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The Way to Nearness: Heidegger's Interpretation of Presence

WHAT DO WE mean when we speak of "presence"? Do we refer to the ostensibly concrete, pragmatic presence of things at hand, of objects lying before us which we may touch and manipulate? Do we include the often nonproximate presence of persons, for example, an author's mediated influence, or the emergent presence of moods, of weathers, of responsibilities — in other words, things which we cannot touch but which nonetheless touch us? Have we pondered this wide-ranging parasensuous sense of "touch"? Have we distinguished between the presence of now and of here or, alternately, grasped the intimate complicity of spatial presence and temporal present, as something that goes beyond mere terminology? For that matter, what about the intangible but weighty presence of words, meaning not just external signs — written or phonetic, not just language as a body of information or a scheme for communication, but language as a universal function transcending the status of instrument or entity, a function neither objective nor subjective, language as the very condition of intelligibility and multidimensional articulation? In what sense is the sense of what is said — whether verbally, in "body language," or in other modes of expression (such as images) — present to one who follows? For the words "sense" and Sinn, as Martin Heidegger explains in his preoccupation with the latent poetry of idiom, originally signify way, course.1 Is presence, as something that elusively concerns and bears upon, homes in, touches, means, perhaps associated with following a way or going through? These questions announce the main themes of my discussion. If presence has to do with "throughness," it is probably no accident that Heidegger's approach to the problem, which claimed his attention practically from start to finish of his long career, comes itself to resemble a series of ever renewed attacks on an ever receding stronghold. Conceived as necessarily experimental and provisional, this project involves, as I shall indicate, the assumption of now one word, now another, in the endeavor to name, invoke, and thus draw into a luminous clearing, the specter of presence. But throughout