Testo integrale di "Tragici greci di Heidegger: il rapporto tra presenza e deinon"

THP pnr^i^^^^^*'^ ^^^'^ GREEKS: 

THE RELATION BETWEEN PRESENCE AND DEINON 



A Thesis Submitted To 
Brock University 



By 
John MacDonald 



In partial fiilfillment of the requirements 

for the Degree of 

Master of Arts 

in Philosophy 

April 2002 



© John Andrew MacDonald, 2002 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 1 



30 



59 



Approaching the Tragic Nature of Boredom Through Heidegger' 
Analysis of Aristotle's Critique of Antiphon 



CPIAPTER 2 

Heidegger's Analysis of Fundamental Boredom as an Access to 
Steresis (Privation) 



CHAPTERS 

Heidegger's Analysis of Judgements as an approach to the Problem 
of the Meaning of the Philosophical Existence for the Greeks 



CHAPTER 4 

The Greek Positing of the Philosopher in Relation to the Tragic 
Nature of Greek Existence 



CHAPTERS 

Deinon: The Utter Tragedy of Being-Human 



CONCLUSION 

153 



82 



PREFACE 

This thesis was written in consideration of a later application that I was planning 
to make in order to do PhD work in Philosophy. For this reason, the topic, 'Heidegger's 
Tragic Greeks,' reflects an attempt taht I made to deal with a major issue in 
contemporary continental philosophy, and hence prepare myself for a career in the 
discipline. The topic required that I begin to formally study ancient Greek, as well as 
familiarize myself with Latin. 

The pjaper as a whole does not reflect all that, looking back today, I would like to 
have included. I do not, for instance, speak of Heidegger's interpretation of the Greek 
term 'psyche.' I later came to believe (and still do) that he understands this word in the 
same sense that Aristotle says that 'plot is the soul of tragedy,' although I have never 
found any evidence to support this. I also later came to belive that Heidegger's claim 
that 'the ancient philosophical meaning of being is being-at-hand,' which this thesis has 
Heidegger attributing to Arisotle, actually has its origin (for Heidegger) in Protagoras. In 
spite of these and certain other difficulties, I do believe that, even today, the thesis does a 
fairly competent job with one of the more difficult areas of contemporary continental 
philosophy. 

I would like to express my gratitude to my advisor. Raj Singh, and my second 
reader, David Goicoechea, for their understanding and patience during the progression of 
the thesis. I wrote it in the light of a comment that Prof George Nathan of Brock 
University once said to me about philosophers: These are great geniuses that though 
about the problems for their entire lives. If you belive that you have found an error in 
their work, perhaps you need to re-read them before deciding to criticize. 



INTRODUCTION 

Martin Heidegger's interpretation of the ancients was bom out of something like a crisis 
in the interpretation of the Greeks, which can be characterized as nothing other than the 
realization of the idea that the Greek philosofrfiers put a serious question mark over existence. 
This idea, which had its germination in Prussia with Jakob Burckhart and his teacher, but first 
came to be seriously cultivated in the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, was the first in depth 
investigation into whether the Greeks, on the one hand, questioned existence or, on the other 
hand, put a question mark over existence. To question existence is rather innocuous, since it 
amounts to little more, in the end, than a child looking up at the stars and asking what it all 
means. To put a question mark over existence, however, is another business entirely. 

For the Greeks, as the life work of Martin Heidegger amply demonstrates, the nature of 
Greek thinking and the objects towards which it is directed follows so absolutely from the tragic 
view of the human person that, in a certain sense, philosophy is Greek and could only have 
developed in Greece. Perhaps stating it a little less categorically, philosophy could have 
developed elsewhere at least to the extent that something like they way the Greeks understood 
life was at the forefront: presence, in other words. 

This thesis deals with the problem of Heidegger's relation to the Greeks, specifically in 
terms of his understanding of the Greeks and presence. It is the position of this dissertation that 
the Greek notion of presence is, as Heidegger understands it, the homeliness of the hearth that 
radiates through all the things that humans concern themselves with. This is thought by 
Hpidegger, as the Greeks did, specifically in contrast with the uncanniness/unhomeliness of the 



ii 

human apart from his or her concern with things. Therefore, the thesis is an attempt at exposing 
the relation between presence and the unhomely by situating it withing Greek existence and the 
meaning of the Greek Philosopher. 

In order to support this position, the thesis has been divided into five parts. The first two 
chapters deal with Heidegger's explanation of the relation between Greek notion of physics 
{phusis), metaphysics (specifically in relation to an analysis of time and motion in Greek 
thought), and what Heidegger calls the fimdamental attxmement of Dasein (boredom). More 
exactly, it deals with these issues only so far as they allow us to bring out something like the 
notion of 'presence' in relation to things and homelessness or restlessness in relation to the 
human being. The rationale for these two chapters in relation to the central problem of the 
paper is that in Heidegger's elucidation of physics and metaphysics, he conducts his analysis in 
such a way that he explicitly uncovers that dimension of human existence that he calls the 
fundamental attunement of Dasein. This fundamental attunement is, in turn, similar to what the 
Greeks understood as the deinon, the imcanniness/un^'omeliness of the human. The third and 
fourth chapters take as their explicit themes the problem of the Greek understanding of the 
assertion and the ways in which the person can comport him/herself toward things, two issues 
which are not separable. The rationale for these two chapters in relation to the central theme of 
the paper is that Heidegger's analysis of these two areas in Greek thought brings out precisely 
why the philosopher and the philosophical way of life is the highest mode of existence for the 
Greeks and how this is thought specifically in terms of the uncanniness of humans. The final 
chapter gives a complete elucidation of presence as the homeliness of the hearth and shows 
specifically how this is thought of in contradistinction to the uncanny/unhomely for the Greeks. 



Ill 
This last chapter also explains Martin Heidegger's reaction to the Greek's interpretation of the 

highest mode of existence, and what he posited as a counter-thought. The essay as a whole is an 

attempt to fully concertize an important dimension of Heidegger's understanding of the Greeks, 

that is, the relation between presence and the demon or Greek notion of unhomely, which, to my 

kijowledge, has not been offered anywhere in commentaries on Heidegger. 



CHAPTER 1: 
Approaching the Tragic Nature of Boredom Through Heide^er's Analysis of 
Aristotle^s Critique of Antiphon 

This thesis attempts to deal with the concept of presence as it relates to 
Heidegger's understanding of the tragic nature of Greek existence. In terms of its 
content, then, the thesis is rather straightforward. Within this limited context, presence, 
for the Greeks, means two things, both of which simultaneously pertain to the Being of 
beings and to the extreme interpretation that the Greeks gave to their existence. On the 
one hand, presence means aei, the eternal, that which is permanent or everlasting, 
although taken in a very specific sense. It precisely means the ontological determination 
of the Being of beings as understood in such a way that the beings are treated as though 
they were permanently present-at-hand (even if this determination is not always explicit). 
Co-though in this sense of presence is a peculiar tarrying along of the thinker with the 
eternal and unchanging. Put negatively and somewhat more accurately, it is an escape of 
the thinker from the fleeting and transitory (in other words, fi"om the aleatory and 
momentary lustre of this or that thing which happens to catch our attention at any 
particular moment) to that which always is and permits an always identical comportment 
which need not be broken. On the other hand, presence means the same as the English 
word lustre. This second determination is more concerned with the explicit relation 
between the person and entities, or what it ultimately means for an object to be an object 
of our concern. In this respect, Heidegger's understanding of presence in relation to 



2 

Greek philosophy is that of the presence of the hearth, the warm being-at-home with the 
things that concern us. This is a homehness of things that is thought specifically in the 
light of a fundamental unhomeliness of people. 

Unfortunately, a sharp distinction between the two senses of presence here cannot 
be enacted. The reason is not that the determination of the concept of presence is 
thereby an ambiguous one, but rather that the determination is so fundamentally 
dependent on the two sides of the issue that a discussion of presence as present-at hand 
ultimately turns into a discussion of presence as luster (and vice versa). In other words, a 
discussion of presence as present-at-hand is ultimately, at the same time, a discussion 
about presence as lustre. The reason for this interrelation is very complicated, and it is 
unclear whether Heidegger ever attempted an interpretation of its necessity. 

In order to begin a demonstration of the first tier of our problem, the present and 
following chapter will consider Heidegger's elucidation of the Greek notions of time, 
motion, physics (phusis) and metaphysics, in order to show how, though this analysis, 
Heidegger approaches one of the fundamental determinations of the Being of beings as 
the permanently present at hand.I will begin this analysis in the present chapter by 
thinking about physics and metaphysics in relation to the everyday Greek understanding 
of Being, that is, presence-at-hand, insofar as it is thought in terms of motion and time. 
(I) Initial Remarks on Aristotle and the problem of the *Now': TEVIE AND 
MOTION 

In the lectures of 1927/ The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger argues 
that for Aristotle, time is somehow with things, although not the same as them: 



time is everywhere (pantachou), not in one definite place, and it is not in the 
moving thing itself but />am, beside it, in some way close by it. Motion and time 
differ in how they belong to the moving thing and to that which is in time an 
which we call intratemporal. (BP, 235) 

Time is in the soul because time is inherently countable, and counting takes place in the 

soul. I feel, however, that it is unclear here what it means when Aristotle says that time 

is, from the above quote, everywhere, and yet in the soul. Therefore, in order to clarify 

this, I shall need to explore the notion of time as the Greeks did, in relation to motion. 

It is, of course, obvious that time is somehow coimected with motion, either the 

motion of the hands on a clock, or the motion of the sun across the sky, although it is 

unclear to me from this precisely what such a coimection entails. Motion is 

characterized by a changing away from something, toward something else, which, as 

Aristotle sees it, need not involve a change of place, since the quality of something can 

change without it moving. Just as Heidegger sometimes characterizes Dasein in terms of 

a stretching out to entities, where he is trying to see how, for Aristotle, time can be 

understood in terms of motion, he brings in the notion of stretching 

A completely formal sense of stretching out is intended in 'from something to 
something' [which does not primarily have a spatial character] .... The 
determination of suneches, being-held-together-within-itself, continuum, 
continuity, also belongs to stretch. Aristotle calls the dimensional character 
megethos. This determination megethos, extension or magnitude, also does not 
have a primarily spatial character, but that of stretch. There is no break implied 
in the concept and essential nature of 'from something to something;' it is, 
instead, a stretching out that is closed within itself When we experience motion 
in a moving thing, we necessarily experience along with it suneches, continuity, 
and in this continuity itself eA: tinos eis ti, dimension in the original sense, 
stretching out. (BP, 242-243) 

Stretching is, for Aristotle, the being of motion, that which gives it its sense, since 

whenever we experience a particular instance of motion, we experience stretching. This 



4 
is inherently related to the notion of an earlier and a later. 

Heidegger argues that according to Aristotle, change takes place from some state 
to another, in this irreversible sequence. In time, we understand the irreversibility of the 
earlier (the prior, the away from there) moving toward the later (the posterior, the toward 
the here or hither), that is, the 'was now' to the 'not yet now,' where the 'now' is 
understood relative to these. The 'nows' are countable and themselves count, which is to 
say they count the places that have been traversed in motion, "[tjime is number as that 
which is counted in following the places traversed by the moving thing, that is, so far as 
we follow in the motion the transition as such and in doing so say 'now'." (BP, 248) 

The nows that are read off of motion have the peculiarity of being each different 
and each the same. Heidegger explains that every now is always different, since they are 
always read off of something in a different place. Yet, as nows, they are all always 
'nows' in some sense, and hence in its essence or essentia each now is always the same, a 
now, while in its way or how of being, its existentia, it is always different. Moreover, 
even though every now is different, at any particular point in time we happen to find 
ourselves, it is always now. The now, insofar as it marks the transition from the earlier 
of the later to the later of the earlier, it contains within itself the notion of earlier and 
later, and therefore, bares dimension within itself I understand this in the sense that any 
particular now is not somehow isolated in itself, to wit it could be separated from and put 
beside an infinity of other isolated nows as if they were merely points on a line or a time 
line. The now itself is transitory, and can be stretched more or less at will, which is why 
the 'now' of the hour is just as much 'now' as the now of the second. Since any 



5 
particular limitation of the now (into seconds, hours, days, etc. - the particular kind of 
now as limitation is determined entirely arbitrarily and does not belong to what is 
ownmost as time, any more than four houses is essential to four as such) is only possible 
because of the transitory character of the now as such, the conception of a time line as an 
infinite succession of nows is possible only derivatively, that is, if we think of the now as 
such as a stretching. 

Generally speaking, then, the now that we are indicating is a limiting, of a marker 
of that which goes no further and hence is finished. A particular minute or second can be 
identified as 'now' because it is complete, goes no further and hence can be identified 
concretely. We identify what limits something with the thing itself, because it would be 
absurd to think of the limitation or completion of a thing as having independent being 
apart from the thing being limited. But the now that is used to identify a completed 
something is, for Aristotle, number, and hence is independent because it bears no relation 
to the being of the thing being counted by it. This is manifestly true, since, for instance, 
identifying a group of things by whatever number they happen to consist of says nothing 
at all about the nature of the group, since the same number could be used to identify an 
entirely different group that simply happened to be in the same number. Time is only 
able to measure things because they are transitional. 

Aristotle, according to Heidegger, suggests that there is not only a connection 
between motion and time, but also the soul, for this connection with the soul seems to 
allow there to be time. Ellis comments in Heidegger, Aristotle, and Time in Basic 
Problems Sec. 19 that " time seems to be to metaxu, what's in between, bounded by a 



6 

now on either side. So if we fail to notice to metaxu, then there doesn't seem to be any 

time." (Time, 162) Hence, 'the between' allows there to be time for Aristotle by placing 

a distinction between two nows, since Aristotle feels that without such a distinction there 

would be no time at all. Insofar as Aristotle suggests that we perceive motion and time 

together, time is most fimdamentally understood with respect to motion that has a 

number, arithmos. These things are in time, intratemporal. The now is in time because 

it constitutes time, but the transitional thing is in time in the sense that it is embraced 

{periechesthai) or held by it, and this is what constitutes a thing's intratemporality (its in- 

time-ness, its being measured by time). Heidegger suggests that w^iich is held in time is 

either moving, or at rest, which (rest) is determined negatively with respect to movement, 

meaning that the geometric relations are not in time, but are extratemporal, since they 

neither move or come to a rest. 

I believe that the key of what has been said is that time is thought in terms of 

number, and number is not thought univocally. Number is peculiar because it does not 

relate to the various numbers as a genus. In support of this, I cite Heidegger's comments 

in the Plato's Sophist lectures/ 1924-5 that 

The parts of a number have no common horos, no common delimitation in the 
sense that through the horos, which is identical here with katholou (general or 
universal), each of the parts would be determined proportionally. For example, in 
the case of 10, the two moria, 5 and 5, have no koinos horos, each is for itself, 
diorismenon, each is distinct. Likewise, 7 + 3 indeed make 10, but seven does not 
have a relation, in the sense of the katholou or koinon to 10 or 3. (PS, 82) 

We can understand this more simply by giving an example from division. If I give the 

division equation 6/3 = 12/6, it would seem that the numbers here were being used 

generically, because the equation completes itself as 2=2, since both 6/3 and 12/6 both 



7 

equal 2. However, '2' would not be meant in the same sense, as though everything which 

we expressed in terms of '2' was being meant in the same respect. Because, on the one 

hand, 6/3=2 means that we have six things, are dividing them into three groups, and 

thereby have two things in each group. On the other hand, 12/6=2 means that we have 12 

things, are dividing them into 6 groups, and have 2 things in each group. In either 

statement, the two means something like 'twoness,' but in different respects, because the 

'2' in the first example refers to 6 things in three groups, while the '2' in the latter refers 

to 1 2 things in 6 groups. Numbers, Heidegger says, is to be thought in the sense that a 

number is like a syllable which is set off against other syllables, whereby there is no 

syllable in general. A number is therefore unlike a point because all points are umvocal. 

The unity of the numbers with Number is, rather, analogical. Let us recall, though not 

elucidate here, that Aristotle was the first to understand Being as analogical. 

Time, understood in terms of counting, as Aristotle though it, implies a relation to 

the person's being- with-the-things, is dependent on the counter. Hence, there is a 

threefold intentional relation when it comes to time, the counter (intentio), counted 

(intentum), and the counted as countable. As Heidegger comments, 

[tjime is what is counted. If there is no soul then there is no counting, nothing 
that counts, and if there is nothing that counts then there is nothing countable and 
nothing counted. If there is no soul then there is no time. (BP, 254) 

Without the counter, there is no time. 

Aristotle asks the question of the how-being or way of being or existentia of time. 
The being of time is in a certain sense dependent on the subject, but it is no more purely 
subjective then it is purely objective. It will have to be shown how 



8 

the Dasein, inasmuch as it exists, is further outside than any object and at the 
same time further inside, more inward (more subjective), than any subject or soul 
(because temporality as transcendence is opeimess) ... [T]he phenomenon of the 
world manifests itself to the Dasein. Given that the Dasein exists, is in a world, 
everything extant that the Dasein encounters is necessarily intra worldly, held 
around [con-tained] by the world [as the temporal thing is embraced by time]. 
We shall see that in fact the phenomenon of time, taken in a more original sense, 
is interconnected with the concept of the world and thus with the structure of the 
Dasein itself (BP) 

What is still left to be determined is what time is, taken in a more original sense. 

It is my position that time, insofar as it is the now, holds entities that have the 

character of transition, the passage from the earlier to the later - that are in motion. Time 

determinations are always those that Dasein takes, not ones that have independent being 

apart from that, because time determinations, when they are understood independently, 

are simply derivative abstractions from the originary taking of time that belongs to the 

mode of the being of that entity that we ourselves are. The Future, for instance, is 

Dasein' s taking time fliturally. Heidegger uses the term 'then' for the phenomenon of 

our taking time futurally, in the sense that "After the lecture, I can then return home.' 

The 'then' expresses Dasein's mode of being as 'I am expecting,' either something that 

will happen or that I intend to do. Heidegger comments that 

I can only say 'then' when I am expecting something, only so far as the Dasein as 
existent is expectant [that expectance is a mode of the being of Dasein]. Such a 
being-expectant, an expecting, expresses itself by means of the then. It utters 
itself in such a way that it does not expressly mean itself but nevertheless displays 
its own self in this expression of the then. (BP, 259) 

Heidegger says that these time determinations are not comported to as extant objects, but 

express ox projects Dasein's mode of being as a site in which Dasein can comport itself 

to entities. Moreover, Heidegger indicates that Dasein's taking past time is 'at the time.' 



9 

I believe that this is to be understood in the sense that we would say in English that 'I did 
not realize my spouse was cheating on me at the time," and has the mode of being of 
retention. Heidegger suggests that a specific kind of retention is forgetting, a retentive 
comportment to an entity as veiled to my cognitive grasps. I retain it as inaccessible to 
me. 

In contrast to the comportment having something futurally as expecting of the 
future and the having something erstwhile in the retention of the past, Dasein take time 
in the present in what Heidegger the enpresenting (Gegenwartigen) of something. An 
entity (taken in the broadest sense) is futural in Dasein's expecting of it, is former or 
erstwhile in Dasein's retention of it, and present in Dasein's enpresenting of it. 
Heidegger suggests that Aristotle already knew these determinations, and understood (a) 
'then' and 'at the time' as Dasein's self-expressions of expecting and retention; (b) 'then' 
and 'at the time' as determined in relation to a more primordial now, as 'not yet now' 
and 'no longer now,' meaning that enpresenting is already understood 'then' and 'at the 
time.' Enpresenting of the past and the future means that expect and retain in such a way 
that we project the expected or retained thing into a present, as 'not yet now' and 'no 
longer now. Time, therefore, has a unified structure insofar as enpresenting pervades 
through the other determination. However, it is not only that Aristotle determined that 
we comport ourselves toward an entity in the present time, but also that it is implied in 
any judgement, even if we do not make this explicit for ourselves. 

What Heidegger wishes to emphasize in this analysis is that what belongs to an 
originary sense of time is a unified structure of retention, enpresenting and expecting. 



10 
and this unity is what must be kept in mind. This unity, which Heidegger calls 
temporality, is important for two reasons. In the first place, it is what will allow a full 
intelligibility to be conveyed upon the fourfold essential structure of the now that was 
elucidated earlier:(l) embracer of entities; (2) making possible intratemporality; (3) 
transitionary nature; (4) time imderstood as counted/unveiled. Secondly, it is that 
according to which we will be able to convey an understandable sense on being. 

Time, as generally understood and as Aristotle thought it, proceeds as an infinite 
sequence of nows. This understanding heads much closer to the actual phenomenon of 
time that simply counts itself off endlessly into the future. This infinite series of nows as 
Aristotle understood it (Heidegger differs in his own understanding as he sees time as 
finite, although that is not important here) comes fi^om the future and progresses toward 
the past. I would argue that this needs to be understood in the sense that we say T am 
waiting for Christmas to come' - it comes and arrives and it passes by or away, time 
passes or elapses, in that irreversible order. I feel that this is a proper example because it 
seems to bring out the essence of the actual phenomenological experience itself in a 
precise manner. Expecting, retention, and enpresenting is the way that Dasein reckons 
with or takes time. 

Heidegger refers to a number of structures that belong to all time determinations, 
be it now, then (not yet now), or at the time (no longer now). Aristotle did not see the 
first two of these determinations, but he did see the third, although we shall consider 
Heidegger's elucidations of the first two here briefly because I feel that it offers 
important illustrations of what will be raised later in this thesis concerning the Greeks 



u 

and the nature of the participial form, that is, of the notion of co-presence. Although 
Heidegger himself does not explicitly say this anywhere, I would argue that the notion of 
the participle and of copresence can be shown to rest at the ground of his interpretation 
of the Greeks. 

The first structure Heidegger illustrates concerning time is significance. I 
understand this in the sense that just as the world is that in which there are a manifold of 
relations, of in-order-to's and for-that-purpose, etc., such as the hammer which is the 
right or appropriate tool for its fiuiction, so too is time 'appropriate time.' 'Hammer' is 
in the world, not as a thing, but as a fimctional relation, there is a hammer and at the 
same time its function, the one is co-present with the other. I would argure that time 
expresses this sense as well when we speak of time in terms of a particular time for-that- 
purpose, in the sense that it is an appropriate or right time for doing something or for 
something occurring, as opposed to an inappropriate or wrong time for something. I 
have time for doing such and such. Time here is not thought in isolation, but is copresent 
with that which it is an appropriate time for. In this way, time has the character of 
significance. According to my interpretation, then, since significance has to do with 
manifold functional relations, to say that it is the right or wrong time for something does 
not primarily imply that it is a good or bad time any more than to say a hammer is 
appropriate for the job primarily means that it is a good or bad tool. Rather, the point is 
that the thing happening is co-present, with the time that it belongs to, it is 'when' it is 
supposed to be. I would like the reader to note that the form here is the same as when we 
invoke a participle, such as by saying 'I was thinking about the test as I walked into the 



^\ 1».. 



12 
gymnasium.' The thinking is temporally co-present with the walking in, that is, it 
belongs in the same time. I understand this in agreement with the fact that we do not say 
a hammer is being a good hammer because it is working as opposed to broken, but rather 
it is doing what it is supposed to, is properly operative in its place in the system. 

Significance, as an ontological structure of time, is not necessarily immediately 
evident, but is brought out through /?r/va//o«, one of the central concepts that Heidegger 
adopted from he Greeks and specifically from Plato's Sophist. That time is 'having time' 
for such and such is brought out in privation, that is, specifically when 1 do not have time 
to do something. (Cf Z, 46) 

The second structure of time that Heidegger identifies is the datability of the now. 
This means that the now is always a now-when, and as such occurs concurrently with 
some event or occurrence. We say, for instance, 'now' when the large hand of the clock 
is on the three. The now does not somehow float around independently, but is at the 
same time that the hand is on the three. In agreement with this, Heidegger says, "[b]y the 
term 'datability' we denote this relational structure of the now as now-when, of the at- 
the-time [no longer now] as at-the-time-when, and of then [not yet now] as then-when." 
(BP, 262) The now is always the now of something: now the pot is boiling, now it is 
time to leave, etc. I would again point out that we can see the relation to the participial 
form, specifically in terms of the present participle. If 1 say 'I am thinking while 1 walk 
into the room,' the thinking is taking place at the same time as the walking into the room. 
The past and future determinations can be easily derived from this original relational 
present: (a) I was thinking before 1 walked into the room; (b) I will be thinking after I 



13 
walk into the room. The now is co-presented with whatever thing that happens to be- 
now, be-fiiture-now, be-past-now. The now can be indefinite because the particular 
dating is entirely arbitrary (the when of the now can just as easily be 3 o'clock as not, 
even if it is 3 o'clock at both instances, since one person can affirm the nowness of the 3, 
while the other determines the now in terms of seconds instead of hours). 

Because of the arbitrary nature of the particular dating (even though dating must 
belong to the now, then and at the time), past present and future as at the time, now and 
then necessarily implicates the Dasein because dating reflects the mode of being of the 
one who dates, of the Dasein, because dating is a way that the Dasein is (if this was not 
the case, there would be no dating). Since the now as now- when depends on datability, 
it is wrong to view time as an impersonal free-floating sequence of nows. I would argue 
that it is precisely the co-present nature of the now that is dependent on the Dasein, 
because the now is newer Just a now in itself, but 'now when.' The now is now only 
when it is assigned to something particular, related to something, in a similar sense to 
what we mean when we say Being is the being of an entity. 

The third structure of time that Heidegger elucidates is the spannedness of time. 
The now is, so to speak, as Aristotle also saw a marker in relation to which the past and 
the future span out and yet are held in constant contact with. I said before that, for 
instance, the 'then' is 'not yet now,' and so enpresenting is implicated in it (since 
enpresenting is implicated in the now itself). This has to do with a certain spannedness 
of time that belongs to the enpresenting as such. I believe that this means, now in a more 
determinate way, that the then is a 'till then,' where there is an 'in the meanwhile' that is 



'1. -.. ifTs-V^.. 



14 
situated between the now and then. In Enghsh we say, for instance, since it is five 
o'clock there is two hours until we leave, until then. The leaving is futural in the sense 
that there is a meanwhile, a span of time between now and then. This, again, is clearly 
manifested in the participial structure, such as when we say 'I am thinking about how my 
performance will go tonight. ' There is a span of time from my thinking to the 
performance which will occur later. I emphasize the participial form because, in this 
case, 'the thinking' has a time relation, and that in relation to which the thinking is 
related also has a time relation, and so since there are two things that have a time 
relation, their times can be thought in relation to one another temporally. This could not, 
for instance, be the case if we tried to place a simple noun in relation to a later time, 
since, as Aristotle saw, the noun does not express time. It is from this spannedness that 
what we call duration receives its sense. The 'meanwhile' is, in turn, datable, because it 
is, for instance, at the same time that we are waiting for the performance to begin. 
Moreover, as Aristotle also saw, the now itself bears within itself an intrinsic span, 
whether or not it is related to the past or future, since it is, as was said, not merely a now 
point but a now-when. As the when of the now is always a thing or event occurring over 
a particular stretch of time, the now must itself bear some stretch in itself It is, in this 
regard, transitional or stretching in itself, and bears that relation to motion in the sense 
that motion was explained earlier. 

Since any relation to an entity is always implicitly an entity that is either now, 
then or at the time, and, as we have seen, 'now,' 'at the time' and 'then' are self- 
expressions by Dasein of enpresenting, retention and expecting, that is, modes of its 



t.< 



15 
being, then, as Heidegger says, "we compwrt our Dasein always in some particular way 
toward our own most peculiar ability to be [to be as enpresenting, retaining and 
expecting]." (BP, 265) It is my understanding of the problem that this issue would be 
difficult for us to see because we say, for instance, in the judgement "The dog is white," 
that no temporal sense seems to be implied and further that no relation to our 
comportment to an entity at-hand is implied because the only thing being intended in the 
judgement is whatness, not the existentia. We cannot see what, for Aristotle, was 
completely obvious, that the existentia must be expressed here. Why do we only see 
whatness? Because for us existentia, as Kant said, does not pertain to the thing, to the 
res, is not a real predicate. I, for instance, might say that the lecture tonight is what is 
'then,' not yet now. Since 'then' does not belong to the being of the lecture as such, its 
whatness, the 'thermess' or not-yet-nowness of the lecture brings nothing whatsoever to 
the concept of lecture, and in this regard it would be the identical case if the lecture was 
in the now of enpresenting or the 'at the time' of retention. A concept is supposedly 
what did not originate in time, and what will not pass away in time, has no future or past, 
but simply is, as though the concept is in a kind of extended now that never began and 
will never end. 1 am of the opinion that, given the sum of what has been said until this 
point, we are still in the dark as to why this is. It is not even clear how the 'now' could 
have this structure. 

As was said earlier, the everyday understanding of time sees that time comes out 
of the future towards us and passes away, which I understand to be meant in the sense 
that we say Christmas is coming. This is a future in which Dasein projects itself forward 



16 

in such a way that it is (mmarily returning back to itself in the present (since the 

projection, as time passes, will continually get closer to the present). In the past, Dasein 

projects itself back to what has been and gathers it back into the present. The Greeks 

expressed this with the term ekstatikon, a being outside oneself, which will become very 

important to us later (although Heidegger no where m^^es such a claim, I would say that 

the notion of ekstatikon is the central concept around which Heidegger's interpretation of 

the person always turns - a position I will continually develop): 

The common Greek expression ekstatikon means stepping-outside-self It is 
affiliated with the term 'existence.' It is with this ecstatic character that we will 
interpret existence, which viewed ontologically, is the original unity of being- 
outside self that comes-toward-self [future], comes back to self [past], and 
enpresents. In its ecstatic character, temporality is the condition of the 
constitution of Dasein' s being. (BP, 267, also cf BT, 377) 

Only if Dasein's existence has this ecstatic (outside of itself) temporal character is 

something like a common understanding of time possible. 

I now have a gained a sufficient characterization of the Greek notion of time and 

shown, at least in a preliminary way, what the notion of the present time entails in the 

Greek. I have also brought out the notion of motion in Aristotle, which is co-determined 

with that of time. Further, I have characterized more concretely what it means for an 

entity to be in the present time. I have maintained from the beginning that for the Greeks 

being means presence at hand, and I now understand it explicitly as the being in the 

present time of that which we are comporting ourselves toward, the thing at hand. 

However, why this thing must be in the present time and at-hand is still unclear, and this 

'why' must be clarified since it is precisely this that is preventing us from understanding 

the crux of Heidegger' s interpretation of Aristotle' s understanding of time. 



17 
(H) Antiphon: UNDERSTANDING NATURE FROM TIME AND MOTION 

It was said at the beginning of this section that we were interested in time and 

motion insofar as it assisted us in coming at the Greek notion of physics and 

metaphysics. I will now uncover the relation, which is somewhat brought out by 

Heidegger but not really developed in explicit relation to the extent that I will do here. 

Given the concept of motion that has been co-determined with the concept of time, we 

can now approach what Aristotle mean by phusis. Phusis or nature generally has the 

same sense as eidos, what the thing is in its possibility, irrespective of whether it is actual 

or not. The Greeks generally think phusis in this respect with regard to the movement of 

bodies. In his 1962 publication What is a Thing, Heidegger says that a body for the 

Greeks is what moves according to its own nature [phusis], whereby 

[t]he purely earthy body moves downward, the purely fiery body - as every 
blazing flame demonstrates - moves upward. Why? Because the earthy has its 
place below, the fiery, above. Each body has its place according to its kind, and 
it strives toward that place ... When a body moves in its place, this motion 
accords with nature, Kataphusin ... [such as when a] rock falls down to earth. 
However, if a rock is thrown upward by a sling, this motion is essentially against 
the nature of the rock, para phusin. Ail motions against nature are bia, violence. 
(WT,83) 

Phusis implies in its essence a movedness, kinesis, and most specifically a leading 

toward beings that occurs after a passing over of beings to their being. In the 1967 

publication Pathmarks, Heidegger says that movedness for the Greeks essentially means 

"something heretofore hidden and absent comes into appearance." (PA, Phusis, 191) For 

Aristotle, this is the case epagwge, which does not mean induction, but rather '"leading 

toward' what comes into view insofar as we have previously looked away, over and 

beyond individual beings. At what? At Being. For example, only if we already have 



It 

treeness in view can we identify individual trees. Epagwge is seeing and making visible 
what already stands in view - for example, treeness." (PA, Phusis, 187) Hence beings 
only are insofar as they are in movedness, and this is the case whether they are actually 
physically moving or at rest. Phusis is what is responsible for stability of a being. I 
understand this to mean that the particular chair can only have that stability, that it is 
constantly a chair at any particular instant, in the movement of phusis that passes over 
that being to its Being and then moves toward the entity. In order to more fully 
understand this, I believe that it needs to be thought in terms of the relation between 
things that we do produce, and those we do not. 

