Claudia Baracchi
Contributions to the occurring of the past: from the outset, I am speaking of the past. I am not for the moment concerning myself with the appropriateness of this determinate and singular mention of the past, as if it obviously were the past and one. I am speaking as though the past would require a supplement (contributions, indeed), so that it will have been what it was to be. Note, I am not saying: so that it (the past) may be what it is, for this is never a prerogative or possibility for (the) past as such. Nor am I saying, without qualification: so that it (the past) may have been as it will have been—as though the past, in its determination, were a matter of arbitrary retrospective projections, a future invention.
In order to avoid viewing the past merely as a matter of later constructions, the articulation illuminating the past as coming from the future must be qualified. The past would be dispensed, dictated by the future. Yet, the intimation here is that the past out of the future, the past that will have been, arrives or will have arrived as what it was to be, that is, “as itself.” This needs to be emphasized because what is at stake is not, or not simply, allowing the proliferation of possible projections of the past according to a multiplicity of manners of retention, interpretation, or reconstruction—re-creations of the past that, in their relative plausibility, would lie alongside one another, as it were. Often the desire to counteract one-sided or totalizing accounts of the past leads to this kind of response. But, precisely in its reactive character, this response is itself one-sided, for it leaves unscrutinized one of its apparent corollaries, namely, that the past might be the mere aftereffect of optional interpretive strategies or, literally, the creation (an optional creation) of historical revision. To the extent that it neglects the investigation of the disquieting problems thereby implied, such a response seems indeed superficial, even irresponsible.
Thus, I am speaking as though the past would require supplementary contributions, so that it will have been what it was to be, so that it will have arrived, reached itself—become itself. Quite decisively, this way of speaking is oriented toward a disclosure of the past in essential terms. And yet, in the same movement, it points beyond essence. For it appeals to essence and, at once, reveals it as a matter of temporal unfolding, as what-it-was-to-be. And not even the teleological structure clearly announced here may give unity to the temporalizing movement of essence and cast essence in terms of unqualified cohesiveness and completion. For the determination of the what-it-was-to-be, that is, the identity of what-it-was-to-be and what-will-have-been, remains a task (ergon). (Quite self-consciously, my language evokes Aristotle here.) In this sense, essence bespeaks the unbound, as-yet-undecided openness of the movement of temporality.
These considerations, then, cast light on the past both in its necessity and in its unexhausted possibility, on the past in its becoming (therefore as yet unfulfilled) necessity. On the one hand, then, the past is exposed as shining through the necessity and necessitating force of those narratives that will have become dominant. On the other hand, and simultaneously, the past is exposed in its no less necessary irreducibility to necessity, in its necessarily overflowing its own necessity (or in its self-overflowing necessity). Thus, the “itself” and “necessity” of the past come to be understood in terms of superabundance, non-self-coincidence, and temporal dispersion. The past is illuminated as that which still remains in play, moving, yet to be decided—to be supplemented, indeed. The essence of the past will not possibly have been collected into one whole, let alone recollected—for it comes out of the future, as the yet-to-come (zukünftig) or arriving still.
It is in light of these remarks, then, that I am venturing to speak as though the past would rest on a future both possible and necessary—in order not so much to have come to pass at all, but to have come to pass otherwise, irreducibly. As though the past would call out to its heirs and successors—in order not so much to occur, but to be freed from the narrative incrustations of its occurrence and keep occurring, indeed recurring, flowing into itself f rom the future. In this way, the future may be disclosed as the past to come. The past may reenact itself in a repetition whose prerogative is uniqueness (Weiterwinken eines Winken). At stake is glimpsing and, at once, showing and undergoing, at the heart of the Greek beginning, the rift of thinking—letting the rift that thinking is, in its tension and s elf-differing, keep enacting itself. Repetition would, thus, bespeak enacting the beginning in its rift: enacting thinking, sustaining the effort of its restlessness and intensity.
Hence the call for contributions, for the decisive supplementation. But contributions from whom, whence? Who or what is it that stands exposed to such an assignment?
* * *
In the Beiträge zur Philosophie Heidegger speaks of a “hidden history” (verborgene Geschichte) of which, in the nineteenth century, the figures of Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche would have been symptomatic. Such a history would by no means be secret in the sense of unknown, yet remains unreleased in its essential implications, latent, as if beneath the threshold of ordinary experience. In the course of such considerations, Heidegger asks: “does this history as the ground of Dasein continue to be inaccessible to us, not because it is past, but because it is still too futural [zukünftig] for us?” (143/204).1 It is in light of this question that a renewed understanding, in fact, experience of “our” history imposes itself in its urgency—a crossing over into that which remains unacknowledged in our dominant discourses “about” ourselves. Indeed, the task of “[t]hinking in the crossing,” as Heidegger envisions it, entails bringing “into dialogue [Zwiesprache] that which has first been [das erste Gewesene] of the being [Seyns] of truth and that which is futural in the extreme of the truth of being [Seyns]” (Beitr. 5/5–6), that is, what was first constructed (secured) out of the experience of being and what remains yet to come in the arriving of being.
