held. husserl emptyness

World, Emptiness, Nothingness: A Phenomenological Approach to the Religious Tradition ofJapanAuthor(s): Klaus HeldSource: Human Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2, Back to the Things Themselves (Apr., 1997), pp. 153-167Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20011147 .

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Human Studies 20: 153-167,1997. 153

? 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

World, Emptiness, Nothingness: A Phenomenological Approach to the Religious Tradition of Japan

*

KLAUS HELD t Department of Philosophy, Bergische Universit?t Wuppertal, 42097 Wuppertal, Germany

The spirit of phenomenology can only thrive if we consider the most important task of philosophy to be not the discussion of texts and authors, but rather the

courage to summon up the "naivete" to occupy ourselves immediately with

the things themselves. The question then becomes, however, which "things"

primarily deserve our attention. That which the English language denotes with

the word "thing" is called pragma in classical Greek, res in Latin, and Sache

in German. All of these words originally meant something like "matter," that

is, an important task of communal life. Communal life means dwelling in a

common world. We live in an age when all the cultural worlds of humanity are coming ever more quickly together to form one single world. Thus, today an urgent matter confronts us: understanding between human beings from

different worlds within the one world.

Such understanding appears uncomplicated enough so long as it remains a question of organising the essentially uniform international management of politics, economy, and technology. However, if the encounter between

persons from different cultures were limited to this, coexistence in the one

world would amount to little more than abysmal boredom in a global Coca Cola monoculture. For this reason there arises the responsibility of preserving within the one world the tradition-based differences pertaining to the various cultural worlds, and the task of opening oneself, as a member of a particular culture, to the other cultures in their very foreignness.

It is as a member of a Western culture that we are struck by the foreign? ness of Japanese culture, which is at present so successful. In this situation

phenomenological thought has the exceptional opportunity to prove its worth in comprehending Japan's cultural tradition and world, and to make this its

"thing." Like every cultural tradition, that of the Japanese is stamped by religion. I should like to attempt, therefore, to illuminate for our Western

* The original text in German has already been published in the Festschrift Rombach, 1995.

* I would like to thank Renzo Lorente (SUNY at Stony Brook) for translating this article into English and Felix 'O Murchadha for his help in checking and supplementing the translation.



154 KLAUS HELD

understanding a few features of the religious tradition of Japan's cultural

world.

I am convinced that, of all modern philosophical methods, the phenomeno?

logical style of thinking offers us the most assistance, for at bottom the world

is from the start the "thing" on which all phenomenological thought centers.

The basic subject of phenomenology is, as the name implies, appearance. The basic assertion of phenomenology concerning appearance is: Whatev?

er human beings encounter appears to them embedded in sense-referential

contexts, "horizons". For their part, these contexts also mutually refer to one

another. The phenomenological conception of world denotes the universal

context of reference for all horizons, wherein everything relating to human

beings at all has its place. This "wherein" is not to be understood as if the

world were a gigantic container for appearances; rather, the world is nothing other than the happening of appearing itself, and therefore constitutes the

basic subject of phenomenology. In order to explain this thesis, I shall begin with the state of affairs by virtue

of which there are horizons, and hence appearances. This state of affairs is

reference, or the process of referring. There are explicit references, that is,

signs of every sort, from written characters to traffic symbols, and there are

also implicit references, which constitute the precondition of our being able to

use signs at all. The paradigmatic example of this in Husserl's phenomenology was the co-present reverse side of a thing in the present givenness of its frontal

side. In seeing the front I am referred-usually inexplicitly-to the possibility of bringing the back side, now unseen, to present givenness. This possibility does not belong to the perceived thing, it does not exist "in itself," that is to say,

independently of any relation to me. Instead, it is a possibility ? in German a

M?glichkeit ? which lies within my ability, is contained within my "power"

? in German my Verm?gen, and can therefore be designated with Husserl's

apt characterisation as a Verm?glichkeit, that is a "potentiality" which lies in

my power, a subjective potentiality.

