Jacques Derrida - The Ends of Man
Minggu, 22 Maret 2015
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The
Ends of Man
By
Jacues Derrida
First published in French
in Marges de in (1972), this lecture was given in New York in October
1968 at an international colloquium. The theme proposed was "Philosophy and Anthropology."
"Now, I say, man and, in general, every rational being exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means
to be arbitrarily used by this or that will. In all his
actions, whether they are directed to himself
or to other rational beings, he must always be regarded at the same time as an end…”
Kant, Foundationsof the Metaphysics of Morals.1
[In The Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings on Moral Philosophy,
trans. Lewis White Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 86.
Further references are to this edition.]
"Ontology… has merely enabled us to determine the
ultimate ends of human reality, its fundamental possibilities, and the value
which haunts it."
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness.2
[Trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1966), p. 784.]
"As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man
is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end."
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things.3
[(Les mots et les choses) (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), p. 387.]
Every philosophical colloquium necessarily has a political
significance. And not only due to that which
has always linked the essence of the philosophical to the essence of the
political. Essential and general, this political import nevertheless burdens the a priori link between philosophy and politics, aggravates
it in a way, and also determines it when the
philosophical colloquium is announced as an
international colloquium. Such is the case here.
The possibility of an international philosophical colloquium can
be examined infinitely, along many pathways, and at
multiple levels of generality. In its grea test
extension, to which I will return in a moment, such a possibility implies that contrary to the essence of philosophy—such as it has always
represented itself at least—philosophical
nationalities have been formed. At a given moment,
in a given historical, political, and economic context, these national groups have judged it possible and necessary to organize international encounters, to present themselves, or to be represented in such encounters by their national identity (such, at least, as it is assumed by the organizers of the colloquium), and to determine in such encounters their proper difference, or to establish relations between their respective differences. Such an establishment of relations can be practiced, if at all, only in the extent to which national philosophical identities are assumed, whether they are defined in the order of doctrinal content, the order of a certain philosophical "style," or quite simply the order of language, that is, the unity of the academic institution, along with everything implied by language and institution. But the establishing of relations between differences is also the promised complicity of a common element: the colloquium can take place only in a medium, or rather in the representation that all the participants must make of a certain transparent ether, which here would be none other than what is called the universality of philosophical discourse. With these words I am designating less a fact than a project, which is linked by its essence, (and we should say by essence itself, by the thought of Being and of truth), to a certain group of languages and "cultures." For something must happen or must have happened to the diaphanous purity of this element.
in a given historical, political, and economic context, these national groups have judged it possible and necessary to organize international encounters, to present themselves, or to be represented in such encounters by their national identity (such, at least, as it is assumed by the organizers of the colloquium), and to determine in such encounters their proper difference, or to establish relations between their respective differences. Such an establishment of relations can be practiced, if at all, only in the extent to which national philosophical identities are assumed, whether they are defined in the order of doctrinal content, the order of a certain philosophical "style," or quite simply the order of language, that is, the unity of the academic institution, along with everything implied by language and institution. But the establishing of relations between differences is also the promised complicity of a common element: the colloquium can take place only in a medium, or rather in the representation that all the participants must make of a certain transparent ether, which here would be none other than what is called the universality of philosophical discourse. With these words I am designating less a fact than a project, which is linked by its essence, (and we should say by essence itself, by the thought of Being and of truth), to a certain group of languages and "cultures." For something must happen or must have happened to the diaphanous purity of this element.
How else are we to understand that international colloquia—which
aim to repair, to surmount, to erase, or simply to
relate national philosophical differences one to another—seem possible and
necesary? Conversely, and above all, how are we to understand
that something like an international philosophical encounter is an
extremely rare thing in the world? The philosopher knows, and today can say to himself, that this extremely recent and
unexpected thing, which was unimaginable a
century ago, becomes a frequent phenomenon—of a disconcerting facility, I even
would say—in certain societies, but is of a no less remarkable rarity
in the greater part of the world. On the one hand, as far as thought—which perhaps is repulsed by this haste and volubility—is
concerned, what is disquieting has to do more with
the fever for colloquia and the multiplication of organized or improvised
exchanges. On the other hand, it remains no less the case
that the societies, languages, cultures, and political or national organizations with which no exchange in the form of an
international philosophical colloquium is possible are of considerable number
and extent. Nor must we hasten to interpret
this impossibility. Essentially, it does not have to do with a prohibition overtly deriving from politico-ideological
jurisdiction. For when this prohibition
exists, there is every chance that this issue already has become meaningful within the occidental orb of metaphysics or
philosophy, that it already has been formulated in political concepts drawn
from the metaphysical reserve, and that the possibility
of such a colloquium henceforth is apparent. Without this no
overt prohibition could be articulated. Also, speaking of the noncolloquium, I was not alluding to some ideologico-political
barrier which would sector, with borders or curtains, an
already philosophical field. I was thinking, first of all,
of all those places—cultural, linguistic, political, etc.—where the organization of a philosophical colloquium simply would have
no meaning, where it would be no more meaningful to instigate
it than to prohibit it. If I permit myself to recall
this obvious fact, it is because a colloquium which has chosen anthropos,
the discourse on anthropos, philosophical anthropology, as its theme, must feel bearing down on its borders the insistent
weight of this difference, which is of an entirely other
order than that of the internal or intraphilosophical differences of opinion
which could be freely exchanged here. Beyond these borders, what I will call
the philosophical mirage would consist as much in
perceiving philosophy—a more or less constituted and adult philosophy—as in
perceiving the desert. For this other space is neither philosophical nor desert-like, that is, barren. If I recall this obvious fact,
it is also for another reason: the anxious and
busy multiplication of colloquia in the West is doubtless an effect of that
difference which I just said bears down, with a mute, growing and menacing pressure, on the enclosure of Western collocution.
The latter doubtless makes an effort to interiorize
this difference, to master it, if we may put it thus, by
affecting itself with it. The interest in the universality of the anthropos is doubtless a sign of this effort.
Now I would like to specify, still as a preamble, but in another
direction, what appears to be one of the general political
implications of our colloquium. While refraining from
any precipitous appreciation of this fact, simply rendering it for all to reflect upon, I will indicate here what links the
possibility of an international philosophical colloquium
with the form of democracy. I am indeed saying with the form,
and with the form of democracy.
Here, democracy must be the form of the political organization of
society. This means at least that:
1. The national philosophical identity accommodates a nonidentity, does not exclude a relative diversity and the coming into language of this diversity, eventually as a minority. It goes without saying that the philosophers present here no more identify with each other in their thought (why else would they be several?) than they are mandated by some unanimous national discourse. As for the fact that the totality of this diversity might be exhaustively represented—this can only remain problematical, and in part depends upon the discourses to be proffered here.
2. No more than they identify with each other, the philosophers present here do not assume the official policies of their countries. Let me be permitted to speak in my own name here. Moreover, I will do so only insofar as the problem before me refers in truth to an essential generality; and it is in the form of this generality that I wish to state it. When I was invited to this meeting, my hesitation could end only when I was assured that I could bear witness here, now, to my agreement, and to a certain point my solidarity with those, in this country, who were fighting against what was then their country's official policy in certain parts of the world, notably in Vietnam. It is evident that such a gesture—and the fact that I am authorized to make it—signifies that those who are welcoming my discourse do not identify with the policies of their country any more than I do, and do not feel justified in assuming those policies, at least insofar as they are participating in this colloquium.
And yet it would be naive or purposely blind to let oneself be
reassured by the image or appearance of such a freedom.
It would be illusory to believe that political innocence has
been restored, and evil complicities undone, when opposition to them can be
expressed in the country itself, not only through the voices of its own
citizens but also those of foreign citizens, and that hencefoth diversities, i.e. oppositions, may freely and discursively relate
to one another. That a declaration of opposition to some
official policy is authorized, and authorized by the authorities, also means,
precisely to that extent, that the declaration does not upset the given order,
is not bothersome. This last expression, "bothersome,"
may be taken in all its senses. This is what I wished to recall, in order to begin, by speaking of the form of democracy
as the political milieu of every international
philosophical colloquium. And this is also why I proposed to place the
accent on form no less than on democracy. Such, in its most
general and schematic principle, is the question
which put itself to me during the preparations for this encounter, from the
invitation and the deliberations that followed, up to acceptance, and then to
the writing of this text, which I date quite precisely from
the month of April 1968: it will be recalled that these were the weeks of the opening of the Vietnam peace talks and of the
assassination of Martin Luther King. A bit later, when I
was typing this text, the universities of Paris were
invaded by the forces of order—and for the first time at the demand of a rector—and then reoccupied by the students in the upheaval
you are familiar with. This historical and political
horizon would call for a long analysis. I have simply found it
necessary to mark, date, and make known to you the historical circumstances in which I prepared this communication. These
circumstances appear to me to belong, by all rights, to
the field and the problematic of our colloquium.
