimo’s Heidegger
and the Aesthetics of Living

Heidegger’s claim in The Principle of Reason (Heidegger, 1991) that “to

think from the point of view of the Ge-Schick [destiny] of Being means to
entrust oneself to the liberating bond of the Überlieferung [tradition]”
(Vattimo, 1988: 175). As Vattimo cashes this out, the recollection of
tradition is liberating in the sense that it frees us from the foundational
nature of metaphysical thought: An-Denken “ungrounds” metaphysical
theses precisely because their historically relative character becomes
foregrounded. Moreover, this conception of thought as An-denken is
synonymous with the reconsideration of past ideas in the history of
philosophy for their significance in the current situation: insofar as this
situation is constituted by a weak ontology, past ideas retain currency only
through renouncing their foundational claims, and rise to significance to
the extent that they contribute to thinking life in an anti-foundational
manner.
Vattimo extends the notion of post-metaphysical thought as An-Denken
by equating it with the further Heideggerian notion of Verwindung. This
term suggests an alternative to overcoming (Überwindung), an alternative
Heidegger himself suggests in a number of places10. Vattimo notes the
difficulty of translating this term, and indicates that it has a number of
meanings which must all be taken into account in order to understand
Heidegger’s intent. Verwindung may mean distortion, twisting,
convalescence, or resignation. On Vattimo’s interpretation, when
Heidegger suggests the possibility of a Verwindung of metaphysics, he is
alluding to a kind of resignation to metaphysics which paradoxically
allows a twisting-free from it. Vattimo gives substance to this difficult
notion by suggesting that the Verwindung of metaphysics should be
understood as a resignation to the impossibility of thinking in categories
which are absolutely outside or beyond metaphysics, simultaneously
accompanied by the refusal to interpret these categories as objective truths
which conform to permanent structures of the world. In this way, the most
metaphysical aspect of metaphysical thought – its reference to Being as
ground or foundation – is subverted from within11.
Vattimo thus argues for a particular interpretation of the image of post-
metaphysical thought which emerges from Heidegger’s work as one which
involves the necessity of thinking in metaphysical categories, but in such a

10
Most importantly for Vattimo, in the first essay of Heidegger’s Identity and
Difference (Heidegger, 1974). Heidegger also uses the term in the context of a
discussion of nihilism in “On the question of Being” (Heidegger, 1998a).
11
Vattimo’s most thorough analysis of the term Verwindung, on which I have
drawn here, is in Vattimo, 1988: 172-3.
 Ashley Woodward 199

way that they are ungrounded through An-Denken (recollection) and

Verwindung (distortion). Such a thought rejects the idea of thinking new
ideas as theories which might more accurately represent the supposedly
stable structures of reality: to think Being, it seems, we must recollect the
history of thought (and this is precisely what Heidegger does in his studies
in the history of philosophy, which, Vattimo argues, should be understood
not as preparatory to post-metaphysical thought, but as themselves
exemplifying post-metaphysical thinking). At the end of the essay
“Dialectics, difference, and weak thought,” however, Vattimo suggests a
way in which post-metaphysical thought may yet think the new. Here he
writes that this possibility comes into play:

insofar as Ge-schick does not merely hand down Wirkungen [effects], but
also specific traces, elements that have not actually become the world: the
ruins accumulated by history at the feet of Klee’s angel (Vattimo, 1984:
163).

The reference here is of course to Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the

philosophy of history” (Benjamin, 1999). Vattimo’s suggestion is that of
all the messages handed down through history, some are more influential
than others in constituting the horizons of the present. There are always
messages, however – books, texts, local traditions, and so on – which have
been preserved but have not had, or no longer have, an effect on the world.
Such messages are the ruins of the movement of history, where all that has
not contributed to progress lies as waste. Thinking the new in a weakened,
post-metaphysical manner, Vattimo suggests, means rummaging in the
ruins of history which – in Benjamin’s image – fall at the feet of Klee’s
Angelus Novus. In the next and final section, I shall attempt to pick up and
dust off some shards of Sartre’s thought which seem to have accumulated
at the Angel’s feet.

The An-Denken of existentialism: Sartre and the aesthetics

of living
If we follow the thread of Vattimo’s interpretation of Heidegger, we find
ourselves in a position to reconsider Sartre’s thought. This interpretation
does not help us to assess the correctness or incorrectness of Sartre’s
interpretation and appropriation of Heidegger on specific points of detail.
Nor does it allow a point-by-point refutation of the issues on which
Heidegger criticises Sartre in the “Letter on humanism”. What it arguably
does allow, however, is a transposition or “twisting” of the framework
within which Sartre’s relation to Heidegger, and the contemporary
200 The An-Denken of Existentialism: Vattimo’s Heidegger
and the Aesthetics of Living

relevance of the former’s thought, might be considered. If we follow

Vattimo’s argument that post-metaphysical thought is only possible as an
An-Denken and a Verwindung of metaphysics, then arguably we need not
dismiss Sartre’s analysis of human reality, consciousness, and lived
experience out of hand, on the grounds that he has not fully broken with
metaphysics. Rather, while accepting that Sartre does not break with
metaphysics as radically as Heidegger may wish, we might recognise that
he nevertheless goes a long way in applying what is for Vattimo most
distinctive about Heidegger’s gestures towards post-metaphysical thought
– that is, an ungroundedness, or anti-foundationalism – to human reality.
In the essay “An-Denken: thinking and the foundation,” Vattimo makes
the following suggestion regarding the nature of the self that appears as a
corollary to the anti-foundational conception of Being that he finds in
Heidegger:

[…] liberation from the exclusive bond to its historical context puts Dasein
itself in a state of suspension; a suspension which touches him in his
deepest constitution as subject (and it is in this sense that I believe
Heidegger’s antisubjectivism is to be read).

What then can be said for the continuity that constitutes subjective life
(even on a psychological level), when the latter turns out to be marked in
its very structure by the discontinuity of the Ab-grund [abyss]? Are we not
in the very same situation described by Nietzsche in The Gay Science,
when he speaks in aphorism 54 about "the consciousness that I am
dreaming and that I must go on dreaming"? Nietzsche’s work clearly
shows that all this has vast implications for the mode of thinking the I as
individuality/identity (Vattimo, 1993: 128).

I wish to argue that these implications, which Vattimo finds in Nietzsche

and Heidegger, are precisely what Sartre draws out in productive ways
through his existentialist theory of consciousness. Moreover, for Sartre,
the ungrounded character of human existence which devolves from this
theory of consciousness means that “living” becomes something we must
approach in an aesthetic manner. Vattimo’s reading of Heidegger thus
allows a rethinking of Sartre’s work which situates it as contributing to a
Heideggerian aesthetics of living; one that is relevant to the current
situation. In this final section, I will outline this interpretation by first
glossing Sartre’s analysis of consciousness in The Transcendence of the
Ego (Sartre, 2004) and Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 1956), then
recalling his remarks on the link between choosing values and aesthetic
judgement in Being and Nothingness and “Existentialism is a humanism”
(Sartre, 1975).
 Ashley Woodward 201

Sartre begins to develop an “ungrounded” theory of consciousness and

the self in his early engagements with Husserlian phenomenology. In so
doing, he moves decisively away from the Cartesian tradition in which the
cogito is posited as a secure foundation for knowledge. In The
Transcendence of the Ego, he argues against Husserl’s thesis that the ego
is a transcendental condition for consciousness, accompanying, and
necessary for, all conscious experience. Sartre contends that positing such
a transcendental ego is superfluous within the terms of Husserl’s own
phenomenology. He notes that it is often thought necessary to posit this
ego in order to account for the unity of consciousness and the
individuation of separate consciousnesses, but argues that these two
features of consciousness can already be accounted for adequately by the
phenomenological theory of intentionality. This theory posits that all
consciousness is consciousness of something. On Sartre’s interpretation,
this means that consciousness always transcends, or moves beyond, itself
towards objects exterior to itself. In so doing, Sartre argues,
consciousness is unified by the object(s) that it posits. Moreover, in
positing objects it limits itself, constituting a “synthetic totality” which
isolates itself from other totalities of the same type (i.e. other
consciousnesses) (Sartre, 2004: 6-7). Sartre concludes:

the phenomenological conception of consciousness renders the unifying

and individualizing role of the I totally useless. It is, on the contrary,
consciousness that renders the unity and personality of my I possible. The
transcendental I thus has no raison d’être (Sartre, 2004: 7).

Sartre further argues that the ego is a “transcendent, external” object of

consciousness, a synthetic unity of states, actions, and qualities12. It is an
object posited by certain conscious acts, but not a permanent
accompaniment of all consciousness. The ego arises when consciousness
reflects on its past states, acts, and qualities, and synthesises these
elements into a unity. For Sartre, consciousness is an impersonal
“transcendental field” which acts spontaneously, and consciousness is the
condition for the possibility of the ego, rather than vice versa. The
rejection of the transcendental ego means that the spontaneous activity of
consciousness has no foundation and is not conditioned or limited by a

