We’ve been thinking about “to on,” the participle which is simultaneously the nominative/substantive “the being” and the verbal “being.”  We saw with Plato’s Gorgias that with the beautiful thing beauty is present as the usual Greek way to understand being.  This was then more fully shown as movement (Aristotle) or appearing, and so the mansion appears as houseness incarnate, houseness is merely present in the average house, and is deficient in the dilapidated shack.  Varying degrees of beauty is how being presences.  “Merely present” means “present at hand,” so if it is a question as to whether the hammer has a red handle, we appeal to the hammer “at-hand.”  We also noted for Protagoras man is the measure of all things, or as Homer says the gods don’t appear to everyone in their fullness.  So, Niagara Falls may appear as a wonder of the world to a tourist, and as noise pollution to the local resident.  A person may find the mansion gaudy and the shack quaint.  This is how things stand with beings as appearing.  But, with Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus we are also looking as beings in their unity or as a whole.  We saw with Anaximander this has to do with the interplay of beings as a whole going from being out of joint (adikia) and falling into place (dike), and back again on a spectrum.  With Parmenides we saw the interplay between the world of life/becoming (thinkers are not close to life – e.g., Thales lost in thought and falling into a well) and being.  With Heraclitus we saw the interplay of the child at play and the listless old person, and the thinker who is youthful even in great age.

There is a duality of being in the present with (i) “being in the moment” of absorption being one end of the spectrum like being lost in a thriller novel or captivated by the palm tree swaying in the wing, to (ii) lack of absorption in the dragging on and stretching out of time (Langeweile, boredom).  Nietzsche gives the example of the once free bird banging itself against its cage, but Nietzsche overcomes this eternal return of the same tragedy with joyful eternal return of the same difference: e.g., in a letter to Overbeck (which has drawn a lot of ink from Nietzsche scholars) where Nietzsche presents the image of people with cabin fever at a rainy cottage while he by contrast is delighted there in writing one of his Untimely Meditations (Nietzsche, 1975: 11.3 382). The time of the Greek thinkers was a transition time when boredom was coming to be internalized.  We don’t for instance just internally experience boredom while reading the book, but boringness is actually experienced as a temporal and actual feature of the book itself like plot, characters setting, boringness. 

To see this in the inward turn in the history of Being, Heidegger gives the central example of boredom (Heidegger, 2001).  Boredom is a conspicuous way that our moods don’t simply run their course in our inner lives for a hermetically sealed “I,” but are a way we are ek-static: “in the world / outside of ourselves.”  I may experience boringness to be a trait of a book like plot and setting, though the book need not appear to the next person as boring.  Toohey (2004) notes what is surprising is for the Greeks boredom initially seemed to lack the fundamental internal component moods are assumed to have today:  Aristophanes in the Archarnians has one character say “I groan, I yawn, I stretch, I fart, I don’t know what to do.  I write, I pull at my hair, I figure things out as I look to the country, longing for peace.”  He does not name that he is bored but describes the symptoms. We also see this oddity in Euripides’ Medea, and Pindar said too lengthy an exposition might lead to boredom, but again the symptoms are named, not boredom.  Similarly, Iliad 24. 403 and Euripides Iphigeneia in Aulis both lack a word for boredom.  As the inward turn proceeded in the history of Being, the outward cancer of this horror loci took up residence inside of us, which is how Heidegger interprets Nietzsche’s Will to Power text regarding “this most uncanny/unhomely of all guests (Nietzsche 1967, vol. XV, p. 141).”

Parmenides said apprehension and Being are the same.  Boringness is a prime example of this as stretching, dragging-on temporality of my mood is duplicated in the dragging-on, stretching temporality of my boring book.  Moods are exemplary in this sense of a union of inner and outer, and so for instance in David Copperfield Dickens writes:  David Copperfield: “I was sensible of a mist of love and beauty about Dora, but of nothing else … it was all Dora to me. The sun shone Dora, and the birds sang Dora. The south wind blew Dora, and the wildflowers in the hedges were all Doras, to a bud  (Dickens, 2004, ch 33 Blissful).”

Thinking about Heraclitus, Heidegger starts with Heraclitus by putting fragment 16 as the inception (37), meaning this will be the emphasis and guiding thread through the interpretation: “From the not ever submerging/dunon (thing), how may anyone be concealed (from it)?  Submerging means being-concealed.  There is a hurried zeal (42) to try to understand the fragment, and this must be noted.  To dunon is a participle and so it can be seen as a noun, substantive, or verbally as a time word. So, it can refer to the thing that is submerging as well as the submerging itself. Or both simultaneously.

