HAAS, ALEXANDER, M.A. August 2020 PHILOSOPHY MARION, HEIDEGGER, AND THE QUESTION OF GIVENNESS (74 pp.)

Thesis Advisor: Gina Zavota

In Being Given, Jean-Luc Marion claims that Heidegger errs in subordinating the givenness of phenomena to Ereignis, unduly restricting the ways in which phenomena can be said to “give themselves”. The problem, however, is that without this stricture, we are unable to make certain distinctions that are indispensable for understanding phenomena in the diversity of their appearing. Take, for example, technological phenomena (e.g., televisions, radios, computers, etc.) On Marion’s account, these phenomena give themselves; show themselves insofar as they give themselves. But is this really giving, or instead, a kind of intrusion, a permeating of our space by technological phenomena? What Marion is missing, is a robust account of the context, or better, the locus of apparition that allows us to differentiate the ways in which phenomena show up. I will argue that Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis is such a locus.

MARION, HEIDEGGER, AND THE QUESTION OF GIVENNESS

A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

by

Alexander Haas

August 2020 © Copyright All rights reserved Except for previously published materials

Thesis written by Alexander Haas B.A., Kent State University, 2015 M.A. Kent State University, 2020

Approved by ______, Advisor Gina Zavota ______, Chair, Department of Philosophy Michael Byron ______, Interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences Mandy Munro-Stasiuk

TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………...iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………iv CHAPTERS 1. Jean Luc Marion’s Phenomenology of Givenness §1 Introduction……………....……..………...…………………………………………....1 §2 Phenomenology, Science, and Method…..…………………………………………….2 §3 Phenomenology and Principles………...... …………….……………………………....6 §4 Husserl and Objectness……………..…………..……………………………………...8 §5 Heidegger and Being…………………………………………………………………...9 §6 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….……..….18 2. Heidegger on Being and Ereignis §1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………...20 §2 The Kerhe and Overcoming Metaphysics…………………………………………….20 §3 Es Gibt and the Givenness of Being and Time……………………………………….25 §4 Es Gibt as Ereignis……………………………………………………………………30 §5 Philosophy and Thinking……………………………………………………………..34 §6 Thinking and Metaphor………………………………………………………………39 §7 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………43 3. Marion, Heidegger, and Givenness §1 Introduction…………………………………………………………………………...44 §2 Unconditional Givenness……………………………………………………………..44 §3 The Universality of Givenness………………………………………………………..51 §4 Equipmental Phenomena……………………………………………………………..53 §5 Technological Phenomena……………………………………………………………57 §6 Towards a Heideggerian Account of Givenness……………………………………...60 §7 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………70

REFERENCES…………………………………………………………………………………..72

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to thank my advisor, Dr. Gina Zavota, for all the time and effort she has put into this project. Her patience with me boggles the mind. I will always be grateful for the support and encouragement she has shown me. I would also like to thank my examining committee: Dr. Michael Byron, Dr. Benjamin Berger, and Dr. Joanna Trzeciak-Huss for reading and commenting on my work. I also want to thank Alex Martin. You’ll get over Camus. I also want to thank Zach Nickels. While he’ll never endorse the arguments contained herein, I hope he sees that we are working on the same problem from different sides. I also want to thank Will Fenton. We’ll make it through Kant together someday. I also want to thank Moad Aldabbagh. His singular focus is something I’ve tried to emulate. I also want to thank Kevin Lower. His friendship has meant the world to me. I also want to thank Dr. Kwang-Sae Lee, for whom I am still rewriting my seminar papers. Lastly, I would like to thank Václava Hazuková. That my idiosyncrasies have not driven her away is truly miraculous.

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1 Jean Luc Marion’s Phenomenology of Givenness

§1 Introduction

In his 1997 monograph Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, Jean-Luc

Marion aims to “make possible a revival of phenomenology,” to demonstrate the relevance of this philosophical movement that has fallen out of favor in recent years.1 Marion attempts to make good on this aim by liberating phenomenology from the two horizons that have come to define it in the textbooks: objectness and Being.2 To move beyond these horizons, as Marion claims, is to acknowledge that not all phenomena show up as objects or beings. Consequently, the sort of phenomenological revival Marion has in mind hinges on the possibility of a departure, our being able to dispense with, and get along without, the strictures one finds in the work of both Husserl and Heidegger.3 But there is a danger in this, of which Marion is no doubt acutely aware, that in dispensing with these horizons, one may also be dispensing with phenomenology itself.4 Marion’s task then is a fairly straightforward one: he must demonstrate the way in which phenomenology is thinkable apart from both objectness and Being; that is, he must demonstrate the inability of objectness and Being to exhaust the essence of phenomenology.5

As the title of his book indicates, Marion conceives of the essence of phenomenology in terms of “givenness,” and the task of phenomenology as attending to phenomena as they give

1 Marion, Jean Luc. Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffery L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. xiv; BG hereafter. 2 Ibid., xiv. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

1 themselves in experience.6 Towards the beginning of this text, Marion explains that we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that givenness constitutes the essence of phenomenology, for givenness is a theme that we find running through the work of both Husserl and Heidegger.7 Despite the prevalence of this theme, however, Marion’s position received quite a bit of opposition, with thinkers such as Ricoeur and Derrida contesting his claim.8 In order to firmly establish its legitimacy, Marion traces the genesis of the concept of givenness in the work of Husserl, and explores its modification and development in the work of Heidegger.

Challenging Marion’s reading of Heidegger, this essay pushes back on his suggestion that

Heidegger consigns givenness to the horizon of Being. While he might appear to do so, a careful consideration of his later work shows Heidegger to have abandoned the sort of ontological inquiry that would justify Marion’s claim. Anticipating a bit, Marion accuses Heidegger of forsaking givenness insofar as he interprets the idiomatic expression ‘es gibt’9 by way of the term ‘Ereignis’.10 11 Failing to appreciate his nuanced use of ‘Ereignis,’ Marion mistakenly asserts that Heidegger understands the phenomenality of phenomena ontologically.12 But this is not the case. Throughout the course of this essay, I will defend Heidegger against Marion’s charge. Specifically, I will argue that Heidegger not only abandons the horizon of Being, but also provides us with a non-metaphysical conception of givenness, one that does justice to the things whose antics give rise to world.

§2 Phenomenology, Science, and Method

6 Ibid., 3. 7 Ibid., 2. 8 Ibid., 3. 9 In German, ‘es gibt’ is an idiomatic expression roughly equivalent to the English ‘there is’. Literally, however, the phrase means ‘it gives’. 10 The German term ‘Ereignis’ is similar to the English ‘event’. But as we will see, Heidegger does not always use the term this way. 11 Ibid., 34. 12 Ibid.

2

Before we tread this ground, however, it may prove useful to start with a brief sketch of

Marion’s take on phenomenology. Doing so will put us in a better position to make sense of the way in which he both stands in a certain proximity to, and yet, ultimately distances himself from,

Heidegger. Marion begins by distinguishing phenomenology from the natural sciences.13 In

Ideas, Husserl had described phenomenology as the science of consciousness.14 According to

Marion, this sort of determination on the part of Husserl, and his followers, radically misconstrues the nature of phenomenology; losing sight of what is decisive, they miss the breakthrough that it makes possible.15 Science, Marion claims, is inseparable from proving, and is inextricably tied up with rigorous demonstration.16 Fixing phenomena in place so as to make them indubitable, science situates their appearance in a rational foundation that is beyond dispute.17 Phenomenology, on the other hand, breaks with this familiar procedure. Marion explains that while science contents itself with proving, phenomenology concerns itself with showing.18 Instead of prejudging phenomena by the benchmark of certainty, phenomenology attempts to let “appearances appear in such a way that they accomplish their own apparition,” that is, it aims at receiving phenomena as they give themselves in experience.19 Consequently,

Marion argues that “phenomenology has no other goal and no other legitimacy than to attempt to reach the apparition in appearance”.20

Here, according to Marion, we hit upon the fundamental paradox of phenomenology:

“that it takes the initiative in losing it;” more precisely, that it effaces itself before phenomena,

13 Ibid., 7. 14 Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 63; I hereafter. 15 BG 7. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.

3 recedes into the background so that they can come to the fore, unencumbered, of themselves.21 If this paradox seems unaccounted for in the literature, Marion explains, this is because “many phenomenological attempts have simply repeated and corroborated the privilege of

(metaphysical) perception and subjectivity over and against manifestation”.22 Marion’s argument is that a good deal of what passes for phenomenology fails to come up against, let alone confront, the manifestation of phenomena in appearance, as phenomena are, more often than not, shackled to an ego, and misconstrued as some sort of non-originary effect.23 Phenomenology, then, in order to remain faithful to itself, must in some sense abandon itself, stage its own disappearance in such a way as to allow for “the original manifestation of what shows itself”.24

The goal, Marion explains, is to “connect the apparitions of things in their most initial originarity to the so-to-speak native state of their unconditional manifestation in themselves”.25

Doing justice to this paradox—thinking it through with methodological rigor and precision, neither dispensing with nor diffusing it—requires us to take up the question concerning the method appropriate to phenomenological investigation.26 As Marion explains,

Husserl was the first to recognize the problem this paradox poses for phenomenology.27 He argues that Husserl’s near obsession with the theme of method, his continual reworking of the reduction, and his repeated attempts to begin again, recommence everything, and pin down the meaning of phenomenology, can only be understood when we take stock of the “difficulty presented by this paradox”.28 Importantly, this requires a certain break with the familiar

21 Ibid., 9. 22 Ibid., 8. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 9. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.

4 procedures and operations that have codified around the thematics of method.29 Traditionally conceived, method is subject to the dictates of reason and to the demand for an “indubitable basis for knowledge”.30 Citing Descartes and Kant, Marion explains that this foundationalist picture of things is sustained by, and proceeds through, an identification of the “a priori conditions for knowledge”.31 With these conditions in place, indubitability necessarily follows, as those objects that are produced, constructed, or synthesized according to said conditions begin to show up as absolutely certain.32 In short, when conceived in this way, method concerns itself with bringing about the “certainty of objects”.33

Phenomenology, by contrast, radically rethinks what it means to proceed methodically and consequently opens the way for a renewed experience of things.34 Marion explains that phenomenology attempts to “provoke the indubitability of the apparition of things, without producing the certainty of objects”.35 In this way, phenomenology drops the Cartesian-cum-

Kantian demand for “a priori conditions” and abandons the attempt to ground phenomena in anything other than themselves.36 Going further, Marion insists that when doing phenomenology,

“the method does not run ahead of the phenomenon, by fore-seeing it, pre-dicting it, and pro- ducing it”.37 Instead, the method “travels in tandem with the phenomenon, as if protecting it and clearing a path for it by eliminating roadblocks”.38 Here, we hit on the meaning of the

29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid.

5 reduction39, which, Marion explains, involves “suspending ‘absurd theories,’ the false realities of the natural attitude, the objective world, etc., in order to let lived experiences bring about as much as possible the appearing of what manifests itself as and through them”.40 Succinctly put, the reduction aims to put out of play the various obstacles that hinder manifestation. Importantly, though, the reduction doesn’t “provoke the apparition of what manifests itself,” but instead,

“clears away the obstacles that encircle it and would hide it”.41 Strictly speaking, the reduction doesn’t do anything.42 As Marion explains, the reduction “takes the initiative… only in order to offer it to what manifests itself”.43 In the end, Marion characterizes the reduction as a “counter- method,” one which turns against itself in order to let the apparition in the appearance show itself.44

§3 Phenomenology and Principles

Having treated the question of method—the procedures proper to phenomenology—

Marion turns to the question of principles, and more specifically, the challenge facing a project defined as a counter-method.45 As Marion explains, “the question of the principle poses a principle question: how to assign a principle to the method… that takes the initiative to give up the initiative?”.46 In other words, how does one formulate a principle that does not contradict the spirit of this practice that turns against itself in an attempt to yield to the phenomena it interrogates? Marion’s answer to this question is twofold. First, the principle must “accomplish

39 Note, Marion’s use of the term ‘reduction’ differs from Husserl’s. Making no reference to “transcendental subjectivity,” Marion practices the reduction for the sake of the given, and isn’t interested, as Husserl was, in using the reduction to study the correlation between subjectivity and world. 40 Ibid., 10. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 11.

6 its primacy only by disappearing before apparition”.47 Second, the principle must “be determined by the very thing—the manifestation of what manifests itself—that it claims to govern or at least describe”.48

Following Husserl’s suggestion that “one must... take the phenomena as they give themselves,” Marion puts forward his own phenomenological principle: “the more reduction, the more givenness”.49 Turning to Husserl’s The Idea of Phenomenology for support, Marion argues that this text confirms the link between the reduction and givenness, for there, Husserl made the claim that only the reduced phenomenon is an absolute givenness: “The psychological phenomena in psychological apperception and objectification is not really an absolute givenness, rather, only the pure phenomenon, the reduced phenomenon”.50 In other words, absolute givenness is achieved in and through the reduction. Seizing on this passage, Marion insists that

“what phenomenologically validates a phenomenon as an absolutely given is therefore not its mere appearing but its reduced character”.51 That is, givenness is inextricably bound up with the reduction insofar as the latter “operates like a sort of middleman who leads the visible towards givenness; it leads scattered, potential, confused, and uncertain visibles… to givenness, according to which it assesses their degree of phenomenality”.52 Neither legislating the terms nor imposing a categorical scheme, the reduction stages the givenness of phenomena by allowing the pure phenomenon to unfurl itself absolutely.53 Freed in this way, Marion believes phenomena set

47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 14. 50 Husserl, Edmund. The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), p. 64; TIP hereafter. 51 BG 14. 52 Ibid., 15. 53 Ibid., 17.

7 their own measure, and come to meet us by giving themselves of themselves in and through the reduction.54

Having sketched Marion’s view, let us take up his reading of Husserl and Heidegger.

Bear in mind, my aim in what follows is to set the stage for an eventual confrontation with

Marion’s interpretation of Heidegger. Whether or not he accurately represents Husserl’s view is outside the scope of my investigation. In rehearsing his critique of Husserl, I merely wish to contextualize his arguments against Heidegger’s treatment of givenness, for these arguments are in service of a claim I am very much intent on refuting: Heidegger, like Husserl before him, hits on the unconditional character of givenness, but unable to face the radicality of this discovery, banishes givenness in favor of the Being of beings. The fact that Marion takes himself to be tracing a theme running through the works of Husserl and Heidegger requires us to have at least a little familiarity with his understanding of both figures. Consequently, before we attend to his reading of Heidegger, we will briefly explore his treatment of Husserl.