12
Briefly, these terms have the following meaning for Sartre. States are inert,
passive modes of consciousness, such as emotions. Actions encompass both
physical actions and psychical actions (such as doubting, reasoning, or meditating).
Qualities are potentialities for particular states or actions, such as “failings, virtues,
tastes, talents, tendencies, instincts, etc.” (Sartre, 2004: 28).
202 The An-Denken of Existentialism: Vattimo’s Heidegger
and the Aesthetics of Living

stable structure. Without the transcendental ego, consciousness

“determines itself to exist at every instant, without us being able to
conceive of anything before it. Thus every instant of our conscious lives
reveals to us a creation ex nihilo” (Sartre, 2004: 46).
This analysis of consciousness in The Transcendence of the Ego, I
suggest, undermines the common view – which is arguably something of a
caricature – of Sartre as a traditional, Cartesian subjectivist. Arguably, it is
such a view – based on certain (perhaps unfortunate) passages in the later,
popular lecture “Existentialism is a humanism”13 – which dominates the
orthodox Heideggerian view of Sartre as a metaphysician14. The view of
consciousness which Sartre develops in The Transcendence of the Ego,
and which continues to inform Being and Nothingness and other
existentialist writings, is radically destabilised, cast adrift from any secure,
Cartesian point of reference. In Being and Nothingness Sartre emphasises
the transcendent character of consciousness established in The
Transcendence of the Ego: consciousness surges up spontaneously at each
moment, necessarily transcending or going beyond itself. This view of
consciousness undermines the identity and stability of the self, and
underlies Sartre’s paradoxical assertion that consciousness “must
necessarily be what it is not and not be what it is” (Sartre, 1956: 120).
Insofar as consciousness transcends itself and is not bound to a fixed
identity by an underlying ego, but rather nihilates its past, it is not what it
is. Insofar as consciousness projects itself beyond itself towards futural
possibilities, it is what it is not.
In Being and Nothingness as well as “Existentialism is a humanism”,
Sartre continues to insist that consciousness must be the ground of
philosophy, since it is our primary point of access to the world. However,
given the analysis to which he subjects it, it appears as a ground which is
itself without a stable foundation. Insofar as consciousness constantly and

13
For example, in this lecture Sartre states: “Our point of departure is, indeed, the
subjectivity of the individual, and that for strictly philosophic reasons. It is not
because we are bourgeois, but because we seek to base our teaching on the truth,
and not upon a collection of fine theories, full of hope but lacking real foundations.
And at the point of departure there cannot be any other truth than this, I think,
therefore I am, which is the absolute truth of consciousness as it attains to
itself…outside of the Cartesian cogito, all objects are no more than probable, and
any doctrine of probabilities which is not attached to a truth will crumble into
nothing” (Sartre, 1960: 360-1).
14
Tilottama Rajan supports this view, arguing that “when Heidegger ‘corrects’
Sartre, he reduces the latter’s work metonymically to Existentialism is a
Humanism…” (Rajan, 2002: 56).
 Ashley Woodward 203

necessarily transcends itself, it is incapable of forming a stable structure or

enduring presence. As such, Sartre’s model of consciousness conforms
with the image of subjective life that Vattimo finds in Heidegger, where it
is marked in its very structure by the discontinuity of the Ab-grund.
Indeed, the view of the Cartesian cogito that Sartre develops characterises
it as a “groundless ground” in the sense that it is a necessary starting point
of any philosophy, but it cannot form a stable foundation on which to
construct an edifice of knowledge as Descartes wished. Sartre writes: “In
truth the cogito must be our point of departure, but we can say of it,
parodying a famous saying, that it leads us only on condition that we get
out of it” (Sartre, 1956: 120). “Getting out” of the cogito is precisely what
Sartre’s existentialist theory of consciousness does by “deconstructing”
the ego through the self-transcendence of consciousness, leaving us with
an image of the self which is contingent upon the groundless ground of the
transcendental field, or of consciousness as transcendent15.
From this interpretation of conscious experience as ungrounded, Sartre
draws the implication that living becomes something we must understand
and carry out on an aesthetic model. For Sartre there is neither a human
nature nor a God to ground our choices concerning the forms of life or
modes of existence we adopt. Instead, as is well known, Sartre believes
that we have a radical freedom regarding the choice of values by which we
live. This radical freedom is directly related to Sartre’s rejection of a
perduring ego and his view of consciousness as self-transcendent, for on
such a view of the self, we have no stable “inner character” which might
direct the values we live by. Such values are instead radically contingent,
and must be invented. Sartre explains:

[T]o say that we invent values means no more nor less than this; that there
is no sense in life a priori. Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to
make sense of, and the value of it is nothing else but the sense that you
choose (Sartre, 1975: 367-8).

So how does one choose values? It is here that the aesthetic character of
living becomes evident. Drawing a parallel between the artist who paints a
canvas and the choice of moral values, Sartre writes:

As everyone knows, there are no aesthetic values a priori, but there are
values which will appear in due course in the coherence of the picture, in
the relation between the will to create and the finished work […]. We are

15
In Being and Nothingness the notion of consciousness as a transcendental field is
abandoned, but the spontaneous, transcendent nature of consciousness that it
supports is maintained and extended.
204 The An-Denken of Existentialism: Vattimo’s Heidegger
and the Aesthetics of Living

in the same creative situation […]. There is this in common between art
and morality, that in both we have to do with creation and invention. We
cannot decide a priori what it is that should be done (Sartre, 1975: 364).

Sartrean existentialism thus construes the process of choosing values on an

aesthetic model, insofar as such values arise through a process of creation
rather than existing prior to this process. Moreover, Sartre understands this
choice of values as a matter of concrete action in and on the world:
choosing values is no abstract affair, but takes place through the project of
living. As such, Sartre develops what may justifiably be termed an
“aesthetics of living”. On Sartre’s account of consciousness, there are no
“interior depths” of the mind or soul which might be expressed through
action, and choosing values is not a matter of introspection which precedes
action. Insofar as the ego is construed as a contingent object of
consciousness, the self is “out there”, in the world, with things. The self
cannot act as an invariable structure for valuations which may consistently
be applied in varying situations, since the ego is not thought to be present
in every situation. For Sartre, then, choosing values is a process
coextensive with creative actions: we do not determine our values a priori
and then apply them to the world, but rather, living is conceived as a
creative process whereby values become manifest through our concrete
engagement with the world. Sartre expresses this point through one of the
most memorable images in Being and Nothingness:

[…] in this world where I engage myself, my acts cause values to spring up
like partridges (Sartre, 1956: 76).

In conclusion, the argument I have briefly sketched here is that Sartre

applies the anti-foundational principles that Vattimo gleans from his
reading of Heidegger to human life, to lived experience, in ways which
make the practice of living a characteristically aesthetic one. Insofar as
Sartre presents an “ungrounded” interpretation of human subjectivity, on
Vattimo’s ontology of the current situation his work takes on a healthy
complexion of living significance. It is true that the “ungrounding” in
Sartre proceeds in a very different direction to the ungrounding Vattimo
finds in Heidegger: ungrounding through the evanescence of
consciousness as a transcendental field or transcendent upsurge, rather
than through the contingency of history and language. In this respect,
comparisons between Heidegger and Sartre do not extend very far.
Moreover, it is likely that neither Heidegger nor Vattimo would approve
of the use to which I have put their thought here. Nevertheless, if we ask
what conceptions of ourselves, of our conscious experience, and of our
 Ashley Woodward 205

lives are made available by the “weak” conception of Being as the

historical transmission of messages, then, I suggest, with Sartre we go
some way towards finding an answer. What we may find of value in
Sartre, I have argued, is a Heideggerian (in the sense of “anti-
foundational”) notion of lived experience which still speaks to us today. It
is in this direction, I suggest, that we may give flesh to Carravetta’s
suggestion that Vattimo’s weak thought gives us the freedom to “reopen
the dossier of existentialism”, and which indicates one possible link
between the thought of Martin Heidegger and the aesthetics of living.

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 MARTIN HEIDEGGER AND THE ALETHEIA
OF HIS GREEKS

VRASIDAS KARALIS

I) Back to the Origins

No one can deny the fact that Martin Heidegger’s approach to the Greeks
is at the same time erroneous and ingenious. Historically, his interpretation
is that of a schoolboy who, impressed by what he reads, can’t get his facts
right. Philosophically however, he stretches the semantic calibration of the
texts he is talking about into an unimaginable perspective by expanding
their exegetical potential to its utmost limits. In that liminal position, the
Greek text itself develops unexpected synaptic connections which relocate
the semantic centre of its structure. Heidegger re-structured Greek texts in
such a way that new meanings emerged and new perspectives were born
out of structures hitherto exhausted by centuries of commentaries and
endless ambitious attempts to "reconstruct" their "original" meaning.
It is obvious that whichever the Greek text he is dealing with,
Heidegger has serious problems with its context. He cannot see any
relevance to the fact that Greek thinking emerged as a form of talking
about spaces of common experience and interaction. Indeed the political
nature of Greek philosophy even in its most moral, metaphysical or even
logical expression is passed over in silence in all his commentaries on
them. The fact that Greek thought became self-reflective, when criticism
of ideas and opinions became a public institution and addressed issues of
shared values, remained also an untouchable mystery for Heidegger.
Moreover, the fact that around the end of the sixth century thinking started
addressing issues of its own self-articulation remained something of an
odd and irrelevant observation for him throughout his life. Finally the fact
that these specific philosophers lived, thought and died in their own
societies and within their own semantic universe seems also to have
remained something of an arcane mystery for him: the connection between
philosophy and the philosopher remains equally untouched and discarded.
In a way, according to him, the texts themselves were written by language
 Vrasidas Karalis 209

as a transcultural and trans-temporal entity, bridging centuries, societies

and thinkers beyond the specificity and singularity of each particular life.
The rhetorical oscillation between the “Greeks” and the specific
philosopher he was talking about is another interesting ambivalence of his
approach: Heidegger talks about the Greeks as if the individual
philosopher was an instant within a supra-personal continuum. The fact
that Anaxagoras was exiled for impiety and Socrates executed for “novel
daemons” had no impact on their thinking, according to Heidegger, or
more precisely, their ideas had nothing to do with their destiny.
Yet, overall his approach to the Greeks was that of a typical German
philosopher who had read Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy
and had become somehow irritated by the "naturalistic" re-interpretation
of the main philosophical trends by Edward Zeller. Heidegger’s approach
is intensely focused on the conscious attempt to de-historicize the
philosophical text as a product of its society and the work of a specific
individual. He dives into the "deep structure" of the text in an attempt to
experience and bring out the very essence of the form of thinking that
made it possible. However, a modern reader of Jaeger’s Aristotle (1934)
learns a considerable amount of information not simply about the
philosopher’s life but also about his philosophical problematic and his
specific way of philosophising. The prudent interweaving of personal
details (in their absolute majority, of course, conjectures or imaginative
reconstructions) with philosophical discussions about the validity of his
arguments or the significance of his deductions give both to the
unspecialised reader and the overspecialised philosopher something to
think about and reach a conclusion relevant to their own degrees of
understanding or expectations from the text.
When we read Heidegger’s lectures on Aristotle’s Metaphysics we
have the impression that he partialises the text by inscribing into it his
own problematic and semantic references beyond the horizon of Aristotle.
“Admittedly,” he writes, “Aristotle did not in our context [our italics]
explicitly unfold the question of a full knowledge of essence. Although he
did, in fact, bring the delimination of the essence of actuality into the
closest discerning connection with the determination of what a capability
is. But for reasons which lie locked in the ancient and Western conception
of being and thereby of what-being, neither is the central problem for the
question of essence posed later” (Heidegger, 1995: 192). The suspicious
reader immediately understands that Aristotle’s text is used, in
Heidegger’s context, as the testing ground for a hypothesis which is not
emerging from its own structure without the mediation of another mind
and of a different way of thinking. The text is not explored or even
210 Martin Heidegger and the Aletheia of his Greeks

