Truth as Openness

The modern subject obliterates the problem of Being by turning philosophical practice into epistemology. We saw that in Bruno and Spinoza it was not method which dictated the development of their ontology: by focusing on mathematics, it was possible to see how reality is known, although not by being subordinated to method.

Heidegger does not develop a theory of knowledge in its own right, as his primary concern is to develop a radical ontology. This fact does not make the problem of knowledge irrelevant or marginal in his work; rather, it brings it to another level.

Knowledge itself, then, will need to acquire a new and broader meaning outside the subject/object dualism and the analysis of some of Heidegger’s texts will show how it is possible to talk of a gnosiology in Heidegger, even though he does not use this term himself. As a starting point I shall consider Heidegger’s speech as a rector (Rektoratsrede), known as The Self-Assertion of the German University. The philosophical relevance of this text has been highly disputed. The reason why this 1933 speech gave rise to many controversies and opposing interpretations has to be found in the context in which it took place, the rise of National Socialism in Germany and Heidegger’s brief adhesion to it. Nevertheless I am not going to focus on the immediate political aspect of the speech, as what I am really interested in is Heidegger’s concern for the university as an institution, an inescapable element of his philosophical research and the place where knowledge as such is transmitted, apprehended or called into question. It is not a coincidence that in many of his lectures Heidegger used to start by interrogating himself and the student body on what they were actually doing when they started their activity united in the Gefolgschaft, the «following» of those who have the privilege of gathering around a leader who is himself guided by a spiritual mission. The Gefolgschaft finds its origin in the history of the ancient barbarian populations of Germany, as narrated by

Tacitus, and it constitutes part of the essence of Germany and of its university, an essence that is historical and needs to be asserted. Whilst it is not surprising that some of the Nazi auditors easily misread Heidegger’s words in favour of much coarser ideals, it is interesting to note Heidegger’s commitment to the university as the home of science. As a matter of fact, it should not be forgotten that for Heidegger science «is philosophy, whether it knows and wills it – or not»¹³⁶.

In order to analyse the sense in which Heidegger intends science, it is useful to start from a different, and somehow broader, concept, that of knowing:

Among the Greeks an old story went around that Prometheus had been the first philosopher. Aeschylus has this Prometheus utter a saying that expresses the essence of knowing.

τέχνη δάνάγκης ασθενεστερα µακρῶ

“Knowing, however, is far weaker than necessity”. This is to say: all knowing about things has always been delivered up to overpowering fate and fails before it.¹³⁷

What Heidegger is trying to show by appealing to the Greeks is that we have forgotten the essence of knowing and therefore the essence of science; he translates τέχνη as knowing in order to stress the fundamental difference between the ancient Greek conception of knowledge, which was not of a theoretical type and therefore it was not worthy of contemplation and admiration as such, but as «the power that hones and embraces Dasein in its entirety»¹³⁸. It seems, then, that there is a totality in the essence of knowing that does not appear in the modern way of approaching knowledge, which seems to conceive science as a progressive form of praxis that tries to add up more and more material; for the Greeks knowledge expresses the link between the inside and the outside, i.e. the being-there that is neither the contemplating subject nor the inanimate object and that is subordinated to the power

136 M. Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University”, in Philosophical and Political Writings, edited by M. Stassen, Continuum, New York 2003, p. 4.

