Heidegger seemed to have become expecially frustrated that his earlier formulations were still not understood in the proper way - as he would often say, primarily because we who are accustomed to speaking of "beings" only as static "objects" and "facts" have lost the ability to "hear" the names of Being as the Greeks heard them.
[F]or Heidegger an ontology with ethical content is always bad ontology. This assumption represents a failure to encounter Plato's thought because the idea of the good cannot be adequately characterized as either purely ontological or an ontic value, as Heidegger's own indecision shows.
In the case of Heidegger's Parmenides, which presses a philosophical argument, it will be meanings to come, rather than events proper, that will be implicitly promised, predicted, hinted at, -- meanings rather than events in that the emergence, revelation, fulfillment of meaning is the philosophical "event" par excellence.
Heidegger acknowledges that for Aristotle the zóon politikon is a speaking animal, but he is quick to project the teaching of Plato onto the speech of the zóon politikon. The speaking citizen does not overcome the inauthentic preoccupation that pervades the rule of the They in everydayness, and his deliberative speech in the public space of the polis is, Heidegger claims, trapped in ‘habits’, ‘fashion’, ‘immediate vogue’, ‘idle talk’.
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Gods and men are not only lighted by a light--even if a supersensible one--so that they can never hide themselves from it in darkness; they are luminous in their essence. They are alight; they are appropriated into the event of lighting, and therefore never concealed.
So what is the immediate and untranslated thought of the thing? What shows itself self-evidently insofar as we keep all preconceptions at a distance, simply describe without any philosophical theory? What lets the thing be as it is without doing violence to it?
For Heidegger, it is that which is continuous in the thing—not the form, but that which allows the interpretation or translation of the thing qua form and matter, or ens creatum and increatum, to remain constantly together, to stand together; it is the constancy or continuity of the thing, the standing and remaining, das Ständige, die Konsistenz.
What [Schürmann] finds is that the beginning is not a single unified beginning of philosophy in the One (as Parmenides has usually been interpreted: see below), but a tragic knowledge, a knowledge of our mortality and its contrary (championed, in Parmenides' work, by the goddess). This interpretation shatters the sedimentation of father Parmenides. This new parricide reincarnates Parmenides again as thoughtworthy at the end of metaphysics (in Heidegger's sense), when philosophy as ontology, theology and logic has withered away. I use the word reincarnated with twofold significance: a) the beginning is always ahead of us, which is a point Heidegger makes tirelessly, and b) this reading also restores the human life-span, as a philosophical issue, to the time between birth and death.
[E]ssence cannot be defined because any definition must constrain what is being defined within certain limits laid down ahead of time, but essential to what exists are its possibilities and not its limitations. To the extent to which they are characteristics of an existing Dasein; truth, knowledge, justice, etc. must not be treated as objects that can be separated from us and examined from a distance and dispassionately: they must be treated not as present-at-hand objects to be viewed theoretically, but rather as existential possibilities with which we are concerned.
Heidegger's writings are his pathways, so it is important to remain within the hermeneutical context and not to over draw our conclusions. Heidegger is acting as a guide and is pushing and directing us up the mountain, but the right analogy is that we still have to do the climbing and follow this path with our own thinking.
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Heidegger's Greeks do not actually write, and if they do write, the less they write the better. The best Greeks, for Heidegger, seem to be ones who merely speak, and who speak single, heavily charged substantives with which they tacitly connect highly sophisticated and profoundly meditated but unspoken associations.
Heidegger clarifies that in Heraclitus, "becoming" is not to be equated with modern notions of "process". Becoming is rather the act of arising; an entity "stands and flashes up," so that one may say that "The entry of entities in their determinateness is thought in the moment of brightness."
Heidegger would most likely account for the incontinence of a Provo resident viewing pornography in terms of Dasein's curiosity. The pornerastic inhabitant of Provo reveals the fact that he has allowed himself "in making use of information services such as the newspaper" or the television or the internet, to be disburdened of concern for his own Being by falling into the They.
