Tag: Heraclitus

Kenneth Maly: A Refreshing and Rethinking Retrieval of Greek Thinking

A Refreshing and Rethinking Retrieval of Greek Thinking Book Cover A Refreshing and Rethinking Retrieval of Greek Thinking
New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics
Kenneth Maly
The University of Toronto Press
Hardback
xxxv + 288

Reviewed by: R.A. Goodrich (ACHE Chapter of the Society for the History of Emotions – University of Melbourne & ADI Philosophy & History of Ideas – Deakin University)

 

Kenneth Maly begins his pedagogical book, the seventeenth volume in the “New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics” series since 2006, by directly addressing his readers with a set of suggestions and guidelines (xi-xv). Only later does he announce that his “project” is written for those not necessarily possessing any “philosophical training” (17). In the course of retrieving ancient Greek thinking, readers will encounter “issues of translation, the core theme of change” and thereby “the dynamic … intertwining conditions” that enter “the more hidden way of thinking that is less logical” (17). To achieve such a retrieval, Maly nominates a pre-eminent hermeneutic pair, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, whose earlier published and unpublished writings “shed light on how things ‘started’ in the early days of Western thinking” (xxviii; cf. xviii).

The Retrieval of Greek Thinking is divided into four main parts preceded by a personal “Preamble” based upon extensive dialogue about Maly’s “project” at the onset of the deadly SARS-CoV-2 plague (xvii-xxxv) and an “Interlude” introducing Heidegger’s “key words” and what they and their cognates “say-show” (3-16). The first part (17-92) surveys traditional, often ossified interpretations of ancient Greek thinking before several forays into alternative approaches of what the ancients “experienced, thought, and said” (17) including examples drawn especially from Nietzsche (47ff., 63ff.). The second part (93-163) delves into Maly’s framework centrally associated with Heidegger and his re-interpretations of, for instance, Anaximandros, Parmenides, and Herakleitos. Also contained within the second part are holistic analogies with David Bohm questioning quantum theory and with Lao Tzu evoking the Dao principle. The third part (165-288) explicates ten ancient Greek words, ten pivotal concepts ranging from khora, aletheia, and phusis to logos, psukhe, and nous, as reconstrued by Heidegger. The final part (289-319) closes by way of four questions or issues calling for further enquiry as well as a coda elaborating how “everything is connected, driven by potential” by which all of us “will be transformed” (314 & 319).

Given limits upon length, what follows will mainly probe the use made of Nietzsche and (whilst acknowledging the larger role played by Heidegger throughout the text) will concentrate upon the latter’s first book to appear in English, the 1935 Einführung in die Metaphysik [Introduction to Metaphysics], that is, before Heidegger’s lectures from 1936/1937 onwards began repeatedly yoking Nietzsche to the Greek-influenced poet Friedrich Hölderlin (apart from 1935, pp. 96-97). In keeping with Maly’s mode of presentation within the Retrieval of Greek Thinking, this review essay will conclude with the kind of apophatic discourse not only permeating Maly but also encountered in Nietzsche and Heidegger. This endpoint shapes the degree to which interpretations of crucial examples of extant writing or thinking attributed to centuries of Hellenic intellectuals from Thales of Miletos onwards remains open to debate. For instance, Heidegger laments how we become mired in “the terminology of linguistics,” in “technical instruments that we use mechanically to dissect language and establish rules” which “grew out of a very definite interpretation of the Greek and Latin languages” (1935, pp. 40 & 41). Without supplying evidence, it is not obvious that the long neglected Dionysos Thrax’s Tékhnē grammatikē (ca. 100 B.C.) and Marcus Terentius Varro’s De lingua latina (ca. 44 B.C.) respectively are candidates given their marked theoretical and practical differences as Daniel Taylor (1990) amongst others documents. Such contestability is not simply a debate over the interpretive use of textual contexts and intellectual allusions as Lara Pagani (2011) reviews. It equally derives from the presumption that adhering to the monistic if not holistic hypothesis that all that exists ultimately can be referred to one category (e.g. 301-303, 314-315) in opposition to upholding a duality of mind and matter. Or, in Maly’s words, apprehending the “It” is tantamount to attending to “what is happening beyond the physical and the measurable” (318). His “Meanderings” section (300-312) captures a multiplicity of ways to experience “It,” but “only with non-conceptual thinking and saying … that is poi-etic” (300) where the “poi-etic” involves “connotation rather than denotation” and is “open-ended rather than defining” (135). Ultimately, the “It”

is not a thing, even though things are one with it. It is not physical, even though physical things are one with it. It is not measurable, even though measurables are one with it. (318)

I

 

Having disclosed the direction of this critique, let us begin with Nietzsche’s incomplete 1873 manuscript Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen [Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks]. Maly praises it for its “groundbreaking insight” into “how to approach the Greeks, how to see and hear … uncluttered by inherited biases” (77) notwithstanding his overall goal of extending “Nietzsche’s intentions beyond even the steps he took”:

Nietzsche here is a springboard that takes us further … in a way he did not – and perhaps could not … [given] possibilities that were not yet available when Nietzsche attempted his history of ancient Greek philosophy. (73)

From Nietzsche’s perspective, Thales to Sokrates epitomized “an inherently insatiable thirst for knowledge” and they “controlled it by their ideal need for and consideration of all the values of life” (§1, 31). Moreover, he continues, “what they invented were the archetypes of philosophic thought” and formed not a “republic of scholars,” but a “republic of creative minds” (§1, 31 & 32). Yet Thales, the earliest acclaimed philosopher, leaves us in a quandary because he apparently began “with an absurd notion, with the proposition that water is the origin and womb of all things” (§3, 38). According to Nietzsche, there are three reasons for attending to this proposition:

First, because it tells us something about the primal origin of all things; second, because it does so in language devoid of image or fable, and finally, contained … if only embryonically, is the thought “all things are one.” The first reason still leaves Thales in the company of the religious and the superstitious; the second … shows him as a natural scientist, but the third makes him the first Greek philosopher. (§3, 39)

Even if the above-mentioned proposition was not actually stated as a “pure abstraction,” but instead functions as “a concrete expression of it,” even if the thought is “unprovable,” its “value” centres “precisely in the fact that it was meant non-mythically and non-allegorically” (§3, 42 & 41) — and, as Maly might add, non-scientifically (48).

Maly, revisiting Nietzsche’s 1873 manuscript, contends that it recognised amongst early Greek thinkers a realisation that “‘the way things are’ is a dynamic unfolding,” a “dynamic of interdependent conditions and not merely independent things/being” nor, for that matter, the presence of “a highest being or highest unchanging principle” (63). Their texts should not be regarded as “incomplete or failed attempts” at ordering neatly organized logical arguments, but as engaging in dialogue “intended to expand our ability to think, our ability to stay with the question” in all its “complexity” (64 & 65). However, before embarking upon an Excursus on “the word tragic” (65ff.), Maly declares that “Nietzsche’s truth – my truth – is not a dogma but rather an engagement in developing the mind … that goes beyond mere academic exercise.” By so doing, intellectual “gymnastics” should be rejected so that “thinking” instead becomes “conscious, critical awareness” without “reaching a ‘final completedness’” (64).

II

The Excursus rapidly dissects the meaning of “tragedy” and “tragic” as well as the Dionysian-Apollinian dialectic within Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy [Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik] (2nd edn. 1874). For Maly, the term “tragedy literally means ‘goat song’,” although the connection between the two remains uncertain (65). Without providing readers details of possible connections, Maly basically recapitulates Nietzsche’s conflated aesthetic, epistemological and metaphysical speculations (66-69). Yet passing comments in the extant writing of Herodotos, Thoukydides, and Aristoteles – all of whom variously analysed the eventual dominance and significance of Peisistratos from 560/559 to 528/527 B.C. over Athens and the region of Attika – have long been used to rationalise a welter of possible genetic connections. For example, the term might refer to the goat sacrificed in rituals to the god Dionysios from which tragedy in theatre eventually developed; or, by analogy, to the sacrificial nature of the protagonist facing death within rituals and performances; or to the goat skin costumes of performers comprising the chorus; or, relatedly, to the use of a chorus of satyrs often depicted as half-goat, half-human. Equally conjectural are attempts to anchor the connection historically, notably, the first enactment of tragedy at Athens’ City Dionysia by the actor/playwright Thespis, ca. 534 B.C., the first one said to have initiated dialogue between an individual actor and the choric leader (khoragos) and to be awarded a goat.

