Temporality, World, Enframing

Introduction

In Martin Heidegger’s “Memorial Address” the philosopher raises the problem of the “thoughtlessness” marking his contemporary social milieu.¹ For Heidegger, human beings are distinctly “thinking” beings, and yet the human beings of his mid-twentieth century Germany exist in a state of “flight from thinking.”² Lost in “calculative” thought, this modern instance of humanity “never stops, never collects itself,” never takes time to nourish its “roots,” and so becomes subservient to the global technological machine that works to reproduce humans as computers.³ Against this system, Heidegger seeks to reclaim the “autochthony” of human beings in “meditative thinking,”⁴ and attempts to do so in the second section of his Discourse, “Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking.” For readers today, however, it would not appear that his meditations were widely successful in their goal. In the twenty-first century, the extractive impulse that Heidegger describes in The Question Concerning Technology as a “challenging,” “setting-upon,” or “expediting”⁵ has fully globalized. We are embedded in the world-machine to such a great extent that we can conceive of no alternative.⁶ Is there any otherwise to be found through which we might trouble its operations? It is the intent of this paper to think toward such an opening.

I. The Question of Being, Temporality, Historicality⁷

Any treatment of Heidegger’s Being and Time must, necessarily, begin with the foundation he elaborates, a foundation that has the character of a question, and a particular one, at that: the question of the meaning of being. For Heidegger, the great loss of human thought is the loss of the meaning of being, and more so, the pervasive trivialization of the question of this meaning.⁸ Any talk of being is marred by “prejudices”: being is the universal, being is the indefinable, being is the self-evident.⁹ No one of these prejudices succeeds in properly formulating the question of the meaning of being,¹⁰ the question which is perhaps best articulated in Heidegger’s 1935 text, Introduction to Metaphysics: “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”¹¹ “Everybody understands” being, and yet everywhere this understanding is “average and vague”—we “stand in an understanding of the ‘is’ without being able to determine conceptually what the ‘is’ means.”¹² Our language is furnished with a knowledge that exceeds us, is saturated with the excess of our situation. Being is filled with itself, and this surplus overwhelms us.

Fortunately, Heidegger provides us with a handle by which we might take up this question—indeed, we are this handle. The human being as Dasein, in Heidegger’s terms, is the “one who questions,”¹³ the being that “in its being … is concerned about its very being,” the being that has, “in its very being, a relation of being to this being.” As such, Dasein is distinguished as the being that “is ontological.”¹⁴ As Heidegger will go on to make clear, the existential constitution of Dasein is care, the fact that “Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence, in terms of its possibility to be itself or not to be itself.”¹⁵ Dasein “does not simply occur among other beings”; being is an “affair of Dasein,” a passionate with-ness.¹⁶

For Heidegger, then, we must undertake an analysis of this particular being if we are to reawaken the question of the meaning of being, which means that we must first understand the everyday experience of this being as already caught up in an understanding of being. Because Dasein is caught up in this way, we see that “philosophical research and inquiry” is not a specialized task reserved for academics but “a possibility of being of each existing Dasein.”¹⁷ Dasein’s specificity has nothing to do with a “vapid subjectivizing of the totality of beings” through the transcendental lens of humanity;¹⁸ rather, the preliminary analysis of Dasein on the way to the meaning of being discloses the question as a primordial mechanism, movement, or operation of being, a processual, evential impulse intrinsic to the structure of what is and ancestral to the existence of Dasein. To take hold of this question in this way, this un-foundation of process and event, is, then, to take hold of the danger that besets our thought while simultaneously making thought possible: temporality. Being “itself … is made visible in its ‘temporal’ character.”¹⁹ To take up the question of the meaning of being is to take up the temporality of being as the openness that churns at the foundations of existence.²⁰

