9

Man and World 18:65-78 (1985) Nifhoff Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands

REPRESENTATION AND THE IMAGE: BETWEEN HEIDEGGER, DERRIDA, AND PLATO

VERONIQUE M. FOTI
New School for Social Research

Introduction
Heidegger's de-structive analysis of the history of metaphysics accords central importance to representation (Vorstellung) and to the representative world-picture; indeed, he regards the modern epoch (characterized by the ascendancy of metaphysics and technology) as essentially the epoch of representation. 1 In a searching and subtle study of the notion of representation, 2 Jacques Derrida asks whether Heidegger does not, in fact, remain wedded to representation, in that he tacitly presupposes a representative pre-interpretation of the very notion of representation. This presupposition which Derrida finds "at work in Heidegger all the way up to his strongest and most necessary displacements" (p. 321) shows itself less in the presumption of a semantic core for the term "representation" (although Derrida finds Heidegger somewhat careless on this point) than in Heidegger's notion of a "'destiny" ( G e s c h i c k ) of representation according to which modernity is the delegate, envoy, or representative of a more originary envoy of being which may be characterizes as presence or A n w e s e n h e i t . In essence, Derrida claims to find in Heidegger a representational schema of the degeneration of a primordial presencing into representation, '"as if the couple A n w e s e n h e i t / r e p r e s e n t a t i o n still dictated the law of its own interpretation. ''3 This schema, Derrida alleges, informs Heidegger's understanding of Greek thought as initiating the destiny of representation without being itself subject thereto. This turn towards representation consists, on Derrida's reading of Heidegger, specifically in Plato's determination of reality as form, apprehensible aspect or configuration, as eidos - a determination which ushers in a preoccupation with the image (Bild) which mediates the ascendancy of the representative world-picture. 65

66 If thinking is to disentangle itself from the web of representation it must, Derrida indicates, tell its own history differently: it must regards its own beginning not as presence, but as dissemination, as the entracing of difference (diffdrance) which decenters the very notion of a beginning. As Derrida puts it in another context, that which takes the place of the origin is "not absence instead of presence, but a trace which replaces a presence which has never been present, an origin by means of which nothing has begun. ''4 Such thinking, he remarks parenthetically, might be able to articulate itself with Heidegger, or again it might not (p. 325); and which option holds is unimportant, for the critique of Heidegger incorporates itself in an exploration of the far-flung net of representation in which thinking has remained caught. Although I agree with Derrida in attaching no particular importance to Heidegger's "authorship," I want to argue in this paper that the new thinking does indeed articulate itself with Heidegger, hearing the "with" here as the mark of probing conversation. My purpose is not to defend Heidegger, nor to assimilate Heidegger to Derrida, but, firstly, to keep alive the complexity, tension, and challenge of what Heidegger gives us to think, over against the threat of foreclosure by Derrida's critique, and secondly, to indicate a persistent if secret encroachment of representative thinking on this critique. I will pursue these concerns w~thin a limited compass: the relation of representation to the image or Bild. Derrida takes for granted that a representation is a posited image or picture and, furthermore, that such an image may also be understood as a copy, substitute, scene, painting, or as the "objective reality" of an idea in Descartes's sense, s so that metaphysical/epistemological, aesthetic, and political representation are held together ab initio under the aegis of the specular image. That the notion of the image be unproblematic and univocal is required if the Platonic eiclos is to be understood unambiguously as Bilcl and as the distant ancestor of representation - an ancestor, to be sure, who would be less then pleased to encounter his own offspring. In Heidegger's texts, by contrast, there is a neglected and quite unthematized tension between two senses of the image or Bild, 6 such that one sense is representational and is epitomized by the worldpicture (Weltbild), whereas the other and more enigmatic sense has a kinship to Derrida's notion of the trace. Although Heidegger does indicate, in passing, that he considers the latter sense of Bild to be primary, 7 he leaves the tension between the two senses quite unresolved. This is all the more surprising since both senses bring into play some of

67 the linguistic complexities which Heidegger stresses with respect to the term "Bild." These comprise the links to the notions of Bildung as the education and formation of the person, of shaping and form-giving (bilden), and of phantasia and imagining (Einbildung), which in turn is linked, through the cognate term Vorstellung, to representation, thetic positing, Gestell. The representing image can, in any case, not be straightforwardly regarded as the corruption or degenerate representative of the non-representing one, so that Heidegger's dual thematization of the image does not necessarily reiterate the schema of presence and representation. Both of the Heideggerian senses of the image have an important and complex relationship to Greek thought. A consideration of these relationships will be crucial for addressing the problematic of origins, destining, and delegation, which forms the core of Derrida's critique, and for fruitfully exploring the tension between the two senses.

