At the end of his essay, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1964), Heidegger poses a series of intriguing questions. The most enigmatic asks: “Does then the title of the task of thinking run, not ‘Being and Time,’ but clearing and presence [Lichtung und Anwesenheit]?” (ZSdD, 80). The words “Being and Time” appear in quotation marks, used among other things to indicate titles of books. Yet I shall resist the temptation to raise the hollow question as to whether Heidegger intends some sort of abjuration of Being and Time here. Heidegger’s appreciation and critique of his own magnum opus is a matter of public record. Nevertheless, the change in title does indicate a metabolism of thought, a transition. In what direction?
The change is not a mere substitution of terms, Lichtung for Sein, Anwesenheit for Zeit. In any case the substitution would presumably have to be reversed. For the earliest and most persistent “name” for Being is Anwesenheit, “presence.” If it were a matter of sheer substitution the change in title would have to be Anwesenheit und. . . . And what? Is “clearing” a name for Time? We might be inclined to think so in light of Heidegger’s use of the word in his lecture “Time and Being” (1962). In his discussion there of the “there is/it gives Time” we hear such phrases as “Time as the realm where the clearing extends a manifold presencing” (ZSdD, 17). Yet Lichtung is surely a name for the coming to presence, that is, the Being, of beings. In the “Letter on Humanism” clearing and Being are equated (W, 163; BW, 211). Our confusion increases when we remember that Anwesenheit, suggesting Praesenz and Gegenwart, is originally the word that impressed upon Heidegger the significance of the conjunction of Being and Time. In the phrase from “Time and Being” just cited, “manifold presencing” is of course a reference to Time. In short, by the time the title of the task of thinking has become Lichtung und Anwesenheit we are far beyond “reversals” of any kind. Being and Time, Time and Being—these pervade both clearing and presence. These name the selfsame, as Heidegger says, although they are not identical, each referring to the propriation, the “There is/it gives” Being and Time.
The final questions of Heidegger’s “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” run: “But whence and in what way is there [gibt es] the clearing? What speaks in the Es gibt?” (ZSdD, 80). These final questions manifest something like a priority of the clearing over presence for the task of thought. That is doubtless because Anwesenheit has always worked its effects throughout the course of metaphysics as ousia and parousia, albeit unthought; whereas Lichtung is not as such a name granted by the tradition. Its root, Licht, “light,” lumen, is of course omnipresent in Christian ontotheology. Yet Heidegger’s Lichtung presumably struggles to say and to think something else. That struggle is what is meant by the chapter title, “The Transitions of Lichtung” My reason for taking up the transitions of Lichtung is that commentators, in their discussions of Ereignis, “propriation,” have often forgotten that Heidegger’s own way of giving Ereignis concrete meaning is through thought on Lichtung, the clearing of Being.
Heidegger supplies a great deal of information about the word Lichtung in the essay I have been discussing. He supplies it in conclusion to his remarks on Hegel and Husserl and by way of introducing the matter of alētheia. That introduction may be summarized in four steps.
1. For both speculative dialectic and transcendental phenomenology the matter of philosophy comes to shine forth, becomes present.
2. Such shining forth occurs within a certain luminosity or brightness, Helle.
3. Brightness itself requires an open or free space in which the strife of luminosity and obscurity can occur.
4. The name of such openness, the free region, is die Lichtung.
Heidegger now explains that the word Lichtung tries to translate the French clairière, the word itself being modeled morphologically on the forms—no longer current even in dialect—Waldung and Feldung. He adds:
The forest clearing is experienced in contrast to dense forest, called Dickung in our older language. The substantive Lichtung goes back to the verb lichten. The adjective licht is the same word as “light” [i.e., not heavy]. To lighten something means to make it light, free and open; for example, to make the forest free of trees at one place. The free space thus originating is the clearing. What is light in the sense of being free and open has nothing in common with the adjective “light” which means “bright,” neither linguistically nor in terms of the matter. This is to be observed regarding the difference between clearing and light. Nevertheless, it is possible that a factual relation between the two exists. Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness, and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates the clearing. Rather, light presupposes the clearing.
The passage tries to prevent Lichtung and lichten from collapsing into the meaning ensconced in the substantive das Licht, “the light.” It makes special demands on both language and thought. Perhaps we should take a moment to consider the demands made on language—parallel though not identical—in German and English.