This means for our analysis of Dasein that we must approach this being in its distinctive temporality, which Heidegger terms “historicality.”²¹ Dasein “sustain[s] a certain interpretation” of being in time, and this interpretation is “ontologically reflected back upon the interpretation of Dasein.”²² This mutual interpretation “develops or decays according to the actual manner of being of Dasein at any given time,” but this contingent quality entails the necessity of critique, insofar as a development in either direction might obscure the fundamental basis of any such interpretation—that is, to repeat, time, the possibility of the “‘occurrence’ of Dasein as such,” and indeed, the possibility of any and all occurrences.²³ Without critique, temporality as basis or horizon is “handed over to obviousness,” and along with it everything that “has been handed down” through it.²⁴ However, in reawakening the question of the meaning of being through the analysis of Dasein, the “elemental historicity” of Dasein is “discovered” and can be “properly cultivated.”²⁵ In doing so, we “discover, preserve, and explicitly pursue tradition … [and] thus assume[] the mode of being that involves historical inquiry and research.”²⁶ To avoid being “deprive[d] … of [our] own leadership in questioning and choosing”²⁷ we must, therefore, uncover the fundamental historicality of our being, through which the temporality of being as such is disclosed to us, and so come to recognize the structure of our being-in-the-world as historically determined but temporally open. Such a recognition allows for Heidegger’s “positive,”²⁸ “productive”²⁹ project of “destruction,”³⁰ which is necessary for a truly existential (or structural)³¹ understanding of the world. The ossifying substantialization of tradition, history, and time must be overcome before a proper understanding of temporality as the meaning of being can be established. To this end, it is necessary that we consider the structure of the “workshop,” which Heidegger uses to describe the everydayness of Dasein caught up in the world, so that we might explicitly pursue the more primordial question of temporality as such.³²

II. The World, the Manifold of References, Significance³³

What makes up the world? This is the question that we, with Heidegger, must now ask. For Dasein in its everydayness, the world as a “structural factor” is of little consequence; what matters more for this quotidian existence are the innerworldly beings that populate the world, which is to say, more generally, “thingliness and reality.”³⁴ If an ontological project starts with Dasein’s everyday obliviousness, it will not discover the world.³⁵ Rather, for Heidegger, the first hints of the world as a structural factor of Dasein’s existence—that is, its being-in-the-world—can be seen in the sense of the world as being “‘around’ [‘Um’],” as opposed to it being a thing or a sum of things.³⁶ The world is a “surrounding world,” an “Umwelt”; it is characterized by its “aroundness,” its “Umhafte.”³⁷ The world is not an extended emptiness full of careening, discrete objects; it is the thickness of surroundings.

From these preliminary remarks, Heidegger proceeds to circle closer and closer to this “world.” We touch the world in our everyday “dealings in [Umgang in]” it, a mode that Heidegger characterizes as “a handling, using, and taking care.”³⁸ When we begin our ontological project from this position, things no longer present as “‘mere things,’” but as akin to values, pragmata: “that with which one has to do in taking care in dealings.”³⁹ Things are embedded in a network, a context, and they always bring with them this context; indeed, they are inextricable from it. Things are not first encountered as mere things but as “useful things [Zeug].”⁴⁰ “In our dealings we find utensils,” Heidegger writes, and as a consequence, we must determine “what makes a useful thing a useful thing: its utility.”⁴¹ This, Heidegger articulates as follows:

... there ‘is’ no such thing as a useful thing. There always belongs to the being of a useful thing a totality of useful things in which this useful thing can be what it is. A useful thing is essentially ‘something in order to . . .’. The different kinds of ‘in order to’ … constitute a totality of useful things. The structure of ‘in order to’ [‘um-zu’] contains a reference [Verweisung] of something to something … useful things always are in terms of their belonging to other useful things … an ‘organization’ shows itself, and in this organization any ‘individual’ useful thing shows itself. A totality of useful things is always already discovered before the individual useful thing.⁴²

So, then, to speak of the things with which we deal on a regular basis is to speak of the totality of references of which this or that thing is but a part, a node. The thing has a “handiness [Zuhandenheit]” that is in fact our most primordial understanding of a thing, prior to any thematic understanding of it as an ‘object.’ We are intimately, originally in touch with the “manifold of references” that gives structure or organization to the world.⁴³

This manifold does not only consist of useful things and their referential network, but also the “what-for [Wozu]” of the “work to be produced” and the “whereof [Woraus] of which [the work] consists.”⁴⁴ Furthermore, in this contact with the tool, and its referential handiness, and the specificity of the work toward which such handiness is inclined, and the materials in which and with which this handiness works, Dasein comes into contact with other tool users and the references established by these others that precede it. This, all together, is what Heidegger terms the “workshop,” which is his more ontologically developed interpretation of the aroundness of the world, the world as surroundings.⁴⁵ Dasein, from the first, is plugged into a referential context that places it in relationships of encounter with utensils and projects and materials and others and even the laws of nature, relationships that Dasein can neither ignore nor be separated from, and which, in most instances, constitute the invisible milieu of Dasein’s everyday existence. What Heidegger is here describing is not a space of “objectively present world-stuff” being “subjectively colored” by the cognition of human beings; rather, Heidegger is attempting an ontological description of a being, Dasein, that is attuned to a world possessed of a structure, a being that depends upon this structure and its being attuned to it for the very possibility of its cognition.⁴⁶ Cognition is a “founded mode of being-in-the-world.”⁴⁷ Reflection, abstraction, speculation: each of these requires the prior founding of thought in involvement, encounter, or dealings with the world.⁴⁸ For this reason, Heidegger argues, we have “always ‘presupposed’ world” in our every thought. The workshop is an original form of existence.⁴⁹