Every such reference leads from a presently realized subjective potentiality to potentialities which, to be sure, though not yet realized at the moment

in which the reference occurs, could however be realized in future. Let us

imagine that the reference from the front to the back of my desk could speak; it would then say to me: If you go around the desk which you now perceive

before you, you can see the back of it. This "you can" is, however, ambiguous; it refers first to the present and means: You now possess the ability to see

the reverse side; at the present this act lies within your potentiality. Yet the

reference also refers to the future, and contains the thesis: There will be a

possibility of your seeing the reverse side.



WORLD, EMPTINESS, NOTHINGNESS 155

The two theses contained within the "I can" are not independent of one

another. The thesis, with which a certain endowment is affirmed of my present

ability, can only be verified by the confirmation of the second thesis, according to which something still lying in the future will become present. But this

confirmation does not belong to my present ability. Strictly speaking, I know

that the desk really presents me with a reverse side only during the moment

in which I see it. The transition from the expected to the actual present is in

principle uncertain ? so uncertain that I cannot even count on the fact that any future at all will become present for me. Every such transition is in fact not

to be expected, but only to be hoped for.

With every "I can" of a referring I affirm for myself present potentialities

which, however, are real possibilities only insofar as the presents anticipated therein become later an actual present. It is because I trust in the potentialities of reference presently at my disposal, which will be confirmed at least in

part through the realization of future possibilities, that a world as a reliably

appearing context of reference belongs to my existence. It is the essential

feature of daily life that human beings constantly, though not expressly, fall

back upon potentialities of reference as if they were in this sense a regular

possession at their disposal. Yet, in reality there exists no such disposal over

potentialities, but always only the unstated hope concerning the unavailable

becoming present of possibilities. That potentialities of reference appear as available to human beings is, in

the normality of everyday life, not something which they are aware of in

the form of a specifically assumed attitude toward the future, or even in the

shape of explicit theses, but rather because their daily life experience is deter?

mined and attuned through and through by a primordial trust in the becoming present of possibilities. This basic attunement or mood can nevertheless be

shattered, if far-reaching, stirring moods ? whether joyful or sad ? break

through the equilibrium of everyday life. It goes without saying, of course, that in the ordinary situation of mood everyone also knows of the possibility that expectations will not be fulfilled. Yet here one encounters this possibility in a completely different attitude than in the deep moods.1

In everyday life the transition from an immanent possibility to an actual

present is experienced as the normal case. The failure of such a transition to

take place is measured against this normal case and appears, accordingly, as

an absence or lack of the expectable, asprivatio; for the everyday expecta? tion, time is responsible for the fulfilment, so to speak, of what is expected by human beings, and if it withholds the expected from them, this has the character in principle of an exceptional case. This ranking between the normal case and withholding is turned upside down in deep moods. The ever possible



156 KLAUS HELD

withholding assumes primacy; every actual coming to presence appears as a

surprising granting of the unexpectable. The ordinary, fundamentally mood-attuned lived attitude, through which

human beings trust in their potentialities of reference and thereby have a

world, rests on their not allowing their deep moods to surface. The inversion

of this mood-situation, whereby the becoming present appears as a granting of the unexpectable, is the explicity experience of morality. Philosophy shares

this shattering experience with religion. In the distance from daily life, which

philosophy gains by means of the break with the normal mood, the question can be posed: How does the everyday primordial trust, in which the granting of the unexpectable out of the withholding appears as the normal case, and

accordingly the withholding as the exception, become possible? With this

question one is at the same time asking how the world as a reliably appearing context of reference is originally constituted.

For the everyday mood the withholding as such remains unstated and

unrecognized, for it appears as a mere privatio of the expectable. In this

fashion, the unexpectability of the granting of the transition to presence dis?

guises itself as the specious normality of this very transition. The withholding conceals itself as the specious normality of this very transition. The with?

holding conceals itself to the extent that the granting of the transition appears as self-evident; the granting of the unexpectable takes place in everyday life

as the withdrawal of the withholding into unobtrusiveness; the withholding enters the shadows in favor of the normal becoming present. Thus its self

concealment is the condition of possibility for the original constitution of the

normality of everyday life.

