MAKING SENSE OF HEIDEGGER: A PARADIGM SHIFT Thomas Sheehan Stanford University April 2012

What, after all, was Heideggers philosophy about? The usual answer has been being (das Sein), at least since the early 1960s when William J. Richardson and Otto Pggeler crafted the still dominant paradigm for understanding Heidegger. But the uncertainty of Heidegger scholarship is nowhere more evident than with this key term. Heidegger begins Being and Time with the famous citation from The Sophist, where the Eleatic Stranger tells Theaetetus and Theodorus: Obviously you have long known (what you mean when you say being). But we who used to think we knew, are now confused (244a) We might say much the same thing about Heidegger. He may have known what he meant by being but he did not always make that clear to the rest of us. In fact, we might make our own the plea that is enunciated in the next sentence of The Sophist: Teach us, then, so that we wont imagine we understand what you say when in fact we dont. Was Heideggers main topic being? Or the meaning of being? Or was it the clearing, which Heidegger called the Ur-phnomen? Or was it Ereignis, the Es that gives both being and time? Or was it ? Or perhaps the that Heidegger once found in ? Are all of these the same thing, seen from different points of view, or are they different phenomena? And if different, what distinguishes them? Confusion reigns at the heart of the Heideggerian enterprise, and the fetishization of being that has dominated this way of philosophizing for the last fifty years can no longer solve the problem. Before even venturing into this or that particular topic within Heideggers corpus, we must first clarify what his thought was ultimately about: What is the thing itself? I will argue that to attain such clarity, a radical paradigm shift is required, one that takes seriously Heideggers phenomenological reduction and, as a consequence, reads Sein in terms of Anwesen, the meaningful presence of something to human being. But then in turn, Heideggers project shifts from the centrality of being as meaningful presence to what is responsible for such meaningful presence from Anwesen to Anwesenlassen. Once we have worked out what the latter

means, we will be in a position to ask the question about the core of Heideggers thought. My thesis here is that the language of being (Sein) has run its course and hit the wall. *** Heidegger never understood being as the raw existence of things out there in space and time. That was what he called existentia in the sense of Vorhandensein, the ontological substance of things when they are considered apart from human involvement with them which is to say, before the enactment of a phenomenological reduction. It is wrong to think that Heidegger refused the phenomenological reduction and instead conducted his early investigations of the everyday world within the natural attitude. Husserl, however, thought that was the case, and he always accused Heidegger of not understanding the phenomenological reduction. Heidegger himself gave Husserl reason enough to doubt his protg when in October of 1927 Heidegger drafted significant sections for Husserls eventual Encyclopaedia Britannica Article, specifically on the idea of phenomenology and the method of pure psychology (including the phenomenological reduction).1 In that draft he argued that the topic proper to phenomenology was being (das Sein), but always in correlation with some form of human being. When that correlation is explicitated by way of a phenomenological reduction, the things out there in the world become phenomena: the perceived of a perception, the loved of an act of love, the judged of an act of judgment that is, always in relation to a constituting act by human being. In his own work, of course, Heidegger focused the reduction on practical action; and there the phenomena are the things we engage with in our practical dealings (Umgang). A few weeks after composing that draft for Husserl, Heidegger clarified the phenomenological reduction in his course Grundprobleme der Phnomenologie (autumn, 1927), and contrasted his own understanding of the reduction with that of Husserl. For Husserl, he said, it means leading things back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. On the other hand: For us phenomenological reduction means leading the phenomenological
1

Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with

Heidegger (1927-1931), ed. and trans. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 107-116 (= Husserliana IX, 256-263).