And yet, “Dasein can lose itself in,” “be numbed by,” or “get[] stuck in” the workshop, failing to participate in, and even fighting against, the rejuvenating deconstruction of its structures that is assured by the temporality of being.⁵⁰ World must be “understood [even] more precisely” if this failure is to be avoided.⁵¹ Such a task begins, for Heidegger, with those “disruption[s] of reference” that provide glimpses of the referential framework itself, so making the reference, and by extension, the workshop, “explicit.”⁵² This does not yet constitute an ontological understanding of the world, but in Dasein’s noticing of a “breach” in the “totality,” Heidegger argues, “world makes itself known.”⁵³ In catching sight of the “referential totality [Verweisungsganzheit],” we come that much closer to an ontological explication of the world.⁵⁴

If “reference and the referential totality” are “in some sense constitutive of worldliness itself,” which is to say, constitutive of the structure of the world or the world as structure, it is necessary, then, to mount an “ontological analysis of the kind of useful things in terms of which ‘references’ can be found in a manifold sense.” For Heidegger, “[s]uch a ‘useful thing’ can be found in signs.”⁵⁵ The sign as an “indicating” is the “ontic concretion” of the structure of reference as “in-order-to.”⁵⁶ Put otherwise, signs make explicit the formal character of reference; they point, in their very structure, to the structure of reference that constitutes the workshop, and which, for Heidegger, constitutes the structure of the world. Signs “have an eminent use in heedful dealings” because they recursively indicate the totality of such dealings, and Dasein’s constant involvement in this totality.⁵⁷ Heidegger formalizes his definition of the sign later as such (original emphasis):

A sign is something ontically at hand which, as this definite useful thing, functions at the same time as something which indicates the ontological structure of handiness, referential totality, and worldliness.⁵⁸

Thus, the final step in Heidegger’s ontological explication of the world presents itself: an existential definition of the worldliness of the world. Permit me to follow in his reasoning.

To reframe his preceding discussion in terms of the referral of the sign, Heidegger writes: “Beings are discovered with regard to the fact that they are referred, as those beings which they are, to something. They are relevant together with something else.”⁵⁹ This relevance of innerworldy beings is “an ontological determination of the being of these beings.”⁶⁰ This determination cannot be understood apart from the “total relevance” of the workshop, but insofar as the workshop, through the operation of signs in various modes and forms, can now be seen to have certain “orientation[s]” or inclinations, certain intrinsic torsions, warpings, or tropisms, a final term constitutive of the workshop remains to be disclosed.⁶¹ We have seen the totality of the workshop to consist of useful things, the referential organization of handiness, the work and material of handiness, others, and nature, but Dasein itself must be thought as an active agent in this totality. Dasein is not merely a witness or observer; Dasein is at work in the world, actively shaping and forming and being shaped and formed by it. The specific relevance of a thing “ultimately leads back to a what-for which no longer has relevance, which itself is not a being of the kind of being of things at hand within a world, but is a being whose being is defined as being-in-the-world, to whose constitution of being worldliness itself belongs.”⁶² Included in the total relevance of the workshop is the “possibility” of being of Dasein, a possibility which we defined, above, as the openness of temporality, the possibility of possibility as such.⁶³ So, then, the workshop, as the context of Dasein’s everyday dealings, contains in its structure a recursive reference to the possibility of these very dealings, to the possibility of its own possibility as the context of any and all dealings. This reference is to the primordial letting-be (time) which, as noted in the text, is for Heidegger “related in principle and very broadly to every kind of being.”⁶⁴ Time is the original unfurling and undoing of every encounter with innerworldy beings, that which has “always already let something be freed for relevance,” the “a priori perfect,” that which is “not something ontically past, but rather what is always earlier, what we are referred back to in the question of beings as such … [the] ontological or transcendental perfect.”⁶⁵ Dasein, as the being defined in its being as temporality, is therefore “referred to an in-order-to in terms of an explicitly or inexplicitly grasped potentiality for being,” understanding itself as “that for which it lets beings be encountered beforehand,” the very “wherein” of “self-referential understanding” that, in the last instance, constitutes the “phenomenon of world.”⁶⁶

