Returning the World to Nature_ Heidegger’s turn from a transcendental-horizonal projection of...

Returning the world to nature: Heidegger’s turnfrom a transcendental-horizonal projection of worldto an indwelling releasement to the open-region

Bret W. Davis

Published online: 17 September 2014

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract The central issue of Heidegger’s thought is the question of being. More

precisely, it is the question of the relation between being and human being, the

relation, that is, between Sein and Dasein. This article addresses the so-called turn

(Kehre) in Heidegger’s thinking of this relation. In particular, it shows how this turn

entails a shift from a transcendental-horizonal projection of world to ‘‘an indwelling

releasement [instandige Gelassenheit] to the worlding of the world’’. Although a

wide range of pre- and post-turn texts are referenced, since this shift is explicitly

thematized in Heidegger’s Country Path Conversations, these three fictional con-

versations from 1944/45 take center stage in this study.

Keywords Heidegger � World � Nature � Turn � Country path conversations

‘‘Nature is itself a being encountered within the world’’ [SZ 63]. … If this

were the last word of the philosopher, the analysis of Being and Time, with its

anti-Romantic dryness, could lead to the suffocating vision of a world totally

cut off from life, partitioned like a gigantic workshop, completely centered

upon its own space and … blind to the Earth. It seems, however, that it is

precisely a reversal of this interpretation of the relation between world and

Earth that the Turn most clearly effects.

—Michel Haar1

The earth does not belong to us. We belong to it.

—attributed to Chief Seattle

B. W. Davis (&)

Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, MD, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

1 Haar (1993), 16, 19, second ellipses in original.

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Cont Philos Rev (2014) 47:373–397

DOI 10.1007/s11007-014-9304-2

Now indeed, proper releasement [Gelassenheit] consists in that the human in

his essence belongs to the open-region—that is, he is released precisely to it.

(GA 77:145/CPC 95)2

Nature is older than those ages [Zeiten] which are measured out to humans and

to peoples and to things. ‘‘Nature’’ is the oldest time [Zeit] … as the clearing

[Lichtung], in her everything can first be present. Holderlin names nature the

holy because she is ‘‘older than the ages and above the gods.’’ (EHD 59/EHP

81–82 tm)

The central issue of Heidegger’s thought is the question of being. More precisely, it

is the question of the relation between being and human being, the relation, that is,

between Sein and Dasein (see WhD 74/WCT 79; GA 55:293; GA 16:704). This

article addresses the so-called turn (Kehre) in Heidegger’s thinking of this relation.3

In particular, it shows how this turn entails a shift from a transcendental-horizonal

projection of world to ‘‘an indwelling releasement [instandige Gelassenheit] to the

worlding of the world’’ (GA 77:151/CPC 99).4 Although a wide range of pre- and

post-turn texts are referenced, since this shift is explicitly thematized in Heidegger’s

Country Path Conversations, these three fictional conversations from 1944/45 take

center stage in this study.

My discussion of Country Path Conversations, and of its place in Heidegger’s

overall path of thought, focuses on two interrelated issues. First, I elucidate

Heidegger’s critique—and show that it is also a self-critique—of what he calls

‘‘thinking as willing’’ in the form of ‘‘transcendental-horizonal representation.’’ It is

through this critique that he develops his understanding of a more proper kind of

thinking as ‘‘non-willing’’ (Nicht-Wollen) and specifically as ‘‘releasement’’

(Gelassenheit) to ‘‘the open-region’’ (die Gegnet). The open-region is Heidegger’s

‘‘topological’’ word in the first and longest of the three conversations for the

‘‘clearing’’ (Lichtung) of being (see GA 15:335/FS 41). While the ‘‘horizon’’ is ‘‘the

2 A list of abbreviations used for Heidegger’s texts can be found at the end of this article. The original

German text will be cited first, followed by a slash and the corresponding English translation. In cases

where I have modified existing translations, ‘‘tm’’ will appear after the page number of the translation.

Where only the German original is cited, translations are my own. In the case of citations from

Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (Collected Edition), abbreviated as GA, the volume number will be followed

by a colon and the page number.3 On the several senses of the Kehre in or at issue in Heidegger’s thought, see Davis (2007), 61–65,

321–23.4 In Country Path Conversations Heidegger characterizes ‘‘the essence of thinking’’ as ‘‘an indwelling

releasement to the worlding of the world’’ (GA 77:151/CPC 99). In the excerpt from this text published in

1959, he modified the latter phrase to read: ‘‘the indwelling releasement to the open-region’’ (G 68/DT

87). We can infer that there is a close semantic proximity between ‘‘the worlding of the world’’ and ‘‘the

open-region,’’ yet also that Heidegger found the latter a more apt expression of that with regard to which

‘‘the human dwells in nearness to farness’’ (GA 77:151/CPC 99). We might say that the worlding of a

delimited world, a horizon of meaning, takes place within the undelimited expanse of an open-region, and

properly takes place, not by way of transcendence or overstepping of limits, but rather by way of ‘‘going-

into-nearness’’ (anchibasie) to what nevertheless remains far, that is, by way of entering a relation of

indwelling correspondence with what reveals itself in determinate, horizonal forms while at the same time

and of necessity withholding itself in its indeterminate abundance (see GA 77: 101–2, 112–13, 116, 155,

182–84/CPC 65, 72–73, 75, 102, 118–20).

374 B. W. Davis

123

side turned toward us of a surrounding open,’’ the open-region is ‘‘what the open

that surrounds us is in itself’’ (GA 77:112–13/CPC 72–73). Second, I show how this

transformation of thinking involves a retrieval and radical rethinking of ‘‘nature’’

(Natur).

1 Nature in excess of history

As becomes most evident in Country Path Conversations, Heidegger’s later

‘‘thinking of the history of beyng’’ (seynsgeschichtliches Denken) is not a mere

historicism or historical relativism that denies any exposure to an ‘‘excess’’

(Ubermaß) of our historically determined horizons of meaning (see GA 65, §131),

precisely insofar as it intimates an expansive sense of ‘‘nature’’ that encompasses

rather than opposes history. Already in a text from 1929/30 Heidegger begins to

recover a sense of physis as

this whole prevailing that prevails through man himself, a prevailing that he

does not have power over, but which precisely prevails through and around

him … it nears him, sustains and overwhelms him as that which is: physis, that

which prevails, beings, beings as a whole. I emphasize once more that physis

as beings as a whole is not meant in the modern, late sense of nature, as the

conceptual counterpart to history for instance. Rather it is intended more

originally than both of these concepts, in an originary meaning which, prior to

nature and history, encompasses both, and even in a certain way includes

divine beings. (GA 29/30:39/FCM 26)

Fifteen years later, in Country Path Conversations, it is suggested that the

historically and regionally delimited horizons of our thought and experience take

shape within the ‘‘abiding expanse’’ (GA 77:114/CPC 74) of an open-region, an

‘‘open and yet veiled expanse’’ (205/132) which Heidegger here and elsewhere

intimates is the most originary sense of nature. As suggested in the final epigraph

above, this greater field of nature is the temporality and the clearing that would

encompass the divine as well as history. This most encompassing sense of nature

would not even be restricted to ‘‘earth’’ and ‘‘sky’’ in their mutually appropriating

mirror play with ‘‘mortal’’ and ‘‘divine’’; rather, as what includes the divine and

prevails through the human, it would be the differentiating-unifying ‘‘onefold of the

single foursome [Einfalt des einigen Gevierts]’’ (VA 172).

Country Path Conversations goes so far as to presage a possible ‘‘liberation from

history [Befreiung von der Geschichte]’’ (GA 77:184/CPC 120). This is emphat-

ically not to be understood in the sense of a metaphysical transcendence to a

supernatural or suprahistorical realm, but rather in the sense of an exposure to an

excess in our sojourn (Aufenthalt) in the Enthalt as that which encompasses—both

holding within itself and withholding itself from—all epochally delimited horizons

of history (see 182/118–19). With regard to his thinking of Ereignis as the ‘‘It’’

which gives both time and being, Heidegger later says that such thinking would

involve an ecstatic indwelling which ‘‘stands in and before That which has sent the

various forms of epochal being. This, however, what sends as appropriation, is itself

Returning the world to nature 375

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unhistorical [ungeschichtlich] or, more precisely, without destiny [geschicklos]’’

(ZSD 44/TB 41 tm). Let us be clear: this thinking would not involve an

abandonment of the historicality of our existence; we have never and could never

simply dwell outside of history. But authentically being historical entails that we at

the same time maintain an awareness of the limits of our historically determined

horizons; it entails that we sense the withdrawal, the self-concealing excess, of the

greater open-region of nature.5 Properly being historical entails that we dwell within

the horizons of our historically determined worlds while at the same time

acknowledging that these worlds are embedded (eingelassen) in, rather than

transcend, this encompassing open-region.