Even a cursory reading of Nietzsche’s opening sections – a book he described to Friedrich Ritschl as “a manifesto” (Letter 40, 30 January 1872) – depicts tragedy as the Dionysian and the Apollinian “mutually augmenting one another” (§4, p. 47). Whilst Maly’s conclusion of his Excursus (70-71) mentions both the “contrast” and the “dynamic tension between the two,” the tripartite nature of perspectives embedded within Nietzsche is not fully clarified here for his readers. In brief, metaphysically speaking, the Dionysian is the “truly existent primordial unity, eternally suffering and contradictory” (§4, p. 45). For the ancient Greeks, “the greatest abstraction” beforehand had “kept running back into a person.” But Thales had purportedly said, “Not man, but water is the reality of all things” (§3, p. 42). Next, epistemologically speaking, only through a state of “intoxication” – Rausch akin to ekstasis (cf. §1, p. 36) – can the most “horrible truth” be glimpsed and, “once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence” to the point where “now he understands the wisdom of … Silenus” (§7, p.60). In the words of Seilenos, legendary mentor and companion of Dionysos, so often echoed by poets and philosophers alike, “What is best of all is … not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon” (§3, p. 42). It is an understanding not merely affectively felt or experienced, but also able to be expressed or predicated in communicable language. Finally, aesthetically speaking, once our individual rational apprehension with all its “restraint and proportion” has “succumbed to the self-oblivion of the Dionysian states” associated by Nietzsche with dance and music initially, then “Excess” – Übermaß or that beyond measure or proportion – will have “revealed itself as truth” and contradiction (“the bliss born of pain spoke[n] out from the very heart of nature”) (§4, pp. 46-47).

The Apollinian is also expounded thrice. To continue drawing upon Nietzsche’s wording, metaphysically speaking, the “two halves of our existence, the waking and the dreaming states,” are “compelled” to uphold “the truly nonexistent” in the form of “a perpetual becoming in time, space, and causality,” that is, as “empirical reality” (§4, pp. 44-45). So, epistemologically speaking, when construing “our empirical existence, and that of the world in general, as a continuously manifested representation” of a postulated “primal unity,” we know little more than “a mere appearance of mere appearance” in dreaming states and “mere appearance” (Erscheinung) in waking states “as that which alone is lived” (§4, pp. 45 & 44). Aesthetically speaking, the arts for artist and spectator alike are “absorbed in the pure contemplation of images” (Bildern), and whose satisfaction in “minutest details” are akin to the “dreamer’s pleasure in illusion” – “together with its beauty” (§ 1, p. 36) – or are “projections” of one’s “self” (§5, p. 50).

Whenever the Dionysian and Apollinian interact in genuinely tragic artworks, Nietzsche declares, it is “only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” (§5, p. 52). Towards the end of Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche repeats his declaration, elaborating upon his “leap into a metaphysics of art” by conceding that there is “only one way to make it intelligible and grasp it immediately.” How? Through the “significance of musical dissonance” (§24, p. 141). As does tragic myth, music also possesses the “same origin,” a “common source,” in the Dionysian “primordial joy experienced even in pain” (§24, p. 141). Alternatively expressed, “artistically employed dissonances” reveal to us “the playful construction and destruction” of a world, such “world-building force” being comparable to a child at play building “sand hills only to overthrow them again” (§24, pp. 141-142). Here, Nietzsche has shifted from portrayals of the diurnal world, from portrayals of “an art degenerated to mere entertainment” or to “a life guided by concepts” (§24, p. 142). Instead, we enter “a sphere of art that lies beyond the Apollinian” (§25, p. 143) where

art is not merely imitation of the reality of nature but rather a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature, placed beside it for its overcoming … [and] participates fully in this metaphysical intention of art to transfigure. (§24, p. 140)

III

In this penultimate section, let us briefly examine Maly’s attempt to guide his non-philosophical readers from the normal, traditional static duality we first inherit and upon which we first reflect (“the first beginning”) towards the retrievable “non-conceptual experience” of the dynamic non-duality (“the other beginning”) that he contends is “knowable beyond conceptualization and is sayable only in non-conceptual, poi-etic language” (169). As befits this lengthy third part of Retrieval of Greek Thinking, it adheres to “the transformation of thinking and language” undertaken by Heidegger as he journeyed towards the non-dualistic in pursuit of “the meaning or question of being” (169).

Maly seizes upon the “unresolvable tension” this question raises, translating the crux of Heidegger’s 1935 Freiberg lectures, the Einführung, as: “We stand between two equally unsurpassable limits: On the one hand, as we think and say ‘being “is,”’ we immediately make being [Sein] into a being [das Seiende] …. on the other hand, as long as we experience beings, we can never deny the ‘being’ and the ‘is’” (171). Heidegger (1935, pp. 23ff.) subsequently elucidates the distinction not only by examples of individual objects such as a piece of chalk’s characteristics, but also by way of institutional objects such as a school whose building both inside and outside has a multitude of specifiable features. Yet the being or existence as such (Sein) of chalk or of school which makes it a particular being rather than a non-being (nichtseiend) eludes us. In wrestling with this conundrum, Maly urges his readers to avoid “oppositional” thinking, thinking limited to oscillating between “differences” (175).

However, what Maly neglects to examine for his targeted readers’ consideration are the multiple meanings or uses of the “is” when predicating or categorizing something (“that creek is algae-ridden”), when identifying or defining something (“this pentagon is a plane shape with five equal straight sides each of whose interior angles measures 108º”), and when stating the existence of something (“there is a supreme being”). That being as such (Sein) is “in” or belongs to particular beings such as chalk and school might at first be regarded as feasible since when ascribing characteristics to objects or things – “chalk is fragile” or “a school is a place of learning” – their existence is usually presumed before the characteristics being attributed to them. Yet presuming existence is not tantamount to identifying existence in itself as the most basic characteristic of existing objects simply because existence in itself is not a characteristic or ground, ingredient or source of existing objects. In other words, if we emphatically state that “cheetahs and dragonflies do exist,” we are stressing that some things possess characteristics connoted by the words “cheetahs” and “dragonflies”; that is, that these sets of characteristics apply to certain things.  Similarly, if we state that “centaurs and unicorns do not exist,” then we are denying that anything possesses characteristics connoted by the words “centaurs” and “unicorns”; that is, that these sets of characteristics do not apply to anything notwithstanding our imaginative ways of picturing fictional entities. Heidegger’s disclosure of the paradoxical nature of being or existence as such (Sein) and his subsequent quest for pinpointing its tendency both to conceal and to reveal itself in particular beings (das Seiende) appear to be stymied from the onset.

For all its running commentary on key Greek terms, the third part of Retrieval of Greek Thinking gives little background about Heidegger’s response to and handling of pervasive turn-of-century phenomenological and hermeneutical analyses influencing his major writings in the decade before the 1939/1945 war (see, e.g., the Steven Crowell, Edgar Boedeker, and Cristina Lafont 2005 contributions). Two examples come immediately to mind. Firstly, by opposing the methodological division between mind and world, consciousness and its objects, with which to begin one’s philosophical enquiry, Heidegger began by refocusing upon indivisible being or existence as such and its meaning from which conscious and natural processes unfold in their turn. Secondly, when probing the fragmentary passages such as Herakleitos and Parmenides on logos (cf. 1935, e.g. pp. 96ff., 104ff.) up to Platon’s dialogue Timaios (ca. 360 B.C.) (cf. 1935, e.g. 50ff., 72ff., 137ff.), Heidegger often seems to be adapting a neo-platonic understanding of the metaphysical trajectory of early ancient Greek thinking and language (to be investigated in our concluding section).

Let us now end this section with the potential danger faced by Maly’s designated readers. In the attempt to defamiliarize traditional or reductive interpretations of pivotal notions including phusis and aletheia, do Maly and Heidegger all too frequently resort to neologisms that read as stipulations to be absorbed rather than debated? Consider the following passage about the “inner connection between Being and seeming”:

… we can grasp this connection fully only if we understand “Being” in a correspondingly originary way, … in a Greek way. We know that Being opens itself up to the Greeks as phusis. The emerging-abiding sway is in itself at the same time the appearing that seems. The roots phu- and pha- name the same thing. Phuein, the emerging that reposes in itself, is phainesthai, lighting-up, self-showing, appearing …

It would be instructive to clarify the naming force of this word through the great poetry of the Greeks, as well. Here, it may be enough to indicate that for Pindar, for example, phua is the fundamental characteristic of Dasein: to de phua kratiston hapan, that which is from and through phua is wholly and fully the most powerful (Olympian Ode IX, 100); phua means what one originally and authentically already is: that which essentially unfolds as having been (das Ge-Wesende), in contrast to the subsequently forced and enforced contrivances and fabrications. (Heidegger 1935, p. 77)

Now consider some of Maly’s glosses, for instance, when readers first encounter Dasein which ordinarily signifies “to be there” with its prefix da meaning “here” or “there” (3):

 In Heidegger’s thinking the word da indicates the “open expanse” in which one finds oneself … [and] always has an ecstatic character.

