Sallis: Earth

But what of the earth in Heidegger’s discourse? What does earth mean? Is this a possible question within Heidegger’s discourse, the question of meaning? No doubt one can elaborate certain meanings, certain senses, of earth as it functions in such texts as "The Origin of the Work of Art." Michel Haar   has done so with care and precision, delimiting and discussing four distinct senses of earth. First, earth belongs to the dimension of withdrawal, of the concealment that holds sway in unconcealment, of the lethe   that belongs to aletheia  . Second, it is linked to what has been called nature and, in the Greek beginning, physis  . Third, it constitutes the material in the work of art; here Haar draws the important corollary that the earthy material is what remains of the work of art when its world has disappeared, that this element is what allows one in another epoch to encounter the force and beauty of an artwork of the past, that it is what — to cite Haar’s beautiful example — allows the hieratic flash of the mosaics in Ravenna to touch us with a grace that henceforth escapes their world. Fourth, earth is the native soil (heimatlicher Grund  ), not   as the ground of a biological or vital rootedness, not as one’s factual place of birth, but as the Heimat that is both given and yet chosen, the homeland where one has learned to come into one’s own. One can even — as Haar also does — seek to unify these senses in the singular thought of a non-foundational foundation. And yet, every [xiii] such discourse on the meaning of the earth will remain questionable, will remain exposed to the recoil of what is said back upon the very saying. For, within the Heideggerian discourse, meaning is determined by reference to a horizon   or, more precisely, a world; it is from the world that all things within the world receive their meanings. But the earth is not something within the world; it is not a thing at all. It is rather what, in originary strife with the world, remains always also withdrawn from the world and the measure provided by the world. To undertake to say what the earth means is to risk submitting it to that measure, to the rule of the world, violating, as it were, its non-sense. Unless, perhaps, one also says that the earth means nothing, interrupting thus every delimitation of sense by opening it onto an abyss. Little wonder that Haar lets the question obtrude: On what basis can we say the earth? And it is at that very moment that he alludes to the Platonic chora and to the "bastard reasoning" that seems the only recourse for one who, like Timaeus, would speak of what withdraws from speech. (Foreword, p. xii-xiii)