7 The work of art

http://homepage.newschool.edu/%7Equigleyt/vcs/heidegger-owasum.pdf
Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes

One of Heidegger’s most challenging essays is ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, originally drafted in 1935 and published in an expanded version only in 1950. There he distinguishes between the work of art as a specific entity (for example, a poem or a painting) and art itself, the latter being understood not as a collective name for, but rather as the essence and origin of, all works of art. Heidegger asks what art itself is, and he answers that art is a unique kind of disclosure.

Dasein is disclosive of the being of an entity in many ways, some of them ordinary and some of them extraordinary. An outcome common to both kinds of disclosure is that the disclosed entity is seen as what it is: it appears in its form. Examples of ordinary, everyday ways of disclosing the being of entities include showing oneself to be adept at the flute, or moulding clay into a vase, or concluding that the accused is innocent. Each of these ordinary cases of praxis, production and theory does indeed disclose some entity as being this or that, but the focus is on showing what the entity is rather than on showing how the entity’s being is disclosed. On the other hand, extraordinary acts of disclosure bring to attention not only the disclosed entity but above all the event of disclosure of that entity’s being. Extraordinary acts of disclosure let us see the very fact that, and the way in which, an entity has become meaningfully present in its being. In these cases not only does an entity appear in its form (as happens in any instance of disclosure) but more importantly the very disclosure of the being of the entity ‘is established’ (sich einrichten) in the entity and is seen there as such.

Heidegger lists five examples of extraordinary disclosure: the constitution of a nation- state; the nearness of god; the giving of one’s life for another; the thinker’s questioning as revealing that being can be questioned; and the ‘installation’ (Sich-ins-Werk-Setzen) of disclosure in a work of art. Each of these cases discloses, in its own particular way, not just an entity but the very disclosure of that entity’s being. Heidegger seeks to understand the particular way in which art itself discloses disclosure by ‘installing’ disclosure in the work of art.

In his essay Heidegger refers mainly to two works of art: van Gogh’s canvas ‘Old Shoes’, painted in Paris in 1886–7 and now hung in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the 5th century bc Doric Temple of Hera II – the so-called Temple of Poseidon – at Paestum (Lucania), Italy. Let us consider the temple at Paestum as we attempt to answer two questions: what gets disclosed in a work of art and how does it get disclosed?

(1) What gets disclosed in a work of art? Heidegger gives three answers. First, a work of art lets us see disclosure in the form of ‘world’ and ‘earth’. A work of art discloses not just an entity or an ensemble of entities but the whole realm of significance whereby an ensemble of entities gets its finite meaning. The temple at Paestum not only houses (and thus discloses) the goddess Hera, but more importantly lets us see the social and historical world – rooted as it was in the natural setting of Lucania – that Hera’s presence guaranteed for the Greek colonists. A work of art, Heidegger argues, reveals the very event of disclosure, which event he calls the happening of world and earth, where ‘earth’ refers not only to nature and natural entities but more broadly to all entities within a specific world.

Second, a work of art lets us see the radical tension that discloses a specific world of significance. Heidegger understands being-in-the-world as a ‘struggle’ (Streit or polemos) between a given world and its earth, between the self-expanding urge of a set of human possibilities and the rootedness of such possibilities in a specific natural environment. Here, ‘struggle’ is another name for the event of disclosure whereby a particular world is opened up and maintained. What a specific work of art discloses is one particular struggle that discloses one particular world – for instance, the world of the Greek colonists at Paestum.

Third, a work of art shows us disclosure-as-such. The movement of opening up a particular world is only one instance of the general movement of alēthēia: the ‘wresting’ of being-at-all from the absolute absence into which Dasein is appropriated. Thus a work of art not only shows us a particular world-disclosive struggle (the way the temple of Hera shows us the earth–world tension at Paestum) but also lets us see the ‘original struggle’ (Urstreit) of disclosure-as-such, whereby significance is wrested from the double closure of intrinsic hiddenness and fallenness.

In short, what a work of art reveals is disclosure in three forms: as world and earth; as the struggle that opens up a specific world and lets its entities be meaningful; and as the original struggle that structures all such particular disclosures.

(2) How does a work of art disclose disclosure? The specific way that art discloses disclosure is by ‘installing’ it in a given work of art. Here, ‘to install’ means to bring to stability; and ‘to install disclosure’ means to incorporate it into the physical form of a work of art. There are three corollaries:

What the installing is not. Heidegger does not claim that the work of art ‘sets up’ the world and ‘sets forth’ the earth for the first time. That is, installing the disclosure of earth and world in the work of art is not the only or even the first way that earth and world get disclosed. The sanctuary of Hera was not the first to open up the world of Paestum and disclose the fields and flocks for what they are. Tradesmen and farmers had been doing that – that is, the disclosive struggle of world and earth had been bestowing form and meaning – for at least a century before the temple was built.

What the installing is and does. Art discloses, in a new and distinctive way, a disclosure of earth and world that is already operative. Heidegger argues that the temple as disclosive (a) captures and sustains the openness of that world and its rootedness in nature, and (b) shows how, within that world, nature comes forth into the forms of entities while remaining rooted in itself. Heidegger calls these two functions, which happen only in art, the ‘setting up’ of world and the ‘setting forth’ of earth.

