2.57
We aren’t bringers of light, the ones who light beings up. The picture is too simplistic: if we enable beings to be the beings they are (for us), then they do the same; that is, as we enable things to appear (e.g., as created things, extended things, or things to which we pay attention, and so on), so too they enable us to appear (e.g., as a privileged being in creation, as one who uses such and such, or as one who recognizes or pays attention to such and such, and so on) — which is not to say that these ways of appearing are the most responsive ways. But things and us are amenable to these ways of appearing. Furthermore, they enable how we enable them to appear (e.g., beings reveal themselves as beings that can be understood as created; and so on). – We’re in a weave of us, things, and worlds.
All forms of living are mutually co-lit in a similar way: dogs encounter beings with their particular bodies; so too cats; so too sweet peas. Even stones co-light other beings through their encounters. There’s a co-responsiveness among things. It’s not we who bring light, for light comes from multiple sources. — “In perceiving thisness, we respond to having been addressed. (In fact we are addressed all the time, but we don’t always notice this.)”[1]
As we call to beings, so they call to us. We meet—suspended, distended, attended, taken out and put back into ourselves—in an analogous way to what Heidegger calls world-projection: “this occurrence of projection carries whoever is projecting out and away from themselves in a certain way […;] in this being removed […], what occurs is precisely a peculiar turning toward themselves on the part of whoever is projecting.”[2] This reaching out from ourselves, out towards the other and back again, has the structure of metaphor: a crossing-over. So, too, things metaphorize towards us: they, too, cross-over.
This crossing-over presupposes a distance; metaphors highlight commonalities by starting from difference and distance. – These metaphoric gestures respect contexts they never fully comprehend.
[1] Zwicky, W&M, LH52.
[2] Heidegger, FCM, p. 363. See p. 362–5.