The Thesis of Being and Time Part 1: Der Zeitbegriff als Vorstellung

Aporia 1: A concept of time is a representation of time. A representation sets something before us (vor-stellung) in such a way that this thing is made present again.  In order to represent time, we must make present again not only the present, but the past and the future. We must therefore make present that which can never be found in the present. 

Aporia 2: In the representation of time, not only must we present again what is not  --nor could ever be --present. We must also be able to perform this presentation precisely from out of the present. In other words, there is the horizon of time to be made present, and there is the horizon of time in which such a presentation is to take place. The  horizon of time to be represented (H2) must be re-presented in the present horizon of time (H1). 

Aporia 3: The horizon of time (H1) in which this representation of the horizon of time (H2)  takes place, although it is the present time of the act of representation, is not included in the concept being represented, but serves as its implicit condition. The present horizon of time (H1) is either no longer or not yet represented in the concept of time. But, as was stated in Aporia 1 above, it belongs uniquely to the concept of time as its distinguishing feature and task  to make present what is no longer (the past) and not yet (the future).

Conclusion: The result is a familiar paradoxical turn of phrase. Most obtusely and oracularly, it claims: the concept of time is the time of the concept. Or in other words, to attempt to conceive of time is to attempt to conceive of the condition of that conception. Time is implicit in its own conception.

Heidegger's Difference and the Homeric Hero: A Hermetic History

     As we grow older/ The world becomes stranger,the pattern more complicated/ Of dead and living. Not the intense moment/ Isolated, with no before and after/ But a lifetime burning in every moment/ And not the lifetime of one man only/ But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

                                                                  --T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

An elucidation of the meaning of the Homeric hero is a task fraught with peculiar difficulties. The several modern transformations of “the hero” notwithstanding, there is even in the Greek “ἥρως” (haeros) a dynamic history of meaning to be considered. In early Greek, “

ἥρως” underwent a process of generalization, in which it came to mean “warrior in general,” whereas before it specifically meant those Greeks before the time of Troy. The genealogical retrieval of the meaning of “hero” therefore stumbles upon a peculiarity with the very first step it takes: the earlier meaning of hero is steeped in genealogy. There is intrinsic to this earlier sense of hero a retrospective reverence, an heir’s appreciation for the burden of his lineage, a responsibility to the demands of patrimony (here understood as the glory inherited from the father). Though one need not read further than the fourth line of his Iliad to confirm that Homer employed “ἡrwς” in its later, generic sense of “warrior”  “πολλὰς δ᾽ ἰφθίμους ψυχὰς Ἄϊδι προΐαψεν ...ἡρώων”), even the most imperceptive of readers would be hard pressed to receive this first word as Homer’s final word on the hero. Indeed, in a poem which culminates in the underworld, there is an inexorable movement towards what came before, the place of things past and things passed away. If it can justifiably be said that Homer’s Iliad single-handedly gave a new and fuller meaning to the hero, this did not happen overagainst the common and earlier meanings of the hero, but rather as a reconsideration and renewal of those meanings.

In keeping with this movement towards the past, the meaning of the hero takes on an earlier resonance as the poem progresses. A notable instance of this arises in Book IV when Agamemnon, after proclaiming his desire that Nestor –revered for his past, apparently unmatchable heroism—should have the youth of “some other of the fighters”, is inspired to rally his most capable warriors by way of playful invective. Upon approaching the last, and arguably most outstanding of these other fighters, namely Diomedes, Agamemnon spurs him on in the following words:

What’s this?—

you, the son of Tydeus, that skilled breaker of horses?

Why cringing here? Gazing out on the passageways of battle!

That was never Tydeus’ way, shy behind the lines—

he’d grapple enemies, bolting ahead of comrades…

Now there was a man, that Tydeus, that Aetolian.

But he bore a son who’s not the half of him in battle.

(IV. 370-400).[1]

Implicit in Agamemnon’s light-hearted rebuke is the notion that a true warrior (hero in the common sense) is measured by the glory of his father (hero in the earlier sense).           This is accentuated by the fact that to such a rebuke the great Diomedes responds in silence and in deed, while Sthenelos, a man of incomparably less stature in battle, retorts with the boast that both he and Diomedes are greater than their respective fathers (IV.410).

It is, of course, an observation of no great perspicacity to remark upon the importance of patrimony for the warriors of the Iliad; nearly all fighters are epithetically  identified as sons of their fathers, and often, when death looms near a particular hero, the reader is made aware at some length of his lineage, sometimes through that hero’s own mouth. What is of essential importance, however, is the way the Iliad links the general meaning of the warrior and his patronymic origin to an even deeper source: war is not only the place where death and destruction reign, but where things are born. To steer us away from taking this as an empty truism, we might cite what Heracleitus says on the matter:

polemoς pantwn men pathr esti, pantwn de

basileuς, kai touς  men qeouς edeixe touς de

anqrwpouς, touς men dolouς epoihse touς de

eleqerouς

(War is Father of all, and of all it is King, and it has shown some as gods and others as humans, it has created some as slaves and others as free).[2]

In the Iliad too, war is not in the first place a violent conflict between men, war is poihsiς (poiesis); it is the creative unveiling of the deepest distinctions, of who the gods truly are, and of who men truly are. As polemoς (polemos), war is that which holds together the most divergent poles ---an irruption of the hidden unity at the center of polar opposites. The “warrior in the general sense” is therefore not to be thought of emptily as “a fighter” but rather as a sign which points to its origin, or better, as one who actively retains the image and likeness of the one who has begotten him: the pathr pantwn, polemoς. In this way both meanings of hero converge: the “hero as warrior” is truly heroic only in so far as he participates in war, i.e., in the poetic revelation of his father, pathr polemoς.

