Cont Philos Rev (2015) 48:445–462 DOI 10.1007/s11007-015-9349-x
The heart in Heidegger’s thought Robert E. Wood1
Published online: 12 November 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract The notion of the heart is one of the most basic notions in ordinary language. It is central to Heidegger’s notion of thought that he relates to the primordial word Gedanc as underlying attunement that issues forth in emotional phenomena. He plays with all the etymological cognates of that word to zero in on the phenomena involved. The key experience of Erstaunen that grounds the first beginning of philosophy is paralleled by Erschrecken that grounds Heidegger’s ‘‘second beginning’’ and plays counterpoint with the first. Along with Befindlichkeit as one’s basic attunement, these are key phenomena that belong to the heart, not to ‘intellect’ or ‘will.’ Thinking in terms of the intellect is das rechnende Denken¸ thinking in terms of the heart, besinnliche Nachdenken. It is the latter that provides the ‘‘poetic-intellectual’’ experience for both the arts and philosophy in which such ‘‘world space’’ is created that even the ordinary appears extraordinary. Keywords Heart Erschrecken Erstaunen Befindlichkeit Das rechnende Denken Das besinnliche Nachdenken ‘‘As soon as we have the thing before our eyes, and in our hearts an ear for the word, thinking prospers.’’ Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Thinker as Poet’’ The notion of the heart plays a significant role in human life, but it has not had nearly the attention it deserves in philosophical circles. The Oxford English Dictionary has 18 pages, 21 columns of distinctive uses for the word ‘heart.’ Obviously it plays a central role; it is, so to speak, at the heart of everyday usage. I suggest that is because we each live out of our heart, out of a uniquely subjective & Robert E. Wood
[email protected] 1
University of Dallas, Irving, TX, USA
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magnetic field of attractions and repulsions, functioning as the default mode for each of our ways of conducting ourselves. We each automatically move unreflectively in the direction of our heart’s preferences. Through the heart we inhabit the life-world. Even though the heart is the seat of the emotions, it is, perhaps even more basically, that which guides us even in the unemotional character of most of our comings and goings. It is this more constant orientation of one’s life to which Heidegger especially attends. This is a theme made central in the work of fellow phenomenologist Max Scheler, especially in his essay ‘‘Ordo Amoris’’ where, invoking Pascal’s ‘‘reasons of the heart,’’ he says that ‘‘the heart deserves to be called the core of man as a spiritual being much more than knowing and willing do.’’1 Again, ‘‘man, before he is an ens cogitans or an ens volens, is an ens amans.’’2 We are governed by an order of preferences that antecede conscious intention. This observation is crucial in distinguishing the order that operates underneath all conscious acts from emotional states that give expression to the heart.3 This distinction is crucial to understanding Heidegger’s focus upon phenomena having to do with the heart. It is important to note that, although there is a plethora of metaphorical uses of the term ‘heart,’ there are some that, although they seem metaphorical, are not. The heart as a pump in the middle of the chest that one takes as the primary analogate in fact automatically expresses emotional states: It leaps for joy, is crushed with sorrow, skips a beat at the thought of the beloved, pounds with fear, burns with desire or rage. The close link between emotional states and the way the pump operates in such states indicates that the term ‘heart,’ as the center of the psychophysical unity of the human being, includes both the pump and the states of mind as literal usages. In Heidegger’s case, the centrality of the notion of the heart is indicated by the inscription over the door of his residence in Freiburg: Behu¨te dein Herz mit allem Fleiss, denn daraus geht das Leben. ‘‘Guard your heart with all diligence for from it follows one’s course of life.’’ (Proverbs 4:23). And the focus of Being and Time upon the care-structure indicates the central role of the heart in his major work. The heart is given independent attention in What Is Called Thinking?4 and appears explicitly in his comments upon Parmenides and Rilke. In the former work it is linked up with a set of etymological connections that cannot be rendered fully into English. He appeals to the old German Gedanc that is linked to the Anglo-Saxon 1
Scheler (1972, p. 100).
2
Scheler (1972, pp. 110–1).
3
For Scheler’s treatment of the heart, see my ‘‘Virtues, Values, and the Heart in the Phenomenology of Scheler and von Hildebrand,’’ forthcoming in Phenomenology and the Virtues, J. Hemberg and P. Gyllenhammer eds. (London: Continuum). A comparison of Scheler and Heidegger will appear in a projected volume I have in process, Heidegger in Dialogue. It includes thus far Plato, Buber, Sartre, Strasser, Dewey and Ricoeur as well as Scheler. On the theme of the heart, see also my Introduction to my translation of Stephen Strasser’s Das Gemu¨t as Phenomenology of Feeling: An Essay on the Phenomena of the Heart (1977). I was directed to this work by Paul Ricoeur’s treatment of the heart in Fallible Man. Ricoeur, who encouraged the translation, wrote the Foreward to it. Finally, the theme of the heart is the center of my Placing Aesthetics (1999).
4
Heidegger (1968/German 1972). The translation as What Is Called Thinking? could also be rendered as What Calls for Thinking?