Thus, at the heart of the Beiträge is the attempt at coming to terms with the “originary positioning [Setzung] of the first beginning” (Beitr. 119/170), that is, the Greek inception.2 Out of this positioning an other (or, in fact, the other)3 beginning is to “play forth,” as the Zuspiel of “inceptual thinking” grounded in the yet to come. However asymmetrical and incommensurable, the two modes of inception are indissolubly intertwined. Indeed, for the other beginning to unfold, “a more originary retrieval [Wiederholung] of the first beginning” and “the mindfulness [Besinnung] of its history” must be pursued (40/57). Such a retrieval, then, at once signals the inception of the other beginning and the restitution of the first beginning to itself. Crucial to this endeavor is cultivating an unprecedented intimacy with the first beginning, such that the first beginning may show itself anew and a deeper insight into it may be seized. For this, a mode of thinking attuned to beginnings and itself incipient is called for. As Heidegger says, “inceptual thinking is necessary as an encounter [Auseinandersetzung] between the first beginning, first to be won back, and the other beginning to be unfolded” (40/58). In a certain sense, let it be noticed in an anticipatory fashion, “winning back” the first beginning and “unfolding” the other beginning are to be comprehended in their sameness.
Not unlike his analyses in previous works, Heidegger’s approach to the Greeks in the Beiträge is dynamically twofold. It presents a distinctive oscillation, or tension. On the one hand, it calls for a de-sedimenting reading of the Greek texts, which would show them as irreducible to later systematizations and encounter them more primordially. On the other hand, however, the Greeks, most notably Plato and Aristotle, are decisively inscribed within the comprehensive framework of the “history of being,” or of metaphysics; the Greek inception is seen as already entailing an orientation, impressing a direction, prescribing the history of thinking leading to “us”—quite decisively, it is seen as finding its fulfillment in that history.
Thus, the first beginning (der erste Anfang) is understood as metaphysics, or Platonism.4 Concomitantly, Plato is recognized as the threshold, the locus in which the question of the truth of being is both raised and deflected, obscured. For here a turning would have taken place from the primordial insight into truth as disclosure to the understanding of truth as correctness already anticipating the doctrine of adæquatio.
The first beginning, thus, would have begun with a lapse, or as a lapse—primarily because of the faintness (literally, an asthenia) characterizing the way in which the question of being was posed. The question of being (Seyn) was formulated in terms of beingness (ousia, Seiendheit) and accessed by reference (by turning) to beings. In this perspective being is approached as itself a being. In other words, the question was raised concerning the truth of beings, the being of beings, without, however, broaching the question concerning truth:
The first beginning experiences and posits [erfährt und setzt] the truth of beings, without questioning toward truth as such, because what is unhidden in it, a being as a being, necessarily overpowers everything and uses up even the nothing, taking it in or annihilating it completely as the “not” and the “against.”
The other beginning experiences [erfährt] the truth of being [Seyns] and questions toward the being [Seyn] of truth in order first to ground the essencing [Wesung] of being [Seyns] and to let beings as the true of that originary truth spring forth. (Beitr. 125–26/179)
The “leading question” concerning being as ousia (the question asking “what is . . . ?”) overshadows the “grounding question” of Seyn, that is, the question “toward” the being of truth (I maintain the awkward translation above in order to emphasize questioning as a matter of orientation, of aiming). It is the prevalence of the former and the simultaneous occultation of the latter that constitute metaphysics as such. Folded within such a movement is the reduction of privation to denial and negation.
In the first beginning, Heidegger suggests, human Da-sein would undergo and be overwhelmed by beings in their peremptory upsurge. In virtue of this “inceptual experience [Erfahrung]” Da-sein would come to understand itself as animal rationale (Beitr. 126/180). Out of the emergence of beings (of nature) and of the protective self-distancing of Da-sein, there arises Da-sein’s self-understanding in terms of ratio. The question of the truth of being is as such covered over and, concomitantly, the experience of beings is lost as well, for beings are retained only as conceptually made present, as secured to presence, re-presented, objectified by the “knowing animal.” The contraposition subject/object, and hence the priority of the knowing subject, of knowledge as mastery, is already inscribed here. Being becomes a matter of knowing; truth (distanced and mastered in its arising) turns into certainty:
Why, in the open of physis, did logos as well as nous already have to be named early on as the grounding sites of “being” [des “Seins”] and why was all knowing arranged accordingly?
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physis is so overpowering that noein and logos are experienced as belonging to it, even belonging to beings in their beingness (not yet grasped “generally” in terms of ideas). But as soon as experience, as originary knowing of beings themselves, unfolds unto questioning towards beings, questioning itself, retreating before [vor] beings, grasped as differentiated and in a certain sense independent with respect to beings, as such setting itself before [vor dieses . . . sich stellend] beings, must set them forth [her-stellen]. (Beitr. 133/190)
The fading of the question of being occurs precisely in thinking being on the basis of beings. But, again, in such thinking the sense of beings is also obscured. In the final analysis, beings will have been apprehended by reference to being as the supreme, most encompassing being (onto-theology).
I should, in passing, underscore Heidegger’s sweeping gesture (especially in §§95–114), allowing him to gather into a relatively seamless narrative (the one history of Western metaphysics) the Greek beginning and its developments through medieval scholasticism, modernity, and German idealism, all the way to Nietzsche—as though the translation of zoon logon echon into animal rationale, of logos into ratio, were an unproblematic matter; as though the conflation of logos and nous, and the understanding of both in terms of ratio or intellectus, were equally obvious; as though the Greeks should essentially be comprehended as proto-Cartesian in their thrust, or even as laying out the task that Hegelian teleology will have accomplished; as though the Greek inception were to be reduced to that which became possible or thinkable in its wake, without considering how it also indeterminately exceeds that which it enabled and made possible. In fact, without considering how the enabling may have been predicated precisely on the forgetfulness, on part of the enabled, of the enabling source as excessive; without considering how the oblivion of excess may precisely have allowed for the arising of the “history of the West” as distinctively forgetful. (Here the challenge would be to think the creativity of oblivion, oblivion as generative force.) In other words, it may be that, far from seamless, continuous, or causally calculable, the “history of metaphysics” developed in a fragmented fashion, through radical discontinuities and fissures of forgetfulness, following unexpected, far-from-rectilinear turns. It may be that the Greek beginning, neither the first nor the last, lies more hidden and inaccessible than ever precisely in its alleged epigones, in the schools bearing the names of its key figures. I signal these issues here as eminently worthy of being examined further.
