Amor Fati and the Eternal Return

This is my final paper for the course on Heidegger, Bergson, and Deleuze I took last spring. The focus of the paper is Deleuze's articulation of the Eternal Return in Nietzsche. It's a little rough, but overall I'm quite happy with it. Since writing it, I have been reading a lot of Zizek, Badiou, Hegel, Lacan, et cetera, a regimen which has significantly altered my reading of Deleuze. Yet, returning to the paper, I was surprised at how much it prefigured this shift. More on that later.

~

Yet to Come
Amor Fati and the Eternal Return in Nietzsche and Deleuze


He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise.
- William Blake, “Eternity”

~

Amor fati: love of fate, fatal love –

We are faced with a volitional intuition and a transmutation. 'To my inclination for death,' said Bousquet, 'which was a failure of the will, I will substitute a longing for death which would be the apotheosis of the will.' From this inclination to this longing there is, in a certain respect, no change except a change of the will, a sort of leaping in place (saut sur place) of the whole body which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will. It wills now not exactly what occurs, but something in that which occurs, something yet to come which would be consistent with what occurs, in accordance with the laws of an obscure, humorous conformity...It is in this sense that the Amor fati is one with the struggle of free men.¹

Who is this man who wants to die? Who wills death, longs for death? Who is capable of affirming his death? He who has becom strong enough to affirm even that most terrible burden, to discover in that most terrible realization a joy more profound than any mere enjoyment or pleasure, a joy that cannot be bound to oneself, but that flies from the self and from every captivity, that mercilessly destroys anything that would try to capture it. He who can kiss that joy as it flies, who can love death for discovering in death the joyous escape from that which dies.

Bousquet distinguished two moments. First, a resignation: I cannot will death, I cannot affirm it; that burden is too heavy, too big for me, I would collapse beneath that weight, and so I can only wait for death to take me. I have an inclination for death, I bend toward it, I submit to it and accept its inevitability. On my knees, hunched over, I yield to its merciless judgment, I await its cruelty in pathetic surrender. I have only my little pleasures which allow me to endure this wretched life, those little joys I was able to capture and bind, and I can forgive myself of them because they will not return once my time has come.

When Blake says this man “does the winged life destroy”, we must read it in the fullest sense: he destroys, diminishes, disgraces that purest joy in capturing it, he possess it on the condition that it will soon be gone, and this is already its death; this little joy is only a corpse, an idol, a fool's joy, for it can no longer take flight and attain its highest power, it is already paralyzed, doomed. Yet we can also repeat this quite differently: it is no longer he who destroys the winged life, but the winged life does destroy him.

He who cannot affirm the highest power of joy, who can affirm his joy “once, only once”, will suffer the wrath of his prisoner when, as a phoenix, it rises out of the ashes of its miserable double in a furious incandescence, casting its captor to the flames. These men content to wait for death, to endure life, to take pleasure in the littlest of joys, will receive the most pitiful fate: “they will have, and be aware of, only an ephemeral life!”²

In the second moment, resignation is overcome, the resignation has transformed into exaltation, apotheosis. The man content to wait for death, unable to affirm it, to will it, to carry this burden, is forsaken in favor of a new strength, a new capability: a longing, a passion for death expresses a will transformed, no longer a failed will, a “nothingness of the will” as Nietzsche says. It is now the most profound expression of a “will to nothingness”, no longer stifled by those petty pleasures that distract one from the immensity of its cruel fulfillment.

The man who wants to die, who wills that everything of himself that cannot affirm and cannot be affirmed, everything petty, weak, cowardly, that all of this should die with him – and this is the highest power of joy, this is the winged life attained. When everything base, everything that weighs heavy on one's back, has been annihilated, only lightness and joy remain. He has become capable of casting off everything of himself that has failed and of retaining only that highest power of affirmation. Even negation remains only as a power of affirmation: to will death, but to will the death of that which, incapable of affirming even itself, is resigned to die – to affirm this resignation as such. This is the exaltation of the will: the will to nothingness undergoes a transmutation, becoming a will to affirmation; the abyss swallows everything heavy, so that only an arrow swift and sturdy, sent with the whole force of one's being, can escape its gravity; and so that even the abyss itself is swallowed up by the line of flight the arrow draws.

The man who wants to die succeeds in surpassing the man who cannot affirm his death, who waits patiently for the abyss to open and take him. The man who wants to die becomes capable of shouldering this terrible burden, but only so that he can liberate in himself that which is utterly weightless, the winged life. “What makes one heroic?— Going out to meet at the same time one's highest suffering and one's highest hope.”³ This weight may lead him all the more quickly into the abyss, but it is precisely everything of himself that is a burden for him that is so annihilated, so that the quickness, exuberance, affirmation and joy are set free.

Does this not imply a third moment, a moment when, after death is affirmed and all that cannot affirm death is annihilated, a will to affirmation flies free into its winged life? We have seen the last man, the man resigned to die, and his nothingness of the will; we have seen the man who wants to die, who, in realizing the completion of the will to nothingness, surpassed the last man and his ephemeral life by liberating from his very being a life that would escape that which dies. Are we not then waiting for this winged life to appear, this life that finally overcomes every burden, every death? Are we not awaiting the Overman?

~

Amor fati –

Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year—what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of all my life henceforth! I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things:—then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love from henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse, I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation! And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer!⁴

How does Nietzsche realize this love? How could anyone accomplish such a task? The problem is at once an ethical problem, the problem of how to live, how to make beauty of this life and in this life, to have done with negation and accusation, to make life into pure affirmation. It is through the power of affirmation that beauty and strength and importance is discovered in even the smallest of things, even in cruelty, in pain, in illness, in limitation. To make of one's life an affirmation would mean that the value of everything must be evaluated; of every person, every act, every relationship, every moment. Everything is evaluated so that beauty and worth can be discovered in every thing, so that every thing can be remade on this basis. The will to affirmation would realize and rescue the beauty in everything, in spite of the values imposed on the world that obscure, denigrate, or deny that beauty. Affirmation is the only way in which ethics, as the examination and reinvention of one's very mode of living, one's ethos, can be rescued from the accusation, judgment, and denial of morality.

The problem is also, at the same time, an ontological problem, the problem of “what is necessary in things”. It is not only a matter of “what is”, “what exists”, but rather, of what must exist, of what, in things, necessarily exists. An ontological affirmation cannot affirm everything that is without succumbing to a paralyzing inadequacy. However, it must affirm that which, in every thing, necessarily exists, that which must be made to exist. We seek not a total ontology that would affirm as existing everything, even the most base, most vile, most deserving of inexistence, but a selective ontology that engenders in existence that which must exist, and expels all the rest. Whereas the former would 'let be', the latter will 'make be'. A selective ontology would not simply describe reality, but would engender it as such, as that which must necessarily be; it would select in existence that which purely exists in and for affirmation, and thereby would create a pure ontology. Thus we can see that when ontology becomes pure, it merges with or implicates ethics, it is an ethics, ontological ethics. There is no longer any trace of the classical distinction between what is and what ought to be, a boundary dividing ontology from ethics; there is only what must be, as the traversing of the gap, an arrow crossing the void, a love of fate.

