(21) CONCLUSION: Blogging Through Prof Martin Heidegger’s Interpretations of Greek Philosophy
“We know next to nothing about the poetic truth of the tragic poetry of Aeschylus and Sophocles (Heidegger, Heraclitus 1944, 237)”
“The human is the place of the truth of being, and this is why the human can, at the same time, also be the confusion of the madness of empty nothingness (Heidegger, Heraclitus 1944, 280).”
I’d like to close out this E-Project with some thoughts on Heidegger’s 1944 course of Heraclitus’s Logos (I was previously looking at the 1943 Heraclitus course)
Last time we looked the 1943 course at how a friend can detect a toxic relationship between lovers who are oblivious to the defective nature of their relationship since the friend is not caught up in the relationship like the lovers and so can see the dysfunctionality that the lovers are too near to the relationship to see. The friend can see the forest despite the trees. The friend has the distance/perspective to see the simplicity of the interplay of the lovers for what it is, sees the jointure/whole of beings “as” the relationship, the truth which pulls itself together by pulling the love of the boy asunder (133). Logos as legein means to gather, “to let appear that One in whose oneness is gathered what is essentially together in itself and foregathered from itself … This is why with Parmenides, the other inceptual thinker, noein is the grasping of the One together with legein (133).” The world of the lover and the world of the friend co-exist in oneness, though the friend is able to hear the unsaid in what is said (135). The example we looked at last time was the dysfunctional relationship between handsome Alcibiades and ugly, insecure Socrates in Plato’s Symposium.
Similarly, if we divorce ourselves from conservative vs liberal agendas and simply look at the interplay between the traditional definition of marriage and LGBTQ+ rights, we see traditional marriage’s claim to be a moral guiding perspective in life is defective because it does unnecessary violence to LGBTQ+ rights, and so needs to be deconstructed and reconstructed in a more inclusive way.
Circumspection (insight) ultimately deals with the goal not of logos, but of nous -where the discourse ultimately ends. With the Doctor, for instance, he deliberates with the goal of making the patient healthy. At some point, the doctor will come to an insight, an aisthesis, a straightforward perception that shows him what he must do in order to cure the patient, at which point there can be action. The outermost limit of the deliberation is the eschaton, at which point the insight arrives, a straightforward perception, the point at which we “see states of affairs as a whole (PS, 1 10).”
In the summer semester course of 1944 Heidegger looks at the Logos of Heraclitus. As is clear throughout Heidegger’s many works, the Nothing pervades Heidegger’s texts, “monotonous (225)” as he calls his work. He is opposed to human modes of communication of the moment like gossip (230). He will often go 100s of pages or to other books entirely without explaining a term he is using for instance. He wants his reader to attend to what they don’t know going forward. His goal was to enact a “generation of the slow (146).” He was arguing against a humanity attempting to master the world by ordering it, which was born with the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle (e.g., classifying 188). We learn how to think physically by studying physics, and historically by studying history etc.
Thinking can be “crooked and confused (155)” if it takes later developments in Philosophy and reads them back into earlier thinkers like reading Heraclitus through the lens of the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle. We also saw this crooked and confused thinking by the deluded boy in the dysfunctional relationship: “what the human encounters daily is foreign and unfamiliar to him (241).” The boy’s romantic relationship is compared to Love and found defective, a dis-closive relationality (250), it is “here that the originary difference between beings and being precides (252).” Heidegger says relations were very important in Ancient Greek math. Ancient Greek mathematicians, particularly those like Euclid, made significant contributions to the study of relations, especially in the context of geometry. Here’s a simple example involving the concept of equality: Euclid in his Elements discusses various axioms and postulates, one of which indirectly deals with relations through the concept of equality. For instance, Axiom 1: Things which are equal to the same thing are also equal to one another. This can be expressed in a modern context as: If A = C and B = C, then A = B. This simple statement is foundational in understanding transitive relations, where if two elements are related to a third in the same way, they are related to each other in that way as well. This axiom forms the basis for many geometric proofs and logical arguments in mathematics. Like the “inebriated (292)” thinking of the boy in a bad relationship we “recklessly deceive ourselves (173).” Heraclitus says not to listen to him but the Logos (187). The Logos safeguards (210) beings to be as they are, is collecting/gathering to preserve, like how we collect art to let it shine forth in our gallery (218-219). The boy’s friends see the toxicity of the relationship because they are not caught up in it like the boy, they “intuit something from a distance (255).” Heraclitus has found a “relational rule” in being (256).
