Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art

Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art Poiesis in Being Mark Sinclair Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art Th...

Author: Mark Sinclair

83 downloads 1371 Views 529KB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art Poiesis in Being

Mark Sinclair

Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art

This page intentionally left blank

Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art Poiesis in Being Mark Sinclair

© Mark Sinclair 2006 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–8978–9 hardback ISBN-10: 1–4039–8978–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sinclair, Mark, 1973– Heidegger, Aristotle, and the work of art : poiesis in being / Mark Sinclair. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–8978–8 (cloth) 1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976. 2. Art – Philosophy. 3. Aristotle. I. Title. B3279.H49.S523 2006 193—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2006042624

Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Abbreviations and Method of Citation

vii

Introduction

Part I

1

A Ground-laying of Greek Ontology

1

The Question of Being

19

2

Repeating Metaphysics: Heidegger’s Account of Equipment

47

3

Time and Motion

78

4

The Moment of Truth

Part II

111

The Turn to the Work of Art

5

Art and the Earth

135

6

Art, World and the Problem of Aesthetics

168

Conclusion

192

Notes

196

Bibliography

212

Index

218

v

Acknowledgements My thanks are due, above all, to Keith Crome at Manchester Metropolitan University, whose persistence as a friend, reader and philosophical colleague has greatly improved this book. I am also indebted to Ullrich Haase, who commented on early versions of the work in his role as my PhD supervisor and to Mike Garfield for his generous advice in matters of Ancient Greek. A version of Chapter 2 first appeared under the title ‘Heidegger’s account of equipment in Being and Time as metaphysics in its repetition’ in the Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology, Vol. 36, No. 3, 2005. Parts of the same chapter not included in this article have also been published in French under the title ‘Science et Philosophie dans Etre et Temps’ in Noésis, No. 10, Heidegger et les sciences (ed. M. de Beistegui and F. Dastur), 2006.

vi

Abbreviations and Method of Citation I translate the titles of Aristotle’s texts, but they are cited according to the standard pagination of the Bekker edition of the collected works (Opera, Berlin, 1831–70). A list of the English editions upon which my own translations are based are to be found in the bibliography. As a rule, key Greek terms are introduced in Greek script, and subsequently transliterated or translated except when they appear in citations of other authors. The titles of Heidegger’s texts are always translated in the text but I refer primarily to the German editions in the references. The texts of the collected works (Gesamtausgabe, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main) are cited with the letter G followed by the volume number of the text, the page number and, if possible, the page number of the English translation after a forward slash. I have often modified the translations, and for the sake of brevity the English edition is not cited if it indicates the pagination of the German edition. Concerning other French or German texts, unless a reference to an English edition is provided the translations are my own. I refer to the following volumes of the Gesamtausgabe: G3

G5 G7 G9 G13 G18 G19 G20

Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1990). Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans. R. Taft, 1997). Holzwege (1994). Off the Beaten Track (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, trans. J. Young and K. Haynes, 2002). Vorträge und Aufsätze (2000). Wegmarken (1976). Pathmarks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ed. W. McNeill, 1998). Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (1983). Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (2002). Platon: Sophistes (1992). Plato’s Sophist (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, 1997). Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (1979). History of the Concept of Time (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans. T. Kisiel, 1992). vii

viii Abbreviations and Method of Citation

G21 G22 G24

G26

G29/30

G31

G33

G39 G54 G56/57 G55 G65

G66

Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (1976). Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie (1993). Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1975). The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans. A. Hofstadter, 1988). Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (1978). The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans. M. Heim, 1992). Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit (1983). The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker, 1995). Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die Philosophie (1982). On the Essence of Human Freedom: Introduction to Philosophy (London: Continuum, trans. T. Sadler, 2002). Aristoteles: Metaphysik IX. Translated as Aristotle’s Metaphysics 1 1–3 (1990). On the Essence and Actuality of Force (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans. W. Brogan and P. Warnek, 1995). Hölderlins Hymnen, Germanien “und, Der Rhein” (1980). Parmenides (1982). Parmenides (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans. A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz, 1992). Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (1987). Towards a Definition of Philosophy (London: Continuum, trans. T. Sadler, 2000). Heraklit (1979). Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1989). Contributions to Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans. P. Emad and K. Maly, 1999). Besinnung (1997).

I refer to non-Gesamtausgabe editions of Heidegger’s work (with the page number of the corresponding English edition appearing, when both possible and necessary, after a forward slash) according to the following abbreviations: EM

ID

Einführung in die Metaphysik, (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987, 5th edn). Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, trans. G. Fried and R. Polt, 2000). Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957). Essays in Metaphysics: Identity and Difference (New York: Philosophical Library Inc., trans. by K. Leidecker, 1960).

Abbreviations and Method of Citation ix

NI NII

PIA

S

SG

SZ

UK1 UK2 UK3

VS WHD

ZSD

Nietzsche – Vol. 1 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961). Nietzsche – Vols I and II (New York: Harper & Row, trans. D. F. Krell, 1991). Nietzsche – Vol. 2 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961). Nietzsche – Vols III and IV (New York: Harper & Row, trans. D. F. Krell and F. Capuzzi, 1991). Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation). I refer to a bi-lingual German/ French edition of this text: Interprétations Phénoménologiques d’Aristote (Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress, trans. J. F. Courtine, 1992). This edition reproduces the text in the Dilthey Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 6 (1989). I refer to the first English translation of this text, ‘Phenomenological interpretations with respect to Aristotle’ in Man and World 25 (1992): 358–93, trans. Michael Baur. Schelling: Über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1971). Schelling’s Treatise on Essence of Human Freedom (Athens: Ohio University Press, trans. J. Stambaugh, 1985). Der Satz von Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957). The Principle of Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, trans. R. Lilly, 1991). Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984, 15th edn). Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, 1995). ‘Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerkes: Erste Ausarbeitung’ in Heidegger Studies, Vol. 5, 1989, 5–22. ‘Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerkes/De l’origine de l’oeuvre d’art’ (Paris: Authentica, 1987). I refer to the Gesamtausgabe edition [G5] of ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes’ in this way. I cite the translation of the essay in Off the Beaten Track after the forward slash but I do not always follow it word for word, and I rely heavily on the those of D. F. Krell in Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 1995) and of A. Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Vier Seminare (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977). Was Heißt Denken? (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1954). What is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row, trans. F. Wieck and J. Gray, 1972). Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976).

x

Abbreviations and Method of Citation

Since some of Heidegger’s volumes of essays (G7, for example) have no completely corresponding English-language edition, I refer to three translations with the following abbreviations: EGT EP QCT

Early Greek Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, trans. D. Krell and F. Capuzzi, 1975). The End of Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, trans. J. Stambaugh, 1973). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, trans. W. Lovitt, 1977).

Introduction

In the end, if you destroy, let it be with nuptial tools. René Char This book seeks to contribute to an elucidation of the meaning and possibility of philosophy in the present age by examining the interpretation of Aristotle that is to be found in the work of the twentieth-century German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. The aim, in the most general terms, is to determine the manner in which both a positive appropriation and a critique of Aristotle lie at the very heart of Heidegger’s philosophical enterprise from the early 1920s onwards. This enterprise, however, including the interpretation of Aristotle that is central to it, is radicalised and begins to grasp more fully its own historical implications by means of Heidegger’s phenomenological reflection on the essence of art in the mid-1930s. Such reflection on the essence of art does not form merely an isolated or special problematic within Heidegger’s work, and, in other words, it is not limited to the significance of what philosophers have come to term a ‘regional ontology’; it rather transforms the basic question of philosophy that Heidegger had posed in the 1920s, namely the question of being. The most specific aim of this study, therefore, is to determine exactly how Heidegger’s phenomenology of the artwork transforms his earlier interpretation of Aristotle articulated within a questioning of being, and ultimately to show that it is only from the perspective of this transformation that the historical and philosophical import of Heidegger’s earlier work, and thus the development of his work as a whole, can be adequately understood. This schematic delimitation of the aims of the book may do little to avert the impression produced by its title that it will offer a comparative study of the theory of art and of the determination of being articulated 1

2


by both Aristotle and Heidegger. It would seem, in terms that are used here in a provisionally indiscriminate fashion, that the study will compare the ‘metaphysics’ and ‘aesthetics’ of both Heidegger and Aristotle. To this end, and according to one accepted method of such a comparative study, it would be necessary initially to present the ideas of Aristotle – first come, first served – concerning the subjects in question before describing those of Heidegger. A concluding section of the book would then venture to ascertain exactly how the ideas of these philosophers differ, and perhaps even how the ideas of Heidegger represent a philosophical advance, if advances can be made in philosophy, on those of Aristotle. This somewhat simplistic conception of the aims and method of the study, although not entirely false, would be troubled, however, by the fact that Heidegger himself offers an interpretation, different interpretations, of Aristotle. The lecture courses published in Heidegger’s collected works over the last three decades have revealed the extent of his concern for a ‘phenomenological interpretation’ of Aristotle in the 1920s. Not only do we have to deal, therefore, with Aristotle and Heidegger, but with Aristotle, Heidegger and, third, Heidegger on Aristotle. Yet what further complicates such a simplistic conception of our study is the fact that Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle is no mere historical adjunct to a modern, self-contained or systematic philosophy, but is instead integral to his own thinking. This is at least indicated by the fact that the text of Being and Time, Heidegger’s magnum opus of 1927, emerges not only from the aforementioned lecture courses offering ‘phenomenological interpretations’ of Aristotle, but also, and more immediately, from an unrealised project to extend these interpretations in the form of a book-length work. It might be thought that something decisive occurred for Heidegger not to have realised this extended Aristotle interpretation and to have written Being and Time instead. Nevertheless, it will become clear in what follows that any attempt to separate crudely the main lines of Heidegger’s ‘own’ work regarding metaphysics and aesthetics from his interpretation of Aristotle is problematic. A sense of this problem, and that is to say, an initial understanding of the significance of Heidegger’s Aristotle interpretation and of the manner in which this interpretation inheres in his work of the 1920s, can be gleaned from the introductory sections of Being and Time. The very first pages of the text indicate that it has something other than a simply incidental or accidental relationship to the work of Aristotle and to that of Plato before him. The question of being that it is necessary to ‘restate explicitly’ in the face of contemporary philosophical indifference to being and to the meaning of being itself, was a question that ‘provided

Introduction 3

a stimulus for the researches of Plato and Aristotle, only to subside from then on as a theme for actual investigation’ [SZ 2]. Heidegger’s claim is that the ‘fragmentary and incipient’ determination of being that is to be found in the work of both Plato and Aristotle is one that has ‘become trivialized’ [SZ 2], taken for granted and no longer even seen as an issue, in the history of philosophy after its Greek inception. Such opening remarks, however equivocal they may be, already seem to propose a return to the thinking of both Plato and Aristotle as a return to the living source of an ossified philosophical tradition, a source that would provide resources for the articulation of the question of the meaning of being. These remarks are developed, of course, in §6 of the text, which delineates ‘The Task of Destroying the History of Ontology’, a task that was to be carried out in a projected second part of Being and Time that remained, in the event, unpublished. It should be noted, first of all, that the necessity of what Heidegger advances as an ‘ontological destruction’ within the philosophical project of Being and Time lies in the finitude, in the historical situation of all thought. The simple but nonetheless decisive fact that in the seventeenth century Descartes takes up the conceptuality of medieval philosophy, which itself derives from Greek philosophy, constitutes a preliminary indication that any attempt, even the most radical, to begin thinking philosophically from nothing but a blank slate will be pervaded by traditional concepts and traditional angles of approach. Descartes, famously, first attempts in philosophy to ‘demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations’,1 but in the edifice constructed on the site of this demolition there is much more of the tradition than he cares to recognise. For Heidegger, this testifies to the fact that thinking always has a site in history from which it inevitably inherits a past that is always ‘more or less explicitly grasped’ [SZ 21]. Moreover, it is the definitively modern attempt to found philosophy in and for itself independently of the tradition that exacerbates an already quite traditional tendency to ‘fall prey’ to the past, and that is to say, to adopt the concepts inherited from the past unthinkingly and as self-evident, with neither the concern nor the ability to return to the sources from which they issued. Accordingly, Heidegger formulates the task of his ontological destruction in the most succinct manner thus: If the question of being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments that it has brought about must be dissolved. We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of being as our clue, we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we

4


arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of being – ways which have guided us ever since [SZ 22]. The determination of being within the philosophical tradition is to be interrogated and shown to be fragwürdig or question-worthy, even and perhaps precisely where it is not explicitly posed as a question. Yet this loosening up of what is an ossified philosophical tradition seeks to achieve, in the end, a destruction of the ‘traditional content’ of ancient ontology. Ultimately, Heidegger seeks, in other words, to advance a decidedly untraditional reading of the Greeks, of Plato and Aristotle, in showing how the tradition only conceals the originality of the problematic that underlies their thinking. Within such destruction, Heidegger’s concern for Greek thinking is, indeed, largely limited to the work of Plato and Aristotle, to what can be understood as the inception of philosophy, if it is true that what Plato baptises as something new with the name philosophy is a fundamentally different form of thought to those that had preceded it.2 Notwithstanding the occasional reference to Parmenides and Heraclitus, to a certain extent in the 1920s, Heidegger seems to accept the common characterisation of the pre-Socratic thinkers as those who have not yet attained the height and rigour of the work of either Plato or Aristotle. The work of the latter would represent the ‘scientifically highest and purest stage’ of ‘ancient ontology’ [SZ 26]. Of course, denominating, as Heidegger does, the quite different bodies of work written by Plato and Aristotle with the terms ‘ancient ontology’ is problematic. Yet, it is not illegitimate, since, as Heidegger had argued in 1922, for all that Aristotle ‘gains a principally new basis in his Physics’ for philosophical research, this research that is motivated by reflection on the possibility of movement nevertheless remains the ‘concrete refinement’ [PIA 33/373] of what had gone before, that is, of Plato’s thought. On this account, Aristotle’s thinking represents the summit of Greek philosophy, and for as much as its limits determine the entirety of the history of philosophy, it nevertheless contains an originality unheeded by the tradition. The claim is that whilst Aristotle establishes ontology or metaphysics as we know it, his thought nevertheless exceeds the tradition that he founds. Such a claim might lead us to suspect, and rightly so as I will show, that Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle ultimately concerns not merely what one particular philosopher happened to find in the work of another but instead the limitations and the essential possibilities of metaphysics itself.

Introduction 5

The fact that Heidegger’s ontological destruction is advanced as a destruction of the traditional content of ancient ontology means that if the term destruction is to be understood partially in a negative sense, then this ‘negative’ moment is directed more towards the present age and the understanding that it has of its own Greek origins than it is to these Greek origins themselves; ‘its criticism is aimed at “today” and at the prevalent way of treating the history of ontology’ [SZ 22]. Heidegger’s ‘destruction’ is not to be confused with Descartes’ ‘demolition’. Of course, in making manifest an untraditional originality of the Greek ontological problematic, Heidegger will at the same time criticise, which is to say, determine the limitations of this problematic. In this sense, the task is one of ‘discriminating the basis and the limitations of the ancient science of being’ [SZ 26]. Such critique is in no way simply a negation of the past, and it is always intended as a critique of the present age and the contemporary inheritance of the limits of Greek ontology. The more obviously ‘positive’ aspect of this destruction, however, consists of the attempt to unearth the original experiences at the inception of Greek ontological, philosophical conceptuality, and it is what is described as ‘a demonstration of the origin of our basic ontological concepts by an investigation in which their “birth certificate” is displayed’ [SZ 22]. This notion of a philosophical ‘birth certificate’ (Geburtsbrief ) finds its own origin in the work of Kant. At the beginning of the transcendental analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes that the analytic of concepts must search for a priori concepts in the faculty of the understanding ‘as their place of birth (als ihrem Geburtsorte)’.3 In taking up and transforming this notion, Heidegger only emphasises the distance that separates him from Kant and the radicality of his own approach. The birthplace of our philosophical concepts is not to be found in an a-historical intellectual faculty, but rather, and rather more literally, in ancient Greek philosophy and, more specifically, in the Greek experience of beings. The distinction between Greek experience and conceptuality is, in fact, the very crux of Heidegger’s historical thinking, the epicentre, as it were, of the shock that the tradition receives in its destruction. To varying degrees and in different ways, Heidegger is concerned to unearth the prethematic horizons of experience that underlie the formation of Greek ontological concepts. There would be a difference, or a certain distance, between the horizons of experience at the origins of Greek philosophical concepts and what was explicitly thought and reflected on by the Greek philosophers with those concepts. What is implicit would here determine what is said explicitly, without the formative power of what is implicit having been explicitly recognised. It is, therefore, only in

6


retrieving the sense of these original horizons of experience that we can be sure of the sense of the philosophical concepts that we have inherited from the Greeks. If our modes of thought and conceptuality have to be validated or certified, then ‘only by means of this destruction can ontology fully assure itself in a phenomenological way of the genuine character of its concepts’ [G24 31/23]. Such a ‘destructive’ interpretation of Greek philosophy, and of Aristotle in particular, is integral to Heidegger’s thinking, as we have seen, because of the historically rooted nature of thinking and of philosophy itself. Of course, the fact that philosophy has always inherited concepts and ways of thinking from the tradition that has preceded it, however unthinkingly or inauthentically, might appear to be merely a fact, and hence something of which we could doubt the necessity. Yet it is a fact that has its ground in what Heidegger terms the human being’s facticity. Philosophy is historical in its essence, it thinks from within history and cannot legitimately stake a claim to an eternal truth that would have descended from an otherworldly sphere, because Heidegger argues that the human being, as what he terms Dasein, is a being that is in its essence time. In revealing a temporality thought beyond time conceived as a series of now-points – nows that are no longer, a now, and nows that are not yet – the second division of Being and Time shows at once that history is not given as an object for an a-historical gaze. The possibility of any thematic reflection on history, any historiological inquiry (Historie) is given in Dasein’s historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) as the ever preobjective movement of temporality or history itself. The past, on this account, is that which is accessible only to an interpretation grounded in history, in the present and through our openness to the future. In contrast to the very ‘ideal’ of historical objectivity, that is, a-historical objectivity, on the part of the historian, the past, for Heidegger, is that which can be brought to expression only through a historically rooted interpretation. Any supposed objective enquiry into the history of philosophy can, at best, only read the obviousness and ‘self-evidence’ according to which it has assumed traditional concepts back into the inception of philosophy itself and, at worst, it can perceive in the history of philosophy, however much it has finally resulted in the truth, only the history of an error, ‘mere darkness’ [G24 174/124]. Hence if contemporary thought is to make a genuine advance on the tradition by taking a step backwards to the origins of this tradition itself, then this step backwards can only be achieved through and with the step forwards; the past from out of which we think has to be re-appropriated and interpreted anew. In order to certify the birth of philosophy, in order to gain a guarantee

Introduction 7

as to the genuine character of present-day philosophical concepts, Greek ontology has to be repeated, not identically, as if we were simply to say what has already been said, but as a productive or creative repetition or Wiederholung – literally, a ‘fetching again’ – made possible by the temporal difference or the hermeneutic distance between the present enquiry and the past of the tradition itself.4 Heidegger’s ontological destruction, therefore, is already and inalienably creative or constructive. It is a function of a historically rooted interpretation. Hence destruction, and thus an appropriation of Aristotle, is integral to Heidegger’s phenomenology not only because our traditional concepts require historical certification and validation, but also because the birth certification itself requires a phenomenological interpretation of Greek thinking. On this basis, one might even think that far from being separable from his interpretation of Aristotle, Heidegger’s work is in a sense identical to it. Some months after the publication of Being and Time, however, in the lecture course of the summer semester of 1927 entitled The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger delineates three different moments or aspects of the ‘method’ and ‘idea of phenomenology’ [G24 26/19]. These three moments, namely reduction, construction and destruction, together constitute the method and idea of phenomenology as fundamental ontology, which is the articulation of, and the response to, the question of the meaning of being. First, the reduction as ‘a priori cognition’ is that in and by which thinking accomplishes the move from a being to a determination of its being. The analytic of Dasein provided in Being and Time is such a reduction insofar as it attempts to determine the being of the being that we are, namely the human being. Yet, and second, being is not itself a being, it does not stand before our eyes as an object, and hence it must ‘be brought forth in a free projection’ or a construction. To the ‘reductive construction of being’, however, and third, there necessarily belongs an ontological destruction. In characterising the unity of this threefold, Heidegger writes: These three basic components of phenomenological method – reduction, construction, destruction – belong together in their content and must receive grounding in their mutual inherence [Zusammengehörigkeit]. Construction in philosophy is necessarily destruction, that is to say, a deconstructing of the traditional carried out in a historical recursion to the tradition [G24 31/23]. If, as we have seen, ontological destruction is in a certain sense creative, then it is still something other than reduction or construction. The

8


‘reductive construction’ of being that is to be found in the text of Being and Time, in other words, is not an ontological destruction, and yet it bears an inner, organic relationship to the latter. Heidegger announces that the determination of this relationship or co-belonging remains as a task to be carried out, and in fact it is one to which he does not return in the lecture course. This is no accident since it is, in the end, impossible to offer a simple formula that would express the ‘relation’ of each of these three moments to each other. They cannot, in fact, be separated in order to determine subsequently what the relation of each to the others might be, and here we should be careful to note that destruction, reduction and construction are not, despite the terms of the passage above, three component parts of a whole, that is, parts able to exist independently of each other. For reduction, construction and destruction correspond to the three ‘moments’ or ‘aspects’ of time, namely present, future and past, and as Aristotle recognised, as we will see in Chapter 3 of this study, the present, past and future cannot be understood as parts of time. Despite the difficulty of accounting for the unity of the three aspects of Heidegger’s method, a method which is in no sense tripartite, it can be said in general that a reduction, that is, the analytic of Dasein, seeks to think the problematic originally constitutive of Greek ontology more originally than the Greeks themselves. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology of the 1920s is fundamental not only in that it seeks to pose explicitly the question of the meaning of being, but also in that it seeks to lay anew and more originally the foundations of Greek ontology. Curiously, the text of Being and Time itself is much less clear than the lecture courses of the 1920s concerning this second sense of fundamental ontology. This issue will have to be addressed more fully below, but in certain respects Being and Time has at least the allure of a modern, apparently self-sufficient philosophical treatise. Yet stating that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology seeks to rethink Greek ontology ‘more originally than’ the Greeks themselves merely marks the site of a problem, our problem, since it is often difficult to separate Heidegger’s ‘own’ thinking from his destruction of the traditional content of Greek ontology. Heidegger’s accounts of what is to be found in the latter undergo a certain development along the path of his thinking from the beginning of the 1920s onwards. It will become clear, in fact, that his historical and hermeneutic interpretations of Aristotle always allow for the possibility of both a ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ – or a ‘generous’ and ‘less generous’ – repetition, which could emphasise either the limits or the originality of Aristotle’s thinking. Moreover, the very sense of the attempt to think more originally than Aristotle resists

Introduction 9

generalisation and each aspect of the problematic of fundamental ontology must be approached in its specificity. Recognising the bare fact that the analytic of Dasein is intertwined in an attempt to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology should lead us to adopt, at the very least, a cautious attitude to any attempt to understand Heidegger’s thinking as a body of work separate or even separable from that of Aristotle. Of course, one may still wonder how the work of Heidegger is any different in this regard to that of, say, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant or Hegel. Surely, it will be said, the work of these modern philosophers cannot be understood adequately without comprehending how they develop certain key ontological, philosophical ideas first introduced by Aristotle. Yet the difference between Heidegger and these modern philosophers resides in the fact that if the former claims to make any advances in philosophy, then these advances are made possible only by a step back, ein Schritt zurück, to the more or less hidden sources of the Aristotelian tradition itself. But what, then, is achieved by this step backward? What is it that Heidegger’s phenomenological ‘birth certificate’ of metaphysics achieves? A response to such questions can be found in a passage from Besinnung or Meditation, a posthumously published text written in the period 1938–40, in which Heidegger despairs at a certain misreading of Being and Time: And even the attempt to lead this metaphysical thinking in itself back simply to its own ‘presuppositions’ and thus to initiate from out of itself its self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung) must fail; for such an attempt [‘Being and Time’] is inevitably once more interpreted metaphysically [G66 211]. Being and Time would have been but an attempt to lead modern metaphysics back to its own presuppositions in preparation for an overcoming, a self-overcoming of metaphysics itself. The ‘presuppositions’ at stake here can be understood as the original experiences both veiled by and constitutive of Greek philosophical thinking. Being and Time would lead us back to the presuppositions of metaphysics, therefore, insofar as it attempts to expose and think more originally the problematic of Greek ontology. This means that the text of Being and Time would represent something quite different to a positive philosophical thesis concerning being and the human being. It would, in other words, be something other than one more position or stage within the history of metaphysics, another purportedly self-sufficient account of what is as such and in general, and understanding it thus, however ‘inevitable’

10 Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art

such understanding may be, would be to understand it metaphysically, in the ‘pejorative’ sense of the term that Heidegger develops in the 1930s, precisely insofar as it would fail to perceive the historical nature, and the historical retrocession, inherent in the project of fundamental ontology. Leading back metaphysics to its presuppositions in such a manner, however, would allow for a consequent overcoming of the metaphysical tradition itself. The positive sense of this idea of overcoming and self-overcoming will become clear only in the conclusion to this study, but on the basis of the preceding pages it should be clear that overcoming metaphysics is not an act of discarding it, and that one cannot free oneself from the metaphysical tradition as one can free oneself from an opinion. The later Heidegger only appreciates this more, particularly in that he will argue that the apparent redundancy of metaphysics in the present age is but a function of its realisation in the modern techno-sciences. If, in any event, it is true that the fundamental ontology to be found in Being and Time is an attempt to lead the philosophical tradition back to its own presuppositions, then the text itself presents us with a formidable challenge to the ways in which we read and to our inveterate habits of philosophical thinking. We would have to forego, for example, the language of ‘debts’ and ‘indebtedness’ when discussing Heidegger’s relationship to Aristotle, language which seems to be omnipresent in contemporary scholarship, since such terms, however reasonable and even correct they may be, are completely inadequate as a means of understanding the peculiar status of Heidegger’s historical thinking. More profoundly, we would have to assess how such historical thinking exceeds the propriety imposed by the fixing of the proper name ‘Heidegger’ to a body of philosophical work. It is by way of such assessment or reassessment that we might come to understand how Heidegger could affirm to his French interlocutors at the conference organised in his honour in 1955 at Cerisy, Normandy, that there is not, and never was, such a thing as ‘Heidegger’s philosophy’. The present book constitutes an attempt at such a reassessment, insofar as it seeks to understand the transition from Heidegger’s work of the 1920s to that of the 1930s as the movement from a ground-laying of the philosophical tradition, a reduction or leading-back of this tradition to its own presuppositions, to a possible self-overcoming of metaphysics itself. In showing how Heidegger’s reflection on art is pivotal to it, I aim to demonstrate in what ways and to what extent Heidegger’s work can, and indeed must, be understood according to this movement. Such an approach requires a reading of Heidegger not only ‘from the start’, but

Introduction 11

also ‘from the end,’ and that is to say, retrospectively, from the perspective of the later work. Of course, this approach will appear problematic given that, as noted, Being and Time in some respects does indeed seem to adopt the appearance of a self-sufficient philosophical treatise and also because we are attempting to read this text according to the guiding thread of what Heidegger says about it some ten years after the fact of writing it. Yet in accounting for these difficulties I hope to demonstrate the veracity and necessity of the approach. In the course of the study, I will argue that Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle falls, in fact, into not just two, but three distinct periods. Texts such as the pivotal essay of 1922 entitled Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle, and the recently published lecture course Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie [G18], Basic Concepts of Aristotle’s Philosophy, show us that prior to 1925–6 Heidegger had attempted to retrieve an analysis of ‘factical life’ [PIA 18/359], that is, what he will come to term an analytic of Dasein, from Aristotle’s physical and practical writings. Although Heidegger already speaks of a Destruktion in this period, this retrieval is also termed a ‘dismantling return (abbauender Rückgang)’ [PIA 31/371] in 1922. I use the latter terms in denominating this early period, in order to distinguish it from the project of fundamental ontology proper and from the destruction that is an essential aspect of the latter. It is necessary to make this distinction, since if Heidegger’s phenomenological thinking is virtually indistinguishable from his appropriation of Aristotle in the first half of the decade, then from 1925 to 1926 he moves away from the generosity of his earlier readings of the Stagirite, and his approach becomes, in general, more critical. As I will show, this movement seems to be occasioned by Heidegger’s discovery of what is termed Dasein’s ‘ecstatic temporality’, a temporality more original than any traditional determination of time as a series of ‘nows’ or present moments, which would constitute the horizon for any ‘understanding of being whatsoever’ [SZ 1] and thus even the meaning of being itself. For with this discovery of ecstatic temporality Heidegger argues that the traditional determination of time that it delimits and supersedes is originally articulated by Aristotle, who would account for time thus precisely because he was only able to ‘understand’ being itself according to one particular moment of time, according to the present, and thus as presence. This second phase includes the relatively lengthy readings of the basic concepts of Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics presented in lecture courses after Being and Time, such as On the Essence of Human Freedom [G31] and Aristotle’s Metaphysics 1 1–3 [G33], delivered in 1930 and 1931 respectively. A third phase in this


interpretative appropriation of Aristotle, however, is introduced in 1935 by means of Heidegger’s reflection on the work of art, and attains perhaps its fullest expression in the essay on Aristotle’s Physics, ‘On the Essence and Concept of Phusis’, that Heidegger writes in 1939. As should now be clear, my aim is to show how it is only from the perspective of this third phase that Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle as a whole can be adequately comprehended, and that is to say, comprehended as a movement from a ground-laying of metaphysics to an overcoming of metaphysics itself. For as much as this study advocates the necessity of reading Heidegger backwards, Part I examines fundamental ontology as a repetition and ground-laying of Greek ontology. Chapter 1 examines Aristotle’s questioning of being, with a particular focus on book Zeta of the Metaphysics and with reference to Heidegger’s interpretations of it. In this manner, the chapter provides an initial account of Heidegger’s attempts to destroy the traditional content of Aristotle’s ontology. The three following chapters develop this account in showing how the analytic of Dasein takes up the three different but related senses of the ‘ancient’ and, in fact, Aristotelian conception of being that are delineated in §6 of Being and Time: not only would being be conceived in this ontology as presence, but it would also be thought as being-produced, and that is to say, from the perspective of finished products such as tables, chairs and artworks. As we read within Heidegger’s discussion of the idea of ens creatum, the created being, that Descartes inherits from medieval philosophy, ‘createdness, in the broadest sense of something having been produced, is an essential structural moment of the ancient conception of being’ [SZ 24]. A third such ‘essential structural moment’, however, is to be found in the problematic of being as, and in its relation to, truth and language. Chapters 2–4 of this study, then, each take up one of these three moments of the ‘ancient conception of being’. Chapter 2 examines Heidegger’s repetition of Aristotle’s analyses of the particular human comportment that is poiesis or production, which comportment, as I show in Chapter 1, determines the Stagirite’s philosophical account of beings in their being. Chapter 3 examines Heidegger’s delimitation of Aristotle’s account of time in the Physics, but only after having shown how this delimitation occurs on the basis of an appropriation of Aristotle’s conceptions of movement within the analytic of Dasein. Chapter 4 concerns Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle’s accounts of truth and his related analysis of praxis and prudence. In all of these chapters, I begin from the perspective of fundamental ontology and return to the earlier analyses

Introduction 13

of the dismantling return in order to elucidate and assess the former. According to this method, I seek to avoid the partiality of a recent study by Ted Sadler, which relies on the more negative, critical arguments concerning the Stagirite to be found in the texts of the period of fundamental ontology, in order to claim that Heidegger can be understood simply to oppose ‘his own philosophy’ to that of Aristotle.5 In this way Sadler seeks to overturn a broad ‘school’ of commentators on the early Heidegger – including Robert Bernasconi, John van Buren, Theodore Kisiel, Jacques Taminiaux and Franco Volpi – that has stressed the importance of Aristotle’s practical writings and anthropology to the project of fundamental ontology and thus the fact that the text of Being and Time is much less than transparent concerning the appropriation of Aristotle that is at its heart. Part II of the study turns to the third phase of Heidegger’s Aristotle interpretation, one occasioned by reflection on art. The fact that this reflection is by no means held within the limits of a regional ontology, and thus by extension that it concerns the very essence of Heidegger’s Aristotle interpretation, is emphasised in the appendix added in 1956 to the essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, which was presented as a series of lectures in 1936. The entire essay moves knowingly yet implicitly, along the path of the question of the essence of being. Reflection on what art may be is completely and decisively directed solely toward the question of being [UK3 73/55]. Heidegger’s reflection on art is directed toward the question of being. This reflection on the poetic or poietic, to use the Greek term here as denominating more specifically fine art or artistic creation as opposed to mere craftwork, is a reflection on the poietic in being. It is pivotal, in fact, to what Heidegger will famously describe as a turning or Kehre in being as the matter of thinking, since he writes now not of the meaning, but instead of the essence or Wesen of being. In order to trace this movement, Chapter 5 of the study pays particular attention to the three different versions of ‘The Origin’ – a title that I use to name the three versions collectively – that are now available, offering a genetic study of them. I will show how this reflection on art leads beyond fundamental ontology, and concomitantly to a revision of the sense of the three different aspects of the ‘ancient’ and Aristotelian conception of being that were examined in Part I of the study. This, as I will argue, is a revision that allows us to understand more fully what is revised, namely


fundamental ontology, as a leading-back of metaphysics to its own presuppositions. Particular emphasis will be placed on the manner in which it transforms the analysis of equipment provided in the 1920s as a ground-laying of Greek ontology. Chapters 2 and 5, in fact, form the backbone of the study insofar as they articulate how the transformation in Heidegger’s account of equipment can be understood as a reduction of metaphysics that allows for, and leads to, the possibility of an overcoming of metaphysics as such. A corollary of this argument will be the claim that the most significant aspect of Heidegger’s Aristotle interpretation is not, in fact, his appropriation of the Stagirite’s account of praxis and the mode of thought proper to it, namely phronesis or prudence. To remain at this level of analysis is, I contend, to perceive in Heidegger only a philosopher who is indebted to another philosopher, who happens to be called Aristotle, and who had some interesting ideas concerning human being that were obscured both in his own work and by the philosophical tradition that followed from it. To perceive fully the significance of Heidegger’s changing appropriations of the Stagirite’s determination of poiesis as denominating both artistic and ‘prosaic’ production is, on the other hand, to apprehend his Aristotle interpretation for what in essence it is: an attempt, at the end of the metaphysical tradition, to delimit the meaning and the essential possibilities of metaphysics by thinking through what can be understood to be the highest point of its Greek inception, in such a way as to enable us to think beyond metaphysics itself. In this manner, I aim to challenge some of the claims of the broad school of commentators mentioned above, but in a direction, to be sure, that is diametrically opposed to that of Sadler. Instead of arguing that Heidegger is, after all, less indebted to Aristotle than we may have come to think, the intention here is to show how the former is ‘indebted’ to the Stagirite to a degree that renders the idea of ‘indebtedness’ insufficient as a means of comprehending the historical significance of his thought. Chapter 5, and also the conclusion, will be concerned to determine how Aristotle’s own account of the poietic in being provides resources for Heidegger’s attempt, beginning in the 1930s, to delimit the metaphysical tradition in a manner that is still more radical than that of fundamental ontology. It will be necessary to determine, on the one hand, the extent to which Aristotle belongs to the tradition that he can be understood to found, and, on the other hand, the extent to which he exceeds it as thinking more originally than those that succeed him. Within this framework, the final chapter of the study examines Heidegger’s attempt

Introduction 15

in the 1930s to locate in the artwork a specific modality of truth, a way in which truth can occur, and his concomitant critique of the philosophical tradition of aesthetics as establishing a divorce of art from any function of truth. The chapter will be concerned to determine what resources, if any, can be found in Aristotle’s Poietics in order to think beyond the modern aesthetic death of art, a death that can be understood to be recorded in the work of Kant, and that is proclaimed explicitly by Hegel in the nineteenth century. Only Part II of the study, which comprises Chapters 5 and 6, then, is concerned directly with the question of the artwork. This approach is necessary since Heidegger’s reflection on art is, strictly speaking, unintelligible without a proper understanding of fundamental ontology. Nevertheless, I hope the study will be of interest not only to students of Aristotle and Heidegger, but also to those with a more specific concern for aesthetics and its history. Of the existing English-language scholarship concerning Heidegger and Aristotle, it is necessary to situate the present volume in relation to the three major book-length studies of the two thinkers which have appeared in English during the last decade. The first, Ted Sadler’s Heidegger and Aristotle: The Question of Being, published in 1996, I have already mentioned. Notwithstanding some lucid analyses, the study is vitiated by its scant regard to Heidegger’s work both prior to and after the years 1927–30 and this facilitates the author’s somewhat superficial claims concerning Heidegger’s opposition to Aristotle. Catriona Hanley, in her Being and God in Aristotle and Heidegger, published in 2000 (Lanham and Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield), seems to pass a similar judgement on the work of Sadler, and her work is indeed a more evenhanded contribution. Hanley’s readings of Aristotle are acute and share a similar intention to those in the first chapter, in particular, of this study, insofar as she intends to relate Heidegger’s interpretations of key concepts in Aristotle to contemporary Aristotelian scholarship. Yet Hanley’s approach differs to mine in several ways: not only is her focus in relation to the question of being the question of theology, but also this approach is pursued according to the avowedly traditional method of a comparative study, with, in the end, only a minimal concern for Heidegger’s own interpretations of Aristotle, and for what these interpretations should lead us to conclude concerning the meaning and possibility of Heidegger’s own thinking. Moreover, Hanley is also concerned almost exclusively with the Heidegger of the period of fundamental ontology. A year prior to the appearance of Hanley’s work, William


McNeill published The Glance of an Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle and the Ends of Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press), a text which is not bound by the same restricted chronological focus. This is a valuable study of the question of theory and of the Augenblick, the moment or blink-of-an-eye, in Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle both in the 1920s and after the Kehre. If my approach seeks to radicalise, in the manner described above in relation to the ‘broad school’ of commentators, McNeill’s study in the areas for which we do have a common concern, then this is only after having been influenced by many of his readings.

Part I A Ground-laying of Greek Ontology


1 The Question of Being

This introductory chapter of the study examines Aristotle’s articulation of the question of being on the basis of a reading of book Zeta of the Metaphysics. Of the disparate texts collated under the title of Metaphysics, book Zeta is the first of what are held to be the three central books; central not only according to their situation within the text of the Metaphysics, but also, and much more significantly, in that they constitute one of the keystones of Aristotle’s ontology. In reading book Zeta in relation to another of these keystones, namely the text of the Categories, the aim is to examine Aristotle’s approach to the question of being with regard to Heidegger’s attempts to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology. The first section of the chapter is concerned with Aristotle’s establishing of the form of thought that we have come to term ‘ontology’ and with his reduction of the question of ontology to that of the nature of ousia, beingness. Particular attention will be paid to the morphology and to the everyday, pre-philosophical senses of this Greek term, since it is to these that Heidegger appeals within his concern to overturn traditional readings of Aristotle. In tracing the argument of Zeta, and with reference to the Categories, the second section of the chapter brings into relief the impasse Aristotle reaches with the attempt to determine beingness as to hupokeimenon or ‘the subject’ in the third chapter of the book. The section shows how the impasse is a function of the two different approaches that Aristotle adopts to the idea of subjectivity and beingness itself: the categorial determination of being, on the one hand, and the technical or physical determination of being, on the other. Examining the problem of subjectivity in this way enables us at the end of the section to assess fully Heidegger’s attempts to interpret the sense of both to hupokeimenon and ousia in a manner that allows Aristotle to be understood 19


as something other than a thinker of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘substance’. The third and final section of the chapter develops these arguments in showing how Aristotle’s two different approaches to the question of subjectivity and beingness are in fact a function of the problematic, explicitly discussed elsewhere in the Metaphysics, of ‘the manifold ways’ in which ‘being is said’. This is a problem that famously motivated Heidegger’s philosophical thinking at the beginning of his career, and it is on the basis of delineating his approach to it that it will be possible, in the following chapters of the study, to examine how fundamental ontology takes up the development of Aristotle’s questioning of being in the second and third of the central books of the Metaphysics, namely books Eta and Theta.

1.1

Ontology and ousia

α – Ontology In the first chapter of Metaphysics Zeta, Aristotle poses the guiding question that animates the collection of texts in its entirety: τg τ ν [1028b4]? The Greek ν is a participle form of the verb ‘be’, 'ναι, and literally translated the question reads What is the being. Yet here to on has, in one sense, the significance of a collective noun in denominating everything that is, that which exists, the existent. In this manner, it is equivalent to the plural participle form τb ντα, ‘beings’. To on names beings, just as, for example, τ καλν, the beautiful, denominates all beautiful things. On these grounds, one might hope to provide an adequate response to the question ti to on by pointing to particular beings, just as the interlocutor of Socrates in the Greater Hippias [287c–d] responds to the question ti to kalon – What is the beautiful? – by referring to particular beautiful things. These participle forms have, however, a further and more profound sense that is presupposed by their use as a collective noun. What distinguishes something beautiful, what allows particular beautiful things to be the beautiful things that they are, is the beautiful, beauty. We can meaningfully describe something as beautiful, only if we somehow have access to, only if we somehow understand what beauty itself is. Now beauty itself must in some way be other than particular beautiful things given that it is common to them all. Of course, how we are to conceive the beautiful in its identity with and difference from beautiful things remains to be philosophically determined, but underlying the use of to kalon as a collective noun is its sense as naming what allows beautiful things to be the sort of things that they are. The same applies to to on.

The Question of Being 21

It can mean a being or beings but also that which distinguishes a being as such, that by virtue of which a being is. What distinguishes a being from non-beings is the fact that it is, and a being is by virtue of its being; and being is somehow other than beings or things themselves because, as Aristotle writes, it is ‘what is common (τ κοινν) to all things’ [1005a27]. The question ti to on, then, enquires concerning beings as beings or beings insofar as they are beings: τ ν ν, as Aristotle otherwise articulates the problem.1 By way of beings, the question seeks to determine the being of beings, and the fact that being itself, and not merely beings, is in question here is manifest in the infinitive form to einai, being, that Aristotle occasionally uses in the place of to on.2 Hence, ti to on is commonly translated as ‘What is being?’ Such is the most fundamental question of philosophy, which, as Aristotle claims, was first raised long before him. From Heidegger’s perspective, however, this question of being is both ambiguous and limited. His argument is that for all that the question aims at the being of beings, it does not interrogate being itself in a sufficient or sufficiently lucid manner precisely insofar as the meaning of being does not enter into the purview of its enquiry. Certainly, what Heidegger terms in 1926 Aristotle’s ‘fundamental science’ has ‘more to say than: being is being’ [G22 150]. Aristotle, to be sure, seeks to arrive at a determination of the being of beings, and his response to the question of being is not an empty tautology. Yet, it would remain the case that the being of beings is here sought without the meaning of being having been posed explicitly as a question or seen as an issue. Aristotle would thus presuppose, unknowingly perhaps, a certain meaning of being within his attempt to determine the nature of being itself, and this would limit the originality of his enquiry. This issue can only he dealt with schematically at this juncture, but Heidegger’s argument is that Aristotle’s thinking occurs within a paradigm or framework, the limits of which he himself has not understood. In fact, as Heidegger argues much more clearly after Being and Time than in the opening passages of this text itself, the meaning of being is not brought into question by what he terms the ‘guidingquestion’ of ontology or metaphysics that is here emphatically articulated by Aristotle.3 The fact that being has a meaning would rather be presupposed or only indirectly seen in this enquiry, and it is for this reason that in the 1930s Heidegger claims that ontology as such has been and is that form of thought that only passes over the question of the meaning or the essence of being itself. In posing the question of the meaning of being, therefore, Heidegger will seek to turn the guiding-question


of philosophy, namely ‘What is being?’, into what he terms the ‘grounding-question’ of philosophy, that is, the question of the meaning or of the essence of being. In any event, according to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, it would seem that there exists a science or Rπιστxμη of beings in their being.4 We have come to call this science ‘ontology’ or ‘metaphysics’, but these are not expressions proper to Aristotle. The term metaphysics arises only in the first century after Christ as a means of classifying Aristotle’s writings that deal with beings in their being, and some sixteen centuries later the name ‘ontology’ will enter history for the first time.5 However, whilst neither ‘ontology’ nor ‘metaphysics’ constitute extrinsic and anachronistic titles for this particular science, one title that Aristotle gives it is first philosophy.6 Such a title seems to indicate that this mode of philosophical thought, of science, is of particular importance, and that it somehow constitutes the base or the summit, and perhaps both, of reflection. Notwithstanding its primacy, however, this science has a problematic status, since it does not conform to Aristotle’s own account of the nature or scientificity of science itself. For Aristotle, a particular science bears only on one genus, one genus of beings; mathematics bears on mathematical entities, for example, as physics bears on moving entities. Yet, being itself is not a genus, since, first of all, a genus constitutes a specific sort or region of beings – such as the mathematical and the physical – which, by necessity, excludes others. Being cannot be a genus, and that is to say, it cannot constitute one region of beings, since everything that exists is, precisely, ‘in’ being. Already on this basis, it is possible to understand how Aristotle could have written elsewhere that, in fact, there can be no science of being.7 Despite its characterisation of first philosophy as a science, the Metaphysics provides other arguments seeking to demonstrate not only that being is not a genus, but also that there is no higher genus than being itself. The latter argument has a similar form to the one sketched in the preceding paragraph. There can be no genus higher than being, and that is to say, being cannot be subsumed under another genus, because everything that exists is in being. The supposedly higher genus beyond being would have to be characterised by and thus participate in that of which it is the genus, which is both absurd and impossible. Now the importance of this argument cannot be overstated, for it means that being cannot be defined. For all that first philosophy, as we have seen, claims to search for the ti or the ‘what’ of the being of beings, being itself escapes and transcends all definition. To define, for Aristotle, is to subsume what is defined under a genus of which it is the species; man, for example,


is a rational animal. To define being, then, would be to subsume it under a genus that would necessarily be more universal than being itself. Yet, this is impossible. The former argument, the one according to which ‘it is impossible for … τ ν, being to be a genus’ [998b22], is justified in Metaphysics Beta by a demonstration of the absurd consequences of supposing that it were: if being were a genus, it would have to be differentiated into species by differentia, such as rational in the case of the rational animal; yet everything is in being, and thus the genus would already be attributed to the species-forming differentia, which is impossible. Speciesforming differentia must be entirely independent of and unrelated to the genus, and if animal could be attributed to rational, if the rational were already a species of the animal, then a cow would either not be an animal or else be a human being, a rational animal. Being, therefore, may be common to all things, as we have seen, but this commonality is not that of the generality of a genus – and not only can being not be defined, but being itself cannot serve to define anything else.

β – The form and pre-philosophical senses of the Greek ousia These preliminary considerations allow us to understand how, after announcing the apparently venerable question of being in Metaphysics Zeta, Aristotle can hold it to be difficult and problematic; the question ‘which was raised long ago … is still and always will be what baffles us’ [1028b3–4]. This question of being, however, is immediately rephrased or drawn back to another question: What is οSσgα? The question of being for Aristotle is a question of ousia, which was already the Platonic name for being. Morphologically, οSσgα derives from οBσα, the feminine nominative present participle of the verb ‘be’. To follow Joseph Owens, this variation in the ending ‘renders the meaning more abstractive than when the participle is used as a noun’.8 In English one can render this more ‘abstractive’ sense by adding the ending ‘ness’ to ‘being’ as a translation of the participle form. Ousia, then, is ‘beingness’, and Heidegger translates the term in German in this way as Seiendheit. In the Physics Aristotle discusses phusis as J οSσgα τaν φjσ'ι ντων [II, 1, 193a10], and such a phrase speaks of the beingness of beings, in this case the beingness of natural beings, and thus the term would seem to have an ontological rather than simply an ontic meaning. It concerns, in other words, not merely beings, but beings in their being.


Of course, as deriving from a participle form, the verbal form that also functions as a noun, ousia also denominates something, a ‘concrete’ thing. Upon posing the question of ousia, Aristotle begins the second chapter of Metaphysics Zeta thus: ousia is thought to be present (cπbρχ'ιν) most apparently in bodies. Hence we call animals and plants and their parts οSσgα, and also natural bodies, such as fire, water, earth etc [1028b8–10]. Aristotle passes from the ‘abstractive’ to the concrete meaning in the one sentence. Beingness is thought to manifest itself in bodies, and for this reason these bodies and their parts are οSσgαι, ‘beingnesses’. Evidently, the word ‘beingness’ renders this ontic or concrete meaning only in a clumsy manner, but this difficulty by no means implies that it will not serve as a translation of ousia, as Owens argues. The translation that the author proposes, namely ‘entity’, is hardly a solution to the problem, for it is problematic from the opposite perspective. Regardless of its etymological origins, ‘entity’ would seem to have an irreducibly ontic meaning, rendering a phrase such as ‘the entity of beings’ quite meaningless. Yet Owens is not mistaken to reject the traditional English translation of ousia as ‘substance’, which derives from the Latin substantia.9 In the course of the present chapter it will become clear how what Heidegger terms the ‘thoughtlessness’ [EM 46] of this translation tends to efface the original sense of the Greek word, but it is necessary, from the outset, to reject it on two counts. Primarily, substantia was not originally formulated as a translation of ousia, but rather as a transcription of the Greek cπστασι, and therefore it has no direct relation to the verb ‘be’.10 Second, the etymological sense of substantia as designating ‘what stands beneath’ corresponds to merely one of the aspects of ousia as determined by Aristotle, namely τ cποκ'gμ'νον, which is commonly translated as ‘the subject’ or ‘substrate’. Of course, ousia was first translated in Latin as essentia, essence, but this translation would now seem to privilege another specific moment of ousia, namely what a thing is in the originally Platonic sense of its idea or form. Although the translation ‘beingness’ might seem somewhat artificial, prior to its philosophical usage in Plato and Aristotle ousia was a common Greek word, and it is to the original and manifold meanings of the word that Heidegger seeks to draw our attention. The first dictionary definition of it is ‘property’, ‘estate’, ‘possessions’ and ‘wealth’. How is it that a word that derives from a participle form of the verb ‘be’ has this


meaning? Heidegger answers in 1927 as follows: What is tangibly present and at-hand (vor-handen) is reckoned by everyday experience as that which is, as a being, in the primary sense. Disposable possessions and goods, property, are beings; they are quite simply that which is, the Greek οSσgα [G24 153/109]. Being for the Greeks, in the highest and proper sense, means to be in the manner of property, estate and possessions. Property and possessions are that which is in the proper sense of the word. Such, for Heidegger, would be one aspect of the meaning of being that is at least implicit in Greek ontology. In his magisterial study of The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek Charles H. Kahn has shown, quite independently of Heidegger and contrary to what has often been assumed, that the appearance in Greek of ousia is, in fact, subsequent to that of the compound forms παροSσgα, presence, and iποSσgα, absence; the latter terms are ‘both found in Aeschylus whereas the simplex οSσgα is not attested before Herodotus’.11 Ousia, then, would be a mere abbreviation of a word that means presence. Of course, such an argument could be formally refuted by claiming, following Owens, that ousia means neither presence nor absence, but the Latin participle form ‘sence’ which is common to both, however we were to conceive the latter.12 Yet such a formal argument fails to take into account the sense of ousia as property and estate in its manifest presence, and it is rather, for Heidegger, the case that the particle para is always implied in the simplex ousia. Being means presence for the Greeks in the way that ‘real estate’ is present. The latter is not ephemeral but rather constant and built to last. Thus, as Heidegger has it, ousia means ‘constance (Beständigkeit) in presence’ [G3 224/168]. This sense of the term ousia, then, is documentary evidence for the claim that prior to its philosophical elucidation, being, for the Greeks, already has a determinate meaning or meanings, and is far from having the ‘vague and indifferent meaning of reality in general’ [PIA 52/392]. It must be said, as Heidegger does, that before the advent of philosophy the Greek language was already ‘philosophical’ insofar as a participle form of the verb ‘be’ articulates these meanings. The German language is similarly fortunate since the family of words relating to the German Anwesenheit mirrors the polysemy of ousia. Formed from a past participle of the verb sein, ‘be’, das Anwesen means property, estate; das Anwesende, the one or that which is present; and Anwesenheit itself means presence as opposed to absence.


Yet presence is a ‘moment’ or ‘part’ of time. Time in some sense ‘consists’ of the past, present and future. It can be argued that this temporal meaning of ousia is the most fundamental meaning of the term, since it is what allows a word that pre-philosophically means property and estate to come to signify what is proper to beings as such, beings in their being, in philosophical discourse. The temporal sense of ousia, in other words, would underlie both the pre-philosophical and philosophical use of the term. It is in this way that Heidegger aims to use ousia as documental evidence for the argument that being in Greek ontology means presence in a definitely temporal sense: The outward evidence [äußere Dokument] for this (although of course it is merely outward evidence) is the treatment of the meaning of being as παροSσα or οSσα, which signifies, in ontologico-temporal terms, presence [Anwesenheit]. Entities are grasped in their being as ‘presence’; this means that they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time – the present [SZ 25]. The sense of ousia as parousia is itself only superficial evidence, but Heidegger will seek to show that Aristotle, and Plato before him, ‘understand’ being as presence, without explicitly reflecting on this understanding itself. Being here would have a meaning, without this meaning having been brought explicitly into the open or having been thought as such. In fact, it is this meaning of being that would determine the scope and limits of the first extensive philosophical account of time, which is to be found in the fourth book of Aristotle’s Physics. The third chapter of this study will examine this question, but on Heidegger’s account, by virtue of his ‘understanding’ of being as presence Aristotle would think time on the basis of the present, of the now, and perhaps even as itself something present, ‘as one entity among other entities’ [SZ 26].

1.2

‘Substance’ and ‘subject’

α – The categorial determination of beingness The first chapter of Metaphysics Zeta, then, leads the question of being back to the question of ousia itself. The second chapter begins by stating that ousia is most obviously apparent in physical bodies and their parts. Yet, it is still necessary to determine ‘what things are beingnesses’, ‘whether there are any beingnesses beyond the sensible’ and ‘how sensible beingnesses exist’ [1028b29–30]. The question concerning the existence of super-sensible beings is an indication that the question of


beings in their being unfolds in two definite directions for Aristotle: it leads not only to an ontology but also to a theology, to a determination of the being or region of being that is most in being, that being or region of being whose presence and constancy is not subject to the vicissitudes of movement and time. Our immediate concern here is not with the link between ontology and theology in Aristotle’s work, but in the terms of the later Heidegger, Aristotle’s metaphysics has an onto-theological constitution.13 In book Zeta, the immediate and more fundamental task, since it is presupposed by the other question, is one of achieving, if not a definition, for reasons that we have delineated above, then at least what Aristotle announces as a determination in its type, a typical determination of ousia itself. Traditionally, the verb cποτωσαμNνοι at 1028b32 is translated as ‘to give a rough sketch’, but as Rudolf Boehm argues, here ‘there is no trace of an opposition between an indeterminate “typification” and a distinct and determined concept’.14 In the absence of the possibility of definition, then, first philosophy is by no means limited to the vagaries of an indefinite sketch of being; it is rather a question of striking the stamp or mark that will determine beingness as such. The third chapter begins in proposing four candidates for the title of beingness, namely τ τg Dν 'ναι, the Latin quid quod erat esse or quidditas – which I translate as ‘quiddity’ – τ καθλον and τ γNνο, the universal and the genus, and finally to hupokeimenon or ‘the subject’. The latter is, according to Aristotle: that of which everything else is predicated, while it is itself not predicated of anything else. And so we must first determine the nature of this; for the subject is thought to be in the truest sense beingness [1029a2–4]. In asserting in this way the primacy of the subject as that of which everything else is predicated whilst not itself being predicated of anything else, Aristotle would seem to refer to the account of primary beingness that is to be found in the text of the Categories. This reference to the Categories appears all the more evident on the basis of the first lines of book Zeta, which discuss the problem – one to which we shall return – of the manifold senses of being in a restricted, intra-categorial sense, as relating only to ousia and the different categories, such as quality and quantity. Book Zeta thus seems to presuppose an understanding of the Categories, in which we read: Beingness, in the truest, strictest, and the primary sense of that term, is that which is neither asserted of nor to be found in a subject, such


as a particular man or a particular horse. But we do speak of secondary beingnesses, those within which, being species, the primary or the first are included, and those within which, being genera, the species themselves are contained. For instance, a particular man we include in the species called ‘man’ and the species itself is included in the genus called ‘animal’ [2a10]. In this pivotal passage, Aristotle distinguishes between something ‘being in’ and ‘being said of’ the hupokeimenon. ‘Being in’ is the relation of an attribute or quality to its possessor. The beings that are ‘in’ a subject are those incapable of existing apart from or ‘separated from the subject, in which they are’ [1a24–25]. Colour and size, for example, are not self-sufficient beings or independently existing entities; they exist, and can only exist, on the basis of the thing, that is, the subject of which they are the qualities. For its part, the subject would continue to exist in its own right if it were to undergo a change in its colour or size; the green chair after having been painted red is still the particular being, the particular chair that it was. Such characteristics of a thing as colour and size, therefore, do not constitute the being of things in a proper or the highest sense, but rather presuppose it. They are the mere συμ'ηκτα or accidents of a being, what merely accompanies a being.15 The difference between ‘being in’ and ‘being said of’ is not to be thought as a distinction between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic. A quality in a being is already an attribute or κατηγρημα of that being, what can be said to exist in a being. The various modes in which something is in a subject are, for Aristotle, categories and, as Heidegger reminds us, the verb κατηγορ'j'ιν, which is a contraction of κατγορ'j'ιν, means to accuse someone verbally in the γορb, the public court. The meaning and possibility of Aristotle’s categories as determinations of both language and things has been a matter of widely diverging interpretations, but the difference between ‘being in’ and being ‘said of’ lies in the ‘in’ and the ‘of’ rather than in the saying.16 When we say that Socrates is a ‘man’, as opposed to saying he is white, this beinghuman is not a characteristic present in a subject. ‘Being said of’ a subject is, in fact, a relation of the 'δο and γNνο, the species and genus of a being to a singular, particular being itself. Now, the word eidos derives from the verb ‘to see’, ρbω, and before having any indifferently logical sense, it denominates the aspect of a thing, that which is most manifest in or of a thing, and that which determines what sort of thing it is. The


what-it-is of a being as determined by the eidos and genos is, however, always predicated of what is termed a ‘this’ or τδ' τ [3b10], a singular, particular being as a subject. This singular being is the condition of, and is more primordial than, its being what-it-is. Certainly, it is not possible to separate the one from the other; the subject of which the eidos is asserted is already and inalienably a ‘particular man’ or a ‘particular horse’. Nevertheless, according to the text of the Categories the eidos that we predicate of the particular being is a secondary beingness, beingness in a secondary sense, whereas the particular of which it is predicated is the subject and primary beingness. This is to say that being a particular thing, a ‘subject’, is a more fundamental determination of the beingness of a thing, than its being the sort of thing that it is. With such an affirmation of the ontological primacy of to hupokeimenon as primary beingness, Aristotle distances himself from the thinking of Plato, according to which the eidos of a being is more in being than the particular being itself. In radicalising Socrates’ questioning – What is virtue? What is beauty? – Plato is led to marvel before the eidos of beings, the look, visage or aspect according to which things present themselves as what they are. Yet since the eidos of house, for example, is common to all particular houses, Plato separates it from empirical beings themselves. A word that originally designates the visual aspect of a being now denominates what will, in fact, never be apprehended by physical eyes. The eidos as separate from empirical beings is now that which is most in being whereas the empirical being itself merely partakes in this eidos, it is a mere image of the latter and is not properly in being. Against this promotion of the eidos over and above the empirical being, then, the Categories asserts the ontological primacy of the singular, particular being as the ‘subject’ to which its eidos is bound. Concerning the idea of secondary beingness, however, a divergence should be noted here between the Categories and the Metaphysics. According to the former text, both the eidos and genus determine the τg Rστιν, the what-it-is of a being, although the eidos is higher in relation to beingness than the genus since it approximates more to the particular thing [2b8]. Metaphysics Zeta will, however, disqualify both the genus and the universal from the philosophical enquiry after having initially proposed both as two of the four possible determinations of beingness, since they would only be found in language, in the logos, and not in the things themselves.17 As will become clear, it falls to quiddity to be the genuine mark of the what-it-is of a being.