However, in the tense unfolding of his meditation, Heidegger also highlights the degree to which the other beginning would inceptively occur out of the first and belong in it. In this sense, the Übergang (passage, crossing) from the first to the other beginning can be understood as a retaining that overcomes, a destruction that remembers, a freedom that at once recognizes and is owned. “Retaining bespeaks: questioning towards the being of beings. But the overcoming bespeaks: questioning beforehand towards the truth of being [Seyns], towards that which in metaphysics never became a question and never could” (Beitr. 128/182). The overcoming occurs as a sustained engagement with and insight into that which is to be overcome. This, Heidegger points out, was undertaken already in Sein und Zeit: “This double character in the crossing, which grasps metaphysics more originarily and thus at the same time overcomes it, is through and through the mark of ‘fundamental ontology,’ i.e., of Being and Time” (ibid.). Indeed, as Heidegger will repeatedly emphasize,
[m]indfulness of “ontology” is necessary in the crossing to this [other beginning] from that [first beginning], so much so that the thought of “fundamental ontology” must be thought through. For in fundamental ontology the leading question is first grasped, unfolded and made manifest . . . as a question. (Beitr. 143/205)
In fundamental ontology the guiding question of Platonism is made to appear, revealed as such. It is grasped as what it is, as itself—grasped, that is, in a manner that is attuned to it, truer to it than even its own self-understanding. Addressing the “remarkably shallow ‘critique’ of ‘ontology’ ” undertaken, for example, by Jaspers, Heidegger continues:
A bare rejection of “ontology” without an overcoming of it from its origin accomplishes nothing at all; at most it endangers every will to thinking. . . . Conversely, an overcoming of ontology first requires therefore precisely the unfolding of ontology from its beginning. (ibid.)
Again, this is precisely what was at stake in Sein und Zeit. For “the thinking willing . . . in Being and Time seeks a way of crossing from the leading question to the grounding question” (ibid.).
Thus, again in the Beiträge it is a matter both of destroying the sediment and of recollecting the forgotten, bringing it back to life and light, seizing it in the inceptive unfolding of its essence. Destruction and overcoming occur only as radical understanding, as taking up anew, as if for the first time. This is why, among other things, history (Geschichte) is not an addendum to an autonomous systematic development, is neither historiography (Historie) nor historicism (Historismus), but rather constitutes the very possibility of an other inception:
Playing forth is of historical essence and a first thrusting [Brückenschlagen] of the crossing, a bridge [Brücke] that swings out to a shore first to be decided.
But the playing forth of the history of the first inceptual thinking is not a historical [historische] addendum to and portending of a “new” “system” but rather is in itself the essential transformation-promoting preparation of the other beginning. Therefore, in a manner more inconspicuous and more decisive, we must perhaps direct the historical mindfulness only toward the thinkers of [belonging in] the history of the first beginning and, through a questioning dialogue with their questioning posture, suddenly plant a questioning that one day finds itself expressly as rooted in an other beginning. (Beitr. 119/169)5
In the “task” (Aufgabe) here outlined it is neither a matter of opposing metaphysics nor of leaving it behind:
But even for this very reason, thinking in the crossing dare not succumb to the temptation of simply leaving behind [hinter sich zu lassen] that which it has grasped as the end and in the end, instead of accomplishing [hinter sich zu bringen] this end, i.e., apprehending this end now for the first time in its essence and letting this be transformed and played into the truth of being [Seyns]. The talk of the end of metaphysics dare not mislead one to the opinion that philosophy is finished with “metaphysics.” On the contrary: in its essential impossibility metaphysics must now first be played forth into philosophy and philosophy itself must be played over into its other beginning. (Beitr. 122/173)
The task entails that we become mindful, aware of what it means to inherit, that we experience such inheriting as nothing automatically befalling those who come afterward. It demands that we thoughtfully become heirs, for “[o]ne is never an heir merely by the accident of being one who comes later [Späterer]” (Beitr. 138/198).6
But Heidegger’s intimation may be understood in an even more radical fashion, for ultimately adumbrated here is the other beginning as nothing other than the first beginning more primordially understood, taken beyond its own self-understanding or self-representation. To be sure, the first beginning, while remaining “decisively as first,” must also be “overcome as beginning” (Beitr. 5/6). Indeed, in the thinking that announces the other beginning, “reverence before the first beginning . . . must coincide with the relentlessness of the turn away [Abkehr] of an other questioning and saying” (Beitr. 5/6). And yet, Heidegger also emphatically recalls that “[t]he style of thoughtful mindfulness in the crossing [from one beginning to the other], too, is already determined by this allotment [Zugewiesenheit] of the one and the other beginning to each other” (Beitr. 4/5). Again, and even more decisively, the beginning as such “reaches ahead and thus otherwise reaches beyond that which is begun through it and determines accordingly its own retrieval [Wieder-holung]” (Beitr. 39/55). It is in and as the insight into that which, however essential, remained concealed in the first beginning that the other beginning finds its inception. It is in glimpsing that which the first beginning never consciously saw but only blindly enacted, that which the first beginning could not remember but only obliviously thrived on, that the other beginning becomes possible and (perhaps) necessary. In beginning to experience that which the first beginning, in its very unfolding, could not experience, the other beginning begins. It begins, that is, as the inceptive responsiveness to that which necessitated the unfolding of the first beginning, to that whose obscuration was precisely the function of the first beginning in its unfolding glow. In a way, then, the other beginning indicates the first beginning in the movement of becoming aware of itself (Selbstbesinnung), of what prompted it—the first beginning gaining “historical mindfulness” over and beyond its crystallized historical self-account (Beitr. 4/5). The other beginning points to the inceptual manifestation of the heretofore necessarily, essentially non-manifest. It could be said that implied here is a certain liberation, a certain transpiring of the first beginning beyond its own constraints.