§4 Husserl and Objectness

According to Marion, while Husserl may seem to acknowledge the preeminence of givenness, he ultimately subordinates it to the horizon of objectness.55 In order to establish this,

Marion quotes from a passage in The Idea of Phenomenology, one where Husserl equates givenness with objectness: “Set forth the different modes of givenness in the proper sense, that is to say, the constitution of the different modes of objectness”.56 Marion goes on to argue that if this equivalence between givenness and objectness was nothing more than an admission that objectness is a kind of givenness there would be no difficulty, for objectness would be conceived

54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 32. 56 TIP 54.

8 as one of the modalities of givenness.57 But that’s not Husserl’s move. On Marion’s reading, when Husserl equates givenness and objectness, he is “measuring givenness by the yardstick of objectness”.58 According to Marion, objectness is simply a mode of givenness, and Husserl is therefore not authorized to assimilate “all modes of givenness to modes of objectness”.59

As Marion explains, Husserl “blocks his essential victory;” he leads the phenomena back to a more originary givenness, carries out the reduction in such a way as to allow phenomenality to be decided by givenness in its varying degrees, only to submit the phenomena to the

“unquestioned paradigm of objectness” and to judge givenness by the benchmark of the object.60

Insofar as Husserl assumes the equivalence of both givenness and objectness throughout his work, Marion claims, he assimilates the one to the other, and he never really “questions their essential contrast,” their radical difference.61 Consequently, while Husserl opens the possibility of a phenomenality of givenness, a phenomenality that can “permit the phenomenon to show itself in itself and by itself because it gives itself,” he fails to seize on this possibility, and instead, construes the phenomenon on the “basis of the ego of a consciousness that intends it as its noema,” or object of thought.62

§5 Heidegger and Being

Taking himself to have demonstrated that Husserl “recoils before his own advance” and abolishes givenness to the extent that he regards objectness as the benchmark by which the phenomenality of phenomena should be judged, Marion turns his attention to Heidegger.63

Unsurprisingly, Marion argues that Heidegger follows Husserl in taking givenness as his theme

57 BG 32. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid.

9 and goes further than his teacher in pursuing the phenomenality of Being according to givenness.64 And yet, Marion discerns a similar “recoil” in Heidegger’s work, an unwillingness to follow givenness to the end. But whereas Husserl had abandoned givenness in favor of objectness, Heidegger unduly subordinates it to Ereignis.65 By means of an analysis of both

Being and Time and Time and Being, Marion attempts to demonstrate that Heidegger’s thought marks a retreat similar to the one observed in Husserl’s work.

In order to establish this point, and justify the reflections that are to follow, Marion highlights certain key passages in Being and Time, arguing that even in Heidegger’s early work, the question of givenness was at issue.66 As readers of Heidegger well know, with Being and

Time he sought to “raise anew the question of the meaning of Being” and to rescue this question from the oblivion into which he believed it had sunk.67 Taking time as the “horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being,” Heidegger attempts to work out the meaning of this question concretely, through an analysis of that being for which Being is an issue, namely,

Dasein.68 At least explicitly, givenness doesn’t appear to be one of his concerns, with notions like ‘temporality,’ ‘death,’ and ‘anxiety’ taking center stage. And yet, Marion argues, in a text where “Being should have opened for and onto itself and settled its own horizon (time), it is nevertheless accompanied and even preceded by the ‘ça donne’ or ‘it gives’”.69 In pointing out passages in Being and Time where Heidegger invokes the ‘it gives,’ Marion attempts to demonstrate the way in which the ‘it gives’ was at work in Heidegger’s thought decades before

64 Ibid., 33. 65 Ibid., 37. 66 Ibid., 33. 67 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), p. 19; BT hereafter. 68 Ibid., 32. 69 BG 33.

10 the seminar that comprises Time and Being, a seminar that Heidegger understood to correct his earlier thinking on the matter.

The first passage Marion alerts us to occurs toward the beginning of Being and Time, at a point in the text where Heidegger is attempting to pin down that entity which will allow us to catch a glimpse of Being.70 Before settling on Dasein, and while discussing the difficulties involved in making the selection, Heidegger details some of the modes in which Being is said to appear: “Being lies in the fact that something is and in its Being as it is; in Reality; in presence- at-hand; in subsistence; in validity; in Dasein, in the ‘it gives’”.71 Having drawn our attention to this passage, Marion raises the following question: “How are we to understand the fact that

Being dwells in anything that is not it?”.72 As Marion explains, there is a tendency to read

Heidegger as laying bare the various ontic regions in which Being may be said to manifest itself, and answering the question as if it were simply a “matter of the ontic deposits where [Being] takes root and opens”.73 Interpreted in this way, Heidegger is merely listing the domains in which Being issues forth.

There is a problem with this reading, however, one to which Marion quickly alerts us. He explains that when taken in this way, the ‘it gives’ is radically misconstrued, treated as an ontic domain on the same footing as Reality, presence-at-hand, and validity.74 According to Marion, this interpretation errs for the simple fact that the ‘it gives’ is not an ontic region; it is not a space that owes anything to beings, and consequently, it cannot be treated as a sort of shorthand for a possible way to be.75 Staying with this passage, Marion puts forth his own reading, arguing that

70 BT 26. 71 Ibid. 72 BG 33. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid.

11

Heidegger’s reference to the ‘it gives’ underscores his claim, as it is a “question of a nonontic instance rendering Being at the very least accessible”.76

Developing his argument further, Marion draws our attention to another passage, one that speaks to the relationship between Being and Dasein.77 Importantly, Marion chooses this passage because Heidegger seems to suggest that access to Being requires Dasein, and that this relationship is intimately bound up with givenness: “Only as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding of Being is ontically possible) does ‘it give’ Being”.78 Marion maintains that this passage reveals that while Heidegger understood Being to admit of an ontic condition, namely, Dasein, he also understood that Being comes to meet this ontic condition in the form of an ‘it gives’.79 Marion argues, “to appear in the mode absolutely proper to it, Being comes forward in an ‘it gives’”.80 According to Marion, this further demonstrates the way in which givenness was an issue for Heidegger as early as Being and Time.81

Taking one final example, Marion alerts us to a passage towards the very end of Division

I of Being and Time, a passage where Heidegger is detailing the relationship between Dasein and truth.82 “Only as long as the truth is does ‘it give’ Being—not beings; and truth is only insofar as and as long as Dasein is”.83 According to Marion, taken together with the previous passages, this passage reveals that Heidegger’s investigation into the Being of beings turns up a phenomenology set in motion by a certain givenness.84 While Heidegger’s focus in the early parts of Being and Time is certainly Dasein, his examination of this being for which Being is an

76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 BT 255. 79 BG 33. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 BT 272. 84 BG 33.

12 issue uncovers an originary givenness that Dasein alone secures.85 As Marion argues, “the entire

Dasein analytic consists only in a staging, thus an ‘it gives,’ of Being on the basis of the

‘complete givenness of Dasein as a whole’”.86 When read in this way, Marion insists, we can make sense of the way in which Being differs from beings.87 Unsurprisingly, Marion argues, the phenomenality appropriate to Being turns out to be “carried out in and through an ‘it gives.’

Being, insofar as it differs from beings, appears immediately in terms of givenness”.88

While we might be inclined to regard Marion’s reading as anachronistic, as

“overinterpreting metaphors ventured without concepts in [Being and Time],” such a move would be premature, for as Marion explains, Heidegger himself admitted to interpreting his earlier references to the ‘it gives’ as “half attempts” to come to grips with the problems of

Ereignis he would later explore.89 In light of Heidegger’s admission, Marion claims, his investigation is justified.90 He argues that “at the end of the path that led him from [Being and

Time] to [Time and Being], Heidegger recognizes that the first occurrences of ‘it gives,’ therefore of any givenness whatsoever, foreshadow the final elaboration of this same theme”.91

Consequently, Marion claims, there is no break between these two texts; they pursue the same theme, “confront the same question: givenness, make use of the same paradigm: ‘it gives’”.92

Having established the legitimacy of his inquiry, Marion turns his attention to Time and

Being with an eye toward assessing Heidegger’s self-interpretation. Marion’s interest in this late lecture is prompted by Heidegger’s suggestion that Being and Time inadequately treated the

85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., 34. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid.

13 question of givenness, failed to think the es gibt as Ereignis, and, therefore, misconstrued the nature of the ‘it gives’.93 Probing this self-assessment, Marion questions Heidegger’s construal of his earlier thinking as a “failing,” wondering instead, if the ‘it gives’ would “remain all the more in agreement with givenness as it resists the attraction of every authority, whatever it might be”.94 In what follows, Marion attempts to hold Heidegger’s hand to the fire and to demonstrate the way in which he obscures the very problematic he brings to light. To be clear, Marion’s charge is that in reading the ‘es gibt’ as Ereignis, Heidegger forecloses the possibility of an inquiry into the nature of givenness; like Husserl before him, he takes givenness as his theme, only to restrict it at the last moment, tying it to the Ereignis. He thus violates the spirit of the reduction, furnishing givenness with an arbitrary interpretation that givenness itself does not supply.95

Before we proceed any further, it may prove useful to say a few more words about

Marion’s charge, teasing out an aspect of the argument that might easily get overlooked. Recall

Marion’s use of the term ‘be’ above. In suggesting that we get a better handle on the nature of givenness insofar as we see it as resisting “the attraction of every authority, whatever it might be,” Marion is both pinning an ontological reading on Ereignis and suggesting that Heidegger’s identification of the es gibt with Ereignis places givenness squarely in the horizon of Being.

While we will refute both claims in the next chapter, it is enough to keep them in mind for the time being, as they undergird Marion’s argument against Heidegger. In what follows, we will continue to outline Marion’s reading of Time and Being, laying the groundwork for our confrontation with his view, and our defense of a Heideggerian take on givenness.

93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid.

14

Returning to the text, we notice that Marion lauds Heidegger for radicalizing in Time and

Being what Being and Time had merely hinted at, namely, that “the phenomenality of Being goes hand-in-hand with an originary ‘cela donne,’ to the point of passing into it”.96 In order to justify this point, Marion quotes, at some length, the following passage from Time and Being:

We say of beings; they are. With regard to the matter ‘Being’ and with regard to the matter ‘time,’ we remain cautious. We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather there is [es gibt] Being and there is [es gibt] time. For the moment we have only changed the idiom with this expression. Instead of saying ‘it is,’ we say ‘it gives’.97

Whereas Heidegger, at least at this stage of the investigation, was content to regard such a move as indicating little more than a terminological shift or idiomatic substitution, Marion argues that this “linguistic turn of phrase indicates more radically a conceptual turn”.98 As he reminds us,

Heidegger will later argue that with this shift, “Being [itself], presencing [Anwesen] is transformed [verwandelt]”.99 Refusing a metaphysical interpretation of Being, one that would construe Being as the “ground of beings,” this substitution allows Being to show up as a

“gift”.100 Commenting on the significance of this “conceptual turn,” Marion argues that insofar as Heidegger “admits that if only beings are and if Being itself is not, Being can be thought only as it is given—taken in givenness”.101 While such a move may appear to be little more than a case of linguistic sleight of hand, Marion insists that for Heidegger to “transpose Being into the realm of givenness, does not imply an arbitrary act of will”.102

According to Marion, the reason for Heidegger’s shift is twofold. First, it allows him to assign Being to a new horizon, as his own investigation has demonstrated “the impossibility of

96 Ibid. 97 Heidegger, Martin. “Time and Being,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 4; TB hereafter. 98 BG 35. 99 Ibid. 100 TB 6. 101 BG 35. 102 Ibid.

15 holding Being within the horizon of Being (only beings are, Being is not)”.103 Second, it allows him to account for “the most essential trait of Being in its difference from beings, its withdrawal”.104 Phenomenologically speaking, the gift is marked by a certain withdrawal. As

Marion explains, “the gift alone has it as proper to it to withdraw itself at the very moment it brings and leaves, gives and abandons [donne et abandonne] its given”.105 In this way,

Heidegger’s turn towards givenness provides him with a way of making sense of the withdrawal of Being.

Having demonstrated the centrality of givenness in Heidegger’s account and the role it plays in his later thoughts on Being, Marion argues that Heidegger ultimately flees before his own advance, and forecloses the possibility of “thinking Being and beings within the horizon of givenness acknowledged as such”.106 He does this, Marion claims, by “baptizing the ‘it’ with the name of Ereignis”.107 According to Marion, “the givenness of the ‘it gives’ can be understood only on the basis of the ‘enigmatic it’”.108 Echoing Heidegger here, who argues that holding fast to the enigma is the only way to bring the giving of ‘it’ into view, Marion insists that “the enigma must be preserved from all metaphysical regression that would interpret the ‘it’ in the sense of an ‘indeterminate power,’ one too hastily determined, to the point where it would appear as an ontic agent”.109 Heidegger is right, Marion argues, at this stage of the argument, to

“‘capitalize the ‘It’ of the ‘it gives’” so as to avoid attributing a proper name to the ‘it’ that would “lower the givenness that puts it into operation to the rank of a causation or effectuation

103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., 36. 107 Ibid., 37. 108 Ibid. 36. 109 Ibid.

16 by this or that being, privileged or not”110. According to Marion, staying with the ‘It,’ not only safeguards the enigma, but “defends pure givenness,” serving as a “sort of bracketing of all transcendence in the sense that Husserl reduced the grounding of God and Heidegger himself proclaimed a methodological ‘atheism’”.111 Upon closer examination, this move proves to be something of a phenomenological necessity, for otherwise, the enigmatic ‘It’ would “inevitably turn into a being (indeed the supreme being),” and givenness as such, would fall into oblivion.112

Despite the phenomenological necessity, Heidegger ultimately reads the ‘it gives’ as

Ereignis, arguing that “what determines both time and Being, in their own, that is in their belonging together, we shall call: Ereignis, the event of Appropriation”.113 Going further,

Heidegger insists that “the ‘It’ that gives in ‘It gives Being,’ ‘It gives time,’ proves to be

Ereignis”.114 Lamenting Heidegger’s move here, Marion argues that “contrary to his declared prudence, Heidegger immediately lifts the anonymity of the ‘it’ and obfuscates the enigma”.115

Insofar as he bestows upon the ‘it’ the name Ereignis, Marion argues, he errs, violating “his own interdiction”.116 The problem with this move, Marion insists, is that it “depends on an interpretation,” one that the ‘it’ does not supply.117 As Marion explains, “the ‘it’ does not on its own claim to be [Ereignis], but is overdetermined in this direction”.118 Drawing our attention to

Heidegger’s own admission that he interpreted the ‘it’ as Ereignis, Marion raises the following question, “But what rule can justify this interpretation?”.119 According to Marion, the absence of

110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., 37. 113 TB 19. 114 Ibid. 115 BG 37. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid.