The techne onta, artifacts, differ from the things we encounter that are not 
produced in accordance with the kind of movement that pertains to them. In artifacts, 
there is not a passing over of the thing to its Being and then a moving toward the entity. 
Rather, "[t]heir 'rest' has the character of having-been-completed, having-been- 
produced, and, on the basis of these determinations, as standing 'there' and lying present 
before us ... The eidos must stand in view beforehand, and this antecedently envisioned 
appearance, eidos proaireton, is the end, telos [the final product that is in view], that 
about which techne has its know-how." (PA, Phusis, 192) I understand this to mean that 
the eidos is what is first in view, and so there is only a going toward the thing, not an 
initial passing over. Since the eidos in this case is in the person and not the artifact, the 
eidos here is not the arche of the artifact, that from out of which the thing comes and is 
with it constantly. 

For Aristotle, according to Heidegger, /^/lusw is ousia, beingness. Aristotle was 



19 
the first one to use the term ousia as a philosophical term. The ordinary meaning of this 
word is "house and home, holdings, financial means; we might also say 'present assets,' 
'property,' what lies present [at hand]." (PA, Phusis, 199) The reason Aristotle was the 
first to pick just this word to indicate the Being of beings will have to be shown. Firstly, 
though, it should be noted that in order to see phusis, we need to discriminate, krinein, 
which in its proper determination means distinguishing what appears of its own accord 
from what doe not, distinguishing the superior from the inferior, the essential from what, 
in relation to it, is trivial. The Greeks said that most people cannot see Being because 
they are caught up in the concerns of life and hence unable to step back from it all. It is 
the thinkers that see Being. I will later demonstrate how the Greeks understood this in 
terms of the ontological constitution of the person. 

In order to more fully bring out what Aristotle thought about Being as the present- 
at-hand, Heidegger contrasts his theory with that of Antiphon. Antiphon said that Being 
was what preceded and remained after, for instance, the production and latter 
deterioration of the bed. Today we would call this the matter, "earth is what truly 
perdures throughout, whereas the changes of hrythmos [form] happen to it only now and 
again." (PA, Phusis, 204) Antiphon argued that the proton arruthmiston kath eauton, the 
primarily and intrinsically imformed, that 'stuff at hand that persists throughout the 
various changes in form is being, the stably present-at-hand, or, if you wish, eternal, aei. 
Although this is position is generally attributed to Aristotle, Heidegger says that Aristotle 
actually strongly opposes it. Being is aei, but not in the sense of eternal matter. Aei in 
the Greek primarily has the sense of what is at the time, what lingers a while in 



20 

presencing (a term I am leaving ambiguous at this point), not the eternal. It is often 
indicated in the secondary literature on Heidegger that his understanding of presence is 
related to the aei as the eternal. And yet, presence in its fundamental sense of presencing 
is not eternal, even though it is aei, for it is precisely the sense that the presencing will 
fade that dominates the phenomenon. Gadamer, in Heidegger 's Ways, explains this well 
in relation to the aei, "Heidegger made the ingenious observation that 'always,' aei, had 
nothing to do with aetemitas [eternity], but must be thought along the lines of [what is at 
the time], of that which is present. This can be drawn from the usage of the language : 
Ho aei Basileuon, [the king at the time, not the eternal king]." (145) Gadamer 
principally has in mind here the mapping of the existentia of the entity onto the structure 
of the 'now.' In its twofoldedness, the now is, at the same time, perpetually now (since 
any particular occasion on ^\1lich we ask what time it is, the answer is always now), and 
just this now (since no two nows are identical. In this sense, the entity is tacitly (we will 
deal with this later) treated as though it is always present at hand, and, at the same time, 
can only ever be at hand right now. However, the relation to this example is not only 
formal, but material as well. The relation of the king to the aei in the example Gadamer 
gives also crops up in The Principle of Reason, when Heidegger speaks of the royalty of 
the child (we will also deal with this later). The king is the royal, the maginifcent, and it 
is in the presence of that which we stand right now. Presence in this sense means what 
has lustre for us, the lustrous, that which arrests the eye (or ear, etc.). Aristotle 
understands the aei primarily in this sense. Aristotle does not say that Antiphon's way 
of understanding phusis is wrong, but rather he will relegate it to the lowest realm of 



21 
being. I shall now consider why. 
(m) Aristotle's Critique of Antiphon: 
Initial Thoughts On The Two Senses of Presence 

According to Heidegger, Aristotle's understanding of hyle and morphe 

(commonly called matter and form) is not simply a restatement of Antiphon' spro/o/i 

arruthmiston and ruthmos. Hyle and Morphe do not mean what is intended in the Latin 

materia and forma. Hyle means something for production, in the sense that the wood 

from the woods is for table making. I feel that morphe means eidos in a similar sense to 

what Plato saw in it, although for Plato eidos is what is common (koinon) to the 

particular things, and hence relegated the eidos to an entirely different place from the 

particulars. Aristotle said that the eidos has to be understood as manifested in the things 

at hand before us, in the sense of "'table' that puts itself forth into this table here." (PA, 

Phusis, 211) How is this to be understood? Heidegger comments that 

we say of a painting by van Gogh, '[Now] this is art[!],' or, when we see a bird of 
prey circling above the forest, 'That is nature' ... [We do not say this in regard to 
anything, not] just when some piece of canvas hangs there smeared with dabs of 
colour, not even when we have just any old 'painting' there in front of us, but 
only when a being that we encounter steps forth preeminently into the appearance 
of a work of art ...[W]e find what is phusis-like only where we come upon a 
placing into appearance; ie., only where there is morphe. Thus morphe 
constitutes the essence of phusis, or at least co-constitutes it .(PA, Phusis, 212) 

When we see a piece of art, art in the real sense of the word, we say 'Now this is art!,' or 
'Wow! This is Art,' In this, the existentia of the Art, the thatness, is shining through. In 
his later essay Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger comments that "[i]n general, of 
everything present to us, we can note that it is; but this also, if it is noted at all, is noted 
only soon to fall into oblivion, as is wont of everything commonplace. And what is more 



22 
commonplace than this, that a being is? In a work, by contrast, this fact, that it m as a 
work, is just what is unusual." (OWA, in PLT 65) From this I feel we can also understand 
what Heidegger saw the Greeks to mean by the presencing of the gods, which is victim to 
no end of peculiar reading. We sometimes in normal language speak of gods as avatars, 
when they manifest themselves in a human form. This is the god incarnate. I believe 
that it is this sense that Heidegger is speaking of art here in relation to the Greek notion 
of presencing. In the painting in front of us, it is as though 'art' itself was present 
incarnate in the painting, not as some indifferent universal concept lording over it 
somehow, but rather art is manifest in the art work, was manifesting itself in its lustrous 
radiance through this painting. ' Aristotle, in understanding being in this way, is entirely 
in line with the Greek understanding of Being as presencing, it is only that he was the 
first to see it from the things at hand. This is the sense morphe has, which is one half of 
the determination of phusis in Aristotle. 

When the human being has the experience of the 'now this is art' or 'now this is 
car' or 'now this is a palm tree,' or whatever you wish, Heidegger says that he or she is 
most essentially at home. In relation to the general boredom and meaninglessness that 
pervades our existence, this encounter with an object that is truly presencing is the time 
when man is most at home. In a conversation with Medard Boss, the following exchange 



'In this way, we encounter the Being of this being in a way that is not a mere abstraction. 
Heidegger often makes the point of trying to show how we can encounter being in a way that is direct and 
immediate. In the ZoUikon seminar he gives the example of hearing a hving thing in the woods, and 
looking down to see that he had actually mistaken rustling leaves for a living thing. However, what this 
privative shows is that something like the concept of 'living thing' is given immediately in the experience, 
an^ not only abstracted to by eccentric philosophers for the sake of categorization. 



23 

once occurred 

Heidegger: one must look upon the useful as 'what makes someone whole,' that 
is, what makes the human being at home with himself ... In Greek Theoria is 
pure repose, the highest form of energeia, the highest manner of putting-oneself- 
into-work without regard for all machinations. It is the letting come to presence 
of presencing itself 

Boss: Our patients force us to see the human being in his essential ground 
because the modem 'neuroses of boredom and meaninglessness' can no longer be 
drowned out by glossing over or covering up particular symptoms of illness. If 
one treats those symptoms only, then another symptom will emerge again and 
again ... They no longer see meaning in their life and ... they have become 
intolerably bored 

Heidegger: ... To be absorbed by something ... [means] 'to be totally preoccupied 
by something , as for instance, when one says: He is entirely engrossed in his 
subject matter. Then he exists authentically as who he is, that is, in his task ... 
Da-sein means being absorbed in that toward which I comport myself... To be 
absorbed in beholding the palm tree in front of our window is letting the palm 
tree come to presence, its swaying in the wind, is absorption of my being-in-the- 
world and of my comportment in the palm tree. (Z, 160-161) 

Human existence fulfils itself to the extent that we are captivated, with the presencing of 

a being happening to be the most exemplary case for Heidegger. We will understand this 

more fully later in relation to the unhomely 

Let us explore what has been said. Heidegger often speaks of god or gods, 

sometimes to express a particular relation,^ sometimes according to the fact that people 

no longer believe in gods, and sometimes simply in and of itself This has led some 

commentators, especially recently, to contend that Heidegger is secretly trying to espouse 



^One often hears the term 'god' in Heidegger and forgets it is the relation that is being 
emphasized, for instance when Heidegger says "the primordial determination of man as that being which, 
in the midst of beings as a whole, lets beings hold sway in their unconcealedness. This letting hold sway is 
accomplished by exhibiting beings in their forms and modes of presence and by presCTving beings there in 
- occurrences in which poetry as well as painting and sculpture, the act that founds a state, and the 
worshiping of the gods first obtain their essence, bringing these essences into being historically and as 
history by their words and works, actions and raptures, assaults and downfalls." (BQP, 128) 



24 

his religious views in the guise of a secular philosophy, and are getting taken quite 

seriously in doing so. Herman Philipse, in Heidegger 's Philosophy of Being, suggests the 

following 

What I am claiming is, first, that the doctrines which he [Heidegger] is expressing 
are utterly incoherent and confused if they are naively interpreted in the way 
Heidegger presents them, namely, as purely secular analyses of the phenomenon 
of human existence. Second, I hold that these doctrines become more coherent as 
soon as one supplies the Christian views at which they are hinting implicitly. We 
might say that Heidegger was a Neo-Pascalian theologian rather than a 
philosopher. Arguably he was the most creative religious writer of the twentieth 
century, who outwitted both official theologians and many philosophers by going 
underground and by concealing his religious message in secular philosophical 
garments. (374) 

Philipse's understanding does not come from a simple lack of effort with Heidegger, for 

he is well versed both in Heidegger's corpus and the secondary literature. Rather he had 

tried to find, to use one of Heidegger's terms from the Greeks, ground, the pole around 

which Heidegger's philosophy turned, and in the absence of any secular explanation, 

posited a religious one. Again, this is not accidental. If a commentator does not clearly 

delineate the notion of presence and show exactly what fimction this had in Greek 

thinking, it does sound very much like the presence -parousia that is spoke of in the 

New Testament - and so it should, fox paromia, even in Plato's time, is the Greek term 

for presence. 

I believe that God, as Heidegger uses the term, if he is using it technically, has the 

same cognitive content that it did for Holderlin. This does not say much though, for 

Holderlin is well known for having spoken of gods in all things, but this simply sounds as 

if there are god-things pantheistically lurking in entities. In order to clear this up, we 

need to make a distinction. 'God,' as Holderlin uses the term, according to the spirit of 



25 

the time, means the same as 'ground.' Heidegger comments, in relation to the way a 

group of young Swabians understood Heraclitus' henpanta einai, that 

In its formal meaning, pantheism means: pan-theos, 'Everything - God'; 
everything stands in relation to God; [this means] all beings are in relation to the 
ground of beings. This ground as the One, hen is as ground what everything else, 
pan, is in it, in the ground. Hen kaipan. The One is also the whole and the 
whole is also the One ... Hen kaipan, this followed Heraclitus' fragment hen 
panta einai, Fr. 50, and was according to the spirit of the time the chosen motto 
of the three young Swabian friends, Schelling, Hegel, and Holderlin. (S, 68) 

Hence, the term God implies no creator figure in the sense of the God of the new 

testament. The term ground here is, though, still ambiguous. 

I would argue that the notion of ground is sometimes misunderstood to mean that, 

aside from it, the entity would simply evaporate into nothing. In relation to Leibniz's 

clarification of the principle of ground/reason, Heidegger clarifies this issue in his 1957 

book The Principle of Reason, "in Leibniz's sense, a ratio siifficiens, a sufficient reason, 

isn't at all a ground capable of supporting a being so that it doesn't straightaway fall into 

nothing. A sufficient reason is one that reaches and offers to beings that which puts them 

in the position of fulfilling their fiill essence, that is, perfect io. " (PR, 71) I feel that the 

overarching theme of the book where this quote comes from is the notion of ground as 

the call to the ground, the separating off of the essential from the inessential, that is, the 

trivial (cf what was said earlier of Aristotle on this matter). Hence perfect io here has the 

same sense as Heidegger's use of 'perfection' in translating Pindar's Nemean Ode III, 70, 

in his 1953 book Introduction to Metaphysics, "in venturesome exploration of the entity 

[there] is manifested perfection." (IM, 113) Pindar's usage is identical with what 

Heidegger understands Heraclitus to mean by the term polemos, "not mere quarreling and 



26 

wrangling but the conflict of the conflicting, that sets the essential and the nonessential, 
the high and the low, in their limits and makes them manifest." (IM, 1 13-4) Given this 
clarification, I may now proceed to the second part of the determination of phus is in 
Aristotle. 

The other half of the determination of phusis (beside morphe) is hyle. Heidegger 
comments that hyle is dunamis (power, potentiality, possibility, appropriateness). I 
understand this in the sense we say that the wood that has been selected is appropriate to 
the making of the house. More specifically, dunamis has the quality of being-at-the- 
ready-to-be-enacted, in the sense that a runner poised on his marks on the starting line is 
ready to go (cf The lectures on the Essence and Actuality of force in Aristotle from 
193 1, EAF, 187-8). Speaking of dunamis, Marx, in Heidegger and the Tradition, speaks 
of '"possibilities' press toward their 'actualization,' energeia. "(Ill) Morphe is a 
greater degree phusis than hyle is. The poised runner (dunamis), for instance, is not 
indifferent towards the enactment of the running (energeia), but precisely has this in view 
in itself, and in this sense has the entelecheia in itself It is this poise in which the end 
and the dunamis lie stable before the work is enacted that is the stable presencing. 
Therefore, as peculiar as it sounds, Aristotle can say actuality {energeia) is prior to 
potentiality {dunamis). I feel that if we keep the presencing of the work of art in mind, 
this means that the morphe that comes to presence as eidos is phusis to a lesser degree 
than eidos, as was said earlier, material for production, which is now understood to mean 
that which is so constituted so that it can be passed over in a productive seeing that goes 
to the universal and returns in the hyle realized as morphe. More precisely, then. 



21f 

Heidegger's position is that morphe is eidos in Plato's sense, except that for Aristotle it 
relates, for instance, to the 'now that is art! ' (Or 'Wow!, that is a house, etc.) of the 
particular, not the 'idea.' I would express this in the following way, although it is more 
precise than Heidegger goes: for Plato the particular is the mere example of the universal, 
while for Aristotle it is the exemplar (at one place unrelated to the present context 
Heidegger does not make a strong distinction between example and exemplar, using the 
interchangeably, but I feel warranted in doing so here). My position, then, which goes 
beyond what Heidegger actually says but seems to be the overarching sense of his 
position, is that Hyle is dunamis, that which is primed to presence as the exemplar. Put 
briefly, according to my interpretation of Heidegger here, which is somewhat 
unorthodox, the whole movement that passes over the particular, to the universal, and 
back to the particular that then presences (a term that still needs clarification) is phusis 
for Aristotle. 

Heidegger suggests that Antiphon's doctrine of phusis, in contrast to Aristotle, is 
thought of by Aristotle in terms of the constantly at-hand, or more specifically as the 
present-at-hand appearance that emerges in a steresis, privation. Heidegger, to my 
knowledge, no where says this explicitly, but I feel that I can demonstrate this and what it 
entails by an exposition of the lecture course of 1929-30 - The Fundamental Concepts of 
Metaphysics, which I will do in the next chapter. In order to get an initial understanding 
of the present-at-hand as a kind of showing that happens in privation, I will consuU 
Heidegger's magnum opus. Being and Time. 

The following two passages will serve to clarify what I feel are two common 



28 
misconceptions about Being and Time. Part of the reason that the term eidos is misread 

in Being and Time is because readers do not attend to the fact that the 'look' that is being 

discussed is also the one that we have in advance (which is clearly stated at the end of 

this passage, since this is what the Greek term primarily means), not just the way 

something at hand looks. Another related problem (we will see both of these issues in 

the following passage), is that the notion of present-at-hand is taken to be a deficient 

mode of ready-to-hand. This is not what Heidegger says, because what he is trying to 

show is not that the present-at-hand is a deficient kind of readiness to hand, but rather 

(following the discovery in Aristotle he had made at that time, and his interest, at least 

since the lecture course on Plato's Sophist, to show a positive phenomenological 

determination of 'the negative,' two things quite unprecedented in the history of 

philosophical scholarship) Heidegger wanted to show that the present-at-hand is what 

shows itself when the ready-to-hand is deficient, not that it is itself a deficient kind of 

readiness to hand.^ Hence, in relation to these two issues, he says 

This kind of Being towards the world is one which lets us encounter entities 
within-the-world purely in the way they look (eidos), '}v&X that; on the basis of this 
kind of Being, and as a mode of it, looking explicitly at what we encounter is 
possible. Looking at something in this way is sometimes a definite way of taking 
up a direction towards something- of setting our sights towards what is present-at- 
hand. It takes over a 'view-point' in advance from the entity which it encounters. 
(BT, 88) 

In relation to the issue of the present at hand, he says "the modes of conspicuousness, 

obtrusiveness, and obstinacy all have the function of bringing to the fore the 



'Otherwise he would have had to have listed the present-at-hand along with the other deficient 
kinds of readiness-to-hand, that is, along with conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy. 



29 
characteristic of presence-at-hand." (BT, 104) Precisely how the present-at-hand relates 
to privation will be determined in the next chapter. This next chapter will also serve to 
begin to ground a further new distinction that has been introduced in this section, that of 
presencing. 



\, 



30 
CHAPTER 2 

Heidegger's Analysis of Fundamental Boredom as an Access to Steresis 

(Privation) 

This second chapter will elaborate what was discussed in the first chapter, that is, 
what Heidegger has to say about metaphysics and, specifically, how this exposes the 
fundamental attunement of Dasein and the unhomeliness of man. We will also complete 
our understanding of the present-at-hand and time, introduced in the previous chapter. 
Therefore, given what Heidegger has illustrated in terms of Being and phusis for the 
Greeks, we will see how he relates it to the problem of beings as such and as a whole. 

In the previous chapter, it was indicated that in a productive seeing we go beyond 
beings to their Being, and then come back toward them. We shall now explore this 
further in terms of metaphysics, which fully parsed is Ta Meta Ta Phusika. 
(1) Phusis and Logos 

In one s>Qn%Q, phusis means nature or essence, in the same way that we say 'it is in 

his nature to help the poor.' A\io, phusis has the sense of growth and, more specifically, 

the oneness of this growth. Heidegger writes that 

Phusis means that which is growing, growth, that which has itself grown in such 
growth. We here take growth and growing, however, in the quite elementary and 
broad sense in which it irrupts in the primal experience of man: growth not only 
of plants and animals, their arising and passing away taken merely as an isolated 
process, but growth as this occurring in the midst of, and permeated by,'* the 
changing of the seasons, in the midst of the alternation of day and night, in the 
midst of the wandering of the stars, of storms and weather and the raging 
elements. Growing is all this taken together as one. (FCM, 25, some emphasis 



¦•in the sense that, in the citation from Rilke in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, the entities 
are permeated by and hence expressive of the world of abject poverty. 



31 

added) 
This general unity of all things is the way in which man normally finds himself and 
operates according to in the everyday, ^\ilich includes the processes which he is caught 
up in himself, such as birth and death. Phusis is the "whole ... that prevails through man 
himself ... it nears him, sustains and overwhelms him as that which is: phusis, that vviiich 
prevails, beings, beings as a whole." (FCM, 26, some emphasis added) Heidegger 
suggestd that Phusis here does not mean the same as what we think of when we say 
'nature, the totality of entities,' because determining the whole of the extant beings as 
'nature' is an external determination which is not necessitated by the things themselves. 
I understand this to mean that It would be the equivalent of determining the entirety of 
the extant as a unity by invoking a certain number encompassing them, which may 
certainly be imposed on them but bears no strict relation to any actual imity pertaining 
among them. Phusis, conversely, expresses the unity that actually 'prevails' through the 
beings themselves, and strikes man precisely as that which is. In The Basic Questions of 
Philosophy, the companion lecture course to Heidegger's second magnimi opus. 
Contributions, Heidegger suggests that Phusis is, most primordially, the emerging of that 
which emerges in its constancy over that which is concealed and withdrawing, (cf BQP, 
112-113) 

Heidegger suggests that this whole or unity, this prevailing of beings as a whole, 
which is still unclear for us, is generally concealed from the common understanding, 
which is why Heraclitus says phusis kruptesthai philei, the prevailing of things has in 
itself a striving to conceal itself (cited in FCM, 27) The Greeks saw that there was a 



n 

bringing out of concealment through legem, a speaicing out, so that there is a spoken, a 
logos. This legein is a letting come to word, is understandable, in coimterdistinction to 
its opposite, the not letting come to word, kruptei. Heraclitus says "[t]he master, whose 
Oracle is at Delphi, neither speaks out, nor does he conceal, but gives a sign [signifies]." 
(cited in FCM, 27) Hence, if the opposite of legein is concealing, then legein is a 
bringing out of concealment. In this way, Heidegger suggests that phusis or being, taken 
as this unity of beings as a whole which likes to hide itself, is wrested fi^om concealment 
in the logos. Logos is, then, where truth as aletheia happens, where something is wrested 
from concealment. Philosophy, as sophia, has the interest of speaking of this unity in 
logos. According to Heidegger, Aristotle's more strict determination of the logos proper 
to philosophy as apophainesthai holds to this understanding, as a forcing out of the 
aphanes, the concealed which does not unconceal itself of its own accord, to reveal itself 

Phusis for the Greeks is a twofold determination, a combination of that which 
prevails and the prevailing of that which prevails. The phusei onto for the Greeks, as that 
which is always already at hand, never coming to be or passing away, such as the stars, is 
contrasted with the techne onta, that which man produces, and therefore d& phusei onta 
prevail on their own without any assistance (which is not the case in the techne onta). 
This, however, suggest Heidegger, is a more narrow determination of phusis, as simply 
one region of beings, and is in fact derivative from the more originary concept of phusis. 
Phusis also means nature in the sense that we say "it is his nature to help the poor,' 
where nature means something like essence or inner law, the prevailing as such. Hence, 
phusis, as a question concerning the prevailing of beings as a whole, bears within itself 



33 
this twofold determination. It was only later that this twofold detennination became 
distinct, even though it should belong together, so that we now treat the twofold 
determination of phusis asphmei onto, separate from entities we produce. 

We shall now determine more explicitly what it means to Heidegger to enquire 
into beings as a whole. For Aristotle, according to Heidegger, first philosophy was a 
twofold questioning of phusis, into beings as a whole and into the essence of beings. 
Science, the inquiry into beings within a specific domain (such as the heavens, plants, 
etc.), is only possible because beings in their full richness are already revealed. In this 
respect, philosophy is not a science, but rather the sciences are possible only if something 
like philosophy is already in place. The questioning of phusis as enquiring into beings as 
a whole and the essence (the essence being what Aristotle determined as ousia) of beings 
belongs together, although we have nothing from Aristotle to account for the what the 
nature of their unity is, nor is this question asked today. 

Aristotle determined the twofold questioning of phusis more explicitly in terms of 
movement, since, as I said in the previous chapter, for him beings were most properly 
determined in their being in terms of movement. Hence, Heidegger suggests that the 
twofold questioning of phusis became one of "the on katholou and concerning the 
timiotaton genos, concerning beings in general, concerning being, and concerning that 
being which properly is [the prime mover, the theion, although this is considered apart 
from any particular religious view]." (FCM, 34) "Katholou,'' the universal, the generality 
of beings, means here the categories. However, it must also be kept in mind that the 
universal is also brought out, for instance, in oratory (though as such is not a proper 



34 

argument), when the orator uses a striking example. 

Heidegger remarks that Aristotle, in book six of the metaphysics, outlines the two 
questions that are proper to first philosophy without saying what the coimection is 
between them. In the first place, philosophy inquires into beings as such, what a being is 
insofar as it is a being, irrespective of whether it is any particular being. Secondly, 
Philosophy inquires into beings as a whole and hence into the prime mover. The 
medievals took this over, but without seeing the coimection between the two, identified 
the inquiry into God as first philosophy, as the orderer and cause that lay behind the finite 
beings. God was higher than the finite, but in some sense just as much at hand or extant, 
and thereby understood in terms of the things that are encountered in the everyday. God 
for Thomas is the most knowable, because it is not the result of an intellectual 
abstraction, as is the case with pure space and number. It is this taking of the theion as 
one being among others by the scholastics that Heidegger calls the trivialization and 
superficiality of the present day imderstanding of metaphysics. 

Heidegger also suggests that the present conception of metaphysics also bears a 
confusion within it insofar as it deals with what is not sensuous. Aristotle understands 
first philosophy as dealing with beings as beings, and with that which is the most proper 
being, the theion. But here there are two different kinds of non-sensuous. In the first 
place, Aristotle said that there are determinations that do not pertain to any being in its 
peculiarity but none the less to all beings in general, such as unity, otherness, difference 
and opposition. This, for the medievals, means the non-sensuous, since the sensuous 
gives only what is individuated and dispersed and hence not completely determined. The 



35 

determinations reached by the intellect are non-sensuous and universal, are not given by 

the senses, but are understood as belonging to beings as beings {on he on for Aristotle, 
ens qua ens for Thomas), "the determinations that are always already and necessarily co- 
present^ in them, such as, for example, unum, multa, potentia, actus and suchlike," 
(FCM, 48, some emphasis added) in other words, the categories . On the other hand, the 
way in which these are beyond any p)articular thing (passing over any particular thing to 
see what would be the case of beings in general) is different from the way in which God 
is beyond any particular thing. The normal way in which we understand the me/aphysics, 
the lying beyond things, is a unity of two senses of lying beyond that do not coincide, and 
hence the normal conception of metaphysics is confused, and the question remains as to 
why these disparate notions of passing-over pertain to metaphysics. The fundamental 
unclarity in modem metaphysics is that it deals with the most abstract objects of 
knowledge, the categories, and, due to its maimer or way of being, the most concrete 
object of knowledge, God. In order to rid ourselves of these later confusions which 
really do not allow us to see what Aristotle meant, we will take our orientation here into 
the problem of metaphysics with what Heidegger says of the notion of Dasein in 'The 
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.' Although I have, until now, stayed away from 
the more existential aspects of Heidegger's thinking in his interpretation of the Greeks, I 
will now delve into this dimension, for without such an analysis Heidegger's 
understanding of Aristotle and his understanding of Greek thought as a whole will remain 



'Keeping in mind what was said of co-presence earlier, in terms of the participle and at-the-same- 
timp-ness. 



36 

foreign to us. 

Dasein and Boredom 

In 'The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,' Heidegger illustrates the 
meaning of the term Dasein or being-there in contradistinction to its negation, nicht - Da 
- Sein, and does so explicitly to bring out a very specific dimension of human existence. 
Heidegger illustrates this with the example of being in a conversation with someone and 
yet 'not being-there. ' We mean this in English when we say that the mind wanders 
(away) so that we are not caught up in the conversation, but in some other matter that we 
are concerned with, so that if someone were to ask us for the substance of the 
conversation we would not be able to tell them. This being-away is not simply a not- 
being-there in the sense that if the rock is not there it is simply absent, but rather our 
concern redirects itself away from the immediate, is not enthralled in the lustre of the 
immediate, but rather concerns itself otherwise - the meaning of which we shall soon see. 
(cf FCM, 63; CTP, 212-213) Heidegger says that "this potential to be away ultimately 
belongs to the way man is in general. Yet man has the potential to be away in this 
manner only if his being has the character of being-there." (FCM, 63) 

The not-being-there speaks to a peculiar attunement of boredom in Dasein, which 
Heidegger calls its most fundamental attunement. (cf FCM, 89) Generally speaking, 
Heidegger suggests, boredom is a kind of stretching out of time, even if we drive it away 
or escape it by finding something to occupy ourselves with, and hence is always with us 
in some way or other It will go away for a certain period of time, but since no 
involvement can concern us absolutely, it will return. We caimot escape it through the 



37 

passage of time. Heidegger says that "[wjith open eyes [boredom] looks into our Dasein 

(albeit from a distance), and with this gaze already penetrates us and attunes us through 
and through ... [It is an] insidious creature that maintains its monstrous essence in our 
Dasein." (FCM, 79) This boredom is a not being lost in or engrossed by something, 
which happens at various times to various degrees, and we usually encounter it because 
of the various ways we try to 'pass the time' in relation to it. On the other hand, at a 
fundamental level, it happens subtly, and yet absolutely. 

Often as people we will make time for ourselves to go out for the evening with 
friends. In doing this we our able to leave ourselves behind for a time, that empty us 
which we would have had to live with if we remained at home. Even this, though, 
doesn't allow us to escape our boredom entirely, as evidenced by a slight yawn or polite 
tapping of the fingers during the conversation. And in any event, you know it is just for 
one night, that your desire to eliminate boredom will not be properly satiated by it. I 
understand this in the following way: Everyone knows that, for instance, the lustre of a 
new favourite song quickly wears off after repeatedly playing it for hours on end - a 
problem also for new love. In the time we give ourselves for the evening out, we bring 
time, the drawing out of time, to a standstill, but only for a wliile where we are entirely 
present in the situation, cut off from our past responsibilities and fiiture concerns. We 
see this in the reverse direction when melancholies observe people that have been 
oppressed by something or other (either directly or indirectly) and take it up as there 
cause to right the injustice with all the fire of youth. The individual with the cause 
speaks from an existence pervaded by purpose and a drive toward the overcoming of 



39 

inequity and tyrrany, while the melancholic, partially out of amusement and partially out 
of self pity remarks: at least this one has a cause. 

In terms of my interpretation, we might say that there are many things that press 
on us in life: the sensation of first eye-contact with a strange girl, the heartbreak of a love 
betrayed, the oppression of one's 'rights,' the need to fight for philosophy against a 
common conception of its triviality, the sorrow at the emptiness of religion in our time, 
the recklessness of politicians, the television channel changer that is not at hand, and we 
could draw this out infinitely. Heidegger writes that the most profound boredom consists 
in the fact that none of these concerns oppress us absolutely, "[t]he deepest, essential 
need in Dasein is not that a particular actual need oppresses us, but that an essential 
oppressiveness refuses itself, that we scarcely apprehend and are scarcely able to 
apprehend this telling refusal of any oppressiveness as a whole." (fi-om FCM, 163-165) It 
is in this that the ekstatikon (being outside oneself, mentioned in a previous section in 
relation to ecstatic time) of man truly comes to the fore, because since man is so 
essentially run through by this subtle boredom, a demand is made on man to be there, 
''Dasein as such is demanded of man, that it is given to him - to be there. ^ (From FCM, 
163-5) 

On the other hand, this fundamental boredom that pervades our existence has a 
primary signicance in terms of the objects themselves. If we were not somewhat 



*As we shall later see, Heidegger himself concluded that this essential miseiy, and especially in 
relation to the analysis of the thinker (cf CTP, 77) could only be dealt with if we accepted)ai% essential 
restlessness as a fact (cf FCM, 166), and therefore took up a new position toward thinking, one that did 
not tiy to eliminate the question with answers, but continually lend more weight to the question (cf WCT, 
158-9). 



39 

distanced from objects, that is, if it did not belong to the very meaning of our existence to 

let objects be as objects, that is, for their own sake, there would be no way to distingush 
ourselves from the objects. Heidegger cites the case of a schizophrenic who is, in certain 
instances, unable to distinguish himself from a clock, "he is [captivated by the clock to 
such an extreme that he actually becomes] dazed by the object he observes [so] that he 
no longer has a distance to what he observes." (Z, 53) 

Heidegger says that aside from the boredom we strive against, such as when we 
are waiting at the train station and start walking up and down the road, or the boredom 
we escape by making time for an evening out, there is a third kind of boredom which 
involves a general kind of indifference that falls over the individual. We say, for 
instance, it is boring for 'one,' in the sense that "it is boring for one to walk down the 
streets of a large city on a Sunday afternoon." (FCM, 135) There is a profound 
indifference at work here that explodes the differences between the various beings and 
between ourselves and other beings, "[b]eings have - as we say - become indifferent as a 
whole, and we ourselves as these people are not excepted. We no longer stand as 
subjects and such like opposite these beings and excluded from them, but find ourselves 
in the midst of beings as a whole, ie. in the whole of this indifference. Beings as a whole 
do not disappear, however, but show themselves precisely as such in their indifference. 
The emptiness accordingly here consists in the indifference enveloping beings as a 
whole. " (FMC, 138) The whole is the refusal of beings as a whole, in the sense that 
when 1 am caught up in my concerns I am lost in things, but in indifference beings as a 
whole refuse my concern. 



