II
In The Unnameable , Beckett articulates, as an experience with vision, the pathology of enframing that holds sway in our time. He writes:
My eyes being fixed always in the same direction I can only see, I shall not say clearly, but as clearly as the visibility permits, that which takes place immediately in front of me, that is to say, in the case before us, the collision, followed by the fall and disappearance. . . . In a word, I only see what appears immediately in front of me, I only see what appears close beside me, what I best see I see ill.[9]
What he describes, here, is the pathology in a reifying way of looking and seeing, eyes that can impose on what they see only that mode of being present which is reflected in what Heidegger has called the "frontal ontology" of traditional metaphysical discourse. In Being and Time , Heidegger reminds us that, "when we merely stare at something, our just-having-it-before-us lies before us as a failure to understand it any more ."[10] Heideg-
ger connects staring, as a way of looking and seeing, with an ontological attitude that posits what is there to be seen as vorhanden , as being present-at-hand. The history of the West is a story of the increasing reification of the perceptual Gestalt . Thus, in modernity, the Gestalt becomes a manifestation of Gestell .
In "Das Ge-Stell," a lecture-essay not yet published in an English translation, Heidegger, like Hegel, sees the diremptions that have shattered the modern world. And, like Benjamin, Heidegger sees the world constructed in the time of modernity as a world in ruins, a world in which only fragments and traces remain to tell the truth. In "Das Ge-Stell," then, he observes that, in the present epoch, our perceptivity has for the most part been subtly pressured into losing—or disengaging from—its original, spontaneously emergent sense of organic structural integrity, so that we experience the wholeness of structural wholes as mere collections of fragments, shards, splinters. He writes:
The fragment [Stück ] is something entirely other than the part [der Teil ]. The part shares and imparts itself [teilt sich mit ] with [by, as, in] parts in the organic whole [das Ganze ]. It takes part in the whole, belongs to it. The fragment on the other hand is separated out and indeed is thus as fragment, as what it is, only as long as it is locked up in opposition to other fragments. It never shares and imparts itself in and as part of an organic whole.[11]
The importance of this passage lies, as I read it, in the crucial distinction between an organic whole and a collection of atomic parts—in effect the distinction between an oppressive, pathological figure-ground Gestalt , fragmented and disfigured by the enframing conditions operative in the epoch of das Gestell , and a radically different Gestalt released from such conditions. If we distinguish between a totality and a whole , we may say that, whereas the first is a closed totality, the second would be a whole precisely because of its openness, its consent to alterity, the passage of time, the endless justice of emerging and perishing.
In the same essay-lecture, Heidegger gives the "enframing" of das Ge-Stell further definition: "The Ge-Stell ," he says there, "is universal in its imposition [Stellen ]. It concerns everything that presences [alles Anwesende ]."[12] For "in the Ge-Stell the presencing of everything that presences is placed at our disposal and made readily available [zum Bestand ]."[13] Why is this dangerous? In "Die Gefahr" ("The Danger"), another one of the Bremer Vorträge , Heidegger asserts that, "according to its essence, the Ge-Stell does not protect [wahrt nicht ] the truth of the thing as thing." In other words: "In the essence of the Ge-Stell it comes to pass that the thing loses
its protection [Verwahrlosung ] as thing."[14] The very being of the thing is at stake, here. But not only the being of the thing: Our "ownmost" being as human beings, who we are and who we could become—that also is at stake, as the passage from Schelling already suggested.