Yet, if the “crossing” from the first to the other beginning may be understood in these terms, this strand of Heidegger’s thinking, in its power and radicality, exposes the radically problematic character of another strand of his efforts to read the Greek beginning as the promise that finds its genuine fulfillment first in modernity (in modern as well as premodern, scientific as well as theological, dualisms), then in Hegel, and finally in Nietzsche ( the one who would have inverted Platonism). At the heart of Heidegger’s meditation one finds this deep disquietude or rift. On the one hand, a thread of his thinking pursues the richness, the as-yet-unfathomed, hence irreducible, fecundity of the first beginning, and emphasizes the grounding function of the first beginning with respect to the other beginning. On the other hand, his narrative of a unitary and homogeneous “history of metaphysics” formulaically reduces the Greek beginning, makes the first beginning simple, reifies such an origin. It could even be surmised that this discourse sets such a beginning up in order to tear it down: “This erecting of the towering [Ragenden] of the first beginning is the sense of the ‘destruction’ in the crossing to the other beginning” (125/179). The difficulty I am here bringing to the fore is that this narrative may forget the Greek beginning in its uniqueness as well as complexity, and do so in a twofold way: (1) in the first place, by obliterating the forgetfulness of the Greek beginning which is necessary for a phenomenon, say, such as Cartesian scientism to arise at all (again, the creativity of oblivion); (2) secondly, and at the same time, by obliterating the obliteration, by forgetting the forgetfulness it enacts, making such forgetfulness even more elusive, even more arduous to catch. In this dimension of Heidegger’s thinking one may find a potent gesture of occultation, which gains its rhetorical force precisely in virtue of its repeated appeals to the task of manifestation.
Even as one considers what lies at the heart of Heidegger’s meditation toward the other beginning, one wonders whether there may not be reasons to discern deep (if barely audible at this point) resonances between the movement of this thinking and certain dimensions of the ancient Greek experience. Heidegger is seeking an emancipation from subjective, psychologistic, or “personalistic” manners of investigation, stretching out to a mode of thinking that in more than one crucial sense does not say “I”:
Said in the preparatory exercise is a questioning that is neither the goal-oriented doing of an individual nor the limited calculation of a community. Rather, it is above all the further hinting [Weiterwinken] of a hint [Winkes] that comes from that which is most question-worthy and remains allotted [zugewiesen] to it.
Disengaging from any “personal” fabrication succeeds only from the intimacy [Innigkeit] with the earliest belonging [Zugehörens]. (Beitr. 4/4)
In the other beginning, Heidegger is striving inceptively to say, to announce “the great turning around [die große Umkehrung] . . . which is beyond all ‘revaluation of all values,’ that turning around in which beings are not grounded in terms of human being, but rather being-human is grounded from being [Seyn]” (Beitr. 129/184). He warns that “[i]t is no longer a case of talking ‘about’ something and presenting something objective [ein Gegenständliches darzustellen], but rather of being owned over to [appropriated by] that which owns [sondern dem Er-eignis übereignet zu werden], which amounts to an essential transformation of the human from ‘rational animal’ (animal rationale) to Da-sein” (3/3). In this turning “Dasein’s allotment [Zuweisung] to being [Seyn] comes into its own” (4/4). Crucially, then, what is announced concerns us (again, Selbstbesinnung)—the way in which we do not find our measure in ourselves but dwell, belong in mystery. Indeed, the way in which we are “used” by being, which, owning us, takes place and eventuates in and through, over and beyond us, in glowing affirmation as well as in the even more originary “no” or withdrawal (125/178).7 Heidegger continues:
[I]s not the yes and no an essential possession of being [Seins] itself—and the no even more originarily than the yes?
But how? Must not the “no” (and the yes) have its essential form in the Da-sein that is used by being [in dem vom Seyn gebrauchten Da-sein]? The no is the great leap-off [Ab-sprung], in which the Da- in Da-sein is leaped open [ersprungen]. The leap-off, which both “affirms” that from which it leaps off, but which also has itself as leap no nothing [nichts Nichtiges hat]. The leap-off itself first undertakes to leap-open the leap, and so here the no surpasses the yes. Therefore, however, seen externally, this no is the setting-apart [Ab-setzung] of the other beginning against the first beginning—never “negating” in the usual sense of rejecting or even degrading. Rather, this originary negating is of the kind of that not-granting that refuses a still-going-along-with out of knowing and recognizing the uniqueness of that which in its end calls for the other beginning. (Beitr. 125/178)
The “no,” the privation not to be understood in merely privative terms, points to that which, in and as Dasein, eludes (lanthanein) Dasein. It points to latency as “essential” and “constitutive” of being-there, as intimating the “structure” (here words are lacking, or must signify anew) of coming to pass. The “no” indicates being-there as dispossessed, as not cognitively mastering, let alone owning itself in its becoming, but rather as belonging—belonging in that which can hardly be a ground.
