Neoplatonic Henology as an Overcoming of Metaphysics

REINER SCHRMANN
New School for Social Research

The closure of metaphysics, which some audacities in the

. " Enneads seem to indicate by transgressing it ...
Jacques Derrida*

It has often been noted that among the academic disciplines philosophy
is the one that depends most on its own history. This may be so because,
just as we learn to speak from our parents and society, so we learn to
think from our forebears and our culture. Our twentieth century may
furthermore place us in the peculiar position where reflecting upon the
historical situatedness of our reasoned convictions has become a major
element of the philosophical endeavor itself.
Whoever sets out to do philosophy, whether in the Middle Ages or
today, places himself within a lineage. He is situated diachronically. But
he is also situated synchronically, he places himself within a cultural
network of exchanges. This network makes for an interest that is
operative in philosophical works, an interest that turns the philosopher
into the spokesman for his times. One may describe this synchronic link
in psychoanalytical terms and speak of a desire that comes to the fore in
thinking. One may also describe it in structuralist terms and speak of
systemic rules that thinking obeys in every age. One may finally describe

*JacquesDerrida, Margins of Philosophy,transl. A. Bass (Universityof ChicagoPress,

1982), p. 172 (translation modified).

25
26

it in phenomenological terms and speak of epochal modes of being in the

world. This last approach has the advantage of laying bare strategies in
the history of philosophy, which obey a certain logic. Thinking these
strategies through to the end, we may learn something about our own
times, about where we come from and where we may be going. To me,
tracing the transmutations that philosophical topics undergo through the
ages, with the intent of clarifying our own topos, is the most fruitful way
of doing philosophy today. Looking with one eye to the sequence of past
epochs, and with the other to the potential that this sequence yields for
our own age amounts to more than a mere history of concepts
(BegAflsgeschichte). It consists rather in treating the cultural fluctuations
as a phenomenon in the strict sense.
Borrowing a term from Heidegger, which occurs in his lectures from
the mid-twenties on and which has since been used and abused
particularly by contemporary French writers, one may call the method of
reading our past for the sake of our present the "deconstruction"
(Abbau) of history.' To suggest the potential that the discourse on loci,
the topology, yields for present thought, I wish to follow-to "de-
construct"-one such major strategy in the history of philosophy: that of
henology,,the doctrine of the One. More specifically, I shall try to see in
what direction the transmutations point that henology undergoes from
Plotinus to Meister Eckhart to Heidegger.

"
Reading the Henological Tradition Prospectively

At first sight, the henological strand in philosophy runs rather

smoothly from late Antiquity to the Middle Ages to Modernity-at least
in one respect, namely that the discourse about the One is ultimately a
discourse about God, that henology is negative theology. In this one
regard, its history is deprived of real ruptures, of breaks. Or so it seems
when we read that tradition prospectively, as I shall briefly sketch, from
the Neoplatonists to our contemporaries.
Plotinus is usually, and probably rightfully, considered the father of _
speculative mysticism. His teaching is speculative since it consists
apparently in hypostasizing forms of thought into realms of the world,
and it is mystical since by such hypostatization Plotinus wishes to
account for an experience of transcendence that leads the mind beyond
'
reason. Here is one well-known text from his Enneads that shows quite
beautifully the link between cosmological speculation and inward
experience:
 27

.
Several times it has happened: I awake from the slumber of
.
_ the body to return to myself; and leaving behind all things and
becoming self-encentered, I behold the most marvelous
. '
beauty. Then, more than ever, I am assured of community
with the loftiest order. I live the highest life and acquire
identity with the divine. Poised within it by having attained
. that activity, I am raised above all other intelligible beings.
Yet, there comes the moment of descent from intellection to
reasoning, and after that sojourn in the divine, I ask myself
how it happens that I can now be descending and how the soul
ever entered into my body.22

Plotinus' cosmological interest is obvious: the soul's ascent described

in these lines consists in leaving the body behind, moving beyond
everything intelligible, and becoming centered upon the subsisting One
(here the hen psyches, the One within). Plotinus refers manifestly to the
three so-called hypostases: Soul, Mind and the One. There is also a
strong probability that the One is God, since by the ascent, he states, he
'
acquires identity with the divine.
Besides the cosmological interest, the tone of inwardness is evident,
too. The experience Plotinus relates is apparently autobiographical. His
disciple, Porphyry, tells us that his master "achieved the supreme goal
four times during the period I passed with him, by no mere latent fitness,
but by the ineffable act."3 However obscure the content of Plotinus'
experience may be, he himself describes it as "acquiring identity with the
divine." The traditional conclusion is that the supreme hypostasis in
Plotinus, the One, is God, that Plotinus' henology is negative theology. It
has to be negative since, as just quoted, the divine is above all intelligible
beings, above the hypostatic nous, and can therefore be spoken of only
through negations.
To proceed with this sketch of the received opinion about henology-
with its prospective reading-let us look at that thinker of the High
Middle Ages who seems to fall most squarely within the Neoplatonic
tradition, the tradition characterized by the representation of degrees of
being and by the strong interest in inwardness: Meister Eckhart. The
degrees of being are so essential to his thinking, it seems, that he does not
hesitate to introduce a rational and a trans-rational element even into
God. He calls this latter and highest degree of being, which is not
intelligible, "the Godhead," and strictly speaking, it is not a degree of
being, but non-being. He states squarely: "God and Godhead are as far
apart as heaven and earth."4 Why is the Godhead beyond God? Because
 28