vision back from the apprehension of a being [Seiende], whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being [Sein] of the being (understanding the being in terms of the way it is disclosed).2 Here it almost seems as if being stands on its own, with no relation to human being. But not so. It is the very nature of the phenomenological reduction to explicitly draw the reflective philosopher into the correlation between the and the that lets it be seen; and that entails understanding the being of the phenomenon as the meaningful presence of the phenomenon to the mind (not just to the senses) of the phenomenologist. In other words, a reduction of a Seiendes to its Sein is a reduction of the thing to a meaningful Anwesen that always includes human being as its dative. In fact Heidegger himself, especially in his later work, shied away from the word Sein. I no longer like to use the world being, he said.3 The reason: Being remains only the provisional word. Consider the fact that being was originally called presence [Anwesen] in the sense of a things staying-here-before-us in unconcealment [that is, in meaning].4 Therefore, as long as we take the word in the broad sense in which Heidegger meant it as encompassing intelligent activities (minding) of all sorts: practical, theoretical, aesthetic, and so on we may say that the Anwesen which is the outcome of the phenomenological reduction is a things presence to mind and never its out-there-ness apart from a human engagement. Of course neither Husserl nor Heidegger doubt that things remain out there after the reduction. Husserl explicitly said that we must not overlook the most essential thing of all, namely that even after the purifying epoch, perception still remains perception of this house, indeed, of this house with the accepted status of actually existing.5

2 3 4 5

GA 24: 29.15-18 = 21.25-30. GA 15: 20.8-9 = 8.34-35. GA 7: 234.13-17 = 78.21-24: her-vor-whren in die Unverborgenheit. Husserl, op. cit., 91 (= Husserliana IX, 243.30-34).

And Heidegger added that the thing in nature shows up in the reducing gaze that focuses on the act of perceiving, because this perceiving is essentially a perceiving of the thing. The thing belongs to the perceiving as its perceived.6 For Heidegger as well as for Husserl, things are still out-there (vorhanden) after the reduction; its just that such things are not philosophically interesting. The subject matter of a phenomenological inquiry is things only insofar as we are in some way meaningfully engaged with them. After the phenomenological reduction, the only philosophical problems one may properly pursue are those of sense and meaning, i.e., hermeneutical questions. In its most basic form, the phenomenological reduction is a matter of learning to stand thematically where we always already stand existentially. The upshot of Heideggers phenomenological reduction is that we engage with things from a contextualized, first-person embodied-experiential stance that inevitably makes sense of things. Even if I get information about a thing from someone else, it is still I who get that information in the first person. (This is the unavoidable truth of Descartes ego cogito.) And no matter where I get that information from, I cannot not make sense of it. (In other words, human being is pan-hermeneutical.) This firstperson experiential sense-making is where I stand prior to any move into the theoretical or the practical. *** Within Heideggerian circles this reading of being as the meaningfulness of things which is the heart of the paradigm shift I am proposing here may be a scandalum piis auribus; however, the textual evidence strongly supports it. For example, in the War Emergency Semester of 1919 he declared that what we first encounter and always live with is the meaningful (das Bedeutsame) that is what is first and immediately given to us without some mental detour through a conceptual grasp of the thing. When we live in the Umwelt, everything comes at us loaded with meaning, all over the place

Husserl, op. cit., 113 (= Husserliana IX, 261.6-9).

and all the time.7 Which means: If beings are the meaningful (das Bedeutsame), then their being is their meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit). This position is especially pronounced in Heideggers lectures and writings of 1924. For example, his course on Aristotle: For a long time now, I have been designating the ontological character of human existence as meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit). This ontological character is the primary one in which we encounter the world.8 Or in reading through his essay The Concept of Time, one can hardly take a step without stumbling over the word Bedeutsamkeit. The lived world is present not as a thing or object, but as meaningfulness.9 We have now identified the basic character of encountering the world: meaningfulness.10 We identify meaningfulness as the worlds primary ontological characteristic.11 The following year, Heidegger again signaled the centrality of meaning to human being in his course on logic: Because the very nature of human being is to make sense of things, human being lives in meanings and can express itself in and as meanings.12 Finally, in Being and Time Heidegger designated the very structure of world (Welt) as

7 8 9

GA 56/57: 73.1-5 = 61.24-8. GA 18: 300.15-18 = 203.27-29. GA 64: 65.18-19 = 55.15-16. Ibid. 23.32-33= 17.25-26. Ibid.: 24.2-3 = 17.30-31. Cf. also ibid. 25.13-14 = 19.1-2: . . . the primary character of encountering the GA 21: 151.4-5 = 127.30-32.

