Christopher Merwin
Emory University
TWELVE YEARS AFTER the end of the devastation of World War II, in the fourth in a series of lectures in Freiburg under the title Basic Principles of Thinking, Heidegger invites his audience to not simply follow these basic principles, but to meditate [meditieren] on them, “[m]editare is the same word that stands in our loan word Medizin; medear means to attend to something, to healingly care” (GA 79: 146, 137). The aim of this paper is to bring together Heidegger’s reflections on healing (das Heilsame), in the wake of the war in the third Country Path Conversation (GA 77), “Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older Man”, to Heidegger’s reflections on the hale (das Heile) of Hölderlin a year later in “Why Poets?” (Wozu Dichter?). It is my contention that these remarks become understandable when viewed in light of his examination of δίκη (díkē, justice) as the joining or right ordering between the gods and mortals in “Anaximander's Saying” (Der Spruch des Anaximander). The three texts, written between 1945 and 1946, and during a time of personal distress and uncertainty for Heidegger in the aftermath of the war, offer us some of his deepest reflections on justice. Heidegger’s thinking of justice as δίκη or Fug in the texts of this period provides us a sense of the ontological and temporal structure of justice which I wish to explore. Doing so will allow us to better understand his thinking of healing as a way of temporally abiding (as weilen) in an “out of joint” way. By looking at the interrelation of these three texts, on healing, the holy, and what Heidegger terms reck and recklessness, I claim that justice may be understood as both a human comportment and a mediated relation to beings in the abiding expanse.
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This mediation is achieved through δίκη (justice) as the jointure that brings entities together in right order. Fundamentally δίκη (justice) can be achieved through Heidegger’s words Ruch and geruhen, as esteeming others, allowing them to be as they appear in the open expanse. In such a way Heidegger can be essentially understood as offering a conception of justice (δίκη) that not only allows for an authentic relationality to others but that offers the possibility of healing in our fractured techno-scientific age.
My paper will be divided into three parts. First (I) I will discuss the role of Heidegger’s reflections on δίκη, beginning particularly with his intense engagement with Anaximander in the early 1930’s and culminating with the 1946 Spruch des Anaximander. I focus on δίκη's association with a cluster of terms across his thinking during this period, namely der Fug, sich Fügen, die Fügsamkeit and their cognates. Understanding these terms in their full sense across different contexts gives us a stronger Heideggerian sense of the limits, obligations, and promises of justice accomplished through the comportment of esteeming or reck. Second (II) I move to a brief analysis of the open expanse from the third Country Path Conversation and show how the expanse mirrors the temporal and ontological relation between δίκη and ἀδικία and how the holy and hale likewise mirror the comportment of τίσις, Ruch, and geruhen. Finally, I conclude in part (III) with some provisional comments as to how we might understand δίκη as both a type of healing and ‘justice’. It’s my contention that in thinking the temporal-ontological structure of δίκη alongside the holy and the hale we may have a better understanding of how these three texts realize a mode of thinking, acting, and poetizing which do justice to the entities involved and allow for a more authentic mode of presencing.
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Heidegger’s treatment of the term δίκη, aside from some passing references to its use in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Metaphysics in the 1924 lecture courses on Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy and Plato’s Sophist, occur in the 1932 summer semester course Der Anfang der abendländischen Philosophie (Anaximander und Parmenides) (GA 35) where he translates the term with the German Fug. It is my aim in this section to connect Heidegger’s discussion of δίκη and ἀδικία, translated and referred to in each of the texts of this period as Fug and Unfug, as ontological structures, to the unusual temporality of the awhiling expanse, via the comportment of τίσις or reck (Ruch). I deal first with δίκη and its temporal and ontological structure before moving on to its relation to Ruch. I will then relate these to the temporality of the awhiling expanse and its healing power in section two (II).
It is worth noting that two years later Heidegger would offer his winter semester course Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” which bears a brief but important reference to δίκη. Heidegger would pair up his reading of Anaximander and Hölderlin again 10 years later in 1941 with the lecture courses Basic Concepts (GA 51) and Hölderlin’s Hymn “Andenken” (GA 52), and a year later in Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (GA 53) and Parmenides (GA 54) and again in 1946 in Wozu Dichter? (GA 5), and the lecture and subsequent course on Der Spruch des Anaximander (GA 78), although the term and its conceptual translation appears frequently throughout his work in this 14 year period1.
