Martin Heidegger: The Indispensable Thinker

by
William Clark
Martin Heidegger: The Indispensable Thinker by William Clark.
© 2015 by Pegasus Flight of New York. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic,
recording, or photocopying form without written permission of the
author or the publisher.
Books may be purchased in quantity and/or special sales by
contacting the publisher.
Published by: Pegasus Flight of New York
Interior Design by: Rex Loure, WESType of Boulder, Colorado
Cover Design by: Max Telinger, NZ Graphics
Library of Congress Control Number: 2008901658
ISBN: 978-1-897221-52-4
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
1. Philosophy
First Edition
Printed in USA
This work is dedicated with the profoundest gratitude to the staff and
faculty of the University of Cambridge, where it has been my honor to
labor alongside giants of learning and personal integrity. WC
 In the absence of the courage to follow the path set down by a
seemingly impossible question, there is nowhere to go. The universal
leitmotif becomes repetition.
What, Heidegger asks, is the source of the meaning of
being? This is the central question Heidegger pursues through 102
volumes of his collected works.
Plato called being eidos, Aristotle energeia, Aquinas esse. What
do these terms have in common with each other as well as an entire
tradition of thought? They all conceive being as meaningful
presence. Heidegger had no doubt about it: He knew that being had
been understood in terms of presence (as in that there) and the
present (as in that there now, with this now constituting the past—as
nows past—and the future, as nows to be) for at least 2500 years. His
guiding question is, How did this peculiar intelligibility arise?
This early on in our discussion of Heidegger, the answer he
ultimately evolves can only be meaningful as a heuristic. The source
of all intelligibility or the meaningfulness of all things is die Lichtung or
clearing, the die ereignete Lichtung or thrown-open and appropriated
clearing. If we can keep the language in mind, we can work our way
through to an understanding of what Heidegger experienced as its
necessity.
The clearing or open space is human being (not the or one human
being). Intelligibility belongs to life, and to human beings above
all. Human being is out and beyond itself, comprising an “open
space,” preoccupied with death (or that which is not yet but insures
the advent of the nothingness of life, the loss of life, the living that is
dying), informed by an absolute past (genetic, bodily, traditional,
linguistic, environmental) and determined in the present
accordingly. Human being, it might be said, gathers itself together
within the open space of constant transcendence of the here and now,
the this or that. Appropriation, however, is never to a center. Human
being is without an organizational center. It is very precisely
dispersed (across a field or clearing), and without the recognition of
this peculiar situatedness, der Sinn vom Sein (the meaning of being)
cannot be imagined in its emergence.
A more fundamental question is hard to conceive. What could be
more basic than the understanding we have of all things, the world
and everything in it, in its realness or being?
Heidegger must be taken at his word when, to the very end of his
life, he describes himself as a phenomenologist (GA 14: 147.15-16 =
201.1, 54.2-3 = 44.32-33). Sein can only be understood with respect
to the phenomenological reduction of things to their meaningfulness to
humankind. I once heard Slavoj Zizek refer to reality as “nothing” (“I
hate it,” he said) and all I could think of was Lewis Carroll and this
curious ability to see nothing, and at this distance, too. If being means
nothing whatever, how do I manage to get my shoes on?
 What is that which grounds the clearing? It cannot be
defined. Heidegger calls it es (it) as in “it gives.” Upon arriving at the
it, that which triggers the clearing into its upsurgence, Heidegger
observes, “there is no more room even for the word ‘being’” (GA 15:
365.17-18 = 60.9-10). In the clearing, the thing emerges into its
intelligibility, which it must do. There are no flatly unintelligible
things. If a thing occupies our experience, it has already been
understood in some sense, though this understanding is not a matter
of correctness or incorrectness, and it certainly doesn’t bring the thing
as “something out there” into existence; the thing is indeed “out there”
and quite independent of human beings.
So, what permits the meaningfulness of any given thing? The thing
must be taken as such-and-such. It must be taken not in itself but as
a possibility (as good, as for throwing, as tall, as beautiful, as
dangerous). There is no question of correctness. In fact, the
correctness of a hammer is not its being in itself a hammer. It is a tool
within the context of tools, human needs and work. It is as its
possibility—more for use, perhaps, than for ornamentation. The
clearing is that in which possibility manifests itself with/as the thing,
given human ends and concerns.
