Worlding and
thinging
draw us.
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
Similarly,Heideggerlocatesthecompletionoftherelationofbeingand nonbeing in the thing, and in so doing reforms this opposition as distorted descriptions that pretend to describe nothing or non-being outside ofBeing.
We instantiate Death as Nothingbyenshriningitastheconditionofthebeyond.
Nothingisenshrined,andassuch exists or functions in our world not beyond it.
The riddle o f the beyond forms itself as a totality; or Nothing as a limit constitutes the world as a totality.
This is the way in which
the god emerges as what cannot be compared. Heidegger answers Anselms riddle, in Proslogion,describingandformingthelogicalbasisforHisexistence, "Whatisthatthan which no greater can be conceived? ", with 'What exists. "
Everythingweighsonexistence. Theweightof'what'in"whatexists"canturn the answer into a question: "What exists? " and the answer "What exists" at least allows
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
299
? existence to mimic identity. (What the thunder said; is what we say--not what we say it said, but what we say. )
Heidegger describes animation as a therapy to undo metaphysics and its (or our) forming ourselves (as humans) into animals that perish; We must recover the way to our capability as mortals: not to make us anew, but for us to see ourselves as o f old. Under the aspect of what Heidegger calls metaphysics, in which being is determined as representation,humansaredescribedasanimals,"alivingbeing"(DD179). Lifeisadded to our being, as electricity animates Frankenstein's monster's body, or as holy words animate a golem, or as god breathes into the shaped dust to make man. Objects cannot
become things, however; nor can bodies become human. In Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik(? ? 44),14Heideggerdistinguishesbetweenmineral,animal,andman: astone
exists without a world ('weltlos), the animal exists within a diminished world (yveltarm: world-poor), and man exists within his world-making (yveltbildend).
In summarizing Heidegger's methodological introduction to an unpublished course on the Phenomenology o f Religion in 1920-21 Theodore Kisiel paraphrases Heidegger's phenomenological description of factic experience, both as an activity and as that which is experienced:
What is had, lived, experienced in factic life experience is more than a mere object for a subject and its theory-forming activity, it is a world in which one can live. (One cannot live in an object. ) This formal indication of the world can be further articulated formally as our environment or milieu, as that which encounters or confrontsus. Itincludesnotonlymaterialthingsbutalsoidealobjectivities,like
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
300
? those o f science, art and religion. In this environing world, there also stands the with-world, that is, other humans socially characterized, as relatives, superiors, peers,strangers,andnotasinstancesofthescientificgenushomosapiens. Finally, in the very same world also stands "I myself" the self-world. (154)13
Our factic life experience articulates three umwelten: the given environment o f material and ideal objects, the with-world o f social relations, and the self-world.
Twenty years latter in a 1941 lecture course published as Grundbegriffe Heidegger translates these tripartite existential distinctions into the ontology o f Being:
To what "is" belongs not only the currently actual, which affects us and which we stumble upon: the happenings, the destinies and doings of man, nature in its regularity and its catastrophes, the barely fathomable powers that are already present in all motives and aims, in all valuations and attitudes o f belief.
(Basic Concepts I. ? 2)16
The actual describes the order o f the world presented earlier as "that which encounters and confronts us. " The actual also describes the normative powers in us, akin to the "ideal objectivities," understood as also a proximate order determining us. The limits of Dasein that allowed for Heidegger's existential analytic to describe its presence in its engagements have been dissolved, but not to expose the mechanisms of our being let alone our biology or consciousness. We are given to ourselves in and through the history o f our
embodiment within a world of beings, outside o f what being, existing, worlding, thinging means.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
301
? The actual slips into the possible, but not, however, through an Aristotelian dialectic, but as the description ofthe world towards-us. Ifthe actual is the descendent of the 'towards which', 'in relation to which' ofDasein, the possible describes the stances, the intentionality of Dasein:
To what "is" belongs also the possible, which we expect, hope for, and fear, which we only anticipate, before which we recoil and yet do not let go. To be sure the possible is the not yet actual, but this not-actual is nevertheless no mere nullity. The possible "is," its being simply has another character than the actual.
(Basic Concepts I. ? 2)
Possibility and actuality are not bound or determined by substance, but are rather the conditions or grammar of being: both the possible and the actual 'are'. The grammar of this 'being' is another semantic chain (best described, although the passage is rather long, in "Letter on Humanism"):
[T]hinking is the thinking of being. . . . Thinking is--this says: Being has fatefully embraced its essence. To embrace a "thing" or a "person" in its essence means to love it, to favor it. Thought in a more original way such favoring [Mogen] means to bestow essence as a gift. Such favoring is the proper essence o f enabling, which not only can achieve this or that but also can let something essentially unfold in its provenance, that is, let it be. It is on the "strength of such enabling by favoring
that something is properly able to be. This enabling is what is properly "possible" [das "Mogliche"], that whose essence resides in favoring. From this favoring
Being enables thinking. The former makes the latter possible. Being is the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? enabling-favoring, the "may be" [das Mog-liche]. As the element, Being is the quiet power" ofthe favoring-enabling, that is, ofthe possible. . Ofcourse, our words mogliche [possible] and Moglichkeit [possiblity], under the dominance of "logic" and "metaphysics," are thought solely in contrast to "actuality"; that is, they are thought on the basis o f a definite--the metaphysical--interpretation o f Being as actua and potentia, a distinction identified with the one between existentia and essentia. When I speak ofthe "quiet power ofthe possible" I do not mean the possible o f a merely represented possiblitias, nor potentia as the essentia o f an actus o f existentia; rather, I mena Being itself, which in its favoring presides over thinking and hence over the essence of humanity, and that means over its relation
to Being. (196-97)
The grammar o f 'possibility' is bound to that o f 'thinking'. These grammars pivot around a set of, what I think should be called, functions: embracing,favoring, enabling, and
possibility}1 Functions are transitive in that they can be used to link different aspects of being or different grammatical levels. 'Embrace', for example, relates being to essence through relating thing and person. This last use allows 'embrace' to be seen as love or
favor. Favor is a bestowing, but of essence. This essence understood as enabling redefines favoring' in relation to this 'enabling? . Such enabling presents being as
possibility because it is attached to letting being be, that is, the function is inverted so that it is directed not from us to the world but from the world toward us. This double movement functions as a link between world and us, but one understood as subjunctive and neither constitutive nor object-like. It is nevertheless real.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
303
? The last modality about which he has little to say explicitly is the necessary {Basic Concepts I. ? 2). In the 1941 lecture the modality of necessity is unexamined, or rather collapsed into descriptions o f Being. In "Das Ding," in effect, necessity will underwrite the chain o f semantic implication that unites the functioning o f the jug, that is, its temporality, as what it is. Meaning, because it expresses always a final cause independent from our actual usage, but rather as a possibility within the world, is a form o f necessity. Something is what it is necessarily; it could not not be what it is without ceasing to be this.
Mortals necessarily die; this necessity is experienced as a possibility. Living and thinking through this possibility is what it means to be capable o f death. What constitutes this being "capable o f death as death"? Heidegger suggests: by coming to oneself "in the shelter of Being'. This shelter is death. 'Sheltering' means to be both ahead and behind. A shelter is the limited whole ofthe world, and as such marks the difference between my world and the world. This difference enables me to call my world a world. 18
How does death shelter Being? This is the same question as How does being become present to itself? How does what exists become conscious or self-reflexive? I ask what is a mortal? and answer 'myself. This question, however, is a riddle because the entire sentence "I ask what is a mortal? and answer 'myself? " can also stand as an answer, andsoon. Thisself-reflectionmeanstobecomemortalwithintheshelterofBeing.
