We’ve been thinking about “beings” for Anaximander, which we have argued does not mean beings as a whole collection but beings in their unity of presencing or appearing.  For example, Heidegger points out mystic Meister Eckhart says love changes man into the things he loves (Heidegger, 2013, 175-6).  So, for example in “eros love” we read in Dickens’ 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).”  Similarly, for the “agape love” Eckhart would have been mainly interested in, it was how I am effaced and transfigured by loving the suffering widow, orphan, stranger, and enemy more than myself, who in turn are transfigured to be lovable.  Love as philo-sophy is the desire seeking eros of Achilles united with the value bestowing agape of Jesus in “the overman,” who Nietzsche aptly called “Caesar with the soul of Christ” in Will to Power, 983.  Our moods, like boredom and love, are ways we are ek-static / ek-sist, are outside of ourselves. 

Last time we thought about “logos apophantikos” which is a philosophical term, primarily associated with the work of Aristotle and later interpreted by Heidegger, which refers to a “declaratory statement” or “statement-making utterance” – essentially a statement that explicitly asserts or denies something, thereby expressing a truth claim that can be evaluated as true or false; it signifies the act of making a judgment through language, where something is “posited” as being a certain way.  The key word is “as,” something “as” something, more specifically something “as” something else (eg., the leaf as green).  Such a thing is intelligible as separation/difference (greenness) in identity (the leaf) because our basic stance toward beings is “taking-as.”  So, for example, if I hear a living thing at my feet in the forest only to look down and see it was really rustling dead leaves in the wind, I have mis-taken the dead leaves as a living thing.  This mis-taking also implies that our basic stance toward the world is taking-as.   When discussing logic, “logos apophantikos” refers to a proposition that can be definitively judged as true or false based on its structure and the relationship between subject and predicate.

For Anaximander there is going to be a stepping forth (genesis) and receding back (phthora) of beings.  This is a coming to be and passing away.  We are not talking about causal sequence and the coming into form of matter and the eventual passing away out of form into matter, but standing forth as appearing, self-manifestation.  Heidegger says it is an event: the new book has “appeared,” or the guest speaker has made an “appearance.”  And so for instance the new corvette appears in all its radiance to the teenager watching it zoom by on the road, but this has perhaps faded for the driver who has been using it every day for the last few months.    

The key phrase in Anaximander is kata to chreon: According to necessity.  What is necessity.  Fate is necessary.  Recall what was said about Holderlin’s Hyperion’s Song of Fate about what is fated for humans:

“Radiant the gods’ mild breezes / Gently play on you / As the girl artist’s fingers / On holy strings. – Fateless the Heavenly breathe / Like an unweaned infant asleep; / Chastely preserved / In modest bud / For even their minds / Are in flower/And their blissful eyes / Eternally tranquil gazey / Etemally clear. – But we are fated / to find no foothold, no rest, / And suffering mortals / Dwindle and fall/ Headlong from one/ Hour to the next Hurled like water / From ledge to ledge / Downward for years to the vague abyss (Holderlin’s “Hyperion’s Song of Fate” quoted in Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, 101)” … [Heidegger and Fink commenting on the passage say] “the gods wander without destiny, their spirit eternally in bloom, while humans lead a restless life and fall into the cataract of time and disappear.” (Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, 101)

Aristotle speaks of the epitome of human life as Theoria, the contemplative life, which is  godliness/deathlessness: athanatizein.  Deathlessness doesn’t mean immortality, since the Greeks thought everyone were immortal, but rather childlike absorption in life like the eternally youthful ambrosia eating gods among even the old.  By contrast Apollo spoke of most humans in the passage Holderlin bases his Hyperion’s Song of Fate on: “Mortals, who are as wretched as the leaves on the trees, flourishing at first, enjoying the fruits of the earth, but then, their hearts no longer absorbed in life (Akerioi), vanishing (my translation modifying Krell, 1999, 105).”  We have Apollo contrasting between the fire and absorption of youth and the listless tedium of old age.  In Epistles 1.8 Horace describes the lethargic illness of boredom as a trait of old age.  

The thinker, by contrast, is a tranquil absorbed youth even in old age.  Heidegger comments regarding thinker Heraclitus’s Fragment 52: “The Geschick of being, a child that plays …the being of beings (Heidegger, 1991b, 113).”  We will see that restlessness being brought to repose with a calm mind is what Heidegger argues as the purpose the Greeks had for philosophy.  Aristotle clarified only a beast, or a god, delights in solitude (Politics 1253a28), and so we picture the general tragic character of the masses (hoi polloi) apart from their distractions as cabin fever.  Lucretius for instance speaks of the restless lives of the Roman rich pursued relentlessly by anxiety and boredom.  Regarding Aristotle’s Theoria, Heidegger comments “[T]he ‘useful’ as ‘what makes someone whole,’ that is, what makes the human being at home with himself … In Greek Theoria is pure repose, the highest form of energeia, the highest manner of putting-oneself into-work without regard for all machinations. It is the letting come to presence of presencing itself. (Heidegger, 2001b, 160-61).”  We will consider this “useful” again below with Anaximander.