 The absolute center of Heideggerian thought is Ereignis or
appropriation. The “subject” always already stands open to what
is. Now, this claim taken by itself is misleading. The subject does not
stand open to reality in the same way that a door stands open to the
evening breeze. What must be kept in mind while reading Heidegger
is that the human being has been appropriated by what is, and that it
is this appropriation that renders him open. He must be
open. Roughly put, it is being that engenders and sustains the human
being. The human being has never for a moment belonged to any
other “element.” As such, the conception of an atomistic, isolated self
that confronts an object in a world that is not it(self) is a fiction, one
with a very long history. The “subject” has already been marked by
the being from which its life is the merest extension.
Heidegger preferred not to speak of subjects or selves but of
dasein or the openness to being that is our own. The human being is
situated in the world, in one place and circumstance rather than
another, and he is himself sein (being), always already included in
what is. We cannot exist in the absence of intelligibility, the
meaningfulness of dasein, the world and what dasein does. He
cannot approach being from the outside or take up “a view from
nowhere.” Amazingly enough, this is a truth that philosophy and,
more recently, science have largely blinded themselves
against. Within the openness that is dasein, as always already
implicated in the world of objects, as claimed and connected on all
sides, a thing can appear as this or as that, as meaningful.
As impossible as it may sound, Dasein is always out beyond
itself. Its existence is not self-contained, as if what is coughed it up
and then abandoned it. It is in what is and beyond it. It is mortal, and
everything it does (or declines to do) is an expression of the
availability of only so much time or of a timeframe whose pressing
demands will not go unanswered. It is bound to possibility. A thing
only appears to dasein as it does because dasein must be on the
lookout for the satisfaction of, say, thirst (X as drinkable or as
undrinkable). The identification of X (a pool of water) has to be
thought of in a certain way for it to stand forth as it does (as
drinkable). Its drinkability takes the human being out of and beyond
itself into the possibilities of what can obtain—satisfaction of thirst or
hunger, sickness and death. These possibilities belong to the future,
the yet-to-come—not the is but the is-not-yet. Dasein is extended
beyond the present into the past (e.g. of recollection and physical
evolution) and the future (e.g. work, reproduction, child-rearing,
friendship, striving).
To grasp how a thing comes to appear to man in one way rather
than another, we must attend to the presence of the thing in its
meaningfulness. The word (a linguistic thing) that is showing itself is
present. The word that is familiar has attained a depth of
meaningfulness that would be unavailable to a word presented in a
lost script. In the latter case, we would still experience marks, shapes,
inscriptions of a seemingly manmade kind—and within this
constellation of terms the word of the lost script would show itself as
an instance of the unknown script rather than as naturally occurring
streaks or as chicken tracks.
Heidegger isn’t interested in the makeup of any given thing as it
exists, say, on a distant, lifeless planet. Do things exist upon such
planets? Of course, just exactly as they exist here when no one is
present or before anyone could be present. For Heidegger there is no
question of the existence of the external world. His preoccupation,
from first to last, is how those things show themselves as they do
(whereby I experience my mother’s face one way and you
another). He is from first to last a phenomenologist.
We have long attributed a meaning to being as opposed to beings,
or that which all beings must share in their recognizability as
belonging to what is. Since the ancient Greeks, so for 2500 years,
being has meant the “constant, steadfast presence” of things. But
Heidegger wants to know how it is that the meaningfulness of being
arises. What induces the meaningfulness of being? His answer: the
world.
World is the context. I do not mean, for instance, the church that
serves as the context for a certain kind of wedding. I mean everything
that is contained within the between and the beyond that is Dasein
(e.g. goals, ambitions, tradition, values, religion, religious architecture,
gods). One “element” that goes into your crush in third grade on the
pigtailed girl, without you knowing anything about it, is the match
between your developmental level and hers (physically, socio-
emotionally). This is not to say that the third-grader cannot have a
crush on his teacher. It is only to say that what goes into the between
and beyond (dasein) is radically different in each case. The pigtailed
girl is a peer, and she shows herself accordingly. The peer shows
herself only in terms of dasein’s own age, whether physical or psycho-
maturational or some combination of factors.
This is of course an immense simplification. Dasein, like the world
(as Heidegger uses the term), is the meaning-inducing context itself,
all that is between and beyond that shapes how what is shows itself
(e.g. a culture’s standards of female beauty, of what is done by whom
at what point in life, of hierarchies of students and teachers). Dasein
is not other than its culture, its biology, its environs and possibility (of
loss, mourning, anticipation, anxiety, perseverance, postponement of
pleasure and so on). The showing of the object in its meaningfulness
happens in the between (according to what informs dasein) and the
beyond (or dasein’s involvement in what has been and will
be). Heidegger in no way endorses the deconstructive claim of the
textuality of all things. He never formulated the in-itself of reality as
infinite interdependence. What he said, and what seems to me
absolutely beyond dispute, is that meaning resides in constitutive
relationships which in their endless variety but as configured in a
certain way he called world, the source of meaningfulness.