Heidegger's understanding of the representative image is most clearly articulated in his essay "Die Zeit des Weltbildes" ("The Time of the World-Picture"), dating from 1938. 8 The representative image, and above all the world-picture, is a systematic structure, a model or formation (Gebild) devised by man which serves to explain that which it represents. By means of such explanation the alien, uncanny, and seemingly incommensurable is reduced to the compass of the familiar and managable; man establishes and orients himself in a world conceived as, in principle, the reach of his mastery. Man takes his bearings by putting himself in the picture (setzt sich ins Bild); 9 and since the picture thus allows him to direct his efforts and to allocate his resources economically, it sets the standards of what is right and what counts as true in the sense of rightness (Richtigkeit). As a norm for adequation, the picture both presupposes and enjoins the understanding of truth as adequation. The representative picture and, in particular, the world picture is characterized by a systematic coherence which it derives from the positing activity of man, the subject who determines beings as the objects of his representation and installs himself at their center. Despite its claim to encompass the whole and to provide systematically for all possible perspectives, the world picture characteristically fails to do justice to any given perspective in its concrete arising. It must bypass

68 the fullness of the concrete because the latter always involves its play of shadows, the incursion of the incalculable which haunts the worldpicture as its proper but, for it, invisible shadow. 1~ If the representative image or picture is devoid of any visible shadows and is traced entirely in ethereal light, it is not an image in the sense of being a spontaneously arising, sensuously apprehended aspect of things which, though ephemeral, may be treasured in man's beholding and shaped and transfigured through man's aesthetic response. It is rather a schema, a diagram, a conceptual structure which bears, though often covertly, the mark of man's devising. If conceptual representation obliterates shadow-play, the image as sensuous configuration and disclosive aspect, by contrast, shows but does not represent. It is pertinent to note in this connection that, notwithstanding Derrida's equation between the representative image and the Cartesian "objective reality" of the idea, Descartes draws a firm distinction between idea and image. The former pertains properly to the intellect, whereas the latter is engendered by the rebellious power of imagination which Descartes seeks to subordinate to the intellect and thus to confine within the limits of representation.1 Greek phantasia, Heidegger finds, is unlike the imagination successfully subordinated to the intellect in that it does not share the work of objectifying representation but rather allows for the presencing of beings, their coming-to-appearance for man insofar as he remains open to their advent. In virtue of this openness, man is included within the self-disclosing of beings and does not set himself up at their center as the originator of a totality of representation. His position is hence not one of mastery, but of exposure and entanglement. 12 Although Heidegger considers representation and the representative world-picture to be proper to modernity and to the history of metaphysics, Plato's understanding of the being of beings as eidos, as their quasi-visible aspect or image, constitutes for him, as Derrida emphasizes, the mediation and hidden presupposition of the emergence of representation. This mediation, which must now be examined, becomes the more astonishing when one considers that a representation such as the world-picture is, in virtue of its schematic and systematic character, precisely not an image proper in the sense of being the quasi-visible aspect of beings in their presencing.

