EDUCACIÓN

Jeff Malpas

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decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people. . . . The temple-work, standing there, opens up a world . . . the temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves.³

Crucial to this account is the role of the artwork in the establishing of a world, where such “establishing” is seen as identical with the “happening” of truth, understood, not uncontroversially, as that which first allows things to be seen and so enables the possibility of particular truths. Heidegger thus focuses on the way in which a particular thing opens up a realm of under-standing and illumination that goes beyond the particular thing itself. The particular thing, most characteristically the artwork, stands at the center of a larger horizon in which other things, an entire world, are brought to light within an essentially relational context (for they are shown in their relation to the thing that stands at the center of the horizon). For Gadamer, this ac-count provides the basis for the development of a hermeneutic theory as well as an aesthetics; for me, what is of interest is its broader significance for philosophy and ontology—as well as for the idea of the transcendental.

In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” we see Heidegger trying to articu-late what he articu-later comes to call the “topology of being,” that is, an account of the “place” in which things come to presence, in which they come to be.

In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he refers to this “place” using the Ger-man Stätte, but elsewhere he talks of it in terms of Topos, Ort, or Ortschaft (all of which can be translated as “place,” although Ortschaft is sometimes given as “settlement” or “locality”). Talk of “place” here carries a certain ambigu-ity, for the “place of being” names both a generalized structure that is vari-ously described by Heidegger at different stages in his thinking (in “The Origin of the Work of Art” it is described in terms of the “strife” between the concealment of Earth and the openness of World that is the twofold es-tablished in and through the work that is the temple), but since that structure is always a structure given particular instantiation in this place, so it also names each and every place in and around which things are brought to pres-ence and the “worlding” of world occurs.

The idea of the inquiry into being as an inquiry into the place of being is apparent very early in Heidegger’s career, in his lecture notes from the course he gave in the summer semester of 1923 in Freiburg. There we find him preoccupied with what he calls “facticity,” which he characterizes in terms of the way in which Dasein is “in each case ‘this’ Dasein in its being-there for a while at a particular time.”⁴Facticity is that aspect of our own being according to which we find ourselves already given over to things, ac-cording to which our being is indeed always a being there—acac-cording to which it is always already “in” the world. If the analysis of facticity is a cen-tral concern here, then, so too is Heidegger concerned to investigate the na-120 Jeff Malpas

ture of the world and of the “wherein” that characterizes our own being in relation to the world. The world, claims Heidegger, is that which environs or surrounds us and also that toward which we are oriented, about which we are concerned and to which we attend. But how do we encounter the world? And if our encounter with the world is always an encounter with respect to particular things and situations, how are these encountered?

Heidegger proposes to answer these questions by looking to our every-day, precritical encounter with things. The example on which he focuses is an ordinary thing of the home or the workplace, a table. How is the table first encountered? We might be inclined to say, as a material thing, as some-thing “with such and such a weight, such and such a color, such and such a shape,”⁵as a thing that also offers an infinity of possible perceptual appear-ances. The thing as material, natural thing can be distinguished from the thing as it might be evaluated or used—as it might be significant or mean-ingful. Heidegger denies, however, that the thing grasped as mere object, ei-ther as natural object or as meaningful object, is what is first encountered.

Instead what is prior is the “in the world” as such, as that is articulated in and around specific things such as the table, but not any table, this table, the table before us now. Thus Heidegger tells us,“This schema must be avoided:

What exists are subjects and objects, consciousness and being.”⁶We cannot first posit things aside from our dealings with those things nor the selves in-volved in those dealings aside from things. Instead Heidegger turns to an analysis of an example taken from his own being-there, a description of the table in his family home:

What is there in the room there at home is the table (not “a” table among many other tables in other rooms and other houses) at which one sits in order to write, have a meal, sew, play. Everyone sees this right away, e.g. during a visit: it is a writing table, a dining table, a sewing table—such is the primary way it is a being encoun-tered in itself. This characteristic of “in order to do something” is not merely im-posed on the table by relating and assimilating it to something else which it is not.

Its standing-there in the room means: Playing this role in such and such characteris-tic use. This and that about it is “impraccharacteris-tical,” unsuitable. That part is damaged. It now stands in a better spot in the room than before—there’s better lighting, for ex-ample. . . . Here and there it shows lines—the boys like to busy themselves at the table. Those lines are not just interruptions in the paint, but rather: it was the boys and it still is. This side is not the east side, and this side so many cm. shorter than the other, but rather the one at which my wife sits in the evening when she wants to stay up and read, there at the table we had such and such a discussion that time, there that decision was made with a friend at that time, there that work was written at that time, there that holiday celebrated at that time. That is the table as such it is there in the temporality of everydayness.⁷

There are a number of points that are worth noting in this passage. The first is the way in which Heidegger takes the encounter with the world to have Heidegger’s Topology of Being 121

its origin and focus in our prior involvement with a particular thing that is itself implicated in a larger system of relationships. The world is thus under-stood as relational but also as brought to focus around particular nodal points within the web of the relations that constitute the world. Moreover, in the encounter with the thing, we also encounter ourselves and others.

