III—
Heidegger's Seer in the Moment of Vision
What is important is only whether the contemporary Dasein , in keeping with its existential possibility, is original enough still to see on its own the world that is always already unveiled with its existence, to bring it to words, and thereby to make it expressly visible for others.
Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology[82]
No transformation [Wandel ] comes without an anticipatory escort [vorausgleitendes Geleit ]. But how does an escort draw near unless there takes place an opening illumination [wenn nicht das Ereignis sich lichtet ] which, calling, needing, envisions [er-äugnet ] human being, that is, sees [er-blickt ] and in this seeing [Erblicken ], brings mortals to the path of thinking, poetizing building.
Martin Heidegger, "Overcoming Metaphysics"[83]
§1
In his book on Hegel, Charles Taylor explains Hegel's glorious vision, his way of seeing the phenomenology of the Spirit, arguing that,
if we contemplate the succession of finite things where each passes and is succeeded by another, we are eventually forced to shift our central point of reference from the particular, finite, ephemeral things to the continuing process which goes on through their coming to be and passing away. This is the identity in difference. But the locus of this process is not any particular finite thing, but the whole system of limited ephemeral things.[84]
All finite beings are, as Hegel sees them, marked by inherent contradiction: contradiction internal to their very being, contradiction in their external relations to all other beings. As finite embodiments of the infinite, all finite beings must go under, submitting to the perishing that is inscribed from the very beginning as their fate. Moreover, every entity can be only by reference to another which it is not; hence it is related to an other which negates it and tends to suppress it.[85] Hegel's vision is in some ways quite similar to the vision that Heidegger attributes to Anaximander. But there are also some crucial differences between Hegel's vision and the vision that Heidegger constructs for himself in the process of reading and interpreting Anaximander. Because, for Heidegger, the philosopher's gaze must be directed by the question of
question of the continuation or interruption of history. For this question ultimately bears on the philosopher's position with regard to the repetition and reproduction of injustice, the perpetuation of domination and suffering, in the ontic realm of history.
Before we concentrate on Heidegger's reference to the seer in his commentary on the Anaximander fragment, it would be useful, I think, to consider in some detail Heidegger's discussion of the "moment of vision" (Augenblick ) in division II of Being and Time . It is in this second division that he formulates critical questions and reflections with regard to fate and destiny; authentic and inauthentic ways of experiencing the orders of time, history, and tradition; the historical significance of our cultural forgetfulness of being; the need for a culture of memory; the need in our time for a radical break with the past and a repetition of the inception, the possibilities granted us in and as the origin of historical time; and the urgent need for foresight, a radically different understanding and vision of the future. Although at first it might seem that there is no significant connection between the resolute "moment of vision" and the experience that Heidegger attributes to the seer in his commentary on the Anaximander fragment—and that there is even less of a connection between the "moment of vision" and the "vision" that is involved in what Anaximander has to say in the fragment, we will see, by way of a reading of Being and Time , as well as some other texts, that such an interpretation would need to be corrected. There are, in fact, deep and significant connections to be seen.
§2
We will begin, as we did with Benjamin, by taking up, but only briefly, the question of memory in Heidegger's thinking. This we must do, not only because memory—recollection—is at the very heart of his thinking, but because, as I have already suggested and will here be arguing, it is, contrary to what might at first seem most obvious, the work of recollection and not prophetic foresight which constitutes the vision of the seer, both in the Anaximander fragment itself and in Heidegger's discussion of it.
Looking over the history of Western civilization, Heidegger, like Nietzsche before him, saw the ever-increasing manifestations of nihilism: a nihilism that he interpreted to be the signs and symptoms of the oblivion of being. And in particular, as he read deeply in the history of metaphysics, he discovered that the question of being is no sooner posed than the possibility of a thinking truly open to the claim of this question—truly open to being opened by it—is immediately foreclosed by ontically reduced interpretations, and moreover, that the traces of this foreclosure continue to go
unnoticed. Heidegger also sees (writings 1936–46) that this "decline" from the opening moment that takes place in the history of metaphysics corresponds to an increasing "desolation of the earth" (Verwüstung der Erde ).[86] Seeing this, he is moved to ask: "Can the extreme measure of suffering still bring a transformation here?"[87]
How can a philosopher respond to such a question—and to the need of which it speaks? For his part, Heidegger conceived the task of what he called "thinking" to be, first and foremost, the overcoming (Überwindung ) of this "extreme blindness" (aüßerste Verblendung ), this extreme "forgetfulness of being" (Seinsvergessenheit ) within the discourse of metaphysics, by a process of recollection that would accompany the critical reading of the history of this discourse and by a corresponding critical analysis of the prevailing cultural conceptions of time, history, tradition, and historiography. What this work of recollection would demonstrate, with clear and incontrovertible textual evidence, is that every one of the major concepts that figured in the thinking which inaugurated the history of metaphysics underwent what can now, in retrospect, be seen as a process of increasing reduction and reification: it is now possible to see that, and also how, in the process of being handed down from generation to generation, the principal concepts were unknowingly being altered according to a concealed logic of totalization and reification: a process of "de-generation" separating these concepts from the creative power of their originary moment. This degeneration or ruination is made strikingly clear in such texts as "Overcoming Metaphysics," "Recollection in Metaphysics," and "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking." The argument, in fact, is so strikingly clear that, when one first actually sees this logic of closure, the effect can resemble what Benjamin calls a shock of recognition.