Although the ancient world was not subject to the rule of enframing, traces of a way of thinking that was already, without knowing it, preparing the ground for the distinctive, ever-increasing enframing of the modern world can sometimes be detected in its philosophical discourse. Thus Heidegger finds it necessary to ask a question which calls for the history of being: "In what sense and in what way is it manifest, [even] in the earliest moment of the coming to pass of being [des Seinsgeschickes ], that in being, i.e., in [the Greek philosophers' conception of]
Other statements in this text leave no room for misunderstanding: "If enframing is a destiny of the coming to presence of being itself, then we may venture to suppose that enframing, as one among being's modes of
coming to presence, changes."[17] Thus he says that "another destining, yet veiled, is waiting."[18] But, he adds, "modern man must first and above all find his way back into the full breadth of the space proper to his essence."[19] I take this to include by implication the spacing of the perceptual Gestalt: it too must be allowed to presence, to emerge and take shape, in accordance with the logic
In his work on Nietzsche, Heidegger describes the will that emerges in the time of the Gestell in a way that enables us to translate the account into a description of the perceptual Gestalt distinctive of this time: the Gestell is manifest, he says, in "the will's surrounding itself with an encircling sphere of that which it can reliably grasp at, each time, as something beneath itself, in order on the basis of it to contend for its own security. That encircling sphere bounds off the constant reserve of what presences
simply nothing.[22] This disconnection between figure and ground in the typical experience of perception is a symptom that gives us fateful warning: the times in which we are living are indeed dangerously "out of joint" (aus den Fugen ).[23]
In order to understand the perceptual Gestalt as a site and instance of enframing, it is necessary to reflect on perception as a process of articulation, a process of bringing-forth (hervorbringen ). What is distinctive about the way that perception under the sway of enframing articulates and brings forth a figure-ground Gestalt ? "Enframing," Heidegger says, "challenges forth into the frenziedness of ordering that blocks every view of the coming-to-pass of revealing and so radically endangers the relation [of human beings] to the essence [Wesen ] of truth."[24] Although enframing "comes to pass as a destining of revealing," it is "a destining that gathers together into the revealing that challenges forth."[25] Although, under the spell of enframing, perception still takes part in a process of unconcealment and effects a certain bringing-forth, its interaction with the presencing of being tends to become a "challenging-forth into ordering," an "ordering of the real as standing reserve."[26] Such perception is of course disclosive, but it is also at the same time deeply forgetful, willfully concealing the openness of the ground, the gift (the Es gibt ) of the field in which, and by grace of which, it takes place—and even repressing the fact of this willful concealment: "The Open [itself] becomes an object, and is thus twisted around toward human beings."[27]
Under the spell of enframing, then, perception is never far from violence; its knowledge, in fact, is a power that can come only from aggression and torture. The Gestalt , therefore, essentially undergoes a process that it would not be an exaggeration to describe as its disfigurement: "The original emergence and coming-to-be of energies, the
With regard to the question of this dullness, this loss of radiance, perhaps it will suffice for the moment to note, here, just two decisive passages: [1] In Being and Time , Heidegger asserts that, "in 'setting down the subject', we dim entities down to focus."[31] [2] In "The Question Concerning Technology," Heidegger says that "Enframing blocks off the shining forth and holding sway of truth."[32] With regard to the "hardening into permanence," Heidegger argues, in Basic Concepts , that "presencing does not mean mere presence, but emerging and opening-up. . . . Mere presence, in the sense of the present-at-hand [Vorhandene ], has already set a limit to presencing, emergence, and has thus given up presencing."[33] In elaborating this point, he observes that "what presences only presences in emerging and precisely not in the presence that has congealed into permanence." "It belongs," he says, "to the essence of presencing that its possible non-essence of hardening into something permanent is repelled in it."[34] All these assertions gain special significance when they are understood concretely as phenomenological observations referring to the emergence and dissolution of the figure-ground structures that form in the event of perception and depend on the way our looking and seeing let them emerge, bringing them, drawing them forth, out of the encompassing field of visibility.
Most in question, perhaps, and most at stake, is our attitude towards the ground: whether or not its dynamism, its openness, its dimensionality, is granted by the corresponding receptive openness of our perception—our willingness, for example, to let perception be decentered, drawn into abysses of invisibility, radically surprised. As an ontologically oriented capacity, perception calls upon one to "engage oneself with the open region and its openness [das Offene und dessen Offenheit ] into which every being comes to stand."[35] Elaborating this point, with words ("not to lose myself") that echo Schelling's, quoted at the beginning of this study, Heidegger explains that:
To engage oneself with the disclosedness [Entborgenheit ] of beings is not to lose oneself in them; rather, such engagement withdraws in the face of beings in order that they might reveal themselves with respect to what and how they are and in order that presentative correspondence might take its standard from them.[36]
Moreover, this comportment requires an acceptance of concealment: "Letting-be," he says, "is intrinsically at the same time a concealing [Das Seinlassen ist zugleich ein Verbergen ]. In the ek-sistent freedom of Dasein . . . there is concealment [Verborgenheit ]."[37] We need to give thought to the social, political, and cultural significance of the disruptive and
anarchic ontological "standard" or "measure" implicit in this engagement, this way of looking and seeing.
