Being at the Beginning - Heidegger's Interpretation of Heraclitus Pt 1

Being at the Beginning: Heidegger's Interpretation of Heraclitus Herr Schulz, wenn ich nachdenke, dann ist es manchmal so, als ob Heraklit danebensteht. – Heidegger to Walter Schulz1 In Heidegger's lexicon 'being' usually designates what, in this or that historical epoch, it means for any entity to be. Hence, it is not to be confused with a term designating any entity or set of entities, though it necessarily stands in an essential relation to human beings, as creatures uniquely capable of differentiating beings from what gives them meaning. But the meaning of being, so construed, must also be distinguished from what grounds or constitutes its essential correlation with human beings. Heidegger labels this ground the Ereignis.2 He also refers to it as Seynsgeschichte to signal the fact that, as part of this Ereignis, the history of interpretations of being constitutes and, in that sense, underlies our way of being and understanding being. In the process, this still-unfolding history takes hold of us in the ways we make this destiny our own, mindlessly or not. Indeed, in our preoccupation with particular beings (including the metaphysical preoccupation with them insofar as they exist, i.e., with the being of beings), this history easily escapes our notice. In the period from 1935 to 1945 Heidegger attempts to develop a kind of thinking that could become mindful of this history and thereby free from it (a Being at the Beginning freedom, it bears adding, that calls, by no means for forgetting or dismissing it, but for paying final respects to it).3 Essential to this history and no less party to it are salient ways of thinking that privilege some entity or another (God, nature, matter, humans, scientifically determined reality) as the key to the meaning of 'being.' By thus obscuring the difference between being and beings, these ways of thinking unknowingly contribute to concealing – and waylaying any concern for – the grounds of that difference. Heidegger subsumes these traditional, obfuscating ways of thinking under a single term: "metaphysics". Against this metaphysical tradition but also thanks to it, Heidegger struggles to think in terms of this history – seynsgeschichtliches Denken – where the thinking understands itself as firmly part of that history and where the history is not a record or explanation of the past, based upon some reckoning in the present, but instead a process that essentially involves and appropriates us and is constitutive of our unfinished being. Or, as Heidegger also puts it, we have been thrown or appropriated into this history and it is in terms of this history that we have – and have yet – to come into our own.4 Not surprisingly, in Heidegger's scenario, Plato’s thought plays a central role as the beginning of metaphysics.5 To be sure, he sharply distinguishes Plato from Platonists. While Platonism can be identified with idealism, “Plato was never an ‘idealist’ but instead a ‘realist’” (GA 65: 215/CPh 150). However, he also takes pains to identify the long metaphysical shadow cast by Plato. The Contributions to Philosophy, for example, are replete with the locution “since Plato”: “since Plato,” we are told, there has been a “continual decline” (währender Verfall) (GA 65: 134/CPh 94); “since Plato, the truth of the interpretation of ‘being’ has never been questioned” (GA 65: 188/CPh 132; GA 55: 98); “since Plato, thinking is determined from the standpoint of a suitably purified way of representing beings” (GA 65: 458/CPh 322).6 But the expression ‘since Plato’ points in two directions, towards his predecessors as well as those who followed in his footsteps (that “series of footnotes” in Whitehead’s memorable phrase7) and both directions are necessary to evaluate not only Heidegger's claim that Plato inaugurated metaphysics but also Heidegger's efforts to prepare the way for thinking the history of be-ing, i.e., for non-metaphysical thinking. In other words, in order to understand and assess Heidegger's view that Plato’s thinking marks the beginnings of Western metaphysics, we have to come to terms with his interpretation of its departure from the foregoing ways of understanding what-it-means-to-be.8 More specifically, Heidegger asserts at several junctures in his Contributions to Philosophy (1936-38) that Plato was able to interpret the beingness of beings as ijdeva in no small measure because of the foregoing Greek experience of o[n as fuvvsiV.9 In other words, Plato's thinking supposes the experience of being at the beginning, described by his predecessors as the experience of fuvvsiV. This claim cries out for elucidation and one of the main tasks of the following