1. The Unfolding of the Ascetic Ideal in the Unfolding of the Appeal of Being

A. THINKING IN THE DRAWING APPEAL OF BEING

In the first paragraph of his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger advances a thought that figured in a preliminary way in his rectorial address: thinking finds its essence [Wesen] in an intrinsic relation to being.¹ Thinking carries out the appeal of being to the essence of human being. To “carry out” [vollbringen] means to unfold something in the fullness of its essence, its Wesen, its coming to pass. So thinking may unfold the appeal of being in the fullness of its coming to pass in human being’s coming to pass. I have interpreted Bezug by translating it as ‘appeal’. In its Bezug to human being—its relation to or draw on human being—being is more like a call in dasein than something standing over against human being and relating to it. “Thinking does not make or bring about the Bezug.” Rather, the Bezug of being is handed over to thinking from being; it is like an offering that happens as thinking thinks. A double middle voice is audible: as thinking thinks, being (is). Being comes to pass as human being comes to pass thinking. The manifestness [Offenbarkeit] of being is in the coming to pass of thought.

The structure of Heidegger’s thought in this paragraph is similar to that in his discussion of Eigentlichkeit in Being and Time. As thinkers (and poets) “watch over” or take care for being (in the sense of “have a care for”), they come to their essence in the watching or caring. Although thought and being are not identical, a sameness of Wesen unfolds, not as the subject or object of an action, but as being happens in regard to itself, that is, in a middle voice. The thinking that Heidegger has in mind is being in the middle voice.² Heidegger’s emphasis is on the Bezug of being vis-à-vis thinking because it delimits and interrupts our inherited interpretation of human and provides a basis for rethinking human. Our emphasis is on this Bezug because it indicates that in the interruption of our ethos by the appeal of being we find an accord that goes far beyond any community of agreement that we might construct. The accord of being and human being makes manifest not an essential or defining structure—an essence in that sense—but a quality of belonging that is not at all clear to our usual ways of thinking, one that is close and intimate, like a dwelling that infuses the dwellers and gives them a space of passage that constitutes them. Although such an accord is not a structural continuity, and although it has an abysmal dimension, nonetheless, as accord, it provides unity in the sense of sameness for being and human being. Although it is not a structure of meaning, is not subject to meaning, and in thinking defers the circumscription of meaning, this accord appears to be suited to the metaphors of dwelling, giving, and offering. The proper role of the thinker and poet is approximate to that of a shepherd or to a careful and devoted guardian who by alert attentiveness preserves the manifestness of being. In this attentiveness one comes to pass in the unfolding, not in the vacuity or dispersion, of being. Heidegger speaks of “the simplicity of the manifold dimensions’ rule” (LH 6-7). Being is the element of thought that enables thought and brings it to its essence. Thought belongs to being; and being “bestows essence as a gift,” makes thinking possible in being’s coming to pass, is thought’s “may-be,” its finite, ecstatic, temporal coming to be.

A releasing serenity, which Heidegger meditates under the name of Gelassenheit in another essay, pervades this thought—a striking contrast to the cadences of Heidegger’s preparatory rhetoric in his rectorial address. It is not the serenity of dogmatic certainty or of theoretical clarity, but one of deep, virtually unspeakable propriety of being in which nothing in everyday life is privileged.

The may-be of being means that the full range of finite possibility—death and suffering as well as pleasure and happiness in everyday life—are allowed in the fitting accord of thought and being. Heidegger’s play on mögen ‘favoring’ and mögliche ‘possible’, in the term mög-liche, or may-be, gives emphasis to the disclosiveness of human finitude in the context of being’s giving, bestowing—enabling [vermögen]—the essence of human being. Being enables thinking to be thinking and is of thinking’s disclosive process as thinking’s disclosive process is of the enabling disclosiveness of being. Allowance, even the gift, of life in its simplicity accompanies the despair and ruptures of living as well as its moments of peace and congruence. May-be suggests the difference of being in its company with existence. In its allowance and affirmation one lives through the difference and is not totally circumscribed by one’s travail and success,

Serene joy in the midst of life is clearly projected by this thought. Being’s allowance of life, the sameness of this allowance in all divisions of life and in the midst of life’s dispersions, the thought (of) being, this middle voice is not ruptured by life. It gives the possibility of releasing serenity in its difference from everyday life. The thought of its ontic rupture would be nihilistic for Heidegger. Being is not to be overcome by the disaster or disruption: it is without the possibility of ontic hernia. Nor do the ruptures of living have any privilege in disclosing being. They show the finitude of existence, and they can provide the shock necessary to give vitality to the question of being. But being is voiced in a primordial accord with thought and language, a quiet power [stille Kraft] of favoring and enabling that is quite other than the wreckage or satisfactions of life. This accord is beyond the erotic, consumptive, dispensing, establishing, deposing, nurturing, killing, competitive, impotent, controlling, loving, hating, despondent, suffering, abusing, warring, negotiating, peace-giving elements that constrain us to be human. The accord pervades these elements. It saves them in the sense that they are. Rather than a reign of chaos, it illuminates them, gives them moment and voice beyond their discourse. Being in its accord means more than the whole of human meaning. It gives unity beyond the lives of humans. The accord of being thus has a redemptive aspect that bestows “the gift of essence,” interrupts mere nothingness, as it were, and saves the being of all beings that are destroyed, consumed, or made static in the world of humans. Or at least so it seems. These are indications whose thought is still beyond us, but they are vaguely audible in our belonging to being as this belonging comes to us in our heritage.

More meaningful for Heidegger’s thought than meaning itself. More important than the whole of our values. More hale than our most robust vitality. More affirming than our highest love. Beyond our satisfactions. Saving of essence even in our helplessness and hopelessness. Beyond the limits of identity and causality. This dimension of Heidegger’s thought is both ascetic and ideal. It restores a seamless mystery of being in the midst of effecting the sharpest cut into twentieth-century thought. It tells us that human being belongs to being and that being, although abysmal and severe in relation to all that we value, is beyond the travail and limits of our common lives. In Nietzsche’s terms, the angel rather than the animal and the rupture of the angel provide the stimulus for thought. There appears to be no chaos in the coming of thought’s essence, although there is an abundance of mystery. The withdrawal of being and the non-essence of its event are interpreted in the language of mystery under the aegis of bestowal in this aspect of Heidegger’s thought. He speaks of chaos only in relation to the dispersions of life that has forgotten its essence. It seems in essence that the bestowal of essence is the thought. There appears to be a continuing triumph of being over chaos, and for Nietzsche that is the ascetic ideal.

This much is given and forecast in the first three paragraphs of the “Letter.” The stakes are high. Without the accord of thought and being, thinking becomes instrumental (LH 8-9). It teaches, elaborates, explains, and solidifies itself into positions to be defended and expanded. It becomes like an ethos in that it both nourishes identity and closes people to differences that threaten the autonomy that sustains them. Chaotic confusion is the result. People confuse essence with personal autonomy, public openness with the enabling openness of being, role-dominated communication with a speaking proper to the human essence, subjective self-possession with essential relation to being. The essence of humanity is thus threatened, and this extreme danger is not apparent to us because our language, rather than homing in on being’s bestowal of humanity’s essence, covers over the truth of being and “surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over being” (LH 9). The dispersion of human life in this confusion of dominations and manipulations and its resulting demeaning of human life and indeed of the entire world has lost the quiet sameness of being. Heidegger does not project a totalizing society, but rather one in which the differences of beings, their disclosiveness, not the uniqueness of their roles, but their essential relation to being in their disclosures, are heard, attended with gentle care, and preserved in their address by our ways of being with them.

This is far from the pastoral romanticism that some readers find in Heidegger and either attack as obscure or appropriate by cultivating rusticity or early twentieth-century ways of life that are unburdened by some of our conveniences. Just as mortal temporality, according to Being and Time, is the meaning of all events in dasein’s world, so the bestowal of essence is concurrent with everything in human life, including its perversions and horrors. But Heidegger’s intensity of conviction, his desire to be faithful to the appeal and draw of being, and his prophetic sense of both doom and hope provide a setting for single-minded, even obsessed, concern for the simplicity and sameness of being. One expression of this intensity is found in the rectorial address. Another is found in this letter in which the corrupt dispersion of human life is held in judgmental contrast to what appears to be the purity of being—purity at least in relation to lives that are unclaimed by being. Heidegger’s rejection of democracy or any other communal system is not the issue. It is rather his longing for reunion with the lost “claim of being” that propels him toward language and thought that struggle for, not the thought of mere difference or of disjunction without unity, but the thought of being that unfolds in the fullness of its essence (LH 11). The demands of this quest drive him to separate from the inessential part of the world in an almost priestly way—in the world, but not of it. Is there an inessential part of the world?

That question raises the further question as to whether the question of essence is itself inessential in the sense that it does not lead to the discovery of anything ultimate or have ultimate value for people and in the sense that it is not the primary question of our tradition. Without ultimate value people and beings are heard in the ‘mere’ quality of their life struggles. Their hierarchies and roles are at best conveniences in a given way of life. Without sanctity their anguish and happiness can be clearly heard—not necessarily heard, but possibly heard—in the interruption of the inherited claims to ultimacy, claims that suggest a staggered range of importance concerning who is anguished or happy. An absence of ultimate importance levels us all, discloses us all without the sanctions of the many orders of our lives. In such an interruption of ethics, the ascetic ideal of Heidegger’s approach to being, this part of our Western ethos, is momentarily suspended, and the question of ethics affects the beginning steps that one might take toward retrieving something in our tradition that has been lost. The lostness, our common lack of essence, not what has been lost, affects us and provokes us to think in that moment.