Yet here we must proceed with the utmost caution. For what is the source of this imperative? Doesn't it imply an authority that would reintroduce morality? In what sense can we speak of a pure being, a necessary being, and doesn't this reintroduce a value higher than what is, which opposes existence, which existence merely resembles, against which existence is judged? These concerns will plague us until we consider Nietzsche's solution to the two-fold problem of Amor fati. The will must undergo a test, a torturous crucible, if it is to affirm and love its fate, to make fate itself the object of the will, a will taken to the very limit of its power, to the n^th power. The last man, despite his resignation to death, does not know of this love, for his will is reduced to its minimum of power, and so he cannot will his fate. It is only the man who wants to die that can pass the test, that has a will strong enough to affirm death and all the miseries of fate. In becoming capable of this affirmation, becoming-equal to the task, he aspires to overcome himself, his mortality, all of his weaknesses and limitations He prepares the way for the Overman: “At the stage of the 'during,' or the becoming-equal, the 'overman' becomes an ideal we seek to imitate.”⁵ Nietzsche's test will eliminate these weaknesses and liberate a winged life from that which dies; the Overman will no longer be an ideal for man, but will have already overcome him. With the force of an arrow escaping the gravity of the abyss, it affirms the must that flashes between ontology and ethics as a bolt of lightning. Nietzsche's test is the eternal return.

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Eternal Return –

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again—and you with it, speck of dust!'— Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine!' If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you; the question in each and every thing, 'Do you desire this once more, and innumerable times more?' would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight! Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal? —⁶

Nietzsche's test is first presented here as a hypothetical, a mere thought: could you affirm the eternal recurrence of the same events, of every moment of your life, from the most wonderful to the most terrible? Could you affirm it all again to the n^th power? Could you will your life, all of your life, without the intrusion of anything new? Yet Nietzsche also says this thought will change you if it does not crush you. What is this change? If one is able to affirm this life once and only once, content with the little pleasures, then one will always confront the intrusion of the new into one's life as miraculous, the mark of a higher power than one's own. One cannot change things or oneself; one can only dwell in those little routines and habits that make one comfortable. The new must come from without, with a strength and a violence greater than one's own. This man would be crushed by the thought of the eternal return, as his only consolation for his miserable life is that it will be over soon enough, and the new will intrude at his death when he is spirited off into the afterlife.

Yet the man who can affirm this terrible weight has discovered the greatest secret. He is able to affirm the eternal recurrence of the same events because he can liberate the new from every past event of his life, drawing out of those same things something different by making difference a power of his acting. It is no longer a divine guarantee, but a immanent imperative. This man lives such that he can affirm all of his past, and the new within everything past, in his every act. It is by making the new, the different, in one's act that one frees from those same events the power of the new, as if the whole of his past is the same, but at the same time, everything has changed. It is as if those same events now mean something completely different, because we now see them as having been necessary for the new to emerge in that very act. One can now affirm all of one's past indefinitely, in every new act that subsequently reacts back on and reveals the new in the same series of events. One can affirm the eternal return of the same events, because this has become the condition for producing the new.

Hence we can draw from this hypothesis an ethical imperative. “The eternal return says: whatever you will, will it in such a manner that you also will its eternal return.”⁷ Only will that in which you can eternally discover the new, that which can serve as the condition for something different. This imperative gives rise to a genuine change in one's actions; not a simple modification of habits, but a reorientation of every action towards change itself; to will all of one's life, such that the action of this will changes everything. The same events can be affirmed eternally only if they are said of an internal difference, an eternal differing from themselves; they are affirmed only as opening onto the new. They are the 'same events', but they can be affirmed as such only on the condition that in this affirmative act, every one of them is changed; the 'same' is said only of difference when we can affirm our power to eternally make the difference. One is impelled to think of one's actions in such a way that they can be affirmed eternally as the conditions for something new to emerge, as having been necessary for the new. The thought of the eternal return must discover in every past event the potential for something new, and in fact, the necessity of something new.

Yet insofar as this is only a thought, only hypothetical, it has no real imperative power without the support of an authority. How might we think this test as not hypothetically but really imperative? And if this thought is an ethical imperative, what is the reason for this emphasis on the new and different? What is the ethical value of these, and can they really serve as the highest values, such that our imperative need consider none other? The problem is we have yet to discover the relationship between ethics and ontology, and so we must consider the eternal return not only as an ethical test, but an ontological principle. Nietzsche himself takes up the concept of eternal return from the ancients, but not without making it serve as the condition for something new, a new concept.

The ancient concept was an ontological or cosmological principle that conceived reality in terms of the 'cyclical hypothesis': given an infinite amount of time, every possible finite event will be realized, and after which time every event will be realized again to infinity. In this way, the same events will return identically for all eternity. This hypothesis, in Nietzsche's own time, became a scientific claim, the claim of either a mechanistic universe or a final thermodynamic equilibrium: “The two conceptions agree on one hypothesis, that of a final or terminal state, a terminal state of becoming.”⁸ In this way, all change in the universe will terminate in a final equilibrium identical to the beginning state of the universe, after which everything will happen again in the same way, thus subordinating all change to an ultimate identity.

Nietzsche rejects the cyclical hypothesis in both its ancient and scientific formulations. “Nietzsche says that if the universe had an equilibrium position, if becoming had an end or final state, it would already have been attained. But the present moment, as the passing moment, proves that it is not attained and therefore that an equilibrium of forces is not possible.”⁹ He defends this claim by denying the necessity of positing a beginning point from which all change is born, as there is an absurdity in this notion: if there was an equilibrium position before change began, it would have had no reason or power to change, it would have remained as it was. Because there was no beginning to becoming, but rather an “infinity of past time”, a final equilibrium would have already been attained if it were at all possible. And if it had ever attained this state, it would again have no reason or power to leave it.¹⁰ Thus the eternal return as ontological principle cannot base itself on the idea that there is an ultimate series of events bound between a beginning and an end which are identical, and which will repeat identically whenever the end is reached, a “mechanical process [that] passes through the same set of differences again.”¹¹

How then does the eternal return become an ontological principle? “According to Nietzsche the eternal return is in no sense a thought of the identical but rather a thought of synthesis, a thought of the absolutely different which calls for a new principle outside science. This principle is that of the reproduction of diversity as such, of the repetition of difference...”¹² We must then think this principle of synthesis, this synthesis of difference as such. What returns of the same events is precisely their capacity to be synthesized differently; they must necessarily return, but they only return eternally when, in every act, a new synthesis is carried out, a new combination of those same events is produced, such that everything that returns does so only insofar as it is now made different. The new combination succeeds in discovering in the same events something new, some new possible combination. The same events only return as the condition for something new that subsequently discovers in them a new sense; it is this new sense, created in new combinations, that returns, and the 'same' is said only of this new sense that flees from any necessary identity.