By means of this primordial constitution of the normality of everyday life, the unexpectable possibilities of the future turn into presently available poten? tialities. Out of the unbridgeable temporal abyss between future possibility and verified, presently fulfilled potentiality arises the surmountable difference

between many, at present equally available potentialities. The dimension for

differences that are available at the same time is space, it is the apartness with?

in the simultaneous. Through the primordial constitution of the normality of

everyday life the world arises as the space in which potentialities are corn

present as differentiated and thereby able to refer to one another. The world

stretches open in primordial constitution. This unfolding of the world consists

in the fact that the dimension for the differentiated, compresent potentialities is opened out.

The panorama of these potentialities organizes itself in various fields of

reference, the horizons. The world as the context of reference in which all

horizons belong together is happening, for its being consists in future possibil? ities being transformed into co-present potentialities, and this transformative




happening is, for its part, only the reverse of the happening of the self

concealment of withholding; the two happenings belong together, just as the

concave and convex aspects of a curvature do. This complementary happen?

ing is the appearance. It offers space for the embedding of all the appearances in horizons; by belonging in a place within the context of reference of the

potentialities, an appearance has its locus "in" the world.

Since the world happens2 as such a giving-place, the events within it are

e-vents in a literal sense, that is incidents that come forth out of the world due

to its space-giving character, they are, so to speak, e-mergences. The world

allows them to emerge toward us out of the horizons, due to the concealing of

the withholding itself in favor of the co-presence of potentialities. It thereby becomes possible for events to appear to us as poles, to which co-present

potentialities can jointly refer. Thus events in everyday life can strike us as

identical and persisting objects. But in the co-presence of potentialities the

completely uncertain future lies concealed, and the presence of the object's

identity stretches into this future. It is for this reason that the ordinary assump? tion of objective identity is an anticipation of the unexpectable transition into

a present. This anticipation does not acquire its right from that which appears at present. It can be motivated only by the human will, which is in the position to stretch itself into the absolutely unknown. Objective identity results from

the will's positing. I shall return to this question at the end.

I said that the being of the world consisted in the granting of open space for events to emerge. In this sense the world is the all-embracing dimension

of openness. Because of this openness the Greeks designated the world as

a whole as sky -

uranos? The world as uranos holds a place -

topos, in

Greek - ready for each event. A space, which leaves place for everything, is

empty. The happening of appearing, the laying itself open of the world, is

the disclosure ofthat emptiness which originally yields space for everything. In this connection it seems remarkable to me that the Chinese and Japanese character for "emptiness," read in Japanese as ku, is identical to a symbol that originally designated sky; this indicates that interculturally there exists an experience of emptiness in which it is grasped as synonymous with the

openness of the sky. In the context of this experience "emptiness" does not mean the emptiness

of an unfilled vessel, it is not the absence of something, but rather possesses a

"positive" character, for it is the original granting of space. That the world is this emptiness, however, can only become apparent to me in the disruption of

my fundamental everyday mood. Therefore, in everyday life emptiness loses its positive meaning. Only in deep moods is the happening of space-giving experienced as a granting from the withholding. In the mood of everyday life it must remain inconspicuous, since the granting of co-present potentialities



158 KLAUS HELD

consists precisely in the escaping from our attention of the withholding.4 Thus, its total inconspicuousness belongs to this happening; the space-giving of the original emptiness itself completely disappears in favor of that for

which it leaves place. This feature of the world's space-giving has, to my knowledge, been

broached only once in the long Western tradition of thought: In the "Timaeus"

Plato introduces the chora as the most primordial, barely conceivable, precon? dition for the beautiful ordering of appearance, hence of the kosmos {Timaeus

50a). Chora actually means "place." The word goes together with choreo-, one

could paraphrase the meaning of this verb as: "to give place by withdrawing and becoming an embracing space." The chora is hardly conceivable because

it offers place to every entity in the cosmos precisely by withdrawing itself

and thereby eluding comprehension. One can translate chora as "space," as

is usually done. Yet the being of this space is not the static existence of a

receptacle, but the happening to which I have referred.

