Heidegger's Philosophy of Mind
I.
The period after World War Two saw the emergence
both of the so-called later Heidegger
andof
the corresponding problem of the unity
of
his thought. Although his major work,
Sein
und Zeit, 1927 (=SZ) had announced
Heidegger's
intention of working out the meaning
of being
(Sein), his publications up through
1943,
with the exception of the brief Vom
Wesen
der Wahrheit, presented only his preparatory
analysis of human openness (Dasein).
However,
Heidegger's post-war publications seemed
to emphasize “being itself” (the history
of being, being as language, pre-Socratic
notions of being, the withdrawal of
being
in the modern world) and indeed almost
seemed
to hypostasize being into an "other"
with a life of its own. This state
of affairs,
combined with Heidegger's announcement
in
1953 that SZ would be left a torso,
gave
rise to such questions as whether his
later
thought was still phenomenological,
how it
might be continuous with his earlier
writings,
and how, if indeed at all, it was to
be understood.
A first wave of scholarly
engagement
with the later Heidegger was issued
in a
number of important writings which,
because
they were published before 1966, fall
outside
the scope of the present essay. H.-G.
Gadamer's
Wahrheit und Methode (1960), while
based
on Heidegger, opened up original new
paths
into hermeneutics and its application
to
literary as well as philosophical texts.
Significant interpretations appeared
in German
(Allemann, Demske, von Herrmann, Löwith,
Marx, Pöggler, Pugliese, Schulz, Volkmann-Schluck,
Wiplinger), French (Biemel, Birault,
Chapelle,
Guilead, Levinas, Wahl), English (King,
Kockelmans,
Langan, Richardson, [p. 288] Seidel,
Spiegelberg,
Vycinas), Italian (Chiodi, Vattimo)
and Dutch
(IJsseling). Secondary literature on
Heidegger
from 1945 through 1965 ran to almost
1800
titles. From 1966 until his death in
1976
Heidegger published some essays, a
seminar
and a lecture course [1-8], but, most
importantly,
he began the publication of his Gesamtausgabe.
Among the most significant
works that will appear in this Collected
Edition are the heretofore unpublished
texts
and notes from his lecture courses
and seminars
from 1923 through 1944. Some of these
have
recently appeared [9-18], but the entire
project will require some years to
be completed.
The present report is devoted exclusively
to Heidegger's own publications between
1966
and today, and particularly to the
topics
of (1) the development of his early
thought
in dialogue with Husserl and Aristotle
and
(2) the unity of his thought around
the notion
of Ereignis (the opening up of the
open space
required for meaning), for these two
topics
come to the fore most clearly in Heidegger's
latest publications.
The secondary literature
on
Heidegger continues to expand (almost
2000
titles since 1966), and some of these
works
are listed in the bibliography at the
end.
Inevitably, some very good studies
had to
be omitted for lack of space. A word
about
the title of this essay is in order.
One
cannot speak of a "philosophy
of mind"
in Heidegger without serious and major
qualifications.
The center of his thought remained,
in the
broadest sense, the correlation between
the
being of entities and human being.
Thus he
considered the issues of mind, consciousness,
and knowledge -- in short, subjectivity
--
to be two steps removed from "the
thing
itself," first because they were
derived
problematics in relation to human openness
(Dasein), and secondly because Dasein
in
turn received its meaning from the
nature
of being itself. It is true that the
question
of intentionality ("mind")
served
as Heidegger's entrée to working out
the
meaning of human being, but in the
process
Heidegger shifted the weight from intentionality
to what he called transcendence. Nonetheless,
with the qualifications that will emerge
below, we may try to gain access to
Heidegger's
own topic via the problematic of mind.
The
first step is to locate, by way of
a schematic
overview, the general lines of Heidegger's
central issue. [p. 289] I.
THE QUESTION OF THE MEANING OF BEING.
Heidegger began philosophy in 1907
with the
reading of Franz Brentano's 1862 dissertation,
Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des
Seienden
nach Aristoteles [2, p. 81]. He learned
that
the Greek particle on has both a gerundive sense (to-be-in-being: sein) and a substantive sense (that-which-is-in-being: das Seiende). From that was born his question: If that-which-is-in-being has several senses, what is the meaning of being of entities in its very ground or “analogical unity”?
In another phrasing: What is it that lets being come about at all in human experience? Or:
What is that "gives" or "dispenses"
being within the range of human experience? [My
emphasis. ed.]
The focus is not on the
being-of-entities
but on what makes possible the experience
of the being of entities. The question
may
seem to coincide with that of traditional
metaphysics, viz., the investigation
of entities
in their common being (ontology) and
of being
in its highest instance (theology).
But Heidegger
was interested not in the ontological
or
theological characteristics of the
being
of entities, but rather in what it
is that
allows for the experience of all modes
of
being; or: what it is that "gives/dispenses"
the being of entities to human experience.
Heidegger takes a step back, as it
were,
back behind all ontological and theological
ways of discussing being, and he seeks
to
discuss the provenance of all modes
of the
experienced being of entities. On the
way
to SZ Heidegger transformed the question
of being in two ways, one which we
may call
"phenomenological" and the
other
"kinetic."
The phenomenological transformation.
Being for Heidegger is always the being
of
entities, but he interprets such being
not
as the raw existence of entities but
as their
meaningful disclosure to human experience.
Whereas entities may exist apart from
whether
or not human beings exist, being as
the meaningful
givenness of entities never "is"
apart from human experience. Being
is the
meaning of entities. But Heidegger’s
question
concerns the meaning of being. This
question
about the meaning of being (also called
the
question of the "truth" or
disclosure
or giving/dispensation of being) concerns
how it happens that the being-of-entities
(not just entities, but entities in
their
being) is given or dispensed to human
experience.
That question shifts the emphasis from
the
relation of intentionality between
human
experience and the meaningful entities
it
encounters, to the relation of transcendence
between human experience and whatever
it
is that makes possible the being of
entities.
As we shall see below,
Heidegger's
phenomenological transformation of
traditional
ontology entailed an ontological transformation
of traditional phenomenology. The kinetic
transformation. Heidegger allows that
the
tradition did discuss the being of
entities
in more or less explicit correlation
with
human experience, but he claims that
metaphysics
failed to see whatever it is that gives
or
"dispenses" (makes possible)
the
being of entities. that being is intrinsically
kinetic, i. e., an ontological movement
of
disclosure that is bound up with the
ontological
movement of human being itself. Thus
metaphysics
interpreted the being of entities as
one
or another form of stable presentness
in
conjunction with human being as a stable
subject. Heidegger's kinetic transformation
of the being-question entailed (1)
working
out the meaning of kinesis in Aristotle
as
an ontological presence-by-absence;
(2) determining
human nature as an ontological [p.
290] movement
of presence-by-absence (transcendence);
and
(3) interpreting the "dispensation
of
being" (Seinsgeschick) as an ontological
movement that renders entities present-in-their-current-form-ofbeing
by somehow remaining "itself"
in
relative absence (a-letheia).