β – The physical determination of beingness: hylo-morphism and the horizon of production within greek ontology The third chapter of Metaphysics Zeta seems to begin, then, in referring to the categorial determination of the subject as primary beingness. Yet, for all that the text of the Categories asserts the primacy of the hupokeimenon, it says what the latter is not rather than what it is, and as Etienne Gilson notes, this is merely ‘to situate ousia rather than to define it’.18 Even if the aspiration for a definition of ousia is somewhat misplaced here, it still remains to reach an understanding of the ‘subject’ itself, and this is the very task of the third chapter of Zeta. Aristotle proceeds as follows: In one sense matter is said to be the nature of to hupokeimenon, in another form, and in a third, the compound of these. By matter I mean, for instance, bronze; by form, the schema of the idea; and by the combination of the two, the statue [1029a2–6]. Without warning the enquiry undergoes something of a paradigm shift at this point. The apparently categorial determination of being is taken over by an extra-categorial determination of being, namely a thinking of what is according to the concepts of υ ! λη and μορφx, matter and form. It is not by chance that, as David Bostock notes, ‘Aristotle’s logical works show no awareness of the division of things into matter and form’,19 for both concepts arise within a quite different relationship to things than that contained within the categorial determination of beings in speech. The paradigm is no longer what can simply be said of a being, but is instead ποgησι, the particular human comportment that is the production of things such as tables, chairs and artworks. Before examining the senses in which matter and form can be determined as to hupokeimenon, therefore, it is necessary to examine the sense of Aristotle’s hylo-morphism and of the perspective of production from which it arises. First of all, hule does not originally mean matter as an undifferentiated substrate of all things. It comes to have this sense in the Physics, as will become clear, wherein Aristotle argues for the existence of a primary matter from which the four elements – earth, fire, air and water – derive. Prior to this account of matter, it means material in the sense of the raw material, the work-material out of which a product is made. More narrowly it means wood, both in the sense of a wood or forest and of timber as the work-material from which products such as tables and chairs


are produced. Thus, as Heidegger writes succinctly in 1927: Matter plays a fundamental role in ancient philosophy not because the Greeks were materialists but because matter is a basic ontological concept that arises necessarily when a being […] is interpreted in the horizon of the understanding of being which lies as such in productive comportment [G24 164/116]. The following chapters of this study will draw out fully the implications of this, but Heidegger’s argument is that the very idea of matter derives from the interpretation of a particular comportment of the human being, namely production. Concerning the concept of morphe or form in Zeta, 7 Aristotle accounts for his determination of it as the ‘schema of the idea’ in describing the procedure of production and the mode of knowing that is proper to it, namely τNχνη: ‘Things are generated through techne from the eidos in the soul. By eidos I mean the quiddity of each thing’ [1032b1]. Before the physical process of production the producer must have in mind an image of the being that is to be produced, which image is the very essence of the product that will, in the end, come to be present. In order to produce a table, for example, the carpenter must first envisage the essential shape or form of the table to be produced. It can be said, therefore, that: health comes from health and a house from a house; that which has matter from that which has not. For the art of medicine or of building is the form of health or the house. By beingness without matter I mean the quiddity [1032b12–15]. According to this use of the locution τ τg Dν 'ναι, which I translate as ‘quiddity’, the sense of the imperfect tense Dν is apparent: the quiddity of a being is what it already was when it stands in its actual presence.20 Concerning the concept of τ σjνολον or the ‘compound’ of matter and form, it is necessary to note at this juncture that it cannot be understood as a compound of pre-existing parts. First of all, as Aristotle underlines in Zeta, 17 form is not an ‘element (στοιχ'"ον)’ of a being [1041b14]. The elements of a being, as we read in Metaphysics Δ, are its ‘first and immanent components’, such as earth and fire or the letters of which a syllable is ‘composed (σjγκ'ιται)’ [1014a26]. The elements of a being have the possibility of an independent existence, and are already


in themselves beings. Yet form cannot be understood as an element for it is what unifies diverse elements in the individuality of a particular being. Form is ‘something other’ [1041b27] than the elements that it unifies; it is of another order than these and thus it cannot be understood as a real part of a being. Form, in other words, is neither a being nor an ontic property of beings, but rather a determination of the beingness [1041b29], as Aristotle notes, of beings. Yet if form cannot be understood as an element or part of a being, can matter be understood in this way? The fact that earth, fire, air and water are termed elements may seem to suggest a positive response to this question. However, in each case these four elements are already matter in a particular and determinate form.21 It is, in fact, impossible to perceive either a form without a matter or matter without form; the one cannot be perceived without or apart from the other. As little as form, then, is matter in itself an element in the sense of a real, separable part of a being. It is in this sense that Aristotle, as we will see more fully, thinks matter and form as two of the four ‘causes’ of beings as such, two of the four ontological, rather than simply ontic, grounds by virtue of which a being comes to be and is the being that it is. On the basis of delineating the technical or poietic origin of the concepts of matter, form and the compound of both, it is possible to comprehend Heidegger’s assertion in 1931 that although form–matter is the ‘most worn out schema’ in philosophy, one that is applied indiscriminately to each and every being, it did not ‘fall from the skies to be used at will’ [G33 139/110]. It rather arises from an interpretation of the being of the product. It should be noted here that for Kant the concepts of matter and form ‘underlie all other reflection, so inseparably are they bound up with all employment of the understanding’.22 Yet Heidegger’s historical birth certificate of metaphysics seeks to underline the fact that these concepts have their origin in a perspective or horizon of production, which horizon is the knowing, the practical knowhow that is techne. This technical horizon of Aristotle’s thinking may seem perplexing if we consider the primacy of sophia and the theoretical way of life for Aristotle, such as it is articulated in the first book of the Metaphysics: It is generally assumed that what is called Wisdom is concerned with the primary causes and principles (τn πρaτα α$τια κα τn ρχn), so that […] the man of experience is held to be wiser, than the mere possessors of any power of sensation, the artist than the man of experience, the master craftsman than the artisan [981b28–982a1].


Yet the point is precisely this: insofar as the person of wisdom is wiser – σοφ%τ'ρο – than the ‘architect’ who draws up the plans, who is wiser than the craftsman who, as is said, gets his hands dirty, who is wiser than the man of experience, who in turn is wiser than the men of mere senseexperience, there is, as Heidegger writes, a ‘genesis in factical life’23 of sophia, which means that philosophy is born through and arises from our everyday technical concern with production. Aristotle’s philosophical thought never leaves this ground behind. It is from the inner connection of the eidos and matter–form within the domain of techne that Aristotle interprets the being of natural beings, the natural product, and beings as such. This horizon of production is already evident in the pre-philosophical sense of ousia as property, possessions and estate. These beings are beings that are produced, and both prior to and with the argument that ousia means constant presence, Heidegger also uses the term as documental evidence for the claim that being means being-produced in Aristotle.24 This horizon, however, by no means arises without precedent in the work of Aristotle and it is an essential moment in what Heidegger terms the ‘ancient conception’ of being. Plato’s determination of the idea as the genos of a being already speaks of the generation of a thing, of that from which a thing descends, before having a merely logical sense, and both these senses are still present in Aristotle’s definition of the term [1024a29 ff.]. More specifically, throughout the 1920s, Heidegger outlines the argument that any understanding of how the eidos in Plato becomes genuine being or the genuine being over and above the empirical being has first to recognise the sphere within which something like an eidos ‘naturally and explicitly emerges’ [G19 47/33], namely the know-how specific to productive comportment. The argument here is that Plato’s separation of the eidos from the empirical being itself is motivated by the priority of the prototype or paradigm envisaged by the producer before and for the process of production. This sense of eidos is clearly delineated in the Cratylus [287c–d] and Book X of the Republic. In the latter text, Plato describes the envisaging of the eidos by the producer within a discussion of the nature of the artwork. Here, the empirical being – the product – is a copy of the idea or eidos in the mind’s eye, and, consequently, the artwork, in being understood merely to copy the empirical being, is but a copy of a copy and at a third stage removed from the truth. Heidegger’s argument does, however, encounter an essential difficulty: for Plato, it is not simply the case that one does not produce the eidos of the being to be produced. This Aristotle himself argues, since if


the eidos were produced it would have to be produced out of something and this would lead to an infinite regress.25 According to Aristotle, neither the matter nor the form of a being is produced and one can produce only the compound of the two. Yet Plato goes further: the eidos as the paradigm of the being to be produced is not in the mind of the producer. It is that upon which the vision of the mind’s eye must be focused, and which pre-exists this vision itself in an otherworldly sphere. This would seem to be why Heidegger only ever sketches the argument in the 1920s and why he speaks of the necessity of returning to Plato from Aristotle according to the Aristotelian hermeneutic principle that one must proceed from what is clear to what is obscure. Having discussed the technical origin of Aristotle’s hylo-morphism, it is now possible to return to the question of how the hupokeimenon can be determined as matter, form and the compound of both. In order to respond to this question, however, it is necessary to determine how within the physical and, properly speaking, technical determination of being the term hupokeimenon has two senses, which are both articulated within the analysis of the principles of becoming or change in the first book of the Physics. For Aristotle, all change occurs between contraries. The becoming warm of something, for example, is the replacement of coldness by warmth. Yet if change is to be the change of something rather than a simple succession of unrelated and evanescent states, as the Sophists would have it, then ‘something must underlie (δ'" cποκ'"σθαι τι) the contraries’ [191a4]. Moreover, there can be no ‘reciprocal passion between the contraries’ themselves [190b33];26 warmth does not heat up cold but it rather heats that which is cold; love does not unite discord but unites what is in a state of discord, a being that has the property of being in discord. Were we not to posit such a third term underlying the contraries we would be left with a difficulty, ‘for the contraries never appear as constituting the beingness of beings’ [189a29]. The contraries are mere attributes of beings, mere accidental predicates, and, for Aristotle, a predicate is always predicated of a ‘subject’. The relation of the physical to the categorial determination of being that emerges here becomes all the more evident when we consider that change is that by which we are able to distinguish a subject from its predicates; we would not be able to say that, for example, Socrates is sitting down if there were no movement by which we could distinguish this state of the being of Socrates from another.27 To hupokeimenon, therefore, is a principle or ρχx and is ‘prior to what is predicated of it’ [189a30]. Yet, what persists through the change whereby a being as such comes into existence? Aristotle arrives at a conception of the ‘natural underlying


factor (cποκ'ιμNνη φjσι)’ in what he terms pure genesis, which is to say natural or technical production, by way of analogy: It will bear the same relation to concrete things in general, or to any specific concrete thing, which the bronze bears to the statue before it has been founded, or the wood to the couch, or that which is without shape to a beingness that has both individuality and being (πρ οSσgαν Oχ'ι κα τ τδ' τι και τ ν). This will count as one principle but not, of course, one in the sense of a concrete individual (τ τδ' τι) [191a10–12]. Wood comes to be a wooden couch when it has adopted the form of a couch. Bronze comes to be a bronze statue when it adopts the form of the statue. Yet since bronze and wood are already particular forms of matter and come into and out of existence, there must be an utterly indeterminate and formless primary matter of which they are but are an epiphenomenal manifestation. There exists a primary matter that is not only prior to determinate work-materials, but also to the four elements. Of course, this primary matter can only be known by analogy, since it is not possible to encounter matter without form, but in its undifferentiated uniformity it is what would underlie all pure genesis.28 From the above it should be clear that determined hylo-morphically, the subject is either a singular being that exists as the compound of matter and form, or a material substrate that underlies the change whereby such a compound comes into existence. As Aristotle writes in Metaphysics Z, 13: ‘about to hupokeimenon, of which we have said that it underlies in two senses, either being a this, which is the way an animal underlies its affectations – or as the matter underlies the act (Rντ'λ'χ'g&)’ [1038b5–6].

γ – The problem of ‘subjectivity’ in Metaphysics Zeta, 3 We have seen that after articulating the categorial determination of the subject as that of which everything else is predicated whilst not itself being predicated of anything else Metaphysics Zeta, 3 proposes hylomorphic determinations of the subject, as matter, form and the compound of both. As I have already indicated, the hylo-morphic and logical perspectives are hardly incongruent and a thinking of the eidos of a being is common to them both.29 Yet for all that the two perspectives overlap, the fact remains that if the categorial determination of beingness contrasts to hupokeimenon to the eidos as primary to secondary beingness, the technical determination of being can only speak of the


subject in terms of matter, form and the compound of both. From this latter perspective form or eidos can no longer be thought as a mere secondary determination of beings. On the contrary, and as Aristotle continues: if the form is prior to matter and more truly existent, by the same argument it will also be prior to the compound [1029a6–7]. The ‘and’ in this sentence is not conjunctive but explanatory, which means that the priority of which the sentence speaks is not chronological but ontological. Form is prior to matter, that is, higher than matter with regard to being, because it is that which determines a being as the sort of thing that it is, as opposed to matter, which in itself is totally and utterly indeterminate; and insofar as form is prior to matter in this sense it will consequently be prior to the compound of the two. Far from being contrasted to the hupokeimenon, then, form is now in fact the highest moment of it. At this point it becomes clear that if book Zeta of the Metaphysics presuppose the text of the Categories, it nevertheless seems to undermine the intentions of the latter text. It is on this basis that Aristotle goes on, in fact, to bring into question the categorial determination of the subject in the following sentences of the text: We have now stated in outline the nature of beingness – that it is not what is predicated of a subject but that of which the other things are predicated. But we must not merely define it so, for it is not enough. Not only is it obscure, but also it makes matter being; for if matter is not being, it is beyond our power to say what else is [1029a8–20]. We must not determine beingness as the categorially determined subject because, primarily, it is obscure or unapparent, hδηλον. Aristotle does not provide a deliberate explanation of this obscurity, but it would seem that it is obscure precisely because the categorial determination of the subject says more what to hupokeimenon is not than what it is. Second, and more significantly, we must not define beingness in this way, because matter would thus become the basic or highest determination of ousia, since we have no other way of accounting for the nature of beingness itself. If we contrast primary beingness to the eidos of a being as secondary beingness, then we are left with no other means of accounting for the former than that of the concept of matter; and


accounting for the highest sense of being in this way would be nothing short of nonsense, since matter in itself is utterly indeterminate. On this basis, the chapter concludes in returning to the threefold determination of the subject according to matter, form and the compound of the two: Hence it would seem that the form and the combination of form and matter are more truly being than matter is. The being, then, which consists of both – I mean of matter and form – may be dismissed, since it is posterior and obvious. Matter too is in a sense evident. We must consider the third type, for this is the most perplexing [1029a29–34]. The compound of form and matter is more adequate to being than matter is, but form is prior to matter, and thus it is prior to the compound. A reflection on being as to hupokeimenon, then, is led, almost despite itself, back to the question of form, to the point where Aristotle speaks throughout Zeta of the eidos or what-being of a being as primary beingness.30 It is true to say concerning the idea of primary beingness advanced in the Categories, as does Etienne Gilson, that ‘every time that Aristotle attempts to say what it is he ends up contenting himself with saying what it is not’.31 Yet the inability to say what it is in the Metaphysics leads to an eclipse of the original idea itself. The consequent retreat in the face of what Gilson calls the ‘question of questions’ to the profit of a thinking of form constitutes, as commentators have never ceased to remark, the moment at which Aristotle’s opposition to Plato becomes unable to capitalise on its initial gains. If the supposition of the subject as primary beingness is the starting point of the inquiry in Metaphysics Zeta, then it is precisely this starting point to which the procession of the philosophical inquiry never manages to return. It cannot be understood in terms of matter, since in itself hule is wholly indeterminate, but nor can it be understood in terms of form or eidos, which Aristotle will examine in the guise of quiddity in the following chapters of Zeta. The quiddity of a being is what each being is ‘said to be per se’, and it is ‘what is most proper amongst the elements of the ti esti’, the what-being of a being.32 It constitutes the most intimate essence of the eidos and of what can be defined in a being, but, as such, it still excludes the accidents and matter of that of which it is the quiddity. As little as matter, therefore, can quiddity constitute the haecceity or the principle of the individuation of particular beings.


δ – From substance and subject to beingness and the lying-before With regard to the impasse that Aristotle faces in Metaphysics Zeta, Heidegger seeks to argue, as we have done in the preceding analyses, that if this text renders problematic what was asserted without any obvious difficulty in the Categories, then this is because the perspective has changed from the categorial to the poietic relation to beings.33 Aristotle attempts to account for the subjectivity discovered within the former by means of concepts germane to the latter, but this attempt is almost entirely self-defeating insofar as it undermines the categorial assertion of the subject as primary beingness. Yet, Heidegger offers a more fundamental argument concerning the very sense, the ontological sense, of the idea at the origin of the difficulties Aristotle encounters, namely the idea of subjectivity itself. The traditional translations of ousia and hupokeimenon as ‘substance’ and ‘subject’ are both metaphors. Nevertheless, they both articulate a definite interpretation of the Greek terms: Aristotle would posit the existence of a ‘core’ of a being that would lie or stand ‘beneath’, so to speak, its accidental attributes. If, after book Zeta, to hupokeimenon can no longer be opposed to ousia in a secondary sense, then Aristotle nevertheless would offer us a thinking of the subject as a ‘substantial form’. This is what Zeta, I would describe in discussing the ‘separability’ of ousia.34 Of course, we can never apprehend a sensible being without attributes, such as a determinate colour or size, but it would remain the case that this core is separable in the sense that it is the condition of, and prior to, its attributes. Ross has even argued that the existence of the subject as substance is ‘something self-evident’ for Aristotle, just as it for us, and that the Stagirite adopts the ‘view of the “plain man” ’ in positing it.35 It is precisely such appeals to the self-evident and the obvious that are the target of Heidegger’s attempts to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology. As we read in the discussion of the idea of substance in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, written in the 1930s: ‘what seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose’ [UK3 7/5]. It is necessary to recognise that what is self-evident for us was by no means necessarily self-evident for the Greeks themselves, and that with the idea of the hupokeimenon Aristotle articulates something new in philosophy, something unthought by his forebears. Moreover, it is necessary to recognise that the Latinate idea of substance itself is philosophically ambiguous insofar as it serves to mark both sides of what Heidegger terms the ontological difference, the difference between being and


beings. As we read in §20 of Being and Time, within the philosophical tradition, the ‘expression “substantia” functions sometimes with a signification which is ontological, sometimes with one which is ontical, but mostly with one which is hazily ontic-ontological’ [SZ 94]. For all that the idea of substance posits the existence of an ontic core of a being – we might say a ‘meta-ontic’ core of a being given that it can never be apprehended in itself without accidents – the idea of substance is supposed to constitute a response to ontological inquiry, to the question concerning the being of beings. The fact that this traditional ambiguity contained within the idea of substance is not explicitly drawn out as the most profound of all questions only registers, for Heidegger, ‘a failure to master the basic problem of being’ [SZ 94]. Although some passages of Being and Time discuss the idea of to hupokeimenon relatively indifferently,36 Heidegger seeks to show elsewhere, throughout his career, that the question of the ontological difference resonates perhaps even more strongly in the Greek term that is translated as the ‘subject’ than it does in the term translated by the Latin substantia. Heidegger argues, in fact, that the translation of hupokeimenon by the idea of the subject obliterates not only this ontological problematic but also the original sense of the prefix hupo-, which would not originally have a metaphorical sense. To treat the second point first, hupo would here mean not below but before, and this in the spatial rather than temporal sense of the term, as in the phrase ‘before the statue they prayed’. This common sense of the particle is manifest in the Greek huparchein, a verb that appears in the first passage that I cited in this chapter from Metaphysics Zeta, and which is ordinarily translated as ‘to be present’. It is on the basis of understanding this point that it is possible to comprehend the ontological sense that Heidegger attempts to draw from the participial form of the word hupokeimenon. The most telling expression of this argument is to be found in the following passage from Heidegger’s essay of 1939 on Aristotle’s conception of phusis: One might object that our translation here is ‘wrong’. Aristotle’s sentence does not say … a ‘lying-present (Vorliegen)’ but rather ‘something that lies present’. To understand why it is not wrong, however, requires of us (as is so often the case with the philosophical use of the Greek language, but too little noticed by later thinkers) that we understand the participle cποκ'gμ'νον in a way analogous to our understanding of τ ν. T ν can mean a being, that is, this particular being itself; but it can also mean that which is, that which has being. Analogously cποκ'gμ'νον can mean ‘that which lies present’


but it can also mean ‘something distinguished by its lying-present’ and so it can mean the very lying-present itself [G9 260/199–200]. To hupokeimenon is a word that would speak of a being, certainly, but of a being in its being, of that which lies-before in its lying-before or lyingpresent. The participial form would offer itself to be understood, in other words, not only in its nominal sense, as naming a thing, but also according to its verbal sense, as speaking of an activity; in Thomistic terms, in speaking of the ‘act’ of being itself. Understood in this way to hupokeimenon is a word that speaks of the ontological difference, of beings in their being, which being is conceived as a being-present. Hence, as Heidegger continues: ‘in accordance with the explanation of οSσgα by way of cποκ'gμ'νον the beingness of beings means for the Greeks the same as to lie present “there”, that is “in front of” ’ [G9 261/200]. The passages cited above from Physics I concerning the hupokeimenon might seem to undermine both elements of Heidegger’s interpretation of the participial form, since, first of all, I resorted to the traditional translation of the verb hupokeisthai with the English ‘underlie’. Yet despite the commodity of this translation, its sense must be thought as persisting in the sense of a remaining present, as Heidegger argues in 1930.37 To hupokeimenon is what persists through change, it is that which remains present. Moreover, in relation to the verbal sense of the hupokeimenon, it is necessary to recognise that Aristotle in no way simply posits here a being, a thing, as what persists through its change. The subject is here one of three principles of the being in movement and, as Pierre Aubenque writes, it is ‘less a being, than a power (puissance) of being’.38 To hupokeimenon is less a being than a remaining-present, a factor of the being in movement. This is one of the reasons why Aristotle can think matter as the hupokeimenon in pure genesis, when matter itself can in no way constitute a singular, determinate being. Both of the terms ousia and hupokeimenon, then, name an onticontological difference, and they are to be understood in a verbal sense, as a being-present. Heidegger always, from the early 1920s onwards, advances this argument from the perspective of the physical determination of beings, but even the categorial determination of to hupokeimenon as primary beingness is to be thought in this verbal sense. It is on these grounds that Heidegger can argue that to hupokeimenon is merely what Aristotle is ‘supposed’ [UK3 7/5] to have called a ‘core’ of beings, and that the ideas of the subject and of substance are essentially ‘un-Greek’.39 Certainly, primary being is what determines the singularity of a being, and it is prior to its accidental attributes. Yet Aristotle does not simply


posit an invisible but nevertheless ontic core of beings as a response to the ontological question of the nature of being. In other words, Aristotle’s response to the question ‘What is being?’ is not simply: a being. It is the being of the singular being, the singularity of the singular being that is in question with the terms ousia and hupokeimenon. Understood in this way, both terms would offer no grounds for the Thomistic argument, articulated by Gilson and Owens after him, that Aristotle would remain at ‘the level of substance and essence’40 at the expense of a veritable thinking of the existence or the ‘act of existence’ of ‘substance’ itself. Even without taking into consideration the development of the question of being according to the ideas of δjναμι and Rν'ργ'gα, ‘possibility’ and ‘actuality’, in books Eta and Theta of the Metaphysics, for Heidegger, such an argument can claim to improve the work of Aristotle only on the basis of a traditional loss of the primordial truth of his thinking.

1.3

On ‘being is said in many ways’

From Heidegger’s perspective, the promotion of what the Categories determine as secondary beingness to the status of primary beingness in Metaphysics Zeta is no mere idle contradiction, and nor is it one that could be adequately accounted for and explained away by means of a reconstruction of the genesis of Aristotle’s thought, such as that proposed by Jaeger.41 For Heidegger, such genetic studies remain ‘without genuine grounds’ in the absence of a ‘genuinely philosophical interpretation of Aristotelian research’ [G22 145]. The genuinely philosophical interpretation consists in recognising that Aristotle’s ontology is far from being systematic or univocal, and that there is a difference between the categorial and the physical determination of being. These are two distinct, though overlapping, perspectives and, famously, a constant refrain within the Aristotelian corpus is τ ν λNγ'ται πολλαχa, ‘being is said in many ways’. The final task of the present chapter is to delimit the specific sense of this problematic of the manifold meanings of being. The most complete enumeration of the manifold ways in which being is said is to be found in Metaphysics Epsilon: Being properly said is said in manifold senses: we have seen that there was accidental being, next being as true and non-being as false; besides these there are the categories, for example, the ‘what’, quality, quantity, place, time, and any other similar meanings; and, further, besides all these, the possible and actual (Rν'ργ'gα) [1026a33].


Being, for Aristotle then, is said not just in two, but four, different ways. Now as scholars have often remarked, the discourse markers with which Aristotle links the moments of this fourfold – ‘next’, ‘beside these’ and ‘further’ – show that the manifold senses of being are not worked out on any a priori or deductive basis. For Heidegger, Aristotle presents ‘a serial juxtaposition without any consideration of their structure or connection, much less of their justification’ [G33 13/10]. They are four ways in which, as it would seem, Aristotle simply happens to find being articulated. Of these four ways, however, it should be noted that the fact that the Greek word Oργον, which means a work or product, is contained in the term Rν'ργ'gα serves to indicate that being as ‘possibility’ and ‘actuality’ belongs to the technical determination of being. Both concepts are issued as a means of accounting for the fact of movement, as the third chapter of this study will show, and they develop the account of beings as a hylo-morphic compound. Metaphysics Epsilon adds, then, two ways in which being is said, namely accidental being and being as truth and falsity, to the categorial and poietic determination of being that we have already encountered. The four ways in which being can be said are, however, immediately reduced to three since Aristotle disqualifies accidental being from the philosophical enquiry to follow in the central books, Zeta, Eta and Theta.42 Yet, there is a basic question to be posed in relation to the very idea of the multiplicity of meanings of being: how can being be said in different ways without it falling into equivocation and meaninglessness? According to the opening passages of the Categories, if something is said in many ways, it is either said μωνjμω, equivocally or συνωνjμω, univocally. Things said equivocally are those that have the same name but are different in definition, such as a ‘bat’, which is both a furry flying mammal and something with which one hits a ball. Things said univocally are those that not only bear the same name but also share the same definition such as a man and an ox, which are both ‘animals’. Being said univocally is, therefore, the relation of genus to species. Now as we have seen, being is not a genus, and no one way in which being is said can be held to be the genus of the others, which would form its species. The ways in which being is said are not, for all that, condemned to the dispersion and arbitrary association of that which merely shares the same name, for Aristotle makes a further distinction between what is said equivocally by chance and what is said equivocally with reference to one guiding meaning. The different uses of the word ‘health’ are offered as an example of the latter in a famous passage of


Metaphysics Gamma, 2. Health is a physical condition of the body. Yet we also say that particular foodstuffs are healthy insofar as they can produce health, that a walk is healthy because exercise can lead to good health, and that someone has a healthy complexion because this complexion is a sign of good physical health. In each of these three cases, health is said neither equivocally as an accidental association of the same name to different things nor univocally, for health in the primary sense of a bodily condition is not the genus of which the three other examples are species. In each case health is spoken of in a different sense and yet πρ ;ν κα μιbν φjσιν [1003a33–4], with reference to or towards something unified and of a single nature, in this case a corporeal condition.43 The same can be understood to apply, then, to the manifold meanings of being; they all refer back to a grounding meaning that is, in a sense, common to them all.44 Yet what is the meaning of being that is primary, to which the others all refer? The first lines of book Zeta would appear to offer incontrovertible evidence as to the primacy of the categorial determination of beingness. The book begins thus: Being is said in many ways. […] It denotes first the ‘what’ of a thing and the tode ti; and then the quality or quantity or any other such category. Now of all these senses in which being is said, the primary is clearly the ‘what’, which denotes the beingness […] and all other things are said to ‘be’ because they are either quantities or qualities or affections or suchlike [1028a10–20]. The fourfold of Epsilon, then, has become at the beginning of the central books a manifold that is merely internal to the categorial determination of being. Being is already said in many ways within the latter, since the categories other than ousia always refer back to ousia itself; quality, for example, is always the quality of something, and it cannot exist independently of the beingness of which it is the quality. Consequently, it has been argued that the extra-categorial ways in which being is said and to be examined in the course of the enquiry within the Metaphysics, namely being as possibility and actuality and being as truth, can be reduced to the former or, at most, that they are mere modifications of it. In fact, upon the interpretation of ousia in the Categories as substance, it has commonly been argued that the guiding and fundamental meaning of being to which all the others refer would be substance. Aristotle would articulate a doctrine of substance or, at least, such a doctrine is to be retrieved from the difficulties and contradictions


presented by the corpus that has been handed down to us. The attempts to interpret Aristotle’s thinking in this sense are supported by the treatment of the ideas of possibility and actuality, on the one hand, and truth, on the other, within the philosophical tradition itself. The conception of possibility and actuality in Kant, for example, as categories, categories of modality articulated within judgements,45 only facilitates the interpretation of dunamis and energeia as mere modifications of the categorial determination of being. Moreover, once the question of being as truth in Aristotle is viewed from the perspective of the modern understanding of the judgment as the site of truth, truth becoming merely a property of judgments, the primacy of the categorial sense of being seems assured. The other senses of being, if any sense can be made of them at all, would no longer have any of their own ground to stand on. Such an approach, it should be noted, determines Franz Brentano’s interpretation in his On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, a text that served as one of Heidegger’s introductions to philosophy in his youth. Even though Heidegger attempts to draw out the ontological problematic within the categorial determination of being itself, he seeks to overturn any readings claiming the categorial to be the primary, if not the sole, meaning of being in Aristotle’s ontology. To this end, in his most extensive treatment of the question, which is to be found in a lecture course of 1931 on Metaphysics Theta, he advances a forceful argument concerning the authenticity of the introductory lines of book Zeta, which state the problem of the manifold meanings of being only in the narrow, intra-categorial sense. For Heidegger, this statement ‘could not have come from Aristotle but was inserted later by those who attempted to paste together the individual treatises of Aristotle into a so-called work’ [G33 18/13]. Certainly, it cannot be denied that the categorial determination of being is presupposed by the enquiry within Metaphysics Zeta, and yet it can be argued that the particular statement could not have come from Aristotle because the enquiry itself exceeds the categorial determination of being insofar as the hylo-morphic determination of being is extra-categorial. At the very least, it is necessary to recognise here that if Aristotle did write these lines, then he did not provide a particularly helpful introduction to the text, given that they seem to establish the enquiry within limits that the enquiry itself will go on to transcend. After Zeta, however, Aristotle’s ontological enquiry further transcends the categorial determination of being. Books Eta and Theta will interpret the hylo-morphic compound in terms of dunamis and energeia, and this raises the ontological enquiry onto another, higher plane. On Heidegger’s


reading, the determination of beings in their being advanced by the ideas of to hupokeimenon and ousia in Zeta would be thought more deliberately and developed with a thinking of being as ‘actuality’ and ‘possibility’. Aristotle himself leads us to perceive this since elsewhere, in De Anima or ‘On the Soul’, he underlines that: ‘admitting the one and being are said in multiple ways, the principal sense (τ κυρgω) is that of entelechia’ [II, 412b8–9], the term entelechia here standing as a synonym for energeia. The remark is distinctly troubling for those who claim the categorial to be the primary sense of being, since here the claim is that being thought as actuality is the principal, that is, the highest and master sense of being. On this account, the primacy that the categorial determination of being seems to bear at the beginning of the central books of the Metaphysics is only, in the end, a chronological priority; the fact that Aristotle approaches the categorial sense of being first by no means implies that it is the most original sense or that the enquiry will be confined to its limits. Hence, if we are to look for a pivotal or grounding sense of being to which the others would refer, then from this perspective it would be more fitting to look towards the poietic rather than categorial sense. In this way, the text of De Anima says what is not said explicitly concerning actuality and possibility in the Metaphysics, and yet book Theta of the latter text offers a competing account of the highest or master sense of being, which is no less challenging to traditional readings. For in the final chapter of this book Aristotle writes that τ κυρι%τατα ν [1051b1], the master sense of being, is neither the categorial nor the poietic, but is instead being as truth. Being as truth or λxθ'ια would thus be the highest sense of being. It is in examining, then, the senses of being as truth, and as actuality and possibility that Heidegger attempts to overturn traditional accounts of the primacy of the categorial determination of being. It is necessary to note in this connection, however, that in 1931 he goes as far as to argue that being, to on, thought as possibility and actuality would offer a ‘non-ousiological’ and consequently ‘non-substantial’ determination of being. On this account, ousia would be proper only to the categorial determination of being, and its translation by the Latin term substantia, which tends to efface the question of the ontological difference that it harbours, would not be as violent and thoughtless as Heidegger has claimed it to be elsewhere. Ousia, then, is to be distinguished from to on, ‘ousiology’ from ‘ontology’, and ‘inasmuch as the question’ of the difference between the two ‘has not been posed, much less answered, this indicates that we have not come to terms with the question of being’ [G33 10/7]. Yet this argument is deeply problematic, for any attempt to


isolate ousia as concerning solely the categorial determination of being would be bound to fail. We have already noted both that the categorial and poietic determination of being, though different, are not incongruent, and that the Physics discusses the ousia of natural beings [193a10]. What we learn from this argument, an argument that Heidegger does not seem to repeat or develop elsewhere, however, is that it is always from the perspective of the poietic determination of being, from being thought as possibility and actuality, that he returns to the categorial determination of being in order to destroy the traditional interpretation of ousia and hupokeimenon in the Categories as substance and subject.46 In the introduction to this book it was stated that the second, third and fourth chapters of the work address the appropriation of Aristotle’s thinking operative within the analytic of Dasein according to the three aspects of the ‘ancient conception’ of being delineated in §6 of Being and Time: being as being-produced, being as presence, and being as truth. We are now in a position to see that two of these three senses of the ancient conception of being relate directly to the particular senses of being that Aristotle himself delineates. The ancient understanding of being as presence, however, would on Heidegger’s account implicitly underlie all of Aristotle’s thinking rather than being explicitly recognised within it. At any rate, although the second chapter of the book indirectly discusses the account of being as actuality and possibility, in examining Heidegger’s account of equipment as a repetition of Aristotle’s poietic determination of being, the sense of dunamis and energeia will be deliberately discussed only in the third chapter, which shows how in the course of the 1920s Heidegger appropriates Aristotle’s conceptions of movement before attempting to delimit his account of time. It is on this basis that the fourth chapter will be able to take up the question of being as aletheia, in showing how Heidegger seeks to destroy the traditional content of Aristotle’s account of truth.

2 Repeating Metaphysics Heidegger’s Account of Equipment

The preceding chapter examined Aristotle’s articulation of the question of being in relation to Heidegger’s attempts to bring to light the original significance of ancient ontology. It is on this basis that it is possible to turn to the analytic of Dasein presented in the text of Being and Time and specifically to the account of equipment that is an essential aspect of this analytic itself. The general concern of the chapter is to determine the manner in which this account of equipment relates to, or inheres in, Heidegger’s destruction of the traditional content of ancient ontology as an attempt to think more originally the productive or technical horizon at the inception of philosophy. In the last decades the account of equipment within Being and Time has been the subject of much debate. Particularly in the light of the later Heidegger’s delimitation of a world in which beings have become a ‘standing reserve (Bestand)’1 ordered and controlled by the modern techno-sciences, it appears both problematic and ambiguous. Does not this ontological reduction of things to their utility, and of nature to a mere natural resource, belong to the very history of metaphysics that Heidegger will seek subsequently to delimit? In posing such a question Hubert Dreyfus has claimed that Being and Time represents a ‘penultimate stage’ in the history of metaphysics. Although this stage would be prior to the full-blown achievement of metaphysics in the technology of the twentieth century, it would nevertheless make possible the latter in removing ‘every vestige of resistance … to the technological tendency to treat all beings … as resources’.2 This is an argument that Michel Haar has reiterated in his The Song of the Earth.3 Michael E. Zimmermann, however, has attempted to show that ‘Dreyfus may be overstating his case’.4 The author emphasises the aspects of Being and Time that defy a pragmatist or instrumentalist understanding of beings, and also the fact that 47


the analysis of equipment itself is already on the way to the later work since it clearly distinguishes the mere manipulation of tools from modern industrial technology. To summarise the stakes of the debate, one party argues that the analysis of equipment represents a stage in the history of metaphysics and thus a definite, positive philosophical position, which position will be transformed quite radically from the 1930s onwards. The other stresses that it is already on the way to the later work, that the transformation is less marked than might be supposed, and that it requires, in effect, only a slight development or ‘correction’.5 Although Zimmermann’s response hardly constitutes an argument against Dreyfus’ reading, both perspectives seem to have their own, at least partial, truth and validity: if the reduction of nature to a mere natural resource in Being and Time is undeniable and somewhat disturbing then nevertheless the text does offer us another attempt to think nature, and Heidegger’s later work is, in some sense, a consequence of this first analysis of equipment. There is, however, an undisputed basis of this dispute. There is something that Zimmermann does not bring into question in responding to Dreyfus’ argument. This is the claim that the analysis of equipmentality is a positive philosophical position. What is not brought into question is the idea that just as Leibniz, for example, thinks beings monadologically in 1714, or just as Kant thinks what is as a transcendentally determined objectivity in 1781, Heidegger offers an analysis of equipment in 1927. For in opposition to Dreyfus’ argument Zimmermann can only claim that the positive philosophical position articulated in Being and Time is not quite or not yet the correct one. It is precisely such positivistic approaches to Being and Time that Heidegger decries in the passage, cited in the introduction to this study, from Meditation, a text written in the years 1938–40, which it is worthwhile to cite again: And even the attempt to lead this metaphysical thinking in itself back simply to its own ‘presuppositions’ and thus to initiate from out of itself its self-overcoming (Selbstüberwindung) must fail; for such an attempt (‘Being and Time’) is inevitably once more interpreted metaphysically [G66 211]. To fail to see that Being and Time leads, in a historical retrocession, metaphysics back to its own presuppositions would be to read the text metaphysically, in what I have termed a positivistic fashion. Yet were one to wonder how this passage could be in any way relevant to the

Repeating Metaphysics 49

account of equipment, and, more significantly, to suspect here the violence of a retrospective self-interpretation achieved only after the Kehre of the mid-1930s, the following passage from a 1931 lecture course concerning Metaphysics Theta articulates specifically why the analysis of equipment must be understood as more or perhaps less, at any rate as something other than a positive philosophy: What the Greeks conceived as Rπιστxμη ποιητικx is of fundamental significance for their own understanding of the world. We have to clarify for ourselves what it signifies that man has a relation to the works that he produces. It is for this reason that a certain book called Being and Time discusses dealings with equipment; and not in order to correct Marx, nor to organise a new national economy, nor out of a primitive understanding of the world [G33 137/117]. The analysis of equipment does not result from a narrow or primitive, that is, pragmatist view of the world but rather arises on the basis of Greek thinking. The analysis would find its raison d’être in the thought of the Greeks, for whom episteme poietike – a knowledge of producing, a practical know-how, that is otherwise denominated as techne – was fundamental for their determination of what is. It would be less of a return to the things themselves, a simple description of experience, than a return to a technical or productive horizon at the inception of metaphysics. Ultimately, then, the very sense, meaning and possibility of this analysis would answer only to the following question or questions: Why must phenomenology make such a return to the Greeks, what are the scope and limits of this step backwards and what does it achieve? Of course, and as the introduction to this study indicated, the basic fact that the very origins of the analytic of Dasein lie in a phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle is more or less well-known given the publication of Heidegger’s texts of the early 1920s.6 Yet in responding to the above questions, the task of the present chapter transcends any attempt to establish merely Heidegger’s ‘debt’7 to Aristotle. I aim to show that the historical significance of the analysis of equipment can be comprehended only in determining how it is offered as a ground-laying of the productive horizon of ancient ontology. It is in interrogating the implications of this act of historical ground-laying that I aim to make manifest the significance of the analysis of equipment as a leading-back of metaphysics to its own presuppositions. The chapter is divided into three sections, sections which reflect the fact that the account of equipment is a multi-layered and polyvalent


piece of philosophical work. Notwithstanding the basic aim of the chapter, the first section examines the account as an aspect of the analytic of Dasein in Being and Time independently of its relation to the work of Aristotle. The section focuses on the manner in which the account is achieved by radicalising the phenomenological conception of intentionality, and subsequently on the problems that it meets with regard to the status of nature in particular. Proceeding in this fashion will allow us to evaluate Heidegger’s important claim, issued in 1929 partially in response to the problem of nature within Being and Time, that the account of equipment was more of a philosophical means than an end in itself insofar as it served to gain access to the ontological structure of Dasein’s being that is world or worldhood. In turning to Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle, the second section shows that the most profound sense of the account lies in its attempt to expose the original truth of the technical horizon of Aristotle’s thinking. The third section, in conclusion, determines the historical significance and the limits of this repetition of the origin of metaphysics by showing how, in leading metaphysics back to its own presuppositions, it already points beyond itself towards another thinking and thus to Heidegger’s later work.

2.1

Hand and world

α – Transcending intentionality In a footnote to the essay of 1929 ‘On the Essence of Ground,’ Heidegger seems to respond to pragmatist interpretations of the analysis of equipment in Being and Time that would pass over the ontological issue of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. If this analysis is understood in a superficial, ontic sense, then ‘there is certainly no prospect’ of understanding the ‘fundamental constitution of Dasein’ [G9 155/370]. Subsequently, however, Heidegger writes: The ontological structure of beings in our ‘environing world’ does, however, have the advantage, in terms of an initial characterisation of the phenomenon of world, of leading over into an analysis of this phenomenon and of preparing the transcendental phenomenon of world. And this is also the sole intent – an intent indicated clearly enough in the structuring and layout of §§14–24 of Being and Time – of the analysis of the environing world, an analysis that as a whole, and considered with regard to the leading goal, remains of subordinate significance.


Heidegger’s claim here is that the analysis of the Umwelt or environing world, and that is to say, the analysis of equipmentality, would serve to lead phenomenology to the structure of world (Welt) or worldhood (Weltlichkeit) as such. World in this sense, as we will see, is not a mere ontic totality of things with which a Cartesian, worldless subject would reckon and to which it would be opposed, but instead an essential aspect of the being of Dasein as a being-in-the-world. The claim, however, implies that the full ontological structure of worldhood would not be exhausted by its determination as the environing world; the latter would be merely one modality or aspect of the former, and the former would be, to use spatial metaphors, more profound or wider than the latter. Insofar, then, as the analysis of the Umwelt or environing world ‘leads over’ to an analysis of the more basic phenomenon of worldhood as such, the account of equipment would be of ‘subordinate significance’, and would, in fact, be more of a philosophical means than an end in itself within the general economy of the analytic of Dasein. It should be noted that the specific claim in this passage that the sole intent of the account of equipment is to lead phenomenology to the structure of worldhood is not true and quite misleading, for it has other ‘purposes’ in relation to Greek ontology. Nevertheless, the argument that the account of equipment is more of a means than an end within the analytic of Dasein does have its own truth. Certainly, the ‘essential gain (wesentlicher Gewinn)’ [SZ 352] that the account of equipment represents constitutes an integral aspect of the analytic of Dasein from its beginning to its end, but it is nevertheless clear that this account is introduced in §§13–24 of Being and Time in order to make manifest the transcendental structure of world. What is less clearly signalled in the text, and what it is necessary to outline here, however, is the fact that it achieves this in transforming, in thinking through and beyond, the idea of intentionality that Heidegger inherits from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, his teacher, who had in turn taken up the idea from the work of Franz Brentano. It is possible to isolate three stages in this movement from the phenomenological conception of intentionality to an account of worldhood. First of all, §13 of Being and Time takes up Brentano’s formulation of the idea of intentionality in describing the being that we are or at least can be, namely Dasein, as a ‘directing itself towards (Sichrichten auf)’ [SZ 61] the beings that it is not.8 For Heidegger, however, this intentional relation is prior to the relation of a knowing subject to a known object, since we are already concerned with things before any act of judgement or reflection. We are already involved with things before any


theoretical apprehension of them, and the idea of theory is here to be understood not only in the modern sense, which would include the calculative and ‘disinterested’ stance of the scientist, but also in the originally Greek sense of θNορ,ιν as a thematic intuition, an aesthetic contemplation of beings. Theory in the first sense presupposes the second, and this second sense is already a founded or secondary modality of Dasein’s being-in-the-world: This kind of being towards the world is one which lets us encounter entities within-the-world purely in the way they look ,δο, just that; on the basis of this kind of Being, and as a mode of it, looking explicitly at what we encounter is possible [SZ 61]. Beings show themselves within our everyday activities (Umgang) and to an everyday concern (Besorgen) before they are simply stared at as things in their specificity and individuality. The second moment in the movement from a conception of intentionality to one of worldhood arrives with the further interpretation of this pre-thematic intentionality according to the guiding thread of the particular comportment that is manual production. The ‘entities first thematised phenomenologically’ in the analysis are ‘those which are used, which are found in the course of production (das Gebrauchte, in Herstellung Befindliche)’ [SZ 67]. The exemplar or paradigmatic environment for the analysis is the ‘workshop (Werkstatt)’ or the ‘work-world of the craftsman (die Werkwelt des Handwerkers)’ [SZ 85]. Phenomenology here looks first to manual production and more generally to manual activity in order to arrive at an ontological determination of our activities as such and of the being of the entity encountered within the world as such. The question of the meaning and possibility of such an approach ultimately finds an answer only in relation to the work of Aristotle, but it is in a certain sense facilitated by the fact that the German word for action, Handlung, already contains a reference to the hand. The German word could be compared to the word, of French origin, manœuvre insofar as here the work of the hand is extended to a more general sense of acting. In any event, acting or doing as the more general term that comprises making is here viewed from the specific perspective of making; in Latin agere is here determined with a view to facere, and in Greek praxis with a view to poiesis. The entity encountered within our everyday dealings is termed das Zeug. As a collective noun the word designates man-made things that serve a purpose, namely implements, utensils, gear or equipment.9 One


can translate das Zeug as ‘product’ or ‘equipment’; ‘equipment’ is helpful in that it is a collective noun, yet ‘product’ is equally important in that, as I will show, the analysis of das Zeug aims to ground the horizon of production at the origin of Greek ontology. Now, equipment is that which has a function or purpose, that which has been produced for a purpose as with ‘equipment for writing, sewing, working, transportation, measurement (Schreibzeug, Nähzeug, Werkzeug, Fahrzeug, Meßzeug)’ [SZ 68]. The fact that equipment is always equipment for something, something which exists for us ‘in-order-to (um zu)’ do something, means that an individual item of equipment is what it is only in relation to other items of equipment, that it ‘always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment’. This is evident to both the German and English languages since ‘strictly speaking’ there is no such thing as ein Zeug, an equipment. Each individual piece of equipment arises within what is termed a structure of reference (Verweisung): the pen is equipment for writing only in being referred in its use to the paper; the hammer is equipment for hammering only with reference to the nails, the nails with reference to the wood and so on. This referentiality is not determined by a goal or end that would be decided by a reflecting subject. Before being grasped conceptually, before being thematically apprehended, the hammer is first of all manipulated, grasped with the body and by the hands. This grasping must withdraw itself from our attention by virtue of a certain ‘forgetting’ [SZ 354], which is prior to, and the condition of, any explicit act of reflection or memory. Action has, in other words, its own intelligence, its own sight, its own foresight and hindsight; it is, properly speaking, neither nontheoretical nor pre-theoretical, but is rather guided by a seeing peculiar to it. Heidegger terms this seeing a circumspection, an Umsicht, taking advantage of the fact, as with the terms Umgang and Umwelt, that ‘um’ can mean both ‘around’, here in the sense of a looking about or around, and, with the preposition ‘zu’, ‘in-order-to’. What we originally see is seen in a context of or as a function of, our projects. The entity as equipment is originally seen as something in-order-to do something, and as something that points beyond itself according to the task at hand. What should be underlined here is the fact that Heidegger redetermines the traditional conception of intentionality not only in showing how our relation to beings is originally non-thematic, but also in determining this pre-thematic or operative intentionality from the perspective of our use of equipment and thus from our interests or intentions in the everyday sense of the term. It is in developing what is historically the derivative sense of the philosophical term intentionality – the


derivative sense that in fact led Brentano to wonder whether he should not have avoided the term altogether10 – that Heidegger transforms both Brentano’s and Husserl’s determination of it as a Vorstellen or Vergegenwärtigen, as the mental act of presenting or making present an object. According to Being and Time, the entity apprehended by our circumspection is zuhanden, ‘ready-to-hand’, before the possibility of its being perceived or intuited as vorhanden. Before continuing with the question of intentionality and worldhood, two points are to be noted here: first, if Being and Time attempts to establish a sharp distinction between Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit, the reference to the hand in both terms betrays a more profound affinity, an affinity that is only clarified, as I will show, within Heidegger’s destruction of the history of ontology. It is, in other words, only within this destruction that Heidegger clarifies the reference to the hand contained in the term Vorhandenheit, a term which is introduced as an ‘interpretative expression’ [SZ 42] of the Latin existentia, and which ordinarily designates the fact of something’s being there, its being at-hand and thus its being available in the widest sense. Second, if equipment is zuhanden or ready-to-hand, then this does not mean that the referentiality of equipment only functions according to an item of equipment that we have in hand. Nor does it mean that all equipment has this destination to our hands, that all equipment is manipulable or handlich. Equipment, as Heidegger will specify in a lecture course of 1927, is ‘not only equipment for writing or sewing; it includes everything we make use of domestically or in public life. In this broad ontological sense, bridges, streets, street lamps are also equipment’ [G24 414/292]. These streets or street lamps are not, of course, in any literal sense ready-to-hand, and they do not serve a purpose in being manipulated. The being as ready-to-hand is not what it is, or, better, it is not how it is in being manipulated. It is rather the circumspection of Dasein that confers to the innerworldly being its Zuhandenheit in apprehending pre-thematically a totality of equipment or a totality of references. This circumspection, then, is the prior condition of any particular item of equipment. As the last quotation indicates, however, it nevertheless remains the case that the determination of the being of equipment as such is achieved from the perspective of the use and the utility of the Werkzeug – the tool that one manipulates – and the vision or the specific intentionality which guides this comportment. It is from the intentionality peculiar to the use of the tool – der Gebrauch des Werkzeug – that Heidegger interprets the being of the innerworldly being in general as referentiality. One could question the legitimacy of such an


extension of the intentionality of our use of tools to the product as such and in general. For commonly and properly speaking, we do not, for example, use our shoes, but rather they are worn, need it be said, on our feet; and in being worn they are not used up but rather worn out. Moreover, it may seem at the very least doubtful that in walking in the street – the street which is, for Heidegger, equipment for walking – all that surrounds me is encountered within a horizon of references. Certainly, one does not, for the most part, pay attention to the pavement on which one walks, and one usually walks in order to arrive somewhere, but do the cars, the buildings and trees refer to each other within a horizon of references? Heidegger may give the impression of having recognised that equipment is not always useful insofar as he enumerates modalities of the in-order-to of equipment: Dienlichkeit, Beiträglichkeit, Verwendbarkeit and Handlichkeit [SZ 68]. Not all equipment, then, is Handlich or handy, and Beiträglichkeit – a helpfulness or conduciveness – may seem to suggest something other than the ideas of the being-useful or the being-able-to-be-used of something, which are articulated by the terms Dienlichkeit and Verwendbarkeit respectively. Yet these modalities are never clearly distinguished from each other, and when the text turns to the example of a pair of shoes it does so in terms of Verwendbarkeit, which is to say that the example does not in any way interrupt or even complicate the analysis of referentiality. In any event, recognising the fact that the analysis of Being and Time privileges the utility or usefulness of the tool that we have in hand is essential for an understanding of why, to note a question to which I will return, in the final version of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ Heidegger turns to the example of a pair of shoes in order to reveal a reliability (Verläßlichkeit) of equipment that is prior to and the condition of its usefulness or utility (Dienlichkeit). To return, however, to the question of Heidegger’s movement from a thinking of intentionality to a thinking of world, the third moment of this movement occurs with the elaboration of the ‘structural items’ essential to the referentiality of equipment. There are three such items: 1 Primarily, rather than the ‘tools themselves’ Dasein is concerned with the ‘work – that which is to be produced’, the ‘towards-which (Wozu)’ [SZ 70]. The table, for example, that we are in the middle of making is ‘that with which we are primarily occupied (das primär Besorgte)’. Given that it is part of a totality of references, this ‘towards-which’ is also zuhanden. It is, however, that which ‘carries’ a totality of references, since there can be no such totality without something to produce.