Nietzsche and Heidegger are separated by the issue of whether the simple lack of an ontological ‘home’ and the consequent question of being and its loss move through and define our history. On Nietzschean terms, Heidegger misreads our common history by his thought of the claim of being. That claim and Heidegger’s attraction to it give voice to the ascetic ideal, the ascetic force that shapes both the claim and our history in its hope-giving, meaning-giving obsession before the chaos and homelessness of human being. The claim of being overrides the accidents and randomness that riddle our economies, thought, and practices. A being’s claim on human being and its differences from human being—such elements are found by Heidegger to be ontic, and the governance of ontological thought by beings and their many differences constitutes nihilism for him. The issue between Nietzsche and Heidegger at this point rests with quasi-historical claims: for Heidegger, human history is constituted by the claim of being, its manner of thought, and its being forgotten; for Nietzsche, human history is constituted by a conflict between those who can live fully in the meaninglessness of life and those who must hide chaos in order to survive it.

“Man essentially comes to pass [west] only in his essence [Wesen] where he is claimed by being. Only in this claim ‘has’ he found that wherein his essence dwells. Only in this dwelling does he ‘have’ ‘language’ as the home that preserves the ecstatic in his essence” (LH 13). There is something consumptive in these only’s. Heidegger intends to set apart human being by virtue of its ecstatic relation to being. “Such standing in the clearing of being I call the ek-sistence of man. Only to men is this way of being proper” (LH 13; emphasis added). This ecstatic relation makes reason—ratio—possible, as well as human essence. Human being is completely unique in this “standing.” Rather than ratio joined to animality, the human being is singular in its body: the whole body is found in the relation to being. As Heidegger shifts the terrain of thought from a mind-body dualism, he puts the meaning of animality in question just as he has already put thought in question. It is not a question of adding qualities to animality; it is a question of rethinking human being in the singularity of its essence. The biological sciences, medicine, and psychology are also put in question. We cannot know properly the human mind and body by disciplines that are based in the mind-body division. The human body is not an animallike object. Although the facts of the sciences are not necessarily wrong, their structures of knowledge and interpretation skew whatever they discover by the assumptions about the world and mind that are built into their perceptions and verifications. Heidegger’s claim, with which we are now familiar, is that these disciplines must be rethought in reference to the question of essence of human nature. Ek-sistence is the leading thought for this reconsideration, because human being is found only in its Bezug to being. Human being comes to pass only in the clearing of being. The disclosure of being is the truth of human existence.

The only means that humans are separated from other creatures by an “abyss” (LH 15). However other creatures are known, they do not stand ecstatically in the lighting-concealing advent of being. Human being is the provenance of the truth of being. This means, I believe, that although human being inevitably turns away from being (error delimits it in its ecstasis), nothing in the human is utterly dumb to being, nor is being completely erased for any aspect of human being.³ The human body is singular in its ecstasis. Ecstasis thus eliminates kinship with creatures; an abyss separates us from them. Ecstasis finds part of its meaning in an only that suggests a totally unique relation with being, an only that erases the thoughts of ‘no clearing at all’, simple darkness, dumb juxtaposition, or meaningless convergence. The abysmal mystery of being thus appears to consume our kinship with other creatures, to imprint human being with an encompassing destiny of being that makes singular every dimension of human experience and provides a pervasive sameness for human being, however that sameness is thought.

Have we moved beyond the ascetic ideal by shifting the provenance of thought from its traditionally dualistic mind-body character? Probably not, because undwellable chaos has been consumed in an assurance of dwelling that, no matter how mysterious and questionable, elevates our cries and our laughter by an ecstasis that finds its fulfillment in a reconceived thinking and saying of being. Is animality rethought, or merely lost? In Heidegger’s thought we find our essence in the ecstatic coming of being, in a departure from unspeaking earth that, no matter how mortal, is nonetheless saturated with meaning in meaning’s loss. Perhaps the human cry is never like an animal’s because it is infused and constituted by meaning. But failure to hear the radical delimitation of meaning in the cry is one aspect of the ascetic ideal, and we wonder about what we are unable to hear in our ethos in which meaning reigns even in our spasms, twitchings, and murmurs of satisfaction. Does the abyss that separates us from the animal constitute an opening in which we might hear mere suffering and death, mere happiness that is interrupted continuously by the abyss, a glow of meaning and a depth of essence that find their intensity by an absence of gift that accompanies them? A strangely equalizing body of sounds in which elevation, enlightenment, and superior cultural sensitivity mean nothing? An equalizing body in which the question of the meaning of being has no suasion over folly, in which the cry cries and pleasure pleases, in which there is neither rank nor governance—the equalizing human body that puts in question the claim of being and the thought of being as meaning and essence come to pass, passing away in the body’s earth as it shifts under the impact of whatever cataclysm or nurture befalls it.

B. RECOLLECTION OF BEING AND NOTHING ELSE

The “Letter on Humanism” is like the Rector’s address and Being in Time in the sense that it is largely preparatory to a language and thought not about being but of being. The clear change from the address to the “Letter on Humanism” is that a nationalistic appeal is no longer part of Heidegger’s preparatory strategy. His preoccupation with human destiny and human lostness is important for both works, but his conviction is consistent in both pieces that people are homeless to the extent that their lives and thought are oriented primarily by a specific ethos rather than by the essence of their language and thought which becomes manifest in an epoch-making interruption of the Greek ethos.⁴ If we retrieve a sense of homelessness in the midst of our familiar environments, we take an initial step back to the forgotten essence that will lead us, as human beings, home. The preparatory work includes an interruption of our satisfactions with our identities and our ethos. It includes the emergence of the question of ethics in the context of the question of being. The ethnic interruption of Heidegger’s initial steps toward the thought of being is aligned with the primordial interruption in Greek culture. The interruption’s importance is governed by the question of being which, as we have seen, circumscribes the interruption and gives it a quite specific meaning and destiny: that of returning us to the abysmal essence of our language and thought. Our return to essence-giving being in its ungraspable mystery is like a homecoming.

In our heritage the thought and saying ‘there is being’, which comes to us in Parmenides’ fragments, is the one that continuously moves thought (LH 22). Being is not an object to be contemplated or a prime mover, but takes place in the coming to pass of language and thought and in this coming to pass is world-governing. Being clears for beings in the middle-voice sense of clearing clears. Clearing is the region for the appearing of beings. Instead of nothing at all, being (is), and beings are. When thought and language think and speak in an open address with beings and also, at once, are fully attuned to their own clearing event, ‘there is being’ is said, as distinct from forgotten and left unsaid, in the very process of thinking and speaking. As a person thinks and speaks in this alertness and attunement, he or she is predisposed to allow what is focused to be delimited by the clearing, by the ‘there is being’. The ungraspable mystery of being then pervades thinking and speaking that address and relate to beings.

In Heidegger’s reading of our heritage, thought began in the clearing interruption of the question of being. We have already felt the impact of the clearing effect that can accompany an interruption of habitual patterns of certainty, most recently in this chapter when we asked if an interruption of the question of being would clear the air for the sounds of human suffering and pleasure that are otherwise drowned out by many valuable things. Heidegger’s claim, however, is an explanatory one as well as a descriptive one. Thinking begins in this clearing interruption in Greek thought; this beginning is fateful in the sense that it delimits the future of thought. Thought is forever coming to the interruptive clearing of beings; it emits or sends thought in our heritage; thought is always in the hegemony of the sending and clearing of being; that is, being (is) or gives itself in thought so that beings come to stand as something; and our heritage is made up of the ways in which things come to stand in thought. Human beings thus ek-sists in the “nearness of being” as the dispensation of being unfolds in human history (LH 29). Human being is a continuous process of nearing and falling away from being in this dispensation: it is its own continuous interruption of being’s interruptive closeness in the midst of unthinking endurance.

Our language thus serves, protects, and preserves thought to the extent that it allows a ‘saying’ of this dispensation as it speaks of things. Heidegger’s preparatory work is not necessarily a saying of being. It is an attempt to prepare the way for recognition of the importance of thought and language that is oriented to being. It is responsive to the originary interruption of the question of being and the originary bestowal of thought in our heritage. It maximizes an awareness of its own inability to do what it projects as most desirable. It provides a continuing diagnosis of our consumptive endurance and our forgetfulness of our proper essence. And, as preparatory, it steadily undercuts its own prescriptive authority. But we have found that it also does not put in question the originary preeminence of being. The pattern of certainty that accompanies this trusting service to the importance of being, not only in our tradition but in the very movement of thought, is where we have located the power of the ascetic ideal. That being is continuously near is known without doubt in Heidegger’s discourse. Hence his language speaks of the thinking that is yet to come, thinking that bears in mind the truth of being as “meditative recollection of being and nothing else” (LH 42).

In this ‘nothing else’ we have found that the body of desire, mere living, the viciousness and crudeness of ordinary life, the division of bruteness from civility, and the meaninglessness that pervades meaning: all such elements of human living are subjected to the provenance of being. This subjection has a muffling effect in the sense that the giving of being, the continuous ‘it gives’, casts the mere desire of thought, the ordinariness of thought, and its meaninglessness into the role of a falling from thought proper. Proper thought is to be clear, simple, and clean. It is to be filled with care for being, never aversive in its proper realm. Critical diagnosis, though necessary, bears witness to thought’s fall, and the thought of this fall will protect the falling in its being and save it from fallen obtuseness. The longing for home that Heidegger thematizes is a longing for essence that always puts dispersion, ambiguity, and discord in their proper place. Dispersion takes place in the process of twisting free from the hold of forgetfulness, but it, too, is retrieved in its being in the process of turning to being, a process that allows a clearing rule of thought, and one that allows dispersion to dwell in the language that is the “house of being” and the ‘place’ most fitting for humans.

And when we suffer in our mere living, or when we experience simple pleasure? When we only exert ourselves to make something, to carry out an ambition? When we undergo the normal senselessness of everyday dispersion and distraction, or when we merely conform, that is, when we live ordinarily? Does the thought of nothing but being attune us to our ordinary misery and happiness? Only to the extent that it tells us that there is something much more important than ordinary pain and the enjoyment of everyday things. We can read Heidegger as saying that everyday things will be elevated by the simplicity of proper thought, but the question is whether they are everyday in their elevation. The ‘saving’ of the everyday from the everyday, the preserving of what is proper in the midst of the ordinary, appear to eliminate the very thing that is to be preserved and saved: the everyday.