This uniquely Greek understanding of polemoς, if it is to be properly grasped, must be set firmly against the backdrop of the Homeric gods. For the fact remains that there is no god by the name of “War” in the Iliad; there is only the god of war, Ares ---and it is not Ares but Zeus and Zeus alone who could possibly merit the epithet “Father of all.” Not only must this fact be conceded, but it is prerequisite to understanding polemoς properly. For Heracleitus does not identify polemoς as a god, but precisely as that which shows (deiknumi) who the gods truly are ---and only in this sense is it father even of them. What is it that makes polemoς such a father? What assurance can be had that this connection between Heracleitus’ oracular pronouncement and Homer’s understanding is no haphazard and arbitrary connection?

 The answer to these questions is hinted at in Hegel’s discussion of Homer in his Philosophy of History. There he makes the astute observation that for the Greeks “Fate [is] a pure Subjectivity appearing superior to the gods”[3]. Though Hegel is constrained by his metaphysical position to think of Fate as a “subjectivity” (a notion arguably foreign to the Greeks), he nevertheless touches upon the essential reason why polemoς is accorded its privileged paternal role. polemoς is the encounter with Fate par excellence.In a manner unparalleled by any other event, war displays the mettle of mortals in the face of their uncertain, yet certainly and swiftly approaching, fate. The brilliance of the warrior is a “brilliance darkly showing”, it is an illumination of what refuses all unveiling, an illumination of the unbearable, if inscrutable, presence of fate. For mortals, fate comes in the form of death, and the paradox of death consists in this: when death comes, it disappears. The appearance of death’s disappearance is frequently remarked upon in the Iliad, in the all too familiar ---and thus easily overlooked ---phrase that when a warrior meets his end, “a mist comes over his eyes.” That blindness, understood as a consummate non-appearing, befalls a warrior at that moment when his previously unseen fate finally comes to meet him is a detail by no means unrelated to the poetic nature of war to which Heraclitus has given utterance. Indeed, for Homer, as for the Ancient Greek world as a whole, the connection between the excess of fateful, poetic vision and blindness is testified to in such preeminent figures as Oedipus, Teiresias, Demodokus, and Homer himself.

If in the Iliad the heroic patrimony and the poetic nature of war resolve themselves to a single origin governed by the mysterious ‘appearance’ of fate, this does not occur merely through the subtle indications of Homeric imagery, and even less  through the distant sound of disembodied, abstract themes—waiting as it were to be seized upon and rescued by philosophic reflection. Rather does this resolution in the meaning of the hero occur through the singular character to which all indications and background themes refer, and this is unmistakably Achilles. As Glenn Arbery has convincingly argued in his Soul and Image: The Single Honor of Achilles that the entire Iliad cannot receive a proper critical treatment if it is not read with the story of Achilles’ birth firmly in mind; for it is here, in the account of Achilles’ half-divine lineage, that patrimony and the poetic strife between men and gods are fused into the mark of Achilles’ fate: unparalleled mortality. Paying careful heed to the bitter union with mortal man which Thetis, Achilles’ mother, was made to endure, Abery finds justification to characterize Achilles in the utterly unique image and likeness of his parents, a characterization which at once hearkens back to Heracleitus’ polemoς while drawing upon Heidegger’s thought of “dif-ference”:

[Achilles] is the human form of what Heidegger, in accounting for the relation between “world” and “things” in his essay “Language,” names the “dif-ference” (the word is broken at the point of its joining of two meanings— “bearing’ and “apart”).…Achilles has the kind of reality in the imagination that brings men and gods together by holding apart—with the whole pain of his being—the middle where they can be at one.[4]

Achilles, sprung from the bitter union of Thetis and Peleus, is a living image of the union between men and gods, and for this reason he is the boundary stone, the threshold of pain over which it seems neither man nor god has ever crossed and fate has trod but once. It is perhaps of some significance that Heidegger’s thought of the dif-ference is first articulated in his meditation upon Georg Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening”—not only because this articulation is the fruit of a reflection on poetry but, more to the point, because it arises in the course of considering, in Trakl’s poem, the specific line, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone”.

            Trakl’s pain-begotten threshold of stone[5], as it is interpreted by Heidegger, is not only a most fitting image for the dif-ferent position in which Achilles stands; its significance is far weightier than a mere vehicle in which Homer’s insight can be conveniently situated and passed along into contemporary discussion. Instead, the need to give voice to the enigmatic nature of stone, observed in Trakl’s line, is already found in one of the deepest regions of the Iliad, the region in which the Homeric transformation of the meaning of the hero—a transformation which not only roots the later meaning in the older one but even locates both in a still older meaning—is consummately accomplished.