Moreover, if the work will take its place within a totality of references once produced, then even in the process of production the work to be produced is referred beyond itself to what it is produced for. The towards-which ‘has in its turn the kind of being of equipment’ [SZ 70] since products are produced for a purpose. 2 Work-material constitutes the second item. The work to be produced is not merely produced for something but it is also produced from ‘materials (Materialien)’; In the environment certain entities become accessible which are always and already ready-to-hand, but which in themselves, do not need to be produced. Hammer, tongs, and needle, refer in themselves to steel, iron, metal, mineral, wood, in that they consist of these. In equipment that is used, ‘Nature’ is discovered along with it by that use – the ‘Nature’ we find in natural production [SZ 70]. Prior to the determination of nature as the objectively determined matter (Materie) of the natural sciences, we encounter a nature that furnishes the materials of production. The work to be made will be produced from such materials, and the equipment that we use to produce it has itself been produced from them. This original nature, then, is a type or particular region of innerworldly beings that are not, or are not yet an item of equipment. These beings do not need to be produced and are what produce themselves. The sense or indeed the possibility of such natural production is not given any positive ontological clarification within Being and Time, but nature in this sense is encountered within the scope and range of the work to be produced; ‘the wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-power’ [SZ 70]. Even outside of the specific perspective of the workshop, nature is originally encountered as a function of our projects, since the ‘wind is wind “in the sails” ’, apprehended according to an everyday estimation or reckoning (Rechnung)’ [SZ 102], before it is measured or calculated objectively and numerically in its velocity at the meteorological station. This nature as what is always and already zuhanden was named before Being and Time, in the lecture course of 1925 entitled Prolegomena to the History of the Concept of Time, what is always and already vorhanden.11 This earlier formulation shows us a use of the term Vorhandenheit that is in accord with its literal sense; nature is here that which is available, that which is found before the hand through our use of equipment. Between 1925 and 1927, however, it would seem that Heidegger has made a decision, one that can be explained quite easily: in spite of all that distinguishes the


tool or equipment from nature as a natural resource – the latter is not, or at least, is not yet a tool – to the extent that it appears within a horizon of references, nature also is zuhanden. Certainly, the terms ‘always already’ preserve an intrinsic difference between the natural and the artificial product, but within the transcendental perspective of fundamental ontology, one that attempts to determine things as such and in general as determined by referentiality, this difference cannot be granted any genuinely ontological status. 3 If the towards-which is what carries a totality of references, then this Wo-Zu itself is always determined by a ‘primary towards-which ( primäre Wozu)’. This primary towards-which is a ‘for-the-sake-of-which (Worumwillen)’ that ‘always pertains to the being of Dasein, for which in its Being, that very Being is essentially an issue’ [SZ 84]. Our practical projects always have as their final end our own being itself, even if we do not ordinarily see or grasp ourselves authentically as such a for-the-sake-of-which; the hammer is used to hammer the nails, to consolidate a house, and thus to protect ourselves from bad weather. The being of the beings that we are not as encountered within a horizon of referentiality, then, has its ground in the being of Dasein. Heidegger’s phenomenological reduction to equipmentality ontologically reduces the innerworldly being, and this includes natural beings, to a function of the intentions or, more plainly, the will or ‘willing (Wollen)’ [SZ 194] of the being that we are. Now it is by means of elaborating these moments of the structure of referentiality that §18 of Being and Time is able to determine the whole of this structure as an a priori transcendental horizon, an a priori horizon which is worldhood. In any given situation, an individual item of equipment appears as referred to others within a totality of equipment. These references are not the ‘things’ themselves but rather constitute the horizon in which they can appear, a horizon of meaning or sense (Bedeutsamkeit) [SZ 85]12 by virtue of which items of equipment can be encountered as referring to one another. A totality of equipment is only made possible, then, by a totality of references, which Heidegger otherwise terms a Bewandtnisganzheit. This can be translated as either a totality of involvements, following Macquarrie and Robinson, or as a totality of finality, but in choosing the latter option it is necessary to recognise that the German term serves to bracket any traditional conception of finality. Finality, here, determines the being of the innerworldly being as such and does not result from the thinking of a reflective subject. Consider that in a particular situation Dasein lets a hammer be involved in a project and thus with other items of equipment; this ontic letting be


involved of a particular item of equipment within a particular project has for its condition of possibility an ontological ‘letting-be-involved (Bewendenlassen)’ [SZ 85]. Regardless of whether the item of equipment is a hammer or a saw, Dasein lets the item of equipment be an item of equipment as such, and this by way of understanding pre-thematically a horizon of references. In order for equipment to be equipment, this totality of references must have been, if not ‘discovered (entdeckt)’ – Heidegger reserves the term for the things that we are not – then ‘disclosed (erschlossen)’, and the ‘previous disclosure of that for which what we encounter within the world is subsequently freed amounts to nothing else than understanding the world’ [SZ 85–6]. The understanding of world, then, as an a priori horizon of finality, is the condition of possibility of the use of equipment; and, for Heidegger, it is by means of the understanding of this horizon that there at once occurs a pre-reflective understanding of the being of the innerworldly being, namely its Zuhandenheit. At this juncture, it is possible to comprehend how Heidegger’s redetermination of intentionality leads to a surpassing of the idea of intentionality as such. In fact, it is on this basis that it is possible to understand the movement of Heidegger’s thinking from the delimitation of the task, issued in 1925 within a reading of Husserl, of a rethinking of the ‘being of the intentional’ [G20 148/108] to the following assertion of 1928: ‘transcendence, or being-in-the-world is never to be equated and identified with intentionality; if one does so, as so often happens, one proves only that he is far from understanding this phenomenon and that the latter cannot be grasped immediately’ [G26 215/168]. World is not to be equated with intentionality for it is not a particular or occasional act on the part of Dasein, but an a priori horizon of all such acts. Before any intentional – in every sense of the term – relation to particular beings the horizon of the world has and must have already been disclosed. Hence if Dasein’s circumspection is to be understood as a relation to beings, this relating is only possible on the basis of the prior understanding of the ontological horizon of world, which itself is a constituent of the being, of what Heidegger terms the Existenz, of Dasein; world is an existential as opposed to the categories that determine the being of the things of the world, namely Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit. Dasein is that being to which belongs being-in-the-world, and, to be sure, it is not in the world like shoes are in a box. It might be better to say that Dasein is its world, which is to say that Dasein is no mere thing or substance in one region of the world, about which we would have to wonder how it could get across to the beings that it is not in order to perceive them. As Heidegger is keen to stress, Dasein is already this ‘across’. Therefore, Dasein is not merely, to


translate the German term literally, a being-there, for this can be said of any particular thing that the human being is not, but a being-the-there, the very condition of possibility of distinguishing any particular ‘here’ from any particular ‘there’. What I hope to have shown in the preceding pages, then, is that Heidegger’s claim in 1929 to the effect that the account of equipment is more of a means than an end in Being and Time is far from being false. Although, and it is important to note this, Heidegger’s lecture courses appear to show that he had already advanced an idea of worldhood in the 1920s prior to articulating an explicit account of Zuhandenheit,13 the account allows phenomenology to move from traditional determinations of intentionality to a thinking of world. Certainly, the question of what sense can be lent to the idea of worldhood beyond its determination as the work-world or environing world remains, and this is a question to which the following section of the chapter responds. Yet even in abstraction from the question of its relation to Greek ontology, the account of equipment does have a purpose beyond itself within the analytic of Dasein, a purpose that allows us to understand how the text of Being and Time could itself describe this account as ‘restricted,’ ‘narrowed down’ and ‘simplifying’ [SZ 118], and why commentators have occasionally doubted its ‘phenomenological credentials’, holding Heidegger to have ‘overstated the matter’ concerning Zuhandenheit, since ‘we do encounter the occurrent, the present-at-hand, in our everyday awareness, and not just as a matter of remotion from the practical’.14

β – The scission of nature in being and time A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare. William Henry Morris The analysis of equipment already seems to meet its own limits in relation to the idea of nature discussed in §15 of Being and Time, for, as has often been noted, there is a certain scission or slippage in the idea of nature here, insofar as there are two more or less distinct approaches to it. Heidegger attempts to account for nature not only as a natural resource, with which we would engage within the horizon of our practical tasks, but also as that which ‘ “stirs and strives” ’, which ‘assails and enthralls us (als das, was ‘webt und strebt’, uns überfällt) as landscape’ or as ‘flowers in the hedgerow’ [SZ 70]. This second approach brings into question the analysis of Zuhandenheit. For if one can happily defend the


claim that the wind in the sails is something other for the fisherman than what it is for the scientist in the meteorological station, or that the farmer’s ‘springhead in the dale’ is other than the geologist’s ‘source of a river’, because and insofar as both wind and springhead are situated within a referential context, then it is much more difficult to understand how a nature which ‘stirs’, ‘strives’ and ‘enthrals’ could at all be understood in such a context, as pointing beyond itself within a horizon of finality. In the terms of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, for example, such an experience of nature would be the preserve of aesthetic judgement; a modality of judgement that is, precisely, without interest, that is in no way a simple judgement of finality.15 If one were to suggest that a landscape or a being such as a flower is stared at, intuited, rather than being pre-thematically apprehended – regardless of whether this pre-thematic apprehension could be interpreted according to the idea of Zuhandenheit – in §15 Heidegger would seem to disagree, since he writes that nature remains ‘hidden (verborgen)’ [SZ 70] by the perception of things as vorhanden. In §43, however, we find a remark that recognises the true extent of the problem. For not every Vorhandenheit is a Dingvorhandenheit. The ‘Nature’ that embraces (umfängt) us is, of course, an entity within the world; but the kind of being which it shows belongs neither to the Zuhandenen nor to the Vorhandenen in the sense of ‘Naturdinglichkeit’ [SZ 211]. There would be, then, a nature, or a natural being which would not have the being of Naturdinglichkeit, a natural thingliness; a Vorhandenheit, a presence before the eyes of a nature, that would not be the nature of the modern natural sciences. This remark stands only as a question, however, and in Being and Time the play of inverted commas within which the question of ‘nature’ is approached is never settled or resolved. In the footnote to the essay of 1929 ‘On the Essence of Ground’, Heidegger returns to this question of nature. If ‘nature is missing’ within the analytic of Dasein, then there are ‘reasons for this’: The decisive reason lies in the fact that nature does not let itself be encountered either within the sphere of the environing world, nor in general as something toward which we comport ourselves. Nature is originally manifest through Dasein’s existing as finding itself attuned in the midst of beings. But insofar as finding oneself [Befindlichkeit] belongs to the essence of Dasein, and comes to be expressed in the


unity of the full concept of care, it is only here that the basis for the problem of nature can first be attained [G9 155/370]. In opposition to §43 of Being and Time, nature is here no longer to be thought as a sort of innerworldly being. It is manifest instead through the transcendental horizon of world. Yet, not by means of world in the guise of a horizon of equipmental references, but rather world thought according to Dasein’s affectivity or Befindlichkeit. In Being and Time Heidegger will, in fact, go on to show how world constitutes the horizon of Dasein’s affectivity and mood (Stimmung);16 through its moods Dasein discovers the beings that it is not and discloses its own being to itself in a manner that is irreducible to and prior to any thematic cognition. Worldhood, thus, will indeed be interpreted from different perspectives within the framework of fundamental ontology. The horizon of finality is but one aspect of the structure of worldhood itself, and Dasein is certainly not only a being-in-the-world in using equipment; if the pure perception of things as vorhanden is achieved as a ‘certain un-worlding (bestimmte Entweltlichung)’ [SZ 65] of the world, then this un-worlding, as Heidegger states in 1925, does not mean that there is a simple disappearance of the world, but rather only that the world shows itself in a ‘deficient meaningfulness’ [G20 300/219]. Nevertheless, the attempt to interpret the being of nature in terms of world in 1929 is problematic and demonstrative of a philosopher grappling with a problem for which there is no ready solution. For the question of nature is here approached in abstraction from the categories of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit, whereas a solution to the problem will only be found, as the fifth chapter of this study will show, with an ontological determination of the innerworldly being beyond both categories, which occurs with Heidegger’s discovery of earth. Recognising, in any event, that the structure of worldhood is indeed not exhausted by its determination as the work-world grants further justification to the claim that the analysis of equipment constitutes more of a means than an end within the analytic of Dasein. Certainly, if this analysis is a means, then it is not simply a means. Heidegger, of course, writes of it in 1929 as being of ‘subordinate significance’ rather than as a philosophical tool that could be discarded. One might hazard – in venturing into the domain of psychology – that it is because of the end that it serves that Heidegger generally seems to be quite convinced of its truth as a categorical determination of the being of innerworldly beings, despite the problems it encounters. Yet the orientation of the analysis of Zuhandenheit towards the quite particular form of human comportment that is manual


production has a deeper and more historical source. This source is Greek ontology and the philosophy of Aristotle in particular. And it is in determining exactly how Heidegger returns to the latter that it will become clear why any form of psychology remains at an infinite distance from the historical stakes and significance of the account of equipment.

2.2 The ground-laying of the productive horizon of Greek ontology The preceding chapter of this study examined Heidegger’s concern to reveal a ‘horizon of production’ that is constitutive of the philosophical problematic of Greek ontology. In order to determine the exact manner in which the account of equipment is to be understood as a repetition of this horizon of production, however, it is necessary to turn briefly to the sense of the concept of Vorhandenheit as it is discussed within the genealogy of the concepts of existence and essence to be found in the lecture course of 1927 entitled The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. The genealogy, articulated in the second section of the lecture course, provides us with a central element of the attempt to provide a ‘birth-certificate’ for ancient ontology that Heidegger had sketched in §6 of Being and Time and that was to appear in the unrealised second part of the project of the text itself. The concepts of essence and existence are, in Descartes words, ‘omnibus nota’17 in philosophy, perennial concepts in philosophy. As Heidegger puts it within the lectures: ‘to each being the what-question and the whether-question apply. At first we do not know why this is so. In the philosophical tradition it is taken as self-evident’ [G24 123–24/88]. After attempting a positive interpretation of Kant’s negatively stated thesis that being or existence is not a real predicate in the first section of the lecture course, Heidegger returns to the undisputed ground of the medieval dispute concerning the unity and distinction of essence and existence in finite beings in the second. This ground is given in the most decisive terms in which the distinction between the finite being and God is expressed: the ens increatum and the ens creatum. The finite being is the creature in the proper sense of the term, that which has been created by God. The finite being consists of an essence, a what-being, which insofar as it is existent, has been actualised or made actual by God. Existence is here understood as actualitas, as actuality, as the result of an acting or action. As Heidegger stresses, the concept of actualitas itself signifies that ‘something exists if it is actu … on the basis of an


agere, a Wirken, a working, operating or effecting’ [G24 122–23/87]. Moreover, the Latin etymological roots of the term existentia are ex-sistere, or ex alio sistere, which means to stand outside of another being, namely its cause.18 Thus: the verbal definition of existentia already made clear that actualitas refers back to an acting on the part of some indefinite subject or, if we start from our own terminology, that the extant [das Vorhandene] is somehow referred by its sense to something for which, as it were, it comes to be before the hand, [vor die Hand kommt] at hand, to be handled [für das es ein Handliches ist] [G24 143/101]. Before having a causal relation to other beings, the particular being itself has been made existent. It is not without reason, then, that the German term that Heidegger uses as an ‘interpretative expression’ of existentia should have a reference to the hand, since the existence of a being is here the result of a production or creation – a miracle of creation performed, as might be said, by the hand of God. Yet if medieval philosophy can interpret the concepts of existence and existence from this theological perspective of production as if as a matter of course, then this results from the fact that the Greek ontology from which it develops already issues from such a horizon of production. The preceding chapter examined this argument but it is necessary to add here that in Heidegger’s discourse Vorhandenheit serves to translate, with Anwesenheit, the Greek ousia; the former German word stressing the being-produced of beings, the latter their being-present. Thus, as Heidegger writes, ‘the verbs ,ναι, esse, existere must be interpreted by way of οSσα, the Vorhandene as the Anwesende’ [G24 109/153]. Upon the delimitation of a technical horizon constitutive of Greek and medieval ontology, in the second section of the lecture course the principal task of a critical engagement with this ontology is described in terms of a ‘restriction and modification’ of the thesis according to which essence and existence belong to the ontological constitution of each being. There is a need for a ‘foundation’ or ‘justification’ (Begründung) of this thesis ‘as to its limited validity to beings in the sense of the Vorhandene’ [G24 157/111].19 In short, Heidegger’s claim is that the being of Dasein must be interpreted beyond the concepts of existence and essence, and the following chapter will approach this question more directly. The further task, however, is one of providing a ‘founding-argument’ for the technical horizon of Greek ontology. For Greek ontology would interpret


beings from a perspective of production without explicitly elaborating the sense and the necessity of such a perspective within ontological inquiry itself. Thus: only when the founding argument [Begründung] is given is a legitimate birth certificate issued for the ontological concepts of essentia and existentia which grew out of this way of posing ontological problems. The grounding [Begründung] of the horizon described above for the interpretation of beings with regard to their essentia and existentia can be carried out only by making intelligible from the most distinctive constitution of Dasein’s being why Dasein primarily and for the most part has to understand the being of beings in the horizon of productive-intuitive comportment. We must ask: What function does the comportment of producing and using in the broadest sense have within Dasein itself? The answer is possible only if the constitution of Dasein’s being is first brought to light in its general basic features, that is, if the ontology of Dasein is made secure [G24 164/117]. It is to be remarked that a quite particular use of the idea of a ‘birthcertificate’ of metaphysics is evident in this passage: the birth-certificate is not merely the unearthing of the horizons of experience at the inception of philosophy, but a founding argument that is, in the end, nothing but the analytic of Dasein. In any event, given that this analysis is to question productive comportment and ‘using in the broadest sense’, it is clear that the analysis of equipment is offered as an attempt to ground or to found more originally the productive horizon of Greek ontology. The analytic of Dasein must show, in fact, that the Vorhandenheit of the finished product is a secondary, derivative determination of its being, since things are originally encountered as ready-to-hand. In the course of the genealogy, however, Heidegger uses the term Vorhandenheit in a potentially confusing sense that denominates not only that which is produced, but also the product in its use as that which is available, disposable. Ousia itself already denominates the ‘equipment which we use and the natural products with which we constantly have to do [das gebrauchte Zeug und die ständig genützten Erzeugnisse der Natur]’ [G24 153/108], and a being in the Greek sense is, thus, a vorhandenes Verfügbares, that which is available and at our disposal. The term verfügbar only draws out here what is already contained in the term Vorhandenheit itself. Yet this does not mean that ‘Vorhandenheit appears here clearly as an original category which has in no way a need to be founded on Zuhandenheit, of which it would be a deficient mode’20 as


Jean-François Courtine has argued. For Heidegger qualifies the argument as follows: Concerning its Vorhandenheit the Vorhandene is conceived of ontologically not so much with regard to its disposability for use or with regard to productive, or practical comportment in general, but rather with regard to the finding-present [Vorfinden] of that which is disposable [G24 153/109]. The terminology could appear confusing for the reader of Being and Time since here Vorhandenheit expresses an idea of disposability in general. Yet if the terms of the argument are problematic, the argument itself is clear: the Greeks, namely Plato and Aristotle, were not able to think the utility or availability of the product in an original way because they determined it as that which is found before the eyes, as that which is apprehended in a beholding intuition. The same argument is, in effect, articulated in §15 of Being and Time: The Greeks had an appropriate term for ‘Things’: πρbγματα – that is to say, that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings (πρdξι). But ontologically, the specifically ‘pragmatic’ character of the πρbγματα is just what the Greeks left in obscurity; they thought of these ‘proximally’ as ‘mere Things’ [SZ 68]. It is, however, necessary to gloss this argument, for Heidegger’s more specific claim, as we have seen, is that Plato and Aristotle never recognised the specifically pragmatic character of the finished product. The ‘mere Thing’, in other words, is thought within Greek ontology from the perspective of the finished product. Heidegger attempts to stress this in a handwritten note in the margins of his own copy of Being and Time, and not without cause, since the fact that it was not stressed in 1927 has not helped commentators to recognise in the account of equipment something other than a positive philosophical position.21 The meaning and possibility of this argument concerning Greek ontology, however, can be fully clarified only in determining exactly the manner in which Heidegger achieves an analysis of Zuhandenheit by radicalising Aristotle’s thinking. In the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle writes: Thought by itself however moves nothing, but only thought directed to an end, and dealing with action. This indeed is the origin or cause


of productive activity also, since he who makes something always has some further end for something or someone (πρ τι και τινο) in view: the act of making is not an end in itself, it is only a means, and belongs to something else. Whereas a thing done (τ πρακτν) is an end in itself: since doing well (,Sπραξíα) is the End, and it is at this that desire aims [1139a35–b4]. The basic point to note here is that the distinction between poiesis and praxis advanced by Aristotle seems to be effaced in the analytic of Dasein. For Aristotle, the end of poiesis is beyond poiesis itself since the finished product is always for someone and something, for the use to which it can be put. Praxis, on the contrary, is an end in itself since the deed or action is its own end; acting well is the end of action itself. As opposed to production, which is the carrying out of a task that I may or may not want to do, in praxis the human being explicitly discloses the for-the-sake-of-which, the ο(υ ;ν,κα [1142b16] of its own actions. Within the analytic of Dasein, however, our everyday dealings, which Heidegger relates to the Greek praxis in the last passage cited from Being and Time, is determined, as was noted in the preceding section, from the perspective of productive comportment or poiesis itself. For Heidegger, production always and already has its end in itself even if it is someone else who will use the finished product; if I produce something for someone, this act of producing is still a function of my own purposes, and thus it is always and already for the sake of myself, however inexplicit or, to cite Being and Time, inauthentic the apprehension of this for-thesake-of-which may be. The analytic of Dasein thus synthesises poiesis and praxis, and it should be noted that this synthesis in fact adds the practical conception of the for-the-sake-of-which to a radicalised version of Aristotle’s poietic account of causality. For the other structural items constitutive of referentiality that §15 delineates can be understood to correspond to three of the Aristotelian four causes. Most obviously, the idea of the work-material as the always and already zuhanden corresponds to the idea of what is rendered in Latin as the causa materialis, as the material from which something is made. Less obviously, and second, the idea of the ‘towards-which’ corresponds to the causa formalis, which is the form that is first envisioned by the producer and then realised in the material. In this connection, it is necessary to note that if Heidegger could not deny the necessity of first mentally envisioning what we are to produce, then he would nevertheless argue that in the course of production the producer is orientated by a less thematic understanding of what she is attempting to realise. Third, when Heidegger writes that the


‘towards-which’ ‘has in its turn the kind of being of equipment’ [SZ 70], he can be understood to take up the traditional idea of the causa finalis as the end or purpose that the product itself is to serve. The above remarks concerning the fusion and radicalisation of poiesis and praxis within the analytic of Dasein do not, however, address the question of what resources could be drawn for a thinking of Zuhandenheit from Aristotle’s work itself. For despite the apparently critical tone of the passage above from Being and Time and of The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, earlier in the 1920s Heidegger had offered more generous readings. In the lecture course of 1924 entitled Plato’s Sophist, for example, Heidegger interprets Aristotle’s determination of the product’s being ‘for something or someone’ in the above passage from the Nicomachean Ethics as a statement of the product’s having a ‘reference (Verweisung) to something else’ [G19 41/29]. Similarly, in another lecture course of the same year, Fundamental Concepts of Aristotle’s Philosophy, within a reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric Heidegger translates the term τ συμφNρον, which one ordinarily renders as the expedient, as Beiträglich – Beiträglichkeit or conduciveness being one of the four modalities of the referentiality of equipment enumerated in §15 of Being and Time – and he adds that ‘a Beiträgliches is in itself such a being that has a reference to something’ [G18 58]. Would this mean, then, that Aristotle has somehow apprehended the referentiality of the being in its use, that is, the Zuhandenheit of the product? It is necessary to bring to light here Heidegger’s changing responses to this question and the different ways that he approaches it. First of all, in the essay of 1922 entitled Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle, Heidegger attempts to show, with regard to the discussion of accidental being in Metaphysics Epsilon, that Aristotle has indirectly encountered, and yet passed over, the referentiality of equipment. Aristotle writes: The producer of a house does not produce all the attributes that are accidental to the house in its construction; for they are infinite in number. There is no reason why the house so produced should not be agreeable to some, injurious to others, and different from perhaps every other existing thing; but the act of building is productive of none of these [1026b8]. The builder builds the house according to a plan, a plan that may be modified according to the particular needs of the client. Yet this plan is the limit of the builder’s knowledge and it is not within his powers to know if


the inhabitants will find the finished house agreeable or disagreeable. Such characteristics as the agreeable or disagreeable are, in modern parlance, merely subjective and they are that which lie beyond the purview of any determinate knowledge; they are that with which ‘no science, whether practical, productive or speculative, concerns itself’ [1026b5–6]. On Heidegger’s reading, however, the idea of the agreeable or disagreeable articulates a conception, however indirectly, of the being of the house in its use. Yet, the fact that Aristotle can write of such characteristics as merely the accidental shows that the environing world is at once apprehended and lost in Aristotle, that it is only indirectly seen, because of the primacy of a determinate sense of being, namely ‘being-produced’. What is, is ‘originally present as that which it is only for the productive dealings; it is already no longer present within the kind of dealings which make use of it, insofar as these dealings can bring the finished object into diverse, no longer primordial aspects of care’ [PIA 52/392]. Aristotle would think being as being-produced, then, without breaking through to an ontological thinking of the product in its use. Such an interpretation would seem to prefigure the claims that Heidegger makes in 1927. Yet within this same text, and until at least 1924, Heidegger attempts to read the concepts of dunamis and energeia, ‘actuality’ and ‘possibility’, in terms of the analysis of Zuhandenheit. The fact that matter such as planks of wood are, on Aristotle’s account, potentially a table, means that the wood ‘refers to something’ [G18 300], namely the form of the table that it can possibly adopt. The wood has the characteristic of Dienlichsein or Verwendbarkeit, a being useful or being-able-to-be-used for something. This interpretation is developed in the most telling fashion within a lecture course of 1926 entitled The Fundamental Concepts of Ancient Philosophy, with the addition, in the event, of a third term to the duality of Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit. The work-material encountered through our use of tools has a ‘readiness’ and a being ‘appropriate-for (Eignung-zu)’ [G22 173] that constitutes its Vorhandenheit, which is here to be understood in the sense of the always and already zuhanden of Being and Time. Upon the fulfilment of the movement of production, a being-in-movement that is its Unterhandenheit, a being ‘under-the-hand’, the product achieves its entelechia, its having-itself-in-its-end in the form of the finished product. Yet Heidegger seeks to distinguish entelechia from energeia.22 Although the two terms are more often than not rigorously synonymous in Aristotle, energeia can designate the being-in-work of a being in the sense of its function or activity.23 Thus, for Heidegger, upon its being-finished the product is available for a use, available to be put to work as zuhanden


and this is its energeia. The ‘actuality’ of which Aristotle speaks in relation to the finished product could be understood, therefore, as Zuhandenheit. Heidegger, then, provides different responses in the course of the 1920s to the question of whether an account of Zuhandenheit can be retrieved from Aristotle. It is on the basis of these arguments concerning equipment, and thus the referential horizon of world, that one can understand the movement in Heidegger’s arguments as to the possibility of the retrieval of a conception of world and being-in-the-world from Aristotle. In 1924, Heidegger even goes so far as to argue that Aristotle has apprehended the basic ontological structure of human being, namely its being-in-the-world; if the human being is the animal that has language, the term ζωx is to be interpreted as signifying being-in-theworld. To be sure, upon rendering the Greek word as In-einer-Welt-sein, Heidegger immediately acknowledges the force of the interpretation with the following remark to his audience: ‘Perhaps you are of the opinion that this is read into Aristotle, but perhaps you will also see that interpretation is nothing other than the bringing to light of what is not there (Heraustellen dessen, was nicht da steht)’ [G18 66]. This is probably Heidegger’s most extreme formulation of the very task of historical and philosophical interpretation, in a lecture course, Fundamental Concepts of Aristotle’s Philosophy, that presents his most generous readings of the Stagirite. Yet Aristotle can write in On the Soul that J ψυχy τn ντα π+ Rστιν,24 that the soul is in a certain sense (all) beings, and if one translates π% as ‘how’, Aristotle can be understood to state that the soul is the ‘how’ of beings, the modality in and by which beings as such exist. Rather than being an expression of Aristotle’s alleged naive realism, as many modern commentators have had it,25 this would be an articulation, for the Heidegger of 1924, of a thinking of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology of 1927, however, Heidegger leaves to one side the Greek concept of world since it ‘could be set forth only by way of an interpretation of Greek existence’ [G24 155/110]. Although Aristotle does not explicitly articulate a conception of world as a moment of the ontological structure of being-human, an understanding of the experience of world that underlies his thinking would require us to look beyond the letter of the Aristotelian corpus to, first of all, pre-Socratic thinking and particularly to Heraclitus.26 Yet, in the end, Heidegger recognises that his earlier and more generous interpretations of referentiality and worldhood in Aristotle are over-interpretations. This is why he can write in 1927 that the ‘concept of world, and the phenomenon which it designates are what philosophy in general has not yet recognised’ [G24 234/165].


Of course, Aristotle even apprehends the fundamental role of the hand in the manipulation of the tool in describing it as a sort of instrument for which there exist others: ργανον πρ ,ργbνων.27 Yet, once again, the original being of the product, its Zuhandenheit, cannot be conceived in determining the innerworldly being as what is present before the eyes. Consequently, one can say, as does Rémi Brague succinctly, that within the analytic of Dasein ‘what Aristotle says is rethought from a more original grasp of the phenomenon intended’.28 This more original grasp of the phenomenon is the interpretation of world as a horizon of referentiality.

2.3

Metaphysics in its repetition Does not this absolute primacy of equipmentality awaken a certain suspicion […]. That Dasein must work in order to exist in the fullest sense, is this not a trait that comes to it from the essence of technology? Michel Haar29

The first section of this chapter showed how the analysis of equipment in Being and Time is already more than a simple description of experience insofar as it serves to gain access to the structure of worldhood by radicalising the phenomenological conception of intentionality. The second section of the chapter has shown that the analysis has another, more profound and more historical ‘purpose’, in that it seeks to reappropriate, and provide a birth certificate for, the Greek inception of metaphysics. We have seen, in fact, that in the course of the 1920s Heidegger moves from the claim that an account of the Zuhandenheit of the finished product is to be found in Aristotle to arguing for the necessity of a radicalisation or ground-laying of his thinking. On the basis of these findings, the very least that must be recognised is that the account of equipment in Being and Time is in no way a Heideggerian invention. The account is instead determined by the inception of metaphysics. Despite his well-founded suspicions concerning this account, therefore, nothing could be further from the truth than Michel Haar’s remarkably un-Heideggerian claim that ‘in Sein und Zeit, analysing equipmentality for example, he [Heidegger] abstracted as much from his own time as from the structures bequeathed by history’. It is no more coherent to argue, as the author does at the risk of contradicting himself, that the analysis of equipment derives ‘from a historical period of transition between the world of the artisan and the industrial world of the beginning


of 19th century’.30 Understood in this latter sense Heidegger would simply be reactionary. The analysis is rather an attempt to rethink or radicalise Greek ontology, an attempt to demonstrate the truth of the inception of metaphysics. It derives neither from a reactionary refusal of modern industrial technology nor from a pragmatic worldview; and the pragmatic misinterpretation of Being and Time consists not only in neglecting the question of being but also in holding pragmatism to be a modern discovery. Insofar as it fails to apprehend the sense of the technical horizon constitutive of Greek ontology, and in looking to Heidegger solely for a corroboration of its own ‘findings’, modern pragmatism is nothing less than metaphysics without roots, a metaphysics that does not understand its own historical origins and possibility. In Heidegger’s reduction to equipmentality, to cite Rémi Brague once again, ‘what Aristotle says is rethought from a more original grasp of the phenomenon intended’. Yet this more original grasp only draws out what is already implied and harboured in Greek ontology itself. In recognising this, it becomes impossible to hold, with Hubert Dreyfus, that this reduction represents a historical stage of metaphysics. Far from being a stage in the history of metaphysics, the reduction to equipmentality is already a de-construction of this history insofar as it brings its inception back to what it itself implies and thus to its original truth. It is necessary to add here that if this reduction were a stage in the history of metaphysics it would be a rather peculiar one given that it endures in Heidegger’s work only from the beginning of the 1920s to the middle of the 1930s, and that it would be a stage that would not correspond in any way to the technological twentieth century itself. Dreyfus is not wrong, of course, to point to the proximity between the reduction of nature to a natural resource in Being and Time and the delimitation of the Rhine as a source of hydraulic pressure at our command in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’.31 This proximity is not accidental. Yet it results from the fact that the reduction to equipmentality attempts to show the truth of the Platonic–Aristotelian determination of beings. The determination of beings as the actuality of formed matter is, in truth, already a reduction of what is to its utility, to what can be used and produced. Only on these grounds is it possible to understand that the objective determination of beings in modernity that, as Heidegger will argue, occurs as a reduction of what is to what can be dominated, controlled and rendered instrumental does not occur simply as a perversion of the tradition that has preceded it. My contention is, then, that it is solely by understanding the reduction to equipmentality in Being and Time as the origin of metaphysics in


its repetition that this reduction can be understood in its relation to Heidegger’s later delimitation of modern technology. In the movement from Being and Time to Heidegger’s work of the 1930s and beyond there is no change of positive philosophical positions, no correction of one positive thesis – a positive thesis that would have a certain ‘debt’ to Aristotle – by another that would be nicer, as it were, to nature and more responsive to contemporary ecology, but a leading back of metaphysics to its own presuppositions, which itself leads to the possibility of a more essential delimitation, an ‘overcoming’, of metaphysics itself. Any talk, however well intentioned it may be, of a Heidegger I and a Heidegger II can only obscure this movement. Not only would it seem to lead us to assume that here two different philosophical positions are in question, but also in this way we speak of the beginning and the end of a movement, rather than grasping the movement itself that underlies and is the condition of both; but, of course, as any reader of Aristotle knows, and as we will see in the following chapter, grasping movement as movement is a most difficult task. If the analysis of Zuhandenheit in Being and Time is more of a means than an end in itself insofar as it enables phenomenology to gain access to the structure of world, then it is also, and more profoundly, a ‘means’ insofar as it serves to reduce the inception of metaphysics to its own truth. Of course, in this second sense, much more so than in the first, the idea of ‘means’ and ‘ends’ or ‘purposes’ is problematic. To gain some clarification of the problem it is necessary to underline that my argument here does not constitute a denial of the fact that Heidegger holds the analysis of Zuhandenheit to constitute an essential phenomenological advance in the 1920s. Without doubt the author holds the analysis to be an ‘essential gain’ notwithstanding the problems that it encounters in relation to the question of nature. In other words, the fact that the reduction to equipmentality is metaphysics in its repetition does not mean that Heidegger thinks at the time that it is any the less true. The reduction is not a mere strategy, simply a means and thus something like a negative philosophical position. This is why Being and Time can offer the account of equipmentality without deliberately stating the stakes of it as a repetition of the productive horizon of the inception of metaphysics. It has been argued that fundamental ontology offers something akin to a negative value judgement concerning equipment insofar as it distinguishes between the authentic and inauthentic modes of Dasein’s existence. Jacques Taminiaux, for one, reads this distinction as an opposition between two ‘fields’ of existence:32 either Dasein is involved with


equipment and other people in the world as inauthentic, or it heeds the call of its conscience in a supposedly authentic isolation from these people and these things. The distinction between the two modalities of existence would, therefore, be one between the public and the private, between a public life and the purity of a quasi-Platonic dialogue of the soul with itself, within which Dasein would disclose itself as a solusipse. Thus, for Taminiaux, Heidegger is, in the end, quite peculiarly unAristotelian and it ‘goes without saying within the framework of fundamental ontology that it is by a sort of distraction, … by a sort of letting slip of our most proper possibility that we pay attention to things’. On this basis one can only go on to remark, as the author does, an apparent ‘rehabilitation’33 of poiesis and the use of equipment in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. Not only the creation of artworks but also the production and the use of equipment would now be seen as an authentic possibility of human existence. Taminiaux’s reading is problematic in many ways, not least because it views the turning that occurs in Heidegger’s thinking as a change of value judgement concerning the use of equipment. More fundamentally, however, the reading of Being and Time itself is untenable. Certainly, Dasein can certainly disclose itself as a solus ipse, but Heidegger’s qualification of these terms has nevertheless to be taken seriously: this existential ‘solipsism’ is so far from the displacement of putting an isolated subject-Thing into the innocuous emptiness of a worldless occurring that in an extreme sense what it does is precisely to bring Dasein face to face with its world as world, and thus bring it face to face with itself as a being-in-the-world [SZ 188]. Moreover, how could it go without saying that we achieve authenticity in a splendid but ultimately nihilistic isolation from the things and people of the world when Being and Time states that Dasein’s authenticity ‘discloses the current situation of the “there” in such a way that existence, in taking action, is circumspectively concerned with what is factically ready-to-hand environmentally’ [SZ 326]? There is no negative value judgement concerning equipment within the framework of fundamental ontology, and if we are to understand the sense of the reduction to equipmentality it is necessary to recognise that Heidegger’s intentions and his own reflections on the sense of fundamental ontology at the time are not at all what is significant. What is significant is rather what the work itself does, what it achieves; and


what it achieves is, precisely, a leading back of metaphysics to its own presuppositions, to its own truth. Concerning the passage from Meditation to which I referred for a second time in the introduction to this chapter, there is, without doubt, the violence of a retrospective self-interpretation inherent in the further claim that fundamental ontology seeks to bring metaphysics back to its own presuppositions in order to lead metaphysics to its own transformation. If Heidegger’s work of the 1920s were offered in order to attain the work of the 1930s, he would already know the thinking to be attained by the path that his thought has yet to travel, and, thus, the very idea of a path of his thinking would be reduced to nought. As Jean Beaufret reminds us, ‘one should not imagine that everything is contemporaneous in Heidegger’s thinking. It is a question of a path which invents itself as it advances’.34 In order to determine adequately the limits of fundamental ontology and how these limits lead to Heidegger’s later work, it is necessary to return briefly to the question of Vorhandenheit. If the term does not merely signify the being as intuited or perceived before the eyes, but also, as a translation of ousia and existentia, denominates the produced and the producible, and finally that which is available or disposable, then what is the sense of Vorhandenheit in relation to modern philosophy? What, in other words, is the connection between modern metaphysics and Greek hylo-morphism? How has modern philosophy inherited the technical horizon at the inception of metaphysics? What does it mean, as Heidegger will argue from 1922 onwards, that the concepts ‘which were fixed for the first time in Greek ontology and which later faded out and became formalised, that is to say, became part of the tradition and are now handled like worn out coins’ [G24 152/108]? I have already indicated that in Being and Time Vorhandenheit denominates the being as it is methodologically determined by the modern sciences of nature in addition to the being merely intuited. It is not, however, until §69 that Heidegger explicitly questions modern scientific method. The first section of the paragraph attempts to provide a temporal interpretation of Dasein’s circumspective concern, and thus of Zuhandenheit. The aim is to show that this modality of the being of innerworldly beings has its ground and possibility in Dasein’s temporality. Consequently, the second section is concerned with ‘The Temporal Sense of the Way in which Circumspective Concern becomes Modified into the Theoretical Discovery of the Vorhandene’. Both senses of the word theory are meant here: the aim is at once to provide a temporal interpretation of perception or intuition, and to provide an ‘existential concept of science’, to account for the ‘ontological genesis’ [SZ 356] of theoretical


comportment in the sense of scientific method. To this end, however, Heidegger focuses on the ontical genesis of scientific method in referring to ‘the classic example of the historical development of a science’, namely the emergence of modern mathematical physics. Within an analysis that will be reiterated in the 1930s,35 for Heidegger, the particularity of this modern science rests neither in an increased attention to the facts, nor in the application, after the fact, of mathematics to nature, but rather ‘in the way in which nature herself is mathematically projected’: In this projection something constantly Vorhandenes (matter) is uncovered beforehand, and the horizon is opened so that one may be guided by looking at those constitutive items in it that are quantitatively determinable (motion, force, location, and time). Only ‘in the light’ of a Nature which has been projected in this fashion can anything like a ‘fact’ be found and set up for an experiment regulated and delimited in terms of this projection [SZ 363]. It is not altogether clear whether matter is an intrinsic or merely an extrinsic determination of Vorhandenheit here, but the mathematical projection or objectification of nature would establish, for Heidegger, an a priori determination of entities as such. As an a priori projection, however, the modern mathematical projection of nature only determines the truth of the being that is perceived. This is why, in interpreting the temporal sense of Vorhandenheit, Heidegger seems to reduce beingperceived to being-objectified. The ‘objectification of beings’ is characterised by a specific kind of making present (ausgezeichnete Gegenwärtigung). This making-present is distinguished from the Present (Gegenwart) of circumspective circumspection in that – above all – the kind of discovering which belongs to the science in question awaits solely the discoveredness of the Vorhandene [SZ 363]. Heidegger’s thinking verges on the paradoxical here: on the one hand, the attempt is made to give an existential and hence temporal interpretation of the modern mathematical objectification of nature, which in itself tells us nothing about the specificity of this objectification as opposed to the simple perception of beings. This only shows us, however, that an existential interpretation of science in terms of Dasein’s temporality will, in the end, be fruitless, that is, quite impossible. On the other hand, the historical originality of the modern mathematical


objectification of beings is recognised, only for it to be determined as a priori, and hence, at least in any traditional sense of the terms, as something essentially unhistorical. In effect, this difficulty shows us that in relation to the historical question of Vorhandenheit fundamental ontology itself cannot adequately address the questions that it itself raises. The remarks in §69 of Being and Time concerning the technical equipment involved in modern scientific activity – remarks that do not think technology in a sense that would be faithful to the Greek techne as a mode of knowing36 – demonstrate that fundamental ontology is far from being able to think the relation of techne to the modern sciences. Yet if it is unable to think this, and unable to see anything else in the modern mathematical projection of nature than the truth of what is, then this is because it has no other site from which the distance could be gained for a critical perspective on this projection. For as much as fundamental ontology seeks to reveal how the very idea of matter arises within an ontological reduction of the innerworldly being to that which is used and used up, as the origin of metaphysics in its repetition it has no critical distance from the tradition that it repeats. This site and this distance arise only upon the discovery of what we might call the extra-metaphysical ‘principle’ of phusis that Heidegger discovers in the pre-Socratics. Although fundamental ontology already points, in and from itself, to this thinking insofar as the repetition of the productive horizon of Greek ontology opens up the possibility of a return to a thinking wherein beings are not conceived within such a horizon, this discovery, as will become clear, is only achieved through a phenomenological reflection on the work of art. At the beginning of the ‘Zähringen Seminar’ of 1973 Jean Beaufret asks Heidegger how it was possible to describe the analysis of equipmentality as an ‘essential gain’ in Being and Time and as merely of ‘subordinate significance’ only two years later. Heidegger responds neither immediately nor directly. In the course of the seminar, however, he offers the following remarks concerning the repetition of the Greeks in the 1920s: Already in Being and Time there is such a return (Rückkehr), although it is still slightly clumsy (ungeschickt). In Being and Time, in fact, this occurs as a Destruction, that is to say as a dismantling, a de-structuration of that which, from the beginning, is destined as being in the uninterrupted succession of transformations that is the history of philosophy. But in Being and Time there had not yet taken place a genuine knowledge of the history of being, whence arises the awkwardness and, in truth, the


naïvety of the ‘ontological destruction’. Since then, this necessary naïvety has given way to a knowledge [VS 133]. Being and Time was already a destruction, a dismantling of the philosophical tradition, yet it was naive or clumsy, ungeschickt, which is to say, unhistorical, not yet properly historical. Heidegger deliberately plays here on the relation of the word ungeschickt to ‘Geschick’, which means ‘destiny’ or ‘fate’ and to ‘Geschichte’ which means ‘history’. This naivety of fundamental ontology is to be thought not only in relation to the ‘not yet’ of a return to the phusis of pre-Socratic thought and the ‘not yet’ of a questioning of modern technology but also in relation to the inability to think adequately, even if it can name it, the ‘essential deviation’ [G24 168/119] that Greek ontology endures through its transmission in the Latinate tradition. By means of a reflection on the work of art in the 1930s, and, more specifically, by means of a reflection on the traditional idea of efficient causality, Heidegger will in fact return to Aristotle to show that the horizon of production that determines it has a truth prior to any mere utility. Yet this does not mean, as the fifth chapter of this study will argue, that fundamental ontology is wrong or false, but only that it shows the truth of the tradition of which Greek ontology is the origin, that is, the truth of the Latinate transmission of Greek philosophy.

3 Time and Motion

As the second section of the preceding chapter indicated, fundamental ontology sets itself the task of restricting the sphere of validity of Greek ontology in showing that the ontology of ousia is valid only, and to a limited degree given the analysis of Zuhandenheit, for the beings that we are not, for innerworldly beings. One might say that if both the concepts of existence and essence derive from an interpretation of the finished product, then in distinguishing human Existenz from the sphere of the categorial, phenomenology must show that Dasein never is a finished product. Although we may describe someone who has attained a certain degree of excellence in this way, for Heidegger Dasein is always and already ahead of itself because its Existenz is what he terms a ‘beingpossible (Möglichsein)’ or a ‘potentiality-for-being (Seinkönnen)’ [SZ 143]. In order to clarify these terms, and before relating them to the work of Aristotle, it should first be noted that with such a thinking of potentiality or possibility Heidegger moves beyond Kant’s determination of it as a category of modality, as a mere ‘empty logical possibility’, which ‘signifies what is not yet actual and what is not at any time necessary’ [SZ 143]. Of course, Kant makes a further distinction between the logical possibility of a concept – that which is not in itself contradictory – and the possibility of the thing of which the concept is a concept, a real possibility. The proof of the latter is the actual presence or presentation of the object corresponding to the concept.1 Yet possibility here means merely the ‘contingency’ of something that may or may not ‘come to pass’ [SZ 143], and, in fact, is tantamount to actuality. The second point to note is that possibility is, in quite different senses, at once a category and an existential in fundamental ontology. The being ready-to-hand of an item of equipment is a being-possible for something, but this occurs only by virtue of Dasein’s understanding of the world as a horizon of 78

Time and Motion 79

finality. This understanding is a ‘projection (Entwurf )’ [SZ 145] of the possibilities of items of equipment. Given that such a projection rests ultimately on the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ peculiar to Dasein, however, it is Dasein itself that is always thrown beyond itself in projecting possibilities for the sake of its own being. Dasein is a ‘being ahead-of-itself (Sich-vorweg-sein)’ [SZ 192]; it is always on the way to achieving a possibility of its own being. Such a being-underway is not to be merely ‘tacked on’ to a traditional or indeterminate conception of being, but it rather determines the very Existenz of Dasein itself. Hence when Heidegger writes that Dasein’s essence [Wesen] lies in its Existenz, the former term is as little to be understood as a what-being which may or may not be actual as the latter term is to be understood as denominating the that-it-is of something, the fact that something is. The Wesen of Dasein is to be understood in a verbal sense as, precisely, a being underway, a being-possible. It is by thinking the Existenz of Dasein in this way that, according to the Basic Problems of Phenomenology, the analytic of Dasein aims to counteract the ‘naivety’ [G24 155/110] of Greek ontology. Even before the advent of the Christian doctrine according to which each and every being is created, Greek ontology would be naive insofar as it interprets human being in terms of the being of the things of the world, insofar as ousia is thought to determine beings as such, the human being included. This is a problematic that is essential to the project of Heidegger’s destruction in 1927. In addition to recovering the original sense of the three different moments of the ancient conception of being, namely being-produced, being as presence and being as truth, Heidegger seeks to delimit a form of naivety or inauthenticity that has infected philosophy from its inception. As we read in §6 of Being and Time: Greek ontology and its history […] prove that when Dasein understands either itself or being in general, it does so in terms of the ‘world’ [SZ 21–2]. Greek ontology would have to be delimited, to be shown to have only a restricted sphere of validity, for it does not ‘get beyond a common conception of Dasein and its comportments’ [G24 156/111], and the Existenz proper to the being that we are has ‘been forgotten in naive ancient ontology’. This forgetting at the inception of philosophy would determine the entirety of its history.2 Even Kant’s demonstration of the impossibility or paralogism of any application of the categories determinative of objects to the transcendental ego does not lead to a positive account of the Existenz of Dasein.3


Greek ontology, then, would be determined by the inauthenticity or fallenness that Being and Time shows to be the everyday fate of the human being. To a certain degree the charge seems irrefutable in relation to Aristotle. One glance at the treatise On the Soul is sufficient to recognise that the basic ontological concepts such as ousia, form and matter, which all originally derive from an interpretation of innerworldly beings, are carried over to an interpretation of human being itself. The question here, however, is precisely one of degree. The preceding chapter referred to Aristotle’s statement that ‘the soul is all things’, and this would seem to distinguish quite radically, perhaps even ontologically, the soul and the beings that it is not. For Aristotle, the soul is not a being in one region of the world about which we would have to wonder how it could go outside of itself to encounter the things that it is not. Perhaps no description other than naive seems to qualify better Aristotle’s determination of the soul as the form or eidos of the body, but this naivety is not that of a naive realism and a positive interpretative appropriation of it is not impossible. Certainly, one can say, as Heidegger does concerning Husserl in 1925, that ‘if there were an entity whose ‘what’ is precisely to be and nothing but to be, then this ideative regard of such an entity would be the most fundamental of misunderstandings’ [G20 152/110]. The eidetic determination of the soul almost inevitably achieves a reification of the soul itself, one that obscures both Dasein’s being-in-the-world and its being-ahead-of-itself as a beingpossible. Yet, significantly, the soul and the body as form and matter, are not two things or substances, two separable beings, as they will be in Descartes. Hence in a register that contrasts sharply with that of 1927, Heidegger can even write in 1926 that Aristotle’s doctrine of ψυχx, as an ‘ontology of life’, brought ‘the problem of the soul onto genuine grounds for the first time’ [G22 184]. These brief remarks serve to illustrate that Heidegger’s argument in 1927 is not to be taken at face value and that it cannot be adequately understood without reference to the earlier interpretations of the 1920s. Aristotle’s account of the soul in De Anima admits both a ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ repetition; one can stress both its limits and its originality. The primary aim of this chapter, however, is to examine the most fundamental aspect of Heidegger’s positive appropriation of Aristotle’s thinking within the analytic of Dasein. This concerns the very determination of Dasein as a being-possible and being-under-way, for the earlier texts of the 1920s show that Heidegger develops an account of the movedness (Bewegtheit) of Dasein by appropriating Aristotle’s determination of movement (Bewegung) and the thinking of possibility that is involved in it.

Time and Motion 81

This appropriation is by no means explicit in Being and Time and, as has been remarked, there is no thematic discussion of movement in the text itself. Section 48 does, however, offer an indication of the importance and centrality of a thinking of movement, movement understood in the widest sense, within the analytic of Dasein. The section seeks to clarify the being of Dasein as a being-ahead-of-itself in comparing it to beings ‘to whose kind of being becoming belongs’, such as fruit in the process of ripening: When we speak of the ‘not-yet’ of the unripeness, we do not have in view something else that stands outside and which – with utter indifference to the fruit – might be present-at-hand in it and with it. What we have in view is the fruit itself in its specific kind of being. […] The ripening fruit not only is not indifferent to its unripeness as something other than itself, but it is that unripeness as it ripens. The ‘notyet’ has already been included in the very being of the fruit, not as some random characteristic but as something constitutive [SZ 243]. The not-yet-being-ripe of the fruit would not be something in or with the actual piece of fruit, nor would it simply be a future state of the fruit, to which the fruit at present would be indifferent, and that is to say, unaffected in its being. The not-yet-being ripe of the fruit rather determines the very being of the fruit itself insofar as it is ripening. Now according to Being and Time this ‘ripening’ of the fruit is ‘formally analogous’ [SZ 244] to the being of Dasein, whose being ahead of itself as its own not-yet is to be interpreted positively as constitutive of its own being as a being-possible. For all that fundamental ontology seeks to distinguish the being of Dasein from that of innerworldly beings it is not, then, and perhaps surprisingly, averse to establishing an analogy between the former and a particular sort of the latter, namely natural beings. In the first section of the present chapter the aim is to show, in fact, how this analogy is but the exterior manifestation of a more extensive appropriation of Aristotle’s account of movement, and, in particular, of phusis or nature as movement. First, following Heidegger to a certain extent, and with particular reference to the analyses of Pierre Aubenque in his Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, I aim to show that the Physics offers a thinking of, to use a term that will be clarified, an ‘ecstatic’ movement. Subsequently, I will show how Heidegger appropriates such an account of movement in thinking the movedness of Dasein according to the most profound structure of its Existenz, namely its ecstatic temporality.


Considering Heidegger’s conception of temporality leads in the second section of the chapter, however, to an examination of Aristotle’s own account of time in Physics IV. This account is read with regard to the delimitation of it as a ‘vulgar’ conception of time that Heidegger announces in §6 of Being and Time and articulates extensively in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. As I indicated in the introduction to this study, this delimitation of Aristotle’s conception of time as deriving from an ‘understanding’ of being as constant-presence seems to inflect negatively the entirety of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Stagirite in 1927. Yet I will be led to ask whether Aristotle does not in fact think time according to his own determination of ecstatic movement, and that is to say, whether he does not at least offer the possibility of a thinking of time other than as a mere succession of ‘nows’.

3.1

Ecstatic movement

α – The three principles of becoming in Physics I Wherever something is asked concerning the essence of movement, being must be brought to language. Thematically or not, being must here be uttered [G31 58]. In the Physics Aristotle addresses the question of movement according to two distinct, but overlapping, analyses: in the first book of the text according to three principles of becoming, and in the third book according to the concepts of dunamis and energeia, ‘actuality’ and ‘possibility’. Sandwiched between these books we find an account of phusis or nature, and in what follows I treat all of these analyses in the order that they arise in Aristotle’s text. The seventh chapter of the first book of the Physics delineates the plurality of principles presupposed by the fact of becoming – τ γγν,σθαι – as follows: anything that ‘becomes’ is always complex: there is what begins to exist and something that comes to be this; and the latter may be regarded under two aspects – as what persists (τ cποκ,ιμNνων) or as the contrasted qualification (τ iντικ,ιμNνων) [190b11–17]. If a man becomes cultured, what he has become, namely cultured, can be opposed both to the man and to his previously being uncultured. In becoming cultured the man remains as that which has become cultured, whereas his being uncultured, the ‘contrasted qualification’, does not.

Time and Motion 83

In this way, Aristotle delineates three principles constitutive of becoming, principles that are of ‘universal application’ [190a14], applying to every movement or change (μ,ταβολx)4 as such. The first is what comes into being, the new aspect in the becoming or change. This Aristotle terms form (eidos). The term is here to be understood in a broad sense as denominating anything that can be predicated of a thing, such as Socrates’ being cultured, his pallor or any other attribute.5 It is only in the subsequent discussion of what is termed pure genesis, the coming into being of something as such, and not merely the coming into being of an accidental quality of a thing, that form is to be understood in the narrow and proper sense as denominating the essence or what-being of a being. Second, form is opposed to that from which the form has become, that which itself does not persist in the change; becoming cultured can only come from being uncultured, pallor from a state that is not pallor, namely a healthy skin tone. Form, in short, can only come from the contrary of this form. Such a contrary Aristotle thinks according to the idea, whose significance cannot be overstated, of the στNρησι, the privation or shortage of the form that comes into existence; being uncultured is a lack of culture, coldness is a lack of warmth. For Aristotle, shortage is an , ∂δο π%,6 a sort of appearance. This would mean that when we say that someone is uncultured, this being uncultured is given as an absence of culture in the person herself; culture appears in a certain sense as precisely what is absent in the person’s being uncultured. With this thinking of shortage Aristotle aims to make the fact of movement comprehensible in transcending the impasses or aporiai that had led to the denial of its reality in earlier Greek thinking. Parmenides, for one, would have held that being, to on, is unchanging and thus that movement is a mere illusion. One of the intellectual impasses supporting this view can be stated as follows: what arises from a process of change can come neither from something that is nor from something that is not. Both are equally impossible since what results from the change cannot come from something if this thing already existed, just as much as it cannot come from nothing, for there is nothing for it to come out of. Yet, on Aristotle’s account, what becomes comes neither from simply something, nor from simply nothing, but rather from the positive absence of the form, a lack that resides in the being that persists through the change: It is obvious that, from the premises ‘being has only one meaning’ and ‘contradictories cannot co-exist’, it is not a true inference that there is nothing which ‘is not’; for ‘what is not’ may very well not exist absolutely but be ‘what is not this or that’ [187a3–7].