40 

No matter how fragmented oxir everyday existence may appear to be, however, it 
always deals with beings in a unity of the 'whole,' if only in a shadowy way. 
Even and precisely when we are not actually bu^ with things or ourselves, this 
'as a whole' comes over us - for example, in authentic boredom. Such boredom 
is still distant when it is only this book or that play, that business or this idleness, 
that drags on and on. It irrupts when 'one is bored.' Profoimd boredom, drifting 
here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all 
things and human beings and oneself along with them into a remarkable 
indifference. This boredom manifests being as a whole. (Pa, WM, 87) 

Heidegger suggests that the indifferent refusal of beings as a whole is a "refusal of that 
which somehow could and was granted to Dasein. And what is that? The very 
possibilities of its doing and acting." (FCM, 140) This refusal of beings as a whole co- 
presents the possibilities of Dasein. It is this that first allows the human to comport 
him/herself to beings as a whole. 

Heidegger suggests that it was the Greeks who concluded from this that 
philosophy arises in man due to a fundamental boredom and the overcoming of such 
boredom. 

All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware 
of this fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action 
resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a 
melancholic mood is creative. Aristotle already recognized this connection 
between creativity and melancholia when he asked the question :Why is it that all 
those men who have achieved exceptional things, whether in philosophy, in 
politics, in poetry, or in the arts, are clearly melancholies. Aristotle explicitly 
mentions Empedocles, Socrates and Plato in this context ... As a creative and 
essential activity of human Dasein, philosophy stands in XhQ fundamental 
attunement of melancholy. This melancholy concerns the form rather than the 
content of philosophizing, but it necessarily prescribes a fundamental attunement 
which delimits the substantive content of philosophical questioning. (FCM, 183) 

Heidegger does not elaborate on this to any great degree, but I do not believe that there is 

any great mystery here. Anyone knows that philosophers are not close to everyday life in 

the sense of being lost and caught up in the various goings -on around them. (For 



41 

Heidegger's analysis of old Thales contemplating the stars and falling in a ditch, see Z, 

85) 

Heidegger suggests that the seer in ancient Greek was also understood in this 

way. The seer is ho mantis, is the mainomenos, the mad man. In what sense? The mad 

man is not entirely there, with us and talking to us, but not entirely there. The seer is of 

course not insane, but rather not there in the same way that the mad man is not there. 

Heidegger comments that 

A madman is beside himself, outside himself he is away. We ask: away? Where 
to and where from? away from the sheer oppression of what lies before us ... The 
seer is outside himself in the solitary region of the presencing of everything that 
in some way becomes present (EGT, Anaximander Fragment, 35) 

Although Heidegger nowhere says this, I would like to add that it is equally as clear that 

this not being close to things is needed in order to gain a peculiar clarity of understanding 

of them, as we say of people in a romantic relationship that cannot see how bad it is - 

while all their friends can see it quite clearly. The problem is that for the person in the 

relationship, they are so eimieshed in the details and intricacies of what is going on that 

they caimot, to use a phrase Heidegger occasionally likes to employ, see the forest for the 

trees. The whole is there for them vaguely and indeterminately, 'something isn't right,' 

but since they latch on to the particular things that are going on so vehemently that the 

relationship as such and as a whole remains in this vague indeterminacy of 'something 

isn't right.' For the outsider, though, to whom the intricacies are not as available and not 

really that interesting anyway, they only see the whole, and see it quite blatantly, and 

understand the various particulars as merely symptomatic of the whole. It is because 



42 

everyday life does not have the lustre for thinkers that it does for others that they can ' 

perceive life so penetratingly. Everyone, as has been said, experiences a certain refusal 
from things, in that no one has the blessing of being granted an absolute involvement. 
The philosopher is just the most extreme case of this, although only the Greeks 
concluded from this that the philosopher is therefor the most essential person, as we shall 
see later. 
(m) Otherwise Than Being 

Not being close to life and its opposite are not merely determinations of the 
concern one has for it, although it is ftmdamentally that.^ In order to think of it in 
another way, we need to consider Heidegger's understanding of Plato's idea of the good. 
In order to orient ourselves here, we shall consider what John Sallis, in 'Reception,' says 
about it, and then see how completely he misses the mark. Sallis, in his investigation 
into Heidegger's reading of the Greeks, directs us toward Heidegger's examination of the 
idea tou agathou of 'The Republic' in 'The Basic Problems of Phenomenology.' 
Heidegger rejects the common reading of idea tou agathou as idea of the good, and 
instead proposes to consider it in terms of a epekeina tais ousias, a beyond or otherwise 
than Being. Sallis suggests that it is towards this Beyond Being that Heidegger's 'Being 



^This is the very ground of what is thought in the Greek notion of the ekstatikon, the ek-static, 
"Differentiating between what appears of an by itself [Being] from what does not appear of and by itself 
[an entity] is a krinein in the Genuine Greek sense: separating out what is superior from what is inferior. 
Through this critical ability of differentiating ... the human being is hfted out of mere captivation by what 
presses upon and preoccupies him or her and is placed out beyond it, into the relati(Hi to being. In the real 
sense of the word, one becomes ek-sistent, one ek-sists instead of merely 'hving' and snatching at 'reaUty' 
in the so-called 'concem for real life,' where 'reality' is only refuge in the long-standing flight from 
being." (PA, Phusis, 202) 



43 

and Time' is ultimately aimed at, i.e. "to move beyond Being to the meaning of Being." 
(Receptio, 88) In this regard, Sallis suggests that Heidegger's 'Plato's Doctrine of 
Truth,' insofar as its aim is exposing Plato's understanding of paideia, makes explicit 
the steps towards an ultimate Beyond Being or a revolution of the soul, through 
progressively greater stages of unconcealement. However, what is, in Sallis' words 
"remarkable," is that, according to Heidegger, the prisoner must return back into the cave 
because of the inseparable reference 'education' has to its privation {Bildungslosigkeit, 
apaidemia): " 'Next, then,' I said, "make an image of our nature in its education and lack 
of education." (514a, cited in Reception, 88) This connection, Sallis suggests, 
demonstrates how Heidegger is correct in suggesting that for the Greeks aletheia must 
always bear its relation to the overcoming of lethe, ie., unconcealment must always also 
maintain its connection with the overcoming of concealment. 

Sallis also suggests that, for Heidegger's Plato, it is in the self-shining of the idea 
tou agathou that the other ideas are able to come to light, and therefore show themselves 
in their 'look' only in this light. The ideas are, therefore, 'present,' in the light of the 
idea tou agathou, which is itself, however, not present. Heidegger conmients in a 
marginal note in his copy of 'Plato's Doctrine of Truth' that "'agathon of course idea, 
but no longer coming to presence, therefore scarcely visible." (cited in Reception, 89) 
Sallis reads this to mean that Heidegger sees as belonging to unconcealment, especially 
to the highest form of unconcealment, is a concealing and a hiding, a barely visible. In 
other words, when truth is seen in its ownmost, it has concealment belonging to the very 
heart of it. Sallis then suggests a way of coimecting this essential blinding, this 



44 

concealing at the heart of a gaze upon the greatest unconcealment, the highest idea, to the 

republic as a whole: 

This coincidence shows what it is that governs those reversals of beginning and 
end that are marked so clearly in the text of the 'Republic' The vision to which 
the philosopher would come in the end exposes him, at once, to the concealment 
that he will have sought to escape from the beginning. Vision of the idea will 
always be also reception in a realm of obscurity. In the end as in the beginning 
the philosopher will have been received in Hades (Reception, 89). 

Let us leave aside for the moment the problem of the invisibility of that which shines, 

which we shall return to later. In order to demonstrate that Sallis does not bring out 

anything essential with respect to Heidegger's understanding here, because he does not 

broach the difficult problem of production, we shall move to an understanding of the idea 

of the good that unfolds out of a resolution to the problem raised in the last chapter of 

how the present-at-hand relates to privation. 

We took our latest orientation from a search for a less essential determination of 

being-close-to-life. Being close to life for the Greeks involves a certain familiarity with 

it, and brings out the fundamental essence of what they understood by eidos, which has 

not been completely understood until now. Let us determine exactly what Heidegger 

thinks the Greeks thought of this. The eidos, as has been maintained, is what is 

encountered pr/or to the actual thing at hand, such as the look of the table that the 

carpenter has in mind before the production begins. How does this relate to things we do 

not produce? Regardless of whether we are able to delineate the essence of something, 

the eidos, in a proposition, we still have a certain familiarity with it, so as if we go to 

market to buy strawberries, even if we do not know the definition of 'strawberry,' we are 

still able to return home with strawberries and do not confiisingly bring home, for 



45 

instance, a Parrot. In just this sense, there is here a certain closeness to life that holds 

court over any facts we can lay down in a proposition, because we somehow have the 
essence cited in advance. This means that the "exemplar is the look which is cited in 
advance, the look of that which makes up the outer aspect of the table - the 'idea,' the 
essence ... the essence is not gleaned from the individual cases as their universal; it has 
its own origin." (BQP, 73-4) There is, in this regard, a productive seeing. The idea of 
the good in Plato's republic not only lights up beings so they can be known, but even 
allow them to stand forth in terms of their existentia and essentia, without being 
reducible to these. Heidegger quotes from the Republic that "the known not only 
receives its being known from the good, but also it has from thence that it is and what it 
is, in such a way that the good is not itself the being-how and being- what, but even 
outstrips being in dignity and power." (BP, 284) This idea agathou, the epekeina tes 
ousias, the otherwise than being, is that upon which knowledged of beings and Being as 
existentia and essentia rests. This is why Sallis is wrong. For the Greeks being as 
existentia/essentia is the kind of being that belongs to an entity qua produced, which 
causes Heidegger to conclude, on account of the productive seeing that was just 
mentioned, that the idea of the good is nothing other than the demiurge that later appears 
in the Timeaus, "the producer pure and simple." (BP, 286) The eidos as the anticipatory 
familiarity with things is why Greek philosophy is interpreted in the light of techne, 
which is an anticipatory know-how that man has in his procedures against beings, in the 
sense we say the shoemaker has that kind of know-how before he actually begins his 
making of shoes for the day. This anticipatory know-how is, in part, the primary source 



4$ 

of wonder, thaimiazein, for the Greeks.* 

I would suggest that all of what has been said implies a relation of the person to 
the beings as such. We shall now try to deal with the issue of 'beings as such. ' In 'The 
Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,' Heidegger distinguishes between three senses of 
'world,' world here referring to the kind of access a particular being has of entities. The 
stone is worldless, in that it has no access to other entities. More specifically, neither do 
animals, who are worldpoor in the sense that they have no access to beings as such, 
purely for their (the beings) own sake. World is more specifically defined as "the 
manifestness of beings as such [for their own sake] as a whole. " (FCM, 284) The reason 
that man comports himself to beings while animals are captivated by beings (which does 
not mean spellbound, but rather involved with beings in such a way that they do not 
encounter beings as such, for their own sake) is that man is in a certain way held back 
from beings, "all comportment is only possible in a certain restraint and comporting, and 
a stance is only given where a being has the character of a self or, as we also say, of a 
person." (FCM, 274) This being-held-back from beings is spoken from out of the 
ftmdamental attunement of Dasein as boredom, that is, the refusal of beings as a whole to 
have any being oppress us completely. 

Because of his insight into boredom as a fundamental attunement and therefore 



*It is also because it is inherent in techne to increase die quantity of its know-how that the original 
wonder at the being of beings fell away into a will to increase in what is known about beings, specifically 
in Plato's philosophy. Heidegger says that since the time of the Greeks is gone, and we no longer 
experience this wonder, the question of the Being of beings appears to be a mere curiosity, but what 
actually lay at the very ground behind the Greek wonder still unthought and nonetheless parmeates us 
today (cf BQP, 159), as we shall see when we inquire into the deinon. 



47 

the 'as' structure (beings as such as a whole), Heidegger had to modify position of his 

earlier philosophy that logos, to which the 'as' pertains, is somehow downgraded with 
respect to nous, because he realized that something as something does not depend on a 
simple prior unity, but rather is the condition of any comportment at all. He maintained 
early in his career that the 'as' of the logos is the determining something as something 
(eg. Dog as Black, etc.), or more specifically something as something else (dog is not the 
same as black). Since the determination of the logos was not a simple seeing of the thing 
itself, nous, logos was thereby thought defficient. Heidegger later said that the 'as' 
pertaining to the logos was the 'beings as such and as a whole,' currently under 
investigation in this thesis. This refusal of beings as a whole is the condition of the 
possibility of comportment, the specific way in which humans relate to beings. Hence, 
this "fundamental orientation on the part of metaphysics toward the logos permeates not 
only philosophy - the determination of being as 'categories' - and not only scientific 
thought in general, but all our explanatory and interpretive comportment toward beings." 
(FCM, 289) Therefore, "to the extent that logos is connected with nous and with noein, 
with apprehending something, we may say: there belongs to man a being open for ... Of 
such a kind that this being open for ... has the character of apprehending something as 
something. This kind of relating to beings we call comportment, as distinct from the 
behaviour of the animal." (FCM, 306) 
(IV) Steresis (Privation) 

I am now in a position to clear up the problem in Heidegger's thought of the 
relation of being-at-hand to privation. Metaphysics, as Heidegger says, basically means 



4S 

(as the name implies) passing over something to get to something else. This mainly takes 
place in philosophy by example thinking (although thinking by use of metaphor, etc., 
implies the same thing). An example is defined as something that has deficient being 
with respect to the principle or category it illustrates. There is really nothing other that 
contemporary thinking does. We say something like "an effect follows from a cause," 
and explain it to the first year student that doesn't understand by saying something like 
"for instance, if you apply such and such an amount of heat to water under standard room 
pressure it will boil." All of the sudden 'causality' becomes remarkably clear to the 
student. This is not by accident, because the principle itself needs to be linked to 
something familiar to the student. In every case, the person needs to appeal to his or her 
life. For the most part though, this appeal to one's life almost inevitably involves an 
appeal to the commonplace and everyday, "[f|or ordinary understanding examines 
everything it finds expressed philosophically as though it were something present at hand 
and, especially since it seems to be essential, takes it from the outset on the same level as 
the things it pursues everyday." (from FCM., 291-2) For the Greeks, Aristotle's technical 
term ousia meant, in everyday parlance, that which was at hand, "[t]he Being of beings 
obviously is understood here as permanence and constancy. What projection is to be 
found in this understanding of Being? The projection upon time ... [A]uthentic being 
comes to be understood as ausia, parousia in a sense which basically means the 'estate' 
[Anwesen], the immediate and always present [gegenwartigen] possession, the 
'property.'" (KPM, 164; also IM, 61) We make the appeal in a way that remains with the 
way things already are with us, not in order to expand ourselves. Since concepts in 



49 

philosophy are thereby ultimately grounded in the fact that they receive their 

determination through our own individual being-there with things, and the 
interconnection between concepts ultimately leads back to us, "since all formally 
indicative concepts and contexts of interpretation address whoever is trying to understand 
with respect to his or her being-there, a properly unique interconnection of these 
concepts is also given at the same time." (FCM, 299) 

Moreover, Heidegger suggests that since metaphysical thinking as example 
thinking is inherently understandable, discourse must also be understandable, "[wjords, 
discourse, occur in and out of such agreement with whatever can be referred to from the 
begirming and can be grasped as such, with something that several people can and must 
simultaneously agree with one another on." (FCM, 308) This is how Aristotle 
understood language, and every proposition brings this out. If I say that, the board is 
black, I am simultaneously intending its what-being and how-being, its essentia and 
existentia. What the board is, is grey, and how it is, is at - hand. Can this be objected 
against? "One could of course say: This statement is intended to say that the board is 
black and not red. What is at stake is only the way the board is constituted." (FCM, 330) 
In other words, the judgement seems to be indifferent as to whether the thing being 
judged about is at hand or not. And yet, even in Being and Time, Heidegger claimed that 
since the time of the ancients "presence-at-hand has been equated with the meaning of 
Being in general." (BT, 268) 

This is an important point to consider, because otherwise Heidegger's insistance 
on an interpretation of being as present-at-hand is empty. For the Greeks, the solution 



_.«^i., ;¦,• 



50 

perhaps becomes more clear when it is recognized that their way of indicating things was 

demonstrative. 

The 'this' [eg. This piece of chalk] means, more precisely, here in our immediate 
neighborhood; while we always mean something more distant by 'that,' but still 
within the range of 'the here and there'- this here, that there. The Latin language 
has in this connection still sharper distinctions. Hie means 'this here,' iste means 
'that there.' ///e means 'that far away' (WT, 24) 

Words like 'this' and 'that' are demonstratives, which means they point at. They can 

serve the function of & pronoun, substituting for the noun, so instead of saying 'the 

chalk,' we say 'this,' identifying what and indicating it. The definite article 'the' is, as 

Heidegger says, derived from demonstrative words. The 'this' and the 'that' do not 

primarily substitute for substantives (or nouns), but rather serve the function of 

indicating, or, more precisely, 'the' originally carried the sense of identifying something 

at hand, "[t]he naming of the substantive itself always occurs on the basis of a pointing 

out." (WT, 25) I do not know if Heidegger ever cites this passage specifically, but 

Aristotle identifies a substance as, in part, a 'this,' something at hand, "for substance 

means a 'one' and a 'this,' as we maintain." (Metaphysics 1037b28) More specifically it 

is a Tode Ti, a 'this here'." (cf WT, 49) The oneness or singularity of the 'this' follows 

fi-om it being an example of the imiversal (cf WT, 49), although at this time we will 

leave the nature of the example and the universal unclarified somewhat. 

Insofar as the judgement names a being, something that is (what and how), then if 

Heidegger is correct presence-at-hand must be implicated here somehow. Yet, the 

objection is that the judgement 'the board is grey' is supposedly indifferent to the 

existentia of the board. How do we resolve this? Heidegger retorts, and this is the crux 



51 

of his entire argument for being as present-at-hand, that it is "precisely in any possible 

dispute over how it is constituted, it becomes clear that in order to decide, we have 
recourse to this board at hand as such and to what is at hand in it. In other words, in the 
assertion 'The board is black,' we have always already had recourse to the board as this 
one at hand."* (FCM, 330) Insofar as a ^a^/c judgement is in subject-predicate form, and 
therefore asserts something of something, it implies that this thing is being asserted of it 
in such a way that the absence of such a determination can not be said of the thing. But 
since such an absence is possible, the only way the judgement can be something positive, 
that is, something that positively affirms the determination and denies its lack is to have 
some manner of appealing to an authority that can resolve the issue, namely, our being- 
there with beings (beings taken in the sense of 'something' that is). Since, then, the 
notion of something 'as disputable' is implicit in what a judgement is, the authority for 
the resolution of the dispute is also implied - not us, the ones that judge, but that to which 
we appeal in order to resolve the dispute, our lives and experiences. In fact, the extent to 
which an appeal to our own lives is implied even in a concept can be seen precisely in 
those people to whom such an appeal is denied. Hence we find an inability in the blind 
to comprehend 'red,' or the deaf 'tone,' or the very young 'unrequited love.' 

The presence-at-hand of a being is revealed in steresis or privation, that is, if it is 
concealed from the interlocutor whether or not a predicate is to be attributed to a subject 



'The value of what is present at hand was, though, for the Greeks, negligible. Aristotle, in his 
critique of Antiphon's concern for the present at hand, basically reduced it to non-essence, "[i]n relation to 
the essence as whatness, the presence at hand of a particular individuation of the essence is of no 
importance to the Greeks (BQP, 67)." 



52 

or not. Although Heidegger does not proceed to the next logical step here, that is, to an 

objection that seems quite natural from what has been said, according to the spirit of the 
analysis we can make it quite easily. Could it not be said that certain judgements can be 
considered in relation to the object, but since they are not an item of possible dispute 
they do not imply a relation to the object, that is, those judgements we call analytic or 
tautological. For analytic judgements are called purely formal judgements, judgements 
(as the name implies) that analyze concepts, so that the predicate contains no more than 
is implied in the subject - Philosophy's famous 'all bachelors are uimiarried,' for 
instance. Let us consider this. Analytic judgements bear a tautological form, meaning 
the content is, ultimately, the same in the subject and predicate, although indeterminate. 
Hence the form A is A would be tautological, irrespective of what A concretely 
represented, while A is B, vdiereby B is some indeterminate content other than that of A, 
would not be tautological. Now 'A' here is not nominal, in the sense that if we were to 
list a series of names we could, equivalently say: Dog, Bill, Love, Time, A, Desk, ... For, 
while the other names name determinate beings [things that are in some way or other], 
'A' does not, and so can stand in the place of Dog, Bill, etc. In other words, 
tautologically, 'A is A' can mean a dog is a dog, or love is love, and so A is not 
understood nominally in the sense of the letter A, but rather in the sense of 'one.' For 
'dog' and 'bill' are names for determinate beings, and if we abstract from these 
determinations we are left, not with determinate beings, but with specific beings: this 
one; this one, etc., without it being decided in what way they are determined. 

We know, and this is crucial, that 'A' in the tautological judgement stands for a 



53 

an undetermined specific being and not an tmdetermined unspecific being, because 

otherwise any judgement, such as A is B, would be analytic. But the analyticity of the 
analytic judgement consists in the fact that 'A' is a being, something. In order to be 
something, a being must be what it is and not what it is not, and a fortiori, not nothing at 
all. A bachelor is a bachelor by virtue of being a bachelor and not a candy bar and not 
nothing at all. 'A' is 'A' by virtue of being just specifically what it is and not what this 
specificity excludes and not nothing at all, for if the content is unspecified, then A is A 
would be expressing, out of sameness, A is B, anything is anything, and not simply A is 
A, this is just what it is. 

Since the content of the analytic judgement is specific and undetermined, and not 
unspecific and undetermined, the 'A' is a one. ''* Now, 'One' is not what we encounter 
prior to our encounter with a being, but what we are lef^ with once all determinations 
have been abstracted away from the being. We know this because the oneness of the 'A' 
in a tautology is specified, if undetermined. In order for something to be specified, it 
must co-intend with the specificity the actual specific determination itself which is what 
is specific, for otherwise there is nothing about the 'A' which differentiates it from the 
'B,' a condition which makes the analytic judgement possible. Specificity does not 
somehow magically attach itself to entities, which is clear enough in entities that are 
thought of univocally, that is, wherein the difference between entity A and B is merely 



"^e Greek number system, as is known, began with the number two, not one. NumbCTS for them 
were mathematical, mathesis, that which is encountered prior to any being. It is eminently questionable, 
then, why one' was not a number for them. 



54 

nominal." Rather, specificity only follows from the matter itself. In this regard, even in 

analytic judgements, the so-called formal judgement, even here an abstraction from 

beings we are there with in our lives is implied, for otherwise the notion of 'one' would 

be empty, that is, unspecific, and hence not sufficient for what the analytic judgement 

needs: a specific undetermined content. This is why Heidegger can claim that since the 

time of the ancients, being has been understood as present-at-hand. But what does this 

presence imply? 

(V) The Eternal Return 

If we speak of presence here, then it is in reference to the present time, not in the 

sense of a lustrous presencing, which is a different distinction, although that too has its 

time. Heidegger comments that 

'In being' means: being present [at hand, not absent]. Beings are more in being 
the more present they are. Beings come to be more present, the more abidingly 
they abide, the more lasting the abiding is. What in time is present, and therefore 
of the present? Only the 'now' is of the present time at each given moment. The 
future is the 'not yet now,' the past is the 'no longer now.' The future is what is 
still absent, the past is what is already absent. In being, present in time at the 
given moment is only that narrow ridge of the momentary fugitive 'now' rising 
out of the 'not yet now' and falling away into the 'no longer now (WCT, 101) 

It is well known that being means a kind of eternal endurance, something that is not 

future or past but simply is. Thought categorially, as philosophy has for a long time, the 

determination of something endures whether the thing factually exists or not. Heidegger 

says somewhere that 'horse' w, irrespective of whether the horse in front of me passes 

away [or, predicatively, whiteness or largeness, etc.]. In other words, the concept bears a 



"Although from what has been said it is obvious that even entities thou^t of univocally are still 
entities, and hence imply a 'one.' 



55 
temporal perpetuality within it. Moreover, substance, by which we mean the object in 
general, what predicates are synthesized with, is the thing that endures purely and 
simply. Object 'in general' does not mean any particular thing, but rather the conceptual 
endurance that is already assumed of any thing whatever, that it is one and the same thing 
over time, for otherwise things could not be nouns and we could not name them. As we 
have seen, this presence ultimately reduces to presence at hand. 

In the passage cited above there is an ambiguity. The 'now' is, so to speak, 
fugitive, a mere momentary instant, fleetingly emerging between the not yet now and the 
no longer now, and yet, for all that, the future and the past orient themselves to it, as not 
yet now and no longer now respectively. Heidegger suggests that Aristotle understood 
the past and the future as me on ti, not nothing, but deficient with respect to the fact that 
they are not present. 

The future, and more importantly, the past, are determined with respect to the 
present. Nietzsche, as Heidegger says, in speaking of the eternal return indicates the 
will's revulsion against time, against the 'it was.' The difficulty of understanding 
Heidegger and Nietzsche here proceeds, not from the complexity of the thought involved, 
but at the absolutely fundamental metaphysical level at which the statement is being 
posited. In order to understand the difficulty here, we must consider the phenomenon of 
time. Time as we experience it, as was said earlier, flows out of the future and into the 
past, quite the opposite of world-time which is an endless progression of nows that march 
steadily on into the future. We say, for instance, at the beginning of November, that 
Christmas is coming. On Christmas day we say that Christmas has arrived, and the day 



56 
after we say, if anyone asks when Christmas is, that it has already passed. Our 

experience of time here shows a temporahty of the past, it moves in that direction. The 
future, according to its direction, is toward the past, as that vMch is not yet present. The 
present too, according to its directionality, is what is not yet past, for the present arrives 
for the moment and, with Christmas, passes, is gone. The past is what is simply gone. 
Yet, and this is the key we said that the past is what is no longer present, as though the 
temporality of the past was somehow oriented toward the present, even though when we 
consulted the experience of time itself we found no relation of the past to present. In 
fact, the present was simply what was not-yet-past, and hence // was understood in terms 
of the past, not the past in terms of it, if we understand it merely in terms of its temporal 
character. 

If we understand being in terms of the enduring present, then the present must be 
fully standing unto itself, and hence cannot be understood in terms of its transitive 
temporal character, that is, as not yet past. The revulsion of the will does not consist in a 
revulsion against the past per se, but rather against the a past that does not leave a fully 
standing present. Heidegger comments that "[t]he revulsion turns not against the mere 
passing, but against that passing away which allows what has passed to be only in the 
past." (WCT, 103) In other words, the revulsion consists in the fact that the past is not 
stamped with the temporal mark of the future, that is, with a temporality that is 
determined by virtue of its relation to the present, that the past is not a future perfect. 
The revulsion is in the fact that the present cannot fully stand, standstill, because the past 
does not eternally, always, return to it, as the future always passes over into it. 



57 

How does the will overcome its revulsion at the mere passing away of the past? It 

wills the past back into the present, effectively negating the temporal character of the 
present (not-yet past) and the past (mere past) in order to determine the past, not as mere 
past, but as past-present, no longer present - and hence the temporal mark of the present 
is no longer a 'not-yet-past,' since it is the pole around vsdiich the other two temporal 
ecstasies turn. As Heidegger says, "[t]he will becomes free from what is revolting in the 
'it was' when it wills the constant recurrence of every 'it was.'" (WCT, 104) 

Nietzsche is very clear on this point. In Zarathustra, the dwarf interprets the 
eternal return of the same to mean that time as a whole is eternal, which is to say that 
what seems like an indefinite time line extending infinitely into the fixture and past is 
merely a deception, just as the earth deceives us into thinking it is flat if you simply look 
out into the horizon. Zarathustra rejects this interpretation though, and says that the 
eternal return is not to be understood in this way, but rather in terms of the moment itself 

Put somewhat more simply in terms of human existence, the difference is 
whether we are to understand tragedy as a merely ontic phenomenon, or in terms of the 
basic character of beings themselves. On the one hand, the dwarf perceives the most 
dismal thought to be a mere travesty of time, whereby beings become indifferent to us in 
light of the fact that newness and novelty of them gets ripped asunder. Zarathustra, on 
the other hand, understands beings themselves as tragic, which is precisely what makes 
the thought so abysmal. A revulsion against time is implied in anything we concern 
ourselves with, for otherwise we could not concern ourselves with anything, since any 



58 

particular being we are concerned with implies in itself a conceptual endurance if it is to 

be just that being that it is. To be a being, then, means to be something that can be an 
object of concern. But then beings are merely that, something which we can concern 
ourselves with. Nihilism breathes precisely in this melancholic awareness: no matter 
what I am concerned with or the extent to which I am concerned with it, it is merely 
something, one being among nfmite others, and no more worthy of my concern than any 
other being. 



59 
Chapter 3 

Heidegger's Analysis of Judgements as an Approach to The Problem of the Meaning 
of the Philosophical Existence for the Greeks 

This chapter, and the one that follows it, takes as its theme a problem initially 
raised in the previous two chapters, namely the judgement and the relation of the person 
to things. In these two chapters, the aim will be to proceed from the necessity of the 
relation of the proposition to our existence, to an understanding why the philosophical 
life was the highest mode of being for the Greeks. We will begin by examining 
judgements and statements. 
(I) Judgements and Statements 

The copula in a judgement, Heidegger says, is meant to combine "[t]he 'is' has 
received this designation 'copula' because of its combinatory position in the proposition 
intermediate between subject and predicate: S is P (BP, 177)." According to Heidegger, 
this combinatory function of the copula was first introduced in Aristotle's discussion of 
the logos, which for him meant logos apophantikos, "that discourse and forms of 
discourse whose function it is to exhibit that which is, as it is (BP, 180)." This is 
distinguished from pure logos in that a pure logos can have any meaning and form, from 
prayers to complaints. A logos as statement is made of nouns and verbs. 

Heidegger suggests that verbs themselves bring something to mind and carry a 
certain sense of time (hence verbs have a tense), but they do not indicate if any actual 
particular instance of the action is going on. In the same way, 'being' only seems to 



signify a combinatoiy sense if there is a subject and predicate present, and is therefore 

the combining itself In order to understand this, Heidegger emphasizes that in Aristotle, 

the copula which serves the combinatory fimction is not itself a being like the subject or 

predicate, which carries the multiple sense of 'what' a being is, the 'that' something is 

and the thing 'as it is,' which an assertion in Aristotle's sense always expresses. 

Heidegger comments further that: 

[t]he 'is' signifies the being of a being and is not itself like an existent thing. In 
the statement 'The board is black,' both the subject, board, and the predicate, 
black, mean something existent - the thing that is the board and the thing as 
blackened (BP, 182). 

The 'is' does not belong to the thing itself, but to thinking, and is at once a combination 

(prossemainei sunthesin tina), sunthesis, and a separation, diaresis. The 'is' is not an 

entity like the 'that' or the 'as such' outside of the mind, but is none the less an entity of 

the mind, one the mmd produces as ^productive mind that synthesizes. Heidegger 

suggests that the entity that is combined does not somehow have independent being, exo 

on, aside from the thought that produces it, but it is unclear what is actually to be 

understood by this (mental) entity and its relation to the 'that' and the 'as such' of the 

(objective) entity. 

In order to make this clearer, we will very briefly consider Heidegger's analysis 

of the history of the judgement after Aristotle to see the determination of the copula as 

implying both essentia and existentia - and why according to Aristotle this must be the 

case. Heidegger looks at nominalism in order to see if it is possible to construct a theory 

of judgement that does not refer to the existentia or the mode of the being of things. 