The transformation of thinking that Heidegger calls for requires that we think out

toward another inception of history only insofar as we paradoxically ‘‘turn back to

where we truly [eigentlich] already are’’ (GA 77:176/CPC 115), even if we have

never yet properly been t/here. ‘‘We are [always already] appropriated to the open-

region; but we do not yet experience it as the open-region’’ (124/80). Because

humans have not yet experienced who they truly are and wherein they truly are,

things have not yet been allowed to be what they truly are. Things ‘‘have become

objects before attaining their thing-essence,’’ and the human-essence has been

transformed into egoity ‘‘before the essence of the human could return to itself’’

(140–41/91). Heidegger’s attempt to think the relation between the human and the

open-region is thus an attempt to rethink the relationship that has heretofore been

(mis)represented in terms of horizonal transcendence so that it may ‘‘manifest itself

otherwise and indeed in it originary truth’’ (88/56; see also 89/57, 121–24/78–81,

221/143). The other inception presaged in Heidegger’s thinking of the history of

being would not simply be one more historical epoch that is neither more nor less

true than others; rather, it would be a time when the historically and regionally

determined horizons of our thought and experience are finally understood to be what

they truly are: intelligible delimitations of the open-region or ‘‘holy chaos’’ of

nature. In truth, most properly, the humanly intelligible world is not transcenden-

tally projected onto an ‘‘alien nature,’’ but rather takes shape through our non-

willful participation within the self-revealing and self-concealing expanse of nature.

Before this encompassing sense of nature was subjected to metaphysical

restrictions, which set nature in opposition to history, culture, the supernatural, and

so forth, it was intimated in the first inception of Western thought by one of the

primary early Greek words for being itself: physis. The question is whether, after all

the restrictions to which it has been subjected, the word ‘‘nature’’ is still capable of

bearing the unrestricted sense of the open-region within which our historical

horizons are delimited. If only to raise this question anew, let us follow the turn in

Heidegger’s thinking as it leads back to and even beyond a recovery of the inceptual

sense of physis. Let us follow his turn from a transcendental-horizonal projection of

world to a releasement to the open-region, and let us read this as a returning of

5 At the edges of our human horizons we can sense, as John Sallis suggests, temporalities of nature—a

‘‘uranic time’’ and even a ‘‘lithic time’’—that exceed and encompass the temporality and historicality of

Dasein. See Sallis (2004).

376 B. W. Davis

123

world to its proper place in the abiding expanse of what he sometimes calls, with

Holderlin, nature.

2 From will to Gelassenheit

At issue in the first and longest of the three texts gathered in Country Path

Conversations is a transformation from the modern essence of thinking as a kind of

willing, specifically as a transcendental projection of world or positing of a

transcendental horizon of meaning, to a more proper and more originary essence of

thinking as an indwelling releasement to the worlding of the world as the regioning

of the open-region. Two senses of ‘‘non-willing’’ are said to be at stake in this

transformation of thinking. Non-willing in the first sense entails a transitional

‘‘willing of non-willing.’’ In the second, more radical sense, it indicates not merely

the negation of thinking as willing, but rather a manner of thinking that ‘‘does not at

all pertain to the will,’’ a manner of thinking that is otherwise than willing (GA

77:106/CPC 68–69). It is crucial to heed Heidegger’s insistence that what he means

by non-willing or ‘‘releasement’’ (Gelassenheit) cannot be understood within the

entire ‘‘domain of the will,’’ a domain which includes passivity as well as activity,

deference as well as assertion of will (GA 77:109/CPC 70). The conversation goes

on to determine this non-willing manner of thinking as a releasement to, and waiting

upon, the open-region as that in which the human properly belongs and to which it

properly responds. This non-willful thinking involves what we might call a

participatory and responsive belonging, rather than a passivity in regard to some

external being or foreign force. It is said to involve a ‘‘resolute openness

[Entschlossenheit]’’ (143/93) and even a courageous ‘‘surmising’’ (148/97; also

165/106–7). Indeed, this ‘‘indwelling in releasement to the open-region’’ is said to

be ‘‘the genuine essence of the spontaneity of thinking’’ (145/94).

Yet, this spontaneity is no longer understood in terms of the will of human

Dasein projecting a transcendental horizon of meaning. Releasement itself, the

proper initiative of thinking, comes from the open-region in which the human

belongs. We read:

Guide: Releasement comes from the open-region, because releasement properly

consists in the human remaining released to the open-region, and doing

so by means of the open-region. The human is released to it in his

essence, insofar as he originally belongs to the open-region. He belongs

to it, insofar as he is inceptually a-propriated to the open-region, and

indeed by the open-region itself

Scholar: In fact, waiting upon something—provided this is an essential, and that

means an all-decisive, waiting—is also based in the fact that we belong

to that upon which we wait

Guide: Out of the experience of waiting, and indeed out of the experience of

waiting upon the self-opening of the open-region [Warten auf das

Sichoffnen der Gegnet], and in relation to such waiting, this waiting was

spoken of, addressed [an-gesprochen], as releasement [Gelassenheit]


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Scholar: This is therefore a befitting naming of waiting upon the open-region

Scientist: But now if transcendental-horizonal representing—from which

releasement releases itself into the open-region on the basis of

belonging—is the heretofore prevailing essence of thinking, then in

releasement thinking transforms itself from such representing into

waiting upon the open-region. (GA 77:122/CPC 79)

In proper thinking as non-willing, one is released from the will to determine the

being of beings on one’s own by transcending or ‘‘stepping over’’ beings to form a

horizon of meaning in which they are then allowed, or compelled, to show

themselves as objects. And one is released into a relation of waiting upon, listening

and responding to, that in which one belongs. In the ‘‘Letter on Humanism’’ (1947)

Heidegger writes: ‘‘As the belonging to being that listens, thinking is what it is

according to its essential provenance [Als das horend dem Sein Gehorende ist das

Denken, was es nach seiner Wesensherkunft ist]’’ (GA 9:316/PM 241 tm). The

‘‘essence of thinking’’ is thus no longer experienced as the willful positing of a

transcendental horizon, but rather as an ‘‘indwelling releasement to the worlding of

the world’’ (GA 77:151/CPC 99). The ecstatic character of Dasein as being-in-the-

world is now understood as an ‘‘indwelling steadfastness’’ (Instandigkeit) in the

open-region.

In Country Path Conversations, as in subsequent texts such as the ‘‘Letter on

Humanism,’’ Heidegger is unfolding his path of thought by means of what he later

calls ‘‘immanent critique’’ (ZSD 61/BW 431 tm). Indeed, when Heidegger speaks of

‘‘the heretofore prevailing essence of thinking’’ that links thinking with willing, and

in the specific manner of transcendental-horizonal representation (122/79), he is not

just speaking about Kant, and he is not just speaking more generally about the

modern tradition of philosophers from Descartes and Leibniz to the Neo-Kantians

and Husserl; he is also implicating his own earlier thought. The critique of

transcendental-horizonal thinking as willing in Country Path Conversations should

be understood in part as a self-critique of Heidegger’s own Kantian-inspired

thinking of transcendence in the late 1920s as well as the voluntarism of his thinking

in the first half of the 1930s.6

To be sure, Heidegger’s texts from the late 1920s through the mid-1930s are

richly ambiguous and multivalent. Indeed in Was heisst Denken? (1951–52)

Heidegger suggests that ‘‘all genuine thoughts belonging to an essential thinking

remain … ambiguous [mehrdeutig]’’ (WhD 68/WCT 71). We need to bear this

hermeneutical principle of ambiguity in mind especially when reading Heidegger’s

texts from this period, whether we are looking to see how they anticipate his later

thought, whether we are looking to them for pathways that were opened up but not

taken up by Heidegger himself, or whether we are looking back by way of

‘‘immanent critique’’ to find, for example, clear manifestations or lingering residues

of transcendental-horizonal thinking-as-willing. In this article, I limit myself to this

third approach, that of immanent critique, which I undertake in order to suggest how

Heidegger’s path of thought self-critically developed between Being and Time

6 On the latter, see Davis (2007), chapter 3.

378 B. W. Davis

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(1927) and Country Path Conversations (1944/45). We shall see how Heidegger

turns from a transcendental-horizonal thinking to a thinking as releasement to the

open-region, and at the same time how this turn entails a pivotal rethinking and

deepening appreciation of nature or physis. It is no accident that these conversations

on thinking as releasement to the open-region take place on country paths.

3 Transcendental thinking in Being and Time and after

In the introduction to Being and Time (1927) Heidegger states: ‘‘Being is the

transcendens pure and simple,’’ and: ‘‘Every disclosure of being as the transcendens

is transcendental knowledge’’ (SZ 38/BT 36). The aim of the book is then said to

be: ‘‘The interpretation of Dasein on the basis of temporality and the explication of

time as the transcendental horizon of the question of being’’ (39/37). The

temporality of Dasein, more specifically the ‘‘ecstatic unity’’ of ‘‘the horizonal

schemata of future, having-been, and present’’ (365/347), provides the world with

its worldliness, that is, it allows the world to be a ‘‘referential totality of

significance’’ (123/119, see also §18) within which beings can show themselves in

meaningful ways. ‘‘Insofar as Dasein temporalizes itself, a world is, too’’ (365/348).