The work of art lets us see – directly, experientially and in all its glory – the already operative interplay of human history’s rootedness in nature and nature’s emergence into human history. In Heidegger’s words, art ‘stabilizes’ (zum Stehen bringen) the disclosive struggle of world and earth by ‘installing’ it in a particular work of art, such that in and through that medium, disclosure ‘shines forth’ brilliantly in beauty.

The two ways art discloses disclosure, and their unity. Art itself is a specific and distinctive way in which Dasein is disclosive: it discloses disclosure by installing disclosure in the physical form of a work of art. This installation has two moments: the creation and the preservation of the work of art.

Creation is an artist’s Dasein-activity of incorporating disclosure – the world-openness that is already operative – into a material medium (stone, colour, language and so on). This incorporation of disclosure is carried out in such a way that the material medium is not subordinated to anything other than disclosure (for example, it is not subordinated to ‘usefulness’). Rather, the medium becomes, for whoever experiences it, the immediate disclosure of disclosure.

Preservation is the corresponding Dasein-activity of maintaining the power of disclosure in the work of art by resolutely letting disclosure continue to be seen there. Creation and preservation are the two ways that Dasein ‘projects’ (holds open and sustains) the disclosure that is installed in the work of art. The unity of creation and preservation is art itself, which Heidegger calls Dichtung – not ‘poetry’ but poiesis, the creating-and-preserving installation of disclosure in a disclosive medium.

Disclosure is the central topic of all Heidegger’s philosophy, and this fact shines brilliantly through his reflection on the origin of the work of art. Art, both as creation and as preservation, is a specific and distinctive Dasein-activity: the disclosure of disclosure in a medium that is disclosive. In the work of art, as in Heidegger’s own work, it’s alēthēia all the way down.

6 Forgetfulness, history and metaphysics

Heidegger sees a strong connection between the forgetting of disclosure-as-such, the history of the dispensations of being, and metaphysics.

Forgetting disclosure-as-such. Because disclosure-as-such is intrinsically hidden (this is what is meant by the mystery), it is usually overlooked. When the mystery is overlooked, human being is ‘fallen’, that is, aware of entities as being-thus-and-so, but oblivious of what it is that ‘gives’ being to entities. Fallenness is forgetfulness of the mystery. Another term for fallenness is ‘errancy’, which conveys the image of Dasein ‘wandering’ among entities-in-their-being without knowing what makes their presence possible. Since disclosure-as-such is sometimes called ‘being itself’, fallenness is also called ‘the forgetfulness of being’.

However, disclosure-as-such need not be forgotten. It is possible, in resolution, to assume one’s mortality and become concretely aware of disclosure-as-such in its basic state of hiddenness. Such awareness does not undo the intrinsic hiddenness of disclosure-as-such or draw it into full presence. Rather, one accepts the concealment of being itself (this is called ‘letting being be’) by resolutely accepting one’s appropriation by absence.

The history of the dispensations of being. Heidegger’s discussions of the ‘history of being’ sometimes verge on the anthropomorphic, and he often uses etymologies that are difficult to carry over into English. Nevertheless, his purpose in all this is clear: to spell out the world-historical dimensions of fallenness.

As we have seen, disclosure-as-such ‘gives’ the being of entities while the ‘giving’ itself remains hidden; and this happens only in so far as Dasein is appropriated by absence. When one forgets the absence that appropriates Dasein, and thus forgets the hidden giving that brings forth the being of entities, fallenness and errancy ensue. Fallen Dasein then focuses on the given (entities-in-their-being) and overlooks the hidden giving (disclosure-as-such). None the less, the hidden giving still goes on giving, but now in a doubly hidden way: it is both intrinsically hidden and forgotten. When the hiddenness is forgotten, a disclosure is called a ‘dispensation’ (Geschick) of being. The word connotes a portioning-out that holds something back. A certain form of the being of entities is dispensed while the disclosing itself remains both hidden and forgotten.

In German, ‘dispensation’ (Geschick) and ‘history’ (Geschichte) have their common root in the verb schicken, ‘to send’. Playing on those etymologies, Heidegger elaborates a ‘history’ of being, based on the ‘sendings’ or ‘dispensations’ of being. (The usual translations of Geschick as ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ are not helpful here.) In Heidegger’s view each dispensation of being defines a distinct epoch in the history of thought from ancient Greece down to today. He calls the aggregate of such dispensations and epochs the ‘history of being’. Because the whole of these dispensations and epochs is correlative to fallenness, Heidegger seeks to overcome the history of being and return to an awareness of the hidden giving.

Heidegger believes the parameters of each epoch in the history of being can be glimpsed in the name that a major philosopher of the period gave to the being of entities in that age. A non-exhaustive list of such epoch-defining notions of being includes: idea in Plato, energeia in Aristotle, act in Aquinas, representedness in Descartes, objectivity in Kant, Absolute Spirit in Hegel, and will to power in Nietzsche. What characterizes each such epoch is (1) an understanding of being as some form of the presence of entities and (2) an oblivion of the absence that bestows such presence. None the less, even when forgotten the absence is never abolished, and thus traces of it remain in the various dispensations. Therefore, in studying the texts of classical philosophy Heidegger searches for and retrieves the unexpressed absence (the ‘unsaid’) that hides behind what the text actually expresses (the ‘said’).

