Thinking is--this says: Being has fatefully
embraced
its essence.
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
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. " This seems to mean that one can put these into a description of an eco-system with semantic implications: Earth is the building bearer, nourishing with its fruits,tendingwaterandrock,plantandanimal"(DD179). Canthisdescriptioncounter the indifference o f physical laws and the effects they describe (in very simplified forms)?
The onto-semantics o f 'in' translates intentionality (the aboutness o f language; in this case how language picks out or attaches to things) into a form o f possession: an ontological implication and metonymic nearness. Nearness describes a categorical proximity between intentionality (aboutness) and what is. This means that nearness descibes a unity o f categories (but not into meta-category). This preserves famess (relativedifference)throughinthedistinctionsdeterminingthesecategories. Thesepoints o f categorical unity are things. Thus famess functions not between things but within things: the distance between the taking and the keeping or the holding and the outpouring, between the giving (jug) and the gift (wine). Something cannot be 7<<' proximity. This is a category error: 'inness' is an expression of nearness. To be 7n' is to be replaceable. If we pour the wine into the void, can we justify this use o f in by saying they are equivalent at an ontological level? They are mutually implicating by functioning as a place holder for
the other. They are not, therefore, equivalent in relation to each other, but they are equivalent within a system o f mutual exchange stabilizing the jug as an intransitive holding.
A thing is not in nearness, but rather in thinging, which as we saw is analogous to nearness, is "in the simple onefold". This means a thing is what it is as a function of the semantic series determining a thing as a thing in the unity o f the world determined by the
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? same functional semantic series of the thing: the thing stays itself and in this staying stays the world. These functional semantic series at the abstract level o f their unity, and thus for Heidegger their level o f interaction or at the level at which they can replace each other, as the wine replaces the void, constitute the semantics and the referent organizing Heidegger's use o f'Weilen'. The aspect ofthis verb that suggests 'dwelling' captures this inness as both the expression and the criterion for Being. This might suggest the riddle, 'what is inside itself? ' with the answer: 'everything. ' I am not sure this captures the double-logic here; rather the riddle should be 'what is in what it itselfcontains? ' If I answer 'a jug' I'm not sure I know what I could mean. But if I answer 'the world', I can
makesenseofthat. Consequently,Icanonlyanswer'ajug'ifIcanmakethejugaworld. If everything functions as a possible world, and if such worlds constitute themselves as worlds (and thus they cannot reveal themselves as such but constitute themselves as worlds), then the distinction between particular and universal or context reduces to determiningthatwhichmakestheseworldsworlds. Theworldandthings-as-worldsare constitutedbysemantics. Thissemanticsdescribesaself-reflexiveteleologyorentelechia that at every point in the functioning of a thing condenses the entire series in the thing. The thing becomes a system o f possibilities, where unlike in Aristotle, these possibilities as
the unity o f 'to be' constitute actuality, the ontologically real. These possibilities are not actualized, as form or anything else, but used within an actualized totality. Thus the reality,theBeingofthingsmeansthepossibilitiesoftheiruse. Athingisfundamentally subjunctive. Thesubjunctivemodeofthingsisactualizednotinthemselvesorinobjects
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? but in the totalities which they themselves are and in the totality o f the world (quadrature as onefold).
Each thing spatializes its function, that is, the changes which constitute its use, such that it exists through these changes as they reflect the totality o f changes. Thus things become the still-points for themselves and in this stability structure their changes as auniquetemporalsequence. Eachthingdeterminesaparticularkindoftimeexpressedas and expressing what they are. Time is scattered as condensates o f possibility throughout andastheworld. Theorderednatureandrelativeindependenceofthesethingsas condensates o f time determines them as controlled dynamic systems that constitute in their very nature the means by which time is expressed as time: their identity as things, which is totalized at any and every particular moment or aspect o f their functioning, in relation to whichtheunfoldingoftheirchangingpositionandfunctionisorderedastime. Thisisa descriptionofaliving,animatebeing: thusthingsthingandappropriateandgatherand dwell or stay or linger.
These verbs 'to appropriate" and 'to gather' and 'weilen' are descriptions, however, and it is exactly their ontological status that is at issue. They do not have any ontological force separate from our use o f them as descriptions. They are liable o f misuse, confusion, false attribution: language exists as much as anything else, but does it exist or function or mean in the way that jugs do? In Heidegger's attempt to replace the hylomorphic (matter/form) unity o f substance that Aristotle's constructs in order to counter Plato's reduction of matter to form he in effect reduces matter to a kind of functioning that replaces matter with a conceptual semantics constituting a temporal
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? series. The interaction between user and use is dissolved into the idealism o f the pure function, such that the semantic description ofthis function reduces identity into a transcendent form; call this the point o f categorical unity or intersection (the metaphoric use of mathematical language is not arbitrary here), in this case designated by 'wer/en'.
Heidegger describes 'matter' in this way:
Earth is the building bearer (bauend Tragende), nourishing (nahrend) with its fruits, tending (hegend) water and rock, plant and animal. . . . The sky is the sun's path, the course ofthe moon, the glitter ofthe stars, the year's seasons, the light and dusk ofday, the gloom and glow ofnight, the clemency and inclemency ofthe weather, the drifitng clouds and blue depth ofthe ether. . . (DD178)
The earth is the source, the out of which (bauend) that upholds (Tragende) through its nourishing and tending, the organized forms of matter we recognize (mythically pictured). The sky is a path, a course, a glitter, the season's, light and dusk, gloom and glow, clemency and inclemency, drifting and blue depth. In all o f this the sky is used, and thus emerges as the sky as a function o f these uses. The uses o f both earth and sky are differentbutcomplementary. Theearthismothering,parentalandshepherding(inthe way that "Man is the shepherd o f Being" in "Letter on Humanism"): bearing, nourishing, and tending. The sky is that which the sun, moon, stars, year, day, night, weather, clouds, and ether (whatever that is) display it. This displaying, for the most part, enacts a system of oppositions (or negations) as the possibilities ofBeing for both the sky and its limiting or determining objects and concepts.
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? TeXsuiTi Kai 8vxeA^xeia (ct verbum temporale nomini)
They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death
as death. Only man dies. The animal perishes. (DD178)
Animals like things have only their functioning ahead and behind them; they do not have death, like humans do, "ahead of itselfnor behind it" (DD178). Did we not know that we die? Or that we are called mortals because o f this immanent and imminent death? Our education proceeds from the fact o f death towards the semantics o f death.
In Being and Time, Heidegger writes "By its very essence, death is in every case mine, in so far as it 'is' at all. And indeed death signifies a peculiar possibility-of-Being in whichtheveryBeingofone'sownDaseinisanissue"(BT284;240). Daseinis ontologically constituted in the "mineness and existence" determining the particularity of DaseinasDaseinforitself. Identityandexistencemeetindeathandnotingenesis:11
"Death is the possibility o f the absolute impossibility o f Dasein. Thus death reveals itselfas thatpossibility which is one's ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped [unuberholbare]. As such, death is something distinctively impending. Its existential possibility is based on the fact that Dasein is essentially disclosed to itselfj and disclosed, indeed, as ahead-of-itself.
(BT 294; 251).
Death exposes what in "Das Ding" should be understood as the semantical structure of 'in' and 'myness'. The possibility (Death) o f an impossibility (Dasein) describes a limit
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? that determines death as absolutely interchangeable (that is, interchangeable without remainder): one forms the limit ofthe other as a totality.