"Our age rages," he said (lecture series 1951–52), "in a mad, steadily growing craving to conceive history in terms of universal history, as an occurrence."[88] For him, world history is rather "the destiny whereby a world lays claim to us."[89] There can be no recollection of being without the overcoming of the prevailing cultural conceptions that would, in effect, appropriate it for their own designs and ends. What is needed is a recollection that returns to think the "origin" which was posited in the history of being: a recollection that would release the hermeneutical significance of the "first inception," the opening "event" of being. In "Recollection in Metaphysics" (1941), Heidegger says:
Recollection [Erinnerung ] in the history of being is a thinking ahead to the inception [Vordenken in den Anfang ], and belongs to being itself. The opening event [Das Ereignis ] grants the time from which history
takes the granting [die Gewähr ] of an epoch. But that time span when being gives itself to openness can never be found in historically calculated time or with its measures. The time span granted shows itself only to a reflection which is already able to glimpse [zu ahnen vermag ] the history of being, even if this succeeds only in the form of an essential need.[90]
Such recollection, such thinking, would be the overcoming of "philosophy" as we have known it; and it would be, perhaps, a preliminary preparation for what might be called "another beginning":"But with the end of philosophy, thinking is not also at its end, but in transition to another beginning."[91]
The "first inception" belongs to a past that, while present, was never present to itself—nor, a fortiori, has it ever been present to itself as past. The first inception, the origin, depends on a future time to bring about a certain reflectively constructed presence to itself that it did not have—and could not have had. But just as, for Benjamin, the philosopher as historical materialist who brings the past into the present must struggle against the temptation simply to consign it to the past as nothing but ruination and catastrophe, so for Heidegger, the thinker who undertakes a process of recollection might be strongly tempted to see in the history of metaphysics nothing but an irredeemable decline. Resisting the Spenglerian narrative, however, Heidegger was able to (fore)see in the end of "philosophy" a "gathering into the most extreme possibilities" (Versammlung in die aüßersten Möglichkeiten ).[92] The task of thinking, then, is to "gather" into recollection some of these still unrealized possibilities from their concealment in the original opening, the first inception of Western thinking. For Heidegger, the Anaximander fragment that we are considering in this chapter is an incipient saying of being.[93] And that means not only that we of today should read and think it in its incipience, its continuing originality and generativity, but that we must recognize in the saying the vision of a seer who has in an extremely significant sense already seen what is still to come. Not the ordinary events of the future, of course, but the revelation of something ontologically significant—or say a presently still concealed dimension of the history of being.
To some extent, the seer's "moment of vision," that moment in which the seer lets the work of
ture. Like Kant, neither Benjamin nor Heidegger wanted to encourage a "schwärmerische Vision," a vision with exalted pretensions.[94] The seer's vision can disclose the possible only if it takes responsibility for a recollection of the epochal presencing of being.
The temporality of this recollection (Erinnerung ), however, is radically different from that of ordinary memory, because, whereas ordinary memory is straightforwardly concerned with the past, recollection is concerned with the generative event of an inception that has been, but still presents us with regenerative possibilities for a new beginning. As Heidegger expresses it in his 1941 Grundbegriffe:
The inception is certainly something that has been, but [it is] not something past. What is past is always a no-longer being, but what has been is being that still presences but is concealed in its incipience.[95]
The past, of course, is past, and ordinary memory relates to it accordingly:
Everything past is only something that has passed away. But the passing away of beings occurs in the essential realm of being. This does not, of course, "subsist" somewhere "in itself", but is what is properly historical in the past, the imperishable, and that means it is an incipiently having been and an incipiently presencing again.[96]
Recollection is concerned with an inception which, in one sense, bears the temporality of that which has already been, but which, in another sense, bears the temporality of that which has not yet been, not yet come to pass. Recollection is a return not to the past but to the originary temporality of inception, to gather up that which could still generate the truly new:
According to the historiological reckoning of time, the earliest is indeed the oldest, and, in the estimation of ordinary understanding, also the most antiquated. The earliest, however, can also be the first according to rank and wealth, according to originality and bindingness for our history and impending historical decisions. . . . We name this "earliest" the incipient [das Anfängliche ]. From it comes an exhortation, in relation to which the opining of the individual and the many fails to hear, and misconstrues its essential power, unaware of the unique opportunity: that recollection of the incipience can transport us into the essential.[97]
Thus, for the historian,
everything earlier is something past, by means of which he can illuminate what comes later and what pertains to him according to his needs. Here the earlier has no power of decision because it is no longer experienced as the incipient in history.[98]
But for the thinker, the inception of metaphysics, as the discourse of being, is not consigned to the past:
The inception, however, can only be experienced as an inception when we ourselves think inceptively and essentially. This inception is not the past, but rather, because it has decided in advance everything to come, it is constantly of the future. We must think about inception this way.[99]
Recollection into the first inception of Western thinking is therefore "a fore-thinking": "a forethinking into the more incipient inception."[100] It is a process that requires fore-sight and anticipation, preparations in thought that might indicate the way to another inception. But Heidegger emphasizes that we must understand these preparations appropriately:
The word anticipation should show us the way to consider that what should be brought to knowing here cannot be produced from man by his own choice. Anticipation means grasping something that comes upon us, whose coming has long held sway, except that we overlook it. . . . Thinking in anticipation and for anticipation is essentially more rigorous and exacting than any formal-conceptual cleverness in whatever sector of the calculable.[101]
And he adds, most importantly, that
to attain anticipatory knowing we must practice such knowing. . . . The fundamental condition [for such practice] is readiness to make ourselves free for the essential.
In other words, words that he used earlier, in his 1927 work, Being and Time , we must learn the attitude of Entschlossenheit: a kind of resolute openness or resolute preparedness, a steadfast, firmly committed anticipatory openness for what might still come from the first inception, if we think with care towards its recollection.
In an early text (1915), "The Concept of Time in the Science of History," Heidegger argues for a process of cultural creation (Kulturschaffen ) that is mindful of tradition and "gathers what is past." But in the course of making this argument, he says that philosophical thought should undertake this creative cultural recollection" in order to work it through further, or to combat it."[102] The intriguing word, here, is of course the little word "or." In this phase of his thinking, Heidegger was just beginning to recognize the need for a very radical break with tradition—or perhaps, rather, with the way in which tradition has been received and handed down. Thus he was also beginning to realize that this break cannot be understood as straightforward, because there are, in the tradition, traces of a truth that must be
preserved. But mere continuation of the inception—repetition in this sense—can only be de-generation. By the time he wrote Being and Time , he would take the "combat" a step further, not hesitating to speak of the need for a thinking that is willing to resort to argumentative "violence" (Gewaltsamkeit ),[103] and indeed arguing that
the question of being does not achieve its true concreteness until we have carried through the process of destroying the ontological tradition. (BT 49, SZ 26)
Since, as he says in Being and Time , "in the field of ontology, any 'springing-from' is degeneration," recollection of the inception, the inaugural opening, can only mean the destruction of the prevailing ways of experiencing and conceptualizing time, history, and tradition, ruled as they are by the assumptions of reifying ontology (BT 383, SZ 334). But he was also beginning, there, to articulate this "destruction" as an intricate hermeneutical process, a deconstructive process, destroying tradition precisely in order to rescue from the ruins what he will later refer to as the thought of the "first inception." It is necessary, he says,
[to] destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of being. (BT 44, SZ 22)
The destruction must consequently be carried out with the understanding that it is part of a process of construction—a vision of another inception, seeing unrealized possibilities in a past that never was.