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term ‘thanc,’ the term Gray and Wieck use in translating Was Heibt Denken? into English.5 Heidegger says, Gedanc means ‘‘das Gemu¨t, das Herz, den Herzensgrund, jenes Innerste des Menschen,’’ which is translated adequately enough as ‘‘man’s inmost mind, the heart, the heart’s core, the innermost essence of man…’’ He goes on to explore the German etymological cognates. Gedanc is the primordial word that is the standard for its cognates; it is related to Denken (thinking), Gedachtes (remembrance), Gedanke (idea), Dank (thanks), Geda¨chtnis (memory) and Andacht (devotion).6 The English cognates do not work as well as the German. Thanc, thanking, thinking work, but there is no English equivalent for Geda¨chtnis that usually means memory and for Andacht that means devotion, that is, meditatively, appreciatively giving thought to something.7 Heidegger goes on to say that ‘‘Geda¨chtnis means primordially das Gemu¨t and devotion.’’8 English ‘memory’ does not typically carry these connotations, although ‘memorial’ does connote a kind of devotion, but it is not etymologically related to thinking or thanking. There is at least a parallel in Greek when mnemosune as memory is the Mother of the Muses, that is, the source of inspiration that relates the everyday to the gods. Further, in his discussion of nous and noos in Parmenides, he says that noos means ‘‘das Sinnen, das etwas im Sinn hat and such zu Herzen nimmt.’’9 One could translate this as ‘‘thinking that has something in mind,’’ but this misses both the heart and the ‘‘sense’’ that is not found in what we call ‘cognition’ but in the operation of the heart. Sinn, as in English, has dual meanings: the sensory and the meaningful. Heidegger’s Sinn des Seins is found exemplarily in the work of art where sensory presence and meaning are fused. The expression zu Herzen nehmen later gets transformed into in die Acht nehmen as a translation of noein, the activity of nous.10 Presumably Heidegger sees an etymological relation between Acht and Dacht. Even though Heidegger links Gedanc with Gemu¨t and Herz, he also cautions against too narrow an understanding of these terms in this connection. He says that Gedanc does not mean what today is called Gemu¨t and Herz which emphasize the feeling side of what is involved, though it includes that. Gedanc is rather ‘‘das Wesende des ganzen Menschenwesens,’’ ‘‘that inmost essence of man which reaches outward most fully and to the outmost limit, and so decisively that, rightly considered, the idea of an inner and an outer world does not arise.’’11 This is a remarkable statement: the heart reaches to ‘‘the outmost limit,’’ such as Parmenides claimed at the opening of his Peri Phuseos: ‘‘The steeds that bore me took me as far 5
Heidegger (1968, p. 144/1972, p. 157).
6
Heidegger (1968, pp. 139–41/1972, pp. 91–93).
7
Heidegger (1968, p. 148/1972, p. 195).
8
Heidegger (1968, p. 145/1972, p. 158).
9
Heidegger (1968, p. 207/1972, p. 172).
10
Heidegger (1968, p. 146/1972, p. 159).
11
‘‘Der Gedank bedeutet: das Gemu¨t, das Herz, den Herzensgrund, jenes Innerste des Menschen, das am ¨ uberste reicht und dies so entschieden, dab es, recht bedacht, die weitesten nach auben und ins A Vorstellung einer Innen ind Aubsen nicht aufkommen la¨bt.’’ Heidegger (1968, p. 144/1972, p. 157).
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as my heart would desire.’’12 Rilke makes a similar claim.13 Likewise, the claim that the heart transcends the distinction between inner and outer is remarkable. The deepest inwardness is that which is absorbed in the deepest exteriority. It is precisely the notion of Being that includes everything in its scope which informs the Gedanc as a mode of dwelling within the Whole that undercuts the modern subjectobject dichotomy. What is of central import to the current essay is the distinction between emotional states and the more primordial orientation of the heart that Scheler identified as the underlying source providing the automatic order of preference for the individual. In Heidegger’s work, I would claim that Da-Sein as the locus of the question of Being is the Gedanc.14 It is perhaps to avoid the emotional associations that Heidegger chooses not to employ the terms associated with heart in Being and Time, though in the discussion of Befindlichkeit, he does refer to the treatment of the affective life in Augustine, Pascal, and Scheler for whom the heart is a central notion.15 In the later consideration in What Is Called Thinking? he calls attention to the crucial distinction between emotional states and the underlying orientation of the heart. In ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology,’’ Heidegger calls Gemu¨t ‘‘that original gathering from which unfold the ways in which we have feelings of one kind of another.’’16 The heart is a prior orientation of the human being from which feelings emerge. Strong feelings emerge because there is a prior care for the objects of those feelings, a care that is dispositional. If we follow the notion of Da-Sein back to its origin in Being and Time, we can see how central to Heidegger’s thought is the notion of the heart. Consider such basic notions as Befindlichkeit, Sorge and Stimmung, which are non-emotional, everyday states, while Angst and, in his later work, Erstaunen and Erschrecken are emotional phenomena that take hold of those who experience them. They are ways in which relation to Being in Heidegger’s sense is glimpsed. The heart is the locus of one’s being apprehended. But even the non-emotional states of everydayness are ways in which we are apprehended, taken by a way of being in which each of us always finds her/himself by reason of the attunement of one’s heart. Da-Sein, the place where relation to beings as a whole appears among beings, is grounded in the lighting/clearing of Being. Being, so conceived, is other than both beings and their Beingness, or things and their principles. In Platonic terms, Heidegger’s Being is other than the realm of genesis and the realm of ousia and stands, in a way that has to be severely qualified, in the place occupied by Plato’s Agathon as light for the intelligible.17 The historical emergence of the question of Being that takes center-stage in Plato appears within a quest that is grounded in thaumazein, in Erstaunen, in awe, as the 12
I find it odd that Heidegger does not exploit this first line for his purposes.
13
Heidegger (1971b, p. 128).
14
Heidegger (1962, §2, p. 27/1979, p. 7).
15
Heidegger (1968, I, §5, p. 139/1979, p. 178).
16
Heidegger (1977b, p. 19).
17
Plato (1969, VI, 508E).