Lichten is in fact two verbs. The first is related to the adjective licht (Old High German lioht, Middle High German lieht) meaning “bright,” “luminous.” It stems from the Indo-Germanic root leuk-, “shining white,” as in the words leukos, lux, lumen. In this sense lichten, used transitively, means “to make bright, to illuminate.” In the passive voice, for example in Schiller’s phrase, taghell ist die Nacht gelichtet, the word is only quasi-transitive, quite close to the (poetic) intransitive, der Tag lichtet. Goethe uses the intransitive to describe lightning: nun wittert und lichtet es gut.
However, lichten is also a form of leichten, related to the adjective leicht (Middle High German lihte), meaning “of little weight, not heavy.” Its Indo-Germanic root appears in the Sanskrit laghu and the Greek elaphros, elachys, “small, lightweight.” (Heidegger is therefore quite right to note that although their morphological history is one of increasing convergence the words have distinct origins.) Lichten in the sense of leichten, always transitive, means to make less heavy or to heave up and carry. One sets sail by “weighing anchor,” die Anker lichten. In seaport towns small harbor vessels called Leichter or “lighters” are employed to disburden ships of their cargo. Recall Walt Whitman espying “the belated lighter” while “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (11. 46 and 117). Elsewhere, on the parade ground or battlefield, one can thin the ranks, die Reihen der Kämpfer lichten. In a portion of the forest, as Heidegger relates, one can thin or clear the forest of trees, den Wald lichten.
The adjective leicht, in addition to its central meaning, also possesses a number of fascinating derivative senses. In architecture leicht suggests the opposite of squat or bulky—hence airy, soaring; leicht in general may also mean nicht schwierig, not difficult, easy; in terms of injury leicht means gering, slight or insignificant. Finally, leicht is related to the words gelingen, “to be successful,” Lunge, “the lungs,” and lungern, “to crave.”
Everyone interested in the English-language parallels should read the twelve gripping pages of the Oxford English Dictionary that treat the cognates of “light.” Here is but one sidelight, hardly a highlight, on the adjective “light” in the sense of “not heavy.” As we have just seen, elaphros and elachys are related to the “lung,” that airy, sponge-like organ that preserves us in the light of day, or the light of day in us. The connection of “light” and “lung” seems farfetched until we recall the rather skeptical account offered by Leopold Bloom (the “distinguished phenomenologist”) of the resurrection of the dead in Christian dogma:
The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. . . . [Joyce, Ulysses, “Hades”]
The lights are the lungs. Perhaps, as lungern suggests, and the ancient Greeks attest, they are the seat of all enthysiasmos, here meaning the attunement of all disclosure.
So much for sidelights. What about the demands of lichten and Lichtung on Heidegger’s thought? I will trace those demands in four texts: Being and Time, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” “The Letter on Humanism,” and “On the Essence of Truth,” the first in some detail, the remainder more fleetingly.
Although the word Lichtung and its cognates do not appear often in Being and Time, the matter is omnipresent.1 What in that treatise are called “existence,” “openness to the world,” “transcendence,” “understanding of Being,” “disclosedness of Being,” and Da-sein revolve about the theme of clearing. Of the five direct references in Being and Time to Lichtung or to its terminologically employed cognates four are of central importance. The remaining one can be absorbed into consideration of the four key references, which are located in the following places: first, in section 28, on the thematic analysis of Being-in, especially p. 133 11. 1–10; second, in section 31, on Da-sein as Verstehen, p. 147 11. 1–3; third, in section 36, on curiosity, pp. 170–171 complete; fourth, in section 69, on the temporality of being-in-the-world and the problem of the world’s transcendence, preliminary remark, p. 350 11. 27–37 and p. 35111. 1–8. (The reference in section 79, p. 408 1. 7, fits easily into the thematic of the prior reference in section 69.)
