clarifying Heidegger’s clearing relative to existential interest
gary e. davis
Google A.I. usefully answers this question: “What is Heidegger’s understanding of Clearing (Lichtung)?”
It’s useful because it’s misleading in a commonly-represented way, which is useful to indicate.
In short, the clearing is not a space (to be revealed). It’s a mode of being (to be engagingly enowned).
So, what the “They” of the online archive says (in today’s version) is that, “in Heidegger's philosophy,…” so to speak. Heidegger doesn’t claim to have a philosophy (though otherwise is commonly claimed). “… Clearing (Lichtung) refers to the fundamental space of disclosure, the open region where entities can appear and be understood.”
Obviously, a space of disclosure results from disclosing. A clearing requires clearing. Clearing results in a clearing.
But, for Heidegger, the motive for clearing is existential: appeal of self-actualization, emancipatory interest, and thus educational interest (enlightening in the normal sense). That’s not overt by him, but it’s easily made evident: We are compelled (“thrown”) by the appeal of horizons. It’s beyond process, which can too easily be passively regarded. Clearing is not without motive.
Sonia Sikka says of Being and Time, at the beginning of her entry on “Clearing” in The Cam-
bridge Lexicon, “Dasein…discloses itself and the world” (152). But why?
Even A.I. intimates more than a process: The clearing “is not a specific entity itself, but rather the condition that makes it possible for entities to emerge into our awareness and be meaningful.” Making possible. That’s about desired capability formation (power to effect), not just experiencing
a process.
That condition is enactively engaged. It doesn’t magically emerge from, say, “all things shining”
(H. Dreyfus and S. Kelly book, 2011), which is a physicalist trope (metaphysicalist conception), echoing Aristotle’s energia (which would please neo-Thomistic Thomas Sheehan), not from “shimmering unfolding,” Richard Capobianco, 2022.
Sikka adds, quoting B&T, “Dasein…is itself the clearing” (SZ 133). Again, why?
But Richard Capobianco (RC hereafter), for example, splits off Dasein (thus marginalizing motives for clearing) from a full interest in being, when he discusses a passage from Heidegger’s Considerations (in RC’s Heidegger’s Being, cited above) in order to maintain a sense of exalted “Being” apart from there being transformative interest (e.g., desire to actualize one’s “authentic potential for being,” B&T, so common for precocious children and aspiring talents).
RC interprets the Heidegger passage (RC: 26) as expressing “…the ‘truth’ of Being…,” as if truth is a quality of “Being,” not (as Heidegger states it commonly) the truth-of-being, truth of being, which is existential, wholly engaging one’s being, human as there being desire to enjoy self-transformation in one’s world of life, lifeworld.
RC’s commentary on the notebook passage is his own translation, which deceptively capitalizes 'Being', unlike the published notebook translation, which I discuss here.RC says that the truth of being “is named here by Heidegger as the ‘clearing’ (Lichtung) that reveals-conceals…,” which conceals Heidegger’s reference to (in his notebook passage quoted by RC) the “transporting-transfixing,” which is more than revealing.
The generative efficacy of clearing is integral to Heidegger’s orientation toward enabling inception, especially relative to future possibility for originary constellating.
RC continues (26): “…and this brings into view his key later position that ‘the clearing itself is Being,’ as he put it so emphatically in Letter on Humanism (1947).” But Heidgger didn’t do that.
Rather, in LoH, as part of Heidegger’s dwelling with self-concealment in Greek metaphysics, he says that their own sense of clearing (the Idea, “outward appearance”) conceals the truth of being: “[T]he truth of being as the clearing itself remains concealed for metaphysics” (Pathmarks, 252). “[T]he clearing itself is being” there, relative to Greek metaphysics which conceals by externalization, displacement, exaltation.
But the truth of being is existential, potentially transformative, not merely eventual disclosure of self-concealment. Though Sikka notes that “the disclosedness of Dasein is constituted by its having a self-reflexive relation to its own being,” she doesn’t intimate why constitutive self-reflection (thinking) becomes appealing.
In other words, Greek metaphysics not only preserved, in self-concealment, the revealing of the Idea, but thereby concealed the transformative motive of existential truth, i.e., the truth of being, desire for actualizing one’s potential. Mere disclosure of background clearing into clarity conceals the exist-
ential condition of being in want of transformation (emancipatory or avidly questioning) which is self-determinative (or, in Aristotle’s idiom, eudaemonic).