interrogated from within its own presuppositions and schemata of

conceptualization: on the contrary it is asked questions that it is unable to
answer. Indeed it is re-inscribed within a problematic which may have
existed in its semantic potential in a subordinate or even symptomatic
manner but now through Heidegger’s intervention it is relocated and
becomes the dominant axis of signification within the existing text. We are
under the impression that Heidegger’s framing of Aristotle’s meaning of
essence (which obviously ignored the philological problems about the
writing of his Metaphysics as we have it today) does not really reveal the
real tension in the semantic potential of the notion as investigated by
Aristotle himself. If so, it would have been obvious that the concept of
essence in Aristotle was an ambiguous innovation in relation to Plato or
the Pre-Socratics; ambiguous in the sense that it contained semantically
both Plato’s and Parmenides’ understanding of it but with an added layer
of new reflection, belonging to his era and its own performative use of
language. Aristotle’s notion of ousia goes beyond the physicality of the
notion as seen in Plato for example; it was indeed the first attempt to
create logical schemata for the conceptualization of something prior or
posterior to experience. For Aristotle, essence is a pre-physical notion and
as such a post-linguistic event; indeed, from the point of contemporary
socio-cultural thinking one could argue that it was not even a “psychical”
notion but that it represented a “bridge-concept” linking the empirical with
the notional and thus establishing an epistemological discourse of self-
reflection about the act of thinking and the philosophical activity as such.
Heidegger is searching for something else in Aristotle’s text which is
not going to be found there. According to Heidegger the absence itself
becomes the ultimate postulate for the philosopher’s task. He wants to
point out the “concealment” of being and its problematic which it seemed
to him must have started sometime then in Western philosophical thinking.
Yet Aristotle leaves the concepts of ousia and dynamis in a pregnant
ambiguity – an ambiguity that made his text so crucial in forming,
informing and reforming a wide variety of conceptual frameworks
throughout the centuries. On the contrary, Heidegger seems determined to
univocalise the text, to extract or impose a form of semantic unity which
the text itself does not posses, if only for its multilayered synthesis. He
interrogates the text by positing questions which didn’t exist in its
semantic horizons. When Aristotle posited the question of essence, he was
talking about the intellectual enterprise to find the synaptic connectivity
that underpins the polymorphous diversity of objects, relations and
meanings. Heidegger problematises the text for what is not included in its
formal and conceptual configuration, of what has been excluded or
 Vrasidas Karalis 211

implied, as a sub-text – an approach in itself creative and challenging, in

accordance with Aristotle’s most elegant statement: Ș ȖȐȡ ȞȠȣ İȞȑȡȖİȚĮ
ȗȦȒ (the creative activity of thought is life, Metaphysics, ȁ, 1072: 26).
In this sense, he doesn’t receive the wrong answer from the text and his
own approach cannot be judged on the basis of historical verifiability; on
the contrary he manages to graft the text with a new layer of significations
that relocate its hermeneutical potential. His approach is an act of creative
expansion of the Aristotelian thought in its notional singularity. Even
when Heidegger asks questions about Being, or the real being, a term
which for Aristotle had completely different connotations, a new horizon
of significations emerges from within the Aristotelian thinking forms.
Thinking is an act of translating experience and transferring conceptual
abstractions onto the level of cultural discourse: it internalises a way of
thinking and then externalises it through the practices or the needs of the
prevailing discourse. Essentially Heidegger’s approach makes Aristotle’s
thinking a conceptualising model for today’s philosophical enterprise, by
acclimatising his thinking forms into the discursive potentialities of
contemporary philosophical discourse.
Indeed the creative elaboration of Aristotle’s metaphysics can hardly
be underestimated. Ancient Greek, Christian and Arab commentators saw
Aristotle’s texts as ultimate codes of reference to be endorsed, elucidated
or rejected. Heidegger chose a different approach: he tried to salvage the
philosophical "essence" of Aristotle by extending the limits of its language
and bringing them to their final consequences. This was not an attempt to
"modernise" Aristotle but from a modern problematic to analyse the
semantic conditions of his philosophical statements and then elaborate on
the morphoplastic potential of his language. In this respect Heidegger (and
we might stress here: despite the limitations of his own thinking)
succeeded in extricating Aristotle’s thought from its canonical position as
a holy relic and made it again contentious and antagonistic to the dominant
way of philosophising in the first half of the twentieth century – a
philosophical thinking dominated by naturalistic progressivism or
biological determinism. "How concepts antagonise culture" is probably
the best way of describing Heidegger’s re-configuration of Aristotle’s and
indeed of ancient Greek’s thinking as a whole.
Aristotle is not the only case of such interrogation for the emerging
signification. Heidegger’s most famous endeavour must be the Pre-
Socratics and his attempt to retrieve through them the Being-discourse
from its later concealments. In that respect it will be interesting to see his
approach to them in juxtaposition to that of Karl Popper in order to
appreciate the different perception and understanding of what thinking is
212 Martin Heidegger and the Aletheia of his Greeks

about in both cases. In his seminal essay “Back to the Pre-Socratics”,

Popper, after an extensive analysis of the various discussions between the
Pre-Socratic philosophers, pointed out that they established a method of
thinking which was incorporated into modern science; he terms this
method as “the theory that knowledge proceeds by way of conjectures and
refutations” (Popper, 1972: 152) and by “criticizing theories” establishing
“rational knowledge” and forming thus the scientific critical way of
thinking. Popper himself refers to a certain loss after the Pre-Socratics,
strangely reminiscent of Heidegger’s concealment of being: “To my
knowledge,” he suggests, “the critical or rationalist tradition was invented
only once. It was lost after two or three centuries, perhaps owing to the
rise of the Aristotelian doctrine of episteme, of certain and demonstrable
knowledge (a development of the Eleatic and Heraclitean distinction
between certain truth and mere guesswork). It was rediscovered and
consciously revived in the Renaissance, especially by Galileo Galilei”
(Popper, 1972: 151). The essay, written in 1958, looks like an intellectual
rebuttal of Heidegger’s appropriation of the Pre-Socratics on the very
same grounds that Heidegger perceived a loss and a concealment of an
important element of the philosophical activity before Socrates. Popper
stated that “[...] the critical attitude of the Pre-Socratics foreshadowed, and
prepared for, the ethical rationalism of Socrates: his belief that the search
for truth through critical discussion was a way of life – the best he knew”
(Popper, 1972: 153).
Unquestionably Heidegger had a completely different notion in his
mind when he indicated a certain loss in philosophical thinking that he
observed after the Pre-Socratics. The concealment he observed was
something beyond the idea of epistemic rationalization we witness after
Aristotle. It was almost beyond the limits of the contemporary
philosophical language; it referred to a much more fundamental form of
thinking. Heidegger understood that our relation with Greek philosophical
thinking was determined by erroneous translations through philologists’
titanic attempts to reconstruct the “original” and “authentic” meaning.
Knowing that translation will always be incomplete and erroneous, he
attempted to translate conditions of signification and not crystallized
notions created by convention and normalised by custom or academic
canonisation. With the Pre-Socratics in particular, Heidegger makes issues
of approach and interpretation aspects of the process for the translating not
of the content of words but of the signifying processes that made them
possible. So he moved to a completely different direction the task of
interpreting the Greeks by relocating the centre of semantic articulation.
The text itself became the locus in which both its history and future
 Vrasidas Karalis 213

converged: each philosophical term (and Heidegger mainly focuses on

words or brief statements) is to be understood as a process leading to its
invention and as a point of departure from its meaning. Heidegger extends
the limits of its meaning by a subtle transference of its semantic field
towards different relations. The philosophical statement, word or verse,
are not limited by their historical context: indeed Heidegger’s translations
de-limit language from its conditionality and bring to the fore the endless
variability of meaning. This has to be seen as both positive and
misleading. The paradox of his approach is probably the most interesting
and ambivalent element of his whole understanding of the aletheia of his
Greeks.