Death is an ontological and grammatical limit determining our living, not only as dying, but as a limited totality, "as ahead-of-itself'. (It is this relation between ontology and grammar that I need here) Dasein is always an issue for itselfthrough the multiplicity o f its stances mediating between its throwness (enmeshed within the historical, social, existential givens) o f Being and being ahead-of-itself. The distinctiveness o f this fate which is never overcome/ outstripped can twist possibility into function such that Dasein functions always toward this death. The Cartesian jug head with its pineal gland attaching spirit to its mechanical arms, even if the possibilities o f our Being are not knowable, sketches being human as living like a jug as thing, unfolding at every point, as a temporal series attached to ontological possibilities (not just existential possibilities as in Being and Time). 12
If things become animate, if they are to us what they do (being acts through ontological implication), how are humans functional? If meaning is determined, or emerges, through use, then divinities function to use us, and through and in that use we gain a being as things analogous to how things function as things for us. Death is the limit of our functioning, in the way that becoming an object is the limit of a thing, forming itself outofuseintosubstance: "AstheshrineofNothing,deathharborswithinitselfthe presenceing ofBeing. As the shrine ofNothing, death is the shelter ofBeing" (DD178- 79). 'Nothing' is 'that which in every respect is never something that merely exists, but whichneverthelesspresences[west],evenasthemysteryofBeingitself'(DD178). Does
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? nothing merely exist? Heidegger translates the Parmenidian One, constructed out o f the impossibility ofthinking ofanything (even ofnothing) that does not exist, into the functional implication that determines Being (or uses o f'to be') as a collection of collected (gathered) temporal series, hyloentelechia, emerging, or totalized as things, as determinate subjunctive modes. The world consists o f the collection o f these subjunctive modes. Heidegger is recasting what Duns Scotus, on whom he wrote his habilitation dissertation, and Peter Aureol call potential time, a domain oftime separate from physical and heavenly movement (as Being). Rejecting the Aristotelian picture o f time as determined and enacted by these physical changes, Duns Scotus followed Augustine's conception o f time as an internal measure separate as such from movement and the world. The developing realism of Scholastic philosophy, however, resisted Augustine's conclusion that time only exists within the mind. Potential time, therefore, describes both our measuring o f time and the possibility o f time which we find described in external movements and in things.
ParmenidesandAristotledescribetimeasthatwhichisandthatwhichisnot. This definition is translated, following the theological pressure of Augustine (and Biblical descriptions o f the ontological possibilities exploited by God, especially in Joshua), into "[t]ime consists o f something that exists outside the mind and o f something that does not exist outside the mind" (300). Averroes elaborates in Commentarrii in Aristotelis libros de Physico audilu:
Time is composed of past and future; but the past has already stopped being and the future does not yet exist. Time is composed o f being and nonbeing . . . .
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? Itisthesameformovement;nopartofmovementisinactuality. Whatever part one designates, it is already distant; therefore, it is also composed o f what has already ceased to be and what is not yet.
Such things do not possess a complete existence; these things receive a complete existence from the mind. The mind conceives the indivisible that exists in reality. 13
Averroes use o f exist, however, tied as it is to Aristotle's use o f ousia and energia (potential), Time and movement are continuous, and therefore indivisible, within the world.
Duns Scotus turns Augustine's reduction oftime to the mind back into the world. He locates potential time, a description of a time sense separate from physical change, in theworld. Similarly,Heideggerlocatesthecompletionoftherelationofbeingand nonbeing in the thing, and in so doing reforms this opposition as distorted descriptions that pretend to describe nothing or non-being outside ofBeing. We instantiate Death as Nothingbyenshriningitastheconditionofthebeyond. Nothingisenshrined,andassuch exists or functions in our world not beyond it. The riddle o f the beyond forms itself as a totality; or Nothing as a limit constitutes the world as a totality. This is the way in which
the god emerges as what cannot be compared. Heidegger answers Anselms riddle, in Proslogion,describingandformingthelogicalbasisforHisexistence, "Whatisthatthan which no greater can be conceived? ", with 'What exists. "
Everythingweighsonexistence. Theweightof'what'in"whatexists"canturn the answer into a question: "What exists? " and the answer "What exists" at least allows
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? existence to mimic identity. (What the thunder said; is what we say--not what we say it said, but what we say. )
Heidegger describes animation as a therapy to undo metaphysics and its (or our) forming ourselves (as humans) into animals that perish; We must recover the way to our capability as mortals: not to make us anew, but for us to see ourselves as o f old. Under the aspect of what Heidegger calls metaphysics, in which being is determined as representation,humansaredescribedasanimals,"alivingbeing"(DD179). Lifeisadded to our being, as electricity animates Frankenstein's monster's body, or as holy words animate a golem, or as god breathes into the shaped dust to make man. Objects cannot
become things, however; nor can bodies become human. In Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik(? ? 44),14Heideggerdistinguishesbetweenmineral,animal,andman: astone
exists without a world ('weltlos), the animal exists within a diminished world (yveltarm: world-poor), and man exists within his world-making (yveltbildend).
In summarizing Heidegger's methodological introduction to an unpublished course on the Phenomenology o f Religion in 1920-21 Theodore Kisiel paraphrases Heidegger's phenomenological description of factic experience, both as an activity and as that which is experienced:
What is had, lived, experienced in factic life experience is more than a mere object for a subject and its theory-forming activity, it is a world in which one can live. (One cannot live in an object. ) This formal indication of the world can be further articulated formally as our environment or milieu, as that which encounters or confrontsus. Itincludesnotonlymaterialthingsbutalsoidealobjectivities,like
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? those o f science, art and religion. In this environing world, there also stands the with-world, that is, other humans socially characterized, as relatives, superiors, peers,strangers,andnotasinstancesofthescientificgenushomosapiens. Finally, in the very same world also stands "I myself" the self-world. (154)13
Our factic life experience articulates three umwelten: the given environment o f material and ideal objects, the with-world o f social relations, and the self-world.
Twenty years latter in a 1941 lecture course published as Grundbegriffe Heidegger translates these tripartite existential distinctions into the ontology o f Being:
To what "is" belongs not only the currently actual, which affects us and which we stumble upon: the happenings, the destinies and doings of man, nature in its regularity and its catastrophes, the barely fathomable powers that are already present in all motives and aims, in all valuations and attitudes o f belief.
(Basic Concepts I. ? 2)16
The actual describes the order o f the world presented earlier as "that which encounters and confronts us. " The actual also describes the normative powers in us, akin to the "ideal objectivities," understood as also a proximate order determining us. The limits of Dasein that allowed for Heidegger's existential analytic to describe its presence in its engagements have been dissolved, but not to expose the mechanisms of our being let alone our biology or consciousness. We are given to ourselves in and through the history o f our
embodiment within a world of beings, outside o f what being, existing, worlding, thinging means.
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? The actual slips into the possible, but not, however, through an Aristotelian dialectic, but as the description ofthe world towards-us. Ifthe actual is the descendent of the 'towards which', 'in relation to which' ofDasein, the possible describes the stances, the intentionality of Dasein:
To what "is" belongs also the possible, which we expect, hope for, and fear, which we only anticipate, before which we recoil and yet do not let go. To be sure the possible is the not yet actual, but this not-actual is nevertheless no mere nullity. The possible "is," its being simply has another character than the actual.