One can hold it to be impossible that something should come from what is not, a μy ν, only in failing to recognise the relative non-being, rather than absolute non-being, that is shortage. If shortage is that which ‘in itself is not (καθ’ αcτ μy ν)’ [191b15], it is not simply nothing, since it is always the lack of a definite form. It is, as Heidegger extrapolates in 1924, a ‘not-being in the sense of a definite being-there (Da), a being-there of absence’ [G18 298]. The third principle of becoming is what can be opposed both to form and the shortage of this form, namely what persists through the change, to hupokeimenon. The first chapter of the present study examined this question. Yet if there are three principles of becoming in general, namely shortage, form and hupokeimenon, what is the ground of this threefold? What do these principles divide? The idea of divisibility is key here, since as Aristotle underlines in book six of the Physics ‘everything that moves has to be divisible (δικιρ,τν)’ [234b10]. Yet the three principles of becoming cannot be understood to divide the being in movement in any ordinary, and that is to say, ontic sense. Certainly, in the preceding chapters of the first book of the Physics Aristotle discusses in relation to his predecessors the enquiry into the principles of becoming as a question of the elements of beings. The principles, however, cannot themselves be understood in this way since shortage, first of all, is a sort of non-being. Shortage is a conception of beings in their being, and it thus cannot be an element in the sense of a real part of the being in which it would inhere. Second, and as I showed in the first chapter of this study, if matter and form or the ‘subject’ and its accidents are that of which a being is ‘composed’, then they are no more simply parts or elements of a being, given that it is physically impossible to apprehend the one without, and thus apart from, the other. The three principles, then, do not constitute a mere ontic division, a division that would occur at the level of beings. They constitute instead an ontological ‘division’; the three principles of movement are the principles of the being-moved of a being. Yet the question remains: how are we to think the three principles as principles of the being-moved of a being? In order to think this, it is necessary to recognise that at the moment of a being’s movement, its form is what it will be. The form of a being is what it is not yet; it is what it is on the way to becoming. This form, however, can only come from the positive lack of the form that was resident in the subject. This lack or shortage is what a being is no longer; it is what it is on the way to no longer being. This is to say that the being that is in movement, is both the not-yet of its form and the no-longer of the shortage of this form. In other words, the being that is

Time and Motion 85

in movement is stretched out, as it were, as or in the direction of its not-yet and no-longer. The not-yet and the no-longer cannot be understood to represent states which are merely absent from a present being, which itself would at each moment of its movement be indifferent to these states, but they rather constitute the being of a being in movement. This is to say that the not-yet and no-longer cannot be understood, however difficult it may be not to think in this way, as chronologically prior and posterior to the present state of the being in movement. In its movement, a being is at one and the same time shortage, form and a present ‘subject’ or hupokeimenon. It is such a threefold ontological structure of becoming that is to be thought as ecstatic, a standing outside of itself, a non-coincidence with itself of the being in movement. As we read in Physics IV, ‘every change is by nature ecstatic (Rκστατικν)’ [222b21]. Aristotle otherwise expresses this idea by saying that every change is the being outside of itself of a being: ‘movement makes the being exist outside of itself (κνησι Rξστησι τ cπbρχον)’ [221b3]. It is to be remarked here that the verb Rξστησι or Rξιστbναι that I have translated as being-outside-of-itself is the origin of the Latin existentia, and in 1927 Heidegger notes the essential affiliation of the verb with the idea of ecstasis that he uses to describe Dasein’s temporality.7 In the Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935, however, Heidegger dissociates the two terms, introducing a much more negative argument concerning the verb: ‘the thoughtlessness and vapidity with which one uses the words “existence” and “to exist” as designations for being offer fresh evidence of our alienation from being’ since the original Greek verb would mean, in fact, to be destroyed and thus ‘precisely not to be’ [EM 49]. A word that we use to speak of the being of a thing would originally mean the destruction and thus non-being of a thing. Yet this etymology is by no means certain. As Pierre Aubenque retorts in citing the dictionary of Liddell and Scott, the Greek verb never possessed such a negative sense, even if, for Aristotle, ecstatic movement has the secondary effect of wearing out, aging and finally destroying beings.8 To follow Aubenque, the idea that the being in movement exists outside of itself means that ‘in every one of its moments, it “bursts open,” as it were, overtakes itself and re-overtakes itself according to a plurality of senses and directions that define the ecstatic unity of its structure’.9 In order to conceive this ecstatic structure we are compelled to think the being in movement as stretched out beyond itself as merely a present thing and thus beyond the present moment in time. Certainly, this temporal sense of the three principles is by no means thematic in the


first book of the Physics. This is evident when Aristotle discusses form and shortage together as either the presence or the absence, the parousia or the apousia, of form [191a7]. Form and shortage are presented simply as a question of presence or absence, whereas, as we have seen, at the moment of the change form is not simply present but it is what a being is not yet, and shortage is what a being is no longer. Yet, in the end, the temporal sense of Aristotle’s analysis can only be determined in reading Physics IV. The more immediate task of the present chapter, however, is one of examining the account of phusis in the second book of the Physics in relation to what is announced in the first book as another way of overcoming the Eleatic impasses concerning movement: a thinking of movement according to the conceptual doublet of dunamis and energeia.

β – Phusis and the definition of movement according to dunamis and energeia According to the first chapter of Physics II, physis constitutes a particular sort or region of beings, the phusei onta, natural beings. As examples of such beings Aristotle offers animals and their organs, plants and the four elements: earth, fire, air and water. This region of beings is delimited in contrast to the beings that are produced technically. The natural being has the iρχx κινxσ,ω [192b14], the principle of its movement in itself, whereas the being produced technically has this principle in another being, in the producer; a human being is generated from a human being whereas a bedstead is not generated from a bedstead [193b8–9]. Human beings, here considered biologically, produce another human being through the process of reproduction, whereas the technical product can never reproduce itself in this way even if it ‘incidentally has within itself the principles of change’ [192b22–3] which inhere in its materials. A wooden bedstead could bring forth a tree if it were allowed to germinate, but never another bedstead. For Aristotle, ‘everything that possesses this kind of principle’, namely the principle of its movement in itself, ‘ “has” phusis’ [192b33–4]. Phusis is, thus, the principle of the movement of the phusei onta. To follow Heidegger’s translation in 1939 of arche in this context, phusis is the ‘origin and ordering’ [G9 247/189] of the movement of natural beings; origin and ordering because phusis is not, so to speak, left behind by that of which it is the origin, but it rather always remains with what emerges from it. Phusis thus constitutes the being of natural beings; the question of what phusis is, is one of the beingness of natural beings – J οSσα τaν φjσ,ι ντων [193a10].

Time and Motion 87

Aristotle enumerates different modalities of movement in delimiting the sphere of the phusei onta. These modalities are, in effect, presupposed by the analysis of becoming in Physics I, and they correspond to different categories of being: locomotion (φορb) is movement according to the category of place (κατ τπον); growth and diminution (αvξησι and φθσι), the increase and decrease in the size of something, is movement according to the category of quantity (κατ πσον) and alteration (iλλοωσι) is movement according to the category of quality (κατ ποον). These three modes of κνησι are, however, to be distinguished from pure genesis and its counterpart, φθι, corruption, which is movement according to the first of the categories, namely beingness. This is the most fundamental modality of movement in relation to the question of phusis since a determination of the essence of the latter is achieved within a comparison of natural to technical production. Notwithstanding the fact that Aristotle here and elsewhere uses the terms κνησι and μ,ταβολx interchangeably, as signifying a change away from something to something (Oκ τινο ,$ τι), metabole is the most general concept of ‘movement’. In other words, metabole has two species, namely genesis/corruption and kinesis, which itself has three modes.10 Upon delimiting the region of natural beings, Aristotle first addresses a contemporary conception of the essence of phusis as matter. The form of natural beings can change as when one recasts a bronze statue, but the material persists; the form thus can be thought as merely accidental and temporary, whereas the essential element would be its matter. Certainly, the bronze can be further reduced to its elements, but this is why ‘different people say that either fire, or earth, or air, or water, or some of these, or all of these are phusis itself’ [193a24]. Against such a determination of the essence of phusis as consisting in the ultimately ‘underlying material’, Aristotle posits the primacy of form. Just as unformed wood is not yet a table, a product of techne, the matter that is, for Aristotle, only potentially flesh and bone does not yet have the phusis [193b3–4] that pertains to flesh and bone itself; ‘when we speak of the thing into the nature we are inquiring, we mean by its name an actuality (entelechia) not merely a potentiality’ [7–8]. Beings are, in the proper or highest sense, only when they hold-themselves-in-their-end, only when they come to stand as the sort of beings that they are in their form. Hence, nature is the distinctive form or quality of such things as have within themselves the origin and ordering of movement, such form or characteristic property not being separable from the things themselves, save conceptually [193b3–5].


In technical production the form that the produced being will assume is first envisaged in the soul before the matter itself is set in motion in the movement of production. Natural production, however, without there being such a pre-envisaging of the form, is a self-production, a self-placing into form, which is more proper to the essence of phusis than the matter that form as a self-placing appropriates. Phusis, then, is the movement of a self-placing into form, but it is necessary to determine what movement itself is, for as Aristotle writes in Physics III [200b14], without understanding this we have not yet arrived at an adequate determination of phusis. Here Aristotle offers an account, a definition even, of movement in terms of dunamis and energeia or entelechia, but these concepts are more presupposed than explained in the Physics, and they are examined in the most extensive fashion in the Metaphysics. All three terms, in fact, already derive from an interpretation of the being of the being in movement. Concerning dunamis as, according to book Delta, a ‘principle of movement or change’ [1019a19], the production of a table, for example, requires that the wood have the capacity or potentiality to support the form of a table. It requires also the capacity of a producer, an agent, to shape this wood into a table, a capacity that is realised in the finished product. In both these active and passive senses dunamis is a determination of the being of beings and, like shortage, it is to be thought as a certain sort of non-being, the presence of an absence. Dunamis, however, is relative to energeia, to the actuality for which it constitutes the possibility. Now the technical origin of energeia is evident given the Greek word from which it derives, namely ergon, which means a work or task, but in the movement of pure genesis, if matter is the possible then the energeia of a being is its being-in-work, its standing present in its form. Energeia thus is form, but form viewed from a certain perspective, as Aristotle writes in Metaphysics Eta, 3: We must not fail to recognise that sometimes it is doubtful whether a name denotes the composite beingness or the energeia and the morphe, whether, for example, house denotes the composite thing made of bricks and stones arranged in such-and-such a way or the energeia and the eidos, a shelter [1043a29–33]. ‘House’ can denominate either bricks and mortar arranged in a certain way or a shelter, and the latter is the veritable being-in-work, that is, the function of the being of a house. According to this sense of energeia Heidegger’s attempt to interpret it with the idea of Zuhandenheit shows

Time and Motion 89

itself to be by no means arbitrary. The tradition has, however, translated both energeia and entelechia with one term, namely actus, act or actuality, and they are indeed synonymous insofar as they denote not the process of movement itself, but rather the state of a being at the accomplishment and completion of this process; a house can only be a shelter at the end of the process of its being built. This endpoint of movement is rest, but rest is an aspect and a shortage of movement rather than the absolute negation of it, and Aristotle clearly distinguishes rest from immobility, the former characterising only those beings that can move.11 Although dunamis and energeia issue from an interpretation of movement, Metaphysics Z does go on to develop a thinking of these terms that is contrasted to movement. For every movement is incomplete – making thin, learning, walking, building: these are movements, and indeed incomplete. For it is not true that at the same time a thing is walking and has walked […] But it is the same thing that at the same time has seen and is seeing, or is thinking and has thought. The latter is what I mean by energeia and the former what I mean by movement [1048b28–35]. Seeing, thought and even life itself are neither the result of a process nor a process that seeks an end outside of itself in the way that the movement of building aims towards the finished house. Such activities fall under the title of praxis [1048b20] as opposed to poiesis, for they have their end and perfection in themselves; the present of these activities is already perfect, and thus it can be said that it is the same thing to see and to have seen. It should be remarked that in such activities energeia does not come to replace dunamis, but it is rather the pure manifestation of its possibility that safeguards and even develops the latter. As Aristotle writes in On the Soul, energeia in this sense is not the destruction (φθορb) of dunamis in its becoming actual but rather its preservation (σωτηρα)12; the act of playing a musical instrument, for example, is not the destruction of the musician’s capacity to play, but it is rather the full manifestation and often the improving of this capacity itself. There can, however, be no definition of either sense, the one relating to movement and the one contrasted to it, of energeia: The notion of energeia that we propose can be known by induction (Rπαγωγx) from the particular cases; we need not seek a definition for every term, but must comprehend the analogy. That as that which is actually building to that which is capable of building, so is that


which is awake to that which is asleep; and that which is seeing to that which has the eyes shut, but has the power of sight; and that which is differentiated out of matter to the matter; and the finished article to the raw material [1048a38–9]. Energeia, then, cannot be defined and can only be known by induction. It cannot be defined because it is a determination, not simply of beings, as Heidegger is keen to stress, but of the very being of beings. As we saw in the first chapter, for Aristotle the being of beings transcends all possibility of definition; it can neither be defined nor serve to define anything else. This means, however, that it is necessary to understand the idea of induction here in a quite particular sense. In fact, if we were to understand ‘induction’ here as the empirical working through of several factual instances in order to attain something general and abstract from the properties in which they share, then the translation of epagoge by ‘induction’ is misleading. Epagoge, as Heidegger writes in 1939, means rather: ‘leading-toward’ what comes into view insofar as we have previously looked away, over and beyond individual beings. At what? At being. For example, only if we already have treeness in view can we identify individual trees. ’Επαγωγx is seeing and making visible what already stands in view – for example, treeness [G9 244/187]. Selecting particular examples of energeia in order to attain a general, conceptual determination of energeia itself, would only presuppose what it attempts to explain insofar as we would already have to have an understanding of energeia in order to select examples of it. Aristotle’s ‘induction’, therefore, in this instance at least, is to be understood as the interpretation and making explicit of what we have always and already understood of beings in their being, and in this case in their being-in-work. The induction necessary to an account of energeia, however, and as Aristotle relates, has an analogical form. ‘Actuality’ can only be known fully in relation to ‘possibility’, the possibility to become that particular ‘actuality’, and thus the relation between the ‘actual’ and the ‘possible’ can only be thought in the manner of, and in fact as what underlies or enables, the relation between the finished product and the raw-material, for example, or of that between the person seeing and the person sleeping. On Heidegger’s account, with such a thinking of ‘actuality’ and ‘possibility’ as an interpretative, ontological response to the fact of movement, Aristotle’s Metaphysics attains another level of philosophical enquiry, one

Time and Motion 91

in which there occurs a genuine breakthrough to the being of beings. Although the question of the ontological difference still resonates in the ideas of to hupokeimenon, ‘the subject’, and ousia that are promoted in book Zeta, in book Theta the question of the being of beings is nevertheless brought much more explicitly to the fore. To return, however, to the ‘definition’ of movement in Physics III, if both the concepts of energeia and dunamis derive from an interpretation of the fact of movement, then what sense could there be in attempting to define movement itself with these very concepts? The enterprise would be circular from the outset, with movement defined by ‘actuality’ and ‘possibility’, and ‘actuality’ and ‘possibility’ explained in terms of movement. Yet, this would only be a vicious circle if we expected from this ‘definition’ a veritable definition rather than an account of movement – rather than, in other words, an attempt to make the fact of movement intelligible in the widest sense. The point to be drawn from this difficulty is that movement resists definition as much as the ontological ideas used to account for it, because movement, like dunamis and energeia themselves, is of the order of the being of beings. According to Aristotle’s infamous ‘definition’, however, in all its modalities ‘the actuality (entelechia) of what is possible as possible is clearly movement’ [201b4–5]. Now for the proponents of what has been called the ‘process view’, entelechia is here to be translated as actualising, and thus movement would be defined as the actualising, that is, the process of the becoming actual of a potentiality.13 This interpretation is problematic on several counts: nowhere else in the Aristotelian corpus can entelechia be understood to signify a process rather than a result of a process, and the definition would risk becoming still more circular, if not vacuous, since movement would be defined as a transition or process, that is, as a movement. Certainly, it cannot be denied that Aristotle describes movement elsewhere as the becoming actual of a possibility. The third chapter of Physics III offers the following remarks: movement does appear as a certain energeia, but as not yet having come into its end; the reason for this is that the possible of which there is actuality (energeia) is incomplete. Hence the difficulty of grasping what it is. For what can it be save a shortage, or a possibility or a pure actuality? But none of these seem possible. It remains then, as we have said, to define it as a certain actuality [201b31–202a1]. Movement is a certain actuality, a certain energeia, but one that is ateles, incomplete, not yet at its end. It is incomplete, because the possible has


not yet been fully actualised, which is to say that the possible has not yet been destroyed in becoming actual. An account of movement as the becoming actual of possibility, then, is not foreign to Aristotle’s thinking. Yet such an account tells us less about movement than it does about its beginning and its end, and, in the words of Aubenque, it ‘would be to use the notions of actuality and possibility in an extrinsic way in relation to movement as if possibility and actuality were the terms between which movement moves and not determinations of movement itself’.14 The most fundamental problem of such an account, however, is that one cannot simply assert the chronological priority of possibility to actuality. Certainly, on the one hand, wood is capable of, appropriate for being formed into a table before the process of its formation. Yet, on the other hand, possibility is only known in relation to the actuality of which it is a possibility, and it only becomes manifest in its actualisation. This is why Aristotle can write in Metaphysics Theta, within a discussion of the different senses of priority in relation to both terms, that actuality is prior to possibility according to its concept or formula, τu λγ/ [1049b13]. If possibility precedes actuality as the condition of the latter, then it is equally true to say that actuality precedes possibility as the condition of the latter’s revelation. On this basis, one can understand why Aristotle’s response to the question of the respective chronological priority of either possibility or actuality is ambiguous, why he will assert that ‘according to time, actuality is in one sense prior, in another sense it is not’ [1049b12]. In fact, and to cite Aubenque once again, the debate concerning the respective priority of possibility and actuality is a false debate. Actuality and possibility are co-originary; they are only the ecstases of movement; only the clash of possibility and actuality at the heart of movement is real; only the violence of human discourse … can maintain dissociated … the originary tension which constitutes, in its unity that is always divided, the being of the being in movement.15 The energeia of form is what a being is not-yet in its movement, but this not-yet arises only from the possibility – in other words, the shortage – of this form. That dunamis and energeia are the ecstases of movement means that they are the mutual implication of a being’s not-yet and no-more insofar as it is in motion. Dunamis and energeia as determinations of the being of the being in movement, then, are another way of expressing the threefold, but not tripartite, structure that Aristotle first

Time and Motion 93

approaches in the Physics according to three principles of shortage, form and hupokeimenon. It is, for us, from this perspective that Aristotle’s ‘definition’ of movement must be thought. Possibility and actuality are here distinguished, and without such a distinction any discourse concerning movement would be impossible. Yet, they are at once spoken of in their indistinction and mutual implication. Movement is the actuality of the possible as such, it is that by which the possible shows itself in its own particular actuality as the possible in relation to the higher actuality of which it is the possibility. The ‘actuality-view’ of Aristotle’s definition is, thus, right to understand in the word entelechia an actuality rather than an actualising, and to understand movement as in some sense a specific actuality of the possible. Yet this view remains abstract without an apprehension of the very ecstatic structure of movement. Although Heidegger does not explicitly bring to the fore the ecstatic structure implied in Aristotle’s determination of movement in general, the essay of 1939 entitled ‘On the Essence and Concept of Phusis’ brings the particular ecstatic structure of phusis as movement to the fore. The first point to note concerning this structure is that the particularity of phusis as movement lies not only in that it is self-moving, but also in that natural production, unlike technical production, does not come to its end in the repose of the finished product, but rather consists in a constant process of generation and corruption, as the tree that blossoms and sheds it leaves within the cycle of the seasons. In the final paragraph of the first chapter of Physics II, Aristotle characterises the unfinished movement or the energeia ateles of phusis, which is a continual movement of self-placing into form, as a ‘way’: phusis which is addressed as genesis is a way into phusis (I φjσι J λ,γομNνη 0 γNν,σι δ Rστιν ,1 φjσιν). […] [W]hatever is a being from and in the manner of phusis goes from something toward something insofar as this being is determined by phusis (iλλ τ φυμ,νον Rκ τιν ,1 τ Oρχ,τα, φj,ται). But ‘toward what’ does it go forth in the manner of phusis (,1 τ ο2ν φj,ται;)? Not toward that ‘from which’ (it is generated in each instance) but rather toward that as which it is generated in each instance (οSχ Rξ ο2, iλλ’ ,1 3) [193b12–18]. Heidegger argues that ‘way’ here is not simply to be thought as a distance between a starting point and a goal, but rather as a being-on-the-way. The natural being, in other words, is not a mere present-at-hand


thing which would exist indifferently between the two limits of its movement. Certainly, at 192b Aristotle writes that all phusei onta are beings in the proper sense or have being; that the defining characteristic of being itself is to be a hupokeimenon; and that phusis is always in such a hupokeimenon. As the first chapter of this thesis showed, however, if to hupokeimenon speaks of something that lies present before us, then it speaks also of the being of the thing as residing precisely in its lyingpresent. The fact, therefore, that phusis always resides in a hupokeimenon does not mean that the movement of phusis would have its seat in a selfidentical subject that would be ontologically ‘indifferent’ to its movement, but only that at each moment of movement there is something that lies present; and it is the lying-present of a natural being which is to be understood as a being-underway. This being-under-way is a being-on-the-way to phusis itself. This movement cannot, however, simply be represented in the form of a circle, since phusis does not advance towards that from which it was generated, but rather it advances towards what it will become. Although the process of natural generation as a being-on-the-way never has to go outside of itself, since, for example, man generates man, a father, for example, does not beget another father but rather a son. On the one hand, then, what is generated is something other than that ‘from which’ it is generated; and yet, on the other hand, it is the same since it is still a man. Thus if the movement of phusis cannot be represented in the form of a circle it is nevertheless the case, as Heidegger writes, that the ‘ “from which”, the “to which”, and the “how” ’ of phusis as a placing itself into appearance ‘remain the same’ [G9 293/224]. This is to say that if phusis as a going forth is a returning into itself, then the ‘self to which it returns’, rather than being a mere indifferently present-at-hand thing, ‘remains a going-forth’. In the concluding lines of the chapter Aristotle returns briefly to the account of shortage in the preceding book of the Physics. Morphe, form, is phusis but both these terms are said διχa, in two ways, insofar as shortage is a kind of form [193b20–1]. As Heidegger extrapolates, the being-under-way of phusis as a coming into appearance of form is at once constituted by an absence; in this being-under-way an absence ‘simultaneously becomes present’ [G9 367]. Yet Heidegger thinks this absence in two ways: not only as a no-longer but also as a not-yet. This is to say that Heidegger draws out the implications of the three principles of becoming in Physics I rather than following Aristotle’s analysis to the letter. Form is not simply to be opposed to shortage since it is, as what a

Time and Motion 95

being is not yet, in itself a sort of absence. Thus, to return to the example of the ripening fruit, on the one hand the fruit in fruition is not yet the ripe fruit that it will be; but the not-yet of the ripeness of the fruit can emerge only from the lack or shortage of what it will be. The ‘not yet’ and the ‘no longer’ as, in their unity, a sort of absence constitutive of the present being in movement, then, constitute the very being of the natural being as a being-under-way, and it is on this basis that Heidegger offers what one can read as a definition of phusis in Aristotle. Phusis is ‘the presencing of the absencing of itself, one that is on-the-way from itself and unto itself. As such an absencing, φjσι remains a going-back-into-itself, but this going-back is only the going back of a going-forth’ [G9 299/228]. The natural being, insofar as it is in movement, is its own not-yet and no-more16 and, again, if this ecstatic movement as phusis is the returning back of phusis into itself, then this going back is a going-back to a being that is only ever a going-forth.

γ – The ecstatic temporality of Dasein Such is the interpretation of phusis that Heidegger offers in the most deliberate fashion in 1939. Yet how exactly does the analytic of Dasein appropriate Aristotle’s accounts of movement and of phusis of movement? In the project of a phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle that Heidegger articulates in the essay of 1922, a thinking of the movedness of ‘factical life’ is explicitly, despite the opacity of some of the terms, related to the concept of shortage: As ‘not yet such and such’, and in fact as the That-with-respect-towhich (Worauf) of concern, it [factical life] is at the same time already such and such …. The ‘not-yet’ and the ‘already’ are to be understood in theirqq ‘unity’, that is they are to be understood on the basis of a primordial givenness, a givenness for which the ‘not-yet’ and ‘already’ are determinate explicata. Determinate, because with them, the objective (das Gegenständliche) is placed in a determinate aspect of movement. The concept of στNρησι is the category of the above named explicata [PIA 42/383]. It is necessary to recall at this juncture that throughout the 1920s Heidegger attempts to interpret dunamis and energeia in terms of Zuhandenheit. It would seem that it is for this reason that the weight of a thinking of the movedness of ‘factical life’, that is, of Dasein, falls on the idea of shortage. Yet just as in the essay of 1939, shortage is here


interpreted as the unity of the ‘not-yet’ and ‘already’ of the being in movement – a unity which is ecstatic in the sense outlined above. In order to understand fully this interpretative appropriation, however, it is necessary to underline that the first division of Being and Time shows that Dasein’s being has, in fact, a threefold structure. First, as we have seen, Dasein exists as a being that is ahead-of-itself as a being-possible. Yet, second, the possibilities that Dasein projects do not come to it, as it were, out of thin air. Dasein has ‘in each case already been thrown’ or delivered over ‘into a world’ [SZ 192]; it always and already finds itself with a past and an understanding of itself, of which it is not the master and which determines the range of what is possible for it. Dasein, then, is not merely a potentiality-for-being, but it is a thrown-potentiality-for-being. Third, however, Dasein always exists in situ as a being-alongside the entities that it is not. Dasein, then, is an ‘ahead-of-itself-already-being-in (a world) as being-alongside (entities encountered within-the-world)’ [SZ 327] and Heidegger names the unity of this threefold structure care (Sorge). The second division of Being and Time, particularly §65, elaborates the specifically temporal sense of this threefold structure of care. Primarily, Dasein’s being-ahead-of-itself is a being-futural. Dasein is that being which has its being to be, and it comes to itself or towards itself from the possibilities that it projects as possibilities of its own potentiality-forbeing. Dasein exists as its future, which future is more original than and other to a now ‘which has not yet become actual and which sometime will be for the first time’ [SZ 325]. It is only in existing as ahead-of-itself, as its future that Dasein can expect or await any innerworldly event as that which is simply not yet present. Second, Dasein’s being-thrown is an existing as its past (Gewesenheit), existing as a having-been. Such a having-been is to be contrasted to the being no-longer present of something vorhanden; ‘ “As long as” Dasein factically exists, it is never past, but always is indeed as already having been, in the sense of “I-am-as-having-been” ’ [SZ 328]. Dasein has its thrownness or having-been to be, and it is only on the basis of this having-been that it can recall or forget an innerworldly event that is no-longer present. In projecting possibilities as a being-futural Dasein projects its own having-been, and if it comes towards itself as a beingfutural, then in so doing it always comes back to itself from the past. Hence rather than being an ineluctable necessity, Dasein’s past is the source of its possibilities as a being-futural. Third, as a being-with or being-towards the things of the world, Dasein exists as a presenting (Gegenwärtigen), a making-present of the beings with

Time and Motion 97

which it is concerned. It is only upon the horizon of its own temporality that the beings that Dasein is not can appear as either zuhanden or vorhanden. In existing as the unity of what Heidegger terms, in an Aristotelian mode, the ecstases of the future, present and past, Dasein is to be thought as a being that exists outside of itself: The future, the character of having been, and the present, show the phenomenal characteristics of the ‘towards-oneself’, the ‘back-to’, and the ‘letting-oneself-be-encountered-by’. The phenomena of the ‘towards’, the ‘to’ and the ‘alongside’ make temporality manifest as the Rκστατικν pure and simple. Temporality is the primordial ‘outside-of-itself’ in and for itself [SZ 328–9]. Temporality as the basic structure of Dasein’s being ‘is not something that might first be extant as a thing and thereafter outside itself, so that it would be leaving itself behind itself; instead, within its own self, intrinsically, it is nothing but the outside itself pure and simple’. Temporality, thus, is not, if by the verb ‘be’ we mean to be merely and simply present. Rather than saying that temporality is, it is better to say that it ‘temporalises’ (zeitigt sich) itself. Accordingly, Dasein is not first a being that would subsist in itself as a substance only to be led out of itself by the occasional fact of movement, but it is nothing other than the movement, the unfolding, as it were, of its ecstatic temporalisation. To paraphrase Heidegger’s reading of phusis, if Dasein always comes back to itself from its having been and towards itself from its being-futural, then the self to which it returns and comes towards is not merely something indifferent to its movement, but rather remains a going-forth in the movement of its temporalisation. It can be seen clearly here, then, how Heidegger mobilises the basic structure of Aristotle’s account of ecstatic movement, and even of phusis as movement, at the level of Dasein’s ecstatic temporality. Of course, if phusis and Dasein are formally analogous in their self-moving structure, then Dasein is not merely one being in the world amongst others, but that being for which there is world; it is a self-aware being-in-the-world. It is necessary to recall here that even if the analysis of Dasein appropriates Aristotle’s account of movement, then fundamental ontology nevertheless seeks to distinguish radically the being of Dasein from the being of the things that it is not. Dasein’s movedness, then, can in no way be accounted for according to the concepts of matter and form, nor according to any of the Aristotelian modalities of movement. In other words,


‘the movedness of Dasein is not the movement of something present-at-hand’ [SZ 374]. At bottom, the movedness of Dasein is to be distinguished from the movement of the things of the world, because Dasein is not simply a being that can occasionally, or even continually, undergo movement in time. Heidegger seeks to show that Dasein is the movement of time itself as temporality. Temporality, as forming the horizon of world and therefore of ‘any understanding of being whatsoever’ [SZ 1], is that ‘ “in which” the present-at-hand is in motion or at rest’ [SZ 419]. The movedness of Dasein is ultimately to be conceived ‘in terms of the way Dasein stretches along’ [SZ 374] between its birth and death. Dasein is this stretch, it is the between of its birth and death, but not as something between two points in time. Certainly, one can consider one’s own birth and even one’s own death as mere empirical events that occur in time, notwithstanding the fact that no empirical experience can be had of either the one or the other. Yet more fundamentally, as a being that has its being to be, Dasein is a being-born and a being-mortal. Dasein is its birth because it always has the fact of its birth to assume as a task insofar as it exists as a being-possible; it is its death because as mortal, as soon as it is born it is already faced with the unrealisable, non-experiential possibility of its own death. Dasein, therefore, does not simply move along a pre-existent path or way in time, but it is the whole of this path itself, it is a being-under-way which stretches itself out as its days advance. This stretching out is termed the ‘historising’ (das Geschehen)17 of Dasein and it constitutes, as I indicated in the introduction to this study, the prior condition of any thematic study of history.

3.2

Vulgar time and ecstatic temporality Physics IV doubtless confirms the Heideggerian de-limitation. Without a doubt, Aristotle thinks time on the basis of ousia as parousia, on the basis of the now, the point etc. And yet an entire reading could be organised that would repeat in Aristotle’s text both this limitation and its opposite. Jacques Derrida ‘Ousia and Gramm[ ’18

Thus far the chapter has shown how Heidegger appropriates Aristotle’s conceptions of movement within an account of the movedness, which is at bottom the temporality, of Dasein. Yet if Aristotle can be understood to think movement as an ecstatic movement, then does he not in some sense think time accordingly? Is time for Aristotle not, at least in some

Time and Motion 99

manner, an ecstatic time? As I have already stated, according to the sketch of the destruction of the history of ontology provided in §6 of Being and Time, the answer to this question seems to be negative. If Aristotle is one of the Greeks of whom Heidegger writes here, then he would think time on the basis of the present, as a series of now-points, and ultimately as a ‘mere thing amongst things’ [SZ 26] in passing over Dasein’s ecstatic temporality. The ground of these two aspects of the vulgar conception of time would lie in a Greek understanding of being itself as constant presence. However, following the guiding thread of Jacques Derrida’s remarks in ‘Ousia and Gramm[ ’, the intention here is to show that Aristotle’s text does indeed admit both Heidegger’s delimitation and its opposite, namely a thinking of an ecstatic time. This second possibility has been deliberately advanced by Pierre Aubenque – to whom Derrida does not refer on this point – within a brief but remarkable passage of his Le problème de l’ être chez Aristote. In reading Physics IV, therefore, the ultimate aim of the following analyses is to develop Aubenque’s claims in relation to Heidegger’s delimitation. This delimitation is expressed in the most extensive fashion in the lecture course of 1927 entitled the Basic Problems of Phenomenology, and in reading this I will show that it contains significant nuances that leave it much more open-ended than §6 of Being and Time itself might lead us to assume. The account of time in Physics IV has three main stages, which I examine in the first three following subsections. It begins ‘by means of an exoteric discourse (δι τaν Rξωτ,ρικaν λγων)’ [217b31] that brings to light the problems, the aporiai that result and have resulted from philosophical reflection concerning time. In his customary manner, Aristotle proceeds by introducing a positive response to the philosophical question only after having examined the conceptions of his predecessors.19 Second, this treatment of the aporiai is succeeded by a determination of time as the ‘number of movement according to the before and after’. Third, Aristotle offers an account of the status of the now in relation to time, an account that the elaboration of the aporiai and the determination of time presuppose to varying degrees. It is on this basis that I aim to show the manner in which Aristotle’s thinking does indeed allow for both a positive and a negative repetition.

α – The exoteric discourse The exoteric discourse concerns the question of whether time belongs to ‘beings or non-beings (τaν ντων Rστιν s τaν μy ντων)’ [32], and the question of its nature or phusis. In relation to the first question Aristotle


articulates an aporetic that has three phases: first, time is composed of the past and the future, but as that which is no more and that which is not yet respectively, the past and future do not exist. How, then, can time exist if it is ‘what is composed of that which does not exist (τ δ ’ Rκ μy ντων συγκ,μ,νον)’ [218a2–3]? The second phase begins by reformulating the same argument: if a divisible thing exists, its parts must also exist, but time, although apparently divisible into parts, namely the past and the future, has parts that do not themselves exist. Time, thus, does not seem to have any existence; it seems in no way to be an existent thing. If, however, these arguments would seem to privilege the ‘now’ as the most existent aspect of time, then the now itself cannot be understood as a part of a whole, given that the past and the future are non-existent. This is one way in which we can understand the argument according to which ‘time does not seem to be composed of the now’ [218a8–9]. Yet it can be understood in a more fundamental way with reference to the account of the continuity of time that, as we will see, Aristotle discusses and develops in the course of Physics IV. The now is not a part of time, time is not composed of the now, because time is continuous, that is, divisible ad infinitum, and the now itself, in merely dividing the past from the future, is indivisible in the sense of being without duration. The third phase of the aporetic examines the paradoxical status of the now: it is difficult to determine whether the ‘now’ which divides the past from the future is perpetually different or perpetually the same. On the one hand, that it is different seems inconceivable because it is impossible to say when it disappears to allow a new ‘now’ to take its place. It cannot disappear when it is present, precisely because it is present; but neither can it disappear in another instant, and the reason for this is to be found, again, in the theory of continuity. Time contains a potential infinity of indivisible, durationless ‘nows’, like the line contains a potential infinity of extensionless points. Consequently, no two ‘nows’ can be next to each other, as it were, in time since there would be time between them, as time is infinitely divisible. The now, therefore, cannot disappear in another now, since between the first now and the now in which it disappears there is a potential infinity of other ‘nows’ in which it would have had to have remained identical to itself, which is impossible. On the other hand, that it is the same seems equally impossible because it would nullify the distinction between the past, present and the future; ‘the events of 10,000 years ago would co-exist with those of today and nothing will be posterior or anterior to anything else’ [218a26–9].20

Time and Motion 101

Aristotle begins the exoteric discourse, then, in asking whether time is or is not a being, whether or not it can be understood to share in ousia [218a3]. The first two phases of the aporetic lead us to apprehend the ‘now’ as the most real or existent aspect of time. This already seems to be an illustration of the veracity of Heidegger’s thesis concerning the meaning of being in Aristotle and the limitations that this imposes on his determination on time: being means presence, to be present as a thing is present. Time, thus, can only be thought on the basis of the now, and ultimately as a mere thing. As Heidegger argues in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: Seen in this way, what time is, is only the now that is vorhanden at each now. Aristotle’s aporia with reference to the being of time – which is still the principal difficulty today – derives from the concept of being as equal to Vorhandensein [G24 386/272]. Time as commonly conceived is ‘the intrinsically free-floating run off’ of an ‘extant sequence’ of ‘nows’ [G24 385/272]. The vulgarity or commonality of Aristotle’s exoteric discourse, then, would consist in the fact that it approaches time as if it were a mere thing without considering the adequacy of such a discourse itself. In other words, Aristotle asks ‘what is time? (τg Rστιν χρνο)’ [219a3] without enquiring whether an account of time does not require us to bring into question, first, the possibility of time having a what-being or essence in the manner of, say, a table, and, second, the very meaning of being itself. It remains to be decided, however, whether Aristotle’s exoteric discourse does not lead at least to the possibility of an esoteric, non-vulgar approach to the question of time. Certainly, in the course of Physics IV Aristotle never explicitly brings into question the validity of the exoteric approach in counterposing it to any other.21 Yet it is not unreasonable to expect that the introduction of the problem of time by means of the exoteric discourse serves only to deconstruct, as it were, this discourse itself, for as Aristotle writes, these introductory considerations lead us to suspect that time’s existence is ‘faint and obscure’ [217b33] and even that it ‘does not at all exist (5λω οSκ Oστιν)’.

β – Time as the number of movement The idea that time is no mere thing amongst other things is one that seems to emerge from the first of Aristotle’s positive arguments in Chapter 11 of Book IV of the Physics. This argument concerns the relation of movement to time. On the one hand, time is intrinsically related to


movement or change since without it, without our recognising the movement of one particular thing, without even the passage of thoughts in the soul – which, for Aristotle, is a form of movement22 – we would be unaware of the passage of time. On the other hand, more or less change can occur in the same time, which means that time itself cannot be identical with change. Time is not movement, then, but it is intrinsically related to movement. It is ‘something of movement (τ τt κινxσ,ω)’ [219a4]. But what sort of a thing is it? In what way is it a thing? For Aristotle, the movement of a moving body is only in that body itself, whereas time, as soon as we apprehend a moving body, is ‘current everywhere and about everything (παρ πdσιν)’ [218b14–5]. This argument will be developed in Chapter 13: beings that have at least the possibility of movement are ‘in time’ and are ‘embraced (π,ριNχ,ται)’ by time.23 These terms can, of course, be compared to Kant’s determination of time as a form of intuition, and Heidegger does indeed make this comparison.24 Understood in this way, then, time would be much less a being than it would be akin to a condition of possibility of beings. Moreover, to return to the initial articulation of the problematic in Chapter 10, the question of time is twofold: Aristotle not only poses the question of whether time belongs to beings or non-beings but also the question of the nature, the phusis of time. This question is not to be understood in the originally Platonic sense of the what-being of a being, since the aporetic that Aristotle articulates in relation to it concerns the question of whether time can be identified with the revolution of the heavens.25 The question of the phusis of time is, therefore, a question of what one can describe as the ideality or the reality of time. Aristotle responds to the question in greater depth in Chapter 14 of Physics IV in arguing that time cannot exist without the soul.26 Insofar as time is what is counted or measured in relation to movement, time itself cannot exist without a ‘mind’ to measure or quantify it. Time, then, is that which embraces beings, but it is this ‘embrace’ only in relation to the soul. We are, at least in principle, not very far from Heidegger’s own determination of temporality as that which is more subjective than the subject and more objective than the object. The idea of being in time can be understood to lead us beyond the idea of time as a thing amongst things. The account of time as the duration of movement does not, however, afford us any possibility of transcending the second aspect of what Heidegger delimits as the vulgar conception of time, namely the primacy of the now.

Time and Motion 103

Aristotle begins in stating that all movement, as movement from something to something, has a ‘magnitude (μNγ,θο)’ [219a11] or dimension and that this dimension, is continuous, that is, infinitely divisible. Movement cannot be decomposed into a series of static parts, but the continuity of movement depends on or follows from the continuity of the dimension that the moving body traverses in locomotion. Although locomotion is the primary example, dimension cannot simply be understood in the sense of spatial extension, since it is thought as a determination of metabole, of movement in its broadest sense, as Aristotle will underline.27 The problem is not treated explicitly, but all movement must be seen as possessing dimension: the alteration of a thing from its being-red to its being-green, for example, must also be seen as having a dimension, a stretch, evidently non-spatial, such that its movement cannot be decomposed into a series of static parts.28 On this basis, Aristotle states that if dimension and movement are continuous, then so too must be the time in which it occurs. The concepts of before and after (πρτ,ρον κα lστ,ρον) are then introduced as determining all three levels; although ‘before and after’ have, for Aristotle, predominantly a spatial sense, they characterise dimension, movement and time. In any length, we can distinguish a before and after of spatial position, and in any locomotion we can distinguish between the successive places that the body occupies. In distinguishing the before and after of movement, however, there is already implied a distinguishing of a before and after of time: When we determine a movement by distinguishing (ριζ,ιν) its before and after we also recognise a lapse of time; for it is when we are aware of the measuring of motion by a before and after that we say that time has passed. Our determination consists in grasping that they are different, and that there is something else between them. For when we think that the extremes are different from the middle, and the soul says that the ‘nows’ are two, one before and one after, then we say that there is time, and that that is time. For time is distinguished by the now [219a22–30]. The before and after are here spoken of as point-like, rather than as stretch-like. They are not the past and the future which the now divides, but two successive ‘nows’, one earlier, one later. In the case of locomotion the being in movement is now-here and now-there, it was at the starting point of the movement at a certain point of time, and it reached the terminus at another. In distinguishing between the first and second


place we have always already distinguished two points in time; and, for Aristotle, it is only in distinguishing these two successive ‘nows’ that we recognise that time has passed. It is in this way, then, that time is apprehended as the ‘number’ or measurable duration of movement; for Aristotle, time is ‘the number of movement (iριθμ κινxσ,ω) according to the before and after’ [219b2].

γ – Time and the now The account of time as the measurable duration of movement privileges the now as that by which we are able to delimit periods of time. Yet if the now in the guise of the before and after has the function of delimiting periods of time, then what is counted in the counting of time is not the ‘nows’, for the now is durationless and in any period there will be a potential infinity of them. Aristotle proceeds to determine the characteristics of the now in relation to time in comparing analogically this relation to that of the mobile thing and its movement. It is within this questioning of the status of the now in relation to time that, as I will argue, we do in fact encounter the possibility of an original thinking of time beyond a conception of a mere succession of ‘nows’. With the analogy Aristotle addresses the third phase of the aporetic concerning the existence of time, since it emerges that the now is Janusfaced. From one perspective it is always the same, from another perspective it is always different; it is ‘the same as subject (3 ποτ’ Dν), but different as to its being (,ναι)’ [219b10]. On the one hand, just as the moving body is the same particular thing in different places, so too the ‘now’ is always the same. This is not to say that the now is a subject as a thing that drifts from the future to the present and the past, but merely that there is always a now; and that this permanence of the ‘now’ can be compared to that of the moving body throughout its motion.29 Yet just as the hupokeimenon or tode ti becomes other than it was in its motion, ‘as the Sophists distinguish between being Coriscus in the Lyceum and Coriscus in the market place’ [21–2], so too the now at each moment is always different; each now is a different now from those which have preceded it. There is always a now but at each time the now is always different, and, in this way, time at once ‘owes its continuity to the now and is divided by it’ [220a5]. Aristotle compares this dual function of the now in relation to time – and that of the mobile in relation to its movement – to that of a point on a line, for the point divides two parts or sections of a line whilst making the parts two parts of the same line. It is necessary to recognise that this analogy is limited, even ‘it is obvious that the now is not a part of time, just as the division of motion is not part of motion

Time and Motion 105

any more than points are of a line’ [19–20], since time and motion are successive continua; the past and the future, like the prior and future course of a movement, do not actually exist, they are not existent parts of their continua. Yet, as Aristotle continues, like the moving point on a line, insofar as the now is always different it is to be understood as a limit in relation to time, since it allows us to delimit periods of the latter. Insofar as it is always the same, however, it is to be thought as number for ‘limits are limits only of the particular thing they limit, whereas the number 10, for instance, pertains equally to the ten horses, the sum of which it has defined, and to anything else numerable’ [22–4]. In relation to time, then, the now can be apprehended either as a limit or as number. Yet in both cases the now is not itself time. On the one hand, as a limit, given that it is not a period or part of time, the ‘now’ ‘is not time but incidental to time’ [220a21–2]. On the other hand, as number, it is not time but rather something self-identical which numbers time. Although the now is the most fundamental aspect of time insofar as it is that which guarantees its continuity, it is nevertheless not a part of time, and is a mere accident of it. Time, then, is other than the now even if it can only exist on its basis, and Aristotle expresses this paradoxical state of affairs thus: ‘there is no time without the now, and no now without time’ [b33–220a1].

δ – Heidegger’s delimitation of Physics IV In any philosophical inquiry concerning time, one must, as Aristotle notes revealingly, begin with the now, not only because it is the most fundamental aspect of time, but also because it is the most immediate and intelligible aspect of time. In questioning time one must begin from what is ‘more easily intelligible’, namely the now, just as in order to determine the nature of movement one must begin from the moving body, since the moving body is a particular being, a tode ti, which ‘movement is not’ [219b32]. Yet for as much as the analysis begins in privileging the now, it finishes in showing that time is other than the now, even if it can only exist by virtue of the latter. The possibility, therefore, remains open for a determination of time beyond a mere succession of ‘nows’. The privilege that the now enjoys throughout Aristotle’s analysis, particularly within the account of time as the number of movement, does not preclude this. Could we not even say that the exoteric discourse, despite the fact that Aristotle does not counterpose it to any other, contains the seeds of its own destruction, and this precisely because it is an exoteric discourse on time that follows from a much more esoteric determination of movement? Such is the argument of Pierre Aubenque. The


argument is forceful, in every sense of the word: if, primarily, we take into account that form or energeia, shortage or possibility and the hupokeimenon are not parts of a being, but rather three aspects of the being-moved of a being, and if, secondly, we recognise that these moments correspond to the future, past and present respectively, then it should come as no surprise that within Physics IV neither the past, nor the present, nor the future are existent parts of time. Thus, as Aubenque writes: The vocabulary of part and whole, of ‘composition’ […] must be banished if one recognises that it is not here a question merely of a division into parts, but of the manifestation of the structure that indissolubly unifies and divides, that is, in one word, ‘ecstatic’, of the being in movement.30 The argument is all the more forceful for the fact that Aubenque does not even treat the privileging of the now within Aristotle’s analysis as a problem. Yet on this reading, a reading that leads Aubenque to write of an ‘ecstatic time’ in Aristotle, time is not a being, but is rather constitutive of the ecstatic structure of the being of beings insofar as they have at least the possibility of movement. Certainly, the argument has the form of an imperative, since, once again, Aristotle does not explicitly forego the exoteric discourse concerning time. Yet it remains the case that such a non-vulgar conception of time is required by and implied in Aristotle’s own determination of movement. Our access to such an ecstatic time remains blocked as long as we content ourselves with a determination of time as the mere measurable duration of movement, as a mathematically determinable passage of time. In §81 of Being and Time, however, Heidegger does offer the outline of a positive reading – an ‘existential-ontological’ interpretation – of Aristotle’s definition of time as the ‘number of movement according to the before and after’, which seeks to reveal the possibility of an original thinking of time, time as other than measurable duration, in this definition itself. On this interpretation, time is ‘that which is counted in the movement which we encounter within the horizon of the earlier and later’ [SZ 421]. Heidegger reads, thus, the before and after as the horizons divided by the now, rather than as two successive ‘nows’, and he elaborates this with the example of following the movement of the hand of a clock: Time is that which is counted and shows itself when one follows the travelling pointer, counting and making present in such a way that

Time and Motion 107

this making-present temporalises itself in an ecstatical unity with the retaining and awaiting which are horizonally open according to the earlier and later [SZ 421]. We say now ‘here’ now ‘there’, now at 5 seconds past the minute, now at 6. In marking time with each now we can count time, yet each now is only encountered within the horizon of the before and after, insofar as we at once retain the past and expect the future. This horizon formed by this ecstatic expecting and retaining in relation to the now constitutes the unity of a temporality that is other than, irreducible to and the presupposition of the time that is counted. In the lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology of 1927, Heidegger offers an interpretation of Physics IV that seems to go in the same direction. Insofar as the now, not being a part of time, is nothing in itself and merely separates the past from the future, it is already stretched beyond itself in the direction of the past and the future: In the now as such there is already present a reference to the nolonger and the not-yet. It has dimension within itself; it stretches out toward a not-yet and no-longer. The not-yet and no-longer are not patched onto the now as foreign but belong to its very content. Because of this dimensional content, the now has within itself the character of transition [G24 351–2/248]. In unifying and dividing the past and the future the now is nothing but a transition from the past to the future. In this sense it has dimension, not temporal dimension as a part of time, but rather a pre-quantifiable dimension which is a stretch insofar as the now must stretch itself out in order to at once hold together and separate the past and future. This reading of the now as transition is offered, however, on the basis of an interpretation of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of movement and of Aristotle’s theory of continuity. With regard to locomotion, for example, there can be no movement at any isolated spatial point of the movement because each point of the dimension that the moving body traverses is without extension. One cannot reconstruct the locomotion of a being in adding up, as it were, or tracing all the different points which it has traversed; in this way we only discover a being in different places and not movement itself. If, therefore, movement is movement away from something to something, then the away from and the to must be understood primarily as stretch-like, as the horizon of the being in movement. One can only apprehend the


movement of a being within this horizon of a from/to, a horizon which Heidegger interprets, again, in terms of Dasein’s ecstatic temporality.31 In order to apprehend a being in movement we must retain its prior path and expect its future trajectory. The argument concerning the transitional character of the ‘now’, therefore, is that it is due to this character that the time in which movement appears does not allow for the disintegration of movement into a series of static parts. In short, the argument is that the continuity of movement requires an ecstatic thinking of movement and, consequently, a thinking of ecstatic time. The interpretations advanced in the Basic Problems of Phenomenology, then, show us that Heidegger perceives at least the possibility of reading Aristotle positively in relation to the two essential characteristics of the vulgar conception of time: the reification of time and the concomitant privileging of the ‘now’. Yet, Being and Time and the Basic Problems of Phenomenology provide a further argument concerning what the vulgar conception of time fails to bring into view: world-time, which is time as forming the horizon of Dasein’s concern with things. It is necessary to examine this argument in order to comprehend the full scope of Heidegger’s delimitation of Physics IV. World-time, for Heidegger, has three essential characteristics. Primarily, before being measured numerically, time is encountered as the prethematic horizon of Dasein’s dealings with that which it is concerned. When we tell the time from the clock, neither the clock nor time itself are the ultimate object of our concern, but we are rather concerned with how much time there remains in order to carry out and complete the task at hand; the time I am trying to determine is always ‘time to, time in order to do this or that, time for […] this or that’ [G24 364/258]. Time, thus, has the character of significance, it is always ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’ time, and our everyday dealings with the things of the world occur as a guiding oneself according to time, a taking time for something, a taking into account of time. This taking into account of time as ‘time to’, is a guiding oneself according to one’s own ecstatic temporality. Such pre-thematic reckoning, therefore, is both prior to and the condition of the determinate, numerical measurement of time in the use of the clock; the latter arises as a ‘modification’ of the former. Second, world-time has the character of datability. Every ‘now’ that we express in our time-reckoning ‘by its nature is a now-when’; it is ‘related to some being by reference to which it has a date’ [G24 381/269]. The ‘now’ that we express always means a ‘now when such and such is occurring or is existent’. In other words, what is expressed in saying ‘now’ is not some abstract free-floating thing but rather Dasein’s making-present of beings. The

Time and Motion 109

same applies for what is expressed in saying ‘then’ and ‘at-a-former-time’. The then is a then-when, the ‘at-a-former-time’ is a ‘then-when’ in the sense of the past, and what is expressed in both cases is the expecting and retaining, the horizons of the future and the past, of Dasein’s ecstatic temporality. Third, the now is spanned and stretched within itself, as when we say ‘now’ meaning ‘now, during the lecture’ or ‘not now!’ when someone disturbs our concentration when working. The ‘now’ is not originally a point, but in dating beings it is rather a stretch that varies in each case. For Heidegger, then, the vulgar conception of time as a mere freefloating sequence of extant nows passes over the significance, datability and stretchedness of world time. This passing over would be nothing other than a fallenness resulting from Dasein’s understanding of itself and its world in terms of the things in the world as vorhanden. The covering up of the specific structural moments of world time, the covering up of their origination in temporality, and the covering up of temporality itself – all have their ground in that mode of being of Dasein which we call falling [G24 384/271]. Yet how does this argument concerning the world-time effaced in the vulgar conception of time relate to the work of Aristotle? First of all, Heidegger attempts to draw a thinking of the now as stretch-like from Aristotle’s determination of the ‘now’, so there is no critique involved here.32 Second, it would seem impossible to claim that Aristotle failed to recognise the datability of time, since time, though not movement itself, is always something that pertains to movement, something that embraces beings in movement and rest. Hence if Aristotle does not explicitly articulate an idea of datability, then it would not have been difficult for him to do so. There remains, then, the significance of time as the horizon with which Dasein reckons pre-numerically and pre-thematically in its everyday concern with equipment. Concerning this point alone does Heidegger’s account of world-time offer the possibility of a critique of Aristotle. Yet not perceiving the originally pre-thematic significance of time would not preclude an apprehension of time in its basic ecstatic structure. Hence the argument is, in the end, quite peripheral. The arguments concerning world-time have little purchase on the work of the Stagirite, and Heidegger, as we have seen, does perceive at least the possibility of a positive reading of Aristotle’s determination of time. Nevertheless, in the end, Heidegger holds that although the ‘nows are not pieced together into a whole’, Aristotle nevertheless ‘characterises


time primarily as a sequence of nows’, thus expressing in ‘clear conceptual form, for the first time and for a long time after, the common understanding of time, so that his view of time corresponds to the natural concept of time’ [G24 329/232].33 It is to be remarked here that Heidegger places the emphasis less on the reification of time than on the primacy of the now, and that there is also a certain ambiguity in the argument: Aristotle’s view corresponds to the common understanding. It would, in fact, be better to say that his determination of time corresponds to our common understanding of time, given that Physics IV is the first comprehensive philosophical account of time as such. Section 81 of Being and Time is similarly ambiguous in discussing, in fact, the possibility of a positive appropriation of Physics IV. Aristotle would ‘move in the direction of’[SZ 241] the vulgar conception of time and it is only after the elaboration of the analytic of Dasein that it might be possible to appropriate Physics IV in a positive manner. Quite understandably, perhaps, a thinking of the meaning, that is, the temporality of being has first to define itself in its radical difference from the tradition before being able to positively appropriate the latter. Heidegger, then, does not exclude the possibility of a positive appropriation of Aristotle’s account of time. Would this mean that the negative claim, advanced somewhat hastily in §6 of Being and Time, according to which the Greeks ‘misunderstood’ the relation of being and time ‘in interpreting ousia as parousia’ would be a mere ‘prejudice’, as Pierre Aubenque claims?34 It is difficult to decide. But it is necessary to recognise that it is one thing to assert the possibility of a double reading of Aristotle, and another thing entirely to claim that the less generous reading is a prejudice. To state, as Aristotle does, that the future, present and past are not parts of time is one thing, whereas elaborating the structure of time as an ecstatic temporality is another thing entirely. There is, in the end, no doubt that the exoteric approach to time and the concern to account for time as the calculable duration of movement impose a limitation on Aristotle’s philosophical vision. Hence the approach that Jacques Derrida formulates to Heidegger’s work seems more apposite than Aubenque’s attempt to locate a mere prejudice in it. For Derrida, it is necessary to read the texts of the tradition both in accordance with and beyond certain propositions or theses that Heidegger articulates, such as the argument that Aristotle expresses a vulgar conception of time in Physics IV.35 Yet this imperative issues, at bottom, from Heidegger’s work itself, since it is precisely his historical thinking that leads us to recognise the possibility of both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ readings of the texts of the tradition, readings that can stress either the originality or the limits of these texts.

4 The Moment of Truth

The supposed clarity of we moderns rests only on the fact that we have done away with the problems [G21 168]. The preceding chapter of this study showed that despite Heidegger’s charge in 1927 concerning the naivety of Greek ontology, the analytic of Dasein is nourished by an appropriation of Aristotle’s account of movement. The question of movement, however, is but one aspect of Heidegger’s positive appropriation of Aristotle in the dismantling return of the early 1920s. The texts from this period show that the elaboration of the analytic of Dasein draws, in addition, from the richness of the anthropology inherent in Aristotle’s practical writings. In particular, the essay of 1922, Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle, shows that Aristotle’s account of phronesis or prudence is of fundamental importance for the analysis of Dasein’s authenticity, its authentic appropriation of itself as a being-possible. This would mean, then, that in the course of the 1920s Heidegger would have developed one aspect of Aristotle’s determination of human being as a remedy to the ontological naivety and inauthenticity concerning human being from which it itself would suffer. If not exactly a ‘paradox’,1 this is certainly remarkable. The leading aim of this chapter is to examine the account of prudence in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, and to interrogate the meaning and possibility of Heidegger’s appropriation of it. It can be said that the question of prudence becomes a focal point of Heidegger’s interpretation in the early 1920s because it implies the questions of temporality and movement specifically in relation to Aristotle’s account of human being. Yet the account of prudence involves another of the themes of the destruction of the traditional content of ancient ontology 111


that Heidegger sketches in §6 of Being and Time. As I indicated in the introduction to this study, the meanings of being that the destruction is to examine are not only being as being-produced and being as constant presence, but also being as truth. This third aspect of the problematic has, in fact, a quite particular status, insofar as the destruction of the traditional content of Aristotle’s determination of being and truth is discussed, if not presented fully, within the body of the text of Being and Time itself, particularly in §§33 and 44. The account of prudence in the Nicomachean Ethics involves an idea of truth since Aristotle describes it as a mode of iληθ,j,ιν, of revealing or being-in-the-truth. Before turning directly to Heidegger’s interpretation of prudence in the second section of the present chapter, therefore, it is necessary to examine the destruction of the traditional content of Aristotle’s determination of truth that Heidegger seeks to effect. Within the lecture course of 1925–6 entitled Logic: The Question of Truth, Heidegger announces his intentions in enumerating three claims that phenomenology as fundamental ontology aims to overturn [G21 128]: first, that the site of truth is the judgement or proposition; second, that truth is a correspondence of thought with thing and third, that the historical origin of both claims is to be found in the work of Aristotle. I begin with the first two claims before turning directly to the work of Aristotle.

