presence

Category: Heidegger - Being and Time etc
Submitter: Murilo Cardoso de Castro

presence

Presence (Anwesenheit), 25-26, 71, 415-418, 423 (constant); das Anwesende, 326 ("what presences"), 417 ("what is present"); being present (anwesend sein), 346 ("bodily," leibhaftig), 359, 369, 389, 417 ("having presence"), 423 (constantly); in the later marginal remarks (=fn): 105fn (constant), 153fn, 320fn; also "presencing," 39fn (Anwesen), 235fn (Anwesenheit). See also objective presence (BT)



Everyone who is acquainted with the middle ages sees that Descartes is ‘dependent’ upon medieval scholasticism and employs its terminology. But with this ‘discovery’ nothing is achieved philosophically as long as it remains obscure to what a profound extent the medieval ontology has influenced the way in which posterity has determined or failed to determine the ontological character of the res cogitans. The full extent of this cannot be estimated until both the meaning and the limitations of the ancient ontology have been exhibited in terms of an orientation directed towards the question of Being. In other words, in our process of destruction we find ourselves faced with the task of Interpreting the basis of the ancient ontology in the light of the problematic of Temporality. When this is done, it will be manifest that the ancient way of interpreting the Being of entities is oriented towards the ‘world’ or ‘Nature’ in the widest sense, and that it is indeed in terms of ‘time’ that its understanding of Being is obtained. The outward evidence for this (though of course it is merely outward evidence) is the treatment of the meaning of Being as parousia or ousia, which signifies, in ontologico-Temporal terms, ‘PRESENCE’ [“Anwesenheit”]. Entities are grasped in their Being as ‘PRESENCE’; this means that they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time – the ‘Present’ BTMR §6

The problematic of Greek ontology, like that of any other, must take its clues from Dasein itself. In both ordinary and philosophical usage, Dasein, man’s Being, is ‘defined’ as the zoon logon echon – as that living thing whose Being is essentially determined by the potentiality for discourse. legein is the clue for arriving at those structures of Being which belong to the entities we encounter in addressing ourselves to anything or speaking about it [im Ansprechen und Besprechen]. (Cf. Section 7 b.) This is why the ancient ontology as developed by Plato turns into ‘dialectic’. As the ontological clue gets progressively worked out – namely, in the ‘hermeneutic’ of the logos – it becomes increasingly possible to grasp the problem of Being in a more radical fashion. The ‘dialectic’, which has been a genuine philosophical embarrassment, becomes superfluous. That is why Aristotle ‘no longer has any understanding’ of it, for he has put it on a more radical footing and raised it to a new level [aufhob]. legein itself – or rather noein, that simple awareness of something present-at-hand in its sheer presence-at-hand, which Parmenides had already taken to guide him in his own interpretation of Being – has the Temporal structure of a pure ‘making-present’ of something. Those entities which show themselves in this and for it, and which are understood as entities in the most authentic sense, thus get interpreted with regard to the Present; that is, they are conceived as PRESENCE (ousia). BTMR §6

All explicata to which the analytic of Dasein gives rise are obtained by considering Dasein’s existence-structure. Because Dasein’s characters of Being are defined in terms of existentiality, we call them “existentialia”. These are to be sharply distinguished from what we call “categories” – characteristics of Being for entities whose character is not that of Dasein. Here we are taking the expression “category” in its primary ontological signification, and abiding by it. In the ontology of the ancients, the entities we encounter within the world are taken as the basic examples for the interpretation of Being. noein (or the logos, as the case may be) is accepted as a way of ‘access to them. Entities are encountered therein. But the Being of these entities must be something which can be grasped in a distinctive kind of legein (letting something be seen), so that this Being becomes intelligible in advance as that which it is – and as that which it is already in every entity. In any discussion (logos) of entities, we have previously addressed ourselves to Being; this addressing is kategoresthai. This signifies, in the first instance, making a public accusation, taking someone to task for something in the PRESENCE of everyone. When used ontologically, this term means taking an entity to task, as it were, for whatever it is as an entity – that is to say, letting everyone see it in its Being. The kategoriai are what is sighted and what is visible in such a seeing. They include the various ways in which the nature of those entities which can be addressed and discussed in a logos may be [SZ:45] determined a priori. Existentialia and categories are the two basic possibilities for characters of Being. The entities which correspond to them require different kinds of primary interrogation respectively: any entity is either a “who” (existence) or a “what” (presence-at-hand in the broadest sense). The connection between these two modes of the characters of Being cannot be handled until the horizon for the question of Being has been clarified. BTMR §9