§3
As we shall now see, Heidegger later, in "The Turning" (1941), gives to the formulation of this destruction a surprising concreteness. "The Turning" ("Die Kehre") is a text of singular importance because, as its title indicates, it names what in retrospect can be seen as the most radical development in Heidegger's thinking: nothing less than a bold reversal of the way he had, in Being and Time , been attempting to receive and work with the opening question of metaphysics, the question, namely, of being. He effected this reversal after realizing that the analytic of Dasein, which immediately follows his radical formulation of the phenomenological method in the "Introduction" to Being and Time , is actually a terrible betrayal of this method, perpetuating the traditional foreclosure that already takes place in the very framing of the question of being—the question that is supposed to open and inaugurate the discourse of metaphysics. Radicalizing the
Husserlian formulation, Heidegger defines the phenomenological method as a hermeneutical procedure, a process that takes place in the interplay between concealment and unconcealment, a process of subjective self-restraint or self-effacement yielding to the presencing of what presents itself, letting the phenomenon show itself from out of itself.
In "The Turning," Heidegger argues, against the pressures of the metaphysical tradition, that
we locate history in the realm of happening, instead of thinking history in accordance with its essential origin from out of destining.[104]
"Only," he says,
when man, in the disclosing coming-to-pass of the insight [im Ereignis des Einblickes ] by which he himself is beheld [von diesem Erblickte ], renounces human "self-will" [menschlichen Eigensinn ] and projects himself toward that insight [Einblick ], away from himself, does he correspond [entspricht ] in his essence to the claim of that insight [Einblickes ].[105]
We are, he believes, in a time of grave danger; but he refuses hopelessness and turns his gaze into the inception, the opening, in order to foresee the possibility of a different future: "another destining, yet veiled, is waiting," he tells us.[106] But, he asks, ascribing—strangely—a visual presence to being:
Will we, as the ones caught sight of [als die Erblickten ], be so brought home into the essential glance of being [in den Wesensblick des Seins ] that we will no longer elude it? Will insight into that which is bring itself disclosingly to pass? Will we correspond to that insight [Einblick ], through a looking [Blicken ] that looks [blickt ] into the essence of technology . . . ? Will we see the lightning-flash of being in the essence of technology? [Sehen wir den Blitz des Seins im Wesen der Technik ?][107]
This passage shows the strangeness of the text. But it is perhaps only fitting, after all, that a text intended to mark at once the most radical turning point in his own thinking and the possibility of a turning point in the unfolding decline of the history of being should turn to a hermeneutical phenomenology of the uncanny. With the trope of the "lightning-flash," absolutely shattering and bursting open the subject-object structure of traditional metaphysics, a structure within which we have been all too complacently comfortable, Heidegger is attempting to think in the most extreme visionary terms both the catastrophic-redemptive "turning of the danger" and the intense experience of the reversal that shattered and transformed his own thinking. With regard to the first aspect, he says: "The turning of the danger comes to pass suddenly." There is a "sudden
self-lighting," a "lightning-flash" (das Blitzen ) in which "the truth of being flashes."[108] With regard to the second: "Insight into that which is [Einblick in das was ist ]—thus do we name the sudden flash of the truth of being into [the realm of] truthless being."[109] "When insight comes disclosingly to pass, then we are the ones who are struck in their essence by the flashing [light] of being. In insight, men are the ones caught sight of. [Die Menschen sind die im Einblick Erblickten ]."[110] Heidegger attempts to explain the experience in question, but without mitigating the uncanniness of its ontic-ontological doubling:
To flash [blitzen ], in terms both of its derivation and of what it designates, is "to glance". [Heidegger's word, here, is blicken , which can also mean "to look" or "to gaze at."] In the flashing glance and as that glance, the essence, the coming to presence, of being enters into its own emitting of light. Moving through the element of its own shining [seines Leuchtens ], the flashing glance [der Blick ] retrieves that which it catches sight of and brings it back into the brightness of its own looking [birgt der Blick sein Erblicktes in das Blicken zurück ]. And yet that glancing, in its very giving of light, simultaneously also keeps safe the concealed darkness of its origin as the unlighted [das Ungelichtete ]. The in-turning that is the lightning-flash of the truth of being [Einkehr des Blitzes der Wahrheit des Seins ] is the entering, flashing glance—insight [Einblick ].[111]
It would seem to be a question, here, of the possibility of a "glance" or "look," a "glance" or "look" of being and coming from being, doubled by the possibility of a corresponding look or glance on the part of appropriately thoughtful human beings. (This strange thought, however, also appears in the 1942–43 lectures on Parmenides, wherein Heidegger undertakes a critical examination of our ordinary and habitual way of looking and seeing, and pursues the logic of this critique in a preparatory meditation on another, radically different way of looking and seeing.[112] Reflecting on the Greek word
There is, of course, a strong temptation to give this text a "merely" metaphorical interpretation. I have repeatedly argued against reading Heidegger this way, if this designation opposes the "metaphoral" to the "literal" in a way that effectively denies the text any meaningful, transformative relation to experience. What such a text calls for is not a blunting of its power to shatter and burst open—its power to transform our
experiencing and thinking, but instead an effort to take it seriously, take it to heart, and work with it in and as an experience of thinking.
Like Benjamin, Heidegger thinks the interruption of the continuum of history as a lightning-flash. It is at least possible—conceivable—that with the unexpected suddenness of a bolt of lightning, another inception could take place. But only, as Heidegger repeatedly insists, if we are in readiness: only if we have undertaken the necessary "preparations." Such "preparations" would not necessarily be followed by a new inception. But without our preparations, there can be no reason for hope.
