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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Heidegger: place, presence « Previous | |Next »
May 2, 2007

As I'm struggling to make sense of place over at junk for code I want to continue looking at the way Jeff Malpas unpacks Heidegger's understanding of it in his Heidegger's Topology Being, Place, World. Malpas says:

Heidegger claimed that one of the great breakthroughs in his own thinking was to realize that this Greek understanding of being was based in the prioritization of a certain mode of temporality, namely the present, and so understood the being of things in terms of the “presence“ presencing” of things in the present—in terms of the way they “stand fast” here and now.

The issue of being is tied here directly to the idea of presence or presencing as such. Malpas says that this leaves leaves open as a question just what is meant by presence as such and whether what Heidegger means by presence is always one and the same. Thankfully, for us, he goes on to explore this.

He says:

It seems to me that Heidegger does indeed tend to think of being always in terms of presence, but that presence does not always mean presence in the sense of standing fast in the present, and so, when Heidegger refers to the way in which being has always meant “presence” or “presencing,” what remains at issue is just how “presence” should be understood. In fact, “presence” encompasses both presence or “presentness” (in the sense of that which is present as present) and the happening of such presentness (as the presenting or presencing of that which is present).

He says that I take “presence” itself to be ambiguous between both the entity that presences.... as well as presencing as such and thus take it to be ambiguous between beings and being... as well as between that which is
intelligible and that in which intelligibility is grounded. So there is one distinction here (between presence and what presences) that plays out in at least two ways (in terms of being and beings, as well as between the ground of intelligibility and what is intelligible). Malpas then says:
If this distinction between these two senses of “presence”—presence as that which is present as present and presence as the happening of such presentness—is accepted, then much of Heidegger’s thinking can be seen as an attempt to recover the latter of these two senses and, in so doing, to recover the necessary belonging-together of the former sense with the latter.

The presencing or disclosedness of a being is alway. a matter of its coming to presence in relation to other beings. This is why, for Heidegger, presencing or disclosedness is inseparable from the happening of a world. The happening of presence or disclosedness—the happening of world—as such. The “happening” here is the “happening” of the very things that we encounter in our concrete and immediate experience of the world.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:38 PM |