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gift of the god Thaumas.18 Awe is other than curiosity, for the latter disappears with the discovery of the object of curiosity or the solution of the problem and will then be shifted to another object. Curiosity is regional, awe is encompassing. Curiosity arises with regard to this, that, and the other; awe concerns our place in the Whole. Curiosity moves us in determinate directions within the everyday; awe breaks us out of the rounds of daily life and takes hold of us totalistically; awe is a way of being profoundly moved. Kant described awe as the sense of the sublime, a simultaneous positive and negative reaction to the objects that occasion it. He narrowed his chief focus on it to the human encounter with magnitude, whether of size or power, whether the starry skies above or the storm at sea, though he found it also in relation to outstanding individuals. Awe flows from the tension between our bodily insignificance when faced with overwhelming magnitude and our ability to transcend that in thought through an awareness of the encompassing Whole within which it appears and to which we are specifically related by moral disposition. But Kant also called attention to its arising at the sense of the essential unrepresentability of the encompassing Whole that is applied to Yahweh as the Source of the Whole in the Hebrew Bible.19 Awe is a feeling of being uplifted that plays counterpoint to being overwhelmed in the contemplation of the object or non-object that occasions it. Such awe is the proper state translated imprecisely as ‘‘fear of the Lord.’’ Rudolph Otto named its object the Mysterium tremendum et fascinans, Mystery, encounter with which is experienced as what both repels and attracts us. For Plato and Heidegger, such a feeling of awe is the arche of philosophy, not as starting point that is left behind in moving from it, but as enduring ground, the way the axioms and postulates of geometry continue to govern the theorems that flow from them.20 Heidegger must have known that experience. It is the basis for his experience of Erschrechen or horror that things no longer occasion such a possibility. Erstaunen is that which makes us aware of the encompassing Mystery of Being to which we are essentially directed as Erschrecken does in a negative manner because of the lack characteristic of our age. Erstaunen is that which is schematized by the life of religious communities that preserve a relation to the Encompassing gathered around sacred places and sacred times and fostered by silence and meditation. Brought up in the Roman Catholic milieu of Bavaria and a student for the priesthood, Heidegger must have experienced something of the awe that religion at its best attempts to preserve. In his later life he maintained a relationship to the Benedictine monastery as the place of silence and meditation where relation to the Mystery can grow. It was in this milieu that Heidegger learned the difference between das rechnende Denken and das besinnliche Nachdenken.21 As we all know, these terms are 18
Plato (1977, 155C).
19
Kant (1987, §23–9).
20
Heidegger (1958, p. 79).
21
Heidegger (1966, p. 46/1959, p. 13). Heidegger invokes the same distinction in (1969, p. 163/1959, p. 102): he called thinking ‘‘in the second sense’’ logos, but ‘‘in the first sense’’ memory, devotion, and thanks that belongs to the thanc. He refers to the latter as equivalent to Meister Eckhart’s ‘‘spark of the soul’’ (2000b, p. 149/1959, p. 96).
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typically translated as ‘representative-calculative thinking’ and ‘meditative thinking’ respectively. Representation is not immediately present in rechnende, but it is implied. Calculative ordering presupposes a re-presentation of what is originally presented. Of course the term ‘calculative’ suggests mathematical ordering; but what is involved here is any logical ordering: scientific, philosophic, and theological as well as mathematical—or even everyday ‘‘figuring’’ that the carpenter or the farmer exercises. Metaphysics as first philosophy attempts a systematic representation of the Whole that reached its highpoint in Hegel’s System as an attempt to recapitulate and consolidate the speculative tradition.22 Heidegger’s project is an attempt to think the ground of the metaphysics of that tradition, what metaphysics presupposes but does not explicitly consider. Descartes’ letter to Picot as a preface to his Principles of Philosophy presents the Tree of Knowledge whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and whose branches are mechanics, medicine, and morals.23 This image furnishes a perfect opportunity for Heidegger to ask the question concerning the ‘soil’ in which the tree is planted as the ‘ground’ of metaphysics.24 For Heidegger it lies in Da-Sein’s mode of Being-in-the-World. ‘‘Meditative thinking’’ takes place in the milieu of the lifeworld and not in abstraction from it. It can lead to an enhanced mode of dwelling in the world. In Wahrig’s Wo¨rterbuch, Nachdenken involves thinking grundlich, thinking u¨ber alles, and being in Gedanken versunken: thinking most basically, thinking most comprehensively, and in a manner that absorbs one totally.25 The nach suggests thinking again, after one has already thought, and thus is a kind of reflection upon reflection. This fits in well with Heidegger’s attempt to think back to the ground of metaphysics. Gabriel Marcel spoke in parallel fashion of first reflection, rooted in abstraction and detachment that apprehends cognitive objects and poses and solves problems, and second reflection, rooted in a recovery of presence and participation that contemplates Mystery.26 What does besinnlich add to Nachdenken? Wahrig’s Wo¨rterbuch offers nachdenklich as a synonym for besinnlich, but what besinnlich adds to Nachdenken etymologically is Sinn or meaning. Here meaning should be understood, not in the sense operative in a request for the ‘‘meaning’’ of a term, i.e. for a definition, but in the sense operative in the observation that ‘‘Proofs for the existence of God don’t mean anything for me,’’ i.e. they do not speak to my heart; they give me only the God of the philosophers, not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.27 The translation of besinnliche Nachdenken as ‘meditative thinking’ is not bad, provided we understand meditation properly. And here we draw near to the kind of meditation practiced in the Far East that leads to satori, an enlightenment poles 22 Heidegger (1977a, p. 215/1947, p. 23). See also Heidegger’s lecture course Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. (Heidegger 1988, p. 40). 23
Descartes (1955, vol. I, p. 211).
24
Heidegger (1998a, pp. 277–290).
25
Wahrig (1989, p. 552a).
26
Marcel (1960, vol. 1, pp. 95–126, 260).
27
Pascal (1966, p. 309). He is said to have kept that statement sewn in his garments close to his heart.