Humanism or Metaphysics
Thus the transition will be made quite naturally between the preamble and the theme of this communication, as it was imposed upon me, rather than as I chose it.
Where is France, 'as concerns man?
The question "of man" is being asked in very current
fashion in France, along highly significant lines,
and in an original historico-philosophical structure. What I will call
"France," then, on the basis of several indices and for the time of
this exposition, will be the nonempirical site of a
movement, a structure and an articulation of the
question "of man." Following this is would be possible, and doubtless necessary—but then only—rigorously to relate this site
with every other instance defining something like
"France."
Where then is France, as concerns man?
After the war, under the name of Christian or atheist
existentialism, and in conjunction with a
fundamentally Christian personalism, the thought that dominated France
presented itself essentially as humanist. Even if one does not wish to summarize Sartre's thought under the slogan
"existentialism is a humanism," it must be
recognized that in Being and Nothingness, The Sketch of a
Theory of the Emotions, etc., the major
concept, the theme of the last analysis, the irreducible horizon and
origin is what was then called "human-reality." As is well known, this is a translation of Heideggerian Dasein. A
monstrous translation in many respects, but so much the
more significant. That this translation proposed by Corbin was
adopted at the time, and that by means of Sartre's authority it reigned, gives us much to think about the reading or the
nonreading of Heidegger during this period, and about what was at stake in
reading or not reading him in this way.
Certainly the notion of "human-reality" translated the
project of thinking the meaning of man, the
humanity of man, on a new basis, if you will. If the neutral and undetermined notion of "human reality" was
substituted for the notion of man, with all its
metaphysical heritage and the substantialist motif or temptation inscribed in it, it was also in order to suspend all the
presuppositions which had always constituted the
concept of the unity of man. Thus, it was also a reaction against a certain
intellectualist or spiritualist humanism which had dominated French philosophy (Brunschvig, Alain, Bergson, etc.). And this
neutralization of every metaphysical or speculative
thesis as concerns the unity of the anthropos could be
considered in some respects as the faithful inheritance of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and of the fundamental ontology in Sein
und Zeit (the only
partially known work of Heidegger's at the time, along with What Is Metaphysics? and Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics). And yet, despite this alleged neutralization of
metaphysical presuppositions,4 [[The humanism which
marks Sartre's philosophical discourse in its depths. however, is very surely and very ironically taken apart in Nausea:
in the caricature of the Autodidact, for example, the same
figure reassembles the theological project of absolute knowledge and the humanist ethic, in the form of the encyclopedic
epistemophilia which leads the Autodidact to undertake
the reading of the world library (which is really the Western library, and definitely the municipal library) in alphabetical
order by author's name, and in areas where he is
able to love Man ("There is an aim, sir, there is an aim…there are men…one must love them, one must love them") in the
representation of men, preferably young men. It is in the dialogue with the
Autodidact that Roquentin levels the worst charges against
humanism, against all humanist styles; and at the moment when nausea is slowly rising in him, he says to himself, for example,
"I don't want to be integrated, I don't
want my good red blood to go and fatten this lymphatic beast: I will not be fool enough to call myself 'anti-humanist.' I am not a humanist, that's all there is
to
it." Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New
Directions, 1959), p. 160.]] it must be recognized that the unity of man is never examined in and of itself. Not only
is existentialism a humanism, but the ground and horizon of
what Sartre then called his "phenomenological ontology" (the subtitle
of Being and Nothingness) remains the unity of human-reality.
To the extent that it describes the structures of human-reality,
phenomenological
ontology is a philosophical anthropology. Whatever the breaks marked by
this Hegelian-Husserlian-Heideggerian anthropology as concerns the classical
anthropologies, there is an uninterrupted metaphysical familiarity with that
which, so naturally, links the we of the philosopher to "we men," to the we in the horizon of humanity. Although
the theme of history is quite present in the
discourse of the period, there is little practice of history of concepts. For example, the history of the concept of man is
never examined. Everything occurs as if the sign
"man" had no origin, no historical, cultural, or linguistic limit.
At the end of Being and Nothingness, when Sartre in programmatic fashion asks the question of the unity of Being (which in this
context means the totality of beings), and when he confers
upon this question the rubric "metaphysical" in order to distinguish
it from phenomenological ontology which described the essential specificity of
regions, it goes without saying that this
metaphysical unity of Being, as the
totality of the in-self and the for-itself, is precisely for itself were of Being; as the totality of beings, in which they were
effected, itself was linked relating and appearing to
itself, by means of the essential project of
human-reality.5 [["Each human reality is at the same
time a direct project to metamorphose its own For-itself in an
In-itself-For-itself and a project of the appropriation of the world as a
totality of being-in-itself, in the form of a fundamental quality. Every human
reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and
by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by
being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus the
passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man
in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose
ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion." Being and Nothingness,
trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1966), p. 784. This synthetic
unity is determined as lack: lack of totality in beings, lack ofGod that is
soon transformed into a lack in God. Human-reality is a failed God: "Also the
ens causa sui remains as the lacked…" (p. 789)..”the
for-itself determines its being as a lack (p. 795). As concerns the
meaning of the Being of this totality of beings, as concerns the history of
this concept of negativity as a relationship to God, the meaning and origin of
the concept of (human) reality, and the reality of the real, no questions are
asked. In this respect, what is true of Being and Nothingness is
even more so of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. The concept
of lack, linked to the non-self identity of the subject (as consciousness)
and to the desire and agency of the Other in the dialectic of the master and
the slave, was then beginning to dominate the French ideological scene]]
What was
named in this way, in an allegedly neutral and undetermined
way, was nothing other than the metaphysical unity of man and God, the
relation of man to God, the project of becoming God as the project constituting human-reality. Atheism changes nothing in this
fundamental structure. The example of the Sartrean project remarkably verifies
Heidegger's proposition according to which "every humanism
remains metaphysical”,metaphysics being the other name of ontotheology.
Thus defined, humanism or anthropologism, during this period, was
the common ground of Christian or atheist
existentialisms, of the philosophy of values
(spiritualist or not), of personalisms of the right or the left, of Marxism in the classical style. And if one takes one's bearings from the
terrain of political ideologies,
anthropologism was the unperceived and uncontested common ground of Marxism
and of Social-Democratic or Christian-Democratic discourse. This profound concordance was authorized, in its philosophical
expression, by the anthropologistic
readings of Hegel (interest in the Phenomenology of Spirit as it was read by Kojève), of Marx (the privilege accorded the
Manuscripts of 1844), of Husserl (whose
descriptive and regional work is emphasized, but whose transcendental
questions are ignored), and of Heidegger, whose projects for a philosophical anthropology or an existential analytic only were
known or retained (Sein und Zeit). Of course, here I am picking
out the dominant traits of a period. The period
itself is not exhausted by these dominant traits. Nor can one say in
absolutely rigorous fashion that this period started after the war, and even less that it is over today. Nevertheless, I believe that the
empiricism of this cross-section is
justifiable here only insofar as it permits the reading of a dominant motif and insofar as it takes its authority from indices which are
unarguable for anyone approaching such a period. Further,
the cross-section is provisional, and in an instant we
wifi reinscribe this sequence in the time and space of a larger totality.
In order to mark in boldface the traits that opposed this period
to the following one, the one in which we are, and which
too is probably undergoing a mutation, we must recall
that during the decade that followed the war we did not yet see the reign of the all-powerful motif of what we call today, more
and more, and even exclusively, the "so-called human
sciences," the expression itself marking a certain
distance, but a still respectful distance. On the contrary, the current questioning of humanism is contemporary with the dominating and
spellbinding extension of the "human
sciences" within the philosophical field.
The Relève of Humanism
The anthropologistic reading of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger was
a mistake in one entire respect, perhaps the most
serious mistake. And it is this reading which furnished
the best conceptual resources to postwar French thought.
First of all, the Phenomenology of Spirit, which had
only been read for a short time in France, does not
have to do with something one might simply call man. As the science of
the experience of consciousness, the science of the structures of the phenomenality of the spirit itself relating to itself, it
is rigorously distinguished from anthropology. In the Encyclopedia,
the section entitled Phenomenology of Spirit comes after the Anthropology,
and quite explicitly exceeds its limits. What is true of
the Phenomenology is a fortiori true of the system of the Logic.
Similarly, in the second place, the critique of anthropologism was one of the inaugural motifs of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. This is an explicit critique, and it calls anthropologism by its name from the Prologomena to Pure Logic on.6[[Chapter 7, "Psychologism as Sceptical Relativism," sec. 39, "Anthropologism in Sigwart's Logic," sec. 40, "Anthropologism in Erdmann's Logic."]] Later this critique will have as its target not only empirical anthropologism, but also transcendental anthropologism.7 [[Ideas I, see e.g. secs. 49 and 54.]] The transcendental structures described after the phenomenological reduction are not—thoseo1 the intrawordly being called "man". Nor are they essentially linked to njan's society, language, or evento his "soul" or "psyche." Just as, according to Husserl, one may imagine a consciousness without soul (seelenlos),8 [[Ibid]] similarly—and a fortiori—one rnaylnragine a consciousness without man.