(Basic Concepts I. ? 2)
Possibility and actuality are not bound or determined by substance, but are rather the conditions or grammar of being: both the possible and the actual 'are'. The grammar of this 'being' is another semantic chain (best described, although the passage is rather long, in "Letter on Humanism"):
[T]hinking is the thinking of being. . . .
Thinking is--this says: Being has fatefully embraced its essence. To embrace a "thing" or a "person" in its essence means to love it, to favor it. Thought in a more original way such favoring [Mogen] means to bestow essence as a gift. Such favoring is the proper essence o f enabling, which not only can achieve this or that but also can let something essentially unfold in its provenance, that is, let it be. It is on the "strength of such enabling by favoring
that something is properly able to be. This enabling is what is properly "possible" [das "Mogliche"], that whose essence resides in favoring. From this favoring
Being enables thinking. The former makes the latter possible. Being is the
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? enabling-favoring, the "may be" [das Mog-liche]. As the element, Being is the quiet power" ofthe favoring-enabling, that is, ofthe possible. . Ofcourse, our words mogliche [possible] and Moglichkeit [possiblity], under the dominance of "logic" and "metaphysics," are thought solely in contrast to "actuality"; that is, they are thought on the basis o f a definite--the metaphysical--interpretation o f Being as actua and potentia, a distinction identified with the one between existentia and essentia. When I speak ofthe "quiet power ofthe possible" I do not mean the possible o f a merely represented possiblitias, nor potentia as the essentia o f an actus o f existentia; rather, I mena Being itself, which in its favoring presides over thinking and hence over the essence of humanity, and that means over its relation
to Being. (196-97)
The grammar o f 'possibility' is bound to that o f 'thinking'. These grammars pivot around a set of, what I think should be called, functions: embracing,favoring, enabling, and
possibility}1 Functions are transitive in that they can be used to link different aspects of being or different grammatical levels. 'Embrace', for example, relates being to essence through relating thing and person. This last use allows 'embrace' to be seen as love or
favor. Favor is a bestowing, but of essence. This essence understood as enabling redefines favoring' in relation to this 'enabling? . Such enabling presents being as
possibility because it is attached to letting being be, that is, the function is inverted so that it is directed not from us to the world but from the world toward us. This double movement functions as a link between world and us, but one understood as subjunctive and neither constitutive nor object-like. It is nevertheless real.
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? The last modality about which he has little to say explicitly is the necessary {Basic Concepts I. ? 2). In the 1941 lecture the modality of necessity is unexamined, or rather collapsed into descriptions o f Being. In "Das Ding," in effect, necessity will underwrite the chain o f semantic implication that unites the functioning o f the jug, that is, its temporality, as what it is. Meaning, because it expresses always a final cause independent from our actual usage, but rather as a possibility within the world, is a form o f necessity. Something is what it is necessarily; it could not not be what it is without ceasing to be this.
Mortals necessarily die; this necessity is experienced as a possibility. Living and thinking through this possibility is what it means to be capable o f death. What constitutes this being "capable o f death as death"? Heidegger suggests: by coming to oneself "in the shelter of Being'. This shelter is death. 'Sheltering' means to be both ahead and behind. A shelter is the limited whole ofthe world, and as such marks the difference between my world and the world. This difference enables me to call my world a world. 18
How does death shelter Being? This is the same question as How does being become present to itself? How does what exists become conscious or self-reflexive? I ask what is a mortal? and answer 'myself. This question, however, is a riddle because the entire sentence "I ask what is a mortal? and answer 'myself? " can also stand as an answer, andsoon. Thisself-reflectionmeanstobecomemortalwithintheshelterofBeing.
The gift ofthe water can become ajug, or thejug can become a world and the water a canopy. Counting abstracts things into the concept o f quantity, determining identity as that which can be counted. Patterns best described by numbers organize a syntax, between sound-tones or between poetic lines, or between a magnet and a falling
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? rock. Theseenablingpatternsemergeinthemorecomplicatedsyntaxofmusicorpoetry or physics.
If things emerge as forms under the aspect of our knowing and representation they exist as identities separate from time or related as non-temporal moments determined as identities. Making, even ifunderstood as a transcendental aesthetic, functions as a form of representing, o f knowing, and thus ignores how things present themselves to us within the circle of before us, to which we respond, and as already ahead-of-us, determined by our expectations or uses, to which we recall:
When and in what way do things appear as things? They do not appear by means o f human making. But neither do they appear without the vigilance o f mortals. The first step toward such vigilance is the step back from the thinking that merely represents--that is, explains--to the thinking that responds and recalls. (DD181)
The inexplicable and unfathomable character of the world's worlding lies in this,
that causes and grounds remain unsuitable for the world's worlding. (DD180) We cannot think the world as a description (language or art) or explanation (science). 'Making' functions through cause and effect, that is, making is always a picture of evolution and thus o f identities and changes describing an ontological language. Heidegger believes that this kind of language constructs a world as representation, within Berkeley's formulation "esse = percipi, Being equals being represented" ("Moira" 82). '9
So nestling, they join together, worlding, the world.
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? Nestling, malleable, pliant, compliant, nimble--in Old German these are called ring and gering. The mirror-play o f the worlding world, as the ringing o f the ring, wrests free the united four into their own compliancy, the circling compliancy oftheir presence. Out ofthe ringing mirror-play the thinging ofthe thing takes place. (DD180)
The gap between identities and moments brought out by Zeno in his defense of Parmenidian One is not overcome by examining the relation between finite or infinite, or through calculus, but is erased in the semantics of 'ring' and 'gering', in the qualitative relation in which things emerge as things and the world emerges as world. Gering in modem German diminishes a gap into a short distance, a trifle; the differences described by formal identities, the structured separation constituting quantity and number, is translated into a qualitative relation, a mere separation, a nothing much. Is quantity simply ignored in this semantics?
"Thinging is the nearing ofthe world" (DD181), or the translation of objects describedbynumberorascountableintoqualitativerelations: nearandfarcaptures perspective,andthusdoesnotuniversalizeintoequa-distant,quantifiableparts. Thinging, as a qualitative relation, is non-formal and non-generative; instead it is "the thinking that responds and recalls". What kind of consciousness or state of thinking or being responds and recalls?
Out of the ringing mirror-play the thinging of the thing takes place.
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? Thethingstays-gathersandunites--thequadrature. Thethingthings world. Each thing stays the quadrature into a happening ofthe simple onehood of the world. (DD 181)
The ontological force of being human and even of thinking, therefore, is not a function of description or explanation, but ofwensende Verhaltnis. 'Mirror-play' is a traditional image o f the mind. Heidegger uses it here as a description o f the world as conscious. But the focus here is on the mirroring as an essential relation, constituting the quadrature as this relating. This sound good without making a lot of sense: it's all hidden in the mirroring.