This internal difference, internal to every 'same event', of which the same is said, is what Nietzsche calls will to power. “If...the will to power is a good principle, if it reconciles empiricism with principles, if it constitutes a superior empiricism, this is because it is an essentially plastic principle that is no wider than what it conditions, that changes itself with the conditioned and determines itself in each case along with what it determines.”¹³ The same events only return by virtue of this internal principle that makes them serve as the condition of the new, and that determines those events as new at the same time that it determines the new itself. The same events are synthesized as different in the determination of a new combination, and this determination is the destiny of those events. In this way, the affirmation and love of fate must discover in what occurs the destiny of the new. “Destiny never consists in step-by-step deterministic relations between presents which succeed one another according to the order of a represented time. Rather, it implies between successive presents non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions.”¹⁴

Destiny is affirmed as the destiny of past presents to enter into new combinations, to produce the new that simultaneously determines them anew, giving them a new sense. This plastic, internal principle of difference is thus the ontological principle of the eternal return. Everything returns, but only insofar as it enters into new combinations: “In the eternal return, identities do not return; combinations return, which differ in their atomistic nature. [It] actually unmasks these illusions by making this moment distinct from all others...The present moment assembles a unique combination, distinct from adjacent ones...When we become aware of different combinations, we become aware of novelty, which, rather than emerging from us, erupts from the random play of combinations within time itself.”¹⁵ Everything exists only as a combination, in which the things combined no longer exist except as pure differences, pure elements of an absolutely different combination. They are no longer identical to what they had been, but differ from themselves in being implicated in a novel combination that determines them anew. The affirmation of fate, of destiny, is thus the affirmation of the necessity of chance; what is necessary in things is their ability to enter into a 'random play of combinations', chance encounters that give rise to a new sense in them. Chance, affirmed as necessary, is the internal principle of that which returns in the eternal return, it is will to power. “Chance is the bringing of forces into relation, the will to power is the determining principle of this relation. The will to power is a necessary addition to force but can only be added to forces brought into relation by chance.”¹⁶

If everything exists only in combinations of differences, as combinations of differences, then nothing can be identical to itself, there can be no inner essence or model of things. Here we can think of Plato, who distinguished between the ultimate Forms or Ideas which were identical in themselves, and the things we encounter in the world which are only approximations or copies of those models. Yet there is a third category, the simulacrum: that which resembles or appears to be the copy of some model but does not depend on that model, which only imitates that model as a mask or disguise, hiding a different internal principle. In Plato, simulacra do participate in some other model despite imitating another; for example, the sophist resembles the philosopher, whose Idea is truth, but actually participates in the Idea of prestige or wealth. Yet before the simulacrum is determined as the copy of another model, it is known only as possessing an internal principle different than what was thought. The internal principle of the simulacrum qua simulacrum is difference, only difference.

The ontological principle of the eternal return is precisely that there can be no model, no essence, no identity, of that which returns, and that everything exists only in combinations whose internal principle is difference. The 'same' things exist as such only in returning, in being repeated with a different sense, determined anew in a novel combination that arises out of chance. The 'same' things are said to exist only as an affirmation of chance, of the chance that they might take on a different sense, and this affirmation is the internal principle of that which returns. In this way, things only return as simulacra: “[T]aken in its strict sense, eternal return means that each thing exists only in returning, copy of an infinity of copies which allows neither original nor origin to subsist...it qualifies as simulacrum that which it causes to be (and to return). When eternal return is the power of (formless) Being, the simulacrum is the true character or form – the 'being' – of that which is.”¹⁷ It is in this sense that the eternal return is a selective ontology: it selects, in what exists, that which is capable of differing from itself, of entering into new combinations and attaining a new sense. Only that which can affirm the chance of differing, and has this affirmation as an internal principle, will return. Affirming chance as necessary and as the only necessity is Amor fati.

What returns in the eternal return is every thing, but only the extreme form of every thing; every thing returns only insofar as it is capable of being transformed, insofar as it goes to its limits rather than resting within them. Those forms or senses of things in which they have stable identities, immutable essences, natures already determined, are abolished in the instant of chance, of determination as such, in which everything is determined anew. “Only the extreme forms return – those which, large or small, are deployed within the limit and extend to the limit of their power, transforming themselves and changing one into another.”¹⁸ The values of all things are not already determined, but in every moment must be determined anew; in this way, eternal return becomes the ethical test of evaluation, in which everything is evaluated in terms of what it can do, what it can become, in the new combination that thereby determines itself by affirming the chance of this becoming-other. This is the point at which the ontological principle becomes an ethical imperative; not simply a hypothetical imperative, a selective thought, but a real and realized imperative, a selective being. “It is no longer a question of the simple thought of the eternal return eliminating from willing everything that falls outside this thought but rather, of the eternal return making something come into being which cannot do so without changing nature. It is no longer a question of selective thought but of selective being; for the eternal return is being and being is selection.”¹⁹

Whatever you will, will it such that you also will its eternal return. This means that every act of the will must select in everything that determines it a different sense, a different way of being. The being selected in the eternal return is always a different way of being, a being said of becoming, an identity said of the absolutely different. The value of everything will give way to an evaluation that selects in everything new values, new powers. This is what extreme form means: that which only exists in its capacity to become other than what it is, by entering into a novel combination. The extreme form abolishes everything weak, limiting, stable, already-determined. “Eternal return alone effects the true selection, because it eliminates the average forms and uncovers 'the superior form of everything that is'...the superior form is...the eternal formlessness of the eternal return itself, throughout its metamorphoses and transformations. Eternal return 'makes' the difference because it creates the superior form.”²⁰ Masked by every formed identity is a formlessness, a chance to become different, and this is what is selected and affirmed. The superior form is what must exist, what must be made to exist, and this is where ethics and ontology coincide – thought and being become indistinguishable in the will, the affirmation of the will to power.

The superior form of everything is realized when form itself becomes a mask for an internal principle of formlessness, when identity becomes a mask for difference. The 'same events' return only when they are capable of differing from what they were. This is the ethical imperative: in everything that has value, discover the power of an evaluation that gives sense to values, and that can endow everything with a new sense, a new value. “In what do you believe?— In this: that the weights of all things must be determined anew.”²¹ This revaluation of all values becomes the task of an ontological ethics that would select the superior forms, that would make exist that which must exist of necessity, and affirm this necessity in a love of fate. But necessity is only the necessity of difference, and fate is only that of what is yet-to-come: not a result whose identity is determined beforehand, but the affirmation in everything that occurs of what is only as yet-to-come, and this affirmation is determination as such. “The extreme formality is there only for an excessive formlessness...In this manner, the ground is superseded by a groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which turns upon itself and causes only the yet-to-come to return.”²² The eternal return affirms in what exists that which exists only as yet-to-come: internal difference, the potential to differ, to become.

In the act that affirms the eternal return and selects the superior form that must exist, the actor affirms all of the past as the necessary condition for action. Yet insofar as all of the past is implicated in this new combination arising from the chance of the act, it is implicated only in its capacity to differ from what it was prior, in its capacity as the condition of something new. The past is affirmed, but only that which, in the past, is eternally yet-to-come. Every sense of things past that would demand identity, stability, limitation, fidelity to the essence, all of these are eliminated. In the same way, the actor's own identity, his self, is abolished, he is dissolved in the act as the pure power to differ from what he was, he becomes unrecognizable. All of the weaknesses, limitations, and failings that characterize him are abolished, and he becomes otherwise.

