Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 18:30:59 +0800 Subject: Re: Gestell/Gewinnst - Truth as opinion From: Malcolm Riddoch <m.riddoch-AT-ecu.edu.au> On Friday, December 5, 2003, at 12:51 AM, Michael Eldred wrote: > Cologne 04-Dec-2003 > > I do not see any opposition or conflict between "Heidegger's Greek > meaning > of 'being'" and a "phenomenology of being". No, me neither, absolutely not an opposition more an interconnected convergence of interpretive strategies around a common theme. > Heidegger's phenomenology of > being did not fall from the sky. Also totally agreed. To cut him off from his millieu and elevate his thinking to the spontaneous work of genius is to do Heidegger no favours at all. And most definitely his Greek interpretations are an important influence on his thinking. However, your assertion that his thinking has: > a Greek historical origin and > emerges only in the philosophical Auseinandersetzung with this origin > as > preserved in the Greek texts we still have is something else and of course debatable. I think his Destruktion of Greek thought has a phenomenological basis which is informed by that very Greek Destruktion as well as neo-Kantianism, but that's just my interpretive bias. You however go further than merely asserting this Greek basis as your own interpretive strategy amongst others. You see the actual provenance of Heidegger's thinking in the Greeks which would explain why you insist we have to start from the Greeks in order to understand Heidegger's entire path of thinking. The historical origin can then presumably be traced from the actual Greek texts through to Heidegger's own thinking of being as some sort of progression in the history of the understanding of being. That's an interesting interpretive strategy in itself, reading Heidegger in terms of his own historical Destruktion of philosophy which starts with the Greek origin. I can see now why you have to assert this Greek origin as originary as if you can uncover the originary meaning of Heidegger's work in the Greek. Heidegger himself more or less made this distinction. However, we fundamentally differ here in our respective approaches to philosophy. Where you see an originary truth I see a way of talking about 'things', a way of interpreting philosophical text in terms of one interpretive strategy or another, without recourse to any origin other than one's own groundless understanding. For me, there is no fundamental basis for assertive 'truth', no lost origin to be found in texts, only our own modern lostness in talking about truths. We are always 'on the way' and there is no guarantee that any one way leads anywhere, back to a historical origin or forwards to a new beginning or down into a totalitarian nightmare. That's not to say your way, thinking the originary in Greek thinking, is less valid than any other interpretive strategy, but as you might appreciate I can't interpret it as anything other than your own ad hoc attempt at thinking rather than as an uncovering of an originary Greek truth. And I don't mean 'ad hoc' in any other sense than that is the essence of all our thinking about these phenomenological matters. We make ad hoc assertions because that is where we always start from, with the essential groundlessness of all understanding that starts with the phenomena themselves. Obviously others, like the ancient Greeks and Heidegger, have also thought about these matters but since all I have is my own interpretation of their texts their thinking is always second hand and never 'originary'. I'd say we would just have to agree to disagree on this one. > A view with the potential for truth, by contrast, is indicative, i.e. > it > points to where it can be potentially shared by another, it opens to > the > possibility of sharing it with someone else so that views may even > agree. So for me this sharing of truth is already cut off from any notion of some truth that can be shared or passed along, the altercation you speak of is your own responsibility for thinking and I see dialogue as already an individual altercation in reworking the other's assertions in terms of one's own interpretations. For instance you can take these words any way you like, and you do so for your own benefit, and together we can work through these matters in order to further our own understanding of them with or without 'sharing'. > The strife of truth among human beings, a debate, is thus a mutual > pointing > to evidence that is meant to shed light on the issue in question. In > this > evidence, certain phenomena are open to view. The simpler the phenomena > pointed to, the more likely that an agreement on the truth > (unconcealment) > of the matter under discussion can be achieved. Yes, but what is 'agreement' and what is a 'simple phenomenon'? If the simplest phenomenon is being then it seems the simple can be said in so many ways, in so many different senses from a multiplicity of perspectives and individual motivations for thinking it that agreement becomes a rather complicated affair. > It would be a truncated Heidegger if I tried to exclude parts of his > thinking and not take them into consideration as potentially > enlightening > for the question concerning what is meant by Gestell. > Have I said anywhere that we should forget any part of Heidegger's > thinking > and just concentrate on his phenomenological interpretations of Greek > texts? Well you have been insisting that those Greek interpretations are the origin and starting point for any thinking of Gestell. Please note I am not saying in any sense whatsoever that we should exclude the Greek parts of his thinking and not take them into consideration as potentially enlightening for the question concerning what is meant by Gestell. I am not thinking exclusively here, quite the opposite, I think nothing fundamental is decided and everything is open to question. > Baseless? I have provided concrete indications of why the > interpretation of > Gestell has something essential to do with Heidegger's unearthing of > what > the Greeks mean by being. Heidegger lays out explicitly and in detail > how he > puts together the term 'Gestell' as a gathering (Sammlung) of Stellen, > so I > would be surprised if that were at all controversial for you. He also > says > that Gestell is his word for the essence of technology (Technik). Is > that > controversial for you? I don't think there is any hermeneutic violence > in > either of these findings. So again, I'm not contesting your interpretive strategy for thinking Gestell, this thread is not an opposition to your thinking but an attempt on my part to think through how our respective approaches are already a way of thinking what is true without recourse to any other authority than our own modern baseless situatedness in the hermeneutical circle. I'm trying to think through the thread on 'Nietzsche/Nazism - Truth'. It's my opinion that either way, going back to the Greeks or starting with phenomenology, is a valuable way to start the bootstrapping process that opens up the problem concerning technology that nonetheless remains something entirely questionable no matter what perspective you start with. In this sense, thinking the 'origin' in ancient Greek texts is as good a place as anywhere to start. > Heidegger himself achieves his interpretation > of _technae_ in