5—
The Field of Vision:
Intersections of the Visible and the Invisible in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty
All that is visible clings to the invisible. . . . Perhaps the thinkable to the unthinkable.
Novalis[1]
Every visible is invisible. . . . The invisible of the visible.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible[2]
[Immanent critique] must dissolve the rigidity of the temporally and spatially-fixed object into a field of tension of the possible and the real.
Theodor Adorno, "Sociology and Empirical Research"[3]
All reification is a forgetting.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,
Dialectic of Enlightenment[4]
I
We shall be giving thought, here, to perception: to the formation of the figure-ground Gestalt , the relationship among figure and ground, the field of perception, and the horizon that delimits it. In questioning our experience with vision, we will be working with a number of different texts, but will give special attention to two texts in which the nature—or, say, the character—of our sight, our capacity for vision, is the major topic of thought.[5] These two texts, each one in its own way a record of the boldest, most radical, and most unsettling thinking, are Conversation on a Country Path , a meditation on Gelassenheit (releasement) that Heidegger wrote down in 1944–45, and Merleau-Ponty's "Working Notes," fragmentary texts written near the end of his life and published posthumously in a collection bearing the title The Visible and the Invisible .[6]
In his Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty wrote: "I am a field, an experience."[7] Later, in his 1959 "Notes de Travail," he wrote that, "the world is a field, and as such is always open."[8] "There are fields in in-
tersection, in a field of fields, wherein the 'subjectivities' are integrated" (VIE 227, VIF 281). In fact: "Each field is a dimensionality, a being is dimensionality itself" (VIE 227, VIF 280). In Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological meditations on the logic of the perceptual field, Heidegger's "Feldwege," his "paths in the field," are given a needed hold on our experience with perception.
The question of the figure-ground Gestalt that is formed in perception is of much greater importance than it might at first seem. As this present study will demonstrate, reflection on this matter takes us right into the formulation of a radically hermeneutic phenomenology, and thus into illuminations of the attitude of Gelassenheit , a new approach to the problematic of ontology, and a far-reaching critique of metaphysics. Indeed, it might be argued that, in Heidegger's Gelassenheit essay, there is such a bold re-thinking of the figure-ground formation and its field that the dialogue effects a decisive "Revolution der Ortschaft des Denkens" (a "revolution in the topology of thinking").[9]
There are, as both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty understood, some quite surprising rewards for a path of thinking that attempts to deconstruct the elegant conception of the ground which has held sway in the discourse of metaphysics by returning to the more elementary experience of the ground in the structure of perception. Similarly, it can be useful to begin with a hermeneutic phenomenology of perception as one way (Weg ) to think anew [i] the subject-object structure and the character of the relationship it involves, [ii] the reduction of the presencing of being (die Anwesenheit des Anwesens ) to being ready-to-hand (Zuhandensein ) and being present-at-hand (Vorhandensein ), which are the only two modes of presencing we recognize in our time, and [iii] the reduction of the immeasurable dimensionality of being, of that which opens up the field or ground of the ontological difference between being and beings, to the ontic dimensions of beings.
Taking a position that agrees with Heidegger, the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment remark that "the loss of memory is a transcendental condition for science."[10] If, because of the increasing instrumentalization of reason, one may suspect an inner connection between the historical development of rationality in the West and the forgetting, or rather the suppression, of the potential for enlightenment inherent in our perceptual capacities, then our reflections here should be read as attempting a certain critical recollection, an anamnesis both of our still unrealized potential—an ontological normativity—and of the historical suffering for which this falling-short is responsible.
The project for philosophical thought involves two deeply related tasks: a recollection of the as yet undeveloped potential in nature's gift of perception and a recollection that brings to light the violence that is both cause and effect of our historically predominant way of looking and seeing. In what follows, I am suggesting that, in redeeming the immemorial depths of vision, both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty made significant contributions to this project.
II
Consider two well-known examples of ambiguous, reversible Gestalten: the duck-rabbit, derived from Jastrow, that appears in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations[11] and the equally familiar formation that can be seen either as a white vase in a black space or as the heads of two people—twins, in fact, since their silhouettes are isomorphic—directly facing one another across a white space.
These drawings attract and hold our attention because of their perceptual ambiguity: they invite us to reverse the figure-ground relation that we initially and spontaneously see. They invite us to shift our visual focus, seeing as figure what we had taken as ground and seeing as ground what we had taken as figure. They invite us to allow our eyes to play with the freely flowing interplay that is possible between figure and ground, to soften the dualism that typically differentiates figure and ground. The duplicity of these images makes them intriguing; it also makes them a source of visual pleasure. In their presence, one experiences a certain jouissance , a certain delight, a certain quite singular freedom: it is as if one were magically transported back in time—back to the innocent enchantments of early childhood. For, once upon a time, our vision knew nothing of the inhibitions, the constraints, the disciplinary regimes to which, in due time, it would be subjected. Once upon a time, our vision could move freely, spontaneously, back and forth, between dream and reality, fact and fantasy. For the child, Gestalt reversals were natural events, manifestations of a mimetic magic inherent in the visionary world. Why shouldn't a duck turn into a rabbit or a rabbit turn into a duck?
The Gestalt shift, reversing figure and ground, letting a different configuration emerge—Wittgenstein talks about the dawning of an aspect—is a prime example of a hermeneutical process: it is the hermeneutics that is inherently and spontaneously operative in the dynamics, the ekstatic interactions, intertwinings and intercrossings of the perceptual act, in so far as it be deeply, chiasmically, ontologically thought and re-membered.
In "On the Mimetic Faculty," an essay on a topic that assumed considerable importance in the thinking of the Frankfurt School philosophers—especially Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse—Benjamin wrote this:
Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man's. His gift of seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.[12]
According to Benjamin,
this faculty has a history in both the phylogenetic and the ontogenetic sense. As regards the latter, play is for many its school. Children's play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behavior, and its realm is by no means limited to what one person can imitate in another. The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill and a train. (Ibid.)
And he follows this point with a question: "Of what use to him is this schooling of the mimetic faculty?" Of what use is the hermeneutic ability to see something as something else? These "natural correspondences," he says, "are given their true importance only if seen as stimulating and awakening the mimetic faculty in man." Insisting that the "gift of producing similarities . . . and therefore also the gift of recognizing them, have changed with historical development," Benjamin contends that the "direction of this change seems definable as the increasing decay of the mimetic faculty. For clearly, the observable world of modern man contains only minimal residues of the magical correspondences and analogies that were familiar to ancient peoples."[13] For him, "the question is whether we are concerned with the decay of this faculty or with its transformation." Or again: "The question is whether this [faculty] can be developed and adapted to improved understanding."[14] Although we will not be concerned, here, with the "mimetic faculty" as such, the question that Benjamin puts to history—the question, namely, regarding its decline and the possibility of transformation, or, say, a new beginning—will also be ours: ours, in particular, with regard to the historical fixation (Ge-stell ) that imposes itself in our time, our epoch, on the structure (Gestalt ) of figure and ground in our everyday perception.
For Heidegger, as we shall see, the question that Benjamin formulates must become a question of being, an ontological question challenging the history of metaphysics as a history of being. But perhaps a promising beginning for our present work of thought would be to reflect on the
phenomenology of the playfulness in the child's mimetic attitude, for it is surely such aesthetic playfulness that maintains figure and ground in a freely flowing interaction and lets the structure they form undergo a spontaneous reversal. In short, it is a question of a deconstructive, afformative movement, in perception, that can release the figure-ground structure from an inveterate tendency to reification that inhibits the free, spontaneous interaction between the focal figure and its dynamic ground.
It is inherent in the nature of the perceptual Gestalt that the being of the ground, the ontological event of its field-dimensional presencing, is radically different from the being of the figure—different from that (figurative being) which presences within its allowing. However, for both rationalism and empiricism, schools of thought which re-present perception as an act of re -presentation, the nature of the field or ground is either ignored, since its being, its presencing, cannot be mastered, cannot be totalized and reified, or else it is turned into another figure, another object, another (vorhanden or zuhanden ) being. Interpreted in this way, perception is nothing but a transposition of the metaphysical re-presentation of the Absolute Ground of Reason, duplicating the repressive measures that such Reason imposes—recoiling in horror from its occasional glimpse into the abyss—on the ground it has made its own. "To think being," Heidegger says in his 1942–43 lectures on Parmenides, "requires in each instance a leap, a leap into the groundless from the habitual ground upon which for us beings always rest."[15] And he adds: "Being, however, is not a [graspable] ground but is [for the gaze that would grasp it] the groundless. . . . In fact, we surely fall into the abyss, we find no ground, as long as we know and seek a ground only in the form of a being , and hence never carry out the leap into being or leave the familiar landscape of the oblivion of being."
In terms of the problematic of the present study, viz., the phenomenon of the perceptual field and the differentiation of figure and ground, the post-metaphysical importance of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty consists in the fact that, in their phenomenological articulations of perception, they both attempted, albeit each in his own way, to deconstruct these metaphysical re-presentations, subtly violent disfigurations of the ground—and to point in the direction of another way of experiencing the field of perception and its figure-ground formations. And, although neither said so explicitly, perhaps they had an intuitive sense that a different understanding of perception—a different experience with perception—might somehow, someday, make possible a new, post-metaphysical beginning for philosophical thought. The post-metaphysical question—question for a post-
metaphysical phenomenology—is therefore: Can the perceptual field, the ground of perception, be released from our historical compulsion to represent it in a way that accommodates our will to power and its need to totalize and reify the presencing of being? In other words: Can the ground be experienced as ground? Can its hermeneutical way of presencing, i.e., as a dynamic interplay of concealment and unconcealment, be given appropriate respect in the receptivity of a perception that lets itself be appropriated by the ground and accordingly lets the phenomenon of the ground be what and how it is? Can the coming-to-pass of the ontological difference that is constitutive of all the local figure-ground differences taking place in our perceptual field be made visible hermeneutically, and thus without violence to its withdrawal into concealment? But the question concerning the constellation of figure and ground cannot be separated from the question concerning the structure of subject and object. Hence the possibility of a movement beyond metaphysics must also think the historical possibility of breaking out of this structure into the spacing of the ontological difference: différance , the primordial, sensuous, ekstatic écart . As Heidegger states it in his Parmenides lectures, it is a question of "the way historical man belongs within the bestowal of being (Zufügung des Seins ), i.e., the way this order entitles him to acknowledge being and to be the only being among all beings to see the open" (PE 150, PG 223. Italics added). We might also say that it is a question of our response-ability, our capacity as beings gifted with vision, to measure up to the responsibility for perceptual responsiveness laid down for us in the "primordial de-cision" (Entscheid ) of the ontological difference (ibid.). To recognize the operation of the ontological difference taking place in the figure-ground difference of the perceptual Gestalt is to recognize the ontological difference as the primordial Riß , the primordial Ur-teil underlying all our perceptual syntheses and judgments—and recognize, moreover, that this rift, this division, decision, and scission, an ekstatic écart underlying and gathering all our so-called acts of perception, is also the only "norm"
In a 1943 text, "On the Essence of Truth," Heidegger says:
To engage oneself with the disclosedness 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 [vorstellende Angleichung] might take its standard [das Richtmaab ] from them.[16]
Borrowing words from Foucault, who borrowed the thought from Georges Dumézil, I want to suggest that, in thinking about perception, we must look for "structured norms of experience, the scheme of which could be found with modifications on different levels."[17] This articulation of different structural and normative levels of experience is the major theme of Merleau-Ponty's early pre-phenomenological work, The Structure of Comportment , a critique of prevailing theories that set the stage for all his later, genuinely phenomenological work. The claim that we shall be considering here, then, is that there is in our perception an ontological norm; but if the configuration of such a norm takes place—and is—only in the breach, then we shall be compelled to acknowledge that the ordinary, everyday perception it solicits is summoned to endless transcendence—and thus to a certain transgression.
In Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty renders the lighting visible as the worldly, ontic assignment and articulation of a normative level for vision: "The lighting," he says there, "directs my gaze." "We perceive in conformity with the light." "The lighting is . . . what we take as the norm" (PPE 310–11, PPF 358–59). But in "The Anaximander Fragment," Heidegger shows that there is also an ontological assignment of normativity, which the gift of the lighting articulates. "Presence within the lighting," he says there, "articulates [i.e., brings forth, gives an enabling field to] all the human senses."[18] The ontological norm, or measure, gift of the lighting, draws the gaze of the ego-logical subject into its abyssal dimensionality, into the depth of a ground and field that resists totalization and closure, denying the gaze its sovereignty, its lucidity and certainty, and calling into question the ontic compromises that would reduce the ontological dimensionality of the lighting to a mere level of illumination serving the sociocultural normalization of the gaze. The normativity of the lighting that Heidegger is attempting to bring into our recollection as that dispensation and assignment by which the character of our vision will ultimately be measured is a chiasmic intertwining of concealment and unconcealment, the presence and the absence of light, the anarchy of the deepest, most extreme night, which the lighting protects, and into which it endlessly withdraws. The lighting gives light; but it also brings opacities, false appearances, destabilizing shadows, and blinding darkness, reminders of our irremediable finitude. If the ontic normativity of the light can be made to serve any economy of perception, the ontological normativity of the lighting is an absolutely uncompromising measure, a measure beyond being, that submits all regimes of perception to the questioning of its deconstructive justice. Measured against the abyssal dimensionality of the lighting,
the force-field of perception that has structured life in the modern world could begin, perhaps, to lose its enchanted hold.
III
In his Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty asserts that "it is necessary to put our surroundings in abeyance the better to see the object, and to lose in background what one gains in focal figure, because to look at the object is to plunge oneself into it, and because objects form a system in which one cannot show itself without concealing others" (PPE 67, PPF 81–82. Italics added). According to this account, figure and ground are inevitably opposed to one another in a strict logic of equivalence: for every gain, there is an equal loss. In this logic, a logic that the modern bourgeoisie has institutionalized and embodied, the visibility of things always comes at a price; and the penalty is always a certain differential concealment. Such is the economic "justice"
In a later chapter, Merleau-Ponty essentially reiterates this point: "I have visual objects because I have a visual field in which richness and clarity are in inverse proportion to each other, and because these two demands, either of which, if taken separately, might be carried to infinity, when brought together, produce a certain culmination and optimal balance in the perceptual process" (PPE 318, PPF 367. Italics added). Is Merleau-Ponty right? Is there a compulsory, inevitable trade-off between richness (in the ground) and clarity (in the figure)? Must perception always involve such a strife, such a dualism? Is no other way of experiencing their interaction an historical possibility? What is in question here—and indeed at stake—is certainly not the differentiation of figure and ground as such, but rather the way in which this differentiation is constituted and maintained—or say held in our beholding. It is, then, a question of their interaction, and more specifically, the dynamics of their structural differentiation: whether there is an ongoing, free flow of "communication" between figure and ground, or, instead, a certain obstruction, a barrier, a fixation, a reification of the difference, inhibiting the spontaneity of this "communication." Could there be a freely flowing interaction between figure and ground, instead of a relation of gain and loss, fullness and emptiness, absolutized presence and totally negated absence? When the ground withdraws and a figure emerges, is it necessary that the gaze forget and deny the ever-emergent energies of the ground, its boundless wealth and generosity, its resourcefulness, its unlimited capacity to bring forth (hervorbringen) ever-new configurations of being?
We must ask whether this logic of gain and loss, this logic of equivalence, is a matter of essential necessity—or whether the dynamics of the perceptual Gestalt could be otherwise. It could be, for example, that the sway of this logic is to a certain extent a reflection of the political economy within which we live—a reflection of its character, the character it prizes and rewards. In any case, we must not immediately assume that it is entirely natural, that it is in no way an historical construction—hence, a contingency that could somehow be altered, provided that certain historical conditions were also to be altered. And we must not immediately take our normal, everyday habits of perception as establishing the ideal norm for perception. Its deepest implicit potentialities, its enlightenment, and its "promise of happiness" might call for perception with a radically different character.
IV
In "Plato's Doctrine of the Truth," Heidegger contends that "everything depends on the
In the "Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking," a scientist, a scholar, and a teacher, each representing a distinct point of view, converse while taking a walk on paths that traverse, and put them again in touch with, the fields of the countryside—Feld-Wege . They are gathered together on a path of thinking laid down by the question of being. They have allowed themselves to be claimed by what calls for thought. And what most calls for thought is thinking itself.
The scholar, representing a traditional philosophical point of view, remarks that "thinking, understood in the traditional way, as re-presenting, is a kind of willing. . . . To think is to will, and to will is to think."[20] This enables the teacher, representing Heidegger's most advanced stage of thinking, to go right to the heart of the matter: "I want non-willing," he says (DT 59, G 32). The scholar, however, like the one falling into the abyssal dialectic of despair that Kierkegaard diagnoses in Sickness Unto Death , can think "non-willing" only as another form of willing: "Non-willing means . . . willingly to renounce willing" (ibid.). What the three are attempting to think, rather, is a thinking released from willing altogether, a thinking, therefore, beyond the duality of willing and non-willing . (In the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" to his essay on the Trauerspiel , Benjamin attempted, in a perhaps rather similar spirit, to disconnect truth as disclosure from the will of the subject: "Truth," he wrote, "is the death of intention.")[21]
Like some of Plato's dialogues—the Lysis and the Phaedrus come at once to mind—Heidegger's conversation takes place away from the city—on a country path. And, significantly, it continues into the evening, into the night. The only dialogue of Plato that takes place at night is the Symposium , on the topic of love. Perhaps it is, here too, a question of love—or say a certain caring, the love that manifests thinking. Be that as it may, the scientist, the least likely of the three, observes that the thought he just articulated was "not my doing but that of the night having set in, which without forcing, compels concentration" (DT 60, G 33). This "not my doing" indicates already a certain understanding of non-willing. And the reference to the night suggests an even deeper intuition. For, in the night, one cannot see—the invisible holds sway. The night is the time of sleep and dreaming. It is the time, also, of fantasies, haunting: in the night, one can feel more intensely the presence of what is absent. The night, moreover, is the time when the old and familiar boundaries, the very definition of things, cannot be counted on: there is, instead, confusion, interpenetration, chiasmic intertwining, a deeper unity. Though much of it was probably written at night, the discourse of traditional philosophy is a philosophy of the light, of the day. It is a discourse produced under the hegemony of daylight vision.
Heidegger's discourse, interrupting this hegemony, takes place at night, and, as the teacher says, "still far from human habitation" (DT 60, G 33).
Allowing himself to be drawn into the spirit of the conversation, and expressing, whether or not he realizes it, a certain experience of the "non-willing" they are seeking to understand, the scientist declares: "Ever more openly I am coming to trust in the inconspicuous guide who takes us by the hand—or better said, by the word—in this conversation" (ibid.). It is a question, they all agree, of somehow letting their capacity for releasement (Gelassenheit , letting-go, letting-be) be awakened. "Awakened": that is to say, it cannot be a question of willing releasement. Taking up this point, the scientist says: "You speak without letup of a letting-be and give the impression that what is meant is a kind of passivity. All the same, I think I understand that it is in no way a matter of weakly allowing things to slide and drift along" (DT 61, G 35). The three concur that what they are trying to think is "beyond the distinction between activity and passivity," because "releasement does not belong to the domain of the will" (ibid.). But, as they also agree, "releasement" cannot be identified with the traditional theological concept of a renunciatory non-willing (DT 62, G 36). As we shall see, releasement involves a certain neutralization of the will-to-see, so that the gaze relates to what it is given to see with composure and equanimity, letting it appear as it is. (One of Heidegger's words for this is Erscheinenlassen . He also will speak of a Seinlassen .)
The scientist then asks a crucial question, shifting the conversation to the problematic of re-presentation: "What has releasement to do with thinking?" (DT 62, G36). To this the teacher replies: "Nothing, if we conceive thinking in the traditional way as re-presenting." The scientist promptly confirms this, confessing that, "with the best of will, I cannot represent to myself this nature of thinking [i.e., releasement]." This seems to lead them into a dilemma, an impasse: If releasement is not a matter of re-presentation, how can it be thought by a philosophical thinking that knows only the work of re-presentation? "What in the world am I to do?" asks the scientist. "We are to do nothing but wait," says the teacher. This, as the scientist is the first to admit, leaves them all very disoriented: "I hardly know any more who or where I am," he says (DT 62, G 37). This also shows just how radically the ontological question challenges ordinary and familiar experience: it even calls into question our sense of who and where we are. In Being and Time , published in 1929, Heidegger called upon us to think of ourselves as essentially Da-sein: being-there, ekstatically living in the openness of being. But who then, including Heidegger himself, fully understood what this interpretation meant, what new self-understanding it
demanded of us? In his 1942–43 Parmenides lectures, Heidegger emphasizes that, for the pre-Socratic philosophers and poets, looking is "self-showing": "the human look thus experienced [accordingly] disclose[s] the encountering person himself in the ground of his essence" (PE 103, PG 153). How we see shows, reveals, betrays the Grundzüge of who we are—just as much as, if not more than, it places before us, within the openness of their unconcealment, the beings at which we are looking.
According to the story Heidegger wants to tell in his 1944–45 "Conversation on a Country Path," we are essentially ekstatically open beings, living in the immeasurably open dimension of being. But we are, virtually from the very beginning, closed to this dimensionality: virtually from the very beginning, our experience is foreclosed, inhibited, restricted, too bent on willful mastery, too keenly focused on objectification to be aware of it— or take it into our care. We are essentially ekstatic: but this essentiality is only given to us as a potential that needs to be realized, a capacity that needs to be developed. Thus it must be said that we are always already ("immer schon") Da-sein , beings of (belonging to) the openness—and yet also that we are not yet ("noch nicht") such beings, not yet Da-sein (see the teacher's comment, DT 72, G 50: "That [before being released by waiting into the openness of that-which regions,] we were [outside it], and yet we were not." Also see the exchange on DT 75, G 53).
If we go to "The Anaximander Fragment," we find Heidegger observing there that what is always presencing, together with the things that are visibly present, is not "something over against a subject, but is rather an open expanse [Gegend ] of unconcealment, into which and within which whatever comes along lingers" (AXE 34, AXG 319). According to Heidegger, we do not notice the open expanse that the lighting gives us because our "vision is confused by habituation to the multiplicity of the ordinary."[22] Ordinary vision, the vision of das Man , of the anonymous anyone-and-everyone, attends to beings and overlooks being, sees what is visible and ignores the invisible, notices what is present but is unaware of presencing (the gift, or givenness, of the field) as such. Ordinary vision empties the contextual field of meaning: for ordinary perception, the ground is not significant. Although the ground is the source of the figures we see—as we are wont to say—"against" it, ordinary vision regards it as not sufficiently interesting, and it tends therefore to cut off the ground from the figures which engage its attention, thereby inhibiting a freely flowing interplay between them in a disfigurement that affects them both.