The turn toward this final moment of transformation is prepared for in that scene of Achilles’ final conversation with his beloved companion, Patroklos—a scene which may be said to initiate or set up Achilles’ turn of heart away from the mourning of his mortal fate toward the profound depth of his mortality as it is illumined in battle and projected toward Hades. In that final encounter, before assuming the guise of Achilles through the aspect of his armor, Patroklos must first identify his friend anew, speaking from a surmise that has slowly been growing in his own heart:

            Pitiless: the rider Peleus was never your father nor was Thetis your mother, but it was the grey sea that bore you and the towering rocks, so hard is the heart within you. But if you are drawing back from some prophecy known in your heart and by Zeus’ will your honoured mother has told you something, then send me out at least, let the rest of the Myrmidon people follow me, and I may be a light to the Danaans. (XVI. 33-39)[6]

                                       

With his desperate appeal to Achilles’ unapproachable heart, Patroklos unwittingly touches upon the meaning at the heart of the Homeric hero. Patroklos, whose very name refers to the “glory of the father” (what we have ventured thus far to call by the name “patrimony”), speaks with a sudden boldness --as if by a word inspired --and, in what should not be mistaken as mere hyperbolic metaphor, he finds the audacity to renounce Achilles’ well known parentage in favor of a truer—if more obscure—origin. Because of the petrified likeness he perceives in his friend’s heart, Patroklos is moved to trace Achilles back to the “hliabatoi petrai”, the “towering rocks”. The only other possibility that Patroklos can conceive of in order to account for his friend’s almost inhuman reticence (a possibility which he immediately announces so that the abrasive nature of his first address might be ameliorated) concerns a prophetic message from the gods regarding Achilles fate. But Patroklos is speaking from a greater wisdom than he himself knows; what he does not perceive is the way his two proposals are essentially linked, namely through one of the most unseen gods in the entire poem: Hermes.

Patroklos’ fate falls far short of the final lines of the poem, where the veracity of his obscure insight is revealed; for it is only in the twenty-fourth book that Hermes makes his most significant contribution to the poem (namely, guiding Priam safely into the camp of the Myrmidons to redeem the body of his beloved son), and it is there that the intimate relation between Achilles and Hermes is displayed. They are related as an original and its reflection in a mirror, both of them sites of dif-ference, yet neither of them ever crossing into the world of the other. There are in support of this pairing several discussions of no negligible length concerning the door of Achilles’ shelter, which only Achilles himself and Hermes are known to be capable of opening alone, and which Hermes will not cross to meet his double face-to-face.

Hermes is the one god who accompanies fate through the threshold, he is the god of crossings, a messenger between gods and men, and the sole companion of each man to his ultimate fate in the underworld. As Marc Froment-Meurice has written:

Hermes, the proper name of a god of paths, of accesses granted or refused, takes his name from a simple pile of stones (in Greek “ermaion” [(hermaion)]), the significance of which we do not know.[7]

Through his likeness to Hermes the threshold-god, Achilles is also likened even further back to stones in need of interpretation, of, as it were, a herme-neutic. To say that Hermes is the key to, indeed, that he leads the way to the meaning of Achilles is to recognize Homer’s implicit demand upon his listeners that, if they would seek the deepest region in which heroism can be found, they must, like Priam, receive an immortal escort.

Though traditionally Achilles has served as a figure of emulation for the Greek world as well as the Western world that issued from it, the Iliad does not ultimately offer in Achilles a paradigm for imitation in human action, but rather a terribly inimitable presentation of the mystery of mortality. The proper response to such a heroic spectacle does not in the first place consist in the call to action, but in the courage to listen, when all action has become futile, for the coming of the god in the ringing of the poetic word.

---

[1] Trans. Fagles

[2] Fragment 93.

[3] Pg. 250, Trans. J. Sibree.

[4] Pgs. 38-40 in The Epic Cosmos. Ed. Louise Cowan. Dallas, TX: The Dallas Institute Publications, 1992.

[5] Lest it be objected at this point that we remove ourselves by three degrees from discussion of the Iliad if we pursue an inquiry into the source material for the source material of a single commentator on the poem, it should be observed that the “stone threshold” in connection with pain is by no means foreign to our primary text. It appears, once, in book XXIII, line 202: Iris, who first arrives in the Iliad “bearing her painful message, ” and makes her final appearance in it standing “poised at the stone threshold” of the house of Zephyr (the West Wind). Here the threshold is a site of urgency, the ground on which one may stand—once, for a moment—who must also be elsewhere.—Ed.

[6] More or less a word-for-word translation

[7] See his “Hermes’ Gift” in That is to Say. Trans. Jan Plug. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Heidegger Contra Transhumanism Part 1: Dasein, not Mensch

"Make no mistake, what we are speaking of here is a transformation in the essence of man."
There is a great irony in beginning the bald declaration of such a radical proposal as Heidegger does, in his now infamous Einführung die Metaphysik, with the assurance "make no mistake" ---a phrase seemingly guranteeing univocity to a proposal that is anything but univocal. As this post will hope to indicate, not without reason is this proposal vulnerable to the grossest and most dangerous of misunderstandings. Not without reason does it seem to join the chorus of a legion of modern thinkers proclaiming man's transformative enlightenment, as in Kant's second Kritik, where the transition from man to a rational being in general becomes the essential index of the truth of practical concepts, or as in Marx where the dialectic inherent in the economico-historical essence of man eventually yields his consummate transformation towards the achievement of a species-being --to say nothing of the Nieztschean "either-or" of a Letzte- or an Ueber-mensch, heralding the advent of a bio-technologically empowered master race. Not without reason, we say --for, the very reason, the very grund, that necessitates the semblance of an affinity between Heidegger and these modern thinkers of the metaphysically trans-human, has according to Heidegger himself,  not been negated but has become utterly concealed, obnubilating the fragile divide that must be maintained in order to hold apart things and their mighty opposites. Not without reason, then, unless the lack of reason, the abgrund, be equatable to the retraction of a reason, nay, of its very essence, into perfect concealment. Indeed, Heidegger's quote comes precisely at a time of what he would call, a year later in his Beiträge, abysmal distress, or as the Einführung has become quotable for formulating: the flight of the gods and the darkening of the world unto its night. Heidegger's seemingly dismal assessment of this catastrophic concatenation of events is well-known. The spirit of historical humanity whose very effluence is thinking itself,  has reached the final stage of its ex-piration; it has become disempowered, and this lost power has cascaded down into the volatile  deadlock of power-constellations that the techno-political realm, as a result, has exclusively become. Following fast upon this disempowerment, thinking undergoes an emergency and a struggle for its own life; it gasps to give new breath and meaning to the old words in terms of which alone it is allowed to receive a public, political hearing. Those words, now at such a desperate stage in the life of Western thought, are the philsophical dialect of Heidegger's Rektoratsrede, and they refer to self-assertion, the will-to-know, the spiritual mission of a people, over-powering power, and, yes, a transformation of man --and we must pay attention to the precise wording here: not only a transformation of man, but even more emphatically, of the essence of man. What could have been meant by such a transformation, if it is not meant to join the chorus of exhortations of the transformation of man that Heidegger understands as a mark of the last metaphysicians, from whose company he strives at every turn to sharply distinguish himself? In the series of posts that follow I wish to point out a path that leads toward  an answer to this question.