137 Ibid.

138 Ibid.

of fate, in a perfectly tragic fashion, in other words, Dasein. Nevertheless, we are faced with a dilemma: if it is true that the Greeks could initiate Philosophy as we know it because of the fundamental relationship between knowledge and fate, it is also true that Philosophy as such has led to the disappearance of this totality in favour of a science that has turned into something else. Tέχνη is no longer a global way of knowing but has turned into the practical branch of theoretical knowing (ἐπιστήµη), namely, technology. Already in Plato and Aristotle, respectively in the Republic and in De Anima, the ἐπιστήµη appears to be characterized as an intellectual and universal form of knowledge, deriving from the first principle, respectively the ἱδέα and the οὐσία. In Chapter I we gave an account of the Platonic transition from a mnemonic tension of Being to an understanding of Being as presence. The metaphysics of presence, i.e. the metaphysics of the ens, following Heidegger, lays the basis for the systematic reduction of Philosophy (as Metaphysics) to the calculation, prediction and control of beings, namely modern science, which resolves itself into τέχνη, in a fashion that renders the question of Being, so dear to Heidegger, unnecessary¹³⁹. One of Heidegger’s great merits, I think, has been to let us see that the problems of philosophy are not of an intellectual nature, i.e. the question of Being is not an intellectual question but the means philosophy uses in order to address them

139 In the Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger contextualizes this cognitive situation through the word “machination”, i.e. “a manner of the essential sway of being”, which “is the early and still long hidden showing of what is precisely not ownmost to the beingness of beings”. Machination is

“early” precisely because it finds its roots in ancient Metaphysics and Heidegger provides a rather explicit schema that exemplifies such a derivation:

“οὐσία (τέχνη – ποίησις – ἱδέα) constant presence

ens creatum nature history

causality and objectness re-presentedness

lived-experience”.

See M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) [1989], Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1999, pp. 88-90.

are intellectual; it is not surprising, then, that metaphysics has been the core of philosophy for centuries and that it has led to the supremacy of modern science, which has obliterated thinking. As Heidegger himself makes clear in What is called Thinking?:

Thinking – more precisely, the attempt and the duty to think – is now approaching an era when the high demands which traditional thinking believed it was meeting, and pretended it had to meet, become untenable. The way of the question “What is called Thinking?” lies even now in the shadow of this weakness. The weakness can be described in four statements: 1. Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences.

2. Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom. 3. Thinking solves no cosmic riddles. 4. Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act.¹⁴⁰

If we are to extract a theory of knowledge from Heidegger, we cannot look to a sort of epistemology, a term which is now unequivocally used to indicate the philosophy of science, mainly within the analytic philosophical tradition. We have to understand knowledge through the practice of thinking, which means abandoning the scientific temptation of seeing nature as objective.

Following Heidegger, then, the problem of knowledge cannot even be considered as properly philosophical unless it regains the characteristics of totality found in the Greek tragic tradition; yet Heidegger is perfectly aware that it is impossible to ignore what has happened between us moderns and the Greeks and he is always very careful to avoid giving any judgement of value, even if it is about technology. The fact that Being has delivered itself as technology is itself part of the necessity, the fate to which knowing is subordinated. Being itself has delivered itself as technology, thus hiding behind its concealment and hiding the very fact of its own concealment, therefore making the question of Being useless and forgotten. I would like to be faithful to Heidegger and, at the same time, to pull myself out of his paths of thought, in order to get him to speak to a different tradition, and that is why, despite everything that has been said, I would still like to give a name to the problem of knowledge in Heidegger: gnosiology. Gnosiology, if compared to epistemology,