As this happening, the chora is objectively no different from that emptiness which is the world itself. Since complete inconspicuousness makes up the

essence of this emptiness, it does not lend itself to any sort of comprehension. The absolutely inconceivable is appropriately designated as nothingness. This

concept also plays a significant role in Western thought. Yet it is only in the

East-Asian tradition that nothingness has been treated as that space-giving

emptiness which is no mere lack of filling and is nothing other than the

being of the world itself.5 As the concept of "nothingness" stands here for

the absolutely inconceivable, it inevitably arouses the suspicion of being the

product of an empty intellectual game. The suspicion can only be dispelled if there exists a concrete experience that legitimizes the use of the concept of

"nothingness" as indicated.

As a term for the space-giving emptiness, "nothingness" aims ultimately at the self-concealment of withholding, that is, as that completely uncertain

future whose coming to presence lies utterly outside our disposal. That the

transition to a present is always a "wonder," the pure possibility of a granting from the withdrawal is confirmed when it fails to appear. However, this non

appearance is not an experienceable event, but rather the becoming impossible of all experienceability. But how, then, can this happening become the con?

tent of an experience, as is required for a legitimate use of the concept of

"nothingness?" For something to become the "content of an experience" need not mean

that it becomes an object. Moods, too, are experiences; that is to say, with?

in moods, too, something becomes clear in its determinateness, without its

comprising the object of the mood. In the European tradition, it was not until

the phenomenology of Heidegger that it was recognized that moods can in




this sense contain a 'truth' and not merely represent an inner subjective state

(Heidegger, 1996, p. 126). In contrast, it appears, that in the wisdom-doctrines

of East-Asia, it has long since been seen that in mood the world itself can be

opened up.6 In the deep moods the world itself is apprehended non-objectively as the

happening of appearance. But what is shown by this happening is always only the coming to presence of the absolutely unavailable future, thus the opposite of the becoming impossible of all experienceability. Accordingly, even in the

deep moods this becoming impossible cannot be experienced immediately and as what it is in itself, but only by fitting into the coming to presence and

by assuming its form. The becoming impossible of the transition to presence can only become the content of experience by being experienced as at once

the movement of this transition and its countermovement. This happening

alone, the countermovement of the becoming both possible and impossible of

experienceability as the complementary movement of the actually occurring

appearance, can be that which concretely confronts and unsettles human

beings in a deep mood.

Through this coming to presence, in the transition from unavailably future

possibility to presently available potentiality, the context of reference unfolds

itself; the open dimension of appearance "world" is unfolded. Within its

horizons we can orient ourselves: Action receives its area of latitude, which

makes it possible in the first place, by means of the difference between the

manifold potentialities; and through the referential relations arising between

them the possible options for our action-orienting decisions are delineated.

Thus, the self-opening of the world as space offers place for the mobility with

which the acting individual freely follows the particular references of a given context of reference.

Along with this happening of self-opening and the unfolding of difference

and multiplicity, one can imagine an happening with a counterposed direction: a closing-off and contraction into a compact thickness, through which every difference disappears and hence all mobility becomes impossible. Such an

happening is no mere invention of thought; it is concretely experienceable in many phenomena, namely in all alterations through which determinate

qualities change into their polar opposite. In the transition from brightness to darkness, from warmth to cold, from looseness to firmness and the like, this happening becomes experienceable for us in a bodily way, to intuition

and feeling; we see how the bright openness of space closes itself off, how

distinctiveness fades away, how suppleness gives way to rigidity. If it is to be possible for one in deep moods to become aware of the

countermovement in appearance of the making possible and impossible of

experienceability, the support for this experience must derive from an event



160 KLAUS HELD

that occurs to us in the world. To be sure, this event must not be limited

to individual incidents in the world; it must concern the world itself. The

qualities to which I have referred satisfy this demand; they confront us not

only as properties of things, for example as the cold in a snowball, but also

as ways in which we experience our dwelling in the world as a whole ?

"being-in-the-world," in Heidegger's formulation. The coldness or darkness, for example, which we express in "impersonal sentences" like "it is cold"

or "it is dark" are of such kind. Fundamentally qualities like "uncanny" or

"joyful" cannot be attributed to any things as properties, but always refer to

the whole of the atmosphere in which the world appears to us in particular situations. Therefore, deep moods find their support in such world-opening

qualities. Hereafter I shall designate these qualities as elementary qualities.