 The first thing necessary to catch the sense of direction that will lead us to this path is to cast a backward glance toward the inception of phenomenology; for there is a strong continuity that runs from the essential motivations of this beginning all the way to Heidegger's 1935 call for transformation. It is of seminal importance to understand how phenomenology, at first rather imperceptibly in the nascent form of Brentano's Deskriptive Psychologie, and then with increasing clarity in Husserl's lifelong critical engagement with psychologism,  becomes aware of its own necessity and vocation precisely by delimiting the field of an emerging, still amorphous, science of man, namely psychology. Heidegger's Habilitationshcrift faithfully pays homage to this critique and sustains this critical engagement when Sein und Zeit first brings what Heidegger considers to be the true phenomenological characterization of the essence of man as Dasein precisely in relief from the ontic sciences of man, chief among which is psychology. For the purposes of gaining an intial orientation to the question of man's transformation, it will be enough if we can appreciate the logic here operative in Heidegger's delimitation of the field of psychology, and, in general, of the ontic sciences, sharply from that field in which Dasein comes into view. This appreciation will also serve, secondarily, as a reference point by means of which the reader of Sein und Zeit may dismiss claims that the work is itself a psychological or philosophico-anthropological study masquerading as an ontological study --a claim which seems to perennially appear in myriad subtle forms and misguide  scholarship from time to time.

According to that logic of Sein und Zeit, the problem of the field of psychology and the attempt to achieve an adequate concept of man really becomes transparent in its requirements and achieves proper self-understanding when it is referred back to those mechanisms whereby a science achieves its foundation: namely foreconception and fundamental conception. The tendency to surrender such phenomena as "inner experiences" or "emotional states" to the field of psychology is here anticipated and countered. Everything, indeed, depends upon our fore-conception of the phenomenon in question; we can certainly greet stimmungen as instances of "psychological moods" or "inner experiences" but the question is: what fore-conception enables this greeting? Certainly not one that just fell from the sky but one that was established with the very foundations of the science of psychology. So the real question about "mental processes", because it is dependent upon that forum in which the identification of something *AS* mental process is made possible, is reducible to the question of how sciences get founded. More specifically, a science is only capable of being founded if a certain domain is granted to it in advance as that which it must subsequently discover. For example, in the broadest sense, biology, before it even begins, must be granted the possibility of treating anything whatsoever precisely with an eye toward whether it is living or non-living. At a certain point, it may even try to procure a certain"working" definition of life, but it has only come up with this definition by first recognizing and examining living and non-living things. It is clear, then, that biology is made possible by a fore-conception of life that is presupposed in its most basic concepts and that therefore unifies the foundation of that science.

If, in the fore-conception in terms of which a science establishes its basic concepts, the inherent unity of its task and the extent and limit of its objective domain is established, then accompanying this establishment a discernible rank and priority necessarily presents itself in the fore-conceptual interrelations that already obtain between the fundamental concepts of entirely distinct sciences: one science must inherently presuppose another if in the objective domain of that other science can be included the fore-conception which makes possible the fundamental concepts of the first. This rank and priority among the sciences, based solely on the manner of each field's fore-conceptual founding, necessarily leads to a truly unique possibility: the possibility of a science the fundamental concepts of which alone constitute that same science's pre-given objective domain of investigation. Heidegger in Sein und Zeit calls this necessity "Der Ontlogische Vorrang des Seinsfrage". Vor-rang is here given according to the inherent capacity of an inquiry to pursue its own Vor-griff, fore-conception. Such a science whose most proper object is also its origin, and whose proper conceptuality must not only be rooted in but must also thematize its fore-conceptual basis Heidegger calls Fundamental ontology. This science necessarily deals with the fundament of all science as an explicit theme in the course of accessing its proper object. At the same time, this science relates to its objective domain for one reason and one reason alone: to make explicit the fore-conception in terms of which that objective domain gets founded. Now, in fundamental ontology this aforementioned objective domain is constituted by that being (seiende) which serves as the condition for the possibility of the explicit establishment of any fundamental concepts whatsoever. Ontically speaking, such a being is called man (mensch). Both psychology and fundamental ontology look to man as to the being which occupies their respective objective domains, but they take this object in entirely different ways. In what, epistemically speaking, does this difference consist?

