Wilberg (HPIT) – As Sutras de Heidegger

Heidegger’s ‘Discourse on Thinking’, first published in 1959, includes two remarkable and profound pieces – his Memorial Address in honour of the German composer Conradin Kreutzer, and his ‘Conversation on a Country Path’. In his introduction to the English translation of both pieces, John Anderson notes how they carry forward a significant shift in ground from Heidegger’s earlier thinking on Being and Time   — a shift acknowledged by Heidegger himself in his collection of essays, published in the same year, entitled On the Way to Language.

“I have forsaken an earlier position, not   to exchange it for another, but because even the former position was only a pause on the way. What lasts in thinking is the way.”

Anderson summarises the essential nature of the meditative way of thinking that Heidegger introduces in the Discourse as follows:

“… it is a thinking which allows content to emerge within awareness, thinking which is open to content. Now thinking which constructs a world of objects understands these objects; but meditative thinking begins with an awareness of the field within which these objects are, an awareness of the horizon   rather than of the objects of ordinary understanding. Meditative thinking begins with an awareness of this kind, and so it begins with … the field of awareness itself.”

Openness and receptivity to this field of awareness is described by Heidegger as ‘releasement’ (Gelassenheit  ). Heidegger names the field itself using a variety of related terms such as ‘region’ (Gegend), ‘regioning’ (gegnen) and ‘that-which-regions’, all of which stand   in a dynamic relation to the German word for an ‘object’. This word (Gegenstand  ) implies something which stands over and against (gegen) the observer, as opposed to the open ‘field’ or ‘region’ in which it first comes to stand out or ‘ex-ist’ as an object. The question then arises as to the nature and ‘horizon’ of this field or region, a question addressed in the Conversation first of all in relation to our visual field of awareness:

Teacher: We say that we look into the horizon. Therefore the field of vision is something open, but its openness is not due to our looking.

 

Scholar: Likewise we do not place the appearance of objects, which the view within a field of vision offers us, into this openness …

 

Scientist: … rather that [appearance] comes out of this [field] to meet us (begegnen  ).

 

Teacher: What is evident of the horizon, then, is but the side facing us of an openness which surrounds us; an openness which is filled with views of the appearances of what to our re-presenting [in thought] are objects.

 

Scientist: … But what is this openness as such, if we disregard that it can also appear as the horizon of our re-presenting?

 

Teacher: It strikes me as something like a region, an enchanted region where everything belonging there returns to that in which it rests.

The region is therefore that ‘open expanse’ in which things do not even stand over and against us as objects but rather “rest” or “abide” in their nature and origin – “the region”. Yet as Anderson notes, the spatial expanse of the region is not a vacuum or a static sphere of emptiness or ‘non-being’. That is because its horizon, as a boundary, must by its very nature have another side to it than the one facing us — a ‘transcendental  ’ side. The transcendental side of the horizon is the active “regioning of the region” or “that-which-regions”. For it is that which comes to meet us as the horizon of our field of awareness, and that which first opens the expanse of that field for us within that horizon. But what of the nature or self-being of “that which regions” – what it is ‘in itself’ rather than purely ‘for us’?

Scientist: But that-which-regions and its nature can’t really be two different things – if we may speak here of things at all.

 

Scholar: The self of that-which-regions is presumably its nature and identical with itself.

 

Teacher: Because that-which-regions regions all, gathering everything together and letting everything return to itself, to rest in its own identity.

The phrase ‘its own identity’ however, cannot be taken as referring simply to the identity of any given thing, for that in turn consists in abiding in its own origin – in that-which-regions itself.

No one familiar with Indian religious thinking can fail to hear in this discourse an echo   of the Shaivist notion of caitanyamatma — that ‘self’ whose true ‘identity’ consists in abiding in its own origin – the universal awareness field (Shiva) within which the open expanse and horizon of each individual’s awareness opens up. And “to abide in the origins of its nature” is Heidegger’s very definition   of ‘Ayran’ in its root meaning of ‘the noble’.

Nor can we fail to recognise in this and other parts of Heidegger’s Conversation a profound restatement of the essence of yoga as a path leading the individual back to their true self, and thereby also to freedom, liberation or ‘releasement’ in this life (jivanmukta). Heidegger’s ‘way’ is kriya yoga as Patanjali described it, but understanding the renunciation of ‘egoic’ action and thinking as an active “step back” into an awareness prior to all thought and a renouncing of wilful action and thinking.

Scientist: Now authentic releasement consists in this: that man in his very nature belongs to that-which-regions, i.e., he is released to it.

 

Scholar: Not occasionally, but – how shall we say it – prior to everything.

 

Teacher: …. Because the nature of thinking begins there.

 

Scientist: Thus man’s nature is released to that-which-regions in what is prior to thought.……

 

Teacher: And so, abiding in his origin, man would be drawn to what is noble in his nature. He would have a presentiment of the noble mind.

 

… a patient noble-mindedness would be pure resting in itself of that willing, which, renouncing willing, has released itself to what is not will.

 

As for worship (puja), understood as a mode of giving thanks, this thanking, understood as the very essence of noble-minded thinking, requires no ‘being’ to thank and no ‘thing’ to thank for, besides a “being allowed to thank”.

 

Scholar: Noble-mindedness would be the nature of thinking and therefore of thanking.

 

Teacher: Of that thanking which does not have to thank for something, but only thanks for being allowed to thank.

This understanding of meditative thinking and thanking must be placed in contrast with its shadow and counterpart – that “calculative thinking” that Heidegger described as the order of the day in the era of global technology. In the Memorial Address it is this ‘thinking’ that is addressed and brought to our awareness in no uncertain terms.

“Such thinking remains calculation even if it neither works with numbers or uses an adding machine or computer. Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time ever more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which meditates the meaning which reigns in everything that is.”

This thinking is above all a wilful thinking, aimed at the calculated manipulation of anything and everything. Presciently, Heidegger cites the words of an American chemist, uttered at a meeting of Nobel Prize winners in 1955: “The hour is near when life will be placed into the hands of the chemist who will be able to synthesise, split and change living substance at will.” Heidegger’s comment:

“We take notice of such a statement. We even marvel at the daring of scientific research, without thinking about it. We do not stop to consider that an attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life and nature of mankind compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little.”

The will to manipulate and exploit living substance itself, however is but an expression of the essence of calculative thinking as wilful thinking – not patiently pre-meditated thinking but pre-motivated thinking. Even the simple will to re-present things in thought is a form of willing.

Scientist to Teacher: … You want a non-willing in the sense of a renouncing of willing, so that through this we may release, or at least prepare to release ourselves to the sought-for essence of a thinking that is not a willing.

 

Scientist: With the best of will, I cannot re-present to myself this nature of thinking.

 

Teacher: Precisely because this will of yours and your mode of thinking as re-presenting prevent it.

 

Scientist: But then what in the world am I to do.

 

Scholar: I am asking myself that too.

 

Teacher: We are to do nothing but wait.