Notes on Heidegger’s Essay: “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (1969)
This late essay draws together Heidegger’s thought on the nature of thinking and logos in “What is Called Thinking” and other later works and brings them to bear on his original project of Being and Time and the question of alethia and truth. It is remarkable to compare this essay back to the approach of BT and see how far Heidegger has traveled in his thinking. Indeed, at the end of the essay he writes:
“Does the name for the task of thinking then read instead of Being and Time: Opening and Presence [Lichtung und Anwesenheit]” (73)
The argument is standard Heidegger: Philosophy has never thought the Being of being; only in Parmenides’ Fragments do we get a glimpse of thinking before it is lost to philosophy under the sea of metaphysics. Heidegger attacks Hegel and Husserl in this essay for their rallying cry: “to the things themselves.” Heidegger hones in on the “themselves” in this call: it says that the things presence themselves either with an objective clarity of the world (Husserl) or an indisputable clarity of the subject (Hegel), of which it is the task of philosophy to demonstate:
“Hegel’s speculative dialectic is the movement in which the matter as such comes to itself, comes to its own presence. Hussrl’s method is supposed to bring the matter of philosophy to its ultimately originary giveness, that means: to its own presence” (64)
This misses the entire point for Heidegger: not only does it obscure the “manifest character of [the] what-is” (72), but it traps philosophy in the circularity and self-assuredness of which it has never escaped. The way out, and thus the end of philosophy, is to begin thinking what is necessary to think about the presencing of what is present; to begin thinking what conditions philosophy’s own thought:
“But what remains unthought in the matter of philosophy as well as in its method? Speculative dialectic is a mode in which the matter of philosophy comes to appeal of itself and for itself, and thus becomes presence.” (64)
Philosophy (from Plato) has not explained presence, it has only rested self-assuredly on its own presencing. This is, of course, what Heidegger concluded at the end of “What is Called Thinking,” where Parmenides conclusion of a fragment (being: to be), would be initially replaced and translated by Heidegger as (present: to be present), only to reshuffle the deck and align it to the unconcealment.
This essay is attempt to think about the grounds of that unconcealment and marry it to his concept of the clearing [Lichtung] whilst simultaneously arguing that this is what is required in order to bring about the end of philosophy. After his discussion of Hegel and Husserl, he begins his discussion of the clearing and its necessary presence for presencing:
“Such appearance [all presencing, but specifically here that self-assured presencing of philosophical thought in Hegel and Husserl] necessarily occurs in some light. Only by virtue of light, i.e., through brightness, can what shines show itself, that is, radiate. But brightness in its turn rests upon something open, something free which might illuminate it here and there, now and then. Brightness plays in the open and wars there with darkness. Wherever a present being encounters another present being or even only lingers near it–but also where, as with Hegel, on being mirrors itself in another speculatively–there openes already rules, open region is in play. Only this openess grants to the movement of speculative thinking the passage through that which it thinks. We call this openess which grants a possible letting-appear and show “opening” [lichtung]” (64-65)
It is not the presencing of being that is at issue in the clearing but the “possible prencing of that presence itself” (“End,” 68). Or, as he puts it in WHD, “the being here of what is present,” which, once again, he gets to from Parmenides eon emmenai in the Fragment (“being: to be”). This is what Heidegger will argue “the opening [die Offende] and/or the lighting/clearing [die lichtung] is all about: “But philosophy knows nothing of the opening. Philosophy does speak about the light of reason, but does not heed the opening of Being.” (66). The end of philosophy is reached, Heidegger claims, when we begin to think the nature of that which allows presence to presence (“For there is no light and no brightness without the opening” itself as such–the question of the Being of being, “the free space of the opening” (67).
