Paralipsis is a rhetorical figure of thought that hints at something by mentioning it in passing, or saying it negatively. Here I explore this figure as saying the unsaid. Speaking Being.
“But if man is to find his way once again into the nearness of Being he must first learn to exist in the nameless” (223).
In the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger distinguishes the public realm, and its derivative, the subjective (cogito), as having reduced thinking to a techne (disciplinary practices all governed by the various forms of the principle of sufficient reason, which cannot fail to submit all and every to some “in order to”), a techne that brings us to lose the nearness of Being. He offers a paradox: the nameless, which cannot be subordinated to the “in order to,” not only brings Being close: it also grants us power to speak.
“Before he speaks man must first let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say.”
Before I can address the nature of this claim—that Heidegger says “again” is perplexing—I want to dwell on what it means to “learn to exist in the nameless.” To exist means to stand out in the world. To exist is to be held out in the world, to endure the very moment of our being there in the “openness of Being” (252). World is the clearing/showing “of Being into which man stands out on the basis of his thrown existence.”
Most of us have not “learned” to be, to let be, such a moment, for what awaits us in such a moment of namelessness is the emptiness and meaninglessness of the public and the generic patterns of meaning it dictates for the subjective interpretation of existence. Such generic patterns are what have governed through having to submit—and to bring any individual to submit to—what is already named. Uncovering the emptiness and meaninglessness of any name reveals that the nameless already always shines there. Learning to exist in the nameless requires a techne, a mode of revealing the nothing in the unsaid, the unnamed, which brings Being close.
And here he addresses how we might “learn” to be claimed by Being again.
He asks: “can we obtain from such knowledge” –knowledge of our ek-sistence in the belongingness of Being— “directives that can be readily applied to our lives?”
Most of us have not “learned” to be, to let be, such a moment, for what awaits us in such a moment of namelessness is the emptiness and meaninglessness of the public and the generic patterns of meaning it dictates for the subjective interpretation of existence. Such generic patterns are what have governed through having to submit—and to bring any individual to submit to—what is already named. Uncovering the emptiness and meaninglessness of any name reveals that the nameless already always shines there. Learning to exist in the nameless requires a techne, a mode of revealing the nothing in the unsaid, the unnamed, which brings Being close.
And here he addresses how we might “learn” to be claimed by Being again.
He asks: “can we obtain from such knowledge” –knowledge of our ek-sistence in the belongingness of Being— “directives that can be readily applied to our lives?”
“The answer is that such thinking is neither theoretical nor practical. It comes to pass before this distinction. Such thinking is, insofar as it is, recollection of Being and nothing else [hence the again]. Belonging to Being, because thrown by Being into the preservation of its truth and claimed for such preservation, it thinks Being. Such thinking has no result. It has no effect. It satisfies its essence in that it is... For it lets Being—be” (259).