Toward the end of his article, “Nietzsche’s Proclamation: ‘God is dead,’” Heidegger notes the sense of danger in Nietzsche’s thought and the anxiety he communicates to his readers. Yet Heidegger would not divert us from the danger or shelter us from the anxiety. For what is at stake in such anxiety is the very matter or “sake” of thinking: thinking itself dwells in anxiety, and must sustain that dwelling with care. The “later” Heidegger rejoins the “early”: “Anxiety in the face of thinking is . . . anxiety in the face of anxiety” (H, 246).
In his article, “The Critique of Subjectivity and Cogito in the Philosophy of Heidegger,” Paul Ricoeur writes: “The basic difference, perhaps, between the later Heidegger and Heidegger I would be that the self no longer finds its authenticity in freedom unto death, but in Gelassenheit, which is the gift of the poetical life.”1 Ricoeur formulates carefully what many others have argued in a cruder fashion, namely, that Heidegger’s later preoccupations with Sein abandon the “existentialist” trappings of Dasein and of anxiety in the face of death in favor of the more high-minded contemplation of Being and the language of Being. Against Ricoeur cautiously, and against those cruder formulations polemically, I would like to argue that Gelassenheit is already at work in the analysis of anxious Dasein in Being and Time (1927), and that anxiety in the face of death remains central to Gelassenheit (1959) and to the thoughtful-poetical life. Though the second half of the argument will receive fuller treatment here, some comment on the role of Gelassenheit, “releasement” or “letting-be,” in the analysis of Dasein is needed.
As I understand it, the crucial problem of Heidegger’s hermeneutics of Dasein, in which the disclosure of Dasein’s primordial finitude is to be secured, is to let death be. Letting finitude come to light invokes the problem of letting-be as such. Gelassenheit is precisely that hermeneutical project of achieving a mode of thought and language beyond any sort of representational, valuative, or manipulative consciousness, all of which in their will to power obscure that dimension in which the finitude of Dasein plays. In Being and Time Heidegger selects the phenomenon of anxiety in the face of death as the one whose phenomenological description and hermeneutical pursuit will display the elemental character of Dasein as care. Because anxiety is a remarkably individualizing phenomenon, the description of it must banish the idle talk, whimsical curiosity, and tranquilized bustle characteristic of Dasein’s everyday modes of behavior, and allow Dasein to stand in the simplicity of its Being-there. Yet precisely on that account the ontological explication of anxiety confronts enormous difficulties in bringing the phenomenon to language and communication. At the very heart of the experience of anxiety lies an excruciating silence, in which words about anxiety tumble over one another and issue hollow sounds. This is true even when the “professor of philosophy” speaks most coldly and abstractly, without visible signs of fear and trembling.2 In “What is Metaphysics?” Heidegger describes the crisis into which discourse is thrown in the experience of anxiety in terms we first heard in chapter two: “Anxiety robs us of speech.” “Die Angst verschlägt uns das Wort” (W, 9; BW, 103). Verschlagen means to strike dumb, to deprive of breath, to distract from a path of thought, to board-up and shut-away. Anxiety strikes us dumb. “Because beings as a whole slip away, so that just the nothing crowds round, in the face of anxiety all utterance of the ‘is’ falls silent.” One can speak of anxiety at all only by releasing oneself into the nothing, that is, by becoming free from “those idols everyone has and to which he is wont to go cringing” (W, 19; BW, 112). Idols—that means: words. A phenomenological description of anxiety—in the face of death, thinking, and itself—must therefore be an anxious description, one that experiences its radical finitude, its being-towards-an-end, its metabolism, in its every word. The death of Dasein is anticipated when the nothing in which its interpreting is suspended returns the echo of a burst of laughter to every one of interpretations’s words. The death of Dasein is anticipated not so much in chit-chat at funerals as at the writing desk.
