As everyone knows, “technology” is a core concept in Heidegger’s later thought. Heidegger’s meditation on technology exerted a major influence on both the critique of modernity and the unfolding of postmodern currents, and it pointed the way for the “philosophy of technology” that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century; Heidegger has even been retrospectively canonized as a model “philosopher of technology.”
Yet this emblematic image of Heidegger is often painted as that of a reactionary resister, pessimistic or romantic: it is said that he denied “the exaltation of human subjectivity”[1], ignored the “promoting role”[2] of modern technology, and was a “romantic” afflicted with “nostalgia”[3].
These judgments are all perfectly fine on the face of it, but to borrow Heidegger’s own phrase, they are “correct, but they miss the truth.” To pin these labels on Heidegger in advance does nothing at all to help us understand and develop his philosophical thought.
If pessimism means holding that no theoretical design or social movement of humanity can overcome the fate of modern technology, then Heidegger certainly is pessimistic in that sense. But what if Heidegger does not at all think that the fate of modern technology is something that needs to be “overcome”? What if the “fate” he understands is not “a forced misfortune” at all (《演》24)?
Heidegger himself clearly drew a line between himself and pessimism and romanticism. He said: “The essence of modern technology lies in enframing. Enframing belongs to destining in the realm of revealing. These sentences say something different from the widely circulated statement that technology is the destiny of our age, where ‘destiny’ means the inevitability of a fated occurrence that cannot be changed.” (《演》25)
We know that Heidegger was best at playing with words (of course, there is no pejorative sense here), always drawing profound meanings out of the most familiar concepts. For that very reason, we especially must not seize on a few isolated phrases out of context (for example, the famous “Only a god can save us”) and then slap a label on Heidegger. We must find a way to enter into Heidegger’s language game if we are to gain genuine inspiration from his insights.
Of course, Heidegger’s thought is rich and weighty; if one were to retrace the whole course of his thinking in his own footsteps, the task would be far too difficult, and unnecessary besides. What concerns us here is not the evolution of Heidegger’s own thought, nor do we intend to distinguish the similarities and differences between so-called early Heidegger and late Heidegger (though we may touch on that question). What concerns us more is how to reflect on our own situation. We hope to draw strength and guidance from Heidegger. Therefore this article does not attempt to verify the developmental history of Heidegger’s thought, but instead tries to string together Heidegger’s line of thinking in a question-oriented way. Although the line of thought we reconstruct will inevitably bear the taint of forcing things together, in any case we are trying to arrive at a line of thought, not merely at some answers.
What we are asking about is “technology,” or our own historical situation. We live in a technological age—that fact does not require a philosopher to discover it. The key point is what precisely this thing that governs our age—modern technology—means. “What is truly uncanny is not that the world is becoming completely a technological world. More alarming is that humanity is utterly unprepared for this transformation of the world. We still do not have the capacity for meditation, for soberly distinguishing what is truly arriving in this age.” (《选》1238)
When people appear to be “fully prepared” for everything, it is precisely then that they have forgotten the “world,” and have lost the capacity to prepare for the changes of the age.
And what the so-called pessimists emphasize is not this capacity to “prepare,” but rather the capacity to “control.” Modern people hope to control their own fate, control the development of technology, and rule the changes of the world. Thus those who claim that humanity does not possess such control are classified as pessimists. But is not this human fixation on control, or this fascination with power, along with its self-satisfied arrogance, itself one of modernity’s “symptoms”?
Heidegger’s reason for saying “Only a god can save us” was that a reporter from Brass kept hoping to get from him some “help” for “reform and revolution” (《选》1310).
Heidegger said: “Philosophy will be unable to bring about any direct change in the present state of the world. Not only philosophy cannot, but everything human thought and plotting can as well, insofar as it is merely human, cannot do it. Only a god can save us. The only possibility left to us is to prepare, in thinking and poetry, for the appearance of the god—or for the god’s failure to appear in the decline…” (《选》1306)
Is this a “pessimistic” statement? Is what is truly tragic not precisely the fact that “philosophy has been replaced by cybernetics” (《选》1308), that science has been reduced to a mere instrument for remaking the world? And if what is most frightening is that humanity is utterly unprepared for the world’s changes, then to say that the activity of thought and poetry can enable us once again to “be prepared” is hardly not a kind of optimism, is it?