4.1 Destroying the traditional content of Aristotle’s account of truth

α – The assertion and the primordial phenomenon of truth The originally scholastic definition of truth as adequatio intellectus et rei, an adequation or correspondence of the thing with thought, is famously ‘assumed as granted’2 by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. Truth, on this account, is the correspondence of the subjective representations or concepts bound together in a judgement, a judgement expressed by the linguistic proposition, with the state of affairs judged. Thus, as Kant writes: ‘Truth and illusion are not in the object so far as it is intuited, but in the judgement about it so far as it is thought.’3 The site of truth is the judgement, and it is true insofar as it agrees with or corresponds to the things judged; the false judgement, for its part, is one that does not correspond to the things. As seemingly self-evident and traditional as it may be, Heidegger argues that such a conception of truth as an agreement or correspondence of knowledge with its object is profoundly problematic [SZ 216]: how can

The Moment of Truth 113

thing and thought agree if they are two fundamentally different sorts of beings? They cannot be equal, precisely because they are of fundamentally different orders, and yet the idea that they should be merely similar is insufficient, for knowledge is supposed to give us knowledge of things just as they are, and not to be merely similar to the things that it knows. Posed in this way, the problem is merely one form of the problem of the relation between mind and body, between the real and the ideal. It is, however, in seeking to unearth the ontological foundations of the correspondence theory of truth that §§33 and 44 of Being and Time propose an account of propositional truth as a ‘being-uncovering (Entdeckend-sein)’. On this account, the truth of the assertion is not to be understood as the correspondence of subjective representations to an objective state of affairs, because the proposition or assertion is directly related to beings as an uncovering or ‘pointing-out (Aufzeigen)’ of them. The idea that an assertion expresses isolated representations in the mind simply ‘belies the phenomenal facts’ [SZ 217] of the making of an assertion. If we make the assertion that, for example, the mirror is hanging askew on the wall, we are not directed to a subjective representation of the mirror but rather to the mirror, even in the absence of the mirror itself. It is necessary to recognise that ordinarily and spontaneously we make assertions concerning things without the advent of psychic or subjective representations of these things, and that we understand perfectly well the sense of the assertion – again even in the absence of its object – without such representations ‘in the mind’. The assertion, for Heidegger, ‘is a way of being towards the thing itself that is’ [SZ 218] and it is, in other words, a mode of intentionality. In this way the assertion enables ‘what is already manifest’ to be ‘made explicitly manifest in its definite character’ [SZ 155] insofar as it highlights and brings explicitly to light a particular state of affairs in what has already been pre-thematically apprehended within Dasein’s concerned circumspection. For Heidegger, Dasein primarily encounters beings within a hermeneutic as-structure, of which the primary mode, according to §32 of Being and Time, is Zuhandenheit. Beings are seen as suitable or as unsuitable for the task at hand, and thus they have already been subject to a pre-thematic interpretation. It is on the basis of this pre-thematic interpretation that there arises the possibility of further determining and interpreting beings through what Heidegger terms – for reasons that will become clear – the apophantic as-structure of the assertion. In asserting a predicate of a subject, a being is given a definite character by the assertion. The assertion ‘the board is black’, for example,


points up and points out the board in a determinate manner, namely in its being black. The assertion thus achieves a certain ‘narrowing of content’ [SZ 155] in relation to its object, since it isolates and makes manifest the being according to one or to a limited number of its characteristics. Assertion, however, does not automatically reduce its ‘object’ to what is vorhanden, since it can point something out as zuhanden. Saying that the hammer is ‘too heavy’ for the task at hand is not yet the objectifying statement ‘the hammer is heavy’, and for Heidegger there are many ‘intermediate gradations’ [SZ 158] between Dasein’s pre-thematic concerned dealings and pure objectifying statements. In any event, for Heidegger, the assertion articulates something as something, it determines something in an explicit manner, and in this way it is a ‘pointingout that gives something a definite character and which communicates’ [SZ 156] this pointing-out to others. Although, as we will see, Being and Time claims to find such an account of the assertion as a pointing-out in Aristotle, it comes to Heidegger more directly from the work of his teacher, Edmund Husserl. The first Logical Investigation distinguishes the order of expression (Ausdruck) from that of indication (Anzeichen), expressive signs from indicative signs.4 The latter are without meaning (Bedeutung), since ‘to mean is not a particular way of being a sign in the sense of indicating something’.5 Husserl determines the indicating of both natural and conventional signs as a function of what one has traditionally termed the association of ideas.6 The knot in my handkerchief, for example, would make me recall, by association, what I was supposed to remember. Expressive signs, however, are not, in essence, indicative. Expressive signs are the signs of language, linguistic signs, and these do not have meaning by the association of words with subjective representations. The very idea of language as a sign is in question here but attention to the modality of our own experience is sufficient to undermine the certainties of any account of language as inert signs indicating mental images: the acts of speaking, listening or reading a newspaper involve nothing like the decoding or association of inert signs with such images. Of course, one can call to mind images in order to understand the meaning of a word, but this is by no means necessary to its meaning. On this point, Husserl presents us with a sort of challenge: ‘Let a man read a work in an abstract field of knowledge, and understand the author’s assertions perfectly, and let him then try to see what more there is to such reading than the words he understands.’7 For Husserl, understanding, thus, cannot be reduced to intuition, in either of its perceptive or imaginative modalities. In a sense, Descartes


had already shown this with the example of the impossibility of mentally envisioning a chiliagon, a thousand-sided figure,8 and after him Husserl can be understood to criticise Aristotle’s argument in On the Soul that for the ‘thinking soul images (φαντbσματα) take the place of direct perceptions’, and that the soul ‘never thinks without an image’ [431a14–17]. Yet Husserl does not merely aim to overturn an account of language as sounds and visual signs indicating mental images, but also any account that separates a sense or concept from the word itself. For Husserl, in the experience of language ‘we live entirely in the consciousness of meaning, of understanding, which does not lapse when accompanying imagery does so’ and this being conscious of a meaning suffices to distinguish ‘the meaningful sign from the mere sign, that is, the sounded word set up as a physical object in our presentations of sense’.9 This is to say that as an expression the physicality of the sign in a certain manner effaces itself as a mere inert thing and manifests itself as a meaning. Certainly, we can stare at written words as if they were merely arbitrary, meaningless marks on paper, and we can repeat a word until it becomes a meaningless sound. Yet this merely makes manifest that words are ordinarily infused with meaning, animated by a meaning intention, and it is with such a conception of infusion or animation that Husserl attempts to move beyond the traditional opposition of word and concept as sign and signified. The meaning intention that animates words, however, is in its own right always and already a being-directed towards an object or state of affairs meant. Expressive meaning is a ‘pointing to (hinzeigen)’10 what is intended insofar as it is aimed at an object or state of affairs, but without the intuitive or imaginative presence of the latter, this intention remains empty and unfulfilled. Husserl’s analysis of expression is original, and it has been developed not only by Heidegger but also by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty.11 Yet, in the course of the first Logical Investigation Husserl seems to shrink back from the fecundity of his own thinking. For the claim is made that actual speech is always sullied by an indicative function, and that expression in its purity resides solely in a solitary monologue of the soul. In Speech and Phenomena Jacques Derrida has drawn our attention to this deeply problematic recourse to an idea of a private language, showing how it enables the transcendental idealism that will be developed in an explicit form after the Logical Investigations.12 Somewhat paradoxically, expression here is at its most expressive when it does not leave the sphere of consciousness, a consciousness that is translucent and purely present-to-itself. Heidegger has by no means the same metaphysical commitments, although certain


passages of §33 of Being and Time do seem to repeat Husserl’s idealism insofar as they advance an account of a discourse or Rede that would be expressed or externalised in the words of a language.13 In the final chapter of this study I will show how such an idealistic and dualistic approach to language is overturned within Heidegger’s reflection on poetry in the 1930s, but the basic orientation of Husserl’s determination of language as expression is essential for his account of the assertion: although it is a mode of being directed to or intending beings, language, as something other than an inert present-at-hand object, requires neither the perception nor the imagination of the beings meant to have meaning. This is undoubtedly a condition of all kinds of irresponsibility and idle talk or Gerede, as Heidegger will show in §35 of Being and Time, but it nevertheless constitutes the peculiar virtue of language itself. In Heidegger’s terms, however, the demonstration of the truth of the assertion as a pointing-out consists in: nothing else than that this thing is the very entity which one intends in the assertion. What comes up for confirmation is that this entity is pointed out by the being in which the assertion is made – which is being towards what is put forward in the assertion; thus what is to be confirmed is that such being uncovers the entity towards which it is. What gets demonstrated is the being-uncovering of the assertion [SZ 218]. The assertion as an ‘uncovering is confirmed’ or demonstrated as true ‘when that which is put forward in the assertion shows itself as that very same thing’ [SZ 218], when the state of affairs shows itself and is apprehended as the state of affairs that it was presumed to be. The truth of the assertion does not consist of the comparison and agreement of subjective representations or concepts and objects, but rather of the apprehension of the identity of what was merely presumed, pointed-out or emptily intended in the assertion with the things themselves. Thus, if the truth of the assertion is to be thought as an adequation, as Heidegger reasons in 1925, the adequation is not a relation between two things, but rather one between two modes of intentionality; it is the ‘commensuration (adequatio) of what is presumed with the intuited subject matter itself (res)’ [G20 69/51].14 Prior to any theory of correspondence, then, from Heidegger’s phenomenological perspective the assertion is true as a pointing-out and uncovering of beings. Yet truth, on this account, is not only


a characteristic of the proposition, but also of the things ‘proposed’. The beings uncovered by the assertion are themselves true, precisely to the extent that they are uncovered, and in this case truth means ‘beinguncovered’ [SZ 220] rather than being-uncovering. The uncovering and being-uncovered of beings by means of the assertion does not, however, constitute the most primordial phenomenon of truth. According to Being and Time, in fact, there exist two further levels of truth. First, the beings encountered within Dasein’s circumspection are already true and pre-thematically uncovered insofar as they are discovered and interpreted by the hermeneutic understanding of our everyday existence. Second, and still more fundamentally, in interpreting, understanding and thus discovering the beings that it is not, for Heidegger Dasein has already understood, interpreted and disclosed (erschlossen), however improperly, its own being as a being-in-the-world to itself. This disclosure is the ‘most primordial phenomenon of truth’ [SZ 220]. Dasein is always ‘in the truth’ [SZ 221] insofar as it always has some understanding of its own being. However, given that Dasein’s authentic disclosure of itself to itself occurs only on the basis of its originary thrownness and fallenenness, in which it fails to grasp authentically its own being, Dasein is always and already in ‘untruth’ [SZ 222]. To be sure, if we hold fast to the idea that truth can only be the correspondence of a judgement with its object, these uses of the term truth may seem unlikely, if not impossible. Yet the fact that both Dasein’s hermeneutic uncovering of the beings that it is not and its disclosure of its own being are prior to the truth of the assertion means, for Heidegger, that the ‘proposition is not the site of truth, but rather truth is the site of the proposition’ [G21 135]. The original site of truth is Dasein’s being-in-the-world, and in positing the assertion as the site of truth the traditional account gets things the wrong way round. It suffers from something of a retrospective illusion, since ‘that which is last in the order of the way things are connected in their foundations existentially and ontologically, is regarded ontically and factically as that which is first and closest to us’ [SZ 225].

β – Aristotle and the logos apophantikos Fundamental ontology seeks not simply to ‘shake off’ the traditional account of truth, but rather to appropriate it at its origins in retrieving a conception of the truth of the assertion as an uncovering from Aristotle. This is to say that Heidegger argues against a long tradition that propositional truth is not a question of correspondence or agreement in the work of the Stagirite. This may seem to be something of a thankless task


given the opening lines of the treatise On Interpretation, which proposes a threefold distinction concerning the essence of language: Words spoken are symbols (σjμβολα) of affections (παθημbτων) of the soul and written words are those of words spoken. As writing, so also is speech not the same for all races of men. But the affections of the soul themselves, of which these words are primarily signs, are the same for the whole of mankind, as are also the things of which these affections are likenesses [16a4–8]. The spoken word, that is, the material sound, is a σjμολον of the affections or παθxματα of the soul, just as the written word is a symbol of the spoken word. Aristotle nowhere explicates the meaning of the idea of symbol, but these oral and written symbols are different for different races of men, and thus they are a matter of convention and social institution. Language or logos is a vocal sound that has meaning not by nature but ‘by convention (κατn συνθxκην)’ [17a2], insofar as the vocal sound becomes and is instituted as a symbol.15 Precisely because the relation between word and affection of the soul is conventional, the equation of the sign or σημ,"ον with the symbol in the above passage is problematic. In the First Analytics the sign is defined as a ‘necessary or probable demonstrative premise’, since ‘that which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened or being’ [70a8–10]. The sign is a relation of one thing to another, a natural relation such as that of cause to effect, and in this sense wet streets are the sign of recent rainfall. The relation of vocal sound to the sense or affection of the soul, however, cannot be understood as such a natural relation, and for this reason one can say that the use of the idea of the sign as equivalent to that of the symbol is improper, notwithstanding the fact that the adjective Aristotle uses to describe language as meaningful or significant, namely σημαντικ, derives from the same root as σημ,"ον.16 What the spoken word symbolises, however, namely the affections of the soul, are the same for all men and are likenesses, μοι%ματα, of the things which themselves are also identical for us all. In the following paragraph of the text Aristotle characterises these states of mind as νημα [10], thoughts. As likenesses of things, the affections or thoughts in the soul have a more natural and immediate relation to the things themselves than they have to the spoken word by which they are expressed.


How are states of mind to be understood as likenesses of the things themselves? Is Aristotle simply proposing a conception of words as signs of psychic images, images that would resemble things? The passage from On the Soul that I cited earlier, in which Aristotle states that the soul never thinks without an image, would seem to offer a positive response to this question. In the lecture course of 1925–6, however, Heidegger challenges such a traditional reading of the text of On Interpretation in underlining the fact that Aristotle writes pathemata and not pathe: it does not say παθη, which at best could mean condition, but παθxματα, that which encounters and is taken up as the encountering, affection in a broader sense. And μοι%ματα means that which has been made equivalent, what μοω Oχ,ι, what as an encountering is in the same way as beings themselves; it comports itself in the same way, that is, the perceiving as that which is to be perceived, the perceived of the perceiving; perceiving gives beings themselves and it lets them encounter as they are [G21 167]. On this account, the equivalence or likeness concerns not two beings, subjective representation and objective thing, but rather the distinction between the apprehending of the thing and the thing apprehended, the seeing and the thing seen. But what would it mean to argue that the word, if it is not symbolic of the things themselves, is symbolic of our modes and manners of apprehending beings? And if this were the distinction that Aristotle articulates, how is it that he is able to separate the two elements so clearly in the passage itself? Heidegger’s argument is difficult, and by 1927 it would seem to have been retracted since in Being and Time we read only, and without doubt correctly, that the conception of representations in the soul as likenesses of things articulated in the first chapter of On Interpretation is ‘by no means proposed as an explicit definition of the essence of truth’ [SZ 214]. The question of truth arises explicitly in On Interpretation with the distinction of the proposition from other modes of discourse. For Aristotle, all language is significant or has meaning, even the different parts of language taken in isolation, namely noun and verb. Every word is an annunciation or φbσι, but it cannot stand alone if it is to be an affirmation (κατbφbσι) or negation (iποφbσι); ‘the word man means something, but not that he is or he is not: there is affirmation or negation only if one adds something else’ [b28]. Affirmation or negation can be articulated in the form of the copula or in the verbal ending, but the proposition requires the holding-together and, at one and the


same time, the holding-apart, an identity in difference, of a ‘subject’ and ‘predicate’: Just as there are thoughts in our minds without truth or falsity, while there are others at times that have necessarily one or the other, so also it is in our speech, for combination and division (σjνθ,σι κα διαρ,σι) belong to truth and falsity [16a10–13]. It should be noted that Aristotle maintains the distinction between thought and speech here, but an assertion such as ‘the board is black’ requires a synthesis and a holding-apart of ‘board’ and ‘black’. It is only in being combined thus in the guise of an affirmation or negation that words and sentences can be true or false: Every sentence (λγο) is meaningful (σημαντικ), though not naturally, as we have observed, but by convention. Not all are exhibitive (iποφαντικ), but those only that have truth or falsity in them (Rν 6 τ iληθ,j,ιν m ψ,jδ,σθαι cπbρχ,ι). A prayer is, for instance, a sentence but has neither truth nor falsity [17a1–5]. The affirmation or negation proper to the proposition or iπφανσι is what distinguishes it from utterances such as prayers, commands and the like, which, as Aristotle continues, are to be examined in the study of rhetoric and poetry. Heidegger’s claim that Aristotle has apprehended the truth of the assertion as an uncovering draws heavily on the literal sense of the terms used in the above passage. The ‘logic’ lecture course of 1925–6 offers the following translation of its second sentence: ‘only a pointing-out letting be seen is the discourse in which revealing or concealing carry and determine the authentic speaking-intention.’17 Our attention is drawn, thus, to the literal sense of the adjective apophantikos, which I translated above, somewhat clumsily, as ‘exhibitive’. The proposition is here an iποφαν,σθαι of beings, which literally means, given the middle-voice form of the verb, a letting-be-seen of beings.18 Moreover, Heidegger underlines both the privative alpha of the Greek a-letheia and the verbal form aletheuein that Aristotle employs. The logos apophantikos is thus to be thought as an un-covering of beings themselves, a ‘bringing something to light’ [G21 131] or a ‘bringing into the open’ [G21 142] of beings. The false proposition, for its part, would not be one that simply failed to correspond to beings, but it would be a covering over or concealing of beings since, again, Aristotle uses the middle-voice form pseudesthai, a being-concealed.


Yet, Heidegger’s argument concerning the logos apophantikos is by no means exhausted by such etymological considerations. Beyond the text of On Interpretation it is characteristic of Aristotle, as Pierre Aubenque notes, to speak not ‘of judgement, but only of the proposition’.19 In Metaphysics Gamma, for example, Aristotle defines truth itself as simply saying that what is, is and that what is not, is not.20 Thus, as Heidegger argues in reading this passage: The essential thing lies in that discourse is not grasped in the sense of judgment […] but rather as discourse, as an iποφαν,σθαι, a letting be seen of beings. If one has understood this basic structure of λNγ,ιν then it is not possible to find something in this determination of truth and falsity that would give grounds for the determination of truth as image and representation of beings in consciousness in the sense of a corresponding [G21 163]. The fact that Aristotle can offer a definition of truth without referring to any account of representations as the intermediary between word and thing is, for Heidegger, testimony to the fact that Aristotle apprehends the logos apophantikos as a letting-be-seen. Furthermore, in the Sophistical Refutations Aristotle even describes the relation of word to thing rather than word to thought, as symbolic: ‘it is not possible to draw into discussion the things themselves, but instead of them, we must use their names as symbols’ [165a7]. One might suppose that the absence here of an intermediary between word and thing is a condensed expression of a more elaborate doctrine. In addition, one might suppose that the suppression of the intermediary is natural and legitimate, since the affections are already similar to the things themselves.21 Such are the arguments of Pierre Aubenque. Yet this allows Heidegger to argue at the end of the 1920s that: what Aristotle sees quite obscurely under the title σjμβολον, sees only approximately, and without any explication, in looking at it quite ingeniously, is nothing other than what we call transcendence. There is language only in the case of a being that by its essence transcends [G29/30 420/308]. Literally, symbol means that which is thrown or held together. Yet on this account what would be held together is not the word and subjective representation but rather the word and its meaning as a pointing out, a letting-be-seen of beings, and this within the open region of Dasein’s


transcendence or being-in-the-world. Heidegger’s argument is certainly ingenious, if not violent, but it is not groundless. Concerning the question of whether an account of truth as correspondence is to be found within it, there are, then, two possible approaches to Aristotle’s determination of the logos apophantikos. These two approaches exploit the ambiguity of the Aristotelian corpus in diametrically opposed ways. It can be argued that the passages discussing the logos without any mention of subjective representations as the intermediary between word and thing merely articulate a condensed form of a more elaborate doctrine, a doctrine of correspondence. Conversely, one can argue that in these passages Aristotle apprehends the original truth of the logos apophantikos as a revealing and letting-be-seen of beings; and, consequently, that the passages which do seem to describe representations in the soul as binding word and thing express but a loss of or a falling away from this original truth of the logos. It is impossible to decide which of these two approaches allows for the more ‘accurate’ interpretation of the work of the Stagirite. Yet the second approach constitutes one of the most original and challenging aspects of Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle.

γ – Truth and being: Heidegger’s interpretation of Metaphysics Θ, 10 As I noted in the introduction to this chapter, Heidegger seeks to overturn not only the argument that Aristotle presents a correspondence theory of truth, but also the claim that the Stagirite determines the site of truth as the proposition. In what way, then, can Aristotle be understood to think truth more broadly or profoundly than as merely a property of the proposition? First of all, in the Metaphysics Aristotle describes his predecessors as those who ‘philosophised’ or ‘theorised about truth’.22 By no means does this imply that metaphysics is to be reduced to a theory of knowledge, an epistemology, for philosophy is here explicitly characterised as ‘knowledge of the truth’ insofar as it is knowledge of the principles and causes of beings, which causes are true ‘above and before anything else’.23 Truth here determines beings in their being and thus Heidegger can write in Being and Time: the ‘iλxθ,ια that Aristotle equates with πρdγμα and φαινμ,να signifies the things themselves; it signifies what shows itself – entities in the how of their uncoveredness’ [SZ 219]. Moreover, in the book of definitions, Metaphysics Delta, we find a definition of falsity that clearly, at least in intention, distinguishes


falsity as a property of the proposition, from falsity as determining things. ‘False’ are such things as really exist, but whose nature it is to seem either such as they are not, or like things which are unreal; chiaroscuro and dreams. For these are really something, but not that of which they create the impression. Things, then, are called false in these senses: either because they themselves are unreal, or because the impression derived from them is that of something unreal [1024b22–4]. Certainly, the examples provided here are of the order of what is understood as representation: painting and the work of imagination are false because they would give us the impression of reality when they are not that reality at all. Nevertheless, if a thing gives the impression of being something that it is not, that thing is false, falsity here being a characteristic of the thing itself. Furthermore, in On the Soul Aristotle describes perception or α$σθησι as always true: The perception of proper objects (τaν 1δων) is true, or is only capable of error to the least possible degree. Next comes perception that they are attributes, and here a possibility of error arises [428b18–20].24 Normally when we perceive something, say a boat, what we perceive is in fact a boat, and thus the perception is true. Of course, from afar we may think that we see a boat when in fact it turns out to be an outcrop of rocks, but such a case constitutes only the exception to the rule that perception is itself true. The genuine possibility of error emerges only when we determine the attributes of things, when we determine something as something: Assertion, like affirmation, states an attribute of a subject, and is always true or false; but this is not always so with νο8: the thinking of the definition in the sense of the quiddity is true and does not articulate something as something [430b26–28].25 The determination of something as something, which for Aristotle is a dianoia, is always either true or false. The apprehension of the essence or


quiddity of a thing, however, is not achieved by means of such reasoning, but rather through pure intuition, noein or nous. This intuition is always true in the sense that we either apprehend the essence of something or we do not. The contrary of truth in this case is not falsity but pure ignorance. On this evidence, then, the site of truth is in no way restricted to the assertion in Aristotle’s work, and, as Heidegger underlines, in On Interpretation it is not truth that is determined in terms of the proposition but, on the contrary, the proposition that is determined in terms of truth. Aristotle thinks truth from different perspectives, and in Heidegger’s terms ‘the phenomenon of uncovering has several essential “aspects” ’ [G21 170]. Further evidence that Aristotle does not restrict truth to being a property of the proposition can be gained from considering the problem of being as truth in Metaphysics Epsilon. As was noted at the end of the first chapter of this study, within the discussion of the manifold senses of being Aristotle disqualifies being as truth and non-being as falsity from the philosophical enquiry to follow in the central books, since ‘falsity and truth are not in things’ but ‘in thought (Rν διανο&)’ [1027b26–7]. Despite this disqualification of being as truth, the final, tenth chapter of book Theta describes being as truth and falsity as τ κυρι%τατα ν [1051b1], being in the most proper sense. The Greek noun κυρω or κυρο means the master, owner or possessor, and thus a book that is otherwise concerned with being as dunamis and energeia reaches its denouement in stating that truth is the master and most proper sense of being. The contradiction between book Epsilon and Zeta would appear to be blatant. In holding that Aristotle locates the most primordial phenomenon of truth in the logos, in logic, modern commentators have proposed three different ways of abolishing or at least mitigating the contradiction: primarily, it has been argued that the chapter does not belong at all to book Theta, that it was not placed there by Aristotle.26 In accepting that the chapter does belong to the book, Werner Jaeger has attempted, second, to interpret kuriotata as meaning not the most proper but rather the most common. On this reading, being-true in the most common sense can be nothing other than the copula and thus the chapter would simply revert to a discussion of truth as the assertion.27 Third, Ross has finally resorted to bracketing the words kuriotata on in the Greek, and omitting them from the Oxford translation.28 On Heidegger’s reading, however, there is no contradiction in the passage from books Epsilon to Theta because the modality of truth that


Aristotle excludes in the former is mere dianoetic truth, the truth of assertions. Aristotle already gives an indication here that truth will be questioned in another sense: Concerning simples and essences (τn rπλd κα τn τ Rστιν) there is none (truth and falsity) in dianoia. The points that we must study in connexion with being and non-being in this sense, we must consider later [1027b28–30]. The passage is hardly pellucid but the noetic apprehension of the essence or quiddity of a being is not a question of dianoia, and the inquiry will have to return to the question of truth in the former sense.29 It is precisely to this question that Aristotle returns in Theta, 10, in first of all distinguishing between the truth of assertions concerning what can at one moment be present in a being and at another moment absent – the chair’s being red, for example – with the truth of incomposite beings. Concerning the latter we read: just as truth is not the same in these cases, so neither is being. Truth and falsity are as follows: contact and assertion are truth (for assertion is not the same as affirmation) and ignorance is non-contact. I say ignorance because it is impossible to be deceived with respect to what a thing is except accidentally; and the same applies to incomposite beingnesses (μy συνθ,τn οSσα) for it is impossible to be deceived about them [1051b24–30]. By non-composite beings, then, Aristotle intends the ti estin, the whatbeing or essence of a thing. The truth of the apprehension of the essence of beings is described as a θγ,ιν, a direct touching or contact, and as a φbναι, an asserting or saying, rather than an articulation of something as something within an affirmative or negative proposition. This direct contact is nothing other than the pure seeing of nous, since Aristotle goes on to write that the aletheia of the non-composite occurs by way of noein [1052a1]. It has been argued that Aristotle here speaks, in a Platonic mode, of supra-sensible entities rather than of physical entities in their essence. Non-composite beings would mean pure forms or essences existing apart from, somewhere other than matter, and according to Owens, book Theta finishes in showing ‘that if immobile beings are admitted, they can be known only by simple contact’.30 The text, however, offers no grounds for admitting either that Aristotle is offering a hypothetical


discussion or that the discussion concerns simply or solely supra-sensible entities. Aristotle speaks simply of the truth of the apprehension of the form or essence of a being, which essence book Theta has shown to be more in being, as energeia, than possibility and matter. The passage, therefore, ‘simply’ concerns the truth of essence as such. For Heidegger, according to the ‘guiding thread of uncovering (am Leitfaden von Entdeckung)’ this pure contact with the essence of beings is to be understood as a ‘pure uncovering’ [G21 181], one that is prior to and more primordial than apophantic truth. Thus as Being and Time declares: Aristotle never defends the thesis that the primordial ‘locus’ of truth is in the judgement. […] And because Aristotle never upheld the thesis we have mentioned, he was also never in a position to ‘broaden’ the conception of truth in the λγο to include pure νο,"ν. The truth of α$σθησι and of the seeing of ‘ideas’ is the primordial kind of uncovering. And only because νησι primarily uncovers, can the λγο as διανο,"ν also have uncovering as its function [SZ 226]. In Aristotle’s work it is not the proposition that is the site of truth, but rather truth that is the site of the proposition. The original truth would, in fact, be the condition of the uncovering achieved by the proposition, since we can only say something about something if that thing has somehow already been disclosed to us. Now, in the ‘logic’ lecture course of 1925–6, Heidegger attempts to develop this account of aesthetic truth in the direction of the analysis of the hermeneutic ‘as’ and of Zuhandenheit, but, in the end, he does accept that an account of such an as-structure is not to be found in Aristotle.31 It nevertheless remains the case that the Stagirite locates a modality of truth that is not only prior to, but also the condition of, the articulation of something as something in the assertion. It should be noted, in concluding this section, that Heidegger issues such an argument directly against the interpretation advanced by Franz Brentano, who recognises the different senses of truth in Aristotle only to hold that the truth of the proposition is its most primordial modality.32

4.2

Truth and the phronetic moment

The first section of this chapter has shown the manner in which Heidegger discovers in Aristotle’s work both an account of propositional truth as an uncovering of beings, and an account of noetic truth that is, in fact, the condition of the assertion. This leads, however, to a third and final question: does Aristotle offer a thinking that could relate to what


Heidegger terms the most primordial phenomenon of truth, namely the disclosure of Dasein’s own being to itself? Such a question leads to the analysis of phronesis or prudence in the Nicomachean Ethics, and leads us back to the questions of movement and time. In the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics prudence is delineated as one of the modes of aletheuein, of revealing or being-in-the-truth, which constitute the intellectual or dianoetic virtues of the soul. Aristotle lists five of these modes: techne, phronesis, episteme or scientific knowledge, sophia and nous. The fact that phronesis and techne, which relate to human action and production respectively, are delineated as modes of revealing or being in the truth shows that Aristotle in no way restricts truth to a function of theoretical and scientific comportment. The first four of these modes of revealing all occur with and by means of logos, but in the second chapter of the book they are divided into two categories that relate to two faculties, or even ‘parts’, of the soul: the Rπιστημονικν and the λογιστικν, the ‘scientific’ and ‘deliberative’ faculty.33 The former comprises episteme and sophia, the modalities of knowing concerned with the permanent and unchanging, with the class of beings that cannot be ‘otherwise than they are (hλλω Oχ,ιν) [1140a1]. The objects of episteme and sophia are ever-present but the objects of phronesis and techne, on the contrary, are beings that can change, that can, in other words, undergo movement. Nous, then, is not included in this division, but it is in fact present in all four modes of knowing, since they are all forms of dia-noia. Within each group Aristotle seeks to determine which is the highest mode of knowing, and prudence is asserted as being higher than techne. But how is techne a mode of revealing? Aristotle does not give an explicit response to this question in the Nicomachean Ethics, but in the 1920s, Heidegger points to the account that Metaphysics Zeta provides of the envisaging of the eidos in the soul within technical deliberation.34 The aletheuein of techne is given in the letting-be-seen of the paradigm of the being that is to be produced, which paradigm would then be imposed on the work-material. Prudence, however, is concerned with action rather than production and is higher than techne, since, as we saw in the second chapter of this book, ‘in the case of poiesis the telos is something other than it; but this does not hold for praxis; the acting well is itself the telos’ [1140b6–7]. For Aristotle, technical production is always a means, a means towards an end, namely the finished product. The latter is always for someone or something, and thus the end of poiesis is other and external to the producer herself. Prudence, as a concern for acting well, however, is its own end.35


Prudence is still a form of deliberation and it does not exclude all reckoning concerning means and ends or what is conducive to the attainment of the end – τ συμφNρον πρ τ τNλο [1142b33]. It is not dissimilar to techne insofar as it reasons as follows: if such and such is to happen, say giving the right birthday gift to a friend, then this and that must be done. Yet, in prudence the human being discloses itself as its own end insofar as it is concerned with ‘what is good for the human being (τn iνθρ%πH dγαθb)’ [1140b7] and the ο9 ;ν,κα [1140b16], the for-the-sake-of-which of our actions. The person who is prudent is the one who is able ‘to deliberate well about what is good and advantageous for himself, and not merely in one specific way, for instance what is good for his health or strength, but what is advantageous for the good life (,2 ξtν) as a whole’ [114025–7]. Prudence, thus, is a mode of revealing that relates specifically to what is the good life for a person as both an individual and a communal being. In prudential deliberation the human being reveals or discloses itself to itself as its own for-the-sake-of-which and as a being that can be otherwise than it is in its social praxis. Now in the essay of 1922, Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle, Heidegger argues that this determination of human being as what can be other than it is, although it implies an idea of movement, does not achieve a positive determination of the movedness of ‘factical life’, and that Aristotle arrives at such a ‘formal’ determination merely by means of a negation of what is understood as authentic being, of being in the highest sense, namely immobility and eternity as permanent presence.36 Certainly, the idea of human being as a being in movement is not simply erroneous, but it is formal, that is, problematic, insofar as it does not adequately distinguish human being from the being of the things of the world. Heidegger argues in addition that if Aristotle thinks the soul as that which can undergo movement, then this movement is thought from the perspective of its end and fulfilment. For such a fulfilment would occur in what is, for Aristotle, the highest mode of revealing by means of which the soul contemplates the eternal, namely sophia. For Heidegger: The being of life is seen as movement which transpires in its own self, and indeed the being of life is within this movement when human life has come to its end with respect to its ownmost possibility of movement, that is when human life has come to its end with respect to the possibility of the movement of pure beholding [PIA 43/383]. Heidegger’s reading seems to be based on, and confirmed by, the tenth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, wherein perfect happiness – ,Sδαιμονα – is


held to consist in the activity of the highest virtue, which is the highest precisely because it contemplates the highest things, and ‘we ought so far as possible to achieve immortality, and do all that man may to live in accordance with that which is highest (τ κρbτιστον) in him’ [1177b32–4]. It is, then, such a conception of the becoming immortal of the human being by means of sophia that implies, for Heidegger, an idea of the cessation of the particular movement of factical life itself. On these grounds, the basic task of a phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle in 1922 consists, first, in asserting the primacy of prudence as deliberation concerning the good in the given situation against Aristotle’s positing of sophia as the highest mode of revealing. Second, the interpretation must radicalise the idea of the being-moved of factical life in its prudential concern for itself: Dasein must be shown to be not merely a being that possesses the possibility of movement, but rather to be one that is always and already ahead of itself in its concern for itself and the things of the world. The ‘concrete interpretation’ of Aristotle must show how factical life as the unity of its ‘not-yet’ and ‘already’ in the presence of things is that which is, in fact, illuminated or disclosed in prudential insight. Beyond Aristotle’s merely formal characterisation of human being, prudence must be interpreted as that by which Dasein apprehends itself authentically in its own proper movedness. The additional moments of prudential insight delineated in the ninth Chapter of Book VI are particularly significant for this reading. For Aristotle, the deliberative excellence constitutive of prudence is ‘insight as regards what is advantageous, arriving at the right conclusion on the right grounds at the right time (,ρθτη J κατn τ +φNλιμον, κα ο9 δ," κα : κα 3τ,’ [1142b28]. Prudence, then, discloses not only the for-the-sake-of-which of an action in its concern for acting well, in its concern for the how of its action, but it also discloses the grounds upon which this action is to be undertaken, and the right time for the particular action itself. The idea of the right time, the propitious moment for a possible human action is what Aristotle otherwise expresses with the term καιρ, as can be seen in the second book of the Nicomachean Ethics.37 For the Heidegger of 1922, however, insofar as prudence consists in a disclosure of the end of the action, that is, the future, in addition to the grounds of the action, that is, the past, the kairological moment is to be thought as a phenomenon of original temporality, and not merely as the ‘now’ of the vulgar conception of time:

φρνησι is the being of life in the temporalising illumination of its dealings (mitzeitigende Umgangserhellung). The concrete interpretation


shows how this being, καιρ, is constituted in φρνησι. The practical and solicitous conducting is always a concrete conducting in the How of the concerned dealings with the world. φρνησι makes the situation of the one who performs the action accessible: in securing the ο9 ;νεκα (the ‘Why’), in making available the particular towardswhat-end, in apprehending the ‘Now’, and in sketching out the How [PIA 42/381]. On this account, the kairological moment of prudential insight would achieve an illumination or revelation of Dasein in its concern with things in a given temporal situation. In this particular moment of truth, in effect, Dasein or ‘factical life’ would disclose itself to itself as its own ‘already’ and ‘not-yet’ within a concrete situation. In advancing this interpretation, Heidegger also takes up the analysis of the role of nous within prudence that is presented in Chapter 11 of Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. The apprehension of the ‘ultimate and contingent (το8 Rσχbτου κα το8 Rνδ,χομNνου)’ [1143b3], the ultimate and contingent particulars upon which practical deliberation and reasoning is based, is achieved by nous or aisthesis, terms which Aristotle uses here synonymously. Yet on Heidegger’s reading, prudence: goes toward the Oσχατον, the extreme, in which the determinately seen concrete situation intensifies itself at the particular time. φρνησι is possible as a deliberation and solicitous comportment only because it is primarily an α$σθησι, an ultimate and simple overview of the moment [PIA 42/381]. The disclosure of the given situation by means of prudence is a simple seeing within which Dasein discloses itself to itself. Heidegger reads, therefore, the seeing of the Oσχατον as less a question of the apprehension of particular things than of the disclosure of factical life to itself in its own particular temporal being-possible. The disclosive insight proper to the prudential moment is, in other words, to be read as the Augenblick, the blink of an eye or the moment of vision that is analysed in Being and Time.38 Now as I have indicated, fundamental ontology distinguishes between two modes of the being of Dasein, namely its authentic and inauthentic existence, notwithstanding the fact that ‘proximally and for the most part’ [SZ 42] Dasein exists in an average mode of being which is neither the one mode nor the other. Heidegger will develop this discourse of authenticity in the 1930s in speaking no longer of modes of Dasein’s being, but of the essence of contemporary man as subjectivity, and hence of the necessity of taking the leap into Dasein, of becoming Dasein itself.39 At any rate, Dasein’s falling


or inauthenticity, its tendency to understand itself in terms of the things with which it is concerned occurs by virtue of a mode of temporalisation that is based upon the primacy of making-present. This primacy does not exclude having-been and being-futural since it is a mode of temporalisation, but Dasein nevertheless loses or forgets itself as a thrown potentialityfor-being. The authentic modality of having-been occurs as repetition (Wiederholung), according to which Dasein assumes and takes up its past expressly as a source of possibility for its existence as a being-futural. The past, whether this be one’s own past or that of world history, is always a task, and in repeating it Dasein becomes authentically what ‘it already was’ [SZ 325]. The authentic modality of the future which repetition itself implies consists in Dasein’s apprehension of the finitude of its own temporal existence in the ‘anticipation (Vorlaufen)’ [SZ 336] of its mortality and being-towards-death. The unity of repetition and anticipation of one’s being-possible is constituted in the moment of vision. In a narrow sense the moment can be thought as the authentic modality of the ecstasis of the present. Yet, insofar as here Dasein’s mere making-present loses its self-sufficiency and primacy with respect to the other ecstases of temporality, the moment is the event of Dasein’s appropriation of itself as futural and as a having-been. In the given situation Dasein pulls itself away from its absorption in and with the things of the world, and from its average everyday being-with-others; not, to be sure, in order to isolate itself from them, not in order to become an isolated subject, but, on the contrary, to disclose the proper scope, grounds and limits of a possible action in the given, temporal situation. The moment of vision allows Dasein to deliver itself authentically over to others and to the things of its concern in apprehending the most proper possibilities of its own being. The moment of vision, then, is the unity of the authentic appropriation of the present, past and future, and in this way it is, in fact, predominantly futural. In authenticity the ‘ecstasis’ of the future takes precedence, since Dasein discloses itself to itself as a being that has its being to be. It is in this sense that Heidegger seeks to interpret Aristotle’s analysis of phronesis in the early 1920s. For as forceful as this ‘ontologisation’40, to use Franco Volpi’s term, of phronesis may seem to be, Heidegger would seem never to retract it completely, not even in the lecture course of 1927, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, within which he speaks of the naivety of Greek ontology: Aristotle already saw the phenomenon of the instant, the καιρ, and he defined it in the sixth book of his Nicomachean Ethics; but […] he did it in such a way that he failed to bring the specific time character


of the καιρ into connection with what he otherwise knows as time (ν8ν) [G24 409/288]. Although the term kairos does not appear in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, the analysis of prudence would be nothing less than an account of what kairos could mean. Yet it is, in the end, doubtful whether Aristotle adequately or properly comprehended the phenomenon of the Augenblick, since it does not lead him to bring into question the vulgar conception of time articulated in Physics IV. It is manifestly the critique of Physics IV that Heidegger articulates in 1927 that motivates the transformation of his more ‘generous’ repetitions of Aristotle’s determination of prudence. The critique of Physics IV leads Heidegger to perceive more acutely the force, the violence even, of his readings of the Nicomachean Ethics. It is possible, however, to move in the opposite direction along this path cleared by Heidegger’s thinking. It is possible to begin, as does Pierre Aubenque, in arguing that Aristotle, on the basis of an account of ecstatic movement, provides an account of an ecstatic time in the Physics, and then proceed to show how prudential insight occurs according to such an ecstatic time.41 In this sense one might seek to underline, following Jacques Taminiaux, that ‘it is doubtful that Aristotle thought the time of πρdξι could be characterised as “number of the before and after” ’.42 This is to say that it is perhaps doubtful whether Aristotle himself thought that the physical determination of time as the mere calculable duration of movement would be adequate to account for the temporal structure of prudential insight. Nevertheless, the basis of Heidegger’s charge within the destruction of 1927 is already to be found in the dismantling return of 1922. If there is an original thinking of the movedness and temporality of factical life to be found in the analysis of prudence, then this analysis is betrayed by Aristotle’s merely formal definition of the human being as a being that can be other than it is. Such a definition locates the human being as just another being in time. This betrayal would only be confirmed by the basic conception of ousia as determining the being of all beings. In addition, it would be equally undermined by the analysis of sophia as implying, in some sense, a cessation of the movement of the soul, which analysis is predicated upon an idea of the eternal and thus on an understanding of being as constant presence. Yet, this betrayal, this philosophical naivety would by no means preclude, as Heidegger remarks in 1928, an authenticity of action, an eigentliche Handlung [G26 236/183], in Greek praxis itself.

Part II The Turn to the Work of Art


5 Art and the Earth

It is not the opinion with which a thinker ends up that is decisive, nor is it the framework within which he gives this opinion. It is rather the movement of questioning, through which alone truth comes into the open [S 128/106]. Part I of this book examined the manner in which fundamental ontology appropriates and delimits Aristotle’s ontology. It undertook this in the second, third and fourth chapters according to the guiding thread of the three aspects of the ‘ancient’, Aristotelian conception of being delineated in the sixth paragraph of Being and Time, a paragraph that sketches the task of ‘destroying the history of ontology’: being as being-produced, being as presence and being as truth. It is on the basis of having examined fundamental ontology in this way that it is possible to turn to Heidegger’s reflection on the work of art in the 1930s and to the reading or rereading of Aristotle that this reflection both articulates and implies. Such is the concern of part II of this book. The present chapter seeks to trace the movement of Heidegger’s thinking in 1935–6, a movement that achieves a turn from fundamental ontology to ‘another thinking’, a different form of thought and questioning. The chapter does this, as noted in the introduction to the book, in paying particular attention to the different versions of ‘The Origin’ that have been published. Although the final version of ‘The Origin’ has itself been published in several editions, three distinct versions of the essay are available, which are referred to as follows: 1 UK3 The final version of the essay is based on the text of three lectures given in November and December of 1936 at the Freie Deutsche Hochstift in Frankfurt am Main. In the Gesamtausgabe edition of Holzwege (G5) the text appears according to the modified version first published in 135


1960 by Reclam, which included an appendix that Heidegger added in 1956. The Gesamtausgabe edition also includes Heidegger’s own annotations to the text, which were written between 1960 and 1976. 2 UK2 A lecture that was delivered in November 1935 and repeated in January 1936 under the title Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art’, which was published with a French translation by Emmanuel Martineau, without the agreement of the German copyright holders and thus ‘privately’ by Authentica, Paris in 1987. 3 UK1 A first elaboration of the lecture, Vom Ursprung des Kunstwerkes: Erste Ausarbeitung, ‘On the Origin of the Work of Art’, that Heidegger gave in November 1935, which appeared in Heidegger Studies (Duncker & Humboldt, Berlin, Vol. 5, 5–22) in 1989. The present chapter focuses on the genesis of Heidegger’s thinking in these three texts concerning the idea of earth (Erde), which is the fundamental philosophical discovery of his reflection on art. The discovery of earth occurs according to what one can term a second hylo-morphic repetition, a second repetition of the concepts of matter and form. As a birth certificate of the technical horizon constitutive of the Greek, Aristotelian inception of metaphysics, the first repetition sought to interpret the truth of matter and form in terms of the Zuhandenheit of equipment. The second seeks not only to make manifest a horizon of world, but also to advance beyond the idea of matter as such with a thinking of earth. Heidegger’s argument is that the artwork makes manifest a more profound origin of both the concepts of matter and form, namely earth and world. In advancing this argument ‘The Origin’ attempts to establish a decisive ontological distinction between the artwork and the mere product, which implies a differentiation of creation, the creation of the work, from prosaic production, the making of the mere product. Concomitantly, Heidegger seeks to bring to light a ‘remarkable fatality (merkwürdiges Verhängnis)’ constitutive of the history of philosophical reflection on art. This ‘came into being with the Greeks (Plato and Aristotle) with the characterisation of the artwork as a finished thing (angefertigtes Ding), that is, as a product (Zeugwerk)’ [UK2 52–3]. Greek ontology would thus interpret what is ‘higher’, the artwork, from the perspective of what is ‘lower’ [UK2 52–3], the mere product, insofar as it interprets the former according to the concepts of matter and form. The fact that Aristotle includes the examples of brass or wooden statues within his accounts of poiesis or technical production would only be the confirmation of an ontological levelling that would find its origin in Plato. For Heidegger,

Art and the Earth 137

this original incapacity to apprehend the ontological specificity of the work of art would determine the entirety of the history of philosophical reflection on art given that the schema of form–matter is ‘that which is used, in the greatest variety of ways, quite generally for all art theory and aesthetics’ [UK3 12/9]. The preceding two chapters of this study showed that fundamental ontology sought to counteract a traditional tendency to interpret human being in terms of the being of the things of the world. Yet, at this point Heidegger’s destructive focus changes. The ontological levelling that he seeks to dismantle in 1935–6 concerns the reduction of the artwork to the status of the mere finished product. Of course, in Greek ontology and throughout the philosophical tradition, the artwork is seen as something more than the mere product insofar as it is mimetic, symbolic or allegorical, insofar as it shows something other than itself and has an intellectual content. Nevertheless, to the extent that both world and earth are passed over within traditional reflection on the artwork, for Heidegger, it remains the case that what is proper to art has been lost and passed over, and consequently that art itself has been impoverished. The following and final chapter of this study will examine the delimitation of Aristotle and the tradition of philosophical consideration of art that issues from Heidegger’s thinking of world in art. The present chapter, however, is divided into two main sections. The first determines how earth is discovered through a reflection on both the reception and creation of the artwork, and by means of a return to the idea of phusis in pre-Socratic thought. With regard to the latter point, the manner in which Heidegger returns to Heraclitus’ fragments in order to delimit Aristotle’s hylo-morphism will be examined. In the second section of the chapter, however, I will show how this delimitation becomes, in the end, a positive appropriation of Aristotle’s work. For after 1935–6 Heidegger goes on to interpret anew the very sense of the techno-poetic horizon of Aristotle’s thinking. I will show, in fact, how Heidegger is led to revise the very sense of not only one, but all three of the aspects of the ‘ancient conception’ of being advanced in §6 of Being and Time. Heidegger’s reflection on the work of art, then, is a ‘work in progress’, one that even in the final version of ‘The Origin’ is on the way to transforming itself and to grasping fully its own implications. This dynamic concerns not merely Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle, but also the very attempt to distinguish the artwork from the mere product. It is to be remarked that in the first section of the final version of the essay Heidegger discusses three traditional determinations of beings that are


often interrelated in the history of philosophy: the thing as the unity of substance and accidents, as a manifold of sensations and as formed matter. The first and third of these determinations of beings derive, of course, directly from Aristotle, but in discussing matter and form, Heidegger turns from an interpretation of the artwork in terms of world and earth to a re-determination of the being of equipment in such terms, and this by means of reflection on a painting by Van Gogh. The two earlier versions of ‘The Origin’ allow us to recognise that this section is a late addition to the essay, and thus that it is a consequence of a reflection on the artwork as such. Hence if traditional philosophical reflection on the artwork interprets what is higher from what is lower, then the movement of Heidegger’s thinking is, in fact, the inverse. In tracing this dynamic I will show that a genetic approach to ‘The Origin’ is a necessary precondition of an adequate understanding of the final version of the essay.

5.1

Art and the discovery of earth

Before examining the manner in which Heidegger’s phenomenological reflection on art achieves a discovery of earth, it is necessary to elucidate the very sense of the title of the essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, and the approach to the question of art that it implies. The word ‘origin’ in the title could, of course, be taken to mean something like a cause, and thus the origin of the work of art would be the artist. The selfevidence of such a response finds itself immediately undermined by the fact that the artist is only what she is in relation to the works that she creates. If the artist is the origin of the work of art then the latter is also the origin of the artist. We are, however, transported to another level of enquiry in recognising that ‘artist and the work are in themselves and in their reciprocity by a third, which is the first, that is that from which the artist and the work of art receive their name’ [UK3 1/1], namely art. Art is the origin of both the artist and the work, but this is an origin that is not empirical or ontic but rather of the order of being itself. Art is that which determines particular beings – work and artist – in their being. In one sense of the genitive, therefore, the question of the origin of the work of art is a question of art as an origin, of how art is and can be the origin of work and artist. In the other sense of the genitive, however, the question of the origin of the work of art is one of what the artwork can originate, what it can do, work or achieve. In incorporating both senses, the question of the origin of the work of art might otherwise be formulated thus: What, or rather, how is art? The being or the ‘essence of art (Wesen der Kunst)’ [UK3 2/2] itself, and not merely the essence of


the artwork, is at stake in this questioning. The form of the question is analogous to Heidegger’s question concerning being insofar as the latter seeks not simply the being of beings, but rather the meaning, essence or truth of being itself. Yet no simple analogy can be established here, since this reflection on the essence of art moves ‘along the path of the question of the essence of being’ [UK3 73/55]. Art and being, in other words, are not two separate terms between which we could establish a relation after the fact, as it were. Heidegger’s reflection on art, the poetic, is a reflection on the poetic in being. Of course, art itself can be found only in or through both the artist and the work. In order to question the essence of art it is necessary to begin with one or the other, with either the reception or creation of the work. Heidegger begins with the work’s reception since, as he argues, it is necessary to apprehend what the work of art is, or, better, what it does, what it works, in order to apprehend the specificity of artistic creation as distinct from mere making. This approach gains additional justification with the argument that the work always has a priority and independence in relation to the artist; the artist ‘remains something inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge’ [UK3 26/19]. The work in its reception, in other words, will always tend to exceed the intentions of the artist and the extent to which it does this is, for Heidegger, a measure of its originality, its grandeur or greatness. Of course, if we are to begin with works of art in order to apprehend art itself, we have engaged in a somewhat circular procedure. In referring to particular works of art one has already presupposed what art is, given that such a presupposition is the condition of saying that something is a work of art. One falls, as it were, only deeper into this circle in focusing solely on the highest possibilities of art, on original and thus ‘great art’ [UK3 26/19], as Heidegger does. Yet this is neither a ‘vicious’ circle nor one, as with Hegel,1 that could receive a speculative resolution. It is rather what Heidegger terms a hermeneutic circle: it is necessary to recognise that we have an understanding, a pre-understanding of the essence of art, of that which determines the work as a work, and it is this pre-philosophical understanding that constitutes the possibility of both the experience of artworks and philosophical questioning of the essence of art itself. Far from being an impediment to a rigorous enquiry, this circle constitutes the possibility of the enquiry itself. Consequently, the enquiry can neither seek to avoid this circle, nor wonder how to enter into it – for it is already in it – and it must rather attempt to find its way in the circle knowingly.


α – Earth and the reception of the work In admitting that the appeal to particular works of art in order to determine the essence of art has a circular structure, the only possible starting point is works of art that are ‘familiar to everyone’ [UK3 3/2], such as monuments, churches and paintings. Yet, in Heidegger’s terms, if works of art are considered in their ‘pure actuality (unangetastete Wirklichkeit)’ it seems as if they are ‘as naturally vorhanden’ [UK3 3/2] as other beings. The painting consists of paint on canvas, after all, and it hangs on the wall like the hat on a hook. Such a claim is as crude, given that it abstracts from what one has termed the aesthetic experience of the work, as it is obvious. Against the very idea of Zuhandenheit, the work of art announces itself in its presence before the eyes. The fact of the being-there of the artwork presents itself as such rather than effacing itself within an equipmental totality. Moreover, as Heidegger notes, the work has a ‘selfsufficiency [Insichselbststehen]’ [UK3 26/19] that is quite extraordinary and which seems, first of all, to isolate it from all other beings. It is by means of this phenomenological appeal to the self-sufficient presence of the artwork that Heidegger discovers earth, but it has come under some scrutiny in recent commentary. Julian Young has argued that the paradoxical fact of the matter is that Heidegger, in this passage of thinking, has effectively lapsed into ‘aesthetics’, into insisting that the proper response to art requires the adoption of the ‘disinterested’, ‘aesthetic attitude’. This fact alone should be sufficient to reveal the forgettable character of the entire passage.2 Heidegger’s simple recognition of the fact that we tend to look at or stare at works of art in their individuality becomes, according to Young’s ‘reading’, a paradoxical reversion to ‘aesthetics’. Yet there is no paradox implied here since staring at the work is not equivalent to, and by no means implies, the ‘disinterested’ attitude proper to aesthetics. More to the point, in his Nietzsche Heidegger is concerned to correct misinterpretations of the very sense of ‘disinterestedness’ in Kant’s aesthetics: the suspension of will is here no mere lack or indifference, but rather the highest modality of human being.3 Putting forgettable ‘criticisms’ to one side, it is clear that the artwork shows itself in its seemingly self-sufficient presence. Yet in what does this presence consist? As Maurice Blanchot writes after Heidegger, the ‘statue glorifies the marble’.4 The marble is glorified, which is to say that its veins and lustre come to presence within the limits of the particular


configuration of the statue. In poetry, language does not simply efface itself in delivering us over to that of which it speaks, but rather the tonality of the word is brought to resonate. In painting, the luminosity of the pigment arrests our attention. In the work of art, if it is original, what we call the ‘work-materials’ are brought to show themselves in a remarkable fashion. Moreover, to follow Heidegger’s evocation of a Greek temple,5 the temple-work can bring to presence not only the nature of the stone, but it can make manifest all that surrounds it: Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the obscurity of that rock’s bulky yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest itself in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, first brings to radiance the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea. Tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and thus come to appear as what they are [UK3 28/21]. In its insistence on thinking what is verbally – the temple rests, holds its ground, makes the storm manifest, brings to radiance the light of day and so on – this description recalls the account of a nature that would ‘embrace’ us in Being and Time, and consequently, the attempt to determine a Vorhandenheit that would not be a Dingvorhandenheit in §43 of the text of 1927. Here it is not, however, a question of nature as a particular region of beings, of the natural being as opposed to the thing made, but rather of an aspect of all beings, of the mineral, vegetal and animal to follow the examples provided. The temple brings to presence not only itself in its physicality but beings as a whole. The work allows beings to show themselves as what they authentically are, thus illuminating ‘that on which and in which man bases his dwelling’, which ‘we call […] the earth’ [UK3 28/21]. On this account, earth is neither a particular region of beings nor, thought astronomically, a particular mass of matter. The artwork brings itself and the beings which appear in its horizon to presence in their physicality, but it can achieve this only because being as such is given as an ‘emerging (hervorkommen)’ [UK3 32/24] and rising into presence, an


emerging which unfolds itself in an ‘inexhaustible variety of simple modes and shapes’ [UK3 34/25]. Now although this emerging and coming-to-presence would seem to be able to be located the most directly in the generation of the natural being in the narrow sense – in the blossoming of the tree, for example – it nevertheless constitutes, for Heidegger, the being of all beings. The being of beings is given as an emerging or coming into presence that is prior to and more primordial than the movement or rest of beings in any traditional or Aristotelian sense of these terms. From the perspective of human being, this comingto-presence is one that is granted to it, one that arrives for and before it.6 This coming-to-presence of beings is thought by Heidegger as a Wesen or Wesung, an essencing or presencing that is more original than any Anwesenheit or presence and that is irreducible to any comportment of the being that we are. Certainly, the ability to experience a work of art as making manifest the earth requires attention on our part and perhaps even a particular human faculty. Such a faculty integral to the experience of art has been thought traditionally as the imagination. Yet any thinking of the imagination in art must begin with the originality of the work as making manifest earth, if we are to avoid reducing this originality to a merely subjective play of human faculties. This is why, although in a perhaps surprisingly hesitant manner, ‘The Origin’ brings into question the adequacy of the idea of the imagination for a thinking of art as such [UK3 60/45]. The philosophical stakes of such a thinking of earth are brought into relief in the most acute manner in comparing it to the traditional idea of the sensible, a comparison which Heidegger invites us to make in 1958: ‘The earth: […] this term names everything which, visible, audible or palpable, carries us and surround us, exalts and calms us: the sensible (Sinnliche)’ [G13 150/98]. Yet this is only a comparison; it is merely a delimitation of what a thinking of earth transcends. For the conception of earth is a transformation of what philosophy has thought as the sensible in opposition to the intelligible. Earth is not the mere inert matter of experience that would be ordered by and grounded in prior intelligible, causal or transcendental conditions. It is to be thought verbally as an emerging through which beings as such are. Far from being a mere matter lacking a form, earth is already the emerging of latent and present figures and shapes. In the end, earth is ‘equally sensible as non-sensible’ [UK1 13], or as Heidegger will write later in the 1930s in the Contributions to Philosophy, it is the more profound origin of what ‘metaphysics knows as the sensible’ [G65 482/340]. I will return to this question, but in the path of Heidegger’s thinking, then, a thinking of earth is what serves, at


least partially, to delimit the very idea of metaphysics as such. On this account, metaphysics would be a particular, and historically situated, form of thinking concerning being that passes over earth. It is possible to begin to comprehend why this thinking of earth is neither an edifyingly imaginative projection of nature, nor the result of a mere subjective aesthetic experience devoid of any ‘objectivity’, in determining how this rising and emerging is, at one and the same time, self-secluding. The experience that we might have of the startling vivacity of the colour and tone of a painting, for example, is an experience that would seem to resist any scientific explanation. Yet rather than being deprived of truth, for Heidegger this experience is precisely one that makes manifest the truth of the physicality of things as such, as that which is refractory to any scientific, calculative explanation. Colour shines and wants only to shine. When we analyse it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone. It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained [UK3 33/25]. In order to explain the phenomenon of colour the scientist posits a true world beyond appearances, a world behind the scenes, in this case one consisting of wavelengths. Explanation here means to give an account of something in terms of something else, namely its cause or ground. The scientist attempts to explain colour in positing a world of wavelengths but what we perceive is not wavelengths, and in explaining colour thus, colour itself has been passed over. Any such explanation of what appears will transform it into something other than itself, losing the phenomenon that it attempts to explain. In this connection, it is worthwhile to return to §69 of Being and Time: if the modern mathematical projection of nature establishes an a priori framework of a quantitatively determinable space, time and motion, this projection, far from establishing the truth of beings, only passes over the primordial truth of being as an emerging that refuses to give over its own secret. Earth is that which is forever closed to the sciences, whether physical, chemical or biological, and it is neither simply a ground, nor a Boden, a basis, if by such a term we mean a being. It is rather an ‘abyss (Abgrund)’ [UK1 11]. Earth is an ‘emerging that is a self-secluding (das HervorkommendeBergende)’ [UK3 32], an emerging that hides itself, that maintains its own absence. Earth, in fact, is refractory not only to the methods of modern science but, more generally, to any calculative thinking. The burden of the weight of a stone, to follow Heidegger’s example, is something other than a calculated weight. The heaviness of the stone that might be


perceived in the temple, or more prosaically, the heaviness of the rucksack that feels light at the beginning of the journey, heavy at the end, is not itself a number or a scale of measure, however exact the latter may be. A simple calculation of the heaviness of something has transformed this heaviness into a weight. Heaviness itself is encountered only within the order of experience, which is prior to any numerical calculation, and it refuses to reveal itself to such calculation. Thus: ‘Earth shatters every attempt to penetrate it’ [UK3 33/25].