1 The term δίκη also appears once in the Beiträge (GA 65: 46, 37) in §17 under a list of other Greek terms, but is dealt with extensively through Heidegger’s German rendering of it as Fug and its associated cognates - Erfügen – dispense, die Fuge – conjuncture; sich fügend – compliant, etc. These terms also find further importance in the 1941 texts Über den Anfang (GA 70) and Das Ereignis (GA 71).
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Heidegger informs us in the 1932 lecture series that we should not translate δίκη and its opposite ἀδικία as exclusively “justice”, iustitia, or “injustice” and that the terms must be interpreted outside of a juridical-moral sense which refers solely to human relations. He offers instead the older German words Fug, compliance, and Unfug, non-compliance, respectively. Compliance, particularly in its modern English usage, does not carry the etymological sense of this older Gothic term as ‘fitting’, something which is incorporated, binds, or attaches and whose further etymology carries a connection with ‘being glad’. Heidegger provides the example of a horse’s tack and harness as not fitting, and further provides the standard German expression mit Fug und Recht, a phrase which he will use again in the Country Path Conversations, and which we can hear in the English expression that something is “right and fitting”. Fug, Heidegger tells us, is “[c]ompliance—that is harmonization, the dovetailing of the totality of something coordinated in itself. Compliance therefore characterizes something inter-related,” as night and day, birth and death (GA 35: 13-14, 11). In his analysis of Anaximander’s statement he brings together the meanings of δίκη, τίσις, and ἀδικία and says that τίω (as τίσις) relates to compliance and non-compliance importantly as ‘appreciate’ or ‘esteem’ (schätzen), further glossed as ‘correspondence’ (Entspruch), to “take the measure of something in its relation to something else, determine whether and how it corresponds to something else” (GA 35: 13-14, 11). In this way Heidegger tells us that δίκη “emphasizes the belonging together as such, τίσις brings out the respective measuring off of the correspondence (GA 35: 13-14, 11) and in this way Heidegger translates the second half of Anaximander’s fragment as, “‘they (beings) bestow compliance and correspondence on one another in consideration of the noncompliance’” (GA 35: 14-15, 12) and further amends the translation to read: “it says that the reciprocal bestowal of compliance and correspondence, which indeed characterizes appearance, happens according
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to the measure of time” (GA 35: 15-16, 13). It is time which stands in closest connection to the way in which beings come into appearance and withdrawal, or disappearance and concealing, “time lets disappearance happen” (GA 35: 18-19, 15). Heidegger links Being and time as φύσις. Time, as χρόνος φυει, allows the concealed to emerge as “self-unfolding, self-presentation in the open, self-showing—appearance” (GA 35: 19-21, 16). Time is the allocative power to measure out to beings their Being, outside the realm of calculation, and place before in the present, take back in the past, and hold back in the future. Δίκη then is the fitting in with this measure, complying with the allocation and measure of the appearance and disappearance of beings in the open. As Heidegger’s translates δίκη a few years later in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics (GA 40), using a cluster of words related to Fug, “[w]e translate this word as fittingness. Here we understand fittingness first in the sense of a joint or structure; then as arrangement, as the direction that the overwhelming gives to its sway; finally, as the enjoining structure, which compels fitting-in and compliance2 …Being, φύσις, is, as sway, originary gatheredness: λόγος. Being is fittingness that enjoins: δίκη”. Nearly ten years later in the lecture course on Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, Heidegger would name the god Δίκη as ‘that which is fitting’ and part of the realm of the lower gods, beneath Zeus. In his lecture course the following semester, the Parmenides Heidegger will translate δίκη with the more standard ‘order’, although he will retain his earlier conceptual development saying: “[w]e mean ‘order’ as an indicating, demonstrating, assigning, and at the same time arranging and ‘thrusting’ order. It is to this that man has to be ordered, and so it is precisely out of it that he can err into the path of disorder, especially when the assignment conceals itself and
2 „Wir übersetzen es mit Fug. Wir verstehen hier Fug zuerst im Sinne von Fuge und Gefüge; sodann Fug als Fügung, als die Weisung, die das Überwaltigende seinem Walten gibt; schließlich Fug als das fügende Gefüge, das Einfügung und Sichfügen erzwingt“ (GA 40: 169).