As we shall see below,
Heidegger's
kinetic transformation of the being-question
entailed the retrieval or articulation
of
what Aristotle and the Greeks left
unsaid.
In their unity, Heidegger's two transformations
of traditional ontology point to a
single
issue: the essence of human being as
a pres-ab-sential
movement (called "transcendence")
that makes it possible for entities
to appear
in their being, or equally, for the
being
of entities to show up in human experience.
The name Heidegger gave central issue
is
itself a kinetic term, Ereignis or
appropriation,
which is Heidegger's interpretative
translation
of kinesis in Aristotle. In the last
section
of this essay we shall see how appropriation
is the unifying issue of Heidegger's
thought.
II. THE POLEMIC WITH HUSSERL
In recent publications [8, 14, 17]
Heidegger
has clarified for the first time explicitly
and at length his debts to and disagreements
with Husserl.
By analyzing how Heidegger's
own thought grew out of and yet away
from
Husserl, we shall see how Heidegger
began
to transform phenomenology from a philosophy
of mind into a philosophy of appropriation.
A. Heidegger's debts to Husserl Phenomenology
was born of the effort to gain an a
priori
science of mind as the foundation for
scientific
philosophy and ultimately for philosophically
grounded empirical sciences. The first
step
in that direction was Franz Brentano's
Psychologie
vom empirischen Standpunkt (1874).
Brentano
methodically bracketed the metaphysical
claim
of the existence of mind as a substance
in
order to focus presuppositionlessly
on mental
experiences just as they directly reveal
themselves to immanent apperception.
The goal of his empirical-descriptive
(as contrasted with an experimental-genetic)
psychology was first to describe the
essential
structure of mental experiences and
then
to arrange and classify them according
to
their natural order. Inner apperception
--
not to be [p. 291] confused with a
supposed
introspection -- reveals that the common
characteristic of all mental experiences
is directedness toward or reference
to a
meant object (Beziehung auf ein Objekt,
intentionale/mentale
Inexistenz eines Gegenstandes), whether
or
not that object actually exists in
the world.
The essence of mental experience is
intentionality
-- the minding-of-the-meant. Whereas
Brentano
only showed that intentionality characterizes
mental experience, Edmund Husserl's
Logische
Untersuchungen, 1900/01, (=LU) worked
out
the essence of intentionality, at least
in
its logical performances, with regard
to:
its bivalent structure of intentio
and intentum;
the way the intentum is had, viz.,
in the
"how" of its being-intended;
the
possibilities of empty and fulfilled
intention;
and the nature of truth as an intentional
identity-synthesis of the meant and
the perceived.
But as far as Heidegger
was
concerned, the major achievement of
LU was
the discovery that the being of entities
can itself be rendered present as a
phenomenon
through categorial intuition. Taking
expressed
language as his clue, Husserl showed
that
not all parts of an assertion can find
intuitive
fulfillment in sensuous perception.
For example,
in the statement "The paper is
white,"
the intentions represented by "paper"
and "white" can indeed be
filled
in by the corresponding sense perceptions,
but the state of affairs corresponding
to
"is" (the paper as being
white)
does not appear to sensuous intuition.
It
remains a surplus over and above the
content
of sensuous intuition and so requires
another
act, founded on sensuous intuition,
to render
it immediately present: the categorial
intuition.
The dimension of the categorial corresponds
to what the tradition called "being."
More specifically, it is the "being-as"
dimension of phenomena (X as Y = X
is Y).
Therefore, by freeing being from its
mere
status as a copula and by seeing it
as a
directly given phenomenon, Husserl
showed
that the full range of phenomenological
immediacy
covers not just entities but entities-in-their-mode-of-being,
entities as being such or so. Intentionality
in its full range is intrinsically
ontological,
a disclosure of entities in their being.
Heidegger's debts to LU were chiefly
three
and concerned the goal, the theme,
and the
method of philosophy.
1. The goal: The meaning of being. By discovering
that the being of entities is an immediately
given phenomenon, Husserl, [p. 292]
unbeknownst
to himself, had opened the way to a
phenomenological
solution of the traditional being-question.
If all intentional comportment has
its intentum
in the "how" of its being
intended,
then categorial intuition likewise
sees being
in the "how" of its being
intended
or revealed. To Heidegger this suggested
a question that went beyond Husserl:
What
is the nature of the empty intention
that
can be "filled in" by being?
Or:
What is the relative absence from out
of
which being is disclosed as presence?
2. The theme: The being of intentionality.
Husserl had demonstrated that the essence
of all comportment is intentionality,
indeed
as a movement (directedness to) that
reveals
(renders present). To Heidegger this
suggested
the need to think out the unity of
movement
and revelation in terms of presence-and-absence.
In Aristotle, movement (kinesis) is
the momentary
presence that an entity has on the
basis
of its stretch towards the privatively
absent;
and revelation (aletheia) is the becoming
present of what was heretofore absent.
But
the intention of being is a stretch
into
relative absence (empty intention)
that allows
being to come from absence to presence
(fulfilled
intuition). Thus the goal and the theme
of
philosophy came together in the one
issue
of pres-ab-sence: human being's intentional
movement (presence by absence) as correlative
with the revelation of being (presence
from
out of absence).
3. The method: Phenomenology. Husserl's investigations
into logical comportment provided the
model
that should characterize all phenomenology,
viz., rigorous analytic description
of the
a priori (i. e., the being) of the
various
modes of intentionality.
For Heidegger phenomenology
was a method for letting intentionality
show
itself (legein as apophainesthai) just
as
it shows itself to be (phainesthai).
Phenomenology
was the ontology of intentionality.
And since
intentionality itself is intrinsically
ontological,
the phenomenology of intentionality
could
lead to solving the question of the
meaning
of being in its analogical unity. The
goal,
the theme, and the method of philosophy
thus
form a unity. Husserl bequeathed to
Heidegger
a descriptive method for analyzing
the kinetic-disclosive
essence of intentionality for the sake
of
raising and answering the question
about
the absence that allows the being of
entities
to become present. [p. 293] B.
Heidegger's transformation of phenomenology
Heidegger's debts to LU were transformed
into tasks insofar as Husserl's later
works
(1) failed to follow up the ontological
implications
of the discovery of categorial intuition,
(2) overlooked everyday intentionality
in
order to study pure consciousness,
and (3)
legislated the reductions as the necessary
means for moving from the natural attitude
to transcendental consciousness. In
Heidegger's
eyes these shortcomings were due to
Husserl's
inadequate pre-grasp (Vorgriff) of
the task
of philosophy. Heidegger's topic was
the
traditional being-question, phenomenologically
transformed: how one "minds being"
in its various instantiations and its
analogical
unity.