10 11

world meaningfulness.
12

meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit)13 and referred to Division One of Being and Time as his doctrine of meaning (Bedeutungslehre).14 The center of that doctrine is the phenomenology of being-in-the-world. But since the essence of world is meaningfulness, we should interpret In-derWelt-sein as In-der-Bedeutsamkeit-sein. The very structure of human being consists in its a priori engagement with meaning.15 Absent that engagement, we cease to exist. When we are no longer related to meaning, we are dead. This entails that we are ineluctably hermeneutical: it is our only way to be. We necessarily make some sense of everything we meet, and if we cannot make any sense at all of something, not even interrogative sense (What is this?), we simply cannot meet it. There can be no encounter with things (much less an understanding of the existentia of things) that lies outside our hermeneutical horizon of possible Anwesen. And whatever we make sense of must first of all be in the senses an Aristotelian principle that Heidegger ties to Geworfenheit and Befindlichkeit. Heidegger insists that meaning which is always discursive is confined to the realm of the human. Having to make sense of things is an index of finitude.16 Recall Heideggers theory of meaning and its corollary, his theory of world. How do things become meaningful? In Being and Time Heidegger writes: Meaning is an existentiale of human being, not a property attaching to things. . . . Human being alone has meaning.17 But at the same time: When things within the world are discovered with the being of man that is, when they come to be understood we say they have meaning.18
13 14 15

SZ, 87.17-18 = 120.23, and 334.33-34 = 384.1. SZ, 166.2-10 = 209.18-28; cf. GA 64: 24.4-7 = 17.34-35. Geworfener Entwurf is what Heidegger designates as [der] Bezug zum Seins [i.e., zur Anwesen]: GA GA 3: 280.30-31 = 197.24-25. SZ, 151.34-35 = 193.11-13. Ibid., 151.22-24 = 192.35-37. The text continues: But strictly speaking what is understood is not the

48: 283.1.
16 17 18

That is, we alone have the ability to make sense of things, and we do so by connecting a possibility of ourselves (a human beings, they make sense. And world is what brings that about:
________________________________________________________________________________________________ THE WORLD AS A REALM OF MEANINGFULNESS things things things things HUMAN CONCERNS HUMAN POSSIBILITIES

______________________________________________________________________________________________

Heidegger says, As existing, human being is its world.19 That is, the world is ourselves writ large as the matrix of intelligibility. It is our thrown-openness (geworfener Entwurf) turned into a set of meaning-giving relations. The world consists of lines of referral to our concerns (represented by the arrows in the diagram above), referrals such as this-as-useful-for-that. All these lines of referral lead to our ultimate concern of staying alive. We are a hermeneutical field of force, like a magnet that draws things together into unities of meaning20 insofar as these things are connected with a possibility of ourselves as the final point of reference. Anything outside the scope of our spatio-temporal hermeneutical ken does not make sense. *** The previous sections have offered several interconnected arguments for why Sein in Heideggers sense of the term is best understood as Anwesen, the meaningful presence of something to human understanding. I will now argue that this Sein even in its phenomenological transformation as Anwesen is not the ultimate concern of Heideggers work. It is obvious that Heideggers fundamental topic was not the being of metaphysics (Vorhandensein). But it is

meaning but the entity, or alternatively being. Meaning is where the intelligibility of something is maintained. The phrase alternatively being refers to when being (Sein) rather than beings is the focus of the question.
19 20

SZ 364.34-35 = 416.8: Dieses [= das Dasein] ist existierend seine Welt. GA 9: 279.1-4 = 213.10-12.