of an experience of which our mind is capable and which consists in

nothing less than penetrating beyond God represented as Creator, as
Father, as Saviour, etc. Eckhart calls this experience the "breakthrough."
"God cannot be enough for me in all that makes him God, and with all his
divine works. For in this breakthrough I discover that I and [the
Godhead] are one. "5
To a prospective reading of the history of philosophy, Meister Eckhart
appears as the synthesizer of the Neoplatonic and the Aristotelian
traditions. He is usually presented as the one who christianizes the
Plotinian "return" of the soul into its source, by radicalizing the
Aristotelian doctrine of analogy. Things created resemble their Creator
inasmuch as they possess partially qualities that God possesses fully.
Just like Aquinas before him, Meister Eckhart applies the pattern of
participation by diminished similitude to the relation between Creator
and creature. Aquinas called this relation "analogy toward one."6 It has
subsequently been called analogy of attribution. Its model is the relation
between substance and accident. Eckhart pushes this model beyond its
original form in Aristotelianism towards a monism of being. Quite as all
accidents have their being from substance alone, he says, so all creatures
have their being from God who alone fully is. Thus being is not theirs, but
God's. "Being is God,"' and "all creatures are pure nothingness."8
Things created are mere nothingness because they can only borrow their
being, but never make it their own. If in such a radical theocentrism the
old Greek and Patristic conviction that there is something in man that is
more than man is to remain valid-in Augustine's words, that God is
more intimate to me than I am to myself-union with God can only mean
identity with him. Hence Eckhart's statements to the effect that I and the
Godhead are one. The medieval heir to the Plotinian hen (One) is the
identity between the "spark in the soul" and the Godhead.
This is one example of Eckhart's extremism, which seems to confirm
that henology amounts to negative theology. All things have to be denied
their being so that only the process of deification truly is. This being is
furthermore beyond all possible intellection and in that sense also
nothingness. Instead of "being," Eckhart, too, speaks rather of "the
One," accumulating qualifiers against all customary usage: the identity
between the ground of the mind and the ground of God is "one unique
unity without difference."9
Finally, there is a definite henological strain in Heidegger too. What
he called "authenticity" may indeed fall within the old tradition of
inwardness. The word Eigentlichkeit, he writes, has to be taken literally,
as referring to what is my "own," eigen.1o It means that we stop losing
 29

ourselves by doing what everyone else does, that we stop fleeing from
ourselves into distraction and dispersion" and take up our existence as
our own. One may see here a late reminiscence of Plotinus' remark that
he became "self encentered."'2 The difference is, however, that Plotinus
reverts inward from the physical and emotional manifold, whereas the
authentically existent according to Heidegger reverts from our many
ways of covering up death. To accept one's mortality is to become eigen,
to come into one's own by becoming what one already is, namely
"towards death." The self that we retrieve in authenticity is not the
'
individual ("ontic") self that has its history, made of birth, childhood,
'
adolescence, etc.; it is rather a potential, a possibility, and as such, once
again, nothing. Meister Eckhart may have taught something similar
when he urged his auditors to be "rid of allEigenschaJt,"I3 which means
"property" in the sense of a quality, but also in that of ego-attachment.
Eigenschaft is essentially diverse, scattered, whereas the true self is a
void, opposed to all diversion and diversity. Heideggerian authenticity
thus has undeniably Neoplatonic overtones.
. The more directly henological strain appears in Heidegger's writings
after Being and Time. The One is still opposed to literally dissolute
existence: "singleness does not individualize [us] into dispersion."
However, the One is something towards which we are to move:
"Singleness carries the soul to what is unique, it gathers it into the
One."'4 Just as for Parmenides, the One, for Heidegger, is being: it is
, "what is singular as such, what is singular in its numerical unity and what
is singularly and unifyingly one before all number."" Formulations like
this have led some commentators to believe that Heidegger's "being" is
man's "all-powerful partner," "a power towards which one may assume
personal attitudes as towards the Christian God."'6
To the received opinion, henology amounts undoubtedly to negative
theology, and the One is a substance. There are metaphysicians who call
the supreme being "the Good" because God_is that being in which man's
desire for irrevocable possession finds rest. 17There are those who call it
"the Beautiful" because it orders all things into a cosmos, an order that
can be mastered by reason." Still others call it "the Truth," for it is
known by the mind's return upon itself.19 Finally, more mystically
inclined metaphysicians, it seems, call God "the One" because we
cannot really know of him what he is.20 Nevertheless, henological
negations are the most adequate language about God for those who are
the most intimately convinced that he is. Such is the common opinion
about this tradition, which does not agree easily with a retrospective
- eading of it.
 30