What is foreshadowed is the truth of being as Ereignis, as the coming to pass of being-there: “Being [Seyn], however, up to now the most general and most current in the shape of beingness, becomes as Ereignis the most unique and most wondrous [or most estranging, Befremdlichste]” (Beitr. 124/177). Ereignis names being as being-harbored in the coming to pass of beings, for beings are made manifest as “sheltering [Bergung] of the truth of Ereignis” (Beitr. 144/207).8 In turn, being-there, “used” by being, is said to be that through and as which being eventuates, properly comes into its own, appropriates, that is, comes to pass, takes place (ereignet). The transition from truth as correctness of judgment to truth as the turning of Ereignis (Beitr. 130/185) is made perspicuous through the recognition of “time” as “the naming of the ‘truth’ of being [Seins], and all this as a task, as ‘on-the-way’ [’unterwegs’]; not as ‘doctrine’ and dogmatics” (Beitr. 128/183).
If, however, these are crucial lineaments of Heidegger’s work in the Beiträge, one must wonder whether similar concerns may not be heard in the inaugural articulations of Greek thinking. Is the Greek beginning, precisely in its irreducibility to dominant historiography, altogether other with respect to these insights in the inceptive work Heidegger announces? Is the Greek beginning, in its exceeding the scribes’ narratives and canonizations, other than the other beginning? Even the briefest re-turn to the Greeks raises doubts concerning, first of all, whether the thinking that says “I,” be it in a psychologistic or transcendental mode, can be ascribed to them; whether they truly inaugurate the thinking of the priority and centrality of the human being, most notably as animal rationale (which heralds the priority and centrality of ratio tout court, hence of omni-intelligibility); whether, in its culmination, their thinking does in fact obscure the truth of aletheia as disclosure, thus laying down the conditions for the possibility of truth as certainty, of representation, of dualism in its various forms; and lastly, whether, blinded by the overwhelming luminosity of what is, overly filled with the arriving of phenomena, they exhibit a desensitization to the crevices and interruptions pervading being-there—a desensitization or “blindness to the ‘no’” that would only allow them to affirm, to say “yes.”
Indeed, how would the “I,” let alone “personality,” or even the priority of reason without any further qualification, be thinkable on Plato’s terms (and I am not here speaking of Platonism and its many souls)? Isn’t Plato, to mention but one of the fathomless difficulties inscribed in his body, the thinker of eros, of desirous rapture and loss of self, of love as that which, alone, would allow for recollection, and hence for knowledge as the contemplation of what is? Isn’t knowledge, thus understood, groundless and belonging in a movement that is neither autarchic, nor autonomous, nor yet subjective? And, if knowledge articulates itself in the lack of ground, or if its “ground” is love (for love endows one with different eyes, allows one to see what would otherwise remain shrouded), does this not suggest that, prior to all knowing in the strict sense, one is always already in the world, belonging there, exposed and involved in all manners of action? After all, isn’t Plato the thinker of—not just any ultimate principle, but a principle he calls the good, in light of which, he indicates, all knowing gains its sense and worth, but which remains itself unknown, impervious to dialectical/eidetic grasp, beyond being as beingness (epekeina tes ousias)? Does this not compromise any idealistic or dualistic program?
Furthermore, isn’t much of Plato’s work, just as is the case with Aristotle’s, a sustained response to the anthropocentric claims of the sophists? Finally, what about the shivering of Plato’s logos, restlessly oscillating between demonstrative and mythical elocution, for reasons that are neither extrinsically “stylistic” nor the result of authorial strategy, but rather have to do with the intractable limits of language and reason?
Again, concerning the centrality of the anthropos and the all-encompassing work of rationality, one asks: Did Plato as well as Aristotle not recognize physis above all as that which, in its orientation and scope, exceeds the human, marks the limits of human grasp, indeed encompassing the human as that which the human cannot bring back to itself, that which remains opaque, illegible (vs., e.g., §97)? Is this not symptomatic of a nascent insight into being-there as being-owned, appropriated, belonging in that which is neither mastered nor reducible to the human? In this connection, one thinks of Timaeus as well as of various Aristotelian observations disseminated throughout the corpus (e.g., EN book Z, where we find a reflection on the anthropos as relatively unremarkable vis-à-vis the splendor of other phenomena in the cosmos). Suffice it here to mention the following crucial moment of Metaphysics Λ, in which Aristotle, through an unusual (for him) and all-the-more-remarkable appeal to myth, articulates the nexus of divinity and physis and barely hides a smile in mentioning the anthropomorphizing stratagems of humans:
The ancients of very early times bequeathed to posterity in the form of a myth a tradition that the heavenly bodies are gods and that the divinity encompasses the whole of nature. The rest of the tradition has been added later as a means of persuading the many and as something useful for the laws and for matters of expediency; for they say that these gods are like human beings in form and like some of the other animals, and also other things which follow from or are similar to those stated. But if one were to separate from the later additions the first point and attend to this alone (namely, that they thought the first substances to be gods), he might realize that this was divinely spoken and that, while probably every art and every philosophy has often reached a stage of development as far as it could and then again has perished, these opinions about the gods were saved like relics up to now. Anyway, the opinion of our forefathers is evident to us to just this extent. (1074b 1 ff.)