equally clear that the thing itself of his work was not Sein-as-Anwesen.21 The full textual evidence makes it clear that Heideggers ultimate focus was not on being or presence but rather on what allows for that presence, the source (Herkunft) of being as the meaningfulness of things.22 His formal term for that source was Anwesenlassen, where Anwesen stands for the presence-to-mind of things, and where the underscored lassen refers to what allows for or makes possible that Anwesen. And Sein was not that source. In 1969 Heidegger said, If the emphasis is on the words to allow for presence, there is no longer room even for the word being.23 Now we can see that, in order to carry out his project, Heidegger had to take three steps away from metaphysics. The first step (which was necessary but not sufficient) consisted in submitting traditional ontology to a phenomenological reduction, thereby transforming the metaphysical notion of being as the existence of things apart from us into the phenomenological understanding of being as the meaningful presence of things to us. But establishing the fact that being means phenomenological Anwesen was not Heideggers final concern. Taking that first step means still having one foot stuck in metaphysics and its guiding issue, the being of beings, only now reformulated in a phenomenological mode as the meaningfulness of the meaningful. At best this step reaches only the antechamber of Heideggers fundamental question or Grundfrage. More important is the second step, which entails reaching through meaning and asking: Granted that Sein reduces to the Anwesen of things, what lets Anwesen meaningfulness come about at all? This step is the leap into a new and fundamental question, heretofore unasked in Western philosophy. Without appealing to a creative deity, or a transcendental ego, or some crude notion of causality, what lets meaning come about? Heidegger answered that question with a set of metaphors. If we are to encounter things as
21

Compare GA 8: 99.18-19 = 95.27-28 (dem zu-Denkenden, dem Sein) with GA 14: 50.2-3 = 41.4-5 (das

Sein . . .nicht mehr das eigens zu Denkende). But compare as well GA 81: 209.8.: Das Seyn ist die Er-eignung, die, was vormals Sein geheien. . .).
22

GA 6:2: 304.11 = Nietzsche IV, 201.13-15. Herkunft von Anwesen. GA 2: 53.34-35, Das Anwesen aus Anwesenlassen: GA 14: 45.29-30 = 37.5-6; no longer room: GA 15: 365.17-18 = 60.9-10. Cf. Zollikon

dieser Herkunft.
23

228.8-9 = 182.10-12 (Anwesen. . .verschiedet.)

meaningfully present, he said, there must be something prior, like an ur-openness (das Offene) that things must traverse in order to become present to us;24 or something analogous to a clearing in the forest (Lichtung) within which they can appear to us as this or that;25 or an area spread out before us (die Gegend) in which we can meet and make sense of things.26 He also designates this openness as the disclosedness of meaning to man (die Wahrheit des Seins). In addition he calls it Sein selbst or Sein als solches or even Seyn.27 In an important conversation with Jean Beaufret, Heidegger finally announced in plain terms that what he meant by the clearing was intelligibility: In Being and Time the title for this question was: the question about the meaning of being (SZ, p. 1). And to put it briefly, meaning is the realm of unhiddenness, the realm of clearing (intelligibility). Within this intelligibility, all understanding is possible, i.e., all takingsomething-as (= bringing something into the open).28 Note the distinction between the second and the third sentence above. In the second sentence the clearing is spoken of as intelligibility (Verstndlichkeit) as such. The third sentence, however, speaks of understanding a particular thing by taking it as something, e.g., taking (or projecting) a rock as a hammer. The former, the clearing, is what makes possible the understanding of something, that is, rendering the thing intellectually accessible by bringing it into the open as this or that. Hence, we may clarify the relation between these two sentences by saying that the clearing/intelligibility is what makes it possible for us to understand things in terms of their various meanings. The clearing is the openness of mind () in the broad sense of the ability to understand at all. As the early Heidegger put it: The primary openness of man is
24