"But what else," Heidegger asks us in his Parmenides lectures, "is this relation of being to the essence of man than the clearing and the open which
has lighted itself for the unconcealed?" (PE 146, PG 217). Heidegger claims, in other lectures on Parmenides, that the ancient Greek poets and philosophers experienced being, the immeasurable ground of presencing, the field laid down for vision, as "a luminous appearance in the sense of illumined, radiant self-manifestation."[23] For them, for their vision, being is ("is" in the sense of the Greek
In the Parmenides lectures, Heidegger argues that "the open, to which every being is liberated as if to its freedom, is being itself" (PE 150, PG 224). And it is "the open," he says, that "first lets beings emerge and come to presence as beings" (PE 159, PG 237). "Man alone sees this open" and "gets a glimpse of this open while comporting himself, as he always does, to beings, whether these beings are understood in the Greek sense as what emerges and comes to presence, or in the Christian sense as ens creatum , or in the modern sense as objects" (ibid.). Indeed: "In his comportment to beings, man in advance sees the open by dwelling within the opening and opened project of being" (ibid.).
However, we see the opening of the open "without beholding it" (ibid.). "The Open [i.e., the ground itself] becomes an object, and is thus twisted around toward human beings."[24] As a predominant characteristic of our time, this objectifying tendency, reducing the dimensionality of the visual field, is called "enframing" (das Gestell ), and, according to Heidegger, it effects a corresponding reduction (Entschränkung ) in the lighting, the presencing of which first opened up a field for our vision: "Enframing blocks [verstellt ] the shining-forth and holding sway of truth [i.e., the moment, or event, of aletheic unconcealment by grace of which there is a visual field]."[25] In his work on Nietzsche, Heidegger even asserts that, because of the enframing of the open dimensionality that takes place in the modern world, "the whole field of vision [Gesichts-kreis ] has been wiped away."[26]
Enframing also, of course, affects the horizon of vision: "The horizon no longer emits light of itself. It is now nothing but the point of view posited in the value-positing of the will to power."[27] In another text, directing our attention to (what we might call) the character of our vision and to how this way of looking and seeing affects what is, what is present, to be seen, he observes that "the original emergence and coming-to-be of energies, the
There are, Heidegger contends, two ways of looking and seeing, two understandings: one, seeing in the "original sense," is "emergent self-presenting"; the other is "grasping" (PE 107–8, PG 158–59). The first is also described as "the look of being" (der Anblick des Seins ) (PE 147, PG 219) and as "the essential sight of authentic thinking," beholding in the openness of the lighting the presencing unconcealment of being itself (PE 159, PG 237). It would be a soft, gently hovering gaze, softening, deconstructing the metaphysical division that separates figure from ground. But in a culture such as ours, driven by the will to power, vision tends to become, as Heidegger already phrased it in Being and Time , "a fixed staring at something that is purely present-at-hand."[29] (In his Phenomenology of Perception [PPE 54, PPF 66–67], Merleau-Ponty speaks of Western metaphysics as positing a "freezing of being.") Now, to be sure, Heidegger admits, "The Greeks were acquainted with the grasping look [der erfassende Blicken ], just as, conversely, and in addition to such looking as an act of subjective representation, we also know the look of encounter [that lets presencing bring beings forth from out of itself]" (PE 107, PG 159). "But," he says, "the question is not whether both these essential forms of looking, the encountering and the grasping, are known or not. The issue is which one, the look of emerging into presence or the look of grasping, has the essential priority in the [experiencing and] interpretation of appearances and on what basis this rank is determined" (ibid.). The "look of the modern subject is the look of a being that advances by calculating, i.e., by conquering, outwitting, and attacking. The look of the modern subject is, as Spengler said, following Nietzsche, the look of the predatory animal: glaring [das Spähen ]" (PE 108, PG 159). Of course—and this is most important for understanding Heidegger's reading of the Greeks and, more generally, his relationship to the history of Western civilization, which many commentators have taken to be driven by a certain nostalgia for the glorious past of ancient Greece—it must be acknowledged that "the Greeks too experienced the look as an activity of man.
But the basic feature of this grasping look is not glaring, by means of which beings are, so to say, impaled and become in this way first and foremost objects of conquest. For the Greeks, looking is the 'perception' ['Vernehmen '] of beings on the basis of a primordial consent [Einvernehmen ] given to being, which is why the Greeks do not even know the concept of object and never think being as objectivity" (PE 108, PG 159–60).
The modern way of seeing is responsible for the historical fact that the gift of being, the presencing of being, which is open to many possible ways of being visible, gets to be seen in only two modes: being ready-to-hand and being present-at-hand. These, and these alone, corresponding to the two ways of looking and seeing, are the two historical ways in which being has presenced in the restricted dimensionality (Entschränkung ) that enframes and conditions our modern world.[30]
To make this historical process more understandable, Heidegger always resorts to the telling of a narrative. Once upon a time, he says, in the world of the ancient Greek poets and philosophers, the field of vision was experienced as
The increasing dominance of a certain tendency in vision has increasingly produced a world different from the world of the ancient ones: a visually governed world that, moreover, reproduces and reinforces the increasing dominance of this tendency and, at the same time, the occlusion, or even indeed the suppression, of all other potentials. In the Greek world of antiquity, this type of vision, vision with this character, certainly existed; but, at least among poets and philosophers, a different way of looking and seeing could take place and shine forth.
In the Parmenides lectures, Heidegger attempts a description of the way poets and philosophers of Greek antiquity must have looked at the ordinary and self-reflectively experienced their looking. "By way of preparation," he writes, "we note that the uncanny, or the extraordinary, shines throughout the familiar ambience of the beings we deal with and know, beings we call ordinary. . . . In its essence [the uncanny] is the inconspicuous, the simple, the insignificant, which nevertheless shines in all beings" (PE 105, PG 156. Italics added. Translation altered). But the Greek poets and philosophers did not overlook this inconspicuous shining—and this way of looking at the ordinary things of their world was visibly reflected in the character of their comportment, showing who they were and who they thought themselves to be: "That which within the ordinary comes to presence by his own look is man. . . . Man himself is that being that has the distinctive characteristic of being addressed by being itself, in such a way that in the self-showing of man, in his looking and in his sight [in seinem Blicken und seinem Anblick ], the uncanny itself, [which to Greeks eyes took the form of a] god, appears" (PE 105, PG 154–55).
Let us return, now, to the progress of the conversation on a country path. What, in our world and our time, would a receptive "openness," an "openness to the presencing of being," involve? And why should it matter? The scientist reflects that, "previously, we had come to see thinking in the form of transcendental-horizonal re-presenting" (DT 63, G 38). The scholar then comments: "This re-presenting, for instance, places before us what is typical of a tree, of a pitcher, of a bowl, of a stone, of plants, and of animals, as that view into which we look when one thing confronts us in the appearance of a tree, another thing in the appearance of a pitcher, this in the appearance of a bowl, various things in the appearance of stones, many in the appearance of plants, and many in the appearance of animals" (ibid. Italics added). In re-presentation, we see only "what is typical." In other words, re-presentation is a process of repetition, re-producing a typifying, reifying way of seeing that is normal, standard, and habitual. It is, we might say, a normalized pathology: a fixation on the same, a compulsion to see always the same, a way of patterning our experience, a way of receiving what we are given to see so (ontically) common that the (ontological dimension of the) pathology is not even recognized.[34]
In "What Are Poets For?," where Heidegger records thoughts suggested by his reading of Rilke, the philosopher is led to a crucial moment of recognition: "Objectification," he says, "blocks us off against the Open." And then he adds this: "The more venturesome daring does not produce a defense."[35] Instead of thinking, experiencing, perceiving in a way that is
simply present, openly (ekstatically) present to (with) what is presencing—this would be the phenomenological attitude formulated in the "Introduction" to Being and Time , namely, letting the phenomenon show itself from out of itself—we think, experience and perceive as an act of will. But the action of the will is an essentially aversive intervention, aggressively establishing a (temporal and spatial) distance which delays, postpones, and pushes away. The prefix in the word "re-presentation" indicates this deferral, this willful, anxiety-driven refusal to let the phenomenon show itself from out of itself; and it points to the presence of what might well be called a repetition-compulsion, arising from a deep-seated anxiety—perhaps, as a defensive ego-logical response to the no-thingness of the openness as which being presences—and from the deeply pattern-forming need that it arouses: a need, namely, to master and dominate the presencing of what presences by re-presenting it to ourselves on our own ego-logical terms. And the words "places before us" betray the fact that this re-presentation is under the spell of modern metaphysical enframing—das Gestell . In German, the prefix is "vor," which bears both a temporal and a spatial sense of "before." The spatial sense connects especially clearly with the totalizing, typifying, reifying character of enframing: that which presences is placed before one in a frontal position that makes visual mastery and domination that much easier.
In his lectures on Parmenides, Heidegger gives a very blunt—and normatively charged—definition of re-presentation (Vor-stellung ): "To represent means here to present before oneself, to bring before oneself and to master, to attack things" (PE 103, PG 153). And here, as elsewhere, he connects representation with the rise to power of the modern ego and its installment in a subject-object structure: "Metaphysically thought, the essence of the Ego consists rather in its making every other being something standing over against it, its object, its over-and-against, its pro-jected ob-ject. . . . Thereby the Ego proceeds to the totality of beings and presents this to itself as something to be mastered" (PE 137, PG 203–4). "Man," he adds later, in an analysis that was anticipated by Schelling,[36] "is the living being that, by way of re-presentation, fastens upon objects and thus looks upon what is objective, and, in looking, orders objects, and in this ordering posits back upon himself the ordered as something mastered, as his possession" (PE 156, PG 232). I think this analysis is correct, but it needs to be connected to a cultural analysis of the commodity structure, and of course the institutions of private property and capital.
Following a discussion of how representation typifies, how it patterns our responsiveness to the ordinary things that appear in our field of
vision—commonplace things like trees, pitchers, and bowls, the friends' conversation (re)turns to the phenomenon of the ground or field. To the scholar's analysis of re-presentation, the scientist says: "You describe, once again, the horizon which encircles the view of a thing—the field of vision" (DT 63, G 38). "It goes," says the teacher, "beyond the appearance of the objects."—"Just as," adds the scholar, "transcendence passes beyond the perception of objects." The teacher follows this with a crucial observation: "Horizon and transcendence . . . are [normally] experienced and determined only relative to objects and our re-presenting them" (DT 64, G 38). In other words, the openness of the field and its horizon are subject to a process of reification: they are not experienced in releasement, i.e., not allowed to presence as they are. Thus the teacher adds that "what lets the horizon be what it is has not yet been encountered at all." And he explains what he means, by saying: "We say that we look into the horizon. Therefore the field of vision is something open; but its openness is not due to our looking" (italics added). Following the logic of this hermeneutic phenomenology, the scholar notes that, "likewise, we do not place the appearance of objects, which the view within a field of vision offers us, into this openness." The teacher then elaborates the phenomenon further: "What is evident of the horizon . . . is but the side facing us of an openness which surrounds us; an openness which is filled with views of the appearances of what to our re-presenting are objects."
This prompts the scientist to wonder what this openness is "as such," "if we disregard that it can also appear as the horizon of our re-presenting?" The teacher is ready with a response. Giving an answer that recalls the Anaximander fragment about which Heidegger was thinking, the teacher says: "It strikes me as something like a region , an enchanted region where everything belonging there returns to that in which it rests" (DT 65, G 40). But when the scholar requests clarification, he cannot say more—"if by 'understanding' you mean the capacity to re-present what is put before us as if sheltered amid the familiar and so secured." The problem is that re-presentation is inherently dualistically differentiating, hence foreclosing—as the prefix implicitly indicates; whereas what would be appropriate, given the openness, and what is called for—say releasement—is precisely not such closure. How, then, can the region and its horizon, together with the enchanted field within its bounds, be thought, experienced, seen with the openness and Erscheinenlassen of releasement?
