Heidegger, Schelling, & the Reality of Evil
Part 14

4,431 words

Meister Eckhart

Part 14 of 15 (Read all parts here)

The Concealment of Concealment

An authentic experience of beings is one that acknowledges that when beings present themselves to us in their meaningfulness, this presencing is always accompanied by absence. Whatever we may learn about beings, something else always holds itself back. We never completely penetrate things to know them in their entirety, thus there is always an element of mystery to beings. Yet it is precisely this mystery that will and its metaphysics of presence seek to cancel (see part twelve). Thinkers begin to demand, implicitly (it is not made explicit until the modern period) that what is be constantly present, in the sense of fully available and intelligible. This means that absence or concealment, as inherent in the nature of being, comes to be denied, discounted, or “forgotten.”

Forgotten too is the clearing which is itself a kind of absence, and Heidegger explicitly refers to it as a “mystery” (Geheimnis).[1] The clearing is a certain sort of “nothing” – an absence, an “open space” in which we encounter the being of things. Thus, Heidegger understands the clearing as “withdrawing itself”: it absents itself so that beings may presence themselves to us within it. As a result, the clearing is “intrinsically hidden” or “self-concealing.” But the mindset of will, which Heidegger sees as the thread running through the entire history of metaphysics, denies absence and mystery, thus it cannot come to the realization that the clearing even exists.

Heidegger argues, controversially, that early Greek thinking displayed some awareness of the clearing, but that by the time of Plato (and the birth of the metaphysical tradition) the clearing had been forgotten – or Western man had been abandoned by it. Heidegger makes this argument largely on the basis of tendentious readings of a few pre-Socratic fragments. A more plausible, and perhaps much more obvious case can be made on the basis of what we know about Greek religion and mythology.

We could point, for example, to the Fates – over whom even the gods have no power – as indicating an awareness of the fact that meaning, and the destiny it makes for us, is not under our control. We could also point to the many myths concerning the punishment of hubris, as an affirmation of mystery and a warning to those who would seek to cancel it. And we could discuss what we know of the Greek mystery cults, which seemed to provide a corrective to the rationalist, Apollonian side to Greek thinking, which aims to remove darkness and to bring everything into the light. But this is a subject we cannot explore here.

Because the clearing is self-concealing, the forgottenness of the clearing – or obliviousness of its very existence – is always a possibility. In other words, the very nature of being/the clearing lends itself to being “forgotten.” And this means that the oblivion of being remains a permanent possibility for mankind. We seem to face a choice. We can open to being in its play of presence and absence, and open to the open clearing in which this play occurs, and in which we ourselves occur and meet our destiny. Or we can close to being, deny absence, and demand that all that is be fully penetrable and manipulable, attributing to ourselves the role of creators of meaning.

Two millennia ago, we seem to have chosen the latter – and it’s all been downhill from there. The difference between the early metaphysics of the Greeks, and the late metaphysics of the Germans (which reaches its conclusion with Nietzsche) is merely that in the former case the demand that all beings be fully penetrable and manipulable is still implicit. In the latter case it is explicit – and metaphysics ends when this “agenda” is made explicit. Modern technological civilization is, for Heidegger, the enactment of the metaphysics of will to power, which, in effect, jumps off the pages of Nietzsche and is deployed as the determinative character of the world in which we now live (but only because Nietzsche gave voice to a “sending of being” already prepared by Ereignis).

Given all the foregoing, the inexorable conclusion seems to be that the forgottenness of the clearing is the root of evil. Bret Davis states that “the rage of evil is a dissonant excess (Unwesen) which feeds on the concealment of concealment, on the oblivion of the mystery [of the clearing].”[2] We have seen that the characters in Heidegger’s dialogue “Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older Man” state that the will is evil, and we know that, according to Heidegger, will denies or forgets the clearing.

The net result, again, makes it remarkably like Schelling’s characterization of evil as a lashing out at otherness – at all that resists being known and manipulated, and thus a lashing out at absence – which at the same time exalts the self, turning it into the “reversed god.” Indeed, according to Heidegger’s history of metaphysics, as the oblivion of being deepens, the “human” (i.e., “subjectivity”) becomes elevated to godlike status. Again, this process reaches its climax in nineteenth-century German philosophy.