The quasi-sacramental quality of Heidegger’s thought regarding being betrays the ascetic ideal in Nietzsche’s sense, an ideal that obliterates the meaninglessness of the mundane by an ever-giving, elevated, and ontologically different essence that destroys much of what it is designed to save in the saving process. When this loss is not interrupted by the ordinary senselessness of life, we are ensnared in a group of values that easily lose the mere burst of hilarity, the everyday struggle to survive, or the cry of simple desperation. We lose them in an effort to elevate them and to give them more than they have: meaning beyond all everyday meanings and truth with a quality of ‘ever’.

I doubt that we can hear each other well until we interrupt our senses of privilege and elevation and interrupt as well the meanings by which we perceive salvation from that which none of us is saved: the ordinary meaninglessness of everything that gives us meaning, and the simple disruption of all of our presumed continuities. Nietzsche’s account of the ascetic ideal is right in this, that whatever in our tradition saves and preserves seriousness concerning truth and meaning saves and preserves the very elements that are taken to be overcome by truth and meaning in their seriousness, and also that this inaudible preservation makes soundless the senselessness and disruption that it is intended to replace.

There is one paragraph in the “Letter on Humanism” in which Heidegger says that proper thinking is manifest in a part of his letter. This part goes beyond preparatory thought and enters into a more fitting saying of being. Prior to this observation he said that “historically only one saying belongs to the matter of thinking” (LH 42). Essential thinking “lets being be” (LH 42). It guides humans in their ek-static bearing with being into the region where healing arises and beings become hale (LH 43). This healing does not mask evil but makes it all the more apparent. “The essence of evil does not consist in mere baseness of human action, but rather in the malice of rage. Both of these, however—healing and raging—can essentially occur only in being insofar as being itself is what is contested” (LH 43). The nihilation of rage illuminates itself, is cleared, as having an essence, too. Destructive rage is in the history of being, albeit perversely. Its lost essence is the nihilation that belongs to being. Being’s nihilation is found in its not being a being; in its essence (it) is not, (is) other than existence. In that sense being’s withdrawal is nihilation. It is like a no to everything that is. Everything possibly definitive falls away from being. In its healing favor, however, being grants the fall; and when, in its falling away from being, human being closes on itself and is closed to being’s favor, a compulsion to degeneration and calamity takes place. Only if this rage that accompanies forgetfulness of being, the rage that is expressed in a society of consumption and manipulation, for example, only if it is thought in the healing gift of being can it undergo a quiet regeneration by returning to its favoring, never-destroying, granting essence. When falling from being is thought in its fall from being, dwelling in the house of being can take place (LH 43-44). Then the rage of separation from being is quieted before the granting that clears even for this rage. Malignant rage is never nothing. It, too, exists. Without the giving of being, instead of rage there would not have been . . .

Because the granting of being is always other than what is granted, the ‘evil’ that comes with the granting clearing of existence does not, in Heidegger’s thought, occasion a contamination of being. For Heidegger, being is not stained. We are seeing, however, that its freedom from contamination constitutes the pervasive stain of the ascetic ideal in the thought of being. This thought of being appears to be impossible without the ascetic ideal.

Further, from human “ek-sisting in the truth of being” can come the human’s true fortune and lot in life (LH 44). People can find their directions from the dispensation of being: one “abides” in the truth of being (LH 45). Human economy is ruled by this dispensation which, although it never tells a person what to do, provides the gift of being by which all things can be truly minded. In such minding of being, the human deed exceeds objectification. Thinking then “towers above action and production, not through the grandeur of its achievement and not as a consequence of its effort, but through the humbleness of its inconsequential accomplishment [Vollbringen]” (LH 45). Ek-sisting then can come to language, “for thinking in its saying merely brings the unspoken word of being to language. . . . Being comes, clearing itself, to language” (LH 45). Then, “ek-sistence thoughtfully dwells in the house of being. In all this it is as if nothing at all happens through thoughtful saying” (LH 45).

At this point Heidegger says: “But just now an example of the inconspicuous deed [Tun] of thinking shows itself. For to the extent that we expressly think the usage ‘bring to language’, which was granted to language, think only that and nothing further, to that extent we retain this thought in the heedfulness of saying as what in the future continually has to be thought, we have brought something of the essential unfolding of being to language” (LH 45-46). The moment of thinking to which Heidegger refers is not preparatory to essential thought, but breaks through separation from being to the thought of being as the words bring being to language and do what they say regarding “being that comes, clearing itself, to language.” In this deed, this event that unfolds the appeal of being in the fullness of its essence, human being comes to its essence and, by coming to it, thinks and “says” its essence. Its essence is brought to language. We have a moment in which “the sole matter of thinking” is thought, a moment that is joined by ‘the Same’ to essential thinking whenever it occurs in our heritage (LH 47, emphasis added). No evil can dwell in this moment, no technological madness, no misuse of beings. The danger, Heidegger says, is that we confuse the Same with a being, with something self-identical. Then ambiguity and “mere quarreling” constitutes the danger, and essential thinking does not occur. But without this confusion we can be in the dispensation of being in a fitting way: “The fittingness [Schicklichkeit] of the saying of being, as of the proper sending [Geschick] of truth, is the first law of thinking” (LH 47). Not the necessity of self-overcoming, not its own dangerousness, but the fit of the saying and the sending of being is the first law of thinking. Although being means for thought a continuous process of self-overcoming and experimentation in the preparatory aspect of thought—an aspect that is largely definitive of the best thought available to us—in the destiny of being, proper and fitting thought in a deed beyond manipulation and objectivation, in this abysslike mystery, there is neither self-overcoming nor corruption nor destruction. Rather, there is saving power, whose saying [Sagen] is the first law of thinking.

Further, the knowledge that being’s dispensation is saving power, that being is the sole matter for thinking, and that language can be fitting to the self-sending and fortune of being appears to be the lot of the essential thinker. This knowledge has the practical effect of providing certainty outside of the self-overcoming processes. A dispersion of the Same would be no less than the raging madness of language and thought ensnared in forgetfulness of being. That would be the effect of thought out of touch with its own being and proper heritage. The proper thought of being is not subject to dispersion or ambiguity or to any interruption other than that of its own advent. Instead of interrupting his own approach to being or interrupting the thought that being can be thought in a fitting way, Heidegger suggests a strategy of preparation that is based on the secure knowledge that being is the sole matter for thinking. He says that attention to the propriety of thoughtful saying means that we consider carefully when and whether we say anything regarding being. We must time our saying carefully, now assuming that our thought and language give being its proper sway, with reference “to what extent, at what moment of the history of being, in what sort of dialogue with this history, and on the basis of what claims, it ought to be said” (LH 47). The rigor with which we call being to mind, the carefulness of saying, and a frugality with words determine the strategic piety of this thought. Such careful gathering of language into “simple saying” restores thought “inconspicuously” to “the poverty of its forecasting essence” (LH 47). At this point in Heidegger’s thought, the die is cast for the indelible stamp of being. A version of poverty, chastity, and humility deeply marks this die.

Heidegger’s claims about being seem to place essential thought outside the sway of an ethos. On the one hand, he has relegated values to an activity in which the subject takes priority over being; he has seen that valuing is correlated with warring over the highest and most objective values. The effort to prove the objectivity of values is bizarre and foolish, he says. This effort does not know what it is doing (LH 34). Being is beyond value and valuing and puts ethics as such in question. But Heidegger exempts the thought (of) being from evaluation and judgment. It is set apart from the vicissitudes, accidents, and collisions of its heritage. Nothing intrinsically chaotic takes place in its proper middle voice. Unlike Nietzsche’s thought, Heidegger’s is never interrupted by the serious consideration that the essential thought of being is an error, that our philosophy has its origin in an error whose only ‘value’ is the negative one of interrupting the experience and life of the senses.⁵ Rather, Heidegger’s thought means that humans exist in an openness that has no disruption in its mystery. Its disruption of ordinary life is at once a calling of human life to its totally nonordinary and nonsensuous essence. Being (is) dispensation that sets the standard for interruptions, but is also openness that grants and never vacates.⁶ One part of its destiny in Heidegger’s thought in the “Letter on Humanism” is thus to forget its mortal temporality and to cast its mortality in a self-denying valuation that holds at bay its own interruption. In this sense, his thought (of) being, in its presumed and unqualified openness, seems to fall prey to its own thoroughly ethnic quality which privileges the Greek and German cultures and which sees no alternative to nihilism if its mysterious difference is traversed by nothing at all. In this dimension it exhibits the anxiety typical of the ascetic ideal.

2. Giving Thought to Simple Oneness

The fine line that we have followed divides the effect of the thought of being in human effort, in Heidegger’s account of it, and the continuous sameness of being as he speaks of it. In its withdrawal from any specification, being is like nothing at all and is like (an) abyss. In that sense it is also like chaos. It escapes meaning and has the effect of putting all specifying thought regarding it in error. Human being loses being, is always on the verge of being and nonbeing, and is at once abandoned and given by being.⁷ Being, in its oblivion, leaves room, as it were, for straying, forgetting, and, as we saw, the malicious rage of living as though being were not. The oblivion of being calls for a radical dismantling of our tradition which has thought of being as a being and puts in question all of our values and concepts which develop in this tradition. But the oblivion of being also is subject to recovery in essential thought, and the language that Heidegger uses regarding being in its recovery does not appear to incorporate a recoil away from being and its question, but rather to intensify its mystery, withdrawal, closeness, dispensation, and otherness. Being remains in question in its verge, but it also attracts an uninterrupted certainty and asceticism regarding it in Heidegger’s thought. The withdrawal of being at once preserves being from dispersion in its dispensation and highlights the mortality, separation from being, forgetfulness of being, and closeness of being for humans. The retrieval of the question of being, however, invokes a voice that is not circumscribed by human being. It is an ecstatic voice in which being as clearing openness, as disclosedness, is revealed in a highly disciplined and ontologically alert way of thinking. Both this way of thinking and being as (it) comes provisionally to Heidegger’s language incorporate the ascetic ideal as Nietzsche described it. How is one to live in this provisional and questing thought?

