Second Day: Existence without Existents (Levinas)

July 2, 2020

Last night I saw Celan’s poems as navigational beacons pointing to constellations of stars in the night sky. This morning I wondered whether if I learned how to chart these constellations from my island that I would find a way to orient myself toward the world that is now gone. So I picked up the book again from my small pile and opened it again to Lichtzwang to confirm my vision in the light of day. As expected, I immediately found the names of moons, other orbiting planets (e.g., Saturn), and astrological constellations. For example, Taurus the bull (Stier) seemed to be the constellation I saw last night, but there were also astrological signs of other constellations, galaxies, which are described as giant disks filled with starry-eyed premonitions (Vorgesichten besternt). But the poem that finally caught my attention seemed to describe the poems themselves as means of transportation off the island, and this definitely is of interest to me, as it would be for any castaway. The first line reads: “CLEARED also for departure” (Freigegeben auch dieser / Start); and the final line of the poem describes the “you” of the poem as actually “lifting off” and “gaining altitude” (du gewinnst / Höhe). Therefore, if I began my meditation on day one with the statement “The plane is no longer on the taxi strip ready for takeoff,” here we have the image of the poem that is not only ready for departure, but apparently has taken off; moreover, it now carries (trägt) “you.” I find myself wondering if this is the same “you” (dich) that appeared earlier in the phrase, “I must carry you.”

Since I can’t pursue this question much further today, interrupting my reflections on Heidegger’s concept of world, I will only briefly refer to Derrida’s quite extensive and somewhat tortuous hermeneutic interpretation of this phrase in several places, particularly in Rams (2003), which appears the same year as the second seminar of The Beast and the Sovereign (2002–3), where Derrida also clearly acknowledges Aries as a constellation in Celan’s horoscope. In both places—rather, in the same place on both occasions—Derrida seems to vacillate between two interpretations of the second-half poetic statement Ich muß dich tragen. First, Derrida often refers to the process of incorporating and/or internalizing another person in the processes of mourning or melancholia (“incorporation” in the psychoanalytic understanding encrypting the other’s psyche in the unconscious). Second, he interprets the “you” of the statement in the maternal sense of carrying an unborn fetus in the womb. Although he does not ultimately choose between the two alternative readings of the line—in fact, Derrida never chooses anything that is presented in the form of an “either/or,” and that is the very essence of a deconstructive style—it is clear that he favors the latter reading since it complements his own concept of “absolute hospitality,” a concept that is primarily derived from the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. I have always found Derrida’s use of the image forced, a bit too obsessionally “Derridean,” and so I favor my interpretation of the verb “carry” (tragen) as etymologically moving something from one place to another; thus, the poem itself is a kind of equipment for transporting or carrying, in the sense of Heidegger’s “equipmentality” (“in-order-to”), which is also supported by the reference to the plane “cleared for departure” that appears in the poem I have quoted above. Nevertheless, I realize that my own reading could be accused of being equally forced, especially given my situation as a castaway, which naturally influences my reading the phrase Ich muß dich tragen. Perhaps I am hopeful that this line is addressed to me, in some way, and that somebody is coming who will carry me away from my own desert island. Since that day has clearly not arrived yet, however, I break off my own hermeneutic digression and return to where I left off last night, reading Sein und Zeit before the pages turned to shadow and darkness and I found myself instead gazing at Celan’s word-constellations in the night sky.

Returning now to summarize the first day’s meditation, I came to the following conclusions concerning the applicability of Celan’s poetic statement “the world is gone” to Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of world.

• First, the statement refers to the familiar and invisible world that disappears in some way; the world that appears in its place is filled with the shadows of familiar things that have now become strange, uncanny, and “un-homely,” as in unfamiliar-familiar.
• Second, from this I concluded that darkness is a kind of light too! This is because darkness “lights up” (aufleuchten) portions of the world that is now covered in darkness, which obstructs or “stands in front of” the invisible and familiar world wherein Dasein was.
• Third, according to Heidegger’s ontological claim, it is only in the disturbance of the world composed of things that are already accessible and “ready-to-hand” that the once invisible world first appears as a “phenomenon” (from the Greek phanein, meaning “shows itself”), proving that the invisible world can undergo fundamental modification.
• Finally, fourth, from the above claim the poetic statement “The world is gone” may now be given a positive phenomenological meaning in terms of what the world is not (nicht), not yet, or no longer.

