Date: Tue, 04 Apr 2000 17:47:19 +0200
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)
Subject: Re: Aisthaesis, transcendence, being-in-the-world


Cologne, 04-Apr-2000

df803-AT-freenet.carleton.ca schrieb:

> Micheal,
>
> You often say that to talk 'about' Heidegger misses the point. Now you
> say  that it would  be best  to talk from Heidegger. I have some sense
> of what you mean with regards to  this distinction, especially right
> now, the sense of talking from Heidegger? I think this distinction
> seems worthwhile going into. What would  be a way of talking about
> Heidegger that is 'about' and not 'from'?  Are we always sure of
> talking  from Heidegger? Is it really Heidegger or 'something' else
> that we  talk from?

Ariotso,

I think I phrased it: "learning to speak from where H. is speaking". It is
the place from where H. is speaking that is important, not Heidegger. We
cannot be sure to be speaking from that place, but can only try to (learn
to) follow the movement of thought in H.'s texts which point to the place
from where this thinking imbibes its draught. Ultimately, we are each
thrown back onto our selves to decide whether we are seeing the sight of
what H. has in view.

> For me, when Heidegger  writes, for instance, that, "in idea, theoria,
> intuitus, essential intuition, recourse is had  to a consciousness that
> looks, a recourse  so incapable of  solving  the problem of
> transcendence, that it is not even capable of  seeing the phenomena of
> transcendence" (GA 26, h233-235);

In German the word for "intuition" is "Anschauung", from "anschauen" which
means simply "to look at". "idea" is similarly formed from "idein", the
Greek verb for "to see", and "theoria" is from "theorein" which means
"anschauen", "to look at". So all these central words of philosophy have to

do with seeing with our transcendental sight. With the ontological
difference, or transcendence, H. aims at showing up the dimension within
which this sight sees.

> I think, partly because I am reading
> it right now, of the thinking that is a listening and a  bringing into
> view  the things  themselves  in the _The principle of Reason_ which
> is not a conceptualization where  a synthetic activity of the mind
> would, with the help of memory  and imagination, read that which the
> phenomena would be for that activity of the mind but a  letting beings
> be, a release that lightens all things, an  "elevating"  thinking.
>
> The  curious  thing is that there is here hardly a simple twsiting free
>  from Plato since in GA26, he does make the  juxtaposition that the
> _idea  tou  agathou_, beyond beings and the realm of ideas, is the
> for-the-sake-of-which. (H236-237)

The twisting free that is going on here is a hitherto unheard-of
re-interpretation of Plato (_idea  tou  agathou_) and Aristotle (_hou
heneka_) as "for the sake of" (Umwillen), which resituates the phenomena
that Plato and Aristotle have in view _explicitly_ within the context of
Dasein's existing. Cf. what Levinas makes of Plato's _epekeina taes ousias_

-- the contrast could hardly be greater.

If one reads some of other literature on, say, Plato and Aristotle, it soon

becomes apparent just how much Heidegger's phenomenological re-reading
brings these thinkers back to life. H.'s phenomenological interpretations
of _logos_ are crucial to getting in on the phenomenal ground floor, before

the ascent into logic and reason which have held sway over Western thinking

for two-and-a-half K. To the present day, logic has a stranglehold on
thinking. Presently reading Heinrich Rickert's _Das Eine, die Einheit und
die Eins: Bemerkungen zur Logik des Zahlbegriffs_ ("The One, Unity and the
Number One: Remarks on the Logic of the Concept of Number"), just one
example of the reign of logic.

In his Kant interpretation, H. points out that Kant shrank back from
putting the power of imagination (Einbildungskraft) into a foundational
position, for this would have meant not usurping, but subverting the
supreme reign of reason
(Vernunft).

Yours,
Michael
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