17 such a rule is obvious.120 In substituting Ereignis for the ‘it,’ Marion claims, Heidegger obscures the problematic of givenness.121

Towards the end of Time and Being, Heidegger insists that “the gift of presence is the property of [Ereignis]. Being vanishes in [Ereignis]”.122 Seizing on this claim, Marion argues that givenness is ultimately abolished by the Ereignis, as givenness no longer sets its own bounds, but instead, is worked out in accordance with the Ereignis. He writes:

Heidegger acknowledges givenness beyond or outside Being only to immediately misconstrue it by supposing that it still only gives (itself) on the side of the Ereignis and under its aegis. Givenness to be sure, but only as a brief transition between Being and Ereignis, a mere relay, provisional.123

Reading Ereignis as an ontological term, Marion argues that Heidegger forecloses the possibility of givenness by “assigning beingness to the Ereignis”.124 Instead of probing the question of givenness in such a way as to render Being thinkable within this horizon, Marion claims,

Heidegger follows Husserl in subordinating givenness to an alien horizon.125 In this way, he repeats his teacher’s mistake, and leaves unexplored the possibility of an investigation into the nature of givenness as such.126

§6 Conclusion

Were Ereignis to play an ontological role in Heidegger’s work, Marion would be right to accuse him of treating Being as the ultimate horizon of thought. As I mentioned above, he is mistaken; not only does Ereignis not serve ontological ends, but Heidegger gradually loses faith in Being as he becomes more hostile towards metaphysics. In the next chapter, I aim to

120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. 122 TB 22. 123 BG 37. 124 Ibid. 38. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid.

18 demonstrate this by way of a detailed analysis of Time and Being. Before moving on, however, I would like to say a few words about the reading of Heidegger I will be arguing for. My central claim is that he uses the term ‘Ereignis’ metaphorically; the same goes for his use of ‘es gibt’.

Furthering the claim, I will make the case that much of Heidegger’s language use in his later texts is metaphorical as well. If I haven’t defined his terminology yet, it is because the literal meaning of his vocabulary isn’t at issue. In what follows, I will explain how these metaphors function, and how they turn up a givenness that falls outside the scope of Being.

19

2 Heidegger on Being and Ereignis

§1 Introduction

So, as we have seen, Marion’s claim is that Heidegger is working well within the horizon of Being, and that Ereignis is just one more ontological term, one more name for Being. There is an obvious problem with the first part of this claim i.e., that in Heidegger’s work, Being acts as a condition for the possibility of phenomena, determining from the outset the modes of phenomenal manifestation: when taken as a whole, Heidegger’s texts just do not support it.

Marion can surely make his case with respect to Being and Time, The Basic Problems of

Phenomenology, and the other texts composed in the twenties, but with respect to the texts composed in the thirties, this claim is implausible at best. What Marion fails to consider is the

Kerhe, or turn in Heidegger’s thinking, the move away from anything that smacks of fundamental ontology, and ontological inquiry more generally.

§2 The Kerhe and Overcoming Metaphysics

Prior to the Kerhe, Heidegger had been interested in discovering certain “a priori conditions,” namely, those that make possible the ontologies that are foundational for the development of the sciences.127 Simplified to the extreme, Heidegger’s goal in these early works is to “raise anew the question of the meaning of Being,” in an attempt to disclose the ontological structures that are necessary for an understanding of Being in the sciences.128 In this sense, the ontological investigations Heidegger is concerned with here are transcendental, as they seek to

127 BT 31. 128 Ibid.

20 uncover the conditions that are requisite for an understanding and experience of beings. But these structures are “hidden,” “covered up,” and “disguised,” requiring a particular sort of sight, or method, to make them manifest.129 Heidegger argues that phenomenology provides us with a way to bring these structures into view, defining phenomenology as letting “that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself”.130 A quasi-poetical rendering of Husserl’s famous slogan, “To the things themselves!,” Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology invites us to consider phenomena without subjecting them to some prior standard of appearance.131 Despite their concealment, Heidegger insists that these structures can be brought to light by attending to them in such a way as to let them show themselves from out of themselves, and not imposing on them any outside determinations.132 Since these investigations are ontological, the horizon is necessarily one of Being, and with respect to these earlier texts, the first part of Marion’s claim is correct.

After the Kerhe, however, Heidegger’s enthusiasm for the project of the early works, i.e., fundamental ontology, begins to wane. He begins to speak of “overcoming metaphysics,” overcoming attempts to make claims about “the whole of that which in any way is”.133

According to Heidegger, these various attempts are all predicated on the distinction between the

“sensuous” and the “suprasensuous”.134 The sensuous designates that which is “apprehended by the senses,” the fleeting and mere appearance; the suprasensuous stands for that which “can be grasped with the understanding and with reason,” the constant and unalterable.135 Since its

129 Ibid., 59. 130 Ibid., 58. 131 Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations: Volume I, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 168: LI hereafter. 132 BT 60. 133 Heidegger, Martin. Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister,’ trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 23; HH hereafter. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid., 24.

21 inception, metaphysics has sought to transcend the sensuous domain and make contact with “that which truly is,” the eternal and the everlasting.136 Heidegger’s call to “overcome metaphysics” is a call to give up on the very idea of a “reality” existing outside of time and chance, a call to give up on a distinction that has been philosophically decisive.137

Additionally, overcoming metaphysics consists in overcoming Being, that is, overcoming those ontological structures which, for at least two millennia, have served to determine beings.138

In one of Heidegger’s last lectures, given in the fall of 1969, he goes so far as to suggest that

“there is no longer room for the very name of Being”.139 Heidegger’s remarks in this lecture course demonstrate the radical change that his thinking undergoes. In the later texts, Heidegger backs away from questions concerning ontological categories structuring experience. As his student Hans-Georg Gadamer explains, the Heidegger of this period “freed himself from the transcendental mode of questioning” familiar to Being and Time.140 What Heidegger is after in these later texts is a kind of thinking that inquires into the ways in which things are revealed, but that is neither “ontological” nor “metaphysical” in its orientation.141 Heidegger explains that engaging in this kind of thinking requires us to free thought from “any ‘ideal,’ ‘causal,’

‘transcendental’ or ‘dialectical’ explanation of beings”.142

When cashed out in these terms, and within this problematic of a non-metaphysical way of thinking, the project of Being and Time and the early lectures cannot help but appear as

136 Ibid. 137 Ibid., 23. 138 Heidegger, Martin. “Overcoming Metaphysics,” in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 83; OM hereafter. 139 Heidegger, Martin. “Seminar in Le Thor,” in Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 60; SLT hereafter. 140 Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “The Way in the Turn,” in Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 125; TWT hereafter. 141 Heidegger, Martin. Contributions To Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 41; CP hereafter. 142 Ibid., 354.

22 metaphysical through and through, something to be abandoned in favor of the new thinking being attempted here. Importantly, Heidegger’s abandonment of the project of fundamental ontology, and transcendental thinking, serves to undermine Marion’s claim that Being plays the role of ultimate horizon in Heidegger’s work. For as we have seen, this way of framing the issue of phenomenal manifestation misses the significance of the Kerhe, and the work that follows in its wake. Ultimately, this part of Marion’s claim is untenable, as it is not supported by

Heidegger’s texts.

This brings us to the second part of Marion’s claim, i.e., that Ereignis is ontological, that it is another name for Being. As was the case with the first part of Marion’s claim, Heidegger’s work fails to provide justification for it. But whereas the first part of Marion’s claim could find some justification in Heidegger’s early work, Ereignis is a later notion, one formulated after the abandonment of fundamental ontology, mobilized in the attempt to overturn the priority of the horizon of Being. In order to demonstrate this, one need only mention the larger context of

Heidegger’s remarks about the “name of Being” quoted above.143 Heidegger makes these remarks in the context of a larger discussion concerning Ereignis and the es gibt. He is pointing out the way in which Ereignis is irreducible to Being and resists any sort of metaphysical determination. Consequently, the claim that Ereignis is ontological is unfounded.

This demonstrates that Marion cannot hold on to the above mentioned claim, as it is essentially baseless. But perhaps more importantly, it now becomes apparent that he cannot intelligibly maintain that Heidegger understands the phenomenality of phenomena in terms of the horizon of Being, all the while subordinating the givenness of phenomena to Ereignis. For with the introduction of the figure of Ereignis we pass beyond metaphysics, Being, and ontological

143 SLT 60.

23 inquiry. In the end, Marion will be forced to give up on at least one aspect of this claim, and it is obvious which one of these he will have to give up, namely, the idea that Heidegger limits the apparition of phenomena to the horizon of Being. This has a twofold significance for the present investigation. First, it allows us to problematize Marion’s suggestion that recognizing the limits of the horizons of objectness and Being leads to the notion of a givenness freed from all horizons, strictures, and conditions. For there is another option: to think givenness in terms of

Ereignis. As is clear from what has come before, Marion never really considered this option.

While he may have appeared to, the foregoing considerations have shown that Marion’s discussion missed the subtlety of Heidegger’s thinking on Ereignis. In order to block

Heidegger’s preferred approach to givenness, Marion must provide another argument, one that does not tie Ereignis to Being. In the absence of such an argument, Marion fails to provide us with a compelling case for accepting his account. Second, it allows Ereignis to show up as a way of understanding givenness unencumbered by the problems of both objectness and Being, that is, it allow the Ereignis to seem like a plausible way of accounting for givenness.

Going forward, our claim is as follows: With the introduction of the Ereignis, Heidegger provides us with a way of accounting for the givenness of phenomena that does not rely on ontological or metaphysical notions. So far, our discussion of Ereignis has been framed in terms of Marion’s critique of Heidegger’s later texts. We’ve said very little about Heidegger’s own understanding of Ereignis, and how it figures into his later thinking. Ereignis has also remained largely undefined up until this point—although as we shall see, definition talk is radically out of place here. In order to remedy this situation, and get a handle on Ereignis, the focus of the investigation must now shift to Heidegger’s texts. As Marion devoted his energies to

Heidegger’s discussion of Ereignis in “Time and Being,” we will do the same. However, at

24 times, we will supplement our discussion of “Time and Being” with references to various middle and late period works. This will allow us to fill in some of the gaps, and get clearer, concerning the matters at stake in Heidegger’s thinking.

§3 Es Gibt and the Givenness of Being and Time

Our engagement with Marion revealed that one of Heidegger’s aims in “Time and Being” is to come to terms with the es gibt. In the previous chapter, we held back the question concerning the origin of this formulation, the way in which the es gibt took root in Heidegger’s thinking. We have reached the point in our study where we can now raise the question: How does Heidegger arrive at the es gibt? Put simply, Heidegger arrives at the es gibt in the course of an “attempt to think Being without regard to its being grounded in terms of beings”.144 Phrased somewhat differently, Heidegger arrives at the es gibt when he begins to think Being without appeals to the candidates held out by the metaphysical tradition, e.g., God, Spirit, or mind: in short, any entity whatsoever. According to Heidegger, when we begin thinking along these lines, we will notice that “from the dawn of Western-European thinking until today, Being means the same as presencing”.145 Heidegger goes on to explain that this determination of Being is brought about by time, and more precisely, the figure of the present, as distinguished from the past and the future.146 As he continues in his questioning, Heidegger begins to wonder what we can say about Being and time, for neither strictly speaking is. He writes, “We say of beings: they are.

With regard to the matter ‘Being’ and with regard to the matter ‘time,’ we remain cautious. We do not say: Being is, time is, but rather: there is Being [es gibt Sein] and there is time [es gibt

Zeit]”.147 In availing himself of this idiomatic expression, Heidegger avoids the sort of

144 TB 2. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid. 147 Ibid., 5.

25 ontological language that would cast Being and time as beings, for to say “es gibt Sein” and “es gibt Zeit” is to say “it gives Being” and “it gives time”. Inquiring into the It [Es]—he starts to capitalize the It here—that gives, Heidegger explains that bringing this enigma into view requires an account of “what is given in the ‘It gives’”.148 The goal here is to clarify “how that giving is to be determined which, as a relation, first holds the two toward each other,” by way of a meditation on the givenness of Being and time.149

According to Heidegger, we can succeed in this goal by “paying heed to the wealth of the transformation of what, indeterminately enough, is called Being”.150 What Heidegger has in mind is the following: We catch a glimpse of the givenness of Being, and consequently, the It that gives Being, when we reflect on the ways in which Being historically unfolds, that is, when we take stock of how what we call “Being” answers to the presencing of phenomena. Heidegger provides us with a number of examples culled from the great philosophical works. The list, however, is not exhaustive. He explains that Being unfolds historically “as the hen, the unifying unique One, as the logos, the gathering that preserves the All, as idea, ousia, energeia, substantia, actualitas, perceptio, monad, as objectivity, as the being posited of self-positing in the sense of the will of reason, of love, of the spirit, of power, as the will to will to will in the eternal recurrence of the same”.151 The philosophical tradition’s respective words for Being speak to the presencing of that which comes to presence—historical determinations of Being as modifications of presence. While these determinations of Being comprise something like a

“history of Being,” we need to be careful not to take “history” in the ordinary sense of the term,

148 Ibid. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., 6. 151 Ibid., 7.

26 for “Being does not have a history in the way in which a city or a people have their history”.152

Heidegger explains that “what is history-like in the history of Being is obviously determined by the way in which Being takes place and this alone”.153 In other words, Being owes its historicity to the It that gives; Being “takes place” in and through the It.154

One of the ways in which Heidegger understands these transmutations of Being is in terms of a call and response structure.155 Traditionally conceived, ontological inquiry consists of an a priori or a posteriori investigation into the nature of beings, bringing various conceptual resources to bear on the phenomena under consideration, in an attempt to discover those structures determinative of how things are. By transposing Being into a historical key, however,

Heidegger is implicitly challenging the idea that philosophers discover, or turn up, anything when they raise ontological questions. This is not to suggest that philosophers are in the business of creation, that ontological structures are like works of art—products of the imagination.