Heideggerdiveststheuseofathingfromtheuser. Bydissolvinghumanagency, will, and intentionality he effectively animates the thing. A thing enacts a usage; things do not emerge as ready-to-hand within either an interpretive description or in relation to our existentialinvolvement. Heideggerhadalreadydissolvedhumanbeingsinourordinary involvementin"DasMan"inchapterIVofBeingandTime. Thisdisappearancedescribes our knowing how or rather our involvement outside of the hypostatization of self- consciousness and identity. In Being and Time our engagement remains within and with the world. Our thinking remains specifically intentional. Heidegger attempts to dissolve the predicative logic supporting subject and object, or the real as countable, as constituted
through identity, in the relations enacting our involvement. The existential analytic and its circumlocutions describe this relational enacting and involvement as the ontological conditionofourbeing. Thisontologyorrathertheontologicalcommitmentsthatthese relational involvement's entail are entrapped within a hermeneutic circle that transfers the
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? cite of Cartesian doubt from the subject to language itself. Thus in order to dissolve the threat o f skepticism, Heidegger must establish the ontological ground o f language. The way to language that determines Heidegger's famous turn involves the exploration of the ontologicaldimensionoflanguage. Thisgroundcannotbeestablished,butcanonlybe invoked or enacted. Thus the absence of other individual human beings in Heidegger's description of "the They" and their exclusion in "The Thing" occurs differently, or rather theontologicalstatusofdifferentsitesarebeingcontested: ourinvolvementintheworld as opposed to our involvement in language. In his attempt to make language ontological
Heidegger approaches, albeit from a different ground (from within qualitative relations) the drive toward an ontological language in Cognitive Science, a language to instantiate qualitative states within (as opposed to Heidegger's palimpsest or vague dissolution) quantitative patterns.
Heideggerarticulatestwokindsoftime. Science,evenofanAristoteliansort, gives the object its own time, but embeds it in a system of causes described by strict implication (although human beings may not be able to describe these system of causes). Heidegger, however, makes the time of the thing its doing and thus the succession of actions between us and the thing. Time condenses as the thing by making visible as such its standing alone, its structure or substance. Unlike in Being and Time where ready-to- hand described an economy ofuse between Dasein and an object as tool within the structure of our concerns, in "Das Ding" we as mortals are taken up by the world, by the thing. Both we and objects disappear in the condensation o f time that constitutes both things and the temporal possibilities available to us. 20 The stability o f scientific time, and
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? thus the stability ofthe identity ofthe object over and against us, on the other hand, is a function of its description under a particular rule (or formula).
Identity determined by use animates the real (which is no longer substance) with a meaning expressed as what something does. This form o f identity-functionalism precipitates a synesthesiac collapse of a temporal series (a doing) into the thing: what we recognize as a thing when we see theform of the jug. Heidegger does not want form to bethecriterionforidentity. Thecriterionforidentitybecomesinsteadanunderstanding ofthe semantics ofjug syntax: void-holding-outpouring-giving-gift-giving-outpouring- holding-void- gift into the earth, sky, divinities, and mortals, as the conditioning category and relation (weilen) determining the unity of the quadrature. Each word describes a jug- state and a relation to the other functors or jug-states.
The circle o f language meets itself in the thing circling from out o f the world circling as the world described in the circle of sense of the world worlding, thing thinging through which we become things inside ofthings or worlds inside ofworlds:
If we let the thing be present in its thinging from out of the worlding world, then we are thinking of the thing as thing. Taking thought in this way, we let ourselves beconcernedbythething'sworldingbeing. Thinkinginthisway,wearecalledby thethingasthething. InthestrictsenseoftheGermanwordbedingt,wearethe be-thinged, the conditioned ones. We have left behind us the presumption of all unconditionedness. (DD181)
This is a circle from 'letting be present' to 'thinking' [". . . wesen lassen, denken . . . "]; or is this the point from which two overlapping circles copy out the thing thinging itself from
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? out ofthe worlding world, neither on top or underneath, but in the thing as thing? This is not, however, a hermeneutic circle inlaying our descriptions inlaying our involvement in the world. What or who is inside what or whom? If we "cannot live in an object", we can live in a thing. Ifwe are to make sense of"Das Ding" we must ask 'how can we enter the thing? " Thiscirclingof"lettingthethingbepresent"into"thinkingthethingasthing" circles us, or imagines us as the limit of the animate world. We are be-thinged by
becoming things, and in this becoming we expose our condition as a thing to the world. Worlding and thinging draw us.
What does it mean to inhabit the thing? or to be a thing?
If we think of the thing as thing, then we spare and protect the thing's presence in the region from which it presences. Thinging is the nearing o f the world. Nearing isthenatureofnearness. Aswepreservethethingquathingweinhabitnearness. The nearing ofnearness is the true and sole dimension ofthe mirror-play ofthe world. (DD181)
Iwillretranslatethisfirstsentence: Ifwethinkthethingasthing,thenweconservethe essence o f the thing in its space-world (Bereich) from which it emerges and abides (west). These changes are primarily of emphasis in order to draw out the semantic mechanisms constitutingthinkingthethingandworld("DasDing"173-74). Ifweare"dieBe-
Dingteri" a thing is "Bereich". To think the thing as thing means not to conserve the thing butitsworld. Inconservingtheworldweplaceourselvesinthepositionofthething,we acknowledgeitsworldasours. 'Conserve'combinesL. 'servare',topreserveandprotect and L. 'con', a form o f 'cum', 'with, together'. 'Conserve' can, therefore, be construed as
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? a form o f'weilen "verweilt esErde undHimmel, die Gotttlichen und die Sierblicheri' ("Das Ding" 170/ We enter the thing by preserving its world as ours, and thus we replace it as the wine does the void. Consequently 'nearness', which is enacted through 'nearing' the world through 'thinging' the thing, is what is real. The black box in this thinking is how the relation between particular and universal, or rather between thing and world, can beovercome. Thisovercomingtakesplacethroughthecategoricalunityeffectedby lweilen\ This suggests that Heidegger has translated space into 'nearness' and time into 'weilen'. The mechanisms ofthis translation and the descriptive rules or the mechanisms (thehow? )of'nearing'and'staying'remainhidden. Heideggermakesthesemechanisms oftranslation the transcendental conditions ofour inhabitation ofboth ourselves and the world. Asanunintendedeffectofthisthinking,Heideggershowsthattheproblemof
justifying thinking or being within the world requires a conceptual thinking on the borders between science, philosophy and art that interrogates the mechanisms o f 'nearing' and 'staying' as they function as a 'making'. Heidegger highlights the process of our and the worlds making by trying to resist reducing the real to making or to substance. Similarly in resisting the temptation to justify or ground his thinking, he conceptualizes our essential conditionedness by circling into a myth that outlines the mechanisms o f its making as the limit of our involvement in the world.
What is the shadow outline o f this making? Do we understand what we are looking for when we ask how are we made or how do we make the world?
We can circle into the world into ourselves or into ourselves into the world: this is ourKantianheritage. Emersonpicturedthisas"Natureislovedbywhatisbestinus";but
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? this love is a redrawing ofconcentric circles endlessly. Emerson draws circles in spirals of replacement, totality failing and following totality towards doing "something without knowinghoworwhy"(175). Ifweforgetourselveswelosethehowandwhy,or"Iam not careful to justify myself' (173). Justification settles us. Emerson's experimenting, as he calls it, "unsettle[s] all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane" (173). The loss ofjustification proceeds from asking forjustification: "The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated
without end. . . Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another canbedrawn. . . "(166). Thereisnottranscendentworldortranscendentknower,but the 'eternal generator abides . . . somewhat superior to creation": the stability of an
aufhebung in relation to which the world appears as the world changing, the world worlding. In this shift from 'I', the unsettler to the eternal generator, itself circles the eye with a horizon, as if Emerson conflates the transcendental aesthetic describing the 'science o f a priori sensibility' o f the first Critique with the aesthetic judgment, a 'critique o f taste,' ofthethird.