Husserl's ultimate interest,
on the other hand, was the relatively
modern
one, traceable to Descartes, of building
a pure logic or mathesis universalis
on the
foundation or pure consciousness. This
ultimate
goal prescribed the penultimate theme
of
his philosophy: the epistemological
clarification
of pure consciousness insofar as it
can become
the object of universally valid statements
in an a priori psychology. And just
as the
goal prescribed the theme, so the theme
dictated
the method: that of bracketing intentionality
in the natural attitude so as to reach
transcendental
consciousness. We may spell out Heidegger's
disagreements with Husserl in three
areas:
the field of phenomenology, its theme,
and
its method.
1. The field: Everydayness vs. theoretical
comportment. For Heidegger intentionality
was primarily operative in the realm
of ordinary
habitual experience -- e. g., work,
conversation,
history, religion -- and it deserved
to be
treated on its own terms and not, as
Husserl
would have it, by analogy with or from
the
viewpoint of theoretical comportment.
Heidegger
maintained that Husserl's logicaltheoretical
interests not only prevented him from
seeing
everydayness as the basic field of
intentionality,
but also led him to read the natural
attitude
from a prejudicial natural-scientific
viewpoint.
His analyses of perception, for example,
tended to interpret perception as a
mere
"staring" at objects (cf.
his descriptions
of the famous cube on his desk) rather
than
realizing that human beings first of
all
have the things of their world in pragmatic
concernful dealings (Umgehen mit) and
"perceives"
any single thing only within a totality
of
other useful things (a hammer with
nails,
[p. 294] shingles, etc.).
Moreover, Husserl tended
to
see human being in the natural attitude,
e. g., the empirical ego, simply in
connection
with psychophysical and neurological
processes,
hence as a thing-entity of nature.
In that
regard, Heidegger considered the "natural
attitude" in Husserl to be not
natural
enough. In Heidegger we may speak of
a transposition
of the ontological as-factor from the
theoretical
dimension that Husserl discussed in
terms
of the categorial intuition to the
practical
dimension of everydayness. In ordinary
experience
human beings live in their concerns
and projects
and thus already have a practical,
if unthematic,
understanding (hermeneia) of the being
of
themselves, other people, tools and
nature.
For example, when we employ tools for
purposes,
we know the tool as for something,
and this
pragmatic as-factor indicates that
human
being already understands the beingdimension
of the tool (X as being Y). In fact,
Heidegger
claims that the Greeks basically experienced
being in this practical modality, as
evidenced
by their appropriation of the word
ousia
-- which refers to things of practical
concern,
like tools and houses -- for "being."
For Heidegger humans give evidence
that they
are a living understanding of the being
of
things (= the "hermeneutical as")
whenever they perform a task (using
a hammer
to nail) or spell out a pragmatic concern
("Give me the lighter hammer").
Theoretical statements with their categorial
or "apophantic" as-factor
("This
hammer weighs two kilos") are,
for Heidegger,
derivations from and a leveling down
of the
primary practical way that one understands
being.
2. The theme: Facticity vs. pure consciousness.
Heidegger claimed that Husserl, fascinated
by his rediscovery of the ideal content
of
logical acts and in keeping with his
epistemological
and logical interests, neglected the
ontological
question of the being of real intentional
acts (and more generally, the question
of
the meaning of being as such) in order
to
focus on pure consciousness. Heidegger,
on
the other hand, influenced by Dilthey,
found
historical existence (facticity) to
be "the
point where all philosophical inquiry
arises
and to which it returns." We may
note
four points of difference between Heidegger's
reading of facticity and Husserl's
characterization
of pure consciousness.
(a) Worldliness vs. immanence. For Husserl
consciousness is immanent being, i.
e., selftransparent
in such a way that its direct [p. 295]
intentional
acts are interior to reflective intentional
acts. For Heidegger, human beings in
their
lived, factical intentionality are
being-in-the-world,
i. e., always "outside" the
supposed
immanence of consciousness and concernfully
absorbed in worldly contexts of meaning:
the use-world of implements, the co-world
of sociality, and, running through
both of
these, the self-world of concern for
their
own interests. Evidence of human worldliness
is the fact that we always find ourselves
in moods, that is, "tuned in"
to
a given worldly context.
(b) Fallenness vs. apodictic self-givenness.
For Husserl apodictic self-givenness
is the
index of the presence that direct intentional
acts have for second-order reflective
acts;
the selfgivenness of consciousness
is in
contrast with the givenness of transcendent
entities which may not be as they appear
and indeed may not be at all. For Heidegger
human being as being-in-the-world is
so absorbed
in its intentional interests and in
public
opinions (das Man) that our true nature
is
usually hidden from us (fallenness),
and
we know ourselves not directly but
by reflection
(Relucenz) from our projected concerns
(Praestruktion).
Far from being a negative factor that
would
argue against intentionality in everyday
life, fallenness testifies that we
are so
utterly intentional as to be lost in
our
interests. It also indicates the need
to
"wrest" self-givenness from
everyday
absorption, but not by a reduction
to some
disengaged consciousness. Rather, intentionality
can thematize itself from within its
own
movement, e. g., by the breakdown of
tools
or especially by the "call of
conscience."
(c) Thrownness vs. self-position. For Husserl
consciousness is absolutely self-positing
(so much so that the annihilation of
the
world leaves it untouched) and as such
is
absolutely constitutive of the meaning
of
transcendent reality. For Heidegger
human
being in its facticity does not posit
itself
over against the world and then constitute
it presuppositionlessly from some supreme
vantage point. Rather, we find ourselves
already thrown-open (posited into possibilities),
which possibilities in turn constitute
the
meaningfulness or being-dimension of
the
things we meet in the world. As already
thrown-open
(geworfen), we are already opened up
(vereignet)
by possibility, and we attain authentic
selfhood,
not self-position, by personally reappropriating
our openness. [p. 296]
(d) Mineness vs. pure consciousness. For
Husserl "consciousness" is
finally
"pure consciousness," seen
in its
eidetic whatness apart from concretization
in a corporeal individual. For Heidegger
factically lived intentionality is
always
individuated as one's own (Jemeinigkeit),
is known only in "having oneself"
in historical situations (Mich-Selbst-Haben),
is bodily and emotively determined
(Befindlichkeit, Stimmung), is always
co-existing
with others (so much so that for the
most
part "everyone is the other and
no one
is himself"), and in the final
analysis
is projected towards the ultimate personal
possibility that is one's death. In
short,
"We ourselves are the entities
to be
analyzed." Moreover, factical
human
being can never be reduced to an atemporal
eidetic whatness, for our essence is
our
very temporal existence, the need to
become
the projected possibility that we already
are.
3. The method: Hermeneutical induction vs.
phenomenological reduction. Method
in phenomenology
is not a technique imposed on the subject
matter but simply a way of seeing the
issue--
intentionality--in its being. If, following
Husserl, we speak of intentionality
as "constitution"
("the property of an act which
makes
the object present"), then phenomenological
method is the interpreter's way of
re-seeing
how intentional acts constitute modes
of
presence. As such, phenomenological
method
entails looking away from the thematically
intended object so as to see its "how"
or mode of presence, i. e., its being.