The gift ofthe water can become ajug, or thejug can become a world and the water a canopy. Counting abstracts things into the concept o f quantity, determining identity as that which can be counted. Patterns best described by numbers organize a syntax, between sound-tones or between poetic lines, or between a magnet and a falling
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
304
? rock. Theseenablingpatternsemergeinthemorecomplicatedsyntaxofmusicorpoetry or physics.
If things emerge as forms under the aspect of our knowing and representation they exist as identities separate from time or related as non-temporal moments determined as identities. Making, even ifunderstood as a transcendental aesthetic, functions as a form of representing, o f knowing, and thus ignores how things present themselves to us within the circle of before us, to which we respond, and as already ahead-of-us, determined by our expectations or uses, to which we recall:
When and in what way do things appear as things? They do not appear by means o f human making. But neither do they appear without the vigilance o f mortals. The first step toward such vigilance is the step back from the thinking that merely represents--that is, explains--to the thinking that responds and recalls. (DD181)
The inexplicable and unfathomable character of the world's worlding lies in this,
that causes and grounds remain unsuitable for the world's worlding. (DD180) We cannot think the world as a description (language or art) or explanation (science). 'Making' functions through cause and effect, that is, making is always a picture of evolution and thus o f identities and changes describing an ontological language. Heidegger believes that this kind of language constructs a world as representation, within Berkeley's formulation "esse = percipi, Being equals being represented" ("Moira" 82). '9
So nestling, they join together, worlding, the world.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
305
? Nestling, malleable, pliant, compliant, nimble--in Old German these are called ring and gering. The mirror-play o f the worlding world, as the ringing o f the ring, wrests free the united four into their own compliancy, the circling compliancy oftheir presence. Out ofthe ringing mirror-play the thinging ofthe thing takes place. (DD180)
The gap between identities and moments brought out by Zeno in his defense of Parmenidian One is not overcome by examining the relation between finite or infinite, or through calculus, but is erased in the semantics of 'ring' and 'gering', in the qualitative relation in which things emerge as things and the world emerges as world. Gering in modem German diminishes a gap into a short distance, a trifle; the differences described by formal identities, the structured separation constituting quantity and number, is translated into a qualitative relation, a mere separation, a nothing much. Is quantity simply ignored in this semantics?
"Thinging is the nearing ofthe world" (DD181), or the translation of objects describedbynumberorascountableintoqualitativerelations: nearandfarcaptures perspective,andthusdoesnotuniversalizeintoequa-distant,quantifiableparts. Thinging, as a qualitative relation, is non-formal and non-generative; instead it is "the thinking that responds and recalls". What kind of consciousness or state of thinking or being responds and recalls?
Out of the ringing mirror-play the thinging of the thing takes place.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
306
? Thethingstays-gathersandunites--thequadrature. Thethingthings world. Each thing stays the quadrature into a happening ofthe simple onehood of the world. (DD 181)
The ontological force of being human and even of thinking, therefore, is not a function of description or explanation, but ofwensende Verhaltnis. 'Mirror-play' is a traditional image o f the mind. Heidegger uses it here as a description o f the world as conscious. But the focus here is on the mirroring as an essential relation, constituting the quadrature as this relating. This sound good without making a lot of sense: it's all hidden in the mirroring.
Heideggerdiveststheuseofathingfromtheuser. Bydissolvinghumanagency, will, and intentionality he effectively animates the thing. A thing enacts a usage; things do not emerge as ready-to-hand within either an interpretive description or in relation to our existentialinvolvement. Heideggerhadalreadydissolvedhumanbeingsinourordinary involvementin"DasMan"inchapterIVofBeingandTime. Thisdisappearancedescribes our knowing how or rather our involvement outside of the hypostatization of self- consciousness and identity. In Being and Time our engagement remains within and with the world. Our thinking remains specifically intentional. Heidegger attempts to dissolve the predicative logic supporting subject and object, or the real as countable, as constituted
through identity, in the relations enacting our involvement. The existential analytic and its circumlocutions describe this relational enacting and involvement as the ontological conditionofourbeing. Thisontologyorrathertheontologicalcommitmentsthatthese relational involvement's entail are entrapped within a hermeneutic circle that transfers the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
307
? cite of Cartesian doubt from the subject to language itself. Thus in order to dissolve the threat o f skepticism, Heidegger must establish the ontological ground o f language. The way to language that determines Heidegger's famous turn involves the exploration of the ontologicaldimensionoflanguage. Thisgroundcannotbeestablished,butcanonlybe invoked or enacted. Thus the absence of other individual human beings in Heidegger's description of "the They" and their exclusion in "The Thing" occurs differently, or rather theontologicalstatusofdifferentsitesarebeingcontested: ourinvolvementintheworld as opposed to our involvement in language. In his attempt to make language ontological
Heidegger approaches, albeit from a different ground (from within qualitative relations) the drive toward an ontological language in Cognitive Science, a language to instantiate qualitative states within (as opposed to Heidegger's palimpsest or vague dissolution) quantitative patterns.
Heideggerarticulatestwokindsoftime. Science,evenofanAristoteliansort, gives the object its own time, but embeds it in a system of causes described by strict implication (although human beings may not be able to describe these system of causes). Heidegger, however, makes the time of the thing its doing and thus the succession of actions between us and the thing. Time condenses as the thing by making visible as such its standing alone, its structure or substance. Unlike in Being and Time where ready-to- hand described an economy ofuse between Dasein and an object as tool within the structure of our concerns, in "Das Ding" we as mortals are taken up by the world, by the thing. Both we and objects disappear in the condensation o f time that constitutes both things and the temporal possibilities available to us. 20 The stability o f scientific time, and
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? thus the stability ofthe identity ofthe object over and against us, on the other hand, is a function of its description under a particular rule (or formula).
Identity determined by use animates the real (which is no longer substance) with a meaning expressed as what something does. This form o f identity-functionalism precipitates a synesthesiac collapse of a temporal series (a doing) into the thing: what we recognize as a thing when we see theform of the jug. Heidegger does not want form to bethecriterionforidentity. Thecriterionforidentitybecomesinsteadanunderstanding ofthe semantics ofjug syntax: void-holding-outpouring-giving-gift-giving-outpouring- holding-void- gift into the earth, sky, divinities, and mortals, as the conditioning category and relation (weilen) determining the unity of the quadrature. Each word describes a jug- state and a relation to the other functors or jug-states.