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removed from the object of the meditation Descartes practiced and, following from him and others, the Enlightenment sought in the eighteenth century, the premiere age of representative-calculative thinking. For Heidegger meditative thinking is thanking, appreciative thinking that allows things to draw near and take hold of one comprehensively.28 ‘‘Drawing near’’ happens when something—a person, a thing, a work or art—steps out of the circle of everyday adjustments, takes hold of us, and places a demand upon us. We ‘‘take it to heart’’; it becomes part of our operative center. But in this we are not simply passive: The situation undercuts the distinction between active and passive. One has to struggle, holding oneself together, practicing recollection, re-collecting oneself, in order to allow oneself to be thus worked upon if and when the serendipitous happens. The contrast between these two modes of thinking is further developed in the contrast between logic and sigetics, that is, calculative ordering and the discipline of silence.29 Following the logical path leads to cognitive mastery, following sigetics involves a ‘‘letting be’’ that leads to ‘‘being apprehended.’’ Entry into silence is described most beautifully in Augustine’s recounting of the so-called ‘‘vision at Ostia’’ where the inner tumult became silent, where the world around became silent, where the mind itself became silent, during which time he was gripped by a Presence that drew upon him totally. To analogize such an experience, he uses all the senses, and not just seeing and thus not just having a ‘‘vision.’’30 ‘‘Yet I love a kind of light, a kind of voice, a kind of fragrance, a kind of food and a kind of embrace…of the man of my interior where it [the ‘vision’] flashes forth to my anima.’’31 With all that bombards one’s attention today, the inner silence that precedes and attends such an experience is almost impossible to achieve. That is one reason why Heidegger loved his mountain retreat. But even unreflectively living in the life-world, one is for the most part guided by one’s heart, by one’s spontaneous preferences. One lives out of one’s heart. In Being and Time, Heidegger names this underlying orientation Sorge or care.32 As we noted, one’s heart sets up zones of closeness and remoteness from one’s personal center. My wife and my children, who are scattered throughout the country, are closer to me than my students in the classroom or even than my brain which grounds my awareness. Meditative thinking helps to deepen that closeness in relation to the objects of meditation. Art in general and poetry in particular arise out of such reflection. It is important to note that, making explicit the factors we have been considering is not the same as living them through. The mode of reflection we are exercising 28 Heidegger (1968, pp. 138–47/1979, pp. 91–95 and 157–9. The separation of the references in the German text is required because the English translation puts the transition between lectures at the end of each lecture rather than separating them as the German does, placing all of them at the end of the text. 29
Heidegger (2000a, §§37–8, pp. 54–55/1989, pp. 78–9).
30
Augustinus (1977, X, §10).
31 .
Ibid. [T]amen amo quandam lucem et quandam vocem et quendam odorem et quendam cibum et quendam amplexum, cum amo deum meum, lucem, vocem, odorem, cibum, aplexum interioris homini mei, ubi fulget animae meae…’’ 32
Heidegger (1962, §41, pp. 235ff/1979, pp. 191ff).
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here presents what Heidegger called ‘formal indications’ that point to what experience lives through.33 Heidegger sees the arts as the ‘‘saving power’’ in our times where relation to the Mystery has steadily retreated before scientific-technological progress and, linked to that, the constant stimulation of consumer demand.34 The will to power, the will to become ‘‘lords and masters of nature’’ in the modern project, carried forward in scientific technology, has progressively driven out those ways of understanding that maintained a relation to the Mystery of Being. Nietzsche sensed what was happening and proclaimed the death of God. He asked, ‘‘Who has given us the sponge to drink up the sea?’’35 For Heidegger, relation to the Mystery of Being is the element in which we live, like fish in water. He saw his contemporaries as fish floundering after the drinking up of the sea.36 Having himself known awe before the Mystery and having discerned it in Plato’s own grounding of his thought, Heidegger experienced with horror, with Erschrecken, the disappearance of the sense of Mystery, the ‘‘forgottenness of Being,’’ in modern and recent thought.37 Following the question as to the ground in which the Tree of Knowledge is planted, Heidegger’s overall project is expressed in the title of his epilogue to What Is Metaphysics?: ‘‘The Way back into the Ground of Metaphysics.’’ We already noted that it lies in our mode of inhabiting a common world. Da-Sein finds itself ‘‘thrown’’ into a world that has been articulated in a centuries-long process whose creations are passed on to succeeding generations through language.38 The first aspect of this thrownness is biological. As a biological entity, we are each peculiarly specified by our own genetic endowment. Dwelling in a world, we are stamped with ways of thinking, acting, and feeling peculiar to the community in which we find ourselves and that focus and narrow the possibilities of opening and developing genetic endowments. Based upon those two determinants, biological and cultural, we eventually have chosen for ourselves ways of orienting ourselves within that world to arrive at the character we each currently possess. Thus we each have in any given time three interlocking levels of determinants that comprise the necessary framework for the exercise of our own deliberate personal choices. These determinants set the default mode for the choices we make. They determine where our heart is, how we each are spontaneously attracted, repelled, or rendered neutral by what appears within the field of our experience. Dwelling in a world, we are each essentially moved by our personal concerns. Some things are ‘‘near and dear’’ to us and some things are remote. What is most fundamental in such a world is what Aristotle called ethos, usually translated as character, but expressed in a peculiar modality of feeling, as the felt 33 Heidegger raises the issue of ‘‘formal indication’’ and illustrates it with his treatment of Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews (1998b, pp. 25ff). 34
Heidegger (1977b, p. 28).
35
Nietzsche (1974, III, §125, pp. 181–182).
36
Heidegger (1977a, p. 195/1947, p. 6).
37
Heidegger (1998a, p. 276).
38
Heidegger (1962, §29, p. 174/1979, p. 135).
