Günter Figal
Translated by Richard Polt
In one of the last texts that Heidegger published, he sketches his “way to phenomenology” and at the same time reflects on the future possibilities for phenomenology:
The age of phenomenological philosophy seems to be over. It is already taken as something past which is only recorded historically along with other schools of philosophy. But in what is most its own phenomenology is not a school. It is the possibility of thinking, at times changing and only thus persisting, of corresponding to the claim of what is to be thought. If phenomenology is thus experienced and retained, it can disappear as a designation in favor of the matter of thinking whose manifestness remains a mystery.
(“My Way to Phenomenology”, TB 82)
Thus, “in what is most its own”, phenomenology does not necessarily have to be realized; it remains what it is, even as a possibility that is only waiting for its realization. But above all, this “ownmost” possibility of phenomenology persists without being bound to a philosophical programme or a philosophical method. As Heidegger characterizes it, it is nothing but the very possibility of thinking. As thinking articulates itself, this possibility takes on various colours – just as, according to Heraclitus, fire takes on the scent of the incense that is mixed with it (fr. B67). Considered in regard to its “ownmost” possibility, phenomenology becomes anonymous. It is the unnamed – and thus usually also the unknown – in all thinking, even if, in the philosophical direction that Heidegger attributes to himself, it has entered, for a limited time, the familiarity of the named.
The anonymity of phenomenology is not a late discovery for Heidegger. In retrospect, it is already apparent as central to his philosophical beginning. He says that in his study of Husserl’s Logical Investigations – “at first rather led by surmise than guided by founded insight”–he experienced how “what occurs for the phenomenology of the acts of consciousness as the self-manifestation of phenomena is thought more originally by Aristotle and in all Greek thinking and existence”. There – and this is already the case for young Heidegger – the matter for philosophical thinking is alētheia (see Chapter 8). This is, according to his retrospective explanation, “the unconcealedness of what-is present, its being revealed, its showing itself” (TB 79). Thus the anonymous “ownmost” of phenomenology not only constitutes phenomenology’s future; it is also already its past and, as such, the past of all philosophy. Because philosophy lives on the basis of its Greek beginning, all philosophy has ultimately been phenomenology, without having been recognized and named as such. The fact that Heidegger still designates his own philosophical beginning as a “way into phenomenology” is not incompatible with this anonymization of phenomenology. True, the access to phenomenology leads one at first into a particular philosophical programme; it familiarizes one with a particular method. Yet in so far as phenomenology is recognized in its essence, it becomes universal and can thus do without its name. In turn, this universalization gives a special weight to a thinking that sets out under the name of phenomenology. With the universalization of phenomenology, its explicit form, the form that carries out this universalization, becomes the truth of all philosophy.
The anonymization and universalization of phenomenology is the fundamental movement of Heideggerian thinking. As such, this movement is his contribution to phenomenology, a contribution no less essential than paradoxical. On the basis of this movement, Heidegger’s powerful philosophical work comes to light in a homogeneity that is perhaps surprising, given his relentless alteration and reinterpretation of his own concepts, given his always wakeful readiness for a new beginning. Yet this movement includes even his late turn away from philosophy for the sake of a thinking that wants to articulate “something that it is no longer the matter of philosophy to think” (“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”, BW 441). The “end of philosophy” and the “task of thinking” belong together under the point of view of anonymized phenomenology. Philosophy, as Heidegger understands it, lives in the wake of the Greek beginning of the “unconcealment” of phenomena, regardless of whether philosophy is aware of this beginning and whether its concepts are adequate or inadequate to it. And the thinking that goes beyond philosophy in order to think its way into philosophy’s “unthought” (BW 446) runs up against something that Heidegger, with Goethe, calls a “primal phenomenon” (BW 442). Inasmuch as thinking gains access to the “unthought” of philosophy as a primal phenomenon, it is radically different from philosophy and yet, in a nameless way, phenomenological like philosophy. Thus Heidegger’s distinctive relation to the philosophical tradition is clarified by the phenomenological character of this thinking.
