[Andrzej_Wiercinski_(ed ... - WordPress.com

Seins wartet, kann er eine Ankunft des Seinsgeschickes erwarten, ohne in das bloßeWissenwollen zu verfallen. 22Thus, in Heidegger’s late philosophy, expectation has no object; it means the openingfor the space for an appropriation (Ereignis) of Being. Expectation does not denote idleness:it is the being attentive to the process of appropriation of Being, of its coming-tolight(Lichtung), which motivates us to revere that which emerges beyond the confines ofhuman immanence. This reverence enforces a self-limitation or descent into humility, andthis word depicts quite well the sense of Heidegger’s Gelassenheit, in which we hearechoes of St Augustine’s humilitas. The aim of humility is that of allowing for the othernessof a human being or of a thing; in Scheler’s philosophy it is love which correspondswith this moment. When creating the analytic of being-there (Daseinsanalytik) on thestrength of religious examples, Heidegger stressed strongly the experience of an immediatetranscendental intervention in the life of a being-there; Heidegger turned his attentionaway from the phenomena of experiencing transcendence in a contact with another humanbeing or with nature. Later, in Sein und Zeit, he does eliminate this flaw, showing thething as an epiphany of transcendence. In the contact with a thing I am touched by itspresence, which is akin to being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode) and which liberates myexistence, making it an authentic presence.c. Death as the Condition of Full PresenceIn conclusion we can say that death, in the philosophical conceptions mentioned above,is a metanoia of existence. Death is the opening of our outlook above and beyond anyrelations; things, when they are seen from this point of view, are seen as worthy in theirabsolute, relationless authenticity; they are not seen as worthy because of the possibilitiesthey offer of using them as tools, 23 in this phenomenological and existential understanding.Death reveals things in their ‘unbound’ presence, or, if we use Heidegger’sterminology, in their being. Let a verse from the poem On a Rose by Angelus Silesius 24be an example for this view:Die Ros ist ohn warum; sie blühet, weil sie blühet,Sie acht nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet.The nature of the appearance of the phenomenon reveals another aspect in addition tothe aspect of the content of a concrete thing (freed from human usurpation), i.e., theaspect of presence as such. 25 Phainasthai, in its full dimension, cannot be reduced to agiven structural content of a thing; the nature of phainasthai is something more, becauseit is the very moment of a liberated and free lighting of presence as the horizon where ourmeeting with the thing takes place. It was Heidegger who discovered the phenomenologicaldifference between that which appears and its appearance as an horizon of meetingwith the thing. He writes:22Martin Heidegger, Die Technik und die Kehre, 8th ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1991), 41.23I spoke about this at the international conference “Ethik und Politik angesichts der ökologischenKrise,” held in Szczecin in 2003. The subject of my paper was Großzügigkeit des teleologischen Denkens;its text has not yet been published.24As quoted by Heidegger, in Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, 8th ed. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta,1997), 69.25This problem was addressed (at the conference in Szczecin) by Haeffner. Haeffner’s text wasentitled In der Gegenwart leben [Living in the Present].209