The first reference. The thematic analysis of Being-in as such in chapter five imposes itself as a task because of the need to synthesize the concrete analyses of “world” (chapter 3) and “the who” (chapter 4) and in order to prepare the way for the designation of the structural whole of the Being of Dasein as care (chapter 6). Is such a synthesis really necessary? Not if we have been careful to prevent “world” from collapsing into the res extensa of categorial interpretation and the “who” of Dasein into the res cogitans of metaphysical subjectivity. Yet Heidegger is well aware of the burden of tradition, which as Karl Marx says of history in general, oppresses the brain of the living like a nightmare. And it is almost as though Heidegger could hear the utterances of future commentators who would find nothing more natural than to identify Dasein with the subject and world with the object. The thematic analysis of “being-in” is to awaken the reader from such a nightmare, in which the entire project of Being and Time would founder. Heidegger has no illusions about the difficulty of his task. For his earlier attempts to define Dasein as “the Being of the ‘between’,” and yet as the global phenomenon, may very well have roused the ghost it wished to lay to rest. It is at this point (chapter 5) that the word “Dasein” begins to appear as Da-sein, the separation paradoxically indicating the inseparability of world and self, and even of Sein and Da-sein, in disclosedness.2 Heidegger now writes—and here it will be necessary to read the German text:
Die ontisch bildliche Rede vom lumen naturale im Menschen meint nichts anderes als die existenzial-ontologische Struktur dieses Seienden, dass es ist in der Weise, sein Da zu sein. Es ist “erleuchtet,” besagt: an ihm selbst als In-der-Welt-sein gelichtet, nicht durch ein anderes Seiendes, sondern so, dass es selbst die Lichtung ist. Nur einem existenzial so gelichteten Seienden wird Vorhandenes im Licht zugänglich, im Dunkel verborgen. Das Dasein bringt sein Da von Hause aus mit, seiner entbehrend ist es nicht nur faktisch nicht, sondern überhaupt nicht das Seiende dieses Wesens. Das Dasein ist seine Erschlossenheit. [SZ, 133]
The ontically figurative turn of speech that refers to the lumen naturale in man means nothing else than the existential-ontological structure of this being; it means that this being is by way of being its Da. To say that it is “illuminated” means that it is lighted in itself as being-in-the-world, not by means of another being, but in such a way that this being itself is the clearing. Only for a being that is lighted existentially in such a way are things that are at hand accessible in the light, concealed in the dark. The Da accompanies Dasein from beginning to end. To lack it is not merely factually, but quite generally, not its way to be. Dasein is its disclosedness.
A few brief observations on this passage may be in order.
Lumen naturale is called an ontic image of man’s Being. While it may serve as evidence for the analysis of Being-in it may not be taken as ontologically grounded and clarified. For it is not a being which, as ontic attestation, can serve to ground the analysis; it is rather one of the burdens of our tradition—“burden” meant here in both its musical and more oppressive senses.
Heidegger nonetheless tries now to make this image (lumen naturale) an icon of the existential-ontological structure of Da-sein. The attempt fails, for reasons that will become clear when we arrive at section 36, “Curiosity,” the third reference to Lichtung.
That Heidegger is aware of the problematic nature of this particular burden or image is suggested by several peculiarities in the German text: (a) meint nichts anderes: the word “means” suggests perhaps that, in traditional doctrine at least, lumen naturale actually “says” something quite different; (b) “erleuchtet” appears in quotation marks, the “goose-feet” (Gänsefüsschen) in this case indicating that the illumination in question is not the work of the Paraclete; (c) nicht durch ein anderes Seiendes: written in defense, meaning “not illuminated by another being which would be characterized as lumen supranaturale, beyond the raptures of Time”; (d) ist and als are emphasized in order to preclude ontic-apophantic interpretation and to make room for an ontological-hermeneutical analysis (see the distinction between the apophantic and hermeneutic “as,” SZ, section 33).
Note, finally, that although “light” and “dark” are introduced here they are restricted to the context of the disclosure of things at hand; there is a being that is gelichtet in such a way that things are accessible to it in the light—but concealed from it in the dark. Lichtung makes light and dark possible, but, at the same time, unlike a transcendental condition-of-possibility, does not flood the darkness and expunge all concealment. Lichtung seems to be something more—and yet less—than light. To it, at the end of the passage, Heidegger gives the name Erschlossenheit, one of the oddest words in the German language, containing the multivalent prefix Er-. It is one of those fundamental words of which Freud, following Karl Abel, postulated that they contain their opposite within them and thus are pregnant with opposition.3
The second reference. Section 31 of Being and Time discusses Da-sein as “understanding,” one of the existential structures of the Da. As projection upon possibilities, Dasein possesses a kind of circumspection and vision that allow it to see what is at stake in its existence. What sort of vision is that? Heidegger calls it “vision of Being as such,” Sicht auf das Sein als solches, “for the sake of which Dasein in each case is the way it is,” umwillen dessen das Dasein je ist, wie es ist (SZ, 146). He also calls it perspicuity, Durchsichtigkeit. However, Heidegger immediately senses the proximity of a tradition that will distort his meaning. Perspicuity does not mean some knowledge or insight resulting from examination of self. It is not a matter of egocentricity or of the Puritan “inward journey.” Heidegger continues (in a passage that needs no commentary):
The expression “vision” must of course be preserved from a misunderstanding. It corresponds to the clearedness [Gelichtetheit] which we characterized as the disclosedness of the Da. Vision does not mean perception with the bodily eyes, nor pure nonsensuous apprehension of something at hand in its being at hand. Only one peculiarity of sight is taken up for the existential significance of sight: that it lets us encounter beings that are accessible to us as uncovered in themselves [dass es das ihm zugänglich Seiende an ihm selbst unverdeckt begegnen lässt]. Of course, that is what each of the “senses” achieves within its genuine domain of discovery. But the philosophical tradition from its inception is oriented primarily toward “sight” as the mode of access to beings and to Being. Preserving the connection with the tradition, we may formalize vision and sight to such an extent that we achieve a universal term for characterizing every access, to beings and to Being, as access in general [Zugang überhaupt] (SZ, 147).
