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.
A void is necessary but not sufficient to hold something; one also needs a material limitbywhichtocreatethevoidandkeepitstableandimpenetrableinnormaluse.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
It is the nature ofearthtoresistthingsmadeofearthandsoon.
Lockedefinesbodiesthroughtheir
formal integrity described as their possession ofa particular area of space. Heidegger's use of, what I consider, a Lockean version of matter, however, is less about the nature of matter than it is about the semantics of being 'in space'. Locke's matter, therefore, means to be self-standing and self-supporting. To be 'in' matter is to be constituted in this way.
Such a vision of matter and being-in describes not only things but people, or rather "Man in the State [ofLiberty]". In this State men "have an uncontrollable Liberty, to dispose of his Person or Possessions" (Second Treatise, ? 6). In order to provide the
justification ("justifie to the world") for representative government, Locke must establish a limit to arbitrary power ("Just and Natural Rights") in who someone is, in their ontological-socialstatusasself-standingandself-supporting. Thenaturalstateofbeing
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human is a "State o f perfect Freedom to order their Actions, and dispose o f their Possessions, and Persons, as they think fit, within the bounds o f the Law o f Nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man" (Second Treatise, ? 4). Andthus"everyManhasaPropertyinhisownPerson. ThisnoBodyhasanyRight to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properlyhis"{SecondTreatise,? 27). Self-ownershipdeterminesthestatusofMan against the power o f others. The scope o f power is limited by rights (as justification) and expressed through ownership o f Property. Given his use o f this ontological picture underlying both the status o f matter and men (not women o f course) in Locke, Heidegger's transformation of matter (as self-supporting objects) into mutually related things within and in relation to the earth, sky, mortals and divinities can (and should) be read as a political allegory. There is a lot in stake in such an allegory (I do not have the space to pursue such an allegory here).
Our making seems to place the jug as self-standing outside o f our perception, and thus to constitute it as a thing and not an object. This is not true, however:
It is, to be sure, no longer considered only an object of a mere act of representation, but in return it is an object which a process of making has set up before and against us. Self-support is what the making aims at. But even in truth we are thinking o f this self-support in terms o f objectness, even though the overagainstness {Gegenstandlichkeit) ofwhat has been put forth is no longer groundedinmererepresentation,inthemereputtingitbeforeourminds. But
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from the objectness ofthe object, and from the product's self-support, there is no
way that leads to the thingness o f the thing. (DD169)
The jug is not a jug, however, because it is made. It becomes a jug once it can be used as a
jug. If that uses pre-exists the making then it is made to fit that use. If such a use does not yet exist, then it only emerges as a jug, out o f the background, once that use is recognized and it, as a particular kind o f thing, is recognized as that use.
This picture of what something is within the semantics of its use opposes Heidegger's picture of scientific reduction: "the wine became a liquid, and liquidity in turn becameoneofthestatesofaggregationofmatter,possibleanywhere. " Thismeans wine=liquid =a state ofmatter. This equation describes the substrate ofall reality as matter, as substance. When Heidegger says that the "states o f aggregation o f matter" are "possible anywhere" he means that matter has been reduced to a quantity within a single frame. WhatHeideggerisresistinghere,ofcourse,isthereductionofthequestion'what is real? ' to the question 'what does it consist of? ', asking instead the questions 'how do we use it? ' or 'what does it do? '.
Themodemworldisaworldorganizedaroundquantity. Timeandspacefall under sets of points in a meta-space which maps our travel or experience in the world as a function o f speed, so that faster means less distance. The Flugmaschine (airplane) and the Rundfunk (radio) shrink space; Film shrinks time by translating the seasonal time scale through which plants live into a representation taking a minute, or the sites of "altesler Kulturen" (ancient cultures), as if their identity and inhabitation and animation exists in their stones or the aura of their landscape, are transplanted by film into our present. Our
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space machines and time machines can present themselves to us while they present or shrink the world so that we know it is the world they show us ("Der Film bezeugt uberdies sein Gezeigtes noch dadurch. . We reach the world through our machines, which
justify their veracity through the transparency ofthe mechanisms, which can film themselves,asinPersona,filmingthemselves. Thesemachinesfunctionastest apparatuses, by and through which we determine what is real. For Heidegger, science asks and answers the question, 'what is real? ' This reality is guaranteed by translating things into the logic described by machines, onto film or into radiowaves or into a machine producing an asymmetry o f forces (an airplane), in which the world is regularized into distance or rather into quantity.