Metaphysics. The various ways that presence or being has been dispensed, while absence has been overlooked, are called in their entirety ‘metaphysics’. Heidegger argues that metaphysics as a philosophical position began with Plato and entered its final phase with Nietzsche.

The Greek philosophers who preceded Socrates and Plato were, in Heidegger’s view, pre-metaphysical in so far as they had at least a penumbral awareness of disclosure-as- such and at least named it (Heraclitus, for example, called it logos, alēthēia, and physis). However, none of these thinkers thematically addressed disclosure-as-such or understood the correlative notions of ek-sistence and Dasein. Heidegger calls the penumbral awareness of disclosure-as-such among archaic Greek thinkers the ‘first beginning’. And he hoped that a ‘new beginning’ would follow the end of metaphysics. If the first beginning was not yet metaphysical, the new beginning will be no longer metaphysical. Heidegger considered his own work a preparation for that new beginning.

But metaphysics persists. The history of the dispensations of being has reached its fullness in the present epoch of technology. As Heidegger uses the word, ‘technology’ refers not to hardware or software or the methods and materials of applied science. Rather, it names a dispensation in the history of metaphysics, in fact the final one. It names the way in which entities-in-their-being are disclosed today.

Heidegger maintains that in the epoch of technology entities are taken as a stockpile of matter that is in principle completely knowable by human reason and wholly available for human use. With this notion metaphysics arrives at its most extreme oblivion of disclosure-as-such. In our time, Heidegger says, the presence of entities has become everything, while the absence that brings about that presence has become nothing. He calls this nil-status of absence ‘nihilism’.

Overcoming metaphysics. None the less, Heidegger sees a glimmer of light in the dark epoch of nihilism. In this final dispensation of metaphysics, the hidden giving does not cease to function, even when it is completely forgotten. It continues dispensing presence – paradoxically even the nihilistic presence which obscures the absence that gives it. Because the hidden giving goes on giving even when it is forgotten, we can still experience it today (in a mood not unlike dread) and retrieve it. This recovery of world-disclosive absence requires resolution or, as Heidegger now calls it, ‘the entrance into Ereignis’. To enter Ereignis today is to experience a different kind of nihil (‘nothing’) from the one that defines nihilism. The absence that bestows presence is itself a kind of ‘nothing’ (not-a-thing). This absence is no entity, nor can it be reduced to the being of any specific entity or be present the way an entity is. That is why it is so easily overlooked. Its ‘nothingness’ is its intrinsic hiddenness.

To enter Ereignis is to become aware of and to accept the disclosive nihil that rescues one from nihilism. Thereupon, says Heidegger, metaphysics as the history of the dispensations of being ceases and a new beginning takes place – at least for those individuals who achieve authenticity by way of resolution. But metaphysics will continue for those who remain inauthentic, because dispensation is correlative to fallenness.

Summary. The forgetting of disclosure-as-such is metaphysics. Metaphysics knows entities-in-their-being but ignores the very giving of that being. The aggregate of the epochs of metaphysics is the history of the dispensations of being. The history of these dispensations culminates in the epoch of technology and nihilism. But world-disclosive absence can still be retrieved; and when it is retrieved, it ushers in (at least for authentic individuals) a new beginning of ek-sistence and Dasein.

5 Hiddenness, Ereignis and the Turn

Hiddenness. Heidegger claims that disclosure-as-such – the very opening up of significance in Dasein’s being – is intrinsically hidden and needs to remain so if entities are to be properly disclosed in their being. This intrinsic concealment of disclosure-as- such is called the ‘mystery’. Since Heidegger sometimes calls disclosure-as-such ‘being itself’, the phrase becomes ‘the mystery of being’. The ensuing claim, that the mystery of being conceals itself while revealing entities, has led to much mystification, not least among Heideggerians. Being seems to become a higher but hidden Entity that performs strange acts that only the initiated can comprehend. This misconstrual of Heidegger’s intentions is not helpful.

How may we understand the intrinsic concealment of disclosure-as-such? One way is to understand the paradigm of ‘movement’ that informs Heidegger’s discussion of revealing and concealing. Taken in the broad philosophical sense, movement is defined not as mere change of place and the like, but as the very being of entities that are undergoing the process of change. This kind of being consists in anticipating something absent, with the result that what is absent-but-anticipated determines the entity’s present being. Anticipation is the being of such entities, and anticipation is determined from the absent-but-anticipated goal. For example, the acorn’s being is its becoming an oak tree; and correspondingly the future oak tree, as the goal of the acorn’s trajectory, determines the acorn’s present being. Likewise, Margaret is a graduate student in so far as she is in movement towards her Ph.D. The still-absent degree qua anticipated determines her being-a-student.