The work produced refers not only to the “towards-which” of its usability and the “whereof” of which it consists: under simple craft conditions it also has an assignment to the person who is to use it or wear it. The work is cut to his figure; he ‘is’ there along with it as the work emerges. Even when goods are produced by the dozen, this constitutive assignment is by no means lacking; it is merely indefinite, and points to the random, the average. Thus along with the work, we encounter not only entities ready-to-hand but also entities with Dasein’s kind of Being – entities for which, in their concern, the product becomes ready-to-hand; and together with these we encounter the world in which wearers and users live, which is at the same time ours. Any work with which one concerns oneself is ready-to-hand not only in the domestic world of the workshop but also in the public world. Along with the public world, the environing Nature [die Umweltnatur] is discovered and is accessible to everyone. In roads, streets, bridges, buildings, our concern discovers Nature as having some definite direction. A covered railway platform takes account of bad weather; an installation for public lighting takes account of the darkness, or rather of specific changes in the PRESENCE or absence of daylight – the [SZ:71] BTMR §15

Similarly, when something ready-to-hand is found missing, though its everyday PRESENCE [Zugegensein] has been so obvious that we have never taken any notice of it, this makes a break in those referential contexts which circumspection discovers. Our circumspection comes up against emptiness, and now sees for the first time what the missing article was ready-to-hand with, and what it was ready-to-hand for. The environment announces itself afresh. What is thus lit up is not itself just one thing ready-to-hand among others; still less is it something present-at-hand upon which equipment ready-to-hand is somehow founded: it is in the ‘there’ before anyone has observed or ascertained it. It is itself inaccessible to circumspection, so far as circumspection is always directed towards entities; but in each case it has already been disclosed for circumspection. ‘Disclose’ and ‘disclosedness’ will be used as technical terms in the passages that follow, and shall signify ‘to lay open’ and ‘the character of having been laid open.’ Thus ‘to disclose’ never means anything like ‘to obtain indirectly by inference’. BTMR §16

[SZ:326] Anticipatory resoluteness discloses the current Situation of the “there” in such a way that existence, in taking action, is circumspectively concerned with what is factically ready-to-hand environmentally. Resolute Being-alongside what is ready-to-hand in the Situation – that is to say, taking action in such a way as to let one encounter what has PRESENCE environmentally – is possible only by making such an entity present. Only as the Present [Gegenwart] in the sense of making present, can resoluteness be what it is: namely, letting itself be encountered undisguisedly by that which it seizes upon in taking action. BTMR §65

Curiosity is a distinctive tendency of Dasein’s Being, in accordance with which Dasein concerns itself with a potentiality-for-seeing. Like the concept of sight, ‘seeing’ will not be restricted to awareness through ‘the eyes of the body’. Awareness in the broader sense lets what is ready-to-hand and what is present-at-hand be encountered ‘bodily’ in themselves with regard to the way they look. Letting them be thus encountered is grounded in a Present. This Present gives us in general the ecstatical horizon within which entities can have bodily PRESENCE. Curiosity, however, does not make present the present-at-hand in order to tarry alongside it and understand it; it seeks to see only in order to see and to have seen. As this making-present which gets entangled in itself, curiosity has an ecstatical unity with a corresponding future and a corresponding having been. The craving for the new is of course a way of proceeding towards something not yet seen, but in such a manner that the making-present seeks to extricate itself from awaiting. Curiosity is futural in a way which is altogether inauthentic, and in such a manner, moreover, that it does not await a possibility, but, in its craving, just desires such a possibility as something that is actual. Curiosity gets constituted by a making-present which is not held on to, but which, in merely making present,’ thereby seeks constantly to run away from the awaiting in which it is nevertheless ‘held’, though not held on to. The Present ‘arises or leaps away’ from the awaiting which belongs to it, and it does so in the sense [SZ:347] of running away from it, as we have just emphasized. But the making-present which ‘leaps away’ in curiosity is so little devoted to the ‘thing’ it is curious about, that when it obtains sight of anything it already looks away to what is coming next. The making-present which ‘arises or leaps away’ from the awaiting of a definite possibility which one has taken hold of, makes possible ontologically that not-tarrying which is distinctive of curiosity. The making-present does not ‘leap away’ from the awaiting in such a manner, as it were, that it detaches itself from that awaiting and abandons it to itself (if we understand this ontically). This ‘leaping-away’ is rather an ecstatical modification of awaiting, and of such a kind that the awaiting leaps after the making-present. The awaiting gives itself up, as it were; nor does it any longer let any inauthentic possibilities of concern come towards it from that with which it concerns itself, unless these are possibilities only for a making-present which is not held on to. When the awaiting is ecstatically modified by the making-present which leaps away, so that it becomes an awaiting which leaps after, this modification is the existential-temporal condition for the possibility of distraction. BTMR §68

