First Day: The Darkening of the World (Heidegger)

June 30, 2020

The above description is not from a dream, but something I saw on CNN before I ended up on my island. It is offered here as a counterpoint to the famous example from “The Question Concerning Technology” that establishes the essential nature of modern technology, revealing what Heidegger calls the “standing reserve” (Bestand). According to the well-known argument, nature no longer produces naturally out of itself as phúsis, but rather is “set upon,” “challenged,” “ordered” by the technological apparatus; thus, everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to immediately be on hand, indeed, to stand there so it will be on call “for further orders.” For example, “The airplane stands on the taxi-strip . . . for this it must be in its whole structure and every one of its constituent parts itself on call for duty, ready for take-off.”

For the airplane to be ready in its “whole structure and all of its constituent parts,” it means that the pilots are in the cockpit doing their final checklist, the flight attendants have run through their safety presentation, the customers are in their seats and belted in, but also that the baggage has been loaded, the flight engineers have run the required maintenance, the ticketing agents have counted all the passengers, the tower has been notified, the transportation agencies have everything ready to go on the other end, the hotels have cleaned the rooms and they are ready for occupancy, the corporations have confirmed that the meeting is scheduled at 13:00, the tourist company has already dispatched their guides to the airport to meet the tour group, the ship is waiting at the dock in Amsterdam to take the next cruise up the Rhine, and so on and so forth. In other words, if we would carefully follow every switch and relay, we would gradually see the world appears to be connected everywhere and coordinated at every point as if in a vast symphony from one invisible conductor. Now, if we were to multiply this one example by a factor of 102,000, which was the number of flights per day worldwide on July 30, 2019, we might begin to glimpse an aspect of “the whole structure and all its constituent parts,” but this would only reveal a partial representation of the manner in which the “world worlds” (Die Weltwelten) under the regime of technological challenging, according to Heidegger’s argument.

However, if we attempt to trace out only a few of the constituent parts belonging to the whole structure of technological “enframing” (Ge-Stell) just a year later from the counter-example offered above, we would see that the pilots are not in the cockpit and the flight attendants have been laid off, only a few customers are in their seats and most of the plane is empty, the mechanics are in the hangers taking the planes apart rather than getting them ready for takeoff belted in, the ticketing agents have been furloughed, the tower is running on a skeleton staff, the transportation agencies have fired most of the drivers and the hotels are less than 40 percent occupancy, the corporations have canceled their meeting and are doing it via Zoom, the tourist companies are closed for the season, and the ship is rusting below the waterline and has to be dry-docked in Rotterdam, and all the destinations along the Rhine are under quarantine and closed to all tourism.

What the counterexample reveals is a major fault line in Heidegger’s argument concerning the essential power revealed by technology—and by the whole structure of the global economy—as an unlimited and over-powering nature that was projected based on atomic energy in the 1950s, and which had only, as its furthest and most external limit, the end of the world brought about in a nuclear holocaust. Today, it is clear to everybody (tout le monde) that the power of technology and economy has crashed into the limit revealed in the power of another nature, perhaps on a molecular level, which is the overpowering nature of life itself. (Concerning this other domain, to his credit, in the 1929 seminar on the concept of world, Heidegger himself admits that life is “a domain of openness which possesses as wealth [i.e., standing reserve] with which the human world may have nothing to compare”). It is not that the “naturing nature” (Natura naturans) that was revealed as the dominant ordering principle of the technological and economic expansion of the postwar boom era, or later, the fundamental mechanism of the era of globalization that followed for the last fifty years, is completely in default. For example, one can still hear the arguments from politicians and technocrats that basically still depict the global economy as a “standing reserve” (Bestand), and that “once the pandemic is over,” the economy in its “whole structure and in all its constituent parts” that have simply been sitting there idling like the airplane on the taxi strip will suddenly receive its order to take off. Even the rise of the global markets during the pandemic, based on hedging bets on the outcomes, holds to this view of the total economy as a standing reserve. And yet, simply based on our counterexample, this does not seem likely, or at least not all at once, if only because a machine cannot function properly when many of its parts are either missing or lost altogether.

