What marks out the kind of being that belongs to human being – to the being that we ourselves are – is, as Martin Heidegger famously asserted, its essential questionability. [i] This questionability does not concern merely individual or species ‘survival’ nor any of the conditions for survival (food, shelter, reproduction, and so on), but instead the very nature of that being as it relates both to the world and to itself: what is the manner of that being, how and in what way is it to be realized, and how is it to be realized in this situation?
In this way, the questionability of human being should be seen as a question that is perhaps more perspicuously put in terms of ‘who’ the human is or may be (where ‘human’ must be understood as naming an ontological rather than a merely biological category – which means it can encompass many different forms and need not be restricted to the biological species that is modern homo sapiens). [ii] The questionability of human being thus implicates the very identity of human being as it arises for human being. And in this way too, since the question of who we are, which always implicates both self and other, is not a question to be addressed in just any way (as if who we are could be a matter of arbitrary choice), the question of the who’ of being’ is at one and the same time ontological and ethical. Moreover, the question of the ‘who’ is bound up with the ‘how’, and especially with the ‘how’ understood as tied to action, since it is through action – which is to say, through concrete engagement in the world – that identity is articulated and realized.
Because questionability belongs to the being of the human, human being in the world is always faced with questionability and uncertainty. Human being is in and of the world, and yet in being so, it is also apart from the world. This is the basis for the human experience, not merely of loneliness (which can be experienced, as in the case of many non-human animals, without any sense of worldly separation), but of alienation even of homelessness. Here alienation and homelessness must be understood not as absolute states in themselves, but as part of the structure of the human situation as already belonging to the world – they are modifications of such belonging and possible only on the basis of it. Homelessness and alienation are thus modification of being at home, just as placelessness and displacement are modifications of being placed, just as being apart is a modification of belonging to.
Human being always finds itself already in the world, which also means: already in a situation, in a place. It is this prior human belonging to the world, as this is given through the placed character of human being, that is itself the basis for human questionability. Such belonging to the world, such being in a place, is not a matter merely of static location or simple juxtaposition, like objects that stand next to one another, but rather of active relatedness. To be in the world, and so to be in a place, is thus already to be given over to being affected by and responsive to both place and world. To be in the world is to face the world and so to be open to its demands. It is this very ‘openness to’ that is the basis for human questionability. Human being already finds itself in the world, already in a place, but the how of its being-there is always ahead of it – it stands as a question for human being that cannot be answered in advance. Because human being is indeed ‘in question’ in this way, human being can also be said to stand in an essential relation to decision – human being demands decision. In as much as ‘crisis’ itself refers us back to the idea of decision (via the Greek krinein), so human being is always faced with decision (even when this goes unrecognised) and so is always, to some extent, in the midst of ‘crisis’ – human being is precisely a being in crisis, just as it is in question.
The sense of crisis that belongs to the very character of human being, to its ontological situation, must be distinguished from the sense of crisis that is part of our contemporary historical situation – that sense of crisis that derives from the very real threats to human life on the earth that encompass the rise of pandemic diseases,global changes in climate, the renewed danger of nuclear conflict, and the widespread breakdown of existing ecological systems. Even were there no such historically specific threats to the possibility of human life and existence, still human life would be no less ‘in question’, and so no less faced with crisis and decision. The ontological crisis is, in this sense, more fundamental than any historical crisis. Moreover, only if this is recognised can we properly understand and begin to address the historically specific threats that we now face. Those threats have arisen, not as a result of processes or events that are independent of human decisions but are rooted in such decisions. The historical crisis of human being is thus a crisis of our own making, and it is grounded in the responsibility that human being has for its own being, including its specific historical realization.
It may be said that this crisis has come about through human ignorance – a lack of knowledge about the consequences of certain directions in human technological, economic, and social development – but knowledge is never complete, and lack of knowledge is not itself a sufficient explanation here. The contemporary historical crisis is not only underlain by the ontological crisis that already and always belongs to human being but is indeed rooted in it. It is because we look past our questionability – which includes our ignorance, our fragility, our fundamental uncertainty – and instead, treat the world, including our own existence, as if it were almost entirely amenable to our command and control, and so as if it were subject to our decision, that we find ourselves in a situation in which our historical future is now in question. The reality is that the world was never subject to our decision. Rather than the world being subject to us, it is we who are subject to the world.