This takes place at an utterly crucial point in Metaphysics, when Aristotle must cogently argue for the oneness of the sky in kind and in number. One is struck here by the vigorous indications of a philosophy of history sustaining itself in the face of the irretrievability of origin and impenetrability of its mystery; by the suggestion of the fluctuating life (and death) of ways of thinking; and by the thought of human finitude, not understood as diminishment but instead revealing the unique luminosity of human debris, of the traces left across the expanses of time. Coming to Aristotle in this manner makes it arduous, if at all feasible, to consider his thought as the mere, and for that matter unfinished (imperfect), projection of Thomism, or even of the Hegelian longing for the system.
Again, concerning the crucial issue of being as beingness, ousia: is this a doctrine? Aristotle is conspicuously the thinker articulating being in terms of physis (Physics, Met. Γ), as Heidegger himself acknowledges in the “Physis” essay.9 The Metaphysics constitutes a sustained and unresolved elucidation of the difficulties inherent in the language of ousia as well as, more broadly, in the polysemy of being. It is, after all, Aristotle who announces that understanding being in terms of ousia, far from constituting an answer, let alone a doctrine, was and remains a question concerning which “in early times, and now, and always” one experiences aporia (Met. Z, 1028b 3 f.). Aristotle is, moreover, the thinker of the human as integrally involved in the self-reproducing workings of life, which the human serves without owning or even grasping it, as if the human were an organon of physis, “used” by it. For physis, albeit assumed in its teleological orientation, remains ultimately inscrutable, hidden, its purposefulness operating according to causes not always determinate or determinable, mysterious. Aristotle articulates the that, not the what, of teleology. The task of thinking is yet to be accomplished.
In the final analysis, nous itself, just as all first principles, remains excessive vis-à-vis the demonstrative procedures of knowledge, calling attention to the excess of intellection or intuition with respect to knowledge and, in fact, the radical alterity of nous with respect to logos. This latter point may also account for the convergence of nous and aisthesis suggested in EN book Z. Quite consistently, Aristotle is the thinker of unexhausted aporia and enduring wonder.
One concluding specification: Is Aristotle not, as Heidegger also remarks in Sein und Zeit, the thinker of truth as phenomenon? Does Aristotle not, in the opening of Metaphysics, use the terms pragma, aletheia, and phainomenon synonymously, suggesting that it is truth, understood as “fact” or what shines forth, that motivates inquiry and orients it with necessitating force (Met. A, 984a 18, 984b 10, 986b 31)? Aristotle will never simply have discussed truth as the mere property of statements. On the contrary, he will relentlessly have underscored the problem of the dissociation of logos from the sensible/intuitive stratum of experience (most notably in Met. G and EN VIII, where incontinence is treated not as a vice, but as the dissociation of logos from desire or experience), warning against it precisely as a problem. And this understanding of truth as phenomenal disclosure could not be more remote from a conception of phenomenon as opposed to purely intelligible form, of appearance as opposed to essence, and hence sensation to cognition. The phenomenon of truth discloses the primordiality of truth with respect to the scientific pronouncement and points to the pre-epistemic dimension of experience, indeed, the non-demonstrative ground or un-grounding condition of demonstration. Aristotle further develops what in Plato is the object of sensibility, apprehended in and by trust (pistis), in terms of the nonscientific, in fact ethical, prerequisites of science. For the taking in of truth in its necessitating self-evidence is a matter of comportment, of posture, of being “healthily disposed with regard to the truth.” (Met. G, on the so-called law of non-contradiction, signals the import of ethics for ontology. Aristotle is far from simplistic or rationalistic in his ethical discussion.)
Thus, let it be recalled parenthetically, the privileging of affirmation and concomitant oblivion of the primordiality of the “no” is not articulated, even at the zenith of Greek thinking, in an epistemological/cognitive vein. It appears indeed that the privilege the Greeks accord to the radiance of phenomena, to being, to the affirmation and positivity of what is there, far from revealing and addressing a need for conceptual control, has a root in a certain priority of the ethical.10 In this sense, Heidegger’s emphasis on and prioritization of the “no” (withdrawal, privation) is revealed in its problematic character or qualified cogency. For only in light of the priority of the pursuit of knowledge does the emphasis on affirmation and positing engender the problems Heidegger appropriately underlines. But, in light of the intertwined dimensions of ethos, sensibility, and experience, how would one deny that affirmation is originary, in fact radically so, precisely because lying beyond the claims, values, and authority of knowledge stricto sensu?
The mention of these vital moments in the Greek inauguration can here only be contracted, abbreviated in the extreme. To be sure, such aspects of the meditations of Plato and Aristotle, while by no means secondary or marginal, are for the most part obscured in the traditional canonization of these thinkers, that is, in the assimilation and transformation of them into “the tradition”—an assimilation and a transformation through and as which “the tradition,” in the singular, is itself as such formed.
Yet, precisely to the extent that Heidegger undertakes to encounter the first beginning in a more primordial way, it seems that the acknowledgment of these traditionally repressed aspects of the Greek inception would most properly belong here. Otherwise the forgetfulness, indeed, the forgetfulness of the forgetting or unconscious blindness that may remain at work in Heidegger’s readings of the Greeks could end up in complicity with, even reinforcing, the “history of metaphysics” that Heidegger is seeking thoughtfully to traverse. Or is the impoverished schematization of the first beginning necessary in order to set into relief more starkly and cogently the articulation of the other beginning as unprecedented? Is the patricidal logic of the new truly inescapable?