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proclivity to behave in certain ways. In his remarks on music, Aristotle—somewhat surprisingly for most people—calls music the most imitative of the artforms, much more so than painting! We would have expected the opposite. But Aristotle remarks that painting only gives us the signs of ethos as inward disposition, while music gives us the ethos itself.39 In Heidegger’s study of Aristotle, he was centrally concerned with this ethos as it manifested itself in phronesis or practical judgment, the ability to size up situations. To call ethos ‘‘character,’’ a Greek term that means ‘‘stamp,’’ emphasizes the shape given to our very life of feeling by our upbringing, but misses the essential role of feeling as attunement. We are fundamentally ‘‘tuned’’ by our belonging to a certain world, and that sets us up to behave in a certain way. This is what Heidegger calls Befindlichkeit, how we find ourselves, our basic mood.40 Of course, we have to distinguish between a particular mood into which we may have fallen and our basic dispositions that govern our choices. As we all know, Heidegger in Being and Time, much like Plato in his image of the Cave, considers the typical way in which we are in such a world as a state of Uneigentlichkeit, usually translated as ‘‘inauthenticity,’’ etymologically parallel but misleading insofar as it suggests ‘‘phoniness.’’41 Sartre misunderstood it as ‘‘bad faith’’ and self-deception.42 But by calling the typical state of humankind ‘falling’ (Verfallen), Heidegger himself only reinforces the tendency to associate it with phoniness.43 German Eigentlichkeit is linked to eigen, English ‘authenticity’ to Greek autos, and English ‘appropriated’ to the Latin proprius: all refer to ‘‘one’s own.’ What is initially at stake is how appropriation occurs, underscored later in the central term Er-eignis or ‘‘appropriating event.’’44 In belonging to a life-world as a realm of meaning, we automatically go along with that world, are appropriated by it, and fail to appropriate it on our own: we are uneigentlich. We fail to secure sufficient distance from it to determine what is really manifest and what only seems to be because it is what ‘‘they say.’’45 It is Plato’s realm of doxa to which we are collectively chained in the Cave. Heidegger appeals to an awakening to the sense, i.e. the coming to presence, in what he calls an Augenblick, a ‘‘moment of vision,’’ of our own mortality, our ‘‘Being-toward-death.’’46 It is this that performs a kind of epoche of the life-world: It pries us loose from our everyday involvements and calls us to responsible appropriation. This kind of sense or meaning has to do with the way in which what is thought of is present to us: It has to do with personal distance or nearness. Our own mortality as a significant presence is essentially different than that same mortality thought of and 39
Politics, VIII, 5, 1340a, 1ff.
40
Heidegger (1962, §52, p. 303/1979, p. 259).
41
Heidegger (1962, §29, pp. 172ff/1979, pp. 134ff).
42
Sartre (1956a, b, pp. 47–72).
43
Heidegger (1962, §34, p. 210/1979, p. 166).
44
Heidegger (2000a, p. 175/1989, p. 258).
45
Heidegger (1962, §27, p. 163/1979, p. 126).
46
Heidegger (1962, §§46–53, pp. 279–312/1979, pp, 235–260).
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calculated in terms of actuarial tables on the basis of which we might take out a life insurance policy; or, to apply the same mind-set religiously, it is different than awareness of mortality that leads us to take out heavenly insurance by keeping the rules and nodding our heads in assent to—or perhaps in falling asleep while hearing—what ‘‘they’’ teach us. How do we think death as an overwhelming presence and not simply as an intellectual object, whether governed by worldly prudence or religious commitment? Martin Buber distinguishes Object from Presence, detachment from participation, an intellectual relation from a totalpersonal relation where the heart is touched and transformed; that is what is at stake here. Buber noted–on a parallel with typical Japanese aesthetic—that ‘‘the script of life is so unspeakably beautiful to read because we know that death looks over our shoulder.’’47 We will return to that in a moment. But prior to the rise of modern science, i.e. prior to the deliberate passing of all manifestation through controlled methodological grids, there was a place established, through poetic-religious proclamation, for the mysterious background into which receded everything jutting into the world of everyday manifestness. Poeticreligious proclamation is the typical modality in which the sense of Mystery, of the hiddenness behind all manifestation is preserved.48 And it is preserved in a way that establishes its significant presence. Poet and prophet initiate and recall relation to the Mystery that stands in the background of everyday awareness. Metaphysics may have established a conceptual place for this but does not as such access it. Consider, for example, the metaphysical attempts to prove the existence of God. If they prove, they prove within the same kind of space of distance involved in a mathematical proof. An intellectually proven God is no closer to us than a Euclidean right-angled triangle—which suits Spinoza’s ‘‘intellectual love of God’’ just fine since all things, humans included, are to be treated with the detachment that one gives to lines and planes and triangles.49 Hence Pascal, the thinker of the heart, contrasted the God of the philosophers with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and proclaimed that the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.50 It is just this sense of overwhelming presence, which speaks to the heart and that we also find in Augustine,51 that has been occluded through metaphysics and then in principle lost through the rise of the modern scientific, technological world. Poetry as the vehicle of expression for the truths of the heart is pushed to the periphery as a kind of superfluous icing on the cake, as mere subjective response to objective truth, not as the preservation of the Mystery in the concreteness of the life-world. Now, at the level of the analytic of Dasein preparatory to thinking Being, Heidegger’s emphasis was upon dwelling in a world as a mode of Uneigentlichkeit. This gave rise in thinkers like Sartre to an emphasis upon the individual as a self47
Buber (1965, p. 91).
48
Heidegger (1971a, p. 149).
49
Spinoza (1955, Part 3, p. 129).
50
Pascal (1966, §423, 154). In the Modern Library edition (1941, §277, 95).
51
The central theme of the Confessions is the ‘‘restless heart’’ that is announced very early in the work (I, §1).
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creating project.52 In Heidegger’s case, however, the ascent from the Cave was paralleled by a coming back to the Cave, for the aim was not simply gaining a sense of his own being, but gaining a sense of Being itself.53 And the vehicle of such a return was poetic dwelling. Heidegger turned to poetry as a distinctively different way of thinking and spoke of poets and philosophers, not in Platonic terms as lower and higher, but as occupying twin peaks, both above the valley of everydayness and calling out to one another.54 He came to see poets in particular and artists in general as vehicles of the ‘‘saving power’’ in the contemporary epoch of enframing where everything is viewed as being at-hand for our projects.55 Art as the ‘‘saving power’’ has to do here with the essential receptivity to concrete manifestness of the Mystery as essential ‘‘letting be,’’ as Gelassenheit. And such letting-be is essentially tied to the comprehensiveness of what is given in any given world. Getting oneself in hand by running ahead to one’s own death and thus gaining distance from the world of everydayness is for the sake of essential ‘‘lettingbe.’’ Far from surrendering oneself to a sea of feeling, such letting-be involves the strictest mode of attentiveness, a greater rigor than what logic can provide, for it is attuned, not to this or that problem or problem-region in the various sciences, nor even to the most general features of all problem regions in metaphysics, but to the fully concrete givenness of the actual world. One cannot help but note how far this seems from the resoluteness that arose from the letting himself be gripped by the sense of his own mortality, choosing his own models, and returning to the everyday world with his essential projects described in Being and Time.56 It is as if Heidegger got burned by his aligning himself with National Socialism, choosing der Fu¨hrer as the voice of Being, and calling for the enlistment of the university in service to the Volk under the guidance of Adolf Hitler.57 He gave his heart to the vocation of resolute service and lost heart, dis-appointed from his rectorship, returning ‘‘back from Syracuse’’ to the academy.58 He then dedicated himself, among other things, to a study of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, attempting to rise to the level of Hegel’s thought for which he thought the present age was not suitable, as if to re-examine the philosophic grounds of the bourgeois order hitherto treated with contempt.59 He also immersed himself in the study of Nietzsche and the poets.60 His dedication to thinking with the poets 52
Sartre (1956a, b, p. 291).