Just how dangerous it is to preserve the connection with the visualist tradition Heidegger exhibits in section 36, “Curiosity,” with—
The third reference. Heidegger’s analysis of curiosity begins with a retrospective summary of the existential structure of understanding and the primary, global phenomenon of disclosure.
In the analysis of understanding and of the disclosedness of the Da in general we referred to the lumen naturale and designated the disclosedness of being-in as the clearing [Lichtung] of Dasein, in which a thing like sight first becomes possible. Vision was grasped with a view to the basic mode of all disclosure appropriate to Dasein, that is, understanding, in the sense of the genuine appropriation [Zueignung] of beings, beings toward which Dasein, along the lines of its essential possibilities of Being, can relate itself.
Yet Heidegger’s reference to vision is now compelled to become part of the destructuring of the ontological tradition, insofar as the tradition is enslaved by “the desire to see.” Heidegger cites the opening words of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: Pantes anthropoi tou eidenai oregontai physei, which he paraphrases as follows: human being is shaped by the “care” of sight—the orexis, the prevailing will (in Nietzsche’s sense) or passion, to see. Heidegger also identifies it with noein, the purely intuitive apprehending that constitutes “the fundament of Occidental philosophy” from Parmenides through Hegel.
As further testimony concerning the passion to see, which binds the most exalted theōria to the meanest oggling of curiosity mongers, and which Sartre so enticingly analyzes as the Actaeon Complex (Being and Nothingness, IV, 2, ii), Heidegger introduces Augustine’s account of concupiscentia oculorum (Confessiones X, 35; SZ, 171). Augenlust, the passion of the eyes, becomes a word for sense-knowledge and cognition in general. That passion, “perilous in many ways,” will haunt the Occident for centuries to come. Augustine writes:
In addition to that concupiscence of the flesh present in delight in all the senses and in every pleasure—and its slaves put themselves far from You and perish utterly—by reason of those same bodily senses, there is present in the soul a certain vain and curious desire, cloaked over with the title of knowledge and science [vana et curiosa cupiditas, nomine cognitionis et scientiae palliata], not to take pleasure in the flesh but to acquire new experiences through the flesh [sed experiendi per carnem]. Since this is rooted in the appetite for knowledge, and since the eyes are the princely sense, it is called in God’s Scriptures concupiscence of the eyes.
Seeing belongs properly to the eyes. However, we also apply this word to other senses when we set them to the acquisition of knowledge. We do not say, “Listen how it sparkles,” or “Smell how red it glows,” or “Taste how it shines,” or “Feel how it gleams.” We say that all these are seen. Yet we say not only “See how it shines,” which the eyes alone can see, but also “See how it sounds,” “See how it smells,” “See how it tastes,” “See how hard it is.” Hence, as has been noted, sense experience in general is called concupiscence of the eyes. . . .
That the passion to see is common to both curiosity and theory expresses two important theses in Being and Time: first, knowing is a founded mode of disclosure, by no means primary, hence not the keystone for an ontological analysis of Dasein; second, all theory—including phenomenological theory—presupposes a nonthematized lapse from handiness to presence at hand and must therefore be traced back to the world of everydayness—here in the phenomenon of curiosity. Yet both theses have repercussions on Heidegger’s effort to preserve contact with the visualist tradition in his account of disclosure and clearing. Heidegger does not wish to reduce man’s relation to beings to the status of a pure, presuppositionless, eidetic or intuitive apprehending. Far from it. He wants to restore the layers of complexity and richness that theory has always already stripped away. Lichtung ought to be a name for those layers of complexity, not an attempt
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question.