In "The Turning," this most strange and disturbing text, which scholars have consistently neglected, undoubtedly because they are puzzled by what appears to be the "personifying" of being and cannot see how to give it an interpretation that is other than mythological or metaphorical, Heidegger is attempting to think such anticipatory preparations in terms of our experience as beings who have been given the capacity to see. In keeping with the image of lightning to designate the catastrophic intensity of the turning point, the abruptness and unexpectedness of the interruption in the historical unfolding of being, and the moment when the possibility of another inception first becomes manifest, he spells out what is required of us in preparation, proposing to think our historical task as calling for a response to the "glance of being" that would correspond appropriately to the claim made on our capacity for vision by this phenomenon. The "look of being" is therefore simply a provocative way to formulate the ontological claim on our visionary capacity. If, as he says in this text, we are always "seen," always "beheld" by the "look of being," this is because—or this is to say that—in beholding, we are always beholden, always held, always bound, in a certain ontological beholdenness: what, in Being and Time , Heidegger would call our Schuldig-sein . We are beholden, because the visibility of the world, the gift of the lighting that makes beings visible, makes a claim (Anspruch ) on our capacity to look and see. In "The Turning," it is suggested that this claim calls on us to look and see with a thoughtfulness that would correspond to the manifestation of the possibility of a new inception in signs of hope—signs never more than flashes of light, instantaneous, puzzling, beyond the possibility of expectation. In question is the character of our gaze: whether it will respond to these signs with a looking and seeing that corresponds to the revelatory moment with appropriate thoughtfulness. In his meditations on Heraclitus, Heidegger would use the word
concealment, and [b] the event, the Es gibt , of being, as the disclosure or unconcealment that grants the field of lighting within which our world-disclosures take place. Are we capable of a vision, a looking and seeing, that could be described as "of being"? "Of being": that is to say, it would be a question of a looking and seeing that understand themselves to be involved in the unconcealment of being, a looking and seeing gathered, out of time, into originary temporality.
"The Turning" is very much, then, an allegorical text. The lightning-flash, rending the sky, effecting a decisive scission in the night, renders for all to see a visible reminder that the crisis of nihilism calls for a decisive response: a resolute commitment to the task of anticipatory thinking— thinking into the possibility of another inception. And with the differentiating scission that it articulates in the openness of the sky, it evokes the ontological difference between being and beings, representing it in the realm of the visible as a critical moment of "decision" in the history of being and the history of metaphysics. Thus it represents that opening moment of inception when the difference between being and beings was first brought forth. But the possibility of another inception is to be glimpsed in the space opened up by the rendering of the ontological difference. For it is into the space of this difference, into the immeasurable dimensionality of this difference, that originary presencing, while giving finite beings unconcealment, itself withdraws into concealment and thereby preserves historical possibilities for new forms of presencing from the nihilistic reductions of what might be called a certain ontological historicism. I mean by that the historical reductions of ontological possibilities to the presently prevailing modes of presencing.
Articulating a decisive difference, the lightning-bolt intimates at once the Geschick , the sending or decision of being, the fateful assignations of presencing which inaugurated the unfolding of its epochal history, and the resolute commitment, the decision to give thought to the Geschick , by which we human beings would be enjoined to correspond in appropriate ways to the calling of our time. As a flash of light illuminating the enveloping darkness, the lightning suddenly appears at the darkest, most hopeless moment—a messenger of hope, perhaps, intimating at least the possibility of a saving enlightenment.
§4
In chapters 4 to 6 of division II of Being and Time , the work to which we shall now give thought, Heidegger uses his existential phenomenology to formulate critical arguments against the conceptions of time, history, and
tradition that have figured prominently in the history of Western philosophy and Western cultural life.
However strange it may seem, the fact is that the trope of the philosopher's gaze plays a major role in these chapters, continuing his attention to vision in the preceding division. In chapter 3, division I, Heidegger suggests that "in its projective character, understanding goes to make up existentially what we call Dasein's 'sight ' [Sicht ]" (BT 186, SZ 146). He then names the disclosive forms that such sight can assume: the "circumspection of concern" (Umsicht ); the "considerateness of solicitude" (Rücksicht ); "a sight that is directed upon being as such" (Sicht auf das Sein als solches ), "for the sake of which any Dasein is as it is"; and the sight of "transparency" (Durchsichtigkeit ), of "self-knowledge," the "sight which is related primarily and on the whole to existence" (ibid.). After introducing this nomenclature, Heidegger comments:
We must, to be sure, guard against a misunderstanding of the expression "sight". It corresponds to the "clearedness" [Gelichtetheit ] which we took as characterizing the disclosedness of the "there". "Seeing" does not mean just perceiving with the bodily eyes; but neither does it mean a pure non-sensory awareness of something present-at-hand in its presence-at-hand. In giving an existential signification to "sight," we have merely drawn upon the peculiar feature of seeing, that it lets entities which are accessible to it be encountered unconcealedly in themselves. Of course, every "sense" does this within that domain of discovery which is genuinely its own. But from the beginning onwards, the tradition of philosophy has been oriented primarily towards "seeing" as a way of access to entities and to being . To keep the connection with this tradition, we may formalize "sight" and "seeing" enough to obtain therewith a universal term for characterizing any access to entities or to being, as access in general. (BT 187, SZ 147. See also BT 397, SZ 346.)
Soon after this passage, in regard to which we must forbear the extensive critical commentary its extremely questionable position calls for, Heidegger introduces "fore-sight" (Vorsicht ) as one of the three background dimensions of existential understanding. But as he uses this term, it does not mean a prophetic power, an ability to make shrewd or valid predictions about the future, but refers, rather, to the fact that, as he formulates it,
when something is understood but is still veiled, it becomes unveiled by an act of appropriation, and this is always done under the guidance of a point of view, which determines that with regard to which what is understood is to be interpreted. In every case, interpretation is grounded in something we see in advance —in a fore-sight . . . . Any-
thing understood which is held in our fore-having and towards which we set our sights "fore-sightedly", becomes conceptualizable through the interpretation. (BT 191, SZ 150)
In both the first and second divisions, Heidegger's frequent references to different ways of looking and seeing bear out his claim that "a Dasein can, in existing, develop the different possibilities of sight, of looking around [Sichumsehens ], and of just looking" (BT 385, SZ 336. Also see BT 397, SZ 346). What concerns him in division II is that singular "potentiality-for-seeing" which he calls "der Augenblick": "the moment of vision." It is in terms of an experience with vision—but is it a look, a glance, a glimpse?—that, like Benjamin, he attempts to articulate a radically different relationship to time, history, and tradition.