The absent is, by nature, hidden. But when it is anticipated or intended, the intrinsically hidden, while still remaining absent, becomes quasi-present. It functions as the ‘final cause’ and raison d’être that determines the being of the anticipating entity. That is, even while remaining intrinsically concealed, the absent-as-anticipated ‘gives being’ (Es gibt Sein) to the anticipating entity by disclosing the entity as what it presently is. This pattern of absence-dispensing-presence holds both for the disclosure of Dasein and for the disclosure of the entities Dasein encounters.

It holds pre-eminently for Dasein. Dasein’s being is movement, for Dasein exists by anticipating its own absence. Dasein’s death remains intrinsically hidden, but when anticipated, the intrinsically hidden becomes quasi-present by determining Dasein’s being as mortal becoming. The absent, when anticipated, dispenses Dasein’s finite presence.

The same holds for other entities. The anticipated absence determines Dasein’s finite being. But Dasein’s being is world-disclosive: it holds open the region of meaningful presence in which other entities are disclosed as being-this-or-that. Hence, the intrinsically hidden, when anticipated, determines the presence not only of Dasein but also of the entities Dasein encounters.

Therefore, the very structure of disclosure – that is, the fact that the absent-but- anticipated determines or ‘gives’ finite presence – entails that its ultimate source remain intrinsically hidden even while disclosing the being of entities. This intrinsic hiddenness at the core of disclosure is what Heidegger calls the ‘mystery’. Heidegger argued that the ‘mystery’ is the ultimate issue in philosophy, and he believed Heraclitus had said as much in his fragment no. 123: ‘Disclosure-as-such loves to hide’ (Freeman 1971: 33 ).

Ereignis. The paradigm of movement also explains why Heidegger calls disclosure-as- such ‘Ereignis’. In ordinary German Ereignis means ‘event’, but Heidegger uses it as a word for movement. Playing on the adjective eigen (‘one’s own’), he creates the word Ereignung: movement as the process of being drawn into what is one’s own. For example, we might imagine that the oak tree as final cause ‘pulls’ the acorn into what it properly is, by drawing the acorn towards what it is meant to be. This being-pulled is the acorn’s movement, its very being. Likewise, Dasein is ‘claimed’ by death as its final cause and ‘pulled forth’ by it into mortal becoming. This being-drawn into one’s own absence, in such a way that world is engendered and sustained, is what Heidegger calls ‘appropriation’. It is what he means by Ereignis.

The word ‘Ereignis’, along with the image of Dasein being appropriated by the absent, emerges in Heidegger’s thought only in the 1930s. However, this later language echoes what Heidegger had earlier called Dasein’s thrownness, namely, the fact that Dasein is thrust into possibilities, anticipates its self-absence, and so is ‘already’ involved in world-disclosure. Both the earlier language of thrown anticipation of absence, and the later language of appropriation by absence, have the same phenomenon in view: Dasein’s alreadiness, its constitutive mortality that makes for world-disclosure.

The paradigm of movement also helps to clarify Heidegger’s claim about the concealing-and-revealing, or withdrawing-and-arriving, of being itself (that is, of disclosure-as-such). In a quite typical formulation Heidegger writes: ‘Being itself withdraws itself, but as this withdrawal, being is the ‘pull’ that claims the essence of human being as the place of being’s own arrival’ (1961: vol. 2, 368 ). This sentence, which describes the structure of Ereignis, may be interpreted as follows:

The ‘withdrawal’ of disclosure-as-such
(that is, the intrinsic hiddenness of world-disclosive absence)
maintains a relation to Dasein
(which we may call either ‘appropriation’ or ‘thrown anticipation’)
that claims Dasein
(by appropriating it into mortal becoming)
so that, in Dasein’s being,
(in so far as Dasein’s being is the openness that is world)
being itself might arrive
(in the form of the relations of significance whereby entities have being- as this-or-that).
The Turn. One can notice a certain shift within Heidegger’s work beginning around 1930, both in his style and in the topics he addresses. As regards style, some have claimed that his language becomes more abstruse and poetic, and his thinking less philosophical than mystical. As regards substance, he seems to introduce new topics like ‘appropriation’ and the ‘history of being’.

The problem is to discern whether these and other shifts count as what Heidegger calls the Turn (die Kehre). Some argue that beginning in the 1930s Heidegger radically changed his approach and perhaps even his central topic. The early Heidegger, so the argument goes, had understood being itself (that is, disclosure-as-such) from the standpoint of Dasein, whereas the later Heidegger understands Dasein from the standpoint of being itself. But to the contrary it is clear that even the early Heidegger understood Dasein only from the standpoint of being itself.

Heidegger clarifies matters by distinguishing between (1) the Turn and (2) the ‘change in thinking’ that the Turn demands, both of which are to be kept distinct from (3) the various shifts in form and focus that his philosophy underwent in the 1930s. The point is that, properly speaking, the Turn is not a shift in Heidegger’s thinking nor a change in his central topic. The Turn is only a further specification of Ereignis. There are three issues here.

