"devilish" is understood as evil and evil is a violation of the principles of good citizenship. Such conceptions of the "demonic" will never touch the essence or the essential compass of the Greek δαιμόνιον. But as soon as we try to approach the essential realm of the "demonic" as it is experienced by the Greeks we must engage ourselves in a meditation which, from a pedagogical point of view, will again draw us away from the so-called theme of our lectures.
Aristotle, Plato's disciple, relates at one place (Nicomachean Ethics, Z 7, 1141b 7ff.) the basic conception determining the Greek view on the essence of the thinker: καὶ περιττὰ μὲν καὶ θαυμαστὰ καὶ χαλεπὰ καὶ δαιμόνια εἰδέναι αὐτούς φασιν, ἄχρηστα δ᾽, ὅτι οὐ τὰ ἀνθρώπινα ἀγαθὰ ζητοῦσιν. "It is said they (the thinkers) indeed know things that are excessive, and thus astounding, and thereby difficult, and hence in general 'demonic'—but also useless, for they are not seeking what is, according to straightforward popular opinion, good for man."
The Greeks, to whom we owe the essence and name of "philosophy" and of the "philosopher," already knew quite well that thinkers are not "close to life." But only the Greeks concluded from this lack of closeness to life that the thinkers are then the most necessary—precisely in view of the essential misery of man. The Germans would not have had to be the people of thinkers if their thinkers had not known the same thing. Hegel says in the preface to the first edition of his Logic in 1812, " ... a civilized people without metaphysics" is like an "otherwise copiously decorated temple without the Holy of Holies."1
The thesis quoted from Aristotle says the thinkers know δαιμόνια, "the demonic." But how are "the philosophers," these harmless eccentrics who occupy themselves with "abstract" matters, supposed to have a knowledge of "the demonic"? Δαιμόνια is used here as an all encompassing word for what is, from the point of view of the ordinary busy man, "excessive," "astounding," and at the same time "difficult." On the contrary, what is current, what a man is doing and what he pursues, is for the most part without difficulty for him because he can always find, going from one being to the next, a way of escape from difficulty and an explanation. The many and all too many pursue only the beings that are current; for them, these are real, if not precisely "the" reality. But in mentioning "reality," the throng attests that, besides what is currently real, it has something else in view, which, to be sure, it does not clearly see. The essence of the πολλοί, the many, does not consist in their number and mass, but in the way "the many" comport themselves toward beings. They could never be busy with beings without having Being in view. Thus "the many" see Being and yet do not see it. But because they always have Being in view, although not in
1 Hegel, WW (Verein von Freunden) Bd 3. p 4