Polarity is essential for elementary qualities. Their determinateness is

defined only through their relationship to their respective opposite.7 On

account of this relationship they can be intensified, or rather diminished,

i.e., in the language of Kant, they are "intensive magnitudes" which neces?

sarily admit of degree (Kant, 1965, pp. A166/B 207ff). "Warm," for example,

always means "warmer than;" this means, at the same time, that every "warm"

is also a "colder than," namely in relation to a higher grade of warmth. In this

relation, the being of warmth turns out to be cold; this being is, therefore, not

stable: Warmth is what it is as the passing over into its opposite. The transi?

tion into its polar antithesis happens to the elementary qualities not merely

externally, rather they are in themselves transitional. As a result, their being is not originally a persisting condition, but an ambivalent movement; what

we experience as warmth is equally the passing over from cold into warmth

and vice versa.

It is through the inner mutability of the elementary qualities that appear?

ance, the elusive happening of the granting of emptiness, can become the

experiential content of deep moods. The countermovement between the tran?

sition to presence and the becoming impossible of this transition becomes

experienceable in the concrete mood and the bodily state of being in a sit?

uation as the ambivalent movement of appearance, with the world's ways of being like "it is cold," simultaneously emerging out of and disappearing into their opposite. The world as world therefore becomes experienceable

primarily through these essentially oppositional transitions between the ele?

mentary qualities ? in the intertwining of the happiness of "becoming" with

the melancholy of "passing away." It seems to me that Japanese culture has traditionally been stamped by a

special receptivity for this process of oppositional transitions. The ambivalent

movement of appearance becomes the content of experience through a blend?

ing of the morning freshness of reviving appearance with the melancholy of




transitoriness. This tense unity becomes experienceable above all in the deli?

cate, simultaneous illumination and blurring of all contours in the transitional

situations between the elementary conditions of the world, for example in the

porous mist ? in Japanese kasumi ? on the border between two seasons or

between day and night.8 Yet in Japanese culture the elementary qualities themselves can also become

the support for deep moods when they show themselves "in" particular events

in the world. However, in the Western classical tradition, going back to

Aristotle, we find a difficult obstacle standing in the way of an unbiased

phenomenological understanding of what this "in" means. Since his Cate?

gories we have thought of the fundamental structure of an object's being as

a determination of an underlying determinable - in Aristotelian terms ti kata

tinos.9

At the basis of this structure is the platonic interpretation of the thing

according to the model of production. This model could among other rea?

sons become ontologically authoritative, because it is only in production that

we have access to beings in such a way that their inner structure becomes

understandable to us through the experience of our own power of disposal.

Every production relates to what lies before and what lies ready as the deter?

minable object to which human beings give further determination through their dealings with it. In light of the structure of the "determination of an

underlying determinable," the events in the world are conceived as in their

already-lying-before, persisting and identical objects, which function as the

"bearers" of every respective quality. Still, this fundamental structure loses its validity when we recall that all

objective identity is anticipated only in an anticipation of the future by the will ? a future which, however, escapes our power of disposal. In the deep moods objects receive their determinateness exclusively from the comple?

mentary happenings of the becoming possible and becoming impossible of

appearance. Accordingly, here they can only so confront us by their becom?

ing, as it were, the focuses in which the elementary qualities, the poles of

this complementary happening, manifest themselves. Here events no longer function as identical bearers of determinations to which, then, the qualities also belong as properties, but instead become pure "e-mergences," that is

places in which the qualitative diversity of the internal countermovement of

appearing manifests itself. The opening of the world, the light of its daybreak, is focused in these places.

For this reason these events are not only or not primarily things. Owing to

the predominance of the production model, things enjoy a special position in

the Western tradition with respect to the rest of the events in the world; for

the structure "determination of an underlying determinable" becomes clearly



162 KLAUS HELD

experienceable in the thing as that which can be worked upon. In Japanese

culture, things are treated ? provided that they can function as places or foci

for the appearance of the world itself ? as equal to the other events in the

world, and so as equal to human beings, ways of life, actions, movements

etc. In a touch of moss or a stone of a rock garden, the elementary qualities of the world are just as experienceable moodwise as, for instance, in the

movements of a Noh dance or in the gestures and features of an eminent

artist's personality. The objectification of the elementary qualities in our Western tradition

already insinuated itself through the propositions of our Indo-Germanic lan?

