Achtung/Gelassenheit:
War, Peace, and Phenomenology

By Jeff Grygny

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There may be some things that are too important to try and analyze. Saving the world, I’m more and more thinking, is one of those things.

     I like to ride my bicycle fast. This is how I first caught on to the principle of achtung/gelassenheit, a phenomenological observation on war and peace.

     It’s a truism in phenomenology (the philosophy of experience) that our perceptions come to us in figure/ground relationships. Whatever we perceive clearly and sharply—any object at all—resides against a relatively fuzzier and indistinct background. This is true for things we see, hear, smell, even our thoughts and feelings. Whatever we focus on becomes clearly highlighted—stands out against—a dense background of everything-we’re-not -paying-attention-to-at-the-moment, like when we focus on the wings of an airplane in the sky and forget to notice the sky behind it. This phenomenon, like the music of the spheres, is so constant we don’t notice it. When we do notice it, our experience is subtly, radically transformed.

     When I ride fast, I’m looking for hazards and opportunities: those things that might hinder my goal, or that help it. Everything else fades into a blur of things-I-don’t-care-about. This propensity often draws me into embarrassingly rude behavior, as I cut off drivers and nearly collide with pedestrians whom I hardly notice. Sometimes, when I ride particularly intensely, I begin to feel as if all obstacles are my enemies. I subtly begin to hate them. Stupid bus. Stupid rollerblader. Etc.

     This is the principle of “achtung”—the phenomenological source of war.

     “Achtung” is German for “action/attention.” The goal is all that matters; everything becomes subsidiary to goals, opportunities and hazards. Everything else is ignored. Herein lies the dangerousness of war. “Achtung” is admired and praised in most cultures; its avatars are sports figures, movie heroes, and entrepreneurs who revel in beating the competition. But the weakness of “achtung” lies in its unfortunately inescapable peripheral blindness. Aristotle called this “hamartia,” the hero’s tragic flaw. Exactly the same virtue that made him so good at what he does also inevitably sets him at odds with the greater cosmos around him.

     What is the corollary phenomenological experience of peace?

     I spent several weeks just noticing peace whenever it arose in my world. Then I became a hunter of peace, which, I discovered, resides in the underfolds and hollows of life, like shadows, giving depth to action. Peace is in the voices of small children playing; it can be seen in the shoulders of friends working on a project together; it plays in the random flight of a butterfly; the dancing of sunlight in the leaves. It happens when the tight focus is relaxed, and the mind lets the environment’s many rich details creep into awareness. The world subtly reveals itself as an ocean of experience, complex, deep, and vast. The phenomenologist Martin Heidegger called this experience “gelassenheit,” literally “relaxing” into being-ness.

     In gelassenheit, the figure and the ground take on a more equal relation: one senses one’s environment with all one’s being; feels deeply, and becomes more subtly sensitive to many things. It is the phenomenon of play and flow, not warfare; the journey, not the goal, is what is

worthwhile.

     So, to combat war, just relax into peace. Don’t fear, don’t worry. Let tightness and aggression relax into peacefulness and love. Sounds nice and simple, no? Do you see a problem?

Of course it's difficult to relax when conditions aren't ideal; when one is actually being attacked, for example. Those conditions create a strong goal, which of course flips one into Achtung! This is what makes fighting for peace so oxymoronic. Hmmm.

     If you try to fight war, you fall into the trap of war. On the other hand, if one says, “Well, I’ll just relax and not validate war,” well—the Nazis took over Germany at the same time Heidegger was teaching gelassenheit. While it might work for an individual, “just relaxing” doesn’t necessarily promote peace on a cultural scale.

     So practically, to make peace a goal would be to combine relaxation with focus. A state of alert balance: achtung/gelassenheit. This balance is what the ancient traditions of meditation taught, and their practice is one way to cultivate peace in the world. Peaceful resting combined with precise attention is the reward of mindfulness meditation as practiced by many traditions. What I’ve been calling “achtung/gelassenheit” is also known as “shamatha,” or cultivating precision and peace, in Buddhist traditions; it can cultivated in formal sitting practice, in art, or even, as Gandhi knew, in simple activities such as washing the dishes. When we relax our goal-orientation a bit and let the world into our awareness, we cultivate a non-aggressive state of mind which is also right there in the present moment without fuzziness.

     If enough people practiced achtung/gelassenheit, a new order would spontaneously emerge from the vast creativity of many intelligences blending. We will not figure out how to solve the world’s problems—we will become the solution.

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