Learning from the older form of the German word for "region," the three friends are led to think of the region as an "open expanse" which gathers and shelters, "resting in an abiding" (DT 66, G 41–42). It is "an
abiding expanse which, gathering all, opens itself" and lets everything belong in its own resting. (In the essays on Heraclitus and Parmenides, Heidegger will say that the
At this point, the three friends find themselves saying more than they can understand—or more, anyway, than they can understand in the traditional sense of "re-present." "Probably," the scholar opines, "it can't be re-presented at all, in so far as in re-presenting, everything has become an object that stands opposite us within a horizon" (DT 67, G 43). "Any [traditional type of] description would reify it," as the teacher points out.
Re-presentation is a mode of relating to things that knows only how to experience them in their reduced and reified state, as objects for subjects. There are only two ways that things are allowed to presence (be present) for a subject bent on re-presenting them: either as being ready-to-hand (zuhanden ) or else as being present-at-hand (vorhanden ). That there could be any other historical possibility for things to be encountered is simply not conceivable within the framework of re-presentational thinking. Re-presentation essentially refuses the dynamic presence of the thing and will not consent to encountering the thing until it has re-presented that transcendent presence to itself on its own terms, viz., as a graspable, completely determinate ob-ject, something standing over against it, enframed, fixed, mastered, ever at our disposal in the dualistic structure of subject and object. A fortiori, re-presentation also must refuse the dynamic presencing of
the ground , the field of perception as such. But, whereas things have allowed themselves to be reduced to objects for subjects, the presencing of the ground cannot be possessed in this way at all. The more one tries to grasp it, to objectify its dynamic presencing, the more it recedes, withdrawing into the elusiveness of its self-concealment. In fact, the more intensely one tries to grasp the ground (Grund ) as an ob-ject, as a figure, the more intensely one will experience it instead in its disfigurement—as a groundless ground, an Ab-grund , an abyss (PE 150, PG 223).
And yet, as Hölderlin understood, thinking the abyssal nature of the ground not under the sign of nihilism but, on the contrary, under the sign of an inexhaustible sending or giving: "Vom Abgrund nemlich haben wir angefangen."[37] ("From the abyss, namely, we began.") The only appropriate attitude, therefore, is what the three friends agree to call "waiting," a receptivity that is very different from the "receptivity" described in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason , and in which "we leave open what we are waiting for" and let ourselves be released into openness (DT 68, G44). This is the only way to let the phenomenon of the ground show itself, from out of itself. Moreover, this attitude calls for a certain egolessness in their own discourse together: somewhat like the analysand freely associating words in the course of Freudian analysis, they must learn to "move freely in the realm of words" (DT 69, G 45), thinking with words released from the ego's censorship; and they must even learn to renounce the practice of identifying themselves with what they say (DT 71–72, G 49). Who speaks, and whose words are whose, does not matter.
Returning to a matter that still calls for thought, the friends let their attention be drawn to the presencing of the horizon. The teacher suggests that "the horizon is but the side of that-which-regions turned towards our representing. That-which-regions surrounds us and reveals itself to us as the horizon" (DT 72–73, G 50). But the horizon has another, darker face, for that-which-regions opens out into the incommensurable openness of the invisible, a field of presencing concealed behind the horizon, beyond the horizon that makes visible our limitations, our finitude. The three agree that, in one sense, we are always already within the horizon; but in another sense, we are not so long as we have not yet "released ourselves" from a "transcendental" (metaphysical) relation to the horizon (DT 73, G 51). But such releasement, they also agree, is not something they can "do" all by themselves (DT 71, 74; G 49, 53); and yet, this does not mean that there is nothing to be "done." What the three friends call "waiting," for instance, is a way of thoughtfully preparing ourselves for the historical-cultural
moment when releasement becomes possible. In "waiting," we become aware of our "belonging" to that-which-regions and allow ourselves to be "appropriated" by the claim it makes on our capacity for an open mode of responsiveness—a mode of perceptivity that corresponds, by virtue of its openness, to the gift (Es gibt ) of the opening openness of the field, the ground, that-which-regions (DT 73–75, G 51–53).
What is the relation, then, between releasement and that-which-regions? It is agreed that the relation is neither a connection of cause to effect (as in the objective thought of empiricism) nor a transcendental-horizonal connection (as in the subjective thought of rationalism). But it also "can be thought of neither as ontic nor as ontological": not the first, because it requires a turning-away from the "fallen" state of forgetfulness typical of ordinary, everyday experience; but not the second, in so far as "ontological" is to be understood in the pre-Kehre terms of the essential structures of Dasein (DT 76–77, G 55). No positive answer to this question comes to them at this point.
The three friends consequently return in an ever-deepening hermeneutical circle to question the thing: What about the relation of the thing to that-which-regions? (DT 77, G 56) The scientist suggests that the region "determines [be-dingt ] the thing as thing." The scholar suggests that it would therefore be best to call the relation "determining." (He uses the word Bedingnis .) Retrieving the point they reached earlier in thinking about the relation between releasement and that-which-regions, the scientist replies: "But determining is not making and effecting; nor is it rendering possible in the sense of the transcendental." This leads to their thinking together about "the relation of man to the thing," the scientist reminding them that they earlier had begun to question "the relation between the ego and the object" (DT 77, G 57) and that, in this regard, they had come to the realization that the subject-object relation "is apparently only an historical variation [eine geschichtliche Abwandlung ] of the relation of man to the thing, so far as things can become objects" (DT 77–78, G 57. Italics added). And it is clear that, with this recognition of historical contingency, a recognition that also figures prominently in Heidegger's lecture on "The Turning" (1949–50), they have taken a decisive and consequential step in preparation for thinking our historical emancipation from the dominance of the subject-object structure and the traditional re-presentation of the figure-ground formation.[38]
The teacher points out that things "have become objects [even] before they attained their [essential] nature as things" (DT 78, G 57). And the scholar suggests that "The same is true of the historical change of the hu-
man being to an ego" (ibid.). We human beings have become ego-logical subjects before ever having realized our true dignity—the wondrous gift of our great potential. We are more than, and other than, the philosophers' "rational animals" and "ego-logical subjects." But who are we? What is our nature, the becoming of our Wesen ? The three friends are not ready to venture an answer; but they are quite sure that, in order to achieve, not just a new historical self-understanding, but rather an understanding that in some deep way is felt as more essentially fulfilling, we shall be required to learn a different way of seeing. And this, they believe, requires learning non-willing—and, in particular, "a relinquishing of the willing of a horizon [ein Absehen vom Wollen des Horizontes ]" (DT 79–80, G 59). Such relinquishing is a precondition for "receiving" the regioning of that-which-regions in an attitude of releasement, an attitude of ausdauernde Verhaltenheit , "steadfast composure" (DT 81, G 61).
Nearing human habitation again, and consequently nearing the end of their conversation, the three friends give thought together to the nature of thinking itself, taking as the measure of their collaboration the deep connection between thinking and thanking. (Heidegger discusses this matter at greater length in the lectures of What Is Called Thinking ?) With this, they approach a crucial question—one that might be called "the reception of the given"—or "the way of approaching the given." Although the reception of the given constitutes a fundamental problem for every theory of knowledge, every attempt to understand perception, it has never before been questioned with regard to thanking. And yet, we know well that the appropriate way to receive a gift is to give thanks. Why do we not think of the receptivity involved in perception as calling for an appropriate expression of thankfulness? How can we take the given for granted? In the objectivating discourses of empiricism—the discourses of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, for example, the given plays a crucial role, but is reduced to atomic impressions, particulate sensations, punctual sense-data: it is never problematized as such; that there is anything at all given to us for our beholding, rather than nothing, is simply there for the taking, taken for granted. And in the subjectivizing discourses of rationalism—Kant's above all, perhaps—the given is always re-presented in such a way that its givenness, its having been given, is lost sight of in the subject's assumption of the power to give the given to itself: in Kant, the moment of receptivity is immediately concealed beneath the process of re-presentation.
In broaching the relation between thinking and thanking, the three friends are implicitly calling into question the way in which both philosophical schools have given the gift of thought to the perceptual
given—and to the appropriateness of our reception. With this, we return to the question of releasement—the appropriate comportment toward that-which-regions, the field of perception, the ground of the figure-ground Gestalt . Although this comportment is not spelled out in much phenomenological detail, we can, I believe, gathering together the few fragments that shine and catch our eye, like splinters of broken glass, constellate a preliminary concept. As a way of receiving that which it is given us to behold, Gelassenheit calls for a composed, relaxed gaze, very alive and steady but not too sharply focused, hovering gently in a meditatively neutralized mode of engaged awareness, letting the phenomenon show itself from out of itself. It is a question of neutralizing the will, neither willing nor non-willing, learning how to "ground" one's capacity to see in the mood (Stimmung ) of equanimity, letting the ontological attunement of this mood determine and direct the gaze. We should not be surprised to learn from this conversation that Gelassenheit is, in fact, the only attitude appropriate to the hermeneutics of the phenomenological method, as Heidegger already characterized it in Being and Time . Letting the phenomenon show itself from out of itself means, however, letting the ground, the field, that-which-regions, presence without needing to grasp it and objectify it in a mastered totality. And it means—as is suggested by the friends' discussion (DT 88–89, G 72) about the word attributed to Heraclitus, which they translate an In-die-Nähe-hinein-sich-einlassen , "letting-oneself-into-nearness"—letting the interaction between figure and ground—hence the interplay between the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent, the near and the far—take place freely, spontaneously. It means, therefore, that we must let go of our compulsion to impose our will on the flow of this interaction. Finally, it means developing a capacity for receptive openness that would radically alter our modern ego-logical identity—for as long as we continue to understand and comport ourselves as such subjects, we will continue to reduce to a state of objectivity and ready availability all the things we are given to behold, and even the immeasurable fields of visibility and invisibility that are gathered hermeneutically around them. (It needs, however, to be said here that the Gelassenheit of Heidegger's radically hermeneutical phenomenology, letting the phenomenon show itself from out of itself, does not mean an uncritical and passive reception. Since, as his discussion of the three senses of Schein in Being and Time and his even more elaborate, and almost baroque discussion of this word in the Parmenides lectures demonstrate, appearance can be illusory and deceptive as well as veridical, it is imperative that the method of phenomenology ensure a double move-
ment, combining releasement with a shattering deconstruction of the phenomenon. This balancing of trust and suspicion, of course, only makes releasement all the more difficult and treacherous.)
In his 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics , Heidegger reiterates the conception of phenomenological method he formulated in Being and Time , holding that "to apprehend [Vernehmen ] . . . means to let something come to one not merely accepting it, but taking a receptive attitude toward that which shows itself."[39] But this is not the attitude (Einstellung, Verhalten ) of ordinary vision. Perhaps, as Heidegger seems to acknowledge in his Parmenides lectures, it never was, not even in the world of the ancient Greeks—except among a few extraordinary poets and philosophers whose thought has been passed down to us. Be this as it may, in any case this is not the attitude that prevails in our time. Moreover, if Heidegger's historical narrative makes sense and is at all convincing, it seems plausible to believe that, in modern times (i.e., since the emergence of humanism in the fifteenth century), a culture and economy driven by fantasies of domination have made this attitude an increasingly difficult one for anyone, even extraordinary poets and philosophers, to embody.