The object of psychology, man, is found within an objective domain constituted by an already established fundamental concepts of the psychic, experience, consciousness (and perhaps the unconscious, etc), but these are dependent upon a fore-conception of human existence which is determined based on an understanding of "an underlying", i.e.the subjectum of subjectivity in terms of which, e.g., the ego, id, and super-ego would be found (but this exmple should not be taken to restrict our sense of psychology to psychoanalysis). Such a fore-conception predetermines man as a "bearer of mental processes" which processes can in turn be investigated in their own right. And here we see the main difference: for while man as psychic is taken as an object according to fundamental concepts that have already been established in keeping with certain fore-conceptions, man as Dasein is taken as an object precisely to the extent that it is capable of being taken as a pre-conceptual condition for the possibility of all fundamental concepts, i.e. insofar as the man is that being in terms of which the fore-conception of Being itself may be made conceptual. Angst, eigentlichkeit, sein-zum-tode, langeweile, grundstimmungen, etc. are all inquired into strictly in terms of the way they illuminate the foreconception of that very inquiry ---a foreconception which is ultimately Sein itself.  It is for this reason that man is called, in Fundamental Ontology, Da-sein.

Did Heidegger Read Kant's Transcendental Dialectic?

In the midst of an admirably even-handed consideration of the early Heidegger's auseindersetzung with Kant, David Carr makes a fleeting observation about how the intensive probing of that hermeneutic confrontation also  happens to be exclusive of an extensive reading ---even, in fact, exclusive of the entire extent of the first Kritik upon which it is focused:

One thing that strikes readers of Heidegger on Kant in these writings is that his analysis is very detailed and close to the text, but it is focused entirely on the first Critique and indeed goes no farther than the first third of that work. He has almost nothing to say about the “transcendental dialectic”and its critique of traditional metaphysics, in which the first Critique culminates, much less about Kant’s moral philosophy, for which the first Critique is preparing the way.

Carr doesn't stop with this somewhat blunted criticism, however. In what is an appraisal in all other ways self-restrained, Carr permits himself the following anomalously pointed remark: "...I have to wonder, in all seriousness, if Heidegger ever got as far as the paralogisms in his reading of the first Critique." The implication of Carr's speculation is clear: even in terms of its sources, Heidegger's reading of Kant is a narrow, lopsided one.
  In the present post, I want to take the opportunity to briefly suggest one reason why this is so --- why, that is, it is far from a matter of accident that Heidegger devotes himself exclusively to the Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic in the majority of his Kant interpretations. As an aside I would allow the remark that Heidegger did not read other parts of Kant's corpus to pass as a piece of rhetorical hyperbole, were it not for the fact that even hyperbole does not allow itself to contradict historical fact (there is no need to waste breathe justifying Heidegger here on this point, he marshals so much evidence in the copious cross references he makes to the entirety of Kant's corpus ---nevermind the Dialectic). It might have been a nice addition to his Kant interpretation if Heidegger had produced, say, a phenomenological, or later, a seynsgeschichtliche interpretation of the Dialectic, one that is not altogether inconceivable in what its outline would have looked like, but Heidegger did not do so for, I would argue, a rather simple structural reason. One need only consider the architectonic of Kant's first Kritik to supply himself with the readily available answer.
   While the arrangement of the Kritik's Doctrine of Elements  can be regarded, as the Prolegomena in fact does regard it, as an arrangement of increasingly comprehensive pure foundations for the sciences of mathematics, physics, metaphysics respectively treated under the Aesthetic, Analytic, and Dialectic, nevertheless the work's arrangement can also be regarded from another vantage point. If in the former regard it is the Dialectic that treats of the possibility of metaphysics as an actual science, then in the latter regard it is the Transcendental Logic as a whole that furnishes the reader with the principles for a science of metaphysics as Kant alone wishes to establish it. This double vantage point is inherent to the work itself and may be explained by the fact that the pure physiological principles of the Analytic are at the same time metaphysical, since for Kant they ground any possible gegenstandsbeziehung.   In the order of presentation, then, the Analytic is designed to take over exactly that place reserved by Scholastic thought for metaphysica generalis, while the Dialectic is to occupy the place of metaphysica specialis. That this is so according to the rule of the work is made all the more obvious by the fact that the Dialectic's threefold division of paralogisms, antinomies, and Transcendental Ideals mirrors precisely the threefold division of metaphysica specialis into the specific domains of soul, world, and God. And it is precisely in this superficial observation of the works arrangement that we have a strong indication of the reason for Heidegger's focus. Months before Heidegger gives his phenomenological interpretations of the first Kritik, Heidegger is introducing to his students, in the Grundprobleme lectures of 1927, the problem of ontological difference, and he is doing so precisely through a destruktive meditation on Kant's categories of modality as they circumscribe the bounds of real predication. Although Heidegger had previously penetrated the Transcendental Analytic before the Phenomenological Interpretations in his 1925 Logik lectures, there it was self-evident why his examination had to limit itself in range and scope. By contrast the Phenomenological Interpretations, like the controversial Kantbuch that followed it, stood in need of some justification, and the Grundprobleme proffer that in linking the interpretation of Kant with the elaboration of the ontological difference.
     This link is of direct importance to the issue of Heidegger's attachment to the Analytic because it is as a consequence of the ontological difference that Heidegger will sever the possibility of doing anything like a metaphysica specialis from ontology properly understood. A properly ontological science will begin, as all metaphysica generalis attempt to do, with the question of Being as such. But, as the Grundprobleme make clear in their introduction, the method by which such a beginning is to be made consists in enacting a phenomenological reduction ---one which is vastly different from the move Husserlian phenomenology acknowledges by that name. In fact, precisely what was allegedly bracketed in Husserl's reduction is what is shifted toward in Heidegger's, namely Being as an antecedent given (seinsverstaendnis) which precedes and enables ontic datum:

We call this basic component of phenomenological method - the leading back or reduction of investigative vision from a naively apprehended being to Being phenomenological reduction. We are thus adopting a central term of Husserl's phenomenology in its literal wording though not in its substantive intent. For Husserl the phenomenological reduction, which he worked out for the first time expressly in the Ideas Toward a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1913), is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the Being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed).   