Heidegger isn’t satisfied with either option; he is trying to think the nature of ontological inquiry apart from either creation or discovery. The structure of call and response provides him with a way of doing this.

Take Plato, for example: using the structure of call and response, Heidegger interprets

Plato’s ontological doctrine as “words of Being”.156 When Plato puts forward idea as a guide for thinking the Being of beings, Heidegger argues, he is neither advancing this doctrine arbitrarily nor is he doing so out of some sort of conceptual necessity; instead, he is responding to the demand that is made of him by the Es gibt.157 In other words, the network of processes, things,

152 Ibid., 8. 153 Ibid. 154 Ibid. 155 Ibid., 9. 156 Ibid. 157 Ibid.

27 and relations that comprise Plato’s world call out to him; inviting a response, they elicit from him a discourse on forms. Through this interplay, the world begins to show up in accordance with this doctrine, and the way things are in agreement with an unchanging realm of ideas. When framed in this way, it might seem as if the Es gibt determines the nature of the reply, dictating the terms of the response. But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. First, the Es gibt does not supply human beings with a ready interpretation, word, or language for getting at the presencing of Being. Second, we lack any criterion for determining the adequacy of our descriptions of

Being’s ascent to presence; all correspondence talk, or insistence on correct representation, misses the point Heidegger is trying to make. He insists that “we simply have to acknowledge the fact that a philosophy is the way it is. It is not our business to prefer one to the other, as can be the case with regard to various Weltanschauungen”.158 The goal here is to think Being as it is given, and the history of metaphysics as it unfolds historically, without adjudicating the claims made by philosophers. In this way, we move one step closer to bringing the Es gibt in to view; sidestepping the question concerning the truth of ontological schemes, we position ourselves so as to catch sight of the ways in which these systems get off the ground and take root in the world.

But the Es gibt proves elusive; transfixed by the radiance of that which comes to presence, we lose sight of what is decisive—the giving by which what is shines forth into the open. This is nothing new. Heidegger remarks, “In the beginning of Western thinking, Being is thought, but not the ‘It gives’ as such”.159 Receding into the background, the Es gibt yields to

Being; accentuating the splendor of presence’s presencing, the Es gibt allows Being in its givenness to accede to visibility.160 Whereas Being is near synonymous with presence, and the

158 Heidegger, Martin. “The End of Philosophy,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 56; TEP hereafter. 159 TB 8. 160 Ibid.

28 presencing of beings, the Es gibt is best understood in terms of “withdrawal,” a receding or concealing that comes closest to pure absence161 Heidegger makes this point when he explains that the Es gibt is unthinkable apart from the way in which it “withdraws in favor of the gift which It gives”.162 From what has come before, we can see that the gift in question here is Being, and that Being’s givenness takes place concomitantly with a “withdrawal” of the Es gibt.163 The presencing of Being is inseparable from the absencing of the Es gibt.

Heidegger’s reflections on the nature of time yield similar results, with the givenness of time concealing an It that gives.164 He argues that “the giving that gives time is determined by denying and withholding”.165 Denying the primacy of the now, and withholding the assimilation of past, present, and future into some sort of undifferentiated unity, the givenness of time shows itself as a “mutual-self extending,” an opening up of openness itself.166 In this way, Heidegger rejects the traditional interpretation of time, namely, the one handed down by Aristotle, which conceives of time as something “calculable,” a mere “succession in the sequence of nows”.167

We err, Heidegger claims, insofar as we search out time in the “watch,” “the dial,” or the

“modern technological chronometer”.168 Reckoning with time, he insists, requires us to “look carefully at that which shows itself to us as time”—past, present, and future, approaching and reaching us in their “mutual-self extending”.169 In some sense anterior to space, time names that opening in which space takes place.170 As Heidegger argues, “the self-extending, the opening up,

161 Ibid. 162 Ibid. 163 Ibid. 164 Ibid., 16. 165 Ibid. 166 Ibid. 167 Ibid., 11. 168 Ibid. 169 Ibid. 170 Ibid., 14.

29 of future, past and present is itself prespatial; only thus can it make room, that is provide space”.171 Notice that, in all of this, the Es gibt and its givenness are nowhere to be found. In giving time, the It withdraws, makes itself absent so as to bring about the presencing of time in its diverse modalities. Were the It not to deny itself, time would fold in and collapse under the weight of the leveling pressure of the Same. In other words, the denying and withholding constitutive of that giving which gives time ensures temporal heterogeneity, the tripartite structure: past, present, and future. The presencing of time is inseparable from the absencing of the Es gibt.

§4 Es Gibt as Ereignis

Turning up a concealedness at work in the giving of the gift, Heidegger’s analysis of

Being and time reveals the gesticulations of the withdrawn Es. Recall that the point of investigating Being and time was to bring the Es into view, to supply the Es with a determination so as to lay bare that giving in which Being and time come to presence. The very absence of the

Es, however, would seem to preclude our even speaking of it, not to mention supplying it with something like a rigorous formulation. And yet, all of this has not been for naught; inquiring into the Es we caught a glimpse of the presencing of Being and time. Construing this making manifest of Being and time as a kind of “delivering over into what is their own,” Heidegger maintains that “what lets the two matters belong together, what brings the two into their own and, even more, maintains and holds them in their belonging together—the way the two matters stand, the matter at stake—is Appropriation [das Ereignis]”.172 Punning on the German word for

‘own’ [eigen], Heidegger’s use of the term ‘Ereignis’ gets at the event in which Being and time

171 Ibid. 172 Ibid., 19.

30 come to presence in their ownmostness.173 174 Etymologically, ‘Ereignis’ is derived from

‘eräugen,’ which signifies a “bringing something out into view,” a placing or displaying before the eyes [Augen].175 While Stambaugh’s translation of ‘Ereignis’ as ‘Appropriation’ captures the sense of “belonging” Heidegger wishes to convey, it covers over the sense of “unconcealedness” he believes is harbored within this ordinary German term. Bringing together ‘eigen’ and

‘eräugen’ in ‘Ereignis,’ Heidegger argues that the Es is best understood as a singular happening, an event in which Being and time are made manifest in accordance with what is ownmost to each. In the case of Being, this is presence as the long history of transmutations of what it means to be. In the case of time, this is temporality as the self-extending opening into the cleared open.

As a result of the foregoing considerations, we can see that Ereignis is unthematizable, unreachable by means of an intentional act. Heidegger explains that “we can never place

[Ereignis] in front us, neither as something opposite us nor as something all-encompassing”.176

The conceptual is out of place where Ereignis is concerned, in no small part because Ereignis lacks the ontological weight associated with beings and objects.177 Heidegger goes to great lengths in this lecture to establish this point, continually reminding us that Ereignis “neither is, nor is [Ereignis] there”.178 If we were to take stock of the furniture of the world, Ereignis would not be among our inventory. Importantly, this is not to suggest that Ereignis is transcendent, lying in some sense outside the world. For how could Ereignis be transcendent? It has no ontological status. Unthinkable apart from the interplay of presence and absence that gives Being

173 Importantly, ‘eigen’ isn’t etymologically related to ‘Ereignis,’ and the phonetic similarity between the two words is a historical accident. It’s Heidegger’s hope, that one will hear ‘eigen’ in his use of the otherwise common term ‘Ereignis’. 174 Heidegger, Martin. The Event, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), p. 156; TE hereafter. 175 Ibid. 176 TB 23. 177 Ibid., 20. 178 Ibid., 24.

31 and time, Ereignis points to the relationality which marks the presencing of phenomena.179

The conceptual’s inability to seize on Ereignis, and to bring that which withdrawals in the withdrawal to presence, signals the failure of representation, and fact-stating discourse more generally.180 Heidegger continually reminds us that that “thinking which represents and gives account” in no way corresponds to Ereignis.181 In the end, all we can really say is “Ereignis ereignet,” i.e., Ereignis occurs, happens, or takes place.182 Of this saying, Heidegger explains that it says “the Same in terms of the Same about the Same”.183 An example of what Heidegger will later dub “tautological thinking,” this saying “says nothing” so long as we “hear a mere sentence in what was said, and expose that sentence to the cross-examination of logic”.184 The difficulty is largely a linguistic one, and has to do with the form of our language, the subject- predicate structure of declarative statements.185 To say “the Same in terms of the Same about the

Same,” is an attempt to bring to language that which can never occupy the position of grammatical subject, and consequently, resists all predication.186 Meditating on the ereignet of the Ereignis, Heidegger fixes his thinking on the eventfulness of Being and time in their givenness; marking the singularity of this happening by means of an invocation of “the Same,” he attempts to stay with the uniqueness of this occurrence by never straying from the matter at hand. While perhaps torturous, Heidegger’s prose masterfully avoids the kinds of constructions that would misleadingly cast Ereignis as some sort of concept.

179 Ibid., 19. 180 Ibid., 23. 181 Ibid. 182 Ibid., 24. 183 Ibid. 184 Ibid. 185 Ibid., 20. 186 Ibid., 24.

32

Insofar as Heidegger gives voice to that to which no concept can correspond, it would be a mistake to saddle Ereignis with conceptual determinations such as “transcendent” and

“transcendental”. To do so would be to implicate Heidegger in the very discourse he is trying to extricate himself from and, thereby, to miss the radicality of his thought. In making an appeal to

Ereignis, Heidegger is attempting to forego our usual ways of construing the world—rendering it intelligible by positing an outside that sets the bounds of sense and acts as an a priori condition for the manifestation of that which in any way is. By the time Heidegger hits on Ereignis, he is no longer laboring in the shadow of Kant, no longer in the thrall of “conditions for the possibility of x” talk. But if Ereignis isn’t some sort of Kantian transcendental condition, then in what way are we to take his talk of a “withdrawal”? To speak in this way would seem to suggest that presencing requires a withdrawal, that the very phenomenality of phenomena is brought about by a more primordial receding that in one way or another prepares a place and makes room for phenomena in their arising. When framed in this way, Heidegger is doubtless another transcendental philosopher carrying on the Kantian legacy. The problem, however, with this line of questioning, is that it focuses almost exclusively on one element in the relation, withdrawal, at the expense of the other, presence. Consequently, it construes this relation asymmetrically, with dependence running in only one direction, when in truth, the relation is symmetrical, with each element acting on and mutually affecting the other. Accordingly, neither element in the relation is more originary than the other; they are both equiprimordial, arising together through their interplay. In this way, Heidegger skirts the problem of transcendental philosophy by positing nothing that conditions but is itself unconditioned. So, while Ereignis ultimately is not a Kantian transcendental and does not serve as a condition for the possibility of anything, this shouldn’t be taken to mean that with the introduction of Ereignis Heidegger abandons the language of

33 conditions. Instead, he deepens it, suggesting that when thought moves in this direction, “we have left behind us the presumption of all unconditionedness”.187

What Heidegger seems to be getting at here is the reciprocal relation between presence and absence, the way in which the two mutually-affect and co-determine each another. An example may be helpful here, one in which the interplay of presence and absence is on full display. In the Middle Ages, phenomena came to presence as creatures of God.188 In order for phenomena to show up in this way, something must withdraw, recede, and conceal itself, namely, the Greek experience of Being.189 Conversely, in order for this Greek experience to recede into the background, another way of experiencing the world must present itself, displacing these older ways of experiencing the world, and allowing for phenomena to begin to show up in a different way, in this case, as God’s creation. What this example highlights is the interdependence of presence and absence: presence’s dependence on a withdrawal and absence’s dependence on an emerging. Ereignis points to this relation. To think Ereignis, and consequently to take seriously the belonging together of the concealed and the unconcealed, that which presences and that which makes room for that which presences, is to locate Ereignis in the world.

Doing so involves situating this reciprocal relation amidst phenomena, in the thick of things, so to speak.

§5 Philosophy and Thinking

At this point, a worry begins to set in, one that Heidegger is no doubt acutely aware of, namely, that he has shirked his philosophical responsibilities, abandoning conceptual rigor in

187 Heidegger, Martin. “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 2013), p. 179; TT hereafter. 188 Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 2013), p. 74: OWA hereafter. 189 Ibid., 41.

34 favor of some sort of mysticism. It is one thing to challenge the preeminence of representational thinking, pointing out its deficiencies and limitations. A number of highly regarded and well respected philosophers have made this move: Wittgenstein, Derrida and Rorty, just to name a few. It is another to challenge reason, grounds, and our usual forms of justification, insisting that these notions are out of place where one’s own work is concerned. This is Heidegger’s cardinal sin against philosophy, the cause of our worry sketched above. Instead of trying to defend against, or even to ease our concerns, Heidegger bites the bullet and insists that he is no longer doing philosophy. But if he is no longer doing philosophy, what exactly is he doing? From what has come before, his answer shouldn’t be a surprise: Heidegger insists that he is “thinking”.

While not all that surprising, Heidegger’s claim is jarring nonetheless. For a long time, we have equated philosophy with thinking, or if not equated, at least believed that the two belong together in some sort of real and significant sense. Heidegger’s radical suggestion is that the two can come apart, with philosophy itself being conceived as a danger which continually threatens thinking190. Now, in order to properly unpack Heidegger’s claim here, we must necessarily shift the focus from “Time and Being,” to “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”. These two lectures largely cover the same ground; however, their perspectives are different; they treat the same topics from different vantage points. Consequently, there are some points that

Heidegger merely hints at or that, for the most part, remain implicit in “Time and Being,” that he makes explicit in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”. The nature of thought, or at least what Heidegger means by thinking, is such a point. Accordingly, the focus of our investigation will now shift to this lecture in an attempt to get clear about the way in which

Heidegger construes thinking and how he distinguishes it from philosophy. Clarifying

190 Heidegger, Martin. “The Thinker as Poet,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 2013), p. 8; TTAP hereafter.

35

Heidegger’s remarks on thinking serves a twofold purpose. First, it puts us in a position to appreciate how it is that Ereignis falls outside the scope of metaphysics. And second, it lays the groundwork for our account of givenness in terms of Ereignis.

