I think it goes back to the later 1960s and early ‘70s, when I was a young boy at the Rudolf Steiner school in München, where my teachers tried to get me to write neatly, legibly, with a Tuschenfüller (fountain pen), and where I, being contrary, decided to use only felt tip and ballpoint pens, producing an atrociously unreadable script.
It wasn’t until I went to university, and received as an entrance gift, a reliable old Parker, that I came to appreciate the qualities of fountain pens as being aesthetic as much as utilitarian. And I have since then acquired maybe 20 other such pens.
What has this to do with Heidegger? I have recently been slogging through Martin Heidegger’s 1933-1935 lectures on ‘Being’ and ‘Truth’.1 ‘Why,’ I have been asked, ‘would you do that to yourself?’ For one, I don’t actually regard it as punishment so much as a more rewarding pursuit than, say, sport, or pop music. More importantly, though, I decided it was time to look at the source material for all the commentary I had read by others. So I would understand what the hell they all talking about as such length. And, as it turned out, it turned into an object lesson in itself. More on that later.
Heidegger talks about people being lost in their ‘everydayness’. Going about their business in the world without deeper thoughts about the essence of that world, or the essence of their own ‘being’. An ‘inauthentic’ state, as opposed to the ‘authentic’ state of deep and probing thought about the nature of personal and communal existence in a historical context, says Heidegger, in many more words, and probably much more depth of meaning than I can summon here.
To be fair, though, he also said that most of us live for most of our lives in the inauthentic state of ‘everydayness’, and even those who access authentic, deeper thoughts about the meaning of it all, also exist simultaneously in everydayness and inauthenticity.
I was in a decidedly inauthentic state on Friday night, with beers to keep me company. When I looked at my collection of fountain pens currently not in my rotation, meaning they were emptied, rinsed, and set aside from the eight or so pens I do use in a daily succession for notes in my longhand journal.
I came across my Chinese-made Baoer 388 online. A sleek-looking ‘knock-off’ of the Parker Sonnet series. I bought the Baoer for about $5. A ‘cheap’ Sonnet is about $200. But the black lacquer that made the Baoer seem so sleek had bubbled and peeled in places. Cheap manufacturing. One of the reasons the Parker is a much more expensive pen.
So, Friday night. Beers. Pen. I scraped the lacquer off the entire barrel, and then the cap. To reveal the barrel is brass, and the cap is made of steel. And, of course, that the ‘gold’ trim on my pen is not gold. Just a thin veneer of a goldy-coloured foil. The pen now looks quite scrappy. But also quite appealing in the integrity of its construction. Like ripping up a deep pile carpet to reveal beautiful, if scrappy looking hardwood floors beneath.
What has all this to do with Heidegger? Well, in his magnum opus Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) he talks about truth being the ‘unconcealment’ of what is always there to be seen. In his lectures on truth, he expands this to mean not the everyday meaning of truth, but the more profound truths to be seen in Plato’s allegory of the cave (The Republic, Book VII), where the ‘inmates’ of a cave prison are ‘forced to gaze on shadows created by artificial light and cast by artifacts paraded by unseen manipulators. Their conception of what exists and of what is worth having is so severely distorted and the deception by which they are victimized is so systematic that they cannot even recognize that they are confined, and would not regard an interruption in their routine ways of thought as a liberation.’2 When an escapee, being a philosopher, emerges into sunlight, he is exposed to reality as it is, but when he returns to free the others in the cave, to show them how they are deceived, they doubt him. (It strikes me that the term ‘enlightenment’ stems from this very allegory).
Heidegger spent a good bit of time and verbosity dissecting the allegory of the cave to talk about truth as always present but concealed. This isn’t truth in the sense of ‘she told the truth’ or ‘he told a lie’. It is a wider truth about the human condition, tied to the essence of human existence itself, which is always communal and specific to time and place, and is never transcended by proposed ideals above or outside that human existence, since all such proposals are made by people within their own existence in the first place.
This is where the pen comes in. Is the pen, stripped of the concealing lacquer, a more unconcealed, truthful representation of itself? Or does it go even deeper than that, into political economy? Do the Chinese demonstrate to us in manufacturing a cheap pen like this that the Western lionization of capitalism is an expensive and unnecessary lie? That capitalism, unlike the Chinese version of it, squeezes profits from workers and consumers with a use-value much lower than the purchase price of products?