Toward the end of “Building Dwelling Thinking” Heidegger speaks of the loss of accord [Bezugsverlust] with things that occurs in states of depression.⁸ This loss of accord does not represent our abandonment by things or a void in the midst of things to which depression makes us alert. Things in their very essence are with us, and we in our essence are with things. Disclosedness constitutes a sameness pervasive throughout the world. In a delicate elaboration of being-in-the-world, Heidegger speaks of human dwelling as an abiding with things and locations. To dwell is to be, and to be is to be with things in their disclosures. When we are depressed, he says, we lose our rapport with things. We are still essentially with them and they with us, because human being is being with things. The feeling that we are closed off from things and that everything is at a great distance from us does not properly manifest human being. Human being “stays” with things, and depression includes a “failure” of things to concern us and to speak to us in their continuing disclosures. Feeling severed from things, we are quietly at odds with our being in our depression.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, found the anxiety and depression of those in need of the ascetic ideal to indicate a negative attunement in life in its threatening, severed, and meaningless dimensions. Their loss of vitality is a failure of nerve before the totally uncaring quality of vitality. Rather than lacking insight, they saw and heard clearly the chaos and absence that pervades all of life. Life-affirmation is not a retrieval of being and presence, not discovery of nurturance and sameness at the heart of things, but is rather a will to will in the midst of a process for which dismemberment is as revelatory as affiliation is. For Heidegger a depressed loss of rapport with things is stayed in (indwelt by) the disclosedness of present things. For Nietzsche, a depressed loss of rapport with things opens onto discord and strife that discloses no option to discord and strife. For Heidegger, depression is able to overcome by retrieving the rapport. For Nietzsche, depression is overcome by an affirmation of the discordant conditions of depression. Although Heidegger speaks of human being as verging on both being and no being at all, his emphasis falls heavily on the ecstatic, continuing, giving disclosedness of being—its sameness—which makes appropriate human renunciation of the primary importance of the ordinary, broken, sensuous world. Being is always the guiding star. Dwelling is one name for human communal life when it is guided by alertness to being as people build and think together. In it there is no cause for depression or madness. Its proper affection, we shall see, is that of serenity in association with a strict and critical attitude toward the ordinary world.

Dwelling for Heidegger thus names a basic way of life in which human living is guided by the dispensation of being. He raises the question of dwelling in this essay in 1951 at a symposium on Man and Space. It was a time of concern over the housing shortage in postwar Germany, a time when many people were homeless. His clear conviction is the war that has caused homelessness has its roots in a homelessness that is far more pervasive of Western culture than Germany’s specific plight.⁹ Homelessness accompanies human inattentiveness to being and a consequent fixation on production of goods, usage space, and satisfaction of needs that arise in deafness to being’s gift. Human being belongs to being, finds its home in a play of being’s dispensation and in a virtually unheard longing for being that arises in this originary kinship. To learn to dwell is to attempt to appropriate this kinship in the relations of humans to things. Dwelling is found as humans home in on and preserve the disclosedness of things in building their structures of communal life.

Although Heidegger gives no hint of the exaggerated hope for total cultural mobilization and transformation that motivated his Rector’s address, his purposes are nonetheless practical in this essay. He is addressing people who are concerned with the problem of housing and with rebuilding the bombed-out infrastructure in the German cities. He wants to provide a direction for planning and an exemplary way of thinking in the process of assessing and planning.¹⁰ They must rethink the usual approaches to solving social problems if they are to avoid the pathology that has led to the destruction of homeland. They could simply use the resources available to them to produce houses and buildings. They could once more clear the rubble and fill up the space with structures into which people would move with their furniture and equipment. But then nothing essential would have been changed. The environment would continue to appear ready for exploitation. Blueprints and traffic patterns would guide construction, and no thought would be given to the gift of being that makes possible the gathering of things and spaces into a region of communal life; communio, the sameness that makes a human environment, would seem to be a body of elements that are defined by human need and desire. Heidegger’s purpose is to rethink the sameness that makes possible a human community in which being, not our forgetfulness of being, not practical and charitable anthropocentricism, infuses the meaning and significance of building and dwelling. He is attempting to influence the reconstruction of Germany by tending to being’s gift of disclosure and to make more likely a society that is dedicated to its own disclosedness by its preservation of things in their disclosedness. It would be a society that does not destroy itself by a mordant, if well-intended, consumption of things for the purpose of further consumption. It would maintain itself in care of the simple oneness that gives all being in common.

This project entails a return to essential words that speak in alertness to this oneness, hold quietly a lost awareness, and withhold that awareness in their ordinary usage: “For with the essential words of language, what they genuinely [eigentlich] say easily falls into oblivion in favor of foreground meanings. . . . Language withdraws from man its simple and high speech. But its primal call does not thereby become incapable of speech; it merely falls silent. Man, though, fails to heed this silence” (LH 326). Heidegger’s plan is to heed the silence of the primal call of being in a few essential words as he assesses the environment out of which and to which he speaks, to give way to the saying of being that is hidden in them, and to uncover, by his language and thought, being’s dispensation of dwelling. The question of ethics continues. There is no normative group of values or way of thought that is able to set unquestioned standards. But the language of being also does not fall into question, and we shall find the ascetic ideal operating where the rule of self-overcoming and questioning leaves off.

If we mortals do not preserve our ecstatic kinship with being in the ways in which we build things and form spaces, Heidegger says, we will cultivate neither ourselves nor the things around us. The issue for him is one of advancing the growth and flourishing of things. Instead of marshaling the passions of conquest, ambition, and pride, through which Heidegger in his rectorial address hoped to lead the German people to the ecstatic transcendence of the question of being, he now appeals to desires for freedom, growth, and peace with the intention of giving priority to “the primal oneness” of being. Underlying his words is one of the fundamental questions of Being and Time, namely, how mortals are to care for their world. And, consonant with Being and Time, his conviction is that proper care can develop only if we give priority to the simple and unseamed disclosedness of being which both gives the world its clearing for life and in its difference from beings makes questionable all of our values and goals. Mortals are always of being—in the ‘voice’ of being—and in the loss of being. So how they maintain the question of being will define their way of dwelling. In maintaining this questionableness, this mortality, they take care of themselves and of things by not disturbing, covering over, or using up the disclosures that make up the world. They preserve the ecstatic relation of being that constitutes their mortality, that is, that constitutes their living. Mortality is being in the loss of being. This means that mortals most properly are “sparing” of the ecstatic occurrence of disclosure. Both the German word that Heidegger uses, schonen, and the English word, spare, that translates it indicate a relationship in which one preserves something by not using it up. Using up in this context means taking something over and giving it its definition by the way it is used. The frugality that Heidegger has in mind is a matter of letting things be, conserving them in their disclosedness, as distinct from relating to them primarily in their everyday usefulness. They are not primarily valuable; that is, they do not have their being by reference to either positive or negative valences. Before valuation, they are, and their care is found in efforts to be with them in our common being and loss of being.

“The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing” (LH 327). By sparing things we leave them to their own disclosure, respond to them in their disclosures, and preserve their free openness for relation. The word dwelling [Wohnen] has taken us to its own essential meaning: to leave things in the peace of their essence as we live and build with them (LH 325-27). We build with things in the manner that we dwell with them. We stay with them, allow them their place, with a strict discipline of sparing them, or saving them, in their being. In that staying we find ourselves at home in the world. Our dwelling then stands out from the concerns of daily life into the disclosures of things that mandate an allowing, restrained forbearance with things. Mortals then live in a fallen ecstasis of being—with being to spare.

This proper releasing of openness, an elaboration of Entschlossenheit with words that cannot be heard as indicating strength of will, finds its space in the “primal oneness” of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. The measure of propriety is the “simple oneness” of these four elements, a simple oneness that gathers into a space the nurturing earth, ethereal sky, presencing and withdrawing divinities, and humans who can die. This unfolding onefold that gives the space of dwelling is spared by human devotion to earth, sky, divinity, and mortals in their essential accord with being. We are to preserve their yielding and giving space, to devote our building and making to their dispensation of clearing space. An opposite to this devotion is found in primary concern for what we find ourselves wanting, our desires to project our physical and social needs onto the world in an insatiable drive to fill the vacuum that divides us from being. In that desire we use up, clutter, expropriate, and consume our resources. We build by filling spaces with no rapport with the yielding fourfold. We spend or accumulate resources rather than preserve disclosure. We make ourselves homeless in the strife and conflict of getting, expending, and owning. We lose the poverty of our mortality, our humility before disclosiveness in its yielding and withdrawing, and the chasteness of all things in their accord with being.

Heidegger leaves no doubt that life dispersed by energy given over to the many competing claims of existence, life insensitive to its own ecstatic essence, will occasion depression and homelessness. The abstemious and gentle option that he proposes, one that is filled with reverence for being in its simple oneness and its primordial divergence from anything specifiable, tends toward resolution of the question of ethics by single-minded devotion to being. Such devotion allows restitution of simplicity and unity to life, not by an excellence of virtue, but by an allowance of being in all relations. The severity of his judgment concerning ordinary relations is itself redeemed as things are saved in their essence from the mordant effects of anthropocentric values. Our economy is to be measured by a dispensation of being that can teach us how to live not primarily with virtue, but with reverence in which our mortal difference from being is honored and preserved in all actions. Until that devotion and reverence is approximated by our holding our being always in question, we shall not know how properly to think or act. Everything but our reverence for being is provisional. By that reverence a simple oneness can become audible beyond the fragments of our lives, like a call, finally, to home.