Derrida’s deconstruction practiced an objectivistic ontologizing of
traces, differance, writings, textuality, supplements and so on. Indeed,
Derrida took considerable pleasure in compiling an idiom to give
expression to his singularly subtle and ingenuous meditations,
objectivistic all the same. While Heidegger mentioned his interest in
the philosophy of Derrida, so influenced by his own, he must have
seen immediately that it was no mere imitation or further evolution.
Heidegger came to speak of the origin of meaning as it in the
phrase “it gives.” The “it” is not susceptible to definition, but it “gives”
the peculiar configuration that constitutes the context that is world and
hence the kind of showing (disclosure of objects) that takes
place. The origin is of necessity concealed. There is no getting at
that which gives configuration, that comes in advance of
configuration. It would be fair to say, then, that the organizing center
of all meaning is itself meaningless and undisclosed.
What might be called the mechanism of meaning is the as or, to
use a phrase from Heidegger’s masterpiece Being and Time, the as-
structure. If I am undertaking an activity (say, building a tree house), it
is only meaningful as it conforms to an objective, as it is arduous, as it
corresponds to what is generally done, etc. If a thing shows itself in
terms of discursive thinking (say, a pair of bookends), it is as equal or
unequal, as qualitative or quantitative, as potentiality or actuality,
etc. The as-structure is always already embedded in the between and
the beyond, the “space” of synthesis. A hammer is as suitable for
driving nails. Strip away this particular as and the thing no longer
shows itself as a hammer.
Because appropriation has gone overlooked, Heidegger thought
Western civilization to be in decline. The world (in the non-
Heideggerian sense) is trivialized by technology and a calculative
reason that deprives nature and human beings of all dignity and
higher purpose.
 For Plato a thing’s realness consists in its ideal intelligible
appearance. Heidegger is interested in the conditions that determine
the thing in its appearance, in the divers ways in which a thing shows
itself. There is an intellectual and a practical appropriation of the
thing, in part because the thing has already appropriated us or dasein
in advance. The thing that discloses itself to us, discloses us to
ourselves by virtue of a primordial belonging. The world does not
begin on the other side of a chasm; we only are as we have been
claimed by it. Only within this claim can an object show itself, and the
nature of this claim is what Heidegger would investigate.
The Greeks conceived of reality in terms of perfection and
completeness. As such, the greatest reality went to that of the most
permanent self-sameness, and in Plato’s eyes the immateriality of the
idea recommended itself on this basis. Aristotle describes a
movement from potentiality to actuality, imperfection to perfection,
incompleteness to completeness. Reality does not ultimately belong
to an idea but to the tode ti or “this thing here.” The changeableness
of the concrete thing as against the permanence the Greeks sought in
reality becomes a problem, but Aristotle attempts to reconcile
movement to stasis. The thing is in movement or change, yet it is one
that tends toward stable perfection or completion. Plato and Aristotle
are, as such, exponents of what has come to be called the
metaphysics of presence, being as presence—as permanent
availability in the present. Similarly, this is the metaphysics of
contemporary science.
Heidegger takes on the question raised in Aristotle of the simple or
the non-composite. This can only be being itself. As Heidegger
writes, “The being of a thing does not just sometimes belong to a thing
and sometimes not, but belongs to the thing constantly and before
everything else. Being as such, simplicity, unity—these cannot be
analyzed further back….The disclosedness of the simple completely
excludes the possibility of non-disclosedness.” However, as we know,
a thing can disclose itself variously. An apple is food and a weight
and a projectile and an aesthetic experience and so on.
Aristotle’s positing of simplicity renders propositional logic
dubious. A proposition is the synthesis of a subject and an alleged
property; it is a yoking that simultaneously keeps subject and property
or properties distinct or non-simple. Hence Aristotle speaks of the
simplicity of the tode ti as known only via an unmediated intuition. He
employs the figures of “touching” and “addressing oneself
to.” Heidegger sums up Aristotle’s view, “Regarding whatever is
present in and of itself—of such things there is no deception but only
apprehension or non-apprehension….Above all, however, this
complete unmediated constant presence of being, of itself and for
itself, this most constant and purest presence, is nothing else but
reality in its highest and most proper sense.” So, quite clearly,
Heidegger isn’t primarily in search of the meaning of being. He wants
to know how it is that any meaning at all arises.