paper is to try to shed some light on it. In order to do so, the first order of the day is to come to terms with what Heidegger understands by the Greek experience of fuvvsiV. Although Heidegger points to the Pre-Socratics in general, with their writings “peri; fuvsewV,” for evidence of the nature of the supposedly foundational experience of fuvvsiV (GA 55: 109), he does not identify sources for this experience by name in the Contributions. However, in his early 1940s lectures on Heraclitus, lectures that he gives one year after the initial publication of "Plato's Doctrine of Truth," he hammers out an interpretation of Heraclitean fragments that focus on fuvsiV and, albeit briefly, its connection to ajlhvqeia.10 The main enterprise of the following paper is to examine Heidegger's interpretation of Heraclitus' description of the primordial experience of fuvvsiV as a key to understanding being at the beginning of Greek thought. As one might expect, given Heidegger's understanding of the history of be-ing in the sense glossed above, his interpretation of Heraclitus is not motivated principally by antiquarian concerns of setting the record straight. His interpretation of Heraclitus' fragments aims at understanding them not simply as the dawn of metaphysical thinking but more importantly as a way of thinking that, by stopping short of the thought of what grounds its own thinking, cannot take leave of that history. It is hardly coincidental that, for the better part of three decades beginning in the mid-1930s, Heidegger repeatedly finds inspiration and corroboration for his own thinking through reflections on Heraclitus' fragments.11 Although he ultimately gives a certain nod to the importance of Parmenides over that of Heraclitus,12 Heidegger's interpretation of Heraclitus' fragments provides important clues (Winke) to what he means by the need for a new beginning of our thinking. 13 Not surprisingly, given these objectives, Heidegger reads Heraclitus' understanding of fuvsiV in terms of the ontological difference, such that the term 'fuvsiV' stands not for a particular being (Seiendes) or even for the set of all beings (Seiendheit), but for being itself (Sein).14 Heidegger's interpretation of Heraclitus, it hardly needs emphasizing, is audacious, if not tendentious to a fault. After all, what Heraclitus (oJ SkoteinovV) has to say about fuvsiV is not only obscure but also exasperatingly terse and, even if we indulge Heidegger's presumptions about reading notions from other fragments as synonyms or metonyms for the term, the net result is far from conclusive evidence of anything like a unified conception of fuvsiV. Further complicating matters is Heidegger's tendency to interpret Heraclitus in light of subsequent treatments of being.15 Of course, there is also plainly a value to the audaciousness of Heidegger's interpretive style, not only for the incentive it provides to re-examine Heraclitus' fragments in light of that interpretation, but also for the window it provides to Heidegger's own effort to prepare for thinking that frees itself from metaphysics. The following study is undertaken with an eye to probing this potential of Heidegger's interpretation without overlooking its tendentiousness. 16 The bulk of the following essay is an attempt to reconstruct how Heidegger, on the basis of Heraclitus' fragments, interprets the experience of fuvsiV as a key to the meaning of being at the beginning of Western thought. In a brief conclusion I address how this experience of fuvsiV supposedly underlies Plato's inauguration of metaphysics and how Heidegger's interpretation of this experience relates to his own post-metaphysical project of thinking the history of be-ing – and taking leave of it (GA 70: 21). I. Fuv v s iV as the ever-emerging self-concealment When Heidegger observes that Plato's interpretation of the beingness of beings rests on the experience of o[n as fuvvsiV, Heidegger has in mind the constancy and presence of beings, emerging on their own (vom ihm selbst her), where ‘emerging’ precisely means coming out from being closed off, concealed, and folded in upon itself (GA 55: 87). As Heidegger puts it in another context, “fuvvsiV names that within which, from the outset, earth and sky, sea and mountains, tree and animal, human being and God emerge and, as emerging, show themselves in such a way that, in view of this, they can be named ‘beings’” (GA 55: 88). Yet this formulation, he immediately warns, can be misleading if it suggests that the Greek essence of fuvvsiV amounts to some all-encompassing container, the result of a generalization of experiences of things emerging (e.g., seeds and blossoms). As Heidegger puts it, “the pure emerging pervades the