In clarifying the first conclusion, I return to underline the contradictory way appearance-disappearance is being employed here to describe the event that happens when the invisible and familiar world “disappears.” That is to say, isn’t it contradictory to say that the world that never actually appeared beforehand can suddenly disappear, or that its disappearance is actually what causes it to first appear? How is it that can we understand, much less perceive, what has disappeared-appeared in this case? This is the question that guides the entire analysis and is repeated at the conclusion of each section in this division; for example, “Why can the worldly character of things be lit up?” However, if one were to track all the uses of the verb “to light up” (Aufleuchtung) from the first division of Zein und Zeit, one could see all the manners in which Heidegger employs the verbal metaphor of the kind of light that shows the world in a certain definite way. To illustrate, I simply picked up my copy and leaved through it randomly, highlighting every instance I come across to confirm this usage:

Has Dasein itself, in the range of its concernful absorption in equipment ready-to-hand, a possibility of Being in which the worldhood of those entities within-the-world with which it is concerned is, in a certain way, lit up [aufleuchet] for it, along with those entities themselves?

If such possibilities of Being for Dasein can be exhibited within its concernful dealings, then the way lies open for studying the phenomenon, thus lighting it up [dem aufleuchtenden], and for attempting to “hold it at bay,” as it were, and to interrogate it as to those structures which show themselves therein.

The context of equipment is lit up [leuchtet] not as something never seen before, but as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection.

The environment announces itself afresh. What is thus lit up [leuchtet] is not itself just one thing ready-to-hand among others . . .

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 [leuchtet] 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.

But if the world can, in a way, be lit up [aufleuchtet] it must assuredly be disclosed [erschlossen].

Finally, in a later passage concerning the darkness that anxiety lights up in the world:

Anxiety discloses an insignificance of the world; and this insignificance reveals the nullity of that with which one can concern oneself—or, in other words, the impossibility of projecting oneself upon a potentiality-for-Being which belongs to existence and which is founded primarily upon one’s objects of concern. The revealing of this impossibility, however, signifies that one is allowing the possibility of an authentic potentiality-for-Being to let be lit up [Aufleuchten-lassen].

Certainly, in all these examples, Heidegger’s intention is to argue that the previous way the world was “disclosed” (erschlossen) can in no way be determined by the traditional language of “appearances,” which can only be applied to things that are first of all “present-to-hand” (vorhanden). In fact, he goes so far as to claim that this mode of being previously disclosed cannot even be inferred from anything that is merely present to consciousness. This sets up his later arguments against Cartesianism and all traditional ontology from Plato onward. In effect, Heidegger reverses the Platonic order between the apparent world and the world of essences here, since it is the most familiar world that is invisible, and the world formerly represented as the predisclosed realm of the Idea is now in a secondary position and may even be inessential to the determination of Being as such. (Of course, this is what Heidegger himself sees as one of his greatest achievements philosophically: “the reversal or overturning of Platonism.”)

My second clarification touches on something that may be obvious to the reader already but should be stated again at this point. Heidegger is not concerned with the mode by which all things are present, as in traditional ontology, nor with “any object whatsoever,” as in logic, but rather only those things that have already been predetermined or “assigned” (verweisenen) to belong to some kind of “equipment” (Zeug). Thus when these referrals are broken or disturbed (as in the example of the plane that is no longer ready takeoff), what appears or is suddenly “lit up” (auffleuchten) is not “the true world,” “the essential world,” “the world as such,” and certainly not the “world in its totality,” but rather only the darkening of a region of the familiar and invisible world that has suddenly appeared as an obstruction. However, “the world as such,” or “the world in its totality,” never appears anywhere in the world, even in these special situations, and Heidegger says this quite explicitly and repeatedly. In fact, what appears is only the partial or finite world that has been disclosed by Dasein’s own concern that was “lit up only with the readiness to hand of that concern,” but that is now in a state of being disturbed or disrupted. Of course, here Heidegger is setting the later analysis of “care” (Sorge) that will conclude the analysis of the concept of world and will provide the single source of light and darkness.

