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'what is a thing? ' as asking for the identity ofthingness (x=y or x=x: the difference between these is partly what's at stake in the essay). But answering 'what is a thing? " with "a jug" is a kind of mistake, at least an acknowledgment that we do not know how to answer Heidegger's question.
What would count as an answer to a question o f identity? In mathematics it seems clear: 5+5=10. We can substitute either side of the equation for the other, and thus algebraispossible. Identity,therefore,seemstodescribesynonymyandthroughthis describes how words mean: morning star = evening star. Thing as thing, and not as a particular thing, cannot be picked out ofthe world like an object and put in such an equation. A thing is the same as what? Another thing. Such self-reflection cannot yet answerthesecondincarnationofHeidegger'squestion: "Whatinthethingisthingly? What is the thing in itself? " Heidegger's version of a thing = thing will be "the thing things", but this does not make any sense within our language, as a function of the logic of 'is' that we understand. Heidegger must dissolve 'is' into nearness, a language function describing a resolution o f the categorical difference between quantity and quality. The quality of being a jug determines the jug as a jug, and therefore as a thing: an identity.
Heidegger asks "what is the jug? " This is not the same kind of question as "what is a thing? ". We can answer this question with little ambiguity: "A vessel, something of the kind that holds something else within it. " "A vessel" answers "what is a jug? " with its function. A jug has a use first. It becomes a thing (what it is) by having this use. Thus 'what is a thing? ' asks 'what does a thing do? ' But I imagine I still would not answer 'a thing things" or 'a jug jugs'. To what question might we answer this? I might say this in a
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language that included x=x but not x=y, that is, a language without metaphors. O f course, in our language we understand "a thing things" as a metaphor. A thing is what it does and thus the noun 'thing' becomes a verb, becomes its function. Ajug's nature is not brought about by making, because the use of anything is not determined by making. Making something fulfills a use that pre-exists. Even if we find a new use, or a use, for a found or already made object, it becomes what it is to us through that use. The thing has to emerge as something within the scope ofour concerns, as a part ofthe relations that constitute our world.
Heidegger opposes function to form as involving two different ontologies. Function determines the real through nearness, something like an implicate order or series. 5 Form determines the real as substance and order: "That is why Plato, who conceives of the presence of what is present in terms of the outward appearance,. . . everything present as an object of making (des Gegenstand des Herstellens- arfahren)"(DD168). What about representation, or the identity ofthings as form or as substance, as Aristotle conceives of it in Book VII of the Metaphysics, is determined by understanding, as Heidegger believed Plato did, "everything present as an object o f making"(DD168). Similarly,whataboutunderstandingtheoriginofanobject(orthing) in its making leads to an object overagainst us, or to identity as a function of form, or to thehypostasisofknowingasbeing? Heideggerslipsoutofthisknotofquestionsand assumptions by redefining "making" as "what stands forth" and not as that which stands "against us" (iGegenstand). Heidegger recognizes that making is not the same as representing, but if this making determines identity both making and representing are
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determinedbyasimilarkindofknowing. Standingforthimpliestwothings: "Stemming from somewhere", having a beginning and an origin, a thing became, and thus did not always exist as such, and it had a cause; and once made it exists within "what is already present" (168). But neither standing forth nor standing against reaches across the noumenal boundary to "the thing qua thing". 6
Heidegger investigates things-in-themselves by investigating the onto-semantics o f the '-in-' sandwiched between 'thing' and the self-possessive 'themselves'. The sides and bottom do not hold the wine because we do not pour the wine "into the sides and bottom" (in den Wcmdung und in den Boden). The sides and bottom are impermeable, but they do not yet hold (noch nicht das Fassende). Because we pour the wine into the void formed bythematerialformofthejug,thisvoidholds: DieLeereisdasFassendedesGefafies ("Das Ding" 161). Heidegger determines identity as that which can be entered--by 'in'-- the empty space o f the jug is what the jug is as vessel because that is where the wine is wheninthejug. Thefunctionofthejug,itsholding,takesplacethere. Thislinksspace andidentitynotbypossession,butbyanequivalenceofbeing,byidentity: theemptiness is where the wine is at another time. Die Leere in moment 1 = Der Wein in moment 2 in the space defined by the sides and bottom. Possession implies a separation, successive
being as the space between, where the emptiness implies the possibility o f replacement as wine, and where the wine implies the possibility of replacement as emptiness. What exists is always permeable over time, and thus existence requires not solidity vis a vis other objectsbutinterpentrability: isthasbecomein(into). Theexampleofthejug,therefore, is hardly arbitrary. It represents how things are: being a thing means by implication ?