We have stated that the self-concealing of the clearing makes its forgottenness (or, in Davis’s words, its “concealment of concealment”) an ever-present threat. But this means, therefore, that the evil of will – and the resultant “devastation” of “the wasteland” – are always possible. The forest and the desert are the two fundamental possibilities for mankind. Human beings have chosen each, at various times, and will continue to do so. Like Schelling, Heidegger apparently believes that man’s freedom is the choice of good and evil.

Freedom remains, for Heidegger, fundamentally a mystery – because even though we can speak of man’s “choice” of forest or desert, it is impossible to explain why the choice is made. Indeed, it is not even clear that a choice is involved at all, at least not in any conscious way. In the dialogue, the interlocutors arrive at the position that the malice of evil may be inherent in being itself:

Older Man: The process of devastation will thus not be warded off, much less ended, with the setting up of a morally grounded world order. [N.B.: because the progressivist conception of a “morally grounded world order” is merely one of the disguises assumed by the malice of evil. – C.C.]

Younger Man: Because here the “measures” that humans take – however massive their “extent” may be – are capable of nothing. For malice, as which the devastation occurs, may very well remain a basic trait of being itself.

Older Man: If in fact the devastation rests in the abandonment of beings by being, and if this abandonment comes forth from being itself. But don’t you also find that this thought – that being is in the ground of its essence malicious – is an awful demand on human thinking?[3]

Indeed, we have absolutely no idea why the Greeks, more than two millennia ago, turned toward the will and the metaphysics of presence. We may only be flattering ourselves in thinking of this as a “choice.” At times, Heidegger’s account of history seems as if it may leave no room for free choice at all.

In the quotation above, the older man speaks for Heidegger when he suggests that the abandonment of being “comes forth from being itself.” The abandonment of being is thus one of the “sendings of being” or of Ereignis: a shift in meaning that does not occur as a result of human design. It seems we may not have “chosen” to obscure or deny the clearing at all. This may be precisely the reason why Heidegger also speaks of the “abandonment of being,” as if it is being that has chosen to do something to us, not we to it.[4]

Yet at the same time it is tempting to think that Heidegger does believe in some sort of fundamental choice, for he offers an alternative to the insurgency of the will and he speaks of it as if it is something that men may choose. This alternative is called Gelassenheit. Literally, this could be translated as “leavingness” in the sense of “letting-alone-ness,” but Heideggereans often translate it as “letting beings be.” The origin of the term is usually credited to Meister Eckhart, who was an important influence on Heidegger.[5] The exact meaning of Gelassenheit is fiercely debated by Heidegger scholars, and we can only delve into the matter very briefly here. The concept is referenced in Heidegger’s dialogue between the two prisoners of war, without the term itself being used. The two men have the following exchange:

Older Man: So when the human sets things toward himself as objects, and only lets them stand as such and subsist in this sense, he does not let things be in their restful repose [Ruhe].

Younger Man: The human chases things around in an unrest that is foreign to them by making them into mere resources for his needs and items in his calculations, and into mere opportunities for advancing and maintaining his manipulations.

Older Man: By not letting things be in their restful repose, but rather – infatuated by his progress – stepping over and away from them, the human becomes the pacesetter of the devastation, which has for a long time now become the tumultuous confusion of the world.

“Letting things be in their restful repose” is essentially what Heidegger means by Gelassenheit, and it is presented here as the diametrical opposite of will. Will regards beings as “objects” standing in opposition, making them into “mere resources for [man’s] needs,” into objects of calculation and manipulation, and thus making man into “the pacesetter of the devastation” which he foolishly equates with “progress.” But what exactly does it mean to “let things be in their restful repose”? The obscurity of these sorts of formulations, which abound in Heidegger, is responsible for generating much of the debate about the meaning of Gelassenheit.

A Heideggerean Mysticism?

As an approach to understanding the concept of Gelassenheit, let us consider it in its opposition to will. The malice of will (and hence its evil) stems from the forgottenness of the clearing, or the oblivion of being. It is thus reasonable to infer that Gelassenheit, as the opposite of will, must involve the opposite of this forgetting, or, in some sense, its overcoming. Does Gelassenheit mean the “recollection of the clearing”? Possibly. But when Heidegger speaks of Gelassenheit he does not primarily refer to an intellectual or theoretical realization. Gelassenheit cannot simply mean a mere theoretical understanding that the clearing exists. Will, after all, is not an idea, it is a state of being; an attitude toward the world that animates all of one’s actions. Gelassenheit must be something similar.