My third clarification concerns precisely what kind of light we are talking about here, which I have poetically phrased as “the light of darkness itself”; although Heidegger himself argues that what shows itself in certain existential moods like anxiety does not necessarily need darkness to show itself: “Anxiety can arise in the most innocuous situations. Nor does it have any need for darkness, in which it is commonly easier for one to feel uncanny. In the dark there is emphatically ‘nothing’ to see, though the very world itself is still ‘there,’ and ‘there’ more obtrusively.” And yet in this passage I would strongly disagree with the sentence where Heidegger claims that “in the dark there is ‘nothing’ to see,” which presupposes that “nothing” can appear with or without the need for darkness. Therefore, to demonstrate this point, I will now turn to Levinas, who very early on also rejected this claim concerning the appearance of nothingness as the “authentic potentiality” for Being to be lit up.

But first, before turning to Levinas’s description of the night, let’s list all the adjectives that Heidegger employs to describe how the nothing becomes a phenomenon in these moments, when things suddenly “show themselves” and become in different manners “present-to-hand,” but only by being what they were not beforehand. According to Heidegger’s description, they appear in the modes of “conspicuousness” (Auffälligkeit), “obtrusiveness” (Aufdringlichkeit), and “obstinacy” (Aufsässigkeit). This is how things show themselves and become “present-to-hand,” a presence that is described as being obtrusive, obstinate, obsessive, obnoxious, recalcitrant, refractory, damaged, or missing altogether. Some things thrust themselves forward and lunge themselves at us, while others withdraw into the background and seem to disappear from view or vanish in plain sight. Still other things just sit there, becoming obstacles to our concern, so that we suddenly have the urge to simply push them out of the way in order to return to the familiar and invisible world. In all these examples, we should underline the presence of definite force that defines the nature of the presence that Heidegger has in mind, which he will later characterize as a conflict or struggle (Kampf, Walten) and even as war (Krieg). In his writings on Heidegger, including the second seminar on The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida will constantly underline the change in the nature of the force in Heidegger’s later writings, beginning as early as 1929 in the lecture “What is Metaphysics?,” noting that the word Walten never appears once in the pages of Sein und Zeit, published just two years earlier. It will turn out that 1929 was also a decisive year for Levinas as well, when he traveled to Freiburg to attend the lectures given by Husserl, and it was also that year that he first attended the seminar given by Husserl’s most famous student. (It is significant that, five years later, Levinas will publish his first essay on Heidegger’s philosophy, “A Philosophy of Hitlerism.”) As I will discuss in the next meditation, it is not certain that Levinas attended the winter semester of Heidegger’s 1929–30 lectures on boredom, but Heidegger’s turn to “meta-ontology” and the theme of Nothingness is already present in the writings of 1929 onward, and especially in the lecture “What is Metaphysics?,” delivered at the Davos workshop in that summer, which Levinas did attend.

Turning to Levinas’s description of the same phenomenon from his earliest work, De l’existence à l’existant (1947), I will preface my commentary by observing that, in some respect, this work was also composed on a desert island (though not allegorically, as in my case), since it was initially drafted while Levinas was interned in the German Gulag between 1940 and 1945. Nevertheless, as Levinas himself admits in the preface to the first edition published two years after the war: “The stalag is evoked here not as a guarantee of profundity nor as a claim to indulgence, but only as an explanation for the absence of any consideration for those philosophical works published, with so much impact, between 1940 and 1945.” In the section called “Existence sans existents” (Existence without existents), Levinas explicitly responds to Heidegger’s claims cited above concerning the situation in which “nothing” appears, offering the following rejoinders, which I will scan in a logical form of propositions, definitions, and interpolations:

• First, let us imagine all beings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness.
• But what of nothingness itself? Does it also revert to nothingness?
• Something would happen [Quelque-chose se passe]
• Question: What happens?
• Response: There is [il y a], which is not Nothing [nicht Nichtung], and yet not “something” either, but “being in general.”
• Answer: Therefore, nothingness does not revert to nothingness, but rather to “being in general.”
• Definition: “being in general” is “anonymous, impersonal being.”
• Analogy: Night is the experience of “anonymous, impersonal being in general,” that is, if the term “experience” wasn’t already inapplicable to a situation where is neither object nor subject, this or that, and no discourse [no language, no references], and lastly, “no world” either.
• Nevertheless, there is a presence that remains, which is not the presence of “something.”
• Likewise, the disappearance of all things and the “I” leaves what cannot disappear, the fact of being before any election, before one wants to be or not to be, a participation with “no exit.”
• Only “being in general” remains, belonging to no one, like a field of forces, a heavy atmosphere, a swarming of points with no central point, or monad.
• “There is” [il y a].

Looking at the above description, if the direct confrontation with Heidegger’s concept of nothingness is not clear enough, I will place Levinas’s characterization of the reversion of nothingness in the night alongside the following two passages in which Heidegger describes the nothingness that appears in anxiety:

In that in the face of which one has anxiety, the “It is nothing and nowhere” becomes manifest. The obstinacy of the “nothing and nowhere within-the-world” means as a phenomenon that the world as such is that in the face of which one has anxiety. The utter insignificance which makes itself known in the “nothing and nowhere”, does not signify that the world is absent, but tells us that entities within-the-world are of so little importance in themselves that on the basis of this insignificance of what is within-the-world, the world in its worldhood is all that still obtrudes itself.

What oppresses us is not this or that, nor is it the summation of everything present-at-hand; it is rather the possibility of the ready-to-hand in general; that is to say, it is the world itself. When anxiety has subsided, then in our everyday way of talking we are accustomed to say that “it was really nothing.” And what it was, indeed, does get reached ontically by such a way of talking. Everyday discourse tends towards concerning itself with the ready-to-hand and talking about it. That in the face of which anxiety is anxious is nothing ready-to-hand within-the-world. But this “nothing ready-to-hand,” which only our everyday circumspective discourse understands, is not totally nothing. The “nothing” of readiness-to-hand is grounded in the most primordial “something”—in the world.

Now to summarize Levinas’s overall objections to Heidegger’s earlier ontology of nothingness in Sein und Zeit, at this point I will outline three main objections that could be drawn from his work during this period.