53
I have suggested that Plato’s Line is really the edge of a circle viewed from the side. Since the Good is not only the ground of the intelligible but ‘‘the principle of the Whole,’’ the movement up the Line and out of the Cave must be followed by a movement from the top down to the bottom in the Cave. See Wood (1991, vol. XLIV, pp. 525–547). 54
Heidegger (1998c, p. 237).
55
Heidegger (1977a, b, c, pp. 26–7).
56
Heidegger (1962, §62, p. 352/1979, p. 305).
57
Heidegger (1991, 98).
58
Gadamer (1989, p. 429).
59
The unpublished notes students took at the seminar show that Heidegger was only concerned with an exposition of the text and not with ‘‘the things themselves’’ about which Hegel speaks. He practices little ‘‘violence’’ on the text. 60
The upshot of the study, of course, was the two volume Nietzsche (1979–1987).
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went beyond philosophy to establish a counterpoint to philosophy in a second beginning for what he then calls Denken. If the philosopher and the poet occupy twin peaks, calling out to one another across the space grounded in the valley of everydayness, the thinker emerges occupying a third peak.61 What I claim is that the locus of the sense of encompassing Being as the source of poetic experience is precisely the heart. In the following section, I want to develop that further by looking to two texts: Heidegger’s comments on some fragments from Parmenides in What is Called Thinking? and his comments on a poem by Rilke in the essay ‘‘What Are Poets for?’’ Heidegger went back to Parmenides for help in getting back to the ground of metaphysics in a more fundamental mode of thinking than that practiced in the history of metaphysics. But in reading Heidegger, one has to be aware independently of the whole context of what Parmenides said and how it has been taken, for Heidegger gives a very selective focus. Parmenides set forth his thought in a poem called Peri physeos or On Nature, of which we have only significant fragments.62 The poem is divided into three parts: a very poetic proem replete with live religious metaphors, and two rather prosaic parts that follow the poetic introduction and that present two ways of thought: the way of a-letheia or truth and the way of doxa or opining/appearing. It begins with the line: ‘‘The steeds that bore me took me as far as my heart would desire.63 It is at least interesting that the beginning of metaphysics lies in the outermost limits of the heart’s desire. The introduction to Parmenides’ work describes an ascent from a realm of darkness and light carried by a chariot with glowing and singing axles and guided by the daughters of the sun to the gates that divide the realms of night and day. Here the daughters persuade the goddess Dike or justice to open the gates. The goddess takes Parmenides by the hand and grants him the basic revelation: ‘‘estin kai me estin ouk estin.’’ ‘‘‘It is’; and ‘it is not’ is not.’’64 Parmenides goes on to say that ‘It is’ is changeless and absolutely one—like a well-rounded sphere.65 He says further that we are to test by logos the truth of what he says here.66 Werner Jaeger claims that this is the first time logos is used in the sense of logical deduction.67 Following the deductive line from the original claim that being is and non-being is not, being is seen to be changeless because change involves having to think that not-being is by reason of the no-longer-being of the past and the not-yet-being of the present, and indeed, following Augustine, the nottemporally-extended character of the Now, moving out of the no-longer into the not-
61 For a comparison of the philosopher and the thinker in Heidegger’s thought, see Wood (1995, pp. 311–33). 62
Kirk and Raven (1966, pp. 263–85).
63
Kirk and Raven (1966, §342, p. 266).
64
Kirk and Raven (1966, §344, p. 269).
65
Kirk and Raven (1966, §351, p. 276).
66
Kirk and Raven (1966, §346, p. 271).
67
Jaeger (1960, pp. 102ff.).
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yet.68 Estin: Being just ‘‘is’’ in a changeless present. And it is absolutely one—not a one among many or a one composed of many as we are, because each such one– one-among-many or one-composed-of-many—is other than each other such one. But then ‘‘it is’’ is also not like a sphere because a sphere has a plurality of aspects and absolute oneness excludes all not-being, even that found in the mutual otherness of all the aspects of a sphere, the periphery from the center, one point on the periphery from all other points. The realm of being as the changeless One is the realm of a-letheia, of truth. The realm of doxa is the realm we typically occupy: a mixture of day and night, of light and darkness, of multiplicity and change. But one who would walk the way of truth needs to know also the doxa of mortals in order to follow the outmost limits of the heart’s desire and ascend to being-taken by the eternal rest of the changeless One.69 Thus the traditional understanding of Parmenides. But we have to keep in mind that this Being is at the outmost limits of the heart’s desire. The heart’s desire opens the metaphysical quest. In his attempt to clarify the notion of thinking in Parmenides, Heidegger zeroes in on a few isolated texts which he works over and over, sifting them again and again. He focuses particularly upon two Parmenidean dicta: to gar auto noein estin te kai einai, literally translated as ‘‘the same thing exists for thinking and for being’’70; and chre to legein te noien t’ eon emmenai, often rendered as ‘‘That which can be spoken and can be thought needs must be.’’71 Heidegger’s translations are as follows: For the traditional ‘‘The same thing exists for thinking and for being’’ he translates instead: ‘‘for the same (to auto): taking-to-heart (noein, to think) is so also the presence of what is present (einai, to be).’’72 For the usual translation, ‘‘That which can be spoken and can be thought needs must be,’’ he translates: ‘‘Useful (chre) is the letting-lie-before-us (legein) also (the) taking-to-heart (noein) too: beings in being (eon emmenai).’’73 In the Introduction to Metaphysics, noein as Vernehmung is the Geschehnis that possesses man.74 The focus follows the way back into the ground of metaphysics through thinking the sense of Being as the light/clearing that gives us access to beings as beings. Heidegger understands this in the Parmenidean dicta as ‘‘the presence of what is present’’ and as ‘‘beings in being.’’75 Thought in its primordial sense is the place where the sense of Being as the sense of the Whole opens up, a sense that governs how beings appear. Thought attends to this opening up. The thought of Being is the being-taken by that meaning, being attuned to it, living in it. Beings appear in its light as coming to presence. Noein, 68
Confessions, XI, §26.