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entering into o f being entered into. Even the scythe, while it does not seem to have two states (empty and full, in varying degrees), cuts by entering into a stalk. Already, with the jug to be means to be that which is containing, that which can be entered or can enter (the
wine). The jug as a vessel contains (or in Hiedegger's language, holds); we are close to the jug jugs.
Heidegger recognizes the obvious in a comedy o f falling over: Butthejugdoesconsistofsidesandbottom. Bythatofwhichthejugconsists,it stands. What would a jug be that did not stand? At least a jug manque, hence a
jug still--namely, one that would indeed hold but that, constantly falling over, wouldemptyitselfofwhatitholds. Onlyavessel,however,canemptyitself. (DD 169)
We have a riddle: What would be a jug that did not stand? answer: a jug. Such a misfit jug functions as a jug, but all at once and outside of our use of that function (except as a joke, maybe). The failure ofajug still marks it as ajug. This riddle, however, pretends to
picture a jug outside o f its essential form; a jug has sides, o f course; how silly, what would a jug be that did not stand up? Is this standing what it means to have bottom and sides? It can stand with these. But the silliness should ask what would a jug be without bottom or sides? Nothing. Not even a not-jug. If the answer were a not-jug, this would be like a jug exclaiming, I wish I was never bom. Heidegger's riddle says, 'I wish I was never a jug.
I'd rather be a bomb! ' So I fill the jug with explosives, with uranium maybe. But to be nothing could only result from an alternate history, either for me or for the species.
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But ifI say, 'I don't want thisjug to be ajug, but I want it to be me,' and then I fill it with circuits, or I paint on a face and put it into my bed; or I discover I'm an object and I want to be a thing, or I'm a product of evolution and history, but I want a teleology, so I fill myself with a soul. The potter makes the void, he does not form the clay except as an accidentaleffectofshapingthevoid. IfIpainttheamphoraamIpaintingthevoid?
If I make a jug without an inside, a solid jug, then I have made the form of a jug but not a jug. If I simulate the form of a tree I have not made a tree; but if I simulate the functioning, the physiology o f the tree in its actual working, then I have made a tree regardlessofitsform. Notalltreeslookalike. IfIsimulatethefunctioningofahuman being, then I have made a human being. In Cognitive philosophy this is called functionalism,andservesasajustificationforthemechanizationofthemind. Buteven here everything rests on what we mean by human being, and, as we might o f Heidegger, we can always ask what does a human being do?