• First Objection: Levinas critiques Heidegger’s emphasis on the instrumentality of things as the privileged point of access to the “pre-disclosure of being,” especially since this instrumental attitude can also be used to characterize Dasein’s treatment of others as “things” that can be manipulated or used—including being used up or destroyed. All things and persons are indiscriminately thrown in together in the world that is “disclosed” by pure instrumentality, in which others can also be assigned to basically serve merely as “equipment” (das Zeug) for Dasein’s own dealings and projects. In other words, persons are simply tools. Moreover, just like the things that are no longer “ready-to-hand,” other people can also become “present-to-hand,” causing a disturbance to the basic organization of referrals that Dasein has carefully set up, that is, the structure and organization of Dasein’s world. At this point, persons can also appear in the modes of “obtrusiveness” (Aufdringlichkeit), or “obstinancy” (Aufsässigkeit). They can become obtrusive, obstinate, obsessive, obnoxious, recalcitrant, and refractory. Relations to others can also suddenly become damaged or broken, no longer serviceable, or lost altogether as when another departs or suddenly passes away. In many other circumstances having to do with Dasein’s projects and dealings with the world, other people are simply found to be “in the way,” obstructing Dasein’s goals as an entity that is first and foremost defined by its “mineness” (Eigentumlichkeit), and when this occurs Dasein feels the violent urge just to simply push all the others out of the way like so much “stuff” (zeug), as Heidegger says.
• Second Objection: This follows immediately from the first objection and is stated explicitly in the conclusion of “Existence without existents.” By calling attention to the extremity of the existential situation that is posited in the night (and in the “tragic”), “Negation does not end up together with being as a structure and organization of objects,” but rather designates a purely impersonal field without “proprietor or master.” I will not take the time to go back through all of Heidegger’s descriptions of the disruption or break in the whole structure and organization of references that is manifested by the appearance of the “not” (nicht) or “Nothingness” (Nichtung); however, we should note that in all the descriptions Dasein itself seems strangely “held back” and “at a distance” from the event, and that the disruption only touches on the eye or the hand. In other words, Dasein may become temporarily “fascinated,” afraid or anxious, but its bodily existence never becomes fundamentally disabled, and its ability to “flee” the situation of anxiety by falling into distraction and inauthenticity always seems a possibility and a power it maintains as if “what happens” is always kept at a safe distance as in the manifestation of the sublime. Opposing what he calls an “impassive reflection” on the nothingness revealed in anxiety, in his own phenomenology, Levinas will instead emphasize that those forms of physical embodiment of nothingness that grip consciousness do not let it go as in the experiences of insomnia, bodily pain, and illness. From this we might conclude that Heidegger’s experience when writing Sein und Zeit could never be compared to that of a real castaway who cannot really choose to flee his own desert island. Thus the feeling of incarceration was never real incarceration, as Levinas experienced in the gulag, nor the anxiety over death ever an encounter with real death that Levinas had to face in the news of the extermination of his family in Lithuania. I imagine that these experiences led him emphasize those extreme “hypostases” from which consciousness could not choose to flee and before which the Ego experienced a passivity that is beyond its own activity and passivity; whereas, for Heidegger, the night of insomnia only temporarily disrupted sleep, and boredom was only an obstacle to falling into a state of distraction. For Levinas, the freedom of falling into inauthentic states of idle talk, distraction, sensual pleasure, curiosity, and so on, were prohibited from the start—in fact, these would be pure luxuries that the Ego, if it had the power, would choose over the horror of pure impersonal Being.
• Third Objection: Of course, Levinas’s most ardent and lifelong contention with Heidegger can be summarized in the following statement that appears at the end of the same section where he also historically opposes the Bergsonian critique of Nothingness to the idea of anxiety in the face of death. However, he writes, “to ‘realize’ the concept of nothingness is not to see nothingness, but to die.” This last statement expresses perhaps the most severe critique of the philosophy of existence, which Levinas also claims represents “modern philosophy” in its historical opposition to the philosophy of Bergson, who, we should recall, had been the primary representative of modern philosophy in France until the turn of the century. The rejection of Heidegger’s philosophy (and certainly Sartre’s as well, even though he could not have read Being and Nothingness in the camp unless one of the other prisoners had managed to smuggle it in) is based on the claim that death gives us “something to see,” even if this something is “nothing.” In response, as Levinas objects, death gives us nothing to see, does not “show itself as a phenomenon,” neither does it allow us to take our distance ultimately; thus, there is no transcendence to be found in death—in the face of dying, one simply dies, or rather, perishes! Perhaps in reply to Heidegger’s infamous claim that man can truly die, whereas animals can only merely perish, I imagine Levinas might object: “men can certainly perish too! I have personally heard the news of my family, and of the millions who are being exterminated just like animals!”

In (the) light of the pandemic, I wonder if we would say the same concerning the millions who have been stricken down by Covid, and the millions more that will soon follow? Does their death remain an “authentic possibility” that also “lights up” the world wherein our own Dasein anxiously awaits a future, especially since world only belongs to existing Dasein, according to Heidegger? Or instead, have the dead simply perished in the night, often alone and without family, their bodies have been carried out under the cover of darkness to be stacked like cordwood in refrigerator trucks or like crumps of paper across the floor of air-conditioned football stadiums filled with a thousand other corpses? In many ways this recalls the comment by Dr. Rieux, Camus’s narrator in La Peste, who was also a “first responder” to the outbreak of the Bubonic plague in the city of Oran:

Since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination. The doctor remembered the plague at Constantinople that, according to Procopius, caused ten thousand deaths in a single day. Ten thousand dead made about five times the audience in a biggish cinema. Yes, that was how it should be done. You should collect the people at the exits of five picture-houses, you should lead them to a city square and make them die in heaps if you wanted to get a clear notion of what it means. Then at least you could add some familiar faces to the anonymous mass. But naturally that was impossible to put into practice; moreover, what man knows ten thousand faces?