Indeed ‘‘Dasein is its world’’ (364/347).

The world is transcendent, grounded in the horizonal unity of ecstatic

temporality. It must already be ecstatically disclosed so that intraworldly

beings can be encountered from it. … That such beings are discovered along

with the there [Da] of its own existence is not at the discretion of Dasein. Only

what, in which direction, to what extent, and how it actually discovers and

discloses is a matter of freedom, although always within the limits of its

thrownness. (SZ 366/BT 348 tm)

Although always on the basis and within the limits of its thrownness (i.e., the

facticity of its historical situatedness, embodiment, attunement, and so forth), it is

Dasein that ‘‘projects’’ the world, that is to say, it is Dasein that ‘‘chooses’’ its ‘‘for-

the-sake-of-which’’ (Worum-willen) (SZ 12, 298/BT 11, 285–86), ‘‘deciding for a

potentiality-of-being, and making this decision from one’s own self’’ (SZ 268/BT

258), and thus freely defining the meaningful context that determines the being—the

whatness even if not the thatness—of beings. This will change. In Contributions to

Philosophy (1936–38), a decade after Being and Time and a decade before he will

respond to Sartre’s alleged misunderstanding of Being and Time as a voluntaristic

existentialism, Heidegger writes: ‘‘The projection [Entwurf] of beyng can be thrown

[geworfen] only by beyng itself’’ (GA 65:447/CP 352; see also GA 9: 327–28/PM

249–50). Humans are required participants in this event of beyng, but the event

exceeds and appropriates humans in a manner not yet evident in Being and Time. By

this time Heidegger will have also granted nature and ‘‘earth’’ a much more decisive

role in beyng, such that nature can no longer be conceived, as it was in Being and

Time, as ‘‘a being which is encountered within the world,’’ that is, as an

‘‘intraworldly entity’’ (SZ 63, 211/BT 63, 203 tm).


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In Being and Time, ‘‘nature’’ is said to be uncovered first and foremost as

something ready-to-hand, specifically, as material for production: ‘‘The forest is a

forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock, the river is water power, the wind is

wind ‘in the sails’’’ (SZ 70/BT 70). As a derivative mode of discovery, we can

observe nature scientifically as a set of objects that are of less, and of a different,

concern to us (see SZ 357ff./358ff.). ‘‘We can abstract from nature’s kind of being

as readiness-to-hand; we can discover and define it in its pure presence-at-hand. But

in this kind of discovery of nature, nature as what ‘stirs and strives,’ what

overcomes us, entrances us as landscape, remains hidden’’ (70/70 tm). Here

Heidegger seems to intimate a third sense of nature that exceeds both ‘‘readiness-to-

hand’’ (Zuhandenheit) and ‘‘presence-at-hand’’ (Vorhandenheit); and yet, he

immediately resorts back to contrasting what is present-at-hand with what is

ready-to-hand: ‘‘The botanist’s plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow, the

river’s ‘source’ ascertained by the geographer is not the ‘source in the ground’’’ (70/

70). In any case, in Being and Time Heidegger claims that even the ‘‘Romantic

conception of nature,’’ by which is presumably meant nature as what ‘‘stirs and

strives’’ and so forth, ‘‘is ontologically comprehensible only in terms of the concept

of world’’ (65/65). Even nature ‘‘which ‘surrounds’ us’’ is said to be an

‘‘intraworldly entity’’ (211/203 tm).

In the 1927 lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger

again says that ‘‘An example of an intraworldly entity is nature’’ (GA 24:240/BPP

168). But now he also says that ‘‘intraworldliness does not belong to nature’s being’’

(240/169). Now he identifies nature with what is present-at-hand (das Vorhandene),

and he understands the latter not merely as a mode of intraworldliness, in contrast to

or derivative of readiness-to-hand, but also as what is there already, prior to the

arrival of Dasein, as what may or may not be taken up into Dasein’s world.

‘‘Intraworldliness belongs to the being of what is present-at-hand, nature, not as a

determination of its being, but as a possible determination’’ (240/169 tm). ‘‘World is

only if, and as long as, Dasein exists. Nature can also be when no Dasein exists’’

(241/170). When ‘‘Dasein projects a world for itself,’’ nature can appear in that

world as what does not need that world to be what it is in itself. Nature can appear as

what does not need to appear (to Dasein) in order to be or, as it were, to ‘‘merely

subsist.’’7 Nature as it ‘‘merely subsists’’ prior to being revealed as ready-to-hand,

meaningfully present-at-hand, or as what ‘‘stirs and strives,’’ can presumably appear

in withdrawal, on the periphery of our concernful dealings, leaving a bare

meaningless trace in the otherwise meaningful world that is opened up and

structured by Dasein’s thrown-projection. In any case, while nature may ‘‘merely

subsist’’ on its own, in order to present itself as present-at-hand and thus to be in any

meaningful sense, it must enter Dasein’s world, the world that Dasein projects and

is.

Heidegger repeats this idea in his 1929 lecture course The Metaphysical

Foundations of Logic, where he says that ‘‘Intraworldliness does not belong to the

7 The mode of being of ‘‘what is neither ready-to-hand nor present-at-hand, but merely ‘subsists’

[nur »besteht«]’’ (SZ 333/BT 318 tm) is announced in Being and Time, but its clarification is postponed

until the third division of the book, which was never published.

380 B. W. Davis

123

essence of present-at-hand things as such, but is only the transcendental condition,

in the primordial sense, for the possibility of present-at-hand things being able to

emerge as they are.’’ And ‘‘World-entry happens when transcendence happens, i.e.,

when historical Dasein exists’’ (GA 26 250/MPL 194). Heidegger spells out the

super-natural thrust of ‘‘transcendence’’ as follows:

[W]hat Dasein surpasses in its transcendence is not a gap or barrier ‘‘between’’

itself and objects. But beings, among which Dasein also factically is, get

surpassed by Dasein. Objects are surpassed in advance; more exactly, beings

are surpassed and can subsequently become objects. Dasein is thrown, factical,

thoroughly amidst nature through its bodiliness, and transcendence lies in the

fact that these beings, among which Dasein is and to which Dasein belongs,

are surpassed by Dasein. In other words, as transcending, Dasein is beyond

nature, although, as factical, it remains environed by nature. As transcending,

i.e., as free, Dasein is something alien to nature. (GA 26:212/MFL 166,

emphasis added)

According to Heidegger’s transcendental-horizonal thinking in the late 1920s,

‘‘Dasein is something alien to nature,’’ something that transcends nature and

projects a world in which nature can show first itself as something meaningful or

even as something deprived of meaning.

In this same lecture course from 1929, Heidegger makes it clear that what he

means by world-projection, or what he calls the following year ‘‘world-formation’’

(Weltbildung) (see GA 29/30/FCM), is a matter of ‘‘thinking as willing.’’ ‘‘World,’’

he writes, ‘‘is primarily defined by the for-the-sake-of-which. … But a for-the-sake-

of-which, a purposiveness [Umwillen], is only possible where there is a will

[Willen]’’ (GA 26: 238/MFL 185). The 1929 essay ‘‘The Essence of Ground’’

confirms that what is at issue here is a kind of transcendental ‘‘will’’ that, rather than

being restricted to operations within the world structured by the Umwillen, would be

responsible for transcendentally ‘‘forming’’ (bilden) the Umwillen as such. We read:

This surpassing that occurs ‘for the sake of’ [Der umwillentliche Uberstieg]

does so only in a ‘will’ [» Willen «] that as such projects itself upon

possibilities of itself. … Every kind of comportment is rooted in [this]

transcendence. The ‘will’ in question, however, must first ‘form’ the for-the-

sake-of as and in a surpassing [Jener »Wille« aber soll als und im Uberstieg

das Umwillen selbst »bilden«]. (GA 9:163/PM 126)

4 Recovering from voluntarism

Thus begins the most voluntaristic period of Heidegger’s thought. In the first half of

the 1930s, his embrace the language and thought of will is not confined to what

Derrida calls the ‘‘massive voluntarism’’8 at work in his Rectoral Address and, we

should add, in his appeals in other political speeches in 1933–34 to ‘‘the towering

8 Derrida (1989), 37.


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will of our Fuhrer’’ (GA 16:236). While his texts during this period are, as I have

said, richly ambiguous, the tendency toward one form or another of voluntarism is a

prevalent thread in them up through his 1935 course, Introduction to Metaphysics.

In Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger writes: ‘‘Whoever wills, whoever lays

his whole Dasein into a will, is resolute [entschlossen]’’ (EM 16/IM 22), thus

developing an explicitly voluntaristic interpretation of his notion of Ent-schloss-

enheit. In a note added to Introduction to Metaphysics in 1953, Heidegger endeavors

to reinterpret this passage such that it would imply that willing can be traced back to

Dasein’s openness to being, which would mean that this ‘‘relation to being is rather

one of letting.’’ But surely this reinterpretation is more compelling as confirmation

that a major turn has taken place in Heidegger’s thinking, a turn from the will to

Gelassenheit. In his first lecture course on Nietzsche in 1936, written when

Heidegger had not yet turned highly critical of the ‘‘will to power,’’ he says: ‘‘Will

is, in our terms, Ent-schlossenheit, in which he who wills stations himself abroad

among beings in order to keep them firmly within his field of action’’ (N1 59/Ni 48

tm). Decades later, in a 1975 conversation with John Sallis, Heidegger directly

contradicted this 1936 self-interpretation and insisted that Entschlossenheit ‘‘has

nothing to do with the will.’’9 In fact, this self-reinterpretation can already be found

in Country Path Conversations, where Entschlossenheit is said to be a matter of

non-willing and Gelassenheit. Here too preferring reinterpretation to immanent

critique, he says that this was already the sense of the term in Being and Time,

where it meant ‘‘the self-opening for the open’’ (GA 77:143/CPC 93). Surely the

matter is more ambiguous.10 In any case, it is clear that after the late 1930s

Heidegger thinks that modern metaphysics has defined the being of beings as will

(GA 67:159), and that technology is a manifestation of the ‘‘will to power’’

exacerbated into the cybernetic ‘‘will to will’’ (VA 76). In Country Path

Conversations he even ventures to suggest that ‘‘Perhaps in general the will itself

is what is evil’’ (GA 77:208/CPC 134).

In Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger writes: ‘‘Questioning is willing-to-

know [Wissen-wollen]’’ (EM 16/IM 22), thus affirming what a decade later in

Country Path Conversations he criticizes as the modern understanding of knowing

as based on a willful interrogation rather than a non-willful waiting and responding

(see GA 77:25, 163–64, 226–28/CPC 16, 105–6, 146–48). At the beginning of the

second conversation the Teacher asks: ‘‘Would not then all willing-to-know

[Wissenwollen] be shaken from the ground up?’’ (163/105). The conversation goes

on to problematize ‘‘questioning as willing’’ along with ‘‘the will-to-a-ground’’ and

‘‘the will to fathom’’ (164–66/106–7). It is suggested that ‘‘another manner of

questioning’’ and ‘‘surmising’’ is possible, namely as a thinking out toward a

‘‘provenance’’ (Herkunft) that is ‘‘groundless’’ and, insofar as ‘‘abysses [Abgrunde]

… prevail only within a looking backward toward grounds,’’ also ‘‘abyssless’’

(200–1/130). Rather than seeking to fathom the provenance, which can only lead to

an infinite regress—insofar as for any ground discovered we would then want to

9 Personal correspondence from John Sallis, dated August 26, 1996.10 See Davis (2007), chapter 2.

382 B. W. Davis

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know the ground of that ground, and so on—the proper comportment to the

provenance, the Herkunft, is to ‘‘let it come to us’’ (200–1/130–31).

In the first conversation, this issue is discussed in terms of the horizon and the

open-region. Insofar as we understand the human as ‘‘the animal rationale, the

living being who thinks,’’ and we define thinking as ‘‘the representational setting-

before [Vor-stellen] and setting-toward [Zu-stellen] of the horizon,’’ then to think

the essence of the human we would need to posit a horizon for this horizonal

thinking that defines the human. But this means that, ‘‘In establishing a horizon for

the determination of the essence of thinking, we are, in fact, initially positing the

horizon for the horizon,’’ and in this line of questioning ‘‘what ensues is an endless

succession of horizons encased in one another’’ (GA 77:90–94/CPC 58–60).

Transcendental-horizonal thinking can never attain to positing its own ground; it can

never think the origin of its own thoughts. In its attempt to transcend—that is to say,

‘‘to climb over’’ (ubersteigen)—beings to the horizon of their being, in the end

transcendental-horizonal thinking runs up against what it cannot think out beyond or

back before, namely, ‘‘the other of [the horizon] itself, which it itself is as the

selfsame’’ (102/65). What forever eludes transcendental-horizonal thinking is, so to

speak, the backside of the horizon of thought, the other side of the limit that, contra

Hegel, only recedes each time we try to cross it. What can be crossed is always

yesterday’s horizon, and each new day brings with it a new horizon. The other side

of the horizon, as the self-concealing origin of thought, can only be called ‘‘the

unprethinkable’’ (das Unvordenkliche). It is precisely through the experience of

opening itself up to and being opened up by this unprethinkable other side of its

horizons of meaning that thought gets in touch with and is touched by the

provenance of those horizons. ‘‘It is thus in the unprethinkable that the essence of

the human is released to the open-region’’ (146/95). Thinking in attentive

responsiveness to this unprethinkable provenance would no longer be a transcen-

dental positing of horizons; it would no longer be a matter of climbing over but

rather an abiding within that which holds all within itself while also thereby

withholding itself (see 182/118). Such thinking would be a ‘‘coming-into-nearness

to the far’’ (116/75), in which horizons are opened up through an attentive ‘‘waiting

upon the self-opening of the open-region’’ (122/79).

5 From transcendence to indwelling

The turn in Heidegger’s Denkweg from will to Gelassenheit is thus a turn from

transcendence to indwelling (Instandigkeit). This shift is evinced in some marginal

notes Heidegger made to his copy of Being and Time, in the section in which he

claims that ‘‘being is the transcendens pure and simple’’ and that ‘‘Phenomeno-

logical truth (disclosedness of being) is veritas transcendentalis’’ (SZ 38/BT 36). In

one note, written next to a passage that says that in the question of the meaning of

being ‘‘inheres the possibility of its most acute individualization in each particular

Dasein,’’ he writes: ‘‘properly speaking: bringing about the standing-within the there

[eigentlich: Vollzug der Instandigkeit im Da].’’ On the same page, after sketching

the plan of Division One of the book as ‘‘The interpretation of Dasein on the basis of


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temporality and the explication of time as the transcendental horizon of the question

of being,’’ and next to the title for the final, unpublished section, ‘‘Time and being,’’

Heidegger adds the note: ‘‘The difference bound to transcendence. The overcoming

of the horizon as such. The return into the provenance. The presencing out of this

provenance [Die transzendenthafte Differenz. Die Uberwindung des Horizonts als

solchen. Die Umkehr in die Herkunft. Das Anwesen aus dieser Herkunft]‘‘(SZ 440,

marginal notes to p. 39/BT 36–37). We recall that this third division of the first part

of the book, where ‘‘everything is reversed,’’ where Dasein’s temporality

(Zeitlichkeit) would itself be situated within the temporality (Temporalitat) of

being, this division ‘‘was held back because thinking failed in the adequate saying of

this turning [Kehre] and did not succeed with the help of the language of

metaphysics’’ (GA 9:328/PM 250). What Heidegger presumably failed to accom-

plish by way of transcendental-horizonal thinking, that is, by way of thinking

Dasein’s primary ekstasis in terms of a transcendental ‘‘willing’’ that projects its

world, is a thinking which sufficiently understands that ‘‘ek-sistence means standing

out into the truth of being,’’ or, as he more precisely puts it in a marginal comment

to this line from the ‘‘Letter on Humanism’’: ‘‘ecstatic in-standing within the

clearing [ekstatisches Innestehen in der Lichtung]’’ (GA 9: 327/PM 249; see also

343/261).

A decade after Being and Time and a decade before the ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’

Heidegger’s broke with transcendental thinking unequivocally in Contributions to

Philosophy,11 where he writes: ‘‘Because Da-sein as Da-sein originally endures the

open realm of concealment, we cannot in the strict sense speak of a transcendence of

Da-sein; in the sphere of this determination, the representation of ‘transcendence’ in

every sense must disappear’’ (GA 65:217/CP 170).

Even if ‘‘transcendence’’ is grasped differently than before, i.e., as surpassing

[Uberstieg] rather than as a super-sensible being, even then the essence of Da-

sein is all too easily distorted by this determination. For, even in this way,

transcendence presupposes a below and a hither side and is still in danger of

being misunderstood as an act of an ‘‘I,’’ a subject. Thus in the end even this

concept of transcendence is mired in Platonism (cf. ‘‘On the Essence of

Ground’’). … Da-sein stands inceptually in the grounding [Grundung] of the

appropriating event, fathoms the ground of [ergrundet] the truth of being, and

does not pass over beings to their being. (GA 65:322/CP 255 tm; see also

§132).