To say that the visualist tradition tears away layers of complexity means that it claims to have located the source of light in a particular being. Heidegger does not say it in Being and Time, but he senses it and will later say it: the visualist tradition is inextricably onto-theo-logical.
The fourth reference. How does theory presuppose the lapse from what is handy to what is at hand? We recall the famous case of the too-heavy, broken, or missing hammer. What we have more difficulty remembering is the temporal significance such a lapse always had for Heidegger. (See the brilliant analyses of theoretical “backtracking” in the logic course of 1925–26 [21, sections 12, 13, and 15], mentioned in chapter two, above, analyses which however manage to get along without explicit use of the term Zuhandenheit.) The temporal problem is broached in the introductory remark to section 69 of Being and Time, “The temporality of being-in-the-world and the problem of the world’s transcendence.” The section opens:
The ecstatic unity of temporality, that is, the unity of the “outside itself” in the raptures of what is to come, what has been, and the present, is the condition of the possibility that there can be a being that exists as its “Da.” The being that bears the name Da-sein is “cleared.” (Cf. section 28, p. 133.) The light that constitutes this clearedness of Dasein is not some sort of power or source, ontically at hand, of some radiant brilliance occurring from time to time in the being in question. What clears this being essentially, that is, what makes it “open” and “luminous” for itself, was defined prior to all “temporal” interpretation as care. In care the full disclosedness of the Da is grounded. Such clearedness first makes possible any sort of illumination and brightening, every apprehending, “seeing,” and having of something. We will understand the light of this clearedness only when we cease searching for an implanted power that is at hand, only when we inquire into the total constitution of the Being of Dasein; that is, care; that is, the unified ground of its existential possibility. Ecstatic temporality clears the Da originally. It is the primary regulator of the possible unity of all the essential existential structures in Dasein.
Here once again the visualist tradition supplies ontic attestation for the ontological structure of clearing; here once again it threatens to flood the dark with its brilliant glare. But Heidegger’s temporal analysis of care adds a new dimension to both the “use and disadvantage” of that tradition. Die ekstatische Zeidichkeit lichtet das Da ursprünglich. How are we to understand this temporal clearing? By appealing to the ancient luciferous chronometers, the moon, sun, and stars? Or is there something in Heidegger’s effort that explodes the metaphor and metonymy of time and light, where we do not know which is the vehicle and which the tenor? Does not the second sense of Lichtung come to bear precisely here, suggesting that the raptures of ecstatic temporality lighten, clear, and open the world?
To be sure, the clearing does have something to do with the finitude of time. In section 79 Heidegger emphasizes (the fifth and final reference, SZ, 408): “Because temporality constitutes the clearedness (Gelichtetheit) of the Da ecstatically and horizonally, it [clearedness? temporality?] is always already interpretable, and therewith familiar, in the Da originally.” Yet the full elaboration of the temporal horizon of the Da, which would include a complete account of science as theory, waits upon an analysis of the “connection” between Being and Truth in terms of the temporality of existence (SZ, 357); that is to say, it waits upon an analysis of the temporal quality of Being in general (SZ, section 5). It is a long wait.
In the essays and treatises published immediately after Being and Time, Lichtung suffers eclipse. The “open region,” “openness,” “the free,” and “freedom” are Heidegger’s preferred ways of advancing the question of Being (Anwesenheit) and Truth (Unverborgenheit). Yet in the 1930s, perhaps during the very years Heidegger is working on the problem of Ereignis (1936–38), Lichtung begins to establish itself again as a word for the disclosure of Being. Recall the extensive discussion of the clearing in the central section of “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935; UK, 56–60), where Lichtung and Verbergung engage in the creative struggle which is the work of art. Yet Lichtung itself manifests the character of revealing and concealing, indeed of a dual concealment or darkness. Lichtung grants the opening upon or access to beings. Yet it is not a proscenium or stage, its curtain always raised, for the play of beings. For in the clearing one being can conceal or distort another. Furthermore, the clearing itself hides behind what is present: it fails to disclose what it is we are referring to when we say of a being simply that it is. Lichtung betrays a failing, a radical silence (Versagen). It embraces beings as a whole in the same mysterious way as does the nothing. Yet if the clearing already implies Verbergung, then Heidegger needs a new word for the disclosive power of Lichtung. He finds it in Entbergung, revealing or “unconcealing” (see “On the Essence of Truth,” section 7, and especially “Logos” and “Alētheia,” in VA and EGT).