69 II In his study "Platons Lehre v o n d e r Wahrheit" ("Plato's Doctrine of Truth"), 13 Heidegger claims that the essential unsaid in Plato's thought is a change in the conception o f truth with respect to previous thinkers. Since Plato's understanding of truth underlies his notion of paideia (education, Bildung), it comes to the fore with particular clarity in the parable of the cave in Republic VII, where paideia is Plato's focal concern. Plato, according to Heidegger, moves within and yet rethinks the Greek understanding of truth as un-concealment or alOtheia. He rethinks it with a view to the self-manifest radiance of the eidos or idea. Un-concealment becomes mediated by the idea which thus gains ascendancy over al~theia and requires of man an adequate apprehension, an intellectual vision which has been laboriously accustomed to the splendor of the idea. The eidos mandates the labor of paideia; but it also presupposes the "idea of the G o o d " which grants to the eid6 their manifesting power, and fitness and clarity to the apprehending intellect. Through its orientation towards the eid~ and towards the Good, truth acquires the character of rightness or orthotOs; it comes to reside in right apprehension and right speech rather than in the unsolicited and undirected presencing of beings. Plato initiates but does not consummate this change in the understanding of truth from alOtheia to orthot~s; and Heidegger finds his thought characterized b y an ambivalence between them. This ambivalence shows itself also in Plato's notion of paideia or Bildung: true education seeks to free man from his bondage to unworthy concerns, to remind him of what he always already is, to awaken a mindfulness of the disclosure of beings into which he is immemorially initiated; but it can do so, for Plato, only through the guidance of an image (Bild) which sets itself up as a standard for adequation. One might add here that, since the striving after and conformity to an ideal image is a form of mimetic enactment, the pitfalls of rnem~sis become for Plato a central educational concern. It is, then, the understanding of truth as orthotYs, as requiring the proper direction of the mind and an adequation to determinative standards which, though ambivalently articulated b y Plato, has marked the entire tradition of metaphysics. However, that Plato should have regarded these standards, the eidO, as in some sense akin to the image, that he should have, as Derrida puts it (p. 321) allowed the world to

70 become Bild, seems then of no particular importance for the destiny of representation, unless for the fact that visual metaphors lend themselves naturally to an emphasis on ideality and distance. 14 However, as we have seen, a representation is not properly an image and cannot claim any direct ancestry in the Platonic idea understood (as Heidegger does understand it) as image or aspect (Aussehen, Anblick). It is, then, not the image-character of the eidO which is responsible for representation. One might also point out here that Plato's fascination with luminosity and shadow has a venerable ancestry in the Homeric poems (the unparalleled sensitivity of which to "the modes and forms of light and darkness" has been commented upon by scholars is ), and in Heraclitus's and Parmenides's concern with fire, light, and darkness. In other words, a fascination with light, if not indeed with the image, bespeaks itself already in the Greek articulation of al~theia. Furthermore, insofar as the eidos is akin to an image or an epiphany, it must, rather like a holy image, be apprehended in its singularity and in its proper situation; it does not readily allow for substitution, repetition, or for being deployed at the discretion of man in the manner of a representative. There is more complexity and perhaps more ambivalence in Plato's notion of the eidY than even Heidegger is prepared to recognize, and certainly more than Derrida's equation between representation and the image and his rather simplistic notion of the image allow for. This is attested, historically, by the fact that Plotinus, in his rethinking of Plato's understanding of manifestation and beauty, severs all links to representation, 16 thus showing that Plato's thought could also lead elsewhere than into the metaphysics of representation. It is surprising that Heidegger fails to consider, indeed, obliterates the play of absence in the Platonic eidos. Thus, whereas Plato speaks of the Sun which the accustomed eye supposedly can behold in its full radiance as the offspringg and token (ekgonos) of the Good (Rep. 506e-507a), Heidegger, citing this very passage, describes instead the fire burning in the cave as the ekgonos of the Sun (p. 134). The Sun may be beheld in the splendor of its presence; but the Good, whose offspring it is, remains for Plato problematically withdrawn (epekeina t~s ousias), casting upon all manifestness the shadow of its absence. The phenomenal self-manifestness of the eidO is thus forever incomplete; and the orientation which they enjoin points towards an inaccessible origin, the absence of which tends to be dissimulated, like an embarassment, by its shining representatives. It is, indeed, in this problematic of the absent origin and, in particular, of the dissimulation of

71 absence and voidness that one should look for the prefiguring of the metaphysics of representation. It is the need to dissimulate, rather than the image, which calls for restitution by means o f a substitute (Derrida, p. 309), and indeed also for the focus on the positing and restituting subject which characterizes representation. If this is so, the suspect image has cleared its name and awaits, perhaps, another thematization.