The first thing to bear in mind is that Heidegger is working with a very narrow, and yet very broad, conception of what philosophy is. According to Heidegger, “philosophy is metaphysics”.191 On the one hand, Heidegger’s conception of philosophy is extremely narrow, for it excludes subjects like ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics: in short, almost all the disciplines we traditionally regard as philosophical. But on the other hand, his conception is extremely broad, for to construe philosophy as metaphysics is to regard anything as philosophical, insofar as it makes claims about that which in any way is. This follows from

Heidegger’s insistence that metaphysics designates any attempt to make claims about “beings as being in the manner of representational thinking which gives reasons”192 Given this definition of metaphysics, the empirical sciences count as philosophical, not to mention ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics. This brings us to the second thing we need to be mindful of, namely that

Heidegger’s move from philosophy to thinking signals an abandonment of two traditionally very important language games. First, the game of giving and asking for reasons (to borrow

Brandom’s terminology), and second, the game of alethic evaluation, i.e., the game of evaluating the truth or falsity of a given claim.

With these preliminaries in place, let us move to the letter of Heidegger’s text. Heidegger begins this lecture with the bold suggestion that “philosophy in the present age has entered its final stage”.193 Importantly, when he speaks of the “end of philosophy,” he doesn’t mean “a mere

191 TEP 55. 192 Ibid., 56. 193 Ibid., 55.

36 stopping”.194 Rather, his use of “end of philosophy” talk is intended to convey the “completion of metaphysics,” or the all-pervasiveness of “Western European thinking,” the development of a

“scientific-technological world,” and the “social order proper to this world”.195 Heidegger explains that with the emergence of this world, “representational-calculative thinking becomes dominant,” and beings become subjected to the benchmark of “efficiency,” evaluated “in terms of the effect which their application brings about within the progress of research”.196 With the pervasiveness of this mindset, and the increasing role it has come to play in daily life, Heidegger wonders if thought is somehow exhausted with the completion of metaphysics, attaining its last possibility in scientific-technological theorizing.197 He asks, “but is the end of philosophy in the sense of its evolving into the sciences also already the complete actualization of all the possibilities in which the thinking of philosophy was posited? Or is there a first possibility for thinking apart from the last possibility which we characterized?”.198 No doubt, the question seems strange, for in our time, thinking is construed along representational lines, understood to involve calculation, and thought to achieve its most perfect form in its service to the sciences.

Heidegger, however, pursues the question all the same, insisting that we stay with it and entertain the notion of a thinking inaccessible to philosophy, one that it can neither experience nor adopt.199

Importantly—and Heidegger makes this point explicit—thinking is in some sense inseparable from philosophy, finding itself “moved to review the whole history of philosophy,” even “forced to think the historicity of that which grants a possible history to philosophy”.200

194 Ibid., 56. 195 Ibid., 59. 196 Ibid., 58. 197 Ibid., 59. 198 Ibid. 199 Ibid. 200 Ibid., 60.

37

How are we to make sense of a thinking that is neither philosophical nor scientific in its orientation, and yet has as its task a rigorous engagement with philosophy in all its historical manifestations, not to mention the demand to think historically about the way in which the history of philosophy unfolds? Heidegger himself gives us a clue when he notes that the notion of thought he is attempting to develop “falls short of the greatness of the philosophers;” it is “less than philosophy”.201 What Heidegger seems to be getting at here is the way in which thinking eschews the declarative mode, the speculative pronouncements we have come to expect from philosophy.202 He explains that “the thinking in question remains slight because its task is only a preparatory, not of a founding character”.203 In other words, thinking isn’t concerned with providing answers to outstanding metaphysical questions, doesn’t bother with the foundations of the world, and provides us with precious little in the way of knowledge.

But what then is thinking? According to Heidegger, thinking is thanking, a taking to heart and being appreciative of what lies before us, what calls and claims us, i.e., the world of things and relations.204 Heidegger is here moving away from the philosophical mainstream which conceives of thought as a grasping, an apprehending, or even a penetrating, of the real.205 These terms harbor within themselves a certain violence, a sense of domination and control Heidegger is eager to leave behind. In terms of our discussion thus far, the notion of thought Heidegger is keen on developing, and putting to use, stays with phenomena and engages them in their eventfulness, or the way in which they presence and absence and are caught up in metaphysical systems. This involves resisting the temptation to pass judgement on these systems, and instead,

201 Ibid. 202 Ibid. 203 Ibid. 204 Heidegger, Martin. What is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), p. 143; WCT hereafter. 205 Ibid., 211.

38 taking them as they are given in order to discern how they get off the ground in the first place.

Heidegger explains that the perspective he is after is one in which “the tradition will open up to us only if we bring into view what it brings to us”.206 Bearing in mind our previous discussion of the history of Being, the cultivation of a thankful attitude toward the philosophical tradition is a way of sidestepping metaphysical disputes, and positions Heidegger in such a way as to catch sight of things configuring themselves in accordance with ontological doctrine. This requires a thinking that simply gives thanks to the various ways in which the world shows up.

§6 Thinking and Metaphor

Thinking, then, must make use of a non-propositional language, a language free of cognitive content, if it is not to slip back into the discursive mode. In this way, it is subject to neither alethic evaluation, nor the game of giving and asking for reasons. Not surprisingly,

Heidegger’s texts are full of this kind of language. He continually reminds us to “pay attention to the path of thought rather than to its content”.207 Coming to grips with his work, then, requires us to sometimes follow thoughts’ movement, rather than brood over a “series of propositions”.208

His language in these later texts is perhaps best understood by what the philosopher Donald

Davidson calls “metaphor,” the “imaginative employment of words and sentences” belonging

“exclusively to the domain of use”.209 Taking aim at the view that “associated with a metaphor is a definite cognitive content that its author wished to convey and that the interpreter must grasp if he is to get the message,” Davidson argues that metaphors show more than they say.210 Strictly

206 Heidegger, Martin. The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 45; PR hereafter. 207 Heidegger, Martin. “The Principle of Identity,” in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 23; TPI hereafter. 208 TB 2. 209 Davidson, Donald. “What Metaphors Mean,” in Inquires into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 247; WMM hereafter. 210 Ibid., 262.

39 speaking, a metaphor “doesn’t say anything beyond its literal meaning”.211 Old words cast in an unfamiliar light, metaphors help us “notice aspects of things we did not notice before”.212 In most cases, what a metaphor helps us “see is not… propositional in character”.213 If it were, we would be able to state it in “fairly plain words”.214 Our inability to render metaphor in straightforward prose language leads Davidson to argue that the “attempt to give literal expression to the content of the metaphor is simply misguided”.215 In being struck by a metaphor, we don’t come to the “recognition of some truth or fact,” but rather, arrive at a new way of seeing the world.216 Instead of conveying cognitive content, metaphors induce vision by showing what can not strictly speaking be said. Heidegger clearly intends for some of his words to play this role, as is evidenced by his “hint” for how to follow his thought: “the point is not to listen to a series of propositions but rather to follow the movement of showing”.217 By making use of this sort of language in his discussion of Being and time in their eventfulness, Heidegger casts metaphysical systems, and the world they have been used to explain, in a new light, making salient various features of both these systems and the world that we never saw, with the hope that we will begin to lose faith in the sorts of explanations mentioned above.

The use of metaphor to help us overcome our old beliefs is nothing new, as Richard

Rorty reminds us: “metaphor is an essential instrument in the process of reweaving our beliefs and desires; without it, there would be no such thing as a scientific revolution or cultural breakthrough”.218 Sometimes metaphors are required in order to help us change our perspective,

211 Ibid., 246. 212 Ibid., 261. 213 Ibid., 263. 214 Ibid. 215 Ibid., 262. 216 Ibid. 217 TB 2. 218 Rorty, Richard. “Non-reductive Physicalism,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 124; NRP hereafter.

40 reorient ourselves, and get a handle on the world. When we find that our current linguistic forms are no longer working, the invention of new and unusual forms is required. Heidegger’s use of new and unusual language is not a copout or an indication of his failure to live up to his intellectual responsibilities; his new and unusual use of language is in fact the same method used by the revolutionary poet or scientist, who introduce new metaphors in order to change our focus.219

Heidegger would no doubt protest this characterization of his thought. He takes great pains in a number of late lectures to distinguish his thinking from metaphor and to block metaphorical readings of his thought. Heidegger’s uneasiness at the very suggestion of these sorts of interpretations is spurred by his understanding of metaphor. Going back to the Greek meaning of the term, Heidegger explains that metaphor is a “transposing,” or a “carrying-over,” the transformation of a sensible content into a supersensible one, grasped by some sort of non- sensible faculty of the mind.220 Consequently, Heidegger dismisses metaphor as metaphysical, arguing that “the metaphorical only exists within metaphysics,” as the former relies on the latter’s distinction between the sensible and the supersensible.221 From Heidegger’s perspective, it would then make little to no sense to appeal to metaphorical language in the attempt to overcome metaphysics, as this language is complicit in the very thing he is trying to displace.

But be that as it may, our characterization of Heidegger’s language as metaphorical doesn’t read metaphysics back into his thought at the level of language, for the notion of metaphor we appealed to challenges the traditional view of metaphor he has in mind. To consign metaphors to the “domain of use” is to reject the idea that they convey anything; instead they show something,

219 Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 12; CIS hereafter. 220 PR 48. 221 Ibid.

41 and this clearly seems to be what Heidegger is after, a language that shows, but strictly speaking, says nothing.

But what exactly does Heidegger’s language show? And how does this thinking which thanks help us to see? The answer to these questions is to be sought in Ereignis, in the relationality Heidegger stumbles upon when he begins to consider the es gibt and to wrestle with

Being and time in their givenness. Above, we saw Heidegger distancing himself from that thinking which attempts to grasp reality by way of representing the world in its truth, apprehending the eternal and the everlasting with the aid of reason and the understanding. In eschewing this way of thinking, Heidegger aims to move away from metaphysics and to set aside questions concerning the constant and the unalterable, the really real, and that which truly is.

Adopting a thankful attitude toward philosophy, one in which the historicity of the tradition comes into focus, Heidegger attempts to reckon with the world in all its sensuousness and to think the world apart from any and all limiting principles, a priori conditions, or transcendental signifieds. Letting the unconditioned wither away, Heidegger makes a clean break with Kant,

Kantianism, and any other philosophy that would seek to guarantee sense by way of an appeal to a structural outside. In this way, Heidegger can be seen as rejecting what Davidson calls the

“dualism of scheme and content,” the idea that there is a meaningful distinction to be made between an “organizing system and something waiting to be organized”222. It’s an adherence to this dualism, Rorty argues, that “permits the idea that we can engage in two distinct sorts of activity: empirical inquiry into causal conditions of actuality and philosophical inquiry into transcendental conditions of possibility”.223

222 Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquires into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 189; OTVICS hereafter. 223 Rorty, Richard. “Derrida and the Philosophical Tradition,” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 331; DPT hereafter.

42

Foreswearing transcendental conditions, Heidegger moves in the direction of actual ones.

Owning up to the radical finitude of all things, Heidegger imagines a world in which the sensuous arises through relation; utterly conditioned, the sensuous comes to presence through the mediation at work in the interplay of presence and absence. Were Heidegger to make this point in propositional language, he would no doubt be accused of slipping back into metaphysics, of describing the world as it is in itself. Heidegger’s use of metaphor to show us a world thoroughly mediated by sensuous relations is an attempt to avoid furnishing Being with another name and to avoid making assertions about the way things are. Whereas the majority of working philosophers make use of the declarative mode to lay bare fundamental truths, Heidegger makes use of the poetic resources harbored within a language in order to draw out features of the world that are covered over by metaphysical speculation. Having no ontological status in and of themselves, these features bear Being, suffer and sustain metaphysical speculation long enough for the world to show up as having a way it is.

§7 Conclusion

In the next chapter, we will take up this question of world in Heidegger, with an eye toward further clarifying the relation between Ereignis and givenness. Remember, our goal is to demonstrate, contra Marion, the plausibility of conceiving givenness in terms of Ereignis.

Marion’s eagerness to move beyond Heidegger and ensnare him within the horizon of Being blinded him to the possibility of this approach. Heidegger’s insistence on the worldliness of

Ereignis, and the givenness of things, requires a detailed account of his later conception of the phenomena of world. Before we tread this ground, however, we need to provide an argument against Marion, namely, one which demonstrates the inadequacy of his treatment of givenness.

In this way, the advantages of following Heidegger will be made plain.

43

3 Marion, Heidegger, and Givenness

§1 Introduction

In the previous chapter, I faulted Marion for his unwillingness to take the “turn” in

Heidegger’s thought seriously, arguing that a close reading of the texts in which the Ereignis is developed undermines the claim that this is an ontological notion that reinscribes phenomena within the horizon of Being. As I mentioned above, Marion’s ontological reading of the Ereignis is motivated by his desire for a “pure givenness,” a givenness freed from any and all horizon, stricture, or condition. Reading the Ereignis as he does, Marion makes it seem as if Heidegger unduly subordinates phenomena, requiring that their appearance take place in accordance with the demands of Being. Far from signaling a breakthrough, Marion argues, Heidegger’s later thinking marks a retreat, a move away from the very problematic that should have been his theme. While he goes further than Husserl in pursuing the question of givenness, Marion claims,

Heidegger too obscures the consequences of his investigation.

§2 Unconditional Givenness

As we’ve seen, this reading is inadequate; finding little support in the texts, it requires us to turn a blind eye to the later Heidegger’s vehemently anti-metaphysical streak. Confusing

Ereignis with Being, Marion covers over the promise of Heidegger’s later thought. In what follows, the goal will be to motivate a Heideggerian account of givenness, one no longer encumbered by the dictates of metaphysics. Importantly, this is not the same as an account of givenness without subordination—strictures or conditions that must be in place for phenomena to show up. To dispense with such strictures is to relapse into metaphysics. While one might be

44 tempted to get along without conditions of apparition, such a move should be avoided, as one risks treating givenness as an unconditioned—a sin Marion no doubt commits. A mainstay of metaphysical discourse, the unconditioned plays a pivotal role in the work of figures as disparate as Plato, Kant, and the early Wittgenstein. The difficulties associated with the unconditioned are fairly well known, and for our purposes here, it is enough to note that appeals to the unconditioned open one up to the charge of plugging explanatory gaps with unexplained explainers.

Taking givenness to be first in the order of explanation, this approach ignores the constitutive role of context in our understanding of phenomena. Consequently, trying to temper metaphysical violence by invoking an unconditioned is a dead end, misguided insofar as it leads one to believe that phenomena are intelligible apart from any and all context. Despite these difficulties, the motivations underlying the view are understandable enough, that is, we can see why one might want to relax, and ultimately do away with, conditions of apparition.

