Date: 	Mon, 12 Aug 1996 20:17:52 -0400
From: paul.murphy-AT-utoronto.ca
Subject: the texts of thinking


In his response to Robert Scheetz, Dr. Michael Eldred briefly claims that 
tragedy, the Bible, Shakespeare are not sites of thinking, whereas 
Heraclitus and Heidegger are 'thinkers'. (Sorry for the bad paraphrase, I 
inadvertently deleted the relevant post). Without rehashing the 1967 
French debate on the philosophy / literature borderline, I simply want to 
point out that for Heidegger, at least, the tragedies of Sophocles cannot 
so easily be 'bracketed' from or by thinking. Especially when the topic (the 
issue, the question, whatever) under discussion is violence, and it is in 
Sophocles that Heidegger finds the thoughtful meditation on man as to 
deinotaton, das Unheimlichste (in H's translation), the most uncanny, 
subsequently (as the 1935 lecture develops) the violent one, the one open 
to being (holding sway for the Greeks as physis) in such as way as to 
struggle against it in a primal 'scene' of violence (Gewalt-taetigkeit). 
Heidegger's recourse to Heraclitean polemos goes by way of a long 
meditation on Sophocles (and does so again in the 1943 lecture on 
Hoelderlin's _Der Ister_). 
This isn't the only 'recourse' to 'the literary' in Heidegger's oeuvre, 
of course; see the 'myth of care' in _Sein und Zeit_.
Cheers,
Paul N. Murphy
University of Toronto


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