III Heidegger offers such a thematization of the image in his essay " . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . ." (1951).17 In his poetic dwelling, man takes the measure of a dimension; but such measuring is neither the reduction of all things to the representable and calculable, nor yet a Protagorean establishment of measure within the limits o f human competence and concern, is Rather, the dimension opened up b y such measuring is the span of the difference which allows for the belonging together of earth and heaven, indeed, of the Fourfold, and which thus allows man to assume his mortality. Man does not so much take (nehmen) this measure as he, by attentively hearkening, receives it (vernehmen); but since he must measure by the immeasurable, his measuring is nevertheless, in a sense, hybristic (vermessen). 19 What allows him to take his measure from the immeasurable is the image understood as the appearance or aspect of things in and by which the immeasurable manifests its inalienable corLcealment. The image, understood as the irrecusable and enigmatic appearance of things, insofar as it transcends the pre-interpretations of profane perception, works (bildet ein) the intrinsically hidden into the manifest without thereby violating its self-concealment. The image incorporates the hidden as the invisible proper to the visible, 2~ as the uncanny which permeates the aspect of the familiar, as the surd of the sensuous which resists representative schemata, as the very enigma of manifestation. Since the essentially non-manifest cannot be pictured, diagrammed, explained, or reduced to the compass of the familiar, the image in this sense (the sense which Heidegger considers to be originary) does not represent. Instead o f collapsing the enigmatic into the established and known, the image distends the familiar into the enigmatic. It is the task of the poet and artist to maintain this distension, to resist foreclosure, to safeguard the image over against the encroachment of representation, so that man may remain exposed to the difference. The poet and the artist can fulfill this task so long as they consign

72 themselves to the immeasurable, so long as their work remains poised in the tension between silence and articulation. They thus remain responsive to the granting and grace (charis, Huld) of all presencing. This grace or charis which marks the image in its arising and which brings about the haunting fascination of appearance is, Heidegger remarks, itself poetic (dichterisch, tiktousa). 21 It calls for the work but seeks, through the configurations of the work, to manifest the silence of the granting. Heidegger understands beauty, the beauty which marks the originary image (and which may be terrible as well as lovely), as the coming together of ravishment (Berfickung) and transport (Entrfickung, Entzfickung)? 2 The image ravishes through the assertive passion, the nearperfection, the excess of what is brings to appearance; and it transports by pointing back towards the enigmatic silence which cradles passion and perfection, and which these rejoin in their very extremity. This silence is an emptiness (Leere) or nothingness (Nichts) understood, somewhat speculatively but apart from either nihilism or metaphysics, as perhaps the "highest name" for being which waits as yet to be found and spoken, and which the epoch of representation has so far obliterated. :3 One may then understand the image, in the originary sense, as the luminous trace of an interplay: the interplay between voidness and the lawful enchainment of phenomenal arising. Heidegger thematizes this interplay, in different texts, with both Greek and Eastern leanings, namely as the filial relation of physis to "holy chaos," and also as the reciprocity between "color" and "emptiness," the Japanese notions of iro and ku. 24 The image shows in that it renders phenomenal and thus allows for an arising into un-concealment. The very presencing and being of beings (Anwesen) is their arising into un-concealment. If phenomenal arising is thus thought as Anwesen and unconcealment,2s however, it is clear that the image is not, for Heidegger, unique or even privileged in bringing to appear; rather, un-concealment is already and above all the work of language. Language or, as Heidegger prefers to call it, saying (die Sage) allows to beings the configurations of their presencing and of their absence, thus bringing them into their own, as it also brings into its own the disclosive existence of mortals. Heidegger characterizes the saying of language as intrinsically hermeneutic in that it first draws man into a hermeneutic relation to the presencing of beings and into the gap of the difference, thus allowing the difference to address and claim man. 26 To think language as a hermeneutic un-concealment is, of course, to depart from the metaphysi-