The circle o f language meets itself in the thing circling from out o f the world circling as the world described in the circle of sense of the world worlding, thing thinging through which we become things inside ofthings or worlds inside ofworlds:
If we let the thing be present in its thinging from out of the worlding world, then we are thinking of the thing as thing. Taking thought in this way, we let ourselves beconcernedbythething'sworldingbeing. Thinkinginthisway,wearecalledby thethingasthething. InthestrictsenseoftheGermanwordbedingt,wearethe be-thinged, the conditioned ones. We have left behind us the presumption of all unconditionedness. (DD181)
This is a circle from 'letting be present' to 'thinking' [". . . wesen lassen, denken . . . "]; or is this the point from which two overlapping circles copy out the thing thinging itself from
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
309
? out ofthe worlding world, neither on top or underneath, but in the thing as thing? This is not, however, a hermeneutic circle inlaying our descriptions inlaying our involvement in the world. What or who is inside what or whom? If we "cannot live in an object", we can live in a thing. Ifwe are to make sense of"Das Ding" we must ask 'how can we enter the thing? " Thiscirclingof"lettingthethingbepresent"into"thinkingthethingasthing" circles us, or imagines us as the limit of the animate world. We are be-thinged by
becoming things, and in this becoming we expose our condition as a thing to the world.
Worlding and thinging draw us.
What does it mean to inhabit the thing? or to be a thing?
If we think of the thing as thing, then we spare and protect the thing's presence in the region from which it presences. Thinging is the nearing o f the world. Nearing isthenatureofnearness. Aswepreservethethingquathingweinhabitnearness. The nearing ofnearness is the true and sole dimension ofthe mirror-play ofthe world. (DD181)
Iwillretranslatethisfirstsentence: Ifwethinkthethingasthing,thenweconservethe essence o f the thing in its space-world (Bereich) from which it emerges and abides (west). These changes are primarily of emphasis in order to draw out the semantic mechanisms constitutingthinkingthethingandworld("DasDing"173-74). Ifweare"dieBe-
Dingteri" a thing is "Bereich". To think the thing as thing means not to conserve the thing butitsworld. Inconservingtheworldweplaceourselvesinthepositionofthething,we acknowledgeitsworldasours. 'Conserve'combinesL. 'servare',topreserveandprotect and L. 'con', a form o f 'cum', 'with, together'. 'Conserve' can, therefore, be construed as
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? a form o f'weilen "verweilt esErde undHimmel, die Gotttlichen und die Sierblicheri' ("Das Ding" 170/ We enter the thing by preserving its world as ours, and thus we replace it as the wine does the void. Consequently 'nearness', which is enacted through 'nearing' the world through 'thinging' the thing, is what is real. The black box in this thinking is how the relation between particular and universal, or rather between thing and world, can beovercome. Thisovercomingtakesplacethroughthecategoricalunityeffectedby lweilen\ This suggests that Heidegger has translated space into 'nearness' and time into 'weilen'. The mechanisms ofthis translation and the descriptive rules or the mechanisms (thehow? )of'nearing'and'staying'remainhidden. Heideggermakesthesemechanisms oftranslation the transcendental conditions ofour inhabitation ofboth ourselves and the world. Asanunintendedeffectofthisthinking,Heideggershowsthattheproblemof
justifying thinking or being within the world requires a conceptual thinking on the borders between science, philosophy and art that interrogates the mechanisms o f 'nearing' and 'staying' as they function as a 'making'. Heidegger highlights the process of our and the worlds making by trying to resist reducing the real to making or to substance. Similarly in resisting the temptation to justify or ground his thinking, he conceptualizes our essential conditionedness by circling into a myth that outlines the mechanisms o f its making as the limit of our involvement in the world.
What is the shadow outline o f this making? Do we understand what we are looking for when we ask how are we made or how do we make the world?
We can circle into the world into ourselves or into ourselves into the world: this is ourKantianheritage. Emersonpicturedthisas"Natureislovedbywhatisbestinus";but
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
311
? this love is a redrawing ofconcentric circles endlessly. Emerson draws circles in spirals of replacement, totality failing and following totality towards doing "something without knowinghoworwhy"(175). Ifweforgetourselveswelosethehowandwhy,or"Iam not careful to justify myself' (173). Justification settles us. Emerson's experimenting, as he calls it, "unsettle[s] all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane" (173). The loss ofjustification proceeds from asking forjustification: "The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated
without end. . . Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another canbedrawn. . . "(166). Thereisnottranscendentworldortranscendentknower,but the 'eternal generator abides . . . somewhat superior to creation": the stability of an
aufhebung in relation to which the world appears as the world changing, the world worlding. In this shift from 'I', the unsettler to the eternal generator, itself circles the eye with a horizon, as if Emerson conflates the transcendental aesthetic describing the 'science o f a priori sensibility' o f the first Critique with the aesthetic judgment, a 'critique o f taste,' ofthethird. TheunsettlednatureofNatureservesasthecriterionforourknowingand being and our failure: "People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them" (174). "Hope" proceeds in the unsettling o f circles as the future or let's say subjunctive circle o f the generator, a spiral or line pointing through and beyond anyparticularcircularlimit. Sohesays,"Greatnessappealstothefuture"(Self-Reliance, 137). In this state the world is never just ours. Making another world ("to draw another circle" [175]) or finding oneself beyond oneself and the coherence o f a 'past' world ("'when he knows not whither he is going'"[175]) recasts our subjectivity knowing as
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
312
? "the soul [that] generates matter" ("Poetry and Imagination", 450). "Imagination animates" (451): soul-making can not only be about the soul but in its power to make the world.
How do we enter into this making and animating?
What is the horizon ofjustification? The fundamental implication that defines the relations ofjugging, the semantic, temporal chain determining thejug asjug. Justification must act in two directions. It must control and determine the categorical relations around which the demand for justification arises. Scenes like: 'this is x. '; 'Why is it x? '. Heidegger must forestall the asking of this 'why. ' As we have seen every term in describing the temporal-functional series o f 'jug' provides an implicative link to another. This links are often categorical: from holding to gathering for example. Heidegger, however, has posited function as the ground o f being, and thus within the semantics o f identity only 'weilen1articulates a fundamental categorical relation: between time, space, aspects o f the world, human beings, and divinities. Its functional flexibility, its ability to constitute the other terms from taking to 'gering,' allow it to displace demands for
justification into explications o f its meaning. It describes, however, a condition o f all beings,ofboththingsandthequadrature,andinthisenactsBeingitself. Thisenacting animates. Thus,justificationdissolvesintoanimation.
Heidegger splits value from justification. Heidegger is not asking the constructivist questions 'how do we make a world? ' or 'how is it that we, human beings, can find the world at all, or as our world, or as a world? ' (the kind of questions, with some philosophical modification, that could make sense to McCulloch). Nor is he asking 'why
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
313
? these things (or any thing or any particular set of things) make a world? ', Thoreau's ontological-semantic justification question. He describes how we fit (how we experience fitting) the world from within language as a fitting together of a semantic puzzle that will pickouttheworld/formoflifeinwhich'weilericanworkandmean. Theintentionality of his language addresses not us but this 'weilen' determined world-Being. In this puzzle notallpiecesareofequivalentvalue. Asetofpiecesthatseemclosesttotheshape- functioning o f the jug are more 'valuable' because they are nearest to the reality o f
jugging. There is no single nearest part o f the world to the jug--the analogy fails because the world is not an accumulation of solid-edged things. This resistance is because, like the latter Wittgenstein, Heidegger resists viewing the world from sub species aetemitatis, which for Heidegger means as a function of quantity.
He cannot, however, abandon quantity. The following quotation answers the question 'How can you get qualitative distinctions to describe quantity? ':
But things are also compliant (ring) and modest (gering) in number, compared with the countless objects everywhere o f equal value, compared with the measureless mass of men as living beings.