What the outbreak of Covid in the spring of 2020 has revealed is a crack in the world that was revealed by technological enframing. In other words, what initially appeared in the whole structure and between all its constituent parts was a thousand tiny hairline fractures, which have gradually widened to become the size of the Grand Canyon. This is not to say that the world is not still technologically enframed, but only that the frame is shrinking today. Perhaps a better way of describing this is to say that another nature that exceeded the previous frame—a nature that, as of yet, has no relation to world!—has intervened to cover the entire canvas with dark splotches, as if the overpowering nature of life itself is in the process of “deconstructing” (abbauenden) the world-picture that belonged to the age of technology. Therefore, if we could gather around this picture, we might all agree with some confidence that that world-view is now gone! What it depicts is in the past, and thus the picture itself can now be placed in a museum along with other antiquities and artifacts that were useful and belonged to past worlds, like sawmills and sailing ships. As in the description of the museum in William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, moreover, there is no picture of the world outside the museum’s architectural frame of glass and flowers. In fact, perhaps as a final refutation of Heidegger’s arguments in the 1950 essay, it is more than a little ironic that today everybody knows that only Science will save us! Not only humans, but also animals and plants, and even the world itself! Would anyone today take seriously Heidegger’s early counterclaim that only poetry will save us? Not likely, and I can only imagine that the bucolic German philosopher would be laughed out of the ICU ward for being even more deranged than Nietzsche’s madman.

Last night I established, based on a simple empirical example of the plane no longer standing on the taxiway, that the world described in Heidegger’s postwar essay is no longer the same world that has been “worlding” from the beginning of the pandemic. (Apparently, the world is no longer “all that is the case,” according to Wittgenstein’s famous proposition in the beginning of the Tractatus.) Nevertheless, I have heard many claims that the previous world still exists, and that it is still a “standing reserve” (Bestand), like a machine that is simply left idling, waiting for the order to be given to ramp up again and even to exceed its productive output of energy for making more world. According to this view, we are simply in a period of being in-between two moments that are suspended in duration in a manner that resembles Heidegger’s definition of boredom (Langeweile), which I will return to later. Nevertheless, these statements also implicitly acknowledge that our current duration is not in-the-world; our current state of being-in between is obviously neither in the prepandemic world from which we just departed, nor in the world that will arrive only when the pandemic is over and full economic productivity can resume, even exceeding its previous output, according to politicians. Of course, such statements can easily be dismissed as signs of wishful thinking, or desperate hope that barely conceals the fear that motivates the strength of conviction behind them.

Of course, I am not saying that a postpandemic world will never arrive, or that the pandemic will never end, but rather that when the day eventually comes and we resume some measure of normal economic activity, we will have already forgotten how the world worlds. In other words, following Heidegger’s earlier existential analytic of Dasein (which I continue to privilege over the later ontology), our existential knowledge of being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) is primordially formed by familiar everyday experience and habit, not by epistemological reflection or representation, nor by our technological mediations of a common world. Consequently, given the duration of being-in-between two worlds where we now inhabit, and will continue to tarry in for an uncertain and perhaps immeasurable period of time, our existential comportment toward what is being-in-the-world is already undergoing change, along with our sense of what is most familiar and everyday experience. In other words, what was most familiar to us before is now appearing unfamiliar, strange, and uncanny (unheimlich); this is because today what is most unfamiliar to everybody (tout le monde) is being-in-the world as such.

Recalling Heidegger’s earlier analysis of “equipment” (das Zeug) in establishing our relation to world, in many ways the plane that is no longer on the runway ready for takeoff can be compared to the broken hammer, which no longer appears “ready-to-hand” or “standing to attention” (Zuhandenheit), but instead becomes peculiarly “conspicuous” (auffällig), which marks the passage from familiar to the strangely unfamiliar and uncanny. Here, we should also recall that the German sense of unheimlich employed by Heidegger (and also by Freud during the same period) designates something that was once familiar or “homely” that suddenly becomes “unfamiliar,” but in the existential sense of becoming “an unfamiliar familiar.” For example, the ghost of a loved one who appears in my dreams brings with her this sense of being an unfamiliar familiar, which also relates the feeling of the uncanny to the normal processes of mourning and melancholia. The face of a loved one who recently died, or who suddenly left home, constantly returns in my thoughts and visions, and her visitation becomes strangely not at home, a ghost of the familiar.