140 M. Heidegger, What is called Thinking?, p. 159.

has a stronger ontological connotation, as it generally indicates a theory of knowledge that derives from the actual being of beings and not from the manner in which beings are grasped; the Greek word γνώσις, as a matter of fact, differs from ἐπιστήµη as it indicates a non-theoretical knowledge but an intuitive, and sometimes mystical, experience, thus implying an ethical level, i.e. an actual involvement of the knower with the known as opposed to a subject/object dichotomy. In the case of Bruno and Spinoza, who understand man as qualitatively in-different towards the rest of nature, the notion of gnosiology does not incur any difficulty. In the case of Heidegger, on the other hand, it is not enough to rule out epistemology in order to speak of a gnosiology, although I think that there is indeed a concept that brings Heidegger closer to Bruno and Spinoza and that is the one of Lichtung, as it is found in the Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). We wish to show how close his notion of Lichtung [clearing] is to a tradition that, I think, has a lot more in common with Heidegger than it is generally believed. It is important to stress that we are not advocating a mystical interpretation of Heidegger’s thought, although that is the risk run by any interpretation claiming to be alternative to modernity. The Philosophy of the Renaissance, in particular that of Bruno, has been in many ways considered not properly modern, due to its colourful, sometimes obscure, and strongly allegorical language or because it has been seen as a strong political stance against the religious oppression of the time but it is my opinion that neither of these analyses properly exhausts its value. After all, Heidegger is not immune from allegations of mysticism and it would not be hard to compare the two philosophers on that ground; Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge is itself a very slippery ground between Philosophy and mysticism but I shall refrain from adopting such interpretations in order to keep the discourse on a solid philosophical track.

The notion of Lichtung is inserted in the Heideggerian quest for originary truth, as expounded in the Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), a work published posthumously, composed not long after the suspension of Sein und Zeit. Such notion carries the task of making explicit, and thus overcoming, some of those aspects that

made it impossible for Heidegger, not to pursue his ontological project, but to pursue it from such an anthropocentric point of view as that of Da-sein and through a language too highly compromised with metaphysics and therefore with the

«Abandonment of the Question of Being». Heidegger’s vocabulary enforces upon thinking a powerful twist aimed at rescuing thinking from the now sterile theoretical path of metaphysics; the terms, and sometimes images, he uses have got a sensuous and ethical dimension, in the sense that they should not only be thought but practised and experienced: as was noted while talking about the Rektoratsrede, Philosophy as ontology is not a merely intellectual issue. Thus we shall address the notion of Lichtung, which is generally translated into English as «clearing» but which, as happens with many Heideggerian terms, needs to be qualified in depth. Lichtung has a very specific meaning as clearing but not related to Licht, i.e. light, which theoretically excludes possible analogies with any “philosophy of light”. Heidegger gives an account of the etymology of Lichtung revealing that, historically and linguistically, its meaning is borrowed from the French word clairière, which is the open and free space left in the midst of a wood or a forest when the trees thin out.

The actual word Lichtung, in fact, is composed of the archaic German words Waldung (wood) and Feldung (field), and the Waldlichtung is precisely the open space in the wood; furthermore Lichten, as a verb, means to “thin out”. Nevertheless, even though the etymology does not involve the concept of “light” as such, it would be too easy to dismiss the relation of clearing to “light” because, if we move onto another level, we can observe that the Lichtung, the clearing in the wood, allows light to get through and enlighten the clearing itself. If we wish to make a phenomenological observation, we cannot ignore that a clearing clears the way to something else; so we cannot exclude tout court the possibility of light, which would need to be qualified as well on its own. For now it will be enough to notice that the clearing provides the possibility of a double movement of retirement and advancement, a step back and a step forwards practised at once, which is the same

movement Heidegger attributes to memory. The Lichtung is not and cannot be a univocal notion, as we can tell from Heidegger’s own words:

If truth here means clearing [Lichtung] of be-ing as openness of the midst of beings, then one cannot even enquire into the truth of this truth unless one means the correctness of the projecting-open – but that misses in manifold ways what is essential.

For, on the one hand, one cannot inquire into the “correctness” of projecting-open at all – and certainly not into the correctness of that projecting-open through which on the whole the clearing is grounded. On the other hand, however, “correctness” is a “type” of truth that as its consequence lags behind the originary essential sway and therefore already does not suffice for grasping originary truth.¹⁴¹

Here «correctness» is intended as referring to that «manner of the essential sway of be-ing» Heidegger calls «Machination», which is incompatible and almost antithetical to the Lichtung: «correctness» refers to what is objectively measurable and predictable, which provides an immediately usable kind of truth that erases any need for the undetermined and the concealed and thus any need for a clearing. We are talking of a type of measuring that radically differs from that theorized by Bruno.