II) The Problem of Translation Aletheia

Heidegger’s question of aletheia is primarily a problem of semantics. Like
logos in Greek, aletheia is a word of polyvalence and multiordinality: in
different contexts, it encapsulates a variety of meanings according to the
validity of the statement or the values of the speaker. In Parmenides the
concept appears twofold: as the noun for "truth", "reality" and as the
personification of the quest for truth. The Pythagorean Philolaus equated
the notion with the absolute notion of the number whereas according to
Democritus it could not be found because it was hidden “en bytho”, in the
deep. Anaxagoras employed the neuter to alethes indicating that “the
weakness [of the senses] means that we are incapable of discerning the
truth” (Waterfield, 2000: 130). Careful study of such sentences can easily
confirm that the notion of aletheia indicated four different processes: first,
the process of experiencing something while it is happening; second, the
process of establishing a relation between guess and event; third, the
process of trying to conceptualise the "real" as an internal reality; and
fourth, the confirmation of hypothesis by means of referring to an
extralingual event.
It is true that the Pre-Socratics gave particular importance to the first
two processes, whereas Plato and Aristotle to the last two. But for both
Plato and Aristotle the language of philosophy was much more complex
and self-referential while the structure of their sentences had a different
organisation, reflecting a different order of experiencing. Aletheia had
already developed a self-validating history of a variety of meanings which
were denoted every time the term was employed. Hence the different order
of abstraction in the notion of truth that we see in Aristotle or the last
dialogues of Plato. Parmenides however is a very interesting case in regard
to his way of understanding aletheia. In reference to him, Felix M. Cleve
214 Martin Heidegger and the Aletheia of his Greeks

coined the pejorative term “glossomorphic” to indicate “the possibility of

talking without thinking” (Cleve, 1969: 538); and he added: “The
Parmenidean einai, then, has a verbal stem that has lost its original
meaning” (Cleve, 1969: 542). Ignoring the negative characterisation, the
term can be apt to describe the transitional nature of Parmenides’
language, especially of the way he understood the most crucial terms of
his philosophy einai and aletheia, and the connection between them as
terms of logical thinking.
Martin Jaeger pointed out that while aletheia was given its “pregnant
and almost philosophical sense” by Hesiod, Parmenides “carried it on to a
new stage of meaning” (Jaeger, 1947: 94). Parmenides’ glossomorphism
can be seen in his famous assertion that “[t]hinking and being are one and
the same” (Jaeger’s translation). Jaeger insists that “in announcing this
identity he is simply attacking the conceivability and knowableness of the
Non-existent. [....] Parmenides can have no doubts about the existence of
an object, inasmuch as noein itself is never really noein except when it
knows the actual. What the understanding or logos contributes is the all-
important consideration that the Existent cannot be as our senses reveal it
to us – namely something manifold and in motion” (Jaeger, 1947: 103).
Indeed this is the crux in Heidegger’s understanding and translation of
aletheia. He understood the fluidity of the notion in the way that the Pre-
Socratics used it. The fluidity itself expressed a new order of abstract
conceptualisation, to be completed only with Aristotle, almost two
centuries later. When Heidegger tried to transpose the concept within the
contemporary way of understanding the truth, he had to re-trace its
semantic evolution. Indeed, if Parmenides’ aletheia has two meanings,
Heidegger’s has only one. It reverted to an “originary” meaning from
which supposedly it came from. In that sense Heidegger attempts a
reversal of signification. By doing so, he suggests a new understanding of
aletheia as un-veiling, unconcealment. He states: “In so far as being as
such is, it places itself into and stands in unconcealment, aletheia”; and
adds: “We thoughtlessly translate, and this means at the same time
misinterpret, this word as 'truth'. To be sure, one is now gradually
beginning to translate the Greek aletheia literally. But this is not much
use if immediately afterward one again understands 'truth' in an entirely
different, un-Greek sense and reads the other sense into the Greek word”
(Heidegger, 2000: 107). He stresses that this meaning of aletheia as
unconcealment, “was lost due to 'logic'” (Heidegger, 2000: 127); and that
the appropriation of aletheia by Western Dasein has led to the
transformation of “the original essence of truth, aletheia (unconcealment),
[...] into correctness” (Heidegger, 2000: 203).
 Vrasidas Karalis 215

Whoever reads ancient Greek philosophy knows that aletheia also

means, amongst other things, correctness, exactness and verification. In
his famous lectures of 1942-43 on Parmenides Heidegger suggests that the
radical transformation of the essential meaning of aletheia for the West
took place with the Romanisation of Greece which led to its understanding
as veritas or rectitudo. One could suggest that what we witness in the
Latin translation of the term is indeed a localisation, by omitting the over-
loaded connotations around the Greek term. That was a common approach
to the philosophical language of the Greeks in its appropriation by Latin
authors. The fact that there was something asymmetric between Greek and
Latin has been announced poignantly in Lucretius’ famous verses: “Nec
me animi fallit Graiorum obscura reperta / difficile illustrate Latinis
versibus esse, / multa novis verbis praesertim cum sit agendum / propter
egestatem linguae et rerum novitatem” (De Rerun Natura, 1: 139-139)1.
The idea that Latin was poor in words to fit the "strangeness of the things"
may account for the process of translatio in the widest sense of the word
that we see during the Hellenistic and Late Antique period; it was a
translation both of imperium and of culture which led to the gradual
emergence, collapse and re-emergence of the West. In his lectures on
Parmenides, Heidegger struggled to indicate the magnitude of such
asymmetry and the problems it caused for the question of Being in the
West. “What is decisive", he observes, "is that the Latinization occurs as a
transformation of the essence of truth and Being within the essence of the
Greco-Roman domain of history. This transformation is distinctive in that
it remains concealed but nevertheless determines everything in advance.
This transformation of the essence of truth and Being is a genuine event of
history. The imperial as the mode of Being of a historical humanity is
nevertheless not the basis of the essential transformation of aletheia into
veritas, as rectitudo, but is its consequence, as this consequence it is in
turn a possible cause and occasion for the development of the true in the
sense of the correct" (Heidegger, 1992: 42). Yet, later in his life he would
qualify the statement by indicating that aletheia indeed “was originally
only experienced as orthotes, as the correctness of representations and
statements” (Heidegger, 1972: 71).
We could explicate further on this, but indeed one can claim that
Heidegger understood that translation meant a conscious omission of
contextual localisation and an attempt to elucidate the invariant structure
of the text which was beyond the level of its verbal articulation in its

1
“I know how hard it is in Latin verse/ To tell the dark discoveries of the Greeks,/
Chiefly because our pauper-speech must find / Strange terms to fit the strangeness
of the thing” (trans. W.E. Leonard).
216 Martin Heidegger and the Aletheia of his Greeks

original language. His own translations of the fragments by Parmenides

and Heraclitus try to bring to the surface the pre-lingual structure of the
experience determining the expression and as such configure in his
philosophical idiom the ground against which such statements could be
possible today. Without being a linguistic relativist, he refutes the idea put
forward by the famous Bible scholar Eugene A. Nida that “[a]nything that
can be said in one language can be said in another” (Nida, 1969: 4).
Different things are said by different languages in the sense that different
aspects of experience are stressed by each language; indeed languages
complement each other through their singular taxonomies since they call
into being different forms of life and experience extralingual in
themselves. Heidegger understood that since there are not enough words to
talk about the multiplicity of mental images, we tend to overload
traditional words with surplus meaning. In his approach to Parmenides he
embarked on finding the substrate significating processes that transcend
the limitations of grammar. His approach was that “what can be said in
one language can be only understood through another”. Maybe this refers
to the privileged position of both Greek and German as languages of
inherited philosophical potential; yet one can easily understand that for
him what was lost in the translating process could only be retrieved in a
pre-linguistic level expressed by the "is-ness" of the verb to be. “It must be
that what is there for speaking and thinking of is; for [it] is there to be, /
whereas nothing is not...” (Gallop, 1984: 61). In the un-grammaticality of
the first sentence in the existing fragment 6, we can attribute Heidegger’s
immense creative effort to recapture the amazement of Parmenides in front
of the presencing of Being and the confusion of his language in the
process of articulating the elusiveness of such experience. Parmenides
associated aletheia with the absence of predication in the existence of
being; and Heidegger tried to retrieve that process as he embarked on the
titanic project of constructing, in his own context, a new vocabulary for
the ontological grounding of unconcealment. Probably it is still early to
tell how successful he really was.

III) From a Historical Perspective

It is obvious that Heidegger’s Greeks have been a contentious issue in the
study of his work. Not simply because Heidegger had a philosophy of his
own which he projected onto a diverse tradition of philosophical
propositions. The problem with his approach to the Greeks, similar to the
problem of most German philosophers after Hegel, refers mainly to his
own creative re-interpretation of their work and posits the question of the
 Vrasidas Karalis 217

limits of such a creative approach to the thinkers or indeed to all

philosophical traditions of the past.
The main point of the present exploration is that such an approach is a
cultural or even a political question which can be understood both
symptomatically and circumstantially. Despite his implied belief that he
belonged to an extra-temporal almost ahistorical philosophical continuum,
Heidegger was the product of his age and indeed a figure refracting its
resistances and fears. Philosophically, his approach to the Greeks has to be
also understood as an engagement with certain texts from a specific
hermeneutical position at a very critical point of the history of Europe.
From within that position, we have argued, Heidegger understood that the
“Greeks” needed a new translation of the structure of their thought and not
of the reference of their statements. Such translation re-wrote the Greek
philosophical legacy and re-created its semantic potential. There were
limits of course, both historical and exegetical. Heidegger for example
thought that Greek philosophy ended with Aristotle, which is grossly
unfair to the great thinkers of Stoicism and Epicureanism, even to
Plotinus, a thinker whose style of philosophising is strikingly close to his.
But beyond such strange "concealment", the obvious question remains to
be answered: can we interpret a philosophical text of the past in a “valid”
manner, meaning by understanding its values as they were defined by their
own horizon of significations, if we maintain the privileged position of
knowing what followed the specific text and its reception throughout the
centuries?
Despite their privileged position, the fate of the Greeks has been quite
unfortunate in the history of philosophy. Since their re-discovery after the
Renaissance and more specifically after the German Hellenism of late 18th
and 19th centuries, Greek philosophical legacy has been attributed crucial
importance for the contemporary development of all philosophical
questions about the mind, morality, politics, knowledge, ontology and
epistemology. Historically, Heidegger’s ideas about the Greeks express
the profound anxiety of many European thinkers before the fragmenting
languages of modernity and their need for canonical authorities which
articulated problems through the intense dialogue within the confines of a
communitarian understanding of thought. It is the presumed self-
sufficiency and self-totalisation that gives to the philosophy of the Greeks
a sense of generative principles that defined and circumscribed areas of
thinking about their historicity. Furthermore, circumstantially the
philosophies of the Greeks express something which is not specifically
Greek; they express a social order that represented semantic co-relations
that could be historically situated and conceptually understood. But from a
218 Martin Heidegger and the Aletheia of his Greeks