The gentle nurturance of Heidegger’s projected world accords with the nurturance he ascribes to being. Being’s withdrawal means that the home of mortals is a place of suffering and death as well as a place of care-filled attentiveness to the being of all things. But the yielding, giving provenance of being has absolute priority in Heidegger’s language. Exploitation, aggression, mere division and separation, erotic passion for its own sake, unconscious devices and manipulations to arouse interest and intensity in life, cruelty, the mindless drive for autonomy and self-esteem, indifference, simple will to survive: such living ‘things’ are to be understood only within the jurisdiction of being’s mysterious grace. In Heidegger’s language, being gives all such things their essence, their essential space in time, and it gives essence so thoroughly that even the language of causation fails to address adequately the radicality of being’s gift. Dispersing and aggressive things show the withdrawal of being, their fall from being, but their power of disclosure is negative in the sense that for Heidegger they open onto what they conceal and fall from. His thought can respond properly dispersing and aggressive things only when it thinks them in being’s dispensation, a dispensation in which they in their fall are continuously subjected to their ‘essence’ in the course of being’s magisterial withdrawal. In Heidegger’s economy, whatever does not nurture the disclosure of being departs from its essence as it lives out its nonnurturing drive. This way of thinking thus appears to hold within it a well-concealed despair over life outside of being’s priority. Without the simple, nurturing sameness of being, could life be worth living?

3. A Simple Conjunction

Being’s rule in Heidegger’s thought, we have found, is shown in two distinct ways. On the one hand, no formulation about being is final or complete and ethics is perpetually in question. Conversation and thought regarding being are never definitive and are always subject to reconsideration. On the other hand, the priority of being is not in question, and its priority provides Heidegger with a type of knowledge that tends toward a piety of certainty regarding the mystery of being and proper responses to this mystery. We turn now to Heidegger’s thought specifically regarding mystery by considering the relation of revealing to concealing. We shall find that it is a relation of conjunction that partially defines being’s mystery. It is mystery of simple unity without internal scission. This thought on Heidegger’s part is an elaboration of an ontological position that is informed by and supportive of that part of the ascetic ideal that emphasizes conjunction and unity. We shall find that the concealment of being does not put in question simple oneness, but rather is interpreted by reference to simple oneness. Being’s abysmal aspect is seamed by conjunction. Although human beings come to pass in the question of being, our questionableness, when properly appropriated, opens us to being’s clearing disclosedness and to the inadequacy of human being to grant being or to comprehend it. Being, however, is not transgressed by fall or dispersion. Although being is beyond translation and full embodiment in this world, it is transcendent in its simple oneness. This oneness is shown in Heidegger’s use of the word and to connect revealing and concealing.

We shall consider the ‘beyond’ of being in its simple oneness in the context of Heidegger’s meditation on Heraclitus’s sixteenth Fragment. Three issues are before us: In what sense will being not travel over and come to proper translation except by recognition of its concealment? How are we to understand the connection of concealment and unconcealment? And in what way does this connection address the question of how we are to live? We are raising the issue of the ontological connection between concealing and unconcealing, on the one hand, and between concealing and unconcealing and human dwelling, on the other, in the context of the remnants of the ascetic ideal in Heidegger’s thought.

Being, in its nearness, we found, is beyond human grasp. Although it can come to its own saying in language and thought, it cannot be translated (carried over) into any kind of objectivity or subjectivity. Our claims about being are thus properly subject to continuous rethinking. Essential thinking also requires a radical transformation of what we traditionally call thinking into a singular kind of commemoration of the question of being as it has had an impact on and has escaped from our heritage. In this commemoration being remains appropriately beyond any specificity that we might apply to it. It is beyond translation.¹¹

In his discussion of Fragment 16B, Heidegger emphasizes that he is not looking for an “objectively correct” interpretation of Heraclitus.¹² He intends to follow Heraclitus’s language as it points to the appropriating event [Ereignis] of concealment and unconcealment. Lanthanomai, for example, points to the conjunction of concealment and unconcealment. It says, “I am—with respect to my relation to something usually unconcealed—concealed from myself” (AH 108). He further indicates by a middle-voice formulation that the sameness of an event in this conjunction is expressed by me . . . pote: “something does not . . . ever . . . (what then?) . . . come to pass otherwise than as it comes to pass.” That is, something comes to pass of itself and out of itself. In the case of this phrase, the me, the negation, comes out of the event of coming to pass, reverts back to that event, and indicates an obscure sameness. Further, kruptesthai speaks of the self-concealing of phusis and elaborates its philia, its love, of self-concealing (AH 113). The self-rising of phusis and its self-concealing both complement the phrase “the not setting ever” in the context of his discussion. Both phusis and “the not setting ever” are, in their middle voice, occurrences in which concealing and unconcealing mean ‘the Same’. Conjoined by and, concealing and unconcealing mean that “never entering into unconcealment, it [phusis] is the enduring rising out of self-concealing” (AH 118). In the case of both Heidegger’s and Heraclitus’s phrase “thoughtful wonder,” unconcealing and concealing are meditated and released as they take place in and through their own event. This releasing meditation, in its middle voice, shows in its turn both unconcealing and concealing in the sameness of their event. It is thoughtful and alert, but also obscure and beyond the reach of categorical thought. Thoughtful wonder is a way of being that Heidegger contrasts to the self-showing but self-forgetful choosing and grasping [elesthai] that characterize the middle voice of the subjectivity of ordinary living. Concerning these instances of the middle voice, Heidegger speaks of “the purely appropriating event” that gives rise continuously to the question of lighting and making obscure, that is, to the occurrence of aletheia prior to our fixing assertions and certainty-giving choices regarding objects. Concealing and unconcealing are pervasive in the very issuance of activity and receptivity, and yet in their sameness they are beyond the reach of activity and receptivity.

Heidegger uses middle-voice structures to translate Heraclitus’s Fragment 16B so that it speaks now more clearly than it could in a language that excludes the middle voice. But Heraclitus’s thought is nonetheless beyond translation and is concealed in two senses: one is the concealed dimension out of which unconcealing ever rises, and the other is the untranslatability of Heraclitus’s obscure wonder. Both concealments are pervasive in the thinking and speaking in which Heidegger and Heraclitus mutually engage. By returning to the middle voice, Heidegger is able to say that concealment conceals (of itself) in the occurrence of unconcealment, without suggesting either activity or passivity in concealment and unconcealment. Only in this middle voice does the full wonder of concealment and unconcealment come to bear and does Heraclitus’s thought come home to us.

When we say that concealment is beyond translation, beyond indicates distance that is not to be overcome by any means of approximation. That is a nonrelational distance, one that does not call for conjunctive connection, but rather one that traverses and transgresses translational relations without incorporation or appropriation. Concealment has this quality, but Heidegger also qualifies this sense of distance when he speaks of concealment and unconcealment not as contraries or differing powers, but as belonging together in their difference as Same. For example, he says that Heraclitus means by the to me dunon pote—the not setting ever—that “both revealing and concealing—(are) not . . . two different occurrences merely jammed together, but (are) . . . one and the Same” (AH 112-13). This nearness is of the very event of self-showing, not as a formal essence or as a consequence of some pre-fixing action. As the occurrence of ever-rising, the Same is a nearness that reverts to itself in concealing and unconcealing and in its event is ever beyond translation.

Heidegger interprets this nearness of concealing and revealing in the language of sheltering and preserving which can be taken as elaborating the thought of beyond. Self-showing is sheltered and preserved in self-concealing. Self-showing “belongs” to self-concealing. There is a quiet withholding that suffuses the occurrence of self-showing, a holding back which yields the ‘ever’ quality of self-showing, which gives it place and pace. This self-preserving, saving aspect is of the self-showing event. It is the same in the event with self-showing, and it means that self-showing enjoys a reciprocity of revealing and concealing, a conjunction that happens as the event’s own given voice. Self-showing never goes into concealment. Conjoined with concealment, unconcealment is ever rising out of concealment.

On this reading the bestowal of presencing is composed of an almost unthinkable “intimacy” of concealing and revealing. Heidegger interprets this conjunction in the metaphors of love [philia], joining, an ever-rising movement toward one another, an ever-living fire of rising without extinction (AH 115-18). The meditative thinking that follows the ever-rising of self-showing is interpreted in the metaphor of gathering. “The meditative fire,” in the context of Heraclitus’s thought, “is the gathering which lays everything before us (into presencing). To pur is O Logos” (AH 118). In this thinking the world occurs as lightened and sheltered: ‘the not setting ever’ sets no more in this meditative thinking than it sets in the unconcealing of all other beings. A “consonance” runs through not only Heraclitus’s words, but through the near-rapturous, always ecstatic clearing that yields presence (AH 118). This consonance or joining, in its sameness of concealing and unconcealing, does not have the voice of fracturing or fragmenting. In the conjoining voice of and, no transgression traverses the Same. Concealing and unconcealing suffer no wound or injury, no intensified ‘yond’ in their event. Although they are beyond translation in their nearness, they are borne so intimately together in Heidegger’s thought that there is no scission in their voice, no distance, no splitting difference.

This is a voice that moves always toward a serenity of releasing and open dwelling. In such dwelling, presencing in its concealment is both commemorated and bestowed; self-concealing is recalled with alert and sensitive restraint and humility. Commemoration and sensitive restraint themselves yield presencing in self-concealment, and the circle of Same continues to speak in its voice of Same beyond identity and difference. At this point in his discussion, Heidegger asks,

Did Heraclitus intend his question as we have just been discussing it? Was what this discussion has said within the range of his concepts? Who knows? Who can say? . . . The fragment does say [the sort of thing we have said] provided a thoughtful dialogue may bring it to speak. The fragment says it, and leaves it unuttered. (AH 120)

The unuttered remains, in its own voice, in question, Heidegger says. And these questions always invoke only such things as were manifested long ago on those paths under diverse disguises.¹³ That distance and its disguises that Heidegger thematizes occur in our everyday and self-assured oversight of the mystery of revealing and concealing. People turn away from the yielding of presencing and toward “what is present” (AH 122). The familiarity of our ordinary connections voices a distance from the logos that gathers the presence of all connections. The middle voice of unthoughtful choice [elesthai] is that of separation from its own presencing, a voice of stupidity that lacks intimacy with what is closest and most bonded with it. The untranslatability of the concealing and unconcealing of presencing is not carried over in the occurrences of ordinary life, and the nearness of ungraspable mystery, of this splendid obscurity, is beyond the disposition of our ordinary predispositions and values.