The last man, resigned to die, unable to will his fate as the advent of the new, remains fixated on the necessity imposed upon him by his conditions, and repeats these conditions incessantly out of his inability to affirm and to act out of necessity. He can only repeat and retain his weaknesses, limitations, and failings. Because he cannot become otherwise, cannot make something new from his conditions, he cannot pass the test of the eternal return. The man who wants to die, on the other hand, becomes capable of affirming his fate, he actively abolishes his weaknesses in discovering in his condition something yet-to-come, the Overman. Yet while he may pass the test, he will be annihilated as such in the process. Everything in him that constituted his identity, his self – weaknesses, limitations, failings – is eliminated, and so this identity, this self, falls into the abyss. In the third moment, the eternal return liberates from this man the pure will to affirmation, the affirmation of the yet-to-come, and the Overman is born as a child. “The 'small man' and 'last man' repeat since they lack the ability to take action (the repetition of the before). The great heroic and active man, or the 'one who wants to perish,' repeats in order to become-equal to the action (the repetition of the during). And yet both of these must perish in the third moment. This agrees with Nietzsche's sentiment that man is something to be overcome: 'he is a bridge and not an end.'”²³

In the eternal return it is not the past that conditions us, nor ourselves as capable of acting and exceeding these conditions, that returns; they are both led to death, swallowed by the abyss, dissolved in the act. Yet man dies, he is overcome, only in liberating, in his conditions and in himself, that which is yet-to-come. It is not the life of man itself that must die, but man as that which limits his life, which cannot affirm all of chance and find a joy and a love in necessity. Man must be overcome, and what overcomes him is the secret and obscure coherence of the act – the coherence or consistency of every possible outcome, everything in the act that is yet-to-come, affirmed as such. Man will only be overcome when all of chance is affirmed in the act, with a love of fate, whatever fate that may be. When ethics and ontology coincide, there is no longer a distinction between man and his condition, as both are dissolved in the act that retains of them only the power to differ, to become, to make the difference. The act must become the pure affirmation of all of chance, of every possible outcome, and must wager everything on that single throw of the dice. When man and his conditions are transformed in the act, overcome by the act, the will realizes the superior form of everything that is, and it is this form that will return eternally in the secret coherence of the yet-to-come, the winged life of the Overman in eternity's sunrise. The abyss of death is swept up in its line of flight, in a new life that escapes the spirit of gravity.

~

Eternal Return –

In the horizon of the infinite.— We have left the land and have embarked! We have burned our bridges behind us—indeed, we have gone further and destroyed the land behind us! Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure, it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of this cage! Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom—and there is no longer any 'land'!²⁴

References:

Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science.

Gilles Deleuze:

D&R – Difference and Repetition. New York: Continuum, 2004.

LoS – The Logic of Sense. New York: Continuum, 2004.

N&P – Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

DTST – Keith Faulkner. Deleuze and the Three Syntheses of Time. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2006.

Notes:

1LoS p 170
2D&R p 67
3The Gay Science §268
4The Gay Science §276
5DTST p 123
6The Gay Science §341
7D&R p 8
8N&P p 46
9Ibid. p 47
10Ibid. p 47-9
11Ibid. p 49
12Ibid. p 46
13Ibid. p 50
14D&R p 105
15DTST p 14
16N&P p 53
17D&R p 80
18Ibid. p 51
19N&P p 71
20D&R p 66
21The Gay Science §269
22D&R 114
23DTST p 124
24The Gay Science §124

Materialism of the Problem

If Deleuze is a materialist, it is because he brings materiality to its limit: the familiar materiality of bodies and their physical relations of force, matter as substantial and formed, at its limit, passes over into the bodiless, insubstantial realm of an unformed and non-formal matter-function. We have the physico-empirical plane of material bodies, of visibilities or sensibilities, which relate in the passage of forces from body to body in causal chains. A cue strikes the cue ball, which strikes another ball, et cetera, constituting a series of passages of force. The complication here is that the passage of force becomes autonomous, inscribed on a different plane than that of the bodies which act and react.

It is this autonomy of passage which Deleuze and Guattari name rhythm. Rhythm must be understood in terms of an alternation, a passage from one thing to the other; they say that rhythm is what happens between milieus, it is a transcoding, a "coordination of heterogeneous space-times." (ATP 313) Coding refers to what Deleuze, in Difference and Repetition, calls 'habit': a regular pattern, a series of relations that endures coherently, that repeats. A milieu or habitus is ultimately no more than a consistent set of habits/codings which endures. Rhythm, however, is not simply a habit, a regular pattern or 'meter', but refers to that which interrupts habits/codes, undermines them, and forces them to reorient.

Rhythm, as alternation, involves a passage from one coded milieu into another; yet this does not simply mean that two foreign milieus relate to each other, that one relates to the other as different from itself, composed of different codes. Rather, they together relate to the outside, to an alterity irreducible to some determinate other. It is this outside upon which the passage is inscribed, in which rhythms reverberate. Rhythms are basically the relation between disparate codes, series, or patterns, such that two different codes relate to the Disparate, to their divergence as such. It is across this disparity that a novel conjunction of the coded elements occurs, that a 'transcoding' is born.

Rhythm is that reorientation of codes or patterns that results when two milieus encounter, between each other, that paradoxical element which undermines their consistent conjunction; ultimately, this element is nothing but a pure distance - not the distance between them, but the distance of each from its threshold, the point after which coding breaks down and the consistency of the milieu is compromised, resulting in a change in nature. Every coding envelops this distance, this threshold of decoding, which is not simply the distance of one set of habits from another, but more like the distance of each coding from itself, its inability to extend itself infinitely, to perfectly coincide with itself. At this point, the being of the thing (milieu) becomes indistinguishable from its problematic status - the consistency of the milieu depends upon the problem of its relation to the limit beyond which it will decompose.

Rhythm as alternation is ultimately the incessant oscillation between the consistent encodings of a milieu, including the transcoding that preserves this consistency when foreign milieus must relate across their difference, and the decoding or loss of consistency which characterizes a passage to the limit. This is the passage which becomes autonomous, drawing a plane apart from that of the milieus and their codes. Passage to the limit is the way an arrangement composes itself as such: beyond the incidental conglomeration of the milieu, an arrangement organizes itself on the basis of a limit it must posit as such by extending its power that far, by occupying the whole distance between its borders, and thereby realizing the threshold beyond which its influence ceases. As Deleuze and Guattari say, the territory is a place of passage, or even the place of passage, the taking-place of passage. The territory is constituted precisely when the threshold of a milieu (or the vertiginous conjunction of several thresholds, converging on the paradoxical element of an encounter) becomes the vector of deterritorialization, thus retroactively positing the consistency drawn between milieus as their 'territorialization', as the becoming-expressive of the habitual functions, and the emergence of partial surfaces, membranes, which give body to limits.

This incorporeal transformation of milieu into territory occurs only when the threshold qua problematic point is treated not as some external threat to the consistency of the milieu, but rather as intrinsic and constitutive of that consistency, a 'positive principle of non-consistency'. If the milieu is defined by a warding off of problems - a denial of the consistency of the milieu itself as problematic and unstable, endlessly caught in a coming-to-itself (positing of its constitutive limit) coterminous with a leaving-itself or becoming-other (passage to the limit/confrontation with the threshold of consistency) - the territory is born of a simple 'change of emphasis': the problem is posited as constitutive/productive, the entire habitual field is reoriented in relation to this problematic status.