Holding that there are authentic and inauthentic ways of being in time, being historical, receiving and handing down tradition, Heidegger lays out a phenomenology of these different ways, showing how there is a certain "pathology" in what we consider "ordinary" and "normal." Thus, for example, he shows that there are two very different ways of anticipating and awaiting (BT 386ff, 397–99; SZ 336ff, 346–48). Anticipation and awaiting, he argues, are ordinarily, normally, dominated by "curiosity," an often over-whelming impatience that cannot tolerate waiting and cannot benefit from it, that refuses to wait, or can only wait if it reduces the future to "what is coming next." As ways of inhabiting and structuring time, anticipating and awaiting can be either deeply felt experiences, rich and enriching, or they can be experienced in distraction, totally bent on a reifying making-present. According to Heidegger, we are living in an age, a time, in which there is less and less tolerance for deferral, for the postponement of gratification, less and less acceptance of waiting, less and less appreciation for the secret gifts in the experience of anticipating and awaiting. And this means that the structure and the dimensionality of the "time" in which we live are correspondingly reduced. This bears on the experience of fore-sight; and it explains why the vision of the seer can be understood, today, only in its degenerate form, viz., as the power to see and predict a determinate future.
With correlatively similar phenomenological analyses, Heidegger shows that there are two ways of experiencing the present: an inauthentic way, commonplace and normal, and an authentic way, much more difficult to achieve:
The ordinary way of characterizing time as an endless, irreversible sequence of "nows" which passes away, arises from the temporality of falling Dasein. (BT 478, SZ 426)
The ordinary way of experiencing time divides it into a series of present-at-hand now-points. Experienced in this way, the now-time (Jetzt-Zeit ) is totally emptied of meaning, rendered homogeneous, repetitive, one-dimensional: it becomes a decayed version of Plato's "image of eternity," a form of endless suffering, dull and meaningless, bereft of radical hope (BT 425–26, 474–79; SZ 373–74, 421–27). Heidegger argues that neither the authentic "will be" nor the authentic "having-been" can be understood in terms of such a series of "now-times." Thus, just as there is a fallen, pathological experience of the future and the present, so too there is a fallen, pathological memory-experience of the past: a way of remembering that is really, when more deeply experienced, a kind of forgetting; a way of relating to what is past which is incapable of receiving it in a way that is open to what it bears—the unrealized "potentialities-for-being," the possible "destinies," that the past always carries forward. Dasein's "has-been" is not a reified past, exhausted and final, but that out of which futures are yet to be made (BT 432–37, SZ 380–85).
According to Heidegger (BT 394, SZ 344), it is in authentic resoluteness (Entschlossenheit ) that the "moment of vision" (der Augenblick ) takes place (BT 387, SZ 338). In Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit (lecture course, 1929–30), Heidegger credits Kierkegaard for suggesting his conception of the "moment of vision":
What we are calling the Moment was in fact conceived by Kierkegaard for the very first time in philosophy. The conception launches the possibility of a completely new epoch of philosophy ever since antiquity.[113]
This "moment of vision" is to be understood, then, in terms of the way in which an historical Dasein chooses itself in relation to the existential possibilities inherent in its historical temporality. More to the point, it would constitute the most radical restructuring conceivable of the temporality and historicality within which Dasein could dwell. Temporalizing itself in authentic resoluteness, the "moment of vision" would be the "awakening" of "Dasein's capacity for being disclosive" (BT 384, SZ 335). Resoluteness, Heidegger says, is "the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possible at the time" (BT 345, SZ 298). In relation to the "having-been" of history, it essentially involves "holding oneself open" (sich freihalten ) for new historical possibilities (BT 355, SZ 307–8).
This is a rigorously hermeneutical process. The resoluteness at stake here cannot be understood, therefore, in terms of the ordinary concepts of
historical decision and action. Nor can it be inserted into the linear timestructure of present-at-hand now-points:
The moment of vision is a phenomenon which in principle can not be clarified in terms of the "now" [dem Jetzt ]. . . . In the "moment of vision" nothing can occur; but as an authentic present or waiting-towards, the moment of vision permits us to encounter for the first time what can be "in a time" as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. (BT 387–88, SZ 338)
(We shall need to return to this passage when we resume our consideration of Heidegger's commentary on the Anaximander fragment.) The word Heidegger uses to describe the "moment of vision"—and the way he uses the word—make this visionary disruption of the now-time clear. Entschlossenheit names a decisive commitment to a deep, ontologically responsible openness in relation to history and tradition. (According to Theodor Kisiel, "Entschlossenheit" first appears in Heidegger's writings in October 1922, introduced in relation to the "ability to unlock." And in 1924, it is discussed as a translation of Aristotle's
According to Heidegger, the "moment of vision" that is prepared by resoluteness is not at all an abstraction from historical situatedness. On the contrary: it must be thought as an "event" taking place in, and with regard to, a particular historical situation. But its way of being historically situated is to look for a perspective on the historicity of the present situation that would enable it to be seen and understood in terms of a "more original" (ursprünglich ) temporality—a temporality from within which we might be liberated from the oppressive fatalism of the ordinary, degraded experience of time and history and might catch sight of radically new possibilities for historical life (BT 370–80, SZ 323–31). The moment of vision "brings existence into the situation and discloses the authentic 'there'" (BT 398, SZ 347. Also see BT 376, SZ 328). The "moment of vision" belongs, therefore, not so much to an individual, but rather more to a cultural community. In resoluteness,
the present is not only brought back from distraction . . . , but it gets held in the future and in having-been. That present which is held in authentic temporality and which is thus authentic itself, we call the "moment of vision." (BT 387, SZ 338)
For Dasein to be in the "moment of vision" for its time is for it to see how a cultural community might be able to "take over" its destiny (Geschick ) as the having-been of historical possibilities that it can in the present still work with creatively for the sake of its future (BT 436–37, SZ 384–85). In the resoluteness of the "moment of vision," Dasein can at least glimpse a way to turn what had seemed past, seemed an inevitable fate, into the future of a potential that has already been granted.
