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| Apollon |
The statue of Apollo at the museum in Olympia we can indeed regard as an object of natural-scientific representation; we can calculate the physical weight of the marble; we can investigate its chemical composition. But this objectifying thinking and speaking does not catch sight of the Apollo who shows forth his beauty and so appears as the visage of the god. — Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology”
The hermeneutic phenomenological project of Vergegenwärtigung may be understood as a circumspect making
present or a bringing to presence either of an object given to perception or
else a recollected or imagined perception. To use Heidegger’s solicitous terminology, Vergegenwärtigung, as a letting-be-involved-in an object
for attentive inspection, such letting be involved can attend to past or historical objects or else can attend to things otherwise “absent,” qua ideal, etc.
What is key is an active attunement to or
re-presentation of that object as it
would be if it were present to us but also and at the same time as it
would be if we ourselves were
“present” to it: open to or available for such a concernful engagement or becoming-involved. Hence Heidegger speaks of Vergegenwärtigung in Being
and Time as a modality of making present [gegenwärtigen], a rendering present [Gegenwartigung]. This way of attending to presentation as such does not relate itself to “mere representations.” Instead, such a “rendering present” of made things or artifacts (Zeug) is a letting
be involved in or with things as things
and as such and that is to say as self-standing presence for us (or for others) in the world.
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| Bronze tripod, Olympia |
Heidegger uses the example
of “archaeological
excavation” (BT 409/SZ 358) as an instance of Vergegenwärtigung. We are invited to consider the conceptual dissonance involved in designating the
“antiquities preserved in museums (household gear for example)” as “antiquities”? By
“what
right,” Heidegger muses, “do we call this entity ‘historical’ when it is not yet past?” (BT 431/SZ 380)
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| Apollo Pediment, Museum at Olympia |
What encountered as “historical” about such objects is what is not encountered, a foregone world “within
which they belonged to a context of equipment” and within which they “were
encountered as ready-to-hand and used by a concernful Dasein who
was-in-the-world. That world is no longer.” (BT 432/SZ
380) The “antiquities which are still
present-at-hand have a character of ‘the past’ and of history by reason of the
fact that they have belonged as
equipment to a world that has been —
the world of a Dasein that has been
there — and that they have been derived from that world.” (BT 432/SZ 381,
emphasis added.)