First, the ‘Turn’ is a name for how Ereignis operates. Ereignis is the appropriation of Dasein for the sake of world-disclosure. For Heidegger, this fact stands over against all theories of the self as an autonomous subject that presuppositionlessly (that is, without a prior world-disclosure) posits its objects in meaning. In opposition to that, Ereignis means that Dasein must already be appropriated into world-disclosive absence before anything can be significant at all.

Ereignis also means that Dasein’s appropriation by, or thrownness into, world- disclosive absence is the primary and defining moment in Dasein’s projection of that disclosure. This reciprocity (Gegenschwung) between appropriation/thrownness on the one hand and projection on the other – with the priority going to appropriation/thrownness – constitutes the very structure of Ereignis and is what Heidegger calls the Turn. The upshot of this reciprocity is that Dasein must be already pulled into world-disclosive absence (thrown or appropriated into it) if it is to project (that is, hold open) disclosure at all. In a word, the Turn is Ereignis.

Second, the ‘change in thinking’ refers to the personal conversion that the Turn demands. To become aware of the Turn and to accept it as determining one’s own being is what Heidegger had earlier called ‘resolution’ and what he now describes as ‘a transformation in human being’. This transformation into an authentic self consists in letting one’s own being be defined by the Turn.

Third, the shifts in Heidegger’s work in the 1930s – and especially the development and deepening of his insights into thrownness and appropriation – are just that: shifts and developments within a single, continuing project. Important as they are, they are neither the Turn itself nor the change in personal self-understanding that the Turn requires.

4 Dasein and disclosure

Heidegger calls human being ‘Dasein’, the entity whose being consists in disclosing and understanding being, whether the being of itself or that of other entities. In so far as Dasein’s being is a disclosure of its own being, it is called ‘existence’ or ‘ek- sistence’: self-referential standing-out-unto-itself. Dasein’s very being consists in being related, with understanding and concern, to itself.

But Dasein is not just related to itself. Existence occurs only as being-in-the-world; that is, the openness of human being to itself entails the openness of the world for other entities. One of Heidegger’s neologisms for ‘openness’ is ‘the there’ (das Da), which he uses in two interrelated senses. First, human being is its own ‘there’: as a thrown project, existence sustains its own openness to itself. And second, in so doing, human being also makes possible the world’s openness as the ‘there’ for other entities. Human being’s self-disclosure makes possible the disclosure of other entities.

Heidegger calls human being in both these capacities ‘being-the-there’ – Dasein, or sometimes Da-sein when it refers to the second capacity. In ordinary German Dasein means existence in the usual sense: being there in space and time as contrasted with not being at all. However, in Heidegger’s usage Dasein means being disclosive of something (whether that be oneself or another entity) in its being. In a word, Dasein is disclosive. And since human being is radically finite, disclosure is radically finite.

The Greek word for disclosure is alēthēia, a term composed of the privative prefix a- (un- or dis-) and the root lēthē (hiddenness or closure). Heidegger finds the finitude of dis-closure inscribed in the word a-lēthēia. To disclose something is to momentarily rescue it from (a-) some prior unavailability (lēthē), and to hold it for a while in presence.

Heidegger discusses three levels of disclosure, ranging from the original to the derivative, each of which involves Dasein: (1) disclosure-as-such, (2) the disclosedness of entities in their being, and (3) disclosure in propositional statements. Heidegger’s chief interest is in the first. There, disclosure/alēthēia is the original occurrence that issues in meaningful presence (being).

Heidegger argues that levels 1 and 2 are distinct but inseparable and, taken together, make possible level 3. The word ‘truth’ properly applies only at the third level, where it is a property of statements that correctly represent complex states of affairs. Therefore, to the question ‘What is the essence of truth?’ – that is, ‘What makes the truth of propositions possible at level 3?’ – Heidegger answers: Proximally, the disclosure of entities in their being (level 2); and ultimately, disclosure-as-such (level 1). His argument unfolds as follows.

Level 1. Disclosure-as-such is the very opening-up of the field of significance. It is the engendering and sustaining of world on the basis of Dasein’s becoming-absent. In so far as it marks the birth of significance and the genesis of being, disclosure-as-such or world-disclosure is the reason why any specific entity can have meaningful presence at all.

There are three corollaries. First, the disclosure of world never happens except in Dasein’s being; indeed, without Dasein, there is no openness at all. The engendering and sustaining of the dynamic relations that constitute the very possibility of significance occurs only as long as Dasein exists as mortal becoming. And conversely, wherever there is Dasein, there is world. Second, disclosure-as-such never happens apart from the disclosedness of entities as being this or that. In speaking of disclosure ‘as such’, Heidegger is naming the originating source and general structure of all possible significance that might accrue to any entity at all. The result of disclosure-as- such is the fact that referral-to-mortal-Dasein (that is, significance) is the basic state of whatever entities happen to show up. Third, disclosure-as-such is always prior to and makes possible concrete human action in any specific world. Such concrete actions run the risk of not being disclosive (that is, being mistaken about the meaning of something). By contrast, world-disclosure is always disclosive in so far as it is the opening-up of the very possibility of significance at all.