… from Sein und Zeit onward, it is a way of saying (1) being-in-the-world and (2) being in the opening-out (expanse) in which being itself emerges …. Thus, Dasein is the word for human existence in its ownmost and most proper way of being, that is, standing-out in the opening expanse … As such, the word Dasein describes the fundamental comportment or relationship that “humans” have – to the world and then to being as emerging – as “ec-static.” This names the fundamental shift, in Heidegger’s thinking, away from subjectivity and its objectifying, to the always already relatedness in the non-dual dynamic of no-thing and no-form “being” that cannot be objectified. (3-4)

Readers are also introduced to aspects of metaphysical being in itself (Sein). Aletheia is Greek for “truth,” the opposite of “falsity,” which “human judgement connects in concepts” that “corresponds” to “things” in the world (217). By contrast, Maly asserts, a-letheia contains the word lethe signifying the forgotten, the hidden, the concealed, the unseen where the negative prefix ἀ signifies “not” (217). After surveying phusis “beyond the traditional ‘reducing to the physical’” – including “nature”? – towards “growth, originating power, origin, force, birth” as signalled by its underpinning verb phuo (235-237), Maly gradually introduces “the playing field” (187) of phusis and aletheia, traced in Heidegger’s later seminars and essays especially on fragments of Herakleitos, by tabling the inner connections of being in itself and its manifestations or phenomena, and then noting:

I include φύσις here because it says the same as ἀ-λήθεια. Although the word emphasizes the action itself, it also shelters the no-form no-thing and dynamic withdrawing-concealing along with that which gets manifest or disclosed – all within the non-dual dynamic of radiant emptiness, aka beyng. There is no “third” aspect as such. Rather, by emphasizing this seemingly third aspect, we are empha­sizing movement from and to. But since all is one, this too is not separated from the non-dual one. (245)

To what extent can the anthropological, etymological, and ontological set of suppositions here unequivocally establish the veracity of Heidegger’s contention that “Being essentially unfolds as phusis” and is based upon “the unique essential relation between phusis and aletheia” (1935, pp. 77 & 78) as relayed by Maly?

IV

Despite sensitivity to the limitations of language and its translatability, the Retrieval of Greek Thinking and its emphasis upon Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s hermeneutical approaches invites us to critically examine their deployment of apophatic discourse and thinking. When reflecting upon the Birth of Tragedy in his 1886 “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” [“Versuch einer Selbstkritik”], Nietzsche finds it “an impossible book” in an affective reconstruction of his authorial state of mind confronting the “what” was being expressed and the “how”:

I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine … uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates …. What found expression here was anyway … a strange voice, the disciple of a still “unknown God” …. What spoke here … was something like a mystical, almost maenadic soul that stammered with difficulty, a feat of the will, as in a strange tongue, almost undecided whether it should communicate or conceal itself. It should have sung, this “new soul”—and not spoken! (§3, pp. 19-20)

Drafting a work during a period of relentless Prussian expansion especially at the expense of Austria and France by 1870/1871 and convalescing from illness contracted at the ten-week siege of Metz, Nietzsche concedes that “this questionable book” about the Greeks was “deeply personal” (§1, p. 17). Yet it obviously does not conform to an exercise in actual or fictional autobiography. Nor, as revealed above, is it a logical, provable argument; in fact, proof is not only scorned, but also seen as inappropriate if not surplus to the needs of readers initiated into Nietzsche’s realm of enquiry. Although better expressed in song than in speech, it becomes a realm expressible in the “strange voice” or “strange tongue” of a disciple of a yet-to-be known god, a disciple who appears to be struggling like “a mystical, almost maenadic soul” (§3, p. 20). By this stage, readers should have little difficulty sensing that female worshippers of Dionysios – the mainades – whose rites involving intoxicated dancing induced violent and enraged, frenzied and ecstatic states – are but a stepping stone into disentangling the question “what is Dionysian?” (§3, p. 20).

Birth of Tragedy provides a foretaste of apophatic discourse without recourse “merely by logical inference, but with the immediate certainty of vision” in which the Greek “terms Dionysian and Apollinian … disclose to the discerning mind the profound mysteries of their view of art, not, to be sure, in concepts, but in the intensely clear figures of their gods” emerging from “these art impulses of nature” (§1, p. 33; §2, p. 38). Between the “two art deities … there existed a tremendous opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollinian art of sculpture, and the nonimagistic Dionysian art of music” but whose contrasting “tendencies run parallel to each other … till eventually, by a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic ‘will,’ they appear coupled with each other” (§1, p. 33). When finally coupled in tragic myths, rituals, and the drama of Aiskhylos and Sophokles, the Dionysian is apprehended as “the eternal and original artistic power that first calls the whole world of phenomena into existence” and the Apollinian as “a new transfiguring illusion” that “becomes necessary in order to keep the animated world of individuation alive” (§25, p. 143). That this “should be necessary, everybody should be able to feel most assuredly by intuition” (§25, p. 144).

Needless to say, that language

can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena (§6, p. 55)

continues to pose problems. For example, how can the “metaphysical intention of art to transfigure” and reveal itself as “a metaphysical supplement of the reality of nature” (§24, p. 140) when transcendental primal reality itself is “beyond and prior” possible experience? Granted, possible experience is patently not presumed by Nietzsche to follow the transcendental arguments and proofs of possible, systematically coherent experience developed by Immanuel Kant (1787, B.125ff. and B.756 & 813ff.). Furthermore, Nietzsche does not appeal to hypothetical counter-instances that appear as little more than cases of seeming experience. Instead, he actually appeals to his own experience of experiencing something of the transcendent when experiencing the third act of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1859) (§21, pp. 127ff.). But if the transcendental is beyond possible experience, then could whatever he purportedly experienced be an actual reportable experience of it? Other examples of what it is for the above-mentioned “cosmic symbolism of music” to reveal or intimate the transcendental brings us back to the vexed issue of what it is for the arts to represent anything. That, of course, returns us to Platon’s question about whether or not, in experiencing a work of art, we experience what that artwork represents (Politeia [Republic] (ca. 375 B.C.), Bk. X, 595b-602b).

Finally, apophatic discourse in arguably its most radical form can be located in the later neo-platonic text of Damaskios of Khalkis, Peri ton proton arkhon [On First Principles] (ca. 534). Damaskios exploits an aporia, namely, an impasse or conundrum, that in so far as the puskhe “divines that of all things, conceived in whatever way, there is a principle beyond all and without relation to all,” then “it should be called neither principle, nor first, nor before all, nor beyond all …; it must not be proclaimed, nor conceived, nor conjectured at all” (Part 1, §2, p. 24). Although “we can conceive nothing simpler than the One, the wholly one and only one,” any act of “predicating … categories” of it results in the “not knowable … not nameable” One being “made many.” Hence, such a predicated One, if “the cause of all and encompasses all,” impedes our capacity “to mount up beyond it” given that the “uncoordinated,” “circular” many “cannot form one cause” (Part 1, §2, p. 25). In brief, the One as the principle of all cannot be involved in any predicated characteristics or relationships because that would contradict its absolute transcendence. At best, the One is completely “ineffable,” completely “unsayable”:

And if it is necessary to indicate something, most useful are the negations of these predicates—that it is neither one nor many, neither productive nor infecund, neither cause nor deprived of causality—and such negations, I know not how, overturning themselves absolutely into infinity. (Part 1, §28, p. 39)

As his translator, William Franke (2004, p. 20) comments, to read Damaskios is to confront metalingual discourse driven to the very “limits of … intelligibility,” demonstrating where discourse “breaks down and yields to the ineffable”; exploiting “a style that is highly discursive and elliptical”; and deploying “the more skeptical-sounding vocabulary of reversal or turning around and against itself … of discourse that refutes and annuls itself”; yet “negatively register[ing] a vertiginous experience of radical transcendence.”

When Maly’s initial “Interlude” introduces Heidegger’s terminology of Dasein/Da-Sein, Seyn/Beyng, and Ereignis (and cognates), his focus is largely upon writings and lectures from 1936 to 1938 eventually assembled as Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) in Maly’s neologistic co-translation]. Maly advises his basically non-philosophical readers that his suggestions for handling Heidegger here include “to be aware that the word Sein was central to Heidegger’s pursuit from the very beginning, where sometimes … what Seyn says was more hidden than at other times” and to “decide for yourself how to read those instances of Sein that are ambiguous, given that there is no logical proof for all of this” (8).

Although this critical review has been limited to Einführung, the 1935 volume already exemplifies many facets of apophatic discourse in train (not to be confused with phenomenological “apophantic interpretations” in Sein und Zeit (see, e.g., Boedeker (2005), pp. 159f. & 168ff.)). Witness how a concluding metaphor reverses the relationship between who and what can speak (if not switching, as Charles Taylor (1992) argues, from “instrumental” language in actual circumstances to “constitutive” language in possible ones):

Even the very act of asking about “the essence of language … regulates itself in each case according to what has become the prevailing preconception about the essence of beings and about how we comprehend essence. But essence and Being speak in language” (1935, p. 41).