It cannot be denied that the clearing, as revealing/concealing, maintains visualist traits even after its eclipse. In his interpretation of Hölderlin’s “Homecoming” (1943), Lichtung is related to aithēr, hence to claritas. Yet it is also related to serenitas and hilaritas, to das Heitere, a special mode of cheerful enthusiasm (hence of lichten as leichten) granted by the holy (EHD, 18). In Heidegger’s interpretation of “As on a Holiday . . .” (1939), Lichtung is evoked by the mention of brightness and celestial fire. Yet Hölderlin also refers to nature as “lightly embracing” all things in its openness, its “lightening” (EHD, 56–57).
We arrive at the apparent source of the visualist tradition in Heraclitus’ mysterious invocation of pyr aeizōon, “ever-living fire” (VA, 275—81). Almost invariably we interpret pyr in terms of the allegory of the cave and image of the sun in Plato’s Republic. But is the metabolism of fire, which as lightning steers all things (fr. 64), to be apprehended by either vision or the mind’s eye? If Heraclitus is the Obscure, questioning into the clearing, it may be because he thinks the lighting differently.
Yet what is it, again, in the visualist tradition that is to be shunned? Nothing else than the tendency to interpret vision and insight in terms of beings as a grounded whole, the tendency of metaphysics or ontotheology, bypassing the ontological difference, to place Being in service to the order of beings. In modern metaphysics that tendency is manifest in the interpretation of perceptio in a particular being (man) who, containing a spark of divine light, catches the light reflected by all created things. As the co-projector and receptor of such light, man is the eminent subject. In Being and Time Heidegger tries to redefine man, not as subject, but as questioner of Being. In his “Letter on Humanism” (1947) he inveighs against the tendency to interpret Da-sein as subject. Lichtung plays a role in his complaint.
That the “essence” of Dasein lies in its existence (SZ, 42) means that man becomes essentially present by being the Da, that is, the clearing of Being (W, 156–67; BW, 205). Man’s understanding of Being is “the ecstatic relation to the clearing of Being” (W, 159; BW, 207). Heidegger writes (SZ, 212), “Only as long as Dasein is, is there [gibt es] Being.” However, he does not mean that the ego cogito founds Being, that Being is “a product of man.” Heidegger interprets the statement as follows (W, 167; BW, 216):
. . . nur solange die Lichtung des Seins sich ereignet, übereignet sich Sein dem Menschen. Dass aber das Da, die Lichtung als Wahrheit des Seins selbst, sich ereignet, ist die Schickung des Seins selbst. Dieses ist das Geschick der Lichtung.
. . . only as long as the clearing of Being comes to pass does Being pass on to man. But that the Da, the clearing, as the truth of Being itself, comes to pass is the dispensation of Being itself. Being is the sending of the clearing.
Surely there is no need to ask whether the “sending of the clearing” is genitivus subiectivus or obiectivus. Here the effort is to think the Es gibt of Being as the clearing, and to prevent the clearing from collapsing into lumen naturale.
In the essay “On the Essence of Truth,” the genesis of which spans the 1930s and early 1940s, Lichtung appears only in section 9, the “Remark.” (The note as a whole—and not simply in its first paragraph—which first appears in the second edition, 1949, seems to be a retrospective addition to the essay: note the words Seyn, Kehre, Geschichte des Seins, and the references back to Being and Time as well as to the intentions of the first eight sections of the essay.) In the “Remark” the phrase appears:
Wahrheit bedeutet lichtendes Bergen als Grundzug des Seyns.
Truth signifies the sheltering that lightens [or: clears] as the fundamental trait of Being.
The phrase is then repeated in a more elaborate context.
Weil zu ihm lichtendes Bergen gehört, erscheint Seyn anfänglich im Licht des verbergenden Entzugs. Der Name dieser Lichtung ist alētheia.
Because sheltering that lightens [or: clears] is proper to it, Being appears from the outset in the light of concealing withdrawal. The name of this clearing is alētheia.