Men alone, as mortals, by dwelling attain to the world as world. Only what conjoins itself out of world becomes a thing. (DD182)
Hodstadter's translation o f 1gering' as 'modest' in the first sentence and then as 'conjoins' in the second marks the emergence of meaning here as following the same conjoining it describes. HeideggerwhenhefirstintroducestheOldGermansenseofringandgering has given the possible meanings, possible translations from which we can make sense of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
314
? his usage. The coherence ofthe quadrature takes place through 'nestling': "So nestling, theyjoin together, worlding, the world" (DD180). The unifying force ofgering works in compliant and complementary relation to the emergent force o f ring, to become a specific unity, to surround and contain, to resist (modem German, ringen): this emergence, however,isofthefour"nestleintotheirunifyingpresence"(DD180). Whatarethe semantics of 'weilen' in this aspect-sliding ring, gering worlding? From the 'ringing mirror-playthethingingofthethingtakesplace"(DD180). Theunifyingrelationsamong
the quadrature, determining the world as the world, determines the thing as a thing. Heidegger etymologizes ring, 'combine,' and gering, 'small,' 'close,' 'little,' back into the old German 'nestling, malleable, pliant, compliant, nimble' in order to determine essence (W esen) and existence and identity outside o f the fragmentation attending identity.
Heidegger will not ask why these pieces? Why these things constitute a world? These questions would be answered by an explanation or description of how the world was made (the question 'why are human beings like they are? ' would be answered with a Darwinian history of our evolution) or of who has given us the world (God or parents) or how do we find ourselves in the world. Heidegger continually maintains a disjunction between representation and making. The animation of the world proceeds through the transformation of all forms of being into actors, personified mirrors. The four 'mirror' each other 'mirroring'; mirroring does not pick out the particular forms of the quadrature. The image o f the mirror or the act o f mirroring are figures for identity, for being. A mirror mirroring, however, is different from saying 'this picture mirrors the world. ' There is even a greater difference. These mirrors mirroring mirror each other mirroring. This means
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
315
? they each enact a collapse o f the particular and context as what they are (mirror) and do (mirroring)foreachother. Thereunityarisesbecauseamirrormirroringanothermirror can functionally enact the mirroring o f another mirror. It is always the world mirroring, not a subject, and thus the mirroring never becomes a particular image (which would require the world to be constructed from within a knowing subject). This use of 'mirror' and 'mirroring' should not be understood to make a claim about what is real. Its claim should be understood to describe the meaning of a world. Such a world can not be fully meaningful, nor can the viability, that is, the justification for this semantics (for the use of 'mirror', for example) be determined, without asking Thoreau's "why do these things make a world? " Consequently, Heidegger's semantics tell us more about 'meaning' than 'being'.
How do we count the matter ofthe world?
But things are also compliant (ring) and modest (gering) in number, compared with the countless objects everywhere of equal value, compared with the measureless mass o f men as living beings. (DD180)
Heidegger suggests that under the aspect of number things gering and ring, and in this they are particular. Number here has already pressured number into a qualitative distinction, built around a 'logic' or 'aesthetics' of identity. Number defined as numerical identity (x=x; x=y) ceases to be countable. Number here is not a semantic function, describing or allegorizing or mapping something into its logic, but functions ontologically as both the groundless ground ofbeing. This means that ifeverything can be reduced to number or quantity, then number and quantity become senseless. Heidegger's description
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
316
? ofscienceandtechnologyasmakingthingsdistancelessisthustwofold. Objectscanbe reduced to each other, and thus are neither close nor far. This reduction is not descriptive but constitutive of what is real and therefore number can no longer function as a description o f particulars. I do not think number functions this way in science or
technology or, for the most part, in mathematics. Mathematicians are often accused of being closet mathematical realists, arguing in public that mathematics is a language-game, but in private hypostasizing number into entities. Heidegger assumes that science and technology function as if they instantiated an unwarranted mathematical realism.
When are objects countless and the mass o f men measureless? Heidegger's answer is 'when objects are o f equal value, that is, reduced to an equivalence everywhere'; and when human beings are beings + life. Quantifying the world into objects makes them uncountable. Theequivalenceofobjectsreducesallobjectstoasinglevalue,wheresince each x = y, all objects collapse into a single term, x or y. Such a reduction makes them uncountable because the are inseparable. The "[mjeasureless mass of men" do not live in any appropriate world: neither in a world that fits within the logic of the thing nor in a
world that is theirs, and thus not replaceable. As being + life they form a reduced identity, X. Heidegger imagines authentic counting as the counting of categories not particulars.
Heidegger wants to resist this equalization, and convert 'scientific reduction' into semantic a description (development from Being and Time and its existential analytic description): absorbtheworldwithinhislanguageofthinkingasthecountertothe absorption o f the world into mathematics. In the "Letter on Humanism" he marks the turn toward language away from an existential analytic, in which our phenomenal experience
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
317
? constitutes our being (Dasein) as stances and involvement's framed within a hermeneutics, not o f language, but o f time as the limit o f both Dasein and the question o f Being (what exists), to a semantic ontology:
For thinking in its saying merely brings the unspoken word ofBeing to language. The usage "brings to language" employed here is now to be taken quite
literally. Being comes, lighting itself to language. It is perpetually under way to language. (239)
"Thinking brings. . . Being comes, lighting itself. . . under way to language"; what does this describe? The circularity of"Being. . lighting itself', the agency ofthinking "put[ting] its saying of Being into language as the home of ekistence" ("Letter", 239), and the intimacy o f language "raised into the lighting o f Being" animates and personifies Being, thinking, and language, as actors and acting, in their becoming visible as what they are. They function as both minds (animate agents) and worlds (grounds and context) making visible each other as the other in this functioning, as if before the differences between these hypostasize into subjects and objects, or selfand world, or particulars and universals. These relations and 'entities', however, are not part of a transcendental deduction. Such a deduction would require justification: why these and not other categories or beings or aspects? why lighting? how does one light the other? Heidegger removes human agency, the temptations toward skepticism and subjectivity by excluding
the demand for justification from his questioning. Rhetorically he does this by presenting his thinking as a description that acts ontologically ("Thinking is a deed . . . its saying
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
318
? merely brings the unspoken word o f Being to language")- Thinking describes thinking, and in this thinking implicates the world, undermines subjective reductions o f being, etc. The equivocation of being "equally near and equally far" (DD177) is opposed by
nearness--through which the world and things appropriate each other (fit and mutually belong together) in the mirror-play and the staying/ dwelling of the ring and gering. Nearness is therefore an ontological value, giving and staying and dwelling through which we understand the earth as nourishing, the sky as sky, the divinities as "beckoning messengers", and mortals as capable of death. Things are not of equal value. How do we recognize or live within this unequal value? How can things have any value that we can recognize? Not by being made, but by dwelling within the reflective implications that determine the world as world within a mutually reflective totality of relations.