mountains and the sea, the trees and the birds; their being itself is determined and only experienced through fuvvsiV and as fuvvsiV. Neither mountains nor sea nor any entity needs the ‘encompassing’ since, insofar as it is, it ‘is’ in the manner of emerging” (GA 55: 102; see, too, 89f). Only on the basis of the primordial experience of the emergence from the hidden into the light is it possible to establish what emerges and thus is something at all rather than nothing.17 With these observations, Heidegger takes himself to be glossing the paradigmatic account of fuvvsiV to be found in Heraclitus' fragments. Notably, he privileges a fragment in which the term fuvvsiV does not occur at all: Fragment 16. He translates Fragment 16: to; mh; du:novn pote pw:V a[n tiV lavqoi~ as “the [process of], indeed, not going-under ever [das ja nicht Untergehen je], how might someone be concealed from it?” As Heidegger reads the fragment, it is important that each of the two words framing it – du:non and lavqoi – suppose senses of hiddenness, ‘going-under’ (as in the setting sun) and ‘being concealed’ (as in the sun disappearing from our view) (GA 55: 47f, 68f; VA 259/EGT 110). Indeed, Heraclitus’ very question – how could what never goes-under (never hides) escape our notice? – gets any traction and force it has from the Greek experience of the all-pervasive interplay of hiddenness and unhiddenness. To be is to be present, but being present is itself always a “luminous self-concealing” (gelichtetes Sichverbergen), i.e., concealing itself behind the being (Seiendes) that it illuminates (VA 255/EGT 108). Like the word ‘ajlhvqeia’ (for reasons discussed more at length below), the opening phrase of the fragment supposes this fundamental hiddenness. For the early Greeks, Heidegger contends, this underlying hiddenness is constitutive of the way beings are, not only in relation to themselves but also to other entities generally. In other words, they do not construe hiddenness merely or primarily in terms of entities' relation to human beings. As a means of capturing this dynamic interplay of presencing and absencing, Heidegger takes pains to argue for translating the participle to; du:non in the fragment verbally rather than substantively, i.e., as “the process of going under” (das Untergehen) rather than as “what or something that goes under” (das Untergehende).18 The verbal translation amounts to construing the term as signifying, not a particular being or type of being, but that in which “the hidden essence of what is called ‘to be’ [>Sein<] resides” (GA 55: 81; see, 100, 155). What Heidegger wants to flag with the word 'hidden' here is, among other things, the fact that this essence is something supposed but not duly understood by the founders of metaphysics (Plato and Aristotle). Precisely in this sense, i.e., not as any particular being or kind of being, the process of never going-under, of never passing-away or even – with suitable qualifications19 – of constantly emerging (to; ajei; fuvon, ajeivzwon) constitutes, Heidegger submits, the underlying significance of fuvvsiV for Heraclitus.20 Yet, even in this fragment, Heidegger emphasizes, fuvvsiV is not to be understood as simply the ever-emerging. As the negative modifiers of du:non indicate, the fragment presupposes the significance of “going-under” and thereby the hiddenness that is its constant companion (that is to say, not some happenstance down the road but rather a dimension integral to its emergence).21 Having thus signaled the central role played by hiddenness in Fragment 16 and identified the theme of the fragment with fuvsiV, Heidegger turns to the fragment where Heraclitus explicitly characterizes it: fuvsiV kruvptesqai filei: (Fragment 123). This fragment is typically translated “nature loves to hide,” but Heidegger’s version reads: “the emerging bestows favor on self-concealing” (GA 55: 110, 121). Prima facie this fragment appears self-contradictory (and inconsistent with Fragment 16) if, following Heidegger, we take fuvsiV in the sense of the subject of Fragment 16 as what precisely never sinks into hiddenness. Or, if there is no contradiction or inconsistency here, then at least it needs to be explained how an emerging, a coming to be present that is never absent, that never “goes under” or “passes away” into concealment can be compatible with or, as Heidegger also puts it, “stands in an essential relation to” (namely, loves or favors) concealing itself.22 Heidegger begins to answer this question by construing filei: – translated “favoring” (Gunst) – as a reciprocal “affording and granting” (Gönnen und Vergönnen).23 This reciprocal affording “secures” (verwahrt) the unity of their essence that is designated