In section 40 of Being and Time Heidegger argues that Dasein’s flight from its own understanding of Being, a flight from the shadowy presence of its finitude into the cheerful light of its everyday preoccupations, because it is a fleeing in the face of itself inadvertently discloses something of its fundamental Being. Dasein’s “falling” away from itself trails clouds of its inglory: that on which Dasein opens as it averts its glance and pursues evasion, namely, being-in-the-world as such, can be phenomenologically interpreted. “More primordial than man is the finitude of Dasein in him” (KPM, 207). It is the primordiality of the alienation that enables Dasein to flee in the face of itself, of the dimension which in the experience of anxiety opens and closes with lightning-like speed, that gives Time and Being to interpretation. Thus anxiety is not an experience from which Dasein needs redemption. Quite the reverse. Anxiety is Dasein’s opening onto its ownmost way to be, an opening that only needs to be cultivated and secured from forgetfulness. For anxiety is that experience which underlies all disclosure and every possibility of interpretation, including, arguably, those of “joy” or “profound boredom.” Being and Time, section 40:
Here the disclosure and the disclosed are existentially selfsame, in such a way that in the latter the world has been disclosed as world, and being-in as a possibility-being that is individualized, pure, and thrown. This makes it clear that with the phenomenon of anxiety a distinctive disposition has become a theme for interpretation. [SZ, 188]
In the description of the phenomenon of anxiety Heidegger’s existential analysis reaches that crucial point where disclosure and the being disclosed converge. It is here that the hermeneutical circle is decisively joined, and Heidegger’s thoughtful descent into it achieved. Thinking is, only insofar as it is thinking-within-anxiety, determinedly open to anxiety in the face of death. This remains the case even when it receives “the gift of the poetical life.”
In Hermann und Dorothea Goethe remarks that neither the wise nor the pious can let death be: the wise man drags death back into life by teaching us how to handle its consequences, while the pious one exults his way past death, celebrating it as the threshold of a more perfect health and well-being. Beiden wird zum Leben der Tod. “For both, death becomes life.” But metaphysics is both wise and pious: for it death means life, just as night means day. I suspect that in the history of metaphysics—which is always the history of morals—subtlety of conceptual manipulation and violence in the handling of death are proportionally related, the one increasing in step with the other. Conceptual transparency thickens with the opacity of death, since death violates every transparency; conceptual manipulation must therefore resort to violence and repression. What should it mean then to let death be? In “What Calls for Thinking?” Heidegger announces that his thinking wants to let the blossoming tree remain in the meadow where it stands, to let it lie before us by taking heed of it (WhD?, 18). Yet how are we to understand that much earlier pronouncement in Being and Time, to the effect that hermeneutical thinking must let death stand as it appears? What sort of resolute openness would this thinking require?3
Man is the being that lives, speaks, and dies: so the Greeks understood him. Yet man is also to deinotaton, as the second chorus of Antigone says, the most terrible being, “terrible in the sense of the overpowering power which compels . . . true anxiety” (EM, 114). However, man’s power confronts obstacles: his force goes out to meet the overpowering power of the whole of being. Not man but Being is overpowering: man exercises force on the overpowering, and so is “violent in the midst of the overpowering.” Although he must be designated as being-in-the-world, man is the being that is least at home among beings; humanity is made to dwell in the unfamiliar and to exercise power in the face of appearances. Such exercise of power Heidegger calls interpretation.
Only when we grasp that the use of power in language, in understanding, in forming and building, helps to . . . bring-forth the act of force which lays out paths into the surrounding power of beings, only then will we understand the uncanniness of all violence. [EM, 120–21]
The outcome of man’s violence against the acknowledged overpowering may be called Gelassenheit The exercise of power in language, especially the language of poetizing-thinking, actualizes the Being (or presence) of a thing and makes it effectively real: the exercise of power in language is the “effecting” of the thing (EM, 122). When the poet utters the word “sea” as though that word were spoken for the first time, his work of art brings that being to presence and lets it shine. However, in order to call the being to presence, in order to utter the word at all, the poet or thinker must respond to the encroachment of the thing. He and his power are at the mercy of the overpowering power of being as a whole—in this case, of that being Melville’s Ishmael calls the “ungraspable phantom of life,” which is “the key to it all.” Man’s every utterance therefore hangs on the edge of an abyss: such is the anxiety of all art, and indeed of all language, which in the vertigo of its most mighty naming stands always on the brink of nothing. Emily Dickinson, number 1563:
By homely gift and hindered Words
The human heart is told
Of Nothing—
“Nothing” is the force
That renovates the World—
The violence of interpretation which makes mortals most powerful is also that which makes their Being most enigmatic and precarious, inasmuch as there is one uncanny and overpowering thing under whose aspect all interpretation turns mute. “All violence shatters against one thing. That is death. . . . It is not only when he comes to die, but always and essentially, that man is without exit in the face of death” (EM, 121). “Anxiety” brings together in one word an experience of the violence of interpretation and of death. This confluence Heidegger calls mortality.