Aristotle is interested in the being as a being: beingness.  We move beyond (meta) the particular being to Beingness (physis):  Metaphysics.  Heraclitus wanted to emphasize the verbal dimension of the participle with the substantive part.  Heidegger notes the boringness (47-48) of such conceptual gymnastics, annoying beating around the bush (53).  It agitates (48) us that we can’t imagine anything to be meant by being.  We are in pursuit of Heraclitus, him “being continually better understood than it first was (50).” 

We are restricted to beginning with grammar because that context which treats words as useful objects (55) is the one available to us.  Dunon is a participle, both substantive and verbal.  It can refer to the thing submerging, and the submergingness (beingness) and enduring of submerging itself.  There is a richness of a participle being substantial, verbal, and both at once so it is richer than grammatical dissection realizes.  Similarly, Being is like an empty word husk (57) to modern grammatical ears and tools attempting to “drive research forward (60).”  Plato asked about the being (ti to on), and Aristotle refined this and asked about the beingness of the being (tis es ousia).  The question more clearly unfolds into the next question.  So the nominal and the verbal is intended.  At attempting to translate here we are putting together a puzzle that we don’t know what the picture on the box looks like.  And translation is key, like how Aristotle translates (59) previous thinkers into his own metaphysical paradigm so he can engage with them critically. 

We have been looking at Heraclitus through the lens of the guiding question of “beings as a whole” in Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus.  Particularly, we are not so concerned with the content of ideas we can take away and use but what arises in the course of philosophizing.  A key idea has been deinon/restlessness/homelessness in distinction to parestios or being at home.  Think again of Heraclitus warming himself satisfied by the simple hearth fire and consider these words by Heidegger:

Suppose that, however, we were to be placed before being in a less painful way.  Suppose that, with one fell swoop, the modern human were to be deprived of such things as the movie theater, the radio, the newspaper, the theater, concerts, boxing matches, and ‘travel.’  Suppose it came about that the human were forced to subsist with the simple things: he would rather die than remember being! (63)

Characterizing the deinon/restlessness/unhomeliness,  McNeill says the following, “Heidegger’s translation of to deinon, ‘the decisive word,’ as das Unheimliche – intends this word to be understood in the sense of das Unheimische, that which is ‘unhomely,’ something ‘not at home’ that nevertheless belongs, in an ever equivocal manner, to the worldly dwelling of human beings (Scarcely, 183).” In precise note, McNeill adds that for Heidegger “to deinon is “the fundamental word … of Greek tragedy in general, and thereby the fundamental word of Greek antiquity, (cited from MacNeil,Heidegger, Scarcely, 188n.47).”

The Greeks long ago made a decision to cover up the essence of man and lose themselves in beings, so that they would never have to live in the truth of the essence of man. Sophocles, in Oedipus at Colonus, puts it in the following way: “But cease now,and nevermore hereafter awaken such lament (cited at Pa, Postscript to What is Metaphysics, 238).” Oedipus is asking his daughters to stop their mourning for his past sufferings and the harsh fate he has endured and live their own lives. Heidegger comments, referring to another place in Sophocles, that “[s]uch is the rise and the fall of man in his historical abode of essence – hupsipolis – apolis – far exceeding abodes, homeless, as Sophocles (Antigone) calls man (P, 90).”

There are many things that press on us in life: the sensation of first eye-contact with a strange girl, the heartbreak of a love betrayed, the oppression of one’s ‘rights’ that allows us to take up a cause with all the fire of youth, the need to fight for philosophy against a common conception of its triviality, the sorrow at the emptiness of religion in our time, the recklessness of politicians, the television channel changer that is not at hand, and we could draw this out indefinitely. The fundamental boredom of human life consists in the fact that none of these concerns oppress us absolutely, “[t]he deepest, essential need in Dasein is not that a particular actual need oppresses us, but that an essential oppressiveness refuses itself, that we scarcely apprehend and are scarcely able to apprehend this telling refiisal of any oppressiveness as a whole (FCM, 163-165).” In every way and at all times we lose our selves in our concerns. We frantically fracture our attention in endless directions, because the alternative is that we would have to face the essential nature of humans, namely, that he can never be at rest, never be satisfied. This is what the Greeks saw as the fundamental tragedy of human existence.  Only the Greek thinkers would have concluded that the philosopher was the most necessary element to human existence, that is, on account of essential homelessness of it.  The masses pursue things, are at home with things to a certain extent, but are yet in misery, not-at-home, due to their essential restlessness. Since the philosopher attempts to attend to things which do not absorb us in a transitory way, but rather as that which always is, it was only the Greek thinkers who would have concluded that the philosopher is what is most essential.  Our basic truth is our figurative being-addicted to beings.

I’m up to section 4 in Heidegger lecture course on Heraclitus. More next time on nature (phusis) and life (zoe).