8. 3 A Thing is a Temporal Condensate of a Semantic Chain
A void is necessary but not sufficient to hold something; one also needs a material limitbywhichtocreatethevoidandkeepitstableandimpenetrableinnormaluse. Ajug holds wine by creating a barrier between the liquid and the forces of dispersal, primarily gravity. This material barrier separates two categories or kinds of being: liquid (a state of matter operating as a substance in relation to our interaction with it) and, for simplicities sake, the force (ofgravity). Even ifwe revert to a pre-Newtonian scientific model and say the barrier is between the wine and its tendency to fall toward the earth and spread itself
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into the largest container possible, we have two categories: the thing, call this the existent, and its essence or tendency. Thus this is not a reduction into a single category of equidistantandidenticalpointsoratoms. Substancefunctionsasafulcrumwithwhichto lever essence and existence into contact. Substance is, therefore, the point of categorical unity o f exactly the same kind as nearness Heidegger posits as constituting a world. But there is a difference between Hiedegger's nearness and the nearness o f substance. Heidegger builds a reductive chain from substance to making to quantify through which science functions. I will call this description through measurement. In this chain one can see that the only point of categorical unity is in the making, between need, will, goal and form and substance. The categorical unification o f how the jug works with its substance is
translated into a determined unity between why the jug is made with how the jug is made towork. Makingleadsonlytosubstanceifthejustificationfornotonlywhyitismade(its use)isunderstoodasansweringalsowhyitwasmadeinthewayitwas. Thisjustification describes how the world works. Heidegger wants to prevent us asking why the jug is self- standing, or rather from asking 'how does the jug stand? '. Such a question leads us to the world, but not the world o f the fourfold. Because in this world we are not used (by divinity). Use cannot counter the indifference of how the world works. Hope might not find an adequate niche in either the mechanisms o f the umwelt or the scientific descriptions of it. Hardy pictured this as tragedy:
. . . the whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity o f countenance
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with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over the surface o f the former like flies.
(Tess o f the d'Urbervilles, ch. xliii)
'Nature', the force of external or given coherence, tinkers with our humanity, erasing our faceandthenobsofmeaningattachedbypatheticfallacytoitsface. Itbecomesmore inhuman by being cast as monstrously human, and then looking without eyes upon our owndiminutionintoinsect-likeinsignificance. Theprocessofourspeciesbecomingself- consciousnessinrelationtotheworldshrinksSibyl-likebeforethisindifference. Weare
the Sibyl as a species.
The particular usage of this jug may be to transport the wine, to measure it, to
stand as a work of art, or an um for the dead, to cook with, to drink from. Are these all separate identities, or does this simply describe the limits ofjugging?
Asking 'how does the jug's void hold? ' pressures the semantics o f 'void' and 'hold' into a new usage. A void takes 'what is poured in' and keeps 'what is poured in' (DD171). Heidegger'sascribesintentiontothejugsothathowitholdsseemstosetup an ambiguous acting where the jug is both taking and keeping. Heidegger calls this
ambiguous, which can only be true if the taking and keeping take place simultaneously. This according to Heidegger's description is not true: taking happens first and then keeping,thejug-thing,nowajug-person,takesthewineandkeepsit. Theambiguityisa functionoftheidentityofthejugbeingitsholding,literallyhowitholds. Thusthe
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ambiguity is a function of the demands of identity, that it be something that extends over successivemoments,notsomethingelseineverymoment. Heideggerisattemptingto figure the thing in time, constitute the thing as what expresses timing (why not making time? ). The unity ofjug asjug, the resolution ofthe ambiguity between taking and keeping, between what is done and what was done, therefore, is determined by the possibility for which the taking and keeping take place, that is, 'the outpouring'.
Function, the 'for which the jug is fitted as a jug", determines the jug as jug by resting (beruhi) [again why not constituting? ] the jug on the possibility that excavates a fixture for
thisjugtoenterintoasajug. Thegroundofidentityisthefuturepossibilityinwhichthe function ofthejug can be fulfilled. This future transposes the selfishness ofthe taking and keeping (can we call this the immoral jug? ) into giving (the moral jug? ): "The holding of the vessel occurs in the giving of the outpouring. " 'Occurs' does not make sense here: how can past actions occur in putative future actions? This use o f 'occurs' is justified (but not explicitly) by the following description:
1. "Holding needs the void"
2. thenatureofholdingisgatheredingiving
3. giving constitutes what is given (let's say the wine) as a poured gift
4. thejug'scharacterconsistsofthispouredgift
5. if the jug remains a jug it can give again, so that the fulfilled possibility remains
a possibility by virtue of its previous use.