61 

Hobbes understood, according to his nominalism, that the copula simply combined 

verbal sequences and was what it was merely in order to convey the meaning of words. 
In other words, the subject and predicate were unified by virtue of being combined in one 
and the same thing, with the result that the copula referred to the essentia or whatness or 
a real determination of the thing, such as if we were to say 'the dog is grey' (without ever 
asserting whether something exists or not). For Hobbes, the copula is unable to express 
bare existence, such as when we say 'the dog is.' Mill's nominalism was somewhat less 
extreme, and suggested that the copula could either refer to the essentia or existentia 
(which for Mill means at hand or extant), or both, depending on the kind of judgement. 
But Mill maintains that it is still possible to make a judgement that merely expresses 
whatness, and in that case the copula can be substituted for the word 'means. ' Hence, to 
judge that 'the unicorn is homed' does not assert the existence of any thing, but merely 
substitutes the word 'is' for 'means,' so that the sense of the judgement is 'the word 
unicorn means, among other things, something that has a horn. Heidegger counters 
Mill's less overt nominalism by saying that even if a judgement does not make it explicit, 
it must assert existence or a mode of being, either explicitly or implicitly. Therefore, in 
the case of the unicorn, its mode of being is asserted as imaginary as opposed to present 
at hand extant. The extent to which this is true of any judgement was shown in the 
previous chapter. 

Lotze posited his theory of judgement in such a way that every judgement is a 
double judgement, with the consequence that there is no such thing as a purely negative 
judgement that stands on its own. For instance, the judgement 'the cat is not grey' is. 



62 

according to Lotze, a judgement about the falsity of an original judgement, 'the cat is 

grey.' All judgements, then, are made up of primary judgements, and secondary 

judgements asserting their truth or falsity, so that all judgements have a double nature. 

From this theory, Lotze identified the Being of beings in exactly the same way that 

phenomenology identified the being of objects. Phenomenology, since Husserl, said that 

there was the intentio, the perceiving, the intentum, the perceived, but also the existentia 

or how-being, the being-perceived of the object which was what its being lied in (the 'as 

how' of the intentional object is 'as perceived' in the same way a hammer is perceived 

'as equipment'). Lotze treats 'being-judged' in exactly the same way as phenomenology 

treats being perceived or the standing-over-against (gegenstand) of the object: 

From Lotze 's theory of judgement, intertwined with the Neo-Kantian conception 
of knowledge as judgement, there arises a specific conception of the being of 
beings as being-judged in a true judgement. This being-judged is identified with 
that to which the judgement refers, the object standing-over-against in knowing. 
Being-judged is equal to objectivity as standing-over-against-ness, and 
objectivity, true judgement, and sense are identified (BP, 203). 

Every judgement is also a claim of being-true, since to say 'the dog is grey' is, when the 

'is' is emphasized, is really little more than a short way of saying 'it is true, or it is in 

fact the case that the dog is grey. But since things are not true or false, only judgements 

having this character, then the implicit 'being-true' in every judgement demands that 

every judgement is actually double: the original proposition, and the judgement of the 

truth or falsity of that proposition. 

From what has been drawn fi^om the tradition, Heidegger says that we can make 

the following conclusion. Firstly, the copula carries the sense of providing a 

determination of the things, either accidentally or necessarily. Next, it denoted its 



63 

existentia or mode of being, not just essentia or what-being. Thirdly, it refers to the 
entity insofar as it is revealed or unveiled (for the Greek this was aletheid) as what it is 
(essentia) and how or in what way it is (existentia), which Heidegger calls being-true. 
The logos, therefore, since it always denotes the existentia or mode of being of the entity, 
is more than just a bare assertion which is only constituted by words. 

Heidegger says that we understand the logos as a bare proposition, as something 
merely verbal, because we make the mistake of beginning our analysis of it with an 
analysis of the merely verbal, the bare proposition. We infer from the fact that there is a 
sequence of words in a verbal judgement that are combined by the copula, to a series of 
combined ideas in the mind to which the words refer, and finally to something in the 
world which the combined ideas agree or adequate with (an adequation of what is outside 
the mind with what is inside it). This understanding of objectivity or truth is wrong or at 
least unfounded because it simply starts from the verbal proposition and fails to think of 
the necessary interconnection of the proposition and essentia/existentia of the thing. The 
combining that happens in a verbal proposition is only possible if a more primordial 
combining has taken place, and it must be seen what this is. 
(II) The Judgement and Intentionality 

Heidegger says that since any assertion is intentional, that is, involves an asserting 
(corresponding to the intentio) and asserted (corresponding to the intentum), then 
whatever is true of the intentional structure as such must also be true of an assertion, a 
fortiori. He suggests that we know an assertion is intentional, since, in the same way that 
it is the case that the instance of an illusory perception demands that the object side of 



64 

the intentional act is not separate from but built into the act of intending itself, so too is it 

the case that an assertion, even if it is about something illusory, also bears the object 
side. A5 Heidegger says, "[e]ven if that about which an assertion is made should turn out 
not to be, an empty illusion, this in no way gainsays the intentionality of the structure of 
assertion but only demonstrates it (BP, 207)." Heidegger suggests that it was first Plato, 
in the Sophist, who suggested that an assertion about a being that is not is still an 
assertion about a being, just one that is not in the same mode as a present-at-hand being. 
It is not simply an assertion about an absolute non-being, ouk on, but a being that is 
somehow lacking or defective {me on). In this way, as Heidegger says, "every logos is as 
such logos tinos, every assertion an assertion about something. This is seemingly trivial 
and yet it is a puzzle (BP, 208)." The question for us now becomes one of seeing why 
the logos, in its very nature, must be an assertion about beings. 

It is my interpretation that for Heidegger, since every assertion is intentional, 
everything asserted about must be understood in terms of an existentia and thereby must 
relate to a mode of being of Dasein. In Heidegger's words, "[o]nly because the Dasein 
exists in the manner of being-in-the-world is some being unveiled along with the 
Dasein' s existence in such a way that what is thus unveiled can become the possible 
object of an assertion (BP, 208)." It is because Dasein already comports itself to and 
understands the Being of beings that an entity can be something that appears in a 
proposition. In other words, along with the unveiling of the Dasein' s existence, the entity 
is unveiled in such a way that it can become an object of assertion. Let us clarify. _ 
(m) World And Judgement 



65 

It is the pre-understanding of the 'world' that allows us to find ourselves with the 

entities we encounter, and since our encountering of entities always happens in a 

particular way, we always encounter ourselves in them in a certain manner. I would 

suggest that 'World' is understood here in the same sense that we might speak of the 

fictional world of a fictional character, where 'world' carries the sense of the general 

context according to which everything that 'happens' or 'is' in that book derives its 

sense. Heidegger says that. 

Even what we encounter only fragmentarily, even what is only primitively 
understood in a Dasein, the child's world, is, as intra worldly, laden, charged as it 
were, with world. What is important is only whether the existent Dasein, in 
conformity with its existential possibility, is original enough still to see on its own 
the world that is always already unveiled with its existence, to verbalize it, and 
thereby to make it expressly visible for others ... Poetry, creative literature, is 
nothing but the elementary emergence into words, the becoming-uncovered, of 
existence as being-in-the-world. For the others who before were blind [the 
readers before having read the book], the world first becomes visible by what is 
thus spoken (BP, 171-172). 

I would suggest that 'seeing,' as Heidegger uses the term here, is not primarily meant to 

carry a bare visual connotation, but has the sense of 'something revealed,' of 'I see what 

you mean,' of seeing in the Greek sense of the ancient 'seer' to whom signs of future 

events are revealed. What is revealed, for instance, is the world of abject poverty that 

announces itself through every entity that Rilke describes in The Notebooks of Make 

Laurids Brigge (BP, 172-173), or through Pascal's peasant woman's shoes that 

Heidegger describes in The Origin of the Work of Art (esp.PLT, OWA, 33-39). 

Heidegger does not explicitly clarify this point, bu it is my position that what is 

generally understood in phenomenology as the existentia, the 'being-perceived' which all 

objects carry as intentional but does not strictly belong to the objects in themselves is 



more fundamentally determined by the way of being, the existentia, that is the mode of 

the being of Dasein, existence. This means that entities can be intra worldly extant on 

the condition that they are within the world and Dasein has being-in-the-world, because 

to be intra worldly carries the connotation of announcing its world, that inner-worldly 

(what Rilke calls 'Life') bursts forth from the entity in the way that Rilke's walls 

announce a world of abject poverty. As Heidegger says of Rilke's The Notebooks of 

Malte Laurids Brigge, "the world, being-in-the-world - Rilke calls it life - leaps toward 

us from the things ... The constitution of Dasein's existence as being-in-the-world 

emerged as a peculiar transposition of the subject which makes up the phenomenon 

which we shall yet more particularly define as Dasein's transcendence (BP, 173-174)." 

Accordingly, I would suggest that the being-in-the-world of Dasein, the existentia or 

mode of being of that entity which we ourselves are, leaps forth from the intra worldly 

extant, and is the condition upon which we are able to find ourselves with entities. It is 

unclear for us, though, given the great difference between the being of the Dasein and the 

being of the intra worldly entities, how 'being' can be a unified concept. 

If entities manifest the world, as is the case of the world of abject poverty of 

Rilke's characterization, so too is Dasein with others because in each case Dasein 

manifest its world as the other do. Heidegger comments, in this sort of notion that is 

present in the Pauline notion of Cosmos, that 

For this common concept of the world it is sufficient to point to the concept of 
cosmos, for instance, in Paul. Cosmos here means not only the whole of plants, 
animals and earth, but primarily the Dasein of the human being in the sense of 
God-forsaken man in his association with earth, stars, animals and plants (BP, 
297). 



m 

Given what we have now seen, let us further our understanding of Aristotle. 
(IV) Aristotle and the Judgement 

I read Heidegger earlier to be saying that being true has to do with unveiling of 

the entity as a what (essentia) and how (existentia), and it is now clear that this unveiling 

depends on the mode of the being of Dasein. Since language belongs to the way in which 

Dasein is, it is not extant like the entities whose mode of being is not the same as that of 

the Dasein, but rather exists. We caimot understand a proposition as a move from bare 

words to ideas, as is normally done, but realize that Dasein already understand a world 

and can encounter entities because of it, and hence the world is not dependent on 

language and words but rather language and words first depend on the world. For, as I 

said, assertions always somehow depend on the mode of being of the entities being 

asserted about, although it is only in Heidegger's reading of Aristotle that we see the 

extent to which this is, namely in terms of the privative and the present-at-hand. Insofar 

as the entities depend on a Dasein that already understands a world, language and words 

must also be so dependent. Heidegger writes that 

Insofar as what is understood, something of the nature of significance-contextures 
is articulated by means of this understanding. These contextures are potentially 
expressible in words. It is not the case that first there are words, which are coined 
as signs for meanings, but just the reverse - it is from the Dasein which 
understands itself and the world, from a significance-contexture already unveiled, 
that these meanings accrue, each to its own word (BP, 208-207). 

Words do not attach themselves to ideas, but rather the ideas realize themselves in words, 
which I believe can be understood in a similar sense to what we mean when we say 'I am 
trying but cannot find a word for what I am trying to express.' If language did not work 
in this way, there would be no connection between the idea and the word. Thus, in 



68 

inquiring into the relation of an assertion complex to a idea complex, and then to the 

thing itself, the 'A is B' assertion to the 'A is B' idea, we cannot begin with the assertion 
complex. It is only by viewing the assertion, idea, and thing asserted as a w^ole can we 
begin to understand its structure, the apophantic structure. 

Apophansis allows a thing be seen {phainesthai) as what it is. The assertion is, as 
Heidegger says, about the thing itself, not my idea of that thing. If I say the dog is black, 
I am not referring to the idea in my head of the dog, but to the dog itself Apophansis, 
therefore has the following basic structure: assertion about thing - the thing asserted 
about. The question is raised, then, what is the third element that we know belongs to 
any intentional structure. Clearly, it will be the thing as asserted about. But what does 
this mean? One can predicate something of a subject in an assertion only on the 
condition that the apophantic nature is already in place, that is, if there is an entity being 
shown in its being. This is the case either if we are showing the entity itself as such that 
it is in itself, or as such that it has one or another determination. This showing of the 
entity is what, according to Heidegger, Aristotle understood by apohansis, and involves, 
as was said earlier, a sunthesis (putting together) and a diaresis (taking apart). This 
separating or diaresis is not a separating out of ideas, because, as was said, an assertion is 
not about ideas but about the thing itself The assertion is about the thing that is given 
for asserting the 'asserting about,' and a predicate is attributed to the subject, but in such 
a way that they are shown to be inherently together. 

Heidegger suggests that the thing belongs with its determinations, not apart from 
them, because it has these determination within a significance-context. This is also the 



69 

basis of communicating with others. I understand this in the following way: I can, for 

instance, say to the other person, such that they listen to me understandingly, that a 

particular chess piece has such and such qualities and fimctions, not because I am 

somehow separating the subject idea 'King' in my mind from its predicates (qualities and 

functions), and transferring my mental states to my fellow person, but because we are 

both understanding the thing in the same context, which in this case is the context of 

what a chess game is. It is clear enough that one must share a context or else 

communication is impossible, for otherwise a five year old could have a meaningful 

understanding of what unrequited love is. It is clear enough, in this latter example, why 

words do not simply refer to ideas, and ideas to the phenomenon, because the meaningful 

context must first light up the phenomenon. 

Heidegger says that what predication really is can only be ascertained if it is 

understood that apophansis primarily refers to an assertion about a thing itself, and not 

about ideas, whereby the thing is understood as something within a context The 

predicate is separable from the subject in words, and in ideas, but not in things. A 

predicate is asserted of a subject that is already unveiled, that is intra worldly, and on this 

basis we can communicate with others. But since it is for Dasein that there is a world, 

then copula or 'is' in the proposition ultimately refers back to nothing but Dasein itself 

because the primary unveiling of the entity which can be the possible object of 
dispartive [predicative] assertion is not accomplished by the assertion but is 
already carried out in the original showing of the unveiling, the asserter already 
understands the mode of being [existentia] of the entity about which he is 
speaking, even before making his assertion. This understanding of the being of 
what is being spoken about does not first develop because of the assertion; rather, 
the assertion expresses it ... The 'is' in the proposition can, as it were, achieve this 
indeterminacy of its meaning because, as uttered, it arises from the Dasein which 



70 

is uttering itself and which already understands in one sense or another the being 
intended in the 'is' (BP, 211). 

It was said earlier that, in some sense, any assertion must refer to the existentia or mode 

of being of the entity. 

Heidegger says that, primarily, in order for an entity to be asserted about, it must 

already be unveiled for the Dasein that is doing the asserting, that is, must be intra 

worldly. But since, as was said of Lotze, any assertion refers to a more primary unveiling 

of the entity, to being true, the copula is not itself determinable or concretizable in any 

assertion because it refers to what is always already unveiled before any assertion. The 

'is' bears witness to that third element of the intentional structure at work in any 

assertion that allows the 'asserting about-asserted about' structure to be. In any assertion 

about the entity, essentia and existentia, whatness and the mode of being of the entity is 

already pre-understood, since the entity is intra worldly. Aristotle says that truth is not in 

things, but in the understanding. But this simply says that the truth is not extant like 

things, and so it is unclear what it means to say that the truth is in the understanding. But 

since understanding is a mode of the comportment of Dasein, it must be inquired into in 

relation to Dasein. Only if the nature of the understanding is cleared up can it be claimed 

in what sense Aristotle says that truth is in the understanding. Heidegger suggests that 

"truth neither is present among things nor does it occur in a subject [as a psychic process] 

but lies - taken almost literally - in the middle 'between' things and Dasein. Being true 

in the sense ofaletheia or unveiling is something that Dasein does to beings so that they 

can stand forth in there being, and, as was is true in the case of the shoemaker, allows 



71 

Dasein to understand itself. The shoemaker understands the produced shoes in such a 

way that the shoemaker unveils himself as a shoemaker at the same time. Hence, it 

belongs to Dasein' s existence, is a mode of Dasein' s being, a way that Dasein is (BP, 

216)." Truth occurs in the subject, but not in the problematic sense of the assertion that 

then has to agree with something outside the mind, but rather as a way of Dasein's being. 

As the threefold intentional structxire belongs to truth, Heidegger comments that 

To the Dasein as unveiling there belongs essentially something unveiled in its 
unveiledness, some entity to which the unveiling relates in conformity with its 
intentional structure. There belongs to unveiling, as to every other intentional 
comportment, an understanding of the being of that to which this comportment 
relates as such. In unveiling assertion the Dasein is directed toward something 
which it understands beforehand in that entity's unveiledness ... Truth and being- 
true as unveiledness and unveiling have the Dasein 's mode of being (BP, 217) 

Hence, in the unveiledness of the unveiled thing, Dasein as unveiling is relating to 

something that has Dasein's mode of being. In other words, Dasein already has an 

understanding of the being that is unveiled because the unveiledness of that unveiled 

being has the mode of being of the Dasein. This does not mean that the entity, such as 

the unicorn, implies a relation to Dasein, but rather that the mode of being of the unicorn, 

'imaginary,' does. Hence, truth as unveiling is a determination of Dasein, and 

unveiledness is a possible determination of the extant, insofar as Dasein, for lack of a 

better phrase, gives 'something' that has Dasein's mode of being to the extant when it 

comports itself to the extant (such as happens when Dasein makes an assertion about it). 

Generally speaking, in whatever way Dasein comports itself to an entity, 

something in the entity will have the mode of the being of Dasein because that third 

element in the intentional structure, as is easily shown in the case of illusions, is a 



72 
structural element of the intentional act itself, regardless of whether we are speaking of 
the unveiledness of the unveiled, or the objectness (standing-over-againstness, 
gegenstand) of the object, or anything else. Standing-over-againstness is not a necessary 
determination of the object, but rather a possible one that is necessary insofar as Dasein 
is comporting itself towards it, and is, in Heidegger's terms, what is mean by the phrase 
Dasein 's Transcendence. Unveiledness, Truth, therefore, is not in the subject or the 
object, but somehow between them. What this third something is in its being still needs 
to be determined, since all that is known so far is that Dasein must already understand 
the entity in some sense if it comports itself to the entity, that is, insofar as the entity is in 
the world. 

The question, though, is becoming more difficult, because it is still unclarified in 
what sense Aristotle's theory of the judgement is to be understood in relation to the being 
of man. It should at least be noted that, according to the manifold senses of 'Being' 
illustrated (essentia and existentia), that being cannot be a genus, and must be analogical, 
since both existence and essence pertain to beings, and existence and essence both are, 
but not in the same way. In order to clarify the matter somewhat, we must show how 
Aristotle casts light on the relation of the assertion to the being of Dasein by considering 
being as presence and the at-hand. 
(V) Dasein and Presence-at-Hand 

Of the many senses of essence that Heidegger attempts to explicate in terms of 
the Greek theory of production, the first is morphe or shape, which we discussed earlier. 
The form, which, as producing, is primarily to be understood in terms of a forming-so-as- 



73 
to-give-shape, was one of the primary senses of essence for the Greeks. The forming, for 
the Greeks, allows there to be a particular entity to be looked at, and hence for the Greeks 
the thinghood of the thing consists of these two elements (form and look). Heidegger 
comments that 

Forming and shaping lend its own peculiar look to what is to be produced and has 
been produced. Look is the ontological sense of the Greek expression eidos or 
idea. In the look of the thing we are able to see what it is, its thingness, the 
peculiar character impressed on it (BP, 106). 

Conceptually, for the Greeks, the look that something presents is grounded in the thing's 

form or morphe. 

Heidegger claims, however, that for the Greeks the ontological significance of the 

look-form relation is not determined by the form, in the sense we would say that the form 

is understood to determine the look we have of the thing in perception. Rather, look, 

understood ontologically, determines the form or morphe for the Greeks, because the 

look is primarily to be taken as a production, not as a perception. Forming, as Heidegger 

says, is enacted on something in the light of an anticipation of a model, guide or 

standard of some sort. The painter, for instance, utilizes the paint and creates a painting 

according to a model, an idealized painting that is the actual painting before hand, its 

ground. This model, which is anticipated before hand, carries the ownmost sense of 

eidos, ^^ which is why the shaped or formed product is understood as a posterior likeness 

of the look or eidos, and is grounded in it. In this sense essence as form carries the sense 



'^It is therefore imprecise to characterize the primary sense of eidos as the look of the thing at 
hand, as Mehta does, "Idea or eidos means the look, the view presented by anything that confronts us, its 
visage (Philosophy, 416)." Eidos primarily has the sense of the look of the thing prior to its coming into 
being. 



74 

of production: 

If the shaped product, the form (morphe), is founded in the eidos, then this means 
that both concepts are understood by reference to the process of shaping, forming, 
producing. The order and connection of these two concepts is established by the 
performance of the process of forming and shaping and the necessary precedence 
in that process of the look of what is to be formed. (BP, 107). 

Prior to actualization, then, the entity qua thing actually formed already was before (ti en 

einai), as anticipatory look in the imagination. It is from the eidos that the formed thing 

receives its genos, which is not simply a group in the sense oi genus but rather its kind, 

its family or stock. The determination 'group' does not carry the specificity of sense that 

'family {gene ton ontonf does, because one might say 'this entity belongs to this group 

accidentally.' 'Family,' on the other hand, does, in the sense that we would say that (C) 

Smith is on account of having been produced by (A), and (B), or in relation to what was 

said earlier, that the particular work of art is essentially of that stock, and that 'Art' is not 

some indifferent category that lords over it. 

The notion of eidos as seeing-before is also brought out in what the Greeks 

understood as the mathematical. In Greek, the mathema are those things which are 

properly leamable, of which numbers are the exemplary case. These things are properly 

leamable because we already have them with us somehow. We say, for instance, that 

there are three books. We do not read 'threeness' off the books, but already have a vague 

idea of it, which enables us to identify the books as just these particular three. Given this 

particular instance of the mathematical, the mathematical in general is this dimension of 

the thing that is always already with us in an indeterminate way. 

The mathematical is that evident aspect of things within which we are always 
already moving and according to which we experience them as things at all, and 



75 

as such things. The mathematical is this fundamental position we take toward 
things by which we take up things as already given to us, and as they should be 
given. Therefore, the mathematical is the fundamental presupposition of the 
knowledge of things. Therefore, Plato put over the entrance to his Academy the 
words 'Let no one who has not grasped the mathematical enter here!' These 
words do not mean that one must be educated in only one subject - 'geometry,' 
but that he must grasp the fundamental condition for the proper possibility of 
knowing is the knowledge of the flmdamental presupposition of all knowledge 
and the position we take based on such knowledge (WT, 75-6). 

It was said earlier that one of the primary determinations of essence in the 

Greeks, phus is, denoted production in the sense of a self-producing, a production out of 

itself, as in the growing of a plant. The actual plant becomes actualized out of its own 

nature (phusis), wliich in this case serves the function of the eidos or look in the previous 

example. The actual maple tree, so to speak, is an incomplete expression of its nature, 

maple tree-ness. The produced being, which comes to be and passes away, is produced 

out of its own nature or phusis, the being of that particular entity, which is prior than it 

and not itself subject to change. Plato also infers from this that the most true, the being 

of the entity which gives rise to it, is also the most actual, to vAt phusis carries existentia 

as well as essentia. The actualization of the possible presses the entity into a fully 

finished limit or boundary, so that the entity is now available to be trapped in a 

definition, "the concept that comprehends the boundaries containing the reality of what 

has been formed (BP, 108)." Hence, for the Greeks, whatever makes up a producing 

which results in the actual produced thing constitutes is essence or thinghood of the 

entity, and is understood as the productive comportment of Dasein towards entities, and 

specifically in terms of the productive seeing explained earlier. This is clear enough in 

terms of artifacts, and also with things we do not produce if we consider the notion of a 



76 
productive-seeing-before-hand. 

(VI)TheDaofDaseiii 

The Da of Dasein is the place of entities, insofar as an entity is understood as 

something actualized, fully fuiished and produced and hence available for use (available 

to be contemplated, worked with, etc.). Once the entity is produced it is available and is 

understood as being in such a way that it is already fully standing on its own account and 

available for whatever use we may have for it (such as is the case with the shovel 

currently resting out in the shed), our property. According to Heidegger, as understood in 

the aforesaid context, the entirerty of these useful entities is, for the Greeks, 

hupokeimenon: 

to/7ro-duce, to place-Aere, //er-stellen, means at the same time to bring into the 
narrower or wider circuit of the accessible, here, to this place, to the Da, so that 
the produced being stands for itself on its own account and remains able to be 
found there and to lie-before there [vorliegen] as something established stably for 
itself. This is the source of the Greek term hupokeimenon, that which lies-before. 
That which first of all and constantly lies-before in the closest circle of human 
activity and accordingly is constantly disposable is the whole of all things of use, 
with which we constantly have to do, the whole of all those existent things which 
are meant to be used on one another, the implement that is employed anA the 
constantly used products of nature: house and yard, forest and field, sun, light and 
heat. What is thus tangibly present-for-dealing'with'^ [vor-handen] is reckoned 
by everyday experience as that which is, as a being, in the primary sense. 
Disposable possessions and goods, property, are beings; they are quite simply that 
which is, the Greek ousia. In Aristotle's time, when it already had a firm 
terminological meaning philosophically and theoretically, this expression ousia 
was still synonymous with property, possessions, means, wealth (BP, 108). 

To say that, for the Greeks, an entity's existentia, existence, or mode of being is 

presence-at-hand, means that an entity, in accordance v^ath its being a finished or 



"The dashes connecting the present string of words does not exist in the English version of this 
text, but the sense suggests that they be linked in some way. 



77 
produced thing, is present or available for our disposal, but more specifically it is there in 
our immediate vicinity or field of concerns. This is the case whether or not the being is 
an artifact, whether it is produced by human hands or not, for reasons we have seen. An 
entity is extant or actual to the extent that it is actually produced and hence available for 
us. This is why Heidegger says that, for the Greeks, "a being is synonymous with an at- 
hand [extant] disposable (BP, 108-109)." Hence, for the Greeks, ousia or essence did 
not carry a sense that essence does today, whereby essence is strictly separated from 
existence - nor can it be, as Aristotle's critique of Antiphon showed. Ousia for the 
Greeks is a whatness/thingness and extantness/mode of being, although for the Greeks 
the existence (presence) aspect is stressed much more than the essence aspect (which is 
the opposite of how things are for us today). 

For the Greeks, the presence of the entity does not refer to a quality of the entity 
as disposable, but our finding or encountering the entity as disposable, not after the fact, 
but in its production. The entity is produced, whatever the specific purpose it will serve, 
in such a way that it is a production towards the producing of a finished, available, 
present-at-hand entity. The presence at hand is intended in the production, what 
Heidegger calls "an out-look upon the look (eidos) of that which is to be produced. 
When Parmenides says that being, thinking and actuality are the same, he has in mind 
something like the forethought that anticipates a producing (cf BP, 1 10)," although the 
precise sense of this will need to be dealt with more explicitly later. This thought is, for 
Parmenides, not creative in the sense of something that the individual person comes up 
with, but rather something that comes to the thinker, somewhat like what we would call 



78 
'inspiration.' This is because the Greeks fundamentally understood 'seeing' as an insight 
given to them, in the sense that the Oracle is given a sign of the things to come (though 
not a detailed account) by the divinity. In a sense it could be said that anyone who has 
the capacity for such things, or has stayed up all night in the attempt to figure something 
out which all of the sudden 'comes to them' at four in the morning, realizes that thinking, 
in its essence, is a waiting and a being given. This is correct, but imprecise. 

Insight [Einsehen] is not different from what is meant above, but it is not quite 
that arbitrary either. The notion of insight essentially bears the mark of impotence on the 
part of the cognizing individual. Generally speaking, it is a seeing, not in the sense of 
seeing a thing, but rather in the sense of what must already be seen in order to see a 
particular thing (In the ZoUikon seminar Heidegger sites the specific case of having to 
already 'see' the 'existence' of a table even though [following Kant] exisence is not a 
quality of the table), (cf Z, 7) What primarily interests Heidegger, though, is not the fact 
that we always already operate in lieu of these various ontological determinations which 
are generally hidden to us, but rather what is needed in order to force them out of their 
hiding place. Being is held in a hiding-waiting, this is the theos or god or ground out of 
which it emerges, (cf N, 184) This is specifically accomplished via various kinds of 
steresis of privation, which Plato first successfully isolated in the sophist. We will be 
examining the notion of privation throughout this thesis. 

Heidegger sets himself the task of understanding the connection and original 
unity of essentia/existentia in the productive comportments of Dasein, which ancient 
ontology operates according to even thought this is never an explicit theme for them. 



79 
The point, then, is to '"conceive beings with respect to their being by having regard to the 
Dasein (psuche, nous, logos) (BP, 1 10)." When there is the productive comportment of 
the Dasein, such as is explicit in the production of great artwork, it operates in such a 
way the thing is produced so as to make it stand on its own, not suggesting itself of a 
relation to the producer (cf PLT, OWA, 40, 65; BP, 1 13). We say, for instance, that the 
greatness of a particular painting or sculpture of piece of poetry lies in the fact that it is 
not simply the reflection of the peculiarities of the creator, but rather is produced in such 
a way that it stands forth in its own greatness, regardless of who made it. The in-itself of 
the product is not simply present in the finished product, but is intended in the producing, 
to wit producing does not simply refer to the act of the Dasein, but the in-itself of the 
product. The peculiarity, then, is that something produced in no way, as might be 
suggested by common understanding, refer back to the producer. Insofar as the self- 
eflFacement of the producer is intended in the production, the produced entity is what it is 
precisely because it does not refer back to the producer (cf BP, 1 14). Being and Time, 
for instance, is what it is for us, not because Heidegger wrote it, but because it has its 
qualities in itself, irrespective of who wrote it. Had, for instance, Scheler constructed the 
piece, it would lose nothing. Production happens in such a way that the in-itselfiiess of 
the product is intended along with whatever it happens to be in its peculiarity. 

It may be contended that this analysis is interesting and yet tnte because it is 
simply an analysis of produced entities, and clearly every entity caimot be said to resuh 
from the productive comportment of the Dasein. Did not the Greeks take for their theme 
the cosmos as a whole which was eternal, and not anything produced or the productive 



80 
comportments of the Dasein? This characterization, \^ch would appear to be the case, 

is manifestly false. Heidegger argues that, as in the production of a house, there is 
material used that is not itself produced but rather already available for the production. 
Hence, productive comportment does not restrict itself to that which needs to be 
produced, but also relates itself, for instance, to the material used in production. But 
then what is not itself in need of production does not become manifest as an in-itself 
primarily, as the produced entity did, but rather is discovered primarily in the production 
process. In Heidegger's words, "The understanding of being in production is so far from 
merely understanding beings as produced that it rather opens up precisely the 
understanding of the being of that which is already simply extant (CF. BP, 1 16)." Unless 
this was the case, we would be not be able to understand matter as that which is already 
there so as to be available for production. Production, then, as Heidegger says, "served 
as the horizon for the ontological interpretation of beings (BP, 1 16)" for the Greeks. 
That this was the case for the Greeks was one thing, but it must be recalled why this was 
the case, namely, that in a productive seeing hyle was that which was primed to emerge 
as eidos. 

It can be seen, then, that the assertion and judgement imply a relation to the 
comportment of Dasein to things. But now that this has been established, we need to ask 
what the various kinds of comportments were that the Greeks felt Dasein could have to 
things. The reason is that, as was said at the beginning of this chapter, the Greeks 
understood the philosophical way of life as the highest kind of existence. In the next 
chapter we will see that this is specifically related to the kinds of beings that 



81 
philosophical Dasein is related to. 



82 
CHAPTER4 

The Greek Positing of the Philosopher in Relation to the Tragic Nature of Greek 

Existence 

The aim of this chapter is to inquire into the various ways that Aristotle outlined 
that Dasein comports itself toward entities. What is hoped here is that the philosopher 
will be shown to be the highest mode of existence for the Greeks precisely because of the 
way in which the philosopher 'is' and the kinds of entities the philosopher comports 
itself to. It was said earlier that the Dasein is attuned by a fundamental boredom, a 
refiisal of things, to wit nothing can concern or oppress us absolutely. What we will now 
begin to see is that the Greeks not only understood this, but they also emphasized that 
there is an essential restlessness to himian existence, whereby himian are driven, 
according to their essential unhomeliness, to be satisfied with the beings they are 
concerned with, and yet never are. We shall approach this here according to aletheia, 
unhiddeness, specifically the uncovering of beings. 
(I) The Mode of Aletheia in Aristotle 

Heidegger suggests that the Greek concept of truth, which for modem thinking 
means the agreement of the judgement with its object, that is, correctness as certainty, ''' 
was understood as unhiddetmess, in the same form that we would say imperfect or blind 
(not-seeing). The notion of the unhidden is important because it implies a relation to the 
hidden, a wresting fi-om the hidden. Heidegger indicates that this occurs in a twofold 



'"Although certainty as the ultimate arbiter of truth only entered the western tradition following the 
Christian theological interpretation of truth, specifically in Luther and Thomas, and there only under the 
specific rubric that arose for a need for the certainty of the salvation of the soul (cf esp.P 51-4). 