In such a world, where the real is measured as quantities, "everything is equally far and equally near". Science, according to Heidegger, places the world under the rule of identity, where everything in its reduction to quantity, is equal ('gleich') under this rule: this is how Heidegger understands objectivity. 3 This is logically equivalent to Marx's description o f exchange value, where use-value, the qualitative value o f a product determined by its function and utility, is reduced to a quantitative system o f equivalency. What Marx calls a Fetish generated by capitalism, Heidegger calls an object generated by science and technology. Even if this picture is true, how does objectivity or quantification erase the difference between 'near' and 'far' so as to dissolve distance? Heidegger works against objectivity here by foregrounding the meaning of far and near as describing relative distancefromaparticularperspective. Thus,heispositingtwolanguageswhichexpress
andembodyopposedandseeminglyincommensurablecriteriaforwhatisreal: the
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mathematical and the semantic. The mathematical produces the object, opposed to us in an objective and meaningless space. The product o f the semantic is the thing, constituted by what it does within an implicate order in which the real emerges as that which is used (and thus within the quadrature o f earth, sky, mortals and divinity each thinks, implies ontologically and reflects the other, through how each determines the entelechy (its actualityandcompletion)formingthefunctionofoneforanother). Heideggerassertsthat one cannot move from the mathematical to the semantic, from the object to the thing. If we have moved from the thing to the object, from the semantic to the mathematical, what prevents the opposite movement? Even if these are incommensurable descriptions o f the real, if the mathematical has replaced or overwritten (a palimpsest) to varying degrees, the semantic, the possibility for this overwriting must exist within the semantic.
If something like this model is correct, then Hiedegger's prohibition of moving from object to thing marks off our phenomenal semantic relation to and within the world from any process o f being made, except our being made by [a] divinity whose making determines us as usable for them. This is a way of conceptualizing a necessary domain of intentionality as the world in which we actually function.
8. 2 Whatisathing? :Functionalism
Have we lost our nearness to things through a process o f history? Again and
again, like our innocence, as we each mature? Is our nearness our everyday condition which we fail to see? fail to see in varying degrees so that we actually live within a world
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whichisnolongernear? Allofthesequestionsaskifwecanwerecoverourselvesifthe world remains as it is?
If there is a single standard for what is real then there is no distance, distance is redefined. Is this a re-definition o f space?
Nearness describes a conceptual relation between different categories or kinds, and thus is not reducible to a single standard o f reality. The problem o f nearness is the problem o f incommensurablity. Emerson wrote in one o f his journals: "There is every degree of remoteness from the line of things in the line of words" (Journals 4:303). 4 Human beings and things are constructed at the nexus o f such category distinctions. This is why Heidegger thinks that the question "What is nearness? " (DD171) is so important in determining the human relation to things: "Near to us are what we usually call things.
But what is a thing (Doch was ist ein Ding)" (DD166). How is 'is' used here? How we read 'is' is what is at stake in the difference between a 'thing', that which is near, and an object which is over against us. Do we say a thing is a list of properties we predicate of a thing or of all things or of thingness? If a thing is not these properties then this 'ist' is not being used as a copula. Heidegger's immediate answer is "Ein Ding ist der Krug" ("A thing is a jug"). But does this suggest that all things are jugs? Why not say "A jug is a thing"? This would agree with our desire to take this jug as an example o f a thing. Heidegger makes the jug, instead, exemplary o f thingness: he can get to the world, the quadrature,throughjugness. Asanexampleajugisamemberofthesetorcategory 'things'. Heidegger wants to undo this kind o f objectification o f things into a category. The exemplary status of'jug', therefore, at least recognizes the force ofthe question
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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.
formal integrity described as their possession ofa particular area of space. Heidegger's use of, what I consider, a Lockean version of matter, however, is less about the nature of matter than it is about the semantics of being 'in space'. Locke's matter, therefore, means to be self-standing and self-supporting. To be 'in' matter is to be constituted in this way.
