Page i The Song of the Earth Page ii Studies in Continental Thought John Sallis, general editor Consulting E
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The Song of the Earth
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Studies in Continental Thought John Sallis, general editor Consulting Editors Robert Bernasconi Rudolf Bernet John D. Caputo David Carr Edward S. Casey Hubert L. Dreyfus Don Ihde David Farrell Krell Lenore Langsdorf Alphonso Lingis William L. McBride J. N. Mohanty Mary Rawlinson Tom Rockmore Calvin O. Schrag Reiner Schurmann Charles E. Scott Thomas Sheehan Robert Sokolowski Bruce W. Wilshire David Wood
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The Song of the Earth Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being Michel Haar Translated by Reginald Lilly Foreword by John Sallis INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis
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Preparation of the translation was assisted by a grant from the French Ministry of Culture Published in French as Le Chant de la terre: Heidegger et les assises de l'Histoire de l'Être © 1987 by Éditions de l'Herne, Paris © 1993 by Indiana University Press All fights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or byany means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984.
Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Haar, Michel. [Chant de la terre. English] The song of the earth : Heidegger and the grounds of the history of being / Michel Haar: translated by Reginald Lilly : foreword by John Sallis. p. cm. — (Studies in Continental thought) Translation of: Le Chant de la terre. Includes index. ISBN 025332694X (hard) 1. Heidegger, Martin, 18891976. 2. Ontology—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series B3279.H49H2213 1993 193—dc20 9221043 1 2 3 4 5 97 96 95 94 93
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For Kinloch
Page vii We have ears because we can listen attentively, and thanks to this we may hear the song of the Earth, its trembling and quivering that remains undisturbed by the huge tumult that man has, for the time being, organized on its exhausted surface. GA 55: Heraklit, p. 247 If we lose the Earth, surely we will also lose our footing [das Bodenständige]. US, p. 205
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CONTENTS Foreword by John Sallis
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Translator's Preface
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Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Works
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Preface The Limits and Grounds of History: The Nonhistorical Part One Being and Earth
I. "Nature" as a Category of Beings Encountered in the World The Primacy of Equipmentality over "Natural Subsistent Beings" Elements of an Internal Critique of the Heideggerian Thesis Death, Clocks, and the Exclusion of "Natural Time"
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II. Dasein and Animality The Phenomenology of the Animal "World" Heidegger's Critique of the Open in Rilke
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III. The Primacy of Stimmung over Dasein's Bodiliness The Facticity of the Human Body and Attunement Stimmung and Subjectivity of Feeling Stimmung and the History of Being: Anxiety and Wonder
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IV. Physis and Earth The Ontological Interpretation of Physis in Heraclitus Nature according to Hölderlin and the "Constancy" of Physis The Four Senses of Earth Part Two The Limits of History
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V. The History of Being and Its Hegelian Model The Primacy of the Past as Gewesen Is There a Heideggerian System of History? "Eschatology," or the Logic of Completion
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VI. The Essence of Technology Phenomenology of Technology and the History of Being The "Preparation" for Completion and the Interpretation of Nietzsche Danger, "Salvation," Ereignis Part Three Art and Earth
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VII. Earth in the Work of Art and in the Poem The Refusal of Aesthetics and the Transhistorical Truth of Art Earth as Nonhistorical Possibility The Discrete Appearance of Poetry: Rilke's Wall The Temptation of Nietzschean Aesthetics Earth and the Dionysian Earth in the Poem
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VIII. Rilke and the Interiority of Earth Subjective Interiority and "the Distant Heart" "The Interior Space of the World" (Weltinnenraum) or the Heart beyond Subjectivity The "Invisible" or Inapparent Harmony of the Earth
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IX. Ecstatic Dwelling: Hölderlin and SaintJohn Perse The Impossible Return to Native Earth Exile without Nostalgia
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Notes
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Index
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FOREWORD John Sallis The Song of the Earth is unlike all others. This text by Michel Haar is not simply a book. Even if its contours still resemble those classical lines that would have served thus to delimit it, there is movement at its edges, vibrations that blur those contours, as if the text were resonating with the song that gives it its title. Neither is it simply a text about Heidegger, about still another discursive orientation forged in Heidegger's thinking. No more than is Jacques Derrida's Of Spirit. But whereas Derrida's text pieces together a Heideggerian discourse on spirit that, primarily because it is always also a discourse against spirit, had hardly been suspected of exercising such force in Heidegger's thought, Haar's text takes up a discourse that has received constant attention ever since Heidegger created a philosophical sensation by introducing it in his lecture "The Origin of the Work of Art," first presented in Freiburg in November 1935 and, in its definitive form, as three lectures in Frankfurt in November and December 1936. At least this is how Gadamer describes its reception, noting that what really made the lecture sensational was Heidegger's introduction of the surprisingly new conceptuality of world and earth. Against the background of Being and Time, the question was no doubt striking: How can Dasein—in its understanding of its own being, shown in Being and Time to constitute the radically new point of departure for all "transcendental" questioning—enter into an ontological relation with something like the earth. 1 And yet, as surprising as it may have seemed against the background of Being and Time and in view especially of the subordinate rank accorded nature in the analyses of Dasein, Heidegger's turn to the earth only resumed a move that had kept recurring throughout the time of what Heidegger finally came to call the end of philosophy, the time of philosophy's completion in Hegel and Husserl, that of its inversion and—if only at the end—its displacement in Nietzsche. One might indeed find Hegel's turn to the earth considerably more surprising than Heidegger's. In the midst of the extended dialectic of observing reason (beobachtende Vernunft) presented by the Phenomenology of Spirit—that is, on the way to absolute knowing—the earth suddenly appears as an almost monstrous contradiction: it is the universal individual, which as universal negativity preserves the differences that it bears within itself, thus doing violence to the forms of organic life in their (different) differentiation.2 In a very remarkable manuscript, written in fact only a couple of years before Heidegger's lecture, Husserl refers to the earth in a way that recalls
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(unintentionally no doubt) Hegel's determination of it as the universal individual: ''For all the earth is the same earth." This sameness Husserl thinks so radically that he comes to say of the earth, against Galileo, at least as a question: it does not move. The earth is the basis, an ark: "The earth is the ark which makes possible in the first place the sense of all motion and all rest as mode of motion. But its rest is not a mode of motion."4 The earth—so basically the same that it must be said not to move. The earth—at rest in a mode of rest so different, so other, that it escapes the force of the conceptual opposition between rest and motion. Yet, by the mid1930s Nietzsche was much nearer the center of Heidegger's attention than was Husserl (however familiar or not Heidegger may have been with shifts in Husserl's texts during this time). In the very semester in which Heidegger presented "The Origin of the Work of Art" in its definitive form, he was presenting also the lecture course on Nietzsche entitled "The Will to Power as Art." One cannot but hear, therefore, in Heidegger's discourse on the earth strong echoes of what was spoken by Zarathustra: that the overman is to be the meaning of the earth. Even if, as Haar suggests, the effectiveness of Nietzsche's turn to the earth is limited by that entanglement in a mere inversion of Platonism that Heidegger has traced in all but the very last texts, still there resounds in Heidegger's discourse something of that Nietzschean imperative: "I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful [treu] to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly [überirdischen] hopes!5 To say nothing of what is sung. Only to ask whether each and every one of the songs in Thus Spoke Zarathustra could not be called a song of the earth. But what of the earth in Heidegger's discourse? What does earth mean? Is this a possible question within Heidegger's discourse, the question of meaning? No doubt one can elaborate certain meanings, certain senses, of earth as it functions in such texts as "The Origin of the Work of Art." Michel Haar has done so with care and precision, delimiting and discussing four distinct senses of earth. First, earth belongs to the dimension of withdrawal, of the concealment that holds sway in unconcealment, of the lethe that belongs to aletheia. Second, it is linked to what has been called nature and, in the Greek beginning, physis. Third, it constitutes the material in the work of art; here Haar draws the important corollary that the earthy material is what remains of the work of art when its world has disappeared, that this element is what allows one in another epoch to encounter the force and beauty of an artwork of the past, that it is what—to cite Haar's beautiful example—allows the hieratic flash of the mosaics in Ravenna to touch us with a grace that henceforth escapes their world. Fourth, earth is the native soil (heimatlicher Grund), not as the ground of a biological or vital rootedness, not as one's factual place of birth, but as the Heimat that is both given and yet chosen, the homeland where one has learned to come into one's own. One can even—as Haar also does—seek to unify these senses in the singular thought of a nonfoundational foundation. And yet, every
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such discourse on the meaning of the earth will remain questionable, will remain exposed to the recoil of what is said back upon the very saying. For, within the Heideggerian discourse, meaning is determined by reference to a horizon or, more precisely, a world; it is from the world that all things within the world receive their meanings. But the earth is not something within the world; it is not a thing at all. It is rather what, in originary strife with the world, remains always also withdrawn from the world and the measure provided by the world. To undertake to say what the earth means is to risk submitting it to that measure, to the rule of the world, violating, as it were, its nonsense. Unless, perhaps, one also says that the earth means nothing, interrupting thus every delimitation of sense by opening it onto an abyss. Little wonder that Haar lets the question obtrude: On what basis can we say the earth? And it is at that very moment that he alludes to the Platonic chora and to the "bastard reasoning" that seems the only recourse for one who, like Timaeus, would speak of what withdraws from speech. But what of this text? What of The Song of the Earth? Can these words be rewritten without the italics that make them function as a title? Is this text a song of the earth? Or does it at least become at certain moments a song of the earth? Not of course the song, for there are others, not only Nietzsche's and Mahler's, but also very ancient ones such as the Homeric Hymn "To Earth the Mother of All," which begins: "I will sing of wellfounded earth, mother of all, eldest of all." 6 If Haar's text is a song of the earth, is it also, like the Homeric Hymn, a song to the earth? One would like to ask—but hardly can—what it could mean today to sing to the earth. Or to compose a song to the earth, of the earth. In a song of the earth will one sing the truth about the earth? What would such truthfulness—remaining faithful (treu) to the earth—now require? Now that the very withdrawal within truth, its monstrosity, has been thought most forcefully as earth. Or would a song of the earth not also resound from the earth, doubling the of, even recasting the song one would sing, recasting it as a response to an unheard song of the earth? Then one would have recognized that a song of the earth always contains, when one sings, a certain earth of the song, the corporeity of its sounding from one's voice. The earthiness (das Erdige) of the song. One must listen. Perhaps almost as one listens to the voice of the friend that, says Heidegger, every Dasein carries with it.7 One must listen to words such as those in The Song of the Earth that follow a discussion of the early Heidegger's view that all time belongs essentially to Dasein, that there is no natural time, a discussion suggesting that here Heidegger steps beyond the limit of his description by excluding the possibility of a time of nature, a discussion that goes on to voice another description, that of an encounter with the play of light and shadows cast by the sun, an encounter in which one might well have no care for what time it is and no concern with any work to be done, an encounter in which one might simply attend to the play of shadows that tells perhaps only of le climat de l'heure. As if singing of a time of the earth.
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TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE The Song of the Earth is a translation of Michel Haar's Le chant de la terre (L'Herne: Paris, 1987). I have worked closely with Michel Haar while translating this text; he has taken advantage of the opportunity presented by these circumstances to augment and change some formulations. Therefore the present text is something more than the translation of Le chant de la terre. Haar has read the entire translation and made helpful suggestions, many of which I have incorporated into the translation. Of course, I bear responsibility for any and all shortcomings. I have translated the German texts from the original whenever possible. In his most recent book, Heidegger et l'essence de l'homme (Millon: Grenoble, 1990), Haar includes a note concerning the capitalization of three words: "Being," "History," and ''Earth." Since it is relevant to the present work, I include a translation of that note as follows:
Being and being According to convention, I write Being with a capital letter when it refers to beings in their totality, or the being of beings, or the beingness of beings, that is, when it is a matter of Being as traditionally conceived as the first or essential or fundamental Being [Etant], such as Idea, Substance, Subject, Will, etc. Thus the capital refers to the great metaphysical names of the History of Being in its successive epochs. I write being with a lowercase letter to indicate being in the active sense of the unfolding of what is within the horizon of time. In this sense being must be understood as a verb and not as a substantive or an abstract concept. Though inseparable from beings it nevertheless differs from every being. In German the nonsubstantiality of being cannot be so easily inscribed. —Finally, an inferiority of German! Heidegger wrote Seyn or Sein in an attempt to avoid, through a simple grammatical effect, positing being as a subject hypostatized and separated from man, whose essence it is to be opened to being by being itself. An ambiguity remains concerning the relation between being in the metaphysical sense and being in the phenomenological sense, at least in such formulations as "The History of Being is being itself and nothing but it" (Nietzsche II, p. 489). Indeed there is at play in the difference between Being and being the possibility of the oblivion of being.
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History and history History (Geschichte) as the series of epochs where being is given and suspended ("epoch" means suspense) is distinguished from historical enquiry (Historie). The adjective historical refers to the History of Being.
Earth and earth As with everything, the earth is some particular earth—the earth of a people, the earth of a work of art—and it therefore seems that the lowercase is required. Nevertheless, we have had recourse to a capital letter to emphasize the nonfactual, nongeographic, nonplanetary character of the Earth as the place of rootedness capable of proffering, given an epoch and world, a nonhistorical possibility. Written with a lowercase letter, "earth" simply designates the earth as a planet.
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ABBREVIATIONS FOR FREQUENTLY CITED WORKS
Heidegger's Works EHD = Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1951). EM = Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953). GA = Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt a.M: Klostermann, 1975): GA 13: Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, ed. F.W. von Herrmann, hereafter GA 13: AED. GA 20: Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, ed. Petra Jaeger, hereafter GA 20: PGZ. GA 24: Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, ed. F.W. von Herrmann, hereafter GA 24: GP. GA 29/30: Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, ed. F.W. von Herrmann, hereafter GA 29/30: GM. GA 39: Hölderlins "Germanien" und "Der Rhein," ed. S. Ziegler, hereafter GA 39: HGR. GA 45: Grundfragen der Philosophie, ed. F.W. von Herrmann, hereafter GA 45: GFP. GA 54: Parmenides, ed. F.W. von Herrmann. GA 55: Heraklit, ed. Manfred Frings. HW = Holzwege, 5th ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1979). ID = Identität und Differenz, 5th ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1976). KPM = Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, 4th ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1973). N I & II = Nietzsche (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961). SvG = Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1956). SZ = Sein und Zeit, 14th ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1977). TK = Die Technik und die Kehre (Pfullingen: Neske, 1962). US = Unterwegs zur Sprache, 6th ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1979). VA = Vorträge und Aufsätze, 3rd. ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1967). WHD = Was Heisst Denken? (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1954). WM = Wegmarken, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978). ZSD = Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969).
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HöIderlin's Works HSW = Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: J. G. Cottasche, 1946).
Rilke's Works RSW = Sämtliche Werke IIII, ed. RilkeArchiv, with Ernst Zinn (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 1962).
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PREFACE THE LIMITS AND GROUNDS OF HISTORY THE NONHISTORICAL Because the great moments of truth pass without disappearing and link together to build up the totally encompassing reality of the present, Hegel perpetually seems to be justified. From Thales or Archimedes up to cybernetics—passing by way of the Leibnizian statement of the principle of reason—it is certain that the technological rationality dominant today was built up step by step according to a rigorously cumulative process. By showing that modern Technology actually accomplishes in practice the most radical and most ancient metaphysical project, namely disclosing an immutable presence lacking nothing and revealing the first and ultimate causes, Heidegger also seems to affirm that universal History, having arrived at its end, no longer holds in reserve any essential principle. Indeed, if the stockpiling of vast reserves of disposable and everdistributable energy answers to the ageold quest for constant presence; if the principle of reason is "realized" in the multiple technological procedures of control, of feedback, of optimization, of productivity, metaphysics would be at once fulfilled and abolished, and the question of the essence of full presence would be in fact resolved. Is the History of Being that commences with the Greeks and culminates in the epoch of planetary Technology fulfilled at the point where it no longer awaits something beyond itself? Having been determined by the principles directing Technology, every future event—petty or grand—seems necessarily to be defined from the beginning as a "consequence" of these principles: accordingly, science is no longer disinterested but is indissociable from domination; or we have massive State Planning. "Nothing new," then, in this final epoch if not the indefinite perfectibility of acquired principles. If in the end the greatest revelations of past ontology—Idea, Energeia, Actualitas, Subjectivity, Objectivity, Will to Knowledge, Will to Power—are now founded and transmuted into the "Will to Will'' supporting the World Order (Gestell), one can hardly doubt that the History of Being amounts to a formidable operation of totalization combining and subjugating all the epochs of truth. Is being 1 thus reducible to its History? And does Heidegger do nothing more than give a new vision, only devoid of all absolute logical necessity, of a Hegelian sys
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tem of world history with his concept of "completed metaphysics" as found in Technology? Quite to the contrary. Indeed, the very development of the History of Being from the Greek logos to modern Technology does not exclude, but implies, a reserve, an opacity, a reverse side which can never be exhibited. It is this withdrawing, nonmanifest dimension that makes History destiny and not the logical unfolding that, according to Hegel, is governed by an eternal necessity. Final totalization does not mean that History is a total unveiling. What could the term Geschick mean if not that being gives itself, "sends itself" (schicken), gathers itself at each moment into a domain of unity (Ge)? This unity is that of an epoch. But each epoch is completely closed and blind to what does not enter into it. There is a radical finitude to an epoch and to all epochs. Every epoch of History is epoché, which means a "holding itself back," "selfsuspension," or "withdrawal'' of being, which goes hand in hand with its manifestation. The epochal or historical 2 as such is deployed on the basis of a free emergence closed in itself. The structure governing History is nothing other than the very structure of being: disclosure and coveting over. What is accessible, thinkable, and doable—which means "true" or "uncovered"—in an epoch or in a given world excludes, as inaccessible, unthinkable, impractical, every other sort of disclosure. What is thereby excluded is not some determinate figure. What is "covered over" belongs to destiny. It is rare and difficult for man to become conscious of such an uncircumventable dimension, since by its essence it does not appear in the epoch itself. Epochal presence lacks nothing. It is full and apparently unlimited. And yet every epoch has its limits which necessarily escape it. How are we to imagine that what gives itself excludes from our view completely different possibilities? The reverse of being is unimaginable. In a world where nymphs and muses, heroes and gods lived alongside man—such people could not suspect a world where angels and demons, saints and witches commonly intermingled in his existence. In an epoch that venerates the narcissistic idols of sport, song, or the cinema, what has become of the call of the muses, the smile of the angels, the words of the saints? Destiny has withdrawn them from the Open. But the most radical withdrawal is not by the one that has ceased to have effects, or the one whose appearance is foreseeable; rather it is the one which, inaccessible, is unimaginably absent and "unlivable." Never compensated, this withdrawal is the one which, at once primordial and continual, makes History destiny. The destinal or epochal sending withdraws; it always remains "behind" all that it manifests. What it withdraws thus remains impenetrable and inaccessible; and yet this nonhistorical is not some pure nonbeing. Rather, in preserving the original and conserving the future, it is what saves us as much from fatalism as from eternal logical necessity. We are unaware of whether the future promises mankind anything more than the indefinite perpetuation and mushrooming of technological civilization, or
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whether, even beyond the West, it prepares another commencement, "a more inaugurally destined future History." Being is the commencement itself which does not cease happening. As the inaugural, being can neither pass away nor become a mere moment of History. If one day it recommences in a completely different way, it is because it is more originary than the series of epochs to which it has given birth. The discovery of this limit where the History of Being flows back, as it were, into itself, where it folds back upon the radical simplicity of the belongingtogether of man and being—this is what Heidegger calls Ereignis: the "event of appropriation." It is an event in which all that happens is the noncoincidence of History with itself; all that happens is the play of being and man. Or rather, the coincidence of completed metaphysics with technology leaves a remainder, an unthinkable inverse, namely a more radical and ancient relation of being to man which governs all phases of History. Ereignis, the last word of thought and which is inaugural like "Tao,'' refers to the other side [face], the nonhistorical side of the "historical" reign of Technology. Ereignis, which does not belong to the History of Being, brings about with the abruptness of lightning the simple thought "outside any epoch": namely, if the essence of technology summarizes twentyfive centuries of Western history, being is thereby assembled into an ultimate and intense congealing of truth in which the forgetfulness of its destiny both increases and can reverse itself. If the elementary insight that man is the property of being and being the property of man belongs to a brief time, to an instant, to an instantaneous glimpse (BlitzBlick), it is ahistorical and does not belong to any epoch. Heidegger often insists on the fact that Ereignis is not a new name for being, which means it is not the principle of a new epoch. The "event" (of thought) by which we are reappropriated by being and disabused of metaphysics is not itself historical. Because it raises the veil over the essence of being, over its withdrawal and its forgottenness—which is thereby potentially overcome—Ereignis is called "nonhistorical" and "beyond destiny": "What addresses us as Ereignis is itself nonhistorical (ungeschichtlich), or better, beyond destiny."4 Only the perspective of Ereignis seems to allow for a place outside the History of Being and, in the end, for grasping it as a completed ensemble and recollecting it without aiming for a totalization of the Hegelian type. In any case, only Ereignis allows thinking to avoid the possible nihilism of a deconstruction necessarily dedicated to the indefinite traversal of "the closure" of metaphysics or to exploring its ambiguous edges and polysemic margins. Ereignis is the condition of entering into this nonmetaphysical experience of the world that Heidegger sometimes describes as lettingbe, or as the nonobjectivized proximity of things, or as the completely nonanthropomorphic deployment of the four regions (earth/sky, mortals/gods) that reflect into each other. This experience of the world is not a nostalgic invocation of the Greeks or of Hölderlin; it even takes place today in parallel, as it were, to the technological Order, parallel to the History which follows on its own momentum.
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The nonmetaphysical requires that there be a nonhistorical dimension. The nonhistorical presumes that being is not caught in the closure of metaphysics. But what sustains and invigorates this parallel world? If Ereignis is the revelation as much of the finitude of history as of the reign of the nonhistorical, this discovery might correspond to a simple nostalgia, to a romantic desire to flee the epoch. What gives a ground [assise] to the nonhistorical? What makes the finitude of History open up into a dimension other than the mulling over of its own limits? What discloses itself on the margins of the technological order, at the heart of this nonworldly world, are things—things taken in the ordinary and simple sense of the term, like the jug that pours a drink. Why things? Undoubtedly because in opening up a world things participate in the obscure burgeoning of the earth in which the historical meets its limit. 5 Before proceeding we once more ask: why are things or the earth the ground instead of individuals? Isn't the individual essentially on the margin of History? Isn't the thought of the later Heidegger strangely silent about the place assigned to the individual at the core of History? Selfhood and "mineness," so radical in Being and Time—do they no longer make sense? Cannot one imagine at the limit of the epoch a crumbling or a decay of the Order under the pressure of a multiplicity of individual, marginal experiences? Indeed, such a "principle of anarchy," more Nietzschean than Heideggerian, could not sustain itself without the support of the epoch, thus of Technology, and even less could it shake it.6 It seems that for the later Heidegger the individual is totally subjugated to dominant principles,7 or even split, torn, caught up in a tension (which recalls the tension between authenticity and inauthenticity) between a healthy distance visàvis technology, which means meditative thought, and a servile but adequate response to the exigencies of the epoch, which means calculative thinking. Heidegger does not think individual existence can serve as a limit for History. Private life is not the nonhistorical. Nor does he think the individual can find his happiness in forgetfulness, much less in the oblivion of History, as Nietzsche would have it.8 If Ereignis touches upon the ahistorical, if it permits thinking to "leave metaphysics to itself,"9 this is only after having traversed the full breadth of its History. Thus Ereignis makes the limits and grounds of the World Order, thought according to its historical provenance, appear as purely metaphysical foundations. Are these scientific and technological foundations, derived in a vague and complex fashion from the "first principles" of philosophy, the soil upon which man walks, on which he stands? Of course not. Even if man begins to distance himself from the planet in terms of cosmological space, the earth he still inhabits hardly has the signification of one "planet" among other planets ("planet" means, etymologically, ''errant heavenly body," "Irrstern").10 Even though, in the final phase of the History of Being, Earth has already become "planetary," it nevertheless gives to man
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the originary experience of place. If there is a height and a depth, an abode, a center of gravity, a "soil for my body" as Husserl already said, it is because there is a Urheimat, a "primordial home," an earth. 11 For we don't live in the abstract space and distended time (are they habitable?) that the unhappy "voyagers'' in spaceships experience. Yet a planetary technoculture governed by information sciences, the media, and standardized consumption has already projected our representations into a neutral and indifferent space. This is why an abyss is hollowed out between the image of the world that produces such a culture and the experience of the "earth" or "natural nature." "Nature technologically masterable by science and the natural nature of the human abode, which are equally determined in a historical fashion, diverge from each other at a maddening pace as two strange and distant domains."12 What is this "natural nature" and what is its relation to being? Does it have a subsistence, a true "reign" outside of the "green spaces" and protected parks? "The Earth remains sheltered in the inapparent law of that possibility which it is itself."13 But what is the Earth? Is it merely a new name for the ahistorical immutability of Nature? In which sense is the Earth "sheltered," spared by History? It does not seem as though it could be purely nonhistorical, for on the one hand it only shows itself through a determinate epoch, through its conceptions, its works, etc., and on the other hand it is situated in the tradition that is also determined by what the first Greeks called Physis, this blooming, holding within itself a secret reserve, of which we perceive but a faint echo. Must we not understand the Earth as a mixture of History and nonHistory? But why does technology threaten the Earth? How can it shake the "ground" of our abode—in German, the Bodenständigkeit, the capacity of drawing support from and standing upon the soil? How is it that Technology can produce a universal crisis of dwelling? "The absence of dwelling (or homelessness: Heimatlosigkeit) becomes a world destiny."14 This sort of rootlessness is more profound than any purely sociological or political phenomenon. When the world is reduced to a network of interchangeable connections, there are truly no more subjects who face objects but only gigantic circulations of energy, products, information, and consumption. Evermore removed, ever less inserted in a situation or a determinate site, technological man more and more finds himself decontextualized, simultaneously integrated and dispersed. The sense of the near and the distant becomes blurred. The oblivion of the Earth is the oblivion of the originally local and regional character of thinking and action. Earth is older than Adam, older than History. And yet Earth is not "pure Nature." Though appearing in the epoché and clearing of being as does every being, it is not reduced to a being nor even to the epochal, but it holds itself back, like being, thus preserving an extraepochal dimension. Historical and yet nonhistorical, it appears as the most elementary ground of the world, as its body, to which our body is necessarily connected.
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Being the hidden substructure of the world, the Earth emerges in it as essentially opaque and withdrawn into itself. Insofar as it is obviously selfenclosed, it presents to the Open its greatest opposition, "its strongest resistance and thus precisely the place of its most constant stability." 15 Yet this undergirding stability is revealed and achieved only within the opening of being. In other words, the Earth does not have at hand "by itself" the power of giving a ground; it first needs an instituting of truth to disclose itself—and notably in a work of art—so that the Earthly basis can reveal itself through it. This thought is in opposition to a romantic conception of Nature which sees in it an ultimate and autonomous source of creation. The Earth is source and resource, but only to the extent that it is wrought and enters into a world. Heidegger does not recognize nature as having power over being. Nature is in being, and not being in nature. Thus the facticity of the human body as physiological is always taken up and transcended in an understanding of being and an attunement which in some manner envelop the body. It is fundamental that the concept of Earth—absent from Being and Time where nature is reduced to a "subsistent being" and where "ecstatic" temporality fulfills the destruction of roots carried out by transcendental philosophy—is elucidated for the first time in connection with the interpretation of the work of art. Stemming from an unabating strife between an epochal world and Earth, the work, beyond its configuration that belongs to the world, makes manifest an "Earth" that beforehand was not visible. This concept of Earth does not simply fuse together the traditionally distinct significations of ''material" and "nature" but makes them communicate. Thus the Greek temple described in "The Origin of the Work of Art" does not simply refer to a cultural world, and it does not simply draw attention to some stone, but it also, by contrast, occasions the appearance of nature as a whole. "The glimmer and the light of the stone, which apparently is only thanks to the sun, make the clarity of the day, the immensity of the sky, the gloominess of night stand out."16 This nature is indeed nature as a whole—plants and animals included, as the text points out a little later on—but not nature in itself or in general, for it is also always historically determined—as Physis, if it is a question of the Greeks, or as the native soil of such and such a people. The poetic or artistic work lights up our abode in expressly founding the ground which always already bears us up.
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PART ONE BEING AND EARTH
Page 8 In truth, physis means, outside of all specific connotations of mountains, sea, or animals, the pure blooming in the power of which all that appears appears and thus "is." GA 55: Heraklit, p. 102 And thus, just as it remains questionable to speak of an organism as a historical [geschichtlich] or even historiological being, it is questionable whether death for man and death for an animal are the same, even though physiochemical, physiological correlations can be ascertained. GA 29/30: GBM, p. 388 Earth cannot do without the Open of the world if it is itself to appear as Earth in the free thrust of its selfconcealing. On the other hand, the world cannot soar above the Earth if, as the prevailing breadth and course of all that has the essential character of the Geschick, it is to be grounded on something decisive. HW, p. 38
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The idea of the dependence of human existence on organic, animal nature rests on intuitive evidence that for its part draws support from metaphysical evidence. Intuitively, in a nonscientific and nonphilosophical manner, we contend that we have a body like those of animals, a body. which, like theirs, nourishes itself, which lives from exchanges with the environment both living and dead, which can be wounded, can suffer, heal, decay, apparently just like theirs. In other respects we are, like organic nature in general, subjected to the alternations of the multiple cosmic cycles, and first of all to that of day and night. This evidence, both vague and powerful and with which our common sense is satisfied, is confirmed by the teaching of a tradition virtually unbroken from the Greeks up to Nietzsche. It claims humans are fundamentally and first of all living beings, animals which in addition possess the faculty of language, and hence the faculty of reason. For the metaphysical tradition, organic nature offers itself as the basis, the foundation—the "fundamental lowerlying stratum," as Husserl 1 and Scheler2 said— in which the properly human activities are rooted (a very biological image), that is, the activities of technicity and knowhow [savoir], political activities as well as private relations that are at the core of a society. In showing the primacy of perception in relation to all other acts of consciousness, phenomenological doctrine simply once more took up and consolidated the ordinary and metaphysical evidence, according to which man is the extension of animal nature. In what way? To the extent that the elementary structures of bodily sensibility (aesthesis, according to Husserl, or perceptual forms in MerleauPonty) most radically constitute the preobjective, which means the preliminary form or first degree of all higher consciousness, which is objective. The Heideggerian description of beingintheworld, which gives little attention to the notion of the bodyproper and rejects any idea of an original insertion of Dasein in nature, shakes the ancient metaphysical certainties rehabilitated by phenomenology. For the beingintheworld that we are, no natural foundation can be imported from the outside as something
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objective and existing in itself, something beyond the worldstructure, which means beyond "worldliness." All that we will ever be able to say, think, or experience of supposedly "natural" phenomena is necessarily situated within the world. One must not understand "world" as an objective, ontic totality of phenomena accessible to scientific observation but as the fabric of possible nonobjective relations with things that are at one's disposal, in current usage, which surround us. The world is the horizon of understanding—not a thematic or theoretical understanding but a practical everyday understanding of beings available for some use. It reveals itself as a network of signs, of significations and references which found the sense of "reality." On the one hand Heidegger's position here is very strong, virtually unassailable, and extremely limited. It is quite strong, for not only must every sense inscribe itself in the horizon of a world, but also every being, whatever it may be, must inscribe, as it were, the weight of its naturality. Thus the "drives" ascribed to us by psychoanalysis (libido, selfpreservation) can bring about an effect, can find their "object"—the object may be the I—only by pursuing the possibilities, the concrete avenues that the world proffers. We will never know what these possibilities could possibly be or what could possibly be their effect in a hypothetical "state of nature." Heidegger will show in Being and Time that every natural "tendency" is a mode of care, or of a temporal relation to the world. And yet this interpretation immediately runs up against a limit: even if the totality of socalled natural phenomena must be translated into the terms of the world (either the world of the everyday experience of the world or a world derived from this first world, one which is not a ''world" except in an analogical sense—the world of science, such as physiology, for example), is it not necessary to admit that the essence and genuine origin of this nature cannot, by definition, be situated "in the world"? In other words, although every being of nature that man encounters—including his own supposed naturality—is necessarily intraworldly, "intraworldliness does not belong to the being [of nature]." 3 Just as the Kantian phenomenon leaves the residue of the thing in itself, the phenomenological transparency of the world leaves a residue: the being of nature. What is this nature, mysteriously inaccessible to the world? Firmly attached to the analysis of the being of intraworldly beings, the early Heidegger reduces "nature" to a variety of equipmental being: the forest is a storehouse of wood, a place for a walk. The claim to an autonomous life on the part of natural beings seems to him to imply the claim of a primacy of a subsistent being initself. Now, it is precisely a question of showing that such a being, which is the basis of traditional ontology, is derived from beings as first encountered, namely, as equipmental beings, utensils. Every metaphysics of nature as primordial substance appears as an oblivion of the being of the world and of beingintheworld.4 Nevertheless, beginning with the Turn of the 1930s, both in Introduction
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to Metaphysics and the essay "The Origin of the Work of Art," a new thought of elementary nature emerges under the names of "Physis" and "Earth." This Nature, set apart from the metaphysical determinations of substantiality and "internal force" inherited from Descartes and Leibniz, turns out to be very close to being itself. This rapprochement between Physis and Aletheia, between the native arising of things and their disclosedness [nonvoilement], is extensively discussed in the courses on Hölderlin 5 and, later on, in the courses on Heraclitus6 and Parmenides.7 It would not be an exaggeration to say that a large part of Heidegger's later thought revolves around this implicit question: What is "natural" in being—granted that it proffers itself first and fundamentally as time, world, and history? Let us recall a few wellknown texts: "Physis is being itself."8 "This appearing and arising itself and on the whole was early on called physis by the Greeks. In a single stroke this name clarifies that upon which and in which man grounds his abode. We name it Earth."9 "Truth belongs, as selfdisclosure, to being itself: physis is aletheia, disclosure...."10 "The inaugural arising of what is present in all being, but also falls askew, even falls into oblivion: Nature (physis)''11. . . "being as physis, as pure emerging (als reines Aufgehen)."12 How is one to understand this unidentifiable being of nature—unidentifiable for the same reason as the thing in itself defined negatively as not coming from worldliness—as now becoming accessible and taking on the sense of the very showing of truth, of disclosure? For physis is identical to being—and not only analogical to being—to the extent that, like being, it shows itself precisely in slipping away, in proceeding into the light of day while keeping itself sheltered and in abeyance. How far can one go with this identification? Does Heidegger not incline us to think that it is simply a matter of an analogy pertaining to a general structure that would somehow encompass nature, a structure which would be that of the phenomenality of truth? In fact, he repeatedly mentions the common origin between the root phu, from which we derive the verb "phuein," "to grow, push," and the root pha, from which we get "phainesthai," "to appear, to become manifest." It should be mentioned in passing that this common origin is not to be taken as some philological "proof," for one could not "scientifically" establish such a commonality simply by beginning with the consonant ph belonging to both roots. Whatever it may be, philosophically speaking, the analogy, indeed the identity between physis ("What does 'physis' mean? It means that which arises on its own")13 and phenomena, or beings, regarding their primary emergence ("that which shows itself from itself")14 raises questions. For if there is an identity, there would also have to be difference! But what distinguishes the "on its own" or "from itself" of nature, the natural sponte sua, from the apparent "spontaneity" of phenomena in general? Is nature itself just a particular instance of the appearing or selfrevealing of every being? Must its "spontaneity" lie only in revealing? What is the es
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sence of this spontaneity? Would it not be paradoxical to hold, contrary to Aristotle, that nature is less spontaneous than beings as such, or than the being of even nonnatural beings? What is the significance of the relation of subordination, such as it is articulated in "The Origin of the Work of Art," between being as aletheia and physis or Earth? It is not at all a relation of derivation. It means that if the Earth appears, manifests itself in the world, it must enter into being. But it does not stem from being; it does not identify with being. If the Earth is neither the appearance of being nor, as Heidegger will make clear, the name of its withdrawal, then does not its proper, autonomous power remain unthought? For the Heidegger of Being and Time there is no doubt that we have no terrestrial roots or subsoil which originally sustain our emergence into the light of day. Nature (above all as elucidated by physiology, for example) does not help us understand anything fundamental about our presence in the world. Physiology does not teach us the sense of anxiety. "Nature is itself a being which is encountered within the world." 15 Our understanding of the animality we find around us and in us is radically limited to the horizon opened by the understanding of the only world to which we have relations. The "animal world," as Heidegger patiently showed in a course in 192930, will necessarily be for us the world of human Dasein with fewer signs and references, a world not more, but less, open, a world without "play,'' an impoverished world.16 The abyss separating us from animality is perhaps deeper than the one separating us from the divine,17 and the human body has nothing in common with the organic body,18 as the later Heidegger will claim in accordance with his initial phenomenological position. This makes the equivalence proposed by Heidegger between physis and aletheia all the more enigmatic. The structure common to each of these—disclosure and withdrawal—in fact sheds no light on the specificity of beings or the manifestations of the "natural" order. Are we supposed to presume that it is the same "principle" of temporality, namely being—elsewhere determined as entirely historical19—which makes natural beings pass from nonpresence to presence and from this to absence? It would be implausible to assume that nature is thoroughly historical, apart from the scientific view of the geological or geographic evolution of the planet. For example, even if the world in which nature is perceived changes from stem to stern between the Greeks and us, are we not obliged to admit that the being of this nature, or the Earth, is not subjected to this historical change? "Earth remains sheltered in the inapparent law of the possible which it is itself."20 Does not purely "physical" arising require a force, whatever may be the metaphysical resonances and forerunners of this concept? Does it not imply a particular type of spontaneity, or if one prefers, a particular type of repetitive, cyclical, rhythmic production? Does not what conceals itself in physis and withdraws from appearing possess an opacity and mass that in
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deed must be called material? How can we claim that physis is "being itself" if, in regard to being, it is different in at least two ways: a repetitive production and a "substantial" density of that which withdraws? In short, must we not recognize in physis an element irreducible to all historicality, a dimension forever nonepochal? In following such a course of reflection do we not risk simply resuscitating a neoLeibnizian or neoSchellingean metaphysics of Grund, of the natural ground? In fact, as soon as we accord to nature the status of a "material endowed with force," we once again set foot on such metaphysical soil. But this is not what the Heideggerian concept of physis or Earth means. The latter does not break with the antiromantic phenomenological effort that aims to establish firmly the irreducibility of Dasein to the organic. In the theme of the Earth there is no return to the metaphysics of an animal substrate, for the Earth simply cannot govern, determine, or ground being. Nevertheless, if Earth remains sheltered from the historical transmutations of truth which mold being, to what language can we have recourse when it comes to its specific determinations? If in all phenomenological rigor it is impossible to speak outside of being, on what basis can we say the Earth, i.e., shed the light of being on this obscure region? Could Heidegger have been forced to deal with Nature—as Plato did hylé, pure "material," or place (chôra)—on account of a "bastard reason"? 21 For he seems to be compelled to have the forevernocturnal and nonmanifest foundation of the world manifest itself in the clarity of truth. Through the concept of Earth a gap is sketched in being that being cannot recoup, a fissure, a "chaos" in the sense of a chasm [béance] that opens itself in a quite undiurnal manner. For in everything that one can discover, in everything that opens and unfolds itself, the Earth is what returns and closes in on itself. The secret of the pebbles or flowers cannot be exposed even if—and especially if—in pulverizing them we can spread them out before us down to their last atom. If there is a "bastard reason," it is in the sense of a necessary detour requiring the nonmanifest itself to become manifest. For the Earth is hardly the substantialization or hypostatization of the dimension of withdrawal or reserve of being. Rather, if "logic" permits such a proposition, it would be primarily the concrete appearance of physis insofar as it withdraws. "The Earth is that to which the arising of all that arises withdraws as such an arising. In all that arises, the Earth comes to be as that which keeps itself in reserve."22 How does this presence of the ''resource" similarly appear both in natural things and in the "material" of works of art? How is it that the sphere of the world, which initially is the most encompassing, can be mixed and alloyed somehow with the Earth by means of a "strife" where neither is vanquisher or vanquished? "The world is founded on the Earth and the Earth thrusts up in the world."23 What sort of continuity is there between the initial affirmation of the primacy of the world and the rediscovery of the Earth both as the ground of
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the work of art (which is never, Heidegger says, a simple material) and as the possible abode and rerooting of man? At first sight the continuity is just this: the concept of Earth breaks, even more profoundly than does the preliminary concept of nature as intraworldly subsistent being, with the metaphysical obviousness of nature as a base or foundation, as a substrate everywhere visible and accessible. Even more foreign to the objectified nature of science than it is to nature as reduced to its intra worldly status, the Earth which founds art and sustains habitation loses its tangible and purely material or natural obviousness. Communicating with the withdrawal of being, it opens a space which, escaping historical mutations, abides unscathed. The Earth is not by itself salutary. Being itself does not offer salvation. "Only a god can save us." 24 But as an unmasterable reserve, as a resource intact even in the face of technological violence, it may well be able to provide for the passage beyond the epochs of the present History of Being. The rediscovery of the Earth also signifies a reintegration of the "sensible" and the body in Heidegger's meditation. The body "proper" or the senses which are quasi absent, or present in a rather oblique or marginal manner in Being and Time, appear in a number of interpretations of the hand, vision, and hearing in the course on Heraclitus (G.A. 55), in The Principle of Reason, and in What Is Called Thinking? as belonging to a dimension that is neither sensible—in opposition to the intelligible—nor simply ''natural," but "terrestrial." But what principally distinguishes this terrestrial dimension from the phenomenological space of MerleauPonty's "body proper" as well as from the Platonic sensible is that in order to be revealed and to have sense it depends on a Stimmung, on an affective attunement which always envelops it. Stimmung, as we will see, leads back to an alreadythere, to a past which was never present and which has to do with what the tradition calls nature. But as is shown in the analysis of anxiety, which reveals the world in its totality, Stimmung also participates in transcendence, in the possibility for Dasein to project itself beyond and outside the space where it is in fact.
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I "Nature" As A Category Of Beings Encountered in the World The Primacy of Equipmentality over "Natural Subsistent Beings" Contrary to all philosophies of nature and life, and in particular those of Bergson and Dilthey, the phenomenology of Dasein challenges the obviousness of man's descent from or primordial fusion with "living substance." But on the basis of which principle? Nature as well as life are accessible only within a world, that of Dasein. 1 As Heidegger says in Being and Time, "Life is a particular mode of being, but it is essentially only accessible in Dasein."2 What the ''particular being" of life is, we do not know; and we can only hypothetically determine it by employing a subtractive method beginning with beingintheworld. We have no intuition of life except within the world. How can we found Dasein on an ontologically indeterminable "living reality"? One finds this position firmly entrenched from the courses before Being and Time and continuing up till the last seminars, notably those with Eugen Fink (196667), as well as the "Letter on Humanism" with its critique of the animal rationale. "The human body is something essentially different from an animal organism."3 To make of man a spiritual stage added on top of a fundamentally biological reality is to fall either into biologism, which means into a form of scientistic determinism, or into a "vague experience of life." It is also to forget that there is no "natural" reality for man that does not present itself as an object of some sort of involvement (Besorgen), which means, of a "care" (Sorge) linked to the temporality of the world. Every understanding of being is an understanding of time. The experience of nature and the body is necessarily inscribed in this temporal, finite opening marked by death, a limit toward which the animal cannot project itself. To Fink, who invoked an obscure vital basis, a "cosmic basis" which we understand because of a simple "ontic proximity," Heidegger responded that such a proximity could never have a purely spatial and factual sense but the sense of a possibility, of an "opening," be it a diminished, deficient one.4
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Being and Time strives at length to show that the concept of natural beings is not originary. Far from founding the world, it derives indirectly from the experience of the practical availability of the things constituting the primordial structure of the world. "Nature is itself a being encountered within the world": 5 one comes across this formula in a number of forms. "Nature... is a limitcase of the being of beings possible within the world."6 Or again "... the phenomenon of 'nature' in the sense of the Romantic concept of nature can be grasped ontologically only in terms of the concept of the world."7 The concept of the world is not yet taken here, as it will be later, in the sense of the historical configuration of an epoch. It does not mean, as it did for Kant, the totality of the objects of possible experience. The world—let us emphasize this—is always in spite of its ontological meaning an ontically determined world (a particular ''culture," one might say) which offers itself to Dasein as a complex of practical everyday possibilities. World in the existential sense signifies the network of "destinations," of the "for the sake of..." that links together and refers objects of current usage to each other for a particular Dasein. In this sense the world is always unthematized. "Worldhood" is the ontologicoexistential structure of these ontic networks. The analysis goes on to show that the concept of a "pure nature" somehow independently present as a being presentathand (Vorhandenheit) is derived through a diminution of the more originary understanding of being readytohand (Zuhandenheit), namely, the being of instruments, tools, or everyday objects of use. Every concept of nature as autonomous in itself—in physics, chemistry, biology as well as in metaphysics, for example that of extended substance—every concept of this sort presupposes a "demundanization" of the world.8 The supposedly immediate presence of nature is in fact the result of an abstraction. In addition to the concept of nature, this critical Heideggerian reversal is concerned with the idea of subsistent presence from the Greeks up to modem science. The immediate and "natural" relation in fact happens to be the relation to equipmental beings, to the Werkwelt, as the Prolegomena of 1925 says, which means to the "workworld" (understood as: work to be done), or even to everyday "utensils," such as cloths, the pen, the glass and plate, but also the watch, the road. Natural beings, for example, the wood and metal of the hammer, are first discovered simply as tools." 'Nature' is also disclosed in the used tool through its use, 'nature' in the sense of 'native.'"9 Let us note the quotation marks do not mean that nature is illusory but that it is something mediate, something inferred on the basis of a more original—here, cultural—experience of equipment; "cultural" even though in Being and Time it does not explicitly concern a determinate epoch of being. In fact, as Hubert Dreyfus has seen clearly,10 this experience belongs to a precise historical period of transition between the world of the artisan and the industrial world, hence, to the beginning of the nineteenth century.