83 

way for the Greeks. In the first place, it means that the uncoveredness of the Being of 

beings is not simply given, but need to be wrested from hiddenness. This is meant in the 

same sense that we say how the Being of a being is not simply given, but must be 

uncovered or made manifest through our cognitive efforts. For the most part. Being as 

such is uncovered in the everyday only insofar as everyday Dasein requires it. This 

allows understanding (comfortably familiar) commerce with the entities that are closest 

to us and which we are primarily concerned with - however it also means that Being is 

primarily veiled. Secondly, whatever of Being is originally uncovered according to the 

needs of everyday Dasein is, more or less immediately afterward, covered up again by 

idle talk when what is understood as Being becomes locked down in concepts and 

truisms. Heidegger comments that 

Dasein need not bring itself face to face with entities themselves in an 'original' 
experience; but it nevertheless remains in a Being-towards these entities. In a 
large measure uncoveredness gets appropriated not by one's own uncovering, but 
rather by hearsay of something that has been said (BT, 266) 

We should note that it is such things as truisms that Plato constantly attacked in the 

dialogues, taking common opinions and "breaking through truisms and coming to a 

genuine understanding of the phenomenon (PS, 9)." Consequently, for Plato "[wjith 

regard to this double coveredness, a philosophy faces the tasks, on the one hand, of 

breaking through for the first time to the matters themselves (the positive task) and, on 

the other hand, of taking up at the same time the battle against idle talk (PS, 11)." 

For Heidegger, Aletheia as imconcealedness of the Being of beings requires that 

the beings be encountered, and therefore the disclosure of the being of beings requires 



84 
that there be a Dasein, since Disclosing is a mode of the being of Dasein, that is, 
disclosure or removing the world from coveredness is a way in which the Dasein is. 
Aletheia generally manifest itself in legein or speaking, insofar as it is a speaking about 
the world. This speaking about the world is a way in which E^asein expresses itself, in 
the sense that it announces itself as the sort of being that speaks about the world, is 
concerned about the world and the things in it, and this self-expressive speaking about is 
"what most basically constitutes human Dasein (BP, 12)." For Aristotle this logos 
primarily took the form of either an affirmation or denial of some quality of a thing, 
although this required a prior disclosiveness of the entity. For, as Heidegger says, even if 
we were to deny a certain quality of something it must already have been disclosed what 
the thing is so that we know the particular quality is what does not belong to it. 

For Heidegger's reading of the Greeks, Aletheia, the disclosing of beings 
according to affirmation and denial, is outlined by Aristotle in five differem way in the 
Nicomachean Ethics (VI, 3, 1 149b 15ff). The five ways are "know-how (in taking care, 
manipulating, producing), science, , circumspection (insight), understanding, and 
perceptual discernment. As an appendix, Aristotle adds 'to deem,' 'to take something as 
something [in the sense of 'I deem it worthy, I take it as being worthy],' and 'doxa, view' 
[in the sense of 'in my view'], opinion. These latter two determinations have the 
possibility of being false, "can distort beings, [they] can thrust [themselves] ahead [of 
beings] (PS, 15)," though they need not be. If, in my opinion, I view something thusly, it 
may or may not actually be the case. Hence, along with general concealment and idle 
talk, there is a third way that beings are concealed, through error connected to deeming 



85 

and opinion. 

Let us briefly consider what Heidegger interprets Aristotle to be describing in the 
various modes of Aletheia. Know-how in taking care, manipulating and producing is 
manifested in specific modes, such as the mode of tailor or that of shoemaker. Know- 
how does not refer to the actual producing that is enacted by the tailor or shoemaker, but 
the know-how that the tailor or shoemaker already has so that they are able to produce. 
Science is a kind of theoretical knowledge of things. Circumspection (insight) is like 
know-how, except that the object of its inquiry is the human, not artifacts. Wisdom is 
real understanding, that which the philosopher engages in. 'Mind' or nous is somewhat 
different, in that it is " a discernment that discerns by way of perception. Noein had 
emerged already at the decisive beginning of Greek philosophy, where the Destiny of 
Greek and Western philosophy was decided, namely in Parmenides: discerning and what 
is discerned are the same (PS, 16)." Discernment with perception is the only one of the 
modes of aletheia that is not a speaking, although it is connected to legein. 

Heidegger suggests that Human Dasein is in truth insofar as it is with unconcealed 
beings by striving against the threefold concealedness of beings elucidated above, while 
the 'they' or 'the many' are generally not striving toward the unconcealing of beings. 
This does not mean that being in truth has to do with a possession of objective truths, 
since prejudices and 'the obvious' are often seen as objective and universally valid even 
though they distort the matters that they are supposed to be revealing. On the other hand, 
something can be genuinely true, if only for one person. 

Heidegger points out that the Logos is the speaking (legein) and the spoken 



86 
(legomenon). If the speaking is preserved in the spoken and is hence a proper 
proposition, then the spoken is alethes. This is how truth is generally understood, 
although it is also where problems can arise. If truth is located in the spoken or said, 
then we can adhere to the said without actually tracing it back to the matter at hand. 
Heidegger gives the example of the proposition or said 'Some days ago it rained.' He 
writes that "[s]ome days ago it rained, I can say, without presentifying to myself the rain, 
etc. I can repeat propositions and understand them without having an original relation to 
the beings of which I am speaking (PS, 18)." This means, I can understand the 
proposition as true without calling to my mind the image of the raining itself that I 
experienced on that day, or even without actually having experienced the raining, but 
merely having heard about it second hand. This is for the Greeks, Heidegger says, 
something that is a so-called \x\xXh without a genuine aletheuein going on, because there 
is no real connection between the proposition and the matter it discusses, an idle talking. 
It is, Heidegger says, the logos of idle talk, the detached proposition which has lost the 
connection to the matters themselves in the sense illustrated above that is true or untrue 
in the sense that we now understand these terms, correct and false. Since the said is 
detached from the matters at hand, truth becomes the agreement of the proposition with 
them. But, Heidegger says, to determine truth as the correspondence of the proposition 
and the thing necessitates that there has already been a prior revelation of the being itself, 
the truth as uncovering. Hence 

such a concept of truth, which determines truth as the correspondence of the soul, 
the subject, with the object, is nonsense. For I must have already known the 
matter in question in order to be able to say that it corresponds with the 



87 

judgement. I must have already known the objective in order to measure the 
subjective up to it. The truth of 'having already known' is thus presupposed for 
the truth of knowing. And since this is nonsensical, this theory of truth cannot be 
maintained (PS, 18). 

I must have already presentified to myself in some way, for instance, the connection of 
the experience of raining and the proposition 'it was raining' in order for the two to later 
become detached and then have the ability for them to be reconnected, depending on 
\^iiether I thought that in this circumstance it was actually the case or not. The general 
adhering of Dasein to the said instead of trying to get to the real matter is part of what 
Heidegger calls Dasein's 'fallenness'. 

Heidegger provides a useful categorization to help us understand what has been 
said. In terms of four of the ways in which aletheia was outlined above - science, 
wisdom, know-how and circumspection (insight) - science and wisdom are epistemonikon, 
contributive toward the development of knowledge, and know-how and circumspection 
(insight) are logistikon, contributive toward the development of circumspective 
consideration or deliberating. 'What' dimension is disclosed about a being depends on 
'how,' the 'way in which' it is approached, either through epistemonikon or logistikon. 
The fifth determination oi aletheia, nous, is not strictly present under epistemonikon or 
logistikon because nous or 'mind' is somehow present in each of science, wisdom, know- 
how and circumspection (insight), since they are dianoein, ways in which noein can be 
enacted (cf PS, 20). Heidegger characterizes the distinction between epistemonikon and 
logistikon in the following way 

The epistemonikon is that ... with which we regard beings whose archai cannot be 
otherwise, ... beings which have the character ofaidion, of being eternal. The 
logistikon is that ... with which we regard beings ... that can also be otherwise. 



f.-i., 



88 

The [logislikon] are the beings techne and phrones is deal with. Techne has to do 
with things which first have to be made and which are not yet what they will be 
[since, as Heidegger said, techne has to do with the know-how that proceeds the 
actual producing]. Phronesis [circumspection, insight] makes the situation 
accessible; and the circumstances are always different in every action. On the 
other hand, episteme and sophia concern that which already was, that which man 
does not first produce (PS, 20). 

This is not a^wr/b/c/ distinction that is the result of any grandiose speculation, but rather 

a compartmentalizing of the various ways in which everyday Dasein deal with beings. 

There are, so to speak, two regions of Being which are investigated according to which 

the way Dasein comports itself, although in a sense there is only one. Kisiel says "the 

mode of... comportment or disclosive capacity differs accordingly as the kind of being 

which is revealed differs (Genesis, 303)." The entities of the logistikon, the constantly 

changing things of home and country, which have the characteristics of the possibility of 

being otherwise, is what it is in contrast to the beings of the epistemonikon, such as the 

heavens and the stars, the world of nature, which are always the same. Insofar as the 

philosopher pursues that which is always the same, 1 shall show why the philospher is the 

highest mode of Greek Dasein. 

(II) The Relative Strength of the Modes of Uncovering 

Heidegger points out that Aristotle raises the question as to the whether the 

epistemonikon or the logistikon is better in uncovering beings as they are. To begin to 

answer this, Aristotle says that the greatest mode of uncovering beings in terms of the 

epistemonikon, so that we are "dwelling with them (PS, 21)," is wisdom, genuine 

understanding, while the greatest mode for the logistikon is circumspection (insight). 

There is always a stratification regarding the degree to wdiich an entity has been 



89 
uncovered, and the ways in which the world is uncovered for Dasein are not all 
indifferently on the same plane. For Heidegger, what is interesting is that Aristotle in his 
most in depth analyses does not proceed from the highest modes of aletheuein, but rather 
the lowest, science and know-how, those modes which are most accessible to everyday 
Dasein. I will now delineate the precise meanings of science, wisdom, know-how and 
circumspection (insight) in Heidegger's reading of Aristotle. 

The question which is asked of all of the modes of aletheuein is twofold in 
Aristotle: "1). What is the character of the beings which the mode of aletheuein 
uncovers, and 2)does the respective mode of aletheuein also disclose the arche of those 
beings? (PS, 22)," although it is initially unclear why this is. Heidegger suggests that the 
first determination of the entities toward which science orients itself is that they are 
determined within the horizon of time. The beings of the science or knowing are 
understood on the basis of time, as those which always are, cannot be otherwise. Science 
has the sense of being informed about something, already knowing it. I understand this to 
mean that if, for instance, someone was beginning to teach me what the boiling px)int of 
water was a standard room pressure by showing me the water being heated to 100 
degrees Celsius, I would stop them and say that I already know that, am already informed 
on that point. This is possible because the object of my knowledge always is that way, 
the boiling point never alters, and hence I can be informed about it. Things, on the other 
hand, which I cannot be informed about have a transitory character and hence require me 
to be present with them at every moment (as otherwise I would not have a grasp on them) 
are not objects of knowledge in this sense. Hence, to have an opinion about that which 



90 

changes could be wrong if the thing itself is not present, and hence such a cognitive 
relation to the changing is not knowledge. In this way, in science I tarry beside the being 
even if it is not actually present to me. 

Heidegger suggests that the beings that science apprehends neither came into 
being nor will they go out of it, but rather are constantly. As such, the being that science 
orients itself toward is most properly a being. But, since the being of the entities that 
science orients itself to are determined as (their how, epistemic entities as epistemic 
entities, as opposed to, for instance, gear as gear) being constantly, then "beings are 
determined with regard to their Being by a moment of time ... The onto are aidia [aei, 
aiwn], ..always, everlasting, ... that which coheres in itself, that which is never 
interrupted (PS, 23)." DeBoer says "Aristotle's question concerning beings as beings - 
that is to say, concerning that which essentially belongs to beings - is guided by a specific 
concept of being as such: that which of beings is constantly present for a theoretical 
beholding is above all that which is (DeBoer, 27)." Let us consider why DeBoer is not 
entirely correct here. 

Aristotle, in De Caelo, also understands the aion as a lifetime, ton apanta aiona, 
fiill presence, the determinate time of a living thing is presence. But how can it be that a 
living thing, since it only has a finite existence, is aiwn, and the objects oi science, the 
beings that are a being in its most proper sense, are also aiwnl For Aristotle, the aiwn 
also means the time of the world, which is eternal. The living thing's aiwn, its 
determinate life which receives its determination by being limited by birth and death, is 
determined in relation to the heavens (cf PS, 23), ouranos, in the sense that the 



91 

changeable is understood as changeable in contrast with the eternal, the stars and the 
heavens. Let us consider this further. 

Heidegger suggests that the Aidia always are, and hence are earlier than the things 
that come into being and pass away. They are always 'now,' and this presence is what 
for the Greeks, in a certain sense, meant Being. Since the changeable and the perishable 
are determined in relation to presence, the aidia are what most properly is, and are the 
arche or origin of all other beings. Without this everlasting ground, the determinations of 
beings would be entirely unintelligible. The heavens for Aristotle are not in time but are 
nonetheless eternal, because for Aristotle what is in time is what is measured by time, by 
means of the nows, and what is constantly and always now is thereby numberless and not 
limitable (apeiron), is not measurable by the nows, and is none-the-less eternal, earlier 
than anything that comes into time. The aidion is thus not in time but none-the-less 
determined in this way. Heidegger suggests that, for Aristotle, then, the being of beings 
is interpreted in the horizon of time, "beings are interpreted as to their Being on the basis 
of time (PS, 24)," whether or not for Aristotle this projection ever became a specific 
theme or not. To say that the objects of science, which are most properly being, are 
interpreted on the basis of time, means that beings as being are understood within a 
temporal horizotL 

Heidegger suggests that the second determination of the objects of science is that 
they are something demonstrated, teachable and leamable. Science or knowledge is of 
such a kind that it can be taught, and know-how also bears this quality. Teachability or 
communicability is the most essential determination of science, which is why 



n 

mathematics is the premier science, since it is the most teachable. Moreover, since we 
are in some sense always with the objects of science and hence do not have to actually 
uncover them. Public oratory is a speaking that is also teachable because it is based on 
the use and manipulation of what everyone already commonly understands. Heidegger 
makes the interesting point, however, that oratory is not a demonstration, but does create 
belief in something by invoking such an obvious example that it is taken by the audience 
to be universal (katholou), applicable beyond that specific case because of the 
obviousness of it, which may or may not be an accurate revelation of the matter at hand. 
In other words, oratory is a leading as opposed to a demonstration. 

Heidegger points out that the sullogismos also works in this way, by proceeding 
from what is accepted by everyone and hence not a questionable matter itself to what 
seems to follow from it, or in other words the conclusion is reached from what is known 
at the outset. This is how science works. It is able to teach what is not known because it 
is simply a precession firom what is already knovm. Mathematics is hence eminently 
teachable because the student simply proceeds from the mathematical axioms without 
having to actually understand or question the axioms themselves. The axioms, for 
instance, of math, occasionally have a proof of them, but this is done mathematically, 
through deduction or the establishment of relations, and hence already presuppose that 
which the proof is being attempted of Hence, says Heidegger, science and sullogismos 
cannot, as the striking example of the orator seems to do, unveil the arche as the universal 
{katholou), which is why oratory is not science and science needs something that it 
cannot explain out of itself There is only a science because something has already 



93 
provided a foundation for it. 

Heidegger argues that, for Aristotle, if science cannot disclose the arche, the 
beings as such, then it is deficient, since it requires something else. Therefore, science is 
not the highest mode of aletheue in with respect to the epistemonikon, but rather wisdom 
has this honor. Within science itself, there is also a deficient mode, which only knows the 
result without a sullogismos, without an understanding of how the result was arrived at. 
Generally, though, science does not show that which show themselves,'* the everlasting 
beings as everlasting, and therefore the arche remains hidden. This is the answer to the 
twofold question that was suggested earlier as the structures of the modes of aletheuein, 
in this case, of the science. It reveals its beings in such a way that has been described, 
and is therefore a deficient kind of aletheuein, in that it cannot, firom out of itself, truly 
exhibit the Being of the beings that it deals with. 

Just as the science within the epistemonikon, know-how within the logistikon is 
also the most immediate form, that which is dealt with by people in the everyday, and 
also has the two-fold questioning pertaining to it, and is also deficient. The most 
immediate in either case is aletheuein, but ungenuine aletheuein. Science disclosed the 
beings that are everlasting, while know-how discloses beings that can be different. Since 
the objects of know-how are not the produced things as such but the object contemplated 
in the producing, they have possibility, can be brought into Being differently, and are 
constantly becoming, therefore. 

Heidegger points out that all of the modes of aletheuein have some manner of 



'^phainomena ' in Greek, cf HCT, 81. 



94 

science within them. The objects of know-how are the purely possible and hence could 

come into being otherwise than it is currently being conceived of. In other words, the 

beings of know-how are in the process of becoming, since they are purely possible. What 

is to be produced is not yet, and hence is not always and could come into being otherwise 

than according to the vision we have of it. Know-how is a preparing to execute or enact 

or bring something into being correctly. Know-how does not have the idea of the thing as 

its goal, but rather the thing itself, and hence the idea is not in the thing itself, but beside 

it, in the sense it is in the soul. In contrast, the beings of nature do not have human 

creators, so that which guides the production and the thing produced (eg. Plant from 

seed) are identical. Know-how is not a genuine aletheuein because the finished product 

does not belong to the domain of know-how, as once the product is done, it ceases to be a 

concern of know-how, and falls into the domain of human use. 

The shoe is made for wearing and is for someone. This double character entails 
that the ergon of Wv^poiesis is something produced for further use, for man. 
Techne therefore possesses the ergon as an object of its aletheuein only as long as 
the ergon is not yet finished. As soon as the product is finished, it escapes the 
domain of techne: it becomes the object of the use proper to it. Aristotle 
expresses this precisely: the ergon is "para' (cf Nic. Eth. 1, 1, 1094a4f ). The 
ergon, as soon as it is finished, is para, 'beside,' techne. Techne, therefore, is 
concerned with beings only insofar as they are in the process of becoming (PS, 
29)." 

Therefore, Heidegger says that in know-how, the outward look of the thing is that which 

is in the soul before hand and which guides the production, the outward look being the 

"proper presence" of the thing to be produced, what is 'pre-presentified' 

[vergegenwartigt]. I understand this to mean, for instance, that the house which will 

some day be present is presentified beforehand as it is going to look. Heidegger points 



95 
out that the matter is what does not have to be produced but is that from which the thing 
is produced and is in a certain sense already there in the outward look. The producer 
always has his eye on the outward look as he enacts the production, the movement, the 
outward look being the arche of the movement. Hence, as is proper to an arche, it is 
there at the inception and at all points along the way. 

Circumspection (insight), unlike know-how, has as its concern human action. 
There is deliberation about circumspection (insight), and hence the object here is the 
best way to act. Heidegger says that the "deliberation of circumspection (insight) is, 
furthermore, a certain drawing of conclusion: if such and such is supposed to occur, if I 
am to behave in such a way, then ... [T]he deliberation of phronesis, like that of know- 
how, is related to something which can be otherwise (PS, 35)." In a certain regard know- 
how and circumspection (insight) are similar because both have to do with outcomes and 
what must happen in order for those outcomes to come to fruition. However, in the case 
of know-how the actions themselves are not the object of consideration, but rather the 
things to be produced. On the other hand, in circumspection (insight), there is 
deliberation on the actions of one to whom the actions belong, "Dasein is the arche of 
the deliberation of phronesis (PS, 35)." Moreover, in know-how, there is trial and error, 
know-how learns to improve through its mistakes, "the one who is not ingrained in a 
definite technique, a set routine, but again and again starts anew [becomes the most 
proficient] (PS, 38)." Know-how wills the success as well as the failure, while 
circumspection (insight) is either-or, there is no failing involved, ''phronesis is not 
oriented toward trial and error; in moral action I carmot experiment with myself (PS, 



96 

38)." 

(m) The Difficulty of Attaining Aletlieia 

Heidegger indicates that pleasure and pain covers up what the proper being of 
man is in such a way that man is no longer transparent to himself, with the result that 
man can be the object of circumspection (insight) insofar as man is hidden from himself 
and must be uncovered. Moreover, "A person can be concerned with things of minor 
significance; he can be so wrapped up in himself that he does not genuinely see himself 
Therefore, he is ever in need of the salvation of circumspection (insight). 
Circumspection regarding himself and insight into himself must again and again be 
wrested away by man (PS, 36)." As long as pleasure and pain [lupe - what depresses 
one's disposition] are basic determinations of man, and if circumspection (insight) is not 
employed the proper 'for the sake of which' that man's actions are directed to will not be 
transparent, and since there is a constant tendency in man to cover himself up, the 
process of uncovering must never end in order that the end toward which circumspection 
(insight) aims, the good of man (anthropina agatha) is constantly in view. 
Circumspection (insight) is not absolute for such an aim, since it can only be attained if 
there is also action, as circumspection (insight) can only guide action. The person is 
therefore imderstood in terms of potential because insofar as action need not be enacted 
in accord with circumspection (insight), the action itself can indeed be otherwise. 

Circumspection (insight) is different from science in that circumspection (insight) 
requires life experience. Heidegger says that young people (he is thinking of Pascal) can 
become wise in mathematics, but not in circumspection (insight). Heidegger cites 



97 

Aristotle point that "young people are not experienced in the factual conditions of 
human Dasein itself (PS, 97)." Hence, young people can be accomplished 
mathematically but not philosophically, as mathematics deals merely with abstractions. '* 
Circumspection (insight) ultimately deals with the goal not of logos, but of nous - 
where the discourse ultimately ends. With the Doctor, for instance, he deliberates with 
the goal of making the patient healthy. At some point, the doctor will come to an 
insight,'^ an aisthesis, a straightforward perception that shows him what he must do in 
order to cure the patient, at which point there can be action. The outermost limit of the 
deliberation is the eschaton, at which point the insight arrives, a straightforward 
perception, the point at which we "see states of affairs as a whole (PS, 1 10)." This is the 
same as in geometry where a polygon is resolved into a triangle, and the triangle is seen 
as a simple whole. For the doctor it is never a question of whether to heal, since, as 
Heidegger says, this is the meaning of his existence and hence already posited from the 
outset. Another way to think of this is in terms of the futural structure of everyday 
existence. We exist in such a way that we 'are' as though our own death will not be the 
next actuality in our lives, as though there will be more time. This understanding of our 
own death as 'later' is not an explicit theme for our everyday existence, it is the meaning 
of it. The thing the doctor ultimately has in view is the point at which he can intervene. 



'*We will return to the issue of the relation of Greek thinking to the child later. 

"The notion of the insight follows, among other things, the Greek mathematicians. Heidegger 
comments that "The Greek mathematicians did not understand axioms as fundamental principles. What 
they had in mind can be seen in their paraphrase of the word: axiomata are koinai ennoiai. Plato used the 
word often; it means 'insight,' 'to have an insight' and indeed with the mind's eye (PR, 15).. 



98 
In this regard, the nous of circumspection (insight) is different from that of wisdom in 

that circumspection (insight) only deals with things in the here and now and hence with 

things that could be otherwise. The deliberation that results in the insight about how to 

treat the patient in front of us is entirely case dependent., and occurs "in the blink of an 

eye, a momentary look at what is momentarily concrete, which as such can always be 

otherwise. On the other hand, the noein in wisdom is a looking upon that which is aei, 

that which is always present in sameness. Time (the momentary and eternal) here 

frmctions to discriminate between the noein in circumspection (insight) and the one in 

Sophia ... [SJophia is Dasein's positionality toward the beings of the world in the full 

sense. Phronesis is Dasein's positionality toward the beings which are themselves 

Dasein(PS, 113)." 

Heidegger indicates that wisdom happens through theorein, which means that 

there is no production involved in wisdom, but rather an idleness, a "not accomplishing 

anything ... but a mere onlooking, a lingering with the object. (PS, 47)," that most 

properly uncovers beings. The object of wisdom are those things which always are, aei 

[the world, PS, 48], and hence cannot be otherwise. The objects of wisdom are obtained 

through seeing, because seeing is the sense that allows for the greatest determinations of 

things. 

Seeing is thus preeminent among the senses in that 'it lets many differences be 
seen'; seeing provides the greatest possibility for differentiating the things in their 
manifoldness and orienting oneself within them. This privileged position of 
horan is all the more remarkable in view of Aristotle's emphasis (b23) that 
akouein is the highest aisthesis. But that is not a contradiction. Hearing is basic 
to the constitution of man, the one who speaks. Hearing, along with speaking 
pertains to man's very possibility. Because man can hear, he can learn. Both 
senses, hearing and seeing, have, in different ways, a privilege: hearing makes 



99 

possible communication, understanding others; seeing has the privWege of being 
the primary disclosure of the world, so that what has been seen can be spoken of 
and appropriated more completely in logos (PS, 49) 

I would like to relate this to what Heidegger says of hearing in his later thought. Hearing 

attends to the call to the ground of beings, to pursue the essential and disregard the 

trivial, and allows us to distinguish them as such. Moreover, while seeing is concerned 

with major distinctions, hearing attends to subtle changes of tone, and is thereby able to 

attend to emphasis. Heidegger can thus ask, in one place, "[w]hat tone is Parmenides 

trying to set in letting us hear this resounding emphasis (EGT, Moira: Parmenides, 92)?" 

Heidegger points out that since Plato, anything that 'is' can be differentiated into 

two realms, the aistheton and the noeton, that which is apprehended by the senses and 

that which can be experienced by nous, the mind's eye. The noeton is that which truly is 

because it is not subject to the changeability of the things of the senses, and hence are 

constant. The particular house shows the essence, hoiise as such, but only in a limited 

way, and hence is me on, not simply nothing, ouk on, but deficient with respect to what 

tiiily is, the primary image, ttie paradeigma (cf HHTI, 24). Aristotie was the first to 

acknowledge that the actual beings we encounter everyday are real beings that need to be 

passed through in order to reach the universal, so that we can then come back and fiilly 

understand the particular, "it is necessary to press on, from what is in a single case 

initially most familiar, to the arche and to appropriate the arche in such a way that fi'om 

this apjM-opriation there takes place a genuine appropriation of the kathekaston 

(particular) (PS, 62)." Wisdom is hard for Dasein, not because the matters to be 

investigated are themselves overly convoluted, but because Dasein adheres to the 



1(N) 

immediate and hence the passing over of the immediate in order to get to the universal is 

counter to the way in which Dasein nonnally is. Wisdom, as a mode of the being of 

Dasein, arises from Thaumazein, wonder at something encountered, or negatively, as I 

understand it, the unintelligibility of something encountered according to what one 

already understands, one is not equal to the encounter. 

Plato, in the 'Theatetus (155d2ff),' says wonder, thaumazein, is the origin of all 

philosophy. Heidegger understands wonder as resulting from 

"not knowing the way ... out of and into that which such knowing first opens up as an 
untrodden and ungrounded 'space.' This space (time-space) ... is that 'between' where it 
has not yet been determined what being is or what non-being is, though where by the 
same token a total confrision and undifTerentiation of beings and non-beings does not 
sweep everything away either, letting one thing wander into another. This distress, as - 
such not knowing the way out of or into this self-opening 'between,' is a mode of 
'Being,' in which man arrives or perhaps is thrown and for the first time experiences - 
but does not explicitly consider - that which we are calling 'in the midst' of beings. 
(BQP, 132) 

This is not wonder at any particular thing, but that beings are as they are, beings as 

beings, or rather beings as a whole, the Being of beings that shine through them. 

Holderling says that the poet must grasp everything, not in the sense of systematically 

trying investigate everything, but rather beings as such and as a whole. According to 

Aristotle wonder proceeds from the simple things at hand, and goes to greater and greater 

cases until it asks if beings as a whole are as they seem. Heidegger says that thaumazein 

proceeds from aporein, from not being able to find your way through from which arises a 

desire to get through to the matters as they actually stand. On the basis of this, for the 

Greeks, who had a peculiar sense of being set over against things, namely, felt that 'not 

being absorbed in things' that we outlined earlier, "what the Greeks call aporia 



101 
characterizes the peculiar intermediate position of Dasein itself over and against the 
world (PS, 88)." 
(IV) Deception 

What I have said about the various ways of uncovering beings must now be 
related to the ways in which they can be concealed to us, namely, to deception. In order 
to see this, we will briefly re-visit the problem of the assertion. Heidegger says that 
Logos has the character of speaking of something as something, or, more specifically, as 
something else, such as saying the dog is grey or tall etc. The dog is determined in terms 
of what it is not. It is hence related to dinoein, a thinking through, not noein. But as we 
saw in the case oi circumspection (insight), noein occurred precisely when the thinking 
through was at an end, when the discourse had ended and the doctor received the insight 
about how to proceed, "[e]verything eschaton and everything /jro/on can be grasped 
properly only if the noein is not a dianoein but a pure onlooking. Here the disclosure in 
the mode of the carrying out of logos fails and recedes (PS, 124)." Gunter Figal 
completely misreads the issue when he says Aristotle cannot get at the noein at all 
because he only manages dianoein (cf , Refraining, 102)." Rather, Heidegger says that 
dianoein in Aristotle is what pertains to the logos. In fact, Heidegger says quite explicitly 
in Being and Time that "[t]he truth of aisthesis and of the seeing of 'ideas' is the 
primordial kind of uncovering. And only because noesis primarily uncovers, can the 
logos as dianoein also have uncovering as its function (BT, 269)." Hence, logos here is 
understood as subservient to nous. 

The 'insight' was not a determining something in terms of something else, but 



102 
rather a simple seeing of the whole. Logos, as Heidegger understood it in his early 
thought, does not primarily uncover beings, but only the logos apophantikos does, since 
it either reveals or distorts beings (pseudesthai), and even then not in a primary way. 
There can be truth, uncovering in a judgement, but it need not be there, and hence it is 
not contradictory for Aristotle to say at one place that truth is in the judgement and in 
another that it can be said without relation to it. In fact, ^Logos, insofar as it possesses 
the structure of apophainesihai, of 'something as something,' is so little the place of 
truth that it is, rather, quite the reverse, the proper condition of the possibility of falsity a 
(PS, 125)," that through the 'as' a deception can occur. How so? 
(V) The Problem of Antisthenes 

Heidegger points out that Antisthenes denied the possibility of addressing 
something as something, or, more specifically, something as something else (cf 
Aristotle's Topics A, chapter 11). In other words, Antisthenes denies the possibility of 
addressing something in the form oikataphasis (affirmation) and apophasis (denial), in 
the 'as' form, which also implies there can not be a contradiction, since a mere phasis 
(showing) cannot be false. The only manner Antisthenes allows for addressing things is 
by tautological naming, man is man. In this regard, Antisthenes denied the possibility of 
delimiting the essential content of a thing in a definition, because the definition is 
macros, containing many words, so it attempts to exhibit one thing in terms of many 
things, in that the thing itself as a one is not addressed but rather is addressed in terms of 
what it is not. This is what Heidegger says Aristotle accepted as the positive content of 
Antisthenes thesis, that a being cannot be properly exhibited in a definition. 



103 
Falsity, thought in the Greek sense, is hepseudes, a deception, "it lets something 
be seen as present, which is not present ... Thus it does not mean that a false logos 
concerns that which is not at all fouk on], but rather it lets something not present be seen 
as present ... In my speech I shove, in a certain sense, in from of what is there something 
else, and I pass off what is there as something it is not, ie., as something that is not 
present (PS, 349)." Heidegger gives the example of addressing a triangle as a circle. 
Following what has been said, the circle is, so to speak, thrust in front of the triangle, and 
I treat the triangle as though it is not there. 1 understand this to mean that in this sense, a 
false proposition is deceptive, a fraud, false in the sense we speak of false money. 
Moreover, "fljogos, even as legomenon, is, in the Greek sense, always oriented toward 
being communicated, expressed for another person, so that the other person can 
participate in the seeing. Insofar as the other, in the case of a deceptive logos, cannot 
participate in the seeing, such a logos is not simply 'false,' but fraudulent (PS, 349)." 
For Aristotle, the judgement is not so much an agreement of the judgement with the thing 
but a letting be seen and a coimter-phenomenon of deceptive seeing, distortion. We shall 
now make this more explicit. 

The kind of logos under discussion, as Aristotle understands it, can have two 
possibilities. It is either the definition that supposedly properly shows the being, or one 
of the manifold determinations of beings, "[fjor in a certain sense every being coincides 
with itself as itself and uath itself as it is qualified (PS, 350)." The latter manner is in a 
sense derivative because it involves a synthesis, a joining together with that which 
already is in itself with something it is not in itself I understand that the same dog is 



104 
intended whether we consider the dog in itself or in terms of its whiteness, the dog as 
white. The deception is only possible in the latter case, because it is the joining of a 
being with something that it is not intrinsically. Antisthenes, Aristotle says (cf 
Metaphysics, V, chapter 28, 1024b32f ), believed only in addressing a being in the logos 
proper to it because he did not distinguish between addressing the thing in itself and 
addressing the thing 'as' something. For Antisthenes, a definition was not possible 
because it did not, following what was said above, address the thing, and hence a 
tautology, positing one and the same thing in relation to itself, was the only proper logos. 
Hence, the addressing of something as something (else) is excluded in Antisthenes 
doctrine. Plato, in the Sophist, called Antisthenes doctrine "the most laughable, 
katagelastotata (252b8)," because it denied that something was to be understood by 
appealing to something beyond the thing itself, while Antisthenes himself tacitly adopted 
a whole slew of ontological structures that go beyond the mere entity at hand, such as 
einai. Being, choris, separate from, ton allown, the others, and kath auto, in itself (also 
cf N, 193). The addressing something as something, as a being, implies a 
kataphasisapophasis, because it addresses a being in terms of what is beyond it, namely 
its Being. Antisthenes tacitly goes beyond the being ontologically, to the Being ofhcings, 
and hence understands the being as a being in its Being. 