Reading the Henological Tradition Retrospectively

Whoever wishes to obtain strong answers from the tradition must raise
strong questions about it. The strong question that Heidegger's
deconstruction puts to the history of Western philosophy is the question
of being: How has being been understood in the epochs that our inherited
. doctrines reflect? This question could hardly have arisen prior to the
historicist turn in the last century, in late Modernity. Looking at the
authors from late Antiquity and the late Middle Ages whom I have
mentioned, it is not so certain that they speak of "the One" only to stress
that the supreme being is inconceivably actual, spiritual, changeless,
powerful, causative, eternal; that our discourse about it has to remain
apophatic. Rather, the very understanding of the tasks and possibilities
of thinking and living may be at stake-in other words, our very
understanding of being.
The being question hinges on the retrieval of what Heidegger sometimes
calls the ontological difference. Simply stated, this is the difference
between the process of coming to presence-of entering into our field of
attention-and the thing that is present or that so enters into our horizon.
The first is best expressed by a verb, "presencing," the second by a noun,
"something present." The easiest way to grasp this difference is to look
at ordinary language. There is something remarkable about the
grammatical form that we call a participle. On the one hand, it refers to
some activity, to a predicate, and on the other, to some entity, a subject.
It is called a participle since it "participates" both in the verb and in the
noun. To say "shining," for instance, is to speak both of an activity, the
emittance or reflection of light, and of a substance that performs such
emittance, the surface of the sea or of metal. The verbal participle
designates something that is essentially one and simple: the fact of
' shining. The nominal participle, however, can be plural: there are many
things on earth that shine. The English "being" and the Greek on (or the
archaic eon) thus are equivocal concepts. They designate both "to be,"
esse, and "a being," ens. About this equivocity, Heidegger writes: "On
says 'being' in the sense of to be a being; at the same time it names a being
which is. In the duality of the participial significance of on the distinction
between 'to be' and 'a being' lies concealed."21
Now the henologists have something quite precise to say about being,
namely that it is not what is ultimate. The One is not a being, not
something. This is clearly implied in the first lines of Plotinus' treatise
"On the One": "It is due to the One that all beings are beings."22 Why
can the One not be called something, a being? "The One is in all respects
the first, but mind, as well as the ideas and being are not first."23 We
 31

heard that what Meister Eckhart calls "the One" is the mind's identity
with the Godhead. The One, then, is not an entity and is therefore likened
to a desert.24 Beings are below the One quite as God the person is below
the Godhead. The derivative status of being in its nominal sense is a
consequence of its chief quality, intelligibility. All that there is, all that
exists, can be understood. But the One, or the Godhead, is beyond the
reach of intellection. Hence it is not a being. Conversely, being is
secondary since it is of the same order as the hypostasis "mind" or the
personal God. Here the phrase "supreme being" is a contradiction in
terms.
What the method of deconstruction can show about the ancient and
medieval henologists is that the being that is derivative is a noun, but that
the First-the Plotinian "One" or Eckhart's "Godhead"-is best
designated by a verb. Heidegger charges precisely that the "verb"
connotation of the participle "being" has been obscured since Plato by
the identification between the nominal on and the supreme being. The
henologists may have been the only thinkers in our tradition who broke
through that obfuscation. Meister Eckhart's diversified vocabulary of
being testifies to this. Two of the several German words translated as
"being" in his writings refer directly to the ontological difference. The
one, iht, is a noun usually translated as "something"; it designates any
entity whatsoever, including God. The other, wesen, is a verb. It can be
translated as "essentializing" or "unfolding," and it designates the
Godhead as well as the mind's identification with the Godhead. It is from
this latter term that Heidegger developed his own understanding of
Anwesen, presence, as a verb, as "presencing."
The henologists are so important for the retrieve of the being question
because they were the ones who kept making the point that whatever our
mind can represent as "a being" must rank, for that very reason, after
some more radical condition. This condition of all beings is not
representable, since it is not something. Henology thus achieves what
negative theology can never achieve, namely, an understanding of the
difference between non-being and being as the difference between the
verbal and the nominal participle, between "to be" and "a being." The
One differs from Mind, and the Godhead from God, as a process or an
event differs from a thing. Plotinus himself never equates to hen with to
einai. In a later Neoplatonist, however, we read these lines:

The One that is beyond substance (ousia) and beyond being

(ontos) is neither being, nor substance, nor act, but rather it
acts and is itself pure acting, so that it is itself the "to be" (to
einai), that which is prior to being (ontos).
 32

The editor of this striking text first attributed it to Porphyry, and later to
the "Anonymous of Turino."2S The One here is not only called "pure
acting" and thereby de-substantialized, but it is also identified with the
verb "to be." Here the ontological difference between the first and the
second hypostasis is clearly expressed as the difference between "to be"
and "a being"; between the indeterminate or pure "is" and the
determinate sum of all beings; between the verbal and the nominal
participle; between wesen and iht.
This de-substantialized notion of the One designates no transcendent
reality-no thing-and in that sense, nothing. The "verbal" understanding
of the One is also irreducible to the later Scholastic notions of ipsum esse
subsistens and actus essendi. Although these notions rehabilitate the
infinitive in the ontological discourse, the verb there serves to express the
principle of intelligibility, which is the Neoplatonic second hypostasis.
As to Meister Eckhart, he takes considerable pains to de-substantialize
his notion of Godhead. His affirmations about the identity between the
"ground" of the mind and the "ground" of God, as we saw, refer always
to an "identity in operation," einheit im gewrke, never to substantial
identity (which would be pantheism). One frequent metaphor for such a
dynamic concept of One is fire:

Acting and becoming are one. God and I are one in this work:
he acts and I become. Fire transforms all things it touches
into its own nature. The wood does not change the fire into
itself, but the fire changes the wood into itself. In.the same
way we are transformed into God so that we may know him
as he is.26

Another metaphor is that of birth. In Eckhart's doctrine of the birth of the

Son in the ground of the mind, what counts is less the variation that he
plays on Christian dogma than the process-character of identity, or the
' variation on the Aristotelian notion of energeia. From the point of view
of the deconstruction, Eckhart's many ways of suggesting energetic
identity with the Godhead appear as just so many approaches to a
"verbal" understanding of being.
Unification is not the act of the Plotinian One, but the One is
altogether unification, hen is henosis. 27 Nor is unification the act of the
Eckhartian Godhead, but the Godhead is altogether unification. Aristotle
had said of an arch,4 that it is nothing in itself, but only a mere ordering.
The example of an army in movement that he gives illustrates the later
concept of the One as the pure principle of an order. An arche, Aristotle
writes, is "like a rout in battle, stopped by first one man making a stand
' '
' .. i- ..... ' ....;
 33

and then another, until the original formation has been restored."28 It is
through this line of thinking that we have to understand the One. Plotinus
calls it the "principle of being," arche ontos.29 As a principle of order, as
the differentiating principle among things, "the First is present without
any coming and, while it is nowhere, there is nothing where it is not."3
This is to say, the One is the factor of coordination in all things without
which all would disintegrate. It is their pure constellation, uniting bricks
into a house, soldiers into an army, cities into an empire. But far from
being the epitome of power, as the modality of phenomenal interaction it
is most inconspicuous.
Here again, the alliance between metaphysical apophatism and onto-
theology obscures the phenomenological discovery contained in henology.
This discovery can now be stated in a paraphrase of the initial quote from
the Enneads: it is due to unification-to their entrance into an order of
interconnectedness-that all beings are beings. In negative theology, on
the contrary, we heard that the One is the supreme being, of which we do
not know what it is, although we know that it is. But if the One as henosis
and as Godhead is a resurgence of the "verb" connotation of the
participle, then we can think, although not know, what it is-we can think
its nature: it is the very movement of nasci, or phyein, of coming-to-
presence, in all that there is. It is the phainesthai, the appearance as
such, in all phenomena. It is their origin in the sense of pure oriri,
showing-forth. These verbs-nasci, phyein, phainesthai, oriri-indicate
how the One is an event. It is the event in which any phenomenon
whatsoever enters into a given constellation or disposition of presence.
The later Heidegger has a word for the One as mere factor of
unification: Ereignis. This is again a word derived from the radical eigen,
"proper" or "own," and has therefore been translated as "event of
appropriation" or "enownment." The point is, however, that appropriating
or owning are no longer understood by the later Heidegger to be human
doings, they refer to man only secondarily. Rather the event of
appropriation, the enownment, designates the link, which is specific to
each era, by which phenomena form an order, a cultural system.
Heidegger calls our twentieth century the atomic age. This is one way of
designating the peculiar mode in which things enter into rapport with one
another today-the way in which they are mutually appropriated or
"enowned." Ereignis is the term for the movement of crystallization by
which things enter into an epochal configuration..
I am not claiming that the medieval henologists understood being, in
the verbal sense, the way Heidegger understands Ereignis. Their lack of
a sense for history should suffice to prevent anyone from such synchretism.
I am suggesting, however, that the medieval henologists were the ones
 34