guages, for they themselves already show the structure "t? kata tinos" In these

languages, only the so-called impersonal sentences like "it is cold" evoke the

respective "quality" of the happening of the world itself. In the Japanese

tradition, the receptivity for the objective world-content of the mentioned

"qualities" can be preserved better because the sentences are differently con?

structed than in our languages. In Japanese the fulfillment of an appearance is that which is primarily recognized, and the one which, in light of the ti

kata tinos-structare, would have to be regarded as the fundamental support of determinations, is as it were a secondary structure which is only belatedly fulfilled. It is not the dancer who is the bearer of the determination of the

dance, nor is moss the substrate of its soft, dull and green properties, but

rather ? judged from the Western perspective

? the other way around: The

fundamental event is the dancing, the going-on of appearing of soft or green;

yet the dancer or moss are incidents built into the event.

It is the happening of the world as chora which comes into focus in such

particular events in a deep mood. The utter inconspicuousness characterizing the space-giving of the chora has also captivated Western philosophy. Con?

sequently, since Plato's discovery of the chora philosophers have failed to

reflect upon the relationship obtaining between the space of the chora and

the places ? the topoi

? in which the elementary qualities appear. The incon?

spicuousness of the space-giving emptiness of the chora was not recognized in its incomprehensibility, but rather interpreted otherwise, as an intelligible

emptiness. This emptiness was grasped ever more decidedly as the continu?

um of infinite, empty space that can be filled with mathematically calculable

forms.10

Kant's transcendental discussion of space in the Critique of Pure Reason

forms the climax of this development.11 Nonetheless, here there appears a

crucial indication with regard to the relationship of the many places to space. These places are in a remarkable way parts, partial spaces of the whole of

the one space. The individual spaces are not "parts" of the one space in the

sense that it is patched together out of them; rather, they are as Kant says,




its Einschr?nkungen, or "limitations" or better "restrictions".12 That means,

however, that the one space is entirely present in each of the partial spaces; the whole of it contracts, so to speak, into the respective place.

Precisely this relationship also holds true for the elementary qualities. They are the diversity of ways in which the open space-the "world"-happens. But

each of the ways of being of the world in this sense appears in the concrete

experience of a deep mood only by presenting itself in the "contraction" of

space to a definite partial space and its place as concentrated in a focal point. In this moodful focusing each of the elementary qualities can be experienced as a "restriction" of a quality of the "world-space" itself, that is, of the space

giving emptiness. That the whole of a quality can be given in every locally restricted appear?

ance of the quality is shown especially clearly in a phenomenon for which

my mother tongue, German, has only a single word: Farbe. In English one

can distinguish between "paint" and "color." As "paint," the color is only

part of a larger amount of colors, as "color" it is the presence of the entirety of the color in the form of its restriction: "Blue in general" is intuitable as

a whole in any blue which is seen. Thus, one is correct in saying that the

world as such presents itself with a certain "color" in every mood-attuned

experience of an elementary quality; it becomes visible as the "atmospheric" or "moodful" color of being-in-the-world. The nothingness of emptiness, as

which the world happens, appears in its coloring and visibility understood in

this sense.

A remarkably exact confirmation of these phenomenological reflections

stemming from the East-Asian experience of the world can be found in the

central meditation text of the Mahayana Buddhism prevalent in Japan, namely the Sutra, which in Japanese bears the title Hannya Haramitta Shingyo. There

the interrelation of the appearance of all things is characterized as their

coloring or visibility, shiki in Japanese, and it is explicitly stated in the most

important sentence of the Sutra that shiki means the same as the "emptiness" of nothingness, ku in Japanese: "Shiki soku ze ku; ku soku ze shiki" which

could be translated, for example, as: "

'Visible is synonymous with 'empty,' and 'empty' is synonymous with 'visible.

' "13 The character for ku, as I have

noted, originally also designated the "sky" in its openness, hence the world.

The basis for the visibility of the world as emptiness is formed by "emer?

gences"? e-vents, which we encounter in a deep mood as places of elementary appearance. In the everyday mood they have hardened into objects as identi?

cal bearers of determinations. For this reason the world, the all-encompassing context of reference, cannot manifest itself as such in the objects of this sort.