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At this first level of discovery where "the hammer, the pincers, the nail refer in themselves to steel, iron, to minerals, to wood," nature seems as though it permeates utensils as prime matter, as the usable and used material of a preindustrial, nonartistic labor. "The wood (which is to say: primarily for Dasein oriented toward the work) is a timber forest, the mountain a rock quarry, the river a hydraulic force, the wind 'in the sails.' When the 'environment' is disclosed, the 'nature' thus disclosed is encountered too."12 So, the primary notion of nature—neither subsistent nor at our disposal—leads back to the support or the constituent element of a piece of equipment in the broadest sense and is not separable from it. It is as if equipment were the form in respect to which nature would be the notyetinformed material. Nature is immediately instrumentalized. Nature as pure subsistence is constituted in a second moment "when one disregards its mode of being as readytohand."13 Only in a third moment is nature posed as a power or autonomous force "which stirs and thrives,"14 which anticipates what later will be described as the original experience of physis. Should not this nature, "which overwhelms us and enthralls us as landscape,''15 be understood not as some remote derivative but as a new type of being irreducible to Zuhandenheit as well as Vorhandenheit? Indeed, Heidegger says this nature "remains hidden" from these two modes of being, thus from the very worldhood of Dasein. Does this mean that worldliness implies a necessary blindness with regard to physis? The text is elliptical on this score. If nature can be moving, it must touch the affectivity of Dasein. Is it hidden because it belongs to a strictly private world and because the "workworld" is essentially public? Whatever the case may be, "nature" is initially grasped as what benefits or is an obstacle to the customary utilization of the world as an instrumental network. In this world surrounding us an environing nature (Umweltnatur) reveals itself as designating not an autonomous natural framework but a cultural "system" encountered in relation to everyday practices. "In the roads, streets, bridges, and buildings, concern discovers nature as having a definite orientation."16 Buildings in themselves obliquely refer to a natural presence: the sun, inclemencies of weather. Roofs, chimneys, public lighting make reference to a nature more or less "readytohand." Dasein depends on it but does not recognize its autonomy, much less its majesty. Rain, cold, or oppressive heat, or darkness only make the journey or the labors more difficult. Yet the readytohand being of the things of the world should not be considered as a sort of secondary quality or a "subjective coloration" added on to a being primitively existing in itself, to "a raw material of the world which is first present in itself."17 If one can speak of an initself, it is being readytohand18 itself as the original determination of both world and beings. The only way science arrives at a "pure" concept of subsistent beings is through setting aside the everyday understanding of equipmentality. This setting aside is prefigured at the preobjective level of everyday use by
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a phenomenon that Heidegger describes as the "rupture" or the "disturbance" of referential relations. A tool can suddenly prove to be unusable. Thus it becomes an in itself, a brute material. Similarly, when man deviates from a direct preoccupation with those things within his reach, nature likewise reveals itself as a pure object of knowledge. But is this not in order to gain an infinitely greater grasp and capacity for manipulation? Heidegger does not yet suspect the massive reversion of technology at the very heart of what he still interprets at that time as the scientific "disinterestedness" toward the world. Elements of an Internal Critique of the Heideggerian Thesis We will pause for a moment with this utilitarian, operative, and quite prosaic definition of worldhood, and consequently with the fact that for the early Heidegger "nature" has only a derivative sense. Surrounded by its utensils, always preoccupied and circumspect, Dasein constantly finds itself referred from one utensil to another: "the writing desk, the pen, the ink, the paper, the blotter, the table, the windows, the doors, the room." 19 As Heidegger explains, these things do not show themselves as themselves, but by way of a continual reference of one to the other whose essence evidently is the activity of writing in one's study. The same goes for the craftsman in his shop, by far the most frequent "example" in Being and Time. But cannot—indeed must not—these people occasionally stop, the one from blackening the pages, the other from hammering the footwear that he repairs? And not only in order to eat, sleep, or bring a stop to the most humbly productive activities, of which the analytic of Dasein breathes not a word, but quite simply, for example, in order to ponder a bouquet of flowers (that the wife of the phenomenologist perhaps has placed on the table where there will without doubt be, besides many papers and pens, some books—perhaps the Critique of Pure Reason and the Fragments of the Presocratics—and that the description of "household equipment" forgets to mention). What does this assimilation of Dasein to industry mean, not to the worker, but to the craftsman? When, in ceasing to work, the writer beholds the flowers or the edge of the forest at the end of his garden; when, idle, he dreams, what happens to the fundamental forms of equipmentality, and thus of worldhood? Heidegger will explain that "simple perception," just like nature, is a deficient mode of the equipmental relation. He writes that when I do nothing but perceive, when I grasp something by a ''simple perception of the thing," "the world proves to be no longer accessible in its full worldliness, in its full significance, as when we meet up with it in preoccupation. Rather, in the pure perception of things the world shows itself as deprived of significance."20 Always at its post, Dasein must work in order to exist fully. Idle, ill, handicapped, unemployed, dreamer, it plummets toward pure life, toward
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facticity, toward animality! Every attenuation of Care, and notably the abandonment to "natural tendencies" which are all modes derived from Care, constitutes a situation of decline and inauthenticity. In this way, the invocation of natural exigencies gets interpreted as an obfuscation of Care and temporality. Does this absolute primacy of equipmentality not awaken suspicions when one considers its intimate tie with the concept of labor which, beginning with Hegel and Marx, determines the metaphysical essence of man in his relation to nature and promotes his manipulative activities? Didn't E. Jünger define the "Worker" as the type of planetary humanity that appears during a specific phase of the twentieth century (after the First World War) and outstrips standard oppositions like bourgeois proletarian, civilmilitary? That Dasein must work in order to exist in the full sense—is this not a trait he has acquired from the essence of technology? But let us return to "nature." When walking in the countryside—and when apprehending it apart from every practical project and every cognitive interest—can we not or must we not interpret nature as an indeterminable presence that we could call neither metaphysical substance nor objective force, nor the sometimes consoling universal Mother of the poets? When the "beauty of nature" strikes us in a shaft of sunlight, in the surprising diversity of forms and colors; when we see an animal playing; when we stand in a meadow in springtime; when we hear the ceaseless rumble of the waves, no equipmental relation is present which might subsequently be broken. Our access is direct, even if, as Heidegger says much later, we must admit that it is always sun or night, spring or winter, meadow, forest, or sea which present themselves as beings—but Nature never does! If it were the last word of the philosopher, the analysis of Being and Time, with its antiRomantic dryness, could lead to the suffocating vision of a world totally cut off from life, partitioned like a gigantic workshop, completely centered upon its own space and... blind to the Earth. It seems, however, that it is precisely a reversal of this interpretation of the relation between world and Earth that the Turn most clearly effects. The prosaic descriptions of natural phenomena in Being and Time in fact offer a striking contrast (and retrospectively seem even strange and forced) if, when considering a similar "meteorological" phenomenon, one approaches it from the reading that is given in a later text, like the commentary on a poem of Hölderlin. For instance, the wind! In the first text "the south wind" does not have any particular nature; it originally discloses itself only in the foresight (Vorsicht, the circumspect view) of the peasant. The being of the south wind first of all consists in presenting itself as a sign portending rain.22 It can become a pure meteorological event only secondarily through this demundanization effected by science which extracts it from the world of the peasant. As if the wind no longer has sense when the peasant doesn't count on it or isn't "preoccupied" in consulting the meteorological forecasts for his harvest! In the poem Remembrance, Hölderlin cel
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ebrates the wind favorable to "daring navigators": "The northeast wind blows / Of all it is the one I love…. " This evocation certainly ought not be taken to be a "'poetic' depiction of 'nature.'" 23 It isn't a question of a subsistent presence of nature, because for Hölderlin the naturality of the homeland is to be won, and this by way of a history, one of exile, of a voyage to foreign lands.24 The wind in the poem is not the "mere report of what the weather is like," but it is a call, the bidding of a sea voyage enriching, but difficult, for the poetnavigator. In the end "nature''—with its other names: the source, birthplace, "fatherland," abode—reveals itself as something quite other than a subsistent being: the secret grounding, indeed the matrix of the world. Death, Clocks, and the Exclusion of "Natural Time" The phenomenology of death could demonstrate it by itself: the analysis of temporality aims to wrench Dasein from the prejudice it has about its obvious inclusion in biological and natural time, as well as from its inclusion in subsistent being in general. This prejudice is shared by common sense (the they), science and metaphysics: for them, death is a fact of nature to which man is submitted. All three have an interest in consigning death to the abstraction of a universal and neutral phenomenon. In this way they remove the anxiety linked to finding out that death is indissociable from the very understanding of being. In fact, death places us in relation to something "nonrelative" (unbezüglich),25 for in death our ownmost potentialitytobe, our being there (and not our subsistent presence), essentially relates itself to an absence of every relation, to a nolongerbeingthere. My authentic presence is given only on the basis of its own absence. Death is the potentialitytobe that comes into relief on the basis of nolongerbeingabletobe, and identifies with it. The thought of mortality, of the radical finitude of being, reveals the abysmal equation of being and nothing. Beingabletodie and beingabletobethere are the same. Sheltering the nothing, the abolition of every being, but also what differs from every thing in the world—"death is the shelter of being,"26 as Heidegger will say later. Therefore Being and Time insists on the fundamental nonnaturality of death. For Dasein, the possibility of death—the present possibility and not some mere future eventuality—has nothing in common with any sort of biological maturation, with the becoming ripe of fruit. Death is not in us as this "secret and already quite formed infant";27 it is not, as it is for Rilke, the fruit that every person carries in himself or herself "around which everything gravitates" and which one must bring into the light of day, into the "austere motherhood of Being."28 "With maturity, the fruit comes to fruition."29 On the contrary, the empirical end of existence does not necessarily coincide with a fruition or a coming to perfection but more proba
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bly with a decline, fatigue, wearing away. As an ontological structure, beingtowarddeath is perpetual. Demise, disappearance as a biological fact, is a point in time. Living beings in general disappear, perish. Only man is capable of death as potentialityforbeing. "Dasein never comes to an end. But it can expire only so long as it dies." 30 Being able to die can have a foundation only in being, not in nature. The possibility of relating to its own end and resolutely anticipating the mortal totality that "I" may be is not learned by way of the objective "fact" of death. This beingabletodie that Dasein can take over or neglect isn't subordinated to the fact that biologically it is perishable. On the contrary, death as an existential possibility ontologically precedes the question of the meaning of death that biology, medicine, or psychology can pose. It is "preordained.''31 In fact, the scientific interpretation of expiration as a purely natural event arises from an involuntary choice oriented toward the they, or toward an inauthentic understanding of being. But biological knowledge itself depends on a specific understanding of natural time as a stream of now points, on a linear time. What this concept suppresses, in suppressing beingabletodie, is temporality as the ecstatic junction of the present and the future. It seems the question of the foundation of this natural time can be approached directly in terms of the status of clocks. Dasein maintains a specific relation with the instruments for reading time—formerly it was the hourglass, the sundial, and today it is the watch, clocks, chronometers. How are all these instruments related both to the natural, objective time to which they refer and to the properly ecstatic time of Dasein? Is there not a direct mode of access to natural time that justifies the clock? When all is said and done, what is the foundation of the clock: is it the flow "in itself" of minutes (the successive fractions of cosmological duration) or is it the temporal relation of Dasein to its world? At first it seems difficult not to relate the everyday experience of watches to what Heidegger himself calls "the natural clock."32 This clock is not part of objective nature but of the everyday, immediate, yet also primordial grasp of the rhythm of light linked to the rising and setting of the sun. "Man," Heidegger writes, "has always possessed the natural clock of the alternation of day and night...." "Human existence procured this clock before all pocket watches and sundials." Or again: "Dasein is there with the watch—be it only the closest and most everyday watch, namely the watch of day and night."33 But is it possible that the time most proper to man is engendered by this natural clock? Heidegger's response is reminiscent of Hegel's: natural time is always suspended in the present. There is no clock that can indicate by itself past and future time. If human time is constituted by natural time and is originally dependent upon it, then man could have, at best, only the notion of an eternal present. What is a clock if not a miniature physical system strictly circular and enclosed in an eternally actual now? This is the point of departure for the critique in the 1924 lecture, "The Concept of Time" (the oldest version of Being and Time), of
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our excessive dependence on clocks. What does Dasein do when it looks at a clock? It loses its time! For all that it can discover on its watch is a neutral time, the calculable time of the they and of science. "Dasein calculates with clocks, and this is why it never has an authentic relation with time through clocks." 34 Conclusion: disencumber yourselves of your watches in order to recapture genuine time. Do not ask what time it is, but: Am I my time? This antinaturalist, antiobjectivist position close to an existentialism (but we are in 1924) will remain unchanged, despite all the contributions of Being and Time, up to the Turn of the 1930s. In fact, it seems there is in §80 of Being and Time, which is entitled "The Time with Which We Concern Ourselves35 and Withintimeness," an attempt to bring forward a certain dependence of Dasein on natural time. Dasein does not give itself the daylight that gives rhythm to its activities. Thus these activities are submitted in some manner to cosmological time. The day has always measured the time of labor. Is dating, calendar time, not founded on the cycles of the earth around the sun? To say this would really be a misunderstanding of the radical profundity of Dasein's temporality. It is through the temporal dimension of its beingthrown that Dasein is originally subjected to the alternation of day and night, and to the other natural cycles . . . : "Dasein's thrownness is the reason why 'there is' public time."36 Or again: "With the factual disclosing of its world, nature is discovered for Dasein."37 Thanks to our own proper temporality we understand the solar rhythms as an element of our facticity. Nature takes part in a sort of prior past of Dasein, but a past which is for Dasein nothing exterior; rather, it is taken up in Dasein's projects. Therefore it would be a mistake to believe that, in the end, the sun is what measures the time of everyday activities. On the contrary, it is with a view to its work that Dasein itself gears the beginning of its labors to the rising of the sun, thus making use of light and solar warmth as readytohand beings. "So, when the sun rises, it is time to ...."38 time to take in hand the tools whose network of correlations constitutes the world, among which is this nonfabricated "tool": the sun. Dating, the calendar, the clock derive from the fact that Dasein knows how to "take into account" the "places" and apparent movements of the sun. The "natural'' clock of day and night is inscribed beforehand in the temporality of preoccupied beingintheworld. "Temporality is the foundation of the clock." And in this regard a sundial is not more "natural" than a clock. For how does time accrue to it? "Why do we find in the position occupied by the shadow on the sundial something like time? Neither the shadow nor the divisible sweep, much less their spacial relation to each other, are time itself."39 What is it then to read the time on a solar clock or a watch? It is not to observe an instrument isolated and in itself. It is to pose either expressly or not a now, but not as an act of abstract presentification. This means: now, I still have enough time to do this or that; or it is now already an hour since I did this or that. Time for ..., time until ..., and time since .... But the
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since only leads back to a new until, to the primacy of the future. A primacy also of practical involvements. Time is already given to us before using the watch. There is never a temporal gap projected ahead when I have a view of some projected activity; this gap could never emerge from the simple position of the hand on the sundial, nor from any being in the world. This time of original temporality stretched from the anticipated future back to the now and retaining the past is situated outside of all nature. To read a clock does not mean to involuntarily collaborate in the time of nature but to project the time of the world without objectively constructing it, which means it is not the time of the "public," published time expressed as objectively coordinated involvements. This objectified time derives from "the time of the world" which originally belongs to the temporality of Dasein, a temporality whose ecstatic unity is neither that of a transcendental subjectivity nor of universal objectivity: "the time of the world... 'is' 'prior' to all subjectivity and objectivity...." 40 Time as the indefinite, numbered, and irreversible series of nowpoints— time according to Aristotle (the first to conceptualize natural, objective time)—is not the most original time but the most derivative, the most fallen time. Indeed, this time called "natural time" is thrice removed from original time which is marked by the act of presentification and projection into the future and above all by the gap between the two, namely, the time of the world directed toward the various lengths of involvements and instrumental relation. Then is there still a "natural" time? Strictly speaking, no, if one understands by "natural" that which produces itself from out of itself. Is not socalled natural time in fact produced or rather constructed by Dasein, which lends to time all its spontaneity and which falls prey to the illusion that time is independent of it? Such indeed is the position of the early Heidegger, who in the Basic Problems reaches this extreme conclusion: "There is no natural time insofar as all time essentially belongs to Dasein. There is, however, a worldtime."41 The affirmation that there is no temporality, not even any time in general outside of Dasein—though it rests on a rigorous phenomenological deconstruction of the pseudoobjectivity of time—is an affirmation that remains metaphysical inasmuch as it concerns the totality of particular beings both in the world and outside of the world. Does not Heidegger go beyond the limits of phenomenological description by excluding the possibility of a natural time subsisting "in itself"? Of course biorhythms, light years, geological and paleontological epochs, even the seasons emerge from a scientific or empirical conceptuality which, because it is itself inscribed in the world, "proves" nothing about the internal truth of the being of nature. Yet, even if these chronologies are intelligible only in terms of our temporality, they hardly seem able to be defined as constructions exclusively derived from the time of the world, especially insofar as the time of "the world" depends on "being readytohand." What could the readytohand being of galaxies, of "black holes," be?
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Is it absurd to describe a significant encounter with the play of lights and shadows, with the sun, which would be independent of any care for what time it is, or at least if such a care were necessarily implied in the experience of temporality, which would have no relation to work that must be done, to some concern, apparently an obsession in all these analyses? Are there not shades in the lighting that indicate and make known—apart from any measure, expectation, or project—the climate of the hour? All of us have come across an old trunk of a felled tree. The concentric circles, recognizable by the various colors of the wood, left by successive seasons—are they not completely foreign to our temporality and do they not show nevertheless a stratification, a density of time, simultaneously visible and unfathomable, a quite ancient progress, slow and irresistible like growth, like physis?
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II Dasein and Animality The essence of life is obscure. The mode of being proper to it, which is "other" than beingintheworld, retains a domain of inaccessibility. Life, like nature, indeed is not immediately accessible, nor is it accessible to intuition except by way of an (intellectual) operation of subtraction applied to the world. Not only is Dasein not "substantively" life with something else added on, but life is, hypothetically speaking, Dasein with something subtracted from it. What is to be subtracted is the world. The animal is "worldpoor." When it comes to animals, what biology and phenomenological observation unambiguously show is a limitation, a narrowness, a much greater closure of the "world." The possibility that life may have a mode of opening quite different than worldliness is not excluded, but we can neither have access to it nor even decide if such a wholly unknown "opening'' exists or not. Far from wanting to depreciate life, Heidegger accords it the possibility of an unfathomable depth that is closed to man: ". . . the essence of life is accessible only by way of a deconstructive method" (by that he means a demonstration which, beginning with the world, shows the world of animals as deprived of certain of its traits), "which does not mean that life is of less value or of an inferior degree compared to human existence. Rather, life is a domain which possesses a rich openness (Offensein) the likes of which the human world perhaps knows nothing." 1 Yet Heidegger has no Romantic or Rilkean2 nostalgia for this possibility of openness. On the contrary, the openness we see here cannot in any manner be identified or even compared with the disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) associated with the understanding of being, or with the Open in the sense of the access to the disclosure of beings. "Animals as such do not stand in the overtness (Offenbarkeit) of beings."3 Why? Because they do not grasp, as we will see, beings as beings. The bee does not see the sun as the sun, nor the flower as the flower: it is referred to them only as nonisolable elements of its environment. Only man sees beings in the light of being. Does Heidegger mean that for us physis is not distinguished from aletheia, from truth as "unconcealment"?
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The Phenomenology of the Animal "World" The patient and powerful description of animality 4 takes up, criticizes, and reshapes the general concepts (which for the most part are naive) of living beings from which the biological sciences5 draw support and in which common sense indulges. If it must be inscribed in worldliness, the discourse about animals nevertheless should not simply be carried over into an anthropologism. To what extent can Dasein "put itself in the place" of animals? Dasein is much too inclined to do this, especially when it comes to domestic animals. We much too quickly shift animals into a genuine world, forgetting that an animal lives in the limited space of an environment. Above all there are two fundamental concepts of the living being that Heidegger will criticize, or rather reinscribe, namely the concepts of organism and animal behavior. A living being is, as we say, an organism. Its unity is not that of a machine. We think of an organism as a complex group of organs working together to promote life. But what is an "organ"? In Greek the word means tool, instrument. We think of an organ as a tool that serves to carry out certain functions: respiration, digestion, reproduction, etc. But a true tool, an instrument of work, makes sense only in a human world. For by itself a tool has no capacity, no faculty. My pen is a utensil, it is always ready for writing. But obviously it is incapable of writing by itself. My eyes see by themselves, or rather, because they have the ability to see. An organ is in the service of a faculty, which is without doubt where the false image of a utensil comes from. Contrary to the utensil, the organ has at its disposal its own impetus that results from this faculty. It is also necessary to ask seriously if the faculty is not "prior" to the organ. ''Can the animal," Heidegger asks, "see because it has eyes, or does it have eyes because it can see?" The answer is clear: "The ability to see is what first allows for the possession of eyes"6 and not the reverse. "We cannot say: the organ has faculties, but faculties have organs."7 Faculties are endowed with organs; thus they are more original than the "organic." So, in the essence of life faculties relate to organs; this relation sketches a field of "property" which characterizes every living being. Animals have a feedback relation to themselves — they eat, defend themselves, reproduce in a relation to themselves — that is independent of the question of the possession or nonpossession of a self consciousness. This relation to self is not one of ipseity, but it also is not absolutely different. "Every ipseity . . . is proprietary (eigentümlich), but not every property has the character of ipseity and selfhood."8 There is no life without this selfreferential unity of "belonging to — its own": even the most elementary living beings, like amoebas, sponges, protozoa, have "property" — that which is its own. Thus the character of an organism refers to a more original structure of animality. Property such as (Eigentum, Eigentümlichkeit), or
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the capacity of selfpossession, is, in the essence of life, more original than the organism, for it is not one quality among others but a "mode of being." "The property of animals means: the animal, and first of all its specific capacity for . . ., is proper to it. It doesn't lose itself, whereas an impulsive drive toward something leaves itself behind itself; or rather, it maintains itself precisely in the impulse and, as we say, is itself in this impulse and drive." 9 Drives are characterized less by an orientation toward their "object" (for example, nourishment) than by this selfreserve and this return to self which is obviously not reflective. On this score Heidegger will insist that a drive can never seize or direct itself toward a being as such. Life's mode of being remains defined by privation, which means it remains opaque to us. How are the specific capacities that define life regulated according to this selfadherence? This is the question of what we call animal "behavior." "Behavior," which is the fact of having a bearing toward oneself, of maintaining, retaining, and containing one's drives, derives from "property": it supposes a sort of blindness and closure of the animal to what is other than itself. "Behavior" (Benehmen) is opposed to the manner of being that belongs to man, that is, to conduct (Verhalten) which implies the relation to . . ., that is, openness. "Behavior (Benehmen) as a mode of being in general is only possible on the basis of the animal being absorbed (Eigenommenheir) in itself. The beingneartoself specific to animals has none of the ipseity of human beings who conduct themselves as a person; this absorption of the animal in itself at the interior of which only directed movement is possible we call compulsion (Benommenheit)."10 Compulsion characterizes not only a passing state but the very possibility of animal behavior. Animals can behave only to the extent that they are in their essence totally ''carried away" (absorbed, dazed, ravished). Compulsion emphasizes the passive component of behavior: animals are attracted/repelled by, led toward this or that being which nevertheless they cannot apprehend as such. For Heidegger, compulsion ontologically signifies the dissimulation of beings as such, a blindness to the being of beings. Animals are excluded from the manifest experience [patence] of beings. The investigations of J. von Uexküll and Rade, which Heidegger uses here abundantly, show that the behavior of bees is not determined by the subsistent presence or absence of flowers and honey, or by an awareness, but by the play purely internal to the insect of an inhibited drive or, on the contrary, of a released drive following the "messages" that are received (colors, odors). The same holds when it comes to the relation to the sun, which explains why bees can find their way back to the beehive after having been separated from it even by several kilometers. Experiments have proven that the bee "knows how" to measure the angle of the height of the sun and its variations, and to proceed on the basis of this angle. But this does not mean that it grasps the sun as such. The bee is completely captured and absorbed by the sun, fixed by and abandoned to it to the point that it
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is deprived of the relation to the sun as a being. The free deployment of its drive requires that it not see the sun! In fact, beings are neither revealed to nor concealed from animals. Their behavior places animals altogether outside of an openness to . . . "Neither their socalled environment nor their self are manifest as beings."12 "It is certain that animals . . . never truly enter into relation with a thing as such."13 An animal is, in a way, surrounded by the circle of its drives, and not by things. This is why it can neither "let beings be'' nor not "let beings be." Behavior strictly predetermines what the animal can "encounter" and what can stimulate or inhibit its drives. What is, finally, the mode of openness of the animal? The guiding idea of Heidegger's lecture course is this: "The animal is worldpoor." Poverty, deficiency, but not an absence of world. The animal both has and does not have a world. It has an environing world (Umgebung), a milieu in which it has a certain "access to beings," the bird to its nest, the cat to the mouse; but it does not have a world because it does not have access to beings as such, to the open, but only to its own noninhibition. The essence of the animal is not the selfenclosed unity of an organism, a closed, physiological unity of forces; rather, it is the closed and determined circle of its characteristic drives, the unity of the possible drives uninhibited in and by the environment. Thus Heidegger corrects the formula of Buytendijk, who says, "Thus it is apparent that in the whole animal world the relation of the animal with its environment is almost as intimate as the unity of the body"14 — when he points out that the "unity of absorption," which means being enveloped in the space of uninhibitedness that makes access to the environment possible, is more profound than the unity of the animal body. The unity of the living body is founded on the unity of its selfabsorption, of its absorbed envelopment in its "property." Thus absorption has both a sense of closure — the revelation of beings as such in the world is removed from the animal — and of openness: it is surrounded by a horizon of drives with which it struggles in order to survive (what Darwinism calls the struggle for survival) and which, without making it lose its property, transports it into what is essentially other visàvis itself. This otherness, even though it may never be manifest to it as such, nevertheless exposes the animal to an "essential shock"15 which remains mysterious for us. Precisely in maintaining the idea of the lack and poverty of animals Heidegger rejects the Romantic idea of suffering or sadness inhabiting not only the animal kingdom as such but even the whole of nature.16 The Romantic idea of a melancholy attached to nature as such, as is the case with the Schopenhauerian idea of a suffering inherent in the will to life, supposes an intuition penetrating into the initself of the living. This direct intuition is impossible for us to the extent that we can only understand animals in terms of the world which is ours. Yet, all statements about animality in general are not proscribed to us. It is even possible, outside of any pessimism, to discuss "worldimpoverishment as the internal problem
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of animality itself." An animal does not suffer from not having a world. Indeed, it must have its own world of satisfaction since it gives free reign to its drives. But if it is true that its behavior opens it up to encountering other things than itself, absorption prevents it from ever grasping beings as beings as such, as well as nonbeings. This absorption also is why the animal never encounters death as such. "Even if physiochemical and physiological connections can be established," death for an animal and human death are not identical. There is a lack and a poverty on the side of the animal because it knows nothing of beingabletodie, of death as it belongs to our possibility of being. As for the essence of natural death, it remains, despite all biological discoveries, enigmatic. For Heidegger, the muteness of animals is the other, even more conclusive, index that attests to the fact that living beings are radically excluded from the sphere of the disclosure of beings. Animals lack speech because they have no access to the world as a dimension of the struggle between revealing and concealing.18 They do not speak because they have no understanding of being nor of nonbeing. Animals do not know nothingness: the "presence" of the environment only appears to them as a pressure without release that absorbs them. The relation they sustain with the objects of their drives does not separate off any free space, any appearance or withdrawal, any play of time and space, and this is why they have nothing to say. . . . The absence of speech in animals is more radical than the absence of the world. It is not a question of an impoverished language but of an absolute privation of speech. On this point the break between human beings and animals seems the most unbridgeable. "The leap from living animals to humans that speak is as large if not larger than that from the lifeless stone to living being."19 Despite this absence of articulated language, one could object that Heidegger's phenomenology has taken into account neither the cries, moaning, nor the grimaces, mimicry, gestures, and postures which are irrefutably modes of expression among, for example, mammals. Finally, the phenomenology of animality teaches us more about man than about animals! On the whole the aim seems to be an exorcism, a demystification of the "link" with nature. Heidegger wants to show the impossibility of an original and fundamental implication or entanglement of human Dasein in living beings, to destroy the idea of an animal lineage, to exclude the myth of natural perfection as emphasized from Rousseau to Bergson. Not only is instinct not superior to intelligence, but it is far inferior to the simple understanding of being. Yet, at the end of these analyses, the mystery of nature remains. Heidegger does not thereby envisage the question of the origin of natural growth, of drive. He does not go back to physis, which would be the drivenness of drives. Will the reciprocity that he later established between aletheia and physis better clarify the enigma of life? Does physis not become simply
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one particular case of disclosure? How are we to understand the "leap" between animals and human beings if there is a reciprocity and hence an apparent continuity between aletheia and physis? Heidegger's Critique of the Open in Rilke This balanced poverty brings into relief the true harshness, or sometimes the simple annoyance, with which Heidegger rejects the affirmation of a superior richness and depth of animality which is found in the Rilkean idea of the Open. 20 As told by the first verses of the Eighth Duino Elegy With all eyes the creature sees the Open. Only our eyes are backwards. . . .21
For Rilke, man is excluded from the plenitude of the "seen" or even from what he calls the "whole" or "pure perception." This connects animals, and only animals, directly with ''nature," but for Heidegger this means that it connects animals indistinctly with all beings. Indeed, for him this is the true definition of the Rilkean Open: an opaque, confused ontic mass, a nonopening. We know what is outside only through the face of the animal.22
Only animals have free access to what is (and is freely itself) because they see without looking, which means without objectifying things. They are, thinks Rilke, because they coincide with this dispossession of the self that projects it totally outside. As Roger Munier says emphatically in his penetrating commentary: "Creatures have full being because they are fundamentally dispossessed, removed from themselves. . . . They no longer participate, and precisely in this way they continue to be linked, joined but fluid, engaged in the flux."23 Heidegger considers this "being" through fusion or absorption that Rilke calls the Open abysmally distant from the Open in the sense of aletheia. To abide in aletheia is to be able to let beings be present as such. This is accomplished neither by making beings the representation of a subject nor losing oneself in beings. The idea that only animality is free and that man has a vision of the fullness of nature only as mediated by it derives from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. For Heidegger this is nothing but the "popular metaphysics" of the beginning of the twentieth century; the commonplace, taken up by psychoanalysis, of the primacy of the unconscious, and this understood as a vital and animal drive. "Considered from the purely metaphysical point of view . . . Rilke's domain of fundamental poetic experience is no different than the fundamental position of Nietzsche's thought. Both are as far removed from the
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essence of truth, from aletheia, as possible." Or again:". . . Rilke's poetry remains overshadowed by a slightly tempered Nietzschean metaphysics."
Whether Rilke's poetical thinking can be measured by its proximity to metaphysics and reduced to this rather schematic Nietzschean position is what we will examine in another chapter. Whatever the case may be, the lecture course of 194243 clarifies the significance of Rilke's Open and does so with a caustic provocativeness even greater than one finds in the text from Holzwege. The tone is that of irritation, of a polemic, and sometimes even of bitter irony. It is as if Rilke's Open threatened to usurp aletheia. It is obvious Heidegger wants to distinguish himself from all irrationalism and to show the abyss between a philosophy of life and the thought of being. Heidegger defines this bogus Open as "an incessant circulation of beings,"26 as the forsaking of all limits; it is undifferentiated, indeterminate, "yet thought" — not as lack but as the "original totality of the real."27 This conception of the Open constitutes one of the final consequences of the oblivion of being, the reign of pure spatiality. The contrast between it and aletheia is so great ''that no formula for the opposition suffices to give an idea of the chasm of this difference."28 The two modes of the Open have nothing "in common but the sound of two homophonic words."29 The danger of Rilke's conception (a danger that Heidegger also perceives in the philosophy of Nietzsche) seems to lie precisely in "the animalization of humanity." "For Rilke, human consciousness, reason, logos are exactly those limits that diminish the capabilities of man as compared to those of the animal. Should we then become 'creatures'?"30 exclaims Heidegger. One seems to hear the response of Voltaire to Rousseau: must we then (in order to recover nature) set ourselves to going on all fours? Heidegger says Rilke accomplishes a reversal of the "hierarchy of man and animal" but remains totally imprisoned in the unthought tradition of the reasonable mananimal. He confounds the indetermination of living beings and "liberty" in our relation to being. It comes down to the fact that he is thoughtless and naive. Commenting on the verse: We, we never have, not even for a single day The pure space before us where flowers bloom [aufgehen] without end.
Heidegger writes: "'bloom' here does not signify phuein as thought in the Greek sense, but that arising through which what blooms [das Aufgehende] dissolves, like a cube of sugar dissipating in water, and vanishes in the atmosphere as if into cosmic relations."31 Furthermore, for Heidegger the equivalent of Rilke's Open would be the undefined, the unlimited, "where living beings become winded and dissolve, released into the endless network of causal relations in nature so as to float in this absence of limits."32 And yet, both in the lecture course of 194243 and in the essay from
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Holzwege (written in 1946), Heidegger affirms that, contrary to its metaphysical connotations, Rilke's Open reveals a relation to the distant and initial sense of Greek physis, and even an intimate belonging to this physis. 33 The Open in Rilke's sense and the Open in the sense of aletheia are "as far removed as the commencement of Western thinking and the fulfillment of Western metaphysics — and yet, precisely through their belonging [to this history], they are the Same."34 They are the Same in being historical stages of the unique History of Being. Does this ambivalence — the extreme opposition between the commencement and the continuity of the Same — allow one to explain with certainty why, without knowing it, Rilke (as opposed to Nietzsche) does not anticipate the essence of technology; why he does not acquiesce to its domination but resists it already beforehand? Despite the underlying presence of the will as the being of beings, which would reveal itself especially in the idea of a "risk" characterizing living beings as such ("nature abandons beings to the risk of their obscure desire"), Rilkean nature does not announce the technological will to will. It is wiser than man, who separates himself from "pure perception." It remains foreign to the project of unlimited exploitation; it remains on this side of human and technological voluntarism — in the Open. There is an "infinite difference" between the obscure desire of plants and animals and the human will of unconditioned objectivization. Yet Rilke thinks the emergence of man outside nature in an increase of will is a radical menace weighing on our very essence. He grasps the fragility of man, the subject and object of will, the master and victim of the project of universal domination. Man risks more and is more at risk than nature ("we risk more than life itself"). Does not this apprehension of the danger of such a will bearing down on the essence of man imply that Rilke is infinitely less voluntaristic than Nietzsche? How can Heidegger maintain that these two thoughts are metaphysically identical? Rilke saw the danger — as did Hölderlin. Did he also think the saving power? It would seem that "security," the intact "sacred" sanctuary, resides "over there" in the Open: "Thus we have, outside of shelter / a security, over there where gravity bears / pure forces. . . . ''In order to escape the danger man must indeed turn toward the Open: "what finally saves us / is being without shelter and to have / returned that being to the Open, seeing it threatened." But, for Heidegger, this "turn in the Open" is brought about completely metaphysically and logically as the inversion of objectification, which means as a subjectification, an unlimited interiorization. To struggle against the exterior proliferation of objects it is necessary to turn toward the "inside," toward the intimacy and invisibility of the "heart." With this, the poetry of Rilke "remains relative to the representation of consciousness,"35 and metaphysically it makes no difference whether it takes the form of calculative domination or that of the reversal into interiority and into the "logic of the heart."
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Yet the question remains whether Heidegger does not submit the Rilkean terms of the "Open," of the "interior space of the world" (Weltinnenraum) and of the "heart," to an overly reductive grid by interpreting the interiority of the world as the interiority of the subject. Perhaps it is not a question of the heart of the poet, nor of the human heart, but rather of the heart of things, an "unheard center," an unnameable center, ''a pure space for space": You learn this: that names for it are endlessly wasted: for it is the center. 36
Can the heart of things that Rilke sometimes calls the "heart of time"37 be identified with subjectivity? And even if this were the case, how could the space of representation, the totality of the nonobjective, also be identifiable by Heidegger with the "enclosure," the "nonclearing,"38 since such an "interior space" implies at least the opening and thus the freedom of the subject? Heidegger bases the essentials of his reading on a poem of Rilke not published during his life: As Nature abandon beings. . . .
But, the word "Nature" is relatively rare in Rilke. The word "earth" is much more frequent: Earth, is it not what you want: to thrust up invisible in US?39
But earth does not seem reducible to the interiority of subjective representation, even if it communicates with it. Isn't the earth here the "subject" which commands us? Is Rilke still a voluntarist? What is the "inside" for him? "What is the inside? / If not a sky more intense / traversed by birds and deep / with the winds of return."40 Is it true that the earth and the sky of Rilke are subjected to the sole "logic of the heart?"41
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III The Primacy of Stemming Over Dasein's Bodiliness The Facticity of the Human Body and Attunement What the Husserlian phenomenology of Ideas II and the early MerleauPonty after him painstakingly described as the original site of the truth with such names as Leib, Leiblichkeit, body proper, flesh, bodiliness, is not brought up in any thematic analysis in Being and Time. Can one phenomenologically and ontologically justify placing the body in a secondary position in the existential analytic? Indeed, there are barely a few allusions, without ever any really explicit references, to the hand that handles tools. 1 Thus, in reference to "the instrument for walking," the street, Heidegger writes: "When we walk, the street is touched with every step; it is, it seems, the closest and the most real of all things readytohand; it slides along, as it were, on particular parts of the body, the soles of the feet."2 But in truth, what is closest for Dasein is not only this spatial proximity with respect to equipmental beings3 but its preoccupation with the proximity and distance of this or that instrument that it can manipulate, or this or that other Dasein, and in particular the friend4 that Dasein can meet. To be in the world is to be inhabited by distance, by an essential remoteness which causes what is closest to us to be not what spatially touches our body but that toward which we are free to move. Inversely, the capacity to reduce or overcome distances (by means of modern communication) is not what truly teaches us to situate ourselves in proximity to things.5 By itself bodily presence does not mean proximity to . . . nor even presence to . . ., or openness to. . . . The spatiality of the body is inhabited by a transcendence, by the incessant projects without which there would be neither distance nor coming together, projects without which the body would be a pure object. Not only is Dasein not an "Ithing fitted out with a body,''6 but it is not enclosed within a bit of space in the way we think of things being so enclosed. "Dasein takes — in the literal sense of the word — place. In no manner is it simply presentathand in a bit of space that the body fills up."7 The spatiality of the body extends beyond its boundaries, as is shown by the mere grasp, or by one's orientation that keeps track of what is here and
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then over there. But why not then accord to the body the status of a possibility altogether fundamental to Dasein? But, as we know, the body is not an "existential." Why? Precisely because transcendence (in other words, understanding) like the other existentials such as attunement (Stemming) and "thrownness" (Geworfenheit) — both permeated with transcendence — are structures more original than the body. The understanding of the world immediately happens to the body. The "proof" of this is given by the fact that sensation, sense data, is not initially registered in a raw state and then related to external objects. "As essential understanding, Dasein is in the midst of what it understands.'' 8 There are no "pure" sensations, but a noise, for example, is directly related to a worldly being. We always understand the noise of some thing: a car that goes by, a door that slams, the rain that falls, and very rarely a "pure sound." "That in the first place we hear motorcycles or cars is the phenomenal proof that Dasein qua beingintheworld in each case is in the midst of what is readytohand within the world, and not first in the midst of 'sensations' whose jumble must first be shaped in order to provide the springboard from which the subject might leap in order finally to gain a world."9 In other words, the body cannot be considered an autonomous and independent basis of the world; it does not face the world as the philosophy of subjectivity would like to think. The capacity of relating sense data directly to exterior objects that the phenomenology of the body attributes only to the body in reality depends on beingintheworld. It depends not only on the body but on the modes of openness, which are understanding, attunement, and thrownness. "Acoustic perception is founded on hearing (Hören) . . . Dasein hears because it understands."10 Without faculties there is no perception; without understanding there are no faculties. When Dasein does not understand, for instance when someone speaks a foreign language, one does not intend pure impressions of sound, but "first of all unintelligible words."11 One does not need to formulate a judgment about these auditory sensations to do this, as Descartes and Kant believed. It is enough for Dasein to "understand" — not intellectually — that it is dealing with another person who speaks. Likewise, it is because Dasein is always already "over there,"12 "outside," related to the world, that it sees and understands "at a distance." The "bearing" of the senses is not a "natural" bearing, it is the bearing of a grasp which "distances." Vision and hearing traverse distances only through an understanding of distance. For Heidegger, this understanding, as all understanding, returns to the body but does not emanate from it. As for understanding itself, it is always linked to a practical concern, to a circumspection (Umsicht). It arises from the preoccupation concerning space and time that have to be passed through every day in the instrumental world whose "measure" is neither objective nor subjective. Every perception is based on understanding as a practical possibility of relating to beings, of acting in the everyday world.
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The Heideggerian analysis shows that our bodily sensibility does not exist purely "physically," that it has no need of being informed by conceptual forms; rather, it is permeated with understanding and attunement. The senses inform us only about what, in a certain sense, we have already understood. But such a formulation seems to mean that the senses can be separated from understanding. Yet, what is "proper" to the senses is to immediately understand and always to be traversed by attunements: ". . . our humanmortal hearing and seeing do not have their genuine element in mere sense reception. . . " 13 In other words, significance is not added to the "sensible,'' but it is immanent in it from the beginning. If the Greeks, says Heidegger, were able to see Apollo in the statue of a young man, it is because they had an understanding of the god which preceded the visual impression. He also says that to understand is to have at one's disposal a "vision" that "does not designate a perception by means of bodily eyes."14 And by the same token it is necessary to beware of thinking that this understanding belongs to an intelligible sphere which could be detached from the senses. This primordial sight as well as thrownness and affectivity (Befindlichkeit) constitute the openness of the world in which the body is situated and makes sense. The understanding of the being of intraworldly beings is more original than pure sensation or visual perception.15 Thus the body is always inserted in the attuned activity projected by Dasein. The body is not only absorbed and born along outside of itself by transcendence and the diverse projects of the world; it also reveals itself as an actual possibility in which we are blindly "thrust." Every project is itself "thrown." The "sense for the situation" (Befindlichkeit) calls us back at every moment to this subjection. Here too the body merges, as it were, into the more elementary and larger structures of beingintheworld. The body is nothing but one manifestation among others of facticity or Geworfenheit, "thrownness." Facticity does not mean being subjected to the necessity of brute facts, but in the first place it corresponds to the fact of being in general, regardless of how unobjective it may be. Thrownness means being always already engaged in the "there" that must be conceived as a network of determinate possibilities. In Geworfenheit "it is disclosed that Dasein is always already mine and is so in a determinate world and beside a determinate sphere of determinate intra worldly beings."16 Thrownness is correlative to the ontic determination of Dasein as destined both to a determinate historical world, that of an epoch, and to a particular "nature," or character. "Havingbeenthrown"17 literally encompasses every "past" of Dasein, including that past which is entirely prior (which has never been present) of "natural" beings to which it is mingled. Birth, as a fact (at some date, in some social standing) and beingabletodie both as an actual and a pure possibility, belongs to Geworfenheit. "Since Dasein exists, it is by this fact already thrown into this possibility"18 (of beingtowarddeath). Thus, facticity covers an immense domain that encompasses and goes beyond the body proper, inextricably linking together the historical and universal pos
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sibilities (of culture), the limited and local possibilities, and all the other actual determinations which are hardly possibilities and which nevertheless are to be taken over. For Dasein is compelled to take over its "indebtedness" regarding the whole of its possibilities, which means it must take over its basis, its Grund which originally is not its own Grund (because it has not given it to itself). Yet, contrary to Sartrean freedom, the facticity of this "indebtedness" also implies that no full selfappropriation of it is possible. Although "thrown as a self," Dasein is ''never master" 19 of its own facticity. Stemming fundamentally reveals facticity, thrownness, the alreadythere of the there. In attunements, in sadness or joy, Dasein "finds itself" in the face of its already there, the alreadythere of the world and of itself. All understanding is imbued with a disposition which situates it, anchors it, or makes it remember its anchorage. "Understanding is never free floating, but is always attuned."20 So, at the beginning of §29, Heidegger can also write that in Stemming beingintheworld sometimes shows itself as a "weight," a "burden." If facticity were limited to the body, such a declaration would end up by situating Stemming on the side of autoaffection, of "cenesthesis," indeed of Sartrean "nausea." Dasein would feel nothing but its own weight or relief from this subjective load. But it is nothing of the sort. Stemming is, as we will see, both a property and not a property, both relative to the I and relative to the world. But first of all it is relative to the world. Stemming does not first provide access to a subjective interiority, nor to a selfenclosed bodily state. It is an attunement that we do not first perceive in us. Do we not say "I am in such and such mood," not "such and such a mood is in me"? More exactly, it is what we occupy ourselves with, what we read or watch that interests us, stimulates us, bores us — in short, that always produces these often changing dispositions. Phenomenologically speaking, Stemming, the atmosphere, emanates from the things themselves and not from our subjectivity or from our bodiliness. In Stemming the world presents itself as what touches us, concerns us, affects us. If we were not thus accosted, struck, surprised by things, we could never experience feelings of security or dread, nor even discover the differences among beings. "The pure intuition of a something presentathand . . . could never discover something as menacing."21 For Heidegger, without the Stemming that implicates us in the world there would be no knowledge, because there would be no desire to know. In order to want to know it is necessary to have been affected, touched. Without Stemming our understanding of the world would be like a spectacle that would always remain "exterior" to us. Yet Stemming is not somehow the obscure face or companion of understanding: it is just as originary as understanding. To understand being is to experience the "there" of a situation. It is one and the same thing to say that every project is thrown and that every understanding or possibility is "disposed," affected by a Stemming. Stemming opens the world in a radical manner, for one cannot
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trace it back to a simple atmosphere that surrounds things. It traverses and thus manifests the totality of beings. In a single stroke it modifies the overall look of the world. After Being and Time Heidegger will also abandon the term Befindlichkeit, which still refers too much to the fact of Dasein "finding itself" (sich befinden) in a subjective way, and he speaks more and more of Grundstimmung, the attunement of the ground. It is in terms of the ground of Stemming that Dasein grasps "its" possibilities: "In the mode of attunement (Gestimmtheit) Dasein 'sees' the possibilities in virtue of which it is.'' 22 Stemming reveals what is implied by the fact of being in being. This is why it reveals a sort of neutral universality without origin, disquietingly irreducible to subjectivity. In Stemming Dasein can coincide neither with its I nor with the world: "attunement brings Dasein before the 'That' (Dab ) of its There as what stands out over against Dasein as an inexorable enigma."23 Therefore, Dasein trenchantly flees or seeks to avoid what Stimmung reveals: the strange connection of facticity and totality. But, Heidegger says, one cannot free oneself from a "mood" except by a contrary mood; that is what we usually mean by a "bad mood," i.e., a denial of the affective situation. Only Angst exposes us to it without defense. Stemming maintains a privileged relation with the body. Attunements are accompanied by physiological modifications. But Stemming is not determined by these. The breadth of Stemming, its connection with facticity and totality, makes it inhabit and, at the same time, "surround" the body like antennae; this connection makes Stemming animate and comprehend the body. Bodily sensibility is in a way subsumed in Stemming. This means that pleasure and pain, for example, are not simple effects of stimuli on the body or in the body, but in each case they qualitatively depend on the whole situation in which they occur. A man who is "preoccupied," "distraught," uneasy, attentive, "relaxed," will in each instance feel the agreeable or disagreeable differently, perhaps he will not feel anything, or will feel it more acutely. And we are always "situated" in a determinate mode of preoccupation. We are never just right here, but over there where we are aiming at in our projects. Thus one could say that Stemming is like the spirit that envelops the body. "Stemming," writes Heidegger, "can enclose man in his bodiliness like a prison. But through bodiliness as one of its paths and ways of expression [Ausschwingungsbahnen) Stemming can also transport him."24 In other words, we can be prisoners of our sensuality or, on the contrary, forgetful of our body in joy or enthusiasm, only because first of all we are open to this or that disposition that the body translates symbolically or analogically. Stimmung and Subjectivity of Feeling Heidegger often emphasizes the existential character of Stemming, which means its ontological and nonphysiological character.25 His analysis is not
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directed toward enriching psychology or erecting an anthropology but toward describing the primordial structures of beingintheworld. In Being and Time, Dasein's experiencing the thrownness of its project depends on its beingdisposed as such (whatever the content of this disposition may be). Stemming is the anchorage and ballast of the world. Nevertheless, concretely or ontically Stemming is not reduced to a universal transcendental condition. We always experience things through a welldefined disposition, be it poignantly as in Angst or joy, be it vague like indifference or urgent and focused like fear or disgust. Nevertheless, such a disposition can be neither identified with a feeling or a purely interior emotion nor devoid of all relations with them. How is one to distinguish Stemming and feeling? Stemming is not something completely other than feeling; rather, it consists of a nonintentional feeling, one not yet explicitly related to the ego or that the individual subject cannot yet claim as its own. Nevertheless, there is nothing unconscious here! Things show themselves in a different light according to our disposition. We do not take this phenomenon to be a mark of subjective distortion. "Objectivity" appears at the same time as subjectivity. Objectivity is derivative: it is "the consideration of all things minus feeling." 26 It is a third moment. The first disclosure of the world happens by way of the thousands of nuances of a nonsubjective feeling. Without it our understanding would be free floating, unsituated. It is in a second moment that we say, "But, after all, it is I who thus sees and senses things." Then Stemming becomes Erlebnis, "lived experience,'' Gefühl, subjective, private feeling. Its nonreference to the subject gives feeling an impersonality, a quasiuniversality, a neutrality close to objectivity. There is joy; it is not my joy. Familiar things, other people, suddenly light up with a flash and a completely novel charm. Likewise — or rather inversely — in Angst, the customary contours and significations of the world become blurred, bizarre; my own being escapes me. All this occurs before being able to discover myself as anguished. Moreover, as Heidegger shows, most of those who have gone this route conclude "But that was nothing!" Stemming is not necessarily interiorized. In an astonishing page from his book Passages, Henri Michaux has given an absolutely penetrating description of Stemming and its mutability. Joy surprises us. When it fades away into melancholy, the latter is not related to the I ("Whose?"), but it is experienced as an immense horizon where "everything distresses." The I remains in the background: it takes part in Stemming and its mysterious changes of quality and intensity, as well as in the events of the world — events that Stemming immediately fills up and transforms as if by magic. Here is this page:27 One catches it in the act, the streaming change of moods. Suddenly joy is there, revealed before our sensing it. One has but to recognize it. But a few minutes later, without a break, it slows down and comes to a standstill in
Page 40 some muddle where it finds a strong tether and which it cannot undo, prowling around without gain. Yet there is an end to the difficulty; there it soars away again, insouciance, joy. But what is this here? Sadness? Whose? Why? About what things, suddenly so numerous, enclosing the horizon? Slowly, a melancholy traverses melancholy, meeting further on a melancholy which melts and draws itself out into a new melancholy. The chariots are stuck. Everything distresses. Everything "repels." Melancholy is always robust.
Thus Stemming is the ground of feeling, its anterior dimension. Through it we always "know," although in a nonreflective manner, "where" we are "at." This revelation of the situation is well expressed by the locution created by the first French translators of Sein und Zeit: "the feeling of the situation'' (Befindlichkeit). Yet by this we do not primarily mean the grasp by the I of a particular situation (and through it of the situation in general, namely of being thrown in the world), but the feeling whose "theme" is the situation itself. Stemming makes the "there" come into the light of day before the Self [Soi]. On the other hand, when it becomes subjective, when it is interiorized, feeling alienates itself from the situation. This difference between Stemming and feeling could be illustrated, though imperfectly, by the difference between the prior disposition to love and love as a feeling toward someone. 28 Kierkegaard defines it brilliantly in describing the state of Cherubin in Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro."29 The pageboy flirts with all women. In reality, he doesn't love any one in particular, but the femininity in all. He is nothing but desire. It is only the lower level in the intensity of his desire that separates him from Don Juan. His desire is "still" indeterminate. It is "still" without an object. His desire is "still" a presentiment. It needs an object to be awakened. Kierkegaard follows a Hegelian line of reasoning: the "still not" of Cherubin is the notyet of immediacy, close to nature, to infancy, of the lack of distinction between the sexes. The sadness of Cherubin comes from the fact that he cannot attain the higher level of distinguishing the sexes, of separating desire from its object. If one can disregard its Hegelianism, which reduces Cherubin to natural universality and discovers in it an unresolved contradiction, Kierkegaard's description corresponds to what every Stemming reveals: a unity that precedes the subjectobject division; a nonverbal dimension for which music is a more faithful analogy than is language. Kierkegaard has described Stemming in a Hegelian manner, but as the musicality of the sense, of the body, "inspired sensuality," a "stage" inferior to discourse. Heidegger thinks Stemming as a music complete by itself, as attunement, the accord that defines the profound coherence of beingintheworld: "A Stemming is an air . . . in the sense of a melody which does not float over the actual, allegedly genuine presence of man but sets the tone for this being, that is, harmonizes (stimmt) and determines (bestimmt) its style and its manner of being."30
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By its attunements, basic affectivity opens more broadly to the world than does any perception and any concept. Indeed, intelligence or rationality never could have allowed us to adequately conceive the opened totality that is present and absent and in which we are situated. "In the end there remains an essential difference between grasping (Erfassen) the totality of beings in itself and finding oneself (Sichbefinden) in the midst of beings in their totality. The first is fundamentally impossible. The second constantly occurs in our Dasein." 31 Also, even though it does not function like a psychology, the analysis of Stemming requires a redefinition of the relation between feeling and reason and, finally, a modification of the very idea of human being. One must concede that feeling, like Stemming, has an even greater and more radical significance than does rationality. The tradition has subordinated feeling — always confused, vague, contradictory — to reason — clear, logical, univocal — as it has the body to the mind. But reason can only put in order the world revealed and opened up by presubjective affectivity. However, Heidegger never intends to reverse the traditional preeminence of rational thinking over feeling in the way of Romanticism (for Novalis, "thinking is only a dream of feeling . . .")32 or of Nietzsche, for whom thoughts are only the shadows of feeling33 or a pale reverberation of drives. Nietzsche proposes the primacy of the body. In the end, Heidegger does not propose the primacy of Stemming but of the manifestation of being through it. Stemming appears as impersonal only because it belongs to the world or to what the later Heidegger calls an epoch of being prior to its relation to a body or to a subject. Hence the question: does the truth of Stemming belong only to the order of the "universal" and historical? Does it not also refer to the Earth? Whatever the answer may be, a feeling not related to the I is vague or obscure only from the point of view of reason. It has its own intelligence where the whole precedes the part, where being precedes beings. The analysis of Stemming also implies a rupture that is difficult to accomplish — a rupture with the traditional primacy of interiority and consciousness. This is not in order to effect a reversal which would aim to affirm the primacy of exteriority and the unconscious. Stemming sketches in a different way, outside of the individual appropriation through feelings, a mode of "affective" presence of things and of beings which allows them to be themselves. To "listen to" Stemming, it is necessary not only to eschew the definitions given by the rational faculty of understanding but to take one's distance from the egocentric interiority of feeling and its intentionality. Our epoch is without doubt too thoroughly molded by the reign of subjectivity to open itself to such a phenomenon, foreign as it is to the sensationalism of "lived experience" which, by way of memoirs, confessions, and romanticized biographies, predominates in the press and in popular literature.