For
Husserl intention or constitution is
performed
by the absolutely self-positing transcendental
ego. Therefore the moment of "looking
away" becomes a radical bracketing
of
the entire natural attitude (with its
already
operative understanding of the being
of entities)
so as to see how entities are intended
by
pure consciousness (phenomenological-transcendental
reduction), indeed in their essential
whatness
freed from individuating characteristics
(eidetic reduction).
But for Heidegger everyday
intentionality
already understands being, and therefore
phenomenological method is simply the
thematization
of ordinary life. That does entail
a "looking
away" from the thematic objects
of intentional
acts. However, this is not a reflective
"looking
back" to pure consciousness, but
rather
a thematic "looking ahead"
into
the realm of projected possibilities
that
is the practical being-dimension of
entities,
their way of [p. 297] being present.
Phenomenological
method for Heidegger is not reduction
but
induction (epagoge: cf. Physics A,
2, 185,
b 13), a second-order hermeneutics
that explicates
the first-order hermeneutical understanding
of being that we already are. By "induction"
Heidegger does not mean reasoning from
particulars
to universals but rather re-seeing
(Hinführung
zu) the being-dimension one has already
seen,
bringing it into explicit view, and
reading
entities in terms of it. When the entity
to be analyzed is oneself, then hermeneutical
induction is "resolve": consciously
seeing and reappropriating the appropriation-by-possibility
that one already is.
In 1921 Heidegger called this "die
Wiederholung
des Lebens." This brief presentation
of Heidegger's disagreement with Husserl
with regard to the field, the theme
and the
method of phenomenology has merely
sketched
out the parameters within which Heidegger
intended to work out, in a phenomenological
way, this question of the analogical
unity
of being. He filled in that area with
his
study of Aristotle.
III. THE RETRIEVAL OF ARISTOTLE
Heidegger was convinced that Aristotle's
treatises constituted an implicitly
phenomenological
philosophy of everydayness without
the obscuring
intervention of a philosophy of subjectivity.
But it was also clear that Aristotle
moved
within the Greek horizon of being as
the
stable presentness of entities. Heidegger's
reading of Aristotle, therefore, had
two
tasks: that of explicating what Aristotle
said about the appearance of being
in everyday
life and that of retrieving what Aristotle
did not say about movement as the condition
of that appearance. Aristotle described
wisdom
as "philosophizing about truth:
(Meta,
A, 3, 983 b 2), not about the concept
of
truth but about the presentation process
that lets entities be seen as what
and how
they are. We may follow out Heidegger's
examination
of that presentation process in Aristotle
under three headings: the place and
kinds
of truth; the structure of linguistic
truth;
and the kinetic condition of truth;
Heidegger
worked out these questions in his 1925-26
course on logic [10]. [p. 298] A.
The place and kinds of truth The tradition
has generally appealed to Aristotle
as the
source of its double claim that the
proper
locus of truth is the judgment or assertion
and that the essence of truth consists
in
the correspondence of a judgment with
an
objective state of affairs. Apart from
the
problems inherent in the position itself
(e. g., how mental representations
can accord
with worldly facts), Heidegger challenges
the claim that this doctrine can be
found
in Aristotle. Heidegger finds in the
Aristotelian
treatises a hierarchy of the "places"
of truth:
1. entities as autodisclosive (on alethes)
2. human being as disclosive of entitles
(psyche as aletheuein) a. in intuition
(aisthesis,
noesis) b. in composition (logos) i.
preverbal:
disclosive comportment (episteme, sophia;
phronesis, techne) ii. verbal: disclosive
speech (logos apophantikos). Four remarks
about this hierarchy are in order.
1. For Aristotle the primary and proper locus
of truth (disclosure) is not human
being
at all but entities themselves. In
Metaphysics
IX, 10, a text which Heidegger defends
as
authentic, Aristotle says that the
most proper
characteristic of entities insofar
as they
are encountered by us is their selfdisclosure
in their whatness and howness (eidos).
The
being of entities is their appearing,
and
humans are revelatory in a secondary
sense,
i. e., insofar as we take things just
as
they reveal themselves to be (1051
b 6-9).
2. When Aristotle considers truth or disclosure
as a performance of human being, he
asserts
that its primary locus is not judgment
(logos
apophantikos) but intuition, whether
sensuous
or, above all, noetic. Because judgment
is
by nature a synthetic and dia-logistic
disclosure
of a complex state of affairs (legein:
to
bind together, dialegein: to say one
thing
through another), it has the possibility
of falsehood as well as of truth and
so is
not the primary mode of human disclosure.
3. Intuition is the primary mode of disclosure
because it immediately presents its
object
without the possibility of falsehood.
[p.
299] Sensuous intuition always aims
at its
proper object (to idion) and in that
sense
is always true (De An., III, 3, 427
b 11).
Noetic intuition discloses its proper
object
by just "seeing" or "touching"
(thigein) it. It discovers and never
covers
over (pseudesthai); at worst it is
not error
but simply non-seeing (agnoein, 1052
a 1-4).
4. Moreover, when Aristotle in Nicomachean
Ethics VI considers human being insofar
as
it "has logos" (to logon
echon),
he considers logos in its prelinguistic
or
preverbal function of disclosive comportment
[18]. He first distinguishes the two
parts
of logos -- the theoretical, ordered
to the
eternal and unchanging and the practical,
ordered to the changeable -- and then
asserts
that the function of both parts is
disclosure.
The theoretical modes of disclosure
are sophia
(wisdom) and episteme (discursive knowledge),
whereas the practical modes are phronesis
(prudence or circumspect insight: umsichtige
Einsicht) and techne (know-how about
the
being of what is to be produced: Sichauskennen).
These four modes of composite-revelatory
behavior are called hexeis, ways that
humans
essentially "have themselves"
as
disclosive in preverbal comportment.
For
Aristotle the best of these modes (beltiste
hexis) was wisdom, whereas for Heidegger,
with his practical and historical interests,
the best of prudence.
But since human being
as prudential
is always posited in a world, Heidegger
combined
the two practical disclosive virtues
into
his notion of concern: human beings
ultimately
act for their own good (phronesis)
and to
that end carry out practical projects
(techne).
The results of Heidegger's reading
of the
place and kinds of disclosure in Aristotle
are: first, the location of disclosure
primarily
in entities themselves, i. e., in their
being,
and, secondly, the unfolding of a panoply
of modes of disclosure in human beings,
with
judgment or assertion being the last.
Within
the logos-modes of disclosure Heidegger
emphasizes
the preverbal over the verbal: logos
is a
preverbal "reading" (Rede)
of the
world as such and so, before it is
ever spoken
out in language.