Insofar as the entirety of the encoding is mobilized in a passage to the limit, the passage itself, in the mode of a fleeing or escape, a passage across the threshold indistinguishable from the threshold itself posited as such, is endlessly displaced within the field, potentially appearing anywhere, amongst any conjunction of elements/functions. The problematization of the field thus involves a displacement of the paradoxical element (line of flight, aleatory point) within the field such that the elements and functions are subject to a continuous variation or redistribution. A materialism of the problem, therefore, should acknowledge the ontological status of the problem as the line of flight, the drawing of limits which territorializes or individuates the pure multiplicity of milieus by virtue of an incorporeal surface, a body without organs, tearing asunder coded elements and functions which are then arranged in relation to the problematic points (thresholds) which, by chance, present themselves in the passage to the limit.

~

The point here is that the vulgar, physical materialism in which all that exists is empirical (perceptible) phenomena enchained by causal determination does not go far enough. In this view, reality appears to us as incomplete, plagued by misunderstandings, errors, illusions, et cetera, only insofar as we possess finite, imperfect epistemological relations to it. So reality is an ontologically complete and consistent 'mechanism', everything can be explained immanently within the material world without reference to any divine or supernatural beyond; unfortunately, this view nonetheless presupposes a perfect, untainted intellect, unbound by finite epistemological limitations, which has total access to the complete chain of causes.

Even if we have no conceivable way of occupying such a position, or we deny that there is any (divine) observer occupying it, this vulgar materialism still presupposes that such a position exists in principle. In this sense, the incompletenesses of reality as we experience it, the problems which intervene and disturb the consistency of our world(s), are only epistemological, symptoms of our finitude and embeddedness, which can be progressively overcome through scientific rigor, increasingly approximating the 'ideal', untainted prerogative. Existence is posited as complete, consistent, only insofar as we rely on a constitutive exception by reference to which we can explain apparent inconsistencies (problems) as illusions resulting from a false identification with the exceptional point.

Deleuze's point, if we may put it in these terms, is precisely that this incompleteness is not epistemological, that there is no exceptional point of clarity from which all problems will be recognized as illusory. He is far more radical, asserting that materiality must be extended to the problems themselves, that the inconsistencies we confront must be included in materiality. This means that for Deleuze, the ontological itself is incomplete, inconsistent, problematic. There is no exceptional point unencumbered by the limitations of finitude. In this way, we do not reduce all problems to the central problem of the inadequacy of our knowledge; rather, problems attain a primary ontological status. This status is precisely that of the threshold posited in the passage to the limit constitutive of the consistency of any arrangement; it is the force of deterritorialization which retroactively territorializes the milieu from which it departs; it is the incorporeal transformation of the ordinary into the singular, of delimited coagulations of flows into the unlimited becoming of virtualities.

Division III Contract, First Draft

This is the first draft of my project proposal as it appears on my contract.


Changing the Subject: Elements for an Ontology of Economy

Ontology of economy: what does this mean? Economics as a science is the investigation of an empirical field, into the phenomena we observe within this field and the way these phenomena operate. If 'empirical' designates what appears to our senses, then by ontology we mean what 'really is', apart from the way it appears to us. This is the famous Kantian distinction between the thing for us and the thing-in-itself. Yet, as Kant makes clear, we by definition cannot know the thing-in-itself, what 'really is there', as our knowledge is always knowledge in and of the empirical realm. Thus, he designates the a priori forms and categories structuring this field, which is to say, our experience of it, and hence what we can know.

We are not strictly Kantian on this matter, but we nonetheless find in him an insight: the ontology of any scientific field, in this case, the economy, would designate precisely the limits, the horizon, of that field in terms of the concepts and categories that delimit and define our experience of it. So in the first instance, we are investigating these concepts as they structure this field. Yet we must go further: why do we have these conceptual orientations at all? Why are there several orientations of this type, as evidenced in the split between different schools of economics? Is direct access to the empirical economy even possible, or is it constitutively mediated by these categories?

Thus, while ontology in the first sense refers to the modes in which the empirical field is disclosed, 'what really is' then referring to how the appearance appears, how we experience it and know it, in the second sense it must seek out that mysterious thing that causes diverse modes of disclosure to come about, that necessitates this mediation in disclosure, and yet is not disclosed itself. This thing is nothing empirical, it does not appear, and yet it is that 'real' that all appearance presupposes. This 'real', though a priori unknowable, is nevertheless not to be foreclosed or ignored. We propose that the real precisely has no existence apart from the problem it poses, that it is the very being of the problem. Different modes of disclosure, conceptual orientations, 'world views', result from different ways of posing this problem and subsequently different solutions, however inadequate.

Science in general, in this way, deals with the cases of solution, and not with posing the problem which delimits its horizon, structuring its field of inquiry. In contrast, philosophy has the two-fold task of analyzing the ontological consistency of the empirical field, of what 'merely is', and of positing the ethical imperative of our relation to it as actors, and so what 'ought to be'. Philosophy has historically been characterized by this mysterious gap between ontology and ethics, neither of which appear as evident empirically.

This brings us back to economy. Economics occupies a unique position among the sciences insofar as it claims to discover within its empirical field, and hence its ontological horizon, an immanent ethics. From the classical political economists to the neoclassicals of today, all that is necessary for a 'good' society to come about, and for us as actors to act ethically, is that every individual maximizes his rational self-interest. The distribution that would result, through exchange between actors, would thus tend toward the best possible outcome, and would spur production to grow, causing society to progress and develop. Hence, we need not look to a 'beyond' to find some divine ethical imperative: insofar as we are rational, we already act ethically, by virtue of our very composition.

Economics is thus a sight of philosophical interest, as it seems that ethics, far from standing apart from 'what is', instead is already immanent in it. Yet this brings us back to our opening considerations: did we not say that 'what really is', abstracted from all particular experience, exists only as a problem or set of problems which refract the disclosure of the empirical into different conceptual (com)positions? My thesis is that, far from either abandoning or foreclosing truth, i.e. 'what really is', or from claiming to have solved this problem whose solution is by definition unknowable, economics has historically taken a far more subtle and subversive position with regard to the famous immanent ethical mechanism, the market, and the implicit relation between ontology and ethics.

So I propose to analyze the considerations above in greater detail, and in doing so, to set the stage for a historical investigation into the conceptual.

~

I realize this is only a teaser, and will publish a somewhat more substantial explanation of the project soon.

"God is dead"

I haven't posted in a few months, primarily because my computer died at the beginning of summer, leaving me with only unreliable internet access. When I did have the opportunity to post, I froze. I did write a lot in notebooks, in preparation for my Division III thesis, but it was for the most part nothing I was ready to share. My computer is back, and I'm back at school. After those months of privacy, I think I'm ready to write publicly again. I'm going to be posting regularly with thoughts for my thesis and other projects, hopefully returning to those summer writings with more rigor and clarity.

For now, I'll begin with something very embryonic and probably obscure, sparked by the introduction to Badiou's Briefings on Existence, and fueled by a summer of reading several books by Žižek.