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Stimmung and the History of Being: Anxiety and Wonder Not every Stemming estranges. Most of the time original affectivity reveals the familiarity of beings, of places, of things. A fundamental attunement, a Grundstimmung, is rare and manifests itself as a sudden estrangement of the familiar. Anxiety wrenches us from the reassuring facts of everydayness and in some way makes us touch the texture and limits of beingintheworld as such. Does anxiety alone possess this privilege of authenticity? Is it the "foundation" of all the other Stimmungen? Why isn't it wonder, which is the most ancient feeling attested to in the philosophical tradition? But first, what does "limits of the world" mean? In trying to define the attunement of Hö1derlin's poetry Heidegger shows that a "fundamental" Stemming not only makes manifest the unity of a world but transports us to the limits of beings, 34 which specifically means: it puts us in relation with the nocturnal ground of the world, the Earth; it puts us in relation with the sacred and the gods, in relation with Being as Geschick, destiny, History. Thus a Grundstimmung reveals not only our situation in the world but the situation of the world with regard to earth, the divine, and history. Already in the early Heidegger one sees that Dasein discovers the "natural" aspect of its thrownness by way of Stemming. "Nature is originally manifest in Dasein by the fact that it exists as dispositionally attuned [befindlichgestimmtes] in the midst of beings."35 Nevertheless, being in accord or discord with natural beings didn't have any great significance for Dasein, for nature was still pure and simple facticity. When, on the contrary, Stemming rejoins man not to a natural subsistent being but to the earth or to the homeland (Heimat), as with Hö1derlin, then we have a true reversal of the point of view of Being and Time, for the earth qua Heimat contains a historical dimension, and history manifests itself by way of and in this earth. Hö1derlin's Grundstimmung evokes a historical event as it sings the elements: it celebrates the "sacred mourning," the experience both of the remoteness of the gods and the distressing distance from the homeland. Therefore this Grundstimmung does not develop a "feeling for nature" stemming from the singular melancholy of a subject. Stemming conveys the intrication of the homeland and a history in which it is not certain that History is the determinant. Is not Stemming ''fundamental" because it gathers together the natural and historical into a common "destiny"? The historicality of Stemming is a discovery that comes after the Turn. In Being and Time it seems that anxiety should be experienced by all Daseins in every epoch. In reality, the question of the epochal destiny of Stimmungen has not yet been posed. After the Turn — that is, in the light of the History of Being — will anxiety retrospectively appear as a vesperal, twilight attunement, linked only to the epoch of the end of metaphysics? The Greeks certainly did not experience anxiety any more than they thought in terms of
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reflexivity and selfconsciousness. Could anxiety have sense only through and for subjectivity? Could anxiety be, in the epoch of technology, nothing but a holdover from the epoch of subjectivity? In fact, Heidegger opposes wonder (in Greek, thaumazein) which had been the Stemming of thinking at its commencement, to anxiety — or rather, dread — which, in the last epoch (which is ours), perhaps announces "another commencement," which means the transition toward an "other History." "In wonder [étonnement] (Erstaunen), which is the fundamental attunement of the first commencement, beings for the first time come to stand in their shape. In dread (Erschrecken), which is the fundamental attunement of the other commencement, the somber emptiness of the absence of a goal and the flight in the face of the first and ultimate decisions are revealed behind every progressivism and every sort of domination over beings." 36 Struck by the marvel of being, "surprised," which means seized, arrested (as Heidegger puts it) by "the uncustomary in the habitual," the Greeks were the first to see and name the eidos, the Gestalt, beings as such. That beings could be in the constancy and nondissimulation of their forms dazzled them and thrust them upon the path of metaphysics. This initial wonder has become foreign to us even though it has always determined us, for through developing a knowledge of beings in their being, the exactitude and certitude of forms or essences in metaphysics and subsequently science have become second nature to us. Greek wonder turned into Cartesian, then technological, evidence. Form has become the historical to us. We know and master the essence of things far too much to be able to sense their enigmatic upsurge. So, we are surprised neither by what is most enigmatic and distant nor by what is simplest and nearest: being. But why are we susceptible to dread as the prevailing attunement of our epoch? Dread is the historical name for anxiety. Just as, on the one hand, anxiety appears not as an interior event but as the collapse of the worldrelations available up till then, so on the other hand dread accompanies the collapse of metaphysical truths that have reigned up till then, namely, ontotheological truth. Dread results from a return to the abysmal and indeterminable character of being. Being once more becomes entirely enigmatic. Beings appear deprived of meaning. Yet this dread is neither necessarily nor universally fathomed [ressenti] by the epoch itself. The distress in the midst of which we find ourselves may be incapable of making itself known as a fundamental attunement. Certainly there is always a vague attunement, but no thinking can emerge from such a Stemming. Indeed, it is the inverse of the dread that reigns under the guise of security: it is the "distress of the absence of distress," the false certitude that one "has a hold on" the real, that all in all there is no noteworthy disquietude to be stirred up.37 Hence it seems that a Grundstimmung both signifies a Stemming that summons thought and ''makes an epoch," or founds History. Far from this Stemming being able only to respond to an epochal
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situation, it allows there to be an epoch in the first place; it is the background of epochality. "It is called 'fundamental attunement' [Grundstimmung] because this attunement transports humans that it attunes into that upon which and in which words, works, and deeds are grounded as things that happen and where history can commence." 38 Such a Stemming is the temporalization of time, the source of History in general. Stemming is not simply caught in History or floating above it like a "spirit of the time," but it is a matrix in which being occurs as History. As such, it is both inside and outside of History. As we will see, it shares this ambivalence with Earth. Every Grundstimmung discloses the Grund, the abysmal ground of being. Thus profound boredom makes Dasein face pure, "ecstatic" temporality. Surely this is also the case with joy, hope, enthusiasm, and serenity even though Heidegger does not expressly say so. Nevertheless, does not anxiety have a privilege? It is no accident that apart from his lectures39 Heidegger dedicated three major pieces to it, namely §40 of Being and Time (1927), the essay "What Is Metaphysics?" (1929), and the ''Afterword" to this essay (1943). Is not anxiety the only one among all the Stimmungen that makes Dasein face Nothing, or Nothingness, which means the very essence of being as what differs [différant] from all beings? Without. anxiety the difference between authenticity and inauthenticity would not be revealed. And a commentator like Bollnow was able to write, "The entire philosophical edifice of Heidegger rests on the narrow base of a single attunement."40 There is no doubt that this formulation is excessive and incorrect insofar as anxiety is not itself a Grund, a basis. But it is true that in one fell swoop it accomplishes the transcendental reduction, the leap from the ontic to the ontological without which it would be necessary, as with Husserl, to resort to a methodological procedure. Anxiety dispenses with long discourses for it dispenses with language: it severs speech. It takes the initiative, it always astonishes. It is, as JeanFrançois Courtine correctly notes, "the upsurge of difference."41 Ever since Being and Time it manifests the primacy of being and world over Dasein. In fact, anxiety has a "transepochal" privilege, and in several respects. Even if as dread (before the abyss of being) it is the attunement of our epoch, it is without doubt the only Stemming which can be experienced in other epochs, at least in those since the reign of the metaphysics of subjectivity. Certainly it is hardly thinkable in Greek philosophy, but under the names of "dread" and "ennui" it is found at the center of Pascal's thinking and that of Kierkegaard. This does not mean that Heideggerian anxiety is reducible to the subjective experience of an individual in the face of God or of a consciousness in the face of itself, like Sartrean anxiety. "We say 'In anxiety it is uncanny to us.' What do the 'it' and the 'us' signify? All things and even ourselves sink into an indifference. . . . In anxiety 'we are suspended. . . .' This is why at bottom there is neither a 'you' nor a 'me' for whom it is uncanny, but an 'us.' All that is still there in the shock of this suspense, within which one can hold onto nothing, is pure beingthere."42
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The "us" translates the German "einem": "someone.'' Anxiety makes the subject no longer know who it is. It takes part in its own "wild" deconstruction, if one can put it this way. This "one" is no longer a subject but an indeterminate presence which feels invaded by a feeling of uncanniness. This indetermination on the side of the "subject" corresponds, on the side of the "object," to a collapse of the finite totality of equipmental relations constituting the world. The text says this indetermination spreads "a fascinated pause" 43 that is not at all a fascination by emptiness: it means that Dasein recoups its essential possibilities, it returns from the "decline" into routine discourse and everyday preoccupations to its mere ability to be temporal, mortal, and to a sort of new and, initially, simplified identity. From the point of view of the History of Being, anxiety as the upsurge of difference does not reinstitute the selfsecurity of subjectivity. It is neither a reflexive self apprehension of consciousness nor a dissolution of subjectivity into the world. Anxiety manifests man as dispossessed of his transcendental faculties, it marks the time of a pause in the metaphysical race toward the perpetual reinforcement of the powers of the human subject. This experience of radical fragility and impotence forever leaves human presence exposed to the breath of the abyss. No assurance by "logic" and science can guard it against this dispossession that makes "the most profound finitude escape our liberty."44 The thought of Stemming marks the end of the philosophy of the will and opens the era of the awaiting —awaiting nonmeasurable events, an awaiting situated, if not already outside of History, at least at its limit: "Original anxiety can awaken in Dasein at any moment. It does not need any unusual event to awaken it. The trifling character of its possible pretext corresponds to the profundity of its reign."45 Even if the two Stimmungen bear some similarities, this could be only because both initially leave one speechless, without words; anxiety could be seen as the inverse experience of wonder (which is the amazement in the face of the gift of being); namely, the withdrawal of being. Beings show themselves, but as completely slipping away from our familiar instrumental grasp. Anxiety presents itself as the only Stemming that brings about the fundamental experience of nothingness. "In the clear night of the nothingness of anxiety — it is only there that the original openness of beings as such arises. . . . Only on the basis of the original manifestation of nothingness can the Dasein of man approach beings. . . In the being of beings comes the nothing of nothingness."46 Only anxiety can tear open the veil of beings and make one face what is other than all beings. "Anxiety bestows an experience of being as what is other than all beings, assuming that through 'anxiety' in the face of anxiety, which means in the mere anxiousness of fear, we do not avoid the silent voice which disposes us to dread the abyss."47 Every Stemming is an experience and every experience is a Stemming, which means a manner of silently being disposed by being. But anxiety is this experience par excellence by which all speech is taken away. Does
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this absolute withdrawal of speech not place History itself in parentheses? Does not anxiety make us regress to this side of History or to pass beyond it? Anxiety is "metaphysical" in that it enables one to glimpse the Self as well as the totality of the epoch, of all epochs and situations, as suspended possibilities. In the end it seems that anxiety is the only Stemming secretly and, without doubt, partially present at the ground of every other Stemming. Is it not even partially present in joy: this heart which beats more rapidly, this suddenly increased and accelerated density of time? "Anxiety cannot be opposed to joy or to the happy agreement of a peaceful striving. It maintains itself — on this side of such oppositions — in a secret alliance with serenity and the sweetness of creative aspiration." 48 Far from being contrary to serenity, and thus far from being linked to subjectivistic voluntarism, anxiety maintains an affinity with Gelassenheit, with serenity. Revealing what metaphysics has forgotten — Nothingness, the totallyotherthanbeings — it sets one on the path of a postmetaphysical, hence posthistorical, relation with being. For this reason anxiety should be called eschatological49because beyond the ultimate end it portends a new dawn.
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IV Physis and Earth Standing there, the building stands on the rocky ground. This repose of the work draws forth from the rock the obscurity of that rock's bulky yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the building withstands the raging storm and thus first reveals the storm itself in its violence. The glimmer and shining of the stones, though apparently only by grace of the sun, indeed first bring the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the dimness of night to shine forth. The secure towering of the temple makes the invisible space of the air visible. The steadfastness of the work stands over against the undulating of the tide and, from out of its calmness, allows its storming to appear. The tree and the grass, the eagle and the bull, the snake and the cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and so come to shine forth as what they are. This coming forth and arising itself and in all things was called, early on by the Greeks, "physis." It lights and clears that whereupon and wherein man grounds his dwelling. We name it the earth. What this word says here must be kept separate from both the notion of a finished clump of material as well as the merely astronomical notion "planet." The earth is that wherein the arising brings back and shelters [zurückbirgt] all that arises and indeed as such an arising. In what arises the earth comes to be as that which harbors [das Bergende]. 1
Far from disavowing his first phenomenological interpretation of nature, which defined it as a particular type of being encountered in the world, Heidegger here seems to reinforce it by showing that "natural phenomena" — sun and night, air and sea, plants and animals, and even the places where man dwells — do not manifest themselves in their being except in contrast to the built work, namely, the Greek temple. In resisting the elements the temple reveals them, makes their presence and even their very identity sensible. Yet the temple is not a piece of equipmental being like the covered platform of a train station that serves to protect us from inclemencies. As it is said in the same essay, "The Origin of the Work of Art," this edifice which ''is not the image of anything" and which does not allude to any worldly reality nevertheless introduces the difference between nature and world. The temple gathers around itself a world (cult, laws, customs) solely within which "natural" things can first, initially (erst is repeated several times), appear as such. But at the same time it reveals another mode of presence than that of diverse natural kinds, namely the formless and ob
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scure presence of the Earth, a support at once visible and invisible which holds and undergirds all things and which is nevertheless ceaselessly neglected, passed by in silence, forgotten, "reduced to nothing." At the dawn of thought the Greeks had grasped under the name Physis both the initial appearing of things (but is it truly "initial" since it depends on the presence of a thing and of the world, of a work?) as well as the basis of all things, the universal support which remains in reserve throughout and beneath the variety of forms. Only much later will Physis designate the Nature of things conceived as their separate Principle, or again the form in itself, essence, substance. And later still Nature will be restricted to the kingdom of individual living beings which have in themselves the principle of their movement in contradistinction to art or history or to the supernatural. Yet, according to the Presocratics, to Heraclitus, Physis does not encompass or delimit a particular region of beings: it designates the totality of beings, which means "living beings and the gods." Thought as the most general trait which embraces and penetrates all reality, Physis is the first metaphysical name of the being of beings; it is the first step toward an "ontotheology" that will seek to define the immutable nature of things as a separate force, an isolable substance, a cause of all particular things. Strictly speaking, without establishing an equivalence between Physis and Earth, Heidegger clearly relates them by emphasizing that one "illuminates" the other, which is the foundation of man's abode; Physis, he says, "lights up that upon which and in which man founds his dwelling. We name this the Earth." But this coming together, though indirect, is surprising and raises a question: might Physis be the illuminated part of the Earth, the disclosure of a totality of which the Earth would be the nocturnal aspect? Such a nontotalizable "totality" could have sense only as indicating the full essence of truth. For the Earth itself can hardly refer to a totality. But does not the Earth coincide, as we will see, with the dimension of withdrawal, obscurity, with the lethe in the essence of aletheia? Whatever the case may be, contrary to Physis, which already contains in germ the metaphysical idea of the totality of beings, the Earth only appears as a complement to the world. The Earth conceals itself, certainly as Physis, but it does not illuminate itself on its own. It conceals itself more than it reveals itself, and yet it reveals itself as that which steals away since it is "that which comes forth as sheltering itself'' (das HervorkommendBergend). But it does not show itself on its own, for in order to appear it must show itself in a world, by means of a world. It is simultaneously available and inaccessible, disclosed and concealed in the thingliness of things and in the "materiality" of works of art. Nevertheless, Earth is not "metaphysical" because it does not convey the name or names for the being of beings in their totality. The concept of the Earth seems to refer to the History of being only so as to better place itself beyond or prior to it. What the Greeks grasped only as the clearing — our abode itself — we name the "Earth": we, at the other ex
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tremity of history, in echoing the commencement and knowing all the mutations of Physis into nature, essence, substance, principle of movement, up to modern objectivity. Can we say then that "Earth" is the nonmetaphysical equivalent of Physis? In order to answer this question, it is advisable to clarify the relationship that the two terms maintain, not with "nature" as it is conceived by the metaphysical tradition, but with unconcealing, or with the essence of truth as disclosedness (Unverborgenheit), aletheia. 2 If Greek Physis primarily corresponds to the clearing of being, to Lichtung, Earth refers primarily to the essential concealing (Verborgenheit, Bergung) which belongs to every unconcealing and about which unconcealment remains unaware. Nevertheless, Earth, because it is submitted to the law of the world, cannot be reduced to concealment. Thus, far from nature, far from plants and animals, a limit seems to arise which one must call nonhistorical. Does not Earth in its withdrawal remain sheltered from epochal mutations? This steadiness, this impassibility of the nonapparent, seems to cautiously point not toward a new "philosophy of nature" but rather toward a kind of impasse, a limit or reverse side —always already past or future — of History. The Ontological Interpretation of Physis in Heraclitus In identifying Heraclitus' physis with aletheia, in retranslating the famous Fragment 123, physis kryptesthai philei ("nature loves to hide itself"), and in interpreting physis as "what arises favors selfconcealing,"3 Heidegger does not intend to restore the true, timeless thought of Heraclitus, but his "unthought." What is the unthought? It is a thought which only belatedly surfaces in a great work of the past where it has not been expressly formulated. It is not the revelation of some negligence or insufficiency of the tradition. Rather, the unthought is the discovery by us of the latent and unspoken richness of a thinking already thought which solicits us as either misunderstood or yet to be thought. Heidegger says when Heraclitus thinks physis he thinks aletheia ''without naming it." Aletheia, the coming to uncoveredness to which a covering over belongs, constitutes the unthought essence of physis. Among other things, this means these two terms are not equivalent or reversible. Physis is being, but being is not simply "physical." Physis announces or anticipates the thought of being, but it is subordinated to it. In other words, as the essence of physis, aletheia is higher or more radical than physis. The latter is the fundamental Greek name for being, and the former is for us the essence of truth. Heraclitus did not seek to grasp the substantial foundation of the world in a natural element like fire any more than did the other Presocratics, nor to determine the universal being of things as nature in the sense of the natural beings of physics or biology. Heraclitus occupies an ambiguous posi
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tion at the dawn of metaphysics. He belongs to the latter inasmuch as he determines physis as the being of beings in their totality. Yet he escapes metaphysics in at least a twofold manner: physis does not name any individual being; rather, it names being; the basic words of Heraclitus — "the everliving fire," "the One," "harmonia aphanès," "invisible harmony" — articulate nothing but the traits of physis and speak just as strongly of being. For metaphysics, the univocity of the name which designates the being of beings will appear as necessary and evident: being will be ousia, energeia, substance, subject, will to power "and beyond this, nothing.'' Opposed to this exclusion of Nothingness is in Heraclitus the inclusion of concealment or of withdrawal in the original unity of all things, as well as the inclusion of contraries in the One. "God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit or abundance." 4 "Natural phenomena" and human events belong on strictly equal footing with the unity of physis, which is called divine. No doubt there is a more empirical cosmology in Heraclitus; no doubt the word physis more intuitively designates the image of vegetal growth (the flower that blooms, or the plant that emerges from the earth) or the rising of the sun. "This 'rising' is immediately perceptible to us in the sprouting of the seed sown in the earth, in the bursting forth of drives, in the blooming of flowers. And further, the sight of the rising sun points to the essence of blooming."5 But the pure blooming of physis does not need these ontic models and images. It is anterior to them as the condition of their appearance. "In truth, other than the specific connotation of mountains, sea, and animals, physis signifies the pure arising (des reine Aufgehen) in the power of which all that appears appears and thus 'is.'"6 By just naming physis Heraclitus does not make the "gigantic generalization" that Nietzsche attributed to Thales — who therefore was, according to him, the first philosopher — a generalization consisting in transferring to the totality of beings a trait that belongs to a specific number of them. Pure arising is not first ascertained in the domain of what we call nature and then applied to the totality of the world (from stones and plants, passing by way of animals up to man, and even to gods). Rather, the "world" ("cosmos") is thought as "fire," which means as pure emergence, as "light" which from the outset intimately penetrates, like lightning or flame, every being without encompassing it like a container. "Nature" is already grasped as "world" in the phenomenological sense. We will come back to this point. In his famous reading of Fragment 123 Heidegger brings into relief a kind of interior life, or elementary pulsation, of physis. On the one hand physis occurs according to a correlation or simultaneity of showingitself and selfwithdrawal. This withdrawal is not simply a hidden dimension, a simple closure, a kind of crypt separated from the broad daylight, but a true reserve that "feeds," so to speak, emergence. One must understand that the withdrawal contains "the essential possibility of emergence,"7 which means preserves it, protects it, maintains it. There is no "nature" without
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potentiality, without reserve, but Heidegger never speaks of a reserve of force. "It is the covering over that vouchsafes to disclosure its unfolding." The second and the most important internal trait of physis comes to light in the word that translates philei; in fact, two words: "dispense favor" (Gunst). Blooming favors withdrawal. What is Gunst, ''favor"? Favor is the freest gift that occurs as a moment of grace. Gunst comes from gönnen, "to grant a gift." As the gift par excellence, favor is the essence of physis and not an event or a particular attribute of an event. "Favor governs physis,"9 writes Heidegger. Thought as the essence of physis, favor does not signify any being or thing that might exist outside of phyein and kryptesthai, but rather the very play of arising and withdrawal. That the disclosure bears within itself a fecund, "positive" coveting over, such is "favor." That occlusion is favored by withdrawal, harmonized with it and in it; that it emerges only from a return into itself and from a saving, from the deep shelter where what does not spring forth collects itself — such is the marvel as well as the enigma of the "there is." The difference between, on the one hand, being such as it bestows itself and conceals itself in a history or gives and withdraws itself in an epoch and, on the other hand, "physical" being comes to light through the simple favor. Here it is not a question, as Reiner Schörmann supposes, of the difference between being as epochal and "a postmetaphysical determination"10 of being. How could Heraclitus be postmetaphysical since he is barely premetaphysical? Favor is the nonhistorical aspect of aletheia. Like the difference between things and the world, it marks a difference that is not situated in any determinate epoch of the History of Being and that nevertheless cannot be elsewhere than "in being." "Favor" does not indicate the possible appearing of "a space of presence deprived of the epochal principle,"11 nor does it mean that "the sending, where presence only grants itself while withdrawing, can reach its end."12 Physis holds itself in reserve only by showing itself and will always do so before, during, and after the History of being, if there is an after. It cannot overcome this law of all manifestation. Favor is immemorial. It is the nonepochal equivalent of Geschick or the sending of being which governs the "suspense" of its epochs, which surely is a poorer equivalent because it is without memory and thus without forgetting. Heidegger's reading of Heraclitus is slow and painstaking, patient and persuasive. He knows how to persuade us of the derivative, belated character of the distinctions in force today, such as that between the "biological" and the "psychological," the "natural" and the "historical." He shows in a decisive manner that the Greek reflection on physis directly overcomes all these partitionings as well as every naive "physics" and points toward beings as such as a whole. Nevertheless, confirming that Heraclitus does not deal with nature in the strict sense but speaks of being paradoxically leads Heidegger, when speaking of "favor," not only to sketch an ontology of nature "in itself," which is supposed to escape the history of the names
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for being, but also to think nature in the strict sense according to the traits of being. In sum, by extracting physis from physics, he ontologizes nature. If the tradition has forgotten being as it is discovered in physis, doesn't the thought of being in its own way obscure the being of natural beings? For there is no doubt that this interpretation makes of life a kind of appearing. The Greek verb Zen, "to live," means "to emerge into the light." 13 Precious few proofs and no genuine "philological" evidence can be given of it. It is not enough to recall that for Homer "to live" and "to see the light of the sun'' are one and the same expression, that if the Greeks name their gods "living beings" they do not understand by this "animals," that the "always living" fire of Heraclitus signified the "ever appearing" fire. The assimilation of Zoé, physis, and Lichtung presupposes, but does not demonstrate, that light is the essence of nature. "The essential link between physis, Zoé and light becomes apparent in that the Greek word for 'light' has the same root as physis, namely phaos, phôs."14 Besides this hardly convincing philological "proof" ("the roots 'phu' and 'pha,'" Heidegger says, "name the same";15 yet these roots have only a common consonant "ph"!), the Heideggerian demonstration rests upon phenomenological evidence. "Nature" is emergence, coming into daylight; thus, essentially light: Physis is the "flame" that bursts into the nonlighted, and that "separates the clear from the obscure."16 But isn't this obscurity itself the same thing as the "physical?" Can one reduce the "physical" to the "phantic?" When, referring to nature in Hö1derlin, Heidegger defines anew Greek physis with which this nature is in a secret relation, he insistently emphasizes that physis as blooming, as the opening which gives to every being its form, its aspect, is the "source of the clearing." "Physis is the arising, the source of the clearing or lighting and thus the hearth and the place of light. The radiance of the 'light' belongs to fire, it is fire. . . . Fire . . . is the Open which ever comes to presence."17 What of obscurity and, above all, what is there of Earth in this luminous physis? Earth seems to be forgotten in the whole interpretation of Heraclitus. What about physis as not just the bursting into light but as the latent thrust, the underground growth, the mute, concealed, nocturnal density? Nature according to Hö1derlin and the "Constancy" of Physis If physis as the first name for being gives way to its epochal metamorphoses and thus is forgotten, it indeed seems that something of its original essence remains constant, unaltered throughout the epochs. Otherwise, how is one to understand the resurgence of authentic Heraclitean traits in the Hö1derlinean thought of Nature? Is not the presence of the Greek commencement preserved until the Romantic epoch despite the forgetfulness and mutations that cover it over? Does its "permanence" depend upon
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some other power than History? Certainly the original sense of the word physis has withered away, but the thought of the "AllOne" in Hölderlin does not stem from a nostalgic myth or a sentimental identification with the Greeks. It is a matter of understanding the Greek opening itself beyond any epochal distance: it is in terms of the withheld truth of the original word, it is precisely in terms of aletheia and its double dimension of blooming and withdrawal, that Hö1derlin discovers Nature. This eclipse of History is the true Hö1derlinean "miracle" which is only possible if physis, or perhaps more profoundly, Earth itself, keeps a hold and a power over History. "All Hö1derlin's thinking and his understanding of being in his beinginstituting poetry are held under the spell of Heraclitus.'' 18 That Nature is a harmonious unity that gathers and traverses the totality of beings, fashioning their differences; that Nature is fire ("Come now, oh fire!")19 — these are not simply "Heraclitean themes" but the expression of the transepochal permanence of physis. The omnipresent raises in its soft embrace The powerful, the divinely beautiful, Nature.20
Marvel of omnipresence, presence everywhere open and everywhere concealed, given with every thing and never exhausting itself in any, Hö1derlinean Nature surely "retrieves" being, for it does not restrict itself to a distinct "natural" domain. "It never lets itself be encountered somewhere within the sphere of the real as some isolated real thing."21 It traverses and unifies the cosmos, plants, animals, and even the constellations and gods. Older than history — Hö1derlin says "older than time" — which means older than the epochs because it is originally time itself, "it meets out the essential order of the future history of the gods and man."22 Heidegger interprets Nature as the source of time and history, which is not found in human temporality but in the very opening of being. "Nature is older than any particular time."23 The original source of all presence, "it has always already allotted the clearing to every real thing in the open solely within which all that is real can appear." Nature draws its power from a Gewesen, an original, prehistoric gathering. If there is a "softness" to Nature, if it holds everything "in its soft embrace," it is because it is not chained to the heaviness of an ontic reality. Its unifying, embracing "power" that in itself is "soft," distinct from all localizable force, flows from the singular omnipresence of its appearing. All its splendor, all its beauty, like that of the Heraclitean "cosmos," even all its divinity consists in its giving to every isolated appearance, but above all to the "contraries," the tension of their belonging together. This power of harmony and beauty (Heidegger says Nature "keeps the most extreme opposites apart")24 is celebrated with a fervor and ardor that is almost mystical in the amazing praise and final benediction of Hyperion:
Page 54 The dissonances of the world are like lovers' quarrels. Reconciliation inheres in dispute, and all which has been separated comes together. The arteries which leave the heart come back to it: all is but one life, burning, eternal. 25
Once more one thinks of Heraclitus: "an inapparent harmony surpasses the apparent harmony," but the metaphor of the "heart" seems to be the mark of an unbroachable epochal distance. Yet, "Alles ist innig," "everything is intimately related." What stands in opposition stands in opposition to itself, in itself, on the basis of a unity of contraries everywhere secretly at work. Heidegger shows what Hö1derlin calls "Spirit'' is not Hegelian reason but simply the harmonious intimacy of Nature. Beauty allows the opposite to be present in its opposition. . . . Beauty is the allpresent.26
This insistence on pure presence, on appearing, on light, on the opening, on primordial emergence, seems to neglect the dimension of obscurity and withdrawal, the earthly pole of physis. The possibility of concealment is barely evoked, and Obscurity, the Night which hides Nature before the dawn, is associated by the poet with mourning. Yet nature does not dispense itself as shadeless presence, as full presence equal to itself, peacefully open. Hö1derlin directly identifies Nature with the Holy (das Heilige). "The Holy is the being of Nature," Heidegger emphasizes. But the Holy appears not only "calmly" as beneficent but in tumult and terror, under the guise of Chaos and the abyss: But now day breaks! I hoped and saw it coming, And what I saw, the Sacred, my word shall convey! ……….……….……….……….……….................................. Nature now is awakened amid clashing weapons, And from high in the Ether down into the abyss below According to a strict law, as formerly, born from the sacred Chaos.27
It would be false to conclude hastily from this that the double character of physis can again be found in the complementarity of the luminous Open and the abysmal Holy. For as Heidegger shows — in agreement with R. Otto, who has made it the essential theme of a celebrated study28 — this double aspect of diurnal and nocturnal, appeasing and repelling, salutary and disquieting, belongs to the Sacred itself. All the ambivalence of Heraclitean physis — peace and war, famine and plenty, fullness and reserve —seems contained in the concept of the Sacred. Indeed, when Hö1derlin speaks of Nature as sacred, he says that it is both near and unapproachable, immediate and mediate. It is difficult to think this because it is a mat
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ter of a nondialectic immediacy. The duality of expansion and return to self which is the essence of the immediate is indeed no more dialectical in Hölderlin than it was in Heraclitus, for the opposite determinations are not successive and synthetic but simultaneous and disjunctive. But what is the Sacred, and what is its connection with the duality of immediate and mediate? The Hö1derlinian Sacred echoes anew Heraclitean thought: "The One consents and does not consent to be named Zeus." The Sacred is neither an emanation of divinity nor a quality of a human or divine person like holiness. Heidegger's position here can neither be separated nor even distinguished from that of Hö1derlin. As the space of the appearance of the divine, the Sacred is anterior to the gods and to the divine itself. 29 It is the originally unscathed, the untouched, the primordial gift of presence which as such is unapproachable. That from which every gift proceeds closes in on itself; what clears and opens every proximity is paradoxically unapproachable. Hence the double Stemming of the Sacred: familiarity, intimacy, penetrating tenderness and at the same time estrangement, anxiety at the loss of every familiar ground. The Sacred "immediately" lavishes in ambivalence: it encompasses and expels. The immediacy of the Sacred is so surprising, so prepossessing, that it is incomprehensible without mediation. This mediation belongs to Logos, which transfigures the immediate. According to Hö1derlin, the poet functions as a mediator: it is the poet who changes "the terror of the immediate . . . into the tenderness of mediate and mediating speech."30 The poem makes the Sacred approachable "without risk": the sons of the Earth now drink the celestial fire without risk31
As with Heraclitus (who differentiated Logos from physis and its characteristic expressions), it is here necessary to distinguish two Logoi, one being the "immediate" logos of the Sacred itself, the other the mediate logos of poetic speech, of the hymn or song. Heidegger calls the Sacred "the poem anterior to all utterance" (unvordichtbar, literally without an utterable precedent). The first Logos is the silence prior to all speech, not the ineffable, but the collected, the unity which precedes all utterance. The unutterable, the Sacred, expresses itself in poetic speech at the risk of losing itself. Indeed, the agitation, the dread, the anxiety that reside in the immediacy of the Sacred are abated, mediated. It is necessary for the modesty of the poet to know how to connect with this abysmal dimension. This modesty must know how to be silent so as to respond to the silence of the Sacred. To seek "the highest" means to keep hush about it. In any case, this danger of betraying the Sacred is finally avoided when man ceases considering the Sacred as an object to be reached, to be described adequately from the outside. The Sacred is nothing "in itself"; it is
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born in the poem, it is what "inspires" the poet. "Let the Sacred be my speech!" "The Sacred bestows speech and itself arrives in this speech. . . . The poem is dictated by what by itself arrives. . . . " 32 Once again the echo of the celebrated sentence of Heraclitus on Logos seems to resound though the poetry of Hö1derlin as Heidegger interprets it: It is not the I of the poet that seizes upon the sacred but the logos of the Sacred that speaks through the poet. Does this decentering, which is hardly "Romantic," of poetic subjectivity nevertheless let all the "permanence" of Greek physis within modern Nature appear? What is the essence of this "persistence"33 that makes Nature forever remain "the coming of the commencement"?34 Is it therefore the persistence of the Anfang or the great Greek commencement, the persistence of a historical debut? But is this persistence not necessarily interrupted? If the commencement remains completely unperturbable, must it not somehow reside outside even of every epoch as something nonhistorical or prehistorical? It seems that physis reappears in Hö1derlin's Sacred only because in its original commencement it never enters into history. If not, how could this sacred found ''an other commencement," "an other History"?35 Could it have inaugurated history ("At the commencement the Sacred decides in advance concerning man and gods")36 if it were caught inside it? The enigmatic anteriority of the Sacred founds History, is "older than time and above the gods," and makes an ambiguous allusion to a nonhistorical principle. At times it seems that the Heideggerian interpretation meets up with the most distant, the most recondite, and certainly the least personal of all the figures of God: concerning the One whom Hö1derlin calls the "Father," the "eternal heart," "the pure fire of the Father," Heidegger indeed says (speaking in a manner oddly similar to Saint Anselm's "nothing greater can be thought") that "nothing more original can be thought,"37 "nothing can be thought of as being earlier"! At times it instead seems that Heidegger, the commentator, rather emphasizes this strangely rebel principle which, in the very opening of being, cannot be bent back on epochality nor drawn into the light. Yet, should this Hö1derlinean "chaos," this wild, barbarous, obscure, abysmal principle that persists "under" History, be identified with what Heidegger describes elsewhere as Earth? Not at all: for Heidegger the Earth is hardly "wild"; as we will see, it has its own order, as obscure as it may be, and its strict limits! It is neither God, nor chaos, nor the unity of the two. That "pure nature" is chaos is a thought that Hö1derlin apparently shares with Nietzsche, at least from a superficial point of view, and not with the Greeks. As for Heidegger, he radically rejects any idea of Nature as originally undifferentiated. Also, from the outset he greatly diminishes the connotation of "panic" that the term has in Hö1derlin by interpreting it as "gaping," which means "opening.38 In doing so, he has without doubt minimized the non Greek elements in Hö1derlin: the Asiatic, the Christian. But that is another question!
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The Four Senses of Earth We call the obscure ground of our abode — unmistakably obscure — the "Earth." The first sense of the concept of Earth indeed is linked to the essence of physis unthought by the Greeks, that is, to aletheia. More precisely, Earth belongs to the dimension of withdrawal, of concealing (lethe) which holds sway in un concealment, in aletheia. But it is not identical with it. It is not simple withdrawal or pure obscurity. "Earth is not the sealedoff that corresponds to concealment"; 39 it is not selfenclosed to the point of being totally removed from what appears. Opacity in Earth is powerful, but it must manifest itself. Thus the weight of the stone or the particular radiance of colors are revealed as modes of what is obviously present but unexplorable. Indeed when one breaks a stone into a thousand pieces; when one calculates its exact weight or its molecular structure; when one breaks down its color in spectral frequencies — none of these analytical measures can penetrate the interior of this heavy mass or this luminosity. "It only shows itself if it does not remain undisclosed and inexplicit. Thus Earth brakes every attempt at penetrating it. It makes every calculative indiscretion veer toward destruction.''40 Earth possesses a secret ground that resists every elucidation and that does not yield to the violence of an explication or exposition. One must acquiesce to its unopenable dimension if one does not want to destroy it. It must show itself as what holds itself in reserve. Thus, Earth indeed appears in the Open, in the clearing of being, but it appears as impenetrable. It is openly latent, manifestly hidden. Heidegger. repeatedly insists that its mode of manifestation is governed by a paradoxical duality: it is das HervorkommendBergende, which means "that which shelters in coming forth,"41 that which in emerging' keeps its own depth hidden. Being essentially this movement of again taking up and going back into itself, it makes this covering rise up and visibly appear in the very midst of the world. "Earth is the spontaneous arising of what is continually selfsecluding."42 As the world is the domain par excellence of free appearing, Earth will prove to be engaged in an ambiguous and conflictual relation with the world, its contrary. Thus it is necessarily compelled to reach an agreement, so to speak, with its inimical principle. "Earth cannot renounce the Open of the world if it is itself to appear as Earth."43 But what is the world? And how are we to take the conflict of Earthworld? In "The Origin of the Work of Art" the definition of the concept of world is considerably enlarged in relation to that of Being and Time. Certainly the world is still defined as a network of possibilities and not as a subsistent being, an initself, or a totality of objects. But quite beyond the practical everyday actions on the equipmental level, this network of possibilities principally concerns moral and political choice, the "courses (Bah
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nen) of decision" and action that an epoch of History offers. "The world is the selfopening openness of the breadth of the simple and essential courses of decision in the destiny of a historical people." 44 The concept of world is intrinsically linked to the notion of epoch, so much so that it seems to be confounded with it. "Whenever being withholds itself in its destiny (which means withhold itself in a "suspense," in Greek epoché, as it dispenses itself), a world suddenly and unforeseeably occurs (ereignet sich)."45 An epoch is a world considered not from the point of view of the more limited destiny of a people (for example the Germans and the French) but according to the History of being. On that account there are doubtlessly considerably more worlds than epochs. In general, worlds are determined by the larger configuration of epochs, except for the Greek epoch, which is the only one among the four great epochs of being (Greek, Christianmedieval, Modern, Planetary) where a people could ''start an epoch." The epochs express the fundamental figures of the destiny of being. Compared to the world as a sum of determinate operations — practical and theoretical, cultural and social, public and private, etc. — during a given epoch (perhaps thought and art always rely on the world only in order to situate it more radically in the epoch and in being), Earth appears as a nonhistorical ground which needs the world in order to be drawn up into the light of day and to assume an epochal style. Yet, this does not mean, as the second sense of the concept of Earth will show, that the Earth arises from an indeterminate initself. Indeed, the Earth cannot be reduced to the pure passivity of a "prime matter" that is to be informed. It possesses its own tendency not only to repel the historical but, following a certain bent, to attract it from its side. Like the "land of a people" — which the Earth always is — it seems more inclined to receive certain forms, certain styles of existence rather than others, without being able to be conceived as a reservoir of preexisting forms. The world and the Earth never combine in a dialectical synthesis ("an empty unity of opposites," Heidegger says) in order to form a third, definitive term. They are contraries in a permanent strife (Streit). This struggle never appears in itself, but only in actions and works. So, the essence of this strife amounts to this: all facts, beings, things, and events belong to History, which means to the Geschick, to the sending or the destining of being. Being does not "give" itself — which means among other things that it is not understandable — outside of its epochs. Nevertheless, something of the nonhistorical must continually enter into this History, conform to it, be informed by it, but also withdraw from it. Thus when a being of "natural" origin becomes a tool in the broad sense, it becomes completely historicized, mundanized, but it keeps something of its initial Earthly origin. In general this Earth is hidden in the tool: as Sein und Zeit shows, it is only when the hammer breaks that we come to deal with wood and metal. But these materials scarcely have any meaning. It
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seems as though the Earthly is totally forgotten and lost there. Nevertheless, can't the Earth appear in a positive sense by way of equipmentality? As equipmentalized as they are, construction materials share some characteristics with the blocks of stone of "nature" in the prescientific sense of a subsistent presence that can be indifferent, reassuring, or menacing. Naturally the planet Earth is used as a base point, as a body, as the substance for buildings, sustaining and inspiring the lines of the various architectural styles. But in addition, through the Earth the edifices, the temples, and the houses are invested with a mode of "natural presence" sometimes neutral, sometimes protective, sometimes disquieting. In terms other than those of Heidegger, a house will strike us as welcoming or severe not only because of its style but because of its mass, a heaviness or lightness that is certainly indissociable from its epoch, a mass that nevertheless seems to inhabit space somehow outside of time. These two dimensions cannot exist separately: "The world is founded on the Earth, the Earth thrusts up through the world." 46 Both are aspects and regions of disclosure, not of beings. There is a strife because there is a reciprocal menace of absorption, since each of the two adversaries tend to encroach upon the domain of the other, and more profoundly, because each of the two needs the other and is inclined to capture the other. There is a strife because the caesura between disclosure and withdrawal does not occur as a simple opposition between world and Earth but goes to the very heart of each of them. Their conflict depends on the more original conflict (Urstreit) traversing both of them equally, which is the conflict between clearing and concealment. The world tends to annul the "ground," whereas the Earth tends to dehistoricize, to decontextualize the ''decisions" of the world. The "decisions" which go to make up the world —which means, for example, the distinctions between what is just and unjust — sometimes imply that which is undecided and "unmastered,"47 a "ground" or "basis" of nonhistorical presence that cannot be decided. On the other side, the Earth reveals for all to see a plurality of beings that have names and indeed roles in the world, and that nevertheless are, as are animals, radically excluded from the openness that belongs to the world. If in a second sense Earth indeed corresponds to what is usually called "nature," it is so in terms of an essential difference. Natural beings — sun, night, trees, herbs, snakes, cicadas — which Heidegger names, among others — do not have any subsistence of their own. They occur only in a world and in relation to a human work, in contrast with it. If it is understandable that a reciprocity establishes itself between the mass belonging to the rock and the consistency of the building built upon it, the relation between plants or animals on the one side and human works on the other is, for its part, not clear. Moreover, Heidegger never points out that language or culture, which are other ways of designating the world, can bring their determinations to a nature that is in itself void of determinations. No doubt
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this or that plant, the vine, the olive tree, the oak, the fir receive such and such a symbolic sense according to a given epoch and world. But nowhere does Heidegger consider that the very being of natural beings is exclusively derived from the world. From this point of view he is a "realist." He says all natural beings are linked by a "unison," a "harmony" (Einklang) that supports their relations. Completely ignorant of themselves, each is held in a flux or a "surge'' that comprises a "current of delimitation" of particular natural identities. It is clear that this harmony, this surge, this capacity for delimitation define Earth in itself in its phenomenal unfolding outside all hypotheses as to its finality or the ultimate sense of natural beings. "This selfconcealment of Earth is not some sort of uniform and rigid closure: quite to the contrary, it unfolds in an inexhaustible and simple plenitude of forms and modalities." 48 This inexhaustible richness seems to be forgotten by the world: "The Earth is the tireless and inexhaustible flowing reduced to nothing."49 Yet man founds his dwelling, his abode, upon it. A third and new sense of the concept of Earth appears in the description of the work of art, no longer outside of it but within it. It is apparently a matter of what one calls the "material" of the work, of what it is "made of": stone, wood, sound, language. But Heidegger radically rethinks the very notion of "material." The work is not originally "drawn" [puisée] (Schöpfen, "to create," literally means "to draw") from the forms of the world but from Earth. The forms are not imposed on a brute, prime matter but are born from the "strife" through which Earth and world are united and held apart. In reality this strife does not exist "in itself" but is first brought about in the creative process: in coming to be, the work of art is "the instigator of this strife," which means it carries out for the first time "the struggling of the strife" (die Bestreitung des Streites).50 The work, which provides the first settinginplace of a world and simultaneously the drawing into appearance of an Earth, does not first depend upon a subjective gesture on the part of the artist but on the essence of truth "setting itself to work." "Since the work institutes a world and sets forth the Earth, it is an instigation of this strife."51 Notice in this passage the determination and restriction of the world (a world), whereas the Earth is marked not by indetermination but by what could best be called a transepochal determination. The Earthly and nonhistorical thingliness of the work is situated, it seems, both within its world and beyond it. Indeed, we know that the "great works" of the past — as Heidegger says, the Greek temple, the Gothic cathedral — are given to us outside of their epoch and outside of the world which was theirs: "The world of which these works were a part has withered away."52 How can they remain accessible to us? When the work is no longer "in its element," no longer performing its primary function of opening the world and has departed from its age, is it not thanks to what resides in it as Earth that we can still encounter force and beauty in it? Or must one instead say all appreciation is historical, as the nineteenth century believed? Indeed, what remains for us of works whose world has disappeared and is, other
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than through the works, completely unfamiliar to us? Is it not a strange kind of belonging to the Earth which, through strictly epochal forms, emerges beyond or on this side of History? Even if we ignore all Byzantine theology or Hindu religion, the hieratic luster of the mosaics in Ravenna or the mysterious smile of the Bodhisattva of Gandhara touch us with a grace that henceforth escapes their world. But what is this Earthly thingliness? "The work sets itself back into the mass and density of the stone, in the firmness and flexibility of wood, into the durability and luster of metal, into the light and obscurity of color, into the timbre of sound and into the power of speech to name." 53 Is this not obvious by itself? Yet, to grasp the specificity of the artistic treatment of "material" it suffices to compare the work of art and the tool or manufactured product. The material in the tool is completely subsumed under a use; it is captured by utility. The tool conceals its thingcharacter behind its "function"; the hammer is not made in order to let the wood and the metal be seen as such. The work, on the other hand, makes the ''material" emerge as something fundamentally unutilizable which belongs to Earth and its withdrawal. Only the work can make this withdrawal and, thereby, its beauty, explicitly appear. And, it does not reveal a simple material stripped of sense which form alone could make interesting: it makes manifest the dimension of the concealment of truth. All beauty is truth emphasized. The "material" makes the nonhistorical ground of the world sensible. This is the reason why in instituting a quasinaturality the work of art first opens the contrasting domain of natural beings. "But then again, in its self sufficient presence the work of art resembles the mere thing that naturally springs up and is worn away to nothing."54 But when it comes to the work this resemblance only emerges after the fact. Earth as Nature is nevertheless not produced by the work but only drawn into the daylight, rendered manifest by Earth as "material." The work is situated in a sort of median between Earth and world. It is doubly "foundational" for, which means revelatory of, the presenceabsence of both the secret consistency of the Earth and the coherence or ordering proper to the world. The essay on the work of art evokes a fourth sense of the concept of Earth without explicating it: the "terrestrial" (heimatlicher Grund). The choice of the word Grund, the same as the metaphysical term designating the foundation and reason for being, is significant: in contradistinction to these concepts, Grund designates the Earth in the sense of a rootedness, the basis or the ground containing a reserve, the nourishing soil, this forgotten "element" from which the roots of the metaphysical tree draw their sap and vitality.55 The idea of the native soil seems more historical than "Earthly" for it is indeed a matter of the soil of a people and not of an individual, thus of an Earth less "free" in relation to a given world than the Earth of the work of art. In itself Earth should not be taken as a spontaneous work of art, for it is less original than the work which opens the world; as obscure as it may be, it follows from a world, a tradition.
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Indeed, "the native ground" is more closely associated with the ungraspable nearness and simplicity of the familiar abode than with the notion of birth. The German word heimatlich does not immediately refer to some native secret, to a concealment of the maternal womb. The "native" Earth is not necessarily that with which we experience a natural attachment. Heidegger's tremendous effort to show that Dasein is not a natural being pleads against this interpretation. Heimat is derived from Heim, "home,'' the place of habitation. There are two attributes of "native" equally derived from Heim; they are the adjectives heimisch, "familiar," "customary," and heimlich, "secret," "intimate." When we indiscriminately translate heimatlich and heimisch with "native" not only do we obliterate these nuances but we forget the initial sense, which is "to inhabit." The three concepts marking the withdrawal of Heim — Unheimlichkeit, uncanniness, Heimatlosigkeit, being away from one's homeland, and Unheimischkeit, homelessness, the absence of familiar places — clearly show the semantic distance between the three words. But none of them actually indicate the native ground. Each of them has some bearing on habitation. Therefore, the native Earth in the sense of the root Heim does not imply any primary relation to the Geburtsort, the place of birth. The charm — in the sense of a captivating and purely "natural" spellbinding power — a place has is a Romantic concept that Heidegger does not take on as his own. When he comments on the fourth strophe of the hymn "The Rhine," An enigma is the pure bursting forth. Scarcely If the song dares reveal it. For As you have begun, so will you remain As strong as the distress may be And education, nothing is more Powerful than birth, And the beam of daylight That touches the newborn,
he envisions the question of birth only as the question of the Origin: "Birth here means provenance from the hidden darkness of the womb, 'Mother Earth.' " 56 To be sure, it is not a question of the birth of a human in "The Rhine" but of the bursting forth of a river. But Heidegger never seems to suspect that there could be a metaphor here for the birth of humanity, as the words "distress," "education," and "newborn" nevertheless suggest. His commentary emphasizes that the "powers of the Origin" are twofold: the Earth and the world ("the ray of daylight") to which the duality of distress and education correspond. "The native" encompasses a greater meaning than the Earth where we are in fact born. The native soil is not a Boden, a ground of biological, purely vital rootedness. Heidegger formally rejects this meaning: "being is not a Boden," he says, and he thereby rejects the racist ideologies of "Blut und
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Boden." The nearness of the Heimat should not be understood — and all of Hö1derlin's poetic experience testifies to it — as one of appropriation and an immediate joy. Heimat means the Earth of the house, the Earth of dwelling, which means incorporated, "preserved," and not just equipped or exploited. "The basic trait of habitation is preservation." 57 Also, the true "fatherland" of each man is not the Earth where he is empirically born but the Earth he understands and preserves, which means he knows how to preserve the secret mixture of native spontaneity and repetition of the past. The "native" is made of this mixture which is not "natural" but chosen, learned. Heideggerian dwelling is not founded on a mysticism or a magic of the factually native place. The native is neither patriotic nor political, nor purely geographic nor linked to the singular charm of a place: it is the ''home" which, though being completely spontaneously given, keeps asking to be chosen, adopted. Every true fatherland is adopted; for the "natural" quality of the native land must also be learned, which means borne from understanding and Stemming to knowledge. This meaning of the native also shows that Heidegger does not at all see the Earth as something initially given once and for all but as the result of an alliance, precisely that of "nature" — that which is given by birth — and of History, both choice and destiny. In one of the discourses in Messkirch he says the native (das Heimische) is vouchsafed "only where the forces of surrounding nature and the echo of a historical tradition remain conjoined."58 Also, it is not surprising that the Black Forest, where Heidegger was not born but where he lived, built, and thought, should become for him more "native" than his native town, regardless of how close it is when distances are measured in objective terms. When Zarathustra entreats his disciples to remain "faithful to the Earth," beyond the refusal of the afterworlds, this obviously signifies the absolute affirmation of the body and the sensible. But these keep their traditional sense of nonintelligible substances. Indeed, metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche has never ceased to substantialize and isolate the Earth. First of all, it reduces it in a PlatonicAristotelian manner to the purely subsistent material offered to demiurgic or morphological in formation in general (when Technology has informed and formalized everything, this underlying stuff will have disappeared, everything will have become a reservoir of available energy).59 Inversely, at the end, in the name of the reversal of Platonism, metaphysics posits Earth as the true "physiological" base of everything spiritual, which is conceived as simple superstructure and "language encoded by drives." In dissociating the concept of Earth both from the concept of substance and from the sensible as such, and in extracting it from the symmetrical alternatives of devaluation and exaltation, Heidegger principally removes from it every foundational function. Earth is neither matter nor is it nature. The elemental is not the foundational. The substructure is not a base. If it is the seat or ground [assise] of the world, if it is in a certain
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respect the origin of historical figures, the nonhorizonal, nonhistorical ground could not be so by giving "causes" or "reasons for being" to them. Every Heideggerian deconstruction leads to the Grund being extracted from its principled, foundational interpretation so as to show that its depth withdraws, that it is an ungraspable reserve and resource. What unifies the different senses of the concept of Earth, what links them to the body, to Stimmung, to the "dwelling," or to the habitation as well as to the "thingliness'' of the work of art, is this unique thought of a nonfoundational foundation. And consequently, what technology most persistently forgets — above all Technology in its most advanced forms, cybernetics, computers, as well as "thinking machines" — is precisely this ever implicit, nonoccurring, nonformalizable, nonexteriorizable, nonavailable dimension, this place and medium of all proximity which is prior to all manifestation, the Earthly ground upon which the world lies without being founded in it.