'Occurs',therefore,means'becomes'andconsistsofanothertimeline. Theuseofthejug happens in the ordinary world as a series o f actions. The function described by this series
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describes the jug as jug, and thus the jug becomes a jug through and by virtue o f this function. Suchauseoffunctionisbestunderstoodasapseudo-mathematicalorlogical function: / (jug) ([outpouring (giving) n holding (taking and keeping)] r>jug). In such a function, 'outpouring', 'giving', 'holding', and so on are functors.
This pseudo-logic provides the leverage to generate a meta-description that can stabilize the transformation of identity into existence as a temporal unity. It gives us a relation between two temporal orders organized around implication, understood as a becomingbyvirtueofwhatsomethingisbythisbecoming. Thusthiscannotbestrictly causal, because identity is always a further effect and never a cause except for after the fact. In the world o f Heidegger's jug all causes are final causes, just as all forms o f 'to be' express existence.
A jug is a jug if it gives through taking and keeping and then outpouring (with the understanding that this 'then' is a temporal marker outside of the jug as jug, that is, its identity). (DD172). Theunityoftakingandkeeping(holding)andoutpouringconstitutes thefull(voile:asinafilledupjug)natureoressence(Wesen)ofgiving. Thisessenceis the 'poured gift' (das Geschenk). Geschenk has been translated as poured 'gift', although it means simply 'gift', but like 'gift' in English 'Geschenk' is the nominalization o f a verb 'schenken' or 'give'. Thus giving becomes giving if a gift is given. The past tense prefix ge- marks the gift as already given, or rather as a gift-thing within the economy o f giving. Once poured the pouring ceases, but the poured gift remains poured and remains what it is as gift. Every point in the time-line that describes how the jug is used, from taking to keeping to outpouring to giving to gift, its jugness is totalized as implicit in the completed
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action. Thus, even ifthejug is empty its identity as gift exists as its potential to give, but this potential is always actualized in our recognition ofthejug asjug. Thejug acts because it is totalized within our time, while the jug is an object when it is totalized within its own time. The time-line that constitutes the jug is reduced to a unit which we recognize as a
jug. Thus a unit of our time is condensed into the jug, and that is its identity. The things around us, therefore, exist as what they are as condensations o f different temporal series. This is the form o f 'to be' as implication organized as function and identity. A thing is a time series that includes all possibilities o f its being what it is (all other moments in the timeseries)atanyandeverymoment. Athing,therefore,asafunction,isdescribed through and as a semantic chain consisting of a set of functors describing a succession (and thus enacting a thing-specific temporality).
8. 4 The Ontological-Semantics of Weilen
The interaction of these thing (time-condensates) form the world. How does this
interaction world? The unity or coherence o f the world is determined through the products o f these series, the poured gift which enacts the identity o f the jug as what it is. This poured gift, however, functions not only by virtue of the jug but in relation to us: "The giving o f the outpouring can be a drink, The outpouring gives water, it gives wine to drink" (DD172).
With the gift as a gift we enter the world from the thing.
"Im Waser des Geschenkes weilt die Quelle" ("Das Ding" 164):
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In the water of the gift lingers dwelling (stays) the spring. In the spring the rock dwells (weilt), and in the rock dwells the dark slumber ofthe earth, which receives the rain and dew ofthe sky. In the water ofthe spring dwells (weilt) the marriage o f sky and earth. It stays (weilt) in the wine given by the fruit o f the vine, the fruit in which the earth's nourishment and the sky's sun are betrothed (zugetraut)1 to oneanother Inthegiftofwater,inthegiftofwine,skyandearthdwell(Weileri) [respectively]. But the gift ofthe outpouring iswhat makes thejug ajug. In the
jugness of the jug, sky and earth dwell (Weilen). (172)
Heidegger clusters things into a cosmogony o f dependent relations, where this dependency evokes indeterminate causal relations (grapes, from which we make wine, require sun and earth in order to grow because o f the causal mechanisms producing photosynthesis, nutritional exchange, plant stability, etc. ). The relations between water, spring, rock, earth, sky, rain, sky, and sun, however, do not function through these implied causal mechanisms. Their evocation is not meant to invoke them. Our recognition o f their dependence is meant to forestall our asking for either further causal elaboration or for a
justification for this picture o f their relation.