who most clearly, in the Western tradition, thought of the difference

between being as a process and being as substance. This is the difference
which, in the writings of the later Heidegger, appears as that between the
event of presencing (Anwesen) or of appropriation, and the modalities or
economies of presence (Anwesenheit). Needless to add, we are far from
negative theology. But we are at the heart of the potential that a topology
may yield for twentieth century thought. This potential would be brought
to bear if we understood fully the discovery made by the henologists,
namely that being is not substance.

Henology versus "Metaphysics"

Many contemporaries would agree-although perhaps not in these

terms-that the substantive representations of being have run their
course. Our age is the one in which all figures of a measure-giving First
are more thoroughly placed in question than ever before. Descartes' turn
to consciousness challenged the epochal order for which God was the
measure, quite as today's structuralists challenge the order in which man
is the measure. From what I have said of Plotinus and Eckhart, the
henologists never thought that the philosopher's task was to secure
some ultimate ground for anchoring all our endeavors, whether theoretical
or practical. At the risk of repeating myself: the Western history of ideas
looks like a smooth development only when read prospectively, that is,
as if we ourselves did not contribute anything to what we read. In such an
uncritical approach, the theocentric intent in henology can hardly be
questioned. Retrospectively, however-once we have heeded the
.
hermeneutician's warning that historiography is a matter of give-and-
take, that in all contact with the past there occurs a fusion of horizons-
our history reveals itself to be made of breaks or ruptures. Reading it
backward, as well we should (we cannot do otherwise, anyway), we
discover crises in which one modality of presence is irretrievably lost as
another comes to the fore and henceforth situates all phenomena anew.
When in the early seventeenth century human consciousness substitutes
itself for divine world-government as the nomos, the law, of our oikos,
our dwelling, one eco-nomy vanishes once and for all. To the modern,
and still more, the atomic era, the way things were present in the age of
Plotinus or of Eckhart is gone. Economies of presence cannot be
repeated. Since their daily world is unknowable for us, we cannot know
what Plotinus and Eckhart really spoke about. What can be retrieved
from these authors is the condition that makes all epochal orders
possible, namely being understood verbally, as an event; and what we
 35

can learn from them is the renunciation of all ultimate representations

that are assumed to imprint their stamp on our life-world.
To the deconstructionist, our Western history thus is made of a series
of ultimate representations. Heidegger enumerates the following:
"Metaphysics is that historical space in which it becomes our destiny
that the suprasensory World, the Ideas, God, the Moral Law, the
authority of Reason, Progress, the Happiness of the greatest number,
Culture, Civilization lose their constructive force and become nothing."3'
All these fictitious ultimate points of moorage, he claims, today become
empty. They have ceased to provide coherence and cohesion to the world
in which we live.
It is in this crisis of ours that the henologists should retain our
attention. At the beginning I said that an interest speaks through the
inherited philosophical works. "Interest" should be taken not in
psychological terms, but in the sense of a strategy immanent to the
transmitted text. The interest that the deconstruction makes us see
operating in works like the Enneads and Meister Eckhart's sermons is
aimed directly at those claims to ultimacy. It is an interest in their
abolition. If, with Heidegger, one calls "metaphysics" the span of
centuries in which the life-world was "stamped"32 by such figures of a
First, then the henologists have effectively overcome metaphysics, if
only by the slightest edge.
The theologians of the Inquisition who condemned some of Eckhart's
teachings obviously lacked any understanding of what he spoke and
wrote about. They did have a flair for the subversive nature of his
thinking in general, though-"subversive" in the literal sense of turning
over (vertere) from the bottom (sub-). It is indeed the bottom, any
foundational construct, that this "verbal" understanding of being-to
einai, wesen-turns up. What the metaphysician holds to be an ultimate
foundation appears to be derivative, quite as in Plotinus the second
hypostasis, Mind, derives from the first hypostasis, the One, and as in
Meister Eckhart "God" derives from the "Godhead." The difference
between the One as a process, and being as the sum total of entities,
including God, thus escapes from what Heidegger calls the forgottenness
of the initial (Presocratic) philosophical question. From the viewpoint of
the deconstruction, that difference appears like an intermittent return
to the issue with which Parmenides inaugurated Western thinking,
couched in the duplicity of the participle eon. But it appears also, and
perhaps more decisively, like the anticipation of an experience which has
become that of an entire culture only in our century, namely that the
quest for an unshakeable ground, a fundamentum inconcussum, is
vain ... except that in our age this discovery engenders dizziness and
36