Now witness how the shortcomings of logical analysis of being as such (Sein) demands removal from a sphere not available to logic and philosophical enquiry reliant upon it:

despite Kant and Hegel, logic has not taken a single step farther in what is essential and inceptive. The only possible step remaining is to unhinge it [that is, as the definitive perspective for the interpretation of Being] from its ground up. (1935, p. 144)

Again, witness two neighbouring examples of how etymologically grounded neologistic expressions, whether in Greek or not, repeatedly pervade a noticeably roving or seemingly discursive style, yet increasingly becoming, for philosophically untrained readers, semantically elliptical as if struggling with what cannot be fully said:

… the having-of-itself wherein the constant holds itself, is the Being of beings; it is what first makes a being be a being as opposed to a nonbeing. For something to take such a stand therefore means for it to attain its limit, to de-limit itself. Thus a basic characteristic of a being is its telos, which does not mean goal or purpose, but end. Here “end” does not have any negative sense …. “end” means completion in the sense of coming to fulfillment [Vollendung]. (1935, p. 46)

What we have said helps us to understand the Greek interpretation of Being … in our explication of the term “metaphysics”—that is, the apprehension of Being as phusis. The later concepts of “nature,” we said, must be held at a distance from this: phusis means the emergent self-upraising, the self-unfolding that abides in itself. In this sway, rest and movement are closed and opened up from an originary unity. This sway is the overwhelming coming-to-presence that has not yet been surmounted in thinking, and within which that which comes to presence essentially unfolds as beings. But this sway first steps forth from concealment—that is, in Greek, aletheia (unconcealment) happens… (1935, p. 47)

Turning to the closure of the Einführung, notice how being in itself (Sein) can only be approached by what it is not so that “talk of the indeterminateness and emptiness of Being is erroneous” when searching for the “meaning of a word” (unless, readers might wonder, when “the happening in which Being becomes word, was poetry” (1935, p. 131)):

The determinateness of Being was brought before our eyes by the discussion of the four divisions:

Being, in contradistinction to becoming, is enduring.

Being, in contradistinction to seeming, is the enduring prototype, the always identical.

Being, in contradistinction to thinking, is what lies at the basis, the present-at-hand.

Being, in contradistinction to the ought, is what lies at hand in each case as what ought to be and has not yet been actualized, or already has been…

… The determinateness of Being is not a matter of delimiting a mere meaning of a word. It is the power that today still sustains and dominates all our relations to beings as a whole … (1935, p. 154)

 

Finally, reflecting upon Sein und Zeit, Heidegger distinguishes it from the Einführung as “a title” that cannot be meshed with the above-mentioned negative “divisions” because it “points to a completely different domain of questioning”:

 

In such a meditation, “Being and time” means not a book but the task that is given. The authentic task given here is what we do not know; and insofar as we know this genuinely—namely as a given task—we always know it only in questioning.

Being able to question means being able to wait, even for a lifetime. But [our] age … takes questioning as … something that does not count as profitable. But what is essential is not counting but the right time—that is, the right moment and the right endurance.

For the mindful god

does detest

untimely growth.

—Hölderlin, fragment from the period of “The Titans” (1935, p. 157)

 

Ultimately, Heidegger, ever mindful of Sophokles’ Antigone (ca. 442/441 B.C.) (see 1935, pp. 113ff.), has broached the understanding of being in itself (Sein) as that which is the realm of the inexpressible, the unsayable. The supposedly first “violent,” “deep intimations” of Dasein and Sein experienced by the ancient Greeks “and placed poetically into its ground, remains closed off to understanding” and “a mystery” had they “hastily take[n] refuge in some moral appraisal” (1935, p. 125).

 

 

 

References

 

Boedeker, Edgar. 2005. “Phenomenology.” In A Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Hubert Dreyfus & Mark Wrathall, 156-172. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Crowell, Steven. 2005. “Heidegger and Husserl: The Matter and Method of Philosophy.” In A Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Hubert Dreyfus & Mark Wrathall, 49-64. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Damaskios. ca. 534. On First Principles / Peri ton proton archon. Edited by L.G. Wersterink; translated by William Franke, “Of the Ineffable: Aporetics of the Notion of an Absolute Principle,” Arion ser. 3, 12(1), 2004: 19-39.

Heidegger, Martin. 1927. Being and Time / Sein und Zeit. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. London: SCM Press, 1962.

Heidegger, Martin. 1935. Introduction to Metaphysics / Einführung in die Metaphysik. Translated by Gregory Fried & Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000 [citations to the 1953 German pagination].

Heidegger, Martin. 1936-1938. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) / Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann; translated by Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

Kant, Immanuel. 1787. Critique of Pure Reason / Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Edited & translated by Paul Guyer & Allen Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Lafont, Cristina. 2005. “Hermeneutics.” In A Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Hubert Dreyfus & Mark Wrathall, 265-284. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1872. “Letter 40: To Friedrich Ritschl.” In Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Edited & translated by Christopher Middleton, 93. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. ca.1873. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks / Die Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen. Translated by Marianne Cowan. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing Co., 1962.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1874. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music / Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 2nd edn. In The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Translated by Walter Kaufman, 29-144. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1886. “Attempt at a Self-Criticism” / “Versuch einer Selbstkritik.” In The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Translated by Walter Kaufman, 17-27. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.

Pagani, Lara. 2011. “Pioneers of Grammar: Hellenistic Scholarship and the Study of Language.” In From Scholars to Scholia: Chapters in the History of Ancient Greek Scholarship. Edited by Franco Montanari & Lara Pagani, 17-64. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Platon. ca. 375 B.C. Politeia. Edited by Giovanni Ferrari; translated by Tom Griffith, The Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Taylor, Charles. 1992. “Heidegger on Language.” In A Companion to Heidegger. Edited by Hubert Dreyfus & Mark Wrathall, 433-455. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Taylor, Daniel. 1990. “Dionysus Thrax Vs Marcus Varro,” Historiographia Linguistica 17(1-2): 15-27.

 

Ahad Pirahmadian: Das Sein & das Tragische, Königshausen & Neumann, 2022






Das Sein & das Tragische. Die onto-tragische Bestimmung des Seins in Heideggers seinsgeschichtlichem Denken Book Cover




Das Sein & das Tragische. Die onto-tragische Bestimmung des Seins in Heideggers seinsgeschichtlichem Denken




Orbis Phaenomenologicus Studien, Bd. 57





Ahad Pirahmadian




Königshausen & Neumann




2022




Paperback 49,80 EUR




238

Rajiv Kaushik: Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology






Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology Book Cover




Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology




SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy





Rajiv Kaushik




SUNY Press




2019




Paperback $25.95




202

Reviewed by: Keith Whitmoyer (Pace University)

The wealth of literature that has emerged (and continues to emerge) on Merleau-Ponty’s thought is striking considering that the span between the publication of the author’s first work, The Structure of Behavior (1942), and his last, posthumous work, The Visible and the Invisible (1965), was only a touch more than two decades of active, “serious” academic production.[1] Reading through much of this commentary, one encounters a series of issues and motifs that seem to circulate through discussions of this philosophy: the living body, perceptual experience, motor intentionality, the flesh, the chiasm, reversibility, the place of painting and with respect to these, the author’s engagement and relationship with Husserl on matters autochthonous to phenomenology. This list, of course, goes on. As a reader of both Merleau-Ponty and literature on his thought, one wonders what, if anything, remains to be said.

Kaushik’s work, Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism, I think, clearly indicates that the answers to the above question—whether and what remains to be said—are yes, and much. It makes this indication, however, by rethinking what it means to read and write about the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty by showing that there is a thought and philosophy here that goes well beyond the well-trodden signs that have typically framed approaches and discussions of this author and his work. Kaushik shows us quite eloquently that readers of Merleau-Ponty’s work need no longer rehearse a series of questions that have already been well-documented (perhaps over-documented) and that there remains much to be thought and discussed. Rather than discourse about the lived body, perceptual experience, the flesh, and so forth, we are introduced to another set of signs that frame and render Merleau-Ponty’s thought and which re-constitute its legibility: the symbolic matrix, the elemental, the oneiric, and most importantly, the event.

In addition to opening the field of Merleau-Ponty studies to a series of questions and motifs that have for the most part been unconsidered, Kaushik’s book accomplishes a second task. To the extent to which Between Philosophy and Symbolism provides another set of signs for entering the domain of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, this work also repositions this thought with respect to the history of 20th Century continental philosophy. In a manner that is the analogue to way in which a set of signs gets recycled within the literature on this thinker, Merleau-Ponty is almost invariably attached to the 20th Century’s “phenomenological curve,” the upslope being the work of Husserl and his immediate constellation, the peak probably being Heidegger, the beginning of the downward slope including its rise in France and the immediate post-war period, ending, of course, with the rise of “post-phenomenology” in the figures of Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, who all in their own ways tried to ring its death knell. By recasting the signs by which we would enter Merleau-Ponty’s thought, Kaushik, I think, succeeds in dismantling this curve (which surely deserves no less and probably worse). Not only does Merleau-Ponty appear as belonging more to “post-phenomenology” than as a member of the movement but the very terms by which we would want to define “phenomenology” in contrast to “non-phenomenology” (including “post”-phenomenology) become (rightly) contested. By re-framing the approach to the work of Merleau-Ponty, Kaushik’s book re-frames the manner in which we can make sense of what means to belong (or not to belong) to the phenomenological movement and what “phenomenology” can signify in the first place. I want to take the opportunity to explore these transformations through a series of concepts that make up the infrastructure of Between Philosophy and Symbolism, the analysis of which will constitute this writing: the matrix, the symbolic, the element, and the event.