However, this phenomenological character harbours a tension; it is just as paradoxical as Heidegger’s anonymization and universalization of phenomenology, which takes its point of departure from a limited way of questioning, finds phenomenology in all philosophizing and thinking, and yet is capable of finding it only thanks to the limitation of its own way of questioning. Because this kind of questioning remains the point of departure, one must relate the universalization back to it; the thought that all thinking is anonymous phenomenology can illuminate only as much as can the understanding of the phenomena that sustains this thought. And if the thought did not lead to a better understanding of the essence of the phenomena, it would remain dependent on a presupposed phenomenology and would thus fall short of every phenomenological attempt at clarification. Thus the decisive question is what Heidegger’s anonymization and universalization of phenomenology contribute to phenomenology.
As we shall see, this contribution is less evident in Heidegger’s early thinking than in his later period; as long as Heidegger openly names his thinking phenomenology, his contribution to it remains, in comparison to his later works, fairly conventional. As the years pass, Heidegger’s meditations become more concentrated; he turns ever more decisively to the essence of the phenomena themselves, in order to understand the fate of philosophy on the basis of this essence. Yet in his final reflections on the theme, he defines the essence of the phenomena in such a way that this essence is again distinguished from all the philosophical thinking in which it was embedded as a motif. It is the unthought not only for traditional philosophy, but also for Heidegger’s own attempt – now seen in a self-critical light–“to ask about a possible task of thinking at the end of philosophy” (BW 446). Heidegger emphasizes the question regarding the “matter of thinking” – which is at the same time the matter of anonymized phenomenology – within all thinking, including his own former thought. To be sure, by the same token, the “matter of thinking” is also what has long been “unthought”. But once again, this matter has an independent status. The anonymization and univer-salization of phenomenology are tacitly retracted, so that there can again openly be what this anonymization and universalization tacitly presupposed: phenomenology itself. This is not the solution proposed by Heidegger; but if he makes this solution possible, his contribution to phenomenology leads beyond the domain of his own thinking.
Heidegger’s contribution to phenomenology, and thus also to its anonymization, begins just as Heidegger reports it in his late text: as a critique of Husserl’s programme, a critique that aims to see phenom-enological experience not as a scientific method, but as a fundamental possibility of human life. Here Aristotle comes into play for Heidegger: the “phenomenology of the acts of consciousness” is traced back to an activity that Aristotle calls alētheuein (unconcealing). The essence of human life or “Dasein”, as Heidegger will work it out in connection with Aristotle, is uncovering or disclosing. In so far as everything that is, is given in Dasein, it is thinkable in its “unconcealment” only on the basis of Dasein. Under the presupposition that beings show themselves as what they are and that, in turn, being consists in self-showing, Heidegger can link his phenomenological adaptation of Aristotle to a revision of Aristotelian ontology. Because every entity shows itself in Dasein, the being of Dasein is the one point of reference in terms of which everything else is understood as something that is. Whatever is uncovered by Dasein and in Dasein announces itself as a phenomenon, and thus announces itself in its being. Ontology, under this presupposition, is possible “only as phenomenology”, as Being and Time puts it (SZ 35).
If we disregard, for the moment, this ontologization of phenomenology – and phenomenologization of ontology – Heidegger’s understanding of the phenomenon as we have just sketched it remains quite close to that of Husserl, or, more precisely, to his canonical definition of the phenomenon (see Marion 2002: 68). According to The Idea of Phenomenology, “The meaning of the word ‘phenomenon’ is twofold because of the essential correlation between appearing and that which appears”. Husserl goes on to explain that phainomenon properly means “’that which appears,’ and yet it is predominantly used for the appearing itself, the subjective phenomenon (if one is allowed to use this expression, which can be misunderstood in a crude psychological sense)” (Husserl 1999: 69, trans. mod.). The definition recurs in the context of Heidegger’s thought: a phenomenon is something in so far as it is seen in Dasein in terms of its very appearing, and not as something that appears, something given independently as a fact. The difference from Husserl lies solely in the description of the phenomenal, and in the way in which the phenomenal as such is validated. In Heidegger’s sense, what is phenomenal is not the objects of knowledge, but the moments of a world, which can be experienced in their significance; and they are grasped as phenomena not through reflection, but by being withdrawn as really given in Dasein. What is lacking, what denies or withholds itself, shows itself all the more intensely as what is factically given. It is no longer something that appears in fact; rather, it comes into appearance in Dasein.