Alēthēia/disclosure-as-such – how it comes about, the structure it has, and what it makes possible – is the central topic or ‘thing itself’ of Heidegger’s thought. He sometimes calls it the ‘clearing’ of being. He also calls it ‘being itself’ or ‘being-as- such’ (that is, the very engendering of being). Frequently, and inadequately, he calls it the ‘truth’ of being.

Level 2. What disclosure-as-such makes possible is the pre-predicative availability of entities in their current mode of being. This pre-predicative availability constitutes level 2, the basic, everyday disclosedness of entities as meaningfully present. This disclosedness is always finite, and that entails two things.

First, what disclosure-as-such makes possible is not simply the being of an entity but rather the being of that entity as or as not something: for instance, this stone as not a missile but as a hammer. I know the stone only in terms of one or another of its possibilities: the entity becomes present not fully and immediately but only partially and discursively. Thus the entity’s being is always finite, always a matter of synthesis-and- differentiation: being-as-and-as-not. Second, disclosure-as-such lets an entity be present not in its eternal essence but only in its current meaning in a given situation; moreover, it shows that this specific entity is not the only one that might have this meaning. For example, in the present situation I understand this stone not as a paperweight or a weapon but as a hammer. I also understand it as not the best instrument for the job: a mallet would do better.

Even though it is a matter of synthesis-and-differentiation, this pre-predicative hermeneutical understanding of being requires no thematic articulation, either mental or verbal, and no theoretical knowledge. It usually evidences itself in the mere doing of something. Nevertheless, in a more developed but still pre-predicative moment, such a hermeneutical awareness might evolve into a vague sense of the entity’s being-this-or- that (‘whatness’), being-in-this-way-or-that (‘howness’), and being-available-at-all (‘thatness’). Still later, these vague notions might lose the sense of current meaningfulness and develop, at level 3, into the explicit metaphysical concepts of the essence, modality and existence of the entity.

The second level of disclosure may be expressed in the following thesis: within any given world, to be an entity is to be always already disclosed as something or other. This corresponds to the traditional doctrine of metaphysics concerning a trans-generic (transcendental) characteristic of anything that is: regardless of its kind or species, every entity is intrinsically disclosed in its being (omne ens est verum).

Heidegger argues that while it is based on and is even aware of this second level of disclosure, metaphysics has no explicit understanding of disclosure-as-such or of its source in being-in-the-world. What is more, he claims that the disclosedness of entities-in-their-being (level 2) tends to overlook and obscure the very disclosure-as- such (level 1) that originally makes it possible. He further argues that there is an intrinsic hiddenness about disclosure-as-such, which makes overlooking it virtually inevitable (see §6).

Level 3. Being-in-the-world and the resultant pre-predicative disclosedness of entities as being-thus-and-so make it possible for us to enact the predicative disclosure of entities. At this third level of disclosure we are able to represent correctly to ourselves, in synthetic judgments and declarative sentences, the way things are in the world. A correct synthetic representation of a complex state of affairs (a correct judgment) is ‘true’, that is, disclosive of things just as they present themselves. Such a predicative, apophantic sentence (‘S is P’) is able to be true only because world-disclosure has already presented an entity as significant at all and thus allowed it to be taken as thus and so. This already disclosed entity is the binding norm against which the assertion must measure itself.

At level 3, however, it is also possible to misrepresent things in thought and language, to fail to disclose them just as they present themselves in the world. At level 1 Dasein is always and only disclosive. But with predicative disclosure at level 3 (as analogously with hermeneutical disclosure at level 2) Dasein’s representing of matters in propositional statements may be either disclosive or non-disclosive, either true or false.

One of Heidegger’s reasons for elaborating the levels of disclosure is to demonstrate that science, metaphysics and reason in general, all of which operate at level 3, are grounded in a more original occurrence of disclosure of which they are structurally unaware. This is what he intends by his claim ‘Science does not think’. He does not mean scientists are stupid or their work uninformed, nor is he disparaging reason and its accomplishments. He means that science, by its very nature, is not focused on being-in-the-world, even though being-in-the-world is ultimately responsible for the meaningful presence of the entities against which science measures its propositions.

3 Being-in-the-world and hermeneutics

In Being and Time Heidegger spells out not only the reasons why, but also the ways in which, things are meaningfully present to human being.

Being-in-the-world. In contrast to theories of human being as a self-contained theoretical ego, Heidegger understands human being as always ‘outside’ any supposed immanence, absorbed in social intercourse, practical tasks and its own interests. Evidence for this absorption, he argues, is that human being always finds itself caught up in a mood – that is, ‘tuned in’ to a given set of concerns. The field of such concerns and interests Heidegger calls the ‘world’; and the engagement with those needs and purposes and the things that might fulfil them he calls ‘being-in-the-world’ (or equally ‘care’).