How do sky and earth dwell (sustained and made visible or meaningful as sky and
earth) in thejugness ofthejug? Things dwell or stay or linger (Weilen) in each other. At this stage in the essay Hiedegger has re-defined the Scholastic concepts o f existence and essence as the criteria for being:
1) Thingness, akin to quiddity, or essence: a thing is what it does as a functioning temporal entelechion (something is if it functions as part of a series of acts).
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2) Existence, the potential to be 'in': an expression o f replacability, where the x=y describes the potential for x and y to replace each other within a common domain, that is, through mutual containment within a mutually describing category. The criterion used to determine if the sides and bottom of the jug hold the wine is whether "we pour the wine into [7/T] the sides and bottom" (169; underline added). Each element, wine and void, for example, is only identical through their mutual articulation o f a common space. Thus identity is determined as the
potential to be 'in' (in, into) the other; they are in each other without remainder, not as described by the phrases 'the book is in the library' or 'the piston is in the engine', but akin to Spinoza's use o f 'in' in his axioms concerning God: "All things which are, are in themselves or in other things" (Ethics).
The borders o f this usage are sketched by the use o f 'in' in 'the boy is in the man', 'in my life', 'in my heart', and even 'I was never in the in-crowd'. 'In', used in these ways, marks the relation between two logical or grammatical categories in which this relationship is both not reducible to the any one category and yet one o f the categories functions as a totality (as void does in Heidegger's jug). Heidegger's use o f 'in' describes the distance betweentwo ofEmerson'suseof'in'inthefollowingquotationsfromhisessay"Circles":
Menceasetointerestuswhenwefindtheirlimitations. Theonlysinislimitation. . . Infinitely alluring and attractive was he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in; now, you have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care not ifyou never see it again. (169)
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We learn that God IS; that he is in me; and that things are shadows of him. (170) This distance, between the social (Thoreau's "seeing through another's eyes'") and epistemological idealism pressures things-in-themselves back into our ordinary involvement with others. These others are, however, things. (Heidegger constructs humans as things, opposing the construction o f humans as objects).
Heidegger'suseofWeilenoverlapshisuseof'in'. "Thegiftoftheoutpouringisa gift because it stays earth and sky, divinities and mortals": the criterion for being a gift is this staying (it stays: weilt), and thus the outpouring can be justified as a gift if it stays these four. The justification o f a semantic distinction, "is this justifiably called a gift? ", resides in the use of 'weilt' (stays) in a novel fashion. One obscurity isjustified by another. We might ask, "how does this outpouring cause this staying o f the earth, sky, divinities and mortals? " Stays suggests an action or event that configures the world in a particularway. Whyaskifthisisagiftifthecriterionforbeingagiftissoobscure? What kind offunction is 'Weilen'?
