Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 18:02:26 +0200
Subject: Re: encryption?
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)


Cologne, 07 August 1998

henry sholar schrieb:
> also, i am attracted to two 
> peripheral movements:  Dasein's ownmost-potentiality-potentiality
> (ie, being-towards-death,the crypt); and the cryptic nature of this 
> cybernetic web of communication with which we have somehow 'met'.

Henry, death as the crypt has the peculiarity (but not only death) of being 
exposed (decrypted) in its encryptedness, i.e. we have a rapport with death 
(Sein-zum-Tode); it is in some sense obvious to us, even in its total withdrawal 
from us. 

Yes, we have ‘met’ somehow, and have always already met in a space of 
Seinkoennen which the telecoms presuppose when building their networks. Even 
living together with someone in the same house for many years does not undo 
encryption -- the other remains groundless. 

Mike Staples schrieb:
> A much needed elaboration for me, Michael. Perhaps you can comment on
> some of the other parts of my quandary. I had begun by assuming that
> being decrypted involved interpretation and, perhaps, presencing. I
> suggested that encryption might not involve interpretation because being
> encrypted was covered over, and therefore no interpretation was
> involved. Henry pointed out that being is always intepretive, so (back
> to my reading of Henry) even the encrypted is interpretation. The
> correction by Henry thus far makes sense to me from the standpoint that
> even encrypted being is still being. I'm fuzzy on how interpretation
> gets involved here, but I'm not arguing against it. I suppose the
> interpretation would be of the hidden (encryptedness) -- which is OK, I
> suppose.

Quandary is a good word, Michael! I’d like to propose it as a translation of the 
Greek _aporia_ (lack of way out, embarrassment). In Plato’s _Symposion_ Eros is 
cast as the son born of a drunken one-night-stand between Penia (meaning 
“poverty”) and Poros (meaning “the way out”). Erotic striving presupposes the 
quandary of not knowing the way forward and at the same time the inventiveness 
of being able to find a way out of any embarrassing quandary. 

This is also the situation with your questions and quandary. Decrypting 
understood as interpretation would be close to the meaning of decoding, but this 
seems to be a secondary meaning, the primary meaning being “bringing out of 
hiding”. 

In SuZ interpretation (Auslegung) is basically understood as Dasein’s 
possibility of elaborating its understanding, which latter is always a casting 
of Dasein’s being towards possibilities. 
“Die Ausbildung des Verstehens nennen wir _Auslegung_.” (SuZ 148) 
“We call the elaboration of understanding _interpretation_.” 
Heidegger continues: 

“In ihr eignet sich das Verstehen sein Verstandenes verstehend zu. In der 
Auslegung wird das Verstehen nicht etwas anderes, sondern es selbst. ... Die 
Auslegung ist nicht die Kenntnisnahme des Verstandenen, sondern die Ausarbeitung 
der im Verstehen entworfenen Moeglichkeiten.” (ibid.)

“In it [interpretation] understanding appropriates what it has understood to 
itself in understanding. In interpretation, understanding does not become 
something else, but itself... Interpretation is not taking note of what is 
understood but is the working-out of the possibilities cast/drafted in 
understanding.” 

I take this to mean that understanding is more primordial than interpretation 
(so that interpretation does not go all the way down) and that the latter is an 
elaboration, a working-out of what has been (already somehow) understood, where 
what has been understood is always an opening for Dasein to exist. What is 
understood is thus already out in the open, i.e. decrypted. Interpretation would 
mean that already understood possibilities of existing are brought more out into 
the open, i.e. a process of elaborative decrypting. 

Jumping now to a thought from the late lecture “The Way to Language” (1959): 

Language already leads the way in such decrypting by pointing-to... and thus 
allowing beings to be brought out into the open. The _logos_ itself is 
decryptive. In listening to language we are able to elaborate our understanding 
of world. Thus we exist in a continual play of encryption and decryption, the 
play of the truth of being, (and from another angle) the play of presencing and 
absencing in which beings can also be called, recalled and allowed to withdraw 
in the dimension of language. 

>But I am confused about "Nothingness". Extracting from my
> understanding of your lead in the past, I am not attempting to oppose
> encyptedness to decryptedness such that decryptedness equals being, and
> encryptedness equals non-being. This, I take it, would correspond to a
> metaphysics of presence. The more I toil over this the more it seems as
> though I don't quite understand how nothingness is. If nothingness "is",
> then it "is" being too, isn't it? Then what is no-being or non-being?
> And to make things just a bit worse, I've heard you refer from time to
> time of Dasein as really being nothing at all.

I suppose nothingness is “said in many ways”, including negation (of a 
statement) and annihilation, but these latter are not primordial meanings of 
nothingness. You’re certainly on the right track in not equating encryptedness 
with non-being and decryptedness with being, since the former terms refer to the 
play of truth. At the same time, however, nothingness is not a being. 

Heidegger’s lecture “Was ist Metaphysik?” (1929) offers a point of orientation 
to approach nothingness through the mood of Angst which “reveals nothingness” 
(_Wegmarken_ 111). Heidegger takes a lead from a “well known interpretation” of 
the “essential impossibility of determining” what Angst is anxious about and 
anxious for, which is expressed in the turn of phrase: in Angst “es ist einem 
unheimlich” (ibid.). This phrase is pretty much untranslatable; something like 
“it’s eery” or “it’s uncanny” (I can’t get “einem” across). 

“As a whole it is so. Everything and we ourselves sink into an indifference. 
This however not in the sense of a mere disappearance, but in their pulling back 
as such they turn toward us. This pulling back of beings as a whole which 
encircles us in Angst, oppresses us. No hold remains. There remains only, and 
there comes over us -- in the slipping away of beings -- this ‘no’. Angst 
reveals nothingness.” (ibid.) 

So beings as a whole can slip away from us in a certain exceptional mood. 

“In Angst there is a shrinking-back-from... which is of course no longer a 
fleeing-from..., but rather a spellbound calm. The back-from... starts from 
nothingness. Nothingness does not attract to itself but is essentially 
repelling. The repulsion from itself, however, is as such a letting-slip and a 
pointing to the submerging of beings as a whole. This totally repelling pointing 
to the slipping away of beings as a whole as which nothingness encircles Dasein 
in Angst is the essencing of nothingness: the nihil-ing (Nichtung). ... Only in 
the bright night of the nothingness of Angst does the originary openness of 
beings as such arise: that they are beings -- and not nothing.” (_Wegmarken_ 
113).

Beings as such are what is “utterly other -- vis-à-vis nothingness” which in 
turn is the “apriori making-possible of the revealedness of beings at all”. 
(114) 

“Da-sein means: being-held-out into nothingness.” (114). 

Nothingness is another name for being itself, which is the groundless ground for 
beings being at all and for Dasein being able to approach beings as such at all. 
Nothingness is decrypted in the mood of Angst, but for the most part, 
nothingness is “obscured in its originaryness” (115); it remains at least 
partially encrypted. Nothingness is repelling in being uncovered; it withdraws 
into encryption in pointing to beings as a whole as they slip away into 
indifference. So nothingness is not something we can grasp (in understanding), 
just as little as we can grasp beings as a whole. Only mood can open up and in 
this sense decrypt beings as a whole. Being held out into nothingness means 
being exposed to its repelling openness as the Other of beings. 


Michael
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