But Heidegger says: “From a new originariness the other beginning assists the first beginning towards the truth of its history, and thus towards its inalienable and ownmost otherness [Andersartigkeit], which becomes fruitful solely in the historical dialogue [Zwiesprache] of thinkers” (Beitr. 131/187). As was suggested above, the other beginning may announce itself as the first beginning becoming aware of itself, inceptively remembering itself, allowing its own oblivion to surface as such—above all, illuminating itself in its self-difference. The other may announce itself in and as the first beginning recovering its irreducibility, always already, to what it may relate or may have related “about” itself—that is, in and as the first beginning making itself manifest as other than itself, as neither self-identical nor self-contained, and hence as a problem. And just as, in their dynamic interplay, mindlessness and mindfulness or forgetfulness and remembrance do not simply succeed each other in terms of linear temporality, but interpenetrate in a movement of unfolding and withdrawal, manifestation and latency, so the interplay of first and other beginning may not be understood merely in terms of succession or supplanting but in terms of the self-differing of the same—in terms of the movement, neither internal nor external, holding together in their difference and inseparability that which comes to shine and that which is overshadowed in the shining, the unfolding and that which it enfolds in its unfolding, the emergent and that which remains hidden, buried, precisely through the emerging. The transition from the first to the other would indicate the becoming manifest of the “hidden history,” of the history of the first beginning, hidden in as well as hidden to the first beginning.
The first and the other beginning would, thus, be thought as the same—which does not mean as identical. This would call for a retrieval of the first beginning as the other beginning—for a retrieval of the otherness, strangeness, and estrangement in those texts that have been made mindlessly familiar but may not be so. The traces and symptoms of an agitation haunting these discourses, destabilizing them, consistently qualifying even the most central systematic outcomes, are pervasive and cannot be relegated to the order of the subliminal or the accidental.
* * *
A brief reflection, to conclude, on the luminous insightfulness and simultaneous blindness or unresponsiveness characterizing Heidegger’s Wiederholung. An insight lights up and for an instant starkly illumines, in the nocturnal expanse, the contours of what-is. However, for the organs used to the dark, what follows is not clarity, but rather disorientation and, for a time, even dimmer perception. What was momentarily wrested from obscurity is swallowed back into latency, forgotten. Insight undergoes deflection and dissipation in the course of time (Met. Λ). Not only does it tend to fade, but also it comes to be deformed, even at odds with itself, an aberration of its own originary disclosure, in the literal sense of an erring or straying-from itself. One begins in a beginning that commands a certain turning, a certain trajectory. Yet, in the wake of beginning, apparently one cannot maintain that orientation, diverges, even turns against oneself, betrays oneself, proceeds in a contrary direction—all the while believing one is proceeding along the same path. It is the latter aspect of this phenomenon that demands attention—not so much the sliding or straying from originary insight, the loss and obscuration of it, but the forgetfulness or the unapparent element of this, the belief that the straying has not happened.
This phenomenon lies at the heart of the problem of memory, transmission, history. It is as though one cannot live in the understanding that occasionally releases itself into manifestation. Errancy bespeaks the continuity of the movement away from itself, without the awareness thereof: it does not take place as the conscious, explicit interruption of a course, but as the claim to a seamless unfolding of it. Thus, in the name of one’s beginning or initial opening, one may comport oneself, whether in the deed of thinking or in other endeavors, according to ways that counter that beginning. What is at stake is a certain rift between the letter and its temporal enactment—or, rather, its lack of enactment, for it tends to die away, to remain only as citation when one has long before lost track of it and of oneself. The root of “political” problems, in general of problems of action, and of all manners of folly, even collective folly, lies here. Consider, for example, the wars waged in the name of Christianity, that is, the rift between the words Christ is said to have uttered and the reception and retention thereof. But this dynamic may be discerned even in the context of the work of one individuated psyche, of one s ingle thinker. One forgets oneself, in spite of oneself, is carried away from one’s own vision. . . . A structure of oblivion, self-alienation, and drifting may be operative at the heart of the unfolding of thinking. And it may have to do with positing, with a positing that posits itself in an unqualified, unmoving way. It is as though the energy of beginning(s) could not be sustained, endured. It seems to grow dimmer, becomes unreadable.
But is this necessary? Inevitable, ineluctable? What kind of awareness would it take, if not to avoid this altogether, then minimally to remain conscious of this phenomenon, to remain vigilant, questioning, and not become oblivious of the curvatures, of the fateful tropisms, that seem to inhere in all positing and project?11 It might take, among other things, a certain lightness with words—a certain necessarily qualified trust in them. For alone, out of context, even if carefully analyzed in their etymology, they may not carry and reveal much. What seems crucial is: how do they live? How do they play with one another, indeed, each time receive their signification in virtue of their interplay? Above all: how are they embodied, how are they themselves deeds, incarnated, at work? How are they necessitated by the upsurge of disclosure? An unqualified love of words for their own sake, which abstracts them from the element in which they live, from their unique context, may be dangerous indeed: potentially desensitizing, dis-integrating, forgetful. A historical narrative such as that of the “history of Western metaphysics” or of being, aiming, in its homogenizing strategy, at drawing continuities based on the systematic stability of signification, may entail a certain oblivion of oblivion. It may display a tendency to downplay oblivion, not taking it seriously enough, that is, not taking seriously a certain indeterminacy marking the past, the past as yet to come. The leap of an other beginning, the leap that an other beginning would be, instead, would indicate: staying with the same, illuminating it otherwise.12
1. Here and throughout the essay, the parenthetical references to the English translation (Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad and K. Maly [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999]) are followed by those to the German text (Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe 65 [Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989]). However, my own rendition of the German passages here quoted significantly diverges from the available translation.