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. " This seems to mean that one can put these into a description of an eco-system with semantic implications: Earth is the building bearer, nourishing with its fruits,tendingwaterandrock,plantandanimal"(DD179). Canthisdescriptioncounter the indifference o f physical laws and the effects they describe (in very simplified forms)?
The onto-semantics o f 'in' translates intentionality (the aboutness o f language; in this case how language picks out or attaches to things) into a form o f possession: an ontological implication and metonymic nearness. Nearness describes a categorical proximity between intentionality (aboutness) and what is. This means that nearness descibes a unity o f categories (but not into meta-category). This preserves famess (relativedifference)throughinthedistinctionsdeterminingthesecategories. Thesepoints o f categorical unity are things. Thus famess functions not between things but within things: the distance between the taking and the keeping or the holding and the outpouring, between the giving (jug) and the gift (wine). Something cannot be 7<<' proximity. This is a category error: 'inness' is an expression of nearness. To be 7n' is to be replaceable. If we pour the wine into the void, can we justify this use o f in by saying they are equivalent at an ontological level? They are mutually implicating by functioning as a place holder for
the other. They are not, therefore, equivalent in relation to each other, but they are equivalent within a system o f mutual exchange stabilizing the jug as an intransitive holding.
A thing is not in nearness, but rather in thinging, which as we saw is analogous to nearness, is "in the simple onefold". This means a thing is what it is as a function of the semantic series determining a thing as a thing in the unity o f the world determined by the
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? same functional semantic series of the thing: the thing stays itself and in this staying stays the world. These functional semantic series at the abstract level o f their unity, and thus for Heidegger their level o f interaction or at the level at which they can replace each other, as the wine replaces the void, constitute the semantics and the referent organizing Heidegger's use o f'Weilen'. The aspect ofthis verb that suggests 'dwelling' captures this inness as both the expression and the criterion for Being. This might suggest the riddle, 'what is inside itself? ' with the answer: 'everything. ' I am not sure this captures the double-logic here; rather the riddle should be 'what is in what it itselfcontains? ' If I answer 'a jug' I'm not sure I know what I could mean. But if I answer 'the world', I can
makesenseofthat. Consequently,Icanonlyanswer'ajug'ifIcanmakethejugaworld. If everything functions as a possible world, and if such worlds constitute themselves as worlds (and thus they cannot reveal themselves as such but constitute themselves as worlds), then the distinction between particular and universal or context reduces to determiningthatwhichmakestheseworldsworlds. Theworldandthings-as-worldsare constitutedbysemantics. Thissemanticsdescribesaself-reflexiveteleologyorentelechia that at every point in the functioning of a thing condenses the entire series in the thing. The thing becomes a system o f possibilities, where unlike in Aristotle, these possibilities as
the unity o f 'to be' constitute actuality, the ontologically real. These possibilities are not actualized, as form or anything else, but used within an actualized totality. Thus the reality,theBeingofthingsmeansthepossibilitiesoftheiruse. Athingisfundamentally subjunctive. Thesubjunctivemodeofthingsisactualizednotinthemselvesorinobjects
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? but in the totalities which they themselves are and in the totality o f the world (quadrature as onefold).
Each thing spatializes its function, that is, the changes which constitute its use, such that it exists through these changes as they reflect the totality o f changes. Thus things become the still-points for themselves and in this stability structure their changes as auniquetemporalsequence. Eachthingdeterminesaparticularkindoftimeexpressedas and expressing what they are. Time is scattered as condensates o f possibility throughout andastheworld. Theorderednatureandrelativeindependenceofthesethingsas condensates o f time determines them as controlled dynamic systems that constitute in their very nature the means by which time is expressed as time: their identity as things, which is totalized at any and every particular moment or aspect o f their functioning, in relation to whichtheunfoldingoftheirchangingpositionandfunctionisorderedastime. Thisisa descriptionofaliving,animatebeing: thusthingsthingandappropriateandgatherand dwell or stay or linger.
These verbs 'to appropriate" and 'to gather' and 'weilen' are descriptions, however, and it is exactly their ontological status that is at issue. They do not have any ontological force separate from our use o f them as descriptions. They are liable o f misuse, confusion, false attribution: language exists as much as anything else, but does it exist or function or mean in the way that jugs do? In Heidegger's attempt to replace the hylomorphic (matter/form) unity o f substance that Aristotle's constructs in order to counter Plato's reduction of matter to form he in effect reduces matter to a kind of functioning that replaces matter with a conceptual semantics constituting a temporal
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? series. The interaction between user and use is dissolved into the idealism o f the pure function, such that the semantic description ofthis function reduces identity into a transcendent form; call this the point o f categorical unity or intersection (the metaphoric use of mathematical language is not arbitrary here), in this case designated by 'wer/en'.
Heidegger describes 'matter' in this way:
Earth is the building bearer (bauend Tragende), nourishing (nahrend) with its fruits, tending (hegend) water and rock, plant and animal. . . . The sky is the sun's path, the course ofthe moon, the glitter ofthe stars, the year's seasons, the light and dusk ofday, the gloom and glow ofnight, the clemency and inclemency ofthe weather, the drifitng clouds and blue depth ofthe ether. . . (DD178)
The earth is the source, the out of which (bauend) that upholds (Tragende) through its nourishing and tending, the organized forms of matter we recognize (mythically pictured). The sky is a path, a course, a glitter, the season's, light and dusk, gloom and glow, clemency and inclemency, drifting and blue depth. In all o f this the sky is used, and thus emerges as the sky as a function o f these uses. The uses o f both earth and sky are differentbutcomplementary. Theearthismothering,parentalandshepherding(inthe way that "Man is the shepherd o f Being" in "Letter on Humanism"): bearing, nourishing, and tending. The sky is that which the sun, moon, stars, year, day, night, weather, clouds, and ether (whatever that is) display it. This displaying, for the most part, enacts a system of oppositions (or negations) as the possibilities ofBeing for both the sky and its limiting or determining objects and concepts.
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? TeXsuiTi Kai 8vxeA^xeia (ct verbum temporale nomini)
They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death
as death. Only man dies. The animal perishes. (DD178)
Animals like things have only their functioning ahead and behind them; they do not have death, like humans do, "ahead of itselfnor behind it" (DD178). Did we not know that we die? Or that we are called mortals because o f this immanent and imminent death? Our education proceeds from the fact o f death towards the semantics o f death.
In Being and Time, Heidegger writes "By its very essence, death is in every case mine, in so far as it 'is' at all. And indeed death signifies a peculiar possibility-of-Being in whichtheveryBeingofone'sownDaseinisanissue"(BT284;240). Daseinis ontologically constituted in the "mineness and existence" determining the particularity of DaseinasDaseinforitself. Identityandexistencemeetindeathandnotingenesis:11
"Death is the possibility o f the absolute impossibility o f Dasein. Thus death reveals itselfas thatpossibility which is one's ownmost, which is non-relational, and which is not to be outstripped [unuberholbare]. As such, death is something distinctively impending. Its existential possibility is based on the fact that Dasein is essentially disclosed to itselfj and disclosed, indeed, as ahead-of-itself.
(BT 294; 251).
Death exposes what in "Das Ding" should be understood as the semantical structure of 'in' and 'myness'. The possibility (Death) o f an impossibility (Dasein) describes a limit
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? that determines death as absolutely interchangeable (that is, interchangeable without remainder): one forms the limit ofthe other as a totality.