GA 15: 401.24-27: Beide, Vernehmen sowohl als auch Anwesen bedrfen . . . eines Freien und Offenen,

innerhalb dessen sie einander angehen. Cf. GA 48, 177.25-8: Wir meinen, ein Seiendes werde eben dadurch zugnglich, da ein Ich als Subjekt fr ein Subjekt vorstellt. Als ob nicht hierzu vorher schon ein Offenes sein mte, innerhalb dessen Offenheit etwas als Objekt fr ein Subjekt zugnglich werden und die Zugnglichkeit selbst noch als erfahrbare durchfahren werden kann.
25

GA 14: 80.8 = 65.4. Heidegger also equates the clearing with world die Lichtung des Seins, und nur
GA 77: 114.12-13 = 74.10.

sie ist Welt GA 9: 326.15-16.

26 27 28

On the equivalence of Sein als Sein and Seyn: GA 11: 148.35-36 = Richardson, xvii.4-5. GA 16: 424.18-22.

grounded in .29 And: The disclosure of man as being-in-the-world is characterized by .30 Only on the basis of ourselves as this ur-openness do we in fact understand x in terms of its meaning as y. But Heidegger also equates the clearing with being as such, which he takes to be the same as Seyn. So, with the clearing have we arrived at the focal topic of all Heideggers work? First of all, in the phrase being as such what does the as such add to being as the phenomenological presence of things? Being as such is only a way of saying being in its essence, where essence refers to the source and explanation (the and ) of all forms of being, understood as phenomenological presence. Since being is always the presence of things to us, being as such does not refer to some different and higher form of being, a phenomenon that stands off on its own. As the source of all forms of intelligible presence, being as such is simply a heuristic term that stands in for whatever makes possible the meaningful presence of all we encounter. Thus being as such names a question, not an answer. So again we ask: When we have reached the openness, or the clearing, or being as such, or Seyn, have we finally arrived at the end of Heideggers quest? The answer is both yes and no but finally no. Yes, with the clearing we have arrived at Heideggers basic topic but only as the subject matter of a new question. The inquiry does not stop here because the clearing is only the fragwrdigste, the phenomenon most worthy of being questioned.31 The open clearing is only das Befragte, i.e., merely the subject matter of Heideggers final and most fundamental question. Recall what Being and Time identifies as the three moments of any question: the Befragte, the Gefragte, and the Erfragte respectively: (1) the subject matter, (2) ones viewpoint on that subject matter, and (3) the answer being sought.32

29 30

GA 18: 326.7-8 = 220.26: Die primr Aufgeschlossenheit des Menschen ist gegrndet im . Ibid. 326.12-4 = 220.30-2: Die Entdecktheit des Seins des Menschen als In-der-Welt-sein ist durch den GA 45: 114.8 = 100.14; GA 48: 282.30-32. SZ 5.7-17 = 24.14-27.

charakteriziert.
31 32

1. The field or das Befragte is what medieval scholasticism called the obiectum materiale quod, i.e., the subject matter under investigation. 2. The focus on that field (das Gefragte) is what the medievals called the obiectum formale quo, the specific optic through which one views the material object. Das Gefragte is the question put to the subject matter. 3. The final goal of the inquiry, das Erfragte, is the answer the philosopher seeks to obtain by bringing the questions formal focus to bear on the material object. It is the heuristic X standing for the not-yet-known tobe-known. Now let us apply these three concepts to Heideggers own later work, where the schema unfolds as follows: 1. The subject matter of investigation is phenomenological being: Sein or Anwesen as the meaningful presence of things to understanding. 2. The focus on that field, the question that is put to such Anwesen, is: What makes it possible? 3. The outcome of the inquiry, the answer to that question, is primal openness, the clearing as the possibility of meaningful mediation. Here, I believe, is where most Heideggerians stop. But if we stop at this point, we have not gone far enough in our search for the thing itself. In one sense it may seem we have gone far enough. Heidegger calls the clearing the ur-phenomenon and identifies it with primal . But we are given pause by the fact that the pre-Socratic philosophers also knew of the clearing and also identified it with primal . Parmenides, for example, spoke of the untrembling heart of well-rounded [] (Fragment 1, 30). In a sense, then, getting only as far as the clearing or Sein selbst means getting no further than the pre-Socratics did. They knew of the clearing at least well enough to name it; however, they never questioned it as such, that is, for its source, for what is responsible for it.33 And if we do not raise that question, we remain merely at the same level as the pre-Socratics. So again: with the clearing or Seyn have we gone far enough? Heidegger did not think so. In the last lines of his lecture The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking, in which he
33