Circumspection operates in the involvement-relationships of the context of equipment which is ready-to-hand. Moreover, it is subordinate to the guidance of a more or less explicit survey of the equipmental totality of the current equipment-world and of the public environment which belongs to it. This survey is not just one in which things that are present-at-hand are subsequently scraped together. What is essential to it is that one should have a primary understanding of the totality of involvements within which factical concern always takes its start. Such a survey illumines one’s concern, and receives its ‘light’ from that potentiality-for-Being on the part of Dasein for the sake of which concern exists as care. In one’s current using and manipulating, the concernful circumspection which does this ‘surveying’, brings the ready-to-hand closer to Dasein, and does so by interpreting what has been sighted. This specific way of bringing the object of concern close by interpreting it circumspectively, we call “deliberating” [Überlegung]. The scheme peculiar to this is the ‘if – then’; if this or that, for instance, is to be produced, put to use, or averted, then some ways and means, circumstances, or opportunities will be needed. Circumspective deliberation illumines Dasein’s current factical situation in the environment with which it concerns itself. Accordingly, such deliberation never merely ‘affirms’ that some entity is present-at-hand or has such and such properties. Moreover, deliberation can be performed even when that which is brought close in it circumspectively is not palpably ready-to-hand and does not have PRESENCE within the closest range. Bringing the environment closer in circumispective deliberation has the existential meaning of a making present; for envisaging is only a mode of this. In envisaging, one’s deliberation catches sight directly of that which is needed but which is un-ready-to-hand. Circumspection which envisages does not relate itself to ‘mere representations’. [SZ:359] BTMR §69

Only on the basis of its ecstatico-horizonal temporality is it possible for Dasein to break into space. The world is not present-at-hand in space; yet only within a world does space let itself be discovered. The ecstatical temporality of the spatiality that is characteristic of Dasein, makes it intelligible that space is independent of time; but on the other hand, this same temporality also makes intelligible Dasein’s ‘dependence’ on space – a ‘dependence’ which manifests itself in the well-known phenomenon that both Dasein’s interpretation of itself and the whole stock of significations which belong to language in general are dominated through and through by ‘spatial representations’. This priority of the spatial in the Articulation of concepts and significations has its basis not in some specific power which space possesses, but in Dasein’s kind of Being. Temporality is essentially falling, and it loses itself in making present; not only does it understand itself circumspectively in terms of objects of concern which are ready-to-hand, but from those spatial relationships which making-present is constantly meeting in the ready-to-hand as having PRESENCE, it takes its clues for Articulating that which has been understood and can be interpreted in the understanding in general. BTMR §70

We need only delimit that phenomenal range which we necessarily must also have in view ontologically when we talk of Dasein’s historicality. The transcendence of the world has a temporal foundation; and by reason of this, the world-historical is, in every case, already ‘Objectively’ there in the historizing of existing Being-in-the-world, without being grasped historiologically. And because factical Dasein, in falling, is absorbed in that with which it concerns itself, it understands its history worldhistorically in the first instance. And because, further, the ordinary understanding of Being understands ‘Being’ as presence-at-hand without further differentiation, the Being of the world-historical is experienced and interpreted in the sense of something present-at-hand which comes along, has PRESENCE, and then disappears. And finally, because the meaning of Being in general is held to be something simply self-evident, the question about the kind of Being of the world-historical and about the movement of historizing in general has ‘really’ just the barren circumstantiality of a verbal sophistry. BTMR §75