If we are to think this idea through the ancient concepts of psyche and kosmos, but also topos, and the relation between them, then we can say that the human psyche is inseparably dependent on the kosmos, the two coming together in the topos that is the bounded, yet open space in which all that is comes to be and passes away. The harmony, or better the unity that is the kosmos is worked out in and through that topos – a topos that appears as always both singular and multiple, separate and yet always together – and to which the human psyche bears witness, in which it finds its being, and in and through which it is taken up as human. Psyche and kosmos, soul and world, both have their ground in topos, in place. It is also in place, in our very situatedness, here, in the midst of the world, both engaged with it and yet as also standing apart from it, that the questionability and so the crisis of human being has its own origin.
Martin Buber reminds us that in Genesis, the first thing said by God to Adam is in the form of a question: “Where are you?” The first question for human being, the question that grounds human being, is the question as to our own situation, our own place, and so also our own possibility. It is a question of orientation, but also a question that asks after the proper bounds within which we find ourselves – since it is only within bounds that there can be any openness of being.
Although it is the first question, that does not mean that the question as to the place of human being is a question that simply stands in a series of questions, such that, once answered, it can be set aside, and one can move on to ask after something else. This first question is first because it underlies all other questions and because it remains as a question no matter what answer is given to it. The situation is exactly analogous to the situation of physical situatedness: to be in a place such that one has a sense of where one is, and such that one can act and respond in a manner appropriate to the place, is not a matter of single act of orientation or self-location that then determines all that follows. Instead, it is a continual process of adjustment and negotiation, almost of conversation, that requires a constant attentiveness to one’s surroundings and the changing relation between oneself, others, other things, and the larger context. [iii]
To be in a place is always to be responsive to the questionability, the ‘crisis’, the uncertainty of place itself. No place is ever completely revealed, and the revealing of place, which occurs as a constant play, is the revealing, never completed, of the world and of the self. It is here, in topos, that the real harmony, the unity, of kosmos and psyche is to be found. The question for historical human being – for our contemporary existence – is whether we can find our way back to this place, and in so doing, genuinely take up and address the global-historical challenges that threaten our continued existence on the earth.
Jeff Malpas, Hobart, Tasmania, June 2021
Notes:
[i] See Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962 [1927]), H12. The issue of questionability recurs throughout Heidegger’s thinking, and, if anything, becomes even more central in the later work - although there questioning is also tied to listening (which, taken together with questioning, can be understood as indicating a fundamental mode of responsive attentiveness).
[ii] Hence the title of Abraham J. Heschel’s valuable little book Who is Man? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965).
[iii] For more on the importance of place here, and so of the topological dimension associated with it, see (among other works) Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topology (London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2018). The ideas developed in summary form here echo aspects of the discussion in Malpas, ‘In the Vicinity of the Human’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (2017), pp. 423-436.
Jeff Malpas is Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart and Distinguished Visiting Professor at LaTrobe University in Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a Distinguished Fellow of the Australian Association of von Humboldt Fellows. He is the author or editor of some 30 books including Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning (Cambridge, 1992), Place and Experience (Cambridge, 1999, 2nd edn Routledge, 2018), Heidegger’s Topology (MIT, 2006), Heidegger and the Thinking of Place (MIT, 2012), and, among many edited collections, Death and Philosophy, with Bob Solomon (Routledge, 1998), Gadamer’s Century, with Ulrich Arnswald and Jens Kertscher (MIT, 2002), Consequences of Hermeneutics, with Santiago Zabala (Northwestern, 2010), The Intelligence of Place (Bloomsbury, 2015), and Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, with Ingo Farin (MIT: 2016). His most recent publications are The Fundamental Field: Thought, Poetics, World (Edinburgh, 2021), written in collaboration with the poet Kenneth White, and Rethinking Dwelling: Heidegger, Place, Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2021).
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