Anima mundi seu orbis
How do these fragments oftime (or function) make a world? The world is a unity as a function of the functioning of a thing (not an effect, because the function of any particular thing includes the quadrature and presents the world as world, it does not form it). Thisseemsabsurdifweincludemorethanonething. Isthequadrature'stayed'in different ways in and for each thing? In other words, things as the condensation of different function-time series produce each a different 'staying' or 'dwelling' of the world. The difficulty o f the world functioning as a world determined by these fragmented times returns Heidegger to the problem of many times (and possible worlds) 15th century philosophers found themselves facing.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
319
? I f time arises as a function o f movement then different movement rates produce different times.
the god emerges as what cannot be compared. Heidegger answers Anselms riddle, in Proslogion,describingandformingthelogicalbasisforHisexistence, "Whatisthatthan which no greater can be conceived? ", with 'What exists. "
Everythingweighsonexistence. Theweightof'what'in"whatexists"canturn the answer into a question: "What exists? " and the answer "What exists" at least allows
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
299
? existence to mimic identity. (What the thunder said; is what we say--not what we say it said, but what we say. )
Heidegger describes animation as a therapy to undo metaphysics and its (or our) forming ourselves (as humans) into animals that perish; We must recover the way to our capability as mortals: not to make us anew, but for us to see ourselves as o f old. Under the aspect of what Heidegger calls metaphysics, in which being is determined as representation,humansaredescribedasanimals,"alivingbeing"(DD179). Lifeisadded to our being, as electricity animates Frankenstein's monster's body, or as holy words animate a golem, or as god breathes into the shaped dust to make man. Objects cannot
become things, however; nor can bodies become human. In Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik(? ? 44),14Heideggerdistinguishesbetweenmineral,animal,andman: astone
exists without a world ('weltlos), the animal exists within a diminished world (yveltarm: world-poor), and man exists within his world-making (yveltbildend).
In summarizing Heidegger's methodological introduction to an unpublished course on the Phenomenology o f Religion in 1920-21 Theodore Kisiel paraphrases Heidegger's phenomenological description of factic experience, both as an activity and as that which is experienced:
What is had, lived, experienced in factic life experience is more than a mere object for a subject and its theory-forming activity, it is a world in which one can live. (One cannot live in an object. ) This formal indication of the world can be further articulated formally as our environment or milieu, as that which encounters or confrontsus. Itincludesnotonlymaterialthingsbutalsoidealobjectivities,like
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
300
? those o f science, art and religion. In this environing world, there also stands the with-world, that is, other humans socially characterized, as relatives, superiors, peers,strangers,andnotasinstancesofthescientificgenushomosapiens. Finally, in the very same world also stands "I myself" the self-world. (154)13
Our factic life experience articulates three umwelten: the given environment o f material and ideal objects, the with-world o f social relations, and the self-world.
Twenty years latter in a 1941 lecture course published as Grundbegriffe Heidegger translates these tripartite existential distinctions into the ontology o f Being:
To what "is" belongs not only the currently actual, which affects us and which we stumble upon: the happenings, the destinies and doings of man, nature in its regularity and its catastrophes, the barely fathomable powers that are already present in all motives and aims, in all valuations and attitudes o f belief.
(Basic Concepts I. ? 2)16
The actual describes the order o f the world presented earlier as "that which encounters and confronts us. " The actual also describes the normative powers in us, akin to the "ideal objectivities," understood as also a proximate order determining us. The limits of Dasein that allowed for Heidegger's existential analytic to describe its presence in its engagements have been dissolved, but not to expose the mechanisms of our being let alone our biology or consciousness. We are given to ourselves in and through the history o f our
embodiment within a world of beings, outside o f what being, existing, worlding, thinging means.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
301
? The actual slips into the possible, but not, however, through an Aristotelian dialectic, but as the description ofthe world towards-us. Ifthe actual is the descendent of the 'towards which', 'in relation to which' ofDasein, the possible describes the stances, the intentionality of Dasein:
To what "is" belongs also the possible, which we expect, hope for, and fear, which we only anticipate, before which we recoil and yet do not let go. To be sure the possible is the not yet actual, but this not-actual is nevertheless no mere nullity. The possible "is," its being simply has another character than the actual.
(Basic Concepts I. ? 2)
Possibility and actuality are not bound or determined by substance, but are rather the conditions or grammar of being: both the possible and the actual 'are'. The grammar of this 'being' is another semantic chain (best described, although the passage is rather long, in "Letter on Humanism"):
[T]hinking is the thinking of being. . . . Thinking is--this says: Being has fatefully embraced its essence. To embrace a "thing" or a "person" in its essence means to love it, to favor it. Thought in a more original way such favoring [Mogen] means to bestow essence as a gift. Such favoring is the proper essence o f enabling, which not only can achieve this or that but also can let something essentially unfold in its provenance, that is, let it be. It is on the "strength of such enabling by favoring
that something is properly able to be. This enabling is what is properly "possible" [das "Mogliche"], that whose essence resides in favoring. From this favoring
Being enables thinking. The former makes the latter possible. Being is the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? enabling-favoring, the "may be" [das Mog-liche]. As the element, Being is the quiet power" ofthe favoring-enabling, that is, ofthe possible. . Ofcourse, our words mogliche [possible] and Moglichkeit [possiblity], under the dominance of "logic" and "metaphysics," are thought solely in contrast to "actuality"; that is, they are thought on the basis o f a definite--the metaphysical--interpretation o f Being as actua and potentia, a distinction identified with the one between existentia and essentia. When I speak ofthe "quiet power ofthe possible" I do not mean the possible o f a merely represented possiblitias, nor potentia as the essentia o f an actus o f existentia; rather, I mena Being itself, which in its favoring presides over thinking and hence over the essence of humanity, and that means over its relation
to Being. (196-97)
The grammar o f 'possibility' is bound to that o f 'thinking'. These grammars pivot around a set of, what I think should be called, functions: embracing,favoring, enabling, and
possibility}1 Functions are transitive in that they can be used to link different aspects of being or different grammatical levels. 'Embrace', for example, relates being to essence through relating thing and person. This last use allows 'embrace' to be seen as love or
favor. Favor is a bestowing, but of essence. This essence understood as enabling redefines favoring' in relation to this 'enabling? . Such enabling presents being as
possibility because it is attached to letting being be, that is, the function is inverted so that it is directed not from us to the world but from the world toward us. This double movement functions as a link between world and us, but one understood as subjunctive and neither constitutive nor object-like. It is nevertheless real.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
303
? The last modality about which he has little to say explicitly is the necessary {Basic Concepts I. ? 2). In the 1941 lecture the modality of necessity is unexamined, or rather collapsed into descriptions o f Being. In "Das Ding," in effect, necessity will underwrite the chain o f semantic implication that unites the functioning o f the jug, that is, its temporality, as what it is. Meaning, because it expresses always a final cause independent from our actual usage, but rather as a possibility within the world, is a form o f necessity. Something is what it is necessarily; it could not not be what it is without ceasing to be this.
Mortals necessarily die; this necessity is experienced as a possibility. Living and thinking through this possibility is what it means to be capable o f death. What constitutes this being "capable o f death as death"? Heidegger suggests: by coming to oneself "in the shelter of Being'. This shelter is death. 'Sheltering' means to be both ahead and behind. A shelter is the limited whole ofthe world, and as such marks the difference between my world and the world. This difference enables me to call my world a world. 18
How does death shelter Being? This is the same question as How does being become present to itself? How does what exists become conscious or self-reflexive? I ask what is a mortal? and answer 'myself. This question, however, is a riddle because the entire sentence "I ask what is a mortal? and answer 'myself? " can also stand as an answer, andsoon. Thisself-reflectionmeanstobecomemortalwithintheshelterofBeing.