philosophical perspective the importance of the Greeks as a generic term

meant a completely different understanding of the cognitive process, of the
place of knowledge in the exploration of conscious existence, of the
process that Socrates would call “the examined life”.
Ever since Plato instituted in his Cratylus the murky business of
etymologising as part of the philosophical endeavour, philosophical
inquiry has suffered immensely from the seduction of linguistic
inventiveness. The Sophists, Plato himself, Christian philosophers, and
some of the most important modern philosophers easily succumbed to the
allure of written signs without the necessary guide of a language theory or
the assistance of implied assumptions about the function of linguistic
statements. Contemporary analytic philosophers, as in antiquity
grammarians and logicians, struggled hard to dissect the performative
functions of various linguistic articulations, implicitly transforming forms
of understanding into questions of logic; Wittgenstein himself struggled
endlessly to form a grammar of philosophical statements in order to
clarify, elucidate and crystallise meaning of specific statements in context.
But he ended with a functionalist, almost behaviouristic interpretation of
linguistic statements that is neither philosophical nor indeed an
interpretation. Yet his statement, “[g]rammar tells what kind of object
anything is” (Wittgenstein 2000: 116), may be the right guide in the
understanding of the objects in Heidegger’s thought.
Heidegger was one of the ambitious philosophers of the 20th century –
and his ambition was greatly assisted by the German language – leaving
aside the strong criticisms of his obscure neologisms. The educational
organisation and the deep reverence for antiquity gave him the opportunity
to embark on the promethean task of re-inventing the language of
philosophy and re-writing its history. We must see his project for the
historical un-concealment of Being as intricately connected to his own
philosophical idiom and from this perspective, interpret and explain his
overall perception of those early philosophers who he, persistently and
indiscriminately, calls “the Greeks”.
As we know there has been a lot of criticism against Heidegger about
his perception of “the Greeks”. Some of this is justified and some totally
inappropriate. Heidegger does not talk about “the Greeks” as such; he
talks about the Greek landscapes in Holderlin’s poetry, or in the
neoclassical tapestries of Germany; and this is not necessarily bad since
“the Greeks” are essentially an abstraction, the hypostatisation of states of
mind, practices or patterns of behaviour. Rejecting this would mean that
with the strange force of empathic union and weberian “verstehen” we are
able indeed to reconstruct and re-live the mental world of the Ancients
 Vrasidas Karalis 219

from within our own mental structure and philosophical conditioning. This
would not only be impossible but even undesirable. Plato is not Plato’s
Plato after Aristotle; and Plato-after-Aristotle is not the same as Plato
Christianus, or Plato Neoplatonicus, or Plato Hegelianus and so forth.
Heidegger approaches the Greeks from the vantage point of having
studied their legacy and the tradition of philosophising they established in
Europe. His perception of them finds in their name a beginning, the origin
and the source of a specific way of thinking – and irrespective of what that
specific way of thinking entails, it is still the beginning of our way of
thinking. Heidegger and indeed German philosophy since romanticism
was obsessed with the question of origins, therefore with the problem of
time. As it is well-known, the secularisation of temporality after the
French Enlightenment led to the disappearance of a providential god or of
an implied eschatology and replaced it with the idea of an endlessly open
and continuously incomplete progress. This had as a consequence the
strong sense of existing-in-time, of temporality and temporal conscience,
in order to situate the thinking subject within such infinity which abolished
all sense of a situated self. Religious temporality placed individuals within
a plan of gradual unfolding; the individual could locate his or her space
and could articulate his or her subjectivity by employing the symbolic
network of associations established by religious myths and more
specifically Christian metaphors. Post-Enlightenment thinking privileged
time because it was afraid of space: the very locus of existence became a
moment of negation and annulment, feeling was strongly internalised by
the emotive language of romanticism. In that process which was rendered
more shaky Charles Darwin’s blind contingency of humanity, or Sigmund
Freud’s destructive introspective conscience, time and temporality
emerged as interpretive principles to account for the disappearance of
space.
Heidegger continued the romantic tradition about the Greeks, despite
being fully aware of its limitations. He continues it in a rather complex
and highly controversial manner, starting with his early approaches to
Plato and then through to the gradual discovery of the Pre-Socratics. We
know of course that when Heidegger talked about the Greeks he meant
Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato and Aristotle. Diogenes Laertius, the first
historian of philosophy, believed that all Greek philosophy culminated
with the work of Epicurus. The Pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle were the
stepping stones towards the completion of philosophy in his work. For
Heidegger however, the Greeks were the names and the words defined by
Hegel: “En” is the word of Parmenides; “logos” is the word of
Heraclitus”; “idea” is the word of Plato; “energeia” is the word of
220 Martin Heidegger and the Aletheia of his Greeks

Aristotle. All these words define the horizon of the word “being” in Greek
and the way that the Greek word for “being”, that is einai, is in its essence
aletheia; for Heidegger aletheia can not be found in the Latin “veritas”.
According to him, aletheia is not accuracy or truthfulness or even fidelity.
Aletheia, he translates, is “esse”, being in its originary, primordial,
essence. It partakes with all words mentioned above; en, logos, idea and
energeia but it is the foundational structure (being) of all of them. It exists
within them and within the totality of the Greek language since Greek is
the language of philosophy and thus its aletheia must or simply points
towards ousia. Now the question arises if aletheia is ousia; how are
disclosed-ness and presence-ness linked? Is aletheia the negation of
Dasein, of the historical being in its “throwness” in society? It is
interesting to remember here that when in the 60s Heidegger visited
Greece, he talked about the “increasing desolation of the modern Dasein”
(Heidegger, 2005: 44) as if the aletheia of “us today” is concealed and
subsumed under modernity and “the chains of calculatory planning”
(Heidegger, 2005: 44).
Unquestionably Heidegger has located a very serious philosophical
problem; how language, unconceals the concealed essence of being. What
then is the relation between language and mental energy? In one Ƞf his last
seminars in 1969, he reverted to Parmenides and stated that “aletheia was
visible to the Greeks in the form of IJȠ ĮȣIJȩ of ȞȠİȚȞ and İȓȞĮȚ as expressed
in the poem of Parmenides” (Heidegger, 2003: 39). Certainly this is one of
the most controversial ideas of Greek philosophy. Parmenides states that
“to gar auto noein esti te kai einai”: “For the same thing both can be
thought and can be” (Waterfield, 2000: 58); “For it is the same thing that
can be thought and that can be”; (Burnet, 1958: 173).
The sentence can be interpreted in many different ways since its syntax
is extremely ambiguous. The equation of being and thinking resulted in a
rather strong association of being with logos and then, in the Greek
context, logos with power and social authority especially with the
Sophists. Furthermore Heidegger linked aletheia with the act of revealing
in a physical sense. In the same text he stressed that “for the Greeks
ĮȜȒșİȚĮ is visible as ȜȩȖȠȢ and ȜȩȖȠȢ means, much more originally than to
'speak': to let presencing” (Heidegger, 2003: 39). This is a very important
statement but it refers again only to a limited number of philosophers.
Paradoxically it bears the ring of the Sophist’s extolment of language as
public performance and parrhesia. Logos from the Greek lego means, as
Heidegger perceptively observed, to gather around, to collect. So is made
language the locus of convergence and confluence of the potential
diversity of the phenomena. So if we associate logos with aletheia, noein
 Vrasidas Karalis 221

and einai, then the act of unconcealing becomes an act of public

appearance and expression in the very Greek sense of the word. Heidegger
adds to this another dimension from Parmenides’ most prominent
opponent. Heraclitus has articulated one of the most enigmatic statements
of all time: Ș ijȪıȚȢ țȡȪʌIJİıșĮȚ ijȚȜİȓ. Heidegger translates this as “[r]ising
(out of self-concealing) bestows favor upon self-concealing” (Heidegger,
1975: 114). The translation is both inaccurate and original. In his
commentary Heidegger states that ĭȪıȚȢ points to aletheia itself. So even
in this Heracletian pronouncement we can detect that “the thoroughly
positive sense of “forgetfulness” still completely shines through. It
becomes visible that being is not “subject to falling-out-of attention”, but
rather conceals itself to the extent that it is manifest” (Heidegger, 2003:
46). So ijȪıȚȢ is associated with unconcealment, the revelation of the latent
being-ness. In fact this is quite simple, almost simplistic as a statement;
the Greeks, especially the Pre-Socratics like Xenophanes or Anaxagoras,
had a more sophisticated perception about the exploration of the latent
being-ness through dokos (opinion) and fantasia (imagination) – as indeed
Parmenides himself, and later Plato in his cave parable. Despite the fact
that Heidegger grew up during the idealistic humanism of classicists like
Jaeger, or Bruno Snell, he seems to ignore the painful struggle of Greek
thinkers to establish and institute the primacy of abstract thinking. In some
strange way, he does not even mention at all the intense intellectual
struggle of early Greek thinkers to see the unity of being within and
probably despite the plurality of beings. His main question is encapsulated
in the statement: “all our considerations take off from a fundamental
distinction which can be expressed thusly: being is not a being. This is the
ontological difference” (Heidegger, 2003: 48).
Philosophically it seems that Heidegger looks at the Pre-Socratics from
within a Platonic or even a Christian paradigm. Historically, most Pre-
Socratics tried to establish links between language (culture), which was
called thesis, with physis, namely nature; some of them tried to reduce the
plurality of experience into certain invariant principles which guaranteed
unity, regularity and predictability. Others simply considered experience
from the point of logical articulation, such as the Eleatics, and especially
Parmenides and Zeno. But Parmenides established an “epistemological
quest” in order to account for both “unity and singularity” by denying the
“plurality of things” (Waterfield, 2000: 54 & 55). Socrates and Plato
however started deductively and from the point of logically verifiable
statements as definitions; an approach which caused serious problems
when it had to deal with liminal cases, exceptions, marginal positions and
generally speaking interstitial forms. Aristotle tried later to solve the
222 Martin Heidegger and the Aletheia of his Greeks