anxiety. Plotinus, on the other hand, tells us that transcending everything

representable as an entity made him "live the highest life and acquire
identity with the divine." And Eckhart says: "When I am transposed into
the divine wesen, there is no place for suffering.... All things [there] are
pure joy."3'
What then is the direction pointed to in the transmutations that
henology undergoes when read backwards? Its "logic" points at least to a
task that seems to await us-and not only the intellectuals in our
society-today: the task of unlearning the search for one measure-giving
ultimate authority. This search constitutes the central reflex of
metaphysics, whether medieval or modem (in the Middle Ages, the
supreme referent metaphysicians sought was substantive, whereas with
Kant it became merely formal). For this hunt, philosophers have
invented a sophisticated weaponry, which Heidegger calls "conceptual
thinking" as opposed to "meditative thinking" or to "the other thinking."
Here are a few lines from his essay "The Origin of the Work of Art," on
which I shall briefly comment before concluding. They begin with a play
on the word "concept," which comes from capere, to catch or capture
(quite as the German Begrif,?`'comes from greifen, to grasp).

The ordinary concept of 'thing' ... captures the thing but

does not seize it as it unfolds its essence [wesen]. It assaults it.
Can such an assault perhaps be avoided, and how? This may
probably succeed only if we grant the thing an open field, as it
were, so that it may show its thing-like character immediately.
Any conception and enunciation about the thing, which tend
to place themselves between the thing and us, must first be
removed .

At first sight, these lines hardly sound like an echo of the henological
tradition. In another language, they deal however with the very discovery
made by Plotinus, Meister Eckhart and others, namely, that we keep
moving among figments so long as we do not break through conceptual
prehension and grant all phenomena what Heidegger here calls an open
field. What exactly is at stake?
At stake is a specific form of "breakthrough" (the term, as I said, is
Meister Eckhart's) that is available to us, a dismantling that becomes
possible and necessary at the end of metaphysics. Heidegger describes it
as breaking through the representations that tend to place themselves
between the mere presencing of things and ourselves. This is the counter-
 37

move to the "capturing" and "assault" that characterize metaphysics

through and through. As such a counter-move it does not yet amount to
"granting the thing an open field," it is only preparatory for such
granting.
Heidegger sides with the henologists when he holds that thinking is not
a matter of a subject's taking full possession of an object through a
representation or a concept. By vocation and by design conceptual
language places us in a position of attack. "Words have become
instruments for hunting down and hitting, namely in the 'procedure' and
the 'labour' of representing everything [as surely as] precision-firing. The
machine-gun, the camera, the 'word,' the poster all have this same
fundamental function of putting objects in retainment."35 Our most
common inherited terms "seize" things, but they do not "seize the thing
as it west," as it is present for its own sake rather than for a subject's sake.
An "object" thus differs from a "thing" by man's reach for possessing
it. In denouncing conceptual or objective language Heidegger challenges
the long history of man's attempt at posing as the master of the earth. The
Bible's advice ("fill the earth and submit it"36) as well as Aristotle'so
("reason, in order to dominate, that is, to know, must be pure from all
admixture""), becomes the over-arching purpose of philosophy with
Descartes' cogito (understood as co-agitatio, attack3g) and of life in
general with the global reach of contemporary technology.
The modality of presence described as "the assault" thus has deep
historical roots. It has fully come to prevail, however, only in the
technological age. It is the late and extreme consequence of orientations
taken at the source of the Greek and the Jewish tributaries of Western
culture. During its long course, the pattern of domination by conceptual
objectification is perhaps challenged only by the henologists,: These
authors hold that we miss what is essential about man when we consider
him to be some definable entity: that particular res, as the Scholastics
say, placed midway between divine and material entities. Today,
objectification by conceptualization has resulted in a generalized
violence that is more destructive than wars: "We do not even need an
atom bomb, man has already been uprooted from the earth.... This
deracination is the end, unless thinking and poetizing can achieve a non-
violent power."39 Before this threat of an end, Heidegger asks: "Can such
an assault perhaps be avoided, and how?"
To the institutionalized violence by which he characterizes our
civilization Heidegger does not oppose a counter-violence, or at least not
a violence of comparable kind. He does not call for some counter-attack.
He does not seek confrontation. Confrontation could only enforce the
violence that lies at the very heart of what he calls our fundamental
38