So then, what is it that is truly arriving in this age? And how is thought and poetry possible to make us ready? We might as well begin with the core concept of our age—“technology.”
I. Technology
In everyday usage, technology is understood as a purposive means and as a human activity. Heidegger does not deny these understandings. Although these explanations are correct, if one is satisfied with them, one will miss the essence of technology.
Heidegger begins his inquiry into technology from the everyday understanding of technology:
Since technology is a means used by human beings to achieve ends, it presents a causal nexus: “human being—(through)—technology—(realizes)—end.” The “end” is always the “result” of a technological activity, but what about the “cause”? In the structure above, the “human being” on the other end, the one who handles technology, is the “cause,” then. But Heidegger points out that this is one-sided. In Aristotle, people understood “cause” in a far richer way than today: besides the “efficient cause,” it also included the “material cause,” “formal cause,” and “final cause.” “These four causes are ways of being responsible (Verschulden[4]) that are intimately connected” (《演》7), and together they are “responsible” for the coming-into-presence of a thing.
For example, the production of a silver chalice is indebted to silver as material, to the “appearance” as form, and to the “defining element” as end[5] (which can be understood as how the finished product is ultimately put to use). There is also another cause, namely the silversmith, usually taken to be the “efficient cause.” But Heidegger says: “The silversmith is not the efficient cause” (《演》7)[6], because “the silversmith does not produce the finished chalice as the result of production.”
“The silversmith considers and gathers together (assembles[7]) the three aforementioned ways of indebtedness.” In Heidegger’s view, “considering” means “letting … emerge.” The silversmith “gathers” the material of silver, the appearance of the chalice, and the use of sacrifice into one, and thereby “brings forth” the “thing” that is the silver chalice. The difference between artifacts and natural things is that artifacts are brought forth by human beings, whereas natural things bring themselves forth, emerging spontaneously of themselves.
After this round of inquiry: technology, as a purposive means, is the bringing-forth of causes in order to realize results; and since the result of “bringing-forth” is the state of a thing’s “standing by and standing ready,” and “standing by and standing ready marks the presence of something present” (《演》8), causality becomes a thing’s “mode of coming-into-presence.” Thus “bringing-forth” is also “bringing out of concealment (absence) into unconcealment (into an open region)” (《演》10)[8]
“Seen in this way,” Heidegger says, “technology is not merely a means. Technology is a mode of revealing.” (《演》10) Technology appears where unconcealment and concealment occur, where [unconcealment] and truth occur (《演》12)
Here, how are the questions of “gathering” and “coming-into-presence” connected with “truth”? Since the question of unconcealment and truth has always been a focal point in Heidegger’s work, it is not developed in detail in “The Question Concerning Technology.” But if we skip over the question of truth, we will not be able to understand Heidegger’s interpretation of technology, and will even struggle to understand his characterization of the essence of modern technology. It is therefore necessary for us to turn back and look at Heidegger’s discussion of truth.
II. Truth
From his early philosophy on, Heidegger continually linked “truth” with “unconcealment,” stressing that truth is not any ready-made set of propositions, but rather the activity of revealing and disclosing. Yet there are indeed different emphases and priorities in the early and the late Heidegger. The early Heidegger focuses on “equipment,” while the later Heidegger says more about “things” and works of art; the early Heidegger is more fond of speaking of “guidance,” while the later Heidegger more often speaks of “gathering”; the early Heidegger seeks the authentic state of Dasein through which truth can appear, while in the later philosophy what allows truth to appear is the so-called “clearing” (Lichtung, or, to say it another way, “clearing of the way”[9]). These changes in terminology do not mean that Heidegger ever underwent any major betrayal of his thought. Basically, the referential linkage of equipment and the fourfold gathering of the thing are one and the same matter, and authentic existence and the clearing are also similar pursuits. It is only that the later mode of expression seeks more thoroughly to free itself from the diction of traditional foundationalist and anthropocentric metaphysics. The guidance of equipment still implies, after all, that one points outward from a human center, whereas gathering need not have the human as its center; “human being” is still an inseparable part of the world, but more as a participant, having abandoned the central position retained, after all, by early philosophy.
For phenomenologists, truth is a thing’s appearing as what it is. But how is such appearing possible? In fact, every appearing is mediatory, or rather situational: that is, it always “appears through…” and “appears within…”.