And within the preverbal
he
emphasizes -- against Aristotle --
the practical
over the theoretical. This shift, of
course,
was basic to his own treatment of concern,
tool-use, and the worldhood of the
world
in SZ. [p. 300] B. The structure of
linguistic
disclosure In order to work out a phenomenology
of disclosure in human being's linguistic
or verbal comportment, Heidegger turned
to
Aristotle's De Interpretatione, a treatise
on intelligibility (hermeneia) both
in the
broad sense of reference and in the
narrow
sense of assertion (apophansis). Here
above
all Heidegger's effort was to retrieve
from
Aristotle a heretofore unarticulated
phenomenology
of facticity. The following presents
in rough
fashion Aristotle's schematization
of language
in the treatise, with help from De
Anima.
Nonsignifying/ referential psophos
monon
Signifying/referential phone semantike
Simple
utterance phasis Complex utterance:
discursivity
logos Noun onoma Verb rhema Nonpresentative
ouk apophantikos (Optative, subjective,
imperative
moods) Presentative apophantikos (Indicative
mood) Affirmation kataphasis Negation
apophasis
true false true false According to
this diagram,
the structure of disclosive language
consists
of:
(1) sounds that refer
(2) to complex states of affairs,
(3) in such a way that they present
something
as something
(4) with the claim that it is or is
not
the case,
(5) with the possibility that the claim
may be either true or false (correct
or incorrect).
Heidegger first explains this position
and
the "retrieves" what it leaves
unsaid.
1. Reference. Whereas animals make sounds,
only humans can make an utterance,
i. e.,
a meaningful or referential sound (phone
semantike). Aristotle delineates the
characteristics
of reference [p. 301] in five interconnected
ways.
(a) The sound must be meta phantasias (De
An., II, 8, 420 b 33), that is, about
an
eidos, not as some "species"
in
the sense of a "mental representation"
but about something that can show itself
in the world of human possibility [19].
(b) A referential utterance is found only
hoti genetai symbolon (De Interp.,
16 a 27),
only when there is a binding together
(syn
+ ballein) of human being and the being
of
a worldly entity.
(c) Meaningful sounds are hermeneia (420
b 19) in the broad sense, i. e., delousi
ti (cf. De Interp., 17 a 18): they
create
a circle of intelligibility by showing
something,
even if they do not yet show it from
itself(apo-phainesthai).
(d) Referential utterances are not physei
but kata syntheken (17 a 1): they do
not
arise from nature but from convention,
i.
e., by the historical actions and social
intercourse of men.
(e) Finally, referential utterances are intrinsically
social (cf. ho akousas eremesen, 16
b 21),
oriented towards others with whom the
speaker
shares the world, and directed to effecting
the hearer's agreement. In summary,
for Heidegger
the referential character of language
shows
that we are: in the world; transcendent
to
the being of entities; hermeneutical,
i.
e. caught up in intelligibility; historical;
and social.
2. Mere utterance vs. talk. While all utterances
are referential, not all referential
utterances
constitute talk (logos). Nouns and
verbs,
for example, are indeed referential
sounds,
but, taken by themselves, they are
only namings
(phaseis). A noun names a thing without
reference
to time; a verb has a reference to
time and
to synthesis (legomenon kat'heteron,
16 b
5), yet it posits neither the time
nor the
synthesis but remains only a sign (semeion)
of such positing. Talk requires synthesis
with regard to time.
3. Mere talk vs. apophantic talk. While all
talk refers to complex states of affairs
in a temporal synthesis, not all talk
is
presentative (apophantikos) of a state
of
affairs so as to let it be seen from
itself.
According to Aristotle prayers, commands,
wishes, definitions and the like are
indeed
talk but not apophantic talk, not talk
which
can be either true or false. Aristotle
refers
discussion of mere talk to the Poetics
and
the Rhetorics (17 a 7), and in that
latter
treatise Heidegger found the basis
for his
own [p. 302] discussion of "mere
talk"
(Gerede) in SZ [19].
4. Apophantic talk: Two levels of disclosure.
Insofar as apophantic or presentative
talk
does not something forth to be seen,
it is
always true or disclosive in the broad
sense
of bringing something out of hiddenness;
the opposite of to alethes in this
wide sense
is to lanthanomenon, that which does
not
appear. However within this broad revelatory
function, apophantic talk can be either
true
or false in the narrow sense of correctness/
incorrectness. The first level of disclosure
has no counterpart of falsehood: it
is a
simple tendency to disclose. This primary
presentational disclosure is our dianoetic
participation in noetic intuition;
Heidegger
calls it "the disclosive having
of an
entity" (in its being), or more
simply,
the pre-having (Vorhabe). The second
level
of truth is embedded within primordial
disclosure
and runs the risk of presenting something
incorrectly as well as correctly. The
basis
of predicative truth-or-falsehood is
prepredicative
presentational disclosure.
5. Disclosure in affirmation and denial.
Assertoric or categorial talk, whether
affirmation
or denial, presumes the prepredicative
appearance
of the phenomenon and then speaks from
(apo-)
the phenomenon so as to show it (-phainesthai)
as such and so or as not such and so,
with
the possibility that such showing may
be
correct or incorrect. What constitutes
the
possibility of correct assertoric talk
is
the same as what constitutes the possibility
of incorrect assertoric talk: the structure
of composing and dividing (synthesis,
diairesis).
Aristotle says that falsehood (and
therefore
truth in the narrow sense of correctness)
is possible only where there is synthesis
(De An., 430 b 1), and he adds that
synthesis
in itself is also a diairesis. It is
not
the case that affirmative judgments
compose
the subject and predicate whereas negative
judgments divide them. Rather, composition
and division both occur in every judgment,
whether affirmative or negative, whether
true or false. Hence, synthesis and
diairesis
are two names for a single bivalent
phenomenon.
The unity of synthesis and diairesis,
whatever
that might be, is the condition for
the possibility
of both correctness and incorrectness.
Aristotle did not question
"below"
the composing-dividing structure of
assertoric
talk to the [p.303] underlying condition
of its possibility. Heidegger's retrieval
of Aristotle finds that underlying
phenomenon
to be movement in the form of what
he calls
the "hermeneutical as." C.
Movement
as the ontological condition of truth
Heidegger's
articulation of linguistic disclosure
in
Aristotle had two major results: first
it
showed that apophantic logos has a
moment
of primoridial disclosure with no counterpart
of falsehood; secondly, it showed that,
within
that primordial disclosure, affirmation
and
denial can be either true or false
because
of the unified structure of synthesis-diairesis.
In his retrieval of the unsaid in Aristotle's
position, Heidegger brought these two
insights
together and (1) interpreted the unity
of
synthesis and diairesis in terms of
the primordial
disclosure in terms of movement.
1. Primordial disclosure as the hermeneutical
as. To know an entity is to know it
as being
such and so. And in the practical mode
of
comportment, that entails knowing the
entity
as "being for" such and such
a
purpose. Indeed, the "as-for"
dimension
(Wozu) is what is priorly known when
one
knows an entity. That is, we can get
involved
with an entity only by being already
beyond
it, by having already understood it
as being
for something. This primordial, unthematic,
prepredicative understanding of an
entity's
being is what Heidegger called the
"hermeneutical
as." This is the underlying structure
that makes possible assertoric composition
of a subject with its logically distinguishable
predicate: synthesis and diairesis.