Ian Alexander Moore, in his valuable study of Heidegger and Eckhart, makes the same point in the following way:

To think being at its most basic level, I must act in terms of the very way in which being is to be thought. I must do something before I can understand. This doing should not, however, be treated as utterly separate from thinking, but rather as a more practical valence of the essential activity of thinking. What, then, must I do? For Eckhart, I must release myself.[6]

(Moore translates Gelassenheit as “releasement.”) In Eckhart’s thought, there is a fundamental identity between the human soul and God (or the “Godhead”). God, in his innermost nature, is conceived as that in virtue of which things have their being. As a result, God himself is no-thing. When our souls are occupied with the busy-ness of the world and all its things, we cannot come to a realization (a making real) of our identity with God. But if the soul is emptied (in effect, a kind of “ego death”) then it too becomes no-thing, and there is no longer any difference between the soul and God. This emptying of the soul is Gelassenheit (or, as Eckhart also calls it, Abgeschiedenheit, “detachment”).

A remarkably similar dynamic appears in Heidegger’s treatment of Gelassenheit. Heidegger, for the most part, eschews theological language, and the clearing (or being) takes, in effect, the place of God. (Though we should most definitely not leap to the conclusion here that Heidegger is declaring that the clearing is God.) The clearing is also a no-thing. It is the “space” in which beings display their being to us. It follows from this that it itself is not a being, and that it cannot and does not presence itself to us in the manner of a being. As we have said already, the clearing is a special kind of “absence”: the clearing “withdraws” so that beings can be.

Now, Gelassenheit, as a human activity or state of human being, is also just such a withdrawing so that beings can presence themselves to us. Recall that Gelassenheit is frequently translated (by Heideggereans) as “letting beings be.” But what is it that we “withdraw” so that beings can present themselves to us in their being? It is precisely egoic willfulness: the will to distort all beings into appearing to us as nothing more than resources for satisfying our needs or desires. This willfulness is “malicious” (and hence “evil”) because it is an annihilation of the being beings have, an insistence on imposing upon them a distortion of what they truly are. Willfulness effectively raises man to godlike status and declares that beings have no being until we impose some being (some meaning) upon them. They are mere “raw material.”

But if the clearing is a “releasement” that withdraws so that beings can be, and the human “act” of Gelassenheit is also a releasement, a withdrawal so that beings can be, then there is a clear isomorphism between the clearing and Gelassenheit. Indeed, we could say that both are “engaged” in Gelassenheit. It may thus be defensible to use stronger language than “isomorphism,” and to say that in the act of Gelassenheit, Dasein achieves identity with the clearing.[7] Seeing Heidegger’s philosophy as “mystical” thus becomes almost unavoidable (depending upon how one defines “mystical”[8]). Indeed, I think it would be no distortion to say that Heidegger’s path of “thinking” (das Denken) uses a “destruction” of the entire Western metaphysical tradition as a “ladder” to a mystical union with the “ground of being” (the clearing). What is overcome is will, and the metaphysics of presence, and what is realized from this overcoming is the necessity of “letting beings be.”

Let us note here that the foregoing implies that we make a serious mistake if we take Heidegger’s reputed “historicism” to mean that the being (or meaning) of beings is entirely reducible to what we take them to be in some historical or cultural context. First of all, such a historicism would be willful, since it declares, in effect, that beings are simply whatever we humans take them to be. Yes, as we have argued, historically situated meaning is a “sending of being” and not our conscious creation. But the assertion that beings are whatever our historically situated assumptions take them as would be an outright anthropocentrism, as it would imply that beings have no being until we confer it upon them. But this is precisely the character of das Gestell. Heidegger signals that he does not endorse such an extreme historicism when he makes it clear, over and over again, that he repudiates das Gestell. Nothing could be clearer than that he regards this standpoint as perverse and evil.

It must follow from this that, for Heidegger, some historically situated understandings of being are wrong. And the standpoint he recommends to us as a corrective to will, “letting beings be,” seems intelligible only if beings already have some intrinsic being that exists prior to our interpreting them in one fashion or other. “Letting things be in their restful repose” means withdrawing our demand that beings conform to some presupposed assumptions about their being, and allowing their own being to display itself to us. If they had no being prior to our bestowing it on them through our act of interpretation, this would be impossible and “letting beings be” would be unintelligible.