This is a decisive thought: for Heidegger, an essential moment of the phenomenal is withdrawal. In the “there of absence” (GA 18: 298), something is there in an intensified way. Much the same can be said of something that is brought forth from absence. This too, in Husserl’s terms, is not given as “that which appears”, but instead is in “appearing”. In this sense, according to Being and Time, a phenomenon is “something that proximally and for the most part does not show itself at all: it is something that lies hidden, in contrast to that which proximally and for the most part does show itself” (SZ 35). The phenomenon is what must be discovered, must be drawn out from concealment. Only this guarantees that it is something that shows itself, and not only something that appears, in the sense of an illusion. A phenomenon is something itself, and not something that looks like something that in truth is something else.
Heidegger remains true to this conviction – that the phenomenality of phenomena is due to the process of discovery – until the early 1930s. When, in the lecture course of Winter Semester 1929–30, Dasein is understood as “world-forming”, this is a radicalization of the position of Being and Time. What comes to appear in the course of the “projection” of a world is not only discovered, but is produced (FCM 285; on the concept of world-formation see Figal [2003: 94–110]). To be sure, Heidegger’s later clarifications show that here he is thinking not of manufacture but of exhibition: something is exhibited, set out into the realm in which it can be experienced, so that it can thus be experienced in its appearing (GA 43: 219; see also N1 176; Figal 2006b). This radicalization is both problematic and illuminating: it makes it clear that the radicalized thought was not unproblematic even at the start. The radicalization obscures the fundamental trait of phenomena: the fact that phenomena not only are shown or indicated, but show themselves. This fact was already marginalized when Heidegger focused on discovery, and in his orientation to production it is lost.
This point may have been a significant factor that led Heidegger to retract his absolutization of production. In doing so, he refers to the beginning of philosophy in Greek thinking, but in a quite different way than he did in the early 1920s. He no longer sees the “first and definitive unfolding” (IM 14) of this thinking in the Aristotelian thought of alētheuein. Heidegger finds a new fundamental word: the word physis.
Even now, Being and Time’s identification of phenomenology and ontology stands fast. Physis, as Heidegger says in his lecture course of Summer Semester 1935, Introduction to Metaphysics, is “the being of beings” (IM 19, trans. mod.) because it is “what emerges from itself” or “the unfolding that opens itself up” (IM 15). In a third variation of the thought, physis is “the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in appearance – in short, the emerging-abiding sway” (IM 15). In this last formulation, at least, it is clear that Heidegger is thinking of physis as the essence of phenomena. It is the appearing in which a thing is something that appears.
Nevertheless, the characterization of appearing as physis is still preliminary. Even here, Heidegger’s project of finding phenomenology anonymously in Greek thinking is not fulfilled in a completely convincing way. Granted, in one way his characterization ideally fits the understanding of phenomena as what shows itself. Even if self-showing is occasioned by an indicating, it is essential to it that it happens on its own or, one could say, by itself, and it is precisely this originality that is conveyed in the concept of physis. The thought of physis stands for the objectivity and unconditionality of givenness, which already for Husserl was bound up with the inception of phenomenology.
But in another way, Heidegger’s thought is too specific. Something can show itself even if this showing does not occur in physis. What shows itself and yet is not a physei on must therefore at least be dependent on self-showing in the sense of physis. As a phenomenon, it must be understood exclusively on the basis of physis, and that is not convincing; it restricts the thought of self-showing too severely.
Heidegger clearly saw this difficulty. He attempted to resolve it in his essay on the beginning of the second book of Aristotle’s Physics by distinguishing between the “essence” of physis and its “concept” (“On the Essence and Concept of Physis in Aristotle’s Physics B, I”, in PM). According to this distinction, only the “concept” of physis ties us to a particular realm of beings, that is, natural beings, whereas the original “essence” of physis is supposedly emergence and self-showing without restriction. The restriction, as given with the concept, supposedly can be dispensed with; it comes into play only when one attempts to grasp the happening of physis in contrast to production. The restriction was misleadingly attached to physis as the fact of emergence.
All the same, we have to ask how the “on its own” that Heidegger wants to grasp with the thought of physis could be explained except in terms of the natural or the living (see Figal 2006a: 377–8). Every attempt to define self-showing on the basis of physis, or even as physis itself, relies on the emergence and growth of the natural. This is not just a model for the “on its own”, but its sole realization. Thus the concept of physis is not neutral enough to stand for the essence of phenomena. If the essence of physis is expressed adequately in its concept, then the reference to this concept is unsuited to the anonymization of phenomenology.