Dasein does not climb over beings to project their being; it fathoms the ground of

being only by standing within and responsively participating in the appropriating

event that establishes that ground.

The turn in Heidegger’s thinking from a transcendental projection of the meaning

of being to a participatory indwelling or standing within the truth of being can be

traced by following the development of his understanding of the relation between

Dasein and the clearing.12 Whereas in Being and Time Heidegger had written that

11 See Dahlstrom (2007).12 See Capobianco (2010), Chaps. 5 and 6.

384 B. W. Davis

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Dasein ‘‘is itself the clearing’’ (SZ 133/BT 129), in the ‘‘Letter on Humanism’’ he

writes that ‘‘the clearing itself is being’’ (GA 9:332/PM 253). In a seminar in 1973

Heidegger reportedly said: ‘‘The clearing … this free dimension, is not the creation

of man, it is not man. On the contrary, it is that which is assigned to him, since it is

addressed to him: it is that which is destined to him’’ (GA 15:386–87/FS 73). In the

Zollikon Seminars he states:

The human being is the guardian of the clearing, of the appropriating event

[des Ereignisses]. He is not the clearing himself, not the entire clearing, nor is

he identical with the whole of the clearing as such. But as the one ecstatically

‘standing out’ into the clearing … he is related to, belongs to, and is

appropriated by the clearing. (Z 223/ZS 178 tm)

That this can be called ‘‘the turn’’ (die Kehre) in his thinking is confirmed by

Heidegger in the following statement:

The thinking that proceeds from Being and Time, in that it gives up the word

‘meaning of being’ in favor of ‘truth of being’ [and subsequently ‘topology of

being’], henceforth emphasizes the openness of being itself, rather than the

openness of Dasein in regard to this openness of being. … This signifies ‘the

turn’ [‘die Kehre’], in which thinking always more decisively turns to being as

being. (GA 15:345/FS 47; see also 385/41)

6 The coming of nature

Let us return our focus to Country Path Conversations to see how this turn away

from a transcendental projection of world leads to an indwelling releasement to the

coming—and drawing back—of the open-region.

In the third conversation, the unprethinkable provenance (Herkunft) is called ‘‘the

coming’’ (GA 77:231/CPC 150), and it is said that ‘‘pure waiting would be like the echo

of pure coming.’’ ‘‘As those who wait we are the inlet [Einlaß] for the coming’’ (227/

147; see also 206/132). When Heidegger speaks of ‘‘waiting on the coming,’’ one is apt

to hear this as a ‘‘repetition’’ of his 1920/21 phenomenological reading of St. Paul’s

vigilant waiting (anamenein) on the parousia, the unpredictable second coming of

Christ (see GA 60:97ff./PRL 67ff.). Even if Heidegger has by the mid-1940s long since

distanced himself from Christianity, that there is a ‘‘religious’’ significance to what

Heidegger means by ‘‘the coming’’ is confirmed in an essay on Holderlin from

1939/40, where Heidegger writes: ‘‘The holy is quietly present as what is coming [Das

Heilige ist still gegenwartig als Kommendes]’’ (EHD 67/EHP 89). And that what is

meant by ‘‘the coming’’ has a future-oriented sense in Heidegger’s seynsgeschichtli-

ches thinking out toward the other inception would seem to be confirmed when this

essay goes on to say: ‘‘In its coming, the holy, ‘older than the ages’ and ‘above the

gods,’ grounds another beginning of another history. The holy primordially decides in

advance concerning men and gods, whether they are, and who they are, and how they

are, and when they are’’ (EHD 76/EHP 97–98).

Yet, other than a passing rejection of Eckhart’s Gelassenheit as a purported

‘‘letting go of self-will in favor of the divine will’’ in the first conversation (GA


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77:109/CPC 70),13 Country Path Conversations rarely speaks explicitly of the

divine. There is, however, one remarkable section in the third conversation where it

is suggested that ‘‘logos means the gathering toward the originally all-unifying One,

whereby the One is the divine itself’’ (224/145). The conversation goes on to say

that it is precisely the attentiveness that prevails in logos as the gathering toward the

originally all-unifying One that is meant by ‘‘the constant waiting on that which we

named the pure coming’’ (225/146). But this waiting is a matter of being fully open

in the present rather than a future-oriented awaiting or expecting: ‘‘we belong to the

coming as the present-waiting-toward [Gegenwart], which in answering [antwor-

tend] lets in the coming’’ (231/150). Indeed, it is said that ‘‘This coming essentially

occurs all around us and at all times, even when we are not mindful of it’’ (227/147,

emphasis added). The coming is, as it were, the incessant presencing of the open-

region, the way it constantly comes to encounter us, addresses us, calls out to us,

offers itself to us, entrusts itself to our care, even as it silently draws itself back,

forever eluding our will to total comprehension, manipulation, and consumption

(see 113–14/73–74).

Is not Heidegger speaking here of ‘‘nature,’’ not just in the narrow sense of the

forests and fields through which country paths wander, but in the fullest sense of

physis as the constant emergence of beings into unconcealment, an emergence that

calls us forth into mindful reception and preservation? The coming would then not

be something supernatural, but rather nature itself. The worlding of the world, the

regioning of the open-region, would be generated ever anew out of our responsive

abiding within the incessant presencing, the always and everywhere coming, of

nature.

To be sure, we can understand the coming in terms of ‘‘nature’’ only by carefully

retrieving a full and originary sense of this word out from under all the traditional

restrictions (Beschrankungen) of it to one side of a host of dichotomies, such as

‘‘nature vs. art,’’ ‘‘nature vs. spirit,’’ ‘‘nature vs. history,’’ and even ‘‘natural vs.

supernatural’’ and ‘‘natural vs. unnatural’’ (EHD 55–56/EHP 78; see also GA

9:239–40/PM 183–84). The gods too are part of nature in this most expansive sense.

We need to recover this originary and encompassing sense of nature from its

scientific objectification, not to mention from its technological reduction to natural

reserves—though even the technological Gestell is an improper or inessential

(unwesentliche) distortion of nature, not something set over against nature from the

outside. As we shall see in a moment, Heidegger follows the early Greeks, as well as

Holderlin, in understanding the most originary and expansive sense of ‘‘nature’’ as

nothing less than being or ‘‘beyng’’ (Seyn) itself.

7 Scientific objectification of nature

In order to follow Heidegger in his attempt to retrieve this originary and expansive

sense of nature, we need to first attend to his critique of the objectification of

‘‘nature’’ on the part of modern natural science. We have seen that, in the late 1920s,

13 This passing critique hardly does justice to Eckhart. See Davis (2007), Chap. 5.

386 B. W. Davis

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Heidegger suggests that the present-at-hand objects of scientific observation are the

closet we come to how things are in themselves, that is, in their meaningless state

prior to their entry into the world, the horizon of meaning, projected by Dasein. In

the mid-1930s, however, and in particular in 1936 in his last major lecture course

devoted to Kant, later published as What is a Thing?, Heidegger comes to view

modern natural science as involving a special, and especially restrictive, manner of

world-projection. This is what he calls also in Country Path Conversations ‘‘the

mathematical projection of nature’’ (GA 77:5, 11–12/CPC 3, 7).

What Heidegger means by ‘‘the mathematical projection of nature’’ is not just

that nature is understood in terms of what is mathematically calculable. ‘‘[M]ath-

ematics is itself only a particular formation of the mathematical’’ (GA 41:69/WT

68). If we restrict our understanding of ‘‘the mathematical’’ (das Mathemathische)

to mathematics (Mathematik), we miss the more general sense of the sign Plato put

over the entrance to his academy, which read: ‘‘Let no one who has not grasped the

mathematical enter here!’’ (quoted on 76/75), and the essential point being made by

Kant when he claims, in the preface to Metaphysical Beginning Principles of

Natural Science, ‘‘that in any particular doctrine of nature only so much genuine

science can be found as there is mathematics to be found in it’’ (quoted on 68–69/

68). The mathematical ‘‘stems from the Greek expression ta mathemata, which

means what can be learned and thus, at the same time, taught’’ (69/69). The crucial

point Heidegger is making is that the mathematical is what can be learned and

taught about things because it is what we already know in advance about them; it is

what we bring to our experience of and experiments with things.