The gift ofthe water can become ajug, or thejug can become a world and the water a canopy. Counting abstracts things into the concept o f quantity, determining identity as that which can be counted. Patterns best described by numbers organize a syntax, between sound-tones or between poetic lines, or between a magnet and a falling
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
304
? rock. Theseenablingpatternsemergeinthemorecomplicatedsyntaxofmusicorpoetry or physics.
If things emerge as forms under the aspect of our knowing and representation they exist as identities separate from time or related as non-temporal moments determined as identities. Making, even ifunderstood as a transcendental aesthetic, functions as a form of representing, o f knowing, and thus ignores how things present themselves to us within the circle of before us, to which we respond, and as already ahead-of-us, determined by our expectations or uses, to which we recall:
When and in what way do things appear as things? They do not appear by means o f human making. But neither do they appear without the vigilance o f mortals. The first step toward such vigilance is the step back from the thinking that merely represents--that is, explains--to the thinking that responds and recalls. (DD181)
The inexplicable and unfathomable character of the world's worlding lies in this,
that causes and grounds remain unsuitable for the world's worlding. (DD180) We cannot think the world as a description (language or art) or explanation (science). 'Making' functions through cause and effect, that is, making is always a picture of evolution and thus o f identities and changes describing an ontological language. Heidegger believes that this kind of language constructs a world as representation, within Berkeley's formulation "esse = percipi, Being equals being represented" ("Moira" 82). '9
So nestling, they join together, worlding, the world.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
305
? Nestling, malleable, pliant, compliant, nimble--in Old German these are called ring and gering. The mirror-play o f the worlding world, as the ringing o f the ring, wrests free the united four into their own compliancy, the circling compliancy oftheir presence. Out ofthe ringing mirror-play the thinging ofthe thing takes place. (DD180)
The gap between identities and moments brought out by Zeno in his defense of Parmenidian One is not overcome by examining the relation between finite or infinite, or through calculus, but is erased in the semantics of 'ring' and 'gering', in the qualitative relation in which things emerge as things and the world emerges as world. Gering in modem German diminishes a gap into a short distance, a trifle; the differences described by formal identities, the structured separation constituting quantity and number, is translated into a qualitative relation, a mere separation, a nothing much. Is quantity simply ignored in this semantics?
"Thinging is the nearing ofthe world" (DD181), or the translation of objects describedbynumberorascountableintoqualitativerelations: nearandfarcaptures perspective,andthusdoesnotuniversalizeintoequa-distant,quantifiableparts. Thinging, as a qualitative relation, is non-formal and non-generative; instead it is "the thinking that responds and recalls". What kind of consciousness or state of thinking or being responds and recalls?
Out of the ringing mirror-play the thinging of the thing takes place.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
306
? Thethingstays-gathersandunites--thequadrature. Thethingthings world. Each thing stays the quadrature into a happening ofthe simple onehood of the world. (DD 181)
The ontological force of being human and even of thinking, therefore, is not a function of description or explanation, but ofwensende Verhaltnis. 'Mirror-play' is a traditional image o f the mind. Heidegger uses it here as a description o f the world as conscious. But the focus here is on the mirroring as an essential relation, constituting the quadrature as this relating. This sound good without making a lot of sense: it's all hidden in the mirroring.
Heideggerdiveststheuseofathingfromtheuser. Bydissolvinghumanagency, will, and intentionality he effectively animates the thing. A thing enacts a usage; things do not emerge as ready-to-hand within either an interpretive description or in relation to our existentialinvolvement. Heideggerhadalreadydissolvedhumanbeingsinourordinary involvementin"DasMan"inchapterIVofBeingandTime. Thisdisappearancedescribes our knowing how or rather our involvement outside of the hypostatization of self- consciousness and identity. In Being and Time our engagement remains within and with the world. Our thinking remains specifically intentional. Heidegger attempts to dissolve the predicative logic supporting subject and object, or the real as countable, as constituted
through identity, in the relations enacting our involvement. The existential analytic and its circumlocutions describe this relational enacting and involvement as the ontological conditionofourbeing. Thisontologyorrathertheontologicalcommitmentsthatthese relational involvement's entail are entrapped within a hermeneutic circle that transfers the
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
307
? cite of Cartesian doubt from the subject to language itself. Thus in order to dissolve the threat o f skepticism, Heidegger must establish the ontological ground o f language. The way to language that determines Heidegger's famous turn involves the exploration of the ontologicaldimensionoflanguage. Thisgroundcannotbeestablished,butcanonlybe invoked or enacted. Thus the absence of other individual human beings in Heidegger's description of "the They" and their exclusion in "The Thing" occurs differently, or rather theontologicalstatusofdifferentsitesarebeingcontested: ourinvolvementintheworld as opposed to our involvement in language. In his attempt to make language ontological
Heidegger approaches, albeit from a different ground (from within qualitative relations) the drive toward an ontological language in Cognitive Science, a language to instantiate qualitative states within (as opposed to Heidegger's palimpsest or vague dissolution) quantitative patterns.
Heideggerarticulatestwokindsoftime. Science,evenofanAristoteliansort, gives the object its own time, but embeds it in a system of causes described by strict implication (although human beings may not be able to describe these system of causes). Heidegger, however, makes the time of the thing its doing and thus the succession of actions between us and the thing. Time condenses as the thing by making visible as such its standing alone, its structure or substance. Unlike in Being and Time where ready-to- hand described an economy ofuse between Dasein and an object as tool within the structure of our concerns, in "Das Ding" we as mortals are taken up by the world, by the thing. Both we and objects disappear in the condensation o f time that constitutes both things and the temporal possibilities available to us. 20 The stability o f scientific time, and
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? thus the stability ofthe identity ofthe object over and against us, on the other hand, is a function of its description under a particular rule (or formula).
Identity determined by use animates the real (which is no longer substance) with a meaning expressed as what something does. This form o f identity-functionalism precipitates a synesthesiac collapse of a temporal series (a doing) into the thing: what we recognize as a thing when we see theform of the jug. Heidegger does not want form to bethecriterionforidentity. Thecriterionforidentitybecomesinsteadanunderstanding ofthe semantics ofjug syntax: void-holding-outpouring-giving-gift-giving-outpouring- holding-void- gift into the earth, sky, divinities, and mortals, as the conditioning category and relation (weilen) determining the unity of the quadrature. Each word describes a jug- state and a relation to the other functors or jug-states.
The circle o f language meets itself in the thing circling from out o f the world circling as the world described in the circle of sense of the world worlding, thing thinging through which we become things inside ofthings or worlds inside ofworlds:
If we let the thing be present in its thinging from out of the worlding world, then we are thinking of the thing as thing. Taking thought in this way, we let ourselves beconcernedbythething'sworldingbeing. Thinkinginthisway,wearecalledby thethingasthething. InthestrictsenseoftheGermanwordbedingt,wearethe be-thinged, the conditioned ones. We have left behind us the presumption of all unconditionedness. (DD181)
This is a circle from 'letting be present' to 'thinking' [". . . wesen lassen, denken . . . "]; or is this the point from which two overlapping circles copy out the thing thinging itself from
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
309
? out ofthe worlding world, neither on top or underneath, but in the thing as thing? This is not, however, a hermeneutic circle inlaying our descriptions inlaying our involvement in the world. What or who is inside what or whom? If we "cannot live in an object", we can live in a thing. Ifwe are to make sense of"Das Ding" we must ask 'how can we enter the thing? " Thiscirclingof"lettingthethingbepresent"into"thinkingthethingasthing" circles us, or imagines us as the limit of the animate world. We are be-thinged by
becoming things, and in this becoming we expose our condition as a thing to the world.