Therefore it is astonishing and highly significant that at the moment when the authority of Husserlian thought was asserted and then established in postwar France, even becoming a kind of philosophical mode, the critique of anthropologism remained totally unnoticed, or in any event without effect. One of the mqst paradoxical pathways of this motivated misconstruing passes through a reductive reading of Heidegger. Because one has interpreted the analytic of Dasein in strictly anthropological terms, occasionally one limits or criticizes Husserl on the basis of Heidegger, dropping all the aspects of phenomenology that do not serve anthropological description. This pathway is quite paradoxical because it follows the itinerary of a reading of Heidegger that was also Husserl's. In effect, Husserl precipitously interpreted Sein und Zeit as an anthropologistic deviation from transcendental phenomenology.9 [[See the Afterword to Ideas, and the marginal notes in the copy of Sein und Zeit (Husserl Archives, Louvain)]]
In the third place, immediate following the war and after the
appearance of Being and Nothingness. Heidegger, in
his Letter on Humanism, recalled—for all those who did not
yet know, and who had not even taken into account'the very first sections of
Sein und Zeit—that anthropology and humanism were nçt the milieu of his thought and the horizon of his questions. The
"destruction" of metaphysics or of
classical ontology was even directed against humanism).10
[["Every humanism is either grounded in a
metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one. Every determination of
the essence of man that already presupposes an interpretation of being without
asking about the truth of Being, whether knowingly or not, is metaphysical. The
result is that what is peculiar to all metaphysics, specifically with respect
to the way the essence of man is determined, is that it is 'humanistic.'
Accordingly, every humanism remains metaphysical." "Letter on
Humanism," in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New
York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 202]] After the tide of humanism and anthropologism that had covered French
philosophy, one might have thought that the
antihumanist and antianthropologist ebb that followed, and in
which we are now, would rediscover the heritage of the systems of thought that had been disfigured, or in which rather, the
figure of man too quickly had been discerned.
Nothing of the sort has happened, and it is the significance of such a phenomenon that I now wish to examine. The critique of humanism and anthropologism, which is one of the dominant and guiding motifs of current French thought, far from seeking its sources or warranties in the Hegelian, Husserlian, or Heideggerian critiques of the same humanism or the same anthropologism, on the contrary seem, by means of a gesture sometimes more implicit than systematically articulated, to amalgamate Hegel, Husserl, and—in a more diffuse and ambiguous fashion—Heidegger with the old metaphysical humanism. I am purposely using the word "amalgam" which in its usage unites references to alchemy, which is the primary one here, with a strategic or tactical reference to the domain of political ideology.
Before attempting to interpret this phenomenon of paradoxical
demeanor, we must take several precautions. First of
all, this amalgam does not exclude that some progress has
been made in France in the reading of Hegel, Husserl, or Heidegger, nor
that this progress has led to requestioning the humanist insistence. But this
progress and requestioning do not occupy center stage, and this must be significant. Conversely and symmetrically, among those who
do practice the amalgamation, the schemas of the
anthropologistic misinterpretation from Sartre's time are
still at work, and occasionally it is these very schemas which govern the rejection of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger into the
shadows of humanist metaphysics. Very often, in
fact, those who denounce humanism at the same time as
metaphysics have remained at the stage of this "first reading" of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, and one could locate more than
one sign of this in numerous recent texts. Which leads
us to think that in certain respects, and at least to
this extent, we are still on the same shore.
But no matter, as concerns the question I would like to ask, that
such and such an author has read such and such a
text poorly, or simply not at all, or that he remains, as
concerns systems of thought he believes he has surpassed or overturned, in a state of great ingenuousness. This is why we
shall not concern ourselves here with any given author's
name or with the title of any given work. What must hold
our interest, beyond the justifications which, as a matter of fact, are most often insufficient, is the kind of profound
justification, whose necessity is subterranean, which
makes the Hegelian, Husserlian, and Heideggerian critiques or de-limitations of metaphysical humanism appear to belong
to the very sphere of that which they criticize or
de-limit. In a word, whether this has been made explicit or
not, and whether it has been articulated or not (and more than one index leads us to believe that it has not), what authorizes us
today to consider as essentially anthropic
or anthropocentric everything in metaphysics, or at the limits
of metaphysics, that believed itself to be a critique or delimitation of anthropologism? What is the reléve of man in the
thought of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger?
The Near End of Man
Let us reconsider, first of all, within the order of Hegelian discourse, which still holds together the language of our era by so many threads, the relations between anthropology on the one hand and phenomenology and logic on the other.11 [[Without neglecting the complexity of the relations between the Logic and the Phenomenology of Spirit, the question we are asking authorizes us to consider them together at the point of opening where Absolute Knowledge articulates them one with the other.]] Once the confusion of a purely anthropological reading of the Phenornenology of Spirit has been rigorously avoided, it must be recognized that according to Hegel the relations between anthropology and phenomenology are not simply external ones. The Hegelian concepts of truth, negativity, and Aufhebung, with all their results, prevent this from being so. In the third part of the Encyclopedia which treats the "Philosophy of Spirit," the first section ("Philosophy of Spirit") inscribes the Phenomenology of Spirit between the "Anthropology" and the "Psychology." The Phenomenology of Spirit succeeds the Anthropology and precedes the Psychology. The Anthropology treats the spirit—which is the "truth of nature"—as soul or as natural-spirit (Seele or Naturgeist). The development of the soul, such as it is retraced by the anthropology, passes through the natural soul (natürliche Seele), through the sensible soul (fühlende Seele), and through the real or effective soul (wirkliche Seele). This development accomplishes and completes itself, and then opens onto consciousness. The last section of the Anthropology 12 [["The actual soul with its sensation and its concrete self-feeling turned into habit, has implicitly realised the 'ideality' of its qualities; in this externality it has recollected and inwardized (errinert) itself, and is infinite self-relation. This free universality thus made explicit shows the soul awaking to the higher stage of the ego, or abstract universality, in so far as it is for the abstract universality. In this way it gains the position of thinker and subject—specially a subject of the judgment in which the ego excludes from itself the sum total of its merely natural features as an object, a world external to it—but with such respect to that object that in it it is immediately reflected into itself. Thus soul rises to become Consciousness. (Die wirkliche Seele in der Gewohnheit des Empfindens und ihres konkreten Selbst gefühlt ist an sich die für sich seiende ldealitát ihrer Bestimmtheiten, in ihres Ausserlichkeit erinnert in sich und unendliche Beziehung an sich. Die Fursichsein der freien Ailgemeinheit ist das hôhere Erwachen der Seele zum Ich, der abstrakten Allgememheit, insofern sie für die abstrakte Ailgemeinheit ist, weiche so Denken und Subjekt für sich und zwar bestimmt Subjekt seines Urteils ist, in welchem es die naturliche Totalitat seiner Bestimmungen als em Objeki, eine ihm äussere Welt, von sich ausschliesst und sich darauf bezieht, so dass es in derselben unmittelbar in sich reflektiert ist, das Bewusstsein.)" Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), sec. 412, p. 151.]] defines the general form of consciousness, the very one from which the Phenomenology of Spirit will depart, in the first chapter on "Sensuous Certitude”.13 [[That is, objectivity in general, the relation of an "1" in general with a being-object in general.]] Consciousness, i.e. the phenomenological, therefore, is the truth of the soul, that is, precisely the truth of that which was the object of the anthropology. Consciousness is the truth of man, phenomenology is the truth of anthropology. "Truth," here, must be understood in a rigorously Hegelian sense. In this Hegelian sense, the metaphysical essence of truth, the truth of the truth, is achieved. Truth is here the presence or presentation of essence as Gewesenheit, of Wesen as having-been. Consciousness is the truth of man to the extent that man appears to himself in consciousness in his Being-past, in his to-have-been, in his past surpassed and conserved, retained, interiorized (erinnert) and relève. Aufheben is relever, in the sense in which relever can combine to relieve, to displace, to elevate, to replace and to promote, in one and the same movement.14 Consciousness is the Aufhebung of the soul or of man, phenomenology is the relève of anthropology. It is no longer, but it is still a science of man. In this sense, all the structures described by the phenomenology of spirit—like everything whicharticulates them with the Logic—are the structures of that which has relève man. In them, man remains in relief. His essence rests in Phenomenology. This equivocal relationship of relief doubtless marks the end of man, man past, but by the same token it also marks the achievement of man, the appropriation of his essence. It is the end of finite man [C'est Ia fin de l'homme fini]. The end of the finitude of man, the unity of the finite and the infinite, the finite as the surpassing of the self—these essential themes of Hegel's are to be recognized at the end of the Anthropology when consciousness is finally designated as the "infinite relationship to self." The relève or relevance of man is his telos or eskhaton. The unity of these two ends of man, the unity of his death, his completion, his accomplishment, is enveloped in the Greek thinking of telos, in the discourse on telos, which is also a discourse on eidos, on ousia, and on alëtheia. Such a discourse, in Hegel as in the entirety of metaphysics, indissociably coordinates teleology with an eschatology, a theology, and an ontology. The thinking of the end of man, therefore, is always already prescribed in metaphysics, in the thinking of the truth of man. What is difficult to think today is an end of man which would not be organized by a dialectics of truth and negativity, an end of man which would not be a teleology in the first person plural. The we, which articulates natural and philosophical consciousness with each other in the Phenomenology of Spirit, assures the proximity to itself of the fixed and central being for which this circular reappropriation is produced. The we is the unity of absolute knowledge and anthropology, of God and man, of onto-theo-teleology and humanism. "Being" and Language—the group of languages—that the we governs or opens: such is the name of that which assures the transition between metaphysics and humanism via the we.15 [[We could verify the necessity of the framework of this ambiguity or relevance, which is accomplished in Hegelian metaphysics and persists wherever metaphysics—that is, our language—maintains its authority, not only in our immediate vicinity, but already in all pre-Hegelian systems. In Kant, the figure of finitude organizes the capacity to know from the very emergence of the anthropological limit.