historical position. "I have never spoken against technology, "40 he says.
Plotinus and Meister Eckhart had already made it clear that the thinking
that moves among entities (the ideas contained in the hypostatic nous, or
Eckhart's "sum total of the created") does not encounter the thinking
that breaks through to the One. This double thinking, so to speak, is even
the distinctive feature of the henologists since they teach not only a
movement of transcendence from the empirical to the noetic, but a
second such movement from the noetic to the trans-noetic, the One. In its
historicized version, in Heidegger, this duality of thinking remains
equally sharp. He couches it in the Kantian distinction between thinking
and knowing, or he states more flatly: "The sciences do not think."4'
What, then, is the task of thinking if it is to "break through"
representational violence? Heidegger's answer is quite clear: Anything
"that tends to place [itself] between the thing and us must first be
removed."
After what I have said, we already know what it is that tends to place
itself between the simple process of presencing and ourselves: it is the
representation of some ultimate entity whose many shapes in metaphysics,
we heard, today "lose their constructive force and become nothing." The
overcoming of metaphysics therefore cannot be obtained by some
contraction of the will. For Heidegger, there is only one attitude at our
disposal by which technological violence can perhaps be broken. The
name for this attitude is yet another word that he borrows from Meister
Eckhart: Gelassenheit, usually translated as "releasement." Releasement,
he says, "does not belong to the domain of the will."'2 Releasement is the
preparatory play of an economy of presence deprived of ultimate
measure-giving representations. It thus preludes the transgression of an
epochal order of presence stamped by domination and of the violence
that results from this stamping. In the lines on which I am commenting,
Heidegger alludes to releasement when he says: "Such an assault [can]
perhaps be avoided ... if we grant the thing an open field." Granting
things an open field in which they may appear-in which they may
become phenomena-was precisely what the One did according to the
interpretation of it that I have given. It is thus not an overstatement when
Heidegger makes an ancient dictum about Meister Eckhart his own and
calls him "the old master of reading and of living
The potential that the topology-the laying bare of topical strategies in
the history of philosophy-yields for present-day thinking affects the
problem area that may well be the most pressing of all, namely the
problem of how to live in a culture whose prime systemic feature is
domination: not domination of man over man (of which there is perhaps
 39

less in today's Western world than in the past), but domination as that
posture to which everyone is called in all he thinks and does.
Heidegger's way of putting contemporary technology into question
goes more surely to the heart of systemic violence than the discussion of
alternatives to standardization and mechanization. He asks, What is the
essence of technology? and he discovers that it is the same as that of
metaphysics, namely the quest for ultimacy. The step that the henologists
took to transgress the metaphysical domination by some ultimate
representation can teach us something for transgressing the technological
domination by global regulation.

NOTES

'Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Ph3nomenologie ( 1927) (Fran)cfurt:V.

Klostermann1975), p. 31, trl. Albert Hofstadter, TheBasic Problemsof Phenomenology
(Bloomington:Indiana U. Press, 1982), pp. 22 f. The "deconstruction" is not to be
confusedwiththe "destruction" (Destruktion), cf.Beingand Time(transl.J. Macquarrie
and E. Robinson,New York:Harper and Row, 1962), p. 63. The destructionis aimed at
"winningback the originalexperiencesof metaphysics,"The Questionof Being(transl.J.
T. Wilde and W. Kluback, New Haven: College and University Press, 1958), p. 93; it
deals withphilosophicalsystems,with books.The deconstruction,on the other hand,deals
withthe wayin whichthingswereor are presentto one anotherand to man at a giventime,it
deals with epochalorders, withphilosophyas reflectinga culture.(Note on the quotations
from Heidegger. while I indicate for each quote the published English translation, all
translations are actually mine.)
'Porphyry, "Life of Plotinus," in Plotinus, TheEnneads (transl. StephenMcKenna,
2nd ed., New York, 1961 ),p. 17.
4SermonNolitetimere eos, transl. Matthew Fox, Breakthrough: MeisterEckhart's
Creation Spirituality in New Translation (New York: Doubleday, 1980), p. 76.
'Sermon Beati pauperes spiritu, transl. ibid., p. 218. The text actually says "God"
where I have put "[the Godhead]," but this kind of onomasticopportunismis frequentin
Meister Eckhart, cf., my Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher (Bloomington:
Indiana U. Press, 1978), p. 73.
6Analogiaad unum, Summa Against the Gentiles, I, 34.
'Esse est deus, "Prologue" to the Opus Tripartitum, transl. A. Maurer, Master
Eckhart: Parisian Questions and Prologues (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval
Studies, 1974), p. 85 (translation modified).
'Sermon Omne datum optimum, transl. M. Fox, op. cit., p. 400.
9SermonAve,gratia plena (not in M. Fox), see myMeisterEckhart, op. cit., p. 107.
40

IOMartinHeidegger,Being and Time, op. cit., p. 68.