Worlding and thinging draw us.
What does it mean to inhabit the thing? or to be a thing?
If we think of the thing as thing, then we spare and protect the thing's presence in the region from which it presences. Thinging is the nearing o f the world. Nearing isthenatureofnearness. Aswepreservethethingquathingweinhabitnearness. The nearing ofnearness is the true and sole dimension ofthe mirror-play ofthe world. (DD181)
Iwillretranslatethisfirstsentence: Ifwethinkthethingasthing,thenweconservethe essence o f the thing in its space-world (Bereich) from which it emerges and abides (west). These changes are primarily of emphasis in order to draw out the semantic mechanisms constitutingthinkingthethingandworld("DasDing"173-74). Ifweare"dieBe-
Dingteri" a thing is "Bereich". To think the thing as thing means not to conserve the thing butitsworld. Inconservingtheworldweplaceourselvesinthepositionofthething,we acknowledgeitsworldasours. 'Conserve'combinesL. 'servare',topreserveandprotect and L. 'con', a form o f 'cum', 'with, together'. 'Conserve' can, therefore, be construed as
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
? a form o f'weilen "verweilt esErde undHimmel, die Gotttlichen und die Sierblicheri' ("Das Ding" 170/ We enter the thing by preserving its world as ours, and thus we replace it as the wine does the void. Consequently 'nearness', which is enacted through 'nearing' the world through 'thinging' the thing, is what is real. The black box in this thinking is how the relation between particular and universal, or rather between thing and world, can beovercome. Thisovercomingtakesplacethroughthecategoricalunityeffectedby lweilen\ This suggests that Heidegger has translated space into 'nearness' and time into 'weilen'. The mechanisms ofthis translation and the descriptive rules or the mechanisms (thehow? )of'nearing'and'staying'remainhidden. Heideggermakesthesemechanisms oftranslation the transcendental conditions ofour inhabitation ofboth ourselves and the world. Asanunintendedeffectofthisthinking,Heideggershowsthattheproblemof
justifying thinking or being within the world requires a conceptual thinking on the borders between science, philosophy and art that interrogates the mechanisms o f 'nearing' and 'staying' as they function as a 'making'. Heidegger highlights the process of our and the worlds making by trying to resist reducing the real to making or to substance. Similarly in resisting the temptation to justify or ground his thinking, he conceptualizes our essential conditionedness by circling into a myth that outlines the mechanisms o f its making as the limit of our involvement in the world.
What is the shadow outline o f this making? Do we understand what we are looking for when we ask how are we made or how do we make the world?
We can circle into the world into ourselves or into ourselves into the world: this is ourKantianheritage. Emersonpicturedthisas"Natureislovedbywhatisbestinus";but
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
311
? this love is a redrawing ofconcentric circles endlessly. Emerson draws circles in spirals of replacement, totality failing and following totality towards doing "something without knowinghoworwhy"(175). Ifweforgetourselveswelosethehowandwhy,or"Iam not careful to justify myself' (173). Justification settles us. Emerson's experimenting, as he calls it, "unsettle[s] all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane" (173). The loss ofjustification proceeds from asking forjustification: "The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated
without end. . . Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another canbedrawn. . . "(166). Thereisnottranscendentworldortranscendentknower,but the 'eternal generator abides . . . somewhat superior to creation": the stability of an
aufhebung in relation to which the world appears as the world changing, the world worlding. In this shift from 'I', the unsettler to the eternal generator, itself circles the eye with a horizon, as if Emerson conflates the transcendental aesthetic describing the 'science o f a priori sensibility' o f the first Critique with the aesthetic judgment, a 'critique o f taste,' ofthethird. TheunsettlednatureofNatureservesasthecriterionforourknowingand being and our failure: "People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them" (174). "Hope" proceeds in the unsettling o f circles as the future or let's say subjunctive circle o f the generator, a spiral or line pointing through and beyond anyparticularcircularlimit. Sohesays,"Greatnessappealstothefuture"(Self-Reliance, 137). In this state the world is never just ours. Making another world ("to draw another circle" [175]) or finding oneself beyond oneself and the coherence o f a 'past' world ("'when he knows not whither he is going'"[175]) recasts our subjectivity knowing as
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
312
? "the soul [that] generates matter" ("Poetry and Imagination", 450). "Imagination animates" (451): soul-making can not only be about the soul but in its power to make the world.
How do we enter into this making and animating?
What is the horizon ofjustification? The fundamental implication that defines the relations ofjugging, the semantic, temporal chain determining thejug asjug. Justification must act in two directions. It must control and determine the categorical relations around which the demand for justification arises. Scenes like: 'this is x. '; 'Why is it x? '. Heidegger must forestall the asking of this 'why. ' As we have seen every term in describing the temporal-functional series o f 'jug' provides an implicative link to another. This links are often categorical: from holding to gathering for example. Heidegger, however, has posited function as the ground o f being, and thus within the semantics o f identity only 'weilen1articulates a fundamental categorical relation: between time, space, aspects o f the world, human beings, and divinities. Its functional flexibility, its ability to constitute the other terms from taking to 'gering,' allow it to displace demands for
justification into explications o f its meaning. It describes, however, a condition o f all beings,ofboththingsandthequadrature,andinthisenactsBeingitself. Thisenacting animates. Thus,justificationdissolvesintoanimation.
Heidegger splits value from justification. Heidegger is not asking the constructivist questions 'how do we make a world? ' or 'how is it that we, human beings, can find the world at all, or as our world, or as a world? ' (the kind of questions, with some philosophical modification, that could make sense to McCulloch). Nor is he asking 'why
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
313
? these things (or any thing or any particular set of things) make a world? ', Thoreau's ontological-semantic justification question. He describes how we fit (how we experience fitting) the world from within language as a fitting together of a semantic puzzle that will pickouttheworld/formoflifeinwhich'weilericanworkandmean. Theintentionality of his language addresses not us but this 'weilen' determined world-Being. In this puzzle notallpiecesareofequivalentvalue. Asetofpiecesthatseemclosesttotheshape- functioning o f the jug are more 'valuable' because they are nearest to the reality o f
jugging. There is no single nearest part o f the world to the jug--the analogy fails because the world is not an accumulation of solid-edged things. This resistance is because, like the latter Wittgenstein, Heidegger resists viewing the world from sub species aetemitatis, which for Heidegger means as a function of quantity.
He cannot, however, abandon quantity. The following quotation answers the question 'How can you get qualitative distinctions to describe quantity? ':
But things are also compliant (ring) and modest (gering) in number, compared with the countless objects everywhere o f equal value, compared with the measureless mass of men as living beings.