As an historical "event," the "moment of vision" cannot be correctly understood apart from Heidegger's critique of historiography (historiology) and the prevailing conception of tradition and history. According to Heidegger,
authentic historiology becomes a way in which the "today" gets deprived of its character as present. . . . [As authentic, historiology] is necessarily a critique of the "present." (BT 449, SZ 397)
The appropriate object of historiography, for Heidegger, should be:
neither that which has happened just once for all nor something universal that floats above it, but the possibility which has been factically existent [die faktisch existent gewesene Möglichkeit ]. . . . Only by a historiology which is factical and authentic can the history of what-has-been-there, as settled fate [entschlossenes Schicksal ], be shown to be otherwise, so that, in repetition, the "force" of the possible gets struck home into one's factical existence. (BT 447, SZ 395)
Struggling, very much like Benjamin, to liberate the cultural experience of historicity, and the historiography to which it gives rise, from their degradation, from a pursuit of the new that is in reality nothing but fate, an endlessly empty repetition of the same, Heidegger argues that
in inauthentic historicality, . . . the way in which fate [des Schicksals ] has been primordially stretched along has been hidden. With the inconstancy of the they-self [als Man-selbst: as anyone-and-everyone], Dasein makes present its "today". In awaiting the next new thing, it has already forgotten the old one. The "they" [das Man ] evades choice. Blind for possibilities, it cannot authentically repeat what has been, but only retains and receives the "actual" that is left over, the world-history that has been, the leavings [die Überbleibsel ] and the information about them that is present-at-hand [die vorhandene Kunde ]. Lost in the making-present of the "today," it understands the "past" in terms of the [inauthentic] "present". On the other hand, the temporality of authentic historicality, as the moment of vision of anticipatory repetition [vorlaufend-wiederholender Augenblick ], deprives the "today" of its character as present [eine Entgegenwärtigung des Heute ], and weans one from the conventionalities of the "they". When, however, one's existence is inauthentically historical, it is loaded down with the legacy of a "past" which has become unrecognizable, and it seeks the modern. But when historicality is authentic, it understands history as the "recurrence" [Wiederkehr ] of the possible, and knows that a possibility will recur [wiederkehrt ] only if existence is open for it fatefully, in a moment of vision, in resolute repetition [wenn die Existenz schick-salhaft-augenblicklich für sie in der entschlossenen Wiederholung offen ist ]. (BT 443–44, SZ 391–92)
The resoluteness of the "moment of vision" is not only the taking-up of an historically unseen possibility; it is also "at the same time a disavowal [der Widerruf ] of that which in the 'today', is working itself out [only] as the 'past'" (BT 438, SZ 386). The "moment of vision" is possible, therefore, only when there is a decisive break with the fatalism of the past—with an experience and understanding of history and tradition that consigns the vision of the inception that is still carried within them to a continuum of now-times that are absolutely, irretrievably in the past. As resolute openness, Entschlossenheit , the "moment of vision" is a "disavowal," a "critique of the present" that opens up a space (Spielraum )[115] of difference, a space, in effect, of freedom, in relation to the past, to tradition, to history as we have known it, and to the prevailing, totally illusory enchantments of the latest "new" and the latest "modern." The disavowal is a crucial moment in the dialectical struggle against history and tradition, making possible the hermeneutical moment that Heidegger calls "repetition." This "repetition"
is not at all a reactionary conservatism. It is not a sentimental attempt to revive a perishing tradition. It is not a glorification or celebration of the past as a demonstration of historical progress. As he conceives it, "repetition" is for the sake of the possible:
The repeating of that which is possible does not bring again [wiederbringen ] something that is "past," nor does it bind the "present" back to that which has already been "outstripped." (BT 437, SZ 385–86)
The repetition that takes place in the "moment of vision" is thus not a repetition in anything like the ordinary sense:
[It] does not abandon itself to that which is past; nor does it aim at progress. In the moment of vision, authentic existence is indifferent to both these alternatives. (Ibid.)
"We characterize repetition," he says,
as a mode of resoluteness which hands itself down—the mode by which Dasein exists explicitly as destiny. But if destiny constitutes the primordial historicality of Dasein, then history has its essential importance neither in what is past nor in the "today" and its connection with what is past, but in that authentic historicizing of existence which arises from Dasein's future. (Ibid.)
The "moment of vision" is a hermeneutical repetition, not of the (finished) "past," but of the (still unfinished) "having-been." (This distinction between the "past" and the "having-been" is crucial: without it, Heidegger's position in Being and Time is totally misrepresented.) The "moment of vision" is, like the lightning-flash in Heidegger's essay on "The Turning" and Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," the lighting up of inceptive possibilities in an historical "forcefield." It is the "repetition of a possibility of existence that has come down to us" (BT 437, SZ 385), a repetition of the inceptive "energies" of the origin, a way of receiving these "energies" and handing them down—in, as, and for the "destruction" of the past and a radically new beginning. Thus, although Heidegger—carefully avoiding the conceit of the predictive seer who would claim to "know in advance"—does not commit himself to saying what inceptive possibilities he thinks tradition is secretly handing down to us nor what possibilities he thinks we "ought" to be retrieving, he insists on his conviction that authentic repetition must be "rooted in the future" (BT 438–39, SZ 386–87).