A. On the one hand, it is precisely when Kant
wishes to think something like the end, the
pure
end, the end in itself, that he must criticize anthropologism. in
the Metaphysics of Morals. One cannot
deduce the principles of morality on the basis of a knowledge of the nature of a particular being named man: "But a
completely isolated metaphysics of morals,
mixed
with no anthropology, no theology, no physics or hyperphysics, and even less
with occult qualities (which might be
called hypophysical), is not only an indispensable substrate of all
theoretically sound and definite knowledge of duties; it is also a desideratum
of the highest importance to the actual fulfilment of its precepts"
("Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals," in The Crit ique
of Practical Reason . . , p. 70). "Furthermore, it is evident that
it is not only of the greatest necessity in a theoretical point of view when it
is a question of speculation but also of the utmost practical importance to
derive the concepts and laws of morals from pure reason and to present them
pure and unmixed, and to determine the scope of this entire practical but pure
rational knowledge (the entire faculty of pure practical reason) without making
the principles depend upon the particular nature of human reason, as
speculative philosophy may permit and even sometimes find necessary. But since
moral laws should hold for every rational being as such, the principles must be
derived from the universal concept of a rational being generally. In this
manner all morals, which need anthropology for their application to men, must
be completely developed first as pure philosophy, i.e. metaphysics,
independently of anthropology" (ibid., p. 71). "With a view to
attaining this, it is extremely important to remember that we must not let
ourselves think that the reality of this principle can be derived from the particular
constitution of human nature (aus der besondern Eigenschaft der
menschlichen Natur). For duty is practical unconditional necessity of
action; it must, therefore, hold for all rational beings (to which alone an
imperative can apply), and only for that reason can it be a law
for all human wills" (ibid., p. 83). We see in these three passages that
what is always of the "greatest importance" (von der hochsten
Wichtigkeit ... von der grossten praktischen Wichtigkeit . . .
von der äussersten Wichtigkeif) is to determine the end in itself (as
an unconditioned principle of morality), independently of any anthropological
givens. One cannot think the purity of the end of the basis of man.
B. But, on the other hand, and
inversely, man's specificity, man's essence as a rational being, as the
rational animal (zōon logon ekhon), announces itself to itself
only on the basis of thinking the end in itself; it announces itself to itself
as the end in itself; that is, equally, as an infinite end, since the thinking
of the unconditioned is also the thinking which raises itself above experience,
that is, above finitude. Thus is explained the fact that despite the critique
of anthropologism, of which we have just given a few indices, man is the only
example, the only case of a rational being that can ever be cited at
the very moment when by all rights one distinguishes the universal concept of a
rational being from the concept of the human being. It is through the offices
of this fact that anthropology regains all its contested
authority. This is the point at which the philosopher says "we," and
at which in Kant's discourse "rational being" and
"humanity" are always associated by the conjunction "and"
or vel. For example "Now, I say, man and in general
(und überhaupt) every rational being, exists as an
end in himself, and not merely as a means" (Foundations…., p.
86). [Note that this phrase is from the passage that serves as the first
epigraph to this text. The deconstruction of the end and of man takes place on
the margins of philosophy: in titles and footnotes.] "This
principle of humanity and of every rational creature as an end in itself"
(ibid., pp. 88-89).]]
We have just perceived the necessity which links the thinking of
the phainesthai to the thinking of the telos. The teleology which
governs Husserl's transcendental phenomenology can be read
in the same opening. Despite the critique of anthropologism,
"humanity," here, is still the name of the being to which the transcendental telos—determined as Idea (in the
Kantian sense) or even as Reason—is announced. It is man as animal
rationale who, in his most classical metaphysical determination,
designates the site of teleological reason's unfolding, that is, history.
For Husserl as for Hegel, reason is history, and there is no history but of reason. The latter "functions in every man, the animal
rationale, no matter how primitive he is. .
." Every kind of humanity and human sociality has "a root in the essential structure of what is generally human,
through which a teleological reason running throughout all
historicity announces itself. With this is revealed a set
of problems in its own right related to the totality of history and to the full meaning which ultimately gives it its
unity."16 [["The Origin of
Geometry," in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenornenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1970), p. 378.]] Transcendental phenomenology is
in this sense the ultimate achievement of the teleology of reason that
traverses humanity.17 [[In a brief fragment from
1934 (Stufen der Geschichtlichkeif. Erste Geschichtlichkeit,
Beilage XXVI, in Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die
transzendentale Phanamenologie [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,1954], pp.
502—3) Husserl distinguishes between three levels and three stages of
historicity: culture and tradition as human sociality in general; European culture
and the theoretical project (science and philosophy); "the conversion of
philosophy into phenomenology."]] Thus, under the jurisdiction
of the founding concepts of metaphysics, which Husserl
revives and restores (if necessary affecting them with phenomenological
brackets or indices), the critique of empirical anthropologism is only the
affirmation of a transcendental humanism. And, among these
metaphysical concepts which form the essential resource of Hussen's discourse,
the concept of end or of telos plays a decisive
role. It could be shown that at each stage of phenomenology,
and notably each time that a recourse to the
"Idea in the Kantian sense" is necessary, the infinity of the telos, the infinity of the end regulates phenomenology's capabilities.
The end of man (as a factual anthropological limit) is
announced to thought from the vantage of the end of man
(as a determined opening or the infinity of a telos). Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally
equivocal sense of the word. Since always. The
transcendental end can appear to itself and be unfolded only on the
condition of mortality, of a relation to finitude as the origin of ideality. The name of man has always been inscribed in metaphysics between
these two ends. It has meaning only in this
eschato-teleological situation.
Reading Us
The "we," which in one way or another always has had to refer to itself in the language of metaphysics and in philosophical discourse, arises out of this situation. To conclude, what about this we in the text which better than any other has given us to read the essential, historical complicity of metaphysics and humanism in all their forms? What about this we, then, in Heidegger's text?
This is the most difficult question, and we will only begin to
consider it. We are not going to empnison all of
Heidegger's text in a closure that this text has delimited better
than any other. That which links humanism and metaphysics as ontotheology
became legible as such in Sein und Zeit, the Letter on
Humanism, and the later texts. Referring to this
acquisition, attempting to take it into account, I would like to
begin to sketch out the forms of the hold which the "humanity" of man and the thinking of Being, a certain humanism and the truth
of Being, maintain on one another. Naturally, it will not
be a question of the falsification which, in opposition to
Heidegger's most explicit warnings, consists in making this hold into a
mastery or an ontic relationship in general. What will preoccupy us here will concern, rather, a more subtle, hidden, stubborn
privilege, which, as in the case of Hegel or Husserl, leads
us back to the position of the we in discourse. Once
one has given up positing the we in the metaphysical dimension of "we men," once one has given up
charging the we men with the metaphysical determinations of
the proper of man (zōon logon ekhon, etc.), it remains that man—and I would even say, in a sense that will become clear in a
moment, the proper of man—the thinking of
the proper of man isinse a able from the question or the Being. This occurs
along the Heideggerian pathways by means of what we may
call a kind of magnetic attraction.