When Heidegger interprets Plato’s “allegory of the cave,” he points out: “As Plato expressly says, the visible and the seen are thereby necessarily yoked together. The yoke that first makes the mutual relation of the two possible is light, illumination.” (《真》97)
The meaning of “light” is of course symbolic. Heidegger points out that the word “light” derives from “loud,” and its characteristic lies in “penetration”—“light is not merely that which penetrates, but penetration itself” (《真》54)
Beings are those present-at-hand entities that stand out in the light, whereas the being of beings is not those entities themselves, but their appearing, the very thing by which we are able to pierce the dense forest of chaos and reach things. “Truth is not something that first subsists on its own somewhere unpredictable, and then later places itself into beings at some point. This is impossible, because it is the openness of beings that first provides the possibility of a place and the possibility of a place filled with present beings. The clearing of openness and the setting-up within openness belong together. They are the same essence of the happening of truth. In its manifold ways, the happening of truth is historical.” (《林》48-49)
That is to say, seeking truth also means clearing out such an open space so as to bring things out into the field. This is precisely what was meant earlier by the essence of technology.
So is truth then just taking some being that was originally standing all alone at some place and moving it onto a newly opened clearing? Of course not. Since it is precisely this clearing that enables beings to be disclosed, then before beings enter the site, where are we to bring them out from? The answer can only be: from the boundary between clearing and forest, from the boundary between clearing and concealment, bringing things in there.
But once certain beings are gathered into the clearing and set up, the clearing is no longer the same clearing it once was. The standing-forth of what has been disclosed occupies the former clearing and becomes a new concealment, waiting for a new round of clearing. “That is to say, the open region amid beings, namely the clearing, is by no means an eternally drawn curtain on a fixed stage, so that beings may play out their fine drama on this stage. On the contrary, the clearing arises only as this double concealment. The unconcealment of beings is never a purely ready-made state; it is an event (Geschehnis, occurrence).” (《林》40)
Therefore Heidegger says: “The essence of truth is the primal conflict (the opposition between clearing and concealment), and the open center is wrested in this primal conflict” (《林》41)
Light and shadow, clearing and concealment, heaven and earth (openness and enclosure) are always locked in struggle; if either side overwhelms the other, people are plunged into confusion. Absolute light and absolute darkness are equally blinding. Moreover, excessive light may make one dizzy and overwhelmed, causing one to shut one’s eyes or to look without seeing. Concealment, by contrast, “can give what exists in possibility; darkness refuses visibility, yet it can also preserve sight: in the darkness we see the stars.” (《真》55)
III. Enframing
Since the essence of truth is the “strife” of light and shadow, technology, as the happening of truth, bears this struggle. Every technology is both a kind of unconcealment and a kind of concealment; whenever technology illuminates some things, it invariably lets others recede into obscurity.
So the question is, what is different about modern technology? Is it not also a mode of truth’s happening? Is it gathering and clearing?
Indeed it is. Modern technology “is also a mode of revealing.” (《演》12) Just as the shadows seen by the prisoners in Plato’s cave are, for them, also “unconcealed,” this does not mean that people need not be freed from their bondage. “Unconcealment has levels and ranks. ‘Truth’ and ‘the real’ are not those things that are in themselves fixed and unchanging for everyone in any perspective, not universally valid things, not any truth that everyone unquestionably has the same right and the same capacity to possess. Every truth has its own time.” (《真》32)
“Truth is neither something that is always already ready-made, something above and beyond human beings. Nor is truth something merely subjective in humans as a psychological matter. Rather, human beings are ‘in’ truth.” (《真》73) Thus, to search for truth is to reflect on one’s own situation. By continuously reflecting on our situation, we may be liberated from the original truth and come to perceive a higher truth. This higher truth is not a negation of the lower truth, but rather an understanding of its conditionality. For example, the prisoner who breaks free of his chains and sees the light of the candle, by taking the figures he formerly saw on the wall to be shadows, perceives the conditions under which those figures are able to appear, and then further understands the conditions of the conditions that allow shadows to appear. This is more likely a repeated affirmation of the most elementary truth.
Heidegger also has no intention of denying the unconcealing power of modern technology, nor does he deny that modern people, in the “cave” built by science and technology, have precise, reliable, and true knowledge of the things that appear on the canvas laid out by science and technology.