Metaphysics, by tethering phenomena to forms, categories, and causes, strips things of their autonomy. So thoroughly determined in this way, phenomena are little more than props meant to stabilize, rather than inform, the metaphysical edifice. This is why phenomenology relies on the power of reduction, attempting to right this wrong by a “clearing away of the obstacles to manifestation”.224 While perhaps laudable, this can be pushed too far, with one metaphysical extreme being exchanged for another.

Setting the question of conditions aside for a moment (we shall return to it below), a bit of stage-setting is in order. Up to this point, we have largely concerned ourselves with explication. Consequently, few reasons have been given to reject Marion’s take on givenness.

224 BG 10.

45

Absent reasons, readers will have no way of judging between the views of Heidegger and

Marion, save personal preference. While pointing out the inadequacies of Marion’s reading of

Heidegger is a start, more work will need to be done to demonstrate the shortcomings of

Marion’s account. To be sure, the aim of this chapter is to build a theory of givenness out of

Heidegger’s later writings. In order to make good on this aim, however, we will need to make clear the advantages of a Heideggerian approach to the question of givenness. This will involve contrasting Heidegger’s ideas with Marion’s, teasing out the differences in their respective accounts so as to highlight the ways in which Heidegger’s thought allows us to tend to phenomena with greater care. In what follows, it will be our contention that Marion errs insofar as he traces phenomena back to a pure givenness, an unconditional appearing. To anticipate a bit, the trouble with Marion’s commitment to this last reduction is that without stricture, without anything to go on but “unconditional givenness,” we seem to be unable to make certain distinctions that are indispensable for coming to grips with phenomena in the diversity of their appearing. What Marion is missing is a robust account of the context, or better, the locus of apparition that allows us to make these fine-grained distinctions. In what follows, I will argue that the Ereignis is such a locus.

Having said a few words about where we are going, we can now return to the question of conditions, and probe in greater depth the difficulties facing an account of givenness that would like to free phenomena in their appearing. Above, we leveled an objection against attempts to do away with the conditions traditionally placed on phenomena, arguing that phenomena are unintelligible apart from their contexts. Largely epistemological, this objection raises the question of access, i.e., how we come to know, or understand, phenomena. Without context, stricture, or some other determining apparatus, it is unclear how we could ever have knowledge

46 of phenomena. Understanding would thus seem to require us to attend to phenomena in their situatedness and to attune ourselves to the relationships they forge and enter into. Conceivably, this sort of work could take many forms, with inquiries into causal, material, and societal conditions serving as examples. While we won’t get into the advantages and disadvantages of adopting a particular approach here, it is important to keep in mind that phenomena are intelligible insofar as they can be traced back to a set of determining conditions.

Admittedly, there is a way out of this objection, one that allows those intent upon freeing phenomena from any and all conditions to avoid the pitfalls we’ve identified and preserve the full-blown autonomy of things. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of the empiricists, one might suggest that phenomena are both immediate and indubitable, self-sufficient and intelligible on their face. Answering the objection by claiming for phenomena the determining power attributed to context, this strategy attempts to ward off unintelligibility by taking givenness to be originary and irrefutable, making it seem as if phenomena are capable of bestowing intelligibility upon themselves.

While perhaps more common in empiricist circles,225 this appeal to an experience that is immediate and indubitable is a move Marion also makes. In order to establish this point, it may prove useful to consider two exemplary passages. In the first passage, Marion links “pure givenness” with “immediacy,” arguing for the priority of the immediately given:

Being, appearing, effecting, or affecting become possible and thinkable only if they happen, before each and every specification of their respective venues, first as pure givenness. Every fact, every problem, and every consciousness begins with immediate givens, with the immediacy of a given. Nothing arises that is not given.226

225 Somewhat surprisingly, Marion draws out this connection: “Phenomenology agrees with empiricism in privileging recourse to the fact” (BG 119). At one point in the text, he even refers to his own view as “phenomenological empiricism” (BG 349n1). 226 BG 54

47

In the second passage, Marion characterizes the lived experience of phenomena as “indubitable,” arguing that our experience of phenomena is no more open to doubt than our experience of consciousness:

For the phenomenon does not arrive directly as an object, but first as a lived experience of consciousness. All that consciousness undergoes and lives remains immanent to it; therefore, every lived experience is identified with consciousness and becomes as indubitable to it as it is to itself.227

As these passages make clear, Marion takes the givenness of phenomena to be not only unconditioned, but immediate and indubitable as well. In this way, Marion accounts for the intelligibility of phenomena by granting them a certain self-sufficiency, an ability to set their own bounds and to determine and confirm themselves.

The problem, however, with answering the objection in this way, is twofold. First, it requires too much of phenomena. Saddling them with the impossible task of bootstrapping intelligibility, this strategy ignores the importance of mediation—the way in which embeddedness in something like a language, a culture, or a tradition shapes and forms phenomena and renders them legible, so to speak. Second, it leads to the absurd view that our experience of phenomena is beyond doubt, that our being in error is off the table because their very appearance is a form of justification. Taken together, these arguments bring us back to our earlier claim, namely, that context matters. One is reminded of Hegel’s critique of “sense- certainty” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where he critiques attempts to ground our knowledge of phenomena in the very immediacy of the given, a givenness both irrefutable and pure. Hegel’s contention is that while this might appear to be the “richest kind of knowledge… for it has not as yet omitted anything from the object, but has the object before it in its perfect entirety,” it is

227 Ibid., 125.

48 actually the poorest, and the most abstract, yielding apprehension but not comprehension.228 In order to demonstrate the poverty of “sense-certainty,” Hegel interrogates the notion of immediacy upon which it rests.229 Critiquing this notion from the inside, Hegel highlights its instability, the way in which it gives rise to its dialectical opposite230 In its attempts to cling to the pure immediacy of the given, “sense-certainty” makes use of the conceptual; invoking terms like ‘this,’ ‘here,’ and ‘now,’ consciousness becomes mediated and subject to language. Losing contact with the phenomena as they appear, consciousness thus comes to know phenomena by grasping them conceptually.231 What Hegel’s argument against “sense-certainty” reveals is that our knowledge of phenomena is thoroughly mediated. While disagreeing with Hegel on some of the particulars, a number of post-Kantian philosophers found his arguments against a pure immediacy compelling232 and launched their own attacks on attempts to erect a foundation for our knowledge of the world out of an unmediated access to the given.

Heidegger, in his own way, picks up on this. In both the early and the late works, we find a thoroughgoing critique of immediacy. As Hubert Dreyfus has pointed out in his commentary on Being and Time, the early Heidegger’s rejection of immediacy was primarily directed against

Husserl, who claimed that “the intentional content of individual transcendental consciousness was self-sufficient, intelligible, immediately and indubitably given to phenomenological reflection”.233 Turning his attention from consciousness to Dasein, Heidegger argues that our knowledge of phenomena depends on the disclosure of the world brought about by our skillful

228 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 58; PS hereafter. 229 Ibid. 230 Ibid. 231 Ibid., 59. 232 By no means an exhaustive list, one could comfortably include Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida, and Robert Brandom in this camp. 233 Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 141; BIW hereafter.

49 coping.234 In other words, the activities Dasein engages in open the world up for view, and, finding their place in meaningful human practice, phenomena are known. Mediated in this way by both our practices and our shared public world, phenomena are never immediately given, intelligible or self-sufficient on their face. While backing away from much of this language— downplaying the importance of Dasein, skillful coping, and disclosive practices—the later

Heidegger persists in his rejection of immediacy. Unsurprisingly, however, the nature of his critique undergoes a radical change. As his thought turns from Being to Ereignis, his concern is no longer to preserve the primacy of practice but, instead, to think the relationality associated with world’s coming into its own, the network of relations that crop up when things gather or assemble, giving themselves over to one another in moments of formative play. The problem with immediacy for the later Heidegger is that it fails to account for the way in which the relative constancy of things is maintained by the relationships in which they are caught up.

Returning to the main thread of the argument, we discover that Marion’s way of accounting for givenness is insufficient in that it fails to appreciate the role of context and mediation, and too quickly abandons talk of conditions. Admittedly, I’m not the first to raise these worries or to cast doubt on Marion’s treatment of conditions. But while the majority of commentators take issue with Marion’s overt use of religious terminology, accusing him of smuggling theological concepts into an otherwise secular philosophical debate235, few have pressed him on the question of conditions, challenging the intelligibility of a phenomenology without measure. In this regard, Bruce Ellis Benson stands out as a notable exception, opposing

Marion on precisely this issue. Otherwise sympathetic to Marion, lauding the phenomenologist

234 Ibid. 235 See Dominique Janicaud, “Veerings,” in Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’ and François-David Sebbah, Testing the Limit: Derrida, Henry, Levinas, and the Phenomenological Tradition.

50 for his attempts to try and “reverse the very way in which philosophy and theology have usually operated,” Benson has his suspicions where the question of conditions is concerned.236

In order to situate Benson’s critique, it may prove useful to say a few words about his reading of Marion. In “Love is a Given,” an early review of Being Given, Benson insists that

Marion is after a “givenness that transcends, frustrates and ultimately doesn’t depend upon us or our concepts,” a givenness that turns away from a philosophical logic of mastery or possession.237 Making good on such a reversal, or turning, requires us to dispense with modes of thought that would begin “with us and our categories and background and ways of thinking”.238

The question, though, as Benson points out, is not “whether he can do this, but whether it’s really a good idea”.239 Benson’s worry is that there may be “something inherently problematic with the project itself”.240 He asks, “Does Marion’s reduction to pure givenness obliterate the very conditions that make it possible to understand and appreciate that which is given?”.241

Transposing this question into a theological key, Benson asks, “does the revealed Logos break through as a ‘pure phenomenon’ without any horizon? Or does that Logos depend upon the context of, say, Old Testament prophesies for its very identity?”242 In light of our previous discussion, these questions highlight the difficulties to which Marion opens himself up by making the claim that givenness is unconditioned, immediate and indubitable.

§3 The Universality of Givenness

As compelling as they may be, these arguments and objections fall short of a full blown critique of Marion’s position. While they certainly draw our attention to the role of context, the

236 Benson, Bruce Ellis. “Love is a Given” (Christian Century, 8 Feb. 2003, 22-25), p. 25; LG hereafter. 237 Ibid., 24. 238 Ibid., 25. 239 Ibid. 240 Ibid. 241 Ibid. 242 Ibid.

51 situatedness of phenomena, and the importance of conditions, these arguments and objections fail to challenge Marion’s insistence on the universality of givenness, his claim that nothing can show up as a phenomenon that is not given. In other words, one could conceivably accept these arguments and objections and still side with Marion on his most central claim. Presumably, this is why Marion insists that:

Whoever wants to make an objection would have to—even before demonstrating the argument that led to it—point out just one phenomenon that is not given or one gift that does not appear. The equivalence of showing itself and giving itself is not an option, opinion, wish, or even a doctrine—but something theoretically compulsory, or rather, dare it be said, a given.243

Taking Marion’s remarks seriously, we will proceed to challenge this equivalence between showing itself and giving itself, demonstrating the ease with which phenomena appear despite not being given. As our investigation unfolds, we will see that this equivalence fails to hold up under scrutiny, with whole classes of phenomena acceding to visibility without being given. Admittedly, a single exception would do, as the universality of givenness depends on the absolute equivalence of showing itself and giving itself. Instead of answering Marion by pointing to just one phenomenon, however, we will point to several and will argue that certain classes of phenomena show themselves without giving themselves. Importantly, this is not to suggest that there aren’t phenomena that show themselves insofar as they give themselves, but rather to suggest that Marion is mistaken when he treats all phenomena in this way. As our analysis will reveal, there are a whole host of phenomena that are visible insofar as they are given. Before we take a look at these phenomena, however, it may prove useful to examine ones that run afoul of

Marion’s view. Proceeding in this way has a twofold advantage. First, it will allow us to clarify our differences with Marion. Second, it will allow us to develop our own account out of the

243 BG 119.

52 failure of Marion’s, putting us in a better position to argue for a Heideggerian approach to these questions.

In the interest of time, we will focus our energies on two kinds of phenomena: those of an equipmental and those of a technical sort. It will be our contention that the visibility of equipmental phenomena is inextricably bound up with their usability, whereas the visibility of technological phenomena is tied to the way in which they pervade, or impose themselves upon, our experience. Interestingly enough, there is some agreement between Heidegger and Marion on this point. Both thinkers describe equipment and technology in terms of usability and pervasiveness, respectively. They part ways, however, where the question of givenness is concerned. As we’ve seen, Marion is committed to the universality of givenness, an equivalence between giving and showing. Heidegger, by contrast, resists this move, reserving givenness for phenomena that freely offer themselves over to the world.

§4 Equipmental Phenomena

With respect to equipment, Heidegger argues that their phenomenality shows up in the form of “serviceability,” that is, when we attend to these phenomena we come to find out that our experience of them is always already organized in terms of “conduciveness, usability, and manipulability”.244 Furthermore, Heidegger explains that “equipment can genuinely show itself only in dealings cut to its own measure”.245 Taking a hammer as his example, he claims that “the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is”.246 Conversely, were we to simply stare at the hammer, inspect it theoretically, and gaze at its “outward appearance,” it would fade from

244 BT 97. 245 Ibid., 98. 246 Ibid.

53 view as a hammer.247 In the end, Heidegger’s analysis of the equipmentality of equipment ties the visibility of these phenomena to their use.