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PART TWO THE LIMITS OF HISTORY
Page 66 According to the History of being, the Earth is an errant planet. VA, p. 97 The epoch of completed metaphysics is about to begin.... Here we understand the name "technology" in a sense so essential that it is tantamount to this title: "completed metaphysics." VA, p. 80 The absence of dwelling becomes a world destiny. WM, p. 336
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V The History of Being and Its Hegelian Model "At first sight one hardly knows how to deny that there is a striking proximity and similarity between Heidegger and Hegel"—such at least is the widely circulated impression in France reported by Jean Beaufret in a remark at the seminar on Time and Being! 1 Nevertheless, instead of raising the correlations and analogies that he finds "evident" and discussing them, Beaufret hastens to insist on the impossibility of any comparison, an impossibility which, according to him, is due to the fact that there is no such thing as a "Heideggerian philosophy"! Since the points of divergence with Hegel are obvious inasmuch as there is neither dialectic nor the rationality of the real in the thought of being, it may be useful, for once, to ask if the correlations between the History of being and the Hegelian History of Spirit arise only from a vague resemblance or from a more profound complicity. No doubt the History of being does not correspond to the logical development of a rational Idea. No doubt it is governed by a principle of discontinuity (epochs arise "suddenly") and by errancy, whose origin is impenetrable to reason (sending, the Geschick, the destiny of being) and is linked to the complementarity of disclosure and withdrawal. Nevertheless an initial, apparent similarity between them seems to be situated at the level of the thought of a destiny. It is not man, as great as he may be; it is not the thinker that decides—it is the ''matter itself," Spirit or being, which at the base of History has always already decided for him. As metaphysical and perfectly blind to the ontological difference as it may be, is not the Hegelian approach to the past of thought recognized, in certain regards, as necessary and exemplary? When Heidegger hails Hegel, "the only thinker in the West who had a thinking experience of the history of thought,"2 such praise, which is accentuated by the extreme valorization of the expression "experience of thought" in the Heideggerian context, sufficiently indicates that there is merit, if not to Hegelianism in general, at least to Hegel's history of philosophy. It is even explicitly stated elsewhere that Hegel "was right": "When Hegel thinks about the nature of his thought he does so through a dialogue
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with the history of previous thought. He was the first who could and had to think thus." But why was Hegel right? How was he the first not to separate his thinking from a dialogue with the history of previous thought? For instance, neither Aristotle nor Leibniz dissociated the essence of their thinking from such a dialogue. Might the novel and outstanding merit of Hegel stem from the fact that when considering the previous History of thought he makes it appear as an organic totality and not simply as the thought of some one or other great predecessor? Does he not also identify History with the "sublation" of the Past? What Heidegger admires above all in Hegel is the discovery of the convertibility of Being and History as "the essential havingbeen" (das Gewesenes), as the gathering and recollection of a havingbeen that continues to last. For Heidegger, who abandoned the primacy of the future at the same time as he abandoned the primacy of Dasein, Being is the essential past: das Gewesene. The phrase "The History of Being is Being itself and nothing but this"4 seems to take up again, in reverse, the great principle of Hegel: Wesen ist was gewesen ist. When he distinguishes the historical from the historiographical (Geschichte and Historie), to what extent is Heidegger taking up again the Hegelian distinction between History, which concerns the inner and essential progress of Spirit, and purely exterior and anecdotal history? To what extent does the use of this distinction not perpetuate, in the thought of being, the metaphysical difference between the transcendentalnecessary and the empirical contingent? Does not all Heidegger's understanding of history, by disparaging forgetfulness and insisting on the task of remembering, reveal a perpetuation not only of Hegelianism but even of Platonism? Nevertheless the Hegelian structure may be even more profound: if it is true that for Heidegger Reason is not what governs History, neither is it chance or blind destiny. The series of the epochs of Being obeys an inflexible and coherent necessity which, he writes, "is like a law and logic."5 What constitutes the "logic" of History in Heidegger? In short, what at first urges bringing Hegel and Heidegger together is the thought of "eschatology," the idea of a final gathering (perhaps of a sort of synthesis) of the whole historical process in a final configuration. For Heidegger it is a question of thinking History as "the dialogue of the dusk with the dawn."6 But then is not eschatology the equivalent of absolute knowledge insofar as each epoch finally finds its sense with respect to the totality of the process? Yet this point of greatest proximity is also, paradoxically it seems, the point of greatest remove inasmuch as the Heideggerian totality rests on the abyss of the ungrounded, and inasmuch as the Greek dawn is not the only commencement possible. Besides the Greek dawn there is indeed "a new dawn'' that offers the possibility of an end of History that is radically different from that of Hegel insofar as for Heidegger it is not a recommencement but a totally different, unprecedented, absolutely new commencement.
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The Primacy of the Past as Gewesen True history is not the ephemeral, the anecdotal, the perishable, the finished, but what hasbeen, lasting till the present and harboring the future. "What is historical (historisches)—which means, the past as such (Vergangenes als solches)—is no more, it is dead. . . . In the History (Geschichte) of thought, what is at issue is thought itself. . . . Everything is preserved. The History (Geschichte) of philosophy busies itself with the past, but equally with the present." 7 For Hegel, this past which is preserved is the eternity of the shapes of Spirit. History, in a decidedly Platonic manner, is nothing but the presentation in time of the shapes of Spirit such as they exist in themselves. The Platonism of such an opposition between the immutable and the changing is dialectically overcome, which means preserved— notably in the form of the difference between the Idea in itself— the Logic— and its manifestation in time—the Phenomenology. History possesses at one and the same time a preeminent value in that it is the absolute itself, and a subordinate value in that it is only the instrument of the manifestation of the eternal Spirit, which has always existed in itself. "History," Hegel writes, "is the representation [Vorstellung] of Spirit as it comes into its own"8 (emphasis added). Inasmuch as for Heidegger truth or being does not preexist its appearance (for being is not something in itself), what sort of nature does this essential past have such that it produces History as "that which abides''? It goes without saying that if it is opposed to a past that simply slips away and disappears (Vergangenes), it is above all because it is capable of a future: "the essential havingbeen (Gewesendes) abides in coming."9 Havingbeen as such transcends the dimension of the pure past: it is neither the past that has disappeared, slipped away (as the root Gang in Vergangenheit indicates), nor the isolated present by itself, nor of course is it only the future. Having shown at the end of his essay on Rilke in Holzwege that the spurious eternity is Vergänglichkeit raised to a nunc stans, "to the emptiness of a moment without duration," Heidegger suggests that the true eternity is das Gewesenes: that which, having been, has not ceased to be.10 Indeed, contrary to Hegel, das Gewesenes is not the product or result of history but an absolutely inaugural anteriority. What controls all History, as Heidegger emphasizes in a number of texts—particularly in Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung—what summons the future is the exigency of the inaugural, the Anfang: the first Gewesenes, the first essential havingbeen, the first grasp of being, exerts a destinylike influence over the whole tradition—such is the force of the Greek aletheia. "The inaugural never passes away, it is never something past."11 Genuine History is the future of an essential and inaugural past. Inaugural Gewesenes is interpreted as the source of History. The definition of History as Geschick, destiny in the sense of Schickung, destination, the sending of being, is simply the recognition of the omnip
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otence of this inaugural past. History is not only what is already there, but it is what is already accomplished in the destiny of the Commencement. In Principles of Thought, Heidegger again takes up into his account the words of the Book of Ecclesiastes, the truth of which Hegel had also shown: "nothing new under the sun." "There is nothing new," Heidegger comments, "except what is old in the inexhaustible power of metamorphosis of the inaugural; this phrase touches on the essence of History. History is the advent of what does not cease to be. Namely, what has already unfolded its essence, and nothing but that, is what comes to us." 12 The realm of destinal necessity exerts itself here with a rigor more implacable than rational necessity in Hegel, and in a more frightening way because it is blind, unfathomable. As in Hegel, History is completed not only at its end but at its commencement, in that it governs all that arises from it—its development. Being is thought of less as difference than as identity deploying itself. Nothing happens that hasn't already been originally gathered in the essence of Being: ''What is is what comes about. What comes about already came about. That doesn't mean finished. What already came about is what is uniquely gathered in the essence of Being; it is the essence of havingbeen (GeWesen) "13 This preformation of History in the inauguration of Being explains the enigmatic phrase at the end of the Afterword to Was ist Metaphysik?: "Every Geschick of beings is inaugurally already accomplished in being."14 Geschick, the destiny of Being, "contains" in advance the totality of History's possibilities. This strict selfclosure of history, which excludes everything outside of it, everything other—is this not some new variety of Hegelianism? It seems as if Heidegger had revived the Hölderlinian theme of the omnipotence of the commencement in order to radicalize it in a Hegelian sense. Instead of "As you commenced, so shall you remain" (hymn, The Rhine), Heidegger's phrase would go: "As you commenced, so you will develop yourself" or "so you developed." The commencement persists throughout the entire History of Being. If the Greeks have such importance for us, it is because the essence of modern Technology is simply the development of the Greek question about the being of beings. If the commencement did not preserve what hasbeen (das Gewesene), which means the gathering of what continues to last, then the being of beings would not dominate our epoch from out of the essence of modern Technology. But in reality the commencement does not develop. One must not confuse commencement and starting point. A starting point disappears in what it produces. The commencement abides unalterable, unchanged in all the sequences arising from it. Here there is a somewhat Hegelian aspect to Heidegger: the commencement has always already fallen into oblivion, has always already been left behind like the pure indeterminate being of Hegel's Logic, but remains sheltered within the entire process. "The inaugural never disappears."15 The essential past as das Gewesene governs the future
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as would an immutable destiny, and not simply as would a first term in a series of transformations. It is clear that the later Heidegger renounced making the future the fundamental dimension both of time and history. Thus one can read in Unterwegs zur Sprache, "What we ordinarily call the future is the Gewesenes that comes to encounter us," and in Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, "Everything to come has its advent in the While of the uniqueness of what hasbeen," in der Weile der Einzigkeit des Gewesenen. 16 To this privileged position of das Gewesene there corresponds, in Heidegger, a persistent defining of thought as "recollective thinking" (Andenken) or remembrance (Gedächtnis or Erinnerung) which, despite the distance between dialectic and the thought of the ontological difference, calls to mind an affinity in the understanding of what one could call the commemorative essence of thought. The essence of thought is retrospection. Recollective thinking from the first looks back (thus only the "step back" is capable of grasping the essence of metaphysics): thinking gets its light from this inaugural and essential past. "Presuming that commemorative thinking [Andenken] thinks ahead, then thinkingback cannot think something merely bygone (Vergangenes), about which one can only say it is irrevocable. Thinking upon (Denken an) what is coming necessarily amounts to thinking what hasbeen (das Gewesene), and with that expression, in contradistinction to the merely bygone (das Vergangene), we mean that which from then on essentially is."17 The first chapters of the second part of What Is Called Thinking? define this commemorative essence of thinking by showing that acknowledgment, thankfulness, and selfcollection belong to thinking: thinking has the character of a "holding back,'' a remaining near to.... To think is to preserve what on its own gives itself to thinking to be retrieved: "We call the gathering of recollective thinking around what offers itself to thinking: Memory."18 But this memory does not depend on the human faculty of remembering. A nonoblivious thinking is simply one that responds to what on its own has already been gathered, preserved in being. Here we come upon another analogy with Hegel. Erinnerung, calling to mind the History of being, is not the resuit of man's efforts, but it is done by being. In the phrase "the Erinnerung of being" "being" plays the role of a grammatical subject which communicates Erinnerung to thinking: "Erinnerung helps thinking to be reminded of the truth of being."19 Just as Spirit makes use of man in order to realize itself in time and to know itself, so being grants to man the role of a witness summoned to make an appearance in court. The only liberty thus left to man would be the refusal to testify, not so much out of revolt as out of distraction or blindness. In any case, man is not the one that effects the reversal from out of the oblivion of being into a caring about a recollective thinking of its History. It is only by thought that man can recognize the necessity, everywhere at work, of a destiny (Geschick) about which he can do nothing.
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Is There a Heideggerian System of History? The History of being possesses a systematic coherence in its development. It possesses unity and totality: "The unity of the One shows itself throughout the History of being in configurations that are sometimes different, configurations whose difference proceeds from the mutation of the essence of aletheia, of the concealing disclosedness." 20 It possesses its own necessity21 and, in the irresistible and irreversible character of its unfolding through to an end, it has a strong teleological structure. Indeed, just as in Hegel the progression is governed by the realization of Absolute Spirit, in Heidegger it is governed by the telos which is constituted by the completion of Metaphysics. Just as in Hegel's Phenomenology consciousness is defined at every moment by the "not yet" of the moments to come and of the final stage, so it is the itinerary to the perfection of being as Will, the maturation of the "will to will," that orders, gathers, and calls, so to speak, the previous moments back to itself. Thus Heidegger writes regarding the difference between Hegelian metaphysics and the metaphysics of the Will to Power (still to come): "This possibility was not yet possible.... The will has not yet appeared as the will to will in the reality which it has itself prepared. This is why metaphysics has not yet been completed in the metaphysics of spirit."22 The ''motor" of History is therefore not this final totalization itself. It is true that Metaphysics tends toward the constellation that forms the essence of Technology—a constellation inasmuch as it gathers and sets to work all the past metaphysical principles (like the principle of reason which transforms itself into cybernetics) that are preserved and actualized in the present. But what propels History, what permits taking into account the mutations of the essence of truth, is the increasing oblivion of the commencement, of the inaugural essence of truth as aletheia. It is in this sense that one can again speak of an inversion of Hegelianism: the Hegelian becoming of truth becomes the progressive establishment of the reign of errancy, the development of nihilism. The withdrawal of being hides to the point of leaving nothing; even that of oblivion effaces itself. History is not the progress of consciousness toward selftransparency, or the absolute movement, but is the gradual loss of the sense of presence as clearing and withdrawal. The "evil telos" that orients History is the complete obscuring of the meaning of being. "The History of Being is the history of the increasing oblivion of Being."23 Although the History of Being may be divided into epochs as can Weltgeschichte, there is no possible comparison between the Hegelian sense of an epoch as a moment in an evolutionary process—conceived on the model of a biological increase (thus the Greeks are the adolescents of the Spirit)— and the Heideggerian sense of an epoch as epochè, which means the abey
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ance, the holding back, the withdrawal of Being. For Heidegger there is no global rationality ruling the succession of epochs; this is why he can say that their succession is a "free succession," eine freie Folge. It is without doubt free in regard to a dialectical necessity that would permit the deduction of the epochs one from the other, but not in regard to the destiny of the oblivion of Being. Each epoch echoes the secret of the Dispensation that is compared to "a unique source (from which) arise diverse streamlets which feed into a river." 24 Heidegger is also led to recognize another necessity, or to put it more precisely, "something which is like a necessity, which is like a law and a logic."25 This law, which is precisely that of the increasing oblivion, is articulated in the same passage of the seminar on Time and Being: ''Between the epochal metamorphoses of being and the withdrawal one can perceive a relation which nevertheless has nothing to do with a relation of causality. One can say that the further away one is from the dawn of Western thinking and from aletheia, the greater is the oblivion into which it falls, the clearer is the manner in which knowledge and consciousness break into the open, and the manner in which being thus withdraws."26 The rule which presides over the succession of epochs and over the linking of the mutations of the essence of truth is, such as one can extract it from this law, apparently completely vague in its generality: the withdrawal of aletheia frees (or makes possible?) Being as energeia; the withdrawal of energeia in its turn frees actualitas; the withdrawal of actualitas frees truth as certitudo, certitude comes down to selfjustification, which becomes the will to selfjustification, etc. This rule implies that the commencement, the grand Presocratic commencement, is not, as the Hegelian commencement, the most abstract and impoverished moment but rather the moment which is relatively the fullest and richest. Yet the very idea that the commencement could have been an absolute plenitude without any lack or reserve seems contrary to all of Heidegger's thought. But does the commencement belong to that which "actually" took place? As we know, Heidegger distinguishes the commencement, the inauguration (Anfang), from the beginning or outset (Beginn): the Commencement itself is never given, it is obscured in the outset.27 But then what is the status of the commencement? Heidegger has vacillated on the subject of the outset of the History of Metaphysics—which is either with Plato or Anaximander; the status of the commencement is enigmatic. Indeed, either the Presocratic commencement "places itself" outside of History, in which case it presents itself as the manifestation of the essence of aletheia in all its purity, and hence as a fullness anterior to History and in a certain manner nonhistorically underlying the entire development ... which dangerously resembles the "in itself" of Hegel's Spirit! Or the commencement is eclipsed at the very start of Western thought, insofar as this outset is the oblivion of the commencement, an oblivion which "happens" from the commencement
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on—but then would not the hidden essence of the socalled initial truth become mythical, supratemporal, or a sort of retrospective crepuscular fiction? Whatever it may be, the "logic" of the History of Being orients itself according to a double series of relations: —Relations to the commencement. Which means all the mutations of the essence of truth (energeia, actualitas, certitudo, will) according to a growing oblivion. 28 —Relations to the end. Among these, the notion of preparation works to unify the historical development and to explain the passage from one epoch to another. Descartes prepared the metaphysics of the Will to Power (he already posits it, but nur unwissentlich, only unconsciously). Leibniz prepared the basis for the completion of the epoch of Modernity.29 Completed metaphysics (Hegel and Nietzsche) constitutes the preparation for the reign of Technology. What is the meaning of this preparation? Is it a kind of condition of possibility? Sometimes Heidegger suggests that such and such a figure of truth makes possible a subsequent truth. Or is it only a prefiguration of it? Another logicohistorical notion close to preparation is that of the incubation: the principle of reason is in some sense lying dormant in the Greek and Christian epochs but already is active before having the power to bring itself irresistibly to bear once it has been stated. Another logical necessity: the tendency in the History of Being toward the unification of metaphysical positions that make completion possible.30 There is even a logic of transitions: just as the Hegelian Übergang is characterized by the decomposition of a preceding world, so the plurivocity of the senses of being at the end of an epoch is the symptom of a transition. "The equivocal character of the essence of reality (multiple signification) is the symptom of an authentic transition."31 It is the call to a decision, not the one by Descartes, but by Being through Descartes. The History of being, says Heidegger, has nothing to do with the psychology of philosophers! The relations to the commencement spread themselves out over two parallel planes of the History of Being: (a) the plane, most generally, of the epochs, which means the major modes of the withdrawal of being; Heidegger distinguishes four major epochs of Being: Greek, Christianmedieval, modernity, and planetary;32 for Hegel there are instead four "worlds": the oriental, the Greek, the Roman, the German; (b) the more specific plane of the mutations of the essence of truth: thus the Greek epoch experiences not only the mutation of aletheia into ousia— presence—but also the passage of aletheia to homoïosis (adequation). The mutations of energeia into actualitas, of ousia into substantia, of hypokeimenon into subjectum simultaneously occur within the Christianmedieval epoch along with the concept of ens creatum. At each moment it is the essence of truth which determines these mutations according to what Heidegger calls "a hidden necessity in its origin"33 (the destiny of oblivion). But the logic of
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the obscuring of the inaugural Greek understanding is on a par with another logic which is not contradictory: a cumulative logic of metaphysical propositions. Thus once being became actualitas, Wirklichkeit, effectiveness, the efficacity of making as manufacturing, being remains fixed throughout the modern epoch and the planetary epoch, where this sense is reinforced. Actualitas is a structure of completion, which means, one of the constituents of the constellation of the will to will. Heidegger writes, "inasmuch as it is reality, being is a substructure which makes possible diverse fundamental positions." These mutations of the essence of truth remain inaccessible to metaphysics, just as its own essence, which equally has a power of necessity, remains foreign to it. Example: in completely conforming to metaphysics Nietzsche "must" think the essentia and existentia: or "must" think the foundation. 34 It is in his cumulative logic (the "concrescence'' which preserves the past stages in the depth of the present) that Heidegger here clearly comes close to Hegel, even if he distinguishes himself from Hegel when he asserts that completion is not at all a perfection, a finishing off. But this distinction is just a way of attributing to the completion a value that is the inverse of what Hegel would have recognized it as having. "Eschatology," or the Logic of Completion It is in the concept of the eschatology of Being35 that the Heideggerian thought of History is most in accord with Absolute knowledge and, in another sense, that from which it is most divergent. The very idea of an end of History is Hegelian. Heidegger does not hide from it: "We think the eschatology of Being is the sense that corresponds to the one in which the Phenomenology of Spirit must be thought in order to respond to the History of Being."36 And he adds that the Phenomenology constitutes a "phase" of the eschatology of Being. Phenomenology is an eschatology not thought through to the end: "the history of Being is the true Weltgeschichte."37 But what sort of end is it? What eschatology means here is that "the History of Being terminates":38 in the last epoch, that of Technology, a gathering (logos) of the final (eschaton) sending of Being takes place. The present of Technology takes up again and totalizes the entirety of what essentially hasbeen, all of das Gewesene. While signifying this last recollecting of Being, eschatology also signifies the departure of Being, the separation from Being or the farewell to Being (Abschied). As the epoch of Gestell [Dispositif], eschatology has a double face, "a Janushead."39 On the one hand it prolongs the Hegelian project of totalization which is that of Metaphysics as a whole: the will to appropriate, to possess, is applied here to Western History. The oblivion of Being is reversed into memory. For the thinking of Being, the "Turn" consists in coming back into possession of itself. But is
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not the memory of the History of Metaphysics a new metaphysics precisely to the extent that the project of overcoming metaphysics ultimately requires its acceptance (Verwindung), its appropriation (Aneignung), its interiorization (Erinnerung), an operation of interminable digestion? Is it not a question, as Heidegger says (and precisely in regard to Hegel), "of speaking of the same matter in the same manner"? 40 But on the other hand, Heidegger completely abandons the Hegelian model when he says that the History of Being has ended and that it is necessary "to leave metaphysics to itself."41 Metaphysics is well and truly dismissed. It is necessary to leave even the thought of Being, to cross out Being (to write it under erasure), because "the History of Being is the History of Metaphysics, and nothing else." Ereignis is not a new name for Being. With the awakening to Ereignis, Heidegger says, the oblivion of Being "overcomes itself": “die Seinsvergessenheit 'hebt' sich 'auf.‘ ''42 This placing of “Aufhebung“ between quotation marks is at the very least surprising! All the more as Heidegger adds: "Now the veiling does not veil itself anymore; on the contrary it is to this veiling that the attention of thought applies itself"! Since veiling makes up an integral part of the essence of truth, or oblivion an integral part of the manifestation of Being, it is necessary to conclude (the "abandonment" or "crossing out" of Being would confirm it) that the question of Being is itself what would turn out to be dismissed. Yet such a conclusion contradicts the majority of the texts of Heidegger where being is described as the missed mark, the goal not yet reached by thinking: "Being is the unique goal not yet established by essential thinking—provided that such a thinking is inaugural and in the other commencement it is necessary for it to precede even poetry in the sense of poetic imagination."43 It also contradicts the recurrent theme of the unthought: what may be thought is the unthought of Metaphysics. What is the use of thinking the not yet thought, since in any case it is not from the not yet thought that thinking can wait for the upsurge of the "other commencement"? Is it in order to restore an improbable totality of Being? Despite these uncertainties, eschatology makes the indeterminable possibility of an "other commencement" appear: "the most distant goal of thinking (...) is situated at an infinite distance from our epoch; it belongs to the historical distance of an other History."44 Despite the precariousness of this "other History," one cannot maintain that it enters into the Hegelian model. One might say that the possibility which is opened by the thought of eschatology is an empty possibility, a pure fiction, a non sense. One might ask: can there be a thought which prepares this nothing which is totally other? Which waits without knowing what it is waiting for, which has in view its own impossibility? Why not, if it is true that Dasein can anticipate its own death as the possibility of impossibility? Why couldn't the West anticipate its limit? Nevertheless, the true encumbrance that presses on the thought of the "other History" is what Heidegger calls "the dan
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ger." The true danger is that Technology "insists" and persists quasiindefinitely. The end of the planetary epoch can have the slowness of what Heidegger calls a Verendung, an "expiration that lasts." "This expiration lasts longer than the history accomplished by Metaphysics up till now." 45 In simpler terms this means that more than twentyfive centuries of Technology await mankind! But the supreme danger is that there may never be a new commencement: it is the "threat of the possibility that to man may be refused the return to a more original disclosure and hence the promise of the experience of a more inaugural truth."46 There also remains the possibility that this ''other thinking" may exist, but stay unseen, unnoticed, perhaps unable to break through. Heidegger compares the fate perhaps reserved for his thinking to that of the poetry of Hölderlin, which during more than a century remained misunderstood and yet waited for a true audience and understanding. Heidegger's thought of History leads, like Hegel's, to a justification not only of the History of thought but also of empirical history. Here again we have an inversion: the Hegelian satisfaction in the face of rationality turns into a quasifatalistic resignation in the face of the progress of errancy. For Heidegger it is useless to become indignant in the face of the “Führers“ just as it is useless to fight the destruction of earth with technological means, for the basic structures of reality are not determined by human action and cannot be changed by it. To the question "What should we do, then?" Heidegger gives a clear but somewhat deceiving answer: wir sollen nichts tun, sondern warten, "we should do nothing, but wait."47 The eventual overcoming of Technology does not depend on man's will. But it belongs just as much to man to be attentive to the hidden metaphysical essence of Technology as it belongs to him to accompany it in some way through to its "expiration." The "completion of metaphysics," says Heidegger, "certainly depends on a historical decision."48 What does this mean? Not that man may be capable of deciding that there may or may not be a completion, but that he decides to respond or correspond to this completion by thinking. As it is said in Holzwege: "Are we the late ones that we are?"49 For Dasein "Being" means havingtobe. We have to assume the role Being prescribes to us. And it is in this acceptance that our povertystricken freedom can find both its measure and its strength.
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VI The Essence of Technology Phenomenology of Technology and the History of Being Heidegger's distance from phenomenology never went so far as to reach a point of rupture. That he had long since abandoned the term itself does not mean, as he indicates in On the Way to Language, that he had rejected what phenomenology had achieved, notably in Being and Time. "That was not the case, as many believe, in order to renounce the importance of phenomenology, but to leave my path of thought nameless." 1 So, when on this path there reappears a word that is linked to the early Husserlian context, the word “Wesen“ [essence], it is necessary to do the utmost to grasp this word in all its import when speaking of the essence of technology. Why is Wesen, absent from Being anal Time,2 now introduced at the cost of risking confusion with the eidetic reduction of Husserl, or even with the Platonic eidos? For it is, after all, a question of the apparently metaphysical difference between technological objects and their mode of being. Moreover, it is a question of Heidegger trying to mark a continuity—and yet a distance—with regard to the traditional ways of posing the question "what is...?" According to Husserl, an essence results from the effort of transcendental consciousness to bring out the invariant meanings. More important than "the things themselves" is the intentionality which is turned toward them. Now, what the phenomenology of Being and Time "makes visible," once the primacy of consciousness is abolished, is that which shows itself ''from itself."3 A phenomenon is not what consciousness uncovers, but it is what shows itself from out of that movement properly belonging to it. Moreover, the being of phenomena is at first essentially hidden, and it is difficult to get at it. The early Heidegger believed that this hidden dimension was accessible, above all through the temporality of the individual. But little by little he discovered that what is more essentially hidden belongs to history. Later on he will say that being is what gives, sends, destines, schickt—that being is Geschick, Geschichte, destiny, History. The early Heidegger had taken up in his own manner the Husserlian project of a "pure" phenomenology. He
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had believed it possible, through a "destruction" of traditional ontology, to strip clean, so to speak, the sedimentations of Selbstverständliches ("what goes without saying"), to remove this superficial layer of sense become banal so as to allow phenomena to appear from out of themselves. For example, when analyzing equipmentality in Being and Time he disregarded the epoch as well as the structures passed on by history. Yet it will become clear that the sense of the being of phenomena is indissociable from their situation in an "epoch of being." Heidegger says it is necessary to understand the word ''epoch" in the Greek sense of epochè, 4 in the sense of the holding back, of the withdrawal that is contemporaneous and correlative to all manifestation. The whole distance separating Heidegger and phenomenology now hangs on this new epochè that requires the prior inclusion of the History of Being in every description of phenomena. Though the presence of the things themselves orients analysis, these analyses lead one astray if they consider presence to be contained in the present. The meaning of the present is conveyed to us by the tradition. One of the most brilliant illustrations of the new Heideggerian method is found in the analysis of the mutations of the "principle of reason"5 from the Greek logos up to technological rationality. The History of Being thus becomes the guiding thread and the primary condition for all phenomenology. The world in Being and Time was the horizon sketched by the network of references effected by equipmental beings; it was ahistorical. From that point on the world is "historical" (geschichtlich). "There, where the essential choices of history are decided,... there a world sets itself up."6 It would not be going too far to say that Heidegger is returning to Hegel7 in order to radically overcome Husserl. In transposing them, Heidegger thus once more takes up the Hegelian ideas of the completion of philosophy and the end of history. He joins Hegel when he shows, precisely in regard to technology, that the principles at the root of the present epoch stem from propositions put forth at the very beginning of the West or at the dawn of Modernity. Without subscribing to the dialectic, Heidegger shares with Hegel the notion of a conservation of principles acquired during the course of history. The doctrine of the History of Being is the most immense attempt at anamnesis and totalization since Hegel. The interpretation of the phenomena of modern technology is only possible by bringing to light the metaphysical principles that governed it secretly and unbeknownst to it. To say technology is the "will to will" implies that present reality prolongs and realizes what metaphysics has already thought under the concept of will. The project of objectifying nature is rendered transparent if one goes back to its historical origin, to its "preparation" in the history of metaphysics. Thus a straightforward perspective on the present cannot suffice to grasp what we call technology. Essence is
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what has been and remains disclosed. “Wesen,“ writes Heidegger, "is the same word as währen." In order to grasp Wesen one's perspective must bifurcate, or transform itself into a perspective on the pastpresent. Even if it reveals the distant bases of the actual world, this pertinence of provenance nevertheless informs all Heidegger's interpretations with a distinctly teleological structure. It is in terms of the end of metaphysics that Heidegger reads the great philosophers as unwitting precursors (or prophets?) of this completion. Is he not assuming a skewed perspective in these exegeses by being oriented toward a final cause, especially when it comes to Nietzsche? Some rather strange relations are brought forward: between the overman and the "functionary" of technology, between the eternal return and the internal combustion engine! Does the notion of the "unthought" in metaphysics permit him to justify this? When Heidegger speculates on the chances of a "salvation" or on the passing of this history which is coming to an end in "another commencement," it really seems he has abandoned every reference to phenomenological vision. Perhaps less than it seems, for the solution to the "danger'' that threatens the very essence of man does not depend on an extrinsic intervention of a mystical order. Heidegger explains that "to save" means "retrieve into the essence."9 Salvation resides "in the gaze" turned toward the essence of Technology. But does this mean it depends solely on the gaze of man? Does this gaze not have to be perceived beforehand, to be "brought into view" (erblickt)?10 What does the passive mean here? Philosophy has always reversed appearances. Heidegger in his turn shows that Technology is not what it most obviously offers up, like motors or engines. Neither is it a mere instrument placed in the hands of humanity. "The essence of Technology is not at all something technical."11 The project at work in Technology is a metaphysical project because it concerns all domains of reality and not only machines. It marks beings in their totality. Technology has the character of Being. Technology leads the multiplicity of dispersed phenomena that one customarily views simply as signs of a "crisis of civilization" back to unity. Everyone knows these signs: the planetary homogenization of the modes of living and thinking; the constant mobilization of cultural and artistic activity; the uprooting and neutralization of space and time; a certain insensibility with regard to excessive suffering (one could add here the fact that wars and catastrophes become television spectacles); the loss of the sense of proximity as well as that of distances, abolished by means of rapid transportation and communication; the rapid circulation of information without any end other than itself; the constitution of immense stocks of energy as well as of enormous means of destruction; along with this there is accelerated consumption whose cost is the squandering of natural resources; politics merely subservient to bureaucracy and planning, etc. Heidegger does not content himself with describing this modernity as oth
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ers do, with a view to sociological knowledge or political critique. He evokes these phenomena only as manifestations of the essence that governs them. Two of the most obvious phenomena of the epoch: modern science and the totalitarian State, which seem to govern it, are nevertheless only "necessary consequences" of Technology. Heidegger invites us to work our way back to the true cause. Science that pursues the mathematization of nature is not an autonomous project. It reaches conclusions beforehand about what the real is; it only admits of the objectifiable and calculable. It is in the service of the more general project of technological enframing (Gestell) 12 and answers to the necessity of its essence. It is because the essence of modern Technology resides in the enframing that Technology must use the exact natural sciences. Thus is born the deceptive appearance that modern Technology is "applied natural science."13 The opposition of appearance/essence here is effected in an almost classical, nearly Platonic manner. Similarly the totalitarian State or "political directivism''—for example, the manipulation of public opinion by propaganda—are only "consequences" of a necessity of essence. Thus it is vain to accuse the Führer or the head technocrats and to become indignant over them for they are not the "cause" except "apparently." "In truth, they represent the necessary consequences of the fact that beings have passed into the mode of errancy."14 All particular domains (art, culture, politics) are presently "equipped." So, "equipment" (Rüstung) which appears along with the necessity of entrusting every domain to a unique and centralized direction, i.e., to planning, also constitutes a manifestation of the essence of Technology. But what does "essence" mean? Wesen has a double sense: on the one hand the word refers to being itself, not as a substantive but as a verb, to "being as self disclosing," Sein als Entbergen: on the other hand essence preserves all the metaphysical traits accumulated during the History of Being, which is the history of metaphysics. The two aspects rejoin in Gewesen or Währen: essence is what maintains being in terms of a prior disclosure. “Alles Wesende währt."15 Heidegger writes, "All that is essential ... everywhere keeps itself concealed."16 Why this dissimulation of essence? It is in keeping with a law of phenomena: the essence of a phenomenon is inaccessible in terms of the processes proper to the domain to which it belongs. No mathematical formula can express the essence of mathematics. The essence of biology escapes biological investigation. The essence of Technology is nothing instrumental or mechanical, but metaphysical. The highest metaphysical principles of the preceding epochs of history are the ones that Technology gathers in its essence and brings to their perfection. The true completion of metaphysics is produced when what formerly was a requirement of thought—for example, that everything have its reason—becomes evident and commonplace. Thus the essence of technol
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ogy is more hidden than anything else to the extent that the principles constituting it have become the reality of the real, which means they have become what is selbstverständlich ("obvious"). For Heidegger, essence is not difficult to see because it is too remote, exiled to some celestial topos; rather, because of its extreme proximity it has been exiled to the oblivion of its historicality. In coming to fruition in Technology, metaphysical principles undergo a transmutation that makes them difficult to recognize. The will becomes the will to will; representation, Vorstellen, becomes Gestell; the principle of reason no longer needs to be named for it is at work everywhere—in general planning, automatization, in cyberneticization. These terms (will to will, planetary apparatus, reality rationalized to the nth degree) are closely linked to the transmuted will. Technology "realizes," actualizes, the modern metaphysics for which to will is to posit being as an object and the object as rational, hence calculable. If the will is metaphysically defined as a Herstellen, a producing, a proposing, the Gestell can be considered as the absolute production of the totality of beings solely by the will. But the will to will is at the same time identical to the traditional essence of the will, and quantitatively different. For there is simultaneously a continuity and a leap between metaphysical principles and their "completed" significance in Technology. Wille zum Willen (will to will) is tantamount to Herstellen zum Herstellen (producing to produce). Technology manufactures in order to manufacture, it exploits the earth in order to exploit it, stockpiles energy in order to stockpile it and not in order to respond to any "actual" need. The doubling back of the will onto itself indicates its "nihilism": it pursues no end, it develops onto itself to the point of the most complete irreality. The construction and stockpiling of thousands of rockets with nuclear warheads does not correspond to any possibility of actual destruction. Technological productivity is taken up into a movement where growth is necessary for it in order to grow; and the supposed goals that are attributed to it, like ameliorating the human condition, can only be illusory justifications. Technology obeys only its own inner logic and not a human will. Moreover this expression shows the circularity inscribed in it: it produces what it is, it wants what it produces, it produces what it wants, it is what it produces. Before long it will be impossible to distinguish the object from the subject. The Gestell 17 continues the final metamorphosis and materialization of all the activities of objectification. What is crystallized in a new form is simply what was latent both in Vorstellen and Herstellen. Stellen, the summons, the seizure of beings, spreads in an unlimited manner. It is no longer just a matter of setting up "in front of oneself" a totally objective world like an image, but of provoking (Herausfördern) nature, forcefully extracting from beings what is most constantly present and transformable: energy. In other words, Technology no longer requires the mere object, Gegenstand, but it
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needs to provide itself with a Bestand, a "reservoir," which means a reserve of everavailable forces, of strictly calculated products. Energy is the most valorized product because it is the most measurable, the most interchangeable. In the generalized ensnaring of beings, all differences—notably that between subject and object—are effaced, lost in the uniformly calculable mass of the "reservoir." "What is there (steht) in the sense of a reservoir (Bestand) no longer stands over against us as an object (Gegenstand)." 18 Paradoxically, absolute objectification leads to the objectless. Thus an airplane on a tarmac is only an object insofar as it is bestellbar as a means of transportation: it is real only as inserted into the network of relations within the "reservoir." When the "reservoir'' extends to the point of encompassing the totality there are no more objects. For his part, man is no longer a subject. Man is taken up into the circuit of Bestellen. He is required to "operate." Technological man becomes the Besteller des Bestandes, the "operator of the reservoir." Provoked to provoke, man is both subject and object of a generalized provocation. Thus the Gestell finally reveals the circularity that belongs to technology: provocative provocation; the production/consumption cycle; the indefinite circulation of energy. The transmutation of the principle of reason in the essence of Technology occurs in the form of a discrete and multiform assimilation. The rationality upon which the Gestell relies is purely pragmatic, functional, which means that the exigency of rationality no longer stems from the principle; it is only an instrument serving the efficacity of the Gestell: it is necessary at all costs to rationalize, organize, plan, automate the "reservoir." On the other hand, it is necessary that an account of the entire process or "event" (Heidegger doubts something really happens in this universe) be given, not to anyone in particular, but to the will to will. Information for the sake of information, about any subject, place, or moment, is one of the modern avatars of the principle of sufficient reason. But the most perfect expression of the principium magnum, grande et nobilissimum, as Leibniz called it, is revealed in cybernetics. The science of selfregulation, cybernetics, is based on the instrumentalization of informative messages and on the strictly operational character of every process. Cybernetics constructs closed systems within which information moves in a closed circle in accordance with perfect feedback. The goal toward which cybernetics advances is the organization of the fields of objectivity so as to be able to dispense with every ontological relation, every reference to a grounding. Technology has an essential need for cybernetics so that it can completely detach the "reservoir" [fonds] from any relation to the ground [fond], or to the fundamental. With Technology, the metaphysical ambiguity of Grund (ground/ foundation) is reabsorbed into the functional clarity of technological rationality. The completion of metaphysics obviously does not mark an end but the onset of its reign. For the principles, both "realized" and forgotten in a sin
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gle stroke, escape all supervision and can thrive in an irresistible way. Nothing fundamentally new happens in this completion; what happens is a limitless unfolding of the established possibilities. Heidegger calls the epoch of the completion the "deceasing" (Verendung) of metaphysics. "This ending lasts longer than the history of metaphysics up till now." 19 Such a statement could well be denounced as "prophecy." Certainly it is no longer phenomenological. But to be in history is not just to be relegated to the mere present; rather, it is also to need to predict and anticipate. There will be no new commencement before "being as will is shattered." How could philosophy be forbidden to speak of the future, especially since the future of Technology is inscribed in the essence of the future? Indeed it is certain that no force— human or otherwise—can hinder the perfectly autonomous development of the will to will and of the Enframing. Is it not disturbing that perhaps only selfdestruction appears as an internal limit of technology? Does man still have a role to play in the face of this necessity? Before posing, along with Heidegger, the question of a way out of Technology, it is necessary to once more go back to the problem of its origin. The "Preparation" for Completion and the Interpretation of Nietzsche To the extent that the history of metaphysics finds its outcome in Technology, all the great thinkers, beginning with the Greeks, "prepared" (announced? anticipated?) this end. This retrospective interpretation gives the history of thought seen by Heidegger a markedly teleological structure. It seems that Western history is no longer the history of being, but the prehistory of Technology: "We must free ourselves," he says in the "Letter on Humanism," "of the technological interpretation of thought whose origins go back to Plato and Aristotle."20 By virtue of the logic that leads to Technology, the great metaphysical positions must necessarily complement each other, succeed one another in a linkage guided by the final result. Each stage of metaphysics must mark a progression in the perfection of will, of objectivity and rationality. Thus metaphysics is not "yet'' [encore] completed with Hegel's absolute knowledge, nor with Nietzsche's reversal. Heidegger says there "still" [encore] remains a stage to traverse. The repetition of this "still" [encore]21 is Hegelian in tone, if not in content. It is also necessary to look into the concept of the "preparation" of Technology, which is not without ambiguity. This sort of preparation presupposes that there is a maturation in History, yet this History is marked by the discontinuity of epochs. Metaphysical thinkers cannot "prepare" Technology from their own point of view but only from the point of view of a retrospective knowledge which is aware of the results and points out the path that leads to them. Heidegger actually speaks of a "wide and essential knowledge (weiten wesentlichen Wissens) which can only have its origin in a thinking of History of Being."22 We know what such a retrospective knowl
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edge risks resembling: Hegelian absolute knowing. On the other hand, to prepare Technology would have to mean to anticipate the principles which will be at its basis. Yet we have seen that the principles of metaphysics are not directly at the basis of Technology. The principle Of reason as stated by Leibniz is different from what it will eventually be once it is transmuted in the essence of Technology. Neither Hegelian negativity nor the will to power can be found again as such, since they have become will to will. Moreover, Heidegger makes it clear that metaphysics is not the cause of Technology, nor its prophetic prefiguration. The principle of reason does not produce cybernetics but makes it possible. In other words, it is as though cybernetics were the "unthought" of the principle of reason. However, if the unthought signifies what has not been explicitly thought by metaphysics, but thanks to it becomes thinkable, the notion of the unthought will not clarify any more for us when we apply it to Hegel instead of Leibniz. It is indeed hard to understand how the unthought of dialectical reason can "prepare" not speculative but "potentialized" rationality, which is the rationality of Technology. 23 And if it is necessary to admit that Leibniz's metaphysics rather than Hegel's most accurately anticipates Technology, why is Hegel considered an essential stage of its preparation? To put this another way, what is Hegelian about Technology if not some extremely general structures like circularity, systematicity, and the selfreflexivity of knowledge? The notion of the unthought is too vague to show, for example, how it is that the ''circle of circles" of Hegel's Logic could constitute the essence of Technological circularity. Perhaps Heidegger wants to escape the kind of details one finds among determinists. Yet the interpretation of Nietzsche suggests a similar causalism. "What is the essence of the modern 'motor' if not a new form of the eternal Return of the Same," he says. Of course, it would be necessary to place this sort of remark back in the context of a long24 and complex argument of which we can give here only a glimpse. The interpretation of Nietzsche is indeed the richest and also the most problematic chapter of this prehistory of Technology. In order to demonstrate that the "metaphysics of Nietzsche" is the "penultimate stage"25 of the process leading to the will to will, it is necessary to establish the absolute continuity between the great tradition of metaphysics and the positions of Nietzsche. One can do so just by "reintegrating Nietzsche's metaphysics into the simple thoroughfares of modern metaphysics"26 in die einfachen Bahnen der neuzeitlichen Metaphysik zurückzudenken (!). The faint modesty of the expression hardly covers over the prejudiced character of the interpretation: zurückzudenken, to seal Nietzsche up in the past. Nietzche's thought is first reduced to the traditional essence of metaphysics. The latter always inquires into the essence of all beings (this will be the will to power); it thinks existence and includes in this the totality of beings (this will be the Eternal Return); it responds to the question of the
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essence of man (this will be the Overman), etc. The necessity belonging to the essence of metaphysics encloses Nietzsche's thought within very precise constraints. Because of this involvement, "the will to power must (muss) state what the foundation is." 27 The same goes for the opposition essence/existence: it "must" occur again in Nietzsche. However, it may be necessary to show on the basis of Nietzsche's texts that it is impossible to reduce the will to power to a quiddity, even if only because the notion of the will to power aims, by way of the theme of interpretation, to reject centralization, the focusing of sense, the "fiction of essence." What stands out when one reads Nietzsche is that his thought is loath to follow the ''simple paths" of metaphysics. For instance, how could we apply the concept of the "totality" of beings to a thinker who wrote: "It seems important to get rid of the Whole, the Unity ... it is necessary to crumble the Universe, to lose respect for the Whole.... There is no whole"?28 How is one to conceive of the Eternal Return as a factual mode of existence when it is always present like a secret revelation, indeed like a new religion? Furthermore, Heidegger does not take account of Nietzsche's critique of metaphysical conceptuality and of the often ludic manner in which Nietzsche parries the classical usage of philosophical language. The only future familiar to the thought of Nietzsche is the preparation of Technology. The Overman is interpreted as the prototype of a "humanity thoroughly conforming to the fundamental essence of Technology.... Only the Overman conforms to the unconditionally 'mechanistic economy.'"29 It is hard to reconcile this image of the Overman, disguised as a technician, or as a brutally conquering dominator, with the texts which present him as gentle, austere, isolated, destitute of political power and moreover not bothering himself with it, "similar to a god of Epicurus." The only question we could pose is: why does Heidegger inflict on Nietzsche such a violent distortion, and at the cost of ignoring the texts? Why assume that "values" in Nietzsche (art, truth) are "paraphrasings" of "Technology"?30 Why want the thinker of fiction and play, the one who exalted the labyrinthine and chaotic character of existence, to be the one who, perfecting Hegelian systematicity itself, best anticipates the world of robots and computers? This remains—at least for us—an enigma. Danger, "Salvation," Ereignis For Heidegger, the danger consists precisely in this convergence of History into the One: that today Technology governs the being of all beings; that it gathers into itself all the real, soon after that, all the possible and all the true, and soon after that, all the thinkable. If it is the threat par excellence, if it places being itself in danger, it is because it threatens the relation of man to being insofar as the Gestell tends to impose itself as "the presumed unique mode of disclosure."31
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Man has the vocation of "watching over the essence of truth," which means he must respond, must correspond through speech (entsprechen) to the opening, indeterminable in advance, of that which gives itself. The fixating of truth within the Gestell and of thought as calculative thought would exile man from his essence. There would be no more relation to the opening, for the possible would be identical to the real. A human being fully adapted to the technological world would no longer be human, for being would no longer be for him worthy of questioning (fragwürdig). Strictly speaking, there would be no more thought, which means questioning, but only calculation. Heidegger discerns the signs of this dehumanization of the human in the disappearance of anxiety and Unheimlichkeit (uncanniness), in the increasing absence of distress. Humanity programed by Technology need not be uneasy: it forms part of the solid consistency of the reservoir, of the Bestand. What happens with the completion of metaphysics is not only the possibility of the disappearance of ontology but the possibility of what Heidegger calls "the death of the human essence." This is not the death that would follow from a super hydrogen bomb or the accidental explosion of several nuclear power plants, which is to be feared. Humanity will be dead when every mode of thought other than calculative thought has been expelled from thinking by the will to will. The danger concerns the essence and not the phenomenon. Heidegger remains faithful to the experience of Sein und Zeit: the essence of man is not given to him as a nature. He has it by being. He can gain or lose it. Calculating thought is, moreover, comparable to what earlier was called inauthenticity in that neither one can simply be put to the side or surmounted once and for all. Yet the danger or the loss of essence is not a "simple" loss as was "the oblivion of being." Rather it is a matter of what "On the Essence of Truth" named "the threat of errancy" (Bedrängnis der Irre). The danger, like errancy, is a double loss—the oblivion of oblivion, which means it is the fact that the dissimulation or the withdrawal of being becomes imperceptible, inaccessible. Technology "realizes'' errancy in that it hinders an interrogative approach to its own sense. The absence of suffering and distress is just a sign of the redoubling of the oblivion, a sign of the abandonment of beings to themselves; it is the sign of the vacuousness of being. Like all Stimmungen ("attunements"), suffering and joy are relations to being. But in the world of absolute voluntarism in which Technology is immersed, man no longer even experiences, or only very passively, the excess of pain. 32 Insensibility to Stimmungen indicates the remoteness of the ontological difference, and this is characteristic of errancy. In the reign of the absence of distress, which is "the supreme and most hidden distress,"33 it is the privilege of very few people—poets, thinkers— "to see the absence of salvation threaten as the absence of salvation."34 Only these people can have an inkling of the commencement of a possible salvation. The salvation itself—which is to be connected with das Heile, "the saving power"—would be that being could appear anew in its saving
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dimension, intact, which means that the withdrawal could be perceived as a withdrawal. This is precluded in our present history. Errancy, or the double dissimulation of truth, cannot be overcome; but Heidegger says in "On the Essence of Truth" that man "does not succumb to it if he is open to experiencing the errancy as such," ''in dem er die Irre selbst erfährt." 35 Now, there is something for us to do in this movement: to see the absence of salvation as such means to experience errancy as such. But what does this "as such" designate? It refers back to essence. To see the essence of the danger, the danger as danger, is to enter into the salvation. "We behold [blicken] the danger and glimpse [erblicken] the growth of what saves."36 And a bit earlier on in this essay he says it is necessary "to focus a still clearer gaze on the danger,"37 and, further on, that it is a question of not "letting slip from view" the extreme danger. This insistence on the gaze seems to situate the salvation on the side of theoretical lucidity, prolonging thus the entire contemplative tradition of philosophy, and ultimately on the side of the possession of a knowledge [savoir]. To be saved it suffices to "have seen," and, as Heidegger explains in connection with Greek eidénai, "to have seen" is to know. This knowledge would be based on the History of Being. However, such an interpretation would be reductive, for essence is not the common genus, the quiddity. Essence is the very unfolding of being with which the gaze is taken up as is all that is. "To save," says Heidegger, "is to release (something) unto its own essence."38 Essence cannot be dominated by the gaze, for it is not posited by it. Without doubt seeing (schauen) is superior to doing (tun). And it would be very easy to gather the texts which emphasize the powerlessness of human action to avoid the "danger." Salvation does not lie in action: Human action as empirical can never provide a true answer to "the danger" as ontological. "Action alone cannot change the state of the world."39 Such formulations, like the apology for "waiting" one finds in Gelassenheit,40 have made one think there is a quietism, indeed a fatalism, in Heidegger. Nevertheless, his position may be justified on at least two counts. First, it is not the efforts to humanize or "pacify" the goals of technology, as Marcuse said, that can avoid the threat of death which weighs on the human essence. For in order to act effectively it is necessary to enter into the play of the Gestell, to accept its rules. For action to be able to provide salvation it would have to be possible and necessary for man to examine the essence of Technology and impose his will on it, but the reverse is in fact what is true. Hence, more profoundly, action cannot change being. As can be seen from the beginning of the "Letter on Humanism," to act is not to produce an effect in a void but "to accomplish," to unfold, to effect what is in advance destined to be possible for us. Action depends on the possible, and the possible depends on being. So man acts in the highest sense when he thinks, when he leads things back to their being. But it is not the process of thought discovering the essence that leads to