Following the excellent commentary provided by Roland Végsó on the first division of Sein und Zeit, if Dasein is always already in relation to world, this world first manifests itself as the referential totality of things “at hand (Zuhandenheit). . . . It belongs to the being of these beings that they refer to other things. . . . Reference here simply means that useful objects that surround us in our everyday circumspect taking care of things point to other objects and, through these relations, also refer to a contextual totality. . . . This totality is what we call world in the phenomenological sense.” But what happens when, as in the example of the canceled flight that pointed to the entire structure and all its component parts, many of the “references” (verweisungen) are no longer “at hand,” having been either negated, lost, destroyed, decommissioned, taken out of the totality, or no longer “referred” (verweisen) to “the whole structure in all its constituent parts”? For example, when the pilots are no longer in the cockpit, the transportation vans are no longer waiting at the airport, the ship is no longer moored at the dock, or the plane is no longer on the taxi strip, but in the hangar being stripped for parts? When this event occurs, as has clearly happened, according to Heidegger’s original argument, then the different constituent parts that are longer “ready-to-hand” (or, in this case, “ready for takeoff”) are suddenly “just present-to-hand and no more” (nur noch Vorhandenes). This event is what Heidegger defines as the “disruption of reference,” whereby the totality of references becomes explicit. In other words, it is at this moment that something like the world first appears, but its first appearance is occasioned by something like a state of worldlessness. “The context of useful things is lit up, not as a totality never seen before, but as a totality that has continually been seen beforehand in our circumspection. But with this totality, world makes itself known.” However, this totality only makes itself “known” by “bidding farewell” (Heidegger) to the totality to which it once belonged (i.e., the world).

The most crucial passage from the first division of Sein und Zeit that describes this situation of worldlessness is the following one:

That the world does not “consist” of the ready-to-hand shows itself in the fact (among others) that whenever the world is lit up in the modes of concern which we have been Interpreting, the ready-to-hand becomes deprived of its worldhood so that Being-just-present-at-hand comes to the fore. If, in our everyday concern with the ‘environment’, it is to be possible for equipment ready-to-hand to be encountered in its “Being-in-itself” [in seinem “An-sich-sein”], then those assignments and referential totalities in which our circumspection “is absorbed” cannot become a theme for that circumspection any more than they can for grasping things “thematically” but non-circumspectively. If it is to be possible for the ready-to-hand not to emerge from its inconspicuousness, the world must not announce itself. And it is in this that the Being-in-itself of entities which are ready-to-hand has its phenomenal structure constituted.

At this point, before progressing to the next step on a path that has been trodden on by so many others—and is not at all like the barren and rocky beach that stretches out before me now—I will simply say that the hammer was never the best example that Heidegger could have chosen to represent “equipment” (das Zeug). In fact, a much more complicated machine should have been chosen to even begin to make visible the structure of references that constitute a world. Perhaps Heidegger chose the hammer simply because it was nearest to hand, but I suspect it is also because he hated more complex machines like airplanes, nuclear accelerators, and atomic bombs. (I can only imagine that Heidegger wrote Sein und Zeit, and certainly the later “Question concerning Technology,” with the same knit stocking cap on his head.) It’s just that the image of an archaic tool like a hammer, which is too determined to belong to the history of “handicraft,” stands in the way of demonstrating the totality of references and assignments that make up the structure of equipment, particularly more technologically advanced equipment. In fact, Heidegger himself states quite categorically that “taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment” (Ein Zeug “ist” strenggonommen nie).

Likewise, I don’t think that the technical term “reference” is a good choice for the translation of Verweisung, if only because it too quickly resembles the linguistic sign; and in the section that follows the introduction of this term, Heidegger takes great pains to “deconstruct” the signifying character in representing all verweisungen that make up the whole structure of what he calls “equipmentality.” In first introducing the term, Heidegger writes: “In the ‘in order to’ as a structure there lies a referral of something to something.” The original German text reads: In der Struktur “Um-zu” liegt eine Verweisung von etwas auf etwas. The translators admit that there is no clear equivalent for the use of the term Verweisung, so they decided to split the difference and translate it both as “reference” and “assignment.” (The Stambaugh translation, if I remember correctly, also maintains the word “reference” for Verweisung.) Henceforth, I have chosen to sometimes employ the word “referral” in place of the terms “assignment” and “reference.” The specific problem I have with “reference” as a translation of Verweisung is that it is too closely telescoped on the specific character of linguistic signs, or signifiers. However, Heidegger immediately clarifies in the beginning of the next section on Verweisung und Zeichen by saying that “although every reference is a relation, not every relation is a reference” (Jede “Zeigung” ist eine Verweisung, aber nicht jedes verweisen ist ein Zeigung). In part, this is because the German word contains the verb weisen as a root, meaning “to point,” which Heidegger will later employ to anchor the phenomenology of signs (die Zeichen) by the manner in which they “show” something by pointing away from themselves toward something else.