We perceive once again the inexpugnable visualist context: erscheint . . . im Licht. In question is a trait of Seyn. Heidegger’s archaism (discussed in greater detail in the next chapter) deliberately remains within the orbit of metaphysics as the distinction prevailing at any given time in the history of Being between Being and beings. Perhaps it is fitting therefore that the visualist context be maintained? “Sheltering” (Bergen) too is related to light, albeit in a negative way: a vintage is geborgen (see Heidegger’s essay “Logos,” EGT, 61–62) by being protected from the light. Yet there is another way to interpret the matter of Bergen with regard to the vintage. The grapes are gathered, the vines lightened of their burden. In heavy casks stored in dark cellars the wine itself lightens and clears. “A sheltering that lightens. . . .” What can that mean?
I had the opportunity to ask that question of Heidegger in a long conversation on the afternoon of January 31, 1976. I introduce it here—as a conclusion to the present chapter—simply because Heidegger’s remarks, as always, were helpful.
Bergen has something to do with truth, but by way of negation and indirection, since Un-ver-borgenheit is by no means Bergen. How are the two related? An essential clue comes from section 6 of the essay on truth, entitled Unwahrheit als die Verbergung, “Untruth as concealing.” The word for “concealing,” then, is not Bergen but Verbergen. Hence we need two English words here, “concealing” for Verbergen and some other word for Bergen. Heidegger’s comment: “Das ist unbedingt notwendig!”—“That is absolutely necessary!”
Among the various English words I described to Heidegger, referring to a long list of notes from the Oxford English Dictionary, was the word “to shelter.” The word is of unknown origin, but may derive from “shield” (cf. the German Schild), related to the verb schildern, Middle High German schiltoere, “to describe in words, to illustrate,” meaning perhaps originally to decorate a shield. The connection of “shelter” with portrayal in words was intriguing, but it was the straightforward meaning of the word that convinced Heidegger: “to shelter” is to protect from wind and rain, but also from glaring sunlight. When he heard that, Heidegger interjected: “Das ist die Bedeutung!”—“That is the meaning!”
Bergen: to shelter from the light. Yet Heidegger formulates the essence of truth and truth of essence—the fundamental trait of Being—as das lichtende Bergen, “the sheltering that lightens.” Or clears. What did Lichtung mean? We discussed the word Lichtung for some time. The upshot of that discussion was that any translation of das lichtende Bergen which appealed to the tradition of lumen naturale was unacceptable: the sheltering does not “illuminate” but actively lightens and clears. To lighten is neither to glow incandescently nor to cast light on something else; it is to reduce or remove a burden or inconvenience. Heidegger called such removal or withdrawal den primären Sinn (“the primary sense”) of the verb lichten in his vocabulary. I mentioned that a number of his translators had been thinking of using the word “opening” to render Lichtung, recalling his use of die offene Gegend, das Offene, and Offenheit (“the open region,” “the open,” “openness”).
Nein, das ist nicht richtig. Offenheit ist eben das Resultat des Lichtens. Die Lichtung ist primär.
No, that is incorrect. The point is that openness is the result of the lighting. Die Lichtung comes first.
I then asked whether one couldn’t think of Lichtung as das Eröffnende, that which opens up something, but Heidegger remained adamant, perhaps because of the awkwardness or ugliness of the expression. His comment: Unmöglich! “Impossible!” I was therefore left with the translator’s unenviable task—to render Lichtung as lighting in the sense of clearing, making less heavy or burdensome. “The sheltering that lightens.” Yet the very first thing that had to be sheltered was the sense of “lighting” itself. Hence my current preference for the cognate of the French clairière, “clearing.” In any case, the task of thinking the transitions of the lighting or clearing of Being (as the self-concealing granting of presence) does not grow any lighter because of my remarks here. Beings are cleared; difficulties are not.
The word “to shelter” was not without its own difficulties. They were basically two. First, to shelter, because of its relation to concealment (con-celare: to hide completely), seemed to suggest a kind of hide-and-seek relationship with beings. Heidegger discouraged my thinking of it in this way by insisting that not even Verbergen, much less Bergen, meant Verstecken, putting something out of sight. 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. Important to the sense of sheltering, after all, was its relation to language—schildern. Heidegger referred me to the theme of “sheer naming” in Hölderlin, as developed in the last of his essays on that poet, entitled “The Poem” (EHD, 187ff.). In doing so he explicitly rejected the Saussurian and other structuralist approaches to naming as a relationship of signification (signifiant-signifié). The second difficulty was that the word “to shelter” had a subjective ring to it: it is “I” who shelters the wine in cellars, protects the sheep in folds. Is it then “I” who thinks the truth of Being? Must not such truth appear within reflection, reflexively, as in the archaic expression “methinks”? Must not Verbergen and Bergen be cogitations?