There are many connections to Heidegger’s discussion of Stephan George in the Herder Seminar, here. Indeed, the clearing here is that prior hearkening which allows and a hearkening as “pointed-ear” and a hearkening as “true hearing” of logos to take place. After explaining his use of the term Lichtung, emphasizing that the relation to light is only somewhat metaphorical because, in old german, licht meant to make something light, free, and open, (which in turn allows light to enter), he writes:
“But light never first creates openness. Rather, light presupposes openness. however, the clearing [die lichtung], the opening [die Offene], is not only free for brightness and darkness, but also for resonance [Hall] and echo [Verhallen], for sounding [Toenen] and diminishing [Verklingen] of sound. The clearing [die lichtung] is the opening [die Offene] for everything that is present and absent.” (“End of Philosophy,” 65)
The hearkening involved here is not merely an attunement, direction-toward or listening-to a sound, but is first and more originally a fore-having and fore-taking against “The silence”–not silence as the absence of noise (because we have not even inserted sound into the picture, yet), but the more “essential” silence that Heidegger likens to the canvas or great slate of nature. This originary hearkening (as a taking-to-heart) precedes the more general use of the term hearkening as having “pointed ears.” To paraphrase an earlier quotation: “there is no sound and no resonance without the opening. Even silence needs it” (from pg. 67).
But can we listen to the clearing? Can we hear that which is the ground of hearing? How can we even know it? Heidegger turns to Parmenides first Fragment (pg. 67):
…but you should learn all:
the untrembling heart of unconcealment, well-rounded
and also the opinions of mortals,
lacking the ability to trust what is unconcealed.
“the untrembling heart of unconcealment” is what interests me here. Heidegger asks:
“What does the word about the untrembling heart of unconcealment mean? It means unconcealment itself in what is most its own, means the place of stillness which gathers in itself what grants unconcealment to begin which. That is the opening of what is open” [that is the silence-ing of what is silent] (68)
It bears similarities to Heidegger’s discussion of The tuning silence in his discussion of Stefan George’s poetry in the Herder seminar, where tuning silence is the starting-to-tune (to the presencing of being): the refusal (and reign) “of the abysmal-ground of the appropriating event of deliverance)” (61), where that event of deliverence is the Being of being. The untrembling heart is that silenc-ing of what is silence in order to take to heart and hearken: “saying–hearing–hearkening–being-silent–silenc-ing” (80).
Silence, like sound, is grounded in this opening: “The opening grants first of all the possibility of the path to presence, and grants the possible presencing o that presence itself” (End of Philosophy, 68). Now, we should clarify that this possibility of presence is not a question of material, visual, or sonic presence. As Heidegger states earlier, “the clearing is the openning for everything that is present and absent” (65). Philosophy has opposed the present to the absent and relegated the latter to the absent or negation of the former. This is Heidegger’s critique of dialectic. But this does not explain the “presence” of what is absent in terms of being, Heidegger may say. This is how I first got interested in silence; I was interested in explaining the nature of silence “on its own terms.” But, as Heidegger critiques in this essay, this question is flawed from the start, because it presupposes the oppositions from which thought can never get out. We must take as step back, he says. A step back into the grounds of this presencing, which, in doing, so, will become a leap forward out of philosophy and into a true thinking of being. Thus, the question of sound and silence should not be asked in terms of opposition or of silence itself (see my dissertation proposal where I outline these two appraoches as a context-depent and autonmous approaches) but to question the “in-between” (a phrase Heidegger uses in this essay) as the grounds for both of them:
“We must think aletheia, unconcealment, as the opening which first grants Being and thinking and their presencing to and for each other. The quiet heart of the opening is the place of still from which alone the possibility of the belonging together of Being and thinking, that is, prescence and perceiving, can arise at all.” (End of Philosophy, 68)
And this ties back into our discussion of noein: for the noein of what is present first requires this opening to that which is present. Indeed, this seems to be the step between hearing-as-understanding and hearing-as-noein…This aspect of aletheia–concealment as opening–”grants the possibility of truth” (69) he writes.
But what have reached at the end of this essay? Nothing, Heidegger concludes, other than the opening of the way forward. For the question that we have now opened up to is:
“But where does the opening come from and how is it given? What speaks in the “It gives”? The trask of thinking would then be the surrender of previous thinking to the determination of the matter of thinking?” (73)
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