At first blush, Marion would seem to agree with the Heideggerian analysis of equipment, characterizing these phenomena as “things available for use, that is to say, things that demand that [we] take them in hand”.248 Their visibility, Marion claims, is inseparable from our being

“implicated and practically involved”249 In order to show up, their functional possibilities must be seized upon, taken up by a practitioner.250 In this way, they differ from objects of theoretical reflection.251 As Marion reminds us, these objects are always subject to an “I/me,” a consciousness “unscathed by what arrives to it with an eye only toward knowledge—knowing phenomena to be seen (heard, touched, sensed), nothing else”.252 We move from objects to equipment, Marion argues, when phenomena begin to engage us as “actors”.253

In order to illustrate this point, Marion turns to a concrete case—a computer.254 Prior to, or apart from, functional considerations, this phenomenon is little more than an “available object,” a subsistent thing that we can come to know in the theoretical attitude.255 As Marion explains, this is how a computer will show up for experts, those whose interests aren’t exactly practical.256 He writes, “an electrical engineer, indeed a technician, can, if not disassemble, transform, and reassemble it materially, at least read and understand perfectly the technical manuals, the diagrams showing wiring and microprocessors, run all the programs, indeed create

247 Ibid. 248 BG 127. 249 Ibid. 250 Ibid. 251 Ibid. 252 Ibid. 253 Ibid. 254 Ibid. 255 Ibid. 256 Ibid.

54 new ones, etc.”257 And yet, the computer shows itself only to the degree that it functions, “only once a hand, as inexperienced as it might be… turns it on, taps on a key, fiddles with the keyboard”.258 At first, progress is slow, with the user risking “all sorts of false maneuvers, including even those most harmful for the equipment”.259 This risk, however, is necessary, part of a training that “is not added on optionally and externally to the computer, but belongs to it obligatorily so that it might appear as the equipment it must be”.260 Without training, or attunement, on the part of the agent confronted with this phenomenon, the computer would never show up as a computer. Marion is quite clear that “the computer truly appears only in proportion to the training to which [we] consent”.261 Equipmental phenomena, on his account, depend on training for their phenomenality.262 Consequently, their showing up is tied to a process of orientation, a taking in hand in which their functional possibilities are put to use.263

In the end, however, Marion walks back much of this language, arguing that the usability of equipment belongs “intrinsically to its mode of givenness”.264 Breaking with the Heideggerian analysis of equipment, Marion construes usability as a kind of givenness, insisting that the possibilities afforded by these phenomena must first be given in order to be taken up.265 Giving themselves to be used, Marion claims, equipmental phenomena show up as the kinds of things that serve human ends.266 Were Marion to agree with Heidegger on the question of equipment, and tie the visibility of these phenomena to their usability, he would jeopardize the universality

257 Ibid. 258 Ibid. 259 Ibid. 260 Ibid., 128. 261 Ibid. 262 Ibid. 263 Ibid. 264 Ibid., 127. 265 Ibid. 266 Ibid.

55 of givenness and undermine his central claim. In order to avoid this outcome, he attempts to broaden the concept of givenness to accommodate usability.

But surely there is a difference between giving and taking, offering oneself over freely and being used? In his eagerness to establish the universality of givenness, Marion runs roughshod over this difference and construes the usability of equipment as a kind of donation, a holding out which serves as the precondition for any taking in hand. Unfortunately, the craftsman isn’t so kind, and more often than not, the workshop is a place of subtle violence. The craftsman doesn’t humble himself before his tools, he masters them, brings them under his control, and exploits them for his aims. What Marion seems to overlook is the possibility of a keeping-back, a withholding that ensures the giving of the gift. Intuitively enough, this keeping-back is what prevents giving from slipping into the thievery of a taking by force. Unable to hold back and resist the craftsman’s clutches, tools are wrested from the workshop and manipulated in service of the job to be done. This inability on the part of equipment to resist is something Heidegger picks up on in one of his later lectures, “The Thing”. Teasing out the differences between things267, in this case a jug, and equipment, Heidegger argues:

The jug’s jug-character consists in the poured gift of the pouring out. Even the empty jug retains its nature by virtue of the poured gift, even though the empty jug does not admit of giving out. But this nonadmission belongs to the jug and to it alone. A scythe, by contrast, or a hammer is incapable of a nonadmission of giving.268

Setting aside the question of the jug for a moment (we will return to it below), Heidegger’s remarks point to the powerlessness of equipment, the helplessness of tools in the face of the master craftsman. Insofar as the tool is “incapable of a nonadmission of giving” it can’t be said

267 The word ‘thing’ is a technical term in Heidegger’s later work, and points to the “gathering,” or “assembly,” involved in the worlds eventuation (TT 175). According to Heidegger, “things” mobilize the worlds elements, and do so through a process of giving (TT 177). 268 Ibid., 170

56 to give, for this nonadmission of giving is what distinguishes taking something from being given something. And yet, equipment are clearly seen; they are visible in their usability. We’ve hit on our first counter-example, an instance of a phenomena that violates the universality of givenness.

§5 Technological Phenomena

Turning now to Heidegger’s account of technology, and the phenomenality these phenomena exhibit, we’ll notice that Heidegger describes them as “imposing” themselves on us.269 Their phenomenality is tied to this “imposing”.270 They show up to us insofar as they pervade our experience. Intrusive, these phenomena weave themselves into the very fabric of daily life. In his “Memorial Address” commemorating the 175th birthday of the composer

Conradin Kreutzer, Heidegger argues that:

technological advancements will move faster and faster and can never be stopped. In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain, drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or other—these forces, since man has not made them, have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision.271

Importantly, human beings are not the only ones “imposed upon” by modern technology. The natural world is also affected, with the profusion of machines and an ever more refined technical know-how altering our relation to the world. One can no longer claim an agricultural practice that “leaves the crops to the discretion of the growing forces”.272 No one can claim to tend to the fields in a way that “protects them in their thriving”.273 Those days are over. In order to illustrate this point, Heidegger describes the process of extracting energy from raw materials; he writes:

269 Heidegger, Martin. “Memorial Address,” in Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 51; MA hereafter. 270 Ibid. 271 Ibid. 272 Heidegger, Martin. “Positionality,” in Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2012), p. 26; P hereafter. 273 Ibid.

57

The coal, for its part, is imposed upon, i.e., challenged forth for heat, just as the ground was for coal; this heat is already imposed upon to set in place steam, the pressure of which drives the turbines, which keep a factory industrious, which is itself imposed upon to set in place machines that produce tools through which once again machines are set to work and maintained.274

As Heidegger’s example makes clear, nothing escapes these fetters. Every link in the chain is secure. Shackled, the whole of phenomena are subject to the demands of modern technology.275

Requisitioned, they are compliant. This distinguishes technological phenomena from equipmental ones. While we manipulate equipment, technology manipulates us. Breaking in on our experience, technological phenomena drag us along.

Importantly, Marion seems to agree with Heidegger here. In his discussion of technological phenomena, Marion characterizes the television screen as a phenomenon that

“imposes itself on me”.276 He writes, “The television screen distracts (displaces) me from myself to it; it imposes itself on me, a mere surface but nevertheless more inside me than myself”.277

Going further, he explains that we “do not even have to move forward to see it or gaze at it, for it has always already been turned on in advance”.278 Pervading our experience, permeating it to such a degree, the television screen has become ubiquitous. So much so, that Marion argues against construing these screens as something external, as if it were a question of remaining

“simply outside them,” as objects kept at the “distance of intentionality and manipulation”.279

Instead, Marion insists, these screens surround and enclose us, “resulting in [our] ensnarement”.280

274 Ibid., 27. 275 Ibid., 31. 276 BG 130. 277 Ibid. 278 Ibid. 279 Ibid. 280 Ibid., 129.

58

As the analysis develops, however, Marion’s account begins to diverge from the

Heideggerian one. Technological phenomena, it turns out, are grouped under the broader category of “habitual phenomena”.281 Habitual in the sense of “our taking the time to accustom ourselves to them,” the visibility of these phenomena depends on our “finding the right attitude, the correct disposition, the hexis or the habitus that helps us resist them, behave in relation to them, use them, eventually understand them”.282 In other words, in order to see these phenomena, we must acclimate ourselves to their pervasiveness and orient ourselves to the ways in which they impose themselves on us.283 Treating this process of habituation as a form of givenness, Marion argues that technological phenomena give themselves insofar as they possess the phenomenological “center of gravity,” imposing “constraints on the I/me”.284 Again, Marion must part ways with Heidegger and construe this “center of gravity,” this orbital pull exerted on us by technological phenomena, as a kind of giving, since failure to do so would chip away at the idea of a universal givenness. Attempting to avoid giving up on his central claim, Marion identifies “imposing upon” with giving.

Are technological phenomena really given? Doesn’t the fact that they impose themselves on us rule this out? With these questions, I hope to challenge Marion’s construal, his attempts to read imposing as a kind of giving. As we’ve seen, keeping-back or withholding is a precondition for the giving of the gift. This, however, is not the only requirement. Refusal is another key ingredient here. In order to give, the gifted must be able to refuse, must be able to decline the offer. This is precisely what imposing denies. It strips the other of the ability to deny what is being offered. It would be a mistake to elide this difference between giving and imposing, for it

281 Ibid., 130. 282 Ibid. 283 Ibid., 131. 284 Ibid.

59 is this difference which allows us to distinguish something like generosity from threats of violence. Whereas imposing forecloses the possibility of givenness, it leaves open the possibility of visibility. Technological phenomena are clearly seen; they show themselves on a daily basis.

Our second counter-example, phenomena of the technological sort, thus run afoul of Marion’s thesis concerning the universality of givenness. They show themselves, but they can’t be said to give themselves, for the way in which they show up precludes their being given.

§6 Towards a Heideggerian Account Givenness

So what does a Heideggerian take on givenness look like? And how does Ereignis fit in to Heidegger’s thinking on this matter? Getting us part of the way there, the movement by means of which the es gibt effaces itself serves as a starting point, providing us with the raw materials for developing a more general account of givenness, one that extends “coming into one’s own” so as to cover a wider range of phenomena, not restricting this singular manifesting to Sein and

Zeit alone. Neither immediate nor indubitable, Heideggerian givenness is relational, in the sense that “to give” is to “assemble,” to be made determinate through a process of joining or gathering together. At odds with the mathematical application of this term, Heidegger’s use of ‘relational’ connotes “needfulness” and “belonging,” inviting us to think dependency and reliance upon as being constitutive of the given.285. Materially robust, the relationality at stake in the later

Heidegger’s thought is distinguishable from any and all formalism by virtue of the fact that what is at issue is the content, the actual conditions at work in the presencing of phenomena.

Parting ways with Kant, and leaving behind a philosophical tradition prone to armchair theorizing, Heidegger gives up on the search for “conditions of possibility” and abandons the hunt for an a priori ground that would allow one to turn up apodictic truths. As Richard Rorty

285 Heidegger, Martin. “A Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper Collins, 1982), p. 32; DL hereafter.

60 has argued, the problem with posing a question of the form “what are the conditions for the possibility of x” is that it

looks like a ‘scientific’ one, as if we knew how to debate the relative merits of alternative answers, just as we know how to debate alternative answers to questions about the conditions for the actuality of various things (e.g., political changes, quasars, psychoses). But it is not. Since that for which the conditions of possibility are sought is always everything that any previous philosopher has envisaged — the whole range of what has been discussed up to now — anybody is at liberty to identify any ingenious gimmick that he dreams up as a ‘condition of possibility’.286

A way of insulating one’s view from arguments containing empirical premises, transcendental explanations are trotted out in the attempt to preserve the autonomy of philosophy by “escaping from actuality to possibility”.287 This costly strategy comes at the expense of losing the world— an exorbitant price to pay considering the fragility of the Platonist’s ethereal wares—as the turn toward possibility evidences a striving for the ‘eternal’ and the ‘everlasting,’ a desire to be admitted into an empyrean realm untouched by time and chance. Something of a criterion of adequacy, the success of this undertaking hinges on one’s ability to attain the sort of “crystalline purity” so abhorred by the later Wittgenstein.288 Fleeing from ordinary ground-level empirical phenomena, the transcendental philosopher seeks out the suprasensuous stuff of metaphysical speculation. Offering up an explanation of the latter in terms of the former, they aim to redeem the world, to save appearances by means of a demonstration in which the sensuous is anchored firmly in the real and made available through the contextualizing power of a regress-stopping class of entities. Taken to contextualize and explain on account of their status as unconditioned, appeals to these entities raise all the old theological problems associated with the causa sui, for

286 Rorty, Richard. “Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 122-23; IDTP hereafter. 287 Rorty, Richard. “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 52 WHRL hereafter. 288 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), p. 40; PI hereafter.

61 instance, “if we are entitled to believe in them without relating them to something which conditions their existence or knowability or describability, then we have falsified our initial claim that availability requires being related by something other than the relata themselves”.289 In other words, one begins to wonder why the network of empirical relations is not enough, why it is that one must get outside the world in order to determine how things stand. Dismissing the causa sui as onto-theological, Heidegger ventures to think a world conditioned by the actual— determinateness as an organic process, an event pregnant with sense.290

Rendering this process poetically, Heidegger speaks of the “fourfold (das Geviert),” the appropriating mirror-play of earth and sky, divinities and mortals (das ereignende Spiegel-Spiel von Erde und Himmel, Göttlichen und Sterblichen); synonymous with the emergence of world, the coalescing of these four elements into an assembly takes place (ereignet) as a “gathering… bringing-into-ownership [Vereignis] of all things to themselves”.291 Borrowing much of this language from Friedrich Hölderlin, the vocabulary Heidegger employs in his quarrel with transcendental philosophy opposes itself to “atomism;” moving in the direction of a certain

“holism,” it turns away from the view according to which entities “are what they are totally independent of all relations between them”292 Dubbing the joining-together of the four a “whole relation,” Heidegger gestures towards a conception of things as nodes in a larger network, a web of signification responsible for the very determinateness of things as things.293 And yet, this

“whole” is both “tender” and “infinite;” subject to the law of appropriation (das Gesetz von

Ereignis), the union of earth and sky, divinities and mortals is celebratory, a round dance in

289 WHRL 55. 290 Heidegger, Martin. “The Onto-Theo-Logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” in Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 60; TOTLCM hereafter. 291 TT 177. 292 WHRL 58. 293 Heidegger, Martin. “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven” in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000), p. 187; HEH hereafter.