problem by creating a compromising synthesis that would account for the

singular and the plural from the point of the potential, establishing a
completely different form of ontological diversity.
This dynamic exploration of experience and language by the Greeks
seems to have passed unnoticed by Heidegger. From his works, it is self-
evident that Heidegger saw the Greeks in an un-historical and de-
historicizing manner; so he missed the dynamic element of their struggle
with their own language to establish signifying schemata for thought-
processes, possibly because of his struggle with German tradition.
Heidegger’s Greeks are presented as derealisations of the historical,
probably in the way that Freud explained the “disturbance” of his own
memory on the Acropolis, as "a sense of guilt [...] attached to the
satisfaction in having gone such a long way: there was something about it
that was wrong, that from the earliest times had been forbidden. It was
something to do with a child’s criticism of his father, with the
undervaluation which took the place of the overvaluation of earlier
childhood" (Freud, 1984: 456).
Heidegger aspired for philosophy to become a sacred science again and
not a professional occupation. Philosophy asks and sometimes answers the
fundamental question: “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”
Whatever subject asks such a question “must transpose itself – and with it
the history of the West – from the center of their future happening into the
originary realm of the powers of Being” (Heidegger, 2000: 41). When
such a transposition takes place, the philosopher, and his people must
return to the origin of the quest, before modernity and its established
history: “the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the
rootless organisation of the average man” (Heidegger, 2000: 40).
Heidegger's Greeks were the emblems of a lost unity that manifested itself
through their understanding of Being as the “spiritual destiny of the
West”. Yet when he visited Greece, the philosopher who, during the 30s,
extolled the land and the soil as principles of self-determination, found
himself in the same Freudian position of experiencing a disturbance of
memory or perception. On the island of Delos, he “saw the emergence of
pure being”, an epiphany and hierophany of the missing aletheia.
"ǹȜȒșİȚĮ", he exclaimed, "is the proper word of the Greek Dasein"
(Heidegger, 2005: 33). On Crete he asked himself “what is this that shines
in things and hides itself in their shine?” (Heidegger, 2005: 23). It seems
that he found in the landscape what the people who lived in it could not
give him. And in that respect it is psychologically and therefore
philosophically interesting to point out that Heidegger in his encounter
with the Greek landscape articulated his very uneasy relationship with
 Vrasidas Karalis 223

modern history. He perceived a landscape without humans, filled with

moving shadows in opposition to the “invisible nearness of the divine”
(Heidegger, 2005: 43).
From the “pathmarks” of the Black Forest to the luminous emptiness
of Greek islands, Heidegger searched for the internal “shine” of the
landscape as the imminent transfiguration of the real. In his statement:
“Delos itself is that field of the unconcealed hiddenness that accords
sojourn...” (Heidegger, 2005: 34) sounds dramatically similar to the
famous beginning of the Gospel of John: “He was in the world, and the
world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him” (John
1: 10). In John one can also find the association of aletheia with action:
“But who does what is true (ho de poion ten aletheian) comes to light, so
that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been done in God” (John, 3:
21); or even in the most Hebraic fashion: “Your word is truth” (Ƞ ȜȩȖȠȢ Ƞ
ıȠȢ ĮȜȒșİȚȐ İıIJȚȞ) (John 17: 17), aletheia is associated with the word
said, with language. This substratum of aletheia as sanctification, indeed
the transfigurability of the real through the intensity of its presencing is
something that culminates in Jesus’ words: “I am the way, the truth and
the life” (John 14: 6) which associates truth with the verb "I am", creating
an immense lacuna in understanding of the conceptual framework
indicated by such identification. No wonder that afterwards Pilate asked
Jesus “what is truth?” (John, 18: 38). In Greek philosophical language
aletheia is out there in the very objecthood of the real; in the New
Testament, and especially in John’s theological language, aletheia is
embodiment: it is the epiphanic revelation of the fullness of life through
the sarx of the human nature.
Indeed in Heidegger’s understanding of aletheia, there exists the
inherent tension of Greek and Hebrew conceptions of truth, as knowledge
and revelation respectively. As Jerome Murphy-O’Connor has pointed out:
“For the Semite the truth of a statement is an extension of the truth of his
maker. For a Greek the reference is primarily to the truth of the object
about which the statement is made” (Murphy-O’Connor, 1968: 182).
Indeed, whether the actual-thing-at-hand reveals something about its
creator or about its very essence, is probably the question at the heart of
Heidegger’s Dasein. For the Greeks however the actuality of things had
nothing to do with the intentionality of a creator. Aletheia indicated the
“intense visibility of beings”, the ability of their presence to be intensely
experienced by the gaze of humans in a responsive relation. Aletheia was
not veritas, truth or Warhrheit; for these notions it seems more appropriate
to use the Greek neuter IJȠ ĮȜȘșȑȢ employed mainly to indicate the “truth
of a statement”. Especially for the Pre-Socratics, and to a certain extend
224 Martin Heidegger and the Aletheia of his Greeks

for Socrates and Plato, aletheia was temporalised cognition, the ability to
establish formal analogies between what is understood and how it is
understood. Aletheia meant responsivity between the seer and the seen, a
relation of mutual interpenetration: the knowing subject changes its forms
of understanding as the known object is resignified. The knower is
transformed by what is known: this is the Greek understanding of aletheia.
In the Greek understanding of the word there is nothing to be un-veiled or
to be revealed; the presence of everything is the epiphany of truth. In
philosophical terms, aletheia can only be found in predication, in the
qualities of beings, not in the ineffability of their pre-formal existence (or
Being-ness). Indeed one could suggest that for the Greeks, aletheia was
the relation established between beings through their predicates. The
Greek verb to be (Eimi) means “exist as” and not “exist”; it presupposes
formal, or formless, presence, therefore predication and actuality.
Existence as such, the being-ness, comes into Greek much later, during the
semantic osmosis of Greek and Hebrew cultures in Alexandria; when in
the Septuagint, the Hebrew God’s answer to Moses is translated as “I am
the being-ness”, (in itself a peculiar syntactical form: “Ego eimai ho on”,
Exodus, 3: 14), then the notion of existence as existing without predication
emerged. (Although the masculine grammatical form is full of cultural
connotations also, something which indicates that there cannot be a
language of being without predication: beings become linguistic events
only in their qualities and connections.)
Heidegger imposed a completely different hermeneutical perspective
when he dealt with the philosophers and the poets he chose to engage
with. He relocated the idea of such epiphanic knowledge into a theological
content so his text brings within it the semantic tensions of its origins. The
tension itself culminates Heidegger’s project to offer new translating
conditions for Greek texts in a way that both infuriated and inspired many
thinkers after him. For example his translation of the Heraclitian saying
“ethos anthropo daimon” as “Man, insofar as he is a man, dwells in the
nearness of god” (Heidegger, 1998: 269); or “the (familiar) abode for
humans is the open region for the presencing of god (the unfamiliar one)”
(Heidegger, 1998: 271) is rather evocative of medieval mysticism (more
specifically of Meister Eckhart or the poet Angelus Silesius) than of the
vision of moral character being the unique fate of the individual.
If there could be a conclusion from the previous notes, it is that
Heidegger never saw the Greeks antagonistically, as if he was struggling
to establish his philosophy through an agon against them. On the contrary
through his Greeks, Heidegger antagonised the history of his era and
somehow used them as an incentive and as a weapon to fight against his
 Vrasidas Karalis 225

time and yet to enrich its intellectual endeavor. Probably this paradox of
his Greeks can be explained by reference to his own intellectual adventure
through his century. Indeed, the philosopher, who never talked about
himself, can be implicitly seen in his works as he was struggling to come
to terms with the history of his time and his own position in it. Probably
the semantic dichotomy of his own aletheia can be felt in his own
paradoxical involvement with historical processes that were beyond his
philosophical reflections and could be interpreted, precisely because of
their origins, only with the discourse of politics. The fact that Heidegger
ignored that “philosophy was born in and through the polis and is a part of
the same movement which brought about the first democracies”
(Castoriadis, 1991: 15) accounts for his own very limiting understanding
of aletheia. Probably only within the institutions of political democracy
can aletheia have the un-veiling impact that Heidegger suggested.
Otherwise it cannot be invested with the psychical energy that will make it
a vital project for transformation. The incompleteness in Heidegger’s
confrontation with the Greek notion of aletheia can be attributed to his
personal inability to confront history. In his own way, he made Greek
thinking relevant again but muted its disruptive truth. By decontextulising
the forms of meaning that aletheia generates, he domesticated the concept
which in any tradition “contains the possibility of a historically effective
universality only by effecting a rupture with the world of traditional or
authoritarian instituted representations” (Castoriadis, 1991: 74). By
depriving aletheia of its most “enowing” element, by erasing the seer from
the seen, Heidegger simply deleted the first letter from the word and threw
the concept back to its pre-philosophical opacity and ineffability.
Indeed, if we may appeal to one of the most playful peculiarities of
Greek grammar, the alpha-privative may also be the alpha-cumulative,
meaning all oblivions together. Heidegger made the Greeks speak
philosophically again by transferring their linguistic representations onto a
contemporary level of significating networks. Yet, he imposed a thick
glass barrier between us and them so much so that everything they were
saying became inaudible and mythical regressing to its pre-logical origins.
Aletheia cannot exist without logos; as Parmenides would have said “for
that is not / cannot be spoken or thought”; and despite its ingenious and
imaginative interpretive translations Heidegger’s discussion of logos is
missing the point of his own innovative approach; because if, as he
explained: “ȅ ȜȩȖȠȢ, IJȠ ȁȑȖİȚȞ is the laying that gathers. [...] ȅ ȁȩȖȠȢ
then would be the Greek name for speaking, saying, and language....”
(Heidegger, 1975: 77) then it remained to be explained what is gathered
226 Martin Heidegger and the Aletheia of his Greeks

and what is said. But that was not attempted and Heidegger’s own creative
misappropriation of the Greeks left behind an unfulfilled great promise.