The subtitle of Kaushik’s book, The Matrixed Ontology, already indicates the central role that this concept will play in his reading. A matrix or “matrix event” is positioned against a theory of the transcendental field where the transcendental as such is identified with some form of ipseity: a self-identical, discrete consciousness that occupies the role of referent for the sense of a world it constitutes. Of course we find such a theory of the transcendental most clearly in Kant’s “I think that must accompany all my representations,” the transcendental unity of apperception; in Husserl through the various iterations of transcendental consciousness and egoicity; and of course in Sartre’s theory of consciousness as the active, centripetal constituting agency of the world’s meaning (“nothingness”). Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is distinguished from these theories at the point where the transcendental field is now reconceived—not as the privilege of a constituting self—but as the interstice, fissure, or, as it were, silent lacuna, the écart (divergence) of difference within beings that allows them their phenomenality. In other words, Merleau-Ponty, on Kaushik’s reading, gives a theory of the transcendental that not only allows for but requires internal differentiation. This is a crucial claim because, as Kaushik indicates, it is this revised theory of transcendentality that immunizes Merleau-Ponty’s thought against the critique that phenomenology necessarily eliminates difference, and in so doing, occludes the possibility of thinking the event as such.

Thinking through the configurations and operations of matrices, as well as their corresponding eventualities, occupies much of the individual analyses of the text. We nonetheless encounter some indications in the Introduction, to which I will briefly turn. Kaushik states:

Matrix events do not emphasize self-consciousness at the cost of difference. They are, in fact, called matrices because they constellate difference as difference…. A matrix event may be equated with differentiation in several ways: in addition to difference between human and animal, it can refer to the exterior and interior, public and personal, language and speech. A matrix event runs a circuit through these differences. But the loop of matrix events is never closed, and neither are the terms that they snap up into them. This is crucial, for unless Merleau-Ponty thinks that, through the event, differences are reduced to an identity, he is not guilty of the typical criticism that befalls phenomenology—that it transforms nonsense into sense and makes what is incoherent coherent.[2]

The typical criticism would be that, in its attempt to trace the lines of force that produce and shore up the everyday appearance of the world and the sense it has for us, phenomenology will discover an absolute origin that constitutes this sense. Such an origin, as the origin of all difference, would not itself be subject to difference. It would be a purely centripetal, outwardly oriented movement that thinks but is not an object thought, sees but is not seen, speaks but which cannot be heard, constitutes a time to which it would not be subjected, and constitutes a space in which it would not be found. As Kaushik indicates, such an origin could, by definition, not abide any exteriority, could have no relation to anything that would not in principle be subjected to its sense-making movement, and in this way could not stand in relation to anything radically other to it. A matrix event, by contrast, produces sense but in such a manner that it nonetheless still includes and even welcomes what is beyond its sense. Whereas the traditional, phenomenological view of the transcendental ends with a closure into sense and the elimination of non-sense, a matrix event remains constitutively open to non-sense and what is outside, and in this way is “adventurous:” the matrix event is never complete but remains on its way, unterwegs, as Heidegger might say, but “on its way” only to difference. Kaushik notes in this regard:

An event is not singular but plural. Its plurality, furthermore, prevents the event from being teleological. That there is a temporal character to the matrix event means neither that it is an origin from which other times succeed nor that it is a destination into which all times lead. The event is neither an origin nor a destination.”[3]

Matrix events are made legible over the course of the text through a second concept, the importance of which is already suggested by the title, symbolism. Kaushik, borrowing from Merleau-Ponty, will also speak of the “symbolic matrix,” and one also hears very clearly through the invocation of this concept the “symbolic form,” and both Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky are on the horizon here, filtered through Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on Institution in Personal and Public History and his last publication, “Eye and Mind.” I want to consider symbolic form and symbolic matrix under the general rubric of symbolism, which I believe should be understood verbally.

In the Institution lectures, Merleau-Ponty says:

The parallel [of painting] with philosophies is acceptable only if philosophies themselves are taken not as statements of ideas, but as inventions of symbolic forms. Shortcoming of Cassirer’s philosophy consists in thinking that criticism is the endpoint, that philosophical sense has a directing value even though this sense itself is taken up into sedimentation. Consider criticism itself as a symbolic form and not as a philosophy of symbolic forms.[4]

The idea at play here, taken up again in the essay Eye and Mind, is that, as Merleau-Ponty famously says, “every theory of painting is a metaphysics.”[5] That is to say, every theory painting—even one that attempts to ignore or deprecate it such as we find in Descartes or Kant—is a theory of expression, a theory about how the sense of what is comes into being, and every theory of expression is already metaphysics, since metaphysics has only ever been the attempt to think the becoming—the expression—of what is. The significant claim here is that we need to hear “metaphysics” not as the “statement of ideas”—metaphysics in a profound sense has nothing to do with the articulation of theses about being—but “as the invention of symbolic forms,” i.e., the invention of ways and means that allow for the expression of a certain point of view, a certain perspective, or way of seeing. Renaissance painting is of course just this: the presentation and making visible of a certain Weltanschauung, a certain frame—one might even say Ge-stell—for what it means to appear, what it means to be.

Kaushik makes the following commentary on the text from the Institution lectures:

His last sentence here, ‘consider criticism itself as a symbolic form and not a philosophy of symbolic forms,’ is sweeping and radical in its proposal to alter both the method and aim of philosophy. If philosophy criticism is itself a symbolic form, this would mean that the ground for every truth claim in fact enfolds a symbolic component. The height of philosophical criticism would then, counterintuitively, eventuate in the symbolic. If so, philosophical criticism becomes absorbed by something very much counter to its usual goals, a form only ever discovered in mutation and that is never itself.[6]

If metaphysics is the invention of symbolic forms, then the tasks for philosophy as well as its very nature are reconfigured and rethought. It means that the symbolic is no longer a regional matter for a specified branch of philosophical discourse but that the symbolic—symbolism in the verbal sense—is at the very center of philosophical discourse. This means, according to Kaushik, that philosophy cannot hope to arrive at a final diapason of self-consciousness or absolute knowledge but that it encounters at best “a form only ever discovered in mutation and that is never itself.”[7] In being oriented by and in terms of symbolic forms, philosophical inquiry is constitutively defined by a certain delay, an internal slippage as its symbols defer their sense. As a result (or even as a function) of this slippage, phenomenological method (now oriented in terms of symbolic forms) can no longer be understood as the disclosure of an absolute origin, but as indicated earlier, must be thought in terms of an ineliminable difference. Kaushik summarizes this as follows:

The symbolic does not, however, mediate or bring beings together with being but opens up and is the very difference between them. It is in other words, on an adventure and is not a destination end or even a proper origin. It takes or is always on an excursion—between consciousness and unconsciousness, body and world, oneself and another, and the things of the world—while also being no place otherwise.[8]

The adventure of sense, its radical openness, and the necessity of the event for phenomenological method are, in a way, thus premised on the symbolic. This adventurousness, however, requires another concept. If the symbolic introduces a function of slippage and differentiation within the articulation of sense, the principle of this slippage must still be clarified. Kaushik accomplishes this by invoking another term: the element, to which I will now briefly turn.

“Element,” of course, immediately recalls the oldest metaphysics of the Western tradition, the φυσιολόγοι, as Aristotle said, those who discoursed on φύσις or “nature.” We should be careful, however, not confuse the use of element at stake in Between Philosophy and Symbolism with a theory of nature, however, nor should we assume that by invoking this pre-Socratic notion that Kaushik wishes to recover or return to some absolute ὑποκείμενον beneath the phenomena that would explain or even express them. As the third term in the triad matrix-symbol-element, the elemental here designates both the plane of excess of sense and the unexpressed (and inexpressible) silence necessary and intrinsic to any event of phenomenality. In other words, the element is the invisible, the absent and by definition indeterminable interstices or lacunae within the world that allow for the visible, which would precisely be their inverse. Kaushik says:

The elements are, to my mind … by no means determinate, by no means exterior to the explicit phenomenon, and do not oppose it. They are rather within the phenomenon and even if they are not themselves phenomenal. They therefore do not introduce a new reality. The only reason they cannot be located is because they are always differentiated and have no specific locale.[9]

The element is, as it were, the unidentifiable, non-localizable and yet silent interior of things that gives but is not given, that makes possible while itself not being a possible object of identification. As such, the element provides the needed principle of slippage since it appears only in its absence, appears only as missing, known only indirectly through indication and never encountered as such. The element in this sense is elicited through analyses of Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on light in connection with Heraclitus’s use of ἁπτόμενον, “kindling.” As Kaushik says a propos of illumination in Merleau-Ponty:

In the logic of light, it is important to Merleau-Ponty that what issues illumination is also within the illuminated. This means that, for him, illumination contains no original source or point of view that can itself be illuminated. It means, in other words, that illumination is in effect also dark—that it is in fact darkness that makes illumination possible. There can therefore be no general ontology of light that does not have to do with its regional context and its inability to be seen…. [Light] penetrates everywhere, explores the phenomenal plane, and yet can never be a single source from which we know about visible things…. Rather than a source, light is an endless refraction and flash-like. This refraction never shows. Its primary character is diversion. Yet both phenomenon as well as its disclosure are because of the very texture of this always diverted light.[10]

Light or the “kindling” Heraclitus speaks of, the spark-like flash in which things appear, is elemental precisely at the point where light itself shows the phenomena but in its function as showing, itself withdraws and is not seen. I see the visible surface illuminated by the light but do not and cannot see the light itself. There is, as it were, then, a darkness, a shadow within all light that makes it possible as light, but in virtue of this darkness light itself remains elusive: vision only operates in virtue of our constitutive belatedness with respect to light—we see only after the fact, after the light itself has vanished, leaving behind only a trace in the form of the visible thing we see. Understood through light and lighting, the elemental is thus not identifiable with any kind of substrate, atom, matter, or even with a “basic ingredient.” The element, or elements, or elemental must be understood verbally: elementality is what happens, indeed, the event, when the things of the world flash up before us, where that flashing, that “deflagration” of the world’s sense comes to pass through an inverse event of recession, darkening, and shadow—a partial disintegration of the world’s sense around the edges, where sense emerges thanks to non-sense and without eliminating it. Elementality is the event of this lighting-darkening, a penumbric passage from one to the other in which the element as such is encountered only through its inverse, through what it allows and not, as it were, “in the flesh.”

The conceptual triad, matrix-symbol-element, as they function across the specific analyses of Between Philosophy and Symbolism, re-orient Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in such a way that we could no longer say with certainty that we are still in auspices of “phenomenology,” at least given the traditional sense of this as “transcendental science.” Indeed, through the mechanism of this conceptual triad, the very sense and meaning of “transcendental” becomes contested. Rather than a transcendental philosophy in the tradition of Kant and Husserl, through Kaushik’s reading, we must now situate Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy on the side of thinkers such as Deleuze and Derrida—thinkers of difference, slippage, and the event. I want to close this consideration of Between Philosophy and Symbolism by turning to the event in more detail.

Since the publication of Badiou’s Being and Event (1988), it has become fashionable for “philosophies of the event,” including Badiou but also figures such as Meillassoux and so-called “speculative realism,” to pose what is supposed to be a fatal critique of phenomenology. The critique, as Kaushik nicely phrases it, operates like this:

The assumption is that phenomenology reorients incoherency to coherency, inconsistency to consistency, nonsense to sense, and therefore also closes itself to the truly abnormal aspect of events… a philosophy of the event does not exclude the transcendental per se…. Only when it is conceived in terms of an intention, whether subjective or bodily, does the transcendental exclude the event…. An event would break from all forms of intentionality so radically that it cannot be an origin, destination, or even a preexisting referent, and its eventfulness would instead be utterly spontaneous.[11]

The conceptual triad matrix-symbol-element undoes intentionality—it makes sense of the birth of sense without reducing this genesis to an intentional form that would erase its excess, other, and outside. In other words, what the reconfiguration of Merleau-Ponty’s thought at stake in Between Philosophy and Symbolism accomplishes is the articulation of a phenomenology that allows for incoherency, inconsistency and nonsense to dwell within the sense of the world and that the emergence of sense does not exclude these. Kaushik reiterates this in the conclusion of the text, where he says “The impossible is internal to all senses, configuring them from within. This matrix, between sense and the meaning that cannot possible make sense, implies that no sense ever exhausts its non-sense.”[12] If the impossible is internal to all senses, if sense itself requires a non-sense internal to it, then it would seem that phenomenology—at least the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty—is already a philosophy of the event.

If Kaushik’s analyses are correct, and the close reading and analyses of the text indicate that they are, then the supposed fatal critique of phenomenology posed by philosophies of the event is not only not fatal, but premised on a misreading of phenomenology—or at least a misreading of the thought of Merleau-Ponty. Furthermore, by making Merleau-Ponty’s thought legible in terms of and through the matrix-symbolic-element, the traditional series of concepts that typically make up the currency of Merleau-Ponty studies—body, perception, flesh, etc.—are recast such that their internal relationship as well as Merelau-Ponty’s original contributions to philosophy (his engagement with Husserl, his conceptualization of phenomenology and its method, etc.) now come to fore clearly in a way hitherto undocumented. That being said, I will only add that Between Philosophy and Symbolism indicates that the more traditional interpretations of Merleau-Ponty’s thought (lived body, perception, flesh, etc.) are, in a sense, already in the past and that they most likely belong there, footnotes to a philosophy that itself continues to thrive and live. The readers of Merleau-Ponty’s work who are yet to come will leave these traditional readings there, in the past, and instead take Between Philosophy and Symbolism as their point of departure.

[1] Contrast Heidegger, who published Being and Time in 1927 and whose academic activity seems to have lasted at least until the late sixties, almost twice the output of Merleau-Ponty.

[2] Kaushik, Rajiv. Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology. (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2019), xii.

[3] Ibid., xiii.

[4] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Institution and Passivity. Trans. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 44; Kaushik, Rajiv. Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism, xviii.

[5] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Ed. Galen Johnson. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 132.

[6] Kaushik, Between Philosophy and Symbolism, xviii-xix.

[7] Ibid., xix.

[8] Ibid., xx.

[9] Ibid., xxii.

[10] Ibid., 64-65.

[11] Ibid., xi-xii.

[12] Ibid., 128.

Martin Heidegger: Heraclitus






Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos Book Cover




Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos





Martin Heidegger. Translators: Julia Goesser Assaiante, S. Montgomery Ewegen




Bloomsbury Academic




2018




Paperback $39.59




328

Reviewed by: Zühtücan Soysal (METU Philosophy)

The English translation of Martin Heidegger’s 1943-44 Freiburg lectures on Heraclitus makes this important text available to a much broader audience than before. Appearing as the 55th volume of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, the lectures exemplify his finest analytical vigor and philosophical insight. The work is particularly important for Heidegger research, as his understanding of the ancient Greek world and interpretation of pre-Platonic thinkers constitute the backbone of his oeuvre. Specifically, the book represents the concluding piece of Heidegger’s Freiburg lectures (1928-44), and thus presents a unique stylistic maturity. In addition, the range of covered issues and concepts is so vast that the lectures may shed light on both his earlier and later work. In terms of his prior work, the Heraclitus lectures might be seen as a fruit of endeavors that began with Beiträge zur Philosophie (GA 65) and the intensive Nietzsche readings of 1936-40, thereby in contrast to his thought preceding Beiträge. In relation to his later work, especially the second part of the book may be read as the foundation of his output for the late 1940s through the 1950s, and also as a springboard for his even later engagement with pre-Platonic thinking (cf. GA 15). What is even more noteworthy than the richness provided by the possibility of establishing such connections is the lectures’ ability to teach the way of thinking and reading by which Heidegger brings the word of Heraclitus into immediate relevance with the historical situation of modern humanity. The task remains, however, that we interpret that way ever anew.

The book consists of two parts, corresponding to two lecture courses. The first part, entitled “The Inception of Occidental Thinking” (1943 summer semester), is mostly concerned with getting a grasp of the ancient Greek experience of the terms φύσις (nature),[1] ζωή (life), δύνειν (submerging), and πῦρ (fire) through an attentive reading of ten of Heraclitus’s fragments, thereby demonstrating the proper mode of approach to his sayings. The second part of the book, titled “Logic: Heraclitus’ Doctrine of the Logos” (1944 summer semester), proceeds from that background and is centered around an elaborate elucidation of what it means for the human to be essentially characterized as ζῷον λόγον ἔχον (the living being having a logos) and an attendant justification of such characterization. No command of the Greek language is necessary to follow the courses, and the laudable translation of Julia Assaiante and Montgomery Ewegen captures the essence of the textual flow. I would also like to maintain that no prior knowledge of Heidegger’s thought is required either. However, Heidegger assumes that his audience has sufficient understanding of Hegel and Nietzsche, which makes it possible to put the confrontations with those thinkers into context.