Now, according to Heidegger's discussion of the Gestalt in "The Origin of the Work of Art," where it is, of course, a question of the mighty strife (Riß ) between earth and world, a strife that the Greek temple brings to heightened presence within its precincts, it must be concluded that the figure-ground Gestalt formed in perception is a local manifestation of this strife, and that therefore, wherever and whenever a visual Gestalt is formed, a vision appropriated by the presencing of being should see a local configuration where the ontological difference is taking place. To see this—to see the figure-ground Gestalt hermeneutically, as an ontological event of differentiation—would accordingly be the most appropriate way of seeing what is there (what Es gibt ) to be beheld. In thinking about the work of art, Heidegger says: "The strife [Streit ] that is brought into the rift [Riß ] and thus set back into the earth [zurückgestellte ] and fixed in place [festgestellte ] is the Gestalt . Createdness 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 [Fuge ] of the shining."[40] Only what we might call, drawing on the word Heidegger uses in "On the Essence of Truth,"[41] a radical deformation or undoing (Verunstaltung ) of the Gestell —that form of the Gestalt formation of ordinary perception most distinctive of the modern
world—could fit the hermeneutical attitude of the phenomenological method that Heidegger formulates in Being and Time and in this way be appropriate to the ontological difference constitutive of the perceptual Gestalt and presencing locally in its dynamic differentiation of figure and ground. (My word "dynamic," here, should be understood in a way that suggests the activity of overwhelmingly powerful energies, the spontaneous, uncontrollable emergings and recedings of
In "The Turning," Heidegger draws on an etymological connection between Eräugnis and the German word for "eye" (Augen ) to suggest a way of seeing and looking that lets itself be appropriated by the presencing of the ontological dimension of the perceptual ground and that thereby would be appropriately receptive and responsive to it: "Disclosing coming-to-pass [Ereignis ] is bringing to sight that brings into its own [eignende Eräugnis ]."[42] It is a question of our somehow learning the way of a "glance" (Blicken ) through which—or say by virtue of which—"the coming to presence of being enters into its own emitting light," a hermeneutical way of looking and seeing "which retrieves that which it catches sight of and brings it back into the brightness of its own looking."[43] By virtue of its hermeneutical character, this way of looking vouchsafes a ring of invisibility and concealment to the field of light and visibility, letting the field open out into a dimensionality entirely beyond its grasp in the free reciprocating gesture of its own giving of light: "in its giving of light, [seeing] simultaneously keeps safe the concealed darkness of its origin as the unlighted."[44]
The lectures on Parmenides suggest, using some traditional phenomenological vocabulary, that as a way of seeing, Gelassenheit requires that we let the openness of the perceptual field—that clearing as which being comes to pass and presences for our vision—be our guide: "The open dwells in unconcealedness. The open is that [which is] closest [and] which we co-intend in the essence of unconcealedness, though without explicitly heeding it or genuinely considering it, let alone grasping its essence in advance, so that the presence of this open could order and guide all our experience of beings " (PE 142, PG 212. Italics added). In these lectures, Heidegger is attempting to draw a picture of ancient Greek life that will point to the maßgebende Leuchten, the determining or measure-giving radiance (PE 144, PG 214) of the lighting and will suggest that, when it is retrieved from forgetfulness and gathered up by re-collection (at PE 124, PG 184–85, Heidegger refers to Plato's doctrine of
ical norm by which our vision should be guided and directed. (On the lighting as normative for our vision, also see Merleau-Ponty, PPE 310–11, PPF 358–59.)
With regard to beings , figures emergent from the ground, Heidegger holds that "man can comport himself to beings as unconcealed only if he perpetually directs his thinking to the unconcealedness of the unconcealed . . . and in that way saves beings from withdrawal into concealment" (PE 124, PG 184–85). With regard to being itself , that is, with regard to the presencing of the field or ground within which beings figure and present themselves in various configurations, Heidegger suggests that Gelassenheit , as the ontologically appropriate way of looking and seeing, requires that our vision be aletheic , truly hermeneutical, re-collecting and thereby protecting that which withdraws in the coming to pass of beings (PE 102–10, PG 152–62). (In Wahrnehmung , the German word for perception, Heidegger's etymologically attuned ears hear not only the taking-as-true of ordinary, everyday perception, but also the preserving, protecting, caring of a perception deeply rooted in the guardian awareness of a recollection of being.) For that which withdraws from our totalizing grasp, concealing itself in its own immeasurable dimensionality in the very process of bringing beings forth into visibility and unconcealment, is what ultimately protects the being of beings from our will to power, preserving them in their transcendence. As a way of looking and seeing, Gelassenheit must serve concealment, the immemorial depths of the invisible, as much as, if not more than, it serves the cause of unconcealment. It is this that makes such a comportment "aletheic." It is this that accounts for the priority—and the uncanny freedom—of the gaze of releasement in relation to the gaze of the ordinary ego-logical subject.
(In anticipation of objections to a reading that introduces the concept of an ontological norm , I would argue that, in these lectures, as well as in many other writings, Heidegger speaks not only of being determined, guided and directed; he also speaks of compliance. Thus, in his phenomenological description of an ontologically appropriate understanding and way of seeing, he says (PE 147, PG 219): "The open and lighted determines what appears therein and makes it comply with the essential form of the look that looks into the light. In correspondence to this appearing look, the disclosing perception and grasp of beings, i.e., knowledge, is conceived as a looking and a seeing.")
The friends' conversation on the country path closes with a deepening sense of what it means to be open to the presencing of being, presencing for our vision in, and also as, the opening-up of a region of light, a field of
visibility. The conversation also closes, therefore, with the articulation of a certain sense of enchantment, and a deeper understanding of what is involved in being appropriated (vereignet, geeignet ) by "that from whence we are called"—called to a more thoughtful perceptivity, belonging whole-heartedly to that-which-regions.
But Rilke's fourth "Duino" elegy reminds us that the ego-logical subject, the bourgeois subject, does not easily renounce its will to power: It proclaims, "Ich bleibe dennoch. Es gibt immer Zuschaun." ("I remain nevertheless. There is always looking.") And adds, though perhaps with a certain anxiety, "Hab ich nicht recht?" ("Am I not right?")[45] Then to the extent that this deeper understanding which the three friends approached was a gift of the gathering night, perhaps neither we, nor they, should forget that, as Benjamin once put it, without meaning to be cynical, "the day dissolves what the night produced."[46]
V
In "Working Notes" dated January 1959, Merleau-Ponty wrote, echoing at once the concerns of both Husserl and Heidegger:
Our state of non-philosophy—Never has the crisis been so radical—The dialectical "solutions"—either the "bad dialectic" that identifies the opposites, which is non-philosophy—or the "embalmed" dialectic, which is no longer dialectical. End of philosophy or rebirth? (VIE 165, VIF 219)
This note continues:
Necessity of a return to ontology—the ontological questioning and its ramifications:
the subject-object question
the question of inter-subjectivity
the question of Nature
Outline of ontology projected as an ontology of brute Being—and of logos . . . . But the disclosure of this world, of this Being, remains a dead letter as long as we do not uproot "objective" philosophy (Husserl). (Ibid.)
Articulating in characteristically reticent language a divergence from Husserl that is surely an indication of the increasing influence of Heidegger's thought, Merleau-Ponty explained that, for him, "ontology would be the elaboration of the notions that have to replace that of transcendental
subjectivity, those of subject, object, meaning" (VIE 167, VIF 221). To begin with, he thinks, we must "deepen" the description of the perceived world, by understanding perception as "spread [écart ]" (VIE 168, VIF 222). What this means, or involves, is something we will attempt in due course to clarify.
Although I believe that his Phenomenology of Perception is far more innovative, bold, and radical, in spite of its incomplete escape from the philosophy of consciousness, than he gives himself credit for achieving, by 1959, Merleau-Ponty wants to put his earlier thought at an unmistakably great distance from his later thinking, on which the influence of Heidegger—not only Being and Time , but also the works that come after the so-called turning—is unquestionably much more decisive.Thus he wrote:
Results of Ph.P.—Necessity of bringing them to ontological explicitation. . . . The problems that remained after this first description: they are due to the fact that in part I retained the philosophy of "consciousness." (VIE 183, VIF 237)
Five months later, in another note, he states: "The problems posed in Ph.P. are insoluble because I start there from the 'consciousness'-'object' distinction" (VIE 200, VIF 253).
To be sure, the task of describing the figure-ground structure (Gestalt ) and the field-character of all experience is already begun in his Phenomenology of Perception , where we will find him asking, "What, ultimately, am I?" and answering, "I am a field" (PPE 406, PPF 465). But later, he says, "'To be conscious' is here nothing but 'to belong to'" (PPE 424, PPF 485), which betrays, we might say, a certain continuing obsession with "consciousness" as the point d'appui , or say the point of departure for his philosophical reflections. And yet, does this statement not already attempt to articulate the possibility of a truly radical transition, making belonging-to (Zugehörigkeit ), or, say, the attunement (Grundbestimmung ) of being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-Sein ) the fundamental experience?
Be this as it may, in his "Working Notes," his thinking has certainly achieved a much greater "Ortverlegung"; although even here he will write, "To be conscious = to have a figure on a ground—one cannot go back any further" (VIE 191, VIF 245). "The Gestalt ," he is convinced, "contains the key to the problem of the mind" (VIE 192, VIF 246). Therefore, as in his earlier phenomenology, here also the concept of the field will play a crucial role. But, whereas his earlier work perhaps stressed the field as contextual delimitation, here he perhaps gives more attention to the openness of the
field, and frequently describes it using Heidegger's hermeneutical language of concealment and unconcealment. "The world," he says, "is a field, and as such is always open" (VIE 185, VIF 239).
"What," he asks, "is a Gestalt ?" In his notes, he replies: "It is a principle of distribution, the pivot of a system of equivalencies . . . it has a certain weight that doubtless fixes it not in an objective sight and in a point of objective time, but in a region , a domain , which it dominates, where it reigns, where it is everywhere present without one ever being able to say: it is here. . . . It is a double ground of the lived" (VIE 204–5, VIF 258–59. Italics added). And he goes on to declare, as a point that significantly enriches the phenomenology of perception one finds in Heidegger. "My body [itself] is a Gestalt and it is co-present in every Gestalt " VIE 205, VIF 259).
In a formulation that lets us discern in the figure-ground structure the involvement of the ontological difference, manifesting in the formation of our most primordial, sensuous experience, Merleau-Ponty observes that we need to "understand perception as differentiation, forgetting as undifferentiation" (VIE 197, VIF 250). And this means that we need to experience and think the perceptual formation as an écart , a separation—and thus, I would add, as a certain dimension of the experience of ekstasis . But, he is quick to point out, it is not a question of "making" or "allowing" it: "This is the night of forgetting. Understand that the 'to be conscious' = to have a figure on a ground, and that it disappears in disarticulation—the figure-ground distinction introduces a third term between the 'subject' and the 'object'. It is that separation [écart ] first of all that is the perceptual meaning " (ibid.).
In a text published in Signs , Merleau-Ponty asserted the seemingly paradoxical proposition that "to see is as a matter of principle to see farther than one sees, to reach a being in latency."[47] But when the point is given an adequate experiential rendering, the paradox disappears, returning us to the hermeneutical nature of the perceptual field as a phenomenon. What he here calls its "latency" is elsewhere ("Working Notes") referred to as "pregnancy":
Pregnancy : the psychologists forget that this means a power to break forth, productivity (praegnans futuri ), fecundity—Secondarily: it means "typicality". It is the form that has arrived at itself, this is itself , that posits itself by its own means, is the equivalent of the cause of itself, is the Wesen that is because it este , auto-regulation . . . there is— —The pregnancy is what, in the visible, requires of me a correct focusing, defines its correctness. My body obeys the pregnancy, it "responds" to it. (VIE 208–9, VIF 262)[48]
(One should notice how the meaning of Wesen undergoes, here, a certain glissage , or slippage, from its original Husserlian sense to a philosophically new and unfamiliar sense that makes sense only in the light of Heidegger's articulation of its relation to
Merleau-Ponty (VIE 206, VIF 259) contends that "the Gestalt implies the relation between a perceiving body and a sensible, i.e. transcendent, i.e. horizonal, i.e. vertical and not perspectival world." (In this context, his insistence that it is "not perspectival" is intended to remark his disagreement with the "sovereign vision" of idealism and intellectualism, schools of thought which posit an absolute position for their vision of the world.) And he explains the Gestalt further:
It is a diacritical, oppositional, relative system whose pivot is the etwas , the thing, the world, and not the idea. . . . Every psychology that places the Gestalt back into the framework of "cognition" or "consciousness" misses the meaning of the Gestalt . (VIE 206, VIF 259)
Now, as we have already noted, the Gestalt forms and unfolds in a field, emerges from it and dissolves back into it. But, writing in the light of Heidegger's work, Merleau-Ponty carries this understanding of the phenomenon further: "Each field," he says, "is a dimensionality, and being is dimensionality itself" (VIE 227, VIF 280).