Gestalt psychology has demonstrated the organic interdependencies, the reciprocally altering interactions, that are constitutive of an undisturbed Gestalt formation process. Insisting that "a theory of perception must be a field theory,"[38] Köhler points out, for example, that "objects show a considerable change in size when they are located within a region which has been strongly influenced by a figure."[39] This means, he says, that the after-effects of such figure-forming processes tend to alter given visual objects. "Prolonged inspection of any specific visual object tends," he notes, "to change its organization. Moreover, other objects which are afterwards shown in the same region of the field are also affected, namely displaced or distorted."[40] Consequently, as the fixation of a staring gaze, the enframing typical of the Gestell interrupts the figure-ground interplay and distorts both figure and ground. Instead of a dynamic, spontaneously flowing interaction between figure and ground, a looser, freer, softer differentiation between the periphery and the center of focus, deconstructing the metaphysical dualism that prioritizes the center, there is a "freezing" of the flow, interrupting the work of time—the emergence and dissolution of perceptual configurations. And when the figure is subject to such reifying intensity, it becomes detached from its ground, frozen in a state of permanent disfiguration. As for the ground, although it is the opening openness, the end-less origin of the figures that enframing brings forth, its presencing is either forgotten, suppressed, and neglected, or else it is submitted to the most extreme ontic reduction—as if it could be possessed by the egological subject as just another figure.
Herbert Guenther notes that the openness of the perceptual ground "is present in and actually presupposed by every determinate form. Every determinate entity evolves out of something indeterminate and to a certain extent maintains its connection with this indeterminacy; it is never completely isolated from it. Because the indeterminate entity is not isolated from the indeterminacy . . . , our attention can shift back and forth between one and the other."[41] The enframing gaze cannot, will not, let the ground be ground; it cannot, will not, tolerate its immeasurableness, its withdrawal from the grasp of perception, its refusal to be totalized, reified, possessed. Instead of a gaze that is softly focusing, gently hovering, open and receptive to the dynamics of change, open and receptive to the spontaneous emergence of new configurations taking place in the dimensions of the surrounding field; instead of a gaze that "withdraws in the face of beings in order that they might reveal themselves,"[42] in the epoch of enframing there
is a tendency for the gaze to become aggressively dualistic—sharp, linear, and atomizing. This is the gaze that has installed—and continues to serve—a metaphysics of reified presence, a metaphysics of closure, violence, and mortification.[43]
This reification is a persistent theme in Heidegger's thought, something he clearly articulated in Being and Time and repeatedly emphasized in subsequent lectures and writings. In a 1941 course on Anaximander, for example, Heidegger declared that "permanence is contrary to the . . . essence of being, contrary to the
In the age we call "modernity," our sight has increasingly become a "line of sight" (Blickbahn des Anblicks ), moving in the "predetermined perspective" (schon bestimmten Vorblickbahn ) of an ego-logical subject.[45] The rise to power of this subject—more specifically a bourgeois subject, inseparable from the capital-driven economy and culture of the bourgeoisie—involves the reduction of the being of people and things to the reified condition of objects that are, as Heidegger puts it, "either to be beheld (view, image) or to be acted upon (product and calculation). The original world-making power,
According to Heidegger, in the world of Greek antiquity people did not relate to what is as to an inwardly conceived image (Bild ) or representation (Vorstellung ). For the Greeks, what is is what presences; and this experience with perception did not involve looking at what is and having a representation of it in the mind; nor did it involve making the one who is looking into a "subject" and making what is presencing into an "object" (Gegenstand ). This construction is the distinctive mark of modernity. It is only in the modern period—the period beginning with the self-affirmation of "Man" in the humanism of the sixteenth century and with a way of looking at the world reinforced and carried forward, albeit in very different projects, by the Cartesianism and empiricism of the seventeenth and by the rationalism and romanticism of the eighteenth—that what is present is determined [1] as an ob-ject, [2] as being there for a subject, [3] as
(re)presented by the subject to itself, [4] as placed (gesetzt, gestellt ) to lie before the subject, and finally, therefore, [5] as present in the form of a representation. In and with this determination of what is present, the ever-increasing power of the subject is claimed and asserted. As Derrida correctly remarks in "Sending: On Representation," Vorstellung "marks the gesture which consists of placing, of causing to stand before one, of installing in front of oneself as available, of localizing ready-to-hand, within the availability of the preposition. . . . The subject is what can or believes it can offer itself representations, disposing them and disposing of them."[47]
Now, Heidegger argues that what is distinctive of modernity—and the cause of his concern—is not so much the fact that experience can be a process of representation as it is the fact that representation is universalized, that it becomes the sole medium for all experiencing, and that its way of relating to what is present encourages us in the attitude of domination. And this means it encourages us in an attitude that does violence to the background of perception, either by simply forgetting its way of presencing, or by gathering it into the Gestalt in a reified re-presentation of presencing.