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falls away” (GA 54: 137, 93). He further emphasizes the relation that δίκη has to concealment and unconcealment when he writes: “[δ]ίκη, understood as the order which ordains, i.e., assigns, to humanity its relations and comportment, takes its essence from a relation to Ἀλήθεια, but δίκη is not determined by the πόλις or on the basis of a relation to the πόλις” (GA 54:143, 96). We must recall, however, that it is δίκη's relation to τίσις as appreciation or consideration which is able to mediate the disorder and noncompliance of ἀδικία. We must also remember that ἀδικία, noncompliance, Unfug, as strife is a structural part of the sway of this process, “out of joint” to use Dan Dahlstrom’s phrasing, and echoing Derrida’s “time out of joint”. Returning to Heidegger’s full translation of the Anaximander fragment from 1932, we can understand a bit more clearly the full relationality that Heidegger is suggesting:
But whence beings take their stepping-forth, thence also their receding ensues (happens) according to necessitation (compulsion); for they (the beings) give compliance [order; fittingness]—maintaining correspondence [esteem, care] with one another, acquiescing3 to a correspondence [esteem, care] with one another—(in consideration of) in return for the noncompliance according to the allocation of time (GA 35: 21, 17)4.We see a similar echo of δίκη’s relation as right and care in Hölderlin’s Hymn “Germania” and “The Rhine”, delivered less than two years after the initial Anaximander and Parminides course:
“Originarily and in keeping with its essence, right [referring to δίκη] first emerges as such in strife; in strife it forms itself, proves itself, and becomes true. It is strife that establishes the sides, and one side is what it is only through the other, in reciprocal self-recognition. For this reason we never grasp a being if we consider only one side, yet neither do we grasp it if we
3 Grimms Wörterbuch etymology for Fug includes also the Latin
aptitudo, aequitas, licentia, occasion which
Heidegger seems to be directly making reference to here.
4 Anaximander’s original fragment reads: ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσίς ἐστι τοῖς οὖσι, καὶ τὴν φθορὰν εἰς ταῦτα γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρεών· διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν. I have added in [brackets] the conceptual terms that Heidegger has
translated these as in German in the earlier section
(GA 35: §3, 13-14, 11) for added emphasis.
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merely add on the other side as well: Rather, we grasp it when we comprehend both sides in their belonging together and know the grounds for such comprehension” (GA 39: 126, 113).The relationship between order and disorder, right and strife, establishes limits, the differences between beings. The grasping comprehension through the correspondence of reciprocal self-recognition allows the freedom to mediate the reckless opposition of ἀδικία. It is to this aspect of correspondence, of appreciation and care, whose relation to δίκη Heidegger elucidates with a reference to the old German words geruhen and Ruoche, that I would like to turn to next.
a. Geruhen & Ruoche
In his 1946 Der Spruch des Anaximander (GA 5) Heidegger introduces the older German Ruch and Middle High German term Ruoche, which he glosses as ‘care’ and ‘solicitude’, to more adequately capture the meaning of τίσις in its relation to δίκη. Ruch is related to the 16th century English noun ‘reck’, itself from the much older verb reccan, and the terms all share a stronger sense of ‘to aid’, ‘to help’, ‘to offer assistance to’ in their Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indoeuropean roots5. Heidegger says that “[c]are concerns itself with another so that it may remain in its essence. This concerning-itself, when thought of as what stays awhile in relation to its presencing, is τίσις, Ruch [reck]” (GA 5: 360, 271). He relates this sense of concerning-itself, even in human relations, with the verb geruhen, seen as esteeming something, letting and allowing it to be itself. It is again, particularly on the temporal aspect of this formulation that I would like to focus, as it will allow me to build a stronger relation with Heidegger’s reflections in the third Country Path Conversation. “What stays awhile”, Heidegger says, “is precisely in the jointure of its presencing” (GA 5: 355, 267) and, “[i]nsofar
5 C.f. Sihler’s New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin and Watkins’s The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.
