ABSTRACT
There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in the philosophical thinking that conceives possibility either as potentiality in the manner of Aristotle or as anamnetic possibilitas in the manner of Leibniz. If this sentence formulates the thesis of Kearney’s book, it also signals a difficulty that some readers will have in accepting it. This difficulty is indicated in the words ‘there are’, words that may lead the author himself to question whether the sentence is an accurate formulation of his thesis. According to the traditional realist and idealist categories, possibilities are in some sense already present in the nature of things. Taking the hint of the ambiguity of invenire as between ‘to invent’ and ‘to discover’, and stressing the idea of what is to come that this verb contains, Kearney sets out to show that more fundamental than the possibility which gives priority to the notion of presence and what is there is a notion of possibility which is not but may be. His point of departure is the Heideggerian account of possibility in which actuality is secondary to possibilizing, Ermöglichen, an account which has its point of departure in the Husserlian phenomenological reduction which, while suspending questions as to the empirical or metaphysical existence of beings, raises the question whether there can be a categorial intuition of being. Dasein’s Ermöglichen makes possible its actuality and facticity. Because Dasein is temporalizing transcendence, its future, its Zu-kunft, its à venir, its projective tocome, is the origin of its present and past. Kearney reminds us of the ambiguity of the verb ermöglichen in a crucial sentence of Being and Time where Heidegger refuses to attribute the enabling exclusively either to Dasein or to being. However, in the Letter on Humanism, where Heidegger has kept his promise to move on from the existential analysis of Dasein, his wish to hold the question of being more persistently before his reader’s attention is marked by a preference for the word Vermögen to refer to the enabling of which he now treats. This may be because he feels that the prefix er-suggests activity too strongly and he wants now to underline the mutual receptivity of thinking and being. Kearney notes the
etymological connection between Vermögen and Mögen, which latter word Munier translates by aimer. Munier also gives désir. This leaves room for the desiring of what one does not love, and indeed the German is better rendered by ‘to like’ than ‘to love’, where again one can like without loving. The CapuzziGray translation of Heidegger’s das ‘Mög-liche’ as ‘favouring-enabling’ facilitates reference back to the notion of care, Sorge, in Being and Time, a reference that is also facilitated by and facilitates the employment of Vermögen for the authentic mode of possibility, Ermöglichen being used to cover the authentic and inauthentic (and indifferent?) modes. Kearney’s and Munier’s aimant leaves open the opportunity to refer Heidegger’s ‘quiet power’ of the favouring-enabling forward to a paragraph much later in Kearney’s study, where mention is made of Bloch’s reinterpretation of Aristotle’s ‘according to possibility’ (kata to dunaton) ‘as a utopic magnet (aimant) which attracts matter towards the future’.