struggling with Greek texts, especially those of > Aristotle, > so to assess whether Heidegger is talking nonsense in his > interpretation of > _technae_ it's hard to see how one could sidestep getting engaged with > the > relevant Greek texts oneself. At least, that's what I decided to do, > for, > without a knowledge of the primary texts, one's own assessment lacks a > firm > foundation. Correct, although this does tend to elide the development of his thinking on technology in the will to will of machination, his Nietzsche interpretation. I assume you think that the Greek interpretation is fundamental here rather than one interpretive strategy amongst others that Heidegger goes through to uncover something that he saw in the historical constitution of our modern human understanding. Again, I'm not at all suggesting that we start with modernity, Descartes and Kant, but that all these texts have a bearing on what Heidegger was talking about, and I am not convinced that it is only in what you interpret as the Greek 'origin' that we can truly see what is going on. I don't see an originary truth here, all I see are path markers always 'on the way' towards an unravelling of the tangled mess that is our modern understanding. From this perspective there is no Greek origin, only one's own modern interpretation of the Greeks. > Nowhere have I claimed that the question of interpreting Gestell can be > "narrowed down" to Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle. I have only > indicated that it is a necessary part of the interpretation, a sine > qua non, > a 'not without'. That's precisely the narrowing down that I have a problem with. As far as I can see there is no basis for this 'necessity' apart from your own assertion that Heidegger's thinking has its provenance in the Greek. That assertion seems to me to be based solely on your own interpretation of what is 'true' in the Heidegger texts as the historical unfolding of a Greek origin. This is itself a very particular way of reading Heidegger, a particular historical interpretive strategy, and one I have no problems with apart from your insistence that it's the fundamental and necessary way to read Heidegger. There is no basis for this 'necessity', all we have are the texts themselves and our own individual attempts to interpret them. > I do not understand our interchange and debating here as a > "representation > of your [one's] own subjective self-certainty" represented in e-mail > texts, > at least, I hope that there is a more phenomenological spirit breathing > here. That's a 'phenomenological' interpretation of what is actually going on here. What else do you have but this email text and your own self-certain interpretation of these words that you then represent in the text of your response? It's the provenance of that self-certainty that is interesting though, the self-certainty of asserting the truths of one's own existence in this world we share. In one sense we are entirely cut off, there is no communication of a 'truth', there is only this email interface and one's own isolated response to its text, but that interpretive isolation is something we nonetheless have in common. There is a form of strife at work here but it's absent any sharing of 'truth' beyond our own peculiar interpretations of one another's text. > Michael Eldred's opinion on the relation of the term 'Stellen' to > Heidegger's interpretation of being is that it is central, i.e. that > it is a > key piece in figuring out what Heidegger's interpretation of being is. I'd perhaps say it's a key piece in figuring out what Heidegger's interpretation of being isn't, but then we would have to walk through the entire Destruktion to see how it relates to the crossing out of being, to theoretical and assertive notions of truth as opposed to authentic disclosure and so on. This centrality is also nothing other than the question itself, it is eminently questionable. > Heidegger also repeats endlessly that the Greeks implicitly understood > being > as "staendige Anwesenheit" (_ousia_). I would say that he repeats endlessly his interpretation of ousia as staendige Anwesenheit. Whether the Greeks implicitly understood ousia in terms of a 20th century German philosopher's notion of "staendige Anwesenheit" is debatable, but of course Heidegger does periodically state this simple problem of interpretation even though his writing tends to lapse back into a more pedagogical style. I think it's an assumption of his philosophy that we never have Greek thinking itself but only ever our interpretive appropriation of it. Whether you find this appropriation interesting or not will depend on whether you think Heidegger's philosophy is an appropriate way to approach the question of what truth, reality, being, presencing etc. mean. I for one find his interpretation of the Greeks far more interesting than any other appropriation of Greek thinking, where this: > interpretation of _ousia_ differs > considerably from the usual traditional interpretations as > 'substance', etc. > In "staendige Anwesenheit" we have once again a 'stehen', combined > with a > temporal determination. And here you even point out that ousia is to be understood not in terms of ousia but in terms of temporal structure and the present, presence, presencing where even this is an appropriative anglo interpretation of Heidegger's German constellation of terms revolving around Anwesenheit, Ereignis, Stellen, Sein and so on. I don't think we can logically derive his thinking from his already violent appropriation of the Greek terms for his own philosophy, I don't think there are any grounds for taking this appropriation literally as originating in ancient Greek thought. But if this works for you then who am I to disagree? > Then we are confronted with asking what this 'stehen' means in the > context > of "staendige Anwesenheit" as the purportedly Greek understanding of > being. > That is a crucial issue, in my opinion, because the usual English > translation as "constant presence" does not pay enough regard to the > 'standing' that is said here. Even though there is, in fact, a > 'standing' in > "constant", it doesn't really come across and 'staendig' then comes to > be > understood merely as 'enduring in time'. This last opens, for me, on what is truly originary in Heidegger's thinking and that is the Husserlian problem of temporality. He even suggests that this notion of originary time is implicitly understood by the Greeks yet not made a thematic concern. It's this passing over the problem of time that apparently closes off the great beginnings of Western philosophy and lays the foundation for the forgetting of the originary meaning of being. My own research interests have revolved around this problem of time, but rather than reading temporality into Greek philosophy I've tended much more toward the phenomenological (Husserlian) side of his phenomenological appropriation of the Greeks. In this sense I really don't see how we're any different, like two gold diggers we're approaching the mother lode of Western philosophy from two different angles, and in the end all you have is a bag of native gold wrested from its source to be fashioned in your own style. Cheers, Malcolm --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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