In telling the history of philosophy, Heidegger attributes to Platonism the first major step towards the modern transformation of the world into an image or picture (Bild ). Derrida nicely summarizes Heidegger's argument in "The Age of the World Picture":
If for the Greeks, . . . the world is not essentially a Bild , an available image, a spectacular form offered to the gaze or to the perception of a subject; if the world was first of all presencing (Anwesen ) which seizes man or attaches itself to him rather than being seen, intuited (angeschaut ) by him; if it is rather man who is taken over and regarded by what is, it was nevertheless necessary for the world as Bild , and then as representation, to declare itself among the Greeks, and this was nothing less than Platonism. The determination of the being of what is as
is not yet its determination as Bild , but the(aspect, look, visible figure) would be the distant condition, the presupposition, the secret mediation which would one day permit the world to become representation.[48]
And with the historical advent of representation, "Man" becomes in two senses the one who re-presents: it is we human beings who determine what is and how what is shall be. It is we who become the "representatives" of and for being, asserting the legitimacy of our domination as the ones sent by destiny, das Geschick , to watch over all of being.
Precisely because the modern gaze is driven by the will to power, and tends accordingly to assault the invisible, to round it up and hold it hostage
in the camps of the totally visible, Heidegger felt compelled to argue, during his 1973 seminar in Zähringen, that phenomenology must be practiced as "a phenomenology of the nonappearing" (eine Phänomenologie des Unscheinbaren ).[49] This hermeneutical rendering of phenomenology commits it to functioning as a practice of resistance, a practice that would challenge and subvert the metaphysics of unity, totality, and reification that circulates in and prevails in our present culture. In the field of our vision, this involves decentering the gaze, disrupting its tendency to exclude and deny what falls outside its narrow, frontal focus.
For Heidegger, the Gestalt is the site of the deepest strife. Thus, for example, in his discussion of "The Origin of the Work of Art," he maintains that
the strife [Streit ] that is brought into the rift [Riß ] and thus set back into the earth and fixed in place [festgestellte ] is the Gestalt . Createdness [Geschaffensein ] of the work means: truth's being fixed in place in the figure [Festgestelltsein der Wahrheit in die Gestalt ]. Gestalt is the structure [das Gefüge ] in whose shape the rift composes and submits itself [sich fügt ]. This composed rift [Der gefügte Riß ] is the fitting or joining of the shining of truth [die Füge des Scheinens der Wahrheit ]. What is here called Gestalt is always to be thought in terms of the particular placing and framing [aus jenem Stellen und Ge-stell ], as which the work occurs [west ] when it sets itself up and sets itself forth [insofern es sich auf- und her-stellt ].[50]
Although this passage is about the Greek temple as a work of culture constructed within the Greek world to mediate the relation between this world and the earth upon which it stands, it may also be read hermeneutically as a deeply truthful comment on the Gestalt that is formed in perceptual experience—as a comment the truth of which requires of us that we think this Gestalt ontologically, i.e., in its ontological dimensionality. What the passage thus calls to our attention is the fact that, among other things, the perceptual Gestalt is always a site where the differentiation between figure and ground instances, manifests, the strife, the dynamic tension, inherent in the ontological difference. At the level of perception, the rift of ontological difference constitutes a certain necessary rending, a certain necessary tearing-apart, of the perceptual field: a figure is brought forth, and as it is being wrested, drawn away from the presencing ground and field, the ground and field withdraw, sometimes receding, however, only in correspondence to a violent, carelessly imposed oblivion. Whether or not the truth shines (west ) in the perceptual Gestalt essentially depends, then, on the way in which the Gestalt is set up and set forth.