β – Phusis and the fall of philosophy This discovery of earth occurs as at once a retrieval of the conception of phusis to be found in pre-Socratic thought and in Heraclitus’ thinking in particular. As ‘The Origin’ argues: ‘the Greeks early called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things φjσι’ [UK3 28/21]. Heidegger interprets quite literally the famous fragment 123 of Heraclitus: φjσι κρjπτ,σθαι φιλ,", ‘nature’ loves to hide herself.7 Phusis is here spoken of verbally, as what likes or loves to hide itself, but this is not to be thought as a merely occasional discretion. This is why Heidegger translates philein in this context as a ‘granting’, giving or ‘favour (Gunst)’.8 Phusis is a granting which nevertheless withholds itself, which maintains itself in hiddenness. Concerning the noun itself, if as a verb φjω means to grow, to put, come or bring forth, to produce in the widest of senses, then this does not mean that phusis denominates a particular region of beings. As Heidegger argues in the lecture course of 1935 entitled Introduction to Metaphysics, it denominates the emerging, the event of presence by which beings as such are This emerging and this standing-out-in-and-from-itself must not be considered as one process amongst others that we can observe in beings. Φjσι is being itself, thanks to which beings first of all become and remain observable. The Greeks did not first experience what φjσι is from natural processes, but rather inversely: it is on the basis of a poetic and meditative (dichtend-denkenden) project of the fundamental experience of being, that what they had to call φjσι opened itself to them [EM 11]. Heidegger thus attempts to retrieve a meaning of phusis that is prior both to its Platonic and Aristotelian sense9 as denominating the essential nature, ground or what-being of a being and to its more narrow Aristotelian sense as denominating a region of beings, the being of those beings which have the principle of their movement in themselves. Our


attention is drawn to the etymological proximity, the shared stem, of φjσι and φa, φbο – light; as light phusis is presence, the event of presence which allows each and every being to show itself in its own particular shape and figure. On Heidegger’s reading this is why Heraclitus thinks beings as fire. Fire here is not to be thought, as Aristotle would have it in accounting for the thought of his predecessors, as an element or material ‘substrate’.10 It is rather to be thought as one of the essential traits or determinations of phusis as an emerging into presence along with the Oν πbντα, the one in or of the all, and the rρμονgη iφανy, the invisible harmony by which beings are.11 Heidegger does not, strictly speaking, identify a thinking of earth with the early Greek thinking of phusis. ‘The Origin’ states only that the emerging into presence, rather than the emerging and concealing of being, is what the Greeks called phusis. The problem here is one of whether the concealing germane to phusis was ever properly meditated by the early Greeks themselves. For if Heraclitus experiences and thinks such concealing, then it is nevertheless soon eclipsed with the advent of Plato’s philosophy. According to the Introduction to Metaphysics this historical event constitutes nothing less than a ‘decline (Abfall)’ [EM 141] of philosophy, the beginning of the end of Greek thought. To a certain extent Plato’s thinking can, in fact, be seen as something like the fulfilment of the early thinking of phusis. The fact that beings come to presence as the sort of beings that they are is a truth that only renders more precise, that specifies, as it were, phusis. Yet if the aspect of a being is that by which it presents itself, this presencing is no longer thought as such but only in terms of its result, namely presence, constant presence. This no longer is what would enable the Platonic separation of the aspect of beings from beings themselves. As Heidegger argues: ‘it is because being is the presence of what is constant in unhiddenness that Plato can interpret being, οSσgα (beingness), as 1δNα’ [NII 217/N4 162]. Instead of being thought verbally as a presencing that maintains its own absence, being is now thought as constant presence, and it is precisely the aspect or eidos of beings that is constantly in presence. It is, therefore, the loss of phusis as an unconcealing–concealing with Plato’s eidetic determination of being that would set in motion the decline of philosophy. Now although Heidegger attempts to retain the word ‘philosophy’ itself for a thinking of being all the way through the 1930s, given that philosophy, properly so called, begins with Plato, Heidegger will, in effect, argue that this decline is not a mere accident that befalls philosophy, but rather the fall is nothing less than the historical advent of philosophy as such.


γ

– Earth and creation: the problem of genius The greatest artist does not have any concept that a single piece of marble does not itself contain within its excess, although only a hand that obeys the intellect can discover it. Michelangelo12

The artwork has the capacity to bring the physicality of beings to presence as what will always exceed our calculative attempts to grasp it. In Heidegger’s terms the work sets-up or pro-duces (stellt her) the earth. In its reception, then, the work itself is productive. This productive capacity of the work is, of course, in some sense dependent on, a consequence of, the process of production carried out by the artist. As I have already noted, Heidegger deliberately focuses first on the reception of the work, and the first version of ‘The Origin’ does not, in fact, offer a positive thinking of artistic creation. Such a conception of creation as opposed to mere making is articulated, in a first movement, with the claim that although the artist uses what are termed materials – marble, stone, paint – these are not used up, but rather brought forth to stand in their presence. Rather than being produced in order to serve a purpose within a horizon of finality, the work of art is brought forth to stand for itself in its irreducible individuality and self-sufficiency. The work, thus, allows the earth to show itself in a particular configuration and the artist ‘does not use up or misuse the earth as matter, but rather sets it free to be nothing but itself’ [UK3 52/38–9]. On this account, creation would allow earth to show itself as such, whereas the result of mere making would present it in the guise of mere useful matter. More radically, however, creation is distinguished from prosaic production not only according to its end, but also according to its means. Creation is thought according to the verb schöpfen, which means to ‘draw from’, in the sense that ‘one draws water from a well’ [UK3 63]. Certainly, in the words of Aristotle’s Physics, the artist produces a figure which nature alone could not produce [198b17], yet this figure is not simply imposed on the earth from the outside. In this connection, ‘The Origin’ takes up the dictum of the German Renaissance artist and arttheorist Albrecht Dürer, according to which ‘in truth, art lies hidden within nature; he who can wrest (reißen) it from her, has it’.13 For Heidegger, the verb wrest or reißen here means ‘to draw out the sketch and to draw the design with the drawing-pen on the drawing-board (Reißen heißt hier Herausholen des Rißes und den Riß reißen mit der Reißfeder auf dem Reißbrett) [UK3 58/43]. The figure or form of the work is drawn from the ‘materials’, which is to say, first of all, that the vision or knowing


peculiar to creation cannot be understood as simply the envisaging, in abstraction from the materials themselves, of an idea, or a plan of the work to be produced that would then be superimposed on, as is said, a raw material. It consists much more in the capacity to apprehend what is possible for the ‘material’ with which one is working; it consists in the capacity to apprehend the possibility of, for example, the statue in the stone, to apprehend what figure the stone itself is apt for or capable of. In this sense the drawing up of the design of that which is to be created is a drawing from the earth. Consequently, the process of creation is, in fact, less ‘creative’14 than it is revelatory, and in realising the design with the work-material the artist does more or perhaps less than act on an inert matter. In ‘wresting’ the figure from ‘nature’ she rather lets the earth come to presence in a definite figure, she brings this figure itself into presence. The craft aspect of creation contains an essential passivity, and as a bringing-forth it is rather ‘a receiving and extracting (Entnehmen) within the relation (Bezug) to unconcealment’ [UK3 50/37]. Heidegger does, however, qualify Dürer’s dictum in stressing the originality of the work: if it is true that there is ‘a capacity for bringing forth (Hervorbringenkönnen) that is art’ hidden in nature, then ‘it is equally certain that this art hidden in nature becomes manifest first through the work, because it lies originally in the work’ [UK3 58/43]. The block of stone constitutes the possibility of the statue, certainly, and yet it is the work of art alone that makes manifest what the stone is capable of, what trait or figure the stone can possibly bear. The second section of this chapter will return to this question, but this minimal qualification of Dürer’s dictum amounts to nothing more than a reiteration of Aristotle’s recognition that one cannot simply assert the priority of the possibility of a work in relation to its actuality. Robert Bernasconi has suggested that Heidegger takes Dürer’s dictum out of context in interpreting it according to the idea of ‘extraction’, and that it is concerned only with the question of artistic fidelity to nature, the careful observation of nature in the artistic imitation of its forms.15 Although this is not an impossible reading, it loses much of its force upon the recognition that with such an interpretation Heidegger returns to what the art-theorist and historian Erwin Panofsky has characterised as a ‘commonplace’16 in Renaissance ‘art-theory’, namely the idea that the work is hidden in the work-material before being unearthed in the process of creation. Michelangelo writes: Just as all styles sleep in the pen and ink: the low, the mediocre and the sublime,


and in the marble every image, noble or vile, according to what our genius (ingegno) can extract from it, thus, my dear lord, your breast contains as much pride, perhaps, as humility.17 Not only is the statue dormant in the marble but also the style of the writer is hidden in the pen and ink. This second example may be more difficult for us to envisage but on this account the artist only extracts or, better, awakens the latent, dormant possibilities of stone and ink, the possibilities that nature herself already holds. It is necessary to note that the ‘common-place’ Renaissance conception of creation articulated in this poem involves a quite particular, premodern thinking of genius. Within a study of the emergence and development of the concept of genius, the historian of ideas Edgar Zilsel has shown how the modern conception of it as an innate, exceptional and irrational – since it cannot be learnt – talent for art has its immediate origin in the ingenum of the Renaissance. The Latin ingenum or Italian ingegno qualifies either a person or an individual trait, sometimes without a definite valorisation, but which, without the addition of a specific qualification, signifies an uncommon talent or a remarkably gifted person. Etymologically, it concerns an innate quality that is opposed to all that can be learnt or reproduced.18 The Renaissance conception of ingenum as designating an innate quality was quite unknown in the middle Ages, and it registers what one can describe as a certain discovery of individuality.19 Yet if the ingenum of the Renaissance will become the genius of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming finally a gift peculiar to the fine artist, then before being reduced singularly and solely to a particular capacity of a subject opposed to the sheer materiality of its objects, for Michelangelo at least, the ingenum of the artist is a capacity that consists in being able to respond to or awaken the capacity of nature that is equal to, if not greater than, the ingenum of the artist herself. We have not yet arrived, as Heidegger writes, at ‘modern subjectivism’, which ‘immediately misinterprets creation, taking it as the sovereign subject’s performance of genius ( geniale Leistung des selbstherrlichen Subjektes)’ [UK3 64/48]. Such a formulation of the problem of genius is, without doubt, forceful. One wonders how a sovereign subject could perform an act of genius, since genius in Kant, for example, is that over


which a subject has no control, something that exceeds the intentions and agency of the artist. In fact, if reference is made to Kant in this connection, it is necessary to note that his account of genius in the Critique of the Power of Judgment carries a certain ambiguity, one that could, in fact, be understood to point back to the Renaissance conception of creation. As Kant writes in an Aristotelian mode, ‘we recognise’ an art in the most general sense ‘in everything formed in such a way that its actuality must have been preceded by a representation of the thing in its cause’.20 The ‘producing cause’, namely the producer, must have ‘an end in view to which the object owes its form’.21 The purpose that the table, for example, is to serve determines its form and the work-materials to be formed. In this way what is to be produced is ‘represented as possible’22 in the producer’s mind, whereas the production proper makes this representation actual. The representation, however, is arrived at according to a process of rational, conceptual deliberation and according to ‘rules’; in order to produce a table, one must select an appropriate material, the table itself must have a certain form, the leg or legs must be joined to the top of the table in a certain way and so on. These rules can be learnt and applied to each particular case of the production of a table. Fine art, however, cannot be understood to be merely the result of the application of such rules, since the author of a product that he owes to his genius does not know himself how the ideas for it come to him, and also does not have it in his power to think up such things at will or methodically and to communicate to others precepts that would put them in a position to produce similar products. The aesthetic ideas expressed by a work of art, ideas that – as will be elucidated more fully in the following chapter – animate it as a work of soul, spirit or Geist and thus as a work of fine art, are beyond method. The ability to think them up is a talent and not an aptitude, which is to say that it can neither be learnt nor taught, and that it cannot be reduced to a mere function of the will. To this extent, Kant’s analysis of the creation of fine art remains quite faithful to Plato’s account of lyric poetry in the Ion as deriving not from techne, which is knowledge, and more specifically, the knowledge and vision germane to production, but rather from a divine power or capacity, a θ,gα δjναμ,ι (533d), which possesses the poet, and consequently those that hear or read his words, by means of a kind of magnetic force. Yet instead of being of divine inspiration the power that exceeds


rational, conceptual thought for Kant is ‘an innate productive faculty of the artist’, albeit one that is a ‘natural gift’, a talent ‘which itself belongs to nature’. Given, therefore, that fine art supposes rules, for otherwise it would not be an art, it is, famously, nature that gives the rule in the creation of fine art by means of genius. Although genius is innate to the artist, then, it is nevertheless nature herself that would be operative or active within artistic creation; it is nature that gives the rule to art. As I suggested, in its ambiguity such a thinking of nature in art may seem to recall the Renaissance conception of creation. Yet Kant provides us with no means to think nature in the sense that Heidegger, after Dürer and Michelangelo, intends. Such a conception is, in the end, impossible for Kant precisely to the extent that within his account of art in general possibility is thought from its logical determination as a mere category of modality, as solely concerning the representation of the thing in the producer’s mind before its actualisation. In other words, if the fine artist ‘does not know how the ideas for it have entered into his head’, then the determination of how these ideas get out of the artists head, which means the account of the physical process of production as creation, is left quite unaffected. Hence if Heidegger’s formulation of the problem of genius is somewhat forceful, then arguing, following Jay Bernstein, that it ‘is precisely because works of genius are not the products of a sovereign subjectivity, and because their excess beyond subjectivity entails a transcendental opacity’ that Kant’s account of genius can be brought into ‘direct affiliation’23 with Heidegger’s thinking, does not do any justice to the force of this formulation itself. It is the discovery of earth as something other than mere inert and transcendentally grounded matter that ultimately legitimates the argument and which decisively separates Heidegger’s thinking from modern subjectivism. The discovery of earth leads us to apprehend a capacity of nature herself within creation, a capacity that does not reside in the sphere of a subject opposed to its objects. Moreover, it is necessary to note that the ambiguity of Kant’s account of nature in art will soon be dissipated in Hegel’s account of the ‘technical skill’ required by artistic creation: the artist must have ‘subdued the sensuous material to willing obedience’. Mere sensuous and ultimately dead matter must ‘immediately obey the artist’s intentions’; it must be mastered by the will and life of spirit.24 It is, then, in thinking beyond modern conceptions of genius that Heidegger seeks to distinguish both artistic vision and the craft aspect of creation from prosaic production. The second version of the essay announces such a distinction in terms of the being-produced (Erzeugtsein)


of the work being hidden (verhüllt) by and taken over by its being-created [UK2 50]. Creation would exceed mere prosaic production in bringing forth a being that sets-up earth. Despite the fact that Heidegger already refers to Dürer’s dictum, the second version thus does not yet dissociate creation and mere making as being of entirely different orders. It ends, however, by asserting the necessity of a ‘correct concept of equipment and a correct concept of the art work’ and by stating that ‘a delimitation of the work of art in relation to equipment is of a principal significance for a correct understanding of art itself’ [UK2 50–2]. In taking up this problem, and notwithstanding the fact that Heidegger stresses the difficulty of clearly establishing such a distinction [UK3 46/34], the final version argues that creation and mere making are indeed of altogether different orders. Of course, art requires a certain craftsmanship but the idea that craftsmanship is the same in both creation and mere making is nothing but an ‘illusion’ [UK3 52/39]. The craftsmanship required for the creative manipulation of paint or stone in creation is of another ‘sort’ [UK3 47/35] than mere making. Creation, thus, would differ from mere making because earth differs from matter, from the ‘using up and misuse’ of earth as matter. In fact, if the very idea of matter derives from the work-materials encountered in the process of prosaic production then what has come to be termed the materials of artistic creation is in no way mere materials; ‘nowhere in the work does there exist something like a work-material (Überall west im Werk nichts von einem Werkstoff )’ [UK3 34/25]. To abstract from the different historical determinations of ‘matter’ – as will become clear shortly, such an abstraction lies at the heart of the problem of Heidegger’s readings of Aristotle’s hylo-morphism – what we ‘misinterpret as matter’ [UK2 32] harbours a more profound secret, namely earth.

5.2

Fundamental ontology in question

α – The shoes and the origin of Zuhandenheit The discovery of the more profound origin of the concept of matter in the artwork inexorably leads to the following questions in relation to equipment or the product: Why is it necessary to say, as Heidegger does initially, that the production of the product constitutes a ‘misuse of the earth as mere matter’, and not a bringing-forth of the earth? And is it not possible to encounter a more profound origin of the concepts of both matter and form in the use of equipment? Heidegger responds specifically to the latter question in the first section of the third and final version of ‘The Origin’. For the attempt is


made here to locate a more profound origin of the referentiality of equipment, a more profound origin of Zuhandenheit. Initially, Heidegger reiterates the analysis of Zuhandenheit in relation to what is now a threefold distinction between the artwork, the product and the mere thing. If the conceptual doublet of matter and form is not proper to the artwork, then neither is it proper to the ‘mere thing’, which means ‘lifeless beings of nature’ such as ‘a stone, a clod of earth, a stick of wood’ [UK3 6/5]. In this connection, Aristotle writes in Metaphysics Z: Evidently even of the things ordinarily considered to be beingness, most are only potencies thereto – both the parts of animals (for none of them has being separately; when they have been separated, then too they all have being merely as matter) and earth and fire; for none of them is a unity, but as it were a mere heap till they are worked up and something unitary is made out of them [1040b5–10]. Elements such as fire and earth are not yet things or beings in the proper sense, because they have not yet come to adopt the stability of a distinct form. Certainly, a mass of granite already has a sort of form or shape. Yet the definite form of the product is determined by the use that the being is to serve rather than a haphazard and ‘prior distribution of the matter’ [UK3 13/9]. To paraphrase Kant, the ‘producing cause’ of the product had an end in view to which the product owes not only its form, but also the particular material from which it is made. This would mean, for Heidegger, that the concepts of matter and form first originate from an interpretation of equipment, of that which is useful. On Heidegger’s account, however, the utility of the product is not to be thought as something that ‘hovers somewhere above it as an end (was als Zweck irgendwo darüber schwebt)’ [UK3 13/10], but rather as something that determines the being of the product as zuhanden. In order to apprehend more profoundly what the ‘equipmental being of equipment in truth is’, however, Heidegger selects the example of a pair of shoes, shoes belonging to a peasant woman: When she takes off her shoes late in the evening, in deep but healthy fatigue, and reaches out for them again in the still dim dawn, or passes them by on the day of rest, she knows all this without noticing or reflecting. The equipmental being of the equipment consists indeed in its usefulness. But this usefulness rests in the abundance of an essential being of the equipment. We call it reliability (Verlässlichkeit). By virtue of this reliability the peasant woman is made privy to the silent


call of the earth; by virtue of the reliability of the equipment she is sure (gewiß) of her world [UK3 19–20/14]. The example of the shoes differs from the paradigmatic status in Being and Time of the item of equipment that is manipulated, the tool or Werkzeug in the narrow sense, in two ways: shoes are not only, properly speaking, worn rather than used but they are also worn, needless to say, on the feet rather than on the hand. Certainly, Heidegger had already referred to shoes in the account of Zuhandenheit in Being and Time. Yet if this reference to shoes did not interrupt this account in any way, then Heidegger now seeks to show that in the fact of their being worn, the shoes have a being that is prior to any utility or usefulness. The shoes are, of course, produced for something, namely for walking and to protect the feet. On the ground, however, or in the field – the two phrases are to be understood both literally and metaphorically – and before the peasant might take them to the cobbler, the shoes have a reliability which is prior not only to their presence before the eyes or Vorhandenheit but also to their Zuhandenheit. Heidegger seeks to show that it is by virtue of the reliability of a pair of shoes – if they are in good state of repair – and only by virtue of this reliability that the peasant can have particular projects to pursue. The reliability of equipment is the prior condition of its utility and the ‘latter vibrates in the former’; it ‘would be nothing without it’ and is its ‘essential consequence’ [UK3 20/15]. The conception of the tool as zuhanden, as appearing within a horizon of finality, then, is still too immediate and the discovery of earth has led to the recognition that the being of equipment is given at a more profound or a lower level – the spatial metaphor is here quite appropriate given the example of the shoes – than that of utility or handiness. In the field, the reliability of the shoes is taken for granted, yet what is in fact granted in this taking for granted is world and earth. Thanks to the solidity of the shoes the peasant woman is open to the ‘silent call’ of the earth, and she is ‘certain’ of her world. This is to say that our practical comportment is founded on an understanding or a knowing, but such knowing is prior to the in-order-to of our everyday projects. Heidegger defends this account of equipment in transforming the argument of §16 of Being and Time concerning the breakdown of equipment. There it was argued that at the moment of the breakdown of an item of equipment the horizon of references that constitute a totality of equipment is, in a certain manner, revealed. In the no-longer-being-ableto-be-used-for-something of an item of equipment there occurs a rupture of its referentiality to other items of equipment. For the genealogical


gaze of the phenomenologist at least, at the moment of this rupture there is a manifestation of the fact that in its use this item of equipment was referred pre-thematically to other items of equipment within an equipmental totality. Now, however, Heidegger argues that the specific manifestation of the utility or usefulness of the broken-down or wornout product in its no-longer-being-able-to-be-used-for-something is evidence of the original reliability of equipment; ‘Such dwindling of equipmental being is the disappearance of its reliability. Such dwindling, which gives things of use that boringly oppressive usualness, is only one more testament to the original nature of equipmental being’ [UK3 20/15]. This is a difficult argument. If the argument of Being and Time could be easily defended, then the claim that the manifestation of utility in the broken-down tool is evidence of an equipmental being more fundamental than utility itself is problematic. For what is supposedly made evident here does not show itself in the same manner as its utility. It does not show itself at all. Heidegger recognises this since he introduces the idea of reliability in the final version of ‘The Origin’ by way, in fact, of a painting of Van Gogh. It is, for Heidegger, only through this painting that we can learn to see reliability; ‘the equipmentality of equipment first expressly comes to the fore through the work and only in the work’ [UK3 21/16]. On the basis of our study of the movement of Heidegger’s thinking, however, it is clear that the account of reliability emerges less from an epiphanic interpretation of a particular painting than it does from the discovery of the earth. In other words, Heidegger refers to a painting in order to articulate a thesis whose necessity results from the discovery of earth achieved by means of a reflection on art. This movement is by no means explicitly articulated in the text and the fact that Heidegger turns to the painting as a ‘pictorial representation (bildliche Darstellung)’ of a pair of shoes upon stating the necessity of a description of equipment ‘without any philosophical theory’ [UK3 18/13] can be considered as disingenuous. But what is Heidegger doing here? To abstract from his somewhat overcharged, if not ‘pathetic’,25 manner of articulating the problem, Heidegger invites the reader to see in a painting a thesis of which the sense and necessity will become clear in the course of the text. The painting allows him, in fact, at once to advance a thesis concerning the being of equipment, and to surpass, from the outset, any idea of the artwork as a mere representation of things. Rather than representing something, the painting manifests beings – in this case shoes – in their being. Of course, one is in no way compelled to accept this reading of a painting, and the fact that the


latter is not even named or specified in ‘The Origin’ is enough to indicate that this is hardly Heidegger’s primary concern. Yet even if one chooses not to accept this reading, this, in the end, takes nothing away from its possibility as a ‘reading’ of a painting. It is, in any event, this more original thinking of equipmentality that liberates the ‘mere thing’ from its determination as the always and already zuhanden in Being and Time. As we read, the ‘equipmental character of equipment keeps gathered within itself all things according to their manner and extent’ [UK3 20/15], but this gathering must be thought more originally than as a horizon of referentiality. For Heidegger, ‘anticipating a meaningful and weighty interpretation of the thingly character of the thing, we must aim at the thing’s belonging to the earth’ [UK3 57/43]. We must aim at the thing’s belonging to the earth rather than saying that it is the earth, because the thing appears in a world, and because world and earth are not themselves things, but two ontological differentials, two aspects of the being of beings. It is a result of a reflection on the work of art, then, that Heidegger is led to think beyond both the concepts of Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit. Philosophical reflection, as he writes in 1936 with specific reference to Schelling, but in terms that describe the dynamic of his own thinking, ‘must guard itself from making the Vorhandensein or Zuhandensein of things the first and sole measure of the determination of being’ [S 137/114]. As significant as it is, however, this thinking of equipment beyond Zuhandenheit is to a certain extent still quite negative insofar, precisely, as it merely seeks to think beyond Zuhandenheit. It is for this reason that Heidegger will always point to the thinking of ‘The Thing’ in the eponymous essay of 1950 in terms of the fourfold of ‘world’, ‘earth’, ‘sky’ and ‘mortals’ as his most decisive.26

β – Techne and poiesis revisited We are still far from pondering the essence of action (das Wesen des Handelns) decisively enough. We view action only as causing an effect. The actuality of an effect is valued according to its utility. But the essence of action is accomplishment. To accomplish means to unfold something into the fullness of its essence, to lead it forth into this fullness – producere. ‘Letter on Humanism’ [G9 313/239]. Examining how the being of equipment in its use is re-determined in terms of earth leads us to the question of the production of equipment: is it not possible to see in prosaic production a bringing-forth of the earth rather than a mere misuse of earth as matter? Although the third section


of the final version of ‘The Origin’ aims to establish a decisive distinction between production and creation, a remark in the second section brings such decisiveness into question. Heidegger writes here that ‘nowhere in the work is there any trace of a work-material’, but he adds immediately afterwards that ‘it even remains doubtful whether, in the essential definition of equipment, what equipment consists of is properly described in its equipmental essence as matter’ [UK3 34/25]. On this evidence, it would seem clear that the third section of the final version of the essay was written before the first and second sections. Yet the distinction between production and creation is rendered problematic in the manner in which it is articulated in relation to Greek thinking in the final section itself. Heidegger first of all stresses that if the Greeks understand both mere making and artistic creation as techne, before signifying a practical activity, the term properly designates a mode of knowing. He argues consequently: The artist is a τ,χνgτη, not because he is also a craftsman, but because both the setting forth of works and the setting forth of equipment occur in a bringing forth [Her-vor-bringen] that causes beings in the first place to come forward and be present in assuming an outward aspect. Yet all this happens in the midst of the being that surges upward, growing of its own accord, phusis. Calling art τNχνη does not at all imply that the artist’s action [das Tun] is seen in the light of craft. What looks like craft in the creation of a work is of a different sort [UK3 47/35]. Both the artist and the craftsman were men of techne, but the latter is a mode of knowing, which, as the condition of any process of production, perceives and draws from phusis a possible outward aspect into the unhidden. In stressing, thus, the priority and originality of techne in relation, in effect, to poiesis, the text aims to safeguard – in a quite negative way – the distinction between two modes of craftsmanship; the craft aspect proper to creation ‘is of a different sort’. And yet the terms of the argument itself, far from supporting a distinction between two modes of craftsmanship, would seem to undermine the very intention of the argument itself. For if the Greeks thought techne in general, which is proper to both modes of production, as a bringing-forth into unhiddenness, then the craft aspect of prosaic production in the Greek sense of poiesis can hardly be held to be a mere manipulation of inert matter.27 This reading of techne as a bringing-forth of phusis is predicated upon an interpretative return to a pre-Socratic sense of the term, as evidenced in the reading of Sophocles’ Antigone in Introduction to Metaphysics.


Techne is here read as an Ins-Werk-setzen-können des Seins, ‘the possibility of the setting of being into work’ [EM 122] in a particular being, namely in a work. The genitive here is at once subjective and objective, which is to say that being is at once the ‘subject’ and the ‘object’ of the setting into work. Techne, in other words, is not simply opposed to phusis, and like world and earth the two are ontological differentials. The two share a common ‘ground’ in being, which ground Heidegger thinks in 1935 as force or even violence: the force (Gewalt) proper to techne is only a harnessing of the prevailing and dominance (Walten) of phusis itself.28 By 1936, Heidegger’s register has been modified insofar as the ‘The Origin’ emphasises the passivity of techne as a bringing-forth. Yet the text would also seem to have generalised this reading of a pre-Socratic sense of techne in relation to Greek thinking as such and thus in relation to Aristotle. It can be said, however, that Heidegger’s reflection on artistic creation demands a rereading of the sense of not only techne, but also poiesis in Aristotle, because the Renaissance conception of creation that ‘The Origin’ takes up, according to which the statue is hidden in the work ‘material’ before it is revealed or unearthed by the process of production, is one that has its origin, via Plotinus in particular, in the work of the Stagirite. In Metaphysics Theta, Aristotle could not link such an idea more clearly to a thinking of possibility: energeia means the presence – to huparchein – of the thing but not in the sense which we mean by potentiality. We say that a thing is present potentially as Hermes is present in the wood [1048a32–3]. Since the wood is the statue potentially, as Aristotle continues, the latter needs only to be wrought out from the former by a process of iφαgρ,σι, a process of abstraction.29 Traditionally, upon its translation as potentia, possibility in this sense has been conceived of as a state of indetermination. Before the actualisation of the specific form of the table, the wood is in a mere state of indetermination, a state from which other forms or determinations could have emerged than those in fact actualised. In 1939, however, Heidegger attempts to think this sense of dunamis much more positively in translating it as ‘appropriate-for [Eignung-zu]’: ‘Appropriate-for’ means: tailored to the appearance of a table, hence for that wherein the generating of the table – the movement (μ,ταβολx) – comes to its end. The change of the appropriate wood into a table consists in the fact that the very appropriateness of


what is appropriated emerges more fully into view and reaches its fulfilment in the appearance of a table and thus comes to stand in the table that has been produced, placed forth, that is into the unhidden [G9 285]. Wood is capable of, appropriate for being formed into a table. In being appropriated by the producer, then, the being-appropriate-for-themaking-of-a-table of the wood is that which is appropriated, but to be appropriated means here to be brought from prior hiddenness into the unhidden. Yet in its appropriation the wood does not become solely energeia or entelechia, but it rather maintains a being-hidden or a beingappropriate, since it always remains possible for it to adopt another form. After a reflection on the work of art, then, Heidegger returns to Aristotle to show that hule is far from being an inert matter, precisely because it is determined as the possible, which is now read as a hidden appropriateness. Certainly, as was shown in the second chapter, Heidegger had already translated dunamis as Eignung-zu, appropriate-for, in the 1920s, but beingappropriate is now thought in a more profound sense than referentiality. Yet if Heidegger is already on the way to thinking the originality of Aristotle’s determination of matter as the possible in the 1920s, it would seem that the hesitation with regard to the sense of poiesis in ‘The Origin’ is motivated less – even if the following two points are two aspects of the same question – by the meaning of hule itself, than by the Latinate and traditional interpretation of ποι,"ν as the operation of an efficient causality. Such hesitation will be replaced by the most categorical of assertions in ‘The Question concerning Technology’: ‘Aristotle’s doctrine does not know the cause that this name designates, any more than it employs a corresponding Greek term’ [G7 11/QCT 8]. Traditionally, and as has already been partially noted, Aristotle is held to articulate a doctrine of the four causes of beings: the material, formal, final and efficient causes. If, as Cornford writes, ‘it does violence to the English idiom’ 30 to speak of four causes, to speak of matter, for example, as a cause, given our post-Cartesian propensity to think causality purely as efficient causality, then the question of how the producer is one of four causes presupposes the question of what an α$τιον is as such. The Greek originally and ordinarily means to be ‘guilty of’, to be ‘responsible for’ something, and as Owens notes, Aristotle often uses the term in an adjectival form which accentuates this sense of responsibility.31 Silver, then, is responsible for the chalice, for example, as is the form or aspect that pertains to it as a chalice. What governs the selection of the matter and the determination of the form is the end or telos of the being, which


is the completion and perfection of the finished product at which the producer aims. Concerning what has been interpreted as efficient causality, however, Aristotle speaks of τ κινtσαν, the mover or τ ποι8ν, the producer, as the iρχy τt μ,ταβολt, the origin of the movement or change. In the case of technical production, Aristotle draws this origin back to the eidos in the soul, since a person is the origin of the sort of change that is building, for example, only on the condition that she possesses the art of building.32 The movement of technical production is born from techne, as we read in The Generation of Animals: It is the form and the eidos which pass from the carpenter, and they come into being by means of the movement in the material. It is soul, wherein is the eidos and the knowledge, which causes his hand or some other part of his body to move in a different way if the work is to be different, the same if it is to be the same; finally, it is by the work of the hands and the body that matter is transformed [730b8–12]. It is the eidos in the soul that moves the hands of the producer, which, in turn, enables the generation of the product. Upon the envisaging of the eidos in the soul the poiesis proper can begin, and yet the producer, insofar as she is merely co-responsible for the product, and because the matter is here the appropriate, does not externally impose, simply by the force of her will, a form on the work ‘material’, but rather lets a possible form come forth from its prior state of hiddenness into presence. The fact that production is no mere efficient acting upon an inert matter for Aristotle is evident in Chapter 9 of Physics I. In distinguishing shortage, that is, possibility from the subject in which it inheres, Aristotle characterises ‘matter’ as that which desires form and existence: If being (ντο) is something august (θ,gο,) and good and desirable, we might think of shortage as the evil contradiction of this good, but of hule as something the very nature of which is to desire and yearn towards the actually existent [192a20–4]. It is not the shortage or possibility that desires form, for something cannot desire its own destruction. It is rather hule, as the ‘subject’ of the change, which desires the form. Such an appeal to an idea of desire could, of course, be understood as a somewhat poetic anthropomorphism. But this understanding is a misunderstanding, and an anthropocentric one at that. For what, in fact, would be more anthropocentric here, would be


the idea that production simply consists in the imposition of a form first envisaged in the mind of the human being on an inert matter. As Heinz Happ has noted in his magisterial study of the concept of hule, this thinking of desire in matter is neither anthropomorphic nor solely of biological significance, and is rather ‘a central philosophical thought’33 of Aristotle’s work. From Heidegger’s perspective, it articulates and supposes a conception of poiesis as a bringing-forth into the unhidden. According to Metaphysics Theta, the capacity of the producer to produce something corresponds to a capacity of the materials to adopt the particular form that the producer has in mind. To δjναμι το8 ποι,"ν there corresponds a δjναμι το8 πbσχ,ιν [1046a19–25]. In Physics III Aristotle analogically compares this relation to that between a pupil and a teacher [202a33–4], and one wonders what sort of efficient causality he could have in mind here. Heidegger, in fact, had already pointed to this analogy in the 1924 lecture course Basic Concepts of Aristotle’s Philosophy [G18 327], which makes the apparent hesitation in 1930s concerning poiesis appear all the more remarkable. For rather than acting upon the pupil, the teacher, if she is indeed capable of teaching and if the pupil desires to know, ‘merely’ turns or leads the pupil towards a possibility of his own being. The teacher draws knowledge from the pupil or, as might more frequently be said, she merely enables the student to realise his own potential. Certainly, poiesis is of a higher rank than pathesis for the Greeks, and as Aristotle writes in On the Soul, ‘the ‘agent’ is always superior (τιμι%τ,ρον) to the ‘patient’ and the arche to its matter’ [430a18]. Yet it remains the case that passivity is not absolutely ‘passive’ for Aristotle, and that ‘action’ is not the external imposition of force, on things that are essentially inert, that would transform something into something that it simply is not. The Latinate translation of what Aristotle describes as the origin of change with the terms ‘efficient causality’ is commonly understood as nothing less than a faithful transposition of Greek thinking, even if it is noted that poiein in Aristotle is more revelatory than creative.34 Less commonly, the fact that Aristotle draws the origin of technical change back to the eidos in the soul, and this not merely as a ‘figure of speech’, has been used to argue that the notion of efficient causality has been unjustly ‘obliterated’35 in his work. For Heidegger, however, this latter argument is utterly anachronistic, and the idea of efficient causality is perhaps the most acute case of how ‘the translation of Greek names into Latin’ is the ‘translation’, that is, the transformation ‘of Greek experience into a different way of thinking’ [UK3 7/6]. The translation of poiesis as facere, the translation of the origin of the movement of production as


causa efficiens, or, and in short, the translation of ‘RνNργ,ια by actus’ is nothing less than a historical event in which ‘with one blow the Greek world was toppled’ [G9 286/218]. Beings are now thought within a perspective or horizon of conquest, domination and subjugation. Action is but the external imposition of force, the result of a mere act of will, an ‘invading’, in the words of Jean Beaufret, of what is other to the agent ‘in order to “push” it into becoming what it is not’.36

γ

– Truth and beingness

After ‘The Origin’, then, Heidegger will show that poiesis is something other than the operation of an efficient causality. Heidegger will finally argue in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ that the Greeks finally gave art, as a mode of bringing-into-the-unhidden, its proper name in calling it poiesis [G7 35/QCT 34]. The sense, however, of this reinterpretation of what Heidegger termed in 1927 the ‘ancient conception’ of being as being-produced becomes fully intelligible only in examining the revision that it entails in the interpretation of the two other aspects of this ‘ancient conception’, namely being as truth and being as presence. Truth in the guise of aletheia is now to be thought as the event of revealing–concealing by which beings are. Heraclitus’ experience of phusis is nothing but an experience of aletheia in this sense, even if the term itself does not appear in the remaining fragments of his thought. For Heidegger, such an experience of aletheia is what liberates us from our ‘modern habits of representation’ according to which man is ‘the carrier, if not the artisan, of unhiddenness’ [G7 273/EGT 109]; and this remark is to be read as a self-critique insofar as in the 1920s aletheia was interpreted as a ‘specific accomplishment of Dasein’ [G19 25/17]. Without doubt, the ‘relation’ between Dasein and being remains as a pressing question, as Heidegger indicates in the appendix to ‘The Origin’, but the very task of thought now consists of apprehending unhiddenness as an accomplishment of beings themselves, an accomplishment that occurs for and before the being that we are. An experience of aletheia as a revealing–concealing of beings themselves must be understood as grounding not only the thinking of Heraclitus but also Aristotle’s physics and the productive horizon of his thinking. Although, as has already been indicated, the Nicomachean Ethics does not clearly delimit how techne is a mode of revealing, for Heidegger, it is now to be understood as one that allows beings themselves to come to presence into the unhidden. Techne is a mode of aletheuein or revealing because it brings a being as such, and not merely


the eidos in the soul, into the unhidden. Furthermore, if Aristotle’s thinking attains its summit with the determination of being as truth in the final chapter of Metaphysics Theta, this truth of the essence of beings is now to be thought less as a revealing carried out by the human being and more as a being-revealed, a having-come-into-presence of the essence of beings. It should be noted in this connection that Heidegger had already, prior to the discovery of earth, made a significant move towards this interpretation in §9 of the lecture course of 1930, On the Essence of Human Freedom, which, in relation to the final chapter of Metaphysics Theta, no longer speaks of the uncoveredness of the essence of beings as an accomplishment of Dasein, but rather of the prior unhiddenness (Unverborgenheit) or emergence (Entborgenheit) of the essence of beings. To be sure, Heidegger’s claim is not that Aristotle or the Greeks in general specifically reflected on the privative sense of aletheia. According to the ‘The Origin’, the hidden history of Greek philosophy consists from its beginning in this: that it does not measure up to the essence of truth that lit up in the word iλxθ,ια, and so, of necessity, has misdirected its knowing and saying about the essence of truth more and more into the discussion of the derivative essence of truth [UK3 37/28]. The hidden history of Greek philosophy consists in the fading away of the ‘privative’ essence of truth that the term aletheia itself names. Yet the experience of truth as unhiddenness must be understood to inform the thinking of Aristotle, precisely to the extent that hule has not yet become an inert matter, and, thus, that producing is not yet understood as the operation of an efficient causality. It is only upon the historical event of the translation of energeia by actus that the privative dimension of truth, now thought as veritas, recedes, and that truth itself can become simply and solely the mere correctness of propositions. As Jean Beaufret writes succinctly, ‘actus presupposes that a will has procured for itself the means to its end; Oργον presupposes rather iλxθ,j,ιν, iλxθ,ια, an epiphanic or rather anti-phanic plenitude.’37 In parallel to the rethinking of the being of equipment in its ‘use’ beyond utility or finality, then, production thought in a Greek sense is shown to have a truth prior to being an operation on a mere inert matter that would be determined and dominated in its essence by human ends. This truth is to be thought as unhiddenness or aletheia. It is according to such a rereading of the originality of the horizon of production


constitutive of Greek ontology that it is possible to understand the full extent of Heidegger’s ‘disregarding of the possibility […] that differences relating to the essential history of being may yet also be present in the way equipment is’ [UK3 17/13] in the final version of ‘The Origin’. The question of the various historical determinations of equipment is now a question because not only does the thinking of reliability move beyond or beneath the Latinate tradition at its end, but, in addition, the Greek essence of production is essentially other than that of the tradition which follows it. Such a remark shows that Heidegger has overcome what, as was noted in the conclusion to the second chapter, he will later term the ‘naivety’ of the historical repetition constitutive of fundamental ontology. This naivety consisted in not yet being able to perceive the original difference of Greek ontology in relation to the tradition that succeeds it. Yet, as I have already argued in advance as it were, this is not to say that this repetition was ‘wrong’ or ‘false’, but only that it shows the truth of the tradition that emerges from Greek ontology. The fundamental ontological reduction of beings to their finality and to the will, to the Um-willen of the human being, regardless of whether the latter is thought in its essence as Dasein, manifests nothing but the truth of the translation of energeia by actus and the reduction of the Greek hule to inert matter. As the introduction to this chapter indicated, in 1935 Heidegger initially held the absence of a distinction between the product and the work of art in Aristotle’s thinking to be a ‘remarkable fatality’, one that achieves a ruination of the essence of art itself. Yet now, at least in relation to the specific question of the earth, the argument is less that Greek ontology constitutes a first impoverishment of the essence of art, and more that Aristotle’s determination of poiesis possesses an originality unheeded by the tradition. In other words, the lack of a decisively ontological distinction between the product and the work of art in Aristotle is less a corruption of what is higher, the work of art, from the perspective of what is lower, the product, than it is an originary thinking of production in general without equal in the philosophical tradition. It is on this basis that Heidegger is led, in the end, to renounce the attempt to articulate a rigorous distinction between the work of art as a bringing-forth of the earth and the product as a mere formation of matter. Henceforth, the focus is less on what distinguishes artistic creation from mere making than on what distinguishes modern technology, that is, modern industrial production from the work of the hand as such and in general, a distinction that the Origin already stresses ‘it is necessary to make’ [UK3 46/34]. The question now, as Micheal E. Zimmermann has


remarked, is one of the difference between the possibility of an ‘authentic production’38 as a bringing-forth of the earth and the machinations of modern technology. Although, as we have seen in the case of Michelangelo in particular, it is artistic creation that has pointed, however indirectly, beyond the horizon of Latinate thought insofar as it has apprehended its materials as more than inert matter, the mere product has at least the potential to bring forth the earth, to unearth the ‘shapes hidden in nature’39 even if withdrawing itself in the measure that it is used, it does not create the shock of the new proper to the experience of an original artwork. The rereading of aletheia called for by Heidegger’s reflection on art, however, is accompanied by a re-interpretation of the very sense of the Greek ousia and the temporal sense of the ancient conception of being as presence. As Heidegger argues in 1939, in order to comprehend the ‘naming power of οSσgα as a basic philosophical word’, it requires to be translated – at least in Aristotle, who would think ‘in a more Greek manner’ [NII 409] than Plato – as: Anwesung, presencing, instead of Anwesenheit, presence. What we mean here is not mere Vorhandenheit, and certainly not something that is exhausted in mere stability; rather: presencing, in the sense of coming forth into the unhidden, placing itself into the open. One does not get at the meaning of presencing by referring to mere duration [G9 272/208]. Beyond any conception of substance, and even beyond any conception of Vorhandenheit, ousia must be thought as presencing rather than as Anwesenheit, presence. The sense of ousia, in other words, is not exhausted by any mere constancy in presence. Certainly, a being in the proper sense for the Greeks is that which is stably in presence, and as Heidegger notes in reading Physics, II, 1, Aristotle characterises beings as the συν,στaτα, at 192b13, as that which has taken a stand. Yet we must ‘learn to see’ [G9 249/191] that it is only on the basis of entering into presence that ousia can consequently be thought as constancy. This argument is developed with reference to Aristotle’s treatment of the Sophist Antiphon’s distinction between matter as that which is igδιον and form or, more precisely, >υθμ as that which is ?π,ιρον, that which comes in and out of existence endlessly, without limit [193a25–8]. The claim is that this is not a distinction between the temporal and the eternal, between matter as the eternal ground of the temporary and changing forms that it can adopt. For, on the one hand, what


is supposedly opposed to the eternal is, in fact, without limit; on the other hand, igδιον or i,gδιον has its root in the word i,g, which does not originally mean the everlasting or the incessant but rather ‘at any given time’.40 The original sense of this distinction can only be understood, then, in recognising, first, that limit or πNρα is to be thought positively as what delimits and thus determines the being as the being that it is; second, that it is this being-limited as the achievement of its entry into presence that characterises that which is as i,g. The latter is the being that has come into the unhidden in the stability of its limit or boundary, and it is only on this basis that it may consequently be thought of as eternal, whereas the being without limit is deprived of this stable emergence into the unhidden. The distinction at its origin, then, is not to be thought ‘with regard to duration but with regard to presencing’ [G9 269/206]. To be sure, this verbal sense of presencing is not to be thought as simply a thinking of movement or becoming. Heidegger’s thinking of presencing after a reflection on the work of art aims, in other words, at more than a conception of the past and future as a sort of absence within a thinking of an ecstatic time. Presencing, to follow the seminar of 1962 entitled Time and Being, is to be thought as akin to a fourth dimension of time.41 What unifies and first grants the ecstatic unity of the future, present and past is the entry into presence of this unity itself. The coming into presence of time in its threefold structure is one, again, that is granted to the human being, one that arrives for and before it. Accordingly, the past and future of an ecstatic temporality are no longer merely a sort of absence but are now to be thought verbally as an absencing (Abwesung), the coming-to-presence or granting of a kind of absence. It is in this sense that in 1940 Heidegger determines the ecstatic structure of phusis in Aristotle as the ‘presencing of the absencing of itself, one that is-on-the-way from itself and unto itself’ [G9 299/228]. The physical determination of ousia, then, is to be thought as a presencing that is prior to any concept of mere presence. Yet, as Heidegger will argue in the 1950s, even the categorial determination of beingness in Aristotle is to be thought in this way. Why is saying, for the Greeks, a λNγ,ιν, λγο? Because λNγ,ιν means: to ‘collect’, to ‘gather’, to ‘lay next to each other’. But such a laying is, as a laying that gathers, raises up, keeps and preserves, a letting-lie-before that brings something to shine forth, namely that which lies present. However, that which lies present is what comesto-presence in its presencing [SG 179/107].


The logos is always logos concerning a hupokeimenon but the being of this hupokeimenon is to be thought verbally as a having-come-into-presence. Language, on this account, collects or draws beings into their being, it brings them into presence and unhiddenness, as Being and Time itself had already argued in its own way. Doubtless, such a conception of logos is never made thematic in the work of Aristotle. Nevertheless such an interpretation is not arbitrary, since it can be understood to be the horizon of experience from which Aristotle, perhaps unknowingly, thinks and speaks given the original sense of his poietic determination of beings. The discovery of earth achieved by reflection on art, then, leads to a revision of the three aspects of Aristotle’s determination of being to which Heidegger had sought to draw our attention in the destruction projected in §6 of Being and Time: being as being-produced, being as presence in the temporal sense and being as truth. Yet these senses of being are intertwined, and the weight of Heidegger’s rereading of the ‘ancient conception’ of being, falls on one basic point: the sense of possibility in relation to the innerworldly being. It is, at bottom, the reinterpretation of the sense of dunamis that allows Heidegger to locate a thinking of presencing in Aristotle’s work. At any rate, it is far from the case that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in the 1920s ‘differs only in minor and generally contextual ways’42 from the reading articulated after a reflection on the work of art, as Thomas Sheehan has argued. Moreover, if it makes any sense to argue, with the advantage of hindsight, that ‘Heidegger’s programme from the start […] always meant an overcoming of the metaphysics of actuality’,43 then it must nevertheless be recognised that he has in no way overcome such a metaphysics in relation to the being of the innerworldly being in the 1920s, notwithstanding the analysis of Zuhandenheit. Such an ‘overcoming’ occurs only by means of a reflection on the work of art. Consequently, the fact that ‘The Origin’ takes up the traditional, and originally Aristotelian concepts of essence and existence in reflecting on the work of art with the terms Riß and quod, the ‘figure’ and the that-it-is of the artwork, is hardly surprising or ‘something remarkable’, as Holger Schmidt writes. For Schmidt, this is remarkable since ‘it is upon’ the ‘archetypical duality’ of existence and essence ‘that the metaphysicoontological tradition that Heidegger intends to criticise is erected’.44 It is a quite naive idea of critique here which underwrites such astonishment: Heidegger’s critique of the tradition is a delimitation that attempts to think more originally than the tradition in order to transform it. This is what he does in showing that the existence, the quod or the Wirklichkeit


of the work of art is not exhausted by any traditional conception of beingproduced or being-created, that is, by any traditional conception of actuality. In fact, the Wesen or the coming-to-presence of beings is more original than both the traditional concepts of essence and existence as determinations of the being of beings; and as Heidegger writes in the Contributions to Philosophy, ‘the basic principle’ of another beginning of thought, of a post-metaphysical and even post-philosophical thinking, is that ‘all Wesen is Wesung’ [G65 66/46], that all essence is an ‘essencing’ or presencing.

6 Art, World and the Problem of Aesthetics

The preceding chapter of this study showed that although the discovery of earth leads Heidegger initially to take a critical stance towards Aristotle’s hylo-morphism, this discovery nevertheless leads to a positive appropriation of the Stagirite’s thinking. Heidegger’s conception of earth draws from and appropriates Aristotle’s determination of hule as the possible in showing how the latter is not yet what it will become in the Latinate tradition. Examining how the discovery of earth is implicated in a retrieve of Aristotle, however, leads us to a final question, one which concerns Heidegger’s conception of world: is it in any sense possible to appropriate positively Aristotle’s thinking with a conception of world in relation to the work of art? If the discovery of earth seeks to think more originally what, in Heidegger’s own terms, ‘metaphysics’ knows as the sensible aspect of the work of art, then the conception of world in ‘The Origin’ seeks to rethink what has traditionally been understood as the intelligible aspect of the artwork. Of course, and as stated in the introduction to the preceding chapter, the artwork is traditionally distinguished from the product insofar as it is not merely formed matter, but formed matter that shows something other than itself, that in some way has an intellectual content or meaning. As Heidegger writes in the second version of ‘The Origin’: [T]he distinctions between form and matter, content and tenor (Inhalt und Gehalt), figure and idea henceforth form the armature of any conception of the work of art. And if there is a fatality, it consists precisely in that these distinctions are always correct and always attestable in the work; for the latter allows itself to be considered as a produced thing which presents a ‘spiritual tenor’. Art becomes the 168

Art, World and the Problem of Aesthetics 169

presentation (Darstellung) of something super-sensible in a formed sensible matter [UK2 53]. The long history of traditional approaches to art in terms of matter, form and intellectual content is no mere aberration since it is always possible to locate the truth or correctness of these concepts in the work. Yet, what Heidegger terms the ‘fatality’ of this history would consist in the fact that the self-evidence of such approaches only veils a more original apprehension not only of earth, but also of world, in relation to the artwork. The ultimate aim of this chapter is to examine the delimitation of Aristotle that Heidegger’s thinking of world in art implies. To this end, the first section of the chapter elucidates such a thinking of world in art in showing how it displaces post-Kantian accounts of the artwork as a Darstellung, as a representation or presentation, of an intellectual content or concept. More specifically, the aim in this section is to show how Heidegger’s critique of the idea of Darstellung addresses the ambiguities of the post-Kantian conception of the symbolic as a mode of presentation that is proper to the artwork. A passage from the introduction to the final version of ‘The Origin’ indicates clearly that the idea of the symbolic is in question: In the artwork something other is brought into conjunction with the thing that is made. The Greek for to ‘bring into conjunction with’ is συμbλλ,ιν. The work is a symbol [UK3 4/3]. In this way Heidegger offers an etymology of the originally Greek term, without discussing the long history of the term in modernity. With the aim of elucidating the import of Heidegger’s thinking, then, I will show how his delimitation of the concept of Darstellung both criticises and appropriates the post-Kantian determination of the symbolic in its distinction from the allegorical, an idea also briefly addressed in the same passage of ‘The Origin’. In relating this thinking of world in art to the discovery of earth examined in the preceding chapter, the second section of the chapter will first examine the sense of the attempt of ‘The Origin’ to locate in art a possible modality of truth, a way in which truth can occur. It is on this basis that it will be possible to examine Heidegger’s critique of modern aesthetics as an alienation of art from truth, and, finally, the critique of Aristotle that is implied in his further argument that such aesthetic alienation already begins in Greek ontology. In reading the Poetics I will seek to determine to


what extent this argument, which Heidegger issues principally in relation to Plato in his Nietzsche, can be understood to apply to the work of Aristotle.

6.2

Art and the problem of Darstellung

α – The return to Greek art and the idea of the symbolic According to ‘The Origin’, the artwork has the capacity not only to bring forth the earth but also to ‘open up (eröffnen)’ or to ‘set up (aufstellen)’ [UK3 28/21] a world. Heidegger articulates this thinking within an interpretive return to pre-Socratic Greece, to the epoch of ‘great Greek art’ [NI 95/N1 80]. The greatness of this art, as Heidegger underlines in his Nietzsche, rests less in the particular quality of the works than in the rank that art occupies within Greek existence itself; and, in the words of Hegel, art in this epoch was the ‘highest form in which the people represented the gods to themselves and gave themselves some awareness of truth’.1 Heidegger, then, can only reaffirm Hegel’s recognition of the centrality of art within early Greek existence, and yet the very task of ‘The Origin’ is one of bringing into question any conception of art as representation. To this end, in the first instance ‘The Origin’ focuses on a particular form of Greek art, namely architecture. It would seem at least difficult to understand a Greek temple as a representation either in the sense of a copy of an already existent being or as a sensible presentation of the ideal, conceptual essence of a being, in the originally Platonic sense of its idea. As Heidegger asks rhetorically: ‘could anyone maintain the impossible position that the Idea of temple is represented (dargestellt) in the temple?’ [UK3 22/17]. In truth, the temple does not represent or portray anything. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure [Gestalt] of the god, and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico. Through the temple the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as a holy precinct. The temple and its precinct, however, do not fade away into the indefinite. It is the temple work which first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the figure of destiny for human being [UK3 28/20–1].