Even so, ordinarily the world is familiar to us: Normally we are aware of how

we are referred from one object to another. But by our allowing ourselves



164 KLAUS HELD

to be referred along we fail to pause; we do not stop in order to experience an object as an emergence, in which the coloring of the world comes forth

gathered and focused.14 Only because we gather ourselves together in a deep mood and, as it were, abandon ourselves to the movement of this e-merging, does the happening of the context of reference become apparent to us.

Nevertheless, the movement of referring, as that which the world is, can

also become explicit for us in a certain manner already in everyday life when

we point to an event; for every pointing is as such a referring. For pointing we

need signs. Ordinarily we have a consciousness of the context of reference

insofar as we know that certain events can be apprehended as signs for other

events. Therefore, the consciousness of signs can bring about our allowing a

deep mood to spring forth.

When, in a shattering experience due to such a mood, events are experienced as places of the world's appearing, they still function as signs

? yet no

longer as marks attracting attention because of their orientational function

within the context of reference, but instead as inconspicuous occasions of

gathering, as Heidegger had glimpsed, when in his later period he spoke of

a "phenomenology of the inconspicuous." It is precisely through that which

is "small" in the sense of inconspicuousness - in the brevity of a Haiku, the

patch of moss on a stone?that the world comes into focus. For this reason, the

medieval Japanese poet Sei Shonagon could write a characteristic sentence,

which in English one could translate approximately as "small is beautiful."15

In order to see a sign in an event from everyday life, one must apprehend it as an object, and this object

? in accordance with the Aristotelian structure

t? kata tinos ? as subject to the determination of a determinable, namely as subject to its interpretation as a sign. Now, as I said at the outset, the

determination of the object, that is, the positing of its identity, requires an

act of human willing. That something becomes an object functioning for us

as a sign, as a mark of identification in the context of reference, is due to

the will. Since the late Middle Ages this will has increasingly dominated the

awareness of signs in our Western tradition.

As a consequence of nominalist skepticism that asserted itself in that age

and has since gained acceptance among us, every determination ofthat which

we encounter appears to us as the product of a human interpretation. This

nominalism originally became possible through theological voluntarism: The

omnipotence of the biblical God the Creator required that every determination

had to be explained as a product of his infinitely powerful will. The likeness of human beings to their creator could be preserved only by conferring a

correspondingly infinite power upon the human will.

The voluntaristic exaggeration of the divine and human power of disposal had its prehistory. Perhaps the most important preliminary decision for it




was taken when the Church Fathers made the Platonic creation myth from the

"Timaios" compatible with the biblical story of the Creation. In the "Timaios"

the divine fashioning of the world as a beautiful order presupposes the chora.

To be sure, according to Plato the chora willingly obeys the creative will of

the world's divine builder, the demiurge: Yet God is also dependent upon its

willingness, for it is the emptiness that gives the space for the creation in the

first place. According to the Christian re-interpretation, the nothingness of

the "creation out of nothingness," the creatio ex nihilo, takes the place of the

nothingness of this emptiness. The Creator's absolute volitional power is shown by his complete indepen?

dence from any precondition whatsoever for his act of creation. To be sure,

the ex nihilo sounds as though the nihil were just such a precondition. But it

is precisely no longer a space-granting nothingness as was the nothingness of

the chora-, God alone produces the space for the Creation. "Nothingness" is

only a name for the absolute independence of God the Creator. In and of itself

it is inessential. The inessential nothingness opens the way to Voluntarism

and Nominalism, since the willful determination of objects through human

interpretation allows the elementary determinateness of the world itself to

fall into oblivion, a determinateness that we experience in the deep moods

and that escapes our power of disposal; the unlimited increase of the willful

determination of the determinable becomes possible. This path has lead to

that domination of the world whose ecological consequences have alarmed

all of humanity. Voluntarism also gave rise to our nominalistic consciousness of signs. For

this consciousness, signs are indices that impel the individual to the voli?

tional exertion and restlessness of an unending search for clues. But it is

also conceivable that there are signs which are experienced as inconspicu? ous manifestations of emptiness.16 As members of Western culture and by virtue of our will-beholding sign-consciousness, we evince less receptivity to

such signs than one observes in Japan. The signs of emptiness only become

comprehensible through a relaxation of the will, as we abandon ourselves to

the internal countermovement of the appearance in the calm composure of

a deep mood, and abandon ourselves to the happening of the space-giving

emptiness that precedes every willful human, or even divine, determination.