Heidegger replied in some agitation that both Bergen and Verbergen are to be thought in terms of physis, “als das Von-sich-her des Aufgehens”—“as the from-out-of-itself of upsurgence.” He paused to talk about the word sich, “itself,” usually a reflexive pronoun expressing a special intimacy of subject and predicate. But Heidegger meant to use the word in one of its many prepositional contexts. Beings irrupt in presence von sich her, of themselves, under their own power, or at least not under ours. Both Bergen and Verbergen, sheltering and concealing, point to the autonomy of presencing; they are its other side, its shadow, its (undiscovered) source. They are the question-mark on the horizon of the query, Whence? The upsurgence of beings into presence, physis as such, is reticent about revealing its origins. It loves to hide. It keeps to itself. Lest I still confuse the sich with a reflexive pronoun which would send me scurrying back to the subject as ultimate point of reference, Heidegger remarked that sich should actually be the pronoun ihm, as it often is in Luther and occasionally in Hegel, when he slips back into his Swabian dialect, speaking for example of a thing an ihm selbst. (Compare the following statement from the “Protocol” to “Time and Being” [ZSdD, 44]: Das Ereignis ist in ihm selber Enteignis . . . [my emphases]; and cf. SZ, section 7.) That which surges up of itself, das Von-ihm-selbst-her Aufgehende, would be (Heidegger concluded) what Goethe—though not Kant—means when he uses the word “objective,” gegenständlich.
Although both Verbergen and Bergen are to be thought in terms of physis, Bergen, “to shelter,” has the other shade of sense alluded to earlier. In the essay on truth Heidegger calls the phrase “the sheltering that lightens” eine Sage, a “saying,” as opposed to a proposition, eine Aussage. Bergen has a special relation to legein, to that peculiar kind of mortal speech that lets lie before it what is already there in presence. Such “letting” is in fact a sheltering. If we can still hear in the word “shelter” the German word schildern, then the meaning of Bergen is: to shelter in fitting words, words that neither hamper nor hurry but only respond to what surges forth, lingers awhile, then slips back into the darkness whence it came.
Yet once Heidegger had mentioned physis, which stems from phōs, phaos, “light,” had he not unwittingly slipped back into the visualist tradition? Indeed. Or is this only partly true? Physis is perhaps the event we ought to invoke for that convergence of the two senses of lichten which would be true to the matter. Upsurgence illuminates nothing; it lightens and clears as the very presencing of beings.
The primary sense of clearing or lighting was that of making less cumbersome, more buoyant. But Heidegger suddenly spoke of it in a new way, repeating several times in an animated and even elated manner the word vielleicht, “perhaps,” “possibly,” separating the two syllables by a scarcely audible breath and raising the tone of his voice on the second, “viel-leicht!” And this suggests “very readily,” “very likely.” The vielleicht, with respect to lichtendes Bergen, implied the possibility of an openness in which what presents itself—and perhaps even presencing itself—can come to the fore.
Such a possibility (Möglichkeit) reminds me of Heidegger’s interpretation of mögen, “to like” and “may be,” das Vermögen, “faculty,” “potentiality,” or “power,” and das Mög-liche, “the possible” or “like-ly,” in his “Letter on Humanism” (W, 148; BW, 196). There Möglichkeit is no longer a condition of possibility in any transcendental sense but a way to designate a thinking that keeps to the element of Being. Viel-leicht is (perhaps) the like-lihood of thinking Being as the clearing. It may be, however, that such thought alights for Heidegger long before he writes the “Letter on Humanism,” long before we find such thinking likely. In Being and Time Heidegger defines Dasein in terms of possibility-being: human existence is the specific likelihood of Sein-können, the possibility of disclosure or Lichtung as such. These transitions or metabolisms of Lichtung may well take us not farther away from but closer to Being and Time.
At all events, what holds in my memory is the elation, a harmonious commingling of hilaritas with serenitas, heard in the tone of voice and seen in the opening wide of the eyes, as though perhaps a heightening in the lungs or catch in the breath was an intimation of the Von-ihm-her of upsurgence—the ineluctably concealed and sheltering source of all possibility, the clearing—viel-leicht!