The temple simply stands in the valley but in this apparently simple standing rests the plenitude of the being of the temple as a work. The temple harboured the statue of the god, but the latter was not in the former like shoes are in a box. The temple would have rather delimited the sacred precinct and, thus, the worldly presence of the god. It would have allowed the god to be present on this earth in being the focus of ‘dedication and praise’ [UK3 30/22], and in this way it would have allowed for a particular ethos or bios, for the ‘paths and relations’ that constitute a particular way of life. Heidegger’s argument, then, is that within Greek existence a temple as a work of architecture was much more than an object of use that would have, in addition, a beautiful form. This Kant argues in the Critique of the Power of Judgment: an architectural work is a useful thing that also has its end in itself insofar as it possesses an additional, aesthetic finality.2 Yet, for Heidegger, prior to any form of finality, the temple sets up or establishes what might be termed Greek culture. Yet, it is not, to use a common turn of phrase that precisely inverts the truth of the matter, an ‘expression’ of Greek culture, as if this culture pre-existed the temple itself in the interiority of a Greek ‘consciousness’. Art is not to be understood as an expression of an age, and the temple does not merely, as might also be said, give form to Greek culture. On the contrary, as an original work it achieves, establishes and opens this culture itself. Thus, as Heidegger argues, an original work ‘is not an “expression” of what a people is, but the summersault which points to what this people wants to be’ [UK2 48]. What I have termed, ambiguously enough, ‘culture’, is what is thought by Heidegger as world; ‘in the reflected glory’ of the splendour of the temple ‘there gleams, that is illuminates itself, what we called “world” ’ [UK3 30/22]. In giving only a schematic determination of the nature of world, ‘The Origin’ characterises it as ‘the self-opening openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people’ [UK3 35/26], and as more fully in being than all those tangible and perceptible things in the midst of which we take ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be looked at. World is the ever non-objective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into being [UK3 29/23]. From these indications it is clear that the notion of world is addressed in broader terms than those of fundamental ontology. Heidegger now


explicitly relates it to all the phenomena that we would subsume under the concept of culture. Yet in maintaining the term culture it is necessary to think it on the basis of a phenomenological determination of world, if one is to avoid understanding culture as the sum total of extant created objects or, worse, as the particular product of the ‘culture industry’.3 ‘The Origin’ does, however, speak of world in a verbal form: die Welt weltet. World worlds ‘wherever the essential decisions of our history are made, wherever we take them over or abandon them’ [UK3 29/23], and thus in the most decisive and the most commonplace moments of history. Such a verbal thinking of world serves to gain for phenomenology more distance from a thinking of intentionality, and to shift the emphasis away from an understanding of world as the result of a projection on the part of the being that we are. There is a ‘worlding’ of the world that is given to the being-in-the-world that we are, and in its different epochal formations world is the web of ‘paths and relations’ within which individuals always and already find themselves. This constitutes only a slight change of emphasis, and Heidegger had, in fact, spoken of world in such a verbal fashion prior to 1927.4 Yet what has changed upon a reflection on the work of art is the status of the innerworldly being: the work is an innerworldly being that itself sets up or projects a world. Not only does the world world but also, and more profoundly, the work can work, that is, set up and make manifest a world. ‘Towering up within itself, the work opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in place’ thus giving ‘to things their look [Gesicht], and to men their outlook [Aussicht] on themselves’ [UK3 29/21]. Here, there is less a shift in emphasis than a definite change of perspective, insofar as the projection of world does not occur solely as a function of the being that we are. Of course, the possible projection of world by the artwork occurs only in our experience of the work itself. The work, as Heidegger puts it, requires ‘preservers (Bewahrende)’, and preserving is not to be thought here simply as an antiquarian concern with the past, but principally as the ability to experience the advent of both earth and world in the work.5 ‘The Origin’ describes preserving as a modality of both knowing and willing, but this knowing and willing is only a response to, a safekeeping, as it were, of the capacity of the work to set-up earth and world. Doubtless, and as Heidegger underlines in ‘The Origin’, the particularity of the ancient Greek world is forever lost to us. Ruins of temples may remain with some of their physical majesty and splendour intact, but the world that such works originally instituted exists no longer. Yet, on


Heidegger’s account, the same power to establish a world would have existed in the forms of Greek art that can more evidently be considered as representative: So it is, too, with the sculpture of the god that the victor of the athletic games dedicates to him. The work is not a portrait [Abbild] intended to make it easier to recognise what the god looks like. It is rather a work that allows the god himself to presence and is, therefore, the god himself. The same is true of the linguistic work. In the tragedy, nothing is staged or displayed theatrically. Rather the battle of the new gods against the old is being fought. In that the linguistic work arises from the speech of the people, it does not talk about this battle. Rather, it transforms that speech so that now every essential word fights the battle and puts up for decision what is holy and what unholy, what is great and what small, what is brave and what cowardly, what is noble and what fugitive [UK3 29/21–2]. The statue of the god was not, at its origin, a sensible, material depiction of the god, which god would only have been accessible in thought. It would rather have achieved the worldly presence of the god itself, since the statue is, or at least was, a holy, sacred statue, and thus was the god itself. Similarly, the tragedy is no mere representation of the battle of the old and new gods, which battle, in truth, would reside elsewhere than in the tragedy, but is itself the battle. The sense and direction of Greek culture, and thus of the Greek world, is what is fought out in the words of the work. It is in asserting that the work is that which it allows to come to presence that Heidegger can be understood to take up the long history of the concept of the symbol in post-Kantian German philosophy. The work of Kant is important in this history insofar as §69 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment opposes an improper use of the idea of the symbol by modern logicians as designating mere arbitrary signs or indicative marks that relate to what they signify merely by the learnt association to a signified. For Kant, the symbolic must rather be understood as a mode of intuition or presentation, which is to say that the symbolised is in some sense present in the symbol and not merely associated to it. The highest point of the development of what Kant announces as ‘deserving of deeper investigation’,6 however, can be located in the work of Schelling. In §39 of his Philosophy of Art, a text of lectures first professed in 1802, Schelling determines the symbolic as a mode of


presentation in distinction from the schematic and the allegorical as follows: The Darstellung in which the general signifies the particular, or in which the particular is apprehended through the general, is the schematic. The Darstellung, however, in which the particular signifies the general, or in which the general is apprehended through the particular, is allegorical. The synthesis of these two, where neither the general signifies the particular nor the particular the general, but where the two are absolutely one, is the symbolic.7 Primarily, the schematic is what Kant had already described as a mode of presentation in which the particular is apprehended by means of a general concept. A particular house, for example, is only apprehended as the particular house that it is by means of the concept of house. The concept is thus presented or exemplified in the individual house – which will always be of particular size, form, colour, matter and so on – and it thus provides the rule for any empirical presentation of particular houses in determining what any house as such must be. The allegorical, however, is the inverse of this procedure, since the general is apprehended through and by means of the particular, rather than the particular being apprehended through the general. The allegory is a mere means for presenting a general truth and refers beyond itself to the latter. Although, for Schelling, both art and mythology constitute the domain of the symbolic, it is always possible to read Greek mythology allegorically: ‘The charm of Homeric poetry and of the whole of Greek mythology rests in truth on the fact that it also contains an allegorical signification as a possibility – one can in fact allegorise it as a whole.’8 Greek mythology can be read as the representation of a general truth of which the mythological figures themselves would be a mere particular instantiation. Athena, for example, as the goddess of war would be merely a sensible instantiation, a mere empty sign, of the idea or concept of war. Yet, in this way one passes over an original symbolic meaning. One ought not to say that, for example, Jupiter or Minerva signify or must signify this or that. One would have nullified in this way all the poetic independence of these figures. They do not signify (bedeuten) it, they are the thing itself .9 The two aspects of the symbol, namely the symbol and what is symbolised, are, in fact, one. The above passage states that the symbol does not


signify something but as Schelling otherwise writes, if the symbol signifies something, it does not merely signify, but it is what it signifies: Signification (Bedeutung) here is at the same time being itself, it has passed into the object, being one with it. As soon as we let these beings signify something, they are no longer themselves. Their greatest attraction resides even in that, whilst they simply are, without any relation, absolute in themselves, they let significance shine through them at the same time.10 The symbol is, in fact, constituted by what Schelling terms the ‘absolute indifference’11 of universal and particular, of signification and sign, in a particular, individual work of art or mythology. This absolute identity brings not only the idea of signification, signification as assuming a separation of sign and signified, into question, but also the very idea of Darstellung itself. The idea of the symbolic pushes the conception of Darstellung to its limits, for if the symbol is the presentation of a general conceptual meaning, then it nevertheless cannot be separated from this conceptual meaning itself. It is this problematic of the symbolic, then, that Heidegger can be understood to take up in asserting the identity of the statue with the god in ‘The Origin’. In §17 of Being and Time, in fact, Heidegger had already encountered, in all but name, the problem of the symbolic within an ethnological context, in discussing ‘the abundant use of “signs” in primitive Dasein, as in fetishism and magic’. In these cases, ‘the sign coincides with what it indicates. The sign itself can represent what it indicates not only in the sense of replacing it, but in such a way that the sign always is what is indicated’ [SZ 82]. The discussion arises on the basis of an attempt to interpret the functioning of signs (Zeichen), beyond any conception of the association of ideas, as items of equipment, and thus of the essence of indication according to the analysis of Zuhandenheit. Yet, Heidegger can find no way to account for the peculiar identity of sign and signified that he has mentioned, and the discussion grinds to a halt at the end of the section with the remark that the categories of Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit are inadequate ‘ontological clues’ for any approach to the question. By the time of his reflection on the artwork, however, if Heidegger takes up the problematic of the symbolic more deliberately, then this is in order to overturn decisively any account of ‘symbolic meaning’ as the Darstellung of a concept. The statue of the god is what it ‘signifies’, certainly, but both being and signification are here to be thought according to the horizon of world. World,


as we have seen, is a horizon of hermeneutic, pre-thematic meaning that is prior to the possibility of conceptual meaning. Within the horizon of world, and with such pre-conceptual meaning, things are what they are for Dasein, and in this way world constitutes the very being of beings. The statue is what it means, therefore, but both meaning and being are to be thought here in terms of the horizon of world. Hence like the temple that houses it, the statue of the god or the theatrical work, as being what they mean, can be understood to serve to establish the pre-thematic horizon of the Greek world, the ‘relations’ and ‘paths’ of a particular way of life. It is necessary to note at this juncture that Schelling’s account of the symbolic in relation to the allegorical and schematic as modes of presentation is somewhat formal. The articulation of all three modes in terms of the relation between the particular and the general or universal omits a consideration of the resistance to conceptual meaning that Goethe amongst others holds to be constitutive of art as symbolic in distinction from the allegory12; the symbol, for Goethe, has a general and ideal signification, but it signifies only indirectly, for otherwise it would turn our interest away from itself in the manner of the allegory. In The Critique of the Power of Judgment, of course, Kant had already stressed the irreducibility of the meaning of fine art to conceptual meaning, even if this is not immediately related to a thinking of the symbolic.13 On this account, the work has qualities or attributes that express aesthetic ideas and by an aesthetic idea, Kant means that presentation of the imagination which induces much thought, yet without the possibility of any definite thought whatever, that is concept, being adequate to it, and which language, consequently, can never get quite on level terms with or render completely intelligible.14 As was noted in the preceding chapter, aesthetic ideas animate the work of art, they are what give soul, spirit or Geist to a work of genius, and they are representations of the imagination ‘associated to a given concept’, which are nevertheless irreducible to the conceptual understanding. For Heidegger, however, if there is something in excess of conceptuality in the work of art, then this is no mere ‘aimless imagining of whimsicalities, and no flight of mere representations and fancies into the unreal’ [UK3 60/45], but rather the pre-thematic, hermeneutic horizon of world. What I hope to have shown in the preceding analyses is that it is not impossible to retrieve something fruitful from the manifold, modern interpretations of the idea of the symbol, as Heidegger himself states in


the Contributions to Philosophy. Yet, it is necessary, above all, to overturn the interpretation of symbolic meaning as a ‘symbolic expression’, as the externalisation or the Darstellung of a conceptual meaning that would originally reside in a ‘consciousness’. It is necessary to think the sense of symbolic meaning from the perspective of the horizon of world. It is still incumbent on us to investigate further in this chapter how world can be thought in art, but already on this basis we can understand Heidegger’s remark that the historical ambiguity and confusion surrounding the notion of the symbol – a notion that Aristotle introduced to philosophy without adequately accounting for what it might mean – is ‘a true descendant of the embarrassment in relation to being that reigns in metaphysics’ [G65 502/353].15 It might be said, more specifically, that the confusion surrounding the concept of symbol descends from the traditional loss or passing-over of the structure of worldhood.

β – Modern art and poetry Heidegger’s argument is that art was neither an expression of early Greek culture nor a mere sensible presentation of a conceptual truth, but rather the establishment of the Greek world. Yet, in what manner and to what extent can a setting-up of world be located in the art of our own age? In posing this question Hegel’s recognition that art in the modern age ‘no longer counts as the highest way in which truth finds existence for itself’, and that art has ‘ceased to be the highest need of spirit’ should not be ignored.16 Indeed, it is necessary to underline that Heidegger’s reflection on the work of art by no means seeks to give a historical account of what art is and has been since the Greeks. Certainly, ‘The Origin’ points to the pivotal and formative role of art not only in preSocratic Greece but also in the establishment of the medieval and modern epochs. Yet, in a manner that can be compared to that of Hegel, this does not preclude but rather necessitates a thinking of the historical transformations that art endures.17 Moreover, Heidegger does not simply seek to determine what art is in the present. The question is rather one of what the artwork can be, and ‘The Origin’ enquires into the essence of art ‘in order to be able to ask properly whether or not, in our historical existence, art is an origin, whether, and under what conditions, it can and must become one’ [UK3 66/49]. The concern, therefore, is for the possibilities of art rather than its mere actuality and thus, as Heidegger writes forcefully in the appendix to the final version of the essay, ‘what art might be, this is one of the questions to which the essay does not give a response. What seems to be a response is only a sign that guides the questioning’ [UK3 73/55].


Heidegger does, however, focus on painting and poetry as modes in which world can be set up and brought into relief. Concerning the question of painting, in the preceding chapter I argued that the discussion of Van Gogh’s painting of shoes is introduced in the final version of ‘The Origin’ as a way of exemplifying a philosophical thesis whose necessity had already been apprehended upon the discovery of earth. Moreover, the discussion of this work is quite particular insofar as the argument here is not merely that the work sets up a world, but also, and more strongly, that the painting makes worldhood – and the earth – manifest as such, manifest for us as philosophers. Yet, this is neither the sole nor the earliest reading of a painting that Heidegger offers. Within a discussion of the idea of schematism in Kant, the lecture course Logic: The Question Concerning Truth of 1925 distinguishes the presentation of empirical concepts from presentation in the guise of art in referring to a painting of the abstract expressionist Franc Marc entitled ‘The Deer in the Forest’. In artistic presentation a concept is represented, which in this case presents the understanding of a being that is with me in my environment, the understanding of a being and its being in the world; the being-in-the-forest of the deer and the way and manner of its beingin-the-forest is presented. We designate this concept of the deer and this concept of its being as a hermeneutic concept, in distinction from a pure thing-concept [G21 364]. Marc’s painting is one of his most ‘abstract’ and this allows Heidegger to claim without ambiguity that the painting is neither a representation of an existent, empirical being nor an empirical presentation of the general, conceptual essence of a being. The painting rather explores and exploits the horizon of world; it brings into relief the interpretative horizon of our being-in-the-world in and through which things are what they are. Phenomenology as such shows that vision is not a positive fact, that the perceived world is already pervaded by meaning and interpretation, and it is this meaning that painting would be able to draw from and make manifest. Certainly, art is still understood here as a mode of presentation. Although the painting is not a presentation of a ‘pure-thing’ concept, it is nonetheless a presentation of the hermeneutic concept of the ‘being-in-the-forest’, the being of the deer as we encounter it within the horizon of world. The idea of a hermeneutic concept is problematic, and the text clarifies neither how the hermeneutic horizon of world can be conceptualised, nor the manner in which a hermeneutic concept


could be a concept that is other than an empirical thing-concept. This problem will be dispelled, however, as soon as Heidegger omits, as he will in the ‘The Origin’, such a hermeneutic concept as the intermediary between work and world. Concerning poetry, §34 of Being and Time had, in fact, already pointed to the poetic work as a manner in which being-in-the-world can be disclosed. In poetical discourse, the communication of the existential possibilities of one’s affective horizon (Befindlichkeit) can become an aim in itself, and this amounts to a disclosing of existence [SZ 205]. Poetry can disclose the affectivity or mood of Dasein that is constitutive of world. It can bring to light and thus set up our affective relation to the things of the world. A poet can invest the most prosaic or mundane activities and things with the whole range of human emotions, and yet this is no idle poetic projection that would be divorced from the truth of things. On the contrary, the poet only develops and exposes the truth of our irreducibly affective relation to things. Such a conception of Befindlichkeit in poetry, as Michel Haar has noted, will be fundamental to Heidegger’s commentaries on the work of Hölderlin from the 1930s onwards.18 It allows Heidegger to delimit and think beyond the conceptual schema of form and content in relation to poetry. The poetry of Hölderlin, for one, cannot be understood simply as the ‘symbolising of authentic reality by images of the un-real that are as concretely sensible as possible’ [G39 16] in the particular verse form of the poem. For this poetry articulates a Grundstimmung, a fundamental tone or mood, which is not to be thought as a mere sonic tonality, but rather as what ‘opens the world that receives in poetic saying the imprint of being’ [G39 79]. The poetry of Hölderlin would dispose its reader to the affective horizon of world and thus to being as such. The lecture course of 1927, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, develops the remark of Being and Time concerning poetry in examining a passage of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.19 The passage describes an exposed interior wall of a partially demolished row of houses. The narrator perceives the poverty, desolation and struggle of the daily existence of the former inhabitants in the traces left on the wall by the gas lamps, in the fractured surface covered by rotting paint. This is far from being, as Heidegger argues, a mere anthropomorphic projection of the human condition onto the wall. On the contrary, ‘the description is possible only as an interpretation and elucidation of what is ‘actually’ in the wall, which leaps forth from it in our natural comportmental relationship to it’ [G24 246/173]. Things, in other words, are already invested with a pre-thematic and pre-conceptual


meaning insofar as they appear within the hermeneutic horizon of world, and the work of literature consists in exploring and exploiting this horizon, in bringing it to the fore. Poetry, creative literature is nothing but the elementary emergence into words (Zum-Wort-Kommen), the becoming-uncovered of Existenz as being-in-the-world. For the others who before it were blind, the world first becomes visible by what is thus spoken [G24 244/172]. Poetry or literature can bring the world into words, it can make the horizon of world itself explicit. Of course, this is not to say that creative language necessarily achieves an explicit recognition of the structure of worldhood in the way of the phenomenologist. Yet if fundamental ontology, in attempting to retrieve and lay the grounds of Aristotle’s determination of the logos apophantikos, had argued that the linguistic proposition was to be understood as a revealing or uncovering of beings, now the argument is that language in its poetic dimensions can explore, set-up and, to a certain degree, make explicit the very horizon of world in and by which beings are. Poetry or creative language, in short, can disclose the being of beings; it ‘brings beings as beings, for the first time, into the open’ [UK3 59/46]. What is overturned within Heidegger’s conception of poetry between Being and Time and the 1930s, however, is the very idea of poetry, and in fact language as such, as a mode of communication. Poetry ‘is neither merely nor primarily the aural and written expression of what needs to be communicated’ [UK3 61/45]. The lecture course of 1934 on Hölderlin’s ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ deliberately seeks to dismantle any conception of poetry as a symbolic expression of the imagination and the lived-experience (Erlebnis) of the poet. The irrefragable correctness of this conception only ‘excludes without hope the slightest possibility of a grasp of the essence’ [G39 27] of poetry itself. For the poet always writes, speaks and thinks within the definite range of possibilities of a given historical language, of which she is not the absolute master. Thus, poetry is to be thought as a work of language in both senses of the genitive: it is the work of the poet ‘on’ the given state of a historical language, certainly, but more profoundly it is the work of language itself as something other than a mere, inert thing. Hence, if we are to say that language is expressive, then it is an expression neither of an isolated subject nor even of a people, but rather an expression of world in the sense of an emergence into words of world, of a setting-up of world.20


6.2

Truth and the problem of aesthetics

α – Truth in art It is on the basis of examining how Heidegger thinks world in art that it is possible to consider the attempt of ‘The Origin’, against much of the tradition of philosophical reflection on art, to understand art as a particular modality of truth, a specific way in which truth occurs. In order to comprehend this fully, however, it is necessary to examine first of all how world and earth can be thought together as two ontological differentials, two aspects of the being of beings. Françoise Dastur has remarked that the task and principal difficulty of any reading of ‘The Origin’ consists in not conceiving the duality of earth and world ‘as a new form of the ancient metaphysical duality of matter and spirit’.21 In order to avert this misunderstanding, one can only underscore exactly how Heidegger thinks beyond such traditional terms. First, as the preceding chapter of this study showed, earth cannot be reduced to any traditional conception of the sensible. It is merely what the tradition has known as the sensible, for it is no mere formless matter but already the emerging into presence, the presencing, of latent figures and shapes. Second, the idea of world delimits and transcends traditional determinations of the intelligible, for already within the framework of fundamental ontology it was not simply thought as an intelligible form projected on or conditioning matter. Although a grounding horizon of intelligibility, the dis-closure of world in Dasein’s existence is not a negation of any closure but rather occurs only by virtue of an irreducible depth, darkness or unintelligibility. Being and Time had already termed world a clearing or Lichtung of being, which clearing is in no way a negation of concealment.22 Consequently, although Heidegger does occasionally characterise world in ‘The Origin’ as an openness as opposed to the opacity of earth,23 neither the one nor the other can be isolated as simply a principal of translucency or opacity; ‘world is not simply the open which corresponds to the clearing, earth is not simply the closed that corresponds to concealment’ [UK3 42/31]. Concomitantly, neither can be grounded upon the other, even if Heidegger occasionally accords a certain primacy to earth in speaking of it, in Hölderlinian terms, as the ‘native ground (heimatliche Grund)’ [UK3 28/21].24 Concerning the irrevocable intertwining of both, Heidegger writes that the earth cannot dispense with the opening of the world, just as the world, in turn, ‘cannot soar out of the earth’s sight if, as the governing (waltende) breadth and path of all essential destiny, it is to ground itself on something decisive’ [UK3 36/27].


If world is the governing here, then it still requires to ground itself on ‘something’ and thus, in a sense, to be governed. Furthermore, given that both earth and world are not things, but ontological differentials, one cannot, properly speaking, even separate earth from world in order to ground the one in the other. Every attempt to distinguish a worldly aspect of things from the earth is bound to fail for it is impossible to say whether the colour of a painting, for example – or colour as such – is of the world or the earth and every attempt to explain or separate the earth as the effect of a pure sensibility – in terms of light waves – will transform it into something other than itself. It is for these reasons that ‘The Origin’ considers the relation between earth and world as a strife or a combat: The strife is not rift (Riss) in the sense of a tearing open of a mere cleft; rather it is the intimacy of the mutual dependence of the contestants. The rift carries the contestants into the source of their unity, their common ground. It is the fundamental design (Grundriss). It is the outline sketch (Auf-Riss) that marks out the fundamental features of the emerging of the clearing of beings. This design (Riss) does not allow the contestants to break apart. It brings the contest between measure and limit into a shared outline [UK3 50–1/38]. Heidegger draws out two senses of the German word Riss: on the one hand, it means a rift in the sense of strife; on the other hand, it means a plan, sketch or design. The strife of world and earth that emerges in the figure, sketch or design of the work is one that arises from an intertwining that is prior to any opposition and one that can never resolve itself into a higher unity. Of course, such a thinking of strife contrasts with the traditional stress in aesthetics on the formal harmony of the elements of a work but it does not exclude such a conception of harmony. For Heidegger, the apparent repose (Ruhe) of the work in its selfsufficiency has its ‘essence in the intimacy of the struggle’ [UK3 36/27] between world and earth in the coming-to-presence of beings. Strife, in other words, is the prior condition of the harmony of the elements of a work. The strife of world and earth is, however, the manifestation of a yet more fundamental or original strife. This is termed an Ur-streit [UK3 51/39], which is to be thought as the struggle between concealing and revealing that is common to, and the abyssal ground of, both earth and world. In their agonistic unity both allow for an ‘open region (Offene)’ or ‘clearing (Lichtung)’ of beings, but this clearing does not give over its own secret and is always and already a concealing.


The very sense and direction of Heidegger’s thinking, then, is to lead us to apprehend that the work has the capacity to instigate such strife by setting up earth and world. The most difficult task that is set for us by ‘The Origin’ is, in fact, that of allowing and enabling ourselves to apprehend an ‘agency’ or ‘activity’ in the world that transcends any traditional categories of movement or change. Such ‘activity’ is the work-being of the work, and work-being is here to be thought verbally, as, precisely, a setting-up of earth and world. If in the 1920s, as we have seen, fundamental ontology had argued that the human being as Dasein is to be distinguished ontologically from the finished product, then from 1935 Heidegger offers a similar argument concerning the artwork first of all, and consequently concerning beings as such: the work is no mere finished product since in its repose there is an ‘ontological’ power and capacity at work. It is this capacity that the artist allows to come to presence, and from which she draws in the process of creation. This is to say that the artist in the process of creation draws not simply from the innate possibilities of the earth but from the strife of both earth and world. Concerning world and creation, however, it is necessary to underline how Heidegger conceives art as drawing from previous culture and the history of art itself as a repetition, a creative deformation of the past. What ‘went before is refuted by the work’, and it achieves a creative ‘destruction (Zerstörung)’ [UK1 8] of both the past and the present, whilst with respect to its future and its ‘coming preservers’, the work is to be thought as a ‘founding (Stiftung)’ [UK3 63/47] of what is to come. Yet this refutation proper to great, original art is no abstract negation, but rather a return to the source, a return to the origins in order to take up that which remains as yet undisclosed, hidden in the tradition. Such an account of the importance of the canon, even if it is not simply a model to be copied, may often seem to have little relevance to the practices of artists in the present day. Yet, for Heidegger, if art is to be great art, and if it is to escape being reduced to a function of the expression of an isolated ego, such historicity of art is essential. On this basis it can be said that if the artwork ‘comes out of nothing in the sense that it never derives its gift from what is familiar and already here’, then ‘in another sense it does not come out of nothing; for what it projects is but the withheld determination of man’s historical existence itself’ [UK3 64/48]. It is by thus locating in the artwork a historical establishment of earth and world, that art itself can be thought as a specific modality of truth. Truth, on this account, is a happening, an event in and through which beings, and thus earth and world, come to presence in a specific configuration. Of course, such a conception of truth in art is possible only in


destroying, which Heidegger had attempted to do in the 1920s, the limitations of any correspondence theory of truth, in addition to any conception of the eternity of truth itself. The truth of art is the ‘establishment (Einrichtung)’ [UK3 49/36] of an open region or clearing of beings. The artwork, therefore, is not merely something true but rather in it and through it truth is at work. Truth and the work-being of the work are here to be thought, once again, verbally or ‘actively’. In its irreducible singularity, in the shock of its newness, the work in its workbeing has the capacity to be a ‘setting-into-work (Ins-Werk-Setzen)’ of truth. As Heidegger remarks [UK3 65/49], this locution is ambiguous according to the two senses of the genitive: the ‘setting into work’ can be understood as the effect of human endeavour or as the work of truth itself. It cannot be understood as either simply the one or the other, but ‘The Origin’ attempts as much as possible to think in the second direction, to counter any reduction of the reception or preservation and creation of the work to the function of an isolated and self-grounding human subjectivity. Thus Heidegger speaks of truth establishing itself, and even willing its own establishment in the work: ‘Since it belongs to the essence of truth to establish itself within beings in order first to become truth, an impulse (Zug) to the work belongs to the essence of truth as one of truth’s distinctive possibilities for achieving being in the midst of beings’ [UK3 50/36]. This impulse of truth to the work is neither simply an expression of the desire of the human being in opposition to the beings that it is not, nor something that could be mystically or mysteriously abstracted from the Dasein that we are or can be. In any event, as an establishment of truth, and as what unifies work, creator and preservers, for Heidegger, in this way art is to be thought as Dichtung or poetry: Truth, as the clearing and concealing of that which is, happens through being poeticised. All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of beings, is in essence, poetry. The essence of art, on which both the artwork and the artist depend, is truth’s setting-itselfinto-work. From out of the poeticising essence of truth it happens that an open place is thrown open, a place in which everything is other than it was [UK3 59/44]. Notwithstanding the English translation of the German term, ‘The Origin’ in no way relates this conception of Dichtung to the Greek determination of poiesis. As we saw in the preceding chapter there is a manifest hesitation or uncertainty concerning the sense of poiesis in ‘The Origin’,


and this connection will be made only in Heidegger’s later work.25 Yet, on this account, all art is poetic insofar as it has the capacity to establish an open region of beings. This is not, to be sure, to reduce the manifold forms of art to a particular linguistic form of art, although it is a determination of art from the perspective of its highest modality, since ‘The Origin’, in a quite traditional fashion, delimits poetry or creative language as the most artistic of all the arts.26

β – Aristotle and the problem of aesthetics The historical import and significance of this thinking of truth in art should not be underestimated. Michel Haar’s argument that ‘The Origin’ constitutes ‘the most radical transmutation of aesthetics not only since Kant but also since the Greeks’27 is no exaggeration. On the contrary, it is necessary to state much more directly that Heidegger seeks not merely to transmute or transform aesthetics, but rather to delimit and transcend, to ‘overcome (überwinden)’ in the words of the Contributions to Philosophy,28 aesthetics as instituting and reinforcing a divorce of art from any function of truth. The final task of this chapter consists in examining this delimitation of aesthetics in relation to the work of Aristotle. The fact that ‘The Origin’ privileges the question of truth over any question of beauty is indicative of the displacement that aesthetic discourse undergoes within it. Certainly, the text in no way negates the adequacy or relevance of a thinking of the beautiful, but it is not bound to any traditional conception of it. For Heidegger, in and through the work, the being of beings is ‘illuminated’, and it is this illumination that can be thought as beauty: ‘The shining that is set into the work is the beautiful. Beauty is one way in which truth as unconcealment comes to presence [UK3 43/32]. Beauty would be but the event of the unconcealment of earth and world that is achieved by the artwork, and it ‘does not exist merely relative to pleasure, and purely as its object’ [UK3 69/52]. Any subjective affects in the experience of the work, therefore, would be merely accidental in relation to the fundamental occurrence of truth as beauty. A passage from the final version of the essay presents in the starkest terms the delimitation of aesthetics that inheres in such a conception of truth in art: The essential nature of art would then be this: the setting-itself-to-work of the truth of beings. Yet until now art has had to do with the beautiful and with beauty – not with truth. […] In the fine arts, the art is


not itself beautiful, but is, rather, called so because it brings forth the beautiful. Truth, by contrast, belongs to logic. But beauty is the preserve of aesthetics [UK3 22/16]. The very name that the modern discipline of philosophy concerned with beauty chooses, however reluctantly, for itself in the eighteenth century indicates the manner of its consideration of the artwork. ‘Aesthetics’ derives from the Greek aisthesis, and it suggests a study of the particular sense experiences that one has before artistic and particular natural objects. In this discipline, the experience of art is thus reduced to a question of the feelings and subjective states, the ‘aesthetic experiences’ and the ‘taste’ of individual human beings, and is alienated from any experience of truth.29 In Kant, for example, truth or knowledge consists in the correspondence of a judgement with its object, but aesthetic judgements can correspond to no object, they can have no objective validity since the beautiful is not a quality of things themselves.30 Of course, Kant will proceed to locate in the judgement concerning the beautiful, a quasi-objective judgement. Such judgements seem to demand the accord of others, and by means of them we discover in ourselves a non-empirical sensus communis or common sense, which constitutes an original bind that we have to our fellow man.31 Nevertheless, it remains the case that Kant begins his reflection on the beautiful upon its separation from truth and with its reduction to a mere subjective response to particular objects. Yet, is it possible to begin a reflection on art and the beautiful in any other way? How can the beautiful be posited as a determination of artworks themselves, given that our responses vary in relation to particular works? In the face of modern aesthetics, Heidegger’s argument may appear to constitute a quite uncritical, dogmatic and ultimately impossible appeal to ‘objective’ qualities of artworks. In this way, however, what is at stake in his conception of ‘great art’, and thus art as such, becomes manifest: any purportedly ‘democratic’ concern to ‘deconstruct’ what one might understand to be an uncritical – if not totalitarian, given Heidegger’s political sympathies in the 1930s32 – appeal to great art is itself only an effect of the aesthetic alienation of art from truth. For as soon as one begins to dispute whether there is, can be or has ever been something such as great art, according to the argument that appreciation of art is inalienably subjective, one has lost the highest possibilities of art itself; art has become the object of the mere taste of individuals. Heidegger in no way seeks to claim that this is not the situation in which we find ourselves. Yet, it is nevertheless possible to look to the


future by appealing to the past in order to show how art can have a formative power beyond mere subjective criteria. Only thus can one overcome the aesthetic subjugation of art within what is but the tyranny of taste. There is, of course, a certain violence inherent in Heidegger’s argument that art and reflection on art heretofore has had to do with the beautiful rather than truth. To remain solely with the question of modern philosophy, art is, as I have indicated, a question of truth in the work of Hegel, and it is for this reason that he brings into question the adequacy of the term ‘aesthetics’ as a title for philosophical reflection on art as such.33 Yet Hegel reflects on truth in art only after the historical event of their disassociation, and this is to say that the statement according to which art is a thing of the past, insofar as it is no longer the highest need of spirit, merely registers, after the fact, the effect of the modern aesthetic divorce of art from truth. Moreover, Hegel can accept this divorce of art from truth because the ‘highest need of spirit’ is conceptual truth; art is a thing of the past because it is no longer an adequate or necessary vehicle of truth thus determined. On this basis we can see the ultimate stakes of Heidegger’s reflection on art: if art is to become once again the highest need of spirit, it is necessary to allow for the possibility of an essence of truth that would be prior to the truth of the proposition or conceptual truth in any sense. Concerning the meaning and possibility of the advent of aesthetics, Heidegger argues in his Nietzsche [NI 99/N1 83] that aesthetics is conditioned and enabled by the primacy of subjectivity in modern metaphysics itself. At the inception of this metaphysics in the work of Descartes the thinking subject in its self-certainty is posited as the first and highest being, the ground of its objects; truth and beings as such are grounded in the self-certainty of the thinking subject. The states of this subject consequently take centre stage in the determination of its relation to its objects, and, accordingly, the interpretation of the experience of art will focus on the states of this subject itself. More fundamentally, however, Heidegger argues that modern aesthetics is but a consequence of Greek ontology. Although the very concept of aesthetics arises only in the eighteenth century, and for as much as modern aesthetics lends a particular weight to the subjective states of the individual before the work, ‘the thing that the name’ aesthetics ‘names […] is old; as old as reflection on art and the beautiful within Occidental thought’ [NI 93–4/N1 79]. To speak of Greek aesthetics would be by no means anachronistic for ‘philosophical reflection on the essence of art and the beautiful already begins as aesthetics’.


The argument is, then, that the modern aesthetic divorce of art from truth and the aesthetic reduction of art to mere subjective states would already be established in Greek ontology. Heidegger would seem only ever to speak directly of Plato, and not of Aristotle, in advancing this argument, but the first element of the argument would find resources in Book X of the Republic, wherein mimetic or representative poetry, which comprises tragedy and comedy, is famously condemned and the poet banished from the polis to come [603b ff.]. In the same way as painting, poetry is at a third stage removed from the truth of the ideas since it creates merely images of images, insofar as it merely copies the empirical being. Worse still, poetry corrupts in appealing to the inferior, irrational part of the soul. It appeals to and gives free rein to the passions when a just and proper life requires the submission of the passions to reason. In the case of tragedy, for example, we are led to have pity and sympathy for what is often but the sensational and irrational behaviour of the protagonists. Divorced from truth in the work of Plato, then, the artwork becomes a question of the affects that it provokes in those that experience it. Certainly, the Phaedrus articulates a thinking of the beautiful, which neither separates it from truth nor interprets it purely in terms of the affects of the human being. Here the beautiful is that which, from itself, appears the most brilliantly, the RκφανNστατον [250d8]; it is an idea, resident in an other-worldly sphere, but its splendour is such that, of all the ideas, it manifests itself the most immediately in the sensible world, and it thus serves as a conduit to the true, intelligible world. Yet, as Heidegger argues, the very determination of the beautiful as an idea already prefigures aesthetics insofar as it separates the beautiful from the things themselves, thus preparing the ground for its determination as a purely subjective state.34 In what way, however, does Aristotle take up Plato’s determination of art? What is the situation of Aristotle within this fateful history of aesthetics? As I have indicated, Heidegger does not address this question in his Nietzsche. The fourth chapter of this study, however, showed that On Interpretation appears to exclude poetry from the domain of truth in delimiting the proposition as the only form of discourse that can be true or false. Even if the truth of the proposition is not determined here as correspondence, it would nevertheless remain the case that art is wholly abstracted from the question of truth. Moreover, the famous, perhaps infamous, conception of tragedy in the sixth chapter of the Poetics according to the idea of katharsis, the ‘purging’ of emotions such as pity and fear, however enigmatic it may be, seems to bring the affects of the subject onto centre stage. At first glance, then, Heidegger’s argument


concerning the origination of aesthetics in Plato might seem to meet little resistance in relation to the work of Aristotle. Yet these are not Aristotle’s last words on the question of art and truth, since On Interpretation reserves a treatment of the question of poetry for the Poetics. In the fourth chapter of this text Aristotle offers a decisive statement of his determination of artwork in the guise, in fact, of the ,1κ%ν or visual image: if one likes to look at images, it is because in looking at them one learns and one concludes what each thing is as when one says: this here, that is it. For if one has not seen the thing before, it is not the representation (mimesis) that will procure the pleasure and it will rather derive from the perfection in the execution, from the colour or from another cause of this sort [48b15–19]. The fact that the passage discusses the artwork in terms of pleasure, Jδονx, might seem only to confirm the argument concerning the beginning of aesthetics in Greek ontology. For Aristotle, if one has not previously experienced the thing of which the image is a representation or mimesis, in looking at it the pleasure will be gained not from the fact of recognising what it is a representation of, but rather from the excellence of the execution and the luminosity of the colours. Rather than an intellectual pleasure of recognition, the latter would be more of a pure and immediate aesthetic delight. Yet, crucially, the intellectual pleasure in question here is not to be understood in any simple sense, and not simply as a function of recognising that, for example, a painting of a horse shows a horse rather than an ass. For, as we will see, poiesis as such, for Aristotle, concerns the general rather than merely the particular. The painter, in fact, rends the proper form (1δgαν μορφxν) [54b10] of a being, the form proper to a being, according to chapter 15 of the Poietics, in disassociating it from the matter in which it naturally inheres. In this sense, we might say ‘this here: that is it’ before a painting of a horse, not simply because we recognise that it is a horse, but because it shows the very essence of ‘horseness’ itself. Just as we might say ‘now that is style’ before something or someone particularly stylish, for Aristotle, a representation of, say, a table or a bird can show us what a table or a bird is as such. We would thus like to look at images because they show the very essence or eidos of that of which they are the representation in the clearest and most apparent fashion. The representation of something would capture, and no matter how accurate or imitative it may be, the very essence of the thing of which it is an image in a way that the thing itself does not.


It is in this manner that the term mimesis can be understood, a term which the Poetics presents as self-evident, and remains undefined in it.35 Mimesis is the representation of a being that draws out from this being its eidos in making it particularly manifest. It is not simply a representation in the sense of an imitation or copy of a being, but a particular presentation of the very eidetic essence of a being. Mimesis in Aristotle is, in other words, and to employ somewhat liberally the terminology that Husserl will develop more than two millennia after the Stagirite, a form of eidetic reduction. Far, at any rate, from being less close to the eidos of a being than the empirical being, as Plato argues in the Republic, the representative image can be understood here to be higher with regard to being than the mere empirical being itself. Such is the poietic essence of painting. It is poietic or creative in that it brings forth, brings to light, the eidetic essence of its model. Yet, as indicated, Aristotle writes that poiesis ‘is more philosophical and more noble than history: poiesis relates to the general, history to the particular’ [51b5–7]. The remark is issued specifically in relation to poetry, but it can be understood to apply to poiesis as such. For Heidegger, as he writes elliptically in the ‘Letter on Humanism’, the import of these words has ‘scarcely been pondered’ [G9 336/275], but art can be understood to be more philosophical than history because it does not content itself with merely recounting facts in their singularity. The term mimesis originates as a denomination of mime and ‘theatrical representation’, and in chapter 17 of the Poietics Aristotle develops his argument in reading Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians: This is what I mean by taking into view the general, concerning Iphigenia for example: a young girl who is to be sacrificed is taken from those that were to sacrifice her, without them knowing, to another country where the custom was to immolate strangers to the Goddess; she is invested with this ministry; some time later the brother of the priestess arrives, and this because the oracle of the God ordered him to go there and in view of a goal foreign to the plan of the play, thus kata symbebekos; having arrived there and being made a prisoner, on the point of being sacrificed, he reveals who he is […]; in which resides the cause of his salvation [55b2–12]. Such, for Aristotle, is the essential structure or the logos of the tragedy, upon which the particular details and names of characters supervene. Indeed, it should be underlined here that all the proper names of the specific characters are effaced in this account of Iphigenia. What, in


essence, the tragedy makes manifest is not a particular girl, Iphigenia, in a particular country, Tauris with a particular priestess, but rather the situation of a girl as such, in a country as such, with a priestess as such. The tragedy makes manifest a general situation in which, as Jean Beaufret writes, ‘anyone could find him or herself’,36 and it thus brings to light the very eidetic essence of the situation. In the Metaphysics Aristotle states that to philosophise is to philosophise about the truth. If poetry is more philosophical than the recounting of history, it can also be said, therefore, that the former has more truth, that it is truer than the latter. Although On Interpretation seems to exclude poetry from the domain of truth in delimiting the proposition as the sole form of discourse that can be true or false, Aristotle therefore cannot be understood to separate art purely and simply from truth. Moreover, the apprehension of the eidetic essence of a being is, as both On the Soul and Metaphysics Theta argue, always true, and thus the particular presentation of the eidos of a being in art can be understood to be truer than the everyday perception of beings. Art in Aristotle, then, has not yet been absolutely divorced from truth to become merely a function of pleasure and taste. And yet the truth and philosophical value of the artwork is ultimately thought only in eidetic terms. A thinking of earth is not foreign to Aristotle, certainly, but Platonic eideticism seems to foreclose an original apprehension of the work in terms of world in his thought. In the end, perhaps more concrete evidence than this eidetic determination of art could not be found for the claim that Aristotle passes-over the structure of worldhood within his thinking as a whole. Thus, Heidegger’s attempts in the early 1920s to retrieve a thinking of world from Aristotle show themselves, once again, to be, in the end, over-interpretations. Finally, the loss of world implied in this eidetic determination of art offers us one way of understanding Heidegger’s argument in ‘Metaphysics as the History of Being’, a text to be found in the second volume of his Nietzsche, that if Aristotle thinks in a more Greek manner than Plato, then between the early Greeks and Aristotle there stands the Platonic idea.37 Aristotle, after Heraclitus and according to his thinking of the possible, can be understood to think being as coming-to-presence, and yet Platonic eideticism leads him to pass over the structure of world.

Conclusion

In being it is only the possible that holds sway (west) as its deepest cleavage (Klüftung), so that it is in the shape of the possible that being must first be thought in the thinking of the other beginning [G65 475/334]. In the Contributions to Philosophy, written in the late 1930s, Heidegger discusses the necessity of overcoming aesthetics and the divorce of art from truth that it institutes. Overcoming the aesthetic scission of art and truth can only be achieved, as we read, by ‘overcoming metaphysics’. Yet overcoming metaphysics is not ‘discarding the hitherto existing philosophy but rather the leap into its first beginning, without wanting to renew this beginning – something that remains historically unreal and historically impossible’ [G65 504/354]. Metaphysics cannot be rejected as an error, as an erroneous opinion, and as §6 of Being and Time had already shown in relation to Descartes, it is precisely the aim to discard the tradition that leads to its intensification and perversion. Thus, the task consists, first of all, in repeating, and not simply reiterating or renewing, what Heidegger now terms the ‘first beginning’ of ‘philosophy’, which occurs in pre-Socratic thought, and which is hence prior to the actual advent of philosophy or metaphysics as such in the work of Plato and Aristotle. In fact, in taking this leap back to pre-Socratic thought, overcoming metaphysics means ‘freeing the priority of the question of the truth of being in the face of any “ideal”, “causal” and “transcendental” and “dialectical” explanation of beings’ [G65 504/354]. On this account, then, metaphysics is that mode of thinking that passes over the truth of being, and that is to say, that passes over both being and truth thought in a verbal sense as presencing, as an event of coming to presence. Of course, although a particular mode of thinking 192

Conclusion 193

metaphysics has taken many forms, such as, as Heidegger seems to argue, Plato’s eideticism, Aristotle’s causal account of beings, Kant’s transcendental philosophy and Hegel’s dialectical thinking. Yet, all of these different forms of metaphysics would either, at best, separate being from beings as condition and conditioned in passing over the event of presencing by virtue of which beings are; at worst, they would reduce being to what is but another being, as is the case with Plato’s eidetic interpretation of beings. With such an argument, Heidegger may seem to take a firmly negative stance towards Aristotle’s ontology. It would appear that the argument is that Aristotle’s causal determination of being precludes an original apprehension of the truth of being. Yet, this section of the Contributions is attempting to delimit and depict the history of Western metaphysics using, inevitably, very broad brush strokes, and it would be a mistake to understand the remark as relating to Aristotle in this sense. For, as we saw in the fifth chapter of this book, Aristotle’s causal account of beings does not necessarily sideline a verbal thinking of being, and it is in fact one of Aristotle’s four causes, namely matter thought as ‘possibility’, from which Heidegger draws a thinking of being as the possible; and such a thinking of being as the possible is pivotal to what the Contributions, to follow the epigraph that heads this conclusion, names the task of ‘another beginning’ of philosophy, another beginning of philosophy in contemporary thinking that can only occur in repeating the first beginning of philosophy. Certainly, and as we saw in the sixth chapter of this book, Aristotle’s concern for an eidetic determination of beings may to some measure preclude a thinking of world, but a conception of being as presencing is nevertheless not extinguished by any such eidetic thinking. In the introduction to this book, I first presented the claim that Heidegger issues in Meditation according to which Being and Time represents an attempt to reduce metaphysics to its own presuppositions, which reduction would consequently set phenomenology on the path towards an essential delimitation or overcoming of metaphysics itself. From this perspective, the delimitation or ‘overcoming’ of metaphysics necessitated by a thinking of being as presencing would have been made possible by fundamental ontology, which would be fundamental not only in that it seeks to articulate the question of the meaning of being, but also in that it would seek to make explicit the very foundations of Greek ontology. The second and fifth chapters of the book cashed out this argument in relation to Heidegger’s accounts of equipment. It was shown, first of all, that fundamental ontology brings to light that the Aristotelian reduction of beings to the ‘actuality’ of ‘formed matter’ is already a reduction of


what is to what can be used, dominated and set to human ends. In this regard, fundamental ontology offers nothing like a rival thesis to ‘Greek ontology’, and this to such an extent that in the 1920s Heidegger can even claim to find an analysis of Zuhandenheit in the texts of Aristotle. Instead, it draws out what is implicit in Aristotle’s thinking. Of course, and as became clear in the fifth chapter, after fundamental ontology and by virtue of it Heidegger will go on to argue that Aristotle’s idea of the being of the product is, quite literally, a world away from subsequent conceptions of actuality, form and matter. Yet, as was contended, this does not mean that fundamental ontology was wrong, but only that it makes manifest the truth of the tradition that follows from Greek ontology. It is in this way that the movement in Heidegger’s interpretations of poiesis from the 1920s to the 1930s is to be understood as a leading back of metaphysics to its own presuppositions, one which subsequently enables a delimitation of the ‘metaphysics of actuality’. Yet how are we to understand fundamental ontology as a reduction of metaphysics to its own presuppositions with regard to the two other aspects of the ‘ancient conception’ of being delineated in §6 of Being and Time, namely being as truth and being as presence? Concerning the first of these aspects, examining Heidegger’s claims that Aristotle thinks propositional truth beyond, or prior to, any idea of correspondence, and that he apprehends perception as a more fundamental stratum of truth itself, the fourth chapter showed that it is less a question here of working out the implications of what Aristotle does say, than it is one of counterposing some of his statements to others. Nevertheless, this appropriation of Aristotle can still be understood in terms of a reduction of metaphysics to its own presuppositions: Heidegger attempts to unveil an original truth of Aristotle’s thinking that would have remained undisclosed in the tradition. More specifically, fundamental ontology sought to bring to light the prior grounds of any correspondence theory of truth, and it is only after having unveiled them that phenomenology can look beyond the limits of Aristotle’s thinking itself. In this connection, it should be recorded here that the apparently pragmatist concern for the truth of the proposition in Being and Time is no more a phenomenological invention than is the analysis of equipment. The movement in Heidegger’s thinking concerning language in other words, is no simple change of focus from the everyday prose of the world to poetic language but instead a historical act of ground-laying, by means of an account of truth as an ‘uncovering’ of beings, of the traditional account of the proposition, which in turn enables a reflection on language in its more ‘creative’ dimensions as bringing beings into their being.

Conclusion 195

It is perhaps more difficult to understand the third aspect of the ‘ancient conception’ of being, namely being as presence in the specifically temporal sense of the term, according to the schema that Heidegger furnishes in Meditation. The account of ecstatic temporality in the 1920s may seem to draw out the presuppositions of metaphysics much less than it seeks to oppose Aristotle’s exoteric conception of time. Certainly, on the one hand, Heidegger claims to develop the temporal meaning of being that was already, if indirectly and inadequately, apprehended in Greek ontology; but, on the other hand, and as was noted both in the introduction to the book and in its third chapter, Heidegger’s discovery of Dasein’s temporality and the concomitant diagnosis of the exoteric nature of Physics IV seem to inflect negatively his Aristotle interpretation in its entirety, his earlier, more generous readings of Aristotle’s anthropology, in particular, becoming more critical by 1927. Yet, as we have seen, Heidegger’s attempted delimitation of Physics IV, which itself is far from being a univocal text, is made possible by an appropriation of Aristotle’s own conception of ecstatic movement, and so this critical stance is in fact much less justified and clear cut than it may initially seem. The idea, therefore, that the text of Being and Time draws metaphysics back to its presuppositions is to be thought in different ways in relation to the different aspects of the ‘ancient conception’ of being that Heidegger takes up. Yet it has become clear that what is pivotal in the movement from the reduction of metaphysics operative in fundamental ontology to the later conception of an ‘overcoming’ of metaphysics itself is Heidegger’s interpretative appropriations of the sense of poiesis. Consequently, for as long as we hold the most significant and original contribution of Being and Time to philosophy to be its interpretation of Aristotle’s interpretation of praxis the most profound sense of not only Heidegger’s text of 1927, but also those that follow it, will remain opaque to us.

Notes Introduction 1. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ed. J. Cottingham, 1996) p. 17. 2. One of the most acute expressions of the argument that philosophy is a particular mode of thinking that begins with Plato is to be found in Jean Beaufret’s La Naissance de la Philosophie in Dialogue avec Heidegger, Vol. 1, Philosophie Grecque, (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973) p. 20. 3. Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, A66, B90 (Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin Academy Edition, Vols. III and IV; translated by N.K. Smith as Critique of Pure Reason, Macmillan, London, 1929). 4. I return to the question of temporality in Chapter 3 of this study, but see Chapter V of Being and Time, particularly §74, for the analysis of how historiological Wiederholung – a fetching again, a retrieving of the past as a possibility for the present – is grounded in Dasein’s historicity. 5. Cf., in particular, the conclusion to Sadler’s Heidegger & Aristotle: The Question of Being (London: Athlone Press, 1996).

1

The Question of Being

1. Cf., for example, Metaphysics, E, 1, 1025b9 and 1026a31. Following recent convention, I refer to the books of the Metaphysics with the Greek alphabet. This is the only text of Aristotle that I cite in this way and this obviates the need to cite the Metaphysics by name in the references. 2. Cf. Δ, 7, 1017a7. On this point and for Heidegger’s most incisive reading of Aristotle’s articulation of the question of being, cf. §2 of the lecture course of 1931 on Metaphysics Θ, G33. 3. This distinction between the Leitfrage or guiding question, and the Grundfrage or grounding-question is a constant in Heidegger’s work of the 1930s. Cf., in particular, the first chapter of Introduction to Metaphysics and NI 79/N167 ff. On the question of ontology, see, in particular, §106 of the Contributions to Philosophy, which concerns ‘The Decision about all Ontology’. 4. Cf. Γ, 1, 1003a. 5. Cf. Frank Capuzzi’s note on p. 154 of N4: ‘The term ontology apparently was coined by Goclenius in 1613, then taken up by the Cartesian philosopher Johannes Clauberg (1622–65) into his Metaphysics de ente sive Ontosophia of 1656, and finally established in the German language around 1730 by the Leibnizian rationalist Christian Wolff (1679–1754).’ 6. Cf., for example, Γ, 3, 1005b1. The non-extrinsic nature of the title ‘ontology’ is clear given the Greek words of which it is composed, but for the same argument concerning ‘metaphysics’ cf. Pierre Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966) p. 28 ff. and NII 213/N4 159 ff. 196

Notes 197 7. See Eudemian Ethics I, 8, 1217b 33 ff. On the idea of particular sciences relating to one genus, see Γ, 2, 1003 b 19. 8. Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978, 3rd edition) p. 139. 9. For Owens’ arguments concerning ‘entity’ and for a useful treatment of the long history of both substantia and essentia as translations of ousia see the fourth chapter of The Doctrine of Being. For further studies of this history see ‘Notes sur le vocabulaire de l’être’ by Etienne Gilson, of whom Owens was a pupil, in L’Etre et l’Essence (Paris: Vrin, 1948) and, in particular, J.F. Courtine’s ‘complement’ to Gilson’s text, ‘Note complémentaire pour l’histoire du vocabulaire de l’être’ in Concepts et Catégories dans la Pensée Antique (Paris: Vrin, 1980, ed. P. Aubenque), which approaches Boethius’ translations of the Greek from a Heideggerian perspective. 10. Certainly, this fact has by no means convinced anything like the majority of contemporary English-language Aristotelians as to the inadequacy of the translation ‘substance’. Mary Louise Gill, for one, acknowledges the problem in her Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989) p. 13, n. 2 but holds, nevertheless, that ‘substance’ does not betray Aristotle’s thinking. 11. C.H. Kahn, The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Riedel Publishing Company, 1973) p. 458. 12. Without referring to Heidegger, Owens (op. cit., p. 150) offers such an interpretation on the basis of the claim that the compound forms derive from the simplex: ‘ΠαροSσα and iποSσgα are rendered in English by presence and absence respectively. The notion conveyed by the syllable “sence” in these words would perhaps best correspond to the Aristotelian οSσgα’. Heidegger deals with the formal objection to his thesis in the lectures of 1930, On the Essence of Human Freedom [G31]. Sub-sections 7–10 of these lectures constitute Heidegger’s most extensive treatment of ousia but for an earlier extensive treatment see §7 of the lecture course of 1924, The Fundamental Concepts of Aristotle’s Philosophy [G18]. 13. On this point, see Heidegger’s essay of 1957 entitled ‘The Onto-theological constitution of metaphysics’ in Identity and Difference. For an earlier discussion of the question in relation to Aristotle, see G19 §19. See also Catriona Hanley’s Being and God in Aristotle and Heidegger (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). 14. Rudolf Boehm, Das Grundlegende und das Wesentliche (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965) p. 59. 15. Cf. Posterior Analytics, I, 22, 83a25. 16. For a treatment of this problem, see Chapter 2 of Aubenque’s Le problème de l’être chez Aristote. 17. Cf. Z, 13 and 14. 18. Gilson, op. cit., p. 52. 19. David Bostock, Aristotle’s Metaphyiscs Z and H (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) p. 72. 20. Heidegger proposes this interpretation in 1927 [G24 151/107] but he is hardly the first to do so. For a comprehensive survey of the interpretations that have been proposed of the locution, see Aubenque, op. cit., p. 460 ff. 21. As D.W. Graham notes in ‘The Paradox of Prime Matter’ (Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1987, p. 476, n. 5) it is for this reason that Aristotle is not

198 Notes

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

altogether satisfied in denominating earth, fire, air and water with the traditional name ‘element’. The four ‘elements’ are not yet what is absolutely ‘elemental’ and thus On Generation and Corruption [I, 6, 322b1], for example, speaks of them as the ‘so-called elements’. Critique of Pure Reason A 266, B 322. According to Heidegger in 1922 ‘Aristotle goes along with factical life in factical life’s own direction of interpretation’ [PIA 45/385]. Cf., in particular, the essay of 1922, Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle and SZ 24. Concerning the genesis of Heidegger’s readings of the senses of ousia, see Chapters 5 and 6 of Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being & Time)(Berkeley: California University Press, 1993). Cf. Z, 7, 1033b1 ff. I follow Ross’ interpretation of this argument on p. 64 of his Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1923). As Pierre Aubenque remarks (op. cit., p. 431) even essential attribution requires a movement of the imagination that dissociates the unity of being into a subject and essential predicate. The conception of primary matter – Πρ%τη Bλη – that Aristotle explicitly names and determines in On Generation and Corruption [II, 1, 329a24 ff.] as a pure possibility, that is, pure shortage has come under much scrutiny in contemporary commentary. For the idea is somewhat paradoxical: if matter has no determinate qualities whatsoever than it is, strictly speaking, nothing. Nothingness would, thus, ‘underlie’ change as one of its principles. This difficulty has occasioned revisionistic readings (e.g. H.R. King ‘Aristotle without Prima Materia’ in the Journal of the History of Ideas, 17, 1956, pp. 370–89) which argue that Aristotle does not, in fact, require a thinking of prime matter at all and that the four elements are the most basic substrate of all things. For a bibliography relative to this question see D.W. Graham’s ‘The Paradox of Prime Matter’ (art. cit.) and for an extended study of the problem cf. Section 3.2, in particular, of Heinz Happ’s Hyle: Studien zum aristotelischen Materie-Begriff (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971). I return to this question but on the relation of the categorial to the poetic determination of being, see Jean Beaufret’s ‘L’enigme de Z’, 3 in Dialogue avec Heidegger 4 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1985), p. 20. Cf., for example, Z, 1, 1028a14 and 7, 1032b3. Gilson op. cit., p. 54. Z, 4, 1029 b13 and Second Analytics, II, 2, 92a7. On this point see Jean Beaufret, ‘L’engime de Z’ (art. cit.). Cf. 1028a31 ff. Cf. Ross, Aristotle (op. cit.), p. 166. Cf. SZ 46 ff. and 319. Cf. §8 of G31. Aubenque, op. cit., p. 437. The third chapter of this study returns to the analysis of the three principles of movement. NII 431/EP 27. Gilson, op. cit., p. 56. Cf. Owens, op. cit., p. 359, n. 58. For this ‘Heideggerian’ critique of Gilson see Jean Beaufret, ‘Note sur Platon et Aristote’ in Dialogue avec Heidegger I (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973).