Heidegger’s term ‘world’ does not mean planet earth, or the vast expanse of space and time, or the sum total of things in existence. Rather, ‘world’ means a dynamic set of relations, ultimately ordered to human possibilities, which lends meaning or significance to the things that one deals with – as in the phrase ‘the world of the artist’ or ‘the world of the carpenter’. A human being lives in many such worlds, and they often overlap, but what constitutes their essence – what Heidegger calls the worldhood of all such worlds – is the significance that accrues to things by their relatedness to human interests and possibilities. Although being-in and world can be distinguished, they never occur separately. Any set of meaning-giving relations (world) comes about and remains effective only in so far as human being is engaged with the apposite possibilities (being-in). Being-in holds open and sustains the world.

In Being and Time Heidegger studies the world that he considers closest to human beings: the world of everyday activity. The defining moment of such a world is practical purposes ordered to human concerns – for example, the need to build a house for the sake of shelter. A group of things then gets its significance from the direct or indirect relation of those things to that goal. For example, these specific tools get their significance from their usefulness for clearing the ground, those trees get their significance from being suitable for lumber, these plants from their serviceability as thatch. A dynamic set of such relations (such as ‘useful to’, ‘suitable as’, ‘needed for’), all of which refer things to a human task and ultimately to a human possibility, constitutes a ‘world’ and defines the current significance that certain things (for example, tools, trees and reeds) might have.

The significance of things changes according to the interplay of human interests, the relations that they generate, and the availability of material. For example, given the lack of a mallet, the significance of a stone might be its utility for pounding in a tent peg. The stone gets its current significance as a utensil from the world of the camper: the desire for shelter, the need of something to hammer with, and the availability of only a stone. (When the camper finds a mallet, the stone may well lose its former significance.)

Hermeneutical understanding. Heidegger argues that the world of practical experience is the original locus of the understanding of the being of entities. Understanding entails awareness of certain relations: for example, the awareness of this as that, or of this as for that. The ‘as’ articulates the significance of the thing. In using an implement, one has a practical understanding of the implement’s relation to a task (X as useful for Y). This in turn evidences a practical understanding of the being of the implement: one knows the stone as being useful for pounding in a tent peg. In other words, prior to predicative knowledge, which is expressed in sentences of the type ‘S is P’, human beings already have a pre-theoretical or ‘pre-ontological’ understanding of the being of things (this as being for that).

Since the ‘as’ articulates how something is understood, and since the Greek verb hermeneuein means ‘to make something understandable’, Heidegger calls the ‘as’ that renders things intelligible in practical understanding the ‘hermeneutical as’. This ‘hermeneutical as’ is made possible because human being is a ‘thrown project’, necessarily thrust into possibilities (thrownness) and thereby holding the world open (project).

Hermeneutical understanding – that is, pre-predicatively understanding the ‘hermeneutical as’ by being a thrown project – is the kind of cognition that most befits being-in-the-world. It is the primary way in which humans know the being of things. By contrast, the more detached and objective ‘apophantic’ knowledge that expresses itself in declarative sentences (‘S is P’) is evidence, for Heidegger, of a derivative and flattened-out understanding of being.

Summary. As long as one lives, one is engaged in mortal becoming. This becoming entails having purposes and possibilities. Living into purposes and possibilities is how one has things meaningfully present. The ability to have things meaningfully present by living into possibilities is called being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is structured as a thrown project: holding open the possibility of significance (project) by ineluctably living into possibilities (thrownness). This issues in a pre-predicative, hermeneutical understanding of the being of things. Thus mortal becoming qua being-in-the-world engenders and sustains all possible significance. In another formulation: temporality determines all the ways that things can have meaningful presence. Time is the meaning of all forms of being.

2 Temporality and authenticity

Heidegger was convinced that Western philosophy had misunderstood the nature of being in general and the nature of human being in particular. His life’s work was dedicated to getting it right on both scores.

In his view, the two issues are inextricably linked. To be human is to disclose and understand the being of whatever there is. Correspondingly, the being of an entity is the meaningful presence of that entity within the field of human experience. A proper or improper understanding of human being entails a proper or improper understanding of the being of everything else. In this context ‘human being’ means what Heidegger designates by his technical term ‘Dasein’: not consciousness or subjectivity or rationality, but that distinctive kind of entity (which we ourselves always are) whose being consists in disclosing the being both of itself and of other entities. The being of this entity is called ‘existence’ (see §4).

Heidegger argues that the structure of human being is comprised of three co-equal moments: becoming, alreadiness and presence. (These are usually, and unfortunately, translated as: ‘coming towards itself’, ‘is as having been’ and ‘making-present’.) As a unity, these three moments constitute the essence of human being, which Heidegger calls ‘temporality’: opening an arena of meaningful presence by anticipating one’s own death. Temporality means being present by becoming what one already is.

Becoming. To be human means that one is not a static entity just ‘there’ among other things. Rather, being human is always a process of becoming oneself, living into possibilities, into one’s future. For Heidegger, such becoming is not optional but necessary. He expresses this claim in various co-equal formulas: (1) The essence of human being is ‘existence’ understood as ‘ek-sistence’, an ineluctable ‘standing out’ into concern about one’s own being and into the need to become oneself; (2) the essence of human being is ‘factical’, always already thrust into concernful openness to itself and thus into the ineluctability of self-becoming; and (3) the essence of being human is ‘to be possible’ – not just able, but above all needing, to become oneself.