In an extremely significant note (January 1960), drawing his thinking into the ontological dimensionality, where concealment and unconcealment, visibility and invisibility, presence and absence are in play, Merleau-Ponty observes that:
The invisible is there without being an object; it is pure transcendence, without an ontic mask. And the "visibles" themselves, in the last analysis, they too are only centered on a nucleus of absence. (VIE 229, VIF 282–83)
In a quite uncanny (unheimlich ) way, Merleau-Ponty's thinking, here, approaches that of Heidegger—closer, perhaps, than he realizes—when he describes the figure-ground formation as a "dis-junction" (VIE 228, VIF 281). For this word moves in the proximity of Heidegger's post-Kehre constellation of words for the self-disclosive articulation (Ereignis ) of being: Fug, Fügung, Unfug , difficult words that may be provisionally translated into English as "jointure," "fit," and "disjointure," or "being out of joint," "not fitting" (see, e.g., his 1943 essay, "Aletheia: Heraclitus, Fragment B 16").
In another note (May 1960), it becomes even clearer that, and also how, Merleau-Ponty wants to introduce Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology into his own philosophical project:
I say that every visible: [1] involves a ground which is not visible in the sense that the figure is and [2] even in what is figural or figurative in it, [the visible] is not an objective quale , an in-Itself surveyed from above, but slips under the gaze or is swept over by the look, is born in silence under the gaze . . . —hence, if one means by the visible the objective quale , it is in this sense not visible, but unverborgen . When I say then that every visible is invisible, that perception is imperception, . . . that to see is always to see more than one sees . . . it must not be imagined that I add to the visible perfectly defined as in-Itself a non-visible (which would be only objective absence) (that is, objective presence elsewhere in-Itself)——One has to understand that it is the visibility itself that involves a non-visibility. (VIE 246–47, VIF 300. Italics added.)
The importance of this text is that, among other things, we can discern Merleau-Ponty's attempt to translate Heidegger's hermeneutics of the ground, in which the "ground" of the discourse of Reason is profoundly shaken and rendered abyssal, into a radically hermeneutical phenomenology of perception, in which the figure-ground structure, and hence too the subject-object structure, laid down by the "rational" vision of ocularcentric philosophies are given a hermeneutical reading and mis en abîme .
In the text titled "The Intertwining—The Chiasm," reflections published together with his "Working Notes" in The Visible and the Invisible , Merleau-Ponty brings this reading to bear on his phenomenological account of our experience of colors, arguing that color is first and foremost a field-phenomenon—that every appearance of color is really to be seen as "an ephemeral modulation" of the world, a "concretion of visibility," an accent that emerges from a less precise, more general color-tone (VIE 131–32, VIF 173–74).[49] As this perhaps suggests, his phenomenology of color, here, comes strikingly near to thinking what the Greeks called
Following a reference to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty's "Notes" say "that the visible is pregnant with the invisible, that to comprehend fully the visible relations (house) one must go unto the relation of the visible with the invisible" (VIE 216, VIF 269). Of course, Husserl, too, gave thought to the invisible—the invisible sides of the die and the house, for example. (See his Cartesian Meditations .) But Husserl could never tolerate the mis en abîme that must ultimately be recognized in the phenomenon of the invisible: he was always too strongly committed to rationalism, and to the transcenden-
tal idealism it required, to learn from the phenomena themselves the messages they could deliver from out of the deep.
"Interrogation and Dialectic," another text included in The Visible and the Invisible , challenges, not the hegemony of ocularcentrism in philosophical thinking, but rather the spell of the philosophical doctrine of "pure vision," the "aerial view" (pensée de survol ), the "sovereign vision" that dominates the other (VIE 73, 77–78, 83, 88; VIF 104, 109, 115, 121). The "privilege of vision," he says, "is not to open ex nihilo upon a pure being ad infinitum: the vision too has a field, a range" (VIE 83, VIF 115). "Far from opening upon the blinding light of pure Being, or of the Objective, our life has, in the astronomical sense of the word, an atmosphere: it is constantly enshrouded by those mists we call the sensible world or history" (VIE 84, VIF 116).
Merleau-Ponty also comes near Heidegger's interpretation of the thing as a site for the gathering of the fourfold: "Things," he says in "The Intertwining—The Chiasm," "are structures, frameworks, the stars of our life"; things are "field beings," presences with different levels or dimensions of generality and specificity; they are not only situated in fields, not only belonging to or inhering in fields, but they also are themselves "fields of intersection," occupying "fields of fields" (VIE 227, VIF 281).
Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty uses phenomenology to contest the history of metaphysics, which has reduced the thing to an object, reduced human beings to subjects, and posited the object it has artificially constructed within a structure of re-presentation (Vor-stellung ) that relates it to a disembodied subject outside time, history and indeed outside the life-world. "I open up access to a brute Being with which I would not be in the subject-and-object relation," he writes ("The Intertwining—The Chiasm," VIF 222, VIE 276). And, on the next page, he records his thinking about the way both empiricism and intellectualism have conceived the thing: "critique of the usual notion of the thing and its properties—— critique of the logical notion of the subject . . . " (VIE 224, VIF 277). Later in this text, bringing out the psychopathology that is reflected in the doctrines of our Western metaphysics, he directly attacks the philosophical deployment of the concept of Vorstellung in the attempt to give an account of our experience (VIE 252–53, VIF 306–7).
Elaborating on the "intertwining," a new concept he has introduced into the discourse of phenomenology,[50] Merleau-Ponty observes that "the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen" (VIE 139, VIF 183). He further declares that "there is no problem of the alter ego because it is not I who sees, not he who sees, because an
anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general" (VIE 142, VIF 187–88). This, we might say, interrupts the philosophical construction of the subject-object structure and begins to break it down, pointing—since it is also a question of a political economy and culture in which forms of (capital) possession and domination have become fundamental—towards the possibility of a radically new cultural experience of people and things.[51] (The way of looking and seeing toward which both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty were moving is also, moreover, a way of looking and seeing that would inherently resist a totalitarian politics. Psychological research studies sponsored by the Frankfurt School and subsequently reported by Merleau-Ponty in "The Child's Relations with Others" indicate that the "authoritarian personality type" has a low tolerance for perceptual ambiguity and tends to pattern perceptual experience in extremely rigid, linear ways.)
An important note reads thus: "Show that since the Gestalt arises from polymorphism, this situates us entirely outside the philosophy of the subject and the object" (VIE 207, VIF 260. Also see VIE 137, VIF 180–81). For Merleau-Ponty, presencing is chiasmic , an immeasurably deep intertwining of presence and absence, concealment and unconcealment, visibility and invisibility that deconstructs the metaphysical doctrine of subject and object—and the cultural practices and habits with regard to people and things that this discourse reflects, reinforces, and presumes to make legitimate. In the texts of The Visible and the Invisible , Merleau-Ponty's radical phenomenology shows how the subject-object structure figures in a theory and culture of re-presentation—and why this re-presentation of people and things, together with a certain re-presentational reification of the figure-ground interaction, must actually be seen as an historical disfigurement.
In a note dated February 1959, the philosopher asks, "What is Philosophy?" His answer, an echo of Heidegger: "The domain of the Verbergen " (VIE 183, VIF 237). Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty challenges the philosophical tradition as a philosophy of consciousness that "disregards Being and prefers the object to it" (VIE 248, VIF 302). Phenomenology must assist us in returning in thought from the presence of the beings that are present to the presencing of being. And perhaps one of the consequences of such a returning would be a new ontology, interrupting the cultural reduction, now centuries old, that renders people as subjects and turns things into useful objects-at-our-disposal.
Calling into question the "ontological value" of the Gegen-stand , Merleau-Ponty writes:
The reconquest of the Lebenswelt is the reconquest of a dimension , in which the objectifications of science themselves retain a meaning and
are to be understood as true (Heidegger himself says this: every Seinsgeschick is true, is part of the Seinsgeschichte .) It's a question of bringing out what has been "verdeckt ": [1] the exigency to grasp the Ursprung ——Entdeckung of the Ursprung and [2] the reduction of the Gegenstand , i.e., Verdeckung of the Ursprung . (VIE 182, VIF 236)
"Ursprung" may be taken to refer, here, to the ground or field of our perceptual experience.
Once again, then, the formation of the perceptual Gestalt is understood in terms of the intertwining or interplay of concealment and unconcealment. For reasons that by now should be obvious, this phenomenology of the Gestalt formation functions as a discursive subversion of the Ge-stell , the metaphysical ideology that favors re-presentation (Vorstellung ) and the logic of identity that endlessly reproduces an ontology of domination.
A crucial development in Merleau-Ponty's thinking takes place with his introduction of the phenomenology of the "flesh" (VIE 130–275; VIF 172–329). The flesh, he says, is to be thought—and lived—as "an element of Being" (VIE 139, VIF 184). It completely unweaves the threadbare text of the body that has held our culture and its philosophical discourse spellbound and in thrall at least since the time of Platonism. The flesh is, he claims, an "essential notion for philosophy" (VIE 259, VIF 313), and is in fact "the place of emergence of a vision" (VIE 272, VIF 326). There is, he contends, just "one sole tissue" (VIE 253, VIF 307), just one elemental medium—a chiasmic flesh; and this medium is to be recognized as an "ontological tissue," a primordial
"My flesh and that of the world involve," according to Merleau-Ponty,
clear zones, clearings, about which pivot their opaque zones, and the primary visibility, that of the quale and of the things, does not come without a second visibility, that of the lines of force and dimensions, the massive flesh without a rarified flesh, the momentary body without a glorified body. (VIE 148, VIF 195)
This passage on zones is reminiscent of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Circles": "The eye," he says there, "is the first circle; the horizon which it
forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end."[52] It also relates to Heidegger's own discussion of zones in his Parmenides lectures. This discussion moves to bring out the fact that the openness of the visual field "deconstructs" the ego-subject's defensive, anxiety-driven patterning of perceptual experience and implicitly explains thereby the ego-logical subject's anxiety in the face of this openness: "The free is the guarantee [Bürgschaft ], the sheltering place [die bergende Stätte ], for the being of beings. The open, the free, shelters and salvages being. We ordinarily think of the open, the free, and the vast as conditions of scattering, dispersion, and distraction. The open and its extension into the vastness of the unlimited and limitless are zones [die Zone ] without stopping places, where every sojourn loses itself in instability [ins Haltlose verliert ]. The open provides [our egos] no shelter or security" (PE 143–44, PG 213–14). In the last passage quoted, Merleau-Ponty is attempting to continue the translation of Heidegger's concept of a Lichtung into the elemental hermeneutics of his phenomenology of the flesh. Heidegger himself inaugurated this difficult translation, as our consideration of texts such as his Conversation on a Country Path clearly demonstrate; but unlike Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger always avoided the call to think through the problematic of embodiment—even though, in the course of his thinking, this problematic calls for thought with surprising frequency and urgency, and unquestionably arises from the immanent logic of his own deliberations.