by the name fuvsiV.24 Employing counterfactuals to drive home the necessity of this unity, Heidegger asks: What would bare emerging, shorn of any connection with self-concealing, be? “Then the emerging would have nothing out of which it emerges and nothing that it opens up in emerging.”25 The term that Heidegger uses for self-concealing is Sichverbergen. The root of verbergen (‘concealing’) is bergen and Heidegger in fact proposes that the former, as the translation of kruvptesqai, be understood in the sense of bergen.26 Further qualifying bergen, Heidegger adds that it is to be understood, not simply as hiding something but also sheltering and securing it, getting it to a safe place. These word-plays are meant to reinforce the sense of coherence between fuvsiV, understood as the constantly emerging presence of things, and their absences or, as he also puts it, the “sheltering concealing” (bergendes Verbergen) (GA 55: 160). Heidegger would have us think of them as one movement, viewed from two sides, each of which depends upon the other. Recapitulating this point the next semester (summer semester, 1944), Heidegger characterizes fuvvsiV as the "emerging" (Aufgehen) that is at once a "return-into-itself" (Insich-zurück-gehen). Thus, while retaining the determination "going up, i.e., emerging" (Aufgehen), Heidegger substitutes "going-back-into-itself" for "going under" (Untergehen, his translation for to; du:non in Fragment 16). These two counterpoints to "going up, i.e., emerging" are not the same, to be sure. But it is easy to see them as complementary, especially given his reading of fuvvsiV as "the never going under" for which hiding is essential (as he interprets filei:). In constantly emerging, fuvsiV conceals itself. "If we heed the fact that going-up is of itself [von sich aus] a going-back-intoitself, then both determinations are not to be thought somehow only as on hand simultaneously and alongside one another, but instead they mean one and the same basic move [Grundzug] of fuvvsiV " (GA 55: 299). Herein lies no doubt the most elusive sense of fuvvsiV, bordering on contradiction.27 They are not simply two aspects of some third thing, e.g., like the contraries, Ax and ~Ax, that x may be at different times or at the same time in different respects. Nor are they dialectically resolved into some higher selfnegating unity, yielded by the negation of a negation. Instead, this emerging and returning-into-itself are two mutual and mutually constitutive determinations of fuvvsiV.28 Indeed, talk of them as two sides or two aspects is fatally misleading, insofar as it suggests either that they are (and are understandable) apart from one another or that they inhere in something or some way of being that does not entail them. The opposing forces responsible for the concavity and convexity of an arc or curve made by moving object may perhaps convey a sense of the contrasting mutuality signified by fuvsiV. Though really distinct from one another (no mere distinctio rationis ratiocinati here), you cannot have one without the other. Each is a condition of the other and the moving arc consists of the mutual opposition (represented by its concavity and convexity) differentiating itself from a foregoing opposition. Perhaps an even more helpful image in this regard, suggested by Susan Schoenbohm, is the way that background and foreground are differentiated and thus determined in the process of perception.29 The differentiation is both diachronic and synchronic. This differentiation is a process that differentiates itself from the foregoing undifferentiation. At the same time, foreground and background differentiate themselves in one fell swoop, allowing things in the foreground to become determinate. Because this differentiation thus takes place both diachronically and synchronically and, indeed, seemingly as a condition for the encounter of anything at all, it has the character of a fundamental, i.e., originary process. Analogously, fuvsiV is at once (diachronically) the emergence from hiddenness and (synchronically) the differentiation and interplay of unhiddenness and hiddenness. But we need not invoke our own metaphors and tropes for fuvsiV here. Heraclitus does this for us and, indeed, Heidegger turns to several images in other fragments to elucidate his interpretation of fuvsiV and demonstrate how it coincides with Heraclitus’ own sense of the matter. Thus, in Fragment 54 Heraclitus speaks of the noble, unapparent (because ever-on-display) fit (aJrmonivh ajfanhvV), taken by Heidegger as yet another reference to fuvsiV. That constant emergence into presence (the “going-up”) counteracts and thus depends upon the concealment (the “going-down”) and in this way they fit