GA 45: 112.8-10 = 98.27-29.

discusses the clearing at some length, Heidegger poses one further question, the final question: Whence and how is the clearing given?34 Elsewhere he asks the same basic question in different terms: How does Seyn come about?35 How does Anwesen come about?36 Or yet again, the final question concerns whence and how there is such a thing as uropenness.37 These questions, taken as a unity form the true Grundfrage, which pushes through the clearing to its source. So we need to take a third and final step. Step one, we recall, was to reduce metaphysical Sein to phenomenological Anwesen. Step two was to ask what makes Anwesen possible, and the answer was the clearing as our uropenness. Now step three asks for what makes the open or clearing possible. Thus, in its final iteration, the three moments of Heideggers fundamental question look like this: The Befragte of the investigation is the clearing itself. The Gefragte of the investigation is the question: What is the source of the clearing? The Erfragte or outcome of the inquiry is that Ereignis makes the clearing possible. But what does Ereignis mean? This brings us to the thing itself of Heideggers thought. ***
34 35

GA 14: 90.3-4 = 73.3: Woher und wie gibt es die Lichtung? GA 65: 78.22 = 54.35. Wie west das Seyn? Cf. GA 66: 420.10 = 371.15: [die Frage] nach der Wahrheit GA 15: 405.30: Wo und wie west anwesen an? GA14: 46.5 = 37.14-15: von woher und wie es das Offene gibt.

des Seyns und ihrer Grndung im Da-sein.

36 37

Ereignis is the appropriation of human being to intelligibility as such. It is the later Heideggers term for what he earlier called Geworfenheit, i.e., the human beings thrownness into the meaning-process. In his Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger straightforwardly declares the equivalence of these two terms. For example: geworfener. . . d.h. er-eignet: thrown, i.e., appropriated;38 das Dasein ist geworfen, ereignet: man is thrown or appropriated;39 die Er-eignung, das Geworfenwerden: the appropriating, that is, mans being thrown.40 And so on.41 I prefer to use the early language of thrownness-without-a-thrower rather than speaking of the appropriation of human being, lest the latter invoke and eventually hypostasize a who or what that does the appropriating. What we are thrown into is the condition of Zu-sein, having to constantly become in order to stay alive. Our actuality is to be thrown into ourselves as possibility, as still to be achieved, as open in the radical sense of never arriving at full self-presence. Human being is ever in movement towards more of itself (or less, as the case may be). Here Heidegger draws upon Aristotles definition of movement as (in Latin actus imperfectus), i.e., the anticipation of a fulfillment that, in our case, we shall never achieve.42 To adapt Augustines
38 39 40 41

GA 65: 239.5 = 169.12. Ibid.: 304.8 = 214.22. Ibid.: 34.9 = 24.32. Taking SZ 325.37 = 373.14-15 with GA 65: 322.7-8 = 226.13-14: bernahme der Geworfenheit = ber-

nahme der Er-eignung: taking over ones thrownness is the same as taking over ones appropriation. GA 65, 239.7-9 = 169.14: Geworfenheit und damit die Zugehrigkeit zum Seyn. Ibid. 320.16-17 = 225.5-6: bernahme der Zugehrigkeit in die Wahrheit des Seins. See also GA 9, 377 note d = 286 note d: Geworfenheit und Ereignis.
42