The mathemata, the mathematical, is that ‘‘about’’ things which we really

already know. Therefore we do not first get it out of things, but, in a certain

way, we bring it already with us. … The mathematical is, as mente concipere,

a project (Entwurf) of thingness (Dingheit) which, as it were, skips over the

things. The project first opens a domain (Spielraum) where things—i.e.,

facts—show themselves. (GA 41:74, 92/WT 74, 92)

Kant confirms this understanding of transcendental projection when he writes, in the

B Preface to the first Critique, ‘‘that reason only gains insight into what it produces

itself according to its own projects [was sie selbst nach ihrem Entwurfe

hervorbringt]; that it must go before with principles of judgment according to

constant laws, and constrain nature to reply to its questions, not content to merely

follow her leading-strings’’ (B XIII) (quoted by the translator in a footnote to WT

88–89). According to Heidegger, ‘‘Kant’s philosophical achievement consists in the

introduction of the word ‘transcendental’,’’ a word with which ‘‘Kant named the

climbing over objects and over the perceiving directed at them, which prevails in

such horizon-forming representing’’ (GA 77:98/CPC 63).14 In taking up the

14 When the conversation goes on to say that, for Kant, ‘‘The horizon is constructed as construct [bildet

sich als Gebild] in the productivity of transcendental imagination [Einbildungskraft]’’ (GA 77:101/CPC

65), one can hear, not just an echo of the thesis of Heidegger’s 1929 Kant and the Problem of

Metaphysics, but also an implicit self-critique of how in that book he viewed his own phenomenology of

the ‘‘transcendence’’ and ‘‘world-projection’’ of Dasein as a development of this most radical insight of

Kant’s transcendental philosophy. According to Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, ‘‘The


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mathematical from the Greeks, and especially from Plato’s so-called doctrine of the

Ideas, and by transferring the location of those Ideas from a transcendent realm,

such as Augustine’s mind of God, to the mind of the human, in the sense of

transcendental subjectivity, Kant lays the metaphysical groundwork for the

mathematical projection of nature in modern physics.

In the first conversation, Heidegger explains ‘‘the mathematical projection of

nature’’ as follows:

Thinking presents nature to itself [stellt sich die Natur… zu, more literally,

sets nature toward itself] as the spatiotemporally ordered manifold of moving

points of mass. With a view to this essence of nature, natural processes are re-

presented [vor-gestellt, more literally, set-before]. In this fashion, nature is

what is pro- (in the sense of toward the re-presenting human) pro-duced [Her-

gestellt, more literally, set-forth]. As what is so pro-duced, nature is as that

which stands over against the human [das dem Menschen Entgegenstehende].

As object [Gegenstand] of human representation, nature is set toward human

representation and is in this sense pro-duced. Thought in this manner,

producing is the basic trait of the objectification of nature. This producing

does not first make nature in the sense of a manufacturing or creating.

Producing sets to work a way in which nature turns itself toward [sich

zuwendet] the human and within this turning [Wendung] becomes deployable

[verwendbar]. This producing turns, from the outset, everything natural into

something objective for mathematical representation. In accordance with this

turning, such representation is already the decisive deployment of nature into

calculation. But this representational setting forth of nature into objectiveness

remains a kind of making manifest of nature. The basic trait of all

objectification is the essence of technology. (GA 77:11–12/CPC 7)

In ‘‘The Age of the World Picture’’ (1938), Heidegger points out that when nature

has become a represented object, this implies that the human has become a

representing subject; indeed in the modern age the human has become the

subiectum, the ground and ‘‘relational center’’ of all that is (GA 5:88/QCT 128).

This ‘‘conquest of the world as picture,’’ Heidegger claims, is ‘‘the fundamental

event of the modern age’’ (94/134). The problem is, to begin with, that ‘‘Scientific

representation is never able to encompass the essence of nature; for the objectness of

nature is, antecedently, only one way in which nature exhibits itself’’ (VA 58/QCT

174 tm). But the problem is not just that scientific representation is one-sided.

Country Path Conversations raises the question of ‘‘whether nature in its

objectiveness does not conceal itself more than it shows itself’’ (GA 77:17/CPC

11). ‘‘It could even be,’’ he says in the ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ ‘‘that nature, in the

face that it turns toward the human being’s technical mastery, is simply concealing

Footnote 14 continued

transcendental power of imagination projects, forming in advance the totality of possibilities in terms of

which it ‘looks out,’ in order thereby to hold before itself the horizon within which the knowing self, but

not just the knowing self, acts’’ (GA 3:149/KPM 106). In this book Heidegger links his interpretation of

Kant to his own thought at the time that ‘‘transcendence carries out the projection of the Being of the

being’’ (228/160).

388 B. W. Davis

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its essence’’ (GA 9:324/PM 247). This would indeed be a doubling of concealment,

for what gets concealed is the fact that nature is essentially self-concealing as well

as self-revealing, and thus that it withdraws especially from scientific and

technological demands to reveal itself in ‘‘boundless unconcealment.’’ The first

conversation in Country Path Conversations goes so far as to say that ‘‘the thinking

of physics and technology, which sets forth nature as object, shows itself as an

attack on nature’’ (GA 77:17/CPC 11), and suggests that, ‘‘through being attacked

by technology, a mysterious defense is set off in nature which aims at an

annihilation of the human essence [eine Vernichtung des Menschenwesens]’’ (33/

21), presumably implying what he speaks of elsewhere as the danger of the

technological reduction of humans themselves to standing-reserve, that is, to human

resources for the cybernetic ‘‘will to will’’ of the technological world (see VA

30/QCT 27; D 142). The third conversation, however, also speaks of a ‘‘healing’’

that can take place by way of opening ourselves to the expanse of nature that

exceeds and encompasses our human worlds (GA 77:206/CPC 132–33).

8 Physis as the emergence of being

Beginning in the mid-1930s, Heidegger seeks to reawaken a more originary sense of

nature by way of retrieving the early Greek understanding of physis and by

developing a new sense of ‘‘earth.’’ In a striking section of Contributions to

Philosophy, entitled ‘‘Nature and Earth,’’ Heidegger bemoans the destruction and

degradation of the original sense of nature, where, as physis, it ‘‘rested in the

essential occurrence of beyng itself.’’ This destruction and degradation of nature, he

says, has been brought about by the natural sciences, by technology, by its religious

subordination to supernatural grace, and by the recreation industry. He ends by

asking, ‘‘Does nature have to be renounced and abandoned to machination? Can we

yet seek the earth anew?’’ (GA 65:277–78/CP 218). Can we, that is, recover an

originary sense of ‘‘nature … as the self-secluding earth [which] bears the open

realm of the pictureless world’’ (91/72)?

In the pivotal essay ‘‘On the Origin of the Work of Art’’ (1935/36), Heidegger

develops a sense of ‘‘earth’’ as ‘‘That which unfolds constant plentitude, and

yet always takes what is unfolded back into itself and retains it’’ (HL 156/HR 137).

In other words, the earth is that which both supports and withdraws from world; it is

that which, in its irreducible strife with world, grounds world abyssally; it is a

‘‘ground which, since it is essentially and always closing itself off, is an abyss’’

(156/137). Unlike traditional conceptions of hyle or ‘‘matter,’’ earth is not just

formless matter that passively receives (or resists) forms or images imposed on it

from without; it is also what intimates to a carpenter ‘‘the shapes slumbering within

the wood’’ (WhD 53–54/WCT 23). Heidegger quotes Albrecht Durer’s statement

that ‘‘art lies hidden within nature’’ (GA 5:58/BW 195), and it is the calling of the

artist not only to bring forth these hidden potentials, these slumbering shapes, but to

do so in a manner that reveals nature as also self-concealing. ‘‘The work [of art] sets

forth the earth, sets it into the open as that which closes itself off’’ (HL 156/HR

137).


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At the same time as developing this new sense of ‘‘earth,’’ Heidegger seeks a

more originary sense of ‘‘nature’’ by attempting to retrieve the inceptual sense of

physis. Here as elsewhere, Aristotle is a watershed figure for Heidegger. Aristotle

tended to reduce physis to one kind of ousia (beingness), alongside techne and so

on. But at times he also suggests the opposite, that ousia as such is ‘‘something like

physis.’’ Here Heidegger finds an ‘‘echo [Nachklang] of the great inception of Greek

philosophy,’’ an inception in which being itself is understood as ‘‘the self-

concealing revealing, physis in the original sense,’’ a sense according to which

aletheia, truth as unconcealment, belongs to physis as emergence (GA 9:299–301/

PM 229–30). To retrieve this original sense of physis as ‘‘the fundamental word of

inceptual thinking,’’ Heidegger goes back to the Presocratics, and above all to

Heraclitus (see EM 10ff./IM 14ff.; and GA 55:85–181).

Here let us look at how he finds a reawakening and a further unfolding of this

originary sense of physis in Holderlin. In his 1939/40 essay on the poem ‘‘As When

on a Holiday…,’’ Heidegger writes:

Physis is an emerging and an arising, a self-opening, which, while rising, at

the same time turns back into what has emerged, and so shrouds within itself

that which on each occasion gives presence to what is present. Thought as a

fundamental word, physis signifies a rising into the open: the lighting of that

clearing into which anything may enter and appear, present itself in its outline,

show itself in its ‘‘appearance’’(eidos, idea) and be present as this or that.