It is precisely because these nearest truths are so clear and reliable that danger lies there. Like Plato’s prisoners, modern people simply do not want to shift their gaze away from what is “without pain, without obstacle, without setback, without confusion,” from “what he is competent for” (《真》35).
Modern technology is not the totality of truth’s modes of happening. “Science is nothing but the expansion of an already open field of truth, and it expands it by grasping and substantiating what appears within that field as possible and necessary.” (《林》49)
And how is this field of truth opened?—“Revealing pervades and governs modern technology. But here… the governing revealing is a challenging. Such challenging places nature under a demand that is violent, demanding that nature provide energy that can itself be extracted and stored.” (《演》12) “We name by the word ‘enframing’ that challenging claim which gathers people together in order to order them to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve.” (《演》18)
What is the difference between “challenging” and “gathering,” between “ordering” and “bringing-forth,” between “demand” and “summons”?
The key is not things like humanity’s destruction of the environment; ancient people also destroyed the environment. The key is not even the amount of interception and storage—dams intercept and store river water, but ancient people long since knew how to use canals and even artificial lakes to store river water. The key is not how great technology’s control is, but how much “room to move” there is, how much “play space” exists in the interval between light and darkness.
In Heidegger’s view, modernity has entered the “age of the world picture,” in which all things are presented as a flattened image, laid out before us without any reservation. “‘We know something well’ not only means that beings in general are placed before us, but also that beings—in all the things contained in it and co-present within it—stand before us as a system. The phrase ‘in the picture’ means ‘to know something, to be ready, to have prepared oneself for something.’ Where the world becomes picture, the totality of beings is determined as that which human beings have prepared themselves for…” (《林》91)
But why did we begin by saying that the danger of this age lies in people losing the capacity to “prepare”? Because what we have prepared ourselves for is merely the static world picture, the things presented under a particular mode of unconcealment, namely modern technology. Thus we, like prisoners in the cave, “stubbornly turn toward what is conveniently accessible,” while “turning away from the mysterious” (《选》230). We are willing only to face things for which we are already prepared, and thus we lose the capacity to understand and respond to change.
The difference between “bringing-forth” and “ordering” is that the former merely calls out to other things at the boundary between light and shadow, at the place of ambiguity and mystery, calling forth their gifts (and thereby indebting ourselves to them); whereas the latter, like a slave owner, orders slaves to hand over what has been previously demanded of them. What comes as tribute will never exceed the prearranged design; the slave owner never wishes to see anything unexpected in the tribute. Everything has already been prepared: no pain, no confusion. Of course, this slave owner is not any individual human being, but modern technology beyond humanity’s power to control.
Because things in the technological world are all gathered together through pre-ordered demands, they lose their ambiguous boundaries. Having lost distance, they likewise lose genuine intimacy. The image of things is grasped so clearly that there is no room for any vague “interval.” Things no longer open onto one another, no longer point to one another, but are all placed together in one general, single framework. The waterwheel merely carries flowing water to the millstone; the millstone gathers wheat and flour, linking field and table… But the dam directly reveals flowing water as joules—the meaning of things has already been set from the outset.
The reason all things in the modern world appear as ordered items, no longer seeming ambiguous, is not that we have truly eliminated the “intervals” proper to each of them, but only that we rely on only one medium for disclosing things—modern technology, which turns the world into images. Heidegger sighs: “Everything is swept into this monotonous state of no-distance, everything is mixed together—so what? Is it not more frightening to push everything into a state of no-distance than to make everything fragmentary and broken?” (《演》173)
IV. Destiny
Of course, no matter how overwhelming this world picture may be, we may ultimately, like the prisoners in the cave, be liberated. So how might freedom be possible? By implementing a new social policy? By launching a political revolution?
We already know Heidegger’s attitude: “If the essence of technology, enframing as danger in Being, is Being itself, then technology can by no means be brought under control through merely human action that relies only on itself, whether positively or negatively; technology, whose essence is Being itself, cannot be overcome by human beings. If it could, that would mean human beings are the masters of Being.” (《同》110)
Only those who are blindly arrogant while deeply trapped in the logic of technology would dare to fantasize about ruling everything; in Heidegger’s view, “technology cannot be artificially overcome,” but can only be “endured (passed through),” “yet such an enduring of the destining of Being always occurs with the arrival of another destiny, which can neither be precomputed in a logic-historical manner nor fabricated as a sequence of historical processes in a metaphysical manner.” (《同》111)
That is to say, the wish to overcome modern technology springs precisely from the pressure exerted by modern technology itself—an insistence on “ordering” everything, calculating everything, making everything completely irreversible and leaving no room whatsoever—making everything “clear at a glance.”