Notes 199 41. Werner Jaeger, Aristoteles. Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung (Berlin: Weidmann, 1923; translated by Richard Robinson as Aristotle. Fundamentals of the History of his Development, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1934; 2nd edition 1948). 42. I return briefly to the question of accidental being in the second chapter of this study but for a full discussion of this question, see Owens, op. cit, p. 307 ff. and the first chapter of Franz Brentano’s Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles. Freiburg im Breisgau, Herder, 1862; translated as On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (Berkeley: California University Press, trans. R. George, 1975). 43. In medieval Scholasticism Πρ ;υ equivocality will be interpreted under the title of analogia attibutionis, an analogy of attribution but as Owens (op. cit., p. 125) notes, this sense of the term analogy, as opposed to analogy as the equality of two relations, is not to be found in Aristotle. 44. Cf. K, 3,1061a35 where Aristotle speaks of a τι κοινν ‘to some sort of common’ but, to be sure, this is not the commonality of a genus. 45. Cf. G33 8–9/6. See infra 2.2 for an account of Kant’s determination of possibility. 46. Ted Sadler remarks on the impossibility of the argument in 1931, and yet it is far from the case that otherwise ‘Heidegger does not disagree with the priority traditionally accorded to the categorial way of saying being’ (op. cit., p. 51). Admittedly, the sense of priority in this sentence is vague but being as possibility and actuality and being as truth are prior, for Heidegger, in the sense of constituting the highest ways in which being is said.

2 Repeating Metaphysics: Heidegger’s Account of Equipment 1. Cf., in particular, ‘The Question concerning Technology’ in G7/QCT. 2. Hubert Dreyfus, ‘Heidegger’s History of the Being of Equipment’ in Heidegger: A Critical Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) pp. 183–94 (originally published in The Thought of Martin Heidegger, Tulane Studies in Philosophy XXXII, ed. M. Zimmermann, 1984, pp. 23–25). 3. Michel Haar, Le Chant de la Terre, (Paris: L’Herne, 1988). I return to Haar’s argument in concluding this chapter. 4. Michael E. Zimmermann, Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Art, Politics, (Indiana University Press, 1990) p. 148. See, in particular, the tenth chapter of Zimmermann’s study: ‘Being and Time: Penultimate Stage of Productivist Metaphysics?’ 5. In his The Later Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2000, p. 218, n. 9) George Pattison summarises the stakes of the argument thus: ‘some argue that Being and Time itself endorse a technological–pragmatic view of the human subject. See for example, Haar 1993. […] Zimmermann, however, emphasises that Heidegger was already privileging the world of the craftsman’s shop over against factory production in Being and Time’. The term ‘correction’ is, in fact, one used by Jacques Taminiaux in his Lectures de l’ontolgie fondamentale, (Grenoble: Gerome Million, 1995) p. 170.

200 Notes 6. My argument develops Robert Bernasconi’s judicious comments concerning the stakes of the analysis of equipment as a repetition of Greek ontology in his ‘The Fate of the Distinction between Praxis and Poiesis’ (Heidegger Studies, Vol. 2, 1986, pp. 111–39), comments that would seem to have been ignored in the debate that I have delimited. In referring to the above passage from G33, Bernasconi writes: The remark still leaves unexplained the precise purpose of the discussion of equipment in Being and Time, but it leaves no doubt that the importance of the discussion will be overlooked if we focus only on the supposed novelty of the descriptions to be found there, or its phenomenological credentials (p. 114).

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

The very intention of this chapter is to bring to light the unexplained ‘purposes’ of this discussion. The term ‘debt’ is one that Zimmermann uses (in the heading of a section of Chapter 9 ‘Heidegger’s debt to Kant and Aristotle’ op. cit., p. 143). As I argue, it is precisely the approach that such a term presupposes which prevents an adequate response to Dreyfus’ argument. Such a formulation constitutes only a slight deviation from Franz Brentano’s definition of intentionality as a sich richten nach. Cf. Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (3 volumes) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968) I, pp. 124–5 translated as Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, London: Routledge, 1973, trans. A. Rancurello, D. Terrell and L. McAlister, p. 88. As Macquarrie and Robinson note (Being and Time, Blackwell, 1995, p. 97), das Zeug can also mean ‘stuff’. The artificial product is still meant here but quite indifferently as to serving a purpose. Cf. the note of 1911 in Brentano’s Psychologie (op. cit.) Vol. II, p. 9. The term intentio was used as a translation of the Arabic ma’na and as Owens notes (op. cit., p. 133, n. 108), ‘the early translators of Avicenna employed intentio in a number of senses but apparently with the common basis of indicating the dynamic function of intellectual activity in the Avicennian interpretation of Aristotle’. The term in its original philosophical usage is thus not specifically linked to the will in the sense of wanting to do something but for a full account of its history see the entry for intentio in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwab & Co., Vol. 4., 1976). This is what Heidegger terms also the ‘Schon-Anwesende’ in 1925 [G20 270/198]. In his article ‘Donner/Prendre’ in Heidegger et la phenomenology (Paris: Unn, 1990), p. 293. Jean-François Courtine holds that the determination of nature as the immer schon Zuhandene, as a ‘very singular’ formulation, betrays another thinking, which ‘according to the economy of the analyses of the period of Sein und Zeit’, would hold nature to be vorhanden rather than zuhanden. Although the author rightly stresses the positive sense of Vorhandenheit as naming the disposable, the available, it is necessary to recognise why the ‘always and already Vorhanden’ becomes ‘zuhanden’ in Being and Time. It is misleading to translate Bedeutsamkeit as significance, since Heidegger differentiates the references that constitute this primordial level of meaning from the specific phenomenon of the sign. Cf. §17 of Being and Time. This is clear from the lecture course of 1919–20 Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, G56–7; Towards a Definition of Philosophy (London: Continuum, trans. Ted Sadler, 2000).

Notes 201 14. Dermot Moran, ‘Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’s and Brentano’s Accounts of Intentionality’ in Inquiry, Vol. 43, No. 1, March 2000, p. 62. 15. Cf. §§1–5 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews, 2000). 16. Cf., in particular, §29 of Being and Time. 17. René Descartes’ Responses to the Third Meditations, (Paris: Vrin, ed. Adam & Tannery, 1983, VII, p. 194). 18. Thus, as Gilson notes (op. cit., p. 16) there is a certain ‘slippage’ of the term in the seventeenth century to the effect that existentia becomes simply an equivalent of esse. This slippage constitutes the possibility of Descartes’ concern for the existence of God. 19. The following chapter of the current book returns to this question. 20. Cf. Courtine, ‘Donner/Prendre’, (op. cit., pp. 299–300). 21. Heidegger adjoined the following note to the reference to the Greek term ,fδο in §13: ‘Why? ,fδο–: μορφx–Bλη! From τNχυη and thus as an ‘artistic’ (künstlerische) interpretation; if: μορφx then not as ,fδο, 1δNα’ [SZ 441]. 22. In the essay of 1922 Heidegger distinguishes the three terms thus: dunamis is the ‘always-particular being able-to-have-available’, energeia is ‘the using of this availability’ and entelechia is ‘the utilising holding-in-truthful-safe-keeping-ofthis-availability (das verwendende in Verwahrung Halten dieser Verfügbarkeit)’ [PIA 51/390]. Admittedly, Heidegger’s interpretation of the distinction between entelechia and energeia is ambiguous here but as the fifth chapter of this book will show, this reading of dunamis, along with the analysis of Zuhandenheit as such, will be radically transformed by a reflection on the origin of the work of art. 23. I return to this sense of energeia in the following chapter but cf., for example, On the Soul, III, 2, 426a 17 ff. 24. On the Soul, III, 8, 431b21. Cf. SZ 14. 25. For an excellent rebuttal of the modern critiques of Aristotle as a naïve realist cf. Owens, op. cit., p. 128 ff. 26. Cf. G9 138/111. 27. On the Parts of Animals, 687a21. 28. Remi Brague, La Phénoménologie comme voie d’accès au monde grec, in Phénoménologie et métaphysique, Presses Universitaires de France, 1984, eds J.L. Marion and G. Planty-Bonjour, p. 272. Robert Bernasconi (art. cit., pp. 112–13) writes equally well on this question: ‘it is not the task of so-called fundamental ontology to offer a rival thesis to that which has been maintained by the tradition’ since ‘ancient ontology while harbouring this meaning, nevertheless fails to articulate it and this is what constitutes, according to Heidegger, its naïveté.’ Yet it is nevertheless true – a fact that the author seems to bring into question – ‘that with his analysis of the world Heidegger attempted to transfer to Zuhandenheit the priority traditionally accorded to Vorhandenheit’. 29. Michel Haar Le Chant de la Terre, L’Herne, Paris, 1987, pp. 51–2. 30. Ibid., p. 162 and 48 for the two quotations. 31. ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’, in Vorträge und Aufsätze, G7; ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in Basic Writings, trans. D.F. Krell, London: Routledge, 1995. 32. Taminiaux presents the argument in the chapter of his Lectures de l’ontologie fondamentale entitled La Réappropriation de l’Ethique à Nicomaque.

202 Notes 33. Ibid. p. 169 and 171 for the two quotations. 34. Jean Beaufret Entretiens avec Frederic de Towarnicki, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1984, pp. 15–16. 35. Cf., in particular, ‘The Age of the World Picture’ in G5/QCT. 36. Cf. SZ 358: ‘Reading off the measurements which result from an experiment often requires a complicated “technical” set-up for the experimental design’. In his Le Principe d’Anarchie (Seuil, Paris, 1982) p. 25 Reiner Schürmann has written that there is here a ‘completely insufficient’ thinking of technology. Insufficient as it may be, it is necessary to understand how fundamental ontology constitutes the possibility of the later reflections on modern technology.

3

Time and Motion

1. Cf. The Postulates of Empirical Thought in Critique of Pure Reason [A 218–26; B 264–76] and the essay ‘What Real Progress Has Metaphysics Made in Germany Since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?’, in Theoretical Philosophy after 1781 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, eds. H. Allison and P. Heath, 2002). 2. On this point see in addition G24 92/66. 3. Cf. The Parologisms of Pure Reason in Critique of Pure Reason A 341–405, B 399–432. For Heidegger’s discussion of the positive account of the being that we are inherent in Kant’s determination of moral personality cf. G24 185/131 ff. 4. Although it is not properly thematised until book V Aristotle uses the term metabole three times in Physics I at 186a16, 191a7 and 191b33. I return to the sense of the term below. 5. Cf. 190b28. 6. Physics II, 1, 193b20. 7. In 1927 Heidegger writes: ‘the common Greek expression Rκστατικν means stepping-outside-self. It is affiliated with the term “existence” ’ [G24 377/267]. 8. Aubenque does not speak of The Introduction to Metaphysics by name but the reference is clear. Cf. p. 433, n. 1 (op. cit.). 9. Ibid., p. 437. 10. Cf. Physics V, I, 225a1: Πdσα μ,ταβολx Rστιυ Oκ τιυο ,$ τι. Heidegger would appear to adopt the traditional reading of metabole as the most general concept of movement unreservedly. However, for a genetic reading that attempts to isolate the particularity of becoming, movement and change in their individual contexts in the Physics, see Lambros Couloubaritsis La Physique d’Aristote (Brussels: Ousia, 1997, 2nd edition). 11. Cf. Physics V, 2, 226b10–16. 12. Cf. On the Soul, II, 5, 417b2–4 and L.A. Kosman, ‘Substance, Being and Energeia’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 2, 1984, pp. 121–49. 13. Criticisms of the ‘process-view’ date from Aristotle’s medieval commentators but the contemporary debate stems largely from Aryeh Kosman’s ‘Aristotle’s definition of Motion’, in Aristotle: Critical Assessments, (Routledge, London, 1999, ed. L.P. Gerson; first published in Phronesis 14, 1969, pp. 40–62) which proposes a version of the ‘actuality-view’: given that the definition is supposed to yield the process rather than the result of movement, movement must be understood as an actual rather than a potential potentiality. The definition

Notes 203 implies in some sense a distinction between different modes of potentiality, between the potentiality of bricks to be formed as a house when they lie idly in the builder’s yard and their potentiality when the house is in the process of being built For rebuttals of Kosman’s criticisms of the ‘process view’ and of his statement of the ‘actuality view’ see D.W. Graham’s ‘Aristotle’s definition of motion’ in Aristotle: Critical Assessments (originally published in Ancient Philosophy 8, 1988, pp. 209–15) and J. Kostmann’s ‘Aristotle’s definition of change’ in History of Philosophy Quarterly, 4, 1987, pp. 3–16. For a recent international bibliography concerning the question of the definition see the fifth chapter of Couloubaritsis’ La Physique d’Aristote (op. cit.). 14. Aubenque, op. cit., p. 454. 15. Aubenque, op. cit., pp. 442–3. 16. In his ‘Heidegger’s Philosophy of Mind’ (in Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey, ed. Guttorm Folistad, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983, p. 307) Thomas Sheehan expresses well Heidegger’s reading of the very being of the being in movement for Aristotle: But such relative absentiality is precisely what lets the entity be a moving entity. Therefore, to know a moving entity as what it truly is means to keep present to mind not only the present entity but also the presence of the absentiality that makes it a moving entity. The presence-of-its-absentiality is the moving entity’s Being-structure. We may call it ‘pres-ab-sentiality’.

17.

18. 19.

20.

21.

22.

The conclusion to the fifth chapter of the current book returns, however, to the specifically verbal sense of presencing and absencing in this passage from Heidegger’s essay on phusis. As Macquarrie and Robinson note on p. 41 of their translation of Being and Time the verb ‘geschehen’ ordinarily means to ‘happen’. Yet, Heidegger stresses the etymological relation that it bears to ‘Geschichte’ or ‘history’ and uses it to denominate the historical existence of Dasein that is prior to history in the sense of the work of historians. In Margins of Philosophy (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press, 1982 trans. Alan Bass), p. 61. Admittedly, Aristotle does not refer to his predecessors within the part of the exoteric discourse that concerns the question of whether time belongs to beings or non-beings but it would seem difficult to hold that this aporetic is one that the Stagirite formulates simply from his own reflections. This argument is the most intuitive but Aristotle does provide another: the now is a limit, time is divisible into finite periods and each such period must be limited by at least two different ‘nows’ that form its beginning and end [218a21–5]. The ‘nows’ must, therefore, be different. It should be noted that time, as pertaining to the enquiries concerning phusis, is already an object of esoteric or, to use the expression proper to Aristotle, acroamatic concern. The Stagirite uses the expression iκροαματιχb in describing his writings and lectures destined first and foremost to the students at the Lyceum rather than to a general audience. On this point, see the first pages of J. Tricot’s introduction to his translation of the Metaphysics (Paris: Vrin, 1966). Cf. Heidegger, G24 358/253–4: ‘Mental actions also come under the determination of motion – motion taken broadly in the Aristotelian sense and not

204 Notes

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

necessarily as local motion. The actions are not intrinsically spatial but they pass over into one another, one changes into the other. In such a mental action we can stop and dwell on something. We may recall the passage in De Interpretatione: !ιστησι J διbυοια [16b20], thinking stands still with something. The mind too has the character of a moving thing’. I return to the question of the movement of the soul in the final section of this chapter. Cf. 221b4–5. Cf. G24 356–7/252–3. Cf. 218a33 ff. Heidegger reads the question of the phusis of time in this way in the lecture course of 1927. It has, however, been interpreted in a different sense. Joseph Moreau – in L’espace et le temps selon Aristote (Padua: Antenare, 1965) – holds the difference to be a difference between an ontological and a merely epistemological determination of time. This is a reading that Jacques Derrida repeats unreservedly in Ousia and Gramm[, but for a telling critique of it see Chapter 4 of Jacques Marcel Dubois’s Le temps et l’instant selon Aristote (Paris: De Brouwer, 1967). Cf. 223a16–29. Cf. 223a29–b1. Cf. G24 343–4/243–4 and Ross, Aristotle’s Physics, Oxford University Press, 1936, p. 65. Cf. Ross Aristotle’s Physics (op. cit.), p. 122. Aubenque, op. cit, p. 437. Cf. G24 347/245. Cf. G24 372–3/264 Cf., in addition, G24 368/260. Aubenque, op. cit, p. 466, n. 1. ‘Ousia and Gramm[’, op. cit., p. 262.

4

The Moment of Truth

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Jacques Taminiaux, Lectures de l’ontologie fondamentale, p. 162. Cf. Critique of Pure Reason A58/B52 and SZ 215. Cf. Critique of Pure Reason A293/B350 and SZ 215. Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen (Gesammelte Werke, Husserliana, Vols. XVIII–XX). The first Investigation is to be found in volume XIX/1. I refer, after the backslash in the following references, to G. Findlay’s translation which has recently been reedited by Dermot Moran: Logical Investigations, Routledge, London, 2001. LU 30/183. For Husserl’s analysis of the essence of indication see §2–4 of the First Investigation. LU 62/206. Cf. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, trans. J. Cottingham, 1996), pp. 50–1. LU 67/210. LU 46/191. See, in particular, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘On the Phenomenology of Language’ in Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, trans. R.C. McCleary, 1964).

Notes 205 12. Jacques Derrida, La Voix et le Phénomène, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1967. 13. Concerning Husserl’s determination of expression, in 1927 Heidegger writes: [T]he sign-function of the written form with reference to the spoken form is altogether different from the sign-function of the spoken form with reference to what is meant by it. A multiplicity of symbol-relations appears here which are very hard to grasp in their elementary structure and require extensive investigations [G24 263/185–6]. In claiming that there is some kind of absolute distinction between the spoken and written word Heidegger may seem to be more Husserlian than Husserl, an impression that would only be reinforced by the account of Rede in §33 of Being and Time. For a discussion of the problem of the account of Rede in Being and Time in relation to the later Heidegger’s reflection on language see Ullrich Haase, ‘From Name to Metaphor … and Back’, Research in Phenomenology 26, 1996, 230–60. 14. Thus, as Heidegger continues: ‘we thus obtain a phenomenological interpretation of the old scholastic definition of truth’. For Heidegger’s reading of Husserl’s determination of truth in the Logical Investigations see the whole of §6 of G20. For an extended discussion of this reading see the second chapter of Daniel O. Dahlstrom’s Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 15. This definition of logos as such at 16b28 follows from the definition of the particular species of language that is the noun at 16a27–9: ‘No sound is by nature a noun: it becomes one, becoming a symbol. Inarticulate noises show (δηλο8σ ) something – for instance, those made by brute beasts. But no noises of that kind are nouns.’ 16. On this point see Aubenque, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, p. 109, and Tzvetan Todorov, Théories du Symbole, Seuil, Paris, 1977, pp. 14–15. Todorov reminds us that it is significant that the term ‘sign’ does not appear in the initial definition in the first line of the passage. Concerning σημαντικó and σημ,"ον, the same ambiguity occurs in English when we talk about the significance of something – as in the preceding sentence – even when it is not in any immediate sense a sign. 17. Cf. G21 133: ‘Caufwiesend sehen lassen (Aussage) ist nur das Reden, darin das Entdecken oder Verdecken die eigentliche Redeabsicht trägt und bestimmt’. 18. On Heidegger’s reading, the prefix apo simply means from the being itself. Cf. G21 133. 19. Pierre Aubenque, op. cit., p. 112. 20. Cf. 1011b26: ‘This will be apparent if we first define truth and falsity. To say that what is, is not, or that what is not is, is false; but to say that what is, is, and what is not is not, is true.’ 21. That it is quite legitimate and natural is the argument of Aubenque, op. cit., pp. 109–10. 22. Cf. 893b2 and 983b17. 23. Cf. 993b20. 24. Aristotle makes the same point concerning perception at 427b12 and 428a11. 25. Cf., in addition, 429b15.

206 Notes 26. Cf. A. Schwegler, Aristoteles, Metaphysik, 4 Vols. 1846–7. Re-edited Frankfurt 1960, Vol. 4, p. 186. 27. W. Jaeger, Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Metaphysik des Aristoteles (Berlin: Weidmann, 1912) p. 52. 28. Cf. Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ed. and com. D.W. Ross, 1924) and The Works of Aristotle, Vol. VIII, Metaphysica (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928). 29. On this point, see Owens, op. cit., p. 412. 30. Ibid. p. 414. 31. Cf. G21 160. 32. Cf. the whole of §3 of Brentano’s text (op. cit.). 33. Cf. 1139a8 ff. 34. Cf. G19 45/29–30 in particular. 35. Cf. G19 §7 and §§19–23 for Heidegger’s most extensive analysis of phronesis and the whole first part of the lecture course for the analysis of the different modes of aletheuein. 36. Cf. PIA 43/383. 37. Cf. 1104a9. For a comprehensive account of the etymological origins and development of the term kairos in Greek thinking see §2 of Pierre Aubenque’s La Prudence chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963). 38. It is on the basis of his earlier interpretations of the sense of kairos in St. Paul and primal Christianity that Heidegger returns to Aristotle in 1922 to locate in it a phenomenon of original temporality. On this point see Otto Pöggeler, ‘Destruction and Moment’ (in Reading Heidegger From the Start: Essays in his Earliest Thought, Albany: State University of New York Press, ed. T. Kisiel and J. van Buren, 1994, pp. 137–58); Chapters 8 and 10 of John van Buren’s The Young Heidegger: Rumour of a Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Chapter 4 of Theodore Kisiel’s The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (op. cit.). 39. The whole of the Contributions to Philosophy [G65] articulates such a discourse. 40. The term is that of Franco Volpi in his ‘Being and Time: A translation of the Nicomachean Ethics?’ in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in his Earliest Thought, (Albany: State University of New York Press, ed. T. Kisiel and J. van Buren, 1994, pp. 195–211, trans. John Protevi). 41. Again see §2 of Aubenque’s La Prudence chez Aristote (op. cit.). 42. Taminiaux, Lectures de L’ontologie fondamentale, (Grenoble: Gerome Million, 1995) p. 166.

5

Art and the Earth

1. See §34 of Hegel’s Aesthetics Vol.1, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, trans. T.M. Knox). Jacques Taminiaux offers an instructive and extensive comparison of Heidegger’s hermeneutic circle, with reference to §32 of Being and Time, and the circularity of Hegel’s speculative approach to the work of art in his ‘Heidegger et l’héritage de Hegel’ (in Recoupements, Brussels: Ousia, 1982). 2. Julian Young Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 49.

Notes 207 3. Cf. N1 126/N1107 ff. 4. Maurice Blanchot L’espace littéraire, (Paris: Gallimard, 1955) p. 296. 5. As Emmanuel Martineau points out [UK2 56] the description of the temple as specifically a temple of Zeus in the second version of ‘The Origin’ is omitted in the third, which means, to be sure, that Heidegger by no means pretends to describe an extant temple. 6. On this point see, in particular, the essay ‘Time and Being’: ‘Coming-topresence (Anwesen) concerns us (geht uns an); presence (Anwesenheit) means: to come-to-stay-with-us (uns entgegenweilen)’ [ZSD 12]. It is to be noted, however, that Heidegger here rethinks the very sense of Anwesenheit as a comingto-presence, whereas in the 1930s, as I will show below, the question is one of locating an Anwesung or presencing that is prior to any Anwesenheit understood as presence. 7. Heraclitus’s fragments are numbered according to their ordering by Diels and Kranz in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker 7th edition (Berlin, 1954). 8. Cf. the essay Aletheia in G7/EGT. For Heidegger’s most extensive reading of Heraclitus see Heraclitus, G55. 9. Cf., for example, Metaphysics Γ , 1, 1003a26–32. 10. Cf. Metaphysics Α, Chapters 5–8 in particular. 11. Cf. fragments 50 and 54 respectively. 12. The Poetry of Michelangelo (bilingual edition), trans. and ed. J.M. Saslow, Yale University Press, 1991, no. 151, p. 302. 13. F.W. von Herrmann (Heideggers Philosophie der Kunst, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994, p. 359) provides the following reference for Durer’s dictum: ‘Die Lehre von menschlicher Proportion’, in Schriftlicher Nachlaß, 3 vols. ed. H. Rupprich, Berlin, 1969, p. 295. 14. Concerning the sense of the term ‘creation’, in his Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffs – Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte der Antike und des Frühkapitalismus (Hildesheim/New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1972. Originally published by J.C.B. Mohr, Tübingen, 1926) Edgar Zilsel has shown that the use of the verb ‘create’ to characterise artistic production, as opposed to divine creation, is still only very rarely used in the Renaissance and, consequently, that when the artist becomes a creator this not only implies a certain slippage of the sense of creation itself but, and more significantly, an elevation of the artist – in comparison – to the position of God. 15. Cf. p. 128 of ‘Ne sutor ultra crepidam: Erasmus and Dürer at the hands of Panofsky and Heidegger’ in Heidegger and The Art of Existing, New York: Humanities Press, 1993. 16. Erwin Panofsky Idea, trans. J. Peake, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968. 17. The Poetry of Michelangelo, op. cit., poem no. 84. 18. Zilsel, op. cit., p. 221. 19. Cf. ibid. p. 220. 20. Critique of the Power of Judgment, §43, p. 182. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., §46, p. 186. The remaining citations from Kant are to be found on this or on the following page of the text. 23. J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art (London: Polity, 1992) p. 101. 24. Hegel, Aesthetics Vol. 1, p. 440.

208 Notes 25. In his article The Still Life as a Natural Object. A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh (in The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein, Springer, New York, ed. Marianne L. Simmel, 1968) Meyer Schapiro holds the shoes in the painting of which Heidegger speaks to be not those of a peasant woman but those of Van Gogh himself. In his La Vérité en Peinture (Flammarion, Paris, 1978) Jacques Derrida has rightly pointed to the naive and pre-critical nature of Schapiro’s argument insofar as he holds the painting to be simply a representation of some existent thing. Yet is Heidegger not guilty of the same naivety insofar as the ontic claim as to the painting showing a pair of peasant shoes is the condition of the ‘ontological’ argument that the painting makes their being as reliable manifest? This is undecidable as there exists nothing to disqualify the claim that the shoes painted make manifest a pair of shoes belonging to a peasant. Derrida has written of the ‘ridiculous and lamentable’ (p. 334) nature of Heidegger’s reading as a ‘moment of pathetic collapse’ (p. 299) yet these comments seem excessive. 26. Cf. ‘The Thing’ in G7/BW. 27. Robert Bernasconi (‘The Greatness of the Work of Art’, in Heidegger towards the Turn (Albany: State University of New York Press, ed. J. Risser, 1999) p. 101 notes that this return to the Greeks ‘look as if it might threaten his [Heidegger’s] attempt to separate’ creation from production, yet without elaborating this problem. Similarly, in his Heidegger. L’œuvre d’art comme péripétie de la pensée (in Phénoménologie et Esthétique, Encre Marine, Fougères, La Versanne, 1998, p. 63) Holger Schmid notes briefly that the attempt to make the distinction in returning to the Greek sense of techne ‘fails’ and that ‘a tension remains until the end, bound to the implicit problem of Platonic–Aristotelian poiesis’. 28. Cf. EM 113 ff. As Heidegger emphasises in the final version of ‘The Origin’, however, the shock of the new in the work of art ‘is in no way violent (hat nichts Gewaltsames)’ [UK3 54/40]. For an extended discussion of this change of register see Chapter 2 of Daniel Payot’s La Statue de Heidegger, (Belfort: Circé, 1998). 29. On the manifold meanings of i6αgρ,σι in Aristotle cf. Owens, op. cit., pp. 382–5. On Dürer and Michelangelo’s inheritance of Neo-Platonism see Chapter VI of Panofsky’s Idea (op. cit.). 30. Aristotle, Physics, Harvard University Press, 1996, trans. Wicksteed and Cornford, pp. 126–7. 31. Cf. Owens, op. cit. p. 162. 32. For the doctrine of the four causes cf. Physics II, 3; Metaphysics, A, 1–10; 2 (which reproduces Physics II, 3); H, 4, 1044a–b; Z, 17; 7, 4; Second Analytics, II, 11–12; On the Parts of Animals, I, 1. 33. H. Happ, Hyle. Studien zum aristotelischen Materie-Begriff, p. 296. 34. Pierre Aubenque notes this; Aubenque, op. cit., p. 441, n. 1. 35. For this argument, cf. Gilson, op. cit. p. 64. 36. Beaufret ‘Energeia et Actus’, in Dialogue avec Heidegger I (op. cit.) p. 124. Beaufret’s essay constitutes an essential supplement to Heidegger’s most extensive genealogy of the transformation of energeia as actuality in ‘Metaphysics as the History of Being’ and ‘Science and Reflection’ in G7/QCT. For a wider genealogy of the movement from Greek to Latin thought see the lecture course of the winter semester 1942–3 entitled Parmenides, G54.

Notes 209 37. This quotation is from Beaufret’s Leçons de Philosophie, Seuil, Paris, 1998, p. 126. 38. Zimmermann, op. cit., p. 163. 39. Cf. WHD 53–4/22. 40. Heidegger cites [G9 269/206] the phrase ‘Ο i, βασιλ,jων’, the ‘king for the time being’, which, as Liddell and Scott note, is to be found in Herodotus. One can say that this use of i, is indicative of its original meaning because it is only on the basis of its being present at least for a while that something can consequently be determined as eternal. 41. ‘We cannot assign what is to be thought as coming-to-presence to one of the three dimensions of time, namely, as one might suppose, to the present. The unity of the temporal dimensions rather rests in the play by which each is implicated in the other (in dem Zuspiel jeder für jeder). This play shows itself as what properly plays in what is proper to time, and thus, in a certain sense, as a fourth dimension – in fact, not only in a certain sense, but in truth. Original (eigentliche) time is four-dimensional’ [ZSD 16]. 42. Cf. Thomas Sheehan’s ‘On the Way to Ereignis: Heidegger’s Interpretation of Phusis’, in Continental Philosophy in America (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, eds H.J. Silvermann, J. Sallis, and T.M. Seebohm, 1983a). The author focuses principally on the text of 1939 since Heidegger’s explications of dynamis, energeia and physis are generally (and I emphasise that word) constant from the early twenties up through the winter semester of 1951–2 and differ only in minor and generally contextual ways from ‘Von Wesen und Begriff der Physis’. Despite the reluctance to generalise, the author fails to recognise what has occurred within Heidegger’s thinking with a reflection on the work of art. 43. Sheehan, ‘On the Way to Ereignis’, p. 161. 44. Schmid, Holger ‘Heidegger: L’œuvre d’art comme péripétie de la pensée’ in Phénoménologie et Esthétique, Encre Marine, Fougères, 1998, p. 70.

6

Art, World and the Problem of Aesthetics

1. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 1, p. 102 and NI 100/N1 84. 2. Cf. Critique of the Power of Judgment (op. cit.), §51, p. 199. 3. For Heidegger’s critique of the modern concept of culture as an expression of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity cf., in particular, ‘The Age of the World Picture’ in G5/QCT. 4. Cf. G56/57, §14, p. 73 and Kisiel, op.cit., p. 506. 5. Cf. UK3 56/42. 6. For Kant’s account of the symbol as a mode of Darstellung cf. §69 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment and Jean Beaufret, ‘Kant et le problème de Darstellung’ in Dialogue avec Heidegger II (Paris: Editions de Minuit,1973). On the distinction between allegory and symbol in post-Kantian thinking see Tzvetan Todorov’s Théories du symbole (op. cit.), particularly chapter 6 entitled La crise romantique. 7. F.W.J Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 5 (Munich: Biedersteen, ed. M. Schröter, 1946), p. 407.

210 Notes 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Ibid., p. 409. Ibid., pp. 400–1. Ibid., p. 411. Schelling, op. cit., p. 410. On this point, cf. Todorov (op. cit.), p. 242 ff. For Kant, the symbolic is principally a mode of the presentation of rational ideas, ideas that can otherwise gain no sensible presentation. Cf. §59 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment. 14. Ibid., §49, p. 192. 15. In 1927, Heidegger had already decried the ambiguity inherent in the modern conceptions of the symbol within conceptions of language: Today the symbol has become a favourite formula, but those who use it either dispense with any investigation as to what is generally meant by it or else have no suspicion of the difficulties that are concealed in this verbal slogan [G24 263/186].

16. Hegel, Aesthetics p. 103. 17. For a comparison of the account on the historical transformations of art that is to be found in Heidegger’s Nietzsche (cf. NI 91/N1 77 ff.) to that of Hegel, see Jacques Taminiaux’s ‘Heidegger et l’héritage de Hegel’ in Recoupements (op. cit.). 18. Cf., in particular, §8–10 of the G34, Hölderlin’s Hymns: Germania and the Rhine and Michel Haar, op. cit., pp. 204–5. 19. Cf. R.M. Rilke, Werke (Leipzig, 1953), Vol. 2, pp. 39–41, trans. M.D. Herter Norton, Norton, New York, 1949, p. 46 ff. 20. I approach this question in a hypothetical manner since Merleau-Ponty will develop Husserl’s thinking of expression in delimiting any dualistic approach to the phenomenon of language and thus any literal sense of the term expression itself. Cf., in particular, the chapter of The Phenomenology of Perception (op. cit.) entitled The Body as Expression and Speech. 21. Françoise Dastur, ‘Heidegger’s Freiburg Version of the Origin’, in Heidegger towards the Turn (Albany: State University of New York Press, ed. J. Risser, 1999a) p. 138. 22. Cf. SZ 133. 23. For example, UK3 35/26: ‘The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.’ 24. In this sense Heidegger will even go as far as to consider thought itself as emanating from the earth. Cf. the essay entitled Hebel: Friend of the House in G13 and Alain Vuillot’s useful treatment of this question in his Heidegger et la Terre (L’Harmattan, Paris, 2000) p. 25. 25. On the etymology of the word Dichtung cf. G39 29: It comes from the old high German tithôn, and is related to the Latin dictare, which is a frequentative form of dicere, to say. Dictare, to say something, to say it out loud, to ‘dictate’ it, to expose something in language, to edit it, whether this is an essay, a report, a dissertation, a complaint or a plea, a song or whatever one wants. All this is called dichten, to expose

Notes 211 in language. Only since the 18th century, the use of the word dichten has been reserved for the composition of linguistic constructions that we call ‘poetic (poetisch)’, that we call ‘poems (Dichtungen)’. In the beginning, Dichten does not have a privileged relation with the poetic. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

Cf. UK3 62/46–7. Haar, op. cit., p. 191. Cf., in particular, the whole of §277 of G65. Cf. NI 93/N1 77 ff. for Heidegger’s delimitation of modern aesthetics. Cf., in particular, the introduction to the Critique of the Power of Judgment. Cf., ibid., §8 and 21. In his ‘The Greatness of the Work of Art’ (art. cit.) Robert Bernasconi has attempted to locate a certain ‘rhetoric of greatness’ in Heidegger’s work in drawing a parallel between the idea of ‘great art’ and Heidegger’s infamous remark in the Introduction to Metaphysics concerning the ‘inner truth and greatness’ [EM 152] of the National Socialist movement. One can, however, refuse this second conception of greatness in accepting the first. Cf. the first page of Hegel’s Aesthetics. Cf. NI 95/N1 80 and Alain Boutot’s Heidegger et Platon, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987) for an extended discussion of Heidegger’s reading of Plato’s determination of art. On this point, and for the interpretation of mimesis that has been presented here, cf. R. Dupont-Loc and J. Lallot’s introduction to their translation of the Poetics (Paris: Seuil, 1980). Cf. ‘L’Enigme de Z’, Dialogue avec Heidegger IV, p. 30. Cf. NII 409/EP 30.

Bibliography This bibliography refers only to the texts that I have cited or, less frequently, that have influenced this study. Heidegger’s texts do not appear in it since they are fully referenced in the list of abbreviations at the beginning of the book.

1

Aristotle

1.1 Collected works Aristotelis opera (Berlin Academy edition, 5. vols., 1831–70). The first four volumes were edited by E. Bekker whilst the fifth, which contains the Index Aristotelicus, is the work of H. Bonitz. The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, ed. J. Barnes, 1984).

1.2 Other editions, translations and commentaries Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ed., com., D.W. Ross, 2. vols., 1924). Aristotle’s Metaphysics Z and H (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ed., com., trans. David Bostock, 1994). Aristotle’s Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ed., com., D.W. Ross, 1936). Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics (London: Loeb, trans. H. Cooke and H. Tredennick, 1938). Generation of Animals (London: Loeb, trans. A. Peck, 1942). Metaphysica. The Works of Aristotle, Vol. 8, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, trans. D.W. Ross, Oxford, 1928). Metaphysics (London: Loeb, trans. H. Tredennick, 2. vols., 1933 and 1935). La Métaphysique (Paris: Vrin, trans. J. Tricot, 2. vols., 1966). Nicomachean Ethics (London: Loeb, trans. H. Rackham, 1926). On Generation and Corruption and On Sophistical Refutations (London: Loeb, trans. E.S. Forster, 1955). On the Parts of Animals (London: Loeb, trans. A. Peck and E. Forster, 1937). On the Soul (London: Loeb, trans. W.S. Hett, 1936). Physics (London: Loeb, trans. P. Wicksteed and F. Cornford, 2. vols., 1929 1934). Posterior Analytics & Topica (London: Loeb, trans. H. Tredennick and E.S. Foster, 1960). Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ed., com., D.W. Lucas, Oxford University Press, 1968). Poetics (London: Loeb, trans. S. Halliwell, W. Fyfe and D. Innes, Loeb, 1927). La Poétique (Paris: Seuil, trans. R. Dupont-Roc and J. Lallot, 1980). Rhetoric (London: Loeb, trans. J.H. Freese, 1926).

1.3 Studies Aubenque, P., La prudence chez Aristote (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). 212

Bibliography 213 ——, Le problème de l’être chez Aristote, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966, 2nd edn). Boehm, R., Das Grundlegende und das Wesentliche (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965). Bostock, D., ‘Aristotle’s Account of Time’, in Aristotle: Critical Assessments (London: Routledge, ed. L.P. Gerson, 1999 – originally published in Phronesis, 25 (1980): 148–69). Brentano, F., Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1862); On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle (Berkeley: California University Press, trans. R. George, 1975). Code, A., ‘The Persistence of Aristotelian Matter’, in Aristotle: Critical Assessments (Routledge: London, ed. L. P. Gerson, 1999 – originally published in Philosophical Studies, 29 (1976): 357–67). Couloubaritsis, L., La physique d’Aristote, (Brussels: Ousia, 1997, 2nd edn). Dubois, J.M., Le temps et l’instant selon Aristote (Paris: De Brouwer, 1967). Gill, M.L., Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989). Gilson, E. L’etre et L’essence (Paris: Vrin, 2000). Graham, D. Aristotle’s Two Systems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987a). —— ‘The paradox of prime matter’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 25 (1987b): 475–90. —— ‘Aristotle’s Definition of Motion’, in Aristotle: Critical Assessments (London: Routledge, ed. L.P. Gerson, 1999 – originally published in Ancient Philosophy, 8 (1988): 209–15). —— ‘The etymology of Rντ,λ,χF’, American Journal of Philology, 110 (1989): 73–80. Happ, H., Hyle. Studien zum aristotelischen Materie-Begriff (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1971). Jaeger, W., Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Metaphysik des Aristoteles (Berlin: Weidmann, 1912). —— Aristoteles. Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung (Berlin: Weidmann, 1923; Aristotle. Fundamentals of the History of his Development, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, trans. R. Robinson, 1934, 2nd edn, 1948). Kosman, A., ‘Substance, being and energeia’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 2 (1984): 121–49. —— ‘Aristotle’s Definition of Motion’, in Aristotle: Critical Assessments (London: Routlege, 1999 – first published in Phronesis, 14 (1969): 40–62). Kostmann, J., ‘Aristotle’s definition of change’, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 4 (1987): 3–16. Moreau, J., L’espace et le temps selon Aristote (Padua: Antenare, 1965). Owens, J., The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978, 3rd edn). Ross, D. Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1923). Schwegler, A., Aristoteles, Metaphysik (4. vols., 1846–7, re-edited Frankfurt: Minerva, 1960). Waterlow, S., Nature, Change and Agency in Aristotle’s Physics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

214 Bibliography

2

Heidegger: studies

Bartky, S., ‘Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 9 (1969): 353–71. Beaufret, J., Dialogue avec Heidegger (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1973–1985, 4. vols.). —— Entretiens avec Frederic de Towarnicki (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984). —— Leçons de Philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1998, 1 and 2). Bernasconi, R., The Question of Language in Heidegger’s History of Being (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1985). —— ‘The fate of the distinction between praxis and poiesis’, Heidegger Studies, 1986, n. 2, pp. 111–39. ——‘Repetition and Tradition: Heidegger’s Destructuring of the Distinction Between Essence and Existence in Basic Problems of Phenomenology,’ in Reading Heidegger from the Start: Essays in His Earliest Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, eds J. van Buren and T. Kisiel, 1994). —— ‘The Greatness of the Work of Art’, in Heidegger towards the Turn (Albany: State University of New York Press, ed. J. Risser, 1999). Bernstein, J., The Fate of Art (London: Polity, 1992). Blanchot, M., L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). Boutot, A., Heidegger et Platon (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987). Brague, R., ‘La Phénoménologie comme voie d’accès au monde grec’, in Phénoménologie et métaphysique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, eds J.L. Marion and G. Planty-Bonjour, 1984). Buren, J. van, The Young Heidegger: Rumour of a Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Courtine, J.F., Note complémentaire pour l’histoire du vocabulaire de l’être’, in Concepts et Catégories dans la Pensée Antique (Paris: Vrin, ed. P. Aubenque, 1980). —— Heidegger et la Phénoménologie (Paris: Vrin, 1990). Dahlstrom, D., Heidegger’s Concept of Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Dastur, F., ‘Heidegger’s Freiburg Version of the Origin’, in Heidegger towards the Turn (Albany: State University of New York Press, ed. J. Risser, 1999a). —— Heidegger and the Question of Time (New York: Humanity Books, trans. F. Raffoul and D. Pettigrew, 1999b). Derrida, J., La Voix et le Phénomène (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967). —— La Vérité en Peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1978). —— ‘Ousia and Gramm[’, in Margins of Philosophy (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Press, trans. Alan Bass, 1982). —— ‘La Main de Heidegger’, in Heidegger et la question. De l’esprit et autres essais (Paris: Flammarion, 1987) pp. 173–222. Dreyfus, H., ‘Heidegger’s History of the Being of Equipment’, in Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) pp. 173–85. Fried, G., ‘What’s in a Word?’, in A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, eds R. Polt and G. Fried, 2001) pp. 125–42. Haar, M., Le Chant de la Terre (Paris: L’Herne, 1988). Haase, U., ‘From name to metaphor … and back’, Research in Phenomenology, 26 (1996): 230–60.

Bibliography 215 Hanley, K., Being and God in Aristotle and Heidegger (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). Herrmann, F.W. von, Heideggers Philosophie der Kunst (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1994). Hodge, J., Heidegger and Ethics (London: Routledge, 1995). —— ‘Heideggerian temporalities: genesis and structure of a thinking of many dimensional time’, Research in Phenomenology, 29 (1999): 146–214. Kisiel, T., The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: California University Press, 1993). Kockelmans, J., Heidegger on Art and Art Works (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer, 1985). Marx, W., Heidegger and the Tradition (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, trans. T. Kisiel and M. Greene, 1971). McNeill, W., The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle and the Ends of Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999). Milet, J.P., L’Absolu Technique (Paris: Kimé, 2000). Moran, D., ‘Destruction of the Destruction: Heidegger’s Versions of the History of Philosophy’, in Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art and Technology (New York: Holmes & Meier, eds. Hames, K. and C. Jamme, 1994) pp. 295–318. —— ‘Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s and Brentano’s accounts of intentionality’ Inquiry, 43, 1 (2000a): 39–65. ——, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000b). O’Murchadha, F., Zeit des Handelns und Möglichkeit der Verwandlung (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1999). Pattison, G., The Later Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2000). Payot, D., La Statue de Heidegger (Belfort: Circé, 1998). Pöggeler, O., ‘Destruction and Moment’, in Reading Heidegger From the Start (Albany: State University of New York Press, eds. Kisiel, T. and U. van Buren, 1994) pp. 137–58. Richardson, W.J., Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963). Ruin, H., Enigmatic Origins: Tracing the Theme of Historicity in Heidegger’s Works (Stockholm: Almqwist & Wiskell, 1994). Sadler, T. Heidegger and Aristotle (London: Athlone, 1996). Sallis, J., ‘Interrupting Truth’, in Heidegger toward the Turn: Essays on the Work of the 1930s (Albany: State University of New York Press, ed. U. Risser, 1999) pp. 14–30. Schapiro, M., ‘The Still Life as a Natural Object. A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh’, in The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein (New York: Springer , ed. M.L. Simmel, 1968). Schürmann, R., Le Principe d’Anarchie (Paris: Seuil, 1982). Schmidt, H., ‘Heidegger. L’œuvre d’art comme péripétie de la pensée’, in Phénoménologie et Esthétique (Fougères: Encre Marine, 1998). Schrag, C., ‘The Transvaluation of Aesthetics and the Work of Art’, in Thinking about Being: Aspects of Heidegger’s Thought (Oaklahoma University Press, eds. R. Shahan and J. Mohanty, 1984) pp. 62–85. Sheehan, T., ‘On the Way to Ereignis: Heidegger’s Interpretation of Phusis’, in Continental Philosophy in America (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, eds H.J. Silvermann, J. Sallis, and T.M. Seebohm, 1983a) pp. 131–64.

216 Bibliography Sheehan, T., ‘Heidegger’s Philosophy of Mind’, in Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, ed. G. Folistad, 1983b) pp. 96–113. ——‘Kehre and Ereignis: A Prolegomenon to Introduction to Metaphysics’, in A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, eds. Polt, R. and G. Fried, 2001) pp. 3–16. Taminiaux, J., Recoupements (Brussels: Ousia, 1982). —— Lectures de l’Ontologie Fondamentale (Grenoble: Gerome Million, 1995). —— The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker (Albany: State University of New York Press, ed. and trans. Michael Gendre, 1997). Volpi, F., ‘Being and Time: A Translation of the Nicomachean Ethics?’, in Reading Heidegger from the Start (Albany: State University of New York Press, eds. Kisiel, T. and U. van Buren, trans. John Protevi, 1994) pp. 195–212. Vuillot, A., Heidegger et la Terre (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000). Young, J., Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Zimmermann, M., Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Art, Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

3

Other texts

Brentano, F., Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 3. vols., 1968). Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (London: Routledge, trans. A. Rancurello, D. Terrell and L. McAlister, 1973). Buonarotti, M., The Poetry of Michaelangelo (New Haven: Yale University Press, ed. and trans. J. Saslow, 1991). Descartes, R., Responses to the Third Meditations in Oeuvres (Paris: Vrin, ed. Adam & Tannery, 1983). —— Meditations on First Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, trans. J. Cottingham, 1996). Diels, H. and Kranz, W. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidmann, 1954 , 7th edn). Hegel, G.W.F., Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2. vols., trans. T.M. Knox, 1998). Husserl, E., Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. (Dordrecht: Kluwer, trans. F. Kersten, 1992). —— Logische Untersuchungen in Gesammelte Werke (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, Vols. 18–20, 1973); Logical Investigations (London: Routledge, trans. G. Findlay, ed. D. Moran, 2001). Kahn, C., The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Riedel, 1973). Kant, I., Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (Gesammelte Schriften, Berlin: Berlin Academy Edition, Vols. 3 and 4); trans. N.K. Smith, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1929). —— Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews, 2000). —— Theoretical Philosophy after 1781 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ed. H. Allison and P. Heath, 2002). Merleau-Ponty, M., The Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, trans. C. Smith, 1962).

Bibliography 217 Nietzsche, On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life (Indianapolis: Hackett, trans. Peter Preuss,1980). Panofsky, E., Idea (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press , trans. J. Peake, 1968). Plato, Euthyphro. Apology. Crito. Phaedo. Phaedrus (London: Loeb, trans. H. Fowler, 1914). —— Cratylus & Greater Hippias (London: Loeb, trans. H. Fowler, 1926). —— Republic (London: Loeb, trans. P. Shorey, 2. vols., 1930 and 1935). Plotinus, Opera, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,ed. P. Henry and H. Scwyzer, 3. vols., 1964, 1973 and 1982; Enneades (London: Faber and Faber, trans. S. MacKenna, 1930). Schelling, F., Sämtliche Werke (Munich: Biedersteen, ed. M. Schröter, 1946). Todorov, T., Théories du Symbole (Paris: Seuil, 1977). Zilsel, E., Die Entstehung des Geniebegriffs – Ein Beitrag zur Ideengeschichte der Antike und des Frühkapitalismus (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1972) originally published by J.C.B. Mohr, Tübingen, 1926).

Index actuality, (energeia/entelechia), 41, 42, 43–46, 68–69, 78, 87–93, 149, 167, 177, 193–194 aesthetics (meaning of), 140, 185–187 aletheia, 46, 125, 161–162, 164 Antiphon, 164 architecture, 170–171 Aristotle Categories, 27–29, 37, 42 De Anima, 45, 80 Metaphysics, 20–46, 88–90, 121–126, 152, 157 Nicomachean Ethics, 65–67, 127–131, 132 On Interpretation, 118–121, 124 Physics, 4, 23, 30, 34–35, 82–95, 99–110 Poetics, 189–191 The Generation of Animals, 159 Aubenque, P., 40, 85, 92, 105–106, 110–111, 121, 132 Beaufret, J., 74, 76, 161, 162, 191 beautiful, 171, 184–188 Bernasconi, R., 147 birth-certificate (of metaphysics), 5–9, 32, 62, 64, 136 Boehm, R., 27 Bostock, D., 30 Brague, R., 70–71 Brentano, F. on Aristotle, 44, 126 on intentionality, 51, 54 categories (in Heidegger’s sense), 58, 61, 79 see also Aristotle Categories Courtine, J-F., 65 Dastur, F., 181 death, 98 Derrida, J., 98–99, 110, 115 Destruction (phenomenological), 3–8, 11, 48, 76–77, 112–121, 132

dismantling return (abbauender Rückgang), 11, 13, 112, 132 Dreyfus, H., 47–48, 71 Dürer, A., 146–147 ekstasis, 85, 131 existence (meaning of), 41, 62–63, 72–73, 78, 85 Existenz, 58, 78–80, 180 fundamental ontology (meaning of), 7–10, 70–75 Gilson, E., 30, 37, 41 Haar, M., 47, 70, 149, 185 Happ, H., 160 Hegel, G.W.F. on artistic creation, 150 on the death of art, 177, 187 Heidegger, M. Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 7, 62, 67, 69, 79, 101, 107–108, 131–132, 179 Being and Time, 2–11, 13, 21, 39, 47–62, 65–66, 70–77, 81, 96–99, 106, 112–117, 122, 126, 130–132 Fundamental Concepts of Aristotle’s Philosophy, 67, 68, 69 History of the Concept of Time, 56–57 Introduction to Metaphysics, 85, 144–145, 156–157 Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 11–13, 44 Heraclitus, 4, 69, 144–145, 161 hermeneutics as-structure, 114, 117, 126 hermeneutic circle and art-theory, 139 hermeneutic concepts in artistic presentation, 178 hule, 30–37, 158–163 prote hule (primary matter), 30, 35 see also matter

218

Index 219 Husserl, E. on intentionality, 54 on expression, 114 intentionality, 50–59, 116, 172 see also Husserl Jaeger, W., 41 Kahn, C. H., 25 Kant, I. on the origin of philosophical concepts, 5 on matter and form, 32 on possibility, 78 on the forms of intuition, 102 on truth, 112 on disinterestedness, 140 on genius, 149 on architecture, 171 on Darstellung or presentation, 174 on the beautiful, 186 logos, 29, 117–122, 166, 180, 190 Marc, F., 178 matter, 30–37, 56, 68, 87–88 metaphysics (meaning of), 4, 9–10, 14, 22, 71 as onto-theology, 27 Michelangelo, 146–150 movement, 4, 40, 80–98, 102–103, 106–110, 127–128, 132, 159–160 of Heidegger’s own work, 10–11, 51–58, 68, 72, 135, 142, 154, 194–195 ontology (meaning of), 20–22 see also fundamental ontology Owens, J., 20, 24, 25, 41 painting, 177–178 Aristotle’s conception of painting, 188–189 Panofsky, E., 147 Parmenides, 4, 83 phusis, 23, 76, 77, 81, 82, 86–88, 93–95, 144–145, 156, 157 Plato and the origin of philosophy, 2–4

and ousia, 23–24 and the idea/eidos, 29, 33, 34 and the fall of philosophy, 145, 149 on inspiration, 149–150 on the beautiful, 186 on art and truth, 188 poiesis, 12, 13, 14, 66, 73, 89, 127, 139, 155–161, 163, 184, 190, 194 poetry, 120, 141, 150, 174, 179–180, 188 possibility, 45–46, 68, 78–79, 86–93, 126, 147, 150, 157–161, 166, 193 reduction (in Heidegger’s phenomenological sense), 7–8, 10, 47, 71–72 Rilke, R.M., 179 Ross, D., 38 Sadler, T., 13, 14, 15 science philosophy as science, 22 modern natural sciences, 56, 74, 143 existential conception of science, 74–76 Sheehan, T., 166 subject (to hupokeimenon), 27–41, 84–85, 94, 104, 159 substance, 24, 26–29, 38–41, 43, 46, 58, 80, 97, 164 Taminiaux, J., 72–73, 132 techne, 31–33, 49, 78, 87, 127–128, 155–161 truth, 12, 34, 42, 43, 44, 45, 75, 111–134, 191, 194 see also aletheia Vorhandenheit (sense of), 54, 56, 58, 60, 61–63, 64, 65, 68, 74–76, 141, 153, 155 Young, J., 140 Zilsel, E., 148 Zimmermann, M., 47–48, 163 Zuhandenheit (sense of), 54, 58–60, 64, 65, 67–69, 72, 74, 78, 95, 113, 126, 136, 153–155, 175

Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art

Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art

Heidegger and Aristotle: The Question of Being

Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity

Heidegger on Art and Art Works (Phaenomenologica)

Time and Exteriority: Aristotle, Heidegger, Derrida

A Work of Art

A Work Of Art

Entity and Existence: An Ontological Investigation of Aristotle and Heidegger

Work of Art

Heidegger On Art

A Work of Art

Work of Art

A Work of Art

Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political

Art and Aesthetics At Work

Aristotle and the Virtues

Aristotle and the Gun

The ethics of Aristotle

Heidegger and ''the jews''

Heidegger and the Subject

Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art

Evaluation in Social Work: The Art and Science of Practice

Heidegger and the Political

Heidegger and the Tradition

Heidegger and ''the jews''

Majestic indolence: English romantic poetry and the work of art

Work and Education in America: The Art of Integration

Aristotle

Aristotle

Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle

Heidegger, Aristotle and the Work of Art