How does an outpouring 'stay' these entities? (Thoreau would ask "why 'earth and sky, divinities and mortals? ' What are these? ") Heidegger can answer the 'how' but not the 'why' and the 'what': "Yet staying is no longer the mere persisting of something
that is here. Staying appropriates. " This staying, and therefore its function as the criterion determining something as a gift (this 'something,' however, is an aspect o f something: Whitehead's unity o f internal diversity), is not an apparent action. I can not say, let's make a test: 'Is this a staying? or is this? Does this stay or does this? ' Thus, its semantic
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obscurity marks it as a function different from the non-action of someone 'staying put' or from the action o f 'taking off. ' Staying happens as the world. It seems not to have a context in relation to which it can happen, except in its blinking away before the forms apparent in representation. Its failure happens as the loss o f the world. Does the radical skeptic really lose the world? Insisting on a real loss (really) can itself have no adequate criteria. We ask instead, can we exist ever outside o f a world? I f we lose the sense o f our categories or assertions o f existence, as both our existing and that which exists, we have lost the sense of existence. 8
Theworldemergesastheworldofearthandsky,divinitiesandmortals: "Yet staying is now no lnger the mere persisting of something that is here" (DD173; underline added). Heidegger creates a temporal confusion: does this now mean 'at this point in the lecture' or 'in our (his) thinking' or does it mean 'now that the jug emerges as a jug through its functioning as a jug'? In other words can we say that there exists two kinds of staying: (l)one as a function of form and representation called normally identity and determined by persistence and (2) another that underlies this one or emerges under the proper gaze as an appropriating? Or is there just one form o f 'staying' that is mistaken under the aspect o f representation. A "persisting o f something that is here" is no longer staying "now". This 'now' is not the 'here' determining staying as identity. 'Here' is construed here as the site o f the real, the present moment formed as the space o f the world in that moment. 'Here' functions as the criterion for being real. So why not say 'something that is here', what does 'persisting add'? Persisting links the phenomenal present spatialized as a 'here'to a chain of"here's", all ofwhich constitute both time and
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theworld. Howisthe'now'thatmarksthenewmeaningofstaying(asnotaformal identityofsomethingovertime)relatedtothispictureoftime? This'now'marksthinking as an outpouring, as a gift that appropriates. What this thinking appropriates and what the outpouring appropriates condense ontology away from the divisions between mind and world. Thinkingnowisnotdeterminedbyanadequacyofrepresentation,butthe belonging to the subject that allows it to emerge as such. Consequently, the confusion of the 'now' semantically marks this now as a point of condensation for two temporal series: the series defined by Heidegger's words and the series described by the functioning of the
jug. The jug, as a thing, builds its substance, if we can call it that, within the same 'now' of our thinking. Can thinking or a thinking or a thought exist in the same 'here' as a jug? Weareontheedgeofacategoryconfusion. Butifweaskcanajugexistinthesamehere of a thought, we are tempted to say the jug can exist in our thought, so that the thought becomesametaphoricalherethatcansupporttheimaginedjug. Thisshouldseema misuse o f 'here'.
All we can say is that 'now' has entered into the semantic matrix organized around Weilen. Heidegger continues to unfold this semantics. Staying "brings the four into the
light o f their mutual belonging" (DD173). Mutual belonging gives o f f some kind o f metaphorical light, or rather mutual belonging make the four visible as mutually belonging. The circularity here is exactly o f the sort as the confusion in the meaning o f the previous 'now'. The staying does not create their mutual belonging it makes what already exists visible. Visible to us? If the answer were yes, then we could still be confused about whether we create the belonging or if we just suffer from false consciousness about the
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realnatureoftheworld. Thisvisibilityfunctionsforthefour,andforusifwefunctionas one o f the four. Heidegger says "the four" are brought into the light o f their own relationship. This is not light for them, but light caused by them. (The world both through thejug and as the quadrature makes itselfvisible. ) How does staying, pouring wineoutofajug,bringtheearthandsky,mortalsanddivinitiesintovisibility? Theunity o f the action o f outpouring that determines the jug as a jug ("staying's simple onefoldness") betroths and entrusts the four to each other.
At the level ofdescription ofthis betrothal all four are the same, "at one" Heidegger calls it. Their abstraction into a unity effect their unconcealment: their becoming true. True for us? Or true to us? The outpouring enacts this unity o f the four, that is, it abstracts them into a mutual belonging that determines the world as a world (as coherent and complete). But this outpouring acts upon this abstraction which it has itself created: "The gift o f the outpouring stays the onefold o f the quadrature o f the four" (DD173). Thisdoubleness,stayingintoaonefoldandstayingtheonefolditself,marksthe complexityofthesemanticandtemporalcharacterof'Weilen'. Theoutpouringdoesnot stay the earth and sky, divinities and mortals into a unity o f mutual belonging and then stay
this unity. Staying, therefore, does not enact anything, it does not make this unity or act in time as we understand it (as succession or even as a present).