Death is an ontological and grammatical limit determining our living, not only as dying, but as a limited totality, "as ahead-of-itself'. (It is this relation between ontology and grammar that I need here) Dasein is always an issue for itselfthrough the multiplicity o f its stances mediating between its throwness (enmeshed within the historical, social, existential givens) o f Being and being ahead-of-itself. The distinctiveness o f this fate which is never overcome/ outstripped can twist possibility into function such that Dasein functions always toward this death. The Cartesian jug head with its pineal gland attaching spirit to its mechanical arms, even if the possibilities o f our Being are not knowable, sketches being human as living like a jug as thing, unfolding at every point, as a temporal series attached to ontological possibilities (not just existential possibilities as in Being and Time). 12
If things become animate, if they are to us what they do (being acts through ontological implication), how are humans functional? If meaning is determined, or emerges, through use, then divinities function to use us, and through and in that use we gain a being as things analogous to how things function as things for us. Death is the limit of our functioning, in the way that becoming an object is the limit of a thing, forming itself outofuseintosubstance: "AstheshrineofNothing,deathharborswithinitselfthe presenceing ofBeing. As the shrine ofNothing, death is the shelter ofBeing" (DD178- 79). 'Nothing' is 'that which in every respect is never something that merely exists, but whichneverthelesspresences[west],evenasthemysteryofBeingitself'(DD178). Does
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? nothing merely exist? Heidegger translates the Parmenidian One, constructed out o f the impossibility ofthinking ofanything (even ofnothing) that does not exist, into the functional implication that determines Being (or uses o f'to be') as a collection of collected (gathered) temporal series, hyloentelechia, emerging, or totalized as things, as determinate subjunctive modes. The world consists o f the collection o f these subjunctive modes. Heidegger is recasting what Duns Scotus, on whom he wrote his habilitation dissertation, and Peter Aureol call potential time, a domain oftime separate from physical and heavenly movement (as Being). Rejecting the Aristotelian picture o f time as determined and enacted by these physical changes, Duns Scotus followed Augustine's conception o f time as an internal measure separate as such from movement and the world. The developing realism of Scholastic philosophy, however, resisted Augustine's conclusion that time only exists within the mind. Potential time, therefore, describes both our measuring o f time and the possibility o f time which we find described in external movements and in things.
ParmenidesandAristotledescribetimeasthatwhichisandthatwhichisnot. This definition is translated, following the theological pressure of Augustine (and Biblical descriptions o f the ontological possibilities exploited by God, especially in Joshua), into "[t]ime consists o f something that exists outside the mind and o f something that does not exist outside the mind" (300). Averroes elaborates in Commentarrii in Aristotelis libros de Physico audilu:
Time is composed of past and future; but the past has already stopped being and the future does not yet exist. Time is composed o f being and nonbeing . . . .
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? Itisthesameformovement;nopartofmovementisinactuality. Whatever part one designates, it is already distant; therefore, it is also composed o f what has already ceased to be and what is not yet.
Such things do not possess a complete existence; these things receive a complete existence from the mind. The mind conceives the indivisible that exists in reality. 13
Averroes use o f exist, however, tied as it is to Aristotle's use o f ousia and energia (potential), Time and movement are continuous, and therefore indivisible, within the world.
Duns Scotus turns Augustine's reduction oftime to the mind back into the world. He locates potential time, a description of a time sense separate from physical change, in theworld. Similarly,Heideggerlocatesthecompletionoftherelationofbeingand nonbeing in the thing, and in so doing reforms this opposition as distorted descriptions that pretend to describe nothing or non-being outside ofBeing. We instantiate Death as Nothingbyenshriningitastheconditionofthebeyond. Nothingisenshrined,andassuch exists or functions in our world not beyond it. The riddle o f the beyond forms itself as a totality; or Nothing as a limit constitutes the world as a totality. This is the way in which
the god emerges as what cannot be compared. Heidegger answers Anselms riddle, in Proslogion,describingandformingthelogicalbasisforHisexistence, "Whatisthatthan which no greater can be conceived? ", with 'What exists. "
Everythingweighsonexistence. Theweightof'what'in"whatexists"canturn the answer into a question: "What exists? " and the answer "What exists" at least allows
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? existence to mimic identity. (What the thunder said; is what we say--not what we say it said, but what we say. )
Heidegger describes animation as a therapy to undo metaphysics and its (or our) forming ourselves (as humans) into animals that perish; We must recover the way to our capability as mortals: not to make us anew, but for us to see ourselves as o f old. Under the aspect of what Heidegger calls metaphysics, in which being is determined as representation,humansaredescribedasanimals,"alivingbeing"(DD179). Lifeisadded to our being, as electricity animates Frankenstein's monster's body, or as holy words animate a golem, or as god breathes into the shaped dust to make man. Objects cannot
become things, however; nor can bodies become human. In Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik(? ? 44),14Heideggerdistinguishesbetweenmineral,animal,andman: astone
exists without a world ('weltlos), the animal exists within a diminished world (yveltarm: world-poor), and man exists within his world-making (yveltbildend).
In summarizing Heidegger's methodological introduction to an unpublished course on the Phenomenology o f Religion in 1920-21 Theodore Kisiel paraphrases Heidegger's phenomenological description of factic experience, both as an activity and as that which is experienced:
What is had, lived, experienced in factic life experience is more than a mere object for a subject and its theory-forming activity, it is a world in which one can live. (One cannot live in an object. ) This formal indication of the world can be further articulated formally as our environment or milieu, as that which encounters or confrontsus. Itincludesnotonlymaterialthingsbutalsoidealobjectivities,like
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? those o f science, art and religion. In this environing world, there also stands the with-world, that is, other humans socially characterized, as relatives, superiors, peers,strangers,andnotasinstancesofthescientificgenushomosapiens. Finally, in the very same world also stands "I myself" the self-world. (154)13
Our factic life experience articulates three umwelten: the given environment o f material and ideal objects, the with-world o f social relations, and the self-world.
Twenty years latter in a 1941 lecture course published as Grundbegriffe Heidegger translates these tripartite existential distinctions into the ontology o f Being:
To what "is" belongs not only the currently actual, which affects us and which we stumble upon: the happenings, the destinies and doings of man, nature in its regularity and its catastrophes, the barely fathomable powers that are already present in all motives and aims, in all valuations and attitudes o f belief.
(Basic Concepts I. ? 2)16
The actual describes the order o f the world presented earlier as "that which encounters and confronts us. " The actual also describes the normative powers in us, akin to the "ideal objectivities," understood as also a proximate order determining us. The limits of Dasein that allowed for Heidegger's existential analytic to describe its presence in its engagements have been dissolved, but not to expose the mechanisms of our being let alone our biology or consciousness. We are given to ourselves in and through the history o f our
embodiment within a world of beings, outside o f what being, existing, worlding, thinging means.
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? The actual slips into the possible, but not, however, through an Aristotelian dialectic, but as the description ofthe world towards-us. Ifthe actual is the descendent of the 'towards which', 'in relation to which' ofDasein, the possible describes the stances, the intentionality of Dasein:
To what "is" belongs also the possible, which we expect, hope for, and fear, which we only anticipate, before which we recoil and yet do not let go. To be sure the possible is the not yet actual, but this not-actual is nevertheless no mere nullity. The possible "is," its being simply has another character than the actual.