Heidegger's self-comparison with his mentor here is particularly instructive in the task of clarifying Heidegger's reading of Kant's Kritik; the explanation (and/or justification) of object-constitution in light of transcendental consciousness has its roots in Kant's Analytic as it is usually interpreted. If an interpretation of the Kritik is to be a phenomenological  interpretation, then it will presumably have to enact the step required to initiate any phenomenological research, namely, Heidegger's onto-phenomenological reduction. But that reduction, which serves to properly raise questions traditionally belonging to metaphysica generalis, precludes the establishment of metaphysica specialis, since, insofar as it investigates three specific (domains of) objects, the latter would be a reversal of the reduction, moving from Being to beings --a move that can only be permitted if the ontological difference remains misunderstood as a difference. Heidegger's reduction is accordingly a recapitulation of the ontological difference contra to  yet presupposed by the difference between genus and species, and therefore also problematic for the difference between metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis. To be more precise, the reduction shows, through the view that it enacts, a difference already present in the domain of metaphysica generalis, prior to its own demarcation from metaphysica specialis. This ontological difference, as the phenomenon which makes possible any science capable of investigating positive data, renders the three specific objects of metaphysics, namely soul, world, and God, as subject to this further unaddressed ontological difference. Soul, world and God have always been interpreted according to an already established metaphysica generalis in order to be secured as objects of investigation --and even when that security is problematized, it is done so only by what is accomplished beforehand by metaphysica generalis ---just as Kant's Analytic supplies the ground for his paralogisms, antinomies, and Ideals. In short, general metaphysics must settle itself and stabilize its fundamental principles before specific metaphysics can commence.  But if one is to, as Heidegger's phenomenological reduction would have it, demonstrate a difference problematizing the ability of metaphysica generalis to come to rest and thereby lay the foundations of metaphysica specialis, then he will also have to read the Analytic in such a way that makes it incapable of dispatching with further consideration of its subject matter in order to then transition to the Dialectic.  The phenomenologically reduced Analytic will be the
beginning of an inexhaustible perplexity.

The Origin of the Work of Art: Hearing the Title properly

It is very easy to let oneself be misled as to what Heidegger's sensationally received lecture Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, is really about. One would think its about art. Certainly it is not a lecture in art history and probably more than one concerning the appreciation of art, but it would seem safe to say its a philosophical lecture about art, a lecture about the meaning of art.

Its not.

One path that leads towards understanding why this is so begins by listening carefully to something which Heidegger as a matter of routine in all of his self-interpretations stresses the ambiguity of, namely, the name of the lecture, the title. The title seems to be addressing artwork, but artwork precisely in a certain respect, namely with respect to its origin. This appearance is initially inevitable. However, there is another way to hear it, and one of the goals of the essay is to show how this alternative way is, surprisingly, the more appropriate of the two. According to this other way, what should be emphasized in the title is not the artwork, thought with respect to its origin, but rather the reverse. That this is so is indicated in the opening sentences of the lecture, which may be understood as a preparation for the destruktion of what the audience is inclined to have heard in the freshly announced title:

Origin means here that from which and through which a thing is what it is and how it is. That which something is, as it is, we call its essence. The origin of something is the source of its essence. 

The lecture is an attempt to show how we can think of origin more properly than all of the history of Western thought has yet been able to by way of a seemingly strange move: by thinking of origin as inherent to the artwork. In the title "The Origin of the Work of Art" the word "Origin" must eventually be heard and understood as a property of art. The artwork does not have its home in its origin; rather, the very idea of an origin has its forgotten home in the artwork. This is why, in the quote above which begins the whole lecture, Heidegger immediately defines ---that is to say, discloses the essence of---the origin. But his definition is peculiar insofar as it implies its own failure; it tells us that the essence of the origin, that is, what an origin is really supposed to be, is to be nothing other than the source of a thing's essence.  But the essence is "what something is, as it is".  Therefore the origin must precede anything "as it is". Of the essence of origin, then, two things may be inferred:

1.) The essence of the origin precedes itself. The origin is, essentially,  pre-essential.

2.) As pre-essential, the essence of the origin lies in a domain in which a thing can be disclosed in such a way that it is not disclosed in the manner of thinking, namely,  in the manner of disclosing "what something is, as it is".  

 What domain is this? That of the artwork. "Artwork" would then name that which belongs to a domain ahead of and prior to any thinking, a domain which the thinking of the present age of technology can only anticipate --and yet must anticipate if it is to still think at all. The reason why the lecture emerges  as a place of repose along Heidegger's denkweg  then, is not because Heidegger has turned to art in the fight against nihilism, but because in pursuing what the origin originally means, Heidegger comes to find that its meaning is not in thought but in art. One might say that origin properly means in the artwork, and thinking has been lead to give thought to this unthought meaning.

The title "The Origin of the Artwork" now sounds different: "The Origin" --that is the origin itself --"of"--that is, as it belongs to ---"the Artwork" (the artwork, which lies ahead of thought).

SEYNSVERGESSENHEIT

  In the comments recently, Still made the following remark en route to a worthy point regarding the differentiation of Seyn: 

"While Seinsvergessenheit holds sway, for instance, the mystery *cannot be thought from itself*, and the thinker is powerless from himself alone to open the space in which it may be so thought"

I will here permit myself the license to tear this quote from its context in order to consider it solely as an indication of the nexus of a peculiar seynsgeschichtlich ambiguity: the time during  which seinsvergessenheit holds sway can be said in more than one way. 