To synthesize
is to distinguish, and the assertoric
synthesis-distinction
(the "apophantic as") rests
on
the prepredicative synthesis-distinction
(the "hermeneutical as")
of entities
and what they are for.
2. Primordial disclosure as transcendence.
Heidegger interprets human being, insofar
as it already knows the being-dimension
of
entities, as "transcendence"
to
that dimension, i. e., as being beyond
entities
and disclosive of the possibilities
in terms
of which entities can be understood.
This
kinetic exceeding of entities he calls
our
Immer-schon-vorweg-sein, our "always
already being out ahead" of entities.
This movement is disclosure in the
primordial
sense; Heidegger calls it "worlddisclosure,"
and it [p. 304] corresponds to the
diairesis-moment
of the hermeneutical as. In his lecture
course,
Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (Feb.
27,
1930 [20]) Heidegger said that diairesis,
seen as human being's transcendence,
"pulls
human being asunder, as it were, and
grants
it a stretchingahead, takes it away
into
the possible..."
But at the same time we
return
from that transcendence to entities
so as
to know them in terms of possibility,
i.
e., "so as to allow the possible
--
as what empowers the actual -- to speak
back
to the actual in a binding way...,
binding
or bonding it: synthesis." Clearly
the
unity of diairesis as transcendence
to the
being of entities and synthesis as
the return
to entities in their being constitutes
the
kinetic structure of the hermeneutical
as,
which in turn makes possible truth
and falsehood
in assertions. Human being is nothing
other
than this disclosive movement of transcendence
and return: excess to being and access
to
entities. Heidegger's study of Husserl
and
Aristotle transformed the traditional
question
of being by putting it on a phenomenological
and a kinetic base. Husserl provided
Heidegger
with a method for analyzing the intentional
disclosure of being, Aristotle let
Heidegger
see the kinetic basis for that disclosure.
Disclosure and movement came together
in
the answer Heidegger gave to the question
of the meaning of being: Ereignis or
appropriation.
IV. THE UNITY OF HEIDEGGER'S THOUGHT:
OPENNESS
Heidegger scholarship is haunted by
a tendency
to hypostasize being into an autonomous
"other,"
separate from entities and from human
being.
Often Heidegger's own way of speaking
about
being seems to abet this misunderstanding.
But it is sure that being is not a
thing
or event off by itself (cf. Physics
B, 1,
193 b 5: ou choriston on) but rather
is only
the disclosive structure of entities,
distinguishable
from entities but neither separate
from nor
reducible to them.
Moreover, it is distinguishable
only by human beings (cf. ibid., all'e
kata
ton logon), specifically through our
kinetic
structure of transcendence-and-return.
When
Heidegger speaks of the meaning of
being
(or equally: the time-character of
being,
the truth of being, the clearing of
being
[8]), he is simply naming [P. 305]
that which
gives or dispenses the being/intelligibility
of entities within human experience.
Thus,
when we speak below about "appropriation,"
we are simply referring to the unified
source
of the many ways that entities are
disclosed
in their being to human understanding.
At
the beginning of SZ Heidegger stated
a threefold
program that he filled out over the
next
fifty years:
(1) the analysis of the kinetic structure
of human being with regard to disclosure,
(2) the analysis of the kinetic structure
of disclosure in its analogical unity,
and
(3) a reinterpretation of the history
of
metaphysics in the light of the kinetic
structure
of disclosure. In order to see the
unity
of Heidegger's thought around the notion
of appropriation, we shall follow this
threefold
program.
A. The kinetic structure of human being
A recent publication of Heidegger's
[9] allows
us to see the simplicity and unity
of the
analyses of human being's kinetic structure
as worked out more densely in SZ. To
state
it schematically: human being as transcendence
(existentially-factically ahead of
itself
in possibilities) holds open the world
within
which one can have meaningful access
to entities.
As an "excess" that has "access"
to entities, human being is called
the "there,"
that is, "opnenness," the
open
area of intelligibility. The kinetic
structure
that holds this area open is called
"care."
The first division of SZ works out
the bivalent
structure of care, while the second
division
defines that structure in terms of
movement.
1. The bivalent structure of care. We have
already seen that the structure that
makes
for human being's practical disclosive
activity
(e. g., in using tools) is transcendence-and-return,
one's excess-and-access. SZ spells
out the
excess-dimension in terms of existentiality
and facticity (or project and positedness)
and spells out the access-dimension
as presence-to
(Sein bei). By existentiality and facticity,
taken as a unity, Heidegger means that
human
being is posited or thrown into its
proper
condition of living ahead of itself
in possibility,
and specifically in the possibilities
that
constitute given worldly contexts.
By presence-to-entities
Heidegger means that humans understand
entities,
relate to them, and are usually [p.
306]
absorbed in them (fallenness). The
definition
of care is: "being-already-out-ahead-in-possibilities
as being-present-to-entities."
It merely
articulates Heidegger's understanding
of
the unity of diairesis-synthesis.
2. The "temporal" structure of
care. The second division of SZ first
of
all shows that the ultimate term of
human
being's already-aheadness is one's
death,
not in the sense of a future demise
but as
ever-present finitude that is concretized
in one's dying. "Being towards
death"
is not to be understood as a directionality
towards a moment that has not yet come.
Rather,
it means that, as finite, human being
is
always "at the point of death."
Secondly, division two discusses how
human
being might appropriate its essentially
finite
condition. The "call of conscience"
is the radical awareness of one's essential
finitude; when heeded, that awareness
issues
in a decision to accept and affirm
what one
already is. This "resolve"
is disclosure
of oneself to oneself in the form of
a "retrieval"
of oneself. The analyses of finitude
and
self-disclosure round out the proper
wholeness
of human being's kinetic structure
and allow
it to be defined in its "temporal"
structure. By "temporality"
Heidegger
means nothing chronological or linear
but
rather the way in which human being's
essential
movement is generated (zeitigt sich).
(a) As ahead of itself, human being is always
becoming its proper possibility, death.
This
becoming or coming-towards (Zukommen)
constitutes
what is called the existential "future"
(Zukunft).
(b) However, what human being is becoming
is what it already and essentially
is: its
finitude concretized in its dying.
In the
existential scheme, the "past"
as something by-gone is replaced by
the "already-essential"
or "alreadiness" (Gewesenheit).
This is Heidegger's interpretation
of Aristotle's
to ti en einai (he translates: das
jeweils
schon voraus Wesende), and it points
to the
a priori determination that is registered
in human being's facticity. The existential
"future" and existential
"alreadiness"
belong together: human being is becoming
what it already is.
(c) The unified movement of becoming one's
alreadiness gives human being its proper
"present moment" or situation,
within which it can authentically understand
itself and properly render entities
present
instead of just being absorbed in them.
The
upshot of SZ is that the bivalent structure
of care finds its meaning in "temporal"
movement. Again, excess (becoming what
[p.
