Cologne, 21 July 1996
Paul Murphy is not going to let Hoelderlin simply fall by the wayside. He
revealingly (entbergend) quotes Heidegger in 1967: "Physis und techne gehoeren
auf eine geheimnisvolle Weise zusammen", the import being that thinking has to
take on the task of stepping outside the sway of the set-up, since "Physis und
techne" have for us come adrift. Where does this leave poetry? Unfortunately, I
don't have the 1967 Athens lecture handy. But you, Paul, indicate that poetry is
taken down a notch or two, which would at least not be out of line with my
proposal to push back the primacy of poetry -- but apparently for H. in favour
of thinking, whereas I want to shift attention from the standingness of the
standing present to the non-standing, the non-being, the self-concealing itself
and ask what sort of art can/could respond to such a shift of the destiny of
beyng, which is, as Heidegger painstakingly works out throughout the thirties, a
transformation of the essence of truth (Unverborgenheit) itself: no longer the
truth of the essence of truth (of beings as such) but the truth of
self-concealment of beyng itself.
The interesting thing about Heidegger's comments on Stravinsky is that the two
works H. is familiar with, namely, the 'Psalm Symphony' and 'Persephone' based
on poetry by Andre Gide, are composed centrally around texts, texts that belong
for H. to a past world. Heidegger does not seem to have much musical
sensibility. At a public lecture I heard in May in Messkirch (Heidegger's
hometown) at this year's meeting of the Martin Heidegger Gesellschaft, the
speaker (Guenter Seubold, Bonn) related an 'anecdote' to the effect that after
the war H. was given a cassette with music by Webern. He later passed this
cassette on to a student of music studying in Freiburg with the remark that he
could not find any access (Zugang) to it. This anecdote rings true with what I
know otherwise of Heidegger. He knew how to say more about sculpture (Chillida
and his magnificent works), because space and beings coming to stand in it have
a close affinity to his experience of beyng. (Raum is a theme that H. comes back
to several times.)
***
My aside needling Derrida is, I think, a not-too-flippant response to the last
section of his 'Ends of Man' in 'Margins of Philosophy': 'Reading us'. Here
Derrida himself parades as a Nietzschean dancer "actively forgetting being". Is
this a flippant exception in Derrida in an unusual period (1968), or is it his
'true program' announced thus without beating about the bush?
***
Robert Scheetz has recently been worried about Heidegger's thinking as being
(merely?) mythical and metaphorical (which then moves on to Heidegger's
"rhetoric", a term to be employed with care, given its deep metaphysical roots
in Plato and Aristotle).
On metaphor: Heidegger says quite often that there is metaphor only within
metaphysics (e.g. GA9 358, GA52 39ff). "To speak of the house of being is not to
transfer the image of the 'house' to being, but rather, from the appropriately
thought essencing of being, one day we will perhaps be able to think what
'house' and 'living' are." (GA9 358). But Heidegger is by no means the only one
to point to the deeply metaphorical nature of language (cf. Adorno, Nietzsche,
Gustav Gerber 'Sprache als Kunst', etc.) The very idea of the metaphor relies on
a distinction between a 'concrete', 'physical' meaning and a 'transferred',
'meta-physical' meaning. A meaning has to be carried across (meta-phor) from a
'proper' area of denotation to in 'improper' area. But one is pretty hard
pressed to make out such a home base for concrete meaning. (What does 'house'
mean, for example?) All language, by naming beings in their being, is
always-already meta-physical. The idea of metaphor is based on some sort of
ontology of presence-at-hand as the 'proper' meaning of being.
On myth: In metaphysics, logos is demarcated over against myth. Logos is the
faculty of mind, reason, that argues from clear postulates using self-evident
axioms of reason. But once the logic of logic is deconstructed by showing that
the truth of statements is founded in a more originary essencing of truth as
unconcealedness, the distinction between myth and logic loses its purchase. The
positing of the essence of truth itself cannot be proven by logic. It is a
creative historical act; but it is not arbitrary. It can only event-uate as a
response to the event itself. Cf. e.g the following passage:
"Mythos, epos, logos belong together in essence. 'Mythos' and 'logos' only enter
into what falsely appears to be a contradiction much spoken about because that
are the Same in the poetizing and thinking of the Greeks. In the polysemic and
confusing title 'mythology', the words mythos and logos are linked in such a way
that both have lost their original essence. If one tries to understand mythos
with the aid of 'mythology', this it like trying to bail out water with a sieve.