2. I will, in this context, forgo questioning Heidegger’s retrieval of ancient Greek thinking according to the logic of beginning, indeed, the first and only beginning of what will have been called the tradition of Western philosophy. Heidegger’s equation of Greek (Western) philosophy with philosophy tout court is a systemic feature of his work that, however remarkable, mostly goes unremarked precisely (1) because of the apparent obviousness of this identity and (2) because in it a fundamental assumption of the dominant historiographic narrative is at once harbored, echoed, protected, and preserved as unconscious and unexamined.
3. Beitr. 4/5.
4. Regarding the incidence of the language of beginnings, see, among others, the exemplary moments in Plato’s Sophist (trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997]), 154, and “On the Essence and Concept of Physis in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1,” in Pathmarks, trans. W. McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 204 and 229.
5. As Heidegger will insist in the “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (Basic Writings, ed. by D. F. Krell [New York: HarperCollins, 1993], 217–65), “the thinking that thinks into the truth of being is, as thinking, historical. There is not a ‘systematic’ thinking and next to it an illustrative history of past opinions” (238). This text returns time and again to the question of history, in which the eventuation of thinking properly belongs or inheres: “Thought in a more primordial way, there is the history of being to which thinking belongs as a recollection of this history, propriated by it. Such recollective thought differs essentially from the subsequent presentation of history in the sense of an evanescent past” (239). The past emerges as anything but evanescent. It is also noteworthy that in the “Letter” the language of experience pervasively structures the articulation of the question of history: “Assuming that in the future the human being will be able to think the truth of being, he will think from ek-sistence. The human being stands ek-sistingly in the destiny of being. The ek-sistence of the human being is historical as such, but not only or primarily because so much happens to the human being and to things human in the course of time. Because it must think the ek-sistence of Da-sein, the thinking of Being and Time is essentially concerned that the historicity of Dasein be experienced” (ibid.). The language of history, experience (erfahren), and Seinsverlassenheit is variously intertwined in the Beiträge (e.g., §§87, 91, 100, 110).
6. Concomitantly with these remarks regarding history, we may recall certain reflections by Husserl in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). In the Beilage “Denial of Scientific Philosophy” (1935), Husserl broaches the question of philosophy as the practice of becoming other, of becoming “a different philosopher” (393), and observes: “There is no doubt, then, that we must engross ourselves in historical considerations if we are to be able to understand ourselves as philosophers and understand what philosophy is to become through us” (391). And again, in the Beilage “The Origin of Geometry” (1936): “The ruling dogma of the separation in principle between epistemological elucidation and historical, even humanistic-psychological explanation, between epistemological and genetic origin, is fundamentally mistaken. . . . Or, rather, what is fundamentally mistaken is the limitation through which precisely the deepest and most genuine problems of history are concealed” (370).
7. On the language of “usage,” see “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, 337, and “The Anaximander Fragment,” in Early Greek Thinking, trans. D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984), esp. 50–58. The eventuation of being through and as us and our belonging in the mystery of such a “use” are related to the problem of the self-concealment of physis, discussed in “On the Essence and Concept of Physis in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1.”
8. Eigen: of one’s own, proper. Eignen: to be appropriate, fit, suitable, inherent, to belong. In “On the Essence and Concept of Physis in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1,” Heidegger turns to related terms to think through the language of dynamis. In the course of his discussion of hyle as to dynamei, he translates dynamis as Eignung, Geeignetheit (appropriation, appropriateness, suitability) and to dynamei as das Geeignete (the appropriated, the appropriate) (214). A gesture toward a thoughtful evocation, if not proper translation, of the word Ereignis may be found in the term “propriation” or in phrases such as “propriative event,” “that which owns, appropriates,” “gaining itself back,” all of which point to the intersecting orders of propriety and property.
9. Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of Physis in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1.”
10. Consider other authors emphasizing affirmation, as diverse as Nietzsche, Derrida, and Levinas.
11. Aristotle’s words in Metaphysics α may be poignantly appropriate to the problem posed by this particular phenomenon: “Perhaps the cause of this difficulty, which may exist in two ways, is in us and not in the facts. For as the eyes of bats are to the light of day, so is the intellect of our soul to the objects which in their nature are most apparent of all (phanerotata).”
12. In a possible continuation of this essay, I would propose a reading of the Sophist lectures as exemplary of the Heideggerian ambivalent approach to Greek philosophy here discussed. This discussion would (1) lay out Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, especially of the Ethics; (2) emphasize the luminosity of Heidegger’s insight regarding the continuity of phronesis and sophia, both considered in terms of gazing, but differing in their overall orientation; both remaining essentially of/in the order of the phenomenal; (3) observe how, nevertheless, the analysis ends up reasserting the inveterate and conventional polarity of practical vs. theoretical thought; however construed in unusual terms (in relation to techne, etc.), sophia ends up being opposed to and detached from what concerns action.
Claudia Baracchi - Contributions to the Coming-to-Be of Greek Beginnings: Heidegger’s Inceptive Thinking
From Heidegger and the Greeks. Original PDF.