Heidegger’s thinking, and Heraclitus’s thinking on Heidegger’s account of it, are processes of translating this beyond that transpires because of our traditional ways of living and experiencing. Heidegger is not translating revealing and concealing as such, but their nearness and distance. The voice of revealing and concealing with its untranslatability is retrieved by the middle-voice structures that replace our usual inclination to transform everything into subjects and objects. In its retrieval its untranslatability is protected, but the yielding, bearing, sheltering nearness that Heidegger retrieves also has the voice of untransgressed Same—a “wholesomeness,” a “self-keeping,” “self-restraining,” “self-veiling” voice (AH 123). This is a voice without fragment. Nothing un-dwells in it.

Heidegger’s thought is a questioning one not because revealing and concealing un-dwell in scission and fragmentation, but because being is always other to mortality and because our Western experience is constituted by forgetfulness of this otherness and the seamless, ungraspable occurrence of concealing and unconcealing. Our thinking is thoroughly seamed by the beyond of revealing and concealing. Our lives are ruled by the perversity of our historically developed indifference to being’s untranslatability. We live fragmentary lives, choosing hay rather than gold, in Heraclitus’s words, holding on to all that we can grasp in our distance from what is nearest to us. But the destiny of this distance is found in the dispensation of the obscure Same of revealing and concealing. It is a destiny that recalls us to dwelling in the connection of the concealing that yields presencing and of the revealing that gathers whatever is.

Heraclitus’s “not setting ever,” however, occurs in a fragment. The fragment’s historical setting, which Heidegger emphasizes early in his discussion, is one of vague recall, a group of phrases repeated from other fragments and scraps of hearsay. We have Fragment 16B because of the survival of Clement of Alexandria’s Paidagogos, in which Clement folds it into a Christian metaphor for divine life and presence. Heidegger unravels this weave and, instead of divine presence, finds in the fragment the thought of undecidable conjunction in concealing and unconcealing. The fragmented, piecemeal aspect of the transmission of this thought does not invade what is thought or the truth of the thinking event. The consequence of ignoring the dispersed and fragmented transmission is that an and rather than a slash connects concealment and unconcealment. Instead of a fragmented juxtaposition of revealing and concealing, Heidegger elevates the saying of the fragment beyond its fragmentation and gives to it conjunction without division. As a result, wholesome dwelling in commemoration of being, beyond and with the fragmentation of human life, is obscurely forecast by Heidegger’s questioning thought. The language of suffering, radical darkness, unthinkable transgression, madness, mindless separation, silent indifference, near and inappropriable difference—this language arises from our traditional and constitutive falling away from being, not from being’s fragmented quality, but from the Same of revealing and concealing. Our suffering is a voice of this human falling away, not of a fragmented and demented quality of presencing and truth.

Shall we say that Heidegger’s translation of Heraclitus overcomes the possibility of any transgression in revealing and concealing? Has Heraclitus the obscure shown us in Heidegger’s retrieval of him a way of dwelling with and beyond fragmentation by recalling the fragmentation of our ordinary lives? Has Heidegger’s Heraclitus gone beyond his own fragmentary presence in our language and thought? Or shall we say that Heraclitus’s fragments provide the space of both Heidegger’s and Heraclitus’s thought, that this space transgresses the conjunction that Heidegger adds to it? That the fragment interrupts the presumptive joining of revealing and concealing and, as the voice of fragment, makes unthinkable the conjoining and and Heidegger’s dwelling with it? That fragmentation and not Same name the voice of revealing/concealing?

By dividing the Same of concealing and unconcealing in Heraclitus’s thought from the transmission of this thought in fragments, Heidegger separates the translation of Heraclitus’s fragment from its historical transmission. In Heidegger’s translation, concealing and unconcealing ‘are’ Same and ‘are’ consequently quite beyond the broken words and fragments that gather ‘their’ thought. Unconcealing gathers words and fragments, but its concealing protects it not only from the exhausting mortality of historical circumstances, but also from the fragmentary manner by which unconcealing comes to us. Concealing and unconcealing neither flow nor fall apart in the breakage of historical life. Unconcealing is ever rising. The same voice of concealing and unconcealing has untranslatable distance in its historical life, forever beyond and with the fragmentation in whose voice we come to hear their obscurity. By thinking this fragmentation in the context of concealing we find a serenity that appropriates the fragment in its gathering and singular occurrence. The circle of Same is retained in the withdrawal of fragmentation. We read the and in this withdrawal. The conjunction restores the Same out of differentiation while bestowing the distance that traverses the thinker’s language. While Same is not translatable, the and is quite translatable in the retrieved distance between Same and language regarding it. ‘Concealing’ and ‘unconcealing’ are not Same because of the and. Yet the conjunction obscurely retains in Heidegger’s thought the untranslatable Same and preserves it from the fragmentation of a slash.

And yet. The and indicates by its double preservation, if not knowledge and justification of the Same, at least the restoration of concealing to unconcealing in our thought of it. This is a fragmented action, this restoration, an obscure retrieval of Heraclitus’s thought in the midst of the divisions of language and transmission. I find in Heidegger’s thought no voice for this restoration other than that of arbitration among the fragmentary possibilities that have formed the transmission of his thought. The voice of the and is one of interpretation in which are preserved the full range of fragments and divisions, only one of which gives the possible thought of Same. In this sense fragmentation seems to occur in the voice of Same as it comes to us in both Heidegger’s and Heraclitus’s thought. Heidegger’s projection of Same beyond fragmentation reveals a multiply fractured process of transmission which his thought submits to the rule of simple being.

The Same of concealing and unconcealing has in its destiny a piety that gathers differences into Same by a disciplined recall of the concealing nearness of unconcealing in the fragmentation of speaking and thinking. The signature of fragmentation—cycles of creation and destruction, exhaustion of meanings, ceaseless play of endings, departures without origins, the impulses and imagination of contentious eros—such things that Heidegger knew well, leave the Same unmarked and suffer a distinctive humiliation in his thought by virtue of the Same’s intimate withdrawal. The near difference to Same on the part of dispersed things means that a kind of poverty runs through the riches of ordinary life. No sense of eros excites Same. We have already noted the serene gathering of differences that characterizes the truth of this dwelling, and in this serenity is gathered as well the language of our tradition—destructured by Heidegger in its theological import—by which we recall the unspeakable mystery of Being and its yielding in the midst of all that is speakable and graspable. Concealing and unconcealing as Same are not subject to the breakage of fractured life. The conjunction and means that unconcealing is ever rising without breach. There appears to be no basis for destruction in the ever-rising of unconcealing: the ever-rising is the measure of the destruction of ordinary excess, pride, and valuation. Distance from the ever-rising, however, occasions loss of Same. This loss is part of the meaning of that dwelling by which the loss is recovered in alert attentiveness to the concealing of unconcealing. This recovery demands the asceticism of proper living, its gentle renunciation of the power of all that is only pleasurable, contrary, self-assertive, lustful, violent, retentive, and given to the world of competition and ambitious conflict. But the Same does not appear to generate our ordinary distance from it. It gathers in its severe distance, and in that sense the conjunction of concealing and unconcealing is apart from the movement of ordering life’s self-overcoming. It withdraws from this movement and is protected from it. The and conjoins where the movement of self-overcoming fractures.

Can we push Heidegger to the thought that concealing gives rise ever to the fragmentation of the very thought of unconcealing, or that fragmentation is the truth of unconcealing? Probably not, because for Heidegger the conjunction of revealing and concealing is beyond fragmentation. And this means that the and of concealing and unconcealing stands as a fragment over against the fragmented self-overcoming of every fragmented thought in a way that invites further questioning. If this conjunction stands over against the fragmented self-overcoming of fragments, then we may wonder whether dwelling in the thought of this conjunction might advance the nihilism of the ascetic ideal, whether it rules without question in a continuous humiliation of fragmentation without putting itself sufficiently in question to overturn the Same of concealing and unconcealing. In that case, the and of concealing and unconcealing would call for destructuring by the obscure force of the space that transmits it, fragments it, and turns it as a conjunction into an ungathering slash that leaves unjoined the concealing and unconcealing that it is designed to protect.

4. The Rule of Being in Gelassenheit

If our claims are correct, that Heidegger unjustifiably separates the Same of revealing and concealing from the fragmented process that makes the thought of Same possible, that the Same is a thought projected by the ascetic ideal, and that one of its purposes is to provide unity and an eternal (ever-rising) source of life and meaning in the midst of the world that otherwise gives no privilege to life and meaning, then the kind of dwelling that Heidegger idealizes appears to have as its basis the value of the Same. This basis has the valence, the power, to direct people away from meaningless fragmentation and toward gentle communion together in association with all things. The danger is that such gentle communion will also have the unappropriated power to fracture and fragment, to become a nurturing ethos that projects its opposites as perverse and unworthy, the power to defeat them by humiliation and a type of surveillance and conquest that are consistent with the ethos. We shall look first at Gelassenheit and its attractive possibilities for developing a human ethos. We shall conclude by considering the limits of its rule and ask about the fragments of voices that in its insulation it drowns out.

A. A STRONG CASE FOR CLEARING RELEASE [GELASSENHEIT]

In the context of the question of ethics, Heidegger’s thought is a region of language—we can call it an ethos—which develops out of transformations of metaphysical thinking. It overcomes the priority of subject and will by maintaining the unresolvable question of being, obliviousness to which yielded the priority of subject and will. The effect of Heidegger’s thinking takes place as one undergoes the transformations of metaphysical thinking that occur in the process of his discourse. These transformations are forecast by the transformation that takes place in Being and Time: time is rethought in an open and free resolve regarding the continuous mortality of human being and of the human world. A different discourse develops out of this rethinking, a transformation of thinking regarding origin, purpose, and being. Interest in overcoming mortality or finding something deathless for thought and hope becomes less functional. The thorough historicity of being and thought can be reconsidered without the metaphysical polarities of time and eternity, relative-absolute, or contingent being and necessary being. Heidegger’s thought is moved by questions that have been traditionally suppressed and that show the deep uncertainties, the fearful projections, the gaps and severances that constitute our tradition of thought. In the movement of the question of being, that question, which is constitutive of the meanings and connotations of our philosophical history, explicitly moves thinking. Instead of being obscured by words and thought, in Being and Time the question of being is made manifest by words and thoughts. Two things happen. First, the language and thought that carry the question of being explicitly have themselves been formed in resolutions that override the question of being. Language and thought are changed in their functions and meanings in the processes by which the question of being is developed and maintained in Being and Time. Second, the language and thought in Being and Time also tend to cover the question of being with their meanings, which developed when the question of being was largely ignored. The simultaneous obscurity and manifestness of the question of being occur again in this language, but now as an explicit and formative part of the language. A different way of thinking begins to come out of this obscurity and manifestness in the thought of being, and in Heidegger’s work the direction of this thinking is toward a way of thinking in which the very thought of being seems to be undergoing transformation, transmutation, and passing away.