307] one already essentially is) makes
possible
access (the meaningful presence of
entitites).
The next question is how "time
is the
original essence of being" ([16]
lecture
of February 24, 1931). B. The kinetic
structure
of disclosure In the late 'twenties
Heidegger
had hoped to read off the disclosure
of the
being of entities, as itself kinetic,
from
the kinetic nature of human being as
world-disclosive.
His recently published work, Die Grundprobleme
der Phänomenologie [9], was a failed
attempt
in that direction. In the 'thirties
Heidegger
tried a different approach to the problem
of the kinetic unity of disclosure:
through
interpretations of Hölderlin [15] and
above
all Aristotle [1, pp. 239-301].
1. Movement in Aristotle. Whereas his earlier
analyses of De Interpretatione read
movement
simply in terms of human being's transcendence-and-return,
Heidegger's later interpretations of
Physics
II and III studied movement in terms
of the
self-disclosure of entities. In both
cases,
however, kinesis is an ontological
affair.
It is the kind of being that characterizes
moving entities. A moving entity is
one that
does not fully appear (is not completely
present) and yet does appear in its
incompletion.
Its presence is always fraught with
absentiality:
a not yet and a no longer, a coming
into
and a going from presence. 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."
Aristotle's word for the pres-ab-sentiality
of moving entities is dynamis, a word
for
"being." It does not mean
"mere
possibility" but rather "imperfect
presence" or "movement into
presence."
As Heidegger interprets it, it means
the
same as kinesis. Indeed, he translates
both
words coequally as Eignung and Ereignung:
"the appropriation into presence
of
what is not fully present," an
entity's
coming into presence from out of absence.
It is crucial to note that the absential
dimension of an entity's [p. 308] emergence
into presence is itself present in
its own
way, viz., as "privative presence,"
and therefore can be experienced. (Examples:
anticipation of the future of an entity
or
retention of its past [2, p. 13]).
Dynamis
and kinesis are the origin of Heidegger's
term Ereignis. This word describes
a moving
entity's disclosive structure, its
being.
Since being is always and only the
disclosive
structure of entities, "appropriation"
does not name a separate hypostasis
but only
the common way that all moving entities
disclose
themselves.
2. Appropriation in Heidegger. Aristotle
held that, properly speaking, only
natural
entities -- as contrasted with artifacts
-- have their being as movement. However,
Heidegger maintains that all entities,
insofar
as they are autodisclosive phenomena,
have
their being as movement into appearance.
They may come from complete unknownness
into
knownness, or from distortion into
clarity,
or from forgottenness into remembrance.
All
of these are modes of appropriation,
ways
an entity comes into presence. Thus,
to see
an entity as disclosed is to see it
as kinetic.
And that means not only seeing the
present
entity but also (indeed priorly) co-seeing
the being of the entity, its pres-ab-sentiality.
[p. 309]
There is an essential between the self-disclosive
structure of human being and the autodisclosive
structure of entities only on the basis
of
the former does the latter happen.
Human
being is present to itself -- that
is, is
the openness of Da-sein -- only by
being
appropriated into its own self-absence.
But
the openness (Da) is the arena in which
entities
show up as this or that, i. e., in
their
being. The openness is given by the
human
being's kinetic self-absence; and that
absence
in turns allow for the finite presence
of
entities as this or that. Heidegger's
unfortunate
tendency to hypostasize being can be
seen
in the following statement in which
he summarizes
his thought: "Being itself recedes,
but, as this recess, being is precisely
the
pull that claims human being's being
as the
place of being's own arrival"
(Nietzsche,
II, p. 368). Translated, that means:
the
disclosure of entities has a privative
dimension
that is registered in human being's
transcendence
in such a way as to allow the disclosure
of entities.
C. Metaphysics and openness [Ereignis]
Heidegger
undertook what he called a phenomenological
deconstruction of traditional ontology
in
order to show that, ever since classical
Greek thought, the meaning of being
has been
interpreted in terms of time, but only
one
moment of time. He found evidence of
this
in the fact that Plato and Aristotle
named
being with the words ousia and parousia,
"presentness." Thus entities
were
understood as presently disclosed,
but the
kinetic [p. 310] pres-ab-sential disclosing
of entities was overlooked. Correlative
with
this interpretation was the understanding
of human being's logos as a rendering
present
of entities.
The one-dimensional "temporality"
of human being was correlative with
the one-dimensional
temporality of being. In fact there
is no
temporality here but rather an attempt
to
read presentness in terms of, and to
reduce
it back to, the eternal. Time and movement
were seen as indices of the weakness,
the
relative non-being, of the world. In
his
reinterpretation of metaphysics, Heidegger
sought to use the kinetic-disclosive
meaning
of being as a clue to unpacking traditional
ontology so as to show the kinetic
source
of its categories. He meant neither
to "destroy"
metaphysics nor to ground it, but rather
to find the ground from out of which
metaphysics
arose. That ground turns out to be
no "ground"
at all but rather the movement of appropriation,
which Heidegger, citing Heraclitus,
calls
a "game" (cf. Frag. 52: paizon).
And human being's highest calling is
to "play
along" with that game, i. e.,
to realize
and accept its own kinetic involvement
with
appropriation. Heidegger's deconstruction
of metaphysics entailed an analysis
of (1)
pre-metaphysical Greek thought, (2)
metaphysics
from Plato to the present, and (3)
the possibility
of overcoming metaphysics.
1. The pre-Socratics. Heidegger claims that
the archaic Greek thinkers did in fact
experience
the disclosure of entities in both
its positive
and privative dimensions (a-letheia)
but
did not thematize either the privative
dimension
itself (lethe) or its conjunction with
human
being's transcendence. In Anaximander,
Parmenides
and Heraclitus he finds the same topic
addressed:
the openness of things
(aletheia), indeed the emergence of
things
into openness (physis) in such a way
that
things bring with them an intrinsic
absentiality
[13].
As Heidegger reads them, the pre-Socratics
were aware of the privative dimension
of
presence and named it (e. g., kryptesthai
philei, Heraclitus, Frag. 123), but
did not
investigate it for itself. It remained,
as
it were, in their penumbral vision
as they
focused on the emergent, radiant entities
that were the issue of this pres-ab-sentiality.
For Heidegger, the very implicitness
of the
appropriation process is what constituted
the beauty and the enchanting naïveté
of
the archaic Greek world and made possible
their celebration of the up-front-ness
of
things in the poetry, art and [p. 311]
religion.
The archaic Greeks were, so to speak,
"all
eyes," caught up in seeing the
world
as resplendently "there"
without
the mediation of subjectivity or anthropocentrism.
They lived the everyday natural attitude
at its best -- the experience of the
emergent
openness of things -- while the archaic
thinkers
preserved in word the privative presence
that lets things be open. Heidegger's
purpose
was not to "restore" ancient
Greece
but to explicate what it left implicit
and
to articulate what it left unsaid,
i. e.,
lethe and human being's transcendence.