Metaphysics III 2, 201b 32: , . It seems that movement

is a kind of fulfillment, but an incomplete one. Cf. Motus est actus imperfectus: Bonaventure, Commentaria in Quatuor Libros Sententiarum, Part I, distinction 37, Part II, article 1, question 2, no. 2. Cf. GA 31: 58.6-8 = 40.33-34: Wo umgekehrt das Wesen von Bewegung zum Problem gemacht wird, da hlt sich das Fragen in der nchste Nhe der Frage nach dem Sein.

prayer to Heideggers existential vision, we might say: Inquietum est cor nostrum our very being is ever in movement but without the donec requiescat in te, without any final rest either in itself or in the divine. The best that the human being can do is to existentielly become its existential becoming, that is, to personally and decisively assume its own thrown-open-ness. While ever incomplete, i.e., never immediately closed in on ourselves, we still can become whole in our incompleteness by taking over that incompleteness in an act of resolve. Our inescapable movement entails being ever thrown-open, or as Heidegger puts it, stretched out (erstreckt) beyond ourselves while still remaining ourselves.43 Heidegger describes this movement as a self-excess that never loses itself in German, a fortnehmende Zukehr, i.e., a being carried away into possibility (fortnehmende), that is always returning to itself (Zukehr), in the sense of always remaining with itself.44 In a phrase, we are an ec-centric self, an incompletely self-present aheadness-in-possibility. As Heidegger says: This being-ahead-of-oneself as a returning [Sich-vorweg-sein als Zurckkommen] is, if I may put it this way, a peculiar kind of movement that existence itself constantly makes.45 For its part, this thrown-aheadness is the thrown-open space of human possibility. In turn this thrown-open space discloses the possibilities of whatever we may encounter, such that we can take the thing we meet in terms of its own possibilities as related to us. The medium into which we are thrown is open-ended possibility, and this same medium mediates things to their meanings in light of their relation to us. In Heideggerese: Our thrown-openness discloses the being of things. In other words, the openness of thrown-openness is the clearing, the field within which the meaning of things can discursively emerge. And the thrownness of thrown-openness means that

43

Re erstreckt and Erstreckung: SZ 374.22-23 = 426.27-29. Re beyond itself while never losing itself: GA GA 29/30: 527. 35 = 363.15-16. Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, 14, 2 ad 1: Redire ad

29/30: 343.4 = 235.24-25 (Weg-von-sich) and 342.19 = 235.9 (bei sich selbst einbehalten).
44

essentiam suam nihil aliud est quam rem subsistere in se ipsum. Aquinas here draws on Proclus, The Elements of Theology, proposition 83: . All that is capable of self-knowledge is capable of completely returning to itself.
45

GA 21: 147.23-26 = 124.19-20. Cf. GA 3: 189.19-20 = 132.29-30: Von-sich-aus-hin-zu . . ..

we do not generate this openness on our own initiative but rather find ourselves a priori condemned to sustaining (ausstehen) the open.46 Being-thrown-open determines and defines us, it is our raison dtre, and in that sense it grants us our existence as the clearing.47 But there is another side to the story: without thrown human being, there is no clearing.48 The clearing is human being in its thrown-open essence.49 To summarize: Our thrownness into becoming is our a priori thrown-openness, and that thrown-openness is the clearing. Geworfenheit i.e., Ereignis is what is responsible for the clearing. So (step one) we have phenomenologically reduced metaphysical being to phenomenological meaning; then (step two) we followed phenomenological meaning back to the clearing as ur-openness; and finally (step three) we traced that ur-openness back to thrownness. To state the three steps in German: first, from Sein to Anwesen; second: from Anwesen to Lichtung; and third, from Lichtung to Geworfenheit / Ereignis i.e., to thrown or appropriated Dasein. ***