Aristotle said that in a judgement such as taking the table as black, there must be 
a prior understanding of the unity, 'black table,' whereby the unity is then set in relief 
against itself, 'table as black.' The 'as' is an 'as if because in setting them in relief, I 
can then, through synthesis, co-positing them together, identify the table explicitly in 



105 
terms of its blackness, "as if they were one (PS, 126)." This synthesis oflFers the 
possibility of deception, because it is then possible to posit something with the table that 
does not belong to it, such as 'the table is white,' when it is in fact black. In this regard, 
there belongs to both kataphasis and apophasis a diairesis and a synthesis, a taking apart 
of the original whole and a putting them back together in the form of the as. 

If a synthesis and diaresis thereby belong to a logos insofar as it is either 
kataphasis or apophasis, the analysis of the judgement presented thus far has been 
incomplete insofar as it has taken it orientation from statements that either affirm or 
deny. But Heidegger says that if statements that affirm and deny are going to be possible 
at all, there must be a fourfold condition already in place 

"[1] if our representations and assertions -eg., the statement, 'The stone is hard'- 
are supposed to conform to the object, then this being, the stone itself, must be 
accessible in advance: in order to present itself as a standard and a measure for 
the conformity with it [as the assertion has to adequate with the thing, then the 
thing must already be available for the assertion to adequate with it]. In short, he 
being, in this case the thing, must be out in the open. [2] Even more: not only 
must the stone itself- in order to remain with our example - be out in the open but 
so must the domain which the conformity with the thing has to traverse in order 
to read off from it, in the mode of representing, what characterizes the being in its 
being thus and so. [3] Moreover, the human who is representing, and who in his 
representing conforms to the thing, must also be open [must be open, not in the 
open]. He must be open for what encounters him, so that it might encounter him. 
[4] Finally, the person must also be open to his fellows, so that, co-representing 
what is communicated to him [by others] in their assertions, he can, together with 
others and out of a being-with-them, conform to the same thing and, be in 
agreement with them about the correctness of the representing ... In the 
correctness of the representational assertion there holds sway consequently a 
fourfold openness (BQP, 18-19). 

This fourfold must hold sway, if there is to be a representational judgement, not simply 

in its plurality, but most of all in the simple oneness of the four. Throughout this thesis 

we found the need to see the relationship between the op)enness of beings and the 



106 

openness of man for beings. The final element is perhaps one of the most difficult to see, 

not in terms of its content, but rather as to its necessity. One thing that Plato tried to do 

was make philosophy accessible to everyone, and hence accused the ancients of having 

not provided a logos, which in this case means something that was understandable to 

everyone. He imderstood the logos explicitly as implying a being-with-others, which was 

later carried over by Aristotle, 

Logos as 'discourse' means rather the same as deloun: to make manifest what one 
is 'talking about' in one's discourse. Aristotle has explicated this function of 
discourse more precisely as apophainesthai. The logos lets something be seen 
(phainesthai), namely, what the discourse is about; and it does so either ^or the 
one who is doing the talking (the medium) or for persons who are talking with 
one another, as the case may be ... makes this accessible to the other party (BT, 
56) 

As was said earlier, insofar as we make judgements about things, they are inherently 

disputable, open to the possibility of falsity, which now means they can be deceptive. 

Since disputation is a disputation with other, then others are already implied in our 

discourse, especially if Being means, as it has throughout the tradition, being present-at- 

hand. Moreover, the accessibility of the logos to everyone is one of the essential 

elements of metaphysics, because it implies what is graspable by anyone, common, 

which for Heidegger always means the commonplace. 

Given what has been said, we can see that wisdom is more fully aletkeuein than 

circumspection (insight) because it more properly 'accomplishes' than does 

circumspection (insight). This is not because the philosopher's thinking actually results 

in anything, but rather "Aristotle says that the philosopher's pure considering in fact 

delivers something, poiei, and specifically 'by the very fact of having it and carrying it 



107 
out,' hence not by results but simply by the fact that I live this theorem (PS, 1 16)." 
Aristotle compares wisdom to a healthy individual. For instance. Circumspection 
(insight) is that which can restore a person to health. But what is even better is an 
individual that is already healthy, for he "is healthy without further ado, ie., he simply is 
what he is (PS, 1 17)." Wisdom is to be thought of in this way, it is the proper state of our 
spiritual being. Wisdom, as tarrying along with that which is everlasting, is considered by 
Aristotle to be the highest possibility of Dasein, and yet since man has all kinds of other 
needs and desires, he cannot f)erpetually exercise his highest possibility. Nonetheless, as 
wisdom is the pure onlooking upon that which never changes, then the looking itself 
bears no alteration, "the possibility of a pure tarrying, which has nothing of the unrest of 
seeking (PS, 120)." 

For the Greeks, according to the nature of their existence, it was the general 
unease of life that was misery (we will expand on this later), and so the opposite of it, the 
absence of unrest, was therefore the highest good. For the most part, the various 
comportments of man's life (be them in concern of prudence, justice, etc.) imply a 
relation to others. Wisdom as the highest possibility of man, on the other hand, while it is 
often helpful to have others to discuss with, is entirely focussed on the single individual 
because in the disclosing of beings no one can have your insights for you. Philosophical 
IDasein, if it is maintained over the whole of one's life by being understood as the proper 
one, is a kind of deathlessness, athanatizein, since the comportment that relates to and 
hence apprehends (the way in which the philosopher is-there with) the eternal, the 
unchanging, must itself be unchanging, must not stray but tarry with the unchanging, and 



108 
hence in a sense is deathless (without cessation), since what is unchanging admits of no 
passing away, "[hjerein resides the peculiar tendency of the accommodation of the 
temporality of human Dasein to the eternity of the world ... This is the extreme position 
to which the Greeks carried human Dasein (PS, 122)." Being-there in the sense that the 
way you are there is a simple tarrying, a pure abiding, is eternal because it is a tarrying 
along and an abiding with that which does not change, the eternal. In all its other 
comportments, the human is never simply present at hand, because he/she always relates 
to others and to things that are changeable. Here, however, man is ^'eudaimonia insofar 
as it is simply present at hand with regard to its highest possibility of Being (PS, 123)." 

Heidegger and Fink, in the Heraclitus seminar (which we will deal with later), re- 
visit the notion of the philosopher as immortal for the Greeks. There is a dual 
characterization. On the one hand, the restlessness of human existence is contrasted with 
the peace of divine existence, and hence the two are radically separate. On the other 
hand, the Philosopher is divine-like in that he does not suffer the restlessness of human 
existence, "On one side an estrangement rules between gods and human; on the other 
side, however, a clamping together also prevails (HS, 1 13)." Heidegger and Fink 
characterize it in the following way (one should note here how Heidegger distinguishes 
between existentiale and categories, against those who make the absurd claim in that in 
Being and Time Heidegger is developing a system of ontological categories). 

Fink: ... Gods and humans do not form two separated spheres. It depends on 
seeing not the chohsmos [separation], but the intertwining of the godly and 
human understanding of self and of being. 

Heidegger: It is not a question of speaking in a blunt manner of gods and humans 
as of different living beings, of whom the former are inmiortai and the other 



109 

mortal. Spoken in the tenninology of Being and Time, immortality is no 
category, but rather an existentiale, a way that the gods relate themselves toward 
their being. 

Fink: The godly knowledge of the being bound to death of humans is no mere 
consciousness, but rather an understanding relationship. With Athena, who 
appears as mentor to mortals in order to bring help to them, it is perhaps a matter 
of still another theme. The epiphany of the gods is no actual mortal being of the 
gods, but a masking. When Aristotle says that the life of theoria [contemplation], 
which exceeds phronesis [practical wisdom], is a kind of godly life, an 
athanatizein [to be immortal] (whereby athanatizein is formed like hellenizein [to 
be Greek]), that implies that in theoria we comport ourselves like immortals. In 
theoria mortals reach up to the life of the gods. Correspondingly, we must say of 
the gods, that their comportment toward humans is a thanatizein [to be mortal], 
presupposing that one could form this word. The emphasis lies in this, that the 
relationship of humans to gods carmot be described externally, but rather that they 
themselves exist as their alternate and counter relationships, except that the gods, 
to a certain extent, have the more favorable existenz - ontology and humans, on 
the contrary, the less favorable (HS, 111). 

We need to keep in mind here that this pure rejwse of theoria is specifically thought in 

terms of that which allows the human being to be fiilly complete and at home. The 

difference between the citation from the 1924 lecture course on the Sophist and the later 

course on Heraclitus with Fink in relation to the problem of athanatizein is negligible. In 

the earlier lective course, Heidegger has in mind the tarrying alongside of that which 

always is without any regard for utility (since philosophy is useless in that sense). In the 

latter lecture course Heidegger is thinking of the letting come to presence of that which 

presences. In either case, we have pure theoria, the highest form of energeia as a putting 

oneself to work without regard to machinations which brings a fullness and completeness 

to one's life and one's lifetime. The key is that this notion of deathlessness or 

etemalness (non-finiteness, if we can construct such a word), athanatizein, is not a 

categorical determination of anything but rather an existentiale. It pertains to the being 

of the person during his or her lifetime because, if you recall, for the Greeks the eternal 



no 

is also thought along with the lifetime of something as a whole thought in relation to the 
time of the world. Because pure theoria is a relation to one's own being that is perfectio, 
fiilly complete unto itself with none of the incompleteness or restlessness (deinon) that 
pertains to the way a mortal relates to his or her being, the philosopher has the existence 
ontology of a God. 'Theoria' in the Greek basically means: A\1iat makes someone whole. 
This is possible in the Greek because the difference between the way the Gods and 
mortals relate themselve to their own being is that the mortals become homless over 
time. 



Ill 

CHAPTERS: 
Deinon: The Utter Tragedy of Being-Human 

Now that we have finished detennining the relation of the assertion to the Being 

of man, we must expand on what was said of the fundamental attunement of Dasein in 

order to determine presence as lustre. We will have the specific task here of determining 

concretely how the notion of restlessness and its removal, which was raised in the last 

section, is specifically related to the Greek understanding of existence. 

(I) Anaximander 

We shall begin with what Heidegger considered to be the oldest piece of actual 

philosophy in the west, the Anaximander fragment. Taken literally, it reads 

But that from which things arise also gives rise to their passing away, according 
to what is necessary; for things render justice and pay penalty to one another for 
their injustice, according to the ordinance of time 

Heidegger says that this is generally imderstood to mean that things have their genesis, 

and then they pass away, written with judicial language mixed in, because as early a 

thinker as Anaximander was not yet privy to rigorous distinctions and hence simply used 

the language of one domain in another interchangeably. It was thus that, later, 

Theophrastus criticized Anaximander, since Anaximander mixed in language that did not 

properly belong to the true beings, the beings of nature imderstood in the limited sense. 

But was this criticism justified? Insofar as Anaximander is speaking of ta onta, beings, 

and tapolla, the many, Anaximander is not interested in speaking of an indefinite 

number of entities, but rather of being in its totality. What is properly understood as a 

thing is not only the things of nature, but also man, his productions, the things and 



112 
situations effected by him (through action or inaction), and the divine are also things, but 
considered raoxe fully so than just ordinary things. 

Heidegger says that Theophrastus' accusation against Anaximander for 
transposing the language from the realm of the judicial and ethical onto that of the realm 
of nature is absolutely groundless, for it assumes an oversimplified picture of the 
entirerty of what is, whereby beings are compartmentalized into their various domains, 
the law related entities into their own and the natural entities into their own. However, if 
it can be seen that entities are only given their full sense w^en it has been understood that 
they dwell in Being, to wit the language of law belongs most essentially to the 
description of the beings of nature, a very different understanding of Anaximander arises. 
Heidegger comments that 

where boundaries between disciplines do not appear, boundless indeterminacy 
and flux do not necessarily prevail: on the contrary, an appropriate articulation of 
a matter purely thought may well come to language when it has been freed from 
every oversimplification (EGT, AF, 21) 

Dastur provides a useful and, being one that Heidegger uses himself, highly 

accurate account of how Heidegger's thoughts on Anaximander relate to the notion of 

'presence' for the Greeks: 

Homer declares that Calchas was the wisest of all seers because he knew what is, 
was and will be. Ta eonta (later became the philosophical term onto) is here the 
word for what is present {das Gegenwartige). But for us present means what is 
now {das Jetzige), whereas for the Greeks it means what comes to presence {das 
Anwesende) and not merely what stands "againsf {gegen) the "subject," as an 
"object" {Gegemtand) ... Calchas the seer has the view of everything as coming 
into presence, which means that his view is not restricted to what presently comes 
into presence. He is "out of himself ' (Heid Anax,184) 

In the oldest Greek sense of Being, that of Anaximander, Being hands to beings their 



113 

essences out of a fundamental enjoyment. It gives them their limits, not in the sense of 

restriction, but fashioning them into what they really are. Dastur continues 

To xrewn comes from the verb xraw, xraomai, whose origin is the word xeir 
meaning "hand," and which originally signifies "to handle" something, to give a 
hand to somebody or something. By giving Being the name to xrewn, 
Anaximander means, according to Heidegger, that Being hands something to its 
own essence and keeps it in hand, preserving it in this way in its truth, in its 
coming to presence. Heidegger propose to translate to xrewn into the word 
Brauch, which ordinarily means "use" or "need," but which has here to be taken 
in its etymologically prior sense of "enjoyment." The old German bruchen is 
related to the Latin ^w/. Enjoyment implies something else than a mere "need," 
in the sense that it does not involve the experience of lacking, but rather of an 
originaiy profusion that is the very origin of the genesis of beings, of the "gift of 
Being," of the Es gibt Sein (Heid Anax, 187). 

Dastur, however, leaves the notion of presence unclarified, so that what he fimdamentally 

understands here is unclear and makes it seem as though Heidegger is doing little more 

than promoting a mysticism. This is especially the case because Dastur does not 

concretize the relationship of presencing to the being of man. We must now consider 

this more fully. 

(II) Take Into Care Beings as a Whole 

Heidegger points out that there is an ancient Greek saying, meleta to pan, "that 

means, consider that everything depends upon the whole of beings, upon what addresses 

humanity from there. Always consider the essential, first and last, and assume the 

attitude that matures us for such reflection (BC, 3)." Essential does not mean here, as 

has been suggested in all related occurrences throughout this thesis, merely the opposite 

of the accidental, but rather the opposite of the trivial, "[hjistorical man matters only 

when and insofar as he stands in relation to the essence of history and hears a claim from 

this essence according to which what matters is distinguished from what doesn't matter 



114 
(BC, 17)." What matters is that beings as a whole speak to man insofar as they presence, 
that is, have a lustre to which man is attracted. And yet, do to his general unrest, man is 
never free, for he constantly strives after new in order to satisfy himself, and yet '"every 
enough' is just as soon a 'never enou^' (BC, 4)." Man is characterized by a drive for 
the new and a covering up of the old. It is my position that Heidegger, as we shall see, 
will argue that only when man is in relation to the essential based on the call that comes 
from the essential itself can man be free. In order to see this more fully, we must further 
determine presence in relation to the being of man. 

Heidegger says that "[b]eings are - thought in Greek - what presences. What 
emerges [Heidegger's word here is Anaximander's genesis, coming into being] and 
evades [phthora, passing away,] emerges into presence and goes out of presence (BC, 89- 
90)." I believe that what is key to Anaximander's understanding of presencing is that it 
is what is fit for a being precisely because, even though it emerges and lingers for a 
while, beingness, that is, presence, is precisely what is not the eternal. Heidegger writes 
that "[t]ransition is always presencing in which emergence and evasion [passing away] 
presence above all (BC, 103)." Let us consider this in terms of time. 

Time, understood in a Greek sense that had become archaic by Aristotle's time, 
chronos, on the one hand means experienced time, and on the other it means 'it is time' 
for something or other, the appropriate time for it. Experienced time was what we feel as 
drawing out while we are waiting, which is analyzed by Heidegger (in FCM) in terms of 
boredom, and also of the time a person has left, "in Homer chronos [time] means the 
long, lingering time, the endurance of time understood in awaiting, or rather the time that 



115 
still remains for mortals who suffer long. Both are specific forms of time (HS, 61)." On 
the other hand, a thing presences, lingers a while in its own time by overcoming an 
absolute endurance that simply persists forever, since the eternal is 'the imfit ' that is 
overcome in presencing. I understand this to mean the lustre of the thing that concerns 
us is not an eternal lustre, but rather only that which concerns us for a time, whatever its 
appropriate time is. For instance, if it 'is time for us to leave,' then the leaving is what 
concerns us, has a luster in the sense that our attention is given over to it, but only for a 
time. 

As Presence is not what is eternal but has the character of lingering for a while in 
its own time, we must now get a clearer understanding of how the Greeks thought it. We 
will take our orientation from the Heraclitus seminar. In this seminar. Fink begins by 
emphasizing 'light' for the Greeks in terms of a lighting up of things by lightning, 
"[l]ightning, regarded as a phenomenon of nature, means the outbreak of the shining 
lightning-flash in the dark of night. Just as the lightning in the night momentarily flashes 
up and, in the brightness of the gleam, shows things in their articulated outline, so 
lightning in a deeper sense brings to light multiple things in their articulated gathering 
(HS, 5)." The sense here is that light has a visual connotation. Later in this seminar. 
Fink speaks of light for the Greeks in the sense of the dawn sun arising over the water 
and lighting everything up. This is an initial characterization, which, keeping with the 
spirit of the seminar, is a characterization that he later retracts, since this preliminary way 
of thinking of light in terms of the visual lighting of things is quite wrong, especially in 
terms of Heraclitus, which is why Heidegger immediately warns "[a]t first, let us leave 



116 
aside words like 'clearing' and 'brightness.' (HS, 6)" 

The light that the Greeks are concerned with is precisely not that which is visible 

in the sense of being seen by anyone, for the masses do not see it at all, but rather a 

radiance, a glory. Fink comments on Heraclitus fragment 29'* that 

the noble minded prefer one thing rather than all else, namely everlasting glory 
rather than transient things. The comportment of the noble minded is opposed to 
that of the polloi, the many [people], who lie there like well-fed cattle ... But the 
fragment expresses not only comportment of the noble minded in reference to 
glory. Glory is standing in radiance. Radiance, however, reminds us of the light 
of lightning and fire. Glory relates itself to all other things as radiance to 
dullness. Fr. 90 also belongs here in so far as it speaks of the relationship of gold 
to goods. Gold also relates itself to goods as radiance to dullness (HS, 22-3)." 

Radiant presence for the Greeks is what is opposed to the ordinary in the sense of dull, 

namely, presence is the uncanny, and for the Greeks the most uncanny is to deinon (cf 

PR, 82). Hence, for the Greeks, it is not so much a question of physical light wliich lights 

up the panta (beings as a whole), but a lustrous radiance. Even the ordinary presences, 

insofar as it concerns us, but the uncarmy captures our attention more fully and hence is 

radiant to a greater degree. 

Heidegger himself sees all of this in relation to Pindar, which will be important 

for us in a moment: 

Fr. 29 also names the polloi next to the aristoi (the best). In Fr. 1, the polloi are 
compared with the apeiroisin, with the untried, who are contrasted with ego, that 
is, with Heraclitus ... The many do not strive, like the noble minded, after the 
radiance of glory; they indulge in transitory things and therefore do not see the 
one ... Pindar also connected gold, and thus the radiant, with fire and lighting 
(HS, 22; also cf HS, 106-7). 



""There is one thing which the best prefer to all else; eternal glory rather than transient things"; 
Heidegger also treats this passage at IM, 103-4) 



117 

Fink: ... We have indicated that in chrusos [gold], the glimmer of gold must also 
be thought. Here a relationship is thought between the light-character of fire and 
that into which it turns... 

Heidegger: We must think the radiant, the ornamental, and the decorative element 
together in cosmos, which was for the Greeks a customary thought (HS, 1 16). 

Hence, light is not simply the lighting up of things with a physical light, but also the 

radiant light that is precisely what is invisible. '^ The understanding of light as the noble 

and lustrous^" in the Greek follows, among older sources, Pindar's usage of the notion of 

glimmering Gold, "'goldea' So that we may hear more clearly this word and what it 

calls, let us recollect a poem of Pindar's: Isthmians V. At the beginning of this ode the 

poet calls gold periosion panton, that which above all shines through everything, /?fl«/fl, 

shines through each thing present all around. The splendor of gold keeps and holds 

everything present in the unconcealedness of its appearing (PLT, L, 20 1 )." 

Heidegger suggests that even later, in Plato's time, when Being became 

interpreted as eidos and idea, it still carried the sense of a beautiful radiance, although at 

that time the sense is ambiguous and hence the essence of truth becomes ambiguous. On 

the one hand, Plato determined whatness, to ti einai, as what is constant in something 

despite the various particular instances of it (house as such, for instance). For Plato, the 

particulars are me on, not nothing, but deficient with respect to the imiversal because a 

particular is not in the fullness of its possibilities but restricted to a particular form.^' It 

is in relation to, for instance, the house that is seen in advance, that the other 



"Especially in Fr. 54, aphanes, what "does not appear (HS, 82);" also cf HS, 143) 

^"Treated in PLT, L, 205; PR, 1 13 

^' On this the reader should refer to the treatment in BQP, especially at 63. 



118 
determinations (door, stairway) relevant to us can be understood as such. Heidegger 

suggests that we do not involve ourselves specifically with the house as such, but it is 

only because the house is seen in advance that "we experience and use this door as a 

door, this staircase as a staircase to this storey with these rooms (BQP, 56)."^ This is the 

first sense. On the other hand, Heidegger explains that "[t]he word '/cfea' comes fi-om 

the Greek eido which means to see, face, meet, be face to face ... [E]ach of us has at 

some time stood facing a tree in bloom ... Or did the tree anticipate us, so that we might 

come forward face-to-face with it? Standing before us a blossoming tree in all its 

radiance and fragrance - when we perceive it (WCT, 41-2)." The ambiguity is that in 

Plato's time it is uncertain whether it should be decided that the lighting is the light of 

the idea for the mind's eye of the cognizing thinker or the radiant lighting of the things 

themselves^^; the ambiguity also being present in Heraclitus' treatment of radiant glory. ^^ 

In the 'Republic (517b7-c5)' the idea of the good is that which is the source of the 
lighting of things. However, in one sense it is the source of the knowable, and hence in 



^^ Another example Heidegger gives which further illustrates how what is seen in advance 
determines our understanding of something, peiiiaps better shows the phenomenon precisely when there is 
a problem. During the first world war, it was reported that a certain fort had been tdcen, and looking 
through binoculars at the fort it was confiraied that fiiendly soldiers were indeed perched on the wall and 
friendly flags were flying. The outcome was disastrous because the fort was later approached as though it 
was friendly, and it turned out the fort had not actually been taken, but that the person looking through the 
binoculars saw friendly flags and soldiers because he had seen them there in advance - since he had been 
previously told ihsy were there. The initial mistake "became the hupokeimenon for the apparmdy 
'incorrect' seeing (BQP, 60)." 

^^Aletheia as homoiosis or, on the other hand, aletheia kai on - unconcealedness, that is to say, 
beings in their beingness (BQP, 106; also cf PA, PDT, 177-8). 

"Most specifically at IM, 103-4. 



119 
this case truth is understood in terms of the knowing of correct things, ortha, and in the 
other case truth has the sense of unhiddeness and in this respect refers not to the correct, 
but to the beautiful, kala, that A\1iich is" ekphanestaton, "that which, as most of all and 
most purely shining of an from itself, shows the visible form and thus is unhidden (PA, 
PDT, 1 78; also at Nl, 80)." Referring to Plato's Phaedrus, Heidegger says that beauty is 
"what is most radiant and sparkling in the sensuous realm, in a way that, as such 
brilliance, it lets Being scintillate at the same time (Nl, 197)." 

Heidegger suggests that for Plato, there is the further ambiguity that Being is 
understood univocally. The problem here is that if Being is univocal and the various 
things that are must presence in some way, then the distinction between the prescencing 
and that which presences collapses. This can perhaps better be understood in the 
following way: Aristotle said that Being cannot be equivocal (homomtmos) or univocal 
{sunonumos), but is rather analogical. Being is quite obviously not equivocal. On the 
other hand, it cannot be, as Plato said, genus like, univocal, because the genus is what is 
common to many, which must then be differentiated into species. The genus cannot be 
included in what defines any of the species, for otherwise it would not be the genus. 
Heidegger gives the example of rationality, the determination of humans, as being 
included in the genus 'living thing.' In that case, plants, if they are living, would have to 
be rational. If Being were a genus and the different ways of being, such as being true and 
being possible were species, then insofar as these ways are something rather than not, the 



^'It is notable that Heidegger takes his orientation on the beautiful from the Phaedrus, not the 
Syqsposium, which will be important for us in the conclusion. 



120 
genus would have to be included in the species, which is impossible. Being, rather, is 
analogous. Health, for instance, is what is understood in general in something that 
possesses that condition (dehikon), or else something that produces health (poiein), or 
something that is an indication of health (semeion einai), or else something that is 
conducive to the recovery of health {phulatteiri). What is seen here is that while 'health' 
is general it is not said of the various kinds in the same way, and so is not a genus. 
Rather, in all the different cases health is co-intended, and hence thought analogously, 
that is, one thinks the various kinds of health and thinks 'health as such' at the same 
time. Let us consider this another way. It caimot be the case, for instance, that 'essence' 
goes out to both 'essence of kind' in the sense of a commonality of many things and 
'essence of Socrates' in the same way, since the latter only goes out to one person. 
'Essence' in these cases is not intended in the same way. But if being is analogical, we 
must try to understand this in terms of the difficult problem of presence. 

Brogan indicates that Ousia must be understood according to the fact that the 
categories have being only insofar as they "belong together in the unifying presencing of 
a being as a whole ... [Aristotle's primary task in this sense of being, then, is to] think 
how this manifold can belong to a being without contradicting the oneness, the en that 
characterizes the being of beings (Twofoldedness, 1 14)." 
(ED) Presence 

The presence of the work of art is precisely a self-showing radiance, while the 
notion of a standstill, or production, if they are there at all, are entirely secondary. 
Because the notion of presence is ambiguous here, so too is the relation of presence to 



121 
beings. The analogy by virtue of which beings are in being is that of the presencing of 

beings specifically in the lustrous radiance, so that the shining is there with the beings, 

para. But this para is not an empty academic distinction, or some vacuous notion of 

'beside,' but a 'nearness.' Let us consider this. 

Fink quotes from Holderlin's Hyperion's Song of Fate in order to characterize 

how existence was for the Greek people. One has to be careful with this passage because 

Fink prompts it with a warning that the relationship expressed here between the Gods and 

mortals is not what Heraclitus is dealing with in Fr. 62. Care is needed because this 

prohibition is not meant to say that Holderlin is characterizing the Greeks incorrectly, 

only that the strict separation between mortals and Gods in Holderlin's poem is different 

than the belonging together of them in the Heraclitus fragment, and thus Fink later says 

that he only meant to understand that relation (cf HS, 103), later accepting Holderlin's 

characterization.^* Hence, in this characterization of Greek life, Holderlin says the 

following: 

Radiant the gods' mild breezes/Gently play on you/ As the girl artist's fingers/On 
holy strings. - Fateless the Heavanly breathe/Like an unweaned infant 
asleep;/Chastely preserved/In modest bud/For even their minds/Are in flower/ And 
their blissful eyes/Eternally tranquil gazeyEtemally clear. - But we are fated/to 
find no foothold, no rest,/ And suffering mortals/ Dwindle and fall/ Headlong 
from one/ Hour to the nextyHurled like water/From ledge to ledge/Downward for 
years to the vague abyss. (HS, 101) 

Fink, commenting on the meaning of the passage, says the following, "the gods wander 



^*Hence he says, on the strict separation between the Gods and mortals in Holderlin's poem as 
opposed to their mutual belonging togetiier in the Heraclitus fragment. Fink later says "On one side an 
estrangement rules between gods and humans; on the other side, however, a clamping together in mutual 
understanding (HS, 113)." 



122 

without destiny, their spirit eternally in bloom, while humans lead a restless life and fall 

into the cataract of time and disappear." (HS, 101 ) 

Heidegger and Fink introduce the notion of light and the bright with wakefulness 

in this seminar, vdiich has to do with being absorbed in what you are doing. Heidegger 

says that "we sometimes call a wakeful human a bri^t, lively one. His attention is 

directed toward something. He exists in that his bearings are directed toward 

something." (HS, 132) Fink takes up this notion of wakefulness in order to do a 

phenomenological analysis of sleep and dreaming in relation to the Heraclitus fragments. 

As always, a bifurcated notion of the person is presented, where in the dream state the 

person is ekstatic with respect to himself as, on the one hand, the dreamer, and on the 

other, the dreamed 'I.' The dream itself specifically brings out the element of 'concern' 

in human existence, being absorbed by it. 

Fink: In dreaming, we must distinguish the one who dreams and the dreamed I. 
When we speak of a light in the dream, this light is not for the dreamer, but rather 
for the dreamed I of the dreamed world. The sleeper, or the sleeping I, is also the 
dreaming I, who is not the I of the dream world who is awake and sees in the 
dreams. In the dream world, the I of the dream world behaves similarly to the 
wakeful I. While the dreaming I sleeps, the dreamed I of the dream world finds 
itself in a condition of wakefulness. What is important, however, is that the light 
of the dream world is a light not for the dreaming and sleeping I, but for the 
dreamed I. The I of the dream world can have different roles and vary in it self- 
relatedness. A phenomenological analysis of the dream indicates that not the 
sleeping, but the dreamed I kindles a light. Although the sleeper does not see, 
still, as a dreamer, he has a dreamed I that has encounters 
Heidegger: Thus one cannot identify sleeping and dreaming. 
Fink: Sleeping is a vivid form of human absorption. (HS, 137) 

Of course, we cannot equate the sleeping I with the dreamed I, for otherwise it would not 

be possible, as occasionally happens, that the dreamed I becomes aware that it is in the 

dreamed world, that it is a dreamed I and not an actual I that is awake, and therefore 



123 
becomes aware, in a peculiar way, of that other, the dreaming I asleep in the bed. Notice, 
further, how the ekstatic structure of human life speaks further than the intentional 
structure consisting merely of the intentio and intentum. For, if we merely adhere to the 
intentional structure, then all there can be is the dreamed I as intentio and dreamed world 
as intentum, but no sleeper. In regular life, the ekstatic dimension shows itself in the 
dynamism between absorption and indifference. 

We do not only relate to things in such a way that we are utterly engrossed by 
them, but there is also, either subtly or explicitly a not-being-there, a being away, so that 
the lustre of that which we are interested in, that in relation to which we are awake, 
wakeful, is always, as we say in English, including of a kind of lackluster along with it, 
"Being awake is, in its tautness, suffused by the possibility of the sinking away of tension 
and the extinguishing of all interest (HS, 147)." In this regard, if the discussion of the 
relation of sleeping and being awake in the Heraclitus fragments is taken in an average 
way as indicating the factual state of consciousness and unconsciousness, then. Fink says, 
"the human situation, aimed at (in my opinion) in the fi'agment, of standing between light 
and night gets lost." (HS, 138) 

Heidegger suggests that humans are, as is clear, "not related only to what is 
immediately present, to what lies before them in their grasping apprehension. Fink cites 
the example of Plato in the Laws which discusses hope. The captivation that might 
usually be directed toward the things at hand are projected into the future. Hence, 
Heidegger says that "Hope means 'to concern oneself with something very intensely' 
( 1 52)." In order to make it clearer to ourselves how the radiance of the beautiful and the 



124 
Greek notion of the ekstatic are related, we shall consider Parmenides. 
(IV) Parmenides 

Although Heidegger nowhere says this, 'the same,' as Parmenides understood it, 
seems, as we shall see, to be the 'at the same time' tense of the participle, which was 
emphasized earlier in this thesis, although it is not. Parmenides' 'same' is the sameness 
of the matter of thought. It bears an identical character to Heidegger's use of 'the same' 
in the following passage, "Plato's definition of the nature of thought is not identical with 
that of Leibniz, though it is the same. They belong together in that both reveal one basic 
nature, which appears in different ways (WCT, 165)." 