We cannot gloss over the fact that this conclusion, which seems implied by everything Heidegger has said about will and Gelassenheit, raises important problems for interpreting his ideas. For example, if we are meant to equate being with meaning (as Thomas Sheehan argues), then how can beings have a “meaning” independent of our minds, given that “meaning” seems inescapably subjective (i.e., subject dependent)? It would seem that the only way out of this problem would be to acknowledge that some meanings are “real” and do not exist merely “for us.” Heidegger could indeed make this move, given that, as we have already established, he holds that our experience of meaning is not that it is created by us, but that it has an extra-human source. Furthermore, given that das Gestell is not a human invention but a “sending” of being/the clearing (or Ereignis), then we must grapple with the fact that sometimes that extra-human source lies to us. As the younger man says, “malice . . . may very well remain a basic trait of being itself.”

Is the clearing, then, evil? Is it a malevolent demiurge? No, and not just because to think of it in these terms would be an unacceptable anthropomorphism. Instead, Heidegger makes it clear that there is an inescapable duality to being. Given that we have seen that there is an isomorphism between the “act” of letting be and the letting be of being/the clearing, we may infer that there is an isomorphism between human will and the “negative” aspect of being. To put matters loosely (though still very much in a Heideggerean spirit) we may speak of Gelassenheit as an “opening,” corresponding to the “open clearing.” And we may perhaps also speak of will as a “closing,” a closing to being, that matches a corresponding “closing” in being itself. This latter closing is essentially what Heidegger means by the “abandonment of being.”

The dynamic of “opening and closing” is quite similar to the dynamic of “expansion and contraction” employed by Schelling in The Ages of the World, which expands upon the ideas in the Freiheitsschrift. We may also note that there is a clear parallel between Heidegger’s conception of a duality in being (a duality essentially of good and evil) and Schelling’s duality of the will of the ground, and the will of existence/understanding – which may very well have been an important influence on Heidegger.

Being opens “benevolently” when it displays the being of beings to us in the open clearing. And we put ourselves into accord with this opening, with equal “benevolence,” when we open to being and achieve Gelassenheit. Being “closes” to us “malevolently” when it abandons us. But what is this abandonment, exactly? We know that the modern willfulness of das Gestell is not our invention or even our conscious choice. It is one of the “sendings” of being. How does being send us abandonment? In effect, the self-concealing/self-withdrawing of being/the clearing, its “hiding” of itself, “tempts” us to become the “reversed god”; it “tempts” us to regard ourselves as that which confers being upon things, by treating them solely as means to serve our ends. This is, in fact, precisely the function of Satan in Christian theology, to tempt men to become the “reversed god.”

The Satanic parallel is not out of keeping with the language that Heidegger himself uses on occasion. For example, consider the following lines from Introduction to Metaphysics, in which Heidegger is treating the advent of modern technological civilization:

All things sank to the same level, to a surface resembling a blind mirror that no longer mirrors, that casts nothing back. The prevailing dimension became that of extension and number. To be able – this no longer means to spend and to lavish, thanks to lofty overabundance and the mastery of energies; instead, it means only practicing a routine in which anyone can be trained, always combined with a certain amount of sweat and display. In America and Russia, then, this all intensified until it turned into the measureless so-on and so-forth of the ever-identical and the indifferent, until finally this quantitative temper became a quality of its own. By now in those countries the predominance of a cross-section of the indifference is no longer something inconsequential and merely barren but is the onslaught of that which aggressively destroys all rank and all that is world-spiritual, and portrays these as a lie. This is the onslaught of what we call the demonic [in the sense of the destructively evil].[9]

The words in square brackets are Heidegger’s own interpolation, added when his lecture text was published in 1953 (the lectures themselves were delivered in 1935).

The more one explores Heidegger’s ideas, the more they reveal a religious and mystical dimension. And like all mystical ideas, they are shrouded in darkness. One feels that Heidegger is onto something, that he is discovering profound truths about being and about human being, and in a wholly original manner that does indeed break with the metaphysical tradition. Of course, it also feels at times that he is re-discovering profound truths that have been obscured or repudiated by modern man in his hubris. Yet the more we explore these ideas, the more questions they raise. This is not a criticism.