I think that the difference between Camus’s world and our own is that today ten thousand deaths in a single day is not so difficult to imagine. One only needs to wake up each morning and view the jetsam of bloated corpses that have washed up on the beach having been carried in by the tide during the night. In many ways, the night in which all things and persons revert to nothingness would be Levinas’s version of the statement “The world is gone,” which for many reasons is perhaps closer to Celan’s poetic expression than to Heidegger’s more worldly and theoretical version. Earlier, I observed that Heidegger ties one end of the concept of Dasein to the world itself by a rubber band so that Dasein never really loses itself completely in the night, even in the face of the nothingness of anxiety or fear of death, since Dasein can never do nothing more than return to the world wherein it was. However, for Levinas, what is revealed in the night is not the world—in the night “the world is gone”—but rather the purely impersonal Being from which there are no exits (Dans ce sens, l’être n’a pas portes de sorties).

This raises a question that can only be posed in (the) light of the pandemic: if Heidegger proposes that the world is always virtually present in the whole structure of things determined as “ready-to-hand,” and this structure is interconnected in all its constituent parts via “references” and “referrals” (verweisungen), then how many references can be disrupted or broken quantitatively before the rubber band that ties Dasein to this structure finally snaps and the world itself suddenly flies off into a dark and infinite space like a meteor? Perhaps another way of phrasing this question is, How long can Dasein endure in an uncanny and unfamiliar space at the end of its invisible rope before this precarious situation itself becomes familiar and routine—that is, before the statement “The world is gone” simply expresses the normal and habitual state of worldlessness? In other words, how do we know at what point “The world is gone” no longer refers to the past world, but rather to the situation of worldlessness wherein Dasein currently resides? At the same time, it is important to point out that Heidegger was never completely satisfied with the language of “structure” that was employed in Sein und Zeit to characterize the concept of world that was “predisclosed” in the entire network of things that were determined in their being as “ready-to-hand,” and which only appeared and showed itself as a phenomenon when this structure was disrupted. Consequently, the 1929 seminar can be understood as Heidegger’s renewed attempt to fashion a new language for the ontological concept of world, which he does by employing the infamous tripartite formula to investigate the manner by which the “darkening” of the world can again be “lit up” from the perspective of the stone, the animal, and the human. According to the metaphoric formula, what he calls the darkening of the world can be “lit up” in three shades of darkness and light: worldless (weltlos), world-poor (weltarm), and world-forming (weltbildende). Of course, this poetic formula has been misunderstood—even by Derrida himself—as an anthropocentric disparaging of the animal world by calling it “poor.”

As Roland Végsó has discovered in his Worldlessness after Heidegger (2020), Heidegger himself soon realized that the word “poor” was itself a poor choice of words and would inevitably lead to misunderstandings, and that the first revision of the formula occurs in the collection of notes from 1936 to 1938, where we find the following reflection:

The darkening and worldlessness. (Earlier as world-poor! Liable to be misunderstood. The stone not even worldless, because even without darkening.) Rigidifying and reversion of life out of the initial opening. Accordingly, also no seclusion, unless the living being is included—“earth” (stone, plant, animal). Stone and river not without plant, animal. How does the decision regarding “life” stand and fall? Meditation on the “biological.”