Following the later Heidegger’s commentary on his own text, we see, then, that Dasein is not so much the human being, but a mode of being that is intrinsic to being itself, and into which distinctly “human being [Mensch] presences.”⁶⁷ Dasein as “Da-sein” (being-there) is the possibility of a (or any) being that “has always already referred itself to an encounter with a ‘world,’” which is to say, a being that “understand[s] its being and potentiality-of-being with regard to its being-in-the-world”—a relation of understanding that Heidegger calls “significance [Bedeutsamkeit].”⁶⁸ Significance is therefore the structure of the world as “the relational totality of signification,” which we can now formalize as the equiprimordiality of time and meaning in the existential spacing, orientation, or structuration of Da-sein as world—that is, worldliness as the possibility of possibility. Such is the structure of the human being (at present) that is in fact prior (ancestral) to the presencing of the human that we ourselves are, the a priori perfect of an originary difference.⁶⁹ Every sign, every referential in-order-to, draws upon this structure of significance, this originating difference, this ur-sign—time, the coming to presence of presence, the to as such, as Jean-Luc Nancy writes,⁷⁰ that has always already annihilated the possibility of self-identity of any presence—for its energy, continuously referring back to this source in the very structure of its use (Heidegger, above: the “outside of itself in and for itself”; Derrida: the “pure exiting of time to the outside of itself,” the “possibility [that] produces by delay that to which it is said to be added”⁷¹), a structure that we have articulated in the preceding as the “workshop,” the “worldliness of the world,” and which now, from a properly temporal vantage, can be described, with Heidegger, as the very “holding sway [Walten] of the world,” the structure of its perdurance and play in, through, and as time.⁷²

And yet—the play of being is lost, and time, the very structure of significance, loses its vitality. The workshop falls still, an ossified apparatus, a mindless determination. World is rendered utterly concrete, drained of its potency, and with it the being that is self-referentially referred to its spacing as such—Dasein, who is, at present, the human being. The clearing grows steadily brighter and ever more inscrutable, a searing wound, a blinding scission. Thought is given over more and more to thoughtlessness, the dominion of computational reason, a final falling prey that culminates in the world-wide nuclear flash that erases this dominion from view while branding itself in the retinas of its spectators—a singularity without the singular.⁷³ It is this plight out of which Heidegger attempts to think himself, and it is toward this thinking that we now must turn.

III. From the Workshop to Enframing

The workshop is the everyday structure of the world in and as possibility, which, we have seen, is a possibility inscribed in the opening of a more originary possibility: time.⁷⁴ We have seen, as well, that the workshop as the everyday appearance of the phenomenon of the world can be given the name Da-sein (distinctly with the hyphen), an eminent mode of being that takes up the structure of significance as the possibility of its existing, a structure into which historical “Mensch,” the human species, has presenced.

But, insofar as this structure presents itself as possibility, so too does it present itself as danger. Without explicit inquiry into its existentiality (its structure or constitution), the being that has historically presenced as Dasein (here without the hyphen) loses the play of its presencing, taking the structure of the workshop as fixed, the global ideality of a form beyond change.⁷⁵ As a consequence, Dasein, the human being, is brought to a point that brushes upon its existential freedom (emergence, process, change), but never quite embraces it. Instead, Dasein is purified of the messiness that such freedom entails to the point of being rendered an utter emptiness, the nullity of a transcendental capacity which we can simply call computation (and which I have described elsewhere as genius). The original potency of Dasein in its temporality is obliterated as soon as it is realized, made subservient to the strategy or logistics of an absolutely causal logic. The fecund, Mandelbrot space of touch is abolished in favour of the empty geometries of sight, the primordial cognitive tactility of the line as vector evaporated in an instant.