The kind of language suited to letting-be, which aims its violence at its own tendency to forget its fatality, Heidegger calls mortal gesture or bidding, das Geheiss. In an article given the unadorned title “Language,” Heidegger describes the event of language in the statement, “Die Sprache spricht” (US, 20; cf. 147–48). Language speaks. By emphasizing the first term of this apparently violently tautologous assertion, Heidegger denies that it is man who speaks. His denial would affirm that man speaks genuinely only insofar as he listens and responds to the speaking of language. Who then is man? Man is the mortal. In his essay, “The Thing,” Heidegger writes:
Mortals are human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to make death as death possible. Only man dies. . . . Death is the monument of nothing, that is, of that which is by no means “existent” but which comes to presence nonetheless, even as the very secret of Being itself. As the monument of nothing, death is the hide-away of Being. We call mortals “mortal,” not because their life on earth ends, but because they make death possible as death. The mortals are who they are, mortals, being present in the hideaway of Being. They are the essential relation of presence to Being as Being. [VA, 177; cf. US, 22–23]
This passage elucidates several issues:
1. The hermeneutics of language and the language of hermeneutics both require that interpretation open itself determinedly to intimations of the mortality of Dasein, the mortality of Mensch.
2. Only man, conceived as primordially finite Dasein, exists in that dimension of Being which discloses all things and Being as Being. Only man is present to the nothing where Being itself hides. Only man can die. Only man: neither god nor beast, nor an amalgam of the two, that is, the philosopher.4
3. The name Heidegger offers to designate the presencing of beings, and of Being as Being, is the “nothing.” It is the region in which Being hides. This mortal region into which man finds himself thrown, and the way in which man must preserve that region, are further elaborated in a passage from the essay “Building Dwelling Thinking”:
Mortals are human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to make death as death possible. Only man dies, and indeed he dies continuously as long as he remains on the earth, under the sky, and in the face of divinities. If we name the mortals, then we think the other three along with them, although we do not reflect upon the unity of the four. We call this unity the Fourfold. Mortals are in the Fourfold insofar as they dwell. But the fundamental trait of dwelling is protective cultivation [das Schonen]. Mortals dwell in a way that protectively cultivates the Fourfold in its presencing. [VA, 150]
I make the following observations:
1. Being able to die, which means sustaining an openedness to the anxiety of mortal disclosure, is called “dwelling.”
2. Dwelling means care and cultivation of the way in which earth, sky, divinity, and mortality itself come to presence and/or withdraw.
3. Such cultivation waits upon mortals—those who alone are able to die—and is itself fourfold:
(a) Mortals dwell on the earth by rescuing it from all forms of exploitation. The fundamental form of exploitation is the careless violence of any interpretation that flees from “that thing” against which all interpretation shatters. Exploitation is the opiate of thinking. To rescue the earth from the slumbering violence of interpretation means to “let it be free in its own coming-to-presence.” To rescue the earth means to fulfill the task of Nietzsche’s thinking: “Bleibt der Erde treu!” “Remain true to the earth!”
(b) Mortals dwell under the sky, writes Heidegger, insofar as they welcome the light of day and receive the dark of night and do not try to transform the one into the other.
(c) Mortals dwell on the earth under the sky insofar as they await divinities, which they can neither concoct nor command. Indeed, as the Beiträge insist, godhead is experienced in its ultimacy as passage (Vorbeigang).