Végsó also discovers a more complete reconsideration that appears in the recently published Black Notebooks, where, unfortunately, Heidegger also manages to dig himself in deeper by making some disparaging remarks concerning the “worldless Jew.” Nevertheless, in the journal entry dated 1938–39, Heidegger writes:

The designation of the stone, animal, and man by means of their relation to the world (see the lecture course of 1929–1930) is to be maintained in the orientation of its question—and yet it is inadequate. The difficulty lies in the definition of the animal as “poor in world,” despite the reservations and qualifications made there [i.e., in the lectures] concerning the concept of “poverty.” It should not be a matter of being worldless, world-poor, or world-forming. Rather, without field and world / benumbed by the field [also soil, territory, environment] and without world / and shaping the world-disclosing earth / are the more suitable versions of the question’s scope. Therewith the designation of the stone as without field and world, at the same time and even ahead of time, needs its own positive definition. But how is this to be articulated? Surely, in terms of the “earth”—but indeed entirely out of the world.

According to Végsó’s astute reading, we discover that two new terms are introduced: field (feld) and earth (Erde). Moreover, these new terms are now set into relation, but also in opposition, to the world. As Végsó writes, “It is not a surprise then that, beginning in the 1930’s [of course, the period is also personally and politically significant, it goes without saying], Heidegger projects an inherent antagonism into the very heart of this world (that, depending on the context, he designates with terms like Riss, Kampf, Streit, and Auseinandersetzung).” In other words, one could also say that 1930 was the beginning of Heidegger’s “down-going” (recalling Zarathustra’s journey in the section called “The Convalescent”), a period that begins the philosopher’s longest “Error” that also ends in a shipwreck, after which Heidegger finds himself a castaway on his own desert island in the middle of the Black Forest “fogged in by hope,” as Celan says. It is also beginning with this period that Heidegger will increasingly define the agonistic conflict with the “earth” (Erde) as the self-secluding realm that causes the “darkening of the world,” and he begins to recast the entire metaphoric language between light and darkness, or between clearing and concealment, in the mythopoetic terms of Riss, Kampf, Streit, and Auseinandersetzung, and, finally, war (Krieg), in which all the other beings (stone, animal, plant, human, and gods) are fatefully encircled. It is this language that will now color Heidegger’s metaphors of the conflict between earth and world that will appear throughout the later essays on the poets, which is recast as the violent conflict between two archaic languages of nature (phusis)—poetic (poesis) and scientific/technological (technē).

On the first day, I already announced my own rejection of the mythopoetic opposition between world and earth that appears to frame Heidegger’s later metaphysical language, if only because the publication of the Black Notebooks has now made it evident that the earth is the absolute “Ground” upon which the elements of soil (boden), field (feld), homeland (Heimut), and fatherland (Vaterland) are founded. Moreover, these terms—I have called them metaphors—are prominent in the writings and lectures from the 1930’s, and are only barely concealed underneath other mythopoetic themes that are derived from the German poets, especially Hölderlin and Rilke. (As an aside, this is one source of Celan’s Auseinandersetzung, with both Heidegger and Rilke in his later poems as well.) Nevertheless, what is crucial to observe is that, immediately after the war, we might discern that the earlier concept of the “disclosure” of the world as the whole structure in the totality of things that are determined as ready-to-hand returns with a vengeance in the description of the essence of technology as “enframing” (Ge-Stell). In other words, the entire structure of equipmentality that was relatively determined as the world that was predisclosed through the mode of being-to-hand, even though this structure still remained concealed behind the familiar and visible world, now becomes completely present-to-hand and enframed by technological revealing. Likewise, the characteristic of the uncanny familiar-unfamiliar, which was applied sparingly and only when certain things and referrals were disrupted or broken, is now employed wholesale to describe the presence of “the whole structure” of technology in all of its constituent parts—that is, the essential manner in which it produces and reveals the world.

On the other hand, maybe I was a bit too precipitous on the first night after reflecting on Heidegger’s essay that I decided to toss the pages into the fire thinking that this description of the world no longer applied to our own, if only because the plane was no longer on the taxi strip ready for takeoff. However, I recall Heidegger’s frequent description of the technologically enframed world as completely “strange” and even as “eerie”—and especially for “us late-born Greeks,” if I remember the phrase correctly. (Although both terms are possible translations of Unheimlich, there is certainly an affective difference of the intensity in Heidegger’s later use of this term.) It is even somewhat ironic that the technological world of Ge-Stell that appears foregrounded in the postwar essay now looks almost identical to Levinas’s description of the night in which all things and persons revert into nothingness; in fact, the striking resemblance between these two descriptions of Pure Impersonal Being might be called unheimlich.