The elementary coloring of this emptiness becomes apparent when some

event becomes a sign of the world. Perhaps a phenomenological reflection,

interculturally uniting East and West, upon the nothingness of the world as

"chora" and the calm dwelling on the signs of emptiness, can point towards

a new direction for philosophy.



166 KLAUS HELD

Notes

1. In this regard, see my "Fundamental moods and Heidegger's critique of contemporary culture" (Held, 1993a, pp. 286-303). I have outlined the significance of the concept of

basic moods for the philosophy of interculturality in a provisional manner in my article, "Intercultural understanding and the role of Europe" (Held, 1995).

2. In order to express in the German language the idea that the being of the world is a

happening, Heidegger derived from the noun "the world," (di Welt) the neologistic verb

"to world" (weiten).

3. One can easily overlook the fact that this is the concept that Plato and Aristotle predomi?

nantly use to indicate the totality of the world.

4. In Western languages the experience of emptiness is so greatly colored by the everyday that it usually does not occur to anyone to think of anything else regarding the word

"emptiness' than a container that is unfilled. For the well-educated Japanese, the Sino

Japanese sign for "?w" keeps alive the memory of the positive meaning of emptiness; but

in everyday Japanese, the word ku means a lack of filling, in exactly the same way the

word "emptiness' does in Western languages.

5. I am grateful to Tadashi Ogawa for the information that already in 1927, Kitaro Nishida touched upon the inner connection between the Platonic chora and the Buddhist nothing in the context of a discussion of his central concept of basho (Nishida, 1949).

6. In this connection I find it remarkable that in a large number of the Indo-Germanic

languages it is hardly possible to translate properly the German word "Stimmung" that is,

the word "mood" into English, while the Japanese are able to make the intended meaning clear to themselves relatively easily with the help of the concept ki or kibun. In this regard, one must naturally avoid the conclusion made on the basis of an overly quick extension of

the parallel that these words have in their original meaning nothing in common with the German word Stimmung, which is originally related to Stimme

? voice.

7. In relation to this and the following discussion, see my detailed analysis (Held, 1980). 8. For the reference to the philosophical significance of kasumi I am indebted to an unpub?

lished lecture presented by Akihiro Takeichi at the 1991 conference of the Society for

Phenomenological Research on "Interculturality" in Wuppertal, Germany.

9. In this regard, see Tugendhat's still standard investigation (1958).

10. This already begins with Plato himself when he explains the elements on the basis of the

geometric form of the chora (Timaeus, 53a). The forgetting of the chora already governs the classic analysis of Aristotle in Physics 208a, in which in place of the chora the topos becomes the theme of the philosophy of space.

11. See the objectification of space as a "form of intuition" into the "formal intuition" (Kant,

1965, p. B160fn.).

12. See Kant (1965) p. A24/B39 in relation to p. B136 fn.

13. A German translation is to be found in Kukai (1992, p. 138). 14. See my "Intentionalit?t und Existenzerf?llung," (1993b). 15. See in her "Pillowbook," a book belonging to the canon of Japanese culture, the charac?

teristic sentence, "nanimo nanimo tiisakimono wa mina utsukushi" (Shonagon, 1960).

16. In his book (1970), Roland Barthes interpreted Japanese culture as a culture of the sign and the sign itself as "signs of emptiness." According to Barthhes, signs of emptiness

means that the single occurrence functioning as a sign is in itself without any meaning. It

receives meaning only insofar as it differentiates itself from all other occurrences within

a structural totality, which one might name in a phenomenological manner the context of

reference. The signs thus receive their meaning only through human interpretation. In this

way Barthes remains in his "structuralist" interpretation in debt to the Western-nominalist

conception ofthat which a sign is.




References

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Held, K. (1993a). Fundamental Moods and Heidegger's Critique of Contemporary Culture.

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held. husserl emptyness

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