Heidegger wants to pressure matter into function (a hyloentelechia). 9 This criterion o f being as that which acts and is by virtue o f turning 'into' (or maybe one should say being is what can function as a palimpsest: a palimpsest-being) allows the void, even in its absence to do the holding at every moment by being the wine as a holding. This
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distorts the criterion of presence, that Derrida attacks, into another axis where it remains one criterion for being, but within a matrix that includes the absence of the void, the a holding o f the jug, the wine itself. The semantic force o f holding as a partial entelechia (I use the plural here because nothing is itselfthe completion of a function, ofjugging) happens without being present as such. But we can say that the sides and bottom do not hold because they cannot enter into an identity with the wine being held in the way the void can (even though it is replaced). It's replacement is a categorical replacement. This is why Heidegger shows that the air within the jug is not a void. Both a void and holding function within the same logical category. Thejug as much as it does consist of clay can only be anything, let alone a jug, if it includes this logical category, that is, this relation
between void and holding. But what does it mean to 'include' here? How does a thing, a jug, include a conceptual semantics determining a void as a holding?
This is Heidegger's initial answer: "And in the poured gift the jug presences as jug" (DD173) ['7m Geschenk aber west der Krug als K r u g In the gift, however, stays
thejugasjug. ] Thecontradistinction,hereamockdialectic,between"stayingthe onefold" ["verweilt die Einfalf'], the acting ofthe outpouring determining the world as world, and the particularity of "the staying in the gift" ["/m Geschenk. . . west'] through whichthejugbecomesajugislostinHofstadter'stranslation. Isaythisisamock dialectic because not only is there no sublation (aufhebung), it is exactly the conception of matter as following a succession of states that disguises the jug as jug. What is is always
given. It is not made nor does it function as a cause or emerge as an effect. Heidegger is articulating a holism in which the semantics of our language open, in 'weilen' for example,
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as a function of our dwelling in language,10condensing the categorical distinctions in our uses of 'to be' into or as things and the world. The functioning ofthejug, as an action, which at every semantic functor--taking/ keeping/ holding/ outpouring/ gathering-- completesbyimplicationallpreviousandfutureaspectsofthejugsfunctioning: tohold implies, by a kind of ontological or aesthetic [the distinction between these begins to blur] implication, outpouring. Time is condensed in the semantics o f things away from causal chains and into implicate unities:
W e view action only as causing an effect. The actuality o f the effect is valued accordingtoitsutility. Buttheessenceofactionisaccomplishment. To accomplish means to unfold something into the fullness of its essence, to lead itforthintothisfullness-producere. Thereforeonlywhatalreadyiscanreallybe accomplished, But what "is" above all is Being. Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. It does not make or cause the relation. Thinking brings this relation to Being solely as something handed over to it from
Being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking Being comes to language. Language is the house o f Being. In its home man dwells.
("Letter on Humanism", 193)
In "Letter on Humanism" Heidegger wants to distinguish the human from the inhumane in the way that he wants to distinguish between the animate and inanimate in "Das Ding" as determining the nearness of the world and our thinking within and through our actions, our speaking, and our stances toward ourselves, toward the things, and contexts presenting themselves to us.
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Implication o f the 'to hold is to love' sort, an implication that functions as an answer to a question like 'how do I know I'm loving? ', Heidegger calls gathering:
The gift gathers what belongs to giving: the twofold containing, the container, the void,andtheoutpouringasdonation. Whatisgatheredinthegiftgathersitself in approriatively staying the fourfold. This manifold simple gathering is the jug's presenceing. (DD173)
"Belongs" asserts a totality called 'giving' that is the essence of the gift which means the outpouring from the holding, that is the taking and keeping, constituting the void o f the
jug as jug. That which is gathered also gathers--following the same pattern o f abstraction allowing Weilen to enact simultaneously the world and the jug. This gathering o f the aspects ofthejugs conceptual (how and for the sake ofwhich) functioning because it can function as itself, that is, abstracted from its material embodiment in the jug, can 'stay' the fourfoldpreviouslydescribedasstayedbytheoutpouring. Theoutpouringarticulatedthe doubleness o f 'staying', which defines the relation between particular and universal as holisticcontext. Outpouringexposes'staying'asthisrelationshipandinthisunconceals
the world (the quadrture) as a world. Heidegger's attempt to articulate the semantics of this use of 'Weilen', and, therefore, to describe the ontology ofthing and world requires a matching semantic condensation in the jug itself. This requirement is determined by the conception ofBeing as the condensation ofthe uses of'to be'into ontological force. The effect o f this is to allow things to mean, but at the cost o f losing the materiality o f substance and therefore requiring a conceptual identity determining the thing in relation to theconceptualidentitydeterminingtheworld: staying=gathering.