On the one hand,  there is an extensive sense of the time of seinsvergessenheit. The extensive time of seinsvergessenheit is the time that began with the "first beginning," i.e. the time which began with Greek thinking --a beginning of Western thought which also eventually buried the hidden possibility of that same thinking. In this sense, seinsvergessenheit has (increasingly) reigned as long as metaphysics has actually existed. According to this sense, the "mystery," as Still says,  "cannot be thought from out of itself," insofar as it is epochally withheld in order to provide the ages of Western history -- the ages which metaphysics each time grounds for a while. 

On the other hand, there is an intensive sense of the time of seinsvergessenheit. In this sense, the time of seinsvergessenheit is only the present age, the age, that is, where metaphysics consummates what has always been most distinctive of it, namely how Being withholds itself from metaphysics. In this case, the time of seinsvergessenheit is the dissipation of actual metaphysics into the various fields of the sciences, as the latter is ordered in advance into the constellations of technology, the invisible center of whose gathering is Das Gestell. But in this case, if seinsvergessenheit actually comes about through the actual loss of metaphysics in the present age of technology, then it is precisely at this time of the present age that the mystery may yet be thought from out of itself. That is to say, only now, in the reigning of seinsvergessenheit, is the possibility granted to think Being differently than metaphysics was ever eventually able to. Seinsvergessenheit thus becomes the mystery first giving itself to thought, namely in the offering of nothing ---but concealment. And this concealment is none other than the concealment of Being itself (Seyn). This is why Heidegger speaks of technology's essence as a Janus-Head: the sending of Sein as Nothing (seinsvergessenheit) is the giving of the refusal of Seyn. No longer an understanding of Being (Sein) but Being itself (Seyn) is finally given --given as the unthought. Seinsvergessenheit is yet to be thought as Seynsvergessenheit. 

A Teleology in Reverse Part 2: Revisiting Scholastic Idea-logy with Heidegger

Just Thomism has offered a succinct sketch of one possible Scholastic objection to Aristotle's claim that the middle term of a syllogism in scientific demonstration offers fundamental causal knowledge of the truth of that syllogism:

To know what is first requires knowing its ratio or logos.
The ratio or logos of anything is what an infinite mind intended it to be.
The human mind can only understand the intention of an infinite mind by a multitude of finite ideas it cannot reduce.

This is a fascinating objection to me, since it seems to espouse a very peculiar sort of idealism over naive realism (insofar as the latter fittingly names the direction of knowing toward “what is”). The primacy of “ratio or logos” in the knowledge of what is (“to know what is first requires knowing its ratio or logos”) means the privileging of the intentionality of infinite mind over Being, at least in terms of our finite conception. This is initially interesting simply with regard to whether and how this "scholastic" objection is compatible with Aquinas:

1.) How does this square with Aquinas’s claim that the first thing that falls into the intellect is what is, i.e. ens (Ita quod primo cadit in intellectu ens).
2.) How this can be reconciled with the primacy of the transcendental of Being over that of Truth.

It is further of interest to me because the claim that a logos precedes the comportment toward “what is” could also be considered to be Heidegger’s claim. How so?   By understanding that this logos is a seinsverstaendnis, whose wherein (worin) is Welt. Such a logos  would accordingly be the a priori condition for the possibility of encountering what is, i.e. any being (ens, seiend). But Heidegger subtly escapes any form of idealism such a logical precedent would imply by further insisting on the ontological difference --i.e. that what is can mean "a being" only if it already has an other meaning, and that Being makes possible both a being and the understanding of Being. Thus the logos that enables knowledge of what-is (seiend) hides within it a sense of what-is (Sein) that is not brought to light by the logos save as that which conceals itself in logos as what is unthought, indeed as what precedes thought. It is this precedence of what is unthought in the ontological difference that requires Heidegger to return to the Greek thought of τέλος and interpret it differently than the scholastic interpretation of "aim" or "goal" or "intention" (an interpretation which, as I have discussed elsewhere, is led by the Vorgriff of Mind as the ground of Being). This is a fundamental problem which provides Heidegger's rereading of τέλος the justification of its hermeneutic: the Greek meaning of τέλος, because it belongs to the first inquiry into Being, necessarily escapes us. However, and here is the crucial insight: precisely this is the Greek meaning of τέλος. In other words,τέλος, as opposed to the later causa finalis, does not refer to what presupposes mind but what is presupposed by mind, namely Sein as the unthought meaning of what is. This is why Heidegger translates τέλος as that which "circumscribes the bounds" in terms of which something "begins to be what, after production, it will be". τέλος so translated now names the beginning which precedes the thing whose own beginning it is. τέλος destines something, from a long time before, to a teleology in reverse, one for which Heidegger has also reserved the name Seynsgeschichte.      

Get Back In your Cave!: Bloom and Heidegger on the Question of Historical Freedom

The Whirlpool's Rim regularly posts such thoughtful things that I want to respond to but almost never actually do, so I don't want to pass the opportunity up yet again when Tony writes: 

I don't wish to derail the discussion of inauthenticity at Seynsgeschichte, but I wonder how Bloom's view of the value of "the experience of living in Plato's Cave" -- that is, of having lived within a defined cultural tradition -- differs from Heidegger's view of the presupposition of gerede and of the inauthentic as harbor of and "condition of possibility" for the authentic. Is it necessary, in the end, to leave the "vagaries of history" behind?