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as things which stay awhile give order [Je-Weiligen Fug geben] they thereby allow, in their relationship to each other, reck to belong, in every case, each allowing it to belong to the other”(GA 5: 361, 272). In this way, through the mediation of τίσις, reck, and geruhen, we are able to experience justice which discloses us to the temporality of the open as awhiling or abiding. To understand how to right things when the time is out of joint in an “age of devastation”, specifically to the circumstances around these texts, the devastation of World War II, I will turn to Heidegger’s reflections on the abiding expanse and its healing capacity in the third Country Path Conversation.
Heidegger opens his reflections in the third Country Path Conversation by reference to the healing power of the veiled expanse [verhüllten Weite] that the interlocutors find themselves in. Heidegger’s descriptions of the expanse exactly mirror those of the play space of φύσις and Ἀλήθεια. The expanse [Weite] “leads us out and forth”, “swings out into a concealed distance” and at the same time swings back, it “carries us to what is objectless, and yet also keeps us from dissolving into it…[it] delivers our essence into the open and at the same time gathers it into the simple, as though the expanse’s abiding were a pure arrival for which we are the inlet” (GA 77: 205-206, 132). We see here that like the jointure or fitting of δίκη to ἀδικία, the expanse has the capacity to delimit the forest, the speakers, and the war camp, which Heidegger glosses as the ‘objective’. The younger man expresses that he thought his experience of what is healing [Heilsame] was in contrast to the unwholesomeness [heillosen] of the camp, the objective, and, although later in the conversation, the devastation of our own essence which has been eating away at the earth for centuries (GA 77: 210, 136) and which is the abandonment of all life. Importantly this abandonment allows nothing to emerge of itself, to unfold itself, or call others into a co-emerging. Heidegger asks almost rhetorically if
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we might not call this an “age of devastation” due to its abandonment of being. In this way we see that Heidegger feels the techno-scientism of modernity is a “time out of joint” in which the sway and oscillation has swung too far to ἀδικία and Unfug and which can only be healed and made wholesome once things are in order again, a right ordering or fitting which is accomplished through the mediation of τίσις, geruhen, and care and solicitude achieved through mindful awaiting6. This mindful awaiting, however, waits neither upon something or someone nor upon nothing, it is, as Bret Davis has said, “a comportment of attentive assistance which is neither simply active nor simply passive,” a way of being which awaits what is to come, “[b]ecause in the experience of the coming, and in the experience that it is what we are waiting on, and that in such waiting our essence first becomes free – because in the simple experience of all this, what is healing draws near and is granted to us” (GA 77: 219, 142). However, in order to fully understand how this healing occurs and how it makes right what is out of joint, I will turn briefly to Heidegger’s most sustained discussions of healing, outside the third Country Path Conversation, through his reflections on the hale and the holy via Hölderlin.
a. The Holy, the Hale, and Healing
6 Heidegger describes the essence of the Weile in a similar passage a few years later in GA 78, Der Spruch des Anaximander, “Das Wesen der Weile, die je eine Weile ist, beruht nicht in der Dauer, als der „Länge“ der „Zeit“, sondern im Verweilen als dem an-sich-haltenden Zögern, als welches der überstehende Übergang ist, die Fuge selber von Entstehen und Entgehen. Das Anwesende ist als je einer, seiner Weile Verfügtes je ein Weiliges: das wesenhafte Jeweilige. Weilen der Weile ist Aufhalten der offenen Weite in einem zweifachen Sinne: Offenhalten und Anhalten zumal, so daß im Weilen die Lichtung der offenen Weite mit erscheint, aber nicht als solche; Anhalten, so daß die offene Weite nicht entgeht, im Nicht-Entgehen aber zugleich „auf“, d.h. hier offen gehalten bleibt. Dieses zweifache Aufhalten der offenen Weite, im welchem Aufhalten das je Weilende an sich hält, und so je seine Weile wahrt, ist das Wesen der Zögerung, das erscheinende Bleiben im Gang als Stand im schon ankommenden Verscheinen“ (GA 78: 172).