How, Heidegger wanted to know, does disclosure happen? This is
a properly phenomenological question, and in Aristotle he believes he
has uncovered a kindred spirit. Aristotle is unambiguous: The being
of a thing and the intelligible disclosedness of that thing are the
same. Husserl, the great phenomenologist, provided a clue to a
closer reading of Aristotle and of the Greeks generally. Husserl’s
doctrine of the categorial intuition of the presence-as-meaning of a
thing made Heidegger especially sensitive to the Greek conception of
aletheia or disclosure.
In his Metaphysics, Aristotle asserts that the thing only has as much
disclosedness [aletheia] about it as it has being” (II 1, 993b30-
31). For Heidegger, a thing is only disclosed in the openness of the
movement by which the thing in its as-structure goes out beyond itself
and returns. This meaningful oscillation is intelligibility in its barest
mechanism. Beyond or beneath or behind this ground of intelligibility
there is only the abyss of nonsense, the “it” that “gives.” Ignorance on
precisely this point, Heidegger has it, yields the techno-capitalism and
mindless scientism so universally destructive today.
A being involves always the relation of a thing to someone with
human concerns. Knowledge is above all else concerned, always in
advance implicated in existence. Of the utmost significance in
Aristotle for Heidegger is the description of Parmenidean permanent
self-identity in motion or as changing, a movement of the thing toward
its actualization in the future (as this or that). Aristotle isn’t interested
in the further elaboration of a transcendent world of ideal and fixed
Platonic forms. He insists instead upon the tode ti, this thing here,
which he has to make temporal and changing in its self-identity, as the
thing that it is. The tode ti is incomplete to the extent that it is moving
or changing. Analogously, Heidegger sees the thing in its disclosure
as determined not just by what is but also by what will be and what
has been. For Heidegger, Aristotle is no naive realist, but a proto-
phenomenologist. Moreover, Greek aletheia doesn’t mean the simple
existence of the thing out there, but its meaningful presence to dasein.
This kind of knowledge always precedes any propositional effort to
formulate the thing. Given intelligible disclosure, the proposition then
employs the as-structure of the subject-predicate relation. In other
words, propositional correctness is not ipso facto false, but it is
radically partial. Those who would find truth in a strictly propositional
fashion are dealing in a very narrow conception of truth. For
Heidegger, truth as uncovering is more primordial, and this is not the
uncovering of a thing that is then had in its nakedness or irreducible
truth. Uncovering is always a disclosure as-something. There is
always this initial displacement. Or, put otherwise, uncovering is
always simultaneously covering over. The hammer that is not in use
pounding nails can be put to another use, acted upon in another as-
relation, as a doorstop. One meaning covers over the other.
Heidegger thinks that what induced speculative wonder among the
ancient Greeks was the fact that things mean anything at all, that
there was so much about the thing in excess of its mere
thingness. This excess occurs only within the “open space” of the
clearing by which a thing shows itself as-this or as-that. Perhaps
Heidegger’s greatest insight, as the source for more thinking, was the
as as the wellspring of signification. Why the as has this power (why it
is given at all) is unknowable.
A thing assumes a meaning in being encountered, which, you
should note, is only another way of saying being present. “Something
can be settled about things with reference to their being, only insofar
as things are present, that is, as we say, insofar as things can be
encountered at all” (GA 19: 205.7-10 = 141. 27-30). And it is just here
that Jacques Derrida’s lifelong reflections upon presence derive their
point.
 Why, then, did Aristotle, in Heidegger’s eyes, remain a porto-
phenomenologist rather than going full-blown? While he overcame
the Socratic dialectic, he remained inured to the traditional conception
of logos. Indeed, for Aristotle it is the singular human agent who
performs the uncovering of the thing in its meaningfulness. The
Greeks understood the thing in its whiteness as form. As such, for
Plato, the human being could not pull the realm of the unchanging and
eternal eidos out of a hat. It was there to be re-collected or not. For
Aristotle, at least as Aquinas read him, the individual human being
actively extracts the form from the thing, a form whose existence
resides only in the thing. Thomism only furthered obscured the point
by speaking of it as “the abstraction of intelligible species” (Summa
theologiae I, 12, 13).
Heidegger observes quite shrewdly that there is no abstraction or
extraction in Aristotle. Rather, the thing is wrenched from
senselessness in an act of taking-as. A true meaning does not reside
in the thing. The thing never arrives at correctness but gets taken up
over and over again in a ceaseless process of appropriation. Where
Aristotle errs, Heidegger thinks, is in his “vulgar” conception of time as
consisting of now-points, his endorsement of the centrality of the
present.