T
H E O P E N I N G S T R O P H E S of Sophocles’s choral ode tell the inceptionof the human being: the opening up of openness. This is the story of uncanniness. In outline, it holds that the human being is a self-constituting and polemic turning between openness and fi nitude, tran-scendence and thrownness. Such turning is a consequence of the fact that being withdraws or conceals itself when an entity shows up in its being, and so of the fact that Dasein’s being withdraws or conceals itself when Dasein fi rst presences to itself. So the human being “stems from the un-canny [ungeheure] district of withdrawing concealment and in the ‘here’
traverses a mortal course through entities in the midst of entities as a whole.”1 In this chapter, I follow the story to its later stages: to Dasein’s dwelling amidst entities and its owned and unowned ways of being the uncanny entity. The human being is the play between presencing and ab-sencing, opening and concealing, transcendence and fi nitude; how does this play play itself out in the entity?
Heidegger works out what it is to be the uncanny entity using the vo-cabulary of the polis. ‘The polis’ is another term for the clearing, which—
as uncanny—presences and absences. Heidegger captures the uncanny motion of the polis with the image of a central core or pole which itself swirls or whirls: “The polis is polos, that is, the pole, the swirl [Wirbel]
in which and around which everything turns. These two words name that essential moment that the verb pelein says in the second line of the choral ode: that which is constant, and change” (HI81/100). ‘Pelein,’
recall, is the verb used in the ode (instead of ‘einai’) to name the uncanny
1 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 129. In quoting from this text, I substitute ‘entities’
for ‘beings’ as a translation of ‘das Seiendes,’ and I substitute ‘the human being’ (and ‘it’) for the translator’s ‘man’ (and ‘him’). I also transliterate all Greek terms.
way of being: counterturning presencing and absencing. As we saw in Chapter 3, ‘pelein’ names a constancy of motion, which we understood as constant presencing (as absencing). This constancy reappears here in the character of the polis as a pole: a locus, center of gravity, or a fi xed point of reference for all discovery of entities. At the same time, the polis swirls or turns in that it presences by way of absencing and so happens as a swirling giving-and-refusing.
To say that the polis swirls or whirls is to say that Dasein is essentially uncanny or is in the way of pelein. Its openness is given in such a way that it is withheld from it. The uncanny entity oscillates within this presenc-ing and absencpresenc-ing, exposed to the absencpresenc-ing of (its) bepresenc-ing and so to the presencing of (its) being. As we have seen, this makes the human being ontico-ontological. As ontological or open to presencing, the human be-ing is transcendent in the sense that it is metaphysical: it moves beyond entities to being. This has several consequences, including that the human being is capable of experiencing the mood of angst. The ode notes these by describing the human being as both hupsipolis and apolis: rising high in the polis and yet forfeiting the polis (HI59/72).2 In this description we see “the inner contour of the essence of the uncanniest” (EM163/117):
a counterturning between a positive moment (hupsipolis) and a negative moment (apolis). This counterturning is a local counterturning within the uncanny entity’s counterturning essence, like the rotation of a planet in orbit. As we will see, the human being turns between being hupsipolis and being apolis insofar as it goes beyond entities to being but always recoils from being’s uncanniness.
2 Heidegger interprets the Greek ‘pantoporos aporos’ and ‘hupsipolis apolis’ as each naming a single, counterturning phenomenon. This interpretation is violent and implau-sible. Usually, each word of the two pairs is taken to belong to a separate (but juxtaposed) phrase, so a punctuation mark is inserted between them when presenting the originally unpunctuated Greek text. Thus Jebb translates: “yea, he hath resource for all; without resource he meets nothing that must come” (lines 360–361) and “When he honours the laws of the land, and that justice which he hath sworn by the gods to uphold, proudly stands his city: no city hath he who, for his rashness, dwells with sin” (lines 369–371).
Sophocles, Plays: Antigone, ed. P. E. Easterling and R. C. Jebb, trans. R. C. Jebb (London:
Bristol Classical Press, 2004).
As ontic or open to being’s absencing, the human being falls. We have already seen (in Chapter 2) that falling is the fi rst or nearest consequence of Dasein’s uncanniness. We fi nd the same inward, local counterturning structure in the structure of the falling entity that we do in the transcend-ing entity: as falltranscend-ing, the human betranscend-ing is pantoporos aporos, “[e]very-where venturing forth underway, experienceless without any way out”
(HI59/72). To be pantoporos is to discover entities in their being and to be aporos is to fall prey to seeming, mistakes, and idle talk. To be the uncanny entity is to turn between these two.
As falling and relating to entities, the human being is open to the po-lis understood not as a swirl but as a pole. Let me pause a moment to
explain this. To think the polis as a pole is to think the da or open site not as a pure space of intelligibility but as the site in which a particular world or understanding of being transpires: “From this site and stead there springs forth whatever is granted stead and whatever is not, what is order [Fug] and what is disorder, what is fi tting [Schickliche] and what is unfi tting” (HI82/101). Thus the polis is the site of dikē and of history as well as the ground of the political. ‘Dikē’ is another of Heidegger’s words for being. Whereas ‘phusis’ names being itself as emerging-concealing,
‘dikē’ names being as structuring and articulating—that is, being qua the being of entities.