Physis is that rising-up which goes-back-into-itself; it names the coming to

presence of that which abides in the rising-up and thus comes to presence as

open. (EHD 56/EHP 79 tm)

Physis is not an inert material on which forms are imprinted or imposed, either by a

divine craftsman or a transcendental subject, but rather a self-opening emergence of

the clearing that allows things to show themselves from themselves, calling on us to

help unfold this process of the self-showing of phenomena by attentively waiting

and responding. Nature calls on us to let it be; yet, as Heidegger says elsewhere,

‘‘To let be is to engage oneself with beings [Sein-lassen ist das Sicheinlassen auf

das Seiende]’’ (GA 9:188/PM 144), not simply to leave them alone. In contrast to an

artificial imposition of our will or projection of our designs on things, a careful

attentiveness to and engagement with things helps bring to fruition one or another of

their natural proclivities.

Nature, for Holderlin, is not restricted to being one region of beings; ‘‘as the

clearing, in her everything can first be present’’ as the being that it is. ‘‘Holderlin

names nature the holy because she is ‘older than the ages and above the gods’’’

(EHD 82/EHP 82). Even the powers and the very being of the gods derive from

nature, which is ‘‘all-present’’ and ‘‘all-creative’’ (65/87). As the open, nature

‘‘mediates the connections between all actual things,’’ including the relation

between gods and humans. ‘‘The open itself, however, though it first gives the

region for all belonging-to and -with each other, does not arise from any mediation.

The open itself is the immediate. Nothing mediated, be it a god or a man, is ever

capable of directly attaining the immediate’’ (61/83). The immediate is not a

390 B. W. Davis

123

determinate being, but rather the ‘‘the all-mediating mediatedness’’ that lets

determinate beings be in relation to one another.

Now, when Holderlin uses the name ‘‘nature’’ to refer specifically to the ‘‘law’’

(Gesez) or lawfulness of this mediation, then it is said that nature herself is

‘‘begotten out of holy chaos.’’ If the law of nature is the ground of the ordering that

supports also the formation of historical horizons of meaning, that ground is itself

grounded in the abyss of chaos. ‘‘Thought in terms of ‘nature’ (physis), chaos

remains that gaping out of which the open opens itself, so that it may grant its

bounded presence to all differentiations’’ (EHD 62–63/EHP 84–85). Holy chaos, we

might say, is the unfathomable open-region, the mystery, out of which and in which

a delimited, lawful, horizonal openness is formed. If the sense of ‘‘nature’’ is

restricted to the primordial order of the whole manifestness of beings, then we need

another term, such as ‘‘holy chaos,’’ to refer to the excess, the undelimited open-

region from out of which and within which all finite regions of being—all horizons

or delimited realms of openness that provide meaningful order to our worlds—

emerge and into which they ultimately submerge.

As Heidegger says elsewhere, physis names the Greek experience of being in terms

of that which ‘‘presences out of itself and is formed in itself,’’ that which ‘‘unfolds its

contour and its limit out of itself and for itself, versus everything merely floating away

and limitless’’ (GA 45:130/BQP 113 tm). In this manner the early Greeks, to be sure,

experienced the unity of being and truth as physis and aletheia. ‘‘Aletheia as

unconcealedness gathers in itself the primordial Greek meaning of the primordial word

physis. For this word designates that which emerges from itself and unfolds itself and

holds sway, such as the rose emerges and in emerging is what it is. … [But] for the

Greeks, unconcealedness remained unquestioned: for us it is what is most worthy of

questioning’’ (131–32/114–15). The Greeks experienced but did not sufficiently attend

in thought to the concealment (lethe) that always accompanies the un-concealment

(aletheia) of nature (physis). Neither Heidegger nor Holderlin merely returns to the

early Greeks; in reaching back to them they also reach back before and thus out beyond

them. Although, according to Heidegger, ‘‘Holderlin never knew the force of the

primordial word physis’’ (EHD 57/EHP 79), his poetic word reaches out beyond, by

reaching more radically back before, what the Greeks thought as physis, insofar as it

names the deepest dimension of nature, or, when the sense of ‘‘nature’’ is restricted to

the primordial order or lawfulness of beings as a whole, the unprethinkable open-region

of beyng that gives birth to nature: ‘‘holy chaos’’ as the formless origin of emergence

(physis) into order and form. Insofar as they attend to both the self-concealing as well as

the self-revealing dimensions of ‘‘nature’’ in the profoundest sense, Heidegger’s

‘‘beyng’’ (das Seyn) and Holderlin’s ‘‘the holy’’ (das Heilige) are ‘‘names of the other

inception’’ that can no longer be ‘‘brought back into the history of metaphysics, not

even into the first inception (physis)’’ (GA 70:157).

9 The useless yet healing expanse of nature

The third conversation in Country Path Conversations takes place between two

Germans in a prisoner of war camp in Russia. At the time it was written Heidegger’s


123

own two sons, Jorg and Hermann, had in fact been captured on the Russian front. In

a letter to his wife, on April 3, 1945, Heidegger wrote:

Thinking about the two of them has given me a strange strength in writing the

conversation. … in spite of everything I trust in the higher future of our

essence, though at times it looks as though all the Powers of Darkness have

been unleashed even from within ourselves in order to block the path that

leads there. … Soon now the pandemonium will be raging across the meadows

of Holderlin’s homeland; and yet – the water and the groves, the breezes and

the morning and the evening will rest within themselves & always be new

signs. (LW 188)

The conversation begins with the Younger Man relating that,

As we were marching to our workplace this morning, out of the rustling of the

expansive forest I was suddenly overcome by something healing [etwas

Heilsames]. Throughout the entire day I meditated on wherein this something

that heals [dieses Heilende] could rest. (GA 77: 206/CPC132)

Heidegger understands the holy as the wholeness that heals. In his essay on

Holderlin’s ‘‘As When on a Holiday…,’’ Heidegger writes:

What is always erstwhile [Das stets Einstige] is the holy [das Heilige]. As the

inceptual, it remains in itself unharmed and ‘whole’ [heil]. Through its all-

presence this originary ‘wholeness’ [Das ursprungliche Heile] gives to

everything actual the healing wholeness [Heil] of its abiding presence. (EHD

63/EHP 85 tm)

In the conversation, the Older Man suggests that perhaps what the Younger Man has

experienced as healing is ‘‘what is inexhaustible of the self-veiling expanse that

abides in these forests of Russia’’ (GA 77:206/CPC 132). They go on to speak of

this as follows:

Younger

man:

The capaciousness of the forests swings out into a concealed distance,

but at the same time swings back to us again, without ending with us.

Older man: It is almost as if, out of the open and yet veiled expanse, something

could never break in that sets itself in the way of our essence and

blocks its course. So nothing is encountered that bends our essence

back on itself and confines it to a narrowness by means of which it is

made rebellious in itself.

Younger

man:

The expanse carries us to what is objectless [dem Gegenstandlosen],

and yet also keeps us from dissolving into it. The expanse delivers our

essence into the open and at the same time gathers it into the simple,

as though the expanse’s abiding were a pure arrival for which we are

the inlet.

Older man: This expanse provides us with freedom. It frees us while we here—

between the walls of these barracks, behind barbed wire—incessantly

run up against and wound ourselves on what is objective [das

Gegenstandliche]. (GA 77:205–6/CPC 132)

392 B. W. Davis

123

The conversation goes on to say that the ‘‘healing expanse is not that of the

forest, but rather the forest’s own expanse is let into [eingelassen] what heals.’’

Nevertheless, ‘‘the forest does not become a mere symbol of the healing expanse ….

Indeed, I cannot say what was experienced otherwise than in view of what the forest

occasioned’’ (GA 77:206/CPC 133). Perhaps we might still call the healing expanse

‘‘nature,’’ even if it cannot be reduced to any particular natural being, such as a

forest, or collection of such beings. Or perhaps it is better thought of as the holy

chaos that gives birth to the order of nature. In any case, the expanse that ‘‘provides

us with freedom’’ and that heals us from the wounds of running up against what is

objective, is experienced especially ‘‘out of the rustling of the expansive forest’’

(205/132).

It is crucial to bear in mind that what heals is an ‘‘open and yet veiled expanse’’;

in contrast to the essentially delimited openness of a horizon of meaning, it is an

expanse that is so open as to be self-veiling. Whether we call it nature, the holy, or

holy chaos, it is this only inasmuch as it withholds itself and with it all things from

boundless unconcealment. Any horizon of meaning, any totality of significance, any

purview of useful equipment, abides in this wider region of meaninglessness and

uselessness. Accordingly, the conversation ends with a discussion of the usefulness

of the useless, or the necessity of the unnecessary, since without this background

there could be no foreground (GA 77:234–40/CPC 152–57).15 Without an exposure

to the free-dom of this excessive expanse of nature, there could be no historical

decisions which delimit the horizons of our meaningful worlds.