Here, I can only indicate the general rubric and several effects
of this magnetization. In the effort to disdose it at the continuous depth at
which it operates, the distinction between
given periods of Heidegger's thought, between the texts before and after
the so-called Kehre, has less pertinence than ever. For, on the one hand, the existential analytic had already overflowed the
horizon of a philosophical anthropology: Dasein is not simply the
man of metaphysics. On the other hand, conversely,
in the Letter on Human and beyond, the
attraction of the "proper of man" will not
cease to direct all the itineraries of thought. At least this is
what I would like to suggest, and I will regroup the effects or indices of this magnetic attraction beneath the general concept of proximity.
It is in the play of a certain proximity, proximity to
oneself and proximity to Being, that we will see
constituted, against metaphysical humanism and anthropologism, another
insistence of man, one which relays, relieves, supplements that which it destroys, along pathways on which we are, from which we have
hardly emerged—perhaps-—and which remain to be examined.
What about this proximity? First, let us open Sein und Zeit at the point at which the question of Being is asked in its "formal structure" (sec. 2). Our "vague average" understanding of the words "Being" or "is" finds itself acknowledged as a Fact (Faktum): "Inquiry (Suchen), as a kind of seeking, must be guided beforehand by what is sought. So the meaning of Being must already be available to us in some say. As we have intimated, we always already conduct our activities in an understanding of Being. Out of this understanding arise both the explicit question of the meaning of Being and the tendency that leads us toward its conception. We do not know what 'Being' means. But even if we ask, 'What is "Being"?', we keep within an understanding of the 'is', though we are unable to fix conceptually what that 'is' signifies. We do not even know the horizon in terms of which that meaning is to be grasped and fixed. But this vague average understanding of Being is still a Fact”.18 [[TN. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 25.]] I have italicized the we (us) and the always already. They are determined, then, in correspondence with this understanding of "Being" or of the "is." In the absence of every other determination or presupposition, the "we" at least is what is open to such an understanding, what is always already accessible to it, and the means by which such a factum can be recognized as such. It automatically follows, then, that this we—however simple, discreet, and erased it might be—inscribes the so-called formal structure of the question of Being within the horizon of metaphysics, and more widely within the Indo-European linguistic milieu, to the possibility of which the origin of metaphysics is essentially linked. It is within these limits that the factum can be understood and accredited; and it is within these determined, and therefore material, limits that the factum can uphold the so-called formality of the question. It remains that the meaning of these "limits" is given to us only on the basis of the question of the meaning of Being. Let us not pretend, for example, to know what "Indo-European linguistic milieu" means.
This "formal structure of the question of Being" having
been asked by Heidegger, the issue then, as is well known, is to acknowledge
the exemplary being (exemplarische
Seiende) which will constitute the privileged text for a reading of the meaning of Being. And I recall that according to Heidegger the
formal structure of the question, of any question, must
be composed of three instances: the Gefragte, that which is
asked about, here the meaning of Being; the Erfragte, that which is to be found out insofar as it is properly targeted
by a question, the meaning of Being as what
is questioned; finally the Befragte, that which is interrogated,
the being that will be interrogated, to which will be put the question of the meaning of Being. The issue then is to choose or to
recognize this exemplary interrogated being with one's sights set
on the meaning of Being: "In which entities is the
meaning of Being to be discerned (abgelesen)? From which entities is the disclosure of Being to take its departure? Is the
starting-point optional, or does some particular entity
have priority (Vorrang) when we come to work out the
question of Being? Which entity shall we take for our example, and in what sense does it have priority?"19
[[TN. Ibid., p. 26. Note that Macquarrie and Robinson
translate Seiend (which we give as "being," as do most
of the recent Heidegger translations) as "entity."]]
What will dictate the answer to this question? In what milieu of
evidentiality, of certitude, or at least of understanding
must it be unfolded? Even before claiming the
phenomenological method (sec. 7), at least in a "provisional
concept," as the method for the elaboration of the question of Being, the
determination of the exemplary being is in principle
"phenomenological." It is governed by
phenomenology's principle of principles, the principle of presence and of presence in self-presence, such as it is
manifested to the being and in the being that we
are. It is this self-presence, this absolute proximity of the (questioning) being to itself, this familiarity with itself of the being ready
to understand Being, that intervenes in the
determination of the factum, and which
motivates the choice of the exemplary being, of the
text, the good text for the hermeneutic of the meaning of
Being. It is the proximity to itself of the questioning being which leads it to be chosen as the privileged interrogated being. The
proximity to itself of the inquirer
authorizes the identity of the inquirer and the interrogated. We who are close to ourselves, we interrogate ourselves
about the meaning of Being. Let us read this protocol
of reading: "If the question about Being is to be explicitly formulated and carried through in such a manner as to be completely
transparent to itself, then any treatment of it in
line with the elucidations we have given requires us to
explain how Being is to be looked at, how its meaning is to be understood and conceptually grasped; it requires us to prepare the
way for choosing the right entity for our example,
and to work out the genuine way of access to it. Looking at
something, understanding and conceiving it, choosing access to it—all
these ways of behaving are constitutive of our inquiry, and therefore are modes of Being for those particular entities which
we, the inquirers, are ourselves (eines
bestimmten Seienden, des Seienden,
das wir, die Fragenden, je selbst sind). Thus to work
out the question of Being adequately, we must make an entity—the
inquirer—transparent in his own Being. The very asking of this question (das Fragen dieser Frage) is an entity's
mode of Being; and as such it gets its essential
character from what is inquired about (gefragt)—namely, Being. This entity which each of us is himself and which
includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its
Being, we shall denote by the term 'Dasein' (fassen wir
terminologisch als Dasein). If we are to formulate our question
explicitly and transparently, we must first give a proper explication of an
entity (Dasein) with regard to its Being."20
[[TN. Ibid., pp. 26—27. Further references are to this
edition.]]
Doubtless this proximity, this identity or self-presence of the
"entity that we are"—of the inquirer
and of the interrogated—does not have the form of subjective consciousness, as
in transcendental phenomenology. Doubtless too, this proximity is
still prior to what the metaphysical predicate "human" might name.
The Da- of Dasein can be determined as a coming
presence onlu on the basis of a reading of the question of Being which summons
it up. Nevertheless, the process of disenganging or of elaborating the of Being, as
a question of the meaning of Being, is
defined as a making explicit or as an interpretation that makes explicit. The reading of the text Dasein is a
hermeneutics of unveiling or of development (see sec.
7). If one looks closely, it is the phenomenological opposition
"implicit/explicit" that permits Heidegger to reject the objection of the vicious circle, the circle that consists of first determining
a being in its Being, and then of posing the
question of Being on the basis of this ontological predetermination (p. 27).
This style of a reading which makes explicit, practices a continual
bringing to light, something which resembles, at least, a coming into consciousness, without break, displacement, or change of terrain.
Moreover, just as Dasein—the being which we
ourselves are—serves as an exemplary text, a good
"lesson" for making explicit the meaning of Being, so the name of man remains the link or the paleonymic guiding thread which ties the
analytic of Dasein to the totality of metaphysics'
traditional discourse. Whence the strange status of such
sentences or parentheses as: "As ways in which man behaves, sciences have the manner of Being which this entity—man
himself—possesses. This entity we denote by
the term 'Dasein' (Dieses Seiende fassen wir terminologisch als Dasein)" (p. 32). Or again: "The problematic
of Greek ontology, like that of any other, must take its
clues from Dasein itself. In both ordinary and philosophical usage, Dasein,
man's Being (das Dasein, d.h. das sein des Menschen), is 'defined' (umgrenzt) as the zōon logon ekhon—as
that living thing whose Being is essentially determined by
the potentiality for discourse (Redenkonnen)" (p. 47). Similarly, a "complete ontology of Dasein" is posited as
the prerequisite condition for a "philosophical' anthropology" (p.
38). We can see then that Dasein, though not
man, is nevertheless nothing other than man. It is,. as we shall
see, a repetition of essence of manp return to what is
before the metaphysical concepts of humanitas.
The
subtlety and equivocality of this gesture, then, are what
appear to have authorized all the anthropologistic deformations in the reading of Sein und Zeit, notably in France.
The value of proximity, that is, of presence in general, therefore
decides the essential orientation of this analytic of
Dasein. The motif of proximity surely finds itself
caught in an opposition which henceforth will unceasingly regulate Heidegger's discourse. The fifth section of Sein und Zeit
in effect seems not to contradict but to limit
and contain what was already gained, to wit that the Dasein
"which we are" constitutes the exemplary being for the hermeneutic
ofthe meaning of Being by virtue of its proximity to itself, of our proximity
to ourselves, our proximity to the being that we
are. At this point Heidegger marks that this proximity is ontic.