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salvation. Salvation can only come from being itself, which means from Technology; not from Technology as a phenomenon—namely, as what provides solutions to problems (salvation cannot be found, for example, in ecology, which as a technological response to a technological problem remains inside the circle)—but as essence. When one thinks Technology beyond its appearances, namely beyond instruments and calculations, one can then see anew the difference of being and beings and man's belonging to being. Thus Technology is not what saves because it is miraculously transformed, nor is it even the thought of its essence that saves; what saves is the fact that through Technology man is appropriated to being, reunited with a unique and total destiny. Through Technology man is reconnected and once more linked with the whole History of being since the Greeks. So, man does not save himself through contemplation, as Plato and Aristotle believed, but he receives salvation when, in extreme disarray, he is touched by being. Are we dealing here with a thought of grace, influenced by Christianity? One may sometimes be tempted to think so, all the more since the Hölderlinian theme of salvation in extreme distress, a theme more Christian than Greek, seems to echo the words of Saint Paul: "There where sin abounded, grace superabounded." 41 But in Christianity grace does not come from sin itself—it comes from God. Salvation in the depths of the abyss is linked to what Heidegger calls Ereignis. Danger sketches the beginning of salvation, just as the Gestell is the "prelude" (Vorschein) of Ereignis. As the thought of the last disclosure gathering the whole history of metaphysics, Heidegger says Gestell lets the fundamentally simple link of the belonging together of man and being be glimpsed "as in a flash": namely, that man is the property (eigen) of being and being is the property of man. Such a link of reciprocal appropriation (this is how we might risk translating "ErEignis'') is not destroyed but both dissimulated and fulfilled by the Gestell. As such a link it escapes the History of metaphysics. Outside the reign of this History that is both forgetful and totalizing it opens a nonhistorical dimension where man learns anew to let things simply be, to open up to the play that connects earth and sky, mortals and gods. The call of being appearing to man through Technology is not an "event," nor an advent, but one expression of this singulare tantum,42 the unique, reciprocal appropriation. As such, Ereignis is already a cure (Verwindung): the "turning" of the oblivion of being into memory, into the watch of being. But isn't the thought of Ereignis also an overturning of every philosophy of essence, of theory, of vision? Heidegger indeed connects Ereignen to eraügen which ursprünglich (originally) means erblicken, "to bring into view," "to summon oneself to see," "appropriate" (aneignen).43 Ereignis also means beingseen. This formulation is not at all mystical. It only pushes the principle of Heideggerian phenomenology to its conclusion. We can only "make visible" [faire voir] what shows itself "from itself" if by itself it turns itself toward us, engages us, looks at us. The phenomenological gaze is not
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the bestower of sense. It receives all sense from the clearing of being, from the Lichtung. The priority of beingregarded over every sight is that of the clearing over evidence and vision. "In the discourse of the Greeks there is no trace of an act of vision in the sense of the Latin videre; it is simply a matter of a glinting and gleaming. But to gleam is only possible if the open is already there." 44 The first gaze is the first ray through which Ereignis clears us, sees us. The first gaze "does not name the glance by which we inspect beings,"45 but the dazzle or "lightning flash" of Ereignis which tears open the night of the technological world. How could we see the essence if we were not seized by its light? First of all, essence is not what we grasp, but what grasps us. We must not only think essence as what gives itself to our gaze, but as the gaze itself: Im Blick und als Blick tritt das Wesen in sein eigenes Leuchten.46 "In the gaze and as the gaze essence enters into its proper lighting." Our sight is guided by the things that look at us. Die Menschen sind die im Einblick Erblickten.47 ''Men are those glimpsed in the insight." We are the regarded: die Erblickten. For once the translation allows us to render in a single word this ability of Ereignis to erblicken, and to brauchen, rufen, wahren (to "use," to call, to preserve) the being of humanity: it watches over48 us, which means maintains us, keeps us vigilant. Technology itself is "still gaze," noch Blick. Heidegger has often been reproached for having forgotten the "ethical" dimension. Yet if the first motive to move away from phenomenology has been the necessity of a deconstruction in order to let the historicity of truth be seen, the second motive will have been, confirming the vanity of the ideal of rigorous science, to investigate the conditions of a possible ars vivendi. Confronted with a threat as radical as that of the technicization of the world and the instrumentalization of thought, the pure will to knowledge is not only sterile, but ludicrous. Now, this second motive which really only becomes fully explicit in the later texts like Gelassenheit ("releasement") is almost as old in the Heideggerian itinerary as the first motive. Since 1929, at the end of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,49 the relation to Technology was presented as the exigency of a choice, as an alternative more ethical than ontological: "Will the problem of being succeed through all these questions in finding once more its elementary power and scope? Or are we at this point victims of the madness of Technology, of hustle and celerity such that we can no longer have any friendship for what is essential, simple, lasting?" (emphasis ours). Phenomenological neutrality is quite out of place in the epoch of Technology. The position of the "disinterested spectator" becomes untenable when it is a question no longer of the meaning of being but the possibility of the annihilation of the human essence. Therefore does not the questioning of the later Heidegger become more explicitly ethical? How is one to live with Technology? It is necessary to shun every evasive attitude that consists in condemning Technology as a "work of the devil."50 It is out of the question to take refuge in some ivory
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tower or to lead a schizophrenic existence in our world as if there were no radio, nor television, nor cars. We must use appliances and machines, but always keep our distance from them, never forget to have regard for them, always remain open to their "secret," which means to the hidden essence of Technology. In giving a sort of "word" of wisdom, Gelassenheit zu den Dingen—which in the strong sense means letting the objects of Technology be so that they can be received in their own essence, not our essence—does not Heidegger here show that ontology is indissociable from an ethics obviously situated beyond every normative morality? Ethos means "dwelling place." "This word designates the open region where humans dwell." 51 Nevertheless, Heidegger's ethics does not consist in unilaterally preserving the being of this "dwelling'' which technology tends to destroy: habitation, things, earth, rootedness, poetry, the sacred, thought itself ... and friendship. Not only does it not teach the refusal of the world as it is: it wishes that humans could with an "equal strength" live there with a double life and thought:"...today we are erring in a house of the world from which the Friend is absent"—writes Heidegger in his essay on the German poet Hebel52—"the one who is inclined with an equal strength toward the technologically arranged universe and toward the world thought as the house of a more original dwelling." But this Friend "is missing."53
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PART THREE ART AND EARTH
Page 94 Earth is what in its essence closes in on itself. To bring forth Earth means to bring it into the Open as what closes in on itself. The work accomplishes this bringing forth of the Earth inasmuch as it itself puts itself back into the earth. HW, p. 36 The truly poetic project (wahrhaft dichtende Entwurf) is the opening (Eröffnung) of that wherein historical (geschichtliches) Dasein is already thrown (schon geworfen ist). That is the Earth, and for a historical people, its Earth, the selfclosing (sich verschliessende) ground (Grund) upon which it rests along with all that, still concealed in itself, already is. Therefore all that with which man has been endowed in the project (Entwurf) must, through this project, be drawn from the closed ground and expressly set up on it. Thus this ground first finds itself grounded as the supporting ground. HW, pp. 6263 Poetry first places man on Earth, brings him to it, thus brings him to dwelling. VA, p. 192
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VII Earth in the Work of Art and in the Poem The Heideggerian interpretation of art 1—the most radical transmutation of "aesthetics" not only since Kant but since the Greeks—initially comes down to a simple question about the mode of being of works: what kind of things are they? The answer, preceded by a "reiteration" of the metaphysical definitions of the concept of the thing—especially the thing as composed of matter and form—has art appear as the illumination of an "Earth." All great artworks—plastic, musical, or poetic— erect within the density of a specific Earth a configuration (Gestalt) of "truth" or disclosure. Art brings about within beings an entirely pristine disclosure of being. The artistic Gestalt is interpreted as the trace of a strife (Streit) between a world, which is to say a historic dimension, and an Earth, which is to say a prehistorical ground. The Earth is no more the raw material existing in itself than the world is an assembly of clearly preestablished forms. The Gestalt does not soar above a chaos or the indeterminate to which it might give shape. Heidegger says its essence is to bring to light the "rendingstroke'' ("Riss" is a word which means "crack," "fissure," "crevice," but also "outline" or "tracing") which conflictually unites the historicality of the world and the ahistoricality of the Earth. The Riss restores the Earth by instituting in it, or by setting upon it, the unceasing strife of world and Earth. Among the four senses Heidegger gives to the concept of Earth,2 two are particularly relevant to the work of art. On the one hand Earth means the native soil of a people, the element or the environment in which those possibilities realized in art take root, draw their meaning and take form out of an always already given element. Earth is that "in which historical Dasein is already thrown (schon geworfen)."3 Earth belongs to the "commencement," to the obscure "taking hold" [emprise], to the Anfang where the possibilities are not yet explicitly present but hidden and yet somehow prefigured. Earth is the ground that these possibilities, once constituted, reveal as always having had from the beginning. As the Geworfenheit of a people, Earth belongs to the factical limits of its basic
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lot. But these limits will be visible only when the work of art has made them manifest: Aeschylus' Orestes or Sophocles' Antigone makes manifest for the first time to the fifthcentury Greeks the limits already existing between men and the gods, the relations between human and divine justice at the heart of the city. Thus it goes without saying that this native element does not refer to the facticity of an objective determination, an objectivity such as that proper to a "physical" or "human" geography. Earth bears the limits and external conditions wholly exterior to a world, but these elements are not preestablished meanings already secretly present in the initself. These elements only appear by way of the works that express them. Nevertheless, they always retain an obscure and imponderable dimension insofar as their very finitude has not been established or decided by the historical project but is simply "thrown," which means is always already present implicitly in that project as soon as it is explicated. On the other hand, Earth designates what is traditionally called material (stone, wood, metal, color, musical sound, language) which is related to a natural reservoir. Indeed language belongs not only to the historical world, to being, but as sonority it has, in addition to a deposit of latent sense, a natural, ontical facticity, an incontrovertible material density in which the poetic work is embedded but to which it may not be reduced. By virtue of its Earthdimension, the work of art does not belong exclusively to the world and thus to History. The initial strife from which it is borne delves to the roots of history. "Art is history in the essential sense that it founds history. . . ." 4 Art only comes into history after having given birth to history. This initiative character, the capacity of art to make the unity of an entire epoch appear all at once, of inaugurating History, is a nonhistorical capacity: it binds a world to the Earth, and for Heidegger only "great art" has this character. It is not given to every work but precisely to "great art" not only to be "epoch making" in a passive sense but, like a Greek temple—or one might add, a Gothic cathedral or a seventeenthcentury Dutch painting—to give root to a world around itself. In other words, the seductiveness of all great works consists not only in their revealing the historical essence of an era but in their showing the grounds of a world as if for the first time, its particular rootedness in a native soil. That artistic beauty appears as the ephemeral and eternal jointure or articulation of History and the nonhistorical is no longer a matter of a history of art, nor of an aesthetics. The Refusal of Aesthetics and the Transhistorical Truth of Art "Aesthetics" in the narrow sense is of recent metaphysical origin: it dates
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from Kant and rests on the "sensation" of the subject feeling the pure and disinterested pleasure of the play of his or her faculties. It has no meaning apart from the subjective "pleasure of reflection." The very principle of this aesthetics is doubly questioned by Heidegger's thought on art. When Heidegger refocuses the reflection on the work itself, he does so at the expense of subjectivism, of course, but perhaps also at the expense of "pleasure," which, whatever its meaning, should be but is not recognized as such by him. Indeed what is dislodged is both the primacy of intellectual enjoyment of the sovereign subjectspectator as well as the primacy of the artist or "creator" and his or her creative states, which subjectivism holds to be the absolute origin of art. The very origin of the artist can be nothing other than art, if art in its essence—as Heidegger repeats insistently—is nothing other than "truth putting itself to work.'' 5 What indeed does the artist do as a creator (Schöpfer)? The creator must draw (Schöpfen) upon the reserve of being which is open to him. The artist makes manifest the stilllatent stroke [trait] in the "original struggle" (which precedes even the strife of worldearth), that is, in the struggle between the clearing of truth and its withdrawal. In connection with this Heidegger quotes Dürer, saying: "In truth, there is art actually buried deep in nature, and he who can wrest it with a single stroke (reissen) holds it fast."6 But the Heideggerian interpretation which identifies Dürer's "nature" with being does not seek to know how, "concretely" or practically, this wresting is effected. The work is given. The artist's "psychology" matters as little as the empirical biography of thinkers. Yet it is clear that the stroke as a Gestalt, figure, tracing, or rhythm does not by itself insinuate itself between world and Earth. Without doubt, the work of art also comes about, comes into the world, by the hand of the artist, be he painter, musician, or poet. But according to Heidegger, what allows for the stroke of brush or pen is the very opening of truth as the larger circle of art which first of all includes the work, the artist, and those who care for the work: the "preservers" [gardiens], as the translation of die Bewahrenden somewhat awkwardly suggests. Die Bewahrenden are those who "answer," or those who "guarantee," those who actively guard its safety in watching over the meaning of the work (the word "spectator" is avoided deliberately). The artist is not the one who traces this larger circle; rather, it is truth disclosing itself. Now, "it is not we who bring about truth as the uncovered being of beings. . . "7 Art brings forth the essential lines where the truth of a world is lodged by dispatching them deep down into their ground in Earth, and thus it first founds History. Truth or the "original struggle" gives rise to art and to its epochs. Thus there is apparently established an ontological derivation beginning with the essence of truth, which presides over the origin of art through all the epochs of being. It can be presented in the following diagram:
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This derivation is, however, hardly a transcendental deduction of the work from the essence of truth, for it can only be read "from" the work understood as the being where this triple conflict (UrStreit, Streit, Riss) first discloses and unfolds itself. "There must always be in the open a being in which the opening can take its stance and its constancy." 8 To say the work itself maintains the opening of truth means that this truth is not ''first present in itself somewhere in the stars,"9 that it is not preexistent. Yet if the Gestalt is not prefigured in the rendingstroke, in the invisible Riss which unites Earth and world, it is nevertheless at the behest of the truth itself that the artist "creates." So, in the withdrawal of being, in its hidden conflictual character, there must be a latent sketch of artistic configurations. There is, as it were, a project common to the artist who seeks and to the truth that drives him. As MerleauPonty admirably says,10 a painting is a "concentration and comingtoself of the visible," the manifesting of a "secret of preexistence": it is neither a subjective calculation of representation nor the realization of an earlier idea by the Spirit of the world. Heidegger calls this internal impetus of truth toward the work, this pull (Zug) toward it, "the poetic project of truth," or in one word: Dichtung. But what is the meaning of Dichtung, this "poem" which is "the essence of art"?11 It is not a matter of a written or spoken poem, nor an unformulated poem. The idea of a poem without words would be absurd. Actually the "poem" designates that initially secret concentration or condensation of truth tending toward the work. Rather, the poem is truth condensing itself, predisclosing itself while being prefigured in the stroke (Riss) that gives rise to the figure (Gestalt): "What the poem as a clearing project (lichtender Entwurf) unfolds into unconcealment and projects ahead (vorauswirft) into the stroke (Riss) of the Gestalt is the Open, which it causes to come forward. . .. "12 Dichten means, etymologically, "to condense," "to thicken," "to gather together," hence "to compose." The Dichter is the composer in the broadest sense. But he can compose only what of itself gathers together and composes itself. Heidegger cites a letter written by Mozart: "I seek notes that love one another." The notes love one another on their own. The truth gathers itself like a storm preparing to burst. But in art it is with a melody, with a sketch, with a group of colors that we can begin to discern under the Gestalt the Riss, the most profound tracing of the worldearth relation that it makes manifest. Every visible or audible configuration, everything traced or resonant, is obscurely prefigured in the tracing, and this tracing is in the
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silence and invisibility, beyond every distinct or definite figure. In other words, with the emergence of artistic forms a truth which up to that point had remained imperceptible imposes itself as being antecedent to them. This truth, the truth of the opening of beings, is for the first time expressly underscored. This is precisely the definition of a work of art and what distinguishes it from a tool: pointing out the truth as such. "Where production expressly brings about the opening of being— truth—what is produced is a work of art." 13 More directly, there would be no creation as Schöpfung if there were not this antecedent dimension from which to draw. Earth as Nonhistorical Possibility Being as Lichtung, shining [éclaircie] or clearing [clairière]—different German or French14 words for aletheia—this light which hides its proper reserve initially sketches the field in which the "sensible," earthly element of nature can appear. Earth must submit to the law of appearing; it must enter into the light of being without which it would be inaccessible. All "physical" elements—such as solar day and night, speech and silence, the rising and diminishing of sound, the lightness or heaviness of materials and their greater or lesser susceptibility to being overshadowed—must enter into the clearing of truth. Lichtung as a dedensifying "makes possible" the visible and sensible configuration of the latent density of Dichtung. "The Lichtung. .. is free not only for light and dark but also for the voice which sounds out (Hall) and grows faint, for the tone (Tünen) that resounds and dies away."15 This is not to deny the weight, the substantiality, the earthly character of the voice; rather, it is to emphasize that this "earthliness" is radically subjected to the wholly anterior phenomenological condition of appearing. Yet this "priority" does not imply any ontic derivation, as if the clearing physically engendered or produced what it illuminates. The "dark of the forest,'' its density "which language otherwise calls 'Dickung,'"16 says Heidegger, refers to an obscurity residing even outside of the play of light and shadow that necessarily takes place in the clearing.17 Would this unfathomable and unnameable obscurity not be something like the original possibility of the Earth? To put this in inappropriate terms because they are Kantian, must we not see in Heidegger an "ideality" of the Lichtung in relation to a "reality" of the Earth? And yet if the ideality of the former is quasitranscendental because it makespossible, the reality of the second, its material density, is no longer empirical for it is also equally withdrawn, in a position of pure possibility in relation to phenomenality. It is necessary to say Lichtung is quasitranscendental because its illumination does not come from the subject or from its transcendence, which would bring with it the conditions for the possibility of appearing as such. Yet this clearing is a radical makingpossible: in its withdrawal, it precedes every light of thought or reason, ev
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ery vision, every evidence, and every intuition, whatever they may be. "The ray of light is not what first produces the Open, it only traverses it by measuring the clearing. Only the latter can give what is to be received, while procuring for itself the free dimension of its deployment. . . ." 18 Similarly, though subordinated in order to become phenomenal to the presence of the Open, Earth possesses, without being reducible to a nature subsisting in itself or to life conceived as a foundational substance, its own essence which, in relation to being, can be thought at least negatively as the dimension that in itself rebels against phenomenality, namely as the pre historical or nonhistorical dimension. Beyond the critique of naturesub stance, to what extent is this dimension related or akin to what the tradition calls "nature"? To a large extent, no doubt, but the texts in which Heidegger describes this possibility opposed to being are rare. One of the most beautiful and most enigmatic texts often returns to the secret and the character of the Earth as a makingpossible: ''The inapparent law of the Earth preserves it in the moderation of the arising and passing away of all things in the allotted circle of the possible, to which everyone conforms and which no one knows. The birch tree never overreaches the extent of its possibility. The members of the hive live within their possibility."19 Further on it is emphasized that technology "forces the Earth out of the circle of its possibility and pushes it into that which is no longer the possible. . . "20 How are we to situate the "possible" if not as the extreme opposite of Lichtung, which nevertheless is related to it, for in a similar but inverse manner this "possible" draws a "circle," a nonluminous field of makingpossible. Actually, in "Origin of the Work of Art" Earth is described as a Grund that will carry the illumination of the poetic project into the light of day, a ground where no definite possibility is prescribed but where the possibilities revealed by the "poetic" project are already inscribed as if on their own ground. Nothing preexists, except for the "already there" of a retrospective necessity. The relation between the truth or disclosure of being, whose unfolding is entirely historical,21 and the Earth presents a striking analogy with the relation that holds in Being and Time between the project (Entwurf), or understanding, and thrownness (Geworfenheit) or facticity.22 However, the Earth is a nonpassive, nonindividual but powerfully enabling facticity. In contrast to Geworfenheit, which certainly can be "reapprehended" in the project but can never ground the project (only ecstatic temporality is an equivalent of the "rootedness" of Dasein), Earth in the Ursprung emerges through the work of art as a ground [fond(s)] and footing (or foundation without principle) for art itself and for history as an epoch. Let us read the essential passage on this point: The truly poetic project (wahrhaft dichtende Entwurf) is the opening (Eröffnung) of that wherein historical (geschichtliches) Dasein is already thrown (schon geworfen ist). That is the Earth, and for a historical people, its Earth, the selfclosing (sich verschliessende) ground (Grund) upon which it rests
Page 101 along with all that, still concealed in itself, already is. But the world is what reigns (waltet) in the relation of Dasein to the disclosure of being. Therefore all that with which man has been endowed (Mitgegebene, literally: given to him all at once) in the project (Entwurf) must, through this project, be drawn from the closed ground and expressly set up on it. Thus this ground first finds itself grounded as the supporting ground. 23
This passage, which we have already cited, raises a question in that it indicates, without explication, the makingpossible by Earth, an enigmatic makingpossible. Of course it is clear all poetic or original artistic projects (but also, all ontic human projects in the world) are not essentially "thrown" in being inscribed in the project of truth nor because they are historical, nor even because of their worldly situation, but because they are anchored, previously or at least simultaneously, in the Earth. Founded implicitly on the earthly ground, the project "founds," or expressly (eigens, properly) poses, the Earth as its ground. In a way, this repetition is of the same order as the retrieval (Wiederholung) by Dasein of its facticity, which thus wrenches itself away from "falling" or from its identification with subsistent beings. But a difficulty inheres in the enigmatic anteriority of the Earth as indeterminably already there beforehand. What is the essence of this Grund upon which rests the future (all that a people latently already is, but which is hidden from it)? It must be a matter of possibilities of another order than the definite possibilities of the world. The "potentiality" of the Earth is not, obviously, potential being in the sense of matter in Aristotle. It has a historical vocation, for it resembles what other texts call the Anfang or the Gewesenes,24 the obscure concretion anterior to all that will subsequently occur. Yet Earth is neither a rational nor irrational foundation, nor an empirical condition like a geographical matrix. It is not a territory but the elemental terrain where all that shines in history finds nourishment: "the nourishing soil''25 that Heidegger describes as the veiled foundation in which the tree of philosophy is rooted. Of course this Grund enters into the truth of being since it is sayable, but perhaps it does so precisely as that which escapes the History of Being, namely, its commencement (Anfang) which plunges obscurely into the Earth of the West. The History of Being does not make this Grund manifest. But does the impenetrable, opaque dimension of the destiny of Being have its source in the immemorial past of this Western Earth? Heidegger sometimes asks whether the Earth of evening, "the land of the setting sun," the "Hesperia," has simply run one phase of its possible History while keeping in store a recommencement which would belong to "an entirely other age of the world."26 What unheardof "condition" can enable the Western Land to become one day "over and above Orient and Occident, through Europe, the site of the more originally destined History that is coming."27 Only the most radical "reserve" of the Earth withdrawing from all historical manifestation can allow the advent of a new series of epochs which
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would be a complete departure from, and other than, the mere continuation of Occidental History since the Greeks. But what an unthinkable upheaval such a discontinuity would be, since it would imply a collapse of the technological epoch which has become planetary! Can "all" come to an end? And how could it be that beyond the "devastated earth" there might emerge, after a ''long interval," a new Ereignis, a new link between man and "being"? "The abrupt While of the commencement" 28 surely could not begin with "being," for in that case would it not be the same History? Is this only a desperate speculation on the closure of metaphysics? Hope vainly placed in an apocalypse? No brutal destruction or universal conflagration, however, is predicted, but instead a slow wasting of the "world" ending in the reappearance of the "hidden law of the Earth." At least that is how, in the twentyeight long and enigmatic aphorisms of the essay "Overcoming Metaphysics,"29 the future of nihilism is sketched out—establishing then abolishing itself. The link between the receptiveness of the Earth and the overcoming of technology is posited but not elucidated in that essay: "It is one thing just to use the Earth. It is another to receive the blessing of the Earth and gradually feel at home (heimisch) in the law of this reception (Empfängnis, literally "conception," not in the sense of a concept but of a woman conceiving a child) so as to watch over the secret of being and preserve the inviolability of the possible."30 "But the Earth remains sheltered in the inapparent law of this possible, which is its very self." The elucidation of the receptivity of the Earth is only found in the last word of the text: "the poetic (dichtende) and thinking habitation." Is this a "return to nature"? Not at all. Only bringing thought and Dichtung together, only the closeness of the work of art, can teach us anything of the essence of Earth, the essence of this nonhistorical and, perhaps, transhistorical possibility. But how did Heidegger arrive at this thought of the Earth having, through art, an initiating power? How did he go from describing the world of equipmentality and the idea of a rather pejorative facticity to the interpretation of the work of art as the original conflictual appearance of the Earth as ground of the world? Two stages of unequal importance precede the "Origin of the Work of Art" and prepare for this turn: a page of Rilke approached with prudence in 1927 in the course of Basic Problems of Phenomenology and the famous commentary on the chorus in Antigone in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935). The Discrete Appearance of Poetry: Rilke's Wall The ontology of art was absent from Being and Time. Moreover, it was virtually excluded from that work inasmuch as it was unthinkable according to its categories: it was quite impossible to understand the work as a tool deprived of its utility, or as a purely subsisting being, regarded with a cool, theorizing eye. Neither available nor subsisting, still less a Dasein, the
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work of art possesses neither ipseity nor beingtowarddeath nor care nor resoluteness. It is a strange world without art, this world of work in which art is only evoked as one of the inauthentic diversions of the impersonal they: "We enjoy and entertained ourselves as they enjoy themselves; we read, see, and judge literature and art, as they see and judge. . . ." 31 This is the only mention of Kunst! The only explicit reference to Dichtung,32 one extremely circumspect and in the form of an adjective in quotation marks(!), is to be found in paragraph 34: "The communication of the existential possibilities of affectedness (Befindlichkeit), which means the disclosure of existence, can constitute the proper goal of a 'poetic' discourse (dichtende Rede)."33 It is astonishing to note, however, that the privileged relationship between Stimmung and poetry which will be central to the texts on Hö1derlin is already alluded to, albeit with reservation. This caution with respect to poetry hardly changes in the Basic Problems, but the gap found in Being and Time is filled, for the phenomenology of Dasein is for the first time placed in the presence of a being described by the poet (note that for Heidegger it is not fictional, but a document of Beingintheworld) which is neither instrumental nor simply given like nature. In slightly more than a page of the Notebooks from Malta Laudrids Brigge, Rilke indeed describes the pathetic nakedness, suddenly brought to light, of the wall of a demolished house, with its strata of stories and stair ways and its delimitations of inner space: the only standing vestige amidst ruins, its scorched facade hideously soiled and stained, its floors and walls imprinted with the marks of old furniture and fixtures, the stuff of material existence, and worse, sad traces of daily suffering in anguish and poverty. This is the terrible vision of distress made monument. This wall shows something wholly different from what is shown by the walls of an inhabited place, however poor it may be: everydayness as such, the world as such which, in a primordial, elemental (elementare, a rare word in Heidegger) saying, becomes visible and not a mere being of the world. Just before he quotes this lengthy text, Heidegger writes "Poetry is none other than this elemental comingtospeech (ZumWortKommen), or existence (Existenz) becomingdisclosed as beingintheworld. For the others who until then were blind, the world for the first time (erst) becomes visible with this articulation."34 And immediately after this long quotation, he writes, "being intheworld, which Rilke calls life, springs up before us in things in an elemental way." The poet makes us see the things themselves as does phenomenology! It is not a matter of fiction but of an "actual" (wirklich) truth, as Heidegger's brief commentary emphasizes: "What Rilke reads on that denuded wall . . . is not fictionally projected (hineingedichtet) onto it; on the contrary, description is possible only as the explication (Auslegung) and elucidation (Erleuchtung) of what is 'actually' (worklich) in this wall, of what suddenly springs up in a natural relation (natürliches Verhältnis) to it.''35 It is here, with this opposition between truth in the traditional sense and fiction, with this affirmation of the non fictional quality of art, that
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Heidegger's discussion grows halting and shies away. The poet deeply understands the "original world, but he does so in an unreflecting, completely untheoretical way." 36 But when Heidegger later confirms the uncertainty he had concerning the ontological import of poetic revelation, he again recalls Rilke's description and cites it as an example of Dasein's understanding of itself on the basis of things and therefore of an inauthentic selfunderstanding! It is as if, obedient to the command of a long tradition still undeconstructed on this theme and, in spite of himself, taking up once more the Platonic argument against poetry, he objects that the poet cannot "account for" what he shows us inasmuch as he is incapable of telling us how beingintheworld is authentic or inauthentic, just as in the Republic the poet is reproached for not knowing what is true or false, good or bad. As does Plato in the Ion, Heidegger sees in the poet an illumination, an inspiration, certainly not divine but one which gets at the very bottom of things and which is the equivalent of the most radical phenomenological vision; but this true intuition (opposed to "fiction''— the synonym of error—which is a term that much later will be eliminated from Heidegger's discourse on art) remains natural and naive, "unreflected" (unbedachte), without a touchstone: it is blind intuition, intuition without a concept! The Temptation of Nietzschean Aesthetics It seems that during the crucial period of the Turn toward which the Basic Problems takes one, albeit hesitant, step, Heidegger's closeness to Nietzsche was deeper than some simple affinity with his doctrine of artistic creation. Granted, when it comes to the fundamental theme of the course on Nietzsche, which was the awakening of the question of being as the most forgotten question of metaphysics, the Nietzschean motifs only appear in the background. Yet Nietzsche obviously serves as a guide on the path staked out, namely the return to the Presocratics, the return beyond logic to the original sense of logos as "gathering" in Heraclitus: to be sure, Nietzsche remained a prisoner of metaphysics and particularly of the false dichotomy between Heraclitus and Parmenides, "but aside from that Nietzsche understood the great commencement of the entire Greek Dasein in a way that is unsurpassed except by Hö1derlin."37 So, we are dealing with something quite different than a passing fancy or a fortuitous coincidence of vocabulary. No doubt Nietzsche himself is part of the blindness of the whole tradition since he calls the philosophical concept of being "the last wisp of reality which is going up in smoke" (Twilight of the Idols). Yet, among the constitutive elements of the "spiritual decadence of the earth" Heidegger names two dangers that Nietzsche was the first to describe as symptoms of nihilism and attempted to overcome: "making man gregarious, hateful suspicion toward all that is creative and free."38 Now this fall of an epoch
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where "the sinister frenzy of unleashed technology and the rootless organization of normalized man" reigns is not interpreted simply as a consequence of the forgetting of being but as a decline of power. "People are threatened with losing the last spiritual power that allowed them at least to see and estimate this decadence as such. . . ."40 Being is at stake in a strife. Only the great ones who affirm, ''the strong ones," "those who work at works—poets, thinkers, statesmen."41—are capable of wrenching, in great strife, what emerges from withdrawal, disclosure, dissimulation, and banalization. The very height of truth requires a lofty power of affirmation. "The great poetry of the Greeks,"42 that of the Tragedies or of Pindar, rests upon a "naming strength" which is precisely what the word Physis loses when it becomes "nature." Without doubt the origin of this power is found in a correspondence with being as the power of manifestation, of selfshowing. But again and again, the attributes that designate the essence of being as an initial arising of truth are borrowed from the Nietzschean vocabulary of affirmative power: nobility, rank, value (!), power or strength belonging to the few in number, creation (Schaffen). "Being is the fundamental determination of the noble and of nobility. . . ." (Das Sein ist die Grundbestimmung des Edlen und des Adels.)43 Later and apropos of the meaning of logos as "original gathering, rather than as a catchall, a mixture in which everything would have as much and as little value" (Heidegger will soon reject the very principle of the "hierarchy of values" as linked to a representing and calculating metaphysics of subjectivity), we find a remarkable equation of being with rank. "If being must open itself, it must have and maintain rank (Rang)."44 "What determines rank (das Rangmässige) is what possesses the greater strength (das Stärkere). . .. The true is not for just anyone, but only for the strong."45 Of course these statements must be put back in context: they apply in general to the Greek experience of being and are extracted from a commentary on specific fragments of Heraclitus. But taken as a whole the lecture course aims to revive the forgotten question which underlies metaphysics from beginning to end and to show that this question is both "the hidden foundation of our historical Dasein" and the "scarcely veiled abyss above which we make our way here and there, selfsatisfied and preoccupied with all sorts of activities."46 The oblivion of being and of the abysmal depth of its withdrawal seems, in Introduction to Metaphysics, to include the oblivion of power. As for art—still understood from out of the Greek experience of techné—it is taken up within the concept of mastery and taming. Certainly man is not the instigator of the powers that he has to tame by means of art in the broadest sense. "The activity of power (Gewaltätigkeit) in poetic saying, in the project of thought, in the fine workmanship of building, in the political act of instituting, is not the exercise of powers possessed by man but consist in harnessing (Bändigen) and harmonizing the powers (Gewalten) thanks to which beings disclose themselves as such, and do so by virtue of the fact that man involves himself in it. This opening of being is
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the power (Gewalt) that man has to master (bewältigen) in order to be in the midst of beings, which is to say, a historical being." The context as a whole requires us to translate "Gewalt" not as "violence," as G. Kahn often does, but as "power," even though Heidegger uses another term than Nietzsche's "Macht'': "Gewalt" designates a power maintained at an extreme but mastered by itself, devoid of disordered movements and of any of the ugliness proper to "violence."48 Moreover, how could the term "violence" be in accord with the continuity, if not the "constancy," of the opening? If the opening of being is gewaltig, it is by possessing the power to maintain itself and maintain man in the balance of appearance and with drawal. The supposed "violence" would make it a jolting palpitation, an irregular flashing entirely incompatible with the stability of disclosure. The whole space of art is power. The human power of art—which in the Greek technè not only means know how, skill, but also knowledge—is interpreted by Heidegger as the "harnessing" (Bändigung) of nonhuman power. Among these powers one must not only include the "forces of nature," earth, sea, and animals, but also, astonishingly enough, language, the understanding of being, Stimmung, passion (Leidenschaft), the power of building. And yet, this harnessing is limited, for the character of these forces is that they rule man from above, are "overpowers" (Übergewalten). Earth, nature, the existentials, and language equally belong here to the overpower of Being. Having stated these reservations we must nevertheless see the proximity to Nietzsche is very great: art as a harnessing, as conquest, implies in both thinkers a struggle, an act of power. On the one hand, one sees in Nietzsche's definitions of the "grand style" or of the "classic" that art consists in the mastering of a "chaos," the imposition of a law, a form, a style upon it. What is this "chaos"? Chaos is the whole of the underlying drives (Triebe), the superabundant ebb and flow of vital forces, both subjective and nonsubjective. Of course Nietzsche most often presents the mastery of chaos as a mastery by the artist of his own internal chaos: "To become a master of the chaos that one is. . . ."49 "To be a classic, it is necessary to have all the gifts and strong desires, apparently contradictory, but in such a way that they work together under one and the same yoke."50 This capacity to subjugate talents and multiple impulses implies no violence. On the contrary, in artistic activity the tenderness of gratitude (Dankbarkeit) expresses itself toward existence,51 toward the whole of being, including its most "questionable" (fragwürdig) and "daunting" (Furchtbare) aspects.52 On the other hand, if there is a conquest in all art it is by its manifestation of a will to be. Even if the artist shows a will to destroy, to break forms, when that will comes not from any "Romantic" resentment but is, properly speaking, affirmative or "Dionysian," it refers us once more to a "superabundant power pregnant with the future."53 In the end, for Nietzsche as well as for the Heidegger of Introduction to Metaphysics, art lies in ambush for being; it takes possession of it, wrenching it from familiar beings in a climate of rapture and struggle on the brink of the abyss:
Page 107 He who performs an act of power, the creator (der Schaffende) who broaches the unsaid, who bursts into the unthought, who takes by force that which has not yet happened and causes to appear the still unseen, this author of acts of power holds himself constantly at risk (tolma). While risking to master being he must at the same time accept the influx of nonbeing (mè kalon), of dislocation, instability, nonadaptation, and nonadjustment. 54
The struggle which in "The Origin of the Work of Art" is a struggle between the world and Earth is here the struggle against the overpowering power of being. Being is the opening of beings because man is thrown (einrückt) into it. "This opening of beings is the force that man must master so that in the exercise of power he may be himself in the midst of being, which means be historical."55 This struggle is lopsided. Man is "without an escape" (aporos) inasmuch as he collides with an invincible, unharnessable power of being: death. Death is the limit of all human power. He says this with an admirable conciseness: "It (death) brings to an end every accomplishment, it sets out the limit of all limits."56 Whatever it may be, the idea of a struggle for the disclosure of being (which seems contrary to that of a free selfgiving of being to man), this voluntaristic idea, is again and again reiterated throughout the text. Thus logos is interpreted not as the selfdisclosure of being but as the act of disclosing, of "producing the uncovered as such, producing beings in their disclosedness."57 "Logos . . . must designate that (human) act of power by means of which being is regathered into its recollection."58 Man is the gatherer. "In originary saying the being of beings is made manifest in the arrangement of its recollection.''59 It would seem that this human act of force, a willful effort, causes being to appear. Poetry and art as well as political institutions are the founders of History, but they also are understood as wrenching being from its veiled state by sheer struggle. "In the work of art the conquering of disclosure, and thereby of being itself, this conquest of the disclosedness of beings which itself comes about only in the form of a constant antagonism, is always simultaneously a struggle against the hidden, against concealed being, against appearance."60 Despite suggesting a deeper, ontological antagonism, the Riss, the rendingstroke, is still not what unites and separates Earth and world as coming from being itself. The rending which wrenches forth being and brings it to light initially seems to come from an artistic act of power, even if this act is in response to the overpowering character of being. "He who knows (this "knowledge" is art itself)61 is thrown into the very midst of the arrangement (Fug),62 wrenches forth (by the "rending stroke," Riss) being in beings and yet cannot master the overpowering. That is why he is torn between arrangement and nonarrangement, between the vile and the noble. All harnessing (Bändigung) of the powerful by an act of power is either triumph or defeat. Each in its own way casts out the famil
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iar and unfolds the dangerous character of that which is obtained by struggle, or lost: being. In different ways both risk their destruction." The combative, conquering, and lawmaking will of the artist and the necessity pushing him to risk going "beyond the familiar" toward the unprecedented doubtlessly have a Nietzschean ring. But how far can one take this comparison? Unlike the Dionysian, the overpowerful is not the reservoir of forces from which the creation of forms draws; rather, it is the very different limit of the deinon, the terrible, the disquieting strangeness which the artist meets head on. Moreover, Heidegger does not say that the artist must go beyond good and evil, but only that he oscillates between the integration of the organized world and the absence of a defined place, between order and disorder, between the vile or vulgar, the they, and the noble or resolute, solitary affirmation. Art is not "elsewhere,'' superhuman or above common humanity, but like all Dasein's actions it is forever divided and strained between the authentic and inauthentic which no one ever overcomes once and for all. Moreover, Nietzsche does not envisage as strongly as does Heidegger the possible failure of the artist, which would consist in his no longer being anywhere or his being simply crushed by the power he faces. Earth and the Dionysian Thus, in spite of this momentary proximity visàvis Nietzsche which leads him to exalt a despotic voluntarism and an aristocratism of the "creator," Heidegger still never adheres to the basic principles of Nietzsche's aesthetics, namely the idea that the artist and his subjective "creative state" are the origin of art, that this creative state itself is the expression of "natural" artistic forces or the expression of the artistic will to power immanent in the universe. It nevertheless remains true that the interpretation of the work of art as it is formulated in "The Origin of the Work of Art" results from an intimate, prolonged, and detailed debate with Nietzsche's thought on art. The text in Holzwege on art is the fruit of three lectures given in November and December of 1936, scarcely more than a year after the lecture course during the summer semester of 1935, and parallels the lecture course on "The Will to Power as Art" (Nietzsche I) which dates from the winter semester of 193637. This is why we propose the following working hypothesis: the conflictual and unitary relation of Earthworld constitutes both a response to and an "explication" of the relation between the Dionysian and the Apollinian, especially in its original form as seen in The Birth of Tragedy. In this confrontation Heidegger first of all must exorcise the thought of a primacy of creative forces over forms. Yet, despite the insurmountable distance between these two original poles there remains a very strong analogy between them.
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The analogy holds, first, in that these two adverse and complementary "powers," which are engaged in an implacable and unappeasable struggle, must fuse and interpenetrate (Nietzsche uses the metaphor of masculinefeminine coupling) in order to give birth to the work of art. The struggle or strife that always preserves the dimension proper to these adverse forces remains latent, intimate, preliminary to the appearance of the work and thus invisible in it. The essence of the work— strife—is hidden. "The calm of the work reposing in itself has its essence in the intimacy of the struggle."65 In Nietzschean terms, the Olympian appearance of the work dissimulates the Dionysian tearingapart. Seen in terms of the secret struggle presiding over the fusion of powers, a fusion in which they do not lose their identity, every work is a third term. Just as there is no purely Apollinian work that is not due to an extreme decadence, so there is no purely ''worldly" work, that is, one wholly detached from the Earth. Even a work that one could call "worldly"—which would be a work purely symbolic of the Enframing of planetary technology, for example certain hyperrealist paintings (Andy Warhol and his can of Campbell's Soup)66—needs an Earthly "substance," a support such as canvas itself and its colors. At the opposite extreme from this twilight, Greek tragedy is DionysoApollinian. Every work sets up a world on an Earth. But this "third term" is not a synthesis. The struggle is perpetuated and even exacerbated, not appeased, "stifled by an insipid compromise,67 for the antagonists sustain and reinforce each other: Earth cannot give up the open of the world if it is to appear as the Earth in the free upsurge of its selfwithdrawal. The world, in turn, cannot sweep Earth aside if it is to be based, as an ordering breadth and trajectory of all essential destinies, upon something stable.68
Like the Dionysian, Earth—an element recalcitrant to light and form—does not appear in itself but remains sheltered, undiscovered, in constant "reserve." Does this mean a reserve of sense or "meanings still to be discovered" as G. Vattimo suggests in his Introduction to Heidegger?69 It is instead a reserve of possible forms to which manifestation would only give body. For paradoxically, in order to be incarnated Earth and the Dionysian must submit themselves to phenomenality; they must appear in a world. The Dionysian, the unlimited, can manifest itself only in limiting and exposing itself in determinate Apollinian figures: the "pure Dionysian" for Heidegger would be a "barbarous" principle impossible to grasp, intoxication without clear vision, infinite fusion—empirically, the descent into an abyss of sensuality or formless affects.70 Like the Dionysian, Earth is situated on the side of power, and even an overabundance of power. "Tireless and indefatigable,"71 the drive of its "upsurge," the flow of its "current,"72 is as unabatable as the variety of its manifestations is plethoric: "It unfolds itself in an inexhaustible plenitude
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of simple types and forms." Yet if it is surge, flow (Strom, Verströmen, which indicates an erratic flowing), this multiform spurting is not, like the Dionysian, unlimited, indeterminate. Earth is not chaos. Whereas for Nietzsche nature is a "chaos" of forces (where there is in itself neither order nor form nor beauty nor anything that corresponds to our human categories),74 Earth is for Heidegger a secret sketch of forms. Its flux contains an order, its nature is "naturing," its current is "a delimiting current.''75 It is from this obscure medium of embryonic but not predetermined forms that the artist draws. "To draw" (Schöpfen) is the true sense of "creation" for Heidegger, while for Nietzsche it is a Schaffen, a labor, a fabrication (of fictions). Ergo, once more, the importance of the quotation from Dürer: ". . . in truth art is buried deep in nature, and he who can wrest it out (reissen) with a single stroke holds it fast."76 The artistic sketch is drawn from nature, but it takes great effort. "Reissen," Heidegger writes in his commentary on Dürer, "here means bringing the stroke to light, tracing it out with a pen or the drawing board." "Creation" as "drawing" makes possible features of nature visible which certainly do not exist in outline before their revelation by the work. "Certainly there is in nature a figure, a measure and limits to which the possibility of production in the open is linked: it is, precisely, art. But it is equally certain that this art in nature becomes manifest only by the work, because it is originally at home in the work."77 The apparently postRomantic idea of an art of nature is, in sum, shared by the two thinkers, but whereas with Nietzsche the Will to power imposes forms on the chaos that it itself originally is, with Heidegger art is the disclosure in works of forms not yet sketched out but secretly prefigured. What in a very external way first differentiates Earth from the Dionysian is that Earth is not a source, an origin in and of itself. The world reposes on the Earth but is not derived from it like the Apollinian is derived from the Dionysian. Yet the fundamental difference between the two interpretations of art lies in Heidegger's anchoring the work of art in the very unfolding of truth. The opening of being rules and illuminates both world and Earth. Their struggle is preceded by the original struggle which is that of the clearing (Lichtung), which makes possible the access to beings themselves, not directly but by way of the world. Before every epochal determination, the clearing conditions the order of the world and the manner in which the Earth is present. The conflictual relation of Earth and world as determinable in a given epoch is definitively determined only with the emergence of the work. This means that art is derived neither from the depths of nature, as is the case with the Romantics, nor from the world as the network of actions possible within a historical horizon. Strictly speaking, art springs from Nothing, from the jointure of Earth and world; but this jointure remains indeterminate before the appearance of the work. "The workbeing of the work resides in the enactment of the struggle between world and Earth."78 The work gives body to the struggle which rests ontologically on the contradictory tendency of the world to do away with the enclosed and
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of Earth to preserve its movement of closing in upon itself, a movement of nonmanifestation. To say that before the springing forth (which is the putting to work of a specific Earthworld relation) there is, properly speaking, no epoch is to deny that art is simply subjected to its epoch and a "sign of the times." The epoch is the offspring of art. Art is not originally in history (nor in nature). In other words, it does not create an epoch, it "makes" an epoch in founding it. Founding History, it always is related back to the preHistorical. The latter is not simply reducible to the Earth. The initiation, the Anfang, the completely original commencement of History with the Greeks, is, like Earth, both within and outside of every epoch. Earth in the Poem The Earth of the work is, in a general sense, that "of which" it is made: its material element, stone, wood, metal, colors, musical or linguistic sounds. The Earth of a poem can only be language itself. "Poetry moves in the element of speech, as does thought." 79 But speech itself, French, for instance, is not as such a being; it is not anything belonging to the world. Language cannot be reduced to a tool, to a means of expression, to an instrument of information, to a group of signs serving to exteriorize a sense already there beforehand. "It is language that makes beings as beings come into the open.''80 "Only the word grants being to a thing."81 Language renders all things present and carries them to the light of the clearing; it traces the very opening of the Open. Nevertheless, the opening is as much determined as what determines. Language is always a particular language, one spoken by a people living on the earth in such and such an epoch of its history. Yet language is not only a relation to a historical Earth lying outside it; it carries in itself its own Earth, its dimension of withdrawal where its resources lie hidden. The sounds of spoken language, its rhythm, its accents, its timbre, its resonance, its pace, as well as its written characters all at once spread themselves out before the senses—of hearing and sight—and through their material weight they escape signification and withdraw from the clarity of sense and from the transparency of the world. This opacity of verbal matter is what makes up the material and stuff of poetry. "That toward which the work withdraws and what it brings into relief in this withdrawal is what we have called the Earth."82 Like every work of art, such as the temple, the poem "far from allowing the material to disappear instead makes it come into relief."83 Thus the poem does not initially underscore language as the power of opening but as the mysterious, obscure, silent region. The poem draws its forms and finds its beauty in the Earth of words, in verbal substance. How? Once again Heidegger says nothing about the "poetic art" or the artistic activity itself, seeming to forget that the poet necessarily works with
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language at the same time as "listening" to it. For Valéry, the poet extracts from the Earth of words "the gold, the diamonds, the precious stones" thanks to a long and arduous labor, a purely artificial and totally contrived "operation." 84 Following Heidegger, must one believe the poet is a medium who writes "under the influence," as though taking dictation from the sacred? Whatever the case may be, he would agree at least in part with Valéry, whose fundamental aphorism he cites in Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung85 ("The poem—this prolonged hesitation between sound and sense") in order to acknowledge that the essence of poetry is found principally in the body of language and not in the content of thought. Valéry showed that instead of losing itself in its instrumental function of designation, the language of a poem somehow comes back to itself so as to signify itself and allow the mere sonorous and, as it were, incantatory vibration of words to resonate. In this regard he astutely remarks that some of the most beautiful verses—such as "Sois sage, ô ma douleur, et tienstoi plus tranquille" [Be wise, my sadness, and be more still]—do not convey any "message," articulate any idea, furnish any information, or sustain any thesis. "When the verse is very beautiful one does not even dream of understanding."86 Yet the Heideggerian approach radically distinguishes itself—and in many ways—from this contemporary formalism of the text that Valéry in some respect anticipates.87 Through a sort of Nietzschean reversal of the Platonic primacy of the ''signified," textualism tends to absolutize the signifier, in principle to reduce the importance of the effects of sense, finally to surreptitiously exclude thought. But for Heidegger, "the genuine experience of language can only be the thinking experience, and so the lofty poetizing of every great poetry always vibrates to the rhythm of a thought."88 This reciprocity between thought and poetry founded on the unique and original capacity of language—if it is returned to its primary power of saying [dire] in the strict sense, which means of rendering present, manifest, of "giving" being—interdicts the traditional contempt toward poetry as an inconsistent play of images just as much as it does the modern contempt toward thinking as impotent in comparison to active technological rationality. More precisely, if language is capable of instituting things in being, of revealing their relation to the world, poetry, if it recovers the Earth of language, cannot be reduced to the materiality of the word, for it makes sensible "the namingpower of speech," the pure saying. Without analyzing this power, "Origin" mentions it as being among the essentially Earthly traits of the work in general that make up part of this Werkstoff, this construction material that the work of art does not dissimulate for the sake of utility but exposes and expressly brings into relief: the metal comes to glimmer and shimmer, the colors to shine, the tone to sound, the word to saying. All these come forth when the work places itself back in the mass and weight of the stone, into the sturdiness and flexibility
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of the wood, into the hardness and luster of the bronze, into the light and darkness of the color, into the sounding of the tones and into the namingpower of words.