The ultimate possibility into which one lives is the possibility to end all possibilities: one’s death. Human beings are essentially finite and necessarily mortal, and so one’s becoming is an anticipation of death. Thus, to know oneself as becoming is to know oneself, at least implicitly, as mortal. Heidegger calls this mortal becoming ‘being- unto-death’.

Alreadiness. Human being consists in becoming; and this becoming means becoming what one already is. Here the word ‘already’ means ‘essentially’, ‘necessarily’ or ‘inevitably’. ‘Alreadiness’ (Gewesenheit) names one’s inevitable human essence and specifically one’s mortality. In becoming the finitude and mortality that one already is, one gets whatever presence one has.

Presence. Mortal becoming is the way human being (a) is meaningfully present to itself and (b) renders other entities meaningfully present to itself. To put the two together: things are present to human being in so far as human being is present to itself as mortal becoming. In both cases presence is bound up with absence.

How human being is present to itself. Since mortal becoming means becoming one’s own death, human being appears as disappearing; it is present to itself as becoming absent. To capture this interplay of presence and absence, we call the essence of human being ‘pres-abs-ence’, that is, an incomplete presence that shades off into absence. Pres-abs-ence is a name for what classical philosophy called ‘movement’ in the broad sense: the momentary presence that something has on the basis of its stretch towards the absent.

Pres-abs-ence is an index of finitude. Any entity that appears as disappearing, or that has its current presence by anticipating a future state, has its being not as full self- presence but as finite pres-abs-ence. The movement towards death that defines human being is what Heidegger calls ‘temporality’. The quotation marks indicate that ‘temporality’ does not refer to chronological succession but rather means having one’s being as the movement of finite mortal becoming.

How other things are present to human being. Other entities are meaningfully present to human being in so far as human being is temporal, that is, always anticipating its own absence. Hence the meaningful presence of things is also temporal or pres-abs-ent – always partial, incomplete and entailing an absence of its own. Not only is human being temporal but the presence of things to human being is also temporal in its own right.

All of Heidegger’s work argues for an intrinsic link between the temporality or pres-abs-ence that defines human being and the temporality or pres-abs-ence that characterizes the meaningful presence of things. But the meaningful presence of things is what Heidegger means by being. Therefore, Heidegger’s central thesis is this: as far as human experience goes, all modes of being are temporal. The meaningful presence of things is always imperfect, incomplete, pres-abs-ential. The meaning of being is time.

Heidegger argues that this crucial state of affairs – finite human being as an awareness of the finitude of all modes of being – is overlooked and forgotten both in everyday experience and in philosophy itself. Therefore, his work discusses how one can recover this forgotten state of affairs on both of those levels.

As regards everyday life, Heidegger describes how one might recall this central but forgotten fact and make it one’s own again. The act of reappropriating one’s own essence – of achieving a personal and concrete grasp of oneself as finite – is called ‘resolution’ (in other translations, ‘resoluteness’ or ‘resolve’). This personal conversion entails becoming clear about the intrinsic finitude of one’s own being, and then choosing to accept and to be that finitude.

Awareness of one’s finitude. Human being is always already the process of mortal becoming. However, one is usually so absorbed in the things one encounters (‘fallenness’) that one forgets the becoming that makes such encounters possible. It takes a peculiar kind of experience, more of a mood than a detached cognition, to wake one up to one’s finitude. Heidegger argues that such an awakening comes about in special ‘basic moods’ (dread, boredom, wonder and so on) in which one experiences not things but that which is not-a-thing or ‘no-thing’. Each of these basic moods reveals, in its own particular way, the absential dimension of one’s pres-abs-ence.

Heidegger often uses charged metaphors to discuss this experience. For example, he describes dread as a ‘call of conscience’, where ‘conscience’ means not a moral faculty but the heretofore dormant, and now awakening, awareness of one’s finite nature. What this call of conscience reveals is that one is ‘guilty’, not of some moral fault but of an ontological defect: the fact of being intrinsically incomplete and on the way to absence. The call of conscience is a call to understand and accept this ‘guilt’.

Choosing one’s finitude. One may choose either to heed or to ignore this call of conscience. To heed and accept it means to acknowledge oneself as a mortal process of pres-abs-ence and to live accordingly. In that case, one recuperates one’s essence and thus attains ‘authenticity’ by becoming one’s proper (or ‘authentic’) self. To ignore or refuse the call does not mean to cease being finite and mortal but rather to live according to an improper (inauthentic or ‘fallen’) self-understanding. Only the proper or authentic understanding of oneself as finite admits one to the concrete, experiential understanding that all forms of being, all ways that things can be meaningfully present, are themselves finite.

Summary. The essence of human being is temporality, that is, mortal becoming or pres- abs-ence. To overlook mortal becoming is to live an inauthentic temporality and to be a fallen self. But to acknowledge and choose one’s mortal becoming in the act of resolution is to live an authentic temporality and selfhood. It means achieving presence (both the presence of oneself and that of other entities) by truly becoming what one already is. This recuperation of one’s own finite being can lead to the understanding that what conditions all modes of being is finitude: the very meaning of being is time.