RC continues (26): “In this one entry [of Considerations], then, we learn where the ‘leap’ in thinking must go”: “(1) to the ‘temporality’ and ‘time-space’ of Being itself (and not simply to the human being)…,” while for Heidegger, the existential condition of being, mid-1930s, is very human, enduring daily abuse; and Heidegger is engaged with understanding that for teaching effectively. (A great error in Heidegger scholarship is eclipsing Heidegger’s prevailing interest in withness through teaching, exemplary thinking for teaching, not for professing a Heideggerian philosophy.)
Says Heidegger (contrary to RC’s reading), “Being and Time is…a path to the grounding of the truth of being....” not as “a teaching on,” rather as “a path to,” which is about the existential potential of there being freedom of self-actualization, I would argue (e.g., “Essence of Truth” lecture, 1931, again as course topic, summer of 1933).
The truth is an engaging path. It is wholly about one’s life, existing. “Being” there isn’t addressed as elsewhere, apart from being humanly, drawn by possible futurity. Human being is immanently in mind as existence, albeit misunderstood by others. That futural temporality and time-space is to be understood immanently, relative to “our” real 1930s.
But RC wants to separate an exalted sense of “Being” from existential implicature by dismis-
sing existential context as “not simply the human being,” then repeating that dismissal, appar-
ently for exalting a notebook passage which simply rejects misreading of Being and Time:
RC: “(2) to the ‘truth’ of Being itself (and not mere ‘truth’ as the disclosive activity of the human being;)...” Who does he think lives the truth, if not a real life? The truth of being is no “…’truth’ of Being,” like some quality of “Being.”
Heidegger is not distancing himself from a claim that Being and Time is about that which is normally called human. He is rejecting a view that Being and Time is “a teaching on…” rather than “a path to…,” which is to be immanently enowned by readers (proceeding “concretely,” p. 1 of B&T).
RC: “(3) to the clearing itself as Being itself (and not simply as the clearing activity of human being).” No, because RC has concealed Heidegger’s transformative interest of clearing, such that “not simply” serves to split off the reality of being (for existence) for the sake of an exalted “Being” with little regard for actual lives. (This exalting conception is integral to his “manifoldness” of singular “Being” in both RC’s Engaging Heidegger and Heidegger’s Being, echoing Aristotle’s manifold which appealed to Brentano, like the many faces of “God” appealing to theophilic minds.)
RC: “This one entry captures Heidegger’s deep dissatisfaction and struggle.” Not at all. The notebook entry simply and clearly distinguishes his interest from that of misreading, no struggle intimated—but: Note to self there: He had good reason, a decade earlier, to not improvise Part 3 of B&T. (Scholars regard his Considerations as secreted communications answerable to future inquirers, but actually they were work notes, which F.-W. von Herrmann, long-time and last assistant to Heidegger and to his literary estate, has emphasized).
RC next (26-27) moves to another notebook passage, where RC reads Heidegger’s dissatisfactions with others’ misreading as “the confusions in his own earlier work,” which the notebook passage doesn’t intimate at all.
The challenge for Heidegger is getting through to misreaders graciously, not about privately expressing lost confidence in his own thinking. It’s implicitly about teaching a path effectively.
There being that text—like any text—shows a resonant truth—a mirrorplay of granting what’s “there”and bearing undertanding, bearing what’s granted in and for one’s mode of engaging.
The challenge for Heidegger was facing nazism daily, while no one yet had a Critical Theory of what and how propaganda, at the level of conceptual implicature, infects students’ thinking.
I would enjoy discussing RC’s summary of the published summary of Heidegger’s 1973 seminar because RC has sternly suggested online that it is "extensive." But I’ll be brief. RC regards Heidegger there as not merely talking about the motivation of Being and Time—as if, to RC, Heidegger’s formulations of later thought aren’t beyond B&T (such that the seminar is expressing something essential about Heidegger’s career; it is not). Heidegger’s ownmost, preferred post-metaphysicalist understanding is not in play: the point of wholly letting be, “releasement” (Gelassenheit): “regioning of that which regions” (“Country Path Conversation”), which thereby may “constellate” in an original way, like “night neighboring stars.”
So, who regions originarily in difficult times? “Ones to come” (Contributions), relative to readiness (“the few and the rare”) to do so effectively, prospected across Heidegger’s engagement with teaching, especially inasmuch as—beyond questions of being—art grounds history.