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If what is healing about the holy in the third Country Path Conversation seems reserved yet optimistic, Heidegger’s tenor a few years later in Wozu Dichter? takes on a darker and more foreboding tone. Heidegger here links the devastation of modernity with the dawning of the technological and a “single endless winter”. He warns that “[w]hat is whole [das Heile] withdraws. The world is being emptied of what is whole and heals [heil-los]…unless there are still mortals capable of seeing what is unwhole and unhealing threaten as unwhole and unhealing” (GA 5: 295, 221). Such mortals, Heidegger tells us, would have to be aware of the danger that “conceals itself in the abyss in its relation to all beings,” and risk a turn in the essence of humanity (GA 5: 296, 222). This turn of essence is accomplished through a stance of defenselessness and memory, as inward turn, and a refusal to will things into objects. This stance is echoed in Heidegger’s reflections on Hölderlin’s hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine” from a decade earlier when he writes:
Hölderlin names the holy something ‘disinterested’ [uneigennützig]. ‘Disinterest’ here refers not merely to a relinquishing of self-interest for the benefit of the common interest, but rather to that disinterestedness that removes all self-interest even from the common interest—that is, removes from it its tendency toward self-limitation (GA 39: 84, 77)7.We must, like the poets, turn against the essence of the technological as representation and objectification, as the will to will, if we are to turn our essence away from what is unwhole and out of joint in the age of desolation. We must be disinterested in our engagements with other entities, whether plants, animals, or humans. We must, as Heidegger describes in the unfolding of the fundamental attunement of holy mourning, maintain the inner ground of disinterestedness as a resting within ourselves and genuine self-steadfastness, retract our own
7 I am indebted to Andrew Mitchell and his forthcoming article “Heidegger’s Breakdown: Health and Healing Under the Care of Dr. V.E. von Gebsattel” as well as his book The Fourfold, both which deal with Heidegger’s notion of the hale.
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self-interest in relating to objects as such, and promote the object as such, raising it up “into its own good and its own essence,” where it is set free (GA 39: 86, 79).
As I have hoped to have indicated throughout this paper, Heidegger’s sense of δίκη, τίσις, and ἀδικία, far from a juridical notion of justice or injustice, is based upon an ontological stance which we experience through Ruch and geruhen, that is, letting things be and esteeming them for what they are, holding open the space for their arrival through an attentive assistance. This allowing them to be means not understanding them as objects, waiting to be made use of, or serving our own ends, but as esteeming their appearance within the awhiling expanse of nature itself. Perhaps if we mindfully approach the beings we encounter in our lives through this mediation, as friends to come, esteeming them for the beings they are and not what we want them to be, the pendulum of the “age of devastation” might swing back.
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Grimm, Jacob und Wilhelm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. 16 Bde. in 32 Teilbänden, Leipzig 1854-1961. Quellenverzeichnis Leipzig 1971. Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, s.v. “Fug,” accessed May 4, 2015, http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/.
Heidegger, Martin. In the Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975.
GA 5 Holzwege. 7th Edition. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 1994. English translation: Off the Beaten Track. Ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
GA 35 Der Anfang der Abendländischen Philosophie, Auslegung des Anaximander und Parmenides. Ed. Peter Trawny. 2012. English translation: The Beginning of Western Philosophy: Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.
GA 39 Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein.” 2nd Edition. Ed. Susanne Ziegler. 1989. English translation: Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine.” Trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.
GA 40 Einführung in die Metaphysik. 4th Edition. Ed. Petra Jaeger. 1976. English translation: Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
GA 53 Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister.” 2nd Edition. Ed. Walter Biemel. 1993. English translation: Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” Trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
GA 54 Parmenides. 2nd Edition. Ed. Manfred S. Frings. 1992. English translation: Parmenides. Trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
GA 65 Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). 2nd Edition. Ed. Friedrich- Wilhelm von Herrmann. 1994. English translation: Contributions to Philosophy (from the Event). Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.
GA 77 Feldweg-Gespräche. Ed. Ingrid Schüßler. 1995. English translation: Country Path Conversations. Trans. Bret W. Davis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
GA 78 Der Spruch des Anaximander. Ed. Ingeborg Schüßler. 2010.
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GA 79 Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge. Ed. Petra Jaeger. 1994. English translation: Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking. Trans. Andrew J. Mitchell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012.
Mitchell, Andrew. The Fourfold. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 2015
- , “Heidegger’s Breakdown: Health and Healing Under the Care of Dr. V.E.
von Gebsattel.” Research in Phenomenology (forthcoming).
Sihler, Andrew. New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Watkins, Calvert. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. 2nd Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.
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