69
Kirk and Raven (1966, §342, p. 267).
70
Kirk and Raven (1966, §344, p. 269).
71
Kirk and Raven (1966, §345, p. 270).
72
Heidegger (1968, p. 241/1972, p. 147).
73
Heidegger (1968, p. 223/1972, p. 136).
74
Heidegger (2000b, p. 150/1966), p. 108. Heidegger suggests an understanding of phusis as logos anthropon echon, as the logos that possesses man (2000b, p. 187/1966, p. 134). 75
Heidegger (1968, pp. 229–244/1972, pp. 138–49).
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thinking, is taking-to-heart which is letting-be; nous, which becomes in Plato the term for intellect, is here understood differently as related to the Gedank/thanc. One who is thankful is thoughtful. As we noted previously, thought is intimately linked with the heart via its association with memory considered as the seat of devotion. For Heidegger, memory here is ‘‘the gathering of the constant intention of everything that the heart holds in present being.’’ And intention is understood here as ‘‘the inclination with which the inmost meditation of the heart turns toward all that is in being,’’ something not necessarily within one’s own control.76 Taking to heart allows us to exercise memory in the celebration of memorials, such as that which occasioned Heidegger’s reflections in the ‘‘Memorial Address.’’ In Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides, taking-to-heart allows the presence of what is present to make its claim. Taking-to-heart presupposes the gathering (legein) performed by language that lets things be present in the way they are present. Linguistically mediated manifestness precedes taking-to-heart as letting-liebefore (legein). But it also follows as safeguarding in the gathering of what is takento-heart. The two together, legein and noein, rooted in language and the heart, show what thinking most fundamentally is. Letting-lie-before corresponds to the theoretical moment, but taking-to-heart fulfills our belonging to Being.77 Philosophy as fulfilled attunement to Being sets the conceptually elaborated within the framework of fundamental awe attuned to the encompassing Mystery out of which all that comes to presence comes to presence. As in his ‘‘Memorial Address,’’ Heidegger expressly appeals here to two modes of thinking: thinking in terms of logos that becomes dialectic and logistics, and thinking as memory, devotion, and thanks. Thinking as Heidegger here promotes it is the interplay of these two modes. Noein is the being-gripped, being-taken which opens up the fundamental horizon of a-letheia. Indeed, as we have already said, though Heidegger does not refer to it, the first line of the first reflection on the notion of Being in Western thought, Parmenides’ poem Peri Phuseos, begins, not with the intellect, but with the heart: ‘‘the steeds that bore me took me as far as my heart would desire.’’ And it takes him to the feet of the goddess who reveals to him the truth of Being. Thought as noein, as taking-to-heart, belongs essentially to Being. Logical deduction in Parmenides’ poem follows from a revelation by the goddess. One should underscore that noein takes place in solitude and cannot fully be made public.78 There is something essentially private about fully ‘‘authentic,’’ fully appropriated presence to being. Though epochal disclosure of Being tunes a cultural world, and thus dispositionally tunes individuals within that world, calling forth various efforts to achieve correctness of representation within such an opening, nonetheless such tuning is essentially uneigentlich until one takes-to-heart 76
Heidegger (1968, pp. 140–1/1972, p. 93).
77
Heidegger (1968, p. 209/1972, p. 138).
78
Heidegger (1968, p. 169/1972, 164). In his comments on Trakl, he stresses solitude and the ‘‘heavy heart’’ that arrives at ‘‘flaming vision.’’ Heidegger (1971a, b, c, d, pp. 178–81). The notion of the heart is implicit in his dealing with poetry and with aesthetic matters generally. For example, Heidegger (1971a, b, c, d, pp. 44–5) there is a discussion with a Japanese interlocutor where the aesthetic notion of Iki is described as ‘‘the pure delight of the beckoning stillness.’’ Delight is clearly a matter of the heart, but its alignment with stillness indicates relation to an encompassing.