62 which the betrothed are joined by the things around which they gather.294 For this reason,

Heidegger maintains that “appropriation is the plainest and most gentle of laws [das Ereignis ist das schlichteste und sanfteste aller Gesetze];” misunderstood if identified with a “norm which hangs over our heads somewhere… an ordinance which orders and regulates a course of events,”

Ereignis is the movement in and through which thing and world are determined, with each acting as a condition on the other.295 Inextricably bound, the relation between thing and world is a reciprocal one; hence Heidegger’s description of this relation as “infinite,” and his contention that “freed of onesidedness,” the relata do not constitute separate poles, do not “stand by themselves cut-off and one-sided ”.296

Somewhat surprisingly, Heidegger aligns himself with the German Idealists, claiming that the sense of ‘infinite’ at issue in the relation between thing and world finds resonances in the

“speculative dialectic of Schelling and Hegel”.297 Thoroughgoing holists, these thinkers understood the importance of mediation (Vermittlung). Reconceptualizing the movement from premises to conclusion in categorical logic outside the bounds of formal procedure, they took a bit of terminology rooted in the “inference-facilitating role played by middle terms in

Aristotelian syllogisms” and extended it so as to capture the splitting of the self-same, the self- differentiation at work in the development of the whole298 This whole they described is made determinate by way of exclusion—relations of material incompatibility and consequence facilitating the genesis of a world that is conceptually contentful.299 While perhaps a bit alarming

294 Ibid., 188. 295 Heidegger, Martin. “The Way to Language” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper Collins, 1982), p. 128; TWL hereafter. 296 HEH 188. 297 Ibid. 298 Brandom, Robert. A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), p. 2; ST hereafter. 299 Brandom, Robert. “Holism and Idealism in Hegel’s Phenomenology,” in Tales of the Mighty Dead (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 181; HIHP hereafter.

63 on account of the theological connotations, the term ‘infinite’ is misconstrued if taken to mean

‘boundless’ or ‘never-ending’ and is used by Schelling and Hegel to refer to structures that are self-limiting, ones capable of producing their own boundaries out of the inner-differences they harbor within.300 That Heidegger had this sense of infinity in mind is evidenced by his claim that

“the infinity to be thought here is abysmally different from that which is merely without end, which, because of its uniformity, allows no growth”.301

Inviting the comparison with idealism, Heidegger’s use of the term ‘infinite’ makes it seem as if the fourfold relationality of thing and world is in some way dependent on the activities of mind. This is the case inasmuch as the problem Hegel and Schelling sought to address— bridging the divide between appearance and reality—found its solution in the unity of consciousness, the obliteration of the opposition between subject and object in the knower’s ability to grasp itself as the substance of all things.302 Writing downstream from Nietzsche,

Heidegger drops the appearance/reality distinction, and with it, the set of worries that led to the development of German idealism; consequently, he has no need to ground objectivity in subjectivity or to regard objects as re-presentations the subject posits in acts of cognition. In fact,

Heidegger goes so far as to claim that his mature work “abandons from the outset the primacy of consciousness, along with its consequence, the primacy of man”.303 As Reiner Schürmann observes:

No anthropocentrism can be constructed from ‘world and thing’. Indeed, the understanding of world here abolishes all structures of self-transparency. This concept no longer relates to ‘being-in-the-world’ as the ‘a priori necessary constitution of Dasein’. Since it is anti-transcendental in that sense, it operates without any reference to man. The anti-humanism of radical phenomenology is thus only the most striking aspect of the step

300 ST 218. 301 HEH 188. 302 PS 10. 303 Heidegger, Martin. “Seminar in Zähringen 1973,” in Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2003), p. 73; SIZ hereafter.

64

from Dasein’s being—the ‘transcendens pure and simple’—back to its decentered or ex- centric condition, the interplay of ‘worlding’ and ‘thinging’.304

Ignoring the later Heidegger’s anti-subjectivist commitments, an idealist reading of his work would have to gloss over those passages where the human, i.e., “mortal,” shows up as an element in the free play of world and thing.305 In characterizing this play as “infinite,” Heidegger means to suggest that the network of actual relations gathered-together in the arising of world out of the activity of things is self-determining; the distinction between inside and outside falling away as boundaries and limits are self-imposed.

In this way, Heidegger’s appeals to Schelling and Hegel aren’t an embrace of idealism, but instead, a making intelligible of a conception of world in which the sensuous is unmoored from its suprasensuous counterpart, a world in which things hold nothing back and keep nothing in store. Exhausted by the relations they enter into, things differ from objects, for while objects are self-enclosed, things are open, their boundaries porous. As networks of relations, they have no depths to plumb; their contact with the environs is largely superficial, an interfacial exchange between surfaces. Were we to somehow pull back the curtain and get behind them, we’d be disappointed, for their outer appearance doesn’t mask an inner reality. Thoroughly exposed, things offer themselves up freely to a world of relation. Rendering all this rather cryptically,

Heidegger suggests that “expropriation belongs to appropriation,” that coming into one’s own is markedly different from being what one is, distinguishable insofar as presencing in accordance with one’s own is a matter of divesting one’s self of one’s own.306 Giving itself over, the thing enters into relation with world. This relation is one of belonging, an intertwining of thing and

304 Schürmann, Reiner. Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles To Anarchy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 211; HBA hereafter. 305 TT 177. 306 TB 24.

65 world in which each is responsible for the ownmostness of the other. Disrupting the propriety of the proper, this relation precludes the identification of one’s own with property or possession.

Abandoning any claim to an essence or nature, the thing shakes off the burden of Being; coming into its own by forging connections, it is made manifest by forming attachments and solidarities with the world around it. To speak of what is “ownmost” to a thing is to take note of its worldliness, the relationships constitutive of its coming to presence as a this or a that.

Holding fast to the particularity of things, Heidegger affirms their uniqueness. The singularity of their arising depends upon the relations they maintain; they are individuated insofar as they occupy distinct nodes in a sensuous web of functional determinacy. Offering precious little in the way of examples, Heidegger’s account of the jug in his essay “The Thing” serves as an illustration of this otherwise turbid matter. More than a collection of “arbitrary facts about jugs,” his remarks highlight the involvement of things in world by way of an analysis of this most ordinary of containers.307 An exemplary thing, the jug relates to world the way all things do, by pouring itself out in donation, giving out of itself in acts of ceremonial libation.

Through “sacrificial expenditure” the jug gathers, mobilizes the fourfold, and steps out into a world of relation.308 Heidegger writes:

The jug’s presencing is the pure, giving gathering of the onefold fourfold into a single time-space, a single stay. The jug presences as thing. The jug is the jug as a thing. But how does the thing presence? The thing things. Thinging gathers. Appropriating the fourfold, it gathers the fourfold’s stay, its while, into something that stays for a while: into this thing, that thing.309

Making a gift of itself, the jug is drawn out into the free-play of earth and sky, divinities and mortals. Not given but giving, the jug generously proffers itself to world. On the Heideggerian

307 Mitchell, Andrew J. The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger (Northwestern University Press, 2015), p. 14; TF hereafter. 308 Ibid., 13. 309 TT 172.

66 account, givenness isn’t a quality or a state, it’s an act, a movement, a process; importantly, it is one that does not involve consciousness, for while things may relate to mortals, their thinging is not the result of some machination of mind. Codifying this relation, however, humans fix the thing in place—“make a mummy of it” as Nietzsche would say— bringing it to a stand as an object (Gegenstand) of representation, or grounding it in Being (Sein) as one would a being

(Seiende). But things are neither; strictly speaking, they aren’t. They lack ontological weight; they’re “more relation than entity”.310 But out of these relations, Heidegger insists, the “world worlds,” coming to presence dynamically.311

Admittedly, all of this sounds pretty metaphysical—it seems like Heidegger is making ontological pronouncements insofar as he speaks of the “thinging thing,” the “worlding world,” and the “appropriating event of the unfolding four”—with the “mirror-play of earth and sky, divinities and mortals,” serving as some sort of code for the Being of beings. Charitably interpreted, however, Heidegger’s remarks are distinguishable from claims concerning the whole of that which in any way is. Recalling our discussion of metaphor in the previous chapter,

Heidegger’s use of language is akin to a kind of showing, employed in such a way as to unsettle our familiar ways of seeing, and illuminate a world long darkened by vocabularies that countenance terms such as ‘timeless,’ ‘eternal,’ and ‘everlasting’. Whereas assertions made in the declarative mode are subject to alethic evaluation—by virtue of their being taken to state facts or describe whatever happens to be the case—and consequently, are cognitively contentful, i.e., either true or false, metaphors and other more literary constructions are fundamentally misunderstood if assessed in this way. Not the kind of thing to which we can assign a truth value, figurative language is gestural, similar to hand-waving in the middle of a debate. As Rorty has

310 TF 310. 311 TT 180.

67 argued, “tossing a metaphor into a conversation is like suddenly breaking off the conversation long enough to make a face, or pulling a photograph out of your pocket and displaying it, or pointing at a feature of the surroundings, or slapping your interlocutor’s face, or kissing him”.312

In short, metaphors aren’t expressive; they aren’t about anything, and yet, inasmuch as they are still moves in a language-game, they’re pragmatic in the sense that one can put them to use and do something with them. Helping us see aspects of things of which we were otherwise ignorant,

Heidegger’s language is metaphorical through and through; spurning the propositional, he is able to avoid self-referential inconsistency by merely gesturing at a post-metaphysical world instead of making claims about its features, claims which would be metaphysical by virtue of the fact they are claims.

Bearing this in mind, Heidegger’s remarks point to a world shot through with mediation, a world in which things are the focal point. Givenness, on this account, is thoroughly relational, a fourfold movement in which things come into their own by opening themselves up to the world.

Ereignis names this movement—the actual conditions mobilized by things. Sanctioning the givenness of things, Ereignis ensures stability and safeguards the thing from the oblivion into which it would otherwise slip. Dispensing with Ereignis, as Marion suggests, would prove disastrous, abolishing both the thing and givenness itself. Spurring thinking in a more relational direction, Heidegger’s later work encourages us to take the world seriously, to reckon with the sensuous realm in such a way as to do justice to the things which nourish and sustain us.

Whereas realists and other like-minded philosophers profess some fidelity to the world, they forsake the object of their affection to the extent that they try and explain the world by means of otherworldly explanans. The history of philosophy is littered with such attempts, as the examples

312 CIS 18.

68 of Plato’s forms, Kant’s categories, and the early Wittgenstein’s logical scaffolding make clear.

Heidegger’s devotion, by contrast, never wavers; fixing his gaze firmly on the world, he stays with it in an attempt to show us how it is that metaphysical systems like the ones expounded by

Plato and Kant take shape, find their place amidst phenomena, and express the ontological structures that are bore by things and their relations.

Were Heidegger to drop the language of poetry and opt for a more straightforward prose style, we might call him as a “naturalist,” and place him in the company of James and Dewey,

Sellars and Quine, so long as we understand that term to refer to the view that “anything might have been otherwise… that all explanation is causal explanation of the actual, and that there is no such thing as a noncausal condition of possibility”.313 On pain of taking aboard ontological commitments, however, Heidegger must stay with his metaphorical renderings, and avoid endorsing naturalism, for despite the fact that naturalists often oppose themselves to metaphysics, they are working in that tradition insofar as they make claims about how things stand, and offer up descriptions of how it is with the world. Appreciating the way in which the negation of a metaphysical statement is itself another metaphysical statement, Heidegger is careful not to identify his views with naturalism, pragmatism, or any other philosophical school to which he might otherwise be sympathetic. While the metaphoricity of Heidegger’s later texts tell against their meaningfulness in any robust philosophical sense, they no doubt evidence great concern for a world of meaning. Showing more than they say, these texts open us to the sensuous relations constitutive of world, relations made determinate by way of the givenness of things.

§7 Conclusion

313 WHRL 55.

69

Richard Rorty once claimed that paradox is “a small price to pay for progress,” adding that sometimes it is best to regard “accusations of paradox as the voice of the past, and as possible impediments to the creation of a better future”.314 He goes on to suggest that

“intellectual and moral progress would be impossible unless people can sometimes, in exceptional cases, be persuaded to turn a deaf ear to that voice”.315 While not necessarily turning a deaf ear to the past, or completely shrugging it off, Heidegger’s later writings bear little resemblance to those of his predecessors; they simply do not conform to the rules of rigorous thought, and they fail to satisfy the demands traditionally placed on works of hard-nosed philosophy. In “A Letter to a Young Student,” Heidegger admits as much, and acknowledges that his thinking is likely to strike most as a sort of “lawless caprice”.316 Recounting his experience as a lecturer for this young student, Heidegger explains that someone always “raises the question as to whence [his] thinking gets its directive, as though this question were indicated to [his] thinking alone.”317 But, he continues, “it never occurs to anyone to ask whence Plato had a directive to think of Being as idea, or whence Kant had the directive to think of Being as the transcendental character of objectness”318 Deeply entrenched, the vocabularies of Plato and Kant have a certain self-evident quality about them, that is, they generally accord with our intuitions, and seldom fly in the face of good sense. Consequently, questions concerning fundamental determinations and the binding force of master terms rarely surface. Heidegger’s work, by contrast, would seem to lack this general coherence; the opacity of his argumentative strategy often hinders an appreciation of the motivations underlying his view, and the language in which

314 Rorty, Richard. “Robert Brandom on Social Practices and Representations,” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 136; RBSPR hereafter. 315 Ibid. 316 Heidegger, Martin. “A Letter to a Young Student,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 2013), p. 184; LYS hereafter. 317 Ibid. 318 Ibid., 183-84.

70 this strategy is embedded further obscures the path his thinking takes. That Heidegger himself was occasionally puzzled by his own approach is evidenced by an anecdote of Gadamer’s:

Up in his cottage one day during the war, I remember how Heidegger began to read an essay on Nietzsche that he had been working on. He stopped suddenly, pounded on the table so hard that the tea cups rattled, and exclaimed with frustration and doubt, ‘This is Chinese!’ Heidegger had run into a linguistic impasse; he was experiencing a deficiency in language, as happens only to those who have something to say. It required all of his power to hold out under this deficiency and to let nothing offered by the traditional ontotheological metaphysics and its conceptualizations distract him from his question concerning Being.319

Crafting his language in such a way as to avoid committing himself ontologically to the way things are, Heidegger flirts with incoherence; risking the unintelligible, he flouts the norms of philosophical writing, and draws our attention to the givenness of thing and world in and through

Ereignis. Foreswearing claims concerning that which in any way is, Heidegger breaks with metaphysics; performatively enacting metaphors of movement, his later texts give pride of place to processes and relations—conditions I’ve called “actual” on account of their susceptibility to the withering effects of time, and as a way of distinguishing them from conditions of possibility.

That the later Heidegger’s thinking is figural ultimately tells against his consigning givenness to the horizon of Being. Leaving this horizon behind, Heidegger metaphorically showcases the dynamism of things, the thick sensuousness of world induced by expropriative-appropriative acts of giving; his holistic metaphors highlighting givenness as giving over, rather than being given.

319 Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Martin Heidegger—85 Years,” in Heidegger’s Ways, trans. John W. Stanley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 118.

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