So once we have recognized our situation, we will fundamentally change the direction of inquiry—not seeking how to control destiny, but how to understand and accord with destiny.
We noted that Heidegger does not take destiny to mean “the inevitability of a fated occurrence.” Destiny is not one event or a series of events, but the historical situation into which we are thrown, the limits within which we must find ourselves. Heidegger mentions that “the planning of truly poetic creation is the opening-up of that into which historical Dasein has already been thrown. That is the earth. For a historical people it is his earth, the self-secluding ground” (《林》63)—note that Heidegger’s “earth” does not simply refer to some pastoral or rural way of life, but rather to our historical situation, that is, necessity (in the Platonic sense) or limitation. And the opening-up of “earth” of course does not mean leaping out of our historical situation and returning to the agricultural age; it precisely means facing and bearing our historical situation.
To acknowledge limitation also means to recognize the dimension of possibility. A dimension is always also a “limit,” and vice versa. Heidegger believes that the task of thought is “to be able, within its limits, to help establish an adequate relation between human beings and the essence of technology.” (《选》1311) To take up this task, one must first acknowledge the finitude of thought rather than infinitely expand its promises. We must, within our own limitations, within the limits that our age’s destiny can promise us, seek the “ground of the future”—“What we are seeking with this question may be close at hand; it is so near that we fail to see it.” (《选》1238)
The way Heidegger points us toward as one that may make a difference is “releasement toward things” and “open-ness to the mystery.”
“Releasement” means such an “attitude that says both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to the technological world”—“we can make use of technological objects, yet at the same time, in all practical use, preserve our own position as independent from technological objects. We can always let them go.” (《选》1239）
And “open-ness to the mystery” means the attitude by which we remain open to the meaning concealed in the technological world (《选》1239).
Both of these attitudes are, in a sense, attitudes of “letting things be,” yet neither means laissez-faire in the sense of simply turning away from meaning. Rather, they are efforts to keep a distance from things in order to contemplate them more truly and more closely.
After all, the flattening of the world, the elimination of mystery, the filling-in of intervals—these too are wishful views formed under the logic of technology. If we can exercise some restraint and consciously and gradually open up our field of vision, then it may well be possible to open up new spaces of meaning.
V. Art
Of course, the attitude of releasement or open-ness is not something one can simply have if one wants it. How, then, are we to discover and cultivate such an attitude? Heidegger turns his gaze toward “art.”
Why is art so important? We have already said that the danger of modernity lies precisely in modern science’s flattening of the world “without reserve,” and in modern technology’s pre-ordering and fabrication of all things, in the filling-in of “intervals” and the loss of room to move. Art is precisely an activity that “leaves room” or “sets up a space.”
Heidegger said: “Because a work is a work, it sets up that spaciousness. ‘Setting up a space for …’ here particularly means: opening up the free realm of openness, and setting this freedom up in its structure. This setting-up comes from the setting-forth mentioned above. The work as work establishes a world.” (《林》31)
Of course, any tool or even any thing will leave room. That is to say, beyond what they present as “utility,” something still remains. For example, its material, its maker, its appearance, and so on—these things that gather toward the tool will still show themselves in the tool, and draw out an entire world of referential relations. But the more useful the tool is, the more hidden these roots will be—“Stone is used to make a tool, for example to make a stone axe. The stone then disappears into usefulness. The better and more suitable the material is, the more effortlessly it disappears into the tool-being of the tool.” By contrast, the work of art “does the opposite: because the temple work establishes a world, it does not make the material disappear; rather, it first lets the material appear, and lets it appear in the open region of the work’s world: rock can bear and hold, and thereby first become rock…” (《林》32)
Because objects are always measured by their usefulness, whereas the artwork is born precisely at the point where usefulness breaks off. Because the artwork, precisely as artwork, must make itself stand out, so as to astonish and draw the gaze. “The more handy a piece of equipment is, the less noticeable its ‘thusness’ becomes, and the more uniquely it remains within its equipment-being. In general, we can discover in every present thing the fact of its existence; but even if we notice this, we soon forget it again in the customary way. Yet what is more ordinary than the existence of beings? By contrast, in the work, its existence as this very work is something extraordinary. … The more this thrust enters essentially into the open realm, the more unexpected, the more solitary the work becomes.” (《林》53)
McLuhan has a proposition that new media will turn old media into works of art. We can now understand this more easily. Because the arrival of new media lowers or eliminates the usefulness of old media, and once the transparency of a medium is obstructed, people’s gaze may linger more upon that medium itself, and only then does its mediality become visible.