Because privative presence is intrinsically
privative (and thus "loves to
hide"),
it lends itself to being overlooked,
and
when it is overlooked, human being
becomes
absorbed in entities as presently disclosed
and forgets the presab- sentiality
that lets
them be. The emergence of human being
as
the "measure of all things"
in
fifthcentury Greece heralded the end
of the
penumbral awareness of appropriation
and
the beginning of what would become
metaphysics:
the understanding of the world -- the
realm
of human possibility -- as the correlation
between stably disclosed entities and
stably
disclosive human being.
2. Metaphysics as the "forgetting"
of what discloses the being of entities.
The appropriation process (physis,
aletheia)
is an entity's movement into appearance.
According to Heidegger it was with
Plato
that the bi-dimensionality of appropriation
(movement, appearance) was forgotten,
with
the result that only one moment of
it was
seen, the eidetic appearance of entities
as what they are: eidos. The eidos
loses
its reference to the entity's emergence
into
disclosure and becomes instead that-as-which
an entity presents itself for possible
intellectual
viewing by human being. As physis and
kinesis
(privative presence) drop out of the
picture,
any hope of grasping the corresponding
kinetic
nature of human being is lost. The
being
of entities is interpreted as stable
disclosedness,
and human being is understood as the
one
who renders entities meaningfully present
in that stable appearance. And since
only
what is unmoving and eternal is, for
Plato,
truly stable, only the eternal shows
itself
as true being (ontos on).
Temporal, moving entities are relegated
to the status of me on, not-really-in-being.
Concomitantly, a new term emerges to
designate
the being of entities: ousia, "presentness-in-reality,"
and the proper formation (paideia)
of human
being consists in its ability to see
eidetic
presentness in a correct (orthotes)
vision.
Thus, according to Heidegger, truth
comes
to be understood not as the [p. 312]
pres-ab-sential
disclosure of entities but as human
being's
intellectual correspondence with entities
in their disclosed presentness. Aristotle
effects a decisive shift away from
Plato's
emphasis on idea/eidos, but without
recovering
the original Greek sense of kinetic
disclosure.
To be sure, for Aristotle an entity
that
is still moving and becoming is no
longer,
as it was for Plato, a me on; rather,
it
is the primary instance of ousia. It
is a
stable thing (hypostasis) that is in
the
process of being brought forth (morphe)
into
what it is (eidos). In short, it is
an ergon,
a "work" in the unique Greek
sense
of that which appears as being brought
forth
and rendered stable. Its being is energeia,
presentness as an ergon, or (since
telos
means the same as ergon) entelecheia.
While this vision of entities does
regain
some of the archaic sense of movement,
it
falls short of the pre-Socratic insight
precisely
to the degree that it follows after
and is
to some extent controlled by Plato's
idea/eidos.
Kinesis in Aristotle is entirely for
the
sake of appearance and presentness,
so much
so that the absential dimension of
disclosure
is not seen as intrinsically privative
(kryptesthai
philei) but as not-yet-in-appearance.
Ousia
dominates in Aristotle as much as in
Plato,
and although Aristotle gives priority
to
prote ousia (that which is in ousia:
existence)
over deutere ousia (that as which something
is in ousia: essence), nonetheless
the controlling
viewpoint is still ousia, presentness.
The
emergent character of appropriation
which
issues in ousia lies back behind both
existential
and essential ousia and is not recovered
by Aristotle.
From classical Greece
onwards,
metaphysics would continuously manipulate
the whatness and thatness of ousia
by giving
primacy to one or another of them (ontology)
and in turn would trace ousia back
to its
highest instance in a self-present
God (theology).
But all such "ousiology,"
according
to Heidegger, does not raise the question
of the kinetic process that lies behind
stable
presentness. (Even Aquinas' esse entium
and
ipsum esse subsistens is, for Heidegger,
only an existence-oriented modality
of ousiology.)
The forgetting of pres-ab-sentiality
has
its source not in some psychological
defect
of human being but rather in the intrinsically
privative (self-concealing) nature
of pres-absentiality
itself. Human being's fallenness or
absorption
in entities-as-present is thus a normal
consequence
of the very nature of disclosure.
The fact that metaphysics thematizes
the
presentness of entities and traces
it back
to God does not [p. 313] break out
of fallenness
but in fact reinforces fallenness by
elevating
it to the level of a thematic science.
The
history of metaphysics consists in
the various
transformations of the understanding
of the
presentness of entites. For Heidegger
the
fullest form of such forgetting of
presab-
sentiality is the widespread contemporary
attitude of Technik, which interprets
entities
as totally disclosed or disclosable
for human
being's use.
3. Overcoming metaphysics.
The overcoming (Überwendung) or surpassing
of metaphysics refers to overcoming
the forgottenness
of the opening of the open (Ereignis.).
As
early as 1920, in a course on the phenomenology
of religion, Heidegger called this
overcoming
die Umwandlung der Philosophie, i.
e., the
transformation of human being's philosophical
awareness into a recognition of the
privative
dimension of disclosure and of the
corresponding
structure of human transcendence. This
"turn"
was the goal of Heidegger's thought
from
the early 'twenties onward. In SZ it
was
discussed in a preliminary way as "resolve"
(Entschlossenheit), human being's acceptance
of itself as ordered to the appropriation
process; in later writings it is talked
about
in terms of Gelassenheit, letting oneself
go along with the appropriation process.
The Kehre is human being's turn towards
(its
recognition of) the pres-absentiality
that
is already operative both in his own
kinetic
structure and in the kinetic structure
of
disclosure but that is obscured by
fallenness,
metaphysics and the attitude of Technik.
To "take the turn"
is to awaken to the privative dimension
of
disclosure. This means getting "behind"
the historical formations of presentness
(idea, energeia, esse, etc.) which
make up
the history of metaphysics, thus getting
"to" the kinetic source of
all
such formations: appropriation. In
that sense
Heidegger can say that appropriation
"gives"
the various forms of presentness in
metaphysics
while being itself "withheld"
in
the double sense of being intrinsically
privative
(self-concealing) and thus overlooked
(forgotten).
To awaken to appropriation, therefore,
means
to overcome the history of forgetfulness
and to enter into the true movement
that
is disclosure, not so as to extinguish
the
privative dimension of disclosure (an
impossibility)
but rather to recognize and to accept
it
in its pres-ab-sential bivalence [2,
pp.
44 f.]. In short, the "turn"
--
the unifying goal of Heidegger's thought
-- means re-appropriating the structure
of
appropriation.
We have seen that Heidegger's latest
publications
reveal the unity of his thought precisely
by revealing its genesis. His philosophy
is not an existential anthropology
and not
a philosophy of "mind." It
is not
a metaphysics and least of all a study
of
some platonically separate thing called
"being."
Rather it is a phenomenology of movement
or appropriation: the analysis of human
being's
experience of the pres-ab-sential disclosure
of entities in its analogical unity.
[Note:
The bibliography is under construction.] |
Evans Experientialism 