I would suggest that the notion of simultaneity, 'at the same time,' is perhaps the 
primary notion in philosophy. There is, for instance, a being, and at the same time the 
Being of that being. A being is determined, for instance, in terms of its essentia, and at 
the same time, its existentia. Both of these, at the same time, possess both a primary and 
a secondary sense. Essentia is both the what of something generally, its various 
accidental determinations, and at the same time what it is essentially. Existence, taken in 
the classical understanding of it, is both the various manners and ways of its being, as 
well as the primary sense 'that it is.' In speaking of the principle of contradiction, we say 
that the 'what' and 'how' of something cannot both be and not be at the same time}'' 
Heidegger identifies the 'turning' that occurs in this doubling of the at-the-same-time- 
ness, the turning that always involves a turning to something (eg. essence) that is at the 



" Kant was the first to dispute that simultaneity should be placed as a determination of the 
principle of contradiction, cf Heidegger's 'What is the Thing?, but, as we shall see, located it elsewhere. 



125 
same time a turning away from that something (eg. existence) in a belonging together.^ 
For example, in dealing with the 'at-the-same-time-ness' of the essence of truth and the 
truth of essence, one of the myriad of 'at-the-same-time' determinations, Heidegger says 

[a]ll this is enigmatic: the question of the essence of truth is at the same time and 
in itself the question of the truth of essence. The question of truth - asked as a 
basic question -turns in itself against itself This turning, which we have now run 
up against, is an intimation of the fact that we are entering the compass of a 
genuine philosophical questioning ... [T]he turning must belong essentially to the 
single focus of philosophical reflection (Being as the appropriating event 
[Ereignes]"") (BQP, 44)." 

The point is that if we only ask about the essence of truth and do not think what is, at the 

same time, thought along with it, then "we are only half asking; from a philosophical 

standpoint, we are not questioning at all (BQP, 51)." But why should we he persuaded to 

identify this in the ftmdamental thought of Parmenides? 

Heidegger comments that "eon [Parmenides older an more genuine form of 

Aristotle's to on], has two different meanings ... The grammatical name ...for words so 

formed is participle. They participate, they take part - in two meanings ... The word 

blossoming can mean: the given something that is blossoming - the rosebush or apple 

tree. If the word is intended in this sense it designates what stands in bloom ... In its 



^* especially and most explicitly in the companion lecture course to 'Contibutions to Philosophy,' 
namely, 'Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected Problems of 'Logic,' as where the heart of philosophy 
resides (cf BQP, esp. 44). 

^'I leave the translation of Ereignes here as the translators of the lecture course do because turning 
has a temporal context, a tumiag within the 'at-the-same-///we,' and so allotting the term 'event' to 
Ereignes conveys that there is a temporal happening. The point of the notion of Ereignes is that when ever 
we try to delimit what is ownmost in something (the essence of truth, for instance), we inevitably turn 
away from it and must think what is thought along with it (in this case the truth of essence), which means 
that thinking never completes itself, but rather moves in a circular way, is an event, that is, continually 
self'perpetuating. 



126 
linguistic form, it has the character of a substantive, a noun (WCT, 220)." The 

participle, as a verbal adjective, is being emphasized in its adjectival form, and the 

adjective is being taken substantively. In other words, what the thing is, is being derived 

from what the things does. On the other hand, we say, for instance, that the man is 

running down the road. In this case, the participle 'running' is being thought of more in 

the verbal sense. If we put the two together and say, for instance, the nmning man 

[runner] is sweating profusely, the temporal determination of simultaneity is buih in to it. 

Became the substantive form can only de-emphasize, but not eliminate, the temporal 

sense, it has a time bearing just as the verbal sense does. Hence, if we ask when the 

runner is sweating, the answer is that he is sweating at the same time he is running. The 

Greek eon, as it participates in both the substantive and the verbal, expresses 

simultaneity by its very nature. What is the consequence? 

Parmenides said "that, namely the same, is thinking as well as being." The 

'same' here could, especially following the closeness of the Greek language to express 

simultaneity in the participle form, mean that thinking and being are at the same time, 

and hence be the initial expression of this fundamental temporal determination of 

philosophy. Kant, as was said, took, simultaneity out of the definition of the principle of 

contradiction, but re-inserted it back into the highest principle of all synthetic 

judgements, "[t]he conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same 

time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience (cited Heidegger, WCT, 

243)." As Heidegger says, 'at the same time' is Kant's interpretation of Parmenides' 

word 'tauto, same.' Heidegger says, though, that Parmenides 'same' is not the 'at the 



127 
same time' that Kant read into it, pregnant as such a reading may be in the Greek 
language. Heidegger understands Parmenides' 'same' to be identical with the sense that 
was expressed earlier about the sameness of Plato and Leibniz (cf WCT, 165), namely, 
the sameness of the matter to be thought. Heidegger translates Parmenides saying in the 
following way, 'for the same: taking-to-heart is also presence of what is present,' or, 
thought according to the interpretation we are putting forth of presence, ' to the matter 
that calls for thinking there belongs a concern as well as the lustre of that which is to be 
thought. ' Hence, Heidegger concludes "[t]hough Kant says something absolutely > 
different [from Parmenides], his thinking moves nonetheless in the same (not identical) 
sphere as the thinking of the Greek thinkers (WCT, 243)." 

Just as the logos of Heraclitus, as we shall soon see, as legein, is primarily that 
which concerns us, so too is the noein of Parmenides, which is why Heidegger says 
Parmenides and Heraclitus agree in their basic position. Noein is a perception, not in the 
sense of a mere gaping perception, but rather "what is perceived concerns us in such a 
way that we take it up specifically, and do something with it ... We take it to heart (WCT, 
203)." What philosophers take up in their concerned thought is 'the same,' that is, the 
luster of that which calls for thinking. This is why Greek thinking is metaphorical, and 
not because, as is so prevalent today, they had a lazy recourse to an etymological 
dictionary, as though the descriptive (ontic) fact that some ancient people used the same 
words for what we now call objective things and subjective things and, moreover, that for 
the Greeks with their inexplicable preference for 'light' metaphors, thinking was a 
perceiving, that because of this something essential about our being was somehow 



128 
thereby magically established. Such questionable movements proceed from the 
assumption that there is somehow already a subjective side and an objective side and 
then, inexplicably, there is metaphor, one side is somehow carried over to the other. ^ 
The entire theory of the metaphor here is torn utterly asunder if one simply proceeds 
from the other direction and, instead of asking why it is that Greeks used objective terms 
to describe subjective states, that it is asked why it is that the Greeks used subjective 
terms to describe objective states. If one cannot assume the primacy of the subject/object 
dichotomy and is not allowed to start from one side of that dichotomy, much of what is 
currently bandied about in the guise of philosophy turns out to be nonsense, the last 
resort of those who thought they found a way to establish an absolute ground for 
themselves so that they would no longer have to think. 

Heidegger suggests that if for the Greeks thinking was merely a perceiving, then 
this is the equivalent of saying they saw no difference between people and animals. 
Rather, thinking is a perceiving because perceiving is, at the same time, a thinking. In 
perception, there is no indifferent gaping, but rather an attending to something, namely, 
what attracts the eye. When we speak of someone as attractive, as having a kind of lustre 
or radiance about them, we mean they attract our attention. In attraction there is a 
pursuing, and so too does the eye not simply gloss over what attracts it but pursues it. 



^It is often suggested that this is what Heidegger was ultimately aiming at, as though he were 
Hegel and trying to rehash romanticism. One must considCT, though, that no one fought more stringently 
against the dichotomy of the objective and the subjective and that, for the older Greeks, there is no such 
thing as a metaphor.' In our time there is often recourse to cognitive science, and neural discoveries, 
such as the fact that there is a great deal of interconnective material between the various sensory areas of 
the brain, in order to try to 'prove' that a metaphorical Unguistics will estabUsh philosophy as a real 
science. Such things are little more than rhetoric. 



129 
focuses on it and, as the common parlance says, 'gives it a once over.' This is so whether 
we factually see them in front of us or not. In fact, our attention is often most attracted to 
them when they are not there. In our language we say 'absence makes the heart grow 
fonder,' or perhaps 'go yonder,' if we are not attending to them in their absence. For 
thinking it is also the case that we are directed, not indifferently, but rather to what calls 
for thinking, what attracts our thinking to pursue it further. In perceiving and in thinking 
there is, therefore, a relation to the beautifiil, that which in its lustrous radiance shows 
itself 

In order to fully appreciate what Heidegger saw in Being as beautifiil radiance for 
the Greeks, we must approach the Beautifiil in accord with what the Greeks meant by the 
word ekstatikon, which has been deah with at certain junctures throughout this thesis. 
Heidegger's revival of the Greek notion of the ekstatikon (ecstatic), the being outside 
oneself, is not meant merely as an attempt to be innovative with respect to the thinking of 
his time, but rather to bring out the essential determination of man. Aside from other 
instances of it, this being outside oneself is clearly seen in anger, 

"[a]nger comes over us, seizes us, 'affects' us. Such a seizure is sudden and 
tiirbulent. Our being is moved by a kind of excitement, something stirs us up, 
lifts us beyond ourselves, but in such a way that, seized by our excitement, we are 
no longer masters of ourselves. We say, 'he acted on impulse,' that is to say, 
under the influence of an affect. Popular speech proves to be keen sighted when 
it says of someone who is stirred up and acts in an excited manner, 'He isn't 
altogether himself When we are seized by excitement, our being 'altogether 
there' vanishes; it is transformed into a kind of falling apart. We say [at other 
times of someone that] [h]e's beside himself with joy (Nl, 45-6). 

This seizure bears within it two elements, the being seized of the human and the seizing 
itself by 



130 

that ^\1iich is lustrous in the sense of that which captures the attention of the person. 

This being outside of ourselves whereby feelings do not just pertain to our lives as 

internal phenomena can also be seen from the point of view of the body, such as when 

we have stomach problems. 

When our stomachs are 'out of sorts' they cast a pall over all things. What would 
otherwise seem indifferent to us suddenly becomes irritating and disturbing; what 
we usually take in stride now impedes us ... [FJeeling is not something that runs 
its course in our inner lives! It is rather that basic nature of our Dasein by force 
of which and in advance with which we are already lifted beyond ourselves into 
beings as a whole, which in this or that way matters to us or does not matter to us. 
Mood is never merely a way of being determined in our inner being for ourselves. 
It is above all a way of being attuned, in this or that way of mood. Mood is 
precisely the basic way in which we are outside ourselves. But that is the way we 
are essentially and constantly (N 1 , 99). 

Again we see here the opposition between indifference and that which concerns us. 

Hate and love, are another kind of being-outside-oneself where a specific 
gathering function is involved, that is, our outsidedness is gathered back into itself This 
does not happen so that we then regain some kind ©firmer solipsism, but rather our 
being- with-beings completes itself, so it is no longer a question of an inside or an outside 
ofoneself (cfNl,49) 

When something so concerns us so, either in love or hate, we say in English that it is our 

'thing,' it is what matters to us in a pre-eminent sense, it gathers our existence together in 

the sense that our whole life evolves around it. 

The thing is that which concerns us, that which we care about, not only trivially, 

but also something that brings cohesion to our lives in a pre-eminent sense, such as when 

we speak, in love, about someone who is the entire world to us, for she is the pole^' 

around which everything else in our lives turn, because she's the thing, she's what really 

matters: 



31 



This is the sense that polis as a pole has in the Greek. 



131 

"The Roman word res designates that which concerns somebody, ... that which is 
pertinent, which has a bearing ... In Enghsh 'thing' has still preserved the full 
semantic power of the Roman word: 'He knows his things,' he understands the 
matters that have a bearing on him ... The Roman word res denotes what pertains 
to man, concerns him and his interests in any way or manner. That which 
concerns man is what is real in res ... Thus Meister Eckhart says, adopting an 
expression of Dionysius the Areopagite: love is of such a nature that it changes 
man into the things he loves (PLT, T, 175-6)." 

Heidegger says that the thing things, it gather. The sense here is not, in relation to the 

thing, an entity is dispersed into the totality of its relations or that a man is something 

similar to this, but rather the opposite, that in love for his 'thing' man is less himself and 

more at home as the thing (does not disperse itself but rather) gather the totality of its 

relations, including the man, into a unity. Metaphysics, as the name implies, has man 

passing over beings to get to being, but he precisely then does not find it. Only when 

man is captured by a being do the tables turn, "[metaphysical] thinking goes beyond 

beings ... [, and precisely in this] philosophy distances itself from the truth ... The less a 

being man is and the less he insists upon the being which he finds himself to be, so much 

nearer does he come to being (No Buddhism! The opposite) (CTP, 120, bracketed remark 

in original)." Things in this sense of this word, compared to the endless number of 

objects, are rare (cf PLT, T, 182). 

I would suggest that, in fact, it is only when we are not locked up into ourselves 

(which is never complete anyway), that we accrue to the true realization of our human 

being, when we stand in relation to that which dissolves our concern for ourselves. This 

is what Heidegger saw in the 'beautiful.' When I truly find the beautiful, it is never in 

relation to any needs that I have for its use, "in order to find something beautiful, we 

must let what encounters us, purely as it is in itself, come before us in its own stature and 



m 

worth ... [This is] the supreme effort of our essential nature, the liberation of ourselves 
for the release of what has proper worth in itself ... in order that we may have it purely 
(Nl, 109)." This is what Kant and Nietzsche also saw as the essence of the beautiful. 

In relation to this, we may now more fully concretize Heidegger's understanding 
of the person by connecting what has been said to the Zollikon seminars. In the Zollikon 
seminars from 1959-1969, where Heidegger attempted to explain his thinking to the 
Swiss Psychiatrist Medard Boss and his colleagues, a distinction is drawn between 
Heidegger's theory of the person and Freud's. The point on which the whole position 
turns is the development of a theory of Dasein or being-there in which the person is 
understood in such a way that they are not just another present-at-hand object. 
Specifically, Heidegger wanted a theory of humanity that did not try to explain the 
person causally. Freud, for instance, presented his theory of parapraxes or slips of the 
tongue causally, in terms of underlying drives or forces that were the cause of the 
phenomenon. The effect is explained by the cause and the cause is proved via the effect, 
although not manifest in itself It is a theory that deals in terms of proof Heidegger, on 
the other hand, advocated a theory of the person that was not one dependent on proof, but 
the assertions of which are traced back to a ground that is a simple showing - Heidegger 
gives the example of the manifestness of your own existence, even if it caimot be proved. 
One sees both the existence of something, and its real predicates, although the real 
predicates are seen in an ontic maimer (eg. Perception of square, hard, etc.), while the 
existence of the table is seen in an ontological manner, alreatfy seen in advance, insight 
(Einsehen) (cf Z, 6-8). 



133 

The difference between the ontic and the ontological can also be thought in the 

manner of the appearance of beings, and it is particularly helpful here because it brings 
out a special dimension of the person and the ontological. What is not seen perceptibly, 
but rather in advance, is difficult because it is not seen in the same that we see the ontic, 
and hence we feel that we have cause to doubt it. However, and this is one of the core 
insights of Heidegger's thinking, the ontological can be made manifest or forced out of 
its hiding place when steresis or privation is brought in relation to things. We spoke of 
this earlier in relation to the presen-at-hand, but we now need to being it into relief as the 
more general case. Space, for instance, is 'seen' in advance, and it is seen in advance as 
the open and the free, as opposed to the table that is seen in space. Space is the pervious 
which allows the table to show itself We see this in privation, for instance, when a wall 
is put between the table and the observer, since space is no longer the pervious that 
allows the showing of the table, but instead the wall is able to show itself, (cf Z, 8). On 
the other hand, this wall does not prevent the person from still being with the table, since 
they can still locate it in its place. There is a clearing (Lichtung) with respect to people 
and things to the effect that the things can show themselves to the person who is oriented 
toward them, which has nothing to do with whether the light is on or not. Hence, 
Heidegger suggests, we can quite readily bump into something whether the room is lit or 
not. The human being is 'in space' in a different way than the object he or she percieves. 
They are simultaneously situated in a certain spot, and at the object they are perceiving 
(both here and there, while the object does not have this spatial duality). 

The non-causal theory of the person extends to a notion of a person that is not 



134 

simply an empty ego that, aside from this, has various states, but rather the states that a 

person has is not distinguishable from the the manner in which the person has them. In 

the case of anxiety, Heidegger does not allow an empty 'having ego' that has a particular 

state of anxiety which is somehow different from it, but rather dissolves the essential 

nature of anxiety into an existential modification of being-there, and nothing more: 

I am anxious. It makes me anxious, not because I am making myself anxious, but 
because anxiety overcomes me. What about 'having' in such a case of having 
anxiety? The having itself, and just that, is full of anxiety. Anxiety is located just 
in that having. The having is being in a state of anxiety. No, anxiety in itself is 
this state we find ourselves in... [A]nxiety is not simply what is had, but is really 
the having itself [IE. The uncomfortable being overcome]. There is no anxiety 
one can have, but there is having as being in such and such a state, an ontological 
[since it refers to being, existentia, the manner in which one is] disposition that is 
called anxiety. (Z, 63) 

(V) The Deinon. 

Presence, as the Greeks understood it, really had nothing to do with the gleam of 
the sun off of things, but, as has been said, with a kind of invisible lustre. In a context 
unrelated to the present discussion, Naas cites an instructive passage from Heidegger's 
untranslated Zur Frage nach der Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens, "Heidegger recalls 
a passage from the Odyssey (16. 161) in which Athene appears as a young woman to 
Odysseus and his son Telemachus though only Odysseus can see that she is Athene, for 
as the poet says ... 'it is not to all that the gods appear enargeis. Odysseus and his son 
Telemachus both see the young woman before them but only Odysseus apprehends the 
presencing of the goddess.' Such presencing, according to Heidegger, is to be 
understood as 'Shining of one's own accord,' a characteristic to things themselves in 
their presencing (PAH, Keeping Homer's Word, 81)." But it is unclear for us at this 



13f 

point what presence has to do with the being of man. 

In a famous passage from Homer, which is usually translated so as to suggest 
mortals are wretched because they die, Krell translates more literally: Apollo says '"Why 
should I do battle for the sake of mere mortals!' exclaims the sun god, 'mortals, who are 
as wretched as the leaves on the trees, flourishing at first, enjoying the fruits of the earth, 
but then, deprived of heart (akerioi), vanishing (1, 21, 464-66) ... Vanishing how? 
Akerioi, as ... those who are deprived of [heart] (PAH, Kalypso, 105)." Leaving aside 
Krell's thoughts on this, which do not bring out what is essential, the sense of the passage 
is not that of the wretchedness of existence because mortals die, but rather enjoyment 
and fruition are contrasted with a losing heart {Akerioi) over time. This is in line with 
the ways the Greeks understood the passage from youth where one is transfixed on the 
lustre of life, which later none-the-less fades with age. 

In order to get a hold of what is at issue here, we will now determine how, in the 
oldest sense, deinon, the uncanny, for the Greeks can mean the unhomely, and then later 
pursue the determination into its culmination in Sophocles. In Homer, Kalypso is the 
deine theos, the uncanny Goddess (O, 7, 246), and is understood as preventing Odysseus 
fi-om returning home. This is why Heidegger can understand the deinon as opposing the 
homely in the Greek. Athena says "[i]t is Laertes' son, whose home is in Ithaca. I have 
seen him on a certain Island, weeping most bitterly: this was in the domains of the nymph 
Kalypso who if keeping him with her there and thwarting return to his own country (fi-om 
Odyssey, IV, 549-643). 

It is well known, and Heidegger has been often attacked for his reading of the 



136 

Odyssey (cf. EGT, Heraclitus, Aletheia, 107). Heidegger speaks of a concealment with 

resjject to Odysseus, in relation to the Odyssey Theta 93, when Odysseus covers his head 

with his mantle to sob after the singer Demodokos tells of the tragedy that happened to 

the Greeks at Troy, which is generally translated as 'But then he (Odysseus) shed tears, 

without the others noticing it (elanthane), Alkinoos alone was aware of his sorrow.' 

But, grammatically, elanthane does not bring out the sense of others looking at Odysseus 

and failing to see his tears, but rather the concealment of Odysseus himself The German 

philologist Voss, in his variation of the translation, renders elanthane as "To all the other 

guests he concealed his flowing tears (cited at P, 23)," emphasizing the concealment in 

relation to Odysseus, not the others gaping at Odysseus, which is closer to what the 

Greek says. Heidegger, however, goes ftulher. What Heidegger tries to bring out when 

he speaks of Odysseus in terms of concealment is that there is, in general, a concealment 

around him that isolates him, cuts him off from others, an imhomeliness that surrounds 

him - a point that has not been sufficiently seen in the secondary literature, although it is 

doubtful that any of the commentators have sufficiently understood Heidegger on this 

point. ^^ Heidegger brings this all out quite clearly when he says 

In the case of the weeping Odysseus, the Greeks do not consider that the others 
present, as human 'subjects' in their subjective comportment, fail to notice the 
crying Odysseus, but they do think that round about this man and his existence 
there lies a concealment causing the others present to be, as it were, cut off fi-om 
him. What is essential is not the apprehension on the part of the others but that 



^^Naas (96, n. 8) agrees with Heidegger's grammatical understanding of conceahnent in relation to 
Odysseus, but thinks it has to do with Alkinoos being the only one noticing Odysseus. Naas is clearly 
wrong, because there is no way that Heidegger's grammatical point can be accepted and then contend that 
the concealment has anything to do with whether Odysseus is being noticed by others or not. The 
concealment refers to Odysseus, not to Odysseus in relation to the looks of others. 



137 

exists a concealment of Odysseus, now keeping the ones who are present far from 

him (P, 27-8) 

Why far? Because Odysseus' heart is far away. The conceahnent, as Heidegger says, is 
not restricted to this instance of crying, but surrounds this man's existence. Athena brings 
this out quite clearly at the beginning of the Odyssey, "It is for Odysseus my heart is 
wrung - so subtle^^ a man and so ill-starred; he has long been far from everything that he 
loves, desolate in a wave-washed island (from Odyssey, 1, 32-108)." The issue is clearly 
not whether the others can see Odysseus crying, but rather that he is cut off from the 
others in principle, because when one's heart is elsewhere, the people and things at hand 
are not of concern and hence one is not at home with them - is alone and isolated, even 
among many others. Odysseus is not and cannot be absorbed in the situation he is in. 
This is the case in general, and the crying Odysseus is simply a single manifestation of 
the general case. 

The connection between Lustre and the uncarmy (deinon) that captures ones' eye, 
which is really the most important point of this whole thesis, and one that Heidegger does 
not ever make explicitly but in nonetheless central to his entire theory, is brought out 
quite explicitly when Hermes comes to the Island of Kalypso, the deine Theos, to demand 
the release of Odysseus, "[ijn the space within was the goddess herself, singing with a 
lovely voice, moving to and fro at her loom and weaving with a shuttle of Gold. Around 
the entrance a wood rose up in abundant growth - alder and aspen and fragrant cypress ... 



^'Also hCTe we see a theme that would be brought out more exphcitly by later thinko^, a 
connection between the clever thinker and a not being at-home, which is always connected to a certain 
Oddysean nature, an adventurousness. At one point Heidegger says of himself and those who read him 
"adventxirer-like, we roam away into the unknowing (WCT, 169)." 



138 

Even a Deathless One, if he came there, might gaze in wonder at the sight and might be 

happier in the heart (from Odyssey, V, 38-125)." The general point of the Odyssey is the 
absurdity of man's condition that he at all times abandons and neglects his hearth and 
family in the pursuit of adventure and the lustrous and that, in the end, the greatest and 
most lustrous beauty is nothing in comparison to what one already has anyway in the 
everyday of one's home. Hence Kalypso, complaining that Penelope, to whom Odysseus 
wishes to return, cannot possibly be as radiant as she, receives the following response 
from Odysseus, "Goddess and queen, do not make this a cause of anger with me. I know 
that my wise Penelope, when a man looks at her, is far beneath you in form and stature; 
she is a mortal, and you are immortal and unageing. Yet, notwithstanding, my desire and 
longing day by day is still to reach my own home and to see the day of my return (from 
Odyssey, V, 210-91)." In order to clarify what this means for Heidegger, we must 
consider the notion of the Polis. 

The Greek notion of Polis does not mean what we think of a city state, but rather 
"the pole, the place around which everything appearing to the Greeks as a being turns in 
a peculiar way ... the abode of the essence of humanity (P, 89-90)." Zuckart says "/*o/w 
was the polos (pole) around wliich beings-as-a-whole was disclosed to man (Postmodern, 
58)." The polis is where things appear as they are, pelei. But the polis is also the home 
of the counter essence of the abode, polla ta deina ... pelei, manifold is the uncanny 
(Antigone 332, cited at P, 90 by Heidegger)." Jacob Burckhardt understood this as the 
essential tragedy of the Greek polis, "the frightfulness, the horribleness, the atrociousness 
of the Greek Polis (P, 90)." Burckhardt, adopting the insight of his teacher Bockh, 



139 

structured his teaching of the Greeks around the ground that "the Hellenes were more 

unhappy than most people think (P, 90; also cf. BQP, 40)." A young Nietzsche attained 
an auditors transcript of this lecture and, as Heidegger says, "cherished the manuscript as 
his most precious treasure (90)." Burckhardt, however, since he did not approach the 
Greeks in terms of the essential homelessness of man, was unable to understand why the 
Polis was understood as a place of disorder and disaster, since Htvspolis is not so much an 
actual place as the historical abode of man. 

The polis as the abode did not simply bear within itself the horrific as the 
uncanny, as was said above, polla ta deina, but also the demon of the human himself, the 
essential unhomeliness, restlessness of man. Bemasconi, in his analysis of deinon, fails 
to bring out this essential element, "Heidegger understands Sophocles' word "to deinon' 
in terms of the relation between know-how as the violence of human know-how and dike 
as the overpowering junction (Justice, 85)." Deinon does not concern this, but rather the 
essential restlessness, not-being-at-peace of man. McNeil is better here, prefacing an 
essay on the deinon with the following key passage from FCM, "Man is that inability to 
remain and is yet unable to leave his place (Scarcely, 169). Characterizing the deinon, 
McNeill says the following, "Heidegger's translation of to deinon, 'the decisive word,' as 
das Unheimliche - intends this word to be understood in the sense of das Unheimische, 
that which is 'unhomely,' something 'not at home' that nevertheless belongs, in an ever- 
equivocal manner, to the worldly dwelling of human beings (Scarcely, 183)." In precise 
note, McNeill adds that for Heidegger "/o deinon is "the fundamental word ... of Greek 
tragedy in general, and thereby the fundamental word of Greek antiquity, (cited from 



140 

Heidegger, Scarcely, 188n.47)." 

The Greeks long ago made a decision to cover up the essence of man and lose 
themselves in beings, so that they would never have to live in the truth of the essence of 
man. Sophocles, in Oedipus at Colonus, puts it in the following way: "But cease now, 
and nevermore hereafter awaken such lament (cited at Pa, Postscript to What is 
Metaphysics, 238)." Heidegger comments, referring to another place in Sophocles, that 
"[s]uch is the rise and the fall of man in his historical abode of essence - hupsipolis - 
apolis - far exceeding abodes, homeless, as Sophocles (Antigone) calls man (P, 90)." 
What does this mean. Let us briefly recapitulate what we said earlier about the 
fundamental attunement of Dasein, which can now speak to us in a much clearer way: 
There are many things that press on us in life: the sensation of first eye-contact with a 
strange girl, the heartbreak of a love betrayed, the oppression of one's 'rights' that allows 
us to take up a cause with all the fire of youth, the need to fight for philosophy against a 
common conception of its triviality, the sorrow at the emptiness of religion in our time, 
the recklessness of politicians, the television channel changer that is not at hand, and we 
could draw this out irifinitely. The fimdamental boredom of human life consists in the 
fact that none of these concerns oppress us absolutely, "[t]he deepest, essential need in 
Dasein is not that a particular actual need oppresses us, but that an essential 
oppressiveness refiises itself, that we scarcely apprehend and are scarcely able to 
apprehend this telling refiisal of any oppressiveness as a >^ole (fi-om FCM, 163-165)." 
In every way and at all times we lose our selves in our concerns. We fi^antically fi'acture 
our attention in endless directions, because the alternative is that we would have to face 



141 
the essential nature of man, namely, that he can never be at rest, never be satisfied. This 
is what the Greeks saw as the fundamental tragedy of human existence. 

Only the Greek thinkers would have concluded that the philosopher was the most 
necessary element to himian existence, that is, on account of essential homelessness of it. 
The masses pursue things, are at home with things to a certain extent, but are yet in 
misery, not-at-home, due to their essential restlessness. Since the philosopher attempts 
to attend to things which do not absorb us in a transitory way, but rather as that which 
always is, it was only the Greek thinkers who would have concluded that the philosopher 
is what is most essential. Heidegger comments that 

Aristotle, Plato's disciple, relates at one place (Nicomachean Ethics, Z 7, 1141b 
77ff ) the basic conception determining the Greek view on the essence of the 
thinker: 'It is said they (the thinkers) indeed know things that are excessive, and 
thus astounding, and thereby difficult, and hence in general 'demonic (daimonia)' 
- but also useless, for they are not seeking what is, according to the 
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 (P, 100) 

What the philosophers pursue, the uncanny, is not opposed to the ordinary, but permeates 

the ordinary in a subtle way, although the ordinary understanding cannot see it as such. 

We will now ftirther our understanding of the deinon by relating it to the notion of the 

child. 

Heidegger, in his conrmientary on Heraclitus' word 'Agchibasie" from fragment 

122, shows that it has the same meaning as the use of the term 'nearness' in Poetry, 

Language, Thought, and brings out the notion of the child and lustre in the Greek sense 

rather nicely, as well as a thinking that does not wish to resolve itself (I cite crosswise to 



142 

conserve space): « 

"Scholar: Agchibasie: 'moving-into-neamess,' the word could rather, so it seems 
to me now, be the name for our walk today along this country path / Teacher: 
Which guides us deep into the night ... / Scientist: that gleams ever more 
splendidly ... / Scholar: and overwhelms the stars ... / Teacher: because it nears 
their distances in the heavens. / Scientist: ... at least for the naive observer, 
although not for the exact [technological] scientist ... / Teacher: Ever to the child 
in man, night neighbors the stars. / Scholar: She binds together without seam or 
edge or thread. / Scientist: She neighbors; because she works only with nearness. / 
Scholar: If she ever works rather than rests ... / Teacher: while wandering upon 
the depths of the height (DT, 89-90)." 

This understanding of 'child' is exactly what the Greeks saw in children, and something 

Holderlin also brought out in his 'Socrates and Alcibiades,' "Why, holy Socrates, must 

you always adore this young man? Is there nothing greater than he? Why do you look on 

him lovingly, as on a god? - Who has most deeply thought, loves what is most alive, who 

has looked at the world, understands youth at its height, and wise men in the end, often 

incline to beauty (WCT, 20; also cf WCT, 186, 212)." 

The child, then, is specifically what is thought along with lustrous radiance in the 

Greek, namely, the being caught up in the lustre of things that is peculiar to a child at 

play. The full sense is that of the child in contradistinction to the old person who has lost 

a lust for life. Heidegger comments that 

Heraclitus uses different names to name what he names logos, names which are 
the basic words of his thinking: phusis, the emerging-on-its-own, which at the 
same time essentially comes to be a self-concealing; cosmos, which for the 
Greeks simultaneously meant order, disposition, and finery which, as flash and 
lustre, brings about shining; finally, that which hails him as logos ... Heraclitus 
names a/o«. The word is difficult to translate. One says: 'world time.' It is the 
world that worlds and temporalizes in that, as cosmos, it brings the jointure of 
being to a glowing sparkle ... [Heraclitus says oiaion:] The Geschick of being, a 
child that plays, shifting pawns: the royalty of a child (PR, 1 12-3)." 

In Antigone, "[t]he chorus is composed of old and experienced men of the city of Thebes. 



143 
The Greek world is strong enough in itself to acknowledge the radiance and strength of 

youth and the level-headedness and wealth of experience brought by age as equally 

important, and to maintain the tension between them (HHTI, 51)." 

For the Greeks, man is the most unhomely and his care is to become homely (cf 

HHTI, 71 ). But the tragedy of existence, as the Greeks saw it, is precisely that this 

cannot be achieved, "the sea and the land and the wilderness are those realms that human 

beings transform with all their skillfulness, use and make their own, so that they may find 

their own vicinity through such realms. The homely is sought after and striven for in the 

violent activity of passing through that which is in habitual with respect to sea and earth, 

and yet in such passage the homely is precisely not attained ... [Being unhomely is] a 

seeking and searching out the homely, a seeking that at times does not know itself 

(HHTI, 73-4)." Beings only satisfy us to a certain extent, but never completely. We are 

unhomely precisely in our attempt to be at home in beings, we do so by running away 

from ourselves, firom our own restlessness, unhomeliness (cf HHTI, 82). Heidegger saw 

all of this as the essence of what Nietzsche was teaching. 