An art form often arises from some obstructed intermediary field. For example, Chinese characters cannot, like alphabetic writing, proceed directly to sound; thus between expression through brush and paper and the sentence, there emerges a larger interval, and calligraphy opens up its space of meaning within that interval. This space has its own game rules and no longer takes the transmission of sentences as the sole standard.
The so-called attitude of releasement has a similar meaning. That is to say, I could originally have used the nearest tools to accomplish these things without any obstruction, but I deliberately do not let myself depend too much on them, so that I summon them only when they are occasionally needed.
VI. Poetry (Mystery)
I can’t keep writing。。
References:
MARTIN HEIDEGGER，The Question Concerning Technology – and Other Essays ;Translated and with an Introduction by WILLIAM LOVITT， GARLAND PUBLISHING, INC. New York & London 1977
《演》：《演讲及论文集》
《选》：《海德格尔选集》
《真》：《论真理的本质》
《林》：《林中路》
《同》：《同一与差异》
《语》：《在通向语言的途中》
[1] Xu Liang, Philosophy of Technology, p. 73.
[2] Qiao Ruijin, ed., Textbook of Philosophy of Technology, p. 107.
[3] Qiao Ruijin, ed., Textbook of Philosophy of Technology, p. 109.
[4] Sun’s translation as “招致” is not good; “肇致” might be a little better, but the problem is the same. “A 招致 B” is nothing more than a shorthand way of saying “A, as the cause, leads to B as the result,” whereas Verschulden originally means being responsible and being indebted. First of all, it marks a certain relation of status between things, hinting at the relation of burden and debt between them. Heidegger also notes that this word tends to be understood as fault, but “招致” does not carry that sense at all. Moreover, the opposition between transitive and intransitive in German is more clearly presented through the opposition between being responsible and being indebted. And “招致” is hard to turn around in translation. In Sun’s version there is a sentence like “silver 招致 the silver chalice… the silver chalice is attributable to silver,” which is awkward and reveals that “招致” is just a shorthand for “cause leads to effect.” “Being indebted to the silver chalice” would be better. Also, 招致 feels more like an actual action, still dominated by a “dynamic cause” line of thinking, whereas being responsible / being indebted is a relation; the actual action is really the “bringing-forth” or “creating” that works as “gathering.”
[5] Heidegger clearly says, “It is usually translated by ‘end’ and ‘purpose,’ thereby causing a misunderstanding.” (《演》7) Translating it again as final cause is obviously not quite appropriate; finality cause is better.
[6] The English edition has another sentence after this one: “The Aristotelian doctrine neither knows the cause that is named by this term nor uses a Greek word that would correspond to it.” I do not know why the Chinese version omitted it.
[7] Considering the extraordinary properties of the Chinese character “会,” Heidegger’s frequently emphasized prefix Ge- is better rendered as 会, 会聚, or 会集.
[8] Sun’s translation, “production is brought forth from a state of concealment into a state of unconcealment,” is too roundabout.
[9] Translating it as “clarity” is inappropriate. “Clearing in the forest” first of all emphasizes the sense of a “place,” whereas “clarity” sounds either like an action or a state, with not a hint of spatiality. Unless one says “realm of clarity,” which is a little better, but cumbersome, and it may also suggest some state attained by a human being. Translating it as “open space” is also fine, but too ordinary to suggest tension, and in many places it does not read well either (though “clarity” actually reads even worse). “Clearing and presence” is much better. “Clearing” is close to the English clearing, but the German Lichtung also seems to carry a sense of removal. Although clearing sounds more like a verb, Chinese does not strictly distinguish verbs and nouns; read it twice more and it works. Moreover, what clearing in the forest is meant to convey is precisely such a dynamic condition that is not ready-made, but is interwoven between concealment and clearing. As the name suggests, “clearing” is a cleared or clearing site; clearing the site is to allow beings to appear on stage, which matches the sense of Lichtung.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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