A Refreshing and Rethinking Retrieval of Greek Thinking
New Studies in Phenomenology and Hermeneutics
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Maly nominates a pre-eminent hermeneutic pair, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, whose earlier published and unpublished writings “shed light on how things ‘started’ in the early days of Western thinking” (xxviii; cf.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
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Heidegger, Martin. 1927. Being and Time / Sein und Zeit. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. London: SCM Press, 1962.
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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.
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