Such is the “flight from thinking” that Heidegger critiques in his “Memorial Address,” the first section of Discourse on Thinking.⁷⁶ This “flight” is itself its own kind of thought, a thought that “plans and investigates” but “never collects itself”—an intentional thrownness that never returns to its home.⁷⁷ The self-referential hold that allows for the glimpsing of world-structures as historical concretions of being-in-time, possibilities of the existentiality of what is as such, requires gathering, the coiling upon itself of a creature just prior to the leap that allows it to “mount from the depth of [its] home ground up into the ether.”⁷⁸ Without this gathering, thought can never attain to “the rootedness, the autochthony,” that shapes and moulds and sustains it, and so can never make the leap as such, the true leap of an attaining to a possibility.⁷⁹

Instead, thought as calculation, as computation, reigns, or rather, thought is reigned, directed, by computation. Heidegger writes his Discourse at the beginning of the “atomic age,” in which period the workshop is specialized, purified, into an extractive machine or device. Nature “becomes a giant gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry.”⁸⁰ To be clear, this extractive mode of existence predates the computer and computation, functioning as a space into which this particular technology and this particular form of thought has presenced in history. The computer has not always existed, but is, rather, the eminent concretion of this mode of existence. Calculative thought is the totalization of a specific instrumental reference—the symbolic operation of calculation—into the global form of the referential totality itself. The world as workshop takes on the character of a computer; existence is computation.⁸¹ As a consequence, every existent finds itself to be reducible to extractable, calculable energy, and any resistance to this flattening simply requires more powerful computers to be resolved. Thought as “meditating” has no place in this world; thought must only perfect itself as user.⁸² Thus, in The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger argues that “modern technology,” here signified by the computer, “starts man upon the way of that revealing” (i.e., clearing [Lichtung]) “through which the real everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes standing-reserve,” a well of energy to be harnessed.⁸³ This sense of “start[ing] upon a way” Heidegger terms “destining [Geschick],” which is, in fact, the regular operation of Dasein in its fundamental historicality (which we discussed in section one above).⁸⁴ Calculative thought takes this everyday function of Dasein and structures it as “Ge-stell [Enframing],” an operation by which being is transformed into “standing-reserve [Bestand].”⁸⁵ Thought becomes a tabulating of causalities, a “reporting” of “standing-reserves.”⁸⁶ The churning openness at the heart of being becomes merely source—the first presence, the original substance. Being as that which “emerges from itself” like a “blossoming” is frozen into a synchronic spatiality, a plane of points and angles, rather than a surface of lived and multiple movement.⁸⁷ The meditative autochthony of Dasein as the being that participates in the unfurling of being, the being whose thought consists of the historical destining of this unfurling, loses itself to rootless calculation, forgetting the radical, incalculable excess of what is that remains as the original promise and mystery of its existence.

But Heidegger is too careful, here, to declare a final forgetting. In this very structure of modern technology that we have been discussing there is a “demand on us to think in another way what is usually understood by ‘essence,’” the “whatness” of what is now enframed by modern technology as standing-reserve.⁸⁸ Technology as enframing destines the essence of being as standing-reserve, but just as the failure of a tool affords a glimpse of the referential totality as such, so too do the gaps and fissures in this technological frame reveal a glimpse of this destining. In catching sight of destining, we see that “essence” cannot signify a “generic type” but the way in which something “hold[s] sway” or “administer[s]” itself.⁸⁹ Essence is thus not the most original or truest substance of a thing but the way the structure of that thing “is constantly in play,” or “comes to presence.”⁹⁰ Essence (wesen) must be read as a “verb,” and as such, in Heidegger’s German, it has the same meaning as “währen [to last or endure].”⁹¹ Distinctly, this endurance does not imply permanence; währen shares a familial sense with the other verbs “gewähren [to grant]” and “wahren (to watch over, to keep safe, to preserve).”⁹² As the translators of the text clarify, essencing, the holding sway or perduring of essence in play, possesses all of these “connotations of safeguarding and guaranteeing” to which Heidegger alludes with the word währen.⁹³ Essence as granting is, therefore, a coming-to-pass rather than a fixed origin or final form, a movement that Heidegger will eventually define as Ereignis: the “bringing to sight that brings into its own,” the “in-turning [Einkehr] that is the lightning flash of the truth of Being [in] the entering, flashing glance—insight [Einblick],” the “mirror play” when “oblivion turns about, when world as the safekeeping of the coming to presence of Being turns in.”⁹⁴ This in-turning of the world is both danger and possibility: enframing or renunciation. In the latter case, in-turning as possibility, as renunciation, is the letting-be that allows for thought to be “gathered into [its] own [ge-eignet]… within the safeguarded element of the world.”⁹⁵ This safeguarding does not attempt to extract or possess the thing (which would be an “injurious neglect” of its significance, its potentiality, its temporality) but rather “keeps safe the concealed darkness of its origin,” the “unlightened” cavern of a more original belonging.⁹⁶ To be gathered in this way is thus, for Heidegger, “to dwell as those at home in nearness” and so to “become[] aware of Being itself” which “comes out of stillness, as stillness itself.”⁹⁷

Notes