You know that an assessment of the human situation in relation to the movement 
of nihilism and within this movement demands an adequate determination of the 
essential. Such knowledge is extensively lacking. This lack dims our view in 
assessing our situation. It makes a judgement concerning nihilism ready and easy 
and blinds us to the presence of 'this most uncanny of all guests' (Nietzsche, The 
Will to Power, Outline. Werke, vol. XV, p. 141). It is called the 'most uncanny' 
[unheimlichste] because, as the unconditional will to will, it wills homelessness 
[Heimatlosigkeit] as such. This is why it is of no avail to show it the door, 
because it has long since been roaming invisibly inside the house (Pa, OQB, 292; 
also cf Pa, LH, 257)."Due to its instantiated nature, "[h]omelessness is coming to 
be the destiny of the world (Pa, LH, 258)."^ 



^'Also cf The epigraph to this thesis. 



144 

Radiance in the Greek sense is precisely the counter-thought to the deinon of human 
existence, which, following what has been said, arises out of the deinon of human 
existence, namely, radiance is that of the homely, the hearth. Hence, Heidegger is able to 
connect Heraclitus' fire with the lustrous radiance of the gold of Pindar, "[t]he hearth is 
the site of being-homely ... Latin vesta is the Roman name for the goddess of the hearth 
fire ... para : alongside - beside, or more precisely, in the sphere of the same presence; 
parestios, the one who is present within the sphere of protection and intimacy belonging 
to the homestead and who belongs to the radiance and warmth and glow of this fire 
(HHTI, 106, my emphasis). " This is what Heidegger hears when he uses the term 
presence. 

One need not strive for the extraordinary in order to be at home, content. 
Heidegger says that "[t]he Greeks do not conceive of being jwesent and abiding primarily 
in terms of mere duration. For the Greeks, a totally different trait predominates in being 
present and abiding - at times specifically expressed through /?ara [coming closer] and 
apo [going away] (WCT, 256)." 'Wii^para means "nearness, in the sense of radiance 
(WCT, 237)." Nearness here has the same sense as it does in Poetry, Language, Though, 
as a being at home or dwelling with things. Heidegger comments fiuther that this 
presence is a radiance, "[t]he Greeks experience such duration as a luminous appearance 
in the sense of illumined, radiant (WCT, 237)." However, with this radiance, there is a 
tacit hinting of "absenting into concealedness (WCT, 237)," for what we are most at 
home with is what is precisely what is most in danger of losing its radiance and lustre. 



145 
We often hear, to use an example from earlier in this thesis, a new song that, for 
whatever reason, we deem to be our new favourite and hence buy the song so that we can 
play it over and over again. What happens, though, is not that the song in any way 
changes, but over time and repetitive playing the song loses the lustre it originally had for 
us so that we no longer are so concerned to hear it at every possible juncture. 

Philosophers are said to pursue only the fantastic, and so when people come to 
philosophers, they too wish to find the fantastic, where they can temporarily satiate their 
desires. And yet, for the men who came to Heraclitus and saw him warming himself at 
the stove, they were disappointed because there was nothing of the extraordinary. 
Heraclitus, noticing their disappointment, called to them and said for them to come in, 
for even there at the stove "the gods come to presence (Pa, LH, 270)." 

Heidegger interprets, in the famous saying in the Antigone where the many things 
and the human are identified in terms of the deinon, the things as uncanny, in relation to 
the human that is unhomely. The uncanniness of things does not simply mean things are 
incredible, or fearful, for the imcanny in the Greek can also mean Avhat concerns us or 
troubles us, or is in habitual or what allows ordinary things as such. In short, anything is 
uncaimy in the sense that it draws our attention, captivates us either to a greater or less 
degree, interests us in the sense that the lustre of a fine car draws our attention, rather 
than the things that do not. This is the sense that Heraclitus' gathering and laying logos 
still bears within it, following the older cognate of that word, "[t]he old word alego 
(alpha copulativum), archaic after Aeschylus and Pindar, should be recalled here: 
something 'lies upon me,' it oppresses and troubles me." (EGT, Logos: Heraclitus 



146 
fiagment, 60) In this regard, for the Greeks, even pain, as that ^^ch troubles me is 
involved here, as pain is also what concerns us, and so serves the same function of alego, 
"the Greek word for pain, namely, algos ... [is presumably] related to alego, which as the 
intensivum of lego means intimate gathering. In that case, pain would be that v^iiich 
gathers most intimately." (Pa, OQB, 305-6) For a general orientation toward the notion 
of legem in relation to Heidegger, which is quite well known, we may follow Poggeler, 
"[t]he legein in logos is a placing and a gleaning; the placing is a placing together, 
bringing-together-into-lying-before and having-lie-before." (Path, 160). This is meant in 
the sense of the gathering up of the harvest so as to have it lie before us (cf PA, Phusis, 
213). But the harvest that is gathered is not simply something indifferent to us. 
Following what has been said, we shall add that "/egem, to lay, by its letting-lie-together- 
before means just this, that whatever lies before us involves us and therefore concerns us 
(EGT, Logos: Heraclitus fragment, 62)." Hence, logos is intimately related to our 
concerns (cf WCT, 202). 

Because the thinker is a step back from life, he sees the lustre of the uncanny, 
"[ejveryday opinion seeks ... the endless variety of novelties which are displayed before 
it. It does not see the quiet gleam (the gold) of the mystery that everlastingly shines in 
the simplicity of the lighting (EGT, Heraclitus, Aletheia, 122; also cf EGT, Moira: 
Parmenides, 100)." The thinker sees the beings, and also Being, and so sees the 
difference between them. The beings we deal with are of the hearth, we are at home with 
them. This is thought in relation to the unhomely with the Greeks, so that the difference 
between Being and beings is a difference of place. Heidegger, commenting on Plato, 



147 
says "that between beings and Being there prevails the chohsmos, he chora is the locus, 
the site, the place. Plato means to say: beings and Being are in different places (WCT, 
227)." 

Demon in relation to the human is being understood as unhomely, and this 
because its counter word in the Antigone is the hearth. A knowledge of the hearth is also 
displayed in exposing the uncaimy, since the uncanny is uncovered against the hearth. 
But the knowledge of the hearth is not directly exposed. Rather, it is a different kind of 
knowledge. It is a "pAronem, a pondering and meditating that comes from phren, that is 
from the heart, from the iimermost middle of the human essence. This knowledge fi^om 
the heart is an intimating, but one that possesses a lucidity and clarity different from 
normal thinking (from HHTI, 107-8)." 

Holderlin says that Full of merit, yet poetically/Humans dwell upon the earth. 

Heidegger, in his commentary on this, brings out what he sees as technology in relation 

to the uncanniness of existence that we have been speaking of, as the essence of techne, 

'Full of merit ...' humans indeed dwell. In what they effect and in their works 
they are capable of a fullness. It is almost impossible to survey wiiat humans 
achieve, the way in which they establish themselves upon this earth in using and 
exploiting and working it, in protecting it and securing it and furthering their 
'art,' that is, in Greek, techne. 'Yet' - none of this reaches into the essential 
ground of their dwelling upon this earth. All this working and achieving, this 
building and cultivating, is merely cultura, culture. Culture is always already 
only the consequence of a 'dwelling,' of a being 'at home' of spirit. Such 
dwelling, however, being properly homely, is the becoming homely of a being 
unhomely (HHTI, 137) 

The mortals inhabit the earth, and yet there dwelling is not grounded in the earth, but in 

the sky where the unknown God is concealed. In the sky there is a radiance of beauty, 

there blooms a lovely blueness, Holderlin says (cf WCT, 193-4). 



148 

It is, as has been said above, the unhomeliness of man that drives him to be at 

home in things. Heidegger says that 

As long as man is wholly absorbed in nothing but purposefiil self-assertion, not 
only is he himself imshielded, but so are things, because they have become 
objects. In this, to be sure, there also lies a transmutation of things into what is 
inward and visible. But this transmutation replaces the frailties of things by the 
thought-contrived fabrications of calculated objects. These objects are produced 
to be used up. The more quickly they are used up, the greater becomes the 
necessity to replace them even more quickly and more readily (PLT, WPF, 129- 
30)." 

The essence of technology consists in this, the "restless (PLT, T, 166)," unending drive to 

increase our mastery over beings, to reduce the distance between us and them, which 

none the less does not bring a nearness, to be at peace and at home in things in a way that 

would quench the ever increasing restless attempt to master beings.^' It is, as the 

characteristic of man's restlessness, a lack of dwelling, a not being at home. 

Counterposed to the unhomely, to restlessness, dwelling is to be at peace, "in w^t does 

the nature of dwelling consist? ... The Old Saxon wuon, the Gothic wunian, like the old 

word bauen, mean to remain, to stay in place. But the Gothic wunian says more 

distinctly how this remaining is experienced. Wunian means: to be at peace, to be 

brought to peace, to remain in peace (PLT, BDT, 148-9)." Said otherwise, the 

unhomeliness of man consists precisely in his lack of ability to remain at home, "The 

real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, 

that they must ever learn to dwell (PLT, BDT, 161)." 

Poetry is remembrance, Andenken. The poet is given an initial flash, an insight, 

but it is too much. The poem is a re-collecting of what was given in the flash (cf HHTI, 



''The reader should refer to PLT, T, 165-6; PLT, PMD, 228. 



149 

151). Remembrance, (A/we/n^oywe) is the mother of the muses. Philosophy too is a 

remembrance, a remembering of the essence of humanity from out of the presence of 

things and his presence with them. The later interpretation by Plato of being as eidos, 

that aspect that we have already seen when we encoimter things (hence he understood 

thinking as recollection), is derivative of this original remembrance of presence, 

'To have seen' is related to self-illuminating presencing. Seeing is determined, 
not by the eye, but by the lighting of Being. Presence within the lighting 
articulates all the human senses. The essence of seeing, as 'to have seen,' is to 
know. Knowledge embraces vision and remains indebted to presencing. 
Knowledge is remembrance of Being. That is why Mnemosune is mother of the 
muses. Knowledge is not science in the modem sense. Knowledge is thoughtful 
maintenance of Being's preserve (EGT, Anaximander fragment, 36) 

How is light to be understood? Of course, "[t]he word 'light' means lustrous, beaming, 

brightening (EGT, Heraclitus, Aletheia, 103)." Heidegger says that "thinking is neither 

theoretical or practical, but rather comes to pass before this distinction. Such thinking is, 

insofar as it is, recollection of being and nothing else ... Such thinking has no result. It 

has no effect. It satisfies its essence in that it is (Pa, LH, 272)." 

Heidegger suggests that philosophy does not, as the Greeks thought, have to be a 
response to the essential misery of man which hence takes flight into the unchanging in 
order to counteract the transitory and restless nature of man. Rather, if we affirm the 
restlessness itself, we can come to a thinking that does not will a linearity and death of 
the question, but rather a circularity that wills only a further depth to the questioning, 
which he understands as the essence of hermeneutics. This must be understood in 
relation to the notion of place. 

Heidegger's use of the term place in reference to humans means where one is 



150 
coming from. We mean this when we say something like 'where was he coming from 
v^en he verbally assaulted her like that?' And in response hear 'she had stolen his car a 
year ago and he hadn't seen her until now. ' The place is the context from which you are 
speaking, in the light of which what is being said is understandable. In relation to 
someone's actions it might be said that they are coming from a place of great bravery - it 
is that in relation to which you are the way you are, w^ich for the Greeks meant the 
deinon of the human. For the Roman soldier of the imperium, on the contrary, their 
actions were specifically related to the magisterial sense of what it meant to be Roman, 
although the leaders probably acted out of a paranoia more than anything else. We do 
not often in English mention the term 'place' when we try to determine where someone 
is coming from, although for Heidegger it manifests itself quite readily, such as, for 
instance, when he informs someone in the seminar that "[w]ith my questions, I would 
only like to get at the place from which you speak of another night (HS, 54)." 

Heidegger's argument for what he sees as the Hermeneutic circle is not just 
something he arbitrarily thought up, but rather the motion of it speaks to what he 
understands to be the highest possibility for a person, continuous questioning. In order to 
understand this, we must think of the movement of the person in relation to his place, the 
unhomely, and specifically in terms of how the Greeks understood this movement. Of 
movement for the Greeks there are two kinds, linear and circular. The earth was the 
center of everything, and everything moved in relation to it. As movement means a 
striving toward its place, something like a rock strives toward the earth and fire away 
from it. The velocity of something increases the closer it gets to its place. Force or 



151 

Ehinamis, the capacity for motion, resides in the thing itself. Linear motion is incomplete 

because there is a striving toward the place, the topos, but the topos is, as it were, 

separate from the thing striving toward it. Circular motion for the Greeks, that of the 

stars, is complete in that the place is not separate from the movement. The earth is still 

the center with respect to the movement of the heavenly bodies, but heavenly bodies do 

not depend on the earth. Hence, Heidegger says, '[h]ow a body moves depends upon its 

species and the place to which it belongs. The where determines the how of its being, for 

being is called presence (Anwesenheit).' A body needs to be forced in order to move 

away from its place, and will eventually stop because there is no reason in the thing itself 

for the movement. Since circular movement accords with the place, its pace is constant 

and unending. The process of hermeneutics is circular because it accords with the place 

of the person and hence evolves according to an unending process of further questioning, 

and not answers that try to eliminate the question in a result that can then lead to further 

progress . This is why, given the understanding of motion we have here, Heidegger 

contrasts the circularity of his thought with the linear nature of normal thinking. This is 

not because he is trying to arbitrarily act in accord with the being of the human, but 

rather the matter itself accords with it. 

Thus it is that we find ourselves moving in a circle. Ordinary understanding can 
only perceive and grasp what lies straight in front of it: thus it wishes to advance 
in a straight line, moving from the nearest point to the next one, and so on. This 
is called progress. Ordinary understanding can only perceive circular movement 
in its own way too: that is to say, it moves along the circumference, taking its 
movement around the circle in a straightforward progression, until suddenly it 
stumbles upon the starting-point and comes to a standstill, at a loss because of its 
lack of progress. Since progress is the criterion employed by ordinary 
understanding, such understanding finds any circular movement objectionable 
and considers it a sign of impossibility. The fateful thing, however, is that this 



152 

argument about circular movement is employed in philosophy itself, even though 
it is but a symptom of a tendency to reduce philosophy to the level of ordinary 
understanding (FCM, 187). 



153 
CONCLUSION 
PHILOSOPHY AND HONESTY/DECEPTION ; Plato's Heidegger? 

In this conclusioa, I would like to talk about honesty and deception as it relates to 
a way to being able to finalize this thesis on the tragic nature of Greek existence. 
Deception, as the counter thought to honesty, can be characterized in the following way, 
although this passage is taken from Heidegger in an unrelated context, "not to hide 
something to oneself, not to fool oneself, ie., not to delude oneself" (P, 37) It is used in 
this sense when he speaks, as he often does, as thinking in terms of a not deceiving 
oneself, "The realm of the 'concealed-unconcealed' is, if we do not deceive ourselves, 
more immediately familiar and accessible than what is expressed in the banal title Veritas 
and 'truth'." (P, 13) 

Heidegger's thinking is different from technical thinking that only wills a result. 

Such 'knowledge' seizes the being, 'dominates' it, and thereby goes beyond it and 
constantly surpasses it. The character of essential knowing is entirely different. 
It concerns the being in its ground - it intends Being. Essential 'knowing' does 
not lord over what it knows but is solicitous toward it ... [Modem Science] is 
always a technical attack on a being and an intervention for purposes of an 
'orientation' toward acting, 'producing,' wheeling and dealing. Thoughtful 
heedfulness, in contrast , is attention to a claim that does not arise from the 
separate facts and events of reality and does not concern man in the superficiality 
of his everyday occupations (P, 4) 

Heidegger was not the first to characterize scientific thinking as an attack on the being. 
Leibniz even characterized perception in this way. (cf EGT, Moira: Parmenides, 82) In 
any case, I would like the reader to attend to the distinction between normal scientific 
thinking and essential thinking, as well as the trivializing of the everyday opinion. 



154 
Heidegger took up honesty specifically as a problem and as the problem of 
thinking, according to the spirit of the time, as in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, although 
not limited to them, it crops up everywhere. Honesty, as must be kept in mind in order to 
distinguish it firom genuineness (which is a minor distinction that Heidegger only 
occasionally maintains, and both are, in any case, thought of as coimter words for 
deception. Honesty is a thinking a question through to its answer so as to eliminate the 
question that gave rise to the thinking. Genuineness simply does this in order to ask the 
question in a more original way), is a thinking througji, a thinking a problem through.. 
Schelling, in one place, says "Most people, if they were honest, would admit in terms of 
their ideas ... (cited in S, 69). Heidegger comments that '"Most people, if they were 
honest' - [this means] if they really wanted to consider and think through what they are 
appealing to ... [if man's ideas] are taken out of fog and innocuousness with some 
honesty ... [and were to see what is] honestly experienced (70-71)." In other words, put 
negatively, as Heidegger usually does, if people would not deceive themselves into 
thinking they have something by holding on to ideas that they have not honestly thought 
through .... 

In order to distinguish his thinking from the tradition, Heidegger, if he is being 
careful about it, speaks of genuineness instead of honesty, but only to distinguish it from 
technical thinking, since he uses either as the counter-word to deception. Heidegger 
writes in Beitrage that "Genuineness is also more essential that honesty. Honesty always 
has to do only with unfolding what is already given and accessible (consider the genuine 
and the plain and the simple) ... Genuineness means creative strength for preserving what 



155 
is given along with, creative for effecting what is given as a task. Genuineness of the 
heart, of courage, of the attuned-knowing persevering will. Essential patience [is] utmost 
courage (CTP, 256)." 

Although citing a plethora of examples does nothing if it does not speak out of 
the matter at hand, we can at least see here the extent to which it does cast the problem 
of thinking in the light of the relation between honesty and deception, "It is important 
above all ... we do not deceive ourselves and rashly bypass the pressing questions (WCT, 
8 - also cf 34, etc.; for 'honesty, cf 41, 45, 217)." Why, though, is philosophy cast in the 
light of honesty? 

The difficulty of this question can hardly even be intimated in a conclusion to a 
thesis, although it does bear a particularly special relation to the Greeks and so is perhaps 
a good point to end with here. 'Honesty, that which presses beyond self-deception, ' as a 
characterization of philosophical thinking is so prevalent and basic to the European 
continental tradition that it might seem almost pointless to raise the issue. Philosophy is 
honesty - who could argue with that? Almost by definition, philosophy presses through 
the self-deception of the everyday commonplace opinion out of a manner of being of the 
thinker that involves trying to become more and more honest with oneself At the point 
at which one no longer does this, one is no longer a philosopher. Nietzsche, for instance, 
once said of Schopenhauer that he lost his philosopher's composure whenever it got to 
the issue of Atheism, because for Schopenhauer the godlessness of existence was simply 
palpable and was not an issue that could be put into question (cf Gay Science, Book 5). 
In other words, Nietzsche said that Schopenhauer (whom Nietzsche elsewhere called one 



156 

of the most honest writers of his time) stopped being a philosopher jwecisely at the point 

where he was no longer willing to be honest enough with himself to see if he was being 

deceived about the non-existence of God, since positing the opposite of the theological 

ideal is still idealisting, just in the latter case one is less honest about the fact that one is 

guessing. 

To what extent Schopenhauer's nihihsm still follows from the same ideal that created 
Christian theism - One felt so certain about the highest desiderata, the highest values, 
the highest perfection that the philosophers assumed this as an absolute certainty, as 
if it were a priori: 'God' at the apex as a given truth. 'To become as God,' 'to be 
absorbed into God' - for thousands of years these were the most naive and 
convincing desiderata (but what convinces is not necessarily true - it is merely 
convincing: a note for asses). One has unlearned the habit of conceding to this 
posited ideal the reaUty of a person; one has become atheistic. But has the ideal itself 
been renounced? ... Schopenhauer wanted it otherwise [than theism] and therefore 
had to conceive of this metaphysical ground as the opposite of the ideal - as 'evil, 
blind will' ... But even so he did not renounce the absoluteness of the ideal - he 
sneaked by (Will To Power, number 17, rev. 1888). 

There is, then, a kind of philosophical existence that involves a being-honest with 

oneself, and an average everyday existence that involves a being-deceived by opinions 

and the immediate. Heidegger, as has been clear throughout this paper, always sets up a 

strong distinction between the philosophical overcoming of deception. In the end, even 

his critique of technical thinking is premised on the point that it technical thinking) 

subordinates thought to production, or in other words sacrifices honesty whenever it is a 

question of getting a result. Traditional philosophical thinking, insofar as it wills the 

result, the answer, and hence wills the annihilation of the question, is not genuine 

thinking because it sets out with the need to make things easy for itself and remove all 

the weight from the question. In other words, for Heidegger technical philosophical 

thinking is even worse than everyday opinion because it conunits a fr^ud by pretending 



157 
to be honest or genuine, >^^le at the same time deceiving itself in principle. 

What Heidegger does not ask, though, is vvliy is it so necessary that philosophy 
attack the commonplace and everyday For the inunediate and everyday is no less 
necessary that the philosophical. Without the commonplace and everyday deceptions 
that philosophy is called on to press though, there would be nothing for philosophy to do, 
any more than there would be ontological structure of everyday things without the 
everyday things. It could be concluded that if the value of philosophy over common 
opinion is not gained from the necessity of one over the other, then periiaps it stems 
merely from the fact that philosophical truths are more obscure and esoteric. Plato did 
conclude this, although it is somewhat difficult to see because even afrer a thesis on the 
tragic nature of Greek existence we still have little intimation of the extent to which the 
Greeks put a question mark over their lives. 

In the Symposium, Plato, wlio Aristotle identified as a great thinker and 
melancholic, implicitly challenged Parmenides' notion that the thinker pursues what 
calls for thinking merely out of a drive that is good unto itself Plato purposely forces the 
figure of Alcibiades (the paradigm of beauty and excellence in a Greek Person) between 
Socrates, the Philosopher, and Agathon, the good (man), in order to put into question the 
relationship between the philosopher and the good. After Socrates finishes giving his 
speech on love, Alcibiades jumps up and shouts at the audience to not to listen to 
Socrates because he has been deceiving them. Plato writes that "I hope you didn't believe 
a single word Socrates said: the truth is just the opposite! He's the one vtiio will most surely 
beat me up if I dare praise anyone else in his presence - even a god!' 'Hold your tung!' 



158 
Socrates said. 'By god, don't you dare deny it!' Alcibiades shouted. 'I would never - never 
- praise anyone else with you around' (2 14d)." In order to understand this, it needs to be 
kept in mind that Plato is putting into question the kind of iove' that pertains to the 
philosopher as a philosopher (a 'lover' of wisdom). In order to see the problem, we need 
to distinguish between something like a good love and honesty, and a malicious love and 
honesty. The former would be something like what the philosopher is supposed to have 
for wisdom. The latter would be something like the following: imagine an unattractive 
boy that is in love with a beautiful girl. Now, the girl loves an attractive boy, and the 
unattractive boy is resentful. Even though the unattractive boy is not of such a physical 
nature as to be able to get the girl, he does have other devices at his disposal. He can 
point out to the girl that although the boy she loves is attractive, he is not particularly 
intelligent, nor does he go out of his way to treat her well. Although this may be an 
honest remark, it is bom out of a vicious resentment, and wants nothing other than to 
devalue the attractive boy's attractiveness and emphasize the possibility of the girl 
finding the qualities that the attractive boy is lacking in the unattractive boy. But what 
does this have to do with philosophy? 

1 said in my thesis that for the Greeks, as Aristotle argued, people are always, to 
some extent, not close to life, with the philosopher being the exemplary case, utterly 
unsatisfied by and restless with commonplace and everyday things. But although 1 spoke 
of the resuh of this as the positing of theoria as the highest form of energeia, I did not (as 
Heidegger never saw this to the extent, say, that Nietzsche did) indicate the manner in 
which the Greeks (Plato) interpreted this. In part I did not do this because at certain 



159 
points language and concepts turn back on themselves depending on the difficulty of the 
experience you are trying to capture in them. This is one of those cases because, as 
Nietzsche once said of Shakespear, there is no guessing here. One either live it or one 
does not. Here's why: 

There is a kind ofresentfiilness that goes along with not being close to life. In a 
sense, this is exacerbated because not only do you feel the emptiness of not being caught 
up with things, but you also feel jealousy at those people who are engrossed in their lives 
as though it was the most natural thing in the world. The history of philosophy has 
played out along a very peculiar dichotomy that is related to this. On the one hand, 
common opinion thinks philosophy is a silly waste of time because it is useless, while at 
the same time philosophy devalues common opinion because it inherently self-deceptive, 
or non-philosophical (non-honest) if you wish. What Plato was actually saying in the 
symposium is that Parmenides missed something because the philosopher does not only 
engage in intellectual pursuits for his own interest, but tries to get others to question 
themselves. In other words, at least in part, the philosopher is in the business of 
converting philosophical pagans. Just look at Socrates' life! The question, though, is 
whether this drive to get others to question themselves is bom out of a genuine concern 
for them, or out of a need for company to lessen one's own misery. The boy in our 
analogy persuaded the girl to be more honest with herself, but this had little to do with 
the girl's welfare. Perhaps the philosopher devalues that which he was never given the 
chance to be, that attractive boy or that person who is close for life, who never had any 
need for the rare and extraordinary roses of lAilosophy. This is A^liat Nietzsche meant by 



160 
raising the issue as to how it was possible for an ugly commoner like Socrates to gain any 
kind of influence in Athens. At one point, in a rather comical act of self-deprecation in 
Hianan, all too Human, Nietzsche says: ** Being satisfied. - That maturity of understanding 
has been attained is manifested in the fact that one no longer repairs to where rare flowers 
stand among the thorniest hedgerows of knowledge but is satisfied with garden, forest, field 
and meadow, in the knowledge that hfe is too short for the rare and extraordinary." (Human, 
All Too Human, number 399) This is also why he dedicated his Gay Science to those who 
are homeless (unhomely), to provide some manner of relief to them. 

In conclusion, it should perhaps be noted that the issues raised in this thesis are 
clouded by a rather dark enigma called the nature of Greek thinking. Heidegger was 
quite correct in saying we are still very far from knowing them. In fact, all we really 
know for sure is that they were much closer with the matters to be thought than we are. 
At one point, Cadmus, that hidden figure of all western thought, remarks in the Bacchae 
that even if Dionysus is not a God, it would certainly be better if we pretended that he 
was. Plato, who cites Cadmus in the Republic and Laws as the man from Sidon, 
understood the utility of a good deception. Periiaps one of the changes that came with 
the ushering in of the Christian era is that we have lost our ability to see the value of 
deception and tragedy in understanding the nature of human existence. Perhaps we want 
thing to turn out rosy in the end. Christianity as the death of Greek Tragedy? Hardly. 
Even John Milton, the author of Paradise Lost, was, in an introduction to one of his 
lesser known tragedies, able to find a citation from Euripides in the Pauline scriptures. 
But that's another story. 



161 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 

HEIDEGGER'S WORKS CITED 

(BC) Basic Concepts, trans. G. Aylesworth, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 
(jBP^5as/c5 Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, Bloomington: Indiana 

University Press, 1982. 
(BQP) Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected Problems of 'Logic, ' Bloomington: 

Indiana University Press, 1994. 
(BT) Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, San Francisco: 

Harper 1962. 
(CTP) Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth 

Maly, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. 
(DT) Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, New York: 

Harper and Row, 1966. 
(EAF) Aristotle, Metaphysics Theta 1-3: On The Essence and Actuality of Force, 

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. 
(EGT) Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi., New 

York: Harper and Rown Publishers., 1975. 
(FCM) Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, Bloomington: 

Indiana University Press, 2001 
(HCT) History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel, 



162 

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. 
(HHTI) Holderlin 's Hymn 'The Ister ' trans. Will McNeill and Julia Davis, Bloomington: 

Indiana University Press, 19%. 
(HS) Heraclitus Seminar (With Eugen Fink), trans. Charles H. Seibert, Illinois: 

Northwestern University Press, 1997. 
(IM) Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim, New Haven: Yale University 

Press, 1959. 
(KPM) Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft, Bloomington: Indiana 

University Press, 1990. 
(OWL) On The Way To Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz, SanFrancisco: Harper and Row, 
1982. 

(N 1-4) Nietzsche, 4 Volumes, trans. David Farrell Krell, SanFrancisco: Harper and Row, 
1979. 
(P) Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz, Indianapolis: Indiana 

University Press, 1998. 
(PA, LH) 'Letter on Humanism,' in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1999. 
(PA, OQB) 'On The Question of Being, in Pathmarks 
(PA, PDT) 'Plato's Doctrine of Truth,' in Pathmarks 
(PA, Phusis) 'On the Essence and Concept of Phusis in Aristotle's Physics B,' in 

Pathmarks 
(PA, PWM) 'Postscript to What is Metaphysics,' in Pathmarks 



163 
(PA, WM) 'What is Metaphysics,' in Pathmarks 
(PLT, BDT) 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking,' in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans.. Albert 

Hofstadter, New York: Harper and Row, 1971. 
(PLT, L) 'Language' in Poetry, Language, Thought 
(PLT, OWA) 'Origin of the Work of Art,' in Poetry, Language, Thought 
(PLT, PMD) 'Poetically man Dwells,' in Poetry, Language, Thought 
(PLT, T) 'The Thing' in Poetry, Language, Thought 
(PLT, WPF) 'What are Poets For?' in Poetry, Language, Thought 
(PR) The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly, Bloomington: Indiana University 

Press, 1991. 
(PS) Plato 's Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer, Bloomington: 

Indiana University Press, 1997. 
(OWL) On The Way To Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 
1982. 
(S) Schelling 's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh, 

Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985. 
(WC) What is Called Thinking, trans. Fred Wieck and J. Glenn Gray, New York: Harper 

and Row, 1968. 
(WT) What is a Thing, trans. W.B. Barton and Vera Deutsch, Chicago: H. Regnery 

company, 1968. 
(Z) Zollikon Seminars, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay, Illinois: Northwestern 

University Press, 200 1 . 



164 



WORKS CITED BY OTHER AUTHORS 

Bernasconi, Robert. 'Justice and the Twilight Zone of Morality' in Reading Heidegger: 

Commemorations, ed. John Sallis, Indiana: Indiana University Press 1993. 
Brogan, Walter, 'Heidegger's Interpretation of Aristotle on the Privative Character of 

Force and the Twofoldness of Being,' in Interrogating the Tradition, 

Hermeneutics and the History of Philosophy, ed. Charles Scott and John Sallis, 

New York: SUNY Press, 2000. 
Dastur, Francoise, 'Heidegger on Anaximander,' in Interrogating the Tradition, 

Hermeneutics and the History of Philosophy, ed. Charles Scott and John Sallis, 

New York: SUNY Press, 2000. 
Ellis, John, 'Heidegger, Aristotle, and Time in Basic Problems Sec. 19,' in Interrogating 

the Tradition, Hermeneutics and the History of Philosophy, ed. Charles Scott and 

John Sallis, New York: SUNY Press, 2000. 
Figal, Gunter, 'Refraining from Dialectic: Heidegger's Interpretation of Plato in the 

Sophist Lectures (1924/25),' in Interrogating the Tradition, Hermeneutics and the 

History of Philosophy, ed. Charles Scott and John Sallis, New York: SUNY Press, 

2000. 
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Heidegger's Ways, New York: SUNY Press, 1994. 
Kisiel, Theodore, The Genesis of Heidegger 's Being and Time, Berkely: University of 

California Press, 1995. 



165 
Krell, David Farrell, 'Kalypso: Homeric Concealments after Nietzsche, Heidegger, 

Derrida, and Lacan,' in The Pre-Socratics After Heidegger, ed. David C. Jacobs, 

New York: SUNY Press, 1999. 
Marx, Werner, Heidegger and the Tradition, trans. Theodore Kisiel and Murray Greene, 

Northwestern University Press, 1971. 
McNeill, Will. 'A Scarcely Pondered Word. The place of tragedy: Heidegger, Aristotle, 

Sophocles,' in Philosophy and Tragedy, ed. Miguel de Beistegui and Simon 

Sparks, New York: Routledge, 2000. 
Mehta, J. L. The Philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Varanasi: Banaras Hindu University 

Press, 1967. 
Naas, Michael, 'Keeping Homer's Word: Heidegger and the Epic of Truth' in The Pre- 
Socratics After Heidegger, ed. David C. Jacobs, New York: SUNY Press, 1999. 
Philipse, Herman, Heidegger 's Philosophy of Being, Princeton, Princeton University 
Press, 1998 
Poggeler, Otto. Martin Heidegger 's Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and 

Sigmund Barber, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1987. 
Sallis, John, 'Reception,' in Interrogating the Tradition, Hermeneutics and the History of 

Philosophy, ed. Charles Scott and John Sallis, New Yoric: SUNY Press, 2000. 
Zuckart, Catherine H., Postmodern Platos, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 



7.^0-7