73 cal conception of language as the accomplishment and expression of the subject who is its shaper (Bildner) and imparts to it its structure and a representative and communicative function. Heidegger, by contrast, emphasizes the belonging together of saying or of intrinsically poetic language and the non-representing image by linking the conception of language as Ereignis, as disclosive and eventful appropriation, to Er-giugen or bringing into the play of the glance. 27 The showing thus accomplished is not signification, but rather resembles the indicating hint and the evocative gesture. 2s The promise of this new thematization of the image remains nevertheless partially unfulfilled, in that Heidegger does not ask whether certain modes of showing may be proper to the image and set it apart from the showing proper to language. The neglect of this question is the more regrettable since it would take up again the issue of the relation between logos and aisthesis which Heidegger considers in Being and Time, where he gives a rather enigmatic priority to aisth~sis as the originary locus of truth. 29 Furthermore, Heidegger notes but bypasses the differences between the logically articulated and perhaps metaphysically oriented European languages, and certain Eastern languages which lack a comparable structure; he does not work through these differences in his effort to indicate the common source of all language. One suspects that the non-Western languages to which Heidegger gives only brief consideration might come closer to the modes of showing proper to the imageJ ~ Heidegger's neglect of these issues amounts to a slighting of the image which curiously resembles its slighting by representative thought. This paper, however, must address, not the neglected phenomenology of the image, 31 but the questions as to how Heidegger's second and admittedly shadowy thematization of the image, in its tension with the representative notion of the image, bears upon his retrieval of Greek thinking, and how it affects the pertinence of Derrida's critique.

IV The originary image, as Heidegger thinks it, belongs, like logos, to albtheia or the happening of un-concealment. Al~theia unfolds the twofold of the difference in such a way as to allow beings to come into presence and, as presences, to fascinate and enthrall; thereby, however, they also conceal the enigma of their presencing. The frontality of images, in particular, tends to foster the illusion of the self-

74 containedness and self-sufficiency of all presence and invites schematic representation in the interest of conceptual mastery. This grasping response to appearances which transforms them into representations is not merely an historical, cultural, or epochal phenomenon; rather, it always already stands in necessary tension with the response of reticent awe (Scheu) which refuses to absolutize frontality and which recognizes, in the originary image, the circumscription and the figured seal of an infrangible absence. The latter response, Heidegger finds, is the one which shapes early Greek thinking and its key notions of alOtheia, of physis as the unfolding of the twofold of the difference, and of rnoira as the apportioning law of this unfolding? 2 Plato's understanding of eidos and idea, on the other hand, initiates the obscuring of alOtheia and the displacement of the originary by the representing image. Heidegger stresses that the Platonic forms are not aistheta but are accessible only to a thinking which divorces itself from the sensuous? 3 A rift between sensuousness and the supersensory is characteristic of metaphysics precisely because everything sensuous, including the image proper, is permeated by absence and resists full mental appropriation. Plato, of course, degrades images to the very lowest position on the divided line and assimilates them to reflections and shadows, the mere vestiges of presence (Rep. 510a). The turning which Heidegger finds in Plato's thought is then not, as Derrida alleges, primarily a turning towards the image (in whatever sense), but a turning away from all absence towards an ideal presence. This turning obliterates the twofold of the difference which is the matrix of all phenomenal arising. Once al6theia becomes thus obscured, eidos and idea can emerge as privileged presences, and vision becomes a metaphor for their intellectual grasp. Heidegger, as already noted, points to an ambivalence between alYtheia and orthotOs in Plato's understanding of the forms; but he does not bring this ambivalence into clear focus. The ambivalence seems above all to reside in Plato's problematic notion of an origin "beyond being" (epekeina t~s ousias) which resists logos and intellectual appropriation, yet which does not, by its necessary withdrawal, succeed in calling into question the search for pure presence. An ambivalence, by its very nature, cannot mandate or determine the dominance of one alternative. Hence, if Plato's thought is indeed ambivalent at its core, it cannot, as Derrida puts it, "prescribe predominance of representation" (p. 312); and Heidegger's recognition of the Platonic ambivalence is precisely a denial of any such univocal and representative interpreta-