Heidegger posits that the Greek view of the physical world was not what Western man refers to with the word "nature." In fact, he claims that a transformation occurred with Plato, where Western thinking began to understand being through the categories of logic, subordinating being as φύσις to be understood in a purely conceptual manner, as the material world only.
World is not something subsequent that we calculate as a result from the sum of all beings. The world comes not afterward but beforehand, in the strict sense of the word. Beforehand: that which is unveiled and understood already in advance in every existent Dasein before any apprehending of this or that being, beforehand as that which stands forth as always already unveiled to us.
[S]ince temporality is an a priori condition of motion, Aristotle's definition of time as "number of motion with respect to the before and after" is in fact a tautology according to Heidegger's interpretive exposition since the before and after are only understood with respect to the now projected upon temporality.
A chapter from his book Heidegger's Polemos.
For Heidegger, truth understood ontologically is the opening up of a world, the making manifest of beings for Dasein's understanding of Being. But this opening up, this making manifest, is always a struggle to bring forth from concealedness, from lethe. Indeed, for anything to be at issue is dependent on truth as polemos.
Heidegger is particularly aware that the common reading of Aristotle's notion of οὐσία as raw Substance is far from Aristotle's own understanding. Heidegger observes that the "central phenomenon" explicated in Aristotle's Physics is "[individual] being in the how of its movement." Neither Aristotle nor Heidegger is concerned with things as mere objects, but with the world as it is encountered.
[O]ur experience in the world, Heidegger proposes, is a temporal process of manifest actuality and concealed possibilities. What these ontological differences allow is the contemplation of God as the "other side" of all that is manifest that echoes "damma daqqa" in the Elijah theophany of I Kings 19. In short, God is the no-thing of possibilities that ever anew breaks open in unanticipated ways the intractable actualities of life.
Heidegger and the Greeks: Hermeneutical-Philosophical Sketches of Ignorance, Blindness and Not-Being in Heidegger's Beiträge, Plato, Plotinus and Proclus
The discussion of Heidegger's "destructive retrieve" of Aristotle has been intensified in recent years by the publication of Heidegger's courses in the years surrounding his magnum opus. Heidegger's explicit commentary on Aristotle in these courses permits one to read Being and Time with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Metaphysics. My paper analyzes a network of differences between the two thinkers, focusing on the relationship between theory and praxis. From Aristotle to Heidegger, there is: (1) a shift from the priority of actuality to the priority of possibility. This shift, I argue, is itself the metaphysical ground of: (2) a shift from the priority of theory to the priority of praxis. This shift is seen most clearly in the way in which (3) Heidegger's notion of Theorie is a modification of his poíesis. The temporal ground of the reversal is seen in (4) Heidegger's notion of transcendence towards the world, and not towards an eternal being.
How does Heidegger think the political? He thinks it in the only way possible for what he has been called upon to think, namely, from the truth of being. The truth of being is Heidegger's discovery, it is what he unearths as the unthought dimension within which Greek thinking thought in the first beginning.
Aristotle, in Book I, Chapter 2, of his Rhetoric says, "Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" (Roberts, 1954, p. 24). This probable ("may be") definition of rhetoric is significant. First, it lends itself to be read in many ways, and second, it shows us that what is at the heart of epideictic rhetoric is probability and not certainty. In this paper I offer a meditative (thinking) reading of the phrase, "the faculty of observing" in conjunction with discerning the available means of persuasion as posited in this definition.1 At the outset it can be stated that meditative thinking/deconstruction2 is not aimed at specifying a technique to choose "the available means of persuasion." Rather it is that which describes the "essence" of observation. Hence, in this paper I also wish to show that the genuine rhetor is one "who dwells" as one would in meditative thinking.
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From Conference of the Academy of Sciences at Heidelberg, July 26, 1958.
Reflections on Early Greek Thinking.
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