"Ibid., pp. 216 f.
l2Emautofide eis6, Ennead IV, 8 [6], 1, 2.
"Sermon Intravit Iesus in quoddam castellum, transl. M. Fox, op. cit., p. 273.
"Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (transl. P. D. Hertz, New York:
Harper and Row, 1971), p. 180.
"Martin Heidegger,Early Greek Thinking (transl. D. F. Krell, New York: Harper
and Row, 1975), p. 33.
16 Reinhard Maurer, Revolutionund 7Cehre'(Frankfurt:Suhrkamp,1975),pp. 30 and
35.
"Cf., Plato, The Republic 358a, 571 a, 580 b.
18Cf.,Plato, Philebus 64 e.
19Cf.,Augustine, The Confessions,book VII, ch. 10, 16.
zoNowheredoes this positive dogmatic intent at the very heart of metaphysical
negationsabout God appearmore clearlythan at the very beginningof Thomas Aquinas'
Theological Summa. There he declares: De Deo non possumus scire quid est, "We
cannot knowof Godwhat he is" (Ia P., q. 1, art. 7, ad primum).And yet that samearticle is
devoted to establishingthat God is the subject matter of the "sacred doctrine," called a
"science." We cannot know,scire, what God is, and yet there is a scientia of God!
21MartinHeidegger,Early Greek Thinking, op. cit., p. 32. Cf., What is Called
Thinking (transl. F. D. Wieck and J. G. Gray, New York: Harper and Row, 1968), pp.
220 f.
22EnneadVI, 9[9], 1, 1.
23Ibid.,2, 30.
24"[Thelight in the mind] wants to penetrate into the simpleground[of God, that is,
into the Godhead],into the silentdesertinto whichno distinctionhas everintruded,neither
the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Spirit," Sermon Ein meister sprichet, Meister
Eckhart, Die deutschen Werke(ed., J. Quint, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971 ),vol. II, p.
420, 1. 8f.
zspierreHadot, Porphyre etVictorinus(Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes,1968),vol.II,
p. 104. For the change in attribution, see Pierre Hadot, "L'etre et 1'etant dans le
ndoplatonisme,"Etudes n6oplatoniciennes(Neuchatel: La Baconnire, 1973), p. 30.
"Sermon Iusti viventin aeternum, (not in M. Fox), Meister Eckhart, Mystic and
Philosopher, op. cit., p. 104, with the commentaryibid. pp. 104-110.
27E.g.,Ennead VI; 1 [42], 26, 27.This identificationbetween henand henosis entails
a temporalizationof the One which I have developed in my "The Neoplatonic 'One':
Substanceor Funcdon?", forthcomingin Studies in Neoplatonism, vol.VI ( SUNYPress,
New York). I gratefullyacknowledgethe editor's, Professor R Baine Harris', permission
to include sections from that study in the present essay.
2'Aristotle,Posterior Analytics, II, 19; 100 a 11-13.
29EnneadVI, 9[9], 9, 1.
30EnneadV, 5 [32], 8, 23 f.
"Martin Heidegger,The QuestionConcerning Technology(transl. W. Lovitt, New
York: Harper and Row 1977), p. 65.
3"Thetechnicalterms,in Heidegger,that designatethe epochalultimaterepresentations
are "Prdgung," stamp, and "Geprdge," stampings. "There is being only in this or that
destinal stamp...," Identity and Difference(transl. J. Stambaugh,New York: Harper
and Row, 1969),p. 66 (transl. modified).What counts is that "the event of appropriation
(Ereignis) is not a newstamp ofbeing inthe historyof being," On Timeand Being(transl.
J. Stambaugh,New York:Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 40 f. (emphasis mine).
 41

"Sermon, Videte,qualem caritatem, transl. M. Fox, op. cit., pp. 329 f.

34M.Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (transl. A. Hofstadter, New York:
Harper and Row, 1971 ),p. 25.
35M.Heidegger,Heraklit ("Gesamtausgabe," vol. 55, Frankfurt: V. Klostermann,
1979), pp. 70 f.
'6Gen. 1, 28. '
"Aristotle, On the Soul, III, 4; 429 a 19.
'gM. Heidegger,The Question Concerning Technology,op. cit., p. 150.
'9"Only a God Can Save Us Now. An InterviewwithMartin Heidegger,"(transl. D.
Schendler,Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal,VI, 1 [ 1977]),p. 17 (transl. modified).
o"MartinHeidegger:An Interview" (transl. G. Pambrun, Listening, 1971), p. 37.
"Martin Heidegger,Basic Writings(ed. D. F. Krell, New York: Harper and Row,
1977), p. 349.
42MartinHeidegger, Discourse on Thinking (transl. J. M. Anderson and E. H.
Freund, New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 61.
43MartinHeidegger,"The Pathway" (transl. T. F. O'Meara, Listening, 1973), p.35.