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appreciatively the presence of the Mystery of revealing and concealing that such epochal disclosure makes possible. The retrieval of the past, such as Heidegger attempts in going back to Parmenides, and the opening to the foreign, such as he attempts in the other piece, ‘‘Conversations on a Country Path,’’79 conjoined with the ‘‘Memorial Address’’ in Discourse on Thinking, is a way of eigentliche Wohung in the possibilities opened up within the epoch within which we dwell, the epoch of enframing. But it is art, which speaks to the heart, that is the real ‘‘saving power’’ in such an epoch. And so we turn to the artform that opens up the space for all the arts: poetry, as Heidegger takes that up in conjunction with Rilke in ‘‘What Are Poets For?’’80 For Heidegger, as we noted, philosophers and poets occupy twin peaks equidistant from the valley of everydayness.81 He says, ‘‘We have placed thinking close to poesy and at a distance from science.’’82 Heidegger places his discussion of Rilke within the framework of the proximate origins of modern philosophy. As Descartes set in motion the peculiarly modern logic of calculating reason, so Pascal opened up the interior domain of the heart (des Herzens) that is both more interior than such reason and also extends further than the realm of reason’s objects.83 Rilke directly fits into this framework. For Rilke the more extensive realm of the interior of the heart includes especially those whom one loves: the forefathers, the dead, the children, those who are to come that fit within the widest orbit of human concern. The depth dimension of our own inner being (das Innerste des Herzensraums) corresponds ultimately to the widest breadth of the encompassing. This is the realm where love, pain, and death belong together: the abyss of Being. Here things themselves are freed from being mere objects of our mastery. All this takes place within the holy precinct of language, the temple of Being.84 At the same time as this approaches Heidegger’s concern, it also remains limited. As Heidegger notes: For Rilke’s poetry, the Being of beings is metaphysically defined as worldly presence; this presence remains referred to representation in consciousness, whether that consciousness has the character of the immanence of calculating representation or that of the inward conversion to the Open which is accessible through the heart (in das herzhaft zuga¨ngliche Offene).85 This is very much parallel with Heidegger’s general move to ‘‘the ground of metaphysics’’ as a region encompassing subject and object, except that it remains within the subject-object relation. The heart is the organ of a deeper inwardness and a more encompassing relation to others than is intellectual apprehension. Indeed, as 79
Heidegger (1966, pp. 58–90/1959, pp. 28–71).
80
Heidegger (1971b, pp. 91–142/1977, 269–320).
81
Heidegger (1998c, p. 360).
82
Heidegger (1998c, p. 134/1971, p. 154).
83
Heidegger (1971b, p. 127/1977, p. 306).
84
Heidegger (1971b, p. 132/1977, p. 311).
85
Heidegger (1971b, p. 132/1977, p. 311).
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relation to the Open, ‘‘the globe of being,’’86 it is a relation to the surrounding totality of beings. But as Heidegger reads Rilke, it is still a matter of Vorstellung, of placing-before and of over-againstness in which one thinks beings as a Whole but does not fully advance to the thinking of Being itself as that which grants. Might it be that the notion of the globe of being, parallel with the Parmenidean image of being as a sphere, thinks being ahead of time as a totality without thinking Dasein as projected beyond beings as a Whole? It is this which, for Heidegger, allows beings as a Whole to come into focus. But this projection is linked to the Lethe as the hiddenness the surrounds any a-letheia, any coming out of concealment. The Lethe is the darkness which affects the very way in which the light dawns and thus the way things come to presence.87 It is the realm of silence that affects the coming to language. For Rilke, in our ‘‘unshieldedness,’’ our lack of protection (Schutzlossein) in relation to destruction and death to which we are exposed by the underlying ‘‘venture’’ (Wagnis) that is our own being, we construct a world of safety through our theoretical and technological efforts.88 But it is precisely the acceptance of our unshieldedness that brings us into relation to that underlying unity of the globe of being wherein we are joined with others in love and in the acceptance of pain and death. A world of safety shields us from that which would heal us. The epoch of the Gestell, of technological enframing that turns the world into a giant reservoir for our use, is also an epoch of alienation from our essence as humans. The inward turn of the heart opens our relation to the Whole, breaks forth in song, and turns our being into song. Far from this being a mere aestheticism, for Rilke the encounter with the beautiful raises the demand: ‘‘You must change your life.’’89 Contrary to what it might seem from very much that Heidegger says and from much that his readers draw from him, he is not here or elsewhere calling for a repudiation of technology, of science, or of metaphysics. They are part of the history of what has been granted to us. What is needed is a ‘‘friend of the house of Being’’ who, as he says, ‘‘in equal manner and with equal force is inclined toward both the technologically constructed world-edifice and the world as a house for a more original dwelling,’’ one who is able ‘‘to re-entrust the calculability and technicity of nature to the open Mystery of a newly experienced naturalness of nature.’’90 One such ‘‘friend of the house,’’ in spite of a basic difficulty, Heidegger finds in Rilke, who, with Ho¨lderlin and Trakl, are ‘‘poets in a destitute time.’’91 It is the time of the Gestell, of the viewing of beings as standing reserve for our projects, the time of ‘‘the flight of the gods, the standardization of man, the destruction of the earth.’’92 These poets recall us to the ground of metaphysics in the heart, they recall us to appreciative dwelling in that which is granted to us. They lead us to the overcoming 86
Heidegger (1971b, p. 124/1977, p. 302).
87
Heidegger (1977c, p. 132ff).
88
Heidegger (1971b, p. 120/1977, p. 298).
89
This is the last line of Rilke’s poem, ‘‘The Archaic Torso of Apollo.’’
90
Heidegger (1984, p. 98).
91
Heidegger (1971b, p. 94/1977, p. 272).
92
Heidegger (2000b, p. 40/1966, p. 29).
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of mere aesthetics in opening ourselves to the Mystery over which we have no mastery, the Mystery of our belonging to the Whole. For Heidegger, poets and great philosophers are linked: They think out of what he calls a ‘‘poetic-philosophic’’ experience of Being.93 And through giving articulation to that experience in their work, they ‘‘create so much world-space that in it the ordinary becomes extraordinary.’’94 In each case they can be understood only if we penetrate to the fundamental disposition that constitutes the ocean in which their thoughts swim: the experience of the fundamental Mystery that surrounds every disclosure. And, because of this, as we already noted, Heidegger moves thinking in the most primordial sense ‘‘in the direction of poesy and away from science,’’ toward the heart in tension with the intellect. Art, in revealing the fundamental character of the thing as an assembling of the Whole for dwelling, leads us back from the abstract one-sidedness of science, the all-sided abstractness of philosophy and the partiality of all our particular interests, even our aesthetic interests, to the wholeness of meaning. Art can bring us from our various modes of absence and imposition to the presencing of the Whole in the sensuously present. It teaches us to ‘‘let things be’’; it speaks directly to ‘‘the heart,’’ the center of thought, action and feeling; it teaches us meditative rather than simply calculative and representative thinking. It brings us back to the ground of metaphysics: It articulates our sense of Being as the Whole within which we may come to find our own Wholeness.95
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