We have seen that Heidegger understands the entire metaphysical tradition as infected by will and its metaphysics of presence. And we have seen that Heidegger refers to the will as evil. Does it follow, then, that the metaphysical tradition is evil? Were thinkers from Plato to Nietzsche involved in an evil enterprise? (One would not have to commit oneself to the view that the philosophers themselves were evil men in order to believe that they were implicated in something evil.) Surprisingly, this does seem to be where Heidegger’s account of the history of metaphysics leads us. Here and there, he makes claims that amount to this. In one essay, for example, he writes that “the collapse of thinking [des Denkens] into the sciences [Wissenschaften] and into faith [Glauben] is the evil destiny of being [böse Geschick des Seins].”[10]

The history of the last two millennia is, for Heidegger, a history of the ascendency of evil now come to full flower in modern technological civilization. In our next installment, we will bring this series to a close by arguing that Heidegger endorses the thesis of the reality of evil (or, as he calls it, “the demonic”). And we will use the Schellingian-Heideggerean theory of evil to try to make sense out of the often bafflingly perverse behavior of men today.

Notes

[1] See Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 75-76, 226.

[2] Bret W. Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 295.

[3] Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 139.

[4] There is a parallel in Schelling to the idea that malice may be a trait of being itself. Recall that Schelling does believe in a kind of “general evil” in nature, emerging from the ground of being, which “though it never becomes real, yet continually strives toward that end [i.e., strives to be real],” and that only after coming to understand this general evil “is it possible to grasp good and evil in man.” A natural propensity of man to do evil is, he says, “explicable on that basis because the disorder of forces engaged by the awakening of self-will in creatures already communicates itself to them at birth.” These quotes appear earlier in the series.

[5] However, Eckhart only used Gelassenheit in one of the authenticated texts, where it is employed as a synonym for Abgeschiedenheit (detachment). Robert Bernasconi has argued that the term belongs more to Boehme than to Eckhart, who uses it extensively in his Way to Christ. As we noted much earlier, Boehme was a major influence on Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift. See Robert Bernasconi, “Being is Evil: Boehme’s Strife and Schelling’s Rage in Heidegger’s “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 7 (2017): 164–181; 173. There have been a number of valuable studies on Heidegger and Eckhart. For a recent study in English, see Ian Alexander Moore, Eckhart, Heidegger and the Imperative of Releasement (Albany: SUNY Press, 2019).

[6] Moore, 37.

[7] It may be necessary to go even further and reject the claim that it is in the “act” of Gelassenheit that Dasein “achieves” identity with the clearing. The reason is that this seems to imply that the clearing and Gelassenheit are two separate things. In fact, it is extremely hard to distinguish the two. Implicitly, distinguishing between the clearing and Gelassenheit depends upon treating the former as “objective” and the latter as “subjective.” However, when we say that the clearing is a “releasement” that withdraws so that beings can be, this always means “so that beings can be for us,” for there must always be a dative of manifestation, that to which the being of beings is manifest. But what then is the difference between the clearing and Gelassenheit? For Gelassenheit is also a releasement, a withdrawal so that beings can be for us.

[8] See John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986).

[9] Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 48-49.

[10] Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 266. The metaphysical tradition, with its forgottenness of being, gives rise to the specialized sciences. The primary limitation of these sciences is not that they focus on beings rather than being. If we insisted that being is the only valid topic of investigation, then no science other than ontology would be legitimate. Rather, it is that they “pro-ject” a certain conception of being onto beings in advance. Physics is the paradigm example of this, for Heidegger. The standpoint of the sciences is thus fundamentally subjective and anthropocentric. (The issue is complex; for more information, see my essay “Heidegger’s History of Metaphysics, Part Three: The Emergence of Modernity.”) The alternative to the positive sciences, for the metaphysical era, is not an encounter with being but “faith.” “Faith” essentially grants the claim of the sciences to a monopoly on “reason,” and embraces irrationalism – belief in the absence of evidence. And its belief is a belief in a supreme being (a supreme thing that has being). Through faith, being is thus again “forgotten” – as a result both of its ontotheological standpoint, and of its tacit affirmation of the supremacy of the sciences.