(Basic Concepts I. ? 2)
Possibility and actuality are not bound or determined by substance, but are rather the conditions or grammar of being: both the possible and the actual 'are'. The grammar of this 'being' is another semantic chain (best described, although the passage is rather long, in "Letter on Humanism"):
[T]hinking is the thinking of being. . . .
Thinking is--this says: Being has fatefully embraced its essence. To embrace a "thing" or a "person" in its essence means to love it, to favor it. Thought in a more original way such favoring [Mogen] means to bestow essence as a gift. Such favoring is the proper essence o f enabling, which not only can achieve this or that but also can let something essentially unfold in its provenance, that is, let it be. It is on the "strength of such enabling by favoring
that something is properly able to be. This enabling is what is properly "possible" [das "Mogliche"], that whose essence resides in favoring. From this favoring
Being enables thinking. The former makes the latter possible. Being is the
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? enabling-favoring, the "may be" [das Mog-liche]. As the element, Being is the quiet power" ofthe favoring-enabling, that is, ofthe possible. . Ofcourse, our words mogliche [possible] and Moglichkeit [possiblity], under the dominance of "logic" and "metaphysics," are thought solely in contrast to "actuality"; that is, they are thought on the basis o f a definite--the metaphysical--interpretation o f Being as actua and potentia, a distinction identified with the one between existentia and essentia. When I speak ofthe "quiet power ofthe possible" I do not mean the possible o f a merely represented possiblitias, nor potentia as the essentia o f an actus o f existentia; rather, I mena Being itself, which in its favoring presides over thinking and hence over the essence of humanity, and that means over its relation
to Being. (196-97)
The grammar o f 'possibility' is bound to that o f 'thinking'. These grammars pivot around a set of, what I think should be called, functions: embracing,favoring, enabling, and
possibility}1 Functions are transitive in that they can be used to link different aspects of being or different grammatical levels. 'Embrace', for example, relates being to essence through relating thing and person. This last use allows 'embrace' to be seen as love or
favor. Favor is a bestowing, but of essence. This essence understood as enabling redefines favoring' in relation to this 'enabling? . Such enabling presents being as
possibility because it is attached to letting being be, that is, the function is inverted so that it is directed not from us to the world but from the world toward us. This double movement functions as a link between world and us, but one understood as subjunctive and neither constitutive nor object-like. It is nevertheless real.
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? The last modality about which he has little to say explicitly is the necessary {Basic Concepts I. ? 2). In the 1941 lecture the modality of necessity is unexamined, or rather collapsed into descriptions o f Being. In "Das Ding," in effect, necessity will underwrite the chain o f semantic implication that unites the functioning o f the jug, that is, its temporality, as what it is. Meaning, because it expresses always a final cause independent from our actual usage, but rather as a possibility within the world, is a form o f necessity. Something is what it is necessarily; it could not not be what it is without ceasing to be this.
Mortals necessarily die; this necessity is experienced as a possibility. Living and thinking through this possibility is what it means to be capable o f death. What constitutes this being "capable o f death as death"? Heidegger suggests: by coming to oneself "in the shelter of Being'. This shelter is death. 'Sheltering' means to be both ahead and behind. A shelter is the limited whole ofthe world, and as such marks the difference between my world and the world. This difference enables me to call my world a world. 18
How does death shelter Being? This is the same question as How does being become present to itself? How does what exists become conscious or self-reflexive? I ask what is a mortal? and answer 'myself. This question, however, is a riddle because the entire sentence "I ask what is a mortal? and answer 'myself? " can also stand as an answer, andsoon. Thisself-reflectionmeanstobecomemortalwithintheshelterofBeing.
The gift ofthe water can become ajug, or thejug can become a world and the water a canopy. Counting abstracts things into the concept o f quantity, determining identity as that which can be counted. Patterns best described by numbers organize a syntax, between sound-tones or between poetic lines, or between a magnet and a falling
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? rock. Theseenablingpatternsemergeinthemorecomplicatedsyntaxofmusicorpoetry or physics.
If things emerge as forms under the aspect of our knowing and representation they exist as identities separate from time or related as non-temporal moments determined as identities. Making, even ifunderstood as a transcendental aesthetic, functions as a form of representing, o f knowing, and thus ignores how things present themselves to us within the circle of before us, to which we respond, and as already ahead-of-us, determined by our expectations or uses, to which we recall:
When and in what way do things appear as things? They do not appear by means o f human making. But neither do they appear without the vigilance o f mortals. The first step toward such vigilance is the step back from the thinking that merely represents--that is, explains--to the thinking that responds and recalls. (DD181)
The inexplicable and unfathomable character of the world's worlding lies in this,
that causes and grounds remain unsuitable for the world's worlding. (DD180) We cannot think the world as a description (language or art) or explanation (science). 'Making' functions through cause and effect, that is, making is always a picture of evolution and thus o f identities and changes describing an ontological language. Heidegger believes that this kind of language constructs a world as representation, within Berkeley's formulation "esse = percipi, Being equals being represented" ("Moira" 82). '9
So nestling, they join together, worlding, the world.
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? Nestling, malleable, pliant, compliant, nimble--in Old German these are called ring and gering. The mirror-play o f the worlding world, as the ringing o f the ring, wrests free the united four into their own compliancy, the circling compliancy oftheir presence. Out ofthe ringing mirror-play the thinging ofthe thing takes place. (DD180)
The gap between identities and moments brought out by Zeno in his defense of Parmenidian One is not overcome by examining the relation between finite or infinite, or through calculus, but is erased in the semantics of 'ring' and 'gering', in the qualitative relation in which things emerge as things and the world emerges as world. Gering in modem German diminishes a gap into a short distance, a trifle; the differences described by formal identities, the structured separation constituting quantity and number, is translated into a qualitative relation, a mere separation, a nothing much. Is quantity simply ignored in this semantics?
"Thinging is the nearing ofthe world" (DD181), or the translation of objects describedbynumberorascountableintoqualitativerelations: nearandfarcaptures perspective,andthusdoesnotuniversalizeintoequa-distant,quantifiableparts. Thinging, as a qualitative relation, is non-formal and non-generative; instead it is "the thinking that responds and recalls". What kind of consciousness or state of thinking or being responds and recalls?
Out of the ringing mirror-play the thinging of the thing takes place.
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? Thethingstays-gathersandunites--thequadrature. Thethingthings world. Each thing stays the quadrature into a happening ofthe simple onehood of the world. (DD 181)
The ontological force of being human and even of thinking, therefore, is not a function of description or explanation, but ofwensende Verhaltnis. 'Mirror-play' is a traditional image o f the mind. Heidegger uses it here as a description o f the world as conscious. But the focus here is on the mirroring as an essential relation, constituting the quadrature as this relating. This sound good without making a lot of sense: it's all hidden in the mirroring.