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"The jug's presencing is the pure, giving gathering o f the one-fold quadrature into a single time-space, a single stay" (DD174): Das Wesen des Kruges ist die reine schenkende Versammulung des einfaltigen Gevierts in eine Weile. Der Krug west als Ding Der Krug is der Krug als ein Ding. Wie aber west als Ding? Das Ding dingt. ("Das Ding" 166).
The Hofstadter translation loses the continuing unfolding of the semantics of "weilen'by foreclosing how it enacts the jug (assuming it is through presencing). The essence (Wesen) of the jug is the pure (and perspicuous and offhand, ordinary or mere) giving of the gathering of the onefold (simple) quadrature in a singular Staying (under a temporal aspect)andDwelling(underaspatialaspect)[Weile]. If1Weilen'canfunctionasthe nominative Weile, then the functioning ofthejug can constitute what exists with the ontologicalforceofwhatAristotlecalledousia,substance. Themechanismforthis nominalization works through the semantics o f 'in' which determine the relations between and among whatever exists through appropriating and giving. 'In' could function as the criterion for being before because the economy of what in the "Letter on Humanism" Heidegger calls the subjective and objective genitive rests on the assumption that only what exists can be appropriated and given.
The gift stays the quadrature as its own: a gift can only function as a gift within an ontological context determining what it is and which it opens up as its own. In this dwelling it becomes a thing: Der Krug west als Ding. Heidegger is skirting tautology: it is what it is because it acts as it is in a world in which it can be what it is. In this picture what something is is already given, it is neither made nor does it emerge. Time has
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becomeanunfoldingofadynamicanalyticsemantics: Thethingthings. cTothing',asa verb, means 'to gather through appropriating the quadrature's staying (dwelling) in a lingering for a while: into [a] this, into [a] that thing; Essammelt, das Geviert ereignend, dessert Weile in einje Weileges: in dieses, injenes Ding ("Das Ding" 166). The demonstrative pair 'this . . . that' determines nearness and famess as a function o f this appropriating. The patterns of stability or of identity that are required in order for change to appear as change is translated into a structure ofbeing that allows for particular and thus unique relations within and toward the world. "Staying, the thing brings the four, in theirremoteness,neartooneanother. Thisbringing-nearisnearing. Nearingisthe presencing o f nearness, Nearness brings near--draws night to one another--the far and, indeed, as the far. Nearness preserves farness" (DD178). Heidegger translates identity
into a functioning that embeds particularity within a totalizing whole along a semantic chain o f equivalencies that determine what a thing is as a subjunctive configuration o f something as what it is within a world.
If the world is this possible state of affairs, how does one or does a thing get into it? InspiteofHiedegger'susageof'nearness'asakindofnominativeexpression,thatis, as a form of being, it is not a "container", [t]he thing is not 'in' nearness, 'in' proximity. Nearness is an activity, a "bringing near", and thus has no insides in the way that being a thing does. Nearness brings near in the way that thinging o f the thing does. Nearness is like thinging (verb) and not like the thing. But isn't the thing its thinging, and doesn't this thinging proceed through being entered? This seems to invoke a metonymic as opposed to a synecdochic function. The thing stays the quadrature "in the simple onefold o f their
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self-unified quadrature.