‘Dikē’ is usually translated as ‘justice’ but Heidegger understands it as
‘fi ttingness’ (Fug) (EM171/123). We might gloss it as ‘how things hang together’: the world as a set of meaningful relations.3 In a diffi cult pas-sage from the Parmenides lectures (which were delivered a semester after HI) Heidegger explains: “[i]n the polis as the abode of the essence of the historical human being, the abode that discloses and conceals entities as such, the human being is encompassed by everything that, in the strict sense of the word, is ordered to it but is thereby also withdrawn from it.
We do not understand ‘ordered’ here in the extrinsic sense of ‘added to’
or ‘put on’, but in the sense of ‘assigned’, as that which is ordained to the human being, in such a way that the human being is delivered over to this and is ordered into it, and must abide in it, if its essence is to be
3 Fried explains this well: “[J]ustice allows the Dasein that assembles around the pole of the polis to recognize and appropriate as its own the various interlocking, if confronta-tional, tasks given to it as a historical Volk; justice and polemos are equally primordial. In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger discusses dikē (justice) as Fug (EM,123). Justice as Fug is ‘jointure’, an articulation of an interpretive whole within which Dasein uncov-ers the dispensation of its Being-in-the-world. The way in which beings gain articulation as a whole, within the full horizon of practices that unite beings and Dasein around the pole of the polis, is through a justice that polemically articulates the joints and seams (Fu-gen) of meaning among disparate beings. The same articulation, through the ‘mutual self-recognition’ of strife, must orient Dasein in the polis as well. Justice arranges the world of the polis into the joints and harmonies of its structure (Bau), a structure that necessarily stands, like a stone archway, through the dispensation of stress and opposition.” Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 142.
in order. What is ordered to the human being in this way, what befi ts the human being and orders it, we name with the single word order, in Greek: dikē.”4 A world orders all things in relation to each other, thereby making them what they are. This is ‘dikē,’ the ‘law’ of being. Because
‘dikē’ fi rst means order and so ordering, it can come to mean justice in the sense of putting things back in order and setting them aright.
Strictly, the polis is not the same as, but is the site of, dikē, world. It is the clearing in which a world takes place. However, as with any site, it can be addressed by speaking of what takes place in it. It is as addressed as such that the polis can be understood as a pole, around which all enti-ties turn. Heidegger says, “The essentially ‘polar’ character of the polis concerns entities as a whole. The polar concerns entities in that around it entities, as manifest, themselves turn” (HI81/100, translation modifi ed).
Entities turn around the polis in the sense that they only are (and are not) by virtue of their relation to it. Thus entities presence and absence in relation to the polis. The polis “is the site in which all entities and all relational comportment toward entities is gathered. It is the ‘pole’ among all entities and for all entities in their being” (HI86/106). The polis qua world is that in terms of which we discover entities.
The polis is thus also that in terms of which we disclose ourselves as the entities that we are. This is to say that the ordering of dikē is not something that we merely view or (insofar as we are understanders of being) enforce; it is fi rst of all something to which we are subject. The human being is “delivered over to this and is ordered into it, and must abide in it, if its essence is to be in order.”5 We are ordered by this ‘world order’ (dikē)—which is to say, there is a place in it in which we fi t. There is something that we are, some way in which we make sense or are intel-ligible, and we must conform to this if we are to be in accordance with what we are. The history of a people will be the process of engaging in such self-becoming and so coming into their own—coming to properly inhabit the order into which they are destined and so coming to prop-erly inhabit their historical essence. “The polis is the ‘where’, as which and in which order is revealed and concealed. The polis is the way the revealing and concealing of order occur such that in these occurrences the historical human being comes into its essence and especially into its counter-essence.”6
4 Heidegger, Parmenides, 92.
5 Ibid., 92.
6 Ibid., 95–96.
So we have two ways of thinking the polis: (i) in terms of its hap-pening in presencing and absencing, and (ii) as what takes place within this: the dikē that governs the intelligibility of entities. Corresponding to these, there are two ways of describing the uncanny entity in its relation to the polis. As exposed to the polis in its presencing and absencing, the uncanny entity is hupsipolis apolis. As a consequence of this, the human being falls and is pantoporos aporos, where this means that it comports towards entities and the polis as a pole.
Explaining these two main features of the uncanny entity amounts to explicating the various senses of transcendence and fi nitude, insofar as they follow from what it is to be uncanny. We will see that there are vari-ous ways to cash out what it is to be hupsipolis apolis and pantoporos aporos, characterizing the uncanny entity at various levels or depths.
Finally, if to be the uncanny entity is to be hupsipolis apolis and pan-toporos aporos, then to be ownedly or authentically uncanny is to be ownedly hupsipolis apolis and ownedly pantoporos aporos. To see how to be the uncanny entity ownedly, we will have to leave the choral ode and consider Sophocles’s character Antigone, whom Heidegger takes to exemplify owned uncanniness. Working out how she does so will show in what sense Antigone remains a ‘political’ drama for Heidegger and Antigone a ‘political’ heroine.