75 tion of Plato's historical role. Quite apart from the ambivalence, the shift from alOtheia or orthot~s cannot be understood on the model of a diminution or corruption of a primary presence (Anwesenheit) b y representation, because alOtheia is a presencing out of absence and into absence, and absence is not representable. Representative thinking does not presuppose, for its very possibility, a pre-given presence which it then breaks with and seeks to restitute; rather it first institutes the ideal of presence. It does so because it repudiates the togetherness of presence and absence, or what Heidegger calls the "sameness" (without identity) of showing and concealing. 34 The relation of the originary image to the representing image is not already a relation of representation or rnirnOsis; it is rather an usurpation. As a glance at political examples should make evident, not all substitution, let alone usurpation, is representation. The fact that Heidegger leaves the double sense of his notion of Bild so curiously unthematized serves perhaps to emphasize the close and constant danger of such usurpation with its far-reaching consequences for the understanding o f imagination (Einbildung), for the formation or Bildung of man, and for the relation of philosophy to the arts. It emphasizes also that the "saving power" is close to the danger. Unfortunately both Heidegger and Derrida ignore the need for an analysis of the structure o f representation; b u t it is Derrida rather than Heidegger who still tends to represent representation, in that he construes it on the model o f a representative interpretation o f the image. The continued proximity of representative and metaphysical thinking to a more originary awareness of un-concealment, a proximity attested to by Plato's ambivalence as well as b y Heidegger's double use o f the term "Bild", already indicates that Heidegger's effort to retrieve early Greek thinking is not born of nostalgia for a lost ideal which one might hope miraculously to restore in the midst of exile. Such a project of retrieval would indeed be paradoxical, for it would seek to coincide b y representation with the very negation of representation. Heidegger's project of retrieval differs from such a futile project in two main and related respects: firstly, it seeks to engage what remains unthematized and concealed in early Greek thinking and what is hence not a representable presence; and secondly, it seeks to be true to the Greek beginnings by leaving them so as to rejoin them in an unmapped future. The way into the Greek past is a way which leads onward, not onward along the way-stages of progress already established b y the past nor towards an envisaged goal of knowledge, but to a mind-

76 fulness of the enigma of presencing which philosophy has assiduously bypassed. Whereas early Greek thinking thinks phenomenal appearing (Erscheinen, phainesthai) as presencing (Anwesen) and thus as to-be, the retrieval must also think such appearing and presencing as Ereignis, in its appropriating eventfulness. To repeat or retrieve early Greek thinking is thus both to think it, as Heidegger puts it, "more Greekly," b y thinking also its provenance and, by the same token, to think it in a way which is no longer Greek. 3s There is then, for Heidegger, no original " e n v o y " of being who irrepeatably and "first of all uncovers [him]self as presence, more rigorously as Anwesenheit" (Derrida, p. 321) and who reaffirms himself in countless mutations, so as to gather these together into a "grouped indivisibility" (p. 322). If there were such a first presence, Heidegger's notion of the originary image would lose its sense; all images would be representative. Diff~rance is the condition of the Heideggerian image or Bild no less than of Derrida's notion of the trace, or of the renvoi as trace (p. 324). Thinking, therefore, is always already within the play of the image or within the play o f the trace. This is not to say that, malgrd lui, Derrida's thinking here coincides entirely with Heidegger's. Whereas, for Derrida, the play and reciprocity of traces defines the domain of speaking and thinking, such that "the exit from the book, the other and the threshold are all articulated within the b o o k " , a6 thinking, for Heidegger, reaches out, b y means of the image and the word, into the difference and towards a voidness which grants phenomenal arising but which can show itself therein only as absence. The Heideggerian image, though akin to Derrida's trace, marks out an alternative and still insufficiently explored path for non-representative thinking.

NOTES 1. Martin Heidegger, "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," Holzwege (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1963), pp. 69-104. English translation by W. Lowitt, "The Age of the World Picture," The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). Among other relevant texts, see in particular "What is Metaphysics?" and "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," trans. David F. Krell in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). 2. Jacques Derrida, "Sending: On Representation," Peter and Mary Ann Caws, tr., Social Research, vol. XLIX (1982), pp. 294-326. 3. Op.cit., p. 322;see pp. 318-24 for the whole argument.