It may well be that God has been agonizing for a very long time. What is surely less doubtful is how, for centuries, we have been busy with successive ways of embalming Him...
I take the formula "God is dead" literally. It has happened. Or, as Rimbaud said, it has passed. God is finished. [Badiou, Briefings p24-5]

Taking seriously the death of God does not result in the vulgar atheism committed to the claim that God "does not exist", that it is a fiction, a social construction or symbolic function. Nor do we fall into agnostic limbo, unable to decide. God is not explained away as an abstract concept with no real and/or confirmable existence. As Badiou says,

If "God is dead" is asserted, it is because the God spoken of was alive and belonged to the dimension of life. When you consider a concept, a symbol, a signifying function, you can say that they have become obsolete, contradicted, and inefficient. They cannot be said to have died. [ibid p24]

When we say "God is dead", we unrepentantly affirm that God was, God existed, lived, and has now passed. God is a reality, a real existence or mode of existence, that has decomposed. What was this mode, this real thing that God had been?

Here we can take some direction from Deleuze's remarkable book on Foucault [sidenote: a book which, for me, is of the utmost importance in reading Deleuze's works as a whole, from D&R and LoS to the latter writings with Guattari; more on that later]. Deleuze there describes this existence as that of a certain formalized combination of forces; specifically, of those forces of which human beings are capable. God, or the "God-form", is a real thing, just as much as you or I: for Deleuze, everything, every mode of existence, is an arrangement of intensive forces whose consistency ('thing-ness', to be crude) is maintained insofar as these forces do not surpass certain limits, remaining within "non-decomposable variable distances" in relation to each other. Every combination or arrangement (agencement, assemblage) of forces is metastable within its limits. Yet if these distances do decompose, if the relations between forces reach the critical point at which a limit loses efficacy and a threshold is crossed, we then pass into a new arrangement, a new distribution and metastability with new limits.

Any arrangement or mode can thereby be understood by its immanent limits and the tendency of its constituent forces to respect these limits. If we accept that every individual mode is unique, different from every other, singular (and the reasons for doing so are by no means self-evident), then the mode itself is defined as a singularity. A singularity is not merely a unique thing; it is precisely that which is expressed in the tendency of forces to 'posit' and respect limits immanent to their given unique arrangement. Singularity is not simply the uniqueness of terms within a diversity, but the tendency by which "the given is given as diverse" to paraphrase D&R.

The singularity of a mode is thus the unique configuration of forces and their limitations that compose a thing as consistent and metastable, but moreover it is the tendency immanent in the forces so combined toward that metastability. The mode qua arrangement is a multiplicity of singular points toward which the forces arranged tend; as DeLanda describes it in his Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, it is a topological diagram or vector field within which are inscribed various attractors defining the long-term tendencies of the individuated trajectories/forces. When a force exceeds the 'basin of attraction', the diagram bifurcates, and a new distribution of singular points results, along with a new set of limits and tendencies immanent to the resulting re-arrangement.

The God-form is, on the one hand, such a mode, defined by an immanent diagram of potential permutations of constituent forces. The forces involved are all the individual and collective forces of human beings. Yet what makes the God-form distinct from other possible arrangements of these forces, other possible ways we might exist? The God-form names precisely the formalization of a particular mode such that there is a strict division between two generic forces: the general forces of the human life-world, and the divine forces of 'raising to the infinite' or of realizing perfection. In this way, the former forces become the brute matter whose formation corresponds to the latter, which becomes a formalized function expressed by this formation. Man is born as the Content, submitted to a finite form, only functioning through the Expression of God as the infinity of formalization.

To bring things down to earth: God exists when the immanent limits of human beings become autonomous, external, as a formalized system to which they are submitted, a transcendent imposition of function. It is not simply that people 'reify' their social relations onto some imaginary being; as with Marx's notion of the commodity form, God is an 'objectively necessary appearance' - we may be the 'real' causes of our various functions, but God is a quasi-cause that appropriates all of these functions, formalizing them and reducing our 'non-reified' causality to a subjective illusion. With formations like the God-form, the Man-form, the State-form, the Organism, etc, the organization of forces is no longer immanent to the arranged forces, but becomes autonomous of and reacts back on what it organizes. (Strangely enough, this definition corresponds to that of 'institutions'; this problem is very important for my Div III research, and I'm not really prepared to address it appropriately, but I will say I believe the crucial thing about focusing on institutions in economics is to rediscover in them the forces they formalize, to reintroduce strategy at the heart of stratification.)

As Deleuze never fails to remind us, we should not be too quick to rejoice in affirming the death of God, as a new formalization was already waiting to replace him: the Man-form (for more on this, see the appendix to Deleuze's Foucault). Yet, following Foucault, we should realize the futility of now plotting the assassination of Man, as if our Fall from Grace requires a redemptive sacrifice. In a Hegelian way, Foucault understood that the death of God, far from signaling the new reign of Man, was already the death of Man from the very beginning. As soon as Man seized the empty throne of divinity, his fate was sealed. Fidelity to Man does not do justice to God's death, to what God died for: if God has died, it was not to clear the way for Man's reign, but to warn us that this place that Man will fill is a place of death, that Man, too, will die, and that we must already see in Man that which will overcome him, destroying not only God and Man, but the very place they both occupied (the surface qua plan of organization or plane of transcendence).

When Christ dies on the cross, it is at once the death of God and of the Man who takes his place. This is perhaps what is crucially missing in Paul. If we affirm that God is dead, we should do justice to this death; we should be faithful not to the corpse or the ghost, but to the event of death itself. God died not to set Man free, but to free that which was lost to them both, that which may overcome them: the unlimited (af)finity of the singular in its becoming.

Enowning Heidegger

This is a paper I wrote for my metaphysics course, on Heidegger's concepts of 'ownness' and 'Enowning' [Ereignis]. It still needs a lot of work, Section 5 in particular, but I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. I know its written in a very Heideggerian voice, which was my professor's main criticism, but having already written several papers in which I tried to go beyond Heidegger without really finding myself in Heidegger, papers that turned out well but left me feeling overly ambitious, I wanted to dwell in his voice and follow his meandering articulation. Many of the refrains of this paper will show up again, in a different arrangement, in my next post, which will be my final paper for this course on the Eternal Return in Nietzsche and Deleuze.

...

One's Own Life

1.

Whatever direction seizes upon this question,
there will follow one's ownmost pursuit.

If one raises the question
in a call,
a cry,
out into the darkness, only
one's own voice
will return.

What of this return?
What returns is the resolve,
the courage to face the darkness,
to send the question
on its ownmost way.

Nothing more can speak in response.

It gives only the open,
the opening-ground,
the bursting cleavage of Be-ing,
from which may spring
a different life,
one's own life,
for the very first time.


2.

Thinking may follow the concerning question, and yet will wander lost if it cannot seize upon its ownmost way. One may think the question of the meaning of Being; one may be led to the unfolding openness of truth. One may study philosophy, after time become a philosopher, and someday, perhaps, abandon philosophy altogether. Yet thinking will be lost, it will fall prey, and it will find only illusions if it does not take hold of its own way forth. There is no way forward but through darkness, and so one should take heed: when you are lost, you won't know it; you will imagine you have found the right way, perhaps the only way; and yet you will wander on endlessly, unable to find your way, your own way. There is no way forward, but through darkness, and so one must discover, one must bring to light, one's ownmost way of Being. Otherwise, the question, concerning the truth of Being, will lead only into the abyss.