Aristotle said the human is defined by the logos (animal with speech). So, for example, a person relates to herself according to a principle of responsibility, so that she is morally attached to her actions. She can see a murder “as” what it is. We can contrast this with the toddler, the animal, and certain mentally challenged individuals who “don’t know any better” and so we don’t hold them accountable in the same way. Heidegger says the fact that people dissemble and plead extenuating circumstances shows how real the “ought” is as it stands forth when we turn away from it.
Logos for Aristotle is logos apohantikos, taking something “as” something else: the dog as brown.” This is our basic stance toward the world, taking-as. We can see this when we “hear” a living thing at our feet in the forest just to look down and see it was really rustling dead leaves in the wind (189). This defective mis-taking as a living thing simultaneously shows we gently “hear” the call of the Logos in our everyday taking-as, which is our basic stance toward the world. The inconspicuous Logos that gently shimmers through All is made incarnate in mis-taking. I noted previously this kind of thinking was completed in Nietzsche where being was determined as Will to Power where man was seen as Arbiter of life (169). Life could be seen negatively when we consider Thinkers were not close to life (Like Thales falling in a well). There is a path of conventional thinking, and one of essential thinking. Conventional thinking is like the boy deluded about his relationship, and essential thinking points out the toxic relationship in its simplicity and so there is homologein, concession and agreement from the boy.
We might say that 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,’ 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 infinitely. Heidegger writes that the most profound boredom 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 refusal of any oppressiveness as a whole.” (from FCM, 163-165). We are over-against beings.
All asserting is based on a more primary logos that allows the being to step forth as it is, eg., presencing (the mansion is house-ness incarnate) identity (the house in itself) difference (the house is not a dog), over against (I encounter the house “as” not me), being constituted (materiality is co-present with the house), being-related etc. Plato called these the highest ideas on which all other assertions (the house is brown) are based. For Aristotle categories are what is said about any true/correct assertion whatsoever. “House-ness” is seen by the mind’s eye and offers a limited look in the house in front of me. The thing is taken by the grasp of re-presentation. However, with the primacy of truth “as” correctness of the something as something judgment, truth “as” the great “truths” of the human condition like “true friends” gets pushed into the background.
We said with Aristotle the life of theoria/contemplation is a kind of godliness (athanatizein / deathlessness) because the thinker is attuned to what is changeless (e.g.,the idea of justice) and so the restlessness of the soul is calmed, Aristotle saying only a beast or God delights in solitude. Here with Heraclitus, we see a connection to the goddess θεά (thea) Artemis and the divine distanced seeing θεάομαι (theáomai, like in our word theater, a place for viewing) where the thinker’s divine seeing peers into the boy’s delusional seeing and sees it for what it is (dysfunctional, toxic). This is the source of the difference between beings and Being, beings seen from two different kinds of seeing. In the story of Oedipus, Apollo’s oracle at Delphi foretold the truth of Oedipus’s fate, even though Oedipus and others were deceived or confused about the meaning of the prophecy. Heidegger suggests that the seer in ancient Greek was also understood in this way. The seer is ho mantis, is the mainomenos, the mad man. In what sense? The mad man is not entirely there, with us and talking to us, but not entirely there. The seer is of course not insane, but rather not there in the same way that the mad man is not there. Heidegger comments that “a madman is beside himself, outside himself he is away. We ask: away? Where to and where from? away from the sheer oppression of what lies before us … The seer is outside himself in the solitary region of the presencing of everything that in some way becomes present (Heidegger, EGT, Anaximander Fragment, 35).”
The human is not divine, though. Maybe in diagnosing the dysfunctionality of the boy’s relationship, perhaps you overlook that the girl was abused as a child and how that trauma might be affecting her now. Similarly, the doctor may deliberate and come to the wrong conclusion. Opponent politicians or lawyers may offer equally vivid analogies to illustrate mutually exclusive positions. Heidegger says:
But even when the logos is heard expressly by the human, there is not even the slightest guarantee that he will then correspond to (and with) it – there is no guarantee that he will bring the Logos together into his own proper gathering. Even when humans listen with their ears, it is not guaranteed that they have listened to what they have heard, and that they have gathered themselves toward it in a hearkening way (297)
The difference between beings and Being lies in the simple relational rule that the path of the human is taken as genuine by the person (the boy in love), though from the point of view of the divine seeing of the thinker the seeing of the boy is inherently delusional, ungrounded, inebriated, and only is genuine seeing by accident. But these are not two paths. There is a continuum that begins on the deluded human end of the line “as” caught up in life and develops to the philosophical distanced view of life of the thinker. But again, these are not 2 paths. Human life is the interplay between human nearness thinking and divine distanced seeing, which constitutes the core of what the person is.