Because it makes this original power of naming manifest—a power not of the poet but of language in its essence—all great poetry brings to language what remains in abeyance in ordinary language where it is reduced to its function as an instrument of communication: the disclosive essence of language. Poetry says its genuine essence as well as the essence of language as an original poem, a silent poem of the appearing of being. The power of naming exercised and celebrated in the poem is prior even to the conflictual appearance of Earth and world inasmuch as this appearance depends on the power of naming. To the extent that it is what is most deeply concealed, this power constitutes the "material," so to speak, of all poetry. That poetry speaks itself in its power by speaking things and the silent difference between things and world—this gives to poetry the density of a ground, a foundation. This is why Heidegger calls poetry Ursprache,90 the "primordial language" of a people. Poetry is the possibility of language, and language is the first poem. "Poetry is naming, which is the founder of being and of the essence of all things; it is not just any speaking, but one through which all that we then discuss and deal with in everyday language is initially disclosed. Poetry begins by making language possible. Poetry is the primordial language (Ursprache) of a historical people." This Ursprache, which is poetry, keeps its "original'' character by saying again (the poet can only nach sprechen, speak in the wake of language) what language has silently already brought into the open. The primordial poem (Urdichtung) is nothing but the gathering of language saying the being of things. This primordial opening, the Sacred, is the first poem, "the poem prior to all saying (das unvordichtbare Gedicht) that has already surpassed in its saying (überdichtet) all poetic saying."91 This initial, silent poem that in Erläuterungert zu Hölderlins Dichtung is equivalent to the Sacred understood as an apportionment of man and gods is in On the Way to Language rather the mute difference between things and the world ("the resonance of silence") that language shelters. Hence this derivation:
The poet can only respond to (entsprechen, address the encounter with) the essence of language which is the power of giving rise, prior to every discourse, to the correspondence of thing and word, the power of tying a silent line between a thing and the world. Ordinary language thus implies a double degradation, a double loss in relation to the silent poem of lan
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guage and in relation to the poetry that gives to it a faithful echo. In making manifest its own power of naming, the poem reveals the "supporting ground" that language is, a ground prior to history insofar as every event will be inscribed in it: "Poetry is the supporting ground (tragende Grund) of history" . . . "The poets consecrate the soil.'' 92 Here is another radical difference with Valéry: poetry cannot be reduced to a cleverly arranged and calculated assemblage of words whose sonorities and rhythms are harmonized with a view to effecting "happiness" or artistic euphoria (be it sadness or gaiety that is expressed). The words of a poem always allow a more or less fundamental, particular Stimmung to appear: joy, sorrow, melancholy, or "the calm lucidity of rapture."93 Every poem sings the accord—always the same, always changing—which at each moment traverses beingintheworld in its entirety, modulating the difference between things and world, between earth and world. When it is fundamental, does not a tonality likewise manifest a ground which may be an Earth? Could there be one tonality more intimately associated with the Sacred than another, and thus to the essence of poetry: is it joy? is it melancholy? So, the Earth of language, its terrestrial dimension (das Erdige der Sprache),94 is first of all the bodiliness of language:95 on the one side there is the materiality of the voice, which means the sonority or resonance of articulated, spoken language (Gesprochenes)96 or even the murmuring [bruissement] of the voice and its "projection" [ébruitement],97 the articulate sounds that leave the mouth and strike the ear, the physical traits of the voice, be they songlike or only conversational; on the other side there is the visibility of written characters on which the legibility of language depends: in short, writing. "The speech (Wort) of language resounds and reverberates in the voice (Wortlaut), it becomes clear and glimmers in the written figures (Schriftbild)."98 Heidegger takes his distance from the traditional philosophy of language in a twofold way. On the one hand, unlike Plato and Rousseau, he does not propose the primacy of the voice over writing and does not regard the latter as the representation of the former. Phenomenologically we have no way of knowing if one is historically older than the other. Apart from the thought of a "voice" of being (which would be the other pole or origin of what we experience in Stimmung), both the human voice and writing must, from the point of view of the essence of truth, appear in the Lichtung. From this point of view, writing would be closer to the clearing since it clears and illuminates itself (lichtet sich) and glows (leuchtet). On the other hand, Heidegger goes to great pains to extract the "sensible" aspects of language—both audible and visible—both from metaphysics, which reduces them to the purely bodily in itself deprived of sense and to which sense is added only after the fact, as well as from the scientific explanation that reduces them to physical phenomena, to acoustic and visual impressions. "Voice and writing certainly belong to the sensible"
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(what the poet Hebel calls the Earth is indeed the sensible, he says earlier on in this text), "but to a sensible where a sense ceaselessly resonates and appears. Speech as sensible sense measures the breadth of the space of play (Spielraum) between Earth and sky. Language holds open the region where man dwells in the house of the world on Earth and under the sky." 99 It is clear that language as "sensible sense" is equivalent to all appearing, and this is because its "sensible" aspects cannot be reduced to the physiological, even though they belong to physis. The Heideggerian critique discharges each in turn, the modern and scientific interpretations of language as a group of phenomena, of acoustic facts, and the traditional or metaphysical interpretation. Returning to the Earth of language is not a matter of exalting the socalled sensible over against the tradition which has deprecated it in favor of a supersensible element. ''It is rather a matter of asking if in the traditional manner of representing this structure one really has the experience of the bodiliness of language as the character of sonority and writing; it is a matter of whether it suffices to trace this sonority back only to the physiologically represented body and of reducing it to the metaphysical domain of the sensible."100 "But the mouth is not simply a type of organ in a body represented as an organism—on the contrary: body and mouth belong to the current (Strömen) and to the growth of the Earth in which we mortals flourish and from which we receive the firmness of a ground and footing [assise] (das Gediegene einer Bodenständigkeit). If we lose the Earth, then surely we also lose the basis (Mit der Erde verlieren wir freilich auch das Bodenständige)."101 "Losing the Earth" means, for those who speak, that we are not only isolating speech from the speaking body but isolating language from the total play of Earth and world, of man and the sacred. Once more we find here the critique of the "organ" qua instrument102 of a body which is itself reduced to a physiological apparatus. But Heidegger doesn't simply mean here to show that we are "in the world" and not in a "natural environment" like animals. The "physical" resonance of the voice, the sounds issuing from the mouth, is brought back, like the living body, to the Earth understood not only as the ground and basis but as the power of autonomous emergence, as a nonhistorical current and growth. In what sense? The resonance of the voice does not come into relief in a simple materialistic explanation, for its materiality belongs to our origin and to our Earthly spontaneity, to the invisible side of the world that is inseparable from and sustains it. But if the voice receives its sonority from the Earth, it receives its attunement from being or language. Its attunement is an accord. "Die Stimme stimmt." "The voice harmonizes" the "physical" and the "spiritual," the world and Earth. "The resonance, the Earthly character of language, is contained in the attunement (Stimmen) which, playing them off each other, brings about a unanimity between the regions of the world structure."103 Here "the regions" or "world structure" designates the fourfold which is the Earth and sky, man and god. To render language sensible as such, to make contact with the Earth or
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ground that it constitutes, is also to make manifest its power of naming. What does it mean to name? To name is not the power of giving a name to something that already exists but is to allow a limit, an "opening trace" (Aufriss), to appear between the unsaid and the said, between withdrawal and presence. This limit does not come about through a purely human labor but follows from a power of language. To name is not to make something happen but to grant language its most secret reign. What secret is there in the activity proper to language? This secret is twofold. On the one hand it is the correlation of word and thing: "a word is what determines a thing as a thing." 104 "In naming, the things named are called and summoned to their being things."105 Words and things raise themselves up to being in the same movement. A name does not found a thing, nor does it condition it in the sense of a Bedingung (condition for the possibility in Kant's sense), but it has the possibility of placinginpresence. A name is a Bedingnis, a power of putting things in the world. The second hidden trait of language is that its power of disclosure and showing "fetches" not only things but the world, or more exactly, it sets in play the difference between things and world. This difference inheres in language as a silent call. To call, heissen, to name, is to let this call resound, which is also the play of the near and far. If poetry makes things appear as rendered in their dawning, in their birth—the world as though "seen for the first time"106—it does so not by leaving the initiative wholly to words, as Mallarmé would have it, but to their power of manifestation. Poetry lets language turn back toward its power of calling. For Heidegger, poetry makes the very occurrence of the division between the apparent and nonapparent appear. This division, already silently effected in the unexpressed essence of language, is not a fiction or a "creation" of the poet. Man, poets, can "only in turn" speak what language says. To speak is to listen to language; it is to repeat (nachsagen) its speaking (Sage); it is to speak out loud, to make resonate what language says in secret. The only truth that poetry speaks is the truth of language, its truth of showing. "What does 'saying' mean? (. . .) To show, let appear, lead one to see and understand."107 There is no concoction, no artifice in poetry: the Heideggerian position is exactly opposed to that of Mallarmé. Poetic speech is not recomposed, reinvigorated, recreated language but language rediscovered in its initial simplicity. A poem does not produce a fictional world alongside reality. "I say: a flower! and, outside the forgetting where my voice consigns any contour, inasmuch as something other than the known chalice, musically arises, as an idea itself and sweet, the absent one from every bouquet.''108 Here Mallarmé thinks word and idea as identically fictitious, "something other" than the perceived or known world. An idea is nothing but a sonority, a fiction. On this point Mallarmé comes close to Nietzsche, for whom language is founded on "lies," on forgotten metaphors, and who shows that the Platonic idea once more progressively becomes what it was at the beginning: a "fable." To say a flower
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in Mallarmé's way it is necessary to deny reality, to forget it in favor of an "idea," "sweet" because it is reduced to a harmonious group of sounds heretofore unheard of. To name a flower in Heidegger's manner is to hail the initial emergence of the flower itself in the world, to make the flower sensibly present in some bouquet. That things occur in the world, in the one true world, and saying a thing poetically are strictly contemporaneous. Here there is a simple confirmation, for no "explanation" of the originary correspondence of language and the being of things can be given. No doubt this is why the gesture of the poet has often been compared to wizardry. Rimbaud spoke of "evocative sorcery." For Sartre this wizardry consists in treating words as things, which means not being concerned first with their meaning. This interpretation is not wrong, but reductive. The act of the poet who "listens to language," who speaks "after it," who leaves "the initiative to words,'' is not magical but perhaps quite mystical in the sense that he dispossesses himself of himself, effaces himself before a speech which speaks through him. The "song" of poetry resides in the experience of the bodily plenitude rendered in language and in the recognition of its radical power of manifestation. The celebration and exaltation of this power makes every poet—and not just Hö1derlin—"poetize the essence of poetry." No doubt Hö1derlin is the first to have thought in all its depth what the nineteenth century has rather flatly called the "mission of the poet" as a testament to a passionate, unbearable mediation between man and the divine where joy, sorrow, and dread mix—a testament to a proximity struck by lightning. It befits us, fellow poets, to stand Under divine thunderstorms bareheaded, To grasp with our own hand the ray Of the Father himself, and to the people To offer the divine gift, hidden in song. For only we are pure of heart, like children, we have innocent hands. 109
Poetry measures man's abode in the face of God, in the face of the heavens, the space of the sacred where divinity discloses and conceals itself. Poetry founds History—"that which abides"—but also the ephemeral moment which through it receives its essential attunement, its memory: "A lyre gives to each hour its tone."110 Through poetry humans are humans, whatever else their "merits" may be: "Full of merit, but poetically man dwells on this Earth." Without doubt, more than anyone else until Mallarmé, Hö1derlin raises himself far above the lyrical expression of a particular destiny in order to celebrate the "great destiny" of the West as a whole. But beyond "subjective" happiness or unhappiness, every poet sings the necessity, which seems to him quasiforeign, of his own song. One
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cannot cite too many examples of this, and they are found in all centuries. To recall a few: Du Bellay: "And muses from me as foreign flee." (Regrets) Nerval: "Modulating in turn on the lyre of Orpheus. .. " (El Desdichado) Rimbaud: "This was at first a study. I wrote down silences, nights, I recorded the inexpressible. I determined vertigoes." (Alchemy of the Verb) Apollinaire: "We want to give you vast and strange domains Where mystery in flowers offers itself to whoever wants to collect it." (The Pretty Redhead) Trakl: "When Orpheus touches the lyre of silver Mourning the deceased in the garden of evening. . . ." (Sevensong of Death) Rilke: "Only the space of Celebration can receive Complaint." (Sonnets to Orpheus, I, 8) Valéry: "A silence is the strange source of poems." (The Philosopher and the Young Fate) SaintJohn Perse: "And the birth of its song is to him no less strange." (Exile) H. Michaux: ". . . zigzagging like a clumsy phrase that does not meet the bed of History." (Labyrinthes) R. Char: "The poem is love realized by desire remained desire." (Formal Division)
It is not that "poetry about poetry" is only Hö1derlinian, nor that "leaving the initiative to words" is characteristic only of Mallarmé, even if the particular end that he gives it—the abolition of the author—is properly his. Words taking over the initiative means that the purely instrumental relation to language is suspended, which is the ordinary use of language governed by the transmission of information. Instead of words being subordinated to a prior content or sense, the sense is disclosed along with words, in words. Thus, contrary to the banal notion of poets expressing their private dreams, René Char, the poet par excellence of daybreak, of "mornings,'' salutes the sober vigilance of the word which brings about the clearing of presence ("the clearness of the day") before the intervention of a subjectivity, be it dreaming or vigilant: "Raised before its sense, a word awakens us, lavishes the clearness of the day on us, a word which has not dreamed." 111 "A word awakens us," which means acquaints us with what we are looking for, teaching it to us. In the word that does not dream there is something like a permanence, a sort of knowledge [savior] on this side of or beyond the subject, on this side of or beyond sleep and vigilance. "The words that are going to emerge know about us what we ignore about them."112 Where do words come from? Not from us ("words are not of us," says Valéry), but from language, or rather from the link between being and
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language, from the play that it maintains between things and the world, the near and the far. "There is nothing sketchier than a word come from elsewhere and from afar." 113 The word does not dictate something, but sketches a sense that the poet endeavors to fix. What remains to be shown—an immense task—is how a poet responds to the sketchy sense that words such as these provide: seasunnightlovelightningsilence; what remains to be shown is how this sketched sense in the Earth itself, in the very sonority of the words, is equally a sketch of a Stimmung. For the poetic song is not so much a "music," as one is in the habit of saying since symbolism, as it is an attunement, a disposition, an atmosphere.
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VIII Rilke and the Interiority of Earth But there remains the song that names the earth. Heidegger, HW, p. 254 It is no longer possible to apply the measure of the individual heart. Rilke, Correspondence, p. 372
When Hölderlin celebrates a Sacred "older than time," he thereby appeals to a nonhistorical dimension, to a time prior to History (and which nevertheless can decide its future order). 1 Contrary to this, for Heidegger, Rilke's thought is situated strictly within the prolongation of the History of metaphysics. If for him there is a Rilkean Sacred, it is not an inaugural, dawning sacred; rather, it is one allowing for the preservation of simple and ephemeral earthly things spontaneously consigned to oblivion or to disfiguration by "machines"2 (a theme Heidegger takes up in his own thought on Technology). Rilke's poetry would pertain to the twilight: his power would lie in its capacity to take up once more and to recast in a final transmutation the great names that have founded the main epochs of being. It would include a thought of Physis as the thought of beings in their totality and would echo Heraclitus and Parmenides; it would repeat a thought of the subject that makes all truth rest on representation as it does for Descartes and Pascal; it would fundamentally unfold a thought of the Will as the being of beings directly derived from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Thus, underlain by the entire history of metaphysics, Rilke's poetical work would by its terminal and recapitulative3 character occupy a position equal to that of Nietzsche. Finally, Rilke would be a "better natured" Nietzsche, abgemildert, ''softened," a poet who "remains in the shadow of a tempered Nietzschean metaphysics."4 The Angel of the Elegies would be "metaphysically the Same as the Nietzschean figure of Zarathustra."5 In making his entire interpre
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tation depend on this parallel with Nietzsche, Heidegger oversimplifies and dissimulates the fundamental themes of Rilke's thought more than elucidates them. Indeed, the centerpiece of Heidegger's argumentation, namely the conformity of the principal Rilkean names for the being of beings—the "Open," "pure perception," the "heart"—to the traditional metaphysics of subjectivity and interiority, can hardly stand up to a reading of the greater part of the texts. However, we are not going to content ourselves by citing other texts as counterexamples against Heidegger's reading; we will try to read in a different way texts cited by him. This not withstanding, we are not going to stir up doubts about the principle concerning the ''homology" (permitting the reciprocity of propositions) between the "thought" of a poet, whatever it may be, and a metaphysical doctrine. If, as Y. Bonnefoy says, "poetry is a certain excess of words over sense," 6 all debate about the philosophy of a poet will inevitably be reductive to the extent that such a debate will hold as negligible, or at least place between parentheses, the proper character of the poem. Compared to the fortified architecture of a philosophical system, the "doctrine" of a poet will inevitably risk appearing excessively simple, naive, fragile, clumsy. No doubt Rilke seems to have put forward such a doctrine in some of his letters where he explains the basis of his thinking and what one would have to call his metaphysical vision. But nothing proves that what he has thus expounded is actually the sense of his poems. Does Valéry not teach us that the poet is in no better a position than anyone else to get at the truth of his own works? Now, Rilke fully subscribed to this idea. The sense of a poem cannot lie elsewhere than in the poem itself. Subjective Interiority and "the Distant Heart" Heidegger makes out what is essential in Rilke's thought from a poem that defines, as does the Eighth Duino Elegy, the opposing relations that animals and humans maintain to the "Open." The poem goes as follows: As nature abandons beings to the risk of their dull senses and protects none specially in soil or stem: so we are to the primordial ground of our being no longer loved; it risks us. Only we, more than plants or animals, go along with this risk; willing it; sometimes we are the ones that wager (not out of interest) more than even life itself—wager a breath . . . This makes us, outside of shelter
Page 122 secure, there, where the gravity of pure forces is at work; what finally harbors us is our being shelterless and that we have thus turned it into the Open, when we see a threat in order to, in the widest compass, somewhere, where its law touches us, say "yes" to it. 7
This poem is one of the rare texts where Rilke thematically deals with "nature" in general8 and articulates the idea of man as being "wagered" by this nature or by the "primordial ground" of his being. Are this animal nature and our own primordial ground identical? The identity between the two is a possible interpretation, but hardly, as Heidegger seems to assume, something obvious. Indeed there are four terms: nature/beings; the primordial ground of our being/us; and thus there is only an analogy between our relation to our own primordial ground and the relation of beings to nature. The "more'' which we are—through inspiration (the poetic song)—seems to be a radical transcendence, a "wholly other" with respect to "life." Can one deduce from this poem, as Heidegger does in his commentary, that the thrust of Rilke's thought is tied to the postKantian metaphysics of Nature and Will? According to the Heideggerian interpretation, Rilke develops a radical opposition between, on the one hand, the seamless plenitude of animal nature marked by the primacy of the Will (each animal is "risked," but kept in the wager, sheltered in itself) and, on the other hand, the rupture brought about by man thought as the being that goes beyond its insertion in the natural ground. The "Open" would be not only the totality of Nature in the sense of animals but "the being of beings in their totality," which is what the expression "the broadest circle" signifies. Agreed. But note from the start that "the broadest circle" is not an entity closed in on itself; indeed, quite to the contrary: "Distance is all, and nowhere is the circle closed" (Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 20).9 Man breaks with the plenitude of the "Open," turning away from it—as is said in other poems, above all the Eighth Elegy—whereas animals "freely" spring up in it. Animals are "free" because they are completely inserted into the Open, "free from death" and free from reflection on themselves. It is through his reflective and objectifying gaze that man extracts himself from the world and exposes himself. Nevertheless, man can recover this total insertion, this lost shelter; he can recover the Open by internally, that is, invisibly, turning toward it. The "salvation" extended to man by Rilke would be, according to Heidegger, the recovery of a path that would be, of course, identically, simultaneously, that of nature and interiority, but which would have its basis and foundation in the interiority of the subject. Over against the movement of objectification born from calculating, Cartesian reason, Rilke would rediscover the equivalent of a Pascalian logic of the heart, which would mean the return of man through the inside, through the
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"heart," to the interiority of the great All of which they have been excluded. Rilkean wisdom would basically teach this: the solution to the loss of the elemental fusion with nature (a loss that constitutes the very essence of man) is found in the flight toward an interiority so profound that it rejoins this lost unity. It is undeniable that Rilke belongs to the "epoch of subjectivity" and thus to its metaphysics. His poetry quite often stresses the necessity of interiorization, of the transformation of visible things "into us," into the invisibility of the heart: ". . . the most visible happiness / can be recognized only when transfigured, within. / Nowhere, my beloved, will the world be as it is within." 10 Every historical monument ("columns, towers, the sphinx, the flying buttresses of a cathedral'') is naturally consigned to being swept away by time, the destroyer; therefore it should be redressed, raised up, or as the Seventh Elegy once more says, "reconstructed within": "in your gaze / it finally stands, upright, rescued at last."11 Perishable things, "we must transform them completely into the invisible heart/into—oh infinity—into us"!12 The human subject capable of interiority indeed seems to be proposed here as the unconditioned foundation of all truth. Yet to look at it more closely, it is likely that this affirmation concerning the metamorphosis of the world into the "heart" might not have been the pure and simple withdrawal toward the interiority of a subject. Thus, let us read once more this often quoted passage from the Ninth Elegy: Earth, is it not what you want: to arise in us invisible? —Is it not your dream to be invisible for once? Earth! invisible!13
In this text, the subject in the grammatical sense as well as in the sense of an agent, the center and pole of ultimate reference, is the "Earth" and not "us." Earth requires us for its transformation into the invisible. Earth aspires to invisibility (as to its own essence?) by way of us. But what is the invisible for Rilke? It is not certain that this is, as Heidegger thinks, human interiority. It is no more certain, as Blanchot holds, that the invisible is simply the poem.14 For, precisely at the moment of supreme adherence to Earth, words fail. "Unutterably, I assent to you," goes the Ninth Elegy.15 Could not the invisible correspond to the unutterable, to silence? Poetry sings the sayable world, but so as to let it be beyond every name. Thus in Sonnets: Let the rose simply bloom . . . Take not great pains to search for other names. . . (I, 5) Do not slowly, in your mouth, things become nameless? (I, 13)
(referring to the flagrance of a rose):
Page 124 But to name it, no, we don't know how" (II, 6) . . . the secret and gentle intuition that silently grows from the inside. (II, 6) Words tenderly still come close to the Unsayable [Unsäglichen]. (II, 10).
Sometimes it seems silence is the face of glory of which the poem can only be the reverse, a panic, stellar silence more original and more powerful than all speech. This silence (Stille) encloses words; as in the poem The Island of the Sirens, "it swoops down upon the sailors" in the intervals when the sirens are not singing: How encircled (the sailors, but perhaps also words) by the silence that contains all space and breathes in your ears as if its other side were the song to which none could resist. 16
The celebration of Earth ("celebrating the Earth and not the Unsayable," Ninth Elegy) begins by affirming the expressibility of things and the disavowal of an absolute or supraterrestrial unsayable, but finishes by assenting to the inexpressibility of Earthly presence itself. Would not the Rilkean Unsayable be the very "heart" of the Earth both on this side of the poet and his ego and beyond any poetic utterance? Indeed there is a double effacement of the I and of the poem itself that should make us see that the poet no doubt means neither subjectivity nor the work of art when he speaks of the "invisible heart." Yet, according to the Heideggerian reading the Rilkean poetic process of turning toward the heart plays itself out exclusively in the interiority of the consciousness of the subject. The dimension of the heart signifies for Heidegger the passage to another modality of representation. "The turn is . . . a reversal of consciousness, and indeed within the sphere of consciousness," he writes.17 Representational and objectifying consciousness converts itself into a consciousness that ceases to be a presentation in front of itself. The heart would be the conversion to the self of the essence of consciousness: "that toward which the essentially interior and invisible must turn to find what is most proper to it can only be the most invisible of the invisible and the most interior of the interior."18 "The reversion of the aversion to the Open," the reconversion to the Open, would be a return to the absolute heart of the subject, a radical interiorization, an Erinnerung—according to a completely Hegelian movement: negation, negation of the negation, absolute intimacy of spirit. Nevertheless, a large number of Rilkean expressions that designate this return and the heart itself have the significance and incontrovertible place of exteriority. Why would Rilke call the heart "the interior space of the world" (Weltinnenraum) if he only wanted to mark the most profound intimacy of the subject? Why does he also say, in the poem commented upon by Heidegger: "over there where gravity has pure forces" and "the widest
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compass"? Why does what he elsewhere names "the World" belong to the essence of the heart? It seems that in the Rilkean heart the antinomy between exterior and interior is not unilaterally entrenched, as Heidegger supposed, by the folding back on absolute interiority; rather, it is confronted and resolved by a new possibility for the I and the world to exchange their roles. Rilke does not celebrate the absorption of the world into the subject but the relativization, indeed the inversion, of interiority. After all, is he not the first to formulate this phrase: InderWeltsein?20 Might Rilke perhaps be much further from metaphysics than Heidegger depicts him? A doubt, a question, keeps cropping up in the poet about the "obvious" character of the indubitable, certain separation of the inside and outside: "What is the inside? . . ." In Rilke's text this question immediately follows an impulse to shatter this separation so as to establish a unity that is not a unity of the heartsubject but the unity of heartworld: ''Oh, not to be separated!" (Nicht getrennt sein!) Rilke very often celebrates an eccentric heart that he calls "distant," "far," "exposed," "strange," a heart that mankind, or the poet, does not master, does not inhabit, does not know, but about which he or she has a presentiment and desires. "Who sings the faroff heart / that abides, hale, in the middle of all things?"21 This worldheart—a "you heartspace / who has grown out of us. Most intimate to us / that, surpassing us, departs"22—would have more in common with the coincidence of traditional opposites such as the I and the world than with an inflation of interiority. There is something besides the Neoromantic reaffirmation of the absolute primacy of the I in Rilke. Far from the I being what absorbs the world, the world itself is endowed with interiority. Things themselves shelter in their intimate obscurity a quasihuman interiority made of a haze of ardent sentiments not related to definite, isolated subjects: Things are the body of violins charged with rumbling obscurity; therein dreams the weeping of women there, in sleep, is rooted the rancor of entire races. . . .23
In many ways Rilke's poetry shakes the certitudes of interiority, and among them, selfassuredness, selfpossession. Our deepest heart, he often says, is not ours. "Our possession is loss."24 "The Interior Space of the World" (Weltinnenraum) or the Heart beyond Subjectivity "Durch alle Wessen reicht der eine Raum: Weltinnenraum. Die Vögel fliegen durch uns hindurch. . . ."25
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"One space extends through all beings: the inner space of the world. The birds fly through us...." 26 Oneness and unity in and by the space of the world—this certainly is not the neutral, universal space of science. This space we speak of as exterior is not simply "outside." It traverses us and bonds us, unites us. Us: "all the beings of the world," which means we who belong to a cosmos, have an arrangement and harmony, have an Earthly place and a link with the Earth. The "world" for Rilke is not the network of instrumental relations but the living reign of "pure space," a different name than the one given in the Eighth Elegy to this interior space of the world. Across all being one space stretches itself out: reicht. The verb reichen means "to stretch,'' "to extend" to one's proper breadth; it also means to reign. What is this reign (Reich) of space that governs beings without dominating them from the outside, but carries and presses them from the inside? Is it simply the burst of "natural" growth? Perhaps so, but on the condition we understand, as does Roger Munier in his limpid and profound interpretation of the Eighth Elegy, the reign of pure space as a call, as a waiting. "The Open is space: the pure space that is only a call, a naked waiting, the virgin and sovereign element that receives all that comes forth and arises in the growth of what happens, in which (in den, toward which), for example, flowers blossom without end."27 Far from being their passive substrate, at the same time that it moves beings interior space gathers them, or rather precedes them, attracts them; it waits for them in a nontemporal waiting; or rather it longs for them. "The Open longs," writes R. Munier.28 Pure space is the telos, without form and without limit, of the free expansion of things. It is a freedom different from that of humans, not the "congealed, isolated affirmation" of a subject but "full and without measure: freedom as the element."29 Must we not admit even in the simplest approach to things, in vision, that the density, the innermost "substance" and the inaccessibility of space, is what inhabits us? To look "outside" at the growing tree is to experience the inside: "I look outside, and it is the tree that grows in me."30 Perception is not reduced to the contemplative act of a subject facing an object, but it participates in the growth, in the movement, in the spacing proper to things, whether or not they are natural things. "The birds fly through us" does not mean our consciousness represents the flight of the birds; not only do we experience their very flight in our body, but it happens to us through our body in a sense that is not simply a matter of a perception but a fit of passion, of an ecstatic outburst, of "sympathy," of a fluttering of wings that quivers through and beyond us in a space that gathers and envelops us. Rilke recognizes in the "inside" the characteristics of the "outside," and in the "outside" the powers of an "inside."
Page 127 What is the inside? If not a more intense sky Traversed by birds and deep of all the winds of return. 31
Here "interior" space appears as endowed with a spontaneous life, as open to an immense, active ("intense") depth endowed with its own life, and thus far from being personal and subjective. This preobjective space is traversed by mysterious movements, those of the free animal, those of the wind, a wind that "returns,'' instead of dissipating, or of blowing into the void or toward some other place. Rather than the "return to the self" of the subject, is not this return the return without reserve, the Open? As for "exterior" space, it is a "project / outside (im Freien, in the open air) of inner worlds."32 Everywhere there is exchange, circulation of the interior and the exterior, above all in the poems of The Spanish Trilogy:33 Why must a man stand there like a shepherd, so exposed to the excess of influence, so much a part of this space full of events .......................................................................... So he arises at night and the cry outside of the bird is already in his existence and he is emboldened because he has taken all the heavens into his face.... and the shadows of clouds traversing him as would thoughts that space would think for him, slowly.
The most distance space, "the space where the stars move," miraculously blossoms in us. Yet this stellar space could do without us, it . . . could, given over to the distance, overflow into the distance far from us. And now it deigns to come to our face, like the gaze of the loved one, throwing itself open before us and perhaps dispersing its existence in us."34
"The space of the world" flows in us, but on the condition that the "heart" opens itself to harboring the most farflung distance in time, to that of natural time itself, the immemorial past of "blood" ("Its heart [. . . ] a nearname of millennial absences),35 and to the most farflung distance in space, that of the stars and the skies, beyond the skies.
Page 128 Oh I must have done with my wishes for every other conjunction, to accustom my heart to its remoteness. It had better live in the dread of its stars, than to be protected by appearances, allayed by proximity. The overflowing heavens of disappeared stars luxuriating in distress. . .. Here, already on the weeping, ending face . . . begins the imperious space of the world.... Breath the darkness of the earth and again look up! Again. Light and faceless the depth from above weighs down upon you. To your face the face contained within the night affords space. 36
To the human gaze toward the constellated height, frightening and lofty, corresponds the "intense movement of these stars toward you."37 What does loftiness following fright mean for the heart that stares at the starry skies? Is it not a loss of our ownness? The face of the faceless night approaches. What is ours lights up with the stars, flows out of us, as one poem says that has the same inspiration as The Trilogy: Turned up toward what stills, I have assented to the holy night, my senses have abandoned me and the heart has increased without name.38
The "heart" learns there not only its inner measure but the nocturnal outpouring, the breaking of individual subjectivity enclosed in itself, which sees itself delivered over to the anonymous space of the world. "The heart," and no longer "my heart." Black, huge heartholder. ........................................................................... And the sublime that you prepare in space I receive, unrecognizable, upon my fleeting face.39
The gaze immersed in the night, "the infinite obscurity of light," feels its singularity dissolve, the face to which it belongs effaced. Space was silently born in my traits; to fill its great gaze the night, through all its stars, prevailed over me.40
The experience of the heart or of the inner space of the world that the night favors gives the poet access to the complete reversibility of interior and exterior. The plunge toward an interiority of the world summons the effacement not only of the face but of its identifiable substrate.
Page 129 Face, my face: whose are you; and for what sort of thing are you face? 41
No doubt it may seem that in this surprising poem the I, the personal heart, tries to rejoin the anonymity of nature "without face." Does the forest have a face? Does not the mountain of basalt stand there faceless? Does not the sea raise itself from out of the sea bottom without face? Is not the sky mirrored there without brow, without mouth, without chin?42
However, this experience of space without a face expresses rather the experience of an exteriorization, an exposition or a stripping bare of subjectivity which thereby reaches the "unheardof Center," the heart of the world over which no discourse can truly have a hold ("you understand that the names for it endlessly waste away; for it is the center").43 Pure space, if we can reach it, defaces us [dévisage] literally. Stripped of its face, subjectivity loses its eidos, which is the sight (of oneself). It does not envisage itself any more. The "faceless" dismisses the theoretical and reflexive gaze in order to become open to an interiority other than that which is the inverse of a subject facing up, standing fast, expressing itself, affirming itself. There is a simultaneity of dispossession, of exportation and of the loss of the voice, which reverts to a cry: My darkness, my darkness, I stay there with you and everything outside goes by; and I wanted to have grown like an animal a single voice, a unique cry for everything.44
How do we read in these texts the expression of a subjectivity based on itself and satisfied with its consciousness? For Rilke the heart only discovers itself if it surrenders the property of the subject to become the property of the world. This heart is not the I but the "excess of existence" over all ipseity: "Oh heart, how much did, from the first moment, the excess of existence (das Übermass das Daseins) overcome you?"45 The Rilkean ecstasy of the heart accomplishes an enlargement in the sense of an expansion and liberation. The poem cited above emphasizes that the rediscovered "unique cry" could be both beyond language and the single heart:
Page 130 a unique cry for all—; for what is it to me the number of words that come and fly by when a bird song four thousand times sung and sung again makes a tiny heart so grand and one with the heart of the grove.... 46
Certainly the expansion of the heart is part of entering again into direct communication with the Open—which does not mean taking possession of the Open. But it seems difficult to interpret this return to the Open as a simple inner movement of consciousness, as the reopening of a larger, vaguer, more indeterminate subjective space. Heidegger writes: "... not only does everything else turn toward the genuine 'inside' of consciousness, but even more, within this inside everything limitlessly turns for us into everything else. The turning inward of the inner space of the world releases us without end to the Open."47 Understanding the return to the Open as the inversion of all objectivity into an indefinite (more than infinite) subjectivity, Heidegger does not see, or pretends not to see, that the turn back toward the interior, the transformation of the outside into the inside, does not come about as a oneway movement. The discovery of the dimension of the heart implies a transposition and exposition of the interior to the exterior. Or, more radically, exteriority becomes interior. Or still more radically, the "pure space" of the heart of the world is no longer subjective or objective. Far from the exterior simply being interiorized, indeed the first movement, which is a powerful transfiguration of things, permits the direct reading of the interior from the exterior: To transform the world there outside, winds, rains, ........................................................................ into a handful of inner things. Now it all lies carefree In the wide open [heart of] roses.48
But this "wide open" implies at the same time a secret dimension, withdrawn, difficult to approach. The nonanthropological, nonsubjective opening of the heart is quite different from the immediate opening of the animal which, "wideeyed, sees the Open" (beginning of the Eighth Elegy). Could not this heart of the world in the end be what Rilke names the Invisible? If the Invisible is not reducible to human interiority, nor to the Texture of a poem, is it not something like a transmutation of the Open? Is not the Invisible the nonimmediate Open, the withdrawn center that holds all gathered things and unites their adverse tensions? Is not this ungraspable and all powerful center that resists and "dominates us" and toward which "our center" inclines (as the sixth poem of Vergers—a series of poems written in French—cited below indicates) closer to Heidegger's being than to any par
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ticular being, notably to Schopenhauer's will? Who could understand the attraction it exerts as the simple ruse of the vital illusion? The "Invisible" or Inapparent Harmony of the Earth No one knows how much it denies, the Invisible, dominates us, when our life to the invisible ruse gives in, invisibly. Slowly, to the pleasure of fascinations our center is displaced so that the heart is returned to it in its turn: to him, at last, the Grand Master of absences. 49
The subject of this poem is not a ruse of life, the will to live or the will to power, but a ruse of by the Invisible regarding "our life." Which ruse is this? Making use of our desires, our affinities (our "fascinations"), the invisible center of the world entices our subjectivity ("our center") without violence ("gently") to decenter itself so that the heart of the world can take its place ("returns to it in turn''). The invisibility of the heart is what moves us; it is the heart, and not us, which is the sovereign Master "of absences." Which are these absences? They are the modes of the presence of the Invisible, and first of all those of the Angels: "The angel of the Elegies—the 'terrible' angel—is the guarantee for a higher level of reality of the Invisible."50 The Rilkean angel seems to be this power that frees us from our own center, that helps us overcome, if not abolish, the selfenclosure of subjectivity, for here is how the poet appeals to the liberator: Our fate: not knowing how to exit the inner domain that misleads. You appear in our hindrances and enflame them like an alp. Your joy overhangs our realm, and we hardly grasp the outcome; .................................................................. Angel, do I complain, do I complain? But then how would the complaint be mine?51
These absences have come after those of death: "Being dead is a hardship / and full of recommencements."52 The heart opens toward this other "reign." Because there is so little of Nietzsche in Rilke, he treats death and life as a "reign." The Invisible is the unity of the living and the dead. But this unity that is affirmed many times ("In the Elegies affirmation of life and of death reveal themselves to be one")53 should not be thought of as itself belonging to a hinterworld, to a "world beyond whose shadow
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plunges the earth into gloom." This "profoundly Earthly" immanence which is called "the grand Unity," or elsewhere "the profundity of being" (which is another name for the Open in its ''largest circle"), obviously echoes the OneAll of Heraclitus, but without the explicit reference to the latter that one finds most prominently in Hölderlin. If, as with Heraclitus, "an invisible harmony surpasses the visible harmony,"58 it is in the sense of an immanence of the invisible "principle" that governs everything, so to speak, behind the scenes. Yet, in contradistinction to the philosopher (Heraclitus or Heidegger), Rilke, the poet, most often—except for the famous letter to von Hulewicz, of which the previous citations are extracts—desires, seeks in his poem the invisible unity without considering it an accepted principle. Poetry quite often seems more hesitant, less thetic and less affirmative than ontology. Thus, in the dramatic Spanish Trilogy, the unity among some fragments of the nocturnal countryside (eerily lighted and tormented like Van Gogh's Starry Night, which seems to be evoked by it), the unity among various beasts and foreign people and the I of the poet, is not posited or "realized" but postulated, requested of God in a strange prayer. Does not the fusion so violently desired ("to make but one thing of all that") acknowledge a distressing separation? In any case, the poem whose beginning we cite below gives the I an eccentric, happenstance place (at first the I is found at the margin, literally written in parentheses; then, for a moment, as a point of departure; then straying again, uncertain of itself): Out of this cloud, see: that so wildly covers up the star that just appeared—(and from me) yonder of these foothills now nightfallen, nightwinds for a while—(and from me), from this river in the valley floor, that catches the shining of a jagged starlit sky—(and from me); to make, oh Lord, out of me and all things one single thing: out of me and out of the feeling that the herd, returned to the fold, exhaling, endures the great obscure absence of the world—, from me and every light among so many dark houses, oh Lord: to make but one thing; from strangers, for I do not know a single one, oh Lord, and from me again to make one thing....59
The unique thing (das Ding) that the poet summons from his wishes is not obviously a particular being referred to as earth and sky, as the pitcher of wine is in Heidegger. It is named in the optative mode as a possibility: "what belongs to worldandearth" (Welthaftirdisch); it would be "the arrival" (die Ankunft), nothing but it, grasped in the purity of its essence:
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. . . weighing nothing but the arrival
"das Ding, das welthaftirdisch wie ein Meteor ... nichts wiegend als die Ankunft." What arrival if not the very appearing of the nocturnal things and the I, of worldearthI, whose "unity" would be suddenly manifest, imponderable, dazzling and ungraspable "as a meteor''? Indeed the thing would be the flash of the presentation of things present. But the arrival in presence—this "unique thing," the very sudden showing of presence, the quite dazzling burst—escapes in this poem; it is lacking.61 The Invisible is the absence of absences at the same time as it is the presence of things present: a logical contradiction. The Invisible resists, and yet it pulls all the strings, it acts and thereby appears disclosed. In Rilke's poetry the "contradiction" constituted by this plenitude of being in its very withdrawal—being that shines by way of beings—is symbolized by the rose. Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight Of being the sleep of no one under so many eyelids.62
Following Hegelian logic on this point, "pure contradiction" here is the essence of pure identity. But this pure contradiction is not accompanied by any pain, any labor of the negative. It is pleasure (Lust), the delight of a nonsubjective identity ("the sleep of no one"). The delight of an extreme surrender of ipseity. Under petaleyelids sleeps the invisible eye that is not only provisionally closed but eternally unconscious of itself. The interior space of the rose hides a perfect absence. Rilke's rose, like that of Angelus Silesius, is without why; it does not want anything and does not want itself. We are far from the postKantian metaphysics of the will. The rose softly calls to let the invisible opening be, to love the unfathomable intimacy of its withdrawal. And yet it negatively evokes someone who in his sleep could see elsewhere, could have another mode of presence and looking. Is not the eye left unsaid in the poem the invisible center of physis, its gaze abysmally closed but open, which inexhaustibly exposes itself in the visibility of petaleyelids? The amazement of the poet over the unity of opening and closing that can be discerned in one identical thing, over this gift and this extreme reserve, is marked in the poem The Rose Cutting by an exclamation: That one can open up like a lid, and under it lie genuine eyelids, closed, as though, sleeping tenfold, they had to subdue the visual power of an inner world.63
Here there is no longer a "contradiction" but a coincidence of opposites, namely sleep and the watch ("visual power"), even though this watch is
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nothing but a hypothesis, indeed a fiction ("as though"). The identity of absence and presence which is here only suggested is clearly affirmed at the end of the poem when the outside and inside, "the winds, the rains ...," ''anxiety, offense, . . . all this lies carefree in the wide open [heart of the] roses." The rose obviously appears as the secret of the world. But precisely why does the rose become the symbol of the secret harmony of opposites? Rilke's meditation on the "inside of the rose" 64 avoids, with apparent ease, the connotation of a perfectly edifying insipidity, as is implied in a blooming beauty close to being "plucked" in pursuit of the carpe diem, a connotation which has been associated with the symbol of the rose. Without doubt it is in revolt against such insipidity that SaintJohn Perse speaks of "the obscene rose of the poem."65 In contrast, Rilke once again takes up, in a strange and paradoxical manner, with a mystical tradition for which the rose symbolized the "chalice" containing the blood of Christ, and by extension the divine heart, the source of beauty and life, indeed the original unity. Far from simply transposing this theme into the profane order, Rilke makes emerge from the rose, taken as a thing of everyday life, an enigmatic duality and unity of contrary aspects, notably of presenceabsence. This quasimysticism of the most banal everydayness nowhere appears more clearly than in the cycle of twentyfour poems written in French entitled The Roses.66 In its perfect selfreference, the rose there manifests an astonishing unity, not only of gift and reserve but a unity of multiple contrary dimensions, a coincidence of numerous opposed qualities. This unity is all the more pure and more perfect as it leaves the human subject, the poetic ego, outside of itself. Strictly speaking here there is no mysticism in the sense of an absorption of the I into a divine principle. This quasimystical unity occurs by itself beyond or apart from the I in the "silent heart" (1) of the rose which fully bestows itself and fully withdraws, as does everything and as we do ourselves.67 Let us listen to a few verses where this litany of dual unity is intoned with an ardent and simple piety. We say litany because this evocative lyricism of the you [toi] ("Rose, you, oh thing full par excellence" (3); "You are ineffable" (16)) finds in its very repetitions invocations or calls verging on veneration ("Rose. . . / that one should call reliquary / of SaintRose" (9)). The rose is both the supreme vigilance and profound sleep of natural things: whole all awake whose middle sleeps... (1);
legible, written things and illegible and unwritten things: the book cracked ... that we will never read (2);
the reserve or the retention in itself and the dissipation outside itself, both unlimited:
Page 135 which infinitely contains itself and which infinitely overflows . . . (3);
the many and the one: . . . one hundred times thyself in a single flower (4);
loving itself to the point of autoeroticism, but without division between itself and its image, it realizes the impossible "Narcissus fulfilled" (5); it is both individuality and species, fragment and totality: A single rose is all roses (6);
and again both the pure name and the pure tissue of things: the perfect, the pliant word framed by the text of things (6).
In the last six poems doubt and questions will disturb the litany of harmony. Can we be, how could we be, like the rose, a fullness that diffuses itself? Is it a mere "example" (19)? Does it know its own enigmatic unity? Does it know, enclose, and spread the very secret itself of all being? This ineffable accord of nothing and being that we are unaware of (23).
In spite of this doubt, the cycle ends on a note of confidence; the harmony occurs; we are the "contemporaries" (14) of this flower which is not our "age" (it does not have our human temporality): . . . You here who share with us, distracted, this life, this life which is not your age....(24)
Between the beginning and end of the cycle the rose manifests itself in a double aspect of proximity (7 to 11)—as "friend" and "lover" in the gentle familiarity of its "tender forms between cheeks and breasts'' (8)—and distance (12 to 19) or as a menace that marks a sudden passage to the Thou [vous] ("against whom, rose, hast thou adopted these thorns" (12)). Through this alternation, the beating of the heart of opposites is repeated in various figures: that of the saint and the lover (9), of the present and memory (13), of death and afterlife (14); or again it is "you are ineffable [ ... ] sung by an angel" (16), a vertiginous whirling and "calm center," "impulse," and "full rest" (21) departing this "earth of death" and leaving "for a golden day" (22). The rose is both touched and intangible, visible and invisible, exterior
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and interior. But the intangibility, invisibility, interiority—"physical" interiority irreducible to subjectivity—are the essence of this duality. Natural things escape all dependence visàvis human consciousness even more than does the fabricated thing, like the pitcher of wine. Even if we can say that some of these attributes arise from an obvious anthropomorphism ("friend," ''lover," "actress," "your overtight corset," etc.), the rose possesses nevertheless a sort of radical autonomy and the alterity of pure selfposition: "intangible medium" (17); "we are unaware of what happens to you" (18); "enclosed in yourself" (20). No doubt it is true to acknowledge with Heidegger that "not only are we not prepared but also not qualified to give an interpretation of the Elegies and the Sonnets" 68 of Rilke. But have we gone wrong by not having "sufficiently thought" their proper sphere "beginning with the essence of metaphysics"?69 Instead it seems that the attempt to establish and analyze this metaphysical background makes us insensitive to the irreplaceable voice of the poet and doses us to the irreducible Holy that it welcomes. This voice indeed responds to the petition of an invisible center of the world that is neither the I (the "heart" of the world is not the individual human subject) nor nature (which is not conceived of as the metaphysical totality of beings). In celebrating the rose, the poet attempts to approach this center which is the very essence of Earth: "O supreme essence of this floating abode." This perfection of the unstable does not come about, as with Nietzsche, from its eternal repetition. The Earthly is not repeatable. It belongs, outside of all opposition of the relative and absolute, to the order of the "once and for all"; it is marked by the seal of Einmaligkeit, which is the unicity of each moment of existence. The perfection of unicity lies in the absence of its possible return: perfection of the "one time for each thing." This expression recurs in six variations in the Ninth Elegy, and this passage ends as follows: . . . But this having been once, even if only once: having been earthly does not seem revocable.70
But isn't this unicity the echo of the unique heart of the Earth rather than the simple consequence of the irreversibility of time? The way Rilke celebrates the perfection of the ephemeral and allows beings to be in their withdrawal sets itself apart from every positive metaphysics without leading to a negative theology. All the contraries or diverse attributes proper to metaphysical discourse are indeed summoned, only to be, in the end, rejected: the rose in its inaccessible heart is and is not: individual, species; movement, rest; simple word, simple thing.... All opposed or compatible terms are annulled when, at the interior of a thing as well as of all things, they rejoin its point of harmony, of perfect equilibrium:
Page 137 Obscurity and clarity, the flower like the book: all is rest.
But there is no theophany, no night of the intellect and of the senses, no supernatural and withdrawn profundity. Simply the abysmal unity of the simple thing reposing in itself. This "interior" unity that is also the unity of life and death is vertiginously distant, sidereal, but at the same time quite close, for it evens out not only in the rose but in the source, in the tree. Could not Orpheus—the scattered god, the god that according to the myth is, like Dionysus, torn apart, shred, and cast out into multiple beings—be another name for the heart, or this intimate, inaccessible dimension of the Earth: The earth is similar to the child that knows poems. ........................................................................ All that the teacher taught, the innumerable and what is impressed in the roots and the long and complicated trunks: it sings it, it sings it!
This mysterious teacher that has taught poetry to the Earth and will teach it to the poet if he knows how to listen to the song of the Earth—who is this if not Orpheus? But who is Orpheus? The god who carries a lyre, which means the one who is himself the point from whence song is born, the "unheard of center," the secret hearth beyond the reach where the lyre raises itself up by itself ("this place where the lyre / resounding raised itself up: the unheard center," 71unerhörte, that is, that of which one hears nothing but the echo). This "medium'' (Mitte) is named Orpheus, not to conform to a legend, but to confirm that the secret and sacred birth of the poem escapes the poet and that human subjectivity is not its own source of inspiration. "To sing is in truth another breath": the breath of another. "A flight in God." The poem is transport, ekstasis into the divine, forgetfulness by the poet of his own voice. Who is this God to whom Rilke in his youth bestowed a powerful but already closed and ungraspable figure? You are the cock's crow after the night of time, the morning dew, the morning prayers and the maiden, the stranger, the mother and death. You are the changing figure who emerges always solitary from destiny, whom no rejoicing nor complaint escorts and no one like a virgin forests treads. You are the deep sense of things that hushes the last word of its essential being and shows itself always other to others: to the ship as earth and to the land as ship.72
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This distant god is now brought near, but as spreading out into the innumerable and ephemeral figures of Earth. His place can no longer be located and yet it remains one, recollected into one single center. Certainly it is dispersed into the lions and the crags, the trees and the birds (I, 26): "There you sing now again" (ibid.). It is nevertheless originally one song. Gesang ist Dasein. "Song is existence" (I, 3), but the song of an other, the song of Orpheus, the song of the unique heart of the Earth: "lerne / vergessen dab du aufsangst." "Learn to forget that you rose up in song." Know that it is the god. This divinity is both one and diffuse. For Rilke it is clear that God is not dead, contrary to what Heidegger leads us to believe in his reading. 73 ''God is the place that heals" (II, 16). It is not like the Heideggerian Sacred that dwells within itself unscathed, safe, but a place (Stelle) that brings about healing, that is the regenerating center of things. It is an obscure, silent, and unlocatable place. "But He is serene and dispersed" (ibid.). It is a place already named and situated, for it could not be found elsewhere than in the heart of the world, "this unique heart tossed to the joy of the most ample skies" (Ninth Elegy); but it is an unnameable and unlocatable place that, in an astonishing letter from Muzot74 written toward the end of his life, Rilke means to leave nameless, "anonymous": "for a long time I have lived kneeling in the antechamber of his name.... An anonymity begins to grow that must commence again with God in order to be whole and without evasion Its attributes are withdrawn from God who is no longer sayable "Rilke thinks that he could accept the Christian idea of the mediator only if "one admits there is an abyss between God and us."75 In this letter he calls this abyss "the obscurity of God," which means his effacement in the unsayable.