The poet René Char once said: "Je retirai aux choses l'illusion qu'elles produisent pour se préserver de nous et leur laisserai la part qu'elles nous concèdent." ("I shall take from things the illusion they produce to preserve themselves from us and leave them the part they concede to us."[51] These words, however, can be given (at least) two absolutely opposite interpretations. Thus they demand a double reading. According to one reading, the poet would be exemplifying and honoring the very will to power that Heidegger laments, seeing it manifest everywhere in our contemporary world; for the poet would be describing a relationship to things not at all different from the violent possessiveness prevailing in our time. We of today are all too familiar with commodification and the transformation of things into capital resources. So the truth involved here could not be the truth (Wahrheit ) as Heidegger understands it; for Heidegger, as we know, the essence of truth—unconcealment—demands an attitude of caring, protecting, safeguarding, preserving, as his etymological reading of the German words wahren, bewahren, verwahren , and gewähren brings out.—"Dasein," he says in the Beiträge , is the "Wächter der Wahrheit," the guardian of truth, the "Wahrer" of the openness of truth, the one who lives in the care, the "Sorge" and "Wahrung" of being.[52] And such care demands the protection and preservation of the thing's dimensions of concealment and self-concealment. We must also bear in mind that, when Heidegger thinks about perception, he thinks from and with the German word, Wahrnehmung , which means not only taking-as-true, or taking-to-be-true, but also, if thought more etymologically, taking into one's care.
There is, then, a second possible reading of Char's words, quite the antithesis of the first. The violence that Heidegger laments in ordinary perception is the violence that is promoted by thinking—one-dimensionally—that the essence of truth lies in our certitude over correctness. But Heidegger learned from the ancient Greeks that there is another, very different violence in relation to the truth: the violence, namely, that comes from understanding that the possibility of such truth is always dependent on
breaching the defenses of the common perception. Heeding the poet's calling, Char is attempting, against the pressures of the modern Gestell , to experience the birth of things, the awesome event of unconcealment, the moment of opening, the very giving of the possibility of truth as we ordinarily see it. The poet's violence is thus actually a recognition of the overwhelming power of concealment—and an expression of awe and wonder before the event of unconcealment. The poet's violence toward things is not the indifference, neglect, or assault common in our time; contrary to appearances, it expresses the very deepest caring for the truth, wresting the phenomenon out of the reification of everyday experience and returning it to the interplay of concealment and unconcealment. This could not be more at odds with the attempt, common in our time, to wrest the phenomenon out of this interplay and pull it into the reification and dullness of the realm of everyday perception, everyday experience.
This, our second interpretation, is supported by a passage from Being and Time . Here is what Heidegger says:
It is essential that Dasein should explicitly appropriate what has already been uncovered, defend itself against semblance and disguise, and assure itself of its uncoveredness again and again. . . . The uncovering of anything new is never done on the basis of having something completely hidden, but takes its departure, rather, from uncoveredness. . . . Truth (uncoveredness) is something that must always first be wrested from entities . Entities get snatched out of their hiddenness. The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery . Is it accidental that when the Greeks express themselves as to the essence of truth, they use a privative expression—
[54]
Heidegger's point is that love for the truth requires that one resist the spell of conventionality (average everydayness), and that one be willing to fight for the truth, engaging those powerful, and sometimes overwhelming forces in the world which make it difficult, even dangerous, to reach and win it. The poet's violence (indicated by the word "wresting") is violence for the sake of openness to the event (Ereignis ) of unconcealment, a poetizing (dichterisch ) violence intended to rescue the phenomenon from the captivity in which the culturally hegemonic paradigm of truth as correctness has been holding it.
In "What Are Poets For?," Heidegger is inspired by Rilke's poetry to make an observation with profound implications for our understanding of the psychology behind the ego's gaze. Calling attention, as would Freud, to the ego-subject's strategies of defense, strategies that often turn out to be
self-defeating or self-destructive, he says: "Objectification blocks us off against the Open. The more venturesome daring does not produce a defense."[55] (Representation, in re-presenting to oneself, and on one's own terms, whatever presents itself, is thus always a defensive response. And in encounters with others, it will function as a structure of prejudice.) Practiced as Heidegger wants it, phenomenology draws the gaze outside and away from its center, its site of power, situating it instead in the ekstatic intertwining of the visible and the invisible—there where it is vulnerable to