What is primary, then, is not the bare encounter with some “de-worlded,”

disconnected “object,” nor do we first find ourselves as that which stands in opposition to that object, but instead we find self and thing presented to-gether as part of one system of interrelation. With more recent philosophi-cal developments in mind we may say that the account Heidegger offers here is a form of “externalist” theory of the self; the account also bears comparison with Davidson’s externalist position as articulated in papers such as “Three Varieties of Knowledge” (although there are notable differ-ences).⁸But it may be better to say that what Heidegger does here is to re-ject both externalist and internalist accounts, presenting instead a view ac-cording to which what comes first is the world in which both self and thing are bound together and in which each is articulated in relation to the other.

The account that is adumbrated in the 1923 lectures on facticity is, of course, further developed in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) published in 1927.

The question of being posed in the latter work is answered by looking to an analysis of the structure of the mode of being of a particular being—the be-ing for whom bebe-ing is itself in question and to which Heidegger gives the name (at least in this work) Dasein. From the outset it is important to note, however, that Heidegger’s question of being—not only in this work but throughout his thinking—is not a question that asks for some underlying principle or definition of being, nor is it a question that asks for some sort of analysis of the internal ontological structure of independently existing enti-ties. The question of being is not a question about how things, already un-derstood as present to us, are constituted as the beings that they are, but, prior to this, it asks how it is that any being can even come to be present.

In terms of the existing philosophical tradition, Heidegger’s question of being must be understood as more closely related to the Kantian transcen-dental question concerning the conditions for the possibility of synthetic a priori judgment than it is to contemporary inquiries concerning identity, causality, and so forth as these relate to the structure of “reality” or the uni-verse. Indeed, while this way of understanding the question of being is im-portant for Heidegger’s work as a whole, it is especially imim-portant for Being and Time, and the work of the late 1920s and early 1930s, precisely because of the way in which Heidegger’s own thought during this period takes the form of a concentrated engagement with Kant, particularly with the Cri-tique of Pure Reason. Thus the projected second Part of Being and Time was to have included a “de-struction” of the history of ontology, in which Kant 122 Jeff Malpas

was a major focus, while the second major work Heidegger published after Being and Time was entirely devoted to the Critique of Pure Reason—Heideg-ger’s so-called Kantbuch, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik) (1929).

Since Being and Time takes the question of being as a question to be pur-sued through an analysis of the structure of Dasein—literally there/here-being—and since Dasein is understood as being-in-the-world, so the analysis of Dasein is also an analysis of the structure of world or worldhood. As in the earlier work, this analysis gives priority to the relational structure of ac-tive engagement in which both we and the things around us are brought to-gether and mutually articulated. Thus Heidegger focuses the early part of his analysis in Being and Time on Dasein as being-in-the-world, and so on the structure of “being-in” and worldhood. As in the earlier work, Heidegger sees the world as established through the interrelations that obtain between Dasein and the things around it, as well as through the interrelations between those things as such. Indeed, Heidegger analyzes the structure of world in terms of the structure of “equipment” (das Zeug), that together constitutes a system of relationships or “assignments” (one system of such assignments, or part of one, is seen in the workshop), and he famously talks of the way in which the world is itself brought to light through the breakdown in the sys-tem of relationships between equipment—through the broken tool:

The structure of the Being of what is ready-to-hand as equipment is determined by references or assignments . . . When an assignment has been disturbed—when something is unusable for some purpose—then the assignment becomes explicit.

Even now, of course, it has not become explicit as an ontological structure; but it has become explicit ontically for the circumspection which comes up against the damaging of the tool. When an assignment to some particular “towards-this” has been thus circumspectively aroused, we catch sight of the “towards-this” itself, and along with it everything concerned with the work—the whole “workshop”—as that wherein concern already dwells. The context of equipment is lit up, not as something never seen before, but as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in cir-cumspection. With this totality, however, the world announces itself.⁹

The argument of Being and Time also makes clear, however, that the character of equipmental engagement is derivative of the structure of temporality—an idea present too in The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Hermeneutik der Faktizität).