themselves to each other. In this respect, fuvsiV is their fit (Fügung) or, better, their very countervalence (to; ajntivxoun sumfevrein in Fragment 8) and more. The requisite tension in the span of the bow and of the lyre aptly illustrates this character of their fit; the ever-emerging presence stretches out from the self-concealing but this stretch requires the countervailing pull of the self-concealing and vice versa (GA 55: 141-153). To round out this interpretation of the primordial, Heraclitean sense of fuvsiV, Heidegger weaves together glosses on Heraclitus’ images of fire (pu:r) and adornment (kovsmoV). As a fire blazes, it at once initiates and separates light from dark, pitting them against each other; so, too, the fire's flames form an expanse (the primordial "measure"30) even as they consume what lies in their path. That split instant we catch sight of a fire's flames (das Augenblickhafte des Entflammens) opens up a space for appearing and disappearing, the realm in which it is possible to point and show, but also the realm of “the rudderless and utterly opaque.”31 Fire is thus an instructive name for fuvsiV. In the process of yieding, shaping, and consuming the burning coals (Seiendes), the image of fuvsiV as pu:r is meant to capture the event of providing and constituting the light (Sein) and the darkness (Nichts), i.e., the interplay of concealment and unconcealment that allows things to be seen and conceals itself in the process.32 Heidegger contends that similar considerations underlie Heraclitus' characterization of fuvsiV as kovsmoV in the sense of the primordial adorning (ursprüngliches Schmücken und Zieren) that is not to be confused with any decoration or ornamentation of some thing already on hand or even entities as a whole. Nor, he insists, does the kovsmoV in Heraclitus's sense have anything to do with the modern sense of cosmology. Instead, the image of fuvsiV as kovsmoV is meant to convey what "provides the splendor of the fit” of one being for one another, a fit that also enables them to be. So construed, fuvsiV as kovsmoV can only refer to being not beings, again underscoring Heraclitus' appreciation of the ontological difference. "KovsmoV and pu:r say the same," Heidegger contends, because, like fire, the kovsmoV as the primordial adornment illuminates in one and the same event that produces the dark as light's counterpart, yet all the while is itself concealed or overlooked in favor of what has been illumined.33 II. The seeming anachronism of thinking being at the beginning In these glosses of fuvsiV, particularly as kovsmoV, Heidegger repeatedly contrasts this interpretation with metaphysical interpretations of fuvsiV (i.e., as an all-encompassing entity, entities as a whole, or even the meaning of being for entities as a whole). Heidegger himself warns against the anachronism of reading metaphysics back into Heraclitus’ thought and insists on preserving its crucial difference from that of Plato and Aristotle (GA 55: 78f). Thus, Heidegger contends that “kovsmoV does not primarily mean entities in their entirety [or beings as a whole: das Seiende im Ganzen], but instead the fitting of the fit of entities, the adorning in which and out of which the entities beam [erglänzt]” (GA 55: 164).34 From this perspective, metaphysical interpretations of Heraclitus' fragments are nolens volens anachronistic interpretations. Yet, as noted above, Heidegger does not shy away from equating fuvsiV with a sense of ‘to be’ (Sein) – i.e., the verbal sense of the participle o[n – in contrast to entities and any metaphysical understanding of ‘to be’ in terms of entities. Since these terms are not to be found in the fragments of Heraclitus glossed by Heidegger, invoking them also appears prima facie anachronistic, albeit in a way different from the above mentioned anachronism of metaphysical interpretations of Heraclitus. For example, after stressing how fuvsiV cannot be produced and is thus beyond gods and humans, Heidegger glosses fuvsiV here as follows: “Being itself prevails in advance of all beings and in advance of any origination of beings from beings. It is nothing made [Gemächte (!)] and hence has no beginning determined by means of a point in time and no corresponding end of its standing” (GA 55: 166). As noted earlier, Heidegger also invokes the ontological difference in his glosses on the fragments.35 He exploits the fact that the fragments themselves are emphatic about the difference between fuvsiV or any of its cognates (to; mh; du:novn pote, aJrmoniva, kovsmoV) and what they are said to make possible. To be sure, it is hardly patent that the difference signaled is something else, for example, a difference between a cause and its