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Reason and the rationally structured Reality. For Plato, the Reason/Unreason
distinction is ontologically and epistemologically ultimate and immutable. The
Platonic distinction is the source of binary opposition and dualistic thinking in the
traditional Western mainstream Rationalistic thinking. Chora is alterity which de-
fies the metaphysics of presence. But what defies the logic of Platonic reason and
metaphysics only shows the limitation of Platonic logos and reprsentationalism. By
the dexterous hands of Heidegger chora is transformed into Heideggerian absence,
pointing to open-ended multiple ways of disclosure alternative to presence. What
is “absolutely unreal and unknowable” is really what is resistant to the logic of
monolithic Platonic Truth. The “bastard logic,” if creatively recast pluralistically
along the Heideggerian line of thinking, offers intimations of alternative ways of
disclosure of beyng and thinking, points to the manifoldness of enownings and
beyng-historical thinking.
Now let us move on to topology the way Heidegger does in his middle phase,
as in Contributions to Philosophy, and in the later phase, as in The Thing and
Building Dwelling Thinking. In his topological phase, be-ing yields to enowning
(Ereignis). Focus shifts from be-yng to enowning. “Be-ing holds sway as enown-
ing.”9 But when be-ing sways as enowning, “a being is.” This is what Heidegger
says: “Be-ing holds sway: a being is.”10 In the German original, the passage
reads: “Das Seyn west: das Seiende ist.”11 “Seiende” means a a particular thing
(as in thinging). So Ereignis really means thinging, that is, particular, unique, and
unrepeatable happening (event). Now the customary translation of “Ereignis” as
“event” makes sense. Here I am adumbrating the Heideggerian project of nomi-
nalistic process philosophy.
“Be-ing needs man in order to hold sway; and man belongs to be-ing so that
he can accomplish his utmost destiny. . . . The counter-resonance of needing and
belonging makes up be-ing as enowning; and the first thing that is incumbent
upon thinking is to raise the resonance of this counter-resonance to the onefold
of knowing awareness and to ground the counter-resonance in its truth. ”12 That
be-ing enowns Dasein means that be-ing historically unfolds itself in response to
which Dasein projects-open by way of thinking. Here thrown projecting-open is
en-owned projecting-open. Enowned projecting-open is inceptual thinking, that is,
the inception of beying-historical thinking (Seynsgeschichtes Denken).
Unique, unrepeatable, particular historical happening is “time-space as ab-
ground (Die Zeit-Raum als Ab-grund). “Ab-ground is the originary essential
swaying of ground. . . . Ab-ground is the staying-away of ground. . . . The manner
of non-granting the ground. . . . letting be empty—thus an outstanding manner
of enopening. ”13 Particular happening is contingent. Ab-ground is a particular
happening yielding and deferring to other unpredictable contingent particular
happenings, “as yet unrevealed.” Particular happening is not disclosure of being
as a whole. Rather be-ing is the disjunction between presence and absence, that is,
unpredictable, open-ended particular happenings. Be-ing (beyng) or being with a
crossing out “shelters untapped treasures and is the promise of a find that awaits
Heidegger Viewed from an Eastern Perspective 347
projecting-open is such only when it occurs as the experience of thrownness and thus
of belongingness to be-ing.”23 Thinking as enopoening is existential/ performative.
In Four Seminars, Heidegger says: “there is no longer room for the very name
of being. Letting is then the pure giving, which itself refers to the it [das Es] that
gives, which is understood as Ereignis.”24 On giving Heidegger says: that in ”il y
a” or “there is/it gives” [“es gibt”], “ ” the “it” that here “gives” is being itself. . . .
The self-giving into the open, along with the open region itself. is self-giving.”25
But, as pointed out earlier, “being is enowned through enowning” [Sein ist durch
Ereignis ereignet],”26 and enowning, as already observed, is thinging. Just as being
is appropriated (enowned) by enowning, so is enowning appropriated by thinging.
Hence “self-givng” of being is “self-giving” of thinging. The “ground” of the thing
which things is thinging itself.
“Angelus gave us the occasion to show that the principle of reason generally
does not hold in the strict sense. The rose is without why, it blooms because it
blooms. . . . ”27 “The rose is without why, but not without grounds.”28 What are the
grounds? “Blooming is grounded in itself, it has its ground with and in itself. The
blooming is a pure arising on its own, a pure shining .”29 Here Heidegger lets the
Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason or the Kantian notion of the “transcen-
dental condition for the possibility of objects” wither away. Heidegger delivers a
decisive blow to foundationalism. In fine, beyng as enownig is thinging. Blooming
is groundless thinging, Zu-fall.
The jug (better, jugging, that is, the swaying of the jug) is an apt example of
thinging. “The jug’s swaying is the pure, giving gathering of the fourfold into a
single time-space, a single stay. The jug sways as a thing. But how does the thing
sway? The thing things. Thinging gathers.. Appropriating the fourfold, it gathers
the fourfold’s stay, its while, into something that stays for a while: into this thing,
that thing.”30 A jug, when wine or water is poured from it, is a thing that things.