The ordering of self and thing within the larger horizon of the world is itself determined by the ordering of past, present, and future (something already indicated in the earlier work) and captured in terms of the notions of care (Sorge) and being-toward-death, both of which can be taken as tied essen-tially to facticity. It is through the being in question of Dasein’s being, which is evident in care and in the recognition of death, that beings are themselves brought to presence. We might also say that it is through Dasein’s “being-Heidegger’s Topology of Being 123

there,” and so through the Da that is integral to Dasein’s own being, and that is worked out in and through Dasein’s concrete involvement with things, that any other being can be brought to light. The structure that is evident here is essentially the same as the structure that we saw earlier in “The Origin of the Work of Art”: the coming to presence of things, the establishing of world, the happening of truth, occurs in and through a particular place or site, in and through the temple, in and through the Da, the here/there, the place, of Sein. What distinguishes Being and Time from the later discussions, however, is that the framework of Being and Time includes no specific reference to topol-ogy but is instead pursued from within a “transcendental” framework (one that is also hermeneutically and phenomenologically nuanced) that is in ac-cord with the Kantian orientation of the earlier work.

It is significant, particularly in light both of Being and Time’s transcenden-tal orientation and of Heidegger’s own later critique of the earlier work, that in Being and Time it is the projective activity of Dasein that seems to es-tablish the ordering of equipment and the ordering of the world that comes from this. Indeed, the projective activity of Dasein is itself based in Dasein’s own being as that is determined by care, being-toward-death, and temporal-ity. In this respect, temporality can be seen as opening up space—the space within which the structure of equipmentality is itself articulated—and thereby establishing a world. Rather like Bergson, Heidegger appears here to be temporalizing space, in reaction, perhaps, to the dominant spatial-ization of time. But insofar as the opening up of world is indeed based in Dasein’s projecting character, and insofar as this is already presupposed in the idea of Dasein as the being for whom being is in question, so the struc-ture of being, and the strucstruc-ture of world, is given just in the questioning, and questionable, character of Dasein’s own being. World is founded in the projection of Dasein, which is not itself something that is determined by Dasein but is simply Dasein’s own mode of being as such. The same is true in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” although there the character of Dasein as “projecting” has been taken over by the role of the poet, or perhaps the statesman, as founding a world in the founding of a people and a destiny.

It might seem, however, that in its general form the account I have so far outlined is problematic, if for no other reason than that it appears to be cir-cular. If what is at issue is the coming to presence or appearing of things that is identical with the establishing of world, and if this occurs only in re-lation to that kind of being which is being-in-the-world but which is itself worked out in relation to things and to world as such, then isn’t this a strat-egy that looks to explain world, and the appearing of things within it, on the basis of that same world? Put more charitably, one might argue that Heidegger provides no real explanation, only a description. There is some-thing right about this point—but it is correct only inasmuch as it reflects a 124 Jeff Malpas

core point in Heidegger’s own approach. As Heidegger understands it, the question of being is not a question that is answered by looking to some ex-planatory or causal foundation, although to do so is precisely what meta-physics has traditionally attempted. But Heidegger claims that the metaphys-ical tradition has consistently misunderstood or forgotten being. Being is not some being apart from or in addition to beings. And that means there is nothing to which one can appeal in answer to the question of being other than being itself. It is this circularity that Heidegger himself brings to atten-tion at a number of points in Being and Time.¹⁰ So what then is being?

Nothing other than the appearing or presencing of beings as such, and that means that being and world, or at least what Heidegger calls the “worlding of world,” are closely tied together. Neither being nor world, however, can be explicated other than through an articulation of the structural elements that are integral to them. Thus the only possible strategy for Heidegger to adopt is indeed a certain “descriptive” strategy—a strategy that tries to ex-plicate being through uncovering the structure within which certain ele-ments are interrelated and unified. In this respect, Heidegger takes the Kantian idea of “analytic,” as set out in the Critique of Pure Reason, as the ba-sis for his own methodology. Thus Heidegger writes: “In the ontological sense, ‘the analytic’ is not a reduction into elements, but the articulation of

Nothing other than the appearing or presencing of beings as such, and that means that being and world, or at least what Heidegger calls the “worlding of world,” are closely tied together. Neither being nor world, however, can be explicated other than through an articulation of the structural elements that are integral to them. Thus the only possible strategy for Heidegger to adopt is indeed a certain “descriptive” strategy—a strategy that tries to ex-plicate being through uncovering the structure within which certain ele-ments are interrelated and unified. In this respect, Heidegger takes the Kantian idea of “analytic,” as set out in the Critique of Pure Reason, as the ba-sis for his own methodology. Thus Heidegger writes: “In the ontological sense, ‘the analytic’ is not a reduction into elements, but the articulation of