Applying this being outside of self, the first “Being” philosopher in Heidegger’s estimation, Anaximander, can in one aspect be illustrated with the idea that no matter how disjointed/out of joint (adikia) things in your depressed, angst filled teenage life were, when you fell in all consuming puppy love it didn’t matter what you did or didn’t do because with your crush everything in your life temporarily fell into place (order-jointure/diken) and you just wanted to “be there” with them.  Heidegger in the essay on Anaximander in “Off The Beaten Path” translates what he argues is the shorter authentic core of the Anaximander fragment as “along the lines of usage; for they let order and thereby also reck belong to one another (in the surmounting) of disorder.”  Recall earlier Heidegger was quoted regarding Theoria as saying “use” is what is useful, what makes someone whole.  Dastur notes Heidegger’s translation of the word for Being in Anaximander is Chreon/Brauch (bruchen), meaning “use” as enjoyment (Dastur, 2000, 187).  As I said literary writers Robert Browning and Lucy Maude Montgomery poetized similar experiences as fleeting special times when everything falls into place (diken) as “God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world” despite a life of general subtle or conspicuous out-of-joint-ness (adikia).  This is not theology, since even the most hardened atheist knows what it means for everything to be either conspicuously or slightly out of joint but then to temporarily have them fall into place.

Anaximander was the first to speak Being as the temporary surmounting of disorder in the law language (diken/adikia) of the Greek world (as I said quoting Walker the Greeks and their laws/society they created was an expression of who they were and defined them).  Heidegger says of Greek life generally in his essay on Anaximander: “The experience of beings in their Being which here comes to language is neither pessimistic nor nihilistic; nor is it optimistic. It is tragic (1984, 44).”  Heidegger speaks of this Greek “dreadful non-essence of all beings (Heidegger, 2018b, 11),” but we must note it and never “inhibit this agitation (Heidegger, 2018b, 48)” from the mundane, or from enduring someone constantly beating around the bush, etc., because great truths of the human condition are to be gleaned from these.  Anaximander brought to word the “how” of Being as the unity of beings, and so we are ek-static or outside of ourselves, like for instance when we have a headache or stomachache beings (entity: something that is in some way or other) presence/appear “irritatingly.” Not “what (essence)” but “how (existence).”

We’ll pick up this again later.  But, what I would like to stress with Heidegger’s reading again is “beings” or “entities” do not just mean objects like trees and houses.  We still hear echoes of Homer’s word eonta and so we are also talking about dreams, emotions, hallucinations and the like just as much as trees and houses, since all these are something rather than nothing.  The distinction between aistheton and noeton did not become foundational until Plato.  Aistheton refers to the sensible or perceptible realm, the world of appearances that we experience through our senses.  Noeton refers to the intelligible realm, the world of forms or ideas that can only be grasped through the intellect or reason.

What does time have to do with necessity as fate?  The luster is destined or fated to fade off beings and so the tragedy of life is being addicted to beings so we go from one distraction until time rubs off its radiance to the next distraction. Look at all the people today addicted to their smartphones and social media with a constant wave of the news.  Nietzsche even said in his time people were addicted to news.  We are destined or fated to wander restless and unsatisfied like a shade in Hades.  Regarding Theoria’s deathlessness, to die for the Greeks meant to go to Hades and to wander about in a pointless and meaningless boring to and fro.  Homer says in the Odyssey Achilles would rather work as a poor day laborer than rule in Hades, the same Achilles who Plutarch talks of as having a nauseous boredom (alus nautiodes) when there was nothing to do.  Imagine what a “jointure of beings” pall this vision of death would have cast over life for the Greeks!  Heidegger and Fink cite Holderlin that the tranquil lives of the gods who are forever in bloom contrast with mortals who are restless and tragic (Heidegger, 1997b).

When Aristotle chooses Theoria/ the contemplative life as greater than social life, this poses a great contrast between the social and the individual.  Contemplative life is inherently individualistic, not because you can’t discuss ideas with others, but rather essentially because no one can have your insights for you.