effects, i.e., between beings rather than between being and beings, Heidegger's preferred way of understanding the difference. Nevertheless, the conclusion seems inescapable that his interpretation of the Heraclitean fragments provides a much greater window into his own later thinking than it does into the thought of Heraclitus.36 Of course, one might respond that there are levels of anachronism and, while some are plainly egregious, others are unavoidable consequences of the human condition. As Marx puts it, "The anatomy of a human being is the key to the anatomy of an ape."37 From this perspective, Heidegger's reading is hardly an egregiously anachronistic interpretation. He gives a plausible reconstruction of the meaning that Heraclitus attaches to 'fuvsiV' and other terms to designate a basic Greek experience well in play prior to the time of Plato and thus likely shared by him, an experience of what Plato comes to designate and re-interpret as being. There is, after all, nothing implausible about the contention that Heraclitus' fragments on their own terms point to an understanding of what is later ambiguously dubbed 'being,' one that, while forming the backdrop of Plato's understanding, is at odds with traditional metaphysical approaches to being. Moreover, there are good reasons not to limit interpretative possibilities to the presumed self-understanding of an author or even the members of his language community. So even if there is and, indeed, could be no explicit indication that Heraclitus understands fuvsiV as being in the pre-metaphysical sense Heidegger suggests, this does not rule out the plausibility, on other grounds, of interpreting it as such. Yet this way of defending Heidegger from the charge of anachronism has the effect of undermining his very project. For, by accepting the ordinary meaning of 'anachronism' as "an error in computing time," for example, antedating some event or phenomenon,38 this sort of defense presupposes a linear conception of time, where the past is something denumerable that has passed away and is long gone (Vergangenes). In Sein und Zeit Heidegger argues that such a conception is derivative and, indeed, derivative of the temporality that provides the very meaning for human existence. Far from something that is over, the primordial sense of the past is what is always already before us, the thrownness of our finite, mortal existence that we project, one way or another. Each of us lives out this thrownness that informs all our projections and, in that sense, both overtakes us and comes to us in the form of our ending.39 Similarly, the beginning (Anfang) of the history of Western thought is for Heidegger the inception of the event that continues to be ours (Western humanity). In language echoing the analysis of primordial temporality in Sein und Zeit, Heidegger contends that, far from something over and done so that our thinking of it is anachronistic, this beginning overtakes us and, prevailing in advance of us, first comes to us (GA 55: 175). Hence, the need to understand Heraclitus' epoch-making sense of fuvsiV as being at the beginning of Western thought. That need, moreover, coincides with the dire straits in which we find ourselves at the end or, alternatively, at the culmination of metaphysics. Accordingly, we can come to think being at the beginning only on the basis of our own experience of this fate. Not surprisingly, towards the end of the first Heraclitus lectures, Heidegger acknowledges the necessity of having already "come into the vicinity of being, on the basis of originary [anfängliche] experiences" in order to be able to hear "the originary terms of the originary thinking" (GA 55: 176). Following this acknowledgement, he does not directly answer the charge that he's reading his own philosophy into Heraclitus' fragments; instead he simply shrugs it off with the observation that "if unhiddenness is grounded in a self-concealing, if this [self-concealing] is part of the essence of being itself, then fuvsiV also can never be thought in a sufficiently originary way at all" (GA 55: 176). But to think this beginning in a way that captures its originary, inceptive dimension is to come to understand being in a way different from yet underlying the Greek beginning and its understanding of being (Sein) as fuvsiV. It is, in other words, to understand be-ing (Seyn) as the historical grounding of the meaning of being and its difference from beings, i.e., as the ground that constitutes and thus appropriates to itself the essential correlation of that meaning and human understanding of it. Precisely in this connection, Heidegger proposes, recalling this first beginning amounts to thinking our way into another beginning.40