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IX Ecstatic Dwelling HÖLderlin And SaintJohn Perse Difficult it is for him to leave his place Who dwells near to the primordial upsurge. Hölderlin, "The Migration" (die Wanderung) The uninhabitable is our site. SaintJohn Perse, Amers
What does it mean to dwell? Is it simply to find yourself at home somewhere? But what is this "at home"? The dwelling, usually experienced as a shelter, hearth, or comfort, soon takes on an enigmatic aspect when these unusual questions are asked. Is it a kind of spatial excrescence of the human subject? A shell? A more elementary relation with a place? A root? Yet, despite these current and quite reassuring metaphors, the "at home" cannot be reduced to the simple fact of living in symbiosis with a space become familiar, nor even of finding oneself thereby ensconced in a certain soil, linked by a network of bonds and attachments to a land, to a country. ''To dwell" also means "to last." Some regional French dialects say "to remain" [rester] for "to live" here or there. A habitation incorporates time and the epoch just as radically as it does place. Thus opening itself to a vaster time and place, a dwelling always comprises an "ekstatic" dimension by which its inhabitant is drawn outside of the sphere of intimacy, of the hearth in the sense of the center, in order to be delivered to the opaque remoteness of an Earth and to the luminous distance of a world. An "at home" that does not in some way or another lead back to this "excentration" would be a prison or a maddening confinement. The suffocating instance [enstase] of the athome must be broken, opened up so a free dwelling can take place. Contrary to Leibniz's monads that "have no windows through which something could
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leave or enter them," human houses need openings, windowpanes, bays, doors by which the air, light, and visitors can enter. Yet, the human habitation is ecstatic not because of the openings designed by the architect but because humans in their essence, inasmuch as they are beingintheworld, are, as Heidegger has remarked, always "already outside" without having to depart from themselves. "Dasein," he says, "is not at all in a shell (Gehaüse)."2 Certainly he is thinking here of the human body, but this phrase is just as applicable to the human dwelling. Beginning with the intimacy in which, out of need and necessity, it protects and hides itself, the free dwelling must let the transcendence of what is most remote appear. Beyond but primarily at the heart of the empirically inhabited space comes the call for a more secret or more spacious abode; the desire for a more harmonious, more complete site arises. What abode, what site? For the philosopher this other dimension that transcends the ordinary habitation will be "the neighborhood of being," the distance taken with regard to technical objects, the recovered gift of letting things near and simple be, a new listening to language. But for the poet, the desire for the free dwelling manifests itself as a desire for the abode among the elements. For the poet, the elemental is not a simple metaphor of being, as when Heidegger says that "the ground and the soil are the element where the roots of the tree spread."3 For the thinker the element is the nonmetaphysical, nongrounding reservoir, being as" 'the calm force' of the loving capacity, which means of the possible."4 For Hölderlin it is the native soil, the Geburtsland, the "homeland" (Heimat), the country (Vaterland) celebrated as the elemental dwelling: the most intimate place by gift of nature and at the same time the most desirable, the most perfect; das Nächste Beste, "the closest (is) the best.''5 But the most desirable dwelling on earth, the place of birth which through an obscure affinity and mysterious alchemy preserves for the poet the calls and the correspondences of destiny, withdraws into its remote intimacy, the deep secret of the source that it is itself. The dwelling (Heim) draws its essence from the secret (heimliches). To come to terms with this secret is to pass it over in silence, or to speak about it with reticence, with fear: An enigma is pure emergence. Even Song may hardly reveal it....6
The closest and happiest abode (although it is quite distressing for the poet to recognize it in the actual German homeland), the most familiar and the most connatural seems to be the most alien and removed. It will be necessary to forego spontaneously finding oneself "at home" there, to accept exile, the distance of foreign abodes, in order to recover, hopefully, the enigmatic proximity and distance of the familiar.
Page 141 No one, without wings is capable of grasping what is near. 7 Oh, give us wings, with most faithful senses To cross over and return.8
The passage through the foreign space—a long sail, as in Remembrance or The Voyager, or magically taking flight, as in Patmos—supposes the passage through a foreign element with respect to the earth: the sea, the aether, the air—where it is impossible to be at home. It is a trial, the "trial" par excellence. Even though it is not the major theme of this song, the poetry of Hölderlin sings just as much about what the German language understands under the term Heimsuchung as it does about Heimkunft, the homecoming; Heimsuchung means both "affliction" and ''visit to one's domicile"; a "quest" (Suchung) for the dwelling (Heim).9 Also seeking its dwelling in the elemental, the poetry of SaintJohn Perse reveals to us that the ekstatic habitation is not necessarily linked to the native element in the sense of place ("Who still knows the place of his birth?")10 It teaches us that the familiar is not by nature more desirable. Besides, the "inhabitable" element, or rather those inhabitable elements that are sea, wind, sand—favorite themes of Perse's poetry—bear a much more symbolic meaning than the earth in Hölderlin. Sometimes becoming immersed in the language and concerns of the thinker and competing with him, SaintJohn Perse explicitly announces a project of promoting "a few new propositions on the essence of being."ll The elemental is for him both the "natural" element itself and the symbol of the effacement of all beings, indeed of every sign and every name, in the encounter with being.12 Sand is a dune as well as the sea shore and dust—and as an eclipse of History, the pure manifestation of the non foundation. I have built upon the abyss, and the spray and the sandsmoke. 13
The sea is both its multiple play of waves, of shadow and light, and the symbol of being, "a thing far and near";14 "Being surprised in its essence."15 Despite this ambiguity of the elemental, the dwelling that the poet desires is clearly, strangely, exiled from every actual place. And who then still whispers into our ear about the true place?16 Place of the word: every seashore of this world.17
The incessant uprooting of the departure for a vaster and more distant space, unoccupiable and without boundaries, is accompanied by the perpetual refusal and repeated abandonment of every abode that has once more become familiar.
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And the penate, or the household god, let no one think about carrying them with him.
If for Hö1derlin the exile haunts the dwelling, for SaintJohn Perse the dwelling is in exile. But what is an exile for which there is no longer anything foreign? Is it a will to possess the wholeness of the world? It seems not, for to dwell poetically in exile does not mean to feel everywhere at home; rather, it means not to have a home anywhere. Persean exile is neither voluntarism nor the spirit of conquest nor nostalgia nor dereliction. It consists neither in fleeing a particular political country nor in being hounded out of it.19 Exile does not symbolize the abstract transcendence of consciousness or the affirmation of the liberty of the subject but the sacred call of the elemental and the joyful, poetic extradition into the Open of being. "Exile is not of yesterday! Exile is not of yesterday! Oh vestiges, oh premisses," Says the Stranger among the sands, "the whole world is new to me! . . . "And the birth of his song is to him no less alien.20
Exile is immemorial, without a trace in any archive or in any recording; a nonlocatable place of forgetfulness and of eternal birth, a place that does not exist except perhaps as the instant of a lightning flash. Perse is thereby less "Heideggerian" than Hö1derlin. But is it not paradoxical that the philosopher of Unheimlichkeit, of anxiety as well as of estranged joy,21 the thinker of the abyss of being as the wholly other than beings—which still awaits a name—has so fully privileged the poetic quest for the Homeland and for the proper, familiar, domestic abode. "The thinker thinks in the direction of the unfamiliar (das Unheimlichkeit) which for him is not a passage but his dwelling (his "at home," his "house": zu Hause— emphasized in the text). On the contrary, the poet's recollective questioning poetically says the familiar (das Heimische)."22 In occupying the unfamiliar dwelling that Heidegger assigns to the thinker, does not Perse invite us to once more bring into play not only dwelling but also the necessary and yet fragile separation and distribution of the respective tasks of thought and poetry?23 The Impossible Return to Native Earth If the only true dwelling for Hö1derlin is the homeland (Heimat), not the land of the father, the "fatherland," but that of the mother, whose welcoming house, associated with caresses, with love, with the play of childhood, is evoked with its garden of "secret obscurity" (heimlich Dunkel)24 as possessing, along with the familiar countryside of the banks surrounding the
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Neckar, the power of healing all pain—why is this place always lost, always to be reconquered through suffering and through returns which nevertheless can never be complete (Heimkunft, Rückkehr in die Heimat, etc.)? Sure and venerated frontiers, maternal house, And embraces of my loving sisters and brothers, Soon I will greet you again.... 25
This "soon" is forever a deferred, an ungraspable presence. As Heidegger admirably shows in his commentary, this is certainly because what is near and proper to everyone (and also to a people) is not immediately accessible to them. The familiar is in itself the most distant. "It is necessary to learn what is proper to us just as it is what is foreign," writes Hö1derlin in an often cited letter.26 But the emphasis placed by Heidegger on the distance visàvis the homeland as an intrinsic distance visà vis what is one's own limits somewhat the Hö1derlinian sense of the Return. The elan toward the other "sacred elements," the Ether, the Sun, the "adorable blue" of the sky, ''the holy breath" of the Air; the yearning for Nature as the Mother and original dwelling (Heimatliche Natur); the nostalgia for Greece as the ideal fatherland; negatively, the insensibility, the intolerable hardness of the heart of the "maniacally calculating Barbarians"27 of the German fatherland; finally, the wanderings, the "flights" abroad (to Bordeaux)contribute as much if not more to exiling the poet far from the native dwelling than the ontological inaccessibility of the Own. The ode To the Ether already contains the confession of an "elemental," primordial betrayal of the maternal abode: . . . Oh Father Ether, lift me; even before mother took me into her arms and suckled me at her breast, You surrounded me tenderly and poured me a heavenly drink, You first gave the divine breath to my newborn chest. No one can live only on the food of the earth.28
Another flight, dreamed this time far from the paternal soil (Vaterland); the voyage in Greece, another avowed desertion of the German land: What is it that binds me to the ancient blessed coasts, so that I love them even more than my fatherland?29
No doubt only the earth proper (eigen) as the nourishing, womblike element is "sacred," which means both infinitely beneficial and infinitely hidden. No one can flee outside its protective obscurity and traverse the pure clarity of the world without spiritually withering in one's "soul,"
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without "erring," which means without traveling indefinitely and in vain, for he will never come back home again. For, as the plant uprooted from its native ground (eigenem Grund), The soul of the mortal will wither, if Alone under the light of day it Wanders miserably on the sacred earth. 30
In order not to end up in a rootlessness fatal to the soul, the exile must preserve the bond with what is one's own, with finitude. But, once again, why this necessity of leaving "for foreign lands"? What is the foreign for Hö1derlin? Does not foreignness consist precisely in what is one's own, in the dwelling itself? Commenting on these verses of The Migration, where the native recedes toward its own unfathomable and disquieting depths: Unfriendly, and hard to win over is The Closed One [die Vershlossene] that I escaped, the Mother,31
Heidegger writes: "The Own (Eigene) and the familiar (Heimische), the homeland, the Sea, is the most difficult to win over."32 Only the imaginary exile or flight toward an exotic, geographical outpost (the North Pole, the Indes, Asia, the Caucuses)—the most perfect and most fictional example of which (Hö1derlin never took "passage" on an oceangoing vessel) will be the ocean voyage—will learn to recognize the interior distance as his inverse image, to draw closer to, to accept the roughness and cruel withdrawal of the maternal abode and its "source." For the Sea is not the element of the wholly other but the symbolic place where the source (the heart of the maternal, of the original), springing from the earth after having become river and land (the finished, the Measure), spreads out and loses itself in the ungraspable, overrich abundance of the Open (the Unlimited, the All). If the eccentric movement from the source to the Sea stands for the "panic" thrust toward a merging with the element called the "nonorganic"33—a mortal merging with what is one's own like the leap of Empedocles into Etna— this element itself will be the paradoxical space of the reversal or the turning where the Homecoming commences. The place of forgetfulness but where forgetfulness turns into memory, an impoverished place, a place of solitude and extreme errancy ("without paths''), but where all richness commences: . . . Many shrink (Scheue) from going back to the source; It begins, namely, wealth In the sea. [ ... ] The sea gives and takes away memory.34
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This yearning for the extreme removal from familiar surroundings as the path of the initiation to the most intimate secret is not just mythical or mystical. It cannot be explained, but it can be translated into three conceptual equivalents: the first is metaphysical and Hegelian; the second is an abridged "philosophy of history" belonging to Hölderlin; the third is the Heideggerian theme of the selfenclosure of pure proximity, of the selfdissimulation of original emergence. To these three interpretations of the Hölderlinian symbolism of the "dialectic" of the own and the foreign three very different feelings regarding the original abode would correspond: the conquering appropriation; the experience of an exhausting tension between the "native" tendency toward the Measure and the contrary tendency; "Scheue" (modesty), as corresponding with the withdrawal of the being of the native: . . . for the spirit is at home not in the beginning, not at the source. The homeland consumes it. 35
The Hegelian scheme of the alienation or necessary estrangement of the Subject as Absolute Spirit, which finds itself again in the fullness of its beingwithitself only after having "overcome" its being outside itself, is a scheme that seems to impose itself here. Yet, in his book Hölderlin et Heidegger Beda Allemann has shown through contextual relations that this scheme is not suitable. In Hö1derlin's text "spirit" means neither the absolute spirit of the Hegelian will to knowledge nor "the poetic spirit" as Heidegger interprets it but the "god" or ''the demon." Spirit means precisely the familiar emanation of the divine: the Angel of the House or of the Homeland. Yet the relation between what is one's own and what is foreign in Hölderlin remains extremely close to Hegel's dialectic. The foreign, the unlimited, is subdued and related to the homeland, transformed by the "daring sailors." The symbolic sojourn across the foreign land comes back to an appropriation; it contains the notion of the assimilation and domestication of the foreign: as Heidegger says, "this recollection that is bestowed and that through being under way anticipates the source now lets what is odd about the foreign be forgotten, such that only the foreign that is to be clarified in terms of what is proper to it is retained by it."36 The Other is reduced to the Same. Apparent violence. Nevertheless, the dwelling is not taken by force; and the Return is not a synthesis. The single but radical difference with regard to Hegel is that the ownness reconquered does not expand out into the plenitude of an absolute presence to self but withdraws anew into the inaccessible anteriority of the "source." The homeland is not attained except by a ceaseless going back to the source, a return that is governed by the law of "modesty." Its pure proximity would be violated if it were captured, exposed, possessed. The poet will always seek the native and nascent. He will never be able to become ensconced, immobile at the source, or to identify himself with the
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original site. He will always be under way toward it. "To dwell in what is one's own is to be under way toward the source." The poet is the modest one among us, says Heidegger at the end of an astonishingly lyrical passage in his commentary. "Modesty sets the tone for the stroll on the byways of poetry. It guides the advance toward the origin. It is more determinative than any violence."38 This modesty is not psychological; it is the reserve with regard to the proximity, force, and courage to allow what is secret to be secret, the infinite loving tenderness that knows how to let the enigma of the most familiar things appear. As another surprising draft of Bread and Wine says: but it is difficult to think that the origin and the house of youth do not grasp the seer any more. And yet something holds, as a pure rule, the Earth. A clarity, the night, various things calm knows one who indeed understands, a princely one, and shows the divine, even if it is broad and deep as the heavens.39
Outside both Hegelian appropriation and Heideggerian modesty, where can we finally find in Hö1derlin's thought, rather than in his poetry, the "identity" of this mysterious "native element" and the, so to speak, exoteric meaning of the "trial of the foreign"? In the historical meditations of the poet two symmetrically inverse trajectories articulate the very constitution, that is, the institution, of what is "the proper" for the Greeks and for the West (which he names ''Hesperia"). For one as for the other, the discovery of its native character as well as the development of its art and culture must withdraw from the "native" element in order to confront the contrary element, and thereby to make its return to its own. Hölderlin writes, "And I believe that the clarity of exposition is originally just as natural to us as the celestial fire was to the Greeks."40 The "celestial fire," in the Hölderlinean context, means the panic, Dionysian ecstasy, the primitively oriental unity with all: this made up the Proper of the Greeks. The "clarity of exposition," analytical, conceptual, logical power, is the natural gift of the Germans, or of the Hesperians in general. Departing from the unlimited, the Greeks had to go out of themselves into the foreign, Apollinian domain of differentiation, of the limit, of individuation, so as to conquer what Hö1derlin calls "the Occidental and Junoean (which means cold) sobriety."41 They will have been "at home" only after having been able to complete "the return to the fatherland" (Vaterländische Umkehr), to rediscover the original substance of what is sacred to them by way of the clarity of exposition, or in other words, by way of their gods, their cities, and their laws. Inversely, the Hesperians still have to confront what is foreign to them: this '"celestial fire," this deindividualizing ecstasy, this return to an elemental holy. German metaphysics believed to have carried
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out this task by attempting to "conceive the inconceivable," as Heidegger's expression puts it. The repatriation to his own abode by way of the foreign element remains for Hö1derlin the "trial"—Heimsuchung—that still belongs to the future history of the West. Truly, it is indeed the land of the birth, the soil of the homeland That you seek, it is near, it already meets you.43 But the best, the fund that under the arch of holy peace lies, is reserved for the young and old.44
Why does the heart of the dwelling, itself always ready to welcome the exile who always returns, the prodigal son who knocks on the "door awash in surf"45—why does this intimacy slip away not only for the poet but for everyone? Why is this "best," this "fund" (Fund, which means the buried treasure, the precious lode, the legacy from the past, piously exhumed) gespart, reserved, dissimulated . . . to the people of this time? The forced departure for foreign parts and the withdrawal of the Source are not the only figures of the distancing of what is near. ''Homesickness" is not the most piercing part of Hö1derlin's nostalgia. The best of the land—the sacred—dwells, but veiled, exhausted, shrouded under the ancient monuments erected to its glory, abandoned by the gods. Rarely do they show themselves, roaming "wild game," through the elemental.46 The sacred is in mourning. The greatest sorrow is the "sacred grief," the fundamental Stimmung, as Heidegger calls it, in the Hölderlinean song. The gods having fled no longer illuminate the Earth with their presence and no longer draw up its treasure for the mortals. The joy of the return is at every moment plunged into mourning. We will always return home too late. But friend, we have come too late. No doubt the gods live but over our heads, there above, in another world.47 [...] . . . the Father has turned his face away from man and mourning began its just reign over the Earth.48
The true return awaited and prophesied in the "sacred night" will be the return of the gods. Until this new morning, every dwelling on earth is deserted, distressed, but not empty. "The trace of the flown gods" (die Spur der Entflohenen Götter)49 remains. There is a double exile in the dwelling, a double veil of mourning over the threshold, over the door. How is one to endure this distress, and whence will come to us the strength of waiting and of being kept awake throughout this night? The poet asks the elemental night itself, "the ardent one ... the Stranger among humans,"50 to bless us with "forgetfulness and holy
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rapture / to grant the flowing forth of the word!" The poetic speech (Wort) named here, this "Stranger [who] comes to us, the Waker, the Voice that instructs humans"52—the Voice of the sacred and not of the poet— seems to lead to another dwelling where neither nostalgia nor mourning reigns, but at last a happiness in the sole care of language: the poem itself! Be, oh song, my amicable sanctuary! Be The one that gives happiness! with caring love Well cared for, be the garden where, strolling Among the blossoms, ever young, I live in secure simplicity.53
Hö1derlin here takes refuge in the shelter of language. He still has not experienced—indeed he will a little later on—language as having been given to man as "the most dangerous of all goods."54 But has not this difficult dwelling of speech, where the poet still innocently lingers, wends his way [wandelnd], and where he finally finds his own good (Eigentum)— which is nevertheless taught to him by a "Foreign Voice"—has this not suddenly removed us to a site analogous to that of Perse? Exile without Nostalgia The poetic experience of exile in Perse is not derived from a lofty, concerted will to ceaselessly depart from a familiar dwelling for no reason and toward nowhere. It reveals a situation of primordial dispossession into which man is thrown. By birth. It is an exile within being that excludes every political or even psychological connotation. The exile is not a feeling arising as a reaction against a specific situation but rather a primordial condition. The Stranger, the Wanderer, the Nomad, the Prodigal, the Pilgrim, the Prince of Exile—these insistent figures of the exile in the poetry of Perse are not men driven out, persecuted like the contemporary refugee, dissident, expatriate; they do not suffer mortally like those banished or ostracized from ancient cities. Joy and rapture accompany them on their journey. Where are they going? Toward an abode both more humble and richer, nearer and more remote. The exile is exposed like the legendary castaway thrown back naked upon the deserted beach of an unknown land, but for him this moment is not one episode among others in an odyssey. His exile begins with the wonder of "being there" ("and the wonder is announced by the cry: 'oh wonder!' and it is not enough to laugh beneath tears...") by himself; not being near to but with or alongside the least glorious, most fragile, or most malleable things like the sand (the Gering, Heidegger would say):55
Page 149 Here I am restored to my native shore . . . With the achene, the anopheles, with the straw and the sand with the frailest of things, with the commonest of things, the simple thing, the simple thing there, the simple thing of being there, in the passing of the day. 56
No doubt the exile is "the one who does not recognize his fatherland anywhere," as Roger Caillois says in a famous and moreover insightful study, for his "native shore" is precisely "every seashore of this world"; and yet it is not in the depths of its subjectivity, in the home of its heart of hearts, that he will seek refuge as a man ''who has chosen to uncover his pleasures and pains only within his soul" and "is only at home in this inner universe."57 This is a curious misinterpretation which reveals the archetypal pressure of the metaphysics of selfpresence, for nothing is less intimate than the way Perse proceeds. If there is an interiority, it results from the inner correspondence between man and the elements which in nature do not have any particular place. Man is similar to the jubilant winds that have "neither nook nor resting place,"58 to the "labile" constellations that, changing names when the exile changes skies, disappear over the horizon "in search of a pure place."59 What is a "pure place"? It is an unpossessed, unpossessable place where every mark of ownership, where every limit, is effaced, an elemental place. The "uninhabitable"60 elements, sands, winds, rains, snows, and— above all else—the Sea, symbolize ecstatic habitation in the nearness to being. They summon man to ceaselessly leave dead sedimentation, the cinders of history, to shatter the idolatry of his own remnants, to return to the most original site. This site, a "glaring and void place," is no longer "his" site, and yet there is no resource, regeneration, or future power except through it. The open waters will wash, the open waters on our tables the most beautiful ciphers of the year.61 At what feasts of verdant Spring shall we wash this finger soiled by the dust of archives—in this bloom of old age [ . . . ]—as by the strata of sacred villages of white pottery, dead from too many moons and attrition?62
Civilization—the epic poem of knowledge and power—is not celebrated in Perse like a triumphant ascent, as conventionally minded humanists have believed, nor caricatured by a gallery of inconsistent personalities, as critiques discontented with not finding any heroes there have noted, but as forced to appear in the face of primordial emergence. If the innumerable protagonists of history evoked by this antiepic are always reduced to silhouettes without substance—the Despot, the Captain of the chain gang, the Legate, the Regent, the Usurper of the throne, the Donor, the Prophet,
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the Merchant, etc.—this is because, summoned to judgment, to the ordeal by the elemental, these figures are always on the verge of being eclipsed like frail shadows suddenly exposed to the light of being. Exile is the exultant trial of the effacement of all beings in the presence of elementalbeing. The elemental washes, heals, absolves "every penalty commuted to men of mere memory." 63 It annuls the monstrous proliferation of signs and traces, of codes and registers, of annals, of boundaries, frontiers, and stakes, of inscriptions and titles, of all the "tables of memory': Wash, wash, oh Rains! the high tables of memory.64
This multiform, iconoclastic dispersion of reference marks and tables of orientation65 includes the dispersion of "ritual tables" and in a pure, sacred place lets not "new tables" appear, as Nietzsche would say, but "forbidden tables" where one can read the signs or new ciphers of a different, completely fugitive writing, like a vision of immobility within movement: On the great forbidden tables where signs go more fleetingly; in the distant mirrors where the face of the Wanderer slides—his helianthic face that does not blink.66
Faced with the elemental site, not only are historical personalities, writings, monuments, cities, and the most solid foundations done away with, but they are rendered as an offering, piously and ceremoniously poured, in procession, back into the Sea (the elemental par excellence in Perse's poetry) as in a ritual sacrifice or expiation, the works and personalities of dramas or the heroes of myths, as well as all the instruments of staging—masks, costumes, and theater clothing.67 Exile is a naked exposure to the Sea, as to a being without memory, without inscription, without allusion, without reference; an expulsion to a distance that grows dizzyingly until reverting to an unnameable but transparent and tender nearness: Face washed with forgetfulness in the effacement of signs [ ... ] the Sea higher and further... inallusive and pure of every cipher, the tender, luminous page against the night without taint of things.68
Paradoxically—and this is the chief enigma of Perse—this exile is also the ecstatic habitation in what Heidegger calls "the house of being," namely, in language. How can the element that symbolizes the effacement of being at the same time symbolize not (only?) the saying and the said of the poet, the poem, but language itself, the selfuttering, selfcreating text, "the greatest text"? Teach us, Potency! [ ... ] tell us the tone of the greatest art, exemplary Sea of the greatest text!69
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It would indeed be a "contradiction"—to use an expression, inappropriate here, dear to philosophers—if the "greatest text" were the actuality of language, the network of wordsigns with their lexical and semantic code, their internal play and their play of references, in short, the languageobject and instrument, or even if this text element were the poem in its verbal articulation, its pronunciation, its timbre and sonority. But with Perse, as with Heidegger, it is necessary to distinguish on the one side the "Voice of being" that is unformulated, the "silent Voice," 70 the speech of being that no one has spoken,71 the unspoken (preceding all speaking) gathering of logos,72 and on the other side, articulated human speech as the response and correspondence to this primordial Voice understood as a Call. The "greatest text'' will never be written, nor can it be written∙ It is itself a symbol of the Call of being, of being without a proper name, of being as the marine element that, from time immemorial, sends up a similar "mute clamor,"73 utters from the "same wave": "A single and long sentence without break forever unintelligible"74 With this Voice prior to spoken speech, Perse, like Heidegger, repeatedly emphasizes sameness: "in the" same breath uttered the same wave uttering. ..."75 "The same wave through the world, the same wave through the City."76 What we call cosmic or prehuman in man is the Voice without writing, where an original happiness of being is heard: "We go back to the pure nongraphic delight where the ancient human phrase runs."77 How is one to correspond to this Call, the ebb and flow, the immemorial and present ("oh original breath... what do you think you will be drawing from my living lip, Oh wandering force on my threshold . . ."),78 always new and repeated identically ("There has always been this clamor, the identical beginning of three great successive "stanzas"),79 this insistent moan both intimate and far flung ("the thing in us so close and so far"),80 deafening and silent ("this mute clamor on my threshold")?81 There are many paths toward the logos of exile, but the royal road, itself changing, always seems to be a via negativa: the path already evoked of the active forgetfulness of the signs of the world, this destructive repetition of the epic poem of Weltgeschichte; the path of compounding negations (the sea in its transcendence is without..., without...: without monuments, without cities, and without statues—"without stone dignitaries"—"without regency or guardianship," "without adjudicator or council" "Oh Sea without guards or enclosure, oh Sea without vines or husbandry...");82 in the end the most paradoxical path of the absence of a name ("the great thing which has no name").83 This unutterability of the elemental dwelling—the loss of a proper name ("and sea, still we name you, we who no longer have a name")84—goes along with the repeated confession by the poet that he is not the source of his own poetizing activity∙ The "birth of his song" is put back, entrusted to "the stranger" in a great process of desubjectification: "Let a broader breath arise in us, that would be to us like the Sea itself and its great stranger's breath!"85 And indeed the Sea as "the
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thing itself" shows itself, reveals itself "outside of the strophe of the Poet," and the words are repudiated inasmuch as they suppose a space between signifier and signified: And words for us are no more, no longer being signs nor ornament But the thing itself [ ... ] . . . reciting you yourself, the story, see here how we become you yourself, the story....87
What is this identity, this "recovered unity" of the three "terms" that are, for logical thinking, the poem (become the "Story"), the poet (the Storyteller), and the Sea (also called "the text itself")? Nothing founds it nor guarantees it. Is it a ''dream of the sea in us" or "the Truth of the dream: this other sea ... that no one teaches or names"? Real, possible, dreamed—who could say or affirm that this fusion is metaphysical or extrametaphysical? Or that it is the Empedoclean leap? What remains is the thing itself, the elemental, the pure place of exile, the house of beinglanguage. To gain access to it and to abide in exile it is necessary to cross over a Threshold; but perhaps the StrangerPoet can only with difficulty stay under way on this threshold. The Sea is called the Threshold; yet it is itself uninhabitable. What symbolizes here the "threshold" . . . "the royal green of the Threshold... the divine fable":88 the foreign Sea opens [ . . . ] the chief threshold of the greatest Orb and prodigious threshold of the greatest Age....89
Without pushing the symbol too far, a threshold is a narrow place of passage between an inside and an outside, a home and an open space—a place that supports a radical difference. Does not "the textual, the Sea"90 as "the great text," sustain and nourish the difference between itself—the Voice— and the Poem that is born from it and in which it is founded in the end (the end whose sense we do not know)? As the ambivalent place of acceptance and rejection, the marine threshold (designated as both a "place of sanctuary" or a temple91 and the "forbidden site" of the apocalypse)92 gathers into itself the contradictory double dimension of the sacred or the "numinous" according to the famous analysis of Rudolf Otto:93 the terrifying, repulsive element of the "wholly other" on the one side, and beatitude on the other, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The sea as threshold is both a turning back toward a supremely salutary intimacy and an expulsion beyond every basis, the streaming desire and the cruel threat of the unapproachable: resplendence of the other—stone of the threshold washed with love and terrible place of desecration!94
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A conflictual place between a sacrality of the foundation (stone), of memory and rite, and a wild sacrality, forgetful, wandering without a temple, fated to be cursed by all established cultures. Commenting on Trakl's verse "Pain petrified the threshold" in the poem "A Winter Evening" Heidegger writes: The threshold bears the between. What goes in and out in the between is united in its reliability. The reliability of the middle may not give way in any direction. [ ... ] As the decision of the between, the threshold is hard because pain petrifies it. [ . . . ] Pain is the arrangement of the rift. It is the threshold. It endures the between, the middle of the two that are separated by it. Pain joins the rift of difference. Pain is difference itself. 95
If for Perse the threshold is also the rending between—and this holds above all for any grandeur of the foundation and institutions—if it is the place of gathering and of scattering, of jointure and disjunction, the mobile and fluid threshold is not pure pain, nor on the contrary a pure unalloyed joy, but the "favor of the threshold," grace, gift of the poem in a strangeness "loftier than joy."96 There are many thresholds up to the highest Threshold, and all are to be left, or are symbols of exile: our narrow domestic thresholds, beaches and seashores, death itself. Sealanguage, the place of the replenishment of the poem, is the only "frequentable" threshold precisely because it is "uninhabitable,"97 which means it forbids construction, the coming to a standstill, a founding. If the man of exile is wonderstruck by this "splendid lava at our threshold,"98 it is no less lava, a burning, tumultuous devouring power of violence and forgetfulness. But tearing away from the threshold of the ordinary hearth is experienced as pure pain and heartbreak only by "the usual man blinded by domestic stars."99 Must we not read the enigmatic opening of Exile in this sense: "Doors open onto the sands, doors open onto exile,... and the star broken on the wheel, the stonethreshold''?100 Namely, in the sense that the Stranger precedes, greets the cruel retreat of the star (the sun of a familiar place), a retreat not by being removed but by the very crossing of the threshold. The exile extenuates the too human threshold. The ordinary house closed in upon itself, when tortured, becomes pallid, translucent, provisional: "glass house in the sand,"101 a borrowed house (that of the "host" and not the poet's own house). The marine threshold makes every door out of doors: "Oh you who endlessly sing the arrogance of doors...";102 disturbs every smug power: "And you who prowl the homes of the Great like a rumbling of the soul without lair. . . ."103 For the poet the sea is at a remove, a bewilderment for the dweller. Beaches and seashores under the rain and tides are covered with coded writings and portents proffering signs over their thresholds of a higher
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threshold. This highest Threshold dismisses or conciliates death: at the moment that man loses his footing and sets foot in the elemental, the moment of a "lasting fulguration" 104—an expression that echoes of René Char— death is "visited by the immortal Graces."105 Here death is not ''the shelter of being,"106 the very being of being, but "heretical and hollow death, death reprieved!"107 How? By "the sea beyond the stone of the threshold ...,"108 "a vaster place for the resurrection of the dead."109 Is this a metaphysics or "mysticism" of presence? Certainly not of full presence, the fullness of selfpresence, but "all presence and all absence,"110 all generosity and "all denial."111 And again, the Subject, the Poet, the Storyteller, is not the master of what he says but is inhabited by the rhythm and pulsation of the elemental, drunk with divine inebriation like the sibyl breathing not chthonic emanations but the "smoke of the threshold," the foam, the froth of the sea and salted cracklings: "... is it you, smoke of the threshold, who by yourself rise in us like the sacred spirit of wine...."112 Even if the Threshold as "gap," as "lapse"113 is everywhere and nowhere, and even if the sea is "wandering without return"114 and the poem "dream without return,"115 can the exile be thought as a stranger to every dwelling? At the threshold of metaphysics Plato has shown that there is only an Other that is dialectically related to the Same. Heidegger says the Stranger is always under way toward home. "The stranger seeks out the site where he can remain a wanderer."116 Does what applies to the Stranger of Trakl apply also to the Stranger of Perse? For Trakl and above all for Hö1derlin poetic habitation comes back to the earth. It necessarily comes to rest there, establishes itself there, preferably close to the sources. Perse's uprootedness and being, cast toward the uninhabitable, the dissociation of inhabiting and building, could not be tolerated if they were not simultaneously doubled by an indestructible bond to being, to an other unrootedness. The Persian Stranger does not so much flee the earth as the City, which is used up and abused, the wornout earth, "the earth at the end of its utility."117 But how are we to describe his new rootedness? Body, Physis, language: houses of being. If nothing is "more powerful than birth,"118 the "native order"ll9 that accompanies us everywhere and that is deposited in our body gives us roots attached to no "country." Hidden root of the flesh. Ecstatic root toward an other flesh: "... my love... I have no place but in you."120 Rootedness in Physis, emergence and withdrawal, is when the words of the Ephesean seem to recur: Oh you who know and do not know, oh you who speak and do not speak....121
But the exile toward "the great text" does not root us in a genuine, "natu
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ral" site. Though it may be the least uprooted, one of the symbols of Perse—that of the habitation of man, "the great tree"—assumes the ambiguity and the reversibility of Physis and Logos. The great tree is both a natural being, resonant and musical, "shivering in its wooden rattles of dead wood," 122 the seminatural, semicultural place of idolatry, of magic, and the speaking medium where speech speaks, where it speaks in us, insensitive to acquired knowledge: ''Ah! great tree of language, peopled with oracles, with maxims and the murmuring murmur of the blindborn in the pentagrams of knowledge"123 This "reenrootment" always under way, in progress, produces stutterings, mullings; but by allowing moment to moment for the forgetfulness of all learned language (with its turns, with its "arms"), perhaps it gives rise to a memory of a more native language, of a more silent Voice: Those who every day pitch camp further from the place of their birth, those who every day beach their skiffs on other shores, sense every day more clearly the current of illegible things; and going back upstream to the rivers' source, between the verdant banks of appearances, are suddenly struck by this stark Light in which all language lays down its arms.124
The distant "Source" of which the poet speaks here does not emerge in any geographical land. It is the very source of language prior to language. The "Light" is not the light of day, but the lightning flash of being: "... They called me the Obscure and I lived in the Light."125
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NOTES
Foreword 1. HansGeorg Gadamer, "Zur Einführung," in Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960), especially pp. 107109. 2. G.W.F. Hegel, Phânomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1952), p. 219. 3. Edmund Husserl, "Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature," trans. Fred Kersten, in Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), p. 226. The manuscript has been dated May 1934. 4. Ibid., p. 230. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, in volume VI of Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968), p. 9. 6. Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, with translation by H. G. EvelynWhite (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), p. 457. 7. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 9th ed. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1960), p. 163.
Preface 1. Here we write "being" in lowercase letters to mark the fact that it is not a question of substance or a subject separate from humans, but it must be understood as a verb that implies time. "Being" with a capital usually refers to those great metaphysical names (Idea, Subject, Will) defining precisely the Being of beings in their totality, or the beingness of Being according to its successive epochal definitions. Being as historical (see below Part Two) remains ambiguous to the extent that it is identified with its History and by its limits (commencement and fulfillment). 2. According to the conventional use, the adjective "historical" refers to geschichtlich: it marks the distinction made by Heidegger between Geschichte (History as a series of epochs where being gives itself and withholds itself) and Historie (history—science, if not purely incidental, at least factually and strictly chronological). 3. HW, p. 300. 4. TK, pp. 4344. 5. When they are autonomous and not objectified, all things, and not only the potter's jug, are "die wachstümlichen Dinge der Erde," the growing things of the Earth (VA, p. 191). See also HW, pp. 5758. 6. It seems to us that the thought of Ereignis cannot give rise, as Reiner Schürmann suggests (Le principe d'anarchie: Heidegger et la question de l'agir [Paris: Seuil, 1982]), to a liberation of multiple and decentered forces. The turn beyond the oblivion of being marks, on the contrary, a reentry into the Simple and a concentration in the Unique. 7. "... today in the atomic age where particularity, separation, and validity of the individual disappears at breakneck speed in favor of total uniformity" (SvG, p. 138). 8. "In the smallest as well as the greatest happiness, there is always something that makes happiness happiness: the possibility of forgetting, or to speak in more
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scientific terms, the faculty of sensing, for a time, in a nonhistorical manner" (unhistorisch zu empfinden). "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben" in Unzeitgemäb e Betrachtungen, 1, §3. 9. This is the conclusion of "Zeit und Sein," ZSD, p. 25. 10. VA, p. 97. 11. "Umstruz der kopernikanischen Lehre: Die Erde als Urarché bewegt sich nicht" ["Fundamental Investigations into the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature"]. 12. VA, p. 99, GA 13, p. 146. 13. VA, p. 99. 14. WM, p. 336: ("Die Heimatlosigkeit wird ein Weltschicksal"). 15. HW, p. 57. 16. HW, p. 31.
Part One 1. Ideen II, p. 29. 2. "Man... gathers together in himself all the essential degrees of existence in general, and in particular of life, and in him nature as a whole attains the most concentrated unity of its being." (La situation de l'homme dans le monde, Aubier, p. 29.) 3. GP; GA 24, p. 240. 4. See SZ, p. 100, for example. 5. EHD, and GA 39: HGR, GA 52, GA 53. 6. GA 55: Heraklit. 7. GA 54: Parmenides. 8. EM, p. 11. 9. HW, p. 31. 10. WM, p. 299. 11. EHD, pp. 6465. 12. SvG, p. 139. 13. EM, p. 11. 14. SZ, p. 34: the expression "from itself" is repeated twice in the Heideggerian definition of phenomenology: "to let what shows itself show itself from itself as it shows itself from itself." Emphasis added. 15. SZ, p. 63. 16. GA 29/30, p. 274, p. 275. 17. "Humanismusbrief," WM, p. 313. 18. "Humanismusbrief," WM, pp. 32122. 19. "The History of Being is being itself and nothing but this," N II, p. 489. As already indicated in the Preface, following current practice we translate "geschichtlich" as ''historical" and "historisch" as "historiographic." 20. VA, p. 99. The expression "the nonmanifest law" (das unscheinbare Gesetz) does not refer to any scientific law. It designates the course of "self sufficiency" (Genügsamkeit) or the "moderation" proper to the "emergence and the disappearance" of the things of nature (cf. below, p. 108ff). But is not the secret, invisible, unformable character of this fundamental "law" what is essential? Does it not mean that nature keeps in itself a nonmanifestness more radical than being? Nature is more than old, immemorial; more than young, productive of forms never seen. How do things stand with being? Would nature still be without memory? Would nature still be without forgetting? 21. Plato, Timaeus, 52b. 22. HW, 31. 23. HW, 37.
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24. Interview in Der Spiegel.
1. "Nature" as a Category of Beings Encountered in the World 1. Dasein, the being whose existence consists in its understanding of being (cf.SZ, §9, §31), does not coincide with existence in the traditional sense of what is op posed to essence, nor with man as the living being endowed with reason, nor with the transcendental human subject. The French translation of Dasein by being theredoes not seem "skewed" to us (F. Vezin, Être et Temps, p. 524). For the "there" does not designate the occurrence of something actually present, but the very opening to presence, to being, or one might say what permits "beingtoward " As R. Munier rightly shows, in beingthere the there is not simply taken in the adverbial sense (I am there) but in the substantive sense (I am the there which "expresses no facticity, but an ecstatic relation to being which occurs and can only occur through it .... Therefore beingthere is in the infinitive voice, not the being of what is there, but of what is a there for being, opened to being and actively waiting its arrival." Cahier de l'Herne Heidegger, p. 57). When Heidegger writes the word with a hyphen: Dasein, he means explicitly to emphasize the "there'' (how else is one to translate Da?) as the place where being is grasped. The translation "therebeing" (Être et Temps 2, p. 188) seems both to fly in the face of the French language and against a tradition of thinking. As a simple inversion, it belongs to what Nietzsche would call a reactive movement. [I have followed the English convention by not translating Dasein (RL).] 2. SZ, p. 50. 3. WM, pp. 32122. 4. GA 15: Seminare, pp. 23334. 5. SZ, p. 63. 6. Ibid., p. 65. 7. Ibid. 8. SZ, p. 65; cf. also SZ, p. 112. 9. SZ, p. 70. 10. See his article, "De la technè à la technique," Cahier de l'Herne Heidegger, pp. 292ff. 11. SZ, p. 70. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. (the expression in quotation marks in the text refers to a sort of common place of vitalism). 15. Ibid. 16. SZ, p. 71. 17. Ibid., p. 71: ("ein zunächst an sich vorhandener Weltstoff"). 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., p. 68. 20. GA 20: PGZ, p. 300. 21. See below, chapter 2, "Dasein and Animality." 22. SZ, pp. 8081. 23. EHD, p. 85. 24. See Part Three, chapter 9, "Ecstatic Dwelling." 25. SZ, p. 263: "without relation (to anyone)." 26. VA, p. 177. 27. Paul Valéry, La Jeune Parque, Œuvres, I, Pléiade, p. 106. 28. Rilke, Das Buch van der und vom Tode. 29. SZ, p. 244. 30. Ibid., p. 247.
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31. Ibid., p. 248. 32. Begriff der Zeit, p. 10. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. SZ, p. 411: Die besorgte Zeit It is not a question of "preoccupied time" but the time of "preoccupations" (Besorgen), or even better, of "occupation,'' for Besor gen implies more the notion of everyday activities that provide for this or that: one says, for example, "ich besorge mir etwas zum Essen," "I get myself something to eat." The translation by preoccupation puts too much emphasis on a caring, a worrying that is not implied by the word Besorgen. 36. Ibid., p. 412: "officially" we appear too "political." 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., p. 416. 40. Ibid., p. 419: "früher" is translated as "prior." 41. GA 24: GP, p. 370 (emphasis added).
2. Dasein and Animality 1. GA 29/30: GBM, pp. 37172. 2. See below, p. 65ff., and Part Three, chapter 8. 3. Ibid., p. 371. 4. It goes on for 145 pages in GA 29/30: GBM (pp. 261404 are most essential). 5. Notably, Heidegger cites and comments upon the works of the great biologists W. Roux (on embryology in particular), Jacob von Uexküll (on the Umwelt of animals), and Buytendijk (on the difference in the behavior of animals and humans), as well as a number of other famous authors. 6. GA 29/30: GBM, p. 319. Heidegger will abide by this position later on. Thus he writes in VA: "we can be fitted out with bodily ears because we hear," p. 215. 7. Ibid. 8. GA 29/30: GBM, p. 340. This idea would come close to the notion of the "unified field," or the "absolute domain" of individuality or presence, which according to R. Ruyer (La conscience et le corps, passim) characterizes life. 9. GA 29/30: GBM, p. 340. 10. Heidegger indicates (ibid., p. 348) that the term "compulsion" is habitually used in psychiatry, and in regards to humans designates a state of confusion between consciousness and unconsciousness. In the word Benommenheit it is necessary to hear both sich benehmen, to behave, and the verb Benehmen, to carry off, remove, from which comes the adjective benommen, "deprived of sensation," "numb." One could literally translate: transport [emportement] on the condition that we don't take this to mean something like anger, enthusiasm, or verve but rather a movement of being carried off to oneself which closes the animal drive in on itself, even more than leading it toward its goal. 11. Or better, if it sees it, it does not view it. Heidegger thinks that there is a radical difference between seeing (sehen) as a trait of animals, and viewing (blicken) as a human trait. Only the human Blick gathers, collects, and allows to appear, which means makes beings visible in the light of being, as logos does. Heidegger writes: " 'Animals see us,' one says. But animals do not view. With animals a 'watching,' 'being on the lookout,' 'staring,' 'tracking' is never a selfdisclosure of being; in its supposed viewing, an animal never brings itself to appear along with that being that is revealed to it" (GA 54: Parmenides, pp. 158159. [ ..., nie bringt das Tier in seinem sogenannten Blicken ein Aufgehen seiner selbst in ein ihm entborgenes Seiendes mit.] 12. GA 29/30: GBM, p. 361.
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13. Ibid., p. 363. 14. Ibid., pp. 37576. 15. Ibid., p. 396. 16. "... to all life there is attached an indestructible melancholy," Schelling,Sämtliche Werke, Lotte, VII, p. 466. 17. GA 29/30: GBM, p. 396. 18. See GA 54: Parmenides, p. 237; GA 39: HGR, p. 75. 19. GA 39: HGR, p. 75. 20. In "Wozu Dichter" (HW) as well as in a course on Parmenides (GA 54: Parmenides, § 8, pp. 255240). 21. Rilke, Eighth Elegy. 22. Ibid. (the word is is underlined by Rilke). 23. Op. cit. p. 66. 24. GA 54: Parmenides, p. 235. 25. HW, p. 264. 26. GA 54: Parmenides, p. 226. 27. Ibid., p. 234. 28. Ibid., p. 226. 29. Ibid., p. 227. 30. Ibid., p. 229. According to Nietzsche a humanization of the animal corresponds to this animalization of humanity: "It almost seems that at work in this poetry is a limitless and groundless humanization of the animal by which the animal, in terms of the original experience of being as a whole, is even placed above humans and becomes in a certain manner the 'overman' " (ibid., p. 239). 31. Ibid., p. 233. 32. Ibid. 33. In the word "Nature" employed here by Rilke there still resonates the echo of the earlier word: "physis" (HW, p. 257). 34. GA 54: Parmenides, p. 230. 35. "Wozu Dichter?" in HW, p. 286. 36. Rilke, RSW II, p. 477. 37. Ibid. 38. HW, p. 262. 39. RSW I, p. 720, Ninth Elegy. 40. RSW II, 184. 41. These questions are again taken up and developed in chapter 8, "Rilke and the Inferiority of Earth."
3. The Primacy of Stimmung over Dasein's Bodiliness 1. The emphasis on den Hand, the hand, which has a common root with Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit, seems excessive when these terms are rendered in the French translation of E. Martineau (Authentica, 1965) as sous la main (at hand) and à portée de la main (taken in hand). If the reference to this part of the body were of such importance, Heidegger could not have avoided undertaking an analysis of these words. Yet he does not do it, at least in Being and Time. He will explicitly deal with Hand much later; see, e.g., GA 54: Parmenides, pp. 11819, and Was heibt Denken?, passim. 2. SZ, p. 107 (the text indeed mentions the street, Strabe). 3. Like the proximity of glasses on the nose or of the telephone close to the hand. 4. Every Dasein carries with itself (bei sich) the voice of the friend (die Stimme des Freundes), SZ, p. 163. 5. See VA, pp. 16364.
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6. SZ, p. 107. 7. Ibid., p. 368: Heidegger quite regularly uses the word LeibkÖrper: literally "fleshbody" (Leib is the living body; KÖrper in general is the inanimate body). 8. Ibid., p. 164. 9. Ibid., p. 164. 10. Ibid., p. 163. 11. Ibid., p. 164. 12. "Apropos to its spatiality, Dasein is never first here, but over there, and it is from this overthere that it comes back to its here." Ibid., p. 107, emphasis added. 13. SvG, p. 89. 14. SZ, p. 147 (the word "Sehen," "see," is in quotation marks in the text). 15. GA 24: GP, p. 102: "Beings can be disclosed, be this by way of perception or some other means of access, only if the being of beings has already been disclosed—that is, if I understand it." 16. SZ, p. 221. 17. Geworfen is the past participle of werfen. 18. SZ, p. 251, 1.910. 19. Ibid., p. 284, 1.2627. 20. Ibid., p. 339. 21. Ibid., p. 138. 22. Ibid., p. 148. 23. Ibid., p. 136. 24. GA 45: Grundfragen, p. 154. 25. He ranks his description "above every psychology of Stimmungen" (SZ, p. 134). 26. Valéry, Cahiers, II, p. 346. 27. Henri Michaux, Passages, p. 126, Gallimard, 1982 (emphasis added). 28. Perhaps the amorous feeling "fixed" on a person can only be born beginning with a general, erotic mood that is in some sense "without an object." 29. Kierkegaard, Either/Or "The Immediate Stages of the Erotique," trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), pp. 74ff. 30. GA 29/30: GBM, p. 101. On the specific analysis of Grundstimmung and boredom carried out in the course of 192930, see our study: "Le temp vide et l'indifférence à l'être," Exercices de la Patience, 7, 1986, pp. 1736. 31. "Was ist Metaphysik," in WM, p. 109 (emphasis added). 32. Novalis: "... a dead feeling, a grayish, faint life," "Die Lehrling zu Sais," Novalis Werke: Studienausgbe, ed. Gerhard Schulz (Müchen: C.H. Beck, 1969), p. 113. 33. Nietzsche, Die FrÖhliche Wissenschaft, § 179. "Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always more obscure, emptier, simpler than them." 34. GA 39: HGR, p. 223. 35. WM, p. 154, note 55 ("Vom Wesen des Grundes"). 36. GA 45: Grundfragen, p. 197 (Heidegger writes Erstaunen so as to emphasize both the suspense and insistence wonder sets up). 37. See our essay, "Le tournant de la détresse," Cahier de L'Herne Heidegger, translated as "The End of Distress: The End of Technology?," in Research in Phenomenology, Vol. XIII, 1983. 38. GA 45: Grundfragen, p. 170., emphasis added. 39. For the first time in 1925 in GA 20: PGZ, pp. 400406, in relation to Unheimlichkeit ("uncanniness"). 40. Bollnow, Vom Wesen der Stimmungen, dritte durchgesehene und erweiterte Auflage (Vittorio Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1956), p. 67. 41. J.F. Courtine, "L'idée de la phénomenologie et de la problématique de la réduction" in Phénomenologie et Métaphysique, ed. J.L. Marion, PUF, 1984, p. 245.
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42. "Was ist Metaphysik?," WM, p. 111. 43. Ibid., p. 113: eine gebannte Ruhe. 44. Ibid., p. 117. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., p. 113. 47. Ibid., p. 304 (emphasis added). Must we say that Stimmung is the silent source of thinking as such? See our study: "Stimmung et pensée," in Heidegger et l'idée de la phénomenologie, ed. F. Volpi (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988). 48. Ibid., p. 117. 49. On the significance of the eschatology of History, see below Part Two, especially p. 147.
4. Physis and Earth 1. HW, p. 31. We cite this passage because it summarizes in an exemplary fashion Heidegger's position. 2. GA 55: Heraklit, p. 173: "Aletheia. .. is the essence of physis." 3. Ibid., pp. 110 ff. 4. Diels, Fragments of the Presocratics, Fragment 67. 5. GA 55: Heraklit, p. 87. 6. Ibid., p. 102. 7. VA, p. 271. 8. Ibid. 9. GA 55: Heraklit, p. 132. 10. Reiner Schürmann, Le principe d'anarchie: Heidegger et la question de l'agir (Seuil: Paris 1982), p. 258. 11. Ibid., p. 248. 12. Ibid., p. 323. 13. VA, p. 274. 14. GA 55: Heraklit, p. 96. See also p. 162. 15. EM, p. 77. 16. GA 55: Heraklit, p. 161. 17. EHD, p. 55 (emphasis added). 18. GA 39: HGR, p. 128. 19. "Der Ister," HSW 2, 1, p. 190. 20. "Wie, wenn am Feiertag. . . ,"HSW 2, 1, p. 118. 21. EHD, p. 52. 22.Ibid., p. 77 (emphasis added). 23.EHD, p. 59. 24.Ibid., p. 53. 25.HÖ1derlin, Hyperion, end of Part Two. 26.EHD, p. 54, "Die SchÖnheit ist die Allgegenwart." 27. Third strophe of "Wie wenn am Feiertage . . . ,"HSW 2, p. 118. 28. R. Otto, Das Heilige, 1917. 29. WM, pp. 34748. 30. EHD, p. 71. 31. "Wie wenn am Feiertag . . ." (seventh strophe). 32. EHD, p. 76; see also Heraclitus, Fragments, 50: "If it is not me to whom you listen but the logos, it is wise to recognize that all is one." 33. EHD, p. 75; "persistence" translates Festbleiben. 34. EHD, p. 75; "das Kommen des Anfangs." 35. Ibid., p. 76. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., p. 75.