Such a vision of matter and being-in describes not only things but people, or rather "Man in the State [ofLiberty]". In this State men "have an uncontrollable Liberty, to dispose of his Person or Possessions" (Second Treatise, ? 6). In order to provide the
justification ("justifie to the world") for representative government, Locke must establish a limit to arbitrary power ("Just and Natural Rights") in who someone is, in their ontological-socialstatusasself-standingandself-supporting. Thenaturalstateofbeing
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human is a "State o f perfect Freedom to order their Actions, and dispose o f their Possessions, and Persons, as they think fit, within the bounds o f the Law o f Nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man" (Second Treatise, ? 4). Andthus"everyManhasaPropertyinhisownPerson. ThisnoBodyhasanyRight to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properlyhis"{SecondTreatise,? 27). Self-ownershipdeterminesthestatusofMan against the power o f others. The scope o f power is limited by rights (as justification) and expressed through ownership o f Property. Given his use o f this ontological picture underlying both the status o f matter and men (not women o f course) in Locke, Heidegger's transformation of matter (as self-supporting objects) into mutually related things within and in relation to the earth, sky, mortals and divinities can (and should) be read as a political allegory. There is a lot in stake in such an allegory (I do not have the space to pursue such an allegory here).
Our making seems to place the jug as self-standing outside o f our perception, and thus to constitute it as a thing and not an object. This is not true, however:
It is, to be sure, no longer considered only an object of a mere act of representation, but in return it is an object which a process of making has set up before and against us. Self-support is what the making aims at. But even in truth we are thinking o f this self-support in terms o f objectness, even though the overagainstness {Gegenstandlichkeit) ofwhat has been put forth is no longer groundedinmererepresentation,inthemereputtingitbeforeourminds. But
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from the objectness ofthe object, and from the product's self-support, there is no
way that leads to the thingness o f the thing. (DD169)
The jug is not a jug, however, because it is made. It becomes a jug once it can be used as a
jug. If that uses pre-exists the making then it is made to fit that use. If such a use does not yet exist, then it only emerges as a jug, out o f the background, once that use is recognized and it, as a particular kind o f thing, is recognized as that use.
This picture of what something is within the semantics of its use opposes Heidegger's picture of scientific reduction: "the wine became a liquid, and liquidity in turn becameoneofthestatesofaggregationofmatter,possibleanywhere. " Thismeans wine=liquid =a state ofmatter. This equation describes the substrate ofall reality as matter, as substance. When Heidegger says that the "states o f aggregation o f matter" are "possible anywhere" he means that matter has been reduced to a quantity within a single frame. WhatHeideggerisresistinghere,ofcourse,isthereductionofthequestion'what is real? ' to the question 'what does it consist of? ', asking instead the questions 'how do we use it? ' or 'what does it do? '.
Themodemworldisaworldorganizedaroundquantity. Timeandspacefall under sets of points in a meta-space which maps our travel or experience in the world as a function o f speed, so that faster means less distance. The Flugmaschine (airplane) and the Rundfunk (radio) shrink space; Film shrinks time by translating the seasonal time scale through which plants live into a representation taking a minute, or the sites of "altesler Kulturen" (ancient cultures), as if their identity and inhabitation and animation exists in their stones or the aura of their landscape, are transplanted by film into our present. Our
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space machines and time machines can present themselves to us while they present or shrink the world so that we know it is the world they show us ("Der Film bezeugt uberdies sein Gezeigtes noch dadurch. . We reach the world through our machines, which
justify their veracity through the transparency ofthe mechanisms, which can film themselves,asinPersona,filmingthemselves. Thesemachinesfunctionastest apparatuses, by and through which we determine what is real. For Heidegger, science asks and answers the question, 'what is real? ' This reality is guaranteed by translating things into the logic described by machines, onto film or into radiowaves or into a machine producing an asymmetry o f forces (an airplane), in which the world is regularized into distance or rather into quantity.