Heidegger explores Sophocles “Antigone” in his lecture course on Holderlin’s Hymn The Ister.  Heidegger characterizes the tragic nature of Greek existence saying “[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 (Heidegger, 1998c, 90).”  What is this homeless “apolis” and by contrast “polis” with the Antigone play?  For the Greeks the well lived life was embedded in the city/state, the polis.  As I said Walker makes the key observation that “the Greeks loved their laws, the children of their ideals, above all else. Plato and Aristotle reiterate Herodotus when they describe the ideal state as one that controls every detail of a citizen’s life. In the Greek mind, there was no distinction between the state and the citizen. (Walker, 2014, np reprinted online).”  As Zuckart (1996) notes, Heidegger observes the Greek notion of polis does not just mean what we think of a city state, but rather polos, “the pole, the place around which everything appearing to the Greeks as a being turns in a peculiar way … the abode of the essence of humanity (Heidegger, 1998c, 89-90).”  Sophocles countered the polis ground of man with his words “apolis” and “deinon,” that man is fundamentally not “parestios,” not para-Hestia, not the one in the warmth of the homely hearth fire, where Heraclitus said Gods come to presence. 

The collective Greek polis culture eventually produced the thinkers, such as with Hippocrates and others, but especially the sophists.  This inward turn of introspection, as well as self-centered individuals/individualism proved disastrous for being rooted and finding meaning in the collective polis. The leader Creon in the Antigone became apolis: “I am nothing. I have no life./ Lead me away.”  Creon, who should be the embodiment of the polis, is brought to ruins in disregarding the will of the polis and the gods for Antigone with the inflexibility and arrogance of a tyrant.  Figuratively this is the havoc an age of individualism and self-realization/pride/self-interest brought to the citizens of the collective polis, esp. the amoral influence of the sophists and the leaders’ quest for wealth and power.  Similarly, Antigone’s downfall comes from her assertion of individuality of choice of familial love over the rules of the collective, even though she was in the right in the eyes of the people and the gods.  We can see then Aristotle identifying man as a social creature but positing the highest life as the contemplative (Theoria) one enacts a schism at the heart of what it means to be human.  Heidegger’s Nazi period was mainly his attempt at re-enacting this long-lost culture of the collective, such as with the Hitler youth, etc. 

Heidegger says the concept of apolis must be thought together with deinon (uncanny) for the Greeks.  The famous Antigone deinon ode to man says: “Many things are wondrous but nothing more so than man,” but this seems to be understood sarcastically, and so means “Many things are unsettling/unsettled but nothing more so than man (“deinon” at this point of the play has already been used twice with the connotation of “horrible” or “frightening”).” The third ode clarifies this second one by showing that for all his wonders man can’t help being destined for tragedy (e.g., the tragic fate of Oedipus’s family).  

Deinon, uncanny/unhomely, is the fundamental word for understanding the Greeks for Heidegger.  Deinon for the Greeks had the sense of the uncanny but also longing for home, hence we have the image of Odysseus stuck on the Island of Calypso the “uncanny/deine” goddess where he is offered the greatest of things, but they are meaningless to him in comparison to his desire to return home. We abandon the familiar to pursue the uncanny but ultimately find ourselves unsatiated/unhomely.

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 of all guests (Nietzsche 1967, vol. XV, p. 141).”

Nietzsche would conclude this history of Being with his thought of tragic eternal return that in its negative moment seems to be most influenced by Seneca, Ecclesiastes 1:8-9 (“nothing new under the sun”); and the repeatedly seen performance in Schopenhauer in his Essays on Pessimism which Nietzsche cites and responds to.  Eternal return means beings lose their luster for us merely as a function of us spending time with them, like a worn-out recording of a favorite gospel worship song that goes from presencing beautifully/numinously to presencing irritatingly simply by playing it 50 times in a row.  This is what Nietzsche means that “God is dead: We killed him.”  Through the history of Being humanity has proceeded to the point where we have erased the numinous.

We experience beings tragically, as though we’ve encountered them countless times before.   From Heidegger/Boss in the Zolikon seminar we hear patients are intolerably bored and this is the essential ground of the human, which Heidegger contrasts with the Da-sein of being engrossed in your subject matter or the palm tree swaying in the wind: being-in-the-world (Heidegger, 2001b, 160-161): 

Martin Heidegger and Medard Boss: “Our patients force us to see the human being in his essential ground because the modem ‘neuroses of boredom and meaninglessness’ can no longer be drowned out by glossing over or covering up particular symptoms of illness. If one treats those symptoms only, then another symptom will emerge again and again … They no longer see meaning in their life and … they have become intolerably bored (Heidegger and Boss, Zollikon Seminar, 160-161)”

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).  Recall the image of Aristotle above that only a beast or deathless (athanatizein) god delights in solitude.

Beings concern us to a certain extent, but never completely (Heidegger, 2001).  We are unhomely precisely in our attempt to be at home in beings.  We do so by running away from ourselves, from our own restlessness, unhomeliness (Heidegger, 1996).  Today, with our addiction to social media and smart phones, for instance, we have never been better at feeding our addiction to beings, yet never more powerfully in their addictive grasp.  The cure is circular hermeneutic philosophy, not just thinking that wills cessation/answers, and so the original “path opening question” can be reposed in a more original way and the journey begins anew.