Bibliography
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Castoriadis, 1991
Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in
Political Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cleve, 1969
Felix M. Cleve, The Giants of Pre-Sophistic Greek Philosophy, an
Attempt to Reconstruct their Thoughts. 2nd edition, vol. 2. The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff.
Gallop, 1984
David Gallop, Parmenides of Elea, Fragments, a Text and Translation
with an Introduction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Heidegger, 1972
Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New
York: Harper Torchbooks.
Heidegger, 1975
Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, The Dawn of Western
Philosophy. New York: HarperCollins.
Heidegger, 1992
Martin Heidegger, Parmenides. Trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard
Rojcewicz. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, 1995
Martin Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Ĭ 1-3, Trans. Walter
Brogan and Peter Warnek, Bloomigton and Indianapolis: Indiana
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Heidegger, 1998
Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill. Cambridge
University Press.
Heidegger, 2000
Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Gregory Fried
and Richard Polt. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
Heidegger, 2003
Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars: Le Thor 1966, 1968, 1969,
Zahringen 1973. Trans. Andrew Mitchell and Francois Raffoul.
Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
 Vrasidas Karalis 227

Heidegger, 2005
Martin Heidegger, Sojourns, The Journey to Greece. Foreword by John
Sallis. Trans. John Panteleimon Manousakis. New York: State
University of New York Press.
Freud, 1984
Sigmund Freud, "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis" [1936],
in On Metapsychology: the Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James
Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Jaeger, 1947
Werner Jaeger, The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers. Trans.
Edward S. Robinson. London: Oxford University Press.
Murphy-O'Connor, 1968
Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, ed., Paul and Qumran, Studies in New
Testament Exegesis. London: Geoffrey Chapman.
Nida, 1969
Eugene A. Nida, The Theory and Practice of Translation. Leiden: E.J.
Brill.
Popper, 1972
Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific
Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Waterfield, 2000
Robin Waterfield, The First Philosophers: the Pre-Socratics and the
Sophists. Trans. with commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wittgenstein, 1997
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. 2nd edition. Trans.
G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
 CONTRIBUTORS

Paolo Bartoloni teaches Italian and comparative literature at the

University of Sydney. He is the author of Interstitial Writing: Calvino,
Caproni, Sereni and Svevo (Leicester: Troubador Publishing, 2003), editor
of Re-Claiming Diversity: Essays on Comparative Literature (Bundoora,
Vic.: School of English, La Trobe University, 1996) and co-editor of
Intellectuals and Publics: Essays on Cultural Theory and Practice
(Bundoora, Vic.: School of English, La Trobe University, 1997). His new
book, About the Cultures of Exile, Translation and Writing, will be
published by Purdue University Press in 2008.

John Dalton works at The University of Sydney and is the editor of

Contretemps: an online journal of philosophy:
(http://www.usyd.edu.au/contretemps/).

Colin Hearfield teaches philosophy in the School of Social Science,

University of New England. He is the author of Adorno and the Modern
Ethos of Freedom (Aldershot, Hampshire, England; Burlington, VT, USA:
Ashgate, 2004) in the Ashgate series on new critical thinking in
philosophy.

Elizabeth Grierson is Professor of Art and Philosophy and Head of the

School of Art at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, and Adjunct
Professor, AUT University, New Zealand. She is Fellow of the Royal
Society of Arts (UK) and World Councillor for Asia-Pacific region of
International Society of Education Through Art (InSEA). She has
particular interest in Heidegger’s approach to knowledge and the
dismantling of metaphysics. Three forthcoming books are Thinking
Through Practice (Informit, eBook, 2007); The Skilled Hand and
Cultivated Mind: Art, Architecture and Artefacts of RMIT University
(RMIT Press, 2008); and Narratives of Creative Arts Research:
Methodologies and Practices (Sense, 2008).
 Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living 229

Vrasidas Karalis is Associate Professor of Modern Greek at The

University of Sydney and co-editor of the Modern Greek Studies Journal
(Australia and New Zealand) as well as current President of the Sydney
Society of Literature and Aesthetics. He is the translator of Patrick White
and his research interests include the philosophy of literature, art and
cinema. He is currently working on a critical biography of the Greek-
French philosopher Corelius Castoriadis.

Jeff Malpas is professor of philosophy at The University of Tasmania. A

principal topic of his research is the concept of place and topology,
including the role of these concepts in the world of Martin Heidegger as
well as research undertaken with Andrew Benjamin on ideas of
cosmopolitanism as these relate to the built environment. Among his
publications is the monograph Place and Experience: A Philosophical
Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and the
edited volumes From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the
Transcendental (London: Routledge, 2002), Heidegger, Modernity and
Authenticity and Heidegger, Coping and Cognitive Science – Essays in
Honor of Hubert Dreyfus Vols 1 & 2, ed. and intro. Mark Wrathall and
Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000) and Death and
Philosophy, ed. Jeff Malpas and Robert C. Solomon (London: Routledge,
1999).

Jane Mummery is lecturing in Philosophy at the University of Ballarat.

Her publications include The Post to Come: An Outline of Post-
metaphysical Ethics (Peter Lang, 2005) and articles on Heideggerian
methodology and ethics, and the discourses of democracy utilised in the
Australian public sphere. Her current research focuses on the ethico-
political possibilities opened in contemporary continental philosophy.

Peter Murphy is Associate Professor of Communications at Monash

University. He is co-author of Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of
Modernism (London: Continuum, 2004), author of Civic Justice: From
Greek Antiquity to the Modern World (Prometheus/Humanity Books,
2001), editor of Agon, Logos, Polis (Franz Steiner, 2000), co-editor of The
Left In Search Of A Center (University of Illinois Press, 1996), editor of a
special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly (Duke University Press, 1998) on
friendship. His body of work includes more than sixty journal articles and
chapters in edited collections. He is also Coordinating Editor of the
international critical theory and historical sociology journal Thesis Eleven:
Critical Theory and Historical Sociology (Sage).
230 Contributors

Robert Sinnerbrink is Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University.

He is the author of Understanding Hegelianism (Acumen, 2007) and co-
editor of Critique Today (Brill, 2006) and Recognition, Work, Politics:
New Directions in French Critical Theory (Brill, 2007). He has published
articles on European philosophy, social philosophy, and philosophy of
film in Critical Horizons, The International Journal of Philosophical
Studies, Social Semiotics, Literature and Aesthetics, Cosmos and History,
Parrhesia, Continuum, and Film-Philosophy.

Anthony Stephens is Emeritus McCaughey Professor of Germanic

Studies at The University of Sydney and Fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Humanities. He is the author of many works in English
and German on the works of Rilke, Heinrich von Kleist, 20th century
German poetry, and the theory of literature.

Ashley Woodward is a member of the Melbourne School of Continental

Philosophy, and an editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy.
He received a B.A. (Hons.) from LaTrobe University, and a Doctorate in
philosophy from the University of Queensland. He has taught philosophy
at a number of Australian universities, most recently the University of
Tasmania. He is an editor of a book on contemporary aesthetics,
Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life, and he has published a number of
articles on the work of philosophers such as Lyotard, Baudrillard, Vattimo,
and Deleuze.

Peter Williams has taught at universities in the United States and

Australia. He is lecturing in the School of Humanities and Languages at
the University of Western Sydney where he teaches subjects in modernism
and modernity, American literature, aesthetics and philosophy. Recent
publications have been in the areas of Heidegger and the visual arts;
modern and contemporary American poetry and poetics; modernist
literature, mood and affect. He is currently completing a book manuscript
on modernist literature, visual arts, post-hermeneutics and the senses.
 Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living 231

George Vassilacopoulos lectures in philosophy at La Trobe University.

His principal areas of research interest are German Idealism, 20th century
Continental Philosophy, Greek Philosophy, Aesthetics and Critical Race
and Whiteness Studies. He is the co-author (with Toula Nicolacopoulos)
of Hegel and the Logical Structure of Love: An Essay on Sexualities,
Family and the Law (Aldershot Ashgate 1999) and (in Greek, with Toula
Nicolacopoulos) From Foreigner to Citizen: Greek Migrants and Social
Change in White Australia (1900-2000) (Eothinon Publications).

Gianni Vattimo was born in Turin in 1936. He studied under Luigi

Pareyson, and graduated from Turin University in 1959. He studied at
Heidelberg with Karl Löwith and Hans Georg Gadamer, and introduced
the latter’s works to Italy. From l964 he was assistant professor and from
1969 full professor of Aesthetics at Turin. He has been Professor of
Theoretical Philosophy at the same University since l982. He has been
visiting professor to various universities in the United States. He is editor
of “Rivista di estetica” (Aesthetic Review); member of the scientific
committees of various Italian and international journals, and fellow of the
Accademia delle Scienze (Academy of Sciences) of Turin. Recent
publications include (with Richard Rorty, ed. Santiago Zabala), The
Future of Religion (Columbia University Press 2005); Nihilism and
Emancipation: Ethics, Politics and Law (Columbia University Press,
2004); After Christianity (trans. Luca D’Isanto, Columbia University
Press, 2002); Nietzsche: Philosophy as Cultural Criticism (trans. by
Nicholas Martin, Stanford University Press, 2002); Belief (trans. Luca
D’Isanto and David Webb, Stanford University Press, 2000)

 INDEX OF NAMES

(From the Index Martin Heidegger’s name is omitted since it appears

many times in most pages of this volume)