At the very beginning, Heidegger makes it clear that when he says ‘philosophy’, he means something which is essentially Occidental. The word translated as “Occidental” is abendländischen (3),[2] which beckons a land of evening, that is, a region characterized by the sun’s having submerged. These expressions acquire sense as the book proceeds, but one does not find a definition for ‘Occident’ in its relation to a supposed opposite, ‘Orient’.[3] Instead, Heidegger wishes to direct the reader’s attention to what he considers to be more originary and essential. Unexpectedly, though, he begins with recounting two seemingly irrelevant stories about Heraclitus. In one of them, a group of people visit someone whom they think to be an “exceptional” and “tantalizing” philosopher, and surprised by seeing Heraclitus warm himself at an oven, upon which he says: “Here, too, the gods are present” (6). In the other story, the thinker plays a dice game with children inside the temple of Artemis, and shouts at the crowd perplexed before the “inappropriate” behavior of the thinker: “What are you gaping at, you scoundrels? Or is it not better to do this than to work with you on behalf of the πόλις [city-state]?” (10). Far from being insignificant ornaments, the two stories define and constitute the inconspicuous central axis of the narrative, around which the rest of the lectures unfold. It would for now be enough to note that in both stories, Heraclitus baffles the crowd by challenging their presumptions about the relationship between the ordinary and the godly, for he seems to think that Artemis is closer to his everyday abode than she is to the temple bearing her own name. Moreover, just as he rejects conspicuous piety, he rejects conspicuous politics (“working with you on behalf of the πόλις”). Heidegger remarks, at this point, that Heraclitus’s avoidance of ‘politics’ cannot be interpreted as a kind of disinterested neutrality, and thus does not make him ‘apolitical’. To the contrary, Heraclitus is political in the true sense of the word (11-12). This is the only place in the book where a direct mention of ‘politics’ is made, and Heidegger points to fragment 121 as well as to his lecture course of the previous year, Parmenides (GA 54). It would here suffice to say that without a proper understanding of these references in regard to how πόλις is conceived and how its care is envisaged, any political inference would at best be incomplete. Returning to the stories, they also ground the book-long response to a widespread misunderstanding by which one is tempted to think that the issues taken up by Heidegger lie beyond the place where the urgencies of immediate reality reside. Despite the significance of the two stories, on the other hand, their nature is preparatory.

There is a particular difficulty in translating Heraclitus and getting a grasp of his word. That difficulty, which is experienced to its fullest extent through the course of Heidegger’s elucidations, stems from the millenia-old tradition of thinking which Heidegger simply calls ‘metaphysics’. To explain by way of a rough outline of Heidegger’s account of the history of Occidental thinking, it should first be noted that it begins with the self-opening of the essence of truth, which precedes ancient Greek thought but which nevertheless finds its first decisive expression in the words of the “inceptual thinkers,” namely, Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. Metaphysics, although grounded in “inceptual thinking,” is characterized as the “self-rigidifying essence” which drives Occidental thinking away from its inception (31). Beginning with Plato until its consummation in Nietzsche’s thought, metaphysics not only transformed the word of Heraclitus through a series of interpretative translations but also determined, established, and secured the proper manner of approach to the fragments.

As a result, if one simply wishes to be “true to the word” (cf. 37) of Heraclitus without the disturbances of the long-standing tradition of metaphysics, their path must harbor or at least be open to and ready for a transformation of the path itself. Such transformation is called “learning” (cf. 190), which does not occur on a straight course of development. Rather, while approaching the sayings of Heraclitus through different angles, as if from afar to their essential core, Heidegger’s discourse also employs a stream of thought which turns toward the opposite direction, i.e., from core to afar. The spiraling of the two streams unfolds as a lasting encounter with the metaphysical tradition as every attempt at getting closer to the simplicity of the fragments is met with the voice of metaphysics, bending the discourse into its spiral course. What is learned as a result of this learning cannot be confined into any doctrinal content that replaces ‘false’ translations of φύσις, ζωή, etc. with ‘correct’ ones. Still, the manner and attitude of what Heidegger calls “essential thinking” remains distinguishable from conventional attempts at the thinker’s word.

First of all, Heidegger distances his way of thinking from historiography, which is defined as “the calculating and fundamentally technical relation to history,” whereby history is rendered as a sequence of bygone occurrences (69). As an example, the disciplines of anthropology and philology, on which an array of conventional interpretations of the world and the word of Heraclitus is based, are grounded in the historiographical manner of approach. Contrarily, Heidegger does not aim at lexicographical accuracy or etymological precision; he tries to reach a region of thought where the ‘decision’ for such accuracy and precision has not yet been made. Accordingly, for instance, the two stories recounted in the first lecture, even if they never actually happened, are considered to be worth more than a stockpile of correct biographical findings.

The emphasis on the aspect of ‘decision’ in translation might evoke the idea that words can take any meaning according to the ‘decisions’ of the interpreter, which constitutes the second manner of approach that Heidegger rejects. This idea may result in what might today be called ‘post-truth translation’, by which authority over meaning is surrendered to the arbitrariness of willing ‘decisions’ and individual perspectives. To be sure, ‘decision’ as understood by Heidegger in no way implies such a relativistic indifference to what the thinker’s word says. In fact, such a ‘post-truth translation’ is possible only on the basis of a prior, determinative decision regarding the essence of words in general. In this case, the decision pertains to the contemporary reality in which “[t]he machinegun, the camera, the ‘word’, and the billboard all have this same fundamental function of seizing and arresting the object” (71). In Heidegger’s reading, this state of affairs corresponds to the consummation of Occidental metaphysics, and is marked by the thought of Nietzsche.

The third manner of approach that Heidegger distances himself from involves interpreting the thinker’s word metaphorically. Heidegger explains in various places that Heraclitus’s sayings do not point to anything except what they simply say. To illustrate, the word ζωή is customarily translated as ‘life’, so ζῷον is taken to designate living beings in distinction to non-living beings. Therefore, if ζωή is somehow attributed to φύσις, it must be in a metaphorical way extrapolating the characteristics of living beings to the whole of beings. On this reading, Heraclitus may too easily be classified as a ‘primitive thinker’ in whose thought the lack of formal clarity and conceptual rigor is patched with metaphors (292). Nevertheless, Heidegger demonstrates through the text that if we “think-after the inceptual word,” there is a way to experience those words in their ‘inceptual sense’, although from a distance (85). Thinking-after the inceptual senses of ζωή and φύσις makes it possible even for the modern human to experience both of the words, in their respective ways, as the emerging-forth by which every being—e.g., gods, wars, algorithms—comes to presence, and not as a group of beings in distinction to others. Henceforth, the relationship between the two terms acquires a new character on the face of which hasty classifications of conventional thinking, together with the mindless application of the concept of metaphor, fall short. Of course, with this commentary, only a little insight into what is achieved by Heidegger’s phenomenological odyssey through the word of the inceptual thinker can be hinted at. It is essential to think-after Heidegger’s thinking-after, so that what it means to experience a word above all becomes clear.

If the proper manner of approach to the fragments can depend neither on historiography nor on the unrestricted will of the beholder, and furthermore if we cannot either accept that the thinker says one thing and means another by way of metaphors, then conventional thinking resorts to the suspicion that “an empty sorcery with words is being practiced here” (59). On that matter, Heidegger seems to be very well aware of the danger of falling into empty chatter, so he differentiates between “an empty play on words” and “the concealed play of the word” (138). How is this concealedness to be understood? Does the thinker’s word enclose a meaning in the same way a seed contains genetic information? These questions bring us to the fourth difference, which is also one of the central issues of the book, and which can be read as an encounter with “dialectical thinking.” Dialectics is defined as “the thinking of opposites together in a higher unity,” and is said to begin with Plato (34). Since being itself is determined as ἰδέα (appearance/look) by Plato, ‘truth’ gained its metaphysical characterization as the actuation of appearing (φαίνεσθαι) in assertion (κατηγορία) in accordance with the thing. In other words, the true in the metaphysical sense consists in re-presenting that which presents itself manifestly (cf. 40, 255, 385). Taken in its dialectical history from Plato to Hegel, the re-presentation of what there is in its totality, i.e., of beings as a whole, moves from a murky self-externalization of Spirit into its deciphered union with itself from out of its will to appearance. Accordingly, understanding Heraclitus would consist in resolving the lack of clarity by comprehending his word with respect to this manifest history. This point of view, however complete its mastery over concepts is, comes to a “stand-still” when it is confronted with what Heidegger calls the “irreconcilable” (117), which consists in the idea that Heraclitus’s thought is “not incomprehensible because it is too complicated, but rather because it is too simple” (149). ‘Simple obscurity’, which not only describes Heraclitus’s fragments but also is itself a cardinal part of the original experience of many ancient Greek words, is irreconcilable with dialectics, because absolute cognition can cognize ‘obscurity’ in its unity with ‘clarity’ only after the two are essentially separated. In other words, dialectics is not capable of attributing obscurity to the “essence of things” rather than to the “eyes of the human” (140). Therefore, “the concealed play of the word” is not in the sense that the word envelops a meaning to be unlocked, but instead it refers to the simple obscurity of the word concealed by the tradition of dialectics in general.

The fifth and last differentiation may be thought of as a continuation of the previous point. As the thinker’s word resists being viewed in terms of the metaphysical ideal of manifest explicitness, it becomes relevant to ask whether Heidegger’s way is akin to a kind of mysticism. However, that is not true either. It is clearly maintained that the truth in inceptual saying is “decisively divorced . . . from the hollow dizziness of a mystical profundity” (176). For Heidegger, it seems, the ‘mystical’ is associated with the experiential reckoning of a futile darkness that can never be brought into word. Summing up,

[t]he true in the inceptual sense of the unconcealed does not have the nature of mere clarity of explication and explicability. To the same degree, the true is not the unclear in the sense of an inexplicable and ciphered profundity. The true is neither the one-dimensionality of mere arithmetic nor the ‘profound’ dimensions hidden behind a theatre’s curtain. (180)

Right after these renunciations, Heidegger gives his own account with a very compendious expression whose succinctness I will not adulterate by attempting to unravel: “The true is the unsaid that remains the unsaid only in what is strictly and properly said” (Ibid.).