When _wir_ [in this lecture] use the term 'mythical', we think it in the now
de-fined sense: 'mythical' - 'mythos-like' is the revealing and concealing
protectively sheltered in the revealing-concealing word, as which the
fundamental essencing of being appears in the [Greek] beginning. The names
death, night, day, earth, heavens name essential ways/modes/melodies of
revealing and concealing." (GA54 Parmenides S.104)
Myth is not a made-up story of origins but the opening and drafting of an
historical world. Myth is saga, saying. Myth as the saying of beyng reveals a
closeness between thinking and poetizing post-metaphysically. The thoughtful
myth of beyng says, by critically setting out (auseinander-setzen) the texts of
the philsophical tradition, as what beings could come forth into the clearing,
how truth could essence, how the self-concealment of beyng itself could be
thought-of (andenkendes Denken that does not bring forth). (Possibility is
'higher' than reality.)
Heidegger points out (GA54:103) that "The opposite of 'barbarism' for the Greeks
is not 'culture', but standing insistently withing mythos of logos. There has
been 'culture' only since the beginning of modernity..."
Robert Scheetz does not like 'metaphors' such as 'clearing'. But how do you
know, Robert, that you have understood the 'proper' meaning of clearing? Is
common sense to be the arbitrator of such questions? (One is then satisfied with
a so-called dictionary meaning.) If so, then bye-bye thinking. (Where does a
dictionary get its meaning from?)
Paul Murphy quotes Heidegger quoting Hoelderlin:
"Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter."
This verse, it seems to me, goes hand in hand with assertions in 'Origin of the
Work of Art' such as:
"Solches Sagen ist ein Entwerfen des Lichten, darin angesagt wird, als was das
Seiende ins Offene kommt. [...] Das entwerfende Sagen ist Dichtung, die Sage der
Welt und der Erde, die Sage vom Spielraum ihres Streites [...]. Die Dichtung ist
die Sage der Unverborgenheit des Seienden. (Holzwege S.61)
"Such saying is a drafting of what is lightened and cleared in which it is
announced as what beings come into the open. [...] Drafting saying is poetizing,
the saying/saga of world and earth, the saga of the room for play of their
strife [...] Poetizing is the saga of the unconcealedness of beings."
This would be related only to the drafting of the being of beings. The Bleiben,
perduring in such drafting presupposes a sense of being as standing presence,
nicht wahr? If the meaning of beyng itself is shifted into an inclination or
declination of itself, then the sense of the Bleiben would have to be rethought.
Nietzsche's switch from being to becoming is one such option which, however,
does not get very far, since it ends up turning becoming into a continual
becoming, a standing presence of becoming which Heidegger characterizes as a
"Bestaendigung des Werdens", a coming-to-stand of becoming. Nietzsche thought
being too strongly within the horizon of time/temporality, and thus remained
within standingness, which is the real term in being worthy of questioning.
(Time is only the "provisional name" ("Vorname") for the truth of beyng -- the
turning.)
The chasming of beyng into its various modalities, traditional and otherwise,
can also be put into question. One example: human essence has always been
thought metaphysically as what-being, whatness, with whatness itself being
firmly rooted in the sense of being as standing presence. But is whatness really
a suitable category for thinking human essencing? Could a distinction be made
between whatness and whoness that guided human essencing out of standingness?
Has a start in this direction already been made by thinking human essencing as
da-sein?
What could the draft for an inclined or enclitical world look like? Or would
this be "crossing the line" into a hybristic positing?
In any case, as Michel Peine-a-mon-coeur points out, there is and there will
continue to be strife, not just among humankind but more chasmically in wresting
the sense of beyng, the beyng of beings, etc. from self-concealment. Thinking
has a role to play. And art perhaps too, by taking cognisance of its origins in
techne and considering how it is to, or could essence in today's world.
Beyng loving to hide means that it refuses what has past its time and withholds
what is yet to come. Event-ually, Western humankind will latch on to this play
of self-concealment.
Cheers,
Michael
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