Does this mean, however, that we should now simply abandon Heidegger’s prewar concept of the world entirely and accept Levinas’s description of the night when “everything reverts to nothingness” as a more accurate description of the same phenomenon? No. First, they do not address the same phenomenon (even though both can be understood to address the different phenomenological determinations of light); and in fact, I will argue that they are as different from one another as day and night! For example, Heidegger’s phenomenological description of the way that things are suddenly “lit up” by a strange presence—that is, the disruption of the familiar signs and references accompanied by the darkening of entire portions of the world that was once invisible—can indeed only occur in the full light of day in which Nothingness appears. Perhaps this is why Heidegger negates the night as a cause of this strange and unfamiliar light in which things suddenly become present as uncanny, because the light of darkness can only show itself as a phenomenon in the light of day. Thus we can conclude that both the appearance of world as well as the “there” of Da-sein are fundamentally related to the source of natural light, which is not simply a metaphor, any more than one could say that for Kant the being of the sensible experience is not fundamentally conditioned by the being of sensation.

On the other hand, in the case of Levinas’s phenomenological description of night, we should recall that there are no metaphors of natural light. For example, “We could say that night is the very experience of the there is, if the term experience were not completely inapplicable to a situation which involves the total exclusion of light.” Accordingly, there is no “predisclosed” (pre-ontological) illumination of space for things to either appear or to disappear; consequently, there is no perspective either (i.e., no possibility of taking one’s distance, no “line of flight”). Instead, in Levinas’s description things announce their presence only in murmurs, the sound of rustling, or the voice of silence in the complete absence of language and discourse. “Nothing responds to us but this silence; the voice of this silence is understood and frightens like the silence of those infinite spaces Pascal speaks of.” It is the voice of silence, behind which there is only a murmuring or rustling of a pure impersonal Being that frightens consciousness and fills it with the feeling of horror vacui. Therefore, it would be completely inappropriate to say that in this night nothingness appears, or that the not (nicht) appears as a positive phenomenon, as in Heidegger’s description of anxiety, because there is only a pure void.

Nevertheless, there is still a relation that is posited in the heart of this darkness that is the existence of consciousness itself (although without any corresponding “there,” and outside the “world of others”), a consciousness that resists being absorbed completely by pure impersonal Being, even though consciousness cannot choose to flee from Being entirely. (Thus, for Levinas, being condemned to an existence with “no exits” forecloses the freedom of suicide, something that both Camus and Sartre thought was still possible.) Unlike Heidegger’s Dasein, moreover, in coming face-to-face with pure impersonal Being, consciousness can only dream of becoming distracted, bored, or falling into an inauthentic state of the “they” (Das Man). Yet this option is also foreclosed by Levinas, since if “there is no longer world” (i.e., “the world is gone”), then there can be no “they.” Consciousness is found to be completely alone on its island of night. However, in proposing what he describes as “this extreme situation” of night, where he establishes a confrontation between solitary and personal consciousness and pure impersonal Being, Levinas also discovers the possibility of transcendence as the very condition of personal subjectivity. After all, “To be conscious is to be torn away from the there is, since the existence of consciousness constitutes a subjectivity, a subject of existence that is, to some extent, a master of being, already a name in the anonymity of night.”

Concluding today’s reflections, therefore, I will return to the earlier question, which was posed in terms of an either/or—that is, either Heidegger or Levinas. Having thought the question through in the light of my own situation, which I am only assuming to resemble the situation faced by everybody (tout le monde) today, I have come to the following conclusion: if one is forced to choose a philosophy of existence to live on a desert island, then one needs at least two—a philosophy for the day, and a philosophy for the night. Accordingly, on the next day I will employ both philosophies to describe what I call the two dominant ecstasies that I have experienced both day and night on my desert island: profound boredom, which I will argue belongs only to the day and to the philosophy of Heidegger, and insomnia, which belongs only to the night and to the philosophy of Levinas.