From the final pages of Heidegger’s “The onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics”

The following is my offering - very brief - of Heidegger’s meaning at the very end of the second of the two lectures published under the title Identity and Difference.  You may consider it of no consequence, for it has little to do with nationalism.  But Heidegger does generally, and this is not as unconnected as it may appear.  It is just a small digression from political thinking.

On page 72 of my copy of the Stambaugh translation Heidegger, having remarked upon the openness of god-less thinking to the divine, proceeds:

This remark may throw a little light on the path to which thinking is on its way, that thinking which accomplishes the step back, back out of metaphysics into the active essence of metaphysics, back out of the oblivion of the difference as such into the destiny of the withdrawing concealment of perdurance.

Thinking here does not mean the unending thought process of the intellectual faculty.  It is broader than that.  Heidegger seems to regard thinking more holistically, as the way the mind in general addresses the reality of the world beyond the human organism.  Thus, the “path” or “way” he is talking about here is the procession of the mind from the ordinary conscious state which we all experience in life, and which is characterised by two things.  The first is a state of self-segregation from the real, a state of loss or immersion à la Bacon in passing things (feelings, events, objects).  The second is a state of “perdurance”, of fracture, of sundering to which we automatically ascribe the word “I”.

This ascription conceals our fractured estate, but in the process of advancement from our ordinary waking consciousness it falls away, and with it the states of fracture and immersion.  And then the road is open, perhaps:

No one can know whether and when or where and how this step of thinking will develop into a proper (needed in appropriation) path and way and road-building.  Instead, the rule of metaphysics may rather entrench itself, in the shape of modern technology with its developments rushing along boundlessly.  Or, everything that results by way of the step back may merely be exploited and absorbed by metaphysics in its own way, as the result of representational thinking.

Thus the step back would itself remain unaccomplished, and the path which it opens and points out would remain untried.

So the step back is a gesture in the direction of a willed alteration of consciousness of a quality very different from that we know when we merely think about metaphysics.  If it proceeds to a certain point ... if fracture “withdraws” ... an event of appropriation, a moment of self-possession, will occur, and do so in the nature of an unconcealment.  The religionist may assert at this point that being itself, as the ground of identity, is giving or bestowing this wholly familiar and un-new identity ex nihilo.  The faithless, however, would assert that the organism is merely functioning normally, and identity or consciousness or Dasein - however you want to angle your way into this - is in its proper relation to being-as-the-product-of-life.  Take your pick, according to your constitution.

But now we have erred.  For we are “absorbed by metaphysics ... as the result of representational thinking”, and the moment, and the thing itself, is lost.  Thought kills.

Such reflections impose themselves easily, but they carry no weight compared with an entirely different difficulty through which the step back must pass.

That difficulty lies in language.  Our Western languages are languages of metaphysical thinking, each in its own way.  It must remain an open question whether the nature of Western languages is in itself marked with the exclusive brand of metaphysics, and thus marked permanently by onto-theo-logic, or whether these languages offer other possibilities of utterance - and that means at the same time of a telling silence.

Thought is substantially contained and constrained in language, and thinking is really only the functioning of the intellect as it models in the clay of language what exists before it.  Language, meanwhile, is constrained creatively by the character and capacities of its founder population and of the people who later speak it.  For example, it is quite difficult for Europeans to think of identity and being without seeing the latter as ground for the former.  But Heidegger characterises the possibility that such thoughts come with the linguistic cornflakes as “an open question”.

If they do, then the step back is also contained and constrained by language.  Nothing pure and absolutely true in itself could be arrived at.  Or if it could, it is past the very limit of effectiveness of thinking.  What rare utterance can thinking possibly make when it is detached and brought into balance with one or both of the other perceptual mind functions, and the end of the “path” or “way” is reached?  Well, revelatory myth perhaps, or symbology.  But we are somewhere else now, and of the life that was before, and which will always return, there is “only” the crystalline silence the new utterance fills.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 07:17 PM in The Ontology Project
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