Heidegger draws a conclusion that lies near at hand. He turns back to his early guiding concept of alētheia, but no longer understands it, with the Nicomachean Ethics, on the basis of alētheuein. Instead, he goes back to Parmenides. He reads Parmenides’ saying about the self-sameness of thinking and being as a saying about a Selfsame that can be characterized separately and that holds sway in both thinking and being, in so far as it holds them apart from each other and thus holds them together in the “duality” of “disclosure” and “concealment” (EGT 87). If this Selfsame is understood as alētheia (EGT 93), then Heidegger’s later position has already fundamentally been reached. Aletheia only needs to be explained as the “clearing” in order for the “task of thinking” to be defined in relation to the Greek inception.
Heidegger had already spoken of “clearing” (Lichtung) in earlier works. In Being and Time the term is used to explain “disclosedness” (SZ 133) as well as the kinship of this ontological characteristic of Dasein with the image of the lumen naturale. Heidegger also employs the expression in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (see Chapter 9). In fact, we find there that it already has the same meaning that it will come to have in his late texts. He no longer understands “clearing” in terms of light, but rather as “an open place”. Beings “stand within and stand out within” this openness, which provides us with a “passage to those beings” (BW 178). The clearing is the possibility of phenomena.
It must be admitted that in “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Heidegger still gives the term “clearing” a distinctly different accent than it has in his later texts. In the art essay, the clearing is thought as the openness of concealing and unconcealing, and is bound to the “strife” of “world” and “earth”. The clearing is thus synonymous with the happening of clearing, in a sense quite consistent with Heidegger’s earlier conception: a happening that is now at the same time above all the happening of withdrawal, denial and refusal. The clearing, says Heidegger, “is never a rigid stage with a permanently raised curtain”, but instead happens as “concealment” (BW 179). Something shows itself inasmuch as it has been drawn out of concealment and indicated. In this way, in the work of art, a world shows itself as the entire context for beings, and beings themselves show themselves too.
But the clearing is considered rather differently in the late text “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”. Here the clearing is called the “place of stillness” that “first grants unconcealment” (BW 445), that is, allows the play of concealing and unconcealing. The clearing is the “free space” (BW 444): what is occupied neither by the present nor by the absent. It is neither beings nor not-beings; it is the interval in which something can show itself and be shown.
As this free space, however, the clearing precedes every unconcealing and concealing. Even light presupposes the clearing, just as it is presupposed “for resonance and echo, for sound and the diminishing of sound” (BW 442). The clearing is already there when something is set forth and emerges from what refuses to appear; but the clearing is not a ground (archē or principium) on the basis of which concealment and unconcealment could be understood. The clearing is no ground but, as Heidegger says with Goethe, a “primal phenomenon” (Urphänomen); or, as one would have to say according to Heidegger, a “primal matter” (Ur-sache: BW 442).
It is especially remarkable, however, that Heidegger takes up this “primal matter” as the matter of a thinking that differentiates itself from all “philosophy”. Philosophy as metaphysics is foundational thinking, which the thinking of the clearing renounces. Such thinking finds no purchase in philosophy and thus no beginning. While “at the beginning of philosophy”, with Parmenides, the clearing is “named” with the word alētheia, “afterward it is not explicitly thought as such by philosophy” (BW 446). This remark is extraordinary: here Heidegger implicitly revises the understanding of philosophy that had been in place since the 1922 plan for Being and Time, through the Contributions to Philosophy, until the lectures of the 1950s. Even in The Principle of Reason, Heidegger continues to take his bearings from the concept of physis, and so does not fundamentally depart from his views in Introduction to Metaphysics.
What Heidegger gives up in his late text is the myth of the beginning: his many variations on the history of philosophy as the loss of an originary truth, a loss brought about by tradition (see Chapter 11). This truth, according to the myth, must be retrieved, won back or taken up in an “other beginning”. But as it seems now, the history of philosophy is not the tragic history of an involuntary loss, in which what is lost is nevertheless retained and can be brought into view if one goes back to the beginning. Instead, philosophy has always been what it is in the present. But presently, according to Heidegger’s diagnosis, it is coming to an end in consequence of its foundational thinking. In his view, one should leave philosophy to this end, which promises relief and liberation for a new possibility. The task of thinking, to which all thinking is now duty bound, is posed only after the end of philosophy.