The concentric circles, zones, and clearings surrounding the body are bounded, in our experience of the world, by the horizon, and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology does not ignore this hermeneutic boundary:
No more than are the sky or the earth is the horizon a collection of things held together, or a class name, or a logical possibility of conception, or a system of "potentiality of consciousness": it is a new type of being, a being by porosity, pregnancy, or generality, and he before whom the horizon opens is caught up, included in it. (VIE 148–49, VIF 195)
We participate bodily in the opening-up of the field-dimensions in which we live—" even beyond the horizon . . . unto the depths of being" (ibid.). Husserl, too, gave thought to the phenomenon of the horizon; but his commitment to the sovereign subjectivity of transcendental idealism and an imperative of systematic Reason that requires totality and completeness made it impossible for him to acknowledge appropriately the openness beyond the horizon. Thus, for example, in Ideas I, the world as a whole, the world as such, can be made into an object of theoretical doubt and contained
within the phenomenological epokhé only because he thinks of the world as a "collection of things held together": he cannot see the world as the necessarily ungraspable ground, a field of unfathomable dimensions and a horizon that withdraws from approach. Like the philosophers of empiricism, he can see the world only as an object, a container of things—but still just one more thing. The world Husserl sees is the world of thought , the world as thought, as the posit (Gestell ) of thought. But a phenomenology truly committed to letting the phenomenon show itself from out of itself must deny philosophical reifications of the horizon, renounce the possession of the world implicitly claimed by the transcendental epokhé , and insist on an experience of the world-ground that is appropriately respectful of its open, abyssal dimensionality. Vision is a question of exposure; phenomenology must not attempt to reduce this experience. As Heidegger puts the point, "modern man must first and above all find his way back into the full breadth of the space proper to his essence."[53]
In his Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty asserted, albeit in a vocabulary that he would later indict because of its residual affiliation with the philosophy of consciousness, that "we must rediscover, as anterior to the ideas of subject and object, the fact of my subjectivity and the nascent object, that primordial layer at which both things and ideas come into being" (PPE 219, PPF 254). Thus we find that, in "The Intertwining—The Chiasm," Merleau-Ponty returns to a theme he demonstrated in his Phenomenology of Perception , again pointing out that our everyday perception—and all the philosophies of modernity that have emerged from it—have "forgotten" the existence of "latent intentionality," our prepersonal, prereflective engagements with the world, and imposed on perception a Euclidean interpretation that makes it difficult, if not virtually impossible, to break out of the subject-object structure and the Gestalt formation to which we have been accustomed.
A version of this "latent intentionality" ( fungierende Intentionalität ) also figures in Heidegger's Being and Time , although neither Heidegger nor Merleau-Ponty could recognize it in the concept of a pre-ontological understanding of being. But if there be, as Heidegger wants to maintain there, such a level of understanding, then there must be a level of intentionality—a dimension, we might add, of the chiasmic flesh—through the functioning of which a certain pre-ontological attunement to (and by) the presencing-field of being is constituted. Should we be surprised, then, to find Heidegger asking, in his commentary on Heraclitus, Fragment B16: "Why is it that we stubbornly resist considering even once whether the belonging-together of subject and object does not arise from something
that first imparts their nature to both the object and its objectivity, and the subject and its subjectivity, and hence is prior to the realm of their reciprocity?"[54]
For Heidegger, that from which subject and object emerge—and that, therefore, which is the ground of their intertwining, their unity—is the ground or field of their presencing: the clearing and making-visible that is the gift of the lighting. But, in his Parmenides lectures, Heidegger turns a critical eye on the habits of ordinary seeing: "in the zeal of the ordinary seeing of sense perception [im Eifer des gewöhnlichen Sehens der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung ], we overlook what holds good and serves under visible things and between them and our vision, the closest of all, namely brightness and its own proper transparency, through which the impatience of our seeing hurries and must hurry. . . . The closest [i.e., the self-emerging lighting that lays down the field for our vision] appears therefore as if it were nothing" (PE 135, PG 201). Bearing in mind that
This brings Heidegger's phenomenology very close to Merleau-Ponty's: they are both attempting to bring to light, to make visible, a dimension of our perceptual experience which underlies the subject-object structure. In the preceding quotation, Heidegger's distinction between "reception" and "perception" is crucial. There is a pre-ontological reception that is anterior to ontic perception; there is a pre-ontological openness to the lighting, to the field and ground of perception, that always comes before the grasping patterning of ontic perception and its subject-object structure. Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology brings out this underlying dimension of our perceptual experience, which we tend to forget or repress. Thus he also says in the Parmenides lectures that "because only unconcealed beings can appear and do appear in the open of being, man adheres [hält sich der Mensch ], at first unwittingly and then constantly, to these beings. He for-
gets being and in such forgetting learns nothing more than the overlooking of being [die Verkennung des Seins ] and alienation from the open" (PE 151, PG 225).
Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty seem to assume that the hermeneutical disclosure of the field-inherent dimension underlying perception could loosen the grip of this way of patterning our experience. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, even the earlier phenomenology of his Phenomenology of Perception , goes into this dimension, where we might say that a primordial "recollection of being" has always already taken place long before we have realized it, much more deeply than the accounts of perception proposed by other philosophers. Perhaps Merleau-Ponty was nearing this very recollection when he wrote, in Phenomenology of Perception: "When I turn toward perception, [I] find at work in my organs of perception a thought older than myself, of which those organs are merely a trace" (PPE 351; PPF 404. See also PPE 254, PPF 293–94).
Granting the sociocultural construction of perception, but insisting at the same time that this construction must acknowledge an irreducible nature beneath it, an order of being both determinate and yet always also further determinable—in certain partially predetermined ways, Merleau-Ponty proposes, in his last writings, a return to "wild" perception, a "descent" into "pregnancy" (VIE 212–13, VIF 265–67), into the dimension of our prepersonal, prereflective intentionality, arguing that it is in retrieving the figure-ground formations in our experience of this dimension that we will interrupt the metaphysics of our cultural life and begin to recollect the presencing of being in its primordial laying-down of the ontological difference.
Returning to the chiasmic element of the flesh means, for Merleau-Ponty, a return to the intertwining, and hence to the reversibility, of subject and object (VIE 263–65, 271–72; VIF 316–19, 324–26); it means, also, a return to an "ecstatic" experience of the figure-ground differentiation, and a movement (VIE 265, 271; VIF 318, 324) beyond the metaphysical dualism of the active and the passive. (In rationalism, the subject is active, the object passive; in empiricism, the subject is passive and the object active.) All this is decisively involved in what he calls, in "Interrogation and Dialectic," our "openness upon being" (VIE 88, VIF 122).
Although he does not take up for thought the ontologically appropriate attitude that Heidegger calls "Gelassenheit," his work brought him into its proximity. Thus, for example, in "Reflection and Interrogation," likewise a late writing collected in The Visible and the Invisible , he argues that we need to understand our "initial openness" to the world—"how there is openness" (VIE 28, VIF 49). But for him, much more than for Heidegger,
this calls for phenomenological meditations on our "natal bond," notre lien natal (VIE 32, VIF 53–54) with the presencing of being—a bond we may always enjoy by grace of the elemental medium of the flesh.
A crucial point is reached, perhaps, with the realization that our seeing is, after all, a question of learning-to-see ("Reflection and Interrogation," VIE 4; VIF 18). But it is important to understand that such learning does not have to involve normalization, the imposition, in the name of das Man , of the ontologically blind vision of the anonymous anyone-and-everyone. This so-called normal vision, setting the norm for our cultural and spiritual life, is in fact, as Heidegger has shown, a vision that has recoiled before the openness of the field into which it has been thrown. Since this openness reveals to vision that it is thrown into groundlessness and nothingness, the normal reaction will be anxiety and closure—a need to control, master, and dominate.
However, the intertwinings and reversabilities that take place in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the flesh suggest that there is a certain potential for overcoming and transcending our culturally invested pathology. Reading what is inscribed on the scrolls of flesh, Merleau-Ponty wrote a note which says "that it is being that speaks within us, and not we who speak of being" (VIE 194, VIF 247). Also: "It is not we who perceive, it is the thing that perceives itself yonder" (VIE 185, VIF 239). These experiences of intertwining and reversal, experiences that essentially involve a certain figure-ground reversal, a deconstruction of the normal structuring of perception, must surely be considered as necessary, if only preliminary steps on the path that would take us towards a vision of Gelassenheit .
Heidegger, too, articulates the need for a seer-seen, subject-object reversal , "re-turning" the perceptual relationship to a determination that he reads into the experience of the early Greek philosophers and poets: "In insight [Einblick ]," he says, in "The Turning," "men are the ones who are caught sight of."[55] We become the beheld, held to account in our very beholding, by the field of vision in which we are situated and to which we belong. In "The Age of the World Picture," he maintains that "man is the one who is looked upon [vom Seienden Angeschaute ] by that which is; he is the one who is . . . gathered toward presencing by that which opens itself. To be beheld by what is, to be included and maintained within its openness . . . .—that is the essence of man in the great age of the Greeks."[56] And, in his 1942–43 lectures on Parmenides, elaborating the same theme, he argues that, for the Greeks, the one who looks presents himself, shows himself, "in the sight of his essence, i.e., emerges as unconcealed, into the unconcealed" (PE 103, PG 152).
If, in the Parmenides lectures, Heidegger articulates a reversal of seer and seen, whereby the one who looks is the one disclosed, and indeed made visible not only in facticity, but also in essence, he also brings out a reversal of priority, whereby the ordinary, everyday act of looking is displaced and becomes secondary. The move he makes here is similar to the argument he makes with regard to what we ordinarily think of as "truth": Just as truth in the sense of correctness is displaced and becomes secondary and derivative in relation to
Heidegger thus calls our attention to the more ontological (dimension of) vision in words that have a certain affinity with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological description, in the Phenomenology of Perception , of the prepersonal "natal bond," the "primordial contract," the bodily felt sensory connectedness that precedes and secures "perception" as we ordinarily think of it—perception, that is, as a relation between a subject and its object. In his Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty comments, using language that is already very close to that of Heidegger: "To say that I have
a visual field is to say that by reason of my position I have access to, and an opening upon, a system of beings, visible beings, that these are at the disposal of my gaze in virtue of a kind of primordial contract and through a gift of nature, with no effort made on my part; and from which it follows that vision is prepersonal " (PPE 216, PPF 250–51. Also see PPE 267, 327, 352 and PPF 309, 377–78, 405. Italics added). In the Parmenides lectures, Heidegger likewise points to the emergence of perception on the basis of a "primordial consent" (anfänglichen Einvernehmen ) given to being (PE 108, PG 160). But the difference that the recognition of this originary moment could make hinges on the ability of our gaze to take up for thought a relation that takes hold of us at the prepersonal level of our experience (Merleau-Ponty) and of which we have a pre-ontological understanding—the relation, namely, between our gaze and the gift of lighting that lays out the perceptual field for its activity:
Just as the eye without the ability to see is nothing, so the ability to see, for its part, remains an "inability" if it does not come into play in an already established relation of man to visible beings. And how could beings be supposed to appear to man, if man did not already relate in his essence to beings as beings? And how could such a relation of man to beings as such hold sway if man did not stand [already] in a relation to being? If man did not already have being in view, then he could not even think the nothing, let alone experience beings. And how is man supposed to stand in this relation to being if being itself does not address man and claim his essence for the relation to being? But what else is this relation of being to the essence of man than the clearing and the open which has lighted itself for the unconcealed? If such a clearing did not come into play [Weste nicht solche Lichtung ] as the open of being itself, then a human eye could never become and be what it is, namely, the way man looks at . . . the being encountering him." (PE 146, PG 217. Italics added.)