3.

What can this mean, to speak of thinking's own way, the way due to thinking by right? A primary, if not the paramount, impetus behind Martin Heidegger's works is to discover a way of thinking (and to thinking) that can leave metaphysics to itself.¹ Metaphysics, and the whole of philosophy that has bowed before it, can only produce answer upon answer to whatever question thinking poses; and yet it cannot deliver to thinking that way of answering that would be thinking's own. Metaphysics can only pose thinking's essential question in an abstract, thematic way. It can only speak the question in a voice that is not one's own, in a public voice.² These public words have, throughout the epochs, accumulated so many tangled and knotted senses that we can no longer hear that softness, that lightness, with which thinking gives them voice.

We must deliver thinking over to belonging, to the realm of its belonging: the realm in which thinking belongs, and which belongs to thinking. What could this belonging, this enowning³, mean or represent? Perhaps the question is poorly posed. Casting light on this belonging, and owning over to thinking its ownmost, was a life's work for Heidegger, and we should not expect to answer it hastily without falling prey to misunderstanding. And we might come to find that what we speak of as belonging has no affinity to representation, is not and cannot be represented. Its meaning is not something representable, but rather is only a question whose unfolding-opening reveals the luminous advent of the destiny of truth.

We must enable thinking to claim this question in its ownmost voice, and to enown the way to truth this claim opens.

We must enact thinking by owning over our words, those words we are already following, to the claim of Ereignis.

We must deliver thinking over to the giving, so that thinking will arrive at belonging.


4.

When we speak of owning and belonging, this first and foremost does not mean the ownership of a property or possession.⁴ It is not the ownership of an ontic thing, a being. If we follow the question of Being and avoid getting lost in the tangles of metaphysics, we will find that the truth of Being, and thus thinking's ownmost way to truth, cannot lie in beings. “Whenever a being is, be-ing [Seyn] must sway...From where else does thinking decide here if not according to the truth of be-ing? Thus be-ing can no longer be thought of in the perspective of beings; it must be enthought from within be-ing itself.”⁵ This is imperative. The belonging of thinking with Being in the advent of truth's destiny does not entail a belonging in the way a thing belongs to a person or people, be it private or public property. If we cannot think of owning and belonging otherwise than beings, ontic things as present-at-hand, then we will lose the way of thinking and of Being, and the sense of thinking, Being, man, time, and history will fall prey to metaphysics once more. “The attempt to think Being without beings becomes necessary because otherwise, it seems to me, there is no longer any possibility of explicitly bringing into view the Being of what is today all over the earth, let alone of adequately determining the relation of man to what has been called 'Being' up to now.”⁶

If we follow Heidegger's own way after the question, we find this sense of owning as early as the first approach of Being and Time. The Analysis of Dasein begins: “We ourselves are the entities to be analyzed. The Being of any such entity is in each case mine. These entities, in their Being, comport themselves towards their Being. As entities with such Being, they are delivered over to their own Being.”⁷ Moreover, this Being that is Dasein's own, is as such at issue for it. That is, Dasein's own Being is the matter of its essential questioning. Dasein poses the question concerning the meaning of Being, of its ownmost Being, and this questioning is Dasein's constitutive way of Being.⁸ “That Being which is an issue for this entity in its very Being, is in each case mine.”⁹ Heidegger says that this mineness leads us to ontically designate Dasein with the personal pronoun, 'I myself...', but that this should not mislead us. We may answer the 'who' of Dasein by responding 'I, myself, am Dasein', and yet this ontical answer only indicates the way to an ontological response, as long as we do not go beyond the mere formal, reflective sense of the 'I' as a conscious subject. We must grasp this ontical, reflective, 'subject' self as only an indication of a more primordial ontological Self, as 'only' a way of Being of Dasein. The ontological Self that 'owns', that has as its own, Dasein, is not physical substance, nor is it pure consciousness, but is rather existence itself.¹⁰

The danger confronting Dasein, in its constitutive questioning of its ownmost Being, is seen ontologically as its inability to distinguish what is its own, to answer the 'who' of Dasein: 'my own Self'; rather than 'one self ['they-self'] amongst Others'. Heidegger calls this danger 'inauthenticity', literally 'not-ownness' or 'un-ownness'.¹¹ It arises whenever Dasein fails to distinguish itself from the 'Others', who are not definite, ontical others, but are in an existential sense those to whom Dasein's average, everyday actions are connected via equipment.¹² Dasein loses its ownmost Self amongst the Others, and the 'who' is no longer answered with 'my own Self', but rather as 'one' [das Man], 'anyone', 'nobody in particular'. Dasein becomes unable to claim what is its own, its ownmost Being, and its question is thereby led off course. It will no longer strive to discover the meaning of its ownmost Being, but will be content with the meaning that would satisfy anyone, actually satisfying nobody in particular. One can only think of one's self as 'anyone' amongst the Others. “When Dasein is absorbed in the world of its concern – that is, at the same time, in its Being-with towards Others – it is not itself.” “Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known.”¹³


5.

The question now becomes: how can Dasein seize what is its ownmost?

Insofar as Dasein is constituted by its questioning, it has understanding as its characteristic way of Being. It understands itself in its Being, in that it understands the possibility of meaning for that Being, and the possibility of questioning into that meaning for its way of Being.¹⁴ Dasein's absorbsion and dispersion in the 'they-self' leads it to lose hold on its ownmost possibilities, finding only those possibilities of 'anyone', 'nobody in particular'. Dasein cannot seize what is its ownmost: its way of Being as the projecting possibilities, its questioning into the meaning of its own Being, its ownmost Self. It becomes alienated from everything that is its own. “This alienation closes off from Dasein its authenticity ['ownness'] and possibility...”¹⁵ Understanding has the existential structure of 'projection', that is, Dasein can hold before itself its ownmost possibilities. This projection of possibilities makes up Dasein's ownmost way of Being, which is potentiality-for-Being. “Dasein is in every case what it can be, and in the way in which it is its possibility.”¹⁶

The effect of alienation is that Dasein flees in the face of its ownmost possibilities. Dasein experiences anxiety in the face of its authentic potentiality-for-Being, which, as alienated, it finds as completely indefinite.¹⁷ Dasein confronts in anxiety its ownmost possibilities as indefinite, and thus has the chance to seize its authentic Self and escape from das Man, from understanding itself as 'nobody in particular'. “Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein its Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being – that is, its Being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself.”¹⁸ Yet there is as great a chance that Dasein, when confronted with anxiety, will retreat into the Others, failing to seize its ownmost. The outcome hinges on Dasein's attitude toward its own mortality, toward death.