Eliot's Four Quartets instructs us or assures us or dissuades us with the following: "Only through time/Time is conquered"...and, again,: "History may be servitude/History may be freedom"

I think we may profit by wresting these lines in the direction of Heidegger's thought of history...that is, history as of Beyng. Let us employ the distinction often employed in discussions like those of the meaning of categories liberal and conservative, or those which invoke Burke to describe a proper relation to tradition. That distinction would be the one also used by Berlin in his essays on the topic...namely the distinction between negative and positive freedom. The claim from Deneen to which Tony refers above is that, on the level of "the vagaries of history," that is, the level of things inherited or inheritable as opposed to, say, 'ahistorical transcendentals' (e.g. the Straussian concept of Natural right or, at least, the foundations of this concept), Bloom's admiration of positive freedom was superficial and utilitarian. If historical positive freedom, in the sense of having a (respectable, genuine) cave, is to be lauded, it is only because it offers the opportunity of a higher form of negative historical freedom, that is, of a philosophic escape from one's cave --an escape also from history itself. This may or may not be a fair characterization of Bloom's position, but it does seem to resonate with my reading of his Closing. In fact, Closing  can be seen as a whole to be a long argument for the need for Western tradition to be upheld --and to be upheld for the sake of an eventual philosophic liberation from the bondage of tradition. As an aside I must say Deneen is flat out wrong, however, if he indeed (as it seems prima facie he does) conflates Bloom's contempt for a fraudulent notion of "muliculturalism" with a very different contempt for culture in general, which I, for one, do not see Bloom possessing. So-called multiculturalism and the self-defeating celebration of diversity which annihilates appreciation for real difference, Bloom rightly dealt with in a Nietzschean spirit as a thin rainbow sheet loosely covering a stinking carcass of nihilism and consummate cultural oblivion.
But however much credence we can lend to Deneen's characterization of Bloom's liberalism, there can be no doubt that it is at variance with Heidegger, who is often politically pegged as a conservative or by some of his not so secret unadmirers, a fascist. But the difference here is thoughtlessly missed if we stick to these unhelpful and nearly (I do not say "completely") meaningless categories. I would prefer to construe it with the help of another pair of problematic, though less problematic in my mind, categories, namely "negative and positive freedom". Like Eliot's lines above suggest, Heidegger does not see tradition as either a cave of bondage or a springboard for philosophic assent. For Heidegger and Eliot, tradition blindly masters us for better or worse at first, but --and here is the crucial point--it is that same tradition which is to be made the "object" of our positive freedom. Tradition not only must be labored for to be properly inherited --it is itself worth the labor. The ground and source of tradition is the only place where true freedom is to be achieved. History, properly understood, is transcendental and its bond can never be broken, only modified. In this modification, to which I recently referred  in an enjoyable discussion of Sein und Zeit with Jeremiah, as an "existentiell modification of the the existential of inauthenticty", real recovery of the forgetful condition of human existence is made possible ---and it is made possible precisely and only by a posture of anticipating, i.e. by an historical posture. Speaking modally, then, it is really (i.e. in an ontic site) made possible, but is not yet actual. Because of the non-actuality of this reality (a reality which the early Heidegger, still speaking in the tongue of Lebensphilosophie, would call the true and genuine scientific life, a life sprung from a science capable of recovering and returning to life instead of forgetting and objectifying it, a mature living possession of science), Heidegger's freedom cannot be called positive, but it is certainly even further away from the Enlightenment's exhalted "virtue" of negative freedom.  History and forgetfulness are necessary not only to the obfuscation of truth but for the achievement of truth. Nor are they an instrument for its achievement. They are inherent to its finite possession. Indeed, history is the truth in the sense the truth, in being true, historizes; truth is eventual. Inheriting is built into the very structure of truth. In this way, finitude is not simply man's. It belongs more primordially to truth ---to the way truth ITSELF withdraws, that is, withdraws itself.
       Bloom, like Strauss, seems only to have seen Heidegger in opposition to his own idea of a strictly negative historical freedom. Heidegger is, for him, a relativist of the most brilliant sort, or more precisely, Heidegger is an historicist, albeit one of top philosophic caliber. this is because Bloom sees Heidegger promoting and amplifying the Nietzschean mantra of "commitment" and decisionism --i.e. of willing the historical situation to which one has been fated and of considering all truth to be found in this will, and thus to be entirely historically enclosed or "horizonal." But, as I have had pause to remark before, Heidegger does not say this. If, in Sein und Zeit, he thinks of time as "the transcendental horizon for any possible understanding of Being", this is not because Heidegger thinks truth is a function of historical trend. Rather Heidegger is thinking of time and history differently --not as either a flux or a succession of moments (or ages). but rather as concealments of Being itself. Time gives an understanding of Being (Sein) but Being itself, i.e. Seyn as Ereignis, gives time by giving it itself. There is time only by virtue of the granting of Beyng itself. History is of Beyng. Authentic "positive freedom" lies not in willing one's current historical understanding but in binding oneself to what has already in advance given or made possible the understanding of an age...and that is something which such an understanding initially hides or conceals. To simply will one's historical situation is to misunderstand it. Nietzsche's perspectivism prioritizes history over truth. Heidegger, by contrast sees history as a path to truth, but unlike Bloom he also thinks this path to be part of the truth. To discard it as an instrument would be to discard the truth which we are seeking to reach by its means. The only other thinker who can claim this of history is Hegel, but, as I have discussed elsewhere, he does so in a manner violently opposed to Heidegger.