With this turn away from philosophy in favour of a thinking that is no longer philosophical, because it is no longer foundational, the universalization of phenomenology comes to an end as well. Because at the beginning of philosophy the clearing was not thought, but was at best named by the term “alēetheia”, the phenomenological i nter-pretation of early thinking can count as an independent possibility. But it is not arbitrary; as an interpretation worthy of the name, it can uncover only what is contained in the texts that have been handed down. However, only it, as an i nterpretation, uncovers this. In the ancient texts there was nothing intended that was then lost and covered over. The phenomenological element in them comes to light solely through phenomenology.
If this is the case, the phenomenological interpretation can again come forward openly as such. It may – and should – be called phe-nomenological, instead of lying hidden anonymously in all philosophy and all thinking. Heidegger himself points in this direction when he adopts Goethe’s fundamental term “primal phenomenon”. This means something that is a phenomenon with particular clarity and distinctness: a phenomenon that shows itself with a special intensity that makes it possible to experience its character as phenomenon. This also implies that it is evidently impossible for primal phenomena to be founded on anything else. They cut off, as it were, any attempt to supply them with a foundation; they cannot be understood on the basis of anything else. Hence primal phenomena, as Goethe says, displace us “into a kind of awe to the point of anxiety” (1991: 792); “we feel our own inadequacy” (ibid.: 798). Primal phenomena do not come from anywhere else, and thus they are not “given” either; that would require a giver. At best one can say, with Heidegger: es gibt sie (“they are”, or literally, “it gives them”; on this expression see TB 38–40). But this means that they do not come forth “on their own”, like natural things; instead, they appear.
The appearing of primal phenomena may leave the will to foundation speechless; as Goethe says, when faced with such phenomena, “sensible people” prefer to take shelter in “amazement” (1991: 792). But primal phenomena do not have to be accepted speechlessly. They can be interpreted, they can be developed in their structure and moments, and thus they can also be understood as coherent. They can be experienced hermeneutically. In this way, they enliven and cheer us “through the eternal play of experience [Empirie]” (ibid.: 798).
This holds for phenomena that are recognized as such, in general. It holds for primal phenomena only when “experience” is determined by the intensity of the phenomenal. One does justice to primal phenomena only if, in interpreting them, one considers their phenomenality as such. The openness in which they appear, the hermeneutic space that allows them to oppose us as objects and gives us access to them, lies in these phenomena themselves (Figal 2006a: 153–73).
Heidegger’s talk of the clearing should probably be understood in this sense. The clearing, then, is not a primal phenomenon, and in fact is not a phenomenon among others, but is the clarity of phenomena, which becomes evident in primal phenomena. It would then be proper to the thinking of the clearing to accept it as such, but not to take it as a separate object. The thought of clearing as such would then belong rather to an “experience” that in turn would be oriented by this thought. The thought would stand at the head of a kind of research and description that, beyond foundational thinking, would stand open to the whole realm of the phenomenal. It would stand at the head of a phenomenology that has come back to itself from anonymity and universality.
Figal, G. 2003. Martin Heidegger zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius.
Figal, G. 2006a. Gegenständlichkeit: Das Hermeneutische und die Philosophie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Figal, G. 2006b. “Machen, was noch nicht da ist. Herstellung als Modell gegen und für die Metaphysik”. In Die Gegenwart des Gegenwär, M. Drewsen & M. Fischer (eds), 128–37. Freiburg/Munich: Karl Alber.
Goethe, J. W. von 1991. Maximen und Reflexionen. In Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens. Münchner Ausgabe, Vol. 17, G.-L. Fink, G. Baumann & J. John (eds). Munich: Carl Hanser.
Husserl, E. 1999. The Idea of Phenomenology, L. Hardy (trans.). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Marion, J.-L. 2002. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, J. L. Kosky (trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
See Heidegger’s “My Way to Phenomenology”, in On “Time and Being”; History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, Preliminary Part; “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”, in Basic Writings; Being and Time, §7; and Introduction to Phenomenological Research, part 1.
See T. Carman, “The Principle of Phenomenology”, in Guignon (2006), 97–119; D. O. Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl”, in Kisiel & van Buren (1994), 231–44;
K. Held, “Heidegger and the Principle of Phenomenology”, Macann (1992), vol. 2, 303–25; and Stapleton (1983). See also R. Capobianco, “Heidegger’s die Lichtung: From ‘The Lighting’ to ‘The Clearing’”, Existentia 17(5–6) (2007), 321–35.