“No one can take the Other's dying away from him.”¹⁹ That is, one's death cannot be given up in dispersion amongst the Others, as each Other always has his own death as his own. “Death is a possibility-for-Being which Dasein itself has to take over in every case. With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.”²⁰ In anxiety, in which one's potentiality-for-Being is completely indefinite, Dasein may recognize in this indefinition its own death, as the possibility of no longer projecting any possibilities, the possibility of being unable to define one's possibilities any further. Death is, in this way, the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all: not my own, and not anyone's.²¹ When Dasein finds itself anxious in the face of death, it can either seize its death as its ownmost possibility, that which cannot be outstripped, or it can evade owning up to this possibility, and attempt to pass it off on 'anyone'. This marks the crucial difference between authentic and inauthentic projection. If Dasein is to have its way of Being as its own, it must own up to the possibility that it may no longer exist at all. This is the recognition that anxiety in the face of death is not fear in the face of an ontic event that could 'happen to anyone', but is rather Dasein's defining ontological structure, enabling the possibility of its ownmost definition. No one else can die this death, my death, because only I have this existence, my existence, as my own, and so only I can confront its utter, singular, impossibility.²²

In confronting its ownmost death, Dasein becomes resolved to have its possibilities as its own, refusing to yield them to conformity with those of 'anyone'. This is authenticity. In this way, Dasein holds itself open to the light, the truth, of its Being, rather than passively accepting whatever passes for anyone's truth. It “brings one without Illusions into the resoluteness of 'taking action.'”²³ In the face of the anxiety that arises from fleeing from one's own self into the Others, and among them confronting one's own as absolutely indefinite, one recovers the joy of having one's own possibilities as absolutely singular and unstrippable. “Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized potentiality-for-Being, there goes an unshakable joy in this possibility.”²⁴


6.

Yet we still must attempt to think of the ownmost belonging free of any being, even Dasein. We must allow Being to claim its ownmost truth as we unfold our questioning, and this obliges us to follow the giving of Being itself, free of the gift of Dasein's there. This giving is not only that by which Being is given, but that in which Being will claim what is its own, that is, its truth. Heidegger speaks of this giving in terms of the 'It gives...', Es gibt. “As the gift of this It gives, Being belongs to giving. As a gift, Being is not expelled from giving.”²⁵ Being is a gift, insofar as it lets beings presence; it is the gift of their presence. But it is also a part of the giving insofar as it is the presencing itself, which is not a property of beings, given along with them, but rather belongs to giving. “Being, presencing is transmuted.”²⁶ Heidegger says later that the giving of presence, which is presencing, does not belong to the gift that reaches us, but that the giving is the reaching concealed in the gift. “Does this giving lie in this, that it reaches us, or does it reach us because it is in itself a reaching? The latter.”²⁷ The giving holds itself back, conceals itself, in the gift it gives and unconceals. Thus, metaphysics thinks Being in terms of beings that are given, but misses the sense in which 'It gives Being', in which Being is only in and of the concealed giving itself.²⁸

Heidegger tells us that Being's belonging, be it with time,²⁹ or with man and thought,³⁰ is determined by this concealed giving, which he calls Ereignis, 'en-owning'. “What determines both, time and Being, in their own, that is, in their belonging together, we shall call: Ereignis...”³¹ Yet we must not misunderstand the sense of 'belonging together'. This does not mean that time is a property of Being, is thus determined by Being, any more than the reverse. That man and Being belong together does not mean that one determines the other. These would take on the sense of a belonging together, in which the belonging of the elements is determined by the unified order they form. We must instead look to the sense of belonging together, meaning that the 'together' is determined by the 'belonging'.³² The specificity of this will become clear in a moment.

Man belongs to Being, man is Being's own, in that man as Dasein is always questioning after the meaning of Being, and responds to the question as long as its Being is its own, authentically. “[M]an's distinctive feature lies in this, that he, as the being who thinks, is open to Being, face to face with Being; thus man remains referred to Being and so answers to it...A belonging to Being prevails within man, a belonging which listens to Being because it is appropriated [owned over] to Being.”³³ Yet at the same time, Being belongs to man, is man's own, in that man is open to Being's presencing and can receive the gift of presence. “Being is present and abides only as it concerns man through the claim it makes on him. For it is man, open toward Being, who alone lets Being arrive as presence. Such becoming present needs the openness of a clearing, and by this need remains appropriated [owned over] to human being.”³⁴

In order to think the sense of this mutual belonging that determines the togetherness, the constellation, of man and Being, of time and Being, of thought and Being...we must leave behind the given and well known sense of these. We must 'spring' away from the rigid, metaphysically well-worn possibilities of these terms, out into the darkness.³⁵ Yet if we must leave behind not only time as a linear passage of ‘nows’, and man as a rational animal, but also Being as the ground of beings, where will we arrive but the abyss of darkness? If we have this spring, this projection, as our ownmost possibility as thinkers, then we will be enowned by, we will find our belonging in, the concealed giving itself: Ereignis, enowning, giving-belonging. If we call resolutely into the darkness, we will be claimed by the giving-belonging of Ereignis. We will arrive at the belonging of Being and man, Being and time, as the active essence [Wesen] of thought,³⁶ which finds their identity in giving. Being as the self-identity of present beings, time as the succession of self-identical 'nows', man as the identity of his self, can be thought as such,³⁷ and authentically thought otherwise, only in and of the giving-belonging that gathers them and holds them together in unconcealing-sending:

Ereignis.


7.

The giving-belonging of Ereignis does not pertain to something owned, something that can be given or appropriated, some property or possession. It speaks only of the possibility of giving and of belonging that wells up in and exceeds every being that is given and belongs in the order of a unifying 'together'. It speaks not of appropriation of property, but of the possibility of Being appropriate, well-suited, fitting. It speaks of 'owning' not in the sense of something I own that I can exchange or dispossess, but in the sense of that which is my ownmost, that which I can not give up, that which cannot be given because it is purely giving as such. It speaks of that which I cannot leave, for my disappearance in death is at once its disappearance as well: a life that is my own. We give one another, we belong to one another; I am no more its keeper than it is my keeper, but we are in keeping with one another. We, together – man and Being, man and Being and time, man and Being and time and thought – are only a giving, a belonging, with no owner or owned.

Enowning, Ereignis.



Notes:

1TB 24

2On 'publicness', see: EBW 235

3Where I have chosen to translate Ereignis, I do so as 'enowning', following the translators of the Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). See CP xix-xxii. I will, for the most part, leave it untranslated.

4CP xx

5CP 5. on the translation of Seyn as 'be-ing', see xxii-xxiii

6OTB 2

7EBW 219-20 (emphasis: bold is mine, italics is Heidegger's. This scheme will continue throughout, unless otherwise noted.)

8EBW 213-4

9EBW 220

10EBW 231-2

11EBW 234-5. “The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self...”

12EBW 232

13EBW 233, 235

14EBW 213-4

15EBW 239

16EBW 242

17EBW 243-5

18EBW 245

19EBW 247

20Ibid.

21EBW 250

22EBW 249-51

23EBW 254

24Ibid.

25OTB 6

26Ibid.

27OTB 13

28OTB 8

29OTB 19

30ID 30

31OTB 19

32ID 29

33ID 31

34Ibid.

35ID 32

36ID 39

37ID 32


References:

All works by Martin Heidegger

EBW – Selections from Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, in Existentialism: Basic Writings. Guignon and Pereboom, eds. Second Edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001.

OTB – On Time and Being. trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

CP – Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). trans. Emad and Maly. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999.

ID – Identity and Difference. trans. Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.