Heideggerdiveststheuseofathingfromtheuser. Bydissolvinghumanagency, will, and intentionality he effectively animates the thing. A thing enacts a usage; things do not emerge as ready-to-hand within either an interpretive description or in relation to our existentialinvolvement. Heideggerhadalreadydissolvedhumanbeingsinourordinary involvementin"DasMan"inchapterIVofBeingandTime. Thisdisappearancedescribes our knowing how or rather our involvement outside of the hypostatization of self- consciousness and identity. In Being and Time our engagement remains within and with the world. Our thinking remains specifically intentional. Heidegger attempts to dissolve the predicative logic supporting subject and object, or the real as countable, as constituted
through identity, in the relations enacting our involvement. The existential analytic and its circumlocutions describe this relational enacting and involvement as the ontological conditionofourbeing. Thisontologyorrathertheontologicalcommitmentsthatthese relational involvement's entail are entrapped within a hermeneutic circle that transfers the
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? cite of Cartesian doubt from the subject to language itself. Thus in order to dissolve the threat o f skepticism, Heidegger must establish the ontological ground o f language. The way to language that determines Heidegger's famous turn involves the exploration of the ontologicaldimensionoflanguage. Thisgroundcannotbeestablished,butcanonlybe invoked or enacted. Thus the absence of other individual human beings in Heidegger's description of "the They" and their exclusion in "The Thing" occurs differently, or rather theontologicalstatusofdifferentsitesarebeingcontested: ourinvolvementintheworld as opposed to our involvement in language. In his attempt to make language ontological
Heidegger approaches, albeit from a different ground (from within qualitative relations) the drive toward an ontological language in Cognitive Science, a language to instantiate qualitative states within (as opposed to Heidegger's palimpsest or vague dissolution) quantitative patterns.
Heideggerarticulatestwokindsoftime. Science,evenofanAristoteliansort, gives the object its own time, but embeds it in a system of causes described by strict implication (although human beings may not be able to describe these system of causes). Heidegger, however, makes the time of the thing its doing and thus the succession of actions between us and the thing. Time condenses as the thing by making visible as such its standing alone, its structure or substance. Unlike in Being and Time where ready-to- hand described an economy ofuse between Dasein and an object as tool within the structure of our concerns, in "Das Ding" we as mortals are taken up by the world, by the thing. Both we and objects disappear in the condensation o f time that constitutes both things and the temporal possibilities available to us. 20 The stability o f scientific time, and
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? thus the stability ofthe identity ofthe object over and against us, on the other hand, is a function of its description under a particular rule (or formula).
Identity determined by use animates the real (which is no longer substance) with a meaning expressed as what something does. This form o f identity-functionalism precipitates a synesthesiac collapse of a temporal series (a doing) into the thing: what we recognize as a thing when we see theform of the jug. Heidegger does not want form to bethecriterionforidentity. Thecriterionforidentitybecomesinsteadanunderstanding ofthe semantics ofjug syntax: void-holding-outpouring-giving-gift-giving-outpouring- holding-void- gift into the earth, sky, divinities, and mortals, as the conditioning category and relation (weilen) determining the unity of the quadrature. Each word describes a jug- state and a relation to the other functors or jug-states.
The circle o f language meets itself in the thing circling from out o f the world circling as the world described in the circle of sense of the world worlding, thing thinging through which we become things inside ofthings or worlds inside ofworlds:
If we let the thing be present in its thinging from out of the worlding world, then we are thinking of the thing as thing. Taking thought in this way, we let ourselves beconcernedbythething'sworldingbeing. Thinkinginthisway,wearecalledby thethingasthething. InthestrictsenseoftheGermanwordbedingt,wearethe be-thinged, the conditioned ones. We have left behind us the presumption of all unconditionedness. (DD181)
This is a circle from 'letting be present' to 'thinking' [". . . wesen lassen, denken . . . "]; or is this the point from which two overlapping circles copy out the thing thinging itself from
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? out ofthe worlding world, neither on top or underneath, but in the thing as thing? This is not, however, a hermeneutic circle inlaying our descriptions inlaying our involvement in the world. What or who is inside what or whom? If we "cannot live in an object", we can live in a thing. Ifwe are to make sense of"Das Ding" we must ask 'how can we enter the thing? " Thiscirclingof"lettingthethingbepresent"into"thinkingthethingasthing" circles us, or imagines us as the limit of the animate world. We are be-thinged by
becoming things, and in this becoming we expose our condition as a thing to the world. Worlding and thinging draw us.
What does it mean to inhabit the thing? or to be a thing?
If we think of the thing as thing, then we spare and protect the thing's presence in the region from which it presences. Thinging is the nearing o f the world. Nearing isthenatureofnearness. Aswepreservethethingquathingweinhabitnearness. The nearing ofnearness is the true and sole dimension ofthe mirror-play ofthe world. (DD181)
Iwillretranslatethisfirstsentence: Ifwethinkthethingasthing,thenweconservethe essence o f the thing in its space-world (Bereich) from which it emerges and abides (west). These changes are primarily of emphasis in order to draw out the semantic mechanisms constitutingthinkingthethingandworld("DasDing"173-74). Ifweare"dieBe-
Dingteri" a thing is "Bereich". To think the thing as thing means not to conserve the thing butitsworld. Inconservingtheworldweplaceourselvesinthepositionofthething,we acknowledgeitsworldasours. 'Conserve'combinesL. 'servare',topreserveandprotect and L. 'con', a form o f 'cum', 'with, together'. 'Conserve' can, therefore, be construed as
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? a form o f'weilen "verweilt esErde undHimmel, die Gotttlichen und die Sierblicheri' ("Das Ding" 170/ We enter the thing by preserving its world as ours, and thus we replace it as the wine does the void. Consequently 'nearness', which is enacted through 'nearing' the world through 'thinging' the thing, is what is real. The black box in this thinking is how the relation between particular and universal, or rather between thing and world, can beovercome. Thisovercomingtakesplacethroughthecategoricalunityeffectedby lweilen\ This suggests that Heidegger has translated space into 'nearness' and time into 'weilen'. The mechanisms ofthis translation and the descriptive rules or the mechanisms (thehow? )of'nearing'and'staying'remainhidden. Heideggermakesthesemechanisms oftranslation the transcendental conditions ofour inhabitation ofboth ourselves and the world. Asanunintendedeffectofthisthinking,Heideggershowsthattheproblemof
justifying thinking or being within the world requires a conceptual thinking on the borders between science, philosophy and art that interrogates the mechanisms o f 'nearing' and 'staying' as they function as a 'making'. Heidegger highlights the process of our and the worlds making by trying to resist reducing the real to making or to substance. Similarly in resisting the temptation to justify or ground his thinking, he conceptualizes our essential conditionedness by circling into a myth that outlines the mechanisms o f its making as the limit of our involvement in the world.
What is the shadow outline o f this making? Do we understand what we are looking for when we ask how are we made or how do we make the world?
We can circle into the world into ourselves or into ourselves into the world: this is ourKantianheritage. Emersonpicturedthisas"Natureislovedbywhatisbestinus";but
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? this love is a redrawing ofconcentric circles endlessly. Emerson draws circles in spirals of replacement, totality failing and following totality towards doing "something without knowinghoworwhy"(175). Ifweforgetourselveswelosethehowandwhy,or"Iam not careful to justify myself' (173). Justification settles us. Emerson's experimenting, as he calls it, "unsettle[s] all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane" (173). The loss ofjustification proceeds from asking forjustification: "The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated
without end. . . Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another canbedrawn. . . "(166). Thereisnottranscendentworldortranscendentknower,but the 'eternal generator abides . . . somewhat superior to creation": the stability of an
aufhebung in relation to which the world appears as the world changing, the world worlding. In this shift from 'I', the unsettler to the eternal generator, itself circles the eye with a horizon, as if Emerson conflates the transcendental aesthetic describing the 'science o f a priori sensibility' o f the first Critique with the aesthetic judgment, a 'critique o f taste,' ofthethird.