Comparison shows that for the ‘advanced’ Dasein the day and the PRESENCE of sunlight no longer have such a special function as they have for the ‘primitive’ Dasein on which our analysis of ‘natural’ time-reckoning has been based; for the ‘advanced’ Dasein has the ‘advantage’ of even being able to turn night into day. Similarly we no longer need to glance explicitly and immediately at the sun and its position to ascertain the time. The manufacture and use of measuring-equipment of one’s own permits one to read off the time directly by a clock produced especially for this purpose. The “what o’clock is it?” is the ‘what time is it?’ Because the clock – in the sense of that which makes possible a public way of time-reckoning – must be regulated by the ‘natural’ clock, even the use of clocks as equipment is based upon Dasein’s temporality, which, with the disclosedness of the “there”, first makes possible a’dating of the time with which we concern ourselves; this is a fact, even if it is covered up when the time is read off. Our understanding of the natural clock develops with the advancing discovery of Nature, and instructs us as to new possibilities for a kind of time-measurement which is relatively independent of the day and of any explicit observation of the sky. BTMR §80

But in a certain manner even ‘primitive’ Dasein makes itself independent of reading off the time directly from the sky, when instead of ascertaining the sun’s position it measures the shadow cast by some entity available at any time. This can happen in the first instance in the simplest form of the ancient ‘peasant’s clock’. Everyman is constantly accompanied [SZ:416] by a shadow; and in the shadow the sun is encountered with respect to its changing PRESENCE at different places. In the daytime, shadows have different lengths which can be paced off ‘at any time’. Even if individuals differ in the lengths of their bodies and feet, the relationship between them remains constant within certain limits of accuracy. Thus, for example, when one is concerned with making an appointment, one designates the time publicly by saying, ‘When the shadow is so many fleet long, then we shall meet yonder.’ Here in Being with one another within the rather narrow boundaries of an environment which is very close to us, it is tacitly presupposed that the ‘locations’ at which the shadow gets paced off are at the same latitude. This clock is one which Dasein does not have to carry around with it; in a certain manner Dasein itself is the clock. BTMR §80

Saying “now”, however, is the discursive Articulation of a making-present which temporalizes itself in a unity with a retentive awaiting. The dating which is performed when one uses a clock, turns out to be a distinctive way in which something present-at-hand is made present. Dating does not simply relate to something present-at-hand; this kind of relating has itself the character of measuring. Of course the number which we get by measuring can be read off immediately. But this implies that when a [SZ:417] stretch is to be measured, we understand that our standard is, in a way, contained in it; that is, we determine the frequency of its PRESENCE in that stretch. Measuring is constituted temporally when a standard which has PRESENCE is made present in a stretch which has PRESENCE. The idea of a standard implies unchangingness; this means that for everyone at any time the standard, in its stability, must be present-at-hand. When the time with which one concerns oneself is dated by measuring, one interprets it by looking at something present-at-hand and making it present – something which would not become accessible as a standard or as something measured except by our making it present in this distinctive manner. Because the making-present of something having PRESENCE has a special priority in dating by measuring, the measurement in which one reads off the time by the clock also expresses itself with special emphasis in the “now”. Thus when time is measured, it is made public in such a way that it is encountered on each occasion and at any time for everyone as ‘now and now and now’. This time which is ‘universally’ accessible in clocks is something that we come across as a present-at-hand multiplicity of “nows”, so to speak, though the measuring of time is not directed thematically towards time as such. BTMR §80

The time which is made public by our measuring it, does not by any means turn into space because we date it in terms of spatial measurementrelations. Still less is what is existential-ontologically essential in the measuring of time to be sought in the fact that dated ‘time’ is determined numerically in terms of spatial stretches and in changes in the location of some spatial Thing. What is ontologically decisive lies rather in the specific kind of making-present which makes measurement possible. Dating [SZ:418] in terms of what is ‘spatially’ present-at-hand is so far from a spatializing of time that this supposed spatialization signifies nothing else than that an entity which is present-at-hand for everyone in every “now” is made present in its own PRESENCE. Measuring time is essentially such that it is. necessary to say “now”; but in obtaining the measurement, we, as it were, forget what has been measured as such, so that nothing is to be found except a number and a stretch. BTMR §80

The sequence of “nows” is taken as something that is somehow presentat-hand, for it even moves ‘into time’. We say: ‘In every “now” is now; in every “now” it is already vanishing.’ In every “now” the “now” is now and therefore it constantly has PRESENCE as something selfsame, even though in every “now” another may be vanishing as it comes along. Yet as this thing which changes, it simultaneously shows its own constant PRESENCE. Thus even Plato, who directed his glance in this manner at time as a sequence of “nows” arising and passing away, had to call time “the image of eternity”: X BTMR §81

Submitted on:  Fri, 04-Mar-2022, 14:37