Men alone, as mortals, by dwelling attain to the world as world. Only what conjoins itself out of world becomes a thing. (DD182)
Hodstadter's translation o f 1gering' as 'modest' in the first sentence and then as 'conjoins' in the second marks the emergence of meaning here as following the same conjoining it describes. HeideggerwhenhefirstintroducestheOldGermansenseofringandgering has given the possible meanings, possible translations from which we can make sense of
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
314
? his usage. The coherence ofthe quadrature takes place through 'nestling': "So nestling, theyjoin together, worlding, the world" (DD180). The unifying force ofgering works in compliant and complementary relation to the emergent force o f ring, to become a specific unity, to surround and contain, to resist (modem German, ringen): this emergence, however,isofthefour"nestleintotheirunifyingpresence"(DD180). Whatarethe semantics of 'weilen' in this aspect-sliding ring, gering worlding? From the 'ringing mirror-playthethingingofthethingtakesplace"(DD180). Theunifyingrelationsamong
the quadrature, determining the world as the world, determines the thing as a thing. Heidegger etymologizes ring, 'combine,' and gering, 'small,' 'close,' 'little,' back into the old German 'nestling, malleable, pliant, compliant, nimble' in order to determine essence (W esen) and existence and identity outside o f the fragmentation attending identity.
Heidegger will not ask why these pieces? Why these things constitute a world? These questions would be answered by an explanation or description of how the world was made (the question 'why are human beings like they are? ' would be answered with a Darwinian history of our evolution) or of who has given us the world (God or parents) or how do we find ourselves in the world. Heidegger continually maintains a disjunction between representation and making. The animation of the world proceeds through the transformation of all forms of being into actors, personified mirrors. The four 'mirror' each other 'mirroring'; mirroring does not pick out the particular forms of the quadrature. The image o f the mirror or the act o f mirroring are figures for identity, for being. A mirror mirroring, however, is different from saying 'this picture mirrors the world. ' There is even a greater difference. These mirrors mirroring mirror each other mirroring. This means
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
315
? they each enact a collapse o f the particular and context as what they are (mirror) and do (mirroring)foreachother. Thereunityarisesbecauseamirrormirroringanothermirror can functionally enact the mirroring o f another mirror. It is always the world mirroring, not a subject, and thus the mirroring never becomes a particular image (which would require the world to be constructed from within a knowing subject). This use of 'mirror' and 'mirroring' should not be understood to make a claim about what is real. Its claim should be understood to describe the meaning of a world. Such a world can not be fully meaningful, nor can the viability, that is, the justification for this semantics (for the use of 'mirror', for example) be determined, without asking Thoreau's "why do these things make a world? " Consequently, Heidegger's semantics tell us more about 'meaning' than 'being'.
How do we count the matter ofthe world?
But things are also compliant (ring) and modest (gering) in number, compared with the countless objects everywhere of equal value, compared with the measureless mass o f men as living beings. (DD180)
Heidegger suggests that under the aspect of number things gering and ring, and in this they are particular. Number here has already pressured number into a qualitative distinction, built around a 'logic' or 'aesthetics' of identity. Number defined as numerical identity (x=x; x=y) ceases to be countable. Number here is not a semantic function, describing or allegorizing or mapping something into its logic, but functions ontologically as both the groundless ground ofbeing. This means that ifeverything can be reduced to number or quantity, then number and quantity become senseless. Heidegger's description
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
316
? ofscienceandtechnologyasmakingthingsdistancelessisthustwofold. Objectscanbe reduced to each other, and thus are neither close nor far. This reduction is not descriptive but constitutive of what is real and therefore number can no longer function as a description o f particulars. I do not think number functions this way in science or
technology or, for the most part, in mathematics. Mathematicians are often accused of being closet mathematical realists, arguing in public that mathematics is a language-game, but in private hypostasizing number into entities. Heidegger assumes that science and technology function as if they instantiated an unwarranted mathematical realism.
When are objects countless and the mass o f men measureless? Heidegger's answer is 'when objects are o f equal value, that is, reduced to an equivalence everywhere'; and when human beings are beings + life. Quantifying the world into objects makes them uncountable. Theequivalenceofobjectsreducesallobjectstoasinglevalue,wheresince each x = y, all objects collapse into a single term, x or y. Such a reduction makes them uncountable because the are inseparable. The "[mjeasureless mass of men" do not live in any appropriate world: neither in a world that fits within the logic of the thing nor in a
world that is theirs, and thus not replaceable. As being + life they form a reduced identity, X. Heidegger imagines authentic counting as the counting of categories not particulars.
Heidegger wants to resist this equalization, and convert 'scientific reduction' into semantic a description (development from Being and Time and its existential analytic description): absorbtheworldwithinhislanguageofthinkingasthecountertothe absorption o f the world into mathematics. In the "Letter on Humanism" he marks the turn toward language away from an existential analytic, in which our phenomenal experience
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
317
? constitutes our being (Dasein) as stances and involvement's framed within a hermeneutics, not o f language, but o f time as the limit o f both Dasein and the question o f Being (what exists), to a semantic ontology:
For thinking in its saying merely brings the unspoken word ofBeing to language. The usage "brings to language" employed here is now to be taken quite
literally. Being comes, lighting itself to language. It is perpetually under way to language. (239)
"Thinking brings. . . Being comes, lighting itself. . . under way to language"; what does this describe? The circularity of"Being. . lighting itself', the agency ofthinking "put[ting] its saying of Being into language as the home of ekistence" ("Letter", 239), and the intimacy o f language "raised into the lighting o f Being" animates and personifies Being, thinking, and language, as actors and acting, in their becoming visible as what they are. They function as both minds (animate agents) and worlds (grounds and context) making visible each other as the other in this functioning, as if before the differences between these hypostasize into subjects and objects, or selfand world, or particulars and universals. These relations and 'entities', however, are not part of a transcendental deduction. Such a deduction would require justification: why these and not other categories or beings or aspects? why lighting? how does one light the other? Heidegger removes human agency, the temptations toward skepticism and subjectivity by excluding
the demand for justification from his questioning. Rhetorically he does this by presenting his thinking as a description that acts ontologically ("Thinking is a deed . . . its saying
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
318
? merely brings the unspoken word o f Being to language")- Thinking describes thinking, and in this thinking implicates the world, undermines subjective reductions o f being, etc. The equivocation of being "equally near and equally far" (DD177) is opposed by
nearness--through which the world and things appropriate each other (fit and mutually belong together) in the mirror-play and the staying/ dwelling of the ring and gering. Nearness is therefore an ontological value, giving and staying and dwelling through which we understand the earth as nourishing, the sky as sky, the divinities as "beckoning messengers", and mortals as capable of death. Things are not of equal value. How do we recognize or live within this unequal value? How can things have any value that we can recognize? Not by being made, but by dwelling within the reflective implications that determine the world as world within a mutually reflective totality of relations.
Anima mundi seu orbis
How do these fragments oftime (or function) make a world? The world is a unity as a function of the functioning of a thing (not an effect, because the function of any particular thing includes the quadrature and presents the world as world, it does not form it). Thisseemsabsurdifweincludemorethanonething. Isthequadrature'stayed'in different ways in and for each thing? In other words, things as the condensation of different function-time series produce each a different 'staying' or 'dwelling' of the world. The difficulty o f the world functioning as a world determined by these fragmented times returns Heidegger to the problem of many times (and possible worlds) 15th century philosophers found themselves facing.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
319
? I f time arises as a function o f movement then different movement rates produce different times.