The jug as a thing gathers the fourfold, earth, sky, gods, and mortals that belong
together: they are “the same.” “The jug-character consists in the poured off gift
of the pouring out.”31 The jug is a thing that things. Thinging is gathering. “Our
language denotes what a gathering is by an ancient word. That word is: thing.”32
A jug is a thing as a a mirror-play of the fourfold. The jug jugs. The world worlds.
Jugging, thinging, is thinging-spacing-timing.
“The fouring sways (west) as the worlding of world. The mirror-play of world
is the round dance of happening (des Reigen des Ereignens). Therefore, the round
dance does not encompass the four like a hoop. The round dance is the ring that
joins while it plays as mirror. As happening (Ereignend), it lightens the four into the
radiance of their simple oneness. . . . The gathered sway (Das gesammpte Wesen)
of the mirror-play of the world, joining in this way, is the ringing. In the ringing
of the mirror-playing ring, . . . each one (of the four) retains its own nature. . . .
they (the four) join together, worlding, the world.”33 The event of the “pure gift of
pouring out”of wine is conditioned (be-dingt) by, inter alia, the brewing process
of wine which involves the work of human beings (mortals), the growing process
Heidegger Viewed from an Eastern Perspective 349
of grapes which also calls for human labor, earth (soil, for one thing), sky (the
favorable weather and climate among others), and patterns of wine cultivation
commensurate with cultural tradition (hence gods). The four “belong together”
inseparably and inviolably. The fouring (die Vierung) is the dynamical sway of
the mirror-play of the “betrothed.” The mirror-play of the fourfold, mirroring one
another, as enfolded by “the radiance of the simple oneness,” while each of the four
retaining “its own nature (je eigenes Wesen). In fine, the happening of wine being
poured out of a jug gathers the fourfold in one unifying sway.
Thinking is gathering. To expatiate on the theme, let us talk of the bridge as an
example. “The bridge swings over the stream “with ease and power.” It does not
just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the
bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from
each other. . . . With the banks , the bridge brings to the stream the one and the
other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and banks and
landscape into one other’s neighborhood.”34 Here the bridge as a thing is the center
of gathering. The bridge enfolds the banks, the stream and the landscape. What
makes the bridge the bridge is its relating to other related elements.
A thing things, And things are locations which allow for spaces. “Only things
that are locations in this manner allow for spaces. . . . Space is in essence that for
which room has been made, . . . That for which room is made is always granted
and hence is joined, that is, gathered, by virtue of a location, that is, by such a thing
as the bridge.”35 “The bridge is a location. As such a thing, it allows a space into
which earth, heaven, divinities and mortals are admitted. The space allowed by the
bridge contains many spaces variously near or far from the bridge.”36 A thing that
gathers is a location which generates a space, just as Dasein is temporality. It is
just that Heidegger should have said here that a thing is a time just as it is a space,
just as he should have said in Being and Time that Dasein is spatiality as well as
temporality. Thing is thinging-spacing. But thinging-spacing is thinging-spacing-
timing. Thinging-spacing-timing is a center of gathering.
Let us come back to the example of the bridge. The bridge is the bridge in
virtue of the way it plays the role as “a passage that crosses.” The bridge bridges;
it lets the banks emerge as banks. The bridge gathers into this particular world the
stream and the landscape as well as the banks. The bridge is a thing because of its
dynamically relating to and enfolding the banks, the stream, and the landscape. Does
it also mean that the banks also gather and enfold the bridge as well as the stream
and the landscape? Does it mean that the banks can also be a center of gathering?
Heidegger does not say that the banks let the bridge emerge as the bridge. Nor
does he say that the stream is a center of gathering just as the bridge is a center of
gathering. For him, the bridge is the only center of gathering.
On place Heidegger says: “The essence of the place consists in holding gathered,
as the present “where,” the circumstance of what is in its nexus, what pertains to it
and is “of” it, of the place . The place is the originally gathering holding of what
belongs together and is thus for the most part a manifold of places reciprocally
350 Kwang-Sae Lee
notes
1. Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounter and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger 1929–1976,
trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993),
p. 176; Encounter hereafter.
2. Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic,”
trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schwer (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994),
p. 13; BQP hereafter.
3. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper &
Row Publishers, 1972), p. 17; TB hereafter.
4. Francis Macdonald Conford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato Translated with
a Running Commentary (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul LTD, 1956), p. 193; Timaeus
hereafter.
5. Conford, Timaeus, p. 193.
6. Ibid., 194.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 195.
9. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), section 10, p. 22; CP hereafter.
10. Heidegger, CP, section 139, p. 183.
11. Martin Heidegger, Gesamptausgabe Band 65 Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)
(Frankfurt am Main: Vittotio Klostermann, 1989), 260; BP hereafter.
12. Heidegger, CP, section 133, p. 177.
13. Ibid., section 242, pp. 264–265.
14. “On the Question of Being” which is included in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed.
William MacNeil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 314; PM hereafter.
15. Heidegger, CP, section 242, p. 269.
16. Ibid., section 242, pp. 269–270.
Heidegger Viewed from an Eastern Perspective 351