Abe Masao, xvii Blamires, Cyprian, 207

Adams, Paul, 28 Blanchot, Maurice, 82, 88, 89, 90,
Adorno, Theodore, 119, 124, 158, 91, 92, 137
163, 164 Blochman, Elisabeth, 16, 17
Agamben, Giorgio, 20, 21, 25, 26, Bloom, Harold, 118
28, 29, 32, 43, 44, 82, 86, 87, Boad, C.D., 113, 124
88, 89, 91, 92 Breazaele, Daniel, 56
Aiken, H., 164 Brecht, Bertolt, 4
Alter Robert, 8, 9 Brogan, Walter A., 170
Anaxagoras, 213, 221 Bruns, Gerald, L., 84, 89, 93
Anaximander, xiii, 6, 79 Buchheim, Iris, 18
Angehrn, Emil, 15, 21 Budderbeg, Else, 19
Aristotle, 58, 68, 76, 102, 166, 170, Burnet, John, 220, 226
176, 179, 209, 210, 211, 212, Bush, George, 5
213, 214, 216, 219, 220, 227 Buttimer, Anne, 27
Arnswald, Ulrich, 207
Ashton, E.B., 164 Caputo, John D., 96, 99, 102, 108,
Attell, Kevin, 26 109
Capuzzi, Frank, 205
Bachelard, Gaston, 28, 29 Carnal, Rudolf, 3
Barash, Jeffery A., 16 Carravetta, Peter, 189, 205
Barbiero, Daniel, 193, 205 Carrol, John, 71
Bambach, Charles, 30 Castoriadis, Cornelius, xv, 225, 226
Barnes, Kenneth, 34 Cavell, Stanley, 126, 128, 129, 130,
Barrett, W., 164 131
Barth Karl, xi Chamberlain, Houston, 26, 29, 32,
Baudelaire, Charles, 11 33, 44
Beardsword, Richard, 186, 188 Chillida, Eduardo, 40
Beaufret, Jean, 191 Clauss, Ludwig, 35, 38, 42, 44
Benjamin, Walter, 2, 126, 166, 176, Cleve Felix M., 213, 214
199, 205 Collins, George, 188
Benso, Silvia, 96, 106, 108 Critchley, Simon, 127, 129, 134,
Berdoulay, Vincent, 37 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141
Bernstein, J. M., 160, 162, 164, 167
Betz, Maurice 13, 21 Damasio, Antonio, 113, 124
Bischoff, Ulrich, 53, 58 Darwin, Charles, 14, 219
 Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living 233

Davari, Ardakani Reza, 75

De la Blanche, Paul Vidal, 25, 26, Haar, Michel, 15, 191
27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, Habermas, Jurgen, 7, 75, 76
41, 43, Hamburger, Käte, 13
Deleuze, Gilles, 37, 172 Hammett, Dashiel, 128
Derrida, Jacques, 102, 108, 109, Haushofer, Karl, 37
114, 125, 178, 182, 190, 191, Haynes, Kenneth, 11, 12
206 Harrington, Anne, 25, 26, 28, 29,
Descartes, René, 58, 201, 202, 203 32, 43, 44
Dickie, George, 55 Harrison, Thomas, 206, 207
Dickinson, Robert, 36 Hellingrath, Norbert von, 8, 20
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 50 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
D’ Isanto, Luca, 207 xiv, 1, 10, 216, 219
Dostoyevsky, Feodor, 53, 58 Heraclitus, xiii, 79, 219, 221
Dogen, xvii Hesiod, 214
Dreyfus, H.L., x Hitler, Adolf, 10, 16, 18, 25, 73,
Driesch, Hand, 25 Hofstadter, Albert, 28, 164
Hodge, Joanna, 96, 102, 110
Eckhart, Meister, 224 Hoelscher, Steven, 28
Einstein, Albert, xiii Hölderlin, Friedrich, 8, 9, 10, 12,
Elden Stuart, 28 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20,
Emad, Parvis, 34 21, 31, 43, 51, 71, 72, 74, 75,
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 130 79, 80, 83, 103, 118, 129, 218
Engel, Manfred, 19 Howells, Christina, 190, 206
Entrikin, Nicholas J., 37, 42 Humbolt, van Wilhelm, 80, 81,
Hussein, Saddam, 73
Foucault, Michel, 6, 28, 37, 190, Husserl, Edmund, 3, 50, 157, 158,
206 201
Fox, Nick Farrel, 190, 205 Hyland, D.A., x
Franchi, Stefano, 207
Freud, Sigmund, 172, 219, 222 Jaeger, Martin, 209, 214, 221
Furstenau, Marc, 127, 128, 129, John (Evangelist), 223
130, 134, 138, 141 Jones, James, 135
Joyce, James, 119
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 6, 193, 195, Jünger, Ernst, xvi, 131
205, 207
Galileo, Galilei, 40 Kant, Immanuel, xiii, 1, 2, 3, 58, 73,
Gallop, David, 216, 226 102, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162
Gasché, Rodolphe, 96, 109 Kertscher, Jens, 207
George Stephan, 79, 82, 83, 84 Kettering, E., 99, 111
Gottlieb, Anthony 79 Kitaro, Nishida, xvii
Gray, Glenn J., 205 Kirkergaard, Sören, 53, 58
Gregory, Wanda Torres, 177 Kjellen, Rudolf, 37
Griffiths, Paul J., 112, 113, 125 Kokoschka, Oscar, 53
Guattari, Félix, 37 Krell, David Farell, 34, 49, 50, 52,
Gumbrect, Hans Ulrich, 19 57, 58, 59, 164, 205
234 Index of Names

Kreuzer, Joachim, 10, 19 Neilson, Brett, 90, 91

Kurosawa, Akira, 127, 128 Neske G., 99, 111
Newton, Isaac, 40
Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe, 166 Nicalacopoulos, Toula, 143, 156
Laertius, Diogenes, 219 Nida, Eugene, A., 216
Le Corbusier, 165 Niemeyer, Max, 4
Leibniz, Gotfried Wilhelm, 102 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 2, 14, 15,
Lefebvre, Henri, 37 17, 21, 56, 58, 70, 71, 118, 123,
Leonard, W.E., 215 125, 174, 193, 197
Leopardi, Giacomo, 85 Nishitani, Keiji, xvii
LeWitt, Sol, 165 Nowlis, Vincent, 113
Lewis, Michael, 96, 110
Levinas, Emmanuel, 40 Olafson, Frederich, 95, 96, 111
Lily, Reginald, 188
Lohner, E., 164 Paddock, Troy, 29, 30, 31, 41
Lovvitt, William, 58, 188 Parmenides, xiii, 10, 11, 12, 13, 21,
Lucretius, 215 78, 88, 210, 213, 214, 215, 216,
219, 220, 221, 225,
MacEvoy, Leslie, 127, 128, 129, Emad, Parvis, 142, 149
130, 134, 138, 141 Phillips, James, 16, 31, 43
Macquarie, John, 164 Philolaus, 213
Maly, Kenneth, 34 Plato, xiii, 1, 2, 41, 68, 76, 157, 159,
Malick, Terence, 126, 127, 128, 160, 183, 197, 210, 213, 218,
129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 219, 221
135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141 Plotinus, xiii, 216
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 11 Pöggeler, Otto, 49
Malpas, Jeff, 207 Popper, Karl, xii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 75,
Manousakis, J.P., x 211, 212
Margolis, Joseph, x Pythagoras, xiii
Marion, Jean-Luc, 153, 156
Marx, Karl, 2, 3, 4, 5 Radl, Emmanuel, 25
Marton, Andrew, 135 Rajan, Tilottama, 190, 202, 206
Mason, Eudo C., 12 Ratzel, Friedrich, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
Massey, Doreen, 42 31, 32, 36, 37, 38, 41, 43
McNeill, William, 206 Read, Peter, 39
Megill, Allan, 79 Rée, Jonathan, 49, 50
Melville, Herman, 88 Relph, Edward, 27, 42
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 28, 29, Richardson, William, 146, 156
114, 125 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 8, 9, 10, 11,
Miller, Linn, 39 12, 13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 53,
Mugerauer, Robert, 27 79, 83, 88, 103, 129,
Munch, Edvard, 45, 53, 57 Rilke, Clara, 12
Murphy O’ Connor, Jerome, 223 Risser, James, x, 16
Roberts, David, 49, 58, 77
Nagarjuna, xvii Robinson, E., 164
Negri, Antonio, 90 Rockmore, Tom, x, 190, 191, 206
 Heidegger and the Aesthetics of Living 235

Rosenblum, Robert, 53 Thomas Aquinas, xiii, 58

Roux, Wilhelm, 25 Thoreau, Henry David, 130,
Trakl, Georg, 79, 83
Sadler, Ted, 170 Tronti, Mario, 90
Safransky, Rudolf, xii, 79 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 27, 41, 42
Sartre, Jean Paul, 190, 192, 193,
199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, Uexküll, Jakob von, 25, 26, 27, 28,
206 29, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39,
Schapiro Meyer, 54 42, 43, 44
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm, Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 83
Joseph, 10 Urmson, J.O., 49, 50
Schiller, Claire, H., 35
Schopenhauer, Arthur 14 Vadén, Tere 106
Schulz, Nick, 73 Van Gogh, Vincent, 54, 60, 159
Seamon, David 27 Vassilakopoulos, George, 143
Shakespeare, William, 128 Vattimo, Gianni, xii, 85, 86, 92,
Shawcross, William, 73 189, 190, 193, 195, 195, 196,
Sheehan, Thomas, 145, 156, 171 197, 198, 199, 200, 203, 206,
Silesius, Angelus, 224 207
Silverman, Kaja, 127, 130, 131, Vico, Giambattista, 117, 118, 125
132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137,
138, 139, 141 Wagner, Richard, 14
Smeyers, Paul, 57 Ward, J. F., 71
Snell, Bruno, 221 Waterfield, Robin, 213, 220, 221
Snyder, John P., 206 Webb, David, 207
Socrates, xvi, 209 Whitehead, A.N., xi
Sorush, Abdolkarim, 75 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2, 3, 193,
Spielberg, Stephen, 139 218
Stalin, Joseph, 73 Wolin, Richard, 15, 16
Stambaugh, Joan, 205 Wrathall, M.A., x
Steiner, George, xii Wright, Kathleen, 18
Stephens, Anthony, 11, 13
Stevens, Wallace, 113, 120, 121, Xenophanes, 221
122, 123, 124, 125, 138
Stiegler, Bernard, 166, 178, 181, Young, Julian, 11, 12, 34, 59, 128,
183, 185, 186, 188 141, 165, 173
Stoedner, Helmut, 12
Zeller, Edward, 209
Till, Karen E., 28 Zeno, 221
Thiele, Leslie Paul, 96, 111 Ziarek, Krysztof, 103, 104, 111
Thomä, Dieter 15, 16, 18