The above five points outline Heidegger’s manner of approach in a negative way, that is, by pointing at the inapparent, whereas indeed the progression of the lectures is principally driven by a positive exploration into the thinker’s sayings. In particular, it is the “foundational words” (Grundwortes) which are thought-after, the words that define the domain of inceptual thinking. What is named by each of those words (‘emerging,’ ‘submerging,’ ‘life,’ ‘fire,’ etc.) is also that which is named by “the foundational word of all thinking—namely, the word ‘being’” (90-1). It must be noted, though, that in none of the elucidated fragments does Heraclitus explicitly ask “τί τὸ ὄν” – “what is being?”  This shows, before everything, that Heidegger’s persistent prioritization of the question of being is not about making the name ‘being’ explicit in inquiry, even less about research into linguistic copula. More importantly, this also shows that those words name the be-ing of beings in the ways that the words themselves open. As such, they cannot be thought of in terms of anything that comes before them, and it is in this way that they are inceptual.

What is more, this inception itself is brought into word by Heraclitus as πῦρ, which is delineated as the enflaming fire whose light makes possible all appearing, and also as the origin-creating, sudden strike of lightning which separates the light and the dark in the first place by flashing into the unlit (cf. 161-2). Such a lightning must have separated the Occident from its other and placed forth the two toward one another at the moment of inception in the original saying. It is here crucial to note that whatever comes thereafter, i.e., history, is not seen as a dialogue between two poles, but rather as an enduring conversation with the inception, ensuring that the decision regarding the inception remains both in having-been and in future. The proper characterization of the human’s standing within all these relations depends on how the human itself stands out among beings, which in turn depends on the inceptual sense of another foundational word, λόγος. The central achievement of the second part of the book comprises the elucidation of this term and its history from logos to ratio, reason, and finally, to will to power.

Like other foundational words, logos has undergone severe transformations throughout the history of Occidental thinking. In pre-Platonic thought, logos had not yet acquired its status as an object of inquiry. To be sure, this is not a lack whatsoever on logos’s part, for it was rather seen as the proper ground and region of every inquiry. Even then, logos meant ‘speaking’ and ‘saying’ along with ‘gathering’ and ‘harvesting.’ The most decisive determination of the term occurred with the beginning of metaphysics, where λόγος, φύσις, and ἦθος were taken as the three directions of inquiry into beings as a whole. Accordingly, logic, physics, and ethics, which correspond to those directions respectively, became the disciplines comprising philosophy. At that moment, philosophy was given its distinctive position in relation to other forms of knowledge—that of astronomy, mathematics, etc. To be more specific, by establishing itself as the highest science, philosophy has rendered itself a science among others, a science whose program of research is designated by the tripartite departmentalization of knowledge. In fact, an image of this three-fold division is visible even in today’s commonly accepted classification of scientific branches as formal, natural, and social sciences. Returning to logic, it defines logos as ‘assertion’ or ‘judgment’, and is by the same token defined as the doctrine of valid inference, which results in what Heidegger calls the “dominance of discipline over the matter” (233) in the sense that the original richness of the inceptual word is first trimmed for the sake of researchability, and then the resulting research is given the authority over the meaning of the word in its entirety. In this way, “what is more originary than every kind of science,” i.e., logos, is gauged by “what has first arisen from out of this origin” (227), i.e., logic.

The history of logos after this decisive turning point gets more intricate with the development of Koine Greek, the emergence of Hellenistic Judaism, and the ecclesiastical determination of the term as ‘the Word’ (Verbum), the second personage of the Christian deity. The resulting worldview, which was further modified by the Arabic influence, culminates in its conclusive form with the advent of modern metaphysics from Descartes to Nietzsche. Heidegger claims that in none of these transformations was Occidental thought able to return to its essential ground within the original unity of ἐπιστήμη. On the contrary, it continuously rigidified the metaphysical conception by generalizing its methodological apparatus according to an ideal of universality in order to gain technical mastery over its subject matter (cf. 74, 192, 209, 228, 331). In consideration of all these, it is ultimately critical to avoid accounting this history solely in terms of its intellectual component, as if the determination of logos was merely an issue that we happen to see in the books of logicians. What is at stake here is by no means confined to how ‘logos’ as a technical term is defined. Rather, the conversation over logos is the one between the historical human and its history, however inconspicuously it takes place. In this conversation, ‘subjectivity’ is the final response of Christian theology to the question of the essence of the human, which paves the way for the modern restatement of this response as ratio and reason. When Heidegger implies—in 1944 in Freiburg—that it is the inability of Christian church to justify these responses which caused the two world wars (209), his discursive play reminds one of the dice game at the temple. It seems that both thinkers have a tendency to do “inappropriate things” (11) when it comes to temples and churches.

In the end, what can be said about the pre-Platonic logos, and how do these lectures respond to its call? To begin with, according to fragment 50, one cannot attain “rigorous knowledge” (σοφόν) by merely attending to the word of Heraclitus; rather, it is necessary that we turn toward that which already addresses us (259-60). ‘That which already addresses us’ is called the Logos, and the human essence is characterized by having a logos responding to the Logos. Logos, as a foundational word, can be approached in as many ways as being itself. But the most straightforward way to think of it would be through its sense of ‘gathering’. Accordingly, it is the gathering of beings, which shelters every doing and every saying along with every seeing and every listening. On the one hand, metaphysics interprets this gathering as the most universal of all beings, thereby at the same time retaining the godly as the “universal world-ground” (cf. 13). The persistence of this interpretation harbors the danger of interpreting these lectures themselves from the Christian or anti-Christian perspective. The common denominator of all such perspectives is to ab-cise the godly from the earthly abode of this very thinking, and by the same stroke, to separate the discipline from the matter. On the other hand, in this very thinking, we are thinking after Heidegger, who says after Heraclitus’s sayings: Do not merely listen to these words, but rather attend to the originary Logos (325). In the thinkers’ pointing out our relation to the Logos, there appears to be a resistance against the “dominance of discipline over the matter,” which compels us to ponder our decision between turning toward the script (i.e., merely toward the words) and turning toward the Logos itself.

In the former case, the script is considered strictly with regard to what is said in it. So, for instance, Heidegger’s warning against conceiving the Logos—“the One that unifies all beings” (292)—in terms of “any notions of Spirit, personhood, godhood, or providence” (396) might get particularly important, because in this way the Logos is posited as yet another such concept in distinction to the others, making possible an entire area of research on the conceptual-structural relationships between the ‘One’ of Heraclitus and those warned-against concepts. It may even be possible as a result to upgrade those concepts and have an even superior providence. Consequently, we might have multiple truths instead of the sole truth of the all-uniting One. However undeniable the significance of these possible attainments is, the danger persists as long as the human’s standing among those truths is left unexamined. Be that as it may, in the latter case, that is, when one turns toward the Logos itself, the issue is precisely the human’s standing among those truths. Because, as the gathering, the Logos is that which “for-gathers” (cf. 364) all scripts and scriptures so that they greet the human with their claim, and it is also that which must have already addressed the human—the ‘you’—before any of those multiple truths and before any commandment. “The Λόγος is not the word: it is, as the foreword to any language, more originary than the word” (383). In view of this, if one really has to employ the idea of commandment, one should not expect anything further than the command ‘be’, as there is no doubt on Heidegger’s part that it is the address of being which precedes all (323).

Being, however, is not ‘something’ that lies hidden in some supersensory place and in the heights of some vast soaring speculation. As the little word ‘is’ makes clear to us each time it appears, being ‘is’ the nearest of the near. Yet, because the human being troubles himself first and foremost only with what comes next, he constantly avoids the nearest, particularly since he appears to know very little about the near and its essence. (103-4)

All in all, one will find in this book a rigorous restatement of the question of being on the basis of Heraclitus’s doctrine of the Logos, and Heidegger’s response to many possible ‘post-Heideggerian’ approaches at ontotheology. To me, what is most valuable in the book lies in the fact that it somehow teaches, or at least attempts to teach, what one could expect from a lecture course on logic to teach—how to think. The discipline of logic, while setting out rules and methods of making correct use of reason, can hardly say a word on how to think. Here, on the other hand, how to approach a thinker’s word is demonstrated with authentic care toward what is cared by the thinker. Only by way of such care can we learn from the thinker, and only through authentic turning-towards can we remain in thinking.

[1] The parenthetical translations are provided only as labels and should not be assumed to convey the meaning of the Greek words.

[2] All page references are to GA 55. Pagination of the German text is used.

[3] Lin Ma’s Heidegger on East-West Dialogue: Anticipating the Event (Routledge, 2009) remains to be a scholarly gem in the field.