Something similar though much less developed happens in his writing regarding the question of ethics. This issue is closely associated with the question of being, but it is not so clearly thematized. The question, we found, occurs in studies related to authenticity, truth, dwelling, and difference. In the present context we can state the question in this way: How have we human beings been separated from each other in our world in such a way that our divergences of language and thought have resulted in dispute and destruction? I state the question this way in order to highlight the significance of our tradition’s experiences of ethea which we discussed in the last chapter. We are formed of cultural differences on which depend our senses of belonging, our particular senses of being. But they are also differences in the absence of a nomos that transcends an ethos or a confederation of several ethea. The question of ethics thus arises in the severance and nomadism that are constitutive of our commonalities. We have noted that some of the most cherished values of our ethos are kept in Heidegger’s language, such as affirmation of thinking, peace without destruction, and nonmanipulative enhancement of differences. But another dimension of his thinking puts these values in question. At the center of his thought is the ontological difference between being and beings. It is a difference that is traditionally affirmed. The thought is that being is not a being, but in Heidegger’s work this ontological difference gives in our tradition a continuous fissure in attempts to think or to apply in everyday life the essential unity or identity of being. The pervasiveness or nearness of being in our traditions means, in its difference from beings, the pervasiveness or nearness of gaping and severance, not unlike mere space or complete silence. “Difference” pervades our talk, thought, and practice regarding life and its commonalities. This constitutive gaping, indicated by the ontological difference between being and beings, means not only the absence of one substantia, but also the ethnic discontinuous quality of our various nurturing fields of axioms, rules, and principles. If one tries to overcome the strife-yielding differences among beings by appeal to the nature of being, one perpetuates those differences by setting a group of axioms, rules, and principles over other groups that will, in turn, fight for their ways of belonging. Being will not translate into values that are universal for human beings. This is a descriptive claim: that ethical solutions to problems of destructive differences tend to perpetuate destructive differences by ways of thinking and acting that ignore or blindly attempt to override the inevitable fact that, in our traditions, commonalities are partial and regional. There appears to be no basis in the heart of our history for a continuing harmony provided by an essential identity pervasive for all differences.

If we accept this description as accurate, we might work within an ethos that has the goal of allowing differences and developing a “dia-logos” out of the allowing processes. The inevitability of ethea and their many ways of dwelling is allowed. This inevitability is affirmed in the intention to hear, speak, and think without an overarching field of principles for establishing right or goodness. But this is far less than we have been taught to hope for, and it suggests that even our best hopes, when they look for a final nómos, carry destructive separation from the fragmented bases for human community.

Heidegger’s effort to allow the priority of differences to emerge with awareness in his thinking has become possible in large measure because the priority of the difference between being and beings was thematized in his early work in the question of being. One result of this question is that in Heidegger’s thought the thoroughgoing fragmentation of Western culture is given thematic focus. Heidegger’s thinking itself must be seen as a fragmenting focus in which ethnic belligerence becomes optional as this thinking holds itself in question. The ontological differences of being and beings mean that a peculiar distance, a cut, a fundamental difference vis-à-vis what exists and the essential possibility for existence is in our language regarding all things. If we follow differences, ontological distances, unfathomable mysteries, and above all the relations of domination and violation, we follow the destiny in our culture of the ill-considered ontological difference of being and beings. We have seen this cut already in the structures of ethea, structures that are both of belonging and of hostile violence.

As Heidegger brings to awareness the significance of this difference in our language and thought, he develops a way of thinking that does not constitute one more ethic that aspires to superiority and dominance. He develops with his discourse awareness of the pervasive strife of difference in the history and structure of his own discourse. His is to be a kind of thinking, a dwelling place, that anticipates its own overcoming. By giving priority to difference, to conversation that makes difference its space for dialogue, and to self-overcoming, this way of thinking provides conditions that might erase the dimension of violent hostility that has constituted many types of traditional ethical thinking. The options in our traditions that most attracted Heidegger were focused on dwelling. He attempted to let the freeing, homing aspect of ethos restate itself in a way that erased the belligerent stubbornness in its development. The language of Western mystics, distanced from the imposing structures of creed and worship, helped Heidegger to dislodge the dominance of the ethnic subject in the history of Western experience. The possibilities of dwelling with things in the language of disclosure, not of calculation, helped still more. He found, particularly in early Greek thought, the possibility for speaking and thinking in which things are allowed to be in their own self-showing ethos, a language and thinking that give way to the clearing release of beings. These possibilities give hope that one might think without the domination of one ethos and without the consequences of that domination: the privileging of self, judgment, calculation, and representation.

These possibilities are to be pursued only with the greatest tentativeness. The assertiveness and hard-nosed certainty that we intuitively demand when we feel ourselves to be at our best constitute rejection and suppression of the language and thinking that begin to emerge in Heidegger’s work. The possibility exists to appropriate the ontological difference in our heritage in such a way that differences are addressed without interest in domination. That kind of address cannot be carried out in the discursive functions, emotions, and intentions that develop with the dominations of ethnic rightness and goodness. This is a quandary, because without control in an ethos of well-chosen values, we are surely doomed to nomadic violence of the worse kind. But another kind of nomadic violence on a grand scale among large, overpowering ethea appears to be inevitable in a heritage in which ethnic rightness and goodness mean that those who live in that ethos have the right to overcome others by disputation, conversion, or the imposed control of law.

If the “free space of opening” could give us our thoughts and names, perhaps a world appropriate to our own deepest history and experiences might emerge, a world that appropriates being’s abysmal difference from beings and appropriates as well the consequent privilege of differences in relation to founded, universal values. But how is one to begin? How is one to face this dark obscurity, the free clearing, in common with other people who live according to very different values? One modest option can be found in a way of speaking together.

Is it possible to converse in the domain of free and open clearing as distinct from a region that is circumscribed by a given body of meaning and value? If we are able to let the dominance of will pass away, for example, without the intentions of asceticism or self-sacrifice, without the idea of God or the patterns of universal law or the way of Christ, but let the dominance of will pass away in the puzzling experience of things coming to presence, do words and thoughts then form that carry with them not only their own release but the “release of presence” by language and thought? Can “dif-ference” happen with alertness as people converse together so that beings are released to their differences without ethnic judgment? Will a way of being together develop in which the priority of valuing and judgment changes to a very different kind of affirmation, one that is appropriate to the granting of being in its difference of beings? Heidegger’s essay “The Conversation on a Country Path” engages in such an experiment.¹⁴

This is a conversation among three academics who pursue the possibility of speaking and thinking without giving priority to willing or representation. They develop a slow, careful rhythm of finding words and names for nonvolitional occurrences. They work together to keep in mind primarily the word Gelassenheit ‘clearing release’, which names what they come to suspect is a dimension of speaking and thinking that can take place in ways about which they are unclear. They release themselves easily from Meister Eckhart’s Christian assumptions and language, which gave context to Gelassenheit in his writing. They emphasize the word now by assuming that they do not know exactly what they are talking about when they use it. The word and what it names are, however, equally available. They say the word in a variety of contexts and cultivate a waiting sense, listening to what the word can say in the contexts. They develop among themselves a state of mind characterized by uncertainty and waiting without despair or definite expectation. The image is one of being on a path, like wanderers. The path is already there, and they are already on it when they notice it, but it is not defined by a specific destination, as a highway or a road would have. They feel alert and in the open, and the path they are on accentuates the openness around them. This openness is not like an infinite expanse, but is like a region in which the path goes its way. The region pervades and rests in its path, its countryside, its fences and fields and buildings. It is like a language or a way of thinking that pervades whatever is said and thought.

The three people use a variety of words to speak of this pervasive allowance: sheltering, abiding, resheltering, withdrawing and returning, coming to meet us, regioning, release. They find that their own releasing uncertainty about thinking and Gelassenheit, their bearing of alert waiting and exploring, put them in touch with the dimension of clearing release in their own conversation. Their lack of prescriptiveness attunes them to the nonprescriptiveness that takes place in speaking and thinking. The more they are released from demanding or insisting thought, the more a dimension of speaking and thinking emerges that is different from the language of force, drive, intention, system, or subjectivity. Their own attunement is puzzling to them. It increases their uncertainty and their alertness. It draws them into the conversation, encourages their speaking and thinking, gives them an issue for which their best prescriptions and methods are ill-suited. Their gelassene attunement returns them repeatedly in their conversations to the gelassene region of thinking and speaking, and they do not know what that means. Something abides in their conversation that they can neither will nor represent. It neither solves nor resolves. It does, however, seem to bring them together through release and to occasion increasing interaction.

What the three academicians attempt to think happens among them. In the process of their conversation, they find themselves increasingly attuned to each other through or in something else for which they are trying to find fitting words. They find themselves getting closer to the nearing effect of language and thinking, and by the end of the conversation they are in sufficient accord with each other and their subject matter to complete appropriately each other’s thoughts and sentences. They find that their ideas are formed in the situation of release, uncertainty, and the clustering of fitting words. The transformation that develops is a process of which they find themselves a part. But the transformative process in this conversation is not like that of transvaluation in Nietzsche’s discourse or “de-structing” in Being and Time. The conflict and overcoming that characterize those processes are no longer present. This conversation is gentle in the sense that transvaluation and de-struction have themselves been left aside. The overwhelming, undercutting transmutation and the often violent recasting of words and thought that occurred in the transformation of metaphysical thinking have been released in this interaction, and this experience of release seems to open into a dimension of thinking that was as closed to transvaluation and de-struction as it was to their progenitor, metaphysical thinking. The conversation has no element of strife to overcome. It lacks the desire to cut (or slash) through disagreement or to establish definitive word combinations.