Ontologically, that is, as concerns the Being of that being which we
are, the distance, on the contrary, is as great as possible. "Ontically,
of course, Dasein is not only close to us—even that which is closest: we are it, each of us, we ourselves. In spite of this,
or rather for just this reason,
it is ontologically that which is farthest."21 [["In demonstrating that Dasein is ontico-ontologically prior, we may have misled the reader into supposing that this entity must also be what is given as ontico-ontologically primary (primär), not only in the sense that it can itself be grasped 'immediately,' but also in that the kind of Being which it possesses is presented just as 'immediately.' Ontically. of course, Dasein is not only close to us—even that which is closest: we are it, each of us, we ourselves. In spite of this, or rather for just this reason, it is ontologically that which is farthest . . . Dasein is ontically 'closest' (am nächsten) to itself and ontologically farthest; but pre-ontologically it is surely not a stranger (nicti fremd)" (pp. 36—37).]]
it is ontologically that which is farthest."21 [["In demonstrating that Dasein is ontico-ontologically prior, we may have misled the reader into supposing that this entity must also be what is given as ontico-ontologically primary (primär), not only in the sense that it can itself be grasped 'immediately,' but also in that the kind of Being which it possesses is presented just as 'immediately.' Ontically. of course, Dasein is not only close to us—even that which is closest: we are it, each of us, we ourselves. In spite of this, or rather for just this reason, it is ontologically that which is farthest . . . Dasein is ontically 'closest' (am nächsten) to itself and ontologically farthest; but pre-ontologically it is surely not a stranger (nicti fremd)" (pp. 36—37).]]
The analytic of Dasein, as well as the thinking
which, beyond the Kehre, will pursue the
question of Being, will maintain itself in the space which separates and relates to one another such a proximity and such a distance.
The Da of Dasein and the Da
of Sein will signify as much the near as the far. Beyond the common closure of humanism and metaphysics, Heidegger's thought
will be guided by the motif of Being as
presence—understood in a more originary sense than it is in the
metaphysical and ontic determinations of presence or of presence as the present—and by the motif of the proximity of Being to the
essence of man. Everything transpires as if one had
to reduce the ontological distance acknowledged in Sein
und Zeit and to state the proximity of Being to the essence of man.
To support this last proposition, several indicative references to
the Letter on Humanism. I will not
insist upon the major and well-known theme of this text: the unity of
metaphysics and humanism.22 [["Every humanism
is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one.
Every determination of the essence of man that already presupposes an interpretation
of being without asking about the truth of Being, whether knowingly or not, is
metaphysical. The result is that what is peculiar to all metaphysics, specifically
with respect to the way the essence of man is determined, is that it is
'humanistic.' Accordingly, every humanism remains metaphysical. In defining the
humanity of man humanism not only does not ask about the relation of Being to
the essence of man; because of its metaphysical origin humanism even impedes
the question by neither recognizing nor understanding it." "Letter on
Humanism," in Basic Writings. ed. Krell, p. 202.]] Any
questioning of humanism that does not first catch up
with the archeological radicalness of the questions sketched by
Heidegger, and does not make use of the information he provides concerning the genesis of the concept and the value man (the
reedition of the Greek paideia in Roman
culture, the Christianizing of the Latin humanitas, the rebirth of Hellenism in the.fourteenth and eighteenth centuries,
etc.), any metahumanist position that not place itself within the opening of
these questions remains historically regional, periodic, and peripheral,
juridically secondary and dependent, whatever
interest and necessity it might retain as such.
It remains that the thinking of Being, the thinking of the truth
of Being, in the name of which Heidegger de-limits
humanism and metaphysics, remains as thinking of
man. Man and the name of man are not displaced in the question of Being such as it is put to metaphysics. Even less do they
disappear. On the contrary, at issue is a kind of
reevaluation or revalorization of the essence and dignity of man.
What is threatened in the extension of metaphysics and technology—and we know
the essential necessity that leads Heidegger to associate them one to
another—is the essence of man, which here would have to be thought before
and beyond its metaphysical determinations. "The widely and rapidly spreading devastation of language not only undermines
aesthetic and moral responsibility in every use of
language; it arises from a threat to the essence of
humanity (Gefahrdung des Wesens des
Meschen)”.23 [[Ibid., p. 198.]]
Only
thus does the overcoming of homelessless (Überwindung
der Heimatlosigkeit) begin from Being, a
homelessness in which not only man but the essence of man (das Wesen der Menschen) stumbles aimlessly about."24 [[Ibid., p. 218.]]
Therefore,
this essence will have to be reinstated. "But
if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being (in
die Nähe des Seins) he must first learn to exist in the nameless (im Namenlosen). In the same way he must first recognize the
seductions of the public realm as well as the
impotence of the private. Before he speaks (bevor er spricht) man must first let himself be claimed again (wieder
ansprechen) by Being, taking the risk that under this
claim (Anspruch) he will seldom have much to say. Only thus will the preciousness of its essence be once more bestowed
upon the word (dem Wort), and upon man a
home (Behausung) for dwelling in the truth of Being. But in the claim (Anspruch) upon man, in the attempt
to make man ready for this claim, is there not
implied a concern about man? Where else does 'care' tend but in the
direction of bringing man back to his essence (den Menschen zLneder in sein Wesen zuruckzubringen)? What else does that in
turn betoken but that man (homo)
becomes human (humanus)? Thus hunsanitas really
does remain the concern of such thinking. For this is humanism: meditating and
caring (Sinnen und Sorgen) that man be
human and not inhumane (unmenschlich), 'inhuman,' that is, outside his essence. But in what does the humanity of man
consist? It lies in his essence”.25 [[Ibid.,
pp. 199—200. In the same sense, one could cite many other passages of the Letter.
Thus, for example, "But we must be clear on this point, that when we do
this we abandon man to the essential realm of animalitas even if
we do not equate him with beasts but attribute a specific difference to him. In
principle we are still thinking of homo animalis—even when anima
is posited as animus sire mens, and this in turn is
later posited as subject, person or spirit. Such positing is the manner of
metaphysics. But then the essence of man is too little (zu gering)
heeded and not thought in its origin, the essential provenance that is always
the essential future for historical mankind (geschichtliche Menschentum).
Metaphysics thinks of man on the basis of animalitas and does not
think in the direction of his humanitas.
"Metaphysics doses itself to the simple essential
fact that man essentially occurs only in his essence (in seinem Wesen
west) where he is daimed (angesprochen) by Being. Only from
that daim 'has' he found that wherein his essence dwells. Only from this
dwelling 'has' he 'language' as the home that preserves the ecstatic for his
essence. Such standing in the lighting of Being (Lichtung des Seins)
I call the ek-sistence of man. This way of Being is proper (eignet)
only to man. Ek-sistence so understood is not only the ground of the possibility
of reason, ratio, but is also that in which the essence of man preserves (wahrt)
the source that determines him.
"Ek-sistence can be said only of the essence of
man, that is, only of the human 'to be.' For as far as our experience shows,
only man is admitted to the destiny of ek-sistence (in din Geschick der
Eksistence)." "Letter," pp. 203—4.
The motif of the proper (eigen,
eigentlich) and the several modes of to propriate (particularly Ereignen
and Ereignis), both of which thematically dominate the question
of the truth of Being in Zeit und Sein, has long been at work in
Heidegger's thought. In the "Letter on Humanism" in particular. The
themes of the house and of the proper are regularly
brought together: as we will attempt to show later, the value of oikos
(and of oikësis) plays a decisive, if hidden, role in the
semantic chain that interests us here. (See above, "La differance," note
2, on Oikos and Oikēsis.]]
Once the thinking of essence the opposition essentia/existentia, the proposition according to which "'man ek-sists' is not an answer to the question of whether man actually is or not; rather, it responds to the question concerning man's 'essence' (Wesen)”.26 [["Letter," p. 207.]]
The restoration of the essence is also the restoration of a
dignity and a proximity: the co-esponding dignity of Being and man, the
proximity of Being and man. "What still
today remains to be said could perhaps become an impetus (Anstoss)
for guiding the essence of man to the point where it thoughtfully (denkend) attends to that dimension of the truth of
Being which thoroughly governs it. But even this
could take place only to the honor of Being and for the benefit of Dasein
which man eksistingly sustains (nur dem Sein zur Wurde und dem Da-sein zugunsten geschehen, das der Mensch eksistierend
aussteht); not, however, for the sake of man so
that civilization and culture through man's doings might be
vindicated”.27 [[Ibid., p. 209]]
The ontological distance from Dasein to what Dasein
is as ek-sistence and to the Da of Sein,
the distance that first was given as ontic proximity, must be reduced by the thinking of the truth of Being. Whence, in
Heidegger's discourse, the dominance of an
entire metaphorics of proximity, of simple and immediate presence, a
metaphorics associating the proximity of Being with the values of neighboring, shelter, house, service, guard, voice, and listening.