You could go down that ‘unconcealment’ rabbit hole quite a ways. This is the useful part of Heidegger. He offers analytical tools. Ways of seeing things differently. The not so useful part is that he’s pompous and verbose. And that in his lectures on Being and Truth, he stooped to throwing in passages of Nazi cant so obviously crude and meaningless they completely contradicted his undoubted philological scholarship. That is to say Heidegger’s ideas can be politicized, but equally so by any and all ideological slants, and not without conspicuously clashing with the ideas arising from genuine philosophical analysis.
Look at it another way. When I look at my pen now, what I see is not at all what I thought I saw when I bought it. But the pen does what its purpose demands no matter what it looks like cosmetically. It is a thing-to-hand, as Heidegger wrote about tools and materials in a workshop (in various places in Being and Time), which have no particular meaning or essence until a worker comes to use them for a specific purpose, when they become tools designed for their use. But that use in itself is a human attribute of design and intention to reshape the world in some way. Not only would tools not exist if people did not make them, but their purpose, or essence, is not their own; it is human motivation. The human intention applies even when I use the pen for purposes not intended in its design or manufacture: to draw; to stab someone; to turn it into art; to use it as a lever in a tourniquet; and so on.
If I go too far into the Heideggerian rabbit hole, I come to the phrase in the Matrix film that ‘there is no spoon’. There is no pen, just my desire to record, in some way, my thoughts. Is that, then, the truth or essence of the pen? The human desire and ingenuity to communicate, using recording implements like pens. Or is that the truth of a human need and desire to communicate in a manner beyond the merely verbal and ephemeral?
I don’t really care too much for abstract ideas without direct usefulness in my ‘everydayness’, so I doubt I would contemplate all the possible abstractions too seriously. But I was struck by how much the pen, my transformation of it, and my use of it, reveals about the world I live in, and my own purposes within it.
It is a world which has metallurgy and plastics (the grip and ink feeding mechanism are not metal). A world that has advanced industrial manufacturing techniques to mass-produce the pen, and that has a political economy in which there is a mass demand for the pen, among many others. It is a world in which I know how to write, implying an education in at least grammar, if not also a variety of other subjects on which I write. A world in which I see value in writing. A world in which I have the aesthetic inclination to prefer fountain pens to other kinds of pen, and to at least split my written communication between the handwritten and the typed. A world in which I can have (afford?) more than one pen. And all of that, I reckon, makes up the usefulness of Heidegger’s concept of unconcealment with his wider conception of human existence as communal, specific to time and place, but with everydayness (me just using the pen to write) concealing the true nature of my ‘being of Being’.
It also helps to explain Heidegger’s influence on others. For example, his focus on human existence as prerequisite to all other ideas becomes Jean Paul Sartre’s existential catch-cry: ‘Existence precedes essence’. Althusser’s interpellation—people recognizing themselves as subjects of a controlling state—becomes an explanation of concealment. Derrida’s deconstruction becomes a method of unconcealment.
Earlier on I wrote about an object lesson. In this case a drunken piece of vandalism in scraping lacquer off a pen. If I had not been reading Heidegger for the day or so prior, would this have remained just a bit of mucking about?
In his lectures on truth, Heidegger’s examination of Plato’s allegory of the cave leads to a conclusion that it is philosophers who lead others to an unconcealment of truth. Did reading Heidegger drive me to quaff a few too many beers? Unlikely. I would have done so even without the reading matter. But reading Heidegger did lead me to contemplate a way of looking at things that exceeded the everyday ‘common sense’ interpretation of what I was doing: scraping away perished lacquer. Not working at unconcealment.
It might well be argued that Heidegger, long after his death, inspired me to see a bit more than just the everyday in my Friday night activity. In that sense, Heidegger wasn’t just boasting when he put himself forward as a philosopher like the one in Plato’s cave, leading people to (en)light(enment), even well after his death. Because he wrote it all down. So generations in his own future could read it. Probably using a fountain pen, too.
1Martin Heidegger (2010). Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, trans, Being and Truth. Indiana University Press.t
2David Ebrey and Richard Kraut, (2022). ‘Introduction to the Study of Plato’, in David Ebrey and Richard Kraut editors (2022). The Cambridge Companion to Plato, second edition. Cambridge University Press, pp 1—38 (p 19).
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