However, the crucial point to be demonstrated—zeigen also means “to demonstrate”—is the phenomenological manner in which signs themselves disappear in pointing to another being and causing it to “light up,” which is a poetic representation of the signifying character of the sign. Of course, this same disappearing-appearing character echoes the function of equipment (das Zeug) that is “ready-to-hand” and not “present-to-hand,” and this relationship between these senses is poetically reinforced by the close alliteration between das Zeug, zeigen, die Zeichen, and so on. For example, Heidegger’s first demonstration of the sign is the arrow on the speedometer of an automobile that points to the speed of the car but is also connected structurally to the equipmental-context of vehicles and traffic regulations, in short, to “the whole structure and all of the constituent parts” of technological transportation. Of course, the operator of this connection is Dasein, the driver, who maintains a mobile equilibrium between the sign of the speedometer and the road sign that posts the speed limit; moreover, this also prepares for the distinction between authentic and inauthentic states of existence that defines a possibility for Dasein, since when Dasein is driving it must operate like every other Dasein (Das Mann) by obeying the speed limit as well as all the other signs that determine the whole structure of traffic signals. Dasein only drives authentically (eigentlich) when it is speeding and breaking the rules; hence, the freedom associated with the joys of speeding and not obeying traffic regulations.

Returning to our reflection, prior to connecting the circumspective manner according to which the world of references is “pre-disclosed” by our careful dealing with things and the character of “signs” (Zeichen) that will serve as useful equipment for “lighting up” the structure of this pre-ontological disclosure, Heidegger makes several preliminary assumptions at this step that I will now question in (the) light of the pandemic. First, he must assume that the world was already disclosed simply by the fact it is always already “laid open” by our circumspective dealings with things, and because there is something like a world of things that is already accessible to our concern. Thus “any concern is already as it is because of some familiarity with the world.” In a certain sense, this is a circular argument, of course. However, it is the second assumption that gives me pause and that I want to place in question. “The world is therefore something ‘wherein’ Dasein as an entity already was, and if in any way it explicitly comes toward something [ausdrückenlich Hinkommen immer], it can never do anything more than come back to the world [zurückkommen].”

As Derrida also perceived, Heidegger constantly engages in a play of Fort-Da between Dasein and the world. He ties a rope that binds the Da of Dasein on one end, and on the other to the “wherein” of the world (here, one might imagine those wooden paddles with a rubber ball tied by an elastic band). This Fort-Da structure seems to presuppose something permanent and intractable in the relation between the Da of Dasein and the Fort of the world, so that if Dasein explicitly loses itself in something. That is, if Dasein explicitly becomes Fort-Sein—as, for example, Heidegger says immediately following this passage, when Dasein becomes fascinated—it has no other choice than to come right back to the world wherein it already was. In other words, Heidegger seems to erect a guardrail to protect both Dasein and the world against certain ecstatic states if only to guarantee that in by passing through the unfamiliar and uncanny the world will not be gone forever. Dasein can temporarily go away (Fort) only to find itself right back in the world where it started. The underlying assumption operating behind the entire analysis from this point onward in the analysis is that Dasein cannot lose the world completely, or rather, it can lose itself only to find itself again In-der-Welt-sein.

However, let’s now return to the current situation in which “the world is gone” and Dasein no longer finds itself to be in the world that was (if this is indeed possible, which is a question I will leave open for now). How then can Dasein find its way back to the world when it explicitly moves toward something in some way that is now unfamiliar? For example, in the statement, “I woke up this morning and the world had changed!”—an experience, by the way, that recently occurred to me on the morning after the presidential election—what does this statement mean and what world is being referred to here? The exclamation refers to a disruption or break that suddenly comes to the foreground and points to the “fact” (still only a feeling, not yet a conviction) that the arrangement of the totality of references have undergone a shift to such a degree that the whole structure has changed in all its constituent parts, but this change only appears in the unfamiliar, uncanny, as a darkness that suddenly engulfs the invisible world wherein Dasein was, and still must come back to. It is at this point that we might interpret that statement “the world is gone” in the following manner: the statement refers to the familiar and invisible world that disappears and is gone; the world that appears is strange, unfamiliar, and filled with shadows of former things and others engulfed by darkness. And yet we also suddenly discover that darkness is a kind of light too! Darkness “lights up” (aufleuchten) the world that appears in place of the invisible and familiar world wherein Dasein was. Darkness is a half-light of shadowy adumbration that drinks up the distance between my island and all the other islands. According to Heidegger’s ontological claim, moreover, it is only by the light of darkness that the world can appear as a “phenomenon”; that is to say, it is by the light of darkness (in all manners that I will attempt to describe in the next meditation) that the world as a phenomenon can be modified and undergo change in such a way that statements such as “the world is gone” or that it is not yet or no longer may now be given a positive phenomenological sense, but only in terms of what the world is not.