Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics

4. The Work and Complement of Appearing

68 four The Work and Complement of Appearing Jean-Yves Lacoste I At the heart of phenomenology, a paradox: the real is always already there for those who have ‘‘eyes’’ to ‘‘see,’’ an opening that permits it to appear—yet thought is always defined as a quest for the real. We do not inhabit a world of appearance from which it would be necessary to take leave in order to reach the essential; we inhabit the field of appearing where being is given to us without disguise; ‘‘so much appearing, so much being.’’ Things exist in as much as they invite themselves to us. Were we but able to render account of this invitation, were we only to perceive that it is not in disguise that things appear to us, and were we, finally, to know the conditions under which consciousness is open, all the work of philosophy would be, by right, achievable. Constituted as ‘‘rigorous science,’’ it would thenceforth have only to describe what we all see or understand—which is to say, to describe it better than nonphilosophy , but to do so in presupposing that philosophy and non-philosophy speak of the ‘‘same thing,’’ and that the experience of the non-philosopher does not maintain its relation to things in the deceiving mode of opinion. It is no minor achievement to come down to this, and to do it philosophically . The real is what appears, and not a Hinterwelt to be dwelt in only by The Work and Complement of Appearing 69 ‘‘ideas’’ or ‘‘things-in-themselves.’’ There is no ‘‘saving appearances’’ by founding them in a non-appearing. And what in Nietzsche was still only a cry would actually be accomplished in Husserl who, to be sure, loses all the pathos but gains in the probing force of conceptual articulation. Human life is not lived in the cave, but fully in the element of the real. These are crucial affirmations for which it is not enough to merely assert as so many primary evidences, and which must be discussed in order to know their violence. However, one cannot stop there. And when it is accepted that naïve commerce with things is right, and that its reasons are manifested in a second and ‘‘institutionalized’’ naïveté, namely philosophy, it is not the case that in the field open before the naïve gaze, wherever that gaze opens itself and whenever it opens itself, there is necessarily opened up everything that must be thought, insofar as one takes the risk of thinking. Now, it is indeed for this, if not only for this, that the work of art makes its intrusion into Heidegger’s thinking as a philosophical object. This is not—and it is almost to do injury to the reader to make this specification— because the real has many hues and shades, and not because one must pay philosophical attention to all things to which we pay pre-philosophical attention : for this would amount to saying only that the task of description is always to recover, which is to say that one must describe each phenomenon with scrupulous respect for the proper style of its appearing, and so forth—remarks that are quite right but also quite obvious. The philosophical interest of the work of art is due to the fact that, following the lines of force in Heidegger’s argument, it makes the clear and distinct appearance of what it is not depend on its own appearance, its ‘‘setting to work (met en œuvre).’’1 This then is the problem, or the ob-jection (pro-blem). We are told that ‘‘in the midst of what is, art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is otherwise than usual.’’2 But just what is this ‘‘otherwise’’ and this ‘‘usual’’? There is no mystery in the proposed answer. We see things, and their appearing does not misrepresent their being. In a being is thus confided to us, if we know how to see it, that which philosophy professes to seek, ‘‘being.’’ And it is perfectly possible to adopt the approach that considers every being, in fact, to reveal to us all the riches of ontology: a common flint (humble silex), for example, suffices for Gilson to discover all that ‘‘being’’ means.3 . . . Now it is precisely this sufficiency that we are invited to doubt. And this doubt could take the form of a thesis: in order to perceive exactly...