Whereas Heidegger’s critique of correctness attacks the modern scientific attitude, which seems to assume the measurability of an objectified nature, we saw that Bruno introduces a concept of measuring that is not based on calculation but on relation.

Both ways imply a sort of understanding of nature but the former covers up any access to Being. As a matter of fact, Heidegger is deliberately ambiguous here, as

«correctness» is nevertheless a kind of truth, a way in which Being is delivered to us, but one that, at the same time, contributes to seal its concealment to the point of its abandonment. Whenever τέχνη, daughter and active instrument of the ἐπιστήµη, is identified with the truth, then not only does the openness, which nonetheless opens up such truth, remain concealed but also the problem of its unconcealment is forgotten.

The clearing as openness of the originary truth of Being is therefore not an object that needs to be uncovered, which is a prerogative of the realm of Machination, the realm where knowledge measures, predicts and subsequently produces. It is hard

141 Ibid., p. 229.

not to notice that the need for unconcealment, expressed by Heidegger, springs from the realm of Machination itself, which has supposedly forgotten and abandoned Being as such; «correctness» is indeed related to Lichtung, to the extent that through it the clearing is shut. Such forgetting re-affirms what Heidegger claims in What is called thinking? – which we saw in Chapter I – that thinking is in need of memory. The Lichtung, as a matter of fact, is an openness that keeps in safety, that shelters what is to be given or revealed and that is the reason why it acquires the feature of hesitation, which Heidegger describes in the Contributions. The clearing is the theatre, the stage of the openness where truth is not revealed in the form of ground as presence but through a hesitating self-refusing. Heidegger calls this ab-ground, which replicates the mnemonic dynamic of retention and delivery:

Ab-ground is the hesitating refusal of ground. In refusal, originary emptiness opens, originary clearing occurs; but the clearing is at the same time such that the hesitating manifests in it. Ab-ground is the primarily essential [erstwesentliche] sheltering that lights up, is the essential sway of truth.¹⁴²

What Machination does is forgetting and obliterating the sheltering of this openness, thus occupying the entire stage as if ground showed itself as presence. Being does not stop delivering itself through its own concealment – even when it delivers itself as metaphysics – but the game of Being finds no more shelter for it is forgotten. Memory itself is obliterated because what is to be kept safe and sheltered gets covered up.

Krell, reporting an encounter with Heidegger himself, clarifies this point: «Sheltering has to do with hüten and schonen, safeguarding and protecting the mystery of Being’s self-concealment. For Heidegger such sheltering is the very essence of mortal dwelling. He was therefore careful to warn me not to allow the distinction between concealment (of Being) and shelter (of the mystery) to be conflated»¹⁴³. Man’s task is one of sheltering and protecting, which amounts to going back to a notion of knowing

142 M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), p. 265.

143 D. Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality. Time, Truth and Finitude in Heidegger’s Thinking of Being [1986], Penn State University Press, University Park 1991, p. 92.

as remembering. The movement is opposite if we compare it to what happened with Plato, as we described it in Chapter I, which saw truth being progressively shifted from memory to correspondence: the tension in Plato is finally resolved in favour of the latter. Memory is that thinking which uncovers what is covered up and shelters it, meaning that it guarantees the unconcealment game through retention. If sheltering is the essence of mortal dwelling, then man stands in the openness whether he wants to or not, as Krell notes: «Man alone enjoys the open, oblivious of at least one of his feet, the one planted firmly on the far side of the gap»¹⁴⁴. There is no particular course of action man is supposed to take – we saw that thinking is not prescriptive – but a recalling of man’s position within the openness:

Man only inhabits the keeping of what gives him food for thought – he does not create the keeping. Only that which keeps safely can preserve – preserve what is to be thought.

The keeping preserves by giving harbour, and also protection from danger. And from

The keeping preserves by giving harbour, and also protection from danger. And from