However, while the "moment of vision" is described as looking into, or rather towards the future, it is not to be thought miraculously free of the repetition that perpetuates the historical continuum—the empty, homogeneous time-series in which the creatively explosive potential in the incep-
tion remains lost in oblivion, concealed by the injustice of "that which is." In a passage that has been ignored by the scholars, Heidegger writes:
In everydayness, Dasein can undergo dull "suffering", sink away in the dullness of it, and evade it by seeking new ways in which its dispersion in its affairs may be further dispersed. In the moment of vision [Augenblick ], indeed, and often just "for that moment" [Augenblick ], existence can even gain the mastery over the "everyday"; but it can never extinguish it. (BT 422, SZ 371)
The seer's achievement of a "moment of vision" is not, for Heidegger, the absolute end of the history of suffering. Heidegger refuses to celebrate it as the inauguration of another beginning. While thinking of it as a moment of hope, he refuses to make it a false victory over time and tradition. The weight of tradition and the pull of the past can never be totally overcome. And perhaps this is not entirely regrettable.
Is there a decisive and unequivocal difference, then, as Caygill wants to argue, between Benjamin and Heidegger with regard to redemptive fulfillment? It certainly can be argued that "Heidegger keeps open the possibility that historical time may be a suitable vehicle for authenticity, [whereas this is] an option which Benjamin refuses to entertain."[116] But the distinction that he wants to draw, namely, between fulfillment in historical time (Heidegger) and the fulfillment of historical time (Benjamin), is easily thrown in question by the decisive openness of Heidegger's "moment of vision," that lightning-flash of insightful seeing which, by corresponding to the inceptive disclosiveness of the "look of being," suspends historical time as we have known it within the radically different order of primordial temporality, the temporality of the inception. What can be said with some confidence, however, as the last quotation from Being and Time shows, is that Heidegger does not attribute to the "moment of vision" any miraculous powers to break the spellbinding hold on us of a historicity inextricably bound up with the causes of our suffering. But there is a strong suggestion in Heidegger's work that nothing less than a total interruption of the prevailing temporal order, bringing to an end the historical as we have known it an making way for a new inception, would make such redemption possible.
§5
To know means to have seen, in the widest sense of seeing, which means to apprehend [vernehmen ] what is present [das Anwesenden ], as such.
Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art"[117]
What is "present as such"? And what is involved in the "having (already) seen," which Heidegger emphasizes in "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935–36) and again later (1946) in his discussion of the seer in "The Anaximander Fragment"? When Heidegger, retrieving Greek etymology, emphasizes that to see is to have already seen, that (as he says in his commentary on the fragment) a seer is one who "has always already seen," should we understand him to be attributing to the seer a predictive foresight, a "making-present" of the future? Or is it not, rather, a question of the seer's ability to see what is overlooked, though it is already in view? This gets at part of what is involved; but there are other dimensions. "Having already seen" registers the fact that the beholding of the seer is a capacity which comes from his realization that seeing is a gift, a dispensation (Geschick ), and that it must be exercised in a way that acknowledges the debt that is owed—the beholdenness that precedes the seeing, precedes the beholding. "Having already seen" may thus be said to record the seer's recognition of being held in that beholdenness, always already responsible for seeing what he sees.
What, in the "moment of vision," in the seer's having-always-already-seen, is then "present as such"? In what way or sense is the future made present, seen "in advance"? In "The Anaximander Fragment," Heidegger says:
[1] "The seer sees inasmuch as he has seen everything as present [als Anwesendes ]" (AX 35, H 320).
[2] "All things present and absent are gathered and preserved in one presencing for the seer" (AX 36, H 321).
[3] "The seer is the one who has already seen the whole [das All ] of what is present in its presencing" (AX 36, H 321).
[4] The seer is "the one who has seen, is himself one who makes-present [ein Anwesender ist ] and belongs in an exceptional sense to the whole of what is present [in das Ganze des Anwesenden gehört ]. On the other hand, it does not mean that what is present is nothing but an object entirely dependent upon the seer's subjectivity" (AX 38, H 323).
[5] In question is the developing and exercising of our capacity to be "present" (anwesend ) in the world in a way that would be "illuminating, apprehending, and thus gathering," "present" in a way that "lets what is present as such become present in unconcealment [in der Unverborgenheit wesen läßt ]" (AX 38, H 323).
In arguing for a significant difference between Benjamin and Heidegger, Caygill points to the fact that Heidegger emphasizes the seer's "gathering"
and "preserving," the seer's "making-present." He seems to think that this commits Heidegger to a metaphysical fetishization of the past, making it "present" in a present that continues our bondage to history. But what is it that the seer gathers and preserves? Casting her gaze into the world with a keen awareness of its entering the visible as a site of unconcealment that belongs to an interplay between the visible and the invisible, the seer gathers and preserves by letting be not just what is present, but also what is absent. Moreover, the seer makes them "present," gathers and preserves them, not in a now-present (the Jetzt-Zeit of history into which primordial temporality has degenerated), but rather in presencing as such. That is to say, the seer's vision dislodges things from their placement in the conventional time-continuum of history and gathers everything into the "preserve" of primordial temporality , surrendering all things to the deconstructive interplay (the "Spielraum") of concealment and unconcealment. But Caygill's argument depends on failing to recognize Heidegger's crucial distinction between "making present" in the sense of a Gegenwärtigung and "making present" in the sense of das Anwesene . The "gathering" and "preserving" that Heidegger's seer achieves thus actually destroys the spell of the reified timing of history, gathering all beings, beings both present and absent, into the possibility-field, the open "preserve," of a radically other time-order: "The seer speaks from the preserve [die Wahr ] of what is present. He is the Soothsayer [der Wahr-Sager ]" (AX 36, H 321). What is this "preserve"? It is, for Heidegger, an abyssal dimension which exposes the contingency and transience of all historical formations. In a sense, then, the gathering is a gathering into the anarchy of temporal dispersal and dissemination—the radical ekstasis of primordial temporality, wherein the prevailing order of time and history is exposed to the violence, at once creative and destructive, of the inception.
In the abrupt declaration which marks the end of his "Theologico-Political Fragment," Benjamin connects his concept of revolutionary political action with the concept of "Naturgeschichte," suggesting that the destructive act would be a mimesis learned from nature:
For nature is Messianic by reason of its eternal and total passing away. To strive after such passing, even for those stages of man that are nature, is the task of world politics, whose method must be called nihilism.[118]
(It may be that politics is always a form of violence, but this attraction to a redeeming violence that would put an end to all the violence of politics runs the risk of corruption and repetition, becoming itself just another sequence
in the violence of that politics. But is Benjamin's nihilism the only politics one can derive from the concept of natural history?)