The thrown-openness that enables all meaningfulness of things is, Heidegger says, intrinsically hidden. (It would be an error, of course, to say that the clearing hides itself, as if it exercised quasi-personal agency upon itself.) By this intrinsic hiddenness Heidegger means two things. (1) As the ultimate condition of the possibility of all signification, the thrown-open clearing must be presumed in every effort to make sense of something. (2) But therefore any attempt to make sense of the clearing itself entails the prior utilization of it, and thus constitutes a

46

With sustain I translate Heideggers (1) Entwurf als Offenhalten, projection as holding-open/sustaining, (2) GA 16, 631.31 = 221.31.: ... insofern die Lichtung erst das Dasein ist, das heit es als ein solches GA 45: 212.10-11 = 179.29-30: Wre der Mensch nicht seiend, dann knnte auch diese Lichtung nicht GA 15, 415.10-3: Es gilt, das Da-sein in dem Sinne zu erfahren, da der Mensch das Da, d.h. die

ausstehen as at GA 9: 332.19 = 253.14, and in the sense of ausstehend at GA 65: 35.6-7 = 25.20.
47

gewhrt.
48

geschehen.
49

Offenheit des Seins fr ihn, selbst ist, indem er es bernimmt, sie zu bewahren und bewahrend zu entfalten. (Vgl. Sein und Zeit, S. 132f.).

petitio principii, presuming what one is trying to ground.50 In that sense, thrown-openness as the source of intelligibility is the mystery (Geheimnis), the ultimate factum, the final ohne Warum, behind which one cannot go. In the words of Albert Einstein, the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.51 That is, everything is comprehensible except the fact of its comprehensibility. In Heideggers readings of Hlderlin, the hidden or mysterious ur-openness that is the clearing is equated with nature (), not in a naturalistic sense but rather a phenomenological one: an emerging and arising, a self-opening, the very clearing of the open, the rising up of the clearing.52 He also uses Hlderlins term the Holy (das Heilige) as a name for the clearing that we must always presuppose in all our actions. Nature is . . . prior to and above everything, It is the antecedent in two senses: It is the oldest of every former thing, and always the youngest of subsequent things. [. . . ] What is ever antecedent is the holy; for as the primordial, it remains unbroken and whole [heil] in itself. By virtue of its all-presence this originary wholeness gives a gift to everything that is real: it confers on it the grace of its own abiding presence.53 This unsurpassable, ever earlier openness, which is of the essence of human being, gathers everything isolated together into a single presence and mediates to each thing its appearing. Immediate all-presence is the mediator for everything mediated, that is, for the mediate. The immediate is itself never something mediate; on the other hand, the immediate, strictly speaking, is the mediating, i.e., the possibility for the mediatable to be mediated [die Mittelbarkeit des Mittelbaren],
50 51

Aristotle, Prior Analytics II, 16, 68b 28ff., and 65a 26f. Albert Einstein, Physics and Reality (1936) reprinted in his Essays in Physics (New York: Philosophical Erlaterungen zu Hlderlins Dichtung, 56.22-26 = 79.8-12. das Hervorgehen und Aufgehen, das Ibid. 63.9-18 = 85.17-25.

Library, 1950), 18.

52

Sichffnen, das Lichten jener Lichtung, der Aufgang der Lichtung.

53

because it renders the mediated possible in its essence.54 *** Thrown-openness, as that which allows for meaningful presence, is, for Heidegger, a fact that is hidden, holy, ever-open, and immediate. It mediates whatever we can meet to its possible meanings and constitutes the ultimate horizon of all accessibility. Its hiddenness and holiness are of the essence of human being (das vergessene Geheimnis des Daseins),55 just as are its everopenness and immediacy. Precisely as thrown into our existence (or, equally, having it granted to us), we are the clearing and thus are condemned to making mediate, discursive and therefore hermeneutical sense of everything we encounter.

END

54 55

Ibid.: 62.12-18 = 20-25. GA 9: 195.23 = 149.28.