(d) Mortals dwell insofar as they protect and cultivate intimations of their mortality, and this by letting them be:
Mortals dwell insofar as they conduct their own essence, which is that they make death as death possible, into the usage of this possibility, in order that it be a good death. That mortals come to meet the essence of death in no way means that they make death, as empty nothingness, their goal; nor does it mean that they are to becloud dwelling by gaping toward its end. [VA, 151]
What Heidegger here recounts is in fact the full unfolding of Zarathustra’s Untergang: “That your dying be no blasphemy against man and earth, my friends: that is my plea to the honey of your soul.”5 Dwelling then means: to let the earth be free, to receive the glowing and darkening sky, to await divinities, to encounter mortality—and to reflect on the unity of the Fourfold by confronting without subterfuge the nothing. Yet confrontation with the nothing is the task already undertaken—though surely not completed—in Being and Time.
Reflection on the possibility of Dasein’s death requires a transformed relation to language. Only in the bidding gesture does the mortal let language speak, and the gesture that wraps itself in folds of silence so as not to frighten the world away, the most faithful gesture, is poetizing thought. Poetizing is mortal dwelling and is essential building because its thinking listens to the overpowering speech of language. Poetizing “does not soar beyond or surpass the earth, in order to leave it behind or hover over it; poetizing first brings man to earth, onto the earth, thus bringing him into dwelling” (VA, 192). Accustomed as we are to a poetry that most often leaps up to behold rainbows, the conjunction of poetizing and dying seems bizarre and even contradictory. Or at least in bad taste. Yet Heidegger, like Hölderlin, denies that the wings of poesy are designed to transport mortals to imagined idylls; he affirms that poetry enables man to dwell auf dieser Erde.6 Goethe too offers examples of poetic thinking that dwells on the earth.
The essential affinity of poetry and mortality is enigmatically portrayed in the first scene of the second part of Faust, lines 5505ff. A herald announces poetic images mystical and ghostly, images he cannot grasp, and whose significance he therefore cannot explain. Through the crowd of images a glittering coach draws near; it carries a youthful driver and his master. The driver challenges the herald—who may be the poet himself—to name and describe the two allegorical figures of the coach. Responding to the challenge, the herald describes the driver as a charming and seductive youth; his master seems a wealthy and magnanimous king, so worthy that he defies description. The driver then reveals the identity of his master: it is Plutus, god of plenty, who is also (although the clever youth does not say so) king of the domain of the dead. The “extravagant youth” himself is Poesie. Wealth-and-death (Plutus, Hades) advances in the coach of poetry, although poetry is by no means simply his vehicle. Poesy affirms:
My riches too reveal no end;
For I am Plutus’ fairest friend.
I liven and cheer his feast and dance;
Whate’er he lacks—that I dispense.
Turning to the god of the underworld, the youthful driver demands:
Don’t I steer nicely wherever you say?
Am I not there when you point the way?
Plutus freely concedes that Poesy is to him a kindred spirit:
You are spirit of my spirit.
You act upon my every whim,
Are richer than I myself have been.
I am grateful that your service I command,
Greenest of branches in my garland.
To all a true word I commend:
My beloved Son, in you am I well content!
Here Plutus is designated only as dispenser of wealth. Yet for the ancients, as Goethe knew well, the earth yields her fruits to mortals from underground, in proximity to the kingdom of death. Death rules the domain of images into which the heraldic poet is thrown. The original herald, the original bearer of the magic wand or rhabdos, is Hermes, conductor of souls to the underworld and namesake of the descensional reflection of hermeneutics. Like Poesy, Hermes is wily and seductive; he signifies and leads; he devotes himself to wealth-and-death. Such is “the gift of the poetical life.”
Poetizing-thinking speaks more softly but ultimately more powerfully than the assertory, calculative lingo of science and technology—if not as silently as poetry itself. Thinking must make assertions: Heidegger makes what he himself calls “the naked assertion” that the poem offers access to what is originally achieved in language (US, 16). Heidegger’s thinking within anxiety makes a strenuous call for the gentle cultivation of the poetic word. Not only does mortality speak in a language that thinks within anxiety, but speech also mortalizes in that same language: language is not thought’s vehicle of escape from anxiety but its anxious opening onto mortality. Heidegger’s “naked assertion” is itself a mortal gesture. Inasmuch as interpretation has shattered against “that thing,” all assertion becomes gesture. Mortality itself is that horizon always present but ungraspable—the interminably open yet finite horizon of mere intimation—and interpretation can only devote itself to the Sisyphan task of letting it be.