The unnecessary (das Unnotige), which in a letter to his wife Heidegger says is

what he means by ‘‘being’’ (LW 187), can be understood as the open-region that

surrounds—contains and exceeds—our historical horizons of meaning. We

generally attend only to the limited ground directly under our feet in a particular

time and place, that is, only to what is deemed useful or necessary in our current

horizon of understanding. Technology is the most exacerbated form of this

exclusive attention to the order of usefulness; it is a way of revealing world that

utterly obfuscates the embeddedness of world in nature.

It remains to be stressed, however, that Heidegger is not counseling a return to

physis as opposed to techne. Rather, if metaphysics, starting with Platonism, was

determined by an inverted rooting of physis in techne—such that nature was

interpreted as ‘‘creation’’ and God as a divine ‘‘craftsman,’’ and such that later, after

the ‘‘death of God,’’ the human could take over this role as a horizon-positing

transcendental subjectivity—then Heidegger’s is attempting to recover a more

primordial sense, not only of physis, but also of techne as properly rooted in physis.

In the first conversation, Heidegger reminds us that originally techne referred to

‘‘the letting-see and bringing-into-view of that which a thing is according to its

essence’’ (GA 77:13/CPC 8). In ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology,’’

15 I cannot discuss here the problematic assertion in these pages, penned at the end of the war, that the

Germans are the destined teachers of this lesson to the peoples of the world, or the contrary implications

of the fact that Heidegger nonetheless ends the conversation, and thus Conversations on a Country Path

as a whole, by quoting, not a German such as Holderlin, but rather a Chinese Daoist text that imparts this

teaching.


123

Heidegger writes: ‘‘Once the revealing that brings forth truth into the splendor of

radiant appearance was also called techne,’’ that is to say, the ‘‘poiesis of the fine

arts was also called techne’’ (VA 38/BW 339). The question is how to respond to the

current situation wherein techne has become technology in the sense of ‘‘that

letting-see and setting-toward in which nature comes to appear as a mathematical

object. This technology is the deployment of nature into the objectiveness of

calculating representational setting-before [Vorstellen], where calculating is a

quantitative measuring’’ (GA 77:13–14/CPC 9). Heidegger’s answer is not to see

such technology as ‘‘the work of the devil’’ and escape to the mountains. His

response is rather to develop what he calls (in his 1955 Memorial Address for

Konrad Kreutzer) a ‘‘releasement toward things,’’ die Gelassenheit zu den Dingen,

which would enable us to ‘‘let technological devises enter our daily life, and at the

same time leave them outside,’’ to ‘‘use technical devices, and yet with proper use

also keep ourselves free of them, so that we may let go of them at any time’’ (G

22–23/DT 54). This would be a matter of properly using such things without being

improperly used by them—a matter, for example, of not being outsmarted by our

smartphones or turned into androids by our thumb machines. Such Gelassenheit

toward things would entail an ‘‘openness to the mystery’’ (24/55), an openness to the

withdrawal inherent in the granting of beyng, an openness to the concealment that

accompanies and enables any unconcealment, an openness to the earth that grounds

yet withdraws from our worlds, an openness to the rootedness of the ordering of

techne in the ordering and in the unfathomable excess or ‘‘holy chaos’’ of physis.

To dwell in this manner would be to become what Heidegger calls elsewhere a

‘‘house-friend’’ to the world. Let me close with the following passage where he

attempts to articulate what this would mean:

Today we errantly wander through a world-house that is lacking a house-

friend. It is lacking, that is to say, a house-friend who is in equal manner and

with equal force inclined toward both the technologically constructed world-

edifice and the world as the house for a more original dwelling. Lacking is that

house-friend who is capable of re-entrusting the calculability and technology

of nature to the open mystery of a newly experienced naturalness of nature.

(GA 13:146; see GA 15:340/FS 44)

Abbreviations used for citations of Heidegger’s texts

BPP The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Translated by Albert Hofstadter.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. (Written 1927.)

BQP Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected ‘‘Problems’’ of ‘‘Logic.’’

Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer. Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1984. (Written 1937–38.)

BT Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised and with a

foreword by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany: State University of New York

Press, 2010. (Written 1926.)

BW Basic Writings. 2nd ed. Edited by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper

& Row, 1993. (Written 1927–1964.)

394 B. W. Davis

123

CPC Country Path Conversations. Translated by Bret W. Davis. Bloomington:


CP Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event). Translated by Richard

Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 2012. (Written 1936–38.)

D Denkerfahrungen: 1910–1976. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,

1983.

DT Discourse on Thinking. Translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans

Freund. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. (Written 1944–55.)

EHF The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy.

Translated by Ted Sadler. London/New York: Continuum, 2002.

(Written 1930.)

EHD Erlauterungen zu Holderlins Dichtung. 6th ed. Frankfurt am Main:

Vittorio Klostermann, 1996. (Written 1936–69.)

EHP Elucidations of Holderlin’s Poetry. Translated by Keith Hoeller. New

York: Humanity Books, 2000. (Written 1936–69.)

EM Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik. 5th ed. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1987.

(Written 1935.)

FCM The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude.

Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington:


FS Four Seminars. Translated by Andrew Mitchell and Francois Raffoul.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. (Written 1976–77.)

G Gelassenheit. 10th ed. Pfullingen: Neske, 1992. (Written 1944–55.)

GA Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975–. Cited

by the volume numbers listed below

3 Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. (Written 1929.)

5 Holzwege. (Written 1935–46.)

9 Wegmarken. (Written 1919–58.)

13 Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens. (Written 1910–76.)

15 Seminare. (Written 1951–73.)

16 Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges. (Written 1910–1976.)

24 Die Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie. (Written 1927.)

26 Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz.

(Written 1928.)

29/30 Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit.

(Written 1929.)

41 Die Frage nach dem Ding. Zu Kants Lehre von den transzendentalen

Grundsatzen. (Written 1935–36.)

55 Heraklit. (Written 1943–44.)

60 Phanomenologie des religiosen Lebens. (Written 1920–21.)

65 Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). (Written 1936–38.)

67 Metaphysik und Nihilismus. (Written 1938–39 and 1946–48.)

70 Uber den Anfang. (Written 1941.)

77 Feldweg-Gesprache. (Written 1944–45.)


123

HL Heidegger Lesebuch. Edited and with an introduction by Gunter Figal.

Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2007.

HR The Heidegger Reader. Edited and with an introduction by Gunter Figal.

Translated by Jerome Veith. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

2009.

IM Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard

Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. (Written 1935.)

KPM Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 4th edition, enlarged. Translated by

Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

LW Letters to His Wife: 1915–1970. Edited by Gertrud Heidegger. Translated

by Rupert Glasgow. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008.

MFL The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Translated by Michael Heim.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. (Written 1928.)

N1 Nietzsche. Erster Band. 5th ed. Pfullingen: Neske, 1989. (Written

1936–39.)

Ni Nietzsche, Vol. I, The Will to Power as Art. Translated by David Farrell

Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

PM Pathmarks. Edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1998. (Written 1919–61.)

PRL The Phenomenology of Religious Life. Translated by Matthias Fritsch and

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

2004. (Written 1920–21.)

QCT The Question Concerning Technology. Translated by William Lovitt. New

York: Harper & Row, 1977. (Written 1936–54.)

SZ Sein und Zeit. 17th ed. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993. (Written 1927)

TB On Time and Being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper &

Row, 1972. (Written 1962–64.)

VA Vortrage und Aufsatze. 7th ed. Pfullingen: Neske, 1994. (Written

1936–54.)

WCT What is Called Thinking? Translated by J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper

& Row, 1968. (Written 1951–52.)

WhD Was heißt Denken? 4th ed. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1984. (Written

1951–52.)

WT What is a Thing? Translated by W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch.

Chicago: Henry Regency Co., 1967. (Written 1935–36.)

Z Zollikoner Seminare. Protokolle—Zwiegesprache—Briefe. Edited by

Menard Boss. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1987.

ZS Zollikon Seminars: Protocols—Conversations—Letters. Edited by

Menard Boss. Translated by Franz Mayr and Richard Askay. Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 2001. (Written 1959–71.)

ZSD Zur Sache des Denkens. 3rd ed. Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1988. (Written

1962–64.)

396 B. W. Davis

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References

Capobianco, Richard. 2010. Engaging Heidegger. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Dahlstrom, Daniel O. 2007. Transcendental truth and the truth that prevails. In Transcendental

Heidegger, ed. Steven Crowell, and Jeff Malpas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Davis, Bret W. 2007. Heidegger and the will: On the way to Gelassenheit. Evanston: Northwestern

University Press.

Derrida, Jacques. 1989. Of spirit: Heidegger and the question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel

Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Haar, Michel. 1993. The song of the earth: Heidegger and the grounds of the history of being, trans.

Reginald Lilly, foreword by John Sallis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Sallis, John. 2004. Uranic time. In Platonic legacies. Albany: State University of New York Press.


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