In such a world, where the real is measured as quantities, "everything is equally far and equally near". Science, according to Heidegger, places the world under the rule of identity, where everything in its reduction to quantity, is equal ('gleich') under this rule: this is how Heidegger understands objectivity. 3 This is logically equivalent to Marx's description o f exchange value, where use-value, the qualitative value o f a product determined by its function and utility, is reduced to a quantitative system o f equivalency. What Marx calls a Fetish generated by capitalism, Heidegger calls an object generated by science and technology. Even if this picture is true, how does objectivity or quantification erase the difference between 'near' and 'far' so as to dissolve distance? Heidegger works against objectivity here by foregrounding the meaning of far and near as describing relative distancefromaparticularperspective. Thus,heispositingtwolanguageswhichexpress
andembodyopposedandseeminglyincommensurablecriteriaforwhatisreal: the
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mathematical and the semantic. The mathematical produces the object, opposed to us in an objective and meaningless space. The product o f the semantic is the thing, constituted by what it does within an implicate order in which the real emerges as that which is used (and thus within the quadrature o f earth, sky, mortals and divinity each thinks, implies ontologically and reflects the other, through how each determines the entelechy (its actualityandcompletion)formingthefunctionofoneforanother). Heideggerassertsthat one cannot move from the mathematical to the semantic, from the object to the thing. If we have moved from the thing to the object, from the semantic to the mathematical, what prevents the opposite movement? Even if these are incommensurable descriptions o f the real, if the mathematical has replaced or overwritten (a palimpsest) to varying degrees, the semantic, the possibility for this overwriting must exist within the semantic.
If something like this model is correct, then Hiedegger's prohibition of moving from object to thing marks off our phenomenal semantic relation to and within the world from any process o f being made, except our being made by [a] divinity whose making determines us as usable for them. This is a way of conceptualizing a necessary domain of intentionality as the world in which we actually function.
8. 2 Whatisathing? :Functionalism
Have we lost our nearness to things through a process o f history? Again and
again, like our innocence, as we each mature? Is our nearness our everyday condition which we fail to see? fail to see in varying degrees so that we actually live within a world
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whichisnolongernear? Allofthesequestionsaskifwecanwerecoverourselvesifthe world remains as it is?
If there is a single standard for what is real then there is no distance, distance is redefined. Is this a re-definition o f space?
Nearness describes a conceptual relation between different categories or kinds, and thus is not reducible to a single standard o f reality. The problem o f nearness is the problem o f incommensurablity. Emerson wrote in one o f his journals: "There is every degree of remoteness from the line of things in the line of words" (Journals 4:303). 4 Human beings and things are constructed at the nexus o f such category distinctions. This is why Heidegger thinks that the question "What is nearness? " (DD171) is so important in determining the human relation to things: "Near to us are what we usually call things.
But what is a thing (Doch was ist ein Ding)" (DD166). How is 'is' used here? How we read 'is' is what is at stake in the difference between a 'thing', that which is near, and an object which is over against us. Do we say a thing is a list of properties we predicate of a thing or of all things or of thingness? If a thing is not these properties then this 'ist' is not being used as a copula. Heidegger's immediate answer is "Ein Ding ist der Krug" ("A thing is a jug"). But does this suggest that all things are jugs? Why not say "A jug is a thing"? This would agree with our desire to take this jug as an example o f a thing. Heidegger makes the jug, instead, exemplary o f thingness: he can get to the world, the quadrature,throughjugness. Asanexampleajugisamemberofthesetorcategory 'things'. Heidegger wants to undo this kind o f objectification o f things into a category. The exemplary status of'jug', therefore, at least recognizes the force ofthe question
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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.