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38.Ibid., pp. 6263. 39.HW, p. 43: "die Erde ist nicht das Verschlossene, was der Verbergung entspricht." 40.Ibid. p. 36. 41.Ibid. p. 35. 42.Ibid.p.37. 43.Ibid.p.38. 44.Ibid.p.37. 45.Ibid.p.311. 46.Ibid.p. 37. 47.Ibid.p.43: "Ungeheuer." 48.Ibid.p.36. 49.Ibid.p.35. 50.Ibid.p.38. 51.Ibid.emphasis added. 52.Ibid.p. 30. 53.Ibid.p. 35. 54.Ibid.p. 18. 55.Cf. the variations on the Cartesian tree of metaphysics at the beginning of "Return to the Beginning of Metaphysics," WM, pp. 36063. 56. GA 39: HGR, p. 242. 57. VA, p. 150: "Der Grundzug des Wohnens (aber) is das SchÖnen." 58. "The 700 Years of Messkirch" ("700 Jahre Messkirch"), in Martin Heidegger zum 80 Geburtstag, V. Klostermann, 1969, p. 38. 59. On the consistency of "stuff" (Bestand), see below, pp. 162ff.
5. The History of Being and Its Hegelian Model 1. ZSD, p. 84. 2. HW, p. 298. 3. ID, p. 39. 4. N II, p. 489. 5. ZSD, p. 56. 6. HW, p. 307. 7. Hegel, Leçons sur l'histoire de la philosophie, Gallimard, p. 156. 8. Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte, A: Die Bestimmung des Geistes, herg. J. Hoffmeister (Felix Meiner: Hamburg, 1955), p. 59. 9. Preface to VA. The opposition of Vergangenes/Gewesenes was already made in SZ, p. 328: "'So long' as Dasein factically exists it is never past, though indeed it has always already been in the sense of 'I havebeen.'" See also GA 24: GP, p. 411, on "the ordinary concept of the past." 10. See HW, p. 295: "The whole of what hasbeen (das Gewesene) is what has the character of a Geschick." 11. N II, p. 481. 12. Cf. "Principes de la pensée," Cahier de l'Herne Heidegger, p. 75. 13. N II, p. 388. 14. "Was ist Metaphysik," HW, p. 52. 15. N II, p. 487. 16. EHD, p. 106. 17. EHD, p. 84. "Gesetzt, dies Andenken denkt voraus, dann kann auch das Zuruckdenken nicht ein 'Vergangenes' denken, dem nur der Bescheid des Unwider ruflichen zu leihen wäre. Das 'Denken an' das Kommende kann nur das 'Denken an' das Gewesene sein, worunter wir im Untershied zum nur Vergangenen das fernher noch Wesende verstehen."
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18. WHD, p. 95. 19. N II, p. 481. 20. N II, p. 420. 21. "Every epoch of philosophy has in itself its own necessity." Die Technik und die Kehre, p. 66. 22. VA, p. 76. 23. ZSD, p. 56. 24. SvG, p. 154. 25. ZSD, p. 56 (emphasis added). 26. Ibid. 27. WHD, p. 98. 28. For example, N II, p. 444. 29. N II, p. 435. 30. N II, p. 435. 31. N II, p. 428. 32. Called to mind as "vesperal," the planetary epoch is occasionally named "hesperial" (from the Greek hespéra, evening) which means the twilight of the destiny of Being. 33. N II, p. 423. 34. Emphasis added. Cf. HW, p. 223. 35. See HW, "Der Spruch Anaximanders," p. 302. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. ZSD, p. 44. 39. ZSD, p. 57. 40. "Nachwort" to "Was ist Metaphysik?" 41. ZSD, p. 25. 42. Ibid., p. 44. 43. N II, p. 262. 44. Ibid. 45. "The Overcoming of Metaphysics," in VA, p. 71. 46. VA, p. 36: cf. also ZSD, p. 58. 47. Gelassenheit, p. 37. 48. N II, p. 202. 49. HW, p. 300.
6. The Essence of Technology 1. US, p. 121. 2. One of the rare exceptions being the celebrated phrase "das 'Wesen' des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz," where the quotation marks underline strongly the necessity of breaking with the traditional usage of the word (cf. on this subject the "Letter on Humanism," WM, pp. 32223. SZ, p. 42. 3. SZ, p. 34. 4. Cf. Zeit und Sein, ZSD, p. 3. 5. In the work that bears the same name, Der Satz vom Grund (1957), The Principle of Reason. 6. HW, p. 33. 7. See above, Part Two, chapter five, "The History of Being and Its Hegelian Model." Other Hegelian resonances can be discerned in the History of Being, in particular the extreme emphasis placed on recollection, totalization, even eternalization for example, in SvG, p. 150: "the history of Western thinking shows itself as
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the Geschick of being when and only when we glance back upon the whole of Western thinking from the point of view of the leap and when we recollectively preserve it as the Geschick of being that hasbeen .... The leap leaves the realm from which one leaps while at the same time recollectively regaining anew what has been left such that what hasbeen becomes, for the first time, something we cannot lose." 8. VA, p. 38; währen (Old High German) would be a "derivative" form constructed from wesan, which becomes wesen. 9. VA, p. 36. 10. TK, p. 45. 11. VA, p. 13. 12. Cf. our analysis below and the note below on Gestell (note 17). 13. VA, p. 31. 14. VA, p. 93 (see note 4 of this chapter). 15. VA, p. 39: "All that comes to be endures." 16. VA, p. 30. 17. The transposition of Gestell by Arraisonnement in French (Préau, in Essais et conférence) does not render the gathering, collective character of the "Ge." The French Dispositif allows one to render quite well the sense of a universally woundup mechanism, prepared like a snare. Despite the double sense, the word con sommation could in some cases be used: it would allow for the combining of the two senses of summation, namely addition, totalization, calculation in general on the one hand and brutal questioning and universal seizure on the other. The force of the GestelI is indeed that of a generalized consummation (consommation) that presumes the enumeration and the exploitation of resources, also usury and consummation on the basis of absolute mercantilism. However, Heidegger clearly indicates that the essence of technology implies the mercantilization of being itself: "The humanity of humans and the thingliness of things dissolve, within thoroughgoing production, into the market value of a market that not only includes the whole earth as a global market, but which as the will to will markets the very essence of being. . ." (HW, p. 270; emphasis added). Note the sense of profanation in the "market": the very "temple" of being, Heidegger seems to say, belongs to the merchants. Is not the Gestell the ontological condition of what one calls the consumer society? 18. VA, p. 24. 19. VA, p. 71. 20. WM, p. 312. 21. VA, p. 76, VI, third paragraph; or ibid., p. 81 (XI: "die vorletzte Stufe"). 22. VA, p. 82. 23. On the relation between Hegelian speculative reason and technological rationality, see the remarkable interpretation of Dominique Janicaud, in La puissance du rationnel, Gallimard, 1985 (for example, pp. 23949). 24. Two volumes of the course lectures (the Nietzsche volumes), two essays and a bunch of scattered, important remarks. The remark cited here occurs in VA, p. 126. 25. VA, p. 81. 26. VA, p. 82. 27. HW, p. 223, emphasis added. 28. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, ed. NaumannKrÖner, Leipzig, 1913, vol. XV, § 331. 29. N II, pp. 16566. 30. VA, p. 82 (Umschreibungen). 31. VA, p. 40. 32. VA, pp. 9899. 33. VA, p. 90. 34. HW, p. 272.
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35. WM, "Vom Wesen der Wahrheit," p. 93; p. 195, emphasis added. 36. VA, p. 41. 37. VA, p. 37. 38. VA, p. 150. 39. VA, p. 98. 40. Cf. Gelassenheit. 41. Epistle to the Romans (V, 20). 42. ID, pp. 2829. 43. Ibid. 44. "Das Ende der Philosophie," in ZSD, p. 73. 45. TK, p. 44. 46. Ibid., p. 43. 47. Ibid., p. 45. 48. The French word here is "regard," which we have been translating as "look" or "gaze." However, the root "garder" means "to watch, keep, protect, maintain'' [RL]. 49. KPM, p. 239. 50. Gelassenheit, p. 24. 51. WM, p. 351. 52. Hebel der Hausfreund, p. 31. 53. One finds a strange correspondence to this theme in a posthumous fragment by Nietzsche from the period of Gay Science, Autumn 1881, Sämtliche Werke, eds. Colli & Montinari, 14 (10). Let us merely quote it: "Where shall we, the loneliest of the lonely—for it is certainly what we will be one day under further effects of science—where shall we find an ally of man! Of old, we looked for a king, a father, a judge of everything, for lack of true kings, true fathers, true judges. Later we will look for the friend—man will have become then allmighty splendor, solar systems—but lonely. Will the impulse to produce myths tend also to look for the friend?"
7. Earth in the Work of Art and in the Poem 1. "The Origin of the Work of Art," "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes," in HW. The first version of "Origin" dates from 1936. The text has been reworked many times. The "Postface" dates from 1940. The appendix was written in 1956 for the Reclam edition (1960). 2. See above, Part One, chapter four, "The Four Senses of Earth." 3. HW, p. 62. 4. Ibid., p. 64. 5. Ibid., p. 59 (das SichinsWerksetzen der Wahrheit). 6. Ibid., p. 58. 7. Ibid., p. 41. 8. HW, p. 49: "stance" = Stand; Ständigkeit = "constance." 9. Ibid., p. 50: irgendwo in den Sternen. 10. L'Œil et Esprit, Gallimard, pp. 6970. 11. Ibid., p. 62. 12. Ibid., p. 60. 13. Ibid., p. 50. 14. Heidegger himself indicates the etymological equivalence between Lichtung and clairière (clearing): The German word Lichtung was coined in the nineteenth century to render the French clairière (on this subject, and above all on the question of the priority of Lichtung, see Henri Mongis, Phenomenologica, vol. 76: Heidegger et la question du valeur [The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976], Chapter V, especially p. 186).
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15. ZSD, p. 72. 16. Ibid. 17. "Clarity plays in the open and there is where it struggles with shadows," ibid., p. 71. 18. Ibid., 129, emphasis added. 19. VA, p. 98. 20. Ibid. 21. "The history of being is being itself, and nothing but this" (N II, p. 489). Such a statement, already cited (our emphasis here), gives the appearance of a metaphysical proposition excluding the nothing from the fullness of being taken as beings as such in their totality. But what is at stake here is the essence of metaphysics and it is true that metaphysics has always thought the being of beings, and that the Earth has been left outside of the History of Being. 22. Facticity is both the factual being of Dasein and Dasein's involvement in the being of subsistent beings, in this radically anterior past to which it is delivered, subjected, in the "throw" (Wurf) that throws it into the world. "It belongs to its facficity that Dasein, as long as it is what it is, remains in the throw..." (SZ, p. 179). 23. HW, p. 6263. 24. See above, Part Two, chapter five, "The Primacy of the Past as Gewesen," especially [pp. 13742]. 25. WM, p. 362: "The tree of philosophy grows out of the nourishing soil (Wurzelboden) of metaphysics." 26. HW, p. 300: "eines ganz anderen Weltalters." 27. Ibid., emphasis added. 28. VA, p. 73: "die jähe Weile des Anfangs." 29. VA, pp. 7199. 30. Ibid., p. 114. 31. SZ, pp. 12627. 32. The old fable of Care, Cura, cited in § 42, is seen by Heidegger as "a preontological testimony" of Dasein, which means, prior to the History of Being, prehistorical in a specific manner. If the Earth as a mythological figure gives to human being its name (Homo is derived, according to the fable, from Humus), the primacy of Care, hence time, is what keeps it in its essence "for its whole life." In the fable and In Heidegger's own commentary, the Earth only gives to man his body, understood as its substance and not its original being. "This being does not receive its name (homo) from a consideration of its being, but in relation to that of which it consists (humus). The decision as to where one is to see the 'original' being of this creature is Saturn's, time's'' (SZ, p. 198). The text makes no reference to the status of poetic or mythological discourse as such. 33. SZ, p. 162. 34. GA 24: GP, p. 244. 35. Ibid., p. 246. 36. Ibid. 37. EM, p. 97. 38. Ibid., p.49. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid.,p.47. 42. Ibid., p.77. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid.,p.101. 45. Ibid.,p.102. 46.I bid.,p.71.
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47. Ibid., p. 120. 48. Current usage in German associates Gewalt with law, authority, institutions, and not at all with the arbitrary, disorder, the barbaric. In one of his courses on HÖlderlin, Heidegger speaks of the "power of the opening (die erÖffnende Gewalt) of the fundamental attunement (Grundstimmung)" (GA 39: HGR, p. 92). 49. Wille zur Macht, § 842. 50. Ibid., § 848. 51. Ibid., § 845, "(Raffael) war dankbar für das Dasein," and § 852, "ihr Schaffen ist Dankbar für ihr Sein." 52. Ibid., § 852. 53. Ibid., § 846. 54. EM, p. 123. 55. Ibid., p. 121. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., p. 130. 58. Ibid., p. 129. 59. Ibid., p. 131. 60. Ibid., p. 146. We emphasize antagonism, in being, and human struggle for disclosure, which are not opposite one another but echo each other. Disclosedness, beingdisclosed, contains "in itself" a conflict (Widerstreit) whose essence is not made explicit. 61. This first parenthesis is ours; the one at Riss is in the text. 62. It seems to us that Fug, which renders the Greek dikè (ordinarily translated as "justice"), is better rendered by ajustement ["arrangement"] than by ajointment ["jointure"] (G. Kahn). 63. EM, p. 123. 64. Ultimately Nietzsche will make the primitive double aspect of creative forces merge in the unity of Dionysus, in lucid rapture. But the polarity of the Apollinian and Dionysian remains at the very heart of "Dionysian wisdom." 65. HW, p. 38, emphasis added. 66. On this subject see the essay by M. FromentMeurice, "L'art moderne et la technique," Cahier de l'Herne Heidegger, pp. 302 ff. 67. HW, p. 38: "faden Übereinkommen." 68. Ibid. 69. Editions du Cerf, 1985, p. 130. 70. Cf. N I, pp. 104105. Nietzsche, who seeks in "the grand style" the mastery and structuring of the passions and who otherwise rejected "pure Dionysianism" after The Birth of Tragedy, is opposed to Wagner, whose music supposedly developed "the increasing barbarism of affective states," "the pure exaggeration of the Dionysian.'' 71. HW, p. 35. 72. These terms (HW, p. 36) are also found in Heidegger's analysis of the concept of "bodily and vital chaos" in Nietzsche (N L pp. 56566). 73. Ibid. 74. The Gay Science, § 109. 75. HW, p. 36: Strom des Ausgrenzens. 76. Ibid., p. 58. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., p. 38. 79. US, p. 188 (us). 80. HW, p. 60. 81. US, p. 164. 82. HW, p. 35. 83. Ibid.
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84. See Valéry, "Poetry and Abstract Thought," Oeuvres, I, Pléiade, pp. 133435. All the precious things that are in the earth, gold, diamonds, gems, are disseminated, strewn there, stingily hidden in a number of boulders or in the sand where chance sometimes has them discovered. These riches would be nothing without human labor, which extracts them from the massive night where they slumber, which gathers them, modifies them, and organizes them in finery. These slivers of metal insinuated in an unformed material, these bizarre crystal figures, must receive all their luster from intelligent labor. It is a labor of this sort that is carried out by the true poet. One indeed senses with a beautiful poet that there is little room for persons, regardless of how gifted they are, to have been able to improvise without return, without any other fatigue except that of writing or speaking a coherent system full of happy serendipifies. As the traces of effort, the reprises, the regrets, the chunks of time, the miserable days, and the loathings have disappeared, things are effaced by the supreme return of the spirit to its work; some, who see only the perfection of the result, view it as being due to a sort of prodigy called INSPIRATION.
85. EHD, p. 153. 86. Valéry, Cahiers II, p. 1076 (Pléiade edition). 87. It is not an accident if the structuralist group "Tel Quel" borrowed Valéry's slogan of the primacy of the literality of words, the textuality of the text. 88. US, p. 173, translation modified. 89. HW, p. 35. 90. EHD, p. 43. 91. Ibid., p. 148. 92. Ibid., p. 148. 93. Ibid., p. 153: die Nüchternheit des Trunkenen. 94. US, p. 208. 95. Das Leibhafte der Sprache, ibid., p. 204. 96. Ibid., p. 16: "The poem is that which is purespoken" (rein Gesprochenes). 97. Ibid., p. 31: Verlautbarung, Verlauten. 98. GA 13: AED, p. 150. 99. Ibid., p. 150. 100. US, p. 204, emphasis added. 101. Ibid., p. 205. 102. Cf. above Part One, chapter two, "The Phenomenology of the Animal 'World.'" 103. US, p. 208. 104. Ibid., p. 232: "Das Wort bedingt das Ding zum Ding." 105. Ibid., p. 22. 106. GA 13: AED, p. 15. Hebel der Hausfreund, p. 25. 107. US, p. 252. 108. Mallarmé, "Crise de vers," Œuvres, Pléiade, p. 368. 109. "Wie wenn am Feiertag," penultimate strophe, HSW 2, 1, p. 120. 110. Heimkunft, § 6. 111. R. Char, "Contre une maison sèche," Œuvres Completes, Pléiade, p. 79. 112. R. Char, Chants de la Balandrane, op. cit, p. 534. 113. Ibid., p. 571.
8. Rilke and the Interiority of Earth 1. EHD, p. 76. 2. RSW II, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 18, p. 742.
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3. "Rilke, in whom the epoch of completed subjectivity poeticizes itself to the end," GA 55: Heraklit, p. 220. 4. HW, p. 264. 5. Ibid, p. 288. 6. Y. Bonnefoy, La présence et l'image, Paris, Mercure de France, p. 23. 7. "Für Helmuth Freiherrn Lucius von Stoedten," RSW II, p. 261. 8. More often, for example in the Third Elegy, it is a matter of blood, of heredity, of ancestry, or of pure animality, as in the Eighth Elegy. The identity of man and nature is exactly what man has lost by turning away from the Open. Man transcends nature in a negative sense (in the sense where he has definitively lost the "matrix") and in a positive sense: "... dull, obsessive Nature/is fleetingly surpassed" ("Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 28," RSW I, p. 76970). 9. Certainly the Open is not presence and withdrawal, like aletheia in Heidegger, but how can he maintain that for Rilke the Open is the boundless, hence "precisely the closed, the uncleared"? HW, p. 262. 10. Seventh Elegy, RSW I, p. 711. 11. Ibid., p. 712. 12. Ninth Elegy, RSW I, p. 719. 13. Ibid., p. 720, emphasis added to "you" and "your." 14. Blanchot, L'espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard), p. 184. "Idées": "L'ouvert c'est le poème." 15. Ibid., emphasis added. 16. "Die Insel der Sirenen," RSW I, p. 560. 17. HW, p. 282. 18. Ibid. 19. Emphasis to "over there" added, op. cit. 20. "Für Frau Lisa Heise," RSW II, p. 260. 21. "Tränenkrüglein," RSW II, p. 144, emphasis added. 22. "An die Musik," RSW II, p. 111. 23. "Am Rande der Nacht," RSW I, p. 400. 24. RSW II, p. 502. 25. "Fünf Gesänge," ibid., p. 93. 26. Ibid., p. 93. 27. Munier, Nouveau Commerce, Cahier 2122, Spring 1972, p. 71; reprinted in Parcours Oblique, éd. de la Différance, Paris, 1979. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. RSW II, p. 184: "Ach, nicht getrennt sein " 32. "Gong," RSW II, p. 186. 33. "Die spanische Trilogie," ibid., p. 4546. 34. "Der Geist Ariel," ibid., p. 52. 35. Ibid., p. 730; cf. the entire Third Elegy. 36. "Der Geist Ariel," ibid., p. 5354. 37. Ibid., p. 54. 38. "Aus den Gedichten an die Nacht," ibid., p. 407. 39. Ibid., p. 406; p. 67 "Aus den Gedichten an die Nacht." 40. Ibid., p. 70. 41. Ibid., pp. 33435. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., p. 477. 44. Ibid., p. 335. 45. Ibid., p. 429.
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46. Ibid. 47. HW, p. 285. 48. "Die Rosenschale," RSW I, p. 554. 49. RSW II, p. 519. 50. Correspondence, Brief an von Hulewicz du 13.11.1925, p. 588. See also the Brief to Grafin Sizzo: "read the dead word without negation," p. 532. 51. "An den Engel," RSW II, p. 48. Unser ist: den Ausgang nicht zu wissen aus dem drinnen irrlichen Bezirk, du erscheinst auf unsern Hindernissen und beglühst sie wie ein Hochgebirg. Deine Lust ist über unserm Reiche, und wir fassen kaum den Niederschlag; wie die reine Nacht der Frühlingsgleiche stehst du teilend zwischen Tag und Tag. . . . . . Engel, klag ich, klag ich? Doch wie wäre denn die Klage Mein?
52. "First Elegy," RSW I, p. 688. 53. Letter to von Hulewicz, ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid. 58. Heraclitus, Fragment 54. 59. "Die spanische Trilogie (I)," RSW II, pp. 4344, emphasis added. 60. Ibid., p. 44. 61. When "one single thing" occurs, as in "At the Edge of Night," it is no less ungraspable; neither is it an I nor a nonI. "My room and this vastness / watching over nightfalling land / are One" (RS W I, p. 400). 62. RSW II, p. 185. Rilke had this verse engraved on his tombstone. Therefore it is not only an elegy on his own death, but an elegy on the death of the subject. 63. "Die Rosenschale," RSW I, p. 553. 64. Ibid., p. 554. 65. SaintJohn Perse, Pluies, p. 141. 66. RSW II, pp. 57384. The Arabic numerals given after the quotations refer to the numbers given to the poems by Rilke (for example, "the silent heart": poem number 1). 67. As the poem "Die Rosenschale" says of roses: "These extreme gifts of being . . . perhaps they are ours" (RSW I, p. 552). 68. HW, p. 254. 69. Ibid. 70. RSW I, p. 717. 71. "Die Sonette an Orpheus (II, 28)," RSW II, p. 763. 72. "Das Buch von der Pilgershaft," RSW I, pp. 32627. 73. HW, p. 253. 74. Correspondence, p. 540 (Letter to Ilse Jahr, February 22, 1923). 75. Ibid.
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9. Ecstatic Dwelling 1.Leibniz, Monadology, § 7. 2. GA 24: GP, p. 427. 3. WM, p. 362. 4. "Humanismusbrief," WM, p. 314. 5. The title of three hymns that were never developed beyond sketches. 6. "Der Rhine," HSW 2, 1, p. 143. 7. "Der Ister," HSW 2, 1, p. 190. 8. "Patmos," ibid., p. 165: "O Fittige gieb uns, treuesten Sinns / Hinüberzugehen und wiederzukehren." 9. Nietzsche plays on this word in Zarathustra, IV, "The Shadow." 10. Exil, p. 127. The first edition reads "his birth" (cf. Œuvres poétique, I, p. 213, Gallimard, 6th edition, 1953). The edition of complete works (which aren't complete!) in the Pléiade, Gallimard, 1972, reads "my birth." Our citations of Perse are exclusively from this latter edition, except for the poem Sécheresse, 1974 (in Chantpour un équinoxe, Gallimard, 1975), which postdates the 1972 edition. 11. "In the clear night of noon, we put forward more than one new proposition about the essence of being..." Exil, II, p. 142. 12. "... and sea again we name you, we who no longer have a name," Amers, Choeurs,p. 368. 13. Exil, II, p. 124. 14. Amers, VI, p. 312. 15. Amers, Choeurs, p. 368. 16. Amers, Strophe, p. 311. 17. Vents, III, 6, p. 229. 18. Amers, Choeurs, p. 374. 19. The theme of the Stranger appears in the poetry of Perse even before his political exile in the United States in 1940. 20. Exil, II, p. 125. 21. "The anxiety of daring does not tolerate our opposing it to joy It maintains a secret alliance with the serenity and sweetness of a creative and active desire." WM, p. 112. 22. EHD, p. 129. 23. "The thinker says being. The poet names the sacred. [... ] We know nothing of the dialogue between the poet and the thinker who 'live in close proximity on the most separate mountains.'" "Nachwort" to "Was ist Metaphysik?," WM, p. 309. Heidegger here cites HÖlderlin without naming him: ''And the best of friends live in dose proximity, speaking on / the most separate mountains." HSW 2, 1, p. 173. 24. HSW 2, 1, p. 82. 25. "Die Heimat," ibid, p. 19. 26. "Brief an BÖhlendorff, 4. Dezember 1801," 4, p. 260. 27. "Hyperion," Second Book, Hyperion an Bellarmin. 28. HSW 1, 1, p. 204. O Vater Aether! mich auf; noch ehe die Mutter In die Arme mich nahm und ihre Brüste mich tränkten, Faßtest du Zärtlich mich an und gossest himmlischen Trank mir, Mir den heiligen Othem zuerst in den keimenden Busen. Nicht von irdischer Kost gedeihen einzig die Wesen,
29. HSW 2, 1, p. 153.
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30. "Mein Eigentum," HSW 1, 1, p. 307. 31. "Die Wanderung," HSW 2, 1, p. 141. Unfreundlich ist und schwer zu gewinnen Die Verschlossene, der ich entkommen, die Mutter.
32. GA 52: Andenken, p. 135. 33. Cf. Grund des Empedocles, approx. p. 5. The "nonorganic," the contrary of the organic natural form, is the naturally indistinct infinite, the "deorganic," the "unconscious" (p. 661). 34. "Andenken," HSW 2, 1, p. 189. 35. Fragment of one of the last versions of the last strophe of the elegy Brot und Wein (specifically) cited and commented on by Heidegger in EHD, 4th ed. p. 89, 1st ed. p. 85. 36. EHD, p. 142. 37. Ibid., p. 145 (137). 38. Ibid., p. 132 (124). 39. Ibid., p. 130 (123). 40. Brief an BÖhlendorff. 41. Ibid. 42. EDH, p. 88 (84). 43. "Heimkunft," HSW 2, 1, p. 97. 44. Ibid., p. 98. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., p. 98. 47. "Brot und Wein," HSW 2, 1, p. 93. 48. Ibid., p. 94. 49. Ibid., p. 94. 50. Ibid., p. 90. 51. Ibid., p. 91 (emphasis added). 52. "Am Quell der Donau," ibid., p. 126. 53. "Mein Eigentum," HSW 1, 1, p. 307. 54. Cited by Heidegger in EHD, pp. 36ff. 55. VA, pp. 18081. Cf. EHD, pp. 17174. 56. "Sécheresse," Exile, V, Pléiade, p. 130. This is also an interrogative (perhaps) demonstration of the passage or the trace of the sacred within being: "Oh movement toward Being and rebirth to Being! Nomads, all the sands!... and time whistles flush with the soil .... The wind that removes for us the slope of the dunes will perhaps show us in daylight the place where the face of the god that slept there was molded during the night .... " 57. Poétique de SaintJohn Perse, cited in Pléiade, p. 1286. 58. Vents, I, ibid., p. 179. 59. Exile, IV, ibid., p. 128. 60. Amers, ibid., p. 338: "The uninhabitable is our site " 61. Exil, IV, ibid., p. 123. 62. Vents, I, ibid., p. 186. 63. Neiges, ibid., p. 157. 64. Pluies, ibid., p. 151. 65. Vents, ibid., p. 184: "Dispersing every jubilant stone and every faulty pillar .... " 66. Vents, II, ibid., p. 223. 67. Amers, Strophe, ibid., pp. 29192. 68. Amers, Invocation, ibid., p. 267.
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69. Amers, Strophe, ibid., p. 293 (the same expression is already found on page 290). 70. "Nachwort" to "Was ist Metaphysik?," WM, p. 304. 71. "Humanismusbrief," WM, p. 358: "das ungesprochene Wort des Seins." 72. Cf. Heidegger, GA 55: Heraklit, p. 383: "Logos is not words (der Wort). It is more original than them .... Logos is the region that addresses man in silence, which means the dimension (Weite) that conceals every revealing hint and indication, the dimension reposing in itself." 73. Exil III, ibid., p. 127. 74. Ibid., p. 126. 75. Ibid. (emphasis added). 76. Amers, Strophe, VII, ibid., p. 360 (emphasis added). 77. Exil, IV, ibid., p. 162 (emphasis added). 78. Exil, III, ibid., p. 127. 79. Ibid., p. 126. 80. Amers, Strophe, p. 312. 81. Ibid., p. 127. 82. Amers, Choeurs, ibid., pp. 36566. 83. Ibid., p. 342. 84. Ibid., p. 368. 85. Ibid., p. 293. 86. Ibid., p. 378. 87. Ibid., p. 378. 88. Ibid., p. 367. 89. Ibid., p. 375. 90. Amers, p. 295. 91. Ibid., p. 374. 92. Ibid., p. 370. 93. Der Heil. 94. Amers, p. 372. 95. US, pp. 2627. 96. Amers, p. 377. 97. The two attributes are coupled: Amers, p. 372. 98. Ibid., p. 367. 99. Ibid., p. 310. 100. Exil, ibid., p. 123. To bring the wandering threshold closer, at the beginning of Anabase: "At the threshold of tents all glory!" (Pléiade, p. 93). 101. Ibid. 102. Amers, p. 377. 103. Amers, p. 377. 104. Amers, p. 372. 105. Ibid., p. 368. 106. VA, p. 177: "das Gebirg des Seins." 107. Amers, p. 342. 108. Ibid. 109. Amers, p. 370. 110. Amers, p. 371. 111. Ibid. 112. Amers, p. 367. 113. Amers, p. 376. 114. Ibid. 115. Ibid., p. 367. 116. US, p. 41.
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117. Pluies, ibid., p. 141. 118. "Der Rhine," HSW, 5th and 6th lines of 4th strophe. 119. Amers, p. 332. 120. Ibid., p. 331. 121. Ibid., p. 380. 122. Vents, ibid., p. 180. 123. Ibid. 124. Exil, IV, ibid., p. 162. 125. Amers, ibid., p. 283.
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INDEX
A Aeschylus, 96 Aesthesis. See Sensibility Aesthetics. See Art Aletheia, xii, 53, 69; and Earth, 48, 57; and favor, 51; and light, 99; and the Open, 3031, 32; and physis, 11, 12, 25, 2930, 48, 49, 57; truth as, 72, 7375, 76. See also Truth Allemann, Beda, 145 AllOne, 53, 132 Anaximander, 73 Anfang. See Commencement Angels, 120, 131 Angst, 38, 39. See also Anxiety Animality, 12, 19, 2629, 3032 Animals, 9, 47, 49, 53, 59, 115, 160n5, 160n11; and death, 29, 122; humanization of, 161n30; and the Open, 3032, 12122, 130; and the world, 2530 Anselm, Saint, 56 Anteriority, 56, 69, 73, 99, 101 Anxiety, 12, 142, 173n21; and death, 20; disappearance of, 87; and the Sacred, 55; and Stimmung, 14, 4246 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 118 Apollinian, 108109, 110, 146, 169n64 Appearing, 12, 52, 99100. See also Emergence Appropriation. See Ereignis Archimedes, 1 Aristotle, 12, 23, 63, 68, 84, 89, 101 Art, 86, 102104, 11213; and the Dionysian, 10811; and Earth, xii, 6, 1314, 48, 6061, 9597, 100102; and power, 105108; and Technology, 81; and the tool, 99; and truth, 9799. See also Poetry Artist, 97, 110; 0failure of, 108 Attunement. See Stimmung Authenticity, 42, 44, 108
B Beaufret, Jean, 67 Being: and art, 95; vs. being, xv; Call of, 151; and dread, 4344; equipmental vs. natural, 1518; and favor, 51; and History, 7071; and language, 111, 112; as Lichtung, 99100; and nature, 1014, 158n20; oblivion of, 31, 72; opening of, 105106, 107; as physis, 1113, 49; presentathand, 16, 37; and rank, 105; readytohand, 1618, 22, 23, 34, 35; and the Sacred, 174n56; and salvation, 89; struggle against, 107108; and technology, 80; withdrawal of, 13, 14, 45, 67, 7275, 8788, 98, 105, 133; and wonder, 45. See also Beingintheworld; History of Being Being and Time, 4, 1516, 38, 39; anxiety in, 42, 44; on art, 102103; and body, 34; on death, 2021; on Earth, xi, 12, 14, 42, 58, 100; equipmentality in, 79; on man, 87; and phenomenology, 78; on work, 1819; world in, 10, 57 Beingintheworld, 910, 15, 25, 3537, 39, 40, 42, 103, 104, 114, 125, 140 Bellay, Joachim du, 118 Bergson, Henri, 15, 29 Blanchot, Maurice, 123 Body, 6, 28, 63, 64, 154, 162n7, 168n32; and Dasein, 3438; human vs. animal, 9, 12, 15, 115; and Stimmung, 14, 41 Bollnow, O. F., 44 Bonnefoy, Yves, 121 Building, 17, 47, 59, 103. See also Temple Buytendijk, F. J. J., 28, 160n5
C Carllois, Roger, 149 Care, 10, 15, 19, 24, 168n32 Chaos, 13, 54, 56, 106, 110, 169n72 Char, René, 11819, 154 Clocks, 2124 Commencement, 3, 32, 43, 49, 7074, 101, 102; and Earth, 95; the new, 68, 76, 77, 80, 84; and the Sacred, 56 Compulsion, 27 Consciousness, 9, 41, 78, 124 Courtine, JeanFrançois, 44 Craftsman, 18 Creator, 97, 108 Cybernetics, 1, 64, 72, 82, 83, 85
D Danger, 32, 7677, 80, 8688 Dasein, xiii, 9, 14, 77, 105, 159n1, 161n4, 162n12, 164n9, 168n32; and animals, 12, 26, 29; and anxiety, 44, 45; and art, 102103, 108; and the body, 3438; and death, 2021, 76; and dwelling, 140; and Earth, xi, 13, 62, 95, 100; and equipmentality, 1718; and facticity, 3638, 39, 101, 168n22; and life, 25; and the poet, 103104; and time, 2124; and work, 1819; and world, 1518 Death, 2021, 76, 107, 154; in animals, 29, 122; of the human essence, 87, 88; in Rilke, 13132, 172n62
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Density, 52, 126; and poetry, 95, 99, 113; of time, 24, 46 Derrida, Jacques, xi Descartes, René, 11, 35, 74, 120 Destiny, 2, 5, 42, 58, 67, 69, 78, 117; of the Commencement, 7071; and Earth, 5, 63, 101 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 15 Dionysian, 106, 10811, 137, 169n64, 169n70 Dread, 4344, 55. See also Anxiety Dreyfus, Hubert, 16 Dürer, Albrecht, 97, 110 Dwelling, 5, 48, 60, 63, 64, 91, 13948
E Earth, 56, 168n32; and art, xii, 1314, 6061, 9597, 100102; and being, 1214; and the Dionysian, 10811; vs. earth, xvi; four senses of, xii, 5763; as ground (Grund), 61, 6364, 95, 100101, 115; and History, 53, 63; and the History of Being, 168n21; and language, 111, 11415; and Lichtung, 99100; and makingpossible, 100101; as native soil, xii, 6163, 9596; and nature (physis), xii, 11, 12, 4749, 52, 56, 5960, 63; and the overcoming of Technology, 102; and the poem, 111, 117; and power, 10910; in Rilke, 33, 12324, 13638; song of the, xii, xiii, 13738; and Stimmung, 41, 42, 44; on time, 22; and withdrawal, xii, xiii, 12, 48, 49, 5759, 61; and world, xi, xiii, 1314, 1920, 5762, 9598, 107, 11011, 114. See also Physis Elements, 14950 Emergence, 50, 52, 54, 57, 145 Empedocles, 144, 152 Enframing (Gestell), 1, 8184, 8789, 166n17 Epoch, xvi, 2, 3, 16, 41, 51, 53, 67, 68, 7275, 79, 157n2(2); and art, 111; of the completion of metaphysics, 42, 84; new series of, 101; planetary, 1, 77, 102, 165n32; and world, 58 Equipmentality, 10, 1519, 59, 79, 81, 102. See also Tools Ereignis (appropriation), 34, 76, 8990, 102, 145, 157n6(2) Errancy, 67, 72, 77, 81, 8788 Eschatology, 46, 68, 7577, 163n49 Essence (Wesen), 7882, 8990, 165n2; death of the human, 87, 90; and salvation, 88. See also Gewesen Eternal return, 80, 8586, 136 Ethics, 9091 Exile: in Hölderlin, 14448; in Perse, 14142, 14855 Existentialism, 22 Exteriority, 37, 129, 130
F Facticity, 19, 22, 3638, 42, 96, 100, 101, 168n22 Faculties, 26, 35, 97. See also Hearing; Vision Fatherland, 63, 14243 Favor, 51 Feeling, 3841 Fiction, 103, 104, 11617 Fink, Eugen, 15 Foreign, 14448 Friend, 90, 91, 135, 161n4, 167n53 FromentMeurice, Marc, 169n66
G Gadamer, HansGeorg, xi Gestell (enframing), 1, 8184, 8789, 166n17 Gewesen, 53, 68, 6971, 75, 101 Geworfenheit. See Thrownness God, 89, 145; in Rilke, 132, 13738 Gogh, Vincent van, 132 Greeks, 4243, 111, 146; and art, 95, 96, 105; and nature, 9, 56; and physis, 11, 4749; and Spirit, 72; and technology, 70, 84, 89; and vision, 36, 90. See also Anaximander; Empedocles; Heraclitus; Parmenides; Thales Ground (Grund), 13, 37, 38, 4244, 61, 64, 83, 100101, 115
H Habitation, 6264, 13940 Hand, 14, 161n1, 161n3 Harmony, 60, 13138 Hearing, 14, 35, 41 Heart, 32, 33, 54, 12125, 128, 129, 130, 134, 136 Hebel, Johann Peter, 91, 115 Hegel, G. W. F., 1, 19, 6777, 79, 145; and earth, xixii; and the preparation of Technology, 84, 85; and time, 21. See also Spirit Heidegger, Martin. Works: Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 23, 102, 103, 104; "The Concept of Time," 2122; Holzwege, 31, 32, 69, 77, 108; Introduction to Metaphysics, 11, 102, 105107; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 90; "Letter on Humanism," 15, 84, 88; "On the Essence of Truth," 8788; On the Way to Language, 71, 78, 113; "The Origin of the Work of Art," xi, xii, 6, 11, 12, 47, 57, 100101, 102, 107, 108, 11213, 167n1; "Overcoming Metaphysics," 102; The Principle of Reason, 14; Principles of Thought, 70; Time and Being, 67, 73; What Is Called Thinking?, 14, 71; What Is Metaphysics?, 44, 70; "The Will to Power as Art," xii, 108. See also Being and Time Heraclitus, 11, 14, 105, 132; and logos, 104, 163n32; and physis, 48, 4952, 120; and totality of beings, 50, 5355 History, 15; art as, 96, 97; and Earth, 5, 53, 58, 61, 63; end of, 15, 68, 75, 7880,
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163n49; vs. history, xvi, 68; and the past, 6971; and poetry, 107, 117; as prehistory of technology, 84; and the Sacred, 56; of thought, 6768, 69. See also Commencement; Destiny; Epoch; History of Being History of Being, 15, 32, 42, 6768, 84, 88, 165n7, 168n21; anxiety in, 45; and commencement, 70, 74; and Earth, 48; eschatology of, 7577; and favor, 51; four epochs of, 58, 7475, 79; and the overcoming of Technology, 14, 101102; and phenomenology, 79; and Stimmung, 4244, 46; as withdrawal, 7273. See also Epoch Hölderlin, Friedrich, 3, 11, 32, 42, 63, 77, 103, 132, 154, 169n48, 173n23, 173n28; commencement in, 70, 104; on dwelling, 14048; on nature, 1920, 5256; on the poet, 11718; and the Sacred, 120; and salvation, 89. Works: Hyperion, 5354; Remembrance, 1920, 141; Voyager, 141 Homeland, 42, 14248 Homer, 52 Husserl, Edmund, xixiii, 5, 9, 34, 44, 78, 79
I Idea (Eidos), 1, 43, 67, 69, 78 Inauguration, 6970. See also Commencement Interiority, 39, 41, 136, 149; and the heart, 33, 121, 128, 130 Invisible, 130, 131, 133
J Janicaud, Dominique, 166n23 Joy, 37, 3940, 46, 63, 87, 114, 117, 142, 173n21; in exile, 148 Jünger, Ernst, 19
K Kahn, Gustave, 106 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 16, 35, 95, 97, 99, 116, 122, 133 Kierkegaard, Søren, 40, 44 Knowledge, 1, 63, 73, 145, 149; eschatology as, 68, 75; retrospective, 8485, 88; and wonder, 43
L Language, 9, 96, 106; and anxiety, 44; Earth of, 11415; as house of being, 150, 154; and naming, 116; and poetry, 11114, 11619. See also Speech Leibniz, Gottfried, 1, 11, 13, 68, 74, 83, 85, 13940 Lettingbe, 3, 28, 30, 91 Lichtung, 49, 52, 90, 99100, 110, 114, 167n14 Light, 50, 52, 54, 99, 100, 155 Logos, 2, 79, 175n72; as gathering, 75, 104, 105, 107, 151, 160n11; of the Sacred, 5556 Love, 40
M Mallarmé, Stéphane, 11617, 118 Man: animalization of, 31, 161n30; and being, 102, 107108; essence of, 86; and the Open, 122; and Technology, 83, 87; and time, 2122. See also Body Marcuse, Herbert, 88 Martineau, Emmanuel, 161n1 Marx, Karl, 19 Melancholy, 28, 39, 42, 114, 161n16 Memory, 71, 75, 144, 158n20 MerleauPonty, Maurice, 9, 14, 54, 98 Metaphysics, 44, 63; and anxiety, 46; completion (end) of, 2, 42, 72, 7477, 80, 81, 8384, 87; and death, 2021; in Heraclitus, 4950; in Nietzsche, 3032, 63, 74, 75, 84, 8586; in Rilke, 3031; and Technology, 8486; and tree of philosophy, 164n55, 168n25 Michaux, Henri, 39, 118 Mongis, Henri, 167n14 Mozart, Wolfgang, 40, 98 Munier, Roger, 30, 126, 159n1
N Naming, power of, 113, 116 Native soil, xii, 6, 6163, 9596, 140 Nature, 914, 29, 100, 143, 158n20, 161n33; art of, 110; in Dasein, 42; and earth, 56; and equipmentality, 1618; in Hölderlin, 5256; in Rilke, 33, 122; and world, 1518, 1920, 47, 50. See also Physis Nerval, Gérard de, 118 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, xi, xiii, 4, 9, 41, 50, 150, 159n1; and art, 10411, 169n64, 169n70; and chaos, 56, 169n72; on the friend, 167n53; on language, 112, 116; and metaphysics, 3032, 63, 74, 75, 84, 8586; and Rilke compared, 12021, 131; and technology, 80, 86; on thought, 162n33. See also Eternal return; Overman; Will to power Nihilism, 3, 72, 82, 102, 104105 Nonhistorical, 2, 73, 79, 120; commencement as, 56; Earth as, 49, 58, 64, 96, 100, 102; Ereignis as, 3, 4, 89 Nothingness, 29, 44, 45, 46, 50 Novalis, 41, 162n32
O Objectivity, 1, 910, 23, 39, 49 One, 55, 56, 72 Open, 2, 25, 98, 12122, 132, 144, 171n8; and aletheia, 3031, 73; and Earth, 6, 57; and exile, 142; and the heart, 3233, 121, 124, 130; and language, 111; and light, 52, 54, 100; and space, 126, 127 Opening, 53, 56, 169n48; and art, 60, 99, 105106, 107; as possibility, 15, 87 Openness, 25, 28, 35, 36, 58, 59 Organism, 15, 2628, 115 Origin, 62
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Orpheus, 137, 138 Otto, Rudolph, 54, 152 Overman, xii, 80, 86, 161n30 Own, 11, 48, 69, 71; and animality, 26; in Hö1derlin, 14346, 148
P Parmenides, 11, 104, 120 Pascal, Blaise, 44, 120, 122 Past, 68, 6971 Perception, primacy of, 9 Perse, SaintJohn, 118, 134; and exile, 14142, 14855; and the Stranger, 148, 154, 173n19 Phenomenology, 910, 15, 7884, 8990, 103, 158n14(2) Philosophy: end of, xi, 79 (see also Metaphysics: completion of); tree of, 101, 164n55, 168n25 Physis: and aletheia, 11, 12, 25, 2930, 5053, 57; earth as, xii, 5, 1213, 4749, 115; and favor, 51; in Heraclitus, 4952; in Hö1derlin, 5356; and light, 50, 52, 54; and nature, 17, 105; and the Open, 32; in Perse, 15455; in Rilke, 32, 120, 133, 161n33. See also Nature Pindar, 105 Plato, xiii, 14, 73, 78, 84, 154; Earth in, 13, 63; on language, 112, 114; on poetry, 104; on salvation, 89 Poet, 5556, 112, 11718, 121, 173n23; dwelling of, 140; modesty of, 146 Poetry, 103104, 107, 11114, 11619, 12122; Dichtung and art, 98, 99, 102, 103 Power, 10510, 169n48 Presence, 12, 54, 72, 79, 116, 134, 154, 160n8. See also Withdrawal Presentathand, 16, 37 Preservation, 63 Presocratics. See Greeks Property, 2627
R Readytohand, 1618, 22, 23, 34, 35 Reason, 9, 13, 67, 68, 166n23; and Technology, 1, 72, 74, 79, 82, 83, 85, 166n23; unthought of, 85 Reservoir, 83, 87, 140 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 69, 102, 103104, 118, 12021, 172n51, 172n61; on death, 20, 172n62; on the Earth, 13638; on God, 13738; on Nature, 12125, 161n33; the rose in, 13336; and space, 12630; unity in, 13137. Works: Bread and Wine, 146; Elegies, 30, 12122, 126, 130, 136, 171n8; The Island of the Sirens, 124; The Migration, 144; Notebooks from Malta Laudrids Brigge, 103; The Rose Cutting, 133; The Roses, 123, 13435; Sonnets, 12324, 136; The Spanish Trilogy, 127, 132; To the Ether, 143; The Trilogy, 128. See also Heart; Open Rimbaud, Arthur, 117, 118 Romanticism, 28, 41, 110 Rose, 123, 133, 13435 Rousseau, JeanJacques, 29, 31, 114 Roux, Wilhelm, 160n5 Ruyer, Raymond, 160n8
S Sacred, 42, 54, 5556, 138, 173n23, 174n56; in Hölderlin, 14748; and poetry, 113, 114; in Rilke, 120 Salvation, 14, 80, 8789, 122 Same, 32 Sartre, JeanPaul, 37, 44, 117 Scheler, Max, 9 Schelling, Friedrich, 13, 161n16 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 28, 30, 120 Schürmann, Reiner, 51, 157n6(2) Science, 14, 16; and anxiety, 45; and death, 2021; and Technology, 81; and time, 22 Sea, 14953 Seeing. See Vision Sensibility, 9, 3536, 38, 11415. See also Body Silence, 124 Silesius, Angelus, 133 Sophocles, 96, 102 Space, 12630 Speech, 29, 87; and anxiety, 44, 4546; and language, 111, 11415, 116, 148; and the Sacred, 5556 Spirit, 67, 69, 71, 72, 73, 98; in Hölderlin, 54, 145 State, and Technology, 81 Stimmung (attunement), 3941, 63, 64, 87, 106, 169n48; and anxiety, 4246, 163n47; and the body, 14, 3538; and poetry, 103, 114, 115, 119; of the Sacred, 55, 147 Stranger, 148, 154, 173n19 Subjectivity, 1, 23, 35, 38, 39, 43, 44, 136, 137; in Rilke, 121, 123
T Technology, 15, 43, 63, 64, 74, 75, 120; danger of, 8688; essence of, 32, 70, 72, 8084, 91, 166n17; and ethics, 9091; overcoming of, 14, 77, 101102; phenomenon of, 7984; preparation of, 8486; rationality of, 1, 72, 74, 79, 82, 83, 85, 166n23; and salvation, 89 Temple, 6, 47, 59, 60, 96, 111 Temporality, 12, 15, 19, 20, 44, 78, 100, 135. See also Time Thales, 1, 50 Thing, 48, 51, 95, 116, 13233 Thought (thinking), 71, 162n33; history of, 6769; and poetry, 111, 112; and salvation, 8889 Threshold, 15254 Thrownness (Geworfenheit), 22, 3538, 42, 100
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Time, xiii, 15, 2124, 46, 53, 127 Tools, 1617, 18, 26, 58, 61, 99, 102, 111 Totality, 16, 23, 48, 57, 72; and anxiety, 14, 46; in Heraclitus, 50, 53; and the Open, 31, 122; and Stimmung, 38, 41. See also Physis Tragedy, 109 Trakl, Georg, 118, 153, 154 Truth, 11, 13, 86, 87; as aletheia, 72, 7375, 76 (see also Aletheia); and art, 60, 61, 95, 9799 Turn, 10, 19, 22, 42, 75, 104
U Uexküll, Jacob von, 27, 160n5 Understanding, 35, 37, 63, 100, 162n15 Unity, 40, 53, 72, 126, 13138 Unterwegs zur Sprache, 71, 78, 113 Unthought, 49; of Metaphysics, 76, 80; of reason, 85
V Valéry, Paul, 112, 114, 118, 121, 170n84, 170n87 Vattimo, Gianni, 109 Violence, 106, 131, 145 Vision, 14, 26, 3536, 80, 8890, 121, 126, 160n11 Voice, 99, 11415, 129, 151, 155, 161n4 Voltaire, 31
W Wesen. See Essence Will, 82, 122, 131; to be, 106; to life, 28. See also Will to power; Will to will Will to power, 1, 50, 72, 74, 8586, 110, 131 Will to will, 1, 32, 72, 79, 87; and Technology, 82, 8384, 85 Wind, 17, 1920, 141 Withdrawal, 2, 54; of being, 13, 14, 45, 67, 7275, 8788, 98, 105, 133; of Earth, xii, xiii, 12, 48, 49, 5759, 61; of physis, 5051 Wonder, 4243, 45 Work, 19, 61. See also Art World, 10; of the animals, 2530; and art, 6061; of Dasein, 1518; and Earth, xi, xiii, 1314, 1920, 5762, 9598, 107, 11011, 114; and epoch, 5758; and equipmentality, 18; and nature, 1520, 47, 50; space of, 12628, 130; and time, 23
Z Zarathustra, xii, 63, 120 Zen, 52
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MICHEL HAAR is Professor of the History of Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Paris XII. His publications include Heidegger et l'essence de l'homme and essays on Nietzsche, Heidegger, MerleauPonty, Levinas, and Derrida and on questions of art and esthetics. REGINALD LILLY, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Siena College, is translator of The Principle of Reason by Martin Heidegger and author of articles about Heidegger and contemporary continental philosophy.