The pressure for academic success is gone. There is no need to establish dominance or to carve out an excellent achievement. There is no fear of thoughtful closeness and intimacy. Something else is taking place. Instead of being like a process of bifurcation, the time of the conversation is more like a nearing of differences. Instead of mortal care, the being of this conversation is like an open way to wait. Instead of the metaphors of seeing, those of hearing seem best suited to the released waiting. The activity of the three people, which is hard, concentrated work for them, does not reflect back on itself, but is more like the effort involved in stepping back from one’s characteristic, intuitive hold on things so that something else can take place with more freedom and attention than is otherwise the case. The three participants find that words come together in this process and that different thoughts form that indicate the situation of release rather than a situation of determined and well-intentioned effort.

Heidegger’s way of thinking in this conversation is unmarked by the determined struggle that characterizes his own and other ways of thinking that struggle to overcome metaphysics. In that sense, his conversation is beyond both metaphysics and its overturning. When one thinks within this conversation, the differences among ethea become occasions for dialogue without dominance or recalcitrance. The participants continually differentiate, seek no center, and find thinking to be like a shapeless clearing, like being in the midst of beings, that gives presence and occasions the demand of learning how to speak and think beyond the limits of self-interested ways of life. This modest option cannot quiet our fears of living beyond ethical thought. But it can be taken as one beginning in which our culturally dominant solution to the problem of differences among ethea has begun to be rethought without the violence bred of the dominant classical ‘solutions’ to sharp differences of value and meaning.

B. THE LIMITS OF BEING’S RULE

Being does more, however, in Heidegger’s discourse than provide the ontological difference and the question of ethics. Its dispensation is found in the ‘it gives’ of every temporal moment. Even in Time and Being, a text in which the prominence of being fades, the ‘it gives’ and allowance of presence continue the emphasis that Heidegger consistently placed in being’s dispensation. In this emphasis Heidegger has sought a transformation of Western culture with its inevitability of destruction. This inevitability constitutes the traditional priorities of subjectivity, will, judgment, calculation, use, and consumption. Heidegger’s thought made cultural transformation a continuing goal from the time of his rectorial address. To rethink the question of being is to approach a way of life that recognizes our unhealable distance from being and that struggles to find ways whereby humans can retrieve a transforming care for the being of all things. The allowing of presence—a love of presencing—is one of the moving passions in Heidegger’s discourse. It is one that calls for both radical dissatisfaction with our culture and transformation of our communal lives. The rule of being calls for a society of almost monastic restraint before the human ability to invade, destroy, and use up. Everything but the yielding of presence is dangerous.

In this sense, Heidegger’s thought reinstates the ethical at a “higher” level: the rule of being with its call for judgment regarding the everyday and the transformation of traditional patterns of life is beyond question. It ‘gives’ the entire question of ethics, and in its giving reinscribes an authority beyond definition and control. The rule of being functions like a countenance before which we are always falling and failing and before which we live and die. It has a surveillancelike quality in Heidegger’s thought: it yields life and death, is the coming to presence of those states that most contradict it, inspires awe and anxiety in its difference and withdrawal from human existence, and is the concealing disclosure of everything. It gives us nothing to do that is universally narrative, but its nearness in our existence is inescapable. We do nothing without being’s nearness, and its intimacy is awe-inspiring as we fall from it, forget it, or violate it. Its violation means nihilism. Our forgetfulness of it means destruction and severe loss. Falling from it means suffering. Appropriating its “nearing nearness” means saving power with people and things. Recognizing its withdrawal means hope for disciplines of life-giving restraint. Commemorating it properly releases human beings to life-processes that are nurtured by being and to a life deeply attuned to its own ‘essence’. By appropriating our forgetfulness of being we find renewed life before the primal, acausal, ever-concealing, ever-rising origin that we can never be, but in the commemoration of which we are beyond ourselves in a destiny that comes to pass outside of our comprehension, and yet comes to pass as the home of our dwelling.

In the context of the question of ethics and the nurture/hostility syndrome of any ethos, the rule of being in a life dedicated to clearing release gives emphasis to the allowance of differences in their disclosedness. This emphasis is Heidegger’s strongest response to the defensive hostility that characterizes an ethnic structure. Preservation of disclosure is the hallmark of Gelassenheit’s own disclosure. The sameness of being regulates the propriety of this way of being. Instead of hostility to other’s values, an attunement to the sameness (not of human nature as one or another ethos defines it, but to the sameness of being that transcends ethnic difference) regulates people’s perception and reception of meanings and values. An affirmation beyond value is the guiding affection that we saw operate in the conversation on a country path.

This claim, however, means that ‘affirmation beyond value’ is not itself a value or an ethnically developed power. Although one aspect of Heidegger’s thought makes being the thought of Western culture, his stronger claim is that being is not ethnically dependent, but is the ethos-giving, presence-yielding mystery wherever is can properly be said. This universalizing tendency can be seen in the boldness and confidence with which Heidegger turns away from the possibility that the sameness of being is but a fragment of chaos. The issue is not one of sameness and unity, but of the jurisdiction of sameness and unity with regard to their absence. The questions we are raising are whether in this rule its own strife and difference can be heard, whether the mere sensuality of pain and pleasure can be heard adequately, whether the cry of the other in its meaninglessness can be heard through the voice of being’s sameness.

To incarcerate meaninglessness and absence of sameness—mere dispersion—in disclosiveness, to suppress the sounds of what is most thoroughly excluded by being’s rule, namely no being at all, undwelling, and fragmentation of being’s sameness—to miss these sounds is to cultivate insensitivity to what we, in the heritage of ascetic ideal, most desperately want to hear. I am not sure that clearing release on a country path can be attuned to the singularity of human meaninglessness and can respond to it and in it except by distortion and blind affiliation with it. Heidegger clearly could not put Gelassenheit in question. Neither he nor I know what that means. I (and probably he) fear the consequences of that questioning. Can we live in dispersion without a final sameness? Can we live without the ever-rising countenance of being, veiled and magnificent in perpetual withdrawal and perpetual affirmation? Can we be unshepherded, unherded, as we yield in the it-gives? Can we be lost to order in our orders? Lost to disclosure in our disclosures? Lost to sameness in our ‘essence’? Can we hear our own question as we affirm with confidence the sameness of being?

5. “We Need Desperately to See in the Dark”

The ascetic ideal is one of our clearings, perhaps our most effective one, in which and by which we see things connected, manifesting their meanings, and evoking from us those sacrifices that keep the clearing inflamed by light and truth. The sacrifice is no more manifest than in the distance that writing maintains from everything but the written. We have joined Heidegger in this sacrifice, that the written has held our fixed attention, and the unwritable is either held at bay or is transformed by writing. Consider, in the context of what is most feared in the ascetic ideal, what cannot be written: darkness that is merely there and refuses light and the circumference of light; emptiness without figure, sound, or movement; disordered confusion beyond the reach of grammar; sensations in their moments of pleasure and suffering; satisfactions of taste; a passing stirring scent; a rumble in the belly; loss of presence as a meaningful thing evaporates in our experience and our experience becomes a vapor. In writing about such things, and also in thinking them, a different world begins to form whose distance means not only a sacrifice of the thing written about, but a new (or slightly new) order, certainly fragile and filled with discord and ambiguity, but order nonetheless. The power of the ascetic ideal and the attraction of texts cannot be separated: the power of the lighted text, the power of words, the attraction of ordered lives that, in their order, allow their disorder but keep away the darkness of no light at all, and that inspire an obsession to write and read again and again, a reader’s/writer’s compulsion to know in the truth and light of script. We have not escaped the ascetic ideal in our writing of it.

But the sacrifices of the ascetic ideal go beyond those of the text’s distance from the nontext. We have found what we can now interpret as a certain desperation in Heidegger’s thought, a questionableness that could not be eradicated by his obsession with the question of being, and a desperation that he held in common with the ascetic ideal. Darkness demands illumination, and not by a fragile and tentative light, but by one that is ever-rising and that is conjoined with—that illumines—its concealment even as it withdraws in concealment. This desperation does not find its origin in illumination, but in the question of ethics in which our sense of life and death comes to pass and fades away. How are we to live with this anxiety? By turning it against itself and producing thought that gives the comfort of ceaseless being? By turning the event of wonder into a kinship with the ‘essence’ of life? This anxiety produces enormous effort to eradicate whatever undercuts the saving sameness of being, whatever symbolizes radical fragmentation and mere difference. On Foucault’s account, madness projected that anxiety in the seventeenth century. And in our time, would it be a totally noncommunal aspect of human life? A complete absence of the worshipful? An absence of the Same? The destructive dimensions of heroism? The hopelessness of human life? Would the marks of such things enrage us, enflame us, in our clearing release, our bonds of love, our common humanity, and cause us to contain or eradicate them in the thought of ever-rising, abysmal being? In the clearing release of thought?

And if the question of ethics persists to such a point that the question of being and the conjunction of revealing and concealing are fragmented in their authority for thought, would we have found an opening beyond the ascetic ideal’s horizon, beyond the boundaries of the Western ethos of being’s rule to an uncertainty whereby the mere cry of the other could be heard? If we appropriated and gave rein to this uncertainty of ours, would other holocausts occur? Would we care less? Would we be more attuned to the dangers of our highest values? Would we take delight in strife? Would we be less desperate before the darkness of human life? Would desperation transpire, as Nietzsche thought, into a joy of life that gives affirmation no ontological privilege?

I do not know the answers to these questions. I suspect that in coping with them, as we maintain the question of ethics, we will find that our values and their evaluation have generated blindly some of our worst pain—because of the desperation by which we have sought to see in the dark.