File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0312, message 71


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



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