It is because of this prior mode of "seeing" that Heidegger can write of "the having [always already] seen" of the "seer," both in his lectures on Parmenides (PE 111, PG 165) and in his short text on "The Anaximander Fragment." Man alone, as Heidegger says, is gifted with the capacity to see the open, that field of presencing "which first lets beings emerge and come to presence as beings" (PE 159, PG 237). Whether we realize it or not, by dwelling in the open, inhabiting it, belonging to it, and being attuned (bestimmt ) by it, we have always already seen it. And yet, we must also say: not yet. Because "Man and he alone sees into the open—though without beholding it. Only the essential sight of authentic thinking beholds being itself. But even there the thinker can behold being only because he as man
has already glimpsed it" (ibid. Italics added). Merleau-Ponty would agree, and would point out that his phenomenology brings to light a prepersonal bodily dimension that correlates both with the pre-ontological understanding of being which Heidegger discusses in Being and Time and with the Einvernehmen of the Parmenides lectures. As early as his Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty was calling attention to our ekstatic embodiment, the hidden experiential fact of our primordial perceptual openness, which the hermeneutics of his phenomenology renders visible, perhaps for the first time: "Vision," he writes there, "is an action . . . inwardly prepared only by my primordial opening upon a field of transcendence, that is, once again, by an ekstase " (PPE 377, PPF 432).
One of Merleau-Ponty's notes on the Gestalt , written for The Visible and the Invisible , reads as follows:
To say that there is transcendence, being at a distance, is to say that being (in the Sartrean sense) is thus inflated with non-being or with the possibility that it is not only what it is . The Gestalthafte , if one really wanted to define it, would be that. . . . And at the same time the perception of . . . the Gestalt cannot be a centrifugal Sinngebung , the imposition of an essence, a vor-stellen ——One cannot distinguish Empfindung and Empfundenes here. It is openness ——(VIE 181, VIF 234–35)
This openness resists the labor of re-presentation, resists the deformation and disfigurement of the Gestalt that takes place under the rule of "enframing," the universal imposition of order in the epoch Heidegger calls Das Gestell , And it is this same openness that receives the suffering, violent gaze of everyday perception and bestows upon it the grace of an elemental ground from out of which configurations of being ceaselessly emerge in unconcealment, offering themselves to the gaze that is willing to let go of its inveterate tendencies and learn the beholding of Gelassenheit .
Thus, the task of phenomenology must be to lead our vision back to the openness of the lighting:[57]
Presence in the lighting articulates [i.e., brings forth, gives an enabling field to] all the human senses. ("The Anaximander Fragment": AXE 36, AXG 322)
Lighting bestows [gewährt ] the shining, opens [gibt . . . frei ] what shines to an appearance. The open [Das Freie ] is the realm of unconcealment and is governed by disclosure. ("Aletheia: Heraclitus, Fragment B16": AE 103, AG 258)
The lighting not only illuminates what is present, but gathers it together and secures it in advance in presencing. ("Aletheia": AE 120, AG 278)
The lighting of the being of beings, as a lighting, is concealed. ("Moira: Parmenides VIII, 34–41": Early Greek Thinking , p. 87; Vorträge und Aufsätze , p. 241)
The event of lighting [Das Ereignis der Lichtung ] is the world. The meditatively gathering [sinnend-versammelnde ] lighting which brings into the open [ins Freie ] is revealing; [but] it abides in self-concealing. ("Aletheia": AE 118, AG 276)
If we think it [i.e., the presencing of being] as lighting, this includes not only the brilliance [die Helle ], but also the openness wherein everything, especially the reciprocally related [das Gegenwendige ], comes into shining. Lighting is therefore more than illuminating, and also more than laying bare [Freilegen ]. . . . It is the bestowal of presencing [Gewähren von Anwesen ]. ("Aletheia": AE 118, AG 276)
Mortals are irrevocably bound to the revealing-concealing gathering which lights everything present in its presencing. But they turn from the lighting, and turn only towards what is present, which is what immediately concerns them in their everyday commerce with each other. . . . They have no inkling of what they have been entrusted [zugetraut ] with: presencing, which in its lighting first allows what is present to come to appearance.
[as the gift of a laying-down and gathering of a field of illumination], in whose lighting they come and go, remains concealed from them and forgotten. ("Aletheia": AE 122, AG 281)
The play of the calling, brightening, expanding light is not actually visible. It shines imperceptibly, like morning light upon the quiet splendour of lilies in a field or roses in a garden. ("Moira": Early Greek Thinking, 96; Vorträge und Aufsätze , 251)
But I cannot resist pointing out that, after saying this lighting "is not actually visible," Heidegger draws an analogy that implies that the lighting is visible—or perhaps rather, could be visible, could be seen, if one were to give it the gift of one's responsive awareness. This point is supported by the sixth passage above and also by the next two quotations.
Ordinary perception [Das gewohnte Vernehmen ] certainly moves within the lightedness of what is present and sees what is shining out . . . in colour; but it is dazzled by changes in colour . . . and pays no attention to the still light of the lighting that emanates from duality [Zwiefalt : from the spacing of the ontological difference, i.e., from the ground of being]. ("Moira": English 100, German 255)
The lighting, therefore, is no mere brightening and lightening [kein blo bes Erhellen und Belichten]. . . . [This is true because this lighting is a] revealing-concealing lighting concerned with the presencing of what is present [das Anwesen des Anwesenden ]. ("Aletheia": AE 119, AG 277–78)
In view of these passages, passages that make no sense and serve no purpose if interpreted as "mere" metaphors, "mere" figures of speech, i.e., as without experiential reference, we shall, before we conclude our reflections on Merleau-Ponty, endeavor to read some passages on light and lighting that have been taken from his Phenomenology of Perception and to which we might want to give particular attention. Their affinity with the preceding passages from Heidegger is most striking. One is this:
We perceive in conformity with the light, as we think in conformity with other people in verbal communication. (PPE 310, PPF 358)
Translating this passage into Heidegger's ontological discourse, I take it to be suggesting that being gives the lighting to perception as the ontological norm (or say Anspruch ) for our vision, gives it as that gradient of illumination necessary for making beings visible, making them stand out as figures against a ground. The word "conformity" would then broach the question of the difference between ontic conformity, the "blind" and thoughtless conformity of das Man and the ontological conformity of a vision thoughtfully letting itself be appropriated by the normative claim of the lighting, the claim of the presencing of being, ultimately abyssal and anarchic, which continually questions the openness of our gaze—its responsiveness, its exposure to the disclosedness and alterity of beings.[58] A second, related passage reads thus:
The lighting is not on the side of the object, it is what we assume, what we take as the norm , whereas the object lighted stands out before us and confronts us. The lighting is neither colour nor, in itself, even light; it is anterior to the distinction between colours and luminosities. (PPE 311, PPF 359. Italics added.)
A third especially significant passage is perhaps this:
Lighting and reflection . . . play their part only if they remain in the background as discreet intermediaries, and lead our gaze instead of arresting it. (PPE 310, PPF 358. Italics added.)
In this third passage, Merleau-Ponty may be read as giving phenomenological articulation to the ontological difference between being and beings, rendering it concretely in terms of a field-organizing interplay of concealment and unconcealment: the way that the lighting, as the presencing of being, withdraws into the abyssal invisibility of the background, as the beings to which our attention is drawn come forward into configurations of visibility.
One final passage. Calling our attention to "a tension which fluctuates around a norm," Merleau-Ponty makes the following observation:
For each object, as for each picture in an art gallery, there is an optimum distance from which it requires to be seen, a direction viewed from which it vouchsafes most of itself: at a shorter or greater distance we have merely a perception blurred through excess or deficiency. (PPE 302, PPF 348)
Here, the norm is articulated in terms of the percipient subject's bodily positionality in relation to the visibility of the object. But it is crucial to understand that it is the field as a ground of difference that lays down the ontological norm or condition for the subject. (Heidegger, "Aletheia": AE 120, AG 278: "Just as those who are far distant belong to the distance, so are the revealed—in the sense now to be thought—entrusted to the lighting that keeps and shelters them.") In this regard, re-presentation may be interpreted as an attempt on the part of the subject to appropriate the norm as a condition of its own making. Re-presentation would then be an act of insolence, a demonstration of the will to power, a refusal to acknowledge our responsibility for a comportment in perception that—through its thoughtful recollection—sees in the field of visibility the invisible presencing of being. Thus, as Heidegger states the point in his Parmenides lectures (PE 151, PG 224), it is ultimately a question of our caring, our "guardianship of the open": our "Wächterschaft für das Offene."
VI
In his "Working Notes," Merleau-Ponty wrote: "Each field [of perception] is a dimensionality, and being is dimensionality itself" (VIE 227, VIF 280). But in attempting to think in a way that would "measure up" to the claim on our vision—or say the extreme exposure—that the recognition of this dimensionality would imply, he was conscious of the resistance that would be encountered, and therefore called attention to the difficulties faced in discerning and overcoming the presence of a certain "blind spot" operating, as he put it, using the phenomenological grammar of the first-person singular," at the center of my sovereign vision" (VIE 78, VIF 109). Bringing out the logic of the perceptual field and its dimensionality, he argued that we must give up our metaphysical illusions and learn a way of seeing that is informed by the concession that:
every visible is invisible, . . . perception is imperception, consciousness has a "punctum caecum ", . . . [and] to see is always to see more than one sees. (VIE 247–48, VIF 300)
"Dimensionality" increasingly figured in Heidegger's thinking also. Thus, for example, in the very important 1962 lecture, "Zeit und Sein," he remarked that:
Dimensionality consists in a reaching out that opens up [lichtenden Reichen ], in which futural approaching brings about what has been, what has been brings about futural approaching, and the reciprocal relation of both brings about the opening up of openness [die Lichtung des Offenen erbringt ].[59]
If, as this passage suggests, our entrance into this dimensionality depends on a "reciprocal relation," it must also be said that this relation can take place only at the chiasmic intersection of the visible and the invisible—that intersection where the mode of being which is called "the human being" exists in a dangerous condition of arrogance, blinded by the illusion of mastery over the invisible.
For both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenology of perception is ultimately a questioning of the potential for enlightenment in "ordinary perception" ("Moira": English 99, German 254), "the everyday perception of mortals" ("Moira": English 99, German 253): whether, and to what extent, human beings "can in their own way accomplish [vollbringen ] the lighting (bring it to the fullness of its essence) and thereby protect it" ("Aletheia": AE 120, AG 278). But their discourse is addressed, first of all, to those from whom it can receive a welcoming understanding: "those," in Heidegger's words, "who are [already somewhat] enlightened [erlichtet ] in accordance with their essence, and who therefore hearken to and belong to the lighting in an exceptional way" (ibid.). For, as Heidegger says, the coming-to-pass of being encourages us to believe that "another destining [Geschick ], yet veiled, is waiting."[60] In a double reading, this also says: Another destining is waiting for us—but perhaps only when we have learned, at the last, how to wait.
A character in Samuel Beckett's Endgame asks: "What in God's name could there be on the horizon?"[61] Perhaps only more of the same. Perhaps nothing—or nothing in the name of God. But it seems that for both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the way to enlightenment is a path of vision that would eventually take them into the clearing and openness of fields unknown to the philosophers of traditional metaphysics. On the paths they followed, there would certainly be great trials, temptations, and dangers, as they well understood—but also, perhaps, in some of the commonest and most familiar places, the quiet joy of those unforeseeable enchantments that the great systems of metaphysics have, in their impatient will to power, again and again overlooked.