Gathering everything into the preserve of primordial temporality, into the interplay of concealment and unconcealment, the seer's way of looking and seeing returns everything, as Anaximander's fragment might be read as saying, to their "natural history": the process of coming into being, staying awhile, and perishing. Thus it may be said to return the established institutions and regimes of time and history to the deconstructive work of primordial temporality.
A crucial passage in this regard, one that we have already cited, clarifies both the character of the "moment of vision" and the character of its resoluteness:
The moment of vision is a phenomenon which in principle can not be clarified in terms of the "now". The "now" is a temporal phenomenon which belongs to time as within-time-ness: the "now" in which" something arises, passes away, or is present-at-hand. In "the moment of vision" nothing can occur; but as an authentic present or waiting-towards, the moment of vision permits us to encounter for the first time what can be "in a time" as ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. (BT 387–88, SZ 338)
"Nothing can occur": this tells against the common interpretation of "resoluteness," which takes it to be decision and action without reasons, beyond justification, and totally arbitrary: Heidegger's fall into the politics of irrationalism. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The "moment of vision" does not belong to a now-present in the prevailing order of time and history; nor, a fortiori, does it gather past, present, and future into the present of such an order. The "moment of vision" belongs, rather, to the "transcendental field" of possibility, the force-field of competing possibilities contained at the "origin" wherein the prevailing order of time and history arises. "Nothing can occur": Benjamin's dialectics in standstill?
The passage from Being and Time that we have just considered should be thought in connection with a passage from "The Origin of the Work of Art": the one, in fact, that was quoted at the very beginning of this chapter, and in which Heidegger comments, some eight or nine years later, on the way he understood "resoluteness" in the earlier work. Heidegger says there, in no uncertain terms, that
the resoluteness intended in Being and Time is not the deliberate action of a subject, but the opening up of human being, out of its captivity in that which is, to the openness of being.
Critics and scholars have not given sufficient thought to the phrase "not the deliberate action of a subject." I take it that Heidegger is thereby locating "resoluteness" in the ontological, or, say, "transcendental" dimension: as the openness that recollects being, recollects presencing, it is actually a name for what he will later call "Gelassenheit." According to Heidegger, it was only at first that the word Entscheidung , meaning "decision," was used to signify an "act of man": in the course of his thinking, he soon wanted to understand it ontologically, i.e., as the "essence" of human being, whereby "man" is returned to the dimensionality of being as such and the chains of anthropologism are thrown off.[119] As we must learn from Heidegger's discussion of the lightning-flash in "The Turning," the resoluteness of the "moment of vision" is a moment when the way things have been is decisively and radically interrupted. Resoluteness may be called "action," but only in a very special sense. Heidegger says: "As resolute, Dasein is already taking action [Als entschlossenes handelt das Dasein schon ]" (BT 347, SZ 300). The "already" is crucial here. Resoluteness is always already action because it is the transcendental condition for "action" in the standard sense of the term. It is the attitudinal "orientation" necessary for authentic action. If it seems to be arbitrary and irrational, that is due to the fact that it is being interpreted as decision and action in the standard sense, rather than as the transcendental condition, or the ontological orientation, for the very possibility of authentic action. Thus, contrary to the interpretation of his critics, Heidegger is not at all defining authenticity in terms of decisions and actions for which it would be wrong or inappropriate to ask for justifying reasons. (In "On the Essence of Truth," and in many other writings where he discusses freedom, Heidegger explicitly repudiates conceptions of freedom which think of it in egocentric terms, as an arbitrary, capricious, and irrational exercise of the will.)
Radically understood, the "decision" constitutive of Entschlossenheit is an ontologically drafted scission, a decisive break with the temporality of das Man , the causal continuum of history. It is a decisive break with history as a reifying forgetting of being. What is in question, as Heidegger expresses it in "The Anaximander Fragment," is the possibility of a "decisive turn [entscheidende Wende ] in the destiny of being" (AX 57, H 342). The break consists in the decision to alter the ground for historical decision and action—to shift, as it were, to a radically different ground. This alteration takes place by virtue of a resolute openness to the presencing of being, the being of beings. Resolute openness to the presencing of being is the necessary condition for the possibility of authentic historical action. Thus, in Heidegger's later work, this Entschlossenheit becomes a question of the
recollection of being—a deconstructive hermeneutics of memory that must struggle against the overwhelming force of illusory appearance, to make the frightening ruination (Verderb ), the "untimely" work of
The "moment of vision" is the moment of resoluteness because it is that moment when there is a recollection of being and a corresponding openness that gathers all beings into the anarchic temporality and history of being, into the abyssal withdrawal of grounding principles where all the prevailing worldly institutions and regimes of time and history are subjected to what Derrida would call "the justice of deconstruction" and granted other possibilities of generation and construction. It is in this anarchic dimension of justice that resoluteness roots the "moment of vision." And therefore it is ultimately in this anarchic justice alone that authentic action can—and must—be "grounded." (See in this regard "The Anaximander Fragment," where Heidegger refers to what "arises from the abyss of that relation by which being has appropriated the essence of Western man.")[121]
What the seer has always already seen are not specific objects and events belonging to the conventional future: such a "predictive" vision is nothing but a cheap, fetishized simulacrum of the seer's art. When Heidegger says that the seer has "always already seen" (immer schon gesehen ), what he means is that, by virtue of a recollection of being, the seer sees the ontological dimension of time and history, sees the conditions of possibility for historical ruptures and radically new beginnings, sees the decisive "justice" of the ontological difference, through which primordial temporality—Anaximander's "ordinance of time" —metes out the timing of beings (AX 54, H 339). What the seer "foresees" are not the ontic futures of specific objects and events, but rather the ontological, abyssal fate of all beings: the law, the "divine justice" that has always already decided their fate: their coming-into-being, their staying awhile, and the inevitability of their perishing. This fate, as already decided, sentencing all our institutions to the condition of being in ruins, is thus a future that is already past—and yet, of course, not yet. And it is this future, this already past future, that the seer sees. Always already—and yet, not yet. The seer must maintain these two temporal perspectives in a paradoxical moment of vision.