77
4. Jacques Derrida, "Ellipsis," in Writing and Difference, Alan Bass, trans. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 295. 5. "Sending: On Representation," p. 311. See also page 308. 6. Besides "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," see M. Heidegger, " . . . dichterisch wohnet der Mensch . . . ," Vortrdge und Aufsdtze, II (Pfullingen: Neske, 1967). English translation by Albert Hofstadter, " . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .", Martin Heidegger: Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 2 1 3 - 2 2 9 . See also Heidegger's discussion of three Kantian senses of Bild in his Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1973), pp. 8 9 - 9 8 . 7. " . . . dichterisch wohnet der M e n s c h . . . ," op.cit., p. 74; Hofstadter, p. 226. 8. See note 1. 9. "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," op.cit., p. 82. Heidegger here elucidates the German idiom "sich fiber etwas ins Bild setzen," which means to form a coherent representation about something such as to enable one to take one's bearings, to know one's way about it. I have stressed the use of the reflexive pronoun in order to call attention to the way ha which man's self-understanding becomes informed by such a picture. On this point, see also Maurice MerleauPonty, L 'Oeil et l 'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 12. 10. Heidegger, "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," op.cit., p. 88. Heidegger speaks here of the gigantic as the incalculable. 11. The distinction is particularly clear in the Sixth Meditation. F o r a discussion, see m y as yet unpublished article, "The Cartesian Imagination." 12. Op.cit., note 8, p. 98. 13. M. Heidegger, "Platons Lehre yon der Wahrheit," Wegmarken (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1967), pp. 1 0 9 - 4 4 . English translation by John Barlow, "Plato's Doctrine of Truth," W. Barrett and H.D. Aiken, eds., Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971). 14. On Heidegger's resistance to "ocularism," see John D. Caputo, "The Thought of Being and the Conversation of Mankind: The Case of Heidegger and Rorty," The Review of Metaphysics, XXXVI (1983), p. 670. An interesting discussion of vision and distance appears also in Seth Benardette, "On Wisdom and Philosophy: The First Two Chapters of Aristotle's Metaphysics A," The Review of Metaphysics, XXXI (1978), pp. 2 0 5 - 1 5 . I5. See Christopher Rowe, "Conceptions of Color and Color Symbolism in the Ancient World, Eranos Yearbook, 4 1 - 1 9 7 2 , pp. 3 2 7 - 6 3 . The article contains extensive references to the relevant literature. 16. I argue this point in my recent and still unpublished article "Beauty and Memory in Plato and Plotinus." See also Reiner Schfirmann, "L'Hgnologie comme ddpassement de la m~taphysique," Les Etudes Philosophiques (1982), pp. 3 3 1 - 3 5 0 . 17. See note 6. 18. "Die Zeit des Weltbfldes," op.cit., note 8. 19. " . . . dichterisch wohnet der Mensch . . . ," op.cit., p. 72; Hofstadter, p. 223. The double sense of vermessen as (1) to measure completely, and (2) transgressing measure does not appear in the English. 20. See here Maurice Merleau-PonW, The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis, trans. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), chap. iv and working notes.

78 21. " . . . dichterisch wohnet der Mensch . . . ," op.cit., p. 78; Hofstadter, p. 229. See also M. Heidegger, "Aus einem Gespr~ich yon der Sprache," Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1975), p. 143. English translation by Peter D. Hertz and Joan Stambaugh in On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 22. M. Heidegger, "Wie wenn am Feiertage . . . ," Erl(iuterungen zu H6lderlins Dich tung (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1971), p. 53f. 23. "Aus einem Gespr~ich yon der Sprache," op.cit., pp. 1 0 8 - 1 0 . 24. Op.cit., p. 143f. 25. Op.cit., pp. 1 3 2 - 3 5 . See also M. Heidegger, "Moira (Parmenides VIII, 3 4 41)," Vortrage und Aufsdtze, I. English translation by David F. Krell and Frank C. Capuzzi, Early Greek Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1975). 26. "Aus einem Gespr~ich yon der Sprache," op.cit., pp. 1 2 1 - 2 7 . 27. M. Heidegger, "Der Weg zur Sprache," Unterwegs zur Sprache, p. 260. Hofstadter discusses ereignen/eriiugnen (sic) in the Introduction to op.cit., p. xxi. 28. "Aus einem Gespr~ch yon der Sprache," op.cit., pp. 1 0 4 - 1 9 . 29. M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1972), chap. vii B, p. 33f. English translation in Krell, Basic Writings, op.cit., p. 81. 30. "Aus einem Gespr~ich yon der Sprache," op.cit., p. 94. 31. A phenomenology of the image would require the study of relevant works by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. 32. "Moira" and also "Aletheia" in Vortr[ige und Aufsdtze, I, and in Early Greek Thin king. 33. "Moira", ibid., p. 34. 34. " . . . dichterisch wohnet tier M e n s c h . . . ," p. 67; Hofstadters, op.cit., p. 218. 35. "Aus einem Gespr/ich v o n d e r Sprache," op.cit., pp. 1 3 2 - 1 3 5 . 36. Jacques Derrida, " E d m o n d Jab~s and the Question of the Book," Writing and Difference, p. 76.