As goes without saying, this is not an insignificant
rhetoric; onthe basis of both this metaphorics and the thinking
of the ontico-ontological difference, one could even make explicit an
entire theory of metaphoricity in general.28 [[See
below, "White Mythology."]] Several examples of this language, so surely connoted by its inscription in a certain
landscape: "But if man is to find his way
once again into the nearness of Being (in die Nähe des Seins), he must first learn to exist in the
nameless." "The statement 'The "substance" of man is
eksistence' says nothing else but that the way that man in his proper essence (in seinem eigenen Wesen) becomes
present to Being (zum Sein anwest) is ecstatic
inherence in the truth of Being. Through this determination of the essence of man the humanistic interpretations of man as animal
rationale, as 'person,' as
spiritual-ensouled-bodily being, are not declared false and
thrust aside. Rather, the sole implication is that the
highest determinations of the essence of man in
humanism still do not realize the proper dignity of man (die eigentliche Würde des Menschen). To that extent the
thinking in Being and Time is against humanism.
But this opposition does not mean that such thinking aligns itself against the humane and advocates the inhuman, that it
promotes the inhumane and deprecates the dignity of man.
Humanism is opposed because it does not set the humanitas
of man high enough”.29 [["Letter," pp.
209—10.]] 'Being'—that is not God and not a cosmic
ground. Being is farther than all beings and is yet nearer (näher) to man than every being, be it a rock, a beast, a work of art, a
machine, be it angel or God. Being is the nearest (Das
Sein ist das Nächste). Yet the near remains farthest from
man. Man at first clings always and only to being”.30 [[Ibid.,
pp. 210—11.]] "Because man as the one
who ek-sists comes to stand in this relation that Being destines (schickt) for itself, in that he ecstatically
sustains it, that is, in care takes it upon himself, he at
first fails to recognize the nearest (das Nächste) and attaches
himself to the next nearest (das Übernächste).
He even thinks that this is the nearest. But nearer than the
nearest and at the same time for ordinary thinking farther than the farthest is nearness itself: the truth of Being".31
[[Ibid., pp. 211—12.]] "The one thing (das
Einzige) thinking would like to attain and for the
first time tries to articulate in Being and Time is something simple (etwas Einfaches).
As such, Being remains mysterious, the simple (schlicht)
nearness of an unobtrusive governance. The nearness occurs essentially as
language itself”.32 [[Ibid., p. 212.]] "But man is
not only a living creature who possesses language along
with other capacities. Rather, language is the house of Being in which
man ek-sists by dwelling, in that he belongs to the truth of Being, guarding it (hütend gehort)”.33
[[Ibid., p. 213.]]
This proximity is not ontic proximity, and one must take into
account the properly ontological repetition of this
thinking of the near and the far.34 [["The
'Introduction' to Being and Time says simply and clearly, even in
italics, 'Being is the transcendens pure and simple (das
Transcendens sch!echthin)’. Just as the openness of spatial nearness
seen from the perspective of a particular thing exceeds all things near and
far, so is Being essentially broader than all beings, because it is the
lighting (Lichiung) itself. For all that, Being is thought on the
basis of beings, a consequence of the approach—at first unavoidable—within a
metaphysics that is still dominant." "Letter," p. 216.]] It remains that Being, which is nothing, is not a being, cannot be said,
cannot say itself, except in the ontic
metaphor. And the choice of one or another group of metaphors is necessarily
significant. It is within a metaphorical insistence, then, that the
interpretation of the meaning of Being is produced. And if Heidegger has radically deconstructed the domination of metaphysics by the present,
he has done so in order to lead us to think the
presence of the present. But the thinking of this presence
can only metaphorize, by means of a profound necessity from which one
cannot simply decide to escape, the language that it deconstructs.35
[[Several examples of the predominance granted to the
value of ontological proximity: "This destiny comes to pass as the
lighting of Being (Lichtung des Seins), as which it is. The
lighting grants nearness to Being. In this nearness, in the lighting of the Da,
man dwells as the ek-sisting one without yet being able properly to experience
and take over this dwelling. In the lecture on Holderlin's elegy 'Homecoming'
(1943) this nearness 'of' Being, which the Da of Dasein
is, is thought on the basis of Being and Time . . . it is called
the 'homeland' "(ibid., p. 217). "The homeland of this historical
dwelling is nearness to Being" (ibid., p. 218). "In his essential
unfolding within the history of Being, man is the being whose Being as
ek-sistence consists in his dwelling in the nearness of Being (in der
Nähe des Seins wohut). Man is the neighbor of Being (Nachbar des
Seins)" (ibid., p. 222). " 'Ek-sistence,' in fundamental
contrast to every existentia and 'existence,' is
ecstatic dwelling in the nearness of Being" (ibid.). "Or should
thinking, by means of open resistance to 'humanism,' risk a shock that could
for the first time cause perplexity concerning the hutnanitas of homo
humanus and its basis? In this way it could awaken a reflection (Besinnung)—if
the world-historical moment did not itself already compel such a reflection—that
thinks not only about man but also about the 'nature' of man, not only about his
nature but even more primordially about the dimension in which the essence of
man, determined by Being itself is at home" (ibid., p. 225).
"Thinking does not overcome metaphysics by climbing still higher,
surmounting it, transcending it somehow or other; thinking overcomes
metaphysics by climbing back down into the nearness of nearest (in die
Nähe des Nächsten)" (ibid., p. 231)
To destroy the privilege of the present-now (Gegenwart)
always leads back, on the Heideggerian pathway, to a presence (Anwesen,
Anuiesenheit) that none of the three modes of the present (present-present,
past-present, future-present) can exhaust or terminate, but which, on the
contrary, provides their playing space, on the basis of a fourfold whose thinking
entirely informs what is at stake in our question. The fourfold can be
maintained or lost, risked or reappropriated—an alternative always suspended
over its "own proper" abysm—never winning except by losing (itself).
It is the text of dissemination.
Now this presence of the fourfold, in turn, is
thought, in On Time and Being notably, according to the opening
of propriation as the nearness of the near, proximation, approximation. Here we
will refer to the analysis of the four-dimensionality of time and of its play.
"True time is four-dimensional ... For this reason we call the first,
original, literally incipient extending (Reichen) in which the
unity of true (eigentlichen) time consists 'nearing nearness,'
'nearhood' (Nahheit), an early word still used by Kant. But it
brings future, past and present near to one apother by distancing them." On
Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972),
p. 15. "In the sending of the destiny of Being (Im Schicken des
Geschickes von Sein), in the extending (Reichen) of time,
there becomes manifest a dedication (Zueignen), a delivering over
(Ubereignen) into what is their own (in ihr Eigenes),
namely of Being as presence (Anwesenheit) and of time as the realm of the open.
What determines both, time and Being, in their own, that is in their belonging
together, we shall call: Ereignis, or event of
Appropriation" (ibid., p. 19). "What the name 'event of
Appropriation' (Ereignis) names can no longer be represented by
means of the current meaning of the word; for in that meaning 'event of
Appropriation' is understood in the sense of occurrence and happening—not in
terms of Appropriating (Eignen) as the extending and sending
which opens and preserves" (ibid., p. 20).
The facility, and also the necessity, of the
transition from the near to the proper will have been noticed. The Latin medium
of this transition (prope, proprius) is lost in other languages,
for example in German.]]
Thus, the prevalence granted to the phenoinenological
metaphor, to all the varieties of phainesthai, of
shining, lighting, clearing, Lichtung, etc., opens onto the space of presence and the presence of space, understood within the
opposition of the near and the far—just as the
acknowledged privilege not only of language, but of spoken
language (voice, listening, etc.), is in consonance with the motif of presence as self-presence.36 [[On
the topic of what unites the values of self-presence and spoken language, I permit
myself to refer to Of Granimatology and Speech and
Phenomena. Implicitly or explicitly, the valorization of spoken
language is constant and massive in Heidegger. I will study it elsewhere in and
of itself. Having reached a certain point in the analysis, it is necessary to
measure the extent of this valorization rigorously: if it covers almost the
entirety of Heidegger's text (in that it leads all the metaphysical
determinations of the present or of being back to the matrix of Being as
presence, Anwesenheit), it is also erased at the point at which
is announced the question of a Wesen that would not even be an Anwesen.
(On this subject, see "Ousia and Gramme," above.) Thus is explained,
for example, the disqualification of literature, which is opposed to thinking
and to Dichtung, and also to an artisan- and
"peasant"-like practice of the letter: "In written form thinking
easily loses its flexibility. . . On the other hand, written composition exerts
a wholesome pressure toward deliberate linguistic formulation"
("Letter," p. 195). "The truth of Being. . . would thus be more
easily weaned from mere supposing and opining and directed to the now rare handicraft
of writing" (ibid., p. 223). "What is needed in the present world
crisis is less philosophy, but more attentiveness in thinking; less literature,
but more cultivation of the letter" (ibid., p. 242). "We must
liberate Dichtung from literature" (text published in Revue
de poesie, Paris, 1967).]] The near and the far are
thought here, consequently, before the opposition of space and time, according
to the opening of a spacing which belongs
neither to time nor to space, and which dislocates, while producing it, any
presence of the present.
Therefore, if "Being is farther than all beings and is yet
nearer to man than every being," if
"Being is the nearest," then one must be able to say that Being is what is near to man, and that man is what
is near to Being. The near is the proper; the proper is the nearest (prope, proprius). Man is the proper of Being, whkh right near
to him whispers in his ear; Being is the proper of man, such is the truth that speaks, such is the proposition which gives the there
of the truth of Being and the truth of man. This
proposition of the proper, certainly, is not to be taken in a
metaphysical sense: the proper of man, here, is not an essential attribute, the predicate of a substance, a characteristic among
others, however fundamental, of a being, object or
subject, called man. No more can one speak in this sense of
man as the proper of Being. Propriety, the co-propriety of Being and man, is proximity as inseparability. But it is indeed as
inseparability that the relations between
being (substance, or res) and its essential predicate were thought in metaphysics afterward. Since this of man
and of Being, such as itis thought in Heidegger's
discourse, is not ontic, does not relate two 'beings’ one to the other
but rather, within language, relates the meaning of
Being and the meaning of man. The proper of man, his Eigenheit,
"authenticity," is to be related to the meaning of Being; he is to
hear and to question (fragen) it
in ek-sistence, to stand straight in the proximity of its light: "Das Stehen in der Lichtung des Seins nenne ich die Ek-sistenz des
Menschen. Nur dem Menschen eignet diese Art zu
sein" ("Such standing in the lighting of Being I call the
ek-sistence of man. This way of Being is proper only to man").37
[[Elsewhere ("La parole soufflée," in Writing
and Difference, and in Of Grammatology) I have attempted
to indicate the passage between the near, the "proper" and the erection
of the "standing upright."]]
Is not this security of the near what is trembling today, that is,
the co-belonging and co-propriety of the name of man and
the name of Being, such as this copropriety inhabits, and is inhabited by, the
language of the West, such as it is buried in its oikonomia,
such as it is inscribed and forgotten according to the history of
metaphysics, and such as it is awakened also by the destruction of ontotheology? But this trembling—which can only come from a
certain outside—was already requisite within the very structure that it
solicits.38 [[TN. Derrida is using "to solicit" in its
etymological sense here, as he often does elsewhere. "To solicit"
derives from the Latin sollus, whole, and ciere, to move, and
thus has the sense of "to make the whole move." The reference to oikonomia
and burial in the preceding sentence is explained in "La differance,"
note 2, above.]] Its margin was marked in its own
(propre) body. In the thinking and the language of Being, the end of man has been prescribed since always, and this prescription
has never done anything but modulate the equivocality
of the end, in the play of telos and death. In the reading of this play, one may take the following
sequence in all its senses: the end of man is the thinking
of Being, man is the end of the thinking of Being, the end
of man is the end of the thinking of Being. Man, since always, is his proper end, that is, the end of his proper. Being, since
always; is its proper end, that is, the end of
its proper.
To condude I would like to reassemble, under several very general
rubrics, the signs which appear, in accordance with
the anonymous necessity that interests me here, to mark the effects of the
total trembling as concerns what I have called, for
convenience, and with the necessary quotation marks or precautions,
"France" or French thought.
1. The reduction of meaning. The attention given to
system and structure, in its most original and
strongest aspects, that is, those aspects which do not immediately fall back
into cultural or journalistic gossip, or, in the best of cases, into the purest "structuralist" tradition of
metaphysics—such an attention, which is rare, consists
neither (a) in restoring the classical motif of the system, which can always be shown to be ordered by telos, alētheia,
and ousia, all of which are values
reassembled in the concepts of essence or of meaning; nor (b) in erasing or destroying meaning. Rather, it is a question of
determining the possibility of meaning on
the basis of a "formal" organization which in itself has
no meaning, which does not mean that it is either the non-sense or the
anguishing absurdity which haunt metaphysical humanism. Now, if one considers that the critique of anthropologism in the last great metaphysical
systems (Hegel and Husserl, notably) was executed in the
name of truth and meaning, if one considers that these
"phenomenologies"—which were metaphysical systems—had as their
essential motif a reduction to meaning (which is literally
a Husserlian proposition), then one can conceive that
the reduction of meaning—that is, of the
signified—first takes the form of a critique of phenomenology. Moreover, if one considers that the Heideggerian destruction of metaphysical
humanism is produced initially on the basis of a hermeneutical
question on the meaning or the truth
of Being, then one also conceives that the reduction of meaning operates by means of a kind of break with a thinking of Being which has all
the characteristics of a relève (Aufhebung) of humanism.
2. The strategic bet. A radical displacement can
only cotme from the outside. The kind I am
speaking about can therefore not be attributed to some
spontaneous dec’ision of philosophical thought after slome interior maturation of its history. This. setting in motion takes place in
the violent relationship of all of the Occident with
its other, whether it is “linguistic” relationships
(where
very quickly the question of the limits of everything
leading back to the question of the meaning of Being
arises), or ethnological, economic, political, military,
relationships, etc. Which does not mean, moreover, that military or economic violence is not in structural solidarity with
"linguistic" violence. But the "logic" of every relation
to the outside is very complex and surprising. It is precisely the force and the efficiency of the system that regularly change
transgressions into "false exits." Taking into
account these effects of the system, one has nothing, from the inside where
"we are," but thechoice between two strategies:
a. To attemp an exit and
a deconstruction without changing terrain, by repeating what is implicit in the
founding concepts and the original problematic, by using against
the edifice the instruments or stones available in the house, that is, equally, in language. Here, one risks
ceaselessly confirming, consolidating, relifting (relever),
at an always more certain depth, that which one allegedly deconstructs. The
continuous process of making explicit, moving toward an opening, risk sinking
into the austism of the closure.
b. To decide to change ground, in a discontinuous
and irruptive fashion, by
brutally placing oneself outside, and by affirming absolute break
and difference.
Without mentioning all the other forms of trompe-l’oeil perspectives in which
such a displacement can be caught, thereby inhabiting
more naively and more strictly than ever the inside one declares one has
deserted, the simple practice of language ceaselessly reinstates the new
terrain on the oldest ground. The effects of such a
reinstatement or of such a blindness could be shown in numerous precise
instances.
It goes without saying that these effects do not suffice to annul
the necessity for a "change of terrain." It
also goes without saying that the rhcace between these two forms
of deconstruction cannot be simple and unique. A new
writing must weave and interlace these two motifs of deconstruction. Which amounts
to saying that one must speak several languages and produce
several texts at once, I would like to point out especially that the style of the
first deconstruction is mostly that of the Heideggerian questions, and the
other is mostly the one which dominates France today. I am purposely speaking
in terms of a dominant style: because there are also breaks and changes of
terrain in texts of the Heideggerian type; because the "change of
terrain" is far from upsetting the entire French landscape to which I am
referring; because what we need, perhaps, as Nietzsche said, is a change of
"style"; and if there is style, Nietzsche reminded us, it must be plural.
3. The difference between the superior man and the superman.
Beneath this rubric is signaled both the
increasingly insistent and increasingly rigorous recourse to Nietzsche in France, and the division that is announced, perhaps,
between two relèves of man. We know how, at the end of
Zarathustra, at the moment of the "sign,"
when das Zeichen kommt, Nietzsche distinguishes, in the greatest
proximity, in a strange resemblance and an ultimate complicity, at the eve of
the last separation, of the great Noontime, between
the superior man (höhere Mensch) and the superman (Übermensch). The first is
abandoned to his distress in a last movement
of pity. The latter—who is not the last man—awakens and leaves, without turning
back to what he leaves behind him. He burns his text and erases the traces of
his steps. His laughter then will burst out, directed toward a return which no
longer wifi have the form of the metaphysical repetition of humanism, nor,
doubtless, "beyond" metaphysics, the form of a memorial or a guarding
of the meaning of Being, the form of the house and of the truth of Being. He will
dance, outside the house, the akfive Vergesslichkeit, the
"active forgetting" and the cruel (grausam) feast of
which the Genealogy of Morals speaks. No doubt that Nietzsche
called for an active forgetting of Being: it would not have the metaphysical
form imputed to it by Heidegger.
Must one read Nietzsche, with Heidegger, as the last
of the great metaphysicians? Or, on the contrary, are we to take the question
of the truth of Being as the last sleeping shudder of the superior man? Are we
to understand the eve as the guard mounted around the house or as the awakening
to the day that is coming, at whose